AURORA | At the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, tinkering with beakers and butane blow torches isn’t exclusive to the white lab coat crowd.
About a dozen science enthusiasts draped in flannel button downs, college-branded sweatshirts and one particularly pronounced pair of denim overalls were in the center of Aurora’s medical mecca Dec. 12, eagerly watching a pair of bearded biologists pour sterilized bottles of milky liquid into a 3,000-milliliter Karter Scientific beaker.
Many asked about ratios and temperature indicators. Others frantically scribbled down some of the more complex explanations onto notebook pages teeming with formulas and tips.
But these students weren’t cramming for any final exams or working toward any advanced degrees.
Instead, they were pinpointing the bucolic notes of the course material poured into tiny Mason jars before them.
“I’m definitely getting cow farts,” said David Olson, one of the bearded professors at the front of the room. “I don’t know what you’re talking about with wet hay.”
Aurora’s Coda Brewing Company was rife with synesthetic observations like Olson’s during a Fermentology Summit at the brewery’s flagship outpost at 2101 Ursula St. last weekend. Titled “Save the Sour Dregs,” the nearly three-hour event, which was part biology class, part tasting session and part party, walked attendees through the process of cultivating cultures from the dregs of store-bought sour beers.
A devoted crew of local home brewers brought bottles of their favorite pucker-inducing suds to Coda, the dregs — that yeasty sediment left at the bottom of the bottle — of which were then added to a communal culture that will eventually be brewed and tapped at the brewery.
“We’ve done presentation-style things from the stage in the past, but this is the first time that we’ve been this intimate working with people here,” said Olson, who is also head brewer at Coda.
Though the details are still loose, Olson said that the general plan is to create a bijou, five-gallon batch of beer that may or not be served to customers, depending on how palatable he and Jameson Arnett, cellar master at Coda, determine the brew to be. From there the team will whip up a 15-gallon batch, which they said should be enough to get them to their typical 10-barrel batch size. But, as is often the case with brewing sour beers, when that happens depends on what the Frankenstein culture dictates.
“The culture’s really going to have to tell us what it wants to be, and whether it’s going to take a long time or a short amount of time,” Olson said. “My guess is that the 15-gallon batch will be (ready in) four to eight months, and the 10-barrel batch will be six to 12 months before we get a beer that we feel is ready to be released.”
Started last year in a slightly different form, the summit was spawned from the ongoing partnership between Coda and The Fermentoligists, an Aurora-based home brew club catered toward the constantly burgeoning crop of brew masters honing their craft in steamy basements, garages and kitchens. There were an estimated 1.2 million home brewers in the U.S. alone in 2013, with the highest portion of them — about 31 percent — based in the western U.S., according to a survey conducted by the American Homebrewers Association.
“We were really early supporters of them (Coda), and they were really early supporters of us,” said Scott Davidson, co-founder and president of Fermentoligists. “We’ve stuck with these guys. We’re Aurora, they’re Aurora … it’s been a great partnership.”
Davidson, who daylights as a systems administrator, said that events such as the one last weekend at Coda, and home brewing in general, allows for more logical people to tap into their creative side.
“People who are very scientific tend to gravitate toward craft brewing,” Davidson said. “It’s an outlet for people who otherwise may be stuck in a job that is very monotonous and (similar) day to day.”
That marriage of seemingly disparate disciplines has been a guiding principle at Coda — the brewery also boasts a dedicated performance area and regularly showcases local bands — since the it opened on the Anschutz campus in 2014.
“I see (brewing) as an artistic way to express myself … but I have to know the science to be able to make good beer,” Olson said. “I kind of like nerding out a little bit, but art is why I got into brewing in the first place.”
And being in the thick of one of the country’s premier medical hubs has helped the brewery to expand on its methodically creative ways.
“I’ve never been able to paint or draw, but with beer I can understand … through the science I work in every day,” said Brett Dwyer, a neural stem cell biologist at Anschutz and home brewer who frequents Coda and attended the sour summit last weekend. “Like how cooks can express themselves with different spices, herbs and vegetables, brewers can do that through grain. It’s my ability to practice art through science.”
I love this article Quincy!
You nailed what the event was all about and the science behind it. Great meeting you.