Touring Crooked Stave Brewery was a life changing experience. I know I sound like I’m being over dramatic, but I had truly never seen a brewery set-up like that before and it opened my eyes to new opportunities.
Although they started out only brewing sour beers, they have branched out into producing clean beers. We started our tour with a pouring of the Petite Sour Peach and the Coffee Baltic Porter, both of which we casually enjoyed while walking around the brewery.
All of their wort (basically just ground malt water) was originally contracted from Epic brewing, until 2016 when they obtained their own brewhouse.
Everything in their brewery is color coded; ‘green=clean’, ‘red= wood/sour’, and ‘black=no wood/additional culture’. This ensures that the Brett will not contaminate the other beers.
When making a sour fruit beer, tons of local fresh fruit will be added to the top of the large barrels. The fruit will be punched down to help avoid oxidation and promote color extraction.
All 3 main yeast cultures that they use are kept in their own personal lab and monitored/maintained for future use. The lab contained many useful machines like a pre-programmed spectrophotometer, along with a machine that could measure the CO2 and O2 levels in beer. There was also a machine that measured titratable acidity in beer, which is basically just a measurement of how sour the beer is/how much acid is present.
They’ve recently been canning their Brett beers, because they are more stable to package this way and the market has been reacting well. The petite sours are packaged with forced carbonation, while specialty sours and fruit sours are packaged still. This is done by adding sugar and yeast in and recirculating.
The owner Chad has a published research paper on his Brettanomyces project which can be found here: http://brettanomycesproject.com/dissertation/
