99 Bottles of Beer on the Blog - Stevens Point Burly Brown

Brown ales are an under-appreciated class of beers. They don't get attention because they don't push the extremes. They aren't as hoppy as India Pale Ales, they aren't as dark as porters or stouts, and they aren't as malty as the higher scotch ales. When well-crafted, though, they find that sweet spot, that balance, that makes them truly special.

Stevens Point Burly Brown is, unfortunately, not one of the greats. Pouring a dark copper, the brilliantly clear beer comes in at the light end of the color guidelines for a proper American Brown. The aroma, though, is superb - malty with just a tingle of hops, and a bit of chocolate.

The flavor is surprisingly soft, though. The scent's promise of a rich, malty beer is not fully delivered by the beer itself. Instead, you get a light-bodied, rather bland caramel taste, without the roasty or chocolate notes that add some backbone to a well-made brown ale.

The hops of a typical American brown ale were absent along with the darker malts. While a brown ale should never by dominated by hops, a great one will demonstrate the brewer's ability to use hop bitterness to balance the malt, and hop flavor to add piquant zestiness to the malt. Point's Burly Brown just doesn't go there - a restrained hand with the hops manages to avoid cloying sweetness, but fails to deliver any excitement.

It's not a bad beer at all. I might like it more if it were labeled as an amber ale - it's really a lighter beer in color, taste and body than I expect from a well-made brown. There are certainly better brown ales out there; try Abita Turbo Dog or Moose Drool.

Yes, We Have No Bananas - Hefe-Weizen on the Way

I know what I want to brew. It's pale yellow and cloudy, with a billowing, long-lasting head. It smells of bread and cloves and bananas. It tastes kind of tart, with the banana and clove flavors brought into balance by the fuller, grainy flavor of malted wheat. It's a summer beer enlivened by bright carbonation and refreshingly acidic fruit flavors, and made richer by the hazy protein of the wheat and vitamin-rich yeast.

That's what I'll be shooting for tomorrow morning when I fire up the mash tun and brew kettle. Whether I will hit the mark remains to be seen.

First off, I should mention that there are no bananas, cloves or other secret ingredients in a hefe-weizen. The uniqueness of a great weissbier doesn't come from sleight of hand by the brewer, or complicated formulas. It's just malt, water, a touch of hops, and the yeast - especially the yeast.

Such a complex beer comes from a simple grain bill. 10 pounds of German pils malt and 10 pounds of german malted wheat. No roasted grains, no caramel malts, no honey or sugars.

And the hops are simple, too - I'll be using two ounces of Hallertau Mittelfruh hops, tossed in at the 45 minute mark, just to add a touch of bitterness without adding much flavor at all.

Even my mashing schedule will be simple - soak all the malt for an hour at around 152 degrees, allowing the amino acids in the malt kernels to do their work of breaking down the carbohydrates in the grain into fermentable sugars. Then drain the water and rinse the grains, gathering the resulting "beer juice" into a kettle for boiling.

After it's boiled, I cool it down to around 70 degrees (I would like it to get a bit cooler, but that's tough to do in KC during the summer), and add the yeast. The yeast is a special variety bred for this kind of beer - I'll be using Wyeast Lab's Weihenstephan Weizen™ strain, which ought to produce all those flavors I described earlier while they go about their business eating sugar and converting it into CO2 and alcohol.

So much simplicity for such a complex beer. People can't even agree on what to call it. Some call it a weissbier. Some call it weizen. When the yeast is not filtered out, it is known as a hefe-weizen. Some call it simply a Bavarian Wheat Beer. Some people toss a slice of orange into it, some people call for lemon, and some people want to enjoy the beer's complexity without the added fruit.

I know what I want to brew, and I have a good recipe. From here on, it's up to my skill as a brewer and a bit of luck.

Acquiring Self Knowledge

I told myself when I submitted a couple of my beers to the Regional Homebrew Contest last weekend that I was doing so because I wanted good, informed feedback from experienced judges so that I could improve my brewing. Now, having seen the list of winners without my name on it, I realize that what I really wanted was effusive praise and gold medals.

Tapping the Keg!

Regular readers will recall that I won the opportunity to have a full batch of my beer brewed at 75th Street Brewery. It now appears to be ready for prime time - they'll be serving "Triple Sugar Tripel" beginning on Monday, December 29th. Yes, I'm working on putting together some kind of party for that evening, and I'll post details here when I work them out.

I haven't sampled the beer, and we made a few significant changes to my 10 gallon recipe in the process of scaling it up to 200+ gallons, so I'm relying a bit on guesswork to predict how it will taste. The last time I saw this beer it was nothing more than sweet, tea colored water being pumped from the boiling kettle through the chiller and into a fermentation vessel where it would meet up with the special Belgian yeast that does all the work.

I expect that this beer will be the color of medium-strong tea, with a subdued but long-lasting head. The aroma will probably be honey mixed with just a suggestion of hops. The flavor will be sweet, with a strong note of honey flavor, followed by all the esters thrown off by the 75th Street Brewery's Belgian strain of yeast. Those esters will add a fruity, spicy taste to the beer, which I hope will combine with the honey to create a sweet, warming beer that will stand up to rich holiday meals and accompany traditional holiday desserts. At 9% alcohol, it will be a strong sipping beer. My hope is that the sweetness will make it appealing to those who think all craft beer is dark, hoppy and bitter, while the Belgian complexity of the beer will appeal to the beer snobs. It's not really a Belgian Tripel, because those ales focus more on the yeast characteristics than on the sugar, and it's a little dark for the style. Go here for a good article on the tripel style.

In light of the monkish lineage of this beer, it seems appropriate to use the occasion of its tapping to support a good religious cause here in Kansas City. While I'm still working out exactly how it's going to work, I'll make certain that samplers of the beer will have some opportunity to voluntarily support the Central City School Fund, which helps four wonderful Catholic elementary schools in the Old Northeast and the Westside give kids a great education.

Stay posted for more info on the party and the beer.

Beer Update - Mid-December at 75th Street

I dropped by the 75th Street Brewery this weekend to check on the progress of the beer I brewed back in October, and they had just transferred it to the conditioning tanks. It's clocking in at around 9% ABV, with a finishing gravity of around 1.020, which means it will be on the sweet side, but plenty warming.

The conditioning tanks are cooled, so the yeast go dormant. That means the fermentation is over, and conditioning will allow the flavors of the beer to mellow and deepen. It's kind of like how stew or chili tastes better the second day - beer needs a little time to mature before it's at its best. Indeed, the term "lager" is rooted in the German for "lay down" because they would store their beers in icy caves for summer drinking. While my beer is an ale, the principle is the same.

I will post here when the release date is imminent.

In the meantime, go try 75th Street's Nitro Porter. Brewed with a hefty dose of espresso beans, the Porter is dark, rich and awesome.

Beer Update

Saturday is teach-a-friend to homebrew day. I'm going to be firing up the equipment around 9:00, and making 10 gallons of Porter. We'll be converting 20 pounds of grain, 3 ounces of hops, a little bit of yeast and a whole lot of water into something that should taste something like Samuel Smith's Taddy Porter. Drop me an email if you want to learn how to brew. We should be finished in the early afternoon.

Brewing at 75th Street!

Friday was my opportunity to show up at 75th Street and recreate my little homebrew recipe on a grand scale - 200+ gallons of a strong Belgian specialty ale. It should be ready in approximately a month - I will certainly notify readers of this blog when it is available.

The recipe that won the 75th Street Homebrew contest was my attempt at playing with some of the Belgian guidelines. Belgians make the best beer in the world, and they are ceaselessly creative. Inspired by a book I read on Belgian brewing (Brew Like a Monk), I had set out to create a beer that resembled a Belgian Tripel in terms of color and strength, but which retained a flavor of honey. Belgians often use sugars in their stronger beers, to avoid the thick mouthfeel of an all-malt beer of similar strength. While a great doppelbock will feel thick and viscous in your mouth (like drinking a loaf of bread), a great tripel will be more drinkable - the Belgians use a term translating to "digestibility". When i brewed it, it came out a little darker than intended, but it was an easy-to-drink strong ale with a honey aftertaste).

In scaling up the brew to the larger equipment at 75th Street, I worked with Nick and Chris (their two brewers) to come up with a recipe including a quarter ton of malted barley, 25 pounds of honey, and 50 pounds of dark brown sugar. We used their normal hops (hop flavor and aroma are not a big feature of this beer). Here is a picture of the crushed malt and water being added to the mash tun, where the starches in the malt convert into sugar.

After the sugar conversion was complete, we recirculated the resulting liquid (wort) until it ran clear, using a pump to draw it from the bottom of the tank and putting it into the top of the tank. The malt husks act as a natural filter, to eliminate stuff that would cloud the beer. After it ran clear, we pumped it over to the brew kettle, and added water which had rinsed through the grain, absorbing all that malty sugar.

The brew kettle is steam heated, and brought the wort up to a good boil. We added pelletized hops to bring an appropriate level of bitterness to keep the beer from being too sweet. Balance is the goal.

Not long before the boil was finished, we added the honey and the brown sugar to the kettle. The late addition was an improvement on my recipe by the brewers at 75th Street - I had added my sugars at the beginning of the boil, but they wisely pointed out that the earlier addition would allow the flavor compounds in the sugars to be boiled away, and that the increased sugar in the boiling kettle throughout the 90 minute boil would increase the darkening of the wort through caramelization.

After the boil was done, we ran the beer through a heat exchanger to cool it, and pumped it into a waiting tank that already had the 75th Street house strain of Belgian yeast waiting for it. I dropped by the brewery on Saturday, and it was fermenting away, as it will for a couple weeks, after which it will condition (mellow) for a couple weeks before being served.

After the brew kettle had finished its work, the brewers outfitted me with a pair of rubber gloves, a pail of cleaning solution and a green scrubbing pad, and directed me on how to climb in through the hatch of the brew kettle to scrub it out. I truly thought they were joking, as the hatch did not look particularly big, and some of the other vessels are cleaned through chemicals and soaking rather than elbow grease. So, I kind of laughed it off, until I realized that they weren't just hazing the homebrewer. The next time you go into 75th Street, check out the hatch and you'll understand what a feat of gymnastics and force it was to jam myself into the kettle.

It was a great day - commercial brewing is similar in most ways to homebrewing in terms of process, but the quantities and techniques are more sophisticated. My trusty tin pan won't get the job done in transferring water to soak through the grain - pumps are used for everything.

But, as always, the real work of brewing is not done by machines or humans. As I write this, tiny yeast cells are chomping away at the sugars in the wort we created, creating alcohol and CO2. In a few weeks, we'll put it on tap and serve it up. I hope and believe it will be a great beer, but we won't really know until it's ready to drink.

Another Brew Day

Is anybody interested in learning how to create beer out of malted barley, water, yeast and hops? Is anybody interested in spending a few hours drinking beer and playing with propane fires? If you are, email me (dan@gonemild.com) and block out Saturday morning/early afternoon, November 1, on your calendar.

If you want to know what's involved before you dash off an email, here's my description of the process.

I haven't decided what to make - a recent hard drive crash erased most of my brewing records, so I'll be creating something new. Maybe, since it is the Saturday before the election, I'll brew ObamAle - something a little darker, a little stronger, and a whole lot better than what America has been served for the past 8 years.

99 Bottles of Beer on the Blog - Mac's Beer

So far in this series, I've only reviewed beers that I've really enjoyed. I've hoped to turn readers on to a few of the many fantastic beers out there that they might not have tasted, and might not get around to tasting.

Tonight, though, I'm hoping to save you all from a bad experience. Mac's Beer, a new "American Style Beer" contract brewed by Flying Monkey for EME Squared Brewing, is one of the worst beers I've tasted in years. There are lots of bad beers in the world, but this one distinguishes itself with its awful taste.

American Style Lagers are not easy to make. Because they are so light, there is no room for error. If you ferment a porter a few degrees too warm, or if your brown ale has a touch too much hop flavor, the sheer amount of other flavor will cover up the sin. With a beer that is aiming at delivering nothing but lightness and refreshment, though, every flaw is exposed.

I'm not one of those beer snobs who detests American lagers. There are times when a Budweiser hits the spot, and I have fond memories of the hop bitterness and tang of Schlitz. A good, crisp, cold American Lager can be a wonderful beer, though it won't have the depths of flavor and nuances of a Belgian ale.

Mac's is a bad American lager. It lacks the clean crispness of the good ones. Instead, it is heavy with a bready malt sweetness, and lacks the balance of hop bitterness that could rescue it from insipidness.

The aroma from the beer is cooked corn, indicating the presence of DMS (Dimethyl Sulfide). It's a common flaw in light beers, but can be avoided with cautious brewing and an open boil. The cooked corn shows up in the flavor, as well, weighing it down and converting what should be a delicate, light flavor into a heavy, vegetal one.

Many brewers consider American lager to be crap beer, and much of it is. Oddly enough, though, this least-favorite style requires more care and talent to make successfully than any other. Flying Monkey Brewery has made some pretty decent ales, but Mac's Beer shows that it is not ready to run with the big monkeys.

(Update, 8/28: If anybody wants the remainder of the 12 pack, email me at dan@gonemild.com.)

99 Bottles of Beer on the Blog - Unibroue 16

Unibroue is a great brewery, producing top-quality Belgian-style beers from their brewery in Quebec. Their beers are not slavish recreations of any other beer - instead, they are as boldly conceived and richly executed as the finest of the Belgian brewers. They capture the spirit of Belgian beer as much as the flavor.

Unibroue 16 is a Belgian Strong Ale, probably best categorized as a Tripel. "16" is a special beer brewed for the 16th anniversary of the brewery. It is a golden/orangish color, and has a foamy head that settles fairly quickly into a light covering of tiny bubbles. The nose is surprisingly light for a beer that jumps into your mouth with a shout of esters, pepper, alcohol warmth and a bubble-gummy flavor from the characteristic Belgian yeasts.

Weighing in at 10% alcohol, this is a big beer, but it is subtle. The alcohol doesn't burn, and is concealed behind the malty taste and the yeast flavors. The hops do not contribute to flavor, but provide the bitterness to keep the beer balanced instead of cloying.

This is definitely a beer for beer snobs. If you're not expecting the estery flavors of a Belgian tripel, you're going to think you got a bad bottle, but, if you're looking for a solid interpretation of the Belgian Tripel style, you'll enjoy toasting 16 years of outstanding brewing at Unibroue.