We Make Beer: Inside the Spirit and Artistry of America's Craft Brewers
224
We Make Beer: Inside the Spirit and Artistry of America's Craft Brewers
224eBook
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781250017796 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/23/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 712 KB |
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.
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.
Read an Excerpt
1
“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 in science. Now, his appreciation for good chemistry is the product of a desire for ultimate consistency. The whole purpose behind the automation of the brewhouse, the modern technology, and the state-of-the-art quality-control lab across the tiny hallway from Matt’s office is to maintain an optimum level of consistency.
“We take the quality program super seriously,” Matt said. “We’ve got four full-time quality-control technicians. An analytical chemist, a microbiologist, and a sensory technician make up the team as well as a quality manager.”
At the moment, the QC guys were out of the lab. They may have been down on the brewery floor, perhaps gathering samples of fermenting beer. Their lab was expectedly clean, with microscopes here, cabinets full of lab equipment over there, and an expensive-looking minifridge up on the counter. Matt opened the door to the fridge to reveal boxes of slides and small vials—samples taken from fermentation tanks and union barrels to be checked for undesirable microbes.
“If you look in here, there are probably as many samples for barrels as there are for fermenters, because every barrel in our union is basically treated like a separate fermenter.”
The lab is also where Firestone Walker’s microbiologist maintains and tests the various yeast strains used in the brewery’s beer. Although it is not uncommon for a brewery to use a single yeast strain for all its beers while adjusting variables such as time and temperature in fermentation to brew certain styles, Firestone Walker maintains at least three at all times: an ale strain, a lager strain, and a Hefeweizen strain. Quantities of yeast are sampled and examined under a microscope to make sure that they haven’t become contaminated by other yeasts—either naturally occurring wild yeasts or any of the other strains used in the brewery. It is this kind of dedication to consistency that provides one of the biggest difference between modern beer and the beer brewed centuries ago.
A beer like Firestone Walker’s Pale 31,2 named for California’s admittance to the United States as the thirty-first state in the union, would suffer greatly from inconsistency. Unlike a porter, characterized by its dark and strong-flavored malts, or the German lagers, whose long aging periods allowed the yeast to steadily clean up unwanted flavors, a new-world beer like Pale 31 demands uniformity in the brewing process. The hop profile is brilliant but delicate. All its floral wonders could easily be overshadowed by a hint of sour apple notes from wild yeast or any number of the myriad off flavors that can develop if fermentation temperatures are allowed to vary beyond the yeast’s comfort zone. Similarly, the bright, golden-sweet body of the beer that plays in perfect harmony with the floral hops is wholly dependent on the brewer’s ability to mash the grains at the proper temperature. Soaking the grain at the wrong temperature could result in a beer that is too thin or too sweet. Everything has to be just right.
Matt had the chance to brew Pale 31 at Marston’s Burton upon Trent facility in England, where the union barrel system was pioneered. He was underwhelmed by the results: “It didn’t have the same hop impact that we look for. Our dry-hopping methods here are much more refined than what they’re doing,” Matt said. But he did leave the old-world brewery with a better understanding of the roots of the union barrel system and how modern British breweries operate them today.
Most surprising to him was Marston’s lack of laboratory testing on the barrels in the union. Unlike at Firestone Walker, where each barrel is tested several times to ensure freedom from undesirable microbes, there was an assumed level of contamination in the barrels at Marston’s facility,3 according to Matt. Matt also explained that Marston’s use of the union barrels was more functional than Firestone Walker’s—a means of harvesting yeast at its most active point (as opposed to after fermentation is completed, as many American brewers practice). At Firestone Walker, the union barrels are intended to affect the flavor of the beer inside, whereas at Marston’s the barrels are used simply as fermentation vessels and a way to harvest yeast. “They’re using neutral oak, they’re using well-exhausted oak, so they’re not getting any oak impact at all—in fact they don’t want that. They consider that an off flavor. In our union, we are trying to get the oak flavor into the beer—that’s why we’re doing it.
“We both do the same process, but we’re doing it for completely different reasons. Any yeast that comes out of the union is discarded in our program; any yeast that comes out of their union is captured, and that’s what’s used to pitch everything else in the brewery. They use the union for yeast propagation, and we’re using it for flavor development.”
* * *
So, what’s the right way to do it? The pioneers of pale ale don’t bother checking their numerous oak barrels for contamination, so should Firestone Walker really be concerned? Isn’t there wisdom in the methods of the old-world brewers? The United Kingdom’s Campaign for Real Ale, or CAMRA, seems to think so.
Real ale, or unfiltered, unpasteurized ale served out of a cask through traditional hand pumps or by simple gravity, used to be the standard form of ale in the British Isles for centuries. However, as modern technology was able to turn beer into an über-consistent commodity in steel kegs, real ale started to disappear from the British beer scene. But in the late 1970s, CAMRA began its crusade toward bringing beer in Britain back to its roots and away from the mass-produced swill that had taken over the pubs.
But America isn’t Great Britain. American brewers didn’t have the same resources as those of their parent country, so they improvised. Molasses was a popular ingredient in colonial-era brews, as were many other items that would make a devotee of Reinheitsgebot (the German purity laws) blow steam out his ears.
“One of the traditions, to me, of brewing is innovation,” said Jim Koch. As the founder of Boston Beer Company, maker of Samuel Adams, Koch is better qualified than most to speak on the subject. “I see creating and inventing as part of beer’s tradition. My dad had a brewing patent, my grandfather had a brewing patent; I have several. So, to me, again this is sort of a lived experience for me—you read about it in a book and you think, ‘Oh, I need to respect brewing tradition.’ If you actually grew up among brewers, you realize they have always been innovative, at least here in the United States, and that’s my family’s tradition. Innovating, pushing boundaries and doing new things—just approaching everything with a questioning attitude, that to me is part of the tradition of American brewing. I don’t find a dichotomy there. I know my dad didn’t, and I know my grandfather didn’t.”
Few American brewers can stand next to Jim and claim to have comparable brewing credentials. Take away the fact that he founded Sam Adams in the 1980s, when there were essentially no options apart from mass-produced American lagers and imported German lagers, take away the fact that his brewery survived through a boom and bust phase of microbreweries during the 1990s and grew to be the largest craft brewery in the United States, and Jim still has his remarkable brewing pedigree. The recipe that eventually became his flagship Boston Lager came from his great-great-grandfather.
“It sort of made me unique within craft brewing to have six generations of history in brewing, and not as owners but as brewmasters,” he said. “It was not even a business tradition; it was the brewmaster’s tradition. That’s unique in American craft brewing. It gave me a deep sense of history—not just read but lived. My father’s friends were brewers. My grandfather’s friends were brewers. I remember them as a kid. Some of them were quite colorful. It gave me a very deep, historical respect for the traditions and the sort of art of brewing.”
As Jim is fond of saying, his roots and love for brewing did not come from reading books, but from family experience. The result of those generations is a company that often suffers attacks in the form of carping on Internet forums that accuse Sam Adams of outgrowing its roots and putting profits ahead of product. But these criticisms often miss the point entirely. Named for an American patriot instrumental in the American Revolution, the Boston Beer Company and the Sam Adams brand have been instrumental in the American beer revolution. To be sure, Sam Adams the beer is not the only founding father of the new United States of Beer, just as the original Samuel Adams wasn’t the only founding father of the United States of America. But Adams had a knack for inspiring those around him to join the cause, and Sam Adams frequently serves as a gateway to better beer for the college-age drinkers who previously believed that beer was best served in plastic cups on a Ping-Pong table or straight from the keg with one’s legs held above one’s head. It was the occasional six-pack of Boston Lager in college that led me to a realization that beer could be enjoyed as an end in itself, rather than a means toward getting blackout drunk.
Sam Adams provided me—and surely others—with my road to Damascus moment, in terms of enjoying beer. Perhaps the biggest contribution the brewery has given the American beer scene, apart from its offering an example of virtually every style of beer (at the time of this writing, the Sam Adams Web site listed sixty-four beers ranging in style from Vienna Lager to Maple Pecan Porter to Belgian IPA), is the way it has, for many, become the new face of American beer. In many ways, the Boston Beer Company has become the standard bearer of beer culture in America. Sometimes, the company stands at the vanguard of the culture, and other times it catches up to the trends (despite its wide array of styles, Sam Adams seemingly took forever to release an IPA). Its position as a leader or a follower may be up for debate, but its participation in defining beer culture in the United States is clear—even if beer’s role in American culture is still being determined.
“I guess I can start by saying beer is not this monolithic thing,” Jim said. “It’s like saying, What role does air play in American culture? It’s pervasive. It is part of not only everyday life but really special occasions among friends and family. And today, the enjoyment of craft beer has become part of people’s coming of age in appreciation of food and beverages themselves.”
Like a music aficionado seeking out that limited-release album, craft beer culture in America seems to have a fascination with trying new beer after new beer—even to the point of neglecting older classics. On Internet forums, beer drinkers who seek out new beer at the expense of drinking their favorites are known as “tickers.” Many of these tickers are blamed for generating hype for rare beers. Even if a beer is of lower quality than a readily available beer from a different brewer, it can become more valuable among beer traders simply because of its rarity.
Similarly, brewers become guilty of putting out limited-release beers that can generate this level of hype and put the brewery’s name into the beer-geek world as a desirable brewery. Although Sam Adams is already one of the most recognizable beer brands in America, it too occasionally releases beers for the purpose of doing something newsworthy and interesting rather than simply making a good beer. At least, this was the perception of Samuel Adams’s Infinium.
Infinium was first released in the winter of 2010 as a champagne-like brew. Although the style itself is not new—bières de champagne like DeuS from Brouwerij Bosteels in Belgium have existed long before Infinium—the method used to create the beer was completely original, prompting Samuel Adams to market the beer as something completely new and revolutionary. The key difference in the process takes place during the mash. Instead of soaking the grain in hot water, usually around 152 degrees, for a short time, usually around an hour, Samuel Adams mashed the grain at lower temperatures for much longer—a reported 60–70 degrees for several days. The desired result of this extended and strange mashing process was to extract as much starch and sugar out of the malted grain as possible in order to create a dry and high-alcohol beer without the use of adjuncts like sugar. It was released in the winter as an alternative to champagne for New Year’s Eve and holiday parties.
The reception to Infinium was mixed. Some felt that the beer was a syrupy and malty mess with little to no hop presence. Indeed, the noble hops used in the brewing process are faint at best. For those drinkers for whom “quality” really only means “hoppy,” Infinium was a complete disaster. Then there were others who wrote the beer off as little more than a gimmick.
Still, the beer represented a remarkable departure from the standard brewing process and put Samuel Adams back in the conversation with the leaders of experimental brewing. Personally, I liked it. I never treated the beer as something I could pop open after a long day at work as I might another beer. I approached it as I believe it was meant to be approached—as I would a bottle of champagne. I shared it with friends on New Year’s Eve, and with family during Christmas dinner. Infinium fizzed like champagne, but had a slightly buttery taste. Although it was dry, it also had a bit more body than standard champagne.
Still, the most remarkable part about the beer was not the end result but the process. The stated goal was to create a high-alcohol, champagne-style beer without breaking any of the rules set forth by the German purity law, or Reinheitsgebot, which essentially states that no beer shall be made with ingredients other than water, malt, hops, and yeast. The radical departure from standard mash practices wasn’t an attempt to do something crazy, but an effort to meet the challenge of crafting a very specific beer that would be hard to create without the use of adjuncts. This approach fits well with Samuel Adams, which tries to adhere to tradition when possible but isn’t afraid to challenge those traditions when necessary.
“You understand why [tradition is] there, what purpose it accomplishes,” Jim said. “The hops that we use in Boston Lager are extremely traditional hops—centuries old. We get them from their original growing areas. Some of the farmers that we deal with, their families have been growing hops on that same land for three hundred years. That’s tradition. I’ve watched for thirty years people trying to improve on those hops—on Hallertau Mittelfruh in particular. There’ve probably been a dozen substitutes developed that are more disease resistant, higher yield, easier to grow—but they don’t taste like Hallertau Mittelfruh.
“In that sense, that’s a traditional thing that we’re very committed to because it delivers a unique and special flavor, and nobody has duplicated that flavor. If you could improve on it some way, sure. For example, those hops—you need to grow those hops in that terroir, but we noticed over the years that we were selecting hops that other people weren’t, and it was because we were selecting them for flavor and aroma and other people were selecting them for physical appearance—were they nice, bright green? Did they not have wind burn? Do they have a certain sheen? There’s a certain visual standard for selection of these hops that has been in place for centuries.
“We try to do things not just for tradition but because tradition makes sense. We noticed that there was a negative correlation between the appearance and aroma and taste characteristics of the hops. Long story short: For centuries, the Bavarian hop farmers have been harvesting these hops about a week too early because brewers were selecting them based on physical appearance, which peaked earlier than flavor and aroma. If you left them in the field for an extra week to ten days, while the appearance degraded, the aroma and flavor developed more in the hops. We blew up centuries of German hop-harvesting tradition because we could improve the aroma and flavor of the hops.”
It might be possible for some to look at Jim Koch’s practice of reconsidering centuries of hop-harvesting tradition as typical American arrogance. Really, who is he and who are his brewers to come to Germany, where hops have been grown for beer for centuries, and tell them that they are doing it wrong? Why should German brewmasters whose families have been crafting pristine lagers using noble hops for as long as their recorded histories go back be persuaded by a Yankee to change their methods? It would be easy to write Jim off as a know-it-all with no respect for the way things have been done, but it would be wrong.
Jim’s quest is not to shake out the old cobwebs from the beer world but to continue pushing forward. To do that, he enlisted the oldest member of the old guard. Samuel Adams gets a lot of credit for Infinium, and it often takes a lot of the criticism for that beer as well. But what frequently gets lost in the story of that beer is that it was a collaborative effort with the oldest brewery in the world.
When Jim and his brewing team set out to create a new beer brewed in a completely new manner, it was done alongside the masters from the Weihenstephan brewery. The brewers there in the town of Freising, just outside of Munich, are part of a tradition that dates back to when beer was first brewed at the Weihenstephan Monastery in the eleventh century. It sits atop Naehrberg Hill and is surrounded by the modern Weihenstephan Science Centre for Life and Food Sciences, of the Technical University of Munich, where brewers from around the world come to study brewing science. The site is something of a holy ground for brewers, and its impact was not lost on Jim when he visited the brewery to work with its masters.
“Coming from a brewing family—where one hundred and fifty years is a long time in the U.S.—to be working with a brewery that is a thousand years old, it’s just reverential. No brewer can walk up that hill in Freising, where Weihenstephan is, without feeling just reverence for the brewing history,” Jim said. “To walk up that hill and think, wow, for one thousand years brewers have walked up this hill to make their beer. That’s amazing. That’s a very cool thing. This was before the battle of Hastings they were brewing beer there. So, it’s hard to really describe that feeling unless you’re a brewer.
“I get to be one in a thousand-year chain of brewers. That’s unbelievable. For a guy who started twenty-nine years ago and was brewing in his kitchen to be partnering with the oldest brewery in the world—that was just a magical experience.”
* * *
Ultimately, the fundamentals of brewing traditions in the modern beer world are less rigid than, say, Reinheitsgebot. At the basic level, brewers have been doing the same thing since the first time a sloppy prehistoric Sumerian farmer left grains out in the rain. There are historians far more skilled than I who have worked to add detail to the history of beer, which moves from the Middle Ages, when beer was safer to drink than water, through the age of empires and colonization. Those beer makers have all led us to today, where contemporary brewers continue to convert the sugars extracted from grains into alcohol seasoned and flavored with hops and other ingredients.
The union barrel system at Firestone Walker is not the same as the one employed at Marston’s, nor is it very similar to the ones first employed by the first pale ale brewers at Burton upon Trent. But it does provide a romantic link to the past. There are small breweries that pride themselves on their rustic methods, but even they often add modern and experimental twists to their beers. What older methods offer in nostalgia or romance they often lack in the kind of quality control that enables brewers like Matt Brynildson to consistently craft some of the best beer in the world, thus making the use of modern technology and understanding an essential part of the brewing process. Not only does it produce better beer, but it allows Firestone Walker to grow as a company and reach a wider audience that would likely be turned off by an inconsistent product.
It seems as though, when it comes to the tradition of beer, the most important tradition is striving to make better beer. Unlike the ancient traditions of religion, the old processes have never been sanctified. The only thing that matters with beer is the final product. If it tastes good, if it makes people happy, then it’s good beer. The beer community often celebrates “doing things the right way.” The right way means treating brewing tradition with its due respect, but not so blindly as to ignore opportunities for innovation. Jim Koch does that. So does Matt. They are among the leaders of the American beer revolution, and even as they leave some older brewing methods behind, they keep them ever in sight. Even as practices of the past are passed over, the spirit behind those traditions remains intact—as it has for thousands of years.
Copyright © 2014 by Sean Lewis
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction: "We're Making Beer, Man" 1
The Tao of Beer
1. "I See Creating and Inventing as Part of Beer's Tradition" 15
Old-World Tradition and New-World Innovation
2. "That Means I'm Doing It Right" 37
Appreciating Balance in Beer and Brewing
3. "Raising All the Boats" 53
Brewers as Collaborators, Not Competitors
4. "Everybody in Lancaster Hates Each Other" 67
A Fraternity of Brewers
5. "Something to Be Proud Of" 88
Brewing for the Community
6. "The Recipe Doesn't Mean Shit" 103
The Craft of Brewing
7. "The Most Important Thing" 120
Providing for Family
8. "There's an Underlying Theme Here" 132
The Attraction to Brewing
9. "Somebody Please Notice We're Here!" 146
Making Bold and Aggressive Decisions
10. "What Do You Think, You Like It?" 166
Appreciating a Good Beer
Epilogue: "We're Getting Bigger Every Day" 185
The Future of Craft Beer
Acknowledgments 201
Breweries Cited in This Book 203
Appendix: The Brewing Process 209
Glossary 211