Roamer, wanderer, nomad, vagabond. Call me what you will.
- Metallica
No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man.
– Heraclitus
It’s time. I’ll be leaving Stone Brewing soon, the company I co-founded and led for the better part of my adult life.
Counting the ramp-up time, I’ve dedicated almost 30 years to…
Over the years, Stone Farking Wheaton w00tstout has become one of our most anticipated annual releases – and not just because it’s an astoundingly flavorful beer concocted as a collaboration between FARK’s Drew Curtis, nerd royalty Wil Wheaton and Stone Brewing co-founder Greg Koch. It’s the incredible label art adorning this beer over the years that has elevated it to the pinnacle of beer,…
Sometimes we use an elaborate combination of hops to bring out juicy, citrusy, dank and tropical flavors in a beer. And sometimes – SOMETIMES – one hop manages to do all that on its own. That’s what we have here with a magical varietal from New Zealand called Motueka. It’s the only hop we used in the whirlpool and dry hopping process and yet this beer is packed with layers of complex, tropical,…
We took a random bottle off of the packaging line to analyze it for the concentration of dissolved oxygen present in the beer. We punch a hole in the cap and pressurize the bottle using nitrogen - and we push the beer through a special device that detects to the part-per-billion level of oxygen in solution. Oxygen damages beer flavor over time, so we want to have the lowest possible…
The Anton Paar Alcolyzer is a nifty (and expensive) piece of analytical equipment that allows for the determination of alcohol by volume (ABV) in beer – among other key specifications. The Alcolyzer uses near-infrared technology (NIR) to determine how dense a liquid is. Knowing that alcohol has a certain density along with plain water, it can measure the difference between the two, giving us…
Titrations need four things: sample, acid, base, and an indicator. You add acid to a base and indicator-infused sample and by knowing the exact volume of acid added to neutralize the basic solution and change from pink to blue, you can determine how much of a substance is in solution. Titrations are used to determine the total amount of hardness, calcium, and alkalinity in brewing water. This is…
Without yeast there would be no beer. Here are two pictures from our automatic cell counter. The one on the left is a brightfield picture of our house yeast. The one on the right is our house yeast stained with a fluorescent dye called propidium iodide. The dye will bind with non-replicating DNA in yeast cells. Basically, if you see a glowing cell, it’s dead. This is how we determine how viable…
This is a High-Performance Liquid Chromatograph (HPLC). This awesome piece of analytical equipment can measure the concentration of different compounds present in beer, wort, and hops. We use it to measure the concentration of humulone, cohumulone, lupulone, and colupulone in hops. These are collectively known as alpha and beta acids in brewing terms. The alpha acids (…