Adam turns pro

[This is the fourteenth installment of an ongoing series by Adam Draeger,  an experienced homebrewer and engineer transitioning to the world of professional brewing through coursework at the Siebel Institute of Brewing Technology–this is the end of the road–Adam got a job! ] After moving out to greater-Denver and settling in, every day for the first few days I was putting 200 miles on my vehicle dropping off resumes and business cards (I use the term “business cards” loosely since I bought some custom rubber stamps and blank coasters to craft my cards–pictured right) and visited: Left Hand Oskar Blues Upslope Mountain Sun Boulder Brewing Avery Redstone Southern Sun Great Divide Breckenridge Wynkoop CB&Potts TommyKnocker Rock Bottom Golden City Odell’s Fort Collins Brewing New Belgium Coopersmiths Eclipse Bull and Bush Gordon Birsch BJ’s restaurant Asher Brewing Denver Chophouse Pints Pub Del Norte Dry Dock Twisted Pine Yak and Yeti and the Brewer’s Association HQ (for networking purposes)Even though I was willing to volunteer a day or two, most places weren’t giving me the time of day or returning emails/phone calls, etc. (a shout out to Tommyknocker, Del Norte, Funkwerks and the BA for letting me job shadow/intern) There were several days that I was so frustrated that I considered flushing my degree down the toilet and going back into engineering. Well, the fact of the matter is I visited the KROC homebrewing club and these great guys and gals gave me a couple job leads. One lead was that Chris Kennedy at Yak and Yeti Brewpub was leaving (he is the new head brewer for Jamil Zainasheff at Heretic Brewing)…I smothered Chris with confidence and convinced him that he only needed to show me how to brew once, transfer beer once, answer a few questions like how to fill out the alcohol tax form and I’d be good to go…I got the job.Meet the new head brewer for the Yak and Yeti in Arvada, CO. A little info about the Yak:  The Yak and Yeti is an Indian and Nepalese restaurant that has been around since 2001 in Westminster.  Their food is apparently the best around (I can confirm this after having eaten there now).  They became sucessful enough after six years to open a second restaurant.  Dol (the Yak’s founder) purchased the old English-style “Cheshire Cat Brewpub” which is located in a 1864 old house in old-town Arvada.  Chris has been brewing on this 7-barrel system, made from mostly old dairy equipment, for almost three years supplying beer for both restaurants (Coincidentally, the CC Brewpub was also in operation since 2001 before ownership changed). Currently this is only a part-time head brewer position due to the low volume of beer sales, but I’m optimistically going to put some hard work into increasing sales.   I’ve already brewed a batch with Chrs and transfered cellared beer several times by myself.  The other exciting opportunity from this job is the GABF this fall.  Since Chris won a gold medal for the Himalayan IPA last year, the owner wants to me submit beers again.  So my first time attending the GABF and I’ll be pouring my hand-crafted beer at the nation’s largest beer festival.  Who would have imagined?! The first question that most of the locals ask me is “what do you like to brew?” or “what can we expect for beers?”  I can say for the first round, I’ll probably just brew Chris’s four main recipes (IPA, Chai Stout, Pils and Red ale) once and then add a 5th rotating seasonal, most likely a wheat bier.   Since this was an English brewpub, there are still four hand pulls in place for cask beer and room for eight other beers on tap, so plentyof room to grow.  Although, I will have some new friendly competition because just a few blocks away the Arvada Beer Company will be opening its doors in about a month, I’m hoping we can plug each others’ beersand both come out ahead as now Denverites have a beer reason to come to our suburb. If you want more info on the Yak, you’ll have to google it yourself, or start with these links:www.theyakandyeti.com  (excuse the primitive website, I’m not the webguy, but here you can find a news video clip about the brewpub being haunted!) or you can read a little more about the house’s history here:http://www.hauntedcolorado.net/Arvada.html I’ll be using “turtleweiss at gmail dot com”  as my professional brewing email address in case anybody asks. Well, enough yakking from me.  If you ever make it out to Denver or plan to attend the GABF, stop by and try my beers sometime… Prost! Adam Draeger

Adam’s Adventures, Part 13

[This is the thirteenth installment of an ongoing series by Adam Draeger,  an experienced homebrewer and engineer transitioning to the world of professional brewing through coursework at the Siebel Institute of Brewing Technology.

This one is sorta the end of the road, though there’s a fun follow-up post on the way, and Adam promised to let us know when he lands a job–he heads for his new life in Colorado this Saturday–if you’re a brewer needing a smart young brewer to add to your team, shoot me an email and I’ll put you in touch (jwilson [AT] yahoo DOT com).]

It is too bad that the bus didn’t stop at least once for pictures on the way to Austria because the views were beautiful. Lakes, trees and the Alps speckled with country homes on the hillsides, never got a picture except in my mind.
The Austrian portion of the study tour began in Salzburg at a large brewery called Stiegl, brewing 350hl batches probably as big as any of the AB or Miller plants in the US. This brewery was only a few years old from being updated and looked great! They also had a very large gift shop and biergarten which we all thoroghly enjoyed. Stiegl also claimed to have a brewery inside a brewery, because they had about a 5hl working pilot brewery that was located inside their museum. We couldn’t spend much time in the museum because of the schedule, but it was really well put together like the Field Museum in Chicago for instance. Lunch and biers in the biergarten, of course.

We then headed across town to the Austrian Augustiner brewery (not be confused with the one in Munich). This is still owned by the monks from a different monestary and will 100 years old next year. They are still using the same equipment that they used 100 years ago, and plan to completely update and renovate for their centennial celebration. They gave us each a stein to take home and even though their beer was direct-fired and still cooled in coolships (pictured below-right), I loved their maerzen–simply fantastic! What was also amazing was that they still use primarly wood barrels for serving their beers (an empty barrel weighs around 100 lbs). Their biergarten was very old and had huge Chestnut trees (which I found out is the traditional biergarten tree) and was setup with food vendors along the perimeter where you had to pay separately at each place to get your food/beer. We had free beer but the food wasn’t. A few of the guys bought and shared a steckerlfisch (grilled whole fish on a stick) they said it tasted awesome.

After checking into our hotel, we got back on the bus and headed to Gusswerks brewpub north of Salzburg…a little taste of American Brewpubbery. (I should point out that our first brewery that we visited this day was over 500 years old, the second was 100 years old and this brewpub was exactly five years old…nifty) An entreprenuer, from Austria but who studied in Ireland, started this brewpub using borrowed money from friends and built it from the ground up. He had several lagers but also some ales including…a stout! They served us pizza appetizers and some amazing bbq ribs and semmelknodel (bread dumplings). Not surprisingly, we craftbrewer-types had 5-10 times more questions for our host compared to the big breweries that we visited; this hit close to home. Afterwards, Michael arranged for five cabs to bring us all home. As we were waiting I wandered around the grounds and found an art gallery that was still open at 11:30 p.m. and looked around. The art didn’t impress me as much as the motion-sensing projector that was mounted on the ceiling and pointed to the ground. I saw very realistic koi fish swimming around, when I walked onto the projection, I heard water noises and noticed the waves in front of my feed…the fish also reacted to me by swimming in the opposite direction. COOL! There was also popcorn popping and coffeebeans as well, but the fish were my fav. (This video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FslB5g8mVk&feature=related>  shows something similar, but my fish were more responsive.)

The next morning we visited another very old brewery called Eggenberg…the brewery/castle burned down in the 1800’s and was rebuilt again. This brewery is famous for one of the highest alcohol lagers called Samichlaus. The buildings were very cool and we ended in the upper room full of deer antlers as well as boar tusks and ram horns (pictured, right), also the best freshmade brezen I have ever had served alongside their beers. I didn’t care for their other biers that much, but the 14% Samichlaus tasted great, as always (very dangerous beer because you can hardly taste the alcohol, too smooth).
We then traveled to Hopstetten brewery that was quite old, but has thwarted tradition in exchange for innovation and creative beers (still mostly lagers…give them a break for trying) They still used a huge leatherbelt driven grainmill and used the old copper kettles (as did most of the old breweries in Austria). Their main claim to fame is their steinbier. Since they are located in a region that mines a lot of granite, they have open fermentors and a lot of other things around the brewery made from huge blocks of granite. (see photo below of me in garden watering tank, the fermentors were taller and wider than this, but not as long) In addition to primary fermenting their beers in stone, they also would heat up smaller stones on the fire and put them in the fermenting beer so that caramel flavors and colors would be imparted, these rocks sat on the bottom during the whole fermentation. Most Austrian breweries served an unfiltered lager called a zwickelbier and Hopstetten called theirs kubelbier (“bucket beer” because the owner’s dad used to serve guests at parties by running down in the cellar and pull a bucket of beer from the zwickel tap for immediate consumption.) We tried the same. We also tried their maerzen (called “wedding beer” for the American market), a honey lager made with 25 percent honey (there is a large honey maker in the area), a honey bock and a barleywine. These all tasted fantastic.

We then headed to a town called Schlagl where there is also a large monestary that brews beer (the only brewing monestary still left in Austria). Half of us stayed at the monestary that night and I stayed with the other half in Schiffner’s Gasthaus. This guy named Schiffner opened a bed, breakfast, restaurant and beer bar and employs his whole family. He is a professional beer sommelier (or “cicerone” in the US). They prepared a five-course dinner (each course is served with a different beer) for us which was followed by a rare treat. There was a lot of “weird” stuff on my plate, but I tried everything and actually loved everything, it was so amazing. I have done two other three-course beer dinners before, but these were served for 1000 guests and didn’t have the extra care that was provided for our 40 person meal. I enjoyed all the food and the beers by themselves, but wasn’t convinced that each pairing was better than the parts, not that I cared.  After dinner the owner from Eggenberg brought us a 3-liter bottle of three-year-old oak-aged Samichlaus. The beer held up wonderfully. Many people stayed up until dawn partying with the Eggenberg guy since he was bringing out more bottles of crazy beers like Brewdog’s Sink the Bismark. I was still recovering from a bad cough and went straight to bed. If I was feeling a little better, I would have endulged in some of Schniffner’s 150 beer selection from around the world.

The next morning we actually just walked down to the Schlagl brewery at the monestary and had another tour. Most notable about Schlagl was that they used a kettle and lauter tun that were square and painted blue from the outside….I’m not sure what they were lined with on the inside, I sure hope it wasn’t blue paint. Even though they weren’t that big, they were the only brewery that we visited that had a CO2 recovery system. Large places like Steigl might have had one, but it wasn’t pointed out to us. Something else that was unique is that many of the breweries had water treatment before sending the treated water down the drain to the city, but in the US, we like to brag about our “green” efforts whereas the Germans/Austrians just do it as a way of life and try not to draw attention to the “waste” portions of the breweries. Afterwards we went into their restaurant cellar where they had about 10 large wooden fermentors that they cut open and put dining tables inside.
The last stop of the tour we actually headed back to Germany and on our way to Munich we stopped at Flottweg, where they make centrifuges another other “separation technology.” This company was SOOO excited to have us visit, they were giving us things and food and taking our pictures and kept reminding us how honored they were to have us visit. This was very perplexing to me because I tried to explain to the sales rep (btw, I think Austrians know better English than the Germans do) that since all of their equipment will only provide a payback after the brewery is over 100 barrels/batch, that we probably wouldn’t be purchasing their products, though they were very cool. He didn’t seem to mind and they just wanted us to know about them and what they could do.
After a short drive, the bus dropped us off at Doemens and I called up Stina to pick me because we had pre-arranged for me to stay in their apartment for the night. Stina was my wife’s foreign exchange student 12 years ago. My mother-in-law provided their contact information, and I stayed with her and her husband Thursday night. They ordered Chinese for us and we had a lot of good conversations.

Friday morning we headed to a little restaurant and biergarten near Doemens for our graduation ceremony. Lynn Kruger (president of Siebel) flew in to help hand out diplomas. The presentation was very short and both Michael and Lynn gave a quick speech as well as handed us our diploma, class photo and WBA pins. We had a nice meal afterwards with Uerige Alt on mini casks with wooden taps. The dessert was by far the best – Kaiserschmarrn (gourmet pancakes with apples fried in butter, then re-fried in butter, then I think it was fried a little bit in more butter) This was the day of the big wedding across the pond and Rich decided to buy and wear this shirt for graduation as a joke to Alex, our English classmate. (pictured below) Sorry, I didn’t get a photo of me with my diploma yet; we sealed them up in cardboard tubes so they could make the journey back on the plane.
Most of the group was heading to Fruehlingfest at the Theresienweise (Oktoberfest grounds) but I had arranged another stay and didn’t really want to go out anyways. Stina’s parents, Clary and Rolfe Persson, live south of Munich and a few towns north of Aying in Hohenkirchen. They were both so hospitable. Clary did a load of laundry for me, let me call my wife, made supper, gave me biers and then next day offered to drive me to the airport. After supper we sat around the dinner table for about six hours just sharing each others company, I really enjoyed learning more about Germany, they even taught me Str8ts (a number puzzle like Sudoku). They can also see the alps from their town and were trying to describe a strong wind that they experience called a fohn. I didn’t quite understand until I wiki’d it and the American spelling helped jog my memory. I will actually be experiencing similar fohn in Denver but on the east side of the Rockies they are called Chinook winds instead. Two interesting things they told me about the Alps fohn is that (a) they will have red sand in the air that they have traced comes from the Sahara desert and (b) the effects of the wind will seemingly magnify the Alps so close you think you can touch them (about 60-100 km away in reality). I wish I could experience that because they said it isn’t wavy like heat on the road, but crystal clear. Temperature swings of 30 C hotter and then 30 C colder in the matter of hours commonly give people headaches too, apparently.
The next morning Clary suggested that we go for a bike ride to Aying, which is about 8 km south. Beautiful day and good suggestion. We stopped at the Leibhards biergarten again for one last German lager, and it was fantastic like Ayinger beers tend to be when fresh. When we got back we loaded up the car and head to the airport. Uneventful car and plane ride on Saturday, and unevent train and bus ride (Chicago to DSM) on Sunday.
Well, that’s my brewery school summed up in 13 (sometimes long) blog posts. I hope you enjoyed following along as much as enjoyed the emails and comments. Jay might have me check back with a guest post in the future, but I am intending to keep this up on my wife/family’s blog for at least the short term. The only future plans that I have right at the moment is to move out to Denver to join the rest of my immediate family (who has already stormed two weeks without me.) I’ll then begin my search for a brewery position…here’s to successful job hunting and putting my diploma to use.
[raises glass]  Prost!
Adam 

Adam’s Adventures, Part 11

[This is the eleventh installment of an ongoing series by Adam Draeger,  an experienced homebrewer and engineer transitioning to the world of professional brewing through coursework at the Siebel Institute of Brewing Technology.]

Last full week in Munich and except for food words, I haven’t learned any more German. I find that 90 percent of Germans know some English and especially around Hauptbaunhof (main train station). Munich is actually more safe than I expected. I found out that our hostel is in the roughest part of town, but it doesn’t scare me like sections of Chicago did.

This week we had a lot of hands-on modules. The class was split into thirds and my group started with an awesome lecture and demonstrations about draft systems. Great beer + bad draft = bad draft. (And this is a case where two negatives don’t add up to a positive either.) Tuesday we brewed another batch of wheat bier and did the calculations ourselves this time. The batch went without a hitch until it came time to cool it. Somebody had turned off the chiller for the cold water and we couldn’t chill the beer, so they pumped it into the conical instead and used the jackets to cool it. Wednesday we spent the day learning to use the kieselgur <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kieselgur> and depth filter. We filtered the wheat beer that we made last time, then we added speise (more wort/food) and fresh yeast. (yes, some German breweries actually use this method to get consistent products…the yeast is typically a lager yeast for bottle conditioning.) On Thursday, all 38 of us spread out throughout the bottling line and helped bottle four batches of beer. This bottling line is capable of 4000 bottles/hour, but we slowed it down to 2000. We finished in about three and a half hours! After lunch we just cleaned up and grabbed a few fresh bottles of beer and headed to the train. Each night I spent time preparing for our exam that was on Friday. They didn’t do a good job to let us know what was going to be on the exam. All we knew was it had mostly to do with brewing beer, so a lot of the students were anxious and worried about the exam.

On Thursday, we decided to go back to Ayinger <http://en.ayinger-bier.de/?pid=263> for an evening tour. This tour rocked. There were two people from Holland who spoke little English and preferred the tour to be in German (because they spoke that, at least), but our guide did a good job to field questions from both them and our group in our respective languages. This tour lasted two hours and ended with three beers and a free bottle opener. Highly recommended. Afterwards we hit the Liebards Restaurant which is an Ayinger beerhall (owned by the family of Ayinger) and we ate and drank. I decided to have the Mega veinershnitzel along with my buddy Ziggy. This was by far the biggest thing I ever ate (pictured left). It was the size of my large plate and was seated on a bed of fries and came with a side salad. I finished it except a few fries left on my plate got the best of me.

This week was wet and cold and so we didn’t do much stuff outside, except for Monday afternoon. Since our professor had other commitments in the afternoon we actually got out of school on Monday at 1p.m. So I went down to the Viktualienmarkt in downtown Munich for shopping. I found mead, cheese, Oktoberfest shoes and vest. I also had bought some stuff for my daughters.

One night (that was cold and drippy) my Colombian roommate, Adrian, dragged me out to get a beer. Since he was buying, I gave in. We went to the Augustiner Keller <http://www.augustinerkeller.de/en.htm> which was highly recommended by our classmates. When we got inside, the guy pointed to a really small set of spiral stairs that took us about three stories down and into the old cellaring caves. These have been redone and look very new as seen by the picture, but was very cool, nonetheless. When we were done we headed back towards the stairs and found the elevator instead. Sweet.

Friday morning was our final exam. It was five essays that we got to pick out of seven and we had three hours to complete it. I was more anxious for this exam than I would have expected (UWP was a long time ago), but I feel I did well. Michael, who is taking us on our study tour the next two weeks will be grading our exams during this time, so we’ll find out how we did at the end of our study tour…we are all relieved that it is over.

Friday afternoon five of us got on an international train for Prague, Czech Republic. We got there around 11 p.m. and the taxi guys were trying to get five times the recommended price that we studied about, so we walked to our hostel instead (two km) and got there around midnight. The Czech Inn (get it? check inn?) was really well run and had lots of showers, bathrooms, towels, Internet, free maps and everybody spoke English…again, highly recommended. Praha (as the Czech call it) is a beautiful hilly city, and also cheap, as long as you aren’t in a touristy part of town. Pictured right, our bill shows us paying over $1000 crown for a meal…that was like $10 Euro a piece for three rounds of beer and food. Most 1/2 liters were about $1 US (awesome compared to the $4-5 US for each beer in Munich). The pictures cannot capture it like some of the postcards I snagged did (yes, Erin, I got you more postcards). We found the faux Eifel tower, Charles Bridge, the Prague Castle and the John Lennon wall. We also accidentally stumbled upon two brewpubs as well on Saturday. The beer was cheap it was only $30 for each 1/2 liter (well, czech crowns actually and that’s about $1.45 in US$). On Sunday we hit Old Town (which had lots of food vendors, musicians, artists, etc). Then we found two more brewpubs and a beer garten (with awesome Zlatopramen 11° <http://www.zlatopramen.cz/soutez.aspx> Plato beer) before heading on the train back to Munich.

This week we begin our study tour in Germany via group bus and led by Doemens instructor Michael Eder…the big German, will have way too many pics and stories to tell, but will do my best to summarize.

Prost!

ADAM

The ‘dark side’ of New Zealand

You may remember my dear friend Ken Hilton. He’s the best homebrewer I know, and he’s posted here several times. This time, Ken’s cycled his way across New Zealand, and graciously agreed to give us the beer-scoop. Enjoy!

Black Beer, Sand, and the “All Blacks”

You may remember a blog several years ago about cycling around Belgium drinking all sorts of beer with a friend. Well, we decided to go to New Zealand to do the same, although the main focus was cycling and the spectacular scenery. The beer was the reward at days end for having climbed mountains almost daily for the 2940 km adventure.

Intrigued by the title?

The “dark side” is a reference to our very favorite beer in New Zealand…black beer and the black sand beaches on the Tasman Sea…nourished by volcanos, and the “All Blacks”…New Zealand’s national rugby team who wear all black uniforms, are comprised of a substantial percentage of Maori, and come on the playing field doing the Maori war challenge dance to intimidate their opponents.

New Zealand is known for its wine…not for its beer. The majority of New Zealand’s beer culture comes from its English heritage and from the lager revolution. Beer prices killed our budgets…a pint of beer on tap costs $6-$9 for a four percent beer (NZ dollars). A 6-pack of the same costs $12.99-$17.99. A higher gravity beer runs $22-24. Ouch…we explored the sale racks diligently. Now this may have cut us out of some of the outstanding microbrewery offerings using all of the new New Zealand hop varieties like Pacific Gem and Motueka, but it allowed us to explore the subtle nuances of “ordinary beer.” Were we ever surprised!

We toured several breweries…West Coast Brewing in Westport, Monteith’s in Greymouth, and Speights in Dunedin. The Speights tour was absolutely the best brewery tour I have ever been on. And, free taps for 30 minutes at the end. Whoa! Most of these breweries offer milds, pale ales, “original” (older styles of English ales), wheat beers, and, our favorite…Black Beers. Normally a lager, but not always. Not a porter, not a stout, not even a Schwartzbier…somewhere heartier than a Schwartz but not quite a porter. They were yummy…coffee, roast, chocolate…all sorts of subtle nuances. Our favorite of the substantial numbers we tried was from Mac’s Brewery in Nelson…called Black Mac. Not only was this beer our favorite, but it also was bottled in ridged cider bottles with a peel-off cap….the cap had a pop-top ring attached to the side. Really neat and innovative.

Green Man Organic Brewery in Dunedin took the prize for the largest pint of beer…almost a pint and a half on each pour…and 100 percent organic. The most unique brews were a local Belgian-style blonde ale and a golden ale from a micro-brewery in Rotorua. New Zealand was third in line in the gold rush era…first was California, next was Australia, and shortly after…New Zealand. Many of the smaller towns were gold rush towns, and the architecture closely resembles California Gold Rush and the wildwest architecture. The centerpiece of many of these towns is the old hotel. We found a list of the Top 10 best taverns in New Zealand…almost all old hotel taverns…and we quaffed a few in three of the 10: the Wairau Tavern, the Old Victoria Arms Hotel in Cromwell, and our favorite, the Historic Empire Hotel in Ross. This place had a full-mirrored bar with single piece Kauri wood bar 35’ long and 6’ wide, a fireplace with hunting horns and black powder bags, wild boar and deer heads, an old player piano and all sorts of gold-mining memorabilia. It still hung with the old timey tradition of serving beer only in the tavern and food in a separate section. You could take your beer to the food, but you could not take the food to the beer.

In addition to being quite charming, it was also quite “local.” A big bloke corrected me for ordering a Speight’s Original… “You just call it Speight’s…nothing else! You’re probably an American that drinks that horse piss called Budweiser, aren’t you?” Well…the challenge was on. I told him politely that I don’t drink Budweiser…only good beer. The insults, in fun only, flew back and forth. This bloke was 6’4” and probably 350 lbs. Me, at 5’5” and 170 lbs…No worries, Mate! The verbage resulted in an arm wrestling challenge, with beer as the prize. As I suspected that he might just win, I asked him if it was all right to have the event photographed…for my chiropractor. He started laughing…and I seized the moment and took him down!

Would I go back to New Zealand for a beer tour only? Probably not. But I would go back for the drop-dead spectacular scenery, the challenging cycling, the marvelous tramping (hiking) trails, and most of all…for the great Kiwi hospitality.

Adam’s Adventures, Part 10

[This is the tenth installment of an ongoing series by Adam Draeger,  an experienced homebrewer and engineer transitioning to the world of professional brewing through coursework at the Siebel Institute of Brewing Technology.]

Good weather=open bier gartensAs you can see by the collage of mugshots (get it, “mug” shots?, I crack myself up) I frequented a lot of bier gartens this week. The two warmest days we made it to the English Garten which is HUGE and also hosts a lake, lots of trails and bier gartens. I didn’t bring any shorts with me because I had researched the weather conditions for this month and, get this, the web was wrong! So I went looking for a pair of shorts. Germans must never wear shorts or something, I could find a pair of lederhosen for $99, but shorts, I had to pay 25 Euro, which was the cheapest pair I could find. At least I got good use of them this week as most days got to the 70’s F or at least upper 60’s F.
I found a brewpub in Munich. I visited Unions Brau Keller. The copper kettle and system was old and wicked cool looking. The beer wasn’t as pure as the big breweries’ Helles, Dunkel, Bock, etc, but it was cool to drink it in the ambiance of a brewpub/keller (basement).  I bumped into a flight attendant from Sully, Iowa (merely 16 miles from Pella, Iowa)  when I was dining here.
This week at school we covered a lot of topics like chemical analysis, yeast flavors, brewing operations, acidifying mashes and studied the German Reinheitsgebot (which is a lot more complicated than saying just malt, water, hops and yeast, btw) To give you an idea: hops cannot be used after boiling, so no dry hopping. But minerals and bacteria can be used to treat the water ahead of time. Rye and Wheat can be used with top-fermenting yeast, but not with bottom-fermenting yeast. Apparently there are dozens of loopholes but functionally, it is very restrictive and the brewers at Doemens wish it was opened up for more innovation. Before 1987, only beer that was made according to the Reinheitsgebot could be sold in Germany. That means that Belgian beers weren’t allowed to be sold here, nor most American beer. The European states complained, and they passed a law  that allowed beer to be brought into the country, but if it is made in Germany it still needs to follow  the purity law. The country wasn’t (and still isn’t) ready for it; you have to look extra hard to find any beer that isn’t German, Austrian or Czech here. The distributors do not want to chance that they’ll sell these other beers, and most Germans would be too set in tradition to try them so there isn’t much available. I saw a Guinness the other day, that’s like finding a four-leaf clover!
Styles tastings this week covered the history, brew techniques and flavor profiles for ales: Kolsch, Alt, Weiss, Dunkelweiss, Berliner Weiss and Kristallweiss.
We had a group project that split the class into four groups. Our group needed to describe our fictional brewery and our flagship lager and how it was microbiologically stable. Then we needed to describe our “functional beverage” which is like an alcoholic drink that provides something else (eg. caffeine) as a benefit to consumers. We chose a milk lager that would be rich in vitamins and chemicals so it provided retardants for hangovers and tryptophan causing sleepiness so you can “sleep it off.” Totally ridiculus, but our group had fun putting together our presentation. I think we called it Drunken Cow Sleepytime Milk Lager. We then had to make changes to the product such that it would be microbiologically more stable. After two days, we presented and the instructor told us that it wouldn’t be graded, but if it were, all four groups would have gotten A’s.  Oh, and in case you were wondering, our product was made according to the Bovineheitsgebot.
On Thursday we had an in depth tour of all the equipment in the filling room. We will be bottling our wheat beer that we made last week this coming Thursday (16 days later) and so this was a way to introduce us to the equipment that we’ll be using and subsequently cleaning.
This weekend was pretty awesome for checking out new places. A bunch of us took the train to Aying after school on Friday and walked into the Ayinger Brewery (pictured above in my new shorts). They were closed but the receptionist let us walk around a bit. It was a very new facility, modernized and very clean.  Afterwards we walked into the center of town and found a bier garten that sold only Ayinger and relaxed in the sun.
On Saturday, Cade (from Birmingham, Ala.) and I rode the train up to Freising  to visit the historic Weihenstephan monestary, brewing school and brewery. It was on the top of this ridge that overlooked the town of Freising and was really gorgeous. There were flower and tree gartens all around and a bier garten, of course. I tried a barley schnapps (distilled barley liquor. It was sweet, not dry like a whiskey).
We then visited the original Paulaner brewery which is still brewing on a pub level. Afterwards we headed to another Paulaner biergarten where they held Starkbierfest, which was a large biergarten and fest hall. Starkbier is another word for “strong beer”, which is what they call their doppelbocks. A liter of Salvator is all I needed. Wow, this was like a mini-Oktoberfest, but in contrast, 90 percent of everybody was dressed up…I regret not bringing my lederhosen now. There was a 14-piece band that really got the crowd going inside the hall, and outside the temp was perfect and there was plenty of Gemutlichkeit going around.
On Sunday, Cade and I took an another train up to Dachau which is the site of the very first concentration camp in 1933. This was preserved and turned into a free museum for anybody to walk the grounds. All the placards were in at least German and English, but sometimes in six different languages. We hit everything pretty fast but still spent nearly three hours walking the grounds and reading the literature. Very interesting and I appreciated the fact that this was put together by Germans…they respectfully tried to give the history of everything that happened even though it was pretty much self-damning. I suppose a parallelism would be the Americans and slave-trading though.
Will have to put more effort into studying this week as our written essay final will be this coming Friday. If we pass this, we’ll receive our brewing diplomas!
Prost!
ADAM

Adam’s Adventures, Part 9

[This is the ninth installment of an ongoing series by Adam Draeger,  an experienced homebrewer and engineer transitioning to the world of professional brewing through coursework at the Siebel Institute of Brewing Technology.]

Munchen. Munich.

This week was full of a lot and I don’t have enough room to share it all here. I think I may include more pictures this time and less narration.

There are a lot of big breweries in Munchen including: Spaten, Paulaner, Hacker Pschorr, Augustiner, Lowenbrau and Hofbrau. We have been to several of the Augustiner Brauhaus’s as well as Lowenbrau (pictured right) and the most famous Hofbrau Haus, of course (pictured below). The beer at these places is quite expensive around 8 Euro or $11 for a mass krug (liter). We did find a local grocery that has cheap beer in PET bottles and even sells pre-mixed Radler. (see pic, 0.25 euro deposit per bottle!) Radler is beer (lager/weiss) and lemonade mixed together and is quite popular in Germany because you can drink several without getting tipsy.

 

Doemens is actually in a suburb called Grafeling and which we commute by train which takes 20 minutes and another 13 minutes to walk. It is much larger than Siebel and some days there will be 25 staff and 200 students there. Doemans building has a 6 hl brewhaus, small malthouse, full bottling/kegging, fermentation (see pic of 9 mini horizonal fermentors & open fermentation), filtering, laboratories, classrooms on site. Also a cafeteria with really good food that we can purchase daily.

We had a full week of content and they like to mix it up a lot here. Nearly daily we are doing a styles tasting, but in a much more detailed format that covers: history, characteristics, how to make that particular style and other important information for understanding it, then we taste. On Tuesday we split the class and my half went to the third floor for microscopy. We looked at nearly two dozen different yeasts and bacteria that were pre-grown on agar. We got to prepare our own slides which was good practice. Pictured left, you can see yeast that was grown and deliberately stressed so that it started to sporelate (4 acrospores circled in red…can you believe this pic was taken with an iphone looking down the gullet of  microscope…luck shot!). The microscopes we were using we wicked cool, but probably way too expensive, I had a lot of fun preparing, smelling and viewing the cultures. Megaspherea and E. Coli were probably my least favorite to smell (vomit/rotten feet and feces, respectfully).

On Wednesday our groups switched roles, so we got our turn at brewing a German Hefeweizen. The system was nearly fully automated, so with the exception of putting the grains and hops in, and turning one or two valves, most of the valves and all the heat and pumps was controlled via the computer console. This setup is mostly for teaching brewers how to control the BIG systems and they just have it all the same on a small scale. The only thing that went wrong was the mash mixer stopped working and the expert was on vacation that day, so I got to scoop out the lauter tun by hand. We then ran out of empty tubs, so Andy and I (our instructor) went one mile down the road to feed a dozen cows at a small farm in the city…yes, in the city, then I could re-use the empty tubs.

Thursday and Friday had more lectures on styles and tasting as well as chemical analysis and yeast flavor contributions. After class on Friday I bought a train ticket and headed up to see my uncle and family up near Meitingen, Germany.

Friday night we just ate supper and hung out at my uncles motorcycle clubhouse. On Saturday I had asked if there were any local breweries we could visit, there was one nearby in Wertingen called Schwanenbrau (Swan Brew). Braumeister Carry is a 4th generation brewer that graduated from Doemens Institute back in 1980 and he took over the brewery from his father that has existed since 1416 (their family bought the brewery in 1880). It is a 100 hl (~80 barrels) brewery but the demand has been shrinking and he only brews about 17 batches a year now.  He also had a small museum setup that he created from items that he found around the brewery.  This was really cool too, he explained to me the process of wooden casks  (pictured below) from a first-hand experience…anytime I’ve asked questions in America about this practice, little is known, but in Germany they still use actually wooden casks each year at Oktoberfest.

On Sunday I had four meals before 4 p.m. Pancakes for first breakfast. Weisswurst, brezen and Pils for second breakfast (we went to neighboring town that had a motorcycle shop and was having a spring fling to stir up business for the cycling season). We went to my uncle’s in-laws (who live in the same town as he) for bier and braun (we had cakes). Then we had an early supper at 3:30 p.m. that was kartoffel (potato salad) and home rotissare chicken. It was all good, I didn’t eat much for supper, just snacks and more bier of course. I suppose a third of my daily calories might come from bier. I definitely need to start a diet when I get back to the states. Until then I will enjoy the food and beverage while I can.
Prost!
ADAM

Adam’s Adventures, Part 8

[This is the eighth installment of an ongoing series by Adam Draeger,  an experienced homebrewer and engineer transitioning to the world of professional brewing through coursework at the Siebel Institute of Brewing Technology.]

This post I’ll recap my last week in Chicago and traveling to Munich.

I spent the first two days on a team of three for “business of brewing” simulation. We were Jay, Adam and Matt, so we called ourselves “JAM beers.” This was intended to teach us the interactions of marketing, finance and inventory/wip. The format was sort of a workbook and board game to have a visualization and keep track of where all the money was sitting (investors, banks, wip, suppliers, etc). We had a lot of fun with it, but it what was pretty hard learning all the accounting lingo and several steps were counter-intuitively backwards, and we kept putting money in the wrong columns. There were six rounds of investing in new lines and producing goods. We got third place overall but were loads of money in debt. We were on the road to making money, we think if the game would have went 10 rounds we would have been in first place and could have sold for millions. LOL.

The next two days I was put on a different team of five, and we were given our own “case study.” Our case was a fictitious brewery in Germany that was in dire need of modernization, and we wanted to invest in new kettle and energy saving technologies that would have good return on our purchase. To try to complicate our problem we were brewing Pilsner beers, which in Germany means we cannot use technologies that would darken the beer color even though they might be more efficient. Lots of research and then we put together a presentation to give to the rest of the class on our recommendations. In short, we kept our kettle but upgraded the heating mechanisms and then put an energy capture system to preheat the next batch of wort going into the kettle. We ended up saving 43 percent of the energy compared to the old system. Money apparently was no factor.

Friday was presentations and then we were done for the week. Everybody was hoping to go first to get it over with, and when Keith handed us the speaking order we celebrated beforehand. We were first…yeah! Most of the presentations were really good, some more entertaining than others but a good exercise(reminded me of my Kaizen <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaizen>  days at Pella…I even introduced a decision matrix to the team to narrow down to our top choice).

After the presentations I went to Goose Island for my 15th beer, which means I got to pick out a free growler and have it filled. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to consume it, so I sent it home with my wife, she will find some good stomachs to share it with.

On Thursday after we finished the presentation I caught the matinee for “Paul” starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (yes, and Seth Rogen, but I was there for the British humor). The movie was your typical adolescent humor movie with moronic goons and everyday heros and a romantic relationship thrown in, because you have to when that’s the movie formula. I didn’t like the movie much, I guessed the plot, the surprise about an hour early and some of the supporting actors really sucked. Despite these things, I did laugh out loud a few times and I liked seeing Simon and Nick acting together again, that was worth it. I really don’t want to own it, and that says a lot if you’ve seen my Simon Pegg collection. Sorry, for the sidebar…back to talking beer school.

I spent several nights with my buddy Dave from Boise. He and I were good aquaintances from day one (he is a Packers fan), but progressively he became my best friend at Siebel. We both figured that we wanted to try a lot of good food before we left town, and what better way than with good company? So, we visited a Polish restaurant, the Hopleaf (again, and it was even better the second time), as well as Rock Bottom and Haymarket Brewpub (again). His daughter flew out to meet him and she joined us twice as well. Dave is postponing the European part of his tour until next fall, so we parted ways on Friday.  They were going to embark on a Wisconsin beer tour quick before taking the Amtrak home. So I gave him my favorite hot spots in New Glarus, Madison and Milwaukee for reference.

My wife headed out to get my stuff in Chicago early on Saturday and I decided to meet her on the west side of the burbs near Naperville and we met for lunch at the Two Brothers <http://www.twobrosbrew.com/>  Tasting Room (next to Goose Island, Two Brothers is the biggest in Illinois and is 14 years old this month). I had a few of their beers ahead of time and was repeatedly impressed, even moreso after visiting the brewery, pictured right. I was really impressed by their Imperial Stout and their Toasted Coconut Golden Ale called Pahoehoe. If I ever come out with a beer that has toasted coconut in it, remember that I came up with the idea independently, and on the same day. 😉

I had the apartment mostly packed up except for the clothes that would be going in the luggage that my wife was bringing, so after lunch and beer tour/tastings we went back and packed it up into the Escape. We had four pieces of clothes left to pack when my landlord came in to get the keys and settle up. Afterwards we headed to Polish village and stopped by the little sausage shop, bakery and grocery. What fun! Nobody spoke English and the little old buschas kept talking cute gibberish to our daughters. Want herring? We have 12 flavors to choose from. Pre-made periogis in the frozen section? Why yes, only $2.95 for a dozen and many different fillings to choose from. Then we walked across the street to eat at Paul Zakopane Harnas. I felt bad because it was a Saturday night and there was only one couple of elderly Polish ladies in there. The menu was huge and cheap, if only I knew the proportions were as big as they were, I would have ordered a single potato pancake instead. We ordered two meals, an appetizer and two small side dishes for the girls, but it came with a bread basket and soup and salad and dessert. I think we barely ate half the food on the table and took the rest home. Would recommend the experience to anybody, but please consider sharing an entre…no matter how hungry you are.

Erin and the girls dropped me off at O’hare and my flight left Chicago at 9:50 p.m. Eight and a half hours later we were in rainy Munich and it was 1:30 p.m. on Sunday. I only got three hours sleep on the plane; many didn’t sleep at all, so we were tired. I forced myself to stay up until midnight to try to get on a normal sleep schedule and burst through the jetlag. I’m staying at Jaeger’s Hostel, pictured left, one block away from Hauptbaunhof (equivilent to Grand Central Station) so that is convenient. The hostel is a lot nicer than I was expecting as seen by the photo of my bathroom (I opted for a single the first week and several of us may room together next week). They have a small bar in the lobby with cheap beer and a vending machine with beer in it as well. It is perfectly accepted to walk down the street with a glass bottle of beer in hand so long as you aren’t drunk or loud. Several of us walked three blocks down to Augusteiner’s Brauhaus for food and beer, it seemed cheaper than Chicago, but I’m not very good at converting from Euro to Dollars in my head. I’m just going to think in Euro and forget the dollar for the next month…much easier.

Monday was my first day at Doemens Institute of Brewing (part of our World Brewing Academy), but you’ll have to wait until next week’s blog for pictures and stories.

Prost!

ADAM

Adam’s Adventures, Part 7

[This is the seventh installment of an ongoing series by Adam Draeger,  an experienced homebrewer and engineer transitioning to the world of professional brewing through coursework at the Siebel Institute of Brewing Technology.]

One week left in Chicago and I still haven’t figured out if I’ve hit all the places that I want to visit before I’m gone.

This week we had a potpourri of instructors, some new, some repeats.  Topics covered the engineering side of brewing: valves, pumps, controls, maintenance and troubleshooting, cooling, refrigerant and steam systems.  We all really enjoyed Gary Troop’s enthusiastic teaching style when we showed us the ins and outs of steam systems.

My friend Dave from class used to own a Tiki bar, and he taught me some of the history of this uniquely American but South Pacific-inspired culture.  This Tiki movement was born in California in the 1950s.  On Monday I convinced him to take me to Trader Vic’s <http://www.tradervicschicago.com/>  here in Chicago which has been around for 50 years, although it closed for a decade and reopened.  It was cool to hear from Dave what parts of the restaurant were authentic and weren’t appropriate.  You could get some Pacific food and the classic tropical drinks like Mai Tais and Zombies.  The place was also adorned with a lot of 50 year old chainsaw Tiki statues and bamboo furniture.

On Tuesday we had our last styles tasting which were all Belgians (we were joking that since A-B is now owned by a Belgian firm, isn’t it technically considered a Belgian beer now? LOL).  I was trying to find a good time to share my 100th batch of beer (120 min IPA clone from Dogfish Head) with my classmates, so I asked Lynn and Keith if they would let me tack it on the end of the tasting.  We reviewed it as a class, and I didn’t even get my butt handed to me.  Most everyone was impressed on how difficult it is to make a highly drinkable beer at 17 percent, so I felt pretty good from that, but they also pointed out some minor flaws that I couldn’t see on my own.

On Thursday we had our last spiked-flaws tasting that covered packaging defects like oxidation, forced aging and infections.  Afterwards we had our tasting quiz (which wasn’t for credit, just for experience). We were given seven Budweisers, and we had to discern which were controls and which were spiked, and with what each was spiked.  They wouldn’t tell us which or how many were controls.  Even though these were spiked with three times the flavor thresholds, I had a hard time picking out what each compound was on my own (afterwards ,it was obvious).  Only one person got a perfect score, and I ended getting four of seven correct, which was the class average.  We found out that two people in our class are diacetyl “blind” and this is the reason that people taste in panels and not individually normally, but a really fun exercise, and now I’m really inspired to take my BJCP exam.

Randy Mosher <http://www.radicalbrewing.com/rbauthr.html>  came in on Friday to give a lecture on beer and food pairings.  He said the Brazilians call this “harmonizations” and I really like that phrase better too. “Pairing” implies there is only one best choice where as “harmonizes” implies there could be many different matches. (In music, you’ll play a note or chord that works, but sometimes you’ll play a “wrong” note that actually harmonizes better.)  I can’t remember all of them but these stood out: IPA and blue cheese, smoked porter and smoked aged gouda, toffee and Brother Thelonious and a hoppy red rye with carrot cake.  I actually didn’t like the red rye by itself but it tasted great with the cake.

We had four guys that graduated from the concise course on Friday and won’t be joining us in Germany, so we had a little cermony for them and it got loud and obnoxious.  Since it was their last night out and it was my birthday, we decided to take the party to Revolution Brewing (pictured above). Mark and Roger from Pella joined us after supper and we hit two more places for a great birthday pubcrawl.

On Saturday I put together a pubcrawl based on my experiences in Chicago for my Pella homebrew club <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cspbrewers/> , which five guys made it out for.  Chris also invited some friends and there were plenty of significant others around too.  We started the pub crawl with three people it grew to seven and at one point 12 people and down to eight and back up to 10 at the end of the night.  We started at Goose Island and had lunch at Piece Brewery, a 1/2 liter at Hofbrau Uberstein, a flight and prezel at Haymarket Brewpub, an expensive beer at the Publican, three rounds at the Map Room (everybody’s favorite) and we decided to forgo the Hopleaf because it was getting late for supper and it was REALLY out of the way. So we walked around and eventually decided to go back to Goose Island Clybourn for a 10 p.m. supper and drinks.  All of us pretty much hit a wall at midnight, and we called it a night.  I slept good.

This coming week we have group projects on the business side of things and some case studies that we need to present to each other on Friday.  My plane also leaves next Saturday for Munich so I don’t know when I’ll be updating the blog next, I do know that I’ll have plenty of content to do so.

Prost!

Adam “Basscat” Draeger

Adam’s Adventures, Part 5

[This is the fifth installment of an ongoing series by Adam Draeger,  an experienced homebrewer and engineer transitioning to the world of professional brewing through coursework at the Siebel Institute of Brewing Technology.]

Wow, a month already! The first week was like a month, and the last few weeks are really going much faster. Lots of stuff happened this week and I’ll just shortly touch on them.

We learned mostly about filtration, quality, bacterial infections, and how to guard against these nemesi (or in the case of Russian River <http://www.russianriverbrewing.com/> and Lost Abbey <http://www.lostabbey.com/> ….embrace them). After shadowing Peace Tree, visiting Three Floyds, and being taught by John from Bell’s (all three breweries do not filter their beers), it is hard to understand the need for craft brewers to filter their beer. But, we have to remember that Siebel has been in business for over 120 years supporting brewers from mostly “big beer” backgrounds and for A-B, Miller, Coors, and German brewers like Paulner, Spaten, and Ayinger, it is unfathomable to think of selling unfiltered beers. So, I studied and understand the content and reasons for doing it, but in a local brewery or a brewpub setting, I don’t see myself embracing it. Clarifying agents and whirlpool seem to do a pretty good job with cold conditioning for what Americans seem to be looking for in a craft beer. I can see bigger places like New Glarus filtering their beers.

Learning about the bacteria and wild yeast contaminants was sort of fun. I’ve had some beers with off flavors and never really knew what or why, I can see the importance in doing full CIP and extensive sanitization, especially for beers that will be in bottles and on the shelf for a while. We learned about lactobacilli, pediococcus, megaspherea, pectinatis, brettanomyces, and even some strains of sacchromyces that aren’t good for brewers like sacchromyces diastaticus. Many others as well and what they look like, how they behave, what conditions they like, what off-flavors they produce (Megaspherea produces a “vomit-like” aroma), and physical imperfections they make like haze or ropiness.

On Tuesday we had the opportunity to taste some of these off-flavors like diacetyl (buttered popcorn), ethyl acetate (nail polish/solvent), acetic acid (sour/vinegar), 4-Vinyl Guaiacol (clove), and iso-amyl acetate (banana or circus peanuts).

What is really interesting is the fact that they give these to us at three times the flavor threshold for these particular chemicals and they were still very subtle to me. The diacetyl tasted about 1/3 what I remember from the flavor of my first lager and the beers at the Lion’s Head Pub in Chicago. My lager had diacetyl due fermentation temperatures whereas the Lion’s Head tap lines are probably just dirty and have a variety of bacteria that are causing their off-flavors. Prime example of knowing all the causes for some of these off-flavors so somebody can troubleshoot their origins.

Tuesday evening I visited the Pumping Station One <http://pumpingstationone.org/> which is a hackerspace in Chicago. They were featured in MAKE magazine <http://makezine.com/> and are a good bunch of a guys and gals that like electronics, crafts, and do-it-yourself like stuff (imagine Big Bang Theory meets Tim “the tool man” Taylor). Anywho…I brought some of my Ichabod IPA (with homegrown Cascade dryhops) for sharing and it was imbibed quited quickly.

Thursday I studied at Goose Island Clybourn because I heard the Chicago Beer Society <http://chibeer.org/> was holding a meeting there that night. Randy Mosher <http://www.radicalbrewing.com/rbauthr.html> spoke about his beer traveling experiences this last summer and brought candy, sugar, chocolate, and beer to share from the experiences as well.

I also bumped into Mark and Tom from class and we studied together for an hour. The photo at left shows our “flash cards” that most of the students make up for themselves for studying. I haven’t really had the need to since I have all the questions/answers in my notebook, but the flash cards are definitely a more social way to study in a pub.

Friday we had my toughest quiz yet. I still probably did well, but I was stumped on several questions because I was studying “next” to the answers instead of what they were looking for. After the quiz we had a module on taste panels followed by an interactive demonstration. In a triangle test you are given three unlabeled beers and two are the same and one is different and you are instructed to find the odd one out. This isn’t as easy telling Guinness from Harp, these beers were “close.” After we had time to sample our tin-foil-covered beer bottles, we voted. This is an exercise to prove there is a difference or if statistically we were just “guessing.” Beer A had 16 votes, beer B had 11 votes and beer C had 14 votes. This means that “statistically” the beers that we tasted were identical. I voted for “A” because I could smell it had less of acetaldehyde aroma and it was bit drier in mouthfeel, but darn close. “A” was Bud Light, and the other two were “Budweiser.” It was cool that guessed it correctly, but also shocking to find out from the instructor that even a panel of professional brewers has a hard time telling these two beers apart.

After lunch we had our German beer style tasting (with a Czech and Austrian beer thrown in).

We also had an afternoon field trip to Metropolitan Brewery <http://www.metrobrewing.com/>, which is a 15 barrel brewery that has been open for about three years on the north side. Doug, who is also a Siebel grad, his wife, and other business partner gave us samples and answered “big boy” questions for us wanna-be brewers. Afterwards some of us walked a couple blocks down the street to the Hop Leaf <http://www.hopleaf.com/> , which is a beer bar and restaurant with a pretty good menu (beer and food). I tried a Belgian trippel and the beef cheeks (I’ve always heard this was a tender cut of meat and so I seized the opportunity to try them….and good they were)

Earlier in the day on Friday, Erin had a phone interview with DCS in Lexington Park, MD, and at 10 a.m., I had a text saying that she found plane tickets to DC from O’Hare for $139/each so we could check out the area. So we got to the airport at 8 p.m.-ish and were in DC that night at midnight. Since Erin has already been out to this region many times, this trip was really to see if it would be good for our family and if the beer scene could support another brewer. So we visited a few brewpubs in the area including: Hops, Port City Brewing, (2) Capital City’s, Mad Fox, Ruddy Duck and Rock Bottom. These were all in the DC metro area except for Ruddy Duck <http://ruddyduckbrewery.com/>, which was across the bridge from Lexington Park. This brewpub was my favorite of the places we visited due to the atmosphere and the excellent beer (their award-winning Marzen was worthy). We also stumbled upon a Dogfish Head Alehouse….but quickly realized they didn’t brew here and just served their beers. We later found out from our waiter that this place has to buy their DFH beers from a distributor just like the other bars in the area. Sort of a tied house, but not related in anyway to DFH except that they have licensed the name, logo, etc. The food and beer prices were actually quite reasonable (compared to Chicago) and the atmosphere was still wicked cool. The place was really busy and probably made a good business decision; especially after the Discovery Channel’s Brewmasters show and all the publicity advertising it produced.

So are we moving to Colorado or Maryland? I don’t know yet. Given a choice between the two areas, Colorado is still a better “beer” fit, but considering the opportunities for a systems engineer that works on aircraft systems, like my wife, this area is the Silicon Valley equivalent. We’ve been discussing it a lot and are trying to stay open to all these opportunities that are presented to us…it seems surreal that with an accepted job offer we might be uprooting our family to the far east or semi-far west.

Until the next update, Prost!

Adam “Basscat” Draeger

 

Adams Adventures, Part 4

[This is the fourth installment of an ongoing series by Adam Draeger,  an experienced homebrewer and engineer transitioning to the world of professional brewing through coursework at the Siebel Institute of Brewing Technology.]

It’s takes a lot of coffee to study beer! This picture (right) shows the coffee pots that are filled about twice daily to satisfy the homebrewers wanting to turn pro. Confession time. I haven’t had a drop of coffee since the summer of 1996 at Scott Bruss’s parents’ house.  I actually like the smell of good coffee (not burned cafe/gas station coffee) but well made coffee. The reasons I don’t drink it are arguably more philosophical, but I try to justify it using logic. Caffeine is bad for you (like alcohol is in large quantities, okay bad logic), and then I don’t drink caffeine-free because I’m a beer snob and coffee snobs know that caffeinated coffee tastes better. Trust me, if I can snob-up beer, I can snob-up coffee and next thing you know, I own my own electrically controlled brew pot, grinder, and home roaster. I think brewing is enough of a passion (read: addict) that I’m not welcoming the idea of another beverage consuming my time.

This week we had a diversity of professors from other countries.  In college I had a diversity of professors but they seemed to be Asian, Indian and African. In Beer-School, we hear from the Scottish, German, Canadian and English. These guys were great and we bantered over what “real” beer  was and everyone picked on the Canadian in class (even the Canadian prof). I really liked Graeme Walker from Scotland. He is probably the world expert on yeast (and if you remember this week was 40 hours worth of yeast materials).  Graeme was witty, smart, entertaining and really knew his stuff. You could tell he was a real professor because he knew how to lecture and could keep us engaged as well as skipped info that was irrelevant to the materials that we would be tested on. He also told us drinking stories and hangover tips…how can you not like a guy like that? Besides, his accent was a mix between Sean Connery, Shrek and Mrs. Doubtfire .  🙂

Yeast.  YeAsT.  YEAST!  Um, yeah, I’ve learned more chemistry, biology and microbiology this week than I did in high school and college combined. Fortunately we didn’t have to balance chemistry equations or memorize what NAD and ATP stood for (even though I did, just in case).  In addition to learning what makes yeast tick, and metabolic pathways, we got to taste yeast flavor defects…also never forget the importance of Glycolysis and Zinc. From memory our tasting was (because my other notes are in Chicago–I’m in Iowa City awaiting the Megabus as I type–Diacetyl, Acetaldehyde, Yeast, autolyzed yeast (dead), ethanol, high alcohols and one more that escapes me at the moment. Good tasting experience.

We also had our “American style” tasting, pictured above.  Except for Michelob (which tastes pretty good when served in clean glasses at the correct temp) everything was a craft beer, and high alcohol at that.  They really need to give us a snack if they expect us to taste 10 beer high-proof beers.  I didn’t think I would learn much from beers I’ve already tried, but Lyn (remember the tasting expert and pres of Siebel?) is really good at facilitating these tastings and I won’t underestimate her palate or these experiences again.

Only found one new place to eat/drink this week called Local Option. The owner had a birthday party for himself and bought a huge selection of hard-to-get beers. They were awesome. But at $9 per beer, I didn’t stick around long and won’t be going back, even though the selection was probably the best I’ve ever seen at a Chicago beer bar (even better than the old Chicago favorite, the Map Room.

My wife brought a “beer” puzzle to Chicago that I’ve owned for about two years.  I got it used and the pic said that it was taken in 1990 (21 years old….old enough to drink!) I thought it would be cool if the class put it together and then hung it on the wall.  But…I didn’t think they would let me do it.  So I just let it sit on the bar for two days first and tried to get a feel for it. No real feeling one way or another, except Derek who seemed interested at lunch on Tuesday. So I suggested that we just do the border. We only had 20 minutes and got about 80% done with the border before lunch was over.  Next break I come upstairs and see the border is done, a few bottles are finished and the whole puzzle is sitting on a chunk of cardboard that is taped together for easy transport.  Turns out the admin’s are both big puzzle gals and LOVED the idea.  It took us less than 48 hours to put together this 700 piece puzzle just during lunch, breaks and after school. Lupe is getting some glue to put it together and we have been approved to get it hung on the walls of Siebel somewhere.  (I’m hoping to get us to sign it as a class or something).  Nerdy idea that has materialized into something pretty cool!

Monday my roommate and his girlfriend (who is visiting from Belgian) had a fight for three hours and the cops showed up, so that made the week…”interesting.” Let’s just say that Facebook doesn’t advertise how many breakups they have instigated. She left this Saturday and so did he for two weeks, so I have the apartment to myself for 50 percent of the time I have left in Chicago.

I took the Megabus back home to Pella, Iowa, this weekend. The bus was almost an hour late, so I didn’t did crawl into bed until 12:45a.m. on Friday and my daughters had me up at 7a.m. It was awesome to see them and spend some time with them again. Erin was a quilt guild retreat in Newton, and I filled the role of daddy and babysitter at the same time. We had an open house in the morning so we headed over to a friend’s house for the morning, but it ended up being all day since the girls had a good time playing with their daughter and we adults were feeling lazy enough that it felt good to just “hang.”

I’m in Iowa City waiting for my Megabus  return trip and my glass of Great River Dirty Blonde is done (awesome chocolate-flavored blonde ale from an Iowa brewer), so I’m going to call it. Next week ends with another tasting, as well as a field trip visit to Metropolitan Brewery.
Prost!