JAKE>>: Hello, and welcome to Brewing TV. I'm Jake Keeler.
MICHAEL>>: And I'm Michael Dawson. We've met up with the Widmer Brothers a while ago and
talked with them about who they are; why they are; who they are; where they are. Find out
the answers to those questions and meet a couple of really funny dudes in this episode.
JAKE>>: That's right. But before we get to that, we've got something to show you.
MICHAEL>>: It's time to deliver on a promise, tasting notes, open versus closed. Videographer
Chip Walton split of batch of Northern Brewer's Patersbier recipe and we're tasting the results
here today, half-open fermented, half-closed. Let's dig in.
JAKE>>: All right. Want to start with the open?
MICHAEL>>: Yes. JAKE>>: Fruity.
MICHAEL>>: Um-hmm. I get a lot of bubble gum and a little bit of banana on top of some
kind of green tree fruit, green apple, green pear kind of flavors and aromas.
JAKE>>: Do you think that's more ester production with the open fermentations.
MICHAEL>>: And more fennels. JAKE>>: Yep.
MICHAEL>>: Yeah. Really round, nice and soft. JAKE>>: It's a refreshing beer on a hot summer
day. MICHAEL>>: Very refreshing. It's a little
bit of that kind of plasticky flavor that I associate with hefeweizens too. You know,
production there without the closed though. JAKE>>: What about the closed? What do we
see here? it's a bit more dry. Maybe a better attenuation of the yeast perhaps.
MICHAEL>>: Or less mouthfeel. JAKE>>: Hmm.
MICHAEL>>: Maybe less mouthfeel. JAKE>>: Si, senior.
MICHAEL>>: It's just a little bit cleaner. There's tree fruit, pear, apple aromatics
come through a lot more; not as much other stuff laying on top of them kind of getting
in the way. It's a little bit simpler beer. It's a little more pilsner-like almost.
JAKE>>: Yeah, I think out of the two, I prefer the closed fermentation version. I think the
extra flavors in the open fermentation start to mask some of the nice qualities of patersbier.
MICHAEL>>: See, I kind of like the open better because it's more complex. It's still very
light and approachable. JAKE>>: Yeah, you're like that though.
MICHAEL>>: Complex? Light? JAKE>>: I'm a simple man.
MICHAEL>>: Approachable? You're not clean though.
JAKE>>: No, I'm just something that I know and understand.
So the real question is, Chip, which one do you prefer?
CHIP>>: Open. JAKE>>: Chip likes the open.
Well, gully gee, Dawson, we're bickering like a couple of brothers here.
MICHAEL>>: Hey, that's reminds me, we should show you guys our conversation with Kurt and
Rob. JAKE>>: Yeah, we should.
MICHAEL>>: All for brew. JAKE>>: Brew for all.
Either way, this is a good beer, open or closed. MICHAEL>>: Nice job, Chip. Thanks a million,
Chip. JAKE>>: Yeah, well done.
When you tour the Widmer Brothers' brewery in Portland, Oregon, the last thing you might
think of is homebrewing. This place is a far cry from the five-gallon batches in your basement.
MICHAEL>>: The brewery is a mammoth. One batch is 250 barrels and they can brew up to ten
batches in a 24-hour period. Large fermentors hold, two, three, even six batches at a time.
That's 1500 barrels of beer. There's a tunnel that carries beer under the street into tanks
in another facility, and the packaging department with its giant robots can handle 500 bottles
a minute, or up to 300 kegs an hour. KURT WIDMER>>: So from here, these guys can
control brewing. They can control where the direction of the beer flow; like, if you want
to send beer across the street for clarification or back for packaging or racking, they can
control that. They can control cleaning; everything has its only cleaning system. And they can
control CIP tanks from here. And so they can direct wort to whichever tank that they want,
including across the street, and it's pretty remarkable system.
JAKE>>: But after a few minutes of talking to Rob and Kurt Widmer, they're roots in homebrewing
and their humor begin to shine through. ROB WIDMER>>: Oh my God. And you sleep with
this -- you sleep with this woman every night? Oh my God.
KURT WIDMER>>: You sleep, like, with a gun under your pillow, you know, at midnight?
JAKE>>: The do-it-yourself attitude began with their first brewery.
KURT WIDMER>>: It's something that we built ourselves, and we were very proud of it and
we thought it was beautiful, and then when we look here and we look back at that video,
it's like, oh my God. But, anyhow, for the first thousand batches that we brewed on that,
it was a 10-barrel system, we changed something every single time. Literally every time a
procedure -- not ingredients every time but we changed the procedure and it resulted in
subtle changes to the beer over those thousand batches, you know. I mean, one of us would
come in, you know, and say what if we did this, and when you're little and you're draft
only, you can do things like that. When we were homebrewing, I mean, hell, we changed
things dramatically. I mean, you know, but, I mean, who cares. And I mean, my friends
are drinking free beer. They're going to complain? It's like get out, you know.
JAKE>>: Rob and Kurt have been proud members of the Oregon Brew Crew Homebrew Club for
about 30 years. ROB WIDMER>>: Yeah, I think the whole thing
started with homebrewers. I mean, that where the original -- I mean, that's where we started.
You know, people who had interest in beer, you know, a lot of them moved into homebrewing
pretty quickly, so I think that was really the genesis of the reemergence of small brewing.
I mean, early on, most of our customers were those guys, you know -- or best customers.
KURT WIDMER>>: Well, you know, I think that a lot of the people that maybe didn't start
breweries in Oregon but are active in breweries in Oregon are from the Oregon Brew Crew.
ROB WIDMER>>: Yeah. KURT WIDMER>>: And a lot of these guys started
like we did, which is strictly as a hobby. We didn't join the Brew Crew thinking some
day we'll have a brewery. You know, we joined it just because we were a couple of nut heads
and thought that we could benefit from the experience in guys that kind of went ahead
of us. ROB WIDMER>>: You know, a lot of commercial
brewers are still homebrewers and a lot of, you know, homebrewers are, you know, part-time
or full-time or headed that way. You know, a lot of the guys were homebrewers and so
-- yeah, it's definitely -- KURT WIDMER>>: It's, again, it's one of those
-- it's something that no other city can point to. You know, it's certainly not on the scale
that Portland has, so it truly is unique. It's remarkable. Hey, come on, this is going
to nationwide, be careful. ROB WIDMER>>: I didn't say anything. We did
it totally legal. KURT WIDMER>>: Okay. Go ahead.
MICHAEL>>: The Widmer's maintain a close relationship with the Oregon Brew Crew, providing a larger
forum for members' creativity. Through its collaborator project, Widmer Brothers' select
homebrew recipes and brings the creator in to brew a 10-barrel batch with brewery staff.
The beer is then served at bars and pubs throughout Portland.
ROB WIDMER>>: And we pay the Brew Crew, we give them $4 a barrel for every barrel that
we sell, and so far to date, they send all of that money to Oregon State University for
the Falconer McCracken Scholarship Fund for Brewers. So it's a pretty cool deal. I mean,
it's fun for us because we're exposed to a lot of techniques and ingredients that we
just would not do. I mean, one of the last beers, the 11th anniversary beer called for
80 loaves of rye bread, humper nickel rye bread, bread, cubed, that's not something
that we would typically do, and we thought, you know, this is going to be a mess but it
worked and it added kind of a neat, you know -- a neat character to the beer.
JAKE>>: It's that element of experimentation that was and still is essential to the evolution
of craft beer. KURT WIDMER>>: We had the license from day
one to -- to go nuts. ROB WIDMER>>: Yeah, we didn't have any rules.
KURT WIDMER>>: Yeah, I mean, we've got guys that I don't know if they're still doing it
but they were throwing candy bars in, you know, and they -- you know, people were -- were
laying awake at night and trying to think of new wacky things to throw into beer, you
know, and that didn't always work, but nobody ever said, hey, you can't do that, because,
I mean, why not. I think this interview -- this interview is quickly closing in.
ROB WIDMER>>: I love beer. I love the people who drink beer. I love the people who make
beer. I love the places where they do those things. And, you know, it's a part of the
pie. You know, it's a key ingredient in the whole thing that I love, you know. I'm not
sure I can get much more detail than that, but it's just -- like I'm saying, it's so
interwoven with what we do. You know, that's where we've started. You know, we still work
with those guys, and it's just a part of the whole -- the whole thing. That's not very
eloquent but -- KURT WIDMER>>: No, that's good. I think that
captures it. I like the passion that's associated with homebrewing, and I mean if you think
about it, if you invest like an entire Saturday afternoon cleaning your equipment and then
brewing and cooling everything down and then cleaning it and putting it away, you don't
want to just waste your time doing that. And so you want it to be good; you want it to
be great. I mean, you don't want it to be something that you're just going to throw
down the drain. Why would you even waste your time doing that. You want it to be great.
You want it also to be something that you're going to proud to share with family and friends.
Don't put that in the film. Edit that out. MICHAEL>>: After our visit with the Widmer
Brothers, we were pretty thirsty, so we headed to the Gasthaus across the street from the
brewery. JAKE>>: We're here at the Widmer Gasthaus.
Thanks again to Kurt and Rod Widmer for their generosity and time.
MICHAEL>>: They're fun guys to talk to. We're sitting here about to drink some beers that
we can't get back home and we're going to share them with you. What do you have, Jake?
JAKE>>: I have the daft bitter, which is the current collaborator beer. I guess it was
just put on tap pretty recently. What are you going to have?
MICHAEL>>: I'm having the alt beer. It's a dusseldorf style. It's a really beautiful,
clear mahogany color and it smells like baking bread. It's really clean, really nice. And
I'll tell you what the flavor is like in just one second. Mmm, that's good. Lots more bread,
a little bit of coffee, roast note, and some dark tea, bathing hoppiness in the background.
It's dry. It's really, really nice. How's the bitter?
JAKE>>: Well, it's got a nice nose, good hops up front but not overpowering, not overly
floral. It's -- it's not as bitter as I might expect it to be.
MICHAEL>>: It's kind of a British style? JAKE>>: Very much so. It's got a nice color
and it's got a nice caramelly malt profile. It feels much more robust than the alcohol
level would elude to. This is kind of the bitter that I like.
MICHAEL>>: Is there kind of bitter you don't like?
JAKE>>: The collaborator project of course is -- and now we just got some more.
MICHAEL>>: Oh, awesome. Thanks much. JAKE>>: Let me --
MICHAEL>>: Okay. This is all Beer de Table. Is that what he said? We're going to find
out. No. No, this is an IPA. This is a Beer de Table. This is like a really nice light
Saison. It's like 3 percent. It's very pale, very clear. It's got a nice, soft kind of
bubble-gummy nose. Mmm. Yeah, lots more closed bubble gum. Fennels. Spicy.
JAKE>>: What about the IPA? Woah, yeah. Now when you're in Portland, this is what you
come here to smell. MICHAEL>>: It's all hops from front to back.
JAKE>>: Yeah. MICHAEL>>: It's lots of grapefruit like you
said but it's like this really pungent, super resiny, juicy fruit, almost.
JAKE>>: Kurt talked a bit about consistency and having, you know, something that people
would come to expect, and I think it comes through as a house character for Widmer.
MICHAEL>>: Yeah. JAKE>>: It's that balanced approach. You know,
if you have an IPA, there's -- it's still drinkable, there's still a malt body to it.
It's not just a hop explosion. In conclusion, if I had to say one thing about Widmer, I'd
have to say this is a craft brew company that has maintained the spirit of homebrewing and
ingenuity but has also managed to create beers that can be served in the mass public.
MICHAEL>>: Yeah, that's a really -- JAKE>>: And I think when you talk about something
that's hard to do, that is the most challenging thing to do. You know, some people might say
an extreme recipe or trying to get people to drink this or that. What's hard is to maintain
that ingenuity, that spirit of homebrewing, but also find those recipes and find those
beers that are going to appeal to a large audience --
MICHAEL>>: Yeah. JAKE>>: -- because that's going to bring more
people into appreciating, you know, a sour beer or, you know, sake.
MICHAEL>>: It's a really fine line to walk, and they probably deserve a lot of credit
for bringing more and more people into the craft beer full of -- through their beers
like their the hefeweizen. JAKE>>: Absolutely. Well, cheers to Wimder.
MICHAEL>>: Cheers to Widmer. Cheers to Portland. JAKE>>: All for brew.
MICHAEL>>: Brew for all. ROB WIDMER>>: Now the first account was Louie
the 14th. KURT WIDMER>>: It doesn't exist anymore. We
trashed it, literally. It's a great antidote. We -- the owner came by when we were still
building the brewery and said, I want to be your first account. And we're like, oh God,
we have a customer and we haven't even opened the doors; this is great. So, you know, three
months later we give him a call and say, okay, we're ready to go. And he says, bring it on,
boys. So we load up the keg of beer in our 1970 Datsun Pickup Truck, which was our delivery
vehicle and our grain-hauling vehicle, and our hops-hauling vehicle, and took it over
to his place. He had another job, so he was away at work. His wife meets us at the door.
They hadn't opened for business yet. I think it was like 9:00 in the morning or something
like that. She says, okay, the cooler's down here. We'd never done anything like hook up
a keg before. So she goes, cooler's down here in the basement. She turns on the lights.
We're looking at these stairs. And she says, well, here's the ramp aside the stairs. And
so we gathered that you put the keg on this ramp and it goes down. And we'd never done
this before in our defense. You know, it's probably smarter people would have figured
this out. But we put the keg on the ramp -- and I think it was Rob's fault now that I think
about it. ROB WIDMER>>: It was. It was. I could visualize.
I was going to walk this keg down and it just took off.
KURT WIDMER>>: He was going to walk beside it.
ROB WIDMER>>: And I rode it for a couple steps but then I just lost it.
KURT WIDMER>>: So the keg just races down this ramp and disappears kind of into the
darkness, and we can hear horrible crashing going on. I mean, like, walls being torn down
and like, just, mayhem, just horrible. You know, 160 pounds of stainless steel just roaring
through this basement. So we kind of looked at her like, wow, our first account and we're
already out of business; you know, that was -- that was fun. She kind of looked back at
us and then she smiled pleasantly and said, oh, that's happens all the time. And so we
were like, oh, we're professionals, we know exactly what we're doing, you know. And so
we went down, hunted around in the basement until we found the keg, and then wheeled it
over to the cooler and hooked it up and said, now, you might want to wait like an hour or
so and let that settle down a little bit, you know, before you try pouring it. Anyhow,
so they were delighted with the beer, but that was -- that was our first account.