Food? Good. Beer? Gooood.

So I left you last time with the impression that I might be spending my summer downing beer at festival after festival.  In truth, it involved a lot of science but more on that later.  Today I want to talk about two of my favourite things: beer and food.  There has been a lot of attention paid to combining the two in recent years and not just in the cooking pot though I love that too.  Brewmaster dinners and beer and food pairing or even "beer vs. wine" food pairing events.  A great book on the subject is The Brewmaster's Table by Garrett Oliver. Now as you can likely tell I am partial to beer and so please take anything I say about its superiority to wine with a grain of salt.  That being said, I am also learning about wine in Sensory Evaluation class so I am not completely in the dark.


Most people are familiar with the concept of wine and cheese so logically assume that the two go together like rock and roll.  Recently however, I learned that the two are often paired because  cheese has a tendency to coat the mouth and actually reduces your ability to taste things.  Less scrupulous hosts would therefore present it so that they could get away with serving lower quality wine after the initial course.  Most beers actually have the ability to cut through that mouth coating and refresh the palette, a function that is aided by beer's carbonation.  So the question of whether wine or beer is better with cheese is actually dependant on if you are the host or the guest.

Mmmmm. Beer cake.

A lot of people dismiss beer as a lower class alternative to wine, especially at the dinner table.  Admittedly, there are some pretty unexciting and low-brow beers out there but the same can be said for a lot of cheap wines.  If you take the same care and consideration to choose your beer as you do with wine then you open yourself to a whole world of delicious and sophisticated flavours.  Beer isn't just the beverage of appetizers and dinner.  You might be surprised at how great a beer can be for dessert.  One of my favourites is to have bold, citrusy, IPA with a key lime pie or a lemon meringue.  A stout or porter style beer with nice, roast malt flavours like chocolate makes a brilliant match for all kinds of  rich desserts and of course with chocolate.  Last night I prepared a chocolate cake that had a coconut porter added to both the batter and the icing.  Like most foods prepared with beer, serving that same beer with the meal works wonderful.

Other ways to match your beer and food are to consider the flavours and choose ones that either compliment each other or contrast each other.   Regional matches like pairing bratwurst with an Octoberfest Marzen beer makes sense but these don't always work out.  The real secret is to choose a beer you like because it doesn't matter how well the flavours go together, if you don't care for the food or the beer then it's just not as fun.  The main point is to try something new and enjoy yourself so next time you are entertaining, why not pick up a bottle of beer and impress your guests.

If it tastes good, do it. Don't be scared.

Until next time, Cheers!

A Fest of Beer

This past weekend was kind of a big deal for the beer scene in Alberta.  Friday and Saturday saw the 10th anniversary of Calgary Beerfest.  Thousands of fans of craft beer had the opportunity to sample hundreds of beers from around the world.  I know, because I was pouring.  The Olds College Brewery was on hand to dispense our efforts to a very receptive crowd.  I got to talk to hundreds of people over the two day event about our program and our beers.  One of the beers we brought with us was brewed specifically for the event; a brown ale with roasted pecans.  I'm a fan of it and I certainly wasn't alone.  That brew won us the gold medal in the "Rookie of the Year" category.  On top of that, our booth was the one with the collaboration beer, Night Owl.  We were nestled right in between Big Rock and Toolshed, so we all got to talk about the wonderful beer as people were drinking it.  I was even asked to participate in a couple of seminars where the collaborators took to the stage to talk about the whole process to an interested crowd.  Normally, I am not much of a public speaker but after hearing once again, the enthusiasm of the other brewers I couldn't help but embrace the joy of the moment.  Thanks to all who attended and fielded questions, it was fun.

The buzz over Night Owl and our student brewed beer kept us pretty busy the whole time.  During one of the brief lulls in the crowd, I was able to look around and take a moment to soak it all in.  The entire hall was filled with the overlapping voices of revellers, brewers, and dispensers of craft beer.  That is when I remembered the words of one of the many brewers that spoke so openly with our class.  He warned us that having a brewery was hard.  It involves so much more than just coming up with a recipe and brewing beer.  "Be prepared to get out there," he said, "you'll spend your week making beer and running your business and your weekends at shows; on your feet all day, talking to hundreds of people just trying to get your name out there."  That is when it occurred to me, that was exactly what I was doing.  I had come right from my job at a brewery to spend my own free time talking to strangers about the beers I had been involved with.  "So this is what you wanted?" I asked myself, "Yes, yes it is."  The thought put the smile back on my face and enabled me to stand there, footsore, exhausted, and hoarse, and answer with honesty to anyone who asked how I was doing: "Fantastic!"

So until next time,
Cheers!

Up All Night

I should be sleeping.  Am I awake because I'm studying for my finals?  No, but I should be.  Is it because I drank too much coffee?  Nope, just had one.  Too much beer? Nope just one as well.  In fact, I only had one beverage tonight and if you have been reading my blog, I am pretty sure you know where I am going with this.  Tonight was the official launch of the collaboration beer- Night Owl Kenyan french pressed coffee stout.  I am certainly buzzed right now but it's from excitement.

I arrived at Phil & Sebastian's Mission location to find people lined up outside the door.  As a gap appeared in the line, I got to read the sign announcing the launch, complete with the name and imagery I proposed.  What a feeling. The artists that were used really nailed it.  Inside it was bustling and everyone seemed to be enjoying the evening.  It was a great opportunity to talk to people from the collaboration, the industry in general and people who are just genuinely interested in beer and the craft beer scene in Alberta.

I got in line to get my very first taste of the production batch that I got to help brew.  Everything was to theme.  Night Owl glassware, decal on the kegerator, even the handmade tap handles.  I am sorry I forgot to get a picture of that, but trust me it looked cool.  The beer itself was also a success.  It was very much a coffee stout.  Lots of bold and delicious coffee flavours but at the same time, undeniably a proper beer.  It's a product that I am proud to have been a part of and the only disappointment is that it's just around for this one project. So if you want to try it, you better get down to Phil & Sebastian's or meet me at Calgary Beerfest.

For the launch, the guys from the Good Old Fridge had a video chronicling the collaboration.  Be sure to give it a peek if you want to know what tonight was about and let them know what you think: @GoodOldFridge

One thing that I was reminded of during the evening's conversations is the kindred spirit of all the collaborators.  A project like this works even though everyone has different interests because they all share one important thing.  Passion.  Whether that passion is for beer or for coffee, that drive to find the ultimate experience and share it with others is what keeps us up at night.
So from this Night Owl,
Cheers!

Playing Around

So, today is the last day of classes in my first of two years for the Brewmaster and Brewery Operations Management Diploma at Olds College.  It is indeed bittersweet.  On the one hand, my sleep schedule may once again attain normality and my bank account can stop hemorrhaging and begin to recharge.  On the other, I am saying a temporary goodbye to 25 great drinking buddies and easy access to a sort of hive mind of beer knowledge and brewing ideas that our program has become.  The three most common questions that I have heard asked lately seem to be: Have you finished assignment X?  Where are you going to be working? and What beer are you going to brew this summer?

I certainly have a plan in my mind about what I am going to brew in the next four months and in the past I have usually brewed alone.  This summer is different, I have been spoiled lately.  I have been living and breathing brewing and my mind has been racing with new ideas for recipes or reviving styles or contemplating what a beer could taste like with random ingredients.  And so has everyone else.  We have become a sounding board for each other; we share ideas and thoughts and sometimes things click.  We get two or more people with similar notions and a new beer is born.  We have become collaboration brewers on a homebrew scale.

Purple Nurple: started orange and ended pink!

I bought a large selection of supplies to get me through my brewing withdrawals over Christmas and ended up with some extra Saison yeast.  I had been tossing the idea of brewing a beer with beetroot in my mind for a while and when I got back to class and mentioned this, one of my peers informed me that another classmate, Foster, had expressed the same interest.  I immediately presented my idea for a Beet Saison to him and off we went.  We determined that we had a similar vision for the beer and I presented my recipe ideas. He proposed some changes and then we did some tweaking to get it just right.  After some preliminary testing, we set a brew day for our creation lovingly dubbed the Purple Nurple.  It turned out great!  Together we had discussed how to make the beets sing without tasting like cooked vegetables, we researched and sniffed hops to get that right earthy-spiciness, we were an unstoppable team.

The entire year has been a collection of these moments: testing different honeys for an English Honey Ale, sharing experience and equipment for making lagers, testing the effects of water profiles on Pilsners.  IPA's have been born from the simple line "I've got these hops. what do you have?"  When I set up my equipment on a brew day over the summer, I know I am going to have fun and learn something new- I always do.  But it is certainly going to lack a little bit of a spark, that energy you get from sharing your passion with a like minded soul.  I can't wait to see what my classmates have come up with over the next few months, what ideas they've got fermenting.  But more importantly, I can't wait to start turning these thoughts into delicious beer with my friends.

Until then, Cheers!

Speaking of fermenting-
Apparently honey makes yeast buzz too!

Collaboration

Not too long ago, I was given an amazing opportunity.  I was invited to be one of four students representing the Olds College Brewmaster Program on a collaboration project.  You see, this is the 10th anniversary of Calgary Beerfest and they thought it would be a great idea to have a collaboration beer for their upcoming event.  Big Rock Brewery and Tool Shed Brewing were on board and so were the folks from Phil & Sebastian Coffee Roasters and the Good Old Fridge.  Then, in an incredible act of kindness, they all decided to direct the proceeds to a scholarship for the students of the new brewmaster program at Olds College.
Lucky for me, it didn't stop there.  As students of the program, we were invited to Calgary to attend the collaboration meeting where the project was planned and laid out.  We got to shake hands with the brewmasters and everyone involved.  Sitting around that table listening to the dedicated and knowledgeable professionals was incredibly inspiring.  I could see that the excitement and joy was still present after years of experience in the industry.  The sense of co-operation, passion, and attention to detail was incredible and helped reaffirm that I was on my proper path with this career choice.  In the end it was determined that we were going to brew a coffee stout, but one that was made with as much care for the coffee as for the beer.  If you could have heard this cast of characters talking about their individual areas of expertise, you would realize that it couldn't be any other way.  And that it was gong to be great.  When the discussion turned to packaging the product, I spoke up and suggested that since we were studying this very subject in school, maybe the students could help contribute in this area.  This was enthusiastically received and in the end it was decided that Olds College students would submit suggestions for the beer's name, the creative copy for the label, and the art direction that would be executed by the professional artists for the breweries.

Students getting hands-on

We were all added to the communications circle and got to see the progress of the project and the steps that were required for such an undertaking.  I was incredibly honored when my ideas were selected for the packaging of the product and so Night Owl coffee stout was good to go.  Next came the brew day.  Once again we all gathered at the Big Rock Brewery and got to work.  There was a tangible energy about the place as we got underway.  In between steps, we had a personal tour of the brewery from the brewmaster, Paul, and got to talk to the employees as they carried out their work day.
Thankfully, it was a long brew day which gave me ample opportunity to talk to everyone and learn more than a few new things.  We were also able to be hands-on; we pitched yeast into the fermentor and even got to add the hops- still exciting no matter how many times I've done it.

Does your job make you smile like this?

Now it is up to the yeast.  Once it's done fermenting and goes through packaging you will be able to get your mitts on the fruit of our labour at the official launch in Phil & Sebastian's Mission location on April 22nd.  After that, well, I hope you get to enjoy Night Owl at Calgary Beerfest on May 2nd and 3rd.  I just might see you there so we can raise a glass to thank all of the amazing people who have made this collaboration an unforgettable and enjoyable experience.

Until then, Cheers!

Monday Musings (on a saturday afternoon)

As you may well have guessed, there are a lot of great things about taking a course in brewing at a college.  There are classes on sensory evaluation, which can be wonderful or horrible depending on whether or not we are learning about beer taints.  The other day in our ingredients class we got to nibble on and discuss a whole slew of different malts.  Plus, you've noticed we get some pretty awesome field trips.

Specialty Malt; Base Malt; Delicious, Delicious Malt

 
However, by far the best thing about our program is the on-campus brewery.  This sounds like a no brainer; of course getting to brew beer is awesome.  But there is more to it than that.  There is this extra feeling of safety when brewing at school with your peers.  I am not talking about physical well being safety (though I can't stress the importance of that enough).  What I am referring to is that freedom you get from the environment at an educational institute that is somewhat different than the real world.  It's a difficult thing to explain unless you've been to school and then plied your skills afterwards at a real job.  School tries to mimic the workplace but it is sort of artificial in comparison, for us in the brewery, I think that is a great thing. 

Somewhat different than a production brewery!

Most of us have never had the opportunity to brew with real production equipment.  I know that my experience has been limited to components that I built for myself in the garage.  My Coleman cooler mash tun doesn't have steam jacketing, pumps or a million valves;  working on the brewery's equipment is a whole other world.  Mistakes are going to be made, it's inevitable.  When someone is holding a hose and another person turns on a pump, spraying beer on the ceiling (hypothetically speaking of course-though beer does make great hair gel), or somebody leaves a valve open somewhere and we inadvertently spew a few litres of wort onto the floor, no one is going to get in serious trouble.  This is a learning brewery, losses like that are built into the budget and aren't going to seriously affect the business.  Sure, nobody wants to see it happen- I mean that is beer getting wasted for crying out loud- but instead of getting in trouble for that, 13 people get a valuable lesson and the ones responsible merely feel like they have let down their friends.  The consequence is disappointment and shame, nobody is going to get fired. The next time we brew everyone is going to double check that valve, but no one will hesitate to "get in there" for fear of screwing up.

This confidence has bought us a lot of trust from the faculty as well.  We can now sign up to brew our own recipes on the the small 50 litre pilot systems.  There is still supervision in case we get in over our heads but mostly we run the brew day ourselves.  Thanks to the wonderful generosity of the industry we actually have great ingredients to play with so we are free to be creative and experiment without fear of breaking our fragile student budgets.  This allows us to explore ideas we've had but never got around to trying because if it doesn't work out then we have wasted our money.  It is the willingness to explore and try new things that has made craft beer so amazing in recent years.  The freedom that the college environment creates encourages us to take these risks and turn them into learning experiences that we will take with us out in the real world.  A small group of us were brewing an IPA the other day and realized we had a bunch of whole hops that were given to us and needed to be used up.  This motivated us to jerry-rig a filter into a hopback (to run the beer through) right on the spot, and try a new technique that we have only read about before.  It may sound like a simple thing but it was exciting, it was inspiring, and that feeling is infectious.  We felt like MacGyver brewers and that is what makes a career enjoyable no matter how many years you are doing it.  The freedom to be truly creative and the confidence from our successes are what will enable us to continue the great tradition of quality and innovation that the craft beer industry has established.
Until next time,
Cheers!

Drinking in Class

One of my courses in the Brewmaster program at Olds College is this little gem known as Sensory Evaluation.  And yes, this class is pretty much what it sounds like; we evaluate beers.  It is very easy to imagine that this class is a sort of circus with 26 people sitting around getting drunk and talking about beer.  The truth is, as lovely as that sounds, there is a lot going on in this course.  In fact, it is this course that makes me most nervous when it comes time for exams.  You might not believe me, but sensory evaluation is hard.  If we are going to be able to make good beer it is essential that we learn to recognize what it is that makes a beer good or bad.  It means being really critical about everything that is going on in that beautiful glass and training ourselves to consistently understand and recognize what it is we perceive.  It takes practice.

"Oh, good one." You sarcastically reply. "The homework must be arduous."  And yes, of course you are right.  Every time I take a sip, I do consider it homework, except, now that includes every drink of water, beer, wine, spirits, soda, or juice.  It is nearly impossible to just shut my brain off and enjoy a simple beer in peace.  Whats worse, sometimes we need to test things in class that are just down right unpleasant. It is arguably more important to be able to recognize the first indication of spoilage or contamination than the wonder of a perfect blend of hops. Now, this does not mean I am looking for sympathy here, I just want to make sure that you understand that sensory class is not all unicorns and rainbows.  Furthermore, I am going to attempt something waaaaay ahead of its time.  You are going to be able to detect and even rank some taints in beer samples that are invisible to the naked eye.  Over the Internet.  And even though I have already tested these samples, I promise that you will not get any of my germs.  Ready for sensory class? Let us begin.

I taste like beer!

I taste like <censored>

Here are two typical samples of beer (well, after I've tasted them that is).  One of these beers has been spiked with salt, the other has not.  Can you break the Internet and tell which one tastes like the ocean and could make you want to be sick? If you are really not sure, you can highlight the space under the picture for the answer.

You're impressed, right?  Now lets up the ante.  Each one of these beers has been spiked with a varying amount of sulphur (and yes, that tastes as good as it sounds).  Your task is to rank each sample from the lowest to the highest intensity of unpleasantness.  I was going to write some fancy html code that would allow you to actually move the samples but that would have delayed this blog by a month or more, so just do it out loud and forget whatever the people around you might be thinking.

Sulphury,        Sulphuryer,            Sulphuryerer,               Sulphuryest!

Well, there you have it.  You can actually taste beer over the Internet.  Don't you just feel like a brave, new pioneer?   Don't worry, I'll try to have something that tastes a little better next time.
Until then, Cheers!