Hi, we’re back.
In the past few years of brewing beer and researching ways to make our dream brewery a reality we’ve had plenty of success and some failures - I’m talking about bad batches, broken equipment, stained stovetops, pissed off wives, and broken promises. Occasionally, the planets align in a terrible way and the cosmos prevent you from succeeding. Let’s take a look at the darkest time of the beer factory, in a non-chronological order, a time we will always remember as The Summer of 2011…….
Let’s start off by explaining a few things:
1. We brew all of our beer in Pasadena or Santa Clarita. The problem here lies in the fact that we do not have thermal control capabilities in our Pasadena location and our Santa Clarita location was down for a solid month (the brewmaster there was in escrow and living out of a hotel).
2. Summer can be ugly for brewing. The heat and the sun have negative effects on the hops and yeast. All fermenting beer must be kept cool and out of the light as much as possible.
Okay, did you get that? Summer = bad, and facilities…..well, what facilities?
So, a few months ago, we were commissioned to provide a lot of beer to a party. These beers were custom beers that were crafted to be brewed this one time and never again. We made custom names and labels for each of the three beers (a brown ale, an IPA, and a stout). They were tweaked, mass-marketed versions of beers we already had. While we don’t associate these beers with the Neverending Beer Factory, we did use our facilities to brew them and so this event ended up taking over all of our resources, thus, we have not had many of our staple beers available.
At the same time, we had our much-anticipated Imperial IPA, The Shire, finishing off it’s final fermentation on a dry bed of hop flowers. We had high hopes for this beer as it was not only our most expensive beer but also our most alcoholic (~10.5% ABV), and we tried it before it was completely carbonated and it was delicious. It was also our very first IPA <tear>.
Also, we had Lion-O fermenting in Pasadena and Violet Beauregarde all bottled up and ready for distribution. This was on top of the three beers we produced for the party. So, it seemed like things were going well and we were about to have a lot of product. That’s when the heat waves set in…
Lion-O stalled out. The yeast stopped consuming the fermentable sugars and we ended up with a low-alcohol beer. This could’ve been the result of a number of things but we suspect the heat played some part. We decided to repitch yeast with the hopes of getting back up to the right alcohol level, but that didn’t work. Now we’re left with a “light” version of Lion-O.
The Shire and Violet Beauregarde were held in a maximum-security facility for storage since they were at the (now defunct) Santa Clarita facility and needed to be stored somewhere while the escrow company got their shit together. The storage facility was not temperature controlled and Violet Beauregarde bottles blew up into a delicious, sticky mess of beer everywhere. Well, that sucks, but the Shire seemed to have survived this pressure differential and every bottle was intact. Okay – then maybe there’s still hope, right? Wrong! You see, The Shire was being deceptive all along…… rather than explode in a Seppuku like fashion like it’s cousin, Violet, it decided to go a different route and morph it’s chemical composition into a highly volatile and poisonous concoction that whosoever lay taste to it will surely parish and not have everlasting life” – The Shire 3:16.
The Shire was brewed with an inhumane amount of hops and due to their susceptibility to heat/sun, the beer turned into, well, basically Windex. As much as we’d like to recoup our costs of this expensively produced beer, our hearts could not, in good conscience, serve this to our thousands of loyal followers. Shut up. They’re there.
Now, it looks as though all of the beer factory’s brews have met their demise, but how about the three party beers? Surely, those turned out okay. Wellllll………the stout was good.
During the 2nd week of fermenting the brown ale, right before bottling, when all yeast activity should be complete and the airlock silent, we found a sudden resurgence of yeast activity. The airlock began bubbling and the beer was alive. If you didn’t believe in yeast ghosts before then maybe you should now because this wasn’t supposed to happen according to the brewing laws of physics. The explanation – like I said, yeast ghosts. Upon a nerve-wracking taste test we found the beer to be not-very-good and fairly bubblegummy. Was it drinkable? Depends on the person. If you’re 9 beers deep and you can stomach beers from BJ’s then yes, highly drinkable.
The IPA, our second IPA attempt after The Shire (rest in peace), turned out to be a mild IPA. You could even call it a hoppy amber ale. To the people that do not like IPA’s [raises hand], it was really good. To the IPA lovers expecting an IPA, they were disappointed. Well, whatever. Look, the timeline we had to produce these beers was such that we only got one shot of getting it right. There wasn’t going to be any tweaking of recipes. This was it. And technically, we didn’t even really have enough time. It is well known that to carbonate a beer (the bottle conditioning way) you need a minimum of 7 to 10 days. MINIMUM. By the time the beers had completed fermentation and hit their target %ABV levels, we had 6 days left until the party. We tapped as many brewheads as possible and there was no solution to our dilemma – we would not be able to carbonate the beer in time. This is a problem not just for carbonation, but when a beer has not completed its carbonating phase there is a lot of residual sugar that make the beer sickly sweet. So, we’re dead.
“But wait a second, Brewmasters, I thought the Neverending Beer Factory was a magic place where anything can happen if you believe with all your heart.”
Dammit, Little Timmy, you are right. Instantly we racked our powers of brewing and came up with an experimental idea (WE DON’T RECOMMEND IT) where we would fill the bottles almost completely to the top to increase pressure inside and force carbonation to go faster. We had no idea if it would work and it puts every bottle at risk of exploding….. but we like to live on the edge. If a bottle blew up and triggered all the other bottles to go then at least it would look cool amidst the flying shards of glass. So, yes, that’s what we did……
<flash forward 6 days>
We went to the party. The beers were delivered, announced, and people were routing through them with high hopes. Our stomachs were in knots. We knew the brown ale tasted horrible and so we fashioned a label calling it “Nightmare” and even put warning labels saying “Do Not Drink”. In short summary, the carbonation trick actually worked on the brown ale and the IPA. We were amazed to be honest. BUT, the IPA was so overly carbonated that you could only pour a frothy head and wait 30 minutes for it to bubble back into it’s beer-ish self. Okay, so it kinda worked. At least we now know it’s conceivably feasible to accelerate the carbonation phase. However, the outcome appears to be quite unpredictable.
There you are friends; the Summer of 2011. It’s not all bad, though, as we have a number of surprises coming towards the end of the year that we’ll be discussing later. If you’re interested in hearing the latest announcements or are wondering how you can order some of our Perfect beers, please send an email to brewmasters@theneverendingbeerfactory.com and we will add you to our mailing list.
Brewmasters
XoXoXoX
No comments:
Post a Comment