Willimantic Brewing Company Video Tour

Join David Wollner on a tour of Willimantic Brewing Company...

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.

Dann Paquette's Guidelines for a Proper Bitter

Dann Paquette brewed at the Daleside Brewery in Yorkshire prior to moving back to the States to start Pretty Things. He gave us this outline for producing a proper Yorkshire bitter.

"Diamond Geezer"

~a Proper Yorkshire Bitter

82% Maris Otter

10% Fawcett Pale Crystal
8% Torrified Wheat

OG 1.040 FG 1.008 ABV 4.2% 25 IBUs

mash at 150

Challenger for bittering (.75 oz of 8% AA pellets @ 60 min for 5 galllon batch)

Finish with Challenger, First Gold or "whatever you really like 'cause you're not going to use a lot of it."

Use a fruity English yeast and ferment up to 72 degrees.

Use isinglass to clarify.

If cask conditioning, top crop yeast at 1.010 and move to cask, where the oxygen rich environment with spark a secondary fermentation.

Drink by the Imperial Pint.

Dann Paquette Interview

In this second BrewLocal Podcast episode we talk to Dann Paquette and his wife Martha of Pretty Things Beer and Ale Project Massachusetts. To subscribe with a podcast downloader use: http://brewlocal.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Audio

An Evening with Pretty Things

After our brew day at Mayflower, we drove back to Boston and had dinner at Redbones, a great, and hugely popular, concept barbeque and good beer joint where the pulled pork married well with Cambridge Brewing Company's "Imperial Skisbol", a dark Danish smoked lager brewed in collaboration with Nørrebro Bryghus. After dinner, we met up with Pretty Things duo Dann Paquette and his wife Martha on the back deck of Deep Ellum, which proved to be the metaphysical nexus of the day, including several Mayflower beers on tap and cask, Pretty Things' own "Jack D'Or" and "Confounded Mr. Sisyphus" on tap, along with other local standouts from High and Mighty, Berkshire and Cambridge. The laundry list of creative New England breweries and a focus on session beer made for an extremely smart tap list, and it was great to hear how interconnected all the brewers are with each other.

Dann was a fixture of the Bay State brewing scene having brewed at Ipswich, John Harvard's, The Tap and inventing the Rapscallion beer line (where Matt Steinberg also worked), before moving to England and brewing at Daleside for a couple of years. Now back in Massachusetts, the beers he is currently producing span his experience, from riffs on saison to a British brown, to a session lager coming shortly.

Dann and Martha seem to share an impish-psychedelic-storybook imagination and funhouse spirit that is readily apparent in their highly personal and brilliant website. There is a real charm to the Pretty Things mystique, we weren't surprised to hear that Dann looks to fellow madcap Kris Herteleer from De Dolle Brouwers for inspiration. Our conversation lead towards a real interesting mash-up of eccentric Belgian and traditional British beer-ways. Dann's alternate persona "Jack D'Or", an Edwardian character of his and Martha's design furthers the spirit of fun at the heart of the Pretty Things Project.

It was really enlightening to be able to drink Pretty Things beers while Dann expounded on the virtues of authenticity and fun that are the drive of the project. Of particular interest is the brew house rental (not contract brew) model that Pretty Things has worked out with Paper City Brewery in Holyoke, MA (which also has a more traditional contract brewing arrangement to produce High and Mighty). The model has worked well for De Struise and De Ranke in Belgium before they got their own respective breweries.

Thank you to the inimitable Dann Paquette and the eminently charming Martha Holley for a memorable evening.

We'll be posting Dann's Guidelines to a Proper Bitter and a podcast of our conversation on the site shortly.

Matthew Steinberg Interview

In this first BrewLocal Podcast episode we talk to Matthew Steinberg of Mayflower Brewing in Plymouth MA. To subscribe with a podcast downloader use: http://brewlocal.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Podcast

Matthew Steinberg's Recipes

Mayflower Porter

Taking its cues from “Three Threads”, a bartender’s blend of three distinct ales, Porter became the beer of choice for 18th-century Londoners. Mayflower Porter embraces this history. This complex brew is smooth and full-flavored with notes of roasted coffee beans and bittersweet chocolate that will warm the palate all year long.

Recipe Specifics
----------------
Batch Size (Gal): 5.00
Total Grain (Lbs): 11.86
Anticipated OG: 1.063
Anticipated SRM: 34.6
Anticipated IBU: 38.8
Brewhouse Efficiency: 75 %
Wort Boil Time: 75 Minutes

Grain
-------
9.50 lbs. American Pale Malt(2-row)
1.00 lbs. Chocolate Malt America
0.75 lbs. CaraMunich 120
0.50 lbs. Brown Malt
0.15 lbs. Scottish Peated Malt

Hops
------
0.68 oz. Pilgrim @ 70 min.
0.77 oz. Glacier @ 20 min.

Extras
--------
1.00 Unit(s)Whirlfloc Fining 15 Min.(boil)

Yeast
-----
S-04 SafAle English Ale

Water Profile
-------------
Profile: Plymouth

Mash Schedule
-------------
60 min @ 152

Notes
-----
Pitch at 73
Ferment at 66

FG 1.021
Crash chill to 32 after fermentation is finished for 1 week.

Hop Goddess

"The beer itself is a dedication to a girl...cunning and blatant, embodied among succulent notes of earth and spice. I wanted to make a really hoppy beer that was in the Belgian tradition. De Ranke XX Bitter happens to be one of my favorite beers in the world, not that I was trying to brew a beer specifically like that, but I used that beer as a stepping off point."

-Matthew Steinberg

Recipe Specifics
----------------
Batch Size (Gal): 5.00
Total Grain (Lbs): 11.06
Anticipated OG: 1.062
Anticipated SRM: 5.4
Anticipated IBU: 69.0
Brewhouse Efficiency: 70 %
Wort Boil Time: 90 Minutes

Grain/Sugar
-------------
8.00 lbs. Belgian Pilsener
1.38 lbs. Munich Malt
0.81 lbs. Corn Sugar/Dextrose
0.63 lbs. Flaked Oats
0.25 lbs. Biscuit Malt

Hops
-----
0.50 oz. Chinook @ 60 min.
1.00 oz. Sterling @ 60 min.
1.00 oz. East Kent Goldings @ 30 min.
0.38 oz. Sterling @ 20 min.
1.00 oz. Sterling @ 5 min.
3.00 oz. Amarillo @ Dry Hop

Extras
-------
0.25 Tsp Yeast Nutrient @ 15 min.
1.00 Unit Whirlfloc @ 15 min.

Yeast
-----
White Labs WLP510 Bastogne Belgian Ale Yeast

Water Profile
-------------
Profile: Martha's Vineyard

Mash Schedule
---------------
90 min @ 146

Notes
-----
Begin ferment in the low 80's

Aim for high carbonation (~3 volumes)

If you're feeling randy spike with Brett B, but do not age for an extended period.

FG 1.010
84% AA
6.9% abv