Meet the Homebruer: Josh Reyes

If you've been to our Tasting Room on weekends recently, you may have noticed the occasional option to sign up for tours of our brewhouse. Though we're working on relaunching an improved tour program in the near future, in the meantime Josh is able to parade a few interested folks around. Josh is one of our newer additions to The Bruery family, but he's by no means new to beer and brewing.

When did you start homebrewing?

Much like many of our own Bruers, I started homebrewing in college.

Sensory School: All Hail Aroma

We're all familiar with what it's like to eat something when you have a stuffy nose -- you can't really get much flavor out of anything, and the joy is pretty much taken out of any meal. Likewise, when you're diving into a decadent meal at a fancypants restaurant and someone walks by doused in bad cologne, your appetizer suddenly seems to take on notes of locker room.

This is because the full flavor of what we consume is a combination of taste (what we sense in our mouth) and aroma (what we detect with our nose). If you've never tried eating with your nose plugged, take a minute, step away from the computer, pour yourself a flavorful craft beer, and try doing it.

To appreciate and understand the importance of aroma in your sensory experience of beer, we've placed four "homework" items throughout this post that will help you appreciate the ingredients, presentation, and descriptors for all things beer aroma.

Careful Cellaring, Part 3: The Threat of Light

Another factor that can be damaging to you beer cellar is light. Did you know a beer's flavor can change in minutes in direct sunlight? Even unnatural, fluorescent light can harm your beer. The reason this happens is because the hops in beer are very sensitive to UV light. To explain what happens to the chemistry of beer, we turn again to Jess from our lab. 

Ever wonder why "lite" beers in clear bottles taste better with a lime slice and are skunky without one? It's because of a little nasty compound called MBT or as the organic chemist might say 3-methylbut-2-ene-1-thiol.

The odor and flavor of this compound is often reminiscent of skunks but is commonly referred to as the smell and taste of a "lightstruck" beer. The chemistry that goes on to change your delicious hops to skunkiness is well known and shown in the following graph about "The Lightstruck Reaction" (Graham, 2006):

Careful Cellaring, Part 2: The Importance of Temperature

Cellaring beer properly means paying close attention to the many elements that can make your collection age for the worse. One of the most influential factors that can cause any good beer to go bad is temperature. To best understand how temperature effects beer we've once again turned to Jess, our Quality Specialist, to explain what happens to a living beer when it spends time at less than ideal temperatures.

Why do you keep your milk or yogurt in the fridge? For some of the same reasons you would want to keep a beer in the fridge: it helps keep the beer as fresh as possible.

Too Darn Cold

Cold storage is not to be confused with frozen storage. Besides possibly making a beer-bomb in your freezer, keeping beer at sub-zero temperatures is not preferable. There actually are a few instances where freezing temperatures are used in the brewery:

Careful Cellaring, Part 1: The Quality Assurance Process for Creating Clean, Living Beer

Before a beer leaves our brewery to go to your cellar, or your bottle share, or your mouth, it has a very busy schedule as it gets approved for its release into the world. We've explained previously how working with sours comes with its own trials and tribulations, but for cellared & aged beer month at The Bruery we think it's time to delve deeper into the steps it takes to produce and release clean, cellarable, living beer.

As many a craft beer lover may know, the brewing process requires a ton of cleaning and serious attention to sanitation. This attention to detail doesn't just apply to a single brew day. To make sure a beer can be sold and consumed as it was intended to taste, every part of every brew endures our quality assurance process. It takes all levels of staff to pull this off, including our brewers, lab ladies, packaging, cellarmen, and managers. We love to make experimental ales, but with each unique experiment comes new challenges for our team to monitor.

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.