Sunday, April 05, 2009
Food, Wine, Beer & Spirits, "Behind the Bar", Q&A

On tap

Brewmaster John Roberts dishes on his fondness for lager, homebrewing and brew pubs

By Hope S. Philbrick


As Max Lager’s Wood Fired Grill & Brewery gears up to celebrate its 11th anniversary with a special celebration that begins at 6 p.m. on Friday, April 17, we checked in with co-owner and brewmaster John Roberts.

What led you to become a brewmaster?

I was living in Boston in the late ’80s/early ’90s and had taken up homebrewing. I discovered that I really loved it a lot and was really good at it and decided that I needed a career change. I started interning with places up in Boston to learn as much as I could. My aunt and uncle returned from living in Russia and were in Atlanta. They knew that they would open up a restaurant or hotel—they had a background in hospitality—and we decided it would be a good idea to start a family business. I wanted to move back to the South; I’m originally from Gulf Shores, Ala., and Boston’s pretty cold! We put things in motion late ’94/early ’95, and then it takes awhile to put these things together. I moved here in 1996, and took a job with Atlanta Brewing Company for a year and a half while we were in the process of building the restaurant itself. Then I came over here, and the rest is history, as they say.
   
I remember the first time I brewed beer. Those beginning stages were cruder than what I do now, but I was using extract syrup. And when I poured it into the boiling water, the smell that came up out of the pot was amazing to me. I really loved it. I’ve always been a creative person; been a musician all my life. I went to the Berkeley College of Music and studied production engineering. I love to create, but it’s a lot harder to sell music these days. Brewing seemed to fit me really well, and I have an innate ability with it, so I seemed to pick up on it right away and it just feels natural.
   
There are brewing schools and I’ve signed up a couple of times, but each time I moved on to a job brewing. For me, I was homebrewing fanatically, pretty much every weekend for a long time, and at the same time I was going out to brew pubs in Boston and would lend a hand when I could to get as much information as I could. Of course, there’s a difference between brewing at home and in a brewery, but the process is essentially the same. The big difference is learning how the equipment in a brewery works, but I picked up on that very quickly because I’d worked construction through college and a lot of the same principles apply.

What’s unique about your beers?

One decision made early on was to do primarily lager beers. Back in 1998, brew pubs didn’t brew as many lagers as ales. Ales are fermented at warmer temperatures and tend to be more round in flavor. Lagers are more difficult to make because they require a colder fermentation and take a longer time, which is an outlay of equipment. It’s more of a challenge to the brewer because lagers have generally cleaner flavors, so defects are easier to detect.

    We have up to six beers on tap at any given time. But that’s been more difficult recently with the shortage of hops. I like using a lot of hops so if I don’t have any, it’s a problem. This year’s crop is a lot better and hops are more available, though they cost 300 to 600 percent more than they did before. I get my hops primarily from the Pacific Northwest and Germany, occasionally from England and also the Czech Republic.

    I’m the kind of person who likes beer to taste like beer and not have a lot of additions. A lot of people like adding fruit or different spices or coffee or weird things, which sometimes works but sometimes doesn’t. I think beer should be beer and not be too far off the deep end. My beer-making philosophy is that I make beers that I like; I’m a little selfish that way. But it makes it easier because I understand them and know what they’re supposed to taste like. SP