Brewing Beer & Bringing People Together: Inside Aeronaut Brewery with Brewmaster Mark Bowers

Dustin Grinnell (00:00:00 --> 00:03:12)
I'm Dustin Grinnell, and this is Curiously.

Back in March, I headed up to Vermont for some R&R and to make a stop at the Alchemist Brewery to drink some Heady Topper, a legendary IPA that can be hard to come by here in Boston. Sitting there soaking it all in, I started thinking about the craft behind my favorite beers, especially IPAs. That's when I realized I needed to get a brewer on the show. I've been a fan of Aeronaut Brewing Company for years, enjoying their their IPAs while writing fiction at the Somerville Taproom and taking part in events like this spring's Space Week talks hosted by the Space Consortium. When I reached out, they got back to me right away, and the head brewer, Mark Bowers, said he'd love to come on the show to talk about all things craft brewing.

Mark's got a fascinating background. He's a former PhD chemist who was in San Francisco in the mid-1960s during the birth of the craft brewing movement. He's been brewing his own beer since he was a teenager, and after After spending years working in R&D labs, he jumped at the chance to start brewing for Aeronaut in 2014. I visited Aeronaut Brewery on a crisp fall day, and Mark and I had a wide-ranging conversation about the evolution of craft beer, the brewing process, the equipment, the ingredients, prototype beers, and experiments. And then we tasted a bunch of beers, from lagers and IPAs to seltzers and sours.

I've always been someone who defaults to an IPA at a brewery, but this conversation broadened my horizons and made want to try everything. What struck me most from our conversation was a theme that kept bubbling up. Beer is really about bringing people together. It's about being social, having fun, discovering new flavors, and sometimes even sparking ideas and getting things done. That said, I know some younger drinkers are moving away from beer toward cannabis and other alternatives, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Plenty of people report that cutting back on alcohol helps them sleep better, feel more energized, and even lower certain health risks. But if I may, I'd like to make a case for enjoying beer responsibly and in moderation. To help me do that, I'll borrow the words of Edward Slingerland, author of Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization. He writes that alcohol, quote, helps us be more creative. It helps us be more communal.

It helps us cooperate on a large scale. It helps to make it easier for us to kind of rub shoulders with each other in large-scale societies that we So it solved a bunch of adaptive problems that we uniquely face as a species because of this weird lifestyle that we have, end quote. Indeed, beer has been part of the American story since colonial times. It fueled debates in revolutionary taverns, followed soldiers to war, and remained a staple of daily life. From the Founding Fathers' brews to modern taprooms, beer has been a constant companion to our nation's, even our civilization's, story.

Dustin Grinnell (00:03:14 --> 00:03:16)
Mark Bowers, welcome to Curiously.

Mark Bowers (00:03:16 --> 00:03:17)
Glad to be here.

Dustin Grinnell (00:03:18 --> 00:03:27)
I was wondering if we could start with just kind of telling us where we are. What is Aeronaut Brewing Company and what should people know about this place?

Mark Bowers (00:03:27 --> 00:03:49)
We're in Somerville, Massachusetts at Aeronaut Brewing. And we're between Union Square and Porter Square. It's an industrial neighborhood to some extent, but there's some residential as well. And we've been brewing here for over 11 years now, and I've been working at this place for almost 12 years now.

Dustin Grinnell (00:03:50 --> 00:03:52)
So you're a brewmaster?

Mark Bowers (00:03:52 --> 00:03:53)
I'm a brewmaster, yes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:03:53 --> 00:03:58)
Now, what does a brewmaster do? What are the responsibilities? And from day to day, what do you do?

Mark Bowers (00:03:59 --> 00:04:38)
So as a brewmaster, well, I've been brewmaster for a number of years. Originally, I was still brewing as a brewmaster and did a lot of production brewing, and I also do a lot of prototype brewing. Now I'm doing more of the recipe development, checking on the QC. Some of our beers are contract brewed to other locations in the Northeast. QC stuff, new ingredients, the fun stuff, experiments, testing beers, drinking the beers, doing podcasts and other outreach type stuff too as well.

Dustin Grinnell (00:04:39 --> 00:04:52)
Okay. Before we kind of walk around and see the facility and see what equipment you use to make the beer, I was wondering if you could kind of explain brewing beer in the simplest terms?

Mark Bowers (00:04:52 --> 00:05:36)
This can be incredibly simple and incredibly complex. Beer's been around for something like 9,000 years now. It's a huge amount of time. Before, or at kind of dawn of civilization, some people actually think making beer and other fermented beverages was the reason civilization arose in the first place. And there's some evidence for that, that We were drinking beer and we wanted to make more of it and have more time to drink beer. So we started agriculture and we also had to farm barley instead of finding it wild. And so that kind of started the whole brewing revolution. At least that's some thought. I kind of like that personally, of course.

Dustin Grinnell (00:05:36 --> 00:05:36)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:05:36 --> 00:09:17)
So beer is a fermented beverage. It's in the kind of same category as wine, sake, a few other things like that. There's some little odd ones, but beer is generally brewed with 4 ingredients. Uh, water, of course, because it's a liquid. Barley, malted barley, and barley is a type of grain.

We don't eat that too much. Wheat is kind of like rice, are 2 big staples. The barley is eaten too. You can go to grocery stores and find some barley, um, products that you can eat. But barley just seemed to work better for brewing than making bread.

And so that kind of is the reason why we continue to use barley. It malts easier. Malting is sprouting the grain and letting it just sprout and then stopping the sprouting. This wakes up enzymes in the barley that can be used in brewing. So that's where the term malt comes from.

So it's usually barley malt. The, the other two ingredients are hops, and hops look like little paper pine cones. People have been using hops to flavor things for tens of thousands of years, maybe longer. Wasn't used routinely in making beer until about somewhere around 500 years ago. So it's a relatively new ingredient in beer in a sense.

Uh, and then the other thing is yeast and yeast isn't technically an ingredient because it makes beer, but then it kind of drops out. So there's not a lot of yeast in most beers. Uh, the idea is to get the yeast out of it. There's too much yeast. It doesn't taste good.

Yeast is a fungus, and it's used in a lot of fermentation. Yeast is used to make bread, so, and people have made bread for, at home for a long time, and people homebrew now too. But making bread is somewhat similar to making beer, except beer you end up getting a liquid out of it, whereas bread you end up letting it rise and you bake it and you bread. So that's trying to give you a little more simple idea of how the ingredients and the general concept. Now, in order to make beer, it's probably a lot like coffee in the sense that the malt is made into a cereal, it's ground up, you mix hot water into it, make kind of a cereal out of it, and that's a little bit similar to coffee.

Because now you take and filter it. Coffee, if you're doing like a pour over coffee or filtered coffee, you put coffee grounds in the filter, you add water, and then you collect the coffee liquid comes out of the bottom. A lot like brewing. We take barley, we mash it with hot water, we let it soak a while, and then we filter out, add some more water, rinse it out. Take that liquid, which is, uh, very sweet, and we call it wort, and it tastes a little bit like malted milk balls without the chocolate.

Dustin Grinnell (00:09:17 --> 00:09:41)
Yeah, yeah. So that's like the high-level basic brewing process and the ingredients in it and the key stages. When you think about the probably, I don't know, tens of thousands of different beers, what differentiates them in that process? Like the amount of hops, the amount of barley, the— what are all the dials that are turned to make them different?

Mark Bowers (00:09:41 --> 00:12:09)
For any of your listeners, you know, who know that there's different wines and wines, the same grape grown different places can taste different. But there's also a lot of different kinds of grapes. There's not a lot of different kinds of barley that are significantly taste different, but they do taste somewhat different. So that can give you different characteristics in the beer. Unlike wine, where wine is just grapes that go through it and they don't generally treat the grapes at all, barley can be treated.

So you have dozens and dozens of styles. So I'll just pick like a stout first. So some of your readers probably have heard of Guinness stout. That's all over the place. Yeah.

So that's a dark beer. It's black, it's roasty. Some people think it tastes like cold coffee with bubbles. So the similarity between the two is roasted malt versus roasted coffee beans. In fact, the roasters that are used for roasting barley to get this black, dark flavor out of barley for stouts is a similar type of equipment that's used to roast coffee.

In fact, the original guy, Wheeler, back in the 1800s took a coffee roaster, roasted barley so that he can make darker beers, which then eventually became stouts. So different roast levels, different kilning levels, you can get caramel flavors, burnt chocolate, espresso, coffee flavors out of beer. That's just one ingredient. So you also have hops, and hops have a lot of different flavors. Until probably 30 years ago, most hops were spicy, earthy, kind of herbally type flavors.

Dustin Grinnell (00:12:09 --> 00:12:16)
The slogan for Aeronaut Brewing is, uh, brewed with curiosity, backed by science.

Mark Bowers (00:12:16 --> 00:12:16)
Yes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:12:16 --> 00:12:21)
I wonder what does that mean in practice when you're making decisions here?

Mark Bowers (00:12:22 --> 00:13:02)
Well, Curiosity, I guess it's kind of like the podcast, your name, is that we're founded by several scientists, microbiologists. I'm a chemist, and one of our other previous founders was also into biology, microbiology. So we've had a lot of people who are incredibly curious about how things work. Now, I'm a chemist by training, and so Webb brought a curiosity to us to try different things, different types of ingredients, different styles of beer, different yeast and such like that. That's where the science comes from and the curiosity.

Dustin Grinnell (00:13:02 --> 00:13:21)
Yeah, we're in Boston, we're in a very educated area of the country. There's prestigious universities and scientific institutions. MIT is not too far away. So it seems like a very apt slogan for this place, founded by scientists, run by people with scientific backgrounds.

Mark Bowers (00:13:21 --> 00:13:22)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:13:22 --> 00:13:39)
Not all of us, but yeah, yeah, totally. Is there anything that this curiosity-driven ethos has created in particular? You know, like kind of having that curious mindset, has it created a beer or a process or something that you think is kind of maybe unique to Eronaut?

Mark Bowers (00:13:40 --> 00:14:52)
Nothing specific, but we kind of push the boundaries on some things. Uh, Hop Hoppin' Away was, it was an early beer that used very— some people call it full pool, whirlpool, where you do a dosing of hops at low temperatures. We weren't the first to do that, but we jumped on that bandwagon, and our Hop Hoppin' Away was, uh, the first production beer that we did that with, and we call it a session IPA, but other people might call it like more of a pale ale. The border is blurred, but when it first came out, this was kind of unique because it was a lower alcohol, it was under 5%, still had a lot of hop flavor. So when people compared this to other pale ales, they really liked the Hop Hoppin' Away a lot because it just had so much fruitiness to it. It wasn't super bitter. So that was kind of like— now, I mean, a lot of people do that now, but that was one of our first ones. And it's probably the single beer of ours that's won the most awards over the years.

Dustin Grinnell (00:14:52 --> 00:14:54)
I can personally say it's delicious.

Mark Bowers (00:14:55 --> 00:14:56)
One of my favorites.

Dustin Grinnell (00:14:56 --> 00:15:03)
Yeah, I like getting that one first usually. And then the Year of Dr. Nandu is also, is that what it's called?

Mark Bowers (00:15:03 --> 00:15:05)
Yeah, it's the Year of Dr. Nandu.

Dustin Grinnell (00:15:05 --> 00:15:19)
That's quite a good one too. So before we go into the brewing area, what are we going to see? Like orient me to the equipment and what we'll be introduced to.

Mark Bowers (00:15:19 --> 00:17:04)
Sure. The brewery we have here is, we only brew craft beer here now. Originally we canned our beer here too, but once we got to a certain size, we ended up had to find a bigger place. And right now we're contract brewing with two separate brewing companies to make our beer. So the beer that we make here now is just for draft, mostly in our taproom, but we also sell it mostly in the local area.

The specific beer is made here. Our other beers are sold throughout Massachusetts, into Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine, I think. Always varies. And so those are the different beers we've made, but we concentrate here on making draft beers, I said, but also prototype beers, and we're also doing, still do our R&D here. So the brew we have here is a Uh, we have two separate brew houses.

So we have a prototype system, which is one barrel. So that's like 31 gallons per batch. And we have a production system, which is 10 barrels per batch. And we have tank sizes, uh, 10 barrels, and it would be 300 gallons or so. And we have fermenters that are 10 barrel and 20 barrel.

So that's like 600 gallons for the 20-barrel tanks. We keg things here. We do some bottling. In fact, you came on a day when we're finishing up bottling one of our barrel-aged beers. I think it's complete at this point and we walk around, but you can still have this system out.

Dustin Grinnell (00:17:05 --> 00:17:08)
Well, what do you say? You want to walk over? Sure.

Mark Bowers (00:17:08 --> 00:17:09)
All right.

Dustin Grinnell (00:17:14 --> 00:17:22)
Isn't there something unique about Aeronaut in the sense that the taproom's right next to the brewing area?

Mark Bowers (00:17:22 --> 00:17:32)
Yeah, when we first set this up, we have actually two separate locations, two different addresses. We're currently in 14 Pilot Street.

Dustin Grinnell (00:17:32 --> 00:17:33)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (00:17:33 --> 00:17:55)
We walk through this doorway up here and we're in 30 Park Street. Oh, so it was a little bit of a pain getting our liquor license because they said, well, yeah, you want one liquor license for two different addresses. I said, no, right, but they're connected. So we had to show the pictures and show on the map that these two separate addresses are actually kind of the same.

Dustin Grinnell (00:17:55 --> 00:17:57)
It's like 30 feet to separate them.

Mark Bowers (00:17:57 --> 00:18:02)
Yeah. Okay. But our— the whole concept when we originally set up was have the brewery here.

Dustin Grinnell (00:18:03 --> 00:18:03)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:18:04 --> 00:18:33)
All of the brewery parts there. The customer taproom stuff is here, and this part was a food hub. Yeah, but we had people making, um, food on the right-hand side, and the customers were on the left-hand side. Yeah, with chairs and tables along there. Yeah. And so that's the original concept we had, and we wanted to keep it as open as we could. Right. And luckily the permitting allowed us to do this.

Dustin Grinnell (00:18:33 --> 00:18:35)
Yeah, you can almost see behind the scenes a little bit.

Mark Bowers (00:18:35 --> 00:18:47)
Yeah, in fact, especially Friday because we're open at noon on Friday and we're still working in the cellar because usually we open at 5 and we're done brewing by then.

Dustin Grinnell (00:18:47 --> 00:18:52)
Okay. Do you want to see what we can see in there?

Mark Bowers (00:18:52 --> 00:19:05)
Sure. Okay. So you can see right now they're doing some kegging. So after they finish bottling a barrel-aged beer, so we're kegging the leftovers at this point.

Dustin Grinnell (00:19:05 --> 00:19:06)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (00:19:06 --> 00:19:34)
And these are called bottle conditioned or keg conditioned in this site, where instead of carbonating the beer beforehand, we put the beer that's only partially carbonated into the container with some sugar and some yeast, so it will continue to ferment in the keg just enough to carbonate it. Okay.

Dustin Grinnell (00:19:34 --> 00:19:35)
All right.

Mark Bowers (00:19:35 --> 00:19:37)
Somewhat similar to how they make champagne.

Dustin Grinnell (00:19:37 --> 00:19:44)
And what is the big silver container that's going by tubes to the keg?

Mark Bowers (00:19:44 --> 00:19:46)
Uh, those are fermenters.

Dustin Grinnell (00:19:46 --> 00:19:47)
So that's the fermenters?

Mark Bowers (00:19:47 --> 00:20:36)
Yeah. So you can see that they're, uh, cylindrical on the top part. Yeah, the bottom is conical, so they're called cylindrical conical fermenters. Yeah, and these are relatively new, and I'll say last 100 years, somewhere about that, that type of container where it's closed so it keeps infectious agents and things out of the sterile— sterile is a little bit higher degree, but similar. Yeah, they're very similar. Okay. And, um, that allows us keeping cover, keeps dust out, keeps insects out and all that stuff. And, and it's easier to do that with these cylindrical conical off the bottom. We can take yeast off the bottom and reuse that yeast. And that's why the cone kind of concentrates the yeast on the bottom.

Dustin Grinnell (00:20:36 --> 00:20:37)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (00:20:37 --> 00:21:12)
Now this first tank here is a bright tank. You can see it's not really conical. It's just got called a dish bottom. It's because it's just slightly rounded. So in general, there's always exceptions, but generally we ferment in the fermenters. Then when the beer is done fermenting, we transfer just the beer and leave the yeast and hops and whatever else behind and put it into the bright tank. So it's mostly clear at that point. Then we can do some final settling in the bright tank, and we also add carbonation to it.

Dustin Grinnell (00:21:12 --> 00:21:15)
And what's the outcome of the bright tank?

Mark Bowers (00:21:15 --> 00:21:23)
The beer then is transferred into kegs. Oh, it becomes a step between the fermenters and the pack.

Dustin Grinnell (00:21:23 --> 00:21:26)
Okay, so it always goes from the fermenters to the bright tank?

Mark Bowers (00:21:26 --> 00:21:30)
Not always, most of the time. Okay. Yeah, there are exceptions. Okay.

Dustin Grinnell (00:21:30 --> 00:21:32)
In this case, is it going from the fermenters to the kegs?

Mark Bowers (00:21:32 --> 00:21:33)
Yes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:21:33 --> 00:21:37)
And then you're adding something in again for the carbonation?

Mark Bowers (00:21:37 --> 00:21:37)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:21:37 --> 00:21:38)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (00:21:38 --> 00:22:14)
So this one was a little bit different because this beer had been in barrel. So we barrel-aged it in wine barrels for like almost a year, and then we wanted to add some other ingredients to it. So we took it out of the wine barrels, put it into the fermenter, back into the fermenter, and with the way that it's shaped allowed us to add other more ingredients to it, rouse it up, kind of stir it up, add sugar and stir it up. And then we're putting it into the bottles and kegs.

Dustin Grinnell (00:22:14 --> 00:22:15)
Okay, where do the kegs go?

Mark Bowers (00:22:16 --> 00:22:18)
They go into the— yeah, in the refrigerator here.

Dustin Grinnell (00:22:18 --> 00:22:20)
Okay, but those are for sale basically?

Mark Bowers (00:22:21 --> 00:22:29)
And, uh, yeah, but most of those will be served at the bar here, but we do sell some into the general area.

Dustin Grinnell (00:22:29 --> 00:22:33)
Okay, but so yeah, those will go for the— to the taproom, to the bar, and for consumption.

Mark Bowers (00:22:33 --> 00:22:39)
So, and you can see now we're walking into a refrigerator. Refrigerator. This is our tap room refrigerator.

Dustin Grinnell (00:22:39 --> 00:22:40)
Chilling here.

Mark Bowers (00:22:40 --> 00:22:45)
And this is just— we have the setup just for kegs.

Dustin Grinnell (00:22:45 --> 00:22:45)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (00:22:45 --> 00:22:55)
So we store all the kegs not being used clear at this end, and then these up here on the racks with all these funny gauges and tubes and stuff.

Dustin Grinnell (00:22:55 --> 00:22:59)
These racks and the gauges, this and the tubes, this goes to the bar?

Mark Bowers (00:22:59 --> 00:23:00)
Yes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:23:00 --> 00:23:13)
So this behind the scenes, yeah, you use see a bartender pouring your beer, that's what we're looking at right now. Yes. Okay, interesting. So when they say we have to change the keg, they come back here, undo these two—

Mark Bowers (00:23:13 --> 00:23:25)
yes, these fittings. They lift them up, take it off, put the empty one outside where then we wash it, slide another one over, and connect it up.

Dustin Grinnell (00:23:25 --> 00:23:36)
Do you have— like, when you look at the the menu of all the beers, do you kind of have backups? Like if you run out, do you have multiple kegs ready to go?

Dustin Grinnell (00:23:36 --> 00:23:36)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:23:36 --> 00:23:47)
Yeah. So in this case, each one of these, I guess you call it a row here, are the same beer. So for instance, this is a German Pilsner.

Dustin Grinnell (00:23:47 --> 00:23:47)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:23:47 --> 00:24:11)
This is our Oktoberfest. And then this row is Orangutan Skies. This is Roaming Giant, our triple. And so it just goes on and on. And then when it gets lower and there's only a few left, sometimes we'll transfer over here as we bring in a new beer. And then the ones that are diminishing, there are only a few kegs left over here.

Dustin Grinnell (00:24:11 --> 00:24:17)
It's like Fort Knox for beer. Yes, it's a lot of valuable, uh, yeah, liquid in here.

Mark Bowers (00:24:17 --> 00:24:28)
We also have a refrigerator. It's actually just with our cans in it and some kegs that are overflow kegs in it as well. Cool. Shall we keep going? Yes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:24:29 --> 00:24:29)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (00:24:29 --> 00:24:33)
So we kind of started in the front and kind of ended at the output.

Dustin Grinnell (00:24:35 --> 00:24:43)
Because put the fermenting process, the conical containers in context of the process.

Mark Bowers (00:24:44 --> 00:25:10)
Okay. So the brewing process really starts in the brew house. And so, okay. And brewing takes pretty much all day. It's like a 6, 8, 12-hour, depending upon what kind of a beer you're making. And that's what these tanks on the left-hand side here are. There's like 4 or 5 different parts to it. So first of all, this inverted pyramid thing on the top.

Dustin Grinnell (00:25:10 --> 00:25:12)
Looks like it's 20 feet, 30 feet.

Mark Bowers (00:25:12 --> 00:25:14)
Yeah, must be a good 25 feet up.

Dustin Grinnell (00:25:14 --> 00:25:14)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:25:15 --> 00:25:40)
That is a grist cage. So that's where the cracked grain or milled grain is stored in there. And we have a conveyor system on the room next door on the hopper. We load the hopper with the milled grain. It's then transferred up through those tubes into this inverted pyramid that sits way up high. That's step one.

Dustin Grinnell (00:25:40 --> 00:25:40)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (00:25:40 --> 00:26:23)
So when we're ready to brew, so typically we'll probably do that the day ahead of time to load the grain, we call it. Then on brew day, we have water piped up. Then there's another very little pipe that runs from the grain into what's called the mash tun, the bigger round, almost kettle-like thing below it. The grain falls through. As it falls through, water is sprayed underneath the grain in this bulbous thing, which is called a hydrator. So we're hydrating the grain, we're getting the grain wet. It falls into the big container, which has a— we call it a false bottom. It's like a filter in the bottom of it.

Dustin Grinnell (00:26:23 --> 00:26:24)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (00:26:24 --> 00:26:46)
And these have holes in it, so it's very much like a coffee filter. So it sets on top of that. We stir it, we let that set for an hour, and then we run the liquid off of the bottom. Through pipes, through a pump, into another container that looks like this, but on the other side that has the chimney on it. That's the kettle. That's where we boil all of the wort.

Dustin Grinnell (00:26:46 --> 00:26:48)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (00:26:48 --> 00:27:48)
Which is the pre-beer liquid that comes off of the barley. We add hops to it in there. We boil that for about an hour. Then we run it through this other— there's actually two tanks here, one on top of the other. The one on the bottom is a whirlpool.

So the hot boiled wort is then circulated into the whirlpool and it's brought in at an angle so the liquid in the whirlpool spins around. So what that does is concentrate all of the solid material. Even though we ran off liquid, we add hops to it. When you boil it, proteins coagulate. So you end up with solid material.

Dustin Grinnell (00:27:48 --> 00:27:49)
And what's usable?

Mark Bowers (00:27:49 --> 00:27:50)
Just the liquid.

Dustin Grinnell (00:27:50 --> 00:27:51)
And then the liquid goes where?

Mark Bowers (00:27:51 --> 00:28:36)
The liquid then is pumped out back through the pump into a heat exchanger. Okay. And a heat exchanger is kind of like, says we're exchanging heat for cold. So we're putting in this hot wort and on one side and one direction, and on the other direction we're putting in cold water. And so as the cold water goes by the hot wort separated by panels, separators, there's heat transfer. So the cold water gets hot and the hot wort gets cold. So the cold wort goes out, goes into the tank, because we can't ferment it until it's at 70 degrees. So we have to cool it from boiling 212 down to about 70 degrees.

Dustin Grinnell (00:28:36 --> 00:28:36)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (00:28:36 --> 00:28:53)
And then the hot water, we have a hot liquor tank, one of these tanks here. Hot liquor just means water in the brewing world. So it's like a big hot water tank. So we take the hot water that we made from the heat exchanger and we put it in that and we use that to brew our next beer.

Dustin Grinnell (00:28:54 --> 00:28:57)
And then you now have beer in the fermenter.

Mark Bowers (00:28:57 --> 00:28:58)
Yes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:28:58 --> 00:29:01)
And then how close are you to final product at that point?

Mark Bowers (00:29:01 --> 00:29:27)
So it takes one day to brew, but it takes, let's say for typical beers, it takes a couple of weeks, three weeks to ferment it and then have the fermentation stop after four or five days. Let it settle down. We add more hops sometimes to IPAs, dry hopping. We wait for that to extract, settle down, then we put it into the bright tank like I was explaining earlier.

Dustin Grinnell (00:29:27 --> 00:29:27)
Got it.

Mark Bowers (00:29:27 --> 00:29:39)
Okay. Package it. That's pretty much the process. Yeah. So prototype tanks here. These are experimental things. We have 3 or 4 different beers in there now, I think. Okay.

Dustin Grinnell (00:29:39 --> 00:29:40)
That's kind of a miniaturized—

Mark Bowers (00:29:41 --> 00:29:41)
It is.

Dustin Grinnell (00:29:41 --> 00:29:42)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:29:42 --> 00:30:02)
And if you look at the brew system, I guess you would call it, For the prototypes, they're just kettles. These are just big pots. They're upside down, so we drain them, but these are just kettles. So we do it similar to that concept, but it's more manual. We're moving things around. We do have pumps, but we do a lot of things manually.

Dustin Grinnell (00:30:02 --> 00:30:06)
Now, you said, uh, the prototypes— you have a few going right now?

Mark Bowers (00:30:06 --> 00:30:07)
Yes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:30:07 --> 00:30:08)
Is it proprietary, or—

Mark Bowers (00:30:08 --> 00:30:11)
No. Okay, we serve these prototypes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:30:11 --> 00:30:12)
Um, oh, you serve the pro—

Mark Bowers (00:30:12 --> 00:30:12)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:30:12 --> 00:30:14)
The experimental beers.

Mark Bowers (00:30:14 --> 00:30:21)
Yeah. Oh, okay. Unless it's bad, but then it's rare. We've thrown a few away, but we know.

Dustin Grinnell (00:30:21 --> 00:30:26)
You get some bad eggs every once in a while, probably. So you expose the ones that you like to the public.

Mark Bowers (00:30:27 --> 00:30:28)
Oh, yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:30:28 --> 00:30:30)
Kind of get a feel for how other people are feeling.

Mark Bowers (00:30:30 --> 00:30:31)
Exactly. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:30:31 --> 00:30:34)
Okay. And so what are you prototyping now?

Mark Bowers (00:30:36 --> 00:31:06)
Well, one we do is a new hop. We've got an IPA in the tank. I'll give you a taste of the one out of the bright tank, which is a production one. And then out of the prototype, we did, sometimes we do something that's very effective. Instead of brewing two separate beers and just changing one ingredient, we can brew one big beer on the big system, side stream, take some of that beer, put it in one of those tanks and add some other ingredient.

Dustin Grinnell (00:31:06 --> 00:31:10)
Okay. Okay, so you sort of take a little, little something for the experiment.

Mark Bowers (00:31:10 --> 00:31:11)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:31:11 --> 00:31:11)
Got it.

Mark Bowers (00:31:11 --> 00:31:32)
And so one of these ones, we have a New England IPA, which is in the bright tank, is our New Zingland. It's New Zealand hops, but in the New England IPA. And then we wanted to try out another new hop, actually an American hop instead of the New Zealand hop. And we tested that out in one of the prototypes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:31:33 --> 00:31:50)
That must be quite a rush to kind of think of things conceptually and then taste it. Is there always a surprise there? Is there always a thrill there of like, all right, on paper, we've got this amount of hops, we've got these concepts, but now I'm pouring it into a glass.

Mark Bowers (00:31:50 --> 00:31:50)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:31:50 --> 00:31:52)
And there's a thrill of—

Mark Bowers (00:31:53 --> 00:31:55)
Well, there's always an anticipatory thrill.

Dustin Grinnell (00:31:55 --> 00:31:56)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:31:56 --> 00:31:58)
Because sometimes it doesn't come out like you think. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:31:59 --> 00:32:00)
Oh, yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:32:00 --> 00:32:04)
This just isn't right. This is not at all what you were expecting in a good way or in a bad way.

Dustin Grinnell (00:32:04 --> 00:32:07)
Right. Pleasantly surprised or whoops, we missed the mark.

Mark Bowers (00:32:08 --> 00:32:14)
Or something. Oh, we nailed this one. This is even better than I expected. Yeah, it was so different. I didn't expect this.

Dustin Grinnell (00:32:14 --> 00:32:15)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:32:15 --> 00:32:15)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:32:15 --> 00:32:19)
How often do you get that feeling? Is that a daily thing or is that a weekly thing or?

Mark Bowers (00:32:19 --> 00:32:22)
A couple times a week, probably. Okay.

Dustin Grinnell (00:32:22 --> 00:32:32)
Like break it down in terms of like, okay, this is routine beer making. We've got to have a stock and inventory versus experimental prototyping work that I imagine you find to be pretty thrilling.

Mark Bowers (00:32:32 --> 00:33:52)
It's probably maybe 20% prototyping and then the other 70 and, I mean, 80% or so. It's more routine. But even with the beers that we make for the taproom, we have some similar beers that we make kind of seasonally, but quite often we'll tweak them. We can tweak them a little bit. So, you know, this one wasn't— was too sweet last time, let's make it less sweet.

Or we'll say, oh, there's this new ingredient that we think would really work with it, we're going to change out the old one, put this new one in because it's better in some respects, or we think it is. Yeah, so we'll do that, or we'll do a big change to it. It's the same style of beer, but oh, it's almost start from a fresh piece of paper. Let's say, oh, let's change the base malt, the biggest part of the malt, and we're gonna add different other malts to it. Well, let's throw some spice in it.

Dustin Grinnell (00:33:52 --> 00:33:53)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:33:53 --> 00:34:14)
So you, we do it that way or we just start say, hey, we haven't made a, let's say a, a sahti before, which is kind of this Finnish beer, if I remember correctly. And it uses different ingredients and different yeast and such in a traditional way. Let's try something completely different. We've never done this before. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:34:15 --> 00:34:24)
And is there like a, like a, a great, an experiment you did recently that just really you're very proud of? Like, is there a favorite prototype?

Mark Bowers (00:34:24 --> 00:34:36)
One prototype that then went on to a production beer that I like a lot, and it's a lot, it's very different from a lot of other beers, was our Limonade. Comes out in the summer.

Dustin Grinnell (00:34:36 --> 00:34:36)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (00:34:36 --> 00:35:16)
But it's a lemonade beer. And a couple of things that are unique about it, because it really tastes like lemonade. And a beer. Now, some people, they say, well, it's like Radler, which is a mixture of like lemonade or lemon soda, lemon lime soda with beer, and you just mix them. Well, this was designed to be more like lemonade than like just mixing beer and lemonade or lemon juice together. And I used some techniques that didn't require us to make a sour beer. If you've heard of sour beers, your audience probably has.

Dustin Grinnell (00:35:16 --> 00:35:18)
Heard of them, yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:35:18 --> 00:36:32)
A lot of those are called kettle sours, and they're made by putting bacteria, usually, it's usually a 2-day brewing process instead of 1. So, the first day is souring, and you do this with bacteria, very similar to the bacteria that's used in yogurt. In fact, some home brewers will put yogurt— take some yogurt out, put it in their wort to sour it, then they boil it and add hops and then pump it into a fermenter. Well, that takes 2 days. Well, this lemonade beer uses just lemons to make it sour because lemons have enough sour as it already is. And then, um, I also use some special all-natural extracts to kind of bring out the lemon zest and the aroma to it and, uh, add a little bit of a, a sense of sweetness to it so it's just not too puckery. Yeah. And so I think that was kind of a unique one that we did, and we prototyped it, figured out what ingredients, where to get them, how to source them, how to blend things together to get the exact flavors that we wanted in this lemonade.

Dustin Grinnell (00:36:32 --> 00:36:37)
And that just came from your brain as an idea, and then you put it to work.

Mark Bowers (00:36:37 --> 00:36:37)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:36:37 --> 00:36:39)
And it's now on the menu.

Mark Bowers (00:36:39 --> 00:36:58)
Yes. Last year did okay the first time we introduced, and this year better too. So it's— we're kind of growing. We'd love to, like, now let's take some pink lemonade, do maybe a blueberry lemonade beer, and kind of have a whole series, kind of like, you know, people do with the mixed salsa packs and all this other stuff. You just have all these different flavors.

Dustin Grinnell (00:36:59 --> 00:37:10)
Is this part of the mandate of the brewmaster, the brewer, is to kind of push the boundaries a little bit, keep going, come up with something new and exciting and stay on the cutting edge?

Mark Bowers (00:37:10 --> 00:37:11)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:37:11 --> 00:37:14)
So this is craft beer making in essence?

Mark Bowers (00:37:14 --> 00:37:15)
In essence, yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:37:15 --> 00:37:18)
And is there a cutting edge right now for craft beer?

Mark Bowers (00:37:18 --> 00:37:26)
Oh, there's dozens of them, I guess. Sure. And it's, I wouldn't say settling down, but it's kind of leveling off a little bit.

Dustin Grinnell (00:37:26 --> 00:37:27)
In terms of like the innovation?

Mark Bowers (00:37:28 --> 00:37:45)
Yeah, in the sense that it's not as Wild West as it used to be because some people say, well, you've tried every kind of beer almost there is to make, and everybody's thrown every single fruit they probably ever thought of in their life or every ingredient. Someone's made a beer with it, I'm almost guaranteeing.

Dustin Grinnell (00:37:46 --> 00:37:46)
Yeah, yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:37:47 --> 00:38:43)
And so now it's how do you refine that instead of just throw anything in because no one's ever done it before. Then now it's, well, now let's take some of these ingredients and and push it a little differently and make it a little bit more refined, a little bit more looking for what we think people want in a beer. We know they like fruit and bitterness is being dialed down on it. So how do we kind of go after that and make something maybe still very fruity, but natural tasting and try things like that out or All natural, organic. I mean, people have already done that, but they're pushing more into local. What can you do with local ingredients? People love to hear that. Low alcohol, non-alcohol, a big thing too. So a lot of people are getting into— so there's just all these different ones.

Dustin Grinnell (00:38:43 --> 00:38:55)
Do public's tastes change as well? Because I think about like, if you think about movies, like horror is having a moment. Is there something having a moment? Is there a taste that's having a moment now?

Mark Bowers (00:38:55 --> 00:39:46)
I can give you some ideas of what's happened just like in the last maybe 10 years. So IPAs were big. And about 10 years ago, New England IPAs came out, the hazy IPAs. Yep. And they're still, they're very popular, but they're not growing like they were.

It's cooling a little bit. So that's one that kind of peaked, that's probably coming down or leveling off. Another couple that have kind of peaked and dropped way down are pastry stouts. Making these big stouts and throwing chocolate in it, throwing hazelnut, pistachios, all sorts of nuts. Yeah, almonds.

Dustin Grinnell (00:39:46 --> 00:39:47)
It was like ice cream.

Mark Bowers (00:39:48 --> 00:39:52)
Oreo. Yes, exactly. Did you add anything to it, especially the chocolate type stuff?

Dustin Grinnell (00:39:52 --> 00:39:53)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:39:53 --> 00:40:09)
Sours too were really big. People just took these souring process and they threw every fruit they could think of into it. Let's do lemon. Let's do oranges. Let's do kiwi. Let's do dragon fruit. Let's do acai. I mean, what? Pomegranate, all of these, and then start blending.

Dustin Grinnell (00:40:09 --> 00:40:14)
Cambrian explosion. Yeah. This explosion of experimental tastes.

Mark Bowers (00:40:14 --> 00:41:31)
Yeah. So that one kind of peaked and it's coming down. And then it was really big for our Belgian beers, the saisons, because they have kind of a unique yeast. That's one where the flavor is very yeast-driven. The yeast are making these called phenolics, so the spiciness from saisons from the yeast itself.

And so those were really big. And then there were lambic-like beers, which are mixed fermentation or wild organisms to ferment the beer. Those were big for a while. Most Americans got into making it similar to what the Belgians— now that's kind of dropped down too. The one that's coming back is because lagers kind of disappeared once craft brewing kind of took off.

All of the lagers, like with Budweiser, Coors, Miller, all the really big macro brewers make, they've been losing share for 30 years or so, at least in the US. Some other countries they've increased, but in general they've been going down. And craft beer came out, said, now we're not going to make any of that fizzy, bland, yellow beer anymore. You know, we're going to make the craft beer. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:41:31 --> 00:41:31)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:41:32 --> 00:41:43)
The macro beers, they're still made very well, and they went after a common denominator. I can't make a Budweiser beer. I can't make it like what they do.

Dustin Grinnell (00:41:43 --> 00:41:46)
Because it's proprietary process, or you just—

Mark Bowers (00:41:46 --> 00:41:56)
No, in part, but a lot of it is they've nailed the process down and the ingredients and everything like that over, you know, 150, 200 years.

Dustin Grinnell (00:41:56 --> 00:42:01)
Just like a soda maker couldn't make Coca-Cola. Because they also have—

Mark Bowers (00:42:01 --> 00:42:04)
yeah, I mean, they come close. Of course Pepsi is close to Coke.

Dustin Grinnell (00:42:04 --> 00:42:05)
Okay, yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:42:05 --> 00:42:35)
And we can make beers that to an average person is probably close, but not exactly in consistency and price. We can't touch that. Yeah, I mean, we have one person makes 10 barrels in a day here, and, and these big companies have one person with computers and everything else can probably make 2,000 barrels in a day. You know, the scale and the efficiency, we have nothing. So we will never touch things like that.

Dustin Grinnell (00:42:35 --> 00:42:36)
Would you want to make a Budweiser?

Mark Bowers (00:42:38 --> 00:43:11)
No, but what I would like is to be able to have their consistency because they've studied everything in their whole process. We don't. In fact, even, even though we have beers that come out all the time, they're they're made in our contract facilities where they make the same beer over and over again fairly regularly, they can start fine-tuning things. We make a beer, most of the beers here we'll make once a year. So, and then we'll change it the next year. So we can never get consistency here.

Dustin Grinnell (00:43:11 --> 00:43:16)
So are you saying like a hop hop and away, for example, there'll be some built-in inconsistency between?

Mark Bowers (00:43:17 --> 00:43:18)
There always is.

Dustin Grinnell (00:43:18 --> 00:43:18)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (00:43:18 --> 00:43:22)
So even Budweiser has that, but their consistency is really small.

Dustin Grinnell (00:43:22 --> 00:43:23)
It's a smaller thing.

Mark Bowers (00:43:23 --> 00:43:24)
Ours is bigger.

Dustin Grinnell (00:43:24 --> 00:43:30)
So if I had a Hop Hop It Away today and I came back in November, would it be slightly different?

Mark Bowers (00:43:30 --> 00:43:31)
Slightly, yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:43:31 --> 00:43:38)
Okay. Just because there's a little bit of inconsistency in the process?

Mark Bowers (00:43:38 --> 00:44:09)
The process, the ingredients are changing. So you come back like in November, most likely that's going to have a fair amount or be completely new batch of barley, possibly a new batch of hops, or the hops are a year older, well, than they were if we made the hot hop the year before. So ingredients are changing. It's an agricultural process. It's like you go, you buy an apple one day in the market and you go back in the same company, same store, whatever. This apple is the same.

Dustin Grinnell (00:44:09 --> 00:44:13)
But it sounds like you value consistency though. You'd like to as much as possible.

Mark Bowers (00:44:13 --> 00:44:14)
As much as possible.

Dustin Grinnell (00:44:14 --> 00:44:14)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:44:14 --> 00:45:16)
Yeah. But then again, I also like what winemakers do. Do. I mean, because your customer will say, wow, this beer, and I tasted this before, you know, so it's nowhere near what you made last year. I just remember last year, you know, I came in here, yeah, this is the greatest thing in the world. They sometimes will say that, yeah, they say, hey, this is just not the same, and we'll taste them, you know, we say, well, yeah, there's a difference, but it's not like, wow, this is the greatest thing I've ever had, you know. We don't get that. They occasionally do, but then other times, you know, it's most people will taste and say, hey, I can't tell the difference. And a lot of it is a person's taste varies. So if you drink coffee before you drink a beer, that's going to taste— make the beer taste different. Even if you had take the same glass and they didn't tell you this, so you drank some beer and then you drink your coffee and then you drink the same beer, but they told you it was a different one, you'd say, yeah, this is different. I like the first one better because what you had before affects your taste.

Dustin Grinnell (00:45:17 --> 00:45:21)
Just like mechanism is what the taste buds get. Why does that happen?

Mark Bowers (00:45:21 --> 00:45:28)
Well, emotions. If you're feeling good, you're going to taste something differently than if you're depressed or something.

Dustin Grinnell (00:45:28 --> 00:45:29)
Yeah, yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:45:29 --> 00:46:57)
So if you're tasting a lot of different things, after a while they start all tasting the same because now your, your, your taste buds have been overloaded. They're reaching overload on it, and then they're going to start not recording. It was interesting, we had a guy come in to us who teaches, uh, at the time he taught at Tufts, and he had worked at Budweiser for, I don't know, 20 or 30 years as a sensory expert. So, he had a really good taste, but he also studied the whole process of sensory and tasting and such. And, he says, you know, what a number of different things Budweiser did to try to push their beers.

I mean, they're looking for not just consistency but drinkability. They want someone to drink a Budweiser and each time you take a sip, It lingers on your palate a little bit, then goes away very quickly. It says, hey, I'm ready for another one. Now, if you have something like chocolate milk, it kind of coats your mouth. You usually don't have the same thing.

And most people, certainly adults, can't drink a lot of chocolate milk anymore. Yeah. It's sweet. It's cloying. You drink some more, yeah, this was nice, but I can't drink this for, you know, throughout the next 2 football games I'm gonna watch on TV.

Dustin Grinnell (00:46:57 --> 00:46:59)
Oh yeah, definitely not.

Mark Bowers (00:46:59 --> 00:47:36)
So you want something that is kind of crisp, clean, and then that flavor drops off of your palate, but it says, yeah, I want more. It's kind of like this more-ish. So you end up taking another drink. So they're designing their beers to have this more and be balanced so that then you go out to the store, yeah, I really enjoy those beers. I drink like, you know, I pound a 10 of those, you know, the other Right, down like water. Yeah, down like water. It tastes good. You know, if I drink War and Axe, it's just, oh, it's just not the same. I can only drink like 3 of those and, you know, I'm like gurly gassy or, you know.

Dustin Grinnell (00:47:36 --> 00:47:38)
Yeah, feel full or whatever.

Mark Bowers (00:47:38 --> 00:49:52)
They says you pour a pint, glass of beer, can of beer, whatever, and you take a couple of sips, you know, 2, 3, 4 sips, and you describe the beer. What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? What are the flavors you're getting? Things like this.

How does it sit in your mouth? You know, this whole description of sensory that you take. But you drink that beer down, you know, in a— not in a really long period of time, but, you know, 5, 10, 15 minutes, something like that. And then you open another one, take a few sips, and then you describe it again. And you do that until, you know, you've had probably 8, 9, 10 beers, and it's incredibly unlikely that your results, what you write down, your description would be the same for all 10.

Sure. Once you get down to like, you know, 6 or 7, oh yeah, I'm just not getting that anymore. I'm not getting the flavor. It's lingering, you know, I can hardly taste it anymore or whatever, you know, you have this thing. And so you wanna then go back to your beer.

You see what people do, you know, If your beer, and if you compare this to people drinking other beers that have this drinkability, they'll say, well, it stays fairly constant for a while before it goes down. Now, we have this other beer over here that after 2, it was like that. What's the difference between that beer and the other one? Can we make our beer taste better in whatever it takes? That I want to drink more of it and I can, I want like 2 or 3 of them instead of quit after 1 because that's where most of the sales are.

Dustin Grinnell (00:49:52 --> 00:49:55)
Okay. Yeah. And drinking more in one session.

Mark Bowers (00:49:55 --> 00:49:56)
Exactly.

Dustin Grinnell (00:49:56 --> 00:49:56)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (00:49:56 --> 00:50:22)
Someone goes to a bar, you know, they're not, the general brewer doesn't want to sell one small glass of beer to a person. It's nice, you go in and you order maybe 2 of them, or you have— you only order their beer for the evening. If you look at most, a lot of craft beer drinkers, they go out, they rarely drink the same beer twice in an evening. They'll, oh, look at what they've got, I want to try that one.

Dustin Grinnell (00:50:22 --> 00:50:29)
Exactly, that's what I do. Yeah, I do 3 or so, and it's a couple different IPAs and maybe something random.

Mark Bowers (00:50:29 --> 00:50:35)
And yeah, so there's kind of the a little bit background on, you know, what people are trying to do on their beer.

Dustin Grinnell (00:50:35 --> 00:50:35)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:50:35 --> 00:50:43)
It's not just, well, I want to try this. Well, okay, let's get a little more scientific. How are we going to sell more beer? What do we do to sell more beer?

Dustin Grinnell (00:50:43 --> 00:50:49)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we're still in the brewmaking area here.

Mark Bowers (00:50:50 --> 00:50:50)
Yes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:50:50 --> 00:50:52)
What else should we do? I'm in your hands.

Mark Bowers (00:50:53 --> 00:50:53)
Okay.

Dustin Grinnell (00:50:53 --> 00:50:55)
We want to try prototypes. We want to see anything else.

Mark Bowers (00:50:55 --> 00:50:57)
Let's try some beer since we're back here.

Dustin Grinnell (00:50:57 --> 00:50:59)
Right on. Twist my arm, I guess.

Mark Bowers (00:50:59 --> 00:51:36)
Yeah. So the other thing is, there was some craft beer brewer, he made this comment, he says, packaging is where craft beer goes to die. Put it in the keg, put it in the can or whatever. Because every time you do that, you're introducing oxygen to it from the air. You can't keep all the oxygen out. You're shaking it up, you're moving it, but mostly you're getting air into it and other such. And it's a higher surface area in the can or the keg or whatever. So it starts deteriorating. So the best beer ever is out of the tank.

Dustin Grinnell (00:51:36 --> 00:51:49)
Oh, interesting. So let's say it comes out of the tank at a 10, from 0 to 10, it's a 10. And then it gets into like a can. Where are we talking? It goes from a 10 to an 8, an 8.5, 7?

Mark Bowers (00:51:49 --> 00:51:55)
Depends on the brewer, depends on the beer, the amount of oxygen, type of beer.

Dustin Grinnell (00:51:55 --> 00:51:56)
So you could really mess it up?

Mark Bowers (00:51:56 --> 00:51:58)
You could. Oh, hell yeah. Wow.

Dustin Grinnell (00:51:58 --> 00:52:07)
So there's always going to be— I mean, if you say that's where it goes to die, that means you got to be— you got to have quality control over that part.

Mark Bowers (00:52:07 --> 00:52:07)
Yes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:52:07 --> 00:52:09)
Otherwise you can blow the whole thing.

Mark Bowers (00:52:10 --> 00:52:12)
Yes. Huh. Absolutely.

Dustin Grinnell (00:52:12 --> 00:52:13)
And I'm sure you keep a close eye on that.

Mark Bowers (00:52:13 --> 00:52:16)
We try to, yes. Yep.

Dustin Grinnell (00:52:16 --> 00:52:16)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (00:52:16 --> 00:52:24)
And so when I drink beer, it's— I love it out of the tank. It's like I said, it's To me, it's the best it's ever going to be.

Dustin Grinnell (00:52:24 --> 00:52:35)
I guess it's almost like pulling a tomato off of a plant or something. Yeah. Like right from the source. So when you drink, you don't go to that taproom, you go right to the container. Yes.

Mark Bowers (00:52:35 --> 00:52:37)
Now, this is me. I still drink that out of—

Dustin Grinnell (00:52:37 --> 00:52:38)
Oh yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:52:38 --> 00:52:45)
I like, in general, draft beer is fresher tasting if they clean the lines off. I mean, there's all these moving parts.

Dustin Grinnell (00:52:45 --> 00:52:45)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:52:45 --> 00:52:55)
But assuming you go in the bar that takes care of the product, you know, in the keg, and the lines are clean, all that other stuff, draft beer is better than canned beer.

Dustin Grinnell (00:52:56 --> 00:53:00)
Okay, so everything else being equal. Got it, got it.

Mark Bowers (00:53:00 --> 00:53:33)
Because it's a bigger container, it's easier to keep the oxygen out. It's usually cooled all the time. It's shipped cold in kegs, and it's usually— if they're taking care of it right, it's put in. Now, beer, most of the beer you buy in the store, even if you buy it out of the cooler, Most of those beers were sitting on a shelf or in the warehouse warm, and then they cool it just before you buy it, or, you know, right, a day or so before it gets there, it's been in the cooler.

Dustin Grinnell (00:53:33 --> 00:53:37)
And that process of warming, setting— yeah, the taste—

Mark Bowers (00:53:37 --> 00:53:40)
there are people who can taste, you know, a beer that's been left out—

Dustin Grinnell (00:53:40 --> 00:53:41)
oh yeah—

Mark Bowers (00:53:41 --> 00:53:44)
24 hours and then put back in the refrigerator.

Dustin Grinnell (00:53:44 --> 00:53:48)
So there's a spectrum of like taste sensitivity.

Mark Bowers (00:53:48 --> 00:53:48)
Yes.

Dustin Grinnell (00:53:48 --> 00:53:56)
And is this something you develop, or is there like some people, you know, in music they have a perfect pitch, you know, and that's really just like genetic, biological?

Mark Bowers (00:53:56 --> 00:53:57)
It's both.

Dustin Grinnell (00:53:57 --> 00:53:58)
You can learn it a little bit?

Mark Bowers (00:53:58 --> 00:54:58)
You can learn, definitely you can learn a lot, but there's some aspects that it's purely genetic. There's one thing that we taste for when we're doing our QC, we're tasting for faults in beer. There are a number of chemicals, flavors, aromas that can get into beer if, if you haven't waited long enough or you didn't brew it properly in the first place. They come through and they're called faults. And most of these faults can be at very low levels, um, chemically speak, parts per billion which is a very, very small amount of something. You can taste it if it's in the beer. And some things are there at low levels below our threshold, but they actually still make the beer taste better. But once you get above the threshold, then they become a fault. They make the beer taste bad.

Dustin Grinnell (00:54:58 --> 00:55:00)
Okay. So like dose response.

Mark Bowers (00:55:00 --> 00:55:00)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (00:55:00 --> 00:55:01)
Oh, there's a middle.

Mark Bowers (00:55:01 --> 00:55:04)
And different people have different sensitivities to these.

Dustin Grinnell (00:55:04 --> 00:55:05)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (00:55:05 --> 00:56:29)
H2S. A lot of lagers have some sulfur, and you may not even know it's there, but it's somewhat— oh yeah, I'm getting a little soft. Oh yeah. Diacetyl is another one. That's a flavor that comes from It's very similar to the— it's a butter-like flavor for most people, the way they sense it.

It's like the artificial butter that they use in movie theater popcorn. That flavor is diacetyl, and it can be found in beer. And so people try to make sure that that's aged out of the beer or not present in the first place. So, and there's other ones too, you know, that are like that. There's DMS, dimethyl sulfide.

Which is like, for most people, it tastes like creamed corn. Like, you open a can of creamed corn. And that's because it's in the malt, the precursor. And then, when it goes into the beer, it's turned into this dimethyl sulfide. But, if you boil the beer long enough when you're making it, all those precursors disappear.

Dustin Grinnell (00:56:29 --> 00:56:36)
If you didn't get the boiling right or the temperature, some would make it through and then you detect that as a fault in the, in the QC. Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:56:36 --> 00:57:25)
Yeah. So this is interesting. So a number of the big macro brewers of long ago had what professionals call faults, but the average person doesn't detect it because it's at low levels. They've been trained for it and they're sensitive to it. Sure. But there were beers— Rolling Rock is one of them— that had this DMS in it, and at a low level that most people didn't say, oh, this is, this is bad because it tastes like creamed corn. But if you really thought about it and compared it, that most people could probably pick that up. So subconsciously, a lot of people picked up the Rolling Rock, this DMS flavor, and they liked it. So, you know, The typical Rolling Rock beer person liked this DMS.

Dustin Grinnell (00:57:25 --> 00:57:26)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:57:26 --> 00:58:03)
Well, Budweiser bought the Rolling Rock out, and it happened to be that they ended up— Rolling Rock had this DMS because they had this what they call a funky flue. So the chimney went up, it went sideways and sideways a long way before it went out of the building. So all of that stuff would boil up, but it wouldn't make it all the way out the chimney. The chimney was too long and too convoluted. So a lot of it just stayed or dripped back into the beer. Yeah. But when Budweiser transferred that recipe to their plant, the straight—

Dustin Grinnell (00:58:03 --> 00:58:04)
different flow.

Mark Bowers (00:58:04 --> 00:58:05)
Different flow.

Dustin Grinnell (00:58:05 --> 00:58:09)
And so then the cream taste that everyone loved went away?

Mark Bowers (00:58:09 --> 00:58:11)
Yeah, for the people who loved that beer.

Dustin Grinnell (00:58:11 --> 00:58:14)
And did, uh, was there like outrage and revolts?

Mark Bowers (00:58:14 --> 00:58:22)
Yeah, I don't know what the final thing was. I think they probably added some BMS to it or changed the chimney just for that beer, right? So that—

Dustin Grinnell (00:58:22 --> 00:58:32)
how the hell did they figure that out? They just, um, someone said, oh, what happened to the— well, did, did Rolling Rock know that it was the— their truck had—

Mark Bowers (00:58:32 --> 00:58:34)
yeah, they must have known that, and they were doing it deliberately.

Dustin Grinnell (00:58:34 --> 00:58:39)
Otherwise, well, maybe accidentally when they first started, but then they're like, We kind of like this.

Mark Bowers (00:58:39 --> 00:58:43)
Yeah. And they said, well, we can't change it now. Yeah. You know, some engineer, new guy comes in.

Dustin Grinnell (00:58:43 --> 00:58:43)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:58:43 --> 00:58:49)
You got to get rid of that. Oh, why are we doing that? We know we tried that once. It didn't taste the same.

Dustin Grinnell (00:58:49 --> 00:58:49)
That's crazy.

Mark Bowers (00:58:49 --> 00:58:52)
Apparently Budweiser didn't figure that out right away when they bought it.

Dustin Grinnell (00:58:52 --> 00:58:55)
Yeah. That's nuts. And Budweiser went back to it. They—

Mark Bowers (00:58:55 --> 00:58:59)
That's what I've heard. Yeah. I don't know what it, where it is now, but—

Dustin Grinnell (00:58:59 --> 00:59:03)
That's wild. Sort of just these idiosyncrasies of the beers.

Mark Bowers (00:59:04 --> 00:59:31)
There's another one, this diacetyl shows up in a lot of Czech beers. And a lot of people, I'm one, I'm sensitive enough to diacetyl and I don't like that flavor. When I get it, it's beer. It's a big turnoff. But there are a number of beers and one of them is Pilsner Urquell. It's shipped over here. In fact, it's the original Pilsner. Pilsner was invented like 1867 or something. I can't remember the date.

Dustin Grinnell (00:59:31 --> 00:59:31)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (00:59:32 --> 01:00:36)
So that company is still involved. Obviously, they've changed a lot of things. But one thing is that that beer does have diacetyl in it. And that has to do with the way their yeast works and the ingredients and everything else. And Sometimes I think when it's packaged, the diacetyl will increase a little bit and it increases enough to some people taste it like me.

Oh, this is a bad batch. Or to me it's a very bad batch, but somebody else says, ah, it's okay. Or they like the diacetyl flavor. So someone's fault may be another person's plus. So you've got a lot of people, you know, they go to the go to Czechoslovakia, yeah, you know, they have some good beers there, but so many of them were diacetyl bombs.

Dustin Grinnell (01:00:36 --> 01:00:37)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:00:37 --> 01:01:10)
And it's like, and that's one of the things that differentiates Czech beers from a lot of other beers. But yet that DMS is also, if it's below threshold, it adds a nice roundness and fullness to beer, which is actually good for even people who are incredibly sensitive to diacetyl, as long as it's below their threshold. It still synergistically works with other ingredients to make it taste good but not actually taste like diacetyl. It's kind of fascinating.

Dustin Grinnell (01:01:10 --> 01:01:13)
Yeah, it's amazing. So what do you think? Should we try it?

Mark Bowers (01:01:13 --> 01:01:14)
Getting dry.

Dustin Grinnell (01:01:22 --> 01:01:23)
Where are we heading now?

Mark Bowers (01:01:23 --> 01:01:25)
So I'm getting a couple glasses.

Dustin Grinnell (01:01:25 --> 01:01:25)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (01:01:25 --> 01:02:07)
And then we're gonna go, we're gonna try a lager because it's not as, um, strongly flavored. So usually when you drink in the series, you want to try, um, less flavored, crisper, cleaner, drier beers first. And then you go to more heavily flavored, sweeter, higher alcohol things like that. Okay. That's the progression. Yeah. So we're starting with a lager and it's a Dortmunder extract and we're taking it right out of the tank. Lagers, the whole name lager comes from a German word for store. So lagers are aged longer than ales in general.

Dustin Grinnell (01:02:07 --> 01:02:12)
Okay. So you're pouring the beer straight from the fermenter?

Mark Bowers (01:02:12 --> 01:02:14)
From the fermenter, yes.

Dustin Grinnell (01:02:14 --> 01:02:18)
Very large, canonical-shaped silver container.

Mark Bowers (01:02:18 --> 01:02:28)
Yes, and this, the port is a sample port, and it's got different names for it, but we poured it right out of that, this beer.

Dustin Grinnell (01:02:28 --> 01:02:29)
Yeah, cool. Well, thank you, sir.

Mark Bowers (01:02:29 --> 01:02:30)
Yes.

Dustin Grinnell (01:02:30 --> 01:02:30)
All right.

Mark Bowers (01:02:31 --> 01:02:49)
So like I said, lagers are store, so lagers are aged. They are fermented colder temperatures than ales are, and they're fermented longer, and then they're also aged or lagered for a long period of time. So this beer is like 2, 2 and a half months old, something like that.

Dustin Grinnell (01:02:49 --> 01:02:51)
Oh, okay. It's been in that container that long?

Mark Bowers (01:02:51 --> 01:02:52)
Yeah, it's that long. Wow.

Dustin Grinnell (01:02:53 --> 01:02:54)
Wow, it's really good.

Mark Bowers (01:02:54 --> 01:02:58)
It's got a lot of malt flavor to it. There's still some bitterness, some hops to it. Okay.

Dustin Grinnell (01:02:59 --> 01:03:00)
What's the name of it up there?

Mark Bowers (01:03:00 --> 01:03:11)
So we haven't packaged all of it, but we have packaged some of it in the beer. It's the Prostopp. So it's a Dortmunder export beer.

Dustin Grinnell (01:03:11 --> 01:03:21)
This reminds me of, as I was thinking about preparing for this episode, I was thinking about the movie Sideways. I don't know if you've ever seen it. It's a movie for wine drinkers.

Mark Bowers (01:03:21 --> 01:03:23)
Yes, I've seen it. I love Pinots too.

Dustin Grinnell (01:03:24 --> 01:03:40)
Yeah, that's his favorite. But, you know, there's a lot of scenes of tasting. And there's one great scene where the main character is introducing his friend to tasting and the kind of how you, you look and then smell and gurgle. Is there something like that for beers?

Mark Bowers (01:03:40 --> 01:04:07)
Yeah, we start with aroma and depending upon, you know, if you're taking really serious notes, you'll maybe smell it for a couple of minutes and try to take a few sips. Some people even kind of COVID it to try to get more aroma concentrated in there. Okay. Yeah, because soon as you sniff now, or you replace some of it, see, because you're trying to get the concentration of the aroma up a little higher so you can try to smell every little component in it.

Dustin Grinnell (01:04:07 --> 01:04:08)
Yeah, okay.

Mark Bowers (01:04:08 --> 01:04:47)
And then you also kind of taste it. Then you also can, um, you'll suck air into it too, a little bit, because that also kind of volatilizes stuff in your mouth that you don't quite get by just smelling like this. Kind of chew it a little bit. So then at this point you're trying to open up as much what's called retronasal aromas, which means aromas that come from behind in your throat, but it goes back up your nose. So a lot of your taste is the actual flavor tasting part. The only things you can taste are salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and the umami, which is more of a feel.

Dustin Grinnell (01:04:47 --> 01:04:51)
That's the only thing that taste sensory system can pick up.

Mark Bowers (01:04:51 --> 01:05:46)
So, this guy I told you about that gave this— he talked about his DVT test. Yeah. When he came, he brought in these jelly beans and he had all the standard colors. You know, he had like black, he had yellow and green and red. And, he says, so I think maybe the yellow one, he says, What we're going to do is I want you to take the jelly bean, hold it to your nose, put it in, chew it and swallow it, and tell me what the flavor is.

And then take your fingers off your nose and then tell me what you taste. So yellow, you're thinking, okay, lemon, you know, take it in. Yeah, I really like lemon. That sounds something, but I don't know. And then you let go and it's like It may be something like licorice or something because you couldn't even taste it with your—

Dustin Grinnell (01:05:47 --> 01:05:50)
So, smell is so important in taste.

Mark Bowers (01:05:50 --> 01:05:50)
Yes.

Dustin Grinnell (01:05:51 --> 01:05:55)
And without smell, your taste is compromised quite a bit.

Mark Bowers (01:05:55 --> 01:05:56)
Big time.

Dustin Grinnell (01:05:57 --> 01:06:06)
Have you met people without the sense of smell? Maybe they lost it during COVID or something like that. Is their ability to appreciate—

Mark Bowers (01:06:06 --> 01:06:25)
Yeah, they usually don't appreciate. Well, a lot of older people, lose their sense of smell too. And they'll get to the point where they— and they think that that's a large part about a lot of the older people don't want to eat anymore. They're not as, you know, interested in eating is because they can't smell it as much or as well or at all anymore.

Dustin Grinnell (01:06:25 --> 01:06:34)
The, the, the— yeah, so, so much of the appreciation of the things we eat and drink we have thanks to our, our smell sense.

Mark Bowers (01:06:34 --> 01:06:34)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:06:34 --> 01:06:37)
And we lose it and we You know, you're no longer a foodie here.

Mark Bowers (01:06:37 --> 01:06:37)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:06:37 --> 01:06:41)
Yeah. Food's fuel at that point. Interesting.

Mark Bowers (01:06:41 --> 01:06:46)
You have a cold, you can't taste things quite the same either. You know, things don't taste quite as good usually.

Dustin Grinnell (01:06:47 --> 01:06:58)
Does it, you get a cold, does that like kind of put you at a disadvantage for your actual job? Yeah. I mean, you wouldn't be able to taste as well. It'd be like a rock climber hurting their arm or something. Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:06:58 --> 01:07:06)
Yeah. It definitely does. And you have to try to compensate for it. You say, well, I know it's There's probably other stuff in there, but I'm not getting such and such, you know.

Dustin Grinnell (01:07:06 --> 01:07:19)
Is there ways to enhance it? Because I know like there's singers who have special sprays that they use for their vocal cords when they get, you know, overused. Any ways you enhance or—

Mark Bowers (01:07:20 --> 01:07:30)
No, nothing I know of. Yeah. Blow your nose to try to get a little bit of air into it. If it's completely, right, if you're completely clogged and you can't even, yeah. You gotta breathe a little bit.

Dustin Grinnell (01:07:30 --> 01:07:33)
Yeah, yeah. Well, this was delicious.

Mark Bowers (01:07:33 --> 01:07:38)
Yeah, this is, this is one of my favorite beers that we've made. Yep.

Dustin Grinnell (01:07:38 --> 01:07:38)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:07:38 --> 01:08:29)
So this beer style is not too different from the fest beer served at Oktoberfest in Germany. Okay. You've probably had Oktoberfest beers in the US. Yeah. Most, not all, but most Octoberfest beers in the US are an old style of Oktoberfest beer, ones that they don't even serve at the Oktoberfest in Germany anymore. They're sweeter, they're a little bit maltier because they are Märzen style. And the current beer they serve in Germany at the Oktoberfest is called, uh, they just call it Festbier. It's not Oktoberfest, it's Festbier. And it's at the Wiesn, which is like the name of the place where they serve it at Oktoberfest, the hall in the area.

Dustin Grinnell (01:08:29 --> 01:08:31)
Yeah, everyone has the big, uh, drinks.

Mark Bowers (01:08:31 --> 01:09:16)
It's got a little bit higher bitterness, so it's not quite as sweet, so it's much more drinkable. And so that's what I like about this, because this is more like the German Fest beer. It's much closer to that than the average American Oktoberfest beer. We do have our Oktoberfest beer on as well. I drink this over that one because I can drink more of this one, and it's just, it's just cleaner.

I take a drink, it's clean. Wow, yeah, I want another one. Yeah, the other one after a few, yeah, that's nice, but yeah, yeah, it's okay. Yeah. I'm not going to drink it very fast.

Dustin Grinnell (01:09:16 --> 01:09:25)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, high drinkability, I guess. So what else? How do you go up the ladder, I guess?

Mark Bowers (01:09:26 --> 01:09:37)
Well, let's go to, well, we're going to stay with tanks right now. So we're going to go over and get some, an IPA. And this is the one I told you is the New Zealand hops. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:09:37 --> 01:09:39)
So this is the bright tank?

Mark Bowers (01:09:39 --> 01:09:48)
Yeah, this is the bright tank. So the other one was a fermenter. And this is a bright thing. Now this beer is not on. We haven't packaged any of this yet.

Dustin Grinnell (01:09:49 --> 01:09:50)
When do you expect to?

Mark Bowers (01:09:50 --> 01:09:52)
I think it's going to be this week yet.

Dustin Grinnell (01:09:52 --> 01:09:52)
Oh, right on.

Mark Bowers (01:09:54 --> 01:09:56)
It is finished. It's completely done.

Dustin Grinnell (01:09:56 --> 01:10:00)
Meaning it's done here and it's not like in a keg or packaged?

Mark Bowers (01:10:00 --> 01:10:16)
Yeah, and it's already carved. It's aged. It's at the right temperature. It's been cooled. And it's all that. So ready to get started? Yeah, it's all ready. So we just have to have the time so that we can package it.

Dustin Grinnell (01:10:16 --> 01:10:22)
Do you do announcements on maybe social or other places like, okay, the New Zealand IPA is ready to go kind of thing?

Mark Bowers (01:10:22 --> 01:10:28)
We do some stuff. It's gotten better. It used to be we hardly ever announced.

Dustin Grinnell (01:10:29 --> 01:10:32)
Just ends up on the menu and it just ends up on the menu.

Mark Bowers (01:10:32 --> 01:10:35)
But now it's like, come on, let's Totally.

Dustin Grinnell (01:10:35 --> 01:10:35)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:10:35 --> 01:10:54)
I mean, we have an event space here. And so when we first started everything, we had already been brewing beer for a while before the taproom opened. And then when the taproom opened, everything happened. Yeah. Push it out in the market. But, you know, it was less beer folks. It was all everything else.

Dustin Grinnell (01:10:55 --> 01:10:55)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:10:55 --> 01:11:08)
Yeah. And then we still have that reputation of not so much of brewery. It's more, I go there and I went, yeah, the beer is okay, but you know, they only have this great band, right? It is, I go there for the food.

Dustin Grinnell (01:11:08 --> 01:11:12)
There's, yeah, 4 restaurants or so over there. Yeah, there is a lot of, a lot of events.

Mark Bowers (01:11:13 --> 01:11:18)
So this is obviously the style difference is so much. I mean, this is fruity. I love this.

Dustin Grinnell (01:11:18 --> 01:11:19)
Yeah, this is amazing.

Mark Bowers (01:11:20 --> 01:11:31)
Now this is a little sweeter now too. I don't find it quite as drinkable. After I have like 1 or 2 of these, I got enough. I can drink both of them still okay, but I still love this. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:11:32 --> 01:11:34)
So what else are we tasting in this?

Mark Bowers (01:11:35 --> 01:11:41)
Oh, so the New Zealand, this has some special hops. So we talked about ingredients a little bit.

Dustin Grinnell (01:11:42 --> 01:11:48)
So the, you said the hops legit came from New Zealand? With South Island, North Island?

Mark Bowers (01:11:48 --> 01:11:51)
I'm not certain. I've never been to New Zealand, so I'm not.

Dustin Grinnell (01:11:51 --> 01:11:56)
I studied abroad there, so. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. We did, we drank a lot of beer there.

Mark Bowers (01:11:56 --> 01:11:59)
How long ago was that?

Dustin Grinnell (01:11:59 --> 01:12:02)
That was 2004.

Mark Bowers (01:12:02 --> 01:12:05)
Okay. I think the beer's improved a lot.

Dustin Grinnell (01:12:05 --> 01:12:05)
Has it?

Mark Bowers (01:12:06 --> 01:12:06)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:12:06 --> 01:12:09)
Yeah. Has there been a craft beer development there?

Mark Bowers (01:12:09 --> 01:12:24)
And hops in this beer were not in existence in 2004. Oh, wow. Yeah. So one of them, this has two of my favorite hops and they're kind of unusual for hops in terms of flavor. I mean, all hops have a different flavor.

Dustin Grinnell (01:12:24 --> 01:12:25)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:12:25 --> 01:12:32)
But they kind of fall into different groups, and I think the two hops in this one are kind of like much more different than a lot of different—

Dustin Grinnell (01:12:32 --> 01:12:34)
better, in your opinion?

Mark Bowers (01:12:34 --> 01:13:55)
Mosaic, to me, they're kind of in the same They're different, but they have similarities. So this has Nelson Sauvin hop, which has a much more of a white winey type flavor to it. Some even say maybe like a little bit of a gooseberry or something. And it also has Ruwaka hops in it. And Ruwaka is, it's got something that's kind of like, some of them have almost like a diesel-y type taste, almost dank.

It's hard to describe what the, the fruit is like, but passion fruit maybe too. Yeah, but it's different when you put these two together, and it's like, geez, definitely, uh, it's surprising. Yeah, and they're really flavorful. Yeah, and they're pretty unique. I don't know how they've done this, but obviously they have hop breeders, and their hop breeders somehow went off in the direction that's a lot different than all the hop breeders in the U.S. and, um, even Germany and England and other places where hops are bred.

Dustin Grinnell (01:13:55 --> 01:14:05)
Do you have a sense of, like, do you go hop hunting? Do you know what hops are in different areas? And did you— how did you hook up with New Zealand and their hops? Like, how did that come on?

Mark Bowers (01:14:06 --> 01:18:44)
However, this Rawaka hop, 6 years ago or so, maybe it was 7, where it was very hard to get. They weren't growing as much, but also when they harvest hops, they have fairly short windows in which to harvest a hop. And ideally, they like to have all of their hop types that have different harvest dates or harvest windows. Yeah, because if they all have the exact same 2-week period in September or whatever, week and a half period, they don't have enough equipment and people and everything else to harvest all of those. So if they can spread it out, you know, with different varieties, you know, one, you know, it's at the end of August, one like the first week of September, you know, up until, what do you know, whatever, 6, 8 weeks, whatever that harvest is.

Divide it out, it's much easier. Yeah. Well, then the Nelson Sauvin hop took off first and people wanted to go out to that. Well, it happens to have the exact same window that Rawaka does, and Rawaka doesn't have the same, um, clout or popularity that Nelson Sauvin does. To me, I don't know, I almost like them in reverse order, but you know, hops are Polaroid.

Some people love one and hate another, some people, whatever. So it took a while so that they could grow enough and have enough desire for it and enough farms and would feature more rawakka. Yeah. Well, so I kept looking, tried to figure out where can I get rawakka hop. And other people had that trouble back then too.

And then one time, kind of out of the blue, this woman sends me an email. Said she works with this hop farm in New Zealand called Eggers Farm, and she's a salesman for them, and she had been up in our— I don't know if she lived here or not, but she certainly had spent time in this area, and she knew Aaron and I, and she said, hey, are you interested in getting any hops? And I said, do you ever walk out? Yes, we do. He said, I could send you a box.

So we'll have to send it to you from New Zealand. I mean, it wasn't cheap. So I'm going to take a chance on this other hop. And so they sent this box to us. And meanwhile, since then, this farm, Agers, 3 or 4 years after that, it was like right after the pandemic, one of the owners, Clem Agers, came up from New Zealand.

He had opened up a warehouse on the West Coast. That stocks his hops, and then they actually will send the hops from the warehouse in the West Coast, send them out to different places. So he came by the first time that I'd ever met him. He came by and he was— said, he says, um, he brought two beers. He brought one from, um, a brewery in North Carolina.

This is Virginia, but the guy who brews beers there, really into hoppy beers like this. And this client had come there and had given or sold them a special form of Ruwaka hops. Because if you take different plants, they all taste a little bit different. And he had this one plant that he really loved. He said the Ruwaka from this plant is just more Ruwaka-y than the other one.

So he took that and he cloned it and got like, you know, an acre or two of the hops. And he liked that so well, so he had this very good IPA brewer called Sapwood Cellars, and they did a collaboration with Fiden, the brewery in Albany. Both of them make very good IPAs. So he brought a can of this in. This has this ESH1 clone of Ruaka in it.

I tasted this, my God, that's fantastic. Yeah, I loved it. And so I said, I want some of that hop next year. What can I do to get a box of this one? Right.

So he says, I'll see if I can get you some of it, you know. And so luckily enough, he did. So that's what's in this is this ESH-1 Waka Hop. Amazing. From— there's a guy came up to us.

Dustin Grinnell (01:18:44 --> 01:18:45)
And you're going to prototype those?

Mark Bowers (01:18:45 --> 01:18:46)
I hope so.

Dustin Grinnell (01:18:46 --> 01:18:48)
That's the plan. Nice.

Mark Bowers (01:18:48 --> 01:18:49)
I haven't gotten the hops yet.

Dustin Grinnell (01:18:50 --> 01:18:57)
Right, right. So you'll run them all through your process and there'll be a winner or there'll be something you want to—

Mark Bowers (01:18:57 --> 01:19:02)
Yeah. And hopefully he's got enough of those lots that we can order some because they're very limited.

Dustin Grinnell (01:19:02 --> 01:19:04)
Yeah, right, right, right.

Mark Bowers (01:19:05 --> 01:19:40)
So that's what people who have big enough breweries and have enough clout, they'll send people out to the West Coast, New Zealand now, and even Australia to pick hops, or over to Germany for lager hops to pick hops. Because you do the scrub test, you smell a hop, and you try to pick out which ones that you like better, that, that work better with your beer, or the ones you designed the beer for in the first place, and then they get changed Oh, this is what I made my beer originally with 5 years ago and it's never been the same. I want that lot.

Dustin Grinnell (01:19:40 --> 01:19:41)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:19:41 --> 01:19:47)
And people sign up to get that lot and they'll, you know, get, I don't know, boxes and boxes of it.

Dustin Grinnell (01:19:47 --> 01:19:50)
So what, what next?

Mark Bowers (01:19:50 --> 01:20:00)
We're going to try this same beer, but it doesn't have the two New Zealand hops in it. It's got another, but this is an American hop, Pallas.

Dustin Grinnell (01:20:01 --> 01:20:05)
With the— so it doesn't have the New Zealand hops, it has a different kind of hop?

Mark Bowers (01:20:05 --> 01:20:12)
Yeah. Okay. So everything else is the same. So it's a side stream. I told you, you know, we brew a big batch and we take a little bit of it and put it over here.

Dustin Grinnell (01:20:12 --> 01:20:12)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (01:20:12 --> 01:20:35)
But the big batch had all these New Zealand hops. This one has this relatively new American hop called Talus. And it's totally different. So this one is like, really in your face and all this. This other one is a little, little smoother, softer, and different flavor, and it doesn't just jump out at you, but it's still pleasant.

Dustin Grinnell (01:20:35 --> 01:20:37)
Okay. Is that one on the menu yet?

Mark Bowers (01:20:37 --> 01:20:39)
No, neither one of these are on the menu.

Dustin Grinnell (01:20:39 --> 01:20:40)
It's coming out soon as well, you think?

Mark Bowers (01:20:41 --> 01:20:43)
Yeah, we'll probably package that this week or next week.

Dustin Grinnell (01:20:43 --> 01:20:44)
Okay, cool.

Mark Bowers (01:20:44 --> 01:20:56)
What did I do? So this is that same beer. Everything's the same except for the dry hop, the hops that we added to the, uh, to the fermenter itself.

Dustin Grinnell (01:20:56 --> 01:20:59)
It's got that, the hop starts with the T, I think you said?

Mark Bowers (01:20:59 --> 01:20:59)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:20:59 --> 01:21:00)
Tilium or yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:21:00 --> 01:21:02)
It's called, the hop was called Talus.

Dustin Grinnell (01:21:02 --> 01:21:06)
Talus, okay. Totally different taste.

Mark Bowers (01:21:06 --> 01:21:07)
Totally different.

Dustin Grinnell (01:21:07 --> 01:21:11)
Yeah. It's definitely not as intense, I guess, as the last one.

Mark Bowers (01:21:11 --> 01:21:12)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:21:12 --> 01:21:14)
The robustness, but it's a little lighter, I guess you could say.

Mark Bowers (01:21:15 --> 01:21:17)
Lighter, I call it maybe just a little bit softer too.

Dustin Grinnell (01:21:17 --> 01:21:20)
Yeah, soft is good. It's still really good though.

Mark Bowers (01:21:20 --> 01:21:20)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:21:20 --> 01:21:21)
Still an IPA.

Mark Bowers (01:21:21 --> 01:21:25)
They should have had this one first. I think you kind of go this way. I see. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:21:25 --> 01:21:26)
Still an IPA.

Dustin Grinnell (01:21:26 --> 01:21:29)
This is like a hug. That other one's more like a shove or something.

Mark Bowers (01:21:29 --> 01:21:30)
Really? Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:21:30 --> 01:21:30)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:21:31 --> 01:21:34)
But this is, it's nice. It's pleasant. For sure.

Dustin Grinnell (01:21:34 --> 01:21:36)
It is softer, isn't it?

Mark Bowers (01:21:36 --> 01:21:46)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. I think this hop would be better to blend with some other hop. By itself, it probably doesn't cut it for a beer with it.

Dustin Grinnell (01:21:47 --> 01:21:53)
When you taste appear, do you imagine possibilities? Like new concepts? You're like, oh, I could have a little bit of this. So yeah, too much of that.

Mark Bowers (01:21:53 --> 01:22:03)
Or yeah. Yeah. Blend this in, you know, maybe do this and blend it in. I don't think it would go with the New Zealand ones, but it might go with some other American hops.

Dustin Grinnell (01:22:03 --> 01:22:07)
So you said these are going to come out soon. Do you have names for them yet?

Mark Bowers (01:22:07 --> 01:22:14)
Well, prototypes, we don't name them. We number it. So P for prototype, and this one's 582.

Dustin Grinnell (01:22:14 --> 01:22:19)
And the other one is P581 or something?

Mark Bowers (01:22:19 --> 01:22:23)
Well, the big one is New England IPA. That's the name of it.

Dustin Grinnell (01:22:23 --> 01:22:23)
Got it.

Mark Bowers (01:22:23 --> 01:22:24)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:22:24 --> 01:22:27)
And then so when does it get to, this is the name on the menu?

Mark Bowers (01:22:27 --> 01:22:30)
Well, we made this beer before already.

Dustin Grinnell (01:22:30 --> 01:22:31)
So it has a name already?

Mark Bowers (01:22:31 --> 01:22:34)
Yeah, it already has a name. Okay. It's called New England.

Dustin Grinnell (01:22:34 --> 01:22:35)
Oh, is it? Right.

Mark Bowers (01:22:35 --> 01:22:40)
Yeah, that's the name. And it's kind of a style too, in a sense. Got it.

Dustin Grinnell (01:22:40 --> 01:22:41)
And then do you have a name for this one yet?

Mark Bowers (01:22:41 --> 01:22:46)
No, it's just going to be P-582. If we scale it up, then we give it a name. For real?

Dustin Grinnell (01:22:46 --> 01:22:47)
Oh, okay. I see. Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:22:47 --> 01:22:59)
So we'll put it on the sign. We don't have any prototypes up there now, but we'll put P-582 up there and then we'll have like the style name, New England IPA with the pellet hops.

Dustin Grinnell (01:22:59 --> 01:23:01)
I've come in here so many times and I've never—

Mark Bowers (01:23:01 --> 01:23:02)
Really never seen that.

Dustin Grinnell (01:23:02 --> 01:23:06)
Well, I'm sure I have. I just, uh, not sort of savvy enough.

Mark Bowers (01:23:06 --> 01:23:06)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:23:06 --> 01:23:11)
But I will now. So you can come in and try something that's being prototyped.

Mark Bowers (01:23:11 --> 01:23:23)
Yeah. Awesome. And then we put the name, the number like that, so, you know, if people want to check it in on Untappd, it'll be listed there as P582. It's New England IPA. It did a little bit of a description.

Dustin Grinnell (01:23:24 --> 01:23:27)
And then who actually names and names it after it's ready?

Mark Bowers (01:23:27 --> 01:23:28)
All of us do.

Dustin Grinnell (01:23:28 --> 01:23:29)
You guys sit around?

Mark Bowers (01:23:29 --> 01:24:00)
Kind of, yeah. We'll sit around or propose names for it. So it's kind of like the brewers, the head bar staff, our social media person. Those are the typical ones that try to name it. And then the owners have their input too, whether, you know, they go along with it or not. Okay. Especially if it goes into can, that's a higher level to me. Because here, it can be a one-off, you know, even doing a production, we may not never make the beer again.

Dustin Grinnell (01:24:00 --> 01:24:08)
Right, right. I heard there's kind of a story behind the Year of Dr. Nandu. How did that one come about?

Mark Bowers (01:24:08 --> 01:24:16)
So that was like, we had one of the very first beers we ever made was called A Session with Dr. Nandu.

Dustin Grinnell (01:24:16 --> 01:24:16)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:24:16 --> 01:25:35)
They told him they were going to make this brewery and such. He goes, oh, I got these great ideas for mostly for swag for, you know, it wasn't like for the beer or such. So, and he had like one that gets repeated enough. I met the guy a few times. I never really had any sessions with him, but he says, we can do sloth hats.

Sloth? What are you talking about, sloth? Yeah, you just take a sloth and you wrap it around your head. And he drew pictures of the sloths. This is what you got to do.

You got to sell these sloths. It's just because the guy is kind of off the wall a little bit. So they decided, well, we're going to call it Sexual Doctor Nandy. And then our current beer was the first anniversary because every year we've come up with an anniversary beer. So our first anniversary beer was a year with Dr. Nandu.

Dustin Grinnell (01:25:36 --> 01:25:37)
Is Dr. Nandu still around?

Mark Bowers (01:25:37 --> 01:25:51)
He went to Texas for a while, but he has been back. Came back about a year ago, and I think he was in a band and played here too, if I remember right. Wow. Yeah, I got to see him, talk to him a little bit. I don't know if he's been in since then. I don't know.

Dustin Grinnell (01:25:52 --> 01:25:55)
Yeah, yeah. Well, you better come back for the 20th anniversary or something.

Mark Bowers (01:25:55 --> 01:25:59)
Yeah, really. Yes. The Kipps remains all over the place.

Dustin Grinnell (01:25:59 --> 01:26:00)
Yeah, totally.

Mark Bowers (01:26:00 --> 01:26:14)
Well, we're out of beer from that already and worth tasting from the, from our prototypes, but we've got some up on tap that we can go if you want to try. Yeah, sure. A couple other things.

Dustin Grinnell (01:26:14 --> 01:26:15)
In your hands.

Mark Bowers (01:26:16 --> 01:28:29)
We'll go back light. We already hit the IPA, but we're going to do like a grosette. There's a lot of beers that come in at around 5% alcohol that are, I mean, most American macro lagers are 5% or thereabouts. This is a beer that's 5% or a little bit less, 4.6. So this is Griselba and it's a Grisette.

So this is a Belgian style. So it's a little bit like a Saison, but lower alcohol. This is 4%. Okay. And it's, you can see it's light color and you can smell the aroma and you taste the, and so this is a beer that's very, I always said, you know, there's a lot of different styles and it's hard to remember all the different styles, but one easy way that you can put almost every beer into like 4 or 5 styles of beer.

So, The first one we had is kind of like a balanced beer, a balanced lager beer. It's not really super hoppy, it's not really super malty, it's not really strong, it's not super flavorful, like intense flavors. And that's kind of like what all the macro lagers are. This obviously, I think it's better, it's got more flavor, but it still kind of fits that. That's one with sort of the balance and such.

Then, um, you have the hoppy ones like we just had. Yeah, you have the malty ones, and, uh, those are like the stouts and, uh, double bocks and, um, things like that. And then there's sours, like, uh, I talked about the lemonade beer, and we also had some other sour beers. Yeah. And then there's, well Belgian beers, this one.

And this is yeast-derived flavors. This is yeast, so most of the flavor is coming from the yeast in this. It's hard to describe what phenols taste like. We use the term phenolic, but it's kind of spicy, a little bit spicy. Sometimes you might get clove or bubble gum out of it as well.

Dustin Grinnell (01:28:30 --> 01:28:34)
How does one develop a vocabulary to talk about beer like that.

Mark Bowers (01:28:34 --> 01:28:39)
You drink a lot and then you see how the people— what do people call these? And read a lot.

Dustin Grinnell (01:28:39 --> 01:28:39)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:28:40 --> 01:28:43)
And then you got to drink it and say, oh yeah, I see what they mean, and make the match.

Dustin Grinnell (01:28:43 --> 01:28:44)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:28:44 --> 01:28:47)
Yeah. And sometimes it took years to get some, some flavors, you know.

Dustin Grinnell (01:28:47 --> 01:28:48)
Really?

Mark Bowers (01:28:48 --> 01:28:48)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:28:48 --> 01:28:51)
What's one that took you a long time?

Mark Bowers (01:28:51 --> 01:29:06)
Um, lambics have something called funky, and that's Brett. So it's this wild yeast, and some people call it like a wet horse blanket in a good way. I mean, I've had wines where y'all, it's tobacco and road tar.

Dustin Grinnell (01:29:08 --> 01:29:09)
You wouldn't think that'd be a good thing.

Mark Bowers (01:29:09 --> 01:29:22)
Wouldn't be a good thing. But yeah, I mean, you kind of see it when you taste it. They say, yeah, I see that. I can see how it's kind of good because it's a low level and it's not super overpowering. Yeah. Overpowering. Yeah. Too petrol-y or whatever.

Dustin Grinnell (01:29:22 --> 01:29:23)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:29:23 --> 01:29:30)
So that was one, was this horse blanket. From the Brett and kind of barnyard funky. Those are the terms.

Dustin Grinnell (01:29:31 --> 01:29:40)
And were you, is this something you, you're kind of like developing your palate, developing your taste a little? And that's something that is part of the profession, part of the craft?

Mark Bowers (01:29:40 --> 01:29:49)
Yeah. Yeah. They have courses that will teach you, um, how to taste and sensory and beer. Yeah. These different flavors.

Dustin Grinnell (01:29:49 --> 01:29:51)
In Boston, there, do you know?

Mark Bowers (01:29:51 --> 01:30:12)
Yeah, there's some, some of them are done through homebrew clubs that meet up with the home, home brewing can be judged. So even professional beers, you can go to contests and get your beers judged. Yeah, homebrew brewers do that too. Well, they need judges in order to taste it.

Dustin Grinnell (01:30:12 --> 01:30:12)
Sure.

Mark Bowers (01:30:12 --> 01:30:47)
And this, the Beer Judge Certification Program, BJCP, of the US has people who will like give courses or do training and such. So you can eventually be a judge if that's, you know, what you're interested in. Uh, there's also a Cicerone program, Beer Cicerones, where you become an expert and you have a certificate saying that you know different flavors of beer, how to serve beer, a lot of stuff about the The service side.

Dustin Grinnell (01:30:47 --> 01:30:48)
Is that like a sommelier?

Mark Bowers (01:30:49 --> 01:30:53)
Exactly. It's the beer counterpoint to the sommelier.

Dustin Grinnell (01:30:53 --> 01:30:53)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (01:30:53 --> 01:30:54)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:30:54 --> 01:31:01)
I don't know if you ever saw a documentary called SOMM, S-O-M-M, about sommelier training.

Mark Bowers (01:31:01 --> 01:31:01)
No.

Dustin Grinnell (01:31:01 --> 01:31:15)
And it's a really good documentary, but it kind of shows like, I think, 4 people who are trying to get their certification. And it's like notoriously difficult. Process that took like a year of studying.

Mark Bowers (01:31:15 --> 01:31:15)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:31:15 --> 01:31:31)
A year of intense studying and shows like them, you know, tasting the beer and looking for all little intricacies of them and they can name where it's from and, you know, the grape field in the country, in the section of the, it's pretty crazy.

Dustin Grinnell (01:31:31 --> 01:31:31)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:31:31 --> 01:31:39)
That's crazy. Is there, is the same level of like detail and intricacy for beer? Are people naming like the hops where they come from and stuff?

Mark Bowers (01:31:39 --> 01:32:24)
No. Most of it's based on the style of beer. So like, um, lagers, there's, you know, dozens of different beers. Because I just told you one today, you probably had heard of the Dortmunder Export beer. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, people have to say, okay, you have to know what's— how does a Dortmunder Export beer differ from a Helles, from a Pilsner, from, uh, you know, a Märzen, and all these different ones. And then there's because they have 100 different beers at this point, different beers, and they have a style and they have a whole thing written about these. So you have to study and have these different beers and hopefully you can, when you test, you can't get too many wrong.

Dustin Grinnell (01:32:25 --> 01:32:27)
Right. Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:32:27 --> 01:32:41)
But it's not a specific hop. They won't ask you what's the hops in this beer that competes. Yeah. I don't think so. Maybe they've changed., but in general they just want you to be able to at least get the major beer. Yeah. Down.

Dustin Grinnell (01:32:41 --> 01:32:41)
Right.

Mark Bowers (01:32:42 --> 01:32:59)
Yeah. So those 4 categories are kind of interesting. Sour, kind of like balanced or beer tasting beer. Some people say that the malty ones, which include stouts and, and sour. Yeah. And then the, the Belgians.

Dustin Grinnell (01:32:59 --> 01:32:59)
Belgians.

Mark Bowers (01:32:59 --> 01:33:01)
Right. Yeah. Cool.

Dustin Grinnell (01:33:01 --> 01:33:09)
So yeah, we're behind the bar and looking at, these are taps. Yeah. Right? These are taps. These are all the things that are on tap right now.

Mark Bowers (01:33:09 --> 01:33:12)
Yeah, we have what, 16-ish?

Dustin Grinnell (01:33:12 --> 01:33:13)
Oh, okay.

Mark Bowers (01:33:13 --> 01:34:02)
Yeah. 16 beers. Maybe it's 15. Well, let's see. We haven't gotten into the dark ones yet.

Maybe we do that because we only have one really dark one right now. So this is, we're going back to lagers again. And so this one is a Mexican lager called Swarm. So Mexican lagers, well, you've probably had Corona already. Sure.

Well, this is a darker Mexican lager. It's like Dos Equis, if you've had their Double X, that's kind of a brown ale. This is kind of more of that style. So it's maltier. Let's get a little bit more caramel.

Dustin Grinnell (01:34:02 --> 01:34:08)
And we're looking in terms of the, the, it almost looks like a light coffee color. Yeah, yeah, brownish.

Mark Bowers (01:34:09 --> 01:35:09)
Yeah, originally when the Germans came over to Mexico and started breweries like they did in the US in the 1800s, a lot of them apparently came from Austria and Vienna in particular. And those people who set up breweries wanted to brew the beer that they liked in Vienna. And it was called a Vienna lager. Well, they didn't keep the name Vienna, but the beer style has stayed there, whereas it disappeared in Austria and most of the rest of the world, but it stayed in Mexico. That's kind of like what this beer is. Yeah. This beer has some other flavors in it that maybe you're not picking up right away. And it's a little bit more subtle. But this has a honey in it. This is a honey lager as well. And this has an Ozarkan forest honey in it, which is kind of a robust honey that adds complementary flavors to the malt.

Dustin Grinnell (01:35:09 --> 01:35:32)
Well, it's interesting. Usually when I come in here, most breweries, I'll go for the IPAs and I don't know. I just, that's been my jam for a long time. But this conversation, this tasting has already expanded my possibilities. I don't know.

I kind of maybe had a comfort zone. Yeah. And a Mexican lager. Yeah. Wasn't on it.

Mark Bowers (01:35:32 --> 01:35:33)
It just wasn't on it.

Dustin Grinnell (01:35:33 --> 01:35:43)
And this is great. Do you like doing that with people? With beer enthusiasts being like, check out this whole world of options.

Mark Bowers (01:35:43 --> 01:35:44)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:35:44 --> 01:35:49)
Yeah. It's already expanded probably what I'll think about later on.

Mark Bowers (01:35:49 --> 01:37:07)
Oh, wow. That's really cool. I would have never probably ordered it either. Oh, yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Give me the, your latest New England IPA or Pilsner or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. So we'll do some other weird stuff as well.

We've already done two IPAs. We'll go to, this is a strong one for a little bit smaller samples. So this is a triple. So this is another Belgian beers have some of the most unique beers. I think, on the planet.

So you have like the Saison, like we just kind of had that, goes up. This is, um, a triple, which was, um, kind of Belgium's answer in some respects to the pilsner. So you can see it's very light and it's, uh, fairly hoppy. It's got, um, some decent hopping to it, but it's also incredibly strong. This is 9.3%.

Dustin Grinnell (01:37:07 --> 01:37:09)
And this is the name, the name again is?

Mark Bowers (01:37:09 --> 01:37:26)
The style is triple, but the name of this beer is Roaming Giant. We're here, Belgian triple. And not only does this have the yeast flavor coming through, but it also, we have some orange peel in it, we have some grains of paradise in it.

Dustin Grinnell (01:37:26 --> 01:37:29)
Yeah, and Belgian candy sugar.

Mark Bowers (01:37:29 --> 01:37:37)
It's made from beet sugar, so it has a little bit different taste than cane sugar or table sugar, but not a lot.

Dustin Grinnell (01:37:37 --> 01:37:40)
But yeah, I really like that.

Mark Bowers (01:37:40 --> 01:38:07)
This is pretty drinkable too. Usually as beers get higher percent alcohol, they become less drinkable because the alcohol burn kind of hits your throat. This— the alcohol's here, but it's somewhat hidden, and it's also drier than a lot of big beers of this style are. So it's reasonably drinkable, but it'll give you a buzz a lot faster.

Dustin Grinnell (01:38:08 --> 01:38:20)
Totally. Have a couple of these, you're going to be feeling it. As a brewer, as a taster, how do you manage like getting buzzed or drunk? Like how do you try to stay in that safety zone?

Mark Bowers (01:38:20 --> 01:38:22)
Try to drink small amounts.

Dustin Grinnell (01:38:22 --> 01:38:25)
Just have, yeah, because you don't need a lot if you're sampling.

Mark Bowers (01:38:25 --> 01:38:31)
In most days we only taste 1 or 2 beers. So, you know, but we have people in or something, then that's the issue.

Dustin Grinnell (01:38:31 --> 01:38:32)
Yeah. Have a little fun.

Mark Bowers (01:38:32 --> 01:38:37)
Yeah. Yes. Have a little fun. But it's like, oh, you want to try? All these things are fantastic beers.

Dustin Grinnell (01:38:37 --> 01:38:38)
You've got a good job, man.

Mark Bowers (01:38:38 --> 01:38:40)
Yeah. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:38:40 --> 01:38:46)
It's not like making chocolate, you know? Right. This one has, it affects the nervous system.

Mark Bowers (01:38:46 --> 01:38:53)
I actually have more trouble with coffee because just having more than like 1 or 2, then I've got, I got this buzz.

Dustin Grinnell (01:38:53 --> 01:38:53)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:38:53 --> 01:38:59)
And then I don't sleep well at night. I love coffee. I know. Now I have to be careful.

Dustin Grinnell (01:38:59 --> 01:39:02)
Well, for me, it's just 12 PM. Anything after that, I won't be sleeping.

Mark Bowers (01:39:02 --> 01:39:04)
That's pretty much me too. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:39:04 --> 01:39:05)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:39:05 --> 01:39:08)
For beer, you know, it's a little different. It's a little more forgiving.

Dustin Grinnell (01:39:08 --> 01:39:09)
A little more.

Mark Bowers (01:39:09 --> 01:39:10)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:39:10 --> 01:39:28)
Yeah. Speaking of like the health aspects of it, my little peccadillo, so to speak, is reflux. So if I have 3 IPAs, I love it, it's delicious, it was a great Saturday, but I may pay for it. So it's like Tums and Pralosec if you could get ahead of it.

Dustin Grinnell (01:39:28 --> 01:39:29)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:39:29 --> 01:39:31)
Do you deal with anything, any of those types of things?

Mark Bowers (01:39:31 --> 01:40:00)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, try not to do it on an empty stomach in the Tums. And don't drink as much, drink it slower. Right. Drink it hot.

A friend of mine has it so bad he can't even drink some of them. He stopped. He would have a sip or two. I can't do that one. Wow.

Dustin Grinnell (01:40:00 --> 01:40:01)
He knows right away.

Mark Bowers (01:40:01 --> 01:40:06)
Yeah, he knows right away. Wow. And he loves the flavor of some of them. He said, oh, I just can't. Interesting.

Dustin Grinnell (01:40:06 --> 01:40:12)
Are there any like positive health benefits to beer drinking?

Mark Bowers (01:40:12 --> 01:42:46)
That's a stomach thing. And I don't know, I think some of the other things that come out of the concentrated from the still, the congeners and other higher alcohol and such, just don't work well with bodies. I think they just seem to be coming out with more and more negative information on on alcohol all the time. But it's interesting, um, you know, I talked a little bit about how people— what beer brewing came out— that they started civilization. But one of the other things they think, that, um, not only it helped civilization settle down by growing the bar— by settling down so you could grow the barley to make it into beer, but also just getting drunk have a very positive influence on kind of keeping people together.

And, uh, there— I can't remember the name of the book I read, but it's a fascinating read how he goes through history and says, you know, all— almost all cultures have had not just beer but some type of alcohol. Beer is it's pretty big throughout like all Western Europe. Pretty socially accepted. Yeah, socially accepted. Yeah.

Is that so many of these dynasties and empires that arose had drinking was a huge core of their civilization. And they think because it affects your mind in different ways, disinhibits you, makes you a little more social, more social, friendly. Some of them hadn't signed any contracts unless they got drunk with the other person, you know, some war, some other thing or anything like that. So, and it's almost in every single culture that, I mean, there are some that rebelled against it, but most of those had it earlier on when they were developing. And that is huge in terms of people getting along with other people.

Dustin Grinnell (01:42:47 --> 01:42:59)
Right. And I feel like, you know, the United States during Prohibition, they tried a very interesting experiment, which is like, maybe, you know, alcohol is causing a lot of problems in society.

Mark Bowers (01:42:59 --> 01:43:03)
Right. Yeah. Ban it. Yeah. But that failed out well.

Dustin Grinnell (01:43:03 --> 01:43:06)
It was horrible. Like, it didn't go right. Like, people rebelled.

Dustin Grinnell (01:43:07 --> 01:43:07)
People—

Dustin Grinnell (01:43:07 --> 01:43:14)
like, so we needed it. Like, society needed it to some degree. And maybe it's something like a—

Mark Bowers (01:43:14 --> 01:43:33)
loosens us up. Yeah. This is socializing influence. Well, people think that with COVID too, that a lot of the Gen Z people just don't have the same social skills. And part of it is, well, they're not drinking when they, you know, when they get older and they haven't been around people, but, you know, it all kind of flows together. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:43:33 --> 01:43:45)
One of my questions too is thinking about younger generations. They seem to be moving away from alcohol and going to things more like cannabis and seltzers and things like that.

Mark Bowers (01:43:45 --> 01:43:47)
Yeah, more abstaining completely.

Dustin Grinnell (01:43:47 --> 01:43:51)
Totally. I wonder what you think of that.

Mark Bowers (01:43:51 --> 01:44:46)
I mean, we have seltzers here, so we spend a fair amount of time, you know, trying to make seltzers and such. Right. So, as a chemist and a scientist, hey, it's all great, but my love is still beer. So, I'd rather drink beer than drink a lot of these other kind of newer stuff. I don't drink alcohol-free beer.

It tastes kind of okay, but I don't know. Yeah. I want a beer. I want a beer. Otherwise, I'll drink water or just plain seltzer or, you know, something like that.

Right. So, or I mean, I drink wine and other stuff too, but If I'm drinking something non-alcohol, 9 times out of 10, it's just gonna be water. What else? Well, we'll do a couple more. So let's do a non-beer.

Dustin Grinnell (01:44:46 --> 01:44:48)
Yeah, what do you mean by non-beer?

Mark Bowers (01:44:48 --> 01:45:23)
It has no barley in it and no hops. Got it, okay. So this, you can ferment sugar to alcohol and you don't need to make it from grain. To be beer, you have to use grain. Okay. And I think some of the laws may say you have to use hops. I'm not quite certain, but this is made with corn sugar, yeast, and you have to get a special yeast that can ferment just corn sugar because it has no nutrients in it. So we have to add nutrients, get a special yeast, and ferment it. And then we add, in this case, we added pink guava and wine.

Dustin Grinnell (01:45:23 --> 01:45:29)
And this is the guava limeade? Yes. Okay. It's very sweet.

Mark Bowers (01:45:29 --> 01:45:39)
And there's no sugar in it. Wow. I mean, there was sugar in it fermented out, but all the sweetness is more of a perceived sweetness.

Dustin Grinnell (01:45:39 --> 01:45:44)
Man, I've been living with IPAs too long. This is crazy. There's a whole universe out there.

Mark Bowers (01:45:44 --> 01:45:55)
Yeah. We had some beer drinkers. One of them came in recently and said this is the best thing he's ever had. This is better than any of the beers I've ever seen. I like beer.

Dustin Grinnell (01:45:55 --> 01:46:02)
This is good. I do not hate this. Yeah, this is delicious. So 5.2%. Yeah. So hard seltzer.

Mark Bowers (01:46:03 --> 01:46:03)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:46:03 --> 01:46:06)
And then how does a hard seltzer differ from like a sour?

Mark Bowers (01:46:06 --> 01:46:40)
So a sour is actually soured. So even if you tasted a sour beer before the fruit was added to it, it would taste sour. If you tasted this base alcohol seltzer part, it doesn't taste sour. It just tastes kind of like vodka almost. I mean, it's kind of like that. So sours are actually made sour, whereas our seltzer, what sourness there is or tartness comes from the fruit only. It doesn't come from the brewing process.

Dustin Grinnell (01:46:40 --> 01:46:40)
Okay.

Mark Bowers (01:46:40 --> 01:46:45)
We do have a sour up there if you want to try it. Yeah, sure. Yeah, we'll do one of those as well.

Dustin Grinnell (01:46:45 --> 01:46:47)
And so do you brew these? Team.

Mark Bowers (01:46:47 --> 01:46:54)
Yeah, team. Our team brewed these. In fact, some of these recipes aren't mine either. Helen's done a lot of them.

Dustin Grinnell (01:46:54 --> 01:46:56)
Is she a brewer as well?

Mark Bowers (01:46:56 --> 01:47:07)
Yeah, she's got a production brewery. So she does most of the brewing and we have an assistant who just started assisting brewing. I don't do much physical brewing anymore.

Dustin Grinnell (01:47:07 --> 01:47:09)
So this is Tropical Swarm?

Mark Bowers (01:47:10 --> 01:47:15)
Yeah. It used to be a lot more red color than this. McGuire had to look at us.

Dustin Grinnell (01:47:15 --> 01:47:19)
Tart with blood orange, passion fruit, pineapple, papaya. Wow, this one's packed.

Mark Bowers (01:47:19 --> 01:47:58)
Wow, with cherry and blackberry. It's got everything in it. So this has definitely a little bit different sour taste than what the other one did. The other, the seltzer is cleaner, I would say. Yeah.

And the fruit just kind of pop a little more. Yeah. This has the fruit in this kind of meld together and come up It's not as, um, can't pick the different flavors out. The sourness has a different quality to it too, to me. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:47:58 --> 01:47:59)
Is that something you can taste for?

Mark Bowers (01:47:59 --> 01:48:02)
You can?

Dustin Grinnell (01:48:02 --> 01:48:03)
Yeah. Know which one's lactic versus citrus?

Mark Bowers (01:48:05 --> 01:48:12)
Yeah. Sometimes I like the citric acid version better. Sometimes I like these better. And this one, I like the guava filter better than I like the—

Dustin Grinnell (01:48:12 --> 01:48:15)
Has your taste and preferences changed over your life?

Mark Bowers (01:48:16 --> 01:48:36)
Yeah, yeah. I used to like maltier things in general. Yeah. And I could drink a lot more of a malty beer like that, like the Swarm we had. Yeah. I can't drink as much of those anymore. I want something crisper and lighter. For, you know, more drinks. I mean, I'll drink one of those, a small one.

Dustin Grinnell (01:48:36 --> 01:48:40)
Is that almost like one's taste in music, how that changes?

Mark Bowers (01:48:40 --> 01:48:41)
I think so.

Dustin Grinnell (01:48:41 --> 01:48:48)
What do you think that is? You change as a person and the self changes?

Mark Bowers (01:48:48 --> 01:49:04)
Well, there's trends all the time. You think people's basic genetics isn't changing? Yeah. So for some reason, you either got tired of the old stuff and it's new. Sometimes it's new ingredients. Like the new IPAs, those hops never existed before. Yeah. So that's all new.

Dustin Grinnell (01:49:04 --> 01:49:04)
New taste, yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:49:04 --> 01:49:23)
Yeah, that's a new taste. I definitely see that. But I'm liking lagers more and more because I'm getting a little fatigued of the IPAs. Yeah. And so I'll like a really crisp pilsner, like a Dortmunder Export is very crisp. And I just, just hits the spot better.

Dustin Grinnell (01:49:23 --> 01:49:29)
Do you like Say you're off the clock and you sit down here at the bar. How do you decide what to drink?

Mark Bowers (01:49:29 --> 01:49:59)
Yeah, it's difficult every day. Oh God, do I want something crisp? Oh, this one just came on. I should try that. We'll see how that one drinks. So part of it's doing it from, you know, from a professional standpoint. And sometimes it's like, oh God, I want something fruity. I want an IPA tonight. What's the newest one or what do I want out of that? Usually the ones we make here are new and we haven't had before because I know what your Nan Du tastes like and Hop Hop and those.

Dustin Grinnell (01:49:59 --> 01:50:12)
Oh, I have a really specific question. Are you able to conjure up a taste in your brain without drinking it? If I said right now, could you conjure up the taste of Hop Hop in a way? Can you do that?

Mark Bowers (01:50:13 --> 01:50:13)
Yeah, in a sense.

Dustin Grinnell (01:50:13 --> 01:50:17)
Yeah. Oh, that's interesting. So it's like a mind's Hounds.

Mark Bowers (01:50:17 --> 01:50:50)
In a way, yeah. Especially if it's something I've had a fair amount. I can't do that with, you know, I mean, I, we had this one beer for our 50th anniversary that we made and we've never been able to make it again. We can't get the exact ingredients, but people still come to me. It was 2.8%, kind of a session IPA, very fruity. It was a little bit like that New England in terms of how it really didn't get Yeah. 2.8%. Oh, but I can't conjure that one up anymore. I just remember it so good.

Dustin Grinnell (01:50:51 --> 01:50:51)
Yeah. Interesting.

Mark Bowers (01:50:51 --> 01:50:53)
And I've never been able to repeat it.

Dustin Grinnell (01:50:53 --> 01:51:07)
So that one's lost to your memory. Yeah. But it's interesting. It's almost like how if you try to picture your old high school or picture a childhood friend, that visual degrades a little bit. Yeah. Just like the taste does. The taste of food.

Mark Bowers (01:51:07 --> 01:51:07)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:51:07 --> 01:51:08)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:51:08 --> 01:51:25)
Interesting. Yes. Okay. And we'll do one more because it's malty and this is our pumpkin beer. Cool.

You can try it. Okay. Yeah. You got enough there for you to try. Well, I can't drink a whole lot of that one anyhow.

Dustin Grinnell (01:51:25 --> 01:51:28)
I wonder if you can. That's very pumpkiny.

Mark Bowers (01:51:28 --> 01:51:28)
Yes.

Dustin Grinnell (01:51:29 --> 01:51:34)
Very good taste, you know. It's almost like candy corn or something.

Mark Bowers (01:51:35 --> 01:51:51)
Yeah. We put some natural flavors in it as well to kind of boosts the caramel and the— it's got a little bit of butter rum extract flavor in it as well. It also has pumpkin spices in it, pumpkin pie spices in it.

Dustin Grinnell (01:51:51 --> 01:51:59)
Yeah, it's, um, I could probably only have one of those before you feel like you're saturated with that taste.

Mark Bowers (01:51:59 --> 01:52:06)
Yeah. Cool. Well, we'll do one more. Let's do— we're in on a big IPA.

Dustin Grinnell (01:52:06 --> 01:52:15)
Yeah, why don't we, uh, maybe we'll just have a pour and then just end at the table, sit at the table. Sure. Sounds good. And what's this one called?

Mark Bowers (01:52:15 --> 01:52:16)
King Louie. King Louie?

Dustin Grinnell (01:52:16 --> 01:52:17)
Yeah.

Mark Bowers (01:52:17 --> 01:53:49)
All right. So we actually, well, before you taste that one, we'll do the Old Skies too. Okay. I have to tell you the story. So, Old Skies was the first beer.

And then we wanted to make a double IPA of it or something much stronger. Okay. And that's what King Louie is. So this one came first, O Skies, and it's called Orangutan Skies. Okay.

And the name came about, people were just riffing on stuff a little bit and said, oh, you know, I really like that Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, but we'd like to do this like orange-colored beer, you know. And so they go, it's an orange, orange in the sky, orangutan sky. So that's where the name came from. Oh, kind of crazy. So we had that, and then people liked the beer.

This one has kind of faded out, and we brought it back a little bit, changed the recipe a little bit. But then we want, like I said, we wanted to do a bigger version A lot of people really like eels, guys. Orangutans, guys. Yeah. And then we're making an orangutan.

He's kind of a king orangutan. So the guy is, um, The Jungle Book. So it's King Louie. Okay. And this is an Imperial IPA.

Dustin Grinnell (01:53:49 --> 01:53:50)
It writes itself.

Mark Bowers (01:53:50 --> 01:54:00)
Yeah. Yes, we hadn't brewed this in a while, so we tweaked the recipe a little bit this year. People just love this one. Yeah, King Louis.

Dustin Grinnell (01:54:00 --> 01:54:04)
Good for kids. Very nice.

Mark Bowers (01:54:12 --> 01:54:13)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:54:13 --> 01:54:20)
You know, one thing I want to ask for is your background. You know, you Started out, did you go to Caltech, was it?

Mark Bowers (01:54:20 --> 01:54:25)
I postdoc'd at Caltech. Postdoc'd at Caltech. Yeah, well, I got a PhD at Berkeley.

Dustin Grinnell (01:54:25 --> 01:54:26)
In chemistry?

Mark Bowers (01:54:26 --> 01:54:27)
In chemistry.

Dustin Grinnell (01:54:27 --> 01:54:33)
Okay, yeah. So PhD-trained chemist went to Caltech for a postdoc.

Mark Bowers (01:54:33 --> 01:54:33)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:54:33 --> 01:54:36)
And then you end up over here, did you do another postdoc?

Mark Bowers (01:54:36 --> 01:54:41)
Yeah, over here with jobs and kind of bounced around a couple different companies.

Dustin Grinnell (01:54:41 --> 01:54:43)
So R&D work?

Mark Bowers (01:54:43 --> 01:54:48)
Yeah, R&D, medical devices, scientific instrumentation. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (01:54:48 --> 01:54:52)
And then, you know, the next question is like, how'd you make that leap?

Mark Bowers (01:54:52 --> 01:55:17)
Okay, so I started brewing when I was 16. What? Well, this was back in the late '60s, 1960s. I've been around a while. And brewing was— nobody homebrewed then. I had an uncle who homebrewed, and he's the one that kind of you know, got me into it. It just sounded so cool. I'm a scientist. I knew I was going to be a scientist from age 5 or something. I want to be a scientist.

Dustin Grinnell (01:55:17 --> 01:55:20)
Because you're curious and observe the world?

Mark Bowers (01:55:20 --> 01:55:46)
Exactly, the curiosity. Yeah. So then I kind of ended up kind of leaning towards chemistry because you can make things and you can do fancy tastes. Yeah, so I started brewing beer when I was 16 in the basement. The ingredients were horrible and and quit making it. I had to make all the stuff, and it worked. We could drink it and get a buzz off of it, and it kind of tasted good, but it wasn't really good beer.

Dustin Grinnell (01:55:46 --> 01:55:50)
But you— there must be some pride in it though. It's like you— yeah, you built this, you know?

Mark Bowers (01:55:50 --> 01:56:20)
Yeah, I, I made some wines. I made a couple wines that tasted really good. Beer, not so much, but the wine— but wine took a long time to age and like that, so it wasn't as good as getting really good grapes only in the West Coast. I ended up in Berkeley, and instead of like maybe doing wine or whatever, I still homebrewed while I was getting a PhD and met a few other people. And that was at the start of the whole craft brewing revolution. So this is mid-'70s at this point.

Dustin Grinnell (01:56:20 --> 01:56:22)
So that's when craft brewing kind of—

Mark Bowers (01:56:22 --> 01:57:12)
kind of really took off. So there were 2 breweries in the San Francisco in the Chicago area at that time that were considered by today's standards, they were craft brewers. So one was Anchor, which had really been around since the 1900s. They made steam beer. And Fritz Maytag bought the company before it went out of business. It had fallen into disrepair and hardly anybody brewing the beer. He actually revived it and brought it back. And he did some interesting, not just making that steam beer, which was the original beer they made, and he started making other things. So I credit him, and a lot of other people do, with making the first modern American IPA. And I had that when I was out there in 1979.

Dustin Grinnell (01:57:12 --> 01:57:13)
Did a light bulb go off?

Mark Bowers (01:57:13 --> 01:59:57)
Oh, hell yeah. I'm already brewing beer and I taste this beer and it's like, my God, that's what an IPA— and these hops are— they use this new hop, Cascade. Which was very grapefruity and fruity. All the other hops, like I said earlier, the standard European hops and the hops from England, which are the two big places that had hops, they're kind of herbally. It's like that Dortmunder that we first had.

That's not, you know, oh, this fruity, it's not fruity, but it's spicy, it's earthy, but it's, it's got a, a a nice flavor to it, but you don't call it fruity. But this IPA, this Cascade hop, oh, it blew me away. Yeah. And the aroma was there, it's just like, come, jumps out of the glass. Ah.

And so I said, this is great. So we got some of these Cascade hops and we brewed with it. There's another brewery there too that opened up, New Albion. Started by Jack McAuliffe. And this guy is, is like the first modern person to open a craft brewery in the US.

And he opened that in the San Francisco area too, where Fritz Maytag took over a brewery and kind of turned it into a craft brewery. This Jack started from scratch. There were no big tanks you could buy, so he made He took dairy tanks, and dairy used a lot of tanks kind of like brewing does, stainless steel and such. So he took some of those and he welded and made fixtures and such so he could brew beer. So he started that up and he sold beer, and he had two women with him too, which is interesting.

And he had this— he lasted like 3 or 4 years, but he just, he couldn't get enough money to invest to get better equipment to make enough money, you know, to to really get off the ground, scale it well enough. So he ended up going out of business. But Ken— can't think of his last name— but he started Sierra Nevada Brewing. And he came by and visited the place several times, and he got the spark. He had a home brew shop in Chico, in California.

So he opened up a brewery. It's now Sierra Nevada. It's like one of the largest craft breweries in the US. The guy from Russian River too. So this guy Jack influenced the start of the whole brewing revolution.

Dustin Grinnell (01:59:57 --> 01:59:59)
So you were there at ground zero?

Mark Bowers (01:59:59 --> 02:00:01)
I was there at ground zero.

Dustin Grinnell (02:00:01 --> 02:00:07)
That must have been— that's part of your story. That's it. You know, if you had been somewhere else, it may not have—

Mark Bowers (02:00:07 --> 02:01:27)
probably never would have happened, at least not like that. Though I didn't brew Beer, I brewed like a home brew for another 10, 15 years after that. I kind of quit when I got gear and such, but I got interested in cask conditioned beer, which is like the beer that's made in England. We have one like there, a handful, that actually pumps the beer out so it's less carbonation, cellar temperature instead of freezing temperature. So I got into that and there's a group a beer in the Boston area that puts on a Cass Commission Beer Festival every year. And I got involved in that and kind of ended up knowing a lot about the whole beer culture and the beer business and such. And then, um, from that, my career was ending that, and I was getting tired of the professional chemistry stuff. Yeah. And I knew people who were helping aeronauts get off the ground. And I said, hey, I'm tired of doing my other stuff. I love beer. I'd like to do that. So that's my second career, jumping into brewing full-time and bringing all the knowledge from my years in industry as well as beer.

Dustin Grinnell (02:01:27 --> 02:01:32)
Yeah. So you're living the dream. Do you feel like this is— you're doing what you're supposed to be doing?

Mark Bowers (02:01:32 --> 02:01:33)
Yes.

Dustin Grinnell (02:01:33 --> 02:01:42)
No, I mean, the passion is obvious. So what, uh, if you reflect back on those years of starting here, what are some of your favorite memories?

Mark Bowers (02:01:42 --> 02:03:55)
What's your— One was my different uncle that got me into beer brewing, but he really loved German beers, and we had this place in my hometown. So I'm 18, I can drink, at the time, legal in Ohio. And we had this place called the Beer Barrel. And they had, they must have had like 5, 6, 7, 8 taps. Unusual for like the early '70s.

And they had this beer, Mühlenbräu, or Mühlenbräu, the Americans call it. And my uncle loved that. It was made in Germany. Imported to the US. So he said, you should try this.

Oh, it's like the greatest beer. Wow. Because I'd already been drinking the Bud and the PBR, which are good. I loved it at the time. Yeah.

But having this German beer, it was such an eye-opener at that time. And that stuck with me all the time. I went to Germany, I spent a summer in Austria, then visited Germany. When I was 19. I'm over there, I'm trying to find every single beer I can try.

A lot of these things are just wonderful. They're just— why doesn't America have beers like they do over there? Yeah, yeah. And so, you know, those experiences— wow. And same thing in England too, weren't there?

England. And it's just like, my God, all this cask conditioned beer. It's so fresh because they serve the beer within 2 or 3 days, otherwise it goes bad because they're not putting oxygen getting into it. So as soon as you crack it open, it's starting to age. Some people say it gets better the second day, but it's usually after the third or fourth day, it's on its way down if you haven't drunk the whole thing.

Dustin Grinnell (02:03:55 --> 02:03:56)
Right.

Mark Bowers (02:03:56 --> 02:03:59)
And your beer is just different.

Dustin Grinnell (02:03:59 --> 02:04:16)
Why, why beer? I mean, Michael Jordan saw a basketball court and a basketball and he said, this is it. You know, there's skiers that see those two sticks and they start going downhill really fast and they said, this is it. But for beer, you're like, bam, you know?

Mark Bowers (02:04:16 --> 02:04:36)
Yeah, I don't get high with beer. I love all fermentation. I kind of got into all fermentation. I like wine, but wine isn't quite as drinkable. I mean, wine is more simple. I still drink it. It's harder for me to sit down for an evening drink.

Dustin Grinnell (02:04:36 --> 02:04:52)
The word you used, burn, resonated, I felt like, because it just— I feel like the higher you're going alcohol, the more burn there is a little bit. So with wine, it does feel like there's a little bit more burn. It's less friendly to the mouth and esophagus. I don't know.

Mark Bowers (02:04:52 --> 02:05:14)
Yeah. Okay. And then also wine took longer to make. You have to age it. I mean, I love like some of the reds.

So you got to put it in oak. You got to let it set for years before you can taste it. Yeah. Beer, 2, 3 weeks or something, you know, the ale, you can drink it. Wines, you wait 6 weeks, 8 weeks.

Dustin Grinnell (02:05:14 --> 02:05:30)
It seems like a wine is like just a little too fussy, a little too uptight, too idiosyncratic for you. You're like, you know, you're down to earth, you're laid back, you know, you want something that's not going to take That's not going to be too complicated.

Mark Bowers (02:05:30 --> 02:05:49)
Yeah, and I think the whole beer drinking culture is you went out and you drank a number of beers. You usually don't go out wine, go out beer. I mean, you do, you'll go to a bar, you have a cocktail or something, but beer, you know, you sit in front of a football game, baseball game, you're gonna drink some beer.

Dustin Grinnell (02:05:49 --> 02:05:54)
You like the idea of longevity too. Yeah, you know, it's, it could be a 3 to 4 hour session.

Mark Bowers (02:05:55 --> 02:06:11)
Yeah, and that's why I love the lower alcohol beer. You give me a good 3%, 2.5% beer, if it's tasty and it's good, I'd rather drink that. I can drink 5 or 6 of those compared to a 6%, I can drink half that amount. Yeah, for the same, you know, level of—

Dustin Grinnell (02:06:11 --> 02:06:24)
Yeah, there's something fun about the activity. The activity of sitting there, getting a little looser, just enjoying that hit every 20 to 30 seconds, maybe a minute, every sip, you know?

Mark Bowers (02:06:24 --> 02:06:31)
Yeah. Yeah. And it's the socializing, like we've already talked about too. Right. There with people, people you enjoy.

Dustin Grinnell (02:06:31 --> 02:06:40)
Here's like a darker idea. How do you not go too far? How do you not turn into an alcoholic? How do you not, how do you stay?

Mark Bowers (02:06:40 --> 02:06:41)
I've always wondered that.

Dustin Grinnell (02:06:41 --> 02:06:43)
So yeah, you never had issues because—

Mark Bowers (02:06:44 --> 02:07:02)
No, I get to a point where, you know, What, start drinking, then it's just too much. Same with me. The taste is good, or the buzz. And I know now with driving and everything too, you like it, or I— that's always in my mind. But even if it's home or somewhere, or someone else is driving, yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (02:07:02 --> 02:07:19)
I always thought it was something of a roll of the dice for me, like some sort of genetic luck. I think genetic. It's, um, I can do it recreationally, but for some reason it doesn't become compulsive and addictive. It doesn't lead into a darker place, but I've seen family members where it does, and it's like, I'm not entirely sure why.

Mark Bowers (02:07:19 --> 02:07:20)
I'm not either.

Dustin Grinnell (02:07:20 --> 02:07:30)
Yeah, it's like part biology, part life experiences. Yeah. Part, yeah, I don't know. Yeah. But it sounds like you, yeah, you just haven't had a problem with that. Work hard.

Mark Bowers (02:07:30 --> 02:07:36)
Yeah. Well, now it's cutting down a lot because it's just like getting older and, you know, like even—

Dustin Grinnell (02:07:36 --> 02:07:37)
Can't go as hard.

Mark Bowers (02:07:37 --> 02:07:52)
Yeah. It affects sleep if you drink too much and stuff. So, right, you know, I used to always go home and have, you know, a beer or two with dinner in the evening. Now, you know, more often than not, I go home, I won't drink anything.

Dustin Grinnell (02:07:53 --> 02:07:56)
Right. Well, I definitely remember the days of college.

Mark Bowers (02:07:56 --> 02:07:58)
Oh, that's different. Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (02:07:58 --> 02:08:02)
And, you know, the 22-year-old me versus the 40-year-old me, it's like different.

Mark Bowers (02:08:02 --> 02:08:26)
And I know that, you know, the days after, yeah, And the same thing with the festival, you know, 10, 15 years ago, you go to some of these festivals, somebody else is driving and oh God, you know, it took a while to recover from those stuff. But now it's, yeah, it's much more measured and it's like, okay, I'm enough, you know, I'll taste stuff, you know, yeah, she's gonna give me something, I'll taste something.

Dustin Grinnell (02:08:27 --> 02:08:55)
Yeah. You know, when we were tasting all those different beers, I made the observation that like I've already broadened my horizons on beers. Like I've been, if I go into a brewery, it's IPAs. I don't know why, it's just a habit. Yeah. But now it's like already opened up. Do you have any wisdom for, I guess, someone who wants to appreciate beer more deeply?

Mark Bowers (02:08:55 --> 02:09:36)
What excites the clientele up there at all? Right. Do you have anything really new that you really like, or if there's something fresh just came out that you're excited about, or people are? And I don't know, I'd say maybe 8, 9 times out of 10, they'll recommend something that I wouldn't have chose. And you did.

Wow. This is nice. I see what you're doing. I really like it. So I say, do that.

Dustin Grinnell (02:09:36 --> 02:09:59)
It reminds me of, uh, there's a bookstore in Boston called Trident Booksellers, and they have a section where there's books that are wrapped in like, uh, grocery bag paper. Oh yeah. So you can't see what it is. Oh, you don't know what the title is. You don't know if it's fiction or nonfiction. Yeah. And you're just buying. And when you open it, you don't know what you're getting.

Mark Bowers (02:09:59 --> 02:09:59)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (02:09:59 --> 02:10:11)
But you appreciate it still. There's something, there's a little magic, a little mystery to that. And it's something similar to that. Yeah. What you just suggested, you know, just ask, just have someone point the way for you.

Mark Bowers (02:10:12 --> 02:11:25)
If I say don't go to the liquor store, buy something, take it home. Go out, go out somewhere, go out with friends, go out alone even if you have to. Go to different cities, different places have different viewpoints, different types of beer, emphasize different things. But it's always great to go out. The bar scene, even when this country was started, was— so many decisions and things were made in the pubs and the taverns.

That was a socializing place. People went there. And it's still somewhat like that in England almost, but it's dying out. And I think it's even kind of dying out in the US a little bit. People are doing— going out west to socialize over beer and other things.

And I think that may end up becoming something that other people are not with. Go out, check it out, go to the bar, but go with friends, socialize. Yeah, don't drink alone. Yeah, don't drink alone. Don't go overdrank.

Dustin Grinnell (02:11:25 --> 02:11:57)
Yeah, yeah, know your limits, I guess. Know your limits. And, uh, you know, it reminded me, like, You think about like everything's about politics now, and yes, and you know, we're obviously very politically divided and it's a very divisive time. And, uh, it may be like common knowledge, but it seems like in Washington now people don't hang out as much with each other. The politicians don't, the lawmakers don't. Yeah, they don't, uh, have dinners or get-togethers as much as they used to.

Mark Bowers (02:11:57 --> 02:11:57)
Like, they—

Dustin Grinnell (02:11:57 --> 02:12:17)
yeah. And there's something to be said about getting at the table. Yeah, with someone, you know, someone you don't agree with. It's like you're way more likely to have a compromise, to give some— concede some ground. Yeah, to make friends with someone you don't agree with, don't even like. Yeah, you're sitting with them, maybe even drinking with them.

Mark Bowers (02:12:17 --> 02:12:17)
Exactly.

Dustin Grinnell (02:12:17 --> 02:12:25)
I agree. It's like, I don't know, maybe our Founding Fathers were like pounding beers while they were also in their democracy.

Mark Bowers (02:12:25 --> 02:12:26)
I think so.

Dustin Grinnell (02:12:26 --> 02:12:38)
You know, we should bring that back to some degree. Like, you know, just have a few beers with someone who's on the other side of the aisle with you. Someone who doesn't think or believe in the same things, you know? Absolutely.

Mark Bowers (02:12:38 --> 02:12:39)
Yeah.

Dustin Grinnell (02:12:39 --> 02:12:53)
Well, why don't we leave it at that? Yeah. You know, thank you so much for showing me the process, letting me into your world. Yep. I really appreciate it. And I can't wait to come in and keep trying. Keep trying the beers.

Mark Bowers (02:12:53 --> 02:12:53)
Please come back.

Dustin Grinnell (02:12:53 --> 02:12:58)
Good luck with everything. And thank you again so much.

Dustin Grinnell (02:12:58 --> 02:13:20)
Thanks for listening to this episode of Curiously. I hope you enjoyed this conversation with brewmaster Mark Bowers. If this conversation challenged your thinking or helped broaden your perspective, please consider sharing it with your friends and family and use it to have a conversation of your own. If you want to support Curiously, please consider leaving a review. Thanks again for listening and And stay tuned for more conversations with people I meet along the way.