Expansion Update 4: More Warehouse Space = Improved Quality

The addition of our brand new brewhouse from Germany means some things will need to move around inside our current spaces. We're pleased to announce that another step in our expansion plans for 2014 includes the lease of two new warehouse spaces, which means separation of clean beer and sour beer fermentation and packaging.

At the end of January, we leaked a sneak peek at one of our new warehouse spaces located near our administrative offices. This warehouse is pretty cavernous and will be used for marketing department raves the less glamorous parts of the wonderful world of brewing, like bottle conditioning and storage of packaging materials.

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.

Sensory School: The Eye of the Beer-holder

As much as we know looks aren't everything, when it comes to beer the first sensory experience you'll enjoy is the appearance of your pour. There are several visuals that come into play before you even let a beer approach your palate, and they can be surprisingly simple but powerful details.

Color, clarity, head character, the play of light, the shape of glassware, the cleanliness of a pour, the haze of yeast, the color of foam, the dance of those precious little baby carbonation bubbles that float through your beer -- these are just some of the elements that stimulate our senses before even touching a beer. There's a surprising amount of thought that has gone behind the appearance of each and every craft beer you've ever enjoyed, and taking a minute to slow down and understand those visual stimulants might improve your beer drinking enjoyment.

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:

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 - Brewing & Yeasts

Last week we outlined why sour beers are such a pain in the butt to make in Sour Barrel Aged Beer 101- Challenge Accepted! This week, thanks to the power of the interwebz we can answer some of your questions you posted on our Facebook & Twitter. If you have a sour bottle handy, now's probably a good time to pop it open!

Here are some of the common questions related to brewing sour barrel aged beers, answered by Tyler King, our Senior Director of Brewing Operations who we're pretty sure you know by now, and the lovely Jessica Davis, our brilliant Quality Specialist.



Jess has been on our team for several months now and we are thrilled to have on board with her years of experience in SCIENCE! She knows how to do all kinds of weird things in our fancy lab, and she has been handling the tremendous task of keeping our yeasts and beers happy & healthy. If you ever see her around the Tasting Room, give her a sanitary high-five!

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:

Propagating Greatness

We got a new delivery in today!

Our yeast propagator came in the mail!

For those who don't know, we primarily use a single strain of yeast for about 85% of our beers.  It's a Belgian-style yeast strain that is highly attenuating (it eats a lot of sugar) leaving our beers with a very desirable, dry finish.  It's attenuation is also important because we make a lot of beers that are over 8% or even over 10% alcohol and it takes a very strong yeast strain to keep on working and break the sugars down until we get to that strength of beer.  

A problem that we often run into because of this yeast and our massive use of it is that we often don't have enough.  Many of our strong beers basically destroy a yeast pitch after it is done fermenting because of how strong the beer is.  Some of our other beers are simply too unique to reuse the yeast from them for another beer.  For some of our smaller beers, however, we can re-pitch the yeast from one fermentor into another, often up to 8 or 9 times.  In fact, yeast can multiply while fermenting, it must get excited while making all that beer, and we can end up with more yeast after a fermentation than we started with.  Because of this quality of yeast, homebrewers and professional brewers alike will make propagation batches.  In a homebrew, this might just be taking the small vile of yeast that you pick up from a homebrew shop, adding it to a small flask of wort (sugar water made from malted barley) and after a few days of fermenting you'll have enough yeast for a batch of high gravity homebrew.  

Here at The Bruery, part of the reason that we often make low alcohol, draft-only beers like our Humulus ales or 714 is because besides the fact that they are exciting to brew, it works as a giant propagation batch that we can harvest yeast from.  We love making these one-off beers and will continue to do so, but the problem with using them as prop batches is that it means we have to fit them into our brewing schedule at specific times and they take up fermenters that we might need more for something else.

So, we finally got ourselves a yeast propagator.  This bad boy, a 120 Liter Newlands, is going to be our savior.  It's only job is breeding yeast.  We add some wort and some of our house yeast and it efficiently feeds and aerates and does everything that yeast needs to grow up big and strong.  It's like hiring a nanny for our yeast babies.  Now we can get back to making beer while Newlands takes care of the yeast until we need it.

carefully and frightfully unloading our new toy.

Only the best gifts need a drill to unwrap.

Everybody is so excited to see it!

Tada!

One last thing... Jay must bless the propagator.