Brett Beer!

Today I'm brewing my favorite type of beer to brew... Beers fermented with Brettanomyces! This is our first take on a Brett beer at Tombstone and it features a Brett blend that I developed with the help of a small yeast lab. This particular beer is being fermented with Brettanomyces only. No bacteria and no Saccharomyces.

One of my favorite things about brewing Brett beers is the look of shock on other brewer's faces when I tell them that we're bring Brett into the brewery. While cross contamination of yeast is a concern for all breweries, the simple fact is that Brett is just as easy to kill and clean as any other yeast as long as certain precautions are taken. At Tombstone, we actually go a step further than many people might expect. We use color coded gaskets for various types of yeast and we're very careful to ensure that we're not having cross contamination even within our various Saccharomyces strains. Every fermenter is checked with an ATP Luminometer in at least 3 locations on the tank and spot checking is done on all the smaller pieces of equipment. Anything that can tolerate heat is also autoclaved for full sterilization.

Another thing I love about brewing with Brett is that so many people still have false impressions of what Brett actually is. Normally when I hear people describing what a Brett beer is, they say it's a sour beer. I think the reason for that is because Brett is frequently used with bacteria or with other yeast strains to make interesting flavors, sometimes described as earthy, mushroom, funky, leather, or horse blanket. The beer we're brewing today is none of those. Since we are using only Brett, we will be getting flavors that are actually pretty similar to clean ale yeast strains, with the addition of pineapple and stone fruit esters. The beer will be very fun to watch age as it will change rapidly in the first 3-6 months. At that point, the flavor development will slow, but continue on for many years to come.

Although it is becoming more common in recent years, 100% Brett beers are still pretty rare to come by. The first known 100% Brett beers were brewed just over 10 years ago, so it's also new enough that brewers are still finding out what can be done with Brett and many strains are still being isolated and propagated every year.

Other than the fear of cross contamination, one of the most frustrating things for brewers is that 100% Brett beers typically don't have a mouthfeel comparable to what we think of beer feeling like. The reason is that Brett can not create glycogens which contribute creaminess or silkiness to mouthfeel. In order to keep the beer feeling dry and drinkable, but still have a mouthfeel that isn't thin, we are using a large quantity of flaked oats to replace the missing glycogens.

Our first batch of Brett beer should be ready in about 4-5 weeks and will be heavily dry hopped with Lemondrop hops to compliment the pineapple character from our Brett blend!

Lemondrop Helles

Until the time that I went to Germany for school, I didn't have much of an affection for Helles or Pilseners. I had a thought that German brewers were stuck in the past and that the Helles and Pils styles should have evolved to keep up with other modern styles. In a way, the German light lagers have changed over the years, but I would argue that they have actually taken a step in the opposite direction of American craft beer and instead have followed a trend of making the styles even less hoppy in recent years. Good luck telling a German brewer to change their ways though... It wasn't until I tried Augustiner Pils that I really began to change my mind about these styles.

Augustiner Pils is a great hopbursted pilsener and features a lot of lemony, spicy noble hop characters from the use of what I was told was Hallertauer Mittlefrüh. It was the first German Pils that I had where the brewer deviated from the norm and created a beer that really stood out in its class. After drinking that beer, I dedicated most of my spare time in Germany talking with my professors about what goes into making a world class Pils and Helles. I realized that the hopbursted Pils idea was something that could be received well by American craft beer drinkers that normally would pass on the style and I set out to create a Pilsener that I thought would resonate well in the Southeast and used all traditional Pils ingredients. Now, I'm excited to be brewing a Helles that I think is the direction that German brewers would have gone with the style if brewers followed the same trends that we have seen in America: Essentially taking the style and using new techniques and ingredients to create something still recognizable as being a Helles, but upgraded.

One thing that I found interesting about brewers in Munich was that they took great pride in the appearance of their beers. So many hours were discussed about the importance of creating the palest beer possible (as my professors would say, it should not be yellow or gold, but the color of straw) with fast rising bubbles that feed a thick, lasting foam. It would seem that the answer would be simple: use the lightest malts available and carbonate to a high level. However, there are so many more factors that influence color. Perhaps most importantly after the ingredient selection is the equipment used and water chemistry. In Munich, their water is fairly hard with an elevated pH level and doesn't allow for them to brew beers that are quite as light colored as in other areas of Germany or in the Czech Republic. Luckily for us though, we have our reverse osmosis water allowing for us to have a blank slate to start from and a fairly low pH off the bat. For the water, I added only a slight bit of calcium, sulfate, chloride, and magnesium. It was really the smallest amount of each mineral necessary in order to have an effective mash and to have good yeast flocculation. The target pH level was right on at 5.2 without the need for any adjustments.

For the malt, I went with a widely used Pils malt from Schill Malting in Osthofen. Their pils malz is the lightest fully modified malt I have found available at 1.2 degrees lovibond. It was obvious when I opened the bags that the malt was very consistent and light colored and its moderate protein levels should allow for a great head retention. The mash temperature was low and the mash was long to encourage more simple sugars to create a dry easy drinking beer. The wort was very light colored going into the boil kettle and I'm fortunate to have a steam jacketed boil kettle to create a very gentle rolling boil which helps to minimize darkening of the wort.

Up until the boil, everything was mostly true to style (other than the soft water) and what would likely be expected of a German brewer. The boil is where the deviation occurred. Instead of using traditional noble hops, I wanted to use a hop variety that has a lot of the character that I expect from noble hops, but without the earthy, spiciness. A recent varietal, Lemondrop, is perfect for this. It has a true lemon like flavor and is unmistakable. Although it is an American variety, a few progressive German brewers have had success in brewing Pileners with it. In addition to using a newer American hop variety, the only hop addition for our Lemondrop Helles was a whirlpool addition. As a result, the hop flavor and aroma will be more pronounced than what would me expected of a malt forward German Helles. It will almost blur the lines for hop aroma between a German Helles and a German Pils, but the bitterness level will be exactly in line with a Helles at 18 IBU as opposed to a Pilsener at 30-35 IBU (or if you're my German professors, you might say 33 IBU, no less, no more, is the perfect bitterness for a modern Pils).

The yeast strain we used is the lager yeast from Augustiner and it is very distinctive for being able to fully attenuate a beer, but still leave an impression of maltiness. It is a yeast strain that I have used almost exclusively for lagers for a few years now. The Lemondrop Helles will be ready by early December at the latest and should be one of the beers we have on tap at the grand opening of our taproom. Prost!

Strong Scotch Ale

As I get caught up on my blog posts, I'm going to try to refer saying "I'm super excited about this one!" in reference to every beer we've brewed... Except for this one, because I'm super excited about this one.

I've always loved barrel aging beers and the barrels we got for this are very intriguing for me. I've aged beers in unused barrels, bourbon barrels, and wine barrels. My first week in Tombstone, I received an e-mail from a cooperage that they had scotch barrels available. All of the owners of the brewery and I love Scotch, so right when I read the e-mails, I told Matt that they were available and he said buy them. Less than 5 minutes after getting the e-mail the barrels were ordered and we were making plans to purchase a bottle filler for this beer.

We asked specifically that we receive Islay barrels from Laphroaig and Ardbeg. When the barrels showed up, we realized that we got all Ardbeg barrels and one other barrel from a distiller I've never heard of: Glenglassaugh. I was hoping to find the peatiest barrels available and we got exactly what we were looking for. One of the Ardbeg barrels still had about 3 gallons of scotch in the bottom of the barrel.

We talked about what beer we wanted to put into them and we discussed the usual whiskey barrel styles, stouts, barleywine, Old Ales, etc. and we decided to brew a Strong Scotch Ale or Wee Heavy instead.

The fun thing about doing a traditional Strong Scotch Ale is that it features the malt flavors so prominently. Many brewers opt to use a high quality base malt and then brew the beer with a normal one hour boil and use melanoiden malts or crystal malts to get the beer amber colored or to get the sweet caramelly flavors. What we did instead was the old school method of boiling the wort for 5 hours (I actually went closer to 6 hours to boil off enough volume to reach our intended gravity). With the 5 hour boil, the wort gets dark and takes on a very rich, bready flavor and the flavors that develop are very complex with descriptions like honey, caramel, biscuit, or sometimes even burnt raisin. We used an old traditional floor malted Maris Otter for the base and it really accentuated the bread and the caramel malt flavors as well as some of the honey and even a little bit of milk chocolate.

We brewed the beer to go into the barrels at 11.9% ABV which meant we needed a very strong yeast strain. The yeast that we used really brings out a lot of the raisin flavor and leaves a very crisp mouthfeel like you might expect to find in a lager, so even though the beer is extremely complex and thick, it feels very drinkable at the high ABV. The thick body should provide a platform to support the scotch barrel flavors, and when the beer comes out (Sometime in early January), this will be one of the beers that I anticipate trying more than anything I've brewed before. Be on the lookout for this in bombers right after the new year!

Catching Back Up: Hazy Hoppy Beers

Normally I like to update my blog posts as I'm brewing new beers. Unfortunately, I'm still getting the flow of brewing on a new system and as a result, I haven't figured out how to schedule my down time on brew days to allow for blog updates. I'm going to try to get caught up on all our new beers in the next few days and I've already got quite a few beers to write about! Instead of having a bunch of repeat information as I talk about our Pale Ale, IPA, and Double IPA, I figured I could lump them all into one post because they are all brewed with similar techniques.

Each one of these beers is brewed as a "Northeast" or "New England" style as has been popularized by some of the Vermont breweries. These beers are hazy, juicy, intensely aromatic, and, perhaps most notably, they feature a rich, creamy mouthfeel.

When I first began researching these beers a year ago, I thought that the idea of brewing cloudy beers was just a marketing gimmick by breweries that wanted to rush beer out the door. It took a while for me to accept that there was a very good reason for these beers to be cloudy. After trying several examples, I began to realize that there were a few common qualities shared between the highest quality examples. What stood out to me the most was that there was a unique fermentation flavor profile and that they were not being brewed with typical American Ale yeast.

We ended up using a yeast strain that is known for it's peachy ester production. In addition to the unique esters that the yeast produces, it is also a little unique in that it loses its ability to flocculate (clear) in the presence of dry hops. The reason that this is the case is because hop oils smear the yeast cell membrane and then the yeast loses its ability to aggregate. Without being able to aggregate together, the individual yeast strains don't have enough mass to fall to the bottom of the fermenter. What that means though is that all the hop oils that coat the yeast cells also stay in suspension and are not lost, but rather the yeast acts as a sort of hop oil delivery vessel.

Furthermore, the yeast strain we're using is very effective at performing biotransformations. The yeast can actually take one type of hop oil and transform it into other types. The main transformation that we understand is the biotransformation of geraniol into beta-citronella. Geraniol is known as a hop compound that comes across as rosy or floral and beta-citronella is the compound that can taste like candied oranges or tangerine. While you might wonder why we would want to use a biotransformation instead of just using a hop variety that is high in beta-citronella, the reason is that bio-transformations seem to create a synergistic effect resulting in a greater intensity of aroma.

The last unique characteristic of our yeast strain is that it has the ability to create high levels of glycosides which are important to create a creamy mouthfeel. We then enhance that effect with the use of flaked oats and flaked wheat to create a uniquely creamy sensation although the beer is dry and easily drinkable.

These beers are also all hopbursted (the pale ale with 100% Amarillo hops, and the IPA and DIPA with Citra, Simcoe, and Amarillo), meaning we add all of our hops near the end of the boil and in the fermenter. Using this type of technique, we strive to still achieve the same amount of bitterness, but the quality of bitterness is more pleasant and doesn't linger the way traditional bittering techniques do. Since the hops are not in contact with the hot wort for nearly as long as traditional methods, we use 30-40% more hops for each style than what you would typically see in traditional examples.

While all of our beers are still likely to receive tweaks, I have been really pleased with the results of these three and the tweaks for these (if there are any) will be very minor and will be completely geared towards elevating our favorite attributes to the next level.

The Beginning!

A few months ago, I talked to Matt Brown, the founder of Tombstone Brewing Company, for the first time. What started off as a job interview quickly fell apart into two dudes talking for a couple hours about beer. It turned out that we had a lot of the same interests in beers and brewing philosophies. Most importantly, we had the same vision for what would make a great craft brewery. It was very obvious after our first talk that this was a great opportunity to make something special in Tombstone, Arizona. After meeting Matt and his family, it was clear that these were the types of people that I would like to partner with.

One of the most exciting prospects to me was that the idea is to devote all of our attention on making great beer and not necessarily on expanding production. I've always believed in staying small and keeping beer close to home. At Tombstone, we have that option thanks to self distribution being legal in Arizona. Getting away from the three-tier system is something I have wanted for a long time. Although with self distribution we have a lot more responsibilities as a brewery, it gives us the option of brewing a much wider variety.

When I came on board, the building and brewhouse were already purchased and construction had just begun. Fortunately, the brewhouse was designed almost exactly as I would have wanted it and the few minor tweaks that I wanted were mostly still able to be added on. When I moved here two weeks ago, everything was set up and just about ready to be brewed on except for a few minor construction delays. We faced a few more interesting challenges in the last weeks than expected:

First, we had bought yeast with an anticipated first brewday almost a week and a half ago. When buying yeast for use in commercial breweries, it is challenging to get yeast to live for longer than a week in storage. When it became apparent that we would not be able to brew when we thought we would, I realized that I was going to need to feed the yeast fresh nutrients to keep it healthy. Normally, that would not be to big of a deal, except for our grain shipment being delayed by a week, meaning I had nothing to use to feed the yeast. It turns out that since we are in such a small town, the carrier for the shipment only delivers in this city once a week.

We frantically rushed to a homebrew store late last Friday and bought all the dry malt extract they had as well as a pump and some other common homebrew supplies in an effort to keep the yeast healthy. It was a pretty scary time thinking that our specially ordered yeast (which takes 2 weeks for the lab to propagate for us) would be dead by the time we were ready to brew and that there was not much we could do about it. Fortunately, the emergency homebrew shop trip worked out and we managed to salvage the yeast for our first brew day yesterday.

It was very exciting to get to brew for the first time on a new system. I expected a lot of unforseen challenges to pop up throughout the day since I'm learning a completely new system here, but somewhat miraculously, everything worked exactly as my 2.5 year old brewing spreadsheet from school said it should. This was my first time brewing on a system with this much control over each part of the process.

Starting from the beginning of the process, we have a Reverse Osmosis water generator which makes the water as close to pure as possible without distilling it. The system is actually running to take the total dissolved solids to about 1 ppm. Starting with a blank slate like that, I now have the option of recreating any water profile I want for each style of beer. With the use of a flow meter going into the mash tun, I can control the exact water to malt ratio which is also a luxury that I have not had before.

Yesterday, I brewed three 15 BBL batches of beer. It was a little ambitious to brew 3 times in a day since it was my first time using the system, but it worked out very well. The day was about 4 hours longer than what it should normally be, but a slower day was to be expected as I was being extra cautious with every valve I opened and every pump I turned on.

The 3 beers brewed were a Special Bitter, a Blonde Ale, and a Northeast Style IPA. The IPA is the beer that I'm most excited about, but each one of these beers has something different that makes me anxious to try them.

The first batch of the day was the Bitter. I very rarely brew beers that are so low in gravity. Although this bitter will finish right around 4% ABV, the use of high quality, floor malted Crisp Maris Otter, a thick mash, high mash temperature, and a water profile similar to the historical water profile at Burton on Trent, the bitter will still be very full bodied and, despite the name, it will not be very bitter. Right around 30 IBU's, bittered and flavored with East Kent Goldings. In my opinion, the key to making a great low gravity English beer like this is to use a very flavorful base malt and an estery yeast strain. The strain we chose is known for giving peachy esters and creating large amounts of glycerol, enhancing the creamy mouthfeel of the beer.

The second batch was the NEIPA. This is a style that I have been researching for months now. It is a style that I first wanted to write off, thinking that the cloudy appearance was just a gimmick. However, after trying several different examples, I dove deep into research about the interactions between hops and some yeast strains which lead to an obsession with creating this style. Utilizing a very estery yeast with fruity hops, this beer relies on biotransformation of hop oils to create an intensely tropical and citrusy aroma. The mouthfeel of this style should also be very creamy with an intense estery character from the yeast. To enhance the creamy mouthfeel, we used the same glycerol producing strain that we used in the bitter, flaked oats, flaked wheat, and a water profile with a slightly elevated chloride content. Although the terminal gravity will be quite low, the perception will be of a thicker bodied beer due to the creaminess of the mouthfeel.

The last beer yesterday was a Blonde Ale. Typically, brewers don't get too excited about brewing a style that is perceived as being somewhat boring. However, I was very excited about this beer because it will give me the best idea of what our system is capable of. I created a water profile similar to the historic Pilsen water... VERY soft water and very thin mash should result in a light, crisp mouthfeel and will lend to a very high drinkability. That said, I did use a characterful Kolsch yeast strain to provide a lightly fruity flavor profile. At 13 IBU's, 5% ABV, and 3 SRM, this will probably be the most exposed beer I've ever brewed. With no room for mistakes, it was a huge relief that everything went exactly as planned.

At the end of the brewday, it occurred to me how remarkable it was that every beer ended up right on with our target gravities, evaporation rates, temperatures, and pH levels. I never would have guessed that we could make consistent results across three batches our first time on a new system. The beers are all happily fermenting now today and the first beers should be ready towards the end of the month. Stay tuned for an update on the next beer brewed... We're working on a few specialty beers in the next couple weeks!