Maddie Lewis 0:07
Hello and welcome back to Spreading Hoppiness, the Charles Faram podcast today, me and Paddy are joined with Craig Thomas from Abstrax and Julie Shrago from Beachwood Brewing, all the way from the States. So, could you guys just introduce yourself a bit more formally, your roles and what you do, to start off with?

Julian Shrago 0:27
Sure. Julian Shrago, I am the Brew Master and co-owner, co-founder of Beachwood brewing in Southern California, kind of the greater Los Angeles area. And I am the Director of Brewing Operations. I supervise a very passionate team, but that’s the bulk of what I do.

Craig Thomas 0:46
My name is Craig Thomas. I am the National Sales Manager for Abstrax Hops, and I get to go around to breweries and conferences, talk up our products and work with breweries to figure out how best to apply them and hopefully make an impact in positive way.

Maddie Lewis 1:07
How are you guys enjoying the UK so far? Have you spent much time in the UK?

Julian Shrago 1:13
It’s been a couple years for me, but I love the UK and coming back as kind of like a more seasoned beer drinker. Every time I get here, I get to seek out all the beers and the exemplary examples of each style that we just really don’t get in the United States. So, it’s fun, but it’s also educational.

Maddie Lewis 1:33
Yeah cool. And Craig, you trained at Heriot Watt, in Edinburgh, so that must have been quite a big move for you. Can you talk about that transition a little bit, please?

Craig Thomas 1:46
Yeah, it was a big move. I moved over here when I was 18. I went to uni at Edinburgh University when and I did a degree in history, actually. About midway through that degree, I started to discover beer and Scotch whiskey and really got involved and passionate and learnt all about it. Once I graduated, or even before I graduated, I realised that that’s where I wanted my career to go. Not a lot of Scotch distilleries wanted to hire an American with no production experience, right? So, I had to take a step back and kind of understand how I could approach that. I begged my way into working at a small brewery called Barney’s Beer and that was the start of my brewing career. As a transition from coming from America to the UK it was tough, but I ended up living here for eight years. I love it here, and for a lot of the reasons that Julian said as well. I moved back to the US about seven years ago now, and this is the first time I’ve been back since 2019, I guess. Yeah, it’s been a while.

Patrick Whittle 2:56
So Craig, obviously you work for Abstrax, which is essentially a big new innovative brewing products company. Could you tell us a little bit more about for people that don’t know about the company, a little bit of background about the company and what it provides for brewers?

Craig Thomas 3:11
Sure, so Abstrax came onto the scene amongst the legalisation of cannabis in California and decided to take a little bit of different approach to that whole industry. Our founders and owners, they were curious. It wasn’t THC, so much they were concerned about it was all the other things going on in the cannabis plant. The problem was that there wasn’t a lot of resources out there. There weren’t ways to extract it, there weren’t any consistent studies that have really been done on that kind of thing. So, they had to start at the ground zero and invent or buy or hire people who could actually drive and answer a lot of those questions they were asking about. With that mentality, we became the authority in cannabis aromatics and that starts to snowball. We looked at other applications, you start to say, hey, what other solutions are out there? What else smells really good? What can we do with these things? And to that end, we’ve now become supplier for a number of different industries. You know, we’re talking about the brewing industry, and with that focus, we’re talking about water soluble flavours that go into beer, and the one stop shop for creative expression, for efficiencies, for new economies of scale, finding different ways of making beer that resonate with people, and frankly, just makes sense.

Patrick Whittle 4:46
And are these products more suited to bigger, smaller breweries? Does it not matter?

Craig Thomas 4:52
So that’s the beauty of it. And one of the things that drew me to Abstrax is we’re a fairly small company, but the impacts that our products provide are very large scale. And so regardless of whether we’re talking tiny little brew pubs, one-barrel systems, or whether we’re talking million barrels there’s a way to fit into all of it. In terms of not just our products, but our company ethos, the science that we’re diving into and providing for the industry, that analytical techniques, we pioneered and are continuing to share. We’re really trying to be there for everyone.

Patrick Whittle 5:35
And how did you go from being a Brewer to Abstrax? Obviously, you mentioned you’ve moved between here and the US, right?

Craig Thomas 5:43
My journey through my career has been pretty circuitous, but it’s all kind of revolved around the theme of flavour. Like, what got me into Scotch whiskey was my first tour of Highland Park distillery up in Orkney. I went into the distillation room and was just hit by this wall, and I was like, oh, I need to learn about this. What are all these? It’s just this alcohol, vanilla, butterscotch, spirit notes that I was eye opening for me. Everything was learning about flavour. How do you make it? How do you create it? How do you control it? What’s considered an off flavour, and why? And so, whether I was brewing, whether I was working in sensory consultancy, whether I was managing my sensory panel, it was all trying to understand aromatics and then Abstrax comes along it was the alchemy. It was the elixir; they had bottled everything that I’ve been trying to understand for 12 years. I was like, I want to be a part of that.

Maddie Lewis 6:51
And Julian, have you always been a brewer?

Julian Shrago 6:56
No, I’ve been a brewer for 15 years. Beechwood is my one and only brewing job. Before that, I was an aerospace engineer for over a decade. And yeah, I really enjoyed that. I started as a home brewer in college in the mid-90s, and it was a hobby that I had on and off for a number of years. That developed into a passion when I moved to Southern California roughly 22 years ago, and eventually, just through circumstance and trying to get to know people in the industry that led to a second career in opening Beechwood as a brewery.

Maddie Lewis 7:35
Cool. And can you tell us about your journey with Abstrax? How did you come across Abstrax? What was your first thoughts in the brew, before the brew even?

Julian Shrago 7:46
Well a as a scientist, I still consider myself a scientist. I always look forward to these new inventions and new methods and how can you take something that’s a centuries old tradition and have science transform it and make it better. I was curious from the very beginning, and I had sampled some of Abstrax products, but it was when I had a beer from Russian River Brewing in Northern California about halfway through last year that was made with the Quantum Brite product – that was also extracted from Russian rivers, select Nectaron® hops from New Zealand. When I saw the potential of that Quantum Brite product, when it was made from somebody’s select hop varietals, I thought, okay, this is it.  I immediately called Abstrax, and I said, let’s get this queued up with our select varietals right now.

Late last year, we started making some permanent changes in both of our flagship beers, and that also led to us using Abstrax, Quantum, BrewGas, and Skyfarm products in other beers that we were doing. It really helped to dial in new flavour profiles or achieve traditional flavour profiles with less hop matter in the beer. It’s been something that’s worked out great. It is absolutely better brewing through science.

Patrick Whittle 9:15
Did you ever have any apprehensions?

Julian Shrago 9:18
No I didn’t, because my curiosities lead me in that direction anyway, but I do understand people’s apprehension. I think anytime you take something like brewing, which is seen as a very traditional, old-fashioned process and you introduce something that is very scientifically driven, there are people who might be like, well, hold on a second. This isn’t how people make beer. However, it is absolutely a way to make things more consistent, perhaps make things better. It’s also a way to create new flavour and aroma profiles, and variety of beer that it has never been imagined before. I see it only opening new doors.

Maddie Lewis 10:13
Okay, and you guys have obviously both spent a little bit of time in the UK. How do you think the UK market compares to that of the states, when looking at brewing and Abstrax potentially as well, the

Julian Shrago 10:29
The UK is steeped in many, many centuries of tradition, and brewing is certainly one of those things that is also steeped in tradition. I think American consumers are used to new products and ever evolving products. The UK maybe has a slightly different consumer base, but even with traditional beers, I don’t see any reason why these products can’t be used to create traditional beers.

The benchmark for us with our flagship beers was – are the consumers going to notice the difference? Are they going to say, hey, wait a second – did you guys change something about this? Yeah, something’s different.

Nobody said anything. We did this months ago,

Patrick Whittle 10:29
And I’m taking you haven’t told anyone?

Speaker 1 10:32
No, not because I’m trying to withhold or not be transparent, it’s because these products are extracted from our selected hops. It’s just a much more efficient way to get to the target that we’re looking for. And so, I think if you take a traditional English beer and you’re able to use some of Abstrax products and create the same beer, and maybe even make it more consistent, I think there’s going to be embrace, not reluctance.

I think if some breweries try this, and try Abstrax products and maybe not mention it, not to not to conceal anything, but I think back about this thing in the United States – some of those blind soda challenges that people did, yeah, and like, try this product. Try this product. I can’t believe that’s what I’m drinking. I think maybe a lot of these breweries here in England could fold these products in seamlessly, and the consumer would not know. And I think that’s, the true test of how successful you are.

Patrick Whittle 12:23
I’m quite intrigued about the thing you said, the way you got your varieties made up by Abstrax. I don’t know if this might be a question for you Craig, so in terms of, if a brewery had a certain year of a certain hop and they wanted to basically, essentially preserve that so essentially, can you guys capture the flavour of that year of, say, Nectaron®, and then that brewery could have that every single year, and you could just keep repeating it and so on.

Craig Thomas 12:47
Yeah, so there are two answers to that question. The first one is, if we’re talking about taking selected hops and processing them into Quantum Brite it multiplies the aromatic impact of a pound or a kilogram of T 90s, to the point that you’re really extending your total inventory as far as it goes. As far as the numbers look all of a sudden, what might have gotten you through a year of brewing now can get you through up to four or five years, if you really wanted to map it out. So that’s the first answer to that question.

The second answer is, we do have a line as well, which is called our Omni flavours, where we have replicated in much the same way we did with our Brew Gas. We’ve replicated certain lots of hops and brought them to market. Those are forever flavours. As you said, it’s not varietal or it’s not year dependent anymore. You can lock it in forever more.

Patrick Whittle 13:44
Is the picking your select variety and you guys making up – is that only exclusive to brewers that want huge quantities of this thing? Or is there a spectrum?

Craig Thomas 13:55
No, again, going back to your point about catering to the big guys and the little guys. We process hops in a pretty small facility, as far as it goes. We can manage batches as low as 132 pounds, which by most industry standards, as I understand is not actually a huge amount hops. No, most everybody will use 132 pounds in there, and at least at some point in the years.

Maddie Lewis 14:22
So to both of you guys, what advice would you give to any brewers looking to try Abstrax for the first time?

Julian Shrago 14:31
Don’t be afraid, that’s really the main advice. Don’t be afraid and be the first. Be the first to embrace the new technology and get a leg up on it. I know that there are some brewers that I talked to in the United States, that are like, well, I don’t know, or I’m trying to work through some older inventory. I’m like – other breweries are going to start lapping you.

Craig Thomas 15:03
Yeah, don’t be afraid. I mean, I think as brewers, we need to embrace these things that come across. There are some guardrails you can put around your process, where the hope is that it’s very easy to trial our products and use them, and it’s just a matter of doing your homework, sitting down, putting in some time to figure out what makes you happy as a brewer and as a beverage producer. And don’t worry about what anybody else is saying as much about you know, this, that or the other thing that might sway you.

Patrick Whittle 15:46
And just to clarify, these aren’t direct replacements for all hops you would replace a percentage in your dry hop, for example.

Julian Shrago 15:54
I think most of these new products, if not all of them, are best as a supplement. I noticed that when Cryo was introduced, or Lupo Max, Incognito, some of these other products I’ve found to be great supplements or a great way to augment but I still haven’t found anything that has allowed full replacement of T 90 in a dry hopped beer.

Patrick Whittle 16:33
And would you say there’s any particular trends, is there any certain really popular flavours in the Abstrax range? What would you say out of the three core ranges that one stands out as most popular from a sales point of view,

Craig Thomas 16:46
Citra® is king, I would say in the Skyfarm lineup, pineapple or mango, and then King Louis and Pineapple Express in the Brew Gas. Especially with the Brew Gas, like I feel like those two strains just sink in so well with the hop flavours and aromatics. People can see the parallels very easily when they smell those. They can just jump ahead and see how that can work in a beer, especially in IPAs, and so I think that those are the ones that people trend towards.

Maddie Lewis 17:26
I was gonna say, do you have a personal favourite?

Julian Shrago 17:31
Pineapple Express, we’ve we started incorporating that into a newer flagship, just as a very subtle background note. We’ve also used it in a handful of specialty IPAs, just to very much be a kind of front and centre note. That makes those beers very, very aromatic.

Patrick Whittle 17:54
Would you say, because of the Abstrax range you’ve experimented more, has it allowed you just you could, like you said, you can have those subtle, real subtle notes?

Julian Shrago 18:02
Yes, and I will also say that it’s allowed some flavours to exist in beer and other beverages that we make that were difficult. For one, if you talk to a flavour chemist, one of the most difficult flavours and aromas to synthesise or concentrate is watermelon, especially if you try and do it from the actual fruit, good luck. It just ends up tasting like cooked garbage. There are some good quality watermelon extracts out there. They get expensive real quickly. There are some very average quality watermelon extracts out there. But Abstrax seems to have nailed it in terms of potency, aroma impact, flavour impact and price point. The value is amazing. So, in that flavour specifically, they’ve unlocked the code,

Patrick Whittle 18:57
Great. And if you’ve got lots of new flavours coming

Craig Thomas 19:01
Always, yeah, yeah. Before I flew over here, I was sent, I think, about 10/15, new that I’ve got to go through and give my input on. We have an exceptional flavour team that’s always coming up with something new, and now it’s just our challenge to get them out to people as quickly as we can.

Maddie Lewis 19:24
Do you do sensory trials amongst the public for those sorts of flavour, or do you have a professional panel that do all the sensory trials

Craig Thomas 19:36
So, we don’t go to the public at large. As we unveil a new product in the lineup, it’s a lot of internal development, which includes sensory testing amongst trained panellists – our flavour team, who’s creating the flavours. Weirdly enough, when it comes to developing new fruit flavours, a lot of that is just market driven.

There are flavours that exist that people expect, and so it’s not so much, oh, what do we choose? It’s like, okay, what flavours do we need to get out there for people, and how do we make the best version of that? Following on from that, we might do some trials on our own, internally, in terms of brewing and dosing them. Then we may even send some out to some of our close friends and partners to experiment with before they get totally commercialised. But it’s a long process, and we’re trying to streamline it as best we can to just to maximise it and get people what they want as quickly as possible.

Patrick Whittle 20:43
So you mentioned the watermelon thing, and other companies have tried to recreate it and it’s either been expensive, or they’ve missed the mark on sort of aroma and flavour. How is the abstract technology nailed it as such, in terms of, from a price point of view, and still preserving that when you smell it – Oh, that’s watermelon?

Craig Thomas 21:05
You know, that might be a question for our lead flavour chemist. She just seems to have magic fingers, magic palette. She just knows what is required, and honestly, it’s kind of rare for something to be sent back and redeveloped. Part of it is just the company ethos. And I was talking about it in the presentation, how we’re coming from it from a totally different angle. Whether we’re talking about coming from the cannabis industry, all of a sudden you have a totally different perspective, whether that’s on hops or whether that’s on flavours that are out there. I think that that is one of our strengths as a company, we don’t have a lot of preconceptions as to how to make flavours or how to extract hops. It’s more hey, we’re going to approach it this way, and I think it’ll work. And if it doesn’t, then we’ll try a different way.

And so, in terms of building a flavour, we have a very unique take on it, which doesn’t really exist in the industry, if only because it’s coming from cannabis and it’s coming from the leading authority on cannabis aromatics that most of our flavour team has experience in which no one else can really say.

Maddie Lewis 22:26
So my final question to both of you again is, what is next for you both in at Beachwood and Abstrax? What’s next for you guys?

Julian Shrago 22:38
Continuing to increase efficiencies through the use of Abstrax products and other newer, innovative products to see if we can not only make our beers better, but at the very least, the bare minimum, just as good, and reduce certain costs, increase yields. We have to do that -margins are getting squeezed from every angle, and I don’t see brewing business being sustainable without innovative products like this.

Patrick Whittle 23:12
What sort of percentage yields do you find in sort of real time?

Julian Shrago 23:15
We don’t have a centrifuge or a filter. We clarify everything through Finings, but through the Abstrax product alone it depends on the beer. However, we’re seeing a 2 to 3% increase in yield, that was great. There are newer cold side, anti-foaming agents that have also increased our yields that are separate from what Abstrax makes. However, with hazy IPA specifically, we’re seeing really big increase in yield there, like upwards of 10 to 12%

And that outweighs the cost of the Abstrax in terms of what you would spend on hops and what you’ve saved on in yield and things like that.

Well, using the Abstrax products is cheaper anyway, even if I didn’t see an increase in yield, the equivalent dosing rate. So, when it comes to Abstrax – half an ounce of quantum bright is equal to roughly one pound of hops. So, I guess what that means is, if you’re going to translate it, it’s roughly 200 and I’m doing the math in my head, 250 millilitres, is equivalent to a about eight to nine. Yeah, eight to nine kilograms of hops.

Patrick Whittle 24:28
And it’s not nearly the same price as nine kilograms of hops.

Julian Shrago 24:32
Once I pay for my hops and I pay for Abstrax to convert them, it’s still like a 50% reduction in cost, per kilogram.

Maddie Lewis 24:41
Wow, that’s very impressive. Game changer, yeah,

Craig Thomas 24:44
And that’s, you know, to answer your question about, you know, what’s next for me? That’s the reason I joined Abstrax, I smelled the stuff, I thought that it would help a lot of breweries. And I wanted to be a part of that. And at the moment, we’ve gotten around to quite a few, but I don’t know how we have almost 10,000 breweries in the US. There are many more around the world, and I think all of them have the same problems at some level, and I like being part of the solution. How can we help you fix and obviously the efficiencies game is a big part of it. I’ve always been a number cruncher myself, and that’s just, you know, a side benefit to it.

Patrick Whittle 25:28
And the fact you’re able to make those savings and increase your efficiency without affecting the product or potentially improving the product by adding new or new products, creating new products, in general, that’s sort of a win win, isn’t it?

Craig Thomas 25:40
Yeah, we do a lot of Win Win, wins

Patrick Whittle 25:44
All positive. Well, I think, that’s my last question.

Maddie Lewis 25:49
So yeah, if there’s anything you guys wanted to add, but yeah, no. Thank you for coming today and speaking to us. It’s been great.

Julian Shrago 25:55
Thank you for hosting pleasure. This has been my pleasure. Great.