MY SISTER SALLY’S Volkswagen camper van crunched into the gravel parking lot of the Lake of Bays Brewing Company a little before eight in the morning. Elaine, the woman working in the store attached to the brewery, told me that Darren wasn’t there yet, so we walked over to get coffee with her at the local café. Darren showed up soon afterward.
“So, you’re with us for three days,” he said. Someone else had made the same comment. Confused, I explained that, no, I planned to be there all week. It was an awkward moment. Wherever, I wondered, had they got that idea? (Later, I realized: from me. At first I had said three days — I think because that was how long I was planning to spend working at another brewery. Then I got it into my head that a week at Lake of Bays would be much better — without bothering to tell Darren. I guess my attitude was: Why should I? I knew how long I was going to be there.)
He handed me a pair of steel-toed rubber boots and introduced me to the guys I would be working with the most, Mark Campbell and Mike Pawlick, students from the new brewing program at Niagara College, near Niagara Falls, who were on a work placement. We were soon joined by another young guy, Matt. Noticing that everyone I would be working with had a name that started with M (later, I would meet Mitch, the sales manager), I told people to call me “Mian.”
Brewing doesn’t generally produce child prodigies, but I think Darren comes close. Slight and blond, he could be thought of as the Mozart of craft brewing. A dedicated home brewer, Darren had dreamed of opening his own microbrewery while he was still an undergraduate studying commerce at Montreal’s McGill University — without any very clear idea of how to go about it, as he said himself. By coincidence, in 2007 his father had bought the site of a defunct lumberyard in Baysville, a town of about 350 souls that caters to the summer people whose cottages line the shores of Lake of Bays — without any very clear idea of what to do with it. Son’s nebulous idea for a brewery met the father’s nebulous idea for an investment and the Lake of Bays brewing company was born — housed, just to keep things in the family, in a new building designed by Darren’s sister, an architect. The brewery opened on the May long weekend in 2010, when Darren was twenty-three years old. The company initially offered just one beer, a pale ale, but by the time I showed up, it had added a second, a darker beer known as a rousse, and employed more than fifteen people. This made it, I would guess, the town’s largest employer. (And a highly visible one — just a few weeks before, Darren and his crew had dumped an unsatisfactory brew down the drain, overwhelming the town’s sewage treatment plant and causing beer to bubble out of people’s drains.)
The brewery proper was painted amber and white, the company’s colors (and, I later realized, the color of beer), and featured a row of tall windows along one side, which lets staff work to a great degree by natural light — and gives passersby a glimpse of Lake of Bays’ brewing operations. The company store, where you can buy beer and branded shirts and caps, is built into one corner of the building. Outside stands a large circular malt hopper made of corrugated metal and covered with hop vines, which were just sprouting their cones the week I was there. This filled me with angst about my own hops and their struggles with bugs, blights and inappropriately formulated sprays. Next to the brewery stands a two-story building (or strictly, buildings, though they have been melded into a single rambling structure) that came with the property. The downstairs is used for storage; the upstairs houses the brewery’s business offices, a series of odd rooms run together higgledy-piggledy and featuring floors at odd different heights and doors punched through from one building to another. The structure presents a shabby contrast to the shiny new brewery, but the Lake of Bays Brewing Company has been growing too fast to fret about superficial stuff.
I’d been worried that I would be a bit of a fifth wheel. It turned out, however, that it was lucky I was there. Mike had slashed his hand on some broken glass the previous week, an occupational hazard of the beer-making biz, and in his case severely enough to need stitches. I would be doing the work that, for the time being, he couldn’t.
This first morning, we were going to be bottling. Not terribly relevant from my point of view, but I was eager to help. The bottling line was at the back of the plant, tucked between the cold room and a large stainless steel fermentation tank. First thing, we wheeled a skid of bottles into place. To my untrained eye, this job looked pretty precarious: the bottles were stacked upright on it, probably five feet high, with each layer resting on a sheet of heavy brown cardboard and the whole shebang shrink-wrapped together. Because there was nothing else holding the bottles in place, you had to be really careful as you unwrapped the skid not to tap or hit them. We did manage to drop a few.
Anyway, Mark would grab a bunch of these bottles, slap them into a holder which allowed him to flip them over, and then put them onto a tray that squirted water up into each one individually to clean them. From there, he put the bottles onto a flat metal table, where they were fed into a device that stuck a tube into them six at a time, kicking up a beery mist and making a satisfying thunk. This step shot a uniform amount of beer into each bottle (uniform, that is, if and only if the pressure in the tank in the nearby cold room was maintained, something that got overlooked the first morning I was there). Another thunk, and the bottles were capped. Then they slid out the other side of this contraption, and when enough of them had accumulated, a whole row would be pushed onto a tiny conveyor belt and caught by a strange corkscrew device that propelled them through a label attacher. (We spent a fair bit of the morning trying to get the attacher to [a] to actually apply labels to bottles and [b] not to instead spit out gummy labels whenever it felt like it, which we then had to frantically peel off the moving parts of the bottler before they jammed it.)
My job? Simplicity itself. Kenzie, the teenaged girl working there for the summer, would fill the six-packs and then hand them over to me. My task was to close the box, which required me to make two folds, then flip it over and stamp it with its best-before date: January 8, 2012. I was doing all right on the whole two folds thing, but, to be honest, my date stamping was shaky. Most of my boxes said, to eyes not trained to decipher smeared ink, “Best Before:
.” Then I tossed the box on to Matt, who was dropping them into flats of twenty-four, which he put on a skid when they were filled. We’d filled the better part of a skid, the morning’s work, before I was sending a clear message in the best-before department.
But that was a minor triumph. When I started off, Kenzie was just one six-pack ahead of me. After an hour or two, she was two ahead, then three. This was venturing into I Love Lucy territory, the episode where Lucy goes to work in the bonbon factory — fall any further behind and I’d have to start stuffing bottles into my pockets, then drinking them as fast as possible.
There was a hypnotic quality to the whole process. Here comes the six-pack. Make a fold, make another fold, flip it, stamp it. Hand it on. The radio was tuned to the local “music of your life” station, and I was half-listening over the hissing and clinking sounds of the machine that fills the bottles when Bruce Springsteen’s “Glory Days” came on. I’m no big fan of the Boss, but this was one of those moments when a song and your situation match perfectly. “Glory days,” he sang. (Fold, fold, flip, stamp.) “Well, they’ll pass you by.” (Fold, fold, flip, stamp.) “Glory days.” Always wanted out of this town, I thought to myself. (Fold, fold, flip, stamp.). Would have left, if I hadn’t knocked up my girlfriend the night of the prom. (Fold, fold, flip, stamp.) Now I’m trapped on this dead-end bottling line. (Fold, fold, flip, stamp.) At that moment, I wasn’t listening to a Bruce Springsteen song, I wasn’t even in a Bruce Springsteen song — I was a Bruce Springsteen song. I could see my beat-up car, my shabby bungalow with the dying lawn — and see them so completely that I didn’t notice that the soggy labels had jammed the bottling machine and the bottles were beginning to back up and wobble precariously on the edge of the conveyor belt.
In the end, we filled five skids. There are 264 bottles in a layer and each skid holds five layers, so that works out to 6,600 bottles. That’s a pretty typical run, though the week before, they had set a new record: 8,800 plus in a single bottling run. Just four people filling boxes six at a time. Patrick, the plant manager who’d somehow found his way from his native South Africa to Muskoka, called it soul-destroying work — particularly the handstamping thing, which they were getting ready to replace while I was there. Their “problem,” if you can call it that, is one that seems to be afflicting the craft brewing industry worldwide. Lake of Bays Brewing was growing so fast — faster, I suspect, than they expected — that their equipment and their people could barely keep up. (By 2013, they were producing four times as much beer in the average week.)
It was surprising to discover just how physical commercial beer making was, particularly small-scale craft brewing. There was a lot of hefting and turning involved in bottling (excellent, I told myself, for the obliques), but it was positively futuristic compared to kegging. Later that week, we spent a morning filling five-liter kegs with rousse. We’d stick a hose into a metal can, fill it, then slap on a plastic top that featured a built-in pump and spout. A darker, though not really dark, beer, rousse isn’t seen much in Ontario, though it has a following, a drinkership, you might say, in Quebec. I was a bit cool to this flavor before. I got why they made it — the pale ale hit the drinkers who wanted a lighter-colored, smoother beer; the rousse got those people whose tastes ran to darker drinks such as stouts and porters. But filling these finicky cans by hand put me right off it. It wasn’t the amount of beer on my hands and arms that did me in or watching it bubble up over my work boots. Oh no, much worse. We put the cans on the floor to fill them. I sat on a small cart, with a cardboard box as a cushion. But there was so much beer dribbling everywhere (Mark was filling sitting beside me) that after an hour or so I started to get a distinct impression of dampness around where I sat — spilled rousse had seeped under the cardboard and was now being soaked up by my shorts.
Beer should never be taken rectally.
THE MORNING WAS largely overcast, what little sun there was glittering off the small waves on the large gray lake. The mighty nine-horsepower engine on the Coutts family’s cedar runabout droned on and on. Off to my right, I passed a dark, humpbacked island.
In the course of my working life I have commuted by subway, streetcar and, during a memorable year when I lived in London, double-decker bus, as well as on foot and bicycle. But I don’t think anything can match commuting by small boat on a large lake. You’ve got scenery; you’ve got your personal space. You don’t have silence, that’s true, but you’re no mere passenger, you’re your own master and commander.
There aren’t many people around on a Muskoka lake midweek. That’s a good thing, actually. You need a license to operate even a tiny powerboat like my family’s. I do have a license — or to be more specific, bits and pieces of one stuffed in a desk drawer somewhere. I got it more than a decade ago, and time has not been kind to it. Apparently, the police do stop people, and they will issue fines, but I was pretty sure that before eight in the morning, the police boat would be sitting on its trailer in the Tim Hortons parking lot in Bracebridge while its crew downed their morning double-doubles.
Where the lake narrowed down into the South Muskoka River, I twisted back on the throttle and dropped my speed, moving past grand two-story boathouses boasting cupolas and copper weather vanes. I wondered about the “cottages” hidden in the trees behind them. Coming in alongside the old steamboat dock in Baysville with its covered landing stage, I pushed the engine into neutral and let the runabout glide in. I had to hurry. It was almost eight, and I didn’t want to be late for my first day of real beer making — as opposed to filling, stamping and folding — at Lake of Bays Brewing.
We were going to be making rousse. Yesterday, at the end of the day, I had helped measure out the malt and the hops for today’s brewing, working from an ingenious spreadsheet. Lake of Bays had lost its original brewmaster in the spring. “Creative differences,” I gathered. Darren had found a replacement who would be joining them soon, but in the meantime these spreadsheets, which listed ingredients, times, temperatures and the desired results for the various tests they carried out during brewing, let any reasonably attentive person carry out successful brewing. In the cold room, we had opened various heavy foil bags filled with hops and dumped them into plastic bins, which we then marked RO1, RO2, RO3. This was the sequence we’d add them in. Not for the first time, I was struck by the strangeness of hops. Pungent? Visceral? Extenuating? I can’t put my finger on something that is as much felt as smelt. People sometimes talk of a nonmystical “sixth” sense called umami. I wonder if hops don’t point toward a seventh — something between taste and smell and touch, which also, I swear, involves the eyes but not in a visual sense.
I was going to be working with Darren himself today. Later in the week, I would make pale ale with Chris, a university pal of Darren’s who had been Lake of Bays’ first hire. Their styles differed. Darren was intense, Chris a little more relaxed — not sloppy (in fact, it had been Chris who had developed the complex spreadsheets that we followed to brew), just a little more laid back. But in general, although we brewed very different beers, the procedures were very similar.
Beer making happens in the brewhouse. “Well, perforce,” I hear you say. This isn’t a separate building, although I imagine that once, very long ago, it was. I can’t speak for the setup at giant commercial breweries, but at Lake of Bays, the house, if you will, consisted of four large stainless steel tanks, three of which had hatches in the top, the sort of thing you might imagine on a submarine. The capacity of the tanks in the Lake of Bays brewhouse is half that of their fermentation tanks. So when they brew, they have to go through the entire process twice to fill the fermentation tanks.
The brewing tanks were arranged two to a side of a metal catwalk that stood about five feet off the concrete floor. The liquor tank (not booze but hot water, which in brewing is referred to as liquor) and the lauter tun — the big tank where the mash was first mixed — were on one side of the catwalk, the kettle and the whirlpool on the other. The equipment at Lake of Bays is state of the art — at the far end of the catwalk was a touch-activated computer screen. If you pressed any listing on a menu down the side, some part of the brewhouse would display, showing whether this pump or that was on or off, what the temperature of the water was and so forth.
One of my first jobs would be to feed the specialty grains into the mill, which was kept in a small room on the ground floor tucked between two fermentation tanks. I had thought that the big corrugated hopper outside the brewery was strictly a gimmick. Not so. In fact, it held pale malted two-row barley. This malt was the basis of all the beers that Lake of Bays brewed: the two regular ones and their seasonal specialties. I later learned that this malt was their own specific blend of two row, created out of different malted barleys for them by their malting company. This hopper fed directly into the mill.
But the mill was used to grind more than just pale two-row malt. A lot of the difference among beers comes from the specialty malts — a crystal malt, say, or a dark roasted one — that go into the brew. Some brews use other grains, such as malted wheat or rye. Set out by weight and type in a list called the “grain bill,” these varying ingredients help determine a beer’s flavor, aroma, color and even its ineffable “mouth feel.” If you think of that pale two-row malt as the bass line or drumbeat of a beer, the specialty malts and grains provide the guitar solo or the piccolo.
The grains I was grinding now would be part of the afternoon’s brew. I weighed out two different types of specialty malt in their bags on a scale. Once I knew I had the right amount, I boosted each bag up and over my shoulder and then dumped it into the hopper. The grain tends to stick to the hopper’s sides, though, so I needed to reach in and push it down with my fingers. But not too far — there’s no market for finger beer. The mill was connected to a long tube that ran out of the room and along the ceiling of the brewery. The flick of a switch started an auger turning in the pipe that carried the ground malt up and high over the brewhouse, ultimately dropping it into another hopper, this one suspended over the lauter tun.
Darren pushed a switch and started water running into the lauter tun. One hundred liters to begin. Then we tossed in a tub-full of calcium chloride tablets. People tend to think of craft brewers as using traditional or pure ingredients, so this “additive” might surprise them. But it is quite common and in its own way very traditional. Hard water — water with lots of dissolved minerals in it — brings out the flavor of hops, something that British brewers in Burton-on-Trent discovered long ago when they began using water drawn from deep artesian wells to brew their famous pale ale. The local water that Lake of Bays Brewing draws on is very soft, so it really needs the tablets for the beer to work. We tested the water’s pH to make sure the calcium chloride hadn’t made it too alkaline, which would affect its flavor.
The next step was to pull open the gate on the bottom of the wide-diameter tube hanging down from the hopper, releasing the grain. It poured into a square gray device called a grist hydrator, which wet the grain somewhat and then dropped it into the lauter tun.
My big job was to play with a very annoying tap that controlled the flow of water into the lauter tun. You want to fill the lauter tun as quickly as possible but only at a certain temperature. Increase the flow too much, and the temperature started to drop. Correct for that, and the flow began to decrease. I had a big round dial in front of me, about the only nondigital measuring device in the brewhouse, that I watched intently, twisting the tap first this way, then that to keep the water flowing in at a consistent 170 degrees Fahrenheit. While I was busy with this, Darren started the rakes rotating inside the tun. These mix together the water and the grain, a process known as mashing in. I’d done the same thing at home by stirring a wooden spoon around in my enameled pot.
Standing with one hand on the tap watching an enormous dial, fussing constantly to make sure that the temperature never wavered from the ideal, was a pleasantly absurd duty, like something out of Chaplin’s Modern Times or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and one well suited to a somewhat obsessive individual like me (mentally repeating “Zulu as Kono” before charging up any flight of stairs, thinking daily of the royal family). But it was also a key part of the brewing process.
When that water hits the relatively cooler grain, the temperature drops. That’s all right, but you don’t want it to drop too far, or for too long. You want it to stabilize between 150 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit. At these temperatures, the enzymes in the malt are activated and begin converting the malt’s starches to sugars. These are what the yeast will later convert into alcohol. Miss that sweet spot, go too cool or too hot, and you will affect the conversion. The method we followed to add the water to the grains while maintaining a constant temperature is what’s known as a single infusion. Other brewers prefer a technique called a step infusion, where the temperature is raised by successive increments to convert as many starches as possible.
Once all the water was added, I dipped a ladle into the open hatch of the lauter tun and poured some of the wort into a beaker. I put the beaker on a small white plate kept for the purpose on the table next to the stairs to the brewhouse. I squeezed an eyedropper full of brown iodine into the beaker. If the conversion was incomplete, the iodine would turn purple-black. It did not. All the starches had been converted.
With that confirmation, the wort was ready to be pumped to the kettle. Darren sent me under the catwalk to flick a valve that circulated the wort, pumping it out of the tun and then back in again — a process known as verlaufing, which helps extract more of the sugars in the mash. Verlaufing also helps the grain settle in the bottom of the mash tun without becoming compacted. If you get that, you have what is known as a “stuck mash,” and the wort will not drain through this decidedly nonporous mess. Then, turning another valve, I started the wort on its way to the kettle, while Darren sprayed hot water into the tun to “sparge” the grain that stayed behind. Sparging ekes yet more sugars out of the mash.
The kettle is where the brewer brings the wort to the boiling point. Lake of Bays’ particular kettle had three heaters built into its side at varying heights. As the level of the wort rose, we turned on successive heaters. However, the solenoids that turned on the heaters didn’t always work. Mark went round to the outside of the kettle and banged on the pipes with a large rubber mallet while I listened for the telltale sign of the heaters kicking in, a satisfying ba-woom sound.
We wanted to fill the kettle to twenty-seven hectoliters, or just over 713 U.S. gallons, which we measured using a nifty stainless steel dipstick. When we hit the mark, we turned off the pumps and let the temperature climb. When the wort hit the boil, we pitched the first hops. As we dumped in the pellets, Darren grabbed a hose and sprayed the wort to stop it from bubbling up out of the kettle. (Later, working with Matt, I managed to distract him with a question at a key moment. Over his shoulder, I saw brown foam bubbling out of the open lid and spilling onto the brewhouse walkway. The kettle had boiled over.)
There’s a lot of hurry up and wait to brewing. Since this stage — the boil — takes an hour, we turned our attention to the many other tasks that always need doing.
Foremost among these was emptying the lauter tun. The liquid wort just runs out. But the mash, that conglomeration of used-up grains . . . ah, the mash is another question. Darren turned a large green wheel on the side of the tun, which opened a gate in the bottom, and the mash began spilling into a big gray metal hopper. We didn’t want it to plug the gate, so we each grabbed a shovel and started pulling the sodden grain toward us. Darren had asked me to set up four large plastic barrels on a skid and we shoveled the mash into these, scooping it up, pivoting, dumping and then turning back to repeat the cycle. My obliques, already worked by yesterday’s efforts, were being honed to competition level. We moved just under a ton in this fashion, Darren triumphantly striking the classic muscle guy pose when we’d finished. (Later in the week, I unloaded just over a ton all by myself.) After this, I got a hose and sprayed up into the mash tun to wash out more grain. The concrete floor for about twenty feet around the tun was slick with wort and grain.
By this point, about forty-five minutes into the boil, it was time to pitch the aroma hops. Generally, we added three portions of hops to the wort when we were brewing. First were the bittering hops, added early in the process. This first infusion gives beer a bitter flavor, via resins in the hops, but not much more; the oils that provide the aroma and more delicate elements of hops flavor are destroyed by the long boil. That’s why the second batch, the aroma hops, go in near the end of the boil. Not long after this, right near the end, we dumped in the third lot, the so-called finishing hops, which would impart even more aroma. Brewers sometimes also dry-hop — add hops to the wort when it’s fermenting. With no heat to drive off the oils, this boosts both the bitterness and the flavor notes from the hops. I later used the technique at home to get my beer closer to the feel of an “extreme” West Coast–style pale ale.
After the third hops infusion, we added something called Irish moss, actually dried seaweed, which helps the sediment in the wort settle out. That’s a move I rarely, if ever, bothered with when brewing at home. When the boil was over, we pumped the wort into the third and final tank it would occupy in the brewhouse. Called the whirlpool, it is pretty much what the name suggests. The wort was whipped around and around, causing any leftover bits of hops or fragments of grain to settle in the middle of the tank. The clearer wort then ran through a heat exchanger, which cooled the still very hot fluid to about seventy-one degrees Fahrenheit.
Hoses. It’s all about hoses, this beer business. When the beer left the inverter, it traveled through a hose snaking along the floor to what, to me, resembled a standard beer keg. It attached to the keg’s top with a coupling. Another hose ran out the bottom. Earlier in the day, this keg had been filled with yeast drawn off one of the fermenting vessels. As the wort moved through the keg, it mixed with the yeast — the larger-scale version of pitching the little packet of yeast. The bottom hose carried the now-yeasty wort to one of the stainless steel fermenting tanks ranged along the wall about twenty feet from the brewhouse. Tired but content with my role — particularly my precision work on the big tap — I headed home.
When I came in the next morning, I noticed a smaller plastic hose running from the fermenter to a large plastic pail filled with water. The water was foaming frantically as carbon dioxide bubbled off the wort — fermentation was in full force. Placing the end of the hose in water ensured that while that gas was carried off the wort, no outside air — nor the contaminants it carried — could go back up into the fermentation tank. Again, it was the big-scale version of the little plastic air lock filled with water that I bunged into the lid of my plastic pail at home.
The beer would stay here for a week or so. Then it would be chilled even more — “crashed” is the technical term — and then strained through an incredible filter that resembled nothing so much as five feet of acoustic ceiling tiles clamped together in an enormous vise that was tightened by turning a gargantuan wheel. It looked like the sort of thing that Moe used to squash Larry’s or Curly’s head in the Three Stooges, and whenever I saw it, I mentally went “Nyong, nyong, nyong.” Brewers have these nifty glass attachments that can fit onto the end of a hose and let them see the beer as it flows through. There was one fitted on the hose leading into this contraption and one on the hose leading out. Through them I could see that the beer going into the filter was milky; the beer flowing out, absolutely clear. From the filter it was pumped to one of the bright tanks (named for the filtered or “bright” beer they contain). Finally, the beer would be bottled or kegged — taking me back to where I entered the cycle my first day. And so it goes, twice a week all summer, once a week during the winter.
I came away from my week at Lake of Bays with two things. One was a case of pale ale. The other was the realization that beer making, like the rest of the food industry, is as much about cleanliness as it is about technique or finished product. We flushed hoses, we cycled acid and sterilizing fluids through brewing vats, we spritzed everything with sanitizer. The cleaning seemed central, the beer almost peripheral. But as Darren said, “You need that, to be consistent.” It’s an important message, but I suspect it’s one that amateur brewers sometimes don’t get. Again and again, you’ll hear somebody say that they tried making beer and it worked really well the first few times, but after that something seemed to go wrong. Maybe what goes wrong is they get complacent. The first few times, they keep everything meticulously clean, but then they start to relax, maybe figuring that they don’t have to go crazy. In fact, they do. I couldn’t hope to match Darren’s knowledge or Lake of Bays’ technology, but I could at least try to emulate their cleanliness.
FAT LOT OF good it would do me.
“I’m sure there’s more,” I said to Catharine. I held a beautifully formed barley head in my hand. Lovely fat kernels ran in two opposite rows up the sides of the stalk, some capped with the barley’s trademark beards, those long, thin whisker-like shoots that sprout from the tops of the kernels. If a film producer called up a casting agent and said I want a barley stalk for a commercial I’m making, this is what they would send over.
I’d picked this stalk to show to Catharine, who was involved in some mysterious farm-related business in the erstwhile chicken coop. When we got back to the farm from my week at Lake of Bays, I knew things were bad in the barley field, and I was spending my first morning back working my way through the patch, all dry earth and brown, crispy, stunted strands, many speckled with what I took to be mold. But when I found this handsome stalk I took it as a sign — something had survived. Maybe if we really scoured the field, we could put together enough barley to make some beer — even just one batch. Catharine is far more conscientious than I am, so I prayed that if she came back up the hill with me she’d be able to turn up more of the right stuff, something resembling mature, usable barley. She agreed to have a look, and I wasn’t disappointed. Carefully parting the dry stalks with her hands, turning over the heads with her fingers, she found . . . another stalk.
“That” she said, pointing to the barley head in my hand, “is half your crop. And this” — she pointed to the stalk she’d found — “is the other half.”
Conversely, the hops were doing great.