Author Archives: Ed Sabato

From garage to real working brewery

Posted on by Ed Sabato

Like most people who brew for fun, or a living, I think my journey was unique. I was a late bloomer in the home-brewing sense and then went crazy about four batches in. All-grain, stainless, temp-controlled everything, kegerators, brew clubs, competitions, blah, blah blah. I basically became completely obsessed and turned my garage, dining room and basement into everything beer related. I have enjoyed some success in competitions, and numerous friends who drink my free beer have told me my beer is great (not the best litmus test based on the word free, mind you).

The shortest distance between two points is: the willingness to work hard.At this point in the homebrew infatuation, who hasn’t thought of quitting their day job and going pro? After five or more beers, just about every serious beer drinker (let alone brewer) with whom I’ve ever had a conversation mutters something along the lines of: “Wouldn’t it be effing cool to own your own brewery?” Well, I’ve asked myself, and my adorable wife, that question many, many times.

So just how do you go from brewing beer in your kitchen or garage to working in a real brewery? I found that two factors affect the outcome here.

  1. You need to have the extra time available to put in a few shifts a week at a brewery.
  2. The Latin adage: Audentes Fortuna Iuvat – “Fortune helps those daring.”

Save the younger among us, there are very few chances to take on a second job for fun. Most of us have family or job commitments that make this impractical or impossible. And those who do need a second job, usually take one that suits their needs, not their dreams. As a guy with life-long “shit for luck,” I lucked out for once. I was afforded the opportunity to take a one-year assignment in Hawaii. I know, tough life for sure, right? There were a few catches to this assignment. I was going to be working on all new projects that I knew nothing about, could not take a workday off for 51 weeks, and had to leave my aforementioned adorable wife behind. This meant that I would be living the bachelor life for a year, surviving on ramen and beer, but with plenty of spare time for a second job….so extra time available to put in a few shifts a week at a brewery? – check.

Now for finding that brewery.

A week-long business trip to Hawaii about three months before my new job started meant I could scout out the potential breweries in advance. This is how I approached it:

  • At the time I was looking, there were five breweries open or in planning. One was still on paper, so that left four to pursue. (By the way, four months later, there are seven breweries in Hawaii)
  • I contacted the four breweries via email, Facebook, and Twitter to start a discussion, gave my background and discussed my passion for both learning and beer, and offered to work for FREE (which we will discuss later). I thought the internship approach (since I already had a paycheck coming in) would take the pressure off the “hiring process.”
  • Two breweries responded and I started putting together some possible dates to interview.
  • By the time I flew to Hawaii, one brewery owner had not confirmed our appointment, so I was now down to one.
  • I met with the Brewmaster and didn’t give him any BS about what a great a brewer I was. I dropped off three of my own beers and three more he would never see in Hawaii (Double IPAs of course). I think we hit it off immediately.
  • During my five-minute “interview,” I reiterated that I wanted to learn ALL the aspects of working in a brewpub — from cleaning kegs and tap lines, to dumping spent grains, to cleaning the kettles, etc.
  • My new boss agreed to take me on as a “volunteer” on the spot. I was to be the brewery’s first volunteer brewer, and so my journey started to reveal itself.

I am starting with one weekend shift each week, which should be about 10-12 hours in duration. I will start at the very bottom, doing the mundane and the dirty, just like everyone else. Although I will be “earning my stripes,” I have still set goals. The first is to put together one beer that I can say I brewed, conditioned, kegged, and served all by myself in 50 weeks. My loftier goal is to brew a collaboration recipe with the pro brewers to be entered into the Great American Beer Festival in the “PRO-AM” category. I have one year to make it all happen.

I will be documenting the journey along the way. It won’t always be pretty, or very fun, but I intend to share how it goes. So lift your glass and wish me luck.

BSP at Sea Porter (smoked version) Brew Day

Posted on by Ed Sabato

A few years ago when I did my very first brew day, I chose two different beers (“extract with specialty grains”) to take the plunge into brewing. I chose a pilsner, which as a beginner, was probably the worst choice I could have made. The other kit was a clone of Samuel Smith’s Tadcaster Porter (Taddy Porter for us beer

Samuel Smith’s Taddy Porter is an English Porter (BJCP category 13C) and is listed in the commercial examples for the style. It is also one of the only examples you will be able to find just about anywhere in the United States (Fullers London Porter is the other – and also really nice), and the first British Porter I ever tried. What I liked about Taddy Porter so many years ago (more than 20) was the rich and slightly bitter taste. I never could put my finger on how the taste of Taddy Porter was so different until many years later. That first clone kit contained the base extracts, specialty grains, and some good old English Fuggles for hopping. What it also contained was a small vial of blackstrap molasses. Pow! The lightbulb went on instantly; that was the flavor component that made Taddy Porter so delicious. My first brew day went well (if not too long), and a few weeks later I kegged my knockoff porter, and it actually turned out pretty nice.

Fast forward two years, and I am neck deep in all-grain brewing with computer programs, temperature controlled everything, and a brewery storeroom where my dining room used to be. I took that original kit recipe, converted it to all-grain (thanks to BeerSmith), and then started making the tweaks. I did several versions of this porter, which I refer to as BSP at Sea. For the non-Navy types out there, BSP stands for “Brief Stop for Personnel,” on which every sailor wished we could be getting beer, vice people.

3 men in small boat at sea

Brief stop for personnel

The BSP tag also had a second meaning. I was adding a lot more black strap molasses to the recipe, and the beer was quickly becoming “Black Strap Porter” around my house. We tried doing both carbonated and beer gas (Nitro) versions, and they were okay, but not great, in my opinion. Lots of people raved about the beer, but I always thought it was missing something, so I went back to the drawing board to try to get more flavor. I tried using some smoked malt to deepen the flavor and increase the complexity. I did like the result, but I still thought the overall malt bill needed some work. I submitted the smoked (and nitro) version in the Ocean State Homebrew Competition, just to get the feedback, and it got killed in the scoring with 24 of a possible 50 points. This was not great, and to be honest, the nitro ruined it for bottling. Once again, I looked to the drawing board and the malt bill to figure it out.

I began listening to The Brewing Network podcasts about a year ago and had listened to every beer conversation I could. Once again, I turned to Brewing with Style and Jamil Zainesheff for inspiration. I took his robust porter recipe, tweaked it for my own system, and brewed it in May 2015 under the name Pogy Porter. The key to this new recipe was taking the advice to not use the Irish Ale yeast I had been using and to use California Ale yeast (WLP001 from White Labs). The idea was that I should be brewing a robust porter in the American style and not trying to duplicate Irish/English yeast profiles with an American style malt bill. Fermentation went as expected (1.056 to 1.014) and I stored the beer in a carboy under CO2 blanket from May to October. I then kegged it at 12.5psi for a week to see what this new base recipe turned out like. At 5.7%ABV it was really drinkable, and the second I put it on tap at my house (and tailgating) it became a hit. The malt bill was obviously the reason it tasted more complex; the yeast helped by letting the malt be the star. My malt bill for this porter (Pogy Porter):

  • 8% Maris Otter (3 L)
  • 5% Crystal 40 (40 L)
  • 5% Munich II (8.5 L)
  • 8% Chocolate malt (350.0 L)
  • 4% Black Patent (500 L)

This grain bill was the start of my revamp of BSP at Sea, which then received a few tweaks by adding some smoked malt, British pale chocolate malt, and the black strap molasses. This new malt bill for BSP at Sea:

  • 7% Maris Otter (3 L)
  • 7% Cherrywood smoked malt (2 L)
  • 7% Crystal 40 (40 L)
  • 7% Munich II (8.5 L)
  • 3% Chocolate malt (350.0 L)
  • 3% Pale chocolate malt (215 L)
  • 2% Black Patent (500 L)
  • 8oz black strap molasses

The objective is to add even more complexity by adding the smoked malt and molasses, but I am also hoping to get the additional flavor/complexity from adding pale chocolate as well. The Original Gravity (OG) going into the fermenter was 1.059 and we are shooting for a Final Gravity (FG) of 1.012-1.014 for and ABV of 6-6.2%.

Beer is just like any other living thing. You make plans, nurture it, and watch it effectively “grow up,” all the while you never really know how it will turn out until that first glass. In two weeks, we will be moving our experiment to secondary fermentation and aging for a few weeks. During the Christmas Holidays it should be on tap and we will be filling a few bottles for competition to see if we can improve on that 24-point score.

Sea State Schwarzbier

Posted on by Ed Sabato

My infatuation with schwarzbier started years ago when in the Navy on my first Mediterranean deployment (“The Med”). Even though it was 1993 and the American craft brew industry was just starting to discover the ability to make beer that did not suck, Europe was (and still is) the obvious master of the European beer styles. I did not get to go to Germany proper, but I did drink every beer I could not pronounce or recognize. Some styles were obvious wins for me, others took years to enjoy (I still don’t like barley wine). I fell in love with the Czech lagers and pilsners, anything from Germany, and even some of the Dutch and Belgian beers. The ones that really stood out on my Rolling Rock-calibrated palate were the rich lagers and anything amber colored or darker.

Sea State

This is what a “heavy” sea state looks like. Sea States are numbered from 0-5, 5 being the roughest.

I know, I know, it is no huge surprise that the Germans brew killer lagers. But what did surprise me was that these dark beers could be so flavorful without any bitterness and without wandering into porter and stout territory. Schwarzbier has remained one of my favorite beer styles, despite its elusiveness in the American commercial market. This was a driving force behind my putting a recipe in motion and trying to figure it out.

Where to start? The first thing to overcome is controlling fermentation temperature. At the time I was putting the plan together, I had only two ways to control temperature. I could wait until the season here in New England was right, so my basement temperature would help keep my fermentation buckets and carboys in the 50-54°F range, or I could use my homebuilt “keezer” (aka kegerator) to get me in the temperature range. Either would be acceptable as I had already brewed several lagers using the “basement method” with reasonable success. The only issue with the basement method, is that the temperature can fluctuate high out of the acceptable range during the early fermentation. This affects the ability to reliably repeat the beer each time, which will obviously affect consistency. So for my schwartzbier, that meant we used the kegerator in order to control the temperature much more accurately.

How to formulate a recipe that would give you what you are looking for? Since I am reasonably new to the brewing hobby, I sought out a few sources. In my opinion, you should find a commercial example that you like. For me, that example was Kostritzer Schwarzbier. Not only was it something that I really love, it was actually German, and listed in the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) guide as a good commercial example of the style (Dark European Lager, category 8B. It was not the top example though; that one was Devils Backbone Schwartz Bier, which is a VA company and also wonderful.) Once you know what you want it to end up tasting like, then you can research the “clones,” blogs, posted recipe resources, etc. I chose to use the example from Jamil Zainasheff’s podcast (The Jamil Show on The Brewing Network), which was based on his award-winning recipe in his book Brewing Classic Styles. I used the BJCP style guides and the malt bill percentages from Jamil’s show and came up with a recipe that finished at the higher end of the BJCP ranges for the style.

On that first brew day, everything went fairly well. I boiled for around 100 minutes to get great clarity and to minimize any dimethyl sulfide (DMS) from the pilsner malt. I then chilled the wort to 60°F and set my kegerator to 50°F (with 2°F variation). I had grown a good two-liter starter for my yeast (WLP830 “German Lager”), so I pitched the yeast in after oxygenating for a full minute. Primary fermentation was mostly completed in 7-10 days, so on the tenth day set the kegerator temperature to 62°F for the diacetyl rest for two additional days. For those not in the know, diacetyl is a mostly lager yeast byproduct that gives beer a “buttery” or butterscotch-like flavor and aroma. Lager yeast can reabsorb it at slightly warmer temperatures (if it was ever produced by the yeast). After this rest was completed, I then set the kegerator temperature to 50°F again and waited an additional two weeks before “crashing” to 36°F for two additional weeks and then transferring to secondary fermentation (aka “secondary”).

After a month in secondary, we carbonated at 13 psi for a week and I kept thinking about how it would turn out. Would it be anywhere close to what I had hoped? After that agonizing week of waiting, we put it on tap and were amazed at how well it turned out. It was clean, crisp, and the malt flavors came through as expected. The slightly roast character, combined with just enough noble hop bitterness, made it really interesting. The 4.8% ABV made it really drinkable, so much so, that we decided to bottle it within a few days so we would not drink it all before we could get it into competition.

We did enter this beer into the Ocean State Homebrew Competition, along with two wild fermented ciders, a smoked, nitro porter (BSP at Sea), and a Kolsch (Kings Bay Kolsch). It was our first competition, so we had the feeling it would be a bit of a bloodbath when it came to the scoring. In fact, it was a bloodbath for four of our five entries, which will be covered in other posts. But this beer did well, really, really well for the first competition.

For the first run of any new recipe, you know there will be adjustments with the grain bill, brewing or fermenting processes, or the packaging of the beer. We definitely took some of those hits with our other entries, but Seastate Schwarzbier scored 39.5 of a possible 50 points, winning the dark German lager category! This victory, while sweet, felt a little hollow as this was the only entry in the category. It was not until many weeks later that we realized that all the German lager categories were combined, so it was the best German lager period, which made us feel much better about that “gold medal.” As a category winner, the beer then competes in the Best of Show (BOS) round for the top spot of the competition. Of the 23 beers competing for BOS, Seastate finished 10th overall (the BOS winner was a 42-point barrel-aged, stout), which was validation that this beer could be moved from the “experimental” to “completed” folders in the brewing software.

Since this beer enjoyed great success the first time, we brewed it again and used the yeast in the fermentation bucket to start the fermentation of a Baltic Porter, which is still fermenting in the new fermentation chamber as we speak. Seastate is a favorite on the taps at our house, and went over well at a recent tailgate, so this one will be in our permanent lineup.

 

Cask conditioned ales: a “modern” thing?

Posted on by Ed Sabato

This post starts like any bad joke you’ve ever heard. “I was sitting in a bar and this guy says, what the hell is that?”

Yep, that’s right, I was sitting in a bar, and I am sure everyone is stunned to hear it. I had just finished a nice American brown ale (Long Trail’s Sick Day) and was looking at the beer this establishment had on cask. It was Left Hand’s Black Jack Porter, and what is better than a good porter on cask or nitro? Not much, so I ordered one. The bartender got to work on the lone beer engine, and the guy two stools down starts in with the whole “modern beer” and “modern beer drinkers” stuff. I mean, it’s not like I am some hipster tool, with a knit hat, neck beard and insufferably smug attitude. I tried to assure the near-octogenarian that this “new-fangled” thing was anything but new.

To be fair to my bar-acquaintance, the beer engine was cool in the US a little while ago, then went out of favor, and is now enjoying a comeback, sort of. I had my first cask ale while in Gibraltar over Christmas in 1993. Although my beer experience was legendary among my own shipmates even then, cask ales were something I had never seen. The couple of ales I tried were truly British, and the names and styles of the ones I tried have faded from memory. What is still perfectly clear, though, are the flavors and mouthfeel of a cask conditioned ale. They felt creamier, a little softer, and really drinkable. I thought it was some “new” technology that us “ugly Americans” had yet to embrace. I could not have been more wrong.

The original beer engine was invented by John Lofting in 1691, some 300+ years before I ever laid eyes on it. The beer engine was created to solve the problem of moving beer from the cellars to the serving rooms. It was invented by that old mother Necessity, and has been around in various forms ever since.

The real beauty of the beer engine is that it requires no power, other than your arm, and it doesn’t require refrigeration. Simply brilliant, and unique to American culture. In the last few years I have really taken note of the unused beer engines in the Irish and British establishments I frequent here in New England. Kind of sad really, but cask ales have a shelf life. If you don’t move them quickly, they degrade. This is a product of the beer engine’s simplicity. It pumps the atmosphere of the bar right into the keg/cask, oxidizing the beer and making it taste “old” very quickly.

Cask AleI had another interesting experience with cask conditioned beer on my second trip to Brisbane, Australia. A friend of mine had been there many times, and knew of a place called The Breakfast Creek Hotel (the locals call it the “Brekky Creek”). This place had the best steak house going (the kind where you choose your steak in the case) and the Paddy Fitzgerald Bar, a really cool bar that still serves cask ale. The beer was XXXX Bitter (spoken “four-ex”),made by Castlemain Perkins in Brisbane, Australia. On its own merit, XXXX Bitter is a good beer, a kind of English bitter hybridized with a Czechoslovakian lager yeast. It is great, 4.6% ABV, and crushable. The XXXX Bitter on cask at the Brekky Creek is from another world. There is something amazing that happens in the cask. I don’t know if it is the brewers pitch, the wood, the tradition, or the specter of seeing it tapped with a hammer…but it is amazingly different. I have consumed many, many pints of XXXX Bitter, “off the wood” as the barman says, while at the Brekky Creek and they were all amazing. The cask mellows all the flavors a bit. The bittering from the hops is toned down, and the wood adds a different mouthfeel than you would get from a bottle of standard CO2 draught. The differences to most people would be significant enough to suggest the cask and non-cask versions of the same beer were actually two different beers. As a really cool side note to the Paddy Fitzgerald Bar fame, I would add that they have a very interesting tradition regarding a tapped cask. They finish it that day. Don’t get me wrong, they are small casks (10 gallons/38 liters I believe), but those of you sitting in the bar within an hour of closing could get a special treat. The last time I was there, in 2006, I happened to be there with only four other patrons ­– two locals and three of us Sailors. The locals kindly accepted the free pitcher that the barman poured for them and took a while to consume it. My friends and I went through pitcher after pitcher of wonderful beer while discussing such lofty topics as US football vs. Rugby, Rugby Union, and Australian Rules. We also debated who had consumed more, and which of us had the largest bladder (Big Head Todd drank way more, and I had the largest bladder).

These two great experiences with cask conditioned ale whetted my appetite to try more, and to seek out establishments bold enough to serve it as well. It also made me an ambassador, which is why I am offering the links to the British Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) as well as the New England Real Ale Exhibition (NERAX) both of which are a wealth of information.

In this lightning-paced world we now occupy, you can check the ratings of a beer you never heard of in less than 10 seconds on your phone. What you cannot do with your phone, is experience something that takes time, and adds subtlety and complexity over a few weeks, months or years. So wherever you are, take the extra few seconds as you peruse the beer menu to ask you server what is on cask. It will add something to your tasting repertoire, and it just might change the way you look at beer, like it did for me.