Things Learned as a Professional I Wish I Knew as a Homebrewer

Jeremy Wirtes was an avid homebrewer before going pro, but the past 5 years as a pro have been an invaluable brewing education. Here are a few things he wishes he fully understood in his homebrewing days that his experience as a professional brewer has pulled into tight focus.

Oxygen Destroys Hoppy Beers Anyone attempting to make really great hoppy beer at home without kegging it is at a serious disadvantage. Every point in the process where your beer isn’t actively driving off CO2 is a chance for dissolved oxygen to ruin your beer, and it happens so much faster on a homebrew scale than at a commercial scale (where you can purge everything and move beer under pressure, which just doesn’t happen with a carboy or a bucket).

If you’re taking your hoppy beer seriously and you’re not having great luck with bottle conditioning, do yourself a favor and try kegging. Purge the keg with CO2. Everyone should know that, but it’s a really huge point that will improve the quality of your hoppy beers.

A bigger issue could be not realizing when your hoppy beers aren’t living up to their potential. A few instant “tells” include a crystal malt/caramel flavor whether or not the beer had crystal in it, which most of them do not. Then an overall scrubbing of hops character in the aroma, specifically. Despite the fact that you’ll still taste bitterness and you’ll think there’s still hops character there, the aroma will be the first thing to go. If you have aroma left behind, it’s often “cheesy,” which some people will want to blame on hops quality, but is more often than not due to oxidation.

Estery English Ale Strains Are Great for Longevity Not to bag on California ale strains, but with English strains that have a significant ester profile, when the hops drop out (and eventually they all will, no matter what yeast you ferment with), there’s still fruit character left behind.

We have a West Coast–style IPA we just started making, but we didn’t go with a California ale yeast. We went with a heavily flocculating English strain, which a lot of West Coast brewers use. With West Coast IPAS, because of the clarity, there are a lot of hops compounds that fall out of the beer, so you’re left with not a lot of hops when the beer starts to die, and all beer starts to die—that’s just the way it is.

But if you can leave behind a bit of English ale ester profile, it still makes the beer feel like it’s lively. That’s why Lagunitas uses Wyeast 1968 (London ESB). Creature Comforts is using the same strain, reportedly, and making still-clear West Coast–style beer that’s still fruity and tropical. I think there’s something to that.

Pay Attention to Pitch Rates A lot of new brewers will just pitch any amount of yeast. They’ll just buy a US05 Safale packet and call it good for every beer, but then they’ll worry about every gram of hops that go in. I think you could switch that level of importance around. We’re targeting 0.75 million cells per milliliter up to 1.25 million cells, depending on beer gravity.

Hops Quality Is a Challenge Homebrewers have a huge disadvantage in that we’ll buy multiple lots of Amarillo or Citra from multiple suppliers, and we’ll open and evaluate them right then (and assume the rest of the lot is similar to the evaluation batch). We keep our whirlpool hops flexible, and (for example) right now we’re unhappy with a lot of Amarillo we paid dearly for, so we’re using Amarillo in the whirlpool of Falcon Smash just because I don’t want to put it in a dry hop. So that’s one way we’ll be able to use those hops.

As a homebrewer, if you tear open a bag and it doesn’t smell good, you have to have the monetary means to say, “No, I’m not using it in the dry hop.” That’s tough to do when you just spent $50 on a double IPA recipe. I don’t know whether anyone does this anymore, but I used to go to homebrew shops where they would buy one pound bags and sell them to you by the ounce. So they were just rolling them up and taping them and putting them in the fridge. I did that for a year before I figured out what the hell was going on. That’s just flat-out unacceptable. I’d buy them in smaller quantities or by the pound if you’re going to make a big double IPA with Citra. Tear the bag open—if it smells good, just go with it. Then save some of the stuff you weren’t super-pumped with for bittering additions or whirlpools.

If it doesn’t smell good, there’s no magic that’s going to turn it into something great when it hits the beer. That’s just flat-out not going to happen. Biotransformation is great, but that’s from hops that smell awesome going in that then smell better when that occurs. If it doesn’t smell good now, it’s not going to smell good when it hits that wort. Triple Crossing was on the map. Still, there was no resting on laurels.

“All of these beers are constantly evolving,” says Wirtes. “I think that’s a common thing with most of us who are making a couple thousand barrels of beer per year.”

Hops Practice

The way homebrewers use hops is significantly different from the way that commercial brewers view them. While homebrewers can tear open 6-ounce bags at near abandon, the 11-, 22-, and 44-pound bags (5-, 10-, and 20-kg) that professional brewers use are significantly more restrictive while being similarly expensive.

“We’ll open bags of hops we spent a lot of money on, and they are not that great,” says Wirtes. “Those will go into the whirlpool if they need to. Or if we’re not super-pumped about the Galaxy we’ve gotten, and that’s happened, then Vic Secret is not a bad way to go to blend in and get that Southern Hemisphere pineapple. You can’t just do it one for one, but it’s nice to be a little more flexible.”

Variety Is the Spice of Life

As professional brewers who spend significant amounts of money on their raw materials, the brewing crew at Triple Crossing has to be both efficient and nimble. Things don’t always work out as planned, and they’ve developed a brewhouse-wide strategy for coping with unexpected results.

“With Mosaic, if you open a bag and get a bunch of diesel and some of that big hit of evergreen, in a mid-fermentation dryhop, that gets driven off. Or you get more of that deeper blueberry and grapefruit resin rather than just straight pine and diesel,” says Wirtes.

Dry Hop Early

Wirtes and team are firm believers in the power of an early dry hop.

“With mid-fermentation dry hop, a lot of hops seem to get a little bit rounder. You might lose some of the punch,” says Wirtes. “I’ve had Citra beers from us and other brewers, and they can be wildly different despite using similar processes and yeast strains. It begs the question ‘Why?’ Are they getting a different crop than we are? Are they dry hopping at a different temperature?

The way homebrewers use hops is significantly different from the way that commercial brewers view them. While homebrewers can tear open 6-ounce bags at near abandon, the 11-, 22-, and 44-pound bags (5-, 10-, and 20-kg) that professional brewers use are significantly more restrictive while being similarly expensive.

When does that all come into play?”

Their dry-hopping strategy is early, but not necessarily as extreme as some other brewers. They typically start at 1° Plato (.004 SG) from finishing gravity, and the method is one they describe as “all the kids in the pool”—straight in from the top of the tank, no recirculation or pumping.

They load in from the top of the tank, don’t worry about oxygen at that point (since the beer is still fermenting), and let that go for 3–4 days at 68–72° F (20–22°C). Then they drop the hops and any latent yeast out of the tank and dry hop again with the same varietal mix.

Their program does vary a bit based on hops varietal. They get such intensity out of Mosaic, for example, that they don’t have to double up on those as much as with some other varietals. Nonetheless, Triple Crossing is devoted to a process of continual iteration and testing and have been “tweaking all algorithms on the fly.”

Getting Comfortable With Gravity

It was a challenge for Wirtes to be cool with the concept of IPAS that finished with relatively high gravities. On paper, the beers seemed like caricatures. In the glass, the beers tasted delicious.

“We fought this for a long time. In my head, I couldn’t stand it,” says Wirtes. “It drove me nuts. But then I would taste them, and I was happy with them. They sound sweet on paper, but then you have one, and they just don’t feel that way. They feel plush; they feel full, delicate. No matter what the final gravity and hydrometer are saying, our palates and minds are telling us that this is what we want them to be. So we’ve let that be what it is.” Still Wirtes is relieved that their vision for beer resonates with their local market, and that there are customers for the beer they want to make. Their goal is not to make “straight juice,” but to express the flavors of the hops themselves. Yeast character is important, but it shouldn’t be over-the-top or overshadow the flavors in the individual hops they utilize. Each beer should be a different expression of the flavors within the hops used.

“We got lucky—what we want to make on the hoppy beer side is what’s selling really well. If people don’t like hoppy beer tomorrow, we’ll be in hot water.