Bullfrog Brew Day

Having tried a few different and striking bottles from Bullfrog Brewery in Williamsport, PA we knew it was only a matter of time before we would be making the trek up to meet head brewer Terry Hawbaker: friends of ours had smuggled to DC bottles of Bullfrog's "El Rojo Diablo" - a Cabernet Sauvignon barrel aged sour red ale dry hopped with 3 pounds of hops in the barrel, and "Magic Beans" - a barrel aged, soured black saison with chocolate and vanilla beans. Terry's experiments with wild yeast and barrel aging have garnered him both a GABF gold medal in the Wood and Barrel Aged Sour category for "BeeKeeper" and a cult following amongst the beer geekerati.

When we contacted Terry, he was enthusiastic to have us up for a brew day and we had a feeling it would be memorable trip to Billtown. Turns out Terry is a brotherfish, with a birthday in March like ours which ventures speculation on the predilection of Pisces and the umami of sour beer.


Because the brew house at Bullfrog is front-in-center of the pub, Terry and his assistant Nate keep bakers hours so as not to get in the way of the lunch crowd. We were up early to start the brew day at 3AM, with a brief tour of the cellar and a sample of a just tapped cask of an 18 month old Flanders Red, a vinous and intriguing blend, that Terry was going to be transporting to Wilkes-Barre later that day for the grand opening of his friend's restaurant AuRants. With the first sip, we knew this was going to be an amazing day...and the taps kept flowing and the bottles popping.





Terry and Nate are obsessed with the possibilities of their beer. They've learned that patience and the art of forgetting are keys to the life of long aged and mixed fermentation beers: "Beekeeper", a buckwheat honey spiked saison, spent well over 2 years in Cabernet Sauvignon barrels before it was released and at times was thought to be a lost cause. Long aging in oak barrels make for significant investments of time and space for a small brewpub.

Their ambitious schedule of bottle releases of single barrel experiments, painstakingly blended and hand bottled in the cellar have been wildly successful. It's a demanding job keeping the pub supplied with interesting, new drafts and burning the other end of the candle keeping the bottling schedule on-line and it's apparent that these guys are not getting a lot of sleep (and further apparent they're doing so without regret). They are not giving themselves a break either, with plans to put in several more barrel racks in the near future: Underground, Independent...Maximum Rock N' Roll.


Their kegs gone wild series are original, off-the-cuff riffs on Bullfrog's clean draft beers that Terry inoculates with wild yeast and acid producing bacteria in the keg, giving these beers funk without the added wood notes that accompany their barrel aged beers. On the occasion of our visit, the current interpretation was Smokin' Amber Gone Wild. A delicious, hugely complex enigma of smoke, malt and gamey-lacto-funk.

Terry's big 8% abv Edgar IPA is his best selling beer, which they have to scramble to keep in the tanks. Bullfrog has bullied and corrupted their local clientele to expect evermore artful and compelling beers with each return visit. Even his hop bombs haven't escaped the creeping influence of wild yeast, as shortly before our trip Bullfrog released bottles of "Undead Ed" which is a reformulation of Edgar IPA with brettanomyces, which dries out and sharpens the beer, as well as adding enticing aromatics.

It seems Terry is near bursting with ideas for new beers and is only bound by the limitations of the physical space of the cellar and hours in the day. He apprenticed in a very serious bakery that specialized in spontaneous leavening years back that served as his introduction to wild yeast and acid producing bacteria, and he has proved an apt pupil. Terry very consciously sees his brewing as an act of art, yet without any pretense or pomp.

Both Terry and Nate are that great combination of easy going and really engaging, equally music and beer possessed and have fanatic homebrewing backgrounds. Nate just bought a used 55 gallon system to start filling barrels at home: a man after our own hearts. They are both passionate about the entire spectrum of brewing from dialing-in their house Blonde, to Terry's quest for the ultimate Scotch ale, to all the barreled madness.

A bottle of De Dolle's Oerbier Reserva stands sentry over the mash tun. It's one of our favorite and inspiring beers, a mixed fermentation goliath (~13% abv), aged in used Bordeaux casks for 18 months, and it made absolute sense to see it there. We also spotted a bottle of Pretty Thing's Baby Tree on the stairs down to the cellar, who we visited with just a few months back.

Bullfrog was founded in 1996, and still operated by Steve Koch and his father Bob. Charlie Schnable brewed there for 5 years before leaving to open Otto's in State College, PA. Terry came on board in 2004, after brewing for the now shuttered Black Rock Brewing Co. in Wilkes-Barre, PA. Steve has given Terry free rein in the brew house which has paved the way for some really radical creations.

The copper brew house at Bullfrog is an Old World showpiece...

The fermenters and conditioning tanks are right behind the bar, making even transferring beers something that must be done before any customers arrive. Bar patrons have a front row view to the ageless mystery of fermentation.


Like many of the breweries we have visited, a farmer comes by to collect the spent grain once it is removed from the mash tun.


As the brew day wound down, Terry was kind enough to open up a bottle of "Frambozen" for us to sample. A perfectly balanced sour raspberry beer blended from two barrels of completely different beers (one higher gravity, one lower, one with raspberry puree, the other with freshly picked berries). All of their sour barrel aged beers start out clean with the rest served on tap, no special grainbill, mashing , or hopping, the magic is in the microbes and time.


We sat the fella's down for a detailed interview in which we cover all things wild, barreled and otherwise Bullfrog, that we'll have posted soon. If you've never been to Bullfrog, there's no time like the present (to get ripped apart). Thank you Bullfrog.

Willimantic Brew Day

Secreted away at The Willimantic Brewing Company, in Willimantic, CT, David Wollner carries on a nearly 30 year affair with the Humulus Lupus. David has built a reputation as a hopcentric brewer who regularly has 3 or 4 variations on his IPA oeuvre on tap (what we like to call the Wollner Variations). Through constant experimentation he seems to have evolved an extra sensory sensitivity to hop profiling. Being the owner and brewer gives him absolute freedom to brew whatever strikes his fancy, the only constant on his beer board is his flagship Certified Gold.

Willimantic Brewing Company is located in the historic old Willimantic Post Office in the center of town that had sat vacant for close to 3 decades before David and his wife renovated it. They painstakingly restored and have maintained the structure and the postal theme. The other driving theme at Willimantic are the frogs you see all over the place that reference the local tale of "The Battle of Frog Pond".

David was waiting for us on an overcast Wednesday morning at 8:15AM with sacks of milled grain to brew his Summer S.A.S.E., a session ale brewed exclusively with Sybilla hops from Poland. David is a real stand up guy with an easy-zen-humor that puts you immediately at ease and the 7 barrel brewhouse is second nature to him. Within minutes we were up on the platform taking turns dumping sacks of grain in the mash/lauter tun and canoe paddling the thickening mash. We hit our mash temperature dead-on.

When David deemed the mash lump free, we trooped out across the parking lot to the local diner for breakfast sandwiches on Texas toast and got straight into a thoughtful interview that wound in and around the brew day.

When we got back to the brew house we were ready to sparge the mash and collect wort for the boil kettle. We grabbed a few garbage bins from the basement for the spent grain, where we snuck a peak at his Dickel bourbon barrels in which he has aging a double IPA, souring an Imperial Porter and propagating a solera-mother-funk-barrel that he adds whatever he deems worthy to. Next up was raking out the spent grain into the bins to be picked up by a local farmer.

While we waited on the kettle to fill with wort and then come to a boil, we ran the numbers on the Sybilla hops, which David had never used before, to determine our hopping schedule.

Next up was the boil and hop additions...

at the end of the boil, we whirlpooled and ran sanitizer through the fermenter.

When we had transferred all the boiled wort from the kettle it was boots on ...

for hopping in and scouring the inside of the kettle, it’s a sweaty but vital job. Lastly we harvested fresh yeast from the bottom of one of the fermentors and pitched it into the cooled wort.

Everything we sampled throughout the brew day demonstrated David’s assured experience and hop sensitivity: including a super dry, spicy saison fresh from the tank, a crisp Imperial Pilsner ale, and 2IPA, a lush, fruity hop bomb. What really floored us was his huge funky blend of intentionally soured Imperial Porter, vintage Willi Whammer barleywine and some of his solera funk that made for this really ponderous chocolate, oaky, lactic masterpiece.

Among other brewing memorabilia David has on prominent display in the brewhouse is a big picture of the 3 Stooges, stooging out with bottles of beer. The Stooge spirit seemed to increasingly pervade the brew day with everyone naturally adopting their respective personae (Nathan>Larry, Mike>Curly, David>Moe).

Thanks Moe.

We'll be posting a video tour, interview and recipe shortly.

DRINK WILLIMANTIC BEER.

Mayflower Brew Day

Matthew Steinberg gained acclaim as a versatile and innovative brewer at Offshore Ale Company on the exclusive vacation island of Martha's Vineyard, just off the coast of Massachusetts' Cape Cod. Matthew is a truly linked-in brewer who seems to be right near the center of New England's vigorous good beer culture, he's also one of the most gregarious and outgoing guys you'll ever meet. We knew he'd relish the opportunity to spread the good word about all things good beer. Matthew is a brewer possessed with the craft.

Nathan's first contact with Matthew was a few years back. Nathan has family on Martha's Vineyard, so he had plenty opportunity to drink a bunch of Matthew's beer: everything from his cask brown to Hop Goddess, the first American brewed Belgian IPA (not even a recognized style at the time) we're aware of, and it was Hop Goddess that inspired Nathan to contact Matthew and ask about how he formulated the recipe. On the basis of of a short e-mail, he asked Nathan to give him a call and then spent over an hour on the line deconstructing recipes and talking good beer, a completely open book.

Flash forward a few years and a new gig as Director of Brewing Operations at the burgeoning Mayflower Brewing Company in Plymouth, MA. Matthew had us meet him at the brewery at 8AM on a Wednesday morning to mash-in Mayflower's outstanding Porter (which has a light smoked character from peat smoked malt). Matthew has a great assistant in Ryan Gwozdz (formerly of Buzzard Bay Brewing Company, in Westport, MA), who was manning the controls of the shiny new, 20 barrel DME fabricated brewhouse under Matthew's sage tutelage.

Mayflower was opened in 2007 by Drew Brosseau, a tenth generation grandson of the Mayflower's beer barrel cooper, who made the bold decision to self distribute. Their current capacity is around 2,000 barrels a year, with a focus around the Boston market and the South Shore.

Mayflower's impressive Wall o' malt...
and equally impressive bottle collection.
The grain is milled in a room adjoining the brew house.

The grist is then transfered by auger to the grist case above the mash tun.

The rakes automatically stir the grain with the mash water from the hot liquor tank.

One of the first things we noticed while waiting on mash conversion was a fleet of Buffalo Trace bourbon barrels that we learned had been used to age Sam Adams' Utopias and in which Matthew is currently aging a barleywine to be released next year. So of course, it was samples of barreled barleywine all around at 8:30AM. Matthew went the traditional British route using an all pale malt grist and a long boil to develop wort color and increase gravity a la JW Lees Harvest Ale and it's already developing some nice barrel character after only a short dip in the barrels.

A nail is stuck into each barrel to enable easy sampling without undue exposure to more oxygen. This is also done at many other breweries such as Russian River and New Belgium where acetobacter is a major concern.

They have a state of the art, semi-automatic brew house with lots of shiny control panels.

Matthew was testing out his newest toy, a pH probe. The pH of the mash was right where we needed it to be.

Next up was sparging the mash and collecting wort for the boil kettle. The rakes automatically sweep the spent grains out of the tun, but they still need to be hauled out back by hand, where a farmer comes to pick it up.

Ryan measuring out the Pilgrim hops, we assumed and had confirmed that it wasn't an accidental choice for Mayflower.

Just two hop additions for the porter, one at 70 minutes and one at 20 minutes.

Mayflower has a small but growing cask program, each of which have a special hop/botanical/wood added to the cask to make it unique. We smelled some sweet fern that grows out in back of the brewery that they are considering playing with in a future cask offering. They also have a gaggle of grain hungry chipmunks that live out in back of the brewery, and we also spied a wild turkey roaming around.

During breaks in the brew day we recorded a far ranging and informative interview and sampled our way through their stellar current line-up. All their beers were impeccably fresh and bright tasting, including their newest seasonal Summer Rye, a dry, low alcohol, golden ale with some classic spice and fruit from a warm ferment with Fermentis T-58 (a dried Belgian yeast), a good bit of rye and a heavy dose of dry hopping: a really elegant beer.

Midway through the interview we were interrupted by a label delivery. Matthew jumped on the forklift and went to grab them...

We spied a cask of the Golden Ale that was dry hopped with the Japanese hop varietal Sorachi Ace which was originally developed for the Soporro Brewery.

While we were sitting around chatting, one of the resident chipmunks ran in, sadly there are no photos of the chase that ensued. Maybe the fella's should consider a brew house cat.



We retired upstairs for some tacos from a local restaurant and flipped through Matthews first homebrewing book.






Matthew and Ryan bid us bon voyage and fair weather on the rest of our New England journey. A million thanks to these two brew pilgrims.