Founder/Co-Owner Carmine Parisi, Head Brewer Thomas Muhs, Assistant Brewer John Garner and Local Patron/"Midnight Trucker" Inspiration Glenn Haynes talk to Travel Track about process, chemistry and history in regards to their brewery in Ball Ground, Georgia: RockSolid Brewing Co. Their brewery was only one in the state of Georgia to bring home a gold medal for their "Midnight Trucker" dark lager.
Category
🏖
TravelTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 (upbeat music)
00:06 (upbeat music)
00:08 (upbeat music)
00:11 (upbeat music)
00:22 (upbeat music)
00:31 (upbeat music)
00:33 (upbeat music)
00:38 (upbeat music)
00:44 - When I was in Italy, I was a chef.
00:52 So I always liked flavors, I always liked new recipe,
00:55 I always liked to combine food with vegetable flavors.
00:59 So, and beer is the same.
01:00 Beer is like more, same thing like a food.
01:04 You just wanna, you do the base beer
01:07 and you add a little flavors
01:09 and then you taste that you can switch the flavor around.
01:12 You can add and remove it, like, you know,
01:16 and make it disappear.
01:17 So you wanna, for instance,
01:19 if you want a good flare in the front
01:22 and then fade in the back after you drink it.
01:25 So we tried to work on that,
01:26 how to prepare the recipe for that,
01:29 how to work on engineering something
01:31 that you get a good flavors
01:34 and then it disappeared just slowly in the back.
01:37 (upbeat music)
01:39 - I really like just easy drinking.
01:51 I tend to gravitate towards lagers,
01:53 things that are kind of like low ABV.
01:56 But at the same time,
01:57 I don't think that necessarily like, you know,
02:00 a style or a type of beer that's like simple on the surface
02:03 needs to be simple in terms of its, you know,
02:06 in terms of its aroma, its flavor, its mouthfeel,
02:08 like all the different like sensory experiences
02:10 that you have with a beer.
02:12 And so really whatever it is I'm making,
02:14 whether it's our Kolsch,
02:15 whether it's Merdina's Malt or Scotch Ale,
02:18 Midnight Trucker, any of those things,
02:21 the goal is always to have it be a multi-sensory experience.
02:25 (upbeat music)
02:28 - Like I want you to be able to put your nose to the glass.
02:44 You're detecting X, Y, and Z.
02:47 And then I want you to take a taste of it
02:49 and be like, oh, now I'm getting, you know, X, Y, and Z.
02:53 And you're getting like a totally,
02:55 sometimes a totally different experience.
02:57 And you know, especially something like
02:58 one of our Hazy IPAs, it might smell one way,
03:01 but then you taste it and you're like,
03:02 oh, I'm getting something like completely different.
03:04 I think that's what makes it fun.
03:06 I mean, that's what makes making beer fun.
03:09 And that's what makes drinking beer fun.
03:11 (upbeat music)
03:23 - When I first started back there brewing,
03:25 my very first day, I started cleaning kegs.
03:28 Second day I came in, we're brewing.
03:30 And I'm like, oh, this is awesome.
03:31 But it equates a lot to baking, if I'm gonna be honest,
03:35 because you gotta add things at certain times,
03:37 like, you know, like sifting your flour,
03:38 if you don't label the grain right,
03:40 you get, you pull out different flavors
03:42 than you're expecting.
03:43 So I can't bake at all, but I can do this.
03:47 Somehow this makes sense to me.
03:49 (upbeat music)
03:51 (upbeat music)
03:54 - Can you talk about the logic in it?
03:58 Because it has to do with flavor.
04:00 So there has to be a bit of instinct to it.
04:02 - Kind of, I mean, you can't really,
04:04 like through the initial brewing process,
04:07 you can't really taste the flavors outright.
04:08 It just tastes like sugar water.
04:11 Unless you're making like a darker beer,
04:13 then obviously you're gonna taste the roast straight out.
04:16 Like it is roasty as heck,
04:18 coming straight out of the kettle
04:20 or going from the mash tun to the kettle.
04:23 So it's a lot of guessing at first.
04:26 I mean, you have the brewing guidelines to follow,
04:29 your rough estimate, they tell you what it should be
04:32 and you just toy with it.
04:33 It's a lot of R and D coming out of the gate.
04:35 (upbeat music)
04:38 - I never thought I'd see it,
04:49 but you know, it was just fine.
04:51 I've enjoyed it.
04:53 I don't see a lot of real old timers like me here,
04:56 but they, you know, that's all right too.
04:59 I've met a lot of new people here.
05:01 And this is my socializing place.
05:05 They just make you feel at home when you come in.
05:07 And when they first opened,
05:09 I thought I was one of their very first customers.
05:13 I thought they opened at three o'clock
05:15 and I pulled on the door and it wouldn't come open.
05:18 So then one of the owners seen me back there wanting in
05:23 and they just come and let me in and just started talking.
05:27 And I got to know them, their wives, their kids,
05:31 and just made myself right at home.
05:34 (upbeat music)
05:47 - Do you have a specific chair?
05:48 - The first one I come to if it's open, other than that.
05:53 Yeah, but if, you know, if it's not open,
05:56 I'm fine with sitting back there on the couch.
05:58 It doesn't bother me.
05:59 (upbeat music)
06:01 - So business, it's a honey blonde hair.
06:12 So we use different types of grain
06:15 and it's more like, it tastes like really honey.
06:19 It doesn't have an honey there,
06:21 but it tastes like honey because we really put a lot of
06:24 grain, the ingredient there to match the honey.
06:29 So that's huge different there.
06:33 - So Bee's Knees really from its inception
06:43 hasn't really changed a whole lot.
06:45 The reason it hasn't changed is simply because
06:48 it's a really good seller of ours.
06:51 And it's something that people kind of
06:54 naturally gravitate towards.
06:56 You know, we get a lot of people that come in that,
06:58 you know, they've been macro drinkers their whole life.
07:00 You know, they're like, oh, I drink Coors Light.
07:03 I drink, you know, I drink Miller, I drink Budweiser.
07:06 And so people will taste that.
07:09 And it kind of reminds them of something that's a bit more
07:12 of like a macro in style, but like,
07:15 but a little bit more interesting than that.
07:16 You know, it's a little bit more interesting.
07:18 It's certainly more malt focused than it is hop focused.
07:22 And that's something that I've noticed that, you know,
07:25 people that come in and drink here tend to kind of
07:27 gravitate more towards.
07:29 So there hasn't been a ton of evolution in that style.
07:33 And then with Midnight Trucker,
07:35 that's actually the first time we've ever made that beer
07:38 when we submitted it to GABF.
07:41 So that's actually the first iteration of that recipe.
07:45 (upbeat music)
07:48 - But it won.
07:57 It won gold.
07:58 - Yes, it won gold.
07:59 - Only gold in Georgia.
08:02 And I keep thinking, but that's not an easy feat.
08:06 - This beer was supposed to come a little bit earlier,
08:09 but we weren't sure what we want to do and how we want to do
08:14 Okay.
08:15 And then when we decided to have it to work on a dark lager,
08:20 okay, especially this kind of lager, like very flavorful,
08:25 very good full malt, but very smooth at the end.
08:29 And so we decided to go with this kind of recipe
08:33 after a lot of tweaks.
08:35 And then we were looking for a name.
08:39 Like we were to brainstorm around.
08:42 So we asked Glen.
08:43 It's like, since he likes, Glen likes like dark beers,
08:47 you know, easy beer, dark.
08:48 It's like.
08:49 - How'd you make me Glen?
08:51 - We need an--
08:52 - Dude, was Glen just a regular from the GABF?
08:54 - Glen is a regular.
08:55 It's always here at least twice a week, three times a week.
09:00 He's a great member of the team.
09:03 It's more like, I see this, I see clients as a team,
09:08 like one big team come together, enjoying good beer,
09:13 good environment, walk away, like just European style.
09:18 That's it.
09:19 - It's community.
09:20 - Community, community is everything.
09:21 (upbeat music)
09:24 - Whoa, that's awesome.
09:38 - I don't have nothing to do with their making.
09:40 - But you know what's good.
09:42 - I know what I like.
09:44 - And were you a fan of Darkwaters or?
09:48 - Never drank hardly any of them.
09:49 This is a whole new experience to me.
09:51 Somebody asked what I did for a living and I drove a truck.
09:55 And first thing they asked was what was my handle
10:00 and it was midnight.
10:01 So they said, that sounds pretty good.
10:04 And so they made it midnight trucker.
10:08 I was surrounding states.
10:10 I delivered groceries mostly.
10:12 - And midnight?
10:14 - Yeah, night, day and everything else.
10:17 (upbeat music)
10:20,
10:25 (upbeat music)
10:27 (upbeat music)
10:30 (upbeat music)
10:32 (upbeat music)
10:35 (upbeat music)
10:38 (upbeat music)
10:40 (upbeat music)
10:43 (upbeat music)
10:45 (upbeat music)
10:48 (upbeat music)
10:50 (upbeat music)
10:53 (upbeat music)
10:56 (upbeat music)