Eighty Eight Brewing Co.

Hey, I'm Kevin, the Sultan of Sezon, and I'm Brian, I'm the Warden of Winkbeard. We're here from the Pints and Growlers Podcast, and if you love craft beer as much as we do, you'll love the newest beer barren in town. The beer boutique located right at the gates of Transcona at 910 Regents Avenue West. With a huge selection of craft beers and a growler fill station, this is the stop for Pints and Growlers fans when you want to try the beers you hear about on the show. So if you like craft beers, check out the beer boutique right next to the new best Western Premier Winnipeg at 910 Regents Avenue West today. Cheers! Hello ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another edition of the Pints and Growlers Podcast. I'm your host, Kevin Wearsba, and with me as always is the beer barren himself, Brian Lataki. Hi there. This episode is being recorded live in 88 Brewing's Tap Room in Calgary, Alberta, and we would like to introduce our guest for today, Donovan. Hey there, we have a beautiful flight that's set up in front of us right here. Tell us about the first beer that we're going to get into. Alright, the first beer we've got here is actually our top seller at the moment, it's our summer crusher. We call it hologram. hologram is a Belgian-style white ale or a wheat ale, however you want to call that. It could be considered a wit, but we actually don't use a wit yeast in this one, so it's a basic white ale, a Belgian white ale if you will. Eat my wheelhouse, Brian has a deep, deep love affair for anything wheat, so right on, right in my fancy. So Donovan, tell us about 88 Brewing. 88 Brewing, as of two weeks ago, were one year old, and four founders of the company are all their childhood friends born and raised Calgary in, and 1988 was a huge year for Calgary. They had to winter Olympics here, it kind of put Calgary in the stage globally. It brought a lot of money to Calgary, brought a lot of tourists, and it kind of just made people realize that Calgary actually exists, and the 80s were a pretty rad time. Unfortunately, it wasn't alive in the 80s, so I didn't get to experience that. But they kind of just brought back to life that 80s vibe with the Sun Ice Jack, it's the neon colors, the 80s TVs, tube TVs, and wacky beer names, and we tried to just maintain a fun environment here in the top room and the branding we put out. Man, I not mention cool runnings took place during the 88 Olympics. We got some beer names in the reserve from Cool Runnings, for sure. Where did the 80s idea come from? Yeah, like I said, basically just that 80s were a rad time here, so with a lot of cool nightclubs here in town, I'm not from Calgary, so I had to do a lot of education when I moved here just to be part of the company and be able to pump it up like we're doing here. But yeah, the guys, they're all in their 30s, mid 30s, late 30s, and they just love the 80s, they want to kind of bring that back, and a lot of Calgary's really relate to it. They love the nostalgia. We have a lot of people coming here on the weekends dressed in full 80s track here and their Sun Ice Jackets and headbands, and they just people love it. So, Donovan, what's your role at the brewery? I was brought on here before this building was anything, it was just an empty warehouse. It used to be a Carpenter's Trade Union Center, and the founders here, they caught wind of me and what I did, and they reached out to me and I moved here to be the head brewer here. I was in Hamburg, Germany. Oh, nice. That was not the answer I was expecting, and where did you live before that? I'm originally from Royal Manitoba. I grew up just outside of a small town called St. Francis Xavier, it's west of Winnipeg, and I was born and raised there, went to high school and didn't hit the big city until university. So, how did this brewery come together? How did they get a hold of you? That's quite the story. So, you want me to start back at the Winnipeg days or what? Absolutely. So, I went to university, University of Manitoba. I came to high school with a couple of scholarships and I thought I was going to be a doctor. So, I went to University of Manitoba. I pursued my general science degree, and I applied to med school first time didn't work out, so I stayed in university, and I did my major in microbiology, so I kind of fell in love with yeast and metabolism, fermentation, things like that, and then one day, as part of a lab project, we actually toured the Half Pines Brewing Facility just to kind of get an idea of fermentation, and the way yeast plays a role in food safety aspects, bacteria, and it kind of just kind of sparked an interest for me and beer, and on top of the microbiology side of it. I was working at a liquor store at the time to pay my way through university and fell in love with the different craft beers they had, Half Pines is going to hate me, but first little scrap I had, I spit it out, it was the first IPA grew up, small town farm boy, I was drinking mousse head and crown royal, and you know, whatever the bar had for five bucks. But I had my first IPA and I actually dumped it down the drain, and when I decided that med school was in the path for me and that I wanted to be in the brewing industry, I actually went and knocked on the door at Half Pines, and they hired me almost on the spot, I think it was a day later they called me, and I was fresh out of university with a microbiology degree, and they hired me and as a seller person, so never brewed a batch of beer in my life, never worked in a brewery, had no idea what I was doing, but I knew that I wanted to do it, and I knew it could be a lot of fun, so they hired me on, and that's kind of how the whole beer thing started, through my university, my lab experience, I actually built them, their QC lab, so if you had Half Pines to go upstairs, they got a little lab up there, I put that together for them in my first couple years there, and then after salering, packaging, they brought me on as a brewer under Jeremy Wells, who's now at Brazen, and Chris Young, who's at Half Pines, so the three of us were brewing there for a couple years, and after a couple years of that I had an opportunity to move to Germany and do some traveling, so I was traveling Europe and ended up in Hamburg, and started brewing there, bumped into a young guy, about my age, who was starting a brewery, and they needed a brewer, so lived in Hamburg for two years, and then actually Jeremy Wells little brother, James, good friend of mine, he owns Mammoth County in Winnipeg, and I were good buddies, go back a few years, I was in Hamburg at the time, and I was looking for a way back to Canada, I didn't want to go back to Winnipeg, there was nothing really there for me in the beer scene, could have gone back to Half Pines, they would have opened, or welcomed me with open arms, but I was ready for the next step, something better, or not better, but bigger, some of my own, it's kind of poking around, looking here, looking there, and then I was sitting on the couch one night, my phone rings, and it's James, and he's in Alberta looking at a wild goose canning line, just north of here there's a brewery called Blind Man, and they've got a wild goose canning line, James was in Alberta checking it out, and at the time one of the would-be founders of this company was working on that said canning line, and they bumped into each other and they made friends, and this guy expressed that he was opening a brewery, and he needed a brewer, and my name came up, and my phone rings, and it's this guy named Jordan, who's one of the founders here, and he invited me to come run 88 Brewing, and that's my story, and a few months later I was on a plane to Calgary, sweet, how was the brewing seen different between Canada and Germany, that's a great question, Germany's got the Rhine Heights Kabat, which is the German Pirate Law, in Germany it is absolutely forbidden, or fair Bolton, as the Germans say, to brew with anything other than water, yeast, hops, and barley, wheat as an exclusion, or an exception I should say. So they're trying to introduce the craft beer scene to a bunch of stubborn Germans, who want to drink pilsner, and hif-a-vitesons, and hellis-loggers, things like that, and they're trying to introduce IPAs and porters, and American stouts, and dry hops, and bitterness, and the Germans aren't taking to it very well, and I like the challenge, because you can brew swill here, and people will pay for it if it's a craft brewery, they're like, "Oh, it's craft beer, it's good." In Germany it's a challenge, because if it's not good beer they won't drink it, right? And so it was actually a challenge to brew to their standards without using, you can't add lactic acid, you can't add salt, so you can't add anything that aren't the foreign gradients. You have to brew with what there is, it was crazy. Bruce, do you make regularly here at 88 brewing? Oh boy, it's a dangerous question. I'll just start. Generally, if you come here, we generally have about 16 to 20 beers on top. All the time, 7 to 8 of those are core rotation beers, depending on the season, so we have 7 core beers that are produced year round in bottles, or kegs, or around town, regular package product, and then on top of that we try to come out with a couple of new beers every week on our pilot system, but generally we're brewing, we go heavy on the Belgians, we like the Belgians, my European experience has a lot to do with that. The founders were home brewers, they love the Belgian yeast, the Belgian styles, what it could do, so about half of our core range is kind of Belgian based. The rest is either big dank IPAs, or West Coast IPAs, or Sowers, and we have this one who's, she's quite close to our heart, we call her Tiffany. We'll have that one later, and that's a pretty special beer of ours. Good old 80s references, I will never grow all of those, no, never, that's my age group, so we're good. What do your test batches? We're brewing on a 15 barrel is what we ordered, but it's basically 17.6 hectiliters for us, Canadians. That's our main production system, that's we brew all of our core beers, we brew singles of that, double brews of that, we'll get into quad brews of that, and then we have a custom built pilot system that's about one fourth the size, it's a forehack pilot system, it's exact replica scaled down, yeah it gives you about, we can't get all, we don't bottle our pilots, it gives you about eight kegs by the time you're all set and done, and it's a good chance to brew something that's not, you know like if you brew a 50 liter test batch is still a full brew day. You brew a 400 liter test batch. It's a full brew day. So it's worth our time. It gets us some exposure. It lets us pour enough beer that we know if it's good or not. Yeah, it's enough time to play around on end with the exact kind of scale down replica when we're ready to scale up onto the production system. It's a quite easy scale up to get onto the main system instead of going from like a home brew pot into a 20 heck batch. It's kind of nice to just scale it up a few a few hundred liters. And I call them pilot batches or test batches, but they're actually a lot of breweries on town here with brew systems actually smaller than that one. So what's our next beer? Now that we're done. Round one. All right, round one. So that was our hologram white ale. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Just sighted. That one's actually to Belgian style. That one's brewed with coriander and orange peel in the boil as as per wit style, but actually fermented on a saison used to give it a little bit variance over the traditional wit beer. The next one we have is called our night gallery. Night gallery is, you know, it's always toe to toe with hologram as our top seller. Night gallery was a famous 80s dance music club here. I never got to experience. I heard it was quite the scene though. And people when we came out the night gallery beer, people just exploded because of the name. And I wish I understood why I'm too young for this. So night gallery is our new England pale ale. Pale ale because it's not quite as big as the IPA. So yeah, we use a lot of citrus stone fruit hops in this one. It's hazy. It's big. It's stag. The aroma kind of travels across the room. And this is definitely one of my favorite beers. And it's a it's a good pet project. It's it's constantly changing to my to my liking in terms of bitterness, mouthfeel, and just water profile things like that. I already kind of know the answer to this. I mean, it's kind of the entire theme of the brewery. But how do you guys come up with the names for all of your beers? Obviously, you could open up a book of 80s references and just, you know, throw a dart, throw darts at them right or paper clips. But how do you match names to styles? Yeah, it's a good question. A lot of is pretty much like you said, we, um, so the four founders here, they're out of the four founders. A couple of them are major spreadsheet nerd engineers. And they love their Excel spreadsheets. And they have spreadsheet and spreadsheet of beer names and 80s terms and slang and movie quotes. And this baby hits 88 miles per hour. You're going to see some serious shit movie titles. And it's just like they brainstorm a lot and they try to come up with things that aren't like two on the nose, such as a movie title or, you know, like it keeps people guessing like Tiffany could be the singer. It could be from the TV show. You know what I mean? It could be Brock visit Tiffany's. It could be anything, right? Yeah. It depends what you want it to be. But, um, yeah, basically we have a spreadsheet and it goes through a series of approvals. And, uh, yeah, there's a cut like whether it's the founders or the founders, uh, partners and they kind of go through it. They sit down. We kind of have our own social media team, our branding team. And they will sit down and think, what is the most appropriate term or name for that beer? And sometimes the name has nothing to do with the beer. It's just a fun word that we came up with. But yeah, we have a total arson of 80s words or themes to name beer tune. We come up with a new beer and we just look at the spreadsheet really nice. Well, if you ever make a light beer, may I suggest either the hell Johnson or Joanne McLeod. We're going with the ale Johnson and the Joanne McLeod. Perfect. The light, the light logger body break. Yeah. We, yeah, we came up with a what do we have? We had a, it was a grapefruit. No, it was a passion fruit mango sour and it was participation. I'm flipping through the website right now, which I love because you guys have all the beers that you'd made previously. So there's a hammer pan skewing. Oh, nice. Yeah. That one was going to be parachute pants, but hammer pants came out as a more catchy name. The one thing that stood out when we were walking through the brewery was the cardboard cut out of Kelly Kapowski. So there's of course the base-eyed IPA. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Tiffany's watching over me while I'm brewing. Of course, jiggle watch. American Brownale. I would drink about 1.21 of those. I just noticed because Brownale. I know. Yeah. I got to give half-pines credit for that one when I was that when I was working on half-pines we brewed in American Brown and we called it Dr. Emmett. That's so nice. I'll give them a little credit for that one. In what ways can people find 88 brewing beers? Oh, if I, if I'm not mistaken again, I'm not the sales guy. I'm not the, I'm not the delivery guy, but I'm pretty sure we're at about a hundred accounts throughout the city. We're at some of the big name bars. We're at national. We're at Ship and Anger for those of you from Calgary. Definitely no Ship and Anger. If you guys haven't been, I highly recommend it. Wicked pub, Wicked Beer List, Wicked patio, terrible service. It's what you expect. We're at all the liquor depots. We're at the co-op liquor stores where we're everywhere in Calgary. Really, like if it's a craft beer store, we're there for sure. We have a pretty aggressive sales team and they try to get in everywhere we can. It's tough to get on top here in town, so we, we push the bottle sales for sure. So one of the things that I did notice is that all the beers that you sell, you know, obviously not on tap, come in bottles. Do you guys have plans in the future to to can your beers? Absolutely. That's a great question because that's a, that's a tough one for me. I hate our bottling machine. It's very primitive. It's, it's very labor intensive. It's slow. And we knew that. We knew what we're getting into, but when you start a brewery and you have all the startup costs and you take the money to build your brewery and you put it into the, the metal, the flooring, the drains, the tap room, and you put all your money out and then when it comes down to you, like, oh, we got to put our beer somewhere. And at the time, we could afford this little bottling machine. As you guys saw, we're a little restricted for space in the back. We, we're using our space for our tanks and not for our packaging. And so our little bottling machine works for now. We're at the one year mark and we've officially made the decision to switch over to cans this fall. So we'll be rolling out. We've already rolled out our first cans a couple of weeks ago. We've done two runs of that. And our, that was just a one off collaboration. And then our core beers will be in cans, hopefully, by the end of October. For now, we'll do more about canning. And then in the future, we'll hopefully get our own canning line. Let's talk about the tap room while we're sitting here. Two floors tap room, which I love. This is so bought into the eighties that I feel like home. I grew up with so much stuff around here, whether it's the giant tube, tube TV's, the walkmans, the two people outside that are currently playing duck hunt at the bar at the bar. Oh, yeah. This place is just beautiful. It's been received really well. We, when we opened up, I think, like our first day, day one, we had eight or 10 beers on top, which was pretty unheard of for a brand new brewery. It was, you know, we got the neon lights on. We've got the posters. We've got signs. We've got cool beer names. It kind of just took off right away. And our first summer opened, we opened August last year. And it was months of at capacity, turning people away at the door. We've got two floors downstairs is about 35, 40 person capacity upstairs. You've got about 65, 70 person capacity. And then we've got a 50 person patio. Yeah, you're looking well over 100 people in here upstairs kind of turns into a party after seven, eight o'clock. It's pretty much standing room up here. Shoulder to shoulder is get DJ's certain nights. It's bumping up here. It's a little brighter, a little more fun, a little more neon downstairs is black tile floor white tile bar. It's a little more classy, like a cocktail lounge. If you want to, you know, have a date, bring your parents, have a conversation downstairs. It's a little more chill downstairs, quieter vibe. And whether you're downstairs or upstairs, you get a nice overview of the whole brewery as well. It's kind of like not hiding anything. Look at it. Check it out. There's no walls. There's no windows. It's totally wide open concept. And we're, yeah, we're pretty proud of our tap room. We've got 16 tops on each floor as well, just a kind of bounce back a little bit to the packaging of of your beers. You guys, when you guys switch over to canning, you guys are already that much ahead for if you guys want to do any of your special addition beers and bottles and stuff like that. Because you already have the bottler, whereas I know some brewers or we know some brewers who they've primarily done all cans, everything like that. And then all their special addition, all their barrel age, all that stuff is done all with barrels and the wax and stuff like that. But they have to hand bottle every single one of those. So you guys, you guys are way ahead. And we have people actually inquiring about renting our bottling machine. Yeah, it's interesting. Because as we get into canning. So we've already been exploring in the the heaven forbid the Brett beers and people are afraid of Brett beers. I like to think my my experience in my background kind of eliminates some of that fear and worry. We put Brett beers to our tanks. We we keg them, we put them to our hoses and we have had knock on wood, but no issues. And we're currently aging Brett beers and totes. We've got barrels. We've got now we're playing around and we have yet to run Brett beer through a bottling line. There's a little more moving parts there, a little more finicky little places for those guys to hide. So definitely once we get into canning, that's going to open up a whole new world of having bottle condition Brett beers and all that special fancy stuff there. So for our listeners who are not familiar with what a Brett beer is and why it's a pain in the ass. Yeah, of course. So it's funny mention that we've for a one year anniversary, we had three different Brett beers on top. And we had a lot of who's Brett white, you know, why is Brett so important? And Brett is short for Britannomyces. There's different there's different strains of Britannomyces, which I don't want to get into, but you can go from pineapple mango flavor to as we say horse and like horse blanket barnyard and blue cheese flavors and aromas off of Britannomyces and what it is, it's a wild yeast. So Britannomyces exist wild, it exists everywhere. It's on your skin. It's on the table and it's it's a brewery nightmare. So it produces all these funky flavors, but it's quite aggressive and it's what we call diastaticus and diastaticus can actually break down sugars that your brew is yeast can't. So if you get an infection of Britannomyces your beer it will keep breaking down sugar and fermenting and your beers or bottles will start exploding in stores and it's a hell of an infection and really hard to get rid of. So correct me if I'm wrong then they would use uh Brett in that uh surly beer that uses the guys the yeast from the guys beard. That was I believe not surly there from Oregon what's it called? Uh anchor? Nope. No they do dead man. Yeah what's his name? It's trying to plank right now. Uh I can't remember but the but when we talk about open like wild yeast and stuff like that there are entire breweries around the world that have open air vats because that's what they want they want that wild yeast right. It's absolutely huge in Belgium it's it's a huge namesake of their entire brewing world. I think they've been doing for centuries. Yeah I think anchor brewing in Portland or Seattle. I think that's what they're they used to do unfortunately at we've we've heard very recently that they got bought out by Sapporo I think it was. So we don't know what the future of you know the way that they make beers get to happen if it if it does happen to close or if they stop making beer that way that's uh that's an end of an era. Yeah we find it more efficient to just order Britannum lioncies from your e-supplier and dump it into the tank instead of waiting for three years and for the record it was rogue brewing. Rogue thank you so much yeah I can't believe I drew a blank there. Let's get into beer number three here we're already into it. I'm already into it. You're already into it. Kevin looks a little slow moving. Tell us about this third beer. The third beer we call wave pool so um again like the 80s 90s year kid you go to a little kiddie pool you get the waves in there and huge part of summer especially in Calgary summers are hot. Wave pool is what we call our tropical IPA it is uh it is recently risen as one of our top sellers as well it's been a pet project of mine and my co-brewers to kind of perfect this beer. It you we call it tropical IPA it uses at the moment El Dorado mosaic and galaxy hops which all push forward really tropical stone fruit flavors um a year ago that started off as equinot El Dorado and uh Amarillo I believe so we've taken a total turn on this beer and every batch is different and I just want this one to be so fruity but still true to the west coast style because uh the beer industry is being overrun by these hazees these juicy dank beers with silky mouthfeel and no bitterness and uh when I got into brewing I've been brewing for about seven years now and when I got into brewing it was all about those bitter west coast and uh as we say the sea hops and uh I'm thinking there's a world between the two where you can get the fruity stone fruits and that that dank aroma but still keep it nice true west coast bitter style so for any of our listeners who you know have heard about 88 brewing wave pool that probably because you heard it with we drank it on the uh Wesley Studios podcast with uh our uh good friend Denzel LeBlanc yeah this was our first foray into 88 brewing holy crap I think uh Kevin and I both when we first tried it went okay yeah we need to get these guys on the show because this beer is incredible and we love uh dank IPAs we love fruity IPAs this was so next level if you like a fruity IPA this is a beer you need to get your hands on well it's it's not just because we drank that beer and it was so good the reason why we had to come to 88 in an interview you guys it's because a Donovan you're your connections to Winnipeg of course but we've been told by multiple brewers because we you know we talked to all the brewers in in Winnipeg and we're like all right we're going out west who do we need to see and we've heard from multiple people go see Donovan at 88 nice yeah that's good to hear I try not to burn any bridges down when I left that town you know still still near and dear to my heart my folks still live there my brothers live there it's a great town and I love visiting perfect so uh we'll give you our address and when you come back let's get back into the questions what do you love about your job it's so many things I um you know it's it's like cliche yeah you love what you do and you never work a day in your life and uh I mean I wish that were true this week my co-brew is gone my packaging guys on holidays and I've been putting in 12 hour days this week but uh that's the industry and I still love it it's uh I love the creativity um more so like one of the things I really loved about this and I've loved this from the start is when you brew your first batch of beer whether it's your first or your thousandth batch of beer at the end of your day when you're sitting there at the bar then you see all these people drinking your beer and like oh that's good oh look at the color and they're looking their flights like I'll smell this one it's just like it's so rewarding I think it's just like I'm young and it's it's cool to have a career like this and when you sit there and you can see people enjoying the thing that you've spent so much time trying to perfect never perfecting it but trying to perfect it and just making it the best you can and actually having people pay money for it and enjoy it and being happy they spent that money on it I think it's one of the most rewarding jobs hey Brian hey how many uh sides are there to a coin oh there's two sides to every side so with that what do you hate about your job hmm that's a tough one um getting up early is not easy and I think every brewer just knows you gotta get up early to do this job it's either work late or work early you know what do I hate about it oh you know untapped that's what I hate about it I hate untapped it keeps me up sometimes it's just like some people the comments they leave the ratings they leave it's just it it haunts you and I should just stop looking at I should delete the app off my phone and never look at it because I think it's the worst app in the world for rating beer because it's just I don't know well and in some of our guests have have kind of uh have expanded on that prior because they would say is that the last thing that they follow when they're looking for good beers is rating systems like that because people will be like oh there's floaties in this thing oh I know it's too it's too hazy it's too hazy right and and then there'll be like one star we're like are are you are you getting me that's that's that's the only reason why you're giving one star that's not only that like it's it's it's the fact that like it's people rating and and judging which I love but give me give me a way to make it better they'll say great nose amazing mouthfeel great bitterness three out of five and I'm like okay great I love it and thanks for the response but how can I make it better for you you know what I mean and I think it needs to be more of a platform of just like I don't like dark beers and more of a constructive criticism because it could be a huge like it's it's already global everyone's on it and I think it could be a huge a huge feedback tool for every brew in the world when they could read that and say oh well that's what people think of my beer instead of just like two out of five no comment it's almost like there has to be or there is a market for another rating out where you have to pass a question there right be like okay they're drink these 10 20 beers give us your rating and if it's completely out to lunch then sorry try again yeah and that's the thing I like one thing that helps me relax is when I look at these these poor ratings are these hurtful comments as you go to their profile you look at the previous beers they rated and you're like all right that makes sense see like in it and don't get us wrong like on the pints and growers podcast we are willing to tell you that beer is very subjective mm-hmm there are certain beers that people like my brother loves dark beers he loves stouts he loves porters he loves you know black dark beers he's not going to go and buy a wave pool so he might wait the rate of wave pool a one mm-hmm you know because he doesn't like a fruity IPA as I drank more beers and I know Kevin you you've admitted to this in the past as you've drank more certain style beer you your palate changes and you're well you're you're more interested into more you know whether it's a sour or whether it's more of a wit beer stuff that you're not usually you know you've got to it's not the nicest way to put it but you almost got to force yourself to drink more of it in order to get that flavor change well and one of the other things too that we've said prior on the podcast and we only've talked to a lot of people is that just because you don't like a beer the first time you try it doesn't mean that it's a bad beer or that it's not really hitting all those notes you have to at least get at it a second time right beer is one of those things because you know we've talked about the story about the the double IPA from Phantom which I thought tasted like fucking cough syrup and then I told him that he's like hey check this out what don't look at him but I'm like all that thing tastes like cough syrup and then he tasted he's like dude this is amazing and I'm not saying I'm not saying you're on top if you're on on top do you leave a poor rating I'm not saying you're wrong that's that's your opinion that's your taste that's the way you feel and taste and see that beer it's more so as a brewer when you're like you try you put your heart and soul into this do you put your sweat your blood your tears into this job and then someone's like no it sucks yeah you know but that's any job there's any job in the world and you're gonna have criticism like that you just can't let it beat you down I think like if like just answer the question yeah that's what I hate the most about this job in this industry is yeah going back is untapped I think it's it's terrible for a brewer because it's like yeah it kind of beats you down yeah I'm the worst person on a tapped everything's a minimum of four four to me is like a one yeah and then not to say if you guys find my profile that if it's a four it's a one I like it and I drank it I do my best to stay off of it in general it's more so like when you come out so the pilot beer is a big thing for me for my core beers they maintain they get average ratings and they kind of sit after after four five hundred ratings they kind of just sit and they're never gonna tank because you know that they're good their average they're above average so when you come out with a new pilot beer and you're so excited about it and you release it over the week and you give it two three days and you look back at their ratings and you're just like huh so for example unfortunately we're out of it right now but we had this we have this beer and it was a it was a dark multi kettle sour that I brewed with chamomile juniper berries and grapefruit peel and I remember and like I've never and knock on wood I've never made a beer I couldn't sell and this one when it was in the tank and it was carbonated and I drank and I said oh my goodness No one's going to buy it. this. I was like, this is probably the worst beer I've ever made. And it's sold out so fast. And people like, "Oh, it's unique. It's amazing. I love the camo meal. I love it." It was a dark tea kettle sower. And I was just like, "Why? Why are we even doing this?" And it was actually one of our fastest selling pilot beers and highest rated pilot beers to date. Yeah. And just a backpedal to the story. Because I mean, so our listeners have heard it, but you haven't heard it before, is that that double IPA, the one that I said, takes my cough syrup. The second time I had it, it was amazing. Yeah. So never, never count a beer out the first time you have it ever. Even if it's your beer, you know what I mean? Even if it's your beer? Yeah. So I just say, "Oh, that's something for everyone, right?" Let's get back to the questions. If you won $10 million, and you could not put it into 88 brewing, what do you do? Oh, goodness. I'd probably just travel the world, drink as much beer as I could. I love traveling. I love experiencing new cultures, new beers, and whether it's beer or not, whatever they drink in that culture. I'd probably take and just travel forever. Let's jump into our next beer. All right. So we started off our first little flight of three beers with, let's say, sub-7s. We had a white, we had a hazy pale ale, and we had we had an IPA. And now we're going to step it up a notch here. We're going to start off with our West Coast double IPA. And this is this is a baby of ours. Most of our beers, and this is not a cocky statement. Most of our beers we designed our SAP and hit it with the big system, and it's stuck. And beers like hologram have barely been changed since day one, and that was day one on paper, onto a beer sheet, into the big system. And that was most of our core beers, actually, with minor tweaks over the last year. Most of them hit the big system right away without any pilot batch, without any test batch, as we just kind of went for it and said, yeah, we're comfortable to do this. And double dare took pilot after pilot. Everyone's sort of plenty the fabled plenty of the elder. And for those of you who don't know, plenty of the elder is a double IPA from Russian River Brewing. And it is world famous. It is one of the most highly rated beers in the world. And it is highly sought after and extremely hard to find. So I don't know if plenty is really that good, or if it's just the chase, but I'll tell you that plenty really is that good. And I've had it a few times, and whether it's the best in the world or not, it doesn't matter, because it's consistently good, and it's always good. And it's a solid double IPA. And this is our take on plenty. We call this one double dare. You know, double dare you. I triple thought dare you. 80s games kids, all that jazz, but uh, so this is our double IPA. We stuck with some traditional hops. We wanted citrusy. We wanted west coast style, really bitter, really crisp, highly carbonated. We want this one clear, no haze. And um, we think it plays, it plays hard, and it's one of our best selling draft accounts. This is no secret. I am a double IPA whore. Absolutely. I am going to be an absolute whore for this beer. If pliny is even half of what this beer is, I will be more than happy, because you know, there's plenty of the elder, and then I was doing pliny, the younger. I believe so. Yeah. I've actually never had the younger. I've had there. I've had their, uh, what was the, the pig one, blind pig, blind pig, and I've had the pliny in both fantastic beers. Fantastic. If you don't like bitter beers, this is not the beer for you. If you like bitter beers, this is where this is right in your wheelhouse. Yes. I played around a little bit. We played around with this one. And this is 88 IBUs, just for marketing purposes. What a cool, as we've talked about before, the international bitterness unnecessary units. Yeah. Bitterness unnecessary. There you go. Speaking of dream beers, plenty of the elder has come up as one of the, uh, the dream beers that a lot of brewers we've talked to want to try some, you know, who actually have got to it. I actually loved it somewhere, like, yeah, what's your dream beer that you want to try that you, like you've heard about it for years and years and years, but you have not got your hands on it yet. That's a tough one. The, the, the first one that I finally chased down and got to is actually a celebrator, which is a doppelbock from the Ianger Brewery in Bavaria. And that one was worth the chase. That was my, that would have been my beer. I don't know if I really have a beer to chase right now. It was always Pliny, the hunt for Pliny, you know, it was, it was, it was a good hunt and it was fun. And, once you get it, it's just the best feeling in the world right now. I want to be honest and there's probably people I've told that I've had it just to impress them, but I've never had a Julius from Treehouse. And that's probably one I'd really like to get my hands on because that's a beer that people try to replicate. The color alone, like if you look at their Instagram, you look, I don't know if it's Photoshopped, I don't know, but there's something about that Julius beer. It looks like Orange Juice in a can, Orange Juice in a glass. And I would like to, we've, I've tried and I've tried and I've tried. I've probably done three or four pilot batches here at 88 trying to replicate Julius, even though I've never had it. And I would say that's a beer that I'd like to get my hands on. Brian had that one to the list. I just did. That's what actually what I was just doing. What are you currently working with? And what is the long-term beer plan for Donovan at 88? I'm going to stick it out here in Calgary. I like it. My goal is to, to make some world-class beer here. And I think Double Dare is going to put us on the map eventually. I hope I think if we can hit big production and I get distribution, I think Double Dare could be one of our claims to fame. And I want to keep working on that. I want to keep, I don't want to, like it's it's fun. You know, like I said, I come out with two new beers every week. It's fun. It's a lot of fun to play around with, a lot of fun to goof around on, but there's something to be said about perfecting your beer. You take a beer and you just you you pet it. You you work on it. You groom it. And Double Dare is one of those beers for us. It's just it's such a fun project. The more specific part of this question is like, what do you guys as a brewery want to get into like maybe Russian imperial stouts is something that you haven't really explored yet? What's happening? Or like what what what what isn't happening now, but you want to happen in the future? We are we're currently in negotiations with our landlord. There's an open bay across the back lane. So we're in a complex. There's three identical complexes and just behind our building. There's a vacant warehouse and the warehouse has no power. It has no running water. It has no drains. And to me, that sounds like a barrel house a barrel house. And you can't unless you're going to put in water plumbing and drainage, which is going to cost you tens of thousands of dollars to me. That sounds like a barrel aging facility. So we are in a negotiation with the landlord right now to lease that building. And we are ready to ramp up and start an 88 barrel program. We've played around with cognac barrels. We've played around with tequila barrels. And both beers have been highly received fast-selling and just like highly sought after. And I'm ready for the barrel game. That is exactly the answer that we were looking for. I'm ready to accept the 88 barrel game based off of every beer we've had here. Thank you. So, Donovan, do you remember what the first beer that you made was and how did it turn out? So there's the first beer I made and then there's the first beer that I designed. So like I worked at Half Pines and I mean it's you teach a monkey to brew and he follows the recipe and he hammered so beer. So first beer I brewed could have been any of St. James Pale Ale, Little Scrapper IPA, Desterstick, Stout or their Bulldog Amber. It could have been any of those four. I couldn't, I couldn't recall. I don't have a day that's like, oh, that's the first beer I've brewed. Do you remember Chris Young? He was my head brewer at the time there at Half Pines and I remember my first brew day. I was milling in and he looks at many points at me and he says, no selfies. And I don't know if he's joking or not, but he scared the pants off me so I didn't take a brew selfie my first day of brewing because I didn't want to be uncool. I was just so happy to be on the brew house and it was like, like I said, I started there. I was driving the delivery truck. I was packaging beer. I was sellering. I was cleaning tanks and filtering beer and I do remember my first day in the brewery and I had my respirator on. I was milling in and I just remember Chris saying to me, no selfies. Yeah, so that would have been my first brew day, but the first beer actually designed, it was actually, I was brewing beer for Half Pines and for a couple of years there. And it came up that I was going to move to Germany and a day of the owner there, he says, okay, but before you go, you have to make a beer. You have to design a beer, start to finish. And I made a goza. It was kind of my going away for Germany. It goes as a German style salted sour and I made a sour mash, not a not a common kettle sour, but actually a sour mash goes on a home brew scale in their little. I think I'd have figured out a pilot system and I made a keg of goza. It was not bad for my first beer and you know, could have used a little more salt, a little more sour, but overall as well done. So that would have been the first beer I've made was a sour and that actually kicked off my love for sour. Then if you come here to 88, you'll probably expect two to three different soures on the top list at any given time. Is there a brewery that you guys would or you, yourself, would love to collaborate with? We are we're stroking four wins really hard right now. So actually half of our crew just flew out to Vancouver and did some brewery tours there and they made sure to make a stop over at four wins and they've been here a couple times and there's one thing we get. It's comments on our cleanliness. We run a tight ship here and we have a very clean brewery. Our floor is always spotless. Our tanks are always clean. There's no no dirt, no scars, no not even water sitting on the floor at the end of the brew day and that's one thing that gets as noticed and four wins was in town. Twin sales was in town and we were showing off our brewery and they both commented on how clean it was and that kind of kicked off the conversation. We're like, oh well, would you guys like to work with us? And nothing's happened yet, but we are grooming and stroking and we're trying our best. Four wins is one of my favorite breweries in the world. They're especially in Canada. They'd be top three for sure, so I'd like to get some going with them. For us, because the Canadian brewing wards are coming up in Victoria this coming year and that is one of our what we hope will be another Westerly trip over right and and that stuff. So I would absolutely love where I would really hope that you guys do have that Collaboration the next time that we come out here and they're quite open with us They give us a little no whether they're secrets not there like I was like, how do you do this? How do you do that and they're like, oh, this is how we do that? And I'm like oh See, it's so simple. What advice can you give for anybody who wants to enter into the brewing industry? Knock on some doors. Um, right now that the hype seems to be brew school. So I've got a co-brower. He's a They're actually there's two of me. Let's say I'm a head brewer here. There's two head brewer so at the time I was hired Where the time I was interviewed they said would you like to run this place by yourself or would you like to have help? And I was like, well, I'd be crazy to say I don't want help as much as you want that title and Their responsibility. It's like that's selfish and you want help and so they actually hired two head brewers to start this place So Carson. He's my co-brower. He came out of the corporate oil and gas world and he was sick of working for the man And sitting this cubicle and wearing his suit and tie. So he actually gave it all up and he went to old college brew school He had a career. He had a life and he's just like, no, I'm done So he he actually dropped it all he went to the olds for two years and he worked at last best brewing in town here Very very respected brewery in town and so while he was in school. They brought him on he brewed a few batches for them and So we hired Carson out of old at the same time I was hired So there's two of us heading the operations here and then we hired Bill who's our current brewing assistant out of olds as well So old college and Niagara College seemed to be the big thing If let's say you're a bit older and you're established and you have you know, like who's gonna hire a 40 year old with no Experience into a brewery. You got to have some education or at least something to offer Not to not to shit on their age. I'm sorry, but I've always just been the younger guy in the industry so for example right now We've got this young spunky kid Matt. He's 21 or 22 years old. No, he did a road trip across Canada from Quebec And he literally knocked on a door and he says I want to work in the brewery and So we hired him on as our new full-time brewing assistant and it's just nice to see young kids with Enthusiasm and passion for the industry You don't want the industry to die and you want to keep it young and exciting and I think just go knock on some doors What do I feel like I'm gonna be that 40-year-old guy? Walk around being like hey guys. Do you want to do you want an assistant brewer slash Electrician because I want to work at a brewery. You know a man if you hate sleep and you hate money go do it And honestly Kevin if you use your sexy Kevin voice you'll be okay You guys need a brewer and electrician at the same time. There's there's no there. It's any job It's anything you want to do. It's never too late. Like I said just go knock on some doors and be surprised what can happen the dream Yeah, it's amazing how many like we've got we've got three full-time guys in the back I mean two of them from old which is understandable, but we've got a I think there's 12 or 50 people in this place in total including like tap room staff and all that and the amount of people that we've hired Just literally who came in the front door and said I want to work for you And it's just like sure if you want to work for us, then we want to hire you Here's the beer of the month and now it is time for my favorite part of the month That little time that we actually get to drink the beer of the month so Brian Love that sound this month's beer the month is the dunkel which is a seasonal from Winnipeg Brewerks Sitting at 20 IBU's a 5% ABV is a German style dark logger. So one of the things that People have always asked as you know when we say oh it, you know, this is a dunkel I'm gonna be like what's a dunkel that's exactly what a dunkel is and dunkel actually is a direct translation to Dark in German. So if you happen to find yourself in Germany, and you want, you know, whatever dark beers on tap You just say dunkel you got a yell dunkel though because it's German and it's the angriest language ever Dunkel dunkel hell for a line. You might not actually necessarily get an actual dunkel Depending on where you are if you're in pavaria and you ask for a dunkel, then you're actually gonna get a dunkel dark logger Right off the bat when you you know have a nice good taste of the of the dunkel You'll get a little hint of sweetness, but you'll get nice multi-flavor and It's also very very smooth a lot of chocolate taste to it as well. Some heavier darker mulls Midnight wheat is the malt that they use in this beer. I'm a big fan of this beer I actually the first time I tried it was over at the beer boutique at 910 region to have a new west I happened to Notice that they were doing a tasting there and went and visited Darren and tasted the dunkel Fresh off the batch and yeah, no, I I'm a big fan of this beer a lot of people who have who aren't really into craft beer I found that This is one of those beers that you can probably get Some converts. Yeah, right some so if you if you know anybody who is you know kind of on the fans about dark beer Or about craft beer in general throw a I can't have went to pick brew works to dunkel at them and they will Guarantee you're somebody that you know will like it I can't remember who we talked to we were talking to someone who said that they will always test them Or when people say they don't like beer or they don't like craft beer. They'll test them with a dark beer That's it. You're exactly right. That's exactly what this beer is good for us to get people into flavorful multi-heavy beers, which is perfect for this time here if you want to get your hands on a Winnipeg brew works Dunkel you can head down to a lot of the beer barons will have them the LCs will have them if there is Some stock running low never fear. There is a brand new batch that is going to be canned at the end of November and they definitely do have it. I know at the beer boutique on 9 10 region So let's get into rapid fire and before we do that We should probably get into another beer. Oh for sure. This is um. This next beer is exciting This is our this is our baby. This is Tiffany. I was talking about Tiffany. So Tiffany makes the girls go crazy Tiffany makes the guys go crazy Tiffany's it's unique and it kind of It's amazing how many people want this. It's 8% I'll tell you that much So Tiffany is a classic clean no bullshit Belgian sails on and Tiffany smells good So the one thing about Tiffany is just before Tiffany's done right before she's finished remending and you know We let her it's all clean and sails on yeast. There's nothing fancy. Nothing special. Just like no No strings attached sails on and then right before it's finished remending we pump 200 liters of peanut and war wine grapes and do it and Followed with some tartaric acid to to mimic that dry wine flavor that wine yeast will produce and we actually do a Calderose sails on so it's a red wine Belgian sails on it for men's on peanut and war wine juice basically Can you call this breakfast beer? So it's breakfast at Tiffany's? You know what you you probably could again by just calling it Tiffany You open up so many more alleys if you call it breakfast at Tiffany's it just means one thing by calling it Tiffany You can be whatever you want it to be everyone knows a girl named Tiffany And Tiffany's up in the brew house as far as I'm concerned. So that's all that's Tiffany's cut out watches over me all day Let's get into rapid fire rapid fire will be a series of questions that we fire at you you fire back your first answer Again, it always devolves into some type of conversation. So let's have some fun Donovan, what is your favorite all-time beer? Oh goodness Do I have to answer faster can I think about it? You can think about it. You can think about it favorite all-time beer You know when I was young when I first got in the beer scene It used to be the central city red racer. That was my delve. You know, we're living in Winnipeg you were You were limited to the amount of out-of-proven beers you could access and usually they're either old or oxidized or too expensive So red racer would have been my all-time favorite I used to crush that and then as I experienced more beer You kind of grew away from that My all-time favorite beer nectar is from four wins is up there for sure Keeps joking. Yeah, I'm okay. I hope you're listening four wins And if you are you will happily do an interview with you That's tough. I spent some time at canty-on in Brussels and I never had a bad beer from them And I would I would definitely go back there for sure in my next trip I'll definitely go back to Brussels just to go to canty-on for sure. They yeah, I'd say they're probably my favorite beer that we had Doesn't matter what they produced Growler, howler or Crowler, Crowler. What is your favorite brewery that it's not called 88 brewing? Yeah, that's a tough one as well That's a tough question. I don't know if I actually have one like there's There's so many good ones out there and I've never just had this one That's like, you know, again, I don't have to say canty on because it was a life-changing experience to see what they're doing there At least you didn't default to four wins. I thought about it That's stroking a little too hard. I thought about it. I was like, no, they're gonna catch me at my bullshit here No, yeah, again, I'd have to go back to canty-on which is again cliche for a brewer and a beer lover But it's just like if you've never been here if you've never had their beard. It really is eye-opening Donovan, how do you like your steak medium rare? What is your favorite macro brewing? Hmm. I don't know if you'd consider Milk Street macro The Milk Street's pretty macro. Yeah, cuz there is that Moulson I believe? Yeah, Moulson Cours, I don't know. It's a little bad. Is it a little bad? It's a little bad because I know that because it's in Bell MTS play set away. Okay. Yeah, anyway, is there Milk Street organic log or would be probably one of my go-to Beers that are on the macro. I'd say like Again, I wouldn't want to call the macro, but it is a bee A bee in Bev, but a goose island IPA is a solid macro owned beer, you know what I mean? But I actually have I have a really good friend who used to brew a goose island and I would still consider it a craft brewery Brian, what's your favorite Milk Street beer? Hunter third amp. I'm a tankhouse guy. Yeah, tankhouse is good too. Yeah, they make good beer I mean you can't you can't hate on them because they got money Did we just go through their basic entire line and all of us like a different beer? (laughing) - Jesus Christ. - She's doing something, right? - They're big sellers, yeah. Don, what's your favorite beer type? - Yeah, I'd have to go either stout or IPA. - What is your least favorite beer type? - Saison. - As we're drinking, Saison. - Yeah, you know what? Yeah, I like them, I appreciate them. It's just like, I'll never reach for one, you know? I like making them, I think it's a cool beer style to perfect, I think it's a hard beer style to perfect, and I think they're so versatile. And so diverse, you can make a hundred different Saisons. It's just, you know, if there was an IPA stout and a Saison and a Pilsner and whatever side by side, Saison would probably be the last beer I'd come. - I think it's fair to say Saison will not win the bracket. - Yeah, probably not. But, you just, you just, you just skewed it. (laughing) - But the thing when I, when I taste the Saison that we're still sipping is, my favorite part about Belgian style Saisons is that little, either depending on, you know, who brews it, sometimes they have that little bubble gum kind of after taste, some have the bubble gum smell, and you get the bubble gum smell from this one, or sorry, the bubble gum nose. - Yeah, you're gonna play with that mash temp and that fermentation temp for sure. - What are your brewing pet peeves? - If you leave the hose on the floor, like the gun, like the, the wash down gun, you know? You know, like that, don't leave that on the floor, don't put anything on the floor. Just like, when you, when you finish your shift, if you got buckets full of parts, like clean that off, you know, I don't wanna deal with that in the morning, so. - Well, like, it makes a lot of sense considering how much 88 prides they're self on, they're cleanliness when it comes to being in the brewery, right, so. - Well, especially when your brewery is so open to the tap room, you know, both the upstairs and the downstairs tap room. You know, if it looks like shit. - What would you buy a dirty car? - If someone rolled up a dirty, dirty, dirty car. - I know, but it's a dirty money car, and you just assume that guy doesn't care for his stuff, right? - I'm also not licking the car, though. - Yeah, I know, it's not what I'm not a windable liquor, but on that note about licking the car, like it's just like, so I do a lot of micro on the brewery, I do petri dishes, I do membrane filtration, I test the beer from brewed to you bottle, just to confirm it's cleanliness, and you always do a positive control, you always make one plate that's really dirty, and to achieve that plate, I swab the floor, right? And every time a hundred percent of the time, you will grow a dirty plate, and that way when you plate your beer out of the tank or the bottle, whether it's cleaner, dirty, you can compare to how dirty it is based on how dirty the floor is. - So just because of that, don't put stuff on the floor. - All right, I accept that. - Beer garnish, yeah, or nay? - Nah, if you can't brew beer with enough flavor, you're doing it wrong. - Flight, pint, or schooner? - Pint, pint is just big flights. - Finish this sentence, light beer is water. - I take that back, we've had a lot of meetings and marketing, branding, and I think the next big thing in the craft beer movement is gonna be light beer. - Yeah, the amount of light loggers and citrus hop, citrus dry hop, the light loggers, and stuff like that, they're popping up now. - I did this three and a half percent summer sour, and it just sold out in like three days. People want that light, crushable beer. - Well, I mean, you know the lawn, you don't want to have a eight percent I'd want to do. - I get that, so I think just hammered into your head as a craft brewer from, it's been seven years now, and people just like, no, light beer is the devil. - Well, I think it also goes back to macro, right? - Yeah, for sure. - But light has its place in reality. - Yeah, you put the word light in a beer, and it just has a negative connotation these days. - Yeah, the most horrible drinking/post drinking memories that I have in my repertoire of the horrible drinking memories come from, you know, Cours Light, so it makes sense. - Was that the river puke? - Yep, that was the feeding the fishes. - I always heard this rumor, and again, I don't want to sit here and publicly trash macro, but I mean, the more craft brewer is what we do. I heard that, you know how Cours Light has the mountain cold, like mountain fresh, and the mountain turns blue, when it's cold enough. I heard that scientifically, that's the temperature that numbs your taste buds, so you can actually taste what you're drinking. Well, and again, whether that's true or not, that's just something someone told me once, I can't remember who, but it kind of just stuck with me, and I'm like, that's, you try drinking a warm Cours, you know? - Yeah, even if it's not true, that's still hilarious, right? - I believe it, I don't really care, right? Let's get into beer number six. So this one is, again, I told you that most of our beers are either one off on the pilot system, or one off on the big system, and you just keep, you pick that recipe, and you go with it. This beer's not a work of ours, this would be brew number two, with brew number three in the tanks right now. This one is called Good Morning, and Good Morning is our Vietnamese coffee stout. ♪ Good morning Vietnam ♪ Again, Good Morning Vietnam. Pick the reference, right, '80s movies, and. So this one is Vietnamese coffee infused stout. So it's a sweet stout, you know? It finishes at a high gravity, a lot of residual sugar in there. And at the tail end of fermentation, we infuse this for a week on Vietnamese coffee. So Vietnamese coffee is basically coffee grounds infused with chiquiri, and I've never been to Vietnam, but most millennials these days have, because it's the place to go, when your daddy's got enough money to send you there. - Gosh darn it, man. - Right, I mean, I'm one of them, but. - Yeah, I was gonna say, it's like, I'm 30, I'm gonna wait, I'm tackling my body over all there. - Dude, I'm 36, I'm a millennial. - Right, I'm just bitter, 'cause I've never been to Vietnam, and I'm making Vietnamese coffee stouts. This beer is, or was, or continues to be our highest rated, untapped beer, as much as I hate untapped, it's still a good rating reference on what people like. Whether you agree with their ratings or not, people will rate beer that they like, and you wanna brew beer that people like, and that you like, and so as we move into cans, this will be our first pilot beer, that will actually make its way into cans, and we will move this into production. This is a 7.4% stout, and yeah, it's infused with Vietnamese coffee, and for those of you who know Vietnamese coffee, you know that it is served with sweetened condensed milk, and when you get this on tap on the tap room, they will coach your class in sweetened condensed milk. And it's a huge novelty thing that people love. Gary, are you listening? Gary is my brother. This is the beer you need to try. Yeah, it was inspired, like a lot, I love the Sturistics Stout from Half Pines. I love coffee stouts, but you can't just go to another brewery and brew another coffee stout. And this was, yeah, our founders are quite hipster, quite new age. They love what's, you know, like we did a turmeric IPA, you know what I mean? Yeah, and people love that stuff, and it sold really quick, and I thought it tasted like dirt. But again, people like this new health and new relatable stuff, and a Vietnamese coffee stout just exploded, and people love it. So we're on our third brew, and it will be moved up to large production for cans coming October and November. So yeah, as I grow up, stouts was never my, was never my bang, and especially coffee stouts was definitely never even close to it. It's an acquired taste. You have to really drink a lot of beer and kind of get into it. I'm totally down with this Vietnamese coffee stout. Thanks. This is a breakfast beer for me. You know, we've talked before about how you have the blueberry beer. That's your breakfast beer. Yeah. This is a breakfast beer. This is like a breakfast beer, and this one we also pour on the nitro tap. So it's got the Guinness texture, you know? So this is a pride point of mine, and maybe he's just tugging me 'cause he likes to tug me, but his name's Frank, and Frank's like, he's my, sorry to everyone else, he's my favorite bartender we got here in the tap room. And Frank's OG, we hired Frank very, very close to the start. I bumped into Frank, it's shipping anchor, and we tied one on, he was a bartender and security guy at Ship and Anchor. It's famous, famous culinary pub. If you guys have a chance, I definitely recommend it. And Frank and I met at the Ship and Anchor as he was getting off his shift, and we tied one on, and a few weeks later, Frank reached out to me and said, hey, is your tap room hiring? And he's Irish, and he loves this stout, and he loves this stout on nitro, and he would drink it all day, all night, and to me, that's enough. I hope you do have this episode of the Pines and Growler's podcast as a listening party because then all the other bar staff will stop and they'll look at Frank. Oh, but people know the Frank's the best. Yeah, he's love Frank, it's that accent, you know? That's the Ship and Anchor pub on 17th Avenue. Oh, yeah. I keep shouting them out, they're a huge account for us, especially for a kettle sower. They serve our core kettle sower on top, and it just cranks there. When I used to live in Calgary, I used to live in Marta Loop. So yeah, I spent many days over at the Ship and Anchor. Oh, yeah. You guys remember how this was supposed to be rapid firing? Oh, shit, yeah, was that what we're doing? All right, sorry. What is on your daily playlist? Dropkick Murphy's. [MUSIC PLAYING] That's it? I mean, all you listening to Dropkick Murphy's. It ranges, it ranges a lot. I go from acoustic folk punk to Dropkick Murphy's to, you know, 90s hip hop to-- I don't know, also, it's like anything but country really. I'm the worst Calgary in ever. I boycott Stampede, I hate country music. And yeah, I grew up on a lot of that 90s punk pop, and I really liked that. I really liked the skull and the Celtic punk and stuff like that, so it's just a lot of punk rock. So what's the folk punk? The front bottoms would be a good band. She holds a heart and curse, mother to sleep on her. When she's eyes went dressing, somebody said, you're facing me. AJ, aren't AJ is a good one, modern baseball. I never thought that I would see the day. Here I was expecting just because I love him Frank Turner in there and Chuck Turner. Frank Turner is great. Chuck. Chuck Reagan's great. Frank Turner kind of went a little soft for my taste. Okay. I went to his concert here in Calgary last year and I don't think I'll buy another ticket. Too much dancing. A lot of holding hands and throwing lighters around and stuff like that. But like, yeah, I like Frank Turner. I love him. I think he's a great artist, but yeah, a lot of Frank Turner for sure. Do you think there is an unparable food when it comes to beer? No. I think he can. the thing about beer these days is you can make. you can almost make a beer to pair with a food. Like, you can make any kind of beer you want. People are doing all sorts of crazy things these days. So I think the answer is no. You can at least. whether you can't pair a food with the beer, you can make a beer to pair with that food. I really like that answer. Let's do one more question. Let's go get some more beer here. I like this guy. What is your favorite food and beer pairing? Oh, IPAs in Indian food. Yep. That is. right in my wheelhouse. Oh, yeah. When does a beer become too hoppy or too bitter? And this is going to be a cliche answer. I've listened to a few of your podcasts and members use this word, but the word is balanced. Yeah, there's definitely a huge balance. It comes into water profiles, a huge one for me. I think you can add 80 IBUs to a West Coast or you can add 80 IBUs to a New England and the water profile will be the differentiating factor there. When you say water profile because we're beer dumb, can you explain that? Yeah, so you've got what you call your calcium sulfate ratio. So you start with your water profile and a lot of people use reverse osmosis water, which will actually take the minerals out and you can build your water profile from scratch. And that's, yeah, that's something else. We take the Calgary water profile. We go to the city and we get our water profile. It's your bicarbonates, your calcium, your chlorines, your sulfates. And we take that profile and we build on it. And then we go and we take, let's say, a Dublin water profile or a London water profile or a, you know, a Munich water profile. And we can look at their city water profiles and we can find their PPMs or concentration of calcium or sulfates or chlorines or magnesium's all that. And we can add salts to our beer to mimic that water profile. So a heavy sulfate beer will have a different bitterness than a heavy calcium or a heavy chlorine beer. For any of our home brewing friends or anybody who is planning on getting to home brewing, water profile and stuff like that will be covered in how to brew by John Jay Palmer, which is as far as I know is the Bible when it comes to brewing and home brewing. And I found out that the harder the water is, the better it is for IPAs. Yeah, again, it depends if you're doing a new England IPA or West Coast IPA. Okay, yeah. Because you want soft or you want, you want a soft mouth feel. So like, yeah, like you got your, your, your sulfate, higher sulfate, like higher gypsum is definitely going to be different than higher, higher calcium. Yeah. Again, for any of our home brewing friends or people who want to get into home brewing, when you buy that reverse osmosis water, whether it's more of the water or from wherever, right? You go down to your local home brew shop and they will have the gypsum. They will have the certain minerals and then you can basically balance your water to be what you want it for whatever beer style that you're doing. Yeah, yeah. For anyone getting started, I would recommend just getting some gypsum and some calcium chloride. And that should be enough to get you at least started to differentiate your West coasts from your, from your New England's. And yeah, I'd recommend there's, there's a program called brew and water. It's BRU and water brew and water and you can get a free version or you can get the pro version. And either way, I think that's a good way to get started on building water profiles for any home brews out there. Well, let's jump into our next beer. All right. Let's say third and final flight here is our sour flight. We've got three sour beers in front of us. Three different, totally different beers. The first one is very, very close to my heart. This is my first fully designed and brought to production recipe at 88. And they went straight to the big system and was a huge hit and straight to bottles and is out of our core lineup of let's say seven core beers. This is a top three seller for sure. And it is one of our best draft account beers out there in the city. And I came into Calgary from obviously I was originally brewing in Winnipeg and you guys know the Winnipeg scene. And then I was in Germany and the Germany scene is totally different. It is just rocked by macro breweries making hateful vites and vloggers and and pilsners up in the north where I was. And I came into Calgary and when I got this job offer, I had no idea what to expect with the Calgary beer scene. I had no idea. I didn't know anyone in Calgary. I only passed through to go snowboarding, you know. And when I got to the city at the time to realize there was about 30 breweries in the city. Now we're upwards of 40, 50 since I've got here. And I realized that no one was really doing an aggressive, aggressively marketed and pushed core kettle sour. They were seasonals. They were one-offs. They were tap room only. And I was like we got to get a sour out there. And this is do a tang, do a tang, you know kind of play on the word of tang, sourness, tartness. And they have everyone remembers their do a tang from grade school. Pain in the ass when you get to get the middle page out. But this is do a tang. This is my sour, baby. For a listener to listen to the previous episode at zero-issue brewing, they had a kettle sour as well. The ins mouth, I believe. The ins mouth. And that is passion fruit. It is fantastic. It is absolutely fantastic. And so is this kettle sour. Hey, thank you. You know what? A year ago, shit, even six months ago. I, you know, somebody was like, oh, hey man, you want to try a bunch of kettle sours? I don't mean like, no, I'll fuck you. I don't want any of that shit. Yeah. But now, now it has to be done well. Like, there's sour matches. There's kettle sour. There's too much bituric acid or vinegar. It kind of just tastes like baby vomit, you know. Kettle soures have to be done. You know, kettle soures get hated on by sour beer lovers. Like, well, it's not a real sour and you need a barrel age sour or a three year sour. And I think kettle soures get a lot of hate from proper beer nerds. But kettle soures can be done well, provided they're done clean. And I mentioned this last episode. So, so Perry from Tork, one of the things that he mentioned. What's up, Perry? What's up, Perry? And Perry was actually the first person to tell us to come visit you. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Perry and I have the same tattoo artist, actually. Oh, nice. Fixing to become my, my DM for another, uh, Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Yeah. Perry is a good dude. I like Perry. I remember him back from the Fort Geary days. Just a reminder, Perry, you should probably listen to some thrice right now. Anyway, so let's go back to questions. All right. 355 bottle. 355 can 650 male bottle or 473 can. Oh, that's a tough one. So personally, I like the small cans and a six pack. The bombers, the bomber bottles, the 650 male bottle is going in the graveyard. I think people aren't into that anymore unless you're buying a special barrel age, something or other. Yeah, I think bombers are going the way the dinosaur. And I like the small can six pack, but unfortunately, your accounts don't want them. So for up to me, it'd be a small can six pack. As far as the industry's going these days, people want the tall can four pack. What is your favorite beverage that is not beer? Caesar. Caesar's all day. Where's the best Caesar in Calgary? Um, you can actually, there's a steakhouse called Caesar's and they have one of the best Caesar's in town. The other one I would recommend would be Cleaver on 17th Ave. That was sorry. That was just a side question. Yeah. All good. All good. The Caesar at Cleaver on 17th. That was one of those stocked Caesar's with like the hamburger and the chicken wing and the waffle on it and like it's like a full meal. Like one of the yeah, it's like a $20 Caesar, but you get a meal out of it. It's just like I don't even know what the Caesar's that good. It just seems that good. So for our listeners that aren't aware, Calgary claims to be the creator of the Caesar drink. Yeah. And there's the Caesar's steakhouse. My folks came to town in May for my other, they're from Manitoba still and they came in, they came into town in May for my birthday and they took me to Caesar's steakhouse and it was yeah, highly recommended, unbelievable. Good Caesar, good steak. All right. Now back to the actual questions. So I'm just shouting out all sorts of local businesses here and I have no affiliation with. Listen guys, if you don't sell 88 brewing, you need to pick up their stuff. What is your favorite movie? Oh, I would have to say sin city would be up there. Old school is another good one. Nice. Both great choices. Yeah. So to finish off rapid fire, which really wasn't that rapid, but eat it. Yeah. Donovan finished this sentence. 88 brewing is next level. It's the new hottest thing in Calgary. Boom. Love it. All right. Let's get into the next beer and let's get into the bracket. I've heard about this. What are we drinking? All right. Next beer. So this has a spinoff on duetang, which we just had. This is we call it apricot tang. So this is essentially duetang soured with the different culture and then fermented on apricots. And anyone who's been west of Calgary, you go to Victoria, you go to Vancouver, you go to Tifino, everyone at West, you go to Oregon, you go to Seattle, apparently apricots, the new thing. Everyone's drinking apricot beer and we decided to hop on that bandwagon. So here's our apricot sour and this is a multi-lacto strain sour. Is brewing sour is kind of a pain in the ass? Yeah. Just for time constraints, we're working on the two vessel brew system, whether it's our pilot system or our main system. We have a two vessel system. We have a mash-loader combo and we have a kettle and we sour in the kettle. So souring takes overnight. We sour in about eight hours, 10 hours overnight. But that means that your kettle is held up for that day, that evening, unless you feel like brewing at midnight, you're kind of just hooped until the next morning. So I like brewing showers. I think they're fun, I think they're complex. I think they're, they make good beer. It's just for me and a small brewery in this industry, it's a pain in the ass to hold up your brew system for two days, especially we do double batches, which is a three day brew to fill one for a minute. So yeah, that's it, 'cause yeah, soures are peed in the ass. (laughing) - Let's get into the bracket. The bracket is where we're gonna put two types of beers up against one another. - Oh, I don't like this. - And you are cast on a fan. - Have to pick and choose whether you like it or not. - All right. - Let's start it off with what some have deemed an easy one. - I just pick one. You give me two on pick one. - Yep. - No, no context, nothing. - No, and the best part is that for this trip, we switched up the bracket. So, oh God, I listened to the last couple of podcasts. I was like, "I'm ready for the bracket, I got this." - No, no longer ready for the bracket. - Well, I'll say it's on your out. Season two, here we go. Cream, ale or wheat beer? - What's a cream ale? - Wheat beer. Porter or hazy IPA? Oh, that's tough one. Porter. - I gotta say, with the beers we drank today, I'm shocked that went out so early. - Irish red or black logger? - Black logger. Imperial stout or double IPA? - Double IPA. - That I'm not shocked with. American pale ale or brown ale? - American pale. - Light logger or alf beer? - Ooh, I like an alf beer. - Oh, this is perfect timing. Sour or pilsner? - Oh God. Yeah, I'm gonna have to go with sour. Yeah, that's tough one though. Sorry, pilsner. Dunkle or English best bitter dungle. Sorry, Jeremy. (laughing) - We love racking on old guests. - I hate it. - Yeah. - Jeremy's tried and true British. I respect him for that. Wheat beer or Porter? - Porter. - Black logger or double IPA? - Double IPA. - American pale or alf beer? - American pale. - Sour or dungle? - Sour. - Porter or double IPA? - Hmm, double IPA. - American pale, alf or sour? - Oh, God. I'm gonna have to go with the sour. - Kevin's heart breaks. - I'm sorry, I'm sorry. - Sour or double IPA? - He can't do this to me. (laughing) - Ah, God, I'm gonna have to go with the double IPA. - Double IPA with the win. - Is that it? That's the bracket? - That's the bracket. - That's the whole bracket. - Double IPA, yeah. Does IPA win often? - Sometimes. - I think a lot of brewers try to be pretentiously like, I like pills in there, so are alf beers, because they try to be different than like, the, you know. - The status quo? - Alf beer has only one once. And that was to the previous episode who called you assholes, so. - Yeah. - Oh yeah, high zero issue. (laughing) I'm sorry, have you seen that guy's glasses? (laughing) - Well, let's wrap up with our last, our ninth, and final beer as we all pour back what's remaining of the, the apricot. - The apricot, I like that one. - I'm a big fan of that one. - Yeah. - So this, this next beer, as you can see, it's, the last ones were, you know, we've had what we started off with like a weed ale, and we had New England's, and we had IPAs, double IPAs, we had that rosé saison, which is, it had a nice pink hue to it, really clear. We drank a couple of hours, which were blonde, they're a bit, you know, golden, strong in color, and this is our first, like, something that's totally unorthodox, it's way off the page. It's, for those of you listening, it's like magenta, purple, hazy, no clarity. This was our first canned product. It's the first product that we rolled out to the public in cans, and it was small cans, six packs, and it crushed, it absolutely killed. Within a week, we decided to brew a second double badge, and we got the canners to come back and do it again, and it is called our summer camp crush. And this is a sangria kettle sour, and so what we did, we brewed a really low-alcohol, light-bodied kettle sour, and we fermented it on strawberries, raspberries, and tempranillo wine. Wine grapes. Wine must is what we call it, so the wine must is basically the grape juice from wine grapes that's unfermented. So we get the tempranillo wine must, and we fermented it with strawberries and blackberries, and we kind of mimic a sangria on a kettle sour base, and it pumps it up to about five, five and a half percent. I think it's 5.3. Anyways, yeah, this is our hottest summer seller, and it is just like unbelievably crushable. - We went to Winnipeg Beer Fest, not too long ago. There was a beer that was kind of like this, that it was almost, it was almost like a puree. - Is that my girl? - No, no, it was a transcanada brewing. - Yeah, yeah, yeah, transcanada. - It shocks me. - Morgan from transcanada. - Yeah, that shocks me. She's been really knocking 'em out of the park. - I heard they got that whole foodie room in there, I'm so jealous. - Yeah. - The thing with this is that you would almost expect this to kind of be that kind of puree like the bee chunks. - It's actually kind of light body day. - It's quick thing. - It is very, very. - It's super crushable, and it comes in a can, I guess it's a small can, and so this was a collaboration with camp brand clothing. Again, this is not a radio shout out, but camp clothing is a local clothing brand. They're very recognized here in the city, they're a local clothing brand, they're heavy into the camping and hiking scene in the outdoor scene. We've approached each other and said, "Hey, we should make a beer together." That's summer crushable in cans that you can take hiking, take camping, and we did a whole merchandise release on it as well. So this beer comes with its own line of t-shirts and fanny packs and stickers and hats, and it just crushed, it absolutely crushed. - You know what's funny is we pulled up and we parked right out front, and as we were getting out, I go, "Oh, staff, look, fanny packs." - Yeah, all right. - Yeah, it's a thing, it's a thing here, and it's like, in the fanny pack comes with like, three beer sleeves to put your cans in, and it was a pretty cool collaboration, and they are, so like, the current way to test success is to look at your Instagram followers, apparently. So anyways, but it's more so a recognition. You know, like we are at, like we're one year old, and we're over 8,000 followers, I believe, which is huge for the beer scene. As far as opening date to current Instagram followers, if you want to use that as any sort of metric, we were the fastest in Calgary. And to put them perspective camp has 140 or 150,000 followers. So to have them blowing up our beer was just huge marketing for us. - I think with stuff leaving here, like because stuff, of course, is here with us, there is no way I'm not leaving with some of this. - Oh, no. - Yeah, there are six packs in the fridge. Well, I'll take your money, I like money. (laughs) Well, that's one of the things is that I would never, ever, ever consider a sour to be crushable. This is crushable. - Yeah, so a lot of people, a lot of people, you know, when you're talking to other brewers, it's just like, oh, what's your pH? How fast did you sour? And it's like this whole like big dick competition about like how fast you sour your beer. And I've actually realized that it doesn't matter how sour your beer is. And the less sour it is, the easier it is to sell. Right, like there's a pH scale, or there's a titratable acid scale. There's this whole metric on how you can measure how sour your beer is. But as long as it's below the pH of an average beer, you can call it a sour. And people are like, oh, I never liked soures before. And then you give them this sour, that's just slightly sour. And you kind of like hook them. - Yeah. - And then the next one, you make slightly more sour. And the next one, slightly more sour. So to give you an idea, a year ago, the duatang, the first sour we had, when we released it, it had a pH of 3.5. Your average beer has a pH of 4.2. Let's say, I'm gonna finish product. So this is three and a half pH. And over the course of a year, we've dropped that down to 3.2. And no one's noticed, sorry, public. But yeah, no one, yeah, spoiler alert, right? But no one has complained, no one's arguing. And so what we did was we made an entry level sour, and we slowly acidified it over the course of a year to the point of my liking. And no one's even mentioned it. No one's complained about it. No one said, oh, this is due sour, because they're all into it now. - That's why I brought up Perry from earlier, because Perry had always say he would taste a beer that would claim to be a sour or a gentle sour, whatever it would be like, this isn't sour, right? But this is 100% within, as far as I know, Perry's wheelhouse, 'cause these are, like this sour flight is actually sour. - Perry stopped stealing the spotlight and come visit me. - This is for people who would argue between, I like fruit beers, I like sour beers. This is your wheelhouse. This, it's half fruit beer, it's half sour beer, and it is so good and mine was gone so fast. - You basically chugged them. - Like I said, we got 16 taps on each floor. We have the taps full every week. We maintain a core beers and we try to come out with at least one or two new beers every week, and that being said, at least two or three, those are sours. There's at least a couple of stouts, Hazeys, IPAs, everything you want, and we go from beer nerd to home brewer to dad beer to first time beer drinker. And if you're here on a date and you love beer and you're bringing a girlfriend, I promise you will find something for her to like if she hates beer. So people like me. I don't drink beer and I'm like well have you tried this you know, it's a strawberry raspberry sangria sour And like it doesn't taste like beer and I'm like exactly so we like I said we fill the tap room every weekend. There's capacity and we do our best to make sure that everyone who comes in here has something to drink I think that's coming close to the end of the episode anything else you want to add I just want to say for those you listening for those of you in Calgary for those of you who aren't from Calgary and For those of you who visit or plan on visiting Calgary, I just want to say that We've also in our tap room that has been mentioned. We've got this guy named Mike and his nickname is pizza Mike and Pizza Mike does exactly what you think he makes pizza in our upstairs tap room and he makes arguably the best pizza in Calgary and I would highly recommend you come by our tap room and if you don't like my beer at least come try the pizza because Yeah, I've been here for a year and I wasn't from here. I don't have friends here. So you're out making friends You're talking to people are like. Oh, what do you do? I'm like I run 88 brewing and then on the production side like oh my god 88 brewing and I'm like yeah They like they have the best pizza in the city and I'm like yeah, I heard the beer's okay - But legit we we got the best pizza in the city and I just want to give I just want to give pizza Mike a shadow here And if you have the chance, please do come by our tap room and People will literally wait two hours for a pizza here. So yeah, it's cool I thank you guys for coming by and I just want to give all my Winnipeg friends a shout out to you I'm I'm happy I still I still you know didn't burn my bridges and you guys are still chatting about me there So thanks a lot Winnipeg as a tradition on the pints and growlers podcast 88 brewing has been so kind to give away a Glass grower as well as a t-shirt as is we are doing with season two the person who could correctly identify What Donovan decided is the best beer in the bracket if you email pints and growlers podcasts at gmail.com You are entered to win said grower and t-shirt and don't forget that you have to get a Response email saying correct that you are entered into the draw or else you were not entered into the draw Well, Donovan. Thank you very much for hosting us here at 88 brewing in Calgary We really do appreciate it. Where can our listeners follow you on Social media. Oh, I'm a bit of a ghost on social media Instagram's a good one. We've got a pretty sexy Instagram as far as I can tell I'm a moderate to light Instagram user Anyways, yeah, our Instagram's pretty nice our websites usually up to date a lot of websites in the brewing industry Just kind of go to die and they feed off their social media our our website will list our our beer our locations to get our beer Whether it's a store or a draft account we do weekly posts on what's available in the top room So I definitely follow our website and there's a newsletter you can sign up for on our website to get special emails But yeah, I definitely follow the Instagram because that's where the magic happens You can follow them at 88 brew co on Instagram and that's 88 spelled out in actual words not the numbers Same thing 88 brewing dot C.A. with the actual words not numbers Well, that about wraps us up with pints to grow with podcast. I'm Brian I'm Donovan and I'm Kevin and this has been The Pints to Growler's podcast Thanks for listening Subscribe now to this podcast and check out other podcasts from safety net studio by visiting the website safety net studio dot com Hey, I'm Kevin the Sultan of sezon and I'm Brian. I'm the warden of wikipedia We're here from the Pints and Growler's podcast and if you love craft beer as much as we do You'll love the newest beer baron in town The beer boutique located right at the gates of transcona 9 10 regent avenue west with a huge selection of craft beers and a growler Fill station This is the stop for Pints and Growler's fans when you want to try the beers you hear about on the show So if you like craft beers check out the beer boutique right next the new best Western premiere winnipeg at 9 10 region avenue west today Cheers