May 2, 2017 – For many of us beer believers, seeking out craft breweries is no longer enough. We’ve quickly moved on to searching for “micro” facilities that use 30 to 60 barrel brewing systems—as a way to find small-scale, experimental beers.
But those can still be big operations and leave us dreaming of unearthing a hidden fantasy gem. So then comes the “nano” brewery, a commercial brewery using 3 to 10 barrel systems. Sounds really small, right? Certainly these nano folks make some rare, hard-to-get beers.
We actually have a fair amount of them spread around Santa Cruz and Monterey Counties. A very common scenario goes like this: an avid homebrewer, who really geeks out on the chemistry and craft of experimental brewing, and often has some background in tech or science, gets too big for their britches in their home space and decides to take the next step.
The latest is an example of the tiniest commercial beer definition, a “pico” brewery, and they are called simply the Soquel Fermentation Project.
Derek and Renee Mortisen live off Soquel San Jose Road in the Santa Cruz Mountains. They have a young toddler son, a dog, and a garage that is bursting with brewing equipment and barrels. Derek has been homebrewing on and off for five years since completing his PHD in chemical engineering at the University of Washington. He fits in the hobby while working in the medical device sector over the hill, which is the main limiting factor to why he currently brews just once a month. “Only because I have a day job and the constraints of the space,” he explains.
What really makes Derek tick is exploring different beer styles, playing with all kinds of variations and not just sticking to one type. Hence the next step, a label you will soon be seeing on a small number of local beer lists: Soquel Fermentation Project.
“We were trying to think of a name that captured how small the operation is. We kind of just see it more of a project to explore beer styles and explore variables…we’ll never have a flagship beer, one beer you can always come and get. We will constantly cycle through styles and we wanted something to capture that experimental style,” Derek says, explaining how they came up with the name for their “pico” brewery.
This impetus to grow production has pushed the Mortisens to start building out their barn, turning it into an onsite brewery where they can tinker and brew with more regularity—weekly instead of monthly. “We are getting some pretty good beers out, on a small scale, but to fill a whole wine barrel we really have to go up in scale. The only way to do that is to take it into a commercial setting,” says Mortisen.
That is good news for us, meaning that they have started taking their first commercial batch around to local establishments, charmingly in an old, vintage dump truck that they use as their delivery vehicle, to just a handful of spots where the couple enjoy drinking beer themselves. It has been well received.
“We just took it around. There are a few places we like going to, Cremer House, Beer Thirty, Pour Taproom, and we kinda knew they might be interested in supporting something like this. That’s how we started. We haven’t really reached out beyond Steins in Mountain View. We kept it as close as possible and within our own little sphere of where we like going ourselves, so right now there’s not really a danger of us being sold out,” he adds.
That is, until people taste it. The first release is called Dark Farmhouse #1 and is a cozy, rich, dark sour aged four months in pinot barrels from Byington winery. The next batch is a toss up between “a Gose that’s still aging, might not be ready, and a Berliner Weiss made with wild yeast, which will likely be next. We’ll just see what hits first. We are wanting to be seasonally appropriate, so next will be lighter, low alcohol, kinda tart, good for summer,” he says.
Over the summer, it is likely that you may see the Mortisen’s truck set up at the Scotts Valley farmers’ market on Saturdays, slinging beer once a month, or at a brewers night or two around town during guest tap events.
“We are trying to explore different ways rather than the standard taproom style, with a low overhead, so we aren’t constrained by having a constant demand we have to keep up. That liberates us to try different styles,” says Derek. He compares this to how a lot of our local wine labels function. “A lot are just these small mom and pop operations, which is kind of what we are emulating, the winery model.”
For now, the best way to find Soquel Fermentation Project is on Facebook and Instagram.
About the author
Amber Turpin is a freelance food and travel writer based in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
