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.