It's Oktoberfest!
Let's legitimize our drinking by talking about it
scientifically.
Hey guys, Anthony here for D News.
I've got local craft brewer Jesse Friedman
here with me from Almanac Brewery here in San Francisco.
All cooking is kind of chemistry, right?
Yeah.
But brewing I find is especially so, right?
Because it's so specific and precise,
the way you have to get different beers, and things
that you have to change to make things work.
Yeah.
I often say that brewing's a lot like baking.
OK.
You know, both involve a lot of fermentation
if you're breadmaking, and you sort of set up everything,
and then you just sort of set the process loose,
and see what comes out at the other end.
And so instead of like cooking, where
you adjust as you cook, and stuff like that,
with beer it's more like you see how it comes out,
and then you go back to the beginning
and make a new batch, and tweak, and adjust your process.
So tell us about the main ingredients that
are going to go into every beer, and kind of what purposes
they serve.
So, all beer by definition contains four ingredients.
Water, hops, yeast, and barley.
OK.
And that goes back to a 17th century German purity
law that said only those ingredients could
be made with it.
At the time they didn't say yeast,
because it hadn't been discovered,
but after they found out there's yeast, they added that in.
OK.
And so each of those ingredients, and you
can vary all of them in different ways
to make all the different styles of beer.
So what makes us adhere to the 17th century definition,
as opposed to kind of evolving it?
Oh, we don't.
We flaunt it.
My brewery flaunts it at every opportunity.
Excellent.
We put all sorts of different things in our beer.
Yeah, let's talk about it.
Let's talk about some of the other stuff
that you guys put in.
I mean, sometimes fruit is added, right?
Yeah.
Sometimes other kinds of food.
So Almanac Beer, we call ourselves
a farm to barrel brewery.
So we brew, we describe our beers
as being brewed in collaboration with local farms.
So the idea, and we use a fancy French term here,
is to infuse a sense of terroir into our beer.
Because beer is all made with-- all the ingredients in beer
can be dried and easily transported.
So the idea is to go to local agriculture systems,
and bring in fruits and vegetables,
and local ingredients to infuse a sense of California
back into our beer.
You know, we brew with a lot of real fruit,
so we source that fruit from local farms,
and then we stand there and by hand put
all that fruit into the barrels one piece at a time.
Gotcha.
So talk to me about the chemistry of what goes on here.
When you throw everything into the vat, what happens?
Well, you start out with your barley,
and the barley is molted, and that's usually
done by a molster.
So usually a brewery won't do that ourselves.
And they sprout it, and then kiln it to different levels.
And actually, that toasting process
is how we make beer lots of different colors.
We take that, we soak it in just the right temperature of water
to extract out exactly what we want out of there,
and beer brewing is one of those great things where
the process has been evolved over so many hundreds of years
that it's like a self-contained process.
So when we melt all the sugars and starches out of the barley,
the husks that are in there actually
become a natural grain bed that filters it out,
so you get an almost perfectly crystal clear liquid
when you're done with that.
Then we begin a boiling process, and we
add hops during the boiling process.
And the hops act as preservative, and delicious,
delicious flavoring agent.
So we add hops at the beginning of the boil,
and that creates bitterness.
And the more hops you add at the end of the boil,
those actually add aromas.
So you guys are also doing something
that's kind of trendy right now in brewing,
which is the barrel aging.
Exactly.
How does that work?
Well, that's one of those trendy things that's
thousands of years old, if [INAUDIBLE].
It's definitely very in vogue, and it's
one of the most exciting parts of the beer brewing process.
So we take the beer, and don't just
go brew with brewer's yeast.
We sort of draw-- for how strict,
and the Germans are about their beer brewing process,
the Belgians are kind of the opposite.
OK.
So they'll make beers in Belgium that
are what are called spontaneously fermented.
So that means they make the sugar water solution, called
wort, and then instead of adding a very specific yeast strain,
they actually open the windows, and whatever
drifts in through the windows will then
create the spontaneously fermented beer.
What?
So we drawn on that tradition for a lot of our wild,
what are called wilder sour ales.
OK.
So there's a--
But what drifts in through the window?
Well, I mean, it's just like San Francisco Sourdough.
OK.
So in San Francisco, if you want to make San Francisco
Sourdough, step one, go to San Francisco.
OK.
And then you just mix some flour and some water
and put that out, and it'll naturally inoculate.
Because we have, there's wild yeast, there's lactobacillus,
there's all these different bugs.
They're all around us all the time,
it's just a matter of culturing them.
And then as you grow them up, the alcohol tolerant ones
will naturally weed themselves out.
OK.
And so we use a cocktail of while Belgian yest and some San
Francisco sourdough to bring in that local flavor,
and we age the beer in a barrel.
In a barrel the oak is perfect, because as it
gets warm and dark during the day,
the barrel actually will breathe, soaking in the beer
and pushing it back out.
So we get all those great whisky, oaky flavors.
Wow.
That is awesome.
So, how long have you guys been around?
Just celebrated our two year anniversary.
That's awesome.
Happy anniversary.
Well, thank you.
And you guys have a website, as well?
Yeah. almanacbeer.com.
Do you want to know more about Almanac's barrel aging
process, or about the beer brewing process at all?
There is a new show for beer enthusiasts,
it is called Brew Age.
it's at youtube.com/brewagetv.
That starts on October 23, so check it out.
Jesse, thanks so much for coming by.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Let's go get a beer.
Yes!