Behind-The-Scenes at WiLL Brew Lab feat. Brewmaster Nick

Introduction

Adam: This is the WiLLcast, presented
by Wisconsin Lighting Lab. My name is Adam Rupp, and my guest today is Nick
Puddy. Nick, welcome.

Nick: Thank you.

Adam: So Nick is an applications
engineer here at Wisconsin Lighting Lab, and also has the recent title of head
brewmaster.

Nick: I actually recently added that
to my email signature this morning.

Adam: That's cool. It's a real thing.

Nick: Why not?

Adam: I want to talk a little bit
about your background in brewing and how we tie that into the lighting
business, and how we can serve our customers through brewing and some other
things that are related to Wisconsin. Nick, how'd you get into home brewing?

Nick: Well, obviously, at the start, I
like beer — that was the first part. I started with a one-gallon system,
stovetop, a little one-gallon jug. You can do everything in your kitchen. Like,
go try this out, see how it goes.

Adam: How long ago was that?

Nick: My oldest daughter is five, and
I think my wife was pregnant with her at the time, so going on like six years.
From there, I made a couple good batches. A one-gallon batch gets you about 10
to 11 bottles, so I said, alright, we got to upscale a little bit. Then I
bumped it up to a five-gallon system, which you have to kind of move outdoors
if you're doing home brewing with that big of a batch. That gets you about two
cases. Did about a handful of batches out there. Little inconvenient — you've
got to play the weather. A couple times I had to put up a piece of plywood to
block the wind from blowing my burner out. It was just a one-kettle system, so
that has its pros and cons. Did about a half a dozen batches that way — for
different events, birthdays, barbecues, what have you. It took a little bit of
a back burner — pardon the pun — for a while when we had our second daughter,
so I only made a couple batches probably after that, again based kind of on
events coming up. Tried doing some winter brewing in the garage in the middle
of November, which didn't go well at all because you're not playing with the
temperature. And then fast-forward a few years later, and we have now a much
more state-of-the-art system compared to what I was archaically working on probably.
And yeah, it's great.

The Different WiLL Brews

Adam: Marking-wise, how many batches
have we done?

Nick: We've been using — we're
probably close to coming up on like 20 batches maybe now.

Adam: How many different recipes?

Nick: Recipe-wise, I think we're at
about half a dozen. Did a gluten-free — got another gluten-free TWP probably to
come in 8 weeks. Did recently an IPA that went over really well — that was a
five-gallon batch, I'll bump that up to a 10-gallon. Our WiLL Ale is kind of
our staple so far; that's getting canned up next week. Did a stout for Stout
Month, which is in February. And then kind of a pseudo-lager we did for a
marketing tool with some of our outside sales reps. About a half a dozen
different recipes. Couple others in the hopper — looking at maybe trying to do
an NA beer, because there's a market for that, just like there's a market for
gluten-free.

Adam: Absolutely.

Nick: So play to the market, play to
the seasons.

Why Become a Home Brewer?

Adam: Aside from drinking the beer,
what do you think draws home brewers and brewers in general to beer making?
Were you a chemistry guy in high school?

Nick: Really? No. Just the variety and
style — chances are, and nothing against the Busch Latte drinkers out there,
but they don't tend to be very interested in the homebrew process. I love a
variety of beers. There's nothing I won't try. I've had a pizza beer at one
point in my life — it was pepperoni, sausage, didn't matter. It was absolutely
horrible, but I tried it. With that, you want to try making your own to a
certain extent. The other part of it — I always tell people brewing is 20%
brewing, 80% cleaning. Anybody who walks past the brew room probably sees me
cleaning stuff more than anything. So if you don't like doing dishes, you're
not going to enjoy home brewing, because it's all about cleanliness and
sanitation.

Adam: I do the dishes in our house, so
I'm not a stranger to a little bit of dishwashing.

Nick: So everything's clean. Yeah, if
you don't like cleaning, you're not going to enjoy home brewing.

Brewing Best Practices & Resources

Adam: When you got into it, and even
now, what types of podcasts and online educational resources did you use to
learn the craft? I know you also use some iPhone applications. What are the two
or three things that really helped you along the way?

Nick: Podcast — shout out to the Four
Brewers. They tend to moreso critique commercially brewed beers now, but they
still touch on home brewing here and there. I had to do some work on my boat,
didn't feel like listening to music — it was too early for a Brewer game — so I
said, you know what, there's got to be a podcast out there for home brewing.
There's a podcast for everything — we're talking right now. So I listened to a
few of their episodes, follow them pretty closely. And then online tools — in
this day and age, you can find tools for anything. I used a lot of different
tools for building recipes, getting my gravity readings in check, seeing where
my efficiency on the whole brew system comes in.

Adam: What do you mean by efficiency?

Nick: Efficiency — much like LEDs,
where our world is lumens per watt or foot-candles per dollar...

Adam: Exactly.

Nick: ...in that, you're talking
basically extracted sugars from grain. So our system is floating around about a
75 to 80 percent efficiency, which means we're getting 75 to 80 percent of the
sugar out of the grain we're using. In my driveway brewing days, I was probably
only at 60 to 70 at times. So you have to use more grain to get the amount of
sugar you want. We can now use less grain to get more sugar and whatever
alcohol reading we want.

Adam: Do you know what any of the
metrics are around the craft beer operations or some of the bigger breweries —
what the efficiencies are?

Nick: Bigger breweries will get up to
85 to 90 if they're using extracts — you're basically just boiling down grain
and pulling everything out of it. That's like your macro breweries — your
Coors, your Miller — they use extracts and high-fructose corn syrup. That's a
whole advertising back-and-forth between Coors and Miller and everybody. That's
where they get into the 90s, because they're just drilling it down and
mass-producing. Your craft brewers are probably in that 85 to 90 percent range
depending on what they're brewing.

The Brewing Process

Adam: To get into a little chemistry
for a minute — what is the basic process in terms of inputs, the processing
equipment, and then the outputs or the product? What are the mechanics of
what's happening? You talked about efficiency of turning grain into sugar, and
then beyond that, how do you turn sugar into alcohol?

Nick: Sure. Technically, I don't make
beer — yeast makes beer. I make what they call wort. Wort is yeast food.

Adam: Exactly. You're feeding yeast.

Nick: That's exactly what I'm doing.
So if we do a 10-gallon batch, which gets to about four cases, I use about 20
pounds of grain, give or take depending on the alcohol level we're trying to
shoot for. So I take 20 pounds, measure it, grind it up. Get the water up to
165-ish, dump in all our crushed-up grain — basically you're making a giant vat
of oatmeal for about an hour. Then from there, you pull off all the wort, which
is all the extracted sugars and flavor out of the grain. Move that over to your
boil kettle, rinse off the last bit of grain to get those last remaining
sugars. Then what I'll do is get to about 11, 12 gallons — you lose about a
gallon in the boil process. The boil sanitizes it, and that's when you add your
hops. Again, depending on what type of beer it is, it could be just a couple of
hops in a beer, or in that IPA, which is only a five-gallon batch, I probably
use four times the amount of hops that I would in our WiLL Ale, but IPAs have
more hops in them. From there, cool it down, put it in the fermenter. You're
usually looking for a temperature of about 70 to 75 degrees — that's where
yeast likes doing its work. You pitch the yeast in, let it do its thing for
about two weeks. The day after brew day, if there's bubbles coming out of the
fermenter, that means it's the yeast doing its thing, and just sit and wait.
From there, we'll go ahead and carbonate it. I've been using CO2 tanks — put it
on CO2, crank it up. And then we got a canner about two months ago, so instead
of bottles we got cans now, which are a lot more efficient to ship, more
shipper-friendly. And then sending it out the door.

Nick's Top Beer Picks

Adam: Who are your favorite craft beer
companies? Do you have any brewing heroes — anybody within these companies that
you follow?

Nick: Not specifically. Probably
brewers other than the Four Brewers podcast — there is one guy that is kind of
a commercial brewer, so I follow what he's doing, because I've heard him talk,
I've sent him my beer, he's liked my beer. So there's a little bit of
connection there. Bell's over in Michigan, I really enjoy some of their stuff.
Two-Hearted is probably top-five beer for me — that's in my fridge in the
garage right now. Enjoy New Glarus, you know, local staple, you can't really go
wrong there. Other than that, it's what's new, what's different. I'll probably
spend 10, 15 minutes at the grocery store in town if I'm doing grocery shopping
and just say, alright, what's new? One I haven't tried, that looks interesting,
I'll grab a sixer of that. And that might be my brewery to go to for a bit —
see what they're kicking out. If there's a beer that I've heard of that's just
seeing distribution in Wisconsin finally, I'll grab some of their stuff for a
bit. So it's a revolving door. Myself and Jake in the office here, we both use
the Untappd app, where you can track your beer. It's kind of like the social
media of beer drinking. I think I have close to 850 check-ins of different
beers I've had over the course of six years or something like that.

Adam: Nice. That's pretty cool.

Tweaking Beer's Chemistry

Adam: Back to the chemistry for a
minute — it seems like a good chunk of the process is pretty uniform regardless
of the ultimate product. What are the things that you tweak or change to get
some of the different flavors and different types of beer?

Nick: The grain is a big part of it.
The hops, the amount of hops, when you put the hops in during the boil. If you
put hops in at the beginning of the boil, those are your bittering hops —
that's what gives it the bitter flavor. If you put it in toward the end, it'll
give you more of the aromatics of the hops, and not so much the bitter taste.
On the chemistry side of it, one thing we've added is we started doing a yeast
starter — a graduated flask with a little stir bar in there. I'll dump in the
yeast, and then there's a can of wort, which is just pre-mixed. Add some water
in, and that kind of jump-starts the yeast, gives it a head start on what it
needs to do. So that makes for a cleaner beer, makes the fermentation more
efficient. It can shave a day or two off of it. I have an oxygen tank now I've
added into the brew room to oxygenate the yeast and the wort — again, just
makes cleaner beer. But other than the chemistry side, the biggest thing, going
back to it, is cleaning, sterilization, filtered water. RO system — which we
have. We've got an RO system. In fact, the very first batch of beer I made was
before we got that, and I'll tell you, I don't think anybody else can
necessarily tell, but I tasted the water before I started and I'm like, that is
definitely soft water. Well, let's run with it. I could still get a taste of it
in the end, but now that taste is completely gone. The RO filter pulls a lot of
that out, which is nice.

Why WiLL Brew Lab?

Adam: Let's talk about how we ended up
with a brew lab — the equipment here at Wisconsin Lighting Lab. You and I had
been talking about it for a few years, kind of in a joking way — someday we'll
have our own brewery on site and give stuff away to customers. Then when we
built a new building, I remember meeting with the architect, and I started out
with a joke with him — it's like, “that's where the brew room is going to be,”
haha, yeah, right. So we ended up over time building it out, designing it out.
I know you had spec'd out some equipment a few years ago, and then we ended up
investing in that equipment. The original idea — it's changed a little bit —
was we were going to have a Wiffle ball field outside and more or less have an
outdoor showroom for our sports lighting fixtures. When customers came through,
they could more or less play Wiffle ball underneath the lights. And the idea
was: walk into the showroom and there would be a wall of hops growing
underneath our lights. We would use those hops to brew beer, and then customers
could grab a beer, go up to the balcony, and watch a game underneath the
lights, with beer that was made from hops growing under lights. So we checked a
couple of those things off the list. Unfortunately, the city was not okay with
the Wiffle ball field, but we're still working on growing the hops under the
lights. But we do have a fully functional brewery now. Equipment-wise, whose
equipment did we go with, and what are some of the specs on that setup?

The WiLL Brew Lab Equipment

Nick: Spike Brewing, based out of
Milwaukee. That's actually the kettle I had in my driveway that I had been
using — locally based, I liked their equipment, so I said, I want to stick with
these guys, they're in our backyard. The setup we have, they call it a 15-gallon
system. Essentially what that means is you have the capacity of 15 gallons of
fluid, but you have to have space for boil-off and things like that, so we get
10 gallons out of our system. It's essentially a scaled-down version of what a
craft brewery would have. We have three vessels: one is our hot liquor tank,
which is basically just hot water; the mash tank, which is where all the grain
gets dumped into; and then our boil kettle, which does just that, boils it
down. We have two 10-gallon fermenters, to keep a couple different beers going
at a time. We're actually looking to upgrade those to have cooling units, so we
can actually carbonate within those units, take our carbonation down from a
week to 24 hours. So once it's done fermenting, put it on CO2, cool it down to
40-some degrees, and in a day it's ready to can and consume — this week, as
opposed to a week. I just moved some beer to a keg right now, and I'll can it
next week. But slower process. So upgrading that. We have some smaller vessels
that I had from home. Randy actually had — Tracy bought them for his birthday
several years ago, so he brought all that stuff in, and so I'm kind of
utilizing some of that equipment too.

Adam: When it comes to these types of
setups, it's just scale. We're doing four cases, but if you ramp it up to a
one-barrel system where you're getting 10 cases, it's all the same equipment
per se, just bigger. In the utility requirements, what type of electrical power
and anything other than water and electrical did we have to put in? I don't
think there's any gas involved.

Nick: No. The only thing we really
added — I wanted in the room as it was still getting planned out — was a floor
drain. Not that I'd ever expect to need it, but if things go bad, it's better
than having that liquid stay in that room versus going out into the hallway. No
gas. If we did a larger system, maybe we'd have looked at doing gas, but we're
running 240 amperage — I think it might be 40 amps. But yeah, straight 240
electric. Actually it's nice, because you can make a more consistent beer
because it's all digital. So different temperature probes are doing a lot of
the work. I have two pumps that maintain moving fluids around, and that keeps
temperatures where they need to be. And then I've got a nice slop sink in there
for cleaning up everything, because it's back to that washing thing.

Adam: Exactly.

Where Does WiLL Brew Lab Beer Go?

Adam: So what do we currently do with
the WiLL Brew? I know you touched on that previously. One thing to clarify — we
don't sell any of this.

Nick: None of it's for sale.

Adam: Everything we make is for either
consumption at company events, or we give it away — we give away six-packs to
customers. I think pretty much every sports job we usually try and send a
custom six-pack. What does that process look like? You get requests from the
sales team — how do we typically handle that?

Nick: My role is more or less just
keep making beer as much as possible. We have some old vintage lockers that
came with the building that we're filling up, and the goal is to keep those
stocked as much as possible, which is why we have the second fermenter. So now
I have double the capacity.

Adam: What is the capacity set for —
cases?

Nick: I think with the second
fermenter, now we're up to eight. And then if I do anything in the five-gallon
carboys I have, that's another two cases. So there's plenty of room now. But
yeah, I just keep making beer. The sales team will reach out to our marketing
team — like, hey, I got this Moore Road Park sports project — marketing team
throws together a layout kind of custom to that particular project, which the
contractors typically don't even know about. And we send them a six-pack, maybe
a 12-pack if it's a really nice job, and they open it up and see their own
custom label of their project. This one has the lighting layouts on it as well.
They're getting kind of creative with that. But I just keep turning out beer,
and the marketing team has, at this point, an endless list of projects to send
it out to.

Adam: How do we get more capacity? It
sounds like we need more capacity.

Nick: I just need to stop taking
vacation. But it's got more of a schedule built out now. Equipment-wise,
where's the bottleneck in the system right now? The bottleneck was the
fermenters. We just did our first back-to-back batches where we had two going
at once, so that's going to up our game quite a bit. Cooling down the
fermenters internally versus moving them to kegs to carbonate that way — that's
going to eliminate a bottleneck. And then from there, I'm looking into: can we
package off the fermenters? Which we should be able to. But that's something I
want to see if other people have done — any headaches, going back to those
online resources. What have guys done, what issues did they run into, if any.
But yeah, just keep them full.

Adam: Nice. You'll have to contact the
Spike Brewing guys and get them up here for a podcast. You said they're in
Wisconsin?

Nick: Yeah, right down in Milwaukee.
Locally, they do all their stainless steel welding down there — well, some of
their kettles, the stainless. I believe they're importing some of that stuff,
which is not a rarity — when it comes to stainless, you look at anything that's
made stainless, it's probably coming from overseas. But the processing, the
assembly, the fabrication, the design is all done right here. And their nano
system they came out with earlier in the year, in their marketing tools they
said about 80% of different components, engineering, or manufacturing was done
within the US, and of that 80%, I believe 75% of that was done within
Wisconsin.

Adam: So they seem a lot like us.

Nick: Yeah.

Adam: They must have some pretty good
electrical capabilities as well.

Nick: Yeah, there's a pretty
impressive control box. I would say they share a lot of similarities to us,
whether it's the marketing — it seems very similar to us — their development
and innovation on the fly, much like we do. It's a big part of it. And then using
local resources.

Adam: We use, between Muza and C Metal
Fab and a few others, you know, keep it local and tap into that Wisconsin
supply chain.

Nick: Exactly.

Adam: Cool, man. Well, thanks for
coming on. I'm sure we'll have you back. Reach out to those Spike guys — we'll
have them on the show.

Nick: Yeah, absolutely. And thanks,
Adam.