White Labs Brew Co. collaborated with local Las Vegas brewery, HUDL Brewing Co. and took their flagship beer through the White Labs Experiment!
Let’s learn more about HUDL’s Brewmaster, Joe Cuozzo
My name is Joe Cuozzo, I graduated the American Brewers Guild in 1999, I am from San Diego originally, and after brewing in Dallas as an assistant for a year, I took over my first head brewing job in Skagway Alaska for Skagway brewing Co. I then returned to San Diego and was an assistant for Pizza Port and Alesmith before taking over Sports City Cafe and Brewery in La Jolla 2001-2005.
I was also President of the San Diego Brewers Guild during that time frame. I won multiple GABF and World Beer Cup medals at Sports City. I was also the interim Head Brewer at Green Flash. I co-own a brewery in Chicago called Around The Bend and have FOBAB medals with them, and returned to Las Vegas and started Brewing for HUDL in September 2020.
We do have a GABF medal from 2021 and look to continue to add more! We bring San Diego style beers to the Las Vegas brewing scene, and love the SD beer community and remember where I came from.
What sparked this collaboration?
The brew we did with White Labs is to showcase the truth of Dry vs Liquid yeast and what every nuance behind the two are. We now have some apples to apples comparisons vs years back literature.
We are doing a Cream Ale at 6% ABV aged on vanilla. We are also seeing how liquid and dry yeast shift from generation to generation by repitching into WLBC’s Tabberer IPA recipe. We will test every aspect of how the yeast reacted and the results of Diacetyl, Acetaldehyde, and all byproducts of fermentation. We want to know the why!
Why White Labs?
Over the last 25 years, I have been using White Labs yeast. The WLP001 California Ale Yeast is the cleanest version of Chico available. I know consistently the quality behind the product, and the care that is taken every step of the way. How I demand a perfect beer, is how they demand making the perfect yeast.
YEAST makes the Beer!!!
We also brewed with WLP007 Dry English Ale Yeast and WLP077 Tropicale Yeast Blend in a beer in Vegas that we will showcase at this year’s Craft Brewers Conference, one of the biggest beer industry events, the Tropicale yeast was awesome and brought out so many aromatics.
WLP001 is my favorite as it lets every ingredient we use, be showcased how we want it showcased. Reliability and trust. Everything in life is trust. I trust when I order WLP001 that we can regenerate and get nearly 20 generations per pitch when we are able to pitch every 7 to 10 days. (That’s amazing we generally recommend 8-10 generations to reduce risk of a bad batch of beer.)
This makes for amazing beer, low yeast cost per batch, and allows me to have a blank canvas to show off the ingredients we spend money on.
Any Helpful Brewing Tips?
Consistent dumps on our cones to get rid of dead yeast early on, being able to repitch on healthy yeast. Knowing our attenuation percentage on our highly fermentable wort. We feed our wort with tons of zinc and oxygen. We are looking to get this current WLP001 California Ale Yeast up to 20 gens and have it tested. We believe we keep our yeast the healthiest and happiest.
We do not repitch over 40 IBU or over 1.065 Starting Gravity wort. We also believe it is important to have multiple strains in our brewery. We like every beer to have an identity behind it. We feel strong about our cone-to-cone pitching and researching and trying new strains on all seasonal beers.