EPISODE S.4, E.4

Heather (00:09):
Welcome back to another episode of the BrewDeck Podcast. I am your host, Heather Jared. I am joined again, by Cheyenne Weishaar. Hi, Cheyenne.

Cheyenne (00:18):
Hi. How’s it going?

Heather (00:19):
I’m doing pretty good. How are you?

Cheyenne (00:21):
I’m doing great. I’ve had my coffee and I’m ready for the day, today.

Heather (00:24):
I feel like I could use probably about five more coffees, but we’re going to get there. We are also joined today by CJ Penzone. CJ is our newest co-host on the BrewDeck Podcast. Welcome, CJ.

CJ (00:39):
Hey, happy to be here.

Heather (00:41):
So CJ is also a Territory Manager here, at Country Mount Group. Give us a little background on you, CJ, before we dive into today’s episode.

CJ (00:48):
I’ve been working here for about two years. I’m currently managing Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. The lovely Rust Belt, as some people call it. And previous to working here, I had spent five years in production brewing, working my way up from a part-time packaging assistant, all the way up to Head Brewer. And In between, I spent two years working for my family painting business.

Heather (01:15):
Oh, awesome. Well, we’re very happy to have you on the podcast team. Some people might recognize CJ’s voice from our most recent Friendsgiving episode, where we did beer and food pairing at. He was also on Tales from the BrewDeck episode, back in season two. So go back and give us a listen if you want to get a good intro to CJ.

Cheyenne (01:35):
All right. Well, today we are going to be chatting about the science behind head retention. We have a couple of really awesome guests that we’re excited to speak with, but before we do that, Heather, you are a certified cicerone.

Heather (01:47):
That is correct.

Cheyenne (01:48):
And so, you are very passionate about proper glassware, beer presentation, beer clean glass.

Heather (01:55):
Beer clean glass. Yes, absolutely. And if you ask any of my friends, I’m very passionate about non-frosted mugs as well.

Cheyenne (02:03):
I agree. That’s a line that I draw as well, unless you’re in a dive bar, and then…

Heather (02:08):
If you’re in a dive bar and you’re drinking a Bud Light or a Coors Light or whatever. Absolutely.

Cheyenne (02:13):
I don’t think you’re too worried about head retention if you’re in a dive bar.

Heather (02:16):
Yeah. But I don’t want my nice, hazy IPA in a frosted mug or a beautiful stout in a frosted mug.

Cheyenne (02:23):
Exactly. Well, you have some background here. So if you could, would you tell us a little bit about your knowledge on proper glassware, how to present a beer clean glass, and all those things in between?

Heather (02:35):
Yeah, for sure. It’s really, really interesting. Today, both of our guests really dive into the science from start to finish what it takes to have excellent head retention in a beer. And it really is, it begins with ingredient selection, down to presentation and glassware that you use when you’re serving it to a customer. So this is something that we do go through when you’re studying for your certified cicerone is beer clean glasses, and proper glassware. There are proper glasses to be served, to use to serve specific beers, and you definitely want that almost tulip style glass you’re going to get out of Belgium, which are just those beautiful, again, tulip shaped glasses that have that little space at the top for the head retention, the head and the beer. Even the pint glasses coming out of, the English pint glasses that you always see are Guinness poured into.

(03:36)
They have that space in there for the head of the beer to let that aroma come through and all that good stuff. And beer clean glasses is something that I think everybody’s probably experienced when you’ve gone into a pub, or even sometimes the tap room where you’re getting these glasses that just, A, there either filled all the way to the top, or B, the foam just goes away really, really quickly. And a lot of that is because you don’t have a beer clean glass. So there could be residual detergent on the glass from when you washed it. Sometimes you’ll see at the top of the glass, there’ll be lipstick, lip gloss stains, that grease and oil. And that can take away from the head of the beer. So there are a few different tests you can do on your glasses to ensure that they are beer clean.

(04:23)
There’s the sheeting test. So you can dip your pint glass into water or spray it with one of the glass rinsers you’ll see at the bar. If the water forms into droplets on the inside, the glass is not beer clean. That water is then just clinging to those oil spots or just detergent spots that are in the glass. The water should just coat nicely and evenly on the inside of the glass. Another test that you can do on your glassware to ensure that it is beer clean, is the salt test. So you do the same thing, wet the inside of your glass, and then you can sprinkle it with salt. The salt should adhere evenly to the inside of the glass, much like the water would do. If it’s not adhering evenly throughout the glass, it does mean that your glass is not clean, because it’s sticking to different parts of it.

(05:06)
I’m not saying that everybody should be salt testing every single glass that they’re putting out. That would A, take a lot of time, B, leave a lot of salt in your glass-

Cheyenne (05:16):
Very time consuming.

Heather (05:17):
Yeah, very time consuming. But these are ways that you can show what a beer clean glass is. And then of course there’s the lacing test, which is the funnest one, because you actually get to drink beer while you do it. As you drink your beer, if the foam isn’t just leaving a perfect ring form around the glass, your glass is not beer clean. The CO2 will clinging to dirty parts of the glass. So if you’re having random patterns on the inside of the glass, that means that your glass is not beer clean and you’re not going to have the best head retention. So just a few things to look at.

Cheyenne (05:48):
I think that lacing is one of my very favorite parts about beer in general. I love seeing good lacing when you’re drinking a beer.

Heather (05:54):
Oh, it looks amazing.

Cheyenne (05:57):
It’s beautiful. Yeah, for sure. Well, I think that we could talk about this all day long if we had the time to do so, but I don’t want to take up too much more time. So I’m really excited about the guests that we have today. We are joined by Jon Downing, who is a Professor in the Brewing Program at Niagara College. And Jeremy Cross, who is the Lab Manager at Jack’s Abbey Craft Loggers, in Massachusetts. Let’s jump right in.

Heather (06:19):
All right. We are excited to be joined now, by Jon Downing. He is a Brewmaster Professor of the Brewing Program at Niagara College, in Canada. Welcome, Jon.

Jon (06:33):
Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Heather (06:33):
Thank you for joining us today to talk all things head retention. Really excited to have somebody from Niagara College on the podcast. You are popping out some amazing brewers there.

Jon (06:44):
We’ve been doing this for 12 years now and it really is incredible what some of our graduates have gone on to do.

Heather (06:48):
That’s awesome.

Jon (06:48):
It’s amazing in fact.

Heather (06:53):
Yeah. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, how you ended up at Niagara College, and then a little bit about the Brewmaster Program there?

Jon (06:59):
Sure. I started brewing when I was 14 years old, so I’ve been doing this a little while, and now 60. I started as a home brewer. My dad was a PhD in microbiology and chemistry, and he was a research scientist. So as a father/son project, we did a beer and wine thing. His wine exploded. My beer turned out okay, and I had a hobby when I was 14, making beer. My first job was, I was hired as a cellarman in English pubs looking after ales when I was 16. I’d never really planned on it being more than a hobby at that point. And I went to university in Birmingham and England, took some intramural courses because I was working at a couple of breweries during vacations and whatever, in Birmingham. And thought, “Okay, maybe I’ll go into the business side of brewing and apply to a few brewers in England”, like Walking Man, Truman, and Everards, and a few others.

(07:50)
And ended up not doing that, because I came on holiday to Canada in 1985 to visit my sister. And while I was here, I happened to find out about a Craft Brewing Conference, as it was a Canadian Small Brewer Association, CSBA back then, at which Wellington County were opening. And it was announced that brew pubs would be legal. And that night in the pub you could, [inaudible 00:08:17], sitting on my own, these French Canadian guys came up and asked if we could join and we started chatting, because they were at the conference too. And they told me, “Oh, we just bought all the equipment that was on show at the conference and we want to be the first people to open up a brew pub. We have the building, we’ve already started renovating. We just got the equipment, but we just don’t know how to make beer.”

(08:37)
And I said, “Well, I can make beer.” And that’s how I started in Canada. I moved here three months later, I took a Siebel course and had to wait for obviously my landed immigrant status and all that kind of stuff. But three months later, actually February 11th, in 1986, I landed in Canada and started opening the first brew pub in Ontario.

Heather (09:04):
Oh, that’s amazing.

Jon (09:04):
Yeah. Went on from that to… Because I was the first one doing it. I think people at Great Lakes, I helped them on their very first, very, very small system that they had up in Brampton, half a dozen other breweries in Toronto, craft breweries, brew pubs, mostly at that point. And then, moved on from the Atlas, opened up a craft brewery in New Market, ran that for a couple years, started opening up brew on premise stores for people. Opened about 24 of those up I think. And then all total today, I think I’ve opened about 125 breweries around the world. So a little bit of world traveling, making beer, making friends and all that kind of stuff. It’s been a great career. And the early 2000s I think it was, traveling was becoming not so much fun anymore after 9/11.

(09:53)
And just the difficulty involved in what was going on and everything. So I decided, well, I really love my job. At that point, I’d opened up 100 breweries and that have been my goal of my company, and said, well, I want to keep doing this. How can I do it? And so, I came to [inaudible 00:10:13] instead of me going to them, have them come to me. And started working on that. And I came to Niagara College in 2007 through a mutual acquaintance, an accountant friend of mine, and he said, “You should meet and chat to this guy.” And Steve Gill was the name of that guy. And he’s the manager of the Niagara College Learning Enterprise Corporation, which at the time was just the teaching winery that they’d started in 2000. But I talked to him, he talked to his bosses in the academic side and we started working on it.

(10:48)
We got the approval, we designed the program based on what the industry needed, through the Ontario Craft Brewers Association, and what information was available out there at the time, which was mostly graduate courses from UC Davis, Heriot-Watt, Nottingham in England, and the online courses, like Siebel and the American Brewing Institute, people like that. And we had to obviously make something that was driven for college. So it was not post-graduate, not online, it had to be something in-person. And being a college, we also wanted to make it practical. And that’s how the Teaching Brewery came into effect. I designed it, built it. The college had the building done. We got the equipment from Vela here in Niagara Falls. And we got our first 24 students, started in September, 2010, and now 12, coming onto 13 years later, we just hit 30 classes, gone through and over 500 graduates in the industry.

Heather (11:50):
That’s amazing. Well, I’ll say thank you for that, because A, you’ve been opening breweries all across the world and we love that.

Jon (12:01):
Now my graduates are doing it. I think the last count, we have about 30 brewery owners, 30 breweries owned by graduates. Owned and started by graduates. So that’s pretty cool.

Heather (12:12):
That’s crazy.

Jon (12:12):
So don’t [inaudible 00:12:12] in my total, but it should.

Heather (12:18):
It should, you get an assist. You get a good point for that. Well, awesome. So our topic today, we’re talking about head retention and Adam Wilson, who works out in your area, and I know he was out there doing some talks at the school recently, mentioned you and wanted to bring you to our attention that you would be the man to talk about when it comes to the science behind head retention in beer, how to get it, how to keep it, that sort of thing. So can you break down for us, what can provide you with good head retention in beer and how that works?

Jon (12:52):
Oh, sure. I’m not a research scientist by any means, like Dr. Charlie Bamforth, who’s written that excellent book on foam, on the technical side of things. ASBC have wonderful presentations that people should check out for the in-depth scientific side of things. But as a brewer, as a practical brewer, and as a teacher, coming on day-to-day issues with malts, with the hops, students trying to create certain things, we definitely have seen everything and continue to come across new avenues and new challenges when dealing with foam. And basically, we’re dealing with very simple ideas and it’s, what is a bubble? What is foam? And it’s basically, protein surrounding a bubble of CO2. So how do we make that better and how do we work it through is really I guess, what we’re going to chat about here.

(13:51)
And it really starts in the field, with the malted barley… Oh sorry, with the raw barley, the growing seasons, the terroir, everything to do with the farming of the product is going to be determined. And especially the weather on an annual basis is going to be determining what goes into the malting house, and eventually comes into the brewery. And if it’s been a bad year for the farmer, it’s probably going to be a bad year for the malting company. And then a challenging year, should we say, for the brewers to have to deal with those issues. We had one a couple years ago, where [inaudible 00:14:30] levels were all crazy and we had to get malts from all over the world. So every time malt came in, it seemed to be a little bit different, a little bit more protein or less protein.

(14:40)
And that’s really the thing that we’re dealing with when we’re dealing with foam is the level of protein in beer. So when you’re reading your malt ex, your malt analysis, the first thing my eyes go to is always the protein, because I know that’s going to affect my mashes, that’s going to affect my body, that’s going to affect my flavor, my foam and everything all the way through. So when the agriculture’s had a tough year because of bad weather, you’re going to have to do something in six months time when that grain arrives on your doorstep.

Heather (15:12):
Yeah, I think we definitely all saw that in 2021. It’s definitely a tough year. And yeah, check your COAs, that’s always been something we’ve been saying. Always check your COAs.

Jon (15:23):
Yeah. And there are things we can do, obviously the malts that you guys make. Tyler Scholes taught me a whole bunch about all this sort of stuff from GW out there, learning the proteins that are involved. I think there’s five main ones like Hordein, protein Zed or Z, if you’re South the border, those sort of… What is it? LTP, liquid transfer proteins and barley albumen, they’re the main proteins that are involved and some are more critical to hypertension and foam in the long run. But protein overall, is something that you’ve got to really keep an eye on and make sure that you have the right amount. I think it should be minimum 10% and not more than 14% in your malts as they come in, for a base malt anyway. If you’re outside those ranges, then you’ve got to do something about it.

(16:23)
And that comes into the brewing side, which is where we’ll [inaudible 00:16:29], play around with what we’re doing in our brewhouse. The other thing obviously coming out of the malt, the maltster and the malt house is the different types of malt. Over modified base malts will have a negative effect on what we’re doing. If it’s perfectly modified, if it’s like most European types of malts styles, like Pilsen malts, pales ales based on that sort of thing, even if they’re from North America, they will be perfectly modified these days for what we need. But some malts will come in, could a little bit over modified six rows, two rows occasionally. And you just got to keep an eye on that COA, as you said.

Heather (17:12):
Always. So what are some malts that you would recommend that are going to have those higher proteins that are going to lead to that nice, fluffy head that we’re looking for in beer?

Jon (17:23):
Oh, well, the ones that got the good proteins in them and also the melanoidins. Those melanoidins are a product of basically, proteins being scorched or burnt either in the kettle or in the malt house. So the darker malts tend to be very beneficial for us, more so than crystal malts. Crystal malts are a bit on the negative side, whereas base malts on the other hand, are nicely balanced between being beneficial or being negative towards brewing, which is why we can then modify what we do in the brew house to make them work better for us. But definitely the darker malts, the richer malts, anything over 80 to 120 lover bond, as long as they’re not too crystalline, the darker, heavier roasted malts, black malts and so on, also significantly because of the melanoidin complexes in them will really affect the foam.

(18:30)
And also the color of the foam too, which is interesting. Most people look that nice, tight, white dense foam, which will be from the peptides with the proteins in the lower level malts, roasted malts. But if you want that little caramel color or coffee color in your foam, then you need malts from the other end of scale as well. So really you’re looking at both ends of scale as far as malted barley is concerned. Obviously we can throw in other things, other grains that will be good for us.

Heather (19:03):
Yeah, let’s talk about the adjuncts a little bit. Some of those fun ones.

Jon (19:08):
For the flake barley, if you think about the beers that exhibit them the best, like stouts, it’s flake barley, it’s un-malted barley, that extra protein shot and the actually modified malts that they have in there, the darker malts really create that really dense foam that’s possible in a stout. And on the other end of the scale, from wheat beers and wheat malt has the available proteins that could potentially make a good foam, you think, “Oh, there other things along the way that need to happen.” But wheats are there from the malt side anyway. And you got to be careful of obviously other adjuncts. Straight sugar will give you nothing. Rice will give you nothing. Oats will give you some, but most of the oat proteins are more towards the hazy side than towards foam positive side, let’s say. But basically, we’re looking for anything, the polypeptides, the proteins that will be more beneficial to us as a brewer.

(20:10)
And obviously we can do things in the brew house that will modify those grains too. So the different malts, definitely you can choose between them. If your malt is over modified, you can throw in some chip malt or something like that, because that’s a deliberately under modified malt. It’s actually a cool way. We’ve done a bunch of brews in here where we wanted to really interpret older midi… Not medieval, but older, mid-European styles of beer and English styles of beer. And in order to do that, because the malts are so well modified today, we needed to un-modify them. And by using something like chip malt, it really gets us back to using…

Heather (20:55):
An under modified style.

Jon (20:56):
An under modified style. Yeah.

Heather (20:56):
Oh, okay.

Jon (20:57):
And that means that you can get the different proteins coming back in, give you a denser foam again, even from a very well or over modified mold.

Heather (21:11):
So this also has to be quite a balancing act as well, because if you don’t particularly want a hazy beer, but you want a beer with a good head retention and good foam on it, this has to be a bit of a balancing act to still be able to produce that clear beer with a good head retention, with the good proteins.

Jon (21:29):
Exactly. And we can modify it a little bit in the brewhouse where we’re doing the mash. Most malts today don’t need a step infusion or rising infusion, unless you specifically want to isolate out certain proteins or beta glucans. And we do for some beers, like for our wheat beers, we definitely do an infusion, step infusion and sometimes even a decoction, which we are fortunate to be able to do on our pilot sites here, just for the fact that we want to be able to break down some of the larger proteins and the small proteins to increase the foam on the beer.

(22:11)
And we also want those to then drop out. So when we get the larger proteins going through into the kettle with our heartbreak, obviously that’s the proteins bonding together and falling out. So it’s always like you said, it’s a balancing what we do in the mash, what we do in the kettle, the products that are coming in that really, really can affect the density of the foam in the long run, obviously in the finished product. And the type of foam, and sometimes you want different types of foam too. If you’re from my earliest days as brewing, homegrown England and working at the pub, we didn’t want a lot of foam in our beer. The reels ales coming out about 1.4 to 1.5 volumes of CO2. So the customers want that pint glass full. They want it-

Heather (22:59):
Right to the top.

Jon (23:01):
Bubbles on top, so they know it’s live and active, a still and dead beer, they want a live active beer, but they don’t want foam. They wanted that glass to be full, but you cross the channel to Holland and they want their glass half full of foam. So it all depends where you’re from too, what you’re looking for. And how you’re serving it and how you’re pouring it and all those other things too, which I’m get a little bit

Heather (23:22):
All those fun things.

Jon (23:27):
The lack of foam is not an evidence necessarily of a bad beer. It could be the style of beer. So an English bitter should not have a dense foam head on it. It should really be bare, there should be bubbles, but it shouldn’t last. There should be continual lacing as you drink, as the bubbles come out, as it warms up. But it should not have a big mustache making level of foam on top, if you’re having a Hefeweizen or a European lager in any city in Europe, and you’ll be looking for that foam on top. Obviously Guinness is the other extreme in the British Isles School of Brewing, and that they definitely want that very thick, rich foam on top of the Guinness that makes it so wonderful.

Heather (24:13):
Yeah, you need that. I feel like it’s not a real Guinness if you don’t have that.

Jon (24:17):
Yeah. And of course with the Guinness foam, there’s other items in play and in some of the widget cans that we see over here from England and in beers as well, where that widget is in there, sharing nitrogen bubbles to make a denser foam and to pull the nitrogen bubbles, which will pull down and a few bubbles will push up, which will gives up the cascading effect in the glass of making a denser foam with smaller bubbles, all of which made that beer unique.

Heather (24:51):
Well, I love talking malt, of course we love talking malt. We are Country Mal Group, but could we touch a bit on how hops can contribute to head retention and that lovely beer foam as well, because I know that they can play quite a part in that as well, especially with these hazy IPAs and stuff like that.

Jon (25:10):
Oh, definitely. Obviously the yeast is going to ferment the sugars in our wood and that’s going to make us the CO2 that we’re going to need. But that CO2 on its own will create bubbles, obviously that come purely from the malt, but that foam probably won’t last too long without hops around. And it’s the isomerization of hops that really, binding with polypeptides reinforces the bubbles, makes them last longer. A hoppier, more bitter beer generally will have firmer longer lasting bubbles, but obviously the malts and everything that go in are part of it as well. But a higher bitterness unit beer will definitely have more foam, more positives, denser, cleaner.

(26:05)
Sometimes you do want a rocky foam where the bubbles are different sizes, but generally you really want to have uniformity and all the bubbles, nice, tight, small, dense and long-lasting too. And for that, it really is the isomerization of alpha acids in hops that bonds with the polypeptides for the proteins from the malt and to create a more stable, more solid bubble. That’s a possible thing, but that’s how I think of it anyway. And so, that will give you a foam that is long-lasting, and can also be pretty dense and high depending on obviously at the end how you serve it and pour it.

Heather (26:50):
What stage of the brewing process is adding these hops in, really adding to that head retention?

Jon (26:57):
Oh, it’s the boil. You have to, isomerize the hops, which requires the boil. And so, the more hops you put in early in your boil, the better foam you’ll get at the end. Obviously it’s a scale thing. If you’re adding a ton of hops in at the very end of the boil, you’ll still get some of that isomerization. Dry hopping, that’s the other side of this. Generally, to my mind and to our experience in here, dry hopping reduces the foam on beers, more because they’re pulling out… I think the actual science behind it is that the alpha acids are pulling out the isomerized alpha acids from the beer at this point.

(27:42)
So it’s a balance. If you put a lot in, then yes, you’ll be okay. If you put a little in, then you’ll get that reaction of your bitterness actually dropping when you put a dry hop in. And obviously when you dry hop, you’re creating nucleation points. And that will also, nucleation points are pretty key in foaming anyway. But that’ll also cause your beer to be less foamy, because you’re pulling those proteins out already. They’ll then collapse back in and settle out a new fermentor. So just by looking at foam, we’ve all seen the videos of people pouring their bucket of hops into their fermentor and all of a sudden it shoots up and splashes everyone, hits the ceiling and the walls.

Heather (28:26):
I got to witness that last week when I was out doing a collab for the very first time. That was pretty interesting.

Jon (28:32):
Exactly. And that’s clearly the nucleation points. That’s the hops going in at a warmer temperature, into the cold beer and just foam, instant foam. That happens in the kettle too, at hot, which is much more dangerous. But at cold it can be pretty hazardous if you’re standing up on top of a ladder, pouring those hops in. But because now not only have you, first of all, flattened a beer, you’ve now kicked out a lot of the proteins that were around.

(28:58)
So obviously it has to be fairly controlled. You have to be careful how you do it. But the dry hopping will negatively affect your foam initially. If you do enough of it and are very careful about how you add it, then it should have a overall no effect, or maybe a very slight positive effect. But in general, dry hopping will reduce your foam stability, not your stability, but the amount of foam you are going to get, because when you don’t have the proteins there because you’ve already got rid of them all, you’ve already precipitated them out or foamed them out, then you’re going to have the issue of the-

CJ (29:35):
Well, I think you bring up a really interesting point for hazy IPA brewers. They work so hard to put proteins in the mash with a lot of the wheat and oat malts, but a lot of them are not hopping in the kettle and getting those isomerization of the alpha acid, and then they’re dry hopping at exorbitant levels. So do you have any advice for people trying to produce hazy IPA with great foam?

Jon (30:02):
Hop products. YCH and the other guys, Hopsteiner, everybody, they put out products that have isomerized hop extracts and that sort of thing. And those work perfectly for maintaining the foam and for creating the correct balance. You get your aroma, get the other attributes you’re looking for out of your dry hopping, mostly aroma and flavor. Plus they’ve got the isomerization, pre-isomerized.

(30:34)
So by adding that in, you’ve basically leveled the playing field again. So your beer foam should be as good as it would’ve been otherwise. You’ve also got to remember that the foam… Sorry, the proteins that form the haze are not the same proteins that form the bubbles. So that’s a balance too, is to make sure you get those two right. And I think more in the bubbles, if you think about the… Well, when you’re making a cocktail like a whiskey sour or something, that you’re using egg white, which is albumin, which is when the proteins in malt. And when you whisk that up and shake it up, you get a really nice foam and froth on top that sticks and stays in a liquid that would not normally hold, first of all, it’s not carbonated.

(31:21)
So it’s just air bubbles made from foam, and meringue is another example of that. So if you can get that kind of a thing happening with your proteins from your beer, that’s really what you’re looking for. And by modifying your mash and by picking the right grains, which might even be like Carapils malt, things like that, as well as the chip malts I already mentioned, and wheat, and oats obviously. Then those will all help you, because you do want to break out some of the proteins, but you want other proteins in there for your haze and you want other proteins in there for your foam. So it really is that balancing act between those three. So for hazes, it is relatively easy to get a good foam on them, but because they don’t put a lot of boil hops in, it’s hard to keep that foam on beer. So 3 ICE, so ice hop extract I guess is the short answer to that.

Heather (32:17):
That’s great, thank you. We’re going to touch on, let’s just touch on all the ingredients while we’re at it that are available in brewing. Are there specific yeast strains that lead to better head retention?

Jon (32:35):
For yeast to be truly active and good in what it does, which is creating the carbon dioxide and the alcohol. As far as head retention goes, that there will be… Your yeast obviously has to be very healthy. You got to have a good sedimentation, so you want to have your yeast to fluctuate out with some proteins again. There’s more probably negatives to yeast than there are positives, apart from the fact that it makes all the CO2, which is a huge positive. But then from a negative point of view, there’d be, well, if you leave the beer on the yeast on the leaves in the tank for too long, that’ll definitely adversely affect your protein balance in that beer and that’ll really affect your foam that comes out on top.

(33:35)
From the point of view of yeast health. Obviously if you under pitch yeast, you’re going to stress it. That will create certain reactions within the wood and the beer that could adversely affect foam. But really, we’re talking more about making sure that you pitched the right amount and the good clean amount of yeast every time. I’m not a huge expert on yeast, but we should really have my friend Nate here, he’s a colleague and a friend Nate, here. He’s our yeast expert here at the college and talk about this. So I’d say I know that the adverse effects are really based on the depth of yeast in the leaves and at the bottom of the fermentor where they don’t work too well. Yeah, that’s really about all I know about the yeast to be honest.

Heather (34:36):
Which is totally fine. That’s probably a lot more than I actually know about it, so we’re good. All right. So we finished brewing. We’ve gone through the whole process. So we did talk about this, CJ, Cheyenne and I, at the top of the episode, we discussed beer clean glassware. But let’s talk about the serving side of it, even the packaging side of it. What can you do for packaged product to help maintain that packaging in your brewery and being shipped out and being shipped all over the world? How do you maintain that head retention?

Jon (35:10):
It really is, no matter what we do in the field and the malt house or in the brewery, it’s all what happens when it gets into that glass at the end of the day. Luckily people are moving away from drinking beer out of bottles of cans, and they’re drinking then glasses more and more than in past years. So now we’ve picked up that visual part of drinking and enjoying a beer is very important. And you touched on the clean beer glass. The enemies of foam are detergents and fats. So as long as your glasses are clean and beer clean, if they’re not going to be clean when you pour that beer in, there’s all the bubbles are sticking to the side of it rather than nucleating from a point at the bottom of the glass. If your foam disappears rapidly, that’s because the glass probably wasn’t clean and still has someone’s lip balm or lipstick on it, that the fats from that are just breaking down the foam as fast as you can pour it in, basically.

(36:05)
It’s cool if you think about the different methods of how beers are poured from casks, where it’s a hand pump where it’s a gentle, delicate pour with very little carbonation coming out, to the Guinness Stout Tap or the can with the widget in it, where it’s all about shearing bubbles to make the bubbles smaller and it takes time. I don’t know if anyone’s been to the Guinness storehouse in Dublin, but they actually teach you how to do it properly and takes a minute and a half, I think, to pour a Guinness properly. You have to pour it and then stop and then pour again. And they let the foam settle out, they let the cascade clear, and that’s about creating more dense proteins on the surface of the beer to keep the foam and more stable and more thick, for one better term.

(36:55)
If you look at a pilsner pour, the other end of the scale with the increase in the number of people buying those pilsner side port taps, same sort of idea. I remember going to beer stubes in Germany and it would take you about two or three minutes to get a beer, because they’d be pouring them, letting them sit, pouring them, letting them sit.

(37:15)
And this would just out of tasks or barrels, not necessarily with a side either. With the side specifically, it opens and you pour that beer in and it foams about 50 to two thirds of the glass is foam. And then they let that sit there and settle out and you’re thinking, “Oh, my beer’s getting flat, and all those aromas are going.” Well then, they top it up and they top it up and they do it two or three times, and by the time it gets to you, it should have two inches of foam above the glass and an inch or two of foam in the glass, and it’s this wonderful ice cream looking glass of pilsner, purely due to the way it pours.

(37:54)
If you poured it out of a can, you could probably replicate it similarly, but if you poured it on a regular draft system, there’s no way you’d be able to really do that.

Heather (38:03):
I’m loving the resurgence of these side pull taps. I worked in the service industry forever and the first time I got to work with one, I just remember watching multiple YouTube videos and how to do it properly, because it’s so different from what you’re used to. But as soon as I see a beer on a side pull, that’s probably going to be the beer that I’m going to order.

Jon (38:23):
Exactly. Yeah. And it’s part of the show too. It’s bringing the bartender back into play, gone of the days of pitchers being slammed on the table, now watching the guy, it’s all about presenting the right glass, the correct pour, the right color. Sometimes you want that fancy, sometimes you want a nice glass to be in, make it distinctive. And the Belgian’s led the way in that making all their breweries to differentiate, and they brought out a different glass with the labeling, the branding on it. That made a lot of difference. And obviously it’s impacted what we do over here.

Heather (38:57):
And those beautiful tulip glasses. Those are my favorite. Awesome. Well, is there anything coming up at Niagara College that we should know about?

Jon (39:08):
Oh, always. Actually, the graduating class every semester puts on a fantastic event called Project Brew. The beers are made here. Each student is responsible for their own beer. They’re then responsible for marketing it, promoting it, and running a beer festival here on campus. And so, every four months I guess we get a new project brew that goes on. So we’ve got one of those coming up in April. Right now, we’re just plugging away, making lots of beers. We just had an event called Caps Corks and Forks, which was fantastic. It’s where our culinary students create a five course dinner, and then our winery students and our brewery students pair to each course. And that was so much fun. And beer actually won this one. So we defeated wine in the end, on the last course of all things with a fruited sour beer. So sour, sometimes they’re phenomenal and this one is absolutely amazing. So yeah, we do a lot of dinners and fun things like that here.

Heather (40:16):
That sounds like a fantastic event. I will try and see if I can convince anybody to let me come out there for that at some point in time.

Jon (40:25):
Oh, definitely. It’s well worth it. We had over 200 people at that one, and the last project we had over 600, so a lot of good events. Yeah.

Heather (40:33):
Oh, wonderful.

Jon (40:34):
And run by students, which is what it’s all about after all.

Heather (40:37):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, awesome. Well, thank you so much, Jon. This has been fantastic and super, super informative. Really, really appreciate it. And again, thank you for all of your contributions, especially just the Canadian brewing industry. Really, it’s just been phenomenal what you’ve been doing out there. Oh,

Jon (40:55):
It’s totally my pleasure, thank you.

CJ (40:57):
All right, well great. Today we’re joined by Jeremy Cross, the QA/QC manager for Jack’s Abbey Craft Loggers, Framingham, Massachusetts. Jeremy has over 25 years in the craft brewing industry, working for small brew pubs, production breweries, and everything in between and locations varying as far as Alaska to Massachusetts. So thanks for coming on, Jeremy.

Jeremy (41:17):
Thanks a lot, JC. Happy to be here.

CJ (41:19):
Yeah, well, we’re excited to have you on. Jack’s Abbey specifically is a large producer of craft lager with an impeccable focus on quality. So we’d love to know a little bit more about what’s your background in the industry. What brought you to Jack’s Abby and your current role.

Jeremy (41:36):
Sure. I joined the brewing industry back in 1996 when I was about 23. Don’t do the math, please. And I just moved around. I started as an apprentice. I found breweries that interested me throughout the country, and basically when it was time for me to settle down in Massachusetts, my wife had been following me to Alaska and California. That’s when I met Jack, from Jack’s Abby. When I was in California, I did go to UC Davis. So I did the Master Brewers program there in 2002.

(42:21)
So I sat for and passed the associate membership exam there. And so, I’m still a member of the IVD, I guess it was the IOB back then. And when I worked at a brew pub chain in the Boston area, I met Jack. He was pretty green, and he came in and we worked together. We both went our separate ways from there. I tried to open up my place. It was a not terribly successful venture, and I wasn’t too happy. And Jack was at my house for barbecue and said he needed a lab manager. And that was my experience. I didn’t really have much experience in the lab, and it was really trial by fire.

Heather (43:08):
So Alaska, California, Massachusetts, you have been everywhere.

Jeremy (43:14):
Yeah. I came very close to accepting a job offer in Germany. That would’ve been great, but I would’ve had to learn German and I just wasn’t prepared for that at the time.

CJ (43:25):
I guess the trial by fire was the preferred method over the German.

Jeremy (43:29):
Exactly.

CJ (43:29):
Often the best way to learn though. With your-

Jeremy (43:32):
That’s way too precise with the Germans.

CJ (43:34):
Can you tell us a little bit more about Jack’s Abby for our listeners? Your brewery’s uniquely focused on lager and produces over 40,000 barrels a year, which is quite an impressive feat in this market.

Jeremy (43:44):
Yeah, Jack’s been around for, I think this year will be on our 12th year. It’s been through a couple expansions. I started in October of 2018, so I’ve been here a little over four years. When Jack was first telling me he was going to start a lager brewery, I looked at him sideways a little bit and said, “You’re freaking crazy. I don’t know why you would do that. It’s never going to work.” And here I am with him, writing my paycheck. So I guess he got the upper hand on that one.

(44:23)
But we focus primarily on loggers, some traditional styles, some not so traditional. I think Jack’s Abby was one of the first breweries to actually, really try to do some commercial, outside the box loggers. Where Jack Abbey probably didn’t invent IPL, I think we made one of the first mainstream India pale loggers, Hoponius Union. That’s changed a bit over the years. People’s taste have changed from the West coast, really heavily bittered IPAs/IPLs, to more of a softer hop focus. So the IBUs have steadily crept down on that beer for a few years, but I think we’re pretty happy with where it is right now.

CJ (45:16):
That’s fantastic. So I think what brought us here today is, we’re talking about head retention. So let’s dive right in and what research have you been involved in on this topic at Jack’s Abby? And take us through some of the things you’re working on.

Jeremy (45:30):
So Jack and I are both pretty obsessed with foam and head retention. Jack is currently writing a lager book for the BA Series. So he’s been doing a lot of trips to continental Europe to study historical brewing styles. He did go to Siebel and went to Donans. So he spent a lot of time in Germany, and every time he comes back from Germany on a trip, he walks in the lab, pounds his fists on the benchtop and says, “More foam.” So then we think about ways we can increase head retention, because he goes over there, sits at a bar, and while we think our head retention’s pretty darn good over here, he goes there and sees this massive, beautiful foam on top of a lager that just sits there throughout the entire pint.

(46:23)
And that’s what he wants. And we’re looking for perfection, but we’re knowing we’re not going to ever get the perfect, we’re trying to do best that we possibly can here. So anytime he’s saying more foam, that’s when I hit the books again and look and watch podcasts and webinars and research and try to find what we might be doing wrong, what we might be doing well, how to accentuate the well and minimize the bad. Like I said, I went to Davis, and Charlie Bamforth was our professor there, and I think it was his first year at Davis. And so, he had a profound impact on my thinking about foam.

CJ (47:07):
Yeah, he’s pretty much written the book on foam, if I’m not mistaken. That one’s available to the ASBC or it’s one of the…

Jeremy (47:15):
Yeah. Yes, he definitely has. He’s written many books on foam. I remember the first day I sat down at in school and he introduced himself, he said something and I went to my desk mate. I said, “I don’t know if I heard that right, did he just call himself the pope of foam?” And my desk mate said, “Yeah, that’s his name.”

CJ (47:39):
I think that might be one of the best brewing nicknames you could have.

Heather (47:41):
That’s a pretty good title.

Jeremy (47:43):
It is, and I will no way professed to be the Pope of foam or the Archbishop of foam. I’m more of a street preacher on a upside down milk carton, screaming into the ether about hydrophobic poly peptide, stuff like that.

CJ (48:00):
That’s a perfect segue into malt. So what have you been doing on the malt side at Jack’s Abby to really develop good head retention?

Jeremy (48:10):
We adhere to a philosophy that everything you need in a regular beer, from a foam positive standpoint, is there for you. If you’re using just Pilsner or two row or maybe a little Vienna, something like that, you’re going to have all the proteins that you need if you’re making a well hopped beer, even moderately hopped beer. Everything you have there, should be enough for a good foam and good foam stability. We generally find that everything we’re doing to try to improve our foam and our head retention has to do with minimizing the negatives. So we don’t use things like CARAFOAM, Dexter malt, stuff like that. We certainly see positive head retention from darker malts, but we’re not using darker malts for head retention.

(49:12)
We’re using them because that’s what the style calls for. So from a malt standpoint, we just use our basic house logger is really just pilsner malt and Vienna, and we just work from there. We do experiment a little bit, if we’re going to do a traditional Czech style triple decocted beer or double decocted beer or something like that, we might use some slightly under modified malts in order to really capture what the decoction process is supposed to be about. But with regards to using specific malt, specifically for head retention, we don’t really do that.

CJ (49:57):
You mentioned decoction and I think that’s a great point to bring up. Have you found that that has an effect on the head retention?

Jeremy (50:06):
So we do our decoction a little differently. All our traditional styles, we’re not doing multiple decoction most of the time. And our final decoction is usually… The one decoction we do is generally a decoction to mash out temperatures. So if you think about in that vein, what it might do, there are some mired reactions obviously occurring during decoction. So that’s going to help with foam retention. If you have your proteins bonding with carbohydrates and some beta glucans to help a little more viscosity and slow the foam collapse rate, you can get a better foam. Whether doing a single decoction the way we do it, shows an appreciable difference, I don’t really know that. We haven’t really done trials like that.

CJ (51:05):
You mentioned that you guys are more focused on minimizing or removing the negatives.

Jeremy (51:11):
Yes.

CJ (51:12):
Can you walk us through some of those?

Jeremy (51:14):
Yeah, I could probably walk you through a lot of those. So there’s negatives you’re going to see in almost every part of the process. I guess we don’t really need to right now address. Where a majority of the foam issues happen, it could be at dispense. You might be doing everything right in the brew house, but the dispense could be an issue, but that’s not really, I guess what we’re talking about right now. With regards to things we do, hot side. Temperature’s important, thickness of mash is important. So for example, we were starting to see that we were getting some poor head retention on certain beers that we normally get good head retention on.

(52:03)
We saw that maybe our temperature calibration for our mash tone might have been a little off. So we decided to raise the temp a little bit, just by a few degrees, to raise the strike temp. And we were getting a slightly higher initial mash temp to around 147, 148, as opposed to 144, 145. And we saw an appreciable difference when that happened. Generally, we try to have a slightly thinner mash, because if your mash is too thick, you don’t have enough water, you’re not going to be able to hydrolyze those foam positives, like lipid transfer protein and protein Z. So we have a slightly thinner mash for that purpose.

(52:55)
We’ve added PATCO or anti foam in the kettle. We were finding we were getting some excessive foaming in the kettle when you would see the work come out of the [inaudible 00:53:08] and just shoot across, it’s not designed great, it would just shoot across the top and then just cause all this foaming. So we would have to add some anti foam there, because the more you can prevent foaming throughout the entire process, the more you maintain and hold onto those foam positive proteins down the line. You always want to minimize foaming in every process.

(53:36)
That’s pretty much everything we’ve done thus far. Hot side, cold side, I would say, again, minimize the foaming. One of the nice things we’ve been doing, the nice things about working in a lager brewery is, every lager beer we produce, we spund. So we have natural carbonation for people who don’t understand spunding. It’s basically capturing a bit of that fermentation that’s occurring.

(54:07)
So then you’re closing up the tank, banging it up with, basically a pressure relief valve that’s dialed into a certain pressure, and you are then capturing the CO2 that’s being produced. And we can find that if we spunded at the right time during the process, we will get the right carbonation or target carbonation. And why that’s important with regards to foam is that, if we were going to force carbon beer, it goes back to what I was just talking about is that any time when you force carbon beer, you’re going to cause bubbles to occur and those bubbles might precipitate out foam positive proteins that you’ve been working on keeping in your beer. So the less we have to bubble through our beer, the better it’s going to be for the head retention.

(55:03)
One other we worked on that was pretty interesting was, we essentially, again, we’re trying to figure out why we were getting certain foaming problems and we thought perhaps yeast stress might have been an issue. That’s one of the downsides of spunding is, you do get yeast stress. You’re building up pressure in that tank. You already have a lot of hydrostatic pressure just sitting on top of that yeast, but if you are now spunding up the tank, you’re creating a pretty high pressurized environment. So what that can do is put stress on the yeast. The yeast can release a enzyme called proteinase A, which is really bad for foam. It’s just going to eat up all the foam positive proteins. Same with autolysis. If you’re creating a lot of stress on your yeast, the yeast could autolize, so then foam negative enzymes will leak out of the cell and then break down your foam.

(56:02)
So that was one of the things we were concerned with. So instead of, normally we just would spund at the tail end of fermentation, at the same temperature we ferment at, which would be 48 degrees. And the spending device would be set to 0.8 bar. Now at the tail end of the fermentation, what we’re doing is lowering the temperature at spunding to 46, and then the next day, 44, and we lower the pressure on the spunding device. So instead of 0.8 bar, even just going down 0.7, 0.6 bar, we were seeing better foam. And what was interesting is, of those beers that we do that with, we started seeing lower PHs in the can, which indicated to us that we were getting some degree of autolysis that was raising the pH at a certain point.

CJ (57:02):
That’s pretty amazing that you’re talking about the yeast side of things. I don’t think a lot of breweries consider yeast health when they’re talking about their foam. Do you guys have pretty strict rules around how many generations you go with your yeast and yeast cell counting?

Jeremy (57:18):
Yep. We are very strict with our yeast. The general literature might tell you try not to go above 10 generations. We generally don’t hit 10. We’ll generally try to start re-pitching at eight. We’ve recently, in the last couple years, finally commissioned a propagator so. We can propagate a good, healthy pitch pretty easily. We do a lot of cell counts. Recent in the last year, we purchased a cellometer from Nexcelom, which is a automated cell counter, which is great. Gives you a lot of specificity, a lot, it’s counting thousands of cells versus when you look through a haemocytometer and your eyes start going blurry at 50 cells.

(58:09)
So it’s a lot more specific. And the nice thing about the cellometers is you can also test for vitality. So we can do vitality and figure out, well, maybe we are only on generation eight, but the vitality’s dropped a little bit, so maybe we should try to go ahead and start a new pitch. So the yeast side of things is terribly important. If you have an incomplete fermentation, you’re going to leave behind things like amino acids that don’t get consumed. Those are going to be short chain fatty acids, which are also really bad for head retention. So having a good fermentation is extremely important. And also, the other thing you want to do in the fermentation is, if you can, minimize the foam. Loggers, since they ferment slower and colder temperatures, you’re going to get less foaming than an ale.

CJ (59:10):
Does your tank design and size play a factor in that? I’m assuming you guys are set up to appropriately not have beers fermenting and foaming out all the time.

Jeremy (59:25):
All of our tanks have pretty much the standard 25% head space. For the most part, we’re not dry hopping any of our loggers, with the exception of a couple. So we also don’t have to worry about dry hopping and then having those hop bombs come out at you with all that foam and nucleation. So we’re not taking a lot of hop showers here, which is great. Most of our tanks, where we do our, we’ll do four turns, 60 barrel turns into 240 tank. Or if we do high gravity brewing on a lower ABB beer, we might do 280. So we will get a fair amount of headspace in there. And we don’t find that we’re getting a lot of foaming in these tanks with these fermentation.

CJ (01:00:22):
Well, cool. And I think, like you brought up earlier in the podcast, we’re getting to what a lot of people view as the most important part, is the actual dispensing and serving of the beer. So can you walk us through some of the measures you all take to ensure that that beer is forward with the beautiful foam you’ve been working on this whole time?

Jeremy (01:00:41):
Sure. So if you are ever experiencing a foam issue and it’s at the tap, or maybe a place you’re selling your beer to calls you up and says, “Hey, your beer is flat, or your beer is too foamy”, always work from there and work backwards. A majority of the time you’re going to find that’s where the problem is. We’re lucky we have a tap room and we do distribution. So I get all the complaints about anything. And so, when someone calls and complaint say, “Hey, I bought a six-pack of beer. They’re all flat, they pour terrible.” Well, first I’m going to find that can, because we keep a beer library, I can find that can and see what it is.

(01:01:25)
I’ll look back at the CO2 and all that stuff, and then I’ll find if we have that beer on draft, and see how they compare to one another, and maybe the can might pour the head we expect, but the draft not so much. Then you have to figure out, is it glassware? Is it the gas mixture right, the pressure right? Lipids, is the person saying there’s a poor foam wearing a lot of lipstick? There’s so many things that can happen on the dispense side. One of the things that’s important is to, A, train your bartenders, train them to know what a proper pour is.

(01:02:20)
I remember last winter, I was going Christmas tree shopping with my wife, and since I’m Jewish, it’s not my favorite activity, but to placate me, she said, “We’ll go to a local brewery afterwards.” And I remember we bellied up to the bar and she looked at me and my eyes were twitching and I was visibly agitated, and she’s like, “What’s wrong?” And I looked and I saw the bartenders were pouring the beer all the way up to the rim of the glass, zero head. And I knew the owner of the place and I thought, “Boy, he would not be happy if he saw this.” And we drink with our eyes. If there’s not a good head of foam on the beer, you’re automatically going to think there’s quality issues. So you definitely want to train your bartenders.

(01:03:14)
I think a really good thing to do is, if you have glassware in your tap room, have a pour line on it that’s going to give your bartenders a target. This is 14 ounces, this is 16 ounces, this is 12 ounces. And then everything above that should be foam. It does two things. One, it shows them the right way to pour it, but also, you’re always going to have someone in your tap room at a bar saying, “Hey, you’re ripping me off.” They see a foam and they’re like, “That’s not beer. You owe me two more ounces of beer.” At least that line will tell you, Nope, here’s the 16 ounces you’re getting. The rest is really decorative. So those are two of the things I would highly recommend from a tap room standpoint.

Heather (01:04:00):
This is great. I think it’s super, super interesting to just, every aspect of the process from choosing your ingredients to pouring it into the glass, to choosing your glassware, affects the head retention and the foam retention in a beer. And it’s just super interesting to look all the way through that. And it’s the first I’ve really heard about it in regards to the spunding valve. I am going to throw out there if anybody wants more information on spunding, we did do an episode last season, season three, episode 15 is all on spunding, but I don’t know if we really dove into the head retention part of it, so that was super interesting. Thank you.

Jeremy (01:04:38):
Yeah, no, it was pretty wild. I was looking back at all our notes and every time we package a beer, we run it through the alkalizer and we do all the testing on it. So when I was looking at the foam testing results and the pH results and I kept seeing that lower pH on those ones, we were messing around with the lower pressure and the higher foams. It really hit home that we did do something to help alleviate the issues we were seeing from yeast stress.

CJ (01:05:16):
Is there a simple test breweries can do in their own breweries to be testing head retention and foam properties?

Jeremy (01:05:23):
Yes. There are a lot of different tests. Some can be very expensive. Haffman has the machine, you can do the NIBEM tests on, where essentially, you have this electrodes going into the foam and then dropping with the foam and counting the time. And I remember, I was actually talking to Jamie Shearer, who’s the longtime quality lead at Harpoon about. I figured they have all these resources and they might have one of those. And I said, “Do you have one of these?” He’s like, “No, we have eyes. We know what head looks like. Well, why do we want to spend $20,000 on a machine that we can look at?” But there are cheaper versions, cheaper ways you can measure foam. If you went on ASBC and looked at these Sigma method, that’s one we do. It’s very cheap. It’s very easy.

(01:06:20)
Of all the testing we do, it’s the least precise and the least accurate. But for that matter, so is reading beer with a hydrometer, but we do that too. If you have five people read a hydrometer, you’re going to get five different answers on what the gravity is. So a quick overview of the Sigma method is pretty easy. You have this glass funnel, and you’re basically going to pour beer into it, create a foam up to about this 800 milliliter mark. The glass funnel has little tap on the bottom, and essentially you’re going to let that foam sit for 30 seconds. You’re going to drain off any foam that’s collapsed into beer, and then wait something like 200 seconds. And then essentially, you’re going to pour off the beer again, collapse the foam with isopropyl alcohol, and you’re going to measure the time and you’re going to have time versus amount of foam you’ve collected, versus amount of beer.

(01:07:24)
You just plug that into a calculator, it’s going to give you a number. That number in and of itself doesn’t mean a lot, but if you’re doing things to try to improve your head retention. It gives you enough data points to say, “Okay, the Sigma number was at 87 for this beer before we started working on this particular project, and now it jumped up to 103 consistently.” So the one thing I would suggest is, if you do go on the ASBC, look at the method. Because of its subjectivity, if you have multiple people in your lab or multiple people who might be measuring your foam, try to have the same person do it each time, because it is subject to how they pour it and how they time it, and when they decide to stop collecting the beer off the bottom of the sample, because all these little things that change can change your Sigma number quite a bit. So if you have the same person doing it, it gives you continuity. And while your number may not be accurate, it’ll be more precise.

CJ (01:08:38):
Thank you for that. I think most people can use some of those small tips. A lot of breweries get intimidated when you’re talking about QA/QC. A lot of small brewers don’t think they can do some of these tests at their breweries, so I’m much appreciated.

Heather (01:08:51):
Yeah. Is there anything else going on at Jack’s Abby that we should know about, our lovely listeners should know about?

Jeremy (01:08:59):
Well, yeah. So with regards to the restaurant. I think I mentioned earlier, our tap room’s going to be closed for a little bit, because we’re going through a major renovation here. We are continually adding tanks to add more capacity. We’ve taken on a few contracts here and there, so we’re basically never sitting still. We’re always trying to improve, whether it’s things we can find in the lab, like our cellometer that improves with cell counts or whether it is our relatively new canning line, which is really a showpiece and does so much better things for our beer than our old line. We’re just constantly trying to grow and try constantly trying to expand into going into other markets. Because I still think, even though people talk about the beer landscape being saturated, it’s not saturated yet with good lagers. There are a lot more breweries working on lager for sure, but it’s still room to grow in that department, we believe.

Heather (01:10:20):
Oh, 100% agree with that. And you can’t hide a lot in a lager.

Jeremy (01:10:24):
No, it is fun though, because those of us who are lager brewers, we like to stick together. So we do a lot of collaboration. We had a fun collaboration with Ashleigh Carter. She came down here, from Beerstadt, made some fun beer with her other brewers as well. That’s the fun part of the industry, just getting together with other brewers and being able to… I can’t go home and start talking about how much I appreciate foam to my wife. She really loves a good beer, but eventually she’s just like, “Will you just shut up and take the dogs out?”

Heather (01:11:07):
I think we all have those people that are lives that are like, “Can you stop being so picky about things?”

Jeremy (01:11:12):
Yeah, exactly.

Heather (01:11:14):
All my friends get mad at me when I don’t want my beer in a frosted mug. I’m like, “Look, it’s my thing.”

Jeremy (01:11:21):
Yeah. My thing is the shaker pint. I will shout out to the heavens… If I ever walk into a tap room and see a shaker pint, I just start twitching.

Heather (01:11:35):
Yeah. No, thank you. Well, awesome, Jeremy. Thank you so much for joining us today. This has been absolutely fantastic.

Jeremy (01:11:42):
Well, I appreciate it. I appreciate you having me on.

CJ (01:11:44):
Thank you for joining us in this episode on all things head retention. Before we log off for the week, a few exciting announcements. Next month is Women’s History Month, so stay tuned for episodes about the Pink Boots International Women’s Day, collab Brew and women’s history in brewing. We also still have Pink Boots Spot Hops, available for purchase. Reach out to your sales rep for more information. And also a huge thanks to Jeremy and Jon for joining us today. Be sure to check out Niagara College’s Brewing Program and Jack’s Abby Craft Lagers.

Heather (01:12:14):
We will see you all next time.