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>>> My name's Jason Ryan.

I'm the head brewer here at the Hofbrauhaus House in Columbus.

I actually started brewing many years ago was probably close to 15 years just making it and my one bedroom apartment and fell in love with the hobby.

Couldn't pass up the opportunity to work for such a big brewery.

The purity law, 1516 states that you can only use water pumps and yeast in our beer.

And we do abide by that.

Going as far as even CO2.

So all of our beers are naturally carbonated by the yeast itself and the CO2 it produces.

So part of my job is to make sure that those four things are the only thing in your beer.

We actually source as much as we can from Germany.

All of our malt comes from Hamburg, Germany, from a company named Byermen.

All of our hops that we use here are from Germany.

The yeast is propagated in the US, but it's a strain that originated from Munich.

Occasionally we'll do specialty batches with some western hops, but I'd say 99% of what we're using is from Germany, especially in our main flagship beers.

[ Music ] Lagar.

You can ask anyone here laggers what I drink 90% of the time.

I always call it the beer drinkers beer or beer-flavored beer.

You can't go wrong.

It's clean.

It's crisp.

It's not too hoppy, not too malty, not too sweet.

Nice even.

5 to 5.2% malt sweetness balanced by a nice floral hop back note.

No finishes clean.

It makes you want to drink more.

Which is good to a point.

The dunkel.

So that one has our roasted malts in it that's much darker.

It looks more robust than it tastes.

So even though it's got a nice dark brown color, it's got just caramel notes and then that's a little bit sweeter, but not like cloyingly sweet.

You get toasted nut flavor.

And we have a lot of diehard stein masters that are big lovers of the Dunkel.

The Hefeweizen is a fun one that uses wheat malt.

So the purity law does state that in your lagers you'll have to have malted barley.

But in your ales, if you're using an ale strain of yeast, you can actually use wheat and rye malt as well.

So it has about 51% wheat malt and and that kind of gives it a nice full body.

And then we use our house ale strain, which gives it a nice banana, clove aromatic.

So we don't filter it.

So it's typically cloudy, yellow, honey-colored.

We don't filter it to keep the yeast that created all that wonderful banana clove flavor in it.

Well, I feel like I can't not mention Octoberfest.

[ Music ] Oktoberfest, the big one.

So that one we actually import directly from Munich.

There's some laws in Germany that require that Oktoberfest actually be brewed in Munich.

Otherwise you're a fest beer or fest style beer.

We stay true to that and we have it all imported.

Whole bunch of kegs come rolling in and we come from into one of our tanks and we serve it straight out of that.

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My personal favorite seasonal.

Probably going to be our Marzen in March.

That one's similar in style to like a fest beer, but it's got a little bit more of like a mellow biscuit flavor or a sweetness that I really enjoy.

It's kind of like lager with a little bit of hint of caramel in there.

That's just enough to really make it really enjoyable.

Fest beer is a fun one.

A lot of people call it the American-style Octoberfest, but it's actually more of a historic version of the Octoberfest.

So Octoberfest used to be amber in color until the technology advanced to the point where they found ways to mold the Munich malts in such a way where they could get the sweetness of Munich malts without the amber color.

So they started brewing Golden Color Octoberfest, and those got extremely popular.

So now that's what they brew in Munich and that's what we get here.

But the fest beer is was like the old version of the Octoberfest.

And that's kind of what got brought to the U.S. and got widespread.

So that's why in the U.S. we now have mostly amber Octoberfests.

Whereas in Munich, you see a lot of them brewing, more golden ones.

Here at the Hofbrauhaus House ours is a nice golden hue and it's delicious.

>>> We have our Master brewer here this evening.

>>> You can have just about any degree under the sun, and it's somehow relevant to brewing beer.

You have chemistry, Biochemistry, you have mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, all the motors.

There's just so much science behind it that it's hard not to love.

If you're the kind of person that loves to dabble in all sorts of different things and figure things out.

My favorite part is honestly seeing people enjoy the beer.

It's awesome to be a part of something where coming on a Saturday, the beer haus, everyone's having a good time.

People are prosting each other and everyone's just happy with their friends, happy with each other and having a good time.

And it's awesome that something like beer can kind of bring everyone together in that way.