You are listening to another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. My name is Roger, and I do beer here at Binny's. And I'm very excited today because we are doing a beer podcast with the founders of one of my favorite breweries, Alaskan Brewing. Joined with me today are Chris. Hi, I'm Chris. I do wine, but I also love beer, and I'm a big fan as well. Can't wait to get into some of these. Mr. Pat Brophy. Hey, it's Pat Brophy, Director of Spirit Sales, Alaskan drinker since the mid-90s. Johnny, come lately. Our very special guests, Geoff and Marcy Larson of Alaskan Brewing. Hello. It's a pleasure being on the podcast with you all. It's going to be fun. Thanks for joining us. Just because I feel this is so cliche, I need to ask, how is the weather right now in Juneau, Alaska? Nice and cool here compared to you guys. So yeah, we're in the 50s here. It's a little bit overcast. We just had some rain go through, so it freshened everything up and it's summertime in Southeast Alaska, which is awesome. We're on the ocean. We have a maritime climate here. So a lot of moisture, a lot of snow, depending on the time of year. But we, you know, we see whales, orca, bear, all manner of wildlife here. And Juno has like the fifth largest ice field in North America right in Juno. In our backyard, yeah. You can walk right to it. So not only a component of the geology and all of that, but an important component in your beer as well, right? Yeah, hydrologically speaking, it definitely affects our water source, but also it's a big chunk of ice. And so we get a fair amount of warm winds off the ocean that then hit that ice mass, and that, you know, creates the precipitation of the area. So yeah, we are very fortunate. We have a very, very pristine water source here and we appreciate it. There are times, though, we would like to have less rain, but it is what it is. And we chose to live here and it's a beautiful place. Well, speaking of that, so you guys are true veterans of the American craft industry here. You opened your doors in 1986. So tell us a little bit about, you know, how that came about. What brought you to Alaska? Well, what originally brought us to Alaska was working in between college years in the summer times in national parks. And I landed a job at Glacier Bay National Park out just west of here. And totally fell in love with the environment and the area and the beauty of this place. It has so many things. You can catch a king salmon in the morning and then get on shore and hike up through a rainforest and then hop on a glacier and see glacier ice and then head on up and see a goat on the mountain, the Alpine mountaintop. So you have like everything kind of all in one area. So I totally fell in love with it. I had met Geoff the year prior at another park, National Park in Montana. And it was a summer romance that went terribly well. So I convinced him to move up here to Alaska and we both fell in love with it. Yeah. He visited first and then we both fell in love with it and then moved up here. And then the figure out what are we going to do to make a living? And I was a home brewer, so it was a pretty easy kind of transition. My background is chemical engineering, but also with the love of cooking and flavors. It kind of was a hobby that became a profession. We joke a little bit about whose idea it was, and we kind of sometimes blame each other. But truly, I think what was interesting back then is that there was very few small craft focused brewing entities in this country, and so it was novel. And, you know, we didn't know any better. You know, I often say that I think, you know, ignorance was a very important part of the recipe of us starting a brewery in Alaska, not realizing that there were going to be challenges as we faced the actual, eventual reality that we were growing. But yeah, we started with the idea of producing very special products, and then Marcy did some research in looking at the history of brewing, because obviously we all know that the Americas had a rich history of brewing. And lo and behold, Alaska was no exception. There were a lot of breweries. 58 breweries before prohibition? 48 before prohibition up here in Alaska. During the Gold Rush, the Gold Rush brought a lot of brewers up here and a lot of stampeters who wanted to drink beer. So it was amazing how many were existing before the prohibition. And lo and behold, when we were looking at this, it was pretty magical because we were looking at wanting to tell the story of beer because people really didn't know it. They had been marketed into thinking beer was this kind of blonde, somewhat straw-like color, maybe even straw-like flavored product. And we embraced that. And lo and behold, we found old collectors of memorabilia and lo and behold, articles talking about the breweries and brewing problems that those early pioneers had. Right here in this area where we are right now located in Juneau. And one of the collectors gave us a whole bunch of inventory receipts of the raw materials that one brewer had ordered to be able to make the beer. And then we found an interview of the brewmaster that talked about the difficulties of brewing his ales with the coldness of the area. And that was really what started the Alaskan Amber. Because the idea of an ale, a cold fermentation of an ale, wasn't on our mind until we read that and then it made total sense. It's like, wow, yeah. It's easier to keep things cold up here. And then we had the listed raw materials in the ratios. We reconstructed basically what was a recipe from 1907. That's so cool. Amazingly serendipitous that you found those materials. And what a great way to kick off your brewery. That's amazing. Absolutely. It was quite a surprise to have all of that come together about the same time. And Geoff had been brewing up an amber anyway. I mean, he had a homebrew amber that we kind of thought that that's what we wanted to use. But when we had all of this other information come in about the way it was done and the ingredients that were used, he brewed that up as well. And then we had them side by side with all of the investors that we had lined up and they chose. And everybody chose, well, heck, this is history, this is awesome, this is a great amber, let's do it. And that is still our number one selling beer even now. Yeah. So what's the fermentation temperature difference compared to most mainstream ales? Well, OK, so here's an interesting aspect of our brewery. We only have one yeast in our plant and we use our yeast at the coldest temperature it can tolerate. And yet we will make IPAs or other beers, wheat beers that have a much higher temperature fermentation. And I would say we're talking about a 20 degree temperature difference between our coldest fermented beers and our warmest fermented beers. It's all top for many nail yeast. Correct. But you know, the interesting thing, just talking about just the one little other attribute of the Alaskan amber that I think is interesting. So this brewer had to get his hops from basically the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This is prior to World War I. Because that's where he was from. I mean, this was his thing. You think you have logistical problems. The Bohemian hop. The Bohemian hop changed its name to Saas, that noble hop that actually in 1986 was considered one of the most sought after hops in the world. And of course in 1986 it was the Czech Slovakian hop. And now it's the Czech Republic. So in some ways it's just hilarious to think about the historical impacts that hit the beer industry. And yet at the same time here he is in Alaska having really success with making this beer. So he used hops in a miserly way. And that really is one attribute of the Alaskan Amber. It's a malt forward product because of the limitation and logistics he had to face in getting these hops half way around the world to Juno, Alaska, or to Douglas, Alaska. Juno and Douglas are now a combined city. So you talk to a Douglasite, they're not going to recognize that. But do you find a great deal of difference in ester production from this yeast strain, depending on what temperature you're fermenting at? Huge, absolutely huge. It's all about fermentation characteristics. I mean, there are certain attributes as far as body that are impacted by the fermentation environment for these, but there's no question that the esteric components, you can definitely get the classic bananas of wheat beers, not so much the phenolic characters, but definitely the esters of high fruit are evidenced. And so like in our icy bay IPA, it's at a higher temperature fermentation. So it dries it out a little bit more substantially, and also you'll get those esteric components that actually complement, I think, the dry hopping that we do with our icy bay. Yeah, that seems like it would dovetail really nicely with your hop choices there that are kind of a little bit piney and resinous, but also accentuate a lot of citrusy fruit. Correct. Correct. I don't know about you all. Are you all getting thirsty? Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Let's pop an amber. I just poured mine. I was a little bit ahead of the game. Oh man. Oh, they're popping ambers. I thought we were supposed to be all on the same kind of side here. You were talking about it, and I just needed to pop one. Beautiful cans, by the way. This can artwork is just dynamite. Yeah, on the Alaskan amber, it's a a troller up, and there's many ways we harvest fish here in Alaska. And the power troller is probably the quintessential, highest quality way of taking that fish out of the ocean by a hook. And you bring that fish out, and you take care of it and baby it. And in many ways, I think it epitomizes a lot of the spirit of the state. You're out there on the open water. You have this absolutely wild, caught fish, and then you take care of it and are nurturing it so that when it gets to the plate in front of people, they consume it. And so in many ways, it's like it was said by one of our fishermen, you know, here I am doing something I love in a place that's absolutely amazing. And making a living. How could it be better? Yeah, no kidding. Cheers to that. I feel just tasting this beer, that this is one of those beers where sometimes people feel intimidated by beer and food pairings and they kind of overthink it. This beer pairs well with almost anything. I mean, grilled foods, barbecue, things that match its kind of sweet, roasty character, but it can even do well with lighter foods as well. It's just such a kind of Swiss army knife of, you know, when in doubt, this beer goes well with just about anything. Also, I think it's also great as an ingredient in cooking, just because most people think about using wine in cooking. But there's a very, very significant difference in beer, and that is the bitterness that comes from hops actually adds that bitterness that's very typical in spices. And so you have to be very careful of the savory characters because you can overwhelm them with way too high a bitterness. But you're absolutely right. I think our amber does really well with foods, both in their preparation, but also as an accompaniment. As an accompaniment. Totally agree. This would make a great addition to a braising liquid for almost anything because of the low hopping rates. Geoff has a great salmon marinade recipe that is just awesome and it worked perfectly with it. Well, I certainly envy your access to wild Alaskan salmon, that's for sure. We're lucky that way. Absolutely. This beer is gorgeous too. I mean, the malt character is really pronounced. It's lightly sweet and just so easy to drink. I love it. Yeah. It was pale and crystal malts, the crystal malts obviously are those malts that have been roasted while they're still moist. And so the starches in the malt have changed to sugar and then they're slightly caramelized. And so that does a number of things. It creates those amazing reactions that, you know, combine with the protein and sugar to make what they call the Millard reactions that are really kind of those toasty characters that caramel is part of. But also then you have some of the non-fermental sugars that are complex sugars that our yeast can't break down. And so that's the body. So the real complex sugars, which are long chain carbohydrates, but not starch carbohydrates, are part of the component of maltiness that gives it body, but then also a bit of sweetness, but not that cloying sweetness of simple sugars that you would find on somebody's table in a sugar bowl. But yeah, it's amazing. Here we are from 1986 to today. And while maybe there's been some changes in the artwork, we've always tried to make sure that we've kept the liquid the same. That's an interesting kind of evolution in what we've seen in the beer industry. I would say there's a real interesting novelty of what's new and different. But with some of our products, we're really trying to make sure that we have a consistent character that people can go back to. But then there are other product lines that we have that we intentionally change, but then we also obviously change the artwork. The limited edition kind of things. Right. I would personally like to thank you for that. There's so much in the industry now where it's just one beer to the next, topping around, and core products have gone by the wayside for a lot of the newer brewers. But having a core portfolio of great beers and sticking to your roots while still innovating, that's special, I think. Yeah. I think that you guys do a great job of that. We really jumped on the bandwagon with the flagship February promotion to start to talk about some of these old school flagship brands. A lot of things that are malt centric as opposed to hop forward and like Chris said, you can absolutely still have those and then innovate as well. I mean, you guys are literally doing everything people are talking about these days. You've got kettle sours, you've got hazies, you've got even seltzers. Right. Holy cow, really? Yeah, we did that too. You got to. Yeah, no, but we still have our amber and we still have our core. And I think that is something that I really appreciate about everybody here is their dedication to making a consistent product. I mean, back in the early days, that is what you wanted to do in the 86. You wanted to have people taste your beer and then know that that's what they were going to have the next time they come around and be able to find it. And that was what made success. And if you couldn't do that, then a lot of times you didn't have success. So our guys had to work really, really hard to keep this beer exactly where it needed to be within the profile. And it's a testament to their dedication to that. What were people's initial reactions to this beer? I mean, what were people drinking at the time? Like the macro stuff you think of today or? Well, I would say a combination. I would say yes. I mean, there was no question in 1986. You know, we're talking. Rainier, we were drinking a lot of rainier up here. Which is probably like in your neck of the Woods V Grain Belt or Old Style. It's the hams of the Pacific Northwest. Yeah, but you know, there was, you know, back then, only 3% of the beer consumed in the US came from imports. And kind of in Alaska, we were the... The dumping ground. Yeah. Everything that came up here was just awful. If it was out of code, we got it because we weren't going to ship it back. I would say, though, when we started with our Alaskan Amber, you know, we touched on that. It was kind of a shockingly dark beer. But we soon, you know, we're looking at other other flavors that could be indicative of where we're from. And so we always have tried to put Alaska on the label, but we also tried to put Alaska in the product. One of our first forays into something, you know, unique and special was Alaskan Smoked Porter. And the genesis of where this came from was because back in the 1800s and early 1900s, there were a lot of porters and stouts being consumed in Alaska at the time, which, you know, people scratch their head, scratch their head and think that that's odd. Well, the European evolution of beer, you know, was, you know, the 1700s, 1800s. But the new world, i.e., you know, North America was late, late in coming. But by the early 1900s, the East Coast had already already started to succumb to the Lager Revolution. But the West Coast was behind the East Coast. And actually, there were a lot of very, you know, interesting beers being brewed here in the mining days. And guess what, you know, early 1900s, we're talking old world immigrants come to the US and come to Alaska because of the gold rush. Well, they wanted their beers. Well, we sat there and looked at, you know, here's a porter being advertised in the paper and across the street from us was a smokehouse and we would get together on the weekends or the coast of the weekends and share some of our products together and it just became so obvious that here we have the opportunity to roast malts as that old, the older brewers, pioneer brewers probably had to do to get the porters. We ended up roasting malt over Alderwood, which is the only hardwood here. Smoking it. To basically roast and smoke the malt, because back in 1900, you walked the streets of Juneau and guess what you smelled? Smoke. I mean, people were heating their house with wood. They cooked on wood. Everything was smoky and including the beer. So the smoke porter came about really putting ourselves back 100 years and saying, huh, why not? Here's a bit of locally roasted malt that has a character that's different and not unusual necessarily in the world stage of beer. Smoked Rauch beers were still available, but not in the US. So we were the first smoked beer in the US that kind of rekindled that stylistic expression of beer. What a great way for that to come up too. I'm picturing this Alaskan frontier people sitting around sharing beer and smoked salmon, just talking about, oh, well, we could do this. And nowadays, I think so many times we have craft breweries where it's like, what kind of breakfast cereal are we going to dry hop this milkshake-flavored beer with? And it's just something that's, you went from, you have this such traditional, but it's still this kind of just people coming together and innovating with this beer based around what you have there locally is something that I think is kind of lost in Yeah. Well, it was interesting, but there was even, there was like an evolution within the evolution of that, because of course we were very concerned about fresh beer. And so when we bottled and sold this beer and sold out in December of 1988, but we wanted to make sure nobody thought it was old. So we labeled it, even though we sold it in 1988, we labeled it 1989 Smoke Porter. So the first vintage product we actually dated with, you know, the next year, because it was going to be fine for at least a couple of months. And we thought it would take a while to sell, but we were a little wrong about that, so. But we shocked a few people, because they thought amber was dark. Ho, ho, ho. But lo and behold, we started, you know, continuing to kind of taste the Smoke Porter as time passed. And we realized this beer has some aging capability. And that's pretty remarkable for a beer that has 6.5% alcohol and really not that high a bitterness level, which are both attributes of preservative characters in beer, but really, the smoke character is also an antioxidant. And it's also one that tends to stabilize the beer. And lo and behold, we had a beer that was aging really well. And it was 1992 at the Great American Beer Festival, I gathered a bunch of beer aficionados together, including Michael Jackson. And so I had a tasting of our older vintages, and I asked them, do you think we could start talking about these beers being vintaged? And they resoundingly all agreed, yes, absolutely. And then Michael Jackson said to you, but you know, one thing you might want to think about doing is, don't filter the smoked quarter, let some yeast, let it settle and just have it be a living beer. And so from 1993 on, we stopped filtering it, and we always left a little yeast in the bottle. Not to bottle condition, but just to add that element of preservative. In fact, I'm out of my amber. I'm wondering if I could crack that smoked porter. Because one thing about- I beat you to it. Sorry. Okay, one thing though that we emphasize in vertical tastings, which is contrary to wine, is to start with the oldest vintage first. Because what ends up happening is the smoke character is fairly intense when we first package the beer. And it's really very quickly, in the first couple months even, there's a substantial mellowing of the beer. It's really kind of that reactive component that makes smoke preservative and it's characteristic. But as time goes on, the smoke diminishes. So I'm going to open a 2009 smoke. Yep, so 2009 right here. Look at that. I remember that label. I'm dying of thirst. You mentioned you're actually roasting the malt as you smoke them. I was wondering if you went in with pre-roasted brown or chocolate malt and then just cold smoked it or how that worked. We were so fortunate. Right across the street, as I mentioned, we had a commercial smokehouse and he made Lox, which is a cold smoked salt-cured fish, and then also hard smoke. But he had a very sophisticated smokehouse, so we were able to control the humidity, temperatures, smoke density. And so again, you know, we were fixated back in 1986, 87, 88, 89 on the consistency of products. So, but to get to your question, we take pale malt and we then roast and smoke it. And our malt bill for the porter is quite complex. So we do have like the chocolate malts and roasted malts, but a portion of our billing is with the malt that we have slightly roasted in the smokehouse. But smoke deposition is an interesting process. So the malt that goes in to the smokehouse is damp, wet. Much like if we were to malt our own, it would be wet and you would then proceed to dry it. And that's what made beers back before, like let's say the 1800s, all had some smoke character. Indirect smoking or indirect heating of malt just didn't exist. There was direct heating. And so there's always invariably a slight tinge of smoke. But back then, you really wouldn't recognize it because everything in your house was smoky. Everything on the street was smoking because everything was, you're using wood or coal or some sort of heat source that would generate some smoke. But anyway, getting back to the actual smoke deposition. So you have this damp, cool malt being dried. And in the process of vaporizing the water, that malt is substantially colder than the smoking area around it. And much like dew on your on your windshield in the morning, because of the cold glass and the warmer air having moisture condensing out, that's exactly what's happening with the malt. It's not as visual as that, but you have... It's collecting smoke. You've got smoke basically condensing on the malt. Also, water soluble. Water solubles are then with the dampness of the malt, then entering into the malt. And so, there's a couple competing things that are occurring as far as that way smoke is being absorbed on the malt. Much like the roasting of fish or smoking of fish or meats, again, you have that high moisture content, and then the moisture content is being diminished. But in that process of vaporization of water, that meat or fish is going to be colder, so smoke is being deposited. And it's a surface thing. So the surface of the meats are being preserved because of the higher concentration of the smoke. Now we're getting to the geekiness of how do you preserve meats in the light. The moisture of the malt is crucial there. I mean, that's a very common thing with peat-smoked malt and Scotch whiskeys, where it will only pick up the smoke flavor if the malt is damp. If the malt is already dry, then all you're going to be doing is cooking it, and you're not actually going to impart any of that smoke flavor. It has to be damp. In the smoking process, it's extraordinarily important to dry that malt totally. For those people who want to make their own smoked malt, the most important step is to dry it totally so that the acetic acid is driven off. When you talk about home brewers there, that's a good point. I would imagine over the years, you basically revived this style or introduced it to a lot of Americans, and you ended up writing a book on this subject, correct? Because I would imagine you get asked questions all the time from aspiring brewers as to how do I do this? How do I make this kind of beer? Yeah. It was a fun exposition, but Marcy actually was almost part of the ghost authorship. No. All I did was editing, but Ray Daniels and Geoff were the two that joined together to research and put this book together. It was really fascinating. It was fun. I'm so glad because I know when we were learning how to smoke, we were fortunate that we had a commercial smoker right across the street, and he was helping us out a lot because we made a ton of mistakes in the beginning and we did everything from way too smoky, like this is ridiculous, to burning up a batch, to everything. It was nice to be able to impart some of those learning lessons, and then also do some research on what was already being done in the history of smoking and what's still You guys went over there, right? Did you go to Bamberg? We did, and that was fascinating. Oh my gosh, it was incredible. Just being able to visit those breweries that had been around for way, way longer than us. We're considered old, but no, those guys have been around forever, and they're still producing smoked beers and doing it very well. It was really fun to talk to them, and we took some of our smoked porter over, and that actually opened up a lot of doors for us. It's amazing what passing out beer will do with life. One thing I'd say that you share with those breweries is that not only does the smoke come through clearly, but you can tell that there's just great malt character. A lot of those Bamberg breweries have their own malteens, and they smoke their own malt, of course. But you can always get a sense of the underlying malt, and here with your smoked porter, it shines through as well. Yeah, we really wanted to strike a balance. And one thing that we found, really, two attributes, too much of a good thing is not a good thing. I mean, you can over-salt food and you can over-smoke foods, you can over-smoke beers without a doubt. It's a character that's not really typically expected in beer. So, you know, I think a smoked porter, people either like it or they either love it or they hate it. Well, that's the challenge with smoke, right? Smoke isn't a subtle flavor. And so being able to make a balanced smoked beer with such an intense flavor is a real art form. I was lucky enough to judge the World Beer Awards for a few years, and I always ended up getting smoked beer as one of my categories. And that was like the biggest. And every time I'm like, oh, God, this is so hard because it's not it's because it's so intense. But finding these smoked beers that have that exhibit true balance, I think when when you get that, they're just arguably some of the most perfect beer. Yeah, this is also a perfect allegory for why you want to drink your older ones before your younger ones for that exact reason. Exactly, because the smoke character diminishes with time. But so how's that 2009 you opened up? It's smoky. I'm drinking one as well right now and it is beautiful. I mean, I think what's important here, we were talking about descriptors when you're trying things, and it's so easy for so many people to try something like this and just go, well, it's smoky. But if you think past that a little bit, the other flavors in here are incredible. There's a really pronounced fruitiness, like dark fruit character that's just so delicious, and the way it's aging is remarkable. I mean, we've tried a lot of really old, unintentionally aged beers from our cellars, so we know all about oxidative and how it can go terribly wrong. This is just perfect. There's none of that cardboard-y, tired. It's quite the opposite. Just for this beer to be 11 years old and to taste as bright as it does is remarkable. I'd like to point out here that this is one of the most award-winning beers of all time. So if you needed any more encouragement to go try this beer, listen to this, listeners. 19 medals at the Great American Beer Festival, including gold in 91, 92, 93, 94, 2005, 2008, 2010, six medals at the World Beer Cup, including gold in 2000, 2008, and 2010, and the medal in 2010 was for a 1998 bottle vintage, so a 12-year-old beer. A real underachiever. Can you guys step it up a little? Unreal. I mean, have they talked about banning you from these? I mean, I would think at GABF, they would just say like, you have enough, right? How big is your metal case at the brewery at this point? Yeah, you're juicing over there. No, it's been really fun and it's just such a great beer. The smoke is definitely, that's what helps it preserve and what makes it last so long and such a unique one. Its first award actually was in the porter category before there ever was even a smoke category because we entered it in the porter category and it got a silver medal because they didn't know what to do with it. It wasn't really truly a porter, so it was okay, well, at least we'll give you a silver. Then next year they came out, I believe was the next year came out with the smoke category. Again, we tried to put a little bit of Alaska in the bottle, in the glass, in the product, and so the Alderwood is very different. One of the things that Ray Daniels wanted to investigate is really smoke different from different woods. And so he brewed a whole bunch of home brews and then sent them up blind to us. And we had to do duo trials to discern if our taste panel could differentiate those smoke characters. And so what ended up happening is we proved to Ray, he was a little bit of a doubter, that there was some differences. And I'll have to tell you a story about Greg Noonan. Greg Noonan was an author, but also a brewer at the Vermont Bubbin Brewery in Burlington, Vermont. And I went to talk to him about smoked beers, because he was- He was interested in doing that. He wanted to do one too. And he did. And so he said he originally was using hickory, and he had people come up to him saying, did you throw a ham in this beer? And he, no, I smoked the malt with hickory. And he just got so disgusted with it. So he decided to change the woods. So he started using maple wood. And then people would go, golly, did you use sausage in this beer? When he said that, it just hit me, because when we would be making this beer, people would ask, did you put a side of salmon in this beer? Smoked salmon? Because there's so much smoked salmon with alderwood. Flavor association. It just hit me. Oh my goodness. You know, Jimmy Dean's, you know, Maplewood smoked sausage, and then Hickory smoked ham, and Alderwood smoked salmon. These were flavor associations that people were making leaps. No, there was no salmon in our beer. There was no ham in his beer or sausage in it. It was all about people's recognition of flavors and their associations with other food experiences. And I also think smoke almost is a premortal type of thing of security and comfort. Now, I was going to ask about the salmon thing, because an old wives' tale that I've heard about your smoked border many times, and I may have been guilty of perpetuating it sometimes, was that you did smoke them all at this fish smokehouse across You're bad. You're bad, bad, bad. I would say, I would say... It's such a romantic story though. Come on. How do you not latch on to that? He's told this story a bunch, by the way. He's like, I might have said this. I've heard him tell me this story many times. 20 years ago, I would be hot. No, no, no, no. What we do is wait till the last smoking session of that year. That's why we do it in the fall. Then after he makes it smokehouse clean, we come over and make it beer clean. No, there's no fish in this. That would be my response before I realize that the flavor association is actually indelible with the traditional wood of choice for. You had mentioned earlier, and I think it's important for our listeners to appreciate this, that just as you're smoking your own malts here, Alaska has to present some major challenges to brewing. And you have successfully jumped these hurdles with some pretty amazing innovations at your brewery. So I just wanted to see if you could talk a little bit about how you've embraced technology and become a pretty remarkably efficient brewery up there in Juneau. Well, I think it starts by where we are located. So within Alaska, we are in a town that you cannot drive to. We're landlocked. So you either have to take a boat or an airplane to get in here. And so that little bit of environmental difference right there, our location difference has made a huge impact on how we brew and how we do things. And it's forced us to do things quite a bit differently than others. I think we were the first ones, even just getting malt. Most of the brewers down south would just have the malt truck pull up and load their silo. Well, there's no malt truck pulling up to our silos. So we had to send down containers that then the malt truck would fill, and then we'd bring those up and offload them. And even that, the malt companies, that was the first time they'd ever dealt with anybody trying to do something like this. So yes, location has been a big deal in how we do stuff. But I think also the location is also kind of inspirational. We're in a town that in 1916, it was the gold rush. Gold capital, yep. So they ended up realizing they needed more power. So they ended up finding a high alpine lake and they tunneled underneath it and then blinded off the tunnel and then put a Pelton Wheel hydroelectric generator and blew the bottom of the lake up and they have hydro power from an alpine lake up in the Doesn't affect any fish at all. And so they powered Juno with hydroelectric that was totally green. And then in 1964, they put in another power plant. Juno, I would say, is arguably the greenest city in North America. 99.9% of its power is from high alpine lakes being tapped hydro-electrically. Everybody in Seattle just clutched their pearls right now at that statement. But once again, this just shows your conformity to fine Alaskan traditions, not only in the bottle, but as conservationists. And the ingenuity of an infrastructure like that. The mother of invention, for sure. I think something, too, that gets overlooked with brewing is a lot of people don't realize that beer, for the most part, is force-carbonated. So you need to push CO2 into the beer to get the bubbles. So you had a unique solution for that, as well, right? Right. Yeah. Well, yeah, carbon dioxide is extraordinarily important, obviously, for the effervescence of beer. But also carbon dioxide is very important for the processing of beer. What we ended up doing in operations is when you're filling your cans or your bottles, you need to replace the air that's in those with carbon dioxide. So when the beer goes in, it's left, you know, wholesome and intact and not getting oxidized. So carbon dioxide is used a lot in the brewing industry. And usually you ship, you just buy CO2, it's really cheap. You buy it and you bring it in big containers and use it to press out tanks or do whatever you need. And the tanks get swapped in and out and then you get new ones. Yeah. Once again, Juneau, Alaska, that's landlocked. Those containers had to go on the barge and then the barge had to come up here. And by the time it got here, we had less CO2 by the time they arrived than what we started with. And thus, we decided that we needed to capture the CO2 that beer actually makes during the fermentation process and most brewers just blow it off into the atmosphere. So we figured, well, wait, here's a resource. Can we capture that, sterilize it, store it, and then use it in replacement of this stuff we're buying. And it turned out it was, these guys did a great job. It's actually even better quality than what we get because the other stuff is made from fossil fuel. Our stuff is made from grain and good stuff. So. Wow. That is just so brilliant. Any brewery who had done any one of those things would be lauded. But it's remarkable. You're, you know, you're on the cutting edge of all of those. And it's so amazing. I think you're brilliant in that regard. Yeah, we were the first craft brewery that captured its own CO2. And again, that CO2 is from not from sequestered carbon, not from, you know, fossil fuel source. It's from photosynthesis. We're taking our grain and fermenting it, essentially indirectly. I mean, but basically the yeast does all the work. And then we have to sit there and do a little bit more refinement. We remove the water-soluble impurities that we put through activated carbon to remove all the organics. Like, you know, some of the things that we don't want in the flavor of the beer, we remove, like there's dimethyl sulfide in fermentation gases. There's diacetyl. There's other things that are coming out during fermentation that are in that CO2, but we have to remove it. And then we chill it down and store it and use it as we need it. And we're self-sufficient. We've been self-sufficient for over 20 years. I think that whole concept of innovation and maybe part and parcel, part of the whole pioneer exploration of where we're from, I'd have to even say, even in our lab, there's certain compounds that they use to sit there and in a microbiological way, be able to suppress yeast growth so they can see if there's any bacteria. And some of those compounds were pretty nasty. And our lab developed a new process where the United States Society of Brewing Chemists adapted innovative techniques that we developed in our lab to make the lab safer. That was our lab crew that came up with that. You've made some great IPAs over the years, and especially some very interesting smash IPAs. So, single malt, single hop. The hop and malt bills on your Hazy Bay, I felt was really interesting. So, brewed with Pale, Victory, Munich, C30, Brewmalt, Unmalted Oats, Raw Wheat, and then hopswise, Sultana, Mosaic, Simcoe, and Citra. Sounds like quite the recipe. Sounds expensive. Well, yes, but good. It's sure tasty, I will tell you that. Yeah. You hit the Alpha and Omega of brewing. The single malt, single hop, which we call smash, is really trying to let people discover the unique character of one malt and one hop, and really immerse themselves. But then other types of products- Like the Hazy Bay. Are really an expression of something that will just explode with that juicy character of all these other hop components that add each little bit of a different kind of component to this luscious product. And so in some ways, there's a flavor attribute called amplitude and there's certain products that like simple things like ketchup, ketchup, okay, vinegar, tomato, a little salt. Now you can identify those things. But there's other types of product flavors which are just this cornucopia of things and it's like hard to tease out. What is adding to what? Oh my goodness. And it's really a wonderful just flavor experience. But the single hop are also fun. We have a one barrel system, a ten barrel system, a hundred barrel system. So our brewers do one barrel batches all the time. Then that's put on... And we get to drink. Yeah, in our break room. You're allowed one beer after work. And then we see the velocity of sales, quote unquote sales, there's no sales involved, velocity of consumption. And that really is one of the best indicators of, OK, let's get this up to a ten barrel batch. Well, I can tell you the Galaxy was very well received here. The people that were in the know and tried it, just couldn't stop saying enough great things about it. And I happen to hear that you're doing a smash beer with one of my absolute favorite hops that not many people know about. You're going to be doing a Strata IPA soon. That'll follow the fireweed blonde. Yes. We send a crew every year down for hop selection. And part of their mission is to select the hop varieties that we're going to use in our flagship line up of beers. And so you're getting, let's say, a Calypso hop or a Soss hop. There's microclimate impacts on those particular varieties. So our crew goes down to do the hop selection. But there's another part of that hop selection, and that is looking at new hop varieties. And so our team identified the Strata hop is really pretty remarkable. And so we went ahead and contracted and invested in getting enough so that we could release Strata Sphere IPA. Conor, the Strata Sphere. Yeah, nice. But the Strata Sphere IPA actually has another attribute, and that is that it's a hop variety that's kind of new. And I think that's what's kind of really fun. Not only do you have new ways of brewing beers, but it's also a new hop variety. And I would say when we started back in 1986, there was a lot of hop varieties, but not like today. Oh my God. The hop varieties that are available today are just spectacular and varied. And so there's been an amazing blossoming, not only in the expression of craft brewing, but also those other industries that supply us. So we're talking about specialty hops, specialty malts. Well, you guys are ahead of the curve with Husky IPA. You're featuring Mosaic, which is a very popular hop now. You're Galaxy. People are fighting each other over Galaxy. And I really think Strat is going to be one of the most talked about hops in the next year or two. It's a fun one. Thanks so much, guys. This is just so informative, such a joy to talk to people that clearly are really passionate about what they do. And, you know, obviously we think we've conveyed, we're big fans of your beer and it's really something else what you've been able to accomplish up there. So, keep doing what you're doing. Keep brewing excellent beer. Well, thank you very much and keep drinking good beer. That's what the big and big thing is. And we appreciate you guys and being able to send our beer there and have it well received and well taken care of. I mean, that's the big thing, too. All along the way, everybody has to do their part to make sure that it gets to the consumer in as pristine manner as possible. And we really appreciate all the care everybody puts into it along the way. And you guys getting it on the shelves there. Thanks so much. Roger, Pat, Chris, it's been a pleasure talking to you. And be safe and drink good beer. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. Cheers. So this has been another edition of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. Please tell your friends, tell your mom, tell everybody to download wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time, I'm Roger. I'm Chris. I'm Pat. Marcy and Geoff. Cheers. Keep tasting.

I think the locale is what we talk about. The locale influenced our beers fundamentally as far as flavor. But then also the other attributes is, you're in a different place. It's not like, oh, it's always done this way. We've had challenges that we've had to overcome. So for example, our waste streams, our spent grain. Most people have plenty of agricultural, so maybe end users, and even I'm regretting to say that there's someone in our industry that take our, their spent grain and take it to the landfill. Oh yeah, plenty in big cities like Chicago that I know of. And so what we ended up doing is we first started drying it and then using it as cattle feed for a dairyman in Washington. We ship it south. But the reason we had to dry it is because you couldn't just ship it wet south or would ferment on the way down. So that wasn't an option. That's a big expense drying grain like that. I don't think I've ever seen a brewery with a grain drying operation. And I only see it at like the largest distilleries, like the Barton Distillery in Bardstown, Kentucky and stuff. Like it's it's a serious investment with a grain dryer. But on the other hand, from what we see in the distilling side is they can then sell the dried grain versus having to give it away when it's wet. Is that a thing with beer grain as well? That's what that's what we were doing. Yes, we were drying it so that we could send it south and sell it as a viable. Now, it didn't pay for everything, but it did help at least, and it didn't bury Juno and spent grain. We had done other things before. I mean, we had donated to the gardening community, but we knew we were going to bury them with spent grain. Also, spent grain has a high percentage of protein. You have to mix about 15 parts sawdust to one part spent grain for the right carbon-nitrogen ratio for compost and soil additives. Wow. So, we started looking at other alternatives and slowly but surely, over the course of probably 15 humbling years of trying to use spent grain as part of our fuel, we finally were able to break through and make an innovative change in the way we used spent grain as fuel. And now, spent grain basically replaced half of our fossil fuel use. Wow. We have right now two patents and we've been told we're going to get a third patent on it. But the issue really was necessity is the mother of invention. In any other place, we wouldn't have gone this route because it was a very humbling process. You know, some people say it's the cutting edge of technology. I call it the bleeding edge of technology. It is so, so humbling to sit there and suffer all the indignities of, oh, that didn't work. Oh, that didn't work. Some of them were pretty spectacular failures. So, we actually ended up, one thing that helped us out is, we were successfully sending the dried spent grain south, but we looked into a mash press. And in Europe, mash presses are a lot more common than they are over here, with something unique and new to this side of the world. And we looked into that and saw that it could bring us some good benefits. And so, we tested one out, a small unit. And in 1999, we tested it out. And they're expensive, so it was a hard investment. And mash presses is really what, in the brewing process, just to back up a little bit, you take your malt, you grind it, you mash it, which then changes the starches to sugars and extracts certain types of components that then the yeast makes into beer. And then the waste grain is generated by, you take all this good stuff, the mash, and you put it in a lotter ton, which is like a colander. It holds the solids up and then all the liquid comes out. So, I kind of use the comparison of a drip coffee maker. Versus a French press. And the mash filter press gets more out more efficiently, and it also leaves much drier grains. So, we end up reducing our water use by almost 2 million gallons a year. We recovered 5% more out of our grain, which would have been going down the drain, and impacting our local utility for wastewater treatment. But most importantly, it began a change in the way the grain that we had and had attempted to use as fuel. So, we were able to essentially make a breakthrough because of a variety of things that were occurring. Many of them because we needed to change how we did it. We needed to improve our process, and it was almost like one and one equals three. Three, yeah. And we then were able to sit there and all of a sudden make this breakthrough, and we replaced 50% of our fossil fuel use using spent grain. As a fuel, so we burn that now and use that to run the steam boiler. Thus, the beer-powered beer underneath the bottle cap, right? The more beer we make, the more beer we can make. Right. But it's also innovative things that come from people like Captain Cook. During his second voyage, looking for the inside passage, he was well-known for the health of his crew. He was very, yeah, Captain Cook, he was very, very interested in getting local foods and getting local ingredients to sit there and augment the dietary needs of his crew. One of the things that he did was brew beer on board, and in his journals, he had 14 references of the use of spruce in making beer. So we've collected spruce tips and use that as a local ingredient in our beer. We've come to find out we've done some scientific research as far as the oil fractioning, and lo and behold, spruce tips have an interesting ratio of compounds, the oil fractioning that's very similar to noble hops. Huh. Who would have thought? Who would have thought? But Captain Cook, he couldn't get up, so he had to sit there and innovate. Yeah, you work with what you got. You're adding spruce tips to your seltzers, correct? Correct. We started with our beers. Our winter ale was our first foray into spruce tips, and people loved them. We split from there and went to spruce IPA. That's again the spruce tips. That was the thing about Captain Cook's journals. They first talked about the beer that he would produce by taking spruce boughs and making beer, and that wasn't as well-received. But the spruce tips were like, wow, this is great. Yeah, you got to have those tender green tips, right? For people who haven't had a chance to try it, it's such a great corollary with hop varieties, especially some of the newer ones, is that it really isn't just piney. It has a real citrusy, lemony quality, correct? It's really refreshing. Very correct. And it's interesting, that happens in the cooking process when you actually chomp on them. I mean, Geoff got us all eating spruce tips as we're walking along hiking. That's how I was like, well, these are kind of like hoppy. No wonder the moose love them. But when you cook them, they actually bring out the more fruity flavors and the more citrusy and more hop-like flavors, correct? And one thing that, again, it's one of those things that the place kind of influences your brewing techniques, but also your brewing. Not all of our products have local ingredients, but some of them definitely do. We have a limited series of beers that we release, and when they're out, they're out, and we come back with another product. We just finished our Hazy Bay. Hazy Bay. And that's using a locally grown unmalted wheat. Basically we replaced our seasonal products. We're not doing it seasonally. We're doing limited edition, so then we're not tied to a specific season. Gives us more flexibility that way. And the next one that's going to come out is fireweed Blonde. fireweed is an interesting plant up here. It's a beautiful fuchsia type of flower. And for us, it's kind of the beginning of the mid part of summer, and it will tell us when summer's over because it'll then go to seed. But it's a gorgeous plant. And the reason it's called fireweed is because it's most often one of the first plants that flower after a fire. And we have a lot of wooded areas around here, and we have a lot of wildfires. Pretty much it's, you know, wildness and natural. It's not like it's out of balance yet. Like a lot of the fires in the lower 48, there is this natural kind of cycle up here. But the fireweed is kind of the precursor to fireweed Honey. And so the fireweed Blonde has some fireweed Honey in it, which adds a sweetness because parts of it are non-fermentable. But the berry-like character of the Blossom is definitely evident in the Honey. That's really cool. In Alaska, our Icy Bay IPA is the best selling IPA in Alaska. IPA up here, bar none. Yeah. Funny you should bring it up. I just popped one and I'm looking at how beautifully clear it is. On the label is a surfer, which is kind of a bit of an oddity. Yes, there are surfers in Alaska. Surfing in front of big mountains. I believe it. We've got some people surf the Great Lakes, too, and they need to wear wetsuits as well. Hats off. That's some dangerous stuff. They don't need to avoid the orcas though. Orcas and sea lions. Sea lions. Those are the- And then icebergs once in a while. But I think the really unique thing about where this beer was inspired from is, it was on the coast of Alaska in between two giant peaks. One of them is 18,000 feet high. And it goes from sea level. So you're not standing high. I mean, you're at sea level to 18,000 looking up at this mountain, Mount St. Elias. And on the other side is the fairweather Mountain, which is at 17,000. So you're in between these gigantic peaks on the ocean, threading between sea lions and everything else. And these guys are nuts. That's crazy. I mean, the tallest mountains in the lower 48, I think, are Mount Rainier and Mount Shasta. And they're both like 14 and change. Like that's significantly larger. And here these guys are surfing in front of them. I mean, it's just like wow. So our team had to go, some of our brewers had to go out there and experience that. And so they had brewed up an IPA and took it out in a corn can on our one barrel system and took it out. And it stood up well around the campfire as they were in between sets. And so it's evolved since then. And it's because of where it was located, of where we kind of came up with it and the thought of it. We kind of made it into our kind of our nod to cleaning up the oceans and keeping the coast clean. And we have something called the coastal code, which is clean oceans depend on everyone, CODE. So the coastal code, we put a portion of our proceeds from the icy bay into this fund and fund beach cleanups every year. Because even up here in Alaska, we get stuff rolling up on our coast and it just drives us crazy. It's all the watersheds. It's not only just coastal. It's also inland waters, river streams. And what we do is we facilitate maybe some of the dollars to support nonprofits who donate their hard elbow grease into doing what really is kind of a shame that our society kind of tends to create the pollution that chokes our waterways. But again, it's one of those things. I think it is interesting. I've walked the outer coast of Alaska, which is you walk these beaches that anyplace else, you'd think there'd be these huge high rises and a whole bunch of beach blankets out there. But no, there's nothing there but bear prints and lots of them. That's very cool and thank you for doing that. We need more putting back into the community like that. Speaking of an array of interesting hops, this one you lay down a pretty classic base with Cascade, but then there's some newer wave hops in here too. Summit and Apollo are in there as well. Yeah. It's just a great classic IPA. Actually, what do you think of it? That's what I should ask. Yeah. It's super crisp and clean. I mean, it's very different from a hazy. I think as Chris said, the hop varieties also reflect a melding of new and old IPA styles as well, in that it's super juicy and it's very aromatic. It doesn't necessarily have old school hop bitterness or body, but it has the benefit of the newer styles of IPAs because of the aromatics, but not the weighty, creamy. It's still nice and crisp. Yeah. But yeah, it's a very good IPA. Absolutely, Roger. You get that piney, resinous classic character, but the nose shows like a rainbow of citrus zest, from lime to orange, lemon. It's all over the place. It's really pretty, and it is very easy drinking, and a firm backbone of bittering hops too, which is great to see. A lost art. Yeah. This is 6.2, but I mean, it's what I would call a session of IPA. I mean, you could easily drink several of these and not feel like it was too bitter, or conversely, the other end too rich and heavy like a New England. At least everyone in this group could crush them. Yeah. It's definitely a thirst quencher for us up here for an active group. But yeah, glad you like it there. That's great. Yeah, delicious. Next year, you guys are going to be celebrating, what, your 35th anniversary? Am I doing the math correct? Oh, you're right. Probably. Yeah, 86. Yeah. Going to do any special brews or bring any retro ones back? We're working on that. Our groups are concocting a few ideas and plans, and we'll see what comes out of those. Yeah. Right now, we're just trying to navigate all the changing terrain that's going on right now in the hospitality industry and all of our different challenges that we have going on right now. So we have to think about how we do it, how we do this, and yet make it safe and fun for everyone in whatever gets thrown our way down the pike. What's interesting too about our location here in Alaska is we have a fairly amazingly rich history. The miners from that gold rush era brought a lot of the brewing traditions from their locales all over the world. I mean, everyone came to the Klondike. I mean, you're talking, you know, doctors, lawyers, you're talking about people from Europe, you're talking people from all over the world came here for that gold. And also, there's a, you know, there's a fair amount of history within, you know, the Russian era of when they first came and explored here. Yeah. So, you know, so we have, you know, we've done things like Baltic beer, Baltic porters, you know, we looked at some of the Russian imperial stout. Yeah, that was our last 25th anniversary beer. You're doing the Baltic again. I know I was talking to Jeremy about that, so we should be getting some of that this fall then too, which will be great. Right. And then we have a very, very rich local, you know, native tradition in regards to, you know, the harvesting and ingredients. So there's so much rich history that we can tap here. So yeah, it'll be interesting what we'll come up with for our 35th anniversary. We'll keep you posted. Nice. Can't wait.