City Slickers

Jenn follows the trail from barley to beer at Big Rock Brewery 

-By Jennifer Cockrall-King 

As I drive the maze of streets and avenues in an industrial park in Southeast Calgary, I am literally following my nose. “I must be close,” I figure, as I catch another whiff of a sweet, grainy aroma cutting through the diesel fumes of the big rigs whizzing past. I follow the distinctive scent of brewed beer for about a block and a half until I spot the sloping, green, Bavarian-style roofs of its three buildings. I have arrived at Big Rock Brewery.

My tour guide today is sales representative Alastair Smart, a man whose London accent seems tailor-made to discuss all aspects of brewing. Alastair has been with Big Rock Brewery for 23 years, from the very start of the company. He’s the perfect man to walk me through this homegrown Alberta product, from the raw ingredients to keg, can and bottle.

We start our tour at five towering, white, 40-metric-tonne hoppers just outside the milling room. I learn that Alberta grows some of the best two-row malting barley in the world, thanks to our long summer days and mineral-rich soil, which creates the perfect ratios of proteins to starches. The province exports malted barley around the world because of its exceptional qualities for brewing. (Incidentally, Alberta’s famously hard water is great for brewing ales. Those same minerals that wreck havoc on our appliances are ideal for it.)

Alastair hands me a few tan-coloured grains and tells me to taste them. They have a pleasant crunch and a slight caramel sweetness. The first one is a pale malt, light-coloured and grainy in flavour. The second, a caramel, has a deeper tan colour and a pleasant buttery-sweetness. The last, a dark malt, is chocolate brown and has a nutty, almost smoky flavour. Combinations of the three are used to make all of the company’s varieties of beer. Big Rock’s Grasshopper beer uses malted wheat, also from Alberta farms, as well as malted barley.

The malted barley enters the mill room via elevated augers and pipes. It is weighed and then the grains are broken down in the gristmill, a flourmill that coarsely grinds the whole grain. Big Rock beers are all craft beers, an all malted grain beverage with only traditional ingredients that have been around for centuries. Their products contain only malted barley and malted wheat, hops, yeast and water. Big Rock’s Honey Brown also has a dash of organic Alberta honey. Those six elements become no fewer than 11 distinctive beers, and a different seasonal beer every year.

As I take in the place, I spy a pail of what looks like rabbit food. But when Alastair lifts a handful of the bright green pellets to my nose, I realize that these are hops. They smell pungent, fruity, grassy and earthy all at once.

“Hops are to brewing what spices are to cooking,” he says. Big Rock uses between three and five different varieties of hops in one beer, depending on the desired outcome. Hops add the spice, fragrance and bitter qualities (when expertly balanced, bitterness is desirable.)

As we climb a set of stairs to the brewing station, I contemplate the old line, “is it getting hot in here? Or is it just me?” The air temperature becomes akin to a steamy, tropical sub-climate. I see three gargantuan stainless vessels, which have various concoctions brewing inside them.

Chris Chibi, one of the Big Rock brewers, is running the show in this area today. He opens the submarine-style round hatch of the 160-hectalitre kettle known as the mash tun, an old English word for a large container for holding liquids, and the smell of cooking porridge wafts out. We peer into the vessel and I see a slurry of barley grist and warm water. It looks and smells like cooking cereal as it swirls and steams. I’m intrigued as I bask in breakfast aromas. Chris dips a very long pole with a plastic cup at one end into the vat and hauls out a sample, pours it into a small cup and I gingerly lift it to my lips. It’s sweet. I mean, really sweet. It tastes like hot, watery porridge, with shards of barley husk. Alastair informs me that this is just the coarsely-ground malted barley and water; in the mash tun, the starches are converting to sugars, which will fuel fermentation.

The mash is then pumped into a lauter tun, a 160-hectalitre tank with a perforated false bottom, where the husks settle. The liquid that comes out of the lauter tun is called wort. They put it into the brew kettle, bring it to a boil, and the hops are added. From the 272-hectalitre brew kettle, the hot liquid goes into a centerfuge where any bits of hops or grain will collect in the middle, and the clear wort goes around the outside. The residue, called traub, will be added to the spent grain, moved to a hopper to be used as cattle feed. In other words, cow porridge. Who knew?

Chris adds a pail of hops to the brew kettle and then pulls out a cup of the hot, murky liquid for us to taste. This time, the fragrance of hops hits hard and the mixture is sharply bitter. Clearly, the flavours need time to mellow and ferment for this to become the Big Rock beer I know. But it’s recognizable as a proto-beer and it’s interesting to taste it at these early stages.

Before we leave Chris to his work, Alastair points to woman wearing a pair of bright pink rubber boots. “Pink Boots Society,” he yells above the noise down below in the fermentation area. Big Rock brewer Candice Derry, one of only five female members in Canada, is part of the international women’s brewer’s group known as the Pink Boots Society.

Now it’s time for the laws of nature to get to work. The now cooled liquid is pumped into fermentation tanks that can hold between 140 and 550 hectalitres of liquid. Yeast is added and the magic of fermentation begins. I feel like I’m in a cathedral as Alastair and I walk down an aisle of 75 shimmering stainless steel tanks. Some contain ales, a beer made with top-fermenting yeast that is ready in just seven days. Lager yeasts work more slowly at the bottom of the tank, so it takes three to four weeks for them to come full circle. Either way, the yeast feasts on the sugars from the mash tun, which creates alcohol and carbon dioxide as a by-product, which results in a delicious and bubbly product: beer!

From the fermentation tanks the beer is passed through three different filters, the last one removing any particles larger than 0.45 microns, or less than one millionth of a metre. This is important, Alastair tells me, because it allows Big Rock Beer to be sterile for kegging, bottling and canning without having to be pasteurized. Pasteurization means heating up the beer to sterilize it and this would alter the flavour. Because they are unpasteurized, Big Rock beers retain their layers of subtle flavours, a hallmark of the craft.

Big Rock is a microbrewery at heart, though it has grown since its first three beers – Traditional, Bitter and Porter – were first sold in 1985. The company has managed to retain that approach throughout its expansion from a staff of 10 to 125, but it is still a small fry in the world of big beer companies.

We pass from the relative tranquility of the fermentation tanks to the loud bustle of the kegging, canning and bottling lines. About 25 workers and an array of impressive machinery chug away in concert; building labelled boxes, inspecting brown bottles of Warthog Ale marching along a bottling line, placing the freshly filled and labeled beers into six-packs, onto flats and then onto palettes.

In just 30 minutes, a bottle washing machine takes recycled empties through a sequence of washing and stripping off the old labels, to sterilizing the glassware until ready for reuse. Kegs are sterilized and filled, and the canning line is also running at full tilt. It’s like the sound of thousands of sewing machines running at the same time, combined with the clink of glassware and beep of forklifts running palettes to and fro. And then, suddenly, the lines shut down and the space goes silent. It’s lunchtime, Alastair tells me.

Big Rock beer is sold in every province in Canada except Quebec, and is exported internationally to beer-loving Korea. I figure that once the product is packaged it moves straight to shipping and off to the liquor stores. But I’m told there’s still one more stop before Big Rock goes off in all directions, and that is the lab, located on the main floor of the packaging building.

In the lab, a very focused-looking man is pouring small samples of beer onto Petri dishes and labelling them. There are also pipettes and test tubes, Bunsen burners and other laboratory equipment. (Beer glasses being one of them.) This is where samples are tested to make sure the alcohol content is correct, the colour, the Ph, and to make sure it is the quality the brew master, Paul Gautreau, wants on the shelves. Quality control checks here are the last stop before the product is finally shipped out.

I decide to do a little quality control check of my own. Seeing as the Big Rock Grill – a full-service restaurant with on-site catering – is full to capacity (just the average Tuesday lunch Alastair assures me), we choose the loft, a room used for tastings, meetings, and other special events. “Weddings, funerals, bar mitzvahs‚ "we do it all,” Alastair says with a laugh. He pours me a substantial pint of Traditional Ale, a dark glass with a creamy white head of foam, and suddenly I swear that I can taste all of those basic elements I was smelling before. From the nutty chocolate-coloured malted barley to a slight hint of hops, yes, right down to that mineral-rich Rocky Mountain-filtered water.