Inside the Block
We're shining a spotlight on the vibrant businesses and and unique history of the Warehouse Block in Lexington, Kentucky! Every first and third Sunday of the month we're serving up a fun blend of inspiring, behind-the-scenes stories of the Bluegrass region's most dynamic district!
Inside the Block
Episode 5: Mirror Twin Part 2!
Get ready to experience the world of brewing like never before with Derek DeFranco, the head master brewer at Mirror Twin Brewing who takes up behind the scenes! From humble beginnings with a three-barrel system to a thriving 15-barrel setup, Derek shares the brewery's evolution and resilience through challenges like keeping the beer flowing while navigating a pandemic. You'll gain a deeper understanding of the brewing process, from milling grains to sparging and boiling, revealing the artistry and science that go into creating your favorite pint.
Discover the operational side of a brewery, from kegging and canning to adapting to shifting consumer preferences, particularly highlighted during the pandemic when canned beer became pivotal. Derek sheds light on the importance of community and creativity in the craft beer scene, wrapped up with humorous tales behind beer names like "White Girl Wasted."
We are back with the Inside the Block podcast celebrating all the different businesses of the Warehouse Block, and I am here with, not James Franco. Derek DeFranco head master brewer of Mirror Twin Brewing and tell us about the brewing process, because we're here like in the actual warehouse. Is that what you're calling this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we call this the brewery the brewery, so we actually have been brewing over here since 2021. We started in our 725 location, where the main tap room is, and we were actually brewing in the back part of it, and we started on a little three barrel system. It was basically like a glorified homebrew system and we had 10 three barrel fermenters and then a three barrel mash, tun and boiled kettle. So in layman's terms, it's about a hundred. It's about a hundred gallons.
Speaker 1:Okay At a time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, at a time, at a time, okay, and so we had 10 fermenters, and that's kind of why, when we opened, we had we started with 10 different beers, and then we slowly started upgrading the three barrel fermenters into seven barrels and 10 barrels, and we were just doing multiple batches of the same beer into the bigger tanks in order to make more product, because the one thing that we struggled with from the very beginning, when we opened, was just keeping beer on tap, because we could only make so much at a time, and so we did that for a while, and then, in 2018, we expanded to a 15 barrel system, so you go from making a hundred gallons at a time to almost 500. And so that's actually the system that was a big big jump.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and part of the reason was when you're looking at buying a new system, the cost difference between one size to the next doesn't get like it's not that much bigger, not worth bigger. Now, where my a 10 barrel system to a 15, the price isn't that much difference until you start getting into like really big systems. And so we we're still over at the 725 building, so we're Not anymore.
Speaker 2:Upgraded this system, and so what we were trying to wrestle with was we wanted to get the biggest system that we could not only afford, but also we could fit into that space, and so that's why we ended up settling with the 15 barrel, and so we bought our 15 barrel system and then three 30-barrel fermenters, and then we also had some 10-barrel fermenters that we were brewing into as well, and then the pandemic happened. It was kind of difficult. No one really knew how to navigate it, but we did our best, and then, once things started opening up a little bit more, we got really busy, especially because they let us keep what was a parking lot and we turned it into a patio space, and so, all of a sudden, we just couldn't make enough beer, and so we had actually leased this building in 2018 and we were using it as storage, and it just made sense to move everything over here, and so Chad Walker initiated the process.
Speaker 1:We got the building rezoned with a lot of their help, and oh, it had to take another zoning, yeah, to be able to brew beer.
Speaker 2:To brew beer alone without a restaurant. It has to be zoned industrial and it was zone B4. So we went through the process, got it rezoned and then proceeded to go through the licensing with the TTB, which is the federal organization that licenses breweries, and then went through the state licensing process as well. So we moved everything over here. And then we also bought nine new tanks and it increased our capacity from being able to do about 140 barrels at a time to 358 barrels at a time, so it a little bit more than doubled our capacity. And then we also upgraded our canning line in order to keep up with producing.
Speaker 1:Oh, so this is canning.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so normally what I like to do is kind of take people through the brewing process.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, that'd be great.
Speaker 2:And because it's interesting how much People don't know Well and like how much more of an appreciation you get for that pint of beer when you see all that goes into it. Absolutely. So. The first process of brewing starts with malted grain, and so that big steel tank that you see out front, that is our silo and it holds 48,000 pounds of two-row barley and that is basically the heart of most beer.
Speaker 2:That's what we call a base grain, it's what makes up most of what beer is, and then we throw in specialty malts, but most of that is still two row, it's just malted differently. So what we do is we take that grain and we mill it in order to basically access the inside part of it, which is where all the starches are. It's called the endosperm, and we want to keep the husk still intact, and so our mills are pretty specific and we can actually adjust how much we crush the grain, and there's kind of a science to it. You want enough of the husk intact, so you get what's called filterability, but you want enough of the endosperm exposed, so you get good conversions.
Speaker 1:Sperm and beer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, gotcha, so that's where all the sugar is right, okay, good to know when the magic happens, so to speak.
Speaker 1:So to speak.
Speaker 2:So we run it through our mill, it goes into a tank called a grist case and we normally mill in the day before just to make things easier and it sits in here until we do a process called mashing it. And so what we do is we take the grain and we'll auger it into the vessel here which is called a mash tun Okay, and we mix it with hot water and so it goes through that little device up is called a mash tun okay, and we mix it with hot water and so it goes through that little device up there called a grist hydrator and, as you can see, we have rakes that spin and kind of help stir it up. Yeah, so when we first started didn't have that, uh, I mashed in with a drill and a mud mixer like by hand oh, my gosh, my gosh, okay, so this is an upgrade, yes, a lot of big upgrades.
Speaker 2:And so the grain mixes with the hot water, and what that hot water does is it starts to activate enzymes that were created in the malting process, and those start to break down the starches, the complex carbohydrates, into simple carbohydrates. And this process is really important because that's what the yeast can ferment and then turn into ethanol. And so we call this process mashing, or, more specifically, the sacrification rest. And so, once we've got all the grain and the water mixed, we let it sit for an hour, and that's when the hot water activates those enzymes Magic happens, yes.
Speaker 2:The enzymes break down the starches and we basically have this like sugary liquid. We call wort W-O-R-T, not what witches get yeah on their nose. And so you can see, here there's actually a false bottom. It's basically like a bunch of grates. Oh, okay, so you can see, here there's actually a false bottom, it's basically like a bunch of grates. Oh, okay, and so the grain sits on top of this and allows us to separate the liquid from the grain. Gotcha, kind of like you would make tea, right, you don't?
Speaker 1:want a bunch of tea leaves in your tea, so it's steeping and then you're pulling out the grain. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, and so once we're done letting it sit for an hour, we'll actually start to separate the liquid from the grain and it goes into this little device. It's called a grant. Ours is Amy, amy Grant.
Speaker 1:Love it A classic 90s, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:So we separate that liquid. So the grant's purpose is if you can kind of see that the system is relatively level. Purpose is if you can kind of see that the system is relatively level and without the grant, at some point we have to start pumping the liquid over. But they would pull down on the grain bed, okay, and it would pull a bunch of grain through. So the grant, if you notice, is that about a foot shorter than where the mash tun bottom is. Yeah, so it allows us to gravity feed into this vessel and pump from here instead of pumping directly from the mash tun. It's actually like an older technology that they brought back and so we set the liquid, get separated, goes into here and we pump it out into the right vessel, which is our boil kettle.
Speaker 2:Okay, this one, this big, our boil kettle Okay, this one, this big one, yeah, okay. And as we're doing that, we also spray the grain with hot water. We call that process sparging, but really what we're trying to do is we're trying to get as much sugar out of the grain as possible, so it's like rinsing it. So once we've pumped all the liquid over to our kettle, the normal volume that we're trying to get in our kettle is about 500 gallons, and from that point we start to boil it. And we boil it for a couple different reasons. One it allows us to add hops, which adds bitterness, and that's important, because without that balance, beer would be a little too sweet. It also sanitizes the liquid, make sure that there's no outside bacteria or foreign yeast. The boiling process kills all that. And then it also reduces the sugar a little bit more, and again, trying to get as much sugar out of the liquid as possible makes making beer a little bit cheaper. It makes the process a little bit more efficient, and so boiling it allows us to do that.
Speaker 1:Here's a dumb question for you what is hops?
Speaker 2:So hops are actually a flower. Genetically they're pretty similar to marijuana, but they have oils in them that, when exposed to heat, isomerize, which is just to say that the bitterness gets really concentrated, and they are relatively inexpensive as opposed to other methods of bittering. And they also have a they're preservative.
Speaker 1:Okay, so they're doing lots of things, yeah.
Speaker 2:And what's cool is, as hops became more popular, they started growing different varieties and then they took those varieties and started making different varieties with those, and so when I first started brewing, there was, you know, 20, 30 different hops. Now there's hundreds of different varieties and there's also like different, like uh substances, like they. They make concentrated hop oils that are a little bit better for, like, commercial brewing because we don't get as much loss, and everything. So hops are uh critical. Even in when people say I don't like hoppy beers, hops are still in every beer.
Speaker 1:Every beer.
Speaker 2:Because we need to bitter the, the liquid, somehow, and hops are just the most efficient way to do that Cool. So they also all have different flavor profiles and when you utilize them in the process has a lot to do with what kind of flavor Like at what time you introduce it.
Speaker 2:Gotcha so. So when we add hops right at the beginning of when we start boiling and for most of our beers we boil for 60 minutes as well you're gonna get a lot of bitterness. The later you add in the boil, the more aroma and flavor you're gonna get. And then we even add hops directly into our fermenter sometimes where there's no boiling to, to really get that aroma enhanced. And so, uh yeah, hops, they're in every single beer. They're critical to the, the process and the flavor profile of every beer we make. So so from that point, once it's done boiling, we'll actually do something called whirlpool the beer. Most of the time I don't talk about this in tours because it's kind of no one really cares, but it's interesting in the process, yeah for sure. So what we actually do is we will spin the wort. So we have this transgenital port here it's just called a whirlpool arm. And so what we do is we pull the liquid from the bottom of the kettle, goes through a pump and it gets pumped back in.
Speaker 2:Okay, and it makes the wart spin and the reason we do that is so we'll do that for about five minutes and then we'll let it sit and, as it's basically creating a vortex, all of the heavy sediment, like the hop particulate you know some grain husks that got through the false bottom, all that stuff starts to settle at the bottom in a cone. So then when we pull the liquid to go into our fermenters, it's not pulling all that stuff through.
Speaker 1:Gotcha.
Speaker 2:So and so, from this process on, I'm gonna let my head brewer, mike Brown take, take over.
Speaker 1:Yeah, let's definitely meet him. Great, he's also head brewer. You're co-head brewer.
Speaker 2:I'm the master brewer, technically, okay, and then he's the head brewer. Okay, I mean as far as like rank goes, like I'd be like the general, he's like uh head lieutenant.
Speaker 1:Yeah, colonel whatever what is the? What is the come on, brandon?
Speaker 2:I don't know I'm getting mic'd up too you know we all, you know all the brewers we work together um. You know it's a hierarchy in a sense, for, you know, employment reasons.
Speaker 1:Of course.
Speaker 2:We always work really well together. You know we make decisions together. Um, and one of my brewers, doug, he's been with me from the very beginning and so has Mike. Mike started off bartending and then eventually moved into, uh, the brewery. Yeah, and we've just, you know, we just you know, when you, when you spend so much time totally with people, you kind of become family and so we're very in sync. Uh, you know, we're always on the same page with things and you know it's it's nice to have people that you work well with totally and anticipate what you would do if you weren't there, and yeah, I mean that's.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's just key so and it makes it more fun. Yeah, we all have similar personalities and we like the same things, and jokes what do you like? I like to annoy them with really bad dad jokes. Okay, awesome, great, and they love it. But like we all like rick and morty okay great, which we know is the show on yeah cartoon network and um, you know, we're all just kind of goofy, you know, we don't take things too seriously, and I think that's why we work really well together cut from the same cloth and you know, when we come in here, you know like let's get the job done, especially on the really hot summer days where it's in the hundreds.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it gets about 10 to 15 degrees warmer in here than outside because we've got, you know, our kettle going. We use a lot of 180 degree water to sanitize our lines and our tanks and all that stuff, and so there's always steam in here and it can get pretty miserable. And so sometimes, you know, we come in really early in the morning to try to beat that heat.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you were telling me the other day that you guys come in in the summers at like 6 am. Like you have to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, you know, most of the time it's actually closer to like 4 or 5. Wow know, most of the time it's actually closer to like four or five, wow. So yeah, I think we all kind of like coming in here by ourselves a little bit early in the morning because one I feel like we get the most done because you can just, you know, kind of power through it without any distractions, um, but you know it's nice to kind of have that solitude and you know you just tie yourself and you know you couldn't, you know, listen to the music.
Speaker 2:You know, if you're, or my airpods, or a podcast, you're just doing stuff, knocking it out then it's like, man, I wish I had another set of hands yeah, that would help too at four in the morning, whirlpool.
Speaker 3:So what did he say about Whirlpool?
Speaker 1:That it goes into this machine and something about sanitizing and then it goes down into Derek, could you explain what Whirlpool is? Yeah, definitely cut that out, or it looked like I wasn't listening. Yep, all right, I just want to make sure, yeah.
Speaker 3:Okay, whirlpool. So Whirlpool after. After the whirlpool is done, we will let it rest. And since the liquid is spinning as it rests, the solids kind of fall down into the middle of the kettle. So we want to get all the solid particulate out. So when we go to transfer, that solid particulate doesn't get into our heat exchanger and into our tank, we want clean liquid going into our tank.
Speaker 1:Excellent.
Speaker 3:So, Love to hear it, the liquid coming out, we call wort. Derek probably explained that.
Speaker 1:W-O-R-T, by the way.
Speaker 3:W-O-R-T, the good kind of wort.
Speaker 1:Good kind of wort.
Speaker 3:So the good kind of work. Good kind of work, um. So the kettle was at a boil. It's probably still 200, 205 degrees in there, um, and we need to get it into our tank, usually around 70 degrees. So the piece of equipment behind you, uh, is our, it's our heat exchanger.
Speaker 1:Okay, cools it down.
Speaker 3:Yes, okay, so this is like a radiator in your car, exactly like a radiator in your car, actually, we will run. We have one of these tanks over here that is completely full of just RO water.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:We keep that water at 35 degrees so that we can run that cold water through our heat exchanger. At the same time we run our 200 degree work out. That way it cools it down to the 70 degrees that we want. When we're coming out of our heat exchanger we'll run through this right here. That's our flow meter that tells us how many gallons have gone through. It's got an impeller inside of it and every revolution it counts how much has gone through there. That will track how much we are sending into our tank and that way we know okay, we have this many gallons in here.
Speaker 3:When we go to package we have a better idea of how much is left in the tank. In our tank it depends on what we're brewing for the day and what our plan is with that brew. But if we are brewing hazy ipas, we usually have a what we call a starter in the tank and we've made 50 or 60 gallons of low gravity wort and we've put our yeast in the tank already so that we give that chance of yeast to grow and get more active Like a sourdough starter. Exactly, okay, exactly, yep, so hazies. We only use one generation of yeast and that's why we do the starter. We could buy a bigger pitch but it would cost us more. So we buy a smaller pitch and make a starter. Yeah, so we let it grow itself up before we put the usually 400, 450 gallons of wort in there. Other brews we can have yeast pitched from another tank in line. So we'll either push yeast from a tank or we can push yeast from a yeast brink, basically a keg, where we can harvest yeast into it from the tank and then push inline into the tank With the hazies.
Speaker 3:We use a yeast called London Ale 3. It is a yeast that doesn't flocculate. Well, flocculation means to drop out of solution, so the haze you see in the New England IPAs is a lot to do with the yeast. So that non-flocculent yeast will stay in suspension very well, and that's why one of the reasons why they look so hazy. The other types of yeast that we might use are ale yeast or lager yeast, and we also use a champagne yeast. So fancy, yeah, champagne yeast is for our ciders actually. Okay, that's the only thing we use it for, um, and we like ciders yeah, we use.
Speaker 3:We make a lot more cider now than I ever thought we would yeah, is it because it's like people? There's a demand for it yeah, we were buying cider uh, cider boys mostly um some other brands too, and we were selling so much cider that why wouldn't you make your?
Speaker 3:we tried it one time and we're like, oh okay, yeah, let's keep doing this. Um, so champagne yeast for those, okay. Um, almost all of our other flagships use the ale yeast. Um, and we can use this same pitch of yeast multiple times, so we can get 10 to 20 tanks worth of beer from one pitch of yeast. We'll continue to harvest and pitch into the next, so that helps cut costs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm sure.
Speaker 3:But the ale yeast that we use is called Chico. It is a very common yeast that lots of breweries use. It is a clean profile. It is very flocculent, so you'll notice that our non-hazy beers are clear. That's why that yeast drops out of solution very well. It has a clean fermentation, doesn't have a lot of lingering flavors from the yeast in particular, so it allows us to let the malt or the hops or whatever else we're putting in that beer shine.
Speaker 3:The third that was the third yeast. The fourth yeast that we use is a lager yeast. Everybody knows what lagers are. The process with the lagers is a little bit different. Lager yeast like to be a lot colder, so they ferment depending on what strain you use. We start our fermentation with lager yeast at 55 degrees instead of the 70. On the ales and the aces it's going to be colder, yep, so we have to run through our heat exchanger colder or slower. So yeah, but the lager yeast will ferment at 55.
Speaker 3:The lager yeast itself is a little harder to deal with. Just because of the colder fermentation it doesn't propagate as well. So when we go to harvest from a lager yeast there isn't as much yeast to harvest as there would be from our ale yeast. So we have to be a little more careful with our lager yeast to make sure that we are giving it the nutrients it needs, making sure that it has a healthy fermentation, that it grows well, so that the next time we go to use it it's good to go. All that will happen in the tank after we transfer from our heat exchanger. So the fermentation process we're going to use one of those yeasts and, like I said, we have, we have moved our warts through our heat exchanger at our desired fermentation temperature 70 or 55 or whatever that might be into our tank. So in our tanks you've got that, the wart, the sugary pre-beer liquid they move to these things yes okay, let's go.
Speaker 1:Let's go look at these. And this is when you start adding in what?
Speaker 3:um, so, depending on the beer that we are making, there are a lot of different things we can do. Um, so our brew system is a 15 barrel system. Okay, derek probably explained that. So all of these tanks are 15-barrel tanks. So when we brew into these tanks it's one brew. When we brew into these tanks these are 30-barrel tanks it takes us two brews to fill them. Uh-huh, the larger tanks over there are 60-barrel tanks on the other side, uh-huh, so it takes us four brews to fill those up. On the other side, so it takes us four, four brews to fill those up.
Speaker 3:So once we have transferred out of our heat exchanger into our tank just like this tank you can see, or this one right here, actually, you see the where it's bubbling like that. So that bubbling is a sign of active fermentation. So inside that tank there's the yeast and the wort. The yeast is eating the sugars from the wort. It uses. The yeast uses oxygen, nitrogen and a few other nutrients. When it consumes that sugar, it turns it into alcohol and CO2. So the bubbles coming out are CO2.
Speaker 1:Gotcha.
Speaker 3:The alcohol content of whatever is in the tank is determined by how much sugar is left in that tank, in that solution.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:So when we go into our tanks we will take a gravity reading and that tells us how much sugar is in solution. And that tells us how much sugar is in solution. We use specific gravity. So our readings will be 1.06 or 1.08 or 1.04, and the higher the number, the more sugar is in solution. So generally speaking, the higher that our starting gravity, the more alcohol will be in that beer. So most of our hazies come out at 7%. So they go into our tanks around 1.07. They usually ferment down into the 1.0, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8 range and that gives us about 7% ABV. Our light lager, old, reliable, it goes into our tanks around 1.043. So it starts a lot lower and it ends usually around 1.004. So very low, very dry, and that'll get us at a four percent abv. So when we're in the tank, yeast, yeast is fermenting, it's doing its thing. We check gravities out of the tanks after we've brewed every day. We will record those gravities, we put them into our computer and we can track fermentation to see how far along we are.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So ale fermentations we can have an ale fermentation done within a week. So brew day. We check the next day. It's usually dropped a significant amount. The first and second day are usually the very heavy fermentation days. It kind of trails off after that and as it's fermenting, the sugar content is getting lower. Alcohol is going up. The yeast will start to flocculate out. It'll drop out of solution when it doesn't have anything to do. It doesn't have any more sugars to eat.
Speaker 3:The sugars left in the beer some of them are non-fermentable sugars. So any beer that we make with lactose so like our milk stout, it has lactose, which is milk sugar. The yeast that we use cannot consume the milk sugar, so it stays in solution and that's how we have sweeter beers. They'll end with a much higher gravity, much higher sugar content. The yeast will not consume those. The other sugars that yeast won't consume are very complex sugars. So we use a lot of oats and you get a lot of complex carbohydrates out of those. Yeast can't completely break those down, so they stay in solution as well.
Speaker 3:There are a couple other factors we can use that control how much sugar is fermentable when we mash in. I'm sure Derek talked about the temperature of the mash. Yeah, the higher the mash temperature, the more unfermentable sugar there will be, so the more sugar will be left in the final product. With the mash temperature, those unfermentable sugars they don't always read as sweet, they can just read more as like a thicker. They can make the liquid seem thicker, more viscous, a creamier mouthfeel is what a lot of people say Whereas in the opposite, those lagers that finish with very little sugar, very dry, very clean. So really, depending on what kind of beer we're going to make, we shoot for starting gravity and finishing gravity to hit our ABV and our desired level of sugar in the final product.
Speaker 3:So let's talk about wheezing the juice. We make a lot of that. It's a fruited sour, it uses lactose. So we use tangerine, vanilla, lactose and blood orange. Those are the four ingredients that we put into wheezing the juice that come on what we call the cold side, so hot side brewing process. Once it passes that heat exchanger we can add things. A lot of people refer to them as adjuncts. So any ingredient that we put into a beer that was not in the hot side process and some that go into the hot side process are still adjuncts. But blood, orange, tangerine, lactose, vanilla those are all adjuncts we add to a beer. The lactose increases that final gravity, giving that weas the Juice a little thicker, a little sweeter mouthfeel. So with the Weezin' the Juice it's tart, a little sweet. It's 7% ABV, so it's got a lot going on. It's not one of those beers that we're wanting people to have five or six of. It's a very flavorful beer.
Speaker 1:Sounds like a challenge.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you can do it there you go, you do you, yeah, you do you.
Speaker 1:But so how much security do we have here at Mirror Twin?
Speaker 3:None.
Speaker 1:None. Well then, I'm in.
Speaker 3:Depends on what night. Let's see when are we at. Wee's in the juice, all right, you're good. So usually when we make Wee's in the juice, we do a 30 barrel batch.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:We sell a lot of it, so we don't want to make a whole bunch of small batches.
Speaker 1:We rather make a big batch beer. Do you think um?
Speaker 3:it was about this time last year. Okay, now hazy but lazy has become our most popular hazy but lazy, uh well, yes and no? Um depends on what we're talking about drafter cans or in tap house, out in distribution, they're all kind of different so your average person that comes to mirror twin, though, like in-house, what do do they order?
Speaker 1:Like what?
Speaker 3:do you sell Our number one selling beer? Is White Girl Wasted, white Girl Wasted? Yeah, yeah, it's our blonde. Yeah, I was wondering when she was going to come up.
Speaker 1:It's a very approachable beer.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's been our flagship light beer from the very get-go.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and can I ask you where the name came from? Name came from. You'll have to ask Derek. Okay, sounds great. All right, is there a story?
Speaker 3:behind it? Probably okay, derek gave up with all the names when we started really hoping that it's one particular white girl who got wasted.
Speaker 1:So no, I think it's just didn't like in general, like all that, yeah, yeah, yeah, us as a collective we don't take ourselves very seriously when it comes to naming beers, yeah, yeah we like to have fun and I like that you have so many like small batches. I mean, like you'll, you'll brew for you know anybody, essentially yeah. Like somebody could come in and be like I really want. This is what I'm thinking. Can you make me like, just like a batch that would look like this?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we've done collabs with Crank and Boom Ice Cream. Yeah, we've done Spalding beers, spalding Donuts beers. We use a lot of coffee from Nate's Coffee and we'll do the collabs with them. Yeah, we've also had outside companies, most recently Lexmark. So Lexmark approached us. They have a farm, they have beehives on their farm, so they have honey. So honey is another form of fermentable sugar that gets used in beer. Yeah, so we made a honey blonde ale for them. It actually comes out today. Cool, it's called Solar Bee. Solar Bee Love that. So we used 15 gallons of their honey. We used 10 gallons in fermentation. We tasted it. It didn't quite have enough honey flavor for us. So we add another five gallons after fermentation to add a little more honey flavor.
Speaker 1:Now, when you're making these batches, and it's not quite enough honey for you, or something wasn't quite right. So what happens to that beer? Does it still get drunk? So the one that's not quite there yet, and you have to redo.
Speaker 3:No, we don't have to redo anything we have just adding to it, yeah gotcha um, within reason. Yeah, there's only so much you can do. Sometimes, yeah, um, but when so, like when we tasted that one we're adding, we can obviously add more honey at any time we want okay the only issue is that honey is fermentable.
Speaker 3:So we need to make sure that we prevent re-fermentation inside the cans because it'll over carbonate, it'll over pressurize. They just lead to bad. Bad situations. Sure, but add more honey, add more flavor. We can add more vanilla, that's an easy add. We can add more fruit to beers those are all easy ads. Coffee we can. All these things are very easy to add after fermentation, just to bump flavors. So we'll taste before we package things and if something doesn't have enough flavor, we'll add something to it. Or in some cases it doesn't taste sweet enough, we can add a little more vanilla. Vanilla gives off a sweetness, oh, totally Like all desserts, all pastries, everything vanilla. So good.
Speaker 3:Vanilla gives its own perceived sweetness, so that's an easy add.
Speaker 1:Now, are you guys the only ones that are tasting these things? Do you have like some sort of a program where people can come in and help out, because I'm available at all times?
Speaker 3:We appreciate all input. Even the people that just want free beer. So really, honestly, there are just three of us back here, gotcha, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:You got three palates that are like turning out all of this beer for Lexington. I love it. I would prefer more palates.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, yeah, I think it's great Because the three of us we know how we taste things. Yeah, well, we know how we taste things. Yeah, some of us taste other flavors better than others.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So if we're looking for off flavors in a beer, one of the main off flavors is called diacetyl. Doug is very good at picking up diacetyl and it's just about the chemistry of your palate, like the way your tongue's built, and like just some people think cilantro tastes like soap, it's the same concept. Doug is very good at picking up diacetyl. What are you good? At Some of us aren't. I'm pretty good at diacetyl and acetaldehyde, Of course yeah, so acetaldehyde. Me too.
Speaker 2:Acetaldehyde.
Speaker 1:Of course, yeah, so acetaldehyde Me too, acetaldehyde.
Speaker 3:One of the best-selling beers in this country probably the best-selling beer in this country has acetaldehyde in it on purpose. It is a very small dosage and it gives it its unique flavor.
Speaker 1:Are we talking about like a popular beer. Yeah, out there Gotcha.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like the most popular.
Speaker 1:Okay, does it start with like a, b? Yeah, it might Like Schmudweiser, something like that. Oh, gotcha, gotcha. Okay, you keep going.
Speaker 3:So you know to what I was saying about it gives its own unique flavor. You could give the same recipe, same ingredients, to 10 different breweries. They make beer. It's going to taste different coming out of all those breweries just because of their processes and the way they do things. So they do a couple things different. That creates that acetaldehyde and it gives it that unique flavor and that's that's how they kind of set theirself apart, because every light beer is so close to each other that totally you need a little something to stand out differentiate.
Speaker 3:Yeah, totally, I could see that um, let's see what else we got. So we talked about fermentation.
Speaker 1:Yes. Talked about white girl wasted, talked about white girl wasted.
Speaker 3:Yeah, let's talk about IPAs and hops. We haven't really talked about it.
Speaker 1:Let's do that yes.
Speaker 3:We make a lot of IPAs.
Speaker 1:Yeah, a lot of hazy IPAs, which is a very polarizing flavor, right? Yes? You either love it or hate it.
Speaker 3:Yep, polarizing flavor. Right, you either love it or hate it. Yep, I, when I got into craft beer it was in college I hated ipas. Yeah, I started off obviously drinking very terrible light beer like everybody else, yeah, uh, when I finally made it into craft beer, stouts were my thing. Um, I wanted a lot of flavor but I didn't like that bitter hoppiness and it took me a while to get into it. But yes, ipas are polarizing but they are still the number one beer style for craft breweries. Ipas for sure. Yep, sierra Nevada is pale ale. It's a pale ale. It's not an IPA, but it's hoppy. It's got some bitterness to it. All of the New Belgium, the Voodoo Rangers and things like that. Ipas are very popular, so hops are very popular. That's the main flavor in IPAs With hops, which is a plant, by the way.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, I just learned that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Hops are an agricultural product, so, just like grain, they can change from year to year from crop to crop, from farm to farm.
Speaker 3:It can taste different year after year. Then, yep, you're kind of yeah, so hops, there are hundreds of different hops. It's kind of like I grow peppers, there are a lot of peppers, there's hundreds of different peppers. Super spicy, super sweet. I grow peppers. Yeah, there are a lot of peppers, there's hundreds of different peppers. Yeah, super spicy, super sweet, somewhere in between. It's kind of the same with hops. So you can have very tropical hops, you can have very dank hops and you can have some very floral, like less aggressive flavor profiles from hops and aromas.
Speaker 3:So, depending on the beer we're making, we'll use different hops. For that Our IPAs are obviously hop forward. We want whatever hops we're using to stand out. So let's talk about our Monster series. So, like Citra Monster, mosaic Monster, we've probably made 20 to 30 different Monsters. Those are all single hop New England IPAs. So all of those Monster series are base beer. It's brewed the exact same way, exact same recipe, and then we just dry hop with different hops. So Citra Monster is all Citra hops. Mosaic Monster is all Mosaic hops. If you taste those two right next to each other, the only difference in those is the aromas and the flavors of those hops. So Citra hops are obviously very tropical citrus flavors. Mosaic hops can be a little bit more earthy, a little more floral, a little more blueberry sometimes. But depending on where hops are grown they have different flavor profiles. A lot of New Zealand hops Nelson's, alvin, motueka, some of those Galaxy is grown in Australia. They all have different flavor profiles because of where they're grown.
Speaker 3:Just like grapes with wine.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 3:So with our New England IPAs we don't use any hops on the hot side, so we essentially get no bitterness and we only dry hop. So at the top of these tanks there is a four inch port.
Speaker 1:Okay, oh, I see it, yeah, yep.
Speaker 3:While we are fermenting, usually with our New Englands. Two days in we'll open that port and we'll drop hops in the top. Two days in, we'll open that port and we'll drop hops in the top. It's called dry hopping. So with our New Englands, in a 15 barrel we'll add 44 pounds of whatever hop. So for the Monsters, we'll add 44 pounds of central hops into the top of this tank while it's fermenting. While that's fermenting, obviously there's some convection, there's a lot of mixing, so those hops go in and it can be a little turbulent. You'll notice after we dry hop the bucket bubbles very vigorously. A lot of CO2 coming out of solution. Yeah, but those hops and the yeast interact. Mid-fermentation Biotransformation, is a very nerdy thing.
Speaker 1:No, that'sdy thing no.
Speaker 3:A little so much science to all this. When New England became popular, biotransformation was a big topic of discussion.
Speaker 1:Like whole conferences you guys went to about this. It was right next to Comic-Con, right Probably.
Speaker 3:Nobody really knew why New England's stayed cloudy at first. There's a lot of science that's happened since then, over the last five, six years, but biotransformation was one of those things that everybody thought. There's some interaction between the yeast and the hops. The science hasn't been figured out yet, but that's what keeps that that haze in, in in.
Speaker 1:But New England is incredibly cloudy just in general, is there? Any correlation between that.
Speaker 3:Yes.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Maybe clam chowder.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love it. The cloudiest of them all.
Speaker 3:New England's gonna drop two days in, all right, our West Coast IPAs and our pale ales. We'll wait till fermentation is almost over. That way we can pull yeast from those again and then we'll drop after fermentation. It's basically done well. So we'll drop our West Coast and our pale ales, probably like seven to ten days in, as opposed to two days in with the New England IPAs. And that is mainly for us to be able to harvest that yeast and be able to use it again. And also for clarity.
Speaker 3:We dry hop the New England so early it's going to add some haze that we want in the New England that we don't want in our West Coast and our pale ales. So after we dry hop, we'll track the fermentation. When it's done fermenting, we'll track the fermentation. When it's done fermenting, we'll do what's called cold crash, and this goes for every beer, not just our dry hop beers. When fermentation has ended, we'll cold crash, and when I say ended, we check our gravity every day. When the gravity has been the same for at least two days, we know that the yeast really isn't eating any more sugar, it's not making any more alcohol. It's basically done.
Speaker 3:We can taste the beer to make sure it doesn't have any off flavors. Sometimes the yeast can be done fermenting but it's still got some flavors to clean up, dacyl being one of those. It's a massive aldehyde. Yeast can kind of clean those flavors up if you just let it sit and do its thing. But when we're ready to cold crash. The tank has been fermenting at 70 degrees. We need to get it cold. Did Derek talk about glycol?
Speaker 1:I do not recognize that word yeah.
Speaker 3:The way we get get our tanks, the way we control our tank temperatures. Uh, because in the middle of summer it's 100 degrees in here oh, you know, he did talk about how hot it gets.
Speaker 3:Yes, so glycol is a food grade sugary liquid. Okay, um, we have a giant uh piece of machinery outside called gly glycol chiller. It's like 120, 130 gallon reservoir and it keeps glycol is a very, very low freezing point. So we keep the temperature of our glycol and like 25 degrees below freezing, not below freezing, sorry, 25 degrees, which is below freezing. So that glycol chiller is that glycol runs through all these lines up top, all those insulated lines. There's chilled glycol running through those to these tanks and if a tank gets above the fermentation temperature we have it set for it'll open valves that allows glycol to come in. These are double walled. So behind this piece, this layer of that allows glycol to come in, these are double walled. So behind this piece, this layer of stainless is glycol, and then there's another layer of stainless and then the beer is on the inside, gotcha. So we're sending cold things, yep, yep. It's kind of like the Yeti coolers.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's what I was just thinking. It's like insulated yeah.
Speaker 3:Exactly so when we send glycol to the tank, it can keep it in that fermentation range we need, or we can cold crash it. We set the temperature of the tank to whatever we want. So when we cold crash, we crash down to 33 degrees. That will if fermentation is already done. So we're crashing it down to 33 so that we can get all the yeast to fall out. So we're crashing it down to 33 so that we can get all the yeast to fall out.
Speaker 3:The colder we get it, the more clarity we're going to get from our beers and the more we can get solids to drop out. So we'll cold crash the tank to 33 degrees. Sometimes we let it sit there for a few days, just kind of let everything fall out. Some days we will, or some beers we will, uh, immediately start carbonating. It just kind of depends on what our schedule looks like, um, but once we get down to 33 degrees, we can start carbonating With. Well, so with carbonation, um, the way that it used to happen, like forever ago, uh, you could if they were fermenting in like a wooden barrel.
Speaker 3:uh, they close the barrel off as it's producing that CO2 and it's a closed environment. That CO2 goes into its, into solution, like this but, but, but within, so not letting this out. Yep, so while this is fermenting, if we close this, it's gonna build up pressure.
Speaker 1:Just seems dangerous.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's not.
Speaker 3:It's gonna go. It bends. These hold a lot of pressure. Yeah, okay, but the more CO2 that gets trapped in that tank, the more that will go into the solution. So we can close tanks off early and try to capture some of that natural CO2 as opposed to pumping our own CO2 in there to carbonate it, and that's one thing we can do. It kind of saves us on CO2. It can shorten the process a little bit, but with carbonation that's not gonna get us all the way there by closing the tank off most of the time. So we've got the tank closed off, we've got a cold crash, we wanna carbonate it. This is called a XR carb stone, so it's a very porous long. It's like a pumice stone kind of. Okay, sure, so it's got a lot of tiny holes so we can send CO2 in and it goes into the stone and as it comes out of the stone, the bubbles become smaller, so they go into solution easier.
Speaker 3:So we'll run CO2 into the tank we usually run. I like to do what we call 30-30-30. We run at a certain pressure for 30 minutes, we'll up it. Run for another 30 minutes, we'll up it again. Run it for another 30 minutes. That usually gets us to where we want to be in carbonation range, and we'll use a piece of equipment called a Zamen Nagel.
Speaker 1:You made that up. You just made that up.
Speaker 3:No, I wish. Yeah, it's very expensive, but you gotta have it to check carbonation. Zamenagel is the. Obviously it's the guy's name that created it, gotcha, everybody calls it a Zamenagel.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 3:So the way we'll check solution, we'll grab our Zamenagle, we hook it up to our Zwickle. Here's another fun word for you. Yeah, maybe that one up too. But we'll hook our Zamenagle up to our Zwickle. We'll run beer through the Zamenagle, close it off and we open a valve on our Zamenagle that allows, like the CO2 that's in solution. It will allow it to expand. So once the beer is in the Zamenagle, you shake it for 30 seconds. You can look at the gauges on your Zamenagle. It'll show you a pressure and a temperature. So the colder the beer and the higher the pressure, usually the more carbonation you'll have. So there's a chart back here. You can probably see it on the wall.
Speaker 1:Okay, oh, I see it yeah.
Speaker 3:So that shows us-.
Speaker 1:You see a volume chart.
Speaker 3:Yep, yep, exactly. How can you read that from here?
Speaker 1:Excellent eyes. I eat a lot of carrots. Mine are terrible.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I drink a lot of Miratone beer. Mine are terrible. I drink a lot of Miratone beer, mine are terrible. So that carbonation chart, the left side will show you a temperature. The top will show you pressure. So we take our pressure and our temperature reading from our Zamenagel and we find that spot on the chart that tells us our carbonation level.
Speaker 3:We shoot for 2.5 volumes of CO2. That's relatively standard. There are some styles you want higher, some styles you want lower. Stouts we shoot for 2.2. So, not as much carbonation Makes them feel a little creamier, a little thicker that way too. Hefeweizens and ciders, uh, some lagers too. You can shoot for a little higher carbonation. It can give off a little cleaner. Um, it can also accentuate hops. The more co2 that's in solution as you're drinking a beer, you know some of that of that's still coming out and it releases some of the hop aromas too. So the carbonation is another way to affect the mouthfeel and the aroma and the flavor of a beer, even though CO2 is tasteless. Yeah. So carbonation, okay, once we're done carbonating, we get it to where we want, we're gonna package the beer. So we do two forms of package kegs and cans.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the canning stuff over here Show us canning. I wanna see we're at 50 right now. Okay, gotcha.
Speaker 3:This is basically the last step, though, so.
Speaker 1:No, no, no. This is great, I mean there's so much to it. There has to be.
Speaker 3:So two forms of package that we do cans and kegs. We don't do bottles. We used to. It's tedious, it's labor intensive and most people want cans. They're easy to deal with and recycle them a lot easier and sure. So kegs, we will come out of the tank. We'll run through hoses all the way to our kegs. We were kegging earlier today. This is our keg filler. We can fill four kegs at a time and we can fill them in half barrels or six barrels. The half barrel is the larger standard size keg. It's 15 and a half gallons. The six barrel is 5.2 gallons. A lot of bars and restaurants that have like the behind-the-bar coolers with the taps on top, they prefer those six barrels because they fit in there a lot better. Sure, Half barrels are obviously. You know. It's just like the more you buy, the cheaper it gets. Half rails are what most people prefer, um. So we fill a lot of half rails, um.
Speaker 1:But can you buy directly just from you guys, like if I was having a party, yeah, yeah, yeah, I can just call up and be like I want a keg absolutely.
Speaker 3:It's good to know, and I'm the person who talked to you.
Speaker 1:Oh, fantastic, great, Great.
Speaker 3:Um, so kegs, kegs are pretty straightforward. Uh, derek's back here washing kegs today. Um, they get cleaned and they get pressurized with CO2. So when we're carbonated in the tank, we try to keep the tank somewhere between 12 and 15 PSI and that keeps the CO2 in solution so we don't lose any carbonation. Our kegs are kept around 10 so that when we're moving from the tank to the keg the liquid wants to go to the lower pressure system. Okay, sure, so we'll push CO2 into our tanks. That'll push the beer out also. And when we're going into a keg we have a blow off or a bleeder valve that lets pressure out of the keg. So you're pushing pressure. This way, you're releasing pressure over here. Liquid moves from our tanks into our kegs using counter pressure fill. So with the pressure on the kegs it'll keep the CO2 in solution as well. So if there was no pressure on that keg, we'd just scent beer in there full speed. It'd foam up. It's like pouring a beer like super fast as opposed to pouring it super slow.
Speaker 1:Well and when you? I'm remembering this from my college days, but when you first open up a keg to get it going, it's tons of foam, right, because that's all going like towards the top. Is that the same-ish concept? No, I'm just like trying to throw something out that I know about foam. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Temperature has a lot to do with it too. The warmer the beer is, the more it's gonna foam up.
Speaker 1:How many keg stands have you done in your life?
Speaker 3:Ooh.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 3:Love it okay, great More than I probably Correct answer.
Speaker 1:Correct answer. Yeah, I really feel like it's a dying art form, Like you don't hear about this. I don't hear about much anymore with the undergrads at UK, Like I deal with them a lot.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you just don't hear about, really yeah, you don't hear about like keg stands. It's because they're all drinking. This Gen Z situation Go on. Sorry, Tell me about canning Seltzers.
Speaker 3:Seltzers Canning. So when we started we were obviously just doing draft beer. We did not can anything until three, four years in maybe, and we did not have a canning line we had. Now I can't, derek, did we can before c, before COVID.
Speaker 1:Before COVID, though right Okay okay okay.
Speaker 3:Who remembers?
Speaker 2:anything about COVID. That's like, yeah, what he?
Speaker 1:was saying earlier. He was like people really like to drink during the pandemic Iron.
Speaker 3:Heart. Yeah, we use Iron Heart, and then also that was before COVID, though, right yeah, okay, we had the October senior Yep.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, we used to do it by order, where people would fill the cans, where the bartenders would fill the cans and see them. That was first. Yeah, we did that first. Okay. Yeah, we were just using those generic black labels and we would just write them by hand.
Speaker 3:I don't remember what I did last week.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was only telling you, remember that I've seen the dark days?
Speaker 2:yeah, it's not to remember yes, yeah how dare you bring them back up? So before we did ironheart because I remember andy and andy came in to help us we did bashir. No, no, that would have been really cool. Even like this stinks. I'm not closing you guys down, yeah.
Speaker 1:Everyone but you, you get an exemption.
Speaker 2:This is tough, tough, tough times. No, my buddy Andy. So we kind of wanted to feel it out before bringing Anaheim in, and so we did 100 cans of Hazy but Lazy from the tap where we were just putting the cans in sanitizer and then purging them.
Speaker 3:It's very labor-intensiveive, like what home brewers would do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then, like, we were hand applying the labels and it went really well. So we decided to bring Ironheart in. But you know, you can only can, like they're only there for a certain amount of time and there was a minimum you had to can, but after a certain point they charged you more for different brands. That's kind of. It's kind of like you know, damned if you do, damned if you don't. But, um, so we would normally do three different brands to hit their minimum or go a little bit above it, so you weren't charged extra, and then we would release those cans once a month and that went really well. Covid happened. Selling beer in cans was the only way we could do it. Um and so, or growlers, that's when I forget about growlers everybody does, we bought, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, and growlers are just not a very efficient way of doing it.
Speaker 3:They they have the coolest name. Would you like to have four beers at once? Because you will.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or you know the beer will go bad.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's funny to me, though, there are some people who come in who are like there's a four-pack of Mos Def right there and they're like, no, I want a growler. Because they have this perception that the beer they're like beer off tap tastes better, and that's why they still get growlers. It's like it's the exact same beer, like we literally can it, and then right after we can, it goes into case. There's no difference. But I Think with some bigger breweries or probably is I could see they're more carbonated or they might add stabilizers to it so it's more stable. But I mean, I don't know, you know for a fact. But so we did that. And then we bought this little uh express fill machine. It was also very labor intensive. It was called a can Newton and uh, and then we just see him by hand, and then, finally, I was like we can't keep doing this. So then we bought our first canning line and, uh, there was three head head filler. And then we moved over here.
Speaker 2:I realized we were gonna send a lot more beer out in distribution, and so that's where we bought our 10 head filler, and I'm really glad we did, because it would be very difficult for us to keep up with what we're putting out now with the, the original canning line we bought. But that's pretty much the uh history of us getting into that form of packaging. It's funny because when we first started I was like we're never canning, stupid, you know, like you've got to pay for the can, the lid, the label, the four pack, but it's worth it. Well, yeah, I found out it was because now people have one, you go on to store shelves and it kind of is like advertising right. And then also, as you grow, you get to a point where you're making all this beer you can't sell all of it out of your tap room before it gets too old, so then you kind of have to send it out onto store shelves, and so it's funny how things change, yeah yeah, but I really like that you're.
Speaker 1:you know you you're going into this business thinking one thing, but like, as it grows, like you're adapting to, like you want it to go.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you have to right yeah if you want it to be successful yeah, of course.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know, even with pure styles, you know, um, a lot of brewers, uh, you know there are certain styles that they don't like or don't want to make, and you have to realize it's a business too, and if the general public likes that, for your consumers, yeah, and it's the same thing, like we talked about earlier with having a full liquor license. You just have to realize that not everyone likes beer and there's nothing wrong with that. So we just always had that mentality and you know we do a lot of things traditionally, but sometimes we throw a hundred candy bars in the beer.
Speaker 1:What candy bar.
Speaker 2:What was that? Yeah, a hundred.
Speaker 3:What was it? A hundred and one, we've done Snickers A thousand grand. Or a hundred grand. Remember when we did the 84? Oh, 82 Nutty Bars on a keg.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 82 Nutty Bars walk into a keg is what we called it, and we literally put 82 Nutty Bars into a beer.
Speaker 1:I love it. No, but speaking of peanut butter, so tell me about when do you add the peanut or how do you get that peanut butter taste in the Yumi? And Mr PB.
Speaker 2:So we actually use a food grade extract?
Speaker 1:Okay, I don't know if you're like walking across the street to Jif or not. Yeah, we try that.
Speaker 2:Mr Smuckers was like no. So peanut butter, you know, is very fatty and so when you try to add it to beer it is kind of difficult. So the extract is a food grade extract. I would say most breweries that have peanut butter beers use something to that extent and actually it says it's not allergenic. So I don't know if there are actually peanuts used or somehow in the process they extract the allergy.
Speaker 1:So my son has a peanut allergy and so he can still have peanut oil because from whenever they make the oil, it separates the protein. So that might be what's happening with this. So he can still have, like you know, chips that have been like fried in that, and it's like he won't have a reaction to that. So must be what it is with the. Yeah, which is good, good to know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no allergy issues here you know, I'm not 100 sure it's an accurate representation, so come on down. She's like this is what peanut butter tastes. Pretty close, that is pretty close it's like grape flavor.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what is grape flavor?
Speaker 1:doesn't taste like that, definitely flavor. It's delicious. No, it does not.
Speaker 2:Raspberry have you ever seen a blue raspberry? They don don't exist. They don't exist, it's a made up. I've seen pictures of them.
Speaker 1:I love it. Okay, I think we're. This is good, this is really good, and there's so much more science to all this than I. I mean. I walked in and knew that obviously this was like a huge process, but the amount of numbers and scientific terms that have been thrown at me today mind boggling.
Speaker 2:All for beer. Yeah, all words were made up.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, especially the ones towards the end there that you were mentioning.
Speaker 3:We do things so frequently and so often that the science we've kind of Becomes like ingrained. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Totally so. We're most of the time we're trying to figure out logistics of moving things from here to here. We've got our science dialed in, we don't have to worry about it as much. We try to keep everything repetitive Not in a bad way, but the more you do it, the more.
Speaker 1:Systematic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 3:The less variables that change, the less science you have to worry about.
Speaker 2:Love it Just keep up with it, though, and that's how you make a consistent product. And as you grow, when we first started and I think Kraft inherently has a little bit of this where you get a little leeway and people know like well, you know, this product might not taste exactly the same every time, but the larger you get, the more that's expected. Where you know your flagship beers, they don't taste exactly the same every time, but the larger you get, the more that's expected where, oh, I'm sure you know your flagship beers.
Speaker 2:They don't taste exactly the same every time and you know people will notice.
Speaker 1:But I guess people don't really realize. I mean, it's such a it depends on where hops are even grown, like you were saying, and like year to year.
Speaker 3:What the?
Speaker 1:crop was like that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly so and like a living thing the same ingredients and the same recipe to 10 breweries and they'll all taste the same.
Speaker 2:Yeah yeah, you mean different no, no, sorry.
Speaker 3:You give the same recipe and the same grains and the same hops to 10 different breweries. They brew the exact same way.
Speaker 2:It'll taste different at every brewery oh sure so well, and then another thing too is like the really big breweries they have such massive buying power that they get to, like, show up at the farm and say this is the crop we want, because this is going to make our beer taste exactly the same. We don't have that luxury. You know, we kind of get what's left over, in a sense, not saying that it's not as good, it's just not as consistent. And so, like citra is a very popular hop and it sometimes tastes different from 2022 to 2023. Most people may not perceive that difference and sometimes the difference doesn't come out, depending on how you use it. But for the most part, you know, we produce about 3,000 barrels a year, as opposed to larger breweries that produce 50,000. Then you get up into the millions of barrels. You just cannot achieve that level of consistency. For that reason alone, we still try, but it's kind of impossible when you don't have control over every part of the product. Because I'm doing it fair enough.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, we're gonna end with this, because there was a question earlier from myself. Um, the name white girl wasted. Where did it come from? Is Is it one girl?
Speaker 2:No, no, okay. When I was in college I was in a fraternity and we would always joke when one of our buddies had had a little too much, when they'd be like, let's go to Taco Bell or let's go to Jack in the Box, because they had those where I grew up, and we'd be like, oh man, tim is so white girl-laced, and so it was kind of a co-oculism that we used at my college to describe, you know, people who just taking it too far you know well, maybe not too far, but like, I feel like there's a level of beer you have to drink to want jack-in-the-box or waffle house to willingly yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:hey, waffle House is a perfectly good sober experience, sure is. My six-year-old wants to go to Waffle House.
Speaker 1:All the time. Mine does too. What is it with six-year-olds? No, let's go Twist my arm. I love that. So it's kind of for everyone. It's like a euphoria, a level of like yeah, let's all attempt to be.
Speaker 2:I mean, you know, I think for me what I love about beer and what I've always loved about beer is I think it brings people together. And you know you grab beers with your friends because you know you're talking about your day or what's going on in your life, and I've always really loved that aspect of it. And so I love the fact that when I hang out at the brewery in the taproom, you see that happening and I think that's why people love craft beer and that's why people we're social creatures and beer brings people together and I love that fact.
Speaker 1:I love that. Why do you love beer?
Speaker 3:Me personally, and beer brings people together and I love that about it. I love that. Why do you love beer? Me personally. I like the creative aspect of it. There's thousands and thousands of different beers. Untapped is an app on your phone where you can track the beers that you've had.
Speaker 1:Yes, I've heard of those that got me into craft beer.
Speaker 3:Not just that alone, but it helped progress Because there's so many things to track. They're all different flavors. There's a flavor for everybody. People say they don't like beer. I said you just haven't had the right one. There are beers that don't taste like beer. There are beers that taste like there are seven beers in the same glass. Yeah, so you know, I like the variety and the creative aspect of it.
Speaker 2:It's awesome, plus after a 22 ounce bomber of the 14%.
Speaker 3:Barrel aged stuff. Yeah, barrel aged stuff, it's medicine. They are my favorite.
Speaker 1:Medicine. Yeah, thank you both so much. Yeah, you're welcome. Yeah, this has been enlightening. I like it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, luckily we weren't attacked by bees.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know. Yeah, thank goodness. Well, you could have just put them in with the Lexmark beer. Yeah, could have just started making the honey right out here.
Speaker 3:You could have asked them to come pick them up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was like can you come take these bees, Love it. They're not behaving.
Speaker 1:Ah, love it. Oh jeez, they're not sweet enough. Dad joke that Love it.