‘Brew masters probably work more for love than for money’

Beer lovers will be happy to learn that the art of microbrewing is making a comeback. The first brew pub in downtown San Diego is Karl Strauss’ Old Columbia Brewery and Grill, named after master brewer Karl Straus, a Milwaukeean who provides the recipes. The on-site brew master is Marty Johnson, a 29-year-old Pacific Beach resident who went to Point Loma High School and later to UC Davis, where he received a degree in fermentation science. He began his career as an assistant wine maker, but always longed to brew beer. Kimberly Luoma interviewed Johnson at the downtown brewery, and Don Bartletti photographed him.

I started working here last December. I had never brewed beer commercially before. I chose fermentation science after considering what Davis was offering and what I liked to do at the time, which was drink beer. It was also an opportunity to study something I found very interesting. I had to take a lot of chemistry classes, which I dreaded at first but eventually learned to love.

The system we use was designed for one person to be able to operate. At least two days a week are brew days and sometimes four. Each day that we brew, we produce 10 barrels, which is a little over 300 gallons, so we make about 600 gallons a week.

What I do on brew days is load up my car with the malt, 700 pounds of it, that we keep stored in a warehouse. I bring it in, and, in our mash tun, we mix the malt with hot water and let that sit for about an hour and a half. It’s kind of like steeping tea, except you have some enzyme processes that are going on. The malt has a lot of starch in it and the enzymes in the malt convert that starch to sugar, and later on down the line it’s that sugar that gets fermented into alcohol.

So, once that conversion is done, we pump that sugar solution, which is called the wort, over into the brew kettle, and then we boil that stuff for about an hour and a half. This is where the hops is added. You use a different kind of hops and different amounts of it for different kinds of beer. The darkness comes from the kind of malt used.

The brew time depends on the style of beer. The ales take about 16 days, and the lagers take longer, about 21 days. We try to have three to four beers on at one time. We have four 300-gallon serving tanks connected to the bar. It’s a lot easier to serve from those tanks than from kegs, but that would limit us to four beers at one time, so we can also keg off beer from there, and those kegs also give us a flexibility to donate out beer for charitable functions.

On the other days, I do a lot of maintenance. You have to filter the beer, and that can take time. I also do a lot of cleaning. I have very little help, generally about an hour on brew days, and that’s just to help me load in all the malt. A couple of weeks ago, I went to a microbrewers conference and our equipment suppliers told me that I am making more beer single-handedly than anyone else that they know of in this country.

There’s about 200 microbreweries around the country. It’s only a few years ago that some of the laws were changed to allow microbreweries even to be in existence. The owners have plans to open up a couple more of these brew pubs around town--maybe five or six in the next five years--and I’ll be in charge of all of the brewing. So finally I may be a boss with someone to boss.

The best water for brewing is hard, mucky metallic water that no one would drink. I’m not saying San Diego water is perfect, we need to do things to the water to make it better for brewing, and that’s one of Karl’s secrets. When you think about it, brewing is a very natural process. You’re using enzymes that come from a seed or kernel, the barley, but more importantly, you’re using yeast, a living organism that needs nutrients to grow. I think that our beers are some of the best beers around.

Last week I taught a class on brewing at the Learning Annex. And, in my spare time, I do free-lance computer programming. I also like to play golf, go to Padre games, go to movies and, of course, drink beer.

Brew masters probably work more for love than for money. My favorite part of the job is meeting people and talking to them. The most gratifying aspect is seeing people drinking your beer and enjoying it. That’s definitely better than the money you make.