Episode 154: Juicy Dry Hopping

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What you're about to hear originally aired in December of 2019, we'll be back next week with a brand new episode that you won't want to miss. We seem to be able to get to lower VDK numbers and do a better shelf stability while still hitting all of our brand targets in a shorter period of time and saving potentially 48 or 72 hours a tank time. This week on the show, presenters from the juicy dry hopping workshop in Calgary join us to talk about their quest to maximize flavor, aroma, and efficiency in heavily dry hopped drinks. I'm Ryan Dottamitt with Oscar Blues. Hi, I'm Ben Ednonds with Breakside Brewery. I'm Evan Partridge at Firestone Walker Brewery. Daniel Sharp, Director of Brewery and Operations at Nincasi Brewery & Company. Ryan, Oscar Blues has tried it all over the years. Dry hopping cold, warm, with yeast, without yeast, agitated, static, rousing, recirculation, you name it. Before you talk about what's working best for you these days, let's hear about some of the strategies that didn't work so well for you and why. Yeah, that's an interesting question. I'd say that something within all of those methods at some point went horribly wrong. I think one of the biggest things for us was figuring out how to balance a high hop load with some of these different methods of rousing and/or recirculating. With these juicy styles, this is what we were up to talking about today. The hop loads just get bigger and bigger and bigger. But obviously when you try to maximize what you pull out of those, you're going to get all the negatives along with it. Particularly with recirculating, it's the best course to get everything homogenized and to really get a consistent product, but you also have to understand what you're working with. We've recirculated hops with yeast in the slurry and it just smelled like absolute garbage. Literally like garbage. That's all those sulfur compounds that you're pulling out. Sheering hops, sheering yeast. We've dialed in procedures by this point, but we're not afraid to try things, but we have been cautious over the years because you don't want to be that smells like broccoli. Yeah, no doubt. Okay, well describe your current process and what it's accomplishing that some of these other attempts couldn't. We still use a variety of techniques and variety methods depending on the brand. I think the most relevant to this conversation is dry hopping with yeast, but with a very controlled amount of yeast. We're engaging some hop creep because there is still some activity. We're still at fermentation temperature, allowing them to make activity to do something with viable yeast in solution. Just only a controlled amount so that the creep doesn't run away from us and we end up with a VDK bomb. We've got half the brewery trained in how to do solution counts now, so the one we're trying to remove yeast, we get it to a very specific level throughout the tank before we put the hops in. Okay, great. All right, what's here from Ben? Ben, talk about what juicy means in your brewery and also how traditional IPA is evolving under the influence of Hazee or juicy IPA. As this whole phenomenon of kind of new, I guess what we call modern IPAs, has evolved in the last five, six, seven years. I think the term "Jews" has been kind of bandied about in a number of different ways. We wanted to define what that meant for us as we started going down the path of creating new beers and changing some older ones. So between what our peers had done and what we talked about internally on our sensory panels, we identified a number of different traits. Obviously, Intense Hopperom is a huge part of that, the flavor that's really led by fruity and tropical characteristics, lower amounts of traditional citrus or European hop character. Also, quite a bit more of what I would describe always as a rich and lush hop flavor across the entire palette. The intensity of kind of satiating hop character that finished with refined bitterness, with some bitterness still there, but there was a lot more mouth-coding and kind of satiating is probably the best word that I can think of. And then I think freshness is a huge part of this as well, but those were kind of the three components that we've focused on, whether the beer is clear or hazy. Our own beers have, you know, breaks that IPA remains our best-selling beer for nearly 10 years now, but if you look at how that beer is evolved over the years. But it's not the same beer anymore, is it? Well, you know, it's like that. It's the boat question, right? It's a famous question of philosophy. It's the same name beer, yeah, but it is pretty different than it was in 2014 when it was, you know, 15-plato beer that was 70-BUs. Now it's a 13-8-plato beer that's closer to 48-49-50-BUs. And those changes have been instated at the behest of what we see is changing consumer preference for beers that are a little bit softer in their bitterness, but still are incredibly expressive in terms of hop flavor and aroma. Okay, you've mentioned that the sensory data at Breakside shows that shelf stability in your hazy juicy IPAs isn't any worse than that of your clear IPAs. That said, talk about your freshness targets and what you've learned there. Yeah, we try and keep a real stranglehold on pipeline. I think that there is something to be said that the rise and interest in people buying, say, you know, canned four packs or, you know, the rise and interest in hazy IPAs is there's something in consumer psychology that's a beer consumer psychology that's akin to people who want to buy their vegetables, freshness farmers market, or they meet local from butcher, rather than buying it a major chain. And I think as a midsize and growing brewery, one of the biggest challenges we have to face to look at ourselves on it and say, how do we keep these beers really fresh? So that they're landing in front of consumers at 20, 25 days, not at 60, 70, 90 days, even if that beer can still pass sensory benchmarks at that point. And so for us, that's always started by having logistics and shipping and fulfillment be kind of tied in with brewery operations. We really warehousing and logistics report to our director of brewing ops. And so we brew to consumer consumption date rather than to any kind of warehouse, sorry, any kind of production quota. You did some hop addition timing trials. What did you want to learn about that project? Yeah, like Ryan had mentioned about what they were dealing with Oscar Blues in terms of hop creep. We also have been trying to kind of get our arms around hop creep and understand how to both take advantage of it, but not let it cripple and paralyze our production schedule. So in this case, our director quality had a, what turned out to be a really smart idea was to try moving up a portion of our dry hop from our normal time to an earlier point in fermentation to see if we could kind of accelerate the entire metabolic curve of hop creep. We're still in the early phases of testing this, but it seems encouraging. We seem to be able to get to lower VDK numbers and do a better shelf stability while still hitting all of our brand targets in a shorter period of time and saving potentially 48 or 72 hours of tank time. Awesome. Evan, don't get me wrong. I love the folks we have in this industry who are doing all kinds of amazing hop research, but hops are taking all the credit and it's more complicated than that, isn't it? Yeah, I'd say so. Like I was saying in the talk, we brought a whole new yeast drain into our brewery just. to brew these new juicy style beers, which is a big deal for us because we only have two yeast drains. So, you know, when we were looking at it, we were brewing, you know, batches of beer with our house, ale yeast. And we just weren't getting these juicy flavors that we really wanted from this style. It was only until we brought a new ale strain in that we were really actually able to get these newer juicy flavors that we're looking for. We're coming up. We actually pulled out a lot of the hops that were heavy in thials, and that actually kind of got rid of some of those sulfur aromas. I'm John Bryce, and you're listening to the Master Brewers Podcast from the Master Brewers Association of the Americas. There's really only one thing that keeps this podcast going, and that's when listeners like you take the time to thank our sponsors. The next time you talk to a rep from one of these companies, be sure to thank them for their generous support. This episode is brought to you by our friends at BSG, who invite you to experience one of the newest hops from their HAP Solutions line, HS Grove. Developed for HAP Forward Beer Styles, HS Grove, both incredible bio-transformation qualities, giving you the power to transform your next IPA into a stone fruit powerhouse. Choose HS Grove for West Coast IPA, New England IPA, double IPA, American Paleo, or any beer style where delicious fresh fruit aromatics are desired. 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The Master Brewers brewery packaging technology course begins February 22nd. District Great Plains has their annual meeting February 23rd and 24th at Mark I Electric Company in Kansas City. District St. Louis meets at Top Golf and Chesterfield, February 26th. District St. Louis's March Shop Talk will be a Blue J Brewing March 21st. The District St. Louis Spring Quarterly meeting is April 8th. District St. Louis has a joint social with the St. Louis chapter of the Pink Boots Society May 9th at 9 Mile Garden. The Master Brewers brewery maintenance systems course begins June 6th. This time to save the date for the 2024 World Brewing Congress, August 17th to the 20th in Minneapolis. Check out the full counter events at mba.com for more details or to find a district meeting. Near you. Now back to the show. Byerson did some trials that pitted the House Ails strain against a new juicy strain. Give us some data points. Yeah, so overall this new juicy yeast just produces more esters across the board. Almost in every way except for islay on molacetate. One interesting one to point out is Ethel butyrate which it produced a lot more of. We get this huge pineapple character from our beer. And maybe that extra Ethel butyrate is kind of helping the perceived pineapple character of that beer. Also if you're kind of looking at terpenes, you know, overall the beers that were made with the juicy yeast had a slightly elevated terpenes. This yeast does throw a lot more haze than our House Ails yeast does. So that might be acting as a carrier. And interestingly we see a ton of citronella in the beer brew with the juicy yeast. As opposed to the House Ails yeast. You ran into an unpleasant aroma during this process. Talk about that as well as what you did about it. Yeah, so you know when we were doing this side by side batches, we noticed that we were getting a lot of sulfur aromas coming out of the batch brewed with with the juicy yeast. A lot of like onion garlic in our hops but we couldn't really put our finger on it. We can't really measure sulfur at the brewery so we sent it out to an external lab. And it came back that we had a lot of extra methylphioacetate in the beer made with the juicy yeast as opposed to the House Ails yeast. We looked into it a little bit and yeast can actually convert, you know, mercaptons and things like hops into methylphioacetate. So it's just a theory but we thought that you know maybe we were just getting some bio transformation with this juicy yeast. So one thing we did was we actually pulled out a lot of the hops that were heavy in thials. And that actually kind of got rid of some of those sulfur aromas. We didn't actually get a chance to prove that that was exactly what happened but there's just kind of an interesting way of how you know using sensory to drive some analytics and then make changes to your process going forward to make your beer better. Make sense. Talk about how you dry hop for juice. Yeah so we're looking to get towards the very end of fermentation but there's still going to be a little bit left. We dry hop warm and before we dry hop we're basically checking cell counts, checking gravities and then we either dump the yeast or we get a harvest off the tank. So the real and you know the trick for us is to basically find that point where enough yeast is flocked out where you can get a good harvest but you still have enough yeast and suspension to get some of those bio transformation characteristics. We do three days of contact time and then one thing I think that we actually don't do that a lot of breweries do is that we do no rousing, no mixing, no recirculation. We basically use a hot cannon, blow the hops into the top and let them do their thing and we hope that there's enough agitation from the fermentation and as I mentioned just the fact that we have really tall skinny tanks, I think we get some more extraction than you would from smaller tanks from a brewery. Ben that's true for you too right you guys don't do any rousing either right? Yeah that's correct and our large tanks were just letting them settle. Actually I was going to ask Evan a question though is do you as do any rousing recirculation on the smaller tanks down in Venice? Yeah down in Venice we actually do rouse them with CO2 from the bottom. Yep and at breakside we do the same with the 10 and 20 barrel tanks. Why is that? What's the difference? I think for us we believe that the contact time, two things one is that we're not getting as long of a kind of contact time in the liquid column but also that we're actually able to effectively get the hops back into solution far enough and a taller tank I just don't think we're getting it very far up. Yeah I mean if you dry hop on a 20 barrel tank and you open up the bottom the tank you're going to get hops almost immediately so I just think that it's good to recirculate or rouse. Okay talk about how you manage hop creep. Well we basically just had to get a couple things diled in so we really we did a test where we tried raising the mashed temperature. and realize that we were making, you know, we're trying to raise up our ending gravity. We raised the mass temperature, the, you know, the fermentability of the work went down, but after we added the hops, it just fermented all the way out anyway. So we just kind of decided to embrace the, that we were going to get some hop creep, and then once we did that, we started just working on making everything as consistently, you know, consistent as we possibly can. So we normally brewing this beer on the same day of the week, where, you know, trying to brew this beer when our brew house is hot, and you know, don't want to come into a cold brew house, so that'll mess up your firm, like your work fermentability. And then just, we've always been super militant about yeast pitch rates, yeast viability, and then also kind of trying to dry hop at the same time, under the same circumstances. As you can kind of see, you know, maybe, we've been brewing this beer since last December, and about in the middle of May, we actually seem like we kind of got the hop creep under control. Daniel, you wanted to evaluate Whirlpool versus Dry Hop, Aroma, and Nincasi. Talk about that project. Yeah, actually, so that project was done at Oregon State University, working on my PhD. There, that project was mostly just looking at 12 different hop cultivars, single hop beers, and examining either them in the Whirlpool format or the Dry Hop format. And yeah, basically what we saw is typically the, from a sensory perspective, two groups being separated out, the Whirlpool and the Dry Hop, from just the sensory results specifically, and overall intensity, or hop aroma intensity increase as you're moving from within a variety from Whirlpool to Dry Hop. Getting into biotransformation, you asked the question, does hopping regime influence a glycoside extraction? Does it? No, at least from the studies that we saw, and to kind of go back on this, we did a ton of work on glycosides, everything from hopping regime, hop cultivar, enzyme type, yeast type, and we found that really when it comes down to it, there's not a whole lot of terpenal alcohol glycosides, present in hops, at least from what we were able to see, and so that even with the hopping regime, it was pretty a pretty minimal effect. Do you want to talk about the flavor stability testing that you guys did? Sure, absolutely. So the study kind of first started with a study done in partnership with Oregon State University, Brad Barnett, study looking at the impact of dissolved oxygen and temperature on dry hop beers, and so he basically took a look at different storage conditions, forced aged and forced-stored warm and cold-stored beers, and then injected those beers with different amounts of dissolved oxygen. And basically, the findings show that temperature played a much bigger role compared to dissolved oxygen, as it relates to aged beer at sensory attributes. And then building off of that, we performed a much longer shelf life study looking primarily at temperature and storage time, with one of our core brand beers, hazy domination looking at basically warm storage, cold storage, and then a combination of warm and cold storage over the course of 120 days. Tell us more about that. Yeah, so basically trying to look at the sensory impact of storing beer cold versus storing it warm over a period of time, and the main things that we saw come out of this was that even over 90 days stored cold, the beer doesn't seem to really degrade that much in terms of aged beer attributes, but then as we get past 190 days, start seeing the hop aroma intensity go down a little bit, and then particularly with the warm storage samples, even as little as 30 days, and I think Ben mentioned it in his talk earlier today that even a lesson around what five days or something like that, seeing pretty rapid decline of the beer quality, flavor stability. And I should point out that these beers, a few folks asked a question about the dissolved oxygen levels on these beers. These were all pretty low. We have an internal spec below 80 ppp, and then also based on that previous study that I was just mentioning, how DO is kind of a more secondary effect on terms of beer age and compared to temperature and time. That was Ryan Dunnevent, Ben Edmunds, Edvin Partridge, and Daniel Sharp live from the 2019 Master Brewer's Conference in Calgary. All Master Brewer's members can now get their very own free copy of the juicy dry hopping workshop presentations along with all the other outstanding posters and presentations from Calgary. Download your copy of the conference proceedings at MBAA.com or check the show notes for a link. Master Brewer's members don't just get free access to the annual conference proceedings, we also get access to the hundreds of presentations that take place at all of the individual district meetings. But there's only one way to be sure that invaluable, searchable archive reaches its full potential. I know you want to see that happen as much as I do, so let's talk about how you can help. Ask your district officers if you can help them get the presentations uploaded. It's super easy. There's even a short how-to video link at the top of the archive. And if there's a presentation that you think we should highlight here on the show, shoot me a quick message. All the links you need are in the show notes. Are you enjoying the Master Brewer's podcast? Let me tell you about a simple way you can help us keep making more. Take a minute to thank our sponsors. There's no way we could produce this show without generous support from sponsors like Hopstiner, ProximityMalt, BSG, Precision Firmamentation, and the Loupi Linux Change. So please, let them know you heard their message on the Master Brewer's podcast and that you appreciate their support. (upbeat music)