Daily AMA • Page 394

@BlueEyesBrewing I don't have a question.

 

@BlueEyesBrewing do you brew eyes or are you a brewer with blue eyes?

 

@BlueEyesBrewing what’s the best meal you’ve ever made yourself?

 

great minds think alike?

 

indeed!

 

are you a brewer?

 

Top 5 beers you’ve had?

 

Books:
The Outsiders
Star Bellied Sneetches
Night
Dragons Love Lacos
Seriously, Go to Sleep
I have not read any/many books for a very long time other than kids books and am struggling to remember what I've read in the past. I really need to get better at it

Movies:
Star Wars IV-VI (I count the trilogy as one)
Strange Brew
That Thing You Do
Jurassic Park
The Lion King
These change all the time

Fruits:
Bananas
Apples
Grapes
Canteloupe (if they're good)
Watermelon

Cheese on Apple Pie? Sounds gross

Butter on Poptarts? Doesn't sound bad but unnecessary

Taco Bell? I hate the place

Neither, gross

No. The meat is only ok and the wild ones are assholes

Closers:
Banned From the Back Porch
Bound 2
I can't think of a third

Pasta:
Ravioli
Tortelini
Rigatoni

Edit: Forgot to do Places
Norway
Italy
Belgium

Do my kids count?

That's not a question

Neither. When I started home brewing I felt I had to come up with a name for my fictitious brewery no I called it Blue Eyes Brewing Co. based on my dogs (I have 2 huskies). As it turns out, my wife also has blue eyes and my 2 daughters have blue eyes so now I'm the only one who doesn't.

I made a tonsuko ramen last year that took almost 12 hours to make that was really good. Also a prime rib dinner for Christmas a couple years ago with yorkshire pudding, prosciutto and Neufchâtel cheese wrapped asparagus, and twice baked potatoes that I really enjoyed

Just a home brewer. My dream is to open a small local brewery one day

 

Oh man, this is tough because what I thought I loved a few years ago when I've had them again recently I didn't enjoy. My tastes have changed a lot. So my favorite ones right now:
In Perpetuity by Treehouse
BCBS by Founders
Dialed In by Trillium
Single Shot by Treehouse
Lemon Meringue Milkshake by Tired Hands
Whirlpool by Night Shift is my favorite anytime beer that's fairly easy to get around here

 

what's on your ideal burger?

 

Cheese, bacon, fried egg maybe, ketchup

 

not a fan of veggies I see

 

Not many, but especially not on my burgers. I tend to eat a lot of plain food

 

I think Chasing amy did better critically but I've never met a single person who doesn't hate it! haha. I didn't hate it but I didn't think it was very good.
However I am quite used to Clerks 2 being totally dismissed. I haven't seen yoga hosers yet.

 

@BlueEyesBrewing
fuck, marry, kill: pancakes, waffles, french toast

 

How do you prepare your scrambled eggs?

 

Gonna have to go Fuck french toast, Marry waffles, and Kill pancakes. Even though I eat/make pancakes more than almost any breakfast food they're not my favorite.

I've always made them hard, and still do when making them for my daughter and wife, but I've been learning how to make the soft, creamy style and I really enjoy those. Made an Eggslut style sandwich the other day that was fantastic. Also like making French omelettes from time to time.

 

@BlueEyesBrewing What's currently in fermenting away in your house?
What's on deck to be brewed?
How about you move to Michigan and/or give me like $250K to open a place?
What is the best beer style and why is the correct answer saison's?
How much do you care about the macro vs. craft debate and selling out?
Is the Lager trend that is going to explode this summer going to just be a trend like Black IPA's?
What's your favorite recipe you've ever brewed?
Why aren't you in Colorado working for/owning Ratio Beerworks?
Paint me the picture of your ideal brewery that you own? Money is no object so I wanna know all of it: Tank sizes, core lineup, what are your focuses in terms of specialties, etc.

 

Oh man, here we go.
-Nothing fermenting now. I just kegged my Irish Black last week and haven't had time to brew anything new yet.

-At the end of May I'm hoping to have 4 beers on tap ready to go for my daughter's birthday since we usually have a lot of people over for that. I always do a Strawberry Wheat since that's "her beer" but I might change it up and try turning it into a Strawberry Milkshake IPA. I'll probably have a NEIPA and/or Session IPA. I want to start brewing sours so I'm hoping to get a fruited Berlinner done by then. And the Irish one will probably still be around by then haha. Others I have in mind that I want to brew is more work on saisons, keep tweaking with NEIPA's and different hop combos and doing some milkshake/lactose ones, if I get a hang of Berlinner then I want to do a gose, I have a bunch of blueberry bushes in my backyard and I want to use them to make a blueberry muffin sour, ala Great Notions, I have a Bourbon Pecan Imperial Brown planned for my other daughter's birthday, and I want to rebrew my Bourbon Stout I made. I still want to attempt my Brett IPA aged in white wine barrels at some point.

-Why don't you move to New England?

-Haha saison's are great. Probably because of their versatility yet simplicity and letting the yeast do the majority of the work.

-I don't care too much about it. I understand why the breweries are doing it and getting a huge payout and the access to resouces. I also understand the argument against it but at the same time I feel like 90% of craft breweries are in a different market than where the Macros are. An exception could be in a state like CO where you legally can't buy regular strength beer in grocery stores/gas stations etc. and have to go to small local liquor stores. This means that shelf space is a premium for every brewery but that same law has helped out the small breweries tremendously. I feel like anymore most people just want a beer to be beer and will continue to buy the big macros and anyone that wants more flavor and diversity will try the local stuff.

-I don't understand the lager boom going on right now at all. Maybe my palate just isn't refined enough to tell the difference between these and the large market ones who are masters at the process.

-It used to be a Christmas Ale that I made for a couple years but I haven't made it the last couple years and I feel like now I probably won't like it anymore. Recently, I really enjoyed the Session IPA I made a couple months ago. Needs some more tweaking and better process control on my end but I want to make that again.

-Haha I wish I was. A few months after they opened my brother sent me their job opening for assistant brewer to try and get me to move back home. Unfortunately the pay was just over minimum wage and I wasn't going to abandon my well paying career job and try to support my family with that. Also my wife will never leave her family out here and now my parents live out here and help with taking care of our kids.

-Oh boy, I change my mind on all this stuff all the time. I want a 10-20BBL brewhouse and a large taproom. I want close to 90% of the business to be in house sales, with a few accounts at local bars/restaurants here and there. I don't care about distribution to stores and being a production brewery. I would most likely focus on IPA's, Pale Ales, and ideally Saisons as those are my favorites and the sell. I like the approach that places like Treehouse/Tired Hands/Trillium have where they have "flagship" beers that they make all the time but aren't necessarily always available. But they still have the ability to constantly be making individual batches and small batches of whatever comes to their minds. I'd want to start a barrel program after a year or two. One idea that I liked was to work with a college locally that has a microbiology program and have them discover a wild local yeast and collaboratively develop a beer based on what they find. Then when the beer is ready throw a big party to celebrate with them. I would love to have a dog park inside or attached to the brewery. I don't know if that would be possible legally or insurance-wise though. I also had the idea of having a food truck inside the place as the actual kitchen for a restaurant and then for festivals or whatever we could just drive the truck out and attract all the people attending the festival and use it as extra marketing. This is what's coming to mind right now.

 

Haha, I would love to live in NE, but don't know the market at all. I respect what a place like Oxbow is doing, though. My ideal place focuses on things that I like that align very well with the market (big, burly barrel aged stouts/quads/barleywines) and NEIPA's. But I also have a line of rye saisons fermented out with a saison yeast then fruited and pitching brett after that. Those would also get oak-aged, too. Like, the possibilities feel endless with that and I think you could tweak things to do them all year long (dark saisons, focusing on darker fruits like plums/raisins/etc, if at all possible for the winter). I'd also want to old world styles like Sahti's and Grisettes and shit. I just want to do my own thing, collab with people I trust and love being around, and make some cool shit.

Yooooo, our brewer literally just made a Maple Pecan Belgian Golden last friday that we're gonna throw in bourbon barrels. We're slightly concerned because fermentation isn't ripping as much as we thought it would given the amount of maple syrup/fermentable sugars we have in the beer, so we might have re-pitch a bit to help it along, but it was the most delicious wort I've ever tasted.

Interesting answers. I like it. 10-20 BBL brewhouse is pretty big, that's killer. We're just about to move on getting two more 15 BBL's and putting up one of our remaining 7 BBL's for sale. That'd put us at 3 15BBL's, 3 7BBL's, 2 15BBL brites. One of the 7's we'd keep for either a lager tank (my owners are split on this idea, and myself, our taproom manger and our brewer don't want to do that) or for a brett tank (the four of us against a Lager tank really want to do this). A lot of what you said I agree with, particularly low-distro. Working for a brewery that is expanding fairly aggressively, I just don't want to deal with distributors again haha. Keep it hyper local, build that following, distro yourself to places around town/surrounding area.

To be quite honest, if I had unlimited money, I'd have a brewery, build that following, and then about 5 years in start a second brewery in a touristy place in Michigan (along Lake Michigan somewhere) that would function as a bed and breakfast + farmhouse brewery with a focus on saisons, goses, and lighter hopped beers.

Honestly, been spending a lot of time talking with a few people I know who have people that want to invest in a brewery about potentially moving on something by 2020.

 

@BlueEyesBrewing
if you were gonna be on Family Feud, which family members would you bring?
what was your best and/or favourite Halloween costume?

 

I like that idea of rye saisons a lot, never had one with rye before and sounds really good.

So did you just do the maple and pecans in the boil or are you going to secondary with them too? I was originally planning on doing maple with mine but my wife doesn’t like maple too much so she talked me out of it haha.

Everything that I’ve read has said that if you want to make any money you have to do a minimum 7bbl. I always figured a 10-20 would be big enough to allow for growth without being too big that you’d have a ton of beer sitting around. From your posts on here it sounds like you guys have been growing quite a bit which is awesome. I can understand not wanting to deal with distributors though haha. Have you been able to brew any of your own recipes on their system?

That’s super awesome that you’ve been in talks and have a plan going to get your own place. If you do open one I’ll have to make a trip to MI to stop by!

Probably my wife, my dad, and my brother. Maybe my father in law since I’m pretty sure he watches it everyday.

One year I was Gary disguised as a terrorist from Team America. I’m not sure if that was super inappropriate or not but people thought it was pretty funny

 

I believe that our brewer had pecans in the mash and boil (pecans he hand chopped and toasted himself) and then used maple in the boil and I think he might use them in secondary as well but i'm not 100% on that yet. Haven't asked him. Plus, there's like cinnamon and nutmeg in it, too. It's a weird spring time beer haha.

Yes, 7 BBL is basically as low as a commercial brewery should start, IMO. Everyone I've ever talked too -- distributors, breweries, people who make tanks for a living -- all have said "I wish I would've started bigger" if they started with less than 7 BBL's. 10-20 would be great and the cost isn't that astronomically different from 7 to a 10 or 15 BBL. And the footprint in the brewhouse isn't that much bigger either; they mostly just get taller. I brewed only two of my own recipes and one came out super solid (top 8 beer for us on Untappd) and one I would love to have another crack at. But, I moved to sales full time because it was the first full time position I was going to be able to get (our brewer was easily more qualified to be full time in the brew house than I was). But I talk with our brewer a lot and bounce ideas off each other. I think I have good grasps of brewing and recipe creation, but the reps in terms of actually brewing, I lack. So any place that I end up opening, I'd need a brewer, basically.

If it ever happens, the beer is on me!

 

That Chasing Amy hate is wild to me! Why do the people you've met hate it?

(...and trust me, you really do not need to see Yoga Hosers.)