Jason Perkins, Allagash Brewery

Jason Perkins is Brewmaster at Allagash Brewing Company of Portland, ME. Read on to find out how he got into brewing, and what he digs most about working at Allagash.

Know Your Brewer: How did you get started brewing?

Jason Perkins: Like many Craft brewers, my start came with homebrewing. I was always a fan of cooking, and I grew up on a small farm where we grew and slaughtered a lot of the food we consumed as a family. I loved beer and had a natural attraction to making it myself. Once I started working for the brewery I was buying ingredients at, there was no turning back.

KYB: Did you work at any other breweries before joining Allagash?

Jason: Yes, at KettleHouse brewing in Missoula, MT and Gritty McDuff’s in Freeport, Maine.

KYB: What was one thing you learned from the places you worked previously?

Jason: I learned countless things at my first brewing job — it was a big jump from the homebrewing ranks to a real brewery. At Gritty’s, I had the opportunity to work with open fermentation: a very hands-on and enjoyable experience.

KYB: What is a typical workday like for you?

Jason: Putting out (and sometimes starting) fires. Each day varies pretty dramatically — a mix of ordering, scheduling, managing crew and production tasks. I try to spend as much time in the brewhouse and cellars as possible, keeping in touch with the beer.

KYB: What is your favorite piece of equipment in the brewery?

Jason: I have two. The first piece is our Mash Tun. It is an old piece of dairy equipment that we have slowly added improvements to over the years. I have seen it transform, like watching a child grow up. We have added major improvements in its operation, but it still remains a hands-on piece of equipment, and is of course where the base flavor of all our beer begins.

I also have to include our Coolship. Coolships are an old and traditional method of cooling wort to the temperature that yeast can survive in. Originally, they were used to serve a practical purpose — people at the time knew that they needed their wort to be cool so that the yeast they added could survive and ferment the beer. They did not have any mechanical means to do so, so a wide shallow pan called a coolship was used. Over time, as mechanical means were invented, almost every brewery in the world moved to a different way of cooling wort — a heat exchanger being the most common today.

A few artisanal breweries in Belgium have continued to use coolship as a means to produce their unique beer. Our coolship is a unique piece of equipment in our brewery and in the US (the only one in existence, I believe). It is an interesting contrast between the coolship and more modern pieces of equipment like our centrifuge. While we utilize many modernized techniques to produce the best beer possible, with the coolship we use an ancient “technology” to produce a very unique beer. There is also a mystique that surrounds it. The activity that occurs inside the room that houses it is unseen to the eye and difficult to grasp. So many things in our brewery are in our control, and the coolship is a place where our control is more limited and we must rely on the characteristics of our environment. We can control the days we brew into the cooship (based on weather) and the type of wort that enters it, but beyond that we must rely on unseen creatures to do our work. For lack of a better word, it is a magical feeling when the wort begins to enter the coolship.

Come back for more from Jason on Thursday when we’ll find out what his favorite Allagash beer is, and discover a new way to combine Allagash products and dessert.