Beer Camp, Day Two

Some of my young colleagues arrived a bit bleary-eyed after a night out in Chico, but Beer Camp at Sierra Nevada got underway promptly at 8 a.m., and the group was about to get down to business as brewer Scott Jennings helped us create the beer we imagined.

After coffee and breakfast burritos, he took us to the brewhouse where we loaded bags of malted barley into the grinder which pumped into the lauter tun where the beginnings of the mash was mixed with water.  Scott had already begun a mash before we arrived so very quickly we were sampling our own sweet first wort.

Scott provided a complete explanation of mashing and creating the work, including explanations of how the sugars are broken down in the grain, and how the extracted sugars are consumed by voracious yeast.

Next we went to the hop cooler where we assembled the six hop varieties we would add to our brew, including the estate hops we had picked the day before.  The room, which had been nearly empty the day before was filled with racks of fresh hops, picked the day before in Yakima Washington, and which are an important part of the biennial brew called Harvest (one in the fall from the Northern Hemisphere, and one in the Spring from the Southern Hemisphere.

With hops added to the wort, we were retrieved by Terance for a sampling run through the chilled fermentation tanks.  We were lucky enough to the forthcoming 30th Anniversary Estate Ale, and a very rare oaked Bigfoot.  We were joined mid-tour by Tom Dalldorf, founding editor of Celebrator, a magazine about beer and brewing, who is doing a story about Sierra Nevada, and beer camp.

After serenading Tom with a rendition of Dave Mulligan's Beer Camp song, we headed to lunch, a more fine beers.

The afternoon was given over to a tour of the brewery's research facility, and some subjective testing of our own sensabilities in the sensory review department.

I left to catch my plane as the debate over the beer name came down to two possibilites, Mulligan (for Dave and his great song, and the double meaning of a "second chance," and Hopsichord, an obvious play on words.   I suggested Whiplash, for the effect I thought the beer would have.

After picking up my Beer Camp tee shirt, I hit the road for home.