So thanks for coming. Once again, ladies and gentlemen, you're joining us for another lovely episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. We're happy that you joined in today. We've got a lovely episode ahead for you. We've got Roger Adamson. Hey, Roger. Hey, folks. Every time we talk about beer, anything to do with any saison or stout or whatnot, we bring in Roger. I don't think we've stumped you yet, but I think we're going to have a whole podcast episode where we just try to stump you. We talked about the history of what women used to tie their corsets up with. I think you'll probably have a well-organized PowerPoint already made on that, just out of nowhere. Roger is our esoteric guy, a jack of all trades. I actually did a report on scrimshaw and whale bones. I called it scrimshaw. I was like, that's what they used to pick their teeth with. 16th century aristocracy with whale bones. So we've got, no offense, Roger, but we've got bigger guns in the room today. We do, and I'm honored. It's me, right? We've got Nick Williams. Hey, Nick. Hey there, how are you doing? Is your real name Nickademus? My real name is Nickademus. We love that about you. I'm a pretty big fan. Adult Nickademus is okay with it. Child Nickademus was a little less than okay with it. But, yeah. Is that just because of the rhyming opportunities? The rhyming opportunities, the mispronunciation by teachers, and I moved around all over the country as a kid, so, yeah, here and there, and, yeah, it's kind of unique now that I'm an adult. You grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I grew up all over the place, but mostly in the UP of Michigan, yeah, and also the Lower Peninsula of Michigan for a while, and New Mexico for a little while, and North Carolina. He's got the Michigan tattooed on his arm. Yeah, yeah, dude, it's the UP. That's where I'm from. When I read that about you, I was really happy because my family is from Iron Mountain. Oh, cool. I'm opposite end of the UP. I'm Eastern UP. So the fun island part instead of the fun mountain part. Nice. They're just all fun parts of the UP. UP is a UP. UP is a UP. A UP is a UP. And for those of you that don't recognize that voice, we've got Randy Mosher here. Hey, how are you? I'm doing great. Great to have you today on the Real to Bottle. Thanks for coming. We just saw your book in... Ukrainian. Ukrainian, thank you. Crazy. And you said eight languages, your book. Yeah, one more coming. One more coming. That's amazing. Good for you. I mean, it's just crazy that with all the crazy stuff going on in Ukraine, they got to have a book on craft beer now. Right. And we've got Greg Versch, our Director of Communications. Glad to be here. Let's talk about both of you guys. Nick, let's start with you. How you got started in beer. So I know that you kind of did more of the traditional schooling route. You studied here in Chicago, you studied in Munich. Can you talk about when you knew that beer was for you, when you decided to become a fermentation geek, and then your travels via school? Yeah, I mean, you've got a lot more background on me than I usually even call them on. That's scary. I try to steer clear of that. Yeah, so I went through the, may have been the first year, second year, is kind of the early iterations of the WBA program, the World Bring Academy through Siebel here in Chicago and through the Dome's Academy and Gravel Thing just south of Munich, Germany. I graduated through that program. I had had a background in craft beer before then, while in college, as many college students do, I'd become a bartender and happened to be at a craft beer and wine bar. That was a huge thing, one on every corner. This is down in North Carolina, and that led to me looking for something a little bit more stable, less three o'clock in the mornings. I began working for a craft beer distributor, and that finally led me in the whole while. I'm still going to college and home brewing and having a lot of fun, so I decided that maybe the production end of the whole supply chain was where I wanted to be at, and signed up and not quite the rest of the history, but that's where the beginning Studying here locally in Chicago, then studying in Munich, what were the main differences for you between school here versus there? Anything that you noted besides old world, new world, or maybe anything like that? Well, yeah, old world, new world, and the way that that program, I'm not 100 percent, Randy, you might be able to speak to that more than I, but the way that it was laid out when I went through the program was that you were doing most of your theoretical stuff here in Chicago, your book learning to bring a little North Carolina into it, and in Germany, you were doing your practicum. There's all of your hands-on, you're dealing with packaging equipment, physical brew houses, lab, everything like that. It was a little bit of both, and we had some interesting characters throughout the program, both on the faculty and on the student end. We had a couple of people in Germany that just refused to speak any English, and we had some fun afternoons in a lab, which is exactly where you do need them to speak English. Yeah, no major differences. A person who loves beer is a person that loves beer wherever you're at, and you can always find a common ground, I think. That's one of the things that makes beer a fun world to exist in. Why Chicago after? Why not Chicago? I spent the first 10 years of my brewing career down in North Carolina, with a brief break, I was brewing up in Canada. And I met my wife down there, she just finished her master's program, and we were kind of looking all across the country. I've still got a lot of family in Michigan. My sister lives here in Chicago, and we were sort of looking to make a break out of North Carolina. And I, you know, like many people that brew, have held Randy's books in quite high esteem throughout my career, and the opportunity jumped out that I could possibly be working with Randy and sort of several interviews later, and here I am. Thrilled to have him. It's been great. He started right after the first of the year. Finally got the tanks all filled back up again. It's been an odyssey, you know? Yeah. And let's talk about your beginnings. When did you decide that beer was something that you were going to do as a career? I don't think there was ever an epiphany. It just happened degree by degree. I started home brewing and then started accumulating this scruffy notebook full of worksheets and information, and it got thicker and thicker, and I was lucky enough to meet somebody who said, oh yeah, we'll publish that. It's like, now I have to turn that into a book somehow. I published a little homebrew book called The Brewer's Companion back in 1991, I think it was. At the same time, I was working for an advertising agency and eventually out of my own doing freelance, and people that I knew who'd started breweries knew that I did design work, and so I started doing labels for like, eventually for Three Floyd's and Two Brothers and Lakefront in Milwaukee. That was my original very first client. And so I got into the beer industry really as a branding and packaging guy. And then eventually, you know, somebody, I got involved with Five Rabbit, and they were kind of in need of recipe design and broader conceptual stuff. You know, that turned into a partnership and then Forbidden Root. Main partner Robert wanted to start up this company to do a root beer. Beer was the original idea of the company. And it's like, Randy, how do we do that? It's like, well, let's think about that, you know, and what's the bigger idea that includes root beer beer? And, you know, really got in the profession that way. Along the way, somewhere, I started teaching for Siebel, working with Ray Daniels a lot. I think both Five Rabbit and Forbidden Root share that interest in these really unique adjuncts and ingredients that you don't normally find in typical recipes. Is that something that you had just played with in the past or that was something they both wanted to explore and you happen to, you know, have past experience with it or? Well, I got into the weird beers really early, started, you know, reading books out of the Siebel Library on all these weird German styles like Goza and Gurdziski and things like that and sort of writing about and talking about them and brewing them up. And, you know, along the way, just really interested in ingredients and, you know, what does wormwood taste like and kind of really got into that as far as my own home brewing. And then one of the things that attracted me to both breweries is that here are two really definite ideas about what they wanted to be. You know, I think the days are kind of over now, certainly in major markets where you can just start a brewery and just be a craft brewery and have an IPA and a pale ale and a porter and a lager or whatever, you know, you've got to stand for something. You've got to be different from everybody else. What's your favorite kind of lower-priced bulk commodity beer? Do you guys have one? Yeah, I mean, I've got a couple. There's almost always at least a can or two of Papsula ribbon floating around the back of my refrigerator. And I don't know how much of that has to do with, you know, what you grew up with in the back of your father's refrigerator or, you know, where that proclivity necessarily lies. I was a big fan, especially last summer, Sierra Nevada's O'Travaise that they came out, just like a low ABV, easy, like, end of the day. You don't have to think about it. Grab one before you get in the shower, when you get home from work, kind of beer. If I get an easy beer in the summer, it's a Hefeweizen. The Sierra Nevada one was pretty great, is pretty great. You know, I work for two breweries, so I don't, you know, I get beer. I don't need cheap beer, you know, I can just take some. And so I'm really, really lucky in that regard. So speaking of Hefeweizens, you guys have a pretty neat one at Forbidden Root. Can you tell us a little bit about that? It's pretty fun. Would you like to taste it? Absolutely. Even better. Yeah. I feel a little parched. You want to talk and I'll pour? Sure. So the Strawberry Basil Hefeweizen is one of our core brands, and there's three of those currently. The Strawberry Basil Hefeweizen, the Hay Fever, which is a dry hopped saison, pretty traditional. I don't know where it is. Wildflower Pale Ale was previously one of our core beers in 12 ounce six pack bottles. Okay. So yeah, the Strawberry Basil Hefeweizen is fermented just like a normal Hefeweizen. We add strawberry puree quite a bit of it during primary fermentation. It finishes out relatively normal for a Hefeweizen, usually about 75, 80 percent attenuation. So once in the right tank, the Strawberry Basil Hefeweizen gets a couple different additions. We have a cold extract of basil that we do overnight. It's where the basil flavor in this comes from. And we also do a hot tea extract of hibiscus, which is what gives it the color because the strawberry doesn't really give you that color, but it helps visually to taste with your eyes. Sure. Yeah, it ticks the box. If it's not, the color's not there, it won't taste right. It's funny because we got some high culinary grade of basil, and we made our little tincture out of it, and it tasted like spinach. It was just terrible. And so we went across the street to the herb shop and said, well, we need some basil. And it's like, oh, we get this beautiful California culinary stuff. It's like, no, no, no, that doesn't work. It's like, well, we have this crappy stuff that we only use to make our pizza mix. And we're like, yeah, give us some of that. And we took that over and it's like perfect, because it really had that punchy basil kind of aroma, so you don't always know what's going to work in a beer. I like this because I don't like to drink sweet. So when I see just strawberry basil, my mind goes, this is going to be a sweet style. But I think adding on that hops for that balance of the bitterness, it's not sweet. It's actually fruity, but it's delicious. It's all about freshness. The complexity is very broad here. You get the fruity, the herbal, the bitter. And the added benefit of the hibiscus, in addition to the color, is just that slight tannic quality that sort of emulates that tannic, because we have to remember, strawberry is not a sweet fruit. It's actually kind of a bitter fruit. And I think that's an added benefit. I don't think we necessarily really get into that when we, you know, pitch it. Yeah, but it helps. You know, like, we find there's a lot of things that change the flavor that don't necessarily jump out and you put the name on it. But a little, you know, the hibiscus, obviously for color, but it kind of helps finish the beer up, you know, and kind of clean it up. But like just like that does in a rosé wine or something, that little bit of just a little bit of tannic bites provides part of that finish, that crispness without making the beer too sour or too heavy. When you visit Forbidden Root, one of the things that I love about it is kind of like going into an apothecary shop with all the different jars you have of all the different herbs and flowers and spices. How do you decide when to introduce things like hot side versus cold side? It's just a lot of experimentation on your part or? It depends. Like we have a general rule, if we can use it in the Whirlpool, we'll use it in the Whirlpool. So the Whirlpool is like when you've turned the heat off the boiling and you spin that word around and you're trying to create a pile of hops and whatever stuff just to help it filter out. You have about a half an hour where the word is still warm and you have a great opportunity to put spices in there or citrus or whatever. We don't do fruit in there because we don't want the fruit to go through the vigorous part of fermentation because it tends to boil off a lot of the important aromas. We don't want it heated either because the difference between strawberry and strawberry jam, it's not the same. Like this beer uses mostly single-strength strawberry puree, but we also use a little bit of a four-times concentrate of puree because it has just a bit of jammy-ness and it adds a little depth and dimension to the strawberry character in the beer we found. But we do a lot of little tabletop blend ups where we've got a pipette-er and we've got beakers and we'll just run out a couple hundred mils of beer and start squirting stuff in. Sometimes we do that at the very beginning of the project when we're just conceptualizing and trying to get our heads around what flavors work together or might be good. And some we do at the very end of the process when we're trying to decide, okay, we got this basil tincture, we got the beer, it's like how much of this do we want to add to get the right effect? So start to finish, how long did it take for this particular beer? From conceptualization? Yes. Well, it probably took about a year because we went through four batches of it, I think, with different types of strawberry and different... The base recipe, I think, stayed pretty much the same, but we were looking for as close to just a fresh strawberry flavor as we could find, and it's a really, really hard flavor. It's got a lot of different flavor components, it's got this one flavor part that's sort of a little like spoiled butter, and so the strawberry is luscious, but it has this sort of edginess about it, too, and if you take that away, it just seems like You brought up a good point. I mean, I think so many consumers see strawberry on the shelf, and they immediately think like Jolly Rancher, you know, something like candy, yeah, this is a problem, actually, because you can't compete with artificial ingredients. So what else do you have for us here? So this is Hay Fever. So we thought of, again, this one we started working on about a year, year and a half ago. It started as a low-gravity grizzette, or kind of a Belgian table beer, and nobody knew what a grizzette was. So we changed the name from grizzette to farmhouse, and the sales doubled that week. It's like, okay, you can't use the word grizzette, nobody knows what it means. Even I didn't really know what it means. So that evolved through a couple of brewers that were before Nick, and then when Nick started, the trick was trying to get the peppery saison yeast character to work, to play nicely with hops. So we tried one with American West Coast hops, and it was a big clash. Then we tried one that was more noble hop character, and it was like, man, I don't know, it's not really working. Then we found some, we use a lot of El Dorado hops, because we like the flavor and we can afford them, and they're not too hard to get right now. And so we used some fairly good amount of them in the New England, so we thought, yeah, it's got the pineapple character, maybe that'll play nicely with the yeast, and turned out it did. It's very nice beer. This is simultaneously creamy but lean on the finish at the same time. When I first put it in my mouth, I think it's gonna be almost too round, but then it just cleans up, and it's very laser-like in the backside. I really like that. That's somewhat typical of specifically French Cezanne, which is, this is a French Cezanne yeast strain. They tend to have quite a bit to them, but they dry out almost completely. They ferment down to, not nothing, but they ferment out quite a bit, very dry beers. But the yeast profile weaves all these beautiful esters in there that indicate to you that there is, you know, a huge, huge bready note and peppery note. And then on top of that, the El Dorado gets in there really nicely with a little bit of pineapple, a little bit of just kind of generic tropical fruit. I have to say, I think Cezanne's are kind of the kitchen sink of styles, especially in America, and it's refreshing to have one that's not too sweet or too spicy. I feel like there's just no rules at times, and you just can end up with these things that are just either cleanly, like, weird on the finish, too much body, or it just tastes like you're drinking like a fruity soap or something. Yeah, well, they should never be sweet. And then, yeah, Americans do tend to overdo the spices. I have a problem with with beer, that I think people kind of over-coriander it, and then it just tastes like old stale hot dog water. That's hilarious and gross. I know, but it's true. That's most people's only point of reference on coriander is hot dogs. That's what hot dogs are flavored with. So that's the taste of them. So, I could go on in the chemistry of them, you know. Oh, please do. The chemistry of hot dogs. No, you don't want to know that. No, I mean, that cilantro flavor is in some seed and not others. It has to do with ripening. It has to do with these saturated aldehyde chemicals. It's like really, you know, what we find is that every spice, you know, my coriander chapter in my spice book has 27 pages, just on coriander, you know, and everything's a rabbit hole like that. You know, fruits are like that and spices are like that and herbs are like that. And there's just like, when you start really looking at it, everything's as complex as hops, right? Everybody understands how complex hots are. But when you really get into the botany and the chemistry of all these ingredients, it's just like endless. Nick, you brewed a lot of Cezanne's down in North Carolina, right? Wasn't that one of the kind of signature styles down there for you? Yeah. So my last two years in North Carolina, I was at a brewery that did, it was a farmhouse brewery, Haw River Farmhouse, sales is the name of it. Shout out to those guys. They're incredible. We did a lot of Belgian styles and mixed culture and sour, barrel sour beer. Cezanne's are the stock and trade. We did a lot of Cezanne's and I've always loved Cezanne's as a style. When you do them right, they can be a really beautiful palette that you can paint whatever you want to. I love Cezanne's. This was the first beer that I think. I saw the recipe and something about it didn't look right and changed the yeast and changed the recipe up and this was the first beer that I really brewed when I got here. I like it a lot. I don't want to say I think we hit it out of the park on the try one, but yeah, I changed everything up and I enjoy the hell it is. Yeah, we love it. What I love about Cezanne's is that they're complex without being overbearing. There's a lot of depth there, but they're super drinkable. They can sit on the porch and have a few and not going to overwhelm you, but they just have a lot of layers of flavor. As long as they're properly attenuated like this one is, I can't tell you how many bad Cezanne's we've tried. Well, historically, there's not a great reference on what it even is. I looked at Michael Jackson's original tasting, World Guide to Beer. He has one sentence in that whole book on Cezanne's where he says, some brewers in some parts of southern Belgium call their blonde ale Cezanne's. That's it. So the history of it, we like to think, oh, it's in a farmhouse and there's this farmwife, she's stirring the mash or whatever, but it's not like that. So we don't have a good, it's sort of an all made up style, but we love the idea of it so much that we're happy to put up with it. But I think it doesn't have roots like lager does or pale ale or things. This beer is great. Well done. So now that the syrupy sweet, intense soda pop root beers have died down a little bit, is it time for your meticulously put together forbidden root beer to come back? I have to tell you, I kind of missed that beer. Yeah, I don't know. It was that we were halfway through development on that. I mean, we did actually spend two years working on that product to get an all natural product that tasted like a beer and also like a root beer. We actually have a small batch on right now at the brew pub that's a Grand Cru or Grand Croute, as I call it. That's based on a Belgian triple and reproportioned root beer ingredients in there, designed to kind of work with that triple thing. So it's not a straight up classic root beer flavor, but it's certainly if you smell it, you'll think root beer. Yeah, I don't know. We don't have an immediate plans for getting that back in the market. If we feel like the time's right, certainly no ideas are off the table. Roger's crushed. It was a great beer. It just kind of hurt because people had that expectation that once Not Your Fathers came out, that was just root beer as you knew it with alcohol in it. Whereas yours was harkening back to something else that was different and not super sweet. And I don't know, I think it might be something good to revisit. We'd play with it at the pub. And if we start to get some traction at the pub and get some buzz and start seeing those tanks drain, then that will be the indication. Can you tell us the story of the forbidden root part? I think this is kind of neat. Well, yeah. So root beer is based on sassapras, or at least it was until 1960 when they started feeding this chemical that's in it called saffrole to rats. And rats are getting half their body weight in this chemical and then getting kidney problems or cancer or something. Also, it's a feedstock to make ecstasy if you're interested. So I think that's another reason why they keep that off the list. But yeah, so everybody reformulated their root beers, and now the root beer is more or less like a wintergreen on one end and vanilla in the middle with some kind of sweet, spicy and peppery kind of, and a bunch of weird stuff too. It's got patchouli in it. And I mean, it's pretty crazy. It's pretty crazy what's actually in there. But yeah, Forbidden Root, we didn't want to call it root beer, you know, because we didn't want to be like selling alcohol to kids. We didn't really want that stigma, that the expectation that this was root beer. So we thought, let's find a name that we can use that will describe the product, but do it in a way that's clear that it's not necessarily root beer, but it has that word root in it. I think it was from our startup brewer, BJ Pitchman came up with Forbidden Root, because we were majorly into puns at that point in time. So everything was a pun and that was a pretty good one we thought. So that's it. All right. More beer? There are tons of charm. Let's do it. So this is our wildflower pale ale, WPA. This is a beer we've been brewing for a while. So our idea with this beer was to create a pale ale with a hop character that you couldn't ever get to with hops alone. We weren't trying to be all flowery and really perfumey or anything like that. So we used elder flowers, which have a fruity floral kind of thing, which just adds the general fruitiness of the ale. We have marigold, which has a little bit of that same geraniol chemical that Cascade has a lot of, so it kind of bumps that hoppy floral thing. And then the final thing is a Chinese flower called a sweet osmanthus. And that little bit of a kind of a sweet floral at the finish that kind of lingers on your palate, that's the osmanthus. And we found that thing. It's a Chinese herb. It has a lot of symbolism revolving around the moon and really fascinating flower. It's pretty expensive, has a bit of a peachy character to it also. You know, we just thought it would be fun to take hops and take them in the direction you could never get to with hops. This is a little bit oily on the finish. Certainly hoppy. You know, so some of that hop will maybe give you a bit of a resiny thing that kind of does stick with you. And that bitterness does tend to get on your palate and linger there quite a while. Thank you for making a bitter pale ale. These are strange times we're living in right now. It's bitter, it's vegetal, and it's really herbal. Like floral, it's so cool. You can still get like a pale ale that has cut. Yeah. Yeah. That has a balance, a close balance. Yet ironically, it evokes flowers in the title. So again, this is one that maybe needs a pitch on the side here saying, just because you hear flower, don't think this is some sweet kind of beer. It's incredibly balanced, it's dry. It's every bit as hard to come up with the right language to talk about these products. As it is to brew them. I mean, it's really a challenge. I mean, brewing obviously takes a lot more knowledge and skill and time, but in terms of just solving a problem, it's sometimes really people come up with the most unexpected things. And we started as a botanic brewery, but we don't let that message, I mean, you won't see it on the cans because we won't talk about it when we are not there to support it. So we'll talk about it at festivals, it's all over our menu and like when you come to our pub, you understand what we're doing. But by itself, people think we're some Renaissance fair-gruit maker or, you know, I mean, we've just heard the weirdest things about what people think we are based on that notion of botanic brewing. So we try to always put it in a context where we can control the message. Nick, how closely are you working, I'm just thinking about the brew pub in itself, right, as an entity. So these beers are not your typical beer. And we talked about how, you know, in a brew pub, historically, you had, you know, your lagers, nails, whatever. How do you work with food pairing with these? I mean, it's got to be, adds another kind of curve ball with the chef and back of the house. Do you guys work together on this kind of thing? We do. We've just recently, in the last month and a half, I think, six weeks, started doing a beer pairing menu. So not necessarily a beer dinner, but the concept being that if you want to opt in when you walk through the door for whatever the cover charge may be, I don't want to throw a number out because I'm not sure what it is. Six dollars. It's a prefix thing. Best deal in town. You'll have a three course meal, all of them have pairings. Generally, our chef Dan Weiland and I will spend at least a few hours in the week or two leading up to it to pair things and text each other late at night like, wouldn't balsamic go really well with this? Maybe we actually garnish this beer with something from the dish, or things of that nature. It is, it's a constantly evolving thing, and Dan's a really incredible chef, and his palate is dependent on what's in the marketplace currently. So it can be one thing on the Friday beforehand, and if the dinner's on a Wednesday, on Tuesday, he goes to the market, and there's some really incredible halibut, then halibut just made it onto that menu. Right. So you got to stay on your feet. One of the things we're always trying to do with pairing is find those hooks, find those things where two things work together, where either similar or just things that are harmonious, and having more different flavors in any given beer just gives Well, and the fact that these are all dry styles makes it easier. Sweet is notoriously difficult for me to pair. Yeah, I think that's true, for beer especially. Yeah, very good. Cool. All right, one more? Yes, one more. Yes. I'm very happy with all of these. Yeah, thanks. We're thrilled with them. It's very refreshing to see people doing something different. As much as you'd say before that you, as a brewery, have to bring something different to the table, unfortunately, a lot of breweries are not. There are still plenty of breweries opening with the old mantra of, well, we'll do Pales Hills and IPAs and maybe a Barrel Age beer. So yeah, I really think it's neat that you guys are taking extra effort to play around with these ingredients and make them work. Well, it takes longer to build your brand in the marketplace because we're not just like, they can't just put Pale Ale on the chalkboard or IPA or whatever, and have people understand it. So it takes people longer to wrap their heads around what we do and really get the idea and find our products and see how they all relate. But once we got them, we can't like Lagunitas can't come in and knock our handles off, right? So once you establish your brand idea, it's hard to dislodge you and you're not just subject to whatever competition there is out there. So you want to talk about the radio song, Nick? Sure. Can I just say that this is delicious before? That is the idea. Yeah. Well, thank you. Yeah. I was going to offer a small disclaimer. This was bottled, this was canned this morning. Randy literally took it off of the canning line on the way out the door. Cool. Thanks. I think maybe put labels on it while he was driving down here. I put labels on it at home. Between his knees while he was driving down here. Not texting though, just labeling beer. Just labeling beer. That's totally fine. It's not on my phone. The Radios one is one of our New England IPA series, Hazy IPA, Juicy IPA, whatever we want to call it. This one in particular is a rye forward IPA, double dry hopped using a lot of pretty classic hops for the style, El Dorado, Mosaic, Chinook. It's 30% rye too, which is quite a bit of rye. 30% rye and that really comes forward as the spicy component in the malt background. How do you like cleaning the equipment after that? Do you build that? Yeah, we do. We use both flaked and malted rye. Yeah, these beers are, there are a lot to clean up after. We have some of these New England's that have 50% adjunct, because the creamy texture is a really important cue in the style, and you got to have that, and it sometimes takes that much. For the folks who can't see this beer, it pours, it's opaque, and it looks somewhere between orange juice and applesauce. It looks like grapefruit. It looks like applesauce, actually, like a really, really fine applesauce. Don't have it around when your kids are, right? Or do, depending on the kids. Yeah, last part about this one in particular is this one has a pretty hefty dose of lactose, milk sugar put into the boil, just kind of provide a background base of sweetness. Yeah, but this is beautiful, this is kind of one of the favorites for that line of beers in-house. We seem to have a lot of the people that really dig this one more than the other ones especially. I think they're all pretty delicious. Yeah, what are some of the challenges of brewing a style like this? I mean, this is the style right now. I mean, this is what we see so many people asking for, talking about. We worked on this with BJ when he was there. He got really interested in them and we tasted some terrible ones and we thought, I don't know. And then we tasted some good ones and it's like, okay, well, I think we can work with this. And it took us really like six or eight months to kind of wrap our heads around all the different things that you need to do. You need to have a lot of adjuncts, so you have this creamy body. That contributes to the haze too, and you're not using any kettle finings, that additives that would help coagulate protein. What other grains besides rye? We've used flaked barley occasionally, but usually it's oats and flaked wheat. Okay. And then the rye like us in this one. Rye, yeah, generally pretty- Those are about your options. Yeah, pretty normal baseball on top of that. I'll rye wheat in one upcoming. But that high use of adjunct, really a restrained hand on hops in terms of like we put almost no hops in the kettle. Like you get enough bitterness from the Whirlpool Editions. And even now, they're starting to understand that you get bitterness from dry hopping, not from alpha acids, but from other chemicals that are in the hops that also have some bitterness. And when you put five pounds, six pounds, eight pounds, a barrel of hops into a beer, which is a stupid amount of hops, that's the key. That is the key feature, stupid amount of hops, pretty expensive hops, because the cheap hops don't work in these beers. Right. The other thing that's really key is dry hopping during early fermentation at high creusin, when the yeast is at its most active, because the yeast is actually able to change some less desirable aroma compounds into more desirable aroma compounds. There's this whole cascade that starts with geraniol, which is that sort of marigold floral thing, and it goes into linalool, which is orangey, and beta citronella, which is lemony. And then there's a couple other things that cascade down from those. So, that's a real important part, and that seems to be where most of the haze comes from also. Nobody seems to know exactly what it is, but it's a real fine long-lived haze that seems to come from some interaction between the hops and the yeast during fermentation. So, people always describe this style as juicy. On this and a few other examples, but especially in this is jumping out, I get a lot of spice too, and it could be like a floral spice quality from the hops, or is there some yeast in there too? A little bit of both. I mean, you're getting a little bit of that spicy character, that sort of generic spicy character comes through from rye, a little bit from the specific yeast that we use for this, and that I was going to jump in on that. I think the yeast is a very important part of this beer that we really shouldn't overlook. Yeah, as far as the spicy, a little bit of it's from the hops, batch to batch. That can be the difference of this went into the bright tank last night at 6 o'clock. So, this beer is super young. Super young and that may not be there in a week. Well, in effect, we call it hop burn. So, that sort of peppery thing at the end of the taste, that kind of lingers and prickle like a little prickly heat kind of thing, that is the hops and that will go away in about a week or two. People are fanatics about freshness. Yeah, they're a little better after a week or two, when they've had a chance to kind of knit together and mellow. I'm on board with that. Yeah, but I'll tell you the guys that come and line up and take these beers to go, when we do releases, they want to feel something, they want that burn. That's the beautiful part about beer, it's the subjective beverage. Everybody drinks it differently. And it changes every week. Will you guys come back and talk about yeast? Any old time. I had a whole list of yeast questions, but we don't have time to get into it today. But I want you to come back and talk about yeast and beer, because I think it's kind of unknown, but arcane and it needs to come out into the light. So, you'll come back to us? Of course we will. Great. You'll bring more beer, right? Well, actually, we're not going to let you go. Absolutely. Good. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Nick Ademus. Randy, good to have you. Really appreciate it. Yeah, it's great. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Good job today, Roger. I think Roger is the star today. Oh, I was having a ball here. Thanks, guys, for coming. Yeah, for sure. Because they're wealth of knowledge. Keep it up. Thanks for coming. Keep chasing, folks. We'll see you soon. All right, really juice it this time. Give more sorority, girl. Thank you for listening to Barrel the Bottle, The Binny's Podcast.