Fire & Beer

Jason Stein - Timber Ales

September 22, 2021 Season 1 Episode 10
Fire & Beer
Jason Stein - Timber Ales
Show Notes Transcript

This time we’ve got Jason Stein from Timber Ales. Jason’s love of craft beer began at the University of Michigan when he tried Bell’s Hop Slam for the first time. After graduating, Jason became active in the craft beer scene, writing with various publications and starting his own blog. The inevitable next step was to start up his own home brewery and Timber Ales was born, focusing on barrel aged, dark liquids.

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This time we’ve got Jason Stein from Timber Ales. Jason’s love of craft beer began at the University of Michigan when he tried Bell’s Hop Slam for the first time. After graduating, Jason became active in the craft beer scene, writing with various publications and starting his own blog. The inevitable next step was to start up his own home brewery and Timber Ales was born, focusing on barrel aged, dark liquids.

We start off the episode by cracking an ‘I Wish You Weren’t So Awkward Bud’, a collaboration between Timber Ales and Marlow Ales. It’s a super soft IPA and an homage to Letterkenny, a show Jason and Zach both love. From there, Jason takes us through his journey from graduation, to freelance writer, to owner-operator of Timber Ales. After graduating and coming home to New York, Jason was working full-time but ended up on medical leave for hip surgery and was bored out of his mind. His wife worked for a magazine looking for more support for its drinks column and he began his writing journey by consulting with her. He went on to contact breweries on his own to see if they would grant him interviews.

Funk Factory was the first to grant him an interview and it snowballed from there. Jason wanted to learn more about the thought process and the physical process of brewing. He began home brewing himself after graduating from university and his 2 childhood friends, Andrew and Matt, began themselves. Jason would beg them to make stouts and learned the brewing basics from them. It started with a full set of equipment, no baby steps, and it was messy. Of course, the first brews weren’t great, but Jason was hooked and he began to work on honing a solid darker beer recipe. Black Note was the beer that began the fascination with darker brews. For Jason, dark beers are beers you can sit with for a day and get more out of it as time goes on and the temperature changes. Dark beers allow you to bring out the nuance of a barrel aged brew.

Not afraid of being honest, Jason will call out a beer that he doesn’t appreciate. An example of this is when he interviewed the head brewer of Goose Island and called out what he didn’t like. They had some problems with a beer infection and then began adding pasteurization to their process. Then they had a highly anticipated brew get called off after it not turning out properly. Jason goes on to explain how pasteurizing in brewing works. 

Jason also had a series where he would bring established brewers to his own home to brew. It was a fun way to bring people back to their roots and get a different perspective on things. From that experience, Jason learned about the collaboration process and how recipes are created. The concept of Timber Ales was never intended – Jason created barrel aged beers that he wanted to put on tap to get feedback. In order to put it on tap, he had to have a brewery name. The beers were lumberjack-inspired so he just went with Timber Ales. With his full-time job, the brewing was never meant to be a commercial process, it just evolved into one.

Now, Timber Ales is doing huge business and Jason takes us through the scaling process. It actually wasn’t as hard as he thought, but it did mean being careful with yeast levels, equipment, and working closely with his friends. Now, with the success of his beers, is Jason thinking of opening his own premises? Right now, Jason says no. Where he is in life and his location doesn’t lend itself to full-time brewing, so contract brewing works for him at this time.

Next up we crack a second run brew called Chasing Darkness, and Jason discusses his barrel selection process. He utilized his connections with other brewers that have helped him to secure his barrels. We then move on to discuss the blending process. You could get the same beer from the same batch, from the same brewery, and it could come out differently. Preventing that all comes down to blending. To ensure consistency, they pulled samples from various barrels to compare and contrast flavours and differences.

When it comes to contract brewing, the business side of things is a little different. With regular contract brewing, you give the recipe to the brewery, and they brew and can/bottle the product. With Twelve Percent contract brewing, it’s more of a collaborative process. Ultimately, Jason has the final say, but he wants the input of his partners. The aim is always to have the barrels, but adjunct some cans to cover costs. When it comes to cost, it works out by the barrel. Jason retains rights to the name, artwork, and brand, but you can’t really patent a recipe. Once the pandemic happened everything changed, supply chains shut down, national distribution stopped, and having people at the brewery for beer shares has halted for now. Despite that, demand has grown and the delivery sales have opened up more.

With 45,000 check-ins on his beer, how did Jason and Timber Ales get here? Jason believes it was strongly by word of mouth and the impact of his artwork. The labels and cans are almost like paintings; they really stand out. Word started to spread over social media and Rate Beer was a huge part of getting the brand out there. It also helped that Jason was able to build relationships with other local brewers who could get the word out and offer advice along the way. When Jason started writing, he was doing a lot of rating and reviews for Pace magazine, and he felt kind of like a fraud not knowing the process. Hence, learning the ropes. 

To end the episode Jason answers some listener questions, discusses chokeholds, and lets us know when the next bottle release for Timber Ales is. 

 

Find out more about Jason and Timber Ales:

https://www.instagram.com/timber_ales/?hl=en

https://www.instagram.com/nycbeersociety