Barlow Brewing

And so Beergate is upon us.  And why should be care is a natural question.

Much has been made about the invitation from President Obama to Henry Louis Gates and Sgt. James Crowley to meet over a beer.  And just as much hype has been heaped upon the beer choices that these men have made.

The choices for this historical summit are:

President Obama: Bud Light

Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. : Red Stripe

Sgt. James Crowley: Blue Moon.

As a craft beer fan, none of these beers stand out stand out as particularly good beers.  Well, in the case of Red Stripe and BL, the choices are downright bad.

But what is important about beer for this conversation?  Beer is still considered the beverage of the common man.  Metaphorically, we still call blue-collar workers “Joe Six-Pack”, although the Republicans may have ruined that for all of us. 

Beer is still the drink you reach for at a backyard barbeque, or at a baseball game.  Wine and liquor are a bit more formal.  You break those out for special occasions or structured events.  Beer, in this context, is about three men sitting around a table and working through differences.  Stepping beyond ceremony and just hashing things out like neighbors.

I think beer is the perfect choice for this situation and the environment that Obama is trying to create.  Obliviously, he could have chosen a much better beer than Bud Light, and frankly it behooves his images to move up to a Dale’s Pale (in a red, white and blue can no less) or a Sam Adams (brewer AND patriot) beer.

During the presidential race between Bush and Gore, polls pointed to George W. as the candidate that the typical voter would like to have a beer with.  I imagine that Bush would pick something as disappointing as an AB product, too.  I know they are human beings, but I think we all have to right to expect a little more of our presidents.  Certainly one of Obama’s advisors could have suggested something from his hometown of Chicago.  Maybe a nice beer from Goose Island.

I think Obama is a smart guy, but he isn’t the common man.  And, to be clear, I don’t really want him to be.   

It is common is for candidates running for office to be sorted into the “wine track” for upscale voters and a “beer track” for the blue-collar voters.  I’m naïve enough to hope that there is a common space between those two tracks that lends itself to some great craft beer. 

You want someone smarter than yourself to run the country, but the wine track guy is not someone I would immediately understand.  Seeing Obama at a White Sox game drinking something that actually deserves to be savored would actually speak to me.

My latest homebrewing MO is to split and play around WITHIN batches as much as possible. 

The latest one is my American barleywine that just turned 7 months old.  It dropped from a 1.110 down to a 1.023 and finished at an 11.6 ABV.  I bottled ~4 gallons of that batch with oxygen absorbing caps, and then waxed the tops to let them age gracefully.

The last gallon I racked onto a ½ ounce of American oak cubes that I steamed and then marinated in Blanton’s bourbon for almost 12 months.  (I can’t say that leaving them on the bourbon that long actually does anything extra special.  It just sounds cool.)  I’m going to age that for a few weeks and then bottle that last gallon.

I imagine that it will taste nothing like it, but this is somewhat inspired by Lost Abbey’s Angel Share.  What I tasted of the flat barleywine that I bottled, it was slightly sweet with lots of dark fruit flavor and only a slight alcohol warming.  The hoppiness is fading quickly, and the bitterness is softening.  I’m curious to see what the oak and the residual bourbon does to this brew.

I still have some blue wax that can use to bottle the last gallon, as well, but I’ll have to drop a yellow crayon or something into the wax to make those look a little different.

At the end of the year, I can try one of each and compare and contrast. 

Looking to the future, I’m planning to brew my yearly saison this weekend, but I will split that one at least two ways.  The control part will be a standard dry and spicy saison.  Into the remaining beer I will pitch brettanomyces after primary fermentation.  For that I have a tube of White Labs WLP650 brettanomyces bruxellensis, but I might try to also culture up another strain of “wild” yeast from a commercial bottle for a third segment.

After that, I’ve got 10 pounds of cherries that might go into some big, Belgian ales.

Those will all be future posts.

Why are you doing this to yourself?  That is a very good question, and a reasonable way to start this review.  Bud Light Lime has been the butt of many of my jokes in the past.  Honestly, when trying to come up with the worst beer imaginable, I always point to BD Lime.  It sounds terrible.  An unholy abomination of beer.  

But sometimes you have to put your taste buds where your smack talk is.  It was time for me to buy and review this beer.  This beer equivalent of the white frat guy with dreadlocks.  And no, I did not get a little bottle of this fine elixir.  No, I bought big boy weighing in at 1 pint and 6 fluid ounces, but at a sessionable 4.2% ABV.  The plan was to drink the whole thing to get the true experience.  As the label said, it was a “Premium light lager with 100% natural lime flavor.”  No freshness date.

I poured it into a tulip glass to get all of the sensory characteristics, although I would think a frosty mug would have been the natural environment for one of these brews in the wild.

The appearance was many shades of yellow.  The BL Lime is straw yellow in most of the glass with shades of Big Bird on the edges.  It reminded me of a pale, and pure, Berliner Weiss, although the head was fizzy and quickly disappeared to the flatness of flat apple juice.  

The aroma was lime with a capital “L”, but in the background was a corn sweetness that lingered. There were stages to the lime.  First was the smell of a lime flavored freezer pop.  Then it turned to the aroma of fresh limes, and then, towards the end, it mirrored a lime soda.

The taste was what I had steadied myself for.  I had cleared my calendar of good beer in anticipation of a taste bud crusher.  I was sure I was going to have bandages on my tongue like that kid that got stuck to a metal pole in a Christmas Story.  But that didn’t happen.

The body was water thin.  The carbonization was high and prickly.  But there was very little for me to wrap my mouth around.  The beer had a very persistent lime flavor and the whole taste experience was simple and one-note. There was no bitterness and, towards the beginning, there was very little aftertaste.  I was prepared for a light-struck bottle with more skunk ass than Pepe Le Pew’s wet dreams, but the lime covered it all up.

There is obviously a reason why people have been putting lime in Coronas for so many years.  To mask the flaws of these beers, and add some sort of flavor. 

Part of a thorough analysis of a beer is to let it warm up a bit and to see how the flavors evolve and get more complex.  I was going out with the family that night, and I let it sit on the bathroom counter while I showered.   After getting out, beer fatigue was setting in.  It became hard to drink and started to taste like one of those bottles of lime juice you can buy at the grocery store.  At this point, it became difficult to finish.  But I did, dammit.

I was prepared to hate the Bud Light Lime but, in the end, there was very little to love or hate.  The panacea of lime made everything level and unremarkable.    I’m not recommending the Bud Light Lime, but I can see how it would be refreshing on a hot summer day, or paired with Mexican or even Thai.  It won’t stand up to those flavors, but it might cool and revive your taste buds in extreme moderation.

In the end, this wasn’t terrible.  It just wasn’t beer.

Are there more “bad beer” reviews in my future?  I do not know.  You tell me.

Word is from Musings Over a Pint, that the World Beer Festival in Richmond has been postponed until the Spring of 2010.  That is disappointing, but it didn’t sound like things were coming together the way they had hoped.

In the meantime, Durham is still on for October.

I’ve mentioned before that I love sour beers, but they take  a long time to ferment and age.   This means their feedback loop is long, and that it is difficult to tweak recipes and experiment with them in timely way.  Jeff gave me a good suggestion about tasting them every few months and taking notes. 

Despite the fact it is common for these styles to simply taste awful until one arbitrary day, many months later, when they turn into something magical, I think I will try to do that.  It may or may not be valuable data, but it is taking an action of sorts and that is a tiny bit of relief. 

This is a Flanders Red, and it started with an original gravity of 1.058 on May 23^rd and it dropped to a 1.026 two days later with the help of a packet of Safale-05.  At that point, I racked it into a secondary PET carboy, pitched the Wyeast Roeselare blend, and added 1 ounce of medium toast French oak cubes that I had steamed and soaked in pinot noir for 2 weeks.

A mere month and a half later, the gravity is down to 1.012.  The PET container had small, floating bits of pellicle, but no noticeable other activity.  I pulled a  4 ounce sample off the carboy, measured the gravity and poured it into a tasting glass.

The appearance was a light brown with gold and ruby highlights.  Very warm and inviting.  It appeared at bit thin, which is not unusual for a style that ferments down so low.  

It is very early in this young beer’s life, but there were hints of subtle barnyard notes in the aroma and taste.  (More so in the taste.)  I couldn’t not detect any sourness and they was plenty of malt flavor in there for the bugs to dig into for the next year. 

It was interesting for me to see how quickly the yeast and lambic cultures have torn into the beer.  It appears that it will take quite a while for the lactic bacteria to do its job and to sour and acidify.  I’m not known for my patience, but I will try to be.

I’ll taste this one again at the six month mark.

I grabbed a Stone 13^th Anniversary Celebration Ale on draft at Timberwood Grill on the way home from the gym last night.  It is an Imperial Red ale and it clocks in at 9.5% ABV.  Stone says they used more hops per barrel in this brew than any beer that they’ve made before, which is impressive in and of itself.  The starting gravity is 22.5 Plato (about 1.094 by my messy math) which means they backed up those hops with a ton of malt, too.

This one came in a brandy snifter, and the color was that of a dark mahogany with sparing ruby highlights.  The head was creamy, beige and persistent.  The smell was what I was expecting: a nosegasm of simcoe pine and centennial grapefruit.  In the end was a bit of sweet melon.  Perhaps honeydew or cantaloupe.  The resins were tangible, and almost seemed to add a sort of texture.

The taste continues that theme, but the malt kicks in with some sweetness and noticeable alcohol warming.  In another beer, these two attributes would be overwhelming but they are keenly balanced with the landslide of hops in the 13^th.

As it warms, the malt blossoms a bit more and the hops settle down for the ride.  Amazingly, despite the size of this beast, it is very drinkable.  I could certainly have a few of these over the course of an evening.

As a side note, I thought the back label on the bottle (I have an unopened one at home) had an interesting line:

“No matter where you are, we are thankful and hugely flattered when you choose Stone.  However, if you’re outside of our region and you often choose a quality craft beer that is more local, we understand.”

This is a very cool sentiment that echoes Greg Koch’s mission to encourage locavores.  The label also alludes to Stone rolling through their teenage years, which is a departure from Arrogant Bastard-speak of the past.  I had heard that Greg mentioned needing to write the label for this brew during the SAVOR weekend in DC.  It is easy to see how the camaraderie of brewers of that event facilitated those words and beliefs.  It was strange for me to read at first, but it sounds like a company that is growing up and becoming a leader in the craft brewing industry that it deserves to be.

On the bottle, they tell you to drink the Stone 13^th Anniversary Celebration Ale now and to not age or cellar it. 

Good advice, I say.

What more is there to say?  It is American.  It is Badass.  It is Redneck.  It is a lager.  All of those things are fine individually, but only Kid Rock could pull them together to make magic.  And how could the label NOT look like a belt buckle?

Fans that go to Kid Rock’s shows in Comerica Park on July 17 and 18 will get to try it first. 

Isn’t going to the show in the first place punishment enough?  I hope they have staffed the medical tents at the concert appropriately.  They should look like M*A*S*H units before the opening act is done.

I think Jamie Foxx put it best when he said “let’s stop all of this white-on-white crime.”

So here’s a little side-by-side comparison between Three Floyd’s Gumballhead and my homebrewed cloned version.

Three Floyds Brewing began distributing their beers to Virginia years ago, but then cut us off again after what seemed like less than a year later. I assume that they couldn’t keep up on the production side of things, and I don’t blame them for that. But it was cruel deed when they snatched away their Alpha King from me after it had, in no short order, become my favorite IPA.

Another of the many casualties of the withdrawal was Gumballhead. Gumballhead is an American wheat beer that had been aggressively hopped with Amarillo. American wheat beers had always underwhelmed me, and I think I can write some of that off to a younger palate that was still hoppy-crazy. I only had one bomber of this beer, and it was many years ago, but it was an eye opener and it made me think about that style from a whole other angle.

Fast forward to 2009, spring was rolling into Virginia and that was the time that I usually brewed a nice, refreshing hefewiezen. Since it was a yearly brew, I had tweaked my hefe recipe down to the point where it was a perfect summer brew. I kept the fermentation cool, to keep out the bubblegum flavors, and the balance of cloves and bananas was a teetering wonder.  But a six pack of that sounded great, but I wasn’t in the mood for 5 gallons this time.

Long story short: Gumballhead was the answer. A cool, wheat beer with the floral and citrus bite of late- and dry-hopping sounded perfect. I did some research on the web and looked at what some other brewers had done. I tweaked a recipe for my system, and I was ready to go. I even had a name for it: Fritz the Cat. Gumballhead is named after an underground comic book character that I had never heard of, but I had to make a small tribute to an artist I knew and loved: R. Crumb.

The added bonus was that a friend of mine rolled back into town from a roadtrip and brought me back a few beers from Michigan and Indiana. One of them was a Gumballhead, and so it seemed like a good idea to compare the two.

Right from the first pour, the carbonation was clearly different. GBH had a thick bubbly head, while my FTC had a thinner, but creamier, head.

Gumballhead

Fritz the Cat (clone)

Once you get past the bubbles, these two beers are amazing similar looking. Both were deep oranges with straw highlights. My FTC might have been a hint darker, but not in a way that was glaringly obvious. I’m painfully impressed with myself.

Aroma: The GBH had a dump truck of grapefruit aroma with a hint of orange in the median. Mine was reversed in that the orange was in front and the grapefruit was in the backseat.  (Yeah, I’ll mix my metaphors.  Wait, do dump trucks have backseats?)

Taste: This is where the two beers clearly separated, but remained similar. The GBH gave me a slight wheat flavor with a hint of cloves. The more it warmed, the more fruity it became as it reclaimed the grapefruit and slid into apricots. My FTC had more wheat character and a bit more bitterness. It had a deeper and thicker mouthfeel, and it rolled to the side of a tangerine sweetness.

The biggest difference between them seemed to be the carbonation. The GBH, as you could tell by the head, was more bubbly and refreshing. Downright sessionable. My was good for a hot summer day, but the density made it more replenishing than refreshing.

Next time? I’d up the carbonation a hair and I’d probably try to mash it at a higher tempature in order to lower the final gravity.  As I mentioned in my note to friends about FTC, but before this tasting, I would not bitter it with amarillo just for the minor cost savings and I’m just not a fan of that hop for bittering.  Also, I’ve been playing around a lot with Golden Promise, and this one might be closer to style with an American 2-row, or lighter base malt.

Is this one clone?  No, but it is a nice, kissing-cousin to the Gumballhead.  My Fritz the Cat is a light and clean brew…..until you put it up against the work of some professional brewers, but I’m happy with it all the same.

The stripped down recipe:

Golden Promise 2-row 48%
Wheat Malt 48%
CaraVienne Malt 4%

0.25 oz Amarillo Pellets (8.0 AA) – First Wort
0.25 oz Amarillo Pellets (8.0 AA) – 60 min
0.50 oz Amarillo Pellets (8.0 AA) – 15 min
0.50 oz Amarillo Pellets (8.0 AA) – 5 min
0.25 oz Amarillo Pellets (8.0 AA) – 0 min
2.00 oz Amarillo Pellets (8.0 AA) – Dry

S.G. – 1.046
F.G. – 1.010

Yeast- Safale-05 fermented at 68°F

Primary - 2 weeks (dry-hopped the last 7 days)

This event has been postponed until spring 2010.  The latest post about the World Beer Festival – Richmond.

I heard about this last month, but I figured it would be worth a post if you hadn’t heard about the World Beer Festival – Richmond that is being put on by All About Beer magazine on August 29, 2009.

According to their website, they’ve hosted 16 beer festivals in North Carolina, and now they are setting up an event in Virginia.  The details are pretty sparse right now, and none of the breweries have been identified.  All we know is that it will be on Brown’s Island on 8/29/09, the tickets will go on sale sometime this month, and there will be two sessions with the general admissions tickets running $40 a piece and the VIP tickets will be $75. (I’ll hold off judgment of the VIP price until I know more specifics about the bells and whistles of that ticket.)

It will be nice to have a big festival come to semi-central VA, and I look forward to seeing what breweries sign up to be part of this gig.  I’ve heard the Brown’s Island can get hot and buggy during the summer, but that is nothing I know from experience. 

The only downside for me is that James River Homebrewers Club is holding their Dominion Cup homebrew contest that same day, and I’ve volunteered to steward in that competition.  It should be a very busy day of celebrating commercial and homebrewed beer in the commonwealth, and I am looking forward to it.

I’ll let you know more as it trickles down to me….