Erica Shea - Make Some Beer: Small-Batch Recipes from Brooklyn to Bamberg

Copyright 2014 by Erica Shea and Stephen Valand
Illustrations copyright 2014 by Deryck Vonn Lee

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Clarkson Potter/Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
www.clarksonpotter.com

CLARKSON POTTER is a trademark and POTTER with colophon is a registered trademark of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Shea, Erica.
Make some beer: small-batch recipes from Brooklyn to Bamberg/Erica Shea and Stephen Valand; illustrations by Deryck Vonn Lee.1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. BrewingAmateurs manuals. 2. BeerAmateurs manuals. 3. Cooking (Beer)Amateurs manuals. 4. Cookbooks. I. Title.
TP570. S523 2014
663.42dc23 2013034664

ISBN 978-0-804-13763-8
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-3764-5

Interior design: La Tricia Watford
Illustrations: Deryck Vonn Lee
Cover design: Jim Massey
Cover photograph: Marcos Mesa Sam Wordley/Shutterstock
Cover illustrations: (hops) Margocha8/Shutterstock; (background) Palladin12/Shutterstock

v3.1

A question we get asked all the time is how we started Brooklyn Brew Shopin interviews, by people passing through the market, by old classmates we havent seen in years (and who dont recall Erica even liking beer). When youre introduced as someone who created a beer company, people are curious and want to know how you did it. And the how they expect involves us being industrial designers, or having MBA degrees, or growing up surrounded by beer. They imagine business proposals and investor meetings or rich relatives who indulged us. They dont expect our answer to start with, Well, we quit our jobs and went backpacking in Europe for seven weeks.

The idea for Brooklyn Brew Shop existed before our trip. It existed from the first time we tried to make beer and realized there wasnt a single place in New York City to gather supplies. It existed every Saturday we spent brewing around Stephens roommates with our often-improvised equipment. It existed in every bottle we shared with the explanation that yes, we made this. Brooklyn Brew Shop existed for the two of us in the conversations we would have for a solid year about how to do it right, how to make brewing feel more like cooking, and how to make it affordable, approachable, and exciting. We became obsessed with re-creating the sheer delight we experienced from making beer with everyone.

Brooklyn Brew Shop existed as something we could do, as something we really should do, and as something we really wanted to do. But the question that kept coming up was whether this was something we were actually ready to do. Or more to the point: Was this something we were ready to do together?

So we bought the domain brooklynbrewshop.com and started planning a backpacking trip. The seven weeks we would spend backpacking through Europe would serve two purposes. The first would be to sample a lot of beer by drinking our way through historic regions and styles. Wed visit breweries and absorb a wealth of brewing knowledge by, well, absorbing a wealth of beer.

The second was a test. Were we ready to spend every moment of every day together? Would we still be kind to each other when tired and hungry and strained from lifting heavy things (like a 35-pound backpack)? Was our relationship ready for a business and our imagined business ready for a very real relationship? We were young (Stephen 23, Erica 25). Our relationship was younger. And even though we were obsessed with brewing, our beer education was youngest of all.

So we planned, and we saved. Erica researched each stop, obsessively tracking and retracking the best means of transportation. Stephen pored over profiles on couchsurfing.org, a site where people offer travelers a free place to stay, to find the best matches based on profile pictures, music choices, number of cats, and whether or not they loved food and cooking.

In the time leading up to the trip, our conversations alternated between the beers we wanted to brew, how to start Brooklyn Brew Shop, and the weird or useful facts we were learning about Oslo or Brussels or Amsterdam. We were nervous and excited. We sent emails to potential suppliers and brewed test batches for the first few beers we were planning to release, but the opening dates of the Brooklyn Flea (the artisan market where we hoped to launch Brooklyn Brew Shop) were still just marks on our calendar. We booked flights, gave notice at our jobs, visited the doctor while we still had health insurance, and sublet our apartmentsall the while brewing up batch after batch. We threw a going-away party, drank most of the beer we had brewed, and on April 6, 2009, left knowing that whatever happened over the next seven weeks, the lives we returned to would be different. And we were ready.

Our trip started in Oslo. Stephens grandparents and great-grandparents immigrated to Brooklyn from Norway, but hed never left North America until this trip. We knew climate-wise it would have been better to end there in May rather than start there in early April, but we could adjust to climate. The cost of good beer, however, was a little hard to swallow. We met our first host, Sara; went to our first bar, Grnerlkka Brygghus; ordered our first beer; shelled out 89 kroner (about $15) for a pint; and drank up.

Remnants of snow, blustery breezes, and pricey pints were soon the least of our problems. Easter was just a few days away, and, it turned out, Scandinavians take that holiday pretty seriously. Watching chains being locked over the doors of the beer fridge the Wednesday before Easter was a puzzling sight to say the least. The city shut down, and our beer tour went dry for a couple of days.

From Oslo we took a Neil Diamondblaring overnight cruise to Copenhagen, Denmark, where we were staying with a Finnish girl who lost her voice and, along with it, any Danish she had picked up since immigrating. She took us to a bodega where we drank 25-cent beers. Bodegas in Copenhagen arent places to pick up household necessities in the middle of the night like in New York. Theyre more like VFW halls. Wood-paneled and full of old men. Plowing through a pack of cigarettes that couldnt have been helping her voice, she rasped through a cloud of smoke that young people didnt really come here but that beer was impossibly cheap, and it was the only kind of bar where you could still smoke cigarettes.

For the brief window during Easter weekend when bars would be open, our Finnish friend also took us to an amazing subterranean spot, Lord Nelson Bar, the craft beer bar where she worked, followed by another and another. We rented used and mostly rickety bikes, ate smrrebrd from Aamanns, and became enamored by Danish craft beer culture. Never having the same beer twice and finding tap handles labeled with hand-scrawled strips of paper and tape is the ultimate way to discover the beers of a city. No matter how much we learned (and by that we mean drank), it became pretty obvious how much more we had to go.