As we approach the launch of packaged beers from both the Monolith and the Market (the brewery in the Ritchie Market) we’d like to discuss the difference between barrel-aged beers (from the Market) and barrel-fermented beers (from the Monolith). First, we’ll delve briefly into the brewing process in order to provide the necessary background for our explanation.
When we make a beer the initial output from the brewhouse is called Wort. Wort is liquid that contains grain sugars and is nutrient rich, that is then fermented with microorganisms to make beer. In typical modern brewing Wort is transferred to a stainless steel tank where it’s carefully inoculated by a single yeast culture. Depending on the type of beer, and a brewery’s preferred processes, after primary fermentation beer may be either packaged and sold, or it may undergo additional cold conditioning or lagering, also typically in stainless steel.
In a barrel-aged beer, after primary fermentation in steel, the fermented beer is transferred to a barrel for additional aging, usually to add flavor or texture from the wood of the barrel, and/or from the liquid previously in the barrel. (E.g. when you put a beer in a recently emptied bourbon barrel it will typically pick up some wood, and bourbon character). There isn’t typically any fermentation in the barrel in a barrel-aged beer. We do our barrel-aged beers (and non-barrel beers) exclusively at the Market Brewery.
In barrel-fermented beer, Wort is put into barrels after an inoculation step so that primary fermentation takes place in the barrel. There’s no barrel-aging step, but instead there’s an extended period of fermentation facilitated by the characteristics of the barrel. This process is quite slow (taking months to years) and leads to complex flavor profiles and sometimes hard-to-predict results. We do exclusively barrel-fermented beers at the Monolith.
Barrel-aged beer may take as short as 3 months in a fresh-emptied barrel, but often can take 6 to 12 months. Barrel-fermented beer may take as short as 10 months to finish, or as long as 4 years in complex fermentations. There isn’t a “better” way to make beer, and each lead to beers with completely different character. We’re excited to shortly be bringing you beer using both processes!
A question I commonly get asked is the origin of the name Blind Enthusiasm. Choosing a name is something every business needs to do, and one can take a variety of different approaches in how to select the ideal name to reflect what you’re hoping to create. Naming a brewery is no different, but brewery names often fall into a few common categories: a reference to geography, a landmark, or person (e.g. South Edmonton Brewery Company, Whyte Ave Brewery, or Joe’s Brewery), a comment on process or purpose (Hop Crazy Brewery or Good Times Brewery), or a more esoteric loose association of words that may reflect their origin story (Blind Enthusiasm Brewery).
The name you choose can sometime suggest your aspiration as a brewery, though if there’s one thing that’s become quite evident in the craft brewing business, it is that there are no hard and fast rules. I chose the more esoteric/loose association path for our name as I didn’t want us to be limited by geography, and I didn’t want to dictate process as we aspire to explore a wide range of methods in making beer and running our business. By a process of elimination I ended up in the loose association category which has the unique challenge of no specific starting point to reference when coming up for names.
I considered the motivation, intention, and feeling I had in creating a brand new brewery from scratch without professional brewery experience (and no partners or team members in the initial stages). I did have some experience adjacent to the professional brewing space operating The Beer Diaries (a YouTube channel where I interviewed professional brewers at their breweries), as a beer writer at AskMen.Com, and later as the Executive Director of the Alberta Small Brewers Association. All of these roles helped me learn about the industry, but none were actually working within a brewery making or selling beer. And, rather than starting on the safer, more sensible path of starting small and building up based on prior success I jumped right into building at showpiece brewery at the Ritchie Market in Edmonton, and shortly afterward (even before opening our first brewery) started the construction of a brewery dedicated to spontaneous, mixed and natural fermentation all in wood. Most people in the industry would likely declare it a foolish path, and perhaps say I was blindly enthusiastic and lacking common sense. And that’s where the name came from.
It was pretty clear to me that if I was defined by blind enthusiasm, I needed to counteract that by finding strong partners and a great team to keep things balanced as we created the breweries. I set out to find the best people possible to take care the essential roles in the business, so when I was off the rails doing blindly enthusiastic stuff I had good advice and counsel from people that could keep the business within the realm of reality. I feel like we’ve been quite successful in this regard, and at this point I feel strongly that even though we exhibit plenty of blind enthusiasm we’re quite practical and systematic about how we operate. Based on our principles we still do things a little differently than other breweries (see future blogs on this), but there’s always a good reason behind our decisions.
One last comment on the name Blind Enthusiasm is that it also happens to be an homage to a moderately obscure set of characters created by the late Sci Fi author Ian M. Banks. Mr. Banks wrote a series of books in a setting called the Culture, a futuristic Earth-based environment where AIs transcended humanity and acted as protectors and managers of humanity’s expansion. These AIs also had a sense of humor, and in selecting their names tended to choose clever and ironic personal titles like “Lucid Nonsense”, “Flexible Demeanour”, “No More Mr Nice Guy”, and my personal favorite “Zero Gravitas.” The name Blind Enthusiasm is right in line with the ironic names of the great AIs of the Culture, though we’ve got a long way to go to match their cold, calculating methods.
At this point we’ve largely had positive feedback on the name Blind Enthusiasm, and we’ll do our best to be true to our name by staying excited about what we do. The only drawbacks so far have been that it is a fairly hard to spell, makes a very lengthy email or web address, and that it can sometimes be hard to say after a few beers. Other than that, it suits us just fine.
One thing we take very, very seriously at Blind Enthusiasm is the quality of our beer. In fact, our entire operation is designed to provide you the absolute best pint possible. We’ll break it down in more detail here.
By serving beer on-site from our own tanks and lines we can ensure they are clean and optimized for the quality of the beer. Perhaps you’ve had the experience at a bar or restaurant where you’ve had a very familiar beer on tap but it didn’t taste right. Perhaps it was downright bad. Well, there are many, many explanations as to why that could happen:
It could be the glassware: if your glass wasn’t cleaned, sanitized, and rinsed properly you could be tasting some soap, or even remnants from the last beer in that glass.
It could be the beer lines that deliver the beer to the draft tap. Beer lines need to be cleaned at minimum every month, but best is to clean them every 1 to 2 weeks. Not many people do this, and some never clean their lines. If your beer tastes weird, ask when the lines were last cleaned.
The beer itself could be bad for a variety of reasons: the gas blend used to serve the beer could be wrong, leading to an overly carbonated or flat beer. The beer itself could be “off”. Beer is actually perishable! If the a keg is old, it’ll taste oxidized (papery) and the hops will turn to a licoricey mess. There are also brewing flaws that can create a bad beer, e.g. packaging a beer before fermentation is complete, or secondary infections from a microorganism other than the yeast the brewer selected can both spoil a beer. This is still only a partial list, but one key point is that many of these issues are preventable if the brewery is diligent and cares about the beer it is making and selling.
Our care and attention to our beer starts right at ingredient selection. We’re always picking the best, freshest, and highest quality ingredients for our beers. You can take shortcuts by using cheaper or older ingredients, but it’s always going to show in your beers. We also aim to use science and quality testing to ensure we’re brewing well. We test water chemistry and adjust the water based on the results and the beer we’re brewing, we monitor pH’s and gravity closely during and after brewing, we do microbiology testing to ensure our procedures are clean. We’re far from alone in this disciplined approach to brewing; one of the reasons there is so much good beer around these days is many breweries are taking a more serious and disciplined approach to quality control.
One of the greatest tools we use to our advantage is time. For many breweries time is the enemy; they need to brew beers as quickly as possible and keep the beer flowing out the door to fulfil their contracts. Our obligation is to our customers; we only want the best quality beer to serve to our customers. We have the luxury of multiple fermentation tanks (11 in total) where we can shift beers off crashed yeast and take time to lager and cold condition beer until we reach our flavor and clarity targets. Some of our beers are very clear, yet we don’t filter them. Filtration removes flavor compounds but allows you to ship beer faster and on a tight schedule. We prefer a gentler process where beer clarifies naturally, using cold temperature and time, and we think leads to the tastiest result.
We also have high quality standards for the finished beer, and when they are compromised we don’t capitulate and instead make the right decision for the consumer. Even though we’ve only been brewing a few months, on a few occasions we’d have to pour out a batch of beer when it didn’t meet our quality standard. We could have sold those batches, and people probably would have drunk them, but they were as good as they could be. It’s painful pouring thousands of dollars down the drain, but it’s the right thing to do for our long term brand and our relationship with our customers. We’re also patient, and sometimes these beers will turn around in cold conditioning, but sometimes they won’t. We focus on the long term, and as long as we’re learning and getting with each batch we’re going the right direction.
After a beer has reached our high quality bar, and we’re serving it we still maintain vigilance on how it’s tasting. One of the huge benefits of serving beer from our location is that it’s never out of our hands and we can make sure it’s testing right. That also gives us a point of reference for beers that we may be selling to third parties for consumption at other locations. We can generally compare to the very same beer to determine where the flaw may originate.
We have started shipping our beer to bars and restaurants within Edmonton, and we’re doing so with close partners that we know will take good care of our beer. We’re selective, and fortunately there are many other venues that have care deeply about customers enjoying the beer they serve. So, if you see our beer at Biera, or somewhere else, you can be confident that a lot of effort and consideration went into ensuring that you’ll be getting the best pint possible and that we stand behind it.
