March Update

It's been a couple months.  As always, even though the posts have not been regular, the brewing certainly has.  Since the last post we've had several new beers in the works that I am very excited about.  The coming of spring opens the door to a set of beers that just are not ideal in the winter months.  A smooth, dark stout is no longer the pint you want in your hand while you huddle from the cold, but a lighter ale with more citrus and fruity undertones becomes the refreshing drink of choice while you lounge on the porch. Spring also brings a new set of ingredients to work with and a new excitement to the day-to-day that revitalizes everyone and has especially done so my passion for brewing.

Currently on tap we have the Laurel Blonde Ale and Black IPA.  Currently conditioning in kegs #3 and #4 are two new recipes that we are very excited to see how they turned out: an Irish Red Ale and a Pale Ale  with a strong dry hop that boosts the aroma to another level.  As far as the Pale Ale goes, I was tempted to drink the whole keg straight from the secondary it was so good.  I can only imagine what 3 weeks of conditioning and some carbonation will do.  Finally we have a Double IPA in the secondary 3 days into its 14 day dry hop schedule.  This one is no joke.  Unlike the Otium150 Imperial IPA, balance is not the priority.  This is a true Double IPA, target ABV of 9.0% and 100+ IBUs with an incredible dry hopping schedule.  This has 2x the amount of hops of any of Otium’s previous beers and promises to be a favorite. 

For the first time in a while I have some significant brewery related news to report other than saving money and reading a book or two.  I have officially been accepted into the American Brewers Guild Intensive Brewing Science & Engineering Course (IBS&E).  The course consists of 22 weeks of on-line coursework including assigned reading and video lectures coupled with quizzes and exams, followed by 1 week of in-house class work and hands on brewing.  Unfortunately, due to the high demand and limited class sizes, the course does not begin until January 2016.  However, upon receipt of my deposit they will send all of the readings material to get a head start on, which I am very excited to get my hands on.

Brief Review of Beyond the Pale: The Story of Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.

Hey, Chris here.

Just finished reading Ken Grossman (founder/owner/president) of Sierra Nevada Brewing Company's Beyond the Pale. The book chronicles the rise of Sierra Nevada from its home brewing origins to the craft brewing giant it is today.

Here are 6 things I learned:

1) Sierra Nevada's first brewery was made of scrap dairy farm parts that Grossman fashioned into a micro-brewery

(Grossman tinkering with a bottling machine)

Grossman sourced the parts from various defunct dairy farms along the West Coast and learned the finer points of welding and refrigeration on his own (with help from classes taken at the local community college). The "frankenstein" brewery lasted for almost a decade, and was purchased by a brewery who still uses it today!

2) A power struggle ensued between Grossman and a fellow co-founder

Camusi (left) with Grossman in the San Francisco Examiner, 1986

Ken and fellow co-founder Paul Camusi had a bitter falling out. The friction started when Grossman began working endless hours at the brewery and felt Camusi wasn't pulling his weight. The tension grew and grew, but ironically enough, Ken couldn't buy out Camusi and his family's shares due to their hesitancy to sell them because of the growth and success of Sierra Nevada that Ken was largely responsible for. He eventually took full control of the company after years of dispute.

3) They have a high-tech-mad-scientist brewing laboratory on site

Gas chromatograph for analyzing hop aromas

In 2005, Sierra Nevada built a ten barrel pilot brewery--an exact replica of the larger brewhouse--to test smaller batches of beer and advance the research of the beer making process. They equipped this brewery with scientific machines with names like: gas chromatograph (to assist in hop aroma research); liquid chromatograph (for analyzing beer components such as hop resins and malt sugars); inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometer (that detects traces metal in water or finished beer). 

4) It's a great place to work

Workers Pour Sierra Nevada at Beer Festival in Atlantic City, New Jersey

Sierra Nevada places a large emphasis on employee well-being. They offer a free on-site health care clinic, on-site daycare, and beer education courses to all employees. A happy workforce makes great tasting beer.

5) Beer Camp

Beer Campers enjoying samples on an awesome Sierra Nevada bike

Started in 2009, Beer Camp was originally intended for distributors, restauranteurs, and bar owners to learn about beer by helping to brew a small batch at the Chico Brewery. After fielding an overwhelming number of inquiries from fans eager to attend, Sierra Nevada started an online contest where hopeful Beer Campers submit a video in order to prove why they're worthy enough to experience it.

6)  Running a Brewery = Little Time for Family

Ken with his son, Brian, and daughter, Sierra

Throughout the book, Grossman routinely refers to himself as a "workaholic", lamenting just how little time he has spent with his family during his 30 year journey building Sierra Nevada. It reinforces that building a brewery isn't easy, and the entrepreneurial success that Grossman achieved came with consequences. Today, it seems as though Grossman has reconciled this--the book was written with help from his daughter, Sierra, and most of his family has worked in various positions in the brewery.

Pick up the book at Sierra Nevada or Amazon

November: who doesn't like Confucius?

"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
― Confucius

Confucious had it almost right (if you ask him about wisdom I'm guessing he'd say I'm taking the 'easiest' route).  But to the point, choosing a job you love is only half the battle. Put it this way, if you're job was to drink beer (delicous craft beer, not that light lager business, no one loves that) every day (or only on days you wanted to) it would be pretty amazing, right?  Sure, but what if you had to do it alongside a grumpy co-worker (co-drinker) or worse, all by your lonesome?  It would still be great!...for a while.  But there would come a day in your life (like 30 years in?) where you just didn't want to talk to that grumpy co-worker anymore, or in the lonesome instance a point where you just wanted to talk to a co-worker, grumpy or otherwise, and it would kind of feel like working. 

So I would modify the words of Confucius just a bit:  
"Choose a job you love, do it with your closest friends, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”
-Confucius, with a little help from his friends

I brew almost every week, and as many of my previous blog posts suggest, I love to brew.  But as the realities of opening a brewery turned towards doing research on legal documents, licenses, locations, cost analysis, etc and the purpose of brewing became more of finding a beer list for the brewery than creating the most ridiculous beer we could think of, or just something we wanted to drink, I oftentimes felt like I was working.  Luckily, last weekend, I was reminded why I started down this path in the first place.


Last weekend I had the privedge of finally visiting Clemente in Los Angeles.  As most of you know, Clemente and I started brewing together and continued to do so until he moved to LA, almost two years ago exactly. Even though he is across the country he is very much an essential part of the brewing process as we spend our 'free' time constructing recipes together via gchat.  We also have recently started bi-(more lile tri or quad) weekly skype sessions to stay on top of the aforementioned research.  But even though we talk recipes and skype, at the end of the day I am the one brewing by myself on Sunday afternoons watching the Giants beat their previous weeks' record low rushing yardage, and it recently started to feel like work...until last week.

While visiting Clemente and Ila, ironically not brewing but at a Passion Pit concert at the Greek (amazing show), I had the thought: "oh yeah! THIS is why I love brewing and why I want to do it for a living."  In my head 'THIS' was many things all at once.  First and foremost it was spending time with great people.  Clemente and I have a great time brewing and doing anything else (especially while listening to Passion Pit, but that was a bonus, not a necessity). But on top of that it was looking around and seeing tons of people having a great time.  And for better or worst, most of those people had a beer in hand! (or wine decanters, but you can't win 'em all). I said it in my very first post and it still is true (whether or not I forget it because I focus on the wrong things), people enjoy drinking good beer and I enjoy providing it.  I was reminded not to lose sight of why I want to brew, and why I am going to love owning a brewery. Jon Taffer would probably take this opportunity to slap me across the face, but before he does I would like to retort that I am still fully aware of the business side of things.  I just have to remember to not lose sight of why I started down this road in the first place.

So as we continue this process of creating Otium I will continue to remind myself that Confucius was right (or half right)

This post was brought to you by the character '()' (parentheses)

October Update

My oh my does time fly.  It is time for the October monthly update!

What's brewing?

As fall approaches, or is upon us, so does my favorite season for seasonal beers.  Of all the seasonal beers out there it is hard to beat a spiced pumpkin ale.  A great spiced pumpkin ale to me is heavy on the pumpkin, light on the spiced, and just right on the ale.  Clemente recently told me that pumpkin doesn't really have a lot of flavor and that most people associate the pumpkin pie spices with the flavor of pumpkin.  My response? 'Nonsense, I'll just add TWO pumpkins!'

I have tried making several variations of spiced pumpkin ales, but none have lived up to the first one I made two years ago.  So this time around, I planned to replicate the all-grain version of that extract recipe.  I prefer a nice ale that is not overwhelmed by the spices.  There should be a nice aroma that invokes all the nostalgia you could ever hope for and then fades to the background so you can enjoy the flavors of the beer. Last year I tried several variations of pumpkin ales using the spices from the ChaiPA, but all of those were too overwhelming. So this time I went back to a minimal blend of cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg.  We'll see how it turns out, just in time for Halloween!

What's new with Otium?

The braintrust has begun bi-weekly Skype meetings. Right now we are in the information gathering stage to best make a decision on the location of the brewery.  Right now MA, NJ, and NY are all viable options.  We have done some market research that has been very informative and are now looking into the different legal implications of opening in each state.  Every state has very different laws about how much you can make, where you can sell it, and what you can sell inside the brewery.  Because we are going to start out as a very small brewery, these small differences can have a large impact on whether or not the brewery is successful.  It is very important that all the necessary information is gathered before an educated decision can be made about where the brewery ends up.

Stay tuned for the next update and keep drinking craft beer. You deserve it.

Otium Brewery

When I started this blog, my 'dream' was to open a brew pub.  A series of brainstorms, reality checks, and other such events has changed the vision.  The new dream?: a standalone nano-brewery, Otium Brewery, to be precise.

What is Otium Brewery? When will it open? How big is it?  Where is it?  Why the name 'Otium', and more importantly, what the heck does 'Otium' even mean?

Those are all good questions that I will attempt to answer now.  So go grab a beer, sit back, relax, and listen to the story of how Otium came to be...

Those of you who know me already knew, some of you discovered when I started writing this blog, and the rest of you will learn by the end of this sentence, that I have been homebrewing with my brew partner Chris for 4 years now and have made well over 50 batches of beer (all of which you can read about in previous posts).  This is not a story of Chris and me or the homebrewing, however, this is a story of Otium Brewery.

The Idea
Chris and I decided 2 summers ago that we wanted to brew for a living.  A thought that almost every homebrewer has at least once in their life.  Being the financially responsible man that I am, I knew that the best way to accomplish that goal while making enough money to get by would be to open our own establishment.   At about the same time, a phenomenal show by the name of 'Bar Rescue' aired.  Watching the show, I had the obvious thought that "Clearly, if these people with apparently no knowledge of the bar business, or any common sense at all, can open a bar (albeit a failing bar) and turn it around, then I undoubtedly would be successful." The plan was to open a brewpub.

We set out on the research and discovered that opening a brew pub is a costly endeavor (I know, I was as surprised as you are).  $250-500K would get you on your way, but considering I had just started my first job out of college and Chris had just departed to CA to pursue a writing/directing career, we didn't have close to that amount of money (and still don't, but let's use the newly employed excuse anyway).  With that, we knew we had to take a more practical approach.  What could we do that would require the least amount of money, but still accomplish the lifelong (6 months long, same difference) goal of brewing for a living.  The answer, open a small scale nano-brewery!!

The Plan
After some more researching, we decided that the ideal size for what we were trying to accomplish with the least amount of risk/seed money involved, would be a 7bbl system.  A 7bbl system will produce 14 kegs of beer for each batch.  Your standard micro-brewery usually runs a 15 - 50 bbl system, and larger scale breweries can have 120bbl systems or larger. The small size of the system is part of the reason the brewery is called a nano-brewery, but in actuality it is the total annual production that classifies a brewery's size for federal/state regulation purposes.  That is why we won't have to pay the same license fees that Anheuser-Busch pays.

A nano-brewery comes with its pitfalls.  The amount of time/labor that goes into a batch of beer is relatively equal no matter how large the batch, so it's going to be a lot of work for a relatively small amount of beer.  Considering the fact you can only sell as much beer as you make profits will not be huge in its early goings.  Because of this, the plan will be to 'not quit my day job' and brew late at night.  My roommates have already pointed out: "so that will be exactly like what you do now then."  This point alone is the reason I am not terribly worried about the fact that I will have to spend a couple (or several) late nights a week making a little money doing what I would otherwise be doing in my leisure time anyway.  Which is a good segue into what the name 'Otium' means/represents.

The Origins of 'Otium'
The first thing we needed to do to make the brewery real was to name it.  I mean, once it has a name it's half way to being real, right?  True or not, that is what we set out to do, name the brewery.

Brewery naming is a difficult process.  A lot of ideas were thrown around.  A lot of themes were considered.  Chris' girlfriend, Ila, produced a laundry list of possible names that I think she just had lying around in case someone ever asked her for brewery name suggestions.  Near the bottom of that list, amongst several random latin words, was 'Otium'.  I liked the word, no clue what it meant, but it sounded cool, was short and sweet, and just felt right.  So I googled it and came across the wikipedia page on 'Otium'.  The thing that stood out was a phrase "otium cum dignitate," literally 'leisure with dignity,' which is the idea that leisure time should be spent productively: reading, studying, spending time with family, and bettering yourself and the world. It was perfect because that is exactly what brewing is for me.  I spend my time brewing because I enjoy creating something that everyone can enjoy, that's how I spend my leisure with dignity.

Who is Otium?
At its current stages, Otium has a core braintrust: myself (the brewer), Chris (the idea man), and my sister Stephanie (the accountant).  We are very excited for what the future holds.

What next?
If having a name, a recipe list pages long, a box of tasting glasses, an executive board, a twitter account, a facebook page, a website, and a company e-mail address make you a working brewery, well then we are a working brewery.  If it doesn't, and I have a feeling it might not, then there is a lot more work to be done. A lot more work that we are excited to get to do.

The timeline for opening is in the order of years, but I will continue to give monthly updates on the progress of the brewery, no matter how large or small.

If you have finished reading this you are probably done with that beer, so go grab another one.  You earned it!


"Drink Otium - Because leisure is a choice."

It's been a while...

So it turns out keeping up a regular posting schedule is harder than it seems.  Although I haven't posted in well over a year, that is not to say I stopped brewing.  Quite the opposite is true, in fact.

Since my last post in April of 2012, I have brewed 31 batches of beer:

Blonde*

IPA2

Double IPA*

Raspberry Wheat*

Brown Ale*

Pineapple Wheat*

IPA3*

Clam Stout*

Chai-P-A*

Clam Stout

Pumpkin

Pumpkin 2

Blonde

Chocolate Vanilla Stout

Pumpkin 3

Espresso Porter

Maple Christmas Ale

Chocolate Peppermint Stout

Crimson Imperial IPA

Otium150

Maple Bock

Pineapple Wheat

Blonde

Black IPA

IPA4

Rye Pale Ale

Chai-P-A

Mango Imperial IPA

Belgian Citrus IPA

Clam Stout

Black IPA

* served at the Otium tasting in August 2013 (What's Otium? I'll explain in my next post)

That's about a beer every two weeks, but it's more like 6 straight weeks and then a month off, then 4 in a row, then 6 weeks, ... you get the idea.

I also started kegging, almost exactly a year ago.  I have a dual-tap kegerator and 4 kegs that are all full 90% of the time.  There are, pretty regularly, two beers on tap at any one time, making my apartment my primary source of beer for consumption.

In short, I am still brewing, more frequently than when I last posted, and I have big plans for the future that I will explain in future posts.  It is incredibly difficult to post every time I brew, or even close to as frequently.   But I promise you this, I will do my best to post at least once a month with updates.  On (or close to) the 1st, to be precise.  So stay tuned.

Wheat Beer: One for the ladies

  Generally speaking my test for whether or not I have made a good beer is to give it to my female friends.  When the look on their face is utter distaste, I know I have a winner.  Unfortunately that is not necessarily a good thing when you are trying to create a beer list for a brew pub (remember that is the main inspiration for brewing. That, and because beer is delicious).  In order to appeal to the fairer sex I decided to make a wheat beer. The concept is a mix between an american wheat and a belgian witbier.

Ingredients:
Grains:
Wheat Malt
2-row
Flaked Wheat
Flaked Oats

Hops:
Hallertauer
Saaz

Yeast:

Wyeast Belgian Witbier 

Misc:

Orange Peel

Irish  Moss

Mashed at 156 for a sweeter, maltier taste.  

The color after mashing was opaque and very light.

5 minutes before the end of the boil I added the rind of 6 oranges.

The color after the boils is a darker, opaque white.

After a week of fermentation I bottled 1/4 of the batch (~12 bottles).  The beer tastes a lot like a blue moon AFTER you already added the orange.

Why only 12 bottles you ask? Well, that's when things got crazy.  I decided to split the batch a total of 4 ways.  I am not a huge fan of wheat beers (even delicious ones that this one obviously will be), so I figured if there were only 12 bottles of each kind then I could conceivably drink it all.  To each batch I added something different.  To one: raspberries, to the second: pineapple, and the third I dry hopped with centennial hops.

After a week the beers took on the characteristics of the fruit that was added.  In the case of the raspberry, the beer literally sucked the color right out of the fruit, leaving the beer pink and the berries white.

Bottling the separate batches was a little more tedious than I realized. Well, than I realized before it was too late. About three days after added the fruit, when I was planning the bottling, I came to understand the added work I had created for myself.  Because the beer was coming from three separate vessels I had to re-clean and re-santize everything between each batch. That includes the bottling bucket, the siphoning tube, and the bottling tubes.  Not to mention re-starting a siphon every time.  To add to the work the fruit kept getting stuck in the tubing.  That being said, the final result was 12 bottles of 4 different wheat beers, not bad for a days work.

1. Standard wheat (orangey)
2. Raspberry wheat
3. Pineapple wheat
4. Dry hopped wheat

In the future I will not split a batch of beer so many ways.  The added work is not exactly worth it.  Splitting a batch 2 (maybe 3) ways is more than enough.


In bottles: coffee porter, ipa, brown ale, wheat (all 4)
Fermenting: blonde ale (behind on the posting)
On deck: IPA take 2 with some improvements