Is The Age of the Flagship Beer Over?

This here marks the second entry in a loosely connected series exploring the development and evolution of a new brewery's beer lineup, and how a brewery goes about refining such a thing. Part one went into the background of what we decided we should brew at Kent Falls, while a third future installment will eventually expand on the evolution of a particular beer, our Field Beer farmhouse ale. Field Beer was, from the start, intended to be sort of a 'conceptual' flagship ale, embodying an ethos that represented the whole brewery, if not necessarily leading the brewery in sales or release volumes.

Everyone knows that craft beer has dramatically shifted the way that the whole of the adult beverage market works. Before I even jumped into the process of helping to launch a new brewery, and planning and brainstorming and stressing and speculating what beers that I wanted to make would also be practical and sellable to the public, I had noticed something interesting about the way that breweries present themselves to their consumers. For years, maybe ever since the craft beer movement first began, its trajectory has been that of slowly and silently killing the model of flagship beer offerings. It has been one long history of flipping the way in which a brewery works.

For years, a brewery was a brand. Not a place or destination or personality or cult or whatever breweries are to the public now. The clarity and message of the brand was the product; the brewery as a personality was only really relevant so far as it was part of the brand. You didn't expect them to change what they were doing or switch things up on a regular basis. You were either on board with their brand, or you weren't. And while most of these brands did offer several products, they were usually slight variations on that initial core brand. Rather than releasing a distinct new brand with a separate identity, for example, you marketed a "light" version of your existing flagship brand.

Until recently, and even probably still now, this had a huge impact on how the average person would think about and discuss beer. For decades, the focus had been on a brewery as a brand. So that when you would talk to people about beer, most people would say things like "I had that Dogfish Head beer last night," or "You know what you would like? This one beer from back home, Troegs... you'd like it." And so on. The previous model of brewery-as-brand still greatly affects how the average person sees a brewery-as-a-business, even though it hasn't been that way for most breweries in decades. How many breweries today focus almost all their efforts on one single beer brand?

I mentioned that I view this as a slow trajectory, and I think there is an evolution in brewery identity that has been going on since the 70's. Those people that talk about a brewery as if they only make one beer would be wrong in almost every case, but you can understand why, if they don't really have much interest in the nerdy details of the beer industry, they might see a brewery like Sierra Nevada as a singular brand largely embodied by Pale Ale. That type of consumer would only rarely notice that there are other offerings from the brewery, and if so, probably understands that seasonals and special releases are a thing, and don't detract from the core identity of the brewery/brand. In the first wave of craft beer, this view would still basically be perceiving things accurately. Sierra Nevada was built by Pale Ale. That is still the core of their identity, though they happen to make many other products, too. And to the public, Sam Adams is just... Sam Adams. That's the beer. That's the brewery. That's the brand. But because they're a craft brand, sure, they also do sometimes have a seasonal release on tap as well. In the majority of bars, ordering a Sam Adams would create zero confusion. Only the pedantic beer nerd would protest: "But they make like 300 beers! Which one do you mean???"

The founders of the craft beer revolution largely stuck close to the existing model, focusing on flagship brands, but generally expanding this concept into having a group of "core" offerings, plus seasonals. This became the basic template for almost every brewery of the next several decades. Gradually, though, the obviousness of the flagship offering (and its singularity as the brewery's identifying brand) eroded. A flagship became merely the most prominent beer in a broader lineup of core offerings. Is 60 Minute the most popular and common product made by Dogfish Head? Sure, but they're a brand built on experimentation, and thus variety; it would be hard to miss that bigger picture.

One or two flagships bolstered by seasonals and special releases soon became half a dozen core lineup beers bolstered by seasonals and special releases. Much of this shift was likely tied to the resurgence of the brewpub, which, for most casual beer consumers, would start to define their image of what a brewery was. At a brewpub, having a clear and obvious single flagship isn't necessary, and from a branding perspective, doesn't even really make sense. As more and more began to define this new wave of breweries by their Friday-night-dinner experiences at a brewpub, the expectation that a brewery would offer a lineup of six, up to maybe ten core offerings, with a few side experiments that change every now and then, worked its way into our consciousness. And I'd say that's maybe where we've been for the last twenty years or so.

In that sense, the flagship beer is kind of already dead. Most breweries now don't expect to have one huge mega-hit that accounts for 90% of sales. In the rare cases where that does happen, it looks shockingly anomalous. How weird was it that The Alchemist, one of the most talked about and sought-after craft breweries in the world for a good part of this decade, only made and sold a single beer for a long chunk of that time? That Heady Topper stood as the sole offering of an immensely popular and beloved brewery was highly unusual for the time, probably because it wasn't even the brewery's intention for this to happen, but the whim's of fate and the wrath of mother nature.

Starting a new farmhouse brewery in a demographically-oddball rural area, we knew that a tart saison (or any kind of saison) was going to be a hard sale as Kent Fall's primary brand. You'd be surprised at how hard it is to sell large volumes of saison in the current beer market. Yes, I know, that probably sounds like a personal problem. "Have you considered that you only think that because you are terrible and no one likes you or your beer?" is probably your response, and while you are right, don't take my word for it. Ask any brewery that's producing a lot (or a majority) of farmhouse ale — unless their product is sour or barrel-aged. It may seem like saisons are super hot right now, but I think beer nerds talk about saison more than the general drinking public actually buys them in large quantities. In other words, it's a style that may do really well in special release formats (especially, again, if it's barrel-aged or has fruit or some other specialty situation), but saison is not dominating volume the way that, say, IPAs are, or session IPAs for example, or fruited IPAs, or to pick another random example, fruited session IPAs, or fruited session IPAs with citrus zest, or hard root beer. Saison is one of those styles that's beloved, but puts you in a weird spot if you want to make a lot of it.

Anyway, we anticipated this when thinking about our core lineup of beers, and came up with several concepts for "core" beers, though being that most of them were still in the farmhouse vein, we still ended up brewing for variety much more than we had anticipated. I'm guessing this is a common experience for many new breweries these days, unless you're focusing on hoppy beers for your flagships. Hoppy beers are probably the category that remains very easily (very easily) sellable as flagships or core brands, but in order to start off pushing hoppy beers as your primary offering, you either need to have put in the planning years in advance to procure awesome hop contracts from the start, or else be so small that you can still round up the hops you need from spot and trading. In other words, I don't think there are many styles remaining that are particularly easy to push as your flagship offering. And that may be a symptom of how drastically the entire brewing industry has changed. Variety, for now, is king. The real interesting question for me, is: just how sustainable is a model of "variety, always" actually is for every type of brewery, big and small?

If you enjoy my writing or reading about fermentation in general, please consider pre-ordering my book, The Fermented Man, on Amazon, and follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more regular updates.

My Experiences Developing the Beer Lineup for a New Brewery

Some breweries start out from the beginning with carefully engineered marketing strategies, while others take a more free-form, off-the-cuff approach to their products, based on whatever the brewer wants to do next. Most, of course, probably begin with a fuzzy mixture of both strategies. Before finally producing our first beer in February 2015, Barry and I spent about 9 months brewing up a storm of trial batches for only a mere handful of the initial offerings of Kent Falls Brewing Co. It's hilarious how much time — months and months — was spent trialing just a couple beers, compared to the staggering number of beers we've released since then, most of them with minimal test batch experimentation.

For most of the planning phase, we only knew that we would be making one or two particular beers for certain. Being a farmhouse brewery, our first beer was obviously going to be a saison. At the time, the concept of a seasonally rotating farmhouse ale called Field Beer was kind of our intended flagship beer — although we weren't entirely sure what that even meant, for a brewery like ours. Before I became involved, Barry had the artwork, name, and general concept in place. It would be a farmhouse ale that used all local ingredients, including raw grains (oat, spelt, wheat, and rye) that would change with each season. Once I started on with the company, we got to work developing a recipe, deciding on the structure of the beer (clean, funky, sour, wood-aged, etc) and refining the house saison culture that would ferment it. Farmhouse ales can go in a lot of different directions, and at that point we figured we'd only be making one or two saisons (excluding limited barrel-aged stuff) over the course of our first year. After all, with only three tanks and two yeast strains, how many different beers could you possibly make?

The amount of time spent developing those few initial beer concepts was severely disproportionate, in retrospect. Shortly after starting to sort out Field Beer, we settled on our second "core" beer. I had been spending much of my own homebrewing energy, over the several years previous, perfecting my ideal hiking beer, a Brett IPA, and I thought it would be badass to open up with a tart saison and a Brett IPA as flagship beers. As we still drifted through a dozen saison culture variations, we started refining my existing Brett IPA recipe with new yeast strains. Due to the nature of the types of beers I wanted to make, most of the R&D efforts were actually yeast related. Homebrewing gives you the opportunity to very casually and without any real pressure test out different yeast profiles in similar foundational beers over... well, all the time you want. Opening up a brewery, all of a sudden you're in this mad crunch to make sure you found the best possible combination of saison yeast out there. The best, most consistent, must management, most reliable Brett culture. How can you possibly test out all the thousands of different variations and combinations in time before you need to have a recipe locked in?

But then there's the other strange challenges of developing your brewery lineup. When thinking of how to name and label my Bear Flavored beers, ideas came easy. I had a stockpile of images and endless ideas for names, but they all pretty directly channeled my own personal weirdnesses and aesthetic inclinations, and I wasn't bouncing them off of anyone else. Branding, for a brewery that isn't just your own, is a far greater challenge. Everything had to funnel together the different visions of everyone involved, while representing the amalgamation of the brewery identity as a whole — whatever that was. We were still figuring it out, after all, in how we chose to name and label the beers.

Finding a name for our Brett IPA was, oddly enough, possibly the most difficult single thing in the whole long process — as far as creative spontaneity, failed solutions, and time spent before coming up with something that finally worked. We bounced ideas around for at least a month. At my birthday party that year, I passed around a notepad and had friends write down ideas, then vote on favorites. For the longest time, we couldn't quite nail it. But once one idea clicks, it's weird how immediately and easily other ideas click, and the whole trajectory of what you're doing inexorably shifts. Finally, possibly by accident, someone came up with"Waymaker" as the name, and at last, a name actually stuck. I remember thinking about adding coffee to the Brett IPA. Suddenly it hit me: Coffeemaker! The name came with zero effort, because it just made sense, and was kind of dumb and tongue-in-cheek, which is very much Kent Fall's. What about adding fruit to the Brett IPA? Juicemaker! Et cetera. It can take a month to lock-in one concept, and then only hours to establish a quarter dozen more.

You'll hear, from new breweries, that you can never fully anticipate what your first few years will be like. Business plans are just a nice idea you create to show to investors and the bank. Reality will dictate the real flow of the business, and it will almost never resemble the plan. But usually these reflections on the insane momentum of running a brewery are in relation to production growth and sales and whatnot. I suppose, for better or worse, we had a far more flexible vision of what our brewery identity would even be than most do. Or maybe not, even. I don't know. We had a very good idea of the types of beers we would make at Kent Falls. We were going to focus on farmhouse ales and sours and Northeast-style IPAs and a couple stouts here and there with the other varied oddball experiments on the side. In other words, I was going to continue to brew basically the same beers I would have been brewing as a homebrewer anyway.

But amidst all the things we wanted to make, we assumed we would have to start out making only a few of them. Produce a lineup of half a dozen or so core beers that would see relatively frequent distribution, and fill in the edges with some other stuff, some more limited adventures. That's how breweries work, right? I made charts and graphs and notebook scribblings about flagships and brew frequency and hop usages. We assumed that, as brewers, you just sort of establish those things, and the market drinks them up, mostly, and you see what does better and what's weak and go from there. Scale up on some things and scale down others.

One of the main factors determining these initial beers, the focus of a "core" lineup, is yeast. As a homebrewer, this is something you're aware of, but it doesn't dictate your brewing the way it will professionally. And in plotting out your brewery, you will realize just how limiting this sort of planning can be. Especially if you to want to do some oddball things with unique yeast cultures, or if you want to use certain yeast cultures, but only sporadically. Now, you either have to have an in-house yeast propagation system of some sort (which could be costly, eat up the floor space of your tiny brewery, and would demand more man-hours that you don't have), or you have to stick to using the same yeast for at least several batches in a row. Ordering a fresh pitch of yeast for each batch would be a significant cost; money that could be better spent more efficiently. So your schedule is, to a large extent, dictated by how many yeast strains you're able to bring into the brewery, how long you can / plan to keep them going for, and how affordable it is for you to order yeast cultures here and there that you only plan to use for a few batches. There's a reason that most breweries brew 95% of their beers with one house strain, and there's a reason it's usually a nice versatile American or British strain.

In practical terms, if you want one of your core beers to be a 100% Brett IPA with a unique yeast culture that the market still barely understands, that means you have to either brew that beer essentially all the time (hoping it will work as a true year-round flagship), or alternate it with a few other beers (using that same unusual yeast culture) to space out batches and not flood the market. Or finally, you could brew the one beer a couple times for one period of the year, then dump the yeast and switch to a new culture for that tank. Here was a new challenge: how many different beers could I come up with to be fermented with a 100% Brett culture that regular bars and restaurants would be willing to repeatedly buy? Coming up with these ideas in a homebrew setting is one thing, but now, as a production brewery in an area without a ton of craft beer-centric bars, you have to convince numerous bars and restaurants and beer halls to take in kegs of your wacky ideas. As much as I really wanted to brew a 100% Brett IPA as a core beer, could I really sustain the culture as a year-round thing?

Originally, due to the nature of the beers, some practical yeast management concerns, and the whole general Figuring This Out process, we didn't want to bring in a third yeast culture beyond our saison and Brett cultures. We had three tanks. Three tanks, to keep two yeast cultures alive and healthy. We had to devise a core lineup of beers around those two unique house cultures. It was actually quite a fun challenge. It forced me to be creative, but ultimately allowed us to brew most of the stuff that I wanted to focus our core lineup on anyway. We'd be brewing a Brett IPA (and several variations thereof), goses, and an assortment of saisons. The only types of beers that I was fond of but that I couldn't really get to, with that setup, were clean IPAs. But those could wait to come in later, especially as we were waiting to build up our hop resources. And still are — hop contracts are a whole other logistics nightmare that I won't even dive into here.

But the market is a force with a strong will — a will that is fortunately pretty easy to interpret, in this industry — and we were in a position to be adaptable. Or at least a mindset to be adaptable. The nature of our lineup was not set in stone. And the nature of our lineup — the beers I made in the first year, but more precisely how often I made each of them — was something that was shaped by the sort of responses we saw. As it happened, the market seemed to demand the type of brewing I was most comfortable with anyway. The type of brew schedule I would prefer to do regardless, because it's the same approach I took as a curious homebrewer with a terrible attention span. The market demanded variety. I like variety. We found that beers moved fastest, and thus were served fresh and at their peak quality, when we didn't brew any one beer too much all at once. With a few months in between releases — and a number of beers released only on an annual basis — the market could "miss" things they hadn't had in a while, rather than getting bombarded with the same offerings constantly. This realization isn't new — there's a reason why seasonals and one-offs have become such a big thing, even for older, flagship-oriented breweries — but I think this dichotomy is growing more and more prevalent and unavoidable. Perhaps our experience would have been less extreme if we had a tasting room or a brewpub, and regular patrons expecting certain things to always be there. But we had to build a brewery brand based on distribution only, and thus, the frequently-rotating taplists of other people's bars. Beer bars inherently favor variety these days. So, not by calculated planning or lengthy board meetings or strategy sessions, but by instinct and reflex and a readiness to embrace experimentation at the first opportunity, we became the type of brewery that releases about 50 distinct beers in its first year of operation.

We saw quickly that the market likes variety. This is great for me, because I also like variety, and I like brewing different things. But the degree to which the market pushed us toward variety was still shocking to me. And it made me question: is the flagship (or core lineup) model of brewing, at least for small new breweries, starting to die? How much will the rotating nature of beer bar draft lists shape the future of the brewing business?

More thoughts on that over the next few weeks. In the meantime, if you enjoy my writing or reading about fermentation in general, please consider pre-ordering my book, The Fermented Man, on Amazon, and follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more regular updates.

What's the Best Way to Add Coffee Into Beer?

It's always fun to think about how many people have, in their combined efforts, produced a staggering number of variations on beer throughout history. Brewers will commonly remark that few things we make today are truly original ideas — that some historic brewer, somewhere along the way, has already tried just about everything. But there must be at least a few inventions unique to modern brewers. We throw some weird stuff into beer. Coffee, one of the more common and less weird things thrown into beer of late, is a pretty obvious and logical adjunct. Not only does it compliment flavors already present in certain beers, but most of us brewers drink just about as much coffee as we do beer. The notion of throwing coffee into a beer seems like something very particular to our modern sensibilities, but who knows? I've never heard anything indicating that coffee was ever used as a flavoring in beer before the 80's/90's, but while it certainly wasn't traditional, it's not impossible that someone tried it hundreds of years ago.

Now, of course, coffee beer is all the rage. (I could swear I recently saw some statistic about coffee beers being one of the largest categories of beer in competitions, but now that it would be useful, I can't find it). There's hardly a style of beer that we haven't tried adding coffee to. Dark beers hardly warrant mention, but I've also seen coffee sours and coffee saisons. Coffee IPAs are not totally uncommon, and at Kent Falls, we took that trend a step further and add coffee to our Brett IPA — which, as far as I know, is possibly the only beer of its kind. 

When we first started producing Waymaker (the aforementioned Brett IPA), we realized we were limited in what we could brew in those first few months by the esoteric yeast cultures I had chosen for our house strains. We wanted to get as much diversity as possible out of a few beers with similar foundations, and easy-to-add ingredients that could spin a new beer off from an existing base was a common sense way to accomplish that. Thus, Waymaker Brett IPA, with the addition of coffee, could become a second, distinct beer: Coffeemaker Brett IPA. Obviously, we were only going to pursue the concept if it worked. And in this case, it worked wonderfully. We partnered with Irving Farm Coffee Roasters — not only one of the best coffee roasters in the region, but one whose roasting facility happens to be a short (only 40 minutes, about as close as anything gets around here) drive from our farm. Together, we tested out a number of roasts and ratios until we had a combination of beer and coffee that we enjoyed for its complexities and uniqueness. 

Since we were doing only small runs of Coffeemaker to start out, figuring out how to actually add the coffee into the beer wasn't hard. The knowledgeable folks at Irving Farm recommended adding the coffee late in the process, and not using cold brew, which wouldn't extract the full range of flavors. We settled on using a 2x coffee concentrate liquid, which could be pumped into the brite tank under CO2 pressure minutes before packaging the resulting blend. No oxygen, just maximally fresh coffee. You could achieve the same effect on a homebrew scale by pouring 2x strength coffee (at an 11% ratio) directly into the keg. 

This method works great when you're splitting off a batch and only turning a small fraction of it into a coffee beer. (It also works great when you don't have to concern yourself with making 15-30 gallons of coffee yourself). We could have easily employed this method with 6 bbl, up to about 12 bbl volumes of beer. But then we started talking about brewing full-sized batches of Coffeemaker, on its own. Potentially up to 30, even 35 bbls. That's a hell of a lot more coffee. That's a volume of beer that would require potentially 80+ gallons of coffee. Can you imagine 80 gallons of coffee? That's an insane amount. That's almost four times what I drink during the average day. How do you make that much coffee? 

We spent about a month brainstorming methods for brewing 80 gallons of coffee. Irving Farm offered us an old giant coffee maker that could brew 6 gallons of coffee at a time, which is a lot when you're thinking of coffee in terms of just drinking it, but bizarrely undersized in terms of a beer that can suck up a bathtub's worth of the stuff. 

Then we took a trip out to San Diego for Modern Times' Festival of Funk. Modern Times established themselves early on as a leader in the coffee beer game by becoming the first brewery in the country to have an in-house roaster. After that, they started barrel-aging coffee beans, not only to sell to the public to drink (I've bought a few bags; they're trippy cool and tasty) but to add back to beer, and complete some kind of insane beer-barrel-coffee Ouroboros loop. Unsurprisingly, while hanging out at Modern Times, we gleaned a few useful methods from their extensive coffee-related shenanigans.

Many brewers add coffee beans directly into their beer, but we'd theorized that it would be best to avoid this method for a few reasons. First, we didn't want to add the coffee too early in the process, before fermentation. Fermentation transforms things, and both the Irving Farm folks and us Kent Falls folks felt that we would get the clearest, most stable coffee flavor the later in the process the coffee went in. Right into the brite immediately before packaging is about as late as you can get, but the volume of liquid then becomes the issue. So why not just add coffee beans into the brite tank or fermentor, in a bag, you may be thinking? Certainly, that could work, and is probably an alternate solution. But there's a degree of control you may have to give up with this approach, as the amount of contact time between the beans and the coffee are now dictated by the time it takes you to package the beer. Plus, we had been worried about the alcohol pulling undesirable flavor compounds out of the beans, especially with that extended contact time. And then there's the simple matter of scale, once more: when you're Modern Times size (much bigger than Kent Falls, and Kent Falls isn't even that small in the grand scheme of things), how many pounds of Stuff do you want to be shoving into your gigantic tanks? If you reach the point where you're brewing a 200+ bbl batch of coffee stout, say, do you really want to be dropping several hundred pounds of coffee beans into your tanks? What are you going to put all that coffee in? How are you going to keep it out of the packaged product? How are you going to fish it back out?

Modern Times had figured out a nice sort of hybrid approach. I've now adapted it here at Kent Falls, and utilized it for one of our most recent beers, a Coffee Milk Stout. This was indeed the first batch of coffee beer that was all what it was — a full-tank, full-volume batch, thus requiring quite a bit of coffee. (Ultimately, I did end up filling some bourbon barrels with the stout before adding the coffee, so the final ratio was a 23 bbl batch of beer that got about 23 lbs worth of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee). Rather than adding the coffee beans into any of the tanks, I thoroughly cleaned one of our half-barrel yeast brinks, which have butterfly valves on the bottom and top for yeast collection. I poured the whole beans into the keg and set up a loop from the bottom of the fermentor (after clearing it of trub), into our cellar pump, into the coffee-keg, out of the top, then through a hose and back into the racking arm of the fermentor. On the out of the keg containing the coffee, I attached our hop filter, which is basically a torpedo-like tube with two inner stainless steel mesh filters, and which in this case would prevent any coffee beans from riding the beer wave out of their holding vessel. (A smaller type of mesh screen that fits inline would work as well, probably better, as this set-up made for an awkwardly vertical hose arrangement). With this loop, the beer gets pulled out of the tank, runs through the coffee, and returns to the tank, cycling a constant mixture of coffee-beer through the vessel(s). I let this cycle run for a little under a day. When the beer was ready to transfer into the brite tank, I simply reconfigured the hoses so that all the beer from the fermentor would pass through the coffee keg once more along the way.

You could replicate this approach on a homebrew scale quite easily, either with my trusty ol' dry-hop keg set-up, or using a simple bag to contain and filter the coffee before transferring. You wouldn't be running a cycle/loop, but the basic idea would be the same.

Either method — coffee liquid, or calculated contact time over whole beans — could be the easier for you depending on your set-up and scale, at least assuming you're a homebrewer or smaller-scale commercial brewer. Above 20 bbls or so, you probably have no choice but to add beans right into the beer. Result-wise, there are also pros and cons either way. I liked how "present" the coffee character remained, even over time, with the direct liquid injection method. The immediacy and purity of the coffee addition seemed to bring about the clearest, most stable coffee character. But with certain roasts, we also noticed that the coffee character would shift over time and develop an interesting note often described as "jalapeno." The flavor never disagreed with me, and I found it more of a subtle shading with a curious flavor association, but it did shift the profile away from pure coffee, even if the beer as a whole remained pretty vibrantly coffee-forward. With the loop method, based on my impressions so far, I think the result will be a smoother but mellower coffee flavor, and I'm curious to see how it holds up over time.

My favorite part of making coffee beers? With all the experimentation and blends and testing and friends made in the coffee industry, you somehow or another end up with a lot of coffee on hand. I remember the days, years ago, when I couldn't even drink coffee after 4 pm without dooming myself to lay awake in bed all night. Haha. Oh man. How young and much healthier I was back then.

Mixed Culture Wet Hop Saison - Hop Harvest Collaboration with the Brewery at Bacchus

The northeastern US, plucky go-getter that it is, will have a whole lot of hops in the coming years. In five years, ten years, the entire country's hop industry could start to look very very different as new growers, new flavors, and even more new varieties start hitting the market at scale. This is old news, of course, but it still feels like we're waiting to observe the real impact of the restored northeastern hop growing region, and we'll be waiting a little while longer.

There are two big primary questions yet to be answered, from my perspective:

1. How will these new hops taste? Plenty of beers have been brewed with northeast hops now, but even the most established hop farms in the region are still quite young, and thus, I'm guessing the character of the hops will only really begin to take up an identity in the next few years. We'll hopefully start to see new varieties (or renamed varieties) with flavors distinct to this region.

2. How will breweries be able to use the hops? This seems like a fairly mundane logistical question, but it's going to be pretty significant in what kinds of beers these hops are used to make. Pellet hops are much, much easier for most breweries to use — conversely, leaf hops can be almost impossible for some breweries to use at different stages of the process. But pelletizers are expensive, and at the moment, inaccessible to most hop growers in the region.

What we're left with is a lot of mildish leaf hops. And a lot of leaf hops means a very large mound of hops indeed — hell, another reason it's not practical for us to use leaf hops at Kent Falls is that we'd simply have no space to store what we'd need. While the go-to strategy to dispose of any large pile of hops would typically be to throw them in an IPA, you'd have to be very deliberate when taking this approach. Wet hop IPAs have become a huge thing every harvest season of the last few years. But even an IPA blasted with a comically-large pile of hops may turn out with a surprisingly mild flavor. The returns, in other words, maybe be somewhat disappointing in proportion to what went into the beer. There's also the fact that wet hops simply taste very different from traditionally-used dry hops, and this needs to be taken into consideration when adding a wet hop IPA to a brewery's profile. If all of Kent Falls' other IPAs are juice-forward, an earthy, mild, grittier harvest IPA may stand out as a bit odd next to the rest of the lineup.

Barry and I were talking to Mike from the Brewery at Bacchus (editor's note: Mike and Jay, who have been brewing the beer for Bacchus for a couple years now, will soon be taking the lead at Hudson Valley Brewery, in Beacon, NY, so watch out for their stuff to hit the market in a big way soon) about doing a collaboration, and it quickly arose that we should do something based around our hop harvest in early September. From there, we decided that a wet-hopped farmhouse ale was the way to go. Both Bacchus and Kent Falls brew a lot of saison-ish beers, and we decided that the communal nature of the hop harvest was a very fitting start for a collaboration. For fermentation, we literally mixed together our cultures — saison yeast, lactobacillus and Brettanomyces from both Kent Falls and Bacchus went into the batch. There's quite a variety in this batch, though the cultures here are very aggressive. Fermentation was quick. While Tiny House has had several months to age and condition since we brewed it, the turnaround on a beer like this can be much faster than conventional wisdom used to have it. Such sourish mixed culture saisons rarely need more than three months before they can be packaged, in my experience — but obviously, different procedures, cultures, gravities and other extenuating conditions have to be taken into account.

The brewday itself for this beer was quite fun — as some of you may know, as there were a hundred plus people in attendance, and maybe you were there yourself . We're going to be hosting a hop harvest festival every year, and to make it Fun For The Whole Family, we make a big to do out of it. Pig roast, live music, beer, etc, and the general good vibes of a community gathering. Lots of fun, etc. All day long, the hops being harvested were thrown directly into the beer. I mentioned that leaf hops / whole cone hops are quite difficult to use in our setup, and the only place we can practically toss in such large quantities of vegetable matter without an epic bagging nightmare are the lauter tun. Fortunately, this is quite easy — I cleaned the spent grain out of the lauter tun real good, and transferred the wort out of the kettle and into this vessel instead. The false bottom allowed us to dump close to a hundred pounds of wet hops in without fear of clogging anything. At the end of the day, I simply knocked out as I normally would, and cleaned up the used hops as if they were a soggy mass of spent grain.

The resulting beer is simple but delicious — a well-balanced sour farmhouse ale with a good blend of acidity, Brett funk, and tannic rustic earth-notes from the hops. It's extremely complex for its low weight of only 4% ABV. I'll be looking forward to brewing something like this each year. If you would like to try this beer and are / know someone who is in the western Connecticut area, we will be releasing this at the New Milford farmer's market (indoors, basement of the school) this Saturday, January 16th. Keep in mind that while you may think I am a hack and my beer is all dumb, this *was* a collaboration with the Brewery at Bacchus, and those guys are pretty legit, and have never really bottled much before. So! Also, thanks to Mike's fiance Natalie for the lovely beer label. She knows how to art it up real good.

There Are Too Many IPAs On the Market - Here's Why I'm Adding a Few More

Awkward Hug IPA - the first non-funky beer released at Kent Falls.

It's pretty well established that there are just way too many IPAs on the market. We beer drinkers can't shut up about IPAs — especially if we happen to think the style is overrated. Great flamewars are wrought in the embers of the hatred some bear for hoppy beers, and the fact that some believe they're ruining craft beer. (In addition to gose, which is also supposedly ruining craft beer, leading me to believe that one of my favorite non-styles of beer, dry-hopped gose, is extra super duper killing craft beer).

The IPA category (and its offspring) grows determinedly year after year, continuing its domination as the most popular style in craft beer. And while AB has yet to release Bud Lite India-Pale-Ale-Rita, even the big guys have found ways to jump in on the craze here and there, with offerings like Blue Moon White IPA, Yuengling IPL, and for a truly perplexing example, Guinness Blonde Lager (which makes the interesting assumption that the type of consumer who would wish to buy a "blonde lager" brewed by Guinness would really be sold by the presence of Mosaic hops in such a beer).

That is the weird conundrum that IPA finds itself in these days, when undeniably there are many breweries that feel compelled by a demanding and thirsty market to produce an IPA that they may have little interest in making otherwise. No brewery, big or small, should feel compelled to make a beer they don't want to make. But when it comes to IPA, it's never just some vague guesswork at what the market wants. Many people will tell you, accounts will tell you, flat out, that you need to brew an IPA. (Especially in a market where the phrase "sour beer" is largely met with blank stares). In this sense, the sense of demanding that all breweries make an IPA even when they have no interest in doing so, yes, there are too many IPAs. There are absolutely too many IPAs on the market. It's gotten a little crazy over here.

I've gotten into this conversation a couple times now, recently. As often as you catch the "everyone has to brew an IPA or die," viewpoint, you'll hear the exact opposite, argued from an individual's own tastes. At a recent dinner conversation, someone tried a test batch of a saison I was working on and remarked how they liked the different path my beers took. They said: "Just please don't do an IPA."

If you have been reading Bear Flavored for some time, it's not a surprise to you that I (really, really) love hoppy beers. My focus has always been this: one part funky weird beers, one part clean juicy hoppy beers, and one part funky weird juicy hoppy beers. These are the things I like to drink so they are therefore the things I like to brew.

For better or worse, I'm still brewing with this same mindset as a commercial brewer. Focusing on tart and funky farmhouse beers for the Connecticut market probably isn't the smartest idea on paper. But all I really know how to do is brew the beer that I want to drink (as I said; for better or worse), and hope other people like it too. And if they don't care for that type of beer, honestly, it doesn't bother me too much. Tastes differ! And also I'm an incredibly selfish person so there's that as well.

There aren't currently any other farmhouse breweries in Connecticut, and hardly any breweries here are doing any kind of farmhouse / funky beers, so I'm curious if it will seem disingenuous for us to brew IPAs. If the mission of Kent Falls was explicitly, say, "Belgian-inspired beers," having a series of Northeast-style IPAs be our only "American" offering might seem kind of cynical. Fortunately, we haven't actually debuted all that many beers just yet, so we're still in the early stages of defining ourselves, and shaping what people expect from us (even the wildest and most experimental breweries want to have a common through-line). The framework, at least in my head, is to simply brew in the farmhouse mentality: refreshing beers that are satisfying to drink after a long day's work. And really, I think, that's pretty much saying the same thing as: "we brew whatever we feel like drinking." Because whatever you feel like drinking is that which is going to satisfy you after a long day's work.

So that's one reason I feel the market should have more IPAs: if a brewer is really, genuinely super passionate about a particular style, I think they should make that style.

The second reason I don't feel even slightly bad about adding more IPAs to an already-crowded IPA market: IPAs are like bread. Hear me out. Every town in America could have a bakery and everything would be just fine. No one would get into arguments about the Bakery Bubble. We understand, fundamentally, that bread is better fresh, even if we've entirely abandoned buying it so. I haven't counted how many towns there are in America lately, but I'm pretty sure there would be at least, like, 45 bakeries in this one-bakery-per-town situation. I don't know. Maybe half a million? Literally anywhere in that range sounds reasonable to me. Point being, good bread made right is really, really, really best fresh, and therefore you could never really have enough bakeries, if everyone switched to only buying freshly-baked bread from good artisan local bakeries. If everyone switched to only buying freshly-baked bread from good artisan local bakeries, the whole bread world would be revolutionized, and good bread would become far more accessible to the average person by supporting and allowing such bakeries to be ubiquitous and accessible. (American bread currently, in case you were wondering, is largely atrocious. I wish very much and desperately that the same movement that fixed beer would please get around to fixing bread on the whole).

IPAs, like bread, are best very, very fresh. (At least, a large number of people these days would say so). Yes, in spite of the old semi-stretched-truth story of IPAs being sent to India for their powers of preservation. Just because an aggressively hoppy beer may stave off infection in a boat to India for longer periods of time, that doesn't mean this is the best way to drink it. (Besides, their IPAs were likely totally different from what we're brewing now anyway). Most IPA fans today seem to be gravitating toward incredibly super extra fresh IPAs, and I'm right there with them. Hop oils break down quickly, and even in the best storage conditions, IPAs can lose some of their magic spark within a couple weeks, leaving nothing but bland uniform bitterness with no nuance. Industrial bread bakers could find ways to cheat around the freshness of their bread, but ultimately, having access to fresh bread is always going to be better. Some large breweries like Sierra Nevada, Stone and Lagunitas have figured out the logistics of hauling IPA all around the country and maintaining quality, and god bless them. I have infinite respect for the big breweries that do it right. But all things considered, it's simply easier to ensure that a beer is fresh if you're producing small quantities of it, sold quickly, within a local market which will consume it fast. And that is my goal: whatever it takes to ensure the drinker of such a beer receives the freshest and best IPA possible.

So yes, I do think there is room in the market for more IPAs. Not if everyone wants to grow to the size of Stone or Lagunitas or Sierra Nevada, no: they're already playing that game way better than most of us ever could. But if every town in the country (or world!) had a great little bakery and a handful of small-batch, fresh IPAs, always going out the door so quickly that they were always consumed super bright and aromatic? That wouldn't be such a bad world to live in.

What is Brett IPA Supposed to Taste Like?

When I agreed to be the brewmaster at Kent Falls Brewing Co., the first thing that Barry, the co-owner and brewery manger, told me was: "Make sure the beer is as confusing as possible. I don't care what you brew. I don't care what it tastes like. I just want everything to be the maximum amount of confusing."

We're working at all sorts of inventive, cutting-edge ways of confounding beer consumers, like making a lightly-sour saison one of our core beers (for the mainstream Connecticut market), and releasing a refreshingly soft table saison that clocks in at only 3.8% and is dry-hopped with American hops, so if you want to call it a saison, that's fine, but if you want to call it a table beer, that works too, or if you just want to consider it a farmhouse ale, technically yes, it's that also.

Actually, those two beers have been received shockingly well, even the incredibly low-ABV saison. One of my Things lately is that over-explaining this stuff to people from the very start can be detrimental; just give the beer to them, they will taste it and realize it tastes very good, and not have to try to pretend to care about all the style complexities your inner nerd is dying to spit out in exhausting detail at them. Start with flavor and educate based on what they like and their interest level. Unfortunately, though, that only works when you're starting from a blank slate. When the person drinking the beer has half-formed preconceptions, things get trickier.

Brett IPAs are weird. Often, the very people that need to be educated on what a Brett IPA is supposed to taste like, what makes it tick, are those same beer nerds who actually sort of understand what Brettanomyces is. Lots of beer drinkers know: Brettanomyces makes beer funky. It's associated (confusingly, it turns out) with sour beer. But it isn't usually responsible for the acidity in beer, just the funk — and maybe a bigger push of tartness due to the low residual sugars it leaves behind. Brett is as weird and hard to pin down as it is intriguing and complex.

I've written about this before, but now that I'm commercially brewing a 100% Brett beer that, theoretically, thousands and thousands of people (oh shit whoa wait that's weird) are going to taste, I feel like I need to get it out there again: what is a 100% Brett beer supposed to taste like? What is it? Why is it?

100% Brett beers, in general, do not follow the rules that aged, mixed-culture Brett beers do. Being already a mouthfeel, that's hard to explain to someone over a shouted bar order. A year in a barrel with Brettanomyces simply changes a beer in ways that a quick 2-6 week fermentation (our Brett IPA only takes 7 days to ferment out completely, now that the culture has adapted) won't match. Faster, in beer, usually means less intense, sometimes possibly simpler. 100% Brett beers, fermented quickly, are in no way inferior, just different. They bear a different flavor profile. Their funk is a different kind of funk. They're maybe less intense, but their impression of Brettanomyces character is distinct and readily apparent to anyone familiar with it. I've drank enough 100% Brett beers that I think I could still pick one out of a lineup if my hair was on fire and someone was trying to put it out with a dirty hiking sock full of old trash. Trust me, 100% Brett character may be subtler, but it is unique and identifiable, just different from its aged incarnation.

In many 100% Brett beers, you will find crisp notes of zest, possibly some phenols (though most seem to prefer these beers without much of the phenolic notes), usually a hard-to-pin fruit character, and something like dried sweat. That dried sweat is tastier than it sounds, like berries that are cooling off after running a marathon. But this sweaty note, usually what I perceive as the most funky element of a 100% Brett beer as compared to an aged Brett beer, is still fairly tame and subtle, in the way that an anthropomorphic fruit sweating would be far more appealing than an actual human sweating, But, most importantly, 100% Brett beers don't usually approach full barnyard. And they might be mildly tart, at best, but not actually acidic. Brett doesn't make beer overtly sour. It may create an impression of tartness, but a 100% Brett beer is not going to be full-on sour.

That's the general gist, but each 100% Brett beer will of course be slightly different, depending on the brewer's preference and how they steer it. The general consumer is very likely not to know all this upfront, as a lot of confusion regarding Brettanomyces remains. I've heard from many brewers that this has broken them on the style. They've gotten so much misguided negative feedback, often from the very beer nerds that seek out Brett beers, they simply stopped brewing the beer. This is deeply frustrating and sad to hear. And as with any matter of education, it's up to us handsome, knowledgeable few to address this.

Personally, my goal for a Brett IPA is to have that same juicy, aromatic, fruity, refreshing, accessible, not-very-bitter-at-all-actually beverage that I already seek in a good clean IPA, but with a slight edge of Brett pushing the fruit hop character down minor paths tangential from the usual. The brunt of hops, with an undercurrent of something just slightly strange but equally refreshing. I've been working on a Brett IPA recipe for years as my perfect hiking beer, because that's what I want on top of a mountain. Refreshing, but a little wild, a little disorienting. Not cloying or clobbering or overly severe. I want a beer that tastes like a glass of juice from an unknown alien species of fruit.

That, to me, is what Kent Fall's Waymaker Brett IPA tastes like. I'll write more about this specific beer and the history behind my brewing it more extensively in the future, but for now, I just want to write about how it doesn't taste how you might expect. It's probably not nearly as funky as you'd think. While unfortunately I'm sworn to secrecy about the particular strains of Brett we're using (it's a blend of a number of strains, not one single Brett), these particular Bretts are rather clean as a primary fermenter, with just a bit of that funky zest I find in 100% Brett ferments. They work fast: the first batch was a bit funkier due to me knocking out too cold, and the batch taking longer than expected to ferment, but since then, this beer finishes up just as quickly as a Saccharomyces-fermented ale. There's an edge to the beer, like a weird glass of orange juice spiked with some guava juice, but the fruit and the citrus and the juice is very much the focus. It recreates much of the flavors of an IPA, but many of those flavors happen to come as much from the yeast as from the hops. That's the point. I can't decide whether that's the point of a 100% Brett beer to some hypothetical consumer; I can only offer that that is the point of this particular 100% Brett beer to me, as a brewer.

One Untappd review amusingly said, simply: "I've been had." I'm not even sure in which direction they were insinuating they'd been tricked, misled, which is the frustrating aspect of such things: did they think this wasn't enough of an IPA, or wasn't enough of a Brett beer? Too funky, or not funky enough? My favorite thing about this beer is how much it balances both aspects of what it is in equal portions, but maybe that's a negative to you. Either way, in either direction, I really just can't particularly allow it to bother me, because Waymaker tastes exactly like I want it to. And my job, then, is to help show drinkers what a 100% Brett beer can be, what new things it can offer, rather than playing to whatever misconceptions and erroneous goals they may have formed for it. In my mind, this is a style of beer that did not and could not have existed before, I don't know, ten years ago. Naturally, it will lead to some confusion.

What it tastes like is far more important than all the nerdy details surrounding its fermentation. What it tastes like, I hope people agree, is refreshing and juicy and interesting. Wild enough for the top of a mountain, unique enough for a tulip at the bar. So wherever it is that you drink it, whether or not it tastes like a glass of weird orange juice to you too, I just hope that you enjoy it for what it is. The same should probably be true for all beer, come to think of it.

When Life Gives You Double-Batch Brews, Make Lemony Kettle Soured Saisons

The label art indicates in which season the beer was brewed. Wowsers!

I've recently found myself in a situation that, while certainly not unprecedented, is definitely unusual. I am far from the first homebrewer to jump into commercial brewing with no prior experience working at a brewery. Personally, I think the lines between "commercial" and "homebrewer" are going to become increasingly blurred over time as far as the Assumption of Quality goes. Newish online communities like Milk the Funk are already a mix of both pros and homebrewers, all interested in pushing fermentation boundaries with experiments that are cutting-edge no matter who is making them or at what scale. A brewer is a brewer, in my opinion. The equipment doesn't matter too much once you know how to use it effectively.

But equipment does matter, whether a homebrewer or a pro, in that you have to do the best you can with what you got. Only have three conicals? Gotta figure out how many house cultures you can juggle — you're not gonna be able to keep brewing like a homebrewer with ten carboys in a side room and a shelf stacked with jars of yeast. How long is each beer going to take to finish? What's your brewing schedule? Packaging schedule? You only have one brite tank — what happens if two batches finish at the same time? What happens if you have to harvest yeast from two batches at the same time and you don't have a yeast keg free? And how do you dry-hop without a top-access manway, anyway? Can someone please make me a huge funnel that flares outwards about two feet and tri-clamps onto a 2-inch port?

There are endless challenges involved in getting a brewery operating smoothly, especially with extremely limited manpower (to be clear: my nickname at Kent Falls is "Manpower"), but I think you have to look at every roadblock as a potential jumping off point toward new ideas. "The friction of challenge is often that which creates the very spark to ignite a blaze of ingenuity," is probably close enough to an expression that people might sometimes say, I assume, and also an important lesson in why you should never come up with ideas during dry season in a forest. #firesafety

It just so happens that Kent Falls Brewing Co. is on an operating farm, and we're trying to embrace the legacy of farmhouse brewing in many different ways. It's always shocking to me how so many beer styles are a product of happenstance. Brewers didn't start decoction mashing because they did some test batches and realized it would improve their beer — they did it because of a change in taxes on their mash tun volume. Farmhouse brewing has always been about using what you have in the best way possible, and we're trying to keep that in the back of our minds all the time, with everything we do here. The old milk chiller in the cow barn? It helped sell Barry on the property back in 2011, when it occurred to him that it could be used as a coolship and open fermentation vessel. Use everything you have in the most productive, most inventive, most coolest way possible.

By the time I got involved in the brewery, the equipment was already purchased. I didn't have to think about what brewing system, what size, how many tanks, how many tanks to start with and how many to aim to end up with, single batch, double batch, triple batch, etc. As with everything in brewing, this could be good or bad or a little of both. I didn't have to spend months contemplating and jotting down pros and cons of different configurations. My challenge was to simply figure out the best way to use what we had: three 30-bbl fermentors and a 15-bbl brewhouse (plus 16 oak wine barrels).

And our earliest, primary goal was to develop Field Beer, our saison using 100% local malt. Eventually Field Beer will utilize 100% local ingredients, once there's a large enough supply of local hops. There are a few blog posts I probably could and should write about Field Beer — about why local is important to Kent Falls Brewing, what it means in terms of quality, logistics, and the context of this specific beer — but my mission began with the basis of the beer already established. Field Beer will rotate with the seasons, the recipe changing to incorporate a different unmalted grain (oats, spelt, wheat, rye) and a different hop variety each season. I've been pleased beyond my expectations with the quality and efficiency we've gotten from these relatively new operations; our growers and Valley Malt nailed it. We had the ingredients we needed to make a great local saison. We just needed to figure out how to make a flagship beer like this as interesting as possible. The recipe itself was always going to be fairly simple: that rotating unmalted grain (oats for winter) as a small (<10%) portion of the grainbill, and Connecticut-grown, Valley Malt-malted Pilsner for the rest.

I am fascinated by the opportunities to blend. But until our barrel program is relatively established, blending in the traditional context will be fairly limited. I debated blending in old barrel-beer with fresh batches of Field Beer, but that raised more logistical issues than was worth considering for our first beer. The idea stuck with me though: in some ways, double batch brewing is a form of blending. Maybe you have to brew twice to fill each conical, but rather than looking at this as twice the amount of effort for the same result, what if you looked at it as an opportunity to add differentiation? What if there was something unique and different you could do because of the double-batch brew thing, and not in spite of it? Like sour just half the batch, to add a dash of refreshing tartness to the whole beer?

The great thing about this strategy is that it doesn't actually add a ton of time, effort or risk to the process of making the beer, yet it has a great impact on the flavor and complexity of the saison. So far, we've brewed three batches of Field Beer. We decided not to sour that first batch, for various reasons, and treated it as a unique one-off First Batch Ever (read all about the madness that went into making that first batch) and was thus a straight-up 'classic' neo-saison, 5.2% ABV, lightly hopped with American Brewer's Gold. Batch 2 was soured, as the beer will always be going forward. (Bottles include the batch number, but I think Batch 1 has pretty much sold out now anyway).

I will continue to refine and tweak the process as I brew more batches, I'm sure, but the basic deal is this: we mash as normal, keep the temp in the kettle above the pasteurization range until run-off is complete, then begin running the wort through the heat exchanger and back into the kettle. While we're doing this, I run CO2 through the aeration stone rather than oxygen. This way oxygen is scrubbed out, and forms a blanket over the wort in the kettle. I pitch my house lacto culture, rather than innoculating with grain. I've been using this culture (a blend of at least five different lacto strains) for some time now, and prefer both the diversity in culture and reliability in performance I've found with it. If you want to get your own house lacto culture going, my recommendation would be to simply acquire a bunch of different lacto strains from various sources and throw them together... maybe culture some from grain as well, if you're feeling extra sassy.

As far as the souring process goes, time and temperature are the main knobs that I'm going to fiddle with: the first batch I cooled down to 115 F before pitching the lacto, and I let it go for 36 hours, until it was at 3.4 pH. Without any additional heat, the temp in the kettle only dropped down to 104 F before we cut it and fired up the kettle to pasteurize.

After both 'turns' of the batch were together in the tank and fermented out by our saison culture, the resulting acidity is where I wanted it, clean, crisp, refreshing, adding brightness to the beer more than any big pucker-punch of acid. You definitely get the whiff of funky lactobacillus fermentation in the nose, but it's free of anything off. Flavorwise, this is balanced well between lemony tartness and the rustic weird earthfruit of a saison. I'm quite happy with how refreshing and approachable this beer is, how well the souring worked, and how very clean the result of this process was.

I should say that, of course, this is not meant to be a perfectly accurate representation of how historic saison was made. We're not trying to do that. We're a modern American farmhouse brewery, though I'm certainly inspired by historic saison. And we're trying to emulate the mindset of those old farmhouse breweries, but not necessarily any exact recipe. So, no, historic brewers probably didn't kettle sour their saisons like this. We're not necessarily aiming to brew a tart saison just because a lot of historic saison was tart. We're aiming to brew a saison that we find enjoyable to drink, and aiming to take the farmhouse philosophy of using what you have in the most productive, most inventive, most coolest way possible.

As you may or may not know, we're self-distributing in Connecticut for now. Connecticut does not have many breweries making sour beer, or funky beer, or wild beer. I hope we can turn a lot of new drinkers into fans of the tart stuff. So far, the results are promising. I find it actually helps to not over-explain these things: non-fermentation geeks don't need all the particulars and complications. Sometimes if you explain too much beforehand, they'll be overwhelmed, and thus mentally braced to kick back against this too-much-new thing they're trying. But if you only explain: "It's tart, which makes it even more refreshing," the response is generally extremely positive. People focus on the fact that a tart beer is refreshing, which it is, and not that it's some crazy shocking new experience, which it shouldn't be, if it's well balanced. And I've heard now, multiple times, maybe the perfect response: "Damn, this would go great with a burger." There we go.

We bottled 60 cases of this here batch of Field Beer, which will be released locally on 4/17. In case you're interested in checking this particular beverage out, our map of places distributed to is right here.

Lactobacillus funkfoam, or view from a spaceship?

A photo posted by Derek (@bearflavored) on Feb 25, 2015 at 10:44am PST

How to Make Your First Commercial Batch of Beer in 75 Easy Steps

As you may or may not know, I have somehow found myself a job as a professional brewer. I make the beer at Kent Falls Brewing Co, a farm brewery (Connecticut's first). It's pretty sweet! I've been lucky now to have jumped into the world of pipes and clamps and hoses that is professional brewing, and have even made it to the point where we're successfully moving beer out onto the market. How does this work? What sort of process does one go through as a novice pro brewer? I'm sure many of you are curious what it's like to make the dream happen, and so I'd like to share with you these 75 Easy Steps by which you, too, may make your first Commercial Beer. If you are impressed by just how effectively this guide allows you, too, to bring your first Commercial Beer out to market, please share with your friends, family and neighbors so that they too may absorb this useful knowledge!

1. Spend three years opening a commercial brewery. This step is probably the easiest. As anyone in the industry will tell you, breweries practically open themselves.

2. Okay, obviously most of that step #1 was just super painless, but towards the end maybe you find a hiccup or two. Just basic fun stuff like maybe the auger (the pipe that transports the grain from the mill to the grist case) won’t align the way it was intended due to the placement of another pipe, and you’ll have to diagram out some crazy schemes before realizing the grain mill can just go in a different corner altogether, and a super-long auger run solves the problem. Something like this will delay your planned brewing schedule a few weeks, but there was other stuff to get done anyway.

3. When you are just about ready to brew, the winter will take a turn toward the unfathomably brutal and smother your remaining sanity in a blanket of endless snow. This will delay your planned brewing schedule a number of times, but there’s always other stuff to get done anyway. Shoveling, for instance.

4. When the snow let's up for half a day and schedules align, perform your first water brew (a test of the brewing system with only water, rather than actual production of wort). There will be some weird quirks to figure out, some procedural questions to answer, but in general, this goes pretty smoothly. Congratulations! You have now boiled water.

5. Transfer water into a fermentation tank. Find that the glycol immediately chills the tank down to near-freezing temperatures and can’t be turned off. Okay. Uh. That’s… not supposed to happen. Something wonky is going on with the solenoid valves of the glycol system, apparently. This will delay your planned brewing schedule by a day or two. It's okay, you can just... do another water brew, I guess? It's probably for the best, really, if you think about it. The more prepared you are, the better!

6. Briefly considering jumping into the bottled water market instead. The margins are much better.

7. On your second water brew, you’re certain your brew system is operating smoothly. This is great. You’re so close, you can practically smell the wort. Just have to wait for this glycol situation to get sorted out, but that's only a matter of time.

8. Also your cellar-side pump stops working every five minutes due to some unforeseen electrical issue because of course it stops working every five minutes due to some unforeseen electrical issue no it’s cool this is fine it’s just another few days, like, whatever at this point, you know? It’s fine. We've already been delayed a few months, what's a few more days? Seriously, it’s fine, it’s not that big of a deal, we’ll just brew on Monday. All that will be fixed by then, you know.

9. Okay. It’s Sunday night. Time to prep the grain so you're set to go in the morning. Get ready for your FIRST EVER COMMERCIAL BREW holy shit this is so exciting.

10. Why the **** will the grain mill not work?

11. Too tired for this. Can’t troubleshoot. We’ll figure it out in the morning.

12. Monday morning! Brew-time! Right after we figure out this grain mill.

13. Okay, okay, that was our bad. Can’t load the grain in before you start the mill. Should have known better. To be fair, all the labels on the mill are in German. Were you supposed to know what “Zu / Auf / Zulauf” means? Maybe you spent two years teaching yourself German back in the day and you still don’t ******* know what that’s supposed to mean in the context of a grain mill. What do you look like, some kind of German mill scientist? I mean, now you know what that’s for. Okay. Needs to be Zu before you start the mill or it jams. You have to Auf the grain in there as it starts. Got it.

14. NOW WHY IS THE SCREEN FLASHING A RED WARNING LIGHT?

15. AUGER ERROR???

16. WHY WON’T THE AUGER WORK NOW ARE YOU…. ****. ****. OKAY FINE. FINE. THAT’S FINE.

17. Because the coil has popped out of the back of the rotor and jammed itself into the wall, is why. That’s why, right there.

18. At this point brewing is obviously not going to happen until Tuesday, but that’s cool. All the kinks should definitely be worked out by Tuesday. Figuring out a way to work around this whole “auger not working” business isn’t really that hard. One step closer!

19. Look, seriously, it’s no big deal, we’ll just mill 1,400 lbs of grain into buckets and load it into the mash tun by hand. That’s fine. That’s totally fine. We could certainly do that if it’s required. We’ll just get started on that right now, in fact. 1,400 lbs of grain, right on that.

20. You’re brewing! You’re actually brewing! Congratulations. This 20th step in Making Your First Batch of Commercial Beer is easily one of the most important. When Making Your First Commercial Beer, you definitely want to start by Brewing a Beer. Or, if not start, then at least certainly include this step somewhere along the way.

21. Go ahead and make wort. You got this. It's all just hoses and tri-clamps, man. Don't open the wrong valve, don't do anything hastily, don't melt your crotch with hot water and dangerous chemicals, don't ruin thousands of dollars worth of beer, etc. Also might as well make another pot of coffee. Gonna need that.

22. Transfer wort into fermentor. Wow!

23. Pitch yeast. Sanitize everything carefully! Almost there! Stay on target!

24. Holy shit! You did it! The fermentor is half full, now all you have to do is brew another batch tomorrow, let it ferment, crash, harvest, transfer, package, distribute... Oh, and clean. Still a whole lot of cleaning to do. Let's make some caustic and start that CIP on the kettle. What time is it? Never too late for another cup of coffee, anyhow.

25. Man, what a long day. That... that was exhausting. Time to crack open a few beers and celebrate. You've been saving something special for just this moment. Empty it into your face!

26. Get some rest, buddy. You've earned it.

27. Wake up a few hours later, time to do it all again! Let's get some coffee going first though!

28. Still have to load the grain in and stir by hand, but you're a pro at this by now. Think of all the money you save working at a brewery, not having to pay for a gym membership! The benefits really stack up here, when you think about it.

29. Definitely about time for more coffee.

30. Why does the hose water smell like weird plastic chemicals? That's gross. Don't want that in your beer. Guess we can't use the hose? Can someone look into this?

31. Okay, but this step mash in the kettle requires rinsing out the last of the mash to transfer. We're going to need to chase it down with some other source of water. How about service water through the spray ball? That should get it out, right? Yes. Yes. Brilliant. You're a real problem-solver, you are.

32. Why isn't the water coming out of the spray ball? Is everything open?

33. It's just trickling out, like it's clogged with... oh, fuck. Fuck.

34. We clogged the fuck out of our sprayballs with mash, didn't we?

35. FML.

36. Hopefully today's run-off into the kettle won't take four hours like yesterday, but you'll get that sorted out. Just like everything else! Haha!

37. Wait, did you leave the kettle bottom valve open? You're running-off into the kettle, dumbass! It's gonna go down the drain!

38. Stupid! You're so stupid!

39. Run! Run! Wipe out on the floor! This'll hurt a bit.

40. Close call. Maybe poured a liter or two of first runnings down the drain. Not a big deal. Probably didn't need to almost kill yourself, sprinting around a brewery with wet floors, but hey. Really liked that hustle.

41. Mental note: don't ever run. Do things quickly but deliberately. Have full situational awareness at all times, no matter how exhausted or stressed you are.

42. Drink more coffee.

43. Can someone spend, like, eight hours unclogging these spray balls with a paper-clip, one tiny fraction of a grain hull at a time? If someone could just do that right now, that would be just great.

44. Don't worry, we'll accidentally clog them again a second time at the end of the day, when we try to CIP. Ha ha ha.

45. Everything else should go pretty well, though!

46. No truly significant screw-ups. That's very good. Look, at the end of the day, all that matters is you hit your numbers and made wort (and thus, beer) that tastes good. All in all, if you look at it in that light, this is going shockingly well!

47. In a few days you'll notice some epic purple bruises all down the left side of your chest from that wipe-out, of course.

48. Just can't count on things to function smoothly the first time around, I think is the lesson here.

49. Fermentation is really rolling though! So that's great. This beer is going to be delicious.

50. Well, fermentation went perfectly. As long as all the Actual Beer Stuff continues to go smoothly, there's really nothing to get frustrated about. Nothing else matters! Okay? Just keep that in mind because soon you'll be getting your kegging platform up and running and half of the menu displays are in Chinese! Ha ha. Hahahaha.

51. Fill some barrels, fill the brite tank. Relatively easy day.

52. Plan out the rest of the week. Figure it'll take a few hours to try out the kegging platform, work out any kinks in the setup, and teach yourself some basic functional Mandarin. After you know it's running smooth, you can start carbing the beer. Plan to spend the following day packaging. They'll be long days, but it'll feel so good when you're done!

53. Thursday: Test out your kegging platform. You've learned your lesson, by now: it's probably not going to work the first time, okay? Might as well just anticipate that.

54. The fitting for the compressed air into the kegging platform does not appear to be right. So it's just venting air into the atmosphere and won't get up to pressure. Pneumatics won't work. You saw that coming, didn't you?

55. Friday: Fix the connection with the weird, non-standard size fitting. Great. The kegging platform works! Let's get practice cleaning some kegs! Like you said, everything is going to have some hiccup or kink the first time through. Just gotta find it and...

56. Why did it just shut off? Why did it just stop and shut off?

57. Is there a fuse blown somewhere?

58. We'll just get on the phone again and see if we can figure this out!

59. Isn't it miraculous how the human body manages to work so well, almost all of the time? Think about it, man. It's incredible. It's like really pretty rare and usually only after many years of successful operation that it simply fails to function one day. And what real maintenance does it require? Just regular fuel. Waste. Cleaning is optional, really. And normally, that's pretty much it. The human body, man. The human machine. It really is a machine, you know? Just absolutely miraculous, when you really think about it.

60. Long story short: the fuse box inside the kegging platform blew and you need a new one. You make sure it's going to arrive tomorrow, so at least you can package first thing next week.

61. Saturday: Okay, the kegging platform works again!

62. Sunday: Time to carb up this son of a bitch so you can package on Monday!

63. Monday Morning: Why is there beer in the CO2 lines...?

64. Okay, so the CO2 ran out overnight, and the beer started to back-flow. Fortunately, it must have happened right before you came in in the morning to check, so you didn't lose anything significant.

65. Monday: Debate whether beer will be fully carbed by evening with enough time to package, or if it's better to take it slow and plan to package on Tuesday.

66. Take numerous Zahm readings throughout the day to test the carb level. It's going a lot slower than you would have thought, and eventually you'll realize you'll need to hold off until Tuesday to package.

67. Tuesday: Still needs some more carbonation. Take more Zahm readings.

68. You hit it! Let's go!

69. This is actually really easy now that everything is working right. Pretty sweet, in fact. What a convenience this kegging platform is, ultimately! This is so exciting! Your beer will be out on the market by tonight!

70. Calculate, based on keg-filling time, how long it will be until everything is package. You estimate you should be done by around 7 pm, easily, at the latest. Right in time for dinner.

71. You're drooling at the thought of the tasty wild game burger that awaits you, next to the first-ever draft pour of your beer.

72. You are done kegging around 9:30 pm.

73. Race to the first bar ever to carry your beer. Enjoy a burger that the kitchen kindly held for you. Watch with anxiety as the bartender pours the first pour of your first commercial beer.

74. Feel intense relief: it tastes exactly how you wanted it to taste. You've done it! Your beer is out there for the world to tick. In kegs, at least. The easiest way to package. Now you just have to build your bottler from scratch!

75. That can wait, though. Have some more beer first! And also might as well make a fresh pot of coffee!

Kent Falls Brewing - Connecticut's First Farmhouse Brewery, and Certainly It's Most Bear Flavoredest

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Where to Find the Beer

I've been neglecting to tell you guys something, and I'm very sorry. It's exciting news. (At least for me!) News that's going to give me a lot to talk about in both the near and distant future. And as such, news that I needed to hold off on until I have some glimpse of hope that I'm about to get my head above water, with everything going on in my life. This whole last year was extremely difficult, stressful, exhausting, et al. These last few months I've had to devote almost every waking moment of free time to working on this whole book thing that is soon due. There were rotten shark adventures to be chronicled, cheeses to be eaten, sleeps to be deprived, and more. I'm inching slowly but surely closer with the book, thankfully. And while there's still plenty more editing to be done, and it'll be a while before I can get a good night's sleep, it's about time I talked about the second big adventure consuming my daily not-free time.

I really didn't want to just casually drop that I'm now a professional brewmaster (I mean: lol) and then not have the time or mental energy to write about it at all for four months. Granted, it's not like I'm really going to have much more time to write in the next few months even once I am done with a draft of the book, but I'll try my best. Starting up a new brewery is an exhausting endeavor all on its own, but I'll do my best to talk about everything there is to talk about, of which there is a lot. Not much should change here at bear-flavored.com — I'm just going to continue to have a ton of weird brewing stuff to write about, plus catching up on posts from my backlog of homebrew batches and experimental batches. New adventures, new experiments, new opportunities, and a lot of new things for me to learn, this time with some economic pressure not to fuck up. Woo!



But about the brewery.

However you feel about homebrewers starting up new breweries by the coat-tails of their boot-straps, I have to say first off that I did not start this brewery. And thank god — do you have any idea how much work is involved in opening a brewery? It's insane. Couldn't do it, myself. I got off crazy easy: brewery manager and co-owner Barry, who launched the brewery project here at Kent Falls, has born the brunt of the work. You hear how opening a brewery is like 2% brewing beer. This is true. And people talk about how much cleaning is involved. This is also true. What you do not hear is that the other 90% is spent on the phone. Mostly yelling at people. Or sweet-talking people. Or whatever. There's always a lot of red tape involved in opening a brewery, and in Connecticut, they seem to come with a few extra rolls of red tape. There are always unforeseen challenges and hiccups and setbacks. In building a new brewery from the ground up on a swampy farm in the middle of nowhere, there's a million things that can go wrong. Or just set you back month after month.

Pictured: a good working environment.

Barry is very good on the phone; problem solving, networking, and working out general business machinations. This is wonderful for me because I would probably suck at all those things. I just brew the beer, which frankly is maybe the easiest part of running the business.

Our set-up is an interesting one, and a set-up that hooked me immediately, when Barry first approached me in spring of 2014. The brewery is one part of a multi-tiered effort. Kent Falls Brewing Company is located on a farm, but the farm operates independently as a separate business — Camps Road Farm — and includes a 1.4 acre hop field. We are the first farm brewery in the state of Connecticut, and as far as we can tell, also the first commercial hop growing operation in the state. We're growing six varieties: Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, Brewer's Gold, Northern Brewer, and Willamette. In addition to hops, the farm grows a whole bunch of stuff in greenhouses, raises sheep, raises chickens, sells eggs, and will expand its livestock options to include pigs (and I hope goats, because I desperately want a goat sidekick brewer's assistant named Brett. So badly). The farm is gonna grow a whole bunch of different berries that I want to throw into beer, squash, various herbs and spices, and just lots of fun other stuff. We're looking for every possible way to meld the worlds (and economics) of small-scale farming and small-scale brewing. Farmer John is relentlessly productive and impressively skilled at what he does, and I can't even describe how exciting it is to run a brewery that's not just situated on farm property, but on a working, productive, autonomous farm operation. Did I mention my life goal of having a goat for a brewer's assistant?

The third tier of the business is a distillery called NeverSink Spirits, located about an hour away from the farm and brewery, in Port Chester, NY. They'll be doing apple brandy and whiskey, among other stuff. We'll be collabearating on things in the future. I will snatch up their barrels when they aren't looking. Once again, this is unbearably cool. Having a source of barrels, having partners who can take one product we make and transform it into another, adding options, adding knowledge. Adding barrels. Barrels!

Barrels! They patiently await funky dry Brett saison.

Barrels: so far we don't have any whiskey barrels. I will eventually put stuff into whiskey barrels and do some fun stouts, absolutely. But those types of beers are not going to be a focus of the brewery initially. We do have sixteen wine barrels to start off with, which will be home to funky farmhouse ales and sours. In fact, without ever actually sitting down and consciously deciding upon it as a particular focus, it seems most of the beers I will be doing in the first six months or so are all pretty sessionable. With most of my beers, I will be aiming for something juicy and drinkable and expressive. Often, weird. To get an idea of the sort of things I'll be brewing at Kent Falls, see: my blog.

Under construction.

Something that's probably obvious from the recipes I post here: I love my IPAs. In the future, I hope to do lots of IPAs, and we're honing in on a final recipe for a sort of flagship clean IPA that I'm very excited about in a few regards. Securing hops to do the IPA you really want to do can be a huge challenge. That, and juggling a number of house cultures, means it'll probably be some time before you see significant quantities of Kent Falls IPA hitting the market. I'll talk about all that more in the future — I find the juggling you have to do as a commercial brewer developing recipes to actually be very fascinating.

In the meantime, we are, to my great delight, going to be brewing two extra-dope-but-not-clean IPAs: Waymaker, a Brett IPA, and Alternate World, a "sour IPA" or dry-hopped gose, depending how you wanna roll. We're planning to can both beers in 16 oz-ers, which is maybe the most exciting thing of all. I'm hoping we'll be able to get the canning going by late summer / early fall, just in time for peak hiking season. I'm gonna need to get in some serious relaxation this fall, and nothing in the world could be more exciting to me right now than having my own vision of the ideal hiking beer, designed specifically to be drank on top of mountains, on top of a mountain, out of a can. Is this the Matrix?

We have a pond.

All these beers will get their own post eventually, but our first beer to be released, Field Beer, definitely deserves more words than just a brief paragraph here. Until then: it is a saison, it uses all local malts (and will eventually use all local hops), its recipe will rotate based on the season, and it necessitates a somewhat complicated brewing process to get some nice tart funk all up in there. More on Field Beer soon.

Besides being on a farm, what is this brewery like, you may wonder?

It's a good size. I say that having seen firsthand the trend of nano-brewing that's emerging all over the place, and in the Northeast especially. We've got a 15 bbl Prospero compact brewhouse. Two vessels, with the lauter tun on top of the hot liquor tank. Rakes built into the kettle, so we can do all sorts of stuff in the mash (when mashing in the kettle) before pumping over to the lauter tun. This is good, because we'll be using decent quantities of unmalted local grains for certain beers. All our batches will be double brews to start, however, as we currently employ three 30 bbl tanks. In addition to those, we have 8 red wine and 8 white wine oak barrels, and, most interesting of all, an old milk chiller from the 50 acre property's previous incarnation as a dairy farm. The milk chiller holds about 7 bbl, or a little over 200 gallons. The idea is that we'll set it up to use as a coolship (I mean, milkship), which would be really fun — but even using the thing as some kind of open fermentor would be fantastic for now, too.

Moving the milkship out of the old dairy barn.

You may be wondering how a mere homebrewer such as myself stumbled into the brewmaster position at such a bitchin-sounding new brewery operation. This would be a very good question, and I'm not entirely sure myself. Though if I had to guess, I would assume it involves some really effective blackmailing. I will say that such an undertaking would be complete madness without a very good, effective consultant to help you get up and running on the equipment and processes. (You wouldn't believe how many valves are involved in making this beer). While all the recipes are of my design, I'm not sure how they would've ever made it to the tank intact without the wisdom and reassuring McConaugheyian cool of someone much smarter and more experienced than me. While this is still a totally insane venture, the help of our consultant has taken this from "coma-inducing levels of stress inspired by disaster" to merely "mental blackout eyeball bleeding levels of stress necessitated by unmanageable work load."

What else? There are so many things to write about, I know I can't cover them all right now and I'm not even going to try. Various observations and experiences will give me great fodder for many blog posts to come, certainly. I mean, what do you guys want to know? What are you curious about, on the front lines of an experience and opportunity like this? I'll be writing about it all, just hopefully distilling it down one topic at a time. Let me know what you're wondering about and I'll be sure to address it. At some point. Once I finish the book. And get some sleep. Good god I'm exhausted I didn't realize it was physically possible to drink this much coffee.



Our very first beer is hitting the market like... well, right now. I mean literally this afternoon. Partly, honestly, I was waiting to 'announce' my role at Kent Falls until our beer was on the market and thus everything actually felt... real. (The twist though is that currently still none of this feels real to me). We're self distributing in Connecticut to start, mostly in the central / western portions of the state. Barry is driving around today and tomorrow delivering kegs. We'll be in New York sooner or later too... hopefully sooner. Connecticut and New York are going to be our primary regions of focus. One of the most unfortunate quirks of this operation is that there's no taproom or tasting room on the farm, and we'll have to go through a bit of a process in order to even sell beer here. To start, a bar or beer store will be your place to find Kent Falls beer. (I'll write some more updates about that tasting room situation later).

We've put up a convenient Google Maps dodad to help you track down our beer. By tomorrow (Friday, March 13th), a decent number of accounts should have our beer. Right now you'll be able to find Field Beer, our locally-grown saison, but obviously the map will be updated as new beers are released. Waymaker Brett IPA and Farmer's Table saison are up next after Field Beer.

Since we don't have a taproom, and therefore can't have a big opening celebration bash at the brewery, we're working on putting something together at one of our favorite local taverns in April. More on that as we get the details ironed out.

Thanks for following along with all my adventures so far. Thanks for supporting the Bear Flavored Merch store and helping me to put cheese on the table throughout the harrowing and hectic last year. Thank you for not laughing at me too hard at this new turn of events, my highly presumptuous decision to try to make a career out of this beer nonsense. There sure are a lot of new breweries opening, haha! It's unnerving, it's terrifying, it's destroyed my ability to get a good night's sleep, and whatever remains of my sanity is highly questionable, at best. Regardless, I'll be here in the trenches (the very muddy trenches), trying my damndest to make the best beer I can, and writing about it as often as I'm able. Bear with me.

Yes.