Jamil Zainasheff

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.

Ken Grossman

Ken Grossman is a legend in the microbrewing world. And on Tuesday, I got to see him speak on campus. He and Charlie are good friends and Ken comes three times a year to speak to Charlie's undergrad class and luckily we were invited.

Ken started Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. in 1980 and has built it up to be the largest privately held microbrewery in America. Not only that, but he drives the community to be as sustainable as possible. They have extensive water recycling systems, their own waste-water treatment plant, solar panels, fuel cells, and anaerobic digesters which supply much of the energy required for their brewery. Ken also believes in the whole hop and uses nothing else in his beer. Sierra Nevada is by far the largest brewery in the US to use exclusively whole hops. Ken also bottle conditions most of his beers, and does not use preservatives or pasteurization.

There are lots of reasons why I respect Ken Grossman and lots of ways in which I aspire to be like him. He build a brewing empire while minimizing his impact on the environment and refusing to compromise the quality of his product. I won't get into some of the more nerdy aspects of this, but suffice to say I have a bro-mance going on with him that is strictly one sided because he has no idea who I am.

Sierra Nevada just built a brand new brewery in Mills River, NC. It cost over $100 million and is capable of producing up to 1 million bbl of beer per year if fully stocked with fermenters. The new brewery will allow them to save on shipping costs across country and relieve some of the pressure from the Chico brewery which has been working around the clock the past few years to try to keep up with demand. Ken talked a lot about the new project in his presentation and boy is it awesome looking. It might be worth a trip down to NC especially considering it is spitting distance from Ashville which is rapidly becoming a microbrewing hub.

A River Not Worth Crossing

We made our first field trip this weekend. This was not a class-sanctioned trip but something that a few of us just cobbled together on the fly. Sometimes spontaneity can be a good thing. And sometimes it's a mixed bag.

We got lost twice trying to get out of Davis. Which is pretty embarrassing since we had 4 smartphones, an iPad, and a GPS unit in the Jeep. Eventually we made it out of town but not on the interstate. This was OK because we were able to make a pit-stop at Berryessa Brewing Co. and played some monster Jenga.

A two hour drive to a brewery is enough to warrant a break along the way to the to get a beer. And Berryessa had a decent Saison so I'm not complaining.

After Berryessa we figured we may as well stay on the back roads. The idea was to save distance and travel time because I-80 was backed up with traffic. There wasn't any traffic but we had some hills to deal with.

Norm drives a Jeep. When we couldn't find the switches to roll the windows down he pointed out to us they are on the center console because the doors are detachable...as is the roof. Norm likes to hug the turns and there was plenty of hugging to be done on this road. That's what the road looked like for about an hour. By the time we stopped, I was not in the mood for a second beer.

When we arrived at Fogbelt Brewing Co. we got a nice little tour from owner/brewmaster Remy Martin. He is a past Davis graduate. We're starting to find lots of people all around who went to Davis. He made a comment about becoming intimately familiar with their homemade keg-washer if one of us got an internship with Fogbelt. Thanks for the offer, but I'll pass Remy.

Fogbelt runs a 7 bbl brewhouse with two 7 bbl jacketed open fermenters and one 15 bbl custom fabricated unitank where they do their conditioning. They brew once per week and they are still ironing out some of the kinks but their beer was decent so I wish them the best.

We swung by Russian River Brewing Co. They just released Pliny the Younger which is their annual triple IPA seasonal. People are fanatical for it out here and they were waiting in line for 5 hours in the dark and rain to get a pint of it. It must be really good. We didn't get out of the car. That river was not worth crossing.

Instead we drove to Lagunitas Brewing Co. in Petuluma which was on the way home for us since Norm was merciful and agreed to take the interstate back to Davis.

Lagunitas has a giant greenhouse beer garden thing that holds about 300 people and it was packed. Eventually we found a table (it's seat yourself) and managed to get a beer. Some of their beers I really like and others I was not fond of. But overall I was impressed with their operation. They had about 20 beers on tap. About half of them were pale ales or IPAs but there was some good variety.

I was a big fan of the Lucky 13 and it was cool to see a brett beer and a Roggenbier on the menu. The main problem was that they were out of about 1/2 of their food menu and then at 7:45 they announced the last call. It seems like a lot of lost profit if you have 300 people drinking your beer on Saturday night to just kick them out at 8pm. Maybe there is some kind of City ordinance I don't know about.

All and all the trip was worth it but next time, maybe we'll do some planning. Now back to reading about chilled liquor treatment. Don't you wish you were me?

Say No To Thursdays

As far as I can tell, my bike does not like Thursdays. Yesterday I woke up to a slow-leak flat tire. My roommates had already left so I pumped up the flat as much as it could take, threw the pump in my basket, and sprinted as fast as I could towards class. I made it about half way before I had to refill the tire. That's when the tube ruptured resulting in me having to push my bike 1.5 miles and being 20 minutes late to class.

Last Thursday I was riding home after class ( admittedly after a few beers) and I got into a bit of a disagreement with some asphalt. It was dark and there was a girl standing in the bike path as I came around a blind corner. I did the gentlemanly thing and went into the flower bed. Unfortunately when I tried to join the bike path again there was some sort of technical problem and I ended up crashing. Luckily for the flowers I fell on the asphalt. And luckily for me I was wearing a helmet. I bounced right up and got back in the saddle. My roommate, who was ahead of me, had stopped when he heard my head hit the ground and we rode home together. Everything seemed fine until the next morning when I realized I had a cracked rib. Maybe I should dry hop a beer with adrenaline and you doctors can market it as a painkiller.

Hydrogen Bedding

We all remember hydrogen bonding from high school chemistry right? Well in case you need one, here's a refresher. Water is polar meaning the electrical charge of the molecule is not evenly distributed. The H atoms and O atom share two pairs of electrons and the O atom tends to pull those electrons a bit harder so the O side of a water molecule has a slight (-) charge and the H sides of the water molecule have slight (+) charges. When you have a bunch of water molecules close together the H of one molecule is attracted to the O of another molecule. Over the trillions (it's actually more) of these interactions that occur in a drop of water, this adds up and it makes it a lot tougher for us to break apart (melting or boiling) the water molecules. If you want to learn more or have no idea what I just said go to Wikipedia and teach yourself something.

So what does this have to do with anything? First of all, if it weren't for these H-bonds water would boil at about -150ºF instead of 212ºF and we would all be quite unhappy. But the main reason it is important is because it provides us with some insight into our professor Charlie Bamforth's love life.

Charlie likens the water molecule to the Bamforth marital bed. The Oxygen atom is Mrs. Bamforth. The Hydrogen atoms are Charlie. And the shared electrons are the bedspread. Mrs. Bamforth always ends up with the bedspread. Poor Charlie, have a beer on us. (Yes...that is actually him.)

Not The Northeast

Besides the weather, there are lots of things that set Davis apart from Rochester. For example, infrastructure lends itself to being more environmentally conscious. There are bike racks everywhere, more electric vehicles, a bigger food co-op and local food, etc. Today on my rainy ride to the grocery store  I found something I've never seen before.

Outside of the Whole Foods is a public bike repair station. There's an air pump, a bike stand, and a set of tools for quick repairs. Most places in Rochester I have to lock my bike to a no parking sign and I've never seen a place to put air in your tires.

Another thing about California that I have noticed is that everything out here tends to be carcinogenic.

I guess they know something that us Nor-Easterners don't. This sign didn't stop the Home Depot employee from turning Mike's plywood into cancer-dust. So I guess California just wants us all to know that we're slowly killing ourselves.

I don't really eat much citrus unless it is a lime wedge floating in gin, but it is refreshing to see so much produce growing around town. I'm not used to seeing piles of orange on the sidewalks when I go running in the morning. Nothing seems to go to waste though as people tend to eat a lot of oranges around here and what they don't eat, roving bands of pirate-squirrels use to prevent scurvy.

One day this week the temperature dropped below freezing. I guess that still happens here, and I was unprepared so I did what any reasonable person would do and wore sock-mittens on my morning bike commute. I guess that isn't a normal thing to do around here because some lady glared at me in the parking lot at Sudwerk while I was taking this picture.

The last thing I've noticed is that people drink a lot of hot beverages in the morning. Maybe that is true everywhere, and maybe it is just true in our class because we have free tea and coffee every morning but it is obscene how much hot water these people consume. Since I'm trying to make friends I play along. I like to match my tea variety to the instructor that is lecturing. Today since Dr. Lewis was teaching I had Bigelow English Teatime. It pairs well with Dr. Lewis' welsh accent and poetic manner of lecturing.

So overall I am fitting in alright out here in California. But I will be glad to be back to Rochester even if it is twenty degrees below zero and I have to lock my bike to a no-parking sign. At least I will understand what's going on.

Sensory Analysis

We spend most of the week learning about how to make beer. We learn about the ingredients, the methodology, and the packaging. We study biochemistry, food science, and engineering. And at the end of each day a good lot of us stick around and share a beer in the back of the classroom. This "traditional" learning style disappears on Friday afternoons because on Friday afternoons we have sensory analysis with Sue.

Sue Langstaff did her PhD on evaluation of the mouthfeel of beer under Michael Lewis who happens to be in charge of the program here at Davis. She has a company called Applied Sensory that does tasting and consulting for the wine, beer, and olive oil industries here in California and worldwide. I'm quickly realizing the benefit of being introduced to the wealth of knowledge here in Davis. It seems like every time I turn around there is someone like Sue who is an expert in something I am looking to learn about.

So every Friday after lunch Sue lectures for about 1.5 hours about sensory science. Last week it was all about how the sensory system works physiologically (smell being tied to memory, neuroscience, different types of chemo-receptors, etc.) and we developed a baseline for the different big taste groups you tend to encounter with beers.

This is a kind of fun experiment you can do at home. If you can't read the picture, the tastes are sweet, sour, bitter, and astringent. And to make them you use table sugar, citric acid, caffeine, and alum. You can find this stuff at grocery stores (I'm not certain about the alum but I know it is in stiptic pencils). If you're not feeling ambitious enough to do your own experiment, here is how I describe these flavors:

Sweet: Sugar, honey...this is the easiest one. Smooth and makes you salivate a lot.
Sour: Lemon...lime has more flavor and orange is sour/sweet which is a bit misleading. Puckering but pleasant. Acidic.
Bitter: Like when you suck on a Tylenol (not the chew-able kind). Bitter is probably the toughest of these four to distinguish as it is easily confused with sour and astringent. Kind of like bile.
Astringent: Like when you bite into a banana peel that is not yet ripe. Drying of the mouth, raspy friction feeling.

After we tasted the baseline solutions, we did a blind test of four beers that each individually represented each of these characteristics to give us a context for how these main tastes fit into the beers we drink. Tasting beers after reference solutions gives you a new appreciation for how complex beer is.

Today Sue's lecture was an introduction into evaluation of beer. We talked about how to train people to report on a similar basis what they taste in a beer. This deals a lot with statistics and psychology and isn't as interesting as what we did later in the afternoon. This afternoon was probably one of the top 3 things I was looking forward to at Davis. And here is what we did...

Sue brought in these reference standards which are pure versions of the chemicals that cause certain distinctive flavors in beer. Some are desirable flavors: Hop Oil. Some are undesirable flavors: Hydrogen Sulfide (rotten eggs). And some are desirable or undesirable depending on who you ask: Lightstruck (skunky, think Heineken or Rolling Rock). There are 20 reference standards, each representing a unique scent/flavor.

Next we split into 4 groups each with 20 wine glasses. In each glass went some Budweiser along with a bit of reference standard. You do this experiment with the standard mixed in a mild beer such as Bud so that you can learn how the scent of the standard plays with the scent of the beer. We then too turns smelling all of the glasses, which were labeled, and developing an idea for what the different standards smell like when present in a beer.

I took notes while we were smelling. I wrote the name of the standard and then gave my description of the scent. It is important for us to be able to link a smell to a verbal description so we can continually come back to that description and compare and communicate with other tasters. Your olfactory bulb is part of the limbic system which is strongly tied to memory. It also feeds directly into the amygdala which is the part of your brain responsible for emotion. So unlike your other senses that are processed in other parts of your brain, smell is being processed in such a way that recalls memories and creates emotions. This provides you with a strong feeling about a smell, but when you try to verbalize that feeling often you find yourself at a loss. If you look at my notes above, I could smell all 20 of the reference standards which is good. For 10 of them (starred to the left), I had a strong opinion regarding what they smell like and can relate it to something known. For example, caprylic acid smells like goat cheese to me. It is earthy and sort of sticks in the back of your throat. So since I have a strong feeling about how goat cheese smells, when I try a beer if it smells like goat cheese I know that caprylic acid is likely present.

Sue gave us this sweet sensory wheel to help us when we're learning about these things. Around the outside is the type of aroma such as "Nail polish, solvent-like." So when you try a beer and you recognize a scent, you turn the wheel to that scent and you learn about the molecule(s) responsible for it and the likely flaws in your process that caused it.

Beer is interesting that way. Quantifying the quality of our beer is not as simple as running it thorough a GCMS or performing HPLC (for you doctor or biochem nerds out there). There are hundreds if not thousands of chemical compounds in a single beer and high-tech means only get you so far.  It is not just the magnitude or number of peaks you see on your GCMS output that matters. The interaction of all of those flavor compounds in concert is what makes a beer unpleasant or unforgetable. In the end, beer quality can only ever truly be determined by tasting. So keep practicing!

The Bachelor Life

First of all, a couple people have complained that they can't figure out how to comment on the blog. I posted some instructions on the upper right corner of the blog called "Learn To Comment." There's a link there where Google will take you through the process. Shoot me an email if you're still having trouble and we can figure it out together. It would be cool if some people commented though seeing as all of you don't know each other, maybe you'll make a new internet-friend.

I've been living with Liz for the past 5 years other than a brief stint when I was working in Colorado, but even then Liz followed me out there for most of the time. What I'm trying to say is that it has been a while since I've been a "bachelor." In fact, I do most of the cooking and cleaning and dog-maintenance around the house. I'm somewhat of a renaissance man (ladies swoon). So it is quite liberating living in a house with two other guys and doing guy stuff.

We are subleasing a fully furnished townhouse from some Japanese post-docs. And a comical and recurring theme that we have encountered has risen out of a difference in culture. Let me show you some examples:

All in all it is a nice place and we've been enjoying ourselves in it. And as you can see from the bottom photo, we have already figured out how to use the vacuum so we are pretty civilized. The hot water header does make a popping noise for about 20 minutes after someone showers but I've been telling myself it is fireworks a couple of miles away and it is quite pleasant.

One thing that we are lacking is a big pot though. Mike and I made pasta sauce on Thursday and since we used the biggest pot for the sauce, we had to improvise for the pasta. So we did the logical thing and split the pasta between the saute pan I brought and the tea kettle we found in the cabinet. Semolina yerba-mate anyone?

My room is pretty nice. I've got a bed and a big chair. I'm using the TV stand as a bookshelf and there is an extra mattress in case anyone wants to come visit. Also, I've kind of got my own bathroom since Mike and Jeff are both up on the second floor. We look our bikes up out back on the porch which is right behind my head while I'm laying in bed. I'm not too worried about them though cause this place is so poorly insulated I'd wake up if someone was making noise trying to steal them.

We've got our first batch of beer chugging away in the fermentation/bike pump/mailbox key closet. Mike brewed an India-Brown-Belgian (I don't know either, I think he's channeling Sam Caligone) on Saturday with the Sudwerk pilot system.

So that is about it for the bachelor life thus far. We've got the kegerator hooked up in the classroom with Sudwerk's India Pale Lager on tap so that should hold us until this first batch of homebrew in done. And if we run out, at the bottom of our classroom stairs we have a taproom with 1/2 price beers from the Sudwerk guys. Not a bad deal at all.

A City of Bikes

Liz and I only have one car, so the first thing to get sorted once I arrived here was transportation. I had always planned on just buying a bike once I landed and commuting that way. What I didn't count on was the culture here in town. This is the most bicycle-centric place I've ever been. For example, they have bike stop lights.

These do exist, I've been stuck at them before. They've also got bike cops and bike speed limits. You can get pulled over for speeding or a DUI on a bike, and people do. You can get a ticket for not having lights on your bike or parking it on campus without registering it. About the only thing the bike cops won't pull you over for is not wearing a helmet. Only about 10% of people here wear helmets. And besides that, I've seen people doing the following things on bikes since I've been here: smoking, eating, drinking, talking on the phone, texting, listening to music, and walking a dog. Speaking of dogs, check out this little pup I ran into today. His name is Bruiser.

They call him "Bru-Bru" and he just rides in that basket wrapped in his dog bed. Notice the sunglasses being used as a helmet.

And another thing. Everyone rides these beach cruiser bikes which I just don't understand. Bruiser's other owner had this bike that he put 29" unicycle wheels on which he lovingly named "The Beast Machine." I guess maybe they're comfortable or something but for me a good old fashioned road bike is where it's at. I picked up this Schwinn Varsity for a couple hundred bucks from Green Bicycle Depot. Nelson (the guy who owns the place) is in charge of that dog from the photo in my post.

My lady is the orange one. Cool enough, I was able to do a bit of trolling and figure out that it was born January 14, 1964 in Chicago, IL. On a related note, I wish some of you were out here to save me from myself and my bicycle nerdiness. So far she's been a workhorse. I've rode her to class (about 3.5 miles each way) every day this week and today I just spent most of my day cruising around town doing a bit of shopping and sight seeing. The only problem I've had so far is that she has a strong dislike for bungee cords, but we're working through that together and I feel like we've made real progress.

Because the bicycling culture runs so deep out here, people get pretty creative with how they use bikes. See if you can guess what this is.

Bike powered coffee roaster (with a bit of help from a huge electric fan and a couple giant tanks of propane). Whenever you're pedaling the roaster you've got to wear the captains hat over on the left of the frame...I assume. We don't really know how to get our hands on some of these beans but I'll keep you posted.

That's about it for bikes in Davis...for now. So far, I'm still in one piece, I've tried a few good beers, we've got 5 gallons of India-Rye-Brown Ale bubbling away in a shoe closet, and I'm about to read about polyphenol oxidation for you science nerds out there. All in all, life is good.