I hope you all know that
Victory Brewing has picked up the license to brew
Perkuno's Hammer, the Baltic porter I had a hand in instigating and naming at
Heavyweight Brewing. Heavyweight closed last year, of course, and I was a bit bereft: no more Hammer. Luckily, some other people felt the same way, and yesterday was
Hammerfall at Victory.
-----------
We were standing in the control room at Victory. It was stiflingly hot, the AC was out, and we were all waiting for the moment when this first Victory brewing of the Hammer would start.
Ron Barchet (Victory brewmaster): "Tom, do you want to push the button?"
Tom Baker (Heavyweight owner/brewer/everything): "Me? Push the button?"
Brian Hollinger (Victory brewing engineer): "That's the one there."
Dave Sippel (Victory ass't brewer): "I already pushed it."
Me: "Oh. What time is it?"
Brian: "It's 1:00."
Me (looking at a clock that says 1:03): "Cool, 1:00, right on time."
(Silence for about a minute; people sweat) Me again: "Um...exactly what is going on now that we've pushed the button?"
----------
Turns out it was
milling that had started up, so we trooped down to Victory's
marvelous wetmill. Ron explained how wonderful it was: the malt is wetted very carefully so that the
husk gets wet and soft, but not the kernel. This way, when the malt hits the rollers -- which are set quite tightly -- the kernel
cracks as always, but the husk is
not broken up, like it is in a dry mill. This makes for a
better filter bed, and less
tannins from the husk (because of less surface area).
Ron believes that there are
only three wetmills in use at micros in the U.S.: Sierra Nevada, New Belgium, and Victory
(and Deschutes, too: see comments below). It's wicked expensive, and
expensive to maintain as well, and because there are so few of them, if it breaks down, a tech has to come from Germany. It's broken down once so far, which put a crimp in brewing. How long were they down?
"A week," Ron admits. "But the benefits are worth it."
Why is it that Victory is in company with two much larger craft brewers? "Because it's
important," Ron said. "The stability and flavor improvement you can get from the wetmill are very important in the kind of beer we make." Why don't other brewers invest the quarter million dollars in a wetmill if it's so important? "Because here the
owner is the brewmaster," said Ron. "The benefits in shelf-life and flavor are clear." Clear, but not something you can easily measure and put a price on? "Right," said Ron, and grinned. "But here the
accountant is the brewer, too."
-----------
Ron had pulled me a glass of
Sapphire Bock, an interesting beer. A friend of his from brewing school works at a German brewery near the hops regions of Bavaria, near the Austrian border. The
Bavarian hops growers came to him and said, look, we know the American craft brewers are using a lot of hops (
damn betcha!). How can we get them interested in
buying some of our very fine hops? Make a hoppy beer with them, and serve it at the Craft Brewers Conference, he says. Oh, wonderful,
you must make us a hoppy beer with this new Saphir hop! He convinces them that it would make more sense for an American brewer to do it, and he knows
just the guy.
So Victory makes a hoppy bock to his specs, and as Ron said, "It was interesting making it to his recipe. It's
not what I would have done, but it's a perfectly good way of doing it." This was his opportunity to point out -- absolutely correctly -- that Victory had gotten big enough that people have started to
complain that they don't do anything really interesting any more. "That's ridiculous," he said, "getting big has let us do
even more interesting stuff, like this! Look out at the bar, we've got over 15 beers on right now." Victory's
single-hop pils series has been nothing short of
brilliant, but of course, they get
no credit for it from the bulk of the geekerie because 1)they're
lagers; and 2)they're
under 7%.
Sigh.-------
The grist is
welling up from the bottom of the mash tun. It's thick, it's cakey, it's got
beans in it (over 100 lbs. of black-eyed peas; the Roman beans were crazy expensive, over a dollar a pound), it's...getting really high. "I've never seen it that high," says Brian. "
Get that!" Tom shouts gleefully, "
The Hammer's too big for Victory's mashtun!" They split the mash into another vessel (mash cooker?), and kept going.
The aiming point for the Original Gravity of the wort was 20.5P, a
big boy that should ferment out right around 8%, maybe a bit higher. Hopping is early additions of Tettnang and Hallertauer; as Ron says, they've got contracts that make it economically reasonable to use these deliciously aromatic hops for bittering hops.
-----------
My greatest
Hammer Moment was sitting at the bar at dba in Manhattan, about three months after the Hammer came out in 12 oz. bottles, and hearing the
bartender telling another customer about "this beer we had in last week, it was
the best f---ing beer, it was big and black and fantastic, had some
weird name, something hammer, like the God's Hammer, or something, and it
rocked!" And I realized..."Are you talking about Perkuno's Hammer?" "Yeah, dude, that's it! That beer's f---ing
awesome!" A moment I cherish.
Tom offered his best
Hammer Moment. The first run of the Hammer was in individually numbered 750 ml bottles, with a label that was
pretty faint to begin with, and rapidly faded to
next to nothing in a cooler. And George Gray, the owner of
Andy's Corner Bar, the legendary beer bar in Bogota, NJ, calls him to ask him what the hell this great beer is. "What's the name?" Tom asks. And George says he doesn't know, it's just a
white label with a line and 320 written on it in Sharpie ink. Yup, that's the Hammer.
Ron's best
Hammer Moment was when he decided Victory should keep it alive. "My first thought when I heard Heavyweight was closing was how that was too bad for Tom. But my second thought was '
Where am I going to find more Hammer?!' And that's when I thought we should
figure out a way to do it." Now
that's a great Hammer Moment.
----------
I had to leave; had to get home and get back to work. But
the Hammer was on its way. Victory's brewed two 50 bbl. batches yesterday; as Tom said, he only brewed 150 bbls. of
Hammer in the whole first
year of production. It's coming out in 750s and draft. But it
may not be called "Perkuno's Hammer." There may be legal action from other interested parties. Ron: "We may not call it Perkuno's Hammer,
but we're making it."We suggested a few other names: Perkuno's Bummer, Perkuno's Hemmorhoid, Perkuno's Mallet. It was obviously a
slow day for imagination. I still like one of my original suggestions:
Black Blizzard. Whatever name it comes out under, we'll know, and we'll let everyone know:
Perkuno's Hammer strikes again!
Just picked up a hot rumor from a usually reliable source: Sackets Harbor Brewing is planning to break ground on a new $4,000,000 brewery from the ground up in Sackets Harbor this summer. Capacity is planned to be in the 10,000 bbl+ range; if that seems outlandish, remember that Sackets Harbor already has a fairly well-known contract presence. The brewery will include both bottle and canning lines, and will produce both Sackets Harbor beers and a long-promised line of soft drinks. They will also be competing for the growing trade in small-batch contract brewing.
