Harvest Beer & Cheese Pairing Favorites from our Resident Cheesemonger

Today's Harvest Month beer & food pairing comes from one of our humble barrel fellows who spends his day making sure the thousands of barrels in our warehouses stay happy and organized. Before Cesar started focusing much of his time on Bruery beer, he did a lot of homebrewing and worked at a local cheese shop.

Here around The Bruery some call me The Barrel Whisperer, but did you know when first starting at The Bruery I was also working as a cheesemonger? Let’s say I just did I did it for some extra ... cheddar.

Anyways, while working the cheese shop I learned a great deal about different varieties of cheese and how I can incorporate my love of beer to every type.

Harvesting a Brew: Hop School with Tyler King

The words "harvest beer" may trigger thoughts of fresh or wet hopped beers. They are indeed delicious, and though we don't make a lot of beers that taste hugely hoppy, we use hops regularly in both our sours and barrel aged beers for balance and flavor. For our third post on what it takes to harvest a beer, our Senior Director of Brewing Operations Tyler King shares his experience in visiting the Pacific Northwest during hop harvest.

During my transition from BJ’s to The Bruery I was lucky enough to visit the beautiful Yakima Valley for the 2007 hop harvest. I guess I never thought of where hops came from before my trip. With my love of wine and the countryside, I always envisioned lush green mountainsides with 20 foot tall hop towers as far as the eye could see.

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.

Harvesting a Brew: Barley Basics, from Brewer Andrew Bell

As we jump into Harvest Month at The Bruery and The Tasting Room, our staff is dissecting what it takes to harvest all the parts that make up beer. With the number of craft breweries skyrocketing, it's a wonder barley and hop suppliers can keep up

It's easy to take the supply & demand of beer ingredients for granted when we're simply focusing on the enjoyment of a fresh brew, so let's get to know our beer better in our series of posts on Harvesting a Brew. This first one comes from Bruery brewer Andrew Bell, homebrewer-extraordinaire-gone-pro.

Barley is by and large the biggest harvest-able component of beer. Hops get all the glory, and beer people sometimes grow hops at home, but very rarely have you heard of people growing barley at home. In fact, very few breweries grow barley in the US -- two of the few that I can think of off the top of my head are Sierra Nevada and Rogue, and only for a small range of beers.

This is probably due to the fact that raw barley is not particularly useful for beer making. To make it useful in most circumstances, it has to be malted. The malting process is both an art and a science, and is relatively complicated and resource-heavy to do at home, or at an actual brewery, in any large quantity.