AFTER THE FIRE: Hip Hops ... Goodwood Brewing Company: Touched by a Barrel.

AFTER THE FIRE: Hip Hops ... Goodwood Brewing Company: Touched by a Barrel.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

I'm always an quarterly issue behind when it comes to reprinting my columns from Food & Dining Magazine. This one is from Summer 2016; Vol. 52 (May/June/July).

---

Goodwood Brewing Company: Touched by a Barrel

It is a deceptively simple notion to modify the flavor of beer by aging it in Bourbon barrels.

Just as char and time transform simpler corn-based spirits into a sipper’s elixir, so a barrel’s second use with beer can create a characterful hybrid, balancing the chosen base beer with notes of vanilla and spices.

This principle holds true when using barrels previously filled with other liquors or wine, and to a more subtle extent, by exposing beer to various types of wood (most often oak) through chips or spirals.

Currently there are at least 4,200 breweries in America, and many of them have experimented with wood during the aging process. Often these are small batches for limited release, though Alltech’s Kentucky Bourbon Barrel Ale is a flagship, available year-round.

Then there is Goodwood Brewing Company, where all of its beers are touched by wood and brewed with limestone water.

Goodwood’s identity dates to 2015 and a rebranding of the entity once noted for brewing Bluegrass Brewing Company’s beers under license for packaging and distribution. The brewery’s new name is fully intentional, meant to inform beer lovers of the roles played by wood and water.

“We became Goodwood because we are known throughout the region and industry as experts in barrel aged products,” says Goodwood’s CEO, Ted Mitzlaff.

“Our barrel-aged program quality is second to none.”

Brewmaster Joel Halbleib adds, “Kentucky water is fantastic for many reasons; our yeast is happy about the extra calcium. Louisville KY has a global reputation not only for our water quality, but the unique and historic way in which we process it.”

Of course, oak barrels and limestone water are not exactly revolutionary concepts in Kentucky. They form the backbone of the state’s geographically determinate libation, and a tradition informing Goodwood’s tagline.

“What’s good for Bourbon is even better for beer.”

In fact, beer and Bourbon are grain-based cousins, beginning life similarly during the mashing stage, then diverging into fermented and distilled forms. Goodwood’s aim of reinserting beer into a Bourbon-based equation may strike some as audacious.

Others will find it a delightfully appropriate adaptive reuse, both for barrels and ideas.

Pretty used bourbon barrels, all in a row

Goodwood occupies an old industrial warehouse at 636 East Main Street in downtown Louisville KY. Beer has been brewed there since Pipkin Brewing Company opened in 1998, and in fact, Pipkin produced Louisville KY’s first Bourbon Barrel Stout in 2001.

In 2006, BBC’s began brewing its Jefferson’s Reserve Bourbon Stout here. It was a mainstay in markets outside Kentucky, and remains the basis of Goodwood Bourbon Barrel Stout.

Goodwood’s stretch of Main Street used to be lonely unless the Louisville KY Bats Triple-A baseball club was playing at Louisville KY Slugger Field, a few hundred yards to the west. These days the area is changing, and fast.

Angel’s Envy distillery will open soon opposite the ball yard, and the burgeoning NuLu district lies a block away to the southeast. A 200-unit upscale apartment complex is rising directly across from Goodwood, and adjacent industrial acreage is for sale, seemingly destined for residential construction.

Inside Goodwood, there is a tap room and production area packed with stainless steel brewing and fermenting vessels. Upstairs is a vast space that might someday host special events.

In the basement, dozens of barrels are lined in repose. The barrels are used only once by Goodwood, and before being filled, must be closely sniffed, inspected and tested for contamination. Beer remains in the barrel for 30 to 90 days, depending on the type.

Beer ages “in” these barrels, as opposed to “on” them. Mitzlaff explains the difference:

“All our beers are aged either ‘in’ or ‘on’ wood. Aging ‘in’ wood refers to barrel aging from 30 to 90 days, depending on the type of beer we are producing. Aged ‘on’ means we are adding wood to the process.”

Goodwood’s aged-in-the-barrel line includes Bourbon Barrel Stout and Bourbon Barrel Ale, as well as Red Wine Barrel Saison and Brandy Barrel Barbarian Honey Ale. Among those aged “on” wood are Louisville KY Lager (ash), Pale Ale (poplar) and Walnut Brown Ale (walnut). Intriguingly, a seasonal IPA is planned, with an uncommon twist of aging “on” native aromatic cedar.

Wood changes beer; breweries change neighborhoods

The Goodwood line of beers is available in Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, Ohio and Virginia, and with other states queued and ready for their share, Mitzlaff has a plan to serve them.

It is called Paristown Pointe, a $28 million project to be located approximately a mile away from Goodwood’s current location on a patch of ground where Barrett Street meets East Broadway.

Paristown Pointe is a certifiably ambitious neighborhood redevelopment proposal involving multiple investors who are seeking to leverage state tourism tax credits to create an arts and culture district.

Plans call for an enlarged Louisville KY Stoneware factory, a multi-use theater for the Kentucky Center for the Arts, renovated housing, commercial space … and yes, a new Goodwood brewery.

“We’ll have a 70,000-barrel brewery and a significant taproom, beer garden and rooftop bar in Paristown Pointe,” says Mitzlaff. “We’ll continue to operate our existing brewery and taproom.”

Make no mistake: 70,000 barrels is a substantial amount of beer. It represents a potential brewing capacity four times larger than Goodwood has today. In 2014, a craft brewery producing this much beer would have placed 44th in production for the entire country.

Yet such a rate of growth has ample precedent in craft brewing, and Goodwood’s rebranded identity can only be enhanced by participation in what might be a nationally celebrated redevelopment project.

Goodwood’s brewery at Paristown Pointe will concentrate on aged-in-the-barrel beers, and will boast a fully automated brew house as well as both bottling and canning lines. If all goes according to plan, brewing will start in summer, 2017.

Halbleib is bullish about Goodwood’s overall prospects. “Craft beer as an industry has come too far with barrel aging to think of it as a fad,” he concludes. “The sheer variety of brews aged in barrels or on wood these days is mind boggling.”

It is, and it seems only natural that a Kentucky brewery should lead the way by specializing in this emerging art.

---

October 17: AFTER THE FIRE: These old, old habits die hard.

October 10: AFTER THE FIRE: The Great Taste of the Midwest is the best beer fest of them all.

October 3: AFTER THE FIRE: New Albany’s Harvest Homecoming occupation isn't alleviating my "craft" beer Twitter depression.

September 26: AFTER THE FIRE: The seasonality of Oktoberfest in time, beer and year.


__

THE POTABLE CURMUDGEON: Two decades of Beer Corner barrels.

THE POTABLE CURMUDGEON: Two decades of Beer Corner barrels.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

My first Great American Beer Festival was in 1997, and it proved to be a liberating experience.

By tradition and designer, the GABF is about beer brewed right here in America, as opposed to imported brands, which at the time still comprised the bulk of better beer options in metropolitan Louisville.

It always was my goal to help shift this balance. Denver was far ahead of Louisville, and seeing what worked in Denver was an invaluable opportunity.

My GABF tickets came through the good offices of Bluegrass Brewing Company, and I dimly recall this as being advantageous, as they included access to certain perks not available to general admission ticket holders.

It transpired that one of these was a tasting of “vintage” beers, including a vertical Alaskan Smoked Porter selection. Imagine my surprise when I was seated at a table with the late, great beer writer Fred Eckhardt. He seemed to be a perfectly regular guy, but then again, almost everyone was.

It was the primeval, pre-rock-star-brewer phase of the revolution. Very quaint, indeed.

Eventually I had the chance to ask Eckhardt a question: What did he consider the best beer he’d ever beer sampled at the GABF?

After mulling for a moment, his answer was Goose Island’s Bourbon County Stout, and in retrospect, it seems surprising to learn that BCS was only brewed for the first time in 1994, a scant three years before my chat with Eckhardt.

Originally it was Goose Island’s 1,000th batch, and as schoolchildren in Siberia know by now, it came about by aging Imperial Stout in used bourbon barrels brought to Chicago … from Kentucky, of course.

Barrel-aging was a suitably exotic notion in 1997, although back in Louisville, the dawning age of “microbrewing” already had produced an instance of similar experimentation.

In 1994 at BBC’s original St. Matthews brewpub, brewmaster David Pierce filled a used bourbon barrel with Doppelbock and allowed it to sit outside during a wintry snap. Water freezes before alcohol, so voila! BBC barrel-aged Eisbock was the result.

I’m not sure any of it ever passed my lips, but that’s okay. The GABF tickets more than made up for it.

---

My most recent assignment as columnist for Food & Dining Magazine was a profile of Louisville’s Goodwood Brewing Company, to be published in the May/June/July issue.

Goodwood’s identity dates to 2015 and a rebranding of the entity once noted for brewing Bluegrass Brewing Company’s beers under license for packaging and distribution. The brewery’s new name is fully intentional, meant to inform beer lovers of the roles played by wood and water.

“We became Goodwood because we are known throughout the region and industry as experts in barrel aged products,” says Goodwood’s CEO, Ted Mitzlaff.

While researching this essay, I came across a relic of past barrel-aged aspirations. A newer generation of visitors to the “beer corner” of Main and Clay in downtown Louisville might not know that “craft” brewing actually began there almost two decades ago.

Something's brewing on East Main -- or will be soon, by Terry Boyd (Louisville Business First; September 8, 1997)

A 30-year-old Pennsylvania native plans to brew and distribute bottled beer in Louisville for the first time since Falls City Brewing Co. left town for Evansville, Ind., in 1978.

But, unlike brewpub/restaurant operations that combine suds and grub, his new venture is only about wholesale beer, says Paul Hummer III, president and brew master of Pipkin Brewing Co.

Pipkin operated from 1998 through 2001, when BBC bought it and launched its own production brewery at the Beer Corner. In fact, Pipkin had been contract-brewing and bottling BBC brands prior to the changeover.

In retrospect, it’s easy to understand what happened. Pipkin was financed, planned and constructed to be profitable at a theoretical production capacity projected to be reached quickly. It never got there, with familiar ramifications.

Trust me. I know these all too well.

Pale Ale and Brown Ale were intended as Pipkin flagships from the outset, later augmented by Porter and a few gimmicks tied to local universities, and when sales of these brands were too slow, contract brewing was introduced for cash flow.

But the ultimate problem with contract brewing is that it enhances the value of someone else’s brands, not your own.

Many have since been compelled to learn Pipkin’s lessons: Whether the start-up capital comes from a financial institution, a helpful lottery-winning angel or the founding family’s own pockets, there is an unforgiving logic to its expenditure. Keeping one’s nostrils barely above water is better than drowning, and yet subsistence offers no margin for error – and no ability to leverage necessary further investments.

It is a painfully familiar sensation.

---

Around the year 2000, Pipkin borrowed a page from the Goose Island playbook and released a Bourbon Barrel Stout. For many of us, it was Pipkin’s best ever beer. I’m not entirely sure who conceived and shepherded this idea, but my guess is brewer Paul Philippon, future mastermind of the Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery in North Carolina.

That’s right. Philippon brewed for Pipkin.

I’ll never forget my reaction. How could this not be the single best idea in local brewing history? Bourbon Barrel Stout, brewed in Kentucky and aged in bourbon barrels from Kentucky. Just imagine if the brewery partnered with the distillery and cross-marketed the results?

At the time, it annoyed me that Pipkin Bourbon Barrel Stout was a one-time seasonal release. I told anyone who’d listen that it should be the only beer Pipkin brewed; after all, there was ample warehouse space at the Beer Corner. Clear ‘em out, stack 'em high, and go all in.

Now I can see that Pipkin’s precarious situation surely precluded such a marshaling of resources. A barrel-aged program would have required substantial outlays of time and money, and the brewery had a surplus of neither. It’s a fond memory nonetheless, and Pipkin Bourbon Barrel Stout should be remembered as a Louisville trailblazer.

In 2006, BBC began brewing its Jefferson’s Reserve Bourbon Stout (the distillery tie-in later ceased). Alltech’s Bourbon Barrel Ale was launched around the same time. Bourbon Barrel Stout was BBC’s mainstay in markets outside Kentucky, and remains the basis of Goodwood Bourbon Barrel Stout.

In 2016, wood “touches” every beer Goodwood brews, whether by aging “in” (a barrel) or “on” (added to the process).

The rest of the Goodwood story? It's coming in May.

---

March 7: THE POTABLE CURMUDGEON: Can I get a “do-over” on Naughty Girl?

February 22: The PC: Beef Steak and Porter always made good belly mortar, but did America’s “top” steakhouses get the memo?

February 15: The PC: Swill in youthful times of penury and need.

When the Euro '85 series returns: Leningrad USSR. 

_