Barlow Brewing

Here is yet another Founders review, because they just came to Virginia and I am like a kid in a candy shop. Well, a candy shop that only sells beer. And, of course, I’m not a kid and I’m old enough to drink. You know what I mean.

The Founders Cerise is a fruit beer flavored with cherries. That kind of statement usually sends beer drinkers in several directions. I’ll give you a moment. Ready? OK.

If you are the kind of drinker who cringes when you hear about fruit being added to beer, I feel you. I love fruit lambics, and I’ve brewed a few fruit beers in my time (mostly stouts and sour ales), but it is rare that I taste a fruit beer that I want to try again.

The story behind this brew is that they used to make a beer called Rubaeus, which was brewed with raspberries. That has been replaced with Cerise due to the rising cost of raspberries, and to support the farmers of their home state, since the majority of tart cherries sold in the U.S. are from Michigan.

This beer is 15 IBUs and 6.5% alcohol. The color of the Cerise is candy red, but not translucent. Like a dull Kool-Aid red that stains the lips of little kids. The head is thin and light pink in color.

The aroma is tart cherry. There is a back note of acidity, too.

The flavor? This beer has a liquor sweetness to it. It is almost as if someone cracked open a case of chocolate covered cherries and drained the contents into a glass and then threw away the chocolate. There is tons of cherry flavor and cherry skins. The cherries are supposedly added during five different times during fermentation, and there is isn’t a drop of this beer that isn’t riddled with red fruit.

This is a very well crafted beer. It has to be, because the sweetness of the fruit could have quickly over powered this one and turned it into a mosh pit of sweetness. But this has a backbone of light bitterness that keeps this one from becoming too cloying. I’m sure the multiple fruit additions are the secret behind this.

In the end, this one was hard to finish. It just isn’t my thing, but I might try it again with the right food pairing. It might be amazing with a dark, chocolate cake.

So the Founders lovefest ends here. It had to happen eventually, and I had a feeling this would be the dud for me.

It would be interesting to see Founders sour this one up. Dump with one in oak barrels with some brettanomyces, and I’ll be your Huckleberry.

Yet more of the Founders lovefest here, and this time I’m digging into their porter. It is an American Porter weighing in at 45 IBUs and 6.5% alcohol. The label says “Dark, Rich and Sexy.”

It pours a pitch black with no highlights. The head is moderate and the color of an oatmeal cookie. The aroma is a wealth of roast, coffee and some brown sugar. There is some sweetness beyond the sugar, too, like baked cookies. (There is a cookie theme at play here….)

The taste of this porter follows the burnt sweetness of the aroma. The mouthfeel is full and creamy. Bitterness is there but not a hop bitter, but rather in the form of a burnt roastiness. I think it straddles the line between a stout and a porter, and both styles should be happy to try and claim it. As it warms towards the bottom of the glass, this beer is full of sweet baking cookie flavors and, at the end, chocolate. Not the sweet syrup kind, but rather a cocoa powder.

This is a very full and complex beer and it would make an awesome after dinner beer, and could complement many deserts. I really enjoyed the Founders Porter, but I cannot imagine having more than one in a single sitting.

It is dark, rich and sexy, and hopefully in Virginia to stay.

There was a landslide of pictures and tweets coming out of the Craft Brewers Conference in Boston last week. It is an industry event aimed at breweries and brewpubs, but that didn’t make me any less jealous to hear about the brewers in attendance and unusual beers being poured.

Greg Koch, the CEO of Stone Brewing Inc. , gave the opening keynote speech during which he played his “I am a Craft Brewer” video. (If you haven’t seen this toast, do yourself a favor and watch it. It is everything that is right with the craft beer movement.) This was a feel good event that, despite the recession, has every reason to be positive. During 2008, 56 microbreweries were opened and 10 closed. That is good news, but considering the timing of the US economic downturn, I imagine it only captured a portion of the closings. I’m sure Q1 of 2009 will not be quite as wonderful with all the breweries that limped through the holidays only to see the economy turn even worse.

Quality was still on the minds of the craft industry as a differentiator from the macro breweries, and Koch threw out this piece of genius during the address, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. That’s not our market.” He correctly pointed out later that craft brewer creativity goes into their brew kettles, while macro brewer creativity goes into marketing campaigns. The truth hurts.

Another theme he hit upon is calling craft brewers “locavores”. Locavores are essentially people who only eat food grown or produced within a 100 mile radius of their home. I’d like to hear what exactly he said because this is a pretty loose and elastic term despite being the New Oxford American Dictionary’s Word of the Year for 2007. Clearly he is referring to the craft brewers as production locavores, or the supply side of this equation.

I think the metaphor of the locavore is interesting and iconic.

Quality control and consistency is the cornerstone of manufacturing, and macros want everyone in the world to be drinking the same exact beer with different marketing-driven labels. If you want to be part of the crowd, stick with their beers.

Meanwhile, the tomato you get from your garden, or at the farmer’s market, is different than the ones set by rail across the country being pumped with ethylene. It just tastes better, and it is not the same weight, shape and size of all the other ones in the cheap, mass-produced bin.

These products do intersect at the grocery store. The vegetables are segregated in bins for the regular tomatoes and bins for the organic ones. In the same way, you see a 6-pack of Stone’s Pale Ale sitting just down the row from the PBR.

I think consumers “get” the positive effects of personality in locavore products. There is a uniqueness to each handcrafted ale. It is full of the local techniques and it is full of the brewer’s personality. And I’d hate to a craft brewer go broke just because what he makes is different and challenges the American public a little more than they are used to. But that is the game at play until consumers care more about the food and drinks they buy.

While sifting through the galaxy for amino acids, astronomers found ethyl formate, which is the chief chemical responsible for the flavor of raspberries, in a giant dust cloud at the heart of the Milky Way. (Go to the Guardian UK to read more about the Galaxy’s centre tastes of raspberries and smells of rum)

I’m fairly certain I that I’ve never thought about exactly what the galaxy would taste like before. I’m sure if I did, it wouldn’t be so…..nice. I would have imagined it being more like putting your tongue on a metal screen door as a kid, or sucking on a rock.

This is much nicer than I hadn’t imagined.

I cannot wait to say that the next raspberry flavored beer or framboise I drink tastes like the “galaxy”. Such an obscure descriptor should be a signal for my beating.

Occasionally, I’ll try to throw out a review of a beer I’ve had on draft, or while out and about. Sure, I’m a dork and take notes while I’m trying a beer, but it is harder to do so if you are out with the family or a couple of sheets into a long night. These will be quick reviews.

I found this one on draft at Timberwood last weekend. I was sitting down to an enchilada plate and had prepared to order an IPA to go with it, but I couldn’t pass up the chance to try this one despite the fact that a saison was not all that complimentary to the meal.

The New Holland Golden Cap Saison poured a golden amber with a medium white head. The aroma was made up of soft notes of coriander and spice. The first sip was lemon and more coriander with a touch of honey. The body was on the thin side, but that is to style and it made this one even more drinkable. The dry finish left me wanting more.

A very nice sessionable saison. Well, a much as you can session a 7% beer. This is just as nice a summer sipper as Bell’s Oberon. That is very high, although calendar specific, praise.

I’m impressed, and I’m psyched to get my saison brewing later this spring.

…until the f’ing keggle is done.

I bought an old keg from Starr Hill last year, and I still haven’t gotten the top cut off and the nipples welded on in order to turn it into a brewing pot (or keggle). I’ve ordered the parts and hopefully I will get this done next week.

I currently brew with a 7 gallon aluminum pot, which has been OK for many years, but it doesn’t give me a lot room for error when brewing a 5.5 gallon batch, and it doesn’t have a spigot so I’m always having to lift the pot up or siphon to get the wort out of it. The conversion of the keggle will give me a 15 gallon pot, the ability to simply pour the wort out, I can weld a thermometer permanently into the side of the keggle, and I’ll have just about everything except for the March pump to make a whirlpool chiller later in the year.

We’ll see what difference the keggle will make to my batches. Changing an element in your brewing set-up can cause some profound changes in the final beer. I expect that the evaporation rate will be higher from the boil, and I will have to sparge longer than usual in order to have the volume to lose. But that might bump up my efficiency, too.

We will see, but I had to drawn a line in the sand. And if I *can’t* brew until the keggle is done, then it will get done. Soon.

If it has been a warm and rainy April, you need to check up on your hop plants.

Otherwise you walk outside one day to see this:

Those are my Nugget hops. I’ve had them for at least 7 years, and they come up each season without fail and with a vengeance. They look out of control, but it’ll only take me a few minutes to run the trellis strings back down to the ground, cut these shoots back to a few strong vines, and to train them up the first foot or so of string. Later on, I’ll add some more mulch, and then I’ll plant the marigolds around the trellis to ward off insects. I’ve had these hops so long, they barely need me. If they could, they’d probably push me away like a surly two year old until harvest time. Unless I had the hose with me, of course.

The interesting ones are the Cascade hops:

As you can see, they are running behind, which is fine because they are second year hops. I will finally get some cones from them this summer since they had all last year to establish their root system. I’ll have to compare and contrast to two hops as the spring turns into summer…..

I’m scheming the next two batches, and I’m circling around a hoppy IPA and sour ale.

IPAs used to live in my wheelhouse. That was the one style I could nail all the time and every time. But the last two I’ve made just haven’t lived up to my expectations. That shit needs to change right freaking now.

This IPA is will be a hoppy affair. Hoptimization at its best. Jamil recently a did show where they were cloning Green Flash’s West Coast IPA. I’m looking that over and I might riff off that and make something along those lines. Maybe tweak the color a little. Maybe lead a bit more with simcoe.

Sour ales take forever to mature (I feel a name coming out of that. Maybe a Peter Pan reference….), so I just need to get that going so I can leave it alone and let it age. I’m thinking about a big sour like a Flanders Brown/oud bruin and then aging it on French wood that has been soaked in a darker wine. This is a good time to be thinking about it, too, since Wyeast is busting out the Brett strains from April to June. They are releasing Roeselare (the Godzilla of brettanomyces), their Trappist blend (an Orval strain) and the brettanomyces claussenii (low-intensity brett. character cultured from English stock ales.)

After that……I’m not sure. Definitely a saison, but those are best brewed warm (80+ degrees) and I will let the warmth of the summer help me with that. I’ve talked about making an Premium American Lager, too. Despite the fact I really, really dislike almost all commercial examples of that, I want to do it just for the difficulty of it. Honestly, brewing something like that seems *less* insane to me than the Coconut Curry Hefe.

Welcome to my world.

“So this is the strangest beer I’ve schemed up this year. It will either be pretty remarkable or completely undrinkable.” – me, talking about my Coconut Curry Hefeweizen

Well, I was wrong in the above statement because, right now it, is both. Nine days into this beer’s life, and it is very cool and interesting AND impossible to drink.  This one shouldn’t be served in a pint glass or a brandy snifter, but it might be wonderful in a deep bowl over a heaping scoop of rice and some tofu.

I’ve worked with spices enough to know that this will fade but not to the degree it needs to.  This was a small 2.5 gallon batch, like all my crazy experiments are, and that is good for two reasons:  1) If things doesn’t work out, it is not as painful to dump out and it didn’t cost as much as a full batch.  2) If it needs to be diluted, I can brew a second 2.5 gallon batch without spices and blend the two. 

I will be doing #2, but #1 is still a option down the road

The silver lining on this is that the batch might be fine after blending, and oak-aged English pale I brewed on the same day tastes amazing so far.

I’m going to have to revisit the beers of Stone Brewing.

I was a big fan of Stone from the start.  The first beer of theirs I tried was the Arrogant Bastard. (I’ve got an old Arrogant Bastard t-shirt that I used to wear A LOT.  In retrospect, me wearing that shirt might have been a bit redundant.)   It was a really big, malty beer and it came in a big bomber bottle.  The marketing silk screened on the bottle was amazing:

“This is an aggressive beer.  You probably won’t like it.  It is quite doubtful that you have the taste or sophistication to be able to appreciate an ale of this quality and depth.  We would suggest that you stick to safer and more familiar territory – maybe something with a multi-million dollar as campaign aimed at convincing you it’s made in a little brewery, or one that implies that their tasteless fizzy yellow beer will give you more sex appeal.  Perhaps you think multi-million dollar ad campaigns make a beer taste better.  Perhaps you’re mouthing your words as you read this. ” – Arrogant Bastard Ale

I’m older and a little more jaded, but I think I would have loved anything that was in THAT bottle with THAT attitude back then.  As it turns out, it was a good beer, too.  Since that time, I’ve tried just about every beer of theirs that makes it out to the east coast. Most of it good, but almost all of it stepping just a little over the line into overwhelming. 

I really want to love Stone, but their beers are a little too big, a little too sweet, and they depth charge your palate for the evening.  These are bumblebee beers.  Their bodies are way too big for their wings, but somehow they still fly. 

I’ve collected a few of their Vertical Epics and seasonals, and I’ve laid them down to cellar and mellow, but I’ve largely ignored Stone over the last few years because they felt like extremely good one-trick-ponies.  But then I came across their Levitation Ale.

Levitation is a session ale from Stone (4.4% alcohol), which feels like an oxymoron, so I had to pick up a six pack.  Since this a low alcohol (lower original and final gravity beer), the Levitation name is obviously a play on that, and it is categorized as an American Amber Ale hopped with columbus, amarillo, simcoe and crystal hops.

This one starts out with a solid hop aroma.  The simcoe is center stage with a nice, clean pine smell, and the citrus of the amarillo and spice of the crystal are the back drop.  The beer is a deep ruby with light red highlights.  The head is wispy, but persistent.  The body is thin and approaching the gravity of water, but I’m not viewing that as a bad attribute.  That comes with making a session beer.

The taste follows the aroma to a diminished degree.  It is not as intense, but the citrus steps up and the pine falls behind.  The bitterness is the thing that gets you.  It is a full, deep bitter that coats and sizzles on the top of your tongue.  Halfway through the glass, it lessens, but only because it has cut off your ear at this point and it is dancing around you to Stealers Wheel.

Is this one drinkable?  Definitely.  The bitterness is tough, like the first dip into a cold swimming pool, but you get used to it after a while.  I could drink this all night and live to tell the tale, but I don’t think I’d switch back and forth between this and other beers.  Levitation will ruin your taste buds.

It has that extreme….thing that Stone always has.  They made a session beer, but they give it to you with 45 IBUs.  Those bitterness units hit the low end of the style guidelines for an American IPA.  Once again, it is one made on their own terms, and I can respect that.

I look forward to finishing the 6-pack and going back to some of their older beers.  I expect that my tastes have changed, and I will think they are overwhelming and extreme.  But, with the marketing messages that they use, at least they are walking the walk.  Making a session beer hasn’t changed my impression of them, but the way they did it feels like an extension of who they are rather than bigness as a shtick.

I fully expect to take it all back with my next Stone review.