St-Lazare homebrewer wins a chance to brew big
A St-Lazare homebrewer got a chance to brew with the big boys last month, after winning a chance to collaborate with the brewmaster at Beau’s Brewing to make beer on a commercial scale. Frank Schneidawind beat out 477 other entrants to win the Vankleek Hill brewery’s Best of Show prize at a homebrewers competition held last fall to coincide with Beaus’ annual Oktoberfest event. As the winner of the competition, Schneidawind got to sit down with the brewmaster and create a new original recipe to produce at Beau’s to be served on tap alongside 15 of Beau’s beers at this year’s Oktoberfest, Sept. 21 and 22. The beer he came up with is the Banana Moloko, a creamy milkshake-style ale made with more than 75 pounds of organic banana purée to boost the banana and bubble-gum notes naturally present in the yeast traditionally used to create German Weiss-style beer. “We wanted to make a Hefeweizen on steroids,” Schneidawind said. “It’s a balance between clove- y flavours and fruity banana flavours, just pushing that banana flavour as far as we could possibly go. We wanted to come as close as we could to a banana milkshake.” At home, Schneidawind brews a 20- to 40-litre batch of beer once or twice a month, a process that he said usually takes around four hours to complete. Using Beaus’ industrial equipment, he brewed just under 2,000 litres of Banana Moloko in an intense eight-hour day. “The overall process is the same, but with the added volume comes extra manual labour,” he said. “It is a very physical activity. Three hundred and fifty kilos of grain is a lot of stuff to shovel. You don’t just pull that out like a tea bag, you really have to work for it.” Schneidawind has been brewing beer at home for about seven years, and joined the MontreAlers Homebrewing Club almost four years ago. It’s the science of fermentation that fascinates him, he said, as well discovering new flavours and techniques. “As a hobby it’s kind of all-encompassing. It’s all the stuff you really hated to do at school: biology and chemistry and stuff, plus mechanics,” he said. “It’s the science, but it’s also the adventure. Fermentation is such a wonderful thing to watch and behold.” Schneidawind is already getting set to enter another contest: the MontreAlers Homebrewing Club’s annual IronAler challenge. The Iron Chef-style competition asks homebrewers to brew five gallons of beer in any style, using the same set of provided ingredients. Visit montrealers.ca for information on the Ironaler challenge.