During the nine months that the brewery survived, I came to meet new people and develop relationships that remain with me today. It’s those friendships that make the industry of craft beer as strong as it is. Collectively, we share a passion for making amazing liquid, and oftentimes this enthusiasm manifests itself in collaborative efforts between like-minded brewers.

This notion of brewers getting together and sharing ideas on recipe development would actually appear to be a recent phenomenon. Last time I checked, the guys making Budweiser and Coors Banquet Beer haven’t convened annually in the hopes of creating the ultimate lawn mower lager. In their defense, they may be waiting for hell to freeze over. That would appear to be the ultimate reason for the mountains to turn from blue to red.

Each brewer has his or her reasons for working on a collaborative project. When I approach these opportunities, I’m drawn to them like musicians sharing a love for sitting in and riffing through a part of someone else’s jam session. I rarely look to be the lead on the project and prefer to be a traveling artist collaborating at someone else’s facility so I can see how things are done outside our environment.

I’ve collaborated on over 15 different beers now with friends, acquaintances and even people I’d never met before. Each of those productions has given me a chance to explore other breweries, foster new friendships and create awareness for our brands. Traveling to other corners of the globe to brew a new recipe continues to be one of my favorite parts of my job (especially if that travel takes me to Maui, as it did last winter).

There isn’t a published set of rules for collaborating on beers, but there are a few things I consider before agreeing to make bedfellows with another brewery. First and foremost, I believe with conviction there needs to be a legitimate reason for collaborating. Without this, you have no story, and interest in the project will be tepid at best.

During a judging session at the 2007 Great American Beer Festival, while seated next to Hildegard van Ostaden of Brouwerij Leyerth (Urthel), she and I hatched a plan to collaborate on a low-alcohol saison under The Lost Abbey brand. We knew in nine months San Diego would play host to the Craft Brewers Conference. As such, many of the best brewers in the world would be visiting (including Hildegard) and looking to experience our brewing culture. She came to our brewery armed with a wealth of brewing knowledge I have never possessed. Spending eight hours working on a brew together allowed us to converse in depth on some ideas I wished to inquire about.

The recipe was quite simple to work out. Hildegard hoped to brew a saison with no spices in a straightforward manner. Given that The Lost Abbey produces Red Barn Ale (a spiced saison) year-round, this was a great side project for the brewery. Her husband, Bas, created the artwork that adorned the label. We call it the Dom DeLuise label here at the brewery, as Bas really played up my strongest features …

Ten years ago, collaborative beers were less commonplace than they are today. The landscape has changed, and the shelves are now littered with these kinds of releases, I’m left wondering if we have hit a proverbial wall in an almost Grammy-fication of collaborative beers.

Each year, we know that the Grammy Awards show will feature a night of artistry and even some unconventional unions of musicians. Some will seem incredibly natural, like Santana and Rob Thomas, and others more fraught with peril (Milli Vanilli anyone)? While not my first Grammy Awards show memory, I clearly remember that February night in 2001 when Marshall Mathers (Eminem) took to a thundering and rainy stage to perform a version of his hit “Stan.”

He was joined that night by Sir Elton John, who accompanied Eminem in a show of unity. As an openly gay male, John sat in to debunk the rumors of hate swirling around The Marshall Mathers LP release. Their duo still rings as one of the best collaborative musical performances I have ever seen. But most importantly, their performance mattered. It resonated and it found legacy. To me, the essence of a great collaboration should also cause a group of people to work together, hopefully finding meaning in a shared experience, all the while creating an exceptional opportunity for the audience.

And while I’ve been around the collaborative brewing block once or twice even in Belgium, I’m no brewing moped. Rather, I prefer to believe I’ve become a seasoned and selective partner who knows what he is looking for. Of course, we all have to start somewhere. For me, the year was 2002, and like many I was a young ambitious brewer when I collaborated on my first beer. Some local brewer friends and I got together to brew a German-style stein beer. This method of using super-hot rocks to heat the wort was a first in San Diego and certainly told a great story.

Some seven years later, I built on that same process and improved it when I invited Tonya Cornett (then of Bend Brewing Co.) to collaborate with Port Brewing Co. on a new spring release named Hot Rocks Lager. In launching Hot Rocks Lager, we were able to bring back the super-heating of black granite rock addition to a batch of beer and retell the story of how the process came to be. Our brewers love this beer, and the process of super-heating rocks and caramelizing wort continues to be one of the most interesting things we do here at the brewery.

Tonya and I divided the recipe in half. She was tasked with creating the grain bill as I worked on the hops and tweaked the fermentation to take advantage of my understanding of our brewery processes. In doing so, we brought together a shared idealism, and the resulting beer has become one of our most award-winning recipes (a lager no less). If you’re keeping score at home, that’s one for Collaborations and zero for the Duds.

The role of collaboration is complicated. Sometimes it’s educational. Often, it can be technical if a smaller brewery works with a larger, more sophisticated brewery. It can be celebratory or even improvisational. There are few rules for collaborative brewing, but singularly the one that guides me is that too many cooks in the kitchen can yield less than ideal results. This happened to me and some of my best brewing friends once in Chico, CA.

A group of us worked to produce a heritage lager in a sort of “Esprit de Saint Louis” sort of way. It featured wild rice, purple potatoes and even some “beachwood” collected from both the shores of Delaware and San Diego. All told, the beer turned out fantastic. Yet it really didn’t “do” anything.

So we were ushered to a super-secret lab where we played around with all kinds of concentrates and natural additives. Ultimately some carrot juice and cucumber essence jumped in to support the lager. As we set out to improve the beer, the cooks in the kitchen crossed our fruit and vegetable streams in a disastrous those-ingredients-are-better-left-for-salad kind of way. With apologies to Stevie Wonder, I learned that unlike ebony and ivory, cucumbers and carrots do not always go together forever in perfect harmony …

Thankfully, there are more successes than misses, and collaborative beers are here to stay. They present the consumer with amazing opportunities at every turn. What remains to be seen is how many duds the shelves can support before there is a rejection of the artistry. I know that we’re not done with our collaborations here at the brewery, and we’ll continue to be selective about whom we partner with and hope the rest of our craft brewer brothers and sisters follow an equally rooted example.

SAN MARCOS, CA— The 7^th Annual San Diego International Beer Competition concluded Sunday, June 23, with The Lost Abbey earning 6 total medals as well as being  honored with the first ever “Champion Brewery” award. (The Champion Brewery award was bestowed upon the brewery location with the most cumulative points based on awards.)

For three years running, The Lost Abbey / Port Brewing (Port Brewing Co.) has led or tied for the lead with the most medals in The San Diego International Beer Competition. In 2011, Port Brewing Co. garnered 6 total medals which was tied for the most awards. At the 2012 Competition, Port Brewing Co. topped the leaderboard with 8 total medals in addition to winning the Best of Show for Carnevale Ale.

“Having one of the largest commercial craft beer competitions in California each year, we take great pride in competing at the highest level on our home turf,” said Tomme Arthur, Director of Brewery Operations for The Lost Abbey and Port Brewing. “Consumers are always looking for validation, an award from the San Diego International Beer Competition shows them the excellence in brewing we strive for each day.”

The San Diego International Beer Competition and Festival ran from June 21 through June 23 at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. The competition received over 900 entries from 19 different countries and 22 states in the U.S. making it one of the largest in the country.

In recent years, craft brewers have reveled in pushing the bounds of bitterness, challenging their thirsty fans with beers heaped with hops. Starting with India pale ales and their more aggressive younger siblings, imperial IPAs, the trend then spread into other categories, with pilsners, porters and barley wines jostling for bitter supremacy.

But craft brewers are a restless bunch. Lately, a growing number have looked to another element to balance beer’s basic sweetness: instead of bitter-sweet, these beers lean towards sweet-sour. And although the term “sour beer” sounds off-putting at first, there are some exciting flavors awaiting the adventurous drinker. Sour beers faithfully preserve a centuries-old legacy. And, to the delight of modern drinkers, today’s brewers are shaping old styles and techniques to produce an array of new possibilities.

Sour—And More

As we learned through the bitter era, bitterness in beer is not one-dimensional. It can come from a number of sources and be expressed in an array of intensities. Most obviously, hops add bitterness. But the hop variety, the amount used and the timing of its addition, as well as its combination with other varieties, can take a beer from lightly floral to teeth-peelingly harsh. And hops are not the only source of bitterness: Roasted grains, malted and unmalted, can add a burnt-toast astringency to a beer even when the presence of hops is negligible.

So it is with sourness. An assortment of bacteria can contribute sour tones to beer, with intensities that range from lightly tangy to puckering. Rogue yeast strains also contribute acidic notes, and all these organisms produce different effects depending on their succession in fermenting and aging beer. And fruits, spices and other unusual additions can contribute to a sour profile.

Lumping all these beers under the description “sour” runs the risk of emphasizing their most simplistic quality. Jeff Sparrow, the Chicago-based beer author of Wild Brews, originally titled his book Sour Beer. But as he explored the Belgian brewing traditions that have contributed so much to the topic, he changed his mind. “I always say that this beer isn’t sour—it’s wild. I say that because, if all a beer was, was sour, who’s going to like it? There’s so much more going on.”

Lactobacillis

That’s true, but “sour beer” is the term showing up in both headlines and competition categories, which makes “sour” hard to avoid as a leading descriptor.

But Sparrow is right, there is much more going on. In fact, there are three closely overlapping trends attracting attention in specialty brewing. Although all three can have a role in a single beer, they can also exist alone or in combination. It’s a useful exercise to tease them apart: You may discover you like one or two qualities, or you may embrace them all.

Sour Beer: Our tongues register sourness as one of the five basic tastes (sour, bitter, sweet, salty and umami). Taste buds can detect levels of acidity: basically, they measure the pH value. More sophisticated discrimination—does this taste tart? Is it lactic? Is it vinegary?—relies on the interaction of our senses of taste and smell.

The primary sources of acidity are the closely related bacteria Lactobacillus (the sour milk bacteria) and Pediococcus, which both produce lactic acid; and Acetobacter, the source of acetic acid, or vinegar. Lactic acid is a relatively simple flavor, with a sweet-sour quality; acetic acid is sharper. And both acids can interact with alcohol to form chemical compounds known as esters. When all these elements combine, they can produce great complexity in a beer.

Wild Yeast: Brewer’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, was purified in the late 1800s, allowing brewers to exclude other yeasts they found undesirable. One particular genus of “wild yeast,” Brettanomyces (“Brett”) is considered a source of off-flavors in both beer and wine. Indeed, the common Brett descriptors—horse blanket, band-aid, barnyard, sweat—scarcely sound appetizing.

But fans of lambic, Belgium’s most ancient beer style, recognize these flavors and aromas as essential components of these complex beers. Other Belgian beer styles display lower but still important levels of Brett as part of their character. And now, a number of American craft brewers are infatuated with these wild yeasts whose presence once would have been considered an infection, and are learning to deploy them in their beers.

Brettanomyces also contributes some acidity to a beer, but that can be easily overwhelmed by other sources.

Wood or Barrel Aging: For centuries, brewers used wooden containers to ferment, age and store their beer. When an alternative presented itself, most brewers happily adopted materials that were easier to sanitize and more resistant to invasion by unwanted organisms.

But some brewing traditions clung to wood’s qualities. Wood is permeable to oxygen, which allows communities of organisms to live on and in its surface, where they contribute to beer character. If allowed to, Brettanomyces and other organisms will take up residence permanently in wooden barrels.

Wood has other qualities, too. Oak, the most common material for food-grade barrels, releases vanilla-like compounds into the barrel’s contents. Wine makers value different species and sources of oak for different wines, and distillers have learned to char the inside of a barrel to impart toasted and caramel notes to spirits. Brewers take advantage of both new and used barrels to give their beer added flavor.

Wood- or barrel-aging, then, can mean different things: It may be that the beer is affected by the flavors of the wood itself, or by previous liquids stored in the wood, or by microorganisms that colonize the barrel—or all three.

So what about water?

Though less acknowledged today, since brewers can effectively alter it to suit their needs (more on that later), water is, in fact, primarily responsible for the development of the pantheon of classic beers. “It is really interesting to look at the variety of styles that popped up in different parts of the world and became popular and good because of the water they had available to them,” notes Harpoon Brewing’s vice president chief brewing officer, Al Marzi. “The ingredients were all the same, except for the water, and you’ve got completely different beers being made.”

The basic recipe has always been water, malt, hops and yeast. So, why did the darker beers develop in Munich and Dublin, the hoppy pale ales in Burton, England, the pilsners in Plzen? As Olympia Brewing Co. founder Leopold Schmidt, so astutely proclaimed at the turn of the 19th century, it’s the water.

The True Connection Between Hard Rock and Beer

Water is the medium in which all the magic in the brewing process happens. And as innocuous as it seems—it’s clear and, for the most part, tasteless—it’s not all the same. You may have actually noticed when traveling that the water in, say, Portland, OR, may smell (or even taste) a little different from the H2O that comes out of your own tap at home. You may even have to use more soap or shampoo to get a good lather depending on what the water is like. This is what’s referred to as water hardness. And this, specifically, is what’s responsible for the development of different beer styles.

The chemistry of turning malted grains, yeast, hops and water into a delicious, refreshing alcoholic beverage, is relatively straight forward: grains are transformed into starches that, with the help of water and heat, the yeast can consume and turn into alcohol. But a little something called “water hardness” complicates things. “Hardness is mainly due either to lots of calcium and magnesium in the water, so-called ‘permanent’ hardness, as it’s relatively difficult to get rid of,” explains Professor Alex Maltman of the Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences at Aberystwyth University in Wales, “or bicarbonate in the water, ‘temporary’ hardness, which can be precipitated out by boiling.

“There’s a whole range of taste effects [in brewing] that arise from the presence of these substances, such as calcium promoting the bittering contribution of hops, and magnesium enhancing beer flavor, like salt in food. But the main effect—certainly of bicarbonate—is to affect the pH, or acidity, of the liquid during brewing.”

Yeast, who, let’s face it, do all the heavy lifting in the brewing process, are particular about the environment they work in. So, if the pH is comfortable for them, they can do their job well. Now, before this chemistry was known to brewers, they simply had to adjust their ingredients to suit the water. Bicarbonate-rich water—such as that in Munich and Dublin—creates a high pH (too alkaline for the yeast to do their thing properly). But roast some of the grains nice and dark, and it lowers the pH in the mash; the yeast are happy and they make a tasty dark brew, such as a German dunkel or Irish stout.

We can thank the varied geology of this great blue marble we inhabit for the variety of beers we drink today, because the different dissolved minerals in water—depending on the source—have had a profound effect on the development of brewing beer. “Burton-on–Trent in England has very mineral-rich water, including calcium and magnesium,” says Professor Maltman, “so it produces a strong tasting beer. It is also rich in sulfate, which adds a characteristic flavor and improves stability. This why the style known as English pale ale originated there, and the stability enabled it to travel far in those colonial days, even as far as India, if brewed strongly—hence India pale ale.” A relative lack of dissolved minerals, or “soft” water, such as that in Plzen in the Czech Republic, was key in the development of pilsner.

So, yeah, it’s the water. But, really, it’s what’s in the water. That is to say, those dissolved minerals—calcium, magnesium, sulfates and bicarbonates—are really what affect the pH, taste and stability. Which begs the question, how did they get there and why do some places have more or less? The answer lies in the earth itself. “The chemistry of water is greatly influenced by the geology of the aquifer in which it has resided,” explains Professor Maltman. “As one example, the bedrock below Burton, England, consists of sedimentary strata formed around 250 million years ago—a time when what is now England was closer to the equator and in desert conditions. Saline lakes evaporated to leave the sediments—what is now bedrock—rich in minerals such as gypsum, also known as calcium sulfate, and Epsom salts, also known as magnesium sulfate. Just as they were originally dissolved in the ancient lakes, these minerals now readily dissolve into the local groundwater, which is why Burton brewing water is like it is.”

So one may safely draw the conclusion that since the geology of North America is equally varied, the water is too. True enough, and though it hasn’t exactly given rise to specific beer styles, the water available to brewers here has had a profound effect on them—from San Diego’s challengingly hard water to the surprisingly perfect-for-brewing Brooklyn water. The difference today is that with the advanced understanding of what’s in our H2O—most municipal water suppliers can provide brewers with an analysis of the water makeup—we no longer have to brew beers that suit the particular local hardness. Or as Al Marzi at Harpoon so cleverly puts it, “The brewer’s art can be expanded to create any type of water he’d like to have for a particular style.”