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Waipio
94-515 Ukee St, Ste 310 Waipahu, HI 96797 (Brewery and Brewpub) (808) 517-3128 https://www.beerlabhi.com/ |
Beer Lab may be the best representation of a Kamaʻaina (local) brewing company. Yes, there are more recognized and larger brewing companies. Yes, all of them have a Hawaiian word or place in their name. Yet, all but one of the fourteen other breweries in the State of Hawaii are primarily owned by mainland transplants. As Beer Lab founder, Nick Wong, put it during our interview, “I know that if our brewery goes away, I still live here. This is still my home. I wanted to focus this place on getting the local people and the local culture flipped into this first before selling it to the tourists.” However, Beer Lab doesn’t operate within the vacuum of the most isolated population center in the world. Two out of three founders lived on the mainland for college, and all three travel often, bringing them perspective because everything is relative. To learn more about Beer Lab, Hawaii Beverage Guide interviewed their CEO, Nicolas Wong.
Founding
Nick, Derek, and Kevin met as engineers at Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard. Like many engineers, they love beer. Ten-ish years ago, Kevin got injured training for triathlons and needed surgery. Given his need for a new hobby, Kevin got his wife, Lisa, to drive him to Homebrew in Paradise to get supplies. After a couple of years of independent experimentation, Kevin invited Derek and Nick to join him at his house in Mililani for 8 am “learning” and “sampling” sessions. #BreakfastBeer. The morning tasting session involved Derek and Nick “assisting” Kevin which, according to Nick, entailed Kevin pointing and directing (because his back hurt) while Nick and Derek did the manual labor. The group brewing project lead to BBQ’s every other week that consisted of eating, drinking, and improving their brewing skills. When asked what these first brews tasted like, Nick said, “The first beer you make, you might say it’s good, but in your head, you think this sucks, but I worked really hard at it. We always talk about how we wish we could go back and have some of our old homebrews. I thought they were great, but I guarantee they were super caramelly and super sweet because the yeast didn’t finish out.” The next evolution of their brewing adventure was during Derek’s bachelor party in San Diego, where they visited Green Flash Brewing Co and AleSmith Brewing Company. However, it wasn’t until visiting Stone, right before they headed to the airport, that Nick had his “this is what beer can be” moment. This came courtesy of Stone Brewing’s Enjoy By IPA. When they arrived home, they found the awesome beer they discovered was unavailable on the island and realized that in order to get what they wanted to drink, they had to make it themselves. This next step lead to further beer development, greater investment into equipment and requests for samples from people who found their Instagram posts of their brewing adventures. For Nick, inspiration and understanding continued with: West Coast influences of Pliny the Elder (from Russian River Brewing Co), Heady Topper (the Alchemist), and then New England influences of Bissell Brothers and Trillium.
The catalyst for Beer Lab was a trip by Nick to Dogfish Head in 2015. He painted the experience as this: “As you walk up, there’s a metal treehouse from Burning Man that they bought for a dollar, but the shipping was something ridiculous. There were people lying on the grass playing a game, and inside, the bartender was talking with the guys and having a grand time. The brewer walked out from the back, poured himself a beer, and drank while talking to the customers before going back to work. The customers were stoked.” This experience, Nick said, raised the existential question: Why can’t we create that environment here? “It felt like what Hawaii likes to do, which is drinking in the backyard or garage with everybody just mingling and talking. There’s no set forum, no presentation like a dinner party, it’s just: have a beer, sit down, talk story, meet new people, go when you want to go, and stay as long as you want.”
The catalyst for Beer Lab was a trip by Nick to Dogfish Head in 2015. He painted the experience as this: “As you walk up, there’s a metal treehouse from Burning Man that they bought for a dollar, but the shipping was something ridiculous. There were people lying on the grass playing a game, and inside, the bartender was talking with the guys and having a grand time. The brewer walked out from the back, poured himself a beer, and drank while talking to the customers before going back to work. The customers were stoked.” This experience, Nick said, raised the existential question: Why can’t we create that environment here? “It felt like what Hawaii likes to do, which is drinking in the backyard or garage with everybody just mingling and talking. There’s no set forum, no presentation like a dinner party, it’s just: have a beer, sit down, talk story, meet new people, go when you want to go, and stay as long as you want.”
The People
Nick Wong (CEO)
High School: Roosevelt High SchoolCollege:
Engineering Degree from the Colorado School of Mines
BeerLab Role: Marketing stuff and Talking to people
Derek Taguchi (CFO)
From: Grew up in Las Vegas (the 9th island)
College: University of Nevada, Las Vegas
BeerLab Role: Does the Accounting and numbers stuff
Kevin Teruya (Brewmaster)
High School: Mililani High School
College: University of Hawaii.
BeerLab Role: The mastermind behind all the recipes of the beer and Flavor profiles
Nick Wong (CEO)
High School: Roosevelt High SchoolCollege:
Engineering Degree from the Colorado School of Mines
BeerLab Role: Marketing stuff and Talking to people
Derek Taguchi (CFO)
From: Grew up in Las Vegas (the 9th island)
College: University of Nevada, Las Vegas
BeerLab Role: Does the Accounting and numbers stuff
Kevin Teruya (Brewmaster)
High School: Mililani High School
College: University of Hawaii.
BeerLab Role: The mastermind behind all the recipes of the beer and Flavor profiles
Approach and Inspiration
Beer Lab is a hobby turned second job, and as of March 2019, all the founding partners are still full-time engineers. According to Nick, “If we were going to create a business, it would have to be something that we still enjoyed doing. In a normal production brewery, you’re going to pump certain styles of beer over and over again, but that’s not what we want to do, nor what we really enjoy doing. At Beer Lab, we really push to experiment and create beer that is better and better. To do that, it requires a lot of experimentation and a lot of changes and tweaks. We put a lot onto Kevin and our brewers to say, “This beer was good; maybe nobody else will notice it, but I’m going to add a little bit more caramel malt because it’s missing one little piece on the tongue on the ending flavor note.” You don’t need to do this because the vast majority of people that will taste it won’t notice, but we’re always trying to create beer that keeps getting better and better. We also travel a lot and enjoy beer that was made for a particular area and a particular climate. I want to drink big, heavy, thick stouts when I have a jacket on. There’s a beer called (Montucky) Cold Snack from Montana, which is malt heavy and upfront bitter; it’s nothing I would ever drink here, but I loved it there. I was just smashing them while fly fishing. Beer Lab recently broke the ever-rotating beer approach and added on two flagships: the Leahi and Koolauloa. According to Nick, “That really started because my friend Lynn asked, ‘Can you please stop changing the beer because I’m so tired of printing menus.’”
New Inspiration
“We’re still huge beer fans, and we love to try new beer. We’re never going to copy a beer. Instead, we will take parts---the mouthfeel from this one, the added sweetness in the front from another, and the bittered character of yet another, and then mesh everything together.” When asked how the brewers set the calendar, Nick replied, “It’s really just the brewers coming up to the office, playing video games, drinking beer, and saying, ‘Eh, we should make this kind of beer’ and then putting it on the calendar. We have two to three different beers coming out each week.” Additional inspiration has also come from the move to the Waipio production facility. Nick said, “When we were brewing out of University, we used food grade plastic fermenters, which aren’t completely airtight. It drove us to better our brewing and fermentation; we now know when to pull the beer and when to cold crash before the natural yeast starts coming in. Now that we have beautiful, stainless-steel equipment (where nothing from the outside can go in) our beer has been elevated even higher than we thought possible, allowing us to push our beer even further.”
Hawaii’s Influence on BEER LAB
“Our biggest influence is that we were born and raised here in Hawaii. Hawaii is a very Heineken-focused place, and our first beer experiences were sitting under a friend’s mango tree stealing beer. This is what’s ingrained in our heads. Hawaii’s style of drinking is a lot different than that on the mainland where they just sip and stare at the drink with nothing on the table. Whenever we drink, we’re always pupu-ing [eating appetizers] and having more than one beer. A lot of what’s deeply ingrained in us is that, If I’m drinking this, then I want the finish to be a certain way. I want the mouthfeel, I want the pop, I want the karakuchi (dry taste) from the Asahi. For example, we’ll take a great beer we had in Maine, and it maybe won’t work here, but we’ll tweak it to become how we like to drink it and maybe other people would like it, too. There’s also a reason why we went out this way instead of going into Kakaʻako or into Town. To me, I want Hawaii to have beer culture, which is: trying drinking something different, drinking better, drinking something that’s fresher. To do that, I need to convince the people on this side (Central and Leeward Oahu).
“We’re still huge beer fans, and we love to try new beer. We’re never going to copy a beer. Instead, we will take parts---the mouthfeel from this one, the added sweetness in the front from another, and the bittered character of yet another, and then mesh everything together.” When asked how the brewers set the calendar, Nick replied, “It’s really just the brewers coming up to the office, playing video games, drinking beer, and saying, ‘Eh, we should make this kind of beer’ and then putting it on the calendar. We have two to three different beers coming out each week.” Additional inspiration has also come from the move to the Waipio production facility. Nick said, “When we were brewing out of University, we used food grade plastic fermenters, which aren’t completely airtight. It drove us to better our brewing and fermentation; we now know when to pull the beer and when to cold crash before the natural yeast starts coming in. Now that we have beautiful, stainless-steel equipment (where nothing from the outside can go in) our beer has been elevated even higher than we thought possible, allowing us to push our beer even further.”
Hawaii’s Influence on BEER LAB
“Our biggest influence is that we were born and raised here in Hawaii. Hawaii is a very Heineken-focused place, and our first beer experiences were sitting under a friend’s mango tree stealing beer. This is what’s ingrained in our heads. Hawaii’s style of drinking is a lot different than that on the mainland where they just sip and stare at the drink with nothing on the table. Whenever we drink, we’re always pupu-ing [eating appetizers] and having more than one beer. A lot of what’s deeply ingrained in us is that, If I’m drinking this, then I want the finish to be a certain way. I want the mouthfeel, I want the pop, I want the karakuchi (dry taste) from the Asahi. For example, we’ll take a great beer we had in Maine, and it maybe won’t work here, but we’ll tweak it to become how we like to drink it and maybe other people would like it, too. There’s also a reason why we went out this way instead of going into Kakaʻako or into Town. To me, I want Hawaii to have beer culture, which is: trying drinking something different, drinking better, drinking something that’s fresher. To do that, I need to convince the people on this side (Central and Leeward Oahu).
Leahi was developed with a light beer in mind. However, it ended up being a thick beer with an ABV’s of 6.5% with plenty of hops. As it turns out, according to Nick, “When guests come to us, they first ask for a light beer. Then they’ll have one light beer and say, “That was really good. What else do you have?” And it turns out that they end up drinking Big Hazy IPA’s, Big Stouts, and other crazy styles. It’s like, Woah, what happened to the light beer you wanted at the beginning? Koʻolauloa was a beer we iterated so many times. It all started because we tried Trillium, and Bissell Brothers from the New England area, which makes thick, hazy, sweet IPA with very low bitterness. We kept iterating our own version, taking out what we didn’t like and adding in what we did like until we finally got to what we wanted. Instead of the style being a North Eastern IPA, ours is a North Eastern Oahu IPA. The Truth is a beer that we bring out every-so-often. It’s a 100% Brett beer, which we love to play with because of the flavors we can get, as it keeps fermenting even inside of our chillers. We might try it and find that it tastes like plastic, but just by letting it ferment in the keg longer, it becomes great. There was a time when we threw it into a Ko Hana rum barrel and we found that the Brett started eating away at the wood; it was actually breaking down the cellulose. Instead of getting vanilla and oak notes, you got the taste of tree like the sawed stuff at Home Depot.”
Production
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Production Volume
Estimated 2019 Production: Approximately 1500 Barrels Seven different beers fermenting at a time on: 4 x 15 Barrel Fermenters (28 Kegs) 3 x 7 Barrel Fermenters (14-15 kegs) |
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Water Treatment
“We do a lot. A lot, a lot. We have a whole reverse osmosis system, here, and we utilize water chemistry to play with mouthfeels, hop utilization and hop character. We go pretty deep into water chemistry, here. For us, water chemistry is huge.”
“We do a lot. A lot, a lot. We have a whole reverse osmosis system, here, and we utilize water chemistry to play with mouthfeels, hop utilization and hop character. We go pretty deep into water chemistry, here. For us, water chemistry is huge.”
Yeast
“We use a lot of different strains of yeast, here. The biggest one we use is the sacc trois (WLP644 Saccharomyces “Bruxellensis” Trois) or the fake Brett(anomyces). For our West Coast stuff, we use a lot of California Super 001 from White Labs.
Sourcing of Hops and Grain
“We play with a whole bunch of grain and probably have 40-50 different varieties of various levels of roast from diverse areas of the world. We source ingredients from every hole in the world that would grow anything for us; for example, we bring in New Zealand hops, and in the Pacific Northwest, we have a good friend who is a hop farmer in British Columbia. It’s just really a matter of: whoever has the best stuff is what we’re going to bring in to suit the palate we’re trying to hit.”
“We use a lot of different strains of yeast, here. The biggest one we use is the sacc trois (WLP644 Saccharomyces “Bruxellensis” Trois) or the fake Brett(anomyces). For our West Coast stuff, we use a lot of California Super 001 from White Labs.
Sourcing of Hops and Grain
“We play with a whole bunch of grain and probably have 40-50 different varieties of various levels of roast from diverse areas of the world. We source ingredients from every hole in the world that would grow anything for us; for example, we bring in New Zealand hops, and in the Pacific Northwest, we have a good friend who is a hop farmer in British Columbia. It’s just really a matter of: whoever has the best stuff is what we’re going to bring in to suit the palate we’re trying to hit.”
Locations
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