Podcast Brew Day

Brewing the first iteration of this beer with
Grant Wood of Revolver Brewing

This weekend I was very fortunate to have Atypical DFW Podcast's Jason & Caitlin Tyree on staff at New Main as assistant brewers. The weather was pleasant, the house was clean, and the fermentation chamber empty, so I decided to brew my very own batch of Grant Wood's Black IPA. Judging from conversations with Grant, this will be a nice, clean, hop forward beer that looks as great as it tastes.

Unfortunately, Amanda could not brew with me Saturday morning since she was working. I did however wake up before the crack of dawn to send her on her way which forced me to get ready for brew day. After dusting off my full complement of brewing equipment, I kicked the tires and lit the fires.


Not Out of the Woods Yet Black IPA
Substantial Recipe Credit: Grant Wood
5 gal

Malt:
8.5lb Pilsner
1.8lb Munich 10L
0.5 lb Black

Added 1 tsp gypsum & Campden tablet to strike water
Mash at 154F for 90 minutes

Hops:
0.25oz Apollo FWH
1.5oz Saphir 90 min
.13oz Palisade 60 min
1.5oz Saphir 60 min
0.13oz Palisade 45 min
0.5oz Mandarina Bavaria 45 min
.75oz Palisade 5 min
1oz Mandarina Bavaria 5 min

1 tsp Irish Moss @ 15min

Yeast:
White Labs Dry English 007
Ferment @ 64F to 80-90% FG, then ramp up to 70 to finish. Cold crash to 34F & keg.

I went with 007 mainly because I had a Pure Pitch pouch left over from another beer I never got around to brewing. From my experience with mainly stouts, porters, and English ales, 007 finishes pleasantly dry but with a pronounced malt backbone. Yes, I know this is an IPA and the hops should shine through, but I think the maltiness will compliment the citrus and floral notes well. Kind of the bass below the treble.

Each hop charge weighed & measured

I haven't had the chance to brew with any of these hop varieties before, so I'm not quite sure what the finished product will taste like. The Mandarina Bavaria hops are relatively new, being developed in Germany only a few years ago. As the name suggests, these hops impart a sweet citrus flavor akin to tangerines. Saphir is a very mild hop with similar citrus notes and a slight spicy character, making it popular in Belgian ales.

Apollo is a high-alpha variety, meaning it's best suited for imparting bitterness using minimal amounts of hop material. If we had used any towards the end of the boil, it would lend similar citrus character, but with a decidedly more resinous twang. Lastly, Palisade is a variety that has moderate bittering with a fruity-floral quality that I think will pair well with all of the citrus in this beer.

Almost hypnotizing...

The malt bill is deceptively simple with nearly all of the fermentables coming from good ol' fashioned, clean Pilsner malt. A dash of light Munich adds a little toast and grain flavor to liven up the Pilsner. Lastly, we throw in just enough black malt to give this style its signature "black" without making it roasty or burnt-tasting. Contrary to popular belief, black IPAs should not be hoppy porters or stouts. They are first and foremost IPAs, meant to showcase clean or complex hop flavor and aroma. While I love a good roasty porter that wallops you with piney resin, that's just not what this particular style should do. If you want to go that route, substitute the black malt for roast barley and maybe some chocolate malt for classic porter flavor underneath the punch of hops.

I think this will be an interesting beer, and I'm anxious to log tasting notes on this hop profile. When Grant and I brewed the original version of this beer at Dr. Jeckyll's Beer Lab last month, he brought large Ziploc bags of each of these hops except Palisade for people to smell and compare. When the brew was done, he kindly gifted these bags of hops to me, which was no small gift. Aside from relative rarity of some of these hops, they are one of the most expensive ingredients in beer. I was given about a pound of each! Here's to many more brews with these exciting hops!

As usual, I will keep y'all posted on the progress of this beer. I have a couple more brews planned to harness the sweet citrus qualities of these hops, so stay tuned to discover which lucky batches will be blessed with these fine flowers.

Finally, I want to add a new segment to each blog post to keep everyone apprised of what we have available for consumption. This will help me keep stock of what's fresh, what needs to be replaced soon, and which styles I should explore next. I'll also try to have the recipe for each beer available for any of you playing along at home.

Without further ado, here's what's on tap at New Main:

What's On Tap:

Steel Main - British Dark Mild, 3%ABV (Collaboration w/ Kyle of Steel Rain Beer)
Bernoulli Brown - British Brown Ale, 4.5% ABV
Sassy Jester - American IPA, 5-6% ABV (blend)
Rio Bravo Breakfast Sout - 5.5% ABV (Pro-Am w/ Shannon Brewing Co.)

Conditioning:

Brettlinerweisse, 2-3% ABV - Summer
Vanilla 9*8*7 - Russian Imperial Stout, 8.5% ABV - Soonish
Chipotle 9*8*7 - Russian Imperial Stout, 8.5% ABV - Soonish
Birthday Barleywine - 10.5% ABV - November

New Main & Atypical DFW Podcast on location at Dr. Jeckyll's this Wednesday

The title says it all. This Wednesday evening, Atypical DFW Podcast (of which I am now officially a member) will head to Dr. Jeckyll's Beer Lab in Pantego for a show dedicated to this hole-in-the-wall homebrew shop, this off-the-wall 40 tap growler bar, this local music venue with great acts that will have you leaving wall-eyed, and a brand new brew kitchen that... has nothing to do with walls.

Owned and operated by daughter Nicole and father Pat Meyers, Dr. Jeckyll's Beer Lab has been the model of evolution for small business. Aside from its recent success with the addition of the 40-tap craft beer bar and growler fill station, Dr. Jeckyll's has been a staple in the mid-cities homebrewing community since the 90's.

As the local demand shifted, so has the Meyers family business empire, opening Mom's Liquor Cabinet and expanding the homebrew shop to a full service bar and growler fill location. Last year, Dr. Jeckyll's was able to double the overall footprint of the store allowing for a larger stage for local music acts, 3 league ready dart boards, a larger space for homebrewing supplies, and a special brew kitchen for brewing demonstrations each weekend. They will even have movie nights and a back patio beer garden.

Come on out Wednesday night and check out Dr. Jeckyll's Beer Lab in Pantego. While you're there, make sure to stop by our table and see what our podcast is all about!

Subscribe, Share, and Like Atypical DFW Podcast on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter @TyreeRadio, and our new website atypicaldfwpodcast.podbean.com. As always you can download each FREE podcast episode on iTunes, Spreaker.

Pro-Am Brew Session with Shannon Brewing Co.

We have been very fortunate lately to receive such amazing feedback and encouragement from all of our friends, family, and followers of the blog. I want to begin this post by thanking all of you for making this so much more than a hobby for us. It has evolved into a full-fledged passion, one that has provided endless opportunities in which to continue to learn and enjoy ourselves. For those of you who are interested, our offer stands: let us know what kind of beer you want, and we'll brew up a batch just for you. You can even come and brew it with us!

Thanks to our Best in Show win at Operation Bravo Homebrew Competition and Hero Appreciation Event held at Shannon Brewing last November, we had the privilege to brew our winning recipe with Shannon Carter this past weekend. Our beer was a robust porter called Rio Bravo porter. The first incarnation of this beer was made with roasted Hatch chile peppers. That beer turned out great, so last year we decided to brew the base recipe and see how it turned out. All we planned on at that point was having it on tap in the kegerator for Aggie football season.

When we learned about Operation Bravo, we thought it would be fun to participate. I've already detailed the fine work that Homebrew For Heroes does and how the event went for us, but I have to stress that I had no inkling that our football beer would win the day. In fact, when the judges announced the winners, they claimed my beer was a Dry Irish Stout. This is an easy enough mistake since it is common to group several dark beers (from porters to stouts) together at judges' tables. We're just thankful they liked our beer and gave us this rare opportunity to brew with the big boys.

At dawn... we brew.

We woke up early Saturday morning to make the trek from Arlington to north Keller (when I say trek, I mean the usual commute I make every day - the brewery is half a mile away from my office, which can be tempting). Shannon Carter, Jacob Prosser, and a Shannon Brewing volunteer named Connor greeted us warmly as we began to heat strike water and munched on some donuts and kolaches. We planned to brew about a barrel of the porter with a few minor tweaks so that it would work on their pilot batch system. I have only ever used the Brew in a Bag (BIAB) method of all-grain brewing, with pretty low efficiency and a much smaller collection of tools and equipment than most brewers I know. I would say I like to keep it simple, but the cold hard truth is I'm cheap and the tools and toys I want are not.

Where my equipment profile lacks depth, Shannon's is overflowing with several options for implementing them in brew day. Shannon's pilot batch system is basically the proof of concept prototype for his full-scale 20 barrel fire-brewed system. The system has everything you could want to produce incredibly clean, clear wort ready for yeast to do their thing.

Our mash went through a protein rest phase to work on the flaked oats and then stepped up to saccharification to extract our fermentable sugars. The mash efficiency was so high, we ended up topping the boil kettle off with a little more water in an effort to keep our potential alcohol by volume within reason. It was at this point with beautifully roasty aromas swirling and high gravity in mind that we decided to call this beer a Breakfast Stout rather than a Porter. It even fits with the grain bill given the flaked oats added for mouthfeel and the coffee-like aromas generated by our roast barley.

We proceeded through the boil with minor changes in the hops because my original recipe was created at a time when I needed to use whatever extra hops I had lying around. In this case, my original bittering charge was Fuggles, which does not have near the normal amount of bitterness contribution that other varietals do (about 4-5% alpha acids). Had we gone with the exact hopping schedule, we would have had 2-3 times as much hop material in the boil to try to filter out of the beer during chilling. Smart money said to go with a higher alpha acid hop (more bitterness per ounce) and make brew day a little easier.

For fermentation, Shannon pulled his Blichmann Fermenator out for us to clean, sanitize, and assemble specifically for this batch of beer. Assembly felt like putting a rocket ship together, although after piecing together my first valve, I quickly learned where everything fit together on the vessel. If I ever have a few hundred extra dollars lying around, a Fermenator will be on my wishlist.

We also used a few pieces of equipment I've never really seen in action before. Attached to the pump "station" - for lack of a better word - were a plate chiller and a hop rocket. Plate chillers are souped up versions of other common heat exchangers like immersion or standard counter-flow wort chillers. Cold water is pumped through one side of it while hot wort is pumped through the opposite side to exchange its heat to the water. This totally sanitary process reduces the temperature of the wort MUCH faster than regular wort chillers or an ice bath ever could. We didn't even have to recirculate the out-flowing wort back through the boil kettle.

Also attached to our little station was a device called a hop back. More specifically, this was Blichmann's Hop Rocket (Blichmann Engineering makes all sorts of brewing apparatus and is pretty much the top of the line, with lifetime warranties to boot). Hot wort is pulled through the pump then forced through a mass of fresh Saaz hops in the Hop Rocket to impart an earthy, slightly spicy aroma to the beer without any risk of picking up oxygen while the wort is too hot. At high temperatures, oxygen pickup can lead to something called hot-side aeration, which can produce off flavors in your beer. The Hop Rocket is loaded with fresh whole-cone hops and purged of oxygen by carbon dioxide, so there was no risk of fouling the batch. Once the wort is cooled to pitching temperature, oxygen helps kickstart yeast activity, so Shannon hooked up an oxygenation stone inline to the fermenter. We flipped a switch and transferred the whole batch through the station right into the fermenter.

Getting to brew on such professional equipment with actual brewing professionals was a very fulfilling experience for us. We were able to ask questions, check out equipment we've never really had a chance to use before, and play with measurement devices that go above and beyond the ol' hydrometer floating in wort, all while being in the presence of true craft beer fans. Experiences like these don't come every day (well maybe if you actually work in a brewery they do) and I'm thankful that Amanda and I got to share this one with each other. What it really boils down to is passion. Passion makes excellent beer and even better memories.

I want to once again thank Operation Bravo and Homebrew For Heroes for hosting an awesome event and for allowing me to step further into my passion for homebrewing. I also want to thank Shannon Carter, Jacob Prosser, and Connor for giving up their free Saturday morning to brew with a couple of beer nerds.


We can't wait to taste the Breakfast Stout when it's finished! Y'all can taste it as well in a couple weeks when it hits the Shannon tap room. Once they have it tapped and ready to serve, we'll spread the news like wildfire so you have a chance to taste the small batch we made. I hope you enjoy it at least as much as we enjoyed making it for you.

Til then, Cheers!

If you want to learn a little more about David, here is a one-on-one interview with him on Atypical DFW Podcast (free on iTunes, Android, Spreaker, and any other podcast app you can think of). If you like what you hear, make sure to subscribe to the podcast and like Atypical DFW Podcast on Facebook!

Last week in Beer

As those of you who have "liked" us on Facebook may have noticed, last week was crazy busy for us! We brewed our inaugural batch of homebrew up at Dr. Jeckyll's Beer Lab on the new all grain system we designed. We recorded a Local Buzz podcast with Tyree Radio detailing some now overlooked craft beer brands like Sierra Nevada, Lagunitas, Samuel Adams and others. We also scored tickets to a Peticolas event called Making a Hammerer that we sadly could not attend. We brewed a beer alongside Grant Wood of Revolver at Dr. Jeckyll's. And we capped it all off with another Local Buzz podcast on location at the Division Brewery in downtown Arlington.

Details coming soon

We've been teasing the Dr. Jeckyll's brew stand build for a few weeks now, and I'm sorry to say since last week was so busy, I haven't had the time to devote to a post that would do justice to the effort involved. I know many of you homebrewers would like a good bit of detail on the setup so that you could potentially build your stand with all the bells and whistles too. Please be patient! I'll sit down and hash it all out hopefully this week and post everything from pictures to the step-by-step brewing instructions to possibly even a video of the system in action.

I will say that the system worked beautifully, if not perfectly. Through the seemingly complicated tangle of hoses, we managed to brew 5 gallons of a nice big stout for Pete, a patron of Dr. Jeckyll's and an avid homebrewer. The setup operated very well and easily moved gallons and gallons of sweet wort through each stage of the system with only a few "learning experiences." Beer was made and it was a great day. I want to give Pete a special shout out and a hearty thanks for being the first brewer on the new system and letting me tag along on his brew day (to make sure nothing went awry and burned our faces off).

Next came the first of last week's Local Buzz shows. We decided to tackle a common pitfall of craft beer lovers: inadvertently avoiding the breweries that first introduced you to your craft beer obsession. I am certainly guilty of this because the main driving force in my craft beer hobby is trying as many new beers as possible. Smartphone apps such as Untappd helps craft beer lovers find and track each new brew they find, and so it almost becomes a beer-themed arms race with your friends to constantly try more than each other. Not that that's a bad thing!

 Variety is what it's all about for me and many others. However, the very first craft beers you ever tried probably came from some of the American craft beer pioneers like Samuel Adams, Sierra Nevada, Shiner, and others. Just because there are now over 4,000 craft breweries in America doesn't mean this Senior class of brewers aren't still churning out unique and interesting brews. On the contrary, their size and length of time on the beer scene affords them more opportunities than most smaller breweries to experiment and get new flavors out there. You can listen to our podcast HERE and see for yourself why you should take a trip down memory lane to some of these great breweries and beers.

Now, as I mentioned above, we didn't get to attend the Making a Hammerer event that Peticolas Brewing Company threw last week. That doesn't mean we weren't really excited about it! This was a great opportunity to try both vertical and horizontal versions of the same great beer, Velvet Hammer. Many folks in the DFW area are familiar with the Velvet Hammer, and Imperial Red Ale that sits at about 9% ABV with a full mouthfeel and satisfying malt to hops balance. This event allowed attendees to try fresh Velvet Hammer as well as VH aged for a few years (vertical tasting). They then served up some variants of this recipe: Sledge Hammer and Pick Hammer (horizontal, kinda).

As its name suggests, the Sledge Hammer is VH's big sister. ABV in the double digits, huge malt-forward body smashing against a heaping helping of hops, and a beautiful color to boot. We enjoyed this beer for the first time last year at North Texas Firkin Fest here in Arlington and thoroughly enjoyed it. Several times. This beer combines the first wort runnings from two batches of Velvet Hammer to make a huge single batch of Sledge Hammer. The other variant was called Pick Hammer and is everything that Sledge Hammer is not. It is the later runnings of the Velvet Hammer batch, meaning it's not quite as heavy in ABV and body. Many consider this an Amber Ale, though it is still a relative of the parent Red Ale style. We have yet to try this, but it is making its way to taps across DFW so make sure to try it if you find it!

Grant Wood and David doughing in on the Cascadian
Dark at Dr. Jeckyll's

Next came another influential moment in my brewing career thus far on Thursday. I had the great fortune to play host to Revolver Brewing at Dr. Jeckyll's Beer Lab for a pint night and brew session with Brewmaster Grant Wood. Grant is an astoundingly accomplished brewer, having brewed at Pearl, Lonestar, Sam Adams, and of course now at Revolver Brewing in Granbury. Aside from the amazing Revolver beers on tap (including rare offerings like Cinnamon Girl and Fracker Barrel One and everyone's favorite Blood & Honey), Grant and I brewed a Cascadian Dark Ale, more commonly referred to as a Black IPA. A simple malt bill combined just enough roasted barley to give this beer a deep black hue with plenty of fermentables to get this beer into the 6-7% range.

Aside from a deceptively simple malt bill, we used some not-so-common hops called Mandarina Bavaria, Apollo, Mosaic, and Saphir. Each lend their own unique flavors, but together they coalesce into a juicy blend of citrusy west coast IPA flavor and aroma. We brewed 11 gallons of this interesting beer so that the batch could be split into two separate fermenters for a couple of lucky brewers to take home. The wort was auctioned off to the highest bidder and the proceeds went to Irving Cares, a charity close to Irving-native Grant Wood's heart. A great big thanks to both Revolver Brewing and Dr. Jeckyll's for letting me take part in this awesome evening.

Jason Tyree & Wade Wadlington getting us all set up for podcastin'
at the Division Brewery in Downtown Arlington

 Finally, we put a crown on the amazing beer week by spending an evening with our good friends at Division Brewing, Arlington's first locally owned craft brewery right in the heart of downtown. Wade Wadlington and Sean Cooley invited us into their incredible brewhouse for an episode of Local Buzz of Tyree Radio. (If you haven't already, go like them on Facebook and sign up for their FREE podcast on iTunes, Android, and spreaker.com. It's great for road trips, helps a commute whiz right by, or just great brew day listening!)

We discussed Division's tremendously popular Grand Opening on New Year's Eve and some of the delicious beer they have been working on like the supremely juicy east coast style Sticky 'stache IPA, Distant Cousin English Mild, their ever-popular X-mas Morning Porter with fresh toasted coconut, and a special version of their Ben Stout that uses dark chocolate and orange zest to recreate the Terry's Orange Chocolate ball flavor in liquid form. Wade & Sean being ever the perfectionists, one-offs like this one will continue to be tweaked from batch to batch until the right balance is reached, so feel free to give them your honest feedback when you see them at the brewery.

Division will be hosing another grand opening this Saturday, January 30th starting at 11am with an all-new IPA featuring elusive Galaxy hops. Make sure to get there early because a pretty substantial line formed last time in anticipation of their unveiling. Same as last time, $15 gets you in the door with 4 pours to try something you may have missed last time. Please make sure to designate a driver or use a ride-sharing app if you intend to enjoy all 4 pours! Also keep in mind that Division's location in downtown Arlington means you are a stone's throw from great places to eat like Fuzzy's Taco Shop, Twisted Root Burger Co., Mijo's Fresh Mexican Food, JR Bentley's English Pub, and many others.

We will be taking a well deserved week off to bask in the glory of last week's beer-infused memories. We will however be picking up right where we left off with our Pro-Am brewing session with Shannon Brewing in Keller this weekend! We will be brewing our Porter that won Operation Bravo's homebrew competition in November at the Shannon Brewery, so stay tuned for a blog post detailing all that.

What an exciting time here at New Main! We want to thank each and every one of our readers and fans for helping us get to this point. Your support and interest has kept us going this whole time, and very truly, y'all have given us these opportunities to meet so many great people in the craft beer and homebrewing world. We will return the favor by continuing to bring you great interviews with the movers and shakers of craft beer, interesting beer discussion, and some killer homebrew recipes for you to try out for yourselves. Please continue to recommend us to your friends or other craft beer lovers at the bar.

'Til next time, Cheers!

Get that batch a keg. Batches love kegs.

We have a few exciting (to us, anyway) developments to talk about today. Chief-most among them is our fridge is now working like normal again! That means we can pull out of our holding pattern and switch back to homebrew production mode. It also means I can start giving the few batches I've managed to brew in the mean time some much needed TLC.

Starting to get crowded up in here...

We were lucky enough to come home with the batch of beer brewed at Dr. Jeckyll's Beer Lab with Rabbit Hole head brewer, Matt Morriss last Halloween. This was a "toned-down" version of their stellar American IPA, Rude Jester, dry hopped with tons of great American west coast hops. Since we anticipated this IPA to be a little more tame than its parent namesake, we dubbed this batch "Sassy Jester."

Due to a little bit of distraction and some poorly timed kitchen appliance failures, the dry hop went on a little longer than it should have. Oddly, the resulting beer came out exceedingly bitter, almost astringent, though no other detectable flaws were present in the beer. Normally, dry-hopping does not affect the bitterness level of a beer - only the flavor and/or aroma. The malt character was great and once the bitterness blanched your tongue, you could tell the hop character was a nice blend of citrus and tropical fruit flavors.

I kegged this beer and set it in the fermentation chamber at about 65F to condition while we attempted to get the fridge situation taken care of, hoping some time would mellow the off-flavor. I brought a sample up to Dr. Jeckyll's to share with some other homebrewers and to brainstorm some ideas to fix the heavy bitterness. The best solution was to blend this beer with some sweeter brew in an effort to balance the malt-to-bitterness equation. Another homebrewer named Shane mentioned he had a honey-based recipe that finished a little sweet that he had sitting around, so he graciously traded me some of his homebrew for the finished product, should it prove drinkable.

When it comes to blending beer, it is important to get the dosage correct. You have to take care to compare different combinations next to each other so that you get a good idea of each sample's characteristics and differences as compared to its neighbors. It also helps to have a second palate on hand to taste the samples in case you are taste-blind to certain flavors. Amanda and I measured out even portions of the Sassy Jester in 3 pint glasses. We sampled Sassy Jester and Shane's beer alone before blending to develop a control in our minds. I then dosed in 1, 2, & 3 shots into the respective pint glasses for comparison.

From left to right, 1-shot, 2-shots, & 3-shots dosed into a half
pint of Sassy Jester

As expected, the 1-shot sample retained the most bitterness and the 3-shot sample was much more mellow, even masking some of the hop character. We landed somewhere between 1 and 2 shots per half pint, or roughly 1 part Shane's beer to 3 parts Sassy Jester. This allows the drinker to taste the overall West Coast IPA character, still be able to discern a nice hoppy aroma, and have a well-balanced flavor that doesn't shred your taste buds.

Aside from that experiment, I also kegged my half of my collaboration brew with Kyle Nelson of Steel Rain Beer. We called the batch Steel Main Mild to reflect both of our homebrewery names. The final gravity of my half clocked in at 1.015, leaving this beer just a touch under 3% ABV. Definitely light and sessionable, but it doesn't taste thin as one might expect. It has a nice malt presence, little to no hop character and finishes satisfyingly dry so as to invite a following sip. This particular style of beer requires very little carbonation, so I'll check it after a day and see where she sits. If all goes well, we will be entering this beer as a team to the Bluebonnet Brew-off homebrew competition.

The small batch mild that I brewed around Christmas time that ended up more of an English Brown is also ready and carbonated. I kegged that beer a few weeks ago and let it cold condition after tasting what is described as "green beer." This doesn't imply infection, St. Patrick's day food coloring hijinks, or a bad batch necessarily, just that the beer needs a little more time to mature and even out. After sitting a serving temperature for a week, this beer pours beautifully with a nice off-white head and a deep brown satisfying body. I will submit this as a solo entry into Bluebonnet and see what the judges think.

Now that we have beer flowing through our taps instead of sitting in homebrew limbo, we can plan some future batches and get an idea for what we want to submit for competitions down the road. We are definitely planning on re-brewing the 9*8*7 Russian Imperial Stout soon to allow appropriate aging time. I would also like to flesh out a red ale to enjoy by St. Patrick's Day.

Dr. Jeckyll's new homebrew demonstration kitchen!

Our next post will be pretty informative and hopefully exciting as well. As I mentioned last week, we were asked by Dr. Jeckyll's to help them design and build a 3-vessel, 2-tier brewing system that will be used for brewing demonstrations right in the homebrew store! We had a run-through brew session this weekend and learned a lot about our brand new system, and I will detail all of that next time.

Til then, cheers!

So we didn't win the Powerball...

Like many millions of Americans, we seized the chance to take part in the largest lottery drawing in history. Alas, we didn't even get the dang powerball right, so we walked away empty handed. But take heart fellow craft beer lovers! This in no way shape or form has diminished our love of brewing and our ability to bring it to you! Although, a couple hundred million bucks would surely have helped us start up a commercial operation. 

Anyways, back in the real world, we've hit a slight snag in the pipeline that should be remedied in the near future. Our kitchen fridge that came with the house decided to die, was "repaired", died again, then waited for months while "a part came in." I put quotes because, months?! Seriously?! I'm sure Amazon is selling like 18 of the part we needed on a regular basis. I'm not here to slam the repair business because that would be tacky. I told you all that to say our beer fridge has been pulling double duty as our kitchen fridge as well. This means the space normally taken up by several kegs of glorious homebrew was stacked high with lettuce, assorted veggies, at least 4 kinds of mustard, twice as many kinds of salsa, and well, you get the picture. Not beer.

I have every confidence that our last repair visit has solved the problem, so the pipeline should be restored fairly soon. (If the fridge breaks again, the repairman actually asked to buy it from us so they could study from it and learn its secrets. wtf.) With that problem solved, we now have only to brew more beer! And on that front we have been making some serious strides.

As we mentioned on Facebook, we collaborated with our friend Kyle Nelson of Steel Rain Beer on a British Dark Mild last weekend. The idea was to brew a tasty beer that would require a very short fermentation and conditioning phase so that we could submit it for judging in the Bluebonnet Brew-off - the largest single-site homebrew competition in the United States. This is a relatively overlooked style when compared against the overwhelmingly popular American IPA or Pilsner categories. We thought we'd brew a double batch so that each of us would have 5.5 gallons or so to enjoy.

We also decided we would ferment our own half with a different yeast from the other to see which one lent the right character we were looking for. Kyle dosed his half with WLP007 (White Labs Dry English Ale Yeast) from a starter he made a few days before brew day. I wanted to use a unique strain that I heard was an interesting variant of the usual British yeast suspects, but unfortunately both of my local homebrew stores were out of stock (Wyeast 1469 West Yorkshire, for the record). Instead, I opted for Mangrove Jack M07, a yeast rumored to be malt-forward and highly flocculent (meaning the yeast would drop out of suspension pretty readily, leaving behind very clear beer).

Upon further inspection, these two yeast from two different suppliers are essentially the same strain. Oh well, there may be subtle differences in our fermentation temperature profile, so this is still a valuable learning experience. Kyle and I will meet up next week and use a blind taste test to figure out which one we want to submit as a team. We want to give a warm thanks to Kyle and Erin for inviting us into their home to brew with them. Make sure to check out SteelRainBeer for more great homebrew recipes and some great spent-grain dog treats for your pooches!

On other fronts, we have been busy working with Dr. Jeckyll's Beer Lab in Pantego setting up their in-house brew kitchen. Those of you who have read the last 10 or so blog posts know I make it no secret how much I love hanging out at Dr. Jeckyll's. It's a fully stocked homebrew supply store as well as a 40 tap growler bar with live music on the weekends and 4 dart boards. What makes the excitement level go to 11 is that it now includes its very own 3-vessel all grain brew kitchen! Three massive restaurant grade natural gas burners sit under three re-purposed half barrel keggles to offer enough capacity to brew up to 10 gallons of beer at a time. Anybody can sign up for a brew session with the head brewmeister, Scott Cooper. Once the beer kitchen is up and running, for a small fee and the cost of your homebrew batch you can brew and take home as much wort as you can carry! (Due to TABC regulations, you can't pitch yeast at the store. The second yeast touches the wort, you have 0.0000001% ABV beer, which must be produced at a licensed brewery, which Dr. Jeckyll's is not.)

Our next post will detail how the setup works and all of the parts & prices in case you are thinking of putting your tax return to good use this year. Keep in mind, building everything yourself instead of buying everything ready-made off the shelf will save you a good chunk of change, but the overall build will not be cheap. Take some time to learn the basics of a brew stand build while squirreling away as much cash as you can. By the time you're ready to build, you should have a good idea of the value of each element and the cash to pull the trigger. For some inspiration and light reading, visit homebrewtalk.com and check out their user library of homebrew setups.

Til then, Cheers!

Better Know Your Brewers: Legal Draft Beer Co.

It was a cool and clear Tuesday morning in the heart of the Metroplex. The sun was just beginning to peek over the distant Dallas skyline, casting stark rays of light straight down Abram street in Arlington. As we adjusted the visors in our car, we reflected once more on how lucky we were to have the opportunity to meet the newest Brewers on the block, Legal Draft Beer Company. Nearly all of you reading this post have been on a brewery tour and learned how beer is made, but we count ourselves among the supremely lucky few that Greg McCarthy, his partner Curt Taylor, and their master brewer Heiner Orlik invited us to see how a brewery is made.

While a crew unloaded the Legal Draft brewhouse from a flatbed, Greg, Heiner, & Curt all exchanged excited looks and Christmas-morning smiles. Amanda and I walked through the warehouse space that will soon come to house this amazing brewery, imagining with some ease where each tank, pump, and kettle would stand alongside a vibrant tap room and a skilled brewing staff. A cold mist began to blow in, so we all huddled into a warmer space out of the wind to talk about where Legal Draft came from and where it is headed.

How did y'all get started brewing?

Greg: My dad brewed some when I was a kid, and I talked with Curt about 15 years ago about starting up a brew pub in Arlington. Not til a few years ago did I get some stuff together and make a few batches and my friends and I thought, "This isn't too bad." And at the same time I knew I didn't want to do this just as a hobby. Now was a good time and it felt like a good opportunity to do this, so I started putting together a business plan and doing a lot of research and looking around for a place to do it all. Last spring Curt and I were together with that same group of friends and I told him I kind of wanted to do this and he said, "Sign me up!" So we went forward and about middle of June last year I started telling people about what I was going to do so I couldn't back out. And here we are. 

Tell us about bringing Heiner on as your brewmaster.

G: Well I had brewed a few batches, but I always knew I wasn't going to be the brewer. We weren't in any clubs or organizations. I think my beer was pretty good, but it's a whole different subject brewing in your garage compared to what we're going to do. And y'know, we didn't have time to mess around for 5 or 6 years learning how to do that, apprenticing someplace or starting smaller ourselves and seeing if we could grow. We knew we wanted a really good brewmaster, and when I talked to Ezra Cox, then at Revolver, now Cidermaster at Bishop Cider, he said, "Here's what you do. You put an ad in all the trade publications online and you find a really highly qualified, big background sort of brewer and then he becomes pretty much everything that's important to your brewery." 

So we put the ad out in September with our sort of mission statement to make a lot of beer and grow fast, and within a couple of weeks he replied and his first message to me was, "Your mission statement is all well and good, but who is going to be the captain of this ship? Are you looking for someone who was a homebrewer for 2 years or an assistant brewer for a couple of years at some place that doesn't make very good beer, or are you looking for someone who is German-classically trained to be your brewmeister?" And I said, "Well it sounds like we need you." We wanted someone who was dedicated and trained who would do this, and Curt and I drove out to Midland to meet him. He was brewing out at Big Bend in Alpine, and he has a daughter and granddaughter in Forney, so he and his wife were anxious to be closer to them. He also wanted to be somewhere where you didn't have to drive three and a half hours to get to a mall.

Curt: Not to mention, his wife was not fond of all the tarantulas and mountain lions and scorpions in West Texas. 

G: Heiner has been brewing beer in America for 30 years, and he's like us - he doesn't have time to mess around and go the nice patient route with a small brewery. He's very highly educated, he did the whole program at Doemens in Munich, he brewed for Abita for a long time, and he also has a degree in Economics.

C: That's what's impressed me is his diversity of experience. There's not one thing we've run into where he didn't have something to offer. The potential for Greg and I to make mistakes and have to backtrack to go in the right direction, I guarantee he's already saved us a couple of those wrong turns, and I'm sure there'll be more to come. You can't replace over 30 years of brewing experience. The first word out of his mouth is Quality. You have to have quality product, a clean environment to brew in to make something that our friends would enjoy drinking.

What made you decide to open a brewery?

G: Everybody has been over to the largest capacity, oldest continuing brewery in the Metroplex, and the first time I went there I was just amazed because it was 95 degrees outside, not air conditioned, on a Wednesday night, no music, no food, and there were 500 people there. And you know what? It was FUN! It was greater than the sum of the parts by a mile. I just thought if they could do this, then we can too and maybe ramp that game up a little bit.

C: I think Greg and I over the last 15-20 years have been talking about having some place cool in Arlington and every time we leave we wouldn't have to drive to Dallas or Fort Worth. With the brewery and everything else happening for Downtown Arlington, it's going to be a destination. It's going to help to change the face of entertainment in downtown.

Your brewhouse is not very common. Can you tell us more about the IDD High Efficiency Brew System (HEBS)?

G: There are a few breweries across America that have this system. Probably less than 20 systems working right now, and according to Heiner, the mash filter is not a new idea. The system is all mounted to the skid: the mash tun, the boil kettle, the hot liquor tank, and the whirlpool. You pump out of the mash tun through the filter plates and depending on your style, you have the prescribed number of filter plates. Every other plate is solid and the other one has a bladder inside. Efficiency of that process comes from the grain getting stuck on the cloth and squeezed like a tea bag. You get the very last of the sugars out of the grain and when it's done, that grain falls down and you can clean the filter easily and the grain is very dry and heads off into the hopper. So that's different from the lauter tun and you get a greater extract efficiency. 

Then the boil kettle has the usual steam jacket, but it also has a calandria inside which is basically another steam boiler so you get a really high-energy, vigorous boil and a higher evaporation rate in 40 minutes that would take a conventional boil kettle of the same size 90 minutes or longer. So you cut time off each batch, and as you're pumping that wort through the filter and the mash tun empties, you're ready to start mashing in your next batch. You can be working 3 batches of 17 barrels at a time all in a row. When I saw it in action, they started at 9am and intended to brew 3 batches but ended up doing 5 to get a little ahead and they were still finished up by 5pm.

What sort of beers can we look forward to enjoying soon?

G: Heiner is in charge of the recipes, but we'll start off with sort of a core 5 beers: gold lager, amber lager, a hefeweizen, an IPA, and a stout. Something for everybody. Surprisingly, or maybe not surprisingly, there aren't a lot of craft breweries that have a bunch of lagers. It's really an economic decision because it takes more time to ferment properly. The lagers are getting sort of overlooked. By the time we open, we're going to be heading right into the Texas summer time, and we want to have clean refreshing beers with a few options that  everyone is going to want to drink. We'll start with that core 5 and always have that on tap, but the good thing about Heiner is he wants to take it in different directions too. 

Reinheitsgebot means different things to different brewers. For some people it means, "Ve have four ingredients in ze bier and no ozzers!" But Heiner's view is it's all about no adjuncts, it's about the methods and it doesn't mean you can't brew ales or have fruit beers or add orange peel to your wheat beer or have sours or anything like that. He wants to barrel age some stuff, he wants to do sodas like root beer and ginger ale to serve to kids or non-drinkers or designated drivers, he wants to create some radlers, too. He's of the mind that Reinheitsgebot means you do a good job, you brew good quality product in the right kind of environment. You use barley, not rice or corn to cut costs. You know, if you're brewing a wheat beer, technically you're violating Reinheitsgebot, but it really doesn't go against its intent.

C: There's also a strong desire to have gluten-free beer as well, and our system lends itself to that very easily. We can't call it gluten free legally, though,  without adding a certain enzyme that converts any remaining gluten in the beer. We recently went out to San Diego and visited Duck Foot Brewing, and every beer on tap there was gluten-free because the owner is a celiac. We sat there and drank for a couple of hours, and I liked ALL of their beer! It didn't taste like a Redbridge or Omission or anything. They were all good. It would be a good way to tell folks who have that limitation, "Hey we have stuff for you too. Not just soda."

Aside from our favorite draft houses and growler bars, what sort of packaging should we look for on shelves?

G: We will have primarily cans, about 2/3 of our production by volume and get them into stores. We'll have our own canning line in February or March, so we'll be up and running very soon after we start up. (Mobile canning) is a great system, but it gets expensive over time. It would cost us about 3-5 times as much in the first 5 years as having our own machine. We'll pay off the equipment within the first 3 years we believe. 

We'll also have the taproom, and that's always where my head was first. That's where you first visit breweries and I just wanted something with a good vibe, a nice family place to come hang out for a little while. Bring the kids, bring the dog, have games to play, TVs on the wall with sporting events. You know, a place people just enjoy hanging out. We'll also have a big enough place to rent out for events like class reunions, rehearsal dinners, business lunches, whatever folks like to do. 

Photo credit: Dodson Development, LLC

Arlington seems to be at the beginning of a very concerted effort to revitalize the downtown district. How will Legal Draft fit into that picture?

G: (The Texas Live events center) was the first of several announcements we expect to be coming soon. Put a pin down in the absolute center of the Metroplex, and it's right here. It's taken some time, but it takes some vision and some guts to knock down some of the unfortunate looking infrastructure and build places people want to come visit. Groups like Dodson Development have that vision to come in and design some great spaces for everyone to use and enjoy, and it's going to be great.

Our good friends at Division are a stone's throw away from y'all. Do you see any collaborations or neighborhood alliances in the future?

G: Wade Wadlington's shop is real close, and we think that's terrific. It would be great to get even three more. It creates some magnetism and synergy, unless we get one of the very few people that doesn't want to play nice, which just doesn't happen often. Wade and Sean do completely different stuff than what we're doing: he's got fruits and sours and IPAs. He'll be smaller volume, but he'll have twenty different beers on tap and the variety is what makes it fun. And his place looks terrific! Things are starting to happen for him and for downtown and it's really exciting for us all.

Having warmed up with some much needed coffee and much appreciated beer conversation, we left Greg, Heiner, & Curt to unload their remaining equipment and headed back home with an even greater sense of excitement than we brought downtown. The sun climbed a little higher
and burned off the fog to shine on brand new kettles and pumps, and thus Legal Draft Beer Company took some of its first steps onto the DFW craft beer scene.

We want to thank Greg McCarthy, Curt Taylor, and Heiner Orlik for allowing us to be a part of their brewery building process. We are genuinely excited for y'all, and we can't wait to share a pint in Spring of 2016!

Like Legal Draft on Facebook & follow them on twitter @LegalDraftBeer and Instagram legaldraftbeer!

Greg and company will be joining Tyree, Rhode, and myself this spring on Tyree Radio for an all-Legal Draft Local Buzz podcast. We'll make sure to give y'all a heads up so you can listen to even more great news and brews from Legal Draft Beer Company. Don't forget to like and share Tyree Radio on Facebook and subscribe to the Tyree Radio podcast. It's free and it's AWESOME.