Red Brick road to somewhere in Atlanta but not sure where

Red Brick Brewing Co. was the second brewery I visited in Atlanta in an afternoon of brewery and beer education.  These guys have all the elements in place: brewery equipment, beer tap for tasting, space to sit and socialise and a merchandise shop, but somehow the place lacks a bit of soul.

Part of it may have been that there wasn't any personal attention in the form of a welcome or an actual tour. It was more a tasting session with some kit scattered around a large warehouse.

The selection of beers at the bar were reasonable but I can't say I found the branding inspiring in any way, and beers with skulls on them simply don't appeal at all.   I tasted about six or seven beers but I can't say that anything was exceptional or even particularly good. I also thought their 'tasting' glasses were too big and the measures were too generous. The venue seemed to be more aligned with the consumption of beer rather than tasting and experiencing it.

There wasn't much kit standing around and it was spread out in a way that made me think it couldn't possibly work as a unit.  I recall wondering whether this was actually the site they used to brew their beer and whether this was really all the kit they had. I thought it may just be a window-dressing exercise to create the impression of a brewery whereas it may actually be a logistics warehouse.  The large venue may indicate that they have ambitions to grow but it did seem much larger than what may be expected given the amount of equipment and packaging they had standing around. I didn't get the impression that the equipment was in operation either.

Although brew-pubs have their brewing equipment visible for all to see from the vantage point of your seat with beer in hand, this venue made me think that it's nice to have a the brewery tucked away somewhere where it can be revealed during a tour. Hidden equipment seems to be more magical. When you are allowed into the special sanctuary to view the wizardry you feel like a special guest. That is what this place was lacking.

There was a pilot beer brewing kit for developing their product portfolio and I've seen the same kit in more than one place so it must be reasonably good.  Every brewery seems to have an assorted collection of connectors and this collection was in neat mobile unit.

In the end this was a reasonable brewery experience but without the magic of a tour. I was a little disappointed.

Cherry Beer Bombshell

I've heard good things about Belgium beers and talk about fruity beers being quite nice. So I'm travelling in Mainland Europe and spotted this interesting beer.

That's about where the interest ended.

It is a terrible excuse for a beer with a sickly artificial sweet taste that leaves a bitter chemically sweet after taste. The cherry flavour is in there, somewhere, hiding behind all the sugar. Aside from the beer I tasted the other day that was clearly spoilt, this is the worst excuse for a beer that I have ever tasted. 

The Belgian bubble has burst. Not all their beers are wonderful and shining examples to the rest of the world of what beer should taste like. 

Spectacularly Poor Beer Quality

As part of my education into the UK craft and general beer industry, I have been trying different brands that are commercially available in supermarkets and at mini-breweries, where the beer is available to the public. A few days ago I opened a beer that I bought at a well known retail outlet that prides itself on high quality and competes for the top end of the supermarket retail rankings. The beer was ghastly, disgusting, vile and repulsive. I was astounded. The taste might have been described as industrial chemicals smelling a bit like methanol or anti-freeze mixed with vinegar and diluted coke. It is, without a doubt, the worst example of a beer that I have ever tasted. The fact that someone attempted to pass it off as a beer is astounding. It has also made me realise just how spectacularly poor beer-quality can be.

The biggest impact on me has been an immediate dislike of the brand, the beer, and the brewery in question. I've literally written them off from my future tasting list on the basis of one sample. I am not going to mention names, yet, because I want to see how well the supplier and the retailer deal with the complaint. Normally I would never want to visit their brewery, but given that this experience is a serious pit-fall to avoid in this industry I am going to make a point of going to see them.  I want to talk to them in person, inspect their equipment and processes (as much as they will allow me to interrogate them), and to find out more about the distribution chains and how both supplier and retailer attempt to manage product quality. I am interested in the chain of custody - I want to find out who is responsible at what stage of the delivery process?

There is another side to this experience that raised my concerns. How do I know that this beer was a real product of this outfit and not a fake?  There has been a problem with fake alcohol in the UK and I understand that other countries like China have had their fair share of this problem. The BBC lists 5 counterfeit cons you should know about (one of which is alcohol), so as to have less of a chance of falling victim to them.  There is a long list of HMRC news items associated with crooks in the alcohol business.

Drink Aware mentions the dangers of fake alcohol, with health risks being the most obvious and severe, and goes on to list the Trading Standards Institue list of things to look out for in terms of the four 'P's: Place, Price, Packaging, and Product.

• Place: where are you buying? Buy from a reputable outfit.
• Price: If the price looks to good, it probably is fake.
• Packaging: Look out for poor quality labelling, a UK duty stamp, properly sealed containers, and potentially fake bar codes (the later needs more attention in terms of databases, certificates and tools in the form of apps).
• Product: Beware of unusual brand names (well, that would kill the craft beer market, now, wouldn't it?), unusual product appearance, and if it tastes or smells bad, don't drink it. The smell of nail varnish or other chemicals may be an indication. 

This topic probably deserves more time and effort so I will address this again when I have done more research.

Post-dated update:
Two day after I made my complaint the retailer got back to me to apologise for the product not being up to the standard I expected. They reassured me that all complaints are recorded and passed to relevant Partners.   They reassured me that their buyers and technologists work closely with their producers and suppliers to alert them to any concerns. They wanted to reassure me that the information I had provided will help them prevent something like this from happening again. They also offered to send me a gift voucher in the post.

No news from the brewery - they may feel that it is the retailers responsibility to sort it out (pure speculation), but some reassurance they they do their best to ensure everything is managed well on their side would be reassuring and may have tempted me back as a traditional consumer to try their products again.

Brisbane Brewing Co.

An artistic wrought iron gate of a hops-plant leads the way down an alley off Boundary St. to the Brisbane Brewing Co. pub-brewery in the West End.  It's an simple low cost building that feels a bit like a large open-ended garage, reminiscent of what one may consider a good place to start a brewery.   It's a cool venue with a relaxed laid-back feel that looks like a good place to be on a hot day.

The brewing kit is tucked away along one of the walls running the length of the indoor section next to what appears to be a kitchen, with a few extra fermenters squeezed in behind the main bar service area.

The industrial side of this outfit is a bit cluttered and chaotic and raises some questions about housekeeping, which is usually a reflection of an attitude towards health and safety. It may just be that there is limited space and the owners are doing their best to shoehorn a growing business into the limited space they have available.  I like the rustic, rough and ready feel of the equipment and noticed a pile of stainless steel connectors and fittings that every brewery I have visited seems to have.

Many breweries have a simplified process flow diagram depicting the beer making process, which reflects some of the technological advances to a process that has essentially been know for thousands of years.  However, as any engineer will tell you, a simplified process flow diagram doesn't enable you to competently run a micro-brewery. The secrets lie in the details and I have yet to see a brewery where you can peek at the internals of all those pretty, shiny vessels. They are just vessels or fancy big pots, aren't they? Not quite.

 The bar had a good number of taps, mostly their own product and the thing that differentiates a good brew-pub from another for me is that they have more taps than your average bar.  That's because diversity and product portfolio and customer choice is the essence of what this growing craft beer business is all about. Unfortunately this outfit offered the stock standard two size Aussie beer measures (or at least what Queensland usually offers - I discovered that Australia has a bit more beer measurement selection complexity further afield). What I really wanted was to taste a few different things and I was then informed that smaller portions were available, but in the end it would have been better for two of us rather than me out there on my own.  Admittedly beer tourism is better with company but I can hardly expect friends to follow me around the globe on my consulting engineering escapades.

The four 150ml glasses were a bit more expensive than what I would have liked.  In the end their most adventurous beer was apricot infused, and I will admit it wasn't a favourite.  I also found there was a common underlying theme to all their beers that just didn't tickle my tastebuds in the way I like beer to do. I can't put my finger on what it was, whether it was a type of hops they used or the blend of malt they used, but it didn't tick the box that said I'll have to come back here when I know more about beer and learn some lessons from their product portfolio. Admittedly I didn't try any of the darker beers so it might just be their gold and amber range that didn't chime for me.

My general impression was that it was a nice cool environment to get away from the heat and enjoy a beer, but I was a little disappointed with the beer in the end.

Sweet Water Atlanta

On a recent trip to Atlanta I managed to visit the Sweet Water Brewery. The brewery started out in 1997 and is currently located on their second site, a 2,300 square meter facility with a brewing capacity of 400,000 barrels per annum (although they are only brewing  just over half of that at the moment).

Similar to another successful brewery in Scotland, this one was started by two enthusiasts and a dog. I wonder whether the dog is a coincidence or has some magical success driving factor to it.

The setting for the beer tasting is spacious and well thought out. There is an indoor and outdoor area, with the outdoor area clearly designed to host music or other entertainment events with plenty of standing room.  This is an advantage that Americans have over the British - planning permission is much easier to achieve for buildings and space that compliments your business needs.

Sweet Water has a sensible portfolio of beers, with a healthy balance between easy drinking (a German style Pilsner), rich and rewarding (e.g. single and double IPAs) and more adventurous beers like Blue, which is jam-packed with blue berry flavour.  The other thing I notice American's like doing is designing distinctive tap handles, which helps with brand identity. In the UK we only seem to have the round pump-clips.

I can see the temptation to use artificial flavouring to give experimental beers an edge, especially if there is a bit of variability in your fruit flavour from year to year or from one supplier to the next. I wonder what certification system may help keep producers honest and help consumers understand the quality of what they are consuming.

Atlanta has a unique problem with beer sales at their brewing facilities, which unlike most of the other states, is a challenge that has attracted an innovative, if not quirky, solution.  When you visit a brewery you pay for a glass or a tour ticket and you get a few tickets for 'free' samples.  Some places are more generous with their offering and as I will discuss in a future post, a certain demographic of clientele can be attracted by the offering (future reference Monday Night Brewing).

By far my favourite beer available at Sweet Water was their double IPA 'Hop Hash' with a thumping 7.8% ABV and a thunderous 100 IBU rating. It had a gorgeous deep golden honey colour and a delicate pine fruity aroma.  With 100 IBU I was expecting something that was almost too bitter to drink, a bit like raw Aloe juice, but instead it was delightfully complex and mind-numbingly smooth and refreshing. I would have gone back for more, had I not wanted to try more variety and attempt to keep standing on my feet for the rest of the day. It certainly packed a punch.

The brewery was large, by independent craft brewer standards. There was evidence of a staged approach to scale-up investments with fermenters of different sizes.  I've also noticed that each brewery I have visited has the obvious small scale pilot kit to experiment with the next product line.  More than one of the breweries I visited in Atlanta had the same commercial pilot kit, however, Sweet Water had their own design, which was a bit bigger than expected.

As a relatively large 'micro brewery' (that doesn't really sound right, does it?) Sweet Water has invested in a dedicated centrifuge to produce clear beer. It is a single point investment servicing all the beer produced in the brewery and saves them a significant amount of product (a few percentage points), which would otherwise be lost through alternative flocculation and filtration systems.

Some, but not all of the conditioning is done in oak barrels. I suspect this is where the more experimental beers and possible the Blue beer is produced. No hand capping for these guys. They have a state of the art bottling facility, reported to be installed by German's who only spoke German and drank plenty of beer and not much else. That's the stuff of brewery tours, I guess, stretch the truth and make it interesting or entertaining.

In the end this was my favourite brewery in Atlanta. Now, where to find that magic Hop Hash here in the UK?

American Dream

If you told me 15 years ago that an American company would be selling good quality beer in the UK I would have laughed at you. Having read that Goose Island is exporting out this way I went looking for their beer and found it at Sainsbury's.

Is this the new American dream? Just as exporting UK craft beer to America would be.