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Tag Archives: Niagara College

Green Flash OR At Least I Learned Something

May 8, 2012 3:51 pm ⋅ Leave a Comment ⋅

Sometimes, you’ll have one of those moments where the things that you have learned suddenly snap into place and you’re left talking competently about a subject that you thought you didn’t care about. The second semester at Niagara College was based largely around the scientific aspects of brewing. Of course there’s all manner of information available about the ingredients that go into making beer, but the equipment being used in order to facilitate all of that action is important too.

The difficulty is that I wasn’t there for the first month or so of the second semester and never really caught up. The thing you have to understand about Niagara College is that if you’re going to go there to learn about beer, you have to move there. Well, St. Catharines, anyway. There were a couple of students in first year who were commuting from Toronto, but they fared rather better than I did because they were on the same schedule and had the ability to carpool. A sense of camaraderie is important in a situation like this.

In my case, I would get up at about 5:30, drink several cups of coffee, get to the Bay/Dundas bus terminal by 7:00 (leaving the house at 6:30), get on the bus, get to St. Catharines about 8:25, get on the bus to Niagara College and then get to school no earlier than 8:43. I would go to whatever classes there were and then get back on the bus and commute the two and a half hours to my apartment. If you consider the cost of the return trip including the TTC fare… well, don’t.

People ask why I didn’t just drive: I don’t drive. I know how in a vague “I’ve played a lot of Need For Speed Underground” kind of way, although I suspect that I would probably confuse the windshield wiper lever for the nitro booster jets in a real car. What do you mean they don’t have nitro booster jets in real cars? Friend, I think you’re mistaken. Next, you’ll be telling me that carbon fiber doesn’t make it go faster.

For about five months I was doing really well. I made honor roll the first semester, which was good. Then I got offered a book to write and I had to do that and the technical stuff fell aside. Deadlines would crop up, or I’d have to write a column (for which the deadline is usually Thursday. So much for that afternoon class.) Eventually, with the number of tasks to perform, commuting 4-5 hours a day was impossible.

People ask why I didn’t just work on the bus. I did. Sometimes. Initially. Eventually you just get run down and tired. I slept for three days after first semester. You get sick because you’re on a bus with people sneezing and coughing. Also, brewing technology is a pretty hands on kind of thing. The driver frowns on dismantling a pump on the bus.

Essentially what happened was that I started writing about beer in order to get into brewing school and by the time I was in brewing school it was more or less the main source of income and therefore the thing to prioritize. I more or less inadvertently succeeded my way out of the original plan.

The thing is this: You can write about anything. You can’t bloody well brew about anything. Try brewing a treatise on Keynesian economics. Probably, people will not get past the first paragraph.

I was pleased to learn, while I was in San Diego, that I have picked up enough technical brewing information to tell you the following:

Even the outside is fancy.

Green Flash is the most wonderful brewery I have ever seen. A lot of the time when we talked about brewery tech in Gord Slater’s class at Niagara, we were tailoring the information to making things fit together. Most breweries don’t have the luxury of getting everything brand new. A lot of the equipment is bought second hand or jury rigged together or improvised.

In the time before forklifts, the tricyclist’s union was a very powerful political lobby in California. For more on this see Steinbeck’s Of Trikes and Men.

Green Flash is what happens when you have the opportunity to start over from scratch at a new location when you’re in the middle of your life as a brewery. The fermenters are 250BBL behemoths and their layout is such that they maximize the space in the brewery. Green Flash has nearly doubled in production in the last year, up to 45000BBL. Chuck Silva has managed somehow to design a walkway that sits between the tops of the fermenters making it easier to dry hop the fermenting beers. There’s talk of doubling production in the next couple of years.

2000 barrels of beer ticking merrily along.

The fermenters are next to the CIP system. I would not have thought that a CIP system would be remotely interesting to me, but this sucker is flat out sexy. It has dual 10HP pumps. It’s got a sleek touchscreen interface. I was floored by it. I guess if you’re going to significantly dry hop your beers, you need that kind of power in order to wash away residue.

I feel like I should be making Tim Allen style noises and/or talking like Jeremy Clarkson about power.

The brewhouse is similarly impressive. It has two 50 BBL kettles that run simultaneously and the biggest hopback I’ve ever seen. I would guess it’s a 2 BBL hopback. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it allows you to run wort from the kettle through a vessel filled with hops to whatever system you’re using to cool beer. It lets you maximize the amount of aroma retention. I have seen industrial boilers smaller than this hopback. Great googily moogily.

See the hopback? See the dude next to it who’s really small? That’s how big the hopback is.

I was unable to ascertain the information from looking at it, but I think they’re working with a 72 head filler. I cannot really imagine this. I have worked with a single head filler and I’ve packaged off a six head filler. For craft beer, this is a production.

There’s the barrel aging program, just off the tasting room. While we were there, there was a display that showed the DNA structures of the various yeasts being used in the barrel aging process. If I understand correctly, there were also captures of brewmaster Chuck Silva’s DNA. This is a good reminder that the processes going on here are biological and not completely artistic. How much DNA do we share with yeast? Probably not as much as we share with dolphins.

DNA. It’s all sciencey and whatnot.

The tasting room is 4000 sq ft. It is five times as large as my apartment. Actually, if the tasting room had Wi-fi and a coffee maker, I could happily live there. They had a large number of beers on tap and even more for sale. They had a food truck outside. Merchandising takes up an entire wall. I wasn’t kidding in the paper when I said I liked it so much that I bought the t-shirt.

All tasting events, no matter the location, involve hanging around near where the beer is poured.

Now, Green Flash has only been around since 2002. I know that this kind of success doesn’t come overnight, and I can’t tell you how many untold hours of financial planning and design and experimentation went in to giving them the facility they have now, but this is a dream brewery. It’s a marvel. More than that, it finally allowed me to understand how all of this technology fits together and the implications of that information.

I said as much to Chuck Silva. He had the good grace not to beam too proudly.

Posted in: Niagara College, Shameless Plugs ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

So You Want To Be A Brewer: The Inevitability of Crushing Defeat At The Hands Of Mike Lackey

April 1, 2012 3:10 pm ⋅ 2 Comments ⋅

At some point in the middle of the last month, probably during a week when there were midterm exams, I was surprised by an email about the Ontario IPA Challenge. I knew it was coming up, but usually Volo sort of organizes their events independently and it seemed a little too early in the process for them to be sending an email to me, even as a save the date sort of thing for the judging. I was part of the panel of judges last year for the event, so I figured that’s probably what it was and assumed that I didn’t need to look at it immediately and went back to pretending to learn more about centrifugal pumps and turbulent flow than I was actually managing to do.

As it turns out, I was actually being invited to compete independently in the Ontario IPA Challenge as a brewer. This was not, as you may assume, a situation for that called for unalloyed joy.  There are a lot of things to take in to account in a situation like this one:

First of all, I’m not really a brewer. I’m a beer writer who’s a bit of a dilettante brewer on the side, sometimes, when I have a good idea and I’m pretty sure I can make a drinkable beer out of it. I’ve done two semesters of brewing school at Niagara College (initially pretty dashed well and then subsequently less well as I realized that taking on writing a book and 20 hours of commuting a week were mutually exclusive goals that only a madman would actually attempt. I mean, sometimes I require sleep.) and I’ve got about five collaborative brews under my belt.

Secondly, sometimes my beer actually turns out alright. Usually, when this happens I give credit to whomever I’m brewing with, whether it’s Paul Dickey or Mike Lackey or Jason Tremblay or Jon Hodd. The fact that not one of them has been a complete stinker is testament to the talent of these guys who are kind enough to let me borrow their brewing systems and make sure I don’t do anything really stupid. Probably, though, I can afford by now to take a little bit of credit for one thing: my beers have not actually killed anyone. Sometimes people even like them.

Thirdly, there is just no way that I was ever going to win the Ontario IPA Challenge. I was relatively sure that if I could get time on a system somewhere in Toronto and actually manage to brew a beer, it would probably end up being palatable. It might even make it to the second round, depending on the way the first leg of the contest was drawn up. Beyond that, probably not so much, especially since Mike Lackey continues in his seemingly endless path of IPA dominance.

Mike Lackey, as you’ll recall from previous years at the IPA challenge, has a reputation approximately the size of mechagodzilla. He had the top two beers in 2010. Karma Citra won last year, but I’m relatively sure that it crushed the competition by a wide margin and made grown people weep with its beauty. No one felt bad about losing to that beer. I’ve had that beer on tap since then, and honestly, I cannot envision a situation in which anyone will ever beat Mike Lackey in this challenge again unless he takes some ludicrous risks. Possibly, if someone shaves his beard, he will, like Samson, lose his powers.

It’s for that reason that I decided to just relax and have fun with the thing. Since I usually find a concept for a beer that I like and work backwards from that, I thought that it would be fun to work the other way, and I was obliged by my fellow Niagara College student Austin Roach. Austin is from an engineering background and a pretty analytical guy. I like working with him because we’re from more or less the same place geographically (East York) and we have a pretty similar sense of humour (huge nerds). When we talked about the recipe for the thing, he had just a bunch of ideas he wanted to try and I agreed with all of them.

For instance, you can’t win the Ontario IPA challenge by emulating the West Coast IPA style anymore. Great Lakes has that covered. What you could do is emulate the water in Chico, California. We like the hop presence of Sierra Nevada beers and suspect it has something to do with the water profile. He wanted to play with the myrcene and humulene that would come out during the boil in various different types of hops. Those are both hop oils. My favorite hop oil is Linalool because it sounds like something you’d name a Fairy Princess.

What? It does.

We have used a pretty odd assortment of hops in our entry for the Ontario IPA Challenge, including a couple that were completely off my radar for this kind of thing. I think the only one I’ve used before is Galaxy, which made an appearance in the Gin and Juice beer I did at Volo last month. We’ve got some Galena and First Gold and Bullion in there as well. We have not done a test batch. We are making it up as we go along, footloose and fancy free. This is really about playing with the way these hops express their character, rather than some esoteric conceit that I’ve come up with. (I know! Let’s make a welsh mild that utilizes Peruvian maca root espresso and then find some tenuous connection between Wales and the Andes. I’ve got it! Double “L”. Llama Milld. Brilliant!)

Paul Dickey receives our thanks for letting us brew on his system at Black Oak. He’s a most gracious host, and I’ve only had to write a Standard Operating Procedure for his pilot system in exchange for the time. That’s a pretty good deal, if you ask me.

We’re referring to the collaboration as St. Roach. It will be available at the 4th annual Ontario Cask IPA Challenge. All I can promise you is that we enjoyed making it and that it should be substantially different than the other entries while still falling within the BJCP American IPA definition.

Also, expect to see St.John’s Wort Llama Milld on tap somewhere just as soon as I can convince someone that a Peruvian maca root espresso Welsh Mild is a good idea.

Posted in: Bar Volo, Niagara College, Shameless Plugs ⋅ Tagged: , , , , ,

Let’s Kill The Cat And See What Happens

October 18, 2011 10:48 pm ⋅ 3 Comments ⋅

Mostly, brewing school tends to deal with biology and chemistry, but one of the major things that I’ve discovered is that there’s a significant amount of quantum physics involved. At least, for me that’s the case.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with the concept of Schrodinger’s cat. Essentially, it’s a thought experiment. The idea is that you’ve got this closed box which has a cat, a decaying radioactive element and a vial of poison in it. Because of the half life of the decaying radioactive element, the element has a 50-50 chance of having decayed during the process of the experiment, which causes the vial of poison to open and the cat to be sacrificed on the altar of science.

It’s called a quantum superposition. Essentially, because what happens in the box is unobservable until you open the box and either feed a slightly annoyed cat or dig a tiny grave, it’s impossible to know which reality exists. The answer must be that both realities exist, layered on top of one another. It’s important to stress that no animals were harmed in the process of the experiment. It’s not like Erich Schrodinger was sitting there in the lab with a plate of tuna trying to coax little fluffy into a box. I mean, if I were him, I would probably have used someone else’s cat for a start.

Let me put it another way:  A cat, a decaying radioactive element and a vial of poison walk into a bar. The bartender does or does not ask whether this is some kind of joke, the waveform of probability collapses and reality continues more or less as normal.

Because of the idea that observation is the crux of the experiment, simply the fact that the experiment is observed changes the outcome.

The same thing happens with journalism. I think the earliest example of this conceit in action is in Don Quixote. Essentially, the book has two sections which were published independently. The conceit is that Don Quixote is an actual person inhabiting the real world and that Cervantes is simply recording his exploits based on stories he’s heard. By the time Cervantes writes the second half, he has to take into account that people have read the first half of it, and since Don Quixote really definitely exists in the real world, the second half has to take into account that all of the people who have read the first half of the book are therefore screwing with him for their own entertainment.

Essentially, what I’m getting at here is that observation alters reality.

So, let’s say that you’ve got a closed system, like a brewing school. It has students, teachers, administrators and things more or less go on as normal. Beer gets made, people go to their math classes, people go to the merchant alehouse on a Thursday night and get loopy on oatmeal stout. It’s a fine existence.

But if you airlift a journalist into the situation, it changes the situation. I’ll give you a for instance. Crystal Luxmore from The Grid popped in to write an article on the school and sat in during part of a lecture Gord Slater was giving on flocculation in yeast. Suddenly, everyone in the class sat up a little straighter and tried to look as though they were paying a considerable amount of attention, despite the fact that there had been oatmeal stout the night before and it’s a 9:30 class.

Same thing happened the next week when The Grid sent their photographers to get some action shots of brewing students taking notes. Everyone was on their best behavior.

That’s fine. It’s good press for the brewing school. Gets the message out there, might drum up enrollment for next year and it’s more or less over in a couple of hours. Useful for all concerned parties; Minimal alteration of reality. On the other hand, if you throw a journalist into the mix on a full time basis, the possibility of that person really screwing with the status quo is rendered increasingly likely, even if he doesn’t do anything.

I’ve become relatively concerned about this and I’m growing a little self conscious about it.

I’ve got profs that I interact with on a professional basis. I’ve known Kevin Somerville, who’s teaching us about brewing ingredients since before there was a brewing program. I may have consulted with him on buying no-iron oxford cloth shirts as professorial wear. Our sensory evaluation prof, Roger Mittag, has a beer tasting certification program called Prud’homme, which I reviewed positively in the Sun before he got the gig at the college.

Here’s the issue: Niagara College, in addition to being a teaching brewery, is also a going concern, selling growlers and cases of beer out of their brewery store. What happens if I review their products, raise awareness of them and increse sales? What happens if I review on negatively and make it harder for one of my profs to sell the product?  Kevin Somerville is heavily involved with the Indie Alehouse in Toronto, which will be opening in the coming months. Sam Corbeil is with Sawdust City brewing.

Eventually, there’s going to come a point where I need to write about the Indie Alehouse or Sawdust City. They’re new, and one of the hallmarks of beer blogging is novelty. It would limit my scope as a beer writer not to write about new things that are happening in the Toronto scene.  There are a number of possibilities here:

1)      Not writing about Indie Alehouse or Sawdust City at all. Which is, let’s face it, a cop-out.

2)      Writing a piece about the Indie Alehouse or Sawdust City on an informational basis only. Boring.

3)      Writing opinion pieces on these breweries, which, while honest , might end up being positive or negative depending on what they do.

All three of the actions have consequences. This is one of the reasons that there haven’t been many blog posts about the educational experience. Reporting on it would alter the experience in ways that are potentially unforeseeable.

Well, I’ve done that for a month and I’ve got to tell you that it’s dull. It’s deadly, deadly dull. It’s mentally constipating as well, because you can’t do anything with the ideas you get from the program. For that reason I’m going to do something interesting and choose option three, confining myself to honest, if comical, reporting on the entire situation.

In other words, let’s kill the cat and see if the waveform collapses.

Posted in: Niagara College ⋅ Tagged: , , , ,

Time Spent in Reconnaissance

September 13, 2011 10:44 am ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

As regular readers will be aware, I have somehow managed to get into the Niagara College Brewmaster and Brewery Operations Management program. It’s my intention to write about the experience whenever the mood takes me. I doubt that I will be talking frequently about the content of the courses, as some of the material is fairly dry. I will not be committing sentences like “What you want is a friable barley corn so that the starch of the endosperm can be easily extracted after the deculming process” to paper with any kind of regularity outside of exams. That’s the kind of thing that makes for relatively dull reading, unless you’re actually in the course. Also, I would probably have to explain a lot of the specific jargon pertaining to various brewing processes.

I won’t lie. There will be some of that, mostly because it’s fascinating stuff in its own way.

Mostly, I’ll be talking about my experiences.

I’m starting from a relatively humble place from an intellectual standpoint. After the huge number of applications for the program in the first year, I decided that I would start writing about beer in order to create some credentials for myself should the program end up being competitive. I didn’t realize it would work out this well. I landed a gig with Quebecor, writing the beer column for the major regional newspaper markets and for canoe.ca, and thanks to the support and feedback of my editor, I’ve been improving at writing for that format.

The problem is that up to this point, whatever information I’ve had about beer has been self taught or picked up from conversations with brewers and industry professionals. If you’ve ever picked up books about brewing, you know that it’s almost impossible to come up with a complete system of knowledge pertaining to the processes involved. I have a relatively decent understanding of the process generally, even having designed a few recipes and seen them through to service. The problem is that many of the technical details have thus far eluded me. It’s a sort of Rumsfeldian “known unknown.”

My experience in talking to people in the industry is that there are relatively few people who understand everything about brewing. That’s as it should be. Everyone has their areas of expertise, and the reality is that people end up in a certain job and it helps to define their ongoing knowledge base. There are things that they need to know on a daily basis. If you ask a brewer who makes ales for help designing or brewing a lager, there will be trepidation. It’s a lot of information to have floating around inside your skull.

What I’m hoping to be able to do is learn as much as possible about brewing in order to be able to talk about every step of the process with some degree of authority. I freely acknowledge that my own understanding is currently incomplete, and I’m sure that at some point in the middle of this program there will be times when I look back on blog posts from previous years and cringe when I notice that I got details wrong.

There are a couple of questions that I’ve gotten from people about the program, so I’m going to do my best to answer them:

The first question is sort of universal. I’ve gotten it from profs and brewing students and brewers when I explain that I’m going to Brewing School. It’s frequently charitably worded, but it boils down to “You don’t actually picture yourself becoming a brewer, do you?”

The answer is: Possibly!

I really don’t know as yet whether I’ve got any facility for it. People seem to like the beers that I have made, but I think that in order to decide whether this is going to be a career, I’ll need to scrub in and work in a brewery. Fortunately, the school has one of those and luckily I have some access to a pilot system outside of the school which people will let me work with if I ask really nicely. I think it’s about finding a working rhythm and understanding the process. I know that the appeal for me is the creative process: At the end of the day in a brewhouse you have something to show for your work and if you have done it right, it will be something that people actually want to buy. It’s a lot more fulfilling than shuffling numbers in Excel, at least for me. I suspect that I will talk about that in greater detail later.

Usually, when answering that question, I’m quick to point out that even if I don’t end up as a brewer, wouldn’t you rather have someone writing about beer with a really in depth understanding of what goes into it? Instead of some schmuck who is piecing together an imperfect understanding from fragments of information gleaned off the internet and from whatever books are to hand? That would also be a fairly valuable use of everybody’s time.

The second question has more to do with logistics: “Isn’t that a long commute from Toronto?”

Yes indeed. It is a very long commute. Over three hours a day. This semester I’m waking up at 5:00 at least two days a week in order to make this thing happen. The problem is that I write for a major newspaper chain, so in order to remain relevant in a quickly expanding industry, I have to be where the action is. If you want to interview reps from import companies or attend events, you pretty much need to be where the reps and events are.

That said, it’s not without some advantage. I don’t drive, so what I’ve really got is about three hours a day where I am forced to sit quietly on a bus without access to the internet. I plan on making my way through the school’s brewing library during the commute over the course of the next six months. I figure that there can’t be more than about 40,000 pages of information there, so that should work out tolerably. I mentioned this to some fellow students yesterday and they thought I was joking, as you might. I refer you to the Duke of Wellington: “Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom wasted.”

It’s going to be a long slog, but I can tell from the outset that it’s also going to be worthwhile.

For a day to day look at the curriculum, you may want to look at Alan Brown’s blog: Student of Beer

Posted in: Niagara College ⋅ Tagged: , ,

Calling all Brewing Students

August 20, 2011 9:49 am ⋅ 1 Comment ⋅

I’m going to do something a little odd here and use the blog briefly as a platform for a public service announcement.

I got into the Niagara College Brewmaster program this year, and that’ll be starting up on the 7th of September. Apparently there are going to be 36 students this year. So far, I’ve only met one of them. Sebastian something or other from Flying Monkeys. I don’t recall the last name because at the time I met the fellow, he was serving me a 3300 IBU beer with a very high alcohol content and it was the end of Ontario Craft Beer Week. That means that somewhere out there are 34 slightly inebriated miscreants with nothing better to do with their lives than brew some beer.

Anyway, if it’s anything like last year, there are going to be people commuting from Toronto to Niagara-on-the-lake. That probably means that carpools are a good idea. Not only is it cheaper in terms of mileage, but also better for the environment. Unfortunately, due to the college’s stringent privacy policies, there’s no way of getting a list of who’s going to be in the class of 2013. They’re noted for their almost legendary stringency. My god, are they ever stringent. I talked to a couple of profs about it and they looked as though I had suggested some incredibly devious and unconscionable act. It was almost as though they had misheard “is there a list of students going into the program this fall?” as “I’m just going to go over there, put a puppy in a blender and hit liquefy.”

For that reason, I’m posting this in order to see if we can’t get some kind of organization going. It would be fun to meet up prior to the start of school in Toronto for a late summer afternoon meet and greet style event. Possibly at the Only Café, since it’s inexpensive and has a pretty good selection.

If you’re going into Niagara College’s brewing program this fall, go ahead and contact me by email at Jordan.stjohn@gmail.com or on twitter (@saints_gambit). You might also want to try and get into the facebook group that the school has organized.

Posted in: Shameless Plugs ⋅ Tagged: , ,