Barlow Brewing

This one is my first attempt at a Flanders Red.  And with how much I’ve been digging on and obsessing about sour ales, it was only a matter of time. Although this one will test my patience in aging it full term.

I brewed it on the Saturday of Memorial Day Weekend (5/23/09), and the base formula was riffed off of Jamil’s Recipe despite the fact that his grain bill seems a little complicated for the style.  I played it loose with the base grains, and used some of my British Golden Promise instead of Pilsener malt.  I rounded that out with Vienna, Munich, Wheat, Aromatic CaraMunich and Special ‘B’. 

I also used hop plugs for what might be the first time in my ~14 years of brewing.  Now that my keggle is up and in action, I might be leaning more towards whole hops over pellets since they should filter out better with the new set-up.

The game plan here was to control some of the sourness by initially fermenting it with a clean, American yeast.  So the original gravity was a 1.058 when I pitched the Safale-05.  I let that go for 48 hours and then I racked it into a secondary, which is my wild and funky PET container, and pitched the Roeselare blend.  (The Wyeast 3763 Roeselare is a Rodenbach blend of lambic cultures and lactic bacteria.)  By that time, the batch had fermented down to a 1.026, and I figured that would give the wild bugs a lot of sugars to slowly eat through over the next 18 months.

It is standard to age these beers in oak barrels as well, but that is a little harder to do on the homebrew level.  To compensate for this, I added 1 ounce of medium toast French oak cubes to the secondary.  My twist is that I first sanitized the cubes by steaming them, and then I soaked them in pinot noir for about a month before pitching them in the secondary.  This is not a standard practice, but the Flanders Red style is red-winish and often called the “Burgundy of Belgium”.  Inspired the Avery Brabant, which is aged in zinfandel barrels, it seemed like an interesting thing to do.  I’m hoping it’ll add a tiny bit more complexity.

One week down and 71 one more to go.  Damn.

And, yes, this already has been named “Stupid Sexy Flanders”. (Thank you, Matt.)

This coming weekend I’ll being hitting the SAVOR Craft Beer and Food Experience.  This is the second year for this Washington DC event, and I’ll be driving up to check it out.  The gig is based around pairing gourmet foods with the appropriate beer.  Well, actually, the other way around.  There will be a lot of breweries represented that I have had before, but I will be concentrating on the brews that do not typically make it from the west coast to Virginia.  I love the east coast brewing scene, but I’m excited to try some of the hop-heavy and sour beers from the west sayeed.

This is will also be a chance to hang out with some of the rock stars of craft brewing.  To insure that I get the proper amount of that, I am also attending the Lupulin Reunulin the night before at the RFD.  In attendance that night will be Tomme Arthur (Lost Abbey), Vinnie Cilurzo (Russian River), Adam Avery (Avery Brewery), Rob Tod (Allagash) and Sam Calagione (Dogfish Head).  This bunch is sometimes referred to as the “Brett Pack” after their group trip to Belgium a few years ago and for their love of brettanomyces.  These guys are supposed to have a lot of great stories which bubble out during these sessions.

I only got into one salon, but it is the beer and cheese pairing with Greg Koch of Stone Brewing, so I know that will be a lot of fun, too.

I will be hitting these events with some close friends and hopefully meeting up with some beer lovers I’ve met through the internet and Twitter.  It will be a very interesting, and liver killing weekend, and I will be tweeting (BarlowBrewing) as much as I can and hopefully posting pictures later.

This time around I’m trying the Duck-Rabbit Brown Ale.  Duck-Rabbit Craft Brewery is located in Farmville, NC and they call themselves “The Dark Beer Specialist”.  

I tried a couple their beers while in the Outer Banks last summer, but I honestly wouldn’t have tried them if the owner of the shop hadn’t recommended them to me.  Word of mouth, or in this day and age good reviews on the internet, is still a huge factor in how we all figure what we want to try next.  The Duck-Rabbit symbol is the old image that was used by psychologists to reinforce that what we perceive is not only a product of our senses, but also our current mental processes and state of mind.

Honestly, it’s a cool concept that isn’t played up in the marketing I’ve seen.  And without that, just having that image and the packaging they use, the beers of Duck-Rabbit just don’t jump off from the shelf at me.  Luckily, I got some shop advice.

I remembered liking them, so it is good to see that they are expanding and now available in Virginia.  I picked up a few of their brews the other day and the first to get the formal review is the Duck-Rabbit Brown Ale.

It pours a half inch dirty, brown head which dissipates quickly, but clings nicely to the rim of the glass.  The beer is a deep red with cherry highlights. It is very clear for a brown ale and striking.

The aroma is slightly sweet, with hints of caramel and nuttiness that brings pecans to mind.  What really jumps out at you is the smell of the roasted grains.  Usually roasted grains come across in beers as a coffee flavor which can be complex, but mostly end up being overwhelming and boring.  This smells exactly like the actual roasted grains I use when homebrewing.  I taste everything I put in the mash and the pot, and to me roasted barley is warm bread with a slight astringency.  They nailed that, and I loved that smell.

The good news is that that pure roasted flavor comes across in the taste, too.  The mouthfeel is full and there is a hint of toffee.  The bitterness becomes sharper as the beer warms and seems to come from the grains as much as the hops.  Duck-Rabbit says they use Amarillo and Czech Saaz hops in this, but the presence of both was muted at best.  The citrus of the Amarillo was a no-show, but I did get some of the spicy of the Saaz.  Unfortunately, it seemed like the Saaz only helped to make the swelling bitterness even more pronounced.  I wish I had checked the bottling date on this one to see if it was an older bottle.

In the end, I liked this beer and thought the authentic roastiness was amazing, but it puts some wear and tear on your palate.  Solo, it would be really hard for me to drink this all night.  But, with the right foods, it would probably become amazing.  This brown ale with a thick burger, or ribs, or just about any red meat off the grill, would enhance those caramelized flavors and the meat, in turn, would mute the bitterness.  

Try this out, but do so with food.  The Duck-Rabbit Brown Ale is good, but it needs a copilot to really get off the ground.

Full disclosure?  I used to think that Killian’s Irish Red was a pretty awesome beer.

It was the early 90′s and I was bartending just outside of Washington, DC.  The bar I worked in had three beers on tap.  Yes, a whole three beers.  They were Budweiser, Miller Lite, and Killian’s.  I can pretend that it was terribly tragic at the time, or that I’m powerfully ashamed of liking the Irish Red. But it wasn’t. And I’m not. 

It was 1992.

Most of the craft breweries that I really love today didn’t even have a business plan, let alone were making beer back then.  These craft breweries were still just crazy schemes in a few homebrewers’ heads.  Sierra Nevada and Anchor Steam were coming, but you couldn’t get them in grocery stores around here just yet.

I’d like to tell you a story about my father loving craft beer and passing his passion on to me, or that I was way ahead of my peers when it comes to the larger world of beer.  But neither of those would be true.  I still had a year or two before I figured it out.  Well, maybe I still haven’t “figured it out”, but I was starting to understand there was something better.

Killian’s was darker than the other beers, and that freaked my customers out.  They assumed it was going to be more bitter or heavier that the other pale lagers.  I would make the case again and again to the regulars that Killian’s just tasted better.  It was a little maltier, and it did not taste like, well, nothing at all, which the Bud and Lite did quite well.

Fast forward to a few months ago, and I got word from another homebrew club member that he had a code for a Killian’s Tasting Kit that came with pint glasses for free.  Since you can’t beat that price, I ordered one.  (To be clear, it appears that Killian’s figured out that loophole not long after, and they still offer the kit but require a proof of purchase and other information from a purchase of their beer.)

Right about the time I had forgotten about it, I got my tasting kit in a little cardboard poster tube a few months later.  The first surprises were the glasses.  Another member had mentioned that he needed new pint glasses since his were slowly breaking.  When he said that, I pictured nice, glass session glasses with some logo etching.  What I got were four tiny, plastic tasting glasses.  Remember in Spinal Tap when Nigel sketches out a Stonehenge prop for a performance, but mislabels the dimensions so it is made only 18 inches high instead of 18 feet?  Yeah, THAT guy made these glasses. 

(I threw in an adult-sized mug for perspective.)

I’m poking fun here, but I’m OK with the glasses.  Sure the labels are just stickers and they are painfully crooked, but I needed more tasting glasses.  I have a feeling these will be remarkably imperfect, too, which should give them lots of points of nucleation for bubbles and the like.  I’m still a little afraid that a dwarf is going to crush my glasses, but I digress.

Along with the glasses were a bottle opener (are Killian’s twist top?), a tasting mat and a booklet about tasting.  The mat echoes the booklet, so I’ll focus on the booklet. 

The beginning of the book tries to convince drinkers that darker beers aren’t bad, which is the line I was peddling back in college behind the bar.  They even have “Ye Ol’ Dark-o-meter” which I’m guessing is their One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish way of introducing SRMs. 

They also break the tasting session into five steps: Look, Swirl, Aroma, Taste and Cleanse.  Sensible steps, indeed.

The only thing that really confused me was the Beer Styles:

According to the book, the styles of beer are Pilsners, Belgian Wits (no other Belgian beers, just wits, of course), India Pale Ales (but not pale ales?), Killian’s Irish Red (which, since Killian’s is a lager, is the old European Lager category?), Brown Ales, Stouts and Porters.  I don’t expect them to lay down all the BJCP Style Guidelines, but this is more confusing than nothing at all.  Perhaps it would have been better to just stick with the ale and lager comparisons and contrasts.

So, what the hell is Coors trying to do here?  (You knew that Killian’s was made by Coors, right? I knew you knew, but I was just making sure….)   I think they are taking baby steps here to broaden drinkers’ horizons.  Sure, they are doing it in somewhat manipulative way to get people to drink their beer, but any step towards a non-golden lager is a step in the right direction.

It would be really, really easy to make fun of this kit, and I can’t say I’ve completely avoided the temptation.  But they are taking the tasting of beer seriously in this, and that is refreshing stance from a macro.  No frat boy chugging, and no glossy ad campaign. 

You can say they are a macro in craft beer clothing.  Maybe.  But isn’t a more educated drinker, in the end, the most important part?  A craft beer advocate can come from the humblest of beginnings.  It could be the guy behind the bar getting you to try something red and a little different.  It might be the drinker who is just starting to figure out that there might be something better out there.

What the heck am I brewing?

The west coast IPA that christened my new keggle is cold crashing in secondary, and I just need to find the time to bottle that.

The Coconut Curry Hefeweizen is bottled and will be fully carbonated sometime this week.  Frankly, that one still scares me.  It should you, too.

The next two I’m going to tackle are a big Flanders Red/American Wild ale and a Gumball Head clone of my own design.

The Flanders was inspired by the Avery Brabant and I will age that on wood I’ve soaked in pinot noir.  I want to get that going ASAP, because it’ll need to age for 2 freaking years.  When did I get all this patience?  This doesn’t sound like me….

The second one is an American wheat beer with a ton of Amarillo hops.  Three Floyds beers were available in Virginia for a short time before they figured out that they couldn’t meet demand and pulled out.  That was long enough for me to get painfully addicted to Alpha King (which they call a pale ale, but it is an amazing IPA).  While they were around, I also grew fond of their Gumball Head that shook up what I thought about the category of an American wheat.

After that?  I don’t know.  I’ll gladly take suggestions. 

I want to try to do a light summer lager.  Not because I love the style, but because it’ll be real hard to do right.

Then, when it gets really hot, it’ll be saison time.

Really, do I need to go on? 

Of course, I do.  There are so many quotes to be had from the Rolling Stone interview with Kid Rock:

“It just tastes like good American light beer, a regular beer and a light beer, an everyday beer.”

Wow.  You are selling the shit out of that.  How do I sign up?  Where can I, too, purchase this decadent elixir?

Where this really becomes ponderous is the train wreck of a marketing campaign that “Bad Ass” beer will become:

“It’s going to be called Bad Ass Beer. The ads are so funny. There are so many funny ads you can do with a thing called Bad Ass Beer. There’s one where it looks like the Budweiser horses, and they’re all up in the air, just freaked out, like they went haywire, and whatever they ride on is smashed up, and it just has my beer sitting in the front, it says “Bad Ass.” And “…and the horses they rode in on.” There’s another one where we fuck with Corona. We have an old rusty truck with no tires on it and it’s sitting on the Bad Ass beer, and it says, “The only way you’ll ever see a lemon on it.” We’ve got another one with the Bad Ass beer simulating like it’s fucking the St. Pauli’s girl. We’re all doing it locally with an ad agency here in Detroit that does a lot of car ads. The guy lives next to me and runs my favorite bar here. They come up with really funny stuff. It’s just wide-open for fucking with people. And the beer actually tastes good, there’s no aftertaste.”

Every freaking sentence that Kid Rock slurs out should be followed by (sic). 

This campaign could set back beer marketing by years, but I’m most interested to see how the macros will counter the ads.  Will they stoop to Rock’s level?  Or will they take the high, but misleading, road of the “triple-hopped” marketing?

I’m actually really looking forward to this.  I’m excited.  This going to be a hot mess, and I cannot wait to review Bad Ass beer when it arrives sometime around Labor Day. 

It bears repeating:

“And the beer actually tastes good, there’s no aftertaste.”

Fuck yeah.

This is American Craft Beer Week.

As some background, ACBW is a congressionally recognized (House Resolution 753) event to celebrate craft breweries and brewers. A craft brewery is one that produces less than 2 million barrels of beer a year, and that statistic probably excludes Samuel Adams from being a “craft brewer”, but I still consider them a part of the movement in spirit and action. Craft brewers are expected to go into full PR mode this week with special brewery tours, new releases, and events. There’s even a Declaration of Beer Independence that you can sign and promise that you will only drink from independent craft breweries this week.

If you are the kind of person who reads beer blogs, this is no big surprise. If you are the kind of person who reads beer blogs, you probably aren’t doing anything new and special this week that you weren’t already doing. You enjoy craft beers, you think about those brewmasters as artists and you want to support them. You are probably one of the converted.

So how do you celebrate if you are already the very picture of a craft beer drinker? Well, you spread the word.

Do the easy things. Hell, buy yourself a 6 pack of craft beer and give one of those beers away to 6 of your macro drinking friends. Who doesn’t accept free beer? Choose something slightly challenging, but not so over the top that it will split their tongues in half. Give them a solid gateway beer and follow up with them to see what they thought.

Set up an impromptu tasting. Chill down a few styles and have some people over to try them. You can do something fancy with cheese, but the best baby step (read: un-intimidating) approach might dictate just having the beer paired with chips and pretzels.

If you have friends who like craft beer, but haven’t try many styles and breweries, set up a Beer of the Month club like I did. Get 6 people (including yourself) together each month and have each one bring a 6 pack of beer that they have been wanting to try, or love and want to share with others. Everyone trades out 5 of their bottles, and they get 5 different beers back (and keep 1 of their own.) It is a nice way to get some really diverse beers in one setting, get the cheaper 6-pack price rather than buying single bottles, and you get the safety net of only having one bottle if you choose something you might not end up liking. Of course, if you get something amazing, you will need to go out and buy more. Win-win.

Think about what you can do to spread the word. Meet your friends at a bar that sells craft beer and patronize them rather than the usual hangout that only has macros on tap. Buy the first round and make someone else drink something that isn’t a fizzy, bland beer.

Be a beer evangelist for the week. What’s the use of your independence if you are alone?

Ommegang, located in Cooperstown, NY, is a brewery that focuses on Belgian-style ales.  They make a very nice saison (Hennepin), a Belgian dark ale (Rare Vos) and a number of other interesting ales (like the Three Philosophers which is Belgian Quad mixed with Kriek Lambic).  

When I heard about their bière de garde beer that is funkified with brettanomyces, well, I had to check it out.  A bière de garde seems like the perfect base for this sort of souring since the style lays out a nice malt base but has a good bit of sweetness that the wild yeast can slowly eat through.

My bottle was the traditional heavy Ommegang bomber that was caged and corked.  This one was from Batch #2, bottled in October of 2008 and is 6.5% ABV.  The label calls it a “Belgian amber with magical space dust woven in.”  The strain of wild yeast is brettanomyces bruxellensis.
 

This one pours into a goblet a deep, apple juice red.  There is a lot of yeast in this one.  Huge chunks swirl around the glass and stay in suspension for the entire time I drink it.  I’m guessing the space dust turned into a tiny asteroid field.  Being a homebrewer, the chunks don’t bother me, but I am curious about why there is that much sediment.  The head is big and rocky, and it stays around like it is in a contest with the yeast to see who will flinch first. 

The aroma is sour with a relatively light amount of funk.  There is a tiny bit of dry hop spice and lemon, and they peek in from the corners of the barnyard smells.

The taste is acid on the tongue.  The finish is dry, like a saison, with a hint of mint.  The thing that comes to mind the most about this beer is its balance.  There is firm malt and the sourness which is refreshing without becoming that repetitive and pounding one note that a sour ale can become.  

The question I have coming out of this tasting, is should this be cellared?  I suppose it depends upon what you want out of the Bière de Mars.  If you like a pronounced but not overwhelming sourness and slightly sweet balance, find a bottle of this and drink it now.  If you are a sourhead, I’d suggest cellaring this one for a year or so to see how it matures.  This is a heavy-duty corked bottle with tons of living, wild yeast that can keep this beer evolving for quite some time. 

Definitely try this one out.  It is young, but it will grow.

Another communication to friends about the latest homebrew.  This one turned out well, but won’t prepare them for the carnage of the Coconut Curry Hefe to follow this. – jb

This one a little bit of a change up.  The “OE” is an oak-aged English Pale Ale.

I was shooting for a mild, session beer (one that was a little lower in alcohol and could be enjoyed in higher quantities) and something that I could wood age.  This might be closer to being a Special Bitter than an English Pale Ale, but I try not to get too caught up in the styles to the point where I feel like I need to hit a certain malt mix or starting gravity. 

In terms of what style category this would fit in, it would fall into the Wood-Aged Beer category.  That is a big, ugly category that tells you very little of what to expect of the beer because, well, it can’t.  It is simply a beer that is aged on wood, and the base beer could be an IPA, or a Brown Ale, or an Imperial Stout, etc, etc.  The only beers that would not be included in this category, if you wood them up, are ones which require wood-aging as part of the style guidelines like Flanders Reds, Lambics, and the like.

This one is interesting.  Next to sour ales, wood aging beer is a new fascination of mine, and they often go hand in hand.  But it is easy to overdo.  I only aged this one on American Oak for 2 weeks, and I am happy with the flavor that came of it.  Obviously there is a woody flavor, but some hints of vanilla, too.

This one is over-carbonated for the style (perfect for an IPA, overdone for an English Bitter), and not to the point of distraction, but it does point out the thinness of the session-type ale.. 

Let it warm up.  You’ll get a lot more out of this if you take it out of the fridge, and let it sit on the counter to warm up for 15-30 minutes before you pop the top.

Feedback is ante for the next.  The caps say “OE”.  It is called “Barrel Brigade” after the crazy people who go over Niagara Falls in a barrels.

jb

Dear Mexico,

I know you are going through a tough time right now. The swine flu, sorry H1N1, is making you sick, and tourism is down. I get that. No one wants a funny tan line on their face because they have to wear a surgical mask to your lovely beaches. These are challenging days.

And I want to support you and pump a little money into your economy. I’m sure you need it right now. But this is a beer blog and your beers are…..DAMN.

See, America is in the midst of a huge craft beer revolution. It is surprising it has not come to you, our fine neighbor to the south. But good taste unfortunately has never been quite as contagious as say…well, enough with the influenza jokes.

Listen Mexico, you have a wonderful history when it comes to brewing. Michael Jackson says that you had the first commercial brewery in the New World, which was created by the Spanish around the mid-1550s.

Later on, German immigrants settled in Texas and then moved southward into your country bringing with them their amazing brewing knowing and styles. Despite the heat of your land and the difficulty brewing them there, you have the Germans to thank for making the majority of your beers lagers.

And what do you do? You make Corona and Pacifico and Tecate and Sol. Your skunky crap begs for a lime in order to make them slightly drinkable. If I was German, I would hate you.

I think Denis Leary sums this kind of disrespect for the New World up with his routine about why the French hate America: “Why the French hate Americans? Years ago, they gave us the croissant–’le cwa-soh’– And what’d we do? We turned it into a ‘croissandwich.’ Thank you very much.”

Thanks, Mexico. Thanks for turning a perfectly balanced lager into Corona Light.

So, since it is Cinco de Mayo, I’m drinking a Negra Modelo, which is honestly very close to a Vienna lager.

(And why, in the name of all that is holy, are you bringing me a frozen mug? Why do you hate me?)

It is a darker beer with a nice bit of malt and caramel. I like this brew despite the fact it has a corn flavor in the background. But it is clearly a huge winner over anything else you are making and putting in clear glass bottles.

Let me help through these tough days, Mexico. Let’s take baby steps. Put your beer in dark bottles to start with. At that point, you will be at the same crappy quality level with the nasty, but slightly less skunky, lagers that the American macros sell.

Thanks,

Me