Flux Capacitor: Regulating Craft Beer’s Space Time Continuum

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Beer Draft System

Gabe Gordon and his Beachwood partners continually buck industry trends, including how they serve beer.

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JLL So you have two of these systems yourself now, and you’ve installed one at Torst.

GG: That was the point of it originally. What else I found, I was able to fix beers if they were under-carbonated or over-carbonated, badly. Like I know something happened in transit. Especially coming from Belgium. You just never know what you’re going to get. It’s a crap shoot every time. Those ones, I was able to fix. That beer is highly over-carbonated or highly under-carbonated. It’s flat. Instead of sending it back to the distributor, who has to send it back to the importer, who has to send it back to the brewery, and everybody wastes time, energy, money, gas, the whole thing, I can fix it. I just put on 100% CO2, twist the CO2 pressure up. I wouldn’t pour it. And for a day, every time I would walk into the walk-in, I would shake it and shake it. I pull it through, taste it, “Not yet.” Three or four more hours. Perfect. I flip the sign. What did I do? I wasted four pints of beer? I fixed the beer.

And then the last aspect of it that is just kind of a rad bonus, I can do all beers on just nitrogen if I want. Just go click, click, click, click. And I have 22 taps of straight nitrogenated beer.

JL: So you can control the CO2, Nitro, pressure?

GG: Yeah. Any percentages I choose for my manifolds, and then obviously a single regulator for each keg. And I brought it up front, which solved another problem. Most people’s long draw systems take awhile to get to. You have to walk out your bar, through a kitchen, out a door, through a walk-in, upstairs, downstairs. Whatever it is, it’s long draw. There are long draw systems that are 400 feet away from where your kegs are located. That’s really far. That’s a lot of minutes running back and forth. If you have a keg that needs a little bit of tweaking, just kind of dialing in the pressure, I just open the faucet, stand there [click, click, click], close it, count to 10. Perfect. Done. I didn’t even need to walk back.

JL: How do you decide who to build one for?

GG: So far, only my friends ask. I built this thing like six years ago and nobody thought anything of it. It’s not like I hid it. It’s not like I had this secret room. We explained it to all of our customers. Everybody knew about it. I think it just had to get to the level where people were thinking of ways to one-up each other. It’s a good way to do it. It pours beer really well. When we opened Long Beach, I’d been doing testing at Seal Beach to be able to pour beers at two different temperatures, but I really wanted to make it extreme, so we built a second room, and we pour beer at 40, or we pour beer at 55, and I get no breakout with my warm beer, which means I figured out a way to pour beer at cellar temperature. Just like brewers, when they put on bottles, drink between 50 and 55, if you buy a bottle, you have to drink at that temperature, but me as a bar owner, whose job it is to represent these breweries, it’s cool if I pour beer for you at 36 degrees? I don’t understand how that takes my job seriously. It’s silly, so I built the warm room and did a bunch of testing. Actually, we tested it up to 60 degrees, with no breakout. After that, I figured there would never be a time where you’d want anything above 60 degrees. It tastes bad.

Honestly, the beer in the warm room physically pours better than my cold room because we put more technology in the warm room side to make sure we’d be able to do it. The cold room, it’s a little bit more standard underneath part, where all of that happens. If I open another beer bar, I’ll use the same technology and restriction on my warm room, and I’ll do it on my cold room as well, just to make sure it’s a no waste kind of thing. It solved a problem…Even before I had my own brewery, I really wanted to represent these people’s product to the best of my ability. I don’t think any restaurateur doesn’t try to do that. I just think that nobody looked at draft beer for 50 years. Everybody’s just been cool, and I understand why. 90% of the market share, if the normal, average system works perfect, why would you?

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Joshua Lurie

Joshua Lurie founded FoodGPS in 2005. Read about him here.

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