The Secrets of Von Ebert
Pandemonium at Von Ebert, moments after the GABF named the gold medalist in IPA in 2021.
The name Von Ebert can’t be well-known very far beyond the banks of the Willamette River. A small brewery founded in March 2018, it has spent half its life living under the dark cloud of Covid. Yet it has managed to do something no other brewery has ever done—nor probably will. In 2021, its flagship IPA, Volatile Substance, became the third Oregon brewery in a decade to win gold at at the GABF, a capper to a year that started out with a gold for the same beer at the Oregon Beer Awards. (In between, it won the extremely prestigious Beervana Podcast IPA Smackdown!, which people somehow fail to mention). A gold OBA and GABF medal in the same year in American IPA? Breakside, Fort George, Boneyard, Sunriver, Barley Brown’s—none of them has done that before.
The funny thing is, I’ve always considered Von Ebert a lager brewery. Of course, they made IPAs from the start, but what brewery doesn’t? They caught my eye with a stream of characterful lagers that have only improved with time. In fact, just a few months after their showcase downtown Pearl District brewpub started pouring those lagers, they opened a second facility in East Portland focused on wild and spontaneous ales. IPAs seemed like an afterthought.
Von Ebert is still a lager brewery. The wild and barrel-aging program is steaming right along as well. Yet somewhere along the line, Von Ebert’s overlooked IPAs became a more central calling card. I named Nothing Noble the best Oregon beer of the year in 2020–the same year it took bronze at GABF. (How many breweries have won consecutive medals in American IPA at the GABF? Gotta be a tiny club.) Then came last year.
Somehow, the brewers of Von Ebert know something. Last month I stopped by the brewery to find out what.
The Secret to a Great IPA is … Teamwork?
Von Ebert had co-head brewers when it opened, former Commons brewer Sean Burke and Sam Pecoraro, who had done stints at The Commons, Breakside, and Burnside. Sean departed to start his own project, and the approach evolved away from separate, siloed breweries with their own agenda to two breweries tended by nine brewers. To emphasize the dynamic, when I arrived to join Sam, we were joined by Eric Ebel, lead brewer at the Pearl site, and Becca Linn, who periodically interrupted her clean-up to join us when she had a moment. The first thing Sam said, after naming all nine members of the brewing team, was, “We only have one head brewer now, multiple lead brewers, and we share labor across the breweries. We've evolved into this more cohesive unit where we're all brewing all of the beers all the time.”
Talking about the brewing team is common—most brewers recognize how important talent is. Yet it’s also the kind of pro-forma comment I typically ignore. In the case of Von Ebert, there really does seem to be a collective approach. No doubt managing nine opinions is a trick—credit to Sam there—but he would ultimately make a convincing case than hive minds have an advantage. I’ll come back to why I think it was actually the most important point Sam made, but it the moment, I’ll follow the direction of our interview, which I drove in a technical direction.
We started with hop selection. For American brewers, finding the right hops no longer means the right variety, but the particular lot of a variety that expresses the precise flavors and aromas the brewery wants. Until the past six months I didn’t realize what a major factor hop selection had become, but for many brewers, it’s the key to a hoppy beer. Sam explained.
“For Volatile Substance, for instance, we know that we want berry, pine, dank, certain types of berries, and that [guides us] to the type of Mosaic that we’re looking for. When we sit down at the table, it’s not necessarily which is the most intense or the ‘best’ on the table—though best is subjective. We look for the one that works for that beer. A lot of times it’s probably not the hop a lot of other people would use.”
It has gotten to the place where breweries are so particular about their hops that they may select different lots of the same variety for different beers, or for use in different phases of brewing. Sam continued: “Even for one supplier, like Roy Farms, we’ll select multiple El Dorado. We feel like one works better hot side, one works better as a dry hop.” Hop selection can be so important it makes the difference between a special beer and just one that is merely good—an experience he described. “Batch two of Nothing Noble won the bronze at GABF. But that was the last bag of Nelson Sauvin that we were absolutely in love with. We have not been able to source Nelson nearly as perfect for that beer as we did for that batch.”
Part of Von Ebert’s success is recipe design. They make hazies, of course, but like most Northwest breweries, they focus on modern American IPAs. Their formulations start with a decent amount of kettle bitterness for structure and feature juicy, citrusy, or dank elements to take center stage. Volatile Substance is such an interesting beer because it has elements of all these. It’s juicy and dank. You notice it’s fairly bitter, too, once you stop trying to figure out how they made berry fruitiness mesh with that cannabis base note. Von Ebert IPAs are typically clear and always sharp and clean.
If anything else counts as a secret to the formulation, it might be comparatively modest hop infusions. Three pounds per barrel on the cold side is plenty. “Sometimes I feel like [high dry hop loads] translate to worse results: hop burn, mouth coating, stuff like that,” Eric said. “Sometimes it works, but more times than not, it’s off-putting.” Beyond formulations, they continually refine recipes. That’s where the group approach works to their benefit. They are constantly poring over every element of the process.
“We’ve created a culture of being intensely critical of our own beers,” Sam said. Even after winning GABF gold, we sat down and wrote an email about how we could have made that beer better. We know that that’s the only way to constantly improve, and everybody’s on board with it.” Eric noted that they’re such perfectionists they even update their process and formulation throughout the year to deal with subtle changes in their ingredients.
Sam Pecoraro
Lagers
Refinement is even a bigger deal with their lagers. “Good pilsners don’t take a couple batches; they take a couple years,” Sam said. In a city with a lot of great pilsners, Von Elbert’s stands out. The base malts are soft and bready, the hopping saturated, spicy, and elegant. (Surprisingly, they’re one of the few breweries who emphasize Hallertau Mittelfrüh, which its lovely, refined character.)
Everyone at the brewery wanted a banging pilsner from the start, and it took awhile for it to become the beer they wanted. The original version started with multiple base malts and hops, and a rotating yeast strain. “As we began to increase production, we tried to streamline everything. The recipe was too complicated to consistently improve. We settled on a yeast strain, and moved it to just Mittelfrüh. It’s still a blend of base malts, but only two. From there, it became easier to make incremental changes with that simple recipe.”
This seemed to be a consistent theme of the Von Ebert approach—complexity to simplicity. It has marked the evolution of Agostini as well—the Italian pils that made an early arrival in Oregon, and the brewers echoed this theme throughout our discussion.
It will also guide them on a forthcoming “modern” pilsner project. With descriptive names like Modern Berry, Modern Citrus, or Modern Floral, they’ll focus on different hops and hop products.
“A big component of the project is trying to embrace modern hop products,” Sam said. “So much is available now, making these concepts more feasible. With a lot of the extracts and concentrated pellets and [so on], it’s such a fun area to explore. We’ll be trying to balance that polyphenol [bitterness] and not making a big grippy, bitey pils. Using a big bunch of Citra in the boil might be too much, but using an even hand of Haas’ Lupomax might help balance that out and still have that Citra component.” In the end, they have to remain pilsners, however. “But we’re trying to absolutely stay away from IPL or any type of intensity.”
At the moment, Von Ebert has as many lagers pouring as IPAs (8), including a helles and Vienna lager and more obscure styles like Grodziskie and Baltic Porter. They’re not mere specialty beers to satisfy the odd lagerhead or brewer who wanders in—they sell well, too. “There's clearly a big market for it,” Sam said, rattling off the lagers that regularly or seasonally appear in their top-five best-sellers.
Back to Teamwork
I left our interview feeling like I’d failed to surface that “one cool trick” that made Von Ebert’s IPAs so stellar. After I transcribed the interview and thought about what Sam, Eric, and Becca had told me, I started to think maybe they had. I’ve had the good fortune to watch mid-sized breweries like Breakside and pFriem up close, and they also take advantage of their large, talented teams.
“I don’t think there’s any one thing that we know that other people don’t know,” Sam said. “But I do think that we concentrate on everything. Process is the most important thing we do, not recipe. It’s getting great raw materials, and being attentive as possible to every tiny little thing. Eric, Jason, myself, Becca, Maddie, the rest of the team—we pay attention to everything.”
They do this functionally by moving brewers back and forth between facilities and making sure they become familiar with every aspect of both brewhouses.
“Originally we divided beers between breweries. We’ve since shifted around. We only have one head brewer now, multiple lead brewers, and we share labor across the breweries a lot. I feel like we’ve evolved into this more cohesive unit where we’re all brewing all of the beers all the time. We now have blending sessions for the mixed-culture beers that everyone’s involved in. It’s less segmented. That’s helped us really dial in the program rather than having one or two people focus on this, one or two people focus on that. Now we have nine people who are very invested in all these things. How do we focus on three completely different things? It’s everybody having a lot of experience [in all three].”
By coincidence, the latest copy of Craft Beer & Brewing was waiting for me when I got home from the interview. The issue theme was Belgian beers, and I thumbed through the reviews at the back of the magazine. One of the highest-rated saisons (a 99) was the collaboration between brewer Maddie McCarthy and her husband, Breakside brewer Matt Kollaja. Sam had pulled out a can during our interview because they’d been so proud of it. (I took that picture above because I agreed.) Oh great, I thought—now I have to start thinking of Von Ebert as a Belgian-style brewery.