Barrier Brewing Under Construction

My good friend Evan, who I worked with at Sixpoint, has been working on starting a nano-craft brewery for a few years now. I just heard from him, and he sealed the deal on a location!

If you are in New York State, look for Barrier Brewing beers in stores soon. Evan makes excellent beers, and I can't imagine him being anything but successful in his new business ventures.

Remember this guy from my earlier Sixpoint posts? That's Evan. Awesome brewer. Look out for the beers! I'm going to have to coerce him to send some out my way.

Upright Gose Brewday

Here are some pictures form my first day helping out Upright Brewery as an intern. Above is the tasting room. Most of the beers are named by number which is analogous to the original gravity (i.e. the Four is about 1.040 O.G.).

Here's a view of the other side of the tasting room, where many barrel projects are aging.

Their brewing system is a 10 barrel system. The strike water is heated with an electric element, and the boil kettle is direct-fire gas. It's made fairly locally, but I don't remember the name of the company. I stirred in the mash on the Gose, which was a fairly small grist, since we were only shooting for a 1.040 or so beer.

I didn't get a picture of this, but they did an overnight sour mash on about 20 pounds of grain in a cooler. This was smelly pretty sour and funky (think rotten fruit) when we got in, and I added it to the mash as I doughed in.

Here's a view of the open fermenter room (the gose didn't go in there, we put it in a conical). Upright's house yeast is Wyeast 3711 French Saison, which I've been a big fan of since the first time I used it last year. We used the house yeast on the Gose too.

Here's Alex operating the hand-cranked bottle labeler to label the 5, a hoppy pale beer.

We did some science stuff that I had never seen before. Garrit showed me how to a cell count on our pitch rate. After the beer was pitched and well mixed in the fermenter, we took a sample and dropped it onto a slide. The slide has a grid pattern and you can count how many yeast cells are in each square. I don't remember the cell count we got on this, but it was an ideal pitching rate, so we were pretty stoked!

It's cool to see yeast under a microscope. I had never seen that before!

Pictures from Lagunitas Brewery & Russian River Brewpub

These pictures are from Tuesday, June 16th, when Doug and I drove up to Santa Rosa to visit what I believe is one of the best breweries in the world, Russian River Brewing Company. We were not disappointed! On the way there we saw signs for Petaluma, CA, which we recognized as the town where Lagunitas makes their fine creations. It only took a few seconds to decide that we needed to stop off for a few beers. Coincidentally, Ray just happened to be there at the same time with his uncle, his roommate Matt, and another friend. The above pic is from their tasting room. The pours were extremely generous, and there was a big crowd due to the large number of homebrewers in town for NHC.

Lagunitas is a pretty big production facility. We didn't stay for the tour because we needed to get to Santa Rosa before too late. We did take a peek in to see a very large, high end bottling line, and multiple fermenters of 60 barrels or larger, yeast propogation tanks, and a row of 1600 lb. "super sacks" of base grain. Dudes might be stoners, but they are pumping out a large amount of excellent and consistent beers. A little trivia for you: Hop Stupid, their double IPA, is brewed with 100% carbon dioxide-extracted hop extracts (although it's dry hopped with traditional hops). It's the same type of product that Northern Brewer sells as the "Hopshot", which we used in our double IPA homebrew.

Here's a view of the Russian River Brewpub bar. All beers are on a chalkboard with ABV and BU's listed. The left board is for American Ales, the right board is for Belgian and barrel-aged beers.

There are a few barrels in the Brewpub, but most of the barrel aging is done at the production brewery 1 mile away. Pictured are Beatification (an mostly brett beer with a dose of lacto and pedio towards the end) and Consecration, one of the newer sour ales that is barrel aged with dried currents. The Consecration was excellent, but I was not enthralled with the Beatification. Honestly I still have yet to taste an all-brettanomyces beer that I truly enjoy.

This is just a close-up of some coaster art that customers have left. I was really attracted to the diagonal monkey-looking face that had a spooky, otherworldly, almost schizophrenic quality to it. The colors are amazing, which you can't really see here.

All in all, we were able to try the 2 above beers, Perdition, a "Biere de Sonoma", Salvation, a strong dark Belgian ale, Mortification, a Quad, Blind Pig IPA, Russian River IPA, Pliny the Elder, and "Hop 2 It"with Sterling hops. This beer is brewed with a single hop that changes each batch. Vinnie started that beer to get to know hop varietals, and he says that it is a great way to learn about the strengths and weaknesses of each hop varietal, none of which he usually likes to brew with exclusively.

There were so many other beers to try, but we had a 2 hour drive back to Oakland ahead of us. We also had 4 days of serious drinking ahead of us, and as was stated on many occasions during the week, "It's a marathon, not a sprint".

San Diego Day 2: Friday 4/11/09

Frisbee Golf: My new favorite sport

On Friday, we got a relatively early start with a game of Frisbee golf at a Balboa park. I suck, but it was a lot of fun just walking around and throwing the disk. Somehow, I was not hung over in the least.

Sean, Clarissa, and Sean at Green Flash Brewing

The first brewery for the day was Green Flash. We tried quite a few beers in the tasting room, and we were lucky enough to meet with brewmaster Chuck Silva. Chuck had just been interviewed for the Brewing Network's Jamil Show recently, so it was cool to talk to him a little about that and thank him for basically giving out the recipe for the Green Flash West Coast IPA. On the show he also revealed some interesting and unconventional yeast practice: Green Flash ferments with Cali ale yeast (same strain as Sierra Nevada and many other American craft breweries) as high as 72 degrees. The norm would be to ferment at 66-69 degrees with this strain, and most breweries would not go higher for fear of getting off flavors like diacetyl, fusel alcohols, or increased ester production. But Chuck is producing excellent beers at higher temps, which should also help with shortening the fermentation cycle. He also revealed that he has no problems re-pitching yeast from the IPA and sometimes even the Imperial IPA. Conventional wisdom and research says that you should not re-use yeast from beers with alcohol levels of higher than 7% ABV, or hopping rates of over 50 IBU's, but here we have an example of a brewery that is doing both and achieving excellent & consistent results.

Green Flash's tasting list: Many great beers, but the Hop Head Red was excellent!

My favorite Green Flash beers were the Hop Head Red (very sessionable), Le Freak (Belgian IPA), Tripel, and their seasonal low- alcohol saison ( I guess it's never too early for summer beer in San Diego!)

We had to move on. The next stop was Lost Abbey / Port brewing. Like most San Diego breweries it is set in an industrial warehouse area, but inside it was a different story:

The Lost Abbey has the most wood-aged beers I've seen in one place.

The interior of this brewery is dark, moist, and stacked to the ceiling with oak barrels side by side. A bar runs the wall with tastings available for a low price. Most of the beers we tasted were the non-barrel aged Lost Abbey ales, of which the clear favorite was the newly released Serpent Stout, an Imperial Stout at 10.5% ABV.

All the brewery equipment seemed to be a piecemeal assembly of used brewing equipment that had grown almost organically as the brewery expanded production. At least half of the entire space was devoted to barrels! The sign in the above picture is Latin, and if you could read the whole thing it would say "In Brettanomyces We Trust." Not, as I thought: "This is where the Brett be Illin'." I guess I listen to too much early Beastie Boys.

Photo op with Tomme Arthur: A beer geek's idea of a celebrity encounter

We also had a chance to meet Tomme Arthur. He must have known I was a beer geek because I just opened up with a "Hey, can I get a picture with you?" And, you can tell that Tomme is passionate about his product. He told us a lot about the barrel aging they do, and showed us around the new bottling line. Here are a few facts I learned about the Lost Abbey bourbon barrel aged beers:

All barrels are bought from a bourbon distiller (sorry, I don't remember the brand) after having been used only once. They come to the brewery fresh and sealed with a bung. Tomme orders them as he needs them to age the Angel's Share. When they arrive at the brewery, they are simply opened and the fermented Angel's Share is transferred in. No washing, cleaning, or even dumping out of left-over bourbon! Contamination is probably not an issue, because the beer is already over 10% ABV, and remember, bourbon is usually diluted after barrel aging. So the dregs are probably the high-test stuff! The Angel's Share spends 6-9 months in the barrel before being bottled. Then, the barrels are used only one more time to age the Older Viscosity (a barleywine). After the second use, the barrels are sold to a local gardener / plant seller to be chopped in half and used as planters.

One more thing about Tomme that I can appreciate: He doesn't believe in going to brewing school. I can appreciate that since I'm trying to get into brewing professionally and I haven't had a formal education. I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it's cool to see guys like Vinnie Cilurzo and Tomme Arthur, who are living proof that you don't need a formal education to produce outstanding beer.

The last stop for the day was Stone Brewery & Bistro. Unfortunately, we did not make it in time for a tour. There was only so much time in the day, and Stone beers are very easy to get here in NYC. It goes without saying that it's an excellent brewery.

The newly expanded brewery and bistro looks like a beer theme park. You enter from a huge parking lot (I think there are even row numbers), and enter through a huge castle-like door. Inside, high ceilings and a "giant rock" theme abound. There is a gift shop where you can buy Stone hoodies, road bike shirts, socks, pretty much anything you can get with a big Stone logo & gargoyle. When we finally made it into the bistro, the food was overpriced and underwhelming. But the beer list was excellent, including Stone beers and a variety of things we couldn't find back out east.

My overall opinion of Stone is great beer, great marketing, but simply too image conscious for my tastes (It's certainly not something that would stop me from enjoying a fresh pint of Ruination!) I would have liked to do the tour, and I think it would have helped me to appreciate what they have achieved. Also, it's worth noting that we probably wouldn't even see beers like Green Flash or The Bruery out east without the help of Stone's distribution clout. I'm not sure of the details of this arrangement, but Stone helps the little guys distribute farther, which helps a small business make it in a specialized market. That is incredibly cool.

That about wrapped it up for Saturday. Clarissa was nice enough to drive us back and I think I passed out in the car before we made it back (I'm starting to notice a trend here).

To Be Continued...