Recipes: Bird Park & Beast Coast

As part of our San Diego Homebrew Summer program, every Monday between now and the end of August, San Diego Beer News will publish homebrew-scaled recipes for beers professionally produced by craft breweries throughout the county. This week, North Park Beer Co. founder Kelsey McNair, who earned scads of high-profile awards as a homebrewer before opening up his pro venture, is sharing what goes into his Bohemian-style pilsner, Bird Park. Crisp and clean with hop-and-malt depth that goes beyond many local examples of this style, it’s well-suited for the summer season. Meanwhile, Home Brew Mart’s gone in a completely different, easterly direction, submitting a recipe for a New England-style IPA conceived by an East Coast transplant. That hoppily aromatic number goes by the clever name Beast Coast.

Bird Park Bohemian-style Pilsner

Q&A with North Park Beer Co. co-founder and Brewmaster Kelsey McNair

Why did you decide to share this particular recipe?

I think most homebrewers and commercial brewers will agree that brewing an award-winning lager feels like a major accomplishment. Getting our first Great American Beer Festival medal for Bird Park was a truly special moment that I am so proud of my team for. Throughout my time spent homebrewing, the homebrewing community was so welcoming and many brewers shared their award-winning recipes and techniques openly. I felt like this would be a cool opportunity to pay some of that good will forward.

What are some tips you have for homebrewers?

I recommend working with soft water and building your water from scratch if you have the means. The classic examples all are brewed with very soft water. If you’re just carbon-filtering San Diego tap water, you’re not going to be able to achieve the soft and delicate character that is typically exhibited by this style. Our GABF-medal-winning batch was a single-infusion mash, but we’ve recently been tinkering around with step-mashing to increase the depth of malt flavor and improve head retention. We’re liking the results of this change, so we’ll continue to explore it. With any recipe, there’s always room for improvement.

Please share a memory from your homebrewing days?

I have been a long time fan of Moonlight Brewing‘s Reality Czech Pilsner, which for me is an absolutely perfect beer. I remember an event years ago at the now-shuttered Linkery in North Park where Moonlight’s owner and brewmaster Brian Hunt was in attendance for a tap takeover. My wife and I managed to get seats at the bar next to Brian and I tried to strike up a conversation with him about brewing. I told him that I was a huge fan of his beer and asked him for some recipe pointers on brewing a great Czech-style Pils like his. Brian’s response was pretty comical and he said something along the lines of, “Well, first thing you need to do is book a flight to the Czech Republic, go to Prague, and drink some real Czech pilsners. Then and only then might you have some ideas about how to make one.” This was, well, not exactly the advice I was looking for. I still haven’t found an opportunity to make it to Prague. Hopefully, someday. In the meantime, I’ll just drink Reality Czech whenever I can get my hands on it.

How did homebrewing lead you to want to make brewing your career?

The entire process of homebrewing connected the dots between so many different interests I had. In my former career I was a 3D artist working on video games and I saw brewing as simply a different artistic medium to work within. I also was very interested in culinary arts and food science, and while I had no real desire to work in the food-service industry, brewing was an exciting way to explore those interests in a different way. It took brewing only a single batch of beer for me to become infatuated with the idea of brewing and operating a brewery as my ultimate career. It has been a challenging career change and I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, but I have no regrets about it.

Beast Coast New England-style IPA

A summary from Home Brew Mart Assistant Manager Derek Lauridsen

Written by an East Coast native living in a West Coast world, this New England IPA was written in the effort to correct the misconception that all “hazy” IPAs were true to the New England-style IPA (NEIPA). Beast Coast uses few bittering hops, stacking all the New Age hops—Citra, Mosaic, Vic Secret—it can possibly fit into the whirlpool and dry-hop additions. Coupled with an estery and low-attenuating British-ale yeast strain, the result of a NEIPA should be a dense, juicy and potently aromatic IPA…in addition to being “hazy”.

San Diego Homebrew Summer is brought to you by our partners at Ballast Point Brewing, and you can find all of the ingredients to make this pair of beers at Home Brew Mart.