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Address
74-5598 Luhia Street, Kailua-Kona, HI, 96740 Phone Number (808)-339-3599 Taproom Hours Monday-Thursday 11:00am-10:00pm, Friday & Saturday 11:00am-12:00am, Sunday 11:00am-9:00pm https://www.olabrewco.com/ |
A company’s market viability can be improved by processing and monetizing the bounty of lesser used products or products that would otherwise go to waste. The full utilization of crop yields is often in-line with the mission of local businesses who desire to build and grow the agricultural economy here in Hawaii. To further promote this pattern, “waste” byproducts, after initial use, can be shared with others who can find productive uses for these byproducts as new plant starts or compost. Ola Brew has taken this approach to their operations and it has resulted in the processing of thousands of pounds of Hawaii-grown produce. Hawaii Beverage Guide met with Naehalani Breeland, President and Director of Marketing and Brett Jacobson, Founder and CEO of Ola Brew Company, to learn more.
We know that the quality of a product starts with the quality of ingredients. And what better than to use the freshest ingredients from our island. Ola Brew works to increase the demand for local farms not because it looks good on paper, but because we care about our local community, the land we occupy, and drinks that we are providing and distributing to our island community. Ola Brew is both Employee and community owned. We have 650 small investors and 20 employee owners which results in dedicated staff and an engaged community.
Jacobson is, among other things, the Master Brewer for Ola Brew Company. His stylistic approach to beer has been influenced by his West Coast upbringing and his exposure to Russian River Brewery, Bear Republic, and Sierra Nevada (among others). However, he takes a Kona-specific approach to these influences. He explained that they often start with the West Coast influence and then refine it to make it a local beer for the people that actually reside in Kona and come to their taproom. According to Jacobson, “Sometime we’ll have people from out of state come and try our porter. They’ll say ‘it’s a little light’ but it’s because we’re in Kona and it’s always hot. We keep in consideration that when someone’s drinking [our beer], it’s 90 degrees outside, or they’re about to walk out of the taproom and it’s 90 degrees day or night. To do this, we try to keep our residual sugar low on all of our products and to keep everything nice and dry. That’s why we say we’re Kona’s brewery; it’s because we make beer for the people of Kona.”
Craft beer, as a whole, is trending towards fruit infused with different spices and herbs, but most breweries are using concentrates and purees. For Ola Brew, using tropical ingredients direct from farms on an island with ten of the world’s fourteen climate zones is a huge competitive advantage. Direct farm sourcing also impacts the fermentation process, as the produces’ natural microbiomes interact with the purposefully introduced yeasts and bacteria. Consider Cantillon of Belgium, well-known among the best Lambic Breweries in the world; they source all organic ingredients because the residuals from fertilizers and pesticides can affect the stability of the bacteria and yeast from fermenting into developed and complex flavors.
Ingredients
Unless producing a specialty brew allowing them to reach out to neighboring breweries, most of their hops come from the Pacific Northwest on a contract with Yakima Chief. To make grain sourcing cost-effective, Ola Brew Company brought in 44 containers [of hops] at a time from BSG CraftBrewing; however, that required maintenance of a storage warehouse. Recently, HFM FoodService has contracted BSG as a grain importer. This now allows breweries across the state to be more cost-competitive against imports as they no longer are paying the astronomical individual pallet prices or high storage fees.
Ola has been prospecting for wild yeast over the past three years in order to create a house strain that will work with multiple styles of beer. According to Jacobson, “We're looking at getting a yeast that tastes better than any other yeast in the world. We probably won't market when we finally get our main house yeast blend down.” The yeast development has recently picked up steam when Ola’s Chief Science Officer, Constantin Heitkamp, came on board four months ago. According to Jacobson, “He's from Germany, but he's been in the US for about 12 years now. He's got two master’s in viticulture, a PhD in sensory analysis, and was one of the Assistant Professors at UC Davis’s Master Brewers School. He came on board four months ago and he's running our lab completely now. He's developing new products, working with developing new yeast strains that we can use, and then also just trying to use very unique ingredients from Hawaii that you normally wouldn't see. We do all that in-house.” Ola also sources yeast from commercial sources like White Labs and Yeast Bay. When using commercially available yeast, they inoculate them and grow them out.
Water
Kona has up to 16 active wells at any given time. Unlike some other areas, Kona’s water table drastically fluctuates, which creates for great variations in the amount of sulfates and salts. To create consistent water chemistry without the need to constantly adjust the recipe, a series of carbon filtration, charcoal filtration, reverse osmosis, a UV filter and a sterile filter down to 0.22 microns is used.
Wastewater tereatment
Ola Brew was the first brewery in Hawaii County that was mandated to have a wastewater treatment facility and pass monthly testing by a third-party lab. This occurred because Kona’s wastewater treatment was limited. Jacobson explained, “One brewery sometimes can produce as much wastewater as up to like 800 homes. Imagine if someone built 800 homes here in Kona and then just tied into the wastewater system without telling the wastewater department. There would be some issues. So, they're treating it as if we're equal to an unknown amount of homes. So in order for their wastewater system to take in everything that we're producing, they need to regulate what they allow us to dump down the drain.” This resulted in two underground tanks and two aboveground tanks for all of the floor drains and brewery water. It then goes through an anaerobic digestion process, which takes about a week. Then, it goes through a UV filter and some membrane filters. According to Jacobson, “The water leaving, in some cases, depending on what part of it you're measuring, is cleaner than the water coming in.”
Kona has up to 16 active wells at any given time. Unlike some other areas, Kona’s water table drastically fluctuates, which creates for great variations in the amount of sulfates and salts. To create consistent water chemistry without the need to constantly adjust the recipe, a series of carbon filtration, charcoal filtration, reverse osmosis, a UV filter and a sterile filter down to 0.22 microns is used.
Wastewater tereatment
Ola Brew was the first brewery in Hawaii County that was mandated to have a wastewater treatment facility and pass monthly testing by a third-party lab. This occurred because Kona’s wastewater treatment was limited. Jacobson explained, “One brewery sometimes can produce as much wastewater as up to like 800 homes. Imagine if someone built 800 homes here in Kona and then just tied into the wastewater system without telling the wastewater department. There would be some issues. So, they're treating it as if we're equal to an unknown amount of homes. So in order for their wastewater system to take in everything that we're producing, they need to regulate what they allow us to dump down the drain.” This resulted in two underground tanks and two aboveground tanks for all of the floor drains and brewery water. It then goes through an anaerobic digestion process, which takes about a week. Then, it goes through a UV filter and some membrane filters. According to Jacobson, “The water leaving, in some cases, depending on what part of it you're measuring, is cleaner than the water coming in.”
Working with Farmers to Source Local Produce
Ola is committed to sustainable and organic farming practices; however, not every farm is USDA certified. In order to not limit the brewery and cider operations, (whereas Hawaiian Ola’s non-alcoholic beverages come from a small network USDA Organic certified farms) the brewing operation chose not to be USDA certified. To further add to the network of farms, the company has successfully used radio ads and social media to recruit fruit farmers who might want to sell to them. They also seeks out easily grown crops and farm partners in an attempt to create a demand for subprime Ag land, as prime Ag is cost-prohibitive or too vast to all but the largest organizations. Furthermore, to lower the barrier of entry into farming, Ola has created infrastructure by donating plant starts to farmers and being the guaranteed buyer at the end. Breeland gave the following example: “We take white pineapple tops we get from farmers, root them ourselves and donate them to other farmers who we know can grow them well and use organic inputs and things like that. Then we’ll be the guaranteed buyer at the end.”
These combined efforts have allowed Ola Brew Company to process 3,000 to 10,000 pounds of fruit per week on pallets that are juiced on a hydraulic press and then stored in five-gallon buckets. Their inventory is more akin to a freezer bank, a vault full of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fruit that has to last the whole year. This vault includes: white pineapple from Honokaa and Keaau, tangelo and limes from Hilo, lychee from Holualoa in Honaunau, dragon fruit from Hilo, Lihue and Ocean View, and even jaboticaba from Holualoa. It's all across the board.
Ola is committed to sustainable and organic farming practices; however, not every farm is USDA certified. In order to not limit the brewery and cider operations, (whereas Hawaiian Ola’s non-alcoholic beverages come from a small network USDA Organic certified farms) the brewing operation chose not to be USDA certified. To further add to the network of farms, the company has successfully used radio ads and social media to recruit fruit farmers who might want to sell to them. They also seeks out easily grown crops and farm partners in an attempt to create a demand for subprime Ag land, as prime Ag is cost-prohibitive or too vast to all but the largest organizations. Furthermore, to lower the barrier of entry into farming, Ola has created infrastructure by donating plant starts to farmers and being the guaranteed buyer at the end. Breeland gave the following example: “We take white pineapple tops we get from farmers, root them ourselves and donate them to other farmers who we know can grow them well and use organic inputs and things like that. Then we’ll be the guaranteed buyer at the end.”
These combined efforts have allowed Ola Brew Company to process 3,000 to 10,000 pounds of fruit per week on pallets that are juiced on a hydraulic press and then stored in five-gallon buckets. Their inventory is more akin to a freezer bank, a vault full of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of fruit that has to last the whole year. This vault includes: white pineapple from Honokaa and Keaau, tangelo and limes from Hilo, lychee from Holualoa in Honaunau, dragon fruit from Hilo, Lihue and Ocean View, and even jaboticaba from Holualoa. It's all across the board.
Beer
The flagship beers consist of Maa Larger, Luhia Pale Ale, Kiawe Ale, Kiawe Vanilla Porter, an IPA and the AA IPA, which is an amped up version of the IPA. To determine what would become the regular line-up, a first Friday tasting with investors was conducted eight months before opening. According to Breeland, “We are community and employee-owned. We gave [our owners] scorecards for the aroma, mouthfeel, and flavor while tasting everything being created at the time. If there were certain things that they loved that were in balance or out of balance, [they] just gave us notes on it.” As a side note, the beer is not pasteurized before canning and is stored in a cold storage before shipping.
Ola Brew also makes sour beers, and they are looking to expand. “A year from now, we’ll start to roll out lots of different sour beers, which are really fun. We can get a hundred pounds of the best mango and use that to make two barrels of a mango sour; it's a super special thing from the one tree and you can market it that way.” Said Breeland.
To avoid cross contamination, a DNA thermal processor is used for all of their beer and tanks. Jacobson explained, “It takes about four hours to get a result that requires testing for lactobacillus, pediococcus, and rhamnosus; [we’re] testing for everything that would sour beer. For all of our beer, (prior to going into packaging, and whether it's keg or a can over clean beer) we always test and make sure that they're clean before we package.”
To avoid cross contamination, a DNA thermal processor is used for all of their beer and tanks. Jacobson explained, “It takes about four hours to get a result that requires testing for lactobacillus, pediococcus, and rhamnosus; [we’re] testing for everything that would sour beer. For all of our beer, (prior to going into packaging, and whether it's keg or a can over clean beer) we always test and make sure that they're clean before we package.”
Ola Brew Co currently has approximately 20 barrels of aging beer with the goal of expanding to 100 barrels in the next six months. They age both clean beers and bacteria (sour) beers. Currently, bourbon barrels are being used for brews like the Kiawe Vanilla Porter.
They are attempting to acquire a container of wine barrels, potentially from Kendall Jackson’s Vérité Winery, with the goal of using each barrel between two to eight years. The reason for using wine barrels, according to Jacobson, is because “the wine barrels tend to be higher quality.”
They are attempting to acquire a container of wine barrels, potentially from Kendall Jackson’s Vérité Winery, with the goal of using each barrel between two to eight years. The reason for using wine barrels, according to Jacobson, is because “the wine barrels tend to be higher quality.”
Seltzer
Other than sugar, Hawaii (state) grown, ingredients of lemon, lime, lemongrass and ginger will be used. The flavors were also chosen beyond just tasting good, but because they are easily grown and they don’t require fertilizers or pesticides. Breeland added, “lemongrass, lemons, limes, ginger-- pretty much anyone can grow on sub-prime ag-land. We're not only looking for farmers that have very well-established and really nice farms. Any backdoor or backyard farmer can pretty much grow these ingredients.
Seltzer-making varies from company to company. Ola’s approach uses fruit and sugar as a base fermentable. The seltzer is then centrifuged to help eliminate particulate. Jacobson added, “It's very, very clean. It's clear as water and has a very neutral flavor. Then, at that point, we actually will brew more ginger tea, and make more lemon-lime.” There's initial fruit that we put in there and then also, once we're done with primary fermentation, we do a secondary fermentation and [add] more fruits. It’s then sterile-filtered, pasteurized, force-carbonated in a bright tank, and then canned.
Ola Brew’s initial seltzer flavors are lemon-lime, ginger, and lemongrass.
Cider
According to the TTB, Ola Brew is required to have a wine-making license in order to make cider because as soon as another fruit is incorporated, it becomes a sparkling wine. The company plans to expand sparkling wine operations shortly. Jacobson mentioned, "You'll probably start seeing bottles of sparkling wine coming out of our facility. I'll probably start a wine club because that's one benefit [of the wine license]. Since it's sparkling wine, we can actually ship it and have memberships. Can't do that with beer.”
Apple juice is ordered by the full-refrigerated shipping container straight from farms in Washington. A full container is ordered every couple of months. The remainder of the fruits used in cider-making come from the fruit vault.
In the typical cider-making process, apple juice is fermented. The period in which additional fruits are added varies by company; Ola Brew’s approach depends on which product they are making. Jacobson explained, “For some products, we put a percentage [of the fruit] in primary [fermentation] and a percentage in secondary [fermentation] and then some [of the fruit] we've put in at the end right before we can it. In the ginger cider, for example, we put ginger in during primary fermentation and then we dry hop with it and put even more {ginger} in after the fact. It just depends on the product. Some fruits with seeds, for example, are a little harder to work with. We'll typically put [the fruit] into secondary [fermentation] so that we can actually get the seeds out. Otherwise, it gets all mixed up and we get some clogs in our tanks and heat exchangers. It just depends if it's a juice or if it's a whole fruit.” Before canning, the cider is pasteurized.
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