Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast

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136: Doug Constantiner of Societe Brewing on Aroma-Forward West Coast IPA and a Methodical Approach to Funky and Wild Beer May 24, 2020

Show notes

Societe’s Doug Constantiner wants to make beer you can drink a lot of. Not excessively, of course, but consistently.

“The holy grail of beer is not the beer that there’s a hundred bottles of, and every 25 bottles were aged in a different barrel,” he says. “The holy grail of beer is the beer that you can drink every single day. That you can buy on the shelf at the store. And you can have a couple of them every day and not get sick of it.”

The terms “drinkable” and “balanced” get thrown around often in brewing parlance, but for Constantiner and the team, they’re core principles informing every style of beer they make—from IPA to wild ale to imperial stout. Societe has generally resisted the current trend of fruit and adjunct additions in everything, in favor of building a classic brewery brand respected for thorough execution and timelessness. Fellow brewers have noticed, and two GABF gold medals for their session IPA are validation for the quality in their approach.

In this episode, Constantiner gets into the details of these aroma-forward West coast IPAs—pushing malt out of the way while timing additions for better balance of aroma and bitterness, strategically layering hops for complexity despite their “overspiced” nature, building body without malt flavors that get in the way of the hops, and considering unique flavor aspects to hops varieties that can set their beers apart.

“For the hoppy stuff, what do we love about hoppy beers?” says Constantiner. “Well it’s the aroma. It’s not the bitterness, which is why we’ve never published our IBUs. The IBU race of the mid-oughts had nothing to do with hoppiness, it was just bitterness. So we just thought ‘let’s make these hoppy beers as hoppy as we can, and make them a delivery vehicle for that aroma, and get it into your face as quickly as possible, but it has to be balanced too.’”

With their wild beers, Societe takes a similar approach to complexity and nuance, eschewing acidity for Brett-driven funk while carefully adjusting variables in their blending stock.

“Creating acidity is easy. It’s ‘how do we create this incredibly complex layered beer?’ And I think that’s time, blending, and a lot of experimentation.”

Constantiner discusses how they pitch cultures, growing each of their lactic acid bacteria and Brett strains separately then timing additions and amounts to achieve specific results. Cell counts, timing, and temperatures all have big effects on the finished beers, and Societe aims to control and understand the variables.

At the end of the episode, Constantiner recounts the critical move they made earlier this year, moving from a model of taproom sales and distributed draught beer only to canning.

“On Feb 2nd, 100% of our revenue came from on-premise sales,” says Constantiner. “That’s 8% from our tasting room, and 92% from wholesale. Feb 3rd, we started canning. By the time the shelter in place orders and restaurants were shut down in California, we were at about 84% on-premise.”

A couple months later, the brewery’s production is at full speed, brewing at a higher volume than 2019, with new tanks on the way to support more production.

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This episode is brought to you by Brewers Publications, publishers of “Historical Brewing Techniques: The Lost Art of Farmhouse Brewing” by Lars Marius Garshol. Equal parts history, cultural anthropology, social science, and travelogue, “Historical Brewing Techniques” describes Northern European farmhouse brewing and fermentation methods that are vastly different from modern craft brewing. Order your copy of Historical Brewing Techniques today at BrewersPublications.com.

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135: For Noah Bissell of Bissell Brothers, Less is Definitely More May 17, 2020

Show notes

The conversation about hazy, New England-style IPAs invariably includes Portland, Maine’s Bissell Brothers Brewery. From the early days of the nascent style, they embraced the possibility of expressive yeast, and helped cement the style’s place in the canon of modern craft beer. But unlike other contemporaries, they’ve shied away from the model of brewing a nonstop stream of new releases, and have taken a more traditional approach to brewing—constant, nonstop iteration and improvement of the selection of brands they brew.

Cofounder Noah Bissell explains the strategy in a sensible way, with the perpetual dissatisfaction of a committed creator. Why create new beers, when you’re not entirely happy with the ones you make already? Dialing in beers is an ongoing, never-ending process, and the best way to improve those beers is to go all-in.

"I don’t think you could ever even hope to reach that hypothetical nirvana zone for any given idea in beer form, if you don’t really, really commit to it," says Bissell.

In this episode, Bissell discusses the brewery’s dogged focus on improvement: managing for shifting palates, focusing deeply on the bitterness component in soft and hazy beers, dialing in carbonation to heighten the experience, adjusting whirpool parameters, using new advanced hop aroma products, and more. Along the way, he also tackles subjects including cryo vs. traditional pellet, their methodical approach to hops blending, how they select hops for the platonic ideal, and favorite new hops like Sultana.

Bissell built their hazy house IPA, Substance, from a blend that doesn’t include Citra—a bold choice in today’s beer world. But for the brewery, it was both a response to the reality of the hops world when they started, and a solid focus on outlasting short-term beer trends, where “sweet” as a descriptor offers less longevity.

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134: Eric Wallace of Left Hand Brewing Co. Shares Perspective and Advice for Brewers Navigating the COVID-19 Shutdown May 10, 2020

Show notes

This isn’t the first time in his 26 years in the craft beer industry that Eric Wallace, Cofounder and President of Left Hand Brewing Co. and former Chairman of the Brewers Association Board of Directors, has had to deal with adverse business conditions. The late 90’s and early 00’s were a period of net contraction for craft beer, as tepid consumer reaction failed to deliver the growth that many over-leveraged breweries expected. Today, the pandemic poses a different sort of challenge—a widely felt social, health, and economic event that was as unexpected as it has been severe—but lessons learned from craft beer’s early period are still apropos.

In this special industry-focused episode, Wallace weaves through the granular operations issues facing the brewery, from the challenge and necessity in furloughing employees (“furlough is not a moral issue—it’s surviving; It’s a requirement; If you’re going to survive, you have to cut your expenses to match whatever you’re lucky enough to have coming in”) to the utter collapse in sales (“In March, [draft beer] sales dropped to $1700, from six figures [last year]. We’re a stout brewery, and we ended up getting shut down on the… day before St. Patrick’s Day”). Wallace discusses the government tools they’ve been able to secure, such as a loan through the PPP program, and the challenge in any kind of long-term planning. IRI data may suggest that craft beer sales are up in the grocery channel, but that’s a small consolation at best for breweries like Left Hand.

“I’ve read the IRI data, and I’m like ‘Really? That’s what’s happening? Because it doesn’t feel like it,’” says Wallace.

The conversation also turns toward a macro view, with Wallace discussing the shared responsibility of all craft brewers, and all in the hospitality world, to ensure the safety of customers and staff.

“To take the short-term view, right now with all the largesse that the government is raining on our heads, just because philosophically you disagree and your freedom is being imposed upon… that’s bullshit,” says Wallace. “I want to open as bad as anybody, but I also feel an obligation to be a responsible citizen, business owner, member of society.”

What will the future look like? Wallace and Left Hand are planning on two years of severely limited business, as the world grapples with the disease while working to find a vaccine. But that won’t be the end of it. Expect 3-5 years after that to “dig out,” pay off debt incurred in the survival process, and get back on any sort of sound economic footing. There is no quick bounce-back from this pandemic and the ripple effect it is having throughout the economy. This episode is a sobering and honest look at the reality facing the world’s craft brewers.

Brewers Publications (https://www.brewerspublications.com):
This episode is brought to you by Brewers Publications, publishers of “Small Brewery Finance” by Maria Pearman, “How to Brew” by John Palmer, and the forthcoming “Historical Brewing Techniques” by Lars Marius Garshol. Established in 1986, Brewers Publications has published more than 50 books of enduring value for amateur and professional brewers alike. Visit BrewersPublications.com today to browse the complete catalog of books and ebooks.

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133: New Belgium’s Ross Koenigs Takes an Analytical Approach to Hops and Cannabis May 03, 2020

Show notes

Hazy IPA is all the rage, but what’s actually going on when brewers pile many pounds per gallon of dry hops into a tank still in active fermentation? It’s one thing with a homebrew-scale fermenter to take a flyer and do it, and it’s riskier to do it in a typical craft brewery’s 15-, 30-, or even 60-bbl fermenter. But what happens when you fill a 2000 hectoliter (1700 bbl) fermenter with hazy wort and an enormous pitch of London Ale 3, then dry hop with pellets that measure as much as a ton?

New Belgium Brewing reduces the guesswork and risk by taking a highly analytical approach, looking at how compounds in hops undergo transformation through the fermentation and dry hopping process. In this episode, Brewing Innovation Specialist Ross Koenigs dives deep into what the brewery has learned by extensive quantitative testing throughout the hopping and biotransformation process. Additionally, he discusses everything from their innovation process, to the challenging of scaling for production, the impacts of lesser-known hops compounds (such as polyfunctional thiols) on hops flavor and aroma, how biotransformation impacts specific hops like Citra, Mosaic, and Chinook, how California ale yeast makes for the perfect biotransforming yeast, and much, much more.

Koenigs is currently at work on a book on using Cannabis in brewing (that’s “Big ‘C’ Cannabis” including industrial hemp, not just the psychoactive kind), and teases some of what New Belgium learned through the development process for their groundbreaking beer The Hemperor. The episode then closes with a discussion of New Belgium’s new Sour IPA and the process behind designing a juicy and hazy IPA that is then blended with a component of golden sour from New Belgium’s famed foeder forest. Timing and acidity levels are crucial in achieving ideal hops expression in these beers.

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132: Dino Funari of Vitamin Sea Brewing on Creating Trendy Styles That Stand Out From the Crowd Apr 25, 2020

Show notes

You’d have to be confident, or crazy, to open a brewery focusing on New England IPA right smack dab in the turbid heartland of the style, but that’s what Dino Funari, and his partners Peter Kiley, Joshua Sherman, and Richard DiBona, did in early 2019. The brewery got its start, as many do, in the partners’ homebrewing, and they built a reputation over years of give and take, where friends (and friends of friends, and then their friends, too) would swing by Funari’s house and drop off a four pack of beer in exchange for a four pack of homebrew. Eventually, the demand grew to the point where they had to go commercial to keep up, and Vitamin Sea was born. Now, not quite a year and a half in, fans line up for can releases and their crowdsourced ratings put them in the top 50 breweries in the country—big accolades for a crew with modest goals.

In this episode, Funari talks about the challenges of operating a brewery through the COVID-19 shutdown and the implications for guest and staff safety, sculpting a unique approach to brewing New England-style IPAs, using classic C-hops in progressive IPAs, their aggressive pilot brewing schedule on a fully customized homebrew-scale system, approaches to pastry stouts, and more.

Even though they’re brewing on a much larger production-scale brewhouse now, Vitamin Sea still approaches innovation like homebrewers, constantly looking for the tweak that will make the next batch better.

“Every one of our beers is a work in progress,” says Funari. “We’ll release a beer, and people will love it, and we’ll say ‘This is OK, this is good, but what could we do better next time?’”

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131: Sensory Expert Lindsay Barr Wants You to Become a Better Beer Taster Apr 17, 2020

Show notes

Taste. It’s a hard subject to quantify but there’s nothing more important in the world of beer. We spend hour after hour talking about the minute details of brewing process and technique, but how much time and energy do we spend focusing on developing the most important analytical tool we have—our own palates?

In this episode, sensory expert Lindsay Barr, the former head of the New Belgium Brewing sensory program and cofounder of Draughtlab sensory software, walks through the nuances of tasting beer and the fundamentals of palate development. The conversation ranges from basics like building a ritual around tasting for evaluation and breaking down beer modalities to more advanced elements like tying emotional experience to language, moving past binary definitions, breaking through flavor assumptions, and more.

Tasting and evaluating beer is far more than just identifying off flavors, yet so many beer tasters train and focus on these negative elements without considering the need to spend equivalent (or greater) energy on the “on” flavors of beer that help a brewer understand if they’re really achieving the goal of their brew.

The conversation then turns to the challenges in tasting—variances in anosmias and sensitivities, and the changes that tasters experience over time. Palates are not static, and are constantly changing and shifting as a result of everything from life events to exercise to contextual inputs. Consumers change too, and every brewery can benefit from paying attention to that shift in the palates of the people who buy their beer.

“It is important to revisit brand flavor profiles as they change and evolve according to consumer preference, and I do think that brands really should evolve,” says Barr. “I’m not a believer that brands should just maintain as they are out of some kind of philosophical reason. I do think they need to be updated, and incremental changes should be made based on the palate of your consumers, because it is changing and developing.”

Every brewer does sensory on their own beer, every time they taste it. Admitting that we’re doing it is the first step toward developing a more thorough analytical process around it.

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130: Destihl Founder Matt Potts on Developing Your Voice with Sours and Hazy IPAs Apr 10, 2020

Show notes

In the midst of the last Great Recession, Potts felt the itch to turn his brewing hobby into a profession. While preparing and studying at the Siebel Institute, he fell in love with sour beer. He set out to brew it at his own brewery in an unlikely place for sour beer—smack dab in the middle of the agricultural heartland of Illinois. After seeing the demand at the Great American Beer Festival in 2011, Destihl committed to expanding its sour beer production. That has led them on a trajectory they’ve followed to the current day, where 50 percent of the beer they brew is of the sour variety.

Quick-sour beers are a large part of that volume, but unlike typical kettle sours, Destihl doesn’t just push a fast Lactobacillus fermentation. Instead, they use their own mixed culture built from a spontaneous capture in the brewery—an approach that gives them flavors they can call their own. Developing a process to scale their quick-sour program was not easy, and Potts walks us through the successes and setbacks along the way.

That process of innovation is one that they’ve applied with similar force to evolving styles like hazy IPA, and Potts also talks about how they developed their own take on the style—one that’s shelf-stable and capable of tasting great in their far-flung retail markets. They’ve done it without sacrificing elements they find crucial to the style, such as dry hopping during active fermentation to achieve bio-transformative effects.

Location is no impediment to brewing great sour beer, as long as you seek out your own process and your own creative voice. Destihl is proof of that.

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129: Kate Lee and Brian Nelson of Hardywood Park Get Dark and Spicy Apr 03, 2020

Show notes

In this conversation with Hardywood Park Craft Brewery's Kate Lee, vice president of operations and quality, and Brian Nelson, vice president and head brewer, they dive into a variety of brewing challenges. Their flagship Gingerbread Stout starts the conversation, as they work through their process of establishing and maintaining a brand standard for something that is difficult to quantify, then talk about compensating for year-to-year changes in key ingredients, such as the fresh ginger they source from a local farm. Scaling the recipe up for their new brewhouse was a particular challenge, and they recount, they learned the hard way.

Sometimes, however, mistakes turn into hunches which pay dividends later on, as with a batch of base stout in the new brewery that started at 40°P (1.179)—much higher than they expected the first time around, but which has since become a go-to blending beer for their barrel-aged releases.

One beer they’re particularly known for is their Raspberry Stout, and here they talk about the challenges of adding whole fruit to the beer—from pasteurizing the fruit before conditioning using a small jacketed fermenter, to de-seeding the fruit for best results.

Lager is big for Hardywood Park, and they discuss both Hardywood Pils and Richmond Lager—beers that easily outsell the small-batch hazy IPAs which with they also experiment.

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128: Matt Tarpey of The Veil Will Brew With Anything Mar 27, 2020

Show notes

The Veil Brewing Company’s Matt Tarpey has never been afraid of risk. From early career moves that took him around New England to brew with some of the country’s more influential brewers, to a stint interning at Cantillon on a trip that was ostensibly also his honeymoon, he has constantly sought out new opportunities to learn, no matter how challenging that might be. In 2015, the itinerant brewer settled down back in his home state of Virginia to launch The Veil Brewing Co., and brought that same spirit of constant learning with him. Today, The Veil isn’t afraid to get weird, while also paying deep respect to tradition—a dramatic tension that isn’t lost on Tarpey. They will use, and have used, just about any ingredient you can think of, in a beer—both to create exciting experiences for their customers who expect it, and to push themselves as brewers.

In this episode, Tarpey discusses that brewing history and the experience of working with everyone from Tod Mott to Jean Van Roy and Shaun Hill, brewing with non-traditional ingredients like Oreos, Nutella, and activated charcoal, how they learn and experiment and dial in processes around strange ingredients, spontaneous fermentation in an urban setting, the impact on ingredients in wild beers, building a house flavor through blending a single stock of aged hops, letting palates drive the blending ship, using fruit in sour beer, and more.

“Life’s too short to just be serious. We’re focused on everything we do—even the Oreo beers—we’re super focused and constantly tasting and trying to incorporate the character with different ratios. We’re focused on everything that we do, but… it’s balancing the serious and the fun. We love the delicate beers, but we also love the wild and crazy beers.”

Note: Even at an hour and a half run time, this episode is an abridged version of the entire conversation. Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine® subscribers have access to a bonus portion of the conversation where Tarpey discusses the mental anguish of customer feedback, building an approach to lager brewing that isn’t tied to traditional styles, The Veil’s multifaceted approach to brewing IPAs, and more. Subscribe now for access at beerandbrewing.com.”

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127: Kyle Matthias of Deschutes on their “All-In” Approach to Innovation Brewing Mar 20, 2020

Show notes

If you visit the Deschutes Brewery taproom in Bend today, you can’t miss the innovation brewhouse. It’s right there in the front window to your left as you walk in, tucked beneath the towering fermentors that produce the brewery’s best-known brands. The system itself is remarkable—a seven-vessel automated system with two kettles and two whirlpools, so the brewers can split the wort stream after the mash. That is supported by a cellar of 13 nano-scale fermentation vessels and seven tiny brite tanks, all built with geometries that mimic the production brewhouse’s full scale vessels. Managing it all is Matthias, our guest on the podcast this week.

In this episode, Matthias discusses the range of approaches to innovation employed by Deschutes, as well as some of the important lessons they’ve learned over the past year and a half of brewing intensively on the pilot system. The conversations includes:

brewing low-calorie but flavorful IPAs
dry hopping during versus after active fermentation
the impact of pH on hops expression
head-to-head hops tests
the development process for beers such as King Crispy pilsner
Deschutes’ cocktail-inspired approach to hard seltzer and its development process
using alternative acids (besides lactic) in tart and sour beer
the right applications for fruit juice, puree, and whole fruit

And much more.

“To commit to an expense as large as the pilot brewery definitely sends a message that we’re not just going to rest on our laurels,” Matthias says. “We know we need to continue to do things differently. We are continuing to deliver new products, and coming out with them faster and faster every year. [We] rely on emotion, passion, and gut instinct to come up with what could be the next disrupter in the industry.”

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