I realize I haven’t written here since before Christmas and therefore since I’ve started at R&B. It’s been an eventful 9 months to say the least. So what is it like starting at a brewery where you will ultimately be in charge of every aspect of the beer that is produced there? Well, it started slowly. The former head brewer Liam Jackson and brewery manager Patrick Moore had brought the brewery from a place that needed some serious attention to a functioning brewery, although several upgrades were still required. Upon my arrival there had luckily already been the installation of a new Pro-Chiller glycol system. The boiler had not been updated in over a decade however and was only half functioning. It would often turn off in the middle of the night leaving our brewing water cold resulting in many cancelled brew days. We were lucky to have Patrick there to take charge of the planning required to get our current boiler up and running. He also coordinated the purchase and installation of our seven new conical fermenters (a first at R&B if you can believe it). Patrick deserves a ton of credit for getting the brewery to where it is today. It’s an old brewery and equipment continues to need attention on a regular basis.

So what about the beers? When I started at the tail end of 2015 I did not bring on any abrupt changes right off the bat. I observed each brew from start to finish, got to know the brewing system, the yeast strains, our water chemistry and really dove in to getting to know the sensory aspect of each beer. I also got to know the brewers and each of their strengths. We all liked the beers but agreed we should look to introduce small changes to get them to where we thought they should be. When we first started tweaking recipes a month or so in to my time there I was able to draw on our team to produce suggestions and find out what they felt our beers needed. We brought in a new yeast strain (BRY-97) as we felt our house ale strain at the time (Wy 1332) was unpredictable, slow, produced too many esters and could throw diacetyl if we weren’t extremely careful. One of the first things we did was increase our mash temperatures in order to build body in to our core brands. Earlier we noticed our beers finishing below 2 P resulting in thin tasting beers. With the new ale strain and our new mash temps we quickly saw that our beers were finishing quickly (5 days including diacetyl rest), consistently (almost always between 2.6 and 3.2 P depending on the beer) and cleanly (I have yet to taste diacetyl from BRY-97 including all of my time at Steamworks – knock on wood ;). After those changes we tweaked the Red Devil and ESB by reducing crystal malt (from about 12% to about 5%) and adding a small amount of Victory malt. The result was a less sweet beer that still offered full malt flavor and changes that did not change the overall identity of the beers. We completely overhauled the Vancouver Special IPA as we all felt it needed a bit more sharpness and a lot more hop character. The result was a medium bodied IPA with big hop flavor and aroma. I think we did a good job of including flavours and aromas of that we all could appreciate, such as pine (Patrick’s fav), tropical fruit (Carly and Octavio’s fav), and dank (Allan and I’s fav). We layered our hops at 10 and 5 minute boil intervals, then a big shot at whirlpool and we increased our dry hopping to 5 g/L. We utilized the classic Cascade, Columbus and Chinook and added some punch with Eureka, Simcoe and Citra. It’s definitely a lot of different hops but we’re happy with the overall product. My favorite comment I’ve heard about it was “It’s like drinking flowers” (I hope they meant that in a good way).

At times it hasn’t been easy tweaking recipes that have been in place for over a decade. For example we recently changed the yeast on the Sun God kristalwiezen to produce a beer we thought was a more authentic example of the style. The beer had won some awards in the part and that made it more difficult to convince others at R&B that we should go ahead with the changes. However, we produced a few test batches and after a few months we had everyone on board. Barry was skeptical of the changes at first but now says he likes it better than ever. Note: We initially changed the yeast from German Ale (Wy 1007) to Bavarian Wheat Blend (Wy3056) and then to German Wheat (Wy 3333) and we are currently fermenting the next batch with Weihenstephan (Wy 3068). 3068 was our first choice but people thought it was too different to change it that much so quickly. Therefore a compromise was needed to get to where we wanted. The blend was subdued enough to start out the transition and we’ve been slowly tweaking to get to our goal. I am finding a lot of times with this gig you just need to go ahead and make the changes you feel are right, but it’s also important to bring people on board. We’re excited that everyone at the company are loving what we are brewing these days.

We’ve also been able to have fun with the Mount Pleasant Series of beers. The first we came out with during my time here was Allan Cukier’s brainchild of the Lavender Saison. We blended French Saison yeast with Belgian Ardennes and dosed the beer with lavender (using lavender from Happy Valley farms on Vancouver Island) on its way to bright. I have to hand it to Allan, I was not the biggest fan of the idea when he pitched it to me, but we spent a good deal of time getting our lavender addition to just the right dose. We’ve heard that people can’t pick out the lavender, and we’re ok with that because we know what it added to the beer and it was exactly what we were going for (we’ve also heard people say the lavender was really strong). The next beer we produced was a recipe I came up with for a White IPA (actually I didn’t think of it as a White IPA at first, it took Octavio pointing out that my recipe was indeed a WIPA). When I was sharing it with my brewers Carly had an idea to use pear juice concentrate we had on hand in place of dextrose and we came up with a decent quantity for our addition. We used Belgian Ardennes yeast, lots of wheat and Galaxy and Centennial hops. We fermented it in one of our old dairy tanks and dry-hopped at fermentation temps of 26 C. The result was a beer that turned out better than any of us had expected. The beer wasn’t too bitter, had a great mix of hop aroma and phenolics and produced what we can only describe as a perfect little funk to go along with it. We had this beer available for about 5 months this past year and I’m hoping to bring it back as a seasonal come spring 2017. We also produced a Vienna Lager we were all happy to have around and a kettle sour featuring Enigma hops that is extremely crushable at 6.5%.

Just recently we have finally brewed our first new core brand since I joined the brewery. With the opening of the Ale and Pizza House we felt it was finally time to bring an American Pale Ale in to the mix. The beer is called Dude Chilling Pale Ale, named after the park we often hang out in after work and named by my lovely wife Judith, who is much better at naming beers than me. We literally just launched it in our restaurant yesterday and I’m extremely happy with it. It’s nothing special but it’s what I like about American Pale Ales. Light in colour, sessionable and just the right amount of hops with a good aroma. I hope this beer takes off, mostly because I want it around, it’s my go to style for an everyday beer. The labels should be ready pretty soon and they are looking pretty dope.

Beers coming up are a double IPA that’s about 8.5% and double dry hopped with Vic Secret, Galaxy and Columbus. We’re also currently fermenting a Russian Imperial Stout that should come in at about 10.5% abv. Oh and we are relaunching our Dark Star Stout with a new recipe – we’ve toned down the roasted malt, added more chocolate malt as well as Victory. We added more calcium carbonate to our mash and fermented it to 4.2 P finishing gravity so it is much smoother that the previous recipe; our abv is unchanged at 4.6%. We’re going to nitro about half of this batch next week and should have it in the restaurant very soon.

OK, so that’s pretty much a run down on the beer front at R&B right now. There’s so much more that’s happened though. Our brewery manager Patrick has left us to start a brewery up in Prince George called Crossroads Brewery (it’s going to be a sweet-as facility with tons of room for patrons including a massive patio, and Patrick’s going to produce some kick ass beers in a market that needs it badly). I was sad to see Patrick go but it opened the door for me to take more control of the brewery. I’m now taking on the roles of Head Brewer, Brewery Manager and Production Manager at R&B and I couldn’t be happier about it. I have a direct line to our owners and General Manager who have been very receptive of our team’s ideas. As long as we keep producing great beer I feel like we will have the freedom we need to keep innovating and staying relevant in a highly competitive market.

Our restaurant (we really want to call it our tasting room but have been told that’s a no-no by the government) took a lot longer than we expected to get opened. We therefore found ourselves quite cash-strapped for quite a while. So over the past few months our brewery improvement program (aka infrastructure spending) has been effectively frozen. But with the opening of the Ale and Pizza house in late July we are now finding ourselves busier than ever (about a 90% increase in production from this time last year!) and I will soon start pushing for more upgrades. We want to begin a barrel program at the brewery and eventually I would like to get a new hot liquor tank and water filtration system. Oh and it would be spectacular to get a canning machine so we can move away from 341 ml bottles and start getting more of our beers to more people. We also desperately need a new keg washer as we are having to perform maintenance on ours more and more regularly these days.

Overall the past 9 months have been a wicked adventure. I view where we are right now as only a small step forward for our brewery but I feel we’re going in the right direction. We will continue to stride forward and need to. With my amazing brewing team we will continue to focus harder every day on the quality of our beers and dedication to producing a product that we feel passionate and excited about. Our goal is to bring the reputation of this brewery to a point where people equate R&B with quality and dedication to our craft. I realize we are not there yet, and some I’m sure will say we’re nowhere close. But as Michael Lewis told me when I was considering taking this position, to take on a role at a brewery that includes challenges is a more important task than stating at a brewery where everything is fine and dandy. I view this role as a challenge and realize I need to keep getting better in order to fully take it on. It’s a long game and it’s just getting started.