Dan Carey is a brewer I have always wanted to meet. Tasting his beers and hearing him talk I built an impression of him as an intelligent person and one who thinks deeply about beer. I like talking with such people. They challenge me. They expand my knowledge and push me to deepen my own perceptions of what beer is and can be.

Dan Carey founded New Glarus Brewing Company in 1993 together with his wife Deb, an outspoken powerhouse of a woman who handles the business side of the brewery. He has an extraordinary brewing pedigree. Carey started in the industry at the age of 20 working at a small brewery in Helena, Montana. He spent time as an engineer for brewery manufacturer JV Northwest where he built or consulted on the breweries for many of the 1980s craft-beer pioneers. Before starting New Glarus he was a production supervisor at Anheuser-Busch. He was valedictorian of his Siebel Institute class, did an apprenticeship a the Ayinger brewery outside Munich, and in 1992 became the first American since 1978 to pass the Master Brewer Examination of the Institute of Brewing and Distilling in London. He is one of the few American brewers who can rightfully be called a Brewmaster.

In June my book research took me to Madison, Wisconsin. I finally had the opportunity to sit down with Carey during my visit to New Glarus. It was a 30-minutes conversation that left me exhilarated and renewed my excitement about beer.

How do you approach making a beer? What is your process?

First of all the beer has to taste good. That is extremely subjective, tasting good. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don’t consider myself a microbrewer. I consider myself a brewer. I don’t belong to any school. I don’t try to make most outrageous beer. I just try to make something that tastes good.

The Second thing is that it has to be made well. So it has to be consistent and predictable. It has to have a reasonable shelf life. Part of the problem with small breweries is that our beer doesn’t move as quickly as say a suitcase of light beer in cans. We have to make a beer that has a better shelf stability than the large breweries do. So discipline and quality is important. How the beer is brewed is important. And then of course it has to be something that’s practical to make.

So I have an idea of what the beer should taste like that comes about through discussions with various people; Deb (Carey), my brewing team, and my lab team. We talk about what we want the beer to be and then we imagine that. It’s like writing music. People who write music write the music down and they can hear it. It’s the same thing with writing a recipe on a piece of paper.

Also, the machinery cannot be divorced from the process. For example, if you write a recipe and use the same exact ingredients, same yeast, same water, everything exactly the same and you bring it to various brewers you will always have different beer, because the machinery is extremely important. Machinery has its own personality, its own temperament, and its own foibles. So you have to work with the strengths and weaknesses of your machinery. So it gets very complex. In a lot of ways it’s like being a conductor in the sense that you have to write the music and then conduct it.

I like this analogy of making beer to making music. If you’re a good musician you have to have knowledge of fundamentals; the scales and all that. How does that translate into making beer?

It’s a beautiful analogy. The discipline of being a good brewer – let’s call it a Brewmaster. What is a Brewmaster? You have to be a manager of people, so you have to be a leader, which is not easy. You have to be inspired and well educated and really believe in your people for them to follow you. You have to be a scientist to understand the microbiology and biology and chemistry. You have to be an engineer because you have to understand physics; things like heat transfer, and motors, and pumps. You also have to be a little bit of a chef because you have to understand all the flavors that go into it.

You should be able to go into a brewery and the brewer should be able to tell you how many kilowatts or therms of energy they are using to make a bottle of beer, what their loss is in the process, what’s their extract efficiency. Those are all fundamental.

To make good beer is fairly easy to accomplish, especially in this modern age of the internet, and yeast suppliers, and malt suppliers, and equipment suppliers. There’s a whole infrastructure. To make good beer is fairly easy. It wasn’t that way thirty years ago, but nowadays it is. But to make great beer…First of all, what is great beer? When you drink a beer you instantly know a great beer from a good beer. Brewing a great beer is maddeningly difficult, because of all the tiny nuances that you never imagined. Brewing is all about the little subtleties. That takes a lifetime of continual learning and honing of process.

We are very much in the dark ages of brewing. We think that we’re very modern. I’ve even heard brewers at large breweries utter this, “We’ve got the beer nailed.” They know how to make a light lager. They know how to make an American style pilsner.  It’s absolutely and completely understood. It’s been well written about. But now we’re talking about dry-hopping and bottle conditioning and esoteric yeast strains. So all of a sudden we’re back into a world where we don’t really know what we’re doing. It’s maddeningly frustrating because there’s more unknown than there is known. It’s like the 1880s. As a small brewery it’s difficult to have the time and the skill and the laboratory available to do the research. The large breweries have been successful post-prohibition because the they have invested in top-quality scientists. They paid them to be in the laboratory doing silly experiments that really didn’t pay off for a long time. As a small brewer it’s very difficult to be able to do that.

You said that you know a great beer when you drink one. I have thought and written about what makes this so for me. Let me ask you, what makes a beer great?

Nobody really knows, but I’ll give you my opinion. First of all, your palate changes. It depends on how hungry you are. It depends on how thirsty you are. It depends on the mood cycle of your body. So that is important. You may taste a beer one day and it may taste great and the next day it may not. Something as subtle as when you brush your teeth can have a big difference on it. So there’s that.

But also, beer is not just about what’s in the glass. It’s also about the experience. For example, I remember reading a question sent in to I think it was Saveur Magazine. Someone said, “My wife and I went to Tuscany. We were in this beautiful castle on top of a hill. We were having this sangiovese wine, this Chianti. It was absolutely the most beautiful wine we’ve ever had. We bought a case and brought it home. Now we’re sitting in our kitchen drinking it and it’s not the same wine. We’re wondering if something happened with altitude, maybe coming across the ocean in the hold of an airplane. Will that affect the flavor of the wine?” It’s like ‘DUH’. You’re sitting on this beautiful hilltop, looking over Tuscany. So the mood is important. But that’s not really what you’re asking.”

That is exactly what I’m asking. I agree totally with what you are saying.

There’s nothing better than sitting in Bamberg and drinking a smoked beer. But you know what? If I took that bottle of smoked beer and gave it to one of my customers and they drank it in their kitchen they’d say “I can’t drink this.” But if you’re in Bamberg it’s nirvana

But what makes a great beer other than that? You know it because the glass goes empty. Sometimes when one of those awful shaker pint glasses gets put in front of you it takes a long time to finish the beer. Other times you’re talking and all of a sudden the glass is empty. That’s a great beer. So a great beer is drinkable. Whether it’s a light American lager or a double IPA it goes down quickly. The reason it goes down quickly is because it’s got a combination of the correct level of bitterness and the correct level of sweetness, nice condition, and good carbonation. It’s balanced.

Bitterness is not just IBUs. Bitterness is like Eskimos and snow. You know, they have all these words for snow. There should be more words for bitterness, because bitterness may linger. Bitterness may be harsh. Bitterness may be fast. I find that most people like bitterness in beer. Even people who like sweet beers like bitterness in beer. What they don’t like is that harsh and lingering bitterness, a bitterness that’s hard and bites, or a bitterness that lingers, that you taste minutes after you drink. So what you want is, you want the sweetness, you want the bitterness, and you want the bitterness to be quickly cleansed from your palate.  When the bitterness is harsh it makes the beer taste thin and it lacks body. So beer needs body. It needs fullness. It needs condition. It needs nice foam. It needs appropriate haze, or lack of haze. It’s all of those subtleties that come together to make a beer enjoyable.

When I taste a great beer, one of the things that I notice is that I can actually visualize layers of flavor.

Yeah, that’s true. Complexity.

There’s complexity, but it’s not all clumped together. There’s this flavor and this flavor and this flavor. Each one can be picked out, but then they all come together.

I know exactly what you mean. It’s like watching someone tell you a story; like a page turner. I know exactly what you mean. Like if you look at American lager. It is eminently drinkable. A well-made American lager served out of a clean draft line in an ice-cold glass on a hot day, it’s extremely drinkable. But it’s pretty dumb. It’s just kind of thirst quenching. It’s pleasurable that way. And then there may be other beers that are very complex, but they’re like drinking a brick. The idea is to have both. And that’s really hard to make. How do you make a beer that’s drinkable, but still loaded with that complexity where you drink it and you say, “Wow.” And you sip it again and say, “Wow,” and all of these new things happen. You’re 100% right. That’s what people want. That’s exactly what people want. They want to be wowed. They don’t want to be hit over the head with intensity. Bu they want to be wowed by subtlety. Like good music. Like a good singer. Like an orchestra. Like listening to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. You know, it’s like “wow.” And it just keeps getting more intense and more intense

That’s a great comparison again, because with a great piece of music you’ve got these layers. You’ve got the different sections of the orchestra doing different things. You can listen to each one individually or you can listen to the whole thing as a piece.

You’re right. But it’s extremely difficult because you have to have all of your ducks in a row. You have to have the correct yeast strain with the correct health. It has to be perfect wort with the right balance of ingredients and the perfect water and really good hops, and put together in just the right way. It has to be put into a bottle in a stable way. There are so many places you could screw up.

A really great beer like that, you don’t get it all that often.

No, that’s right. That’s right. But there are a lot of brewers out there that can do that. And that greatness does not seem to be tied to machinery. It has more to do with an innate talent, I think. And I think it has a lot to do with the ability to taste. People taste and they make subtle changes and they keep honing and honing. I notice that among a lot of brewers that are very creative.

Working on this book I have visited a huge number of breweries in a very short time. I feel like I’m getting a good overview of what’s happening in the upper-Midwest. Most breweries are making good beer, a handful is making great beer, and a few should do something else. Within that big middle, most breweries have at least one beer that rises above the rest and at least approaches greatness.

You’ve identified three groups. Is there a common thread among those three groups? Do you see any trends that make those that are up at the top better? Or do the differences outweigh the commonality?

At most of the breweries I talk to the brewers, so I’ve spent a good deal of time with brewers. I see a difference in brewers actually. I haven’t quite formulated this completely, but I have this sense that there are “brewers” and there are “people who make beer.”  It’s kind of like tasting a great beer. When you taste a great beer you know it. I have the same sense when I’m talking to a brewer. It’s like “Oh, you are a brewer.” And that tends to show up in the beer. They’ve got the ability to taste. They’ve got the technical know-how. They’ve got the process down. But they also think about beer in a certain way. One reason that I was interested in talking to you is because I have a sense that you think about beer.

All the time.

There’s also a broad tendency in the region toward sweeter, less bitter beers. It’s a general Midwestern thing that I think might be selling the Midwestern palate short. For instance there’s the Iowa Pale Ale (IPA). It tones the hops way down and pushes up the sweetness.

Well, you know that’s true, but you say that these brewers are selling their customers short. Obviously I pay attention to this. If I go to any town in California and go into a pub, there’s some local IPA, and it’s usually 60, 70, 80 IBUs. Big beers. Talk to Joe Sixpack, 20-something year old kid, and they’re sucking that stuff down like it’s going out of style. They love it. They can’t get enough of it. I think it’s akin to hot sauce. But you come to the Midwest and pick an average bar in Iowa, Wisconsin, anywhere, and you would never find an IPA. And if you gave one of these 40, 50, 60, 80 IBU California beers to somebody there, they wouldn’t drink it. They would not drink it.

So we as a brewery do not market, we don’t advertise, we don’t push. We are a pull brewery, which means that our customers pull the beer. We don’t push the beer. So we brew a whole range of beers. We don’t force one over the other. We don’t choose what people drink. We just make it. We make beers as high as 85 IBUs and as low as 8 IBUs and let the customers choose. In general most people will go toward the lower end of the spectrum in the Midwest.

So, when brewers say that, it’s not a grand conspiracy to dumb down beer, it’s what people want. It’s what sells. I mean if you write a book about types of frogs in the Midwest I guarantee you’re going to sell fewer copies than if you write about breweries. If I were a frog expert I would be turning my nose down about, “How could he write about beer? Frogs are more important.” But you know what? People who buy frog books; there ain’t a whole lot of them. And it’s the same with stronger beers.

However, the world is changing. And when you have these beers that are so big and so bitter like extreme hot sauce it brings the median up. Sierra Nevada pale ale 20 years ago was on the high end of the spectrum. Low 30 BUs was a big beer. Now that’s midstream. So when we make a beer that’s 30 BUs, that’s a comfortable session beer. So what the big beers have done is brought people up into a reasonable range, because 30 IBUs is probably appropriate for a beer. A 12 degree plato beer should be about 30 IBUs on average. That’s where beer has historically always been, for obvious reasons. Because it tastes good and you can drink more than one or two. So that’s the benefit of the stronger beers.

You said you think about beer all the time. Why?

I’m compulsive, frankly. That’s really the short answer. The other answer would be that it’s my business. It’s my life’s calling. I consider myself an artist, so I always want to be better. The pursuit of excellence is extremely important to me. And the last thing is that my mind always works. My mind is a very noisy place. Thinking about beer helps me to tone down the demons so to speak. And I like beer.