Q + A with Head Brewer Brandon

We’re big on barrel-aging beer at Avling. Head Brewer, Brandon talks about what he loves most about the process, what’s on the horizon for 2022, and his favourite post-work brew.

What do you like most about barrel-aging beer?

Brewing is science-driven. You are very much telling the yeast what to do and putting tight boundaries around it so that you can reproduce the same product within the same timeline, every time. It’s a highly scientific process, very regimented, and very fragile. Barrel-aging beer has certainly much more of an artistic element to it. You're doing a lot of listening to the beer, giving the beer as much time it needs to evolve - you have a much more thoughtful, artistic, slower, cooperative way to make beer. You need to give it the right conditions to evolve, and then you need to listen to it and taste it along the way to figure out what it needs to become its best self. 

So it's always a bit of a negotiation. It's a bit of cooperation and the elegance of what you get within the timeline of it all just makes for a much more satisfying style that you might spend a year or more nursing to maturity, and then making a bunch of products with it which is pretty special. 

The other thing I really love about it is that when we make our pilsner, we show up and we know exactly what we're doing and 100% of that beer ends up in a tank as pilsner. When we make barrel-aged beer, we never walk into the brewhouse thinking “today I'm making Sangfroid or Pale Fire.” We're constantly filling our barrels with different styles of beer, or styles of different grain and hop recipes, so when we go to make something like Pale Fire, we taste around the cellar, and we FIND it - we don't create it from day one. 

So we taste barrels and try to discover which barrels have the right complementary flavours that will enhance ingredients like peaches, or plums, or Cabernet Sauvignon skins, so it's very fun to go around the cellar! The way we think about it is in colours. So if we're looking to make Sangfroid for example, we're tasting around the brewery, looking for blues and reds, meaning we're looking for barrels that have blueberry, strawberry, cherry, currents - those kinds of flavours that come from blue and red and purple fruit. There are other barrels that have hay, citrus, orange, and grassy flavours, which are yellow and orange colours. If we're gonna blend something like Spinning Yarn or Pale Fire, we're looking for those yellows and oranges. 

You are not controlling all the variables when barrel-aging beer. There's a lot of discovery and there’s a lot of the beer telling you what to do which brings us a lot closer to wine in that way. 

By making beer this way, you have the ability to either strive for consistency or strive for the best possible quality. It really depends on what you are hoping to achieve: is it the same every time, or do you want to make it the most interesting blend you can find? Similar to wine - a 2019 Pinot Noir is going to taste different than a 2018 Pinot Noir and everybody understands that in wine. That's sort of the opportunity that it yields to us is that we can make each year taste connected. You'll always know a cycle or always know that the beer is Pale Fire, but the specifics of the barrel, the specifics of the fruit, means that drinking the 2019 version and then drinking the 2020 version, you will notice the differences. I find this to be much more interesting long term.

What type of beer will you start your brew with/what is best to use for the base?

When we brew barrel beers, we are always using a good amount of non-malted ingredients. We have very specific mashing, process, and recipe guidelines that we would never use for our standard beer because it would result in a beer that didn't taste very good. 

We have a whole style of brewing for our clean beers and an entirely different style of brewing for our barrel beers. 

Past that, we like to modulate bitterness, hop aromatics, and which specific non-malted grains we use. Some barrels have rye, some barrels have buckwheat, some barrels have spelt, others have oats - all of which just give us differences in texture across the cellar so that when we go to find all of our beers, we know how different barrels are going to taste so we can take those ingredients and blend them into something special. 

Barrel type - what are you most inclined to use/ what works best? Where are they sourced?

A lot of breweries approach barrels as a critical flavour ingredient, so you'll see people who bring in fresh bourbon, fresh wine, rum, gin barrels, and they're constantly turning those over so that the barrel is actively and clearly impacting the flavour of the resulting beer. That's one way to do things and results in some really cool beers - but that’s not how we approach our barrel-aging program. We have 20 French oak puncheons, French oak is a little more delicate overall so that's what we use them because we don't want something as punchy as American oak. So instead of being a fresh expression of what used to be in it, they are their own sort of living entity. Each barrel does affect the flavour of the beer inside of it, but it's based on what is living in that barrel. Even though they all use the same house culture, every barrel evolves differently. French oak puncheons are important to us because a large format barrel is more graceful for beer; less oxidation, less oak impact, and those are elements we want in our beers so that we can focus on the flavours produced by our house culture. 

How has the effects of COVID impacted your barrel program at the brewery? Re: shipping, materials, etc

We thankfully haven't run into too many supply chain issues with the barrel-aging program. A huge part of the reason why is because our whole barrel program is using ingredients sourced from Ontario, so we are not dealing with a ton of international shipping which is where the big supply chain issues are happening. Our malt is coming from Ontario, the hops are coming from Ontario, and the yeast lives in the puncheons which we already have. it's a lot simpler than trying to make things that rely on multiple different international shipping routes. The biggest COVID issue has just been not having the restaurant open and not being able to open bottles for our tables in the restaurant for any consistent amount of time.

What’s upcoming for 2022? Any big flavours. Ideas or concepts on the horizon? 

The big centrepiece of 2022 is a new barrel-aged blend on fruit and it's going to be called Violet Moon. It’s a barrel-aged blend, a very rich blend, that was really strong with notes of black currant, raspberry, and black cherry from the beer itself. We then transfer that beer onto 1,500lbs of Ontario blue plums, and after some extended aging on the plums, we added fresh Gammay wineskins. We then packaged it in bottles and are now bottle conditioning it. 

Our second extract of the fruit will result in a beer called Seance, which will be a plum sour that will be packaged in a can. 

So plum is the big flavour for 2022, plus the return of all of Pale Fire, Sangfroid, and Orpheus. 

We also have beers making a comeback, but evolving into new things. Carillon and Meerkat, which are two crowd favourites, are evolving into canned experimentation beers. We are using our house culture to ferment those instead of using clean yeast, bringing new complexity to the beers. 

What’s your go-to style of beer to finish your day in the brewhouse? 

It depends on what we're doing. At the end of a brew day, if we're making beer part that’s part of our core line, I would have Pilsner from the tank - that's the best treat you can have! If it's a barrel day, or a sour packaging day, I'll drink a Spinning Yarn. Very refreshing, but really rich and textured, and it fits a little better with what we're doing.