EPISODE S.6, E.1

[IT’S GIVING… TOP 10 OF 2024]

Toby (00:09):
Happy New Year.

Heather (00:12):
Happy New Year.

Toby (00:13):
Yes. And were just chatting offline here and just we are reminiscing some of the funny and humorous times we’ve had together in this awesome podcast.

Heather (00:22):
Yeah. This is a really good episode to go back and listen to all the dumb things we say on this podcast.

Toby (00:28):
Right. And with that, it is season six of The BrewDeck Podcast, and if this is your first time tuning in, I am your host, Toby Tucker, along with my lovely host, Heather Jared.

Heather (00:45):
Hi. Oh, lovely. That’s nice. Thank you.

Toby (00:48):
It’s just one of the fine words I have to say about you. You’re awesome.

Heather (00:51):
I’m sure.

Toby (00:52):
We’ve made it through six episodes. Well, no, this is six, five, working in a six.

Heather (00:57):
Five seasons.

Toby (00:57):
Yeah. We started it way back in August of 2020 as a way to connect listeners with their favorite brewers, distillers, and suppliers during the pandemic. And since then, it has grown into a community of industry experts sharing their stories, advice, and resources. So for that, thank you all the listeners for joining us in this awesome journey.

Heather (01:19):
Yeah, thanks everyone that’s stuck around this long.

Toby (01:22):
That’s right.

Heather (01:25):
All right, so this is our traditional first of the year, best of last year podcast. Before we’re going to jump into our top 10 episodes from last year, do want to do a little housekeeping. So earlier this month, our lovely team down in Vancouver, Washington, packed and shipped out the Filson vests to all the gold medal winners from the Great American Beer Festival. So congratulations to all the winners. If you were not familiar with our gold medal program, we hand out custom vest to gold medal winners from World Beer Cup, Canada Beer Cup, and the Great American Beer Festival, as well as double gold medal winners at the San Francisco World Spirits Competition who people that win gold, they get and they use Great Western Malt and, or Canada malting base malts, you’re eligible to get a vest and they’re awesome.

Toby (02:14):
They’re kick ass. And you and I have both tried to get some for ourselves.

Heather (02:17):
All the time.

Toby (02:18):
We’ve been shot down.

Heather (02:19):
Every time, every single time. That’s a hard no. Toby and I are gold medal enough.

Toby (02:25):
We’re not important enough.

Heather (02:26):
No.

Toby (02:26):
Just stick to the podcast.

Heather (02:28):
It’s probably best we stay over here. A couple other things, we’ve got some new products coming out this year. We are kicking off a bunch of new products. So first off, Pinnacle Distinction. These are some really cool, innovative distilling yeast that bring unique flavors straight to the barrel. For instance, one of them is titled The Banana Split, which has aromatic and palate characteristics of banana and nuttiness, so make sure to check that out. Also, from Pinnacle, American Whiskey Yeast, the most widely used yeast strain in North America, excuse me, North American whiskey. Pinnacle Distillers Yeast is the traditional choice for making bourbon rye and Canadian style whiskeys, which I drank one or two of.

Toby (03:10):
Yes, of course, we heard about those last week from the folks at Pinnacle, so sounds like some good stuff. We’ve also got Castle products. We’ve been teasing this for a while, but we’ve got a few new products by Castle and our warehouses already ready for our consumer. So we’ve got a new cafe, which is a roasted coffee malt. It’s great for those stouts and porters this winter.

(03:31)
A new wheat blanc that will add that body to your wheat beers. And then we’ve also got a chocolate malt that is really nice as well. The other one on the malt front as far as new products is Tchecomalt. Lastly, we’ve had six new products from Tchecomalt that launched, so you can make traditional Czech beers. One really cool one that we’re extra excited about is the floor-malted Pilsner by Tcheco, some really good stuff. And then we’ve been talking about Durst for quite some time. We’ve got that warehouses out here as well. More to come on that though. So contact your sales rep to learn more about these products, and we’re happy to help you out.

Heather (04:08):
Yeah. Okay, last but not least, this one, care to read, CBC is in exactly three months.

Toby (04:17):
Three months.

Heather (04:18):
90 days.

Toby (04:19):
Things run so fast.

Heather (04:23):
It does every year, and then it takes about six months to recover and then you’re just counting down the days to the next time, but can’t wait, can’t wait to see everybody. It is April 28 to May 1st in Indianapolis, and I’ve never been to Indianapolis, so I am pretty excited to see what the city has to offer.

Toby (04:40):
Should be fun. We got our entire crew, well, almost our entire crew out there every year. So yeah, come say hello and stop by the booth. We’d love to spend some time with you.

Heather (04:48):
Yeah.

Toby (04:49):
It’s a tradition here on The BrewDeck Podcast to start the new season by ranking and recapping our most popular episodes as Heather discussed from the previous year. So without further ado, Heather, let’s get this countdown started. What do you say?

Heather (05:02):
Let’s do it. In 10th place is Episode 5, Revolutionary Women: They’re Everything, He’s Just Ken, and I love the Barbie reference there. We love celebrating Women’s History Month on The BrewDeck Podcast. They’re always my favorite episodes to do, because I always get to talk to some really cool women in the industry. Last year, we shined the spotlight on Borderlands Brewing’s Las Hermanas project and the Hop Forward Society, which is out of Alberta in my territory. So first, we were joined by Ayla and Savanna from Borderlands Brewing Company in Tucson, Arizona. Ayla and Savanna started the Las Hermanas project, a binational all-women collaboration brew. It features one brew day in Arizona and another in Mexico, plus educational workshops for the attendees. So let’s take a listen to Ayla and Savanna as they tell us a bit about the one of a kind project, and then we will jump over and hear about how every year they’re working to make the project even bigger.

Ayla (06:00):
So Las Hermanas is our passion project really. So both Savanna and I were interested in social justice and social work in our previous careers, and we were determined to find a way to have that manifest into what we do in beer. So the Las Hermanas project is actually Arizona’s first binational all-women’s collaboration brew. And the way it works is we have two brew days that take place, one here in Tucson at our facility and another in a city in Mexico. For those who don’t know, there are a lot of really amazing talented women brewers all throughout Mexico. That’s something I didn’t know until we started working with our colleagues in Mexico four years ago. But in this international brew day, we host women at our facility here, and then we actually turn around and travel to the respective facilities in Mexico.

(07:04)
And at this point in time, the project has taken place in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico, which is just south of Texas. We were in Mexico City about a year and a half ago, and we were in Guadalajara just about six months ago. So every year, the project is just expanding and expanding in the largest iteration we’ve had almost 80 women brewers involved. I think that was when we traveled to Mexico City actually. So it’s so rewarding.

Heather (07:34):
So let’s jump back into the actual brew day again. I hear you guys do some educational components throughout the day.

Ayla (07:43):
Yes, so we are so excited and so proud of this. I think every year that we conduct this collaboration, which we’ve done it three times now, we are always looking for ways to improve the project, to expand it, and to add something new. The first year, we had the brew day, second year, we said, okay, how do we make this even bigger? I know, let’s put on a free half day technical workshop for folks visiting. It became increasingly important to us to include an educational component. That’s what a lot of the women we work with had been requesting, especially women in Mexico were saying that they didn’t necessarily have access to very many technical workshops or seminars. So we do on behalf of our very generous sponsors, ask them to donate their time as well for putting on some type of a technical seminar. Last year, we very proudly expanded on the technical component and we really thought about, okay, what else are the needs of the women participating in this program?

(08:57)
And we really realized, you know what, the technical conference is important, but there are other social aspects of this that we think need to be addressed as well. So just last year, we started working with the Pride and Joy Foundation in Phoenix. They’re LGBTQ+ nonprofit that supports women and minorities in different realms of life really. And the wonderful Elena Joy Thurston came down and put on a very hands-on workshop to really talk about empowering women. And at the end of the workshop, everyone who attended were able to go home with concrete tools to help them navigate their workplace or even outside of work. It’s just really wonderful. So we’ve been really excited to think outside of the box and include other types of workshops that are relevant to the project that we’re pursuing.

Savanna (10:00):
Also, to piggyback off of that, as much as we teach them, so to say, they also teach us. All of us, I think, are learning all the time. I think there’s this misconception about Mexico and about their facilities or about women brewers. They face the same struggles that we tend to face here, but we learn so much from these women. A lot of them have technical brewer training or yeah, they’ve gone to school for brewing sciences. So as much as they are learning at these seminars, and shout out to Cheyenne and Brittany who actually did one of these few years ago, as much as they’re learning from these seminars, we’re also learning from them as well.

Toby (10:50):
Then Sharon and Erin stopped by from the Hop Forward Society. Their goal is to diversify the Alberta craft beer industry by reducing the barriers that exist. The Hop Forward Society is focused on creating and building opportunities for the underrepresented groups within the craft beer industry and helping develop safe spaces for people to work, gather, and socialize. Sharon and Erin share some of the things they’ve done and the grants they offer.

Heather (11:14):
Well, why don’t you introduce us to the Hop Forward Society?

Sharon (11:19):
Sure. So Hop Forward Society started a few years ago. After the murder of George Floyd and me personally as a Black woman, I was obviously very closely impacted, I guess, by everything that was going on in the resurgence of Black Lives Matter movement, especially here in Calgary. And there was so many breweries posting, which is really great, their support for Black Lives and their support for their communities. I was just really fired up and I tweeting to some of the beer owners and breweries that I love so much, just asking what does that mean? What does it mean to show support for our Black Lives? What does it mean to show support for the Black community? And I got really great responses and one of those responses actually was from Erin at BORN and kind of slid into my DMs and we started chatting, and we decided to meet for a beer.

(12:17)
She was so gracious to invite me down to BORN and have some beers and just talk about what mattered to us and about the work around increasing diversity in beer. And that kind of snowballed into us getting together with other community members and owners in Calgary to talk about how we could make an impact in the beer industry in terms of increasing representation and diversity and inclusion in the industry. And that led to us founding the Hop Forward Society, which is run by community members, but also people who work in the beer industry. So it’s really, I would say, balanced of both sorts of worlds coming together to try to make a difference.

Heather (13:06):
But no big deal if you just did something small.

Sharon (13:07):
Just a little bit.

Heather (13:10):
Just a little bit. Can you talk about what the mission of the Hop Board Society is?

Erin (13:18):
I can take this one. So when we sat down initially, we thought about creating a scholarship and that’s kind of where our thoughts went to immediately. And then we thought about that a little bit further, and we decided that sort of limited the audience of who this might impact. Not everyone has the means to go back to school and not everyone really needs to go back to school for a formal program to work or access this industry. And so that got us thinking and we thought perhaps a grant program would be a better use of our funds and just a way to make that more accessible. So we have sort of two spheres that we work in with Hop Forward. We’ve got our grant program, which we award once annually to three different folks who are working on making a positive impact in the beer industry.

(14:05)
And then we also have more of a community engagement piece, which is our run through events, which are hosted both for community members at breweries to help people have access to breweries who maybe don’t see themselves in those spaces yet. And then also to host events for our business members, so breweries, restaurants, folks in the hospitality industry to help educate them on how to make their businesses more accessible. And our main focus for Hop Forward, because there is so much great work happening with Pink Boots and a few other organizations for women and beer, we decided not to make that a focus of our organization. So we focus solely on folks from the BIPOC community, the LGBTQ community, and people with disabilities.

Toby (14:50):
And at number nine, our next most popular episode was the distilling special Season 5, Episode 18 Beauty and the Yeast. The names we come up with, they’re just awesome.

Heather (15:01):
They’re really fun.

Toby (15:03):
Yeah, and that’s one of them. Well, we pass the mic off to our resident distilling experts, Geoff Fischer and Chris Lovett to dive into yeast options for distilling, the differences between yeast strains and how they can be used for different types of spirits. They called upon Mitch Codd from Lallemand and Kevin Kawa from AB Biotek to discuss the use of enzymes and fermentation and the ability to create unique flavors through fermentation. Let’s take a listen to Mitch and Geoff when they chat about these differences in brewer’s yeast and distilling yeast. Mitch, I’m going to get right to it, and this is a very broad question. It’s probably coming from my simplified brain here, but I just want to start the conversation. What’s the general difference between yeast options and distilling? That’s a big question.

Mitch Codd (15:50):
It is a big question, but it’s a fairly simple answer if we want to keep it simple. It’s genetics. These are different microorganisms, different lineages of this microorganism and they behave very differently. So if you’re looking at something between brewing and distilling, you actually have a fairly different lineage. They’ve evolved separately for a while. Same with bread and wine making, stuff like that. We have this sort of distinct families of Saccharomyces, and they have very different characteristics that come from them when they ferment. So realistically, we have just this huge, huge pool that we can pull from of genetic diversity and that changes the outcome that we get in the fermentation.

Geoff (16:47):
Specifically Mitch, I was kind of looking around, and I’ve played with a lot of different yeast over the years, both as a brewer and selling these to distilleries. What would you say from a flavor standpoint or from a performance standpoint, what really separates, I mean I’ve known distillers that use a brewer’s yeast and obviously with a lot of the beyond beer segments is people are making more simple types of fermentations, not necessarily malt based, they’re leaning on distillers yeast. Without getting too deep into the actual genetic workings of these, what would you say are the major characteristics between the two families?

Mitch Codd (17:28):
Yeah, so I kind of break it down in two families there, but even within those families, there’s an immense amount of diversity. So even if we just took distilling yeast, we have something that can ferment various sugar types, something that cannot ferment those sugar types. In brewing, you guys use that to your advantage if you want a little bit of sweetness in that beer. And in distilling, we really just don’t want that. If we send sugars to distill, we end up with a flaw in the spirit. So genetically, those are kind of hardwired traits. Can we or can we not use this sugar type? The same can be said for things like kinetics, right? How fast does this ferment? In brewing, you may want that to kind of go low and slow for a bit and develop a certain set of characteristics and flavor and kind of slowly attenuate. In distilling, we just want to push it. In most cases, we want this done in three, four days, send it to distill, start over again, and it generally favors flavor that way as well. Yeah, does that answer your question?

Geoff (18:39):
It does. It helps definitely. It kind of pushes along a lot of brewers that are looking to get into potentially distilling to maximize their equipment or to look at different markets to enter. It’s always a thought that distillers use are more alcohol tolerant and brewers use, although we have a lot of brewers use that are very alcohol tolerant.

Heather (19:07):
If you’re looking for more distilling resources, be sure to check out our distilling catalog online. In eighth place, Episode 19: Don’t Cry Over Spilled Beer. This was actually definitely one of our favorites. We’ve been wanting to do an episode like this for years. Throughout our careers, we’ve always heard many stories of tanks imploding and other kinds of mishaps in the brewery, but the best stories are the ones where they keep a positive outlook, find some kind of way to turn lemons into lemonade, I suppose. And then Haley said in sort of shandy pun, “I got nothing.” Toby, shandy pun.

Toby (19:44):
We need like, yes, we need like a laugh, ha, ha, ha, ha.

Heather (19:48):
Ha, ha, ha. [inaudible 00:19:48] It’ll just be crooked. She’s going to put a trick in because I know it. In this episode, David Lin from Comrade Brewing walks us through what happened when a truck crashed into their facility and collided with their active brewing tanks. Spoiler alert, they made the most of this bad experience and turned their shitty situation into good marketing. Not only that, but this is one of the few episodes our editor didn’t censor us for saying shitty, so yay.

Toby (20:14):
Nice. I like it.

Heather (20:17):
I like it too. Buckle up for this wild ride and see how Comrade Brewing came out on top.

David Lin (20:21):
This was October of 2016. It was the week after GABF actually, if you’re going to have a truck crash into your facility, the week after GABF is actually kind of a good week because we had already been busting our asses, just getting every single tank filled and all our serving tanks full for onslaught of people coming for GABF. It was a beautiful day. It was like a Thursday, I think, one o’clock in the afternoon, 80 degrees, typical Denver Day, just sunny, not a cloud in the sky. We’re still not exactly sure what the guy was doing, but he was just in the parking lot, but he was just sitting on the curb with the front of the truck faced for the brewery and he was hopped up on the curb and he was just revving his engine and I don’t know what he was doing, so we were just like, “He was there for 10 minutes.”

(21:30)
We didn’t know what was going on, so we just kind of ignored it. Of course, we were brewing Superpower IPA. It’s our flagship IPA here, and it’s about almost 50% of our entire production now. And I guess the guy accidentally put it into drive or got it into drive, and it could have been a lot worse, but it totaled another pickup truck that happened to be driving on the road that passes in front of our brewery. So he totaled that truck, then crashed into a concrete filled bollard, and then crashing in through the center of the two garage doors where the brew house is.

(22:23)
I was sitting in the office, I usually do, and I just heard this really loud crash. I was like, “Oh, what are these guys doing here? What do they drop?” And I go out there and you can smell like gas. The water was leaking, there was glass, and yeah, it was kind of a crazy disaster. We ended up rushing. We were in the middle of boil, and so we ran back to where the utility hookup is and we actually turned off the gas ourselves while we were waiting for the fire department to come.

(23:10)
Later on, all the deputies got there and had the EMTs come by. Yeah, this guy was, I don’t know, I think he was just on a cocktail of pills or something. I mean, the EMTs found a pill bottle that he accidentally dropped and dumped him out and it was like, here’s some painkillers, here’s some animal tranquilizers. I don’t even know what these other ones are. So he wasn’t going nowhere. He also had a boot, so he must’ve had injured his foot and he was just hanging out and just finish up his milkshake that he had just gotten from Sonic, I guess because he knew that he was to be going to jail, so might as well take a breather there.

Heather (23:56):
What did you do as your way to make this shitty situation a little bit better?

David Lin (24:02):
Yeah, so we posted about it on Facebook. Luckily, there’s some local news outlets, a little local independent paper. They covered it, so we got some good media coverage about it. The garage doors were also, since they were destroyed, they had come by and they just had boarded up these two commercial size garage doors. So we asked people, “Hey, come by. We’re still open. Don’t worry, we still have beer in the tanks.” We turned from that boarded up all outside into a big sticker wall. So we just invited people to come by and kind of just sticker it up.

(24:48)
After about I think 16 days, the plumbers finally got everything back up connected. We also rerouted it. So if it was going to happen again, it’s not going to break the gas line unless if they, I don’t know, hit it in a different spot, but they kind of reinforce stuff too later on. But we were making Superpower and we were trying to think like, oh, this is really bad. Luckily, we still have a lot of beer. The tap room side really wasn’t affected, so we were still operating and people came by and they wanted to see the damage, and so that was cool. And so we were brewing a beer and I was like, “Oh, maybe we should do something special.” Of course, the very first beer that we brewed after the gas and water was hooked back up again was we had to brew more Superpower because our wholesale accounts we’re jonesing for some more.

(25:56)
And they’re like, “Hey, sorry, we’re got a little behind right now. Can’t brew for a bit, so it’s going to be like a month before we get our next batch on.” And Tyler Brown, who owns Barley Browns out in Baker City, Oregon, that’s where Marx brewed before coming to Comrade. His brother came up with the name More Dodge, Less Ram in honor of the ram truck that had crashed into the brewery. And so what we did was, well, let’s, instead of watering it back down, we brewed it. We brewed to gravity, not to volume. So it’s like, oh, let’s not water it back down, and then we’ll try to make the beer last a little bit longer in the tap room. So we put some extra hops for additional bitterness and then more dry hops, and we put it on kind of as a seasonal. I don’t know if we really had intended it to be how often that we were planning to make it, but yeah, we just cook fruit for special occasions and called it More Dodge, Less Ram and yeah, people liked it and we liked the beer as well.

Toby (27:09):
Absolutely genius. That’s funny. And number seven, which was Season 5, Episode 4: Pink Boots Malt. Our next most popular episode is probably one of the things we’re most proud of from 2024. And again, that’s our Pink Boots Malt. In case you missed it, we launched the first ever Pink Boots Malt, a craft-based malt for brewers and distillers that raises funds for the Pink Boots Society as a part of the same global family of brands, Country Malt Group, Canada Malting Company, and Great Western Malting all share a passion for empowering women and non-binary individuals across the supply chain from the barley fields to our malt houses and from our distribution centers to the tap rooms. This episode is extra special, because we took a look behind the scenes and got to speak with the dreamers and makers behind the Pink Boots Malt. The team dives into the vision, specs, and production for this exciting new project.

Speaker 1 (28:03):
Can you tell us a little bit about the purpose and the goals for the malt?

Speaker 2 (28:08):
Well, obviously our first purpose was to support the Pink Boots Society Scholarship Fund. As the fermentation industry continues to grow, more women are going to be entering this space, and so it’s important for us to find more ways to support those scholarship opportunities. But I think what’s unique about this product as well is that all of the sales for the Pink Boots Malt in the U.S. will go directly to the primary Pink Boots Society organization, but all of the sales in Canada will go directly to the Pink Boots chapter, specifically in Canada, hoping to grow those educational opportunities that they can offer their local members.

(28:51)
But on top of that, as we were discussing this product with our R&D and our barley teams, we wanted to make sure that this was a really versatile malt, one that can be used in really any beer or whiskey style and one that can also be paired with any of the variations of the Pink Boots Hop Blends as well. We also thought that this would be a really great opportunity to highlight a specific barley variety, which is pretty unique for a malt. Unlike Hops, it’s not super common for us to highlight specific barley varieties being used, and we thought that this would be a really cool opportunity to provide education and awareness about some of the awesome barley varieties out there and the regions that they’re grown in.

Heather (29:37):
And I’ll speak on behalf of Canada. Thank you.

Speaker 2 (29:42):
You’re welcome. We’ll take it.

Heather (29:45):
Well, this is a really great time to jump and transition to Shelley and Brandi who had a hand in actually creating this malt. So can you tell us a little bit about the production of this first ever iteration of the Pink Boots Malt?

Hailey (30:01):
Sure. So Tevis Vance is our plant manager. He was involved in getting this set up, and he was really excited to do malt for the Pink Boots. We work closely with Mindy Shepard on the logistics for the rail car and the ship date of this malt. Jeff Bloxham and Charlie Jones set up the malting schedule and Justin Southern works with our barley procurement group, so he arranged for the barley to be brought in and Charlie and I worked on the recipes for the steep and germ and kiln and Carol Bristol and Heather Millward are in the production operations group. So together, we made this batch of malt for the Pink Boots Society, and I think it turned out really good.

Heather (30:51):
Yeah, it’s amazing. Kate kind of touched on that this is a very special variety and this is a single variety malt. So Shelly, can you tell us a little bit about the variety that we actually used?

Shelly (31:02):
Yeah, I’m glad to. We’re using Odyssey, which is a non-GN barley variety, and it is pretty specific for the non-GN field. It’s a no glycosidic nitrile, and that’s important becoming more of a factor in the industry, but it provides a really good foundation malt for whichever direction the brewer wants to go. And so it kind of gives a good Pilsen type of color. There’s good moisture to it and good extracts, which are always important from the money side of things. So they do require a couple extra tests to ensure that this product is the non-GN variety. And so there’s a PSY, which is telling about the absolute alcohol volume per metric ton that can be produced from each batch, and so you always look for a value over 400 on that result.

(32:07)
From the lab side, we were super excited knowing this was coming through, so everybody was really watching as it came through our testing procedures. We had special vested interest, if you will. So it’s been kind of fun for the whole process to see everything, and there’s a lot of people behind the scenes involved in it. So we hit all of our target values and everything, and it was good to go. Then it’s off to you guys and ready to hit the market. So we were really excited to have a key part in making sure all of the parameters were met and excited to see how the brews turn out.

Heather (32:47):
Yeah, it’s going to be fantastic. If anybody wants to learn a little bit more about low GN malt, we did do an episode on it last season, Season 4, Episode 19, entitled, How Low (GN) Can You Go? Very witty. We’ll give that one to Hailey. Is there anything really specific that you have to cater the production to making a dual purpose malt that can be used for both distilling and brewing?

Hailey (33:14):
So when we produce this malt, we make it in sort of like we’re making pale two row, but Odyssey is a good variety. So when we wanted it to have a nice, long steep, first of all with good air rest and while it’s in the steep tanks, we check that the aeration is good. So all the air that we put into the water during the fill time, we make sure that it rolls the grain around nicely during the air rest period. When we drain the water for the steeping process, we monitor the CO2 extraction and the temperature. As the grain goes through that air rest phase, it takes in oxygen and gives off CO2. And when the grain is giving off CO2, it also creates heat, so we make sure that it’s breathing nicely and not getting too warm in the steep tanks. On the final drain, we give the grain a couch to develop the enzymes that will do the work in the germination.

(34:15)
So couch is similar to the air rest where the grain stays in the steep tank, and we extract the CO2 for a few hours before we drop it into the germ bed. So we came up with a really nice steep recipe. Once it got into the germination bed, that’s where we can see it and smell it and feel it. And this batch had a really nice smell. It smells like fresh cucumbers, and it stays in the germination bed for four days. Each day, we sample it and look at the growth. And so we call that account where we look at the acrospire and see where it’s at compared to the kernel size. So the first day, the acrospire is usually one quarter the length of the kernel, and it keeps growing from there. So this batch was really nice growth and Odyssey is a really consistent variety.

(35:09)
It’s very steady, so we’re able to push it in the direction we want it to go, and it responds nicely. So at the end of the germination, we had good growth and it felt nice. We like to keep enough moisture in the kernel so that the growth is good, but not so much moisture that you feel it come out of the kernel. So the moisture was consistent and we kilned it with a recipe that would give us lower color. Similar to recipes we have for kilning, the pale two-row malt where we slowly increase the temperature, just allowing the moisture to be removed and where it could develop a really nice flavor. So overall, it was a really great experience. It was also fun to talk with Heather and Carol as we went along the process of crafting this malt.

Toby (36:05):
As March approaches and you start planning your Pink Boots collaboration beers, be sure to add Pink Boots malt to your next order along with the Pink Boots Hops. The best thing about this malt is that it’s a craft-based malt, meaning it can be used in any recipe at any time of the year too. Contact your CMG rep to learn more.

Heather (36:23):
I definitely have a couple breweries out here that are just using it as their base malt now. They love it so much, so I would get your hands on it before it’s completely gone. It’s going to be new every year. So number six on the list was Episode 20: Game of Tones: Roasted Malt Edition. Man, these just keep getting better and better.

Toby (36:41):
Yes, they do.

Heather (36:42):
In this episode, we dove deep into the dark and complex world of roasted malts. Our special guests, Larry Horwitz of Crooked Hammock and Tim Roberts of Country Malt Group fame provided insights on the importance of roasted malts, such as how they can contribute bitterness and astringency to a beer and how brewers need to balance the use of roasted malt with other ingredients like hops and water chemistry. The discussion covers the differences between imported and domestic roasted malts as well as the evolving technology and capabilities of modern malt houses in producing a wide variety of specially roasted malts. Let’s take a listen.

Toby (37:18):
I’m going to ask a very generic question. When do you use roasted malts and beer?

Tim Roberts (37:23):
Well, I will kick things off here and argue that roasted malts have two primary characteristics. They have color and they have flavor, and so depending what you want, that’s when you use them in beer, most notably, of course, in porters and stouts and stuff, but also in many, many other styles of beer.

Toby (37:48):
Mic drop, episode’s done. That’s all we need to know, right?

Tim Roberts (37:51):
Yeah.

Larry Horwitz (37:53):
He hit the high points. I’ll add to that and say famously, one of the large brewers whose name we won’t mention has used it in small quantities to color [inaudible 00:38:03] and that’s not unusual, right? And I’ll follow on what Tim said there to say that occasionally, I use it for bitterness, for intentional strength. I mean, one of the things that makes some of the dark beer styles so beautiful is, in my opinion, the particular bitterness that you get from using some roasted malts.

Toby (38:26):
Larry, what are your go tos? Is there a specific level of roast that you use or is all dependent on what you’re brewing with and what you look forward to in your final product?

Larry Horwitz (38:38):
It’s a toolkit, right? It’s a toolbox. You put in the tools you need for the job. So for me, I have at my disposal, thankfully, almost every roast malt on the planet. I mean, one of the beauties of a brew pub environment is that we know we’re going to overpay for raw goods. When I say overpay, I’m using that loosely, because we sell beer basically at retail. So my boss is not going to get upset if I say, listen, we’re going to buy this beautiful single variety base malt that’s a dollar pound. We can’t do that all the time, but we certainly can do it from time to time when we need to get a specific character. And I do live in this school of thought that when possible, I’m going to grab the malt of the origin of the style that I’m trying to reproduce, and I’ll pick on British pale chocolate malt, which if I was going to have a roasted malt in my bucket of beautiful, it would be this malt.

(39:34)
They’re made by a couple of suppliers that we’re all familiar with, and you guys represent several of them. And basically, we’re talking about these heirloom varietal barleys that juice kernels are BB or marble round that are roasted to around 300 SRM. I think that malt is pretty magical in general from almost all the suppliers that make it. For years, we’ve purchased from Schnauzer and Beaston and Crisp and all of the other places where you would expect us to buy that kind of malt it stores well. So even when we need to, we can buy it in quantity. But I also use a decently large amount of domestic black malt, which tends to be closer to 500, maybe even 600 on color. I joke that’s the malt that kind of tastes like burning, and sometimes you need your malts to taste like burning. But I’m a real fan of especially some of the hybrid roast malts from the continent that are a little bit lighter in color and flavor.

(40:33)
I just started to experiment with them at some length, and I think they’re unique. I mean, there’re a handful of malts that kind of straddle the world between crystal and roast. And I think about melanoidin malt specifically, which is a really interesting, interesting roast malt because it’s not really roast malt, but it’s totally roasted malt. Does that help you understand kind of where my head is on that? I will tell you that in our inventory on the rig, we have always somebody’s pale chocolate, 300 British-ish malt, not always from Great Britain, and almost always at least roasted barley or somebody’s North American black malt, because those two items in a brew pub, I might need a hundred pounds of it for the gear, depending on the volume coming out of the location. So it’s not onerous to keep a bag of it around. And occasionally, you need color and there you go.

Toby (41:26):
And halfway down at number five, just Season 5, Episode 15: Super Fruit. This is a great one because we focused on fruit additions and concentrates for use in beer, ciders, and other beverages. Chris Hodge, who has been on the podcast many times and a long time industry veteran from Oregon Fruit discusses the company’s history, quality standards, and seasonal fruit offerings. He highlights how fruit purees and concentrates can help brewers achieve consistency in their fruit forward beers. Let’s take a listen.

Chris Hodge (42:01):
Thank You.

Speaker 1 (42:04):
You had mentioned the really high quality fruit that your team is getting in processing, and I’m sure similar to growing barley, Oregon fruit has to navigate the variables out of your control, the weather, growing conditions, all of that stuff. How can you plan and pivot for seasonal availability fruits?

Chris Hodge (42:19):
Well, it’s a really good question for all the right reasons. Farming itself has had big challenges over the last several decades, and a lot of the farmers that we used to be able to pull from have either literally gone out of business or had to change crops completely. So we have had to lean into worldwide sourcing. Worldwide sourcing has opened up opportunities to maintain still high quality sourcing of cane berries and citrus, and one of the things that we never used to bring in was tropical fruit. So really, it’s just expanding the breadth and depth of our sourcing options, whether it’s growers, brokers, a combination of growers and brokers, and then still meeting with small farmer consortiums. South America has become very important for us, Costa Rica, for pineapple, Mexico for a myriad of other things, including mango. So I think the most important piece here to remember is regardless of where it’s sourced, quality of the incoming fruit still needs to meet the highest level of standards for bricks and Pantone and pH, and all the things that make our finished product so amazing. So I hope that, did that answer your question?

Speaker 1 (43:32):
Yeah, definitely. That’s awesome. And it’s super cool to hear about the global reach that you have with the fruits that you’re taking in. And I’m sure, like you said, it kind of expands your options in terms of fruit flavors.

Chris Hodge (43:44):
Yeah. What it doesn’t do, it doesn’t shift any of the financial responsibility that comes with being a worldwide sourcing outfit, meaning that we still have to sign annual contracts, in fact is the only way we’re assured that we can have a mango that’s going to taste the same when you buy it in January is when you order, place your container order or drum order in December. And literally, that’s what we pride ourselves on, being able to have a consistent product from lot to lot, from crop to crop, from year to year. So that when brewers end up building these recipes and formulations for a fruit infused product, they know it’s going to have consistency throughout three or four or five. I’ve had customers who started buying X fruit from us back in 2016 who are still using X fruit to make that very strong selling brand that they built this product around.

Speaker 1 (44:39):
That’s awesome.

Toby (44:40):
That’s a really good point, Chris. And yeah, it’s very similar to what we’re doing on barley and the malt side, right? The consumer expects the same product every time they get it on tap or crack open the can, and a lot of that is work behind the scenes with people like yourselves, making sure that every piece of fruit that comes in your door to process is what you expect and what the brewer or the consumer expects as well. So that’s great.

Chris Hodge (45:11):
Well, I think that’s what gives both of our companies such a leg up on the competition is we have brewing in our veins. I mean, we think about the beer industry day in and day out. It’s funny, when I think about my history in the beer industry, it’s like I still consider myself a beer guy at heart. And much like you and your entire team, you’re beer people. So when we think of incoming fruit, we think of it much like a brewer would think of their hops and their grain or their yeast, all those very important ingredients. So there’s a strong thread there.

Heather (45:43):
And number four on the list is Episode 11: Everything But The Barrel. If you haven’t heard, the latest innovation in aroma technology is here. And in this episode, we’re discussing the best of barrel aging, but without the barrel or the actual aging. We have the pleasure of chatting with Ian Ward and Marc Worona from Aroma Sciences about their new natural extracts that add authentic oak profiles to your beverages without requiring the barrel age process. Let’s take a listen.

(46:12)
Just dive right in and tell us exactly what Aroma Science is.

Speaker 3 (46:16):
Okay. Yeah.

Heather (46:18):
Is?

Speaker 3 (46:18):
Yeah, is, is, is. So it’s all about commercializing this amazing invention. So Russell invented this process to extract the volatile components from plants. And first of all, he tried it with hemp and he built a successful business in the hemp world making CBD. I don’t know if anybody knows about what’s happened in the hemp and cannabis space, but values have really crashed and seemingly, it’s now cheaper to buy hemp and similar products than it was 20 years ago. And so it made it a pretty uneconomic proposition. But what was really amazing is the technology that Russell invented is enables you to capture aroma compounds from an aromatic substrate, whether it be oak or rosemary or anything that’s got a smell to it.

(47:20)
And it captures those aroma compounds in the same proportion as they exist in nature. If you think about any extract, if it’s an essential oil, the typical ways that essential oils are extracted is they use solvents. And so you would typically take a, well, let’s use rosemary as an example. You would take the rosemary leaves, you would grind them up, and then you pour a solvent on top, could be alcohol, could be hexane, and then you allow it to steep for a while, and the solvent penetrates the particle, and then you strain off the solids, and now you’ve got a solvent that hopefully contains the volatile extracts. That’s the essence, if you will, of that plant.

(48:08)
And then you can either evaporate off the alcohol, and you’ve got a nice smelling substance. The problem with that is that’s not how we smell. When we smell something, if you think about perhaps a rose in a garden or a nice beer that you’re going to smell before you taste it, what’s happening there is the aroma molecules are evaporating from the surface of the rose or the glass of beer, and it’s going into your nose, and it gets there via evaporation. And smell is a really complicated process, and everybody should be aware. I suppose that flavor, 80% of flavor is what you smell. So you can only really taste five things, sweet, salt, sour, bitter, and umami, and then you’ve got sort of piquancy and dryness and coolness if you think about mint, but everything else is smell. Everything else is smell either directly or retro nasally.

(49:09)
So if you use a solvent to make an extract, you’re relying upon, you’re hoping that that solvent extracts every compound that contributes to the flavor. And the reality is that it doesn’t. Solvents have specificity based on their polarity. So some solvents are very polar like water, and some are very non-polar like gasoline, and different compounds sit along that polarity spectrum, if you will, at different points. And there’s no such thing as a universal solvent. So you might get an extract that sort of smells of rosemary, but it will never have the complete beautiful authenticity as if you were to smell some rosemary on its own. And the reason is because flavor as aroma, as I’ve described, is very complicated. And some components have very, very strong flavors, but they only appear in miniscule amounts. And if your solvent happens to not be able to dissolve that compound, it’s lost.

(50:15)
And so you don’t have a very authentic representation. Well, this process, Russell’s invented, uses heat and air, and it evaporates the aroma molecules in the same way that you smell. And so when we capture those into alcohol, we have this process where it’s effectively like a distillation. We evaporate the molecules, and then we capture them. We can go into that in more detail but you get a really authentic aroma. And so Russell applied that to oak. And when you smell these things, when you taste them, it’s like putting your head in a barrel. You really think you’re there. And so that’s what’s exciting about this process is that we’re able to make incredibly lifelike, natural extracts.

Heather (51:05):
Can confirm because we all received our sample packs. A, we got to sample them while we were at CBC, B, we all received our little sample sprayers, and it is like sticking your head in the barrel.

Speaker 3 (51:15):
Pretty fun, huh?

Toby (51:18):
It’s so authentic that it triggers that sort of aroma memory that’s in the brain, and it really takes you back either to being in a rick house or in a winery or something like that, where there’s a strong presence of oak in the air.

Heather (51:32):
Not only are there extracts easy to use and cost-effective, but also save you time and eliminate losses. The Aroma Sciences, Heartwood line of oak aromatic extracts can be used to improve balance, perceived quality, and boost oak aromatics in beer, wine, ciders, seltzers, traditional and reduced proof spirits and non-alcoholic beers, wines, RTDs or mocktails. That is the long list of things.

Toby (51:55):
Yes.

Heather (51:58):
All right. Also, on this episode, we had the pleasure of talking to Jeremy Marshall from Lagunitas Brewing. He came by to tell us about their experience using Aroma Sciences in their dark and oaky with their customers have to say about the beer and what they might try next with the extracts.

Speaker 4 (52:15):
We have had the conversation with our guys at Aroma Sciences, but we want to have a pretty candid conversation with a brewer who’s actually tried and used the extract of the beer. So that would be you, my friend. For starters, what beer did you guys make with the extract and what extract did you use?

Jeremy Marshall (52:41):
So the beer that we made, it ended up being called dark and oaky. And the extract that we chose that I’m a big fan of is the Amburana extract, which is also known as a Brazilian oak. So this would be the, if you were to, I’ll have to explain cachacha now, but that’s a fermented and distilled sugar cane. It’s different from rum and that it’s not just the refined sugar, it’s kind of the whole kit and caboodle. It’s got everything in it and it’s very, very common and popular down in Brazil. And then their wood that they age and ended, this would be like the añejo equivalent. If we were to borrow with a tequila analogy, they would take the cachacha, which is no clear, age it on the Amburana wood, and then that would be an aged one. And it would be, I don’t know, very cost prohibitive to get this a barrel.

(53:55)
And the brewers listening who have ever taken rum and tequila barrels, they know that it could be the cartoon where the character gets a bunch of bullet holes and then drinks something and all the leaks come out. These barrels have been used many, many times. They come from warm places, so you’re gambling. And so that’s why I saw a tremendous value in what Aroma Sciences was doing here, which was getting the wood and using their rather cool technology, which it sounds like you’ve already got a chance to get that bit from them, to process it into a super easy to use extract that brewers love, things that you can just slap into the BBT. We just had our beer there waiting to go. And the base beer should talk a little bit more about that. It wasn’t really a porter, it wasn’t really a stout, it was a 5% kind of a mild that had some black malt, a lot of caramel malt, definitely not hoppy.

(55:04)
It was rich but not super boozy or anything like that. We’re not designing a beer to put into a barrel here. We were doing the reverse of that. So we’re designing a beer to kind of put the wood into that so you can put the beer in the BBT and get a little sample and then grab the bottle or the jug of the Amburana wood extract that we had from Aroma Sciences. And then we would get the micropipette and do the whole bench top thing so that we make sure we have a ballpark of where we want to be. And then in, this is a Lagunitas secret that I’ll share with everyone that I think other brewers do this too. Whatever number we think we came up with, we always cut it in half, because you can always add more, but it’s hard to take it away.

(56:02)
And sometimes when you’re bench topping, it’s easy to not have it come over or it’d be a little different when you scale it up. So we put in the amount and got it dialed, and then we’re real happy with how it just transformed the beer. I always think barrels are like cocoons. That beer goes in and kind of metamorphosizes and it comes out different. But there’s that one recipe element that’s there that’s driving a lot of that, which is micro oxidation. So in this case, we’re not oxidizing, we’re not actually aging the beer in the barrel letting oxygen play a role, and I think it brought over a new flavor set that’s novel.

Heather (56:55):
If you’re interested in learning more about Aroma Sciences or trying them for yourself, reach out to your CMG sales rep.

Toby (57:01):
And number three, that’d be third place. For those that don’t know, it is the episode we did Black History Month. In this episode, we’re celebrating Black History Month with Aaron Prothro, founder of Mascot Brewery in Ontario as one of Canada’s only Black owned breweries. Aaron tells us about the challenges he’s faced in the craft beer industry and how he works to empower other Black entrepreneurs.

Heather (57:25):
Again, thank you for coming on. This is the first time we’ve done a Black History Month a recording, so we’re really, really excited about this episode. And we’ve kind of said it before in here, how much representation really matters in this industry. Can you talk a little bit about your mission for empowering Black entrepreneurs?

Aaron Prothro (57:44):
Well, I think the mission for empowering Black entrepreneurship really ties into our goals in the industry. I think what we really want to do is break down the barriers that craft beer itself creates. And we think that that alienates different ethnicities from getting into the space, and we really want to change the perspective of what that craft beer drinker looks like by representing Black people, people of color, disenfranchised people of craft beer, especially with ownership in the industry. So as an entrepreneur, I think my personal story really kind of went into that. I’d already, as an entrepreneur, growing up out east. I always was creative because I always playing by myself as a kid and things like that. I think I developed that creative spirit and wanting to, I was very curious and I wanted to develop different things and create different things. I think that led into that curiosity really manifested into me being an entrepreneur and providing access to people.

(59:00)
I think I didn’t have a lot of access growing up, and I think being an entrepreneur let me really take control of that and really take control of my life and my surroundings. I think that that plays into the idea around not trying to get a seat at a table, but building your own table. And I think I’m a big believer in that you have to be the change that you want to see. So I think especially with the Black community, I think there’s still a bit of an enslaved mentality where people are stuck in the kind of hardships that have happened, which is very valid. But I think my whole idea is now what, we have to acknowledge the history, and we have to acknowledge that some of these things are still happening, but now what? I think entrepreneurship empowered me, and I think it’s a great business, is a great tool to empower people to change their communities. Yeah, so that’s kind of how I think entrepreneurship plays into the Black community and empowering Black people.

Heather (01:00:07):
As they break down, build your own table. That was amazing.

Speaker 4 (01:00:12):
I remember the first time you and I sat down and chatted actually right there in the tobacco and had this very similar conversation to this one. And I’m from Nova Scotia as well. I both grew up probably about an hour or so away from each other. And there is a very strong Black community in Nova Scotia. And how much of being surrounded by strong, powerful, empowering people, did that give you the chance to really step up and give you the tools that you are showcasing right now?

Aaron Prothro (01:00:54):
Well, I think a lot of my sensibilities really evolve from the East Coast and kind of how I think. I think the East Coast, it’s always been hard to get by there. And that toughness was really kind of, I have a part of my growing up, and I think that that now layer in kind of being different and being Black, being mixed race, and you kind of add a little bit more hardship into that. So I think from the beginning, the history of Black people in Nova Scotia, they were given kind of a rough go. The Maroons, the settlers there were put into areas and farm and lands that they weren’t able to farm, they weren’t able to generate money off of, and then it just became a cycle of poverty. And so seeing that really, I think it hit me on a personal level and seeing that how social economic things can impact the whole community of people.

(01:01:59)
And with that though, the generations that come from that, it’s about the mindset. It’s about the mental trauma that you get from thinking that you don’t have choices and that you don’t have anybody to aspire to or real leadership in your community. Not saying that there aren’t amazing leaders in the community that have helped pull people up there and puts a smile on my face every time I go home, because I see that things are changing out there. But yeah, I think that it’s had a massive impact on me growing out east and kind of where I’m at here in Toronto and what I’m doing. I always consider myself an East Coast boy. I never say I’m from Toronto. We definitely want to expand out east with mascot. That’s a personal goal for mine and we’re laying the inroads now to do that. But yeah, it’s had a massive impact on how I think, for sure.

Toby (01:02:52):
Then we’re honored to be joined by Elle Rhodes, Shaunte Douglas and Bri Smith from the Brewing Change Collaborative. The BCC is an organization that works to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion for people of color in the brewing and beverage industries through advocacy, outreach, and education. The guests provide insight and advice for BIPOC individuals looking to get involved in the industry and shines light on the important work being done to create a more equitable and inclusive craft beer community.

Speaker 4 (01:03:23):
Tell me what kind of changes you would like to see happen in the industry.

Speaker 5 (01:03:30):
I think I am one of three Black women bring in the state of Minnesota now, but I was, first, it was really cool to see growth happening and change moving in a more diverse direction, but that is only so much. There’s still lots of push back from just people who see race as a political statement and we’ll come out and say, keep your beer or keep my beer out of my politics, or whatever. It’s not really a political statement just for people to be welcome into a space. So I just would like to see more people that are in smaller places that can rock the boat by supporting more diverse groups, maybe by hosting a BCC event, doing so so that more people feel more inclined and safe and welcome in smaller spaces.

Speaker 4 (01:04:24):
That’s awesome. I am a firm believer that there would be no politics in inclusivity if things weren’t exclusive towards certain people. So I love the fact that the organization stands up for that and makes that very well known.

Heather (01:04:46):
Can you offer a little guidance on diversity, equity, and inclusion code of conduct? I know this is some consultation work that you do as well. Can you give a little bit of what you want to see in these codes of conduct?

Speaker 6 (01:05:06):
Sure. It’s mainly just a framework for a lot of these public spaces in their hiring policies and also in just our tap room interactions that a lot of what the discrimination that people are facing and the very public admonishment that certain people of color have to deal with when interacting with these spaces, that that’s something that these breweries and these entities, if they say that they’re about change, and if they say that if they put certain statements on their beer and in their tap room and on their doors and on their windows, then we want to make sure that they’re really about that. So in terms of our educational consultations, we’ll have open dialogue and conversation and be able to really build out a framework and ask some questions and really get people thinking about how the industry has been biased towards a large group of people for a long time and how that’s know ahistorical and we can change that, but we do have to have a united front in going about it.

Heather (01:06:24):
I do have to say it’s one of the first things I look for when I go into a brewery. Is it on user code of conduct on your door? Do you say that you’re a welcome safe space for everyone? And do you prove that you’re a welcome safe space for everyone and those are the breweries that I want to give my money to?

Speaker 6 (01:06:38):
Absolutely. I feel like you have to see it as someone who works on the service side of things. It’s really important that when I walk into another brewery that I see other diverse people that are serving the beer as well, that I feel welcome and don’t feel like glaring eyes on me or even by the music, right? If the music seems like it’s going to be something that’ll turn certain people off. These little things are important. Everything from how people can get into the bathroom to the experience they have at the counter, whether the company is as diverse, because every place can’t be the most diverse in the world, but it does need to be a welcoming and safe space. So that’s definitely something that we’re pushing for at Brewing Change.

Heather (01:07:33):
And number two, the silver, I guess this would be, This is Rye Malt, Ain’t No Barley, episode 6. Well, you love Spike.

Toby (01:07:44):
Yes.

Heather (01:07:44):
I think you said Brian Buckowski, otherwise known as Spike, founder and VP of Brewing Development at Terrapin Brewing in Athens, Georgia. And our resident distilling expert Geoff Fischer’s back because we always have to wrote Geoff in to come help us with our distilling episodes, and then Canada Malting’s Mac Remington, one of our maltsters comes in too. Spike tells us about their very first beer, which was a rye pale ale and the history of how it was discontinued then brought back as a fan favorite, and we discussed finding perfect rye malt percentage and other challenges of brewing with rye.

Toby (01:08:19):
Just working with rye malt in general. I think there’s a lot of breweries that have played around with a bit and then obviously see quite a bit more of it on the distilling side. So what kind of challenges do you typically have to work with when you’re brewing with rye malt?

Brian Buckowski (01:08:37):
Yeah, I mean rye, I call it the quicksand of malt is what I call it, but in our rye pale ale, there’s only 10%, so we don’t have to use any rice hulls. I would say anything over 10%, you better start adding some rice hulls for your [inaudible 01:08:58] efficiency. It was funny because I do collaborations all around the world, and I have stuck many mashes where people just didn’t believe me because that’s one of my things. If I do a collaboration, I always sprinkle a little rye into the malt bill. But I remember brewing with left hand, gosh, this was probably 10 years ago or so, and they didn’t use any rice hulls and it was probably like a three-hour runoff.

(01:09:28)
But the crazy part was is that it held on to so much work or last runnings in the mash that when we opened to grain out, it just spilled all over the brewhouse floor, and it was like an hour to clean this stuff up. It was just like quicksand. It was pretty funny. So yeah, it can get really nasty, but like I said, 10% usually isn’t that hard, but I would say once you get up to 15 or so, I would start to introduce some rice hulls for laudability.

Heather (01:10:00):
There are a lot of trial and error to get to that 10% sweet spot.

Brian Buckowski (01:10:06):
Yeah. I mean, brewing at home, it probably took me a half a dozen times or so because I didn’t want it to overpower either. So I like everything nuanced. Even when I make crazy beers like our wake and bake french toast stout, when we’re adding just crazy flavors, I just want all the flavors to come in and combine and not overpower each other. So everything to me is about balance, and I think even if you make a very aggressive beer, as long as it’s balanced, people are able to drink it. So if you get something super hoppy but can back it up with some complex malt character, it’s a lot easier on the palette than just a one dimensional hot bomb. So yeah, playing around. I probably started with about 20% and just kept backing it off until it kind of just complemented that the sweetness from the honey malt and then just kind of like I said, try to just tune it in where everything was really nice and balanced.

Heather (01:11:09):
Then Geoff Fischer stops by to address what rye looks like in the distilling world, what is American rye whiskey, and what are the differences of distilling with rye versus other types of grains?

Speaker 1 (01:11:20):
Yeah, we’re definitely seeing more of a resurgence of the rye whiskey right now. We were talking a little bit about rye used in beer. Can you talk to us about why rye is more popular in a whiskey format than it is in beer?

Geoff (01:11:31):
For a distiller, it’s actually easier to deal with than a brewer. I’m sure you touched base on this, but in a beer, you have to separate the grain from the liquid. So you have to have a liquid that’s flowable at a decent rate and doesn’t leave a beer that’s kind of thick. Rye does all of those things in any type of mash. It absorbs more water than any other grain, and it has usually the highest level of beta-glucan, which is like a soluble fiber. Think Metamucil in water, it gets thicker the longer you sit with it. So the same thing happens with rye. So in breweries, you typically don’t see higher than 20, 25%. We have seen beers obviously that push those limits, and if you use some enzymes, it gets easier, but rye is difficult for brewers because of that separation of liquid from solid.

(01:12:27)
In distilling, most large-scale American distilling, even in a lot of craft distillers, they ferment, so they mash with the grain obviously, then they ferment with the grain and they distill with the grain. So even if it gets a little thicker, it gets a little gooey, they can just water that down a bit and still pump it in a still and keep the agitation going and still come out with a 95% rye whiskey, which is fairly common. So it really has to do with how they process the fermented mash or the converted mash, so to speak.

Speaker 1 (01:13:06):
Interesting.

Heather (01:13:08):
So you said brewers are usually using tops 20 to 25% of rye. What is the percentage of rye used to classify it as an American rye whiskey?

Geoff (01:13:19):
So the United States, there’s really two major components that make up the definition of what is a rye whiskey. The first is the percentage of rye must contain at least 51% rye, and it can’t go in the barrel lower than 40% alcohol. So 80 proof. Bourbon has a slightly different set of rules, but those are the two main ones when you talk about classification of, do you want to put rye whiskey on your label?

Heather (01:13:48):
Finally, from a maltster’s insight. Mac Remington shares how malting rye contrasts from barley throughout the malting process as well as the best varieties for rye malting.

Speaker 1 (01:13:58):
Mac, can you tell us a little bit about the differences between malting rye versus malting barley?

Mac Remington (01:14:04):
Yeah, I mean, we could talk for hours about the differences and just try to keep it short and simple will be a challenge. But just for some perspective, 5% of our malt production on site as a whole is malted rye. So we do about 3 to 4,000 tons of it a year. It fluctuates every year, but the demand seems to be growing, so we really getting our process dialed in, but there’s more effort involved in producing rye than typical two-row base malt. There’s a lot-

Speaker 1 (01:14:50):
That’s kind of the sense that I get. We spoke to both a distilling expert and a brewer, and that’s the sense that we got from speaking with them about using rye is there’s a lot more effort that goes into it, and I’m sure it’s the same like you said on the malting side.

Mac Remington (01:15:03):
Yeah. So every year, we basically, I wouldn’t say the quality, but the parameters of a raw material do fluctuate a little bit just like barley. But with rye, we really try to focus on bringing in as plump rye as possible. So if we can get 89, 90% plump rye, that’s going to make our job a lot easier. But some years, your plumpness isn’t as plump. You might only have 70 or 80% plump. And what happens then is that the kernels are even smaller than they typically are, and they tend to compact a lot easier. So starting in the steep tanks, we only do one immersion. So once it’s underwater, we steep in, it’s underwater, and we set a target for around 37% moisture. So our operators are sampling as early as seven or eight hours into the first immersion. There’s a lot of factors that affect the uptake of moisture into the kernel, and seasonalities are one of them.

(01:16:21)
In the winter time, you might be able to hit your moisture targets in 10 or 11 hours. In the summertime, you could maybe hit them at least a couple hours earlier than that. It all depends on what your water reservoir temperatures are at. That’s all stems from how warm or cold your well water is, which can change depending on the water table and the season. So you have to be very careful not to overshoot your moisture as with any grain, but especially for rye, the consequences can be devastating because if your water’s a little bit warmer than you’d like maybe around that 11 or 12 degrees versus your 9 or 10 degrees, if your operators aren’t efficient in grabbing those samples, your rye can pick up moisture too quick.

(01:17:17)
And if you start getting into 40, 41, 40 2% moisture, your rye will become very soft, and it already is fairly soft because it doesn’t have a husk. So what’ll happen is those smaller kernels and that softer outer shell will actually start to collapse and compact together. Even when it’s underwater, there’s compaction that’s possible and you’ll never get it out of your tanks. And when-

Heather (01:17:46):
Sorry, can I just… Sorry to interrupt you.

Mac Remington (01:17:49):
Yeah, no problem.

Heather (01:17:51):
Can you just do that in comparison to barley, because I didn’t know there was only one immersion for the steep when it comes to rye?

Mac Remington (01:17:57):
Yeah, and I’ve heard of others doing double immersion, like smaller double immersions, like two really, really small double immersions. But here in [inaudible 01:18:10] we run one single immersion. We do the same with wheat as well, and that could be just more due to the nature of our system, but it’s what’s been working for us. So we basically steep in and once we hit our moisture, we drop all of our tanks. So we have 14 steep tanks. Each one holds about 16 to 20 tons to make a total of about 180 tons that we steep into our system.

(01:18:40)
But the good part about having many smaller conical tanks is that the head pressure’s a lot lower on the grains themselves versus having a few larger tanks or one really large tank that has all the grain in it at once. These smaller, more smaller tanks are more optimal for specialty grains like rye and wheat because it’s less hydrostatic pressure on the grains themselves. So long story short is that, yeah, we don’t typically have that much issue dropping our tanks as long as we keep our moisture low enough. But we do drop everything altogether, so we don’t drain the first immersion and then drop the grain like any other barley malt, we drop everything together with all of the first immersion into the germ vessel by gravity.

Heather (01:19:37):
If you’re looking for more on rye malt, we published a blog last August called Rye Knot?, where Abi walks us through the different types of rye tips for brewing with rye and beer styles with rye. Check it out at countrymalt.com/blog.

Toby (01:19:51):
And drum roll, drum roll. The number one episode of the 2024. That would be season 5 of The BrewDeck Podcast, No Alcohol, No Problem. They do the dry January thing.

Heather (01:20:08):
Yes.

Toby (01:20:08):
It’s only fitting that this episode lands as number one too, so No Alcohol, No Problem, the big winner, the non-alcoholic market and growth of NA beers has taken off as consumers are leaning into health conscious decisions. We shake things up with Mark Wilson from Abita Brewing to learn about how they got into producing craft soda line and hop waters. So Mark, tell us about your hop water. I know we had a little conversation about it there, and there’s a lot of people, I say a lot, but there’s quite a few people out there making hop water. So tell us a little bit about yours, what you’re doing there.

Mark Wilson (01:20:47):
So I mean, this is a really simple product. I mean, it is what it says. It’s just it’s hop water. So we did some experimentation. The first thing is to try to make it, I guess, as easy to process as possible. So we tried to use hop extracts and oils and just add that to carbonated water and see what it tasted like, and it really didn’t taste great. So we started using, basically just using pellets and having those adding water, and we always went with carbonated water, carbonated first because there’d be a little bit better extraction of the hops under pressure, and then just kind of trial and error, see how much hop flavor we needed to not have any bitterness, but just the flavor being extracted. So it was just some trial and error and doing that with pelletize hops and the pelletize hops gave it a much more rounded flavor and changed a little bit of the mouthfeel as well.

(01:21:57)
And then we add citric acid to it to bring down, to enhance the hot flavor and to make it taste better. I’ve spoken with a lot of brewers and everybody’s doing one, whether it’s in production, ours is actually in the market. We can it and sell it outside of the brewery, but most everybody, most brewers are doing one either for sale outside of their brewery, but definitely having them available in their brewery, in their tap rooms, and everybody, it seems came to the same conclusions that we did and is pelletized hops are the way to go, and then adding a little bit of citric acid hitting a specific pH point.

(01:22:49)
So it’s really just a matter of how hoppy one is versus the other, and then what hops you choose to use. We kind of zeroed in on citrine cascade because we wanted that kind of citrus and those popular flavors. We figured the popular hops would be the best for that, and those two really go well together. So you get kind of the grapefruit and citrus flavor that comes out in it, and it’s a seltzer, it’s carbonated. It’s not carbonated as highly as a seltzer is, so it does have a little bit better mouthfeel.

Toby (01:23:30):
Yeah, that’s great. Are there any challenges to, I guess, backing up a little, any challenges to production or canning/kegging of the sodas and the hot water that listeners may not be aware of?

Mark Wilson (01:23:46):
Not really. I mean, the hot water, not at all. The biggest challenge for the hot water was once we were doing it was to set a standard to meet where, so it could be repeatable because there’s not a whole lot of data from how much hops are extracted just from sitting in water for a little while. And since it’s similar to dry hopping, but you don’t have the yeast activation that’s going on and things like that. So it took a few batches to be able to say, all right, this is exactly how we’re going to produce it, and making sure it was repeatable every time, and then canning that there’s no issues whatsoever. I mean, that’s just going through the line normal for sodas, there’s really not a whole lot different with that. I mean, we use all of the same kegging equipment and packaging equipment that are used for our beer.

Toby (01:24:45):
Then William Perry from False Idol Brewing stops by to tell us about their terpene, sparkling botanical waters. What are terpenes and how is terpene water made? William shares how they got into making these and building a customer base for it.

William Perry (01:24:57):
We started playing around with it kind of as a selfish project. It’s something for us to drink because we’re here, we’re sweating, we’re working hard, and the only thing on the wall is beer. So the idea of having a spritzy flavored water was really cool. So we started playing around with that, and yeah, we launched it into distribution in January. I want to say we started doing this earlier in the year, probably around March or May, something like that. But yeah, we’ve launched it. It’s across the state of Texas, mostly in cans. We do have draft available, but that’s a pretty hard sell for someone to take up one of their faucets with water. So we’ve been mostly moving products in cans Right now, currently, we have five flavors. We have Lime. We have something called Citrus Sunrise. We have a Northern Lights, Bravo Bomb, and we have Pineapple Gold.

Heather (01:26:09):
So you’re not using hot terpenes, so what terpenes are you using?

William Perry (01:26:14):
Yeah, well, it’s pretty interesting what this company’s doing, and they’re not doing anything that abstracts or any of these other larger terpene companies are not doing. But essentially, they’re taking the terpene profile, the different cannabis strains, and they are essentially matching them, but using the terpenes isolated from legal plants, so it’s all legal and there’s no THC, there’s no CBD, there’s nothing like that. It’s just flavor isolates, but they’re not cannabis derived. They’re all from legal plants. And so that’s why we’ve decided to brand it as a botanical sparkling water because they are all, all the flavors are.

Toby (01:26:59):
Wow. Yeah. So after talking about this, I had to look up specifically what terpenes are, right? I mean, I’ve heard about them in THC and stuff like that, but I wasn’t aware that they could mimic those kind of terpenes using a variety of non-cannabis plants. So it’s pretty cool.

William Perry (01:27:19):
Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, there’s terpenes in all sorts of stuff, fruits and plants, and most edible things. Terpenes are kind of the building box with flavor, I mean, for lack of better words. And so it really fascinating that they can isolate something as specific as individual terpenes and then be able to rebuild the same profiles when people ask all the time. Unless you’re in the weed world, terpenes are probably a pretty foreign topic. And so people always ask us, well, what the heck is terpenes? And the best way I can describe it as it’s kind of like essential oils, except essential oils take all of the extract from a singular plant, which includes terpenes and probably includes other things as well.

(01:28:12)
Whereas terpenes are basically dividing out each individual chemical compound that makes up those flavors. And so they have all these different names for all the different terpenes, and they have them isolated with God knows what kind of equipment can do that, but I’m sure it’s very, very expensive. Yeah, so it’s pretty fascinating stuff, but we’ve kind of found a little niche here for us with this terpene water. It’s kind of a foreign idea, but people really like it, and it’s a pretty easy sale. Someone at the tap room, they grab a couple of four packs to go, and the bartender might be like, Hey, you want something for the road, not alcoholic. So they’ll sell them a TURP water, we call it Terp2O, the brand that we’ve decided to call the brand.

Toby (01:29:09):
You’re interested in dabbling into the NA world. We have lots of products to get you going. Check out our Beyond Beer offerings for more information at countrymalt.com\beyond.

Heather (01:29:20):
Well, that’s it.

Toby (01:29:22):
That’s it. That was a really good year. Yeah, thanks for tuning in everyone, and appreciate everybody’s ears as we made it through another season and looking forward to some exciting stuff planned for 2025.

Heather (01:29:35):
So make sure you subscribe to The BrewDeck Podcast so you never miss an episode.

Toby (01:29:39):
Awesome. Good times, Heather.

Heather (01:29:41):
Thanks, Toby.

Toby (01:29:42):
Yeah, will talk you.