SUGAR RUSH
I make a mean cup of coffee, if you give me the right ingredients.
—ICE CUBE
WHEN THE NEW YEAR ARRIVED, I came up with some resolutions. In the past, I’d vowed to wear more lipstick, listen to more rock ’n’ roll, and bake a pie a month. This year, I would brew more beer, drink more beer, and learn more about beer—all in hopes of passing the Cicerone exam in the spring. In many ways, I felt like I hadn’t started studying yet, which felt unsettling. Sure, I’d been going through the steps of my master study plan, from making homebrew to attending the Great American Beer Festival. But many of those experiences felt like extra credit: I’d enjoyed them too much. The idea that I could actually enjoy studying felt at odds with the experience I’d imagined. Then again, there were still more than three months until the test. Maybe I just wasn’t feeling the pressure yet.
On the second day of the new year, instead of doing burpees at the gym or juicing kale, I was shivering outside Breakside Brewery under a blushing winter sunrise. Breakside’s head brewer, thirty-three-year-old Ben Edmunds, finally opened the door, wearing a woven hat, sagging Carhartt work pants, and an orange T-shirt. Ben had graduated from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in Spanish and taught high school Spanish in rural Colorado for four years before he decided he wanted to become a professional brewer. Instead of tinkering with homebrewing, a typical path for commercial brewers, he enrolled in a six-month brewing program at the Siebel Institute, a respected brewing school, that included some training in Munich.
Ben and I walked across this newer brewing facility, and I remembered the last time I had watched him brew, in the original Breakside space—a cramped nine-hundred-square-foot basement room that requires a lot of ducking and polite I’m-coming-throughs. The new brewery was a fifteen-thousand-square-foot complex that made me feel like I was no longer standing inside a startup, but something touched by a benevolent angel investor.
“What are we brewing today?” I yelled over a mechanical hum.
“The IPA!” he shouted back, without slowing his stride.
I couldn’t believe my luck. It had been three months since Breakside won the GABF gold medal for its IPA. Today, I’d see what went into making the beer that had received the most coveted medal at the festival. As the mash tun filled with fifty gallons of steaming hot water—which seemed wasteful, because this water wasn’t an ingredient for the beer but was just a way to warm the stainless steel—Ben explained how the medal had altered their future.
“I always suspected we’d grow,” he said, “but now it’s a foregone conclusion.”
At this point, in 2014, Breakside was brewing 7,400 barrels of beer a year. A year from now, Ben said, they planned to be making 16,000 barrels. Three years later, 25,000 to 30,000 barrels (which wouldn’t bring Breakside even close to the maximum of six million barrels a year the Brewers Association uses to qualify a brewery as “craft”).
I was surprised to hear Ben say they hadn’t yet ramped up production of the IPA since winning the medal. Even though Breakside’s distributor was struggling to keep the IPA in stock, the brewery didn’t have enough hops to make more IPA; Ben had contracted all the hops for 2015 five years earlier, the standard length of time for hops contracting. If he were to order more hops that day, he’d receive them in 2019. Ben mentioned how brewers at 10 Barrel Brewing—a craft brewery that started in Bend, Oregon, and that had recently been bought by Anheuser-Busch InBev—could get whatever hops they wanted almost immediately.
“Awards are great,” he said, “but when you’re trying to compete with the big boys, money talks.”
The only way to make more Breakside IPA in 2015 would be to change the recipe. “That’s not really an option,” Ben said with a confident grin.
I followed him up the grated stairs to the brew deck, which sits suspended between the mash tun, kettle, and whirlpool, the vessel that allows the next batch of beer to start brewing while the first one is still in progress. From the brew deck, I could see almost every corner of the brewery, which made it a good place to see if entry-level brewers were “dinking around,” Ben said. Above a metal work sink hung a brew log neatly covered in plastic, with blank lines for writing everything from the cell count of the yeast slurry to the gravity of the wort before it boils. While I understood that accurate record keeping is key to understanding a final beer, I’d never seen a brewer track this many items.
“We could make a beer without recording the details,” Ben said, “but we couldn’t do it as consistently.” To prove he wasn’t the most rigorous, he explained how another a brewer records the barometric pressure on brew days.
Despite my down coat and hat, I felt like I was back inside the Hair of the Dog walk-in cooler, which made it hard to move away from the warm lip of the mash tun, where a steaming mix of water and malt smelled like the bowl of Grape Nuts I would microwave when I was a kid. But we needed to move on to where the malt is ground, inside a sealed mill room, away from the brewing area. Before we went into the room, Ben handed me a dust mask, which reminded me of Tony, who wore the same kind of mask when he was grinding metal tubes in his shop. Once I had pulled the mask over my nose and mouth, it was already pressing lines into my cheeks. Inside the room, a mill fed by a plastic auger delivered American two-row malt, the brewery’s standard and most frequently used malt, from a silo that loomed large over the building. Other types of malt had to be poured into the mill by hand. Today, by my hands. Lift with your legs, not with your back, I thought, as I struggled to hoist a fifty-pound bag of specialty malt into position so the roasted barley kernels falling out would land inside a machine vibrating with hungry, whirring blades. Once we’d finished that job, Ben asked me to retrieve two plastic buckets filled with vibrant green hop pellets, pungent with aromas of pine and grass. That’s right, I thought, we’re making the IPA …
IPA is the fastest growing craft beer style in America. It may have been the brewers of the West Coast who reinvigorated the style during the past few decades, but India pale ale originated in England, during the late 1700s. If you’ve struggled to justify your beer budget, imagine being a British beer drinker in 1695, when 28 percent of the country’s annual per capita income went to beer. England had a long history of supplanting the dangerous and unreliable drinking water of London with beer: before meals, during meals, and after meals. These were people committed to hydration.
By the 1700s, the Industrial Revolution had begun chugging, cranking, and clanging into productivity in a soot-stained smock. The era brought a few key inventions that spurred commercial brewing, including thermometers and hydrometers (the instrument that measures the density of liquids, used to determine the amount of dissolved solids, or sugars, in wort). Steam power meant breweries could make more beer for less money by more efficiently boiling wort and heating water. Earlier, by the 1600s, people had started baking coal in ovens, a process that produced the highly efficient fuel called coke. Because the new fuel had less sulfur, tar, and undesirable gasses than coal, coke revolutionized malt making. Instead of making only the signed, smoky malts that fed the porter craze, maltsters could gently toast, roast, and coax barley into more refined malts, something they’d previously made in very limited amounts, using malt dried over straw fires. Brewers used those lighter, pale malts to make pale beers, and when the first pale ales debuted in London in 1620, they transformed the public’s palate. Those pale ales were the beers that would morph into IPAs.
Even though brewers had new tools and better malt, they still didn’t understand much of the science of their craft. They knew how to harvest and control yeast, to some extent, but they still didn’t understand the science of the single-celled organisms; Louis Pasteur wouldn’t theorize that yeast was responsible for fermentation until 1857. Beer was only brewed between October and April, when cooler temperatures seemed to decrease beer spoilage. Another thing seemed to decrease spoilage: hops.
Most people know the tale: in order for beer to survive the
long voyage from England to India, brewers started adding extra hops to barrels of beer to better preserve it. A new beer style was born, complete with a geographic name that fits the origin story. Lately, I’d noticed how every retelling of the tale tended to receive strong criticism from beer historians, brewers, and beer aficionados—a tide of revisionism stemming from either a fresh historical discovery or the rise of Internet trolls, it seemed. To find out what was happening, I called Mitch Steele, head brewer at Stone Brewing Co. and author of IPA: Brewing Techniques, Recipes, and the Evolution of India Pale Ale.
“My understanding of the story was the same as everyone else’s until six years ago,” he told me over the phone. After years of research, which included an immersive trip to England, Mitch said he learned there’s still a lot we don’t know about the IPA story. “Anyone who claims to know is mistaken,” he said.
An entrepreneur named George Hodgson, who owned Bow Brewery in London, usually gets the credit for dosing pale ales with extra hops for the voyage to India, but Steele uncovered an alternate reality. Bow Brewery was shipping porter, pale ale, and October beer (a strong pale ale) to India, but no one can find documentation that shows Hodgson created hoppier versions of either. Yes, British citizens living in India received beer that had survived a sloshing, four-to-six-month voyage that crossed the equator twice—temperature fluctuations that aren’t good for beer under any circumstances. Even so, Mitch said, the beer that arrived in India wasn’t all that bad. It wasn’t that a hoppy pale ale was intentionally created for the voyage to India, he told me, but that the beer that did well on the journey, styles that were heavily hopped, became more popular over time. “Especially when Burton brewers got involved.”
As early as the 1200s, when monks started brewing at the local abbey, the town of Burton-on-Trent became known as a magical place where brewers consistently made great beer. Located in the East Staffordshire borough of England, the town is cradled in the River Trent valley. Rainwater flows through deep layers of gravel and sandstone before it’s captured in town wells. The bedrock exposes the water to a rare blend of minerals—high levels of calcium and sul-fate—that do a few things for beer. First, it produces an eggy, fart-like aroma famously known as “Burton snatch.” Local brewers weren’t chasing the snatch, per se, but what the aroma-producing compounds did during fermentation: they promoted vigorous fermentation and caused protein particles and yeast to clump together, which produced beautifully clear beer, a defining attribute of English ales. (You should be able to read a newspaper through a good English ale, brewer Van Havig once told me.) The composition of the water also allowed brewers to add more hops, which made Burton beers slightly less perishable than beers from other parts of the country. Essentially, Burton beers were crisp, clear, and bitter. A new standard was set.
During the eighteenth century, the town of Burton developed a tight relationship with Russia; waterways threaded through Burton, the English port city of Hull, London, and the Baltics. Eventually, a canal became the pathway for transporting IPAs to Liverpool, a prime shipping port for India. Before Burton beers were loaded onto ships, most were aged in barrels for nine months. Then they sloshed their way around the Cape of Good Hope, a trip that took six months. When steam shipping became more prominent in the 1830s, the voyage shrunk to three months. Catherine the Great was “immoderately fond” of ales from Burton, and if I were to brew a beer for her today, I’d “Burtonize” my water by pouring Burton salts in the mash, a common homebrewing technique. The mix of gypsum, potassium chloride, and Epsom salt increases the hardness of the water, which would be especially important if Catherine were coming to drink in Portland, the land of otherwise-enviably soft water.
In the 1700s, Burton ales were strong, copper-colored beers that were slightly sweet, with flavors of dried fruits and the signature Burton hop bitterness, old ales that would eventually evolve into English barley wines. Burton pale ales were another beer entirely. By 1823 the town’s most prominent brewer, Samuel Allsopp, created a recipe for a pale ale designed to mimic Hodgson’s pale London beer. Two more Burton brewers—Bass Brewery and Thomas Salt and Co.—started exporting a pale beer to India around the same time.
Were those beers the first IPAs? While the bitterness in Burton ales increased, and the Burton exports became known as reliably high-quality beers, they weren’t called India pale ales. That matters. Because, even though a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, a beer style’s name is one key piece of its provenance. In 1817 the W.A. Brown Imperial Brewery advertised a pale ale that was “prepared for the East and West India Climate,” and an advertisement in the Sydney Gazette in August 1829 touted an “East India pale ale.” By the 1850s brewers were consistently using the name “India pale ale.”
The Burton versions of IPA appeared in London more frequently than other IPAs, which helped the Burton brewers became known for the style. Like other beer styles, IPA was advertised as restorative, the chicken soup of beers. An ad for Hodgson’s ale in the January 30, 1835, edition of the Liverpool Mercury described the beer as “Being brewed from the finest East Kent hop, it contains a particularly fine tonic quality, and is consequently much recommended by the faculty, even to invalids.” (I couldn’t help but notice that a copy of the paper cost seven pence, while a pint of beer at the time cost two.) For the healthy, IPAs were marketed as beers with extraordinary clarity and “sparkling lightness,” with the “light body of a wine combined with the fragrance and subdued bitter of the most delicate hop.” Champagne, anyone?
Ben moved between the brew deck and other parts of the brewery at an exhausting pace. I tried to stay within conversation distance without getting in his way.
“You probably already know this,” he said, before pushing some buttons and peering at a gauge, “but we’re mimicking the German practice of step infusion mashing.”
He explained how enzymes break starches into sugars, and that two types of enzymes are key for brewing: alpha and beta amylase. Each one creates different types of sugars and works at different temperatures. By bringing the mash temperature up in “steps,” you can activate both kinds of amylase, which helps create a customized wort filled with variable sugars, some of which the yeast will consume and some of which the yeast will leave behind. Brewers who don’t use step infusions—like me, when I homebrew—try to bring their wort to a temperature that activates both amylases in one swoop. Step or no step, never again would I approach the mash temperature as a general suggestion. Brewing is more like making a piecrust than I initially thought; the temperature of the chilled butter matters to the degree.
At one point, Ben disappeared among the long line of fermenters. When he returned, he was holding a clear plastic pitcher filled with about five inches of an obsidian beer with an espresso-crema-hued head. The beer was a stout, a new recipe that upped the body and hoppiness of the brewery’s Irish dry stout, he said. Ben took a small professional sip then passed the pitcher to me. After his second taste, Ben looked at the floor, paused as though he were thinking, then looked at me and decreed, “Yep. Just right.”
Two times, Ben produced a kit that looked like he was about to test the composition of chemicals in a hot tub. It was called a titration, which he used to measure the concentration of sanitizer solution that cleaned the brewing equipment.
“Standards are for everyone,” he said loudly. I felt like he was talking not to me but to the assistant brewers working in the vicinity.
From the brew deck, I saw one of the brewers let out a loud burst of carbon dioxide from a hose before attaching it to a fermenter. He paused and looked around, which made it seem like he’d made a mistake, but he was actually following protocol and purging oxygen from the valves attached to the fermenter tank before adding the beer, which would help keep the beer tasting fresh.
“See,” Ben said, nodding with approval. “It’s those kinds of practices that keep the beer at quality levels.”
Next thing I knew, Ben looked panicked. He’d just
checked the temperature of the mash and something wasn’t right. The mash tun’s mixer paddle wasn’t mixing, which meant sugars from the malt weren’t being evenly extracted.
“It’s just moving around!” Ben yelled at another brewer.
Three of them started attending to the gleaming steel vessel, moving through steam to reach into the small hatch that provided access to the mash and the paddle. I knew they were facing the possibility of a large batch of beer gone wrong.
The mash tun was new, and had only been installed a few days earlier. Now, mechanical errors were creating ripples of chaos, a disruption of the calm rigor Ben tried to cultivate. Before the brewers had figured out how to fix the paddle problem, Ben muttered that the temperature gauge appeared to be malfunctioning, which also had major implications. If the wort was too hot or cold by just one degree, the beer wouldn’t taste right. But he knew that, if he had indeed followed his standard brewing procedures up until this moment, the wort should be the right temperature. “We have to trust our process over the readings!” Ben shouted, like the captain of a ship that just lost radar.
Once the ship was righted and the wort began flowing into the whirlpool, Ben sprinted up to the brew deck and began ripping open large bags of what looked like cocaine. DEXTROSE, said the red letters on the bags. If I’d seen Ben opening containers of premium raw brown sugar or bottles of agave syrup, I wouldn’t have blinked. But this was dextrose, a sugar derived from corn that seemed more like something you’d find at a Budweiser plant than a craft brewery. I was shocked.
“Go ahead and pour it in without getting the stuff stuck to the sides,” he told me.
My Beer Year Page 13