227: Tom Jacobs of Antidoot Is Searching For Simplicity
Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine Podcast
How Do You Blend Herbs Hot Side and Cold Side?
There are some things, especially if you are adding herbs hot side into the cool ship, am, where once that happens, that's locked in y. The only way to solve or rebalance is blending at te and versus cold side herb editions. We have changed also, the process for some herbs or some some ingredients. Like, for example, if we use oranges, we now always do it at the end. And so, you know, but certainly there are some things that work better hot side versus cold side.
Antidoot’s Tom Jacobs didn’t set out with the goal of launching a brewery. It was more a natural outgrowth of his and his brother’s homebrewing, which grew too large to remain just a hobby. Still, Jacobs pursues every one of the small batches they brew with the exploratory zeal that informed their homebrewing days.
The brewery and batches are small, intentionally, for two reasons. First, Jacobs is not willing to compromise their creative vision to achieve the scale necessary for a larger corporate entity. Second, they prefer to use the fruit and herbs from their own trees, grapevines, orchard, and gardens—something only viable at their minuscule size.
Despite their self-imposed guardrails, Antidoot forgoes other mainstream brewing conventions such as style categories because, as Jacobs says, “It’s hard for people to appreciate things without a concept, but if you give them a concept, they judge against the concept.” Moving beyond preconceived notions of what a beer should be, and encouraging drinkers to approach the beer on its own terms, with an open mind, is Antidoot’s raison d’être.
In this episode, Jacobs discusses:
- building a self-sufficient, agriculture-driven lifestyle with a seasonal approach to brewing and growing
- finding a brewing mode between ester-forward Belgian beers and too-acidic sour beers
- foregoing the one-dimensional term “sour”
- blending acidity with bitterness
- using diverse herbs for bittering, such as gentian and wormwood
- selecting for wild Saccharomyces over Brettanomyces to preserve terroir flavors and nuance
- brewing wild cider without losing apple character
And more.
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