“We drink in every stage,” he says while drinking a pint of his latest creation, Father Dave’s Bohemian Pilsner. “That way if something’s wrong we pick it up right away.”
Mozel started out working in the brewery’s kitchen when he first arrived in town the summer of 2006.
“Then one day they asked me if I wanted to brew and I said ‘Yes,’” he says with a grin. “That was in 2007.”
When he made the transition from kitchen to brewery, the company, which opened in 2005, had only brewed 80 batches. “And we’re at 612 now,” says Mozel, noting that one batch makes 780 litres of beer, which equates to 11 kegs or about 1,500 pints. In total, that’s about 918,000 pints of beer brewed right here in Jasper and of those, Mozel is responsible for about 798,000 of them.
Before jumping into the big time with the Jasper Brewing Company, Mozel’s only previous experience was home brewing with his grandfather in his hometown of Lac du Bonnet, Man. So, in the outset, he was trained by Brett Ireland, owner of the brewing company and former brew master. From there, Mozel taught himself everything he needed to know. “It didn’t happen overnight,” he says. “It’s a lot of chemistry, math and imagination.”
And, as it turns out, it’s also a lot of cleaning. “We spend more time cleaning than brewing. Eighty per cent of the job is cleaning,” he says. “Everything has to be sterile and super clean otherwise your beer doesn’t taste good.”
So after every batch, the lautern tun, kettle and fermentors all have to be cleaned.
To clean just one fermentation tank, it takes two and a half hours, as there are three different chemicals that run through it in cycles, each taking about half an hour, and between those cycles there’s a cold rinse. “It’s not all as fun as people think it is,” says Mozel, who also oversees the Banff Avenue Brewing Company and the Wood Buffalo Brewing Company in Fort McMurray.
Although cleaning isn’t the best part of the job, it’s paid off—Mozel has a perfect record. He says he hasn’t “screwed up” a single batch.
