A lot of the history of brewing is the history of regulatory headaches,” says brewer John Laffler of Off Color. It’s a legacy that continues today: Laffler faced bureaucratic setbacks while brewing QingMing, a collaboration beer with the Field Museum inspired by brewing techniques and ingredients from ancient China. For example, because there’s evidence that hemp was used as a filtration mechanism, Off Color was planning to replicate the technique. “We talked to the feds and they were like, ‘If you get this documentation that all these hemp seeds don’t have any THC [you can do it],’ ” Laffler says. But the supplier of the seeds dragged its feet on responding, and by the time Off Color got the approval it was too late, Laffler says. “We said screw it. We substituted alfalfa.”
Koji is not, however, particularly common in brewing. For this reason, Laffler says, fermenting the rice was the hardest part of the process from a technical standpoint. “I started making it in my little apartment. You basically cook rice, add the mold spores—we cooked rice 24 different ways before figuring it out. It was a lot of playing around with my little Instapot trying to figure out the right measurements, time periods [for fermentation].” Then there was the process of scaling up to making 200 pounds of koji at a time. “Fortunately we have a culinary steam generator we use to sterilize our kegs,” Laffler says. “We were able to repurpose that with tubing and some ingenuity to make a large rice steamer.”
