This month’s Sauce Magazine features their annual Wine and Beer Guide, detailing some of what’s going on in the world of beer and wine in St. Louis. While one of my favorite features of the guide is a list of St. Louis area breweries and some of the services they offer, they also feature a dynamite interview with Brian Owens, head brewer at O’Fallon Brewery. Here’s a small excerpt:

Owens, however, relishes every minute of the brewing process, especially savoring the early morning. “The best time in my day in any given week is mashing in the first batch of beer during the day. The beginning of the brew. Nobody’s here usually. It’s 5:30 in the morning. It’s quiet. You’ve got the place to yourself. The smell is absolutely wonderful!”

If you want to read the whole article, you’re going to need to seek out a free Sauce Magazine, as this article is only available where Sauce is distributed now available online! If you don’t know where to find a Sauce, use the handy-dandy Zip Code feature here.

Larry Chase is the Worthouse/Brewery Manager for , a new local Brewpub located in Creve Coeur. Larry was kind enough to answer some of my questions about how they brew their beer, how the ferment it and what some of his favorite styles are. (You can read my initial thoughts of GCFB here.)

STL Hops: How many styles does GC produce in a year?
Larry Chase: GC serves 4 regular house beers: Northern Light Lager (pale lager), Brother Benedict’s Bock (bock), Duke of Wellington IPA (IPA), and Broad Axe Stout (dry Irish stout). We also brew 6 seasonal beers. The current line-up includes Burning Barn Irish Red Ale, Ostara’s Spring Ale, Wag’s Wheat (Hefeweizen), Belgian White Ale, Oktoberfest, and McK’s Scottish Ale. All locations have one 350 gal batch of the seasonal to serve.

STL Hops: How much room for experimentation do the brewers have?
LC: Our head brewers experiment with recipe improvement through process controls and lab testing. Certain seasonal beers are sometimes tweaked on a year to year basis to improve flavor. Experimentation for developing new beers is limited given that the current seasonal rotation is set in place.

STL Hops: Can you quickly explain how the Fermentus Interruptus process works?
LC: Granite City’s business model for beer production is designed for flavor consistency and attractive financial leverage across a multi-unit restaurant concept. We are a restaurant with a microbrewery. A centralized brewery for wort production gives us the opportunity to consistently control the flavor inputs of the brewing cycle. We also remove from the restaurants both the capital cost of brewing equipment and the square footage cost of a manufacturing facility.

We then ship the wort in a customized tank truck to each location. After off-loading into fermenters we pitch yeast and finish the production cycle through fermentation, maturation, and filtering.

Shipping wort instead of finished beer allows us to avoid the complex legal hurdles of shipping alcohol across state lines.

STL Hops: How does the wort arrive at the stores?
LC: The wort is shipped in a straight tanker truck. Our trucks have a series of 4 or 6 individual pods (all insulated) at 400 gal each. This set-up lets us ship multiple styles of beer to multiple locations in one trip. We use hoses and a pump at each restaurant to transfer the beer from the truck into the fermenters.

STL Hops: How do you avoid problems like contamination?
LC: We follow standard cleaning, sanitizing, and testing procedures like all breweries. We simply pay attention to the extra step of wort shipping. The wort is chilled to 40oF and stored in a 37oF cooler prior to shipment. Like all breweries we have the constant challenge of maintaining clean and sanitary conditions.

We have a lab at the central worthouse for on-going sample testing.

Every brewery manager is trained and follows a set of SOP’s for the brewery operations at each restaurant. Our brewery field manager, trained in brewing science, oversees the work of all brewery managers.

STL Hops: How do you deal with things like aging with the limited capacity at each store?
LC: We serve 2 ales and 2 lagers as part of our regular beer line-up. We have enough tank space (5 fermenters, 8 cellar vessels) to ensure our required maturation time for each of the beers. Through our volume and usage reporting system we are able to schedule deliveries to ensure each location has wort on a just-in-time basis.

Running out tends to be only an issue when we experience mechanical failures with equipment at the restaurants. That’s no different from any other brewpub.

We only serve one batch of each seasonal. This increases the demand and the urgency for customers to come try the beer before it is gone.

STL Hops: What’s your favorite style of beer right now?
LC: I lean towards hop flavored and bitter beers. The bigger winter seasonal beers are always fun to drink during this colder time of year.

Thank you again Larry for providing STL Hops readers with a little more information on how your process works.

I got the opportunity to interview Mike Atwood of the blog Hoosier Beer Geek. Mike, and the rest of the Knights of the Beer Roundtable, are doing for Indiana what I’m trying do for St. Louis; promote beer and the culture surrounding it. In a bit of a cross promotional event, think Marvel/DC, he also asked me a few questions about STL Hops, feel free to read his interview with me here.

So I see there are 7 Knights of the Beer Roundtable, is there a King? Do you have a full knighting ceremony?

If there was a king, it was Chris Maples, who started the whole Hoosier Beer Geek thing. He started inviting others along pretty early on, and recently he’s been so busy with work that we never see him. We’ve all kind of taken over for him in the meantime. All decisions, from what we’re drinking on a particular evening to the design of the web site are voted on by all seven members.

The knighting ceremony is highly secretive and if I told you about it I’d have to kill you.

How does it feel to live in Three Floyds country and have the rest of the US extremely jealous of you? (Oh and who do I have to kill to get some Dark Lord?)

None of us are currently beer traders, but it’s definitely nice to know that if we were, we’ve got an ace up our sleeve.

We’re all well aware of Three Floyds (or at least you should be STL Hops readers, if you’re not already) but what other Indiana breweries are you proud to call your own?

We’re really blessed in that there’s a wide variety of brewers in Indiana doing all sort of different things. In Indianapolis and now Terre Haute we’ve got Ted Miller at Brugge Beer doing really fantastic work in a Belgian style. Also in Indy we’ve got the Broad Ripple Brewpub, which is pretty much where craft beer got its start in Indiana. Just outside of Indy in Noblesville we’ve got Barley Island, who won silver for their Black Majic Java Stout at the 2006 GABF. In Fort Wayne we’ve got Dave Holmes at Warbird doing really fantastically drinkable and wonderfully tasty “entry level” sort of craft beer. Down in Bloomington we’ve got Upland, another brewery that’s won gold and silver at GABF, and bronze at the World Beer Cup. We’ve got New Albanian down in New Albany, who currently have us head over heels in love with their Hoptimus. And that’s really just the tip of the Indiana beer iceberg.

You all call yourself “beer geeks,” how do you feel about the term “beer snob?”

Right off the bat we want to let people know we’re geeks, not snobs, hence the name Hoosier Beer Geek. I think we all consider it our mission to include as many people in this wonderful thing that is craft beer, and that’s not a snobby thing at all, is it? The way we see it, the more people that know about craft beer, the better the chances that we’ll be able to find it in restaurants and bars all over the state.

Were you aware that the term “hoosier” has a completely different connotation in St. Louis?

For the first twenty-three years of my life, I lived in a little town called Trenton Illinois, ten or so miles from Scott AFB. When I moved to Indy, I couldn’t get over how often the word Hoosier was used in everyday speech - the news reports: “Five Hoosiers Killed In An Eastside Car Crash”, the words “Hoosier Hospitality”, the IU basketball team… Hoosier this, Hoosier that…

Of course growing up just outside of St. Louis, I was thinking the same thing you are:

Peach fuzz moustache, butt cut
El Camino pick-up truck
Aerosmith, Loverboy, Motley Crue
Holding hands just me and you

We don’t need no high school
I think we’re too cool
We’ll have kids at seventeen
Getting laid at Dairy Queen

Hoosier love, Hoosier love
South Side City Hoosier love

“Hoosier Love” - St. Louis’ own MU330

After a while, Hoosier grows on you though. Like a fungus.

How far have any of you knights traveled because of your beer obsession?

Though it wasn’t a beer-only trip, Gina (my girlfriend and fellow Knight) and I recently returned from DC, where we took in the Brickskeller and one of Dogfish’s brewpubs. We’ve been to Cincinnati on a trip that was basically built around buying beer. I was just at the Tap Room in St. Louis. I think once you’re into beer, every trip becomes a beer buying opportunity.

I recently got a chance to ask Dave Johnson, one of the brewers at O’Fallon Brewery, some questions. I’m going to try and make this a regular feature so if you have anyone you’d like me to interview or any questions you’d like me to ask feel free to contact me.

STLHops: What’s your biggest daily struggle as a brewer?
Dave Johnson: Trying to keep the production up with the sales, and keeping the quality standards excellent.

STLHops: How much creativity are you allowed in this profession?
DJ: In a production brewery you have to brew all your beers very consistent. We only get creative when we come up with a new beer. Then we’ll throw around ideas for weeks, till we come up with something we think will be great.

STLHops: If I’ve heard correctly you guys are only allowed to brew up to a specific ABV, are there any plans to get that changed?
DJ: Currently we can only make beers up to 5% ABW (6.3%ABV), we are in the process of getting it upped to a “wine” license.

STLHops: Do you have any styles or ideas in mind once you do up it to a “wine” license?
DJ: That’s when we can get creative. We have too many ideas right now, but the first one that comes to my mind would be Imperial Smoked Porter- “Barrel Aged”?

STLHops: As a brewery in a small space, how do you pilot out new beers to develop?
DJ: Lately we have homebrewed them. It gives us a idea of the malt profile and the hop profile. Then we can tweak it and scale it up to 15 bbls.

STLHops: I’m sure I’m not the only homebrewer interested, but what equipment do you guys use to homebrew?
DJ: We use Brian’s converted keg for a mash tun, and my converted keg for a kettle. We have a 30bbl. hot liquor tank. We ferment in a 6.5 gal carboy in the temp. controlled Firkin cooler. Then we keg it in a corny.

STLHops: Your beer styles range from the Smoked Porter to Wheach, do you have a theme in mind with all of your beers?
DJ: Except for Gold, all our flagships started out as seasonal or limited offerings. Our Unfiltered Wheat started out as “Summer Wheat”. The seasonal usually have a theme in mind, like Pumpkin Ale in the fall, and Wheach for summer. Our newest is Goats Breath Bock Ale for winter.

STLHops: Why just one strain of yeast? Is it now considered a house strain?
DJ: We don’t have a lab. You have to be careful that different strains don’t mutate. Without a lab you can’t monitor that. Kolsch is our “House” yeast, and what we like about it is it’s versatility.

STLHops: What kind of hops do you use for the 5 Day IPA and when do you put in your hop additions?
DJ: The hops we use in the 5 Day are:
Summit, 90 min. and 60
Centennial, 30 min.
Cascade, 10 min., end of boil, and end of whirlpool
Cascade and Glacier dry hop in the fermenter

STLHops: Thank you Dave for your time.