
I tried the Proving Ground IPA. I tried the cask conditioned style. It was semi warm and lightly carbonated, cause they store it in casks in the cellar and is hooked up to an old school pump tap.
It was a nice place. Next time i gotta try the food. If its as good as the beer i can see going to that place often.



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Proving Ground IPA
OG: 1.070 BU: 100 ABV: 7.0%
A bold IPA in the modern, West Coast style, but with plenty of malt character from our robust Maris Otter. Generous quantities of Columbus and Cascade hops give this bitter beer resinous, piney, and citrus-like flavors while a bit of Czech Saaz hops adds a touch of spice.
Malts: floor-malted Maris Otter; caramalt; wheat; flaked barley; malted rye Hops: Columbus; Cascade; Saaz; dry-hopped with Cascade Food Pairings: assertive, spicy foods, grilled salmon & shrimp, pizza.
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http://www.magnoliapub.com/beer/ales.html
About the Pub The Haight-Ashbury's only brewpub combines good beer, fresh food and friendly service in a comfortable pub setting. Located at the bustling intersection of Haight and Masonic, Magnolia is a refuge from the pace of urban living; a place to relax among friends. The pub fosters the tradition of classic English and European ale houses and the best of San Francisco's unique style.
Magnolia Pub & Brewery is open from Noon until Midnight Monday through Thursday, Noon until 1 AM Friday, 10 AM until 1 AM Saturday and 10 AM until Midnight on Sundays. Saturday and Sunday, from 10 AM to 2:30 PM, we feature our special brunch menu which has become a Haight Street favorite. Stout for breakfast—who knew? Breakfast, lunch or dinner, Chef David Coleman's unique, farm fresh twists on brewpub cuisine are sure to delight.
Do you have a story, anecdote or information about our building or the neighborhood? What occupied our space in the very early days? What was on the other three corners of our intersection in the 1960s? We'd like to know more about our home. Please email us at beer@magnoliapub.com or come by the pub. Magnolia Pub & Brewery resides in a 1903 Victorian rich with history. The building, along with most of the neighborhood, survived the 1906 earthquake. It became home to a pharmacy in the 1920s and much of the beautiful interior woodwork was installed around this time. The pharmacy served the neighborhood loyally through the mid-1960s, when some pioneering bohemians turned it into the Drugstore Cafe as the neighborhood began its famous change. Next came Magnolia Thunderpussy. This well-known woman created her famous desserts here for delivery all around town. She later reopened the cafe in the front, drawing large crowds to sample the curiously-shaped ice cream desserts and while away the wee hours of the night. The 1970s again brought change to the neighborhood but the 1960s spirit lived on at Psalms Cafe, the venture that followed Magnolia Thunderpussy's early in the decade. Psalms maintained the hippie ethic throughout the decade, culminating in an outrageously festive Thanksgiving dinner for the poor in 1979, the cafe's swan song.
Magnolia Pub & Brewery opened on November 11, 1997 after eight months of construction preceded by four years of planning, preparation, searching and negotiating. We somehow squeezed a brewery into a once-creepy dungeon of a basement and gave the kitchen and dining room a healthy dose of the care they needed. The booths and bar were designed to coexist peacefully with the existing, historic tile floor and woodwork (the latter was painstakingly restored to its original condition). The mural, painted by local artist, Jon Weiss, adds a hearty dose of the whimsical and surreal to complete the feel of our pub.
The Brewery
Magnolia Brewery is a seven-barrel facility squeezed into an unlikely space in the basement of our pub. It is a modern miracle that we overcame the sheer nastiness of the 95-year-old basement and now have a working brewery down there. The low ceilings make it interesting but dropping the floor in places and raising beams in other areas has given us an efficient and safe workspace. It is worth noting that we were told more than once that it couldn't be done. Here's a look at the brewing process and how we make beer at our brewery:
The Grain Room
The process begins in the grain room, an isolated area where the brewing grains are stored and milled. The grain gets its own room because the dust can harbor beer spoilage organisms. We use only the finest floor-malted varieties of English barley malt and they are delivered to us in 55 lb. sacks. Milling goes very quickly so it's a good idea to portion out all the grain for a batch—opening sacks of pale malt and weighing out the correct percentages of specialty grains—before starting the mill.
Grain is dumped into the hopper of the mill. The mill has two rollers that crack the grain kernals open, exposing the starchy endosperm of the seed while leaving the husk fairly intact.This is important because the insoluble husk forms the filter bed of the mash in the next step (much like coffee grounds in a coffee maker). The milled grist falls into a conveyor and is transported through the wall and into the mash tun.
The Mash Tun
Water has already been heated in the kettle at this point and is now pumped into the mash mixer just above the mash tun. Here the falling grist is sprayed with the hot water as it drops into the mash tun creating a thick, porridge-like mash that is somewhat similar to oatmeal in texture. The grist steeps in this hot water for approximately 90 minutes. The temperature of the water and the thickness of the mash encourage the enzymes present in the grain to convert starch into simple sugars that are fermentable by yeast. Meanwhile, these sugars and other flavor compounds are extracted from the grains into the water. Magnolia brewery uses a single-temperature infusion process for mashing, meaning that the temperature of the hot water mixed with the grist at the beginning is solely responsible for the mash temperature and the mash is held at that temperature until completion. It is thus very important to use the right amount of water of the right temperature to achieve the desired mash temperature. This varies from beer to beer and a few degrees make a difference.
At this point, it is time to separate the sugary liquid from the spent grain husks. The process is known as lautering. The insuluble husks maintain the shape of the mash bed as the sweet liquid, or sweet wort, is gently run out through the bottom of the mash vessel and pumped over the kettle. Additional hot water is gently sprnked over the top of the grain bed and rinses any reluctant sugars from the grain husks. The wort must be run off slowly to ensure maxium extraction and to prevent collapse or channelling of the grain bed.
The Kettle
Once in the kettle the sweet wort is brought to a boil. Steam jackets circulate steam around the outside of the kettle wall and bottom to provide efficient, uniform heat. Boiling wort serves many functions: it sterilizes the wort to help ensure that the yeast has no unwanted competition from other microbes during fermentation; it precipitates unwanted proteins out of solution so they can be left behind in the kettle when the beer is sent to the fermenter; it allows certain volitile, undesirable compounds to leave the wort via evaporation; it causes some of the sugars to carmelize, enhancing the taste and adding color to the wort.
The most recognizable role of the kettle boil, however, is to get the desirable bitter components of hops to go into solution and become part of the wort. The bittering acids from hops are not soluble as-is—they need the presense of heat and the rolling action of the boil to change form and dissolve into the wort. 60 minutes is about the maximum useful time to achieve this effect so bittering hops are added early in the boil. Ironically, the other important componants of hops—those contributing to flavor and aroma—are very volitile and escape the kettle with the evaporation (when you smell hops upstairs in the pub that means those aroma compounds are no longer in the wort). Therefore, other hops are added to the kettle at various times closer to the end of the boil to impart flavor and aroma to compensate for this loss.
When the boil is completed the wort is whirlpooled so that any unwanted proteins and spent hop solids (together known as "trub" or the "hot break") are forced to the bottom of the kettle in a compact mound. This mound should remain intact as the wort leaves the kettle and should not be permitted to pass through to the fermenter.
The Heat Exchanger
Now it is time to send the boiled, hpped, sweet wort to the fermenter to meet the yeast. But the wort is now at 212 degrees which would kill the yeast upon contact. So the wort must be cooled rapidly to a temperature in the yeast's fermentation range. The heat exchanger is a small but effiecient counterflow device that allows chilled water to run along one side of a series of plates while hot wort from the kettle runs along the opposite side of each plate in the other direction. Heat energy passes from the hot wort to the chilled metal plates and into the cold water. As the wort leaves the heat exchanger it is now at a comfortable 68-70 degrees, perfect for our particular ale yeast. The yeast, having grown somewhat dormant to avoid starvation, needs more than wort sugars to get going again. So we add a bit of oxygen to the wort on the way to the fermenter which helps the yeast rebuild its cell walls and get back to a healthy, hungry state.
The Fermenter
The yeast will use up all of the oxygen that we added and then will begin attacking the fermentable sugars. When the yeast ferments wort it is metabolizing the sugars to produce energy for cell growth and reproduction. The two main byproducts of this metabolism are alcohol and carbon dioxide. In addition, many other flavor compounds are produced are vary greatly depending upon the yeast strain and the temperature of fermentation among othe things. We like to ferment this yeast right around 70 degrees and will vary that number by a degree or two depending on the beer style. The bulk of fermentation takes place over the first three days but the young beer is left in the fermenter for about a week so that the yeast can complete its fermentation, re-absorb some of its less desirable flavors, and drop to the bottom of our cone-shaped tanks. This beer still tastes a bit harsh and young and has a lot of yeast in it. It is transferred to conditioning/maturation tanks to become the beer that we serve and sell. The yeast mass at the bottom of the fermenter will be harvested and reused in additional batches. It is interesting to note that the best fermentations often occur during the 5th or 6th uses of a yeast because the yeast has had time to acclimate to its environment but not enough time to mutate and become less predictable.
Conditioning/Serving Tanks
The conditioning tanks are used tanks from Great Britain, some of which are thirty years old. They are dish bottomed and are perfect holding vessels for final maturation and serving of beer. The harshest flavors from fermentation will soften and mellow while in these tanks and additional yeast will settle to the bottom leaving "bright" beer for service. After about two weeks we carbonate the beers in these tanks and then hook up draft lines to carry the beer straight to the bar upstairs. Unless, of course, we are talking about cask conditioned beer, which goes through an entirely different process described below.
Cask Conditioned Ale and Beer Dispense
Magnolia draft ales are pushed to the taps behind the bar with carbon dioxide pressure, just like most beer dispense systems. There must be enough pressure to keep the beer at the correct carbonation level and to overcome gravity and friction in the lines. For most ales this system works quite well. But for ales designed with low carbonation levels, the pressure required to get the beer to the bar can overcarbonate the beer in the process. Nitrogen/CO2 blends provide an effective way to get the beer to the tap without overcarbonation (nitrogen has a much harder time going into solution). Combined with a special nitrogen tap, this method of dispense can create the remarkably smooth mouthfeel and creamy head of a beer like Guiness Stout. At Magnolia we currently use this method of dispense for just one beer, our Spooky Tooth Stout. It is becoming more common to use it with bitters and other light ales but, in a brewery with such a cask conditioned ale emphasis we feel it is a bit redundant and the cask method is the more traditional of the two (and our favorite way to drink beer!).
In either case, the goal is to pour a beer with reduced carbonation levels and not have it overcarbonate during dispense by pushing it with high CO2 pressure. The low carbonation levels allow the drinker to taste the intricate flavors of the beer itself and not be distracted by the prickly sensation of all of those bursting CO2 bubbles. The beer's flavors rise to the foreground and the mouthfeel is quite smooth. Cold temperatures can also shock the mouth and numb the tastebuds so it is traditional to serve such low CO2 beer at a slightly higher temperature. The beer is still kept cool enough to be refreshing and drinkable but not so cold as to impede taste. Nitrogen beers, however, are often served as cold as regular draft beers and so, in spite of their creamy smoothness, they can sometimes taste thin and lacking in flavor. Depending on the beer, cask conditioned serving methods are often the best way to experience the full effect of low carbontation levels and higher temperature.
We take pride in our cask conditioned ale program at Magnolia. The brewery was designed to be able to condition and serve a large number of cask ales; we are one of the few brewpubs in the U.S. with a dedicated cask cellar (kept at 56 degrees farenheit). Our cask cellar has enough stillage (wooden racks that hold casks in their horizontal serving position) to keep more than 25 casks. We condition the beer in traditional English firkins (9.5 UK gallons or 10.6 US gallons) and we give the beer a generous three weeks to come into condition before tapping. Once tapped, cask ale can be pulled to the bar through one of our five beer engines (and into our traditional 20-oz. English pint glasses).
Beer destined for the cask will be racked (transferred) into clean firkins just after fermentation subsides. The beer is inocculated with either freshly fermenting wort or priming sugars, dry hops are added and the cask is bunged shut and rolled into the cask cellar. Casks are kept on their side, with the shive facing the ceiling and the keystone facing forward. A wooden spile is driven into the shive to vent excess gas and a tap is driven into the front of the cask through the keystone. The beer is checked frequently and when ready a beer line is connected to the tap from the handpump. The spile is removed, allowing air to replace the beer removed to the bar (thus avoiding a vaccuum in the cask). Oxidation then sets in so the firkin must be emptied with three days to avoid off-flavors.
-------------------- "There is never a wrong note, bend it." Jimi Hendrix
Edited by sui (09/14/07 12:14 AM)
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