Dan Brouillette of Lumen Crunches the Data to Find the Best Hops

This podcast is brought to you by Craft Beer and Bring magazine for those that love to make and drink great beer. To learn more or to subscribe visit beerandbring.com or find us on social media at Craft Beer Brew. Episode 463 of the Craft Beer Brewing podcast. I'm Jamie Bogner and for today's episode I am in Omaha, Nebraska. You know, I teased this one last year during our best and beer episodes like, you know, what is going on out here in Nebraska? An interesting concentration of high performance breweries, one that lots of folks and readers and listeners to Craft Beer Brewing are familiar with cross strain, three times in our best and beer. But I was also noticing as I was looking through, you know, over the last year and the year before, phenomenally interesting concentration of Hazy IPA metals, three different breweries, in fact, out here in Omaha, between Omaha and Lincoln, who are all winning metals in this general category over the last seven or eight years, including cross strain. But anyway, my guest on today's episode is Dan Brilett of Lumen. Welcome to the podcast, Dan. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks for making the drive out. It's been, this is a fun thing for me. So I appreciate it. You're a long time podcast listener. Here we are. I am. Yeah. And as you saw in the back, a lot, long time reader as well. Giant stack of old issues of Craft Beer Brewing magazine. It warms my heart. If I get so excited when I see that. The other thing I get excited when I see you're the World Beer Cup plaques that you've got up here, you won two World Beer Cup medals last year in Hazy, Hazy, Hazy, Juicy Pale Ale, Hazy Juicy Strong Pale Ale, both for Whisp, which is your, you know, Hazy, Juicy Pale Ale and slice the IPA, you know, Hazy IPA version of that. Correct me if I'm wrong. Nope. You're right on. Yeah. Six ones of 5.2 percent beer ones is six four. That's pretty much the difference. Two silver medals, a World Beer Cup. And of course, the year before Sled GABF slice one of bronze medal in that same Juicy, Hazy Pale Ale category. So that beer slice, I guess Whisp is one that, you know, in GABF. So now you've got both World Beer Cup and GABF medals for Whisp. I will note Whisp scored a 97 with our judges in Craft Beer and Brewing sliced scored a 98 with the blind judges in Craft Beer and Brewing. And I always love it when I see these, like, awesomely high scores aligned with these medals because we're not generally aware of that when that happens. Anyway, that's one of the reasons we're here. We're going to talk about brewing Hazy and Juicy Pale Ale and Dan, you get pretty nerdy about it. I do. Yeah. We're definitely in the center of the country. So we're a little late to the party a lot of the time. But we make up for it by going all out. And that's definitely what we are with Hazy IPA. You know, we still have people coming in by and full flats to ship to both both coasts or across the world or wherever the beers go on. I don't care. But yeah, that's, it's definitely our focus. We do our fair sure of the barrel age stuff and the loggers and West Coast IPA. But I'd say two thirds of the beer we brew on a given year is Hazy IPA. All right. I love to talk to brewers who are actually passionate about Hazy IPA and don't just make Hazy IPA because consumers want Hazy IPA. And so we're not going to miss this opportunity to get dive deep into it. And you know, and Dan is just as insane as you might think for someone here in terms of data tracking and making sure that the hops that he gets every year, the hops that he's using in the beer are the absolute best and the fit those kinds of flavor, flavor profiles. And so has built some pretty in-depth flavor and lot tracking, sensory tracking stuff tools for himself in order to make sure that what he's getting every year kind of matches up to that. And it's actually, you know, as we were talking before we started here, found more value in that than in selection. And I think that there's an interesting story there to say that it is not just about going going out for selection in person, but using that kind of data to your advantage can be make or break for a small brewery. We're going to dive into all of the details around that. But before we do, Hey brewers, Justin here from G&D Chillers. 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With a minimalist design durable functionality, you can rely on and custom color matching PackTech helps brands stand out while staying sustainable, trusted by craft breweries nationwide, including this one right here who just finished up a canning run with with some packtex. They offer a smarter sustainable way to carry your beer to learn more of is at packtech-opi.com. That's P-A-K-T-C-O-P-I dot com. You also have a G&D chiller here. You hit two of any use in Berkeley yeast. We use Berkeley yeast this week. We have a G&D chiller on the roof and we just went through about 1500 packtex. Checking all the boxes. You hit all the notes right here. All right Dan, we normally start off with a little bit of background. Why don't you tell us yours. You were a professional photographer for a while in your career and yet you got the brewing bug and here we are. Yep, so I worked, graduated from Iowa State University 2006. Caught the photo bug when I was there. Graduated with the degree in psychology. Was sick of school. The only way to go anywhere with the psychology degree is to keep going to school. I wasn't going to do that. So thought, all right, let me pursue this photo thing. Visit it some friends in New York City after doing the photo stuff for about two years. Realize that's where dreams are made or broken and moved out there in about 2009 and at the same time drinking a lot of beer. At that time I was a big wheat beer drinker. When I was living in small town Iowa before moving I was just drinking Boulevard wheat one after the other and had never had a hoppy beer, never big on American craft logger or macro logger or any of that type of stuff. Moved to New York, dabbled in, drinking every German style you could find because there's a lot more of it on tap out there. Sure, sure. And was introduced to a few on work trips, introduced to a few very top notch hoppy beers. One was a trip to San Francisco, got to sip on some plenty, not a bad start and it was all downhill from there. No, but kind of. And then a little brewery in Iowa opened called Topping Lyeth. So when I was home we'd get to get fresh pseudo sue and this is 12 years ago. And then also some other trips during things like zombie dust and just this full introduction to those beers and then also finding the occasional bootleg heavy topper cans at New York bar. So that was all around 2010, 11, 12 and that's kind of where the love of and chasing beer started as far as from a drinking standpoint. And so you started home brewing that on the side. Yep, I was living in New York in thanksgiving time 2011 flew back home to visit my parents in Iowa. And one of our family friends had talked to my mom and she said, you know, I know that Dan and his brother Eric love drinking beer, but do they want to see how it's made? I'm a home brewer and I'm going to make a batch on Black Friday of a Shor's beer. I didn't even know what a Shor's beer was, but I thought, all right, sounds like a good time. So that was one of our family friends in Marty. We went out to Marty's garage, brewed on his Blickman system for the first time and this is again 2011 and drank way too many beers and afterwards me and my brother looked at each other and thought, man, that was a lot of fun. So Google, the brewing equipment ended up on Northern Brewer's website, ordered the full kit, a couple of extract batches of founders breakfasts out and a planiklone and had them shipped to my parents house. I went back to New York and the meantime all the stuff arrived came back for. Christmas, we brewed both beers and that was it. We were hooked. Man, so you were beer nerd and homebrew and homebrewing then I imagine it went back to New York City with you, but then you come back to the this part of the world. Yep, around 2012, 13-ish. I had spent well over 100% of the money I had made in New York, which wasn't much on good times and no regrets. And it was time being young and broken New York City was awesome for me. I imagine it was awesome for you. Then we had kids and I can't, I don't know, being broke with kids in New York City really is not awesome. And so anyway, there was the next phase to that life. Exactly. Yep. It was old and rich in New York City is also awesome. I haven't experienced that yet. But the same. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. Not sure I will, but but young and broke was definite. That was experienced and it was great. But the real world came calling. So I had met a lot of contacts in the photo world thought, you know what? My lease is up. By the way, we were living in sort of a bootleg or department. It was one of those Brooklyn Bushwick warehouses where your building owner said, if the fire marshal's outside, don't open the door and you're paying a guy cash. And I had to drywall my own bedroom when I moved in. So one of those type of places, but you're old apartment is now renting for $4,000 a month. And I was paying 850. Yeah. So yeah, that neighborhood is crazy now. I was just in Bushwick last year just insane to see it. Yep. Yep. It is. So I could great. Great. He's over there now. There are. There was a lack of a lack of a lack of them then for sure. It was just sipping on six point resin and some other East Coast beers. But anyways, I moved back to Iowa and got more into the home brewing found home in Omaha because I was kind of sick of living in small town. Iowa. It's like, all right. Well, if I'm going to do this photo thing here, I need to have actual clients and an airport that has convenient flights to go elsewhere for these jobs and move to Omaha eventually got a house and then really upgraded the home brewing equipment. So that's kind of where it all went. And this was all inspired by another trip out to New York afterwards. Probably around 2014 or 15. I don't remember off the top of my head. It was summer and some guys were telling me, hey, we know you like beer, but this new brewery opened down by Gwannis and it's called other half. You should check it out. So maybe a few of you are familiar with it, but I hopped on the train. Never heard of them. Yeah. Yeah. Small, small little joint hopped on the train, walked down to the eight million stairs you do when you get there, passed the McDonald's and went into the smallest tap room I've ever been in had one foresighted picnic table, a few taps and a chalk beer list. And it was the absolute best. And I can still remember it exactly just because it inspired so many things when I was going home to home brew. And it was like that was sort of what changed things as far as like, all right, there's something to this. And the vibe was just, you know, maybe it was high AVV beers too, but that combination just kind of started my brain working too. There's nothing like this where I live. How do you make it happen? Yeah. That the flavor that they were finding in this kind of hazy IPA canvas. It's truly extraordinary, but also felt so fresh and so new. And yet they also had this kind of New York aesthetic and it was cool without trying to be cool. You know, just can't try too hard on that. It just has to like feel worn and natural and cool. And you know, that old tiny little tap room, which I did a podcast with Sam and there many, many years ago, you know, it was just such a awesome little like felt like you were discovering this, you know, this place in the middle and this strange little neighborhood in New York. And that's just a great place to go. I think it's a great place to go. of a lack of control with temperature for the most, you know, the equipment's getting better all the time. I haven't looked at it in a while, but even near the end of my home brewing with companies like SS Brutech and all these other ones that were introducing glycol chillers for, you know, your basement. And these type of things, that control is coming to be more prevalent within the home brewing, but there's other things you, like you can't go by hyperboost from YCH on a home brewing level, because you would need like two drops of it. So, you know, there's just things like that that don't exist. That commercial brewers are privy too. So it is tough, and at that time, you know, it's like figuring out which yeast drain and these type of things. So I was brewing with a lot of 13, 18, and just any of those London strains trying to put this puzzle together, and obviously got it to a point where I felt comfortable enough to make the next step. The other thing was I never worked at a brewery. So, you know, going to open a brewery, you don't know what you don't know. One of the things I did once deciding to open the brewery was I emailed many breweries who I really respected, both from a beer standpoint, a vibe standpoint, or just technique. And it was, it was saying, if you were to open again, I'm an open a brewery. If you were to open again, knowing what you know now, what 10 tips would you give? And there, everybody I emailed, emailed me back within it. I was shocked. Some of them were, you know, 10 paragraph long emails of sloped floors, which by the way, don't have. You just walk through a puddle in the back because our building's 120 years old. But all these things that I could just go through my check-listing deck. All right, I don't even know what this is, but I need to figure it out because we're in the construction phase of renovating 120-year-old building into a brewery, but I've never worked at a brewery. So, just figuring all that stuff out, and then that was before ever even making a beer commercially because the first beer we ever made, or I ever made on a commercial system, was here. So, it's just, again, you don't know what you don't know, but at the same time, the passion was there, creativity was there, and the like, I'm going to do this attitude was definitely there. And I always tell people the brewery was kind of built on return flight daydreams. So, it was all these trips around and I always carve out time to visit local breweries wherever I went. And then that flight back was always like taking little nuggets from each of those places and just storing them in my head someplace for knowing that like if this ever happens, there's going to be these little oeds to those experiences that pop up within whatever I eventually do. And here we are. Sure, what are your 10 tips to someone who's thinking about or planning on starting a brewery? Well, Slope Flores are definitely one of them. Do as I say, not as I did. Yeah, exactly. You learn the wisdom, you see why they recommended it to. Yeah, totally. And I think having a manageable size, so whether you want to be a, I feel like there's two sizes of breweries in 2026 that work. Either really small ones like us for context, we have a five barrel brew house with the oversized mash done and we have eight tanks, a mixture of fives and tens. We put out 500 barrels a year there about and almost all of it is sold out of the tap room. One of the things we did early on that absolutely saved us just from a sales standpoint was bought a canning line. There's all these smaller canning lines now and within the first year, it was on my like five year plan. Oh yeah, by a canning line. But that first year was we were making crowlers of everything and it was miserable. Quality, you know, they last like two seconds. Some of your bar staff isn't so great at filling them and making sure the quality is there. So buying that canning line, all of a sudden our sales just absolutely skyrocketed. So it was finding something that was manageable. When you got here today, you saw us running the canning line. We did 70-some cases of cans today and I ran all of them through myself. Dominic here labeled all of them on the back end and you can do that. That was something I definitely recommend. But then also just it was a semi manual process, but you know that the canner is good. It's three head canner and so your throughput worked and with two people managing it with a manual labor laborer putting each can on the little roller like you know I get you were still able to do that with two people. It's definitely a thing and then you know from other tips of someone trying to open it's just also we're in a day and age where there's so many breweries that you have to be really good at whatever style you choose. And I have other friends or homebrew customers who bring in beer and they're like oh I really want to open a brewery and I'm not going to discourage anyone because I'm that's not kind of how I am it's always you can do whatever whatever you want to do but you just got to make sure you're good at what you do and not be delusional. So you know find the right people to give you the feedback that you need to to be successful but then also make sure whatever like I said there's what 10,000 some odd breweries right now in the United States. So the customer's palette is very refined because there's so many options. So if you're going to do it you you better do something that stands out and stands up to that quality because we're at that point where I get an email every week from there's a brew bid auction this week because this place is closing or that place and and that's you know that's sad because someone's dream is dying but at the same time that's just the reality of business. So you have to you have to deal with it. So I think as long as if you're going to go for it just make sure what you're making stands out and that it it stands you apart from a quality standpoint. Yeah and and I think that again whatever mode you choose depends on where you are and what those circumstances are if you are in an urban environment where there's a competitive brewery you know mark there's other choices or breweries then you know what we are seeing more often in this kind of challenging brewery environment is the breweries that aren't people's first or second choice are getting hit the hardest. Yeah totally. And so how do you become that first or second choice you know if you're the only brewery in town it's a different mode for you right you know until until there's another one you do need to serve everybody and yet then you get into a competitive city like Denver we're in there's 75 breweries in the city of Denver like how do you become meaningful and and matter and get people to continue to come out to you over and over again you know rather than just bouncing around and trying a much different things and so you've done that again by focusing deeply on this style of haze IPA with this goal of and and not just a goal of of making award winning metal winning noteworthy moving the needle at a national and international level versions of these beers. So why don't we go through you know from you start commercial commercially brewing talk to me about how you dialed in your approach to haze IPA what you discovered now in this commercial world what that allowed you to do with brewing this vision that you had for haze IPA that was going to be there was going to reflect Lumen. Yeah I think one of the the main things is trying to it's sort of a checklist of you need the first is the visual appeal so how do you make a beer that looks the way you want it to look you know a haze IPA pale color some of some of the ones we make first in terms of time in the way that somebody you know is experienced it not yes not first in terms of the most a single no no important yeah we're going if if someone pours you a glass of beer the first thing you're doing you see it I can just see a brew out there that's not the most important thing is not how it looks you know like no no we're not talking about that it's definitely not and and that actually happens where we have beers where things happen and it might look slightly different we've we've learned that you know certain hops make a haze IPA look different like if you're dry hopping a beer heavily with mosaic it's not going to look the same as if you're dry hopping a beer fully with New Zealand hops and those are things where the visual people get stuck on but the flavor is fantastic so there is getting past that and then at aroma like what do you mean by what is that kind of visual difference with in terms of hops that you use from our experience if you were to do 100% mosaic dry hop haze IPA it would have a very light haze so you know it's not that milky creamy light golden pale yellow look it is a it's a beer that's probably slightly darker in color you can almost see through it if you really you know if you held a flashlight up to it but the aroma is fantastic and mosaic is a great hop but people just get stuck on these things whether it's untapped or Instagram you have the haze chasers and the haze boys and all these these people that get stuck on those things and right or wrong it doesn't matter it's just selling beer and making beer it's not milky and pay and the pay list it can possibly be then it's certainly not worth hype chasing yeah and the beer we can today is checks all those boxes a 10% triple IPA collab that you couldn't see through it with a you know thousand lumens flashlight so it's it's it's thick but I see what you did there I didn't even mean to that that just happened because that's what our flashlight is um but uh yeah so so going for that you know you have your visual you have your aroma and it's sort of like a g a bf checklist too of of what the judges go through when you get those notes which we can talk about that as well but uh then obviously after that it's all about the flavor so whether it's the actual body and mouthfeel of the beer to the bitterness to the you know final gravity or residual sweetness and those type of things and then the finish with stringency or lack thereof, it's building recipes that check different boxes for different people. And the beers were brewing our World Beer Cup beers right now. And those will be much different than a beer that I want to make on top drops on Instagram. They're just a different audience. And the thing is about it, we don't brew one type of hazy IPA. This is not the Lumen hazy IPA. We brew different, depending on our mood or what we're going for, there's these different segments within hazy IPA. And it's not just ABV, there's that too. But just different segments and different styles within the style. And we brew all those. And we can get into that because I have a whole stack of recipe sheets. And while the general idea is the same, the sub ideas are very different. Dan, you have just set me up for a topic that I have wanted to talk about so much. And so I'm not going to let this one go. We are going to get into a wait a second, sub styles of hazy IPA. Wait, you're talking about there's a difference between what the dudes on on tap are checking in with 4.6s versus what World Beer Cup judges are giving gold medals. Crazy that all of this kind of breadth could exist out there and that you as a brewery could maybe not just approach it as a singular kind of thing with only one style, but have different things that fit different people. You've got a hazy IPA for that guy that wants to come in here and drink two or three after a hard day of work. And you've got a hazy IPA that someone's going to want to come in and drink a four ounce taster of four of them in order to check them all in on an tapped and impress their friends because all of those things can exist. And guess what? There's nothing wrong with that. Anyway, I want to dig into what these kind of sub styles are and some of these kind of schools of hazy IPA that you know as you guys think about them. 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Folks like video Natalie of Russian river been from breakside Henry need you're out of munkish Kelsey from north park Whitney from Grandfur, Sean from Lawson's finest and more. This year we'll be brewing under the binds at bail breaker. It's sure to be an unforgettable experience. Yeah come brew with me come brew with all of us tickets are on sale now going fast to brewers retreat dot com. All right Dan let's we've got to talk about this because I love this idea that there's not just one model of haze IPA for you. In fact you know for you there's like a lot of different models there are more sessionable approaches there are kind of like cleaner and tighter hop expressions in haze IPA that are definitely geared towards just a general craft drinker. You know maybe some kind of American hops that don't aren't necessarily quite as like fruit forward and then there is just the these saturated just monstrously big and thick you know kinds of beers that then are going to get out there and get out there in the trading world. But but let me not put words into your mouth when you guy when you think about some of the like lanes and tears and sub styles of haze IPA how do they line up in your mind. Yeah they sort of break down two different ways. The more obvious one is a B.V. so you know you have your sessions and I feel like we're to that time now where there's a large audience there's a lot of people who just don't drink anymore and pursue other other ways to get there if you will. But at the same I know what you're talking about. I don't know if we're in Nebraska we better not talk about it like my bust in the door. I'm in Colorado I don't know if I find that the whole like you know cannabis versus beer thing is a giant I think people are in a general health and wellness standpoint like I mean like me I'm getting older I don't drink as much as I did 10 years ago like you know I'm over 50 now and you know I still love beer I just you know it's just not drinking the same kind of quantity that I once did. Yeah and that's probably a good choice and also fair and and popular. So there's you don't have to have this sacrifice of flavor when it comes to a lower A.B.V. beer because if you do it right you can pack all that flavor in there and one of the things we learned from G.A.B.F. and World Beer Cup from the notes and a lot of people you know they they say take the notes with a grain of salt but what we do is look for through lines and it's like all right there might be one judge says this in the next judge notes has the exact opposite. All right we're going to disregard that but if you get multiple that's why we also enter six to seven beers of almost the same style so for World Beer Cup by the way I didn't know this one I started it just happened we make a hoppy beer so we entered six beers into G.A.B.F. last year and by entering six beers of similar style the notes come back similar and we realized that we were letting our beers sit on yeast too long so it was like oh these these notes like these terms that they're giving us on the notes all come back to that so we totally changed how we how we were doing our fermentation and when we were lowering you know dropping yeast and all that started doing that everything changed as far as those notes going away and then fast forward a year for World Beer Cup the notes are totally different we win two metals and there's a different set of notes but they're more based around this stringency so it's like well stringency is you know more of a polyphenolic character that we're getting from the dry hop how do we change that and that's where these smaller beers started to come about because the stringency is very prevalent in a 3.2% beer if you're not careful when you're dry hopping at over four pounds per barrel and a lot of that comes from time and temperature so with the sub-sector talking about now of hazy IPA we're talking about sessionable hazes that are packed with flavor and one of the things we package on Thursdays and we also package on Mondays so we used to dry hop on like a Friday or Saturday route we were dry hopping warm with just jackets off 70 degrees then rousing the tank coming in Sunday rousing the tank again so Saturday afternoon dry hop rouse Sunday rouse and then crash the tank and then leaving the beer on those hops cold until Thursday morning packaging and I thought man we're getting these notes like I can taste it but I don't mind the green green flavor sure sure but if you're trying to win a metal and you have green in your beer you're not getting very far so was you know doing a little research reading up listen to more podcasts and finding out like all right this is stringencies coming from a off balance of polyphenolic issues that are coming from the beer sitting on hops too long and also maybe too warm so then we started dry hopping beers on Friday but packaging Monday and we're dry hopping a little bit colder only letting them sit on the hops and we do unit tanks so we're not moving things to bright tanks like these are it gets dry hopped on a Friday afternoon we're rousing that beer once with CO2 for about a minute at 30 psi through the racking arm and then Saturday I'm coming in putting about 12 psi of head pressure on that beer and crashing it halfway down then coming in again crashing at the rest of the way to 38 degrees we don't crash too cold because they don't want everything to fall out and then carbonating on a Sunday packaging on Monday morning so it was like taking multiple days like two three days off of the contact time on the lower ABB beers and all the sudden the beers were canning on Monday we could drink Monday afternoon it was like oh wow these there is none of that that is stringency it's all gone and it's just all hopped forward like clean clean beer and that's what we started doing with the lower ABB stuff so that was a game changer as far as the strip holds on then all the way you know because time when we were talking about hazy IPA in particular you know is such a factor and you know especially with hoppy beer and competition judging you are not always thinking about the beer that you can drink the day that you're done canning it you're thinking about the beer that a judge is going to drink four to six weeks after that point you know if you're lucky and you know like figuring out how to get it to peak then you know in that kind of judging time frame you know it's also a challenge yeah and I think that's totally spot on and I think one of the things is for some reason a lot of that is stringency doesn't seem to leave if those hops are trapped in the can they might even be giving off more of that polyphenolic burn not to mention depending on how they pour it they you know they ask you do you want us to rouse the can or pour it still quiet but there's only so much to that that's under control and we Thank you. that just getting less of that into the cans is one thing, but also just having less contact time on that giant dry hop load is important. And then also doing it slightly colder. So rather than doing it at 70 degrees, we're doing that at 64. It also helps with the yeast harvest, but that's another story. And we're not finding that the peak of when they judge it, let's say they judge it 30 days later is part of the issue. That's more like that's more of an oxygenation packaging contest, as a lot of people say. So it's controlling that aspect of it. So we're very, we do submit all of our cans for competition off of our canning line, but I totally reset the canning line to different purge times. And we're watching, you know, Phil had one might be the one we go with and those type of things. But as far as a low ABB sessionable beer, that's kind of the strategy. And then we can get into the, to the malt bill and all that stuff. Yeah, I'm curious about that. Like, you know, you're dropping four pounds per barrel into a three point something percent hazy IPA. Like that feels like that could get out of whack and out of balance really fast. Although, as you now mentioned it, I think there is something to this idea of colder, shorter contact that lets you drive more intensity in the desirable hop flavors that you want without picking up some of the, the same kind of intensity out of some of the less desirable hop characters that you don't want in there. So there is something to that where I think, you know, keeping that balance in the right place and like turning up the volume just on the right notes that you want, you know, without getting picking also picking up some of that background noise that's going to be distracting. It can be pretty important there. But in general, it's also easy in this kind of beer. If it doesn't have a full mouth feel to feel like like, and also, you know, some residual sweetness, but not too much because we're also still talking about beers that are going to be judged by other brewers. And, you know, those beers can't be sweet just to build some idea body. So how do you, how do you build a heft in these small beers that can support that kind of intense hop fillabor? Yeah. So I'm looking at a brews sheet right now for puff our 3.2 percent hazy people seem to love it. We love it here. And that beer is only 40 percent based malt. So on a 5 barrel batch, it's two bags of Gambrinis pills, two bags of flaked oats, and a half a bag of chip. And that's it. So it's 40 percent based malt. And people are like, how do you do, you know, how are you running that beer off and don't you, we do use bio gluconase or glucobuster or any of those products. We don't use rice holes, only in stouts. We've only had issues with rice holes. So we've kind of avoided that and we can talk about issues with rice holes. Well, it's just, it's not necessarily that they're, we found that they don't give us anything. So we just avoid using it. We can get into kind of how we use Simpson's malted oats that have the whole still intact on the bigger beers. That's not in this particular beer. But like I said, 40 percent based malt, 40 percent flaked oats, and about a 10 percent chip. So we've got the gris bill on our 3.2 percent hazy. The other thing is we're 100 percent RO Omaha water is not conducive for brewing. So we're, we're looking for around 180 ppm of chloride. We build that up through calcium chloride and then just straight picklings or table salt and ACL. And then our sodium levels are around 40, calcium's around 60 and then our sulfates are zero on that beer. We're putting zero gypsum. So it is zero. So it is straight, NACL and calcium chloride. And that's it. We do target a 5.2 pH on every beer no matter what. And we're hitting that through a combination of those salts and then phosphoric acid. And that's a mash pH. A mash pH. Yep. So we're using 70, 75 percent whatever they sell on BSG of phosphoric acid. And that's going in the mash. We're not adding any salt whatsoever to the sparge, the kettle. It's all going in the mash. And then we're shooting for a first run or a first running's pH of 5.2. And the beta gluconase enzyme is the thing that makes this crazy mash work for you. Since we started using that NACON wood, we've had zero issues. Like all run offs are we run everything off at about 2.5 gallons per minute from the laudertone or from the kettle mashed into the kettle and it keeps everything smooth. So near the end of our mash, we'll throw in about 60 milliliters of glucose buster and let it, you know, for the last 15 minutes of the mash stir in and mix in. And the other thing is our mash temp is really high. It's 158 degrees on that 3.2 percent beer. So our strike water is around 170. So we're mashing at 155. Obviously a high protein grist. We do a 90 minute boil on every beer we brew here, no matter what. Every single beer is 90 minutes. High calcium chloride. Just to increase your energy costs. Yeah, because we have an electric brew kettle. So I love paying OPPD even more money than necessary. With no insulation in this old building, I just, I love spending all that money to them. It's great. But no, why 90? For one, a lot of our other, a lot of our other beers are 100 percent pilsner malt. So I'm a little bit, you know, there's those off flavors that come about with the shorter boils and I'm sensitive to that. We have a lot of customers and friends who are too. So it was like, you know what, we're not in a hurry. Let's just get there 90 minutes plus it makes our post-boil volumes pretty predictable with boil off and all that. So we always know what we're dealing with. Oftentimes with these lower ABB beers, we do end up adding RO back into the whirlpool. Just top it off a little bit because they are more efficient despite the heavy amount of oats. And we have it. Most I'm looking right now are a mash efficiency on one of those beers is 71 percent. So it's not great, but it's not terrible. And a five barrel batch that's sold out of your tap room, you can manage that. You can manage it. Yeah, it's not a big deal. So that's kind of our approach for those smaller beers. The other thing I want to hit on is almost every beer we make no matter the ABB. This is part necessity and part just how it works out is we use three pounds in the whirlpool. So we can get into whirlpool hops and all that later. But we're not big on whirlpool hops. There's other things we add like dine to boost and hyperboost and those type of things. But based on clogging a heat exchange and other things, we are, you know, some of it might be cryo or T90, but we're a three pound whirlpool type of brewery and that's just kind of where we sit. Three pounds total or three pounds total. You okay? Yep. On a five barrel batch. Right. Yep. And like I said, we can get we can get into that whirlpool temperature. Let's talk about that since it's already there. Why are, you know, while the rest of the brewing world is like pushing everything into the whirlpool that they possibly can, taking it out of hot side. And, you know, are you instead also doing anything further up in the hot side process to add different kinds of layers of hop character? Or are you pushing it all then to cold side? So as far as hazy, and I know we only talked about the low ABB and we can get into the bigger stuff because people want to hear that. Yeah. Let's do that too. And the lower ABB is just straight three pounds of T90. So usually that's mosaic, citra, simco or Nelson. Those are our whirlpool hops. So any beer that is, let's say, under six percent gets just straight three pounds of T90. And it's a cool pool. So we're cooling it down to 170. We do a 20 minute whirlpool and a 20 minute rest. That's all those beers get. Once we get above that six percent threshold, that's when we start adding in other YCH products like dine boost and hyper boost. So let's say a beer is between six and seven. That beer will get the same three pounds of T90. And then, but before we do that, we'll send over 25 gallons or a barrel into the fermenter hot. This is a North Park trick. In fact, we still write a whole calcium ignare. Do you see this note on this? You can read that out loud. In P style, I believe that was a evident green cheek saying that he used that and I was like, I'll just write that because then I'll know what it means. So that beer happened to get 25 gallons of hot work sent over to the tank beforehand and we'll do dine boost. And I got ahead of myself there. So some of those beers like six to seven percent, we'll do that normal whirlpool and when we send them over with our yeast pitch, we'll add a certain amount of hyper boost. So typically for us on a five barrel batch, we do everything in grams. That'll be 20 grams of whatever variety we want. So three pounds of T90 hops, 20 grams of hyper boost with the yeast pitch. And we found that we use hyper boost. We've used it all over late in the process, early in the process. When we use it late like with the dry hop or even after it, we get this waxy characteristic and the beers take about an extra 10 days to be what I would say is enjoyable or where I want them to drink for people to not be just being like, woo. Okay, that's intense. I want our beers to come off the canning line for one, we don't have a lot of storage. So I want them to come off the canning line and right into the cooler and adding that hyper boost in with the yeast pitch. Let's it round out. The beers that are over 7% get that dine boost and that's where we do the dip hop send the hot word over. We'll add anywhere from 250 grams of dine boost into directly into the tank with the hot word. That'll sit there for the 40 minutes that the rest of the word is whirlpooling. Those beers still get three pounds of T90 and then once we get to the next step bigger let's say over 8.5% ABV. We'll start to add one bitering addition but it's not actually hops we use flex from Hoss. So we'll use 20 grams of flex as a 10 minute addition which gives us around 25 IBU kick because it sits in there for the 40 minutes of whirlpool as well and then we'll do that same dine boost addition and then if we're making something really big we'll switch out those three pounds of T90 for a cryo just to get that little kick little more oil little less vegetable matter but just to up but basically what happens is the the hop damn in our kettle is not great and our heat ex is sensitive to hop troops so we don't want to clog it up and have to wait forever to knock out a beer so that's kind of the strategy and that was definitely a trial and error type of thing where three pounds is just the sweet spot and whether it's cryo or T90 that's it so yeah that's kind of the strategy when it comes to a whirlpool and you know you you did mention how people think whirlpool hops are are this or that we've tried six seven pounds in there and on the back and we drink the beer and I'm like I I can't perceive a difference and at the end of the day I'd rather save the hops for the dry hop where we're getting all the aromatic qualities and I can control that then on the front end we're noticing no lack of hop saturation most of its made up from the oils anyways which were adding via hyper boost and those products so that's kind of our strategy and it seems to be working yeah it talked to me a little bit about fermentation and of course then I want to also get back to this subject we teased at the top about how you then select or you know get track some of these hops from year to year but but let's talk about fermentation so we can just get that out of the way yeah so we 90% of our hazies are fermented with Lollamon Verden so all dry yeast really why so what what we found we tried yeast from you know all the London strains you can think of fresh pitches and all that and the characteristics we got from the Verden just seemed to check all the boxes for us as far as what we were looking for the other thing is it started off as price we were I didn't so not working at a brewery before means you also don't necessarily know how to harvest yeast you also don't know how to see IP properly or do all sorts of things but that's a whole another story but one of the things was we were just one off pitching these liquid fresh pitches for four hundred dollars a pitch plus shipping and handling and on a five barrel batch that is not conducive to making money so someone turned us actually was some friends out east turned us on to Lollamon Verden one of the things that we do is we buy a brick for 160 bucks right 500 gram brick we then brew one of our small beer so a beer under 5.5 percent and we use a half a brick so we break that into half we pitch in 250 grams and we're getting four generations out of each pitch so we're getting eight generations out of each brick so we build that as we go so the first beer is something under five and a half percent the next beer something under six and a half percent the next beer something under eight and the last pitch is a big beer and it you know it makes each yeast pitch around twenty dollars which then it's not saving the brewedy money because I blow it all on hops but the idea is there that we're not just blowing all the money on yeast and we found a yeast that's conducive to our our style we like the finishing gravity and as those generations pass there's not there's not a big difference in the aroma or characteristics of flavor but there is in the final gravity and that's very conducive to having a 3.2 beer finish at say three and a half play though and then having the beer on the fourth gen say an 8.5% beer finished closer to five and a half play though so it just builds its way up you get stronger pitches we do use zinc yeah with the first the first pitch we use 65 grams of zinc from white labs with every pitch no oxygen it's just straight dry yeast every pitch thereafter we're using we do a 10 a 10 minute three liters per minute oxygen hit on the tank we use 65 grams of zinc and no nutrient and that's that seems to be working out for us and that's pretty much how we do we do experiment with other yeast one of the beers you're drinking right now was with a BSI a BSI strain that's a colab beer and we'll mess around with other stuff because we're always experimenting but that verdant law the lamin verdant is kind of our go to house haze yeast sure sure and it has some some real benefits yeah and one other note we're we're pitching all those at 69 degrees we're leaving it under 70 for 24 hours and then we're letting it free rise up into the low 70s we'll say 72 to 74 depending on the beer one quick note we have a beer that turns out to be a fan favorite it's called green mask so 8.5% hazy and interesting story with that is it's always the last pitch because we had a power outage the first time we ever made the beer I come in in the morning I got a notification overnight that our internet was off security cameras were off about 2 a.m. we had just pitched yeast you know 4 o'clock that afternoon I thought oh this is bad so I come in that yeast is absolutely ripping through that beer the tank is physically warm to the touch because the chillers off because no power that tank was at 79 degrees within 12 14 hours of pitching and I think all right well we just wrecked a beer that's a pretty big beer but it's not dry hop yet so not the end of the world so I take a sample I think this isn't bad it actually tastes oddly good email a few people in the brewing world to see you know what am I what should I be looking for we just keep letting the beer ferment out and it is so fruity and so good that green mass became it's an all-new zealon-top double hazy and now we just breeder right now every time we brew that beer we just turn the jackets off after a day of fermentation and that use goes down the drain at the end of the deal but we just let it get up to like 78 degrees every time so it was a happy accident but it's definitely a profile for that specific beer but that burden can even crush it even even have really high temperatures yeah yeah it was it was going strong and and we just we just brewed the beer last week it's done for mending but it's that's the only beer we do that with everything else gets capped around 73 degrees interesting interesting let's uh I want to let's talk about hops a little bit you know so we talked to you know you talked to the top about how you're a small brewery 500 barrels like you're not doing you know you are using a shit ton of hops and so like you are still using quite a large volume given the scale of beer that's produced here because of what your folks done but that's not generally an amount that's going to give you like high priority in terms of selection you know you knew making hazy IPA focusing on hazy IPA and what and having an aspiration to make some of the best hazy IPA you possibly could make that getting the best quality hops was of incredibly high importance for you and so figuring out how to do that as a small brewery was an interesting challenge but you've tried to harness data your own sensory data your own reactions responses keeping track of that against some of the chemical data from some of these lots talk to us about how you track those things together to try to profile for yourself what exactly you're looking for in terms of balance of oils of total oil content and of general intensity of hops in the specific kinds of you know high point components that you're looking for yeah so early on we were buying everything on spot small brewery just open no contracts I didn't even know what a contract was we're just buying everything on spot and you know you think I'm gonna order a box of citra and you brew some beers you think all right it's pretty good then you order another box of citra and you think what what happened I I'm racking my brain I did the exact same process but this beer is not the beer that I brewed two months ago and the more you start looking into it you realize that there are these huge differences not all citra is just citra there's so many differences within within each variety you know whether that's it's an agricultural product so from lot to lot year to year you get something that's totally different and it wasn't until I had some friends let me use some hops from some of the bigger breweries that get get a very preferential selection and got to got to see what what the big boys use for citra and thought all right this is different you got a taste of the good stuff and then you got hooked to that yep and then all you got to do is figure out how to get it so we had a few meetings with with folks from YCH you know they actually came to visit and it was great just just happened to be in town and I had some questions you know it's like hey we get this we got this bag of citra and I don't love it but how do we get something that's more consistent it wasn't even good or bad it was just consistency and they were telling us well for one if you contract out your hops you can get these allocations that are a lot specific you can figure out exactly what you want the profiles you want and we have these tools online where you can see what our sensory team has filled out these the spider charts as far as this one's mostly tropical or this one's more woodier. Whatever, whatever thing you're looking for, that opened the door for, you know, more investigation. And with anything I do, brewing was a hobby, golf's a hobby, I take all these things and just run them into. They're not hobbies anymore. They're not even fun. I just take them, I have to know everything and go fall out. And that's what happened with the hops. It's like, well, this is one of the maiden gradients of this beer and what's making it what it is. So how do I get the best of the best? And, you know, YCH was super helpful. Also, the people at freestyle and just getting us some great Rahuacca, Nelson and those hops that we use a lot. But then it was kind of the why. Okay, I get, we're getting this hop that they say is 100 on the tropical scale, but what is even making it be tropical? And that's where the chemistry comes in. So it was learning a lot about all the different survivable compounds. And for us, that we're using so little on the hot side, survival wasn't necessarily what I was worried about. It was more just the chemistry in general. So, you know, you get these, you look up the lot, look up tool and you look up hops in general. And there's all these chemical names and all the science that's involved. And it's breaking down. All right, what part of this is actually important or do I need to look for? So there was tons of research talking to other brewers, talking people within the hop world, a lot of time on the internet reading books. And all that stuff, even talking to people since then outside of the beer world who are in perfumes and food flavoring, who deal with terpenes and other type of things and being like, what is actually important to get these flavors? Because if you have a tropical smelling perfume, it's not like they squeezed a mango into the jar. It's made through chemistry. So how do you get there? So it was breaking down. What was important to me? And that's high amounts of lean a little methyl geranate, geranial, and three MH, which is a thial driving compound within the hops. And that's something we'll use more in the whirlpool interacts with the yeast and so on. So it was kind of looking for these three these three compounds in general, lean a little, it's my favorite, methyl geranate and geranial. So just finding hops that were high in those as far as a ppm standpoint. But then from there, it was figuring out how those ppm standpoint rather than yeah. So with YCH and a lot of hop companies, everything is tested and then they come back with ppm, which part's for millions. So you're looking for grams per kilogram. And then you're also trying to figure out what the threshold is. So what's the minimum I need to put in this beer? And for anybody who's heavily dry hopped a beer, you open the tank afterwards and it looks like a large chunk of the hops never even got touched by the liquid. So then you're thinking, what of this, how soluble is this and what even got hit? So how much does do I need to make a difference? And what also blew off in the process? How volatile are these compounds? So you have some of the bad compounds like mercine. So volatile, it's not even worth looking at because most of it leaves the tank. So again, it came back to those three. Which is the danger of looking at total oil versus looking at these concentrations of specific oils in that process? It's exactly. So it's the danger of looking at two things. One, only total oil and also only sensory because someone could put a spider graph of sensory in front of you. And it says, this beer is zero earthy, grassy or vegetal. And it's 100 tropical citrus and berry. And you're thinking, oh, this is going to be a fruit bomb. But then the total oil is 1.0. And it's like, all right, well, there's not actually the hop when you rub it might smell like those things. But there's not much of that in there to make it into the beer. And then you look at the science side and you see that the leaner lule is like 50 ppm, which is really low. So there's hardly even enough to break the threshold once you get into solubility that even though that hop smells great in between your palms, it doesn't actually make it into the beer because there's not enough oil. Or you need to use so much, you would end up with like two gallons of beer because you would soak up all the rest. On the same side as to what you alluded to with total oil, some of the oil content is just bad stuff that blows off or you don't want. And you could see a beer T90 hop that has 3.0 total oil, which is really high. But again, the compounds we're looking for, or methylgheronate, leadolule, and gerennial are all, you know, sub 100. And that beer is going to give you nothing but grass or nothing, or again, soak up a lot of beer. So it's being educated on what you're looking for. And then also how that drives the flavor you're looking for and that combinations of sensory and chemistry. And then also what profile you're looking for as a brewery. So, for instance, for this year, we contract not, we're a five barrel brewery, so we don't have a lot of hops. But we split up our lot selection into multiple lots. So we have 10 boxes of citra of this particular variety, 10 boxes of that, and 10 boxes of another because slice our flagship IPA might be more of a citrus driven thing, where I want more of a tropical for some of our other brands. And then maybe I want to mess around and have something that's a little more funky on the woody herbal side for something else. And people think herbal and bad, but if you look at any citrus profile, herbal is pretty high in all of them. So it's just knowing what you're looking for and then knowing how to read the data to be able to select because when you get a number of lots from YCH or any hop company, you're going to get that data and it's not being overwhelmed and also not just looking at sensory. It's like, well, how much of this chemistry is affecting it? And the answer is it's a lot. And that leads us to selection as well. This was the first year we actually got to travel out for selection. And being that we literally buy the minimum amount of a certain t90 hop to even be invited, it puts you in pod selection. And again, shout out to YCH for being awesome, like just the best hosts giving you all the information. But one thing about pod selection that was, you know, you're trying to figure out why they're giving you the lots they're giving you. So when you're a small brewery like us, you're picking out citrus or main hop. We buy the most of it by far and we go out to YCH and we get to sit in front of three lots. So you're thinking three, but you know there's way more than that because there's all these breweries. So you think, why did you pick these three for me? And for us, we've always been very, very fond. There's millions and millions of pounds of it grown in North America. Over four different states. Right. And then across, you know, not just YCH obviously, you know, Haas as well. Yeah. Yeah. There's just this large. That's howling berry and all these all these brokers and companies. And for us, it was, you know, we, we tend to gravitate and this just happened towards Oregon grown Citra. And at our selection this year, there wasn't an Oregon grown Citra. So then it, it made me start to question even more things because that's what I like to do. Drive myself nuts doing it is, okay, you said you picked these lots up for me. The last two years we've had Oregon grown Citra, why isn't there Oregon grown Citra? So, you know, a little frustrating, but at the same time, you can't just be, you know, all about that. You got to play the game. And I also get it. We by 30 boxes of Citra. We're tiny. There's breweries within seven hours here who buy 3000 boxes of Citra. If not more or entire lots, I get it. Like, but the only way you can kind of gain the, get the quality you want is by looking into it. And then studying the data and asking why, why does this happen as far as why did these hops smell like this or why do they affect the beer like this even more importantly? So we kind of found out that we're almost a select off paper type of brewery because there's something to be said for, there's something to be said for going and selecting hops. Like, it's a great experience and it's really fun. You get to be behind the scenes, see how everything goes, get the tours. I will do that every year. We're invited because it's just a great experience. But for us being so small and having that pot experience, it's almost beneficial to look at the paper and be educated on what you're getting and what's in front of you on the back end. And I should also say we selected Mosaic, Cryo and Citro-Cryo. Both of the lots we selected at Pot Selection were ones that we're using. So, you know, it's, it's not just a total. It did work, too. It did work. Yeah. It's just, I feel like knowing all, being as educated as possible is, is the best answer, especially if hoppy beers your main thing because hops are the ingredient that's driving the aroma and flavor. And it's just so important to me. Plus, I want to know why these things were happening as far as the interaction within the beer. But you as a customer, then, giving your wrap this kind of information. I am looking for Citro that has, you know, threshold of minimum of this, this, and this, and, you know, sensory that's going to map to this. Like, what do you have? You know, and even if you don't have enough to fulfill my entire order with this, you know, or there's some remnants of this, you know, of something that's going to fit this that's going that you can, you know, send my way. And like that, you know, you're an educated consumer at that point, buying hops, but giving them the information that you need for them, you know, to work, you know, to give you the best possible thing, you know, given what that is. Yeah. Totally. And even, and even things that are not measurable, like I said, we tend to, to trend towards Oregon ground citrus. or whether that's the Toar of the Oregon, we use like the last year we used all westwood. This year we're a mixture of westwood and lakeside. We've gotten a bunch of Coleman hops. So there's three farms that are all a stones throw from each other. And I don't know why we keep picking those. Obviously the chemistry says one thing, the sensory says one thing, but also they all happen to be from the same geographical area. So there's something to that as well. And for us it's been a relationship with the farm too. When we were out at Hoppe Selection, we met Max from Coleman, we met Ryan from westwood, we've sensed met the folks from lakeside. So it's kind of sending them beer, showing them what we make, letting them see the flavor profile. We're looking for also sending people beer in the mail doesn't hurt any relationship. So just having that. And then also kind of knowing like, okay, for some reason there's a trend here. I get the chemistry, I get the sensory, I don't understand the Toar. And I don't know that anybody can, but there's a theme. So it's just kind of knowing where your hops come from. And that could be same with New Zealand. It's like we tend to like certain Roacas over others. I don't exactly know why I've never been in New Zealand, but there's just a theme. So it's kind of studying that and finding those trends. Fastening, I'll have to ask you about your Roaca preferences after we wrap this up. But we need to bring this one to a close. And in terms of big picture, you've been doing Lumen for the last post pandemic time, it's a harder time compared to the 20 teens to get a brewery off of the ground. What do you hope for in the near term and the long term future for Lumen? This is a creative project, you're a creative person, but it's also a technical project and you love getting into the details of that. You've kept it small at this point in order to fill both sides of what this audience potentially is for Haze IPA, both a nerdy trader side as well as the kinds of people that are gonna come and saddle up and drink one or two or three after work on a Thursday. You know, and so what does the future look like for Lumen? What do you hope to achieve in the next three years, five years? - I mean, from the actual Omaha brewery standpoint, it's we have such a great customer base from a hospitality side. As you're gonna see here shortly at three o'clock, we have the same people walk in every day for a happy hour, we have the same people walk in before we close. It's just keeping and growing that customer base in those relationships because I know so many customers' names and they know me, they, my kids have literally, I have a three year old and a 10 month old, they're literally growing up in the brewery. So there's those relationships, so it's really fun, same with with our staff. We have a tight knit staff that doesn't change often. So it's just kind of keeping that sense of community within the building. And then on the beer side is just to keep experimenting and growing what's possible within the styles we brew. Again, whether it's the logger or stouts, but mostly West Coast and Hazy IPA. So those are kind of what my barometer for, you know, people will come in and say, "Give me your American Pills, "or 'cause I'm gonna judge the brewery by this." And I think that's my favorite brewery 'cause there's the least amount of hops involved. But at the same time, I go to a brewery. I'm like, what do you got? That's Hazy because that's how I'm judging the brewery is let's see how you made a Hazy and everybody's, they get it misguided and they think, "You just throw a bunch of hops in there." And yada yada yada. And obviously, we all know that's not true. It's a funny notion, but there's a lot more to it than that. So I think for us, as far as growth going forward, it's pushing those boundaries, using all these products that are always coming out, figuring out how to use them. And then I know we talked about it earlier, but from the standpoint of both competition and, you know, hype, you have that whole thing. It's brewing beers for everybody, you know, whether it's for a GABF judge, or the dude who's buying a flat to send it to New Jersey tomorrow. It's just brewing beers for different people, but within that category, that I love to drink as well. - And you can serve all of those people if you dial in beers and understand what they're looking for. And you can serve yourself on that side because all of these are interesting creative challenges that call on some different kind of elements in there. - Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that is a great place to bring this to a close. G&D's new Elite 290 Micro Series runs on a natural refrigerant with near zero global warming potential. Berkeley East Dry Tropics London offers their best selling liquid yeast strain with the ease of use of dry yeast. Pack-tex handles are made from 100% recycled plastic and are fully recyclable. The multi-layered wonders of Indy Hop Strata are now easier than ever for burgers to tap into with Strata Cryo. 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And if you're not all access to subscriber, we'll kick you a free ticket as well. Dan, if people wanna learn more about Lumen and the beer that you make here in Omaha, where can they find you both in real life and in the digital space? - In real life, we're in Little Bohemia neighborhood at Omaha down at 1433 South 13th Street, just south of downtown Omaha. And online pretty much just on Instagram. Just hit up the search and hit up Lumen Beer. You'll find us, I don't know our exact loop. I don't know our exact handle, Lumen Beer Co, maybe, but you'll find it. Those would be the two places I'd look. And that's pretty much it. - Crank up that Connor Obers, that Bright Eyes, that Desipeter Cedos, come rock out here in Omaha. There's a fun creative class and awesome kind of community of brewers that are all working together and all pushing and challenging each other and while also supporting each other to make awesome world class beer and award winning beer over and over and over again. Anyway, it's been great to talk to you about this cheers, Dan. - Yeah, thank you. (upbeat music) - This podcast has been brought to you by Craft Beer and Bring Magazine for those who love to make and drink great beer. To learn more, or to subscribe, visit beerandbring.com or find us on social media at Craft Beer Brew. (upbeat music) [BLANK_AUDIO]