Metro DC Brewery Discussion Thread

Can you break that process down for us? What is it like to take a product you birthed and let someone else grow it? Get technical. I'm fascinated by that part of contract brewing.

 

Ocelot has bottles of barrel aged My Only Friend for sale as of last night for $20.

 

Sure! I can't speak to anyone else's working methods but I can speak to ours. The below is specifically what we do at beltway -- the process at flagship is a little less strict, since it's a much smaller brewery with fewer people to wrangle.

This is probably TMI but people may find it interesting.

The concept for a beer is developed about two months before brew day -- we have an idea for what the beer will be, including whether it has any non-standard ingredients to clear with the TTB regulators. We create the beer label and submit it to beltway with a purchase order and a deposit to hold the brewing slot for us. Beltway emails the label to the TTB for approval.

A month before brew day comes the real creative work on the liquid itself. We make a document called the Batch Process that will become THE BIBLE of that beer. Every single possible decision about how what happens in the beer is laid out in a master document. The goal is to completely eliminate in-the-moment decision making. The batch process includes not just "the recipe" but every process decision... water treatments, pitching rates, propagation steps, and a full cellar calendar of everything that happens on the cold side.

So we send this document to the head brewer and production manager and a conversation begins. They might push back on a couple of our asks, we all talk it through together and think about any complications that might ensue, and sometimes make amendments to the process until it's airtight. At this point the batch process becomes a work order and is translated into a brew log and cellar log. Now no detail can be changed unless signed off by both beltway's head brewer and one of the grimms.

So now we're three weeks out from our brew date and all the creative work is finished, and we all just have to execute. Now that the recipe is locked in, grimm places all of our ingredient orders with various suppliers to make sure everything is on site and drop shipped to the brewery. We also order all of our kegs for the batch (we use microstar) and order our labels to be printed.

Brewing week typically runs from monday to friday, so we drive down from brooklyn sunday night with supplies for the week. It's usually several buckets of bug blends that we propped at home, adjunct ingredients that don't come from our main suppliers, printouts of the batch processes for all the beers that we'll work on that week, our laptops, and some basic stuff like our fancy pH meter and calibration fluid, a wine thief, some little beakers and shit like that.

We show up on monday morning and set up a temporary office zone with our computers, check in with everyone and make ourselves generally available. Generally everything goes like clockwork, the whole staff knows what to do and executes. We just hang out and monitor. But when inevitably something goes wrong -- equipment breaks, microbes fail to sour a beer, the water supply is weird that day and mash pH is out of wack, or surprise! we're short a bag of malt from our order -- we're right there to make the necessary on-the-spot adjustments to make sure the appropriate response is taken from the standpoint of our beer.

Typically we'll be brewing several beers over the course of the week and different things need to get hashed out for all the future beers we're planning, we have lots of process conversations with the staff and throw new ideas back and forth, take physical inventories of our stuff, pull nails from the barrel library we're building and plan blends, etc. It's a lot of fun. And in the downtime we are working on the endless administrative stuff on our laptops.

We only sometimes get to be there on canning/bottling day when the timing works out. When the beer is packaged we order up a refrigerated truck from our freight guy and send it to the brewery to pick the beer up and deliver to our distributors.

 

While at Beltway for the week do you interact with other brewers? Are other places using Beltway using them in the same method or are they more hands off?

 

we haven't run into many other beltway clients personally, outside of greg from adroit who is working part time at beltway now and working with us on our barrel aged sour program. but typically we have blocked out the entire week for grimm projects, at least nowadays. for the most part my assumption is that they are more hands off.

 

Different question, but are you a big fan of how Beltway prices your beers when they have tap takeovers? $28 growler fills of Tesseract one release that mysteriously rose to $40 for the most recent release?

 

I live by Pipetown and duck in sometimes. They have had some Grimm sours/berliners. Prices are what you expect for Grimm and DC. Nothing hoppy yet.

 

@skinsfan we don't really get involved there, our agreement with them is that they get to keep one bbl of each batch to serve in their taproom as they see fit. i do wish they had a more state of the art draft system that could do a better job with growler filling. i understand they are going to revamp their tap room and make it nice, so that's likely in the cards for the future.

 

Not too much information at all, great stuff Grimm! I found it interesting that you place the orders for the ingredients and kegs. Would have thought Beltway would do all of that.

 

Assuming there isn't a crazy release. How long of a wait is it usually for crowlers at Aslin on Fridays around 4-4:30?

 

They've started pre-filling. You should be in and out if they are still offering takeout.

 

I really should've listened to everyone regarding Space Reaper, but I also don't like to knock things unless I try them first. Well, first can was pretty solid. Not as good as Solar Abyss, but definitely tasty. Next can I opened...drain pour city.

I think they would benefit by making their "special release" beers in smaller batches like they did before they ramped up distribution. They seemed to have a better handle on their beers when the batches weren't quite as large.

 

Anyone have any idea how many BA My Only Friend Ocelot produced? Was wondering if I'll be able to wait until Thursday when I was planning to swing by Aslin or if I need to pick some up today. Thanks!

 

They had 8 bourbon barrels filled, but its been on tap for a while so I don't know how many bottles.

 

They had a picture of a bunch of bottles in their Facebook page.

From prior experience (My Sweet Virginia), you will most likely be able to get a bottle on Thursday.

 

Fwiw, I've opened 4/6 cans in my Space Reaper sixer and everything's been fine so far! It's not as good as Solar Abyss was last year, but still a pretty tasty beer without any issues (yet).

 

@mblackie. They filled 1500 bottles from my understanding.

 

5/6 went great for me. The 6th tasted like a 3 month old IPA. 5th and 6th were opened at the same time, and the difference was stark.

 

3 out of 4 cans so far have been borderline undrinkable, and I poured them out halfway through. There's a nasty smell and taste that's pretty disgusting. Completely different on tap. No more $19 sixers for me from DC Brau.