I was Born a Ramblin Man

It has been a little over a week since I left Chicago and it feels like I have been both very productive and extremely worthless at the same time. The worthless is very warranted because I wake up when I wake up and I spend a lot of time on the couch. I start my morning reading about every website that writes anything about the Huskies, then I check back a few more times during the day to see if they wrote anything new. Bear in mind that it is the end of March, spring practice may have started today, but there isn't much news this time of year. At the same time, the Dawgs reading isn't really any different to what I did at Boeing, so maybe it is productive.

Baby steps. That is what it feels like I am making in the direction of opening Payette Brewing Company, but they are starting to get the ball rolling. I just realized how in this post I have equated baby step to being productive...I spent too much time at the lazy B. I met with The White Space today (a design and marketing company in Boise) to talk about Payette Brewing Company. It was a great meeting and I am very interested to see what they get back to me with. I think it will be a great company to work with, the work they have done looks excellent. I want PBC to be "Boise's Brewery" and to get into the "Think Boise First" crowd, I should probably be thinking that way. At first I thought it was too early in the process to even worry about that, but after meeting with them, I think it is going to go a long way in getting me to focus on what I want the image of PBC to be. It will also force me to sack-up, make some decisions and put some money down so I stop dreaming and do.

I talked with some other people while in Boise, most notably the beer buyer at the coop. It was sort of a first stab at some market research. It was good to get his opinion on the beer scene in Boise and where it is headed. He seemed very connected and he is someone I plan on keeping in the loop as I get closer to opening. He was aware of two brewpubs in the planning stages for Boise and maybe one production brewery. The production one he mentioned I didn't get a clear explanation of what he meant by maybe, but it isn't a big deal. Although I would like to be the first, I think this market can support two breweries without a problem.

On the job front, not much luck at this point and I need to get back at it once I get back to Seattle. I had an interview with Mac and Jack's for a position in the cellar. I had some great conversations with the manager which I feel will help me on my search. It wasn't that I was offered a job or that he said no, it just didn't seem like the right fit at the time. If it came to me desperately needing a job I could probably have one, but I need to feel out any opportunities to be a brewer before I take a cellar job.

Big things the next few days, weeks, etc...called finding a job and working on a business plan.

Back to Reality...

...or something like that. I have a hard time saying that making beer is reality while keeping a straight face, but that's what it is. After a good two month stay in Chicago I am going back to Seattle tonight to start the next chapter in my journey towards opening a brewery. The plan is to get a job, sounds easy right...? I will be sure to keep everyone posted on that front, hopefully I post something about that sooner rather than later. I really wish that I could just start opening my own brewery right now, but there is still a lot of planning and more importantly more learning to do before I can do that. I have a lot of ideas that I have been getting on paper, just not necessarily on the blog because most of it is planning stuff that people probably don't really care about. I would love to throw out a time line for opening up Payette Brewing, but I have a long way to go before I can do that.

To be honest, about two months ago I was pretty freaked out when I thought about what was going to happen when I was done with school, now that time is here. I can't remember a time in my life where I didn't have my next step already set up, now that I am in that position, I am having a great time and really excited to see what comes next. Talk to me in a month or two, if I don't have a job and start running out of money, I am sure my tone will change. Right now, I am exactly where I want to be.

This turned into another one of those posts written more for myself rather than anyone else, but I still felt like writing it. It will make for a good segment in a book when my ego gets big enough that I think people will pay to read what I have to say. Time to get back to Seattle and most importantly, go get my dog.

Night of the Living Ales

A week back, I got the chance to take in a beer festival up at Goose Island Wrigleyville. The festival was the Night of the Living Ales, an event with 41 cask conditioned beers from 21 different breweries mostly from the area with a few from California and Oregon. Cask Ales, often referred to as Real Ales, are beers that go through a secondary fermentation in the vessel they are served in (cask). These beers are naturally carbonated in the cask, generally with the addition of some priming sugar. The beers are not filtered or pasteurized, so there is still yeast in the beer, which consumes the priming sugar and created CO2, which carbonates the beer. It is sort a throw back to a time when that was the only method to carbonate beers. Cask conditioning results in a beer that is less carbonated and usually served at cellar temperature, that is why many people who visit England say the drink their beer warm. That is partially true but they also drink plenty of beers that aren't cask conditioned. Americans also have been conditioned by certain big breweries to think that beer is suppose to be served really fricking cold. The English are in my mind arrogantly proud of their "real ales," but I found all of the foreign instructors at Siebel to be condescending about beers that weren't made their way. I think it comes down to making good beer, cask conditioning may or may not make the beer great.

As for the festival, Matt and I tried all 41 beers, so I think I am an authority on which beers were good and which weren't (regardless that my ability to taste beer 30-41 was greatly diminished). Brewers generally go for "big beers" in festivals to try to stand out from the crowd and it worked for at least one brewer, they made a ShamRock Stout. It tasted like an Andes Mint. I didn't totally agree with the awards, but I feel I have no room to talk because I didn't vote. I would have, but I was busy drinking. Another thing I noticed is that the "cult following" thing I talked about in my Three Floyd's post can make you a shitload of money. The Three Floyd's and Dogfish Head collaboration beer, Popskull, was there and had a lot of people going there right off the bat. All I have to say is that those two breweries are talked about as the holy grail of breweries and that was a very mediocre beer.

As usual, the wheels were turning throughout the festival. I obviously hope that I can someday be a brewer at a cask festival and I think that I have a name that will win awards without people even drinking the beer. I will preface this by saying that cask beers are filled through the "bung hole" and closed with a "bung." You may have an idea where I am going with this, I want to have a beer called "T.P. for my Bung Hole" and just to complete the joke, my other beer will be "The Great Cornholio." The best thing about beer festivals, everyone is 21, so there are no kids to offend.

Half Acre Brewing

What is the best thing to do when you are unemployed? The responsible people out there probably think "look for a job" and the practical people think "drink." You know what is awesome about being a brewer, you can do both. I did a little multitasking today by visiting Half Acre Brewing, drank some beer and talked with some brewer, which may or may not help me get a job at some point.

Half Acre is another relatively new brewery in the Chicago area, the beer has been around Chicago for about two years, but the brewery just started making beer in Chicago this month. They started out having their beer contract brewed in Wisconsin, but are only distributed in the Chicago area. The brewery is in a cool old building, but at this point, everything beyond the actual brewing equipment is very much a work in process. They are still building some things like their mill room, wall in their boiler and finish their front shop area. They aren't putting in any sort of pub at this point, but will be selling beer and merchandise on site.

Quick rundown of the equipment, they have a 15 bbl three vessel system and seven uni-tank fermenters (three 15 bbl and four 30 bbl).

Hot/Cold Liquor Tanks, Three vessel brewing system

Fermenters

While I was there, the guys were obviously busy trying to get everything up and running and aren't really set up for tours, but it was great to see a brewery at that stage in starting up. Once again the tour brought up a lot of ideas about starting out, one being location. Rent is a lot cheaper in industrial parks, but there could be some benefit to being in a more visible location. Is the "cool" building/location worth the extra money? I guess that will depend on my goals for the brewery, so we'll see. A location like they have could eventually morph into a pub, restaurant, who knows. Even though I am not going to be in Chicago, I am curious how things develop for the guys at Half Acre because it seemed to be very similar to what I would like to do.

Flossmoor Station

I wrote about my visit to Three Floyd's a few posts back and mentioned visiting Flossmoor Station as well, now that I have regained a some motivation, I have decided to tell everyone about it.

That Saturday (2/28) Matt and I hopped on a train to Flossmoor, Illinois and met Uncle Tom for lunch at Flossmoor Station Brewery. The brewpub is literally the old train station in Flossmoor. Just imagine living in Flossmoor and commuting to Chicago by train everyday...delicious beer would be at your fingertips every time you got off the train on your way home. Anyway, I have to thank Tom for calling the brewer ahead of time and telling him that we were coming and I was a student at Siebel, we got quite the tour. Checked out the 15 bbl system that can be seen from the restaurant, went downstairs and got to check out the serving vessels and the bottling machine. Considering Flossmoor Station is an old train station and they had little control over the layout of everything, they seemed to make good use of what space they had.

The timing of the visit was also lucky/cool because the head brewer, Matt Van Wyk, is on his way out of Flossmoor to be the head brewer at Oakshire Brewery in Eugene, Oregon. Generally speaking, I have a dislike for anything in Eugene (going to UW will do that), but I will have to go check out the brewery down there. Matt was an awesome guy, very informative and could be a great contact out west, so I can't hold it against him that the brewery he is going to happens to share a town with a certain university. I have not had any beer from Oakshire, but will be sure to do some reviews when I get the chance to try them (Matt made great beers at Flossmoor so I am sure they will be excellent). The day we were there was also the first day on the job for the new head brewer, Bryan Shimkos. Another great guy that I was glad to be able to meet and talk to.

Me and the brewers, Bryan (left) and Matt (right)

The topic of bottling came up and as luck would have it, they were planning on bottling the next day, so I volunteered to come down again and help them out. Great chance for me to get some hands on experience with bottling and I am sure they didn't have any complaints about free labor (I did get some beer and food out of it, so it wasn't totally free). Being a small brewpub that happens to bottle beer, they didn't have a very big or very automated bottling system. It was a four head filler that you had to manually put the bottles in and take them out, about as basic as it gets these days. It took us about four hours to crank out about 75 cases (900 22oz bottles) of their Pullman Brown Ale (award-winning beer, pretty darn good if I say so myself). The closest comparison to bottling beer that I have experienced before is putting numbers on soccer jerseys. It is cool at first, but quickly becomes mind-numbing. Or simple put, shitty job, but someone has to do it. I can only look forward to the day when I want to start bottling (actually I would like to can) and don't have enough money or volume to put in an automated line, just wait, I'll be asking for help.

4-Head Bottling Machine

Between a great tour, two meals, a ten beer sampler at 11 am (plus more beers while working) and some hands on work, I had a great experience at Flossmoor Station and can only hope to run into or work with those guys again.

Recent Beer Tastings

Saying that I have tasted a lot of beers over the last weeks would be putting it mildly (styles tasting is a required part of class), but I have some non-school related beer tastings that are deserving of a post. Here we go:

Double IPA's (blind tasting)

Russian River - Pliny the Elder
Dogfish Head - 90 Minute IPA
Bell's - Hopslam

I honestly don't know if you can really pick a winner out of these three because they are all among the top 100 beers in the world on BeerAdvocate, but someone had to try. All of these beers are amazing hop-bombs with an alcohol content high enough to have you buzzing after just one (a nice price tag to limit your intake as well). I don't think we really did the Pliny or the Hopslam favors in the tasting because they are both a few months old and the hops do fade fast, but they were still great. We (Amy, Matt and I) didn't have any formal scoring system or written evaluations, we just picked our favorites. We didn't all totally agree, but one did finish with 2 votes for #1 (huge sample size I know). I am going to leave it to Heidi to reveal the winner...

Heidi's Perfect One: Hopslam

Sierra Nevada's Bigfoot Vertical

Bigfoot Barleywine '02
'03
'08
'09

The idea of a vertical tasting is to sample the same beer brewed over the span of a few different years. It is a interesting way to see how flavors can develop and diminish over time in certain beers. This needs to be done with a beer that is actually meant to age, because many beers are not suppose to be aged and will just taste like crap after a year.

Bigfoot Barleywine Vertical

It would have been a lot cooler if I had found some of the years between the '03 and '08, but I can't complain because I did find those '02 and '03's. Not many stores want to hold onto beers for that long, even if they can charge you a lot more for these vintage beers. We weren't trying to pick a winner, just see what sort of differences that we could find. The most notable difference was that the '09 is super hoppy for a barleywine and that faded quite a bit to the '08 and not really even noticeable in the '02 and '03. When fresh ('09), Bigfoot should probably be classified as a double IPA, but once aged a year it tastes a lot more like a traditional barelywine. After the noticeable drop off in hops from the '09 on, the biggest difference was the sherry qualities in the '02 and '03. Both of the old vintages were really good, a lot of flavors and aromas that aren't generally associated with beer.

This is not the first time that I will do a Bigfoot vertical, this is going to be a yearly occurrence for Bigfoot and me. Ideally, I would like to have five consecutive years every, that is going to have to be space and money dependant.

Goose Island - Fulton Street

Tuesday afternoon class field trip...eat your heart out.

This class sponsored drinking event was a tour of the Goose Island production facility. Walking in we were treated like kings...free beer (that is really all I need to feel like a king, free beer). This was the first brewery tour of this magnitude that I have been on with such a behind the scenes look at how things are done. After we got our beers to start the tour, the first thing I realized was what signifies that your are a successful brewery...two floors. This would make more sense if I had taken some pictures, too bad I didn't bring my camera. I will illustrate with words. The brewing vessels are so big that there is an upstairs to monitor what is going on in the brewing vessels and a downstairs that has all the piping and stuff (less glamorous than upstairs). I am sure this is tiny in comparison to Miller and such, but it was big anyway. I mentioned they have a four vessel system and they actually use it the way it is suppose to be used, non-stop brewing.

The head brewer and an assistant brewer were the tour guides, but we really had free reign over the place. They took us around and talked about different aspects of the brewery and packaging answering questions and didn't mind if we needed to briefly leave the group to refill our beers. I am not going to go into too much detail about everything, but it was an awesome tour and great facility, something to aspire to (15 years or so).

For those that might actually see these beer in the future, we got to sample two of the beers in their new Heritage Series. The Juliet and Sophie, both barrel aged Belgian beers that should be great when they are released. Juliet actually had some flavor problems, but that flavor defect should go away with more aging (I'll spare you the technical brewer talk). Be on the look out for these in a few months if you are into Belgians.

I will eventually get a post up about Flossmoor Station, ideally Saturday before the Night of the Living Ales.

Three Floyds

Half of our (Matt, Paul, Tom and I) Saturday brewery adventure involved visiting Three Floyds (FFF from now on) in Munster Indiana. We jetting over there from Flossmoor Station (post coming later this week) to catch their weekly tour. They are in an industrial park in Muster, so pretty far out of the way, but that didn't stop the place from being packed. When it comes to FFF, I find them to have what I call a cult following. Not the "drink the cool aid, comet chasing" cult, but that cult movie crowd, not your mainstream blockbuster watching crowd. There is probably a much better way to describe it, but I don't have it. To me this can be seen in the artwork for their labels, the decorations in the pub, the destination the brewery in the middle of nowhere Indiana and the way the brewery is maintained. They definitely picked their target and went for it, not a bad thing, just not necessarily for me.

As far as FFF goes, I enjoy some of their beers, but wouldn't say that they have a stellar line up. Their beers in my mind are generally "big beers" with a lot of hop characteristic and not necessarily to style, once again, not a bad thing, just what they chose to do. As far as the brewery and the tour, I came away very unimpressed. They did give us $1 Alpha King Pale Ales during the tour, which no one could complain about (unless you were looking for free beer, but even then, come on, $1). Number one complaint about the tour was the presentation and information. FFF gives one tour a week and the guide we had to me acted like he had already given six tours that day, he didn't really give a shit. For one hour a week I feel that a brewery could get someone to talk to 30-40 people in a way that would make people excited to be there. In general, the tour didn't give people the basic understanding about the brewing process that you would expect when at a brewery. Refer to my post about Two Brothers and go on their tour if you would like to know what a good brewery tour should be.

The brewery itself was the second thing that left me unimpressed. It wasn't that they were lacking space or state of the art equipment, because the place was huge with great equipment. The facility came across the same way as the tour guide, don't give a shit. As we discussed this point when leaving, Matt mentioned that it seemed like they were a big brewery that didn't want to act like a big brewery. True, they aren't a big brewery in the grand scheme of things, but as a business, they aren't a garage brewery anymore. Even if you don't want to be a corporate brewery, cleanliness and organization are just good business practices. To me it comes down to another life lesson that I learned from a movie, "Act as if" (Boiler Room for those scoring at home). I will leave it at that.

The pictures I took don't convey the overall vibe of the place and my video camera died mid-recording, but I put in some unnecessary media anyway.

60 bbl Fermenters, the foam in the bucket and on the floor is yeast coming from the fermentation

Me with the Alpha King, we went strait to the symphony after this that is why I look classy and not like a bum brewing student

Thanks to uncle Tom and Paul for coming and helping facilitate the brewery tour, especially getting us back to the train with plenty of time to spare (15 seconds maybe).

I know I will continue to drink FFF beers when I have the chance, but I just can't get over the fact that a brewery that has been given so much hype and praise in the beer community would be such a let down in person.