Covered in sweat and spent grain, I am starting to rethink my decision to play assistant brewer for the day.
Making beer isn’t as cool as it sounded before I dug into this thousand-pound pile of steaming organic matter, but I press on. After all, this is our beer I am helping to make, the Metromix Saison de Taffy.
The process of removing spent grain from the mash tun, called the mash-out, is the most physically taxing part. It’s a series of small, technical tasks separated by long stretches of waiting. It can be tedious, but to a beer aficionado like Dave Colt, it’s endlessly fascinating.
Colt, co-owner of Sun King Brewing Co., calls commercial brewing a “left brain/right brain” exercise, part art and part science. He talks like a chef — adding a little of this grain, a little of that grain to influence the flavor and aroma — but makes calculations like a chemist.
Sun King is Indianapolis’ newest craft brewery, producing 15-barrel batches of seasonal and specialty beers at 135 N. College Ave.
Colt, 43, and his 34-year-old brewing partner, Clay Robinson, are positively giddy to finally be doing it in their own sudsy fiefdom.
Craft beer, or microbrew, represents a small but increasing segment of the total beer market. According to the Brewers Association, craft beer sales increased by 5 percent in 2008. But it’s still a niche market, constituting only $6.34 billion of an estimated $100 billion-plus domestic beer sales.
Colt and Robinson met in the late 1990s when Colt worked as an assistant brewer at Circle V Brewing Co., and Robinson would stop in to buy kegs for Wabash College parties and Phish shows.
In 2005, Colt went to work as assistant brewer at RAM Restaurant & Brewery Downtown, and he hired Robinson. The duo won many state and national awards the next three years. But they chafed at the corporate hierarchy and dreamed of opening their own brewery.
In July 2008, Robinson quit his job, cashed in his 401(k) and set about drafting a business plan.
“I had enough money to make it to the end of the year,” he said. He scoured the Internet for a commercial brewhouse, and assembled a small group of investors, including his father, Omar, and Andy Fagg, a semi-retired investor who had been drinking Colt’s beer since his days at Circle V.
The group purchased the 15-barrel JV Northwest brewhouse, rented a Downtown warehouse and started transforming the erstwhile ambulance depot into a food-production facility.
After months of retrofitting, renovating and bureaucratic filings, Sun King is fully operational, delivering beer to a growing number of Central Indiana bars and restaurants, including MacNiven’s on Massachusetts Avenue and Siam Square on Virginia Avenue.
It’s a bare-bones operation; there isn’t even an exterior sign to mark the brewery’s location. But Robinson has been working on a tasting room with Matty Bennett of Sequences Design that will be built in the coming months.
“It’s all about sustainable growth,” Robinson said. That’s why the brewery will forgo partnering with a distributor and deliver its own beer for now. It’s also why Sun King beer won’t be available in liquor stores or groceries until at least 2010.
The smallest commercial canning and bottling equipment can run in the tens of thousands of dollars, so the Sun King owners are waiting until they have the cash to buy a used, two-head manual canner.
“We would really like to have canned product around Indianapolis by the time that big race rolls around next year,” Robinson said with a smile.
It takes two of us to lift the Rubbermaid Brute trash cans full of spent grain 6 inches off the floor and onto a pallet. Colt gets behind the wheel of a forklift and moves the pallet to the other side of the warehouse, where the trash cans will sit until a local cattle farmer comes to pick them up.
Each can represents $300 worth of animal feed, allowing the farmer to expand her operation. It’s just one way, along with high-efficiency lightbulbs, skylights and an energy-saving white membrane roof, that Sun King will, in Robinson’s words, “close the loop,” and lessen the brewery’s carbon footprint.
When the wort, or sugar water, extracted from the mash tun is done boiling in the kettle, Colt will chill it and transfer it to the fermenter. Once it is in the fermenter, the brewer will add yeast and wait for two weeks.
The work is taxing — at times mentally, other times physically — and a brewer can spend 10 hours on a batch from the time the grain is cracked to the moment the fermenter is filled.
But Colt and Robinson are doing what they love, and when the cold beer meets empty glass, the whole process seems more art than science.
“You can look at art,” Robinson corrected me once. “But you can taste beer.”
