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PrintToast the season
Now that you’ve had your fill of hearty comfort food, how about something to help wash it down?
Columbus Brewing Co.'s Scottish Ale (left) and India Pale Ale.
Tim Johnson
Columbus is a far cry from being the one-brewery town it once was under the reign of Anheuser-Busch; in fact, it is quite the opposite. The city is undergoing a revival of interest in the crafts of brewing and distilling, with new independent operations seemingly popping up every few months.
With these constantly broadening options, perhaps more Central Ohioans are beginning to appreciate the art and science behind homegrown brews—and maybe feel a touch of pride. The folks at Columbus, Barley’s and Elevator brewing companies have kept the suds flowing for years, but there are plenty of newcomers, as well, such as Rockmill Brewery, Middle West Spirits (makers of the rapidly popular OYO brand of whiskey and vodka), Watershed Distillery and even a meadery, Brothers Drake, which has introduced Columbus to a flavorful collection of honey wines. (See “The roster.”)
Products from these crafters are available for you to fill your mugs, glasses, growlers, snifters, shots and kegs to toast in the new year at bars, restaurants and stores all over Central Ohio, but part of the enjoyment comes from learning about the folks who make them. In what follows, we profile three operations. They may be small, but they each are making substantial footprints while helping to spearhead a revival of their respective crafts.
Middle West Spirits
Ryan Lang opens the lid of one of his six 1,100-liter fermenters and swats away the invisible plume of carbon dioxide that’s released. Inside sits a sludgy mess of froth and bubbles. “Take a whiff,” he says. The giant cauldron gives off a nice, sweet aroma. Its content, called mash—grain mixed with water and yeast (and basically any other desired ingredient)—has been sitting for about a day, and the sugars have not yet broken down.
“Now smell this one,” says Lang, moving to an adjacent metal drum and unlatching its top. This mash reeks of harsh booze—like the restroom of an Arena District bar at 2 am. Voilà, alcohol. This batch has been fermenting for close to a week, and the yeast has converted most of the sugar into ethanol and carbon dioxide.
The most important part of the process, at least for Lang, co-owner and master distiller of Middle West Spirits, has already happened: selecting the right grain to ultimately distill into Middle West’s OYO brand vodka or whiskey. For that, he and co-owner Brady Konya turn to local farmers—a true benchmark of their business, says Lang, who adds that the company is Columbus’s first distillery since Prohibition. “Our philosophy and belief is that you should stand for something,” he says. “You shouldn’t be what everyone else wants you to be. It’s about getting creative.”
Indeed, for this pair of young artisans who began their Short North operation in 2008, but didn’t open for business until 2010, it’s all about creativity. “We learn every day,” says Lang, who recently returned from a trip to Ireland to visit several distilleries in hopes of refining his craft. “We’re humble enough to understand we can learn from people who did this 80 years ago.”
After the mash has fermented, it’s moved by hose over to a giant copper machine, the likes of which one might conceivably find in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. This contraption, called a pot still, which Lang and Konya got from Germany, heats the mash to a boil while churning it with a blender-like device called an agitator. This process separates the alcohol from all the gunk and feeds it into two adjacent copper columns that collect all the evaporated booze, called distillate. It then drips out into a canister past a hydrometer, which tells Lang the alcohol percentage.
“We can redistill it if we want,” he says, adding that when it comes out of the columns, the distillate is around 192-proof (96 percent alcohol by volume), so it’s cut with water.
For whiskey, once the distillate is deemed ready, it’s put into a wooden barrel (or cask), but not before it is filled with water, which swells the wood to ensure there’s no leakage. The water is quickly drained and replaced with the distillate. It’s then stored offsite anywhere from one to 16 years depending on what kind of whiskey is being produced. “For the distiller, it’s all sensory,” says Konya. “The whiskey will tell us when it’s ready. In five, 10, 15 years—it’s all part of the journey.”
Near the front of the distillery, Lang runs his hand through a pot filled with the soft red winter wheat grain
he and Konya receive twice each week from a farm in Fostoria. Lang scoops out a handful, letting them pour through his fingers like gold coins. “Everything starts here,” he says.
Brothers Drake
Not exactly sure what mead is? Go ahead and ask. The guys at Brothers Drake would be delighted to tell you all about their craft. Founder Woody Drake, co-owner Oron Benary and general manager Eric Allen are experts when it comes to honey wine, and the success of their operation, the first of its kind in Ohio, is about opening the city’s eyes to an unfamiliar beverage. “It’s more than sales,” says Allen. “We educate.”
Drake got his start in the early ’90s while living in North Carolina. “There were no meaderies, period,” he says. “If I wanted to try it, I had to make it.” Nearly 20 years later, Brothers Drake has nestled in to the Short North, two doors down, in fact, from Middle West Spirits. “This is a real community,” says Benary.
And like their neighbors, the meaders have committed themselves to sourcing their ingredients from local vendors. They get their honey from a beekeeper in Marysville, their blueberries from Mansfield, apples from Rushville, lavender from Hillsboro—“the birthplace of Prohibition,” Drake points out in a small twist of irony (it was where the women’s temperance movement got its start)—and even the bergamot flowers they use in their Bergamot Blue mead are from the garden of Drake’s mother in Granville as well as a farm in Westerville. “This allows us to have relationships,” Allen says. “You can keep resources in line, tighten the supply chain and see it all happen.”
Sampling any of their dozen kinds of mead, Benary says, “You taste Ohio.”
The process starts with the honey. It’s the only thing each variety has in common. Then comes the fruit, which is pressed by hand in-house. Unlike beer and spirits, which can ferment in about a week, the guys at Brothers Drake let their product sit with yeast for a month and often longer. And even after primary fermentation takes place, Drake and company opt to do it a second time, often while infusing more ingredients and flavors. “Secondary fermentation creates a whole different flavor profile,” Benary says. This is because ingredients don’t respond the same in an unfermented mixture as they would in one that’s already been converted to alcohol.
The cornucopia of flavors produced by the honey, fruit, herbs and spices makes sipping a Brothers Drake mead akin to trying one of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, in that it’s hard to imagine these wide-ranging elements could create such a distinct taste.
“Think of all the wonderful things that sound great with honey,” says Allen, who pours a splash of Pillow Talk, a pungent and pleasant potpourri of chamomile and lavender. The taste is subtle, yet the sweetness of the honey is certainly detectable. Allen reveals a second bottle of the same mead, this one two years older than the first. The flavors are exponentially bolder, without being overpowering.
“The longer the mead sits, the better,” says Benary.
Their most popular variety is Apple Pie, which they ferment in cider instead of water and age for up to 12 months. “This is the one people go crazy for,” says Allen. “You can literally only make it once a year because the apples have to be in season.”
The guys at Brothers Drake are especially excited about a batch of mead they’ve been aging in a whiskey barrel they borrowed from Middle West. “Amazing” is the word they each separately use to describe what they’re currently calling their Bicentennial mead, which they plan to release at their New Year’s Eve party in honor of Columbus’s 200th anniversary in 2012. “You can’t just say, ‘I don’t like mead’ or ‘I don’t like wine,’ ”Allen says. “You’ve got to experiment.”
Columbus Brewing Co.
The Columbus Brewing Co. that exists today actually is the third incarnation (the original dates to the 1800s), but the current operation, under owner and brewmaster Eric Bean, is different from its predecessors.
Opened in 1988,
The process starts with barley, a malt grain that serves as the foundation for most beers, which Bean gets predominantly from Canada, France and Germany. It’s put through a small mill that acts sort of like a pepper grinder—separating the seeds from the inedible stuff. Next, these extracted barley grains, which are naturally high in sugar, head into the mash tun, a big vat that mixes them with hot water for about an hour. The liquid that comes out of this mixture is called wort (basically dark sugar water). The wort then goes into a kettle, where it’s boiled for about 90 minutes. While it’s boiling, Bean and his team add in the hops, an herb that gives beer its taste, bitterness and flavor. (Most of their hops comes from Germany or the Pacific Northwest.)
Next, the wort is cooled and pumped into one of
After fermentation, the beer is aged another two weeks or so in what is called a bright beer tank. During this stage, Bean and his team check oxygen levels and ensure the concoction tastes the way it should. Then, the brew is ready to bottle or keg, which is done in-house. “We run our filler four to five days a week,” Bean says, overlooking the small conveyer, which bottles 35 cases in about an hour.
Bean spent several years overseeing the local branch of Gordon Biersch before coming to Columbus Brewing Co. in 2005 and subsequently completing his purchase of the brewpub earlier this year. Needless to say, suds run in his blood. “I got a job brewing right out of college,” he says. “I thought it would be temporary, but I never looked back.”
For this passionate brewmaster, who got his start brewing from home, each day is a learning experience. “Every beer I’ve had influences what I do,” he says.
Bean looks to the beer culture of Europe, where he’s traveled extensively, for inspiration. He refers to countries such as Ireland, Germany and Belgium—all with long traditions of brewing that have helped forge their national identities and cultural heritage. “We don’t have it yet in Columbus,” he says, though, “We’re getting it.”
A brief history of Columbus brewing
Jay Hoster’s great-great-grandfather, Louis Hoster, arrived in the United States from Germany in 1833. He’d never brewed a beer in his life, according to Jay, whose ancestors instead had made their living across the pond with the family winery. “But if you’re a young German guy [in America] . . . you started a brewery,” Jay says.
The first barrels of Hoster’s beer were brewed in 1836. In addition to Hoster’s, there was Schlee (pronounced “Sh-lay”) and Born brewing companies—each situated in what is now known as the Brewery District. These were considered the big three.
“There had been brewers of ale earlier in Columbus,” Hoster says, “but the ale they made was kind of flat, not very well-carbonated. The Germans brewed lager beer, and lager is a German word for ‘storage.’ You stored the beer for about a month, and you get a crisp, well-carbonated product.”
The onset of Prohibition in 1920 crippled the breweries, though several tried their hands at something new. While some switched to making colas and soft drinks, others brewed what was called “near” beer. Containing less than one-half of 1 percent alcohol by volume, “it’s not possible to consume enough to get intoxicated,” Hoster says.
Though several breweries managed to outlast Prohibition, Hoster’s wasn’t so fortunate. Those that survived then had to contend with the arrival of Anheuser-Busch on the city’s north side in the late 1960s. (In a 1976 issue of Columbus Monthly, Jay Hoster described the 250-acre brewery as “the biggest fish of them all.”)
Though Hoster, Schlee and Born have all been closed for the better part of a century, beer enthusiasts with no affiliation to either family have reincarnated Hoster (in 1989) and Born (Collin Castore, co-owner of Bodega in the Short North, recently announced his intent to open a small brewery under the name).
Ben Zenitsky is an assistant editor for Columbus Monthly.
