Post Passover Hametz Exploration: A Conversation with Ephraim Greenblatt from Hatch Brewery

Solomon Simon Jacob: 0:09

Welcome to The Kosher Terroir. I'm Simon Jacob, your host for this episode from Jerusalem. Before we get started, I ask that, wherever you are, please take a moment and pray for the safety of our soldiers and the safe return of all of our hostages. So Pesach Passover is over and we've spent these last long weeks tasting wines during the four kosot, the four cups, but we've also been missing chametz bread or, more generally, all the leavened products we are so used to consuming on a daily basis. So, in order to celebrate our being reunited with chametz, this episode is focused on the other alcoholic, yeast-based libation beer. The following is a conversation with Ephraim Greenblatt from the famous Israeli Hatch Brewery. So on to some hardcore chametz conversation and tastings. If you're driving in your car, please pay attention to the road. If you're home relaxing, please open a great craft beer, sit back and enjoy this very special journey.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:36

Welcome to The Kosher Terroir. Happy to be here.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:38

What a treat. This is a first for me, because normally we are very, very wine-centric though I think you'll hear some wine-centric discussion as well in our discussions going on but I have here with me Ephraim Greenblatt from Hatch Brewery. Hatch Brewery make some very exciting and incredible beers and since Pesach is over, I figured let's get directly back into the chametz.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 2:08

You gotta jump right back in.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 2:10

So that's the goal here. So what are we drinking?

Ephraim Greenblatt: 2:15

Okay, so we are drinking a beer called Local Time, which?

Ephraim Greenblatt: 2:18

is a relatively new beer of ours. In our core range we produce six beers that we call our core range. So produce six beers that we call our core range. So those are beers we have all the time and this is our newest addition to it. The other five are ales and this is a proper lager. It's a Helles-style lager. So you're looking at a very, very light beer. You're looking for a bit of a bready malt character, a very low bitterness. You might get sulfuric notes from a lager, but this is a classic sessionable. Take this to the beach but have some complexity, but not a lot of complexity so I'm not a person who likes normal abbey ales or things like that.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 2:57

This is a lot more um, complex and a lot more. It's not a very complex beer, but it's got a lot more complexity than a typical Abbe Ale, for me at least.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 3:07

I think you're going to be looking at very different types of flavors.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 3:10

So and,

Ephraim Greenblatt: 3:10

Abbe Ale is going to be very driven by different types of fruity esters. So you'll get berry or raisin. You'll be a bit malt forward. You know the Abbe Ales have a really wide range. Just in Trappist beers you'll have four different ones single, double, triple or quads. So you have a really wide range. But you're going to have very noticeable esters here. You're going to have much, much less flavor overall. The bit of notes that you'll be getting really light this should be very light. This should be really light.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 3:39

Let's take a sip.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 3:43

That Shachakol from a wine drinker was heartbreaking.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 3:48

I don't even do that at Havdalah. I mean, I do everything on wine, but I do like beer. I like Abbey ales. I don't like pale ales. I don't like the pale ale things. I like Abbey ales, the the Belgium strong Belgium ales.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 4:06

Belgium is an amazing country for beer. It really is. They're the, uh, this there are 13 unique styles of beer that are unique to Belgium. 13 different styles the most of any country in the world. And they're, and they just um, but a lot of them are. You know, beer is really four ingredients it's water, it's malt, which is just barley that's sprouted, usually sometimes another grain. It's yeast and it's hops. And I know that's a bit obvious, but it's important to remember that, because it kind of determines which one of those four is being focused, will determine the character of the beer.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 4:43

A lot of belgian beers are yeast forward beers. The yeast that they're, uh, that you'd brew a belgian beer with, is being expressive and is giving a lot of the flavor. It's not necessarily coming from the hops at all. It's I mean, depending on the styles not from the malt, not from the water. It's the yeast is what you're tasting in a lot of belgian beers. The is true for German wheat beers, like a Hefeweizen, a beer like this. You're having a very light contribution from the yeast, just a bit of fruity esters, just a bit of sulfur notes, maybe some DMS, but most of the flavor here you're getting from just a bit of bready malt character et cetera.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 5:20

But that's like now, once you move around, once you know that Belgians are, let's say, yeast-driven, ipas are hoppy beers, right? So those are really hop-driven right.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 5:31

Then you move over to like stouts or darker beers, and those are barley-driven. So different styles of beer will highlight different ones with ingredients and then some of them will actually start to create a, you know, a mixture of the two. An American Amber Ale is saying, hey, can hops shine and can barley shine? Usually they mute each other. Is there a way to make them shine together? And when we do brew one, one of our core ranges is an American Amber and we call the name of the beer Balance, because it's a struggle. Can you have two dominant features in a?

Solomon Simon Jacob: 6:01

beer, so I never knew that I was. Uh, my preference was towards yeast, um, definitely towards east, towards east and but there are a lot of different uses.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 6:13

Very important to remember. You know beer was. Beer is actually the world where yeast was first isolated, like all bread yeast.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 6:20

That we know of came from the carlsberg lab when they discovered an isolated that we know of came from the carlsberg lab when they discovered an isolated saccharmosis in in for beer production. So but there are still a wide, wide, wide amount of yeast and we can do different things to um to get more or less flavor from these. I'll give you an example.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 6:37

Another one of our core range beers is our german wheat beer. It's called a billow, it's a german hefeweizen, and german wheat beers will have natural flavors of clove and banana, and both of those are byproducts of yeast, and what we do is we don't pitch enough yeast. On purpose, we scaled back our pitch rate, and what that does is it creates a little bit of a stressed environment for the yeast, as they're trying to replicate in order to handle the amount of sugar or maltose that they're being fed. And what happens there is the yeast gets stressed and produces excess amounts of these chemicals that don't get reintegrated, and that's where you get more banana and more clove, and we wanted a more expressive beer. So we actually like create a bad environment, in a sense, for the yeast in order to get these flavors, but those are not the flavors you're going to get in a German yeast. It's a very different set of flavors.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 7:26

Okay, so before we go, absolutely crazed, this is too nerdy.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 7:31

Sometimes I get too nerdy. I have a tendency. I love it. It's a pattern. I love it. I've done it once and I do it all the time.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 7:37

I totally love it. I totally love it, too, because people are listening in to learn. So I've learned a lot, even in this few moments. I didn't realize that the breakout of the different types of beers were so clearly differentiated. So tell me a little bit about yourself. Where do you come from? How did you get on this path?

Ephraim Greenblatt: 8:05

You're originally from where I grew up in a small state called New York. I don't know if you've heard of it Sometimes. It's near Connecticut. Yeah, it's near Connecticut.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 8:14

We're in New York.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 8:15

Long Island. I'm Long Island, five towns. Okay, I'm born and raised and I would say one of nine kids went to some pretty intense yeshivas over there for a lot of years. But where this all started, I would say, is most certainly Lego, and for me I have kids that are still obsessed with Lego. But for me Lego was the love of creating things, it was the potential, it was the power, it was the joy of. There wasn't something, and now there is something and that drives me incredibly. Like I have two restaurants here in Jerusalem, one called Hatch, one called Schmaltz, and even what drives me in them is the creation of something. We can create these experiences, we create this place, we create this food, we create this energy. So for me, that always has been and is a very, very strong driver for me. So that's where it started. My first love was really winemaking, wine growing. I decided I wanted to be a wine grower.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 9:13

How does a kid from New York even dream about making you know growing wine? I?

Ephraim Greenblatt: 9:18

wanted to make everything. I just wanted to make, and I still love making. I went through a, pretty recently, a cheese making phase where I just I needed to make cheese. But obviously I'm going to make cheese. I had to make the most difficult style of cheese. So instead of making pasteurized milk cheeses, I found this illegal Haredi dealer that would come with a trench coat and basically sell me illegal unpasteurized milk milk and I wanted to pull out the natural expression of mold and yeast and bacteria from these cheeses. And then I bought a wine fridge and converted it to a humidifier situation to to be a cheese cave.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 9:53

I have to say I made some very, very bad cheese. I have to say I made some horrendous cheeses, a few good cheeses, but it's, it's a love of making. Uh, learned how to weld so I can build my own whiskey, still at home, and I had a. I was, I was moonshining and at that point I was still in colos learning yeshiva at one point, and I had rigged my giant whiskey still that I'd welded in my kitchen. We were living in a tiny apartment and I plugged it into the sinks and I had hoses going everywhere and I told my wife honey, I'm leaving yeshiva. Just keep an eye on it. It's on it's dripping out liquor. You just keep an eye on it. It's on it's dripping out liquor. You just keep an eye on it. It should be okay.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 10:26

And then I get a video of the entire thing rocking back and forth. I'm always saying, honey, is this okay? It's not okay at all. Get out of the house. Just get out of the house, love, it's not okay at all. So I love, I love, I love to make. That's really what it is. And for me, beer. I'll start with wine for a moment, just because of your audience. Decided winemaking was important. I come from a family named Lipschitz who were some of the early winemakers of kosher wines in New York and they had wine stores. I remember there was a Lipschitz one.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 11:00

Yes, I totally remember.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 11:01

Okay, yes, I totally remember Okay.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 11:07

When I made.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 11:08

Schmalz. Actually I was sitting with an interior design company that was a secular hipster you know Tel Aviv brand and company. I was trying to teach them about Schmulke Bernstein so I wanted to give them some context about it. So we had this slideshow and they pulled up a picture of Schmulke Bernstein and just coincidentally, like right next to it was the Lipschitz wine store, and just in the picture I'm like, okay, that's the family wine store and that's the Schmuckaburn thing. So that was my family. But winemaking was my first love and I remember I even sent like 400 emails to every winery in New York just looking for a summer internship and one of my rabbeiniv was really scared of me going to an akosher winery to spend a summer.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 11:47

So he connected me with um, a fellow who was a tree, a logger, I guess a wood tree cutter yeah, it's probably a more sophisticated name for it in santa cruz, who was good friends with ben Kanz of Four Gates. So we went to spend the summer with Richard, who was Benjamin's friend, just so we could be near Benjamin in his orbit and spend a little bit of time in his fields, which was an amazing experience. Ultimately, there were some things about the wine world that were a little hard for me. We were just talking about it a little bit by the tonight. We were at a like. We were just talking about it a little bit by the we we tonight we were at a wine festival and just talking about the, the customer experience of it and the barriers of of approaching it knowledgeably and how, and you know that really threw me off a bit and actually went back to shiva afterwards, went back to colo, um, and then one day I just I think these hands needed to do something, like my hands have to be doing things, and I just felt this. So I called them uh, Denny, denny Kahn.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 12:51

Denny Kahn was the owner of uh, buster Cider and he had a homebrew shop. Then, uh, that point it was in Mivassara and my Hebrew was pretty bad at that point and I called him and I said you know, shalom and Danny is, I think, from Texas went what's that? Perfect, perfect, that's what I want. So I started brewing and then it was a very, very obsessive I have a tendency to go far and intense with some things that I start. So I brewed. My first beer was a stout, and then we started when I started scaling up building equipment and then I just wanted to brew.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 13:27

Wait a second, but Danny does, Danny make he has busters.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 13:33

So Danny had busters at that point coming out of his home brew shop in Imivacera, yeah. Then they moved to Noham, okay, and that's when he was. He was always distilling, he loved distilling, he was always distilling. But that's when they it was sold to Okanash. Okay, now you have Asher and Leiby. That are the owners of Okanash, which owns the Buster's brand. We saw them tonight at the Right, so you.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 13:59

but how did you get to beer? Because that's distilling still.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 14:04

So the distilling is is it at this point? It was not distilling at all. Distilling is is making you know whiskey or or anything where we're concentrating alcohols. It was not that at all.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 14:13

It was just basic beer baking and I just I needed to do, I needed to make something and beer was always on my mind, and you know how would I say the gosh me is so strong with this one, like no, it is because it's. It's not like I'm waiting three years before I can put something on the shelf for a customer or what have you. It's, it's faster, it's it's very similar in a lot of different ways to making wine. I always wonder why people who are really into making wine don't make beer. Because it's it's just you get things, you can iterate faster with beer.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 14:54

You really can. You really can. What blew me away when I went through a phase, not a phase. I'm still in that phase, but I love cocktail making and when I made, we should be drinking more.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 15:04

Yeah, come on, definitely should be drinking more. Yeah, come on, definitely should be.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 15:06

What's the next one? Um, next one's also a lager. It's a vienna lager. So it's similar to the last beer, but a bit darker, a bit more malt character. Actually an interesting story about how this was produced.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 15:16

Um, I'll take it by the second, but when I made my first, when I got into cocktail making, obviously. So for me it's like, you know, buy 30 books in cocktail making and all the equipment and just go head over heels. But what blew me away was the immediacy of it. Right, it was like so you learn a ratio and you're making a margarita, whatever it is, and it's a one to one to half, and you make and you're like, hmm, ratio is not working for me, let's try one and a quarter, and then it's just. It's again, it's just there. Like we were talking tonight about the joy of blending wines, and blending wines to me was a similar experience to mixology, where the creative energy and the result were immediate. There was a challenge Hmm, this beer, I like this wine, I like this character, but I feel like it needs a lower note. Hmm, what about that beer? What about that wine? Let's pair them. Yeah, that works nice, that's there, it's on the spot, there's no waiting for that yeah, but it's except with blending wines.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 16:09

Truthfully, if you're blending good wines, you're gonna have to wait for the results. Anyway you could. You're setting down the, you're setting down the basics, but you're still tasting the wines prematurely. I mean, they mean they could be very accessible when they're fresh, but they develop, they integrate and develop so much more over a period of time.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 16:34

I believe that to be true. I made wine a couple times at home, very much as an amateur, but there's a whole world that I know little to nothing about, but just the immediacy of that blending, though, for me in that spot, was just so. Compare it to whiskey making.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 16:50

Well, yeah, no. So both of them are crazy. Whiskey is out to lunch, totally. I mean, you know.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 16:57

I love making whiskey. Whiskey is a lifetime. I love making whiskey.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 17:01

Whiskey is a lifetime endeavor.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 17:04

The culture of whiskey, of learning about whiskey making is so fascinating.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 17:09

Do you know about this? No, that there are forums in the United States. You know whiskey making is illegal in most of the world on a home level without a license. Two notable accessions are New Zealand and potentially Israel. It's not even clear whether home distilling is legal in Israel or not.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 17:28

I remember once sitting in the Knesset in a session talking about this, where it was the Anti-Alcohol Abuse Society community, whatever, and they were discussing how to help craft breweries develop because they felt that craft culinary appreciation of beer is an antidote to the abuse of beer as an alcoholic, uh, uh, just just for the alcohol. And it was a really, really interesting meeting. But at some point the, the, the person that was it was like a haver knesset, a havera knesset that was running it the local, the workers that were always part of this got very upset. They said how can we be promoting breweries? We're the anti-alcohol people. It's a psychoactive substance that creates abuse. Right, they got really, really upset and it might even be illegal because it's just not clear about what the laws say. And I'll never forget this, like my Hebrew was not great at that point, but in Hebrew she said, like the famous Israeli saying, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. No one cares if it might be illegal, shut up, go home, but it might be illegal. But, that being said, in America it's certainly illegal. So therefore, the entire culture of craft distilling is an illegal subculture.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 18:45

So it was developed on the internet to be this really interesting space. It's a wild west of really, really I don't know the politically correct way to say this, but like of Southern Hick way of talking. And you'll even find that there's a way of speaking on the forums. These are very advanced forums, right? This is intense science that people are pursuing. You have to talk and type in certain ways. So it's common you'd start like this these boys reckon Okay, and then advanced science with the formulas and all your calculations and your hypothesis and how you came to it, and then you end with so I'm told T-O-L-E. So I'm told and that's just the culture of whiskey making on the forums. Okay, it's really really fascinating.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 19:34

I find, I find.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 19:35

That's amazing. Do you know why? Excuse me, I might just if this is not relevant, but do you know why it's a mountain culture, why it's a like it's a mountain culture, why it's a hick culture to make whiskey in the United States? Do you know why it's the mountain people? I'll tell you why. I think it's really fascinating, and it's actually the Whiskey Rebellion. Do you know about the Whiskey Rebellion in the United States, the world's least successful revolution, revolution, revolution.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 20:01

So that came from the following fact you had growers living in the colonies, right that live near the ports, and they grew whatever they wanted and they shipped them right. But if you live deep in the sticks, in your, in your, in your cabin, and you grew a field of beautiful corn, what do you do with the corn? You can't ship it to port because by the time I guess, the porter was not worth. The shipping cost wasn't worth it. Yeah, so what you did was you said how can I take seven barrels of corn and turn it into one barrel to transport? And that's where distillation came in. We turn, you know, you turn the sugars into alcohol, the alcohol into condensed alcohol.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 20:34

So the people that were making the liquor were all the people that were living deep into the mountains in these, on these frontier homestead places, which is why, when they taxed liquor, they said you're not taxing a commodity that everyone makes, you're only taxing the mountain people. Right, and that was the source of that conflict. This is extremely not relevant to what's going on. No, no, no, it's fascinating, it is.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 20:56

It's interesting, it's very cool, it's very cool.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 20:59

Wow, I'm going to tell you about this beer that we're drinking right now for a moment. So this is called Chippergall, which is a beer that we produced. Two funny things about this beer. This beer is a one-off beer that was actually made by accident. It was meant to be a different lager and it was a mix-up in the recipe with an Israeli working American worker and they just made this interesting beer. That was not what was intended, so we kind of had this beer that we made during the war. We weren't sure what to do with it.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 21:27

Wait this war now since October yeah.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 21:31

Okay, this is a one-off. This beer is. This beer is a one-off beer. This is not not part of our core range. And, uh, for the first four months from October till a month ago, um, my brewery manager, who's been with me for six years, is my right hand was in a tank in Gaza and the brewery workers wanted to make a beer to honor him and it wasn't meant to be released to the public.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 21:55

It was just like to make him a few cases and send it to him to drink with his friends. So I don't even understand all the references on the label. If you look at the label, it's's just artillery references, like all of these different things are things that only artillery people understand and it was just meant for him, um, but once we sent it for him, like, some pictures got leaked onto the internet about it and we just been inundated with artillery soldiers sending us messages. How can we get a few? How can we get a few? How can we get a few? This is so important to me. We're like we saw. We got a message.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 22:26

Our fellow said you know, I've been in the hospital for two, two, for two months since I got injured. Like I heard about the beer, how can I buy a few? And yastral who's? You know, a tank driver drove down to barysheva, to the hospital, to bring him these beers and it was just like such an organic expression of like know, we're in the business of craft, of bringing joy to people, and we were really lost during the war at a point Like, what do we do? Like, is this even appropriate what we're making? But when this beer came out and not in a commercial way we didn't tell anyone even that we made it. It just spread on the internets and we were getting these requests for like can, can you bring us joy in this way? It was such a way of highlighting how this kind of heartful creativity and heartful craftsmanship can bring, even in real and even in places where it really doesn't seem appropriate, like there are hostages still in godlike right.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 23:20

I agree with you 100. You know I I, the first week of the war, I didn't put out a podcast, because how can I put out something so mundane as a podcast about wine? It's ridiculous. And I basically shut down. And that first Thursday after, I suddenly got messages like where's the podcast? So I thought, you know, I said, come on, you know like, you know what's going on right. And then I got an email from One of the listeners who was in Gaza.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 24:06

That was about a week later because they didn't go into Gaza immediately, but he was one of the earliest people into Gaza and he had the wherewithal enough to have an email and he said where's the podcast? So I said you, above all, know what's going on right. Is this an appropriate time to do podcasts? He goes we're not fighting. We didn't leave our families and leave our work and you know, fighting in order for everybody to be home huddled around, you know, worrying. We're fighting for Israel to be the way it has to be. I want the podcast Get off your butt. You know like, get going.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 25:00

We're fighting so you could live, not so you can sit there dying and worry.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 25:04

Yeah, can sit there and worry, yeah. So he said stop. Stop, you know, just go back to life and and let us worry about what we're doing in gaza, and you get the podcast done. So after that, I've put out a podcast every week and and I got it.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 25:20

I'll never forget this first week or two when I, like I wasn't sure whether to open my restaurants, and I remember, remember just making this choice to open a little bit kind of casually, and watching people just come with so much anxiety and so much fear and just having a moment to just be safe and have some food and some comfort. And it was really interesting to watch the people that came to, let's say, hatch, when we reopened a couple of days later, came the next day and the next day and the next day, because they just had a safe space to beat. They were hurting and they had like they just needed that and it was just so it's really striking.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 25:52

It's something normal.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 25:53

It was really striking.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 25:54

It wasn't. It wasn't obvious at the time, in the beginning, but it became more and more obvious over time.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 26:00

Well yep, schmaltz is where Schmaltz is inspired by New York style delis and the culture of Eastern European Jewish food. It's a lot of fun. Schmaltz. Schmaltz is inspired by my grandmother, who was a great Hungarian cook or Austrian cook, depending on the day, depending what you asked her, depending who asked her. Let's drink it out of beer. Yeah, yeah, come on.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 26:26

So we started we started with Local Time, which was a core range lager, and then we had the Chipper Golden, which is a lager that's not part of our core range, and now we're drinking a beer that we just released called Schnappi Okay, and this is actually pretty cool. So we make, like I said, six core range beers.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 26:43

And then every month we attempt to make three brand new beers uh, either brand new or we made them once a year ago but, like, really push ourselves to create in bottles with labels and everything um, new beers all the time, and that, for us, is very, very important for the just pushing ourselves creatively as a craftsman and just really coming up with new things and things that we're curious about or that we're curious about or that we're excited about or that we're driven by. So the beer that you're drinking now, that you're drinking now, is schnappy, is a new england ipa.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 27:13

It's a beer that we made once about six months ago and it was like really, really, really popular and we've just had non-stop messages and emails about why you're not brewing more of these. So we just re-released it last week. It'll'll be sold out the next day or two. A beer like this is not going to be on the shelves for very long.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 27:32

What is that underlying fruit?

Ephraim Greenblatt: 27:37

That's hops.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 27:38

That's hops. That is what you're smelling.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 27:40

You're smelling so much hops now. You're smelling so hops is chemically cannabis, homulus lupulus. It's a cousin of marijuana with no THC and we put it in beer as a bittering agent, as an antibacterial agent and, more and more now, as a flavoring agent.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 27:56

Okay.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 27:57

So when the flavors break into different categories, but here you're getting a lot of the tropical notes, Tropical notes and what we call dank notes, which are actually closer to the marijuana style of flavors. A New England IPA is less bitter than a usual IPA. It's hazy. Do you see that? Yeah, Do you see how it's not clear? Yeah, so these are called hazy beers, or people that are into them are called haze boys. These are hazy IPAs and they're hazy because of the sheer volume of hops A and they're traditionally brewed with a bit of oats or something that's going to create some of this kind of creamy hazy approach. So IPAs are usually more bitter and New England IPAs are less bitter and more hop forward and hazy.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 28:39

Alcohol level on something like this I will tell you when I read it on the bottle 6.1. Okay, this is 6.1. I will tell you when I read it on the bottle 6.1. Okay.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 28:48

This is 6.1. These are all around 5, around 5, 6.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 28:53

4.5 to 5 is considered usual. 6 is starting. Ipas are a little higher alcohol as a style but this is pretty standard for an alcohol.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 29:01

Yeah, the difference actually between 5 and 6 is actually an important percent point, if you know this, because your body can process about one, five percent, depending on the size body, but about one, five percent beer per hour, right. So when you drink a six percent beer, that one percent of alcohol is the only alcohol you'll feel over that hour, which is why a lot of people say we get really messed up from craft beer, because those extra percent or two or three is what your body's not processing out in that hour. So that's why triples?

Ephraim Greenblatt: 29:31

well, triples are nine times.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 29:34

I don't think that's what really makes it the first time I ever had a triple was new belgium, um was in color. I was actually in Colorado, um up in Estes park and that's at about I don't know 12,000 feet. So, um, I'm up at 12,000 feet. We were barbecuing and I and I had this little little bottle of uh triple and I was totally looped and I said how in the world could I get so looped from this one little bottle? And it was because it was a triple, but it was also because of the altitude, oh wow, and the high altitude just totally accentuates any alcohol that you're drinking. It's really crazy, fascinating.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 30:30

I wonder what that is. High altitude is lower pressure, which means you're getting less oxygen, right, yeah, but cool, fascinating yeah.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 30:39

If you ever want to get really smashed, drink something heavy duty A triple in Denver. In Denver, well, this is almost 5,000 feet higher than Denver, but my goodness, my goodness.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 30:52

So this is a style that's fun to drink. I like this. This is delicious.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 30:55

This is really delicious. I could see I could get into being a haze boy. You know, like, because this is really I like things that have more flavor and that are, you know, a little crazier, a little hazier.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 31:11

This is fun. This is a fun, approachable beer. Actually, this is a more bitter New England IPA than many which I like Some of them New England IPAs have gotten. They're really popular right now and some of them are really just hard to drink and I think what makes this very drinkable is the bitterness carrying the creaminess. Yeah, the creaminess carries it, it's carried, and sometimes they just step the bitterness so far back and it's just flaccid and just a soup.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 31:38

I always wondered why they had both malt and hops. I always thought, well, you got hops, so you just ferment them. You know you create this thing, so there are no fermentables, actually in hops.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 31:52

It's interesting so let's talk about what malt is for a second. Malt is a confusing term that people everyone knows to use the word, but it's a bit of a confusing term about what it is. Okay, sugar, it is sugar. It's a source of sugar. It is Again if I get too nerdy, you just slow me down.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 32:10

Ultimately you have starches. Starches are 26 molecules of sugar attached to each other In nature. Energy is stored that way, but it's not sweet. If you eat a cracker, if you eat flour, if you eat bread, it's not inherently sweet. Those are starches, which is 26 molecules of sugar. And the reason why it's not sweet in nature is because if it was sweet, birds and bugs would eat everything. There would be no way to store energy. So this is a way to store energy. That sugar is energy, but it's not sweet.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 32:36

But these plants let's say barley, which is what most of beer malt is really barley or wheat malt. What it does is there are natural enzymes that are ready to chop itself into pieces, and once it starts shaving off those sugar molecules, then they become sweet. So those molecules need to be chopped up by enzymes. But when does it happen? It happens when they grow, when the plant needs the energy to grow, so it starts activating those enzymes. So what malt means is you take barley, then you get it wet and you let it hang and it will grow an actual tail, like we call it, an arco spire. We don't do this, the maltsters do that. We buy it already malted.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 33:15

But a maltster does. It takes barley and lets the tail grow and the barley gets into a phase where, hey guys, we're growing, now let's release the enzymes we need to chop up our energy. And as soon as those enzymes become available, they dry it, the tail falls off and that's now called malt. So when we, as brewers, take this malted barley now or we're calling malt, it's now enzyme active or enzyme ready and we grind that and put that in warm water. Those enzymes go crazy, they start chopping it up. We manipulate exactly a lot of variables to what enzymes we want to do what, but we take barley which is not sweet. We put it into our mash, down a certain temperature with water and it comes out sweet. So we're actually getting that enzymatic breakdown. So a malt is malt is going to be the source of all of your sugars, and all alcohol that you've ever drank in your life was sugar Sugar. Is alcohol alcohol sugar right.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 34:02

Those are coming together Now. Hops, though, is not going to provide any sugar or anything fermentable to the process. It's going to provide antibacterial properties, which are important, so that only yeast are working here, not souring agents. It's going to provide bitterness, which is a flavor balancer, and it's going to provide all these different flavors where, in this beer, you're getting a really exaggerated sense of the different kind of flavors they could bring. Those flavors come in different categories. There's citrus flavors, which are pretty common, grapefruit or orange.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 34:33

Is that Okay? So now I'm going to get back into the. I always love to compare things. So when you have things, when you have, you know, a couple of glasses, you can compare wines. That's the only way for me to really explore. So what gives those hops their special flavors? Is it the terroir where they've grown those hops? There's no added flavors that are put into them, is there?

Ephraim Greenblatt: 35:05

um. There there are beers brewed without flavors but, certainly not, not hops themselves.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 35:11

Um, I don't know so much about about a hop growing I've never grown hops but here's a few things that I do know. So, first of all, there are varietals, right. So there are, just like you have, hundreds of varietals of wine that each one would have its own set of flavors, which would certainly be affected by terroir Grapes yeah, excuse me, grapes. Yeah, would certainly be affected by the terroir, but different grapes have different personalities, different types of flavors, mm-hmm and laboratories all over the world where they're tasting these different varietals of hops and trying to find which ones are the most expressive and then isolating those hops. So there's a lot of genetic selection happening for that Now.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 35:57

That being said, the environment does affect a lot. For example, I have made beers with Israeli-grown hops, but Israel is a very, very bad country to grow hops in because our winters are not cold enough. So when your winters are not cold, even though it flowers in the summer, it doesn't flower well. A hops is a vine, it's a perennial vine.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 36:17

So if they grew it up on the hormone it could grow.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 36:21

It grew around my house. I brewed beer. I had a neighbor who was a home brewer and a friend of mine, a secular guy. We were good friends. We'd drink beer together Me with my sisters and my white shirt and my black outfit. We'd sit and he was secular and we brewed tons of beers. He made tons of fun and he would grow hops. So he had a very poor yield but enough for our home brews. So it's not a great country for that.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 36:41

But if you moved up into the mountains.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 36:43

It can be done.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 36:43

You could probably get you know better, a better um, what you call it variation of temperatures, and what have you?

Ephraim Greenblatt: 36:51

You just need cold winters. Cold winter is what you need, and I'm sure.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 36:53

I'm sure in the mountains that that it is doable. I don't know how much demand there is for it, but there is a. There is a. There is definitely a. It can be grown here if it's cold, but that is hops. Hops is an amazing world. It's changing year to year. Often the new varietals that we brew with are just numbers, because they're not even named yet. Like the varietals we're just dealing with experimental products. Now there's a lot of a new world of hop products where they actually isolate the flavor compounds from the hops and give it to you in a powder form or an oil form or a liquid form. I think there's some overlap with the dispensary marijuana community, but it's creating a really interesting hop products because at some point you hit upward limits of how much hops you can add to a product before it gets too grassy, too astringent, too tannic, absorbing too much of your beer. So to keep going, craft brewers I love craft brewing. I love the world of grappling. I love the culture of craft brewing and there are a few features of that culture. One of them is sharing and being open. Like craft brewers are amazing, like they will.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 38:01

One of the best beers america was a russian river brewery is made a heady topper. I made excuse me, made Pliny the Elder, and I remember people would send the brewer emails hey, your beer has won the best award at Best Beer in America, how do I make it? And he would say here's my recipe, take it, enjoy it. So it's a really, really transparent culture. And it's also a culture of pushing the limits of like, how far can we go? And they've hit the upper limit of how much hops you can put, so they had to keep going. And now there's this new world of hop hop extracts, not product. It's a really really fascinating world. I love, I love how far they go with this stuff and they're going.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 38:37

They're no restraint, okay, no restraint okay, so what are we having next?

Ephraim Greenblatt: 38:43

so the next beer, we're going to produce, we're going to produce I'm in in a producing mindset, the next beer that we're going to drink is a chai masala beer. So it's a yeah, it's a brown ale spiced with chai masala. It's actually a collaborative brew that we made with a brewery out of Tel Aviv called Schnitt. Schnitt is a really cool brewery that also has a very, very high rate of creating interesting and unique beers and one of the like.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 39:10

We talked before about the culture of craft brewing and one of the really special parts of it is just this energy of helping each other, working with each other, being inspired by each other, and I think they are a very special brewery Schnitt and for me it was so important to like say hey guys, let's make a beer together. So this is a beer that my brewer sat with their brewers and they tasted the spices and they worked through. What beer do we want to make it? How? What level spices? They fought. There was a big fight about how intense to make it. Should it be an over the top spice beer or should it be a subtle spice beer? A lot of fighting, a lot of discussion, but ultimately they made this product together, which is a cool expression of craftsmen working together. Let's take a sip.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 39:47

So my family's Indian background? Really, yeah, my father was born in Calcutta and so I'm not. Indian spices are not foreign to me and I can taste them coming through, really coming through.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 40:00

There's this. We talked before about Belgian beers and spices are sometimes used in Belgian beers, but there's this monk line the monks say, which is, if you can identify the spice that I put in, then I put in too much. Right, it should just tickle, it should just so. This is, um, this isn't, uh, not a very aggressively spiced beer, but it is a fairly spiced beer. But the goal is to have the different spices come together in a way.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 40:25

Yeah, no, this isn't overpoweringly spiced or something. It doesn't taste like I'm having curried beer, but I can taste that undertone of spices.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 40:39

And it's on a pretty gentle base. It's not too bitter, it's not too sweet, it's not too intense, it's not too malty, it's a pretty gentle base that's carrying this kind of cohesive.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 40:47

So you mentioned your brewers, and their brewers got together. How many people are involved in this? How many people are in your organization.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 40:54

So my brewery is four workers. I'm the owner, I have a brewery manager and a brewer, a brewmaster, and then he has a worker that helps him on the production floor and then the sales manager, so that's four of them, has a worker that helps him on the production floor and then the sales manager, so that's four of them. Um, but me, my brew manager and my brew master are all beer judges. We're all beer geeks where we're. We're the ones that sit in competitions and rate beers and give feedback, and it's a very intense culture in the brewery of like a beer craftsmanship. So even my technically only have one brew master, but there's at least three of you. There's a lot of us. There's three brewers, six opinions I don't know how it works Two Jews, three opinions.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 41:32

It's that kind of situation.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 41:34

A lot of dialogue, A lot, a lot of dialogue. There's a topic that I thought is an interesting topic that relates to the name of your podcast. So terroir right.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 41:50

Now, terroir is not an easy topic to talk about in wine, but it's a very relevant topic in wine, right, it's the expression of place and the expression in a wine. What about beer? Right, it's a question we discuss a lot and we think about a lot in the context of beer. Now I produce my malt. There's no malt coming out of israel, right? So I'm dealing with I'm dealing with english malt, german malt, belgian malt, hops, as we said, it's mostly not coming, uh, from you know, there's almost none in israel, so it's coming from new ze or the Pacific Northwest or Europe. My yeast is made in France, and even my water. I'm a freak about water because Jerusalem has five aquifers, so when you turn on your tap, you don't know which one of the five sources of water is giving you water and when beer is a water-based product. That's magic, that's incredible.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 42:49

That's crazy.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 42:50

So what we do is we have a reverse osmosis system that works throughout the night to fill up this water tank of stripped water that has no mineral content whatsoever. And then when we write a recipe for a beer, we also write a recipe for what water profile we would like for a beer to highlight those flavors. And then we use different minerals and salts to rebuild the water the way we'd want us to create a consistency for for a beer.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 43:16

So my water is not an expression of space place. I strip it and make it from something else. So does beer have a terroir? Is there there a beer of its place, and what would be the parameters and what would that? You know, how would that look? It's a really fascinating question, especially because we're in a pursuit of a soulful experience and we want a beer of here. I want a beer that makes sense for now and for here, to express here. Yet all of my ingredients are coming from, are either stripped away or being imported. So what makes a beer from this place is an important question for us and we talk about it a lot.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 44:04

I'd be curious to hear how that question sits with you. As you discussed before, at least I believe that there is so much variation in how you put those pieces together that you guys sitting here in Jerusalem making this beer, that imparts a certain terroir to what you're doing. I don't know where in the wine industry they get all the different variations of yeast, because yeast is incredibly important within the wine industry. I mean, it's kind of funny. People always say oh no, we use natural yeast. You know, we just use the yeast in the air and that's what we do. No, nobody does that. Nobody does that in a production environment, because as soon as you introduce any yeast to your winery, the winery is Inundated. Yeah, totally inundated with that yeast?

Solomon Simon Jacob: 45:07

Yeah, totally inundated with that yeast. So you have to. Basically, if you want to change the yeast that you're using, you can't just sit back and not introduce a yeast. You have to overpower whatever yeast is functioning in the winery at the moment. So that's the only way you can really control the yeasts at the moment.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 45:27

So that's the only way you can really control the yeasts. Do you know what Lambic is? Spontaneous fermentations in beer making.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 45:33

No.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 45:34

This is a wild thing. We discussed that there are 13 styles of Belgian beers Trappist beers or Abbeyels as we call them, or some of them. There's another style called Lambic, and Lambic is produced in a wild, wild way. It's produced only in January, okay, and the beer, when it's hot work. When it's hot, boiled, sterile liquid is dumped outdoors, usually into a copper bathtub the size of a room. It's called a coal ship and it will cool overnight in this tank and what happens is the bacteria from the air will actually settle in it and after that night they'll move it to wooden barrels and they'll age them for one year, two years and three years and generally blend them for a classic Guayas Lambic, and what you're getting is an expression of place from that night's bacterial profile.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 46:25

Now you are right. It's also taking from the brewery, from the, from the brewery itself. So much so that when a lambic brewery will move, they were scared that they're going to lose their house culture. And what they'll do is they take their beers and they spray the walls and the ceilings and the floors of the new facility to let the bacteria needs get hold in there so that to keep their character consistent. But that is is definitely something that would fall into the category of an expression of of space. Yeah, it's a really fascinating question.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 47:01

Well, you know, I think over time it will develop because you'll start getting hops from here. I mean, the climate in Israel is one of the most remarkable climates in the entire world. We have within such a small footprint so many climates. It's unbelievable.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 47:23

I had an answer. Yesterday I went to Airport City and I was like what's going on? Code on code off. Code on it's freezing, it's raining, it's hot, it's cold. I had an aunt who worked for. Yesterday I went to Airport City and I was like what's going on? Code on code off. Code on it's freezing, it's raining, it's hot, it's cold. What is going on?

Solomon Simon Jacob: 47:31

Well, it really shows in I had an aunt who worked for the botanical garden and she was from Cornell. She was a botanist in Cornell. She came here and she said we're in a. You know, I always I love flowers. If you look at my Facebook posts, I'm always posting flowers Apples, pomegranates, lemons, oranges, loquats, kumquats, like everything.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 48:17

I have all of those in my backyard where I live right now.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 48:20

I don't grow mangoes here, but if you're in, if you're a little further, a little further west, you can have people grow mangoes. This is all within a state that's the size of New Jersey, so that diversity of climate and little microclimate is just incredible. So I'm not sure that in the future you won't be able to develop a real terroir-based beer.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 49:04

I actually, I would go a different direction entirely. I would suggest that the agricultural expression of terroir, or the most Whoa Whoa, you can't.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 49:16

You just poured me a different and a new beer and this thing is like you gotta be kidding. This is fruit.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 49:22

This is fruit, so this is a Okay, this is a mouthful yeah this didn't come from hops.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 49:27

No, no, no, this is not from hops, so this is a Moreno cherry and licorice pastry sour smoothie.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 49:36

So that's a mouthful. Moreno Cherry and Licorice Pastry Sour Smoothie. So that's a mouthful. We could break that down a bit. So it's a sour beer. You're getting a lot of sourness. You're not going to get bitterness in a beer like this. We're going to use sour character instead of bitter character, which will bring it much more into the wine balance.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 49:53

It's sweet, it's not really sweet.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 49:57

It's sweet, but it's not like over the top, super sweet. No, it's not cloying in a wine, not wine cloying. But this is. This is beer sweet. Yeah, this is definitely sweet for a beer. I mean it's a smoothie, so you'll actually get pieces of fruit like don't, don't be surprised if you it's also got it's it's, it's creamy, super creamy. Yep, yep, that's there, and so it's merino cherries and actual black licorice candies.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 50:22

Yeah, I can taste the black licorice too. And that's actually one of the fun things in brewing is just like my brewers were like saying like I think cherry would be cool in this. And one of my another brewer said but it needs some complexity and they add another layer and they just. I had two guys spend two hours peeling candies. That's what they did to make this beer and it's so irreverent in a wine world and a wine world is so respectful of what we're growing and what we're making, and here it's just like let's play.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 50:49

This is playful. This is absolutely playful. But going back to the terroir question for a second, I think that let's see if I can word this well.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 50:58

How would you want it to?

Ephraim Greenblatt: 50:59

go. I don't know how I'd want it to go, but here's how I observe it going and I'm cool with it. Okay, you know, terroir is French for dirt right, is it land? What does it mean?

Solomon Simon Jacob: 51:13

It involves the soil and the stones, the irrigation Cool. It involves all of the growths around it, like all the plantings around it, the trees. So in the wine world it's fairly… but it also involves altitude climate, so it depends on which side of the hill you are your sun exposure, sun exposure and all the rest of that stuff, so go ahead I would say that in the wine world, terroir is looked at through a very agricultural lens.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 51:45

It's what we're growing, an expression of identity through what we grew right, but just let me.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 51:50

I'll key into one last thing before I let you go, and I'm sorry, I'm being an extremely bad host because what a host is supposed to do is listen.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 52:00

But there is one other side to terroir that was involved, was discussed, but typically gets lost in the process these days. Part of it is in the process of making the wine. Okay, so, as an example, in Spain, in Madeira, they take the barrels and they expose them to the sun in order to get this sun-baked barrel with the wine inside it, and it imparts a certain Madeira flavor to the wines that come from there. So your process is also part of the terroir and I think in that instance it might play more to where you're. I think you're trying to go with this, but go ahead.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 53:00

Yeah. So I'm actually going to go even a different direction than process. You know, we make three new beers a month. New beers, which means we're in a constant dialogue with our customers about what they want to drink. That's cool. You know what they have, what excites them.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 53:17

It's a constant, you know process, and I suspect that Tehran beer made sense through the lens of what are the economics of brewing this product and what do the people want to drink and what the people in a given place want to drink want to drink and what the people in a given place want to drink and what is economical to produce is what produce is what created the stouts of dublin and the ipas of england and the different, different areas that the different beers were created were reflections of the what people wanted, what made sense for them. When did they drink it? What part of the day did they drink it? What was the way that they culturally held this drink? Beer is held in hundreds of different ways. Is it in Holland, where children are given 2% beers in school because that's just part of the culture, or is it? I think that's true. No, that's true.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 54:08

Someone from Holland could correct me.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 54:12

But there's so many different, diverse cultural ways to hold the product and that dictates what makes sense for this place. Ultimately, when you're in this dialogue and you're reflecting what makes sense economically to brew and what makes sense culturally to brew, you end up tightening and refining what is the beer of this place.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 54:31

That's a cool idea. It's an incredibly cool idea. It kind of reverses the whole thought of what terroir is, because what it is, what you're saying, is that it's the consumer that's driving the terroir rather than the area, but it's the consumer from that area that's driving the terroir, and I think that that's probably extremely true. I mean, you know, it's very perceptive of you to even think of it that way, and I always like to have my mind opened a little bit or a lot, so that's really perceptive.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 55:14

It's a fascinating process.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 55:15

Turns it on its head.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 55:17

What is it? Because it's so important to us, like whenever I travel anywhere, I want the food from that place, I want the drink from that place, I want what is here. Give me expression of you. And in beer it's not as natural. In wine making, it's so natural to be an expression of here.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 55:31

So what's interesting is I wonder if that really impacts wine too, an expression of here. So what's interesting is I wonder if that really impacts wine too, because I mean, you have all of these German Rieslings and you have all different things, all different wines being made. We always say that it's from the terroir, meaning the environment, but the truth is people produce what they want to drink, so if they get something special and everybody agrees, it's really the customers that are pushing the terroir the choice.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 56:06

So that's you know yes that's very cool. I like that Even in. I have a son who's who's um a clever boy and we like to talk about utopian society and dystopian societies. We're just talking about communism and why it failed.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 56:23

How old is he, he's nine now. I think it was a couple of years ago, though. Cool and um. So we were discussing how communist failure. I was Googling why did communism fail?

Ephraim Greenblatt: 56:32

And one of the things I googled on this reading tim, was that price is a method of communication between the producer and the consumer, where, where, if I made something that the producer makes it that the consumer wants, he can charge a price for it. If the consumer doesn't want it, he won't pay a price for, and that informs the producer. This is not valuable to me and in communist society that breaks down because the factories just are told make a billion shoes, but they don't need to actually sell those shoes, they just transfer those shoes. So you're missing that element of price. I think that relates a little bit to what we're talking here. When there is this dialogue of what people were willing to buy, they're telling the consumers and the consumers are telling the producers where is the value for us, what makes sense for us, what do we want? And that dialogue is a two-way dialogue, because you can't produce what doesn't make sense for this space but no one will buy what they don't want to drink, and it's a bilateral communication.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 57:23

So I think the money is definitely there, but it's also your preference. Ready for our last beer? Yeah Well, last sounds ominous, but Not the penultimate beer, but the ultimate beer. Okay, I don't care what this is. It's not going to shock me as much as the last beer we tasted.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 57:47

If I tell you that I dumped trays of rugelach into it.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 57:49

I could taste this, I can smell it already. This is crazy.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 57:54

So this is a pastry stout. A pastry stout is a style that's evolved over the last couple of years. I'll tell you a little bit about pastry stouts. Have you heard that phrase before? Never, never. So I'll tell you a bit about pastry stouts. No, so pastry stouts is a style that's really, really interesting and I'll take you a little bit through the journey to get there.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 58:17

Stouts so stouts is a beer like Guinness or similar. You might notice they have flavors of coffee and chocolate, right, and what's interesting about those flavors is they're coming from the barley. How does barley taste like chocolate or coffee? It's because it's roasted, and it's roasted in the same way that chocolate beans and coffee beans's roasted, and it's roasted in the same way that chocolate beans and coffee beans are roasted, where a lot of the flavor of chocolate and coffee is coming from the roasting of the chocolate and coffee, which you can get similar or exactly the same flavors from the roasting of barley or wheat. Okay, so you have this style of stout where it's getting these coffee and chocolate flavors. And then there were these styles that it developed called Russian imperial Stouts, which were high alcohol stouts and, by definition, they left a residual amount of sweetness in them. So these were sweeter, high intensity, very chocolate, very coffee stouts. How?

Ephraim Greenblatt: 59:10

high alcohol 9, 10, 11, 12. Okay, okay, so these styles were starting to be brewed and people realized hey the flavors here are coffee and chocolate.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 59:21

What would happen if I just threw some actual coffee into it or some actual extra chocolate into it? And once people started throwing these additives into it, they realized, hey, we're basically just making dessert. It's sweet, it's intense in flavor, it's coffee, it's got chocolate. What about a little bit of crackers like? What about a little bit of something crusty to go into it? And ultimately people just started. Ultimately, people just started making these dessert beers and eventually came a point where people said, okay, well, can I make a donut beer, can I? Okay, well, can I make a donut beer? Can I make a croissant beer? Can I make a Boston cream pie dessert? And at some point they started actually just putting those actual ingredients in there as well. So they designed the beer to taste like a certain dessert and then throw the dessert in as well.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:00:08

So when you throw the dessert in, how does it impart the flavor? I mean, just because you take a chocolate chip cookie and put it into the beer.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:00:20

So in a vacuum alone it wouldn't. A chocolate chip cookie in a beer wouldn't necessarily leave a beer that tastes like a chocolate chip cookie. But if you developed all the characteristics of your chocolate chip cookie to be in this beer you wanted vanilla, you wanted that saltiness you'd separately isolated the different flavors and figured out how can I add those at different points in my malt profile and my. You know exactly how to design it for that. So then throwing in the thing itself either can add or can just be a gimmick.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:00:48

Like let's be frank, like I don't think that every time someone dumps something in there, but this beer was a beer designed to taste like Ragelach and to be influenced by Rogelach. We actually had a lot of fun with it. What we're tasting is the base beer. We released it three of them and we aged the other two one in a Cabernet Sauvignon barrel and one in a whiskey barrel from Luckin Honey.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:01:08

So we set it up as a Whiskey and Rogelach. It's like when did you use this Shabbat kiddish I wanted to bring you that one.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:01:17

We sold out these beers pretty fast. They were all sold out, so I just grabbed the last. I think this might be the last bottle that we haven't sold. It was just found in the corner of a fridge.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:01:25

How many bottles do you make when you do something like this?

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:01:30

So it depends. It depends on how wacky of a project it is. Our usual production size is about 1,000 liters, 500 to 1,000 liters per production.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:01:39

How many barrels is that? Is that multiple barrels or is that one gigantic barrel? We use barrels that we get from wineries and from whiskey places that are about 300 liters.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:01:52

Yeah 300 liters each. That's general. We have a great relationship actually with the milk and honey distillery because they make whiskeys that are X beer barrel, so they're very happy for us.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:02:05

So we, you give them the beer barrels and they give you back the. No, it's the opposite.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:02:09

They start, they get wine barrels, they put whiskey in it, then they pass it to us and we put whiskey in it, then they pass it to us and we put beer in it and we pass it back to them and they put whiskey in it a second time. They even shared with us once one of their gin barrels, which is actually pretty cool, because gin is not a barrel-aged product.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:02:23

Yeah, Right, I was going to say wait what, wait what so.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:02:27

Milk and Honey has made two runs of one smok smoky, one wine of barrel aged chins. And then we made sour beers age in these really funky, funky barrels. I don't know whether to say yeah this is you got to bench after this. This is you're going to bench after this one.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:02:47

This is a fuller, deeper richer man, you know, I've had people tell me that they taste chocolate in in cabs and Cabernets. And what have you Not like this? This is not like a hint of chocolate or a hint of easily.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:03:06

When I trained to become a beer judge. So part of the process is blind tasting six beers and you have to know all the styles of beer by heart and then you have to write a full review of the beer and giving feedback and then you compare it to a professional judge's opinion. So my tongue was really important at that point and I had to. Not I like. I do like cigars. I don't smoke cigarettes, but I like cigars very much. I don't like spicy food very much.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:03:42

And I had to keep off of those for a few months prior to like kind of polish that smoking cigars is not great for your tongue, from what I understand. I I would imagine that it would absolutely kill. I know people who drink wine, who smoke cigarettes even, and cigars for sure. I I don't know how, how you can do that and um and taste wines at any sort of level, but but I've never smoked anything in my life, really Ever. Anything, anything, anything, anything, no.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:04:02

No joints when you were in college.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:04:05

I have never, ever, ever smoked anything in my life, because the first experience I had, where somebody tried to give me something to smoke, I almost coughed my brains out and I said I don't care what this stuff is, I don't ever want to experience this again. My body just totally rejected it. And I was lucky enough that when I was in college, when people passed me joints and things like that, I would just say no, I can't smoke. And instead of being ridiculed for that, the general impression from my friends was more for us, great, come on, no problem, you know, you can sit there and not smoke. Great, and it was just that, was it? So I was lucky enough that I never, I never was exposed to any of that. And smoking cigars like it's not pipes. Cigars are not unpleasant to me, but they don't enhance what I'm trying to eat or drink or what have you at all.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:05:16

Yeah, as a as a pairing, it's a poor. We talked earlier about different kinds of food pairings and the way that work, which is an area that excites me a lot, especially in beer pairings, cause it's such a you know wine pairings that everyone talks about beer pairings as a whole world. Right, it's a whole world that no one there's just not enough people talking about.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:05:32

I don't know. You know it's funny to me because I guess I'm involved with some restaurants that are trying to push the envelope and in many instances beer is the natural go-to.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:05:51

Uh, so we we talked about one relationship between beer and food, which is the most classic, which is a classic um uh element of general food creation, which is a cutting right. Where it's it's, you have a cutter and what needs to be cut, so that what needs to be cut is often fat, but sometimes it's sweetness. Right, it's a heaviness that comes from a sweetness. Sometimes it's fat, and then you have things that can cut. I know about four or five things that could cut. Usually it's in beer, it's usually bitterness, sometimes it's acidity. It can also be like a spiciness, like a heat can cut through.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:06:29

Sometimes a herbaceousness can cut, even without a bitterness. I'm liking on my fifth one, but, but that's a, that's a classic. That's a classic, um, what I would call almost a chemical response, Right, and there are others, Um, but there's so much sophistication. Sophistication in this world, um, where we talk about train wrecks and compliments in other, uh, in other chemicals. I'll give you an example of another chemical reaction Um, dessert wines with dessert, right. Or dessert beers with dessert, right. So we know that when you eat something sweet, you become muted, Like sweet becomes a mute to you, right? A classic example of that eat a candy and then drink orange juice, right, it's horrible. Drinking orange juice after a candy is a terrible experience Because you became numb to sweetness. And then you drink the orange juice and the balance now just got changed. You expected the sour of the orange and the sweet of orange to balance. No longer balances.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:07:31

That's the same with that vermouth that I talked about. If you have something sweet before you have that vermouth, it's awful.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:07:38

Because only the bittering agent only the flavor it gets left. But in a dessert sometimes, when you take a very sweet chocolate dessert and you pair it with a very sweet drink or dessert wine or beer, what you'll do is you'll tone down the sweetness of that dessert and allow the flavors of the dessert to shine, right If it's something that's inherently balanced, like orange juice, where you have acidity and sweetness in a balance, right so then you take the sweetness out. You've misbalanced it or like in that form of it.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:08:08

But, you take a chocolate mousse and you now, suddenly you've toned down the level of sweetness. Now the chocolate, the nuttiness might shine, the chocolatiness might shine. That's an example of another chemical reaction. That's not just that cutting that we discussed. So there are other chemical ones. But then you get really subtle with the bridges, the notes of caramel in this, bringing out the caramel in that Right. And then you have pairings this is a little bit peanutty and there's a little bit peanutty and there's a little bit of jam in there. This is a little bit of of of a fruity and that's a little bit like, um, almost the crust, right. So there's so much of these kind of pairings and they're the train wrecks we call them like, the things that just don't work I like. So this is mean you will actually debate about cause. You mentioned that you that you did like. This pairing is sour and spicy For me, extremely sour beers. I've tried it with spicy.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:08:59

No, no, no, I wouldn't say sour Acid with spicy. I'm not talking about sour, I'm talking about acid with spicy. Sour is acid to me. To me, that's the same word.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:09:12

Not necessarily Sour, is not the amount of acidity Could be?

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:09:17

Yeah, maybe I look at it as a science nerd.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:09:20

I group those things. But whatever it is, for me acidity cuts heavy, but when it's spiciness it basically just makes it more abrasive on your tongue. I've been working for a while. I wanted Hatch at my restaurant in the Shook to like develop a little a small tasting workshop where you can watch like you know have a spicy wing, have a malt forward thing and watch that work and kind of set a balance in your tongue.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:09:44

And then have something really sour and watch it crash. And the opposite take something really heavy and fatty, a fried wing that's crispy and fat, and watch an IPA do its thing on there and watch something much lighter. Just not cut. What acidity, what bitterness does is it refreshes your tongue to the next sip and the next bite of fat.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:10:05

Yeah, like otherwise the fat just lingers Right. No, I get that.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:10:09

I get that, I'll tell you yeah, there's an area here that's actually really exciting and maybe very relevant to the dialogue.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:10:17

I'm on a wine podcast right now and we're talking about beer, but that conversation of being a beer guy on a wine podcast really is something that I talk about all the time, which is wine. People develop certain things that they know better than anyone in the world, but that's also true about whiskey people. Whiskey people care about certain things that wine people don't even know about or care about, and the whiskey world went their own direction with that, and beer went their own direction with it and mead went their own direction, and I get really, really excited about the overlap between these two worlds.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:10:49

Yeah, because there's a ton of overlap and there's a ton, but people won't even talk about the overlap. But people won't even talk about the overlap. I get it, I know, I know.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:10:59

Even tonight we talked about it. We were drinking a wine together and it was pretty acidic and I was just laughing about how the acidity is just fully right. Before they bottle it they just tweak the acidity and that's pretty standard. A lot of winemakers are doing it for it, if I'm not mistaken. In beer no one does it.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:11:13

No, I wouldn't say a lot of winemakers, but there are some people who, especially in today's world, where there's a demand for acidity, can go about tweaking things at the last minute. But that's Do you look down on that. Yes.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:11:35

It depends, yes, you do, no, no, no, yes, you do it, just. Yes, it depends, yes, you do, no, no, no, yes, you do.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:11:38

It depends who's doing it. Wine people don't go anywhere close to this level of manipulation. This level meaning this what did we call it, this beer that we just drank? The pastry stout. The pastry stout, the rugelach pastry stout this is like real rugelach, a real chocolate. I mean I can. It's called rugelach, I can taste the rugelach. I mean it's like unbelievable.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:12:11

But I'll give you another example of, let's say, where the wine world, where the wine world or the whiskey world I like whiskey sits to benefit from the beer world. Beer is served naked. We make our product, we ferment it and we drink it.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:12:26

This isn't naked.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:12:27

This is not naked, this is wearing a Purim costume fella. Okay, fine, but the local time that we started with the Helles Lager, that we started with I get what you're saying, but I'm just laughing when. I'm drinking this.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:12:39

This is, comically, not naked, okay yes, but go ahead the Helles Lager that we started with.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:12:44

It sits, what it is, what it is right. Distillers cared much less about fermentation because all of their product went through such a radical change in distillation to the point where even lefroy used to brag that they would ferment all of their wash with bread yeast. They didn't care, we didn't, they didn't have what to say like. I read a lot of these forums about whiskey making and there's just absurd, absurd information about how to distill, how to ferment. Beer makers know the most in the world about fermentation because this is what they do all day, every day, trying to manipulate fermentation. Right, especially, yeah, wine people have it a little easier because wine is such a great format to ferment. It ferments itself. You just have to keep the. You know you have other variables, but put aside the beer and wine.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:13:36

I'm listening, but there I didn't really trigger something here um but I think that, specifically in comparing whiskey to to, to um, to to beer, you have so much to learn and, in reverse, the wine world and the whiskey world has so much to offer the beer world in what you can do with a barrel Right, what do you do with a barrel? Barrels have so much to give and so much to learn. And micro-oxidation and a hundred other chemical reactions between the vanillins and the wood and what's happening and the bonding, and it's just exciting for me, the crossroads between the different areas are really, really exciting.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:14:15

Yeah, the crossroads between the different areas are really, really exciting. It's so amazing the variations that come about through this, when you, in blending flavors, in blending wines, you have the ability to take all of these different varieties, varietals, and put them in a barrel, or put them in a tank first and ferment them and then put them in a barrel and age them, or you can do it separately. Iacovoria is the latest, which we just drank the other night. I drank with him 18 different fermentations. He took the same varietal it's the same grapes from the same vineyard and he made 18 different variations.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:15:18

Okay, 18 okay, I love that so much, me too, nerd, I love that so much and then he blended them to to create this final wine wine and it's like it is so rich and full A person that makes 18 different fermentations from the same base product is a learner.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:15:44

He wants to know, he is hunting to understand. Teach me what happens when I do this variable and he documents every little thing.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:15:52

Hunting to know.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:15:52

Yes, 100%, and that's what makes him the winemaker that he is. It's unbelievable. That is, teach me. Everything is to learn, everything is more. I need to know more. I need to master this Teach. What will this variable do? How?

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:16:07

do I get everything I want out of this grape, everything I want that's possible to get out of this grape? So I mean it's like it's unbelievable, it's so crazy, it's crazy. Initially he had a thing called Yakov's Playground and that was 12 variations, 13 variations. You can't do. 13's not enough, you can't 13 variations.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:16:35

it's just you can't. What are you going to do with 13 variations? You can't. 13 is not enough.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:16:37

You can't 13 variations. You can't. What are you going to do with 13 variations? I just want you to know. You need 17 plus If it's not more than 17,.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:16:42

I don't even want to talk about it, I just want you to know.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:16:44

There isn't a winemaker alive that I know of, at least, that does anything like that. I mean, they'll blend, you know, four different varietals together, but these are all the same variety from the same vineyard. There might be one that's covered and one that's not. He takes different variations of what's going on early harvest, later harvest, skin macerated, non-skin macerated, different yeasts that are blended in and in the end he then blends it together to get something that is just like and actually what's kind of funny. We had a discussion about this, but I didn't discuss it on our podcast. It's kind of anti-terroir, because what you're doing is you're basically You've shown how much power you have over the land. You're totally taking the terroir out of the picture, because now what you're doing is you're making it to be exactly what you want. So I'm not sure it falls into the kosher terroir landscape, but it's definitely.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:17:54

But I think terroir is going to always exist in this dialogue.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:17:57

It's always a dialogue between control and control and what is 100%? So in that sense of terroir it really is good.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:18:09

It's genes and nurture. It's who we are and what we want to be. It's this constant yin and yang of it's always going to be. I think terroir without the influence of the winemaker is a forest.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:18:25

It's just wild growth.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:18:27

All forests are perfect terroir of being a forest. It's only when a winemaker steps in and says, now, where does that meet me, where does that meet what I hold or what I think or what I want to do, that you get this dialogue and you have an expression of place that's turned into a beautiful thing.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:18:44

So I almost call it the oria terroir. It's like gone beyond the land and what have you? I've been waiting for this moment.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:18:52

I want to pitch you this idea. I have this idea. I want to pitch you this idea. I have this idea. I want to make a wine where I use 20 different varietals. Go ahead.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:19:00

I know exactly who to speak to. No, he's 18. He's not my guy, no, no, I'm much more committed. I know exactly who to speak to.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:19:08

I'm much more committed. I want to do 20.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:19:10

That's my Different varieties.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:19:12

When I started brewing, so the first 200, 300 recipes that I made of beers that I brewed. I never made the same beer again, because every beer was a question and an answer. I wanted to learn about a style, I wanted to learn about an ingredient, I wanted to learn about a hop usage, I wanted to learn about a technique. It was a constant hunt for learning more about this. Ultimately, one of the things I learned was that without iterative brewing brewing the same thing over and over again, which is something that brewers get to do, that winemakers might get to do less you don't get iterative growth Learning from your mistakes on a given beer and then correcting them and watching that change.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:19:51

Well, you might also assume that something does something where it really didn't. It was a mistake. It's an incredible point.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:20:00

We always joke that Budweiser, which is maybe not the most exciting beer that you've ever drank, hires some of the most skilled brewers in the world because they have to make the same product day after day, using grains that come from two different countries, using hops that's an organic product that comes from three different areas. That's a level of to be able to create repeatability as a brewer on that scale is just mind-blowing.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:20:22

So that was the biggest thing with whiskeys, that the best whiskeys were all the blends, because they got consistent flavors. And it was only after people said, you know, they tasted a single malt and they go, wow, I like that. This is exciting. It's not the same taste as everything that I've been drinking up to now. How can I get more of this? And all of a sudden the world went over to single malts. But the truth is that the skills of these incredible whiskey makers are really accentuated in the um, in in the blends. That's where you and and it's the same thing with with wines the blends are are being able to get a consistent blend and a consistency so much. There's so much skill in that it's just unbelievable.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:21:12

So ultimately I found balance, because my brewery manager has been really for really for a long time is a perfect opposite to me. I want the exciting, I want the new, I want to light everything on fire and start again. That's just my personality and he's consistency. He's how do we run a factory? Well, he's how do we get things done the way we said it. He's just the perfect opposite of me in a really great way. Obviously, we conflict all the time, but in the most amazing way. So he was like a friend you can't be producing new beers all the time because you're never dialing in your technique, you're just going someplace else. He was right. So we actually shifted for a while to producing these consistent beers and now we're in this really really like. I think we're in a sweet spot where we have these six beers that we always have and we're always bringing them, we're always perfecting them, we're always learning, we're always tasting and correcting.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:21:59

And then every month we're, we're, we're producing cherry Moreno, cherry licorice pastries, sours, smoothies, beers and chai masala cola beers and and and and rugelach pastries.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:22:28

And rugelach pastry beers, cola beers and and and.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:22:29

And and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and and and and and.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:22:33

And and I'm ready, I'm ready, I'm ready After this, I'm ready to start a beer channel.

Ephraim Greenblatt: 1:22:38

Let's do it, so take care.

Solomon Simon Jacob: 1:22:39

Amazing. Shalom, shalom, shalom, shalom, shalom, shalom, shalom, shalom, shalom, shalom, shalom, shalom Sh. This is Simon Jacob, again your host of today's episode of the Kosher Terroir. I have a personal request no matter where you are or where you live, please take a moment to pray for our soldiers' safety and the safe and rapid return of our hostages. I hope you have enjoyed this episode of the Kosher Terroir. It was really interesting for me as well. Please subscribe via your podcast provider to be informed of our new episodes as they are released. If you're new to the Kosher Terwa, please check out our many past episodes and thank you for listening to the Kosher terroir.