The Lost Abbey

Today is Friday April 6th and it’s a blogging day for all of us who blog. Today the group excercise is on Abbey Dubbel Style beers. Last month it was Stout. I don’t know where the last 30 days have gone but they certainly have been very monumental to say the least.At this time, we are putting the finishing touches on a photo shoot at the brewery and it has been a surreal day around here. I didn’t get into brewing to be famous, rich or important. Nope, I got into brewing because it appeals to my notions of creativity and my artistic sensibilities. When I started considering the multitude of stories that I wanted to blog for this “Abbey” day, my mind wandered all over the place trying to find the natural tie in.Then, I sat down after smiling for the camera all day. It hit me in an instant. We are Port Brewing and we are the makers of The Lost Abbey brand of beers. It is something that I am incredibly proud of and very much focused on right now. The fact that we spent a whole day shooting photos for future Lost Abbey endeavors speaks to this.As I was drifting in and out of the photos today, I started thinking about the relationship of who I have become as a brewer and where I started. It’s an 11 year journey that starts oddly enough with a desire to brew Belgian Style beers at home.It’s 1996. I have recently been hired as the Assistant Brewer at Cervecerias La Cruda in downtown San Diego. I am hired by Troy Hojel to work in this new startup brewpub. We begin to discuss my home brewing equipment and the beers that I have made.I tell Troy that I really enjoy a great Abbey Style beer and we begin to write a recipe for this beer I will brew at home. Chris White stops by the brewery one day and mentions that he has a new “Trappist Ale” strain that they are looking for some feedback on.I get the yeast about a week later from Chris. By this time, Troy and I have been drinking numerous Abbey Styled beers trying to get a “feel” for what we want to accomplish. After settling on the recipe, including the yeast specifics, we start to talk about brewing with sugars.I remember the next conversation like it was yesterday. I’m drinking a pint of our Blowfish ESB when Troy leans in and says in a hushed tone…” I think we should use some raisins in this beer.” I swear, I amost fell off the bar stool when he said this.It really hadn’t occurred to me that using raisins was something that I should concern myself with. After all, I don’t really eat raisins so why would I think they were something worth brewing with? But the thing is, the beer we brewed with the raisins was stunning and it set the wheels in motion for my adventures in Belgian Styled brewing. And I owe it all to the 4oz of juicy Sunmaid Raisins that day.When I was hired to be the brewer at the Pizza Port in Solana Beach, my first seasonal beer was Dubbel Overhead Abbey Ale. It was the first beer in San Diego to be made with Raisins. This was way back in October of 1997.Over the years, I spent hours working with “interesting” ingredients and we always had raisins available at our disposal. One night, Jeff Bagby and I started talking about Saisons and developing color in them without using malt. It was then that we decided we should “alter” the raisins and their structure.We wrote a recipe for SPF 8 Farmhouse Ale and it was decided that to gain color in the beer, we would “blacken” the raisins. So we did and the beer became one of my favorite beers of all time.Fast forward to The Lost Abbey. I have now been brewing beer professionally for almost 11 years and have reached a level of recognition in the brewing business for my creations. This is where The Lost Abbey comes into play. Over the years, I earned for my numerous accolades for these Belgian Styled Beers. Many of them have been “Abbey” styled beers as well.Here at the Lost Abbey, we are now making two Abbey style beers as part of our standard year round beers- they are Lost and Found Abbey Ale and Judgment Day our Dark Strong Ale- both of them are brewed with Raisins. It’s just something that over time, I have grown accustomed to. It’s sort of my comfort ingredient around here.Our Lost and Found Abbey Ale is now made with a custom “raisin puree” that involves Chef Vince and rather large boat motor… It’s so damn cool. It’s also one of my favorite beers that we are making. I tell people that the recipe for Lost and Found is something that I have been working on for over 10 years now.It’s not easy making a great Abbey Style beer. It takes an amazing yeast. It takes a skillful blend of hops and malt. And at the end of it all, there has to be an integration of all these things to create a memorable drinking experience. I for one, think we have figured out our Abbey style beer and for that I am thankful.It’s hard to imagine looking back what might have been. As we were sitting here smiling for the camera all day, all I could think about were those raisins. So next time you reach for an Oatmeal Raisin cookie, remember the raisins. Remember that they have inspired me over the years and stretched my brewing limits.As we move forward with The Lost Abbey part of Port Brewing, we will most certainly think about the raisins each and every time we make a batch of Lost and Found or Judgment Day or 10 Commandments or… Were it not for the raisins in that batch of homebrew, I might be making lager beer in some far away state. I think I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing, so far it has served me well.

You ever have one of those days?

A few weeks back, we were knee deep in a bottling marathon. It just seemed like every single time that we had a batch of beer ready to go, it needed to be bottled. These days, we are bottling about 80% of our beers with the rest going towards draft. The planets sometimes align and we get a whole week without having to operate the bottler(s)- we have two separate units. One for Six Packs and one for our bottle conditioned beers.Sometime around Valentines Day, we had tanks of IPA, Old Viscosity and Judgment Day all ready to be packaged around the same time. This meant that in a 10 day span, we bottled 5 out of the 10 days. Bottling is an incredibly monotonous thing and as our bottling line(for the 22oz and 750mls bottles) is labor intensive. It means that we are often left spending hours on end doing the same task.That particular week, I scheduled a bottling run for Monday-Thursday to get large batches of IPA and Old Viscosity packaged. It was on Wednesday around lunch that things got more interesting. Josh and I were running the filler with Vince capping all the bottles. I saw a flicker out of the corner of my eye over by the garden hose on the east side of the brewery.I didn’t pay too much attention to it but then it moved again. So, I stopped my side of the filler and went to investigate. I found a very small mouse looking concerned about having ventured out of the wall from whence it came not knowing where to go next. This incredibly timid little creature managed to get trapped in the garden hose pile. Being “concerned” for his safety, I managed to corner him and “convince him” to jump into one of the cases from our bottling run. In the box, he knew that the walls were closing in on him and his days on this earth were numbered. He must have known because he started going bezerk and jumping up and down.I laughed. “Escape is futile my friend. Your in my world now.” I showed Vince and Josh my prize new possession and we resumed bottling the beer with Josh seemingly very interested in our new little brewery mascot. As the bottles were going up and down, Josh must have dozed off like a high schooler in science class. Coming to, I soon found Josh filling a bottle cap with some Old Viscosity. “Hey, you think he’ll drink this?” He said?“I don’t see why not,” was all I could come up with. And so it was that we began that afternoon a science experiment of our own. I have been called lots of things as a brewer and more often than not, people say we make some pretty incredibly experimental beers. I take it as a compliment. But this was an experiment of a different nature.Josh set the bottle cap with Old Viscosity in the box and we watched as our new little friend investigated the merits of the dark oil slick like beer inside. Like a beer snob, the little bastard first smelled it. I’m surprised the alcoholic aroma didn’t burn his nose hairs. But like a good student of life (let’s not forget this was seemingly his first venture out into the real world), he plowed on. And plow on he did. He kept taking small nips out of the cap consuming Old Viscosity at an alarming rate.The volume of liquid to body mass of beer he consumed was quite shocking. If he’d been human, I think he would have blown .44 for the officer that afternoon. We kept bottling and watching our new fury little friend become happier and happier with each sip. After a while, it was apparent that we had taken our new friend on a epic journey.He started this epic journey with each step falling into the next. He would put one foot out straight before taking three steps sideways and falling over. Clearly this mouse was housed, pickled, polluted- 18 sheets to the wind. It was amusing to watch as he began walking in to the walls of the box and then chasing his tale.At about 3 hours into the process, the mouse passed out. We weren’t even sure he was breathing (we were fresh out of miniature stethoscopes). Eventually the mouse (like most of us) passed out on his left side with his two right feet very much left hanging in the air. It must have been an amazing sleep. I can only think about it in these terms as drinking nearly ½ your bodies weight in Old Viscosity would have me reeling.We finished bottling not knowing how our new home boy was doing. Josh took mercy on his condition and offered a piece of bread and some water (wait he wasn’t in jail for being intoxicated in public was he)? We left Mighty Mouse to “sleep it off” and retired for the night not knowing if our friend would ever recover from the happiest day of his life…I see trees of green… red roses too. And I think to myself…what a wonderful world!Well HOLY MOSES! The next day when I arrived for work our little trooper was probably enduring the most wicked headache of all time. He was alive, awake but cowering in the corner twitching to the oldies. I was shocked that he was moving. Although to be perfectly fair, I don’t think he was moving all that well. We sort of watched from a distance that Thursday as he didn’t do all that much. Aren’t some friends just better when they’re not sober?I don’t think that Mighty Mouse was feeling too terribly mighty that Thursday. We left him to his devices(he should have drank more water) before heading home that night. Friday was Black Friday. Josh had killed our little friend. Well, at least that’s how I view it. When we arrived on Friday, he wasn’t moving. Not a peep. “Come on little buddy. Give me one sign…” None came.I gave him a proper dumpster burial and saluted his long and fortuitous life. I consider him to be the luckiest mouse to have ever lived. He got to enter the world being born at a brewery and it’s the only world he ever knew. He also got Stinking Drunk on Old Viscosity clearly leaving this world for a higher calling on his terms.And so kiddies the moral of this story goes like this. You can drink all the Old Viscosity your body can handle. But if at the end of the day you try to drink your weight in beer, you may end up meeting a fate like our friend and fallen comrade. A toast then as we spill some beer for “the little guy.” Like the engine who could, he did. Sad to see him go. We’re going to miss you Amigo. “Say, I think I just saw your brother run by…I think I will introduce him to beer as well.Happy April 1, 2007

One Bourbon, One Scotch and Too many Beers?

We just returned from a week long trip to the East Coast and as such, there were more beers than I could shake a stick at. So tonight, my musings are coming at you care of Clynelish 14 year old Scotch. Last week, I tried to start a blog on a Friday night at the brewery but alas, my wit was no match for the Knob Creek Bourbon that was tempting me from my office. And so it is, that I am sitting here now writing about beer with a Scotch in hand. Life is cruel. I know.You ever have one of those weeks? You know the kind where no matter how hard you try, you end up leaving four hours of work on the table each day knowing full well that the weekend won’t offer a respite? Life has kind of been this way for me since the start of the new year. Those of you who have visited our brewery may have noticed that we have ramped up production big time and are now seemingly bottling beer no less than twice a week. This is fantastic as it allows for more beer to head out the door. However, this is not so good as bottling days usually require about 11 hours of my time each day that we bottle.Typically, I arrive at the brewery around 7 AM (depends on how well Syd Vicious slept the night before). My day then starts with calculations for the bottling. The first step required is to test the beer we are bottling for the CO2 content in solution. This is an indicator of how much CO2 is in the beer relative to the target volumes we are looking to get in the finished beer. On our Port Brewing beers like Old Viscosity and Wipeout IPA, we are shooting for 2.8 volumes of CO2.Our starting point on these beers is typically 2.0 volumes of CO2 and therefore we need to gain .8 volumes of CO2 per bottle. We take this starting number and crunch the numbers in the computer along with the total volume of beer to be bottled. With this information in hand, we then work on a “priming solution” which is Dextrose mixed in hot water to dissolve the sugar. This mixture is then racked into a keg.The sugar needs to be blended into the beer along with fresh yeast which will consume these sugars thereby finishing our secondary fermentation in the bottle and giving us the necessary CO2 levels that we need in each bottle. In order to mix the sugars, yeast and beer, we must first create a recirculation loop with a pump in order to homogenize the mixture of the three. This has to be done before we can start bottling so more often than not, I am the first one to arrive to get this part of the day rolling.Around 8:30- 9:00 the reinforcements arrive. At this time, Josh , Vince myself and Bo begin the arduous task of bottling. It isn’t all that much fun standing in one place for at least 7 hours watching the bottler go up and down or the capper doing the same. On the days when we bottle our 22 oz bottles we only need three people to bottle- although four means we can go faster. At best when we do this style bottle, we can rip off 50 cases an hour. However, when we bottle the 750 ml bottles with cork finish, it takes at least 4 people and the best we can do is 40 cases per hour.What does all this mean? Lately, we have been brewing larger batches of beer. Many of these larger batches will enable us to get “ahead” as these beer age well and can handle being produced in larger quantities. We are currently up to speed on all of our bottled beers that we have been making. This will allow us to get the new beers online that we have been chasing for the past 6 months. This week, we will be bottling Judgment Day our Belgian style QUAD. We also will be working on a new batch of Hop 15 for bottling.Both of these are incredibly exciting for me as we have been talking about them for almost one year now. I am sure that our friends and patrons feel the same way as well. However, I think that I am most excited about the batch of beer that is rolling away in Fermenter # 5. This is our anniversary beer which will be called 10 Commandments. It is a recreation of our SPF 8 recipe from Solana Beach that features caramelized raisins, honey and fresh Rosemary. If you have spent any amount of time listening to me speak over the years, you would have realized this to be one of my favorite beers and perhaps the one that I feel ages the best.As such, we are going to make this our annual release. It will be timed to coincide with our anniversary party and the beer will be made once a year to celebrate another year gone. It appears that this party will take place each May. We have had numerous inquiries about the party (and it’s only February)! The hardest part to imagine is that we have been in this space for over 9 months now. That is some seriously fast flying time. As I said earlier, we have many more great things in store this year and this is merely but one of them.But I suppose I should get back to the meat of this post. If you have been anxiously awaiting my post with every breath, you can breathe now. The thing about bottling is that it is all encompassing and it requires undivided attention. This means that while I used to have some spare time to blog during the brewing days, I no longer have this luxury when we are bottling. A four man crew equals Tomme bottling beer as well. So, it’s not that I have been lazy or neglecting my writing. On the contrary, I have been bummed that I haven’t been able to write. I think this will hopefully be the last 5 week hiatus that I have to embark on without being able to blog.Until next time then.

Around the Brewery (with apologies for my verbosity)

We get alot of visitors to our breweries whether it’s one of the pubs or our new packaging facility. It’s one of the coolest parts of being a brewer. People stop by to visit, to drink or even to drop off beer as part of a visit. Each Friday and Saturday we are open for tasting room hours. Like all breweries, we have a devoted clientele that comes through to drink, hang out and listen to us tell our story.Lately, most of these “regulars” have commented how much growth they have seen since we opened the doors back in May. It’s true. We have grown a ton and as things are going it doesn’t look like we’ll be stopping any time soon. I often forget to stop and take a mental inventory of what is going on at Port Brewing and The Lost Abbey as I am involved with most every step from cleaning the Water Closets to shoveling grain. But lately, I have been reminded by so many of our regulars that the winds of change are a blowing and as such, I figured it would be great to write about them.So, here is a summary of where we have been, where I think we are going and what to expect now that we have entered a new year. First and foremost, while I haven’t run the official numbers yet. It appears on the surface that we brewed 1800 bbls of beer in San Marcos this past year. As we didn’t start brewing until March, this projects to 2200bbls of beer for a calendar year. That is alot of beer for a startup brewery with limited distribution. This bodes well for us as we move through 2007.We have set a goal for 2007 that we think is clearly acheivable and that is to grow our sales by 100%. This doesn’t mean that we will be brewing twice as much what it does mean is that we will be working on releasing more obscure and rare beers as part of a new cellar release program that we will soon be implementing.Those of you who have visited us at the brewery have seen the large barrel aging room that we built. This room is currently housing some 90 oak barrels. As of yesterday, I am happy to report that 80 of them are full with all sorts of interesting and potential new releases. Many of our bourbon barrels are slumbering away with Old Viscosity. This beer will be blended back into our Old Viscosity and the honiest of the barrels will be culled out to make Older Viscosity which will make another appearance later this fall.Yesterday, I reloaded the 8 Brandy barrels we acquired for The Angel’s Share. If all goes well, we should see batch #2 this fall. I am anticipating a longer contact time in the wood with this batch as these are second fills and will need the time to extract these flavors. The general thinking is nine months so we should be looking October/November for release.The rest of the barrels are filled with simply HOPE. There are all kinds of things hanging out in our French and Hungarian Oak barrels right now. Presently, we have 4 barrels of Red Poppy that are definitely full of hope. I sampled this beer two weeks ago and at four months in the barrels we are headed in the right direction for sure. It was originally barelled in August. I thought we would need at least a year and it seems that is a good target.We recently racked into barrels a beer which will be released in about 16 months called Belle Proximus. I will say this may be the beer with the highest hopes(or is that hype) that is in our barrel room. Needless to say, I will revisit this beer in another post as it deserves its own blog.But what about the rest of the barrels you might ask. Well, we now have 10 barrels of Cuvee that are working. We racked some into French Oak this year and believe we have a few years of experimenting ahead of us for this beer. In my mind, I have the ability to make this beer even better and we’re certainly going to give it the college try.Lastly, there are what are innocently referred to as “random” barrels in the room. We have 4 barrels of Amazing Grace. We have a bunch of barrels of Avant Garde and a few things else that are maturing away. As none of these beers is actually something that we “designed” for aging, we will be waiting for the microbes to do their jobs and we’ll go from there.If you have had the pleasure of standing around our bar, you probably have heard either Jim, Vince, Gina or myself discuss how we are going to be different in our brewery operations. Well, I thought for those who haven’t heard, I’d share. First off, we want you to come visit us. AND, while we’d like to think that you want to visit just for us, we’re not stupid. If that was the case, we’d just charge you for the conversation and open bottles of water. God knows we wouldn’t have to work so hard. But while you probably enjoy our spirited conversations, we know it’s the beer that you’re really after.So we’re going to do just that. We’re committed to making some very small batch runs of beers that will ONLY be available at the brewery. We think this kicks ass and is a great way to ensure that we get to be creative and see the people we like. Most wineries operate this way. They have a set of “Reserve” offerings and they are only available at the winery or online. And perhaps you have noticed that while we haven’t tapped The Angel’s Share for sale we routinely have opened bottles to share with friends, patrons and visitors.Which leads me to my next note. We have finally picked our ecommerce solution group and hopefully in the next week, we will be in a position to start accepting new members into our patron saints club. This is a very exciting project for us and one we think that has a huge upside. Our first shipment of beers is projected to leave the brewery in Feb with new shipments every two months. We will be sending an email out to those who have requested information shortly(yeah I know I said that three months ago too).Patron Saints members will be afforded great benefits and we think we’ll have lots of fun with this club. As part of our ecommerce solution, we will be building a “Brewer’s Cellar Collection” of beers. These are the beers that have not been designed for wider distribution and in all likelihood will be extremely limited offerings from 18-100 cases at a time. As many of these beers will be skillfully blended bits and pieces from our barrels, it is possible we will only be able to make them once. Is this practical or fair? Not really but we think it’s pretty damn cool way to cut our guys loose.These beers will be known simply by the name Veritas. This is Latin for “Truth.” Each batch will be sequentially numbered as in Veritas 001, 002 and so on. There are no set release dates nor plan in place. But, we think there is alot of honesty and truth to be found in these beers. How is that you might ask? Well, for us, almost all of these beers will have no pedigree. They may have no prior basis and as such, we just don’t really know how they are going to taste and age as they mature. That’s the Brewer’s honest truth.However, for the past 8 years, I have been fashioning beer this way and while some may accuse me of gunslinging, I would argue that the results speak for themselves. So with this in mind, I offer a glimpse of what is coming. Currently we have chosen the blend(the proportions) for Veritas 001. It looks like we’e going to yield a whopping 38 cases. Yes I said that correctly. The beer is a blend of three beers and one of them is some Cuvee from 2004(brewed in 2003). I expect this beer to weigh in around 8.0% ABV and it should be released in the spring. Those wishing to know what it tastes like have two opportunities. We will be debuting this beer on January 22, 2007 at the Stone Bistro and World Gardens in Escondido, CA as part of our Lost Abbey beer dinner. I will be posting the menu here this week as well.Those on the East Coast who were lucky enough to get tickets to the Monk’s Cafe Dinner on February 6th will catch a glimpse as well. I am super excited about this sort of side project that is taking place. It will be fun to go into the barrel room and imagine possibilities based on flavor and not projected case needs.It is my goal to be able to sell these beers online as well as out of our brewery. I think that having an extensive range of barrel aged beers is one of the reasons we bought this brewery and will operate the way we plan to. For those of you outside of Southern California, please note that we are building a shipping area at the brewery and will be doing direct shipping for our beers to states that have reciprical agreements(26 in all) Also, there will be no lists to get on to acquire these beers. We will announce a release date and case total and when they are gone, they are gone.I think that I should wrap this up by returning to the notion of HOPE. We have been getting a tremendous amount of requests from distributors and consumers across this great nation who are looking for our beers. So with this in mind, let’s wrap up with a summary of sorts in case you were hoping we would be in a store near you soon.In 2006, we openend the new brewery. By years end, our beers were available throughout Southern California and they made suprise visits to San Francisco as well. We also inked deals in Arizona and Massachussetts. We thought this was a pretty good start.This month, we hope to roll our first set of beers towards Philadelphia(thanks guys for selling out the beer dinner in two nights)! We have also begun looking to the Pacific Northwest and might be off to tap the rockies as well. That’s it for now. After that, we have to start thinking about more tanks and an expansion. That doesn’t suck. I guess those guys that vacated the building left us a little bit of their mojo and good will? Thanks for that. We can use all the help we can get.2006 was a great year. We opened a new brewery, launched a new brand as part of this and managed to bottle 12 different beers in less than 9 months. With this in mind, we’re going to get off our laurels and see about making a bigger splash in 2007. As the steward of the vision, it is my job to direct this Motley Cru. I love this part of my job and lately I think it shows. We’re about ready to hit the road and do some traveling again. If our paths should cross, feel free to let us know what you think.

Inspired Beers for Sinners and Saints Alike

In the beginning there was Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They were told not to eat the fruit from the apple tree. It was off limits and the fruit was forbidden. They were tempted by the serpent and made a "choice" to eat from the tree. Their actions were not preordained but rather the actions of beings with free will.At every fork in the road, there are signs marking the struggle of Good vs. Evil. The Lost Abbey was imagined as part of a crusade in this ongoing story of Good vs. Evil beer. Everywhere we turn these days, there is a battle being waged between those who make good beer and those who make evil beer.

Welcome to the Lost Abbey

The Lost Abbey?Has it really been 8 years since Gina and I took that car ride to Arizona? On our way to Phoenix, she casually mentioned a restaurant and brewery concept that her brother Vince had conceived. The first time she uttered the words- “The Lost Abbey,” I just knew that one day the concept would bear my artistic brewing stamp.Over the years, I met with Vince and discussed possibilities for the brand. In the process of having these discussions, I started working on a business plan. It wasn’t much of a business plan as I don’t crunch numbers. Still, it was a call to order for the ideas in my head that needed to get flushed out.Sometimes, I would get incredibly busy with the business of brewing and would have to shelve the project. Other times, I was so energized that nothing else mattered. The binder (that held my notes and updates) was always with me in my back pack. When inspiration hit me, my binder was there to catalog the vision.A little bit of history may help with this as well. I grew up Catholic and went to grade school at Blessed Sacrament Parish School and Saint Augustine High School- accepting boys and graduating men. Both of these fine institutions imbued in me the theologies of Catholicism and the tenets of Christianity. These belief systems are the basis and context from which The Lost Abbey will operate. Many of our beer names and imagery will be drawn from familiar religious texts and connotations.“For Sinners and Saints Alike,” acknowledges that we are all the product of free will- we can make choices for ourselves. We believe that our beer is an excellent, some would say, inspired choice. Yet, we don’t pride ourselves as being Saints in the beer world. Far from it as “the sinners are much more fun…”No matter if you fancy virtue over vice, we are here for you. Our beers will take their inspiration from Belgian brewing philosophies which champion full flavors and extol the virtues of taking the long way to get there. The truest of brewing artisans, Belgian brewing is not so much 1+2=3 as what happens if you add 1+8 and divide by three. The answer is the same the process is what is different. At the end of it all, you clearly have beer. The only difference is simple addition vs. circuitous math.Personally, I have been re-energized by the launching of The Lost Abbey brand. I literally run out the door each day looking forward to what work affords me these days. I am living an inspired life in the brewery and it is so rewarding to have the space to translate the vision. Every faith requires at its core one simple premise. You have to believe in something. Right now, I believe in the power of this vision and the people supporting it. To those of you who have already found us. Thank you. It has been a pleasurable 6 months. If you’re new to The Lost Abbey- welcome. It is our sincerest hope that we will give you a reason to stay.