Surly Destination Brewery Grand Opening

Posted on December 19, 2014 by Michael

Surly Brewing Company officially opens their new digs this morning at 11am. So many words are being written/broadcast/Facebooked about this today that the news is hard to avoid. So many others have already given the basic information and said most of what needs to be said. I see no need to repeat what has already been oft repeated. I’ll keep my statement here brief.

Space: The building is beautiful. It combines a stark, concrete- and-steel modern sensibility with warming touches of wood and light. The communal seating in the beer hall encourages socializing (which is what beer is really all about), but there are a few smaller tables for those hard-core Minnesotans who may not want to sit with strangers. The most impressive thing about the space is that the brewery is the focal point. Every vantage in the building – both upstairs and down – looks onto the brewery through two story walls of glass. Beer is at the center of this place.

Food: Chef Jorge Guzman has taken the concept of beer hall food and stepped it up several notches. There is barbeque, meat, shellfish, salads and snacks. They even have pizza and a burger. But the snacks include things like Foie Gras French Toast and Bone Marrow. My don’t-miss menu items (there are so many): Smoked Brisket, Bone Marrow, Charcuterie Board (especially the pheasant rillette and the smoked ham), Bitter Greens Salad. This is food for grazing. It’s not the kind of thing where you order yourself an entrée and go. Order a couple things and share among your group. When those are done order a couple more. Repeat until full.

Beer: Come on. It’s Surly.

I’ve been known on occasion to make statements critical of Surly. But this place is freaking amazing.

Brewer Interview: Dane Breimhorst – Burning Brothers Brewing

Posted on May 12, 2014 by Michael

In a recent Minneapolis Star Tribune column I profiled Burning Brothers Brewing, Minnesota’s first and only gluten-free brewery. For the column I did an extended interview with co-founder and head brewer Dane Breimhorst. We talked in-depth about what it means to live with Celiac disease, how gluten-free beers differ from other beers, and the challenges of crafting gluten-free brews that actually taste like beer. What follows is the nearly-full content of that interview.

Let’s start with your background. What’s the path you took to get here?

I grew up in a small town. And I actually grew up hating beer. In this small town the only beers were a lot of the larger brand beers, and I just didn’t care for them that much. I thought that’s how beer tasted. I thought that was it. I drank it on the farm all the time because after a hot day there is nothing like an ice cold lager. But what I did like to do was make wine. So I started off at eighteen making country wines. If it rotted I made wine with it. Then somebody had this beer kit at a garage sale. It was one of those Mr. Brews or something like that.

Add water and stir?

Add water and stir, ferment it and wait. And it tastes horrible. But I was curious to see if I could make it taste better, because I was also really into cooking. I used to run a little gourmet club when I was in high school and I would ferment anything that fermented.

So it seems like fermentation has been a theme in your life.

Yup. If it rots you can ferment it. I didn’t care if it was grain or if it was dandelions or gooseberries. I didn’t care whatever the heck it was. I’d go to the grocery store and walk through the produce section going, “Wow, there’s a lot of wine in here.” I’m making everything into wine.
But so when I turned 21, I had a Red Hook Extra Special Bitter. I was hooked. All of a sudden I got something different and I started diving into it. Kölsch? I was like, “What is that?” There wasn’t a lot of literature on it and the internet wasn’t huge, so I just started dabbling and anything that looked weird I’d buy. At one point in time I became a stout fanatic to the point where we used to go see an Irish band play every Tuesday night and I would order a pitcher of Guinness and I would dunk my Oreos® in it all night long. And I got other people ordering pitchers of Guinness. All of a sudden you’d see people going into this Irish bar with Double Stuffed Oreos®. I mean people were sitting there listening to the band and dunking Oreos® in Guinness and drinking. It was a new fad in this particular pub. It lasted at least a month or two.
So from there I just started exploring brewing a little bit more. And then my friend Thom and I, we’ve been friends since we were nineteen, we both started thinking that we had enough knowledge of it on a small system, like a little 15-gallon, half-barrel, 20-gallon system, that we could make a brew on premises work. I think it’s a fantastic idea and if it’s marketed right I think that the Twin Cities could use another one. And I thought that if we opened one up in Northeast or over in that area that it would rock. So we wrote up a full business plan on it. We continued to brew. We started brewing together to see where we were both at. We priced it all out and had the business plan written, and we were about to execute it when we got slammed by a brick wall. I was diagnosed with Celiac and that was the end of that. Right away we looked at the business plan and said there’s just not the market for a gluten-free brew on premises and there’s no way that I could run a regular brew on premises without killing myself.

What exactly is Celiac disease?

Alright. So Celiac is an autoimmune disorder. Meaning that when my body ingests a certain amino acid protein strain found in a variety of grass that is the wheat family it triggers a self-attack. Wheat, barley, rye, spelt, all of those grasses are related to each other and they all contain gluten. Well, all grain contains a gluten protein, and that gluten is just a protective amino strain that protects the grain. This particular strain of gluten from that particular grass family affects some of us to where our bodies ingest it and it triggers a self-attack. So my body will actually attack itself and it will do so mostly in my small intestine. It destroys the small hairs that uptake nutrients and you actually become malnourished. So after I was tested, we actually had to go through a full test to see what my vitamin levels were and I was practically third-world country. We had to bump everything way back up again. And when I get sick I can tell because all of my nutrients go down and for the next couple of months I’m prone to any kind of illness because it’s an immune reaction. So for me it feels like the flu times ten, about 48 hours of nasty. Then about a week or two of recovery.

I know there are degrees of Celiac. Some people it’s fairly mild, some people it’s intense. You’re on the intense end of that spectrum.

This is what they’re trying to figure out. It doesn’t seem like it’s so much the severity of the actual disease itself, but the severity of the reaction, the outward reaction. Some people get nothing but a little bit of heartburn. That becomes chronic and of course it’s bad for the esophagus. But the problem is that they are still doing the same damage on the inside. So yeah, my symptoms are pretty severe. There are people out there that are much more severe than I am. My aunt has Celiac and she’ll actually break out in hives all over. I don’t. I just puke out of every orifice. And sit around in the fetal position for a while wishing I was dead. Then after that it’s alright.

So I notice that you were wearing rubber gloves at Winterfest.

I learned a lesson at Hops for Hunger. I was pouring beer all night at Hops for Hunger and I was drinking my beer as well. But as soon as you hand someone your glass, a lot of times they are going to rinse out that previous beer. The glass is soaking in beer. It’s all over everything. So it was all over my hands. So every single time I was drinking my beer I was rubbing more gluten onto my cup and into my mouth. It usually takes about 24 hours for the symptoms to really kick in. I was so bad. I hadn’t had that kind of reaction in a while. Unfortunately brew day doesn’t care about that. I think I did a 16 or 17-hour double brew run that day. It was just running back and forth from the bathroom to the brew floor just wanting to die. I mean, everybody helped. We all kind of chipped in. It was Thom and I for the most part and we just rocked it out. Then I went home, tried to get some sleep, and came right back in the next morning. Welcome to owning your own business. So now when I’m pouring we bring a box of gloves for me to wear.

Sticky hands are just part of a beer fest. You end up with beer all over everything.

I know. Actually, people were kind of whispering about it. “Oh my god, does he hate beer that much? Why is he wearing gloves?” I’m Burning Brothers. I have celiac. It will kill me.

So to get back, you had this business plan and you had to throw it out.

Yup. We were pretty bummed out about it. We weren’t quite in the position that we thought to open an actual package brewery. So I went out and bought pretty much every gluten-free beer that was on the market. Back then that was only three or four. I didn’t like them. They just weren’t my thing. I’ll never cut them down. I’ll never cut down any beer out there. It’s up to personal preference. But it wasn’t my thing. I didn’t like it and I was determined to make my own. I obviously know how to brew beer and so does Thom. So Thom was like, “Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s see if we can brew a gluten-free beer.” We spent years trying. We threw the kitchen at it. We were trying different spice combinations, anything just to mask that sorghum flavor.

So my take on gluten-free beers, most of them, is that you can’t approach it thinking that it’s going to taste like beer. If you accept that and judge it on its own merits, then some of them aren’t so bad. But you have to rid yourself of that expectation.

We kind of approached it that way at first, but I said why not raise our standards up and say this should taste like beer. I want to make it as close to beer as possible. And not just beer, but I want to make it a well-balanced beer, as balanced as I can possibly make it. That was my thing. I missed beer

So what do you have to do to make a gluten-free beer? What’s different than regular barley beer?

You cannot use barley, wheat, rye, spelt, all the main ingredients in beer as we know it today.

So what do you use instead?

I use an ancient grain, which some of the first records of beer out of Northern Africa were thought to be made out of, a grain called sorghum. It’s the primary grain in our flagship beer. That’s a 100% sorghum beer. I also use malted buckwheat and malted millet. I’m trying to experiment a little bit with teff, which is kind of a nutty grass. Wild rice as well. I’m not big on the rice, however. I’ve had a couple of companies ask me if I could sample their malted brown rice. But I always get a piece of paper with it that says “Please don’t feed this to people with celiac because there is gluten in it.” It’s malted on the same malting floor as barley. It’s stored in the same warehouse. I’m like, well then it’s full of it. Are you kidding me? I almost yelled at a couple of suppliers for bringing it into my brewery, because this is s gluten-free facility. We don’t allow it in the facility in any way. So now I’m taking some of that and very carefully packaging it and sending it out to my maltstress in Colorado and saying, “can you give me 20 or 30 pounds of this? I just want to try it to see what the flavor profile is.” That’s the big thing with gluten-free. You’re using different grains, but yet you want to try and get a lot of the same flavors as you would from barley.

So is the brewing process the same with those grains? Will they convert their own starch to sugar or do you have to use enzymes?

They convert. I have to use no enzymes whatsoever. They actually convert very easily, so they’re a little bit more forgiving. Sorghum isn’t. Sorghum is a pain. Sorghum is an absolute pain. That’s why most places will just extract the sugar by adding enzymes instead of using the malting procedure. They just grind it, add enzymes and pull out the sugars that way. But millet and buckwheat are easy. And quinoa as well, which if the price ever goes down on it we’ll run a batch. If I do end up running it, then we’ll do small, one-barrel batches of a tripel, because that’s my Everest. I’m pretty sure I have a recipe down that I can do it, but that will be quinoa, buckwheat, and millet all together with no sorghum in it.

So sorghum to me does have a particular flavor when it’s made into beer. It’s kind of all at once oddly almond/floral and then cider – like green apple cider. But your beers do not have that. There is a little bit of that floral/almond in there, but not as intense as in a lot of sorghum beers. And I don’t get any of that cider character. If this beer is 100% sorghum, why don’t I get that?

So when we were trying to do gluten-free beers at first, we were failing miserably. We just couldn’t do it. We stopped and took a step back and thought, “We’re starting to prove that Einstein’s theory is correct. We’re just doing the same thing over and over again. We’re adding spices. We’re adding this and that. We’re adding as many adjuncts as we can to try to mask flavors. Instead of trying to mask flavors, why don’t we tear it apart?”
You know, I used to be a fine-dining cook. I’m very good at pulling flavors apart palate-wise, at least for food. So I had to start training myself. I’m always trying to look at beer in that sense. With beer and with wine I’m always trying to pull the palate apart and taste it that way. But I kind of stepped back from the beer thing and I went more for cooking. The flavor profiles that I’m looking for are this, this, this, and this. These are the flavor profiles that are good about straight sorghum and these are the ones that are not. So how do we get rid of the ones that are bad? Then I tried to figure out what I had. As much as I liked brewing and fermenting, I was no yeast expert. I knew that different kinds of yeast do different things and give different flavors and different reactions, but I didn’t know why. I didn’t know what happens if you push a yeast here or there. I knew about steam beers, but why does that action happen? Why does it change the flavor so profusely? I started playing around with yeast at that point. I started playing around with hops, completely throwing the books out, throwing out the guidelines and asking, okay so how do I change this profile? I have to add this profile to it and that will neutralize it and make it inert. You know, I add a bitter to a sweet. I add a spice to a sweet.

So working kind of like I would do with food pairings, looking for interactions that will tone down certain things and bring out others.

Exactly. It took a while to really wrap my head around it and start walking down that edge. Now I’m so specific that I’ve kilned my own grains and malted my own grains. It comes to me already malted now, but it’s the exact same thing, so I already know what it’s going to taste like. I can actually send my maltster a sample of my particular roast and she will match it. So we started playing with that. I started pushing yeast a little bit too, trying to get some flavors that might be considered off in other beers. We actually look for them, because they contradict some of the flavors in the sorghum that we want gone. So clever use of hops and yeast is the biggest thing. Fermentation temperatures. How fast I cycle through a fermenter.

So that kind of gets to something you said to me earlier, that yeast is your best friend. Is that primarily the reason?

I’ve always been fascinated by fungus. When I was younger I used to grow mushrooms. Not the hallucinogenic ones. I loved growing edible, culinary mushrooms. It’s hard to find hedgehog mushrooms. It’s hard to find black chanterelle mushrooms up here. And there’s no way I’m going to pay that much for portabellas or creminis. I realized that I could get free spore prints from universities. Growing mushrooms was one of the most difficult things I ever learned how to do. You almost have to do it in a lab. I actually have a glove box and I’m taking spore prints and I’m inoculating plates. It’s like working with yeast. I feel very comfortable with it.

Is there really a big enough market for a totally gluten-free brewery?

Yes. Absolutely. Right now the gluten-free industry in the United States is a 3.8 billion dollar industry. So it’s huge. And the number of cases is increasing yearly. The reason why is not because the number of people who have the genetic code for celiac are increasing, it’s that people are more aware of it and the tests are getting easier. The blood tests are actually pretty decent now. When I first went in, the blood tests were crap. You pretty much had to do an endoscopy and that scares people away from getting tested.
In some states you can be certified that you have celiac. I don’t know what that means to be certified celiac. “Wow! I have a sucky disease and I’m certified that I have a sucky disease! I can’t eat your food anymore! This sucks! Yay me!” But now more and more people are getting tested. That’s one of the things they are testing kids for now. It’s part of the allergen test.
That’s one of the reasons that we want to come out with the beers that we want to come out with. We want to come out with an American pale ale because to me when you’re trying to get into beers and you’re really exploring, there are beers that are better to start off with than others. And I think that the drinkability of American pale ale, especially with the citrus, it makes it a really easy summer beer to drink and it’s a beer that you can drink all year round. And it’s easier for those who aren’t hugely into craft beers. I mean, I have an American premium lager recipe. I’ve brewed it. It tastes like an American premium lager. It’s a pain to do, but I don’t mind doing it. But at the same time I’m like, “Do I want to put out an American premium lager? Do I want to do it?” I might eventually. I don’t know. As I got older I found a place for the American lager – before I got diagnosed. I actually really liked it when I went out fishing. That’s why I want to put it out. I want to put out a fisherman’s eight-pack. Just in cans. An eight-pack kind of thing.

You wouldn’t be the only one. A lot of craft brewers now are starting to put out American style lagers. Town Hall has one.

You can have fun with them. You don’t have to rip out everything with rice solids. I want to see how straw-colored I can make mine. I want to make it as clear as possible, as straw-colored as possible. It’s a challenge to make. It’s a hard beer to make. It’s a stupid-hard beer to make gluten-free because there is so much in the flavor that you have to hold back.

There’s not a lot to mask the sorghum flavor.

The other really difficult one is one that Thom my business partner has challenged me to do, and I’m not sure how I’m going to do it, but he wants me to do an English mild session beer. Trying to get a sorghum beer down in the 2% range, low 3% range – I have a hard time keeping it as low as I do now just because your first instinct is to rip out as much of the sugar from the sorghum as possible. That’s how you’re going to get alcohol from doing that. But to actually try to keep it low and still keep the balance. I’m thinking it’s not going to be a sorghum beer, that’s for sure. It might be just straight buckwheat, and I’ll use a bit of millet just as a pale malt in there.

What about roasted grains?

It gives you a real biscuity flavor if you just use it straight without malting it. If you malt it first you get a lot more of the malt tones in there. It’s still hard to pull that malt flavor out. But when you just roast it there’s no backbone, but a lot of biscuit. You can almost taste the burnt toast in there. It’s good in certain beers.
I was playing around with different stout recipes. I still want to create different stouts, because as I said before, when I was younger I fell in love with stout. I’d like to get back and do a really nice porter and a really nice stout and dive into some of the darker beers, the meatier beers like that. I use roasted buckwheat in one of the stouts that I was working on. It came out pretty good. The best stout I did was with quinoa, but I can’t figure out how to brew it on a large scale and have people afford it. That would be a 750 ml for 30 bucks almost. I know there are people with celiac who would pay that, but at the same time, I just don’t want them to have to. So it will take some time. Right now I’m working on something that’s just as good but doesn’t have quinoa in it.

That would be a hard sell. At 30 bucks you’re in the range of something like Deus Brut des Flandres.

I’m not up to that. I can only strive.

Talking to you it’s clear how your cooking and culinary background translates into brewing. But how do you see the connection?

Well…my attitude on the brew floor. My assistants hate it. I go right back into the kitchen mentality. One of them, thank God, has spent half his life in a kitchen, so he knows what it’s like to be yelled at. There’s a separating line between the brew floor and out here. Out here it didn’t happen. Just forget about it. We made beer. But I get pretty ornery back there. It’s funny, because I revert right back to that. If somebody misses something that’s really, really small it’s the most irritating thing in the world. To me as a cook that’s huge. On the hot side it’s not as bad because you’re not really as worried about contamination and all that, but I’m still, “I didn’t say that lever! Grab that butterfly and God damnit open it now! Jesus fucking Christ, let me do it!” I’m whipping down from the platform and I’m like, “Okay, I’m going to go over here and CIP something.” Actually, I’m trying to work on it.

Having worked for ten years in restaurants, that sounds very familiar.

Exactly. And I want to do everything at once, too. Just like in a restaurant. When they walk into the cooler and grab one thing and come out, I’m like, “what the hell are you doing? You’ve got stronger arms than that, pile it on there. You can take three boxes of hops out of there at a time, for God’s sake. It’s under a hundred pounds. You can do it. You’re wasting time.” Even though it’s not affecting the brew time whatsoever. You’re waiting for water to boil. Nothing is going on besides cleaning the brewery and prepping things out there. It’s not a big rush. But I get that cook mentality where it’s a rush and get it on. When that door opens, this place better be pristine and you’re mise en place better be set out perfectly. And you better be ready to cook some real food. Everything is done to order, baby.
But I also do that with the recipes too. I have my own wait staff that comes by to try recipes that I think are getting to the point that they are good. They come by and grab a growler and tear this apart. Tear it apart. My family, I’ll go to them for compliments all day long. But I want some constructive criticism, damnit. Tear it apart. That’s the reason we entered our beer into so many competitions while we still could. We entered the competitions just to get the feedback from the judges. We never told them it was gluten-free. I don’t want it compared to other gluten free beers. I feel like I have a product that can stand up against other gluten free beers on the market. I more want a product that can stand up to or at least hold its own weight against some of the craft beers. There is no way that I can top some of them, but I’m going to keep trying.

Fulton Beer’s New Production Facility

Posted on April 17, 2014 by Michael

I first interviewed the guys from Fulton Brewing about four years ago. They had come out of nowhere to put beer in bars all over the metro. No one knew who they were or what they were up to. The interview was conducted in a garage in the Fulton neighborhood of South Minneapolis. We drank beers poured from corny kegs in a chest freezer. At the time they were contract brewing their beer at Sand Creek Brewing in Black River Falls, Wisconsin.

They have come a long way since then. I just a few years they opened their taproom near target field, taking over the brewing of all of the kegged product, while moving bottled beer production to Point Brewing in Stevens Point, Wisconsin. Last year Fulton’s total production was around 15,000 barrels. That’s a lot of beer. This year they will complete construction of a new 7 million dollar facility in Northeast Minneapolis that will increase their capacity to a point that they don’t even know. For the first time Fulton will be producing all of its own beer in-house.

I had a chance to visit the facility last night. Quite impressive.

Day Block Brewing Co. & Destihl Brewery

Posted on January 25, 2014 by Michael

There is a lot of excitement right now around the multiplication of new Minnesota breweries. They are coming so fast and furious that I am having trouble even going to check them out. The Freehouse opened just a short while ago on Washington Avenue. I haven’t yet been to Sociable Cider Works, which started pouring at just about the same time. I still haven’t made it out to Victoria to see the guys at Enki, despite the fact that they have been open for some time. Burning Brothers will start putting their gluten-free beers on the street any day now.

Day Block Brewing Company will open its doors on Monday, January 27th at 3pm. Day Block managed to snag Paul Johnston, formerly of Harriet Brewing and Lucid Brewing, as head brewer. I was under the impression that Paul had left the Twin Cities for opportunities elsewhere. I was happy to learn that he was still in town. Joe Williams from Punch Pizza is running things in the kitchen. He’s responsible for Day Block’s small but intriguing menu of specialty pizzas.

I attended a soft opening last night and had the opportunity to sample the beers and taste a pizza. The crew is working extensively with local hop growers to source ingredients for the beer. Hippity Hop Pale Ale is made with organic Cascade hops from Hippity Hop Farms in Forest Lake, Minnesota. Northern Discovery IPA uses rare Northern Discovery hops grown only on a mysterious, unnamed farm in Wisconsin. My only beef with these beers is that they needed more hops, an unusual thing for me to say given my preference for malty beers. I was told that this was because the brewery hadn’t received their full allotment of hops. That’s fine, but why Paul didn’t adjust the recipes to account for this, I don’t know. I look forward to trying future versions of these beers.

My favorite was Frank’s Red Ale, a malt-forward American amber ale. The caramel malt was nicely balanced by moderate bitterness and light citrusy hop flavors. I also liked the Day Block Porter – a little roasty, a little chocolaty, with some nice earthy and spicy background hop notes.

I had the Commie pizza (I just liked the name), a cheeseless pie with bratwurst, kimchi, and hoisin sauce. It was tasty, but the kimchi could have used a bit more zip. They said that they are still working out the kimchi recipe. The Banh Mizza was highly recommended by several people in attendance. It’s kind of a pizza version of the Vietnamese pork Banh Mi sandwich. All of Day Block’s specialty pizzas are very unique. It was difficult to choose.

Out of State Breweries

It’s not only Minnesota breweries that are causing a buzz. There are also new and exciting brands coming in from out-of-state. Oscar Blues from Lyons, Colorado debuts today at the Beer Dabbler Winterfest. Destihl Brewery from Bloomington, Illinois celebrates its Minnesota launch on Tuesday. I am particularly excited about the latter.

Destihl started as two, upscale-concept brewpubs; one in Normal, Illinois and one in Champaign. I visited both while researching my upcoming Perfect Pint’s Beer Guide to the Heartland. I was impressed by the sleek and elegant décor, the stepped-up variations on standard brewpub fare, and the well-crafted beers. Last year Destihl built a 25-barrel production facility in Bloomington that enabled them to package beer for distribution.

Destihl is especially and deservedly recognized for its St. Dekkera Reserve line of sour beers. These tart and funky creations are spontaneously fermented, unblended, single-barrel brews that stay in oak barrels from one to three years. They have won numerous medals from the Festival of Barrel Aged Beers, The World Beer Championship, and the Great American Beer Festival. I’ve had the opportunity to sample several in the line and they are good.

Destihl beers will initially be available only on draft in Twin Cities market. Sixpack cans will follow soon. St. Dekkera sours and other specialty brews will see sporadic availability, but they will be worth watching for. Destihl’s launch event is happening this Tuesday, January 28th at Smalley’s Caribbean Barbeque and Pirate Bar in Stillwater. I chatted with Destihl brewmaster Matt Potts at the 2012 Great American Beer Festival.

Geoff Larson of Alaskan Brewing Company

Posted on December 12, 2013 by Michael

Juneau, Alaska is a forbidding place to open a brewery. It is accessible only by plane or boat. It stays mostly dark for half the year. And then there is the cold. But that is exactly what Geoff and Marcy Larson did. And not only did they open a brewery in Juneau, Alaska, they founded Alaskan Brewing Company in the early 1980s, a time when the whole idea of “craft” brewing was an anomaly. What were they thinking?

I vividly remember the first time I tasted Alaskan Amber Ale. It was several years ago while on tour with my theatre troupe. That beer was on the list at the restaurant where we were eating dinner. The first sip was an “oh my god” experience for me. It was so creamy, rich, and full of caramel. I immediately became a fan of the brewery, even more so when a couple years later I finally got to try Alaskan Smoked Porter, a beer with a reputation that made it seem legendary. I’m still a fan. Alaskan Winter Ale is one of the winter seasonal brews that I wait for every year.

I actually did this interview with Geoff Larson in November, 2011. You know, sometimes you get busy and things just slip by. We sat at Republic (was it still Sargent Preston’s then?) sipping Alaskan Winter and eating sausages. Over the course of our hour-long conversation we talked about the history of the brewery and of the beer industry in Alaska. He revealed how over 2000 pounds of spruce tips are collected to make Winter Ale every year. And just as a warning, we got pretty geeky about smoke. The interview may be two years old, but it’s as relevant today as it was then.

Geoff & Marcy Larson

You opened Alaskan Brewing at a time when small breweries were still fairly rare, and in a place where they were even rarer. What made you think that was a good idea?

The experience I could draw from was the openness, and support, and almost “can do” – I hate to be cliché in that way – attitude that most people in Alaska have. You are living in the last frontier. You get a feeling of the last frontier. You’re exposed to what were, in the very recent past historically, really unbelievable pioneering stories that were successes. So I think there is a predisposition for people to say, “Yeah, that sounds like it can be done. Go for it.”

It tapped into the spirit of the place, in a way.

Yeah. And the mean age at the time was 27. Half of the population was younger than us. I mean, that’s just amazing. We were living in an extraordinarily contemporary, youthful, optimistic environment. It wasn’t necessarily all optimistic at the time. When we started interest rates were at sixteen percent. Sixteen percent is what our first bank loans were for inventory. That was the mid-80s. But I would say that once we started talking about the idea, in Alaska there was a lot more support. There wasn’t anybody that just laughed and walked away saying, “Well that’s stupid.” There was a real supportive feel towards young people.

I can see how that would tap into the spirit of the place. Like you said, until very recently it was pioneer.

Yeah. You know in 1900 Juneau was just coming into its own because they found gold there. And it is a dynamic place. I think there are those elements of hitting something insurmountable, unbelievably large challenges, and saying, “Yeah, we did that.” You know, a mine opening up in the back country. “Yeah, we’ll do that.” I’m going to go climb McKinley. “Okay. You can do that.” I’m going to go fishing and catch a 200-pound halibut. “Oh, okay. I wouldn’t mind a little bit of that.” I was kind of raised that way, in many ways. My parents were always really supportive of what we did as kids. Not towards the brewery. Both Marcy and I come from somewhat teetotaling families.

How did they feel about you opening a brewery?

Oh, I think they would have preferred us choosing a different focus in life. But I think really what was part of that step-wise transition towards getting into the industry was meeting people in the industry who had this reservoir of respect and feeling of being part of something larger than themselves. When we were about to move to Alaska I would swing by a brewery in New York, FX Matt Brewing Company, and FX Matt III spent an entire day with me. Here I was 24 years old. And this is 1982 or 1983. He didn’t sit there and say, “You’re 24. Get out of here. Get a job.” But he did say, “If you do start making beer commercially, make the best beer you can, because you reflect on all brewers.” I thought that was kind of a distillation of what he was talking about. At this place in our history, you are representing all those that came before you.

I think that is still good advice now. If you look at the boom that’s happening right now, some of it is great beer, some of it isn’t very good beer. And it does reflect on everybody.

And definitely in the 1990s you saw that manifested in consumers. Because consumers say, “Well I’ve got to try this category.” And there were a lot of people producing anything. Put it in a bottle and it will sell. And they were right. But it would sell once. The problem was the consumer was ignorant, and would taste this and rightfully so say, “I don’t like this.” And then they judge the whole category. But I have to say those steps towards the feeling that there’s more to it than just making beer really were kind of an interesting genesis.

What were the challenges of opening a brewery in Juneau and what are the challenges now of running a brewery in Juneau, being as it is a place that you can’t reach except by plane?

What were the challenges? Well, it was more a challenge of the times, because it was still a very novel concept. “Oh, you’re going to make a beer and it’s going to be cheap. Great.” And they are thinking price, but I’m seeing implications of low-quality ingredients, price, and low-quality beer. And I was like, “No, we’re going to do something totally different.”

There is an interesting dichotomy in Alaska. There are a lot of alcohol issues that occur in the native communities. They are going through a cultural change away from a totally subsistence lifestyle. And part of that transition is coming into the social norms of what would be reasonable use of an adult beverage. So there was a fairly significant part of Health and Social Services who were concerned about, “Oh, we don’t need a whole bunch of cheap beer being put forth.” So we reached out and talked to those folks and said, “Hey, this is what we’re going to do. What can we do so that we don’t inadvertently do something stupid? What do you see as something that we could avoid?” Open dialogue.

Back then, finding equipment was tough. There was no real infrastructure to supply it. There was stuff that you could pull together. But my background was chemical engineering. I understood how to do things. I knew the right way. I think up front we kind of knew that we weren’t going to have a lot of forgiveness where we are, so we at least need to do things correctly and as efficiently as possible. It’s not like we can just get in the car and drive to get a rebuild kit for a motor. So I’d say we probably invested in some pretty good equipment up front to overcome some of those challenges.

Other challenges? I’d say supply chain. You order today it’s not going to ship and get there until seven days later. That’s still a problem, but in that problem there was a little bit of a benefit. We always had to make sure that we knew the logistics of getting stuff and plan ahead. So again, the challenge created more of a systematic approach. It wasn’t like we could go, “Oh hell. I’ve got to order today.” No, it was, “I’ve got to order for next week.” So it was some training early on that made our lives a little easier down the road.

Once again it’s that Alaskan self-reliance.

But fast forward to today and some of those challenges are still there. But I would say we are in a small community. We’ve always been in a small community. We’ve always been really attuned to our impacts. Early on we talked to the city water department, telling them our expectations for the next five years. “Is this going to cause any issues or growth challenges for you? Because obviously if you can’t supply us, we ain’t growing.” And every five years we try to say, “Okay, this is our forecast.” to our water utility. And I’d say that we’re mindful of that even in the equipment that we buy. We exercise an awareness of how we fit into the larger fabric of our community.

You just talked about something that led me to one of the questions that I had. You have this whole focus on sustainable practice. Where did this desire to emphasize sustainability come from?

We moved to Alaska because we love the out-of-doors, and the out-of-doors in Alaska is pretty breathtaking. And there have been many times in the backcountry when we really have gotten that maybe mythical feeling. “My god, I could be the first person here.” I say that and I have images of specific times I’ve been in that zone. I’ve been to places where I know that no one has been in many years. We have a lot of land coming back from glacial recession, so there are areas where we were camping and it’s really a very fragile environment. You can’t help but think, “We made an impact.” No matter how careful you were, you made a big impact. But I think that sense of connectivity is really part of our state. Subsistence lifestyle is something that people talk about because there is truly a very significant part of our population who live off the land. So when you talk about sustainability it goes back to that, just walking in the woods. We live there because we love it, and I think that there is a certain sense of husbandry and nurturing that comes to you from the get-go.

As far as the brewery itself, I think sometimes necessity is the mother of invention. You know? If you’re wasteful, guess what, you’ve got to buy more of things. You’ve got to ship more of it, and you’ve got to get it up here. So sometimes it’s just common sense. But I think another element that drives Alaskan Brewing is that we’re in a place that challenges the standard way of doing things. You have to say, “Okay, that’s what everybody else does. Is that what we’re going to do?” Sometimes innovation just all of a sudden occurs. Innovation is a departure from the norm; a departure from the norm to improve something. Sometimes the norm has already created those little boundaries of your perception. I’m going to build a square box to live in as a house. Well, what about a yurt? If all you saw around you were square boxes, you wouldn’t even think about a round structure. How do you make round structures with 2x4s? That doesn’t make sense. They’re square. So I think that’s part of it, too. It’s just that we’re in a challenging environment and maybe what other people do we just can’t do. Or maybe we just don’t think about it that way. For instance, our recovery of the carbon dioxide off the fermenting beer when we were at a very small size was unheard of in this country.

That’s something that a lot of people do now.

A fair amount do, but I’m surprised at the craft industry. I think there are only like one or two of the craft breweries that do it besides us. It really surprised me. But we did it just a few years into our operation. One advantage that it creates is that we know the CO2 source. The primary CO2 source that people buy CO2 from is all fossil fuel. They’re burning fossil fuel and then purifying it. It’s really hard to purify it totally when you’re starting with hydrocarbons burning. So the fact that our CO2 comes from fermentation, you know what? It’s pretty easy. Not to say that you can’t have off flavors. You can have DMS and stuff like that coming in from the CO2, so you go through the purification process. But you’re still dealing with naturally occurring yeast by-products, not a whole bunch of aromatic hydrocarbons or other sort of cross links. Petroleum products.

How else has location influenced your brewing?

Marcy did a lot of work looking at some of the historical breweries before prohibition, mainly as kind of a pictorial essay – her training is in photojournalism – of where does beer lie and why is it even relevant in Alaska. It was really an interesting side trip that we took. What we found was that there were a lot of breweries in Alaska before prohibition. And obviously most of the brewing traditions came from the influx of white men going in for the gold. The gold rush attracted people from all over the world and they brought in brewing traditions. But they had additional challenges, many of the same challenges we face today. They had logistical issues. They had environmental issues.

How do you overcome the water or the temperature etc.?

Absolutely. So I think that was another little bit of inspiration for us. We looked at history as a guide to remain relevant today. Why are we in Alaska? Why brew beer in Alaska? Why not brew it down south and ship it to Alaska and call it Alaskan? We have a fundamental ethos that we’re going to brew it in Alaska. That’s one of the most common questions that we get is, “Where are you brewed?” And there’s incredulity in their eyes when we say, “Well we brew it in Juneau, Alaska.”

There were five operating breweries in Juneau at the turn of the century. There are a lot of photographs of them. But one of the breweries, the brewmaster was interviewed and he talked about his trials and tribulations of keeping the fermenters warm enough so that the ale could ferment fully. And that gave us insight into the cold fermentation of our ale. And then we got a phone call from a fellow by the name of Nick Nichols. He was a collector and he had bar tokens. And those were the coinage of the realm because they didn’t have a lot of coins. You know, you would bring in your gold nugget, they’d weigh it, and you’d get 50 tokens. So there is a lot of token collecting up there. But he had a treasure trove of files from the Douglas City Brewing Company, including shipping invoices for raw materials. So we could put together the raw materials with the interviews to try and emulate what might have been the beer that was brewed.

See this is interesting, because I didn’t realize this until I was prepping for this interview that Alaskan Amber was inspired by the history of the Alaskan brewing industry.

Obviously we’re challenged. We couldn’t say that we have his yeast and all that. We could give ratios of crystal malt and pale malt, but what’s crystal malt? Back then they didn’t say 20 Lovibond, 40 Lovibond, 60 Lovibond. You get verbal descriptions of hues, but those are subjective descriptors.

That’s always a problem when trying to recreate historical recipes.

Right. But even the beer we’re drinking right now (Alaskan Winter Ale) is inspired by Captain Cook, 1778. Captain Cook was very meticulous. His journal entries are phenomenal. He’s quite a remarkable man when you think about what he did. But he was also an adamant brewer on board. We had a chance to work with one of our local historical societies and they helped us do a lot of research into what Captain Cook said in his journals about brewing on board. We found fourteen references to where he used spruce in making beer on board. Not all of them were successful. He had a couple references in his journals in regards to literally his “mutinous” crew not being very satisfied with his beer and refusing to drink it. But that particular batch was where he used the boughs of a spruce tree. He was taking whole limbs of the spruce tree, chopping them up, and throwing them in there. So they probably did taste like turpentine. And then there was one reference where he talked of his crew being especially appreciative of the beer that he made. It was from the new growth of the spruce tree. And that first growth, the spruce tips, really is that first flush of nutritive, high sugar content sap. I’ve tasted blue spruce. That’s not as tasty in the spring. But Sitka spruce, literally I’ll be going through the forest and I’ll be munching on the tips. They’re very citrusy. There is a tartness to them. And then there’s also a real floral character to them. But anyway, our Winter Ale is a kind of old ale – old as in “olde” – but with spruce as a component in its spicing. Captain Cook used the spruce tips as a replacement for hops. Because of course he’s going out there on the ocean for a long time. What’s interesting about spruce tips is that they are very high in vitamin C. And of course in beer you have the whole vitamin B complex from the yeast. Today you can brew any beer, any place, any time, but it’s kind of fun to sit there and rediscover that which is relevant to your past. I think we’re living in extraordinarily amazing times as consumers of beer. But I think it’s all been rediscovered.

So a question crossed my mind as you were talking. I don’t know how much Winter Ale you make, but how do you possibly get enough spruce tips to make enough of this beer?

Very good question. It’s actually a really interesting process. When Marcy and I moved to Alaska we lived in a town called Gustavus. We have a friend there who has a processing plant for mainly fish, for smoking fish and stuff like that. So we’ll send her the number of pounds of spruce tips we’re going to buy for brewing that year, and we’ll buy them at the spot price for hops. She puts out a little sandwich sign. It coincides with about when school lets out for the year, so these kids go out and start picking spruce tips. We have a little descriptor of how they should pick them for the health of the tree. You are pruning a tree, so it actually is healthy for the tree. It has to be on private land. It can’t be on public land because we have a lot of national parks and a lot of forest service land, so it has to be on private land. So they go out and pick. It’s wild. I went over there to visit and she says, “I’ve just got to show you this box.” It’s a little 3 x 5 box of cards. So she takes out one of her clients. It’s a kid, so she has the entries of his pickings. The first entry is like three ounces. Spruce tips are very small. They’re tiny. And he’s out there working away. The next week it gets up to be a pound and a half. By the end of the week it’s like four and a half pounds in a day. We’re talking hops are five to ten bucks a pound, so this little kid is getting twenty bucks. The next week, six pounds. Eight pounds. The spruce tips are getting larger. And by the end of the week what’s happening is that the amount we’re buying is going down rapidly, but the amount of poundage coming in is going up rapidly. By the end he was bringing in 15 to 20 pounds. I’ve had so many parents come up and say to me that it’s amazing. Kids get out of school, and all of a sudden there’s a three week stretch of absolute entrepreneurial, I’m getting outside, I’m getting up early in the morning and going out picking spruce tips. They said it sets the tone for the entire summer. The kids are like, “what can I do outside?” But that’s how we get the spruce tips. And we get a lot more than 2000 pounds. We get a lot more. And we’ve been doing this for a number of years. It’s hilarious. I go to Gustavus and I know the yards that have been picked from.

So Alaskan Smoked Porter. I have to tell you that one of the greatest beer experiences of my life was at the Craft Brewers Conference in Chicago a couple years ago. At the reception before the World Beer Cup awards banquet there is this huge trough of beer from all over the world; all of the World Beer Cup entries. As if that weren’t enough, I’m standing at the trough trying to decide what I want to try when a woman next to me pulls out a bottle and says, “That will work.” It was 1998 Alaskan Smoked Porter. It was awesome. But it’s counterintuitive that that beer should age as well as it does. It’s not an 11% barleywine, it’s a 6.5% porter. It should stale. Why doesn’t it?

Well, you know smoke has been used for ages as a preservative. Now maybe indirectly people would say that it’s the drying process where you’re concentrating the salts, which are also a preservative in meats. But actually there are a fair amount of interesting characteristics in smoke. It’s a pretty complex substance. There are a lot of phenols, furfurals…I could go on. My background is chemistry, so I could really go off on a tangent on that one. But a lot of them are bacteriostatic. Not necessarily bactericidal, but they tend to inhibit all growth. They don’t necessarily kill bacteria. But with bacteriostatic – the Latin root “static” means “staying” – it doesn’t allow growth. But there is also a class of compounds that are antioxidants. There is a characteristic oxidation that takes place in the smoked porter, like kind of the dried fruit character of ports and the like, you know, plums, dried cherries and whatever, that comes through in the oxidation of the roasted malts. But I really do think a lot of its age stability is from those smoke compounds that are antioxidants that prevent it from becoming like cardboard. The ugly side of oxidation.

But I have to admit, when we first made that beer – the first year we released it was 1988, December of 1988 – we said, “Well we can’t put 1988 on it in December. By January it’s going to be 1989, people are going to say, ‘Well it’s old.’” So we put that first release as 1989, because beer is best when fresh. We were really fixated on, “This is a porter. It’s not a barleywine. It can’t age.” So we were of the same mindset.

But of course, we’re passionate about what we do, so we keep the beers around. We crack one every once in a while. And after a few years it was like, “Wow. These older beers are good.” So it was at GABF 1992, I got a few people together in my room where I could actually go back to 1989, which was actually the 1988 vintage, and taste a series of beers and ask their opinion. I had the opportunity to have Michael Jackson in on the tasting with Fred Eckhardt, Charlie Papazian, and some others. It was a pretty heavy-hitting group. But I asked them, “What do you think?” And I had them taste the beers and there was a rounding endorsement. “This ages elegantly.” Actually Michael Jackson later said to me, “One thing you might want to think about. Don’t filter out the yeast. Leave the yeast in. It’s a living beer, so let life stay there.”

Which also helps curb oxidation.

Right. So from 1993 on, we stopped filtering that beer. And we kept a library at the brewery, so we have beers all the way back to 1993. And it’s interesting, because obviously the dynamics of flavor change is, simply put, you have smoke that’s actually kind of diminishing over time, but not at a real rapid rate. Maybe it’s really rapid for the first year. There is a real sharp decline of certain characteristics of the smoke that first year. You’ll find that even in Bamberg where they try to keep the same smoke characteristic throughout the year. They can’t smoke malts in the summer, so during the summer they will actually add more and more of their smoked malts to get the same sort of smoke character in their beer. But what happens is that after years the smoke diminishes, so when I do vertical tastings I always recommend that people go from the oldest to the youngest. The aromatics of hops will disappear. That goes fast. In 18 months to two years it will be really hammered. The bitterness also decreases over time. But then you have some of the unique oxidation components that elevate over time. So there is a real dynamic and it’s really fun. It wasn’t intuitive that it could age. But it did.

I think when you said it ages elegantly, that’s a good way to put it. I did have the opportunity at GABF to taste through a three year vertical sampling. Older is better. Not that the new isn’t perfectly good. But older is better.

The Brewers Association asked me to write a book on smoked beers. They got me together with Ray Daniels to write this book. What an experience. I had an experience that was truly life impacting. I called up the Library of Congress and asked them, “I’m writing a book about smoke flavored beers. Living in Alaska, how would I go about getting research information from the Library of Congress?” So I got the culinary science research librarian. Of course, they have such. And he said, “Quite frankly the library of Congress is probably not your best resource. But there are three collections that you are looking for, that have been sold and are probably in the public domain. But we don’t know where they are.” He gave me the name of these three collections and I went to the one that they had record of and I tracked it down. It was called the Hurty-Peck Collection. The wealthiest beverage manufacturer in 1900. He’d been making soft drinks for 100 years. He was extraordinarily wealthy and he decided to collect every book ever written in the English language having to do with any beverage. So he had this collection of English books. It was the University of California-Davis that had finally bought it. So I went there and spent three days immersing myself in this collection of books. I was in awe. I was holding texts that were written and printed in the 1600s. The 1500s. I’m going through and I’m looking for references to smoke. But there was a research librarian that was asking me what I was writing about and he said, “You are the first person who has ever asked for this collection. We’ve had it for three years. When it came into our shop it had the most intense, sickeningly sweet raspberry smell.”

Soda maker.

Soda maker, but from 1900! How in the world did it hold the smell that long? A hundred years! But this librarian said, “You have to put yourself back in that time and you have to be understanding of what they’re writing about and how they’re writing.” He says, “For example, you’re reading texts from the 16^th-century, the 17^th-century, and the 18^th-century. In the 16^th and 17^th-century for sure, who was doing all the brewing? And where were they brewing?” Well, it’s going to be on farms. Farm brewing. “Well who was doing it?” And I was like, “Well…brewers.” He says, “Women. The women were in the kitchen brewing. But women weren’t taught to write. So who was writing these books? It was men. So were men being real attentive to how women were brewing in the kitchen? Possibly not. So you have to be very careful about what you take as far as research and how much credence you put into it.” And I was like, “Oh, got it.” It was like, “Aha!”

But I was kind of frustrated because I couldn’t find positive references toward smoke in these texts. If they had a reference toward smoke it was usually negative. Well, I’m not going to write a book about bad things about smoke. Well in 1600 or 1700 you walk down any street and what did you smell? Smoke. You go to any kitchen and what do you smell? Smoke. Everything had smoke. The reason they mention smoke is when it is unusually intense. Even when we made the Smoked Porter originally, too much of a good thing wasn’t pleasant. So really there’s a balance; hedonistic balances about hitting that threshold where it’s really very appealing but not going overboard.

Pleasant and not oily.

Yeah. And they talked about specific woods having different character and specific sources of heat that they used to dry out the malt that were very pleasant or not very pleasant. But that’s the other thing that was very interesting too is the flavor association thing. Alder is the wood that we used to make the smoked beer in Alaska, because that’s the hardwood that’s available. Many of the breweries in Juneau were brewing and malting companies. They malted their own. So really the smoked porter was again a touch of the history of our locale. But each wood has its own signature. And I would often get asked about the fish flavor of the smoked porter. We clean the smokehouse really well. There is no fish involved. I would go to the tenth degree of being defensive about that. I didn’t get it until a friend of mine, Greg Noonan from the Vermont Pub & Brewery told me his story. He was using hickory in his smoked porter. And he said, “People always thought I used ham. I finally got so sick and tired of that I started to go to maple. Then they started thinking that I was using sausage. Jimmy Dean’s Maple Smoked Sausage.” And that’s when I was like, “Flavor association.” Smoke is not the same from one wood to the other.

No, it’s absolutely not the same. If you think of the beechwood smoke from the Schlenkerla Rauchbier, all the Bamberg rauchbiers, that to me is like bacon, or it’s got that kind of oily ham thing. Cherrywood smoke is really popular now and that to me is char. That’s the best way that I can describe it. It’s not meat related, it’s char. I had a cherrywood smoked bock at the Goose Island Brewpub in Chicago and if I didn’t know better I would have sworn they used chipotle in it. It had that kind of a flavor without the heat. So how would you describe the flavor you get from the alder wood?

Well, my god. There’s a lot that goes on in the pyrolysis of wood degradation.

That’s your chemistry background coming out.

(Laughs) Well you have the hemicellulose, and the cellulose, and the lignin. And each of them creates a specific class of compounds. But because it’s a hardwood, there’s less lignin.

I’m just looking for flavor.

But interestingly enough, the types of phenols that come out from burning wood, there is some eugenol, which is clove. There is a fair amount of guayacol, which is the phenol from a lot of the traditional German wheat beers. But there is also a whole other set of compounds. There are a lot of vanillins. You get that with a lot of fresh, toasted oak. It adds the flavor impacts on any beverage that gets exposed to it. Even on bourbons and stuff you’ll get the vanillins.

That’s a really tough question… I would say the alder has a…It’s a less acrid set of flavors. Greg Noonan talked about it, and he was really familiar with hickory. He talked about it being much more phenolic in character, much more of that sharper kind of eugenol character. I wouldn’t have said that, but hell, he’s around it more than I am so I’m going to trust his opinion. But I would say that the alderwood works really well just because of its tendency not to be so overbearing in some of those acrid notes. I also think there isn’t a huge amount of aftertaste. You talked about it being oily and it just overwhelms. But I think alder doesn’t do that as much. You can get it there, but…

That’s a tough question. I will pose that to my gang. How would you describe the character of alder smoke?

With my company A Perfect Pint I do beer tasting events and beer education. I’m always looking for ways to describe flavor. What does this taste like? How is this flavor different from that flavor?

Of course we all know that there are arguably four or five taste sensations in your palate. I guess it’s no longer arguable. They talk about umami being the fifth one. But aromatics, that’s where flavor is. And I’ve seen gas chromatograph readouts of various smokes, and we’re talking four, five, six hundred individual peaks. The primary one in wood burning, the largest peak other than water from pyrolysis is acetic acid. So when people ask me for advice on how to smoke grains, one of the pieces of advice that I’ll always give is that you’ve got to make sure that you dry the grains out totally, because what you want to do is drive off the acetic acid. Otherwise you will get acetic acid, which is typically really easily discerned and not necessarily pleasant. If you dry the grain totally the acetic acid will be gone. It will volatilize off. No problem.

I would not have associated acetic acid with smoke.

I was smoking malts out the wazoo. I was using corncobs for smoking malts. We brewed a whole bunch of different beers with different smoke sources. Corncob. Sassafras wood. All sort and manner of smoke sources. Straw. So we were just trying to get a different flavor. Ray (Daniels) and I were trying to discern sensory-wise is every smoke that different? Can somebody just pick it out? Ray set it up so that I would smoke the malt. I’d send it to him. He’d brew the batches of beer and he would send me dual trials. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. Then we would have our panel taste it. And our panel would look for what was the same. It wasn’t necessarily what was different, because it was all smoke character, but which two are the same and which is the oddball. He sent us seven sets and we nailed each one. So I’m convinced. Every source of wood is going to put out a different characteristic smoke that can be easily discerned.

One last question. What turns you on about making beer?

You know, originally I would say that it was an undiscovered flavor platform. People had no idea that there was something more than just this blond, wet beverage that was called beer that would give you more than just that sort of experience. And then having exposure to all these other imported beers and our homebrew really kind of gave me a great platform to talk about flavors. In the past I often would talk about how it’s easy for people to describe Vincent Van Gogh’s Starry Night. You can do it verbally. You can do the swirls, the paint, the yellows and blues in the background. There is the little village nestled in the mountains. Whatever. Everybody is thinking the exact same thing. You see it in your mind. But when you talk about flavors, when you describe that very powerful sensory organ that we have, we have kind of relegated it to just being, “Oh. I’ve got to eat. I’m gonna stuff it down my throat.” It’s an ignored sensory platform. And here we are creating something to be able to appeal to that sense hedonistically. It’s just a wonderful little playground of creative reward that you get from your consumer.

And I have to admit, some of the most extraordinary experiences are going into halls and people are coming up to me – they don’t know me – and saying, “Have you tasted this? You’ve got to taste this.” And having personal experiences where it’s like, “Oh wow. That’s just beautiful. That’s elegant.” So I would say that those are the experiences that rewarded me early on. And you know, I still get those. So in some ways it’s still those magical canvases of flavors that are still being discovered. I still get a kick out of that.

I get a kick also from just thinking back on history. We’re rediscovering something that was as pleasurable back then as it is today. We suffer under a misconception that we are living in times that are unique and different than any others that go before us. I look at some of the technological feats of some of our predecessors in Alaska and what they did back then. We ain’t that great. But at the same time, it doesn’t diminish our own pleasure.

Lakewood Brewing Company at the 2013 GABF

Posted on November 27, 2013 by Michael

“Internationally inspired, locally crafted beer.” That’s the motto of Lakewood Brewing Company in Garland, Texas. Founder/brewer Wim Bens was introduced to good beer while growing up in Belgium. Here in the US it was his love of Belgian beers that led him to American craft beer. His split influences are reflected in the beers that he brews at Lakewood. They layer an American sensibility onto a base of classic European styles.

In the lineup you’ll find a classic Pilsner, a Munich dunkel with pumpkin and spice, and a Belgian-style IPA among other Euro-marican brews. The crowning glory is The Temptress, a rich and chocolaty imperial milk stout that Bens calls “dessert in a glass.” The description is apt. It is one very tasty beer.

Mob Craft Brewing at the 2013 GABF

Posted on November 26, 2013 by Michael

These are crazy times for beer. Breweries are popping up so fast that it has become impossible to track them. Believe me, I tried. From December 2010 until March of this year I was writing A Perfect Pint’s Beer Guide to the Heartland, due out next May from the University of Illinois Press (really!). For those two and a half years I put considerable effort into keeping track of all the new breweries in four states. That was a fool’s errand. It ultimately got the best of me. In the interest of eventually actually producing a book I gave up.

I have to admit that since turning in the manuscript, I haven’t been tracking new breweries all that hard. I got burned out on the task. And so it is that I am continually learning about startups in the region. Perusing the list of breweries in the program of this year’s GABF I came across two that I had never heard of. One of them is Mob Craft Brewing in Madison, Wisconsin.

Mob Craft opened in June. The nano-sized brewery is using a crowd-sourced model for determining the beers they produce. Fans can submit recipes or suggestions on the brewery’s website. Drinkers then vote with their dollars by ordering the beers that they most want the guys to make. It’s an interesting concept; a drinker-driven beer lineup.

Excel Bottling Company at the 2013 GABF

Posted on November 25, 2013 by Michael

As a writer I’m a storyteller. I like breweries that have interesting stories. They make my job easier. The story can come from anywhere. It might be the brewer’s career path or brewing philosophy. It could be the history of the brewery or the building in which it is housed. Or maybe it’s the beauty of the countryside that surrounds the brewery. A brewer can make the best beer in the world, but without a captivating backstory it’s terribly difficult to pen an interesting profile. I’m left trying to manufacture magic from the rather mundane reality of making beer.

Excel Bottling Company in tiny Breese, Illinois made my life very easy. The company was founded in 1936 when Edward “Lefty” Maier captured a bank robber and collected a $500 reward. He used the windfall to purchase a bottling machine and open the third soda making plant in Breese. The others have long since closed, but nearly 80 years later Excel is still making soda the old fashioned way. They use real sugar, natural flavorings, and returnable bottles. And those bottles are still filled on that original 1936 machine.

Excel started making beer in 2012. It was mostly a business decision says Paul Maier, “Lefty’s” son. Returnable bottles have to be ordered in massive quantities and they needed another product line to keep them all filled. The current boom in brewing and a change in the law allowing small brewers to self-distribute made beer a likely choice. They hired long-time homebrewer and homebrew store owner Tony Toenjes to oversee brewery operations. Rod Burguiere, a former brewer at Stone Brewing Co. was taken on as assistant brewmaster. Burguiere was looking for a way to move back to his native Midwest and jumped at the opportunity to bring a West Coast sensibility to Southern Illinois.

Summit Brewing Company at the 2013 GABF

Posted on November 22, 2013 by Michael

Continuing with the GABF video interview series, I visit Summit Brewing Company. I chatted with brewers Nate Siats and Jeff Williamson as well as Steve Secor from packaging. They gave me the low-down on expansion, new beers, and Jeff talks about making the transition from Flat Earth to Summit.

I think this one must have happened late in the session. I seem to be a little less focused than in some of the other interviews. It is GABF!

Scratch Brewing Co. at the 2013 GABF

Posted on November 21, 2013 by Michael

Some breweries are just more interesting than others. This has nothing to do with the quality of the beer. It’s more about the brewery’s story and philosophy. One such brewery is Scratch Brewing Co. in the tiny, southern Illinois town of Ava.

Many breweries call themselves “farmhouse” breweries, but for Scratch Brewing Company the term is especially appropriate. The brewpub is located on a plot of forested land about five miles outside Ava. It is truly a farmstead that has been in co-owner Aaron Kleidon’s family for 25 years.

But “farmhouse” in this case also applies to the way they think about and brew beer. They follow an ethic that looks to back to a time when beer making was carried out on every farmstead using the ingredients at hand. They want Scratch beers to smell and taste like southern Illinois. The rustic flavors of their traditionally styled brews are enhanced by the addition of local ingredients, many of which are foraged from the property. These have included such things as nettle, elderberry, ginger, dandelion, maple sap, various roots, and cedar, among others. They grow some of their own hops and source others from Windy Hill Hops, a nearby grower.

The brewery itself is a mix of primitive and modern that reflects the different personalities of the owners. Aaron Kleidon is an expert forager who pushes a more primitive process that includes brewing in a copper kettle over an open fire. Ryan Tockstein represents the modern side of brewing seen in their 1.5-barrel Stout Tanks brewhouse. Foodie Marika Josephson fall somewhere in between and forms a bridge between the two.

While the character of Scratch beers leans heavily on unique ingredients, don’t look for them to be extreme. These brewers make beers to which modern palates will respond, but that are deeply rooted in older traditions. They look to their ingredients to complement other flavors already in the beer, not to overwhelm them.

I had interviewed Marika on the phone for my upcoming Midwest brewery guidebook, but hadn’t had the opportunity to visit the brewery or taste the beers. I was so excited to see them on the list at the Great American Beer Festival.

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