Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground.

Brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airport, serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

More information available at bemidjiairport.

org.

[Music] [Music] Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm producer/director Scott Knudson.

In this episode producer/director Andrew Dziengel visits Rendezvous Brewing in Hackensack, Minnesota where they make a special batch of beer with fresh hops from Grant Goltz.. [Music] GS [Music] My name is Doug Toth.

I'm the owner/co-owner and brewer at Rendezvous Brewing in Hackensack, Minnesota.

Today we're brewing our fresh hop beer.

It's going to be called Rondebrew Fresh Hop.

This is actually the third time we've done it even though we've only been open a little over two years.

The thing that's really exciting about this beer, it's local hops that are grown about 10 miles away.

We have a local friend who grows them for us.

We pick them.

We invite our customers to come in and pick them also and then we brew the beer.

We throw them right in, it really can't get any fresher than that.

So, hops are one of the things that flavor a beer.

I always talked about it like they're the spice.

They're the salt and pepper that you put in a beer.

Hops give it the citrusy flavors.

They give it the bitter flavors.

They give it the tropical fruit flavors in a beer and along with barley water and yeast, you know, hops is really one of the most important things.

So, these particular hops are called Nugget.

They're kind of a classic old-fashioned/new fashioned hops.

They have a high, what they call alpha acid so they're very bitter.

They have just a great kind of a classic IPA flavor.

My hop grower also grows Centennial and Cascade and a little bit of Williamette.

So, you should get your get your thumb behind the hop.

My name is Sue Toth and I'm the owner of Rendezvous Brewing in Hackensack, Minnesota.

Today we had a fresh hop pick which means that the hop grower brought the fresh binds in and our customers were able to pick off the fresh hops for us to create a new beer with grand fresh hops.

We got the idea from a local grower who said that he grows a lot of hops but he doesn't use them all in his own brewery.

So, he was willing to bring in some hops for our customers to pick and for us to make a fresh hop beer.

So, one of the things that's great about this area is Grant who grows our hops for us, found out we were opening a brewery, he tracked us down, invited us out to his house and we had kind of a a discussion a back and forth about what we were doing for the community, what kind of brewery we wanted to make, really a place for people to gather.

At that point, he offered his hops to us and he thought it would be really fun to have kind of this event where we bring the community in to really participate.

This is our third year, actually the first year with Covid, we didn't do it in person but it was it's just a great event.

So, Grant Goltz is a very interesting guy.

He was a geologist by trade.

He now is a home brewer.

He grows his own hops.

He makes birch bark canoes.

He makes his own guitars.

He just a a really fascinating fascinating guy.

Mutual friends introduced us together and it's been a great partnership ever since.

So, we started Rendezvous Brewing in in an effort to bring people to Hackensack.

We wanted a place for people to be able to gather.

My husband and I both lived in the Twin Cities for 30 years and we wanted to move back to Hackensack to retire and we opened the brewery in an effort to have a business in town that would bring people to town that didn't normally come to town.

So, I've been home brewing for about six or seven years.

I used to travel a lot for my job and once I was home all the time my kids said "Dad you need a hobby".

So, they bought me a home brewer kit.

I brewed that the first time.

It turned out great.

I thought, hey this is really fun, bought another kit, turned out really well.

It sort of snowballed from there, made a lot of beer at home, got involved in the brewing process and just started to love creating the rest recipes and more importantly when you brew beer it's fun.

You know, people really enjoy beer and it really helps the community around beer.

We found this building probably 3-4 years ago.

We were able to acquire it.

We looked at what businesses to put in.

The one that would have made the most money for the least investment was self- storage units and we're like well how fun is that?

That's just no fun at all to have downtown building be self storage units.

So, we came up with this idea of a brewery.

We spent about two years in planning, two years looking for financing, two years getting the equipment and the design and everything all lined up and ready.

We were able to open in June of 2020 right in the middle of the pandemic.

So, that was kind of a fun experience.

Our customers were great.

They came in, bought beer to go from us when we were able to be open and it's just been it's been a wonderful experience.

All right, so the heating up part, the water will just come through and it'll come out here and then I'll seal it all up after it's running on the floor.

So, here we're just going to run the water up to zero.

All right, off to the grain.

For this one we're using five bags.

[Music] [Music] All right 45 caramic 2.

Then we need 25 lbs.

of this one.

[Music] that's 23 5 lb.

special bee So what is special bee?

So, special bee is a kind of a roast on a grain.

So, a roasted grain is what gives the coffee or the beer it's flavor.

It's roasted like coffee.

So, the longer they roast it, the darker it is.

The more flavor.

All right, that's our recipe.

All right, this is where the noise and the hard work comes in.

All right, we're going to dump the water that we just put in all right then we're going to fill it up again.

It's what I spend about 80% of my time doing cleaning.

All right, then we're just watching 25 gallons to go in down to here.

When we put the grain in then we're going to go about 145 gallons which is down to here.

So, that water will be pumped in while the grain's going in that's called the mash in from there it sits for about an hour and then we wait for the enzymes to do their work.

So, we'll turn this off and we'll readjust this, this and this.

All right, we are set.

You ready?

All right, water's going in, turn the augur on.

All right, bag number one in and we go check to make sure everything's coming through okay.

[Music] What?

[Music] And then we wait.

Again that's it till it's [Music] done.

And now we wait.

All right, so what we're doing here is we're moving the wart.

It's been in here boiling for an hour.

We're moving it back to the mash ton where we're going to put the fresh hops in.

We're filling it from the bottom up.

All right, while we're filling we'll put some hops in here.

[Applause] All right, looks like we got a 140 gallons yet to go over here.

Oh again if you could smell this it's amazing.

It's real citrusy, you can almost smell the bitterness in it and then that fresh hop there's something about that fresh hop character.

I always say it's like the difference between fresh basil and dried basil They're still basil but it's just very different.

So, this fresh hop has these extra what are called terpenes and flavor agents.

They're just really, really good and as we say now we wait.

We're down to about 120 gallons left to move over.

We started about 190 and we're making 155 gallons of beer.

So, the water coming out of the bottom here, this is our steam condenser and what it is is these little nozzles that are shooting cold water down, each one is spraying just a tiny little spray so the steam comes up from the boil, goes up through the pipe comes down here and this water actually condenses the steam into water where it falls out and goes down the drain and this is all water that we reuse going into to here.

We try to reuse our water and save energy wherever we can.

So, as we move the beer from here over to the fermenter, this is a wart chiller and it takes boiling hot wart in one side goes through these plates with cold water coming through the other side and cools it down to about 75-74° and then we take that hot water that's generated coming out the other side, put it back into the hot water tank and then we use this for cleaning.

So, again we're always trying to save energy and save water and do what we can.

So, there's this cone in the middle that collects all the protein and the stuff that comes over from the mash ton and it builds up this little mountain in the middle.

All right, while we're waiting for the hops to finish, we're going to switch everything around to go through the wart chiller here.

This will be our hot water recovery on this side.

All right, there's my water recovery.

Beer in.

All right.

need to get my cold water source.

So, this big green thing here is called a cold liquor tank.

That's where we filter city water through a reverse osmosis system.

We take it down to three parts per million.

So, it's super clean, super clear and that's what we brew with, also use it for going through here to cool the beer and then like I said we heat it up again and then we reuse this water.

All right, just a couple more hoses to go.

All right, this I'm going to leave right here for now.

So, yeast when it first starts, it really really likes oxygen so we give it a little boost of pure food grade beverage grade oxygen just to give it a little head start.

All right, we've got our beer set up.

So, we're going to drain that out the bottom, run it through the pump through the wart chiller and into the fermentor.

It's been 20 minutes almost exactly so we can go ahead and get that process started.

Open this up that should start coming through and you're going to see beer coming out of that hose in or wart still in a few minutes.

As we turn on the water, all right open closed.

All right, here we go, open this to get the beer flowing, turn our water pump on and finally we turn on the work pump.

All right, we've got wart flowing into the fermentor, get some oxygen going there, don't need that much.

We're right at 74° pretty close to right where we want it.

Like I always say humans have been brewing beer for 8,000 years.

There's lots of tricks.

There's lots of tips and you know, water, barley, yeast and hops makes beer.

Try not to make it too complicated.

The fresh hop thing throws a little wrinkle in cuz we're moving back to vessels that we don't normally go back into but the beer is really good when it comes out so it makes it worth it and that's like just about it.

This will keep pumping through and this will drain into the fermentor.

So, now for the next 45 minutes, check the oxygen, check the temperature check the level of the wart in the mash ton and run back and forth between all three of them to make sure everything is where it's supposed to be.

So, once this is all in the fermentor, I put the yeast in.

The yeast activates overnight.

It'll start bubbling and throwing off CO2 like crazy by tomorrow morning, from there it'll probably be 3 weeks, possibly 2 and 1/2 possibly, 3 and 1 half but around 3 weeks the beer will be ready and finished.

The way we tell that it's finished is we measure the sugar content of the liquid every day and as the alcohol converts yeast, converts the sugar into alcohol, the yeast percentage goes down, the alcohol percentage goes up.

So, we measure that sugar drop and when it hits a a steady point for 3 or 4 days it's done.

As far as the yeast is concerned, we give it a couple extra days.

We do something called a diacidel test and some other tests to make sure that it's actually done fermenting.

If you don't wait long enough sometimes you can get funky flavors in the beer but, you know, that 3 weeks is probably when we'd be pouring this.

Now the big wait?

Now the big wait, yes that is exactly right.

Thank you so much for watching.

Join us again next time on Common Ground.

If you have an idea for Common Ground in north central Minnesota email us at Legacy@lptv.org or call 218- 333-3014.

To watch Common Ground online visit lptv.org and click local [Music] shows.

To order episodes or segments of Common Ground call 218-333-3020.

Production funding of Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their second century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by Bemidji Regional Airport serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

More information available at bemidjiairport.org.

Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008.

If you watch Common Ground online consider becoming a member or making a donation at lptv.org.