Getting Geeky About Craft Beer

Just a few years old, übergeek in Riverhead taps a new market for craft brew. Competition has closed a few Long Island favorites. This brewery has bubbled up a network of support for smaller brands — “rising suds raises all pubs!”

Mash grains. Boil. Extract sugary juice. Add yeast — and boil again. Then, hops. Ferment. Package aged beer.

This is a craft beer making process that übergeek Brewing Company has down to a science.

Tap keg. Pour into glass. Enjoy.

The trick is to experiment, says Rob Raffa, the head brewer and founder of übergeek.

“Anybody can make beer. You do not need a science background,” Raffa says, sitting in his 20-seat tasting room plus bar surrounded by a splash of colorful artwork and more than a dozen beverages on tap. He’s drinking a sour peach ale sporting 6.3% ABV named “i thought you liked to get funky!”

“But if you want to make great beer, you have to really know what you’re doing,” he says. “A lot of the research out there is changing the way that we are currently producing it.”

Much of the action happens in the warehouse behind him. His brewing operation is up to about 31 turns per month, which means he turns over that fresh batch of beer (from mash to glass) about once per day — sometimes twice.

Part of the magic — no, science — comes from the willingness to collaborate with other brewers.

“We’ve become a forum for shared ideas,” Raffa says.

“I think it’s all that we’re doing differently is creating this community that is just getting sharper and sharper with the products that we’re putting out,” he adds. “And with being on the cutting edge of research, I never thought that that would be the driving force for making an actual knowledge hub.”

In the early days, he rented space just down the road at North Fork Brewing Company. In 2021, as production grew, Raffa took over the space he occupies today from the Moustache Brewing Co. tasting room. “My wife especially kept coming down here a month after having a child and helping me flip this place around to open in just one month,” he said.

Raffa was Moustache’s head brewer under owners Matthew and Lauri Spitz. In those days, his palette revolved around hops, which are typically added in the beginning of the brewing process. Mustache added the bitter aromatic buds later in the boil to leverage the hops’s oils to keep the beer fresher, longer lasting, and retain a thick, foamy head. Their operation was about eight turns per month, for eight hours a pop, “if things were really humming,” Raffa said.

Alas, the buzz was over for the handlebar-mustache-sporting brand. In fact, the entire craft brewing industry has “hit a new reality,” says Paul Leone, executive director of the New York State Brewers Association, of which übergeek is a member.

“It’s a real business now. It’s no longer like this is a shiny new toy. Brewers have got to do more than just have a couple of tap lines and a bag of chips,” he says.

Just this year, supply chain issues, higher costs and budding competition has closed — or radically changed — a few Long Island favorites, including the nearby 300-seat brewhouse Peconic County Brewing Company, which shuttered, and Blue Point Brewing Co. in Patchogue, which was purchased by Tilray, a New York City cannabis packaged goods company, from Anheuser-Busch, the brewers of Budweiser and Bud Light. Tilray also acquired Montauk Brewing Company last year.

“It’s certainly a sad story because these folks got into it for the right reason. The margins are small,” Leone says. “And it’s sort of just the natural course of business.”

For Raffa in Riverhead, there are five breweries and a distillery within walking distance — which is “a glass half full” way to look at the competition of being surrounded by the booming winery industry on eastern Long Island. While “rising suds raise all pubs” (a twist on the aphorism “a rising tide lifts all boats”), he says the financial hardships due to the pandemic have shrunk the glass.

“Now there are less mouths to feed, and we still have the same amount of breweries or more just keep coming in,” he says.

“With us being out on the East End, for just supply chain reasons, it makes things expensive,” Raffa adds. “It makes things difficult, things coming in and even things going out.”

Now, with a decade of brewing under his belt and a brand of his own, Raffa has embraced the complexity of zymurgy, the science of fermentation’s biochemical process. In other words, to survive, he has had to get pretty geeky.

“The product itself has so much science behind it, and it’s very easy to just enjoy beer on your couch,” Raffa says. “But when you break it apart, there are so many different aspects to it stylistically, ingredients, composition, hops, and its chemical reactions.”

When Raffa left Moustache in 2018 to start his own brand, he embraced “nomadic brewing,” or making beers at other breweries and distributing them to bars and stores wholesale. “What we ended up doing was proof of concept. And I wish more breweries did that these days instead of going out guns blazing — the market is tumultuous,” Raffa says.

The übergeek brand came later in January 2020. This background prepared him for using his almost 6,000-square-foot space for contract brewing.

In this industry, Leone explains sometimes a microbrewery, which typically produces less than 15,000 barrels per year, can’t keep up with demand, or it wants to expand its operation but doesn’t have the space. “They don’t have to invest in millions of dollars of brewing equipment,” he laughs. “The running joke is if you want to make a million dollars brewing, start with $2 million.”

So they take their recipe to another brewer — that’s where übergeek comes in.

“People used to be able to get 100% of the revenue through retail; that doesn’t work anymore. You need to diversify with wholesale and just other avenues,” Raffa says. “If we were to rely on one of them, it would be impossible.”

Raffa’s larger facility has acted as an incubator for start-up breweries.

“It requires us to do many different practices that we normally wouldn’t have in the first place,” he says. “It also introduces us to some newer things.”

He estimates he brews at least 13% of Long Island craft beer brands, from Saint James Brewery to Two Havens in Smithtown, Kidd Squid in Sag Harbor, and Springs Brewery. According to the State Liquor Authority, which is in charge of licensing, there are about 75 breweries in the region.

It’s backbreaking work to get right, says brewer John Fraioli, who joined the team in April. Often, they start at birdsong by lifting dozens of 50-pound pails of grain through a masher to activate the enzymes necessary to break down the starch in the grain into sugars. The mash is hauled into stainless steel tanks and boiled to create a malty liquid called wort.

“It’s the insanity that keeps me going,” Fraioli says. “It’s the fun craziness.”

In the spirit of trying new things, their newest piece of equipment is a plate filter to guarantee crystal clarity on certain beers, “which normally we’ve just crashed out normally in a tank where we were allowed to just naturally precipitate out.”

This includes the aptly named “... and now for something completely different” — a Mexican lager with low 4.5% ABV that is crisp, clean, and refreshing.

But some beers are enjoyed more hazy, like a flavorful passion fruit, juicy summer IPA called “i thought you liked a challenge.”

India pale ales (IPAs) remain the “champion” for craft breweries, according to the New York State Brewers Association. Raffa admits his masterpiece is “space age times, stone age minds,” an East Coast IPA punching 8.2% ABV with notes of pineapple, mango and citrus.

“I like to dig into a lot of the components that make up our ingredients, and how we can find a way to make them synergistically work better,” Raffa says.

His research brings him to try different kinds of hops and explore strains of yeast that push out more ester, a flavor compound created in fermentation that is responsible for a beer’s fruity flavor.

Raffa says more interest in lagers, which use a different type of yeast than IPAs and take longer to produce, and pilsners (more spiced, hoppier lagers) has diversified what’s on tap. “We are leveraging the natural science behind brewing beer to make wonderful crisp and clean lagers,” he touts.

A rarity in breweries, übergeek is fully vegan, avoiding lactose, honey, or any sugars with bone ash in its own recipes.

Excluding cannabis products, craft brewing is also trending toward low- and no alcohol. Check the shelves of any grocery store and there’s a lot of lightly spiked seltzers, mocktail mixes and several brands of so-called “nonny” beer that taste legit.

“We were in COVID, and people wanted bang for their buck. So for myself, I do like to make higher ABV beers because you can kind of cram more flavor and aroma into them,” says Raffa, who used to be a distiller at Long Island Spirits.

“When we came into the brick-and-mortar here, it caught me off guard because we had all these gigantic beers on tap, but people are coming here to drink and hang out and stay and it became impossible,” he adds.

His tasting room also serves wine, cider, seltzer and nonalcoholic carbonated beverages.

It also makes more sense for a tasting room to serve more beer with lower alcohol content. “The bottom line is breweries today really need to think about themselves in the craft beverage industry, rather than just the brewing industry,” Leone echoes.

Going into the fall generally tends to be the busier season for übergeek, says Jeanne Smith, the tasting room and events manager. “Just with pumpkin and apple picking, people tend to stop by breweries a lot more,” she says.

There’s a beer for that, too: the “i have an issue with the force” pumpkin ale”, which Smith describes as 5.1% ABV and “obligatory” for the fall.

Because they are “kind of hard to find,” tucked three blocks from the Peconic River behind Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County and the railroad tracks, übergeek has partnered with creative types to attract an audience from near and far.

Enter “Geek Talks.” Think TED Talks — featuring scientists, musicians and artists and a crowd of a hundred curious, beer-toting adults. The brewery clears out its entire rustic warehouse space from pallets of cans, kegs, and all of the ingredients for seating and the show. The rows of stainless-steel tanks line the wall. Smith says the lecture series is paired with about two barrels of beer (31 gallons each), wine and cocktails, alongside food trucks.

Other talks serve up a winter warmer beer to raise money for cold-stunned turtles at New York Marine Rescue Center, a furry yoga session with Pints, Poses and Puppies, food and clothing drives for the VFW, Maureen’s Haven homeless shelter and New York Blood Center. They and other brewers also supported a new affordable home in Riverside through Habitat for Humanity dubbed The House Beer Built.

Übergeek’s tasting room is open Wednesday and Thursday from 4 to 8 p.m., Friday from 1 to 8 p.m.,Saturday from noon to 8 p.m. and Sunday from noon to 7 p.m.