EPISODE S.2, E.11

[SMOOTHIE SOUR HOUR]

[00:00:00] TT: Smoothie sours are an emerging infamous beer style. They’ve been around for a few years now and have grown in popularity among craft beer consumers. The style consists of beers where soured beer with the addition of lactose, a.k.a. milk sugar, and different fruit purees are combined to make a malt beverage big on fruit flavor and aroma with an added sour kick to enhance the flavors. The resulting beer tastes a lot like a typical fruit smoothie, hence the name.
It’s definitely a polarizing beer style, to say the least, but it’s also a style that seems to be becoming an industry standard. The smoothie sour has been criticized perhaps unfairly by many in the beer world for being not a beer and has been known to have problems with gushing out of the package. But in spite of that, the new smoothie sour releases continue to be some of the most sought-after and traded styles of craft beer.
We have two guests on the show this week who are very highly recommended by a pooling of our team here, are Country Malt Group, as experts within the realm of smoothie sours and really producing some fantastic representations of the style. They have graciously agreed to share their different experiences and provide their own tips and tricks for successfully brewing smoothie sours. Dan Russo at Oakshire Brewing and John Galante at Alvarado Street Brewery, how are you guys doing?
[00:01:13] DR: Fantastic.
[00:01:14] JG: We’re doing great.
[00:01:15] TT: Awesome.
[00:01:15] DR: Thanks for having us.
[00:01:16] JG: Thank you so much.
[00:01:17] TT: I also got my sidekick with me again today. My buddy, Grant Lawrence, the South Central Territory Manager, who I notated last podcast episode as my translator. He is a brewer by trade, a very knowledgeable guy. Really happy to have him on as well. What’s up, Grant?
[00:01:32] GL: Hey, Toby. Happy to be here as always.
[00:01:34] TT: I mention this every time we start these things. We do this on Friday. Again, it’s a terrible idea. I don’t know how we schedule these on the worst day. I say it’s the worst day, but we talk about beer mid-early morning. Man, I get thirsty, and I don’t want to work the rest of the day.
[00:01:51] GL: Always thirsty after these.
[00:01:53] TT: Yeah. Well, let’s get right into it and just go around hornier. Dan, tell me a little bit about yourself, your brewery, where you guys are located, and what you’re doing.
[00:02:01] DR: My name is Dan Russo. I’m the Director of Brewing Operations at Oakshire Brewery. We’re located in Eugene, Oregon. We have an outpost in Portland, Oregon, about two hours North of Eugene, and distribute to about three states—Oregon, Washington, and Idaho.
We make a full range of styles of beer—everything from your classic pilsner. I’m drinking the Italian pilsner right now, actually. We just released it all the way through the big, heavy pastry stout, barrel-aged beer, name it, IPA as Hazy, IPA […]. Just having fun across the whole stream of the brewing.
[00:02:26] TT: I like that you’re cracking one at 11:15 AM.
[00:02:30] DR: Instead of driving two hours to Portland, I might as well.
[00:02:31] TT: I won’t tell anybody. Nobody’s listening anyway.
[00:02:33] DR: It’s quality control.
[00:02:34] TT: That’s right. John, welcome, buddy. What are you up to?
[00:02:38] JG: Thank you, appreciate it. I’m John Galante, Director of Operations for Alvarado Street Brewery here in Monterey County. We’re very similar. We’ve also got our main production facility here in Salinas. We’ve got a brewpub in Monterey and in Carmel-by-the-Sea as well. We are brewing a full range of styles. The smoothie sours especially we started getting into a while ago. We just consistently wanted to up the fruit intake of our customers. That was where we found ourselves diving right in.
[00:03:07] TT: Awesome. We’re talking about smoothie sours, but some listeners, including myself, can get very confused about all the different styles out there. What is the difference generally between a smoothie sour and these smoothie seltzers that I hear of?
[00:03:19] JG: I could take that one. Dan provides […] too, but I think the smoothie sour—at least for what we’re trying to do—is a fruited sour ale that has extra fruit to give that texture, mouthfeel, and experience of a smoothie like you would have.
Here at Alvarado, we call them slush. Sometimes, we’ll do an iteration of a sour with a little less fruit that’s a more traditional kettle sour style. We’ll do that double, triple the amount of fruit with a little bit different cellar methods, and we’ll call it a slush or a smoothie.
The seltzers, at least for what we are trying to do, are something more designed to mimic a smoothie and not have that sour ale characteristic. But they’re still alcoholic and have a touch of carbonation as well.
[00:04:01] TT: Are you guys doing smoothie seltzers over there, John?
[00:04:03] JG: Yeah. We’re doing smoothie seltzers as well. We’re doing a whole series called Bubble Bath Hard Smoothie. They’re hard smoothies.
[00:04:10] TT: Is that something you encourage folks to pour into a glass as opposed to drinking that out of a can?
[00:04:15] JG: Yeah, absolutely. We find that the experience is better out of the glass when having a seltzer base with a lot of fruit. You have the possibility of having a product that’s not fully homogenized. What you want to do is give the can a little bit of a tilt and pour it into a glass.
The visual aspect of a smoothie in a glass helps so much as well when you’re drinking it. Being able to look at it, being able to release a lot of that fruit aroma into a glass—we always recommend drinking that out of glass.
[00:04:43] DR: I think it’s definitely one of those ones where it’s all about the look. When you go out, and you see people at your pubs and your tasting rooms, and you see those glasses of frothy fruit juice, it immediately draws people’s attention to the tables. That person who may never ever have had one is going in and saying, what’s that? Then they’re trying it, and it’s a mind-blowing experience for them. It really is all about the presentation for it. I think that’s the biggest way to go.
[00:05:07] GL: Do you all remember those days when you were served a cloudy beer? You’re like, something’s wrong with this?
[00:05:13] DR: Oh yeah.
[00:05:16] TT: Dan, your take on a smoothie sour. If you were to give a description to the listeners outside of what John said, anything else to notate?
[00:05:23] DR: Yeah. A big part of our base when we started it is really not just recreating smoothies with fruit, but we’ve taken it into the aspect of a lot of really awesome adjunct usage, starting with using fruit. Our base for our sour beer is always incorporated in astronomical amounts of marshmallow fluff and a ton of vanilla beans. It’s really getting into those crazy smoothies like you’re going to Jamba Juice kind of thing.
It’s really about creating not just a fruit drinking experience, but an actual culinary drinking experience. That’s a lot of the way that we’ve trended it. It started with a lot of fruit. The more we put crazier adjuncts into the beers, the more people are […] when you just released a fruit beer. It’s definitely a lot of different takes on how you build the beers. It’s definitely a lot different than our standard year-round […] space, but it all comes together to make something that’s holy, awesomely drinkable.
[00:06:19] GL: There are a couple of ways to make a smoothie sour. Can each of you walk through the basic techniques you prefer? It might be the same, maybe a little bit different, but Dan, do you want to start off?
[00:06:26] DR: Our base, like I said, is a little bit different when I went approaching this and brewing this for the first time. We’re coming on about a year. We did our first release in June of last year and obviously have taken off pretty awesomely.
I really wanted to start with a base very similar to an Imperial Hazy, knowing full well that a big part of this is not only the fruit mouthfeel, but the base beer has to be able to stand up to all that fruit.
We started with a very wheat- and oat-heavy imperial beer. It’s 10.5% ABV. Then, after fermentation, we tried to use our hazy base. We tried to use our hazy strain, and it couldn’t work through the pH drop. It couldn’t work through the ABV, so we actually just went back to our house strain, which is California Ale, to get to that 10.5% ABV.
Post-fermentation, we do have another series that’s not using marshmallow and vanilla beans, but if we do the marshmallow and vanilla beans, the imperial beer goes solely onto those marshmallows, vanilla beans, and any other specific adjuncts—graham crackers or cinnamon. All that kind of stuff really allowed those adjuncts to interact with the beer first before the fruit gets evolved.
Found out through some trials that the secondary adjuncts get lost in that large amount of fruit. Then, after whatever we feel our right time frame is, we add the different fruits in and get it to package. Get it carbonated, get it packaged, and get it out the door.
[00:07:41] GL: You mentioned wheat and oats. Are you typically using flaked or both or pre-gelatinized? What are you using?
[00:07:47] DR: It’s malted wheat, and then we use flaked oats for that. We try to also do malted oats because I love that flavor like hazies and stuff like that and what it does to the mouthfeel. But you get it up to that full mashed on, and it’s almost like there is no amount of rice hulls that is going to save you.
[00:08:07] GL: Complete mess.
[00:08:08] DR: Yeah, exactly. The first time is fine. You made the first one, and it’s like whatever. It’s a four-hour runoff. We’re never going to do this again until people are lying about the door, and you got to do it every two weeks.
[00:08:20] GL: What about you, John? Any particular technique or method of making smoothie sours?
[00:08:25] JG: Our kind of base sour ale is similar. We do about 10% flaked oats and about 15% malted wheat typically. Again, it really depends on what we want the end result to be, but we usually shoot for something around the 6% mark packaged, so that comes with its own slew of issues.
You want something that’s going to ferment down. We like using one of our hazy strains to get it to ferment down to about 4.5%, 5.5% post part of a re-fermented fruit. We typically like to re-ferment some of the fruit, so we’ll add it near-finishing gravity and then get it down to where we want it. Then, what we’ll do is typically add a majority of the rest of the fruit into the bright tank.
We have pretty much a similar style. We use a blending calculator to figure out the bricks of the fruit? What’s the gallonage that we’re adding? How do we ensure that this is right at our target ABV and it’s still going to have that same mouthfeel that we want? Definitely a lot of things that go into it—one on the brewhouse side is damaged, and then two is on the cellaring side.
[00:09:28] GL: When you’re checking for acidity in the kettle, and you’re making your Imperial sour, do you set again about 10%?
[00:09:35] JG: Yeah. We’re shooting for 9.75% to about 10.5% third fermentation. Target pH for us, we look at about 3.4–3.55, which we don’t sour in the kettle. We actually have a lacto reaction vessel, as we call it. It’s an 80-barrel tank that has housed our lacto culture for about six years now. Put it in there one day, that sits at the bottom, the tank’s never been opened, never been cleaned. You just […] down to it.
It’s incredibly predictable after hundreds of generations that it’s run. We know what it’s doing, and we know that after the second or third batch of whatever sour it is, we know almost like down to the hour or within a couple of hours of when it’s going to hit our target pH.
We know that when you start pulling wort after 18 hours and finish the second or third batch at 3:00 PM or 4:00 PM, we know the next morning when our next guys come in, we can start pulling that wort out. It’s already working, and we’re going to be downright in the […] that we want to be. If we’re doing our normal sour beers, just a regular American sour, we know we need to go for 24 hours because we want that pH to drop down to the 3, 2 range. We know we’ll get there with that extra 6–8 hours.
[00:10:46] TT: Got it. Yeah, man, you just answered quite a few questions there before I can even get to them. That’s really neat, like a fermenter that’s a perpetual stew of sour that you’re just feeding. It’s like a sourdough starter for your kettle sours.
[00:10:59] DR: When we started kicking out these American sour beers—our cucumbers and the raspberry, just the standard sours, five, six years ago—we’re like […] this time. It’s like we’re tying up the kettle in the whirlpool for two days. And then you’re still trying to crank out your regular IPA, your regular amber, and you want a specialty beer. It’s like, do we bring guys to work on the weekend just to make an extra batch of beer?
We just had this tank that was like leaking glycol down the side. The jackets were all messed up. We can’t do anything, but then we can’t pull it out. You might as well make it a sour day.
[00:11:27] TT: Yeah. It’s like going from a paperweight to a useful tank again, very cool.
[00:11:31] DR: Exactly.
[00:11:33] TT: I guess one more thing, you were talking about pH and how it’s kind of different for the different styles. Where do you measure pH out of? Are you doing total acidity like titrating for total acidity or any of that?
[00:11:43] DR: We have a titration for total acidity on these base beers specifically. It was just kind of flying by the seat of our pants. We just kind of found that our initial pH range just works with whatever kind of fruit additions. The adjusting for your fruit pH on the back end, depending on what your fruits are going to be, is a completely different monster.
But it allows you some room when you start adding something that has a lot more like adding fruit that has a very low acidity like key lime, lemon puree, or whatever it is. If you can get to that a little bit higher of a starting pH, then you have a little bit more wiggle room to add a little bit more of that fruit and not make it […] acidic.
No one wants to go back to cascade sours from circa 2011.
[00:12:24] GL: The enamel off your teeth.
[00:12:26] DR: The enamel ripping after four ounces.
[00:12:28] GL: They’re still good in their own way, but yeah.
[00:12:30] DR: Absolutely. I’m not […] like that. Those first ones it’s burning your throat, but it’s delicious.
[00:12:36] TT: More of a sessionable sour. Yeah, I get you. I guess John, a similar question. Obviously, if you want a thing that’s not watering it down, but you are diluting the alcohol of the finished product when you add in a bunch of fruit, right? You’re targeting something like that to like a 10% kettle sour.
[00:12:36] JG: Typically, it doesn’t end up being that high for us. It definitely depends, but it’s more like between 7% and 8%. Based on our blending calculator, how much we want to […] because that’s obviously going to add a little bit of alcohol as well if you’re refermenting some fruit. Then we can determine where we need our starting at. It helps a lot to have that blending calculator first whenever we’re building a recipe so we can really dial it in.
[00:13:17] TT: Can you tell us a little bit as well about how you do your bugs as brewers call them?
[00:13:22] JG: Yeah. Man, I can’t even remember how many we’ve done over the years, but right now, we’ve actually landed on just the […] brew pitch, which is just lactobacillus Plantarum. It hits our target pH, which is the same as Dan’s, around 3.4–3.6 depending on style and what fruit we’re adding. It works really well for us.
We don’t take kettle sour per se anymore. We actually pitch it right into the fermenter. Let that sour for about two days until our pH hits our target, and we can bring it back down to temp, pitch our yeast, and move along from there. It works really well for us.
[00:13:56] TT: Looks like Lallemand has that Philly Sour as well. Is that something you guys have tried?
[00:14:01] JG: Yeah, I’ve seen that. We haven’t tried it yet. We’re thinking about trying it out at some point here soon.
[00:14:05] TT: Cool.
[00:14:05] GL: The one thing that’s really interesting about that Philly Sour that Toby mentioned is that it’s wild yeast, right? It’s not […]. It sounds like you’re using a blend of different lactic, which are bacteria, and this is wild yeast. Kind of neat how different it is that way. That’s awesome.
[00:14:20] JG: At this point, we don’t even know what’s in ours. We actually started with Nancy’s Yogurt, which is like a live culture probiotic yogurt from Springfield Creamery right in the town over from us. They’re distributed almost all over the country.
We just threw Nancy’s Yogurt into it until you get a quart ton or a quart jar for every 20 barrel batch to throw it in there. It would take two days to sour, but eventually, you start recirculating that and then pulling it off instead of throwing more Nancy’s Yogurt in. Then it was like it gets down in two days, and then it gets down to one day. It’s evolved so much. Sometimes it wants to ferment; other times, it won’t ferment. It’s really weird. But it’s interesting. It’s always like, what is going to happen today? But you’re always able to readjust and get the beer. Base beer always hits numbers.
[00:15:04] GL: Yeah, I’ve heard of a few breweries doing that. I’m sure from the yogurt; you get a blend of lactic. I believe John said he was just doing the Plantarum.
[00:15:11] JG: Yeah, I think the Nancy’s, if you look at it, I think it has like seven or eight base lactobacillus that is listed on the side of their little jars. It was just kind of like, okay. This goes back to the early days of Kettle Sour. That was like a Ben Edmunds from Breakside thing. It was like, just use live culture yogurt, and you’ll be good. We’re like, okay. You’re doing a CBC talk on us. We’ll take your advice on it, sure.
[00:15:38] DR: That method definitely worked well. I mean, we did the same with Ziggy’s Yogurt for a long time. That method worked for a lot of brewers over the years.
[00:15:45] GL: Are these people real? Like Nancy, does she like drinking beer?
[00:15:47] JG: I don’t know.
[00:15:48] GL: She should’ve said I just need an unlimited supply.
[00:15:51] JG: You know, honestly, […] she doesn’t like drinking beer, but the family who owns this is the Kesey family, Ken Kesey’s family. You definitely know that they like some special stuff.
[00:16:03] DR: I’m a fan of the Ziggy’s myself. I think I had some Ziggy’s Yogurt for breakfast, John.
[00:16:06] JG: Nice.
[00:16:08] DR: The Icelandic-style skyr yogurt.
[00:16:08] TT: Grant is the backbone for a lot of our content for some of these things. He sent it over to me a couple of days ago to take a look at. The first thing I saw was lactose. I didn’t know lactose had anything to do with smoothie sours. Let’s talk about that. Do you guys use lactose, and is there a preference if you do use them?
[00:16:29] JG: We use lactose occasionally in beers that we think the fruit kind of warrants using some lactose. We don’t use them in all the smoothie sours. I haven’t really found a particular lactose preference. I guess we only use vendors to get that lactose from. Maybe, Dan, do you have anything like that?
[00:16:46] DR: I don’t. Actually, I barely use lactose in the brewery ever. We do like a chocolate milk style once every two years. It’s just one of those things like up in Oregon, especially like Hippie Eugene; there’s definitely a stigma towards products that come from beef and cattle stuff like that. The less you can use it, the more people that you can get to drink it. This is kind of funny because, at the same time, we’re using actual marshmallow fluff, which has egg whites in it. These beers aren’t vegan at all. But for some reason up here, that word lactose throws people off.
We just learned to utilize the standard brew techniques in the East and everything like that to manipulate our final finishing gravities and just use that as the base. And stay away from some of those fruits where maybe a little more body would be needed or blend them with another fruit that’s a lot thicker or jammier that can fill out those places so that we don’t have to use lactose.
It’s one of those things that our owner was when I started talking; you’re not going to use lactose in these. I’m not like, no, we’re not going to use lactose in these, which is fine. I don’t have a preference. But I’ve had some awesome ones that I’ve used lactose, just like I’ve had awesome hazies that have used lactose. I have nothing against it. It’s all about brewing technique and pushing the limits.
[00:17:55] TT: Grant, what do you see down your neck of the woods with some of your customers?
[00:17:59] GL: Kind of what Dan just described; use it sometimes and sometimes not. I would say that the ones that use it, though, tend to use it across all of their smoothie sours. But I like the idea of using it in some and not using it in others, depending on what the body of the puree provides. If you can get that from it and avoid lactose, it’s one less thing.
[00:18:20] TT: I’m glad you mentioned purees. I want to chat with them because obviously, fruit plays a huge role in this particular style. Are you using aseptic? We carry Oregon fruit aseptic puree, and they’re very well received. A lot of folks are using them. Are you using fresh fruit, anything else? Is it, hey, I’m going to throw cinnamon, take a taste, and see if that’s enough. How do you get an idea of what contribution as far as weight that you’re throwing in these types of beers?
[00:18:47] GL: We use fruit from across the board. We definitely focus on aseptic fruit simply for storage. It’s a lot easier to store aseptic fruit. But we use all the fruit that’s really available to us. Whole fruit, not so much because so much of this is going into the beer post-fermentation. We want to ensure there’s nothing on the fruit or anything like that. But we do use a lot of frozen fruit concentrates and frozen fruit juices that have gone through microorganism testing and everything like that.
We’ll use whatever fruit we can find, especially to come up with new combinations of these smoothies and different sours.
[00:19:22] DR: Absolutely. It was one of those ones where it’s easy for us because Oregon fruit products are an hour north. I have to get guys to drive to Portland, or I have to drive to Portland to drop off beer, I have meetings or whatever we’re doing. I take the truck up, drop off beer on the way back, just pull off the road right off I-5, and load up the truck with all the fruit you want at the back of the brewery.
But as John is saying, you start realizing that they have awesome fruits, but a lot of them are just standard stuff that you can get in the northwest, which is amazing because they grow amazing berries up here, all that kind of stuff. But then you’re like, what other cool flavors can you get?
Sometimes you just go with frozen fruit. We don’t use a lot of fresh fruit. I’ve done concentrates before. There are some other aseptic suppliers that are starting to release some really cool new fruit varieties that you hadn’t seen before. There’s papaya; you’re seeing […], a lot of crazy stuff. It’s really searching it out because of the same fruit flavor combinations—there’s only so many times you can do raspberry, blueberry, strawberry, blueberry-strawberry-plum. It all ends up together. Searching out because people are always looking for something new.
But it is mainly focused on purees, and as John said aseptic holds. One of the things we’ve seen a lot more is you might have an idea for a beer on a schedule. You’ll be like, this is the time that we’re going to go get and do raspberries, and then all of a sudden, Oregon Food Products is out of raspberries for a month. Then you’re scrambling to find other fruits because these things are getting more popular, and they can only process so much fruit.
So you have an aseptic so you can jump ahead and order something that’s a month out when they have it available. As opposed to having to order frozen and then find a place to keep it frozen because we don’t have a massive freezer in our brewery.
[00:20:58] TT: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. We had the privilege of Chris Hodge over there at Oregon Fruit Products to join us on a podcast. We talked about obscure, exotic, unusual fruits that they process and get requests for from customers and brewers. What’s the most unusual, exotic, or just crazy smoothie sour flavor combination that you made and/or tried. We’ll start with John.
[00:21:21] JG: There are a lot out there, for sure. I mean, people are constantly trying to come up with new combinations, us included. You want to come up with something like that. Most obscure, I guess it’s not really obscure in terms of flavor profile, but we released our second version of our Uncrushtables Slush, which is a la Uncrustables Peanut Butter and Jelly. That was a fun smoothie style that we did. It was just tons of grape, strawberry, and peanut butter. That was a really fun one.
But we also take a lot of inspiration from Tiki drinks too. We’ve done some Tiki-inspired slushes. We’re going to bring one up here next week that’s like a painkiller style. And we just released a blue Hawaiian, a hard smoothie the other day too. That’s always pretty fun.
[00:22:07] TT: It almost sounds like you guys should be offering up protein powders, and then just like a Jim Rice come in like, I’ll take that with a dash of protein powder or whey protein.
[00:22:22] DR: Get the wheatgrass in there.
[00:22:24] TT: There we go. So tasty.
[00:22:27] JG: It’s been discussed.
[00:22:30] DR: It’s only a matter of time before we get to the gym bros.
[00:22:34] TT: What about you, Dan?
[00:22:35] DR: I think one of the most obscure that I’ve had that wasn’t ours, it kind of blew me away, was a coconut beignet smoothie sour beer. It was from Urban South there in the New Orleans location. It had no fruit in it. It just has coconut milk, coconut cream, and beignets in it. Its straight top tasted like a beignet, and it was my […]. It was cool. I was just like, I don’t even want to attempt this.
I think the weirdest thing that has taken hold of us is our cheesecakes. John says the uncrustables; we have a cheesecake where I’m developing these recipes based on cheesecake flavors. The last one we did, which is probably the wildest, most extreme of the beers we did, was lemon blackberry cinnamon roll cheesecake.
It was like 1/4 Meyer lemon puree, 3/4 blackberry puree, cinnamon, marshmallow, vanilla bean, 200 pounds of white satin donut sugar—meltable donut-sugar, and then 200 pounds of New York style, no-bake cheesecake mix. It was awesome.
[00:23:46] TT: That’s awesome.
[00:23:47] DR: It was great. It was a good comeback because the first cheesecake one we did was the one that we had a recall because a week afterward, it started to referment. There are graham crackers in it, too, so throw that on top of it. Just keep adding to the list of ingredients.
[00:24:02] TT: I love paella. I was wondering if one of you guys could make a paella smoothie? That’s crazy, beignet. You guys mention all these ingredients in these fruits and these different things you put in the style of beer; it can’t be cheap, right?
[00:24:16] DR: No.
[00:24:17] TT: When you have customers come to your taproom or whatever and they’re bucking at $7 or $8 for a pint or whatever format you’re serving in. There’s a lot that goes into it monetarily.
[00:24:27] JG: Oh absolutely. I mean, it’s like most other products. Hops aren’t cheap either. But with the amount of fruit, just the sheer amount of fruit that you’re having to add to these sours, yeah, it’s expensive. Sometimes we’re adding 20–25 gallons of fruit per barrel, which is a crazy amount, and that can really up it. At the same time, if you’re adding that and if you sell it properly, you’re going to be able to increase your yield of the beer, so that helps as well.
[00:24:54] TT: Grant. What about you buddy? You tried a bunch of different ones. What’s the craziest thing you’ve either brewed with or tried as far as a smoothie flavor combo?
[00:25:02] GL: To be perfectly honest, I do not drink that many smoothie sours. But being down here in Texas, Martin House, they’re always cranking out crazy beers like that. They’re the ones I think of. I know they’ve done a cobbler. They’ve done one with buffalo wings. It wasn’t a smoothie sour, but it was a buffalo wing beer. I would say that was the all-time craziest one.
[00:25:22] TT: Yeah, they did that. […] partnered up with some dill pickle company as well out here.
[00:25:25] DR: Did they also do one that was like a partnering one? They did the buffalo one and then they did a ranch sour as well?
[00:25:29] GL: Yes, that’s right.
[00:25:30] DR: I saw that. I think that’s when I said beer’s dead.
[00:25:36] GL: We’ve jumped the shark here. I believe it was their batch two. They did buffalo wings, and then the second time that people liked it so much, they did another one. And then they made a ranch beer to go with it for a chaser.
[00:25:54] TT: They’re doing some cool stuff. Guys from Bhramari Brewing a couple of months ago, when they were talking about pizza dough in one of their beers, is wild. How do you guys get your inspiration from flavors? Is it, hey, I’m listening to the customer base, distributors, or is it just sitting in bed at night thinking about these odd concoctions I can brew up?
[00:26:14] JG: There are so many ways. Go ahead, Dan.
[00:26:15] DR: There is. When it started, when it was just the beginning of fruits and stuff like that, I think it all just came. We started with what the good fruit combinations are, and then you talk about a smoothie, all you need to do is go on the […] website or the Jamba Juice website and be like, oh, cool. These are the popular flavors right now. Then you move on and then you start.
When you get into these other things, we have what we call our Dreamsicle series. We do a tangerine base with another fruit. Like I said, we have the cheesecake once we do. Sometimes you get into these pastry ones or what goes well when you get more of these pastries smoothies sours.
I think it’s just going online and being like what fruits, fruit pastries? I want to do a blackberry pastry and figure out what comes up. You say cobbler, it’s like, oh […], you can make a cobbler beer. Like I said, looking at ways of a culinary aspect and it was some of these beers. All it takes is just finding a cooking website or a desert website and you’re good to go.
[00:27:16] JG: That’s one of the hardest parts, right? Just to find what combination can you do that’s going to be fully drinkable. Something that people are going to really want, but also be exciting and new. Over the years, we’ve taken inspiration, especially a lot of Tiki drinks. We have a whole Daiquiri Island series that we call it, so we’ve done a banana daiquiri, strawberry banana. A sunset edition, which was kind of like a Caribbean passion style a la Jamba Juice like what Dan was saying.
I mean, it’s fun to try to find the different combinations. Similarly to dry hopping where you want to find, hey, what new combination of hops have I not done yet that I think they’re going to pair well together and they’re really going to work out. It’s similar to fruit.
[00:27:57] DR: I think that a lot of it goes back to whether the cooking, barista, or whatever it is until you learn the fruits, really get to know them all and learn ingredients right, you have to play it semi cautiously. Because you picked the two wrong fruits or you do something wrong like you make an undrinkable batch of incredibly expensive beer. You eventually get good at it. You can realize, oh, this is what we need to do.
You want to make sure you’re making something that the customers actually want to drink. I had someone ask me, would you just take a key lime pie smoothie. I’m like, we could do it as a sour beer, why not a smoothie? I’m like, because you know how much key lime puree would have to go into that and how undrinkable it would be because that stuff is so sour? They’re like, I never thought of it that way. You’re like, well, that’s why you are not the one making the beer.
On the other side I take inspiration because as a person that makes them, you got to try other people’s ones. It’s seeing interesting flavor combinations that other people are doing. I have a thing when you see someone try it, and you can kind of tell there are brewers using artificial flavorings. Not concentrates, but actual artificial flavoring and stuff. It’s like, I think I could do that all naturally. Let me give that a go, delve into that, and try to make this as real as possible. I think that’s a big inspiration too when it comes to my side.
[00:29:06] TT: You kind of think like, I’m trying to get this to taste just like juice or just like a specific beverage. Or do you even look at, hey, I got to balance the flavor of the fruits or whatever with some similarity of beer? If I have my eyes closed or a customer had their eyes closed and tasted it, do you want them to have some sense that it is a type of beer? As far as the characteristics most of us would think is a beer, as opposed to just say this tastes like a smoothie.
[00:29:36] JG: I think the reason that people are trending towards these and you’re seeing these drinkers that you’ve never seen before. That’s something that a lot of people talk about. We’re getting whole new customer groups that I never graced our pubs before until we started making these beers. It’s because they weren’t beer drinkers. I will […] the day I die, you can call them a malt beverage, whatever it is. It has malt, it has beer. We brew it like it’s any of our base beers. We just put a ton of fruit there. I’ll stand on my grave and say that this is a beer, whatever.
But it’s because it doesn’t taste like beer, and it’s getting people that are like, I don’t like beer. Then all of a sudden, you see the lady that only drinks wine or the guy that only drinks cider, and then they’re coming in and it’s like, oh. Then you see this thing on their table when you’ve never seen them have that before and it’s kind of an eye-opening experience.
[00:30:23] DR: I think you hit the nail on that. That’s exactly what it is. Especially being a brewer, you want a little bit of that sour ale characteristic. But at the same time, we’ve got 29 or 30 other taps that we can fill with regular beer for those beer drinkers.
It opens up a market for people that maybe don’t want something that tastes like a traditional beer. I mean, it’s non-traditional for sure, but it’s a fun thing. Just like we want to have a stout, a pilsner, and a couple of IPAs on tap, we want to have something different for those people as well.
I think what shows off these beers for good brewers—brewers that are doing them well—is that you kind of can get to that base sour beer. But you’re able to actually create a drinking experience where there are characteristics of the beer, but not necessarily because they’re masked by your ability to make fruit because the base beer is so good.
I’ve had some of these where people have attempted them, and the base beer is bad. Throwing a bunch of fruit at it maybe for the first two sips will help. But after that, you know when there’s a bad beer under that. I think it’s the masterfulness of the actual brewers themselves making the base beer that you’re able to balance all those things out where the flavors of the fruit come forward, and you’re not ruining it by having an underlying bad base beer.
[00:31:30] GL: It kind of sounds, Dan, like the base beer, you want it to be kind of a clean and fruity salad, would you say that’s right? You don’t want those like other flavors that can be in a sour beer. They can actually be enjoyable, but the horse blanket or more of those Belgian flavors, you’re just looking for something very clean and sour as the base beer.
[00:31:57] DR: Correct.
[00:31:59] TT: Just an honest question for you guys. I don’t want to put you on the spot here because you produce and probably sell a bunch of these. But do you personally love this style, or do you have an opinion in either way? Do you just like it or you do it just because you have to?
[00:32:11] DR: No.
[00:32:11] JG: No, not at all. I mean, I love the creativity of it. It’s something that we’ve been able to expand what we’re able to do in our brewhouse and in our cellar. So for that, I mean it’s great.
Do I love them like would I crack one every day? Probably not, but I also like to change up all the different styles of things I’m drinking. I think that just the creativity and the fact that we can open potentially a new customer market as well and get more people interested in beer and brewing, that fact alone, it’s worth having it. It doesn’t feel like a necessity for us. It feels a lot more fun than that.
[00:32:51] GL: I will say, John’s multi-talented because he’s driving a forklift.
[00:32:59] TT: Dan, what about you, buddy?
[00:33:00] DR: It was one of those ones where I would go […] and say that it’s really about creativity at its core. I will occasionally have one like a full one here and there. When we first started making them, I was really excited. I thought the flavoring and all that stuff was super cool. We always have a couple in the fridge. It’s the perfect Saturday, mid-morning beer but not really beer.
But then you’re getting back into it, you’re making them more. In the early days, you’re just making sure the beer is holding up. It’s all unknown because we hadn’t done them, so then you’re doing sensory on them two to three times a week. And then all of a sudden you’re just like, I don’t need to have these all the time. But keeping on the creativity has definitely pushed everything. We do a lot of them.
It’s almost like you have to keep enjoying them because once you lose that thought process for creativity is when the beer becomes uninspired. Keeping the beer inspired, that’s what we try to do with all our beer.
The processes that we put into the cellar, the equipment we’ve gotten to make these beers better, it’s definitely improved all of our learning, and every single member of my team’s ability to brew raises their level. I like them for a variety of reasons. I love the flavor combinations. I love what they can do and what they can be. Am I having one once a week, a full glass? No.
[00:34:15] TT: I think about it, it’s kind of a ridiculous question because if you didn’t like them, you wouldn’t be making them at all. And if you didn’t like them and we’re making them, you’re probably not doing a great job at it. You got to have some sort of passion for what you’re doing here.
[00:34:25] JG: I think it’s one of those ones where it’s fallen into a different realm. You talked about pricing earlier. The price of admission to create these beers and do it properly is very, very high. It’d be hard-pressed for an owner to come up to you and say, if you didn’t want to make these, be like, I heard these are the cool things, go make these. And then come back and say, here’s a $4000 bill for fruit.
I think that’s a big part of it where you’re seeing a lot of people that are passionate about it doing it in whatever way they’re passionate about. As opposed to say, take the hazy IPA trend when it first kicked off, and everyone’s boss said to go make a hazy IPA. And then everyone just tried to make a beer hazy and throw whatever hops they have in their cooler, and it wasn’t following. It’s like okay, the beer is hazy, but it’s using 100% crystal hops. It’s like, that’s not a hazy.
It was much more easy to say, I made a hazy beer and put hazy IPA on a board for hops that are 675 a pound, as opposed to $4000 of fruit and other adjuncts.
[00:35:19] TT: Yeah, that’s a great point. Grant, you’ve done quite a bit of brewing commercially. Was there one particular style that you just said screw it, I dislike this beer because I see it, I brew it, I taste it, or I’m around it every day?
[00:35:32] GL: Not really, I kind of came from a more of a German-style brewery, and smoothie sours weren’t really a thing back when I was brewing professionally. I was spared from that.
But I guess the one that comes to mind was we would do one and we would zest grapefruit for it. It was a great beer. The beer is great, but the amount of labor that went into zesting that much grapefruit, that would just put me off on it. Every year you’d see it coming up on the calendar, you’d be like no. In the end, the resulting beer was awesome. You just had to have a bunch of brewers sitting around the table zesting grapefruit.
[00:36:07] TT: Do you eat them nowadays? You stay away from grapefruits altogether?
[00:36:10] GL: Oh, I love grapefruits.
[00:36:12] TT: There you go. We talked a little bit about challenges, obviously. But going back to gushing or explosions, what are your tips for preventing them? Is there some sort of anti-ferment product, stabilizer, or do you do any flash pasteurization? How do you combat what we know as problematic issues with this type of beer?
[00:36:33] DR: We had this issue. We had one batch of beer, and I’m pretty sure I figured out what happened later on. We had done probably about 17 releases up to this point and then we did actually our first version of a cheesecake beer. It almost made my boss tell me I can never make cheesecake beer again, which might be a good idea.
Essentially, we put the beer into the can, and not more than four days after we canned it, released it, and then five days after release, we got the first email. It was on a Friday. And then by Sunday night, I think we have about 30 different emails and people straight up where there were cans erupting cold in people’s refrigerators. Where it’s kept cold and it’s not going to do it. We did a full recall on it and refunded everybody. We knew that was the right thing to do. It’s our quality control.
That’s when we started the processes to ensure that would never happen again. Immediately, what we did was we borrowed a brewery friends’ bath pasteurizer. Bath pasteurized every single batch during that time frame while we were on order for a small batch pasteurizer from PRO Engineering that was able to use a pasteurizer. It actually heats the beer up at a much more steady rate. Bath pasteurization, you’re having a lot of cans popping, but we need to do it to make sure.
On top of that, we’ve got a filter on order, the lenticular two module filter that actually just came in. We’re going to utilize that between primary fermentation and the secondary process. Whether that’s aging on adjuncts or going grape to fruit to make sure that there’s no yeast in it. And then we’re going to add pasteurization as the third step to ensure that nothing is happening to the beer.
I never wanted to see an exploding can again. Especially when there are all these breweries that have done these and you see them and they’re just like, you don’t keep it cold. And then these other people, these consumers, are like we were trained for this and literally sending us videos of them sticking cans into one-gallon ziplock bags, zipping the bag up, opening the cans so it erupts in the bag, opening a part of the end, and then pouring the beer out of the ziplock. Who wants their beer presented like that? That’s ridiculous. It’s definitely an issue and we’re doing everything we can to curve that from happening.
[00:38:34] TT: John, what about you guys?
[00:38:35] JG: A lot of it comes to having good cellaring techniques. Making sure that your sour ale base is going to finish where you want it. We centrifuge everything including our sour base. And then in a bright tank, after we’ve added a lot of the fruit for these smoothies, we’ll add small doses of potassium sorbate, which will prevent further fermentation. It’ll stop all the existing needs for multiplying. That’s the nice thing about getting all the fruit that we have come in is already tested. There are no living microorganisms or anything on that, so we can essentially prevent any gushers.
But like Dan said, it’s difficult. It’s a very hard thing to do. I mean, we’ve even had an experience with a can that we do that has some coconut cream in it, which actually, we thought it was refermenting potentially because there was a little bit of gushing. We didn’t have exploding cans, but when you opened it, it turns out it was a hydrophobic reaction from the fat in the water mixing in the can from the coconut cream that we added.
You’re always going to run into these issues whenever you’re using new products. It’s a key part for us to stay on top of the cellaring techniques and make sure we avoid those altogether.
[00:39:46] GL: It’s a good point. This is a bit of a new frontier with all the different adjuncts that we’re putting in. There’s a learning curve to it, like the coconut you mentioned.
[00:39:53] JG: Yeah, absolutely. We’re brewers, so a lot of it is learning as you go and trial and error. I think we’ve gotten our techniques down really well. We luckily don’t have those issues again. But we’re always thinking about them, not thinking that you’ve solved every issue in the cellar, for sure.
[00:40:10] GL: The centrifuge you mentioned is nice. Coming out of the centrifuge, you basically have no microorganisms left; you’re able to get them all out.
[00:40:18] JG: I wouldn’t say all, but it drops a significant amount out. And then, once you add the potassium sorbate, there’s nothing replicating anymore. You can essentially stop that fermentation process altogether. When you’re adding the rest of your fruit post centrifuge with the potassium sorbate in there, its likelihood of having a gusher is very, very small.
[00:40:38] GL: Would you be able to tell us about what PPM works for you guys, or if you’re doing it that way? I take it you’re mixing in the sorbate into the puree first, dissolving it, then putting that mixture in the bright?
[00:40:49] JG: Yeah, typically. We’ve done a couple of different methods. PPM, I’d have to look back, I don’t know if I have that off the top of my head. But it’s a relatively small dose in terms of the barrelage in the tank. So we’ve done that. We’re hopefully going to get a deaerated water system in here soon so we can also potentially mix with some deaerated water, just a small amount, and pasteurized water, so we can just add it that way. But it’s worked really well for us so far.
[00:41:16] GL: Yeah. The brewery I was at had a deaerated water skid. I was definitely spoiled. It allows you to do a lot of things that you can’t do without one.
[00:41:23] JG: Oh, yeah, absolutely. We’re looking forward to bringing that online. It just opens up a lot of possibilities.
[00:41:28] TT: Yeah, going back to Dan. So you’re talking about the different pasteurizers, and currently, you said you use a bath, and you’re getting a batch pasteurizer. Can you walk us through a little bit of the bath pasteurizing process?
[00:41:28] DR: Absolutely. We actually have had the bath pasteurizer for about a month now. Bath pasteurization, it’s a much easier introductory thing to design and build if you really want to do it. Luckily we had a friend just north of us that had one. But essentially, what you’re doing, you’re building a gigantic water bath capable of holding. The one we’re using holds about 14 cases of beer at a time. It has inlets and outlets on both sides of the bath. Each of those is hooked up to a pump. The outlets are about halfway up.
You hook up to a pump on one. You’re basically opposite-ins. On one side, it’s going to be on your right, on the other side, it’s going to be on your left if you’re facing the same way. That’s going to be your in, and then the other side is the out. You’re actually creating a cyclone of beer inside, so it’s spinning around alternately. What you’re doing is you’re sitting the beer in the bath with water at about 150–155 degrees and without having a piercer, essentially that you can calculate your pasteurization units. You’re just using an online pasteurization calculator.
Hopefully, your water is at 150 degrees. Hopefully, it’s going for 15–20 minutes, and you’re going to get 10–18 pasteurization units. Which any of your normal yeast strains are going to die at 10–18 pasteurization units. Bath pasteurization is wildly inaccurate, though, depending on how it’s built. The water spins around here; not all the cans are doing. You’re essentially lining the cans in milk crates. The water doesn’t flow through quite as properly. The temperature is a lot harder to control, and it has to be at one temperature. We’re doing them in cans. It’s a much better process for a bottle.
Bottles are meant to take upwards of seven volumes of CO2. Because when you have something as carbonated, and it heats up, the CO2 is expanding out, and the capsule usually holds that in a bottle, but in cans, they’re really meant to only hold maybe four volumes tops. You’d actually start seeing cans start blowing up. Some of the time, the tops pop off. Most of the time, the bottom will actually expand out and literally just blow out of the bottom. It’s very tricky. It worked well for what we need to do for the time frame.
With a batch pasteurizer, it’s like a smaller version of what a tunnel pasteurizer would be. Essentially, hot water is rotated onto the bottle through a pump and sprayed. It’s not a sudden shock to the beer. What it’s actually doing is it’s over the course of 15–20 minutes to get to this pasteurization you need; it’s actually slowly raising the temperature of the bottle. It’s not making the CO2 just expand out, so you’re not losing cans quickly.
Like I said, depending on if you have a piercer that you’re doing it to test what […] you’re getting. But depending on what the thickness of your beer is, the different types of fruit, you’re looking at 15–20 minutes at about 150 degrees to get those units. The downside of the unit we have is that it only holds about four cases at a time. The time frame to do the releases we’re doing takes a lot longer. You need another body in there. But the consistency that we want to do in the bath pasteurization, sometimes we lose seven or eight cases of these beers to the blown-out bottoms.
When you’re selling it for $23 a four-pack, that’s a lot—having something that’s a consistent pasteurization product. The cool part is if you know that pasteurization (if done correctly) does minimal to alternate the flavor of the beer. I think it had a negative connotation, especially in the craft brewing world. But as you get more and more brewers, especially barrel-aged brewers, focused towards spirit barrel age stuff. They all have pasteurizers because they don’t want to recall $40,000 worth of barrel-aged stout. It’s much less of a taboo going into the industry nowadays.
Sometimes you got to explain to your customer and be like, what do you pasteurize? It’s kind of like the old, what? Do you filter? Yeah, man. They do have a filter. It’s definitely an interesting concept. We do triangle tests on all the beer as we go through. We do side by side of beers that we hold back that weren’t pasteurized next to them for weeks afterward to see if there’s any change—keeping them cold. And we’ve seen no change since we started pasteurizing. Was that February?
[00:45:49] TT: Okay, that’s an interesting point you made about the bottles versus the cans and the pressures they take. Your SOPs on your canning better be good, your seems better be awesome, or you’re going to lose a lot of beer. Is there a reason why you like the batch pasteurization versus one of those HTST or flash pasteurizers?
[00:46:08] DR: Really, it was just what you can afford. We looked into some of the flash pasteurizers—even the small ones. The smallest ones, you’re out $80,000, $90,000 right off the bat. The unit we brought in with the measuring unit that goes into the system to get your […] dropped on our door was $19,000 or $20,000. For small breweries, that’s a gigantic gap of money if it’s going to do the job, maybe in the future.
It’s also one of those ones where anyone can do it. You get into something with a flash pasteurizer; you’re going through heat exchangers and all this kind of stuff. You’re getting a more advanced […] into the position. When you’re doing this, you get something like a batch pasteurizer, even just a tunnel pasteurizer that you can stick on the end of your canning line and roll through. You can have everyone from your entry-level seller or entry-level packaging person all the way up to anyone who can use it. It’s quick, easy buttons, like boom, push it in, take it out, put them off.
[00:47:02] TT: You got my gears turning about the cans popping in the bath. I’m thinking here; if you were to take a temp probe, attach that to one of your other cans, and fill it with some kind of liquid that’s a similar density to your beer, you could put that in the bath and then get an idea of what it is. I know that’s how they do large canning for food companies. It’s how they know the thermal death rate and all that. It’s how they measure it.
[00:47:27] DR: Absolutely. I think it also just depends on the design. I think there are different design baths. As long as you can get your flows right and the size of it where you’re not creating suctions, that’s not allowed in the water to flow correctly. You can get near the temperature, and by the end of the borrowing time, which is about six weeks that we borrowed the bath pasteurizer, we went from seven, eight cases the first few runs down to maybe one or two. That was just because someone walked away for an extra five minutes, and all of a sudden, you’re like, oh crap.
But it definitely improved knowing where it was. It just took a minute to do that. Beer loss is still money loss.
[00:48:03] TT: John, something we always ask on these shows (and it could be green tea, it could be drinking the Kool-Aid), what do you enjoy drinking these days and why?
[00:48:12] JG: Probably one of my go-to’s right now is just classic bourbon highball. My brother lives in Nashville, so he always likes to send me some bourbon. I like to have that at the end of the day. That was fun. Just a little bit of tonic, a little twist of lemon, something easy, refreshing, good porch drink for a week of brewing.
[00:48:28] TT: It’s always helpful to have a relative that lives down there.
[00:48:31] JG: Always.
[00:48:32] TT: What about you, Dan?
[00:48:33] DR: Coming in the summer, it’s been kicking into lager season. It’s lager usually paired with—I’ve been on a rye whiskey kick. I’d worked my way through a lot of bourbons over the last few years and tried to get into that knowledge and didn’t touch ryes as much. Kind of been working it into a little bit of a rye exploration for the last probably three or four months ago. A Glass of rye once or twice a week. Sit down and just enjoy and try to learn more about it.
[00:48:58] GL: I’m with you. That rye sounds absolutely fantastic. I’m going to have to pour myself one here later on.
[00:49:04] TT: Before we get John, tell listeners what you’re working on. If you got anything, they should be looking forward to it. I know a lot of us are still dealing with this COVID crap. But once it goes away, what should the listeners look out for? Anything special you guys are working on?
[00:49:16] JG: Look out for more of our hard smoothies with our seltzer base. We’re going to continue those. We got a couple of fun styles coming out here in the next couple of months. If anybody is coming to Monterey County, we’re opening up a new place in Downtown Salinas. We’re going to start construction here pretty soon, and we’re really excited about that. I’m going to be a big bar with a little restaurant and going to have tons of different beers on tap. Come on down to Monterey County and stop by one of our spots here.
[00:49:42] TT: Dan?
[00:49:42] DR: Yeah, I’m just really excited. As I mentioned, we got a filter. Be on the lookout for a bunch of awesome new lagers that we’re working on. Just really trying to dial those in. We’ve been doing it for a while, but the first time you use a filter, you make crystal clear beer right out of the bright tank instead of letting it snap right in a keg. It’s pretty inspiring. We’re going to have some lagers.
We got a lot of new IPA recipes that we’re working on for the summer, and really excited to get to our anniversary month in October, where we’re going to do a whole month of barrel-aged releases, mixed cultures, diving into really are barrel seller, pulling out some absolutely beautiful barley wines, some pastry imperial stouts, ancient bourbon barrels for a long time. Basically, a whole month of awesome barrel-aged releases once we get to the end of this COVID.
[00:50:25] TT: Fantastic. Dan Russo at Oakshire Brewing, John Galante at Alvarado Street Brewery. Hey, thank you guys so much for joining us. It’s been a fantastic chat. Learned a lot. I damn sure enjoyed it. I’m sure Grant did as well, so I appreciate you guys jumping on.
[00:50:40] GL: Thanks for joining us, guys. It was really good hearing about your smoothie sour techniques today.
[00:50:44] JG: Yeah, thank you for having us.
[00:50:46] DR: I really appreciate it.
[00:50:48] TT: No worries. I appreciate you guys tuning in listening to another awesome episode of The BrewDeck. Stick with us as we continue to release these things. Subscribe if you can. We got more info and episodes coming your way. Cheers.

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