This article by Caleigh Cross was published by the Stowe Reporter on Oct. 4.
[W]hat do you do when your brewpub has been decimated by a tropical storm?
If you’re John and Jen Kimmich, owners of The Alchemist, you take a short break from cleaning up the mess to have a beer.
“Less than 48 hours after the flood hit, we had that first canning run,” John Kimmich said.
“Jen was running around, dealing” with the mess from Tropical Storm Irene in 2011, said John. “She came over with the first can off the canning line. I came up out of the basement and the two of us drank that can” of Heady Topper, one of America’s most popular double IPAs.
“I gave her a kiss and said, ‘OK,’” and the couple got back to cleaning up the wreckage.
That first run “was kind of uneventful for us,” John said, because “it was chaos.”
Later that day, “I was a mess, and there was a line of people buying beer. I remember it being a very emotional moment. As terrible as it was for everyone, that was one bright glimmer — people could have an escape and enjoy a beer,” John said.
Tuesday, Oct. 2, the Alchemist’s staff canned the 1,000th run of Heady Topper at its cannery in Waterbury.
Each run has about 600 cases, made up of four different Heady Topper brews combined, said Ron Kimmich, John’s brother, who oversees production and operations.
The Waterbury cannery, located on Crossroad, brews three runs per week, on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
Only Heady Topper is brewed and canned at the Waterbury facility, unless there’s some overflow from the Stowe brewery, said Ron.
To John, a thousand runs is “just a number. It’s a nice, round number, and we’re proud of all the hard work that goes into it.”
Learning curve
“We’ve certainly made our share of mistakes,” said John.
The canning machine didn’t work out of the box — it took years of effort on the parts of John and Joel Hartman, lead technician for the canning machine, to get it to work so the beer remained the piney, crisp, hoppy brew for which The Alchemist is famed.
“There was beer splattering everywhere,” Hartman said. “You would not believe how much … It was a mess.”
After some modifications to the canning machine, an engineer accidentally broke the touch screen display so no buttons were showing. Fortunately, Hartman’s years of experience meant he knew how to get the machine to operate anyway.
“I just knew where all the buttons were,” he said.
“There’s many opportunities to ruin the beer before it gets to the canning line,” John said, but there are hundreds of places for the process to break down on the canning line itself.
“The big thing when you’re packaging beer” is to keep as much dissolved oxygen as possible out of the can, since that’s what causes a beer’s flavor profile to break down over time.
“The flavor gets muddled. The hop brightness disappears,” John said.
When the Kimmichs started canning their beer, they didn’t have the equipment to test sealed cans for dissolved oxygen to learn how much was in there.
John had a friend working at Harpoon Brewery in Windsor who let him bring cans of Heady down for testing.
“It wasn’t good,” John said. “We started saving to get that meter.”
Dissolved oxygen in a brew should be kept under 100 parts per billion, in John’s opinion.
It’s not easy to keep the level that low, he said.
Fermented beer produces carbon dioxide, and since yeast feeds on oxygen to produce energy, there’s hardly any in there when the beer is ready for canning.
However, the process of transferring it to the canning line induces oxygen with every move, and it’s the canners’ job to ensure it’s pushed out.
The Alchemist uses jets of carbon dioxide inserted deep into each can to push out oxygen.
Once it’s on the conveyor, “it’s essentially a poured beer,” John said, and then the head is scraped off, since the largest bubbles, containing the most oxygen, are on top.
Typically, Heady Topper runs clock in at about 20 to 30 parts per billion of dissolved oxygen, John said.
In the beginning, though, it was as high as a whopping 800.
“Those are huge numbers,” John said.
Now, the brewery has the equipment it needs to measure the dissolved oxygen per brew, and refine its processes accordingly.
But Heady Topper still has an “unpredictability that is very hard to control. It still is a living organism that will kind of do what it wants to do,” John said.
Still having fun
For John, the thousandth run of Heady Topper might be just another milestone, but Hartman is excited, and more than a little nostalgic.
“I can’t believe it’s a thousand. It feels like it should be more,” he said.
Those thousand runs have taken Hartman from a job bartending at the old Alchemist brew-pub into a full-time Monday-to-Friday job as lead technician.
“I’m really grateful for it,” he said.
Many Alchemist employees have been with the Kimmichs since the brew-pub days, riding the hazy golden Heady Topper wave to dream careers.
Take Eric Spoerl, the early morning brewer. He gets to work at 4 o’clock every morning to brew, and starts the first canning run by 7 a.m.
“Somebody’s gotta make dreams come true,” Spoerl said, laughing as he left the kitchen.
The Heady wave took the Kimmichs to an unexpected place, too.
“We never imagined we would be packaging beer,” John said. “The landscape was very different for packaged beer” when we started. “Nobody canned. … You were in the old way of packaging beer. Craft breweries felt the need to compete” with larger brewers. “It was the wrong way to do it.”
But he knew glass bottles were out of the question when he was at Foster’s swimming hole in Stowe with his son and the pair came across a shattered Magic Hat bottle.
“I picked up every piece I could find. … I knew if that had been an Alchemist bottle, it would have broken my heart.”
He knew if the couple was going to package Heady Topper, it would need to be in a 16-ounce can, in a four-pack.
People told John, “‘People won’t buy a double IPA in a 16-ounce can,’” he said. “But I would. All day, every day, I’d buy that beer.”
A thousand runs’ worth of customers have already agreed.
