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Mashing, Boiling, Fermenting

Before any business can throw open its doors, it must perfect a service or product. For O’Connor Brewing Company, that means “knocking out” countless test batches using “Ale Pails,” plastic tubing, stainless steel coils, and an old five gallon keg.

The warehouse floor has a strange but familiar smell. Chris describes it by saying, “It starts to smell like a warm bowl of Grape Nuts.” The Grape-Nuts-smell emitting mixture is the wort, the liquid result of the mashing process. “It’s what beer is before it’s beer,” Chris explains, adding that, during the boiling of the wort, enzymes in the grain will attach to strains of proteins which produce maltose, the essential element that gives the beer its residual sweetness and body. It also results in fermentable and unfermentable sugar.

Chris stirs the wort with a metal ladle, then kills the burner. He and Kevin put on work gloves and haul the keg – 50 or so pounds of 210 degree liquid – onto an elevated platform jury-rigged by placing a wooden plank across two aluminum cylinders sitting on a sawhorse. They set up this testing apparatus so that gravity can carry the liquid from the keg through the steel cooling coils and finally into a plastic bucket. Chris points out that, before the days of hydraulic pumps, all beer was brewed vertically so that gravity would carry the liquid through the various stages of the process and end in the cellar, where the fermenting beer would be protected from light.

Our kind of alleyway.

But before Chris allows the wort to flow out of the keg, he checks a binder at his workbench with a series of clock times scrawled on an eight-by-eleven sheet. He glances at his watch, then pulls a step ladder up to the steaming test batch. He upends a box containing different varieties of “finishing hops” into the wort, saying that it acts as a bittering agent and an aromatic. The mixture smells suddenly fresh and crisp, the roasting grain tempered with wood and herb. Chris waits and checks his timetables again before opening the valve at the bottom of the keg and letting the wort flow into the steel coil, which sits in an ice bath. He shines a flashlight directly on the clear plastic tube to check the color of the IPA: a light amber. He looks pleased.

Chris explains that the hopped wort must cool before passing into the tank (a five gallon bucket in this case) because yeast – the final addition – is a living organism susceptible to heat. He tears open the packet and stirs in the white powder. The yeast, he says, reacts with the sugar to make alcohol and carbon dioxide. Then it must ferment. He carries the bucket to a table with other fermenting beer, clamps on a lid, and fixes a valve to catch water vapor.

Kevin returns from a meeting with possible investors and questions Chris about the test batch. They discuss color and density numbers and bubbles forming in the plastic tubing.  dam emerges from his office to see the result, and the three captains of industry stand in conference; Chris in shorts and work boots, Kevin in khakis and a polo shirt, and Adam in slacks and shirtsleeves.

Packaging

Kevin O'Connor

Crucial to craft brew culture is the marketing of the product, and Kevin has lost much sleep in the past months contemplating every possible business scenario. Strach is less manic. Asked what it will take for the brewery to succeed, he points to Chris and says, “That guy to make good beer. The small stuff will take care of itself.” But Kevin has considered every step from plan to profit, grain to glass.

Chris’ artistry with wort and beer, of course, constitutes only the first necessary step for a craft brewery. Kevin knows from his previous line of work that all alcohol vendors in the state of Virginia must operate within a three-tiered system. Before anything else, the brewery must obtain a license. The licensed brewery – O’Connor Brewing Co. – must sell to an authorized wholesaler.  This wholesaler, or distributor, in turn sells to the retailer. Simple enough, except that retailers (bars, restaurants, etc.) must tender cash on delivery to the distributor, but the distributor pays the brewery on its own schedule. Kevin points out that, if the wholesaler decides to pay only once a month, it will deprive the young brewery of necessary cash flow.

Kevin voices this concern not because he can’t handle the logistics of scheduling, but because he has followed this dream on a shoestring budget. Kevin has taken risk by spending far less than he could have. He also counts on the support of his local community, and has no doubt he can attain initial success within Hampton Roads. Kevin takes some inspiration from Caglione, who asserted that in small business, “As in martial arts, you can gain advantage over a larger opponent by using his own strength against him.” Kevin’s low overhead necessitates the exploitation of local markets, the very niches Anheuser Busch and Coors ignore. O’Connor Brewing Company wants to become a fixture in the Hampton Roads area; it isn’t worth the time or effort for a large brewery to tailor a product with one specific market in mind.

Kevin may dream big, but he makes business decisions without unrealistic expectations or ego. He manually checks all his receipts, saves old testing bottles for sanitation and reuse, and has found a CPA who will work pro bono. He is disciplined and unapologetic about his frugality, constantly reminding himself that “if you take care of the cents, the dollars will take care of themselves.” Unlike many of his counterparts in the beer business, Kevin had not underestimated his start-up costs, and considers shouldering more debt with the utmost seriousness.

But not too much. Kevin, Chris, and Adam know that their job is a college kid’s dream. They know that the market will judge them not on how many claims they deny or derivatives they sell, but by how many people they impress. And they stay in touch with this spirit by knowing exactly when to stop talking, put down the ledger, hang up the phone, and have a beer.

The brewery is located at 521 W. 25th Street, Norfolk. They hope to be open by mid to late March.