A Science Project – Single Malt Beer Series

Introduction

To execute a great beer in the brewery is, in a very LARGE way, science. To execute a great beer conceptually, on the other hand is, in a very LARGE way, art. Both the science and the art require experience, knowledge and creativity. Years ago I conceived a project that would captivate the scientific and artistic mind of the brewer: single malt beers. I’m very happy to say that we are finally doing it.

Think of it this way, if we completely understand the behaviors of various malts we have more control of any subsequent beers that we generate. This gives us artistic ability through scientific testing.

We have partnered with Best Malz out of Germany to do a series of single malt beers with all of their base and specialty malts.  The specialty malt beers will differ in that they will be blended with a base malt. The base malt will be selected based on least amount of color and flavor.

Now it’s time for the experiment:

Purpose – Base Malt Series

The purpose of the study is to understand the effects of various malts in the brewery, and the resulting beers. We will control all of the variables of the brewing process except the type of grain used. We believe that each grain will affect the following variables that we can measure in our brewery: extraction rate, change in pH, attenuation, and color. This will also affect many variables that only you can measure with your nose and tongue.

Materials

·         Water (R.S.M.’s finest) enough to get that kettle to 16 bbl of beer!!!!!!!

·         Yeast (Cali ale baby) ~5gal pitch 1million cells / ml / °P

·         715 lbs base malt grains (our variable)

o   Best Malz – Pilsner

o   Best Malz – Vienna

o   Best Malz – Munich

o   Best Malz – Heidlburg

o   Best Malz – Red X

·         Hops (Northern Brewer – single addition at 60min for 16 IBU)

·         Brewer (the Citizen)

·         Brewery and all its stuff (Cismontane Brewing Company)

Method

We will brew a beer where all the ingredient’s processes will be exactly the same with every batch. The one variable that will change is the type of malt. Below is a list of the controls:

·         Mash temp: 152

·         Quantity of grain: 715lbs

·         Run off from mash to kettle: 465gal

·         Hop Addition: 35oz Northern brewer with 10.9% alpha acid at 60 min

·         Boil time: 120 min

·         Yeast: California ale yeast pitching rate 1million cells / ml / °P

·         Fermentation temp: 66 °F

·         Water: We will add water to the kettle to have 16bbl of beer before we transfer to the fermenter.

Data

Currently under collection….

Beer Infusion Confusion

Beer is malleable stuff, like play-dough, gold or… boogers. Although seemingly simple in can be complicated, strange, blended, pervaded, rearranged and infused. Believe it or not beer infusions are a time honored tradition because of the mere fact that beer is like an open ingestible liquid canvas.

Infusion: is the process of suspending a soluble extract in some medium to introduce its products or constituents for an additive purpose.

The most common and widely understood beverage that we generally think of when referring to infusions is tea. You know… green tea, black tea, or Earl Grey (for a more proper English variety). Just mix hot water and leaves and blam! TEA! You can add some flowers, fruit, honey, sugar, weird mushrooms, cave age it, ferment it a bit whatever, there are thousands of things you can do to tea and still have it count. If you think about it beer in every way and process beer is essentially tea. We take hot water, sugar (generally in the form of barely) and flowers (hops) mix it around, cool it down, add some yeast and we call our cold fermented tea, beer. TEA + COLD = BEER (well… sorta). Start there and elaborate.

Follow these basic guidelines then you can start doing all kinds of fun and strange things to add new flavors, blend beverages and be in a general sense, creative. For the record… I didn’t really spell out any guidelines.

Historically herbs and fruit were the most common additional additives to beer. Recently coffee has been a HUGE deal in the beer world. Just about everyone is making a coffee beer. There are tons of ways to add coffee. You can add the ground beans directly to the mash tun, kettle, fermenter or the bright tank. You can make the coffee separately either in a hot or cold process and add that to the fermenter or the bright tank. You could smash the beans with a hammer and leave them on the brewery floor as some kind of modern art. We have tried it all. Black’s Dawn is one of our coffee beers where we add fresh ground beers directly to the fermenter after we cool the beer down.

More recently we have been using our trusty juicer and adding all kinds of fruit, making beer cocktails, and even re-fermenting some of these wacky creations with bugs and wild yeast in used barrels!

On the 17^th Beer Mystic Evan will be at Cinco in LA demonstrating some of this crazy $h!+! Come on down and check it out.

Leaving our Mark

Not a day passes without a new face popping in to check us out; whether it’s a 10+ year local, or a destination tourist who read about us online, or tasted our beer at an event. It’s amazing how often the first words out of their mouths are “How long have you been here?” or “I never knew there was a Brewery here”.  Being a relatively new and small business means we don’t have the budget (or the time) for flashy marketing or douchey gimmicks.  That being said we have been making some general (automatic keg cleaner) as well as some cosmetic improvements that we are hugely proud of.

First and foremost has to be our new signage, which to put it modestly, is a work of art.  We are lucky to have artist and general do-it-all guy like Scott Holden working for us, who spent the better part of a week hand building this sign for us. 

Scott is also responsible for creating the bicycle repair stand (special thanks to The Path Live Oak for providing the tools!) which has been put to good use in the past couple months. 

Things are progressing well here in Cismontaneland.  With new distribution territories opening up in Nor-cal and Arizona, make sure you keep your eyes peeled as more Cismontane beers hit your shelves and local tap lists.  

Thank you for an incredible year and for all of your support, we couldn't have done it without you.  Have a safe and joyous holiday season.

 -Citizen Cismontane 

A New Beginning

Mountain biking is alive and well in California... the hub of which is inarguably South County.  Every Saturday the roads and trails are filled with diehard gearheads, and weekend warriors; competitive groups hell-bent on 25+ miles and friendly neighborhood groups sneaking in a quick run before the 80+degree weather hits.

Truck beds are filled to capacity as dirt fiends head out to The Luge, Santiago Oaks, San Juan, Whiting, Laguna and Aliso Woods; looking for that perfect line and jostling for position up and down the steepest trails in Southern California.   Born and Bred in Orange County, I am amazed that to this day I continue to be awestruck by all the beauty it has to offer.  More often than not from a vantage point atop a mountain bike, with close friends and a cold beer in hand.

On any given day you can probably find one or two members of the Cismontane crew working up a sweat on the terrain which so graciously provides the inspiration for our tastiest brews.  Craft beer and mountain biking movements have grown hand in hand: Northern California, Colorado, Oregon and now Southern California.

We are happy to be hosting monthly rides, with the help of many of our loyal patrons and hope to be doing more mountain bike related activities in the future.  Cismontane is gearing up to be THE mountain bike headquarters in Orange County.  We have some great events lined up, so keep your eyes peeled and we look forward to seeing you on the trails!

Oh Hi there May, Leaving so Soon?

The expansion is so close to being done it’s not even funny.  This is the first week all eight tanks have been connected to our new, weapons-grade glycol chiller.  Digitally controlled fermentation and maturation tanks are more awesome than we could have anticipated.  Our yeast are happily enjoying their controlled environments and us multi-celled critters are enjoying some much needed rest and peace of mind (thanks be to the beer gods for no more midnight temperature checks!) 

We are proud to be so hands on with the creation of our beers, but it is nice to have some automated peace of mind.  With the summer months approaching our brewers couldn’t be more grateful for the added amenities and capacity, sure we could have done without the transformer and pump failures, but we’re happy to have everything up and running!  The last two weeks have been a blur of organizing, bottling and brew days.  Months of setbacks and sweat equity are finally going to pay off.  Get ready world...we are coming at you with everything we’ve got

Progress

It’s been a hell of a couple of weeks at the brewery. We got the green light to start building our new space and walls started coming down, equipment got on trucks and the jackhammers started pounding away. The whole Cismontane extended family has been chipping in and we have made progress. If we keep up this pace we will be finished in a few of weeks… maybe. Either way, we won’t rest until the project is done and the beer is flowing again.

Because I know everyone is interested in the stats:

Currently:

• 1591 sqft (395 tasting room, 1,196 brewery)
• 75 barrels of fermentation
• 60 barrels of storage
• Production was about 600 barrels last year

Future

• 3,187 sqft (530 tasting room, 2,657 brewery)
• 105 barrels of fermentation
• 90 barrels of maturation / lagering
• 60 barrels of storage
• We are hoping to do about 1500 barrels next year (A whopping 0.6% of Stones Annual Production for 2011!)

Oktoberfest – Californian Style

It is beautiful time of year in Southern California. The weather is warm the days are long and the transition to fall is just beginning. At Cismontane Brewing we have the added benefit of being on the edge of civilization, as far as Orange County knows it. The back drop of the Saddleback Mountains and the Cleveland National Forest afford some phenomenal views and hiking and mountain biking.

This year is the first year we decided to brew an Oktoberfest beer. Inspired by the season we decided to take advantage of the fact that the California Buckwheat is going to seed and integrate that into the beer. Along with Derek Bougie, head brewer at Newport Beach Brewing we kicked off a new series of beers that will be incorporating native species.

Video by Yoni (he's the man) http://yonisandler.com/

Keg Art

For those for you that spend any time in the brewery you will know that we are supporters of the arts. If fact we even consider what we are doing, as do some others, an art form. Art in our world includes the various artists that hang their shows on the walls, our handmade tap handles and the fine beers we produce. It doesn't end there…

We have been painting our kegs for some time now. Only a few have noticed. Those that have are generally the folks that handle the kegs at the fine establishments that pour our beers. With the addition of 27 more ½ barrels it was time to crank out a few more Cismontane original works.

The process is simple: Paper off the top and bottom, place a stencil in the gap, name and sign with a permanent pen.

Enjoy…

Tap Handle Re-Un-Invented

Plastic, resin, molds, factories in China and India… The list goes on. I apologize up front for my tap handles not being an electric guitar with flashing lights held by a sumo wrestler, or a dragon wrapped around a race car holding a light saber breathing ice and fire.

This may sound insane to some, but we make our tap handles by hand. When I say this, I don’t mean they are “handmade”, because as most of us know that could mean anything these days. What I mean is we make them from gathering the wood, sawing it, stamping the brass plate and finishing it. This time, we added brass plates. Oooooo, shinny.

We have become so far removed from the items that we use on a daily basis I can't tell you where what I own comes from; where my shirt was made, beer glass made, my broccoli grown, my beer brewed.

This is part of the reason that we create and build our handles ourselves. When you have a Cismontane tap handle on your tap tower you know where it comes from. Long story short, we added a brass plate and we still build the tap handles ourselves.

Ingredients: Salvaged Wild Fire Wood, Varnish, Steel Bolt, Brass Plate, Hands.

Please enjoy our latest handle creation along with our latest beers.

Holiday Experiments

Experimenting is definitely one of the more fun practices in brewing beer. Flavors, colors, names all that stuff. Around the holidays brewers get especially adventurous with spices and higher gravity beers. We are happy to fall in suit because it’s just a good time.

Ross and I have been brewing holiday beers together for a few years now. Some of you may have had the pleasure of tasting our Dead Santa from last year, mildly spiced brow ale. This year our beer is going to be called Hammered Holiday because, all the spices that went into it had been smashed with a hammer. No kidding.

We also had a batch of stout finish a few days ago so we thought we should do something special and age some on something…. A quick trip down to Wholefoods produced a lot of somethings….

Cherries, cranberries, blackberries, cinnamon, dates, figs, black strap molasses, agave, ginger... the list goes on। Diving right in we started chopping things up pouring stout on them and tasting. A little of this a splash of that and presto, we had some pretty nice flavors. We settled on two combinations.

1) Cherries, blackberries and cranberries
2) Figs and dates

Awesome!

Come to our holiday party and we will be tapping both of these beers and the hammered holiday of course! It will be on 12/18/2010.

Eastern European Beer Collectors

This is a strange phenomenon that I really wasn’t prepared for. Another one of the subcultures in the world of things that most of us didn’t know was even out there. What I am referring to are the eastern European Beer Collectors.

No seriously, I get an email almost every day from some die hard beer collector in Poland, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungry, or the Czech Republic. If I was to total all the counts of beer novelties these people claim to have in the emails they write there would be over 100,000 items!

Sometimes I wonder if the emails are even real. They are all written in the same broken English, everyone seems to have about 6,500 items and I always ask them to send me a self addressed stamped envelope so that I can send them something (which I will) and no one ever does. Besides, how did they find us? We are barely even a blip on the beer radar. So, I think to myself maybe this is some kind of scam, but why and for what?

Just when I have convinced myself they are out to get me, someone will send a picture of themselves or their kid with their collection. I love beer, freaking awesome…

MTB Robot Testimonials

I was hooked up with an awesome MTB crew through a good friend, Andrew Kempe. Because we love mountain biking and they love beer we meshed our passions by providing Coulter IPA for their annual SoCal TrailRiders camping event. Needless to say I would have loved to be there myself to crush beers and trails alike.

One of the coolest things ever: When they returned the kegs and taps and such, they also handed us a book of comments from the riders on the beers! Everyone was super stoked on the beer and our generosity. Apparently what goes around does come around.

I am not entirely sure what came over us but Johnny, you’d recognize him as the dude crushing IPA at the bar or sleeping on our couch, started reading the comments like a robot / Steven Hawking recording. Here are some of the ridiculous recordings for your viewing pleasure.

Day of the Irish

Live Irish music, and brewing Irish coffee stout what could better! We had one patron so fired up he kept saying "Are you hearing this?" Needless to say he took home growler of beer and some video of the band.

It's funny how things just fall into place sometimes.... We have been running pilots of strong, near imperial coffee stout for the last couple of months. We finally settled on a recipe that kicks ass and ordered the ingredients for a full batch. In all of the preparation of brewing I completely forgot that Pete, my sister’s fiancé and one of our brewers, was coming to play music with his crew of master musicians.

They have been on an Irish folk music kick and it just so happened that I was brewing our stout with Irish yeast! World class musicians and world class beers, it was truly a thing of beauty.

Normally this wouldn’t be such a special thing but it just so happened that they play traditional Irish folk songs and I was brewing a strong stout that uses Irish yeast.

Not Mother's Day

Today is Mother’s Day, but yesterday was not Mother’s Day, it was Sick-One-Saturday.

Johnny’s thoughts on making stuff to use:
‘The culmination of a creation’s beauty lies in it’s use. This is the precise reason that my favorite things to make by hand are functional. Just as beer is more satisfying out of a hand blown pint glass, a finely shaped glass functions only to it’s full potential when it carries carefully hand crafted beer. Sitting in a brewery owned and operated by close friends while enjoying just such a combination is the polar opposite of drinking a light beer in a plastic cup amongst strangers.’-Johnny

Evan’s thoughts on making stuff to use:
"My friend Johnny is a sick glassblower, and he made these sick cups, and so we wanted to make sure they worked, so we filled them up with sick brew, and they work sick and we slammed beer, sickones. Check the sick sequence of action shots and other sickness. Sick." -Evan

Bottoms up..........

Wet tested and approved for functional applications.

-Happy Mother's Day

Morning Cup of Coffee

I am a coffee drinker. This is a statement that I avoided for the majority of my life, but I've been on the bean long enough now that I have come to accept it. In fact I respect it as well, and having learned a little about the business I am glad that the business is moving to a fair trade. This will allow the farmers around the world to get the best price possible for their product.

My friend Nathalie's husband, Dave, is taking this to the next level and roasting his own fair trade beans in Denver and donating part of the profits to the local food bank. The project is called Beneficial Beans. I got to thinking that this would be a great opportunity for us to brew a killer beer and do something good for the community or the world. So, we got some samples of the beans and are running some test batches.

Coming soon to the tasting room.... Imperial Coffee Stout.

The Ribbon is Cut!

The opening weekend was a hit. Huge thanks to all of you that made it down/up/over to the brewery. We couldn’t have done this without everyone’s support and participation. Family and friends came from all around for the experience, beer, and brewery tours.

Saturday was the main attraction with a ribbon cutting, DJ, raffle, and free snacks! The place was packed with brewery fans and supporters from all over Cismontane California. Kristy Chu, from the Orange County Register, was there and followed up with a great story and pictures.

Sunday was also a blast with more of the same. We sold out of growlers by 3pm and started filling coffee cans and shoes to make up for the lack of supplies. Okay, so we didn’t fill shoes and such, but the growlers are gone for sure.

Thanks again for everyone that came and to the restaurants in the center that helped with catering: The Neighborhood Grill, Celinda's Mexican Food- closed Sunday, Scott's Donuts and Deli, and El Fenix Carniceria.

We are all about great times, good people, tasty snacks, and delicious brews to wash it all down. -Cheers

The Time Has Come

That's right, the tasting room is open and we are priming the pump for the Grand Opening on April 10th and 11th. We have been open for the last two weekends and, although the opening has been very soft, we have received great support from the community, friends, family and a young neighborly rattler.

Our first beer El Modena, mild (brown) ale with an American edge, has already received a great review from our new friend Ron, the founder of the OC Beer Society. The Peninsular Pale will be hitting the first pallets tomorrow and we are looking forward to more smiling tongues. So try to make it to the grand opening to be one of the first to taste our I.P.A.

I can’t tell you how good it feels to be finally moving this project forward with solid products and great people. We are looking forward to the day that all of you make it in if you haven’t already!

Brew Days

It's hard to believe that these days are really here. After all the blood, sweat and tears it felt like we may never see the day where we put all of this hard labor and equipment to work for us. But the day has come.... and don't think for a second that it was smooth sailing.

We crammed to get everything ready for the weekend. Mr. Stewart pulled out all the stops and had all the brewing materials lined up to arrive Friday morning. I was enjoying a brew and chatting about the brew day to come with my friend Laura and her family when I got the call, the grain didn’t show. Bummer.

Believe it or not there are some great people (and great brewers) in this World. One shining example is Patrick Rue from The Bruery. The man hooked us up and supplied us with the grain we need to get through our first batch, saving us days of waiting time.

Once up and running everything went surprisingly well. The brewing went off without a hitch and the wort was looking pristine during the whirlpool when the pump crapped out at about midnight. Bummer x2. We had to bypass the heat exchanger, it took 48hrs to cool and let’s just say we are a bit skeptical about the fermentation, although it seems to be kicking ass.

All in all everything is working well with a few more bugs to work out. Now on to batch 2, chocolate vanilla swirll…