Brewer has unique formula for success

[Jimmy]

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I CALLED the Hart & Thistle at Historic Properties in Halifax the other day looking for Greg Nash. Someone said to try another joint about 10 blocks west. I expected nothing less.

Allow me to explain.

A year or so ago, a friend had started telling me about this guy named Nash — first or last name, no one seemed to know — who made beer unlike any my pal had ever tasted.

This Nash moves around, my buddy told me. One minute he is making suds at some brew pub or brewery. The next, the story goes, he just quits because the owners don’t get him or what he is trying to do. Or because he just can’t stay in one place for long. Or maybe because he’s got a bit of temper.

The people who followed him around didn’t really care what happened. They just knew he had vamoosed, taking his signature “hop bombs” — fresh, flavour-packed brews that taste of whatever he puts in them — until he surfaced God knows where.

They tried to keep track. But the object of their affections seemed to be elusive and peripatetic, which, to my way of thinking, just burnished the legend more.

So when I went looking for him at the Hart & Thistle and discovered that a month ago he became master brewer at the Rockbottom Brewpub, which was about 1½ kilometres closer to my house, well, I smiled for a whole bunch of reasons.

There wasn’t a customer in the place when I arrived in the middle of the afternoon. Just four guys doing a little business in the corner. One of them wears an Allagash Brewing Co. ball cap and a Beer-A-Palooza T-shirt.

But he is no scowling misanthrope. Moreover, he doesn’t seem the least bit enigmatic. When I walk up to him, Nash sticks out a paw and says, “I was expecting you.”

The tone is actually warm. His face creases in a smile.

He’s 47, the grey in his otherwise dark beard offset by the three earrings and the gold chain dangling from his neck. About five-foot-10, he’s got a couple of pounds on him —“Never trust a skinny beer maker, just like never trust a skinny chef” being one of his mottoes. But he’s sturdy, like a man who has made a living working with his hands.

As soon as we enter the “brewhouse,” he begins picking stuff up and moving things around.

“Ninety per cent of this job is cleaning up,” he says.

Nash has a deep voice, a big laugh and a quick mind that he demonstrates with a wonderfully creative use of the F-bomb.

I get the quick tour: the stacked boxes of malt; the vat where the broken-down grain is mixed with heated water so that the enzymes can turn the starches into sugar; and the tub where the liquid is strained to remove the grains.

He shows me the “brew kettle” where the liquid boils.

“This is where you add the hops,” he says. “The longer you brew your hops, the more bitter it becomes.”

He adds a massive dose of hops at the end of the process to make his India Pale Ale-styled “hop bombs.” Then he walks me over to the heat exchanger, where the liquid is cooled fast and piped into the big fermentation tanks where yeast is added.

He lost me a long time ago with his talk of alpha acids, mash and wort. But I can follow what he’s doing today: taking a batch of his Russian Imperial Stout that has a massive 10 per cent alcohol content, throwing in all kinds of fruit and then letting it ferment until Valentine’s Day, when it will go on tap.

“I’ve always been the kind of guy who isn’t afraid to experiment,” he tells me.

“You can take any sort of food substance and infuse the flavours into beer. I’ve made a raspberry chocolate stout. I’ve used bourbon, fresh fruit, tea bags and coffee.”

“When people drink my beer,” he goes on, “I want them to say, Oh my God, that tastes like Nash.’.”

I ask him what he used to drink growing up on the farm in Nappan, Cumberland County, where his parents grew blueberries and Christmas trees and kept cattle and horses, along with a few pigs.

“I’d drink Blue for a couple of months, then try Keith’s for a while, then some Oland’s,” he says. “I didn’t like any of it. “

He started making his own from store-bought beer kits, but he didn’t like that any better. Then one day he walked into an Amherst bookstore and found a copy of The New Complete Joy to Home Brewing, written by a nuclear engineer named Charlie Papazian.

The book almost single-handedly spawned the North American home brewing movement. And it was enough to convince a guy from Nova Scotia who had quit school at 16 that maybe, just maybe, his life had a different purpose than painting cars, cutting meat and life on the farm.

“I knew enough then to get a job brewing beer,” Nash says. “But I wanted my ticket.”

That meant getting his high school equivalency at 31 and then getting into the American Brewers Guild in Davis, Calif., for its master brewer’s class.

He scored a job for three months at the Egan Brewing Co. in Green Bay, Wis., and then made his way slowly back to Canada in his Toyota Paseo. Nash would find some interesting local brewery, land work there for a week or so and then pitch his tent out back.

In other words, he was always a nomad, doing his apprenticeship at his own pace and on his own terms. I ask him if he’s moved around as much as legend has it.

He lists off his job history and lets me draw my own conclusion: the Queen Molly in Yarmouth, back to Wisconsin’s Egan Brewing; the River City Brewing Co. in Winnipeg; the Pump House Brewery in Moncton (twice); and Truro’s Keltic Brewing. For a time, he also installed equipment in breweries throughout New England.

Eventually, he gravitated to Halifax, where he did stints at virtually every craft brewery in the city: John Shippey’s Brewing Co., Propeller Brewing, Garrison Brewing and the Hart & Thistle.

He and a partner dreamed of opening a microbrewery in Burnside Park in Dartmouth, but that never came to pass. So, for now, he’s at the Rockbottom, where it is possible to order a Deadwood Wheat, a Jacktar Stout, a Big Water Brown or a Fathom India Pale Ale that “screams hop flavour and aroma with an amazing candy-like, oily balance” and that, I assume, is the answer to his adherents’ dreams.

He lets me slice open the thawed-out bags of frozen fruit and dump the raspberries, blackberries, blueberries and strawberries into a cauldron. He runs a tube from the tank of Russian Imperial Stout and we watch the canister fill.

“You see some brewers and it’s just a job,” he tells me as we wait. “It’s not that for me. I make a particular kind of fluid in a particular way, and if people don’t like it, we’re not going to get along.”

When it’s done, he grabs a couple of plastic measuring cups, detaches the tubing and lets some of the stout spill into them. Nash hands me one.

“Check that out,” he says.

We touch glasses and then take a drink. I can’t really describe the taste. But, if pressed, I would have to say it could only have one creator and his name is Nash.

(jdemont@herald.ca)

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[GAM]

I thought we were going to keep this quiet!

Sandy

[KMcK]

This article is hilarious, especially if you know Nash and can read between the lines.

[NASH]

[ajcarp]

I think this writer has hit the nail right on the head, it brings a tear to my eye.

I do think he missed some things that round out the picture though;

- The man plays some mean blues licks.

- It is not just beer that Greg believes should be unique and flavorful. He will work to perfect just about any food substance.

In fact I think that he feels the same way about life, again unique and flavorful. Maybe that is why he is never satisfied with the stauts quo.

- If you are looking for someone that knows their way around computer innards, how they work, or not, or any technology issue, again Greg's your man.

- He has great respect and love for his family. I mean the man visits his mother and siblings about 20 times more often than I do. Sorry Mom

Just because,

JLC

[NASH]

Geez are you guys looking for free beer or do you just want cash?

Thanks for the kind words and hope it's going well on the left coast for you guys

[Eagleray]

Great article!

I've been to Rockbottom quite a few times, I need to meet NASH for sure lol

GAM when are we going?

[mr x]

Superbowl beatch!!!

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[GAM]

Great article!

I've been to Rockbottom quite a few times, I need to meet NASH for sure lol

GAM when are we going?

Jason

I go as often as I'm "allowed". A friend and I were there for a late supper last night.

This working for a living, kids and wife all get in the way.

I am on for Super Bowl though, M may drop me if you want a lift.

Sandy