Drink Craft Beer

Home

Great Lakes Brewing Company - Interview with Luke Purcell

Luke Purcell

As many of you may remember, Devon and Jeff went on a road trip to the Great Lakes Region back in September to check out the brewing scene in the middle of our country. You've heard about almost all of them, but what Great Lakes brewery road trip would be complete without a visit to Great Lakes Brewing Company in Cleveland, Ohio? Luke Purcell, the Pub Brewer for Great Lakes Brewing Co., was kind enough to take some time out of his busy day to sit down with us and tell us the history of GLBC, his philosophy on beer, a secret GLBC project and more! And, with this interview, we officially wrap up Devon and Jeff Drink the Great Lakes! So, without further ado, on to Luke Purcell of Great Lakes Brewing Company.

DCB: What got you into brewing, and how’d you end up at Great lakes?

GL: Personally, homebrewing in the basement and by chance I met the master brewer at the time down here at Great Lakes, who was an avid homebrewer at the time… he probably still does it knowing him. He’s a brewer at Dogfish Head now, who I keep in close contact with for when I need help. He invited me to his basement and I homebrewed with him a few times. I was layed off of work so he invited me down here to drag hoses around for a couple months and a couple months turned into almost 12 years now. Kind of accidentally found out what I wanted to do.

DCB: Did you ever take a course?

GL: Yeah, I’ve been to a couple Siebel courses [a professional brewing school in Chicago], we send all our people to Siebel. They try to send a couple people, not every single year, but when the time is right and we have the ability. These guys (GLBC) are real good with brewer education. We’re big time into education for our staff.

DCB: So you’re the pub brewer we were told. Do you have a different brewery for here than for production?

The basement of the pub with tanks in back.

GL: We have the original system… it started as a brewpub. Then this was the first micro in Ohio. We still use our 7 bbl system for brewpub only beers. Every once in a while we’re do a 22 ounce bottle run… those things are kind of just to keep people coming to the pub. Our beers are getting more available, so that keeps people coming down. A few rotating handles aside from our regular stuff. Before our current 75 bbl system we had a 30 bbl system… that building is now condos, and that’s wehre I started. In ’99 we started on the 75bbl system and we’re still adding tanks to that. We’re still filling the building up with tanks.

DCB: Talking about growth, you’ve been here 12 years, how have you seen it change from a 30 bbl system? And were you here when they were just a pub still?

GL: I came in about a year after they started on the 30bbl system, so I learned on both. I didn’t see that startup, but I did see the startup of the new production plant we’re in now. It’s almost like I’ve worked at 3 breweries, that’s one of the things that’s helped me stay here this long. You’re across the street brewing Dortmunder [Lager] everyday. It starts wearing on you, when you’re just producing beer with no creativity. The guys over there, I try to keep them involved in pub stuff now just to keep that excitement and artistic side of it going.

DCB: There’s been the trend of big/extreme beer, but then the breweries now that are focusing more on session ales and new flavors in styles people know and love. I would call your brown something like that. Not what’s expected from a brown, but more of a session beer. Has that always been a conscious decision to not gravitate to the huge hoppy beers?

GL: We do a double IPA, so we hit that side of it… but even those we try to keep it more balanced than some people are doing. That’s more of a product of just how I learned from Andy [brewer mentioned earlier]. That probably sounds funny since he’s at Dogfish Head. But, even recently, I talked to him… I’m making a barleywine and it’s aging downstairs… and I was in the thought process when I was going to do it and I was thinking I need to get this thing to 12%-15% and get it big and the alcohol beefed up. Luckily I called him and he talked me out of it. He said, “just make a nice balanced beer, that’s what you guys are about.” He brought me back to where we’re supposed to be… maybe he didn’t want the competition. We make an effort to keep it balanced no matter what style we’re doing.

DCB: It seems like it’s the new trend, balance that is. More people are experimenting with the session beers now.

GL: There’s a beer here now that’s been on since I came on… called Nosfaratu. We call it a Stock Ale, but there’s no style it fits. At GABF the closest thing is a red ale, but it’s too big for a red ale and too small for a double red ale. It doesn’t get sent to competition because it doesn’t fit, but that goes way back. It has a lot of hops, but it has a lot of malt to balance it. That’s the kind of way I learned.l

DCB: The first thing we ever had from you was the Blackout Stout, your imperial stout. It was just like, wow, that’s delicious. It’s not the overwhelming alcohol, but the roasty notes are there. It’s no 12% beer, which is nice.

GL: What happens is, to get it up to there, people have switched their yeast and people will create flavors they weren’t expecting because they haven’t used that yeast before. That’s what Andy taught me with this barleywine. Just use what you know. We use Wyeast 1028 London Ale for a lot of our ales, probably a majority. It’s easy for me, when I’m experimenting with a beer, to grab it than build up a new one. That’s what I used for the barleywine based on his adviced. Ethanol bomb was the word he used, you’re making an ethanol bomb. That’s one thing people do, they probably don’t know what they’ll get out of it, whereas I know what I’m going to get. We can manipulate it to do different things a little bit with things like temperature. Some of the things we do with the same yeast, youwouldn’t know it was the same yeast. IF you’re familiar with what it’s characteristics are at different temperatures then you can change the beer without changing the yeast. Changing the yeast is fun and I do like using new yeast just to do something different, but it’s good to know your yeast.

DCB: I mean, we homebrew and you can create vastly different flavors on the same yeast.

GL: That’s one of the funnest things to do. A lot of times the homebrew club here will do a group brew, they’ll do 5 of the same brew using 5 different yeasts and that’s fun to do to see what it’ll do. But when you’re taking something you’re going to sell and get on you guys’ website it’s good to know what it’s going to do.

DCB: So it’s interesting you’ve brought up the topic of beers that don’t fit into style. Especially with GABF coming up… a lot of people are saying, “You know, we have this beer that just doesn’t fit in there.” Is that kind of annoying, or is it not a big deal as a brewer?

Just a few of their 40-50 styles.

GL: For me it used to be frustrating. But for 6 or 7 years now I’ve been in charge of what we send to GABF and you just come to terms with it. You realize I’m not going to change that beer to suit their needs, and it has a huge following here. I’m not going to change it. We do 40-50 sytles per year. We have enough beers that fit. We send the ones that fit, and the ones that don’t, we don’t. Our Dortmunder, our biggest selling beer, is the best example. In 1990 it won the GABF Gold Medal. It’s called Dortmunder Gold, it was named after the fact that it won that medal. I haven’t sent that beer for years because it doesn’t fit into the Dortmunder category. One of our brewers mentioned, why don’t we try to make a more true to style Dortmunder. I said, we’re not going to even worry about it. We sell so much Dortmunder, why worry about the medals. Of course you want them, but we have enough beer to be able to send 5-8 beers out there every year. So we don’t worry about it.

DCB: For a flagship beer, there’s a lot going on in the Dortmunder. There’s a lot of flavor. A lot of places will say “It’s our flagship, we don’t really care…”

GL: Most people’s flagships are like that. They think they have to cater to that, get the crowd and then step them up. And in hot weather, we’ll do the pilsner and all that. But I think, here at Great Lakes, part of their success has always been that Dortmunder, being aggressive. You want to talk about balance? It skipped over the stepping stone mentality that says you have to have the light beer. There’s some other breweries around town that think you have to have the macro under the bar or something.

DCB: We saw a lot of that. “It’s not on the menu, but if you ask we have Miller…”

GL: We have an N/A that we have in bottles here, and that’s it. You’d never see that [Miller, Budweiser, etc…]. One of our things is stick to your standards and people are coming around to it. The people that thingk you have to give them something light. Even when you give them something light on tap they’d still rather their Bud Light or whatever. You’re really wasting your time. If you’re going to go that route you might as well sneak under the bar. One brewpub served it in a brown paper bag. If you ordrred it you have to get it in a brown paper bag. Those macros do what they do well, but we should do what we do well too and not worry about it. We have a great wine list here at the pub and you can always order that. If you don’t like the beer… this may not be your place. There’s plenty of places around town.

DCB: One time during this trip we were at another brewpub [New Holland], we saw a guy order a pitcher of Bud Light. The bartender told him, “We don’t have that, we just have this [referring to one of their lighter beers].” The guy responded, “OK, we’ll try that.” The bartender’s answer? “Are you sure, you probably won’t like it. They have Bud Light across the street. Maybe you should go there.” The guy answered, “No, no we’ll like it. That’s what we want.” Finally, the bartender, “OK, but you might not like it.” Well, the guy and his group did, indeed, like it.

Their 70bbl kettle.

GL: That’s the thing, people will discover they like beer the hard way if they are willing to try it. Normally we find that people will like something on the menu if we can get them to try it. Then they’ll think, maybe I’ll try this…

DCB: And, on top of that, some of are friends would completely defy the Bud Light assumption. They hate it. But, we’ve found through trial and error, that one likes sour beers and the other loves barrel aged stouts. Give either a pale ale or a pilsner, and they’ll shrink away. But give them one of these “high level” beers, and they’ll love it! You can ease those people in.

GL: Yeah, my sister, more than anyone, made me realize that years ago. I was trying to get her to try good beer. She would drink Miller Lite. Tried to get her to drink some of our beer. Dortmunder? Something else light we had at the time, whatever it was? Sure enough, she liked the porter the best. Who’d have known? She knows it has to be sipped and enjoyed. I would’ve never thought that was the beer she’d pick out of our beers. It made me realize, you’re wasting your time ifyou’re trying to make your own light flavored beer.

DCB: A lot of it is the saying “I never knew beer could taste like that!” A pilsner will taste a little better, but it doesn’t change the game.

To talk more about the macros, on the success of Coors’ Blue Moon, they’re launching an “ultra premium” beer line. Budweiser has sort of dipped in and out of “craft” beers. What’s your take on how this affects the industry?

GL: Those are the kind of questions that the answer is going to come and we’re going to see. They’ve [Coors] done a good job with Blue Moon. It’s hard to say what will happen. It’s like the reverse of the other mentality that people will only drink their’s. There’s still that element that craft brew mentality that they don’t even want to touch that stuff even if it might be good. I think Blue Moon, and the seasonals, it’s good. You can’t deny that. I think, if they’re going to make it, they’re doing it right. If you’re going to do it, do it right. And they’re very capable of that. I think A-B has gone about it the wrong way, trying to call it something that it’s not. It doesn’t make sense with some of the stuff that they’ve done. But, if Coors keeps having success with the Blue Moon lines and doing it well... It’s a hard question. You know they can do it and you almost hope they don’t do it. But, at the same time, there’s that mentality that some people just aren’t going to buy it because of who makes it. We still have that on our side.

DCB: One of the exciting things, too, is that when the big guys take notice, it means there’s a real market there. It’s not a fad. For the longest time, the macros were all saying, “It’s a fad, they’re just doing crazy stuff out there!”

GL: It’s a fine line. When you’re a brewpub it’s easy to just slam all those guys. But when you’re getting to the point wehre you have a distributor, you’re distributor is a Coors or Budweiser house, which is scary because you’ll be a secondary thought to them. That’s why a lot of those guys sign on for the Budweiser distributor deal. Then you’re just riding on their coat-tails distribution wise. We do a Belgian whit, and it’s very successful outside of the Cleveland market, it’s called Holy Moses. It does a great job in all our other markets other than Cleveland. And what happens is, we distribute through a Coors house and they sell Blue Moon. We can’t get them to sell that beer here. They won’t fight for that tap handle. They sell Blue Moon first then, if they want a second whit, they’ll sell ours.

DCB: That’s an interesting point. Not everyone is distributed through a big house. But, if the big guys get into the craft business, it’s kind of a conflict of interest on the distribution side. If you’re paying them to get your beer out there, but they’re trying to get their beer out there first… It’s a tough race.

GL: That’s the tough thing about what we’re going through locally right now. And a lot of these craft people won’t sign on for the distribution deal like Budweiser is doing. But, just distributing through that house is already like a partnership. If you go around town right now and you see a Dortmunder, you’re probably going to see a Coors and a Blue Moon right next to it because that’s how it works. It’s almost like you’re partnered with them anyways on some level. It’s a tough time. We’re at a time, especially if they’re going to start making more specialties, it’s going to be an interesting 5-10 years to see how it plays out. There’s probably going to be a lot of mid-range breweries that give in to at least the distribution deal that they can get. So it’s hard to say what’s going to happen. And they’re more than capable of making good beer. If you make it out to GABF and you take the Coors tour, there’s a couple little bars around there that what’s called the Barman. It’s a true pilsner that Coors makes, and it’s only there… and… yeah, it’s good [nodding]. It’s good. They have the bartender pouring it correctly, they call it the seven minute draw. You have to order one before you’re halfway done. So there’s no doubt, they can do it.

DCB: That and Stone just hired Mitch Steele from A-B, and now he’s running the brewery at Stone. So they know what they’re doing. They’re not wehre they are because they can’t brew.

GL: And you’re probably see more of that crossover from big to small and small to big.

A promo truck in their brewery.

DCB: Getting back more on the Great Lakes Brewery topic. We’ve seen stacks of barrels or hidden barrels everywhere we’ve gone. Are you guys playing with any of that with your bigger beers?

GL: We’ve done bourbon barrel aged Blackout Stout for the past 3 or 4 years. We take that in January, when it comes out, and we put it on tap and in bottles and we take some of it and fill up bourbon barrels with it. I tasted Old Dominion’s Bourbon Barrel Stout in an airport and that’s when I decided to do it… I like bourbon too, so that helps. One of the restaurant managers and myself drive down to Jim Beam in February, pick up the barrels. They’ve got to know us well enough to know when we’re coming. And we actually drive right up to the dump floor and they roll some of the barrels into our truck. So we’re getting good fresh barrels from them. We have a good relationship with them. They come up here for a tasting. They do a whole bourbon flight. We fill up 2 sessions of 80 people for this thing now. I do that beer, then I do a pub level beer called Rackhouse Ale, named after the rackhouses where the barrels age down there. So we do two beers and they do two flights of their specialty bourbons. It’s become a real good relationship between us and them.

DCB: It’s interesting you use Jim Beam…

GL: We started because that’s where we could get them… and we called them and they said, “Yeah, come and get them.” There’s smaller batch bourbons going on, and people say you should use this barrel or that barrel, but we’ve stayed on because we’ve developed that relationship.

DCB: Harpoon had a Barleywine in Boston, and they aged it in 4 different barrels and they were all very different. And Jim Beam was my [Devon’s} favorite. It was smooth and didn’t overwhelm the taste of the beer. It was smooth.

GL: That’s good to hear [laughs]. There’s a theory I have about that. That industry didn’t go through what the beer industry did. Jim Beam’s been around forever. And they’ve been doing it right forever. They are craft. There are smaller places now, but Jim Beam has always been doing it the right way. They never had that mass production, mass palate in that industry. So, it’s not like they’ve declined. To me, bourbon and distilled beverages have a unique position from the beer industry. How there’s micros and macros, if that’s how you want to say it. They’ve always been doing it the same way. That’s why I don’t think it’s bad to go with the big guys in this case. It’s just most mass-produced, it’s not flavorful… trust me! If they pull us over with the van full of those things, they won’t believe us that we haven’t been drinking [because of the smell]!

DCB: Going on to your brewing, what inspires you when you’re looking to create a new beer? How do you go about testing this new recipe? Do you do it as a small batch at the pub?

GL: Inspiration? It gets harder here because, like I said, we have a long list of brews that we’ve done here. We’re coming up on our 20th anniversary, a year from right now [ September 2008]. It gets harder to think of new things. But the good thing is there’s a group of guys. And the good thing is, wherever it comes from, whether it be a beer fest tasting someone else or what. Some of the production brewers and myself were up at the Great Taste in Madison, and we tasted a smoked IPA and we thought it was a really interesting combination. You don’t usually think of hops going with smoked malt. So, one of the the people with me was like, we should do something like this, but it’s a little over the top with the hops and the balance wasn’t there. So we started doing this beer called Engine 20 that is named after the fire house that a fire fighter who was a friend of one of us here worked at, and he passed on. It’s a little less of that extreme hop, it’s smoked pale ale. It came out really nice with the hop and smoke combination. So sometimes your inspiration comes from trying someone else’s beer. That’s how the Barrel Aged Blackout Stout came, from tasting the Old Dominion Barrel Aged Stout. It helps that we have, locally, a good group of guys that we talk all the time. That still seems to be the norm in our industry, and hopefully it stays that way. People share ideas a lot. You get ideas from customers. I had this beer here, you should do this here, you should use this spice from the chefs here. We do beer dinners so we’re trying to create beers that go with food as well as food that goes with beer here from time to time. We do a Whit Beer here that’s has ginger and lemongrass, instead of the usual spices. And that came from a former chef here, who I’m still friends with. That thing pairs really well with a ton of different flavors. It’s become one of those beers and we have to make it every year and it has a following. So you get the inspiration from all over, you never know where it’ll come from . When you think of something new, it has to be something good too. That’s the other question. The first time we do something new, we do it on the pub system. It’s a large system to make a mistake on, so you have to be a little bit careful not to go too crazy. If I wanted to do something really crazy, I guess I’d dust off the homebrew system and do it at home.

The new 70bbl brewery

DCB: Do you ever find it tough to scale up to the larger system?

GL: I don’t think people always realize how hard that is. It’s not just quadruple all the ingredients. There’s a lot of variables in that. When we first opened up over there, the transition went fairly well on most of our beers. The hardest one was the Edmond Fitzgerald Porter. It took us about a year to get it back. That’s a world class porter with numerous medals. And, one of the proudest moments for me here was when that won a medal after the transition. It’s won two since then. It is hard sometimes to ramp up. When you’re ramping up a new beer, it’s not as hard because it doesn’t have to be exact. But, when we were ramping up the porter, which had been a longtime standard, it had to be dead on. It just goes to show

70bbl brewery again.

you, too, there’s the brewer then there’s the system as well. A lot of places will hire someone and won’t realize it’ll take him a little time to get used to it.

DCB: One more thing we were wondering. A lot of places we’ve seen two barrels very far away from everything else. And it usually turns out that it’s a sour beer that nobody in the brewery really trusts. They trust the system they use for sanitation but, at the same time, don’t think it’s necessary to fully test. Are you guys doing anything like this?

GL: We have a very small amount of beer aging in casks that we can pass by when we go across the street. You can see where they are and it’s funny that you say it that way. They’re out of reach and out of the way. It was a Tripel that didn’t attenuate where we wanted it to, so we took it and did a whole bunch of stuff with it. We recently tasted it and, lo and behold, it’s good now! Soon we’ll see something with that. You don’t want to tell everyone then say, “Oh, but it’s going to be a few years.” And, then, if it doesn’t come out right, you just have to deny it.

DCB: Yeah, you kind of always have to draw it out. You doing anything special? “Yeah, a few things…” What kind of things? “Well, we have a few barrels…” What kind of barrels? Well, we’re doing some sour beer…” Nobody wants to talk about a beer they’re doing that may never be tasted if it goes badly.

Well, we think that about wraps it up, so thanks for your time today! Time to see your new 75 bbl brewery.

Bill in Massachusetts to Reduce Legal Blood Alcohol Level to .02

MA Rep. James Fagan (Taunton)

Hey all you Craft Beer Drinkers! So we are still facing ridiculous alcohol laws even in the "liberal enclave" that is Massachusetts and we're calling on you!

Massachusetts State Representative James Fagan (Taunton) has introduced a bill that will reduce the legal blood alcohol limit for driving to .02. Despite the fact that a 240 pound man could sip a single glass of beer over an hour and be considered illegal, Rep. Fagan thinks this is the only way to stop drunk driving. Read about it here:

Bill on Tap to Dry Up ALL Drinking, Driving

'Tyrannically Low' Legal Drinking Limit Up for Beacon Hill Hearing

If you live in Massachusetts, you need to write your Representative and tell him or her that you are against this bill! Then, write to Representative Fagan's office and tell him you're against this bill. Do so politely but in no uncertain terms. Tell them that you favor responsible drunk driving laws, more treatment programs and harsher punishments for repeat offenders. Even if you don't live in Massachusetts, you can help. Write to Representative Fagan, and tell him why you are against this bill. Write to your Representative and tell him or her why you are against this bill. Every time this issue comes up, we need to let our elected officials know where the population stands.

It doesn't matter that the above articles say this bill won't pass. We need to let our elected officials know that this is not acceptable. If they don't hear anything, next time it might come closer. That's a bad road to start down. Also, to pass this bill without the requisite preparation is completely criminal. If they want to enact this piece of legislation, we need better public transporation. We need a system that won't shut down before the bars close. Representative Fagan, do you really want to save lives? Make the T run an hour past last call, at least. Fund it if need be. I'd rather pay my taxes or a higher fare to have a functional public transit system than enforcing this kind of ridiculous and inneffective law.

To find out who your Massachusetts Representative is, click here.

To contact Representative James Fagan, click here.

And here is the text of his bill.

So write to Representative Fagan. Write to your state representative, even if you don't live in Massachusetts. Tell him or her that you are against Massachusetts House Bill No.1403! And tell him or her why.

St. Patrick's Day Beer Recommendations With A Twist

If ever there were a drinker's holiday, St. Patrick's day would be it. We wanted to do something special this year. While there's nothing wrong with a traditional pint of Guinness, a Black & Tan or a pint of Harp, we thought we could come up with some more interesting variations for your St. Patricks day. We've come up with some interesting drinks along with a special recipe to start your St. Patrick's day off right.

Samuel Adams Irish Red Ale

Every St. Patrick's day needs a good session beer. Lets face it, St. Patrick's day is about drinking endurance and this new offering from Sam Adams fits the bill.

Appearance: Red... duh. Tan head, about an inch.
Smell: Little sweet malt... not much, pretty mellow.
Taste: Mellow. A little malt sweetness... Just enough hops that you can taste some flowery taste, but that's it. You gotta look for it.

Why we like it:
1. Super drinkable... which is great for St. Patrick's Day
2. Nice malt flavor.
3. Easily available, and lets face it, it's St. Patrick's day so you need plenty for you and your friends!

Hop King - Black & Tan

You didn't think we were just going to give our normal list of beers did you? When we sat down to figure out what we wanted for this article we knew we had to do a twist on a black and tan. We came up with what we've come to call "Hop King", a 50/50 blend of Victory Hop Devil & Victory Storm King. Sure it doesn't layer all nice like a Guinness and Harp, but we guarantee you'll like it.

Appearance: Dark dark dark brown... almost black. This won't stay separate, though. It did for a second... but then no. But who cares, let's try it!
Smell: Roasty hops... not roasted hops, because that'd be gross... or would it? (Yes, it would) We smell roasted barley and lots of hops. Mmmmm.
Taste: Bitter chocolate and piney hops. The roast comes through in the finish, but if you burp, you'll burp hops.

Why we like it:
1. A Craft Beer take on a classic St. Patrick's Day favorite.
2. Goes down way easier than you'd expect this combo to. The Stout and IPA round each other out making them easier to drink together than separate.
3. Hops are green. St. Patrick's Day is green. Coincidence... or fate?

Butternuts Moo Thunder Stout

Looking for a Guinness alternative? This stout by Butternuts brewery in upstate New York is the perfect session stout. Just the right amount of malt bitterness with a nice easy mouthfeel that lets you have a few.

Appearance: Almost black, turn to dark ruby around the edges.
Smell: Chocolate milk.
Taste: Chocolatey, smooth and kind of sweet.

Why we like it:
1. Can drink it all day.
2. Awesome artwork... It's a cow being struck by lightning on a can?! Plus you get to say Butternuts all day.
3. Great alternative to Guinness Stout

Around the World in 60 Minutes - A Craft Beer Irish Car Bomb

Another beverage we knew we needed to tap was the car bomb. Traditionally a pint of Guinness with a shot of 1/2 Jameson and 1/2 Bailey's Irish Cream dropped into the pint. At the outset we knew we weren't going to make a beer drink that you chugged, but the idea of a shot glass dropped in gave us some ideas. What we've come up with is a new take on some classic Dogfish Head flavors. For this drink pour most of a Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA intoa glass then pour a shot of Dogfish Head World Wide Stout (18% alcohol) and drop into the pink. Drink at a pace of your choosing, but know that it tastes REALLY good, so you may find yourself sipping to savor.

Appearance: Golden, with black swirling. Head swells after dropping shot glass in.
Smell: A little sweet, and definitely hoppy!
Taste: Just a touch boozy, a little roast and some hops. We wouldn't drink it all day, but we'd drink one or two for sure! A great blend of St. Patrick's Day and Craft Beer.

Why we like it:
1. It doesn't curdle... you can actually enjoy it instead of chugging like you were a freshman pledge.
2. Adds a nice malt backbone to the much loved Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA
3. Blending beers is fun!

(By the way, yeah, that's dust you see on the World Wide Stout bottle... It's been aged a year and a half.)

Ok so we promised a recipes as well. This is a DrinkCraftBeer exclusive developed by Devon. We don't leave Guinness out of our day, we just eat it!

Guinness Waffles with Bailey's Whipped Cream

2 cups flour
2 Tablespoons Sugar
1 tablespoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon unsweetened cocoa powder
1 cup room temperature Guinness (fresh, though, open the can right before you add, do not use Guinness from the bottle)
1 1/4 cups milk
2 eggs
6 tablespoons vegetable oil

Use in your favorite waffle iron and enjoy!

For whipped cream just use your favorite whipped cream recipe and whip in Bailey's Irish Cream to taste. Don't try using whipped cream from the can, it won't work.

Cheers!

Devon and Jeff

Sixpoint Craft Ales Brews �Hop Obama� Ale in Tribute to Inspiring Presidential Camapign Effort

BROOKLYN, NY, BREWERY RELEASES ONE-TIME ONLY CREATION IN NEW YORK AND MASSACHUSETTS TO QUENCH THIRSTY PALATES DURING FIVE-WEEK PRIMARY BREAK

BROOKLYN, N.Y. (MARCH 10, 2008) – Sixpoint Craft Ales today announced the release of the “Hop Obama” ale in both New York State and Massachusetts. Beginning next week, all supporters of the democratic process will be able to hoist a glass of this limited-edition beer that was brewed in tribute to the inspiration that has been Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. The beer will be available in finer bars and restaurants for a limited time throughout both states. It is expected that the beer will only last for the duration of the Democratic primary hiatus, which begins Wednesday, March 12 and extends through April 22.

In keeping with the Illinois senator’s unifying theme, the “Hop Obama” is an indefinable ale that doesn’t adhere to traditional style guidelines. The 5.2% ABV creation contains five different kinds of European crystal malt and three different kinds of Pacific Northwest Hops. Combined with a Scottish yeast strain for fermentation, the result is a highly drinkable beer with a big malt background and an “Obama” of hops that imparts floral and citrus notes with just a hint of spiciness.

“The Hop Obama is our unique Sixpoint creation brewed in honor of the inspirational surgency of Senator Barack Obama,” said Sixpoint brewmaster Shane Welch. “Although we do not intend this beer to be a direct Sixpoint endorsement of Obama, we believe the delicious and refreshing quality it represents reminds us of the Senator’s successful grassroots campaign that positively blossoms each and every day.”

All Sixpoint Craft Ales are unpasteurized and unfiltered and brewed in small, 15-barrel batches using predominantly domestic hops, European malts, a special house yeast, and 100% New York City tap water.

How to Home Brew Beer in Your Kitchen

The Ale Pail

Brewing beer in your home can be as simple, or as complicated, as you want to make it. Here, we’re going to present the simple way. There is a lot of science you can get into, but we’re going to skip a lot of that as there are a lot of people who can tell you about it a lot better than we can. And they have books out (John Palmer’s How to Brew, and Charlie Papazian’s The Complete Joy of Homebrewing). We’d recommend reading these books at some point. You’ll learn a lot about why everything happens, how brewing really works and just a lot more in-depth information. If you want to make this a serious hobby, those are two can’t miss books.

In this article, though, we’re going to run through step-by-step how to brew in a small kitchen setting. We know many of you live in apartments (we do), and we’ve heard too many people say they can’t brew because of this. You can! We know this, because we do it. We’ll show you how to go about brewing your first batch. Plus, we’re including pictures to really show you how it’s done. So, let’s get brewing!

Step 0: Yes there is a Step 0, before you brew you need to decide what you want to brew and how you're going to brew it. Are you going to brew "all-grain" or "extract?" All grain brewing is how your favorite craft breweries make their beer. This process starts with malted barley, and you actually convert the starches to sugar yourself. You get more control over the final product, as you control everything that goes into the beer, and the process of the mash. That being said, with extract somebody has basically done the mash for you, then dehydrated the resulting wort for ease of transport and use for you. Either way works just fine and will yield a great beer with the right recipe. We started out on extract. Once you get the process down you can move up to all-grain pretty cheaply. That being said, this article will show you how to do all-grain. If you are brewing extract, just shoot down to Step 7. From that point on, it's the same process. You just get to skip some steps.

Now, it's time to decide what type of beer you want to brew and a recipe. This is actually easier than most make it out to be. Just choose a style you like and go for it. We recommend using BeerTools.com to get your recipe. Also, you can get info on grains for your recipe here: http://www.beersmith.com/Grains/Grains/GrainList.htm. BeerTools.com offers a great resource for recipes and allows you to easily craft your own as well. Most basic recipes will, and should, use “2 row” or Pilsner malt as the base grain. You want to make sure you mill your grain before you brew. Your local homebrew shop should have a mill. If they don’t you may need to invest in a mill or order online where you can order pre-milled grain. Only mill what you need for this recipe, as the grain will last much longer un-milled. Do not mill the grain too much; you just want to break the hull and expose the starchy inside that will be turned into sugar. Also, the hull will later act as a filter, so if it’s crushed to much it will not perform this function well and you could get a stuck sparge (more on that later).

Special note: We realize that not everyone has access to a home brew shop. If this is the case for you, you can still brew. Milled and un-milled grain as well as malt extract is available online, we recommend Beer-Wine.com. You can buy your grain or malt extract, hops and yeast there. BeerTools.com allows you to construct recipes using extract as well. If you choose to follow the malt extract method skip to Step 7. Malt extract brewing is also a good way to start and get some of the fundamentals down. You can always move on to all-grain later for very little money. This is what we did.

What You’ll Need:

- 5 gallon pot
- Bottling bucket
- Fermentation bucket or glass carboy
- Phil’s False Bottom
- Tubing
- Stopper
- Clamp for the tubing

- Auto-siphon
- Hydrometer
- Glass beer bottles
- Caps for the bottles
- Capper
- Bottling wand
- Iodophor (for sanitizing)

THE MASH

The mash is the first step in making beer after your grain is all set. In malted grain, there is starch and enzymes that can convert this starch in sugar. These enzymes are active at the temperatures you will mash at. In this way, you get sugar from the grain, which is food for the yeast to later produce alcohol and carbon dioxide for your beer. The grain will also give your beer it’s flavor and color.

Boiling Water

Step 1: Turn on your burner and heat the water. You should heat 1 quart of water per pound of grain. You can either use your kitchen stove or a dedicated outdoor burner. Both will do the job, the outdoor burner just does it a bit faster.

Step 2: Heat water to 160 degrees. Once you reach this temperature, add your grain. This is called “mashing in.” The consistency should be that of thin oatmeal. If the mash it too thick, you will not have the enzymes moving around enough to convert the starch to sugar. If the mash is too thin, there will not a high enough concentration of the necessary enzymes to convert the starch into sugar. Once grain is added temperature will drop to around 150 degrees.

The Mash

Step 3: You will want to maintain the temperature of your mash between 144-158 degrees for 60 minutes for a regular beer (if you are doing a high gravity beer over 8% this step is 90 minutes). Stir every 10 minutes or so and take temperature readings from multiple locations. Stirring is key during the mash process. Stir constantly while applying heat, as the bottom will tend to get hotter than the top and might scorch the grain. You also need to make sure the enzymes spread around enough to turn all the starch into sugar. There is a lot of mass and water in your mash, though, so you don’t need to apply heat constantly. Get it up to temperature, and then put a lid on it to keep in heat.

The hotter you mash at the more body your beer will have. This is because, in the higher temperatures of this range, you are producing more unfermentable sugars. Don’t worry too much here, you really can’t screw your beer up too much at this point as long as you stay within this range, for most beers, Pale Ales, IPAs, regular stouts you want to be around 144-152. For a stout or any beer with more body, go up a bit. Do not keep your mash above 155 degrees for the entire time, as your beer will most likely end up overly sweet and very thick, with few sugars that yeast can turn into alcohol.

Step 4: Heat up the mash to 170 degrees Fahrenheit, while stirring constantly to prevent the grain from scorching. At 170 degrees, you end the process where the enzymes convert starch into sugar. This is called “mashing out.”

You have now completed your mash process and now it’s time to sparge.

THE SPARGE

During your mash process you introduced water to your milled grain. The heated water and the enzymes from the grain converted the starch in the grain into sugar. Now we need to remove those sugars. The sparge process helps remove sugar water (known as wort) from the grain/water mixture you have made. These sugars will later be converted to alcohol by the yeast.

Phil's False Bottom

Step 5: To begin the sparge process, convert your bottling bucket into a lauter tun. How to build a lauter tun:
                a) Insert Phil’s False Bottom attached to stopper and hose
                b) Fit stopper to hole in bottling bucket
                c) Clamp off hose

Step 6: First, you will add 170 degree water to your lauter tun, filling to at least 3 inches above the Phil’s False Bottom. This will help prevent a stuck sparge.

Water into the Lauter Tun

You now want to add the contents of your mash tun to the bucket. Be careful here as a) the contents will be quite hot and have a tendency to splash and b) if you pour it too hard, you will compact the grain, causing a stuck sparge… which is kind of bad and real obnoxious.

Once the full contents of your mash tun have been added you can begin the sparge process. We highly recommend you use a sparge arm at this stage. A sparge arm distributes water lightly and evenly over the grain you just added (preventing a stuck sparge)... We don’t have one, though, and we’ve done fine. You can now open the clamp on your hose slightly. You want a slow and even flow back into your brew pot (which you rinsed out after putting the contents into the lauter tun). Releasing too much liquid too fast will result in a stuck sparge, to put more simply, the water will leave too fast and the grain will go dry creating a stuck gooey mush (there it is, that’s what a stuck sparge is!).

Transfer to Lauter Tun

Collecting to Recirculate

Recirculating Wort

Collecting Wort

You will need to have extra hot water around, at 170 degrees, as you don’t have enough liquid in the mash to sparge (we usually have 2 gallons). Using a sparge arm you will slowly add this hot water (if you have no sparge arm, just pour in the water lightly and evenly). You don’t want the grain/liquid mix to get too cool here, or it will runoff slower and the risk of a stuck sparge will increase. The liquid you are extracting at this stage is called your “wort.” You want to recirculate your wort a few times to make sure you’ve extracted all the available sugars from your grain. Do this until the worst runs clear (without grain particles in it), then you can fill your brew pot with your wort.

THE BOIL

Ok it may seem like its taken a bit to get to this point, but we promise it’s easier than it sounds. Really anyone can do this... People have been doing this for thousands of years and they didn’t have anyone telling them what to do, so you’ll be fine. You now have a brew pot full of wort and it’s time to start brewing. Right now, the wort is just sugar water. You’re going to boil it to sanitize it and to boil off some chemicals that will lend your beer an off-taste. Also, you’ll add hops in this stage to balance the sweetness of the beer. IMPORTANT NOTE: Anything that touches the wort after the boil must be sanitized. Follow the directions on the Iodophor bottle for this. Anything you don’t sanitize that touches the wort may introduce an infection into your beer.

Starting the Boil

Step 7: It’s time to brew! (Special Note: If brewing with extract, bring water to boil, add extract while constantly stirring, and wait for hot break.) You want to heat your wort until it boils. Keep boiling until you hit your hot break. You will know you’ve hit your hot break as the wort will foam, you may need to reduce your heat slightly to avoid boil over, but after a few minutes the foaming will subside. Continue to stir occasionally throughout the boil. All you want is a light boil. You don’t need anything extreme. A too vigorous boil will do a few things. First, you’ll boil off more water and get less beer. Secondly, you can caramelize sugars in the wort and get a sweeter beer with less alcohol.

Hot Break

Step 8: Once you’ve passed the hot break you can now add your bittering hops. Start your timer here and your boil will last 1 hour. (90 minutes if it’s a high gravity beer over 8% abv). These are the hops that will make your beer bitter to counteract the sweetness which beer naturally has. They won’t really impart any flavor. Compounds in hops, when boiled, isomerize over time which turns them from volatile smelly oils into stable and bitter compounds.

Adding Hops

Step 9: At 45 minutes into the boil you will add your flavoring hops (75 minutes in for a high gravity beer). These isomerizes for much less time, so will add a hop flavor to your beer, it will be much like what the hops smell like.

Step 10: At 55-59 minutes into the boil you will add your finishing hops (aka aroma hops) (85-89 minutes for a high gravity beer). This addition will leave all the volatile oils in the beer. This will be the hop smell you get.

Cooling the Wort

Step 11: Once your boil is complete, you want to cool your wort as fast as possible. A tub or sink full of ice water will achieve this. Cool your wort to 65-75 degrees (your yeast packet/vial should have instructions for the ideal temperature for the strain you’re using).

Transferring Wort to Fermenter

Step 12: Once your wort is cool, transfer your wort to a carboy or fermentation bucket. Feel free to do this roughly, as you want to dissolve oxygen into the wort. During this step, pour a little into a tube and check your Original Gravity (OG) (water has a gravity of 1.000) with a hydrometer. The gravity is a measure of how much sugar is dissolved in the water of your wort.

Pitching the Yeast

FERMENTATION

If this is your first beer, the fermentation time may seem like forever. This is the most important step, though, so don’t rush it. The sugar you created in the mash is now being eaten by yeast, who are expelling alcohol and carbon dioxide. IMPORTANT NOTE: Sanitize everything your beer is going to touch. This includes tubing, bottling bucket, bottles, caps, siphon… everything.

Step 13: Add yeast to your wort, aerate vigorously and secure a blow-off tube into a bucket of sanitizer. You are now fermenting your beer. Congratulations! Leave your beer alone until you hit your Final Gravity (FG) (two weeks is usually a safe bet on beers under 8% abv). If you think you’re close, use a sanitized auto-siphon or beer thief to take a sample and check gravity.

BOTTLING

Now that the yeast have eaten the sugar in your wort… YOU HAVE BEER! Congratulations! Now, you’re almost there. It’s time to bottle. This step will carbonate your beer (nobody likes flat beer) and give you a way to transport it. You can also keg, but we’ve never done that. There are some books that will tell you how to do that.

Sanitizing Bottles

Step 14: For 5 gallons of beer, dissolve 2/3 of a cup of white sugar in just enough water to leave no sugar grains, and boil for 10 minutes. Add this solution to your bottling bucket. In primary fermentation, the yeast converted all the fermentable sugar into alcohol and carbon dioxide. This carbon dioxide just escaped into the air, though. Adding this little bit of sugar will give the yeast some more food, which will provide them with the fuel to produce more carbon dioxide. Because you will cap your bottles of beer so that air can’t get out, this carbon dioxide will carbonate the beer. This is known as bottle conditioning, which means the beer was naturally carbonated in the bottle. Also, this means your beer is a living thing, as the yeast will continually work to condition the beer, cleaning up certain fermentation by-products.

Step 15: Once the sugar is added, use an auto-siphon to siphon your beer into your bottling bucket. Do this gently so you don’t oxidize your beer. Once all your beer is in the bucket and the sugar is evenly dispersed about your beer you can begin bottling. Insert the bottling wand into each bottle and fill. You’ll want about an inch of space left after you pull the wand out. Do a few and you’ll get the hang of it. Cap each beer as you fill them using the capper that came with your brew kit.

Siphoning to Bottling Bucket

Filling Bottles

Capping

Step 16: Wait 1-2 weeks or so and open a beer. Do you hear a hiss? Pour it. Does it foam? If you answer “yes” to both these questions, congratulations, you’ve now just made homebrewed beer! Drink and enjoy! Post your success stories on our forum or email us to let us know. Cheers!

Still have some questions? Click here to go to our official home brew help post in the forum and ask!

Drink Craft Beer, Eat Craft Chocolate, - A Chocolate and Beer Pairing with Taza Chocolate Company

Drink Craft Beer, Eat Craft Chocolate

A few months ago, Jeff happened to stop by the Wine Gallery in Brookline when there was a tasting of Taza Chocolate paired with wine. He got to talking with the representative from Taza who was there, and loved the story of the company: they're traditional, organic, fair trade and work directly with small co-ops in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic. After he tried the chocolate/wine pairings, one thought struck him... This chocolate would go amazingly with beer! It's less sweet, has fruity notes and is more raw. Wine isn't the best pairing, beer is! This, in turn, is what brought us to Somerville to speak with Alex Whitmore, the head chocolate maker at Taza Chocolates.

We found out about how Taza Chocolate is made. Quite an amazing process, they have control of the process from bean to chocolate. The process is pretty interesting (especially when chocolate is in the air all around you). Surprisingly, it's very close to brewing as well! Winnowing and milling are similar. Then it's ground and put into a kettle. It's processed in the kettle for a while. There's piping moving the chocolate. Temperatures are important. This tour really showed us how making good artisan food and drink are quite similar in the care devotion you have to put into it. Check out the full "how it's made" feature on the right. After the tour, we sat down with Alex to really find out more about Taza, what drove him to start the company and, most importantly, taste some beer!

DCB: How did you decide this is how you wanted to make your chocolate?

Alex: Basically the idea behind the company is to make a kind of chocolate that isn’t made in this part of the world. In Mexico there’s a tradition of drinking chocolate they way we drink coffee. Down there’s there are places with mills all over the place and you can bring in ingredients and they can grind for you and give you the cocoa so you can go home and make your chocolate drink. And every family will have their own recipe. Sometimes people will add cinnamon or almonds if they are wealthy. I saw this and it blew me away. That’s one of the reasons why I started this company and I wanted to incorporate these mills into the company. They do very minimally refine the chocolate, it’s not a very highly refined European style; even in the bars which we refine using the granite stone roller mills, which we can dial in so they are really close and really tight. The chocolate cycles through the rollers for about five hours to refine the particle size of the sugar to where we want. It passing through the air kind of helps release some intense acids that are remnants of the fermentation process. I didn’t talk much about the stuff that goes on at the farm, but the fermentation of the bean on the farm is very important. We like those acids, they’re precursors to the final flavor but we want to release some of the less desirable ones. Very similar to conching, which we don’t do, it’s a traditional part of the European way that we don’t do (Conching is a process where the chocolate is put through a container containing metal beads which break down the sugar particles from anywhere between 4 and 72 hours). The whole point is to minimally refine the bean, we lightly roast and keep a lot of the natural tropical flavors of the bean.

Anyways…I want to drink some beer.

DCB: Alright let's do it. So what we did is took some beers that we thought would go well... but you know chocolate.

Alex: I hate it when people pair port with chocolate and the flavor is sweet and the chocolate is sweet and it’s too much sweet.

DCB: That’s what’s fun about beer, there’s so many flavors so we’ve got a little bit of sweet, some roasty flavors all sorts.

Alex: This is fun, I’m into this! I love food in general.

So our tasting commenced! We ran through a number of beers some great some not so great. What we have to share with you now is the results of our tasting with Alex. We have what we believe are some fantastic beer and chocolate pairings where we felt the chocolate and beer truly worked together to bring out new flavors in both.

Before we go on to the tasting notes, let us say an article like this is great to read about, but we wanted to do something special this time. For those in the Boston area, we’ll be hosting a tasting of all the beers mentioned in this article at The Wine Gallery in Brookline, MA (on Route 9, right near the Brookline Hills T Stop of the D branch of the Green Line). We’ll be pouring samples of each beer along with samples of each of the chocolates on Thursday February 7^thfrom 5-7pm (a week before Valentine's Day). For those that can’t make it down check out Taza’s website at http://www.tazachocolate.com/shop.php and order a bar or two to try yourself.

Without further ado…the beer…and chocolate.

Taza makes four types of chocolate, three of which are the same recipe with varying percentages of cacao: a 60%, 70% and 80% cacao bar. The other is their Mexicano, which is a Mexican style drinking chocolate made with cinnamon. Because the chilled beer can mess up the texture of the chocolate if you're not careful, there's a certain way you'll want to try these pairings. Make sure you let the chocolate melt in your mouth before you drink the beer. Otherwise the temperature will cause it get a little chalky and you'll miss the great flavors than can come out. Also, letting the chocolate warm up is similar to beer, this is when all the volatiles come out. This will allow you to taste the berry, almond and other flavors that are left in because of the process that Taza employs to make their artisan chocolate.

Hoppin' Frog B.O.R.I.S. the Crusher Imperial Stout with Taza 60% Cacao Chocolate
We set out thinking this would be the perfect pairing with the 70% chocolate, but this is where having Alex from Taza around really helped. The 60% proved a much better pairing with this beer. The beer is deep, viscous and rich with heavy roasty flavors and dark malt tones. Pair this with some of the sweeter 60% Taza bar and, after a sip, the roastiness transitions into a brilliant smooth chocolate mocha. The finish of this beer becomes a roller coaster of rich flavors finishing with the smooth sweetness of the Taza 60% Chocolate

BBC Coffeehouse Porter with Taza 70% Cacao Chocolate
BBC Coffeehouse Porter has always been a favorite of ours and the 70% chocolate proved to be one of our favorites from Taza. Pairing the two just seemed to make sense. The BBC Coffeehouse Porter offers a smooth fairly light mouth-feel with light mocha notes and a roasty coffee finish that’s a result of cold pressed Dean’s Bean’s coffee being added to the beer. Alex found this to be one of his favorite beers of the tasting. The combination of these two essentially enhances the flavors in each. The 70% chocolate is a bit less sweet than the 60% and has some deeper roasty flavors. Combining this beer and chocolate gives you a rich mocha porter flavor that each product by itself just doesn’t deliver. We can’t see anyone not liking this pairing.

Verhaeghe Echt KriekenBier with Taza 80% Cacao Chocolate
This is Taza’s darkest chocolate and it’s quite different from anything we’ve ever had. The chocolate itself has a slight sourness, complex roasty tones, slight berry and almont notes with a very unique light sweetness. We knew we had to find a beer that not only stood up to the chocolate but played off these flavors to give you something exciting. Echt Kriekenbier proved to do just that. A traditional Flemish sour ale fermented with cherries, it has vanilla and brandy tones along with the sour cherry taste. Local sour cherries are added to this beer while it’s aging and the final beer in the bottle is a mix of various aged version of the beer. The combination of Taza 80% and Echt Kriekenbier is a sublime chocolate covered cherry sensation. We’re openly not huge fans of fruit beer but we were careful to choose a beer that wasn’t just any fruit beer. This beer is fantastically complex and when paired with the chocolate turns into a decadent dessert. The KriekenBier definitely serves to mellow some of the harsher flavors in the 80%, while the chocolate is a fine counterpoint to the sourness of the beer. Pairing these two provides a definitely different experience than either one alone.

Stone Smoked Porter with Taza Chocolate Mexicano
The Chocolate Mexicano was our other favorite from Taza. Made only with Mexican stone mills (molinos), this chocolate is very simple and is made with roasted cocoa beans, cane sugar, and cinnamon stick. The cinnamon used is incredible as we got to sample some at the factory. This was Alex’s favorite pairing, and ours as well.

The Chocolate Mexicano can be whipped into milk or water to create Taza de Chocolate Mexicano (try this, it’s amazing), or eaten as is. This chocolate has a very different texture than any other you’ve most likely tried. It’s processed less so the sugar is a bit grittier and it melts in your mouth differently than most other chocolates. It's also the sweetest of the Taza portfolio. The subtle cinnamon notes provide a smooth spice that begged to be brought out by a good beer. We had a hunch the mild smoke flavor found in Stone’s Smoked Porter would accomplish that, and we were right.

The Stone Smoked Porter has just a hint of smoke which is why this beer works. Many smoked beers suffer from an overwhelming smoke aroma or taste, but here’s it’s part of a broader flavor profile. The pairing with the chocolate brings out the spiciness of the cinnamon while the roasted malt in the porter helps to balance the sweetness of the chocolate. The end result is a smooth rich experience unlike any other pairing we’ve done.

Good food and good beer belong together and we hope this article has helped you think a little bit differently about what both chocolate and beer can be and how they can work together. We had a blast putting this together for you all and we hope those of you nearby can come taste each pairing for yourself. We want to give special thanks to Alex Whitmore from Taza Chocolate and The Wine Gallery in Brookline, MA. For those who can't attend, everything in this article can be purchased at Wine Gallery in Brookline or Kenmore Square (Wine-Gallery.com ), and the chocolate can be purchased online from Taza's website (http://www.tazachocolate.com/shop.php). Until next time!

Cheers,

Devon and Jeff

Taza - How It's Made

First, it starts in places like Costa Rica or the Dominican Republic where Alex and his partner buy the cocoa beans straight from small farmer co-ops at above fair trade prices. This allows them to maintain a distinct flavor profile, as the regional terroir of the beans is maintained. The beans are lightly roasted to preserve flavor. Cocoa beans, after all, are a tropical fruit, and they have a flavor indicative of that before roasting. Taza's beans are actually roasted right in Jamaica Plain, MA using J.P. Lick's coffee roaster (the roast their own coffee, so Taza uses the machine when coffee isn't being roasted).

From here, the beans are put through a winnowing machine. This separates the chaff (the shell of the bean) from the nib. The chaff is a by-product that is either sold to tea companies or given away as mulch to community groups (we made some tea with the chaff, and it's amazing! Nice cocoa aroma and a good earthy flavor). The nib is collected and then put through Molinos, which are the Mexican stone mills that Taza uses. They reconditioned the mills, shipped them up to Somerville from Mexico and rebuilt them. The nibs are dumped into the Molinos and, if you’re using any vanilla or any cinnamon in the recipe, you grind it right through the mill. It gets completely pulverized with the nib. The way it works is there’s two stones with one that rotates. The product gets run between the two and it’s like a thousand scissors shearing the particle size down and then it shoots out the edge of the stone. It’s flowing liquid at that point. Most people think it’s going to be powdery but it’s not. Just like if you imagine grinding peanuts into peanut butter it’s the same thing. It’s a very oily seed, the cocoa bean. The grinding releases all the oils and shatter the cellular structure. This cocoa liquor (it’s what the industry calls ground up winnowed cocoa beans) is collected into buckets and dumped it into the chocolate tank. In their 300 lb chocolate tank they mix in the sugar. Of course, they use only organic cane sugar which is has a golden color with a natural flavor. All of their ingredients are organic. Once the sugar is mixed in, you start calling it chocolate. The sugar is then refined within the liquor as it passes through rollers. This finished chocolate is then tempered, put into molds, chilled and wrapped by hand. They make 600 lbs of chocolate this way, not including the Mexicano, which is ground using a different process.

Alex goes on to tell us about the next steps:

"Once the particle size is down to the level where we want it to be it’s done. We then add any additional cocoa butter. We don’t use very much here, just a little to reduce the viscosity a little bit to make it more normal to people’s mouth feel.

We then pump our chocolate and pump it into the tempering tank. You ever open a chocolate bar and see a white sheen on top? That means the chocolate is not in temper and the cocoa butter has separated. It's still fine to eat but the texture might be a little off and it’s not that pretty. This machine takes the chocolate and promotes it’s crystallization and solidification. If you were to just melt chocolate and let it cool at room temperature it would be bendy, it wouldn’t have a good snap and it wouldn’t have a pretty glossy finish on it. That’s because chocolate is polymorphous, one of the many issues with working with chocolate. [The tempering machine] takes the chocolate to about 150 degrees then down to about 85 then back up to about 90-95 degrees.

The chocolate is done at this point, poured into molds and cooled to be hand wrapped by our wrapping team."

Taza offers four different chocolates:

Three Floyds - Interview With Nick Floyd

Everyone knows Three Floyds brewing for brewing big hoppy beers like Dreadnaught or huge stouts like Dark Lord, but we found out there's a lot more to Three Floyds. We sat down with Nick Floyd to discuss some of their new ideas, including some bourbon aging, krieks, berliner weisse and a whole lot of more surprises. These guys got their notoriety in the rest of the country for brewing some big beers, but that's just the beginning of what they are capable of. Read on for the full interview with Nick Floyd.

DCB: How did you get started in brewing and what led you to start Three Floyds?
Nick: I started home brewing when I was 18. I originally hated beer because all anyone drank in high school was warm Old Style or warm Budweiser. I’m like, “why are they drinking this shit?” Then I tried some good beer, then around 18-19 started home brewing stuff. I decided when I was 21 to go to brewing school and do it professionally. Then I brewed pro at a couple places, The Florida brewery, Falstaff, and Malta which is a horrible unfermented porter. But some people like it for breakfast so that’s cool. Then I worked for the wine cellar, which is like a German style brewpub out in the west suburbs of Chicago.Then in ’96 we opened Three Floyds, with the help of my brother and dad.

We opened in Hammond, which is north of here. We opened in Hammond because, and everyone asked, “Why’d you open in Indiana, and not Chicago?” In Hammond we had 5,000 sq ft., rent was $500. That’s why we opened in Hammond. If we opened the same size brewery in Cook County, IL, rent would have been $5,000. And we started with very little money! You can see our original brew house, it was just a small 5 barrel kind of ghetto system.

DCB: It must feel kind of good to move from little finance and a little place to here.
Nick: Yeah, and we’ve done it without really any debt, so that’s good! Some people are like, “Well why aren’t you at 20k barrels, like so and so…” Well, because we don’t want giant loans or giant debt load or have partners whose philosophy we clash with.

DCB: So you guys have been open about 11 years now. Certainly a lot has happened in that time, you guys have gotten a lot of acclaim in the beer industry. You’ve gotten some awards. Has there been a difference… is there a pressure now that people have an expectation about what comes out of Three Floyds, when you guys are developing new recipes.
Nick: Yeah, if we don’t make gigantic… I hate to call it “extreme” beers, but that’s what they’re calling them… Like we just made a Helles and people just shrugged their shoulders. But, a terribly good, clean german helles, people are like “eh, boring.” But, if anyone else made it, some other brewery or brewpub, then you know people would love it. Yeah, I guess there is some pressure to always make bigger more alcoholic more hoppy stuff. But we make the whole gamut now.

DCB: Yeah, it seems like things are already starting to diversify. Are you guys trying to make sure that you keep a wide variety of beers open to the public despite that pressure to create extreme beers.
Nick: Yeah, at our pub especially, there’s the very strange stuff and stuff we only make in a 6bbl tank to serve here. But every month now we come out with a new 22 oz seasonal which we’ve never done before. But we’re making more and more beer, 20% growth every year, but shrinking our reach to just Indiana and Illinois. We can’t even keep up with Chicago.

DCB: Yeah, you used to distribute out to Rhode Island, and we used to drive down there to try and get stuff from you guys.
Nick: If you can only deal with 3 distributors, instead of 15, that’s way less headaches and the beer doesn’t have to travel as far and be fresher. When we’re bigger, we’ll be back in those markets.

DCB: Do you have any plans for increased distribution? Or are you working on saturating the current markets right now.
Nick: Our immediate goal is 10k barrels. After that, if we go to 15k, then we can possibly rethink about that. But there are 8 million people in this area so I think that’ll keep us busy for the next couple years at least.

DCB: We also happened to notice that Chicago seems to be a pretty good beer city… With all the quality breweries right in the area and it’s all getting drank.
Nick: Yeah it is, but the distribution laws are terrible. Bell’s pulled out for that reason, New Glarus isn’t here for that reason. And a lot of national brands don’t want to get a bloody nose in Chicago because of the distribution laws. Which are a result of Al Capone and what Chicago is infamous for back in the early part of the 20th century.

DCB: It definitely sounds unfortunate. The more breweries you talk to out here, they all sort of subtly mention the distribution and the franchise laws that exist.
Nick: Well the distributor in Illinois owns you.

DCB: They own your brand and can sell you however they please.
Nick: And if you want to leave them, you have to, in some cases, pay them 3 years of profits of what they would have made. So to buy out a big brand is millions of dollars. If you want to switch distributors, most people can’t or can’t afford it.

DCB: That’d be a good way to get into debt right there. So, speaking of you say you introduce a new 22oz every month, what do you use as inspiration when creating a new beer. Do you test it first, or do you have a good idea of what it is and it gets brewed.
Nick: Both, now that we have a pub we can totally test things in out own weird way. Basically, we’ve always just made stuff that we want to drink. We’re small enough that it all sells. If we made 5,000 barrels of something that wasn’t popular, then that might be a problem. I guess, regardless, we make stuff we want to drink, regardless of what the public wants.

DCB: It seems to have worked so far.
Nick: Like Alpha Kong, I don’t know how that will sell, but I’m sure we’ll sell it all!

DCB: Everyone’s kind of looking out for the new Three Floyd’s beer. It always gets buzz when it comes out. They all seem to be well received too.
Nick: Well, you try your best and make it as clean as possible, with the best ingredients and we try to do the best we can

DCB: Switching gears a little bit, there’s been a decent buzz around Coors coming out with their new craft beer division. Do you have any thoughts on how that will affect the whole industry and how you feel about that?
Nick: I guess they’re already kind of deceiving people with Blue Moon and I guess they’re going to continue on with that. For us, it turns more people onto trying new beers. So I guess it’s not a bad thing. Will our $8 or $9 six-packs be competing with that? I don’t think so. People will always be looking for genuine hand crafted micro. So, overall, I guess it’s a good thing. The big breweries have been slipping in percentages, so I mean they’re just turning to what’s working.

DCB: It’s really a testament to you guys. It was ignored by the macros for so long, now when they start to enter the game it acknowledges a legitimacy that there’s something real there and it’s not a fad.
Nick: Well, we’ve grown consistently and, micro nationally is 5%... that came out of their percentages, so…

DCB: Along those lines, we thought it was kind of interesting when the CEO of SAB Miller came out and said craft beer is a fad and going away, yet their two biggest competitors are venturing in to make fake craft