312: Pure Project’s Winslow Sawyer Brews With Style, Not to Style
Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast
The Benefits of Unfiltered Pilsner Beer
Our main Pilsner reign is unfiltered. We still brew that at our original facility where we don't have a centrifuge. All of our beers are based around municipal San Diego water, which is very high in sulfate and a lot harder. That beer is actually our highest hot side hopping of any beer. It gives a little more body, gives head retention and hay stability.
When Winslow Sawyer and his partners launched San Diego’s Pure Project in the middle of the last decade, they weren’t focused on brewing particular styles. Instead, they began with the tenet of building a brewery focused on sustainability, using natural ingredients from small farmers wherever possible, and lowering their environmental impact while also giving back through the 1% for the Planet program.
IPA wasn’t the initial focus—San Diego already had plenty of great IPAs—but as the hazy IPA trend caught on Sawyer quickly found a way to explore his love of New Zealand hops despite the constraint Pure Project placed on themselves—no reverse osmosis, only municipal water built up, not stripped down. Now, they don’t define their hazy IPAs as “New England-style,” but have coined the term “murky” instead.
In this episode, Sawyer discusses their approach to a range of beers, from IPA to pale lager and even spontaneously fermented acid-forward beer. Along the way, he covers:
- consciously choosing single infusion over decoction in their pale lager
- balancing flavor intensity with drinkability
- altering their approach to hoppy beers over the past number of years
- using Mosaic as a base for experimentation with new hops
- reducing dankness as beers increase in ABV
- brewing spontaneous beers with wet hops
And more.
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