BAM Brew Day at Cleophus Quealy

Oh no! It's Tuesday!

The CQ taproom.

Beer! Barrels! Brewery!

Sorry for the late update. I had another craft beer-y weekend, and I can't wait to share all about it. This is kind of a sequel from the events of last weekend at the BAM Christmas party. One of the prizes for the winning IPA brewer was to brew a version of it at Cleophus Quealy nanobrewery in San Leandro, CA, just south of Oakland in the East Bay. But not only did the winner get to brew with them, all of BAM was invited to CQ for the day! We were guests of the brewery and were treated to beer and pizza. What a better Sunday Funday?


At most there were only about 10-12 of us BAM members there that day. This turned out to be a good number as the brewhouse isn't that big and we all had plenty of opportunity to look into the mash tun and boil kettle. Dan, the head brewer and co-owner of CQ, had to modify the winning recipe, which itself was a version of Jason's original recipe, so it's odd that the winning recipe of a competition wherein all the entries were essentially identical was made, and not just that original recipe. But it's all good. I think the best prize for the winner is that he gets some volume of beer for himself. Whether it is a carboy full of chilled wort to pitch yeast into once home, or some number of kegs to take home after fermentation, conditioning, and packaging, the winner from last weekend gets free professionally brewed beer, and that's a nice prize.

CQ's 7-bbl brewhouse. From this all their beery goodness spring forth!

To me, one of the funny things about the brew day is that I recognized only a few of the BAM members who made it out to CQ. I guess there are a lot of members who don't regularly attend the monthly meetings. It was great to meet them, and to get to know some of them and their brewing techniques, and I had two such informative interactions Sunday. I talked with Kenneth, an older gentleman with what sounds like a slight German accent, about fermentation temperature control. I bought a mini fridge this summer for that, but only have cooling control. This is no problem during the warmer months when the fridge is fighting the higher ambient temperatures, but during this late fall and winter my cold apartment sits in the low 60s, so I really need heating control. I had been looking at building my own paint can light bulb heater, and when talking about this with Kenneth he told me he uses reptile cage heat tape, a much easier, more straight forward way to heat one's fermentation vessel. Kenneth swore by it, so after I returned home from the brew day I looked up this stuff, which I had come across in my light bulb heater research, and realized, "there are pet stores in Berkeley, and one of them has to sell this stuff!" I wanted a working heater before Christmas because I'm traveling between holidays, so I looked up Berkeley pet stores and found the East Bay Vivarium, a whole store dedicated to reptiles right here in West Berkeley! I ran over there, bought the stuff, and by day's end I had my own fermentation heater warming my conditioning coffee milk stout up from the low 60s to the high end of that temperature decade. Having "dry-hopped" 2-oz of whole coffee beans last weekend, this warmer temp will help flavor extraction until I bottle, and will hopefully allow the yeast clean up all residual precursor chemicals, a problem I think I had with my oat pale ale earlier this fall. The temperature has kept well in the high 60s, and I've been shaking the carboy everyday to keep the yeast in suspension to do their work.

The other informative interaction I had at the CQ brew day was a discussion over pizza lunch with Jason, the mastermind behind the BAM Style of the Quarter competition recipe. His recipe had quite an interactive temperature schedule for fermentation, and that's the first time I've done so much work, besides water baths and ice packs, to control and change temperature during fermentation. He explained that it was to allow for maximum primary fermentation, diacetyl rest, yeast flocculation, dry hopping, and final cold crash. It all made sense once we discussed it, and I'll be using aspects of it in future brews. I will definitely be cold crashing from now on, as it really helped with clarity.

Adding first wort hops. 

Shoveling out the spent grains. To compost it goes!

Not only was the brew day fun for us, but I could tell that Dan, CQ head brewer, had a good time, too. Us BAMers got to hang out during the brew, and Dan let us help out as we could. In a small nanobrewery there's a lot of manual labor and little automation, particularly in mashing in the grain and cleaning out the vessels. Dan had us pour the 50-kb bags of grain into the mash tun and stir it in, and once the runnings were transferred to the boil kettle we cleaned out the spent grains from the tun. Several of us teased that we should be invited every brew day, as long as we got pizza and beer ;-) But seriously, this is a great opportunity for a budding brewer to get time in at a professional establishment, volunteering their labor, and learning a lot while ingratiating themselves into the local independent brewing scene. I've contacted CQ asking about volunteering on their brew days and we'll see what comes of it. In addition to my continued conversations with a new microbrewery opening in West Berkeley next year, I'm doing what I can to transition into East Bay brewing.

I had to leave during the boil and got a ride home back to Berkeley from another BAMer. The brew day was a great experience, I got to know more BAM members, and participated in my first professional beer brewing. I hope I can have more experiences like this throughout 2016, and hopefully find my way into a local brewery's employ.

I'm going to be at a conference all next week, so there won't be an update, but hopefully I'll get one ready for the first week of 2016.

Have you got to participate in a brewery's brew day? How was it? What was your favorite part?

Until next time, friends, happy brewing!