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Embracing Inefficiency in Craft Brewing

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I used to do a talk titled "Embracing Homebrewing" (here it is on the Beersmith Podcast). Basically, rather than worry about replicating the exact process/results of a craft brewery, enjoy the things that you can do on a small scale without regulatory oversight (dosing in spirits, ice distillation, foraging) or  economic pressures (expensive ingredients, not worrying about extract efficiency) etc.

The more great brewers I talk to... the more I realize that Scott and I run Sapwood Cellars like a big homebrewing operation more than a small craft brewery. We're lucky that we have enough support and direct sales that don't have to worry too much about cost, time, or efficiency. This post dives into that a little deeper on the benefits of inefficiency using the six beers included in the upcoming shipment of our Out-of-State Shipping Club as examples! 


Variability: Flemish Gothic

Most mixed-ferm breweries have a single house culture they pull off a tank or set of barrels or a specific commercial microbe blend that they add to every batch of a given beer. It makes a lot of sense, it promotes consistency and you don't have to worry about blending/attenuation. However, for me it lacks the dynamic flavor options and variety in finished beers I love. Every time we brew a new sour base beer, we select a barrel with a culture that suits it, and add some to primary (along with a healthy Saccharomyces pitch). 

Flemish Gothic is a beer we blended from three different wine barrels, with three different base sour reds (Standard Red, Provisional Strength, Vin De Céréale) each with a different culture. That allowed us to dial in the acidity, malt balance, and level of Brett expression. It worked out that we did a three-year blend rather than the standard old/young blend done by Rodenbach and many other Flemish Reds. 


Flemish Gothic Tasting Notes

Smell - Real range, right from the start. Honey, leather, blackberry fruit leather, some dried hay of hops. Cocoa, Tootsie Pop. I could see Balsamic, but without the vinegar or nail polish. 

Appearance - Beautiful ruby red. Good clarity. Stable off-white foam, pours three fingers. 

Taste - Bright lactic acidity, with dried cherries in the finish. No acetic harshness in the finish. Mild perceived fruity sweetness. A little damp oak, but not aggressively woody despite the extended aging thanks to the well used barrels. Could have even used a little more. Slight licorice as it warms. 

Mouthfeel - Medium body, pretty smooth. Firm carbonation. Slightly oaky astringency. 

Drinkability - Really good, lots of malt/barrel/Brett character all working together without excessive acidity. One of my favorite sours we’ve done, right up there with Growth Rings. I’d like to blend something similar again in a few years. 

Changes for Next Time - A few people suggested more acidity, but I like it as is. It’s considerably more acidic than my recollection of Flemish Kiss from Commons. I’ll be looking forward to seeing how this one ages.


Effort: Gindicators 2024

Local in-season fruit is less expensive than buying IQF or Puree. What you are paying for with those is convenience and consistency. Buying locally requires figuring out who grows good produce, building relationships, and being on top of communication. For Gindicators, we sourced peaches, nectarines, and apricots as the summer progressed. I picked through them each day, processing and freezing the fruit that was ripe. Waiting on the rest. It's worth it for me to go that extra length to create the best stone fruit aroma possible! 

We paired that with a low-acidity (higher hoping rate) pale base aged in gin barrels. Stone fruit in general and apricots in particular bring a lot of their own acidity. After refermentation we blended in a 30 gallon "double gin-barrel-finished" higher-acid beer to add more gin character.



Gindicators 2024 Tasting Notes

Smell - Funky nose, damp hay Brett. As a result, it reads more saison-ish than our sours usually do. Melds in a fun way with citrus and rosemary notes from the barrels. Plenty of stone fruit, yellow peach especially, but leaves room for the other aromatics. Pez candy. Overall vibrant and varied. 

Appearance - Mild haze, bright yellow body. Sticky white head, good density. End of the bottle pour has some small yeast floaties. Seems like more yeast adhered in the bottle than usual too. Maybe the 58W3 from refermentaiton? 

Taste - Snappy acidity (malic?), glad we selected lower acid barrels for this one! Tastes more acidic than the >3.5 pH suggests. Lots of fresh apricot and nectarine on the palate. Minimal sweetness.  Juniper comes through in the finish, piney, Sprite-like. Faint bitterness from the higher IBU component in the blend. 

Mouthfeel - Firm carbonation. Light body, but not tannic or harsh despite the extended aging. 

Drinkability - The acid level is just about right for my tastes, lingers for a second, but then goes. 

Changes for Next Time - Not much to change on this one. I could be tempted to go up 25% on the fruit, it had a little more punch before we blended in the last 30 gallon gin barrel. Likely wasn’t necessary to repitch yeast so soon after refermentation on the fruit?


Process: Neologism 2024

We treat our sour beers with the same care and attention to sanitation and oxygen ingress as we do our Hazy IPAs. We purge the barrels and bottles with CO2, we fill the blending tank with water and push it out to remove all of the oxygen before transers. I think it really shows with the "vibrancy" of the aromatics we are able to achieve, especially in a dry hopped sour like Neologism. It goes into the blending tank on hops, and infuses cold for 48 hours before bottling. Since we can't do a water push out with the hops in there, we do the push out, then add the hops while purging with CO2. 

The only previous batch of Neologism was named to Craft Beer & Brewing's Top 20 of 2022... that was the only beer we ever entered into a contest of any type!


Neologism 2024 Tasting Notes

Smell - Expressive in the nose with the gin shining. Spruce tips. Barnyard. Hops aren't as "raw" as an IPA, but it is still fresh smelling. 

Appearance - Head is great (dense, long lasting). Slightly hazy golden. 

Taste - A little of that guava thing from the first batch is starting to come through, awesome. Pleasant acidity, tart, but not harsh. Gin is a little more savory-herbal than previous gin beers: rosemary, spruce, bruised basil. A touch of oaky-vanillin as it warms. 

Mouthfeel - Light astringency, firm carbonation. Light body. 

Drinkability - I think this one will continue to improve as the edges soften and the hops integrate more. Still wish we could get more of those McClintock Reserva barrels, but even the second use one really helped this one! 

Changes for Next Time - On point! Not this beer… but would still love to do a Tangerine-Gin and/or a Guava Gin at some point.


Risk: Honeymoon SZN

We try a lot of different things that "sound like a good idea." It would certainly be easier and more reliable to pick a slate of brands to make every year. We do rebrew/blend the same beers occasionally, but we don't have a firm schedule and we always try to leave room for inspiration based on what barrels, ingredients, and flavors we have available. 

For Honeymoon SZN we started with a collab we brewed at Olde Mother Brewing (Frederick). Wedding SZN was a rice ale with Nelson Sauvin, elderflowers, and Phantasm (along with a natural thiol-releasing yeast strain). We racked it to white wine barrels and let the resident culture work. I sourced muscadine/scuppernong grapes (indigenous) through a local farmstand that has a relationship with a grower in South Carolina. I knew it was a good idea from the aroma of my car on the way back - halfway between Nelson Sauvin and Strawberry candy!


Honeymoon SZN Tasting Notes

Smell - Muscadine really comes through. Lots of white grape juice. Some toasty-funk, but not a primary aroma when cold. Bridges the gap between the Nelson and Brett. 

Appearance - Clear. Very pale yellow. Good thick white head that doesn’t last long. 

Taste - Light acidity, even less than Life is Ridiculous. Good fruit character, unique, fresh. A touch of funky smoke in the finish I haven’t noticed before. No elderflower. 

Mouthfeel - Bright, light, spritzy. 

Drinkability - Good, could use a touch more acid, but it is very drinkable as is.

Changes for Next Time - Not sure muscadine is a star… would be fun with a light dry hop. Maybe with another fruit, stone fruit?


Time: Opulence 2024

We age our beers for a long time. Years ago I visited an established brewery that had just added a large barrel facility for sour beers. The brewer running it mentioned he had to meet a monthly production quota for packaged product. Just seems impossible for that to produce fantastic beer. Sometimes we go a month without bottling anything because the beer isn't ready yet... sometimes we are doing back-to-back runs because we don't want something to sit any longer! Opulence 2024 was supposed to be Opulence 2023, but the beer just wasn't ready for the cherries after 8 months in the barrel... but it was at 20 months! We had some leftover high-acidity beer from the previous batch of Opulence kegged off that we blended in with the "fresher" beer that was aged in second-use Cherry Brandy barrels. 


Opulence 2024 Tasting Notes

Smell - Reminds me of my homebrews (in a good way). Funk (leathery) really comes through along with cherry and almond. Cherry is really fun, lots of cherry pie, vanilla, and depth. Nothing weird from the cherry brandy barrels considering the previous use was Imperial Stout. 

Appearance - I wish the clarity was a little better, but the color is a pleasant amber-orange. Great off-white head. 

Taste - Mild acidity, could be a little higher. Detectable bitterness (maybe a hair high). Good cherry flavor, sour cherry pie, vibrant. 

Mouthfeel - Light astringency, which is disruptive to the smoothness. Firm carbonation, medium-thin body. 

Drinkability - It’s solid. I like the lower acidity compared to past batches, but the bitterness gets in the way. 

Changes for Next Time - I wonder if aged hops rather than fresh in the whirlpool would work without providing any weird aromatics? I really like what the Saaz in the whirlpool did for the aroma and balance (lower acidity), but the bitterness clashes with the acidity in flavor… despite being “only” 19 IBUs. Maybe better to go with some alpha acid extract in the tank?


Equipment: Stained 2024

One thing that has worked out well for us is having smaller equipment. Rather than be forced to do big blends, we have equipment that is sized for flexibility. For example, with Stained we age it on wine grapes and raspberries separately. I'm sensitive to the "seedy" flavor that comes from long contact time with raspberries... but I also enjoy the deeper flavors of extended skin contact on grapes. So for this batch we kegged off the raspberry half after two weeks, while the Merlot grapes continued aging for another month until we liked the flavor. This plays into having the time to taste and adjust the production schedule. 


Stained 2024 Tasting Notes

Smell - Berries, especially raspberries… go figure. Certainly reads Flemish Red, Rodenbach etc. rather than Lambic thanks to no big funk/rubber. 

Appearance - Bright red, thin off-white head drops quickly. Good clarity, but not brilliant. Very attractive. 

Taste - Raspberry popsicle, very bright. Suggestion of sweetness from the fruit and malt. THP has cleaned up. Jammy, not overtly malty, but it fills in the fruit. Firm acidity, no harshness. Wine is subdued, but layers complexity and roundness compared to straight raspberries. Clean, not much funk although there is some earthiness. Oak is subdued thanks to third-use barrels. 

Mouthfeel - Medium-light, firm carbonation. Not thin or watery, helps support the fruit. 

Drinkability - Good, plenty of acid for my tastes, delicious fruit. Could be a little more interesting microbially, but it works in the Flemish tradition. 

Changes for Next Time - Could shift more towards the Merlot? Surprised how much acidity it picked up despite the alpha acid extract in the tote.


Out of State Shipping Club

If you are interested in tasting these beers, please sign-up by 10/28! You'll be charged $146 to your card on file and expect to receive your beer the first week of November! Available in: WA, CA, OR, NM, NV, CO, MN, NY, DC, CT, NE, MA, FL, PA, NH, NJ, ID, TX, KS, IN, WI, MO, IA, IL, MI, ND, VA, RI, NC, and SC.

Includes one 500 mL bottle each:

Gindicators 2024: Gin-barrel-aged pale sour with Peaches, Nectarines, and Apricots

Flemish Gothic: 3-year Blend of Wine Barrel Aged Sour Reds

Opulence 2024: Sour Red with Fresh and Dried Sour Cherries aged in Cherry Brandy and Bourbon Barrels

Neologism 2024: Gin-barrel-aged and Mosaic Cryo Dry Hopped

Stained 2024: Wine-barrel-aged with Raspberries and Merlot Grapes

Honeymoon SZN: Wine-barrel-aged with Phantasm and Muscadine/Scuppernong Grapes


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Introducing Craft Brewery Purchasing Organization (CBPO)

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CBPO-Logo

Craft Brewery Purchasing Organization (CBPO) is a national Group Purchasing Organization founded by Eric Ruta, owner and founder of Magnify Brewing Company. Launched in March 2024, CBPO already has nearly 100 members across 15 states. As the craft beer industry has become more competitive, breweries are looking at costs now more than ever. CBPO is […]

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Lawson’s Finest Liquids Proudly Announces They Have Achieved 100% Solar Power Beer

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Lawson’s Finest Liquids Proudly Announces They Have Achieved 100% Solar Power Beer

LFL_Brewery_MountainScene-Fall-Drone-3

(WAITSFIELD, VT)– The sustainability-minded team at Vermont craft brewery Lawson’s Finest Liquids are proud to announce that they have achieved their goal of 100% solar powered beer and brewery operations. Following a […]

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Small Craft Brewery Yeast Management

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When it comes to brewing delicious beer, there are few aspects more important than the yeast. A healthy fermentation allows the malt, hops, and adjuncts to shine. Pitching the right amount of healthy cells helps ensure that the finished beer has the intended alcohol, expected residual sweetness, and appropriate yeast character.  

Over the last four years at Sapwood Cellars we've slowly improved our yeast handling. We've noticed improved fermentation consistency, and better tasting beers. Most of our process is excessive for a homebrewer, but it might give you some ideas!

Harvesting Yeast

We harvest yeast from moderate gravity beers when possible as these cells are less stressed and healthier as a result. Our general rhythm is to brew a pale ale with a fresh pitch, and harvest from that tank for an IPA and DIPA the following week. Once the pale ale fermentation is complete (repeated gravity readings, and no diacetyl or acetaldehyde sensory) we can and soft-crash to 56-58F (13-14C). Cold and dissolved CO2 encourage the yeast to settle out. Specific temperature and time are strain and tank dependent, but that works for most of the English-leaning strains we use (Boddington's, Conan, Whitbread, and the Thiolized-variants).

Once the beer has been cold for 24 hours, we attach a 1/2 bbl brink to the bottom of the tank and pasteurize through the line and brink with 180F (82C) water from our on-demand. 25 minutes hot ensures there aren't any stray microbes that will be passed onto the subsequent batches. After pushing out the water with CO2 pressure we spray the brink with cold water then pressurize it and the tank to ~10 PSI. 

We then dump about a gallon (4L) from the T until the yeast looks good (creamy, off-white) and then begin collecting into the brink. You don't need to dump a large volume of yeast. By keeping steady pressure on the tank and slowly releasing pressure on the brink through the valve at the top we ensure that the yeast won't come out of the cone too quickly (which could punch through pulling in more beer than yeast) and won't foam up in the brink. It takes 10-15 minutes to fill the brink. Usually we are able to collect 110-130 lbs (50-60 kg) before yeast starts coming out the top of the brink. 

We collect yeast before dry hopping to avoid having hops mixed in with the yeast. We also prefer the "less rough" flavor we achieve by dry hopping cold. If you dry hop early-mid fermentation and want to harvest, drop as much of the hops out as you can before crashing and harvesting.

Yeast Storage

Whenever possible we pitch within 72 hours of harvest. Larger yeast cultures generate more heat and thus tend to lose viability more rapidly. Store the yeast as cold as possible, which for us is ~36F (2C) in our walk-in. Ideally that would be closer to 32F (0C) to further slow its metabolism. Shake twice a day to dissipate hot-spots and vent down the pressure to knock-out CO2. If storing the yeast for more than a few days, attach a blow-off line to prevent pressure from building. 

There are studies about various additives for maintaining high yeast viability. We've added phosphate buffer to prevent a drastic pH drop. It's difficult to tell from a single data point, but viability dropped from 95% to 89% after a week of storage. We've seen closer to 10% reductions the handful of times we've stored yeast that long previously.  

We generally won't harvest and repitch beyond three generations (although recently we went to five). That's because with our limited number of tanks, variety of yeast strains, and canning schedule we'd eventually have to hold onto yeast for a couple of weeks before pitching or harvest from a strong beer. 

Determining Cell Count and Viability

There are plenty of successful brewers who pitch a standard weight by barrel/gravity, but knowing how many live cells you actually have is a great way to improve consistency. It's especially valuable if you use a variety of strains or want to bring in a new strain. Our harvests of the same strain can vary by as much as three times in terms of live cells per g of slurry (~.5-1.5 billion cells). The cost of all of the equipment required is ~$500, less than a single commercial 10 bbl yeast pitch from some labs. 

Start by shaking the brink to homogenize the culture. Then run a cup of yeast out, dump it (to avoid counting the cells packed around the port) and then pull a sample. The next step is to dilute the culture to a "workable" concentration - 1:100 for us. Too many cells packed together makes for a culture that is impossible/laborious to count, while too few raises the chances luck will throw-off the count. For a long time I diluted by volume, performing two sequential 10X dilutions with a micropipette. This had two drawbacks. First getting an accurate volume of yeast slurry is tricky because it is foamy and has small bits of trub that can plug-up the pipette. Second, we pitch by weight, so there was always some estimation when it came to converting the volume to a weight or the extra step of determining the physical density of the slurry by mixing with water in a graduated cylinder on a scale. What we do now is dilute by weight, which gives us cells per gram rather than cells per milliliter.

Our scale is accurate to .2 g, so weighing 1 g of yeast into 99 g of water has a ~20% margin of error. As a result I do 490 g of water with 5 g of the yeast slurry. This reduces the maximum margin of error to ~4%. After pouring the diluted culture back and forth to mix, I take 9.9 mL of the diluted culture with the micropipette and add .1 mL of a stock dye solution of Erythrosin B and phosphate buffer (1 g in 50mL of buffer). This results in a total dilution of 100X. You could go even further, a 10X dilution by weight (50 g yeast with 450 g of water) followed by a 10X dilution by volume (1 mL of the diluted culture with 8.9 mL water and .1 g of dye). Live cells are able to expel the Erythrosin B so they won't be stained, meaning any red yeast cells are dead. You can use a variety of other stains, but Erythrosin B is a food coloring and much safer to handle than methylene blue or trypan blue. Here's a post from Escarpmant Labs on using it inspired by my Tweet (which was in turn inspired by this).

Luckily the Boddingtons-type strain we use for most of our batches isn't "excessively" flocculent. When we fermented a run with Whitbread we ran into issues with the cells being too clumpy to count. Luckily BrewKaiser has a whole post on additions you can add to help. Phosphoric acid worked OK, but a local brewer suggested disodium EDTA, which I plan to buy before we do another run with a similar strain. 


Next, place a couple drops on the diluted culture a hemocytometer, apply the slide cover, and stick it under a microscope (we have an Omax). Count the live and dead cells in five squares (each made up of 25 small squares) - four corners, and center. This provides a large enough sample size to avoid undue randomness. A small tally counter helps keep track. The standard rule is to count cells touching the left and top lines, but not the right or bottom. Count connected cells as two only if the daughter cell is more than half the size of the mother. Then I plug the totals into Inland Island's Yeast Cell Count Calculator. Usually our harvests are 80-90% viable off a fresh pitch, and they tend to go up from there on subsequent generations (90-95%). If your viability isn't great it could either be that the yeast isn't getting enough nutrients/oxygen, your initial pitching rate was too high or low, or that you are waiting too long to harvest.  

There are automated solutions for yeast counting, but with some practice the whole processes will take less than 10 minutes.  



Pitching Yeast

To pitch, we attach the brink to a T inline during knock-out. With the brink on a scale we use CO2 to slowly push in the desired weight of yeast (calculated based on the cell count, wort gravity, and volume). We pitch during knock-out so the yeast mixes with the aerated wort as it goes into the fermentor. White Labs advocates using a pump to pitch their fresh yeast inline to achieve better mixing with the wort. Best practice is to do another cell count off the tank once knock-out is complete to validate your process (we did it a few times, but now trust our approach).

When we started brewing more double batches to fill our 20 bbl tanks, we were pitching enough cells for 20 bbls along with the first 10 bbls of wort. Our thought process was that the yeast wouldn't do much in the 3-4 hours before the second half of the wort went in. However, we found our fermentations were less reliable, often dragging towards terminal gravity, and the yeast from those batches had much lower viability than expected. Both of these issues improved significantly once we switched to pitching only enough cells for the initial knock-out volume. This allows for more growth and thus a higher proportion of younger yeast cells. 

Hopefully this overview of our process is helpful for someone starting a new craft brewery, or looking to take their yeast management to the next level. As with anything in brewing, the more variables you can track and control the more consistency you'll have in your results. Yeast management isn't a "fun" topic, but it is one of the simplest things a brewery can do to increase consistency, improve flavor, and save money!





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Anderson Valley Brewing Releases “The Pilsner”

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Anderson Valley The Pilsner

(Boonville, CA)– Anderson Valley Brewing Company (AVBC), the pioneering Northern California craft brewery known for making standout ales, has announced its first nationwide release of a lager, modestly dubbed The Pilsner. The Pilsner is already available nationwide in draft and 6 and 12 pack cans are shipping out of Anderson Valley in August. After judging at the Great […]

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Schlafly Beer Partners with NA Beer Brand WellBeing Brewing

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Schlafly and WellBeing

(ST. LOUIS, MO) — Schlafly Beerand WellBeing Brewing Co. announce today a new strategic joint venture that leverages the respective strengths of both Schlafly Beer, St. Louis’ original, independent craft brewery, and WellBeing Brewing Co., a fast-growing national non-alcoholic craft beer pioneer in St. Louis, to create compelling value for both companies and consumers. Consumers will […]

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