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):

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.

Getting our Feet Wet. In Hops?

We love our little pilot brew system. In case we aren't doing anything crazy on our regular system (which in itself is a crazy notion) we have a strapping little 3 bbl babe system beckoning us to fill it with our weirdest, most experimental, beer dreams, fantasies, and small collabs.

For almost any brewery in So Cal, (wait, let's just go with ALL of CA) brewing with a boatload of hops is increasingly common. And that's one of the things we love about our sunshine state -- we have some of the world's best hoppy beers made right in our own backyard. All. The. Time.

That's all the more reason we made the promise years ago to leave this beautiful beer style to the numerous breweries near and far that are doing a tremendous job making world-class IPAs. And all the more reason it's really bizarre that we've been working on not one, but five hoppy beers for you to try in our Tasting Room.

Tyler has been really excited about this new project, which will ultimately let you enjoy five, single-hop, fresh hopped American pale ales side-by-side (by-side-by-side-by-side). Here's his explanation of what's going on, straight from the Sr. Director of Brewing Operations himself:

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.

Wet Hops

If you know The Bruery, you know we don'y make many particularly hoppy beers, but that doesn't mean we don't love ourselves some classic west coast IPA's.  Right now, the beginning of September, is hop harvest season and we couldn't resist getting our hands on some fresh hops.  Yesterday morning a truck dropped off about 60 pounds of fresh Citra hops picked just for us.  We're going to use these in a fresh hop ale that will soon grace the draft lines at our tasting room.  In a few days, we have another shipment of 60 pounds of hops coming in, this time of Chinook hops and we'll be using those to dry hop the heck out of this beer.  Though is it really called dry hopping when you are using wet hops?  That's a question for the hop gods.

We definitely can't wait to try this one, but don't fret, it's not an IPA.  We've still never made an IPA.

The label on the box of hops picked just for THE BRUERY!!

YUM!

Cleaning all of these hops out of the whirlpool is not going to be fun.  Neither will getting the hops out of the boil kettle.  Or the fermenter.  But it's worth it.