Harvesting a Brew: Jessica Davis explains Working with Brewer's Yeast

So far we've explored what it takes to harvest barley for brewing, but what does it take to get those amazing little living beings we call yeast to convert that barley-sugar-water into beer? Our Lady of The Bruery Lab Jessica Davis can explain and expand your microbiology vocabulary.

You can’t get very far in a brewery without yeast. One way to keep a yeast culture going is to harvest it. Harvesting yeast implies that the cell culture has already been used to make beer. The basic principle is that you are collecting it to use again, then again and probably 10 more times.

Sour Barrel Aged Beer 101 -- Challenge Accepted!

Do you remember a time before you knew about sour, barrel aged beer? You knew what beer was (an awesome beverage), you knew what sour tasted like (remember warheads?) and you knew other delicious beverages came out of barrels (hello wine).

While our fondness for this style is quite apparent in our portfolio, and your support of our experimentation has enabled us to continue to develop new twists on our sour line up, we often hear a demand for even more variety and availability of these tasty treats.

So in the spirit of sour barrel aged beer month, and to quell your awesome curiosity, we want to look closer at three parts of the process of making these beers and explore the risks, pampering special attention, and extra time it takes to make sure our sour barrel aged beers grow up to be happy, healthy 750 mL babes.



We'll look at each part of the process a little deeper, using some questions submitted by you via our Facebook & Twitter, in the following posts about:

More Wet Hops!

We got in another 60 pounds of fresh off the vine hops today.  This time, Chinook and this time for dry hopping.  We're putting these beers into a bright tank and filtering the fermenting beer through them to get them all nice and California style hoptastic.  This beer already smells like a forrest of pine and citrus and this addition of Chinook is going to make it that much better.  Can't wait.

Pizza & Beer - 2

read part 1 here if you haven't yet.

The easy part of having a great chef cook us a pizza and challenge us to create a beer to pair with it was eating the pizza.  The hard part is actually creating the beer.

After Kelly and Peter and the crew left us with nothing but the memory of a pizza a few weeks back, we sat down and started thinking about a few ideas that might pair well with the challenge pizza.

If you recall, that pizza was made using a special dough from Peter that incorporated rye flour and even a bit of caramel malt that had been crushed to a fine powder. The dough was then topped with super fresh burrata, squash blossoms, white sardines, fresh arugula sprouts and flowers, preserved lemon and fennel salt along the crust.  It was cooked in a brick oven that was close to 1000º F creating an incredible texture.

So what does one pair with such a unique pie?  Patrick had some ideas and they, as usual, were obscure.  A Biere De Garde brewed with roasted zucchini, lemon peel and fennel seed.  He laid out the concept and Tyler went to work figuring out how to actually make it a reality.

We work all summer with our BBQ, roasting yams for Autumn Maple, so that would work similarly to the way we'd work in the roasted zucchini which should give the beer just a slight vegetal taste to pair nicely with the fresh arugula.  Lemon peel, or citrus peel in general, is fairly common in brewing.  Fennel isn't something seen too often, but we know the flavor well, that of black licorice, and we know how to use spices around here in a subtle way.  Fennel, however, was the one thing we really weren't confident on the proportions for.  We had to do some small tests on a beaker of one of our other beers that was somewhat similar in flavor to get an idea of how much fennel we'd want to try in the pilot brew.

Today, we tasted the pilot and started in on a full scale batch of this pizza challenge beer.  We'll be unveiling the ale and it's accompanying pizza at an event in Denver surrounding GABF and we can't wait.

roasting some zucchini.

tasting the pilot.

Dogfish Head

As mentioned in our previous post, we are attempting to revive this blog and make it a great destination for you to learn about what we are doing as a company as well as some tidbits about craft beer and all that surrounds it. So, we're going to jump backwards a couple of weeks here and talk about an epic day in our life as a brewery that occurred in mid-June.

We've done a couple of collaboration brews at this point in our short life. About 2 years ago we had Wayne from Cigar City Brewing out at our place to create what eventually became Marron Acidifié and earlier this year we had Sean Lawson of Lawson's Finest Liquids out here to work on Acer Quercus with us. Both of these beers were very exciting to make as it's extremely fun to be challenged with ideas from a brewer that we don't typically work with. As with many things in life, we sometimes need a change in the way that we do things in order to bring back a little more heat to our fire, and getting to collaborate with other great brewers really helps the creative process in this way.

When Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head brewing asked us about doing a collaboration with him, there was no hesitation. Sam is not only one of the biggest names in the craft brewing industry, but his passion for styles beyond the norm are very similar, yet totally different from what we do here at The Bruery. We knew it would be a fun process.

A number of phone calls were made between Sam and Patrick and some of the other folks at our respective breweries. We each came to the table with several ideas for beers that we thought were out of the box enough to be what someone would expect when our two breweries combined forces, yet still sounded tasty. The list of ingredient ideas being traded back and forth over the telephone lines between California and Delaware was enough to make any TSA official who may have been listening in become a bit suspicious.

When it all came down to the final few ideas, the answer became quite clear. A Japanese inspired beer that we could brew with a laundry list of herbs, spices and fruits lending themselves to the citrus, spicy and umami flavors often associated with the profound subtlety of Japanese cuisine. Plus, we could donate a portion of the proceeds to the brewers and breweries in Japan who were suffering from the large Earthquake that recently hit their northern shores.

Sam planned his trip out west to coincide with the National Homebrewers Conference in San Diego and arrived at our brewery straight off of a plane from Philly Beer Week. He's a busy man.

We were prepared with all of the possible ingredients needed for the recipe that had been discussed. Everything from kumquats to ginger to chili powder to sesame seeds to seaweed. Flaked rice, brown rice syrup and some standard malts. And of course, sake yeast.

Sam came roaring into our brewery with the smile and friendliness that we all came and knew to love from his short-lived television show, "Brew Masters." He asked us questions about every inch of our brewery while being taken on a small tour.  He made a point of learning every employee's name and all in all, he was just an amazing guest. You'd think that he had had more than 2 hours sleep the night before...

The rest of the day was simply a pleasure. We began by tasting through some test batch beer that had been brewed previously on our 10 gallon system and mixed in some of the possible spices to get a feeling for what flavor we enjoyed the most. Sam helped Kevin mash in between discussions with Patrick and Tyler about everything from the beer at hand to the bocce ball tournament that we were all participating in that coming weekend.  Kumquats were emulsified, random Japanese treats were munched and, of course, several beers were imbibed.

Overall, the day was a big success.  We all had a great time coming up with a recipe together and getting to know each other while discussing war stories from the brewing trenches, plus it was probably the most hands on brewing that either Sam or Patrick have done in some time and it's always fun to put your boots back on.

The beer is currently in the final stages of fermentation and hopefully we will be releasing it upon the world soon.

Brewing Education

We like everyone on our staff to know as much as they possibly can about beer and here that means more than just tasting beers and studying flavor profiles. It means more than reading books about the history of barley and ancient fermentation techniques. It even means more than setting yourself up with a 5 gallon homebrew pot on your stove. Here, at The Bruery, it means you are going to get your hands dirty and your brow sweaty.

Today, we had our Tasting Room (and soon to be Bruery Provisions) staff put on some rubber boots, tie their hair back and get here early in the morning to help Tyler, Travis and Jay brew a batch of Autumn Maple.

There isn't too much to else to say on the subject, so we'll just let these few photos of Jarred and Kendra do the talking.

Our new brewers are rather tired, but Tyler gives them a big thumbs up.

The Bruery's got more grapes!

Last time we used Zinfandel grapes for a beer that was eventually blended with our young lambic and turned into White Zin, which has been a fan and employee favorite ever since we tapped the first keg. Well now we have a ridiculous amount of Pinot grapes...where will the fun lead?!

Anyone have some cool suggestions of homebrews they've done with grapes or simply ideas they've always wanted to try. You know we're always down for suggestions, though Patrick and Tyler also always have their own crazy thoughts as well. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Time to get Yammy!

It may only be July, but here at The Bruery we're already prepping for the fall...and you know what that means...AUTUMN MAPLE!!!

Our beer that is brewed in the Thanksgiving spirit, full of freshly roasted yams, molasses, maple syrup, fresh vanilla and god only knows what else is underway in the brew house. Tyler and Brian made it to work at 3 in the morning to get started with the roasting and are somehow still going strong. Not sure how much longer they'll last, especially since we'll be brewing several more batches in the coming weeks, but so far so good.

As much as I love the summer time, I can't wait for Autumn.

Yams roasting on the bbq.

A yammy wort flowing through the lauter tun.

2nd Anniversary!

You are probably thinking, wait...didn't The Bruery just celebrate their first anniversary and isn't Papier hitting shelves this month? And you are correct. But our 2nd anniversary ale has already been racked into barrels where it will be aging for a year. It's tough creating something that you know is going to be so delicious, yet you can't touch it for a year. We might have to put these under lock & key so that we don't sneak a taste. Let the countdown begin to anniversary number two...

Science!

A lot more goes into making a great beer than meets the eye. There is quite a bit of lab work that must go on behind the scenes to ensure that every batch of beer reaches its highest potential. Anyone who has homebrewed knows that its tough to duplicate a recipe. We have to ensure that what the consumer gets when they buy a bottle of beer from The Bruery is exactly what they have come to expect from the previous bottles they have opened and this means we must scrutinize every aspect of each recipe each time we brew and then test the final product.

This morning, Tyler dedicated some time to our lab area where he ran some quality control tests to be sure everything is up to par. So far so good. Check out all the cool petri dishes!

Pilot Batches

In our neverending effort to bring new, interesting beers to the table, Tyler and Jay have been spending the week working on some small pilot batches of newly created recipes to see what turns out worthy of a full Bruery batch.  Brewing 10 gallons is much easier than brewing 10 bbls and can lead to some interesting new techniques as seen below...

We can't yet reveal what went into that beautiful wort, but if all goes to plan and it tastes as magnificent as we hope, you'll all get to try this and other new recipes soon enough.