On the Map

The National Geographic Central Cascades Geotourism MapGuide was released yesterday. We are honored to be included on the map and the website. What more can I say? See you at the pub.

Collaboration

The 2010 KLCC collaboration brew was brewed on Saturday. An interesting project for myself, as the recipe required three grains, three strains of hops, and a yeast that I've never used before. The ratios of the grains were predetermined, but the hop drops were up to each brewery. This is billed as a Belgian Cascadian Dark Rye Ale, and I was so glad the the brewers avoided the tragedy of calling it a Dark IPA.

The sparge progressed rather slowly, I suspect due to the presence of the rye and the dark munich. They seemed to shatter to a higher degree in the mill than the other grains. I don't have the luxury of being able to adjust the fineness of the grind for the different grains; the mill is set right where I want it for the bulk of what I brew and I'm afraid to tweek it.

The yeast is another matter. It is the WY3522 Ardennes yeast, a Belgian strain, that I harvested off the bottom of one of the conicals at Oakshire. While I collected a full quart jar, by the time it chilled and settled here at the brewery it had packed down into less than a pint. This gave me no small concern as to the risk of underpitching. Too late to fetch more, though. Its behavior was unlike the usual dry British strains that I use, so I'm having to use observation and the nose to determine as best I can as to how things are going. I thought it had a slow start. Right now, Monday morning, it has a nice brown crust and the aroma is starting to develop. The krausen is not real thick and foamy, but maybe this is just the way it behaves. There is not a whole lot I can do about it, though. I'm expecting to hold the temperature a little warmer towards the end so as to mitigate the likelihood of diacetyls due to the potential of having underpitched. Geeky stuff, eh? More to come.

If this turns out alright, it is possibly the first ever cask-conditioned Belgian Cascadian Dark Rye ale ever produced in a commercial brewery. Who knows.

Cask Swap

The Block15 brewpub in Corvallis is now serving real ale. Rapidly, it seems, as I received an email from them last week that they were about to run out, and as I brew the stuff, I was asked if I could spare a firkin or five.

Yesterday I loaded up the battered old Jeep and brought them four casks. It was nice the see the setup in the cellar, and have a draw of a lovely brown ale. Probably today or tomorrow there will be a Brewers Union cask pulling through the Angram. Soon I expect to receive some Block15 real ale for the first ever guest casks at the pub.

New Years Day. It's been a while since I've been on here, not due to the lack of material, but rather a side effect of the quantity of life to live this time of year. This belated entry is brought to you by a bottle of Hardknott Brewery ale that has traveled 8 time zones in a customer's luggage. Cheers! I'm almost tempted to do a video review, in which I might mention its liveliness.

It's a quiet day here in the pub. This effect is achieved by being shut. After getting out of the pub after 3:00 AM last night (this morning) I managed to sleep until 11:00 AM. That was a long day, including a great evening party of music and happy peeps. Another 45 minutes of lounging was required to convince myself that it was to be a brew day, being that my usual weekend brewing days were to be otherwise occupied this weekend. I didn't want to move. I knew everyone else would likely be avoiding work, perhaps engaging in some form of recreation or watching some silly Rose Bowl thingy. Motivation to leave the comfort of home and drive to the brewery came reluctantly. It's taken half a day for me to realize the privilege I have of spending a day in my own brewery, doing what I like to do. A line from Billy Bragg's "The Short Answer" comes to mind, and if you correctly mention it to me at the pub then there's a pint in one of the pumps with your name on it.

(The "Final Frontier" in the bottle has a bit of a spicy quality to it. I'm sure Woolpack Dave, who is out there somewhere, will divulge the hop that is causing that).

So far I avoided the widespread practice of doing a Poll or Best Of or some sort of Resolution on this blog. Not going to happen; my regard for patterns of numerical significance on the calendar is minimal. Nearly every day there is some sort of personal or business widget that needs tweaking. There is some good stuff coming up on the short term horizon, though. In the very, very, very short term, there is a batch of Union Dew undergoing heat exchange in the brewery right now, giving me time to write this entry. The next batch after this is going to be interesting; this year I get to be involved in the local Collaboration Beer. Around a dozen local breweries are brewing the same beer. Mostly. The relative percentages in the grain bill is determined. The yeast is a WY3522 Ardennes, which I will be harvesting from Oakshire in the next couple of weeks. The three hops have been named, but the timing and quantity of the drops are up to the brewery. For me, never having had formal training or time spent in a large brewery, I'm given the challenge of working with three hops, a strain of yeast, and three types of grain that I've never used before. Needless to say, the nourishing liquid that we release will be the only cask-conditioned offering to be sampled at the KLCC Microbrew Festival in February.

In the longer term, we will be continuing to refine the menu, adding a larger and more diverse list of daily specials. Some new experimental ales are also on the horizon, and I'm hoping to acquire some more firkins this summer when hopefully the cash flow issues might ease, as I would like to do more aging with wood.

See you at the pub. All six engines are deployed, but I think the Tanninbomb cask's days are numbered.

Reminders

I had started this post a couple of days ago, when events were at their freshest in my slowly decaying cortex. Now that it's no longer a couple of days ago, and being in the here and the now, I totally erased the original text. I had to think about it some more, as the random notion that a bit of introspection might be useful and constructive comes fleeting by all too infrequently. I have a few moments between running errands in Eugene and driving a wagonload of goods, so why not pop by High Street Cafe, my Eugene local, to have a pint or two and get this post sorted out.

Running a pub is a silly business. It's a one-sided marriage to a building, a mostly-organized collection of property contained within, and a handful of people rummaging about trying to bring a pleasant experience all around to what one hopes is more than a mere handful of other people. Even with being closed on Tuesdays for the Winter, there is still plenty to occupy the time. Some days I just have to be there to wait for the distributors to show up. Others are spent at the bar, or in the brewery. Today I had hoped to tackle the paperwork on the desk, the late duty report to the TTB, and the messy brew kettle from Sunday's brewday. Instead I'm in Eugene doing the stock run and other errands. This is really a job for Chef, but as he doesn't have a car yet I'm fine with doing it. Once in a while. Then I catch myself starting to grumble. About having to work every day. About the stress. About the negative bank account. About trying to keep the staffing just right, and making sure the menu stays interesting, and worrying about where the money is going to come from to pay the DHS for my restaurant certificate and OTIC for keeping the shiny blue and white signs on the highway. Oh, and the mortgage company was curious why they hadn't received my mortgage payment yet.

(Insert moment of introspection here)

I used to be a highly paid software engineer. After almost 30 years of endeavoring to bend silicon to my will, I gave it up at the end of 2004. Figuring out that I would have a go at diving into the pub and brewery business, for real, started less than two years later. It's been non-stop ever since. I think there are three types of people who go into this job: those that don't know what they're getting into, those that theoretically know what there getting into, and those that know full-blown experientially what they're getting into and do it anyway because they are crazy in a nice sort of way. I think I can safely say that I started out in the middle, having made sure that I would have the opportunity to immerse myself in the environment to see what goes on under the hood. Valuable time was spent at the Woolpack Inn in Cumbria doing just that. And then you plop yourself down in your own pub and the warp drive kicks in. When your signature is the one that the bank expects on the checks, then you notice yourself being drawn into the third category, and then things can get gloomy. Without introspection. And reminders.

I found myself seeking out John Gorka's "Land of the Bottom Line" off my iPhone in the car today. A favorite of mine, and a good reminder. Freedom, or rather, an exchange of freedoms. Today I had the freedom of choosing what I was going to do, and when I was going to do it, within the certain constraints of business, family, community theater obligations, store hours and that late night hour or two of World of Warcraft so I can get that nice new piece of PvE gear. I can see the purpose behind what I'm doing. It's satisfying in a non-monetary sort of way. The original post, the one that I erased, was about the fun and fantastic night we had Saturday night. Norm, Kelly T, Erika and Kip put on a great house gig. I wanted to get that reminder back in this post, because that's what had set it off in the first place. I sat there in the back of the pub that night, on a stool with a pint of cask-conditioned Tanninbomb (from a brewery in Oakridge, Oregon, can you believe it?), and watched the magic that makes a pub a pub. That's a good enough shot in the arm to keep it up for another week or two.

F.A.Q. #1: Distribution

After being open more than 15 months, we get asked a lot of questions. As I work my own bar at least 20 hours a week, I have gathered my own collection of mental notes. I will likely be writing about some of the questions that get asked the most over the next couple of weeks.

A couple months ago the friendly guys from The Eastburn in Portland popped by on a quiet afternoon. Not more than a couple of words in, I was asked if they could buy a keg to take back up to Portland. I would wager that most breweries and brewpubs in Oregon are equipped to do this. Not so with us. First of all, with a few rare exceptions, we don't do any kegging. Our brew length is 8 firkins or 2 UK BBL. This translates into around 90 US gallons. There have been a couple of instances where there was enough ale left in the bottom of the fermenter to draw off into a corny keg, which holds five gallons, providing an interesting demonstration of the difference between a kegged and a casked version of the same ale. But, for the overwhelming amount of the volume produced, a pub interested in handling our ale would have to know how to handle a firkin.

Now, I know that there are a small number of establishments in Oregon that advertise cask conditioned beer. I also know that what they are in truth handling are kegs, likely Sankeys, to which they affix a beer engine. The contents of the kegs are dubiously named cask-conditioned beer, which in many cases simply contain ale destined for keg that has been drawn off from the fermenter and primed in the cask (keg). Handling a firkin is different. The requirements are: stillage, preferably with an auto-tilt; proper temperature control; sundries such as spiles and the right kind of taps for hammering into a keystone; and, very importantly, someone who knows how to handle all these things. So far, despite extensive research, I have only found a handful of places that can handle this. I have high hopes for Block 15, as they soon will be handling real ale in such a way that I would feel comfortable doing cask swaps.

Another important reason for not distributing is simple economics. Even if a pub were to be equipped with all the trappings and knowledge for handling real ale, there is still the problem of (as we are a business) making any money off of selling them a cask. A firkin nominally holds 72 20 oz. pints. In reality we might get 68 or so. Multiply this by the $4.50 to $5.50 we sell a pint for over the bar. For the sake of argument, let's just say that I can gross $350 for a cask. Not counting the brewer's labor, because we don't pay him, the cost of goods sold is around 10% to 20% of the gross. Now, if you, the pub or bar owner, wanted to purchase a cask, you would want to pay in the wholesale range. Kegs, 15.5 US gallons, go for $130 to $140, generally speaking. A firkin contains 10.8 US gallons, or around 2/3 the volume of a keg, so you would want to pay around $90. I could argue for the premium nature of our beer, given it's rarity and the fact that we brew small batches. I did manage to get $150 for the two casks I brought up to the Firkin Fest last year, but I guess that that would be an exception. So, it's easy to see that selling a pint over our own bar is the way to go. We can make sure that it is well kept while at the same time keeping the doors open and the lights on.

Another nice reason for not distributing is that we can stay in control of the delicate liquid. Yesterday I put on the first cask of Tanninbomb, my oak-aged old ale. I like having the confidence that the beer will be handled properly and described and discussed by our own staff. I suggest you pry yourself out of your house and come down for a pint. See you at the pub.

Frost on the Bumpkin

Yesterday I posted that a one-off winter stout is headed for the pumps. I couldn't resist trying it last night, and decided that it was ready to serve. It's deliciously malty and smooth, with a hint of rye. I believe at least a dozen pints have been liberated already.