Creativity and Beer: A Brewmaster's Guide to Flavor Emulation

1. Introduction: I'm Garrett Oliver, and I'm Brewmaster of the Brooklyn Brewery. I've been there for 20 years now and having a particularly great time these days. I lived in London for a year from '83 to '84, fell in love with half condition traditional beers on the hand pump. When traveling all over Europe, taste the beers in Belgium, in Germany, and here and there, got back to United States and I found that the beer that I had gotten used to wasn't here. So, I started making beer at home, not because I was interested in making it, I made it just a habit and then I fell in love with it. These days, people fall in love with it first, breweries around them and then they say, "Okay. I've had a bunch of great IPAs, I've had great Belgian Dubbels." Now, what's going to be my beer and like how can I put my thing into it? The Dubbel is great. So, in this class, we're breaking down creativity in brewing into component parts. The thing is that you always have to start off with an idea and you're going to move them from this idea through your ingredients, into your elaboration phase, which is in some ways, the greatest part of the creativity. So, we're going to show some brewing, but I think we want to talk about how we put it all together, how do we get inspired and how do we move from inspiration until finally, you have something in your glass that taste great and when you taste it, you remember the thing that actually inspired you. I'm going to take one of my favorite food which is Mexican mole sauce of which there are many forms and we're going to transform those flavors into a beer. In a way it doesn't matter what the overall this type of beer is or what flavor it is you're trying to recreate, the basics of what you're going to do are the same, and the way you have to think about it are the same. You start off with a concept and you work your way backwards from that concept, from the ingredients and everything else into the final part which we'll call elaboration, which is actually getting those flavors into the beer and having that beer emerged triumphant from the glass. 2. Brewing Basics and Emulation Beers: So, you guys probably know all this already, so I'm going to give you the five cents version of how beer is made because we have to remember where it is we're starting. So we're starting off with barley malt usually as our base, could be wheat malt sometimes. It could be a little bit of raw wheat as well, but we're starting off with the grains and grains are full of starch. We have to break them down into sugars in order to ferment them. How do we do that? In the mash. So we're going to do a mash and depending on how you're doing your brewing, the mash will either be done for you in advance, creating a wort. But we're going to create wort from grain, and wort is the sweet liquid that you derive from the grain that you're going to ferment. That's going to be boiled with hops but possibly with other things that you might add. In this case, we'll have quite a few interesting things going in there. We're going to ferment that with yeast and the yeast is going to consume the sugar and actually create the beer. So we make wort which is food, essentially, for the yeast and the yeast creates the beer, gives off carbon dioxide, alcohol, and a range of flavors. So that's our starting point, that's our base and from there, we can move into different styles. You need a base to start with, and that base, it can be light and bright, it can be dark and roasted. It really depends on what it is that you want to do. So there are different styles of beer that might be better for different things. If you want to provide a very light bright base, you might go for wheat beers, which are known for their zingy acidity. They're usually not that highly hopped. So if you're avoiding a lot of bitterness, you might go in that direction. But if you have something with a lot of earthy flavors, caramelized flavors, roasted flavors, you're going to have a base beer like a porter or a stout that has roasted malt, etc. that are going to support the overall thing that you're doing. So we're going to break this up into sections, if you like. We have a concept. There are different parts to the process and they start with our grains. Then from the grains, we go into what in the brewery we refer to as the hot side. The hot side is exactly what it sounds like. It's everything that gets cooked and everything that happens while your mash and your wort is still hot. This is going to include your mash itself, your mash temperature at which you're going to convert your starches into sugars which will later lead to how much residual sugar you have, what you're going to be boiling with, what things are better to be added boiled, what things are added post-fermentation. Those of you who are more advanced brewers already know that hops that are added in the kettle taste different than hops that are added after the fermentation. So you can think of these things almost as, okay, you're starting with ingredients, then hot side, then cold side. Once the beer is chilled, it's never warm again. This is never hot again. So everything we're looking to extract or sterilize or everything on the hot side happens there and you figure that part out, and that's part of your initial ingredients. Cold side comes after. Once you're finished with your hot side, you have wort. The wort then needs to be chilled down so that your yeast doesn't die when you put it in, obviously. You're going to ferment. Most people are doing their fermentation somewhere between about 48 degrees Fahrenheit at one end and even up into the 90s for those of you making crazy saisons at the other end. But most of them are happening somewhere around room temperature, somewhere between 55 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit. That's what we're calling the cold side, and the cold side is everything from the fermentation through the finish of the fermentation and then additions of flavors after the fermentation and before bottling or kegging. A normal fermentation, it really depends on what kind of beer you're making. If you're making an ale, a top fermented, warm fermented beer, this can be as little as five, six days. That's what we call active fermentation. It means that the yeast is actively consuming sugars, giving off carbon dioxide, and creating flavors. But there is a period after that, which is often referred to as conditioning, where extra flavors may continue to evolve. But your yeast will probably drop to the bottom of the vessel, sugar uptake is going to slow down or stop, and things are just settling out. So you can expect most beers to take at least two weeks to make. At the brewery, our beers go everything from 14 days from start to finish to months and months, sometimes even years. Whenever I come up with a new recipe, there is going to be a process and an inspiration could come from anywhere. It can be an ingredient like say a certain hop that has an unusual flavor, in our case, the Sorachi Ace hop which smells like lemon and dill. We made a beer based around that. If I make a beer that tastes exactly like a cocktail, which I've actually done a number of times, there's a playfulness to that that really makes it into something special. Well, our first cocktail beer was one that we made with my friend Dave Wondrich who is probably the greatest of the world's cocktail historians. He's a good friend, lives around the corner from me, and we're sitting in front of my fireplace one night and we're on our third Manhattan, which it turns out is the magic one. We're saying, "Wow, this is a great drink. Would it be great if we can make a beer that tasted just like a Manhattan?" Then we looked at each other and we're like, "Hey." One of the great things about being in beer is that when you have a crazy idea, you might be able to just run off and do it, so we did. So we decide to make a beer that tasted exactly like Manhattan. It was called Manhattan Project. We made a beer that tastes like Manhattan by starting with rye whiskey, bitters, and vermouth. It's the classic Manhattan. So we made a rye beer, we aged it in Rittenhouse rye barrels, and then we infused it with about 20 different botanicals that go in to make up the flavors of Angostura bitters and Carpano Antica vermouth. When we were done, the beer tasted exactly like a Manhattan. I put that beer in front of cocktail experts and they started laughing before they even got a chance to drink it, before it got to their lips. They just got up there and said like, "Dude, how did you do that?" It's like a magic trick, and the beer was delicious. There is a much more obscure cocktail called the penicillin. Now, any great cocktail bar in the world literally, you go to China and you go to a great cocktail bar, they know how to make a penicillin. But the penicillin is only about 10 years old. It was invented by Sam Ross who was working at Milk & Honey, got together with Sam and said, "I want to make a beer that tastes like your cocktail." The cocktail itself has scotch, kind of peaty scotch, ginger, honey, and lemon. They seem like things that shouldn't work. Peat and ginger and lemon. I couldn't figure out how did this thing work. We decided to make it, so we teased apart all the flavor. How do we get the ginger flavors in? How do we make something taste like scotch? We actually got peated, smoked distillers malt, gave us the peat flavors. We found out more about ginger than we ever wanted to know, got frozen minced ginger. We had to use 33 pounds of frozen minced ginger per batch, break it up, and get it into the tank. Lemon juice, which turned out to be Sicilian organic lemon juice and wildflower honey which we get from a local producer. We actually worked with Sam to do the blends. He came in, showed us how to make the penicillin properly so we would understand it, and we finally did this drink. I think it was DRAFT Magazine called it one of the top 25 beers of that year. It was a few years ago, so that was a fun one. In some cases though, we have a fully formed idea which is complex and what we're going to be doing is a pretty complex idea. We have to start off with which is the type that we want to emulate, in this case it's going to be a mole sauce and okay, what kind of mole? There are many types. We're going to start here, then we have to look at the ingredients that we're going to need to create that, and then we have to look at process. How do we actually get it there? What is sometimes called elaboration. Rather than try to make this up myself or just look up some recipe online, I want to dive into it. That's part of what the whole creative process is about. It's a way of me learning something that I didn't know before, and that's really what you want. You get the beer, sure, but you also get to learn something. So the place that I'm going to learn it is I have a great friend. I've known her for about 20 years, Barbara Sibley at La Palapa restaurant in New York City, one of the first that was really doing truly authentic Mexican cuisine. Mexican cuisine is so complex. I think that she's going to be the perfect person to teach us how to make a mole sauce so that we can actually translate the mole idea into a beer. 3. Learning About Mole at La Palapa: We're here at La Palapa, which is my favorite Mexican restaurant in New York City. This is really the place where I learned something about real Mexican food. I mean, I thought I was eating Mexican food in college and all since then. Then I got here and I said, ''Oh, it's actually much more interesting and much more complex than I ever thought it is.'' So, look at all of these. What do we got here? Well, hi. Welcome to La Palapa. I'm Barbara Sibley. I'm the chef and owner. These are the ingredients for a mole. So, a lot of people just think, "Oh, mole is that chocolate sauce." The name mole comes from mōlli, which is a Nahuatl word that means concoction or mixture or sauce. So, just like you have guacamole, it's just means avocado sauce or avocado mixture. So, there are many aspects to mole, but there's four basic notes. Basically, you have chilies, spices, fruits, and fruits and binders, and nuts. So, any mole will have these unvarying balances. This is the mole negro oaxaqueño, which as people call it the Queen of Moles. As you can see, 20 some odd ingredients or more. But what we're going to do here, obviously, is put some of these flavors into our beer. So, let's start over here and move our way across and talk about what are some of the flavors that we're going to try to get into this beer later on. All right. So, one of the things that determines the color of the mole is actually the chili, that's the prime ingredient, so it's really the chili paste. So, the mole negro is the mulato, and it's incredibly toasted and charred. Red chili, dry chili is sweet. Why? Because it's the ripe fruit that's been dried. So there's always a lot of sweetness. You even have these, your pasillas, and pasilla means little raisin, and so, they're very sweet. You have a lot of sweetness. They're pretty chewy. One of the things in terms of making a mole is that you end up, any ingredient except for maybe the chocolate at the end, is toasted and roasted one after the other after the other. Always in the same pan. So you're building, you're bringing out the aromas freshly in every nut, every spice and every chili. What we're going to be doing with the beer, actually, is we have a lot of roasted malts in our beer, which we're going to actually pick up on those flavors. It's going to be delicious. As you roast things, you end up with a lot of the same flavors in chocolate, in coffee and in malts, and these, when combined together, can give you an overall impression where these things bind together in a way that is really surprising. An integral part of a mole, especially based with red chilies or these ripe red chilis, is chocolate. Chocolate is one of those things that is one of the ingredients that Mexico has given to the world. Cacao comes from that chocolate or chocolate comes from Nahuatl word xocolatl. It is made into pastes and bars, and was made into pastes and bars even in the days of the Aztecs and the Mayas. A very holy drink, very ceremonial drink usually. That's what all people don't realize that chocolate started off as a drink in the first place and a spice drink. Exactly, and a spice drink, very often with the chili ancho. So, these two were often combined in a drink. It was very frothy, you have special molinillo, you have special things to make it frothy. So when I'm thinking about a beer, it's just a little more. Yes, see? Now you can see where we're going here. A little more froth. That's great. So the next thing we're going to the olores, which are the aromas, the aromatics, the spices. I think this is one of the places where you see the world the most in mole, because you get things that are from all over the world. Some things that are really only Mexican, that is very much like talking about the avocado leaves. The avocado leaves, people don't realize this, but there's a lot of anise undertones to Mexican cuisine. Very, very common in meats, you use them like you would a bayleaf. Exactly. You take it back out then? You take it back out. You could substitute a bayleaf. Mexican oregano is very different. This has eight more layers than the stuff that you put on your pizza in the pizza parlor. You recognize that part there, but there's all this other stuff going on. One of the things with mole is that it is mysterious. That final flavor that you get is a mystery. Where did that come from, exactly? It came from the mixture, it came from the mōlli of it. So anyway, we have coriander seeds, Mexican cumin, and then you have the other anise flavors from the world. You have star anise and anise seeds. Yes, you also have hoja de laurel, bayleaf, and tomillo, which is thyme, cloves. So this is the true cinnamon, this is canela from Sri Lanka. It's very soft. It has a soft, smoky flavor. A lot of the sweetness in a mole comes from fruits, from fruit sugars. So you have tomatillos and tomatoes, and I'm sure you know they come from Mexico, they come from the Americas. They want to get a great gift to the world. A Roma tomato is good just because it has less pulp and seeds. Raisins. You can also use prunes. In the mole negro, you have almonds. Quite a lot of almond in it. I like to use the blanched, sliced almond. These are raw peanuts, pumpkin seeds. So there's a whole group of mole type sauces that are called pipianes, because they're based on pumpkin seeds, delicious. Also, you can make a mole with sunflower seeds. So, these nuts can actually be incorporated into the beer and we'll use them later in our recipe. Well, this is great. I can't wait to taste it. It's going to be amazing. Me either. 4. Selecting and Working with Ingredients: Now, where we're going to start is we have to build the flavors from the bottom up. You don't need to put the entire remoulade flavor in there in one layer at once. So, where can we start. Well, we're going to start as I said earlier with our base spear. No matter what we're doing that's going to provide the platform that we're going to lay these other flavors onto. If you were making a beer that was supposed to be something light, bright and sharp you might decide that you're going to use say an IPA base or a vice beer base or another style of beer. So, the way you can think of this is what is the best underlying flavor for the other flavors I'm looking to carry and if you think about the world of beer, you have caramelized flavors, you have roasted flavors, you have the flavors that you get from your yeast strain. For example, if you want to make a beer that tastes like a banana split and your banana split was supposed to be a scoop of vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce and a banana. Well, if you're a brewer you already know where you get flavors of bananas from, Vice beer yeast. When Vice beer yeast ferments it gives off a lot of banana flavor and aroma. So, you might decide to start there represent banana if you like and then you could use some vanilla bean in there as well and then you can add some dark malts in that'll give you chocolatey flavors and or you could actually use some chocolate and through the really creative use of these things, you can create an overall oppression of a banana Sunday. So, that's a fun thing to work through and what you're looking at here is our various grains that we use to make our work. Now, when you're making a beer generally speaking you're going to have a really pale malt that's going to make up the bulk of the grain that you start off with. This is obviously where you're getting your sugars from and what you're looking at here is some two raw pale malt. We have some caramel malts and those are also known as crystal malts but there are three different types of roasted grains. We have chocolate malt which is named for both its color and its flavor and when you roast something you often will develop some very similar flavors. Three different types, chocolate malt, you have a black roasted barley as well and then you have a type called black patent and black patent gives you the sharp edge. You're going to want to look at what blend you can put together that's going to enrich your base. When you put the chocolate flavors in there through your actual chocolate, you don't need to put it in so much to get the overall impression. I look at all these ingredients as a whole and put them together in my head and decide in your mind like what does this beer going to taste like to you? If this beer turned out perfectly, do you have an idea in your head of what that would be? Then you start working with your ingredients to get there. Now, I know from experience that a lot of these spices will actually show through the boil and end up in the final beer in good shape. So, when you're building one of these beers, you really have to think through your process. Where are you going to add the flavors? Are flavors going to be lost if you add them too early? Do we think that those flavors are going to leave? For example, if you use honey and you use honey at the beginning of the boil, you're going to get a lot less flavor than if you add the honey at the end of the boil. Why is that? A lot of the flavors that we associate with honey are actually volatile, which means that they're going to leave with the steam. If the whole room smells great it smells like honey, the reason why the room smells like honey is because your honey flavor is leaving the pot and a lot of people actually add honey post fermentation. You do end up with the sweetness but you end up with a lot more honey flavor. We start here with our base flavors underlying bread and whatever. We have are caramelized flavors and then we have our flavors of roasted chocolate underneath and now we're going to spread this into everything. So, now it's time to assemble all of your ingredients. So, we almost think of these in boxes if you like. I start with the finished beer. We have our base beer which is made entirely of malt and a little bit of our PENCEO sugar. On top of that our next box if you like in the flowchart is going to be our spicings. These are the flavors that we want in here. You start with your base which is going to be a slightly sweet stout. Not very sweet a little bit with nice roasted flavors. We then know what our spices and Barbara basically told us what we were going to need to use and now we get to the point where it's time for the elaboration. How exactly do we put these flavors into the finished beer. In brewing of course there's a final part which is fermentation and finally bottling. If you're going to bottle. So, now that we have all of our ingredients together it's time to brew. Now, you will at this point be probably either one of two things. You're going to be an extract brewer or you're going to be an all grain brewer. For this, I would say that if you so far have been and only extract brewer that you at least go to the point where you're doing extract plus steeped grains. So, you're half and half. What that means is that you're going to get your base malt portion which is generally pale and so you'll use a pale extract and make it work from that and then your roasted and caramelized grains here will end up in a straining bag that are going to be in our pot back here and heat it up with the wort and then bring out all the dark malt flavors into that wort. You don't really want to go and get a kit that has all of your dark malt flavors already because then you can't really control those flavors and besides you've done all this work to get all these great ingredients, why give somebody else the fun of adding your roasted flavors? So, of course if you're an all grain brewer as you already know, you're going to put your whole match together. Each one of these will have about five percent or so probably about 10 percent or so for your caramelized malt and then you're two row, your base malt is going to make up the bulk of it. You're going to mash all of this together. I would use a temperature somewhere in the mid range 154 155 degrees Fahrenheit. That is going to give you a fermentable enough wort but leave you a little bit of residual sugar behind. One thing you don't really have if you're doing extract is you're not really going to be able to control where the fermentation is going to end quite as well because you can't really control the fermentability of your wort. However, we're not going to worry about that. We're going to create great flavors anyway. If you think your beer is going to become really dry, you might want to think about how that's going to work with the rest of your flavor set. For example, if you have more residual sweetness, you might be able to take a little bit more heat than you would if you had a really dry beer. Later on, we're looking at our yeast strain, we'll also be able to make some decisions. You can choose a yeast that's really neutral like Chico yeast or you might want something that's a little bit more fruity such as the ESB which gives you a light orangey fruit character and that could be something nice to underlie some flavors like this. So, once you've decided how you're going to actually make this beer you're going to use extractor, you're going to go all grain, you're ready to start brewing. So, we've got great stuff to work with and I think it's time for a little bit of elaboration. 5. The Hot Side: Creating the Wort: So, here's something to think about, how sweet, how a dried you want this beer to be. You want your beer to be really dry, you might actually mash as low as 146, 147 degrees. If you're an all grain brewer, 146 probably sounds pretty low. We use it at Brooklyn Brewery for making some really, really dry beers. If you'd like this to have more residual sweetness, and I think that I would probably, we'd look at something 154, 155, 156, maybe as much as four Plato or 1016, for those of you who are using that scale, and depending on how you want to balance out what your hops and your other elements, that level of residual sugar can be really nice. So, our basic building blocks in order to have beer, you have to have our wheat. Now, we have our wheat. Now, we can make this as I was saying earlier, it can be an all grain wheat, you can start with an extract, and then steep some of your dark grains, and so, we have to decide what's going to be part of the wheat, and what is post fermentation? In the brewery, we call this hot side and cold side, and it's pretty self evident what that means. Things that are on the hot side happened hot in your pot, and things that happen on the cold side are during and post fermentation. There's a big difference between them. So, we're going to decide what's going to be part of the wheat, and what comes after the wheat. So, first of all sugars, we're going to do an infusion later on the cold side. But on the hot side, you can't infuse sugar, sugar it has to become part of the wheat. This is the peel on CO that we were doing earlier. So, I put it in there and now keep it moving. Sugar is going to increase our alcohol content. These are going to be very fermentable sugars. Keep that spoon moving by the way, I can feel chunks that are melting and some of them are trying to melt to the bottom. So, make sure you not only go around in a circular motion around the outside, make sure you get to the middle, get a scraping motion going, make sure that all melts up. So, you just want to make sure that you're not going to burn here. So, what else am I going to use on the hot side? Well, I ground up some of our spices. I'm going to use some of it for infusion, some of it on this side. So, our spices will go into the kettle as well. Store those in. This is our avocado leaf, and our Mexican oregano, and we've got some cumin here, and some coriander, and Star Anise. I threw in one. Count them, one clove, because one clove will give you quite a bit in five gallons of liquid. If, you don't want to overdo chocolate in the catalog, you can end up with too much fat in your wheat. So, while that's boiling, is a perfect time to make our paste. We're not going to use it for a couple of weeks now, and that's what the freezers are for. We're going to put it in the freezer, and when it's time to use it, it's going to be ready to go. I'm going to start off with some of these chilies that Barbara showed us earlier, and we're going to start adding our chilies. I think I'm going to only use one. This is our Chipotle, and then canola, the Mexican Cinnamon. Now I've got my raisins, I'm going to start off with a little bit of water. So, always start on the low setting and work your way up. Make sure you got your lid on very firmly. I'm actually going to add in some of these nuts. I think chocolate can go in a blender, and I guess the blenders are going to let me know if it's not going to work. Check that out. We're just going to cook this down and let it simmer for a little while. We need to add any more water we will. We're not really going to use this for a few weeks, and we want it to be in a solid form and put it in the freezer for a few weeks, and this later is what we're going to end up grating, and is grating remember, that's going to give us our surface area, and we're going to add that on the cold side once the beer is finished fermenting, and we're then going to infuse these flavors into our finished beer. 6. The Cold Side: Infusing Flavors: All right. Now, I've got both my hot side and my cold side ready. Here's our mole sauce, and now I've got it in the form of a little disk here. What we're going to do is we're just going to basically shave this, and what we want to do is get it on the inside of a mesh bag. Now, I haven't frozen it well enough, so it has started to melt but you get the idea. What we want to do is get this, break it up, and get it inside of our mesh bag, and we're going to keep most of our materials. Therefore in here, we want to spread it out. We will want it in here in a big chunk. What you're looking for here is surface area, and this is our bag full of stuff, and we're going to tie this off, and we're going to actually add it into here. That is our handy cornelius keg. So, this is our fermenter. We have already fermented our beer in there and our cornelius keg has a large valve here at the top. This is actually a really useful vessel because you have a big valve that comes out the top, leaves you like that, and we will have fermented our beer in our Carboy. It doesn't really matter whether it's glass. My original one was, but some people use plastic buckets whatever. We have are our hoses here with our syphoned starters, so that we can transfer. Remember that, of course, sanitation is paramount. Everything you do here, you will sterilized your mesh bag. Your mole is already sterile because you packed it hot, so that'll be doing fine. You have sterilization through out. When you handle this, if you don't have a sterilized glove on, you have to just drop that in there,usi pull it around and pop it in place. So, I'm going to put this down on the surface, keeping in mind that I would be using a sterilized bowl. We will tie, what people often use for a suspension inside of something is an on waxed unflavored dental floss. Believe it or not, works very well. You can just twist this up. You rinse it around, and then you just drop this in there. You could actually have the end of your dental floss coming outside the cornelius keg, and you just put your valve back on. Average time, I'm looking at for a lot of things like this, it will be maybe a week before we're looking to transfer out. At that point, we'll either go to carbonation and another cornelius keg, or in my case, more likely refermentation in the bottle, but a really super useful vessel to have if you're going to do sorts of infusions. It doesn't really matter what you're using, it could be one day for things like cacao nibs, for example, by themselves. One day is often pretty good. Things like that. Ground coffee, some people will do that for one day. Ginger, five or six days. Your infusion vessel, and then you're good to go. There are flavors that you really want to pop any beer. Again, it doesn't matter whether it's ginger, which actually doesn't survive fermentation that well. You can add ginger flavors on the hot side or right before fermentation, but really, some things you really want to add post fermentation. You get a brighter, fresher, clearer, and more defined flavour. You're going to have to split those things up in your process. What things do fine beforehand on the hot side, what things are best on the cold side. In this case, a lot of our character is best on the cold side. We're adding it here now and then it's a matter all that surface area I was talking about and time. If your flavors, you think at the end of your process you're like, "That's nice but my flavors really aren't intense enough." There are two ways you can do it. You can either add more or you can let it sit longer. Most things that are going to infuse well are probably going to infuse within a week to 10 days. Some things as I said are very rapid. I have been surprised personally by how quickly cacao nibs actually give flavor to a beer. So, I have left them on there too long, and you can get things that you don't want. For example, tannins, tannins will tend to come out of the husks of cacao nibs over a long period of time, where over 24 hours you'll get all the fruity characteristics and not so much tannin. So, you think about it, infusion just like tea leaves. You leave the tea in there for a couple of minutes, you're probably good. You'll leave it in there for a half an hour, you've gone too far. You have to figure out for your particular ingredients, how long is going to be the correct amount of time for your secondary infusion but isn't that part of the fun? I'm looking forward to seeing how this beer turns out. We're going to bring it back to the brewery, we're going to taste it in a couple of weeks and see where we got but I'm really confident that these flavors are going to come through really nicely, that our porter base, our stout base is going to blend its own chocolatey flavors into these mole flavors and really create something delicious and unique. So, you should take lots of photographs along the way and upload these, and see what other people come up with things. You think you could get that mole to powder up better? I want to see your technique. Maybe you've got some kind of freeze dried method. If it's really good, I might use it at the brewery, make less of a mess. So, figure out your own process. Figure out your own thing that you've kind of fall in love with that you want to make a beer inspired by it, and let's bring it. Let's see what you got. I'm looking forward to checking it out. 7. Welcome to Brooklyn Brewery: Welcome to Brooklyn Brewery. Here we are at our facility in Williamsburg, Brooklyn and this is where the magic happens. We're brewing here five days a week, 24 hours a day, making delicious beer for all you guys. We have our own ways of really using our equipment to get all the effects we've been talking about. We're going to show you some of that. So what you see behind you here is the brew house. This is what we call the hot side and this is where all the cooking processes take place. So, the wort is actually chilled down just before it leaves this room, but in here, we do our mash, we do our conversion of sugar, we do our separation of sugars, we do our boil. Then finally, our whirlpool over here, separates all the solids out and we'll send the cooled wort into the next group of fermentation. So, here behind me we have the kettle, here to my right lauter tun behind me, mash mixer over here. What you see here is candy sugar syrup, these are highly caramelized sugar syrup, that we use for a lot of our aviad. We're actually making a new quadruple. I haven't even used this particular candy sugar syrup before. So this next brew is actually going to be a little bit an experiment for us. We have the ability here to add in things like oats. So we have the automated system but there's still a lot of things that need to be added by hand. So here we have some oats flakes, they are already caramelized, and those are going to give us a little bit of mouthfeel and some extra flavors. All right. So, you remember the bit with a mesh bag, that's making our marley mass well. Well, this is the one we use. We usually are filling this with stuff like orange peel, flowers, various spices, and then we'll just tie it off, and we got to have a little parameter line so we'll hook up like that and actually snap it inside the kettle. Depending on what we're using, it might only be a few minutes at the end of the boil, sometimes long as 10 or 20 minutes. So we've had everything from kaffir lime leaves, to whole chillies, the various types of citrus fills inside this bag. And this one, we usually use for 50 barrels, which is 50 times, 31 gallons about 1500 gallons of beer and this is going to hold lot of stuff. So welcome to one of my experimentation rooms. Ba ha ha. We have a lot of stuff going on in here. We have a large barrel house that we have at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. But this is the one that's actually across the street from the brewery. So we keep a little library here of things that we're working on. This is where a Black Ops is made. In fact all the Black Ops used to be made in this room, that's our Barrel-Aged Imperial Stout. We have experiments that are using all wild yeast. Up behind me here, filled anywhere on the 24th of May 2014, and has chamomile tea in it. We have all experiments going on here. Barrels are a great way to do different types of infusions. For us in a commercial brewery, we can't leave stuff in a fermenter for six months, if we want to do all the long term infusion. So, having a small container like this great. Obviously, the barrel itself adds certain flavors. Now you're probably not at home going to be using a 52 gallon barrel. However, you can get five gallon Barrels and they can be really useful. So, you're going to get flavors for a barrel because that contact itself is an infusion. But say if you want to do as we have, each a beer on cherries for six months. This can be a great way to do it. You get barrel flavors and you get slow oxygenation through the wood. One thing you see a lot of people doing, if you want to add some wood flavor to a beer is use oat chips, they do work. They are different than barrel aging though, so you're going to want to experiment both back and forth. Oak chip give you straight oat flavor, but they're not going to give you some residual flavor say from bourbon or wine or mezcal or something else and you don't get the oxygenation. But they can add some really nice flavor. So it's something to check out. If we were making something that was inspired somehow by a flavor that had wood involved, oat chips would be one way that you could get it going. And those are almost always use on the cold side. We keep this room about 52 degrees fahrenheit. Again, you probably don't have a room at home ar 52 degrees fahrenheit, but if you keep it your stuff in the coolest place that you have in your house. You've got a basement for example, do it there, a closet, whatever works. You're going to have to be resourceful because even on the brewery level, we've got to be resourceful too. All right, it's a month later and here we have our beer. Now let's check it out. Nice head retention. Good foam. And boom there it is. Oh yeah. Nice little hint to its residual sweetness not too sweet and I'm getting a little bit of that chilly burn. Just a little bit. I think that's good. I mean, the chilli's really stepped far for it, I can even smell the raisins. The underlying chocolate, is partly the chocolate and partly the roasted malts, coming through really nicely. 8. Hungry for More?: