Sponsored Workshop: Beer Flavor Goes Electric: A New Era of Flavor Innovation

Tom Nielsen [00:07] My name is Tom Nielsen. I'm the director of Brewing and beverage innovation at Abstrax, Hops and Flavors. Um, I've been in the craft brewing industry for 20 years, mostly with, uh, with Sierra Nevada Brewing Company heading up their R&D and raw materials groups, um, and, uh, recently switched over to Abstrax, uh, where, uh, you know, we're bringing a lot of excitement to the industry. Real quick slide on the importance and impact that the brewing industry has had on science. The brewing industry invented the pH scale. Very few people know that The brewing industry invented the aluminum can. Very people know that. So there's this amazing history of really technical scientific innovation out of the industry, and Abstracts really is inspired by that and is aimed at adding to that. But there's something to be said about what beer is and has been for, for many, many years. Uh, traditional beer flavor will never be passe. I don't, I wanna start by saying that and setting that up, that we have the highest level of respect for brewing, for brewers, uh, the craft, uh, what people devote their lives to, and really what's happening in this space up till today. But we also believe that there's a lot more opportunity. And there's a lot more that can be done in the industry, especially at this time where there's kind of an inflection point in what's happening, you know, really a call for innovation and a stepping up of everything that we do in beer. Those beers look delicious, by the way. I mean, I will never pass up a Sierra Nevada pale ale or a Guinness Stout or a Modelo especial. These are great products, but like I said, There's room to expand. I mean, it's 2024, 2025. Beer is going to go somewhere and we can be at the leading edge of where beer takes us. I've been really inspired by Bob Dylan. I just found out two days ago that there's actually a movie coming out about his earlier. Uh, performing life on Christmas. So I'm on the same wavelength as the Hollywood exec executives apparently, but in 1965, Dylan made a huge quantum leap into the electric world from the acoustic world as the quintessential acoustic folk artist of his time. He picked up the electric guitar and changed, transformed his music and really transformed the popular music of the time as well. And he knew that with these new tools that were available to him, he was going to be able to, to take things further, farther, have more fun and really expand what's possible. And that's kind of the inspiration uh that's, that's, that's guiding abstracts a little bit in the beer space. So Dylan, you know, led music into a new era. We really want to help brewers launch beer. And beer flavor into a new era and specifically with hops, I think the last 10-15 years has been an amazing explosion of flavors coming from hops, and a lot of people have benefited from that and explored that. I think we need to take that to the next level. So to start off, we have two samples available to you. The first one is one of my very favorite beers on the planet. I'm lucky to have it in my fridge at all times, uh, from here in California, Santa Rosa, uh, STS pills, Quantum Brite, uh, Aramis version. So, this is really one of the best Pilsners that I've ever tasted, West Coast pills, dry hopped, uh, using a newer noble variety. Called Aramis from the Alsace region in France. So the Russian River team actually had had their Aramis lot custom told with us into into Quantum Bright, have made this amazing batch of STS Pilsner, and it really Quantum Bright does so many amazing things for beer, and I'll talk about this throughout my presentation. But um, in this case, it really softened some of the, the, the, the overly floral notes that Aramis provides and creates a more kind of genuine noble character. The second sample was supposed to be Highland Park Brewing's Weird Day Hot Water. However, we had some logistic issues in getting it here yesterday. Apparently they only put it in full, full barrel kegs and it was just going to be too much of a a pain to get it here. So instead, we've got uh some hot waters that we actually made at Abstracts using citra quantum bright and mosaic quantum bright. So, if anybody wants to try our hop waters, made with quantum bright, they're kind of going around right now. Um, But the Highland Park Weird Day is really an amazing product. This is one of the most simple products to make, and abstracts is probably the simplest way to make it, and it's still extremely delicious, and that's part of the You know, one of the benefits of some of our products is that we're bringing a true to type flavor in a hot water you can't hide. Uh, you can't hide a flaw in a, in a hop flavor, um, and, and really. The Abstracts Quantum Bright product is, is delivering at such a high quality on hop flavor that it's being widely adopted in hop waters across the country. I often hear as I'm, I'm talking to brewers and, and beverage makers, uh, I hear like comments like, oh, is there abstracts in this? or did you try the new abstracts? And abstracts is, is, I mean, it's very flattering that abstracts is being used as almost synonymously with synonymously with, with brewing innovation at this point, but abstracts is a lot more. than this cool brand, right? Um It really is a beer flavor innovation innovation engine at this point. And we have 4 main product lineups. Um, so first off we have Omnihop terpine profiles on the top left. Going down, we have the brugas cannabis terpine profiles. A first of its kind. On the top right we have Sky Farm All Natural flavors. And on the bottom right we have the Quantum series again, another game changing first of its kind offering. Again, we have Omni, Bruga, Skyfarm, and Quantum. So let's start with Omni. Omni was launched in 2023. This was an idea that abstracts had dating back 5 years to use the state of the art in analysis of flavor and take these really, really deep snapshots of what are the flagrants in the in the highest quality cannabis extracts, in the highest quality hop extracts, map that all out. And then recreate it using botanical terpenes that are available to everybody. And then we have some really amazing certified flavor chemists that are helping our scientists do this as well. So with Omni currently we have 12 different varieties Azaca, Cascade, Cashmere, Centennial, Citra, Chinook, El Dorado, Galaxy, Mosaic, Nelson Savin, Strata, and Willamette. Strata is my very favorite. We've recreated some of like the best lot of strata that you could ever find with the marriage of dankness and passion fruit that, that you can only find in, in really the best strata lots. With this, we're able to bring that character every day, week after week, year after year, the same. So we're locking in the best lots of each variety in this format for like a forever top note. This solves the problem that brewers have, all brewers have, of finding lots of hops that are identical year over year. Even within a harvest, there's a huge variation in aromas. From hops. So we've, we've solved for that. If you want to You know, take a quantum leap forward and adopt this kind of thing. You've locked in your Hoparoma intensity and quality in a beer forever, which is a new thing. I mean breweries, what I did for many, many years was work with lots of different hops and recreate as close as possible the flavor that I wanted or that the brewery mandated that needed in our products. One of the most challenging things to do as an IPA or a hoppy beer brewer is to lock in that hop flavor. This Solves for that in a in a really interesting way. So that's the Omni hop profile proposition. What's really cool about this too is that hops come and go. This has kind of become like a sacred ground of hops that have gone away too. So we're actually taking hops that are not going to be available on the market in a year or two and locking it in as an omni profile. So you could go back in time and you know, you could get like a 2016 Citra which maybe was the best year for Citra, and we could provide that sort of character to you forever. So next up is Bregas. BrewGas and Omni actually are the same technology, but Brugas is the cannabis side of it. So whereas we're, we're locking in these forever profiles for hops and Omni here for the first time ever we're offering the brewing industry. The aromatics of the most popular cannabis varieties in the world. Uh, so things like pineapple Express, OG Kush, uh, Sour Tangy, Super Sour Diesel, these flavors are now available for beers and beverages for the first time ever at an extremely high fidelity. We have figured out how to bring the complexity of, of the gassiness of authentic cannabis. And all the nuanced berry flavors and pine flavors and Everything else that exists in cannabis, citrus flavors. So really hops and cannabis are sister plants, right? And we've really leveraged a lot of what we've learned in the cannabis space, which we're really leading the charge in, in uh discovering what drives cannabis flavors and superimposing that over the hop industry, um, which is really a unique aspect of abstracts. We really thrive. In this intersection between creativity, science, and craftsmanship and getting to apply it to, you know, to cannabis and hops, um, and that's really, that's really our bread and butter. So brugas is, is cannabis flavors. These sell out every March. I don't know, I'm not sure why, maybe it has something to do with April 20th, but, uh, we've seen a really a lot of popularity with brugas certain times of the year, um, really wonderful stuff. I fell in love with this product lineup, um. A couple of years ago and yeah, it's really fun to share this with people. So Sky Farm is up next, and by the way, Uh, Omni, Bregas, and Sky Farm are all natural flavors. So on a label, they would be labeled natural flavors. Um, Sky Farm is our, um, foray into the traditional flavor house space. So kind of born, born out of, you know, cannabis extraction and, and turpine technology that we've developed, um, we're kind of becoming the flavor house that grew out of that. There aren't really many new entrants into the flavor house space. This is an old industry that really grew out of the discovery of vanilla. So abstracts is really becoming The flavor house that grew out of, out of this new space, uh, you know, and of this era. Um, but we are making the best fruit flavors now as well. We have a certified, senior certified uh flavor, uh, Flavor scientists that are, are, are coming up with these compositions, uh, you know, decades' worth of experience on staff producing these, these flavor compositions. So we've got right now strawberry, pineapple, guava, watermelon, mango, peach, grapefruit, passion fruit, clementine, raspberry, kiwi, honeydew, um. Just to start, there are dozens more coming. Uh, and I'll talk a little bit more about customs later, but if there's something on here that you like, but you think the pineapple needs to be a little bit more sulfurry or you think the guava needs to be a little bit more seedy, or, you know, the, uh, the watermelon needs to be a little bit more rindy, we can go there. We've got ways to do all these different things. And last but not least is the Quantum series, which to me as a brewer, um, and making hoppy beers for 20 years, was like the greatest Christmas present that I ever got. So I met the team at Abstracts in 2019 at Flavor Con in Cincinnati. And hit it off with them immediately. On their poster they had a GC, which is a piece of chemical analysis equipment that I actually had designed in 2016, and they had it on their poster and they had bought it and were using it to fingerprint these cannabis varieties. And I couldn't believe I was seeing this thing that I designed on a poster. And I was like, who are these guys? What are they doing? So they bought it. And so immediately in 2019, I started sending them hop samples because I knew it would work for hops, what they were doing in the cannabis space. And um gave them like a checklist of things that I wanted, that I think the industry could really benefit from. And in 2023 that last checkbox was checked and Quantum was born. The first lineup in the Quantum series is Quantum Bright. So what I had asked abstracts to do 5 years ago was Take my hops Extract out the oil and distill out the oil at the highest quality at the highest fidelity. That citra needs to smell just like this citra. This cascade needs to be just like this cascade that didn't exist before. Every other method of processing hops into a flavor to that to this point has completely damaged and created artifacts and changed the flavor in a significant way. So this is the first time. That these flavors exist outside of the hop plant we've been able to preserve the authenticity and the true to typeness to an extremely high fidelity. Um, so yeah, it was, uh, that last check box was checked. Quantum Bright was born, and now we have brewers all over the country and all over the world. Like, I can see when, when brewers first smell Quantum Bright, I can see in their eyes that they're just doing backflips. It's this kind of effect, um, and it's been a lot of fun to engage with brewers and, and share the journey with them. So we've got Azaca, Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, Citra, El Dorado, Mosaic, Simco, Strata, Amarillo, and then we've got our Southern Hemisphere lineup which is Nectaron, Nelson Savin, Motueka, Galaxy, Eclipse, and then we've got Vista in there too. So, and we're always expanding this lineup. But the other first that we're offering. All brewers and beverage makers is the ability to custom create Quantum bright with their hops. So never before has a hop supplier come in and told you that you can take the hops you selected and make. You know, this, make an extract out of it. That doesn't, doesn't really exist. You take your hops and you make pellets out of it and it kind of stops there. But now, you can take your selected hops and make it into this game-changing uh emulsion system that is the most efficient way. And in my opinion, uh, the most impactful way to, to add hops and hop flavor to a beverage. So this is custom quantum tolling. Um, again, first time ever you can send us your hops and we'll custom toll it and create Quantumbrite and you can use it and there's so many benefits of it, um, which we can get into a little bit later. But like I said, we can also go into different realms of Sky Farm and, and create custom Sky Farms and, um, different omnis, uh, you know, if you need something a little bit danker, you can. You know, we can elevate that gassiness and give it a little bit more dank. So that's the kind of stuff we do. We work every day at an intimate level with brewers and beverage makers to to kind of make, bring them into the flavorist world. So we've got 2 more samples. I don't know if you guys, you guys are probably thirsty after lunch. I think a lot of people are still at lunch, by the way, I heard it was delicious. Um, we've got 2 beers from Beechwood Brewing down the street in Huntington Beach. Uh, this is their 7%, uh, West Coast IPA called Wonder Walker. They recently custom told their, um, their mosaic. Hops with us to create Quantum Bright from this mosaic. In my opinion, this was the best quantum bright we ever made. There's something so wonderful about this Quantum bright, um, mosaic, um, That I asked Julian, the owner, if, if we could actually get more of it to sell through our own channels, but there's only 1000 pounds of it left. So with a quantum bright proposition, that 1000 pounds becomes like 4 or 5000 pounds. There's some real math going on here with Quantum bright that we can talk about. Uh, if you reach out to us, we'll, we'd love to share that proposition with you. The second one is that same Wonder Walker with Quantum Bread mosaic that we've added um pineapple Sky Farm to. So now you've taken a mosaic-driven beer and added a layer of pineapple, uh, in the most elegant and easy way possible, uh, and that's with our emulsion system. So thank you to Beechwood for putting those together for us. You know, I was kind of, I was having a I was talking to my sister actually a couple of weeks ago on the phone and we just kept talking for hours and hours. And I was describing to her what we do at abstracts, and then she just stops me and she says, Tom, It sounds like you're bringing the artisanship of craft beer. To the ingredient level. And I, I, I, I just stopped. I was like, yeah, that is what we're doing. You're right. So this quote is from Tom's sister, by the way, if you want to. Um And I mean that really is like working with this team now for 1011 months and, and seeing how we do things and the passion that everybody in the organization has and the talent and the attention to the detail. The quality driven nature of what we're doing. and the innovative mindset. is a, like a complete, like, you know, follow through from, from my craft experience. So that DNA is living within abstracts now and it's really, really cool to see what we do. And how we invent. On the ingredient level is pretty profound. And it really starts with our emulsion system. This is groundbreaking stuff. So when brewers buy flavors to flavor their beers, it usually comes in a carrier and you buy like totes and it's bulky and it's usually in propylene glycol or ethanol. What our solution was, is to, to, to make it into an emulsion system, which is basically Away, like salad dressings are emulsion systems. There's like oil and water, and you shake it up and then it's, it, it comes together. Our emulsion systems are like, like that, but you add it to a beer and it's Homogeneous forever once and that flavor is evenly distributed and it's so much more potent than these carriers as well. So it's much easier to use, it's much cheaper to ship. You need a lot less, it's a lot more potent, it's cheaper to store, and there's a bunch of other flavor benefits that go with it as well. We have one of the only Whole Foods Market approved emulsion systems. We've experimented with hundreds of recipes just in the last couple of years. And, and really hit on this like pretty amazingly. It's also all natural. So a lot of, you know, a lot of the issues with emulsions in the past is that they were, you know, relied on an ester gum from like Eastern Africa that, that had a limited supply, like we've, we've gotten away from all those supply chain issues and actually reinvented um a lot of um the technology around emulsions. We have some really amazing scientists working on this. Um, so it's a lot of fun to be part of that group and, and do this. Some of the basic benefits of our emulsion system is that it really extends the shelf life of these flavors. Like, so, all four of those products are in this emulsion system. Right. Um, and they all sort of like extend the flavor shelf life of the products that are used in them. Like we're seeing hop flavors not die off after 45 days. In fact, like linger, you know, sustain, it's like a sustained pedal, you know, to, to go back to the the electric analogy, like now you have this, um, you know, not only do you have this distortion pedal that brings you dankness and, and this other petal that gives you like, like this best mosaic flavor all day, but you have a sustained pedal that elongates that hoppiness to like day 90, 120 where typically it would fade. You know, on day 4560. Which is pretty amazing, you know, very little impact on, on, on any other beer quality metric you can think of. Um, And we're kind of obsessed with this technology. We're like always improving it too. There's ways to make it even better. So we've got the tech and we're patenting the hell out of it. We do a lot of distillation too. So all of our terpenes are like super pure because we're redistilling them. Quantum bright, we're distilling out the oil from the extract. Quantum bright is an aroma first. Hot product. Every other hot product that you see on the market. The flowable products, the oils, they're remnants of alpha acid production. So we have designed our whole process. To, to, to get the essence of these hops out and retain the like the, the real qualities of them. Um, and our distillation techniques is totally different than anything that, that people have done prior, uh, and the basis of it is that it's just a low temperature process. Hot flavors and actually all flavors are pretty sensitive to temperature. We don't, we don't mess with that. We, we didn't launch anything until we had this temperature thing solved and uh really, you know, we can now deliver a superior top note to all beers and all beverages. So, like what you're tasting with the mosaics and the Aramis, um, we can do traditional beer flavors all day. But with this emulsion system, you actually like, you no longer have a limit. On how high you can go. So we can recreate beers all day, you know, and get these traditional flavors, but now there's no upper limit. There's no 10 on the dial. There's no 11 on the dial. You know, so, so what's really interesting is you can pack in a lot of flavor, and I'm really interested to see because I know brewers. I'm a brewer. We'd like to test the limits of things, especially with happiness, so we're going to see. I heard this morning. That, uh, some of our quantum bread is actually gonna be used in, in Pliny the Younger, which is a brand that is known to always push the limits on happiness, so that's super exciting. And excited to see how it turns out. Um, but it all comes back to our extraction techniques too, and Omni Brugas and Sky Farm, those are kind of reformulated flavors, but our extraction technique, which we've perfected in the cannabis space and now superimposed that tech into hops, is really another kind of groundbreaking new tool and allows us to bring the true to tightness again, a low temperature process. And we don't really care about the alpha. We don't know what to do with the alpha at this point. This is an aroma first process, um. And we just got awarded a patent for it, which is amazing. We're just waiting for the ring at this point. So, um, so it's pretty cool. Uh, we're really excited about it. Um, it's all right here in, in Orange County, uh, down the street. So, yeah, we, we've had a really amazing adoption and, um, you know, Uh, implement, implementing, uh, of Quantum Brite into even some flagship years already, so it's, it's been an exciting year for us. And going back to that mindset, that craft brewing mindset of quality and devotion to quality. Um, There's some, some really important quality points to our products too. It's extremely stable, so nothing leaves the door. To you Without a full microbiological assay. It's completely safe and, and micro microbiologically clean and stable. Uh, it's physically stable and foam stable. Uh, the physical stability is tested on every batch, so it's not going to drop out of your beer. Again, these are all just major wins of our emulsion system. And the flavor stability piece that I keep talking about, there's really um a quantum leap and improvement in, in flavor stability in my career. And brewers are always just obsessed with flavor stability. I've seen like two major leaps forward in flavor stability, and they were usually related to packaging. I would consider this a 3rd major leap in flavor stability gains this time related to actually ingredient use, which is pretty amazing. Um And true to type of flavor for Sky Farm, we have the senior certified flavorists on staff. You know, with Omni and Bluegrass, we're using that state of the art analytical equipment to help us reverse engineer and quantum bread is really the low temperature processing, uh, that we've perfected that nobody else can, can duplicate. So, in my view, this is what abstracts is. It is the newest, most state of the art mixing board of flavor that a brewer or a beverage maker has, and we've created new. A new flavors like the gas in the middle there that's never been available before. So as you know, as brewers have always kind of competed to create the most dank beer, it's like by finding the most dank hop. Well, you can do that and that's awesome. But we've also given you the ability to create dankness in any beverage, at any level, at any volume you want, um, with incredible ease of use. So, in my mind, this is abstracts. And it's really been an amazing year. Um, we've had an incredible momentum and traction with the industry, and I keep kind of like thinking about this, this journey. Um, that we're going through at abstracts, and I keep saying like, man, this is like, this is just happening right now. This is not a, like a dress rehearsal. Um, and I really sense that, you know, people are starting to brew different things with our products and find white spaces, you know, and, and really explore, but I'm really convinced that it's just starting. Um, like I said, and, and I think on this mixing board there's no, there's no 10 on there, right? Like there are white spaces in, in beer flavor and beverage flavor that are unexplored, and I think people are going to find some really interesting things, especially with blending like a small amount of brew gas with like a citru quantum bright and making it more dank. Citra hop, you know, adding a layer of like peach to like maybe an Aramis hop, like, you're now able to invent hop flavors that won't exist for 20 years, or ever. Like, and you can do it tomorrow. So it's pretty, it's pretty amazing. Uh, and this is, this is where like the analogy to Dylan going electric, like really hit home with me a couple, a couple of months ago. Um, the tools are now there and how are people gonna really Uh, take advantage of them. So, you know, we're, we're, we're going electric for a new flavor and we're really giving you the tools, uh, to take your beer to a, to a new level. So I think the inspiration really is like, when we started the talk with Bob Dylan. Playing his version of All Along the Watchtower. which had a great harmonica solo. But now you got like Jimi Hendrix taking that song and just like blowing it out of the water. So that's what I think is, is happening. That's what I hope is happening, um, and I think, you know, people are really starting to, to catch on to the new tools, uh, and the new effects and the, and the new things you can do with beer in a really easy, elegant way. And I didn't even talk about the cost piece because who cares about that, right? Who cares about making money? But um it's really bringing the excitement back to beer consumers when there's less beer consumers out there. So I think that's, that's really the charge. That's really, you, you know, uh, the inspiration is to, is to bring that level of excitement back to beer. Like, you know, like. A Stratocaster plugged into a Marshall stack brought the excitement back to music in the 60s. So, so in the back, we've got a bunch of, of things to play with if anybody wants to experiment, but uh I know we have another talk coming up here in a little bit, but thank you uh for your attention and for hanging out. And uh yeah, hopefully my voice didn't get to uh Uh, monotonous for you. I don't, I didn't see anybody fall asleep, so that's good. Well, thank you. Appreciate it. I