The official definition of a craft beer, according to the Brewers Association, is one that’s produced by a small, independent and traditional brewer. But to Atlanta’s Second Self Beer Company, craft beer means something much more—namely high-quality ingredients and processes that produce “layers of character and flavor” which come together in a beer that’s “greater than the sum of its parts.” Second Self’s purveyors take us through the steps—and science—of how they make one of their best-selling craft beers.
Step 1: Raw Ingredients
“Thai Wheat was inspired by my trip to Thailand in 2010,” says Second Self Beer Architect Jason Santamaria, Mgt 06. “I loved the flavor combinations there, and I came back, took cooking classes, ate a lot of food. We started with a plain ale with ginger and lemongrass, but eventually we switched to an American wheat because it better suited the style. We stayed away from coriander, but eventually added galangal, which is a cousin of ginger. It’s a much more robust flavor, and much more potent, so dialing that in was hard. That’s where we’re at now.”
Step 2: Step on the Scale
Early on, Second Self made small batches of Thai Wheat—five to 10 gallons at a time. (These days, the brewery makes 620 gallons at a time.) “Our boil used to finish in five minutes and that was it,” says Alechemist Chris Doyle, Mgt 07, MBA 11. “Now we’re talking 30 minutes, which means all new interactions of your herbs in the beer. When scaling, we had to do a lot of adjustments.” He says they’re still tweaking to this day, restlessly striving for perfection.
Step 3: Too Many Cooks
“We typically didn’t ask for public opinion until we are really confident,” Santamaria says. He and Doyle would brew every other weekend, and always had volunteer friends who would try the beer and give feedback—20 to 30 people total. “They’d like one batch way better than another batch, and we’d take notes,” Doyle says. “This focus group of friends had a history of trying a given beer, which made them experts on its evolution.” Since Santamaria and Doyle were meticulous with their notes, they could always find out why one Thai Wheat was different from another, especially when it got particularly favorable feedback from their tasting crew.
Step 4: The Spice is Right
Second Self gets its lemongrass and ginger from Buford Highway Famers Market, Your Dekalb Farmers Market and Restaurant Depot, but they’d like to bring the spice production in-house. “We’re in talks with some local farmers and hydroponic growers to do it here,” Santamaria says. They tend to go shopping the night before or the morning of brewing, and they make Thai Wheat once or twice a month. “Which means once or twice a month, those markets are out of galangal,” Doyle says, laughing. The pair adds that all the local farmers markets think they’re insane.
Step 5: Milling About
The malt—malted barley and wheat—shows up whole-kernel in 50-pound bags to Second Self from malters in the Midwest or Canada. Santamaria and Doyle lug it to the tanks and manually dump it in. “It’s just transferring seeds into usable sugar,” Doyle says. “You’re cracking the seed, the hull, to get the sugar out. That’s what milling does.”
Step 6: Do the Mash
“Mashing is when you add water to it, extracting all that sugar into the water,” Doyle says. “The enzymes are still active in the seed, so it pulls the sugar out, puts it in the water, and that water is what you draw off and turn into wort. Wort is what you boil and add hops and spices to.” Once all the potential sugar is converted, you rinse off the remaining sugar and then it’s time for the boil.
Step 7: Making the Magic Happen
“Boiling takes about an hour and a half,” Doyle says. Then it’s time to cool it down from 212 degrees to 70. Then it goes to the fermenter for 10 days. “We pitch yeast from one of the other tanks into the clean, empty fermenter,” Doyle says. “We add oxygen, and that allows the yeast to grow daughter cells and expand. When it’s rolling, there’s trillions of cells in the tank, eating all the sugar and converting it into alcohol and CO2. Once that’s done, they start to fall out and fermentation stops.”
Step 8: Quality Control
“We do lots of tasting before and during fermentation,” Doyle says. “We generally check gravities every day.” In the end, he says it’s up to his and Santamaria’s palates. If the flavor is off, they’ll know. Sanitation is extremely important in preventing off flavors, as well.
Step 9: Goodbye and Good Luck
After Santamaria and Doyle are satisfied with a batch, the beer is kegged, loaded onto a United Distributors truck and hauled to various bottle shops, bars and restaurants all over metro Atlanta. “We test beer in market before we have locations sell it to make sure it’s pouring right, that the CO2 levels are right,” Santamaria says. “Because we’re growing, there’s no set route just yet. We’re out there trying new approaches, trying to drum up new sales.”
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