If there’s a pint of beer sitting in front of Doug Checknita, it’s hard for him just to sit down and enjoy it. Chances are he’s going to be thinking about the microorganisms and chemical reactions that helped transform the hops and grains into beer.
“It’s a hard thing to turn off, once you open Pandora’s Box,” Checknita says. “There were a couple of years where I was so deep in it, that people didn’t really like drinking with me. I’d be looking at it and trying to figure out why something tasted the way it did. Now, I have to distinctly separate myself — I’m either having beers or I am thinking about beer.”
Checknita is the head brewer at Blind Enthusiasm’s Monolith, which is devoted to the age-old practice of making “spontaneous and mixed fermentation beer.” But Checknita is more than a beer-maker; he’s fascinated by the science of brewing. There’s a lab on the third floor of the brewery. And, for the last half-decade, he’s worked with the University of Alberta to learn more about the microbiology of spontaneous fermentation in barrels.
And those microbes are creating some of the tastiest beer in the world. This year, Checknita’s creations took home three medals at the Beer World Cup, including a gold for Homage to the Old Ones, which he says is the best batch of brew he’s ever made.
As he got out of high school, Checknita thought he was on the path to become a web developer. But he realized he didn’t want to sit in a chair all day. And, he was naturally curious about, well, everything.
“Everybody who knows me is at least a little bit annoyed by how many questions I ask and how I want to research everything,” he says.
So, a hobby in brewing became an all-consuming passion, and he travelled to the centre of fermented beer culture, Belgium, to work. He spent nearly a year at Cantillon, a Brussels brewery that has made spontaneous fermented beer for generations, using equipment that goes right back to the Industrial Revolution.
At Cantillon, the brewers understood that the ages-old process simply worked. But Checknita is unlocking the “why.” And he’s brought that passion back to his home city.
“In Alberta, there was lots of home brewing, and old wives’ tales. I wanted the quantitative science approach to it.”
This article appears in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue of Edify
