Chuck Silva of Green Flash Brewing Company

Chuck Silva is part of a large community of aggressively creative brewers in and around San Diego who are helping to set the bar, nationally, for what craft beer drinkers drink. The Green Flash Brewing Company brewmaster touts his wide stylistic résumé—he cranks out Stouts, Belgians and barrel-aged oddities. At the same time, he says, he knows where demand in the craft market is going, and he’s more than happy to help lead the way. “There’s no slowing down on the IPA front,” he says. “That’s the natural progression for a lot of folks. The IPA will continue to sell really well as more and more people become more interested in craft beer. You see the numbers. People are trading up to more flavorful beers.”

1. Feed the intrigue
Chuck Silva started homebrewing in the mid-1990s, when he was living in Virginia and working for a defense contractor. A friend had turned him on to homebrews, and while “there was some craft beer available,” he says, “there just wasn’t enough really good stuff available. So I decided to start brewing my own.” He’d been intrigued by beermaking since he was a teenager, when his father received a brewing kit as a gift. He’d never used it, just let it collect dust in a closet. Silva says he was intrigued by that kit. He wanted to know how it worked. Eventually, he found out.

2. Run the boldest kitchen around
At home, Silva brewed the usual array of styles—Porters, Stouts, Hefeweizens and the like. But he also took his recipes far outside the recipe books. He took a Charlie Papazian Cream Ale recipe and spun it off in a new direction with fresh local honey, and fermented an IPA in an oak barrel. He enrolled at the American Brewers Guild to nail down the science behind brewing; stints at a few brewpubs brought tons of experience working with varied ingredients, yeast strains and styles.

3. If you can’t fight economics, don’t
After stints working on brewing crews at San Diego-area pubs Hang Ten, Hops and Karl Strauss, Silva landed the head brewer’s job at Green Flash in 2004. He jumped at the chance to trade eight-hour days for 15-hour shifts, so long as they came with creative control. Green Flash focused on session ales at the time, but it was a tough business to win. “You’re competing against all the big guys,” he says. “They have better economies of scale, they can do it cheaper, they can offer incentives. Just getting shelf space was really tough.”

4. Be distinct, and drinkable
Silva repositioned Green Flash’s portfolio, phasing out the brewery’s session beers and replacing them with big, bold, distinct American and Belgian recipes. The strategy set Green Flash apart—and brewing distinct beers led to growth. “There’s no reason to re-create a beer,” Silva says. At the same time, he argues, big beers aren’t an end in their own right. “I’m not going big just for the sake of being big. Drinkability is one of the big factors. Even if I’m making a big beer, I’m going to finesse the flavors.”

5. Build up that backbone
San Diego beers are notoriously hop-centric, but Silva warns that beers’ malt bills can’t get lost, even in hop-forward recipes. “Malt is what makes the beer. You need good-quality malt.” That’s especially true in Silva’s recipes, which are designed to be simple and straightforward. Silva is a fan of Carastan, a British Crystal malt that throws off rich colors and flavors; it lends depth and complexity to his IPAs while remaining dry and restrained.

6. West Coast IPA
When Green Flash went to break out of its session beer mold, the brewery didn’t just want to brew another IPA. It wanted to make a benchmark California IPA to reset the bar for every hoppy ale in the state. West Coast IPA, the monster Silva came up with, tops 7 percent alcohol and packs 95 IBU, and it became Green Flash’s top-selling beer within six months. “It changed the whole face of the company. Everybody wanted more, richer, more flavor-forward beers from us.” Silva says he keeps the IBU in check by mixing hop varieties, staggering additions and creating layers of flavor that play with bitterness perception. “There’s a menagerie of hops in there. It’s just an extravagantly hopped beer.”

7. Hop Head Red
Silva crafted Hop Head Red as a malty companion to West Coast IPA. He had inherited a smaller Red Ale, which he’d retired; Hop Head fit in with the brewery’s trajectory because it had plenty of rich caramel malt notes, but it stayed dry at the finish, and it led with plenty of bright hop flavors. Silva uses dehusked Carafa and honey malt to keep the beer’s color on point without inviting in acrid, chocolaty flavors, and then dry hops the beer with mounds of Amarillo hops.

8. Get freaky
Silva’s Imperial IPA is much bigger than his flagship IPA, but it uses one-third of the Carastan. Its malt bill is more of a blank slate. The recipe lends itself to experimentation, and that’s what Silva did when he pulled some Imperial IPA wort and fermented it on the side with a Trappist yeast strain. The yeast and big American hops combined to create “this really unique zesty hop character, almost orange pith or orange marmalade, and maybe some melon,” Silva says. “The complexity on that little side fermentation was tremendous.” And so Le Freak, Green Flash’s Triple IPA mashup, was born. The beer is amazingly complex—and, again, almost dangerously drinkable.

9. Play around
Silva is currently working with bourbon, wine and Brettanomyces-infected barrels. It’s less a formal barrel-aging program, he says, than an outlet to experiment and have fun with. “It’s trial and error. We found we enjoyed the flavors, so we’ve added more barrels.” The work with Brett was actually a happy accident—the first wine barrel they picked up was already infected with the stuff. “We really liked the aromatics, the way it changed the beer. And that’s the mother barrel now. There’s just something enticing about that wild character.” ■