PD Brew Day

We found ourselves. In beer.

By Peak Design

Meet dave

Dave is Peak Design's CFO. You'd like Dave. Why? Dave makes beer.

Recently, Dave made some beer. We wanted to make beer with Dave so Dave let us help.

Do you want to make beer with Dave? Yes? Well, today is your lucky day.

But first...

What's that terrible smell?

yeasty goodness

Ugh. It's a jar of home-made sauerkraut that has gone bad. Really bad. Don't worry, Dave will dispose of it properly. Hey, here's a cool fact: like beer, sauerkraut is made through a fermentation process.

Fermentation is when you put yeast or bacteria in something, and the little critters eat up all the sugar and poop out interesting byproducts like alcohol, carbon dioxide, and tasty flavors. How neat is that?

Sauerkraut ferments with a bacteria called lactobacillus. Beer ferments with yeast. Let's hope our beer ferments better than our sauerkraut. Here's all the ingredients:

not a meth lab

Here are Peak Design's brewing apparatuses. They are all very odd looking. Random office passers-by probably wonder what all this stuff is for. When strangers ask us what we use all this equipment for, we like to respond by saying "definitely not making illegal drugs!" and then laughing maniacally for 10 full seconds.

Dave does not like it when people touch the brewing equipment. Always ask Dave before touching.

Step 1: crack a beer

Great, now we're ready to make beer. The first step of making beer is drinking a beer. We decided to drink some beer that we previously made, but you can also drink beer that someone else made.

We poured our beer into a mason jar because we are millennials who crave authentic beer drinking experiences. #brewlife

Step 2: Steep the grain

Beer is made from 4 main ingredients: grain, hops, yeast, and water. You can add other stuff like orange peels, coriander, and chocolate too. But then you will have violated the Reinheitsgebot. Don't worry, while Dave leads a very pure life, he is not a purist when it comes to beer.

Our beer was a partial mash recipe. That means instead of using a giant bag of grain, we used a small bag of grain and then added malt extract. So, we steeped the grain in hot water first.

The grain bag sorta looked like a kidney. Especially when we took it out and threw it in the sink.

Step 3: Add Malt Extract

Dave is pretty good at dumping powdered malt extract into the wort (fancy word for pre-beer). But you know who is really, really good at adding malt extract?

Tay-tay, that's who!

Taylor does a lot at Peak Design...wholesale, logistics, customer service, eBay management...but adding malt extract is her favorite.

Step 4: Add hops

Oh, did you think the fun part was over?

You thought incorrectly. We're tossin' some hops up in the B, fool!

Step 4.5: Take some sniffs

Dave made sure we really got in there and sniffed the heck out of those hops. Honestly, these hops made for great sniffin'.

Our neighbor Stephen came over for a sniff.

Our Digital Marketing Director Elish came over and showed us how to sprinkle hops like a pro. Not even Dave can sprinkle hops like that. But don't say that to Dave's face. He might get embarrassed.

Step 4.6: Eat some cheese and get weird

Stephen is an amazing chef and has a cool business across the hallway from us called Hands on Gourmet. When Stephen comes over, he often brings a delicious plate of food with him. On this brew day, Stephen brought over a charcuterie plate with brie, pancetta, burrata, and grapes. We're not picky. We would have accepted a bag of Doritos. Needless to say, Stephen's charcuterie plate really took this brew day to the next level.

Dave got weird.

Our General Counsel Heidi came in to pick up her farm box. She also got weird. We all got weird, probably from the burrata.

Our CMO Adam got too weird. Dave got annoyed, so he gave Adam a task to keep him busy: add more hops.

Step 5: cool down and pitch yeast

You can't just throw yeast into boiling hot wort. Yeast are tender, sensitive beings who don't do well when thrust into new environments. Much like Dave in that regard.

So, Dave added water the only way he knew how: very impressively.

Then he poured that nasty old yeast in there to do it's thing.

Step 6: clean up your mess

Wow Dave, the time really got away from us! We've got to run. We've all have a thing to go to. An important thing.

Oh, but you've got the dishes! Are you sure you don't need help? Our Lyft is outside waiting for us but I suppose we can cancel it and incur that $5 fee...