Drinking is an Agricultural Act @ BevCon 2016

I must confess, I’ve reworked the classic quote from Wendell Berry more than a few times in my quest to connect our clients to agricultural side of malt. So I had to laugh when I got the invite to speak on a panel with the same title at the inaugural BevCon in Charleston.

bevcon

I’m honored to share the stage with my good friend Sean Wilson from Fullsteam Brewing, Diane Flynt from Foggy Ridge Cider, Ann Marshall from High Wire Distilling, and Sara Clow from Grow Food Carolina. In short, an all-star cast!

We’ll be discussing the distinctive ingredients and the unique flavors that they bring to a wide variety of regionally-focused ales and spirits. I’ll be sharing a summary of this year’s harvest in an attempt to capture the “ups and downs” of growing grains for a niche market.

The conference will also feature a laundry list of the South’s premier brewers, distillers, bartenders, and restaurateurs throughout the three day event. You should definitely make plans to attend!

Farmhouse FEAST @ All Souls Pizza – May 23rd

all souls pizza

We are excited to announce a charity beer dinner with our good friends at All Souls Pizza on Monday, May 23rd!

The Dinner:

The event will feature locally-raised pork from Austin Farms in Old Fort along with several local beers. We are planning to dine on the outdoor patio to enjoy the spring weather.

Monday, May 23rd 6-9PM

Vegetarian option available

$50/pp + applicable service charges

The Menu:

Antipasta – cured meats, pickled vegetables, farm and sparrow bread and ferments

Crispy confit pork belly with second spring greens and scuppernong vinaigrette

Corned ham with asparagus and parsley sauce

Bloody Butcher corn tart with whipped creme fraiche and strawberries

 

The Charity:

A large portion of the ticket proceeds will go to support the outstanding work of FEAST Asheville. FEAST’s mission is to empower families to grow, prepare, enjoy healthy food as part of an active lifestyle.

The Breweries:

Here is what we have confirmed so far…more to come!

Twin Leaf Brewing

Newgrass Brewing

Hi-Wire Brewing

The Tickets:

http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/2547436

The Back Story:

We have been working Austin Farms, in Old Fort to recycle our waste material from the malting process. The waste is a mix of rootlets and thin kernels that are removed from the malted barley. This “waste” is rich in protein and other nutrients, making it an ideal food for livestock. This partnership allows Riverbend to recycle over 80% of the total waste from our operation every year!

Collaboration Update Pt. 1 – Revelry Brewing+Jolly Pumpkin

revelry brewing

Local malt and Riverbend swag heading to Revelry Brewing.

This year’s Brewvival brought together some of craft beer’s finest to Charleston for an epic weekend of tastings, dinners, and boozy brunches. If you weren’t able to make it down, don’t despair. Several of the visiting rock star breweries joined forces with the local talent to create something special and uniquely southern!

The first collaboration features our new friends at Revelry Brewing Company who teamed up with Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales out of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Needless to say I was super excited to get the call from Ryan at Revelry asking us to take part in this one! Jolly Pumpkin’s beers helped get me hooked on sour beers several years back. Maracaibo Especial remains a favorite!

The crew at Revelry put together an amazing array of local and foraged ingredients. Red Bay leaves, longleaf pine needles, and juniper berries. Geechie Boy Mill provided Indigo Blue and Jimmy Red Corn to mash in addition to a blend of barley, wheat, and rye malts from Riverbend!

Ingredient mix for the collaboration

This one will be bottled conditioned with a brett blend to add a nice tart finish. Stayed tuned for information on release date and pricing!

Legislative Meeting at New Belgium

meeting

Andrew Lemley from New Belgium addressing the crowd.

We got an opportunity to meet up with several legislators, board members from the NC Brewers Guild, and our local brewing community this week for a “State of the State” meeting. New Belgium hosted the event and served up Citradelic, Blue Paddle, and some other favorites for the crowd. Green Opportunity’s Kitchen Ready Program prepared some great food as well!

Needless to say, I love the fact that this constitutes a work day!

Margo Knight Metzger, executive director of the NC Brewer’s Guild, provided the crowd with a summary of NC’s craft beer industry.

– 160 breweries ( up from 45 in 2010!)

– 675,000 barrels of total production

– 2nd largest increase in barrel production in the U.S.

– 10,000 jobs

– 1.2 Billion in total economic impact

This update was followed by a roundtable discussion which allowed the legislators and brewers to review current regulations and their impact on the industry. Topics such as excise tax, distribution caps, and ALE enforcement were cited as the major hurdles to grow North Carolina’s beer economy.

I took this opportunity to share what other states are doing to engage and support the agricultural side of brewing. For example, New York state has a wildly successful farm brewery law that provides incentives for using locally sourced grains. Virginia is also working reviewing and incentive program for farmers who grow grains and hops for the brewing industry. These laws help support the development of a food system for craft beer and benefit the farming communities throughout the state. We need something like this to support continued growth in North Carolina.

I plan to join the NC Brewer’s Guild on June 1st for their annual lobbying day in Raleigh. Check back for further updates!

FAVORITE BEERS OF 2015

A brief break in production here at the malt house has provided a minute to share a few of my favorite beers of 2015. Not necessarily new beers, just new to me. Presented in the order they were consumed and noted.

ECLIPTIC / WICKED WEED / STONE – POINTS UNKNOWN IPA

A lot of brewing fire power went into this one! 25% Barrel aged Belgian Tripel and 75% West Coast IPA blend. Probably my first brush with the distinctive tequila barrel character. That flavor clawed its way through the high ABV (9.5%) and fresh West Coast IPA hop blend. The result? A complex blend of tropical fruit (Jarrylo, Calypyso, Amarillo hops) and yeast driven phenolics which blends with the tannins from the tequila and red wine barrels.

favorite beers of 2015

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GREEN BENCH – SAISON DE BANC VERT

So excited to see these guys distributing into NC! As you may know, I’m a huge fan of saisons and this one was one of the best I had this year. Perfectly carbonated and very approachable at 6.5% ABV, this is great example of what “house” cultures can bring to the style. The malt and hop bills appear to be fairly traditional, but there is a distinctive blend of guava and papaya that give way to white vine-like dryness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GREEN FLASH – SOUL STYLE IPA

Yes, you are reading this correctly….a “normal” IPA made this list. Why? because it is just damn good. Green Flash’s West Coast IPA was a “go to” for me, but the reformulation to 8.1% ABV (up from 7.2%) made it less user friendly. Enter Soul Style, similar hop profile and richer malt backbone, but with an ABV just above session strength. I just saw on their website that this one is also available in a Tangerine version…not sure if it will make it to NC, but keep an eye out for it!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FONTA FLORA – BRUTUS

A beautiful saison finished with brettanomyces and whole dandelion flowers. I enjoyed it when it was first released this summer, but a little age really took this beer to another level. My wife and I opened a bottle on one of these recent spring-like evenings and it was really something special. Poured with a perfect, rocky head and a hint of funk in the nose. The beer itself was bone dry and nicely acidic which played well with the bright, lemony flavors that were front and center. Think freshly squeezed lemonade with a shot of seltzer…perfect.

2015 Planting Update

planting

Streaker oats being planted in Lenoir County, NC

As summer fades into fall, we shift our energies from analyzing crop samples to planning for the future. Winter grains are planted in October and harvested in May or early June throughout the south. Orchestrating the harvest, cleaning, and planting of these grains requires a tremendous amount of communication between the malt house and our network of growers. Working on a contract model helps us secure our raw materials for the upcoming year and gives the farmer peace of mind that he will adequately compensated for his harvest. This year we were able to expand our network to include new growers in Western North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky. See below for some highlights.

Carolina White Wheat – Hickory, NC  

We partnered with our friends at Carolina Ground to sustain production of this newly developed white wheat variety. To our knowledge, it has never been malted before and we are eager to see how it performs next summer…maybe the perfect addition to an all NC bourbon recipe?!

Streaker Oats – Kinston, NC 

We got a chance to experiment with this hulless oat variety in 2014 and fell in love with the flavor…think toasted almonds and top shelf oatmeal! After talking with several of our brewer friends we realized this ingredient serves as a “secret sauce” in everything from export stouts to Belgian farmhouse recipes. We were able to secure over a ton of certified seed and will hopefully have a strong harvest in 2016.

Endeavor Barley (2-row) – Heathsville, VA  (Mantua Farm)

While we have several farmers planting Endeavor for us this season, this farm is something special. This bicentennial farm is located in the Coan River watershed, a major tributary of the Potomac and was considered as a potential site for our nation’s capitol. The property is amazing, beautiful rolling land with a Colonial mansion that dates back to 1790! Our farmer has really done a great job of managing this land. Crop rotations, not till practices, and vegetated buffers all serve to limit nutrient and sediment runoff into the adjacent estuary.

This picture doesn’t do it justice, but the stand was already well established by early November, which will hopefully translate into a high yielding, disease resistant crop.

B Corps Meeting with Patagonia

B Corps

Aspiring B Corps from Asheville area meeting with Vincent Stanley (Courtesy Susanne Hackett)

“Malt with a Mission”

Call it a slogan, tagline, whatever you want. Regardless, it doesn’t always get the attention it deserves. Those four words capture our desire to connect local farmers to the craft beer industry, while taking care of our employees and our planet. Simply put, these goals have been a part of our DNA since day one.

One of the companies we’ve used as a model for our development is Patagonia, which was founded in 1973 by Yvon Chouinard. Since their inception, they’ve done things differently (and better) than most companies on the planet. On-site childcare, organic food in the cafeteria, support of organic farming, non-profit donations, the list goes on.

Last week we had the exciting opportunity to take part in a roundtable with Patagonia’s Director of Philosophy and co-author The Responsible Company, Vincent Stanley. The event was aimed at the growing number of aspiring B Corps in Asheville. B Corps operate as beneficial companies that hold themselves to high standards of ethical, environmental, and social conduct in an effort to change the status quo of capitalism in our society.

Each participant submitted questions to drive the conversation. Subjects ranged from worker compensation to political activism to creating and maintaining company culture. Vincent told the group about some of the most challenging days at the company, which led them to layoff over 100 employees due to cash flow issues in the 1980s. He also shared some of the things he took pride in, such as their 20 Million and Change Program.

His message to the audience was clear….stay true to your beliefs right from the start. For example, supporting 1% for the Planet. This level of support is relatively easy to attain for a small company, but becomes more challenging as revenues rise and more people are involved in the financial management of the company.

I left feeling like Riverbend is on the right path. We’re working hard to create a company that supports our community, maintains a work/life balance, and makes great products at the same time.

 

So….will Riverbend become a B Corp?

Hopefully! Achieving this goal requires an extensive assessment of every facet of the business. This includes sourcing practices, employee compensation, renewable energy utilization, etc. Early assessment scores have pushed us to expand our recycling program, improvement record-keeping, and develop an employee handbook.

We’ll keep you posted on our progress!

Homebrew Kits! Now Accepting Pre-Orders

homebrew kits

Introducing Riverbend homebrew kits! We’ve developed an American-style rye pale ale recipe kit that showcases the range of our hand-made, floor-malted, artisan malts. The grain bill is a combination of our Pale and Heritage regionally grown barley malts, combined with a pound and a half of our Carolina Rye malt (the same stuff that went into the New Belgium Hop Kitchen RyePA) and a couple ounces of our specially-roasted chocolate malt. We’ve selected some popular American hop varieties (Bravo, Amarillo, and Cascade) to go in the kit, as well as a pack of Safale US-05, the well-known “Chico” strain of American ale yeast.

This fall, we’ll be launching a web store to sell this kit, and plan to release a series of all-grain homebrew kits over the coming year. Before we launch the web store, however, we’d like to offer our core fan base the first opportunity to pick up a kit.

The kit retails for $44.95 plus tax. The kit will come pre-crushed for your convenience. Please contact homebrew@riverbendmalt.com to place your order. Local homebrewers can arrange to pickup their kit at our production facility. Otherwise, we will set up shipping for out-of-towners.

As a bonus, we’ll offer everyone who places an order by Oct. 31st a coupon for 10% off their next homebrew kit purchase through the Riverbend web store!

We hope everyone is as excited as we are to see Riverbend malt in the hands of homebrewers!

Expansion: Complete!

After months of installing, calibrating, and troubleshooting our new equipment, we finally have the various components of our expansion dialed in. We’ve done several runs now with everything in place and though we’ll continue to make adjustments as we go along, we’re excited to get into a rhythm and focus on doing what we do best: making great malt.

Here are some of the final pieces of the puzzle to get us to where we are today. (Check out part one and part two of our expansion to get the full story.)

 

Bag Unloader/Auger

Using a forklift and this bag unloader, we can easily empty a bag of raw grain and load the steep tanks. This procedure can now be safely operated by one person. We load a super sack onto the frame, put the iris valve in the closed position while we open the bag, then open the valve and use the auger to carry the grain into the steep tanks. A control panel operates the auger and allows us to choose which tank to fill.

Expansion

Brian starts a new batch, using the bag unloader to load the steep tanks.

Grain Conveyor

After the grain germinates on the floor for several days, we use this grain conveyor to help us load germinated grain into the kiln. With a few of us shoveling into the conveyor and one person spreading grain in the kiln, we can load the kiln in just a few hours.

Bucket Elevators

Three bucket elevators have helped us automate the cleaning process significantly. Sure, we still have to shovel grain out of the kiln, but the bucket elevators carry the grain from the kiln to the debearder, the debearder into the seed cleaner, and from the seed cleaner into a hopper equipped with a bagging scale, which we then use to fill 50 lb. bags. No more manually moving grain from machine to machine!

Seed Cleaner

This is the “crown jewel” of the cleaning and packaging operation, a refurbished Clipper seed cleaner, built in the 1950s! (We’re thinking of calling her “Bertha.”) It sorts malt through a series of screens, removing anything too small or too big for disposal. A large fan blows dust off the malt so the brewer gets a clean product. We can now clean and package nearly four tons of malt in half a day!

Dust Collector

This was one part of the system that presented some challenges. The dust collector we originally ordered just didn’t have enough power to handle the dust coming out of the seed cleaner, which uses air to blow the very fine material off the grain. A friend helped us source this bad boy, which provides more than enough suction to keep most of the dust out of the air.

Over the next several months we will enjoy our expanded capacity and a steady production schedule, but always in the back of our minds…what’s in store for phase 3?

Meet the Brewer: Luke Holgate of Hi-Wire Brewing

brewer

Luke loads our malted wheat into the grist mill for the Uprisin’ Hefeweizen brew day.

To celebrate this week’s bottle release of the latest seasonal from Asheville’s own Hi-Wire Brewing, we’ve got a quick Q&A with Hi-Wire’s head brewer Luke Holgate. Uprisin’ Hefeweizen was brewed a couple weeks ago using our Appalachian Wheat Malt and it’s a damn good beer. Kick back with an Uprisin’ and enjoy!

When did you start brewing? What was the first beer you ever brewed, and how did it turn out?

After receiving my BS in Biotech from RIT in 2007 I moved home and took a bar tending job at a local microbrewery. After really just hanging out and bugging the brewer who has since moved on to become the Head brewery engineer for a 100,000+ bbl/year brewery, I began to discover the parallels between my education and the science of brewing. I brewed my first home-brew in a brewery and have never truly home-brewed outside of a brewery atmosphere. My first brew was an all-grain (also never made an extract brew) grapefruit pale ale that was essentially a Sierra Pale clone with grapefruit rind in the boil and juice post ferment. It may just be because it was my first brew but I thought it turned out quite well.

Tell us about your approach to brewing a hefeweizen. What should we expect from Uprisin’?

Hefe’s are a funny style to me because I don’t personally drink them all that often. Although I certainly appreciate a good representation of the style it’s not typically on the top of my beers to order. That being said, I do appreciate the fact that a whole lot of people love them and so when I set out to write this recipe I was trying to make it for a hefe lover and not necessarily to my own palate. Finding the balance between the estery and phenolic flavors and aromas is to me the most important part of producing a good hefe. I have had examples that are completely banana laffy taffy, as well as ones that are thin and have no depth of character. My goal was to make a simple recipe that let the complexity of the yeast come through with a tightly controlled ferment so as not to over do the ester profile.

Tell us about your team of brewers at Hi-Wire.

Our brew team here at Hi-Wire is a great group of hard working individuals. We all have the same approach which is that we are doing this job because we want to learn more and more everyday. We have differing approaches to things like recipe formulation which is enormously important in us coming out with new and exciting brews. I am very analytically minded and need a number or a graph to correlate everything that is happening in my brewhouse whereas Brandon and Nick (two of the other brewers here) have a much more artistic approach to things like recipe formulation which keeps them from being buried in the data that I sometimes find myself blinded by.

What excites you the most about your recent expansion?

Our recent expansion has given us the ability to produce more of our flagship brands but possibly most exciting is the ability to fit more fun and experimental brews into our yearly repertoire. This means more Ringmaster’s Reserve brews as well as new and exciting seasonals.

If you had to drink one beer for the rest of your life, what would it be?

If I had to drink one beer for the rest of my life I think I’d keep it simple. Pabst Blue Ribbon for all eternity.

Uprisin’ Hefeweizen – maltster approved!