Things have been really busy the past two weeks. Last week because of studying and this week because of "going away parties" for people. We've got some folks in the class from far off lands who won't be coming back after the break next week. Bjorn is headed back to Norway, Akira back to Japan, and Danny back to Guiana. So of course we had to send them off right.
The good news is, I get to spend the next week at home relaxing and spending some time with Liz and Ginger before the second session starts up. I updated the "Davis Beers" page tonight since I'm taking a night off from the bars. In total, I've tallied up 161 beers that I've tasted in the last 10 weeks and I'm sure there are a good few that I forgot to write down. Mind you, most of these are samples and shared with friends so of course I don't have a drinking problem.*
I'm going to try to take a few days off from beer when I go home so likely I won't post much for the next week or two. But when we get back, we will have weekly brewing labs on campus so that should be really cool to share. I'm really looking forward to it.
I'll be back in Rochester from Saturday, April 5 through Sunday, April 13 if you want to get together. I promise not to bore you with beer talk unless you bring it up. Hope you're all well.
I tend to rip on big corporations because I find them to be inherently evil. It's not their fault because they have a responsibility to make money. And it's not my fault because I'm cynical.
Occasionally I play the hypocrite and drink beer made by the big boys. That said, I do carry a list of all the AB-INBEV, MillerCoors, Pabst, and Heineken brands in my wallet so I always know what I'm drinking.
Great. So now that we got that out of the way, let me start by saying that our tour to Anheuser Busch in Fairfield, CA was by far the best tour we've had since we've been here in Davis. What makes a great brewery tour? The person giving it. Our girl was Julie.
That's Julie. She's been at AB for 8 years. She used to be in the brewing department and a few months ago she moved to QC. In the background those are all pallets full of can lids. Each one of those "logs" holds 500 lids. There are about 450 "logs" per pallet. So that is about 200,000 lids on each pallet. Now you get a feel for the scale of this operation. Their canning line runs at ~2100 cans/minute...
The brewery has 25 separate grain silos. All of them are connected to this central hub on the top floor of the brewery via vacuum tube (think bank teller drive-thru). You can see #22 in the foreground. All once a brew begins, grain is sucked out of the various silos depending on the recipe and mixed in that central hub in the center of the room before falling to the mills.
The Budweiser recipe isn't a secret. It is made out of 70% malted barley and 30% rice. Since I've already showed you so many pictures of malt mills, here is a shot of a rice mill. This room is directly below the last photograph. So the rice is dropped into this mill. The rice mill and malt mill can grind ~400 lbs/min. The malt mill has 6 rollers. The first pair cracks the husk which is then removed with a vibrating sieve and stream of air. The second pair grinds the endosperm further and a vibrating sieve allows the still coarse bits to flow into a third pair of rollers which complete the grind on these last stubborn bits. These three streams are mixed at the end. This type of operation ensures the husk remains in tact to allow good filtration during lautering (filtering) while guaranteeing the highest extract of sugars from he small endosperm of the grain.
Speaking of lautering...now that is a lauter tun. It is 43 ft in diameter and custom built (of course). Since AB-INBEV uses a high amount of adjunct (not malted barley) in their beers, they have to boil that rice, corn, etc. in water first to gelatinize the starch, before combining it with the mash of malted barley. For this reason, they have 2 cereal cookers in addition to their mash tuns. Once the mashing is complete, the whole slurry is pumped into that HUGE lauter tun that Jeff is standing in front of. Batch size is 670 bbl. Think of that this way; the brewery I worked at in New York made less than that over the course of the whole year.
Yeah, it's all controlled by computers. There is just way too much going on to do things manually. Especially since there were only two guys running the whole brewhouse operation. And I got the distinct feeling one of them was from another department and they were just chatting. The wonders of technology.
Those guys were teamsters. As were most of the people we met on our tour. Most of the work at AB-INBEV is done by unions with a small amount of salaried folks to manage things. Apparently after INBEV bought AB in 2008, lots of the "fat" was trimmed and now there are relatively few salaried people on board.
Here is Tim wearing his Bud Light Lime sunglasses next to a box of lime peel powder. He was pretty excited to be at the source until Julie told us they don't make Bud Light Lime at Fairfield and that powder is for Shock Top. When a brewery is as big as AB-INBEV, they don't brew every product in every package at every brewery. AB-INBEV has 12 breweries in the US and 138 total breweries worldwide. They brew something like 14 brands in Fairfield.
I was kind of surprised to see hops that were almost 6 years old. They are pelletized and we did some rubs on the open bags. They weren't too cheesy so it's probably fine. Mostly I figured that AB-INBEV would have a bit better inventory management and contracting to not have pallets of such old hops sitting around. But, likely they know something I don't because they run a pretty tight ship.
This is a hot wort stripper. AB-INBEV is one of the only companies to perform hot wort stripping. Basically, after the wort is boiled it is flooded into this vessel (tall, like 2 floors) and flows down between all of those tubes. Air is blow up through the tubes. The air scrubs out volatiles not volatilized during the boil, theoretically yielding a cleaner product. Next to this, there is a bypass pipe that's used when they brew Rolling Rock. That is not a joke. Rolling Rock has a lot of dimethyl-sulfide (DMS) intentionally. It is part of the flavor profile so AB-INBEV targets this as an important flavor parameter for that particular brand.
That's not a normal looking fermenter! These rectangular fermenters are used in many of the older AB breweries since they were popular before the "modern" invention of the cylindroconical vessel that you think of when you think fermenter. I took this picture by poking my phone right inside the manway. Those pipes you see running around the wall carry glycol for cooling.
Think of this as a sprinkler on steroids. It is called a gamma jet. It is place in the fermenter after the beer has moved to lagering and that head piece spins around really fast in all directions spraying a high pressure jet of water to clean the inside of the fermenter.
After primary fermentation, the beer is sent to the lagering cellar. These tanks are all single walled and don't have any cooling so the whole cellar is held at 28 F. It was 75 F outside that day so most of us were wearing t-shirts and we spent well over an hour in this place. Rookie oversight.
Luckily Julie loaned us some beer-jackets. That is unfiltered Budweiser on day 19 of its 21 day beechwood lagering cycle. It was good. It's not that it was just better than regular Budweiser, it was actually good beer. I wish they sold it like this. And that was my first beer of the afternoon, so it wasn't the beer talking.
New term of the day is "schoene beer." This is beer that has had the yeast removed but has not yet been filtered brite. It is German.
After the beer is filtered it is called brite beer. That's a picture of me through the sight-glass downstream of the filter. Beer is flowing through there incredibly quickly but since it is so brite you can see right through it. Also, I got a free Bud Light hat from the tour so first come first serve.
By the time we got to the tasting room, we'd all had about 3 or 4 beers since we had to try the product all along the way...FOR SCIENCE. Jeff was feeling pretty good. I think that is a Captain Morgan. Don't really know where that came from.
Overall I was quite impressed with Julie and with AB in general. I intentionally leave off the INBEV part there. The people I met seemed like good people and they really cared about the beer they were making. Hell, before they filtered it, I thought the beer was pretty good. I'm not sure I agree with the whole Razz-A-Rita thing that they're doing, but who am I to judge. They are making a killing on some of those brands so more power to them I suppose. That picture is the floor in the elevator. When a brewery thinks things through to the extent of putting floor drains in the elevators, they're doing alright.
The best speakers we've had so far came to class this afternoon. Jeffers Richardson is the creator of the Firestone Union system that has become an integral part of how California's fourth largest brewery makes beer. He joined Firestone walker in 1995 after he was tapped to be the companies first brewmaster, tasked with figuring out a way to make beer in wine barrels. What he came up with was something similar to how beer was made in the 1800's in Burton upon Trent in the UK. Basically it consists of a bunch of barrels vented to allow for the collection of yeast. After establishing the brewery, Jeffers left (because of a lady friend) and worked at Sierra Nevada as well as dabbling in the olive oil industry for a while before returning to Firestone Walker a few years ago. The brewery had another challenge for him. Like the first time it was focused on barrels. So for the past few years Jeffers has been setting up a wild beer barrel program and a spirits barrel program.
The spirit barrel program uses wet barrels (mostly Kentucky bourbon) and matures high gravity beers in them for about a year. The beers pick up flavor from the wood and the spirits as well as a significant boost in alcohol. Today we tried Parabola, a 14 %ABV, 82 IBU Russian Imperial Stout that had been matured in Kentucky Bourbon barrels for 12 months. It was fantastic. You could really feel this beer in your mouth. Flavors of molasses, toasted marshmallow, bittersweet chocolate, and subtle notes of ripe banana blended with vanilla and oak from the barrel. Definitely something I wish were available out in New York.
While the spirits barrel program is purely about maturation, the wild barrel program is all about bugs. Mostly used wine barrels and retired Firestone Union barrels come into the program. Wort is made in the original Firestone brewery 86 miles away and delivered to the Barrelworks brewery and pumped into the barrels. These are then inoculated with various mixtures of yeast and bacteria cultures and fermented and aged for between 12-36 months depending on the beer and the barrel. Jeffers told us that unlike classical brewing where you can tell withing a day or so when a beer is done, with barrel programs, the beer and the barrel tell you when it is done. This is mostly done by taste. Currently, the program has over 500 barrels...that's a lot of tasting. Once barrels are matured to the point that Jeffers and his colleagues believe it is ready for serving the process of blending begins. Jeffers and blending master Jim Crooks sample barrels and take notes. They compare these notes and then move on to preliminary blending trials. Once they have something they like they introduce it to Adam Firestone and David Walker to see if they approve. If it is a go, they rack the barrels to a stainless steel tank for blending and then bottle it on the old bottling line from Russian River that Vinnie Cilurzo gave them...for free. Jeffers uses wine yeast to condition the beer in the bottle and in about 10 weeks the beer is carbonated and diacetyl free. This Feral One is the first release from the Barrelworks program and it is the best sour beer I have ever tasted.
The new goal before I leave California is to make it to Firestone Walker for a visit. Although I didn't describe it above, that IPA second from the right was hands down one of the best I've ever had. It was 9.5 %ABV and 100 IBU and went down with frightening smoothness. These guys know how to make balanced beer in an innovative way without worrying too much about what other people think beer should be. I think I have a new favorite California brewery.
This week our brewery tour was to Lagunitas. And instead of focusing on the brewhouse or the whole operation, we focused solely on the packaging line or "bottle shop" as people in the industry like to call it. Just for posterity, here's a shot of the brewhouse.
I'm not the biggest fan of Lagunitas in general but everyone has their own opinions and the fact that they just opened a new brewery in Chicago say that lots of people disagree with me on that point. It was pretty tough to really hear what everyone was saying in the bottle shop since it is a noisy place, but it definitely helped to reinforce some of the concepts that we've been reading about and discussing in class. Some things are just easier to understand when you see them in action and beer packaging is one of them. To that end, I took some short videos to try to help show you all what we saw. I'm sure there are better examples out there if you look so if you're dissapointed with my filming capabilities don't limit yourself. Also, I wasn't able to record everything so there will probably be some gaps in your understanding.
Laguinitas kegs and bottles their beers. To keg the beer, kegs are inverted and moved from station to station of a walking beam system (shown in the video). Each time the beams walk the kegs to the next station, they are attached to a filler head which performs one operation of the cleaning and filling process. Draining, rinsing, cleaning, sanitizing, filling etc. all occur at different stations for different amounts of time.
After the kegs are filled, they have to be shipped and this requires loading them onto pallets. Some breweries automate this process but at Lagunitas, it is done "by hand." Since kegs weigh about 160 lbs, having an employee lift them around is not an option. So this vacuum powered lifter allows people to easily move kegs. It is kind of mesmerizing to watch if you've ever tried to lift one yourself.
The bottling line kind of starts in two places. On one end you have to make the crates and on the other end you have to fill the bottles. To make up the crates, a vacuum pulls the crate into shape, arms close the inner flaps and apply some hot glue. Then another set of arms close the outer flaps and kick the crate out onto the conveyor belt. After all of these steps are done, the bottles drop into the crates.
The day that we were visiting, a bent shaft in the crate erector was giving the guys a lot of trouble. Luckily we saved the day. My classmates are pretty sharp. Not much makes it past them and the guy Jeff is talking to in the foreground is the head brewer so of course everyone wants to look helpful.
On the other side of the bottle shop the bottles are filled with beer. They come in on a linear conveyor, are separated by an infeed worm screw and fed into a starwheel. The starwheel sends them into the bottle rinser where they are inverted (Finger Pointing #1) and rinsed with sanitizer. After draining (Finger Pointing #2), they are fed with a series of starwheels (Finger Pointing #3) into the filler where they are evacuated, purged with CO2, and filled with beer. After filling, the jetter (Finger Pointing #4) sprays a very short pulse of 60 °C water into the bottles. This causes them to foam up ensuring the head space is full of CO2 when the crown is crimped on the bottle.
After the filled bottles are crowned and labeled, they converge with the erected crates at the bottle packer where they are separated into blocks 3x4 and lowered by tulip heads into the crates below them. After the crates are glued shut, they are pallatized and shrink wrapped before sending them to the trucks.
So where do all of those bottles and kegs come from? You're looking at them. Bottles come from the glass manufacturer since we don't use returnable bottles here in the US (unlike the rest of the world). It takes anywhere from 1 week to over a year for a keg to come back to Lagunitas. And lots of them never come back. This is a HUGE problem in the brewing industry. Kegs cost breweries $50-$150 per keg depending on the quality and quantity purchased. Currently distributors pay deposits of $25-$40 per keg to the brewery and pub owners pay about the same to distributors. If a scrap yard is shady enough to pay someone for a keg, that person will make about $40 since stainless steel is so valuable. So every time a keg is stolen the pub owner, loses about $30, and the brewery loses about $80. Between the keg loss, the length of time for kegs to be returned to breweries, and the ever expanding production of the brewery, Lagunitas spends about $1,000,000 per month on new kegs. There's a few of them in the parking lot waiting to be filled.
One big issue at breweries is dissolved oxygen. Oxygen in finished beer will contribute greatly to stale flavor. This comes from staling compounds produced from oxidation reactions of the slew of compounds in beer. Beer is comprised of hundreds of chemical compounds and some of these, once oxidized, are detectable to humans at very low concentrations to the detriment of the overall flavor. To monitor this, larger breweries like Lagunitas has a number of dissolved oxygen meters that check the dO2 at different spots around the brewery in real time. This meter is shows that the dO2 at the entrance to the bottle shop is 13.7 ppb and at the start of the bottling process it is 24.9 ppb. During bottling the beer will of course pick up more O2. Lagunitas shoots for < 50 ppb dO2 in all of their packaged beer. I've seen targets in the literature quoted as 20-100 ppb so they seem to be on track. However, it was a bit disconcerting that levels were already at 25 ppb before bottling even started. There's always room for improvement.
Mid-sized breweries like Lagunitas are caught between a rock and a hard place of some aspects. Here is an exhaust of ~60 °C water from the keg washer going down the drain. At a smaller brewery, kegs would be wiped down with a rag and less water would be used. At a larger brewery, this water would be piped to another purpose. But for Lagunitas, it isn't economical to wipe down kegs nor is it economical to try to reclaim this water. So it's wasted. It's kind of like an effeciency no-man's-land.
Steve is 6'1". This give some perspective on how big these fermenters are. This farm had about 30 of them and I think these are 500 bbl or so. At places like Budweiser, they can be as large as 2000 bbl. That's a lot of beer.
That's all folks. Here a clip of the end of the bottle run. Another day of bottling in the bag at Lagunitas. Time to fix the crate erector and then have a draft beer because now that you know how tough it is to get the beer in the bottle, it's best not to have to open one up.
Sierra Nevada is a special place. They operate two, 200 bbl brewhouses and one 100 bbl brewhouse around the clock 365 days a year. Last year they turned out just shy of 1,000,000 bbl of beer. This is not "micro" by any means, but to call it anything short of "craft" would be shortchanging the culture that Ken Grossman has built.
Today we were lucky enough to get a tour of the whole Chico, CA operation. And our version of the tour was extensive. I think it took about two and a half hours. We saw everything from the hop storage to the composter. In between there was a quite a lot of ground we covered and I think the best way to share that is with pictures. I took about a hundred, but I will spare you some of the awful ones as well as some of the super nerdy ones (Read: In line aeration). So welcome to your amateur picture tour of Sierra Nevada.
Sierra Nevada uses 100% whole hops and they are by far the largest brewery in the states to do this. This means no pellets, no extracts, just whole hop cones. Hops come in 200 lb bales. There are 5 guys whose full time job is to break up hop bales for use in the brewery. A hop shipment happened to come in today and we got a taste of what a logistical challenge dealing with these beauties can be.
Whole hops are bulkier, and do not store as well or long as pelletized hops or hop extracts. A new hop shipment comes in about once per month and at any time the brewery has about three months worth of hops on hand. Hop storage is variety dependent, but on average aroma hops will be safe to use for about one year and bittering hops will last about two. Outside the hop cooler is a huge white board that maps the location of everything. Each black box is a different variety of hop and the numbers represent how many bales of hops are in stock. Add all those numbers up and multiply by 200 to figure out how many pounds of hops are in the cooler...
Hops are probably the most iconic of brewing ingredients, but they don't do the heavy lifting. That burden is left to the malt. What you are looking at here is as two roll wet mill. Malt is augered into the top steep tank and soaked in water to help soften the husk a bit. It is then milled by a pair of hardened steel rollers set to a specific distance apart. The goal is to crush the interior of the malt (endosperm) while leaving the husk largely intact. A wet mill is advantageous because the soaking causes the husk to be more pliable and thus a finer crush can be obtained with minimal husk damage. This mill grinds 10,000 lbs of malt in 25 minutes.
The slurry is pumped into the mash tun (fills bottom right of photo). The milled malt is mixed with hot water in the mash tun and stirred for about 25 minutes. The time and temperature(s) of this mashing result in different amount of extract (sugar) from the malt with varying levels of fermentability. After the mashing is complete, the mash slurry is pumped into a lauter tun.
This is a large shallow vessel with a false bottom (think heavy duty screen). Sorry there's no picture but it was lautering when we were walking through and it's pretty steamy so tough to get a feel for what is going on. I did take a good shot from the lower story (these vessels are so large the tops are in the ground floor and the bottoms are in the basement!) The lauter tun has knives on a raking arm that raise and lower into the bed to help the wort run off of the grain. Remember the husk we were talking about earlier? Now it come in handy because it acts as the filter bed to help prevent particulate from the mash from leaving the lauter tun. It also has a sparging arm that sits above the grain bed to spray the grain with hot water to help rinse all of the extract from the grain. Underneath, a dozen or so tube (look like a giant spider) allow the wort to run off into a central grant that is then pumped to the kettle. Since the lauter tun is so large, if only one tube were used, the pressure would cause a huge suction at the center of the tun equaling bad news. Lautering takes about 90-120 minutes depending on the beer.
The products of lautering are sweet wort and spent grain. The grain, still wet, gets pumped to a storage silo where truck from local farms come to carry it away to hungry cows. The sweet wort (think full bodied sugar water) is pumped into the kettle to be boiled for 90-120 minutes depending on the beer. During this time hops are added at different times depending on lots of fun recipe stuff. This is me standing in front of one of the kettles. I'm in the center.
After the boil, we're left with hopped wort, trub, and hop material. Trub (coagulated protein from boiling) and hops are filtered out with a hop-back which is basically a filter that uses the hop material as a filter bed. These spent hops are pneumatically blown out of the filter to be composted later on site.
The hopped wort is pumped out into a plate heat exchanger where it is cooled by glycol from 100°C to 60°C (depending on the beer) in a matter of a few minutes. The cooled wort is dosed with oxygen and yeast on it's way to the fermenter. Below are the yeast brinks (tanks). Those pipes that look like grab bars in handicap restrooms can be rearranged like puzzles to send different fluids different places. This way yeast from any of those three tanks can be sent to a number of different locations and cleaning solution from a single reservoir can be sent to any one of those tanks. Pretty clever huh?
Fermenters at Sierra Nevada are no joke. Most of their fermeters are 800 bbl. To give you some perspective, that is 264000 bottles of beer per fermenter. Now count the fermenters:
This was only one part of one wing of the brewery. And what you are looking at is only the bottom cones of the fermemters. The tops stick upward, outside, for a few stories. It takes 4 batches of beer from the 200 bbl brewhouse to fill one of these which helps to decrease variability between batches, and same floorspace.
Have you ever had Torpedo Extra IPA? It is the most popular IPA in the States. Those four vessles you see on the floor are it's namesake. Ken Grossman invented the hop-torpedo some years ago as a means of ensuring more efficient and reliable dry hopping. Each of those vessels is packed with about 80 lbs of whole hops and beer is pumped from the bottom of the fermenter, through the torpedos (in parallel), and back up into the middle of the fermenter. This happens continuously for about 4 days ensuring all of the beer cycles through the torpedo twice.
Packaging is serious business at Sierra Nevada. They bottle in 12 and 22 oz with crown caps, they do 500 ml corked and caged bottles, and they do 12 and 16 oz cans. Look closely and you'll see that that dark rectangle in the middle of the photo is actually full, capped beers. Wow.
Here you can see cases being fed in below the bottles while the bottles are split off into blocks of 12. Then the cases are built around the bottles. Check out those awesome vertical helix conveyor belts. You know that someone has ridden those at one time or another.
Lots of the machines have automatic sensors on them to make sure that bad bottles are not making it out the door. So the sensors test the bottles, but who will test the sensors? These guys:
Each of these bottles has an intentional defect. They are periodically run through the bottling line to make sure that the sensors are calibrated correctly. If the sensor spits the bottle out, everything is dandy.
Here's a really quick video just to give you an idea of the pace of which everything moves. If there is one hiccup anywhere along the way, everything gets held up. I have no idea how many moving parts there are in this operation but it is amazing to me that everything in this room can function together in such harmony. In a single day they turn out 900,000 bottles of beer.
Sierra Nevada also does kegs of course. Here's a lineup of full kegs ready to be palletized and distributed. Keg filling is a pretty cool sight to see. We wizzed through the kegging operation so I didn't get a good picture but basically, the keg is turned upside down and "tapped" onto a series of stations that empty, clean, rinse, sanitize, cool, and fill it. This is accomplished through a walking conveyor belt that makes the lines of kegs look like waves on an ocean as they are picked up from one station and placed down at the next one.
I don't really know how the distribution laws work in California but boy that's a lot of trucks.
The whole culture here is about sustainability. About 80% of the electricity is generated on site with solar panels and fuel cells. There are panels on most every bit of roof everywhere as well as over the parking lots. The new brewery in Mills River is going to be LEED Gold or Platinum depending on how the paperwork shakes out.
In addition to electricity generation, all food waste from the restaurant and employees is combines with that of the brewery and composted in this lovely screw conveyor. In 10 days it is able to do what a compost pile does in 1 year.
All of the restaurant oil is used to make biodiesel to help offset the fleet. Look at this reactor and the number of trucks they have on the road, it's clear this is not a significant contribution, but it all adds up.
So that concludes our tour. I am sorry for some of the missing photos or explaination. If you have questions, you can ask me or google it. There are much better photos and videos of all this stuff on the internet. I mostly just wanted to photo-brag to all of you to show you what I saw today. Of course the day finished off right with lunch and as much free beer as we could drink courtesy of a great man and a great brewery. Cheers!
Sometimes we go to the brewers and other times they come to us. This week we were lucky enough to have Vinnie Cilurzo from Russian River Brewing Co. come to talk to us about how to make sour beer. Here in the States, any sort of sour flavor in your beer used to be considered a defect and a sign of a failed brew. But increasingly, sour beers have recently become more popular and now command quite a cult following. Vinnie is making some of the best American sours on the market, and he's been doing it for longer than pretty much everyone else. Vinnie was brought on to start a brewery under the Korbel brand called Russian River in the 1990s. In 2003, Korbel decided to exit the brewing business Vinnie accepted the Russian River brand in lieu of severance. He and his wife Natalie opened a small brewpub in Santa Rosa, CA specializing in hoppy beers and sour-barrel aged beers. At the time, sour beers were pretty much unheard of but Vinnie pursued his passion and Natalie helmed the business. This allowed Vinnie to focus on brewing and if you try his beers, you will quickly appreciate that focus.
So what are sour beers? Typically beer is fermented with Saccharomyces cerevisiae (ales) or Saccharomyces pastorianus (lagers). These yeasts are "domesticated" meaning they have been selectively bred over thousands of years by brewers to provide the desired characteristics and flavors for specific styles of beer. For example the yeast used to make Sierra Nevada Pale Ale will make a much crisper, cleaner flavor and provide a much clearer beer than the yest used to make Weihenstephaner Hefeweissbier which will result in a fruity, floral flavor and be much cloudier in appearance. Yeah, ingredients play a role, but as the saying goes "The brewer makes the wort. The yeast makes the beer." So for most brewers the goal is to limit all activity in their fermenter to only one specific yeast strain which they provide.
With sour beers, all bets are off. Brewers making sour beers use "wild yeast's" and bacteria to ferment the wort, leading to a wide range of flavors which some people love and some people find repulsive. Brettanomyces (yeast), lactobacillus (bacteria), and pediococcus (bacteria) are the three types of microorganisms responsible for most sour beer production. They all have different ideal conditions and produce different flavors and aromas when fermenting wort. These byproducts of fermentation are what produce the characteristic flavors in sour beer.
So why doesn't every brewery experiment with these bugs? Because they are extremely difficult to kill. While Saccharomyces has been bred for thousands of years with the primary concern of beer flavor, aroma, clarity, etc. these other bugs have been out in the real world experiencing the tough-knocks of evolution. They can eat almost anything, survive in harsh conditions, and stick around for long periods of time.
So in Vinnie's brewery, he has two (or three) of everything. One for regular beer production, and one for "funky" beer production. Two transfer pumps, two sets of hoses, two sets of kegs, even two bottling lines! Everything is labeled and color coded to limit confusion. Even so, cross contamination is always a risk with so many microorganisms under one roof. If a brewer works with funky beer one day, he/she is not allowed near the clean beer that day and has a separate set of work clothes and work boots for when they switch over to the clean beer production! Vinnie and Natalie dream of the day when they can physically divide the operations. But they have decided to focus on slow growth and are financing all of they current projects purely with cash flow rather than debt, so a new brewery is not an option for now.
In addition to bringing three of his sour beers for us to try, Vinnie also brought 2 cases of Pliny the Elder which is someone of a cult beer. It is a double IPA consistently rated 100% and people tend to brag about it. It was quite good. Vinnie is all about freshness with his hoppy beers since hop compounds in beer degrade over time to no ones benefit. This beer was bottled 6 days before we drank it. Pretty impressive Vinnie!
Ever since I've decided to make brewing a career, my goals for touring breweries have changed. It didn't happen overnight. I've been going on brewery tours for years. Some are fun and some are kind of bogus (you're not even going to show us the brewery and you want us to pay for samples!). But as I have become more educated and began to take brewing more seriously, touring breweries became less about getting a picture looking like I'm the one holding up the fermenter and seeing how many free samples I can get before I'm asked to leave, and more about learning how different breweries go about operating. To that end, if a 19 year old college kid is taking me around telling me that beer is made out of barley, I tend to turn my brain off and switch back to "maximize free samples" mode. Today was not that day.
Jamil Zainasheff is somewhat of a legend in the homebrew world. And for the past few years that has permeated the microbrewing world as well. I own a couple of his books (Yeast and Brewing Classic Styles) and I've listened to The Jamil Show on The Brewing Network. When we asked our professors if we could go on a class tour to Heretic Brewing Co., they told us no. So Kevin organized one and 26 our of 33 of us piled into 5 cars and drove out to Fairport, CA to see Jamil's operation. We were not disappointed.
That is Jamil giving us a preview of his Barrel-Aged American-Sour Blackberry Barley Wine. That sounds pretentious when you put it all together. Loosely translated it was a batch of Barley Wine that he was not happy with (the yeast didn't ferment enough of the sugar so it finished too sweet) and so he decided to put it in some extra barrels he had around the brewery along with some blackberries and wild yeast. Here is one of a few things I learned today. You pound a nail into your barrels and it allows you are easy way to sample them as they age. We started a bucket line. I passed 26 glasses to Jamil and he and Ben filled them up just like that. It was tart and sweet and quite boozy. In 6-12 months, it will probably be fantastic. Today it didn't hold back though and we all agreed it needs a bit more time.
Owning a brewery is not all about blending barrels and talking shop. Brewing beer is much more scientific than that. Or at least it should be if you want to give yourself the best chance of making great beer. This is Jamil's lab. That is a spectrophotometer on the left. It is used to as part of the procedure to measure IBU (bitterness). It used to belong to Sierra Nevada and they sold it to Jamil. Small world...
That is a lot of beer. Each of those pallets has 16 kegs or 40 cases of bottles. Cold storage is usually a problem for new breweries but it looks like Jamil was thinking ahead. It is always good to have room to expand without limiting yourself.
It's popular to name your fermenters. This one is named after Charlie (our professor). We'll give him some crap tomorrow since he didn't come along on the tour. He hasn't even been to Heretic yet and he's got a fermenter named after him. Jamil let each of his daughters name a fermenter when he opened up and one of his girls picked "Big Al"...for Big Alcoholic. I don't think there are any hard feelings there though since she was washing glasses in the tasting room today.
There was a lot more beer chatting going on and we even met Jamil's wife Liz who manages much of the marketing side of things. She filled us in on lots of the archaic liquor licensing issues and sparing with bigger brewers and distributors. But I will spare you from all of those details. Suffice to say it was one of the most enjoyable and educational brewery tours I've ever been on. I would be proud to end up at a place as nice as Heretic someday.
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