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.

 

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 (online), 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 HomeBrewing.org. You can buy your grain or malt extract, hops, yeast or pre-built recipes 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 Get everything you need in Homebrewing.org's Basic Homebrewing Kit (make sure to add-on the 5 gallon brew pot, long stem thermometer and auto-siphon).

- 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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

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!).

 

 

 

 

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. R ight 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.

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

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).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.

 

 

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 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 7th from 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:

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 beer.
Nick: Miller tried in the 90’s with Amber Reserve. It wasn’t half bad. But I don’t know for their CEO to say that is kind of … stupid. You go to any big city and see a new pack of micros. Or to any part of the western United States, it’s everywhere. 

DCB: So, going along, obviously you have a lot of small releases at the brewpub. Do you have any big upcoming releases that will go to production soon?
Nick: Well this summer we just started doing Gumbalhead in 6-packs. That’s kind of our biggest release in years. Other than that just the seasonals and, of course, we’re now known for Dark Lord Day, that’s our other big release. That’ll be in April 2008. 

DCB: This is kind of a weird question, but it seems that you guys get pigeon-holed a lot, especially with the Dark Lord… if anyone knows one beer it’s Dark Lord. Everyone kind of comes out here for that. But you always notice there are a few beer geeks who are like “it was better last year… no it was better the year before.”
Nick: Yeah, they’ll always do that. As long as you annually date it with different color wax… people always say stuff like that. All those British barley wines: “’85 is better than ’88… ’89 is better than all of them.” There’s always going to be that. And that’s a good thing. Some years will be prized over others. I mean, it’s bound to happen. 

DCB: We always notice that people say, “Last year’s was better, they’re ramping up and selling out…” There’s always that guy.
Nick: If we turned the whole brewery into a Dark Lord factory, maybe they could say that… but we only made 90 barrels of it. And it was heavier than ever this year, so you can’t say that no matter what. 

[laughter] 

DCB: One of the interesting things is the way you package your beer too. The wax dipping, the art work is certainly unique. Is that something you wanted to do right from the beginning to have a powerful image along with the beer?
Nick: Well, yeah. When we started, everyone had a tree or a mountain or was named after a town, so we used characters. Then, on top of that, buying the best ingredients and making the best beer possible, trying to make the best graphics that we could. The brewery’s motto is, “It’s Not Normal,” so make the graphics and art totally not normal, and use the best graphics we could find. Randy Mosher, he’s a famous home brewer and he’s written a couple of books, he does our graphics, he’s done a really good job. 

DCB: When you do the wax dipping, does that present challenges as you try to scale up your production?
Nick: Yeah, that sucks! At Knob Creek, you can tell which lady dipped it by which way the wax drips. We actually got a better wax machine, so it’s 2 or 3 days of hand dipping. It makes the beer stand out, though… and it dates it… and it looks cool. 

DCB: One of the things that’s interesting is this term: “extreme” beer. Right now there’s this interesting thing happening in craft beer as a whole where some people are starting to turn away from that term… or trying to.
Nick: Well, extreme you think of guys with barbed wire tattoos. I guess it’s a bad moniker. But, I guess, some of them are extreme in a way. But that’s what micro brews do. Not many are making corn or rice adjunct lagers. 

DCB: Going back to the brewing, what’s inspiring you out there? When you’re looking for something knew, where are you looking to right now?
Nick: Everywhere you go… you go to brewpubs or beer bars and it could be any brewpub anywhere that’s made a one-off weird sour this or wine-barreled this. There’s no one source. It’s all diverse. It comes from I guess everywhere. For me at least. It’s not just Trappist breweries… it now comes from everywhere. And now Europe has some amazing micros, so that’s good. They’re making some inspiring stuff now. 

DCB: Just looking around and seeing those barrels… [pointing at barrels nearby] we’ve seen a lot of people doing the sour thing lately… experimenting with it…
Nick: That’s the newest thing. Those are all just straight up bourbon, though. We will be doing some sour stuff. A real Berliner Weisse… some krieks… and framboise I think. 

DCB: Wow! That’s quite an interesting departure from everything else.
Nick: Well it’s the one place we haven’t really ventured into. It’ll be cool. We’ll make some weird fruit flavored ones. It’ll only be available here. I don’t know if we’ll ever bottle them. We’d have to napalm the whole bottling line. 

DCB: Everyone keeps talking about bringing sour barrels in. And they’re skeptical about bringing it into their brewery.
Nick: It should almost be another brewery if you’re going to do it. We’ll just keep those fermenters on the other side of the building. You don’t want to contaminate the whole facility just because you’re trying one new thing. 

DCB: Well, 10,000 barrels is definitely exciting… especially with very little debt and without big investors. And we’re sure people will be psyched to hear about the sour beers you guys will experiment with. Good luck in the future and thanks for hanging out with us for a bit!

Ever since our first sip of Inkwell Stout, we here at DrinkCraftBeer.com have been big fans of Matthew Steinberg's work. When we heard that he was leaving Offshore Ale Company and their brewpub on Martha's Vineyard to start a new craft brewery in Plymouth, MA, we were psyched. No longer would we have to travel via ferry to drink his beer (Offshore was a brewpub that only had 2 bottled offerings. To get his specialty beers, you had to take a ferry for almost an hour to get to the island of Martha's Vineyard off of Cape Cod). On top of the geographic change, Mayflower Brewing Company is the first new production brewery to open in Massachusetts for a while now, so we wanted to make sure we were there to see the beginning. When news first broke, we called Matt and said we wanted to be there as soon as possible to document the opening and sit down to talk with him. Well, they finally laid the last drain, got the brewhouse set up and fired up their brand new kettle on January 4th. On the 16th, DrinkCraftBeer.com was at Mayflower to check out their beautiful new brewery and talk to Matt Steinberg about his newest project. Oh, we got to try a small sample of Pale Ale as well. Let's just say we're psyched for this new brewery! Now, on to the beer talk. 

DCB: So how did Mayflower come about?
Matt: Drew (Owner) is a descendant of the Mayflower. His family member was John Alden who was the cooper (barrelmaker) on the Mayflower. He was hired to be on the Mayflower so he could make barrels to bring back because they needed to leave some barrels that had beer behind. When the boat came back there were cooperage laws that when you leave with cooperage you had to bring the cooperage back with you. You had to build the cooperage on the boat. So that's part of that story. 

DCB: Haha, so even back then losing kegs was a big problem, I guess!
Matt: So that was part of the labels, using the barrels for the pale ale as the flagship, not that it's barrel aged beer but I don't think most people will expect it to be barrel aged. Then the farmhouse picture for the mellow golden ale and the hops for the IPA. But the porter we decided to go with the three threads story, which is strong ale, dark beer, and lager blended together to make a more drinkable beer for the porters and whoever else were working. So we were thinking, what can the icon look like? Drew found this rope image with three ropes for a boat and I was like, "That is awesome!" So we had our graphic designer draw our own version of that. The color is really cool; you can see on the six packs it sort of has a wood grain. The porter has this charcoal black gray look. I'm real happy with it. Looking at all these images on the computer was very difficult looking at it on the monitor. But then when they six packs came in I was like, "Yeah this is sweet."

DCB: Is brewing in the English style different for you?
Matt: I love the classic part of it. Being at Offshore with the two flagship beers it was one thing. A lot of people really don't understand, but I do love the classic styles. I kind of got over the need to brew a different beer every batch. I loved that for 4 1/2 years but, finally, I was like it's time to buckle down and brew some beer. We brewed the draft beer for the last year I was there and it was really a challenge on that system to brew consistently.

DCB: While you were at Offshore you could really do whatever you wanted to brew, can we still expect some special brews from you here?
Matt: Yeah, we're definitely going to do some. I did design all these beers, so I take any credit or criticism in that sense on these beers. Ryan and I are going to do our best to brew a couple of seasonals that come out every year. We're thinking about doing a Thanksgiving ale which I think makes perfect sense. The one problem I see with that is the release date. All the Oktoberfests are already on the shelf and, as those are coming off, winter beers are going in. Our Thanksgiving beer would be going in say October first and go until New Years. But does it seem like it's old on New Years if you're drinking Thanksgiving ale? So we need to figure that out. We don't want to brew an Oktoberfest because we're an English style brewery. The Thanksgiving ale is probably going to be something like and old ale. We briefly talked about doing a barley wine. I don't love barley wines for personal consumption; they are certainly a fun beer to make because you see how crazy people go. I love Cambridge Brewing company's spring [barley wine] Arquebus that Will [Meyers, CBC head brewer] makes. It's a spring barley wine and it's dry and strong. I don't know how Will makes it so dry but man it's amazing. So that is certainly an option for a spring beer. We've talked about doing some type of wheat beer for the summer. I'll be itching to do some kind of imperial stout. I've got a whole new idea for an imperial that I'll just have to be careful not to call Inkwell (Matt's IRS from Offshore) out of habit.

As proud as I was of that beer [Inkwell] every time I brewed it, it was never the same and it was improvisational stout in title. I am excited to do some new stuff. The IPA here is nothing like any of the IPAs I brewed before... it's 70 IBUS and 6.8-7.2% and it's going to be big and bitter, high aroma, dry hopped. But it will be drinking beer...for freaks. [laughs]

DCB: Will you be doing some cask ales?
Matt: Yeah we will be, I own two firkins personally.
Ryan: [laughs] Yeah probably tomorrow we'll have one filled.
Matt: Shoot yeah we could probably do it tomorrow. We don't have an engine yet, but the idea was to have an engine here (indicating a spot on the tasting room bar top). But this [tasting room] wasn't designed to be a bar here, but we'd need to get a breather and make sure we open it on a day we can get 20 people here, but that shouldn't be a problem.

DCB: [Speaking of places with casks,] if you can get into Deep Ellum that'd be great...since we can walk there.
Matt: Yeah we'll definitely be in there. Aaron does a great job there. Sunset already placed an order as well.

DCB: Were you guys worried about entering the Massachusetts market since there's so much beer here?
Matt: I have to say I don't necessarily think that the saturation is true. One of the issues with the market here in Massachusetts is that the distributors bring in so many beers so it is saturated but it's not saturated by breweries that are local. It's very easy to say, "I drink the local beer;" if you live in Boston it's Harpoon, if you live out west it's Berkshire, but there's nothing down here. And Drew, when he was planning this brewery he had several ideas. He had this dog oriented idea, but that's kind of been played out a little bit. And the Mayflower idea, but he would only do that if it was built in Plymouth. He had to build a facility where it belongs. He had a really hard time finding a location until he found this place which is a great location for a brewery. We're not going to get any walk by traffic. It's not super easy to find, but it's not that hard.

We already have so many locals, the construction guys already want beer, the electricians want beer and it's unbelievable how much business Colony Place is doing. So yes the market is saturated with great beer, but there's room for more. The Publick House has great Belgians and tons of stuff from California, but they have no beer from MA on tap beside a couple specialties and some one offs.

DCB: How big are you guys looking to do production wise?
Matt: Right now we plan on doing 1000 barrels. We have the hops to do up to 1200 this year.

DCB: Where are you looking to distribute?
We're looking to be a small regional brewery in the 10-15K barrel range eventually.

DCB: Will you be doing any bombers?
Matt: We'll be doing 6 packs for now but our bottling machine can be easily adjusted so we'll probably do some special releases in bombers. The IPA will be draft only at least to start, so that may be something that goes into a bomber at some point. We found this really interesting package for bombers that's a 4-pack that you can either do stickers or print on. That would probably be more like a mix pack of bombers, so I love that idea.

We've talked about doing 12 packs, like a mix pack, Christmas time mix packs do really well. 

DCB: So the big questions: When does it hit stores and when can people taste it?
Matt: Well Ryan and I have been tasting it but we're lucky. Draft beer will probably be released late next week or early the following week (January 24/25 or the following week). The accounts that will see it first will be: British Beer Company, Stone Forge Tavern, T-Bones in Plymouth, The Colonial, Sam Diegos and a few others. Cambridge Commons pre-orderd, Union Brewhouse has pre-ordered a few kegs.

Bottles will be some time mid to late February. But I do foresee bottles coming out pretty quick. The tasting room will be open when we say it's open [laughs].

DCB Note: For anyone worried that Matt's beers won't offer up the same quality as his past work, let's just say you have little to worry about. While he may be brewing in the English style, our sample of the Pale Ale was distinctly American in flavor. Not to say there's anything wrong with English beers, but our sample of the pale had nice malt tones with a great up front hop flavor followed by a distinct bitterness. We're excited to try the whole line-up and you'll soon find us scouting out South Shore bars to try them all on tap.