Vito Delucchi
Hey, everyone. Vito from MoreBeer! here. We're in Chico, California, outside Sierra Nevada brewing. We're going to go inside and talk to the founder, Ken Grossman, one of the most pivotal people in the beer industry about Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. What's happening in the beer industry and all kinds of other good stuff. Check it out by Ken. Hey, thanks for having us.
Vito Delucchi
On behalf of more beer, I want to say thank you. And I think on behalf of the entire homebrewing and brewing industry, thank you for the amazing brewery and product that you've created over the years.
Ken Grossman
Well, thank you. Thanks for all the support. And we've actually bought some stuff from you guys over the years as well.
Vito Delucchi
Yeah, Yeah. I've seen I seen some of our products around here. So it's it's really cool to see that. So thank you again. All right. So let's jump in. So the first thing I want to do is kind of talk about your history and history of Sierra Nevada. So I did an interview at Oak Barrel Wine Craft with with Homer in Berkeley.
So it's a Homebrew store, one of the oldest homebrew stores in the Bay Area. And he had mentioned that you had bought ingredients from him back in, I think in the 60s or in the 70s. So can you tell me a little bit about that story or your interaction with with Oak Barrel?
Ken Grossman
Sure. Actually, a game goes back before Oak barrels. So I grew up in Southern California and I lived in San Fernando Valley and that's where I one of the very first homebrew clubs and I think the first Olympic Club in the U.S. Altos Falcons started. And they started a couple of years after I was homebrewing and I had moved to Chico in 1972, but I started homebrewing in the late sixties and went to the home wine shop down there and bought supplies and started making beer in my closet, hidden from my mom, and then got a bit more advanced and started a green brewing pretty early on and then moved up to Chico in 1972 and continued my homebrewing. I'm 17, continued my homebrewing and attended Butte Junior College, then Chemistry and then Chico State and continued to brew and decided I would open up a home supply store myself. And Chico's, you know, was a very small town back then, actually, I think under 40,000 population. And when the students came, it's wild a little bit, but it was hard to to buy in the quantities to supply my homebrew supply store.
So I started leaning on some other homebrew shops that were more established, Oak Barrel being one of them, one of the people being another one. Byron Birch was down there back then and so I would buy 20 airlocks at a time from them and they give me a good break. So that was my go to as far as getting supplies that I couldn't afford to buy on my own as a really small homebrew player.
Vito Delucchi
That's awesome. That was it was it was cool. We were going over that to have have mentioned your name and your my eyes lit up and it was amazing. Tell me a little bit about so because homebrewing didn't become legal until 1978. Right. Right. So what was the scene like back then or was it kind of like, you know, you could use this, but it's not like distilling is today kind of or.
Ken Grossman
No, actually, it was more accepted than that. The scene was, although it was illegal, we'd never heard of anybody getting arrested. And so most home wine shops did have a beer section. And even in Chico, back when I moved here in 72, you could get a little bit of homebrew supplying supplies at one of the downtown local drugstores.
They had a little homebrew corner in the drug store and they had, you know, malt extract and cans and and old crummy hops and, you know, packages that wasn't very good. But so when I opened my own version, Bishop, it was really to further the the craft and art of homebrewing. So I was hooked up with with hop suppliers.
I would go up to Yakima every year. I drove my station wagon up there, would load it up with 1 pound bricks of hop samples. So the samples that normally would go to brewers for selection, you could well, they sold me, you know, 101 pound bricks of every variety being grown at the time, which wasn't that many.
Vito Delucchi
It was, it was a whole cone at a time. Or was it 1080 pellets?
Ken Grossman
Whole cone.
Vito Delucchi
All whole cone.
Ken Grossman
And we got brewers cuts and then I made some friends in the industry and and hooked up with a European supplier so I was able to bring in European hops and then the UK had a pretty vibrant homebrew scene although more catering to making cheap beer at home rather than them making great beer at home. You know, today it's completely different.
There's all sorts of stuff available and, you know, way more knowledge on really the science and art to brewing than I had available to me. But I got pretty serious as a home brewer. And you know, we were culture on yeast and I built a pretty good sized cooler so I could make lagers. And so I was fairly advanced and went to my first conference.
I think it was the first conference of of Homebrew and wine suppliers down in Oakland. And I attended that and met people I'd known from the industry, Frederick Court being probably the lead one and you know, been corresponding the old way back there. No email back in that area. So I was writing letters back and forth about, you know, different beer things and he was writing articles and he had a some publication.
So we chatted and I arranged a tour of the Anchor brewery at the time with Fritz Maytag giving us the tour. This was the old brewery. This was underneath the freeway the previous term before our portrayal and met him and was pretty inspired and then arranged a visit to Albion, which had just recently opened. So it's like around 70, late 77, 78 when I went, visited him the first time and saw what he had built, which was, you know, pretty high end glorified homebrew set up for the time.
Certainly it was way more advanced than what anybody else that I was aware of was doing. And he was brewing a barrel and a half, you know, 45 gallons per batch. And it was him. And he had a partner, Suzi Stern, and saw what they were doing. I'm like, Yeah, I can do this. And came back home. I think after her first or second trip there, I decided to put my homebrew shop up for sale and start writing the business plan to open a brewery.
So that was '78.
Vito Delucchi
'78 when you I know knowing your history, cobbling together a system, I wanted to, as someone who built a brewery myself and cobbling it together on a budget. Tell me a little bit about that, because I think at the time there wasn't as many brewing supplier commercial brewing supplies. There weren't any. Yeah.
Ken Grossman
Weren't any in the US making small equipment anyway. You know, we you mean if we knew better, if we knew we could have gone to Europe probably. And found something to make a small brewhouse that had experience. But in the US there was really just a handful of large equipment suppliers and I think they're mostly all gone now.
But there was a couple that were servicing, you know, Manager Bush and Miller and all that, but the US brewing industry back in 1978, 1980, I mean, it was down to about 40 total brewing companies in America. That's all of them, you know. And I saw Bush down to the smallest and, you know, the small, small brewers back then were, you know, regional family breweries that had survived prohibition in some fashion and were they're trying to eke out a living, living and competing against the big brewers.
And it wasn't a very healthy part of the industry back then. Brewers were closing at a pretty rapid rate and then in the U.S. and you know, it hit its low point around 1980 when we started. And I think there were I can't remember there was 34 or 43, but there was around that many total brewing companies. So everything was cobbled together from dairy equipment and.
Vito Delucchi
Dairy equipment.
Ken Grossman
And other food processing equipment. And Jack McAuliffe, you know, he had sort of shown that you can be pretty primitive and simple and and make good beer. And he was using the 55 gallon stainless steel drums that had been used for soda syrup, Coke or Pepsi or something. And he had converted all those into, you know, mash tun and kettle.
And I can't remember what he used for fermenters, but pretty primitive, I think maybe was 55 billion barrels for everything. And so when when I was looking at what what he was doing, realized that his business plan was pretty flawed, to try to, you know, support two people on a barrel and a half a day. And he was, you know, doing it all himself, the two of them, they would, you know, brew and bottle and he'd load it in his van and drive around and try to sell it.
Vito Delucchi
It's not even taproom. It was just no taproom.
Ken Grossman
No, taprooms were not a thing then. There was no brewpubs at that point. But for us, you know, on paper anyway, we thought, you know, ten barrel batches, that's a nice round number, three or gallons or ten gallons and you know that at least on paper look like that could be a business that would support my partner myself.
I had a I had joined up with one of my homebrew shop customers, Paul Camozzi, and and we thought we could make a go of it at that kind of volume if we could sell. I think our business plan called for us to sell 2500 barrels a year and expansion plans to grow to 3500 barrels a year, 3500 barrels a year at least on paper, we'd be doing well enough to support us.
So that was the plan and we started to build equipment. And I had been a welder when I was in college or actually when when I was in high school and junior high, even. I started welding and I went back to Butte College, which had been the school. I started out up in Chico, so in Chemistry, and I went back and rolled in welding and fabrication.
I enrolled in every class that they offered that had shop access. So it was farm mechanics and and ag ag repair and all these classes that gave me access to the shop with, you know, later than drop outs and welders and.
Vito Delucchi
Great skills to have knowing, you know, having gone through commercial brewing is like you're a chemist, you're an engineer, you're a janitor. Like, so these are all great skills that are transferable into that.
So speaking of that, Chris Graham, our president, said make sure to ask you this so I want to ask you, this was your very first batch.
He said you told him a story about how you got the grain for that batch. And could you share that story with us?
Ken Grossman
Yeah. So thankfully, I had a good relationship. And Fritz Maytag in the crew there at anchor were were quite helpful. I got to know Mark Carpenter and Gordon McDermott pretty well and Fritz and and so I leaned on them a fair amount to just sort of understand, you know, how they made beer and you know, how they got equipment and how they got the ingredients.
And so they said, okay, Bauer, Schweitzer, Maltings. So there was a Malthouse in downtown San Francisco right by Fisherman's Wharf that had been around. Actually, the building had been damaged during the San Francisco earthquakes. We've been around pre pre earthquake and and actually I have a door of one of the malting drums hanging in the hallway out here.
Oh that's cool. But they had this old drum Malthouse And I'd never been to a commercial Malthouse before and so I got it to where the Malthouse was totally cool. And again, this is a really old malt house. I think the the malting drums were from right around the turn of the century. So big cast iron drums and they would malt sort of small batches in these drums and they got bought by Flashman in malting at some point.
But that's where Fritz got his malt from. That's where New Albion got their malt from. And so it was like the logical place. So I drove my 57 Chevy down with two bins on the back, drove to the malt house and they were used to loading rail cars. So the, the area that you would drive a rail car through the got tracks, you could pull your truck and wheel and the chute was, you know, two feet in diameter and there the guy opens a shoot up and fills both bins up and and they drive you over the scale, you know, anyway, way on the way in and the way and the way out.
And I had just under 10,000 pounds on the truck. But what's.
Vito Delucchi
What was it rated at?
Ken Grossman
Not that. That it was a one ton truck so you know I got four tons of weight on it and single, single axle, single tires and so the track is like that. So you got to take half that off. They're like, no way with yours. We're never we're not taking that back. We can't do that. It's you are so like shit, so drive and I can only go about 35 miles an hour going up the freeway on ramp to get out of San Francisco.
And the mach speed, I think was a little over 40 is all I could go and I'm sliding on the road. I mean, the whole rear end is just chilling.
Vito Delucchi
Yeah, because your steering is up front. Yeah.
Ken Grossman
And I got pulled over, finally got pulled over by a patrol, but I was almost home and the guy felt sorry for my and didn't take him and then let me go. But I got back to Chico's, like, okay, next time one one bin, not two bins, and, you know, cut the load in half. But anyway, that was our first load of malt from Bower.
Schweitzer and I brewed November 15th, 1985. Barrels of stout of brew number one. And we knew we weren't going to sell it. And we figured, you know, Stout would hide our sins. It was pretty strong flavors. Yeah. So we that was brewed number one. And then went into Pale Ale Brewing two days later. And pale Ale number one was pretty good.
And that okay, you know, we're close. We made some tweaks to the recipe and Pale Ale two was a little different. Didn't have quite as good of a fermentation and wasn't quite right. And we re propagated. So we were doing all of our own yeast propagation back then. We always, always had and propagated up more yeast from another slant and Pale Ale three was pretty good and I was good enough that we bottle a little bit of it and we were like, okay, you gave it to family and friends.
This is sort of what we're planning on producing. And then after that we were serial cropping, so we were harvesting yeast and repackaging.
Vito Delucchi
Speaking of yeast, you said, you know, so I know it as Chico, 001 Was it referred to as that?
Ken Grossman
No. You know, we had our own yeast library. Okay. You know, as, as home brewers. So this was back in the late seventies and you couldn't really buy, you know, it was no yeast labs that were certainly catering to a craft brewery because you know, really wasn't such a thing. So we got these from all the different collections around the globe, some from the British collection and some from wine stuff and Davis had some yeast and Siebel was was a fairly it was about the last of the American Commercial Brewing Labs.
Right When we started Build the Brewery, I think Wallerstein had just gone out of business and that was another lab. I mean, brewers back in that era, small commercial brewers, a lot of em didn't have really much in the way of labs. And again, these are, you know, historic brewers, you know, the younglings and the the outer shelves and those kinds of historic family breweries.
They didn't have, you know, really dedicated lab staff. And so they couldn't do a lot of the analysis themselves. And so the industry really had a handful of commercial labs with, you know, master brewers and chemists and all that. So you would send your samples off. That was pretty standard, you know, to do most of the analysis that was, you know, above, you know, a specific gravity or, you know, alcohol or CO2 and maybe, you know, D0 those things.
Most brewers had some way of testing nothing like we have today. So most brewers relied on these laboratories that were feeding around the country to do a lot of that analysis. Well as the industry sort of was on its way down, a lot of those labs went out of business because the big brewers had labs and they didn't really need to send out their samples anymore.
Vito Delucchi
Yeah, 40 breweries out there. There's not much business right now.
Ken Grossman
So Siebel was the last. And so anyway, we got all these different yeast and we, we were brewing every week during the year and a half, almost two year construction phase of the brewery. So every week we'd make a batch of pale ale and try a different yeast, try, you know, different hops, try different water treatment, all those kinds of things that a brewer would do.
And we finally, you know, realized we were going to be a bottle conditioned brewery. We didn't have pressurized tanks. We didn't have any way to carbonate naturally or artificially. And and so we just figured we'll bottle conditioned just like we've been doing this home brewers and we needed a yeast that was ferment fast attenuate well fall out and stick to the bottom of the bottle and leave a you know very firm yeast sediment for about.
Vito Delucchi
In the bottle, not in the glass.
Ken Grossman
Right. So the yeast that is now Chico yeast was one that we thought had all those qualities that, that we really needed for commercial and bottle conditioned production. It was pretty, you know, robust. We were very fortunate that UC Davis was not too far away. And so as part of our learning, I spent a lot of time with the Davis Library and talking to grad students and and Dr. Michael Lewis, who was the ran the program back then.
And you know, they were like, you know, you probably shouldn't try to do lager brewing with this primitive because your brewery is, you know, definitely use a top fermenting yeast. And and so, you know, we had realized that was, you know, the direction we had to start out with. And then so we tried to optimize what we thought we needed in a politician yeast and are used to tame yeast.
We're still using today.
Vito Delucchi
Well, again, on behalf of the entire homebrewing and brewing industry, thank you for developing one of the workhorses of the brewing industry and one of my favorite yeast drinks. All right, so let's talk about my favorite beer, Sierra Nevada, Pale Ale. I call it my desert island beer style. So meaning if I could only have one beer for the rest of my life, I would pick this one.
What is one beer? That. That. That would be your desert island beer style.
Ken Grossman
Well, certainly Pale Ale would be would be in there if I only had one beer. It probably pale ale. But the other one which we're brewing in packaging the first batch this year next week, celebration ale. And so I mean, it's one that I brewed our first full year of production, brewed back 96 cases celebration Ale in 1981 and it was, you know, something I'd been to Europe at that point a couple of times UK and Belgium and Germany, and we were aware that, you know, Fritz was doing his Christmas beer and he was doing Liberty Ale and we really wanted to do a dry hopped beer.
So pale ale wasn't dry up just due to our inability to do that initially. So we were like, okay, we want to make a dry beer. We want to make a holiday beer and back, you know, in the forties and fifties there were a lot of breweries that produced Christmas beers and I've still got some old bottles of some of them around from us Brewing Company that sort of went away and, and Fritz had revived that for with his Christmas ale so we wanted to do you know a holiday ale and actually our first, the first one is that white label right there, the long neck celebration all up there.
And that was when I brewed the last 100 cases. And I remember going to Yakima and actually picking the field of hops. We we wanted it was actually a baby field of cascades, but they were just, you know, really nice small cones, but just loaded with little blood and I remember thinking this would be great for dry humping with and so brewed that beer and it was, you know, amazing and really left, you know, a huge impression that we need to do more of this and, you know, more dry hopping.
And so that beer's definitely got a fondness and fun place for me, as well as our Pale Ale.
Vito Delucchi
Celebration. Delicious. I love that one, too.
So speaking of Sierra Nevada, pale ale, one of the cool things that you mentioned a minute ago, too, in the bottle conditions. So now you guys are doing cans. So it is it can conditioned as well.
Ken Grossman
It is. So there's yeast in the can and same as in the bottle, same pitcher, same beer.
Vito Delucchi
Same pitch rate, so same yeast. Uh, everything, sugar, everything. All exactly exact same here.
Ken Grossman
The beer is the same when it heads out the packaging and whether it goes in the bottle again.
Vito Delucchi
And I think the the benefit of of bottle conditioning and conditioning too, is it helps with the shelf life. Right. With it does yeast uptake the oxygen. Yeah.
Ken Grossman
So and you know yeast keeps the beer in a reduced state. So it does provide some protection certainly from, you know, some oxygen ingress that happens during packaging. But, you know, I think many brewers are aware that the oxygen actually in is continually into a bottle and less so into a can. But there is a small amount of oxygen that migrates through the seams of a of a can lid or a bottle cap, more so in the bottle cap because of the porosity of the plastic they use in the liner.
And so there's a small amount of oxygen ingress that's continually happening as the beer sits on the shelf. Corks are the worst. And then you can go through a whole range of bottle caps and the next worst is a puff. PVC So the PVC is we the fact it's got a lubricant in it, but it's, it's used in a twist off bottle cap.
But it's puffed meaning it's got oxygen in that and it's more porous and it's got here and it when they puff it and so that porosity makes the transmission rate of oxygen higher and we did a lot of research around bottle cap liner material and we're actually still looking at at that and we've, you know, picked ones that have, you know, the lowest amount of oxygen transmission.
And then there some, you know, antioxidants that are ascorbic acid that are added to some of the liner materials to, you know, address some of that oxygen ingress. The can is got a much tighter seam. It still does have a sealant material in the in the can seal itself for the liners and not the liner itself. But actually when this is cramped inside there there's a little bit of of a sealant in there as well.
So there's a little bit of oxygen transmission, but it's a much tighter seal than a bottle cap. And the amount of surface area is smaller.
Vito Delucchi
With your kegs too. Would you condition those as well?
Ken Grossman
We we do keg condition some beers we don't keg condition all of our beer so our pale ale on draft is actually a slightly different version. We did use the keg condition and we still do some. The issue is you've got a much larger volume. You've got to talk keg and you've got your yeast, which settles to the bottom and the amount of surface area that the yeast has to react with the volume of beer is much less.
And so keg condition beer takes a lot longer to condition and a bottle or can does just because of the surface to volume ratio in a keg. And so keg condition beers would take a month sometimes to to fully condition so our pale ale is conditioned naturally in a tank but it still undergoes a secondary fermentation in the tank.
We bung it in and allow it to build CO2. Naturally.
Vito Delucchi
Back on Sierra Nevada, Pale Ale. I think there should be the interesting one because it's been around forever. How many gallons or barrels have you guys brewed so far? This one and.
Ken Grossman
I don't have an exact number, but it's many, many, millions
Vito Delucchi
Millions. Millions? Yes.
You know, what's your favorite Sierra Nevada beer, past or present?
Ken Grossman
I get asked this question pretty regularly now. I never give a straight answer. So really, it's like, you know, having a favorite kid, you're not publicly state that. But yeah, you know, my my go to changes a bit during the year.
Vito Delucchi
Depending on the season.
Ken Grossman
Beginning of the season like I'll switch to celebration ale next week so as soon as we hear the week after, as soon as we package and condition it, I'll drink celebration preferentially for most of the season and then switch back to Pale Ale and but we you know, we produce quite a range of beers and I have been known to, you know, have a, a nitro stout or or in one of our lagers or something on a on a regular occasion so I don't stick with just one beer hard every day.
Vito Delucchi
I could hear that.
All right what makes you passionate about beer and brewing? You know, is it an ingredient? It is the process, the science. What is your you mean major? Maybe it's kind of like the the other question, you know, there's somebody aspect, but if you could narrow in on one, what makes you passionate about it?
Ken Grossman
You know, I think for me, I still do enjoy the science. I do still spend a bit of time involved in in, I guess, the research and scientific pursuit of improving beers. You know, I've I've had a saying or around the brewery for years that good is never good enough. There's always places you can tweak and make improvements, whether it's, you know, oxygen control, whether it's, you know, brewhouse process, whether it's the lower thermal stress and boiling.
I mean, there there are so many areas to explore and the science is not done brewing. Science is constantly evolving. And there's, you know, things we learn all the time that can, you know, do some very small tweaks in many cases. But you add up ten small tweaks and there's a noticeable improvement. So just paying attention to the little things, attention to detail really matters.
But for me I'm still fascinated bit with the science. I like the engineering aspect of brewing beer, you know, problem solving and, and sort of working through that. You know, it's a natural and biological process. So there's always things that happen that people can't figure out. And even the brightest minds in the industry have areas where it's like, I don't know why that happened, but it did.
And and you can spend months or years trying to delve into one little aspect of brewing science and, you know, hopefully uncover the answer. But there's always those questions as to what does this do in the process, what does you know that you have to do and the influence of, you know, flavor and head retention and you name it, there's just a wide open amount of things to learn.
And so I think the learning is also really important.
Vito Delucchi
I love that answer because it's like life, right? Like, you know, you never stop learning, you never stop growing, you never stop getting better. You know, I guess you do one day at some point, right? But and yeah, we're always learning new things. So it's like there's always new challenges and, you know, there's going back, looking over like there's nothing new under the sun.
But there is, there is new stuff coming out. Yeah. So that's really cool.
Ken Grossman
I mean, there's lots of new stuff coming out and the, you know, the brewing industry, the brewing or the consumer is also evolving. And, you know, when we started, you know, our Pale Ale was 38 business units and, and for most people it was a shock. I mean, that was just intense flavored beer compared to, you know, if you were an American beer drinker in the late seventies, you were pretty much drinking one style of beer.
We had, like white light lager. You know, maybe Coors at the time was a little happier, actually. They were like 14, 15 business units and AB was maybe 12 or 14. And I an old friend who was a brewmaster at Anheuser-Busch. And, you know, he told me, you know, the whole industry at that time would watch each other and, you know, they had at that point the instrumentation to analyze things down into the, you know, part per million.
And so they'd all watch each other's bitterness levels. And he said without fail. But every year somebody would drop one and somebody else would drop one, and then somebody else would rub $1, you know, lower until they got down to I don't remember the exact numbers, but, you know, in the eight or nine beta test unit range for some of these, you know, domestic lagers, which was a little too low, you know, started to.
Vito Delucchi
Lose out of balance. Yeah.
Ken Grossman
So they went back up again a little bit. But it was the whole industry was just paying attention because people, you know, there was a you know, adds, you know, no bitter beer face and all this, you know, kind of focus on beer being bitter. And I think the consumers at that point, you know, the sixties and seventies, you know, Wonder Bread and the you know, after after World War Two, sort of the homogenization of you know, all of our food supply.
So, you know, there was a blandness that sort of came over America. You know, the least offensive thing was what people were trying to go for. So you didn't want to fan any consumer. So you made products that had, you know, very little character or flavor. And, you know, when we started in the seventies, there were starting to be a resurgence of, you know, of bakeries that were doing artisan stuff and little coffee roasters and some small cheese producers and so there started to be a turn in the culture of food and drink.
And small wineries were starting to open up. And so, you know, the coasts were where most of that was happening on the West Coast, particularly, You know, the Bay Area was probably, you know, the hotbed and or Napa. Yeah, Oregon and Washington. You know, there were some areas there in Colorado. There started to be some some focus on, you know, real food again and real drink.
And so that was part of why we saw there was a niche that wasn't being met by the big breweries that seemed like, you know, we could capitalize on and we didn't need to appeal to the masses. We just needed to appeal to, you know, enough people that thought what we did was, you know, was something they wanted to consume.
And that was sort of the genesis, I think, of why, you know, craft brewing sort of caught hold. It was part of that whole movement across food and beverage.
Vito Delucchi
Yeah. It almost like went, you know, late nineties early 2000s to like really bitter. Do you remember there was a moment where as like 100 ibus right. Yeah. Yeah.
Ken Grossman
Like yeah. You know, and to think I remember I was interviewed in some article, I don't remember what year probably mid eighties and, and my goal then I said God if we can only get to 10,000 barrels that would be, you know, amazing. And, and I think I said in the article, I think that's about the limit of America's appreciation for hoppy beer will be about 10,000 barrels worth of for the people who could appreciate really hoppy beer.
You know it's obviously totally wrong and that was 38 berries. You know, that was well ahead of the the quest to make, you know, more and more, you know, hop hop forward intense beers. And I think the consuming public once you start to really appreciate, you know, hops and the character and you know, intensity, you know, it's hard to go back.
Not that you can enjoy a beer with fewer hops, but I think the the you know, once you sort of appreciate and savor that really hoppy malty balance, it really sets a tone that that, you know, appeals to certainly a certain percentage of drinkers.
Vito Delucchi
Speaking of hops, I want to talk about one of the cool things that I think you guys developed in a lot of other craft brewers. You know, the torpedoes where I'm going with this, but I used to have what I'd call the hop flavor cannon or the cool cipher, and I'd these other things, you know, it could be coffee or fruit or, you know, other things to do on the cold side.
So but I feel like you guys kind of develop that. So tell me a little bit about that history of the torpedo.
Ken Grossman
Yeah. So the torpedo came out of actually ah, or need to make more celebration now. So celebration it will always dry out with whole life hops and it still is. And we were limited as we grew to how many tanks we could break up in. And when I designed this brewery we're in today, we were at the old facility in the mid eighties and I realized we better look at growing the company and building a new brewery.
And we were in a, you know, funky metal building and equipment was primitive and and so we had this vision. And so in 87, 88, we moved over here and when I designed this brewery, we were making little over 10,000 barrels. And so I designed the brewery to go to 60,000 barrels and, you know, which was a pretty bold jump.
And at that point I think anchor was at 35 or 40,000. And, you know, Fritz was like the most successful, you know, small brewer out there. And so I thought, God, if we could ever, you know, get to 60,000 barrels would be amazing. So that was the capacity of the brewery. And our first year we brewed over 20,000.
Our second year, about 35,000, our third year, 45,000 and the fourth year we were out of capacity and celebration. Ale kept growing and we were limited to the tanks. We could do this dry hopping in. And so as we continue to expand, I went to conical bottomed tanks and we have four open hundred barrel fermenters here. That was the original design was to four opens and a dozen 200 barrel aging tanks.
And that got us to that 60,000 barrels. We had a small lager cellar with four, two and a barrel tanks, but we were at a celebration of a capacity. And so I started to play around with sort of an external weight scale. You token hops and to infuse the beer. And so after celebration ale season, we started to experiment with us.
How close can we get to matching our original dry hopping method, which really was just filling these mesh bags full of hops and tying them into the bottom of a fermenter and filling the fermenter up with beer. And so we started this external circulation loop through through a bed of hops, and I started out my first versions didn't work well with just a tube pack full of whole corn hops that we would try to force beer through.
But the amount of back pressure created by going through a compressed beta of cone hops didn't didn't work. And so as I evolved it, we made a smaller one way to put it, hops in a cage and then circulated sort of around it rather than forcing it through. And that was the genesis of of the Hop Torpedo. And so we did this after Celebration Ale season, so we couldn't call it celebration.
So we morphed the recipe a little bit and name the beer after the device that looked like a torpedo. So that's how we started. And yeah.
Vito Delucchi
Amazing, amazing way to add flavor, not just with hops but with other things like that. Yeah. So it's a that's pretty cool whole cone option so that a couple of times I know you guys use a lot of whole cone hops, I think you use more whole cone cascade than anyone probably. Right. Is that Safe?
Ken Grossman
I think so. And I don't have hard data, but I think we're the largest cone hop user in the world now.
Vito Delucchi
Largest whole cone user in general?
Ken Grossman
I don't know that for a fact, but I think it's true. Yeah. So we started out with whole cone hops and we played around with pellets back in our early eighties and pellets were relatively new invention back then. They been around, but the industry hadn't really wholeheartedly converted over to it. At that point, Coors was still whole cone hops.
Ken Grossman
Anheuser-Busch was still whole cone hops for all their production, and they slowly changed their process. I mean, whole cone hops have some really nice attributes, but they're also a pain to deal with. They made it harder to store. They you know, they degraded, oxidized quicker than, you know, pellet in a vacuum seal bag, take up more space there.
You know, there's a lot of reasons why the industry sort of moved away from them. The downside is, though, you know, when the pellet is made, it's it's ruptured, it's, you know, hammer, milled. And we did some trials where we took the same hop lots and we pellet some. And we, you know, use some whole and tasted the beers and the pellets certainly improved extraction.
So that was one thing You got a higher yield.
Vito Delucchi
Because you're opening it up.
Ken Grossman
Yeah. And so they're more efficient to use than than a leaf are. But the flavors were different and not that they were bad. They were just, you know, different character and quality to them. And we opted not to switch. But, you know, that's not to say that today we don't play around with all sorts of hop products.
We do. So we our Pale Ale still like a hole cones hops are, you know, traditional beers are still the way we brewed them, but new new beers, we we feel we've got more freedom, you know, for not altering the recipe.
Vito Delucchi
Speaking of oxidation and that I've had the pleasure to brew with your R&D team a couple of times here before and walking through the process. One of the things I thought that was really cool is you guys do I think it's nitrogen flush and wet milling like you guys are very cognizant of of oxygen pick up. Can you talk to me a little bit about that, some of the things you do to keep, you know, scaling agents out of your finish beer.
Ken Grossman
So our milling process is called a steep condition mill. So it's not true. Wet milling. So there had been a period when there was what's called, you know, truly wet milling. And I don't know that there's too many of those operating globally anymore where the the malt was really soaked in a big hopper and it became soft and sort of mushy.
And then they would sort of send it through the mill. The downside is you're sort of starting that mashing process in your in your hopper. And the bottom of the tank is different than the top of the tank As far as contact time and all that. So there's a lot of variables that were introduced with that and that fell out of favor to steep condition milling.
So that's those mills are produced by both Human and Stryker. Both have large, steep conditioned mills. And in that process the mold is only wet for about a minute. So it travels from a dry hopper through a steeping chamber where you can control the temperature. So you do start mashing then. But it's just about a minute into the process.
The I guess the positives of that is you're not dealing with dust. So, you know, you don't have an explosion hazard and malt mills do blow up occasionally in grain handling dust is is a hazard from both health and and explosion concerns and we use dried water so we actually have a duration system so that water is low in oxygen as well and the mill is flush with nitrogen.
So there's a control of that. And then in our milling process, you didn't add water in that crushing process. And in water in the bottom of the gully that you pump out of into the Marshalltown. And so you're actually starting all your mashing processes there and so you can effective we get proteolytic rest. I mean, you can do various things by changing the temperatures of the different waters that go in.
So the steeping water for minutes can be at one temperature. The water in the milling process can be a different temperature and you go into your mash tun and you can do a, you know, upward infusion or whatever you're going to do.
Vito Delucchi
You're actually working that into.
Ken Grossman
Yeah. So it's it's a pretty critical thing. A lot of those enzymes react very quickly and so that minute or two or three, you can change the dynamic of your wort by controlling those temperatures in those processes. So we do monkey with those seasonally and by brand as well.
Vito Delucchi
All right. We've talked about celebration a lot. And one of my like core memories as a home brewer is, you know, they do the California State homebrew competition and it's held at anchor Steam or it used to be held at Anchor Steam every year. And you guys would always send a keg of celebration before was out on the market.
You know and all us home homebrewers? We loved it. You know it's like, oh, I get to drink celebration. It's just a great memory. And being an anchor is pretty cool. Yep. Let's talk about anchor a little on kind of the state of the beer industry with with what happened with them. Do you have any insight or thoughts on that and kind of, you know, what's happening in the beer industry in general?
Ken Grossman
Yeah. So I mean, to those who follow the beer industry, you know, certainly have seen its ups and downs over well over my history. It's over 45 years or so. I've seen, you know, some real tough times and I've seen some good times. And, you know, we've had, you know, sort of the zero growth before and the nineties and, you know, we're at a place now where the drinkers definitely changed.
And, you know, I think some of the trends were happening pre-COVID, but COVID probably accelerated things a bit across, you know, the full spectrum of life in America, really. And, you know, the the I guess the craze to some degree might have prompted some of those changes, people going to what they might perceive as a healthier alcohol, something that doesn't have as many calories and carbs as beer.
And so, you know, the advent of seltzers and, you know, alcoholic tonics and those sorts of things certainly took some of the craft beer drinkers in a different direction and said, you know, during the pandemic, brewers who had a on premise focus and some of them only had on premise they were really hurt and many of them, you know, ceased to be in existence.
But it certainly changed consuming habits as well. You know, on premise sales have not recovered from the post-pandemic. They're, you know, down ten or 15% below where they were going into it. And, you know, that was the lifeblood of many craft breweries, anchor included. You know, if you've got I think they were probably in the 30 or 40% on premise, certainly in Northern California, probably very high on premise volumes.
And so when that shut down, that that certainly put the hurt on the company overall. But you know, Acres, a unique company. I mean, they're in San Francisco and a really expensive place to do business. They're in a brewery that is romantic as hell and beautiful, but not real efficient. And, you know, they have you know, they're landlocked and had, you know, some older infrastructure and they're you know, they're not unique.
There's, you know, a lot of breweries in America that I think, you know, went through the pandemic and came out not very healthy. And, you know, that's that's a case where, you know, sad to see what happened, but sort of the handwriting was on the wall. You know, it's harder to be a small regional or small, small brewer that tries to go national.
If you're a small regional brewer that focuses on your home market and you've been able to establish yourself there and you can survive off those kinds of volumes, you know, whether you're in Portland or Seattle or Denver or wherever, you know, some breweries, business models have been able to survive and prosper with the changing consumer. But the industry in general is not super healthy.
I mean, if you look at the largest brewers to the smallest, nobody's very few are growing much. A lot of people are flat. And, you know, that's considered good in a lot of people's minds these days where we get back to robust growth again, I don't know. It'll be robust. Hopefully we'll get back to some growth as the industry goes.
The other factor that's impacted many of us is is input costs have gone through the roof, you know, with what's happened in Ukraine that really put a big focus on small grains. And so wheat and barley and oats and grains that brewers use of all gone up significantly in cost.
Vito Delucchi
Yeah, a lot of those that's a growing region. A lot of those mount mortalities are over there and then also the shipping costs have gone.
Yeah just everything going across in a way. Energy was up so bottles and cans cost more, you know, but all the inputs went up well above inflation. And so, you know, a lot of brewers have tried to recoup some of that by raising prices. So now beer is also considered to be a little bit priced out of the competitive set with spirits and wine and in some cases, spirits certainly are cheaper for a drink than a beer is if you're buying a bottle, not not if you go to a bar necessarily, But so that's, I think, impacted a lot of breweries as well as that.
Ken Grossman
You know, they're no longer as competitive. And if you're, you know, price sensitive shopper and you see a, you know, $10 six pack and you see, you know, a bottle of booze for 20 bucks that is equivalent to, you know, five, six packs or whatever, you know. So people are making those choices.
Vito Delucchi
If that's the choice. Yeah. If you're looking at it strictly from alcohol.
Ken Grossman
Yeah. Alcohol delivery standpoint. So, you know, I think there's a variety of things that, you know, have all sort of aligned, unfortunately, to make it much more difficult to to do business, certainly in California. I mean, that's the other thing we've got, you know, very expensive everything. Power is much more costly here than just about every other state in the country.
And we've got a lot of, you know, minimum wage things. And so a lot of brewers that have restaurants and pubs are are struggling with just a lot of those costs that are, you know, present in doing business in California.
Vito Delucchi
So the question, yeah, the changing consumer. Let's get back on that and one of the things, you know, like when I remember when like hazy IPAs came out, you know, a lot of what I call old school brewers, like odd, you know, it's garbage, you know, whatever. But it intrigued me because from I love the science, the engineering, like, oh, it's easy to do that.
No, it's not. There's water chemistry and things. So I've always gravitated towards new new styles and things like that. And then more recently, the seltzers hard seltzers and things like that. And that interests me too, because it was like Mead making, you know, like there's Neutrogena nutrients that are involved. It's the, the process is always gravitating me towards it.
But then I've heard people in the industry say when we chase these trends or chase these styles, we're actually leading people away from beer. And I never thought about it that way. So I'm just interested to hear your take on that. As a lover of science and engineering, I want to learn it all and I want to make it.
But I'd hate to hurt the industry that I love right by, you know. So.
Ken Grossman
Yeah, I mean, you got to respect what the consumer wants to buy, too. I mean, you know, it would be great if we could just be making Paleo, and that's the way that we did. That's just not where the realities are of the marketplace. And so I think as long as we're true to our brewing roots and we still make, you know, great beers and focus on beer, which we, you know, certainly do and will always do, you know, being able to offer a consumer that, you know, gluten intolerance and they want to drink something different, you know, if we don't provide it, somebody else is going to.
And so I guess it's romantic to think that we can keep the beer industry whole by by only focusing on beer. But I really think it comes down to what the consumer preference is and. You know, are we helping drive the consumer into different products? Maybe. But I think if we don't do it, somebody else will get into that space and take your customer away from you.
So if you could at least figure out a way to, you know, still be true to who you are from a, you know, a brewing pedigree or from a beverage producing pedigree, and retain those consumers with your brand family. Hopefully they'll switch back and forth between your products and and still consume beer versus just saying, I'm not going to do that and have them go somewhere else.
Vito Delucchi
Yeah, I love that answer.
Ken Grossman
Yeah, yeah. I mean, we're we're not at least our company. And I'd say most companies, we're not at liberty to not listen to the consumer and do what we want to do. I mean, we used to be that way and it used to be we're going to brew what we like to drink and so be it. Now take or leave it.
But you know, when you've got, you know, a thousand employees and you've got to, you know, make sure that you're, you know, trying to smartly keep the company growing and profitable, you sort of have to do what you have to do to to really figure that out. And it's it's a moving target. I mean, the consumers are quite fickle these days and they're changing, you know, preferences all the time.
And I think that's just the world we live in now. You know, most of the legal age drinkers today know grew up on flavored, you know, sugary sodas and other things that were sweet and not hoppy. And so a and convenient. So I think, you know, you need to understand that that this consumer is coming from a different place than than we did you know 30.
Vito Delucchi
Yeah you're seeing that flavor balance change like IPAs now like 50 ibus kind of like the max like you know and everything and everything's more sweeter, you know, The balance is kind of geared more towards the market you're talking about. Yeah. Here's one for you. Aside, what do you see as the next trend in brewing? You know like we hazy IPA is became big and cold IPA is a big thing right now these kind of like dry like do you see any new thing that you know is kind of on the horizon that.
Ken Grossman
You know as far as you know what the next style is? I, I only wish I knew. I mean, we're we're in a we're getting into areas that are at the fringe of traditional brewing, but we still try to keep our traditional brewers hat on. So we are producing nonalcoholic beers. We're actually packaging some today out in our new can do facility.
And it's you know, it's something that I, I traveled to Europe a fair amount and I'd go to Spain and Germany and you know names were a big thing and you know more than 10% of of what people drink. And you know, as the sensibility about alcohol started to become more prevalent in society, you know, you go to lunch, you know, when I'm a German brewer and they're not going to be drinking a five or 6% alcohol beer, you know, two or 3 a.m. at lunch.
It's, you know, not it's frowned on and not really done so much anymore. But they will drink a00. And, you know, a lot of the European beers, the zero zero is really prominent on the label so they can put it on their table. And so I here, I'm a responsible person. I'm not drinking in free beer as a lunch.
I'm having, you know, zero zero beer at lunch. So I started seeing that and and I came back to our team and said, you know, I think an age are going to be a thing. This would probably starting over eight years ago. And you know, you look at the US marketplace and it's like, well that's only one less than 1% of what's sold in America.
It's not going to be like it is in Europe any time.
Vito Delucchi
At the time it was.
Ken Grossman
At the time. Well, and it still is.
Vito Delucchi
Oh, really?
Yeah, It's a little over 1%. It's still a very small segment of the US market, but it's growing. It's the most rapidly growing segment. So I think, you know, people who do enjoy beer, but for whatever reason, you know, choose not to have alcohol, are looking for tasty, good alternatives.
And so that's what we've been working on to produce flavorful in a way that, you know, are as reminiscent as a real beer as possible. It's not easy. It's technologically challenging. And you do need to, you know, pasteurize those products, you know, could harbor pathogenic bacteria. You know, beer is is is quite safe. It's not totally safe, but it's quite safe from any pathogen growing in it.
And but once you get the alcohol out of it and you still have some residual malt sugars for flavor and body, you've got food there for potentially, you know, microbes to grow on. So you have to be a lot more careful from a health concern within a product. So we built this new facility that it's got all the capability to do.
Flash pasteurization tunneled pasteurization, blending and batching. So we can we can do other fermented and non fermented kinds of drinks and we're just commissioning that facility.
Vito Delucchi
That's the CanDo facility you mentioned. Awesome. So that's what other kind of stuff is going to come out? Hop water, things like that?
Ken Grossman
Yeah, we're doing hop waters and you know, hop waters are sort of in the same boat. They need to be super careful on the micro side.
Vito Delucchi
Acidify it, things like that.
Ken Grossman
Yeah, it's got to be right and you know hops come out of fields and you know they're, they're exposed to all sorts of things in the environment if you've been up to, you know, hop processing there, you know, hops are dried and loaded on a floor, you know, and scooped around with forklifts. And and so they're not really sterile in the scheme of things.
So you can pick up, you know, all sorts of microbes. So you've got to be pretty careful to make sure that the product is clean. And and, you know, all of our hop water is we send out for third party analysis for any pathogenic bacteria we do in-house house maker on it. And having the Candu facility will allow us to do a light pasteurization step on that as well.
Vito Delucchi
Also look forward to having some of the products that come out of there.
So are we. Yeah.
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