11/25/2024
At Bierstadt Lagerhaus in Denver, Ashleigh Carter understands a brewer’s drive to experiment but she advocates taking a different approach. “Look, I’m a brewer, so I get it right,” she laughs. “Like everybody else, I had a little notebook with a bunch of stuff in it on how I was going to mix these ingredients together.” Over time, however, her perspective changed. “Just taking some stuff out of the hat is not innovation, it’s tired,” she says. “I think that’s a very narrow idea of innovation, just changing your ingredients. The idea that some new ingredient is gonna change the whole game, it’s not the world we exist in. Almost everything has been done. I do truly believe in some way, if you’re thinking about it, somebody’s done it already.”
For Carter, her approach to innovation starts with the ingredients and continues throughout the process. “I think we’re constantly being tested by our ingredients anyways, so I think how you use them all kind of changes,” she says. “How do I fix my processes to make those ingredients make the beer taste the same,” she ponders. “We’re constantly trying to get efficient, but not lose quality to efficiency.”
Read the full story by Andy Crouch on ProBrewer.
At Other Half Brewing in Brooklyn, New York, Brewmaster Sam Richardson and his team are constantly thinking about innovation and applying it in a thoughtful way. (more...)