Balance in beer is so important. A truly good beer should have that balance so not to take away from what else is in your glass,” explains a focused Tom Palmer, co-founder and brewer at Battersea’s Mondo Brewing Company.
“Look at a Double IPA for instance, the guidelines that surround that beer are wild enough, but if you make a good version of a beer like that, and it’s balanced, then you don’t notice it being 8%. You don’t notice 100 IBUs and instead, you appreciate how everything fits together perfectly. Balance is conducive to your enjoyment of a beer and that’s why we place so much focus on it.”
Palmer, like the brewery’s other co-founder and brewer Todd Matteson, is serious about his beer. Brewing is in his DNA and it is something he strives for perfection in, not just a good attempt at.
Both he and Matteson are US natives. The former grew up in a family of brewers in St Louis, Missouri, and in his youth he was, by his own admission, a “rambunctious individual”. But it was this….outlook that potentially catalysed his own career in brewing.
“I was kicked out of school and every so often I was taken to work with my father who worked for Budweiser. There’s a part of St Louis where the overwhelming smell of yeast from the brewery just hits you when you get close. You don’t forget that,” he enthuses. “I didn’t know it was yeast at the time until he told me, but walking into that, seeing the big tanks and vats sitting there, as well as a big control room, it was like a Homer Simpson setup.”
The difference being Palmer’s father actually did some work.
He has fond, vivid, memories of his father getting into the massive aging tanks, as well as the big devices that look liked torpedoes, and were called torpedoes, but were instead packed with the beechwood chips synonymous with Budweiser.
“They would push these chips into them before they filled the tanks with soon-to-be conditioned beer. Then, when the yeast settles out onto the beechwood chips, this is where they claim to get their distinct flavour from,” he explains.
In addition to troubleshooting across the brewery, Palmer’s father was also responsible for steam cleaning the chips, as well as controlling brewery yeast. And prior to the operation was outsourced, he was also involved in the control of bread yeast that was supplied to a local breadmaker.
“We have lots of good photos of him in these roles across the brewery and I suppose that is where it started for me. That brewery has some of the best talent in the world, and more than anything, they’ve taken large steps in modernising the process. Large parts of that information has been shared publicly, so the brewing industry at large owes them a debt of gratitude for the work they have done to advance the science,” says Palmer. “Now on the other hand they pushed a lot of small players out, making it difficult to get into the market, so there are two sides of the coin, of course.”
