Smells Like Bean Spirit: Meet the Brewer
This week John sits down with Uiltje brewer James Holman to discuss Uiltje’s upcoming limited Lab Series release, Smells Like Bean Spirit, a 5.2% coffee keller pilsner. James won a bit of notoriety as a brewer back in 2023 when his smoked wheat ale recipe, Smokey the Pear, won gold at the Dutch Beer Challenge. Now he’s back with fellow Uiltje brewer Johnny with this traditional German pilsner that includes a sniff of arabica coffee. In this short conversation he offers his vision of the beer, but also why drinkability matters more than anything else. Enjoy.
Who exactly is James?
I am sitting here with…
James. James from Uiltje.
And what do you do exactly?
I do a little bit of brewing, I do some packaging. All-round general dogsbody for Uiltje Brewing.
How long have you been here?
Five or so years. Six years. A while now. Long enough to know what I’m up to occasionally.
A coffee keller pilsner?
And you’re here because we’re going to talk about a beer you had a large part in making, I would say.
Well, it’s not yet made, so I’m not sure I’ve had a large part in making it yet. But I guess I did have some influence on the recipe, so I can be blamed and claim credit for the outcome.
Very good. And we’re talking about Smells Like Bean Spirit. So the floor is yours. Let’s just talk about what we’re talking about. What’s the style of the beer, and what’s the story?
It is a coffee keller pilsner.
What is that? What’s a keller, for the people who don’t know?
Yeah, to be honest, it’s a good question. A German pilsner, to put it simply. Let’s describe it as that. Yeah.
That’s basically, as far as I understand it, an unfiltered lager? Yes. Kind of an old-school type of beer. It’s kind of like a James beer, to be quite honest with you, because you like the lower-ABV stuff.
I do like the lower-ABV stuff. It is a traditional German beer, so therefore it is fairly basic in its styling, in its presentation. And in theory, now, it will be a 5.2% beer. So I think that’s a nice drinkable beer.
It’s a change for Uiltje. 8% seems to be our standard, or the 9.5% I just think I’m mad, but someone’s drinking them, so that’s great news. But it’s not my cup of tea.
Yeah, yeah, but the keller is.
Well, I mean, we’ll see how it turns out. The coffee’s an interesting addition. I hope that works. Well, it should do; there’s no reason why it can’t. But you never know with this sort of thing.
New recipe, experimentation, exploring. Let’s see whether we can do this and not royally fuck it up. Hopefully not the latter.
This is another day at the office, right, at Uiltje?
Fucking it up.
Or trying not to.
I guess that is one way of looking at it. Yeah, I think we try our best not to fuck it up most of the time, unless we brew a 9.5% triple.
The bean behind the beer
I’ll say quickly about the bean. I know the guys who made it. It’s from Moyee Coffee. The business model doesn’t really matter in this podcast, but it’s high-altitude Arabica coffee.
So we worked with the head brewer, José, over at Moyee, and he kind of chose this specific one after sitting down with Paddy and some of the other people here at the brewery, Marco, Paddy. And this is the bean that would work best with your recipe.
There will be some experimentation in that part as well. Honestly, we’re trying to get it so that we don’t create too much colour, whilst at the same time having a nice imprint of that coffee flavour coming through.
We’re not trying to make it overpowering. It’s a keller pilsner sort of beer, so it’s not meant to smack you in the face the way you might find in a dark porter sort of style. It’s meant to be a little bit more subtle.
We want it to come through. It’s got to be in there. So we will dose and see what works out best. I’m afraid I don’t have the numbers.
I know that changes along the way. That’s part of the process. But maybe just to take a step back: I hear you guys, the brewers on the floor, often talking about lower-ABV stuff, more drinkable.
Yeah. I mean, we’re brewers, we probably drink a little bit too much, so being able to drink a little bit too much of something that’s not going to knock you on the floor is always nice.
This should fit well. This should be a really nice drinkable, sort of easygoing beer. It’ll be available in autumn, so as the weather gets a bit colder, a bit darker, hopefully very appropriate.
That’s, I guess, the aim.
Recipe by committee
And we spoke about this earlier, making a recipe. I know the philosophy on the brew floor is giving all the brewers a bit of a say in what we’re making.
I don’t know if it’s as clean as I’m saying; theory is also different from practice. But in any case, this recipe’s coming more or less under your name and also Johnny’s name, who couldn’t join us because he has a sore throat.
And I think that’s just Johnny’s way of getting out of talking into a microphone.
That is a possibility, but I’m not going to try and diminish his disease situation.
So of course we have Paddi as head brewer, who writes an awful lot of our recipes. But the reality of brewing is there is a fair amount of monotony in your day.
You’re going to spend a lot of it cleaning. You’re going to spend, depending on your task of the day, a fair amount of time doing, what is it, drops if you’re in the cellar.
You’re going to be packaging, which is honestly not the most exciting thing in the world, and it doesn’t matter how you try and do that, it doesn’t get that much more exciting.
And if you like to think of yourself as a decent and interested brewer, then participating, sort of playing an active role in creating recipes, is definitely a break from the norm.
We’re lucky at Uiltje. We do a lot of specials, so this opportunity is not sort of once in a blue moon, but still, it’s good to be involved in the whole process.
And this is an opportunity to do that start to finish. Although the chances of you doing the whole process are rare, but that’s a scheduling problem.
Life comes in between, right?
Life gets in the way. Too many of us have children. That’s definitely made it, uh…
All of you have children.
Almost all of us have children.
The same age as well. The daddy-day age.
Yeah, Corona babies or Covid babies, or whatever the hell they are.
Malts, hops & coffee
Let’s just dive into the recipe. Again, the idea here isn’t to explain it to the very bare minimum. The goal is to give people a bit of an idea of what they’re going to get when they buy it and taste it.
So maybe throw some malts and hops in there. What are we getting?
Okay, so this is an unfiltered keller pilsner, so with that, it needs to have some body to it.
And with that, you don’t want to have a recipe that’s just full of Pils malt. It’s going to be too clean, too crisp, and we’re not looking for that.
So we’ve thrown in some biscuit. We are going to throw in some dextrin, and then a little bit of Carapils to sort of get a little bit of extra flavour in there.
That biscuit malt should also give us a nice amount of body in this beer.
We were contemplating whether to switch the biscuit for something that gave us a little bit less colour.
And honestly, we are also going to maybe have to review that, because it’s a double brew.
So we are going to actually be looking at the colour after the first brew and then make decisions on whether we’re going to adapt our malts for colour.
If we do, then we’ll shift out the biscuit and move to a Vienna malt, simply because that will give us a little bit less colour.
But I wanted that biscuity body that I think comes from biscuit malts. It was always a fun one to use when homebrewing. So yeah, I like to throw it in every now and then.
Do we use that often?
Not often. I think it’s probably been in about one other beer this year, although don’t quote me on that one.
That’s the aim on that front. Hops is very simple. It’s not meant to be too clever.
So what are we actually using? I think we’re using Comet. Actually, it’s going to be a single hop.
So yeah, it’s not trying to be a hoppy IPA. No, that’s not the aim of this. We’re trying to get a nice hop balance with the coffee.
When do you put the coffee in? At what point does the coffee come into play?
At the moment, I think the plan is to shove a little bit into the whirlpool, and then also possibly some into the BBT when everything has settled out.
But again, I think part of that is going to be seeing how the coffee comes through in the beer.
We’ll make a tincture. It’s the safest, easiest way to do this, particularly as we’re not going to be pasteurising anything.
So, into the whirlpool; we’ll give it a nice flavour. We can add the flavour overall, and then after that, you base it on further additives later.
Do you grind the coffee in advance, or do you throw whole beans in? Everybody has a way.
We do use coffee, it’s not completely random. We’ve used coffee quite a bit in previous recipes, also Moyee Coffee as kind of our go-to partner.
That is true. I suspect that for the tincture, we’ll grind. It allows a bigger flavour release.
In the whirlpool, I would have thought we wouldn’t bother. We want to be able to get that out of the beer as well.
Coffee grounds: potential nightmare. Whether they’re going to be brewing something different the next day.
So it’s probably not the best idea that one of our future beers is laced with too much coffee sitting in a line somewhere.
Did you enjoy it? Would you have another?
Do you have an idea of what you want people to experience? I mean, it is personal to a certain degree, more than other recipes that you’re working on and not putting your name to.
Well, for me, it’s drinkability. I’m not interested, most of the time, in trying to have a 20-minute discussion on the flavour characteristics of a beer.
I think the important questions in today’s market are: Did you enjoy it? Would you have another?
They’re really the only important things to say. Everyone’s taste and smell is slightly different, so your individual experience of a beer is going to be an individual experience.
That’s not saying that if I loaded it up with peach or something, you’re going to be tasting raspberries.
It’s more that I want you to be able to say, yeah, I enjoyed that. I’d have another. I’d recommend it to someone.
That is, for me, the most important thing, the nicest thing about sort of creating a beer recipe.
And yeah, the low alcohol, for me, is kind of part of that.
I’ve been in the vicinity when you’ve drunk 8% beers like there’s no tomorrow.
Yeah, no, it’s always messy. I drink far too quickly. I’ll sit there and neck without noticing.
I won’t touch the really boozy stuff nowadays. I don’t like it where the booze is really coming through in the taste.
I like it to lager a lot longer so that it’s a more refined flavour.
But yeah, some of the 8% IPAs we have, they’re very naughty. You won’t register that eight until, well, until you’re on your ass.
I call them dangerous recipes. We’ve had a couple in the last few months. The Juicy Lucy Double we brewed was—
Yeah, that was a really good beer. Honestly, that went down very, very easily.
And what was it, 8.5? It was a serious—
It was a serious hitter. I got home a couple of weeks ago having had two 8% beers, and my girlfriend looked at me and was like, “Are you drunk?”
And it’s one of those moments where you’re like, well, I might be, but I shouldn’t be.
And so, yeah, for me, coming back to this recipe, 5% is a nice drinkable number. You can have three of those and you will be fine, assuming that the taste is good.
A little bit odd is a good thing
But what’s the James signature? And again, I’m not going to put it all on you, this beer, because it’s not a referendum on your character.
I’ve always liked things that are a little bit sort of odd.
“Odd” is a big word in the current beer market. I mean, let’s be honest, everything that you can imagine has been created in one way, shape or form.
I think the last beer that I really, truly put my name on was a beer called Smokey the Pear.
The award-winning Smokey the Pear.
Yeah, it did really well. I was very proud of that recipe.
What year was it?
Oh, I think that was ’22 or ’23. So yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve really committed to a recipe.
But that was sort of me really being able to play, and with that, there was a lot of fruit, there was a lot of smoke.
And yeah, it was an amazing summer beer. I really liked it, and it did very well. We got a gold at the Dutch Beer Challenge, so that was cool.
With this, you take a keller beer, relatively speaking simple, and then we throw in a whole lot of coffee.
I mean, I don’t yet know exactly how much, but we’ll shove a decent amount in there.
And so it’s slightly off your standard, and I think that’s what I kind of enjoy when it comes to writing a recipe: slightly off what you’re expecting.
Particularly if you’re really into your beer, you’ll sit there and be like, “Well, it’s not really on style, or it’s not right.”
It’s like, no, it’s not really on style, but it works, and it’s a play.
And hey, that’s one of the fun things about working here: we get the room to play.
So I think if there’s something that you can twist a little bit, I like to do that.
There’s a good reason that you enjoy homebrewing, and that is you can go out and brew 100 litres (my system allows two, if you’ve really got a low ABV), but if you screw that up, it’s not the end of the world.
And that’s one of the sort of fun things about this place: you can turn around and give them a recipe and be like, “Yeah, so I think it works. It should be fine.”
Good beer isn't made alone
But with homebrewing, it’s you, whereas here there is a certain amount of democracy going on.
I see you guys gather around a beer. Everybody’s kind of tasting, giving their feedback, possibly too much feedback, I don’t know.
But in any case, it is a recipe by committee.
Yeah, no, absolutely. We’re not producing 100 litres here; we are producing thousands. And with that, it needs to move.
I spend a lot of time packaging, and honestly, if I had my way, I’d love to shove a six-month end of life on all of our IPAs.
I think that it’s very hard to maintain a level of quality after that period.
But does everybody taste it? The connoisseurs taste the nuances, but the reality is, the minute something goes into a supermarket, it’s not fresh off the shelves. We know that.
Absolutely. I mean, it takes an awful lot of training to be able to spot some of these smaller deviations from perfect, so it isn’t going to suddenly change everyone’s perception.
But I think that in the end, that’s not really the point. The point is you’re trying to give the best product you can.
In an ideal world, everyone would sit in your taproom and drink thousands of litres of it, simply so it never needed to leave your warehouse.
It would live in cold storage, and you would have an extremely professional barman tapping it at all times.
None of this is the reality, and hey, that’s fine.
As you say, most people, honestly a good 90%, probably will never really be like, “Oh, this is off.”
So, what should you expect?
Again, there’s a difference, because you’re right: it’s actually about the enjoyment.
Did you enjoy it? Do you want another? Getting back to your core questions.
Why is it such an important question? Because does it matter?
Well, if the answer is “I enjoyed the beer and yeah, I’ll have another,” then no, it doesn’t matter.
I mean, in the end, it’s always about enjoyment, pleasure. Yeah.
Drinkable. Enjoyable. One more?
Hopefully it’s an extremely drinkable beer that you all enjoy and want another one of. That would be perfect.
And hopefully you get it when it’s less than three months old, as fresh as it can be.
So says James.