Mitch Steele, 54, is the brewmaster at Stone Brewing Company, which operates facilities in San Diego, California, Berlin, and — from 2016 — Richmond, Virginia. Having been a homebrewer since he was a student at UC Davis in California and worked at Anheuser-Busch for 14 years, he knows brewing inside out. He has become one of the world’s foremost experts on India Pale Ales such as Ruination, a double IPA which was recently withdrawn by Stone. He tells us why.
Ruination IPA
The big thing about Ruination is that it’s based on the Centennial hop. That’s the only hop we use late in the brewhouse for flavour and in dry-hopping for aroma, so it’s a showcase for that hop. You have to dry-hop a Double IPA. Late hop in the whirlpool will give you some pretty good hop aroma, but not at double IPA levels.
The first thing you taste [with Ruination] is that it’s very piney, resiny and there’s lots of lemon hops. We use Centennial in the IPA too, and in that beer — at a lower alcohol content — it comes across as more lemony… with Ruination I get more of a clean, citrusy resin-type character. It’s very bitter and dry; it’s just about that hop character, it’s very intense.
Ruination 2.0
One of the reasons we updated the beer is that the hop character in it is what we’re starting to regard as a classic hop character, as opposed to a modern hop character. There are a lot of new hops out now offering a variety of different flavours: peach, tropical fruit, things like that — and that seems to be what drinkers are gravitating towards now. I believe that Ruination was the first regularly bottled double IPA in the States when it came out in 2002. Other people brewed them first, but we were the first to put it in a bottle and ship it on a regular basis.
It was an opportunity to update the recipe a little bit and that’s all we did. We added some different hops to the dry hopping; we kept the Centennial in there, to keep the original character, but added some other hops. I think that has brought it up to today’s standards.
The other reason is that the market here is becoming very interesting; there are a lot of very good double IPAs on the market, with new ones coming out every day. My impression is that when people go into the store and they see 30 different IPAs, they’ll look at Ruination and say ‘I’ve had that; I like it, but I want to try something new’.
I started at Stone in 2006; before that I was at Anheuser-Busch. For a long time it was fun. I went in there wanting to become a better brewer; I had been brewing at the San Andreas Brewing Co., which was a very manual 14-barrel brewpub system. I wanted to take my skill set to another level — when I joined AB, my thinking was: ‘I’m going to try this for five years and if I like it, great, if I don’t I’ll get back out into craft and I’ll have learned a ton.’ I ended up staying there for 14 years.
Pots-on-the-stove
I was homebrewing throughout that period, but I actually started at UC Davis back in 1984, where I majored in Fermentation Science. It was mostly about winemaking and brewing; I wanted to go into brewing but there weren’t any jobs. It was a terrible time of recession. I ended up taking a job in winemaking, at Almaden Vineyards, which I did for many years.
I was a pots-on-the-stove homebrewer, then I moved to having one of those ten-gallon Igloo Coolers as a mash tun, and that was as far as I got. Now you see these 5000-dollar kits that people are brewing on, and people are building their own systems. It’s pretty cool to see.
It’s driving what’s happening in professional brewing; so many brewers here in the US are former homebrewers and they’ve gotten the opportunity to go pro. There’s a risk because not every brewer understands what it takes to run a brewery, but a lot of the homebrewers that have made that move, that haven’t had that experience, have done really well with it. They’ve had experience of being innovative, writing recipes, and that drives a lot of what we’re doing in the United States.
We’re doing our very best to stay at the forefront of that. I’m very excited about what we’re going to do in Berlin; I think that’s going to be a big deal. Richmond was a necessity because we’re out of capacity here in Escondido; that brewery is going to be a wonderful facility with amazing technology. It’s a major step up for us; I’m really looking forward to that.
Future of Brewing
It’s an exciting time. If craft brewing continues at the pace it’s growing, especially with the growth we’re seeing in Europe, and Australasia, and Asia, there’s going to be a lot of demand for hops that may not be available in [the required] quantities. The other thing is that breweries are getting to the point where they’re using more and more hops per batch of beer; you’ve got that coupled with the growth and it’s a serious concern. I’m not sure it’s going to result in major shortages, though — some varieties are down [here in the US] but there will be other hops available.
It’s something I focus on a lot; when we formulate a beer, I need to make sure that the hops we put in will be available. I look at that very closely.
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