EPISODE S.4, E.9

Heather (00:09):
Welcome back to another episode of the Brew Deck podcast. I am your host, Heather, and I am joined again today by Cheyenne and CJ. Hi y’all.

Cheyenne (00:17):
Hey, how’s it going?

Heather (00:19):
Doing pretty good over here.

Cheyenne (00:20):
Awesome. Is it sunny for you?

Heather (00:22):
It is finely sunny for me.

(00:26)
I mean at time of recording it is sunny. At time of release, it will most likely be raining again, but I’ll enjoy it as I can.

Cheyenne (00:33):
That makes sense.

Heather (00:33):
Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Before we fully jump into this week’s episode, I want to touch on some stuff. The Craft Brewers Conference is coming. We’re going to be at CBC next week in Nashville. So here’s a few things for everyone to put into your calendars. Monday, May 8th from one to 2:00 PM our lovely Tyler Skulls will be doing a talk on rot ingredient storage and best practices. And then from six to eight, we’re going to be at the Pink Boots Members Meetup at Jackalope Brewing. And on Tuesday night, I’m so excited for this. We’re going to be hosting our one stop party at Yee-Haw Brewing from seven till nine. So make sure to come down and join us and some of our amazing vendor partners for a night of live music, and you get to try all of our delicious collaboration brews that we’ve done for the event, and we’re going to just celebrate this amazing industry together.

(01:31)
We have Goodbye June is going to be playing, and this is going to be presented by Craft Beer and Brewing, and it’s also sponsored by, of course, us AB Biotek, Briess Malting, Five Star Chemicals and Oregon Fruit. So make sure to put that in your calendar and come and see us. And then throughout the rest of the week, you can find us all at booth 1345. We’re going to have all of our collab beers on tap and that is 11 beers from local Tennessee breweries. We will all be there doing live podcast recordings, so if you want to put some faces to these voices, come down and say hi. There’s going to be a pinball tournament. Thanks to our friends at Stern Pinball, lots of giveaways, swag and all that stuff. Take a look at our CBC website, justcountrymalt.com/cbc23 for all of our details, and we cannot wait to see everybody in six days.

Cheyenne (02:26):
And speaking of CBC, we have the World Beer Cup coming up, which I personally am very excited for. We’ve got our Filson vest program. With that program, we will be awarding one Filson vest to each brewery that wins gold in that competition. Using either our Great Western Malting or Canada Malting Co base malts. You can also participate in the Filson Vest program when you win gold in the Canadian Brewing Awards, or the Great American Beer Festival. Or for any distillery that wins double gold in a whiskey category at the San Francisco World Spirits. You can learn more about our Filson vest program by checking out our Vest of Both Worlds episode in season two, that’s episode number eight. You can also reach out to your sales rep for more information

CJ (03:09):
To better support brewers and beverage producers, country Malt will be dropping recipes on our website. These will be inclusive of the latest style trends, processes, and will highlight ingredients from our catalog. These recipes are designed by our team of brewing professionals with instructions that are scalable for brewers of any size. You can find them on CMGs website at countrymalt.com/recipes. Is there a style, process or ingredient you would like to see in recipe form? Reach out to your sales rep and let them know or fill out the form on our website. Happy brewing. Stick around for our Ask Abi segment at the end of the podcast.

Heather (03:47):
All right, so we have a full house of guests this week and we’ve got some really, really exciting news. Canada Malting is officially launching our new adjunct facility and adjunct products. This is coming out of our plant in Calgary, Alberta, and the first product that we’re going to be launching is our new rolled oats. So today we’re going to be talking to some guests that are actually not strangers to the podcast, Natasha Peiskar, Kyran Flett, Jonathan Warwick and Idris Abilagbo, all from Canada Malting, telling us all about this really awesome new project. And we’ll also be talking to brewers from Cabin Brewing and great Notion Brewing who’ve actually got to trial the new product. So let’s jump in.

(04:33)
Well, we have a full house today, so I’m going to just jump right into it. Kyran, can you give us a little bit of a brief history on Canada Malting?

Kyran (04:48):
Yeah, definitely. So specifically Canada Malting in Calgary put up the first malt house in 1912, one of the first operations in Calgary and now still kind of resides in the central part of the city. It’s had a mini expansion since then. So we’ve had four different malt houses. We’ve had a ton of growth both from larger brewers but also then with the craft industry over the last 20 years. So we’ve had many additional assets across the prairies and in Calgary to support that growth in the industry. We invested in some country elevators and grain elevators for us to source barley and other grains, and really help drive quality on the inbound. Also, since then, since 2010, we’ve invested in a water treatment facility, a aerobic and anaerobic water treatment facility, which was commissioned in 2013 and which just last year allows us to actually put water back into the river and really reduce our impact on the local watershed.

(05:58)
We’ve created a co-generation, which was commissioned in January 2022 and really try to reduce our carbon footprint, reduce the plant load on the local energy grid and capture electrical generation as we are using heat and energy from the kiln. From there, we actually brought in a bagging line to Calgary to support the continued growth in the craft industry. So that was commissioned in 2019 and we’ve had really great success with that on all of our malt products, which then kind of leads us to our next project, which was an adjunct facility here in Calgary. And same thing, that’s really designed to bring home adjunct production into Calgary and help us define, help us capture quality and our exposure to grain across the prairies and really drive a product specific for brewers from that production standpoint.

Heather (07:04):
Yeah, it’s been just amazing watching the facility in Calgary just grow and grow over the years.

Kyran (07:11):
Yeah, it’s awesome.

Heather (07:13):
And talking about co-gen and the water treatment facility, we had Jonathan on our last episode telling us all about those projects. So Jonathan, as the project engineer for Canada Malting and United Malt, can you tell us about the new adjunct facility project that you were working on?

Jonathan (07:30):
Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, we’ve spent a good few number of years planning this really. I think honestly the first file on my computer on the project was probably back in 2017, so I guess you could probably say this was almost six years in the making. Where we wanted to basically take a look at what we’re selling with under the Canada Malting brand in regards to unwanted adjuncts, and build a facility that at Calgary that enables us to do that all in house. So obviously we had quite a lot of homework to do. This is, although it’s similar to malt, in fact, we sell it to brewers, it’s quite a different process, and there’s a lot of work that we had to do in regards to learning the process, learning the equipment just so we could basically design and build this state-of-the-art line and have it be a top performing really, really high quality production facility.

(08:33)
So we went to school a little bit and we looked at some other facilities that operated running similar equipment for the oak milling industry for breakfast cereals and things like that. We took trips over to Europe to take a look at equipment and really get to the bottom of what was the right choice for us. And essentially, we eventually settled on the design, which we then obviously went ahead and built. So there’s a number, there’s quite a bit of processes at play here, but essentially the heart of the process is the cooking and then the subsequent flaking of the grain. Grains here being, it could be any number of things. A lot of it is obviously oats, but we also process wheat, rye, barley, essentially any kind of cereal crop we can process to some degree or the other.

(09:27)
Oats is the predominant one for us. That’s kind of like the benchmark by which we really test everything. It’s the majority of what our customers are looking for. So that’s where we put a lot of our focus and so that’s why we spent a lot of time with experts and consultants in the oat milling industry. People that have been working in the industry for essentially 30, 40 years were essentially the key design people on the project for us.

(09:55)
We ended up getting a couple different cookers, so it’s something a little bit different that we went for. We actually got two different cookers. One is what we call the steam chest, which is very conventional style of cereal cooker for flaked material. And essentially, really what it is at its core, it’s a big tall cylindrical bin that we fill up with grain and we inject steam into it. Steam is really the motive force of the process. It’s what hydrates the grain and heats up the grain to get it in that sort of semi plastic state where we can flake it to really high quality.

(10:36)
So that’s really simple piece of equipment for us. Essentially we fill it up with grain, we start injecting steam, we turn it over and then when we obtain the optimum quality that we want, we engage the rollers beneath it and we flake everything that comes out, and it becomes a steady state process from there on out. It’s a great piece of equipment absolutely bulletproof. You can basically put in almost anything through it and you’ll get a great thought quality flake out of it, but it is otherwise quite limited in regards to what you can do with the recipes.

(11:12)
So that’s where we come into our second cooker that we bought, which is from a company out of France called Revtech. And a Revtech cooker is quite a unique little beast. It’s essentially, if you had to look at it’s a big tall tower about 25 feet tall, and we have a coiling tube that goes up the perimeter of the tower. And when it’s an operation, the whole thing shakes at a relatively high frequency and it’s quite a scary little piece to see start up, but once it gets going, it steadies out and it doesn’t seem so violent. But essentially what it does is it takes the grain in the bottom and the vibration of the tower vibrates it up until it starts coming out the top.

(11:58)
And the purpose of that is that you get really even treatment of each individual kernel, because essentially if you can imagine taking a zoomed in look into the cross section of the tower, you’ll see all the little grain kernels bouncing around and jumping as they climb the tower. And so that means each side of the grain is getting treated evenly. Each individual grain is getting evenly treated. They’re not one stuck on the outside edge, one stuck on the center. It’s very homogenous treatment of the grain. While it’s coiling up through the tower there, we also inject steam very similar to the steam chest I described earlier. Obviously we’re doing that for exact the same reasons. We hydrate the grain a little bit and we get it warmed up to a nice plastic sort of consistency.

(12:49)
And the Revtech gives us additional opportunities on top of that as well. Because not only do we have the option to inject the steam, we actually have electric power that we can use to heat the tower as well. And that happens in a number of discreet steps. So we can actually get quite a wide range of temperatures, much higher range of temperatures than we can get with steam alone, and that really allows us to tailor our recipes to exactly where we want them to be. We can add a little bit extra heat, we can actually preheat the whole system before even the grain and the steam get introduced, and it keeps it very, very stable in terms of the temperature that we want to see.

(13:33)
It also opens up the possible recipe book of what we want to do. So when it goes beyond flaked oats, flaked, wheat and flaked barley, sort of those really core simple products that move for us, we can actually start do interesting things for us. And this is where we really sort of push the boundaries on the project a little bit, and we tried to look a little bit further into the future and see what we could possibly want to make in the future that A, we don’t make today or B, tailor to our customers if there’s a new trend or a new product that we want to push or grows on organically through demand of the brewers. And that’s obviously something that we’re really interested in doing is taking all this equipment that we have and putting it to work and creating some weird stuff really.

(14:32)
Yeah, so I mean that’s kind of the cooking step and the reason why we do that is, just to give a slight tangent here on the process here, is that obviously we’re taking raw grain in this regard. Raw grain are defined as unmalted, so grain that hasn’t gone through the malted process and we want to sort of take those starch crystals that are inside of it and essentially pre gelatinize them. And what that kind of means, the scientific gets really, really deep and murky if you want to go that far. But essentially, what it means is that the grain is more prepared for gelatinization when you are introducing it into mash like conditions. So when it gets to the brewer, they can essentially take a bag of our adjunct and dump it directly into the mash and the temperatures and the conditions of a mash will mean that you get full utilization of the starch as present kernels.

(15:35)
If we weren’t to obviously cook it, if we weren’t to flake it, and we just take a bag of raw grain and just dump it straight into a mash, it would probably be a mess. You would have A, problems with it going through your mill would be very hard glassy kernels probably making a racket and shattering as they go through the mills. And obviously when it hits the mash A, you may not get that great utilization of the starch that we want or it may just be big solid hole kernels that just make your beds, your mash bed very porous and not very filtered very well. So that’s the reason why we’re doing it, and that’s the pre-gelatinization that we do in these two different cookers.

(16:22)
But for most of the products that we’re doing, we’re also flaking them. So we kind of went to the market and we looked at what was available in regards to flakers and we essentially went for top of the line model. It’s a Bühler model, you wouldn’t believe how much engineering they put into essentially what boils down to two little drums or two large drums. I used to say rolling in opposite directions and crushing grain. There’s quite a lot more to it than you would otherwise think. So it’s got… It’s all a manufactured in Switzerland, the rolls themselves are actually tempered so we can preheat them up to our optimum operating temperature. And when we’re in operation, it actually has a cooling cycle, so it will regulate the temperature of the rolls to keep it exactly on the process spec that we need it to be. The whole thing is really very, very fine in its control. We can adjust the thickness of the flakes to microns on either side of the rolls and get a very even very consistent thickness to our flake.

(17:38)
So yeah, that’s kind of the heart of the process. Obviously, we had to put in a new building to put it all in. We put a dedicated intake facility to essentially handle all the incoming grains separate to one of everything else that we have going on in the plant. Separate storage bins, cleaning, post cleaning, aspiration, tempering, which is sort of the introduction of water to the grain prior to it cooking, it was all part of the other things that we’ve put into the facility.

(18:08)
Really the over encompassing goal for us in the design of the facility was flexibility and quality. So best possible equipment that we get, and putting in as much possible optionality to the process such that A, we can dial in the recipes exactly to what a brewer might want, but B, also leave the door open to future products down the line. And that’s kind of like our philosophy with the whole thing and that’s what we did. And so we spent couple years building it, installing it, commissioning it, and leads us to where we are today where we’re essentially it’s done. And we’re ready to start rolling out the product and getting it into customer’s hands.

Heather (18:57):
Rolling out, no pun intended. Hey.

Jonathan (19:03):
Actually that was not intended, but…

Heather (19:05):
Sure, sure. I do want to say I had the absolute pleasure of getting to actually tour the facility last time I was in Calgary, and it is one of the coolest things I think I’ve seen. It’s just that Revtech is insane, and I hope everybody gets a chance to come and see it one day because it’s just really, really cool.

Jonathan (19:25):
Yeah, it’s quite a daunting facility when you walk in there for sure. And it’s weird. It’s different than what pretty much everything else that we have in the company, so it’s kind of kind of fun in that way. Yeah,

Heather (19:40):
I think I said it, I was like, I don’t, It’s not at all what I thought it would look like. Not that I don’t know really what I thought a flaking facility looked like, but yeah, it’s really, really cool.

Cheyenne (19:49):
It’s been very cool to learn about all of the technology that’s involved behind all of this processing, and it kind of sounds like with this facility you have complete control over the quality of the products that you’re making. So Natasha, can you tell us a little bit about what makes these products different from other adjunct products that are on the market?

Natasha (20:08):
Yeah, so I think the biggest thing is being able to bring this process in house. So we’re able to have… We’ve built this facility, we have it on site, we have complete control over the quality. We’re able to take some feedback that we’ve gotten through the testing process, and really dial in the recipes for this product. So we’re pretty excited about that. We can be a little bit more nimble to the needs of the market, and we look forward to working with our customers on this as we’re getting that feedback and really dialing it in.

Cheyenne (20:47):
That’s very…

Jonathan (20:47):
Very, yeah, and if you wouldn’t mind me expanding on that as well. What we found is that a lot of what is being sold into the brewing market as adjuncts is a good product, but it’s essentially a food product. So the product was produced for the food industry, for the cereal industry, I’ll say specifically, think cereal bars, granola, that kind of thing. And so obviously their concerns and their quality aspects are attuned specifically to what that kind of customer needs, which just so happens it works out very nicely for 90% of criteria that works great for brewers too. But in regards to the finer touches, we actually have the opportunity now to obviously produce a product which is tailored to brewers. So things like the degree of cooking, the flake thickness, these kinds of things that we can actually just tweak a little bit, and get just right for what a brewer might want.

(21:55)
And so obviously that’s that we’ve gone through and we’ve done some test recipes, we’ve gotten an out to some customers, we’ve got some feedback, incorporated that back into the process. I don’t mind, I hope, I don’t mind speaking south tone, but I like to see that as being an ongoing process as we continue to get more experience under our belt and get some few hundred thousand tons through the equipment we can really continue to tweak this to what our customers need. And with specifics on that, I would mention that obviously you may see a transition from quick oats to what we call rolled oats or flaked oats, barus flaked oats, in the CMC bags as we transition over to the new process. To not get too bogged down of the wheat greeds, into the weeds, sorry, is that essentially what we’ve been selling under the Canada Malting brand thus far is a quick oats product, which means that we take an oat groat and we cut it into small pieces, we cook those small pieces and then we flake those small pieces individually.

(23:06)
The reason for it in the marketplace is that, when you’re talking about the quick, what’s called the quick breakfast industry, the instant breakfasts, it was essentially developed as a need to essentially have quick cooking grains that essentially you can have in a pot, you can boil a kettle pour in hot water and have it essentially turn into porridge within a minute or two, and that’s why it’s called quick oats. What we found with our trials, and when we were developing the project is that it wasn’t really necessarily the best product for a brewer to handle. We found that there was a lot of dust and binds that caused a number of issues during handling. So we essentially transitioned into producing what we call a flaked oat product. The process is largely unchanged except for the part where we are not cutting the groat into those small little pieces. So we keep the oat groat nice and intact, we cook it as a whole piece and we flake it as a whole piece.

(24:11)
And what that means is that it will stay intact for longer. It’s a more robust flake, such that as it goes through handling systems gets put into a bag, loaded it onto a pallet, gets sent to a customer, they grab it off of pallets and then they ultimately open it up and throw it into a mill or a mash. There’s far less breakage of binds that gets generated along that way, which means less dust, less mess and better handling through all those systems. So that’s probably going to be the most immediate and obvious change as we sort of transition into our process. But beyond that, the processability from the brewing end should be unchanged. The flavor contribution, the head retention, the body, everything that you look out, look for in your flaked adjunct is unchanged. And that largely goes the same for almost all the other adjuncts as well. When we talk about flaked wheat, flaked barley, they should be about as seamless as they can be. Given that we’re obviously transitioning into a new facility with new equipment.

CJ (25:29):
So in addition to changing to rolled oats from the flaked, we’re also updating our bags. Natasha, could you talk about that a little bit?

Natasha (25:38):
Yeah, so the new bags will have a new Canada Malting branded look to it. Still sticking with that easy open top, although when I was a brewer I took great pride in being able to whip those strings off the bag, but the easy open tops are great, so those aren’t changing at all. We are sticking with a 22.7 kilogram or a 50 pound bag. That’s something I guess we’ve been getting a lot of questions on, and there are some considerations there to do with density of the product and being able to fill and ship the bags safely. Plus also for the brewers out there, you don’t have to make any adjustments to your recipes if you’re already getting a flaked oat product from us. So you’ll keep seeing those flaked products in that size of bag.

Heather (26:34):
That’s great. Could I also pick on your advanced cicerone palette for a second here, Natasha? Because I know that you’ve done some side by side with some of the beers of the products. We’re going to be talking to Cabin Brewing in this episode as well, as well as Great Notion that have worked with our previous lake products and have done some trials with the new rolled outs. They’re going to give us kind of our opinions on them. Can you tell me if you like what you noticed for differences, if you noticed a difference?

Natasha (27:04):
Yeah, absolutely. I did a little secret sensory analysis of my own. No, it was really great. We got to work with some local breweries here in Calgary and I was able to get some kind of before and after finished products of the beverages that they made, and did a blind sensory analysis panel on that. And the long and the short of it is that there were no noticeable changes. There’s a couple of processing changes, which I’m sure you’ll dig into with them as far as how we handle the product, nothing negative. But honestly as far as haze retention, head stability, mouth feel, and flavor went, negligible differences in the change of the product. So super proud of the team here that we were able to create such a consistent product that we’re excited for everyone to use.

Heather (28:06):
Yeah, the feedback that we’ve gotten on these rolled oats has just been spectacular. I literally had a brewer in Calgary that was like, I can’t wait till they’re fully out of the market. We want to use them all the time. So I think that’s great. Idris, obviously we’re talking about… We’re starting with a rolled oat. Can you give us a little sneak peek on what’s going to be coming next?

Idris (28:29):
Yeah, absolutely. So when we started commissioning the facility, we had the opportunity to really fine tune some of our recipes. So other than the flaked oats, we were able to trial some flaked wheat, and some flaked rya and flaked barley on both pieces of equipment. That’s the Bühler and the Revtech. So look out, we have some flaked wheat and flaked rye potentially hitting the shelves here fairly soon. Again, those products have the same characteristics as Jonathan and Natasha have talked about as our competitors out there. So all those characteristics you’re looking for in your flaked products, so head retention, easy outfield, and all of that nice stuff. So hopefully ramping up production on those commodities later down the year.

Heather (29:29):
Awesome. Well, thank you all so much for taking time to come on and chat with us about this today. I know things have been really, really busy as we’re ramping up to get this stuff out there, so thank you so, so much. I really appreciate it. Exciting things coming through. Obviously everybody reach out to your TMs if you have any questions on the new products that we’re rolling out from CMC. Thanks all.

(29:51)
And we are now joined by Rob McCoy, VP of Brewing Operations from Great Notion Brewing in Portland, Oregon. Welcome, Rob.

Rob (29:59):
Hi, thanks for having me.

Heather (30:00):
Thank you for being coming on. Before we dive into the rolled oats that you have worked with, can you tell us a little bit about yourself, how you got into craft brewing and a little bit about Great Notion Brewing?

Rob (30:12):
Yeah, myself just here at Great Notion, been here about five years since 2018 and currently VP of Brewing Operations kind of overseeing everything that we do here between our two breweries and everything in between. I started out in the beer industry about 10 years ago, started out when I was 20, 21 home brewing. Kind of fell in love with it immediately and did that for a few years until I found my first gig selling beer at a brewery in Southern California. From there, went up to the Rare Barrel in Berkeley, spent some time there with those great folks. And then ended up in Portland, Oregon at Great Notion. So just continuing my career here and making a bunch of beer now.

Heather (31:00):
So were you just like… Is Portland a magnet? If you’re like, I want to work in craft beer, so you just go to Portland?

Rob (31:07):
Portland’s a great place to be. I mean, if you’re into the beer, food, the outdoors, it’s a beautiful place to be. Since moving here, I’ve really fallen in love with the beer culture, the brewery culture. It’s like a big, big family up here, which is I think… The beer industry is a big family, but Portland specifically, if you need anything anytime it’s someone one up in town, you’ll be able to get it if you need something and everyone’s… Some good camaraderie. So it’s a great place to make beer, a lot of great people making a lot of great beers, so it’s a good place to be if you like beer.

Heather (31:44):
I absolutely agree with that. I have been down there, and got to explore a little bit of the breweries. It’s quite fantastic. So let’s dive into the rolled oats. You previously have used the Canada Malting flaked oats and we had you trial our new rolled oat, product that we’re just going to be launching. Can you tell me about the beer that you used or that you made with these products?

Rob (32:10):
Yeah, so we actually ended up doing… We planned it out, so we brewed a batch of more or less kind of a standard hazy IPA. So seven, this one came out to 7.2% ABV. And the reason we chose this beer is we had a larger batch of one of our flagships, Ripe, hundred percent citra IPA brewing, and we had another beer called Aura, which is very similar, but we had a little bit of a hot product in the bright tank to give a little extra hopper roam on flavor. So I thought that’d be a great side by side while trialing this new flaked product.

(32:52)
And got to make these two batches that were pretty identical except for those rolled flaked oats, and got to kind of taste them side by side, which was great. Historically, we were on Grain Millers for a long time using their flaked product early on, switched over to Canada malting, oh maybe about six months ago with no issue whatsoever. And we’ve learned to use our system kind of in the early days. It was you spin those rakes too fast, you mash in too quick, you add your oats too early and you just gum up your mash, you get a stuck mash, your efficiencies go to garbage and all that kind of stuff. So very excited to try out this new product.

CJ (33:39):
Well, let’s walk through the process to dive into what differences you saw. So kind of in the mash and lautering, what differences could you point out between the flaked and the rolled?

Rob (33:51):
Yeah, just when we add our flaked product, it’s used at the end of mash. We try to add it gently in the last 20% of our mash in. And again, yeah, a big problem is if you overmix it, your brewer’s not paying attention, puts it in early, you can gum up your mash pretty quick. For this new flaked product has a little bit thicker cut to it, so it doesn’t break up and gum up like a bowl oatmeal immediately. Going into this kind of experiment, the goal is, hey, if it’s as good or better, then our current flaked product, then let’s check it out.

(34:33)
My report from my brewers is it mashed and lautered like a dream. So no issues whatsoever with gumming up or slowing down. They said they transferred just fine. Efficiencies were on average for a beer like that for us. And the final product, tasted them side by side. Those beers did come out within a week of each other, so pretty ideal for a side by side. Drinking those side by side, obviously for hazy IPA, that protein, the turbidity is very key. You get a hazy IPA that’s not very hazy and people are not happy about it. So looking at them side by side, they’re pretty identical. I could argue that the new flaked product had a little bit more turbidity, had a little bit more body, but I’d be splitting hairs. But I did kind of come back to the second sample and perceive a little bit thicker fuller body, which is usually what we’re looking for in a hazy IPA is that big, lush soft body. So yeah, overall everything went very well with it.

CJ (35:47):
Oh, that’s what we love to hear. Did you pick out any differences in the flavor or aroma of the beer? I saw we had some visual cues and some texture, but how about the flavor and aroma?

Rob (35:58):
Not too much. I couldn’t say anything for the aroma and flavor. I think they’re pretty identical, to be honest. For those beers being a hazy IPA and one having a hot product in the bright, it’s pretty dominated by those hop aromas. So for this product it’s more neutral than a honey malted oat or something else like that, which is great for what we’re going for is kind of this protein builder without imparting a lot of flavor, allowing those hops to shine and do their thing.

Heather (36:34):
Moving forward, are you excited to get to bring these into the brew house a little bit more, work with them a lot more versus the old product?

Rob (36:42):
At the end of the day, I feel like we’re making great beer with the flaked oats that we have. So if the bare minimum of what we get out of it is a little bit more rest assured lautering. Being a larger brewery, we have three full-time brewers on staff plus seller and packaging. Something I really look forward to, or look for and products, equipment, anything is how easy can we make this? I know everyone’s going to have an off day, someone might run their rakes too fast on the accident. How do we avoid any sticks in the mud for our production by making things easier, less to think about for all of our staff.

(37:26)
I think our staff is fantastic. We have a killer staff, but there’s always going to be something that comes up. So if I can rest assure just a little bit, we’re not going to stick a mash and we’re not going to lose five, 10% efficiency on some nightmare mash and lauter, then that makes me a lot happier. So that alone, I was excited to make the switch over. And then if we are getting a little bit more body and a little bit more turbidity, even if it’s just a hair, then that’s always good. I mean, at this point we’re always looking for how do we make our beer 1% better every batch? And if that’s a little bit of an edge, then great, we’re making the right choice and going the right direction.

Heather (38:11):
Just that little bit more haze does make a difference.

Rob (38:14):
Yeah, I mean we’re always… For where we are, where we started, we started brewing hazy IPA in 2015, and today for what people really get excited about for hazy, it’s pretty much a different beer. We kind of have two levels of hazy, we have hazy and then we have murky. So depending on what we’re trying to do, it’s hard to do a production batch of a murky beer. It might be a little more yeast driven, but trying to stay relevant and keep up with even the micro trends in the hazy IPA has been a topic for us. So make sure we’re not in 2015 IPA when it’s 2023.

Heather (38:57):
Yeah, for sure. Just want to say thank you so much. Thank you for trialing the products.

Rob (39:02):
Overall, it seemed like a relative minor risk to kind of experiment and do something new because again, staying relevant is… Being on the edge a little bit and trying new things, trying new hops, trying new products, seeing what works, what doesn’t. And the risk reverse reward was pretty good. Everything I’ve had from Canada Malting has been working great for us. And then on a side note, if the price point on it is great, so that’s another factor for us is that price point where we need it and it totally is. So that’s exciting too.

Heather (39:43):
Is there, as we’re gearing up for summer, does Great Notion have any really cool things coming down the pipe?

Rob (39:49):
Let’s see. Man, after last year, which was pretty rough for everybody, we’re just happy to be at capacity and keep the beers turning. For us, being mostly hazy brewery, it’s really cool. Brewing on a lot more West Coast and lager’s picked up on the past year, something different than the regular hazy. Got a bunch of collabs coming out with a bunch of great breweries and doing some cool beers, experimenting with some hops, doing a little more R&D at our smaller system. Just having fun with it, and getting into a good groove for kind of this post COVID world. I’m sure most brewers have felt every six months it was something different, something new. So I’m really excited just like, let’s have a stable year. Let’s brew a lot of beer, let’s focus on quality and hopefully not have demand flip overnight for the fifth time.

Heather (40:45):
Oh yeah, I think we all feel the same way for sure.

Rob (40:50):
Stability just sounds great.

Heather (40:51):
It does. Just a little normalcy would be great coming into this year. Everybody go take a look for a great notion if you can find it in your area. And Rob, thank you so much for coming on today.

Rob (41:03):
Yeah, yeah, we should be all over the west coast. We do ship to a few states across the country. We’re in about 14 states now, so if you check out our website or our app, you can get some beer direct. But if you’re on the West coast, hopefully you’ll see us in some stores around. I think we’re getting to Whole Foods pretty soon here, but we’re spreading out a little bit, which is cool.

Heather (41:23):
We’re now joined by Jonas Hurtig of Cabin Brewing in Calgary, Alberta. Jonas is the co-founder and head brewer at Cabin. Welcome, Jonas.

Jonas (41:35):
Hello. Thanks for having me on.

Heather (41:36):
Before we jump into talking about the rolled oats, let’s just tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell everybody a little bit about Cabin, they don’t know you as well as I do.

Jonas (41:49):
Yeah, so we… I’m from Cabin Brewing as Heather mentioned. We opened just about four and a half years ago in late 2018. So it was myself and my two partners, Hayden and Darren that are the three founders. And we are in the Manchester Brewing District, which is just kind of southeast, I guess, of downtown Calgary right by the stampede grounds. So fairly central. We’re nestled amongst a handful of other breweries, some of the best breweries in the city. We like to brew all kinds of beers. I guess our most popular beer would be a, it’s a hazy Pale Ale called Super Saturation. That’s the beer that we actually trialed the oats in. We do a couple other beers year round. We do a West Coast IPA called Sunshine Rain, an American style pale ale called Retro Spectrum, and a German style pilsner called Luminosity. And then try and put out new beers every couple of weeks, and just having a lot of fun doing it.

Heather (43:05):
Yeah, the specialty beer game has been pretty on point for you. Awesome. So we drove over some of our new rolled oats products and dropped them off at Cabin so they could trial them. You typically use the Canada melting flaked oats, correct? In this beer?

Jonas (43:21):
That’s right. Yep.

Heather (43:22):
Yeah. So let’s start up with how the oats actually just performed in the entire brewing process from start to finish, and then we can dive into differences you saw between the two.

Jonas (43:35):
Sure. So just visually looking at the oats, they’re a lot more whole, if that makes sense.

Heather (43:48):
Yeah, it does.

Jonas (43:48):
The older oats were more the quick oats that you buy at the grocery store and very, very small particulate. Just very crushed up, and the new ones looked more like rolled oats because that’s what they are. But they’re more whole, there’s a lot less broken pieces in there, bigger pieces, which actually helped the lautering. We don’t use high percentage of oats in this particular beer, but our lauters were a little bit quicker. We saw a little bit of increased efficiency as well. Point one, point two Play-Doh in the brewhouse. When we were using these. Sensory, we did blind sensory on the beer after. Everyone… It was worse. Some people thought it was better. Some people thought it was the same, but no one thought the product was worse, or not as good as the baseline.

Heather (45:03):
Yeah. Oh, that’s good.

Jonas (45:04):
So overall, super happy with these. Everybody really seems to like them.

Heather (45:10):
Well, that’s a really popular beer, so I would hope that it would perform really well in it for you. Can you tell us some things that you didn’t like about it? I know we kind of talked a little bit about this earlier, but feel free to just kind of touch on the one thing that really you didn’t like as much about it, or the brewers didn’t as much about it.

Jonas (45:28):
Right. So normally even with flaked product, we throw everything through our mill, which just gives us more consistency when we’re mashing in. Just a more homogenous grist, I guess. Because we have a grist case that we mill into, and then a grist hydrator going into the mash tun. So we tried them through our mill, and for whatever reason, could just be the geometry of the hopper on our mill or the material, the oats seem to kind of create a gap at the bottom of the mill and they wouldn’t feed easily down into the rollers, so we had to coax them a little bit. So I think for these ones, once we start using them full time, I think it might just be easier for us to add them directly to the mash.

Heather (46:21):
To the mash.

Jonas (46:22):
But I’ve also spoken with another brewer who tried these, and he had the opposite problem. So the old ones, they wouldn’t go through their mill, same kind of issue. They would just get kind of stuck there. And the new ones, he said he had no problem dumping them in the mill and having them travel into the grist case and then into the mash.

Heather (46:44):
Oh, wow. So could fully be the mill on that one, who knows?

Jonas (46:49):
Yeah, it’s probably the equipment. Yeah, I don’t know what else it would be.

Heather (46:54):
Did Derek brew this? Could it be operator error?

Jonas (46:58):
If Derek did, it’s definitely operator error.

Heather (47:00):
It was operator air for sure. Sorry Derek. So let’s go back to the beer just really, really quickly. Final product, visually, did you notice any increased haze? Any increased mouth feel on the pallet, anything like that?

Jonas (47:20):
Yeah, so in our blind sensory, some of the notes were creamy mouth feel, which we get normally from this beer, but more of the participants were noticing that. And the haze, with this beer, it’s got a pretty stable haze to begin with, and it’s one that it doesn’t really takes a while for it to drop out. So honestly, we haven’t really had this batch in cans for long enough to really notice any real difference as far as haze stability. We have noticed the head retention is really, really nice with them.

Heather (48:08):
Oh, good.

Jonas (48:10):
Yeah, I think the protein in these oats are really, really nice for foam stability and retention. Just nice frothy kind of meringue foam on this beer.

Heather (48:23):
Perfect. We did a whole episode on head retention a month ago, so we know how important that is.

Jonas (48:33):
Oh yeah. It’s a big deal to nerds like me and you.

Heather (48:36):
Well, and me too. Thank you. Come on. It really honestly is, and we interviewed some really great people for it, but just talking about when you hit a pint that’s poured right to the top of the mug, you’re not thrilled with that. I’m not thrilled with that. I know.

Jonas (48:52):
Come on.

Heather (48:52):
I want a nice frothy…

Jonas (48:56):
I think everyone in the industry hits a point where the head retention is very visually appealing, and it’s just something that you really want to see in your glass of beer.

Heather (49:07):
Absolutely. Are you looking forward to utilizing the newer product moving forward because it’s going to be hitting shelves pretty soon?

Jonas (49:17):
Yeah, I’m excited. I’m excited that it’s flaked and bagged, what is it, two kilometers away from our brewery?

Heather (49:25):
I’m fairly certain you can see it from your brewery.

Jonas (49:28):
Yeah. If we climb up on the roof, I’m pretty sure we can see the Canada Malting facility. That alone makes me pretty stoked. Freshness, environmental footprint, all of that. And yeah, the product, everybody loves the product, so if we can do one small thing to make an improvement, it’s great. Everybody likes that.

Heather (49:52):
Awesome. Well, anything coming down the pipe for Cabin Brewing that we should know about? Any new beer releases you want to give us a little sneak peek into? Got anything fun in the tanks?

Jonas (50:06):
We have, so we brewed a collab with some of our best pals over at Establishment Brewing.

Heather (50:14):
I know those guys.

Jonas (50:16):
I think that’ll be coming out right after this podcast is released, May 3rd. What else do we have coming down the line? We have a light lime lager in the tanks, and it’s not Bud Light Lime.

Heather (50:35):
What?

Jonas (50:35):
Even though that’s what Derek was kind of going for.

Heather (50:40):
Modeled around, but not exactly the same as.

Jonas (50:45):
That’s right. We’re bringing back light lime lagers.

Heather (50:47):
Oh, my god. I do like a light lime lager.

Jonas (50:53):
We’ve got a couple cool sours planned that we’ve got coming up. Yeah, we’re in, it’s almost getting into summer I mode.

Heather (51:08):
I know.

Jonas (51:08):
So we’ve got a lot of patio friendly beers in the works.

Heather (51:08):
Yeah, I think it’s so big for us here in this part of the world where we get three, four months tops of summer and we will use it, utilize every little minute of it that we can. So I foresee your patio being pretty packed this weekend.

Jonas (51:24):
Yep. It’s getting up into the twenties, which end of April is pretty nice in this part of the world, so we’re stoked.

Heather (51:32):
Yeah, we’ll take it. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us.

Jonas (51:36):
All right, no problem.

Cheyenne (51:38):
Welcome to our Ask Abi segment, where you can submit technical and product related questions to our product marketing manager, Abi Connor. Abi, how are you doing?

Abi (51:46):
I’m doing great. How are you?

Cheyenne (51:48):
I am doing awesome. Getting all geared up for CBC. How about you?

Abi (51:52):
Yes, yes. Looking forward to it.

Cheyenne (51:54):
Yeah, it’s going to be exciting. And speaking of CBC, that is coming up next week. Can you give us an exclusive first look at what new products will be announced?

Abi (52:03):
Yeah, definitely. I’m not going to give away too much because we don’t want to ruin the surprise, but we have some really, really great new product launches happening at CBC. We’ve got some brewer’s yeast that are coming on, some flaked oats from a couple different companies. We have samples of those actually at our booth, which is going to be 1345. If you stop by, you can check them out. We also have something, this is my favorite part. We’re going to be bringing on a brand new malt vendor that we know you all love already. So be on the lookout at our booth and on our socials for more information on those launches.

Cheyenne (52:40):
I can’t wait till we get to chat more about it. It’s going to be really exciting.

Abi (52:44):
Yeah, definitely.

CJ (52:45):
Hey, Abi, with summer coming up, we had a listener looking for product suggestions to brew fruity beers. What would you recommend?

Abi (52:52):
Oh, who doesn’t love a cold fruity beer or seltzer in the summer? Ooh, I might have to get rid of those later. Just making my mouth water. So in my experience, getting the most out of your fruity beers takes some science and a little bit of trial and error. It just kind of depends on what type of fruity beer you’re going for. If you’re going for a wheat or if you’re doing an IPA, if you want a sweeter or more subtle beer, we have options for all of those different types.

(53:21)
First, we have fruit purees by Oregon Fruit, which I know you all love. They make using real fruit easy with the consistent color, aroma and flavor to enhance your fermentation. My favorite part about using purees is that they’re concentrated and require less fruit to be added to the blend. Country Malt Group carries a wide range of Oregon Fruit purees, anything from the citrus lines to the berries, anything fun like rhubarb, and we just brought on watermelon, which is another really fun summer flavor.

(53:54)
The best way to determine exactly how much fruit, or fruit puree, that you add to your mixture just kind of depends on flavor profile that you’re looking for. Like I said, if you’ve got a lighter beer, you don’t typically have to add a lot. If you’re adding… You’re looking for more of a subtle layered flavor, you should be adding less fruit puree to your beer. One thing to note about using fruit purees is that it can at times add a little bit of haze or cloudiness. So just keep that in mind when you’re using those.

(54:25)
We also have main fruit flavoring. The thing that I love about using these is that they’re made with natural flavors, and we have a wide range of flavors to choose from here too. Using these fruit flavorings is a bit different than using a puree. You’re basically adding a fruit flavor without the sweetness, so they could be layered nicely and added into lighter beers, or even seltzers without it adding too much of a punch of sweetness. Remember when I talked about the haze, you also don’t have to deal with that like you do with a puree. These flavorings, you don’t have to worry about that because of the starches and proteins. They don’t have those. So suggested dosing for this is about 3% of your total volume, and you can check out these products on our website countrymalt.com.

CJ (55:11):
Thanks, Abi. That was super helpful. Abi will be at BC, so stop by booth 1345 to chat and say hi with her about any technical or product related questions you may have.

Heather (55:22):
That is a wrap. I want to say thank you to all of our guests for coming on today. We are really excited to be launching these new rolled oats. You can see the samples at CBC at our booth, so come and check them out.

CJ (55:34):
We’ll be back next week for a series of many episodes live from the CBC trade show floor.

Cheyenne (55:39):
Don’t forget to subscribe to the Brew Deck Podcast so you don’t miss those episodes or any others. And we will see you in Nashville.

Heather (55:46):
See y’all in Nashville.