421: Gabriel Dulong Is Fermenting a Culture of Innovation at Quebec Craft Stalwart Boréale

There was a time in Boréale’s not-so-distant past when they might have released a new beer every other year. The brewery is one of Quebec’s oldest craft breweries, dating back to the late 1980s, and over its history it has seen waves and trends come and go. But the changing dynamics of craft brewing in the 2010s posed a different kind of challenge that required a new way to approach innovation and risk-taking. Then head brewer, now vice president of innovation, Gabriel “Gab” Dulong played a big part in that adjustment, getting the brewery into the unfolding world of production-scale hazy IPA in 2016, then pushing hard into nonalcoholic NA beer through the pandemic. Today, the brewery remains one of the largest craft breweries in Quebec—and only in Quebec—producing about 100,000 barrels of beer per year. But innovation is now core to their DNA.

In this episode, Dulong discusses:

• helping an established brewery transition to the market realities of the past decade
• reorienting to sell on quality and ingredients instead of price point
• building a new approach to cold-chain storage to properly distribute hazy IPA in Quebec
• generating internal knowledge in NA brewing
• developing style-dependent processes for different NA beers
• experimenting with specialized yeasts before settling on tight processes with standard brewing yeasts
• building mouthfeel and intensity without alcohol in beer
• hopping with modern hop products in NA beer
• malt selection for hazy IPA
• manipulating final gravity for NA versions of core brands
  

And more.

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