by Sayre Piotrkowski, Certified Cicerone at The Monk’s Kettle in San Francisco

(Please note: This article was mis-credited in the print copy to Brian Hunt of Moonlight Brewing Company.  It is indeed written by Sayre Piotrkowski of our beloved Monk’s Kettle.  Drink Me regrets this mistake.)

“Any independent brewer worth his salts must be a MacGyver.” – Brian Hunt, founder and brewer, Moonlight Brewing Company.

MacGyver would have been a brewer.  Where a wine-maker is shepherd, keeping a watchful eye and delicately manipulating processes of the natural world, and where a distiller is in outlaw, concocting powerful potions under cover of night, the brewer is a craftsman, tinkering away in a garage or a workshop, constantly tasting, adjusting and tweaking his recipes and methods.

Many of the men and women who today sit at the helms of our most compelling craft-breweries started in their own homes with crude, improvised tools and accessories.  Before the micro-brew boom of the 1990s small brewing equipment and supply stores like San Francisco Brewcraft and Seven Bridges were very hard to find.  Also, the online communities and support boards, which today are invaluable to new brewers, were virtually non-existent.

This left the aspiring brewer to, like MacGyver, troubleshoot and solve problems through processes of imaginative improvisation and trial and error. This placed home brewers in line with the long-standing traditions and techniques of brewing. The post-industrial production of beer by nationally recognized brands, which have the goal of making a bottle of beer in St. Louis that will taste EXACTLY like the bottle they produced in Colorado or California, is at odds with beer’s mercurial history. Most of the story of beer is compromised of tales of invention brought on by necessity, as in a peasant’s simple desire for a safe-to-drink beverage, other than water out of a stream; or idiosyncrasy, in the case an industrious farmer in need of something to do with the excess grain his goats did not eat.

This spirit remains in many of the independent breweries operating today. While it is true that in the case of some chain brewpubs you do see strict formulas being followed, more often, independent brewers improve when less attention is paid to the way things are “supposed to be done.”

Here in the Bay Area, the hop-drenched, home of the double IPA, much of a brewer’s MacGyvering is concerned with finding ways to cram more hoppy bitterness, flavor and aroma into their beers.  The men and women behind these methods are not shy about sharing them. As one colleague put it, “There’s nothing home-brewers love more than waxing lyrical about eccentrically fangled methods of beer production.”

Will McKenna, a home-brewer based in Santa Cruz, CA is a perfect example. Since Will brews at home with a very small brew kettle he faced the problem of physically fitting in enough hops. He devised an at-home method of hop extraction. Will puts roughly half of a pound of hops into regular tap water and places it in the fridge overnight.  The next day the water is removed and replaced with everclear (roughly 95 per cent ethyl alcohol).  This is let to soak for about a week, after which Will is left with a about a cup of extremely pungent hop extract.  The solution is so strong Will claims he adds only a few drops at various times during the boil or during post-fermentation to achieve the desired amount of hop flavor and aroma in his brews.

No matter how big your brew kettle is, all brewers face the problem of freshness.  More than any other beer styles, IPAs and other hop-centric brews must be consumed fresh and locally. To combat the problem of declining hoppyness as their beers travel across the country,  Dogfish Head, a Delaware craft brewery, has created “Randall The Enamel Animal.”  Randall is “a three foot-long cylinder filter, packed with half a pound of whole leaf hops, that we affix to the beer line leaving a keg.”  Randall reinvigorates your pint of Dogfish Head’s 90-minute IPA with lively hop flavor and aromas, just seconds before it hits your lips.

Clearly there is an improvisational, fun-loving, and even occasionally ridiculous resolve that brings much of the variety and spontaneity to independent beer brewing.  This “why the hell not” attitude is one of the main reasons that beer enthusiasts everywhere are beginning to admit that we are sitting in the most interesting place to drink beer in the world.  Local breweries are constantly re-writing rules, redefining styles, and utilizing whatever tools and ingredients they may have on hand to create something extraordinary to top off the end of a long day.

BEERS MAC WOULD LOVE:

Dogfish Head’s 60, 90 and 120 Minute IPAs: Named for the length of the boil. These beers are unique because they could not be made without the use of two improvised mechanical devices. First: the “hop-shaker,” inspired by a 1970’s era vibrating football arcade game, allows the brewer to continuously add hops to the brew at a consistent rate for the length of the boil. Then, during post-fermentation, these beers are dry-hopped utilizing another device called a “me-so-hoppy” which is an “inert gas fired, closed-loop system, used to spin hop pellets into the beer as it conditions.”

Moonlight Brewing Company’s “Working For Tips” and Craftsman Brewing’s “Triple White Sage”: MacGyver could always use whatever was around and fashion it into something extraordinary.  At Moonlight Brewing, they’ve taken the redwood tips plentiful around their Sonoma County home and utilized them in place of aroma hops to create a delicious beer with a clear sense of place.  Similarly Craftsman’s brewer Mark Jilg uses the white sage abundant near his Pasadena brewery in a delicious Belgian Triple that makes for an ideal companion to any mild fish dish or cream sauce.