BYO Blogs

I went to the first annual Summerfest of the Massachusett's Brewer's Guild on September 3rd. This was the night that Hurricane Earl was moving past Boston, but it stayed out to sea and didn't cause any problems. 

Over 20 breweries had booths and most were serving 4 to 5 different beers. I sampled a lot of good beers including a porter from Mayflower Brewing, a heather ale from Cambridge Brewing Co. and an ale that was wet hopped with Glacier hops from Harpoon. 

Given the time of year, many of the breweries had an Octoberfest on tap. I've always thought that brewing a good Octoberfest is difficult, and tasting the festbeirs at Summerfest only reinforced that idea. Of the 4 Octoberfests I had, only one was decent. And even that beer — although it was well-made — really didn't taste much like a German Octoberfest. (I had an Ayinger Octoberfest on tap at the Sunset Grill yesterday and it was yummy.) The worst of the lot was swimming in diacetyl — why would you even bring a beer like that to a beer festival? 

If Summerfest was any indication, most breweries these days are trying things that are new and creative to interest their customers. There were a lot of beers on tap that fell outside of the boundaries of "everyday" beer styles.  There were plenty of barrel-aged beers, some sours, a wet-hopped beer, beers with unusual ingredients, etc. And most of these were pretty good. 

After returning from a brief weekend getaway for the 4th of July, the time had come to pack my car to the brim with all of my personal possessions and make the move back down south.  During the 500 mile drive, I contemplated my next series of moves on this journey into professional brewing.  Should I just take the first job I can get no matter where it is located or what brewery it is?  What is the best way to prepare myself to open a small brewpub someday?  The more I thought about it, the more it became clear to me that I need to jump into the actual business model I want to be in to gain the necessary skills to be successful.  That meant I needed to be a little picky and also attack this need for knowledge from many angles.  So what have I done to accomplish this so far?

For starters, I’ve been brewing like a mad man.  Four brews in four weeks.  One cannot have a successful small brewery of any kind without good beer.  While I was at Davis I had tasted a few beers that inspired me to create recipes for styles that I hadn’t delved into before.  Dogfish Heads Burton Baton, an oak aged IPA sparked my interest in trying my hand at one.  During our class trip to Sierra Nevada, I had their Milk Stout for the first time and inspired me to see if I could make a great, flavorful session beer like that.  My internship at Stone exposed me to all sorts of great beers, the most original being their Smoked Porter.  So, I decided to take that concept, make it a bit more robust and add some vanilla beans into the secondary.  Avery’s Salvation was a great influence in my decision to make a Belgian triple with a twist, using a combination of Belgian and American yeasts, along with US and NZ hops.  This is the type of work that gets me excited, which has really motivated me to get the ball rolling.

So what else?  Well, I’ve enrolled in both Financial and Managerial accounting at the local college to give me a good knowledge base on the financial end of this future endeavor.  Great beer + great decor + great food + bad bookeeping (despite all the positives will still) = out of business.  Reading those books by Sam Calagione and the guys from Brooklyn brewing have taught me to avoid those pitfalls.  One side effect to choosing to enroll in more classes is that it has essentially rooted me here in this city, which means I just reduced the number of breweries that I can go after from 1600+ to about 30.  I’m not complaining mind you, I could be stuck in a much worse place than here.

Now it comes down to what am I going to do to gain more experience.  God knows San Diego is chock full of breweries right?  Indeed it is.  Right now I am targeting the smaller breweries/brewpubs in the area for brewer positions.  What I am also doing is looking at is bartender positions at brewpubs and beercentric bars.  I’m going to have to be a jack of all trades when this thing gets going, so I’ll to need to get a good grasp of the "front of the house" as well as the production side of the business.

It’s going to be tough since there doesn't seem to be much turnover in this market segment, especially when you factor in the wonderful state of the economy.  Then there's the fact there are simply less positions as a whole in comparison to larger breweries.  Also, when you actually sit down in one, everyone employed there seems to be pretty happy with what they are doing.  I’m hoping that the combination of my previous experience, recent education, homebrewing knowledge and the fact that I’ve been writing this blog will open some doors for me that would otherwise have been closed.  Once that piece of the puzzle has been snapped into place, I should be well on my way to making this vision a reality.

My homebrew club, the Austin ZEALOTS, recently held it's competition, The Inquisition. Our club's Primary Fermenter (President) Corey Martin hosted the event at his house and also threw an after party. There, club members could pick leftover duplicate bottles and give them a try. For the most part, everyone would pick a bottle and pour a small taste for themselves. If the beer was good, they would pass it around. One thing that struck me as I played homebrew roulette that evening was the consistently high quality of the beers. 

A buddy of mine from the Houston Foam Rangers, Doak Proctor, was also at the party and we got to talking about how much homebrewers have improved over the years. Both of us have judged at a fair amount of contests and we mentioned how, many years ago, at a typical homebrew contest, about one-third of the beers were likely to be problematic (and contamination was a very common culprit); the middle third would be drinkable, but not good by any stretch of the imagination and the final third would be solid. 

These days, at a typical homebrew contest, almost every beer is pretty good, and a few are fantastic. The winner in a flight is not just that beer that doesn't show any faults; to win today you have to beat multiple beers that are actually good (and, in BJCP shows, good representations of the beer style). Lagers in particular, have gotten a lot better. Back in the day, almost every homebrewed lager you would taste had a distinct character to it that pegged it as homebrew. These days, many homebrewed lagers are as crisp, clean and well-conditioned as comparable commercial examples. 

Sure, contaminated beers still crop up, and there are beers that may taste fine (or at least are not  contaminated or showing any major beer faults), but don't bear much resemblance to what they are supposed to be. However, by and large, a flight of homebrews at any present day contest is likely to contain mostly well-brewed beers. 

(Window seats, gotta love em)

Prior to this trip to Scotland, I had always wondered what it would be like to be on a plane for over 10 hours straight.  Would I meet some cool people and have good conversation over a few drinks?  Would I sleep most of the way there?  Perhaps watch a couple interesting movies that haven’t even come out on DVD yet?  Only one of those possibilities came to fruition and that was the drinks.  As luck would have it, I was surrounded by a family of 20 returning from a California vacation to their native country France and none of them spoke English.  Not only that, but they were running around from seat to seat drinking wine and cognac while carrying on their rambunctious vacation behavior in the cabin of our 747.  Ixnay on the conversation and the possibility of sleep.  The movies that were shown I had just seen on DVD the week before.  Figures, that Murphy and his damn law.  One thing I will say that the food was pretty good and the service was excellent, so kudos to you Air France.

I arrived in Aberdeen about 17 hours after I left San Francisco (4 hour Paris layover) and was picked up by one of the top dogs at the brewery, Martin Dickie.  The town of Fraserburgh (pronounced Fraserboro by the locals) was about an hour and a half drive north, so I had a chance to get the history of how Brewdog got started and their expansion plans for the future.  We arrived in town and I got a quick tour of the brewery and was introduced to some of the guys that work there.  After getting dropped off at the Bed and Breakfast I was to stay at, I was soon scooped up by a couple of the brewers for a beer tasting back at the brewery. I got to share some of the US beers I brought with me and sample quite a few of what they had to offer.  We ended up hitting the town at about 11pm and let’s just say I hit the wall so to speak after about 36 hours without an ounce of rest.  

Our day of reckoning arrived this week as I pulled up to an unfamiliar classroom on the outskirts of the UC Davis campus.  They encouraged us to arrive a half hour early prior to the official start time for the IBD exam to allow us to get settled and check in.  I decided to arrive 90 min before everyone else began filing in, so that I could get in some last minute cramming, as it has always served me well in the past.  When I felt I my brain was adequately packed with information (As if the last 18 weeks weren’t enough!) I decided to walk the “green mile” over to the testing area.  Prior to this day, I had the preconceived notion that the proctor of the exam would be a stuffy Brit that paced around the room with a yardstick in hand, waiting for some sort of misstep that would be rewarded with a rap on the knuckles from his/her wooden weapon of discipline.  No such luck, thankfully.  Instead we got our program coordinator and our engineering tutor who were obviously much less intimidating than that scary figment of my imagination.  Dr. Lewis and Bamforth were also there to wish us luck, but exited shortly after to leave us to the task at hand.

So I guess the first thing I should address is the difficulty of the exam.  I’m not going to lie, I have never had the pleasure of such a painstaking task in my entire existence on this planet.  That being said, it was not as bad as I thought it was going to be..... for the most part.  On the first day (Module 1), my only problem was that I knew too much. Time management got the best of me on the last couple questions, as I poured out every little detail that was stuffed in my head on the first four and that got me a bit behind.  The funny part is that they warned us about that.  The heat of the moment got to me a bit, but I think I still did all right.  

The second day (Module 2) is typically the one that causes student the most trouble, since it usually deals with the largest breadth of information and it involves the most biochemistry/microbiology.  Not having any scientific background other than my pre-reqs for this program, this should have been true for me as well.  No way Jose.  I learned my lesson from the previous day, curbed my desire to write more than I should and was able to answer most of the questions pretty thoroughly.  On the third day (Module 3), I came face to face with my demon of the class, the engineering section.  This was the part of the test that did end up being as hard I thought. I gave it my best shot and I’ll let the chips fall where they may on that one.  One thing to keep in mind is that these are essay questions that are being graded by a human being, so who knows exactly what they are looking for.  Only time will tell. (About 3 months to be exact.) Just before the final 3 hours were over, I got up to turn in that final booklet and it was like someone just slapped me across the face and said, “Hey man, do you realize that you are DONE!!!”  I immediately headed over to the Sudwerk Brewery for our graduation celebration.