416: Derrick Robertson of BreWskey Narrows His Hop Palette to Explore the Variations Within Varietals

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. We are in Canada for this episode, Monterey All, to be exact my first time in the city of Monterey All. And bringing me here to the city, there's a vibrant brewing scene and one that we've been paying attention to. Even if I go way back, it goes back to my early days in Craft Beer back in the 1990s when as we were seeking out when I was a young early 20s something, you know, beer drinker in Florida. One of the best craft beers, most interesting craft beers that we could get came from a place that I drove past this afternoon as I was driving up here in Yunabru. And, you know, and so this idea of craft beer here in Quebec has always been something that I've been intrigued by. And of course, in the recent years the brewing scene here in Quebec has absolutely exploded. Joining me for this episode is Derek Robertson from Bruski. Welcome to the podcast, Derek. Thank you very much. Derek's been sending beers our way to the magazine. If you're a magazine reader, you've probably seen those reviews. You probably saw their stout dandy last year in our beers of the year. And our best 20 beers, that is, picks up their best 20 beers of 2024. Congratulations on that, Derek. Thank you, you're going. Of course, the IPAs that you send our way regularly regularly show up in the magazine. And, you know, and you make some incredibly expressive beers while I was just down in Vermont earlier this week, I heard brewers in Vermont refer to the term Quebec style IPA. And, you know, the natural magazine editor in me always latches on to that kind of thing. So, naturally, what you in Vermont define as Quebec style IPA, we're going to answer that question over the course of this podcast. Of course, the IPAs that you send our way, whether they've been in the review, reviewed the magazine, or just been ones that I have tasted and drunk myself like the New Zealand Red and Gold series that you sent our way. Some really truly phenomenal beers been incredibly impressed with, you know, with that kind of space. And when I get here, you know, again, talking to brewers in this area, even one earlier today, they're like, Derek, oh, he's, he loves experimentation. He's got, he'll have his brewers just constantly experimenting and like, you know, bringing, you know, doing these tests and bringing the results of those. And as I tour this, you know, from the production brewery or brew pub, really, it's not a calling this a, this is a brew pub shoehorned into a historic building and calling it a production brewery is probably not going to do it as service. But, you know, in this space, you also have a small two barrel pilot system. You're engaged in all sorts of projects. We tasted everything from phonial logger earlier today, you know, to all of Phantasm, six pounds, per barrel, right? Phantasm, sour beer that I swear to God tasted like, like a had passion fruit in it would have been way cheaper to make it a passion fruit. But, you know, anyway, let me just set the stage for everybody because the experimentation runs pretty deep here. I am excited to talk to you about that. I'm excited to talk to you about the way you build expressive IPA that also has balance and also sweetness and also more balance finding it not just from bitterness, but from other kind of flavor components in those beers. I'm really excited to talk to you about some of those experimentation. Yeah, some of these projects that you're working on, you know, we tasted everything like we tasted a check dark logger brew with 3470 that hit a fermentation temperature of 80 degrees. And yet, somehow it didn't have off flavors and tasted clean and nice. And anyway, you're doing some cool stuff here. We're going to try to touch on as many of those things as we can in the hour that we have. It may not be enough time for, but we're going to try before we do that. Justin Thomas, president of G&D Chillers says everyone who works here at G&D shares a common goal to be on the forefront of innovation. So we can solve problems for our customers for a more sustainable approach to refrigeration. They've announced their latest innovation as part of the trailblazing Elite 90 line of propane chillers. The Elite 290 micro series line uses a natural refrigerant features a more compact design with variable speed fans and offers near zero global warming potential. The future of sustainable refrigeration is here. Learn more about G&D's Elite 290 line and visit gdchillers.com. And brewers, what if your yeast could do more than just ferment with Berkeley yeast? It can. 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You're a co-owner, co-founder of this brewery. Your wife's also involved in it. And you have a business partner in this. And it's actually a, I mean, it's a kind of impressive complex here in Montreal with multiple spaces. You also all have a, you're involved in a bakery that's also a part of this. You have the annex/smokehouse. You have the tap room. You have the pub. You've got two different brewing spaces. You have built this production space into a very old building that was certainly not designed for this kind of thing. But it's right here on the waterfront and a beautiful place and beautiful outdoor patios. Tell me the story, your own personal story and the story of bruski. Yeah, so I started brewing beer when I was in university. It was just, some day I was just at my dad's place and I found a book called "Joy's a Home Brewing." I was like, "Oh, you could actually make beer." There's never something I even thought about making at that point. It made everything else cooked a lot, built a lot. My dad's a, is a jeweler and a construction worker, so he did both. The jeweler and the construction worker. Yeah, and like mechanic. Just kind of fixed everything and knew and was super precise about absolutely everything. So I think that created some sort of just precision foundation. I just started making beer in university because it was just a cheaper option than actually buying beer and got super into it. I think like everybody does two batches of the beer and suddenly it wants to open up a brewery. I guess I'll work in engineering for a few years and I'll figure out how to make a brewery and that was kind of always the point. That's kind of what I ended up doing after graduation went off and then I after a job or two in regular engineering, I then went and then the brewery designed for about eight years. That was my major part in the job, just construction. Constructing new breweries. I worked that in maintenance in one of the bigger breweries around here called McCossland, where I was running just the maintenance program and doing installs of the new canning aligns, the deoxygenation method, like all their new machines. So I spent a lot of time just designing breweries for about eight years of my career and at that point, I was just trying to go, "Okay, I've now built enough breweries. Can I make my own?" And one day my wife was just working in, she was working to try to figure out how to become a, I guess like a management, like learn how to do the management part of the restaurant part because I wasn't going to be able to do that. And she was just working for many years there and the bar where everybody went out to go to have drinks was a bar called Dublin's pub and that's where I met Guillaume, which is my other business partner. And we just kind of clicked over the years where it was going, "Okay, let's do something." And then it took about two years of searching for a space and we found something in Old Montreal, which was never really the point because Montreal's don't usually go to this part of town. It's not definitely a little more tourist focused. Exactly. It's super touristy, it's super like club heavy or nice restaurant heavy. So it just, but after two years of searching, it just ended up being a space that made sense for us. It was 900 square feet. The rent made sense. It was a quick turn, so we were able to look at it and build something like, "Okay, we can't brew in this space. We'll never be able to brew in this space." But it'll allow us to start. So we started that in 2015. We're about at the 10-year mark right now. We're celebrating our anniversary in two weeks. So that's like the nice, little cherry on top. It's been this long. But within that time, we were just contract brewing. And we got kind of lucky after third beer. We found a contract brewery that was able to take our size of beer, like the amount of beer that we wanted to make. And because of the size and the fact that we were only really selling in our spot, I needed something that was going to be small. And they were able to accommodate us fairly nicely. And it made it kind of easy for us for the first three years of having them just make good beer for us. I was taking over three quarters of their volume at that point. Oh wow. So it was all almost as if it was my own little brewery. But then we were, we got the contract per brewery becomes the brewery at that point. Sure. But then we got lucky enough that the space right under us, which was an old textile museum opened up. And we're like, okay, that makes sense. Let's just build the brewery because we were, we were full every night. We were not able to make the full, every beer that we really wanted to make. So, and we need a little bit more space. So it made sense for us to start building throughout the should know that you also, you know, building a brewery indoor space in a heavily torsed area sounds like incredibly expensive enterprise. But you also have outdoor patio seating that, you know, in warmer months just gives you so much kind of expansive, you know, power to, to put people. I guess that's a, that's something I didn't really mention is that our, we are currently in what is the Bulsicle market. Which is probably one of the most iconic buildings in Montreal. It's the one that's featured on a lot of, a lot of videos, a lot of just, it's always the one that kind of pops up. It's a building from the 1800s. So it's, it's super old soup. And it, it's gone through a few fires. So the infrastructure is actually kind of recent in here where it's in the 60s, they rebuilt the whole inside and kept the shell outside. And because of that, it's like 42 inches of concrete. The, the everything is hard. Everything is difficult. The walls are, or, or, or, are four feet of just stone and, and like a lot of their limitations on building out the space was actually trying to get equipment into such an old building and trying to get as much of the biggest equipment as we could into these old buildings. So that's, it's been called on all of your brewery engineer, kind of background, trying to figure out how to build the actual production environment in this less than a perfect, you know, less than ideal kind of scenario. I don't think if anybody didn't have the background I had, would have had an easy time to build something in a space like this. They would have been able to, but it would have cost a fortune to hire people like me to try to figure out how to get the stuff in here. After that point, it was just, it was just running and front figure out how to make great beer again. Just different beer and just doing stuff that allowed the, because back then when we just had the pub, we were brewing a thousand liter batches for a 50 cedar. So every batch kind of lasted a month and a half. It was more about having our beer on draft and less about experimentation at that point, it just became safe. And that's what the one we created around brewery are like, okay, I'm going to have this big 1,500 liter batch out, so 12, 13 barrel batch out. But I also wanted two barrel systems just so that we can do experimentation, try stuff out and do things a little bit differently, which where I wasn't able to do that anymore, be on the other system, because it just meant I have this much beer out to sell as draft. Now, okay, I can now do 200 liters and figure out something a little bit different and be a little bit more free with ideas than than what I was able to do before. And so how many seats are you at now between the pub, the tap room, the anx, everything else? Indoor seating were probably about 240 to 50 outdoor seating. I think we're about 600 G's. Yeah. So now it's a whole different story. We're now you're making enough beer to in the high point of summer, you know, quench the thirst of 600 people. Like that's no small feat. No, but the it kind of just shifts production in a certain way where during a major amount of the production ends of just swapping to easy drinking beers, lagers, whites, and a few of those things where during the winter time, I'm selling tooth maybe 100, 200 liters a logger a week, switch it to the summertime, I'm selling 1,500 liters a lot of longer a week. So a lot of that just swaps to that other method. So it's not a the IPA kind of stay standard. I just I take a layer. So maybe 200 liters difference of removing that from cans and put it to draft. And on the flip side, I'm just going to be in the winter time, just add a little bit more cans are overall like week to week production from summer to winter never changes. It's just kind of we offer more cans during the winter and we offer less cans during the summer, but we're always just running like full tilt the whole time. Interesting. Interesting to see that kind of balance of the beer style kind of shift with the season and then the packaging kind of, you know, piece of that kind of fungible and move, you know, alongside as these kinds of things grow. Now, yeah, I mean, it makes sense. A lot of people. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Let's let's talk about some of the beers like, you know, as you started bruski naturally, you know, you come from that engineering background, not unusual in the brewing world, you know, to make that kind of transition, you know, but at the same time when you really started, you know, building a name for the beers that you made, you know, there was definitely some style kind of considerations there. You all are definitely tuned into contemporary styles, you know, everything from, you know, those kind of flavored pastry stouts and smoothie sours to hazy IPA, you make a fair number of loggers and, and you know, that's not to say that, you know, it's all of that like every brewery you make beers for yourselves, you make beer for your customers, you do all the things and you, you know, you want to do all of those things to the best of your, you know, potential inability, you know, but so I want to talk about some of that creative process. 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What you guys were going to make and you know, how you're going to develop an identity for brusque knowing that you have both local customers and you know, a fairly, you know, significant kind of rotating tourist audience here as well. I think it all starts with just the beer menu. We every single Monday I kind of come in and I look up at the board and go, what's the whole? What what's missing? What actually got consumed the most over that weekend? So that's where it's always kind of stressful for everybody that's around me is that I you asked me on a Friday, what I'm going to be brewing Monday. I have no idea. I don't even know what I'm going to be brewing on Tuesday if it's Monday because I'm I'm always allowing that that beer board and that client to kind of decide what I'm going to be brewing. So I look up at the board go, okay, I like I look at the sales, we sold 300 liters of white. I guess we're brewing a white on Monday and I just then define that recipe based across those things. I see a like there's a hole opens up on a fridid sour and then oh, maybe I have to fill up that hole. Same thing happens with IPAs I look up at the board is like Citra something Citra this there's two New Zealand something so like okay, maybe you need to it just needs a this other hop inside of it to create that variety so that the client looks at the menu and then sees that there's not just this one kind of defined beer that's going across going. I like to fill up those holes to try to to look at the things going like okay, there's going to be mosaic and this one is going to be Citra and this one there's going to try to create that diversity of the menu as if I'm looking at a regular food menu and I'm trying to create something that will make people want to look at the thing and go oh I tried the Citra one already maybe we're going to try the mosaic because I am like many of us are very big like I'm a beer geek in the sense of I like to dry all these beers I don't necessarily am able to call to follow the trends but I also know that most of our clients are not most of the people that are going to be coming through the doors and not going to be people that are necessarily coming to chase our beer they're just coming through the door and then want to have a good beer experience and I think that's the most important thing that what we do here is just try and look at the menu and make sure that we're touching everything if we're able to as like summer comes along and we're able to we're like chasing beers will quickly fill up the board with IPA because that's what we produce a lot of that's what we can a lot of but then it goes okay now we have this much IPA Yeah, we need to now create the diversity so that people are able to come look and come here and have the whites, have the lagers, have the darts, have the peanut butter stouts, have kind of almost everything. And oftentimes because those are the solo beer style, that kind of style on draft, they're often highly sold. So they go on draft really quickly and it disappear really quickly and we were always chasing those kind of things. And so that's what one coconut style sells well. Because it's the only coconut stout that you have on right there. Exactly. If I look at my sales, I go, oh, IPA is not a great seller, but because I have six on draft. The white, the white, the, the Vienna logger, the, like even right now, I have three blonde loggers on draft. They're, that blonde logger as a singular brand is not the highest seller. If I'm looking at just one, one of those beers, I combine them and now wins. But it's no longer my top seller, my top seller is the white because there's only one. So that's what a lot of the creativity kind of comes from is just going, okay, how do I fill this void, this, this whole in this menu that that is just always popping up and that it gets created by the clients consuming that product or those kinds of products because that's what they wanted that period. And we see it's always different where we'll have like different, different, different, different parts of the world coming where like Americans are coming, then we're consuming a lot more IPAs and, and loggers and we'll have France people are coming. And then the red disappears a lot faster during those weeks. So different people from different parts of the world are actually different, consuming different products as makes it really hard to gauge. That's why I have a hard time looking at a, at like what am I going to brew on a Monday on a Friday because who's going to be there that weekend? It's really tourism heavy here. Sure, sure, it depends on, you know, what, right, you know, what the special event is and what might be bringing people in from wherever they're coming from. It's nice to have an international city like that. And I also love that, that white beer with beer is such a big consistent thing for you. It's, you know, there are breweries in the United States that do well with that obviously aligash, you know, but maybe not quite the same kind of powerful style as it is here. A little bit of that, that like residual unibru effect there was the blanche de Chamblie and, you know, some of that kind of character. A lot of what's actually interesting in Quebec is a lot of our beer styles are defined about color. So you go in a lot of Quebec breweries or like breweries or brew pubs. It's the blonde, the red, the black, the white. It's just, it's just color based. And it's there, that's how a lot of people would Quebec end up ordering beers. They come around to lay it's because our wit beer is is fermented with London three. It's not, it's nothing. It's just why having on hand at a like that profile. Sure, sure. It's, it's all about things. I, I end up making beers in the way that I would like those beers. So I don't like that overly phenolic or estuary profile or the bit anti-profile that you get from a lot of those ones. So like having a cleaner ferment and then I'm go, what parts do I like from from whites? One of our main ones is called pepper cut because it's, it's lime zest and and pink pepper corns. And it's just doing something that's like those are the parts of the white that I like. I like the, I like the orangey. I like the zesty. But I don't necessarily like the yeast profile. So I take those parts out and I fermented it always with English. She's just a ingredients back in to give you some of those yeast components, but in a much more tightly focused kind of way. Exactly. Interesting. Well, tell me more about this because I, you know, I got to know about wit made with London ale three. Come on. You know, it's like you just waved a red flag in front of the bowl here. I got to ask about this. It's, it's literally just the fact of having to make a product that was highly demanded across the case. Sure. And it was just the kind of thing that it was just like I developed a type of law of a type of weight that people that didn't actually like whites, people like like me really enjoyed. And people that didn't like whites. And so I, we should couch this and saying that you are not a sazon fan. You are not necessarily a classic wit fan that I guess is it that kind of phenolic character that doesn't really jive with you from that as well as some of the, you know, for you tell me it's pretty much that I'm not a huge fan of the Belgian fermentation styles. I like the, I like the clean for men's. I don't mind when banana and a few of those clothes things express themselves in higher gravity beers, but I don't necessarily like them in lower, in lower gravity beers. And so I kind of went, okay, how could that, as I said, I kind of developed a style of, of what do I like about it? I mean, a lot of the whites that we have around here come with an orange, orange on top, but okay, so orange is the big factor of making these, these beers good. I didn't want to necessarily do orange, lime zesting to make a lot more sense. I regretted that choice when I would spend hours zesting, hands-esting lime. I said, just me and my wife would just spend hours taking two cases of lime and zesting in front of movies just continuously. It's like what makes sense as a homebrew, that not necessarily makes sense on the commercial scale. So we would zest all these things. And it was just the, I, I, the rare times I would run bar at talk to people, go, what do you like? Like, we don't like whites. Try this white. And I would serve it to them and they would love it. And it would, and it was just, it's just because it was something that was a little bit out of the, a little bit out of the ordinary for them, but it would still hit the same things that a lot of people that do like the whites kind of liked, which was just something that had, I guess a lot of the times, the orange parts or the zesty, the citrusy parts that were really important for the white component. And as long as you kind of hit those, that kind of made it okay. And the soft texture to that, which also, you know, kind of spans through into your IPA approach is also important. Let's talk about some of the, on the white, you know, what does the grain bill look like for that? Kind of really typical going for 50%, we 10% oats, multidotes, and then 40% pilsner. So just kind of skewing it off that way. Sure, sure. Anything to the kind of process there, it's not, you know, you've got a brew pub brewhouse here and you're, you know, you're not necessarily getting into, you know, some, you know, crazy mash regimens on this. We, I now only do infusing mashing across everything. I use, I have a steam jacketed mash ton, which allows me to, to, to do steps that we used to do that do mash, but the, the types of, of systems that we have, we can't really properly agitate anything. So there's no homogenization that's possible. So we just completely stopped everything is now just single infusion, kind of simple, just for off to the, the, Chef out there to kettle, boil, and just go into the next step. So we've simplified those, those processes across the board. What is water like in that beer? I've been slowly creeping chlorides up across everything. Just the minerality of cross, across all our beers has increased a bit. So chlorides are probably hitting something almost new, Englandy, like 150 with sulfates being about 80 on that one. The general totals, like minerality of the beers a little bit higher, but it just kind of allows us to, to have something that just, if you're having one of our new England's, then you go to the white, you're not overly shocked by a difference in that, in the water profile at that point. Sure, sure. Now, do you, are you building up? Or do you, have you processed water as it comes in here? Water is actually pretty good in Montreal. It's quite, because most, all the water really comes from the St. Lawrence River. So it's all pretty much fresh water and it's quite low in almost everything. So it's almost, it's almost pills in style, a little bit higher, a little bit more, a little bit more hardness, a little bit more, but there's still quite low. So we're able to build across that water. I don't need river as auspices. I don't do you guys, I'm sure. Sure. So we're able to almost build everything from there. You're not on a well water that's, yeah. So then let's keep moving forward on this wit. I'm curious, what does that kind of hot side process look like in terms of hopping and boil? I've shifted across a lot of different things. Now it's just hitting it with the bitterness charge of about 8 IBUs and then we whirlpool with fresh zest, low contact time, maybe about five minutes to pull it out. So we put everything in fusion bags. Because it feels after five minutes, we get the maximum extraction and then we can pull it out without extracting any piff. So it's just like our kind of quickness. And same thing, we do the same thing with coriander, hit it with about one to 1.5 grams per liter of coriander, same thing in bags. We get to pull them out. So it just makes it easier. And we'll whirlpool. I was doing, I was doing mocha wake up. You're zest pooling there. Just pooling, exactly. Also, we just copyright that right now. We zest hop also. So it drives us to ing really. So on that hot side, that's what we kind of do. We pull them out. We transfer to fermenter when we finish fermentation. Everything that we do here after fermentation, we drop down to 16 for a diastinal rest. And then we drop everything to 13 to do any type of infusion at that point. So we'll throw in zests and then we'll rouse them for a day or two. Pretty much do the same process of a dry hop really. And after after that zesting point, we we drop everything out and we we transfer it a bit to bright tank. So this London L3 fermentation just kind of proceeds the same way that your hazy IPA fermentations do. Yeah. Pretty much getting the similar kind of, you know, haze stability from that. And, you know, any any specific hops that that figure into, you know, this kind of wit piece, you know, you're not relying on them for no flavor or for for haze. No, not really. On other beers, yes, but this one, the dry hopping is kind of out of the question on the time frame because we end up kind of these beers are seven to eight days to service. So we're great to glass really because we because being a brew pub, it's we finish fermentation. Yeah. So we for four days fermented out four days soft crash two days or movies throw in throw in our zest rouse next day called crash transfer to serving and pretty much being served right from that point. And that's so there's no real time for dry hopping and it's being served quick enough that the haze usually doesn't drop out. The only difference that we do is I is in winter time, we know the flow rates a little bit less. So often the whites will be too like to barrel batches instead. So that they kind of can keep that haze going. So those will be kegged off instead of being put into tanks because that that during the summer during the winter times, I'm probably selling 50 to 60 liters of white. So our batches would take too long to go through. So at that point, anything will clear out in the cold room. So it makes more sense for us to keep those fresh and keep them keep them rolling. Plus it gives us the chance to kind of experiment change this change. Like go to raw wheat, go to a multi-wheat kind of is like doing anything good. Trying to see if there's something that we can make that'll make the beer better. So we can just do a little bit more rolls on those. And you keep changing those parameters even in this white beer that I'm pretty confident with. Pretty much everything. I'm that's crazy. What are you doing? What are you doing? You're just making a lot of more work for your brewing staff. I think, well, I think they're just used to it now. I endlessly tinker with everything from my recipe. I'm changing everything until I'm not allowed to. It's the whirlpools that determined five minutes before the whirlpool is happening. Dry hop is kind of decided when we need to print cans. It's always just because I'm always questioning. It's always what is the better way to do this? What is what can we change to make this better? Should we? What's the last thing I had yesterday that should make me change everything? I hope tomorrow. It makes it hard on people. Oh my God. You some like a nightmare. If I didn't, if I had already met your staff and seen how much they enjoy this and have bought into that kind of experimentation process and seem to be here for it for themselves. And so otherwise, I think you're driving everybody crazy here. Maybe you are. Maybe they're just putting on a front for me. I don't know. But anyway, let's flip over and talk about IEPA. Before we do that, breweries don't just need a point of sale system. They need a one-stop shop operating system. 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Also, if you're launching a brewery or acquiring an existing one, consider our brewery workshop and new brewery accelerator September 14 through 17 in Fort Collins, Colorado. Over four days, we engage in panel discussions, technical brewery tours, networking and small working group sessions that help you better understand and prepare for the challenges of brewery operation. Tickets are on sale now. Visit breweryworkshop.com for more information and to secure your spot. All right. Let's talk about Haze-Y-I-P-A. I think this is probably where, you know, as you started sending beers our way, it made the most splash with me personally. And then obviously with our blind review panel and everything else that has kind of come from that. I find that there is, you know, this kind of like, plushness to your approach to IPA that feels rich and full. But also, and while sweet, you know, nominally sweet also feels balanced. You know, and so even though they are big and unapologetically big and you do make a fair number of very, you know, double IPA, triple IPA, you know, this kind of Haze-Y-I-P-A space, everything at its core has this kind of soft and softness and roundness. You know, and so even when you're using hops that have a kind of, you know, more pointed edgy, you know, mineral or petrochemical kind of, you know, undertone to them, you know, you've still find this way to kind of add a smoothness and polish to those and give them this roundness that supports the overall whole. So let's start talking about Haze-Y-I-P-A and how you approach it conceptually as you're writing a recipe. When you're writing a new Haze-Y-I-P-A recipe, you know, where do you start? Obviously you've got your soft water, your pumping chlorides up in that in order to, you know, increase the softness. Where do you move from there? I think that the, when we create these doing a lot IPA recipes or these Haze-Y-I-P-A recipes, it's all about trying to figure out word we want to be with them. And that's kind of the moving target at that point. How can we be super soft and super fruity, but then balance that off with a nice amount of Haze, which Haze has these astringencies that you're fighting with, like the Haze-Y or the stuff, the more stringent there is, they are. And we're trying to-- - What? - What and why? Just like Haze is a polyphenol, Haze is a tannic. So we're always kind of, like, these super super Haze-Y beers. The only thing that ends up being super white and Haze-Y is like, is New Zealand stuff. In a level that allows us to have this really nice white Haze, but not be Bernie, where if we do something that's like Galaxy or anything from Australia, you get this same level of Haze, but it's massively Bernie, massively pasty, and you're-- it's just something that you're going to be fighting with. So we kind of always try to figure out how can we make this product as Haze-Y as possible, but also palatable. And that's, I think, the hardest thing that there is in our industry right now is trying to make something that's super white, super thick, super intense. That's going to be sustainably white, because you're going to can it, and after a month, there's going to drop off a little bit. But still be massively fruity, because what people want is like that kind of fruit punch thing. So our overall program for IPAs is really a program. If I look at a singular thing, like if I'm making a logger, that recipe is important. When I'm now making IPA, it's the whole program evolves. So, and it will drag in single IPA, paleo, double IPA, triple IPA. All these things are very evolving, and they're always being like moved around how that singular beer is being moved around. Just because we're always learning, how do we want to rouse stuff? What kind of hops are we going to be using? What kind of bittering, or rematch hopping, or re-noughten-match hopping? It's always like little trials, and every once in a while I'm going to create some sort of consistency. I'm going to like it, and then I'm going to throw something completely off-spec. Okay, so what does removing all the wheat off of this and just put oats is going to do? It kind of makes it a little bit smoother, makes it a little bit easier to drink, but it'll also make it a little bit less hazy than something that contains wheat. But then again, the wheat stuff has these astringencies that kind of come in, because they're a little bit thicker, and they're more stringent for a period of time. Look at the beer a month in, it's not the same beer as two months in, it's not the same beer as what's coming out of the bright tank. So we're always kind of playing around with those things, and the overall process is really looking at the beers and going, like, what can I change to make the overall program completely, completely track? Years ago was completely crazy. single time I made a bureau was changing all day. almost everything. And I kind of realized that grain bills were not as important I thought they were. I think overall process bills are not as important as you thought they were. No. Like in this what was kind of weird was that I would make these, I would start doing collapse with people which would force me to do a very different grain bill. And I could not see that much of a difference between something that was like really high wheat, really high oats, really high, just really low adjuncts had very marginal aspect on what we were brewing. The brewery like tank dimensions, just method, just every other procedure around it was almost more important than that thing. So I still play around with tweaking those minor things, just try to see if I can make it better. But I don't find that the overall grain bill is as important as it as it used to be more pH, pH levels of start of beer as pH. So there's water profiles that we're going to be hitting. And just trying to see how we can increase the haze level, but also reduces stridencies and keep everything kind of balanced in the in the whole mix. So it's just kind of it's a very strong, it's a very difficult dance that we're trying to figure out. And yeah, I have, I have played these mindsets that I have on how I should be making IPA right now and is always looking towards the future of how it should be. So then, and that's interesting, and I do want to talk about this kind of reducing this tringency piece. But then where do you kick off, like you're creating a new IPA, what becomes the creative driver for that? Obviously, there's plenty of hops out there. There's new flavor ideas, as you're thinking about how to start on that, you've got your baseline process wherever it is at that given moment in time. Even as it's constantly dynamically shifting, but what do you generally start in that kind of creative process? Obviously, we're not talking about a collaboration where that starts with a collaborator's ideas. But is your thinking about new something? Is it that ingredient to that that hop idea that starts pushing it? Or is it a flavor idea? You're like, I wonder how we can reverse engineer something like this and do it in an IPA? Is it just testing a certain kind of, you know, program, technical parameter and thinking about the ingredients, you're going to feed into that to talk to me about your your creative process there? I guess where I'm at with new Angular IPAs now is kind of just like what you like to term shaving is I'm kind of just adjusting these little shaving. There's a craftivering podcast term right there. Exactly. So I'm kind of like that. And Evan is smiling right now, as you say that. I'm kind of just shaving these little parameters going, okay, half a bag less of wheat. What does that do? Where a few years ago, it would be like, just take the whole wheat out of it. I'm kind of just adjusting these little parameters. Everything else is just again looking at my menu and going, what beer am I currently lacking? Should I, I'm out of 100% Citra, 100% Citra ends up being the highest seller that we have on the board all the time. Does it be or called 100% Citra? No, I just mean anything like we have a bunch of 100% Citra. Anything that's a 100% Citra. So the customers know it that well. Yeah. Like if it's all Citra, they want to drink it. Always number one seller. So if one of our brands, we have a whole bunch of different brands or 100% Citra, I have a brand called Lots, which the whole idea is that it's a specific lot of Citra. Like this one's really cool. This is called Lots of Citra something. And like right now, the beer that you drink right now is actually called Lots of Motuaka because it's a specific only one lot of Motuaka from freestyle. So it's just defining something going, okay, that's that brand. So it's a lot of where I'm at now is like, I adjust the baseline factors of what a New England is. I'm hitting this more or less the same points than just trying to define like very minute adjustments. But then the the hop profile is really based on what the menu is actually missing. Because it's not just like our beers don't just are not cans that are just disappearing into the market. And then it doesn't matter to just make almost the same beer back to back. If I may, if I have beers that are going to be sitting on the board for three or four or five weeks, the board beating in the menu for me, those if I'm not going to make Citra Nelson right away, if I already have a Citra Nelson on the board, because that means I can't make that beer again until that kind of goes away because I'm not going to really have two beers or Citra Nelson on it, but then I'll make a Citra Motuaka. I'll then make one of my favorite mixes, which is Rewaka Rekau. I'll do these kind of things that are just trying to fill up kind of different holes inside that thing. So that's how I spend almost more of like the IPA process. It's more what are the differences, what are the different things that I can throw on the menu that creates this this nice menu. Not an NBA rotation, right? You've got to throw in somebody to play that center position. Somebody that's going to play that point guard position. Some people have to sit on the bench for a little bit, but you got to keep that rotation fresh so that people can play deep into the playoffs. Rest in peace are Denver Nuggets who bumped out of our playoffs. But in that sense, you look at each of these hops almost as those position players that where you're going to cycle a new beer into that position as the old one comes off the tap list. But tell me about Rewaka Rekau. I'm curious why this one is that's a favorite blend of yours. It's strangely enough for Rekau almost anything New Zealand's amazing. Nelson Rekau, it's really this unsung hop that's just nicely foundational to a lot of these things because Rewaka Rewaka is different. Rewaka is one of these things that it really depends on who you're buying it from. You get these insane diesel, these insane fruities on some other people, and then these just sesame seeds. Crazy, crazy hop. And yes, I think anyone who's listened to our New Zealand podcast episodes about that, I learned so much about that insane hop just from being down there. Wide range, even amongst who you're buying it from, where that specific lot was from what farm, what those conditions were. It's such a pain in the ass off to grow. Everyone hates it. And yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I shouldn't say everyone hates growing it. Like most growers, it poses challenges for them. But we're cow. That's an interesting counterpoint to Rewaka on this. And I did see some Rekau and some fields. I know we saw some at the Nelson Lake farm were down there. What, you know, for you, how does that one kind of hit? And how does it work so well with Rewaka? It's just works really well as a foundational thing. It's almost like Citroe works so well with so many other hops. Rekau alone is fine, but Rekau with something else from New Zealand really bumps it up. And it's almost everything I've ever done that has the Rekau foundation inside of it. It's really, really been good and really interesting. It's been surprising across everything. But it smells nice and you get it on a sensory panel. It's an interesting hop, but it never gets you, you never realize how much it helps all the other hops kind of shine. And that's what we like about, that's what Citroe is a big key for. That's why Citroe is almost in every single one of our beers. It just makes everything a little bit better. So when you use your cow, how do you use it? Is it a 50/50 hop? Rewaka is a really potent hop. And so matching it 50/50, it may actually kind of overpower another hop that you use it with. I find Rewaka to be like smoke molds where it doesn't really matter if I using 50/50 or using just a small percentage of it. It's just kind of, it's just that is the best analogy I've heard for you. That's fantastic. Because I use, because when we make smoke loggers, I make something that contains 5 to 10% or it makes something that contains 50 to 100%. And it's like, it's smokey, but not incredibly so. Not as much as like what you would think of 50% bump up. And same thing I would say about Rewaka. So you're smoke threshold where that's what you perceive. And it does it at a very low threshold. And it just stays at that threshold for no matter how much more you add to it. Rewaka is like that. I almost everything we make Rewaka is either a third or a half of the dry hop. Very rarely do I put just a lot less than that. And I almost prefer higher dosage because I get almost better profile where when it's just kind of part of it, it almost overtakes everything. Where when it's more in it than I actually get more fruits and I get more of the the nice complexity that I get from Rewaka. But something like the Rewaka Rekau blend is 50/50. The bold Rewaka blend. Sure. Sure. Are there any other hop combinations that these days you find yourself gravitating towards? I mean, Citra Nelson's a big winner. Been slowly getting back into just Galaxy because we finally got rid of our 2021-2022 crops and now we're getting back into the other stuff. We're really careful about how we use Australian hops. There's a few hops that are either too haste positive and too intense that we try to now use on second days. Too haste positive. Because too haste positive would be too astringent, too pasty. With a Galaxy pace or like the Australian pace. But most people we'll just call it Galaxy Pace. So these are what we call-- It's galaxy paste and it goes it goes quite pasty especially the 21-20-22 stuff and And and is so we develop techniques here where what we do is they're second to dry You know flavor sense or pasting the visual sense because when I think pasty I think about you know Somebody that never leaves their house and that ends up being like pasty white and it's it's kind of just like In the the stringency level is two astringent. Okay, and they're they stick then they create this level of hate That make that is really nice to look at but you look at the cup and like this is gonna hurt and then you have a big sip and they it never drops out I've had I've had galaxy beers that I've thrown into my loggering tanks for two months to try to clear off and it never fully cleared out And so what we're really really careful and we're really fearful of the Australian stuff and we now Everything we do like that is a second-day dry hop where we don't rouse we throw it in a cold crash Just to make sure that it just we get these nice flavors, but we don't do rouses and we don't kick them up and it just gives us You're looking for inefficiency there. I'm looking for inefficiency. Yeah We're almost everything else is just is just Our typical dry hop technique is we just send everything down to about 13 degrees Dry hop as a single single charge Bump it up the next day bump and pretty much cold crash after that point so super simple 24 hour contact time And everything works that way and then I pull stuff out of that which is Australian stuff and mosaic Because mosaic for some reason seems to be hazegative and Those are kind of the only two that gets that get added into the next day and Mosaic will be bumped That's the only one that's allowed to be roused everything else. That's the Australian stuff Not a lot to be roused has to just like kind of look at the beer just kind of Settle itself away and it's it's not as bad this year. I made a hundred percent Galaxy and it turned out to be pretty good and they've done efforts in their aside to make something interesting because I'm looking for More hops to use because that's where a lot of the things like lots of lots of Motu Acre Just like the definition of our our series called lots which is going That's like one singular one singular hop can be a lot of things What a citra can be so many different citras a motuaca Nelson could be a lot of different things who's growing it what soil base the terror really is so massively important and I with time I'm just kind of hitting a point where I really like eight to ten hops and I would I just don't want the board to say citra Nelson all the time But I love that combination, but I let whether if citra from Jackson hops with a egggers Nelson is a good option that or a Garston or or a egggers doesn't really matter and you throw these names on to try to create this concept of hey These are massively different like agricultural products And that's a lot of what we've been trying to push in these in these recent years are just going these are the hops We want to use but it's not it shouldn't just be identified as a singular Extreme hops it should be identified as as like this is where it's coming from and these people are doing great work And they're doing something completely different and they themselves are deciding This is what we want our stuff to smell like so then we grab it and like hey, this is what our stuff smells like because of these people How much you know, what is that range from you know an egggers Nelson versus a Garston Nelson and you know that Eggers farm and upper motorey we drove past it a few months ago like I you have seen the the tarwhar I know the clay soil that they grow on and You know the Garston you know tarwhar is quite a bit different down there in Queenstown and And it's surround and suit you know kind of an extreme tarot tarwhar You know from your perspective like what would be the difference in a Nelson for those two It's it's crazy the difference you Something what's weird about Garston's the only one that I find if I do a hop rub It's okay But then the beer is incredible when it comes out of it It's it's almost like there's a lot I guess there must be a lot of sulfur compounds or something inside where you're the initial The initial rub like yeah, this is not this is okay And then even the beer has the same thing where I only transfer it to bright and only in bright I go oh my god How fruity is this beer and Then you have stuff like egres which are really pushing this massive kind of diesel intensity kind of thing kind of kind of freestyle a little bit more intense though So it's all these things that they're they're being they're pushing in those those different aspects So they're choosing to go Pushing a lot of these crops a little bit later have a little bit more darkness have a little bit more intensity Obviously things like Garston. They're they're growing clay So they'll a bit more different in the senses. So it's really really different and that's what's nice And but even now like right now I in my cold room I haven't done my hop selection, but I have from egres hops that maybe three or four Nelson's same thing from freestyle three or four Nelson's I have to decide from So even within these individual growers they're gonna have these individual These individual plots and these individual crops that are so different from themselves And we have a hard tie sometimes it's super easy who you rub something like wow sure This is gonna this is what we want and sometimes we rub it away Oh boy, which one should we be taking and like we'll do dry hop tests on some of these and just see if we can figure it out But that's what's that's what's lovely about these these products is dry hop tests tell me about your process for that so a lot of A lot of what we do we used to run so many bottle tests you do dry hop tests with your hop selections samples But when we got a hop selection dirty Because they they'll send you more or less amounts. So this sounds like at eight 28 28 grams our general dry hops about For four to five pounds per barrel. That's about 18 grams The advantage that we get is like we get rub a few hops smell them and we're unsure then we could take the sometimes we'll have Five to six hops and we're not sure about if the if this one or this one's the better option We'll fill a we'll just grab a fermenter that's just going that's just about at the dry hop stage We'll fill up a leader and put more or less five pound per barrel dry hop inside of it And then we'll smell the next day and that might change our choice about which was the dry hop that the actual hot pellets that we wanted to have Because sometimes you think this one smells really good But what is it actually doing in beer? We don't know what is doing in beer until we have we kind of do the little dry hop test We can almost do that thing in four hours because just like shaking the bottle and filtering it out It's almost better in four hours because it kind of eliminates any kind of potential oxidation properties that you would have over the course of a 24 hour period But it allows us to get like a fairly decent interesting result in a very quick time of those characters What do you find yourself leaning towards and have you learned through that testing process? How to better tune your rub? Yeah to what actually shows up in the beer in those characters You can then start to mentally adjust your own sensory You know approach to this and tune into those kinds of notes In many ways yeah It's I think the most important thing that there is about doing a rub is not trying to be interesting Really is it because it's unless you're because like right now recently I did a rub three weeks ago for a New Zealand from Yakima Chief And there was four hops on the table for for for a Nelson one of them was amazing, but it wasn't Nelson At least for what I would determine is being Nelson But thinking about what my brand of lots of Nelson is I'm going to I just took a picture of the lot saying Can I get one box of this or two boxes of this so I can do this? I want to make the singular beer for this thing, but it's not Nelson Because it's so out of spec from what I'm considering it as being Nelson And that's what's massively interesting about the the hop world is that these things will pull out of spec And then we're trying to figure out okay, this is actually a really nice smelling one But it shouldn't be the foundation of what we consider as Nelson because it's so out of spec and And then like we're getting more tuned into that and I'm getting a lot less interested with Crazy things. I do see the I do see the interest and I like using them But they they're they're not the ones that we found actually doing and because like one of the major things that we actually do here is that I on average have three different hop lots of three to five different lots of every hop that we use And I blend according to flavor So if I'm going to be doing citra Nelson and like okay, what do I want this thing to be? I want the citra kind of foundation to be more fruity than I'm going to take my fruity citra And I want the Nelson component to be more diesel-y. Okay, I'm going to use this diesel Citra and then we're going to find a way to tune it into a thing that makes the most out of sense for us I I'm not a huge fan of having singular hop lots anymore. I like having this this range of hops that allows me to kind of blend stuff in like it's spices But just having So like overall reducing the amount of varieties I have but more in like having a little bit less varieties but more range within that same variety so I can play around with those those little levers at that point I am fastated by this and I could probably talk about this forever But we've been talking for a while now and we are not going to have time to talk about things like warm 3470 fermentation and some of the other experimentation and stuff that we've tasted, or the phantasm beer that tastes like passion fruit, because we are just running up against time on this. But Derek, as we zoom out and kind of think about big picture, you know, you've been out this for a number of years. Obviously, experimentation is a core. We've heard how you've developed really finely tuned ways to, you know, to think about variations within even the same ingredient within the same hop, you know, finding different aspects of flavor and avenue and ways to help that express here. You know, as you think about the next couple of years, what's your, you know, what are you looking forward to here at Brusky? What, you know, experimentation is constant, you know, it's not as if there's some projects you're going to tackle, you tackling projects every day, all the time, testing everything, and, you know, reacting to and adding to this kind of list of learning as you go. What, you know, what are you excited about tackling as we go forward here in the future? And, you know, what are the next few years hold for Brusky? I think a lot of what I'm interested in moving, like just in terms of brewing is kind of a whole bunch of new crazy things, because in the last few years, it's just been, I've been kind of stuck building, I've been building a lot of the stuff on the one who builds the new spaces. And it's kind of been a year that there's been a little bit of a slow down building process, and I've been able to concentrate on more of the beer, not just having it being in some ways, it's like, refinement rather than expansion. Exactly, but more, not just refinement, just like having my creative juices, not just thinking about how I should have tank placement and how to run this pipe there and doing that stuff and going, hey, should I be doing a phonial beer? Should I be doing a, this, this, just whatever beer that kind of comes up. So a lot of what I'm looking forward to is that now we kind of have a capacity of brewing beer that has, that is, that is kind of sustainable. We have a demand to beer that also allows us to have everything kind of flowing out of here. So now it could become creative again, even though I've been creative for the last years, it hasn't been as easy to be creative more about just trying to survive and get the beer products out. And a lot of things, like that's where podcasts like what you're doing and just the magazine that you're doing allows us to just have like these quick glimpses of, hey, this is an interesting idea. And just my pilot system goes, hey, there's a new recipe that that crap beer and brewing just did. I'll just copy-paste the recipe. Just go, let's see what this is. And because then we get to try something that we'd have a hard time trying and it might create this idea of, hey, maybe we should do this thing. That's what's, that's, I'm looking more into getting back into the art of brewing more than the, uh, the general production, the production side we kind of have it covered now. And we don't have ideas and necessarily growing much more than we have than we are right now. It's more about how can I make a 30, 30 tap list be massively interesting and keep it rotating and go back to what I love the most, which is home-brained. That's beautiful and that's a great place to bring this to a close. GD Chiller's engineering crew have been piping breweries, wineries and distilleries for more than 30 years. Berkeley yeast bioengineers ordinary strains to make them extraordinary old orchard formulates custom blends featuring specialty ingredients. And he hops lorian combines traditional elements of no will hops with an elegant twang of modernity. Discover how steel chill cups can put your brand on every pour at steelchillcups.com. Arrives as your one stop brewery operating system. Pack tech is trusted by craft brewer is nationwide for their smarter sustainable way to carry your beer. And the brewery workshop will help prepare you for the challenges of brewery operation. If you enjoyed this episode, go to beer and brewing.com. Click that subscribe button. Become a subscriber like Derek and the team here at Brewsky. And, uh, you know, help us bring you conversations like this and also every issue of the magazine, both of our magazines. We're in industry guide and craft beer and brewing. Um, Derek, if people want to learn more about brewsky here in the old city of Montreal, where can they find you both out there in virtual space and here in real life? We're in Bosegull market in old Montreal. We're literally right in front of the, uh, the Ferris wheel. So it's the easiest way to find us. Um, apart from that brewsky.ca, uh, pub brewsky on, uh, Instagram and, uh, Facebook. So kind of easy to find us. I have personally really enjoyed the beers you've sent our way. It's wonderful to see this place in operation. Um, the work you're doing is fantastic. Uh, keep doing it and thanks for sharing all your, uh, thoughts and opinions with our audience. Cheers. Thanks, Jamie. This podcast has been brought to you by craft beer and brewing magazine for those who love to make and drink great beer. To learn more, or to subscribe, visit beer and brewing.com or find us on social media @CraftBeerBrew.