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>> Well, welcome everybody to -- what I'm happy to say is becoming a regular occurrence
here to another brewer series here in Google New York.
So, cheers to that, right? [clapping] Today, I have the pleasure of introducing
Rob Tod, who is the owner/operator of Allagash Brewery up in Portland, Maine.
Allagash started -- first beer sold in 1995, and then going strong ever since.
So, just to let you know kind of where this stems from -- some of you probably remember
when Sam Calagione was here from Dogfish Head a few months ago back in March.
About two months after that, I got added to a string of e-mails because Rob did a talk
at the Google San Francisco office. And e-mailed Sam and said, "Hey, I did a talk
at Google. You really should give it a shot. It's great."
And Sam responded to that with something like, "Hey, I beat you to it.
I did one about a week ago." But my absolute favorite part of that whole
interaction was the e-mail that shows up in my inbox.
Imagine this -- for all you beer lovers out there.
I get an e-mail in my inbox, subject line is "Yo."
It's forwarded to me. It's from Rob Tod to Sam Calagione.
And the first line of the e-mail subject line, "Yo," is "What up Mitch?" [laughter]
I love my job. So, without further ado, Rob Tod.
>> [Clapping]
>> Rob Tod: Thanks a lot. Good. Good. You can hear me.
First of all, sorry, my voice is a little hoarse.
I did a couple of events yesterday and finished the night at the Blind Tiger.
And, I was there -- I don't know if any of you guys have ever been there, but it's very
loud, and I was screaming at the top of my lungs basically for four hours straight.
So it's a good time. And then, I ended up standing on a chair and
yelling to everyone. And at that point basically, my voice was
gone, so. It's actually coming back a little now, which
is good. But, yeah, so I did talk out in at the San
Francisco headquarters, which was a lot of fun.
The way this whole thing started -- I was, in February, out at San Francisco Beer Week
doing an event in Oakland. And Dave Cohen and Dustin Diaz -- who work
out of the San Francisco branch -- were at an event I was at.
And I had just switched over from another e-mail over to Gmail.
And at first, it took me a little getting used to, but after awhile, I just fell in
love with Gmail. I was like, "This is like the coolest thing
on the planet." It just saved me so much time. I love the
way it worked. I'm just like a huge believer.
And I was like all excited about this Gmail, and these guys from the Gmail team were at
this event. And they came up to me and they were like,
"Oh, we love Allagash beer. We're on the Gmail team at Google."
I was like, "No way! I love what you guys do." So.
And we talked for awhile and then they said, "Would you be interested in coming out to
talk about beer at the Google campus?" I was like, "Absolutely.
Just tell me when you want me there, and I'd love to do it."
So, that's how I ended up out there. We had a great time out there.
And then, yeah, like Adam said, I was so excited about it, I told Sam.
And I guess Sam had already spoken here, so. But I'm not sure if he's been out there yet.
But, so I didn't have like a super-firm talk planned.
I just figured I'd talk a little bit about the brewery and the beer, talk a little bit
about each of these beers we're trying today, and then, do a little slide show as we talk.
But anyway, brief history of Allagash -- I started the company back in the summer of
1994. Spent about a year basically just building
the brewery, cobbling it together with a lot of dairy equipment.
We were extremely small. It was a 15-barrel system -- like I said,
with dairy product -- not very sophisticated. Then, I ran it alone for the first year, brewing
all the beer, washing the kegs, loading the trucks, unloading the trucks, continuing to
build the brewery. Our first year's production was 120 barrels,
which was equivalent to 240 kegs. And that made us one of the smallest breweries
in the country. There are definitely some smaller breweries,
but that's tiny production. Just to kind of put that in perspective, you
know, we were 120 barrels. Sierra Nevada, at the time, was probably around
half a million barrels -- or in that range. And Anheuser Busch about a hundred million
barrels a year. So we were extremely small.
We started just doing exclusively Belgian style beer.
Our first beer was the Allagash White, which is what I'm drinking now.
And it's now become our flagship. It's over 80 percent of our production.
Since then, we've added a lot of beers, and we have a pretty cool selection of them here
today. And we're not volume-driven at all.
In fact, over the first ten years, we grew really, really slowly.
We grew from about 120 barrels to 2000 barrels, probably over the first 10 or 12 years.
And the last three or four years, we've grown a lot more quickly from around 2000 barrels
to around 15 or 16,000 barrels a year production. And we have 20 employees.
I know that's not quite as fast as you guys have grown, probably from the same amount
of time from two employees to 20,000 employees. But we're not volume-driven, but the Belgian
category and kind of experimental beer category -- which you'll taste some of our more experimental
beers, which still fall in the Belgian beer category.
But that category's just taken off lately. There's been a huge amount of interest.
When I started, I used to walk into accounts, even -- really, for the first ten years, and
I'd pour people a sample of the Allagash White. And you know, the first thing bartenders would
look at, they'd be like you know, "Why is it cloudy?"
And they taste it, and they'd be like, "Why does it look weird? Why does it taste weird?
What's wrong with this beer?" People had really never had these Belgian style beers, never
really had unfiltered beers. And so, it was a real education -- kind of
long, slow educational process. But they've taken off lately, so.
So this first beer, the Allagash White, probably most of you have gotten a chance to try it.
Like I said, it's the one we sell the most of.
It's the traditional Belgian style wheat beer. It's unfiltered.
The Belgians use a lot of unique ingredients in their white beers.
This is traditionally spiced with coriander and orange peel.
We use a secret spice in it as well. I always say, "If you get me drunk enough,
I'll spill the beans on the secret spice." But I don't think -- I don't know if that's
going to happen in the afternoon, so. It's happened at some beer _____ events.
But, secret spice in it. A lot of unmalted and malted wheat in it.
And it's not filtered, as you can see, or it's very gently filtered.
What that does is it leaves some of the yeast and protein in suspension in the beer.
And not only does that contribute to the kind of nice, elegant, cloudy look to the beer,
but it contributes a lot to the flavor and mouthfeel of the beer.
Over time, this will actually settle out, and the beer will be bright.
And if you decant it from the bottle and just pour the bright beer, the beer tastes quite
a bit different, so. Anyway, we got a few pictures.
This is a picture of the outside of the brewery. We started in a building next to this.
I rented about 4,000 square feet of a warehouse, and we outgrew that after about 12 years and
just built this facility. So basically, this is what we're going to
talk about for the rest of the time. [laughter] This is how yeast metabolizes.
Sugar breaks down into carbon dioxide. I'm going to go through each of these chemical
reactions. No, I'm just kidding -- I'm not.
I don't even -- I used to actually know a little bit of that, but I have no -- so don't
ask me anything too technical. So, they threw this picture in.
That's me believe it or not. A lot of people say, "Did you ever drink crappy
beer? Or kind of bland beer in the old days?" That's
me with a Budweiser there. I think I was outside of a Grateful Dead concert
like 20 years ago, so. [laughter] Now that I have to go get bank loans, I cleaned
up my act a little bit. But these are some early pictures of the brewery.
The space I leased -- I basically did all the, you know, 90 percent of all the work
in there. Cut drainage trenches in the floor that allow
the plumbing, a lot of the electrical work, did a lot of the welding.
That tank, which is kind of all banged up and dented, is our mash ton.
It's actually still our mash ton. We've done quite a bit of work on it.
You'll see a picture of it later. It's worked real well for us, but it's just
an old dairy tank. It used to hold cream at a dairy somewhere,
probably a 50-year-old dairy tank. And there's on the left our first fermenter.
We just stood those up with chain falls and block and tackles.
And there's probably a year-and-a-half -- two years -- in the business.
Our first employee, Ned White. He was with us for five years; he's a great
guy. We still stay in very close touch.
Actually, you know -- do you guys? Well, I'll show you a couple more pictures
and then we'll talk about some of the beers. There's an early picture of us bottling.
The big bottles -- you guys notice some of the -- a lot of the beers we do are in these
big bottles. These are imported from France.
There's only a couple plants in the world that make this kind of traditional Belgian
bottle. So this is how we used to bottle those beers.
We just filled them four bottles at a time on a little hand filler.
And then, that's me I think, corking there. So you had to put every single cork in, push
it into the bottle. It was definitely very labor intensive.
Then the guy on the right, who's doing the hooder, is Jason Perkins.
He's now a brewmaster. So there's Jason again, our brewmaster on
the right. And there's me -- looking like I'm working
-- for a picture, so. [laughter] I honestly don't get down -- I was brewmaster
for the first 12 years. I handed that torch over to Jason about three
years ago. He's much more capable than I am -- does a
great job. I just found I wasn't -- I just didn't have
time to spend enough time down actually making the beer in the production floor.
So Jason's now in charge of that. I still spend quite a bit of time down there,
but not a lot of time actually doing things. They try to keep me away.
I screw things up when I get involved. And this is our brewery now.
That tank on the left, up on the platform, is actually that same old dented tank with
tons of -- we just retrofitted it and kind of.
We haven't automated it at all. We've mechanized it, so it's got -- instead
of having to stir the grain with plastic shovels, we got a machine that stirs it.
And instead of hooking up hoses to each of the tanks and rolling a pump around to move
the beer from tank to tank, a lot of it's hard-piped.
So a lot of changes that kind of make life easier.
But. And then as I talk here, definitely ask questions you know?
Just raise your hand and ask a question. I think there's a mic up here, but I'm sure
you can just ask. So question?
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: Yeah, it's good question. Using aluminum cans?
I've actually thought about it maybe, especially for going out in the boat.
You know, we're right on the water. By the way, I never even mentioned this --
we're in Portland, Maine. It's right on the water. Right on the water.
You know, it's perfect for something like that.
But right now, one of the main reasons we haven't done it -- and I think a can is a
great package and there's a lot of craft breweries in cans now -- we've just got so many balls
in the air. We're growing really fast right now -- 25,
30 percent a year. Which, you know, but probably doesn't sound
like too much for the tech industry. But in manufacturing, it gets tough to grow
that fast to be adding all that equipment and there's constant change and process change.
And we're really having to even pull out of markets, because we're having trouble keeping
up with demand. We just have too many balls in the air to
do a can, but down the line, we definitely might do that.
I think it would be kind of cool. I think it would be cool to do our white beer
in a can at some point, so. So some of the beers we're trying -- I talked
about the white. Another beer -- which I don't think I've got
it up here, but I do actually pour myself a glass luckily -- is the double.
The Trappist monks traditionally brew a single and double and triple.
And we've got the double and triple here today. These are the first two beers that we did
in the big cork finish bottle. The Trappist monks traditionally brew the
single for their own consumption. It's usually low alcohol beer, maybe brown,
light brown, or blond in color. And that's what they brew for their own consumption.
I always say, "If I abstained from anything they abstained from, I'd probably drink heavily."
But sometimes they don't drink -- often they don't drink.
But if they do, they drink the single. Their doubles and triples are their commercially
available beers. Doubles are usually about seven, maybe six
to eight percent alcohol by volume. So it's starting to get, you know, a little
higher alcohol than most of the kind of standard domestic beers you're used to drinking.
Not as high alcohol as some of the other beers we'll talk about in a little bit.
But they're usually maybe seven or so percent alcohol, dark in color.
And then their triples actually as you've probably already seen.
It surprises people, even though it's higher in alcohol, they're lighter in color.
The color really doesn't have anything to do with alcohol.
Guinness, which is a very dark beer, is actually pretty low in alcohol -- just about four percent.
And our triple, which is light in color, is pretty high in alcohol.
That's about nine percent. So triples are usually eight or nine percent
by volume, light in color. And really, the only thing that affects color
is generally how much roasted malt you put in the beer.
You have a question?
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: Yeah, they're pretty protective of their secrets.
I've only been -- I've been to Belgium a number of times.
I actually only visited a Trappist brewery on my last trip.
I went to see Orval -- which I love Orval. It's a great beer, and the monastery is like,
unbelievably cool. It's really cool.
We showed up there in the morning at like eight in the morning, met the guy who runs
the business side of the brewery. He's not a monk.
He's not one of the brothers there. But we showed up there at about nine in the
morning. There was like a dusting of frost and snow
everywhere and it's this beautiful, old, stone building.
It's really impressive. But we actually did get a tour of the brewery
there. Some of the Trappist breweries are very protective,
and they really don't want a lot of people coming through the monastery or the brewery.
Some of them are a little more open. Orval, I think they only open their doors
a couple days a year to let people through the brewery.
But it was pretty cool. And I went there with a bar owner in Boston,
Massachusetts -- David Cipollo from the Public House.
Which is -- if any of you are ever up in Boston, it's a great spot to drink beer -- great food.
But we're going to try to go back now every year to go see another one of the Trappist
breweries. We're going to see Chimay in about a month,
which I'm really looking forward to. So, yeah, I've been to a lot of breweries
in Belgium, but, you know, only been to one of the Trappist breweries.
And Orval's an interesting one too, because it's -- their beer doesn't really fall into
one of the traditional singles, doubles, and triples.
They only do one beer in one package. It's -- I guess it's its own thing.
It's a little bit bitter, a little bit bready, which you'll taste some brett character in
one of our beers. So a little bit of a wild character.
And they do do the petite Orval, which is basically a watered-down version of Orval
for the monks, which I tried, which is pretty cool. Yeah.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: The white is actually the lowest alcohol beer we brew at five percent.
The Belgian beers tend to be -- I mean, there are definitely some lower alcohol Belgian
beers, and the white is about 80, 85 percent of our production.
But a lot of the traditional Belgian style beers tend to be pretty high in alcohol.
And in a lot of ways, they drink almost like kind of a hybrid between beer and wine.
Belgium's kind of sandwiched between Germany and France, so their culture picks up a lot
of influence from beer culture -- of course, from Germany -- but also, picks up a lot of
influence from wine culture. I think the biggest part of the influence
is in the yeast strains. So. We in some ways -- if you talk to different
brewers of Belgian style beers, they'll tell you different things.
Everyone has their own kind of opinions on them.
But we almost look at it as making beer with wine yeast.
And another one of those influences is the higher alcohol content.
But you'll taste some of these beers, especially the Interlude.
It almost tastes as much like a wine as it does a beer.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: The Interlude? Yeah sure. So this is actually one of the things that
is exciting us more than anything about Belgian style beers.
You know, one of the reasons we got into them is, the Belgian beer culture is very experimental
by nature. And they use -- you know, most brewing cultures
will use traditional ale or logger yeast -- the Belgian brewers use just a huge variety
of ale and logger yeast, but they also use a lot of bacterias to ferment with and a lot
of wild yeasts. And you just can't get these flavors anywhere
else. You can put additives in beer that give you
maybe some similar characters, but the character these yeasts give you when they re-ferment
are really unique. This particular beer -- we really kind of
stumbled into it. It was almost basically a mistake or a problem
batch of beer. We were doing a beer which was very loosely
based on a Cezanne, which was a traditional style Belgian beer.
And we brewed this beer, and Cezanne yeast is notorious for -- and at some point I'll
talk basically about the basics of making beer.
I kind of skipped over that -- but the Cezanne yeast, which was the yeast used in the Cezanne
is notorious for petering out during fermentation about halfway through the fermentation.
So the yeast will be eating the sugars, giving off carbon dioxide and alcohol, and it'll
really slow down or peter out very commonly halfway through fermentation.
And that's exactly what happened to this. The yeast basically fermented out the beer
halfway. It was probably about four percent by volume
alcohol. And then it just stopped.
And you know, we were concerned, because we had a 500-gallon batch of beer -- which at
the time was pretty big for us -- that just basically wasn't fermenting, and we couldn't
get it going. We did everything that we knew to kind of
start the fermentation again. We couldn't. So we just kind of forgot about it. Left it
in the tank. It was a dairy tank that we didn't need for
a couple of months. So we just figured we'd leave it there.
Well, I came into work probably two weeks after that -- or maybe even a little bit longer,
three weeks -- and it was fermenting again. They're enclosed tanks, and we have a hose
that comes out of the tank. We put in a bucket of water with a little
bit of chlorine. And you can see it bubbling when it's fermenting.
It hadn't been bubbling for two or three weeks, and I walk by and I was like, "Oh wow, cool!
It's starting to ferment again." So we went and tasted the beer, and we were
like, "There's definitely something in this beer that we did not add." [laughter]
The flavor profile was just -- it was totally being transformed.
So we have a pretty extensive lab program for a brewery our size.
Now it's even much more extensive than it was back then.
And sure enough, we ran it through the lab; there was a wild yeast that was fermenting
this beer. And it really -- it had a lot in common, we
think it is, with Brettanomyces, which is a traditional yeast used in a lot of -- it's
a wild yeast used in a lot of traditional Belgian beers.
And it just gives you these funky -- and each different strain of yeast is different, but
some of them give you kind of a barnyard character. Some people say horse hair, or horse blanket.
And you can definitely get some of that in this beer.
It ferments it out very dry, almost like a wine.
And after this beer was done, we fell in love with the flavors.
It took about three months or four months to finish fermentation, which is very long.
Usually fermentations last a week to two weeks. And we just fell in love with this flavor.
It didn't have some of the more coarse character you get in some Bretts, which can be real
-- have a lot of that kind of horse hair, barnyard character.
But it had just some refined subtle touches of that.
And then a lot of fruity characters, a lot of Venice wine characters.
And I've got a buddy that's a wine maker at PlumpJack Winery in Napa.
And I called up my buddy Tony and said, "Geez, could we get some barrels you use for red
wine? We think this beer would be a real good fit for it."
So he sent us eight. We bought eight of these great French, oak
wine barrels -- which really, they couldn't use anymore, because most of the oak character
was out of them. And we aged this beer -- aged half of it in
the French oak for eight months and then left half of it in the stainless steel.
And then blended the two together. And this is the result.
And you know, it's a real -- when we released it three years ago, this was a really funky
beer. Now, it's almost -- with some of these funky
Belgian style experimental beers that are out there -- it's not even considered that
funky. But it is real unique.
It almost drinks as much like a wine like a beer.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: There are. There are. Avery Brewing. I think it's their 15th anniversary they used
a brett yeast. Vinnie out at Russian River Brewing uses a
lot of wild yeast and bacteria, a lot of barrel aging.
He's doing some phenomenal beers. Sam at Dogfish, Tommy Arthur in Southern California
in the San Diego area. And in a number of other brewers, Ron Jeffries
at Jolly Pumpkin does a lot. He's in Michigan with wild yeast and bacteria.
And it's amazing. Like kind of to circle back to the first thing
I mentioned with this beer -- This is something that excites us more than anything in brewing,
because it's -- Outside of Belgium, no one really had been using these bacterias and
wild yeast to make beer for years. And in fact, they were really considered a
defect in beers. But in Belgian brewing, they're traditional,
and there are a lot of U.S. brewers that are starting to use them to create these flavors
that no one's had before.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: We did. Yeah, this wild yeast -- we were so worried we'd lose it, that we
sent it to two separate yeast labs. And now, they bank the yeast for us.
And whenever we make this beer, we actually have to ask them both to grow it -- it's kind
of a finicky yeast. And so, very often one of them can't grow
the yeast for us to add to the batch. So we have to get it from both yeast producers
just to make sure it comes in. So they bank this yeast for us, and then our
proprietary yeast, which we use for the white beer.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: There are no lactic bacteria in any of the beers we're trying today.
The lactic -- yeah, the yeast that's in this -- what we think is the Brettanomyces --
is a wild yeast. So the bacteria is lactobacillus pediococcus.
A number of other bacteria the brewers use. We're starting to experiment with and we've
got a number of beers. And we've sold some beers on a very small
scale that are just available at the brewery -- the Vagabond and Gargamel -- that use
some of those microbes. But we haven't sold any on a commercial scale.
And one interesting way to add some of these wild yeasts and bacterias is just by adding
fruit to the beer. So we've done a lot of beers with sour cherries,
raspberries, grapes, blueberries. And those fruits naturally have these same
micro-organisms there. They have wild yeast and bacteria all over
them. So when you add those to a batch of beer,
you can get some of these fermentations. The lactobacillus -- the lactic acid bacteria
-- gives the beer a real tart character. This gets a little bit of tartness from the
brett, but it isn't real tart.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: Yeah, this beer definitely does evolve over time.
The whole aging beer thing, we kind of are torn with.
Definitely, our white beer, fresher is better. It's a lower alcohol beer.
Don't let me forget to talk about bottle conditioning a little bit, which does extend the shelf
life of a beer and make it pretty appropriate to age.
But I really think some of -- as you get into bottle conditioned beers -- higher alcohol
beers -- their shelf life goes way beyond six months.
And our triple -- we've got bottles of the triple that are seven, eight years old that
are still drinking great -- that we've stored at cool temperatures, cellar temperatures,
in the dark. And they're drinking great.
They evolve quite a bit. They pick up a big honey character, passion
fruit character. The Interlude does the same thing.
We haven't been brewing this beer for too long, only a few years.
We've got some of the original bottles and they're drinking great.
And actually, I think beer made with traditional -- and this is just kind of our opinion and
our take on it -- beer made with traditional ale and logger yeast, the higher alcohol bottle
conditioned beers, they have a good shelf life, like the triple and they can age fairly
well. Once you start using some of the wild yeast
and bacterias, I think the beers start to hold up a lot better.
They don't tend to get oxidized, and they don't get a tired taste.
When beer oxidizes, it gets kind of a cardboardy, papery character.
And for some reason, these beers don't tend to oxidize very much.
So, they hold up pretty well. So to answer your question, you know, this
beer drinks great right when it comes out of the brewery.
I think it drinks fine after a year. Three to five years, it's probably going to
be drinking okay, but it's really not intended to be aged beyond that like you would like
a cab wine.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: Yep. We'll open one of those. [laughter] So, this is another beer and it's funny --
a lot of the beers that we've done, we really just kind of stumble across.
This beer is called the Curieux; it's our triple.
It's aged in Jim B. bourbon barrels for only about two months.
The bourbon barrels totally transform this beer.
So it goes in tasting like the triple, which we talked about -- you guys have tried.
The reason we came up with this beer -- Susan's totally all rep'd in this area.
She's sick of hearing this story, but you have to listen to it again.
So, it's a true story. We had a -- as I mention, these bottles come
from Europe. It's a very traditional bottle in Belgium
for the Trappist breweries and a lot of the other beers in Belgium.
It's a heavy glass bottle which can withstand high carbonation levels which these beers
have. And we need to get these bottles from Europe,
and there was a shipment that was delayed, and we needed to bottle a batch of triple.
It was in a tank; it was tying up a tank. We had to brew into the tank two or three
days later. So we needed to bottle this beer.
We weren't kegging the triple at the time. But we were going to be basically a couple
pallets of bottles short, which would have left about 120 gallons of beer in the tank.
So we also -- about two weeks prior -- had gotten two Jim Beam bourbon barrels from Jim
Beam, which we were going to experiment with a couple different kind of beers.
We really thought that the darker beer would be better suited for a bourbon barrel.
I think it's one of those almost misconceptions. A lot of people think that a darker beer is
higher alcohol. For some reason, we thought that a darker
beer would be the only thing that would work in a bourbon barrel.
But we had this triple; we don't like to waste beer.
So we -- instead of dumping the beer that didn't have a home in bottles -- we filled
these two bourbon barrels, *** the barrels up very tightly for -- I don't know why we
seal these barrels so tightly -- with wooden bungs, which will hold the pressure on the
barrel really well. And basically put them in our warm room where
we re-ferment our beers. And that was on a Wednesday.
I came in on a Saturday, and it looked like the barrels were about to explode basically.
They were almost like shaking with pressure. There was beer squirting out between the staves
of the barrels. [laughter] And the heads of the barrels were literally
bulging. And I panicked, because if one of those explodes,
it will be an unimaginable mess probably. And so, I ran and got a hammer and a screwdriver.
And I just tried to tap one of the bungs, and I was going to gently bleed some pressure
out. And I basically just touched the *** and
it exploded, went up and hit the ceiling. I got covered with beer.
I couldn't see anything. [laughter] So I took off my glasses and there was like
foam kind of geysering out. It was calming down a little, but geysering
out of the *** and cascading down the side of the barrel.
So I got down on my knees and -- it was the first thing I could think of doing -- and
just started like sucking the foam off the side of the barrel. [laughing / clapping]
So and I was like sucking the foam, and then I pause, and I was like, "Wow, this stuff's
like really good." [laughter] And it had totally transformed -- I forget
which one. Did I pour one yet?
No. Oh, there it is.
So, it had just totally transformed the beer. Because it had been tripled.
We put in the cask just a couple days before. And it had these like huge coconut flavors,
huge vanilla flavors, some herbal characters. And I like ran to the phone and called Jason,
who's now our brewmaster. And I was like, "Man, we've got to make this
stuff." So that next Monday, we called Jim Beam and
ordered ten bourbon barrels, so. We got a great relationship with Jim Beam.
They're really good people. I was just actually talking to them this week
about getting barrels from them next year. We're probably the smallest customer they
have for buying. It's pretty good business for them -- the
used bourbon barrels. If it says 'bourbon' on the bottle, they can
only use the barrel one time. So they have all these barrels to sell.
A lot of them go to single malt scotch distilleries. Some of them go to make tequilas and rums
probably and other whiskeys. But they're kind enough to only -- you know,
we only buy a couple hundred a year from them, but they take good care of us.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: I don't know the exact number. It's over a hundred bucks to get them to us
though. By the time it's delivered, it's well over
a hundred dollars. And so, it's a pretty big market -- the used
barrel business. But they're great people, Jim Beam.
And I love Jim Beam. I love Jim Beam, just the white label Jim
Beam, so.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: Yeah, okay. I'll go through those. And how am I doing on time too? Just what
do we got? We're good? All right.
Till the beer's gone -- that's when the thing ends, right?
Basically, first of all, all of our bottled beers go through a process called 'bottled
conditioning'. And it's a process that's traditional in the
traditional breweries in Belgium. Not all Belgium brewers do it.
And very few breweries in the U.S. do it. And basically what that process -- the beer
gets bottled with a little or no carbonation. And just prior to bottling it -- just like
the champagne makers do -- we'll add a fresh dose of yeast and sugar to the beer, mix it
up, and then bottle it. And then the beer goes into our warm room
-- or our cellar -- and there's a secondary fermentation of the bottle.
The yeast will eat the sugar, give off carbon dioxide and alcohol, and that process can
take a week to a few months depending on the beer, but it naturally carbonates the beer.
So that's why these beers all have a yeast sediment in the bottom of them.
But that process gives you a huge amount of additional layers of flavor and aromas and
complexity. And it also increases the shelf life of the
beer by quite a bit. So the basic run down of the white.
I mentioned traditional Belgian style wheat beer -- five percent unfiltered and spiced.
The double and triple are the Trappist style beers we brew, which I described those.
The next would be the Curieux, which is our triple age in the Jim Beam bourbon barrels.
And then, a couple beers we haven't tried yet.
I think the only other two are the Odyssey and the Black.
The Odyssey is an interesting one. We brewed that.
And we have a real open culture at the brewery. If anyone has an idea on a beer, we're open
to listening to it. It's not just me -- in fact, I didn't come
up with most of these beers. It's usually someone at the brewery that has
a cool idea for a cool beer. And we'll all kind of look at each other and
be like, "Yeah, let's try it. Let's try brewing it."
So, you know, anyone -- even if they work in the office -- they can come up with an
idea for a beer. And nowadays -- I mean, we used to just brew
it and dry it. Nowadays, we'll be a little more methodical
and do it on a small scale, but. A guy named Scott Abel came up with this recipe.
And it's a dark wheat beer. And it's very unlike most wheat beers that
you usually think of as traditional wheat beers.
A lot of roasted malts. When we fermented it out the first time, it
really didn't have a whole lot of character. It was kind of thin and dry.
But we liked where the beer was going, so we decided to take a small portion of it and
age it in new American oak barrels. Kind of give it a real like vanilla, mocha
character. So we took about 25, 30 percent of the beer,
got some new American oak barrels -- the same ones they'd used if you were aging a wine
in an American oak barrel -- and aged the beer for ten months in the oak, aged the remainder
of the beer for ten months in stainless steel, and then blended the two together.
And again, just between the time in that oak, it totally transforms the beer.
You can get a big vanilla character in this beer.
This particular batch has got almost a little bit of a smoky character to it and mocha.
That's all from the medium and light toast oak barrels.
Something else I going to mention about this beer but I forgot, so.
It's interesting -- with the barrels, a lot of people say, you know, "Why do you age in
barrels? Is that just kind of marketing or gimmicky?
Does it really do anything to the beer?" And the answer is, "It absolutely transforms the
beer. It becomes a totally different beer."
If you were to take this same base beer -- age the same beer in a bourbon barrel, a
wine barrel that's been used for wine, a new American oak barrel, a new French oak barrel,
you get totally different beers out of those barrels after a few months.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: Absolutely yeah. Yeah. It picks up tons of flavors of vanillans from
the wood, tannens from the wood, a number of flavors.
And actually, and we use this with the Interlude. A lot of these microbes, bacterias, and wild
yeast can actually live in the wood. The wood can support them.
So you can empty a barrel, and those microbes will stay in it.
And then add another batch of beer, age it for six months to a year, and those microbes
will start working away at that beer, transforming it, giving you some nice tart characters,
funky characters. So.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: Well, the normal triple and the Curieux. Yeah.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: That's a good point. I mean you can put the triple and the Curieux
next to each other and they're just totally different beers.
It really transforms the beers.
Q [inaudible] [laughter]
Rob Tod: Yeah, sure. The odyssey?
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: Oh, are you guys out of this one? If you want, pass it around. No problem.
Yeah, pass it around. Yeah. It's a pretty cool beer.
You get -- and there's just all kinds of -- with the Curieux, it was funny.
We had been making it for six or so months, and I brought it to -- actually it was the
Ommegang -- Belgium comes to Cooperstown brew fest -- which if any of you like brew fest,
that's a phenomenal brew fest. It's great. You get to -- you can camp out.
They have really cool beers. It's a really great setting.
The Ommegang Brewery is beautiful. And I was at that, and this guy Lew Bryson
-- who's a good friend of mine and Philly -- who's a beer writer -- he takes a sip
of the Curieux and he's like, "Woe, there's dill in this."
And I'm like, "What? Dill?" And so I tasted some.
I was like, "Woe, I do get a dill character from this."
I was like, "I wonder if like someone had pickles in this keg before or something.
It tasted like dill pickly. And I kind of panicked.
I was like, "You know, what's the deal with these kegs?" And then I went back to the brewery.
We tried some different batches of Curieux; they all have this dill character.
And a few months later, I was looking at a flavor wheel that I had gotten from a barrel
manufacturer that showed all these different flavors you get from oak, and one of them
is like an herbaceous dill character. So that's something you get out of the oak
for this particular beer. And interestingly enough, I mentioned, if
you age the same beer in different oak barrels, you get a different beer out of each of these
barrels. If you age different beers in the same type
of oak barrel -- so if you have five different bourbon barrels, put five different beers
in it, the beers take different flavors out of the oak.
Or at least the flavors that come out of the oak express themselves differently in each
of these different kinds of beers. So it's really interesting.
The Curieux -- you get that dill from the oak.
We do another beer called the 'Musette' that's aged in the bourbon barrels.
You don't get that dill. You get a lot of mocha character from the
oak. So it's pretty interesting. Yep.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: Good question. I totally stumbled into the beer business, literally.
I mean, you can see the picture of me. That was like -- beer for me was the, you
know -- the cheaper, the better. When I was living in -- I went to school in
Vermont, lived in Colorado for a couple years. I was basically drinking 3.99 twelve packs
of Hams and 3.99 twelve packs of pilsner club and I was very happy.
And I moved back to Vermont where I'd gone to school, and I was going to go to grad school
for geology. And actually my parents were excited, because
they were like, you know, "Finally, after four years of college, you got some direction."
And I wanted to be a geology teacher. So they were all excited that I had some direction.
And the day I got back to Middlebury, Vermont, where I'd gone to school, I called a buddy
of mine -- like found a place to live, got on the phone, called a buddy of mine.
I said, "Hey, dude. I just need a job. I'll do anything.
Just, I want a job. Do you know of anything in town?"
And he was, "Do you want to wash kegs at a brewery that I work at?"
I didn't even know that was a job. [laughter] And the lightbulb went off in my head.
I was like, "Is there free beer involved with this job?"
And he said, "Yeah, there's free beer. You get, you know, a half gallon of beer every
day." So I said, "I'll take the job." [laughter]
So, I showed up that day, and I had done a lot of jobs during college and high school
-- a lot of construction jobs in the summer. And I've done a lot of that work in Colorado.
And I love working with my hands. I love construction. And I'd done a lot of plumbing and some welding.
And I walked into -- and I love just building things and working with my hands.
I walked in the brewery and I was like, "Wow, this has got like everything." Electrical,
plumbing, and there's pipes everywhere, and pumps and motors.
And I worked there for two days, and I saw that.
I saw like the creative end of brewing. I tasted these beers which I really never
tasted before. I was like, "Wow, I didn't know that places
like made these beers." And I just fell in love with it in two days.
And I remember, I called my parents. And my mom and dad were on the phone and I
was like, "I've got news for you guys." And they were excited that I was getting a grad
school application. And I said, "I've decided I'm not going to
grad school. I'm going to be a brewer for a living." [laughter]
And it's like silence on the other end of the line.
And then, after like -- you know, it seemed an eternity, my mom goes, "Rob, one of these
days, you're going to have to stop living in a fantasyland." [laughter]
So, but after awhile, they got behind it, and they realized it was a legitimate business.
So. But I literally stumbled into it.
I have no idea what I'd be doing now, probably teaching geology, which I would have been
happy with. But I sure wouldn't have been able to drink
in the middle of the day if I was teaching geology, so. [laughter]
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: What the Belgian beers. One of the things that's always intrigued
me. When I was at -- I brewed at Otter Creek;
that's where I spent the first year, which is a great brewery.
The owner there was super-supportive of me going off and starting a brewery which was
cool. But every once in awhile -- during say, a
month's period, people would bring in beers that they'd get at a liquor store maybe.
Because at that time there was just all these beers coming out in the market.
Imports coming in. And people would bring these beers in, put
them in the fridge, and we'd accumulate maybe ten or 15 beers.
And then, after work, we just tried the different beers.
Everyone would try a little bit of each of these beers.
And whenever anyone brought these Belgian style beers, and I was like, "Wow, what is
going on with this?" I mean, they were just all over the map.
There was sour beers and fruit beers and these brett beers and the Trappist beers, Cezannes,
wheat beers -- it was just all over the map. And I was just intrigued by -- it's almost
like there's an unlimited palette you can draw from with ingredients with yeast and
kind of make whatever you want. So I liked the fact that it was just so experimental
by nature and so much different. And also, at the time, there were only a couple
breweries in the country doing Belgian style beers exclusively.
And funny enough, there still are only a couple breweries in the country that do exclusively
Belgian style beers. So.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: It's funny -- a lot of our, you know -- knock on wood -- like larger-scale beers
we've been pretty blessed with, I think. One of the reasons I think we haven't made
too many big mistakes with those beers -- and there's a couple, I'll mention -- but
we've really been methodical about the way we've grown.
We've been in business 15 years. A lot of breweries will start out with six
or seven different beers and bottling and kegging and multiple territories.
We just started -- 4:00? Oh, how much time do we have? Five minutes?
Okay -- we really tried to take the approach, "walk before we run." We just did one beer,
draft only, just in the Portland market. And spent a year doing that. And then added
another beer. So as we've gotten more daring with our beers
-- we've only done it when we've had a lot of experience under our belt.
But there are definitely some beers -- like, the first time we did the Grand Crew, we used
anise in that beer. And for our white beer -- back then in a batch,
which was about 500 gallons/15-barrel batch, we put sixteen ounces of coriander in it.
So we're like, "sixteen ounces of coriander, sixteen ounces of anise."
So we dumped it in. It was like drinking liquid licorice.
And just to give you an idea how much it was, we worked that recipe all the way down to
a tablespoon of anise to give it a little bit of that licorice taste.
But that particular batch of beer just -- so, we should have just dumped it, but we
were cutting like one barrel of this one batch into every single larger batch that year for
like months and months. So we've had some issues like that for sure.
Yep.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: Oh, sure. Actually I'm going to hold onto these, because I need.
I don't know if this is enough for me to get through the rest of the thing. [laughter]
No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, pass the -- you can definitely.
Oh yeah, and I haven't even talked about the Blacks, so.
Here, I'll open the Black; pass that around. And then I think we ought to finish up.
So this -- last -- oh, I got to show you guys the slides of the brewery too.
Okay, we're going to *** through these. Hops. I have this in there.
People asked about the hop prices, whether that was real.
That pallet of hops a year-and-a-half ago would have cost us about four, five thousand
dollars. Last year, we had to buy that on-the-spot
market, it cost about $60,000. So, yes, there was a hop crisis. [laughter]
Here's pictures of the brewery.
>> [inaudible]
Rob Tod: You sure? Okay. Okay cool. The hops are grown in the Pacific Northwest
and also in Czechoslovakia for -- the bulk of our hops. So.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: It was a market worldwide crisis. It was all kinds of things.
It was like a perfect storm. For years, hop prices have been depressed.
Farmers weren't making money on it. They were pulling their crops.
And it takes a couple years for a hop crop to really establish itself.
So, they were pulling it out, and basically supply was starting to go down, and it got
to the point where supply dipped right down to where demand was.
And at the same time that happened, there was a big warehouse fire.
A bunch of hops burned in a warehouse -- couple percent of the supply.
There was a spidermite infestation in the Pacific Northwest.
And there's hailstorms in Germany that destroyed crops.
So all this stuff happened at once. And there was a panic.
Hops is one of those things that there's a little bit of extra hops in the market, the
price goes way down, because you know, people don't really do anything with hops except
make beer. But, if you're two percent short on hop supply,
brewers will pay anything just to get, you know, to not run out of beer or out of the
ability to make beer. Some other pictures of the brewery.
This is the new brewery. That's our bottling line with some tanks in
the background. This is Tom rinsing off some bourbon barrels
after filling them to make the Curieux.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: Off the record. Actually, we are required to make sure we dump the barrels
so there's no alcohol left in the barrels. And we usually do get a little bit of bourbon
out of some of those barrels. [laughter] So, it comes out looking like this from the
charcoal. Then you pour it through a coffee filter,
it comes out crystal clear out the other side of the coffee filter.
And it is potent. It's uncut. So there's some bourbon barrels there.
A 2500 gallon foder -- French oak foder in the background, which we've been aging beer
in that for a year with some of these wild yeasts that are in the Interlude.
Should I pass this Curieux around too? You guys -- is this? You might as well drink
these beers, right? There's Jason I think actually sampling some
bourbon after it's been filtered. Do you guys want this one too?
Going to pass that around. So, here's Jason with a couple.
This is a real open business. We have brewers from all over the country
coming in the brewery. You guys saw Sam Calagione speak here.
I'm very good friends with Sam. Everyone's real friendly in this business.
Any brewer can always come in our brewery. There's no secrets there.
These are some brewers from Belgium that we did a collaboration brew with.
And this is actually that same day. Jason is pouring a collaboration beer I did
with Tommy, Vinnie, Adam, and Sam. Yep.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: Okay. Oh, yeah. Yep. With the higher alcohol beers, we really haven't
gotten into doing -- our highest alcohol beer is the Curieux at 11 percent.
We really haven't gotten into those. But those beers are really cool.
I mean, Sam's got some really cool higher alcohol beers, like the 120-minute IPA and
what's the really? The Worldwide Stout, yeah.
Just that higher alcohol. It's not just to have higher alcohol.
That really gives you some cool flavors. Sam Adams does the Utopias, which I love.
You just get -- it almost drinks like a liquor, as much as a beer.
Or like a port. But we haven't really done anything over 11
percent. I don't think we will.
We're more interested in messing around with some of the wild yeast and bacterias.
But those higher alcohol beers are pretty cool.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: That's a very good lead in question for this.
I went to Belgium with that same group of guys -- Sam, Adam, Tommy, Vinnie.
And we really focused on visiting lambic breweries. When I was over there, I got all excited about
lambic beers. And then, towards the end of the trip, I was
like, "You know what? These are really -- let's leave these to the
Belgians." These beers -- basically, what you do with
these beers is, you brew a batch of beer, and instead of cooling it after the brewing
process, after the boil, in a sterile heat exchanger and adding a single-cell yeast culture
and fermenting the beer out with this controlled yeast culture, you cool the beer in a big
open vessel exposed to the outside air. The outside air both cools the beer and it
also adds natural yeast and bacteria to the beer.
And basically, all brewers -- really, in the world -- have always been told that you can
only really make these traditional lambic beers in the Zenne Valley region in the Brussels
area -- in Belgium. So, I just woke up one morning about a year
after going on that trip, and I was just like, "Let's just try making these beers. Why not?"
So, it'll probably be a huge waste of money, but you can see -- we built -- this is a koelschip
that we built on the slide here. This holds about 400 gallons of beer.
The boiled wort goes into this vessel, cools overnight, gets inoculated with natural yeast
and bacteria from Portland. We had no idea whether this would work.
We didn't do any kind of experimentation. We just did it.
It was kind of stupid. [laughter] But we were curious to see if it would work.
And it actually did work. The beer -- you can see this is the wort being
pumped into this room. The louvered windows let the air in.
I don't know if we'll ever sell this beer. We were more just curious to see if it would
work.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: No. No breweries outside of Belgium really do it.
Some breweries in the U.S. have done some spontaneously fermented beers, but none that
I know of have built like a commercial koelschip. So.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: Two years. We brewed this batch just about two years ago.
This is the next morning. It's the smallest of the batches we did.
This batch actually -- the Eves Spneel who does a festival every two years in Belgium.
It's one of the big lambic and sour beer fests -- was over at the brewery about two or three
months ago, and tasted this first batch and the second batch.
And he wants it at a brew fest he's holding over there in December for traditional lambics.
And a traditional unblended lambic is two years old.
It's not a combination of different barrels; it comes from one barrel.
It's basically uncarbonated, spontaneously fermented beer.
And we're bottling that beer I think Monday -- this batch -- two years old after fermenting
spontaneously in French oak. And you know, it came out pretty well.
So we'll see what the reaction is. We were just curious to see if it worked.
That's that batch of beer fermenting in the barrel just from natural yeast and bacteria
from Portland. It tastes like -- have you ever had some of
the sour beers? It tastes like a lambic beer. It's a little
different. It's definitely a little different, but we've
also taken a number of those barrels and added fruit to them.
Some sour cherries, some raspberries, we've added the barrels.
And it's tasting pretty good. We're actually kind of surprised.
All right. I should probably -- I'll quickly mention, This last beer is the Allagash Black.
This is basically -- it's again another recipe. It's loosely based on a Stout, but it's fermented
with a Belgian yeast strain. So we call it like a Belgian Stout, for lack
of a better description -- not really a stout, but it's just the Allagash Black, so.
Q [inaudible]
Rob Tod: Definitely, and actually Susan who reps us in the market can tell you the best
place to get it or where to get it.
Q [long inaudible question]
Rob Tod: That's the brewery crew there. We're an interesting crew.
>> Sadly guys, we have to stop. I could listen to this stuff for hours.
But we do have another event in here at 4:30. Thank you, everybody, for coming.
Thank you, Rob Tod.
Rob Tod: Thank you guys very much.
>> [Clapping]