“Age is Central to City’s success”, The Province – Nov. 1st, 2010

Central City Brewing picked up three individual gold medals for its beer at the awards ceremony, with brewmaster Gary Lohin then accepting the prestigious prizes of brewery of the year and beer of the year.

So what’s his secret?

“When I got up and talked to the brewers at the CBAs I told them, ‘Where we are, we do everything for the beer,’” Lohin tells me over lunch in his Central City pub, which is housed in a sleek wing of Surrey’s Central City mall. “We don’t cut corners, we age the beer properly. And I told everybody, whatever you do, do it for the beer, not for the accounting.”

Lohin has been doing it for the beer ever since he first started homebrewing in Vancouver in the 1980s. His enthusiasm and skill at making near-production brews soon drew the attention of B.C.’s nascent craft- beer scene, and he landed work at the original Whistler Brewing Company and then Okanagan Spring in Vernon.

In the mid-90s he was enticed back to the Lower Mainland to help set up the area’s first brewpub, Sailor Hagar’s in North Vancouver. When Hagar’s decided to stop producing its own beer, Lohin upped sticks again to join Central City as partner and brewmaster.

The brewery’s range of Red Racer beer, with its distinctive logo featuring a flame-haired, leggy, bike-riding girl, is now making waves across Canada, and even in the States. A recent Boston Globe article listed Red Racer IPA as one of six best examples of the style – no mean feat when you consider that Canada is still a ways behind the U.S. craft beer movement.

As a result of all the attention and the resulting increase in demand, work will soon begin on a new Central City brewery, situated near the Pattullo Bridge on the Surrey side of the Fraser. Lohin is clearly excited at the prospect.

“We’re going to build a showpiece brewery. It’s not just going to be a box with a name, it’s going to be all glass and wood.

“We’ve been looking at a lot of green technology. I’ve been touring around the past six months, looking at other breweries in the States, seeing what they’re doing in terms of water treatment, solar energy – which probably isn’t going to work here – geothermal maybe, maybe not for the brewing process but to heat the building . . . recapturing CO2. [The Surrey Development Corporation has] given us a good chunk of money to implement green technology.”

The new facility should have the potential to increase production by as much as ten times.

“We’re looking at North America as a market,” Lohin says. “We’re already shipping to the States. And it’s gaining traction down there. We want to keep that going. We wouldn’t build this brewery just for the local market.”

But then, Lohin assures me, this isn’t just about expanding to do much more of the same. If anything, a bigger facility will give him the opportunity to experiment even more.

“I want to make more styles,” Lohin says. “I’m going to have a barrel room. I want to buy barrels, I want barrel-aged beers. I want to have bottle conditioning. Stuff I can’t even do right now because we’re so maxed out with the production of beer now.

“I’m looking at [the new brewery] as opening up for me. I want to do some experimental stuff.

“My barley wine, I can make once a year. I want to be able to have it year round and put some in port barrels and cabernet barrels, whisky barrels, do releases like that, experiment more, right?

“So we’ll take care of the big beers like our IPA and our ESB, but I want to keep some small tanks, keep it micro.”

Lohin acknowledges there is a danger in becoming too big, a victim of your own success even, when accountants slowly take over the running of the business and eventually determine the flavour of the beer. But he also points out the exceptions to this path, and how growth can be managed to maintain a craft-brewing sensibility – and uses California-based Sierra Nevada, a pioneer of American craft brewing, as a fitting example.

“They still make excellent beers. Full of flavour. Maybe not an IPA as hoppy as some of the beers around. Their beers are just as good as anybody’s. And they’ll be close to a million barrels this year. Are they called a microbrewery?

“But if you go to their place, everything they do is about craft. . . . They have their own hop field and barley field, their hop field is right outside the brewery . . . they irrigate with their waste water.

“They have a univeristy nearby, the university students look after the barley field as part of their course, to learn about that. And they’re still inventing ways to dry-hop their beer.

“But Okanagan Spring isn’t doing that, and they’re way smaller than Sierra Nevada as far as production. Granville Island isn’t pursuing that. They came out with an IPA that tasted like my pale ale.

“It gets to the point where accountants are running the brewery and there are tasting panels that say, ‘it’s too hoppy, we don’t want that.’ They try to hit the critical mass every time. You can hit it with a few beers but not every one.

“If we become bigger, we’re making a success from the beers we produce. We’re not going to cut back. As long as I’m involved, we’re going to ramp it up as far as flavour profile. I want to do some imperial porters and imperial stouts and some bigger beers based on the number of tanks I have.

“Passion is number one in brewing, it really is.”

If there’s one beer that encapsulates Lohin’s passion for big flavour, it’s his celebrated Red Racer IPA.

It’s a beer that’s reshaped many palates on its way to defining West Coast IPA: Bold with huge hops flavours, but an extraordinary balance of bitterness and sweetness.
It was practically a shoo-in for a CBA gold medal in the American-style IPA category. But, perhaps surprisingly, it didn’t win beer of the year. That title went to the far-from-subtly named Thor’s Hammer barley wine.

Barley wine, which can reach up to 12% ABV, is one of those styles on the outer reaches of beer. It sounds extreme, but handled well it can be an extraordinarily refined drink that responds to aging as well as any wine.

“The one that won [at the CBAs] was a two-year-old,” Lohin explains. “I might even re-enter it as a four-year-old at the next World Beer Cup, see what happens. I’ve got some barley wine I made, bottle-conditioned, back at my house from 1998, 2002. . . . I think barley wine will go for six or more years if it’s stored properly.”

Lohin, who has been making Thor’s Hammer since 1995, ages his barley wine for at least a year, with his next batch due at Christmas. You see, it’s not exactly the most simple beer to make.

“It’s an English style, it’s not overly hoppy. . . . It’s got about 10 different malts in it. It takes me along time to brew up. I do a couple of things in the brewhouse – which I’ll keep secret – for more complexity.

“I also have a shot of whisky when I’m making it, with a little of the first wort from it. It’s a little tradition. Puts you in the spirit.

“Then I baby it, boil it . . . let it age warm for a long time. The last one stayed in the fermenter for three months. Even then, we didn’t cool it down. When you ferment it warmer, it breaks the higher alcohol down, makes it smoother. It doesn’t taste like 11% alcohol in it.

“It’s a sipper though. We only serve it in six-ounce portions.”

While every beer has different demands during the brewing process, there are some things at Central City that stay consistent.

“We try to source the best materials,” Lohin says, for one. “I use floor-malted Maris Otter malt . . . That comes across in my beer too. I try to get the freshest hops I can, match them up. I buy German hops, English hops. . . .I try to put the best ingredients I can in there.

“For our size right now, a penny here, a penny there in a glass isn’t going to make any difference to our bottom line, but it is going to make a difference in our beer.”

It’s an ethos that resonates strongly in the burgeoning craft-beer scene, which generally frowns upon cutting corners or doing things on the cheap. And hey, if you find you’re running low on supplies, you can just ask your rival craft brewer if they’ve got any spare.

“If I need a bag of malt, I can borrow some if I’m a short,” says Lohin. “Or if someone needs some yeast, they can come and get it, and it works back and forth.”

This sense of camaraderie among craft brewers is still something that brings out a smile in Lohin, who has been in the scene from the beginning.

“We all go out together, we’ll have beers when we have the chance,” he says. “I had my 50th birthday last month and I had quite a few brewers come over to my house and sit and drink with me. You wouldn’t see that in any other industry.

“We are all kind of in competition but I think we all understand that the more people drink craft beer, the more it opens the market for everybody, Right now we’re about six or seven per cent of the market.

“But if we get the young crowd drinking it, acquiring that taste, it’s impossible to go back and drink the Molson Canadians.”

Craft beer can even change your life.

“You don’t only upscale your drinking tastes, your food gets upscaled,” Lohin explains. “Everything about your life can get upscaled in that way. I like nice wines, nice whiskies. I like good food, I don’t go to fast food restaurants.

“I think all the breweries are doing pretty good though too,” he adds. “Most of the people I know are maxed out.”

But Lohin won’t even let increased demand for his Red Racer beer dictate his standards. Good beer, above all, takes time.

“I can say without a doubt we age our beer longer than any other brewery in B.C.,” he states confidently. “We do it properly. We don’t slam it out.

“Our IPA is six weeks old. Even when I was at some heralded breweries in the States, their IPAs were less. And I think everything comes together. Even an extra week makes a big difference.

“This is where I’m fighting the accountants. But then we win an award and they’re like, OK, you know what you’re doing,” he laughs.

“There’s a lot of demand: ‘There’s this beer here, it’s only three weeks old but we need all this beer because customers are asking for it, LDB has ordered five pallets. . .’ We just have to let them wait. We’re not afraid to do that.

“So the bigger brewery is going to allow me to make more beer to keep that time for the beer, not being pushed, allow me the time to keep the beer aged properly.”

But while this may give Red Racer beer its body, it can only get its soul through the passion of its brewer.

“It’s really to make the beer we want to drink as brewers. I like my IPA because it’s big and hoppy and it’s what I want to drink.

“We don’t want to make insipid beers, we want to make beers that make statements.”

Always aiming higher than your already high standards: A true hallmark of a champion.

jzeschky@theprovince.com
twitter.com/jantweats

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