The Afterglow of Success: Award Winning Beer with BREWHA

Josh Evans of Afterglow Brewing has created an amazing, community focused brewery taproom in Norfolk, VA that is a big success.

In this interview with BREWHA Equipment owner Nathan Janz, Josh describes how he brews his award winning sour beer.

I'm super excited to be here with Josh at Afterglow Brewing in Norfolk, Virginia. How's it been going?

It's been going better than I ever could have imagined. We're selling a lot of beer, we're making good products, we've won some awards. We've been a big staple in the community, so I'd say it's going great.

Congratulations on winning that award with your Mother Fluffer beer. I understand there was a lot of breweries involved, including Mitch Steele's brewery, so that's a huge accomplishment. Can you tell us a little bit about the process of making that beer?

So people always come in, they ask, 'what's your favorite beer?' And of course I joke and say all of 'em, you know, but Mother Fluffer is probably the coolest one right now. It's a fruited sour, so it's peach, pineapple, marshmallow. With a lot of our sours, we do either two-row or pilsen malt and then we do half white wheat, mash around the higher, like 140's, 60 minute boil. So it's a pretty easy beer to make. And then we decide at the end what we want to flavor it with. So with this one, like I said, we chose peach, pineapple and marshmallow. We're like, 'sounds weird', but it tastes good. It's almost like a morning mimosa some people say.

Steps to brew the award winning Mother Fluffer

Our temperature that we mash in at is 149. We order everything pre-milled. We use Country Malt Group. You can pick what your crush is and we order Medium 2.0 and it's a great crush. All of our efficiencies are spot on with that. And then we end up at the end using the paddle just

to make sure there's no dough balls or anything in there that we don't want in there. You know, we don't want a stuck mash 'cause that just ruins your day. But for the most part we've been very lucky with the BREWHA system.

When we're spargingand lifting up, having the holes not only in the bottom but on the side creates more space for the water to get out. For a boil we do like 60 minutes and we actually brew with the top off, which is I think one advantage of the BREWHA system. When you don't have the top on it, you have a lot less chance of the buildup of DMS.

For fermentation we are aiming for 68 degrees. We find that's the sweet spot. Usually we're soured to where we want it at a 3.2 to 3.0 range, and about five to six days.

The yeast that we're using today, it's kind of like a smart yeast, it just knows where to stop, which is pretty cool. So we'll ferment for about five to six days, check our gravity, check our pH, make sure it's where we want it. Then we'll cold crash. We try to get to anywhere between 34 and 36. We try to get it as cold as we can. We'll usually do that for about two days and we dump, you know, all the stuff we don't want, two days in a row and then we'll carbonate.

Battle of the Beers

With Mother Fluffer, it was a award-winning beer for us, so we won the Battle of the Beers, which is a huge competition here in, uh, the Hampton Roads area. And so for me, I wanna win the People's Choice Award because that's the people that are coming in my door. And it's cool I guess to have the brewers like your beer, but for the most part they're not coming here. You know, it's the people.

So how does it make you feel brewing beer like this and having such a warm response from your community? So yeah, there's more to beer than beer. I think it's like being involved with your community, uh, helping people out where we can. And at the end of the day, I'm kind of, uh, living my dream, which I never thought I would own a brewery. Uh, but we're making good beer and it's really fun.

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