Month: April 2007

Today is Friday April 6th and it’s a blogging day for all of us who blog. Today the group excercise is on Abbey Dubbel Style beers. Last month it was Stout. I don’t know where the last 30 days have gone but they certainly have been very monumental to say the least.

At this time, we are putting the finishing touches on a photo shoot at the brewery and it has been a surreal day around here. I didn’t get into brewing to be famous, rich or important. Nope, I got into brewing because it appeals to my notions of creativity and my artistic sensibilities. When I started considering the multitude of stories that I wanted to blog for this “Abbey” day, my mind wandered all over the place trying to find the natural tie in.

Then, I sat down after smiling for the camera all day. It hit me in an instant. We are Port Brewing and we are the makers of The Lost Abbey brand of beers. It is something that I am incredibly proud of and very much focused on right now. The fact that we spent a whole day shooting photos for future Lost Abbey endeavors speaks to this.

As I was drifting in and out of the photos today, I started thinking about the relationship of who I have become as a brewer and where I started. It’s an 11 year journey that starts oddly enough with a desire to brew Belgian Style beers at home.

It’s 1996. I have recently been hired as the Assistant Brewer at Cervecerias La Cruda in downtown San Diego. I am hired by Troy Hojel to work in this new startup brewpub. We begin to discuss my home brewing equipment and the beers that I have made.

I tell Troy that I really enjoy a great Abbey Style beer and we begin to write a recipe for this beer I will brew at home. Chris White stops by the brewery one day and mentions that he has a new “Trappist Ale” strain that they are looking for some feedback on.

I get the yeast about a week later from Chris. By this time, Troy and I have been drinking numerous Abbey Styled beers trying to get a “feel” for what we want to accomplish. After settling on the recipe, including the yeast specifics, we start to talk about brewing with sugars.

I remember the next conversation like it was yesterday. I’m drinking a pint of our Blowfish ESB when Troy leans in and says in a hushed tone…” I think we should use some raisins in this beer.” I swear, I amost fell off the bar stool when he said this.

It really hadn’t occurred to me that using raisins was something that I should concern myself with. After all, I don’t really eat raisins so why would I think they were something worth brewing with? But the thing is, the beer we brewed with the raisins was stunning and it set the wheels in motion for my adventures in Belgian Styled brewing. And I owe it all to the 4oz of juicy Sunmaid Raisins that day.

When I was hired to be the brewer at the Pizza Port in Solana Beach, my first seasonal beer was Dubbel Overhead Abbey Ale. It was the first beer in San Diego to be made with Raisins. This was way back in October of 1997.

Over the years, I spent hours working with “interesting” ingredients and we always had raisins available at our disposal. One night, Jeff Bagby and I started talking about Saisons and developing color in them without using malt. It was then that we decided we should “alter” the raisins and their structure.

We wrote a recipe for SPF 8 Farmhouse Ale and it was decided that to gain color in the beer, we would “blacken” the raisins. So we did and the beer became one of my favorite beers of all time.

Fast forward to The Lost Abbey. I have now been brewing beer professionally for almost 11 years and have reached a level of recognition in the brewing business for my creations. This is where The Lost Abbey comes into play. Over the years, I earned for my numerous accolades for these Belgian Styled Beers. Many of them have been “Abbey” styled beers as well.

Here at the Lost Abbey, we are now making two Abbey style beers as part of our standard year round beers- they are Lost and Found Abbey Ale and Judgment Day our Dark Strong Ale- both of them are brewed with Raisins. It’s just something that over time, I have grown accustomed to. It’s sort of my comfort ingredient around here.

Our Lost and Found Abbey Ale is now made with a custom “raisin puree” that involves Chef Vince and rather large boat motor… It’s so damn cool. It’s also one of my favorite beers that we are making. I tell people that the recipe for Lost and Found is something that I have been working on for over 10 years now.

It’s not easy making a great Abbey Style beer. It takes an amazing yeast. It takes a skillful blend of hops and malt. And at the end of it all, there has to be an integration of all these things to create a memorable drinking experience. I for one, think we have figured out our Abbey style beer and for that I am thankful.

It’s hard to imagine looking back what might have been. As we were sitting here smiling for the camera all day, all I could think about were those raisins. So next time you reach for an Oatmeal Raisin cookie, remember the raisins. Remember that they have inspired me over the years and stretched my brewing limits.

As we move forward with The Lost Abbey part of Port Brewing, we will most certainly think about the raisins each and every time we make a batch of Lost and Found or Judgment Day or 10 Commandments or… Were it not for the raisins in that batch of homebrew, I might be making lager beer in some far away state. I think I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing, so far it has served me well.

A few weeks back, we were knee deep in a bottling marathon. It just seemed like every single time that we had a batch of beer ready to go, it needed to be bottled. These days, we are bottling about 80% of our beers with the rest going towards draft. The planets sometimes align and we get a whole week without having to operate the bottler(s)- we have two separate units. One for Six Packs and one for our bottle conditioned beers.

Sometime around Valentines Day, we had tanks of IPA, Old Viscosity and Judgment Day all ready to be packaged around the same time. This meant that in a 10 day span, we bottled 5 out of the 10 days. Bottling is an incredibly monotonous thing and as our bottling line(for the 22oz and 750mls bottles) is labor intensive. It means that we are often left spending hours on end doing the same task.

That particular week, I scheduled a bottling run for Monday-Thursday to get large batches of IPA and Old Viscosity packaged. It was on Wednesday around lunch that things got more interesting. Josh and I were running the filler with Vince capping all the bottles. I saw a flicker out of the corner of my eye over by the garden hose on the east side of the brewery.

I didn’t pay too much attention to it but then it moved again. So, I stopped my side of the filler and went to investigate. I found a very small mouse looking concerned about having ventured out of the wall from whence it came not knowing where to go next. This incredibly timid little creature managed to get trapped in the garden hose pile. Being “concerned” for his safety, I managed to corner him and “convince him” to jump into one of the cases from our bottling run. In the box, he knew that the walls were closing in on him and his days on this earth were numbered. He must have known because he started going bezerk and jumping up and down.

I laughed. “Escape is futile my friend. Your in my world now.” I showed Vince and Josh my prize new possession and we resumed bottling the beer with Josh seemingly very interested in our new little brewery mascot. As the bottles were going up and down, Josh must have dozed off like a high schooler in science class. Coming to, I soon found Josh filling a bottle cap with some Old Viscosity. “Hey, you think he’ll drink this?” He said?

“I don’t see why not,” was all I could come up with. And so it was that we began that afternoon a science experiment of our own. I have been called lots of things as a brewer and more often than not, people say we make some pretty incredibly experimental beers. I take it as a compliment. But this was an experiment of a different nature.

Josh set the bottle cap with Old Viscosity in the box and we watched as our new little friend investigated the merits of the dark oil slick like beer inside. Like a beer snob, the little bastard first smelled it. I’m surprised the alcoholic aroma didn’t burn his nose hairs. But like a good student of life (let’s not forget this was seemingly his first venture out into the real world), he plowed on. And plow on he did. He kept taking small nips out of the cap consuming Old Viscosity at an alarming rate.

The volume of liquid to body mass of beer he consumed was quite shocking. If he’d been human, I think he would have blown .44 for the officer that afternoon. We kept bottling and watching our new fury little friend become happier and happier with each sip. After a while, it was apparent that we had taken our new friend on a epic journey.

He started this epic journey with each step falling into the next. He would put one foot out straight before taking three steps sideways and falling over. Clearly this mouse was housed, pickled, polluted- 18 sheets to the wind. It was amusing to watch as he began walking in to the walls of the box and then chasing his tale.

At about 3 hours into the process, the mouse passed out. We weren’t even sure he was breathing (we were fresh out of miniature stethoscopes). Eventually the mouse (like most of us) passed out on his left side with his two right feet very much left hanging in the air. It must have been an amazing sleep. I can only think about it in these terms as drinking nearly ½ your bodies weight in Old Viscosity would have me reeling.

We finished bottling not knowing how our new home boy was doing. Josh took mercy on his condition and offered a piece of bread and some water (wait he wasn’t in jail for being intoxicated in public was he)? We left Mighty Mouse to “sleep it off” and retired for the night not knowing if our friend would ever recover from the happiest day of his life…I see trees of green… red roses too. And I think to myself…what a wonderful world!

Well HOLY MOSES! The next day when I arrived for work our little trooper was probably enduring the most wicked headache of all time. He was alive, awake but cowering in the corner twitching to the oldies. I was shocked that he was moving. Although to be perfectly fair, I don’t think he was moving all that well. We sort of watched from a distance that Thursday as he didn’t do all that much. Aren’t some friends just better when they’re not sober?

I don’t think that Mighty Mouse was feeling too terribly mighty that Thursday. We left him to his devices(he should have drank more water) before heading home that night. Friday was Black Friday. Josh had killed our little friend. Well, at least that’s how I view it. When we arrived on Friday, he wasn’t moving. Not a peep. “Come on little buddy. Give me one sign…” None came.

I gave him a proper dumpster burial and saluted his long and fortuitous life. I consider him to be the luckiest mouse to have ever lived. He got to enter the world being born at a brewery and it’s the only world he ever knew. He also got Stinking Drunk on Old Viscosity clearly leaving this world for a higher calling on his terms.

And so kiddies the moral of this story goes like this. You can drink all the Old Viscosity your body can handle. But if at the end of the day you try to drink your weight in beer, you may end up meeting a fate like our friend and fallen comrade. A toast then as we spill some beer for “the little guy.” Like the engine who could, he did. Sad to see him go. We’re going to miss you Amigo. “Say, I think I just saw your brother run by…I think I will introduce him to beer as well.

Happy April 1, 2007