Oy

As to the question about what I'm brewing:

Not much, damnit.

Right now I have a small glut of beers that need packaging. Two saisons and a tripel to bottle. A pumpkin ale to keg (NOW!). A wet hop ale shortly. The wet hop one is, I think, the only beer I've brewed this term, unless there was another in the first week before things got hairy. I've just been swamped. I did harvest 3 or 4 weeks ago a big bucket of Cascades from the yard and brewed with them immediately. Looking forward to that one. But a whole bunch of other projects are backed up and I need a week off to catch up with all the yeasties that need food . . . Perhaps next weekend will be the time to straighten things out, on which prospect more soon.

La Rulles + Brown's

Tried two new beers today.

At Nail Creek, I had a La Rulles seasonal (was it called summerfest?). La Rulles is a Belgian brewery about which I know precious little. Their website is charmingly translated, promising that the products will have "Passion, Quality, and Typicity." Good to know. There is no mention of this summer beer on their page or anywhere else I could find, but it's a delicious, quirky beer with very lively, vivid, lemon and pepper notes. I wonder if it's got grains of paradise or something in there. The lemoniness is striking, but not tart. A most enjoyable and offbeat beer. I should blog, before long, about Nail Creek's first batch of their own beer. Had a sample the other day and it was quite good, but I was without pen and paper. It's a big, malty dubbel, not too dark, with an interesting interplay of caramelly malt and a teasing little sourness. More anon.

The evening beer is less promising. Brown's Brewing in Troy, NY produces a whiskey barrel porter and I'm afraid I'm just not a fan. I had previously had one of their beers, at Nail Creek again, a fun, quaffable summer rye ale, or something like that. This porter is all out of whack though. The nose is full of vanilla from the barrels. The trouble is that the beer doesn't follow through. It's awfully light, closer to a deep brown ale than a porter, in my opinion. It'd be really interesting to transplant the whiskey nose onto a porter with some balls, say, Smuttynose Robust Porter. On this beer, it feels out of place. There's little body here at all and a base beer that might be alright on its own winds up feeling thin and mildly acrid. Oh well.

In other news, the brewery is a mess. Too many beers to make and not enough time. Will either brew something in a helter-skelter, messy environment tomorrow or will just keg a couple beers, specifically the Juniper Blonde and a Saison Framboise. Got shit to bottle too.

Still sipping: Seriously. Who the hell whiskey-barrels a light, session porter? It doesn't make sense...

Seriously Old Beer Tasting II

Continuing to thin out or eliminate some old library stocks, reflecting on when I knew what the hell I was doing, when I didn't, what works, what doesn't, why, that sort of thing:

Multi-Grain Saison, brewed 6/16/06: This has been an interesting beer. Seems like it was never the same twice. The final glass is highly pleasant. The notion was to do a Saison in the manner of an early-twentieth-century farmer, who (the books say) would use whatever was handy. I brewed this with pilsner and wheat malts, plus a gruel of spelt, buckwheat, and rye. Lightly hopped and fermented with 565, which worked this time. The result has often reminded me of Brasserie de Blaugies. I forget the names of their different beers, but there's one or two of them that have low original gravities (this one is only 1046) and that are therefore exceptionally delicate and light. This is one of the palest beers I've ever made and it is dry, slightly tart, and crisp with notes of apple and citrus and a touch of cellar funk. I brewed a similar Saison a couple of months ago but, in search of more old-timey authenticity, added the dregs of a brett beer. The brett got a little excited, the beer is a little funky, and I've elected to make it a raspberry Saison as a way to hide some aromatic imperfections I suspected were unlikely to age out. Should be tasty anyway. It's currently resting with the remains of almost four lbs of raspberries in it and will be kegged fairly shortly.

XX Bitter-er, brewed 7/30/05: The name indicates the inspiration. I was obsessed for some time with De Ranke's XX Bitter, a remarkable beer to be sure, though not what it was. Back in the day when they used a mixed culture from Rodenbach, I thought the beer was beyond stunning; with their current, more conservative, less expressive yeast the beer is only damn good. Anyway, long ago, I tried to "clone" it, a dubious notion to begin with. I pitched Roeslare into a super simple, wildly over-hopped, pils-and-sugar wort. The result has been a consistently odd beer, but one that can at times be quite tantalizing. It is so intensely hopped (66 IBU on a 1054 frame) that it's held up beautifully and I've got a couple more bottles, at least one corked. As one would expect, the balance has shifted as the beer has gotten a little more funky and a little less bitter over time. At some point early on it was quite a bit too bitter and that clashed weirdly with the brett aromas and the ultra-lean, dry body. Right now, it has a very exotic brett aroma, rather like the earthy/leathery quality of Orvall, only much more prominent and incorporating more fruitiness. The palate is too thin, as it always has been, with a weirdly astringent pineapply quality. After brewing with brett and with mixed cultures in general for a few more years, I think the way to do this "style" (Wild Belgian pale ale? Orval et al.? Whatever you would call it), would be to ferment with something like a Saison strain and pitch brett later. There's got to be a way to keep the beer a little more stable, a little more balanced. It was also probably stupid to pitch a mixed culture in mid-July, something I don't do anymore. Anyway, XX was a great experiment and it's always been an interesting glass o' beer. I have a pack of Wyeast's special 3789, billed as the mixed culture, more-or-less Orval strain; whenever I smack that, I'll be making something broadly similar to this, though not quite so damned hoppy. Sometime this fall...

Houb-Doublon, brewed 11/11/07: Not nearly as old as the others, but, what the hell? I'm getting ready to brew another IPA tripel and this one went awfully well. I took a pale/pils grist, added about the same proportion of sugar as for my usual Westmalle-style tripel and hopped it in a way inspired loosely by the La Chouffe version: Chinook, Simcoe, Santiam, Saaz, Amarillo. It was a great beer the minute it was conditioned and it's been lovely ever since. Sometimes, to my mind, it's even better than its commercial inspiration. At close to two years old, it still shows pretty vivid hoppiness. The nose blends tripel-y phenols and esters with the dry hopping, which is beginning to fade a bit. This isn't really a problem, is it? The goal in designing a beer like this is to create a flexible balance that will shift elegantly at the beer ages, hence it's more IPA when it's young, more tripel when elderly. Might be different in a commercial setting, but when you're brewing six or more gallons and you're anticipating drinking four of 'em yourself, it makes sense to create a beer that will develop with some panache and keep you guessing. The hops help it age well, avoiding the thinning problem I was talking about yesterday with my more conventional tripel. I think it might keep eight to ten years, honestly. The palate of this one is full, rounded, balanced, but bristling with hops--is there a more distinctive bittering hop than Chinook?

Seriously old beer tasting I

Did some basement cleaning that involved beer reorganization and thought I'd clean out some, in all likelihood, overly aged samples from early batches. Sharing little glasses with Lisa.

My first Belgian-style single, Saint Carlile, brewed 3/13/05: Rocky head with great lace-work. Somewhat over-carbonated. Orange gold (1 lb Biscuit malt? I was specialty-malt crazy early on) with even a slightly oxidized tinge to the color, like sherry. This style is hardly meant to age for 4.5 years, but I tend to leave at least a six-pack of most any Belgian for experimental, super-extended aging and this is the last one. It has an old malt aroma and flavor that older pale beers tend to get. It's an interesting aroma but begins to wear on you after a few sips. Finish still has a bit of hop to it, but is also over-attenuated. R.I.P.

Forbidden Grisette, brewed 7/2/06: Who makes Grisette?? It's a weird style, in so far as definitions are variable and hard to come by. I got interested in them from reading Farmhouse Ales and cooked one up with a Pils/Vienna/Wheat grist, Mt. Hood hops, and the Forbidden Fruit yeast. I've always had a soft spot for this beer. It's quirky, low-alcohol, wildly refreshing. It's aged surprisingly well and there are another four or five bottles kicking around. I think a little bit of lactobacillus got in here at some point and it's one of those rare times when your beer is a trifle infected and you don't mind. You shrug cheerfully and say,"Well, it is an old-timey style that would've been brewed with a mixed culture." It's an immaculately clear bright gold with a lightly fruity, delicately toasty aroma. The nose also hints at a slightly wild tartness and the palate follows through with a crisp, bright, appley acidity. Am I crazy or, back in the late 90's when Hennepin came out, did Ommegang market it as a Grisette? I could swear it said Grisette on the label somewhere, but later somebody wised up and decided Saison was the ascendent style for American cognoscenti. . . These should be drunk with people who like tart-dry beers on some hot day soon, in the unlikely event one should somehow materialize.

Summer Saison, brewed 5/15/05: This was a break-through Saison, one where I started slowly figured out that spicing was largely unnecessary and that specialty malts should be seriously subdued if present at all, a philosophy that subsequent reading of the aforementioned Farmhouse Ales helped crystallize. This one has a little wheat and biscuit, but is otherwise just pilsner malt and simple, subtle, English and Styrian hops, built along the basic parameters of Saison Dupont (in terms of gravity and IBU). White Labs 565 did its job, something I later learned it would not always do, producing an aromatically vivid beer that is also bone-dry (1.003). Visually stunning and beautifully preserved, with some earthy complexity and a surprisingly full palate, this one gets a classy send-off into the great beerafter.

Then there's "Recalitrant" Saison, brewed 6/30/06: So called because 565 decided to mail it in and quit fermenting at 1011. This was just never a good Saison because it was not dry enough. It hit a sweet spot at one point where it was alright, but it was never anywhere great. As a fitting send-off I think the last bottle was contaminated. Mildly tart. So-so aromatics. Good riddance. All hail French Saison, the strain that has rescued us from such attenuative vagaries.

Finally, Take Two Tripel, brewed 4/11/06: At one point, this was a virtual dead-ringer for Westmalle Tripel. It's beginning to be over the hill and I should probably look for excuses to share the last 5 bottles or so in the near future. 18 to 24 months ago it was dry but full-bodied, estery, complex. Now, it's very interesting but fading: Winey, slender bodied, drifting toward cidery.

Note to self: Locate any corked bottles of the above (there's one or two somewhere) and drink 'em up.

Great tasting note

I make a Christmas Porter that's based on an Old British Beers and How to Make Them recipe. Big fleshy creature chock full o' brown malt. . . I gave a well-aged bottle to a (maltophile) friend who seemed to really need a beer a few days ago.

His tasting note:

Last night we enfolded ourselves into a Christmas Porter. It had the malt body and base tones of the humus of an ancient, dark, Beech forest surrounding a peat bog (I could smell the fungi and hear little creatures scuttling around in the leaves) and had the perfect balance of hops and malt. A triumph and deeply appreciated.

Made my morning...

Style-bending: Hoppy Belgian Pale

In search of a really perfect session beer, I may have stumbled into a style experiment with some merit and I'm not sure who else has done so. It's certainly not just me as at least one of my fellow brewers has been nipping around the same problem with notable success... Belgian pale ales are a weird family, codified in the iconic De Konink (if you'll forgive the phrase) and its sweeter, maltier cousin, Palm. I had a Palm in a Brussels cafe last summer and was pleased but not enthused: It's a simple, straightforward, malty beer that could almost pass for English, topped with a pleasant soupcon of spicy/fruity yeastiness. I've heard De Koninck is magic in the Antwerp cafes but I haven't had the pleasure; bottled over here it's OK, but I don't think it travels well. I suppose an account of the style ought also to include the brilliant Rare Vos from Ommegang, a beer that is flat-out perfectly composed, combining the best of a variety of mid-gravity pale and amber Belgians.

So I went looking to brew a Belgian pale sometime in my first year of brewing and have run through a variety of attempts. I've tried grain bills with pale, pils, Vienna, Munich, and some Belgian and German crystal malts in various combinations, simple to elaborate. I've tried yeasts including 1388, Ardennes, Leuven Pale, and Schelde. Originally I kept the hops well in the background, as a Belgian would, and at some point I decided I was sick of them being relegated to that role and I started fantasizing about a beer that would combine the yeast-derived aromatic complexities and soft, pleasant Belgian malt character with a balance that was maybe closer to Sierra Nevada pale ale than De Koninck.

Somehow what I came up with is a hopelessly deviant Belgian pale concept that I've made twice, starting June '08, quite differently each time, but with the same essential parameters: I shoot for a gravity in the mid-50's; I want a malt character that is fully and toasty; I want primarily noble hops or their U.S. derivatives but delicate touches of sharper Pacfic Northwest standards are not out of the question; I'm a sucker for a spicy floral hop over the top (think Tettnang, Halltertau, Mount Hood) as these are hops you don't always get to enjoy on their own merits outside of the broad family of pilsners. The malt character can be gotten with British pale ale malt, touched with Caravienne, or, as in my current version, all-Vienna.

Here's the current one, named "Petit Houblon," indicating that the beer is in some sense a playful, diminuitive cousin of the new IPA-Tripel style:

10 lbs Vienna, mashed at 147
1 lb of table sugar in the boil
Water lightly Burtonized
1.6 oz Willamette, first wort
1.1 oz Amarillo to bitter
.75 oz each, Mt Hood and Amarillo at shut-off
OG 1053; FG 1012
40 IBU or so? (using older hops so there's a little more variance than I'd like...)
Fermented with Belgian Ardennes
Dry-hopped in the keg with Saaz and Tettnang

It comes out that beautiful shade of gold you only get from Vienna. The nose is marked by pronounced hop spiciness (like Pilsner without the lagery aromas) underlain by sweet fruits (one taster identified lychee for instance). The palate blends a bracing, but rounded hop bitterness, complemented by a toasty maltiness that feels fuller than the gravity might indicate (always a good sign in a Belgian ale). I think some version of this beer will be an annual event, brewed sometime from early spring to early summer. It's direct enough that you can knock a couple back playing darts; it's also pretty elegant and you can sit and think about a glass if you want to; better yet, it serves nicely on draft and seems to reinvent itself every couple of weeks.

Brewery Update

Brewing today: Saison with Wyeast's so-called Biere de Garde yeast (by most accounts, actually the Fantome strain and hence for Saison really...) and tweaked with some grains of paradise and biscuit malt.

Kegging today: "Dear Liza" a hoppy pale ale touched with honey,

On draft: "Up a Creek" Kriek; Arbitrary IPA; "Petit Houblon" Hoppy Belgian Pale Ale.

Bottle conditioning: Sanctus (Dubbel)

In fermenters:

Dizzy's Juniper Blonde (next to keg)
Raspberry Saison
Incredibly unpromising stinky lambic
Saison de Cesar (standard saison with French strain)
"Sweaty Pumpkin!" pumpkin ale

Impending projects:

Ardennes strain: Benedictus (Strong Dark) and a new hoppy tripel
Canada Belges strain: Agnus Dei (fruity wheaty tripel)
French strain from Saison above: Faux red-wine barrel-aged, brett-tinged strong Saison
Brett Brux pale ale
Flanders Brown
3789 mixed culture: Some sort of Orval-ish concoction?
Assorted draft staples (Brown ale, wet hop ale, smoked porter)
Ludicrously Overdue Barley Wine (should I name it that?)
Denny's Rye IPA

Less likely but interesting would-be projects: Pumpernickel Ale, Chili Ale, Sticke Alt.
Winter lager projects: Bohemian Pilsner(s), bock(s); Rauchbier is mandatory this year.

You think I have too many Belgian yeasts kicking around?

You think I have too much to do???