Happy San Diego Beer Week, everyone! Or as they like to say at White Labs Inc., “Happy Thank God for Yeast Week, everyone! You’re welcome!”
In its Miramar-area offices, the men and women of White Labs manufacture the yeast that help make the craft-beer world go around. Its customers include home-brewing enthusiasts and big-name breweries (Stone, Ballast Point) alike. Its grateful consumers and potential consumers include anyone who loves beer that tastes like, well, beer.
“People talk about malt and grains and hops, and yeast often gets overshadowed,” said Neva Parker, White Labs’ vice president of operations. “Without yeast, basically what you have is bitter sugar water.”
Perhaps you are wondering why we are harshing your San Diego Beer Week buzz with talk of science. No worries, beer friends. In addition to being yeast producers, the people of White Labs are yeast educators. The lab offers free tours of its facilities Monday through Thursday at 5 p.m., Friday and Saturday at 1 and 3 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m. You can continue your liquid lessons in the White Labs tasting room, which has up to 32 beers on tap and a tutorial in every glass.
In honor of San Diego Beer (and Yeast) Week, here is a taste of what you’ll learn when you belly up to the White Labs knowledge bar.
Yeast 101
Why should you care about yeast? Because when yeast is thrown in with water, grains and other ingredients, it eats the sugars produced by the grainy mash and belches out carbonation and — most importantly — alcohol. Without yeast, you do not have beer.
When Chris White founded White Labs in 1995, his inventory consisted of one yeast strain — the versatile WLP001, the California ale yeast that is still the company’s biggest seller. The company now has 700 strains in its yeast bank, and it produces about 85 strains per week. There is ale yeast and there is lager yeast. Yeast for Belgian beers and funky sour beers. White Labs also produces yeast for wines and distilled spirits.
The tour meets in the White Labs tasting room, where you will have to ignore the siren call of the beer flights and follow your guide to the actual labs. The beers will still be on tap when you get back. And they will taste even better with a side of smarts.
Ales and analytics
Tours generally start in the Analytical Lab, where young lab techs with backgrounds in chemistry, food science and biology analyze samples of beer, wine and other yeasty substances for customers wanting information on everything from sugar count and alcohol content to the sources of mysterious off-flavors.
There are laptops and a sterile hood and a bags of hops that smell like pot. Most importantly, the Analytical Lab has a window looking into the Yeast Lab. The Yeast Lab is where the yeast-growing process starts. And because this is a clean room requiring lab coats, hair nets, facial-hair nets (where applicable) and shoe covers, looking through the window is as close as most tours get.
Through the window, you can see studious people doing science-y looking things. You might also see big flasks filled with yeast and wort (the liquid extracted during the grain-mashing process) jouncing around on the automatic shaker. It is sort of the beer-geek equivalent of watching a bee pollinating a beautiful flower. Beer happening! Right there!
All of these riches end up in the White Labs yeast bank. After the California ale yeast, White Labs’ top sellers include the Hefeweizen ale, which has a lot of banana and clove notes; and the workhorse known as WLP830, a German lager yeast that puts the “fest” in many an Oktoberfest. Venture into the yeast fringes, and you get wild cards like WLP099, the super high gravity ale yeast that can ferment up to 25 percent alcohol.
What kind of beer do you get from a super high gravity ale yeast?
“Crazy beer,” Parker said, during an interview in the tasting room, where the walls are painted a hoppy green and light fixtures are made from lab flasks. “People are willing to try anything when they’re making beer. They want to do crazy things, and we’re here to help with that.”
Let there be beer
The next stop for the yeast is the Production Room, an off-limits place where yeast is propagated using a special patented process. Hence, the off-limits part. But the next stop for you is the Brew House, a busy place with giant conical fermenters, grain silos and trucks to haul away the spent grain, which becomes cattle feed.
This is also where White Labs makes what head brewer Joe Kurowski calls “the nutrient-rich media to grow our yeast.”
Ninety percent of the rich stuff that is brewed at White Labs is yeast food. Fortunately for us, 10 percent of it becomes beer. White Labs brews three flagship beers in-house, including the Tabberer IPA. There are also milk stouts, rye saisons, double IPAs and whatever else Kurowski and his team can dream up. Take a growler to go, because their beers are not sold in stores or bars.
“Our tasting room is one delicious yeast experiment,” Korowski said.
It’s educational, too. Pony up for one of the tasting room’s beer flights (which start at $6), and you get samples of beers that are all exactly the same, except for the yeast. After hearing about how yeast makes the beer, it was time for a taste test.
First, I sampled the Tabberer IPA’s made with the California and East Coast yeast. In the former, the hoppy flavors were sharp and clean. In the latter, the hops were richer and more lingering. The Hansen Hefeweizen flight included a cream yeast (taste self-explanatory), the traditional WLP300 (big banana and clove flavors) and the American Hefeweizen (lighter on the banana and clove).
Even for a beer amateur like myself, the differences were as plain as the foam on my face. Which is just the way White Labs likes it.
“That’s the big reason we put a tasting room in here,” Parker said. “You can talk about the difference yeast makes, but people don’t believe it until they taste it. And then we make believers out of them.”
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Twitter: @karla_peterson