MAKE IT Underberg and Cigarettes Recipe
Tim Sciascia of Cellarmaker Brewing Co. in San Francisco, California, brewed this beer for GKR, owner of Good Karma Vegan Cafe in San Jose, California. It uses Underberg, an herbal bitter digestif with a strong licorice flavor that is aged in Slovenian oak casks for many months. You can find three-packs of 20 ml bottles at specialty liquor stores. When infused into this recipe, it creates a sophisticated brew with hints of anise and herbs, bittersweet cacao, and a restrained smoky bite.
“We are very divided on the issue of bottled hoppy beer. We refused to do it until we felt that our main customer base had reached a level of freshness education and that we had found a format that gave us every tool available to help ensure the beer is drunk quickly.”
ALL-GRAIN
liters) 72%
Those tools, including a bottled-on date and label instructions for consuming and storage, demonstrate Cellarmaker’s mission to care for its beer long beyond brew day and through its shelf life. “During my formative brewing years, I would go down to the local beer store and buy a six-pack of this or a bomber of that. When I got home, all too often those beers were oxidized and stale,” Sciascia remembers. “It’s a lesson that’s difficult to learn for a hardcore beer drinker, let alone the casual taster. Brewers themselves are doing better at pushing freshness, but there’s a lot to improve. I never want a Cellarmaker customer to be sold a less-than-stellar product, whether they know it or not.”
For those reasons, Sciascia explains, he, Casey, and Caveney plan to keep the brewery small and self-distributing. Their bottles are date-stamped (month-day-year format), and drinkers are encouraged to consume these beers within twenty-one days of bottling. Thus far, Cellarmaker has released Dank Williams, a tropical Double IPA brewed with New Zealand hops, and Mt. Nelson, a pale ale brewed with 100 percent Nelson Sauvin hops at 2.5 pounds (1.1 kg) of hops per barrel.
In addition to IPAS and pale ales, Cellarmaker also crafts a variety of small-batch beers that let them experiment with different hops, grains, barrels, and yeasts. For example, they make a dry-hopped blonde ale, Daphne, and a smoked coffee porter, called Coffee & Cigarettes, that uses locally roasted coffee beans from San Francisco’s Sightglass Coffee. There are often barrel-aged selections on the brewery’s tap list and an occasional kettle-soured beer such as the Soma Vice #2 Berliner Weisse fermented with pureed guava and mango.
Cellarmaker brews on a 10-barrel brewhouse attached to a small tasting room between 7th and 8th Streets on Howard Street. Upon opening, Cellarmaker quickly became a neighborhood hub. When Cellarmaker started offering growler fills in other breweries’ growlers, it became the town hero. “When the brewery opened, a law about filling other breweries’ growlers was just ‘clarified,’” Sciascia explains. “The ABC added the fact that in order to fill a growler that doesn’t have your logo, you have to obscure the logo somehow and add your own info to it while leaving the government warning and having proper label approval. We wrap painter’s tape or black stretch wrap around the growler and then add a hanging tag with all the approved info and warnings.”
Growler fills were hardly the most challenging barrier for Cellarmaker, or any brewery getting started in San Francisco for that matter. “The cost of opening a brewery in San Francisco is almost prohibitive with rents soaring,” Sciascia says. “If you can get through that, however, this is a thirsty, ever-growing market ready for as much good beer as you can give it. Beer city? Not until recently, if yet, but it has been an Epicurean city for a while. Beer is really making its impact now.”