Welcome, everyone. This is the DC Beer Show. We are @DCBeer across
social media, including on Bluesky. Mike Stein,
what is in your Stein tonight? Well, I'm doing something I
never do since we are introducing a new
format here on the DC beer show. I'm having a hazy pale
ale. Why am I having green city from Other
Half? Because there is Incognito flowable hop
product in here. What the hell was that? I have no idea, but we have
a very special guest. We'll bring her out in a little while,
but, Jake, I'm curious. What are you having this evening?
I have here another IPA, another local
IPA at that. It is the precious one. It
is a slightly fruited apricot IPA from
maybe 500 feet from Other Half
at Atlas to brews that if you're at one, you can
walk to the other. You got chocolate in my peanut butter. You got peanut
butter in my chocolate. Good stuff. Jordan, what are you drinking?
Would it be okay to say I'm drinking another IPA? Just
playing. We are three for three so far with
IPA is in two for two with Other Half. Do you have any,
scrap scrapple dapple was the, one of the IPAs they dropped about
a few a few weeks ago, just, you know, not too long ago, but a
Citra Motueka, Eldorado and, Citra
Abstract. So, yeah, having a delightful IPA, and I think
the listeners enjoy this. So, Brandy, what's in your handy?
So Other Half has been mentioned several times,
and I'm not drinking Other Half beer, but this beer is courtesy
of my Other Half who is the GM over at Other Half,
mister Matt Splane. Matt has a very good friend that comes in
to visit him fairly ish often, and he brings
in, local beer. He's a rep, like, wine rep, beer rep.
And I am currently drinking Peabody Heights. So representing
our Maryland breweries, I love Peabody Heights. I have a
pixelated Pilsner. Sadly, there's not a lot
of info on the can. Dear dear
Peabody Heights, I don't like that. Can you put some info on the can
for us beer nerds? Just, like, put some stuff on
the can. Tell me what the fuck I'm drinking. Thank you.
But, yeah. So I'm I'm enjoying that after my homemade
margarita tonight because it is Cinco de Mayo.
I'm so excited for this evening. We're we're switching
it up, and I'm fucking jazzed about it. I'm wearing my
Dynasty shirt. What what are we what are we doing? Let's go.
It's super exciting, Brandy. I'll fill the listeners in.
We are gonna have our guests join us for basically the
entirety of the show. So without
further ado, I will welcome our guest, Shana
Solarte. Shana is joining us,
from Chicago. But why are we having a Chicago guest
on the DC Beer Show? Well, Shana wears many
hats in, the brewing and beverage industries. Right
now, she's currently marketing communications manager at
John I. Haas who make products. So I've got
Other Half, Screen City, which has a John I. Haas product in it.
But then I also have Hopewell from Port City, which is
another product, from our friends at Port City Brewing in
Alexandria, that uses John IHaas, hop
products. But Shana sent us, an email. She wrote a press release
three weeks ago, about the Michael James Jackson
Foundation and some work that, John IHaas is doing with them. So
we wanted to bring her on. Shana, thank you so much for joining
us. What are you enjoying this evening? If you're having a
beverage, what are you drinking? Hey, Mike.
I am enjoying Fuego del Sol. It's the latest
release from Miluna. IPhone would be appropriate
considering our, topic that we're gonna get into later on. So
this is a collab between Miluna and KCBC
in Bushwick, and it uses Stitcher, Mosaic, and
Crush Shops from Haas. You know, just
throwing that out there. It's a West Coast IPA.
Breeze described it as East Coast flavors meets West
Coast sensibilities. It's super fruity and tropical, but
really pale, dry, refreshing. I
regret only bringing one back from CBC. She she brought a
few to share with us last week at CBC, and I only came
home with one because we drank the rest of them in our booth.
Nice. Nice. Nice. So Can
we can we give a quick shout out to Breeze Galindo,
everybody? Yay. Breeze. Love Breeze.
Breeze, thank you so much for, a, being who you are and being
a good friend of ours and, coming on the panel and coming to DC
and being in MJF and being Miluna, and
just being you. So cheers cheers to Breeze and cheers to women and beer,
and cheers to Sean. Well said.
So, Shana, let's back up a little bit, just for
our no. No. For our our listeners that may not be
familiar, CBC is the Craft Brewers Conference. You were just
there where you saw, Breeze Galindo, who is on the board of
the Michael Jackson Foundation.
KCBC, Kings County Brewing Company also has another,
Michael Jackson Foundation board member, Rafa, Rafael
Darmas. So tell us a little bit about your
work. You know, you sent us this press release, and I realized that some people
might not be familiar, with what's going
on between the MJF and Haas. Fill us
in. What's what's happening? Yeah. I'm gonna take a few
assumptions here and just assume most people know what the
MJF is. The short version is they're a grant
making organization that funds scholarships for brewers and distillers
of color. And in the last five
years, they launched in 2020. I think they've sent
80 plus awardees or or given out 80 plus awards,
to places like Stiebel and Harriet Watt and
other great brewing and distilling programs around the
world. And so, Hass,
where I work, we have just launched a hot blend to
benefit the MJF. It's the first of its kind for the
MJF. It's the first of its kind for HAS. And it was a partnership
that sort of came together out of our mutual
desire to grow brewing in a way that makes a really positive impact.
Spent a lot of time chatting with the MJF board over the last few
months, working on this project. And one of the things that they really
wanna drive home is that, you know, there's there's a way
that the American public looks that is not entirely
white but then if you look at the brewing industry and the distilling industries
it doesn't reflect what the population of America actually looks like and
so this is a way for some barriers to
come down you know every every upper level job or even
some entry level jobs in brewing and distilling require some
kind of degree or experience. And if you can't get experience without the
degree and you can't get the degree because you don't have the funds or the
opportunity or the connections, the MJF provides
just one of many ways to to break down that barrier and move
ahead in careers for for their candidates. And
we know that, the Michael Jackson Foundation
has a board that looks probably more accurately like
our local breweries in DC, like our tap rooms, like, our
our folks in the restaurant, food, and beverage industries.
So we had, Breeze Galindo, a board member from the Michael Jackson Foundation
at, Foundation at, Lost
Generation, when Brandy was was hosting the women in beverage
panel, two months ago. But I'm wondering about
other friends or other luminary big people in in the
beverage industry like, Garrett Oliver and Liz Garibay.
How did you get all of these folks together, you know, the MJF? Did
you did you call them all into a room? Did you have them meet you
in a hop yard? Walk us through the process of this blend. Yeah. We
just put up the bat signal and everybody assembled. It was really crazy.
Eat a hop. No. I'm actually luckily for me, a
lot of the legwork was done before I joined Haas. I I just joined last
year, but my understanding is that some of the folks on our
sales and marketing teams and some of our analysts were kind
of trying to figure out what a good path forward would be
to do some charitable work and really, like, give a
spotlight to some organizations that really mean a lot to us.
And, you know, there's a lot of big movers and shakers at Haas who
just, of course, happen to know people like Aaron Oliver. And,
I'm pretty sure this was maybe a CBC past or some other
industry meeting where many beers were had, and this idea was sort of born
out of a bar conversation as many of the best ideas
are. And so we were able to figure out
how how can we put together something that
is very visible, something that the MJF can really
run with and, something that means a lot to them and to us. And for
us, obviously, it's hops, it's quality. We wanna put forward good
quality hops regardless of who's buying them or or what they
represent. And so the idea was born that we would
go to the MJF board meeting. So I think they meet in person
once a year. I think they have a lot of online meetings throughout the year,
but they were going to have an in person board meeting last
fall. And a small team of us hop hop folks, went to
the board meeting. They were gracious enough to give us a little time at the
end of their meeting to do some experimentation. So we
brought, I want to say 16 different hop varieties
from some of them were multiple lots of the same variety. So we
had, I think, three different citrus, multiple mosaics, some of the big
ones. And, all the board members
went through every hop on their own and built their
own blends. And then once they had built
their blends, we gave them some parameters of, you know, logistically, it's
best if there's up to four in a blend. So 25% each
or maybe fiftyfifty or 70 fivetwenty five and so on.
And they, they wrote up what they wanted their blends to be.
We took those blends all in this, this, you know, maybe
hour, hour and a half we were there. We took those blends on paper and
pulled out some fresh samples, recreated them, put blind codes on
them, and then they all evaluated all the blends
together to pick their favorite. And there was sort of
a joke at the beginning of the session that, you know, why
are we even doing this? We're just gonna pick Garrett's blend anyway. And we said,
well, don't worry. We'll we'll double blind it. You'll never know whose is whose. And
then we wound up picking Garrett's, which is funny.
Go figure. But that yeah. We got them all in
the room, thanks to the MJF getting them in the room for us, and we
just sort of crashed the party. Yeah. But, a good bit of
sensory going on there as well. And then even with the double
blind, highly academic, you couldn't you couldn't,
you know, escape the the Jedi mind trick of of
the of the great, Jedi, Garrett Oliver. That's exactly what he
would say. Well, there's an interesting tidbit,
that you had put in the press release that even though, you know,
the the sensory was double blind, the
Citra hops that were selected come from the Losa
Farms in Wapato, Washington state,
which is the only Mexican owned hop farm in The United States.
So I think it's really interesting that, you know, there's been a big
buzzword about meritocracy, as as we're
dealing with these absurd, executive orders. But it's
it's really fascinating that, you know,
a Mexican owned hop farm would be the Citra that
was chosen. As you mentioned, there were three three lot was it three
lots or three different, Citra,
hop yards that were presented? Yeah. Three different pallet lots of
Citra. And so as we're I I'm assuming then all of the
hops smelled were pellets. Is that accurate? These were
all a % pellets. And since I'm asking
you about hops, it seems to be that pellets are still
the industry standard, but I keep hearing this buzz
buzzword, flowable hop products. And Jake tried to
educate me, three years ago on hop products. I still don't get
it. So I'm hoping since we have an expert because you've worked for Cicerone,
you worked for Dovetail, you worked for Omega Yeast. You've been doing
education in the beer world for a long time. What the hell is a flowable
hop product? There are lots of lots of different
flowable hop products. Some really geared toward
bittering, some geared toward flavor. Ultimately, they're
just different types of extracts that can be made from hops.
And so you were mentioning Incognito earlier. Incognito
specifically is a flavor aroma product product
using. And really what it does
is just really boost up efficiency for the
brewer without losing quality in, the
variety specific flavors and aromas. So what
you get is a mega concentrated product that is
cheaper to ship, lighter to ship. Since there's no green matter,
you don't soak up beer. So then you get, you know, more product in the
fermenter, meaning more product in front of the consumers.
And that's just, that's one of, of several different, I'm looking at a
chart that I have next to my my desk, that I
look at all day just to reinforce what's in here, and I'm counting,
you know, a half dozen just by a glance. There's lots of
different global products, but that's, that's a
popular one for sure. So is it is a safe way to look at flowable
hops, just hop concentrate, basically, just for like like
abstract Incognito, it's just pure hop concentrate
that that helps make the make the brewing process more efficient. Is that a safe
way to look at it, or is that too too general? No. That's that's a
perfect way to look at it. It's just a % hops, but in a super
concentrated package, that varies
on usage, but you could probably get, you know, what would be the equivalent
of five grams per liter in
in pellets that you probably only have to use about one gram in
Incognito. I'm I'm probably getting those numbers not exactly right, and
one of our sales guys is gonna call me when he listens to this. But,
you know, if you can fact check me.
So for those of you who haven't seen
Incognito in action, it looks kind of like it
comes in a laundry detergent plastic bottle,
and you're essentially putting that, into the
warp, like, usually pre whirlpool.
I'm most familiar with Mosaic because I think
area brewers like to use that. Popular
hop, it boosts, those kind of,
like, dank berry flavors that I think Jordan and I, in
particular, are looking for in a hazy,
and I find mosaic as a just the plant itself to
be very temperamental. Like, early harvest is way different than
late harvest. Sometimes there were years where it was giving off this
kind of like oniony, allum y flavor,
and other times, much more strawberry, raspberry,
blackberry. And so I just wanna say, I
mean, Mosaic Incognito, has
been a game changer for me because now I see
that as opposed to just mosaic, and I go, oh, this
is something that tastes like what I think mosaics is gonna taste
like. So well done.
Forward and Liquid Intrusion have a collaboration in
honor of governor Wes Moore, and they've got mosaic and
mosaic Incognito in it. And the whole it just pops with
this great berry no. It's really well done.
So kudos to you and the team for that. Yeah. I'd love to hear that.
I I mean, our our sensory team really puts in the work to to
develop the the hop hop lot blend that goes into becoming
Incognito and any other flavor and aroma product. So they're trying to get
as sort of as true to the classic mosaic
or whatever variety you pick as it can be.
And, I don't know. It's pretty cool to work with a lot of very smart
people. I'll add, Shanna, you have
you have, quite a bit of experience, in beer
education. You know, you worked for the Dovetail
Brewing Company, which is sort of notorious for having
beer nerds work there. You know, in production and sales,
you know how to tap a firkin on the bar top, you
know how to make decoction sound interesting, water
profiles and the heaven's water of of Pilton and,
you know, dovetail is well known for having an educational
component. You work to put some manuscript
books together at the at the Cicerone,
organization when you were there. You've worked now on the backside
of brewing the supplier side, first at Omega
yeast, which is a yeast, supplier, and now
with Hass, with the hop supplier. I'm wondering
what you do these days to keep your your passion
ignited, your educational flame lit, as
you are, you know, someone known in the industry for
for educating people. How do you continue to educate yourself and
keep that passion to educate beer brewers, consumers, and
and others? That's a great question.
I I think a good part of it is that I have
so many years of just being a big nerd,
and I seek out new information wherever I can find it.
And part of the excitement of coming to a hops
company was that I hadn't really spent a lot of time around
hops. The the brewery I worked at is not known
for being a big hop forward brewery, so it was kind of like, you know
we've got noble types and and they're
there they're there to support and some of the beers have a little more hop
than others but nothing like we're seeing and you know this entire group is drinking
IPAs right now now. So at at Dovetail, IPA
stood for I prefer alt beer. And that's that's
great. I mean, I love it there. I I still go drink there all the
time. Yeah. I think I think for me, it's,
it's been really helpful to have this technical and educational
background to sort of inform my role in
communications and in marketing, because I think you can ask a
lot of people who work in specialized in technical fields
that a lot of times the comms team or the marketing team doesn't
really know what the company does. They're just brought in because they're, they're good
at their jobs. And, and I think that's, that's great.
But I'm filling a role that's, Hass hasn't had. So I've been able to
kind of make it my own and develop communications in a
way that is very education forward. And we have a lot of
folks on our team who are, like I said, very smart, a lot of them
smarter than me about a lot of things. So it's, it's cool to be surrounded
by folks that are just fountains of knowledge. I, I had it working at
Omega as well. Getting to just sort of pop my
head into Doctor. Laura Burns office whenever I want is
something I really miss. I could text her anytime, but it's not quite the
same as popping my head in the door. So, yeah,
I I I definitely miss having training as a more regular
component of my job, but I don't feel like it's completely gone, which is
nice. Well, it's it's great to have you here on the show,
Shana, and and and we're excited, for all of the work
that you're putting in and Haas is putting in.
Can we ask you what your favorite hop is?
Is it a new world hop, an old world hop? You
know, what what what would you say your favorite hop is?
Controversial answer, maybe for someone who works for an American hop company,
but I'm, I'm a really big fan of Saphir hops, and I
think that's just many, many years of drinking hoppy
lager. If I had to pick an American hop,
I mean, we just commercialized crush last year, right? Right around
when I came on board and I love crush. I think crush is just
an awesome, awesome hop. It smells so good. It smells the
same, practically the same from, from field to
glass. I mean, you rub the fresh cones, you rub the pellets, you rub rub
the dry leaf, and then you have beer with crush in it. It's kind of
all the same, like, peach mango smoothie vibe. I love
it. That's really cool. Two
different hops, wonderfully, decadent in their own
regard. But we should we should let
folks know, Shana, that if brewers or friends who are
brewers who are listening are interested in getting the MJF
hot blend, will their purchase of the blend,
be you know, will it go towards something? What is Hass doing to
to help with this blend? Yeah. So the MJF blend is not
just, a the name alone. It
is also, charitable donation from each
pound sold. So for every pound of the blend sold, we will
donate $5 to the MJF, which
we've got about 5,000 pounds of the blend available. So you
can sort of extrapolate from there. We were pretty stoked to help them
on their most recent fundraising campaign with a big match. And, I don't
know if you saw the photos from their party during CBC, but they raised
$200, which is pretty rad. So we're
we're stoked to be part of it. We're stoked to keep it rolling.
If anybody's listening is trying to get their hands on it, reach out to your
Haas reps. If you don't have a Haas rep, shoot us an email, and we'll
we'll find you one. Awesome. Thank you, Shana.
We're we love we love to see it. We love to hear it, and we
wish nothing but success to the MJF.
Thank you so much. I think it's really cool that we have,
a hop representative on because we talk about
beer so much. It's such a huge aspect of
all of our lives. And, having a
hop expert and someone representing one of the
biggest, hop, deliverers,
I'm gonna say deliverer, producer and deliverer,
is is really a big deal, and thank you for coming on. This is this
is really cool. I'm so excited for some of the upcoming
events we have going on. We have, we
have the Maryland Craft Beer Festival this weekend in
Frederick, Maryland. So many
of us have gone to that. We've even taken a bus there in
years past. Hashtag junket,
Papa beer. So this
weekend, the tenth, is Maryland Craft Beer Festival
in Frederick. Frederick's fucking adorable. I wanna
give my accolades and flowers to Frederick because, you know, I
I noticed a lot of our local DC beer friends and members live up
there. You know, they're lucky because they have tenth Ward and a
bunch of, you know, local breweries, but,
was on my, my second women's panel for the month at Other
Half who uses Paws Pops,
tying it back, book ending it. But, you know, you know, I
come from the gin distilling industry, and McClintock and to the Ward
are are crushing it up there. So massive shouts to
Frederick. So if you're up in Frederick this weekend, come to the Maryland Craft Beer
Festival. The women's brew culture club gets a
hefty half off discount for our tickets because we wanna
see more women and non binary folk in the beverage
industry coming to events. And please join
us. Seriously, please join us for our May beer share,
at DC Brow. We're we're gonna be at DC Brow this
upcoming Friday on the sixteenth, and,
I'm jazzed because, we haven't been at DC Brow in a hot
minute, and they are making some banging beer. And then we'll
be back at DC Brown at the end of the month because, drafts and
crafts, is gonna be there. So we'll be pouring
heavy. I'll be pouring for lost gen, prepping my lovely local
brewery. And then our June beer share is in
at Sovereign, and our July beer share is at ChaCha.
So we we we've got some good stuff coming up. DC beer, fam,
we're gonna be living the best life. We're gonna be giving our
summer girl and theys and thems and he's and us
vibes, and we'll be drinking the best beer. And cheers
to hops, cheers to women and beer, cheers to us drinking
beer, and, cheers to beer in general. Brandy, I
should ask you, do you know what our beer of the
month is now that we're in May?
Mister Stein, I feel like you chose the beer of the month,
sir. So, you are the one to talk about the beer of
the month. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. A minute. But you
thing about it, sir. You did the words. I just didn't know those. The
beer of the month looked good. Shout out to Katie, the the
general manager at Bluejacket, who I'm checking
out her wonderful, robin's egg blue nails on this great
photo you took of Midwest condensation. And Bluejacket is
the brewer for Midwest condensation, the Czech style pale
lager. It's only 3.8%, but it's full of
flavor. And you can get it at the woman owned Brew
Shop in Arlington. So check us out, dcbeer.com
or go to patreon.com/dcbeer.
Remember that members get 10% off so you get that
discount if you become a supporter. Jake, what are
you looking forward to as we look towards May? I
also wanna say, this weekend is also Mother's Day,
which sparks joy. For some of us, I can realize it's
also complicated for others. I just wanna shout
out to moms. We love you. Moms,
beer is for you as well. It's not just for, like, a bunch of
bearded bros. So thank you.
Don't do what Bullfinch Brewery did in Syracuse,
which is have a giant sign outside saying that their
brew brewpub was, quote, unquote, husband daycare
and boyfriend daycare. That's shitty.
Don't do it, Bullfinch. Do better.
Oof. Rough. Yeah. It was a big
yikes because I walked over there and wanted to, like, oh, like, let me grab
a pint. Saw that sign and went, nope. I'll be going someplace else.
That is how you lose my business real quick. I don't do that. It's
2025. Beer is for everybody.
Mom should drink too. Happy Mother's Day. Well said,
sir. Well said. Oh, beer is for everyone. You guys,
the the listeners can't see what we see,
and, there was a beer is for everyone sticker
just flung upon the screen, and I
applaud it so hard. Thank you.
Thank you to, everybody, and thank you to our guests tonight. Jake, do you
wanna take us out? Yeah. I think well said.
Beer events galore coming up. It's May. It's
meibock season. I know it's raining right now, but
there'll be flowers after the rain. A lovely rainbow.
Everybody go out there. Patronize your local brewery. Support
local. Hopefully, tariffs haven't hit yet, and so
things are still as they should be and not
20 to 50% more expensive. Be
nice to your fellow people, beer workers, beer
servers. Go out there. Drink on the patio.
Tip well, and we're at DCB across social media. Check out the
reels that Brandy's doing over on Instagram. It's good, good
stuff. Alright. Bye, everybody. Thanks. Cheers.