THE BREWING PROCESS WAS COMPLETELY immersive. We were using the brief reprieve from tourists to brew extra batches of our holiday line. There was a narrow window in which we would need to brew our three distinct holiday beers and then allow them ample time to ferment. At a minimum, beer takes two weeks to work through the fermentation process.
One thing that set Nitro apart from other pubs and bars in Leavenworth was Garrett’s Northwest brewing style. He was committed to differentiating our offerings by using locally sourced ingredients, hops, and grains. Unlike Der Keller, which exclusively brewed traditional German beers, and the Underground, which served a rotation of German imports, at Nitro we embraced the fertile growing region in the North Cascades and drier arid deserts of eastern Washington. Our beers reflected the landscape around us.
For our holiday line, we had decided to go rogue. We were creating three unique beers to celebrate the winter holidays and Leavenworth’s famous Christmas markets. Our first holiday beer was a chocolate hazelnut imperial stout, brewed with cacao nibs, roasted hazelnuts, and vanilla beans. It would be like a holiday dessert in a pint glass. Next, we were brewing a Gose (an old German beer). Our take on the Gose was popcorn and cranberry strings used to decorate a Christmas tree. The tart beer, made from cranberries, buttered popcorn, and sea salt, would be a refreshing beer to sip while strolling through the vendor booths at the holiday market. Lastly, we were brewing a pine-infused IPA. IPAs (India pale ales) were a favorite in the Northwest. It was nearly impossible to enter a pub anywhere in Washington or Oregon without finding an IPA on the menu. Our hop-forward Christmas IPA would offer the aroma of a fresh-cut pine tree with a sweet, bright finish.
Since Nitro was classified as a nanobrewery, we had to be strategic about our brewing schedule. Our setup was tiny in comparison to Der Keller. We brewed on a ten-barrel system. Every batch we brewed on the system produced twenty kegs, which might sound like a lot, but each keg yielded approximately 124 pints. On a busy day during a festival weekend, we could go through that in a matter of hours. It was simple math. If there were twenty-five people in the bar and each of them had two pints in an hour, that was fifty pints.
Garrett and I had already brewed small batches of each holiday beer in our test kitchen, and now our task was to take the recipes and produce them on a grander scale. Once we had each beer fermenting, we would return to our smaller setup in the kitchen and test another round of beers for January debuts. Like many retail shops, the business of brewing meant planning months in advance.
We had launched our holiday line with the chocolate stout. Garrett had cranked Christmas music while we brewed a traditional stout. It had been fermenting for a week, and assuming the gravity (or sugar content) was where we wanted it, it should be ready for the next step—adding delicious cacao nibs. Tracking a beer’s gravity was something that Garrett took seriously. Some of the sugar in the wort would ferment into alcohol, and the remaining sugars would add sweetness and give the beer body. We charted the beer’s original gravity right before we pitched the yeast, and then would take readings regularly until the beer reached its final gravity number.
“Hey, Sloan, you gonna taste that?” Garrett asked, lugging a bucket of cleaning solution from the opposite end of the brewery.
Kat followed behind him with a spray bottle and a stack of clean rags. She didn’t have a good pair of brewer’s boots yet, so I had loaned her an old pair of mine. The bright yellow boots were giant on her.
“Be careful in those,” I cautioned. She looked like a little girl trying on her mom’s high heels.
“They’re, like, thigh-high.” Kat laughed. “I stuck two pairs of socks in the toes, so I’m good.”
I made note of the stout’s gravity and then siphoned a taste. Even without the cacao nibs, it had a dark, biscuit flavor with notes of caramel.
“Try this,” I said to Garrett, handing him a plastic taster.
He set the bucket of iodine and water at the base of the fermentation tank. He closed his eyes and swished the beer around in his mouth. “Nice. I’m already getting a hint of chocolate. How’s the gravity?”
“Right where we want it.”
“Excellent.” He finished off the taster. “You want to get the nibs ready while Kat and I give everything a good scrub?”
“I’m on it.” I left them and went to the kitchen. Brewing is as much about cleaning as anything else. Cleanliness is as close as it gets to godliness in the world of craft beer. Everything in the brewery sparkled, yet before we began brewing en masse, we would do another clean-down just to ensure that no speck of dust tainted our final product. It didn’t surprise me that Garrett’s previous career was in the tech industry. Working in a brewery was much like working in a lab.
I tugged off my fleece and rolled up my sleeves. Thank goodness Garrett had had the foresight to keep his great-aunt Tess’s industrial kitchen intact. Having the commercial space allowed us to prepare and serve pub fare in the bar and gave us a space to use for our smaller test batches.
Cacao nibs contain magnesium, a mineral known to relax anxiety. It wasn’t a surprise that I often craved a piece of dark chocolate in the late afternoon. Hopefully our holiday stout would be a smooth-drinking chocolate escape. I preheated the oven to 350 degrees and then went to the built-in pantry to grab a bag of the chocolate beans. After spreading them on cookie sheets, I slid them into the oven to roast for ten to fifteen minutes.
Next, I gathered hazelnuts. The benefit of brewing was that we never needed to worry about finely chopping or deshelling nuts or any other fruits or berries used in the brew. Everything would be strained out. It made prep work easy. I tossed the nuts (shells and all) in olive oil and coarse sea salt. Then I arranged them on industrial cookie sheets. Once the cacao nibs were done, the hazelnuts would go in. The heat should bring out a nuttiness and intensify their flavor.
Before my timer dinged, the kitchen smelled like homemade chocolate cake. The ambrosial scent of the roasted cacao nibs was near perfection. Some of our pubgoers loved the smell of brewing—the steeping grains and intense hops. Others didn’t enjoy it quite as much. I was sure that no one would object to the decadent chocolate flavor. I removed the trays from the oven and slid in the hazelnuts. Then I shook the nibs into an industrial mixing bowl. Per the unofficial brewers’ code of taste everything, I popped one of the cacao pieces in my mouth. It had a nice crunch and the deep, rich flavor of dark chocolate chips.
Those will do beautifully, I said to myself as I took the bowl to the brewery.
“That smells so crazy good.” Kat held up her hands, which were protected with rubber gloves. “I want to dive into that bowl.”
Garrett agreed. “Seriously, I thought you had gone on a tangent and decided to bake a cake. If those smell that good, I’m calling it now—the stout is going to be our bestseller.”
I held out the bowl. “Do you guys want to taste them? They’re like a grainier dark chocolate.”
“I do.” Kat yanked off her gloves. “Aren’t they, like, health food or something?”
“You could say that. They’re packed with antioxidants, so sure, this can be our healthy beer.”
“Mmmm. It’s really good,” Kat said through a mouthful of the chocolate. “That would probably be amazing ground up and served on ice cream.”
“Good idea.” I offered her more and then turned to Garrett, who was cleaning hoses. “You want any before I dump them in?”
“I’ll pass. The smell is enough for me.”
“Stay tuned for roasted hazelnuts,” I teased as I climbed the ladder on the fermenting tank. At the top, I lifted the hatch and dumped the cacao nibs straight in. Steam began to form. I shut the hatch and returned to the kitchen.
It didn’t take long for the aroma of roasting nuts to mingle with the lingering chocolate. I returned to the pantry for popcorn and coconut and peanut oil. I planned to pop the corn on the stove. Microwaved popcorn is great for movie night or an afternoon snack, but for this signature holiday beer, I wanted to make sure that we extracted as much flavor from the popped corn as possible.
Ursula had taught me her tried-and-true technique for stovetop popcorn years ago. The result was that nearly every kernel of corn ended up popped to fluffy perfection without a hint of bitter, burnt flavor. I started by pouring the oils into the bottom of a thick-bottomed pan. They would need to come to temp. Next, I turned the burner to medium high and waited for it to begin to sizzle.
To test whether it was hot enough, I tossed in a couple of kernels. Once they popped, I added the rest of the kernels, covered the pot with the lid, and removed it from the heat for thirty seconds. This is a critical and necessary step. I remembered Ursula having Alex count down from thirty to one when she would make homemade popcorn with us on family movie nights.
“Ja, Alex, it is good. You must be patient with the kernels. Ziz way zey warm together and will pop at once when we put it back on ze stove.”
It became like a game. Alex loved the anticipation of counting down. As soon as he would shout, “Number one,” Ursula would place the popcorn back on the burner. Alex would clap at the sound of the kernels bouncing off the pan. Ursula would shake the pan and lift the lid ever so slightly to allow air to escape in the popping process. As soon as the corn finished popping, she transferred it into a large mixing bowl and tossed it with melted butter and sea salt.
I felt a pang of nostalgia as I repeated the steps she had taught me many years ago.
The timer for the hazelnuts buzzed just as I poured the last few ounces of melted butter over the popcorn.
“My God, Sloan, what are you doing? Trying to torture us?” Garrett came into the kitchen. He had swapped his reading glasses for his chemistry goggles.
“What?”
“Kat and I are dying. First the chocolate, now this. You’re killing us. We’ve decided we should add roasted nuts and popcorn to our snack menu at the bar.”
“That’s a great idea.” I thought about the suggestion for a second. “What if I come up with a menu that features one or more of the ingredients from our holiday line?” I had enjoyed the freedom that Garrett allowed me when it came to Nitro’s small pub menu. We weren’t interested in a full-scale restaurant menu like Der Keller’s, but we did like to offer our customers small bites to go with their pints.
“I’m game,” Garrett replied, digging his hand into the bowl of buttered popcorn. “This beer and the hazelnut stout—no problem. But I can’t wait to see what in the world you come up with for our hoppy holiday pine.”
I frowned. “Yeah. I’ll have to think on that one.” The beer featured hops and pine needles. Neither ingredient jumped out at me as something customers would rush to eat on their own. But maybe I could experiment with a pine shortbread cookie. I had made shortbread with lavender and rosemary. The hint of herbs balanced the cookie’s natural sweetness. Pine might just work. I could cut the shortbread in the shape of Christmas trees and dust them with green sugar.
I didn’t mention the idea to Garrett. I would do some test runs on my own and see if they were worth pursuing. “The nuts are ready,” I said.
Garrett chomped on the popcorn. “Sloan, this is insanely good. What did you do?”
I told him about Ursula’s stovetop method.
“Thank goodness for your mother-in-law. I don’t know if I want this in the beer. I want to devour the entire bowl.”
“I can pop some more. It only takes five minutes.” My cheeks felt warm. I wasn’t sure if it was from the heat in the kitchen or Garrett’s effusive praise.
“How long does it stay fresh?” Garrett asked, taking another handful.
“Once it’s buttered like this?” I asked. “Not long. If we want to serve it in the bar tonight as one of our snack items, I can pop another batch and keep it in an airtight container up at the bar. We can toss it with butter and salt right before we serve it.”
“Do it.” Garrett washed his hands before wiping them on a towel and then used it to pick up the tray of roasted nuts. “I’m off to add these.”
I set the popcorn aside. Then I rinsed a bucketful of whole cranberries and set them to boil in a large stockpot on the stove. I covered them with water and added an assortment of holiday spices—cinnamon sticks, nutmeg, vanilla, and candied orange peel. The goal was to create a cranberry syrup or compote that we would add after steeping the grains.
Sugar is a brewer’s best friend. Sugar activates the yeast and helps ignite the fermentation process. The natural sugars in the cranberries would bring the Gose’s sugar content higher. We would need to adjust our sugar levels accordingly.
Brewing is a science first and an art second. Everything from the temperature of the boil to how long the grains are left to steep can dramatically change a beer’s flavor profile. Garrett and I were vigilant when it came to following a beer through each step (start to finish) and documenting any tweaks we might make along the way. Adding an extra handful of popcorn or doubling the cranberry compote without noting it in the recipe would make it nearly impossible to re-create a consistent beer. Nothing was left to chance.
That didn’t mean that we were opposed to experimenting. Far from it. Tinkering with a beer recipe was one of my favorite parts of the job. We left the experimenting to the kitchen, our own version of a mini test lab. But when brewing for public consumption, we wanted to be able to produce the same quality pint after pint. One advantage to being small was our ability to stay nimble. Bigger operations like Der Keller might brew one or two gorgeous IPAs in mass quantity, but we could brew dozens of different styles of IPAs in a short time span because our equipment was smaller and we had more of it. Beer takes the same amount of time to create whether brewing one gallon or ten thousand gallons. Der Keller and the other “big guys” in the craft world had distribution contracts that required them to deliver their most popular beers by the keg and caseload. We weren’t tied to the same rigorous brewing schedule. Producing something new all the time kept our beer fresh and interesting and kept our customers coming in more frequently to try our latest offerings. In the last decade, there had been a growing wave of nanobreweries throughout the Pacific Northwest, and I attributed the success of the nano movement to beer lovers’ insatiable desire for unique and interesting flavor combinations and mash-ups.
Regardless of the size of their operations, brewers are often fanatical when it comes to guarding their recipes, and Nitro was no exception. Garrett kept our coveted recipes under lock and key (literally). Leavenworth isn’t the kind of place where most people lock their doors. Neighbors often pop into one another’s houses to borrow a cup of sugar and drop off a bundle of garden roses. Garrett had come from Seattle, a large city where he would have never considered not locking his front door. It had taken me a while to get in the habit.
Kat breezed into the kitchen. “Garrett asked if the popcorn is ready.” Her youthful cheeks were dewy with sweat.
“Yep.” I handed her the bowl.
“Can I sneak a taste?” She took a big handful.
“Absolutely.” I walked to the stove to stir the cranberries. “This needs to simmer. I’ll come help get the boil going for the Gose.”
The remainder of the morning was hard physical labor. Brewing isn’t for the faint of heart. It requires stamina and plenty of arm strength. Lugging huge bags of grains and stirring the wort with a stainless-steel paddle always left my forearms aching, and yet somehow also left me energized. There’s something about working up a sweat that beats any other form of therapy.
At Nitro we brewed the hard way. We didn’t have silos or augers like the big guys to avoid the heavy lifting. We worked our glutes lugging heavy bags of grain. In my opinion, the extra muscle was what made all the difference in flavor. Brewing by hand allowed you intimate control of the final product, and for me, it was a labor of love. The muscle aches were a reminder of pouring my heart and soul into a beer. Maybe I was biased, but the effort expended for each pint was what made our beer so much better than the mass brewers’. It was like comparing Ursula’s homemade cookies with a store-bought package.
With cookies on my mind, I turned my attention to creating a pine shortbread. A mildly sweet, buttery cookie with touches of pine should be an excellent accompaniment for our hoppy beers. I’d never been much of a forager, although many brewers I knew trekked in the woods on the hunt for wild herbs and flowers. Since this was a test batch, I decided to snag some needles from one of the evergreen trees in Waterfront Park.
Nitro was on Commercial Street, two blocks from the park. I wasn’t sure if picking pine needles from a city tree counted as foraging, but I was up for the adventure. I grabbed my scarf and swapped my boots for tennis shoes. As I headed down the hill toward the park, I passed the Underground. DO NOT ENTER and CLOSED signs had been posted in front of its stone façade entrance. Ross had said something about electrical issues.
I thought about taking a closer look, but overheard voices.
Ross stood next to a man holding a clipboard. “You’re not shutting us down. This is ludicrous! I’m not in violation of anything. This is all because of Kristopher Cooper.”
I didn’t wait to hear the man’s response. This changed everything. If the Underground was being shut down, Ross had a very solid motive for murder.