We Make Beer: Inside the Spirit and Artistry of America's Craft Brewers - Hardcover

Lewis, Sean

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9781250017710: We Make Beer: Inside the Spirit and Artistry of America's Craft Brewers

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1250017718 ISBN 13: 9781250017710

Publisher: St. Martin's Press, 2014

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An eye-opening journey into craft beer–making in America, and what you can find in the quest to brew the perfect pint
Sean Lewis was living in Boston when he first set foot inside the Blue Hills Brewery. He was writing for BeerAdvocate magazine about America's craft brewers, and the then-fledgling Blue Hills was his first assignment. Lewis was immediately struck by the spirit of the brewers he met there. That visit would lead him first to an intensive study of beer-brewing, and later to a nation-spanning journey into the heart―and the art―of American beer making.

What Lewis found along the way was a group of like-minded craftsmen―creators who weren't afraid to speak their minds, who saw their competitors as cherished friends. A group who takes sheer joy in their work, and who seeks the same kind of balance in their lives as they do in the barrels they brew. He shared pints with pioneering upstarts like Paul and Kim Kavulak of Nebraska Brewing Company, and talked shop with craft beer stalwarts like Ken Grossman of Sierra Nevada and bombastic innovators like Greg Koch (the "Arrogant Bastard" behind Stone Brewing Co.). He found, in them and others, a community that put its soul into its work, who sees beer-making as an extension of themselves.

We Make Beer is not just a celebration of American brewing, but of the spirit that binds brewers together. It's about what you can discover in yourself when you put your hands and your heart into crafting the perfect pint.

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About the Author:

SEAN LEWIS is a frequent contributor to and former columnist for BeerAdvocate Magazine. He lives in Santa Barbara, California, where he is a sports and beer writer, and We Make Beer is his first book.

“I SEE CREATING AND INVENTING AS PART OF BEER’S TRADITION”

OLD-WORLD TRADITION AND NEW-WORLD INNOVATION

Two photos hang on the wall in Matt Brynildson’s office. One Matt took himself; the other is hundreds of years old. They show, essentially, the same thing. Rows upon rows of barrels stacked on themselves with tubes and troughs connecting them. The photos are dark and dimly lit. They are depictions of an English style of fermentation vessels known as union barrels—the old one was taken in the sixteenth century at an old Bass brewing facility, the other in the twenty-first century at Marston’s Burton upon Trent brewery. They illustrate the way the tools of the brewer have not changed in hundreds of years. The mystique of the old-world brewing process emanates from behind the framed glass.

Not far from these photos in Matt’s office, his own stack of barrels rests on the first floor of the Firestone Walker brewery in Paso Robles, California, where Matt makes his living as the award-winning brewmaster. The size and scope of the union barrel system at Firestone Walker is much smaller than in either of the photos, and it’s easy enough to move it out of the way when other operations need more space, but the principle behind it remains the same.

When Matt joined Firestone Walker in 2001, the brewery had yet to become the regional power and world-renowned company it is today. Founded by brothers-in-law Adam Firestone and David Walker, the young brewery had been rumored to be fermenting its beer in oak barrels—a process that seemed to their new brewmaster to be overwhelmingly risky and unnecessary.

“When you come to work for Firestone the first thing you learn about is the barrels,” Matt said, as he recalled one of his early conversations with Adam Firestone. “And when I came it was in a transitional period when we were moving from one small brewery to this one. My first question was, ‘We’re not really going to do the barrels, right? That’s all smoke and mirrors and marketing. It has nothing to do with how you make your actual beer.’

“And they were like, ‘No, it’s how we make our actual beer.’ ‘Yeah, but when you move into the new brewery it’s not going to be your focus, right? We’re going to do traditional stainless steel?’ ‘It’s nonnegotiable. Ferment in oak.’”

Firestone Walker’s dedication to fermenting in oak seems at first glance to be a nod to the traditional English systems of wood-barrel fermentation. After all, David Walker is a Brit himself. But it’s not that at all; the story of those barrels is more a comedy of errors than any attempt to preserve tradition.

Both David Walker and Adam Firestone had deep ties to the wine industry. For many outside the beer industry, the Firestone name conjures up images of car tires and vineyards, and rightfully so. The family’s beer tradition begins with Firestone Walker, a partnership forged when David married Adam’s sister. With their roots in wine and a growing appreciation for beer, Adam and David decided to open a brewery and ferment beer in the used chardonnay barrels that the Firestone winery no longer needed. They tapped Jeffers Richardson to be Firestone Walker’s first brewmaster and tasked him with finding a way to make their unique idea work.

“They weren’t afraid of oak, but what they didn’t realize was [the process] probably wasn’t a good fit for beer,” said Jeffers, who was eventually replaced by Matt at the helm but has since returned to head up a new barrel-aging program and taproom at Firestone Walker, known as The Barrelworks. “There was a reason why we weren’t using that [process]. They wanted to use old wine barrels. They thought that would be great. We could reuse all these old chardonnay barrels. And at the time it resulted in what could only be deemed as disastrous results. This is before you could even dream of making sour beers, let alone by accident.”1

Matt wasn’t around during this period, but he likened the finished product to “poor salad dressing—malt vinegar at best.”

Jeffers did his best to convince Adam and David that fermenting in oak was a bad idea, but they were adamant.

“I kept saying we can’t do this, we can’t do this, and they said, ‘Figure out a way to do it.’”

What Jeffers came up with was the union barrel system. It is an old process developed in England and made popular by original pale ale brewers like Bass. Tubes and hoses connect rows of barrels to one another with a swan-neck pipe coming out of the barrels and into a trough to collect any excess blowoff. Wort, or unfermented beer, is pumped out of the kettle and into these barrels, which fill simultaneously thanks to the connections—hence the name, union. Yeast is added and fermentation takes place. If the carbon dioxide created by the fermentation spews young beer out the blowoff pipe, it is recirculated back into the fermenting beer to save money, since British brewers, unlike brewers in the United States, are taxed on the amount of raw ingredients used, not on the finished product. However, the process dates back well before the era of centralized government and uniform taxation.

“Brewers in Burton upon Trent, they say that the original process was developed by the monks in the area,” Matt said. “They found that barrel fermentation afforded them a clearer beer than if they fermented in vats or other vessels. There’s something about the shape of the barrel, the surface area of the barrel, or perhaps the wood. There’s not an exact science behind it.”

At Firestone, the barrels aren’t connected to one another the way they are in a true union barrel system, and Matt doesn’t harvest the yeast that blows out of the fermentation vessels the way the Brits do. But Firestone Walker managed to learn from the old pale ale brewers in England. Instead of using wine barrels, which can become perfect breeding grounds for undesirable microorganisms, the Firestone Walker union system is made up of fresh oak barrels that receive a good toasting before being put to use. Only a handful of their beers ever see time in the union system, the most popular of which is the flagship Double Barrel Ale.

The beer begins the fermentation process in a stainless steel tank, where Matt and his brewing team can control the temperature during the most crucial stages and ensure that the beer begins its life in sanitary conditions. Then, the beer is pumped into the barrels: A hose goes into the barrel, beer is pumped in, and right when it gets to the top a brewer pulls out the hose and jams a bung in its place—then it’s on to the next one. When it’s done, the brewers stand back and let the yeast do its job. There are no glycol jackets or special temperature-controlled rooms to control the fermentation—just oak and yeast.

“Most brewers look at that as pretty archaic and simplistic, and maybe a little out of control,” Matt said. “And it’s funny. Paso gets up to 110 degrees in the summer and all the way down to freezing in the winter. You’d think you’d have these massive fluctuations in flavor and fermentation profiles—and it proves a couple of things: that most flavor development in normal ales as we know it from this standpoint is happening in the first twenty-four hours, when we’re controlling temperature, and that wood has an incredible insulative character. And it also has a pretty resilient, protective character. Whether it’s through tannins or whatever it’s through, but it protects that beer from microbiological spoilage. We literally have no or very few spoilers that affect these beers.”

After several days in the barrels, the beer is pumped back into a stainless steel tank and eventually constitutes only about 20 percent of a full batch. The rest of the beer spends its entire fermentation cycle in steel tanks. After it is allowed more time to mature, or condition, the beer is filtered, carbonated, and bottled.

Double Barrel Ale is made in the spirit of traditional English pale ales and doesn’t share the kind of brash hop characteristics of Sierra Nevada’s iconic pale ale, or even Firestone Walker’s own Pale 31. What it does have is a rich caramel and toffee base that balances out the more dramatic hop flavors. Behind that, there is the slightest hint of oak. It doesn’t dominate the flavor profile, but it presents itself as nearly an afterthought. It is almost as though you were drinking beer from a wooden cup, and, in your thirst, your tongue accidentally brushed along the rim.

Drinking Double Barrel Ale is a pleasant experience because the beer is refined and easy. However, at the brewery itself, visitors can taste an unfiltered version of the beer. Unlike the version that is bottled and distributed to bars and liquor stores around the country, the unfiltered DBA is something of a daring beer and is fermented entirely in oak. For an unfiltered beer, it is surprisingly clear, with just a slight haze. Unlike the standard version, the oak is present in the nose, as are a slight fruitiness and bits of spice. Whereas DBA is a great beer that graciously recedes into the background of a conversation or a meal, the unfiltered version demands to be the center of attention. It’s one of the most popular beers at the Paso Robles tasting room, and for good reason. The beer stands as a prime example of traditional methods employed to make a fantastic product—even if the rest of the brewery is state of the art.

* * *

Next door to Matt’s office sits the control room for Firestone Walker’s brand-new brewing system. It is a Spartan room with little more than a couple of computer monitors on a desk, their screens displaying readouts and charts tracking temperatures and other measurements at virtually every point from the mash tun to the heat exchanger. With the exception of adding hops, every step of the brewing process is automated and controlled by a computer program called BrewMax. Any sort of mystic notions of what working in a full-scale brewery might be like are dispelled at the sight of the screen with its blinking lights, temperature readings, and pH levels on display.

“I think that the brewhouse itself in a brewery is highly overromanticized as having this huge operator-driven impact on the flavor of the product,” Matt said. “Wort production, to be honest with you, especially in a production brewery, is super rhythmic. It’s super repetitive.

“I mean we will do literally fifty turns through the brewhouse. The guy who is on the brewhouse is making these repetitive steps throughout the process. Yeah, he’s controlling everything and he’s monitoring it all—and I think what we’ve done is to use the automation to take care of all the super repetitive types of things that are also super dependent on time and temperature. If a brewer is over here solving a problem and not watching his brewhouse and takes a little more time to do something or misses a temperature because he was busy doing something else, our consistency goes away. We use the tool to do all the repetitive kind of things that could go wrong if you weren’t paying attention and should be super easy if you are. He can watch wort quality, he can watch pH, he can watch clarity, and he can use the machine to refine. And he can work faster.”

A tour around the brewery revealed an even deeper devotion to modern technology over traditional methods. The few rows of union barrels tucked over to the side of the brewery began to feel less and less significant as Matt showed off the various toys and inventions that make brewing in a modern brewery far simpler than when breweries in Burton upon Trent were pioneering the pale ale.

Virtually all tanks in modern breweries have a long steel tube that comes out of the top and bends downward to about chest height. The opening allows carbon dioxide created during fermentation to escape the tank safely instead of building up toward the point of explosion. At breweries like Blue Hills in Canton, Massachusetts, the brewmaster attaches a short length of hose to the end of this pipe and submerges the other end in a bucket of sanitizer solution. The result is something like an airlock that allows the carbon dioxide to bubble out, often with great vigor, without letting contaminants in. Some breweries only have the one tube coming out of the top, and chemicals are pumped through to clean them when the tank is empty. Inside, usually just a couple inches below the top of the tank, a hollow metal orb resembling a stainless steel whiffle ball is attached to the other end of the tube. This sphere, known as a clean-in-place device, sends chemicals such as caustic wash, acid, or plain hot water spraying out in all directions to clean the tank evenly.

Matt pointed to the top of the steel tubes on his tanks and noted how they were a gentle curve rather than steep right angles going straight into the tank.

“It’s a swooping arm with no sharp angles,” he said. “That’s so we can use the hop cannon.”

The practice of dry-hopping, or adding hops to a beer after it has fermented in order to increase hop aroma, is an old one. Brewers have aged their beer on hops, be it in open vats or wooden casks, for about as long as they have been brewing with hops. Until recently, the standard method in most modern breweries has been to add hops to a conditioning tank then pump the fermented beer into that tank—or to open a hatch on top of the tank and dump the hops in. The hop cannon allows brewers to pump the fermenting beer through the device, which is filled with aroma hops, and back into the tank, thus eliminating the need for a secondary vessel. It also allows greater control of the dry-hopping process, since brewers are able to add hops on different days, to add a layer of complexity to the beer’s aroma.

“The swooping arm lets the hops flow in freely without getting jammed up like they would if there were right angles,” Matt said. His face beamed as he mimed the action of attaching a hop cannon to the tank, like a kid describing a new toy.

The hop cannon and automated brewhouse are undeniably cool. There’s a level of technological savvy involved that makes the Firestone Walker brewery feel like one part factory, one part mad scientist laboratory. But that’s nothing compared with what’s just across the narrow hallway from Matt’s office upstairs.

Matt’s first job in the beer industry wasn’t in a brewery. Matt graduated from Kalamazoo College with a degree in chemistry, which he put to work as a hop chemist for Michigan’s Kalsec, Inc., a color, flavor, and nutrient manufacturer for the food industry. He was already an avid home brewer, but his time in the lab working on hop extracts only furthered his appreciation and love for beer. He went back to school, but this time it was brewing school, at the Siebel Institute of Technology, in Chicago. After graduating, he was hired by a then-fledgling brewpub in Chicago called Goose Island, which he helped grow into the well-known brewery that it is today. He made his way out west to San Luis Obispo Brewing Company (SLO Brew) and was eventually hired by Firestone Walker when Adam and David purchased SLO Brew’s facility. His chemist roots were partly why he was so flummoxed by Adam and David’s insistence on fermenting in oak barrels.

“I’ve got this quality piece in place,” he said. “I know how to control the process in stainless. I’m not that interested in barrel aging from the standpoint of consistency, so I was always kind of pushing back there. And here it is nonnegotiable. You have to ferment in barrels. They always make the point that we ferment in barrels; we don’t age in barrels.”

Matt’s brewing prowess has made him famous throughout the beer community, but the brewmaster never lost sight of his roots i...

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