There have been a lot of changes since I made the transition from working at a brewery producing just under 3,000-barrels to one that produces a combined 100,000-barrels in two locations.

The most obvious transition was going from the production side of things to operations side. That’s right, I’m no longer brewing beer for a living. I was expecting a lot of scoffs and confused looks but after explaining this to many close friends, I still receive the requisite response—“it must be so cool working for a brewery!”

Essentially, I have the ultimate office job, if you want to call it that. I am the bridge between the brewery—the production side of things—and the sales reps—the business side of things. While I’m still the office equivalent of keg washer, I’m still spending every minute at work dealing with the beer. It’s my job to assist in production (i.e. plan what is brewed and how much) and make sure the beer gets where it needs to go and ensure it gets there on time.

In addition to the obvious change in job title, I’m also able to witness how a highly functional and nationally renowned brewery operates. For example, the other day at work one of our brand managers informed me that they were conducting an off-flavors tasting in the brew house. Instantly intrigued, I traveled downstairs from my desk to see a table full of different cups, each infected with different symptoms of a bad beer.

If I wanted, I could quaff a nice glass of oxidized brew, or learn what a mug of diacetyl tastes like (it’s extremely buttery, by the way). Although these are things I learned while manning the brew kettle at my previous job, I soon learned that new place of employment wanted everyone to learn this information. Not only were the brewer’s expected to detect the presence of dimethyl sulfide in a bad beer, but the salespeople and tour guides as well! Live by the brew, die by the brew!

After sitting through a forty-minute tasting of off beers and trying to determine the difference between a four year old Czech Pilsner and an American Czech-style Pilsner, I realized that the opportunity for me to learn about beer is only getting greater.

With this new column, my hope is to impart not only brewing knowledge and science, but also the little things that make the beer industry tick. After all, we wouldn’t have great beer without great brewers, but without informed and knowledgeable beer fans and enthusiasts, there’d be no one to enjoy the fruits of their labor.

We experienced a problem during bottling whereby we were not able to properly filter the brew. This left room for a great deal of sediment to fall into the bottles. However, none of the sediment was yeast or hops. Rather some bottles simply ended up with a shocking amount of cranberry bits. Our workaround is to serve the brew to our friends in a glass (as all good drinks should be enjoyed) and run the braggot through a small sieve during the pour.

This may sound very disappointing, but I assure you in comparison to the end result, this is only a minor setback. The brew was very tart and malty with very fruity notes and a hearty amount of sweetness throughout. The finish is quite sharp and boozy, but it doesn’t discourage you from the next sip. We’ve found that the colder the brew is served, the better. While warmer temperatures tend to bring out the true character of the flavors in most beers, in this instance, due to the sharp, almost tannic mouth feel, enjoying this one cold helps make for a better sip.

Overall I really enjoyed how this brew came out but can easily see ways in which it could be improved. I hope to be able to take these lessons and apply them some day, but there are many more beers to brew before then. Not to mention the almost prohibitively expensive cost of brewing up the Crandaddy Braggot. What are some good lessons you’ve learned from experimental brewing? Share your expertise in the comments. Happy brewing!

A braggot, which is pronounced, “bracket” with a Welsh accent, is a hybrid beverage whose origins lie closer to mead. The original recipe was a simple variant of traditional mead by virtue of the addition of hops to the brew. Later on, this recipe was largely changed to include malt in the mix, thus, sparing any grains in the recipe, has it sitting on the edge of being a beer and a mead at the exact same time.

The addition of cranberries to the recipe adds, aside from the delicious flavour of cranberries, additional sugars to the brew, thereby targeting a higher alcohol content. However, all this sweetness comes at a price. The addition of numerous complex sugars to the brew requires a heartier yeast in order to break them down. For this, we use champagne yeast for its ability to survive longer, as well as digest more complex sugars than traditional ale yeasts.

The brew is currently fermenting and we expect to bottle it at the end of the month. That’s roughly a four week fermentation process; nearly double that of your basic pale ale. Bottle conditioning happens over the course of two weeks and soon it will be ready for enjoyment. I’ll report back then to tell you all how it came out. In the meantime, if you’re a home brewer yourself, tell us what you’re brewing up this winter to keep you warm on Twitter or in the comments below.

Despite everything I’ve been learning at the brewery I constantly want to know more. Fortunately, the brewery I work in consists of three people: the head brewer, an assistant brewer and myself. This small crew provides me with many opportunities to not only flood my mind with beer knowledge, but also get my hands into many of the daily brewing operations.

I currently work six days a week. Although I spend three great days in the brewery, the other three days are spent waiting tables. In all honesty, being a waiter is the pits. However, it pays the bills.

Lately I’ve found some of my brewery hours getting cut in order to work more in the restaurant—the brewery is part of a brewpub, so we have a full restaurant and my two jobs are thankfully located in the same building.

Initially I was bummed, since I viewed this as stepping backwards from my ultimate goal of full time brewing. However, I spent one of these forced days off visiting another local brewery and checking out the operations there.

A friend of mine starting interning at a brewery in Brooklyn around the same time I started my tenure at Chelsea. On my day off I hopped the train over to his neck of the woods and had the chance to see the inner workings of another commercial operation. My initial reaction was to the size of this brewery. It dwarfs the facility in Chelsea and produces about 5 times as much brew. Also, the brewery had 8 full time employees and 2 interns.

Although my buddy is now full time, like most people, he started as an intern. Most interns start as the brewery monkey, shlepping around pallets and cleaning kegs. While this is essential to any brewing operation, it also takes the least amount of time to learn. I’m not saying that keg cleaning isn’t important, but when it comes to the mindset of brewery interns, it’s only the first few backbreaking steps down a long road of brewing knowledge.

As he showed me around the space I got curious and began asking a lot of questions about their procedures. Since I now possess a pseudo-working knowledge of a brewery, I started contemplating how the practices at Chelsea were different from the way things were done here. After a few minutes of questioning my pal conceded that he wasn’t sure about most of the procedural activity since he didn’t get many chances to take part in the actual brewing. Most of his time, he said, was spent on the other side of the brewery cleaning and filling kegs and directing transfers.

As I sat on the train home I realized how often I’m able to get my hands in many of the essential brewing activities. While I definitely clean my fair share of kegs and spend a great amount of time completing the less desirable tasks at Chelsea, I’m also allowed to take part in the actual brewing and many other aspects of life in the brew house.

Working in a small brewery—like working for any small operation or company—definitely has its setbacks, but the rewards outweigh these issues by far. Although I may be forced to wait a few extra days for my paycheck, or the beer I make isn’t as readily available as bigger breweries, I have the opportunity to get my hands dirty and actually learn the craft. Despite the little inconveniences, the hops stuck underneath my fingernails and the wort that sticks to my boots is a true testament to the value of learning by doing. Besides, how many other people get to pour themselves a pint in the middle of their workday?

Last Wednesday marked the first official meet-up of the Boston chapter of Girls’ Pint Out. To show our support and see what GPO is all about, the ladies of Beeriety (me, Erin, Alicia) headed to Deep Ellum for some chatting, some drinking, and some killer duck confit mac n’ cheese.

During the course of the evening, I got a chance to chat with Boston GPO coordinator, Rebbeca Millette, and find out a bit more about their organizational goals. Much like Beeriety, GPO is very interested in education, making beer culture accessible, and (as we’ve discussed before) the role of women in the beer community. They also place a special focus on events -  getting women together to expand their beer-horizons through tastings, beer-dinners, home brewing, and other group outings. She gave me a short history of the organization: they started in Indiana earlier this year and have already set-up branches in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Ohio, and now Massachusetts. The Boston branch has only been in existence since September, but they already have over 100 fans on facebook and pulled about 20 ladies for the first gathering. According to Rebecca, this first Boston meet-up was a way to welcome and get to know members as well as gain a sense of their beer-knowledge, interests, etc.

But of course the evening wasn’t just chatting – there was also plenty of tasting to do as we worked our way through Ellum’s lovely draft list. Among the evening’s favorites were local brews like High & Mighty’s Beer of the Gods, Cisco’s oak-aged Lady of the Woods, Pretty Things’ Babayaga, and Clown Shoes’ Clementine. My personal pick of the evening was the Thiriez Extra (pronounced Tee-ri-ay according to Ellum proprietor Max,) a dry, hoppy saison from France. These and other beers helped to open up a number of different conversations, suggestions, and ideas about beer culture – how to learn about it, how to talk about, and how to participate in it.

All in all it was a great evening with great ladies. We here at Beeriety look forward to many future GPO outings!

Recently we brewed our second wet hop beer of the year with about 50-pounds of Cascades from the Yakima Valley. Our head brewer had the day off so I was brought in the brewery to assist with the brew day. I decided that within 6-months I want to be able to run a brewday completely solo so I decided to take the opportunity to sketch out some diagrams and take detailed notes to help me remember some of the more minute details of the process. Since there were only two of us working that day, I didn’t have to surrender my services to deliveries. This meant not only that I could focus all of my energy on brewing—loading and unloading kegs around NYC gets very physically draining—and even had some spare time to take a few photos.

Mashing In:

Here is 1400-pounds of malt doing its magic. For this fresh hop we decided to go for a dark amber color and even added 165-pounds of flaked Rye for a bit of spicyness.

Vorlof:

The purpose of the vorlof, or recirculation, is to clarify the wort. The hot wort is cycled through itself while the bed of spent grain acts as a filter bed collecting husks and other haze causing goodies.

Bag of Cascades:

10-pounds of fresh Cascades hops waiting their turn in the boil.

Fresh Hops:

After the boil, we flush the wort through a hopback full of whole leaf hops to retain all the wonderful aromas, flavors and essential oils the cones have to offer. Normally, we’ll use between five and ten pounds of dried, whole leaf hops for a 30-barrel batch. However, since we were using fresh hops, we decided it’d be much better to utilize 30-pounds of fresh Cascades for this.

In about 3 weeks I’ll have some information—and a few more photos—of the finished and hopefully delicious brew!

More and more I find myself enamored with the smell of hops. Now, I’m no hophead, but there is something about dumping Amarillo pellets into the brew kettle or manning the hop back that really gets to me. Although I may go for a malty porter more often than a sharp IPA, the utilization of hops while brewing has really got my mind—and palate—intrigued.

As I’ve learned more in the brewery, I’ve discovered that I’m relaxing a bit and really starting to enjoy the work. I feel that a lot of this stems from being able to take everything in since I’m no longer stress over little things. For example, where I used to worry that I incorrectly weighed out the wrong amount of hops, I now just stand back and watch the bitter green cones saturate with sticky-sweet wort and just enjoy the experience. I’ve noticed that my not sweating the small stuff, I’m also finding many new aspects of beer that I enjoy, like hops.

My best hop experience actually occurred a few weeks ago. One Tuesday morning our head brewer showed up to work with 56-pounds of fresh Chinook hops divided among four large sacks. While the look of the greenery was impressive the smell was what floored me. Now, pelletized hops come to us in 11-pound boxes and posses a pungent and sharp aroma. The 200-pound sacks of dried hops are overwhelming in size but mellow in scent.

These wet hops, however, had such a clean and grassy smell that I couldn’t help but grab a handful and bring the whole glorious bundle up to my nose. The bitterness was apparent, but it was so clean that I had to keep checking to make sure I wouldn’t forget that scent. Fortunately, the fresh hop beer we brewed that day was done conditioning two days ago and I can experience those fresh hops all over again.

I meant to write this piece about the more technical aspects that hops play in beer, but like I said earlier, it’s often more rewarding to stop sweating the details and just enjoy the experience.

Need more excuses to drink good beer with good friends? Me too. So recently some friends and I came up with a great one: we love to do craft projects, and we LOVE to drink craft beer. Why not put them together and start a Craft While You Craft Night?!

For our first meeting we did a selection of beer and cheese pairings combined with a pinhole art project from designsponge.com. Crafting guru Lauren provided the tools for the project, and I selected some beers and cheeses to sample before, during, and after the project.

For our second meeting we decided to make a beer-themed project, using something most beer-drinkers always have plenty of: bottle caps. Using epoxy, mosaic grout, corkboard, plywood circles, a glue gun, pin-backs, and a few other handy craft supplies, we fashioned some coasters, trivets, earrings, and pins out of our bottle cap collections.

However, before we started crafting, we did a tasting of our favorite Summertime brews. Lauren started us off with a very summer-y beer cocktail: shandy. Shandies can be made a number of ways, but this one was a simple half & half mixture of sparking lemonade and Endurance Arctica Pale Ale. It was bubbly, sweet, and delicious. We then moved to Rebecca’s selection, American Darling, Pretty Things’ “Lawnmower” Lager; then Diana’s, the People’s Pint Natural Blonde Ale – both crisp, clean selections perfect for a summer afternoon. Ready to “spice” things up a little, we moved on to my selection, the Luciernaga Belgian Pale from Jolly Pumpkin. This brew is refreshing and slightly tart, with hints of spice, citrus and apple – a perfect summer-to-fall transition beer. We ended with Heather’s selections: first some Saison Dupont, one of the best saisons around, and we ended with some Ipswich Summer, an unfiltered and citrus-y Blonde. The tastings and the projects went very well!

If you’re not a Craft-er (but still love Craft Beer) there are lots of other possible Beer-tivities that might be right up your alley:

For the film buff: host a movies & craft night – pick a classic (or kitchy) flick and pair it with a selection of beers. You could also do a TV show beer night. Why not drink craft beer (or beer cocktails) during your weekly Mad Men screening instead of downing martini after martini. You’ll stay sober longer and you don’t even have to buy olives!

For the foodie: try a potluck food and craft beer night – everyone brings a combination and you get to explore the flavors that come out when you pair beer with various foods. Or you could go all out and take turns hosting a Craft Beer Dinner where each course is matched perfectly with a particular craft beer.

For the sportsfan: pre-game with some craft beer and then switch to something more session-y when the game starts. There’s no reason to drink swill just because you’re drinking for hours. Don’t be peer-pressured by promises of “Drinkability.”

For the overly-literate: mix up your book club meetings with a tasting before or after you discuss (before, if you’re looking for a more exciting discussion.) Or if you host a weekly Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit night, why not make it more interesting by trying some craft brew while you play.

For the beer-lover with no other beer-friendly hobbies: why not just host a no-frills craft-tasting night? Sometimes the best choice is the simplest one.

Do you have friends, beer, and some way of putting them together? Let us know your favorite craft-ivities, and don’t forget to use the hashtag #mybeer to tell us what you’re drinking!

The history of spices in beer is as old and varied as beer itself. Despite the fact that hops have become the predominant spicing agent used in most contemporary styles, that was not always the case.  In areas where hops are not native or easily grown the role of hops was frequently played by another bitter and/or mildly anti-septic plant, such as marigold, burdock, juniper, or heather. In fact, during the Middle Ages, a substance known as gruit (a mash-up of various herbs and spices) was used to provide the same preservative and flavoring benefits that hops can provide. As recently as the Renaissance, spicing beer was still fairly common all across Europe. Grains of Paradise (a peppery member of the ginger family) was particularly popular and was most likely used to cover over the stale or sour flavors of beer that had been improperly made or stored.

However, as regulatory practices worked towards more standardized beer production, spiced beer remained traditional in some regions and was legislated, regulated, and even shamed out of popular use in others. For this reason, spices are a much more common element of styles produced in regions like Belgium than they are in Germany (where the Reinheitsgebot limited beer ingredients to the big four) or England (where for a while even the use of hops was forbidden in certain ales.)

Though spices are uncommon to many beer styles, if you’re both a beer-lover and a spice-enthusiast (like me) there are still lots of styles you can explore. For the purposes of keeping it simple, I want to talk about three of the spiciest beer categories:

Fall & Winter Seasonals (Pumpkin beers, Winter “Warmers”, Holiday beers, etc.)
Cooler weather means warmer beers, so these seasonals combine the natural warming effects of alcohol with the natural warming effects of certain spices. Pumpkin beers tend to spice with the same ingredients that we know and love in our pumpkin pies. In fact, the core spices used in most cool-weather brews will be things you could find in any given kitchen: cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, allspice, and vanilla. among others. In addition to these types of warming spices, Winter beers frequently add fruit flavors to mimic the classic Wassail experience.

For a Pumpkin Ale try Dogfish Head’s Punkin Ale, Brooklyn’s Post Road Pumpkin, or Smuttynose’s Pumpkin Ale – all of which feature a subtle (instead of overwhelming) pumpkin-spiciness.

For Holiday or Winter Brews try the Sam Smith Winter Welcome, Anderson Valley Winter Solstice, or the Dubuisson Bush de Noel.

Belgians
As legendary beer writer Michael Jackson noted, “the Belgians are the greatest users of herbs and spices in beer.” And you don’t have to be a serious beer expert to feel the truth of this statement. A wide range of Belgian brews feature spice as a prominent ingredient -most notably, Belgian witbiers and saisons. Traditional spices include coriander, sweet and bitter orange peel, black pepper, grains of paradise, and sweet gale – all of which provide the sweet, spicy, and summer-y flavors that you except from those styles.

For a classic Witbier, just pick up a Hoegaarden (unfortunately now owned by InBev) or an Allagash White.

For a Saison try Saison Dupont, Foret, or Ommegang’s Hennepin.

Experimental

Though the Belgians may be the reigning spice champs, the American craft scene is giving them a run for their money with a collective penchant for spices and other unorthodox ingredients. In addition to all the classics, many American brewers are using herbs, flowers, and even chili powder to play with styles and flavors.

Boston-based Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project makes a Rustic Stout with rosemary. Rogue offers us a a beer spiced with Chipotle peppers (their Chipotle Ale, which tastes exactly like what you’d think,) a few variations on Juniper beers (John John Juniper and the Juniper Pale ale,) and even a Chamomile Ale (of same name). Dogfish Head seems to use every spicing agent under the sun, including basil (Black Thai), lemongrass (Namaste), crystallized ginger (Pangea), chiles (Theobroma), and juniper & black tea (Sah’Tea).

Got a favorite spice-y beer? Let us know by tweeting with hashtag #mybeer!

For the past month I’ve been in charge of Saturday brewery tours at the Chelsea Brewing Company. Four months ago, I never would have though myself capable of giving an informative and in-depth brewery tour. However, the hands on education I’ve been receiving has really beefed up my beer knowledge and more importantly, it has giving me a real, physical understanding of the beverage I’ve spent the last several years studying while enjoying the occasional pint.

One of my favorite parts of giving tours is hanging around after giving my spiel and chatting. More than once, I’ve had the opportunity to educate curious beer drinkers about the suds in their glass and introduce them to new flavors. A few people have told me that they had no idea how complex brewing was and were amazed to discover the wide spectrum of flavors an accomplished brewer can achieve with just water, malt, hops and yeast.

When I first began brewing commercially, the process of achieving those various tastes overwhelmed me. Unlike many of the folks on my tours, I was fully aware of the variety of flavors that the basic beer ingredients could create and even knew a bit of the science behind it. However, the more I observed and experienced first hand, the more I felt lost in the process: I constantly fretted about variances in temperatures and time differentials; The threat of a boil-over stressed me out; I worried that I would never be able to operate the brew house alone would spent my off time pouring over brewing manuals and beer books.

As time wore on and I participated in the brewing process more often I learned to relax. I gradually began to understand the little nuances of brewing and things slowly started to click for me. Recently, I’ve found myself correctly identifying certain flavors and even brewing techniques found within the glass in my hand.

One event that really helped me put all of this in perspective occurred while I was running the hopback during an IPA brew. Basically, a hopback is a vessel that brewers use to stream hot wort (i.e. unfermented beer) through whole leaf hops. This process occurs at the end of the brewing process and allows the wort to take on a lot of the flavor and, more importantly, the aroma of whatever hop variety the brewer chooses to highlight in that particular beer.

As is the norm at the brewery, I was asking thousands of questions about the hopback. After about ten minutes I asked our head brewer how to tell whether or not the process was going smoothly. He took the paddle I was using to stir the hops from my hands and gave a quick stroke throughout the bud-filled hopback in front of us.

“Feels good,” he told me. “You don’t want it to thick, but you don’t want the wort running to thin.”

“So it’s all a feel thing,” I asked in reply.

“Of course it is. It’s not rocket science. It’s beer.”