Category Archives: Wisconsin Brewer Interview Series

Interviews with your favorite Wisconsin brewers!

Interview with Kirby Nelson from Capital Brewery

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Capital Brewery

Last week Friday I had the pleasure of interviewing Kirby Nelson, the Brewmaster for Capital Brewery in Middleton, Wisconsin. Kirby has been brewing since the late 70′s and continues to this day making some very fine beers. Lagers mostly, but some ales as well. In today’s age of souped up imperial styles, Kirby likes to approach beer from the standpoint where he wants you to be able to down a six pack of his beers. So he shoots for a easy drinking beer for most of his offerings. Don’t confuse an easily quaffable beer with a boring beer, some of Kirby’s beers are my go to summer favorites. Wild Rice, Rustic Ale, and the now retired 1900 are some of my favorite summer slammers. Their new beer Supper Club, I have not had the chance to try yet, but I will be soon. Kirby says that beer is flying off the shelves and I am anxious to try it. Their Autumnal Fire is one hell of a Marzen and Dopplebock Hybrid as well. With that, I will let the interview speak for itself. Since I have since become lazy with transcribing the audio, it is much easier to just download and listen, it is roughly only a half hour long. Again, I am not a podcaster and know I have some lacking audio interview skills. But Kirby is an energetic and to the point kind of guy. I’m sure you will enjoy the audio better than reading it anyway. So Enjoy!

Interview with Kirby Nelson, Brewmaster for Capital Brewery MP3 Download (Click the link and a download page will appear)

As a Correction Note, a few weeks ago I posted a segment on finding Capital beers in a can. I found out in the interview that they have had their beer in cans since about 1997. I don’t know why I have not seen it here where I live, because I am not far from Madison. Maybe the 12 packs escaped my radar or no liquor stores I went to carried the cans. But either way, this was not a new development for Capital, but rather a new discovery for me. The information in that post still is valid though, regarding the benefit of craft beer in cans.

Below are some pics I took on my phone during a tour we got during the NHC Regionals which were hosted at Capital Brewery. Picture quality is not the best.

The brewing area at Capital

Some of the tanks, if you look on the other end of where that Dinosaur mascot is, there are many more conicals stored there. But I didn't take a picture of those.

Here we are getting a special tanks sampling of the Weizen Dopplebock. I am not sure if this sampling was Kirby approved, but I enjoyed it. I didn't want to mention this in the interview.

I posted this picture so you can see during the interview why I asked if he plays Frank Zappa in the brewery. Each of the tanks is named after a Frank Zappa song. Peaches en Regalia is an instrumental piece off Zappa's Hot Rats album.

Interview with Joe Karls, Brewmaster for Hinterland Brewery

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Hinterland Brewing Co.

If you have not heard of Hinterland Brewing, chances are you soon will. Especially if you live in Wisconsin or the surrounding area. Joe Karls from Hinterland Brewing makes some damn fine beers, and now that the brewery, based in Green Bay with another restaurant location in Milwaukee is bottling their own beer right on the premises. With this new addition, they have the ability to pretty much bottle whatever they want, where prior to this, their beer was brewed and bottled at Grey’s brewery using Joe’s recipe and Hinterland purchased ingredients. The Pale Ale, bottled in 12 ounce bottles, was pretty much all you could find. But now you can find the beer in 16 ounce bottles, and as I type this they have their flagship Pale Ale, Luna Coffee Stout, Maple Bock, and an Amber in bottles with a plan to bottle a Cherry Wheat for summer. They also have several beers on tap as well, and while at the brewery I was lucky enough to sample the bock. All the beers I have had so far have been great, with my favorites being the Pale Ale and Coffee Stout, but I did go through a growler of the Bock on Easter. OK, enough chatter, lets get on with the Interview.

Quick Note: This is the abridged version. I learned from the last interview that transcribing it word for word is a long and arduous task. For the complete audio from the interview, download the MP3 here.

Joe Karls, Brewmaster at Hinterland Brewery

How Long have you been Brewing? I started homebrewing 25 years ago, but I have been brewing professionally for, actually I have been brewing here for 14 years. Actually it was my anniversary just a couple of days ago.

Have you ever brewed anywhere else? Only as a volunteer. Just day brews here and there. I brewed at Cherryland brewing with Mark and Tom up there, which is now defunct. When I was just getting into brewing professionally I went down for a brew session with Gray’s Brewing, just a few things like that.

What was the most challenging process to transition from homebrewing to pro brewing? My last job was not really a physically demanding job. Brewing on this level is very physically demanding. I was very tired for the first couple of weeks before I got my feet under me. There are three levels here: the basement, the main level, and the upper level. During a brew day I’m hitting all three levels multiple times. And I’m squatting, climbing, lifting bags of grain, and lifting half barrels. For example today I just lifted 24 half barrels onto pallets. (Joe does all this himself. He is the only brewer employed at Hinterland, so he does all the brewing, cleaning, and hoisting of the barrels.)

These are the actual Half Barrels (and yes they are full) that Joe had stacked prior to my arrival. All this done by hand.There is no forklift or chain lift at Hinterland.

What type of brewing education have you had, if any? Most of my education, like most people in the industry, came primarily from homebrewing. Once I got into it, I read everything I could get my hands on like books, magazine, and periodicals. Once the Internet became more than just dial-up, that was a fantastic resource. I talked to brewers before I got into the profession. Then I took the short course at Siebel Institute in 1994. I did that to solidify the knowledge. And the short course is just that. It solidifies the knowledge you picked up while homebrewing. If you were not a homebrewer, you would be confused as all get out in that course. So the short course helps you solidify that knowledge as well as make the transition from small recipes to large recipes.

How do you come up with new recipes? Is it by instinct or more technical with a lot of planning? There are two phases. There is the idea of the recipe. That can come from myself, the customers,  or the owner of the company. Even the distributors will come and say “I really want to do this cherry wheat, we’ll go out and we’ll champion it, and really push this. Can you do something like this.” So I said sure, then we talked about what we wanted this recipe to be all about. So the idea has to come from the fact that I have the cellar space, I want to start with this new yeast I have coming in, so what can I brew with it that I have not brewed before? So that’s where it comes from. The idea of a new beer.

After that, I go to the liquor store and buy maybe a dozen different beers related to that style. I’ll sit down with the owner of the company and we will taste them and talk about “Yes this is what I’m thinking” or “No, I want it a bit more hoppy than this one”. What attributes to these beers have that we want to target? Then we pick a few of those beers and figure out what we would change to meet our expectations. From there, we take what we want our end result to be and I work backwards, all the way back to the beginning starting with the water analysis.

Hinterland, dining area

So do you produce test batches on a small scale first? I used to, but that was before three kids and a wife. When I first started, I would make a test batch in my kitchen and Bill and I would talk about any changes we would want to make. But now that we’ve been doing this for quite a few years, and knowing our system and our raw materials we are using we can get things fairly close without a test batch. We may make some tweaks to the recipe as we remake it.

What would you say is the key to your success here at Hinterland? It’s passion from everyone involved. I’ve been doing this for 14 years and still love it today. We recently put in a new bottling line and that ignited the passion for putting beer into bottles again. One other thing I love here, is the owner Bill Tressler, is a brewer himself. He has a passion for beer. That’s huge because this was a brewery set up by a brewer. A lot of the brewpubs and places like that are set up by restaurant owners or entrepreneurs, and those places may not be set up the way I would want them set up, as a brewer.

From right to left, the Hot Liquor Tank, Mash Tun, and Boil Kettle.

Out of the beers you offer at Hinterland, what is your favorite beer to brew? I don’t know if I really have a favorite to brew. From a selfish point of view, the ones that are easiest are best. I have a lot to do in the brewery, so if I can get the brew done that is best. But If you forced me to pick one, it would have to be a stout.  I really love to brew that when I have someone in the brewery who is not a homebrewer or just getting into brewing like a distributor or sales staff.  I love to brew that because it’s amazing to see what they think of a stout recipe. “You mean it’s not all burnt grains, it’s 85% fermentables.”

What would be your least favorite beer to brew? Weizen.  Sticky? We do a honey wheat and a cherry wheat and those are just 30% wheat, and not so much from a stuck mash, but sometimes they cloud up on me because they are so much more doughy. So I’ll have to stop and re-circulation or re-vorlauf my mash. Then our Weizen is 50% wheat so that’s a bear. So yeah, Weizen.

Do you have any beers that maybe you thought may not be well received, but turned out to a be huge hit? Or do you have any that you thought would take off that just didn’t seem to do well? I do have a couple of cases of each. People always want whats new, like a seasonal. When you first tap them, they go like gangbusters, then level off. But one that surprised me that I think is a fantastic beer, we only have about 4 gallons of it left right now. Brewed it last summer to get a new lager yeast started. It’s called River Rock Red. It’s a red lager, it’s a bigger beer at about 7% alcohol content, a lot of hop character (we used hallertau hops) I loved it. I think its fantastic. I brewed last June, and here we are in April and we still have some left. On the flip side the owner wanted me to do a raspberry beer. I want to do a raspberry rye because the rye beer will mask a little bit of the sweetness of a fruit beer. I didn’t want to bitter it up with hops, I didn’t want a sweet beer I wanted a dry beer, and that’s what rye malt does. It helps create a bit a dry feeling beer. Anyway, I thought the beer was alright, but wasn’t going to set the world on fire. But to this day I still get comments, when are you going to do it again?

Besides your own beer, what is in your fridge at home right now, what beers do you usually have on hand? I have a lot of things. I’m not one of those guys who are down on the macro brews, I think they are a great product just like any other style of beer, a well made style of beer. I think they are great product depending on your mood, the time of year and things like that. So in my refrigerator right now, well I like to work out and I watch my weight, so I do have Miller 64. We do distribute with Miller so I do try to keep their products. I do have Pabst, Shiner, Summit (I’m a big fan of Summit), I do have some Budweiser that someone brought over. I do have Sam Adams Nobel Pils at home as well.  I have a lot of stuff in there, only a few of each, but a lot of stuff.

Fermentation Room. Funny story, when we were in here there was some solid fermentation going. Even though it smelled awesome, we could only stay in a short time, even that short time we started to become winded from low oxygen levels.

Do you listen to any music while brewing? No I don’t. I don’t even have a radio in the brewery. I’m usually running around the brewery and don’t have time to hear the radio. If I would have something on, it would be NPR.

My favorite beer from Hinterland has to be the Bourbon Barrel Aged IPA, it’s outstanding. I had the beer in 2007 and at this year’s Beer Lover’s Brewfest, and how it aged was very interesting. Can you tell me what inspired you to brew that beer? We first brewed this beer in 2001, and the inspiration was Bigfoot Barleywine. The beer has changed a little bit, and I think we came close to nailing it. We didn’t oak age it at that time. We did oak age (not that beer), we started oak aging in 1999 in not only bourbon barrels but also new oak barrels. Some beers turned out great and some not so good. Over time we learned what types of beer take well to the oak and what didn’t. You know, you don’t want to put a pilsner in an oak barrel because it’s just too strong of a flavor for that beer. The oak masks all the flavors that make a good pilsner. Big beers, hoppy beers, dark beers those all take to oak aging very well. When we came up with the Imperial, we called it a Barleywine and it was not oaked at the time. We had so many guests at the time who were not beer savvy, and they would come in and see on the board “Barleywine”. They would say, “oh, I don’t want a wine.” They would just dismiss it. Our staff was constantly explaining that it was not a wine, but a beer but it has similar strength in the alcohol and such. So we thought if you get into a real  high alcohol Imperial IPA and you look at the terms Imperial IPA and Barleywine, they are very similar. I’m just going to shoot off on a tangent here for a second Many of the styles overlap a lot. Moreover, many people who are beer savvy, some who think they are beer savvy, will criticize for it not being true to style. I am not one of those guys. I’m in the business of selling beer, so I want to remain true to the style of beer, but I want to be able to market it as well. So anyway, we switched the name to an Imperial IPA and suddenly people got it. Well we started putting it into oak, and I was testing every couple of months. Early on it had hard edges and it was strong, and the bitterness was up front and really biting. Well, like a fine wine, as you aged it, the edges will round and become softer, the flavors on the palate will become softer, and the flavors will blend. We discovered that this beer was at its peak at about 18 to 24 months so I don’t even release it for at least 12 months. The beer that you had, depends on the generation, how many times I used that oak barrel. The more times I use that oak barrel, the less bourbon and flavors from the oak you get. So if I’ve use that barrel three times. I may leave it in there for 18 months, or 20 months. The beer you had this year at the fest was aged 20 months in that oak barrel. To pull some of those flavors, can take that long. The beer you had was brewed in October of 2007, and you tasted it in February of 2010. (here is where we have a short discussion on the two versions of the beer I had, barrels, and touch more on style and judging. It doesn’t really fit the interview, but you can listen to the audio to get that full discussion. If you only want to hear that portion, you can start it at 21:00)

What’s your take on fruit beers? It’s just like my take on any beers. Just like people slamming micros who are macros drinkers or people who are into micros slamming macro beers, I don’t slam any beer. From time to time I like fruit beers. I like most subtle fruit beers, I don’t like the hit you over the head fruit beers…unless they are supposed to be. Like New Glarus Belgian Red, the fruited lambics like the Framboise. Otherwise I like a lighter style of beer with a subtle fruit.

Some of the bourbon barrels in the kegging room

What can we expect to see from Hinterland in 2010? We have beer in bottles, and we expanded our distribution. That’s different from the mid 90’s when you would go to different distributors and you hope they take you. So your sort of lost and floundering hopeful someone picks your beer. Now, we actually have distributors coming to us saying they really want our beer. So now we are expanding our distribution throughout the state, where before we were limited to our keg product which was pretty much just northeast Wisconsin. So back to the beer in bottles, we have our Pale Ale now which is in 16 ounce bottles which is brewed and bottled here. For the last few years it was brewed and bottled using our recipe and our raw ingredients at Gray’s in Janesville. But now we are bringing that back in house. So we have our Pale Ale, our seasonal which is Maple Bock is in bottles, our stout is in bottles, in about three weeks our Amber will be out in bottles and our Cherry Wheat. Then later we have an Oktoberfest coming out which will be bottled.

The new bottles and beer offerings from Hinterland Brewery

Are there any new beers in the works? We have no plans to release anything new that we have not done before. Normally every year I do one or two that is a new or different when I have the cellar space, but this year we just don’t have the space.  Our production has gone way up, it is for sure double, maybe triple our production. We are actually going to be cutting back on more styles. That being said, we are going to be doing our bourbon barrel stout. It’s basically our Luna Coffee Stout and aged in bourbon barrels. So that we are kicking around. I don’t know how much we are going to produce. I don’t know if we are going to bottle that, or just keep it in kegs. So we are working that out.

The new bottling line at Hinterland Brewery

You offer a vocation vacation where a person can test drive their dream job of being a brewmaster under your mentorship. What would a typical person’s experience be like for this package? We were approached five or six years ago by Brian Kurth from Vocation Vacation. That was his idea. He had this idea to test drive new vocation’s. He does have this in several counties around the world. If somebody came up to me a few years ago and said, “Hey, I’m really into brewing and can I brew with you someday?” Normally I would have said, come through for a tour and I’ll show around. But you know I’m busy, I’d have to change my schedule to accommodate them. I start brewing at 2am, and chances are somebody may not want to get up at 2am to come start brewing. Then you have the liability issues, if someone gets hurt or something. That is actually something our lawyer brought up. But Brian got that all taken care of. So now for a fee, you can come do that. What I have been getting, is people have been giving these as gifts to people who are homebrewers and maybe want to see what it’s like to brew on a big scale like this, but maybe have good jobs and don’t want to get into this for a living.  Then I do have some people who are actually thinking about changing their career, either starting a business or starting a brewpub. So Brian takes care of everything as far as liability so we don’t have to worry about that, and he goes as far as taking care of travel and hotel reservations. So within a package, all you have to do is show up. We have had some great guys come in, we have not had any gals yet, but some great guys. What we offer, being a smaller brewery and me being the only [Brewery] employee, we offer a full day, start to finish half batch, which is 15 barrels instead of 30. We do that so you are not here for 14 hours, you’re here for ten instead. It’s all hands on. I go through what all the equipment is about, how to work the valves and I assist them. They do all the work. They have to hook up all the hoses, they have to scrub out all the grains, they have to spray out the mash tuns and clean them up. I just answer the questions. So they get all the hands on experience. So if you are looking at this as a career change or opening a brewpub, like we had a guy come through two weeks ago. He wanted to sit down with Bill the owner [of Hinterland]  and find out what it takes to run a brewpub. Bill owns a Hinterland restaurant in Milwaukee, he owns this Hinterland brewery and restaurant, and he owns the Whistling Swan Inn and restaurant in Fish Creek. So this guy was able to sit down with Bill and talk about the pros and cons of micro vs. brewpub, what is like working with staffing and so on. He got to bounce all this stuff off of Bill and get a lot of these types of questions answered. He got to have him [Bill] as a dedicated teacher or mentor for an hour and half. (If you are interested in trying the Vocation Vacation, click here for more info )

If you could give a homebrewer, or aspiring pro brewer one key piece of advice to improve their beer, what would it be? I don’t know if I can give just one.  Cleanliness, attention to detail, and take good notes. What I always tell homebrewers, and I think this is something I hope anyone reading this or listening takes to heart is always over-pitch. I remember when I started homebrewing and I would get this little packet of yeast, and I would think, “Is this really supposed to ferment all my beer.” No, you need more than that to get good active fermentation, and a quick fermentation. One of the things I have learned is to over-pitch. So I would throw away that packet if it was a dry yeast and go out and get three packets of five grams, and pitch those. If using liquid yeast I would grow it over and over and over, and use it from batch to batch. To get off flavors in your beer, like rubbery flavors, you would have to pitch so much yeast it is almost unimaginable. So over-pitch, you get a faster fermentation, you get no lag period, and guarantee your beer will turn out better. I over-pitch here in the brewery and it works. I have been doing it for 14 years here with no problems.

A lounging area at Hinterland.

Thanks to Joe and Hinterland brewery for giving the opportunity to tour the brewery and provide a great interview. As a side note, Hinterland would a be a great place to stop in Green Bay and make a mini-brewery beer crawl out of it, Titletown Brewery is right across the street. So if you are heading to Green Bay, both of these great places are right by each other.

Interview with Dave Oldenburg- Brewmaster at Titletown Brewery, Green Bay

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First I have to say I had to go back to the old look, the new look didn’t seem to support bold text, and that annoyed me. So with that out of the way.

I spent the afternoon at Titletown Brewing Co in Green Bay on February 12th, 2010. I enjoyed a fine Gueuze, a great lunch, and got to speak with the Head Brewmaster for Titletown Brewery, Dave Oldenburg. Dave has won a silver and a bronze medal at the Great American Beer Festival in the past two years, he has been the Headbrewmaster at Titletown for about 3 1/2 years. The Bonze Medal winning Dark Helmet was on tap at the time I visited as well as the silver medal winning Railyard Ale. So here it is, the first interview in the Wisconsin Brewer Interviews.

Dave Oldenburg: Headbrewmaster for Titletown Brewing Co.

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Download and Listen Option (Right Click then “Save As”) Approx run time is 30 min.

How long have you been Brewing? I started in 2002.

How long have you been the head Brewmaster at Titletown? Between three and four years. I started in 2006 in the summer, so 3 plus years.

Were you a homebrewer before becoming a Pro Brewer? Yes, definitely.

What was the most challenging process to transition from homebrewing to pro brewing? Scheduling. (You mean the Scheduling of the beers or mash?) Scheduling of what’s in what tank at what time. That would probably the single biggest thing. Because all the process is pretty much the same. I mean, a lot of the process is the same because brewing is brewing whether its big or small. But the Scheduling is something I never had to do until I got here. Well, that and filtering I guess. Filtering would be another one. We have a very feisty filter that likes to break and likes to cause me problems. So I’ve had to tame it.

What type of brewing education have you had, if any? I learned most stuff from homebrewing, but once I got the job here, they sent me to Siebel. I did the six week version of Siebel which is everything except the cool trip to Germany. I did two weeks a year for three years. So that was good, I did learn a lot of stuff. Other than that, that’s it. (like you said, homebrewing is pretty much the same process, just on a bigger scale.) Yeah. (I also know that Dave is a BJCP judge as well)

How do you come up with new recipes? Is it by instinct and feel or do you find for yourself its more technical planning? Well, it’s both. There’s the ideal way and the way when you’re in a hurry. The Ideal way is I sit somewhere calm, like in the back yard when it’s warm out. I write up an evaluation of the beer for the recipe. So I pretend I’m tasting it and then I’ll write out, Here’s what it smells like, here’s what it tastes like, here’s the mouthfeel here’s whatever. Then I’ll take from that, I’ll make specs. So say I want it to be 15 degrees plato, and I want it to finish between 3 and 5 plato, or I want it to be this much alcohol. So from there I take it and I write out what percentages of what malts I want to use. I’ll say I want to use this as a base and I want to have 10% caramel malt or whatever it might be and then what yeast I want to use and fermentation temperatures. So I write all that stuff out, and then I go into my brewing software, which is beersmith, which I’m sure a lot of people reading the blog  will probably use with. (I use that too). Yeah, it’s rather geared more towards homebrewers than pro brewers, but its flexible enough that you can use it either way. So then I go into beersmith and plug all the stuff into beersmith and I play around with exactly what amount is it going to be and what colors I want. So for example, if I see it’s going to be this color and I think I want it to be a lighter color, I change this or that. So let’s say it a complicated beer, like maybe there’s a fruit addition, some other interesting technical thing, dry hopping, or anything like that. Then I sit and maybe do a bit of research on the Internet. Like I made a cherry beer a while ago, and I wanted to know how much cherry I wanted use, so I go look on the forums and I see this guy used this much and this guy used that much. (So does that go mostly by percentage or total poundage?) Well, I hardly ever do fruit beers, but when I do, it’s just a measurement of pounds per batch, or pounds per barrel. What I did with this most recent fruit beer,  was I said “OK this guy recommends 10lbs of cherries per barrel, this guy recommends 5”, and so I always go on the low end with weird ingredients so I go with five, then I multiply it by the how much you’re going to make. But then you end up with “I need this much”, but you can only get it in this size pack so we’ll buy three packs of whatever’s close and use that. But the essentials of it are I start with evaluating the beer I have in my head first and then build the recipe. Again, this is the ideal situation. If I’m in a hurry, I may just skip that part.

So do you produce test batches on a small scale first? Nope. None. I should say that there are certain styles that I have not done, and if I had the opportunity to do test batches, I would do those styles. I don’t do it though because it takes almost as long to do a test batch as it would to do a full batch and I don’t have that kind of time. The way I look at the test batch thing is that we are a brewpub and nobodies looking at your recipe to taste any particular way. So if you follow three or four rules, you’re going to get good beer. It may not taste the way you intended it to taste, but it’s still going to be a good beer. That precludes the need for a test batch because you know it’s going to be good, even if it’s not what you intended it. So worst-case scenario is you have to sell it as something else, and that’s not always such a bad thing to happen. That does not happen all that often usually we are able to hit it pretty close. (As a side note, I am sure what Dave is meaning is that if he brews an IPA but it doesn’t quite come across as he envisioned, he is OK with selling it as a pale ale instead. What he does not mean is if a batch is infected he would sell it as a Belgian so-and-so or here is an American Brown Gueuze)

You’ve been pretty successful at Titletown, you’ve won some medals at the GABF and Titletown is a very popular brewpub, so what you say is the key to your success here at Titletown as a brewer or Titletown Brewery as a whole? We have a pretty good management team in place a lot of it comes from that. As far as the brewery end, we have had a pretty good up surge in popularity in the last few years, I think a lot of it comes from we are committed to doing a variety of outstanding beers. At least that’s the idea. Maybe a year after I started we increased our number of draft lines we have available so instead of being able to have 9 beers we could have on tap at one time, we went up to 14. That gave us a lot of flexibility to be able to do a lot more seasonal and a lot more variety. So it works out that maybe that every two weeks on average we’ve had a new beer. So if you don’t come for a month, you may miss a whole beer. And you can’t try them all in one sitting unless you have the little samples, so if you want to have a pint of every beer we produce, you have to be in here pretty often. I think that a lot of it, and making them interesting and putting a variety out there. Making beers like Bamberg brew once in a while, where you know it’s not going to sell that fast, but the people who buy it are really going to like it, and it’s really a niche thing. That keeps the variety up there even though it’s not a real popular beer, not everyone likes their beer that tastes like bacon like I do.

Titletown not only has great beers, but great food as well. This double decker club was phenomanal. And the bread is made with spent grains!

Out of the beers you offer at Titletown, what is your favorite beer to brew? That’s a good question, I never really thought about that before. I sort of enjoy the Dark Helmet (Schwartzbier), because it just smells really good in the brew house. You have that coffee smell, and just a real strong smell. It presents a couple of challenges but then there are a couple of little fun parts of the process that maybe make it a real decent beer. It’s also my original homebrew recipe, it has changed a bit, but it started as a homebrew recipe so that was fun. Yeah, it smells good in the brew house, it’s not a particularly challenging brew, and there are not a lot of problems. Of course hop monster smells good in the brew house too because there’s just a ridicules amount of hops. So that’s good too, but that one’s more challenging because you really have to be on top of your game with making sure you have all your hops weighed out and you have hops everywhere and keeping track of them is tough. You really have to focus, while Dark Hemet you have just one hop addition. Well technically, there are two; one is just first wort to keep foaming down in the kettle.

What would be your least favorite beer to brew, not necessarily a bad beer just a bear to brew? We don’t have it on the board right now, but the worst one is the Dousman Street Wheat, because that is the only one that I do a step mash. Doing a step mash in our mash tun involves about 45 minutes of constant stirring of the mash by hand while it heats. We don’t have any mash rakes, with this size system is just about the size that we could have mash rakes or maybe we wouldn’t. But if you had a size any bigger than this, you would have to have mash rakes, so we are right at the point that we can do it by hand, and we do, and that’s OK. But when you are stirring for 45 minutes, and there is wheat in there so it’s a sticky problem besides the stirring. Although I really like the beer, but it makes for a rough and long brew day. I sure can feel it the next day.

Do you have any beers that you brewed here that you were surprised at how well they were received? Like maybe, you thought it may not be a good seller, but it just flies out the door? Oh yes, I had one that I was trying to do the English Summer Ale style, which is not listed as a BJCP style, but it is listed as a World Beer Cup/GABF type style. I wanted to do that and I thought I’m going to Nitrogen infuse it just for fun. So I was going to have this Nitro infused beer that was and it was supposed to be real malty with a little bit of floral hop smell. I don’t remember exactly what went wrong with it, but I just didn’t like it and it wasn’t selling very well. I cannot remember specifically why I didn’t like, but nobody liked the idea of a nitrogen beer, well actually they like the stout on nitrogen, but the idea of a yellow color beer on nitrogen seemed to just turn people off. So I said “Oh my Gosh nobody likes this.” I end up blowing the nitrogen out, and then adding more carbonation and serving it conventionally, and that did some damage to it besides. I thought, I can’t wait for this beer to be gone. And it just flew, and one of our managers just loved it. Yeah, it was gone really quickly. I will never make it again, because I hated it, but that was one that surprised me. We also had some that surprised me the other way too. I had them where I thought they would fly and they didn’t.

Besides your own beer, what is in your fridge at home right now? It really varies, I actually have a kegerator, and I tend to put Titletown beer in it. I really don’t have a favorite, I will go the liquor store and see what they got, and I’ll buy a few things, try a few new things. But I don’t really have a beer that I always have on hand though. A lot of people do but, if I had one, it would be a nice Gueze, but I’m too cheap to buy those.

From time to time Titletown will also offer Guest beers. I opted for one of these seeing as how I love a good Gueuze and they had one to offer. Here I had Drie Fonteinen Oude Gueuze before my lunch.

Who or what influences your brewing? What I mean by that is if there is a particular brewer or brewery, you look to aspire to be like? I was always aspiring to be like the Great Dane in Madison, but not any particular beers of theirs, just that every time I went in there they had real good beers whatever kind it was. Whatever they made was great, they had four or five casks on tap, well probably more like 2 or 3. They did a lot of things really well, and I think we’ve gotten to be close to that. Well, 2 casks are broken but they are coming back, we still have 2 so that’s close enough. When it comes to my brewing Heroes, it kind of depends on the beer style I guess. If I’m trying to make a pale ale I’m looking at Firestone Walker, if I’m trying to make a Bock I’m looking at Ayinger. Usually what will tend to happen is I will go to some fest like the GABF and I will have something that just blows me away and then I want to make a beer like that. Last summer we had something (at Titletown) called loose caboose, it was an American Pale Ale but fermented with a bit of Belgian yeast and that was an idea I got when I went to the GABF and I had a beer done that way and I thought it was just wonderful. So then, I thought I have to make something like that. So it’s kind of like that, I don’t have any one brewery but I may have a beer that I want to make something like that. I had the Drie Fonteinen Gueuze (a beer they have as a guest beer at Titletown at the time of this interview) the other night and I thought, “I have to figure out how to do a Gueuze here.” I have figured out how technically I can do that here. Actually, that’s an advantage homebrewing has is you can do something like that. I have to figure out where I can store that beer for 1 year to 3 years, plus think about contaminating the rest of my brewery. That’s true for homebrewing but the stakes are a little lower (when homebewing).

Can't Decide? Try the sample platter (mine is pictured above), with 9 beers to choose from. You get 6 of the year round offerings, and 3 of the seasonals. I chose Citra Pale ale, Hop Monster, and Throwback for my seasonals.

One of my favorite beers here at Titletown is Hop Monster; can you tell me a bit about how that beer came about, such as what influenced your choice of ingredients such as the hops and stuff? I did it because for one I have never done a double IPA ever, and I’m trying to knock off all the styles I have never brewed. So you will see a Dopplebock coming shortly which is a style I have never done before, a dry stout, which is a style I have never done. So we are trying to knock a few of those off, and one of those was the Imperial IPA. Just as I was thinking of doing it, we had the hop shortage and so it was quite a while before I was able to get hops. Once I realized I could get a bunch of “C” hops, I wanted to take advantage of it. We spent the money on the hops because they were still rather expensive, but at least we could get them. So I said let’s do the Imperial IPA. The way I came up with it was again the same way I do other recipes. I did however listen to The Brewing Network’s podcast about Pliny the Elder, and took some of the info from that and I took a couple tips form that as far as the grain bill and how there is a bit of corn sugar and a some carapils, which is sort of weird. The hopping was an entire day’s project because I had to figure out how much I could get of each hop, so it was not just make it up and get what you need. At the time, they had an allowance for each kind. So I had a big spreadsheet and this spreadsheet had hop allowances. So basically, it was I had this much hops and I wanted to do three additions, and they were these amounts, and at the end I would see if I would run out of hops or if I could get enough. So I had that for each hop I wanted to use. So I just used my favorite “C” hops and whatever ones were available to me. For example, I bought 20 pounds of Amarillo and they all came in one-pound bags. That may sound like a lot to home brewer, but when you’re brewing on our scale. We usually get our hops in 11-pound sacks. So I had a graph based on the recipe, which is hard to visualize, but it was a stacked line graph and on one axis was the amount of time that the hops were going to be in the beer. It would start with dry, then whirlpool, then five minute, 10 minutes and so on. Then on the other side, it had the amount of hops, so then it would stack each variety on top of each other. So it would show the dry hops and it would show a big amount of Amarillo, a little cascade and a small amount of palisades. SO I had a visual of what I thought the beer was doing to taste like. The dry hops I would smell and taste first, and underneath that would be the whirlpool hops.

Do you listen to any music while brewing? If so, what? Yes I do. It does vary; I’m kind of a NPR nerd so I listen to that. Other times I set my laptop in the grain room and play it in the speakers in the brewery so I can put on whatever I feel like. I sometimes listen to The Brewing Network Podcasts, sometimes other podcasts, sometimes classical. One time when making a Scottish Ale I played bagpipe music in the brewery to try get some influence into the beer.

What is your feeling on Fruit Beers? Most of them suck, but when they don’t they are great. It has to taste like beer with fruit, not fruit with beer. I do like them in principle but most of the ones I’ve had not been great.

What can we expect to see from Titletown in 2010? First, we are going to keep doing what we are doing as far as keeping the variety and keeping up with quality. We are pursuing some more off-site sales, so hopefully you will see us at a lot more bars. Hopefully around the state. We increased our capacity late last year by 25% so we will be able to do a little bit more of that.

Are there any new beers in the works? We will be tapping our Procrastinator Dopplebock, which is the first beer out of our new tank. So we got that fifth tank and decided to make the dopplebock because we were able to let it sit a month. We will tap it the same day as Fat Tuesday, which is the 16th I think. Then there is a dry stout coming next, which is about to go in the tank so that will be a few weeks. We want to tap it on St. Patrick’s Day, and we have a Saison planned, which I don’t have the recipe for yet, but we are working on it. In addition, we will have a bunch more stuff coming out; I just haven’t planned it yet. Every time I plan way ahead it ends up changing anyway.

Look at this. By the time I got to Bridge Out Stout (An oatmeal stout), the head on it was still very nice! That's a sign of good quality.

At one time there was talk of bottling your beer, is that been put aside for the time being? We are going to hopefully get bottling. I don’t know if that will happen in 2010, but it might. It’s something that’s still there, but putting beer in a bottle is more expensive and difficult than the rest of the process so we are still working on how that will work. We have space constraints; we only have what we have when it comes to this building so we are limited in what we can do with it. However, we are looking at a couple of options we have for bottling. I am concerned though because bottling your beer is one of the worst things you can do for it as far as quality goes. What I mean is wheb you put beer in a bottle it’s going to take damage and we want to minimize that damage. I’m really concerned that we maintain a reasonable quality level in the bottle. I am not naive enough to think it will be as good as draft, particularly if it gets beat up between here and the when it gets to the customer, but we want to at least be good. Because I’ve had a lot beer, where I’ve had it at the brewery and it’s wonderful and then I buy it and it’s horrible. And I don’t want to be that brewery. So we are taking it very cautiously. This is the reason it’s taking so long. We just really want to make sure we get it right.

If you could give a homebrewer, or aspiring pro brewer one key piece of advice to improve their beer, what would that be? Take a style that is relatively difficult to brew, I used English bitter but you could do Pilsner you could do something where mistakes can’t be hidden very easy and just keep brewing it over and over until it’s really awesome. And keep good notes!

Do you have any recipes you may like to share with the homebrewers out there who are reading my blog? If anyone has any questions about any of our beers, they can email me and I’ll help guide them in the right direction as far as percentages and ingredients go, as well as a basic brewing method. Obviously, there are some things we do that I can’t give out, but overall I’d be more than happy to provide some insight. After all, every system is a bit different and the beer may not always turn out the same on someone else’s as it does here.

Thanks to Dave for a great Interview!

Titletown Brewing Co.