2 Years In: Brewmaster Nick Talks WiLL Brew Lab + Spike Brewing System

Introduction

Adam: First guest to make a second appearance on the WiLLcast series — Mr. Nick Puddy. Thank you, sir. Welcome back.

Nick: Thank you.

Adam: So what's the brewing process
here at Wisconsin Lighting Lab look like three years in? How's it going?

Nick: Good. Things have been learned.
Lots of things actually — even recently. I've had 20, 25 brew sessions now,
somewhere in there.

Adam: Has it been about three years?

Nick: I think we're at about two and a
half, because there's the acquirement of all the materials, getting everything
built out, testing, figuring stuff out as we went. So that's about one a month?

Adam: Yeah.

Nick: I typically shoot for about one
a month, one every three to four weeks. Now that the world is kind of normal
again, hopefully pointed that direction, we're going to try to ramp up
production a little bit more — trying to get more of a stockpile.

Pump Maintenance & Lessons Learned

Nick: Even in the last couple months,
more things have been learned on the system. I had two pumps that just flat-out
failed. Much like as we were talking earlier with race cars, you have to
rebuild stuff every once in a while. So I had to just rebuild the pumps — a
couple thrust washers that just weren't there anymore.

Adam: Are two pumps required for the
system, or is one a redundant backup pump?

Nick: One is just circulating water
for the hot water tank, so it maintains pressure and temperatures — just
constantly keeps water moving so there's no hot spots. And then the second pump
is the work pump, I guess you could call it — it's the one that's transferring
whatever fluids, whether it be water or beer, into the fermenter and cooling it
down. That's the one that does the bulk of the work, but at the same time
they're both running about the same amount. One's always circulating water,
one's always circulating beer. So for them to actually both go out at the end
of the same brew session was actually kind of expected at the same time.

Adam: Nice.

Nick: Because I didn't have another
one fail the next brew session or two weeks later. I talked to our local
marketing department and they ordered me some parts, which came earlier this
week. So I'm going to rebuild those probably Thursday and then get everything
cleaned up again — thorough cleaning — and start brewing some more beer.

Adam: So you're not only brewmaster
but also the maintenance department?

Nick: Yes, for the brew system as
well. As you know, we all wear many hats. This is one of mine.

Adam: Have you been happy with the
Spike system overall?

Nick: Yeah, absolutely. Talked about
things I learned — that was actually one of the things I reached out to them
about. I said, hey, do you have replacement pumps? I don't see anything on your
website. Kind of how we work, they sent me some troubleshooting guides — here's
a really good video, kind of similar to what we do here. It was some guy that
owns a brew shop that I think sells their equipment, had one of their pumps
sitting on the table. He said, you know, if something goes bad, look at these
four things. I took that apart, and there was a little bit of grain that was
kind of caked in there — nothing too serious, but that was probably when it
stopped working. It just didn't pump the rest of the way. But yeah, this little
Teflon thrust washer about the size of your fingernail, flat-out wasn't there
anymore.

Adam: Did you ask for anchor bolts to
pre-ship on that pump?

Nick: No, but I did ask Hal Mark, and
you asked me, do you need all of these? Like, yes, I need two of them now, and
I'm going to use the other two for spares. Inventory.

Adam: Exactly.

Adam: Cool. Lessons learned — is it on
our marketing and sales process? It sounds like some maintenance lessons
learned, is it technical, the brew process, or is it kind of all of the above?

Nick: Yeah. Some of the stuff that
kind of got passed along in that video, I actually wasn't really aware of. They
mentioned, when you're running the pumps — going back to my driveway days,
you're constantly with the paddle and you're moving grain around. One of the
things that they actually suggested was not doing that when you're running the
pumps. So you pick up extra grain, and that's probably why that thrust washer
actually busted up and just disappeared. So learning more even just about the
process — simple things like that, where maybe I only have to replace that
every 50 batches or something.

Scaling Up the System

Adam: As far as systems are concerned,
say we wanted — I think we talked a little bit about this last time, but say we
wanted to have five times the output. Is it just a scaled-up system?

Nick: Yep. Everything's just bigger,
faster, more volume. More electricity. Just as we talk about sports lighting,
at some point you have to bump it up to 480 because of amp draw. That's
probably — we'd have to look at it — it would probably be a 480. The heating
elements go up in size and wattage.

Adam: So the power requirements change
a little bit.

Nick: Yeah. It'd be a little bit of an
upgrade than what we have in the panel there. But get an electrician and
they'll get it wired up. Literally it's scaling up — the pots, the grain, the
amount of hops, the water. Your efficiency — we talk about LEDs, your efficiency
still stays right about the same. So we run it about 80 to 85% with our grain
efficiency, meaning that we get about 85% of the sugar out of the grain, which
then in turn makes beer. Going to a larger scale, you're still looking at the
same efficiency — just you're making that much more at that point.

Tips & Tricks for Home Brewers

Adam: Nice. So a home brewer that's
looking to scale up to the system that we have — what are some of the tips and
tricks and the hardest lessons learned, beyond pump maintenance? How could you
help somebody streamline their learning process?

Nick: Read as much as you can. Trial
and error — don't be afraid of it, just like any sort of hobby. Message boards
are great, forums, Google, Instagram — honestly Instagram. I know you follow
Spike like I do. They've got great resources on that sort of stuff. They'll
share other people's homebrew setups, which — just seeing how somebody else
does it. We utilize pumps to move fluids from one container to another, where
somebody that's in their garage in their driveway just utilizes gravity. You
put your bigger tank up here, and you slowly step it down until the bottom one
is the fermenter, and you never use a single pump at all. Constantly try stuff,
constantly read, don't be afraid to experiment.

Favorite Recipes

Adam: Do you have any favorite
recipes?

Nick: The current rendition of the
WiLL Ale is probably my favorite, which is actually a tweaked recipe of my
personal reference — a personal recipe, which is “What Does the Hop Say?”, a
little one that I had Tyler help me name at some point. Made a label for it in
my home brew days. It's real flavorful, a lot of good feedback on it. It's got
some hops there but it's not overly hoppy for the people that the idea of hops
just turns them off — they don't want that IPA stuff.

Adam: Exactly.

Nick: So it's got some good flavor
there, but if you're what they like to call a hop head, you get that too. It's
something that we've gotten good feedback on. And then what I like to call my
pseudo-lager beer, which is a beer we don't lager — that'll be another I'm
going to make. Not sure if this batch or possibly the next batch, but that was
another one we got good feedback on. In fact, that was one of the ones that we
sent a decent amount to one of our sales reps, and they said they really liked
it.

Adam: Nice. So do you get repeat
requests for the same beer from certain reps, or do they taste it, they like
it, and we just send it at random? Do we have any —?

Nick: It's been kind of at random. The
one we just canned is actually what we had at our picnic out at Lakeside, which
was a summer wheat beer. That's the one I also say is a cursed beer, because
that's the one that took out those two pumps, and I've had issues with that
recipe every time I brew it. But that one turned out well actually this time,
so that might be a beer repeat. I have a real simple, good-tasting IPA that
actually went over pretty well — a little smoother, again not overly hoppy. I
know some people out there have requests for porters and stouts, so we're going
to try to work those into the winter months, because that's definitely stout
season — get a nice thick heavy beer they can sip in the middle of January as
opposed to July.

Adam: Do you have a coffee beer recipe
at all?

Nick: I want to do one. I'd like to
utilize some local coffee roaster — there's Awesome Brew in the area. I'd like
to try it. There's also — I don't necessarily make a mead, but I do want to
make another gluten-free beer with some honey. There's a guy I actually played
hockey with as a kid that we've gotten back in touch with in the last several
years. He's got a small hobby farm where he's got bees. In fact, he gave me
some of the honey — my girls have been eating it up on English muffins like
every day for breakfast. So I'm going to use some of that, try to get some
local ingredients in there. He's actually interested in our spent grain because
he's got chickens — he's like, I'll feed it to the chickens, I've got a compost
pile. Up to this point, we've just been tossing it, and I'd like to see that
get used.

Adam: Yeah, sure.

Nick: Tyler and I have talked about
getting it dried and making like a granola out of it, but that's pretty
labor-intensive.

Adam: What's left? You have sugar —
25% of the sugar is left?

Nick: But what else? It's barley, it's
wheat, pale malts, just different grains. They're ground up — the consistency
is similar to grinding up oatmeal. It's still pretty coarse. You could dry it
out. Some brew pubs — if you get down to Milwaukee, they'll take it, they'll
grind it up into a flour, and that's their pizza dough.

Adam: Nice.

Nick: Depending on what you use, you
can still make it gluten-free, depending on what grains you pick. I guess not
specifically grains — that's pretty much all gluten — but stuff along those
lines.

Customer Experience

Adam: I mean, from my view, two or
three years in, I think it's been overwhelmingly positive. It always amazes me
every time we bring somebody through — could be a vendor, could be a customer,
could be somebody we're interviewing — everybody always wants to know about the
brew room. We're geeking out about products and the company and everything
else, and they stop in their tracks as soon as they see the brew room. So it's
been a great part of the operation. I think maybe some people were a little bit
concerned about having a brewery associated with the operation, but my view is
always: if you're in Napa, California, I'm sure it'd be okay to have a winery
on site. Or in Wisconsin, it's just part of what we do — making lights and
making beer. So yeah, I think it's been great. From a sales standpoint, sending
out free six-packs with custom labels has just been overwhelmingly positive,
and certainly a great talking point. When people come through to be able to
enjoy the operation and have a glass of beer while doing it — it's pretty cool
as well.

Nick: It's crazy some of the people
that have toured through here, whether they're reps, contractors, future hires,
what have you — it's amazing how many will pop their head in and say that they
either home brew themselves, they've dabbled in it a little bit, or their
father, their cousin, or somebody like that does. It actually circles all the
way back to when you sent some beer to somebody up at Muza.

Adam: Yeah, we've got to get that guy
on the — the guy talking about pictures — sent it to his son, and his son
worked at Spike.

Nick: Yeah, absolutely. We've got to
have — we talked about it but now we're kind of getting back in the WiLLcast
swing of things — getting somebody from Spike would be awesome. I believe his
name's Brian. I know we have his email — we'll definitely have to reach out to
him again.

Equipment Upgrades

Adam: So what are some of your
equipment upgrade dreams? I know Spike has come out with a new system since
we've implemented this one. Do you have kind of a vision in your head of what
the next level might be?

Nick: One thing I'm actually looking
at, probably doing sometime soon — I'd still keep the exhaust fan in there
because it does generate a lot of heat, but kind of looking up at the ceiling,
we don't have water damage or anything like that, but you can see where there's
two nail heads kind of peeking through the drywall. Over time, a lot of
moisture in that room — even though we have a very strong exhaust fan — could
be at some point damaging to the room, the ceiling, the wall.

Adam: Should we check for mold?

Nick: I think we're good there, but
over time it certainly could potentially be a concern. Spike actually has a
system where it's basically a lid that goes on your boil kettle, and then
there's a tube that goes up and down, and you pump water into the side of it.
Basically the steam goes up through there, the water kind of condenses it and
just drops it down — would probably just have to drop down in the sink because
it's right there. It eliminates the need for a very strong exhaust fan. It
literally takes the majority of the moisture out of the air, pumps it down in
the drain, pumps it down into a bucket or whatever. Something like that is
probably something to look at implementing, especially as we ramp up production
again. I don't want to ruin our nice walls in this nice building, because
moisture just isn't escaping as efficiently as it could be. That's one
potential upgrade I'd probably implement sooner than later. And then the other
thing is actually getting a chilling system for the fermenter. Right now the
process of carbonation — it comes out of the fermenter, it goes in the kegs,
and then we put it in the kegerator. I crank the CO2 up and then let it sit for
a week. It works — honestly, it's the way that most home brewers do it. It's a
really efficient way to do it. You can control the CO2 levels pretty well. Now
that we have that dialed in, I don't think we've got any real issues with
over-carbonated beers. So that's dialed in pretty well. But by chilling the
fermenter itself, it is carbonated within the fermenter. So it skips that
transfer, which also helps eliminate potential infections — because anytime
you're moving liquid around, there's always that chance of some sort of germ or
something like that in there. That's actually how sour beers are basically made
— except you're purposely infecting the beer. If you don't want to infect it,
you try to keep everything as clean as possible, which obviously I do a lot of.
But if you keep it in the fermenter, you can carbonate in there — you just have
to chill it down. You can take your carbonation time from a week down to a day.
So I could start chilling it after half a day, get it to temperature, put it on
CO2, and then the following day it's ready to can. You're eliminating a whole
week of production in a sense. As we like to talk about efficiency, making the
whole lean beer production, almost in the sense of just-in-time production — if
you want to get into that aspect of it. So from dumping grain into the water
for the first time to canning it and sending out the door, we could potentially
be talking less than two weeks. Right now we're at about three. That's more of
a down-the-road sort of thing that I would really look at, because the system
we have in place right now works — it's fine, there's no real issue there. But
the steam catcher, I'd like to call it, is probably the main upgrade to look at
down the road. And then, who knows, capacity after that. But the systems we
have have fit us pretty well at this point.

Hops

Adam: Nice. Very cool. So what did you
bring along?

Nick: I picked these on my lunch hour.
I've been growing these for about three or four years now. And much as I'm sure
you can relate, now that you have two children running around the house,
finding time to do extracurricular activities and your hobbies kind of takes a
back road to their extracurricular activities. So I haven't had a chance to
ever harvest my hops. They're at a point right now where they're pretty much
ready to go.

Adam: What's the cycle time on the
plant?

Nick: It is a perennial, so it grows
back every year. Every spring I cut down the old vines, which — vines, which —
with the bee though. So some people think it's a vine, but it's a bine. I don't
know what the difference is in terminology, but whatever. Cut those down every
spring, they'll start shooting up. You kind of cut those back — the fresh ones
— and then the heartier ones come up. Just let them grow up a string or a
lattice structure of some type, and the hops will show up right around early
July, mid-July. Probably about this size. There are certainly some kind of
bigger ones that grow over time. Once you get to be about early to
mid-September, they'll start kind of drying out just a little bit — kind of how
these are now — and you pick them. You can dry them in a food dehydrator, some
people do in their oven, some people just put them on a screen and just let
them air dry. You try to get — I want to say I saw — you try to get like 60 to
70% of the moisture out of them, because otherwise they're real watered down,
you don't get as much of the flavor, you have to use that much more. I'm going
to try to pick them this week and let them air dry for about a week, and I'll
weigh them, see how much I have in weight. A typical batch of beer I use about
four ounces of hops in a 10-gallon batch, and those are compressed pellet form,
where I'll probably need like an entire bag worth if I use fresh hops. So we'll
see what happens. If you rip them apart...

Adam: Is this a certain family?

Nick: So this is a Cascade hop. I
tried to grow both Cascade and Centennial — my Centennial hops never took off,
but the Cascade did. Both of them I picked because they're a little higher on
the hoppy side. This was still home brewing, so of course I was thinking IPAs,
that's primarily what I drink. Not that I'm a beer snob to IPA, but it's what I
tend to lean towards. So that's why I picked those two particular hops. The
Cascade was the only one that grew, but it's a versatile little hop. You can
make a simple pale ale, or even like the WiLL Ale we do where it's not an
overly hoppy beer. It's versatile — they'll call it a flavoring hop and a
bittering hop. If you throw it into the early part of the boil, it's a
bittering hop. If you throw it in towards the end, it's a flavoring hop. And
it's citrusy, a little bit of dankness to it. Going back to our earlier
conversation, we got walked in. But yeah, just a good all-around hop.

Favorite Non-Nick Brews

Adam: So what are your favorite
non-Nick Puddy-brewed beers right now?

Nick: Pseudo Sue, which is made by
Toppling Goliath. Jordan has a relative — I forget the relation — where are
they out of? Are they down in Iowa? They're in Iowa, yeah. Him and Jake
actually brought me back some beer — they had a road trip down to a sports job
site, I forget which job it was off the top of my head, but he's got a relative
that works there, so he gets beer from there a lot. I'm like, uh, yes please.

Adam: That's a good hookup.

Nick: Yeah. I met up with a friend of
mine earlier this past weekend, she got me a collaboration beer that they did
with Central Waters, which is up toward Stevens Point — a barrel-aged beer.
That was not cheap. So she hooked me up with that. There's a Toppling Goliath
version, I guess they're going to put out in October. So I was going to tell
Jordan about that, but that's like a top three beer for me. Bell's Beer at
Bell's Brewing out of Michigan — just about anything they make is right up
there. I try to avoid the larger conglomerates, but there are still some out
there that are still decent beers. Really, if you look at, say, Sam Adams and
Dogfish Head, they've now combined and they're probably bigger than some of the
macro brews.

Adam: Are they still private? Are they
private-equity-owned, or is it still —?

Nick: They're family-owned. Or it's
still family-owned. Sam, who started Dogfish Head, and then I forget the guy's
name who started up Sam Adams — but yeah, they're both still privately owned.
The guy that founded Sam Adams — I found this out several years back — has like
a fund where he will help start up breweries.

Adam: Really?

Nick: Yeah. He's very much into
brewing — he's a craft guy. He wants to see other people try to build their own
brand, try to get out there and continue to kind of edge out some of the macro
brews. And don't get me wrong, I'm not above a Busch Light on a Sunday night
hockey league. I will literally drink — if it's cold, I will certainly try it.
I've had a pizza beer, and as awful as it was, I still tried it.

Adam: It sounds great.

Nick: Yeah, not good.

Adam: So do you see the market — is
there still like a hard shift toward the cider direction?

Nick: Honestly, the ciders have been
pushed aside.

Adam: Has it really?

Nick: It's all seltzers right now.
Seltzers. I don't quite understand it. I get the appeal of it — it's refreshing
on a hot summer day, which beer used to be, and now it's something else. I've
had a few here and there, and I get the appeal, but at the same time, I just
like the taste of a good beer. Every major beer manufacturer, whether it's
craft or macro brew, is making some form of seltzer. Because you almost have
to, otherwise you're just literally throwing money away.

Adam: Yeah, you've got to ride that
wave.

Nick: Exactly. You and I are old
enough, at least myself anyway, to know that all this is is what wine coolers
were 10, 15, 20 years ago. Honestly, Bartles and Jaymes. If anybody — history
repeats and it rhymes, right?

Adam: Yeah, exactly.

Nick: Anybody remembers Bartles and
Jaymes commercials — the little foil wrap.

Adam: Yeah, exactly. Well man, thank
you very much. Thanks for all you do. We'll chat again soon.

Nick: Sounds good.

Adam: Alright, cool.