craft beer & brewing - february-march 2015
DESCRIPTION
Monthly magazine for the craft beer lover.TRANSCRIPT
COOK WITH BEER: HEARTY FAVES
FOR THOSE WHO MAKE AND DRINK GREAT BEER
Craft
Beer &
Brew
ing M
agazine
THE POWER OF PALE ALE | FAVORITE W
INTER RECIPES | WHAT TO DO W
ITH BAD BATCHES | WOM
EN IN BEER Feb
-Mar 20
15 | BEERANDBREWING.COM
| NA ZDRAVÍ!PLUS:
The Not-So-Secret History of
Women in BeerOver-the-Hill: Know
When Your Cellared Beer Hits Its Peak
Beercation: Philly!
& MORE
HOW TO: GET GREAT RESULTS FROM BEER KITS
Ale» Brewers Share Their Favorite Pale Ales
» IPA or Imperial Pale?
» Creative Pale Ale Recipes
» 40+ Pale Ales Reviewed
Magazine®
PALEThe Power of
row, row, carry your boat
Our new Spring Seasonal, Portage Porter, takes the buoyant aromas of roasted coffee, chocolate and almonds, and steers them toward a
silky-smooth mouthfeel rolling one sip into another. Get a boat load. NewBelgium.com
THE ALL-NEW BOILERMAKER G2TM
We needed a new word to describe the BoilerMaker G2™, our reinvention
of the market’s best brewpot. We’ve raised the bar again, adding an
industry-leading linear fl ow control valve, an enhanced surface fi nish,
custom-molded grips for cooler handling, and much more. With
superior engineering, beauty, and performance, we’ve created the
next generation of brewpot.
Check us out at blichmannengineering.com
*Applies to 7.5, 10, 15, and 20 gallon pots.
THE ALL-NEW BOILERMAKER G2
We needed a new word to describe the BoilerMaker G2™, our reinvention We needed a new word to describe the BoilerMaker G2™, our reinvention
of the market’s best brewpot. We’ve raised the bar again, adding an of the market’s best brewpot. We’ve raised the bar again, adding an
industry-leading linear fl ow control valve, an enhanced surface fi nish, industry-leading linear fl ow control valve, an enhanced surface fi nish,
custom-molded grips for cooler handling, and much more. With custom-molded grips for cooler handling, and much more. With custom-molded grips for cooler handling, and much more. With
superior engineering, beauty, and performance, we’ve created the superior engineering, beauty, and performance, we’ve created the superior engineering, beauty, and performance, we’ve created the
next generation of brewpot. next generation of brewpot.
THE ALL-NEW BOILERMAKER G2
We needed a new word to describe the BoilerMaker G2™, our reinvention We needed a new word to describe the BoilerMaker G2™, our reinvention
of the market’s best brewpot. We’ve raised the bar again, adding an of the market’s best brewpot. We’ve raised the bar again, adding an
industry-leading linear fl ow control valve, an enhanced surface fi nish, industry-leading linear fl ow control valve, an enhanced surface fi nish,
custom-molded grips for cooler handling, and much more. With custom-molded grips for cooler handling, and much more. With
superior engineering, beauty, and performance, we’ve created the superior engineering, beauty, and performance, we’ve created the superior engineering, beauty, and performance, we’ve created the
next generation of brewpot. next generation of brewpot.
BREWING INNOVATION BREWING INNOVATION BREWING INNOVATION *Applies to 7.5, 10, 15, and 20 gallon pots.*Applies to 7.5, 10, 15, and 20 gallon pots.
AlePALEThe Power of
| CONTENTS: FEB/MAR 2015 |
68
page 73
62
FEATURES
56 How Women Brewsters Saved the WorldIn the first of a two-part series, Tara Nurin explores the hidden-in-plain-sight history of women and beer from prehistoric times up through Prohibition.
62 Practical Parti-Gyle BrewingParti-gyle brewing is a staple of historical brewing and is still vital for brewers such as London’s Fuller’s Brewery. Homebrewer and writer Joe Stange paid Fuller’s a visit to learn how homebrewers can add parti-gyle brewing to their arsenal (and why they might want to).
68 Hopeless Homebrew SolutionsSometimes a batch of homebrew that you crafted turns out to be a multi-gallon batch of oops. What to do then? Emily Hutto offers four creative solutions.
73 The Power of Pale AleBrewers push the limits of style as this second-largest selling craft-beer style grows and adapts to hop-friendly palates.
74 | Pales in Comparison: A Pale Ale Style Guide
80 | The Full Spectrum of Pale AleAre pale ale differences a regional thing or an old-school/new-school thing? Four craft brewers share their thoughts on today’s pale ales.
83 | Beyond Bitter: Defining Imperial Pale AleImperial pale ale is a derivative style, one that could easily be defined less by what it is than what it isn’t. But in the liquid arts, as in those visual, incredible beauty is to be found in the negative spaces.
89 | Pale Ale ReviewsOur blind-tasting panel tastes through the best commercially avail-able American Pale Ales and English Pale Ales in the United States.
BEERANDBREWING.COM | 3
THE MASH
11 | Stats, Hot-Rod Your Beer- Making Kit, Ballast Point’s Homework Series, Beer Slanging, and Whalez, Bro
18 | Beer Gear Guide
TRAVEL
19 | Love Handles
20 | Beercation: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
BREAKOUT BREWERS
28 | Kane Brewing Company
32 | Rockmill Brewery
36 | Dageraad Brewing
PICK SIX
40 | For Victory Brewing Cofounder Bill Covaleski, choosing a dream six-pack is like DJing: there’s an art to putting together the perfect playlist. Here are the six tracks on his current mix tape.
COOKING WITH BEER
44 | Winter WarmersFrom Herb Marinated Goat Cheese to an apple-brussels salad topped with a tangy Beeranch Dressing to an incredible rib-eye steak with Blue Cheese–Beer Butter and crispy potato skins to tart Lem-on-Beer Hand Pies, Chef Christo-pher Cina has put together a menu that will keep you warm while the weather’s cold.
IN THE CELLAR
50 | Past Its Prime? Vintage Beer Warning SignsPatrick Dawson, the author of Vintage Beer, covers seven points to consider when you’re evaluating a vintage beer.
HOMEBREWING
79 | Pale Ale Recipes
102 | Ask the Experts: Belgian Yeast Strains
106 | Gear Test: Digital Hydrometers and Refractometers
MORE
108 | Glossary & Techniques
113 | CB&B Marketplace
116 | CB&B Retail Shop Directory
120 | Chill Plate
| CONTENTS |
44
50
40
28 16
102
Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® (print ISSN 2334-119X; online ISSN 2334-1203) is published bimonthly in February, April, June, August, October, and December for $29.99 per year (six issues) by Unfiltered Media Group, LLC at 214 S. College Ave., #3, Fort Collins, CO 80524; Phone 888.875.8707 x0; [email protected]. Periodical postage paid at Fort Collins, CO and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine, PO Box 681, Stow, MA 01775. Customer Service: For subscription orders, call 888.875.8708 x0. For subscription orders and address changes con-tact Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine, PO Box 681, Stow, MA 01775, [email protected]. Foreign orders must be paid in U.S. dollars plus postage. The print subscription rate for outside the United States and Canada is $39.99 U.S.
4 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
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| RECIPES IN THIS ISSUE |
Tag Team Pale AlePage 76
30-Minute Pale AlePage 79
City Boy American Pale AlePage 79
American Mate Pale AlePage 79
Rye Must You Label Me Pale AlePage 85
BEYOND THE PALE:
Single Fin Belgian Blonde AlePage 30
No-Math Parti-Gyle Old Ale, IPA, and ESBPage 65
| CONTRIBUTORS IN THIS ISSUE |
RECI
PE P
HOTO
: MAT
T GR
AVES
; CON
TRIB
UTOR
PHO
TOS:
COU
RTES
Y TA
RA N
URIN
; COU
RTES
Y JO
E ST
ANGE
; CO
URTE
SY C
HRIS
TOPH
ER C
INA;
COU
RTES
Y EM
ILY H
UTTO
; COU
RTES
Y PA
TRIC
K DA
WSO
N; JA
MIE
BOG
NER
Emily Hutto is a Colorado-born travel writer with an affinity for fermented beverages. She’s the author of Colorado’s Top Brewers and a contributor at many craft beer and food-centric publications. Find her ethnography at emilyhutto.com.
Dave Carpenter is an avid hombrewer and freelance writer. His writing has appeared in Zymurgy, and he contrib-utes regular Web-exclu-sive content on our web-site at beerandbrewing.com. He also develops curricula for our online homebrewing classes at learn.beerandbrewing .com.
As Executive Chef for the Breckenridge- Wynkoop dining concepts, Christopher Cina oversees and inspires the menus, operations, and culinary teams at all of the restaurant group’s properties. In addition to cooking, Christopher’s talents are also evident in his photography, where his favorite subject is, of course, food.
Patrick Dawson is the author of Vintage Beer, A Taster’s Guide to Brews That Improve over Time, a book that guides the taster through the apparent mysteries of cellaring beer. When not thinking or writing about beer, he is sleeping.
Joe Stange is a freelance journalist who coau-thored, with Tim Webb, the seventh edition of Good Beer Guide Belgium. He also is author of Around Brussels in 80 Beers. A former Associat-ed Press newsman, his articles and photos have appeared in the New York Times and many promi-nent beer publications.
Tara Nurin is a nationally published freelance journalist and beer col-umnist and a Cicerone Certified Beer Server. She runs Beer for Babes, New Jersey’s original beer appreciation group for women, and serves as publicity director for the Pink Boots Society. She leads tasting and pairing workshops through her company, Ferment Your Event.
AlePALEThe Power of
6 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
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Things To Do Today:
Park & lunch with kids
Watch the game with the guys
Tom & Kate's place for BBQ
Brew Beer! Brew Beer! Brew Beer! Brew Beer! Brew Beer! Brew Beer! Brew Beer! Brew Beer! Brew Beer! Brew Beer!Park & lunch with kids
Tom & Kate's place for BBQ Tom & Kate's place for BBQ
Watch the game with the guys Watch the game with the guys
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Bring to temp - "Wort"
Bring to temp - "Wort"
Bring to temp - "Wort"Boil - 60-90 minutes, minimum
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Boil - 60-90 minutes, minimumAdd Hops along the way
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BREWING
PROPERNAME
The craft-beer industry is known for having some unique and silly names for beers, but have you ever wondered where the actual brewery names come from? Not ones to leave a stone unturned, we categorized the names of the top fifty craft-beer brands (based on the Brewers Association Top 50 list for 2013) and plotted them below to find the most popular themes. With the local nature of craft beer, it should come as no surprise that location and geography feature prominently.
By Brian Devine
What's in a Name?
BEERANDBREWING.COM | 11
| THE MASH |
PHOT
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BEERSLANGING
Language for Beer GeeksA quick and humorous key to deciphering the slang terms thrown around in the world of Beer Geekdom.
>> Tallboy[tawl-boi] nounIt’s 25 percent bigger! The Tallboy can holds a sweet 16 ounces of barley soda. Some breweries have taken it a step further, such as Oskar Blues with their 19.2-ounce “Stovepipe” and Sixpoint with their 22-ounce ”SILO.” “Crush that Heady Tallboy and then solo that SILO of Resin, bro." >> Crushable[kruhsh-uh-bul] adjectiveAn easygoing, super-drinkable beer. These are well-balanced beers with low-to-medium alcohol by volume (ABV) but tons of flavor that make you want to go back for more again and again. Example: “Oh man, Found-ers All Day IPA is so crushable.” >> UBIAcronym for “unexplained beer injury.” The origin of this term is often attributed to doctors in Britain, who would encounter inebriated patients in the emergency room unable to explain how they sustained their injuries. Example: “I got nine stitches from a UBI last night. And apparently I also got married.” >> Session IPA[sesh-un eye-pee-ay] nounSynonym for pale ale. Boom! >> Cuvée[koo-vey] noun & verbWhile sometimes used to indicate exceptional quality, cuvée generally means that the beer is a blend. While blending beers pre-carbonation has been a practice for centuries, blending finished beers has seen a boost in popularity of late (and is far more complicated than the tradi-tional black and tan in a Shaker pint). Example: “Austin cuvée’d nineteen versions of pumpkin ale, and it tasted exactly the same.”
Homework for Homebrewers
IT’S NO SECRET that the roots of the craft-brewing industry run deep into the fertile soil of homebrewing. The growth of the industry is largely depen-dent on talented and dedicated home-brewers honing their craft and carving out their own turf in the craft-brewing revolution.
One brewery is taking it a step further by providing the actual recipes to their beers by packaging them with the beers themselves. The Homework Series from San Diego’s Ballast Point is a line of beers designed to pay tribute to their homebrewing roots. “We’ve always been such an open book with our reci-pes since we started Home Brew Mart in 1992 and the brewery in 1996,” says Colby Chandler, Ballast Point’s vice president and specialty brewer. “Honoring our homebrewing roots is part of our vision statement, and putting the recipe on the bottle was something we’ve always wanted to do.”
In fact, the very first beer released in the Homework Series is a hoppy red ale that Chandler designed as Red Scent Ale in 1998. One his favorites to share with his fellow home-brewers, it was a natural choice to be the flagship for the series. “The first one was my wedding beer, and I was a little selfish in wanting to have it again.”
Three more beers—Belgian-Style Double IPA, English-Style IPA, and Pumpkin Ale—have joined that Hoppy Red Ale in the Homework Series.
Says Chandler, “We always wanted to package a Belgian IPA but didn’t have the capacity to do it on any kind of scale until now. The English-style IPA was the very first
IPA we ever brewed back when Peter A’Hearn, our founding brewmaster, was here. It was the first one we ever brewed commercially, and we got to bring it back and give out the recipe. The pumpkin ale was a great collabo-ration between Home Brew Mart and Brewing Manager Aaron Justus.”
In addition to making commercially available award-winning craft beer, Ballast Point also operates Home Brew Mart, a homebrew supply company in the San Diego area and the place where Ballast Point founders Jack White and Yuseff Cherney teamed up to start Ballast Point. “Ballast Point has such a
huge variety of styles of beer, and that desire for variety really goes back to our homebrew roots,” says Chandler. “Most of the pro brewers here in San Diego started as home-brewers, and we love to be on the front edge. We were doing a session IPA eleven years ago and an India Pale Lager nine years ago. From the beginning we’ve
always liked being able to go into the homebrew shop, see new trends, taste ingre-dients, and get tactile.”
That collaboration connection between craft brewery and homebrewers deepens this year as Home Brew Mart launches a homebrew competition to see what beer will be the next in the Homework series. Not only will the winning beer join the ranks of other outstanding beers in the series, but it will also be debuted at the National Homebrew Con-ference, which takes place in San Diego this June.
Ballast Point’s Homework Series is available through-out the Southern California region, and the recipes are available online at ballast-point.com/beer-recipes.
–Steve Koenig
12 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
| THE MASH |
Whalez, Bro. By Ansis Purins
Trending OnlineCraft Beer & Brewing’s Web editors bring you breaking craft-beer news and all-new stories, tips-and-technique articles to help you make your best beer, unique and tested original beer recipes, revolutionary online craft-beer and homebrewing education, plus a free eNewsletter that will deliver free tips, techniques, news, and special offers. Here’s what readers are following on beerandbrewing.com:
Top Stories
7 Spicy Craft Beers to TrySriracha, the beloved and now iconic chili sauce, has made its way into chips, hummus, and even ice cream, so it was only a matter of time before a brewery rolled out their own tangy take. Oregon’s Rogue Ales, no stranger to spicy beer with their Chipotle Ale, announced that they will be releasing a Sriracha Hot Stout. We highlight it and other spicy beers from Ballast Point, Westbrook, Burnside, Night Shift, and Twisted Pine.
Blood, Sweat, and BeerA new film, Blood, Sweat, and Beer, follows two start-up breweries in the first year of their quest. Much like fellow craft-beer documentarians of the film Crafting A Nation, director and producer Alexis Irvin and crew capture small business owners who are revitalizing run-down areas of cities by creating community gathering places.
Homebrewing Techniques
5 Way to Reuse Your Old Growler for HomebrewingIf you’re like us, then you’ve probably assembled a small arsenal of growler jugs over the years. Homebrewers are, however, a resourceful lot, always searching for ways to reuse old stuff. Check out five uses for your old growler.
Top Recipes
Winter Warmer RecipeWith its malty character, this recipe is per-fect for cold days with extract, partial mash, and all-grain recipes. Free on the website.
14 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
| THE MASH |
CHARACTER IPENS WITH AGECHARACTER IPENS WITH AGECHARACTER IPENS WITH AGECHARACTER IPENS WITH AGE
THE ORIGINAL SOUR.Over the past two centuries, RODENBACH has earned its official status as a Belgian National Treasure and one of the most awarded beers globally. Michael Jackson referred to RODENBACH as a “World Classic”. With an active yeast strain that is almost 200 years old, unique living micro-flora working in the 294 oak ‘foeders’ and local Poperingse hops, RODENBACH is the original sour ale, imitated but never duplicated. Rudi Ghequire, brew master for over 30 years, fondly describes his complex brew as tart and fruity with extraordinary balance. You’ll know when you’re ready to enjoy RODENBACH.
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AS THE WINTER HOLIDAYS shrink to tiny dots in the rearview mirror, the excitement and sensory overload that accompanied the stretch from Thanksgiv-ing to New Year’s Day now give way to a new reality: It’s an awfully long time until Memorial Day. Getting through the next few months is going to take patience, per-severance, and a healthy dose of craft beer.
If you received a department store “brewery-in-a-box” starter kit (e.g., Mr. Beer, Coopers DIY, or the Beer Machine) as a gift over the holidays and brewed your first batch before saying good-bye to 2014, then you may have already sampled your initial foray into homebrewing. If not, you will very soon.
While these off-the-shelf kits are certainly easy to use and a good way to get into home-brewing, the resulting beer doesn’t always meet the expectations of today’s discerning craft-beer enthusiast. If after a couple of weeks of waiting, you’ve opened your first bottle, taken your first sip, and wondered why it tastes so, well, amateur, trust us: You’re not the first to be underwhelmed.
But don’t panic and don’t give up! Great beer is more about quality ingredients than it is about the equipment you use. Sure, certain equipment upgrades can make your brew day more efficient and let you make beer in greater volumes, but you can brew excellent beer using these mass-market kits. In fact, the inherent simplicity of such kits makes them a great choice for would-be homebrewers who don’t have a lot of extra space and aren’t ready to transform the spare bedroom into a science lab. The 2.1-gallon (8-liter) Mr. Beer fermentation vessel, for example, offers several advantages:
▪ The unit’s small size is ideal for apartment dwellers and others with space constraints.
▪ The wide mouth makes cleaning,
Bigger Isn’t Always BetterEven after you master the small-batch brewery and move on to larg-er volumes, there are some good reasons to hold onto your original equipment kit:
» Small-batch brewing: Maybe there are times when you neither want nor need five gallons of homebrew. Brewing in small amounts might simply be more convenient for your lifestyle. » Lager and high-gravity brewing: Achieving the optimal pitch rate for lagers and high-gravity beers can be quite a challenge when you need to inoculate five gallons or more. But when you work with small volumes, it’s much easier to pitch enough yeast for the job. » Split batches and experimental brewing: Splitting a 5-gallon batch into two or more smaller batches offers you an opportu-nity to play with different yeast strains, experiment with fruit additions, and more. » Expanding your horizons: Sure, you’re a great homebrewer, but have you ever tried your hand at mead, cider, wine, or sake? Small-equipment kits offer the perfect venue to try before you buy, so to speak.
Hot-Rod Your Beer-Making Kit!
sanitizing, dry hopping, and adding fruit a breeze.
▪ The fermentor’s unique geometry features sloping sides and a flat base to effectively collect trub, hops matter, and other sediment.
▪ The integrated spigot obviates the need to rack and makes bottling a piece of cake (attach a foot-long piece of sani-tized tubing to the spigot to cut down on splashing when you bottle).
So why don’t these equipment kits enjoy a better reputation among seasoned home-brewers? I think it comes down to two things: snobbery and bad first experiences. Only a good dose of humility can chip away at the first of these (and even then, not always), but the second is easily reme-died with a simple shift in perspective and process. With quality ingredients, these kits can turn out excellent beer with just a few minutes more of your time.
Drink FreshPicture the freshest, most delectable bread you’ve ever tasted. Imagine the dense chewy crust that gives way to a tender interior. Think of the yeasty, slightly tangy aroma and layers of nuanced flavor. I’m willing to bet that this loaf didn’t come from a store-bought bread-machine mix. Yes, decent, perfectly edible bread can be made using a bread mix and a countertop machine. But much better bread requires quality flour, pure water, healthy yeast, a bit of salt, and some of your own precious time.
The same is true with beer. You might be able to make passable beer using canned-ingredient kits, but the number one way to improve your beer is to brew from fresh malt, hops, water, and yeast. If you’re ready to put your kit to the test and see what it can do, try our kit-scale pale ale recipe on the oppposite page.
Size doesn't matter, but the difference between homebrew magic and homebrew disappointment comes down to quality ingredients and smart technique. Try these tips (and our specially designed recipe on the opposite page) to get great results from your kit. By Dave Carpenter
16 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
| THE MASH |
Make ItHacker’s Delight Pale Ale EXTRACT
This recipe makes 2 gallons (7.5 liters) of beer, suitable for fermentation in a 2.1-gallon (8-li-ter) Mr. Beer kit. The ingredients are readily available from your local homebrew supply store or from Internet-based retailers. We’ve specifically chosen the hops quantities so that you can purchase in 1-ounce increments without leftovers, and the quantity of liquid malt extract corresponds to small quart-sized jugs of extract. Just remember—buy fresh!
BATCH SIZE: 2 gallons (7.5 liters)
OG: 1.057FG: 1.014IBUs: 40ABV: 5.6%
MALT/GRAIN BILL
3.15 lb (1.43 kg) pale liquid malt extract4 oz (113 g) Caramel 40, crushed
HOP SCHEDULE
0.50 oz (14 g) Citra at 20 minutes0.50 oz (14 g) Citra at 2 minutes0.50 oz (14 g) Cascade at flameout0.50 oz (14 g) Centennial at flameout0.50 oz (14 g) Cascade at dry hop (7 days)0.50 oz (14 g) Centennial at dry hop (7 days)
DIRECTIONS
Place 1 quart (1 liter) of cold water in a 3-gallon (10-liter) or larger stockpot, place crushed Caramel 40 malt in a mesh bag, and place the mesh bag in the cold water. Heat the stockpot over medium heat until the temperature of the water and grain reaches 155°F (68°C). Remove the grain, add the malt extract, top up with 2 gallons (7.5 liters) of water, and bring to a boil. Boil for 20 minutes, following the hops schedule. Chill the wort to 66°F (19°C) and transfer to the fermentor. Top up to 2 gallons (7.5 liters) total if needed and add the yeast. Ferment 10 days at 66°F (19°C), then add dry hops. Bottle after 7 days of dry hopping.
YEAST
1 package White Labs WLP001 California Ale, or1 package Wyeast 1056 American Ale, or½ package Safale US-05
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SHE'S JUST MY TYPEHey ladies! Brewheads has the gear that lets you share your love of craft beer without having to wear those unflattering men's-cut shirts. This wide neck long sleeve top lets you wear it normally or off the shoulder (if that's more your style), and is a collaboration with the Arizona chapter of Girls Pint Out. thebrewheads.com
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SOAK, SCRAPE, GOReusing commercial beer bottles for your homebrew is the economical and environ-mentally-friendly option, and the curved blade of the Labelnator makes it easier than ever to remove those stubborn glued-on labels. labelnator.com
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BeerGear Guide
Whether you're a homebrewer or a craft-beer fanatic, here's the stuff you need…
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| LOVE HANDLES |
The Great Lost BearPortland, Maine
An old-school beer bar with the best of Maine’s beer scene on tap
WHAT IT IS: The Great Lost Bear has been slinging beer since 1979, earning its reputation as a Portland institution and a haven for craft beer. Of the seventy-eight taps, most are pouring New England beers, and the highlights are from Maine’s great brewers—from classics such as a Gritty McDuff’s Black Fly Stout or an Allagash Curieux to the latest hoppy offering from the buzzed-about Bissell Brothers Brewing. The food menu is equally extensive and delicious; paper ephemera and old photographs hang throughout the spacious bar and dining room; and there’s almost always a pint deal or special event going on any night of the week.WHY IT’S GREAT: A trip to the Bear feels like seeing an old good friend with whom you haven’t talked in years; you can pick up right where you left off without missing a beat, and first-timers and thirsty travelers will feel at home in no time. It’s entirely unpretentious, but they take their beer seriously, and with their extensive and constantly rotating selection, it’s the best spot in town to try a beer from a new brewery, make an un-expected discovery, or indulge in a hearty plate of nachos, a few rounds of Oxbow Farmhouse Pale Ale, and get pulled into conversation with the friendly, devoted locals. —Heather Vandenengel Details Hours: 11:30 a.m.–11:30 p.m. Monday–Saturday, Noon–11 p.m. SundayAddress: 540 Forest Ave., Portland, MEWeb: greatlostbear.com
Bittercreek AlehouseBoise, Idaho
A super cellar in low-key Boise
WHAT IT IS: Boise probably isn’t the first place you think of when it comes to west-ern U.S. beer cities, but this gastropub is making a convincing argument that it deserves consideration. With thirty-nine options on draft, a completely stacked cellar, and a thoughtful menu that includes the likes of duck confit poutine and käsespätzle, Bittercreek Alehouse checks all the boxes and then some.
WHY IT’S GREAT: One look at the expertly chosen draft and cellar lists at Bittercreek makes it obvious that Pro-prietor Dave Krick knows beer. In fact, most beer geeks will spend the majority of their time with their noses buried in the page-turner of a beer menu. While the draft list includes the one-two punch of Pacific Northwest and Rocky Mountain options (with the likes of Double Moun-tain and Odell barrel-aged obscurities), it also has a good representation of carefully selected offerings from the growing local brewing scene. But it’s the cellar list that’s the real draw. Not only is it super deep, but the laid back nature of the Boise crowd has allowed bottles such as 2010 Drie Fonteinen Gueze and various Batch #1 bottles from Anchorage Brewing Co. to still grace the pages—and at a fraction of the cost you’d expect. —Patrick Dawson
Details Hours: 11:00 a.m.–1:00 a.m. Monday–Thursday, 11:00 a.m.–2:00 a.m. Friday, 8:30 a.m.–2:00 a.m. Saturday–SundayAddress: 246 N 8th St., Boise, IDWeb: bcrfl.com/bittercreek/
Moeder LambicBrussels, Belgium
Confident curators of taste in the capital of “Beer Paradise”
WHAT IT IS: Brussels has an array of great cafés, but sometimes beer geeks pass through town, between trains, and have time for only one. Moeder Lambic is the one they choose. They arrive to find an ample terrace beneath a wrought-iron Art Deco awning. Inside is a long, mod-ern space with simple wooden booths and a bar with forty shiny taps whose offerings are scrawled overhead in chalk. Behind the bar are an additional six cask hand-pulls, most dedicated to pumping authentic lambics; sparklers on the fonts add froth for presentation. Bottled beers are virtually all 75cl, carefully chosen, and meant for cellaring and eventually sharing.
WHY IT’S GREAT: The staff knows its stuff and receives frequent training in the art of gentle education. Regular beers emphasize smaller Belgian breweries that make consistently characterful beers; local stars Cantillon and Senne get pride of place. Guest taps show the same choos-iness but widen the map to feature Italy, Spain, Germany, and beyond. (U.S. beers are rare here because the staff can’t vouch for their freshness after the boat ride.) They are picky so that customers need not be. It is theoretically possible to order a bad beer here, but it’s difficult. It is even more difficult to leave—even when there’s a train to catch. —Joe Stange
Details Hours: 11 a.m.–2 a.m. Friday & Saturday, 11 a.m.–1 a.m. Sunday–ThursdayAddress: Place Fontainas 8, Brussels, BelgiumWeb: moederlambic.com
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| BEERCATION: PHILADELPHIA, PA |
Philly: Beer Done with Intensity (and a Wry Sense of Fun)
As an epicenter for nineteenth-century brewing, Philadelphia seized hard on this century’s beer resurgence long before most East Coast cities had even caught a hops-scented whiff. By Tara Nurin
BREWING PIONEERS SUCH AS Carol Stoudt of Stoudts, Rosemarie Certo of Dock Street, and Tom Kehoe of Yards Brewing still help set the pace for the Phila-delphia region, which continues to set stan-dards with its breweries, bars, and Belgian connections. As with everything, including their sports teams, Philadelphians do beer with intensity. Unlike with their sports teams, with their beer, they also add a wry sense of fun. You can walk into almost any bar on almost any corner and find at least one local knob and a “Citywide Special”—a shot of whiskey and a PBR chaser.
“Almost every section of Philly has a little brewery now, and there are so many more in planning,” marvels Kehoe. Be-cause it’s so hard to wrap your lips around the breadth of beer in this region, it’s practical to concentrate on a few walkable neighborhoods.
Northern Liberties and FishtownSaid to be the bar that birthed the term “gastropub,” Standard Tap is dog friendly and beloved for its rooftop brunch and
burgers. The Tap’s local-beer-only policy first brought awareness to the native brewery scene and anchored the revival of Northern Liberties (NoLibs).
“From day one we wanted this to be the neighborhood’s unofficial town hall, the neighborhood’s living room,” says William Reed, who launched Standard Tap in 1999.
Jerry’s Bar brings modern meaning to the “gastropub” label. Selections such as Bean Dream from Pizza Boy Brewing (Enola, Pennsylvania), Invasion from Cigar City (Tampa, Florida), and Sidra De Nava from Virtue Cider (Fennville, Michigan) line up next to an expert cock-tail list and house-smoked meats to earn it the designation “best new gastropub of the year” from the city’s most respected restaurant critic.
In Fishtown, entrepreneurs are adding bars seemingly by the month to the streets that once housed little more than Reed’s intentionally grungy music venue, Johnny Brenda’s. JB’s still pounds out the tunes along with Reed’s signature locals-only beer program, but now it’s surrounded by other places of note. Barcade patrons play
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Opposite, top » The tap list at Khyber Pass Pub can be intimidating, but bartenders are happy to help. Opposite, bottom » A wall of windows separates Yards’s popular tasting room from the brewhouse.
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| BEERCATION: PHILADELPHIA, PA |
1980s arcade games while they do battle with Victory’s Golden Monkey and Troëgs Troëgenator, while drinkers at the Frank-ford Hall Biergarten drink enough Bell’s (Kalamazoo, Michigan) Two Hearted—along with German specialties—to earn it recognition as a top Bell’s account.
Yards Brewing Company lies between Fishtown and the SugarHouse Casino. Try a flagship Philadelphia Pale Ale or the Ales of the Revolution series, modeled after recipes written by former Philly dwellers Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson.
While in NoLibs and Fishtown, stock up on bottles at The Foodery and Bottle Bar East. No thanks to Pennsylvania’s “case” law, it’s tough to find stores where you can buy by the single.
South PhillyFor a taste of the old guard, eat brunch at the landmark South Philly Tap Room, then stop in at Pub on Passyunk East (one the nation’s best La Chouffe—Brasserie d’Achouffe (Belgium)—accounts) before strolling for beers on East Passyunk Avenue. You can’t go wrong eating at any of the acclaimed restaurants, but to plan your meal around beer, have a $5 burger followed by a Carton of Milk Stout (Carton Brewing, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey) at the unassuming Franklin Porter or a small-batch domestic at Stateside.
Bring-your-own-bottle (BYOB) restau-rants line the avenue, so prepare yourself with a bottle run to Brew—A Beer Bou-tique, which houses Ultimo Coffee, rated the country’s best coffee shop by TheDai-lyMeal.com. Or skip the coffee and the hassle by staking out the stationary food truck at Garage, where a rotating cadre of guest chefs serve dishes to can-sipping swillers in a converted auto repair shop.
Off the avenue, gather with drinkers who worship craft beer and the servers who sell it to them at Devil’s Den and The Industry, respectively. Its fireplace and homey atmosphere notwithstanding, Dev-il’s Den’s sour events and regular limited releases bring hard-core beer nerds in to worship at the temple of beer-bar-owning diva Erin Wallace. Drinking here saves you a trip to the suburbs if you want to taste Wallace’s GABF-winning ales brewed at her new Barren Hill Tavern & Brewery. If you work in a restaurant or bar, bring your paystub to receive 20 percent off your bill at The Industry, a restaurant designed as an in-the-biz hangout where bottles of Russian River (Santa Rosa, California) and Brooklyn Brewery (Brooklyn, New York) Cuvée Noir are de rigueur.
Clockwise from top left » Sip from classic liter mugs at picnic tables in Frankford Hall’s gravel- covered beer garden; Standard Tap is a gathering place for the Northern Liberties neighborhood; find an all-local, all-draft, all-day beer party at Johnny Brenda’s in Fishtown.
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| BEERCATION: PHILADELPHIA, PA |
Greater Center CityMonk’s Café, once described by a national beer glossy as one of the top five places to drink a beer before you die, is why Phila-delphia is a test market for Belgian beers, why Philadelphia consumes more Belgian beer than any city outside Brussels, and why four pairs of Philadelphians have won contests to brew at De Proefbrouwerij, Brasserie Dupont, Brasserie de la Senne, and Brouwerij Dilewyns. A member of the Belgian Knighthood of the Brewers’ Mash, Tom Peters masterminded Monk’s, and he hires educated and patient bartenders to help patrons decipher the names of 300 lofty brews, bound together in a thick leather menu. Try the mussels and a beer you can’t pronounce.
“It’s insane what you can get now,” says Peters, who opened the cozy but crowded Monk’s eighteen years ago, of Philly’s selec-tions. “It’s an embarrassment of riches.”
Near Monk’s are two more early adopt-ers. Good Dog Bar’s burger has been rated one of the best in the United States, and you can usually find off-duty bartenders from other beer bars there nursing a Founders or a Firestone Walker. Jose
Pistola’s always has some of the hardest-to-find beers on tap to pair with cheap Mexican eats.
Rittenhouse Square, sparkling with luxury shopping, restaurants, and wine/cocktail bars, houses two prime beer spots. Tria Taproom builds on the impeccable reputation of its sister wine-and-cheese cafés to present an all-draft list of beer, wine, cider, and soda; and The Dandelion pours celebrity restaurateur Stephen Starr’s acumen for ambiance and taste into an upscale British pub that serves three cask ales and small-batch British beers by the flight, half-pint, or Imperial pint.
Slightly farther afield are Strangelove’s, with its deeply beer-reverent owners and polished café and bottle shop vibe; Varga Bar, whose ceiling beams down painted images of vintage pin-up girls that are only slightly more eye-catching than the Russian River–heavy bottle list; and funky-sophisticated Alla Spina, where you can spend the night eating pig tails and washing them down with beer cocktails and milkshakes and eight-year-old bottles of Nora and Al-Iksir from Birreria le Bala-din (Piozzo, Italy).
But Wait, There’s More…Notable Breweries Elsewhere in the CityLocals rate Philadelphia Brewing, located in a restored nineteenth-cen-tury Kensington brewhouse, as their favorite place to hang out following a brewery tour. It’s never the same beer twice at Mt. Airy’s Earth Bread + Brewery, known for its flatbreads, dizzying succession of beer recipes, and owners who founded New Jersey’s much-missed Heavyweight Brewing in the 1990s. In Manayunk, try Manayunk Brewery’s Schuylkill Punch mixed berry ale while relaxing on the waterfront deck.
Notable Breweries in the ’BurbsLocals clamor to visit newcomers Tired Hands, Neshaminy Creek, and Springhouse, adorable Forest and Main, and Free Will’s new-and-improved tasting room and extensive sour program. The GABF-winning Iron Hill brewpub chain constantly adds new locations. Two of the most popular lie at the end of a short ride into New Jersey, close to Flying Fish, maker of the famed Exit Series. To the west, Victory is opening a huge new production brewery and brewpub that can be visited (by reservation) on a bus trip that includes lunch and a tour of the existing brewhouse. German traditions continue far into the countryside at the mainstays of Troëgs and Stoudts, and Belgian brewing reigns at Weyerbacher.
Notable Bars Elsewhere in the City If there’s one place to find a partic-ular German beer, it’s at Brauhaus Schmitz, on South Street, where dirndl-clad lasses serve steins to fans cheering on favorite teams in televised soccer matches. In the northeast, practically no week passes without Grey Lodge Pub owner Mike Scotese inventing some goofy holiday that gives him an excuse to don a costume and bring up good stuff from the cellar. And in the Loft District and Point Breeze, Prohibition Taproom and American Sardine Bar are con-sidered among the most legit.
Notable Bars in the ’BurbsWe’ll keep it basic and old school here. The five most influential suburban craft-beer bars are Teresa’s Café (Wayne), Iron Abbey (Horsham), Ca-pone’s Restaurant, Bar, and Bottle Shop (Norristown), Hulmeville Inn (Hulmeville), and Isaac Newton’s (Newtown).
In addition to pours from the namesake taps, Alla Spina offers a selection of local and Italian craft bottles served in Rastal Teku glassware.
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| BEERCATION: PHILADELPHIA, PA |
Old CityBeer lovers should make a pilgrimage to Eulogy Belgian Tavern, which crams thirty taps and 400 bottles into the narrow row-house where jewelers founded Bailey, Banks & Biddle in 1832. Slurp mussels and try a sour Haandbakk from Haandbryggeriet (Drammen, Norway) or a cheese-and-choc-olate-loving Chocarrubbica oatmeal stout from Grado Plato (Chieri, Italy).
Khyber Pass Pub has been a dive bar since before dive bars were cool. It was also a beer bar before most people had heard the term. Special events bring knockouts such as Cantillon Iris Grand Cru (Anderlecht, Belgium) and Loverbeer Madamin (Marentino, Italy).
Opened recently, 2nd Story Brewing takes over a spacious post-industrial space to brew European and American styles. Desserts are decadent, especially the Colonial Porter Banana Cake and The Big and Boozey Adult Sundae, both of which feature ice cream made with the house stout at the historic Franklin Fountain around the corner.
West Philly and Graduate HospitalWest Philly’s City Tap House boasts the most taps in the city (sixty), and you could cheerfully drink what’s pouring from any one of them. If there’s Russian River to be found on tap in the city, you can usually find it at Local 44. The bottle shop next door—also owned by Local 44’s owners, who run Strangelove’s and the ever- cherished Memphis Taproom in the Kens-ington neighborhood—offers a quieter place to drink from a few taps or bottles. Be sure to fill your bank account before you come—the selection is tightly edited to reflect only the most covetable (read: expensive) bottles.
In a historic firehouse, Rosemarie Certo decided to reopen Dock Street as a flatbread-focused brewpub after con-tract brewing the beer she created as the city’s first “microbrew” in 1985. If you’re lucky—or unlucky—you may stumble into a hidden stash of the infamous Walk-er, a pale American stout brewed with goat brains in honor of The Walking Dead TV series.
Graduate Hospital (G-Ho) lies on the fringes but supports enough beer bars to make it worth a trip. Philadelphians con-sistently vote Pub & Kitchen as the best bar in the city; The Sidecar Bar & Grille and Grace Tavern have carried the mantle for years; and a team comprised of a veteran bartender and chef has launched Devil’s Pocket Food & Spirits with twelve taps.
“Beer in this town is like a pebble,” says Pe-ters. “You throw it in the water and it keeps generating more and more around it.”
Top » Troëgs’s tasting room features longtime classics plus experimental brews you won’t find anywhere else. Above » House-brewed beers are designed to complement the food at 2nd Story Brewing.
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WHEN MICHAEL KANE LAUNCHED Kane Brewing Company (Ocean, New Jer-sey) in 2011, he brought more than fifteen years of homebrewing experience, nation-al and international travel, and business savvy to the brewhouse. Appropriately named, Kane Brewing is an embodiment of Kane himself with a sense of place specific to his hometown.
“I didn’t leave my day job to start the brewery until I was thirty-five,” says Kane. “The beauty of what I wanted to do is a long-term approach, to open a brewery and do my own thing with no partners or in-vestors. I’ve spent a lot of time focused on being able to do this on my own, and I have a clear vision to bring craft beer to New Jersey. I don’t say that without the knowl-edge of great breweries in the area,” Kane continues, “But more to bring awareness to what is not exactly a ‘craft-beer’ state.”
Kane, who grew up in New Jersey, says that the state has an educated consumer base for craft beer without a lot of craft-beer production. “It wasn’t [about] getting consumers on board,” he says in reference to the European-beer-style-loving East Coast beer drinkers. “It was getting retail-ers and wholesalers to realize there was a market for this kind of product.” So Kane decided he would use his two favorite beer categories—West Coast–style ales and Bel-
The Garden Statesman
Kane Brewing Company is using West Coast–style ales and Belgian-style beers to bring craft beer to New Jersey. By Emily Hutto
gian-style beers—as a platform to bring local craft beer to New Jersey.
Kane’s West Coast focus was inspired by traveling, when he was blown away by the differences between East and West Coast IPAs. “Compared to English styles [in the East], I was blown away by the really dry, hoppy, aromatic IPAs [in the West]. It was a whole new world.”
West Coast–style IPAs have scaled-back malt profiles and are focused on bright flavors and aromatic profiles, says Kane. “That’s our philosophy with hoppy beers: a lot of pilsner malt, a tiny bit of crystal, and the rest is just the hops.”
The Kane IPAs, including the Head High American IPA and the Overhead imperial IPA, have the slightest “clean bitterness that hits you in the beginning,” says Kane. They use neutral yeasts to maintain the focus on the flavor of the hops and are usually dry hopped for big hops aroma.
“We brew what we like,” Kane reminds me when he describes the other beer style for the brewery. A lot like his IPAs, his Belgian-style Single Fin Belgian-style blonde ale is clean, bright, and crisp. This year-round offering from the brewery is one that beer geeks love, Kane says. “We modeled it after a Belgian single—super low alcohol, drinkable, flavorful, dry, and crisp on the palate. Light in body, Belgian PH
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single seemed to be the obvious choice. We thought it would be a good platform for pulling flavor out of yeast and malt, at only 4 percent ABV.”
Single Fin, like a lot of the other Bel-gian-style beers at the brewery, is brewed with “Trappist-style” yeast, says Kane. “Our first, and the yeast we liked the best, is Belgian Abbaye 2 (ECY13) from East Coast Yeast. That’s what we’ve used the most. [But] we love to experiment, so we’ve also tried White Labs Trappist (WLP500), and we’re about to try some batches using their Belgian Abbey Yeast (WLP530). For most of the year we have a saison strain as well. Most recently we’ve been using a blend of four different strains from East Coast Yeast, but we’ve used the single Dupont strain from White Labs in the past for both our saisons and wits,” he says.
At Kane Brewing, the Belgian-style beers are dry and highly carbonated. “Our Belgian-style quad, for example, is between 11 and 12 percent ABV, dark, and very dry. It’s traditional, with higher carbonation and dark fruit notes,” Kane says. “We want to honor the Belgian tradition, but are by no means experts in Belgian-style beers. We’re an American craft brewery with a twist.”
Often responsible for that twist are the 150 non-sour barrels in the brewery’s ex-
panding barrel program, including bour-bon, tequila, French and American oak, brandy, and cognac barrels. This program yields such beers as the annual release A Night To End All Dawns, a 12 percent ABV imperial stout that ages in bourbon barrels for fifteen months. In 2014, Kane created three additional versions of A Night To End All Dawns—one aged on Madagascar bourbon vanilla beans, one aged on dark roast coffee from nearby Rook Coffee Roasters, and one aged on roasted cacao beans.
Many of the retired wine barrels that Kane uses come from two local New Jersey wineries: Working Dog Winery in East Windsor and Valenzano Winery in Shamong. For Kane Brewing, the empha-sis is on New Jersey whenever possible. “We use a lot of different products that come from New Jersey in our beers,” says Kane. “Coffee, ingredients from local farmers, and even a local microbiologist with a small yeast company—we’ve used his Trappist yeast strain.”
New Jersey is smack in between New York and Philadelphia, so the area is gate-way to many other craft-beer cities, Kane says. “Some brewers have even moved past New Jersey because markets are easier to penetrate elsewhere. We [self-dis-tribute] and have mostly draft sales. We’re totally focused on New Jersey.”
Make ItSingle Fin ALL-GRAIN
“The recipe for Single Fin, a Bel-gian-style blonde ale, is very simple,” says Michael Kane of Kane Brewing Co. “We focus on getting great ingre-dients and the fermentation profile to create a majority of the flavor.”
OG: 1.042FG: 1.008IBUs: 23ABV: 4.5%
MALT/GRAIN BILL
7.5 lb (3.4 kg) Continental pilsner malt5 oz (142 g) Vienna malt5 oz (142 g) Wheat HOPS SCHEDULE
1 oz (28 g) Styrian Goldings at 90 minutes0.25 oz (7 g) Styrian Goldings at knockout0.25 oz (7 g) Saaz at knockout
DIRECTIONS
Mash for 90 minutes at 148–149°F (64–65°C). Boil for 90 minutes following the hops schedule. Chill to 64°F (18°C), then pitch the yeast. Hold the temperature at 64°F (18°C) for 12 hours, then raise it to 70°F (21°C) over the course of fermentation (about 1 week for primary). YEAST
East Coast Belgian Abbaye 2 (ECY13) or other Trappist yeast
BREWER’S NOTES
Kane recommends that you start with 0.25 ounce (7 grams) each of Styrian Goldings and Saaz at knockout and then adjust to flavor.
Recipes are built to yield a batch size of 5 gallons and assume 72% brewhouse efficiency unless otherwise noted.
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“We’re pretty darned happy with the machine and the folks that stand behind it. Your product is great and your people are great.”
Billy PyattCATAWBA BREWING COMPANY
WILDGOOSECANNING.COM
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AMERICAN INNOVATION
The GastronomeRockmill Brewery is designing Belgian-inspired beers that are brewed to be paired with food and is targeting chef-driven states for distribution.
By Emily HuttoMATTHEW BARBEE, THE OWNER and head brewer of Rockmill Brewery (Lancaster, Ohio), had what he calls his “first saison experience” at Gjelina restaurant on Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice Beach, California. At the time, the young somme-lier was most interested in wine and ad-mittedly up until that point had a “haughty attitude toward beer and food pairing.”
“I was riding my beach cruiser from Manhattan Beach to Venice Beach,” he recalls. “It was a sunny afternoon; I’d been exercising; I was in the mood for a long drink and not a short one.”
Barbee and his companions ordered a large format Dupont Saison and a salad with burrata cheese (a fresh Italian cheese made from mozzarella and cream) over arugula with drizzled olive oil and grilled peaches. “The bottle came with a cork and a cage,” he remembers. “The server popped the cork—
aromatics immediately! I was thinking, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa! This isn’t beer.’”
But it was beer. Barbee would soon dis-cover the wonder of saisons—not only did saisons and Belgian-style beers offer versa-tility to food pairing that he’d not yet found with wine; they also provided a connection with Barbee’s agricultural roots. His grand-father was a winemaker and a farmer, and his mother was a farmer, so the seasonality and locality of saison spoke to him.
“Historically, every major [Belgian] farm had its own brewery on location. They used what they had. The wheat might be weak one year, so they brewed with rye, or whatever they had access to. They didn’t let anything go to waste,” Barbee says. “Saison is more of a mindset than a beer style. The underlying mindset to the etymology of saison helps give me a focus with beer design,” he adds. PH
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That first saison experience catalyzed Barbee’s move home to Columbus, Ohio, where he would open a saison-specific brewery, Rockmill Brewery, in 2012.
“Rockmill is a Belgian-style brewery that sticks to the terroir of our water from a well at the brewery farm here in Rockmill. The minerality of our water is similar to that of Belgian beers,” he says. “[It’s] hard water, which I think adds structure and gives an edge to the beer.”
Although most of the beer produced at Rockmill falls into the saison category, no two beers are the same or even remotely close. “[Brewers] can really express them-selves through this style,” says Barbee, whose year-round beer offerings include Petite Saison, Saison, and a brand-new Saison Noir.
“This was my first time working with roasted barley in saison,” says Barbee about the Saison Noir. “We ended up with beer I’m obsessed with now. Its flavor component is candied fruit first and then everything I’d expect from roasted barley: caramel, tobacco, and coffee roast. It’s
perfect for autumn and winter, and it has a ridiculously sexy label.”
A little less sexy beer that will still turn some heads is Rockmill’s new experi-mental gluten-free saison, brewed with millet and buckwheat and fermented with Rockmill’s saison yeast.
“It’s all about the yeast,” Barbee says. “That’s the responsibility of Belgian-style brewing. A big part of our focus is making sure yeast has a healthy life cycle and attenuation. We play Bach and Beethoven and whatever it feels like.” That classical music apparently makes for happy yeast, which creates beers that are effervescent, dry, and drinkable—the most conducive for pairing with food in Barbee’s opinion.
“Rockmill beers are designed to be paired,” says Barbee. “We want this brewery to find its niche in chef-driven states. I pick the most competitive food markets out there [for distribution]. New York, Chicago, California, Ohio, and Kentucky … Colorado is next on my list. I want to get involved with the Aspen Food and Wine Festival, and I like to hang out in the mountains.”
Beyond SaisonsRockmill Brewery also crafts an abbey-style ale, a witbier, a golden ale, and a few barrel-aged beers.
DubbelABV: 8%; IBUs: 46Spicy German hops provide bal-ance to dark fruits and specialty malts in this abbey-style ale.
WitbierABV: 6%; IBUs: 20This wheat ale brewed with coriander and orange peel has a crisp, clean, refreshing body with a citrus bouquet and subdued bitterness.
TripelABV: 9%; IBUs: 34This golden ale is rich and full- bodied with dried fruit and deli-cate, spicy Saaz hops in the nose.
Cask-Aged TripelABV: 10.5%Aged in oak whiskey barrels from Middle West Spirits, this golden ale offers rich vanilla notes that intermingle with the delicate notes of the Ohio Winter Wheat Whiskey.
Beer and Food PairingsHere are Matthew Barbee’s food-pairing suggestions for Rock-mill’s year-round saisons.
Petite Saison ABV: 6%; IBUs: 28This sessionable saison has mild spice and earthy notes. Pair it with sunshine and Vermont Creamery’s Cremont (mixed-milk cheese), a smoked salmon croissant, or dill, bacon, and mushroom quiche.
Saison ABV: 7%; IBUs: 34Rustic, earthy, complex spice notes are prevalent in the aroma of this farmhouse ale, with flavors provided by fermentation esters and hops aromatics. Pair it with cave-aged Gruyère, Croque Mon-sieur, or mussels.
Saison NoirABV: 8%; IBUs: 36This dark saison has the complex aromas and flavor of candied fruit and sweet potato crème brûlée, followed by hints of caramel and mild tobacco in the finish. Pair it with Ossau-iraty (a French sheep-milk cheese), cigars, or espres-so-encrusted cheesecake.
Clockwise from top » Rockmill Founder and Brewmaster Matthew Barbee hase focused heavily on beer and food events, extensively partnering with local chefs and restaurants for tasting dinners; a spread of cheese and appetizers on the brewery farmhouse table; Rockmill’s bucolic farmhouse location is almost as large a draw as the beer.
34 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
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Clockwise from top » Ben Coli and Mitchell Warner of Dageraad Brewing in their new taproom; Coli grains out on brew day; Warner pulls a sample from a fermentor.
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| BREAKOUT BREWERS: BELGIAN-STYLE NEXT WAVE |
IN 2014, BEN COLI, the nerdiest among his homebrew friends, took the home-brewer’s plunge and launched Dageraad Brewing, which he named after the Dag-eraadplaats (“sunrise square” in Flemish), a neighborhood square on the east side of Antwerp, Belgium. “The square is not a tourist destination, just a neighborhood square. It’s a really lovely place to go hang out and have a beer.”
So is Dageraad Brewing. It’s a small op-eration in Burnaby, British Columbia, that just recently opened a cozy new tasting room. After launching the business in April, Coli took his time to transition his recipes from homebrew-size batches to ten barrels at a time.
“Part of our general philosophy is taking things slowly,” says Coli, referring specifically to the house blend of Belgian yeast he’s pitching. “Belgian yeast is slow. It’s way lazier than American ale yeast or British ale yeast.”
Because Dageraad is a Belgian-style brewery, one of the major focuses is yeast. “We’re brewing moderate-gravity beers, and the fermentor is still poppin’ at least a week later,” Coli adds about slow fermen-tation times. “We don’t have a produc-tion schedule,” he explains, nodding to the fact that yeast invariably attenuates. “Production schedules ruin beers. We could probably make more money if we jammed beer out faster, but I get way more satisfaction out of making some-thing special.”
One of the first Belgian-style beers that Coli homebrewed (and now brews at Dag-eraad) is certainly something special—a golden strong ale brewed with pureéd pears and coriander that takes at least six weeks to ferment. He says that from his
The Global CitizensAt Canada’s Dageraad Brewing, Brewmaster Ben Coli is out to create a little piece of Belgium in British Columbia. By Emily Hutto
homebrew equipment to Dageraad’s cur-rent 10-barrel system, that beer has never tasted the same twice.
Another homebrew recipe brought to life at Dageraad is the brewery’s saison. “It’s fermented really dry with French saison yeast. It’s peppery and fruity and crisp,” and according to Coli those flavor nuances can vary ever so slightly from batch to batch.
That variability is what many brewers will tell you is the bread and butter of Belgian-style beer, which historically was made with whatever simple ingredients were available locally at the time. At Dag-eraad, Coli is re-creating traditional styles with ingredients that are most similar to those in Belgium.
“Belgian beer is all about water,” says Coli. “Here we have incredibly soft water, which is really nice for brewing Bel-gian-style beers. From [that starting point], the water can be built into anything you want it to be by adding salts.”
“We’re using European malts,” Coli says, “mostly German, because local malt doesn’t taste the same. Canadian pilsner malt has this sweet, corny taste to it, where-as German malt has nutty taste to it. We’re paying twice as much per bag for this imported malt, but it makes a difference.”
Finally, Dageraad is using “German and Czech hops because that’s what they have in Belgium,” says Coli. “Hops are especial-ly important to Belgian blonde ales, which have a fairly pronounced hops presence.”
By the time these beers are imported from Belgium, Coli points out, they’ve lost a lot of hops aroma. “Take an enormous quad—it tastes great by the time it gets over here,” he says. “But Belgian pale ales and blondes just don’t taste right by the time they get over here.”
Crafted in the Belgian Tradition, Brewed in BCDageraad BlondeABV: 7.5%A medium-dry blonde ale brewed with a secret blend of spices. Crowned with a fluffy white head, graced with a fruity, spicy, citrusy aro-ma, and inspired by Belgium’s strong blonde ales.FOOD PAIRINGS: Dageraad Blonde’s citrus and spicy flavors complement salads and desserts, while its tartness and effervescence cut through fat and refresh the palate, making it a good counterpoint to heavier dishes. It’s also excellent paired with semisoft ripened cheeses and charcuterie.
Dageraad AmberABV: 6%A hoppy aroma and a crisp finish bal-ance Dageraad Amber’s light malty sweetness and bouquet of malt and stone fruit. FOOD PAIRINGS: Amber is an easygoing pub companion and an excellent pairing beer. Its rich malt flavor complements savory-sweet dishes, including Indian and Malaysian curries, braised meats, barbecue, and pub fare.
Dageraad Randonneur Saison ABV: 6.4%Coli created Randonneur Saison in the tradition of farmhouse ales brewed in northern France and Wallonia. Peppery and hoppy, effer-vescent and bone-dry, Randonneur Saison refreshes after cycling through the autumnal countryside.FOOD PAIRINGS: Randonneur Saison’s peppery and lemony notes make it a perfect companion for seafood or salads. Its palate-scrubbing efferves-cence allows it to hold its own against stinky cheeses and fried food.
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The Dageraad Blonde Ale was inspired by Belgium’s variety of strong blonde ales, ranging from semisweet to bone-dry, that offer a huge range of fruit, hops, and spice flavors. Dageraad Blonde gets its depth and flavor complexity from European hops, spices, and the brewery’s house yeast. It has a note of nutty pilsner malt, a whiff of noble hops, a faint note of caramelized sugar, and—when the beer warms—a subtle, floral heat. “The Blonde is my favorite beer,” says Coli. “Bright, sparkling, fruity, and delicious.”
The Blonde is one of Dageraad’s two year-round beers. The oth-er is “an amber made in the Belgian pale ale tradition,” says Coli. “It has a rounded malty flavor with soft hops highlights.”
Although most of the brewery’s beers are made in the Belgian tradition, at the end of the day, Dageraad is still a North American craft brewery that’s open to experimentation. “Our most recent violation of tradition,” jokes Coli, “was a wet-hopped blonde ale brewed with local Centennial hops. I thought the citrusy, fruity components of those hops might go well with citrusy, fruity blonde ale. It’s surprising how much of a difference those hops make.”
For Coli, Dageraad Brewing is an effort to transport a small piece of the beer culture he found in the Dageraadplaats home to British Columbia. “I love Antwerp and the Ardennes. And I really love the beer. But I don’t live in Belgium. I live here in Vancouver. Can we have that beer? Not just occasionally as an expensive, imported bottle, but as a standard, locally brewed beer? Can we drink an authentic-tasting Belgian-style beer from the other side of the city, instead of the other side of the world?” He’s determined to answer those questions with a resounding, “Yes!”
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The Belgian RenaissanceWhile the North American craft-beer scene’s 70s and 80s roots tended toward British and German styles, an undeniable shift toward Belgian styles started in the late 90s and has hit full strength over the past five years. Here are a few American breweries helping lead the current Belgian charge…
Logsdon Farm BreweryHood River, Oregon
“Farmhouse” isn’t just a style, but a lifestyle for Dave Logsdon, founder of the eponymously- named brewery. As one of the founders of Full Sail Brewing (and founder of Wyeast Labs), Logsdon has a depth of experience with craft beer matched by few. For his latest act, he’s built a brewery in the big red barn on his family’s 10-acre farm in Hood River and focused on a lineup of beers that’s purely Belgian-style. From the GABF gold-winning Seizoen Bretta to Cerasus, the World Beer Cup gold-winning Flanders red, Logsdon’s PNW take on these tradition-al styles is making waves and racking up accolades.
River North BreweryDenver, Colorado
This 2 ½-year-old brewery, located in (and named after) Denver’s River North district, launched in 2012 with a mission to brew “yeast-centric beers with Belgian-style flair.” Owners Matt and Jessica Hess continue to carve out space in the competitive Denver craft-beer market with consistently strong releases including their canned River North White witbier and Belgian IPA as well as their Quandary quad and J. Marie Farmhouse Ale. In addition to their year-round releases, an aggressive barrel-aging program has delivered an impressive number of special releases, such as their fan-favorite Rum Barrel Quandary. Recently, they jumped on the beer- inspired-by-cocktails trend with a quad aged in used Manhattan cocktail barrels. Their success is paying off with a recent expansion into the Kansas City market. “I learned to love Belgian yeasts when I was homebrewing,” says Hess. “They just produce such a wide array of delicious and drinkable beers.”
Saint Somewhere Brewing CompanyTarpon Springs, Florida
Founder and Brewmaster Bob Sylvester has earned a reputation for being a bit of a curmudgeon, doggedly focusing on traditional brewing methods such as open fermentation and bottle conditioning and even arguing in favor of green bottles (it’s tradition!). But that same determination manifests itself in his brewing, and his studious focus on Belgian styles has produced some of the strongest farmhouse-style ales in the southeast United States. To some, limiting style so tightly constricts creativity, but for Sylvester, it provides a clear framework for exploration with beers such as Serge (a dark farmhouse ale) or Cyn-thiana (farmhouse ale brewed with grape must). His recent collaboration with Cigar City Brewing, named Deja Vu, dives into American Wild Ale territory, with an incredible citrus hops profile that will have you insisting they brewed with Florida’s main agricultural export (they didn’t—that character comes entirely from the play of hops and yeast).
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| BREAKOUT BREWERS: BELGIAN-STYLE NEXT WAVE |
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| PICK SIX |
A Victorious SixFor Victory Brewing Cofounder Bill Covaleski, choosing a dream six-pack is like DJing: while he could select plenty of great options, there’s an art to putting together the perfect playlist. Here are the six tracks on his current mix tape. By Jamie Bogner
“MY LIST HAS A LOT TO DO WITH memory,” Covaleski says. “With only six selections, these can’t be desert-island beers—they have to have a strong mem-ory component.” For Covaleski, that beer memory—of time, place, and the compa-ny with which it was enjoyed—is far more valuable than simply admiring a beer on its technical merits.
“I admire Budweiser from a technical standpoint,” he says. “With twelve locations and twelve different water sources, their product consistency is technically impres-sive. But it’s not in my dream six-pack.”
“Good DJs are just editors,” Covaleski says. “They can play anything. But choos-ing what to play is the real skill. Here are my six right now, but as soon as [we’re done talking], I may change my mind.”
Tripel Karmeliet(Brouwerij Bosteels, Buggenhout, Belgium)Tripel Karmeliet is one of those beers I discovered after becoming a professional brewer, after we started brewing Golden Monkey. It’s nuanced across the spectrum and just lush and luxurious, with notes of orange blossom and honey. Don’t pigeon-hole it as a tripel—it’s pure liquid seduc-tion that stretches outside of time and place—and I admire it for those qualities.
I’m an evangelist [for great beer] as much as [I am] a brewer, and this beer so perfectly breaks misconceptions of beer as thin or bitter. No matter what kind of bad start someone may have had with beer, Tripel Karmeliet can break them of those bad memories.
Our beers aren’t directly inspired by anyone else’s beer, but when I sit back and drink our V Twelve [Belgian-style quad], I sense some of the things I love about Tripel Karmeliet.
Stone IPA(Stone Brewing Co., Escondido, California)Like so many people in the world of craft brewing, I had my mind blown by Sierra Ne-vada Pale Ale back in 1984. It set up my lust IL
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for hops and hops expression. That came full circle in my first taste of Stone IPA.
What I find amazing about Stone IPA is that it’s somewhat restrained. It has this huge hops character, but it’s not just play-ing loud to play loud. I don’t mean to be demeaning to the category, but something about [Stone IPA] froze time and said, “This is what we’re all heading for.”
They’ve balanced a lot of flavors and components in a way that makes it a great expression of what an IPA should be. People don’t use the word “nuance” with IPA, but the way they’ve constructed it is almost haunting to me.
Herzogliches Braustuberl Tegernsee Maibock(Herzogliches Braustuberl Tegernsee, Tegernsee, Germany)This beer takes me back to 1987 when Ron [Barchet, the other Victory cofound-er] and I took our first trip to Germany and Belgium together. That trip opened
my eyes to the bigger world of brewing culture, and the location on the lake there is stunning.
The Maibock itself was so soulful, almost like a big dog—intimidating with heft and character, but gentle, warm, and inviting—with a copper malty delicious-ness you can fall into liter after liter (then not be able to walk). So very memorable, it showcases malt and warmth and richer flavors yet still has that spicy German hops lift and alcoholic note on the finish that keeps it light and edgy.
Fullers 1845(Fuller Smith & Turner PLC, London, England)Fullers 1845 messes with my head as a brewer, and I’ve spent a lot of time hung up on what components make the flavors I’ve perceived. At first I ascribed the plum flavors to the yeast, but then it tails off in another direction and seems to originate in the malt.
It’s not a confounding or frustrating beer—it soothes me because it’s rich and big and warm—but it plays inside my head. There are so many things going on, but they’re restrained and play to the right level of subtlety. Fullers 1845 is more orchestral than other beers.
It’s funny, but I never really buy a single bottle, because I know I’ll want a second one. I love it with Indian food—it has the perfect depth to balance the heat of Indian dishes. I drink one for the beer itself and enjoy the second one with the meal.
Allagash White(Allagash Brewing Company, Portland, Maine)White just nails refreshment and is a durable food partner. I haven’t tasted any-thing the beer doesn’t work with. It’s just a great beer; I don’t know how to go more in depth. It’s not the most characterful, and there aren’t a ton of things going on, but it’s just perfectly dialed in for what it’s supposed to be.
Keesmann Bamberger Herren Pils (Brauerei Keesmann, Bamberg, Germany)I would put my own Prima Pils in my six-pack because I gain so much pleasure from it, and for a brewer to say that, it says a lot, since we’re generally not so motivated toward self-promotion. The thing that brings me back again and again is the fla-vor-to-body ratio—so much flavor reward and herbal hops presence and dry bite to it for a 5.3 percent ABV beer.
Outside of Prima, my most memorable pils is Herren Pils from Keesmann in Bamberg. It has that light German pils body that you expect and layers and layers of herbal German hops deliciousness.
People often say, “I don’t like hops,” but what you find is that they just don’t like American varieties of hops. I’ll get them to try a pils, and they often don’t think it’s hoppy. I’ve been fortunate to have Herren Pils on a couple of occasions. The brewery is situated across the street from Mahr’s brewery and in striking distance of two other breweries, so singling them out is a pretty lofty statement.
Germans are really good at sticking to style, but [Herren Pils] is differentiated and not what you would expect when I say, “German pils.” The German public measures quality based on similarity to style, but I find nuance to the Herron Pils that separates it from others.
Victory Cofounder Bill Cova-leski at the sampling station in their new Parkesburg, Pennsylvania, brewery.
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| COOKING WITH BEER |
Winter Warme rs
From Herb-Marinated Goat Cheese to an apple-brussels salad topped with a tangy Beeranch Dressing to an incredible rib-eye steak with Blue Cheese–Beer Butter and crispy potato skins to tart Lemon-Beer Hand Pies, these tangy, tart, rich dishes will keep you warm while the weather’s cold. Recipes and photos by Christopher Cina
This page: Spread tangy Herb-Marinated Goat Cheese on warm grilled bread. Opposite page: Pair Grown-Up Potato Skins with an English-style pale or mild.
Apple–Brussels Sprout Salad with Beeranch
Dressing
Active preparation time: 20 minutesChilling time: 4 hoursServes: 4
1 Granny Smith apple, cored and thinly sliced
1 cup red cabbage, shaved8 brussels sprouts, cored and leaves
separated½ cup Cypress Grove Lamb Chopper (an
aged sheep’s milk cheese), shredded¾ cup Beeranch Dressing (see below)¼ cup pecan pieces, toasted
Combine the apple, cabbage, brussels sprout leaves, and Lamb Chopper in a mixing bowl. Toss with the Beeranch Dressing and divide among four plates. Garnish with the toasted pecans.
Beeranch Dressing
Makes: 2 cups
1 cup (8 fl oz) Vienna-style lager1¼ cup mayonnaise½ cup fresh dill, chopped½ cup fresh chives, chopped½ cup fresh Italian parsley, chopped½ cup fresh oregano, chopped2 Tbs garlic, minced1 Tbs kosher salt1 tsp restaurant-grind (a semi-coarse
grind) black pepper1 cup (8 fl oz) buttermilk1 lb sour cream
Combine the lager and mayonnaise and mix well. Add the dill, chives, parsley, oregano, garlic, salt, and pepper and mix well. Add the buttermilk and sour cream and mix well. Refrigerate for 4 hours before serving.
Beer suggestions: Prepare the dressing with a Vienna-style lager such as Great Lakes Eliot Ness, Devil’s Backbone Vienna Lager, or Neshaminy Creek Churchville Lager. Pair the salad with a pale ale or IPA that tilts toward the bitter/piney side of the hops spectrum—such as Russian River’s Blind Pig.
Herb-Marinated Goat Cheese
Active preparation time: 10 minutesMarinating time: 48 hoursServes: 2–4
1 Tbs fresh parlsey, chopped1½ Tbs fresh chives, minced½ Tbs fresh rosemary, minced1 Tbs fresh thyme, chopped1 tsp garlic, minced½ tsp salt¼ tsp black pepper½ cup (4 fl oz) extra virgin olive oil4 oz Haystack Mountain goat cheese log,
cut into 1-ounce discsWarm grilled bread
Combine the parsley, chives, rosemary, thyme, garlic, salt, and pepper with the ol-ive oil and mix well. Place the goat cheese discs into two 4-ounce resealable jars. Pour the herb oil over the cheese to cover. Seal the jar tightly and chill for 48 hours. Remove from the refrigerator and allow to warm to room temperature before spread-ing on the warm grilled bread.
Beer suggestions: Pair with a bright pil-sner, such as Victory’s Prima Pils, August Schell’s Pilsner, or Sixpoint’s The Crisp. Or try with a kölsch, such as Ballast Point’s Pale Ale.
Cast Iron Rib-Eye with Blue Cheese–
Beer Butter
Active preparation time: 15 minutesCooking time: 8 minutesServes: 1–2
2 Tbs butterOne 12-oz boneless rib-eye (14-oz bone in)¼ cup (2 fl oz) IPA1 pinch salt1 pinch freshly ground black pepper2 oz Blue Cheese–Beer Butter (see below)
Place the butter in a large cast-iron pan and place the pan over high heat. Once the pan begins to smoke, gently lay the rib-eye in the pan and brown the bottom. Turn the steak over and cook to desired doneness, being careful to avoid splatter-ing the hot butter.
Remove from the heat just before the rib-eye reaches your desired internal temperature (130–135°F/55–57°C for me-dium-rare; 160°F/71°C for well-done). De-glaze the pan with the beer, then season the steak with the salt and pepper. Place the Blue Cheese–Beer Butter on the steak and allow it to melt slowly while serving.
Blue Cheese–Beer Butter
Makes: 1 pound
½ lb butter (2 sticks), room temperature¼ lb Point Reyes Original Blue Cheese
crumbles¼ cup (2 fl oz) IPA1 tsp kosher salt2 Tbs parsley, chopped
Combine all the ingredients in a tabletop mixer or food processor and blend togeth-er. Remove and chill until the butter sets.
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Beer suggestions: A citrus-forward IPA, such as Victory’s Dirt Wolf, Lagunitas Sucks, or Schlafly’s Tasmanian IPA, works well against the funky blue cheese. Pair with a bold black IPA such as Firestone Walker’s Wookey Jack or Odell Brewing’s Mountain Standard.
Grown-Up Potato Skins
Active preparation time: 90 minutesCooking time: 70 minutesServes: 3–4
3 Russet potatoes, scrubbed2 fl oz olive oil2 tsp kosher salt, divided6 oz pancetta, cooked crispy and chopped8 oz Comté cheese, shredded½ cup chives, sliced½ cup crème fraiche (see below)Freshly cracked black pepper
Preheat the oven to 400⁰F (204°C). Rub the potatoes with the olive oil and 1 tsp of the salt. Place in the oven and bake for 70 minutes or until potatoes are tender on the inside and skin begins to crisp. Remove the potatoes from the oven and allow them to cool until you can handle them.
Halve the potatoes and, using a spoon, scoop out the potato flesh being careful to leave ¼ inch to ½ inch of potato on the bottom. Reserve the potato flesh for another use. Place the potato skins in a pan and top with the pancetta and Comté.
Broil under high heat until the cheese has melted and the potato begins to brown. Remove from the oven and finish with a dollop of crème fraiche and a sprinkle of chives on each potato. Sprinkle with the remaining salt and freshly cracked black pepper.
To turn this dish into a meal, combine blanched broccoli with the reserved potato flesh and fill the potato skins before you broil them.
Crème Fraiche
Makes: 2 cups
2 cup (16 fl oz) heavy cream2 Tbs buttermilk
Combine the cream and buttermilk in a nonreactive container. Cover with a clean towel and place in a warm area. Let sit for 12–14 hours. Refrigerate.
Beer suggestions: Nothing accompanies upscale pub food like a great English-style pale or mild. We’re particularly fond of the bold and assertive flavor of Summit Brewing’s Union Series 3X Mild.
Lemon-Beer Hand Pies
Active preparation time: 40 minutesCooking time: 10–15 minutesServes: 8
2 egg yolks3 Tbs cornstarch
¾ cup (6 fl oz) India pale lager½ cup sugar⅛ tsp salt1 Tbs butter¼ cup (2 fl oz) lemon juice1 tsp lemon zestPastry Dough (see below)Oil, for fryingPowdered sugar (optional)
In a medium saucepan, combine the egg yolks, cornstarch, lager, sugar, and salt. Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly just until the mixture begins to thicken. Remove from heat and whisk in the butter, lemon juice, and zest. Pour into a bowl and chill.
Roll the pastry dough out to ¼-inch thickness and cut into eight 8-inch squares. Place 3 tablespoons of the lemon filling in the center of the dough. Fold the dough over the filling to form a rectangle and press the edges closed with a fork.
Heat the oil in a deep fryer or deep pot to 365°F (185°C). Fry the hand pies until golden brown, 3–4 minutes. Remove from the oil, drain, and serve warm, sprinkled with powdered sugar if desired.
Pastry Dough
Makes enough dough for 6–8 hand pies
3 cup all-purpose flour3 Tbs sugar¼ tsp salt½ cup vegetable shortening1 egg, beaten1 cup (8 fl oz) buttermilk
Combine the flour, sugar, and salt. Work in the shortening with a pastry blade or in a tabletop mixer. Avoid using your hands so the shortening doesn’t warm up. When the dough is crumbly, mix in the egg and buttermilk until the mixture just comes together. Cover and chill for 1–2 hours.
Beer suggestions: Jack’s Abby Hoponius Union remains one of our favorite IPLs, along with Samuel Adams Double Agent IPL, Ballast Point’s Fathom, and Founders’ Dissenter IPL.
Nothing accompanies upscale pub food like a great English-style pale or mild. The citrus flavors in the Lemon-Beer Hand Pie match perfectly with a modern hoppy India Pale Lager.
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| COOKING WITH BEER |
Past ItsPrime? Vintage Beer Warning SignsWhat are some of the ways a beer can go wrong? What signs signal the point of no return? Here are seven points to consider when you’re evaluating a vintage beer. By Patrick Dawson
PHOT
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| IN THE CELLAR |
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CHANCES ARE IF YOU’RE READING this magazine, you have a beer cellar. Aging beer is all the rage right now as people are not only exposed to many more styles, but also as they learn exactly what their palates prefer. But, as eager cellarers start to wade in, it’s all too easy to fall into various traps. And one of the most common is “older is better.” It’s important to remember that eventually, all cellarable beers will succumb to the tide of time. Okay, an exception might be made for vin-tage greats such as Thomas Hardy’s and Cantillon, which have yet to hit the wall, but there’s nothing worse than drinking a beer that’s sat patiently for years, only to discover that it’s a shell of its former self.
It’s easy enough to recognize a beer that’s well past its prime with that first sip. Even non-beer drinkers can tell “old” when they taste it. However, having the ability to detect the indicative aged aspects before a beer heads downhill can pay divi-dends by enabling you to drink whatever stock you might have left in time and helping you learn where a beer’s peak is for the next time. Consider the following warning signs.
Thinning BodyOne of the worst things that can happen to an aging beer is the thinning of its body. Over time, oxidation will reduce a beer’s sugars. As these sugars are oxi-dized, the by-products adhere to the malt proteins, eventually causing them to fall out of suspension, resulting in thinning. Many cellar-worthy styles (e.g., barley-wines, imperial stouts) rely on a malty body to let their maturing flavors shine, and once this base is gone, the beer can become dull and muted.
Brett-Derived Medicinal FlavorsMany American breweries are just now jumping on the Brettanomyces bandwag-on. Brett has wonderful advantages for cellaring: it is a fantastic oxygen scavenger (lowering oxidative effects) and creates a bevy of unique acids that over time can lead to the formation of the tropi-cal fruit-like esters. However, Brett also has the ability to synthesize traditional Belgian yeast phenols (clove, pepper) into 4-ethyphenol (4-EP), a unique phenol responsible for both funky (horse sweat, barnyard) and plasticy/medicinal flavors. This synthesis can occur even in the Bretty-classic Orval, which begins to exhib-it these characteristics after about three years. Once formed, these compounds are relatively stable so, if a young Brett beer acquires the dreaded medicinal flavor, it’s time to drink up or move on.
Stale Oxidation FlavorStale oxidation flavor is the biggie to look out for in your aging beer. While many of the great flavors (e.g., sherry, amaretto, dried fruits) found in vintage beer are due to oxidation, it’s also responsible for the dreaded “stale” flavor, often described as cardboard. And while you may not regu-larly eat cardboard, it’s easy to detect (just think stale bread). Most oxidative flavors are age-stable, so once they appear, they’re going to stick around. And sadly, once they’ve developed to a substantial degree, there’s no turning back.
FlatnessAs a beer rests in the cellar, the bottle closure—be it cap, cork, or swing top—will very slowly leak minute amounts
Having the ability to detect the indicative aged aspects before a beer heads downhill can pay dividends by enabling you to drink whatever stock you might have left in time and helping you learn where a beer’s peak is for the next time. PH
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of carbonation. Given enough time, a beer will eventually become flat. Much of this comes down to the closure type (caps are generally the most secure, with corks close behind, and swing tops being a distant third), but it also depends on a brewery’s bottling practices. A cellar’s humidity can also speed this process if it’s low enough to dry out corks (below about 55 percent). Carbonation is a critical component to all beers, and once gone or significantly reduced, its absence can ruin an otherwise great beer.
Yeast AutolysisAny beer that has been bottle-conditioned or not filtered prior to bottling will end up with some yeast in the bottle. Over time, a combination of alcohol, acidity, and temperature breaks down the yeast’s cell walls, a process called autolysis. Depending on conditions, this can take anywhere from one to twenty years, but the resulting yeast guts that spill into the beer create a variety of “meaty” flavors. In dark-roasted beers, the flavor is some-thing akin to blood, while amber-colored barleywine-style ales suggest soy sauce. Conversely, light-colored beers such as saisons and lambics take on hints of roasted nuts. In tiny doses, these facets can add complexity to a vintage beer, but be on alert if they begin to appear so you don’t end up with an expensive bottle of teriyaki sauce.
Fading Beery FlavorsThe quintessential flavors in a beer are those of malt and hops. A young beer should have these in spades, but the un-avoidable consequences of an aging beer are when the maltiness slowly tightens and hoppiness (bitterness, aroma, taste)
begins to fade. Many beers depend on these flavors to make them what they are, and once they are gone the resulting beer becomes a boring one-trick pony. The hoppiness of American barleywines is a classic example, as many of them are es-sentially Double IPAs (DIPAs) with some caramel malt flavor. As the hoppiness starts to fade in these beers, it’s time to consider whether they have what it takes to make it much further.
Acetaldehyde FormationEssentially, acetaldehyde is present in all beer, although usually at low enough levels not to be detectable. In higher amounts, a green apple flavor will emerge. Typically found in beers served too young (hence the name “green beer”), acetalde-hyde is created during primary fermen-tation before being converted to alcohol during the conditioning phase. However, in an aging beer, the right combination of ingredients can sometimes lead to alcohol oxidizing back into acetaldehyde, a generally unpleasant circumstance. Even worse, in a “wild” beer with a variety of micro biota, this acetaldehyde can then be reduced into acetic acid (vinegar). Watch out for ‘dem green apples.
Again, it’s important to remember that cellared beers will age—gracefully for a while, perhaps, but less gracefully as time goes by. As Adam Avery suggests in “8 Tips for Successful Cellaring” (CB&B, Issue 1), if you think a beer is good for cellaring, put away a case (or at least sev-eral bottles). Every once in a while, drink a bottle. If you detect any of the warning signs I’ve mentioned, it’s time to decide whether to drink up your stock or let it go a little longer.
The quintessential flavors in a beer are those of malt and hops. A young beer should have these in spades, but given enough time they will fade, and once they are gone the resulting beer can become a boring one-trick pony.
Bottle conditioning, evidenced by yeast remains in the bottle as seen above, will prolong the cellar life of a beer. However, over time, the cell walls of that yeast will break down through the process of autolysis, creating the potential for off flavors that range from “meaty” to “soy sauce” to “roasted nuts.”
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| IN THE CELLAR |
BEERANDBREWING.COM | 55
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56 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
How Women Brewsters Saved the World … One Millennium at a TimeIn the first of a two-part series, Tara Nurin (official historian of the Pink Boots Society) explores the hidden-in-plain-sight history of women and beer from prehistoric times up through Prohibition.
IN THE UBER-DRAMATIC INTRO-DUCTION to the Discovery Channel’s trail-blazing 2011 documentary How Beer Saved the World, lightning flashes, fires rage, wort bubbles, and beer historian Gregg Smith tells the camera, “Beer has changed the course of human history. Not once, not twice, but over and over again.”
Calling it “the greatest invention of all,” the film producers credit beer for helping to originate math, commerce, modern medicine, refrigeration, automation, and even the first system of non-pictorial writing. As they explain, our literal depen-dence on beer and earlier forms of alcohol
has likely shaped fundamental aspects of human existence for 200,000 years. Yet the producers ignore the fact that, until fairly recently as history goes, women were the driving force behind much of the world’s beer production.
Of Goddesses and High Priestesses “Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat; it is [like] the onrush of the Tigris and Euphrates.”—Hymn to Ninkasi
In 2004, archeologists placed the discovery of the world’s first fermented beverage (a mixture of fruit, honey, and rice) in Jiahu, China, between 7000 and 5700 BCE. The finding overturned the convention-al wisdom that humans had concocted their first grain-based drink in ancient Mesopotamia, located in modern-day Iran and Iraq. Historians now qualify the Mesopotamian concoction as the world’s first barley beer and remain committed to their original belief that civilization began
A Brief History of Women BrewstersBEFORE THE COMMON ERA
Humans walked out of Africa, probably drinking fermented beverages the whole way.
Agrarian society likely begins in Mesopotamia in pursuit of beer, bread, or both.
Fruit/honey beer fermented in Jiahu, China.
Sumerians, believed to invent word-based writing, write Hymn to Ninkasi and Epic of Gilgamesh; first barley beer brewed in Sumer (modern-day Iran).
Babylonian women invent straws to drink beer.
Egyptians develop sophisticated beer trade.
Germanic women brew beer in forest clearings.
in this so-called “fertile crescent” between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.
They date the evidence found in the Mesopotamian state of Sumer to no ear-lier than 3500 BCE but are confident that the world’s first settlers began growing barley for beer and/or bread as early as 10,000 BCE. Many suspect the hunt-er-gatherers who preceded Sumerians on the evolutionary timeline also brewed beer, accidentally creating the intoxicant in containers filled with airborne yeast and rain-soaked wild grains.
Though they argue over the ancient origins, archeologists who study fermen-tation do agree on one thing: the vast majority of ancient brewers were women. “While men were out hunting, women
were out gathering the ingredients they needed to make other foods and drink to go with the wooly mammoth or mast-odon,” says Dr. Patrick McGovern, the University of Pennsylvania biomolecular archeologist who determined that the Mesopotamian drinking vessels contained the earliest known barley beer.
Once our nomadic ancestors realized they could revolutionize their lives by plant-ing barley, wheat, and other grains, they permanently came in off the road. But they didn’t necessarily change the divisions of labor. “Women [were] the ones who [made] the household fermented beverages,” Mc-Govern says of those early societies.
Sumerian women brewed low-alcohol beer for religious ceremonies and as part of the daily food ration. Sumerian brewers enjoyed tremendous respect, in part because they probably also served as priestesses of the revered beer goddess, Ninkasi. Sumerians believed Ninkasi over-saw the brewing process and “worked” as head brewer to the gods, who’d gifted beer to humans to preserve peace and promote well-being. They showed their reverence in the Hymn to Ninkasi, history’s oldest
written beer recipe. Two thousand years before Jesus and
around the same time that invaders vanquished Sumer, the Mesopotamian city of Babylon ascended by building on its former neighbor’s accomplishments. Like their predecessors, Babylonians held women in high esteem. Babylonian women enjoyed the right to divorce and own business and property, and some historians say they may have participated in some of the world’s earliest commerce as they sold their beer with new forms of bookkeeping and writing. Women were encouraged to work as tavern keepers and professional bakers/brewers.
Archeologists hold that Babylonians or Sumerians introduced brewing to their neighbors, the Egyptians. Egyptians wor-shipped a goddess of beer named Tenenit and told stories about the goddess Ha-thor/Sekhmet who saved humanity from destruction after a binge. Hieroglyphics depict women brewing and drinking beer through straws, which historians say the Babylonian brewers probably invented to pierce thick layers of scum that floated atop their product.
Archeologists who study fermentation agree on one thing: the vast majority of ancient brewers were women. “While men were out hunting, women were out gathering the ingredients they needed to make other foods and drink to go with the wooly mammoth or mastodon,” says Dr. Patrick McGovern.
A fragment of the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest descriptions of the brewing of beer. Courtesy of the British Museum.
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| HOW WOMEN BREWERS SAVED THE WORLD… |
COURTESY OF THE ORIENTAL INSTITUTE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO. PHOTO: ANNA RESSMAN.
COMMON ERA
German abbess Hildegard of Bingen recom-mends hops as a preservative as well as for healing.
Witch trials seize Europe.
Germans impose Reinheitsgebot beer purity law.
English farmers plant first hops crop.
American married women serve “small beer” and cider to their families for good health.
First Central Bank founded in England; Indus-trial Revolution begins; era of brewsters ends.
Prohibition ends legal beer brewing in the United States; women and men brew beer illegally at home.
At first, Egyptian brewing likely fell to the women of the house. But records sug-gest that as “production” breweries spread across Egypt, men replaced women as brewers, and those women were pushed into secondary roles. This corporatization of breweries may have carried Egypt and its most iconic female ruler toward their demise. As the online Ancient History Encyclopedia tells us, Cleopatra, Egypt’s last Pharaoh of consequence, “lost popu-larity toward the end of her reign more for implementing a tax on beer (the first ever) than for her wars with Rome, which the beer tax went to help pay for.”
Brewsters, Witches, and the Beginnings of CapitalismIn Baltic and Slavic mythology, a goddess named Raugutiene provides heavenly protection over beer. Finnish legend recounts that a woman named Kalevatar brought beer to earth by mixing honey with bear saliva. And while Norse folklore indirectly credits a man for beer, the late beer anthropologist Alan Eames wrote in 1993 that real Norsemen (a.k.a. Vikings) allowed only women to brew the “aul” that fueled their conquests. In an article published in Yankee Brew News, Eames noted, “Viking women drank ale, flagon for flagon, along with the men.”
Early Northern Europeans worshipped their beer goddesses as ancient Middle Easterners did, and before the second millennium CE, most European women drank and brewed beer. From migratory Germanic women who brewed in forest clearings to avoid Holy Roman invaders to the English alewives who maintained their traditions until the Industrial Revolution, European women fed their husbands and
children low-alcohol, nutrient-rich home-brew that proved more sanitary than water.
For thousands of years women brewed an unhopped liquid called “ale,” whose quick spoilage rate suited decentralized domestic production. Some entrepre-neurial female brewsters (the feminine equivalent of the masculine “brewer”) produced more than their families needed and sold the surplus for a pittance. But married women held no legal status, and unmarried women held little capital. Their predicament left them financially and politically vulnerable and unable to access the economic developments and technological advancements that gradually transformed Europe from an agrarian society to a commercial one.
German nunneries provided a rare shel-ter for single women to blossom as brew-sters and botanists, with St. Hildegard of Bingen distinguishing herself as the first person to publicly recommend hops as a healing, bittering, and preserving agent some 500 years before mainstream society took heed. Outside monastic walls, a brewster’s right to self-determination lay at the mercy of feudal lords, the Church, or the emerging merchant class—which-ever element or elements held sway in her particular time in her particular region.
The mainstream discovery of hops in sixteenth-century Germany gave the ruling classes more leverage to outlaw dangerous beer additives that brewsters had used for centuries. Granted, purity laws such as Reinheitsgebot undoubtedly kept at least a few drinkers from dying. But they also put higher-cost resources such as hops out of brewsters’ reach. With hops also came longer-lasting beer. Men reacted by building production breweries
and forming international trade guilds. Law and custom kept women out of both.
Meanwhile, as the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaissance and the Age of Exploration, brewsters weren’t just losing relevance. At a time when, by some estimations, up to 200,000 women were prosecuted as witches, they were losing their dignity and their lives.
Depictions of brewsters in art, literature, and pop culture swung negative. And although no one can prove a connection, some historians see clear similarities be-tween brewsters and illustrations selected for anti-witch propaganda. Images of frothing cauldrons, broomsticks (to hang outside the door to indicate the availabil-ity of ale), cats (to chase away mice), and pointy hats (to be seen above the crowd in the marketplace) endure today.
“In a culture where beer defines part of the national character, the question of who controls the brew is paramount,” observes a writer for the German Beer Institute. “He who has his hand on the levers of power, also has his thumb in the people’s beer mug.” By 1700, European women had all but stopped brewing.
Seeking a New Life in America“Unusual, regional varieties of beer, devel-oped by women through centuries of trial and error became first endangered and then extinct.”—Alan Eames, Yankee Brew News
Maybe you’ve heard the story about the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock be-cause they’d run out of beer and needed to build a brewhouse immediately. Well, it’s bogus. It’s true that the trans-Atlantic voy-agers did bring beer rations across the sea
BEERANDBREWING.COM | 59
Prohibition proved devastating to quality beer by producing sixty subsequent years of consolidated, industrial-scale brewing. The tightly defined gender roles of the ’50s and Mad Men-era marketers created an image of beer as a drink for men, made by commercial breweries. But women never ceased brewing.
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| HOW WOMEN BREWERS SAVED THE WORLD… |
and that they didn’t trust the water supply in their adopted homeland because they knew the water back home to be unsafe. But beer rations aboard the ship held up just fine during the journey, and the first thing the settlers built were huts to shelter against the cold.
However, the truth is that once the men built permanent housing, they each built their wives a kitchen brewery. In colonial America, as they had in Europe, married women homebrewed “small beer,” which they supplemented with cider, to sustain their families.
As the colonies urbanized, city men con-ducted their business and pleasure in tav-erns provisioned by regional commercial breweries. But in rural areas, homebrew-ing remained the dominant source for beer for more than a century, and it wasn’t Thomas Jefferson who merited acclaim as a brewer, as folklore would have us believe. Instead, his wife, Martha, enlisted slaves at Monticello to brew her regionally famous recipes for wheat beer.
However, as in the past, “When money got involved, men increasingly started brewing,” says Gregg Smith, who wrote the book, Beer in America, The Early Years: 1587–1840. “As the industry developed, it went that way even more.”
Louis Pasteur’s 1857 discovery of yeast coincided with a massive wave of German immigration, which brought lagers,
refrigeration, cheaper packaging, and rail delivery to an at-once expanding and consolidating full-scale brewing industry. No law kept women out of these facto-ries, but the mores of the time prevent-ed them from entering. However, the Germans’ more relaxed drinking culture did introduce family-friendly bier gardens to America, and proper women in East Coast and Midwest population centers were coaxed outside to drink publicly for the first time. This “cavalier” approach to drinking incensed the leaders of the Temperance movement.
Though low-alcohol lager offered a relative respite from the destructive impulses of rum, Prohibition extended breweries no reprieve. Beer brewing (illegal) crept back inside the home, where women, such as Smith’s coal-country grandmother, kept the tradition going.
“They kept doing what they’d been doing,” Smith says.
It’s hardly necessary to remind CB&B readers that Prohibition proved devastat-ing to quality beer and the beer business by producing sixty subsequent years of consolidated, industrial-scale brewing. The tightly defined gender roles of the ’50s and Mad Men-era marketers created an image of beer as a drink for men, made by commercial breweries where women were valued only as promotional vehicles. But what may prove surprising is that even after Prohibition, women never ceased brewing. Not entirely, anyway.
“In northern Vermont they were con-stantly homebrewing in the late ’60s and early ’70s—both men and women,” Smith says. “It had never stopped.” The same can be said for primitive parts of South America, Africa, and the Far East, where women still brew for their communities using the techniques of their maternal ancestors. In some Peruvian, Japanese, and Taiwanese tribes, twenty-first century brewsters chew rice to release fermentable starches. Women in Burkina Faso (West Africa) mash and ferment sorghum beer in facilities that resemble those in place 5,500 years ago, and groups of Chinese and Cambodian women continue to slurp beer through straws. And as contem-porary Western women lace up their pink boots and chew their way back into brewing, McGovern predicts that a world’s worth of discovery lies ahead.
Says the biomolecular archeologist who officially concluded that the samples from Jiahu and Godin Tepe had safeguarded humanity’s oldest links to beer: “Women are so often tied, through art and other ways, to these (ancient) fermented bev-erages. As we acquire more information, I believe we’ll see that women are more involved than we thought.”
In part two of “How Brewsters Saved The World,” we’ll take this history of women’s contributions to brewing up to present times, spotlighting the women who have helped the modern craft-brewing revolution take root.
BEERANDBREWING.COM | 61
YOU SHOULD KNOW UP FRONT that you have the choice to not parti-gyle but say that you did. You would be a liar, of course, but you would still get to enjoy one of the benefits of parti-gyling as a homebrewer—that is, getting to say that you did it—with-out actually adding extra boils to your brew day or doing all the math.
Now that you have been advised, we will assume that you are an honest person and not a liar. Good for you! Let’s continue.
In short: Parti-gyling means getting multiple beers out of the same mash. The brewer boils successive runnings separately, and then, ideally, blends them to different strengths.
For the average homebrewer, this appears to be slightly insane. One mash/one boil works well enough, and our time is pre-
Practical Parti-GyleBrewingWith its reputation for complexity (and excessive amounts of math), parti- gyle brewing (brewing multiple worts from a single mash) has remained a technique more talked about than actually practiced. But this staple of historical brewing is still vital for brewers such as London’s Fuller’s Brew-ery, so homebrewer and writer Joe Stange paid them a visit to learn how homebrewers can add it to their arsenal. Or at least lie and say they did.
cious. Why add extra boiling and chilling, not to mention extra pots and fermentors?
For brewers of a certain era, however, par-ti-gyling was the sensible thing to do. It had clear advantages. And for commercial brew-ers with the right setup, it still has those advantages today. For today’s homebrewers, it is just one more tool in the toolbox, but those advantages still come into play (and we’ll get to the advantages shortly).
While the technique is not especially complicated, much of what has been writ-ten about parti-gyle has either been too simple—leading to common misconcep-tions—or more technical, glazing the eyes with gravity figures and ratios. Here we aim for the middle way: clear but accurate.
Also, we will get valuable guidance from John Keeling, head brewer at London’s Fuller’s Brewery, producer of arguably
the best-known parti-gyled beers today. We went all the way to Chiswick, West London, to ask him about it and snap pictures of him in one of those fetching safety vests. As he says, “[Parti-gyling] is the most efficient way to get the most out of your mash tun.” He ought to know; he has been doing it since 1981.
Parti-gyling is an old method, used for centuries, to get more beer(s) out of the same grains. The usual but not-quite-right way to describe it is that you make one beer out of the stronger first runnings, an-other beer out of weaker second runnings, and possibly even a third or more beers from additional runnings.
Technically, that counts. “Separate run-nings is legitimate parti-gyling,” Keeling says. But that’s the crude way, and it ignores roughly 230 years of better practice. Keeping those worts separate means that you miss two of the great advantages of this technique: blending worts to hit target gravi-ties, meanwhile making more types of beer.
To illustrate how it works, Keeling de-scribes an approximation of a typical run at Fuller’s. He brews two worts from the mash—the first runnings hit about 1.080 PH
OTOS
: JOE
STA
NGE
Opposite, clockwise from top left » Copper display piece, part of the old brewhouse; thousands of parti-gyles occurred in this mash tun, now a display piece; Fuller’s Brewery, a longtime cornerstone in Chiswick, circa 1978; an old Steele’s Masher (grist hydra-tor) in the old brewhouse.
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| BREWING TECHNIQUE |
gravity, while the second runnings come in at about 1.020. At least three beers come out of those two worts: Extra Special Bitter (ESB), London Pride, and Chiswick Bitter, going from strongest to weakest. Each beer is a blend of both worts. (Some-times the same mash also produces Full-er’s stronger ales, such as Golden Pride or Vintage Ale. Even those beers get a small portion of the weaker wort.)
The ESB typically starts between 1.050 and 1.060, depending on whether it is for cask or bottled for export. London Pride—by far Fuller’s most popular brand, representing three of every beer sold—starts near 1.040. The beautifully subtle Chiswick Bitter, mainly meant for cask at about 3.5 percent ABV, starts with a grav-ity near 1.035. Basically, having worts of strengths that are both high and low lets Keeling blend them and nail those target gravities every time.
Why do it like this? For consistent products and for efficiency in the brew-house. “Consistency is really important,” Keeling says. “I want [the beer] to have personality and character in there, so it does tell me something different from time to time. … We have standards and values here about how to make beer. The observations and what they do, that’s what makes the difference.”
Later I ask Keeling to clarify that idea—the balancing of consistency and person-ality. “The first thing I want a drinker to do is recognize the beer. Then the
More About Fuller’s BreweryFuller’s Brewery is not the only British brewery that parti-gyles, only the best known. That might be because Fuller’s does a better job than most of welcoming visitors and telling its story.
Walking through the posh district of Chiswick—with its trendy coffee shops and $8 million homes—one turns a corner near the river and finds a strategically preserved piece of the nineteenth century. With its red-brick buildings and respectable smokestack, the Griffin Brewery of Fuller, Smith and Turner has been a corner-stone of this community for at least 170 years. In fact, brewing has been going on at the same location since the 1500s.
One symbol of its pedigree is a famous wisteria plant that clings to its offices. This is said to be the oldest wisteria in Britain; it began as one of two clippings that arrived from China in 1816. The other went to the Royal Botanical Gardens but later died.
Fuller’s is aware of its status as an attraction, offering frequent tours and a well-stocked brewery shop. Tours start next door at the Mawson Arms pub, which itself dates to 1715.
Top » Fuller’s Mawson Arms pub dates back to 1715. Above » The wall of wisteria is said to be the oldest in Britain, dating back to two clippings that arrived from China in 1816.
“ Having worts of strengths that are both high and low lets [Fuller’s] blend them and nail those target gravities every time.”
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| BREWING TECHNIQUE |
beer’s character reveals itself through the years of drinking,” he says. “Consistency comes from the [brewery] and its use, but in brewing there are lots of individual decisions to be made.” For example, how long should the brewer recirculate wort before starting runoff? When should the brewer stop the runoff? Based on gravity and other observations, should the mash temperature be tweaked? Should the mill setting be adjusted?
And about that efficiency? Keeling says the second wort is really allowed to run until the extract gets as low as 1.005. “[We] get everything [we] can out of the mash tun.”
After blending, the beers diverge further during maturation. The ESB spends two to three weeks maturing, with hops in the tank. The London Pride is matured for a week but not dry hopped. The Chiswick gets a week and is dry hopped.
And there, in that variation, lies the other major benefit of parti-gyling: the flexibility to make many different beers from the same mash. For homebrewers unbound to tradition or branding, the possibilities are practically infinite. Hop the worts differ-ently. Boil one of them longer. Give them different yeasts. Ferment them at different temperatures and for different lengths of time. The only thing not easily changed, of course, is the grain bill, although it is possible to cap later runnings with extra malt or to add sugar, thus allowing changes to color, flavor, and strength.
Make ItNo-Math Parti-Gyle Old Ale, IPA, and ESB ALL-GRAIN
From simplest recipe to myriad outcomes, flexible parti-gyle style.
TOTAL BATCH SIZE
10 gallons/37.8 liters (two worts of 5 gallons/18.9 liters each)
MALT/GRAIN BILL
24 lb (10.9 kg) Maris Otter malt
HOPS SCHEDULE
3.5 oz (99 g) East Kent Goldings (5% AA) at 45 minutes on the first boil1.3 oz (37 g) East Kent Goldings (5% AA) at 45 minutes on the second boil
DIRECTIONS
Mash at 152°F (67°C) for 60 minutes. Draw 5.5 gallons (20.8 liters) of first runnings and start your first boil. Boil for 90 minutes. Meanwhile, sparge to draw an addi-tional 5.5 gallons (20.8 liters) for the second wort. Optionally, continue to sparge until the runnings drop to 1.005 gravity—to get more, lighter second runnings or additional third runnings that can be used for blending.
Boil the second wort (for 90 minutes) as soon as feasible. This is where the extra brewing equipment comes in handy. Many of us must boil and chill the first wort, then set it aside until we’re ready to blend.
First wort after 90-minute boilEstimated OG: 1.090Estimated IBUs: 46
Second wort after 90-minute boilEstimated OG: 1.045Estimated IBUs: 25
After chilling, blend the two worts to make at least three different beers—and with many more potential variations.
▪ For the strongest beer, blend 3 gallons (11.3 liters) of the first wort and 1 gallon (3.8 liters) of the second to get 4 gallons (15.1 liters) of OG 1.079 wort at an estimat-ed 41 IBUs. This becomes your old ale or barleywine.
▪ For the second beer, blend 1 gallon (3.8 liters) of each wort to get 2 gallons (7.6 liters) of OG 1.067 wort at an estimated 35 IBUs. This becomes your strong ale or IPA.
▪ For the third beer, blend the remaining 4 gallons (15.1 liters) to get a wort of OG 1.056 at an estimated 30 IBUs. Even as the weakest of the three, it’s still strong enough to be a traditional ESB.
VARIATIONS
Traditionalists can go with a favored British yeast strain and de-cide whether they want to dry hop any or all of these beers—in primary, secondary, or keg (or cask, even better). But any combination of yeasts and fermentation can be used, with or without extra hops, to create a wider variety of beers. Belgian yeast, lager yeast, Brettano-myces—there is room to play. The simplicity of this single-malt, single-hops recipe—meant as a starting point—also makes it easy to go even further by subbing in different grain bills or hops varieties.
Right » Casks on display in the old Fuller’s brewhouse. Below » Fuller’s Head Brewer, John Keeling, with humming grain mills in action on the floor above the current mash tuns.
BEERANDBREWING.COM | 65
Keeling refers to parti-gyling as a “particularly Victorian way of making beer.” What does that mean exactly? In this context, it means “practical and industrial.” The Victorians inherited early industrial techniques—then they improved them. The cost of malt was high relative to wages. Meanwhile pubs and drinkers were apparently accustomed to a wide range of beers to suit pref-erence or occasion. Parti-gyle was not a trick in that environment; it was common practice that had improved over time.
Modern homebrewers, meanwhile, typically don’t mind spend-ing extra on malt—we know our hobby costs money; we are not in it for profit. Free time for additional boiling and chilling, on the other hand, can be hard to come by. And for those of us using gas burners, propane isn’t cheap either.
But if you’re interested in historical beer and brewing tech-niques, are motivated to produce greater variety, have extra free time and/or additional vessels (which can help trim the extra time needed), have a fetishistic love of arithmetic, and/or are usually sober toward the end of the brew day, parti-gyling may be just the technique for you.
For my part, I have parti-gyled a couple of times (really!). The beers turned out nicely, thanks, but if I’m honest with myself—and I am nothing if not honest, sirs and madams—I did it mostly just so I could say that I had.
Sorry, Did We Say There Would Be No Math? This is for extra credit then.
Parti-gyling is less intimidating if you are not fussy about target gravity, but I know some of you want to predict everything on paper and then nail it on brew day. You have my admiration, because I am the type to predict everything on paper then completely miss it on brew day, taking notes to record it with the hilarious notion of repeating it in the future.
We’ll go with Keeling’s example of two worts of 1.080 and 1.020, respectively. With those worts you’d like to make three beers of varying strengths—let’s say an IPA at 1.070, a mid-range pale ale at 1.050, and a saison of 1.040.
How do you make that happen? This is where the math comes in. The simplest way to do the math is to use the gravity points— 80 and 20—in per gallon terms. Let’s assume you draw 5 gallons of each wort, so your total points are 400 and 100 respectively (80 × 5 = 400; 20 × 5 = 100).
Are you with me so far? To get 2 gallons of 1.070 wort (for the IPA), we want 70 points per gallon or 140 points. The way to get there is to blend 1⅔ gallons of the stronger wort with ⅓ gallon of the weaker one. Okay, I’ll show my work:
1⅔ × 80 = 133⅓ and ⅓ × 20 = 6⅔133⅓ + 6⅔ = 140
140 ÷ 2 = 70
You get the idea. The next one is easy. When you take 2 gallons from each wort you get a neat 200 points, divided by 4 gallons to make a tidy 1.050. There’s your pale ale.
That leaves 4 gallons—1⅓ gallons of strong stuff to blend with 2⅔ gallons of lighter stuff. You end up with 4 gallons worth 160 points, and there’s your 1.040 wort for your saison.
That’s an illustration. It’s not necessary to nail your 1.080 and 1.020 gravities in the first place, as long you’re ready to do some math with what you have. Also be aware that these are post-boil gravities, as the boil will concentrate the strength somewhat.
There are other ways to be flexible: For example, hit your targets on two of your beers but take whatever you get on the third; or, hit all three of your targets without using all of your wort, saving the rest for a yeast starter or some other use.
Top » Keeling pages through Fuller’s historic brewing logs. Above » Freshly filled Fuller’s casks roll through the production line.
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| BREWING TECHNIQUE |
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MISCORefractometer
Solon, Ohio
For more information, see:www.misco.com/beer
Meets Cutting Edge Techancient tradition
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Find yourself with a yeast bomb or an astringent, grainy homebrew? These yeasty, overly husky flavors are hardly de-sirable in beer; however they can be nice flavor complements to beer bread, biscuits, and other beery baked goods.
Here’s a biscuit recipe passed down from my mother that I’ve adapted as beer bread, which tends to take on the flavor profile of the beer style used. For sweeter, darker breads, use porters, stouts, or other dark ales. For drier, more savory breads try pale ale, IPA, or pilsner.
THE FIX FOR THE NEXT HOMEBREWIf the beer was too yeasty, use a clean, healthy yeast strain and be sure to let the beer ferment long enough so the yeast set-tles out. If the beer was too husky, be sure to properly crush all of your grain (if you’re doing so yourself ) so that it can all be extracted during sparging. Additionally, cold conditioning the beer can help its graininess to settle out with the yeast.
Beer Biscuits2½ cup bread flour 1 tsp sugar2½ tsp baking powder½ tsp baking soda½ tsp salt¼ cup butter¼ cup shortening1 cup ( 8 fl oz) homebrew
Preheat the oven to 450°F (232°C). In a large mixing bowl, combine the flour, sugar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Cut in room temperature pats of butter and shortening. Add the beer. Knead into the dough. With a rolling pin, roll out the dough to a ¾-inch thickness. Cut with a biscuit cutter, then place in a greased cast-iron pan. Bake 14–16 minutes until biscuit tops are slightly golden.
If the batch is too yeasty or too husky, make beer biscuits.1.
PHOT
OS: M
ATT
GRAV
ES
BEERANDBREWING.COM | 69
Let’s face it—homebrewers sometimes craft batches that just aren’t drinkable, especially when they’re new to brewing or using new equipment or ingredients. So what do you do with a multi-gallon batch of oops? Here are four significantly tastier solutions. By Emily Hutto
Hopeless HomebrewSolutions
If your batch of imperial stout has alcohol heat—but not in a good way—tame the sharpness by reducing it down to a bar-becue sauce. Here’s an adapted Breckenridge Brewery recipe for this crafty condiment. Typically the brewery makes this beer-barbeque sauce with its Oatmeal Stout.
THE FIX FOR THE NEXT HOMEBREWExtra booziness is often the result of too high of fermenta-tion temperatures or excess yeast in fermentation. Keeping fermentation temperatures within the specified range of your chosen yeast strain and highly attenuative yeast can help to solve those issues.
If the batch is under-attenuated or under-carbed, make beer soap.
If the batch is too boozy, barbecue it.
2.
3.
Beer-Bar Soap33 oz coconut oil 4.83 oz lye (NaOH)12 oz homebrew ½ oz essential oils of your choice
You’ll also need pH strips and a slow cooker.
Pour the cold beer into a glass bowl and add the lye to the beer (don’t add the beer to the lye). Do this step outside while wearing protective gear as the mixture will get very hot. Cool for 10 minutes.
Melt the coconut oil in a saucepan and add it to the slow cooker. Add the cooled beer/lye mixture to the slow cooker. Stir the ingredients until they form a thick sauce-like substance. Cover and cook on low heat for 45 minutes to an hour. The soap is finished when it is translu-cent and at a pH level of 7 to 10. Wait until the soap cools and add essential oils. When soap is cool and firm, cut into squares and let dry.
Beer-Barbeque Sauce
½ cup molasses¼ cup mustard½ cup chili sauce1 tsp Worcestershire sauce¼ cup powdered onion½ tsp salt¼ tsp pepper½ cup homebrew
Combine all the ingredients in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 15 minutes.
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| HOPELESS HOMEBREW SOLUTIONS |
Your Spent GrainAfter a brew day, salvage the spent grain by either im-mediately freezing it or drying it on a baking pan at 200°F (93°C) until the batch is crisp. From there, the grain can be used directly in a baked-goods recipe or ground to make spent-grain flour.
If you have a loyal brew dog, he or she will appreciate this spent-grain dog treat recipe that I’ve adapted from Deschutes Brewery, with added herbs for minty fresh dog breath.
Spent-Grain Dog Biscuits2 cup spent grain2 cup flour2 eggs1 cup natural peanut butter½ cup fresh mint, chopped
Preheat the oven to 350°F (177°C). In a large bowl, blend the ingredients together to form a dough. Roll out the dough on a floured surface and use a cookie cutter to cut desired shapes. Put the shapes on a cookie sheet and bake for 30 minutes. For longer lasting treats, after those 30 minutes reduce the heat to 225°F (107°C) and bake for 2 more hours.
Fermentation and carbonation issues in homebrew are a great excuse to take on another unique DIY project: soap making. Cate Evans-Baze, who owns Let It Be Naturals in Colorado, crafts a line of beer soap using beer from local breweries.
“Here’s my story about beer soap,” she says. Beer soap mak-ing requires the cold-process method. “You can basically take any recipe that you like and simply replace the water with beer,” says Evans-Baze.
Start the beer-soap process with cold, flat beer. “I usually put my beer in a large glass bowl in the refrigerator for three or more days,” says Evans-Baze. “Every time I open the fridge, I stir the beer to help with the process of losing carbonation. Some people decide to boil their beer for a bit and then either put it in ice cube trays or back in the refrigerator for another day. Bottom line: the beer must be flat, and it must be cold.”
The beer must be cold because the next step, adding the lye or alkaline solution, can be tricky. “Even with water, the lye gets crazy, crazy hot, but the beer takes [the temperature] to a whole new level.”
This lye mixture can have a funky smell, says Evans-Baze. You can counteract that smell with the use of essential oils and other ingredients. “There are an endless number of things you can throw in the recipe,” she explains. “I’ve added coriander, lemon peel, crushed hops, ground-up barley, and amazing essential oils that complement the beer.”
THE FIX FOR THE NEXT HOMEBREWBe sure that fermentation is complete before bottling. At bottling, make sure that you’ve added the right amount of priming sugar to your beer and that you still have a healthy yeast population. For high-gravity beers that spent a long time in the fermentor, you may need to add fresh yeast to the bottles before conditioning. Let bottles sit at fermentation temperature or room temperature for at least two to three weeks.
Professional chef-turned-homebrewer Sean Paxton, who runs the cooking-with-beer website hombrewchef.com, is a big fan of beer brine. During brining, osmosis removes liquid from the meat being brined and replaces it with fla-vors that hydrate the meat, Paxton explains. If your Dop-plebock or Hefeweizen took on an estery life of its own during fermentation, soak up those extra fruit-forward flavors with roasted turkey. Here is Paxton’s turkey brine recipe, adapted with some extra basil and rosemary. Add your own fresh herbs or spices to brine out with a bang.
THE FIX FOR THE NEXT HOMEBREWTry fermenting at a lower temperature. The higher the temperature, the more ester character your beer will dis-play. You can also consider switching to a yeast strain that produces fewer esters.
If the batch is too estery, brine it. 4.
Beer-Brined Turkey4 qt homebrew2 cup kosher salt1 cup sugar 4 bay leaves2 bunches fresh rosemary1 cup loosely packed basil3 bunches fresh thyme3 yellow onions, peeled and chopped3 stalks celery, sliced3 medium carrots, peeled and sliced2 lemons, quartered4 cloves garlic, peeled and sliced4 qt ice or water1 turkey (thawed if frozen)
In a large pot, combine the beer, salt, sugar, bay leaves, rosemary, basil, thyme, onion, celery, carrots, lemons, and garlic. Bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove from the heat. Add the ice or cold water; it will help cool the brine solu-tion. Add the turkey to the brine and refrigerate for 1 hour or until well-chilled.
Preheat the oven to 350°F (177°C). Remove the tur-key from the brine and pat dry. Truss the bird with twine to hold its shape and cook evenly. Place in a roasting pan and roast until a temperature probe inserted in the thickest part of the breast registers an internal temperature of 165°F (74°C). (If you don’t have a probe, a 16- to 20-pound turkey should take between 3½ and 4 hours to fully cook at this temperature.) Let the turkey rest for 20–30 minutes before carving. This will help the keep the turkey moist by letting the meat relax and redistribute its juices.
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WERE YOU TO PRESENT a taster tray to a craft-beer newcomer and ask your subject to identify the pale ale in the lineup, he or she could be forgiven for pointing to the Pilsner. The pale in pale ale is a holdover from a time when most British pints were opaque (See “How Pale is Pale?” page 77), while today’s pale ales are almost universally a translucent copper hue, somewhere between blonde ale and amber.
The name might not be as apt an appel-lation as it once was, but pale ale is more relevant than ever. Walk into any pub in Britain and you’re virtually guaranteed a pint of bitter, lovingly pumped up from the cellar with a swan-necked beer engine. And American pale ale lies at the very heart of the Hophead Revolution, offering a blank canvas upon which to slather hops even while retaining enough malt back-bone to remind you that it isn’t an IPA.
Pale ale’s appeal lies in its ability to invite endless experimentation while remaining an intimately familiar everyday ale. When your palate can’t take another sour and your liver has had it with imperial stout, pale ale is the old friend you keep coming back to again and again.
From Whence It CameOnce upon a time, all beer was dark and smoky thanks to rudimentary malt kilning techniques that involved wood fire and offered brewers little control over the drying process. As technology improved, malts be-came increasingly lighter in color, culminat-ing in the so-called white malt that brewers in Burton-on-Trent favored in the 1800s. So popular was this extra pale malt that Czech brewers stole the idea and invented what we now know as Pilsner malt.
Armed with this new pale malt, British brewers exported vast quantities of pale ale to India before it began catching on in Britain as a refreshing alternative to various brown and black beers. Thus, pale ale as a distinct style emerged initially as “pale ale for India” and later as the diverse family of English bitters whose starting gravities were eventually driven southward by taxes and wartime rationing.
English Pale AleEnglish pale ales are affable and approach-able. Also known as bitter, English pale ale is a single continuum of beer styles (more on that in a bit), with some examples bare-ly breaching 3 percent alcohol by volume
Palesin ComparisonBy Dave Carpenter
A PALE ALE STYLE GUIDE
74 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
PALEThe Power of
Ale
TABLE 1
Style Guidelines for English Pale Ales
BJCP 2008 GABF 2014
Ordinary (standard) bitter
OG 1.032–1.040FG 1.007–1.011IBU 25–35ABV 3.2–3.8%
OG 1.033–1.038FG 1.006–1.012IBU 20–35ABV 3.0–4.2%
Special (best) bitter
OG 1.040–1.048FG 1.008–1.012IBU 25–40ABV 3.8–4.6%
OG 1.038–1.045FG 1.006–1.012IBU 28–40ABV 4.2–4.8%
Extra special (strong) bitter
OG 1.048–1.060FG 1.010–1.016IBU 30–50ABV 4.6–6.2%
OG 1.046–1.060FG 1.010–1.016IBU 30–45ABV 4.8–5.8%
(ABV) and others climbing to 6 percent ABV or higher. These beers also tend to have wonderfully evocative names such as Workie Ticket (Mordue Brewery), Old Hooky (Hook Norton Brewery), Big Lamp Bitter (Big Lamp Brewery), and Old Speckled Hen (Greene King Brewery).
Built on a foundation of nutty, biscuity British pale malt, English pale ales almost invariably feature a healthy mea-sure of crystal malt, which adds caramel or toffee-like depth. Some examples also include a bit of toasted or roasted malt, more for color than flavor, and others even sneak in maize or sugar adjuncts from time to time.
Hops are almost always of English origin. Floral, earthy East Kent Goldings hops are perhaps most closely associated with English pale ale, but minty, grassy Fuggle comes in a close second. Styrian Goldings from Slovenia also find their way into these beers, but Styrians are biologically Fuggles, not Goldings. Com-mon bittering hops include Challenger, Northdown, and Target.
A defining feature of English pale ale is a recognizable complement of fruity es-ters that derive from the signature yeast strains that ferment these ales. As a gen-eral rule, English strains are moderate attenuators and highly flocculent, which means that English pale ale tends to be brilliantly clear and full-bodied. It is this fullness on the palate that makes even
low-gravity examples sturdy enough to prop up a night of larking about.
English pale ales are usually at their best when served in the traditional way, which is with low carbonation (1.1–1.5 volumes, or 2–3 grams per liter, of CO2) and at cellar temperature (50–55°F/10–13°C). When English pale ale first came on the scene, pub customers commonly requested pints of bitter to distinguish such ales from sweeter, maltier mild ales. The name stuck, and nowadays, the term bitter typically implies a cask-conditioned draft product that one purchases in a pub, while pale ale means a bottled beer meant to be consumed off premises.
Finally, a note on nomenclature. Bitter, ordinary bitter, special bitter, best bitter, and extra special bitter (ESB) are all English pale ales: They differ only in their relative strengths. The Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) 2008 and Great American Beer Festival (GABF) 2014 style guides divide English pale ale into three completely arbitrary catego-ries, shown in Table 1.
American Pale AleThe pioneers of American craft brewing initially followed British brewing tradi-tions because the equipment require-ments are relatively simple, and much of the early homebrewing literature came from the United Kingdom. But, as is usually the case, American craft-brewed pale ale soon broke ranks from traditional
MAKE IT
Tag Team Pale Ale ALL-GRAIN
Brewers from Odell Brewing Company and New Belgium Brewing Company developed Tag Team for the 2013 Taste of Fort Collins—a three-day festival that offers local food, beer, entertainment, and artwork. While the original gravity is right in line with American pale ale, the hops load is more akin to American IPA.
OG: 1.050FG: 1.011IBUs: 50ABV: 5.1%
MALT/GRAIN BILL
8 lb (3.6 kg) Pale malt10 oz (283 g) Pilsner malt 8 oz (227 g) Munich malt 8 oz (227 g) Carafoam 6 oz (170 g) Caramalt
HOPS SCHEDULE
0.25 oz (7 g) Nugget at 45 minutes0.25 oz (7 g) Nugget at 35 minutes0.25 oz (7 g) Nugget at 25 minutes0.25 oz (7 g) Nugget at 15 minutes0.25 oz (7 g) Nugget at 5 minutes1 oz (28 g) Crystal at knockout1 oz (28 g) Crystal at end of whirlpool1.50 oz (43 g) Nugget at dry hop (5 days)0.75 oz (21 g) Amarillo at dry hop (5 days)0.75 oz (21 g) Perle at dry hop (5 days)
DIRECTIONS
Mash for 60 minutes at 151°F (66°C), sparge, and boil for 90 minutes, following the hops schedule. Add knockout hops at flameout, and whirlpool for 10 min-utes. (Whirlpool is a post-boil, pre-chill technique that professional brewers use to concentrate the trub and hops solids to the center of the boil kettle.) If your sys-tem doesn’t permit a whirlpool, a 10-min-ute hop stand—allowing the hot wort to sit for 10 minutes before chilling—is a great substitute. Add end-of-whirlpool hops, then chill and transfer to fermentor. Ferment 10 days at 66°F (19°C), then rack to secondary and add dry hops. Package in bottles or kegs after 5 days of dry hopping.
YEAST
White Labs WLP007 Dry English Ale or Wyeast 1098 British Ale or Safale S-04
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PALEThe Power of
Ale
76 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
Color (SRM) 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18
Blonde ale • • • •
Cream ale • • • •
Witbier • • •
Kölsch • • •
American pale ale • • • • • • • • • •
English pale ale • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •
Saison • • • • • • • • • •
Belgian tripel • • • •
Belgian golden strong ale • • • •
Vienna lager • • • • • • •
Oktoberfest lager • • • • • • • •
How Pale Is Pale?When is pale not pale? When it refers to pale ale, of course! Below are some color ranges for a few selected styles, as suggested by the Beer Judge Certification Program’s (BJCP) 2008 guidelines. Not only are English and American pale ales generally several shades darker than blonde ale, cream ale, wit, and Kölsch, but they are often as dark as Vienna and Oktoberfest, both considered amber lagers.
It all comes down to context. Pale ale is, in fact, pale, but only in comparison to mild ales, brown ales, porters, and stouts. As I explain in “Pale by Comparison” (page 74), until pale malt became widely available, beer would have necessarily been some shade of brown or black. The term pale ale was coined when improved kilning tech-nology enabled brewers to create ever-lighter malts, which led to ever-lighter beers. Compared to the porters of yore, the new beers were very pale, indeed.
But still today, the term can remain a bit of a stretch, even within the style category itself. Apparently different brewers have different ideas of what it means to be pale. Here are the approxi-mate SRM values of a few commercial examples:
» Firestone Walker Pale 31 — 7 srm » Mirror Pond Pale Ale — 9 srm » Sierra Nevada Pale Ale — 10 srm » Fort Collins Brewery 1020 Pale Ale — 12 srm » Firestone Walker DBA — 13.5 srm » Schlafly Pale Ale — 13.5 srm » Ska Brewing Euphoria Pale Ale — 15 srm
All of this is, of course, fairly inconsequential, particularly in light of such category-defying terms as black IPA and golden stout. As far as I’m concerned, you can call your beer whatever you like, as long as it tastes good!
English bitters and charted its own course, which, naturally, includes more hops.
The archetypal American pale ale (APA) is that brewed by Sierra Nevada Brewing Company (Chico, California), which is usually credited as having invented the style. What originally set Sierra Nevada’s interpretation apart was its reliance on the then-boisterous Cascade hops, with its signature grapefruit-like aroma and flavor.
This paved the way for countless others, including Mirror Pond from Deschutes (Bend, Oregon), Zombie Dust from Three Floyds (Munster, Indiana), AlesSmith X (San Diego, California), Victory Headwa-ters (Downington, Pennsylvania), Firestone Walker’s Pale 31 (Paso Robles, California), and Dale’s Pale Ale from Oskar Blues (Lyons, Colorado).
While English pale ales remain fairly
balanced between malt and hops, Amer-ican pale ale definitely leans toward the latter. The malt backbone of American pale ale is mostly there to balance the hops, although care should be taken not to be too restrained with the malt, lest one end up in IPA territory. The typical grist for an American pale ale is built on American pale malt or 2-row, with varying amounts of caramel malt. Some brewers like to include a portion of Munich or Vienna malt to fortify the background malt character, but this is by no means universal.
As with most American derivatives of English styles, hops play a greater role in American pale ale than they do in the Brit-ish original, but it’s not just about quantity: It’s even more a question of aroma and fla-vor. While English pale ales display floral, earthy, and even grassy hops aromas and flavors, American brewers prefer to infuse
As with most American derivatives of English styles, hops play a greater role in American pale ale than they do in the British original, but it’s not just about quantity: It’s even more a question of aroma and flavor.
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their pale ales with citrus, pine, resin, and tropical fruit. Typical hops varieties found in American pale ales include old classics such as Cascade, Centennial, Columbus, and Chinook; proprietary examples such as Amarillo, Ahtanum, Citra, Simcoe, and Mosaic; and, increasingly, hops from Down Under such as Pacifica, Rakau, Motueka, and Galaxy.
Another distinguishing characteristic of American pale ale has to do with the timing of hops additions. While English bitters usually rely on a single bittering charge and a moderate flavor and aroma dose toward the end of the boil, late hop-ping is essential to American examples of this style. Virtually all American pale ales feature a generous addition of hops within the last few minutes of the boil; most receive some kind of addition at flameout; and many are even dry hopped. This late hops character makes American pale ale so intoxicating.
American pale ales usually exhibit re-strained yeast character. A few subtle esters are there, enough to let you know you’re not drinking a lager, but the overall im-pression is clean enough that one’s focus remains on the brewer’s expression of malt and hops. In fact, the most popular APA yeast strain for homebrewers and profes-sionals alike is the so-called Chico strain, said to have originated with Sierra Nevada and sold commercially as Wyeast 1056 American Ale, White Labs WLP001 Califor-nia Ale, and Fermentis Safale US-05.
As shown in Table 2, the BJCP’s 2008
style guide recognizes one American pale ale (IPA notwithstanding), while the GABF 2014 guidelines describe two (for more in-formation about the American strong pale ale, see “Beyond Bitter,” page 83).
Belgian Pale AleWhile one usually thinks of England and the United States when speaking of pale ale, the Belgians also produce the aptly named Belgian pale ale. Built on Euro-pean Pilsner malt, Belgian pale ale is a delight, balancing up-front malt sweetness with toasty whole-wheat cracker-like over-tones and just enough hops bitterness to keep everything in check. A Belgian yeast strain usually offers up a bit more in the way of esters than is found in American pale ale, but fermentation by-products aren’t nearly as intense as those that typify dubbels, tripels, and Belgian strong ales.
Commercial examples of Belgian pale ale include De Koninck (Antwerp, Bel-gium), Rare Vos from Brewery Omme-gang (Cooperstown, New York), and New Belgium Brewing’s Fat Tire (Fort Collins, Colorado/Asheville, North Carolina), which may be marketed as an amber ale, but stylistically, it’s a Belgian pale ale.
Whether you’re enjoying a nonic pint of bitter in Leeds, a shaker glass of APA in Portland, or a bolleke of biscuity Belgian beer in Antwerp, there’s a pale ale for every occasion. As comfortable with a bowl of steamed mussels as it is with cold leftover pizza, it’s the ultimate everyday beer that makes others pale in comparison.
TABLE 2
Style Guidelines for American Pale Ales
BJCP 2008 GABF 2014
American pale ale
OG 1.045–1.060FG 1.010–1.015IBU 30–45ABV 4.5–6.2%
OG 1.044–1.050FG 1.008–1.014IBU 30–50ABV 4.4–5.4%
American strong pale ale
N/A OG 1.050–1.060FG 1.008–1.016IBU 40–50ABV 5.6–6.3%
The archetypal American pale ale (APA) is that brewed by Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. Its reliance on then-boisterous Cascade hops, with their signature grape-fruit-like aroma and flavor, set it apart.
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PALEThe Power of
Ale
CB&B RECIPE
American Mate Pale Ale ALL-GRAIN
This ale is a play on a British pale ale using American hops.
Estimated OG: 1.058Estimated FG: 1.012Estimated IBUs: 42Estimated ABV: 6%
MALT/GRAIN BILL
5 lb (2.3 kg) pale malt (2-row)5 lb (2.3 kg) Marris Otter1 lb (453 g) Vienna malt1 lb (453 g) Aromatic malt0.5 lbs (227 g) caramel malt (120 SRM)0.5 lbs (227 g) light brown sugar at 15 minutes HOPS SCHEDULE
1 oz ( 28 g) Liberty at 60 minutes1 oz ( 28 g) Liberty at 30 minutes1 oz ( 28 g) Amarillo at 15 minutes1 oz ( 28 g) Amarillo at 5 minutes
DIRECTIONS
Mash at 151°F (66°C) for 60 minutes. Boil for 90 minutes, following the hops schedule, to get 6 gallons of wort. Ferment at 65°F (18°C). Dry hop for 2–3 days.
YEAST
Wyeast 1028 London Ale Yeast
READER RECIPE
30-Minute Pale Ale ALL-GRAIN
Inspired by the constant hopping tech-niques used in Dogfish Head 60 and 90 Minute IPAs, Alex Grote concocted this nice, drinkable pale ale that showcas-es a good balance between the malt backbone and well-rounded hops flavor and aroma. Batch Size: 5.5 gallons (20.8 liters)Estimated OG: 1.057Estimated FG: 1.011IBUs: 48Estimated ABV: 6%
MALT/GRAIN BILL
4.5 lb (2.4 kg) pale malt or 2-row4.5 lb (2.4 kg) pilsner malt1 lb (0.45 kg) aromatic malt1 lb (0.45 kg) cara-pils/dextrine malt1 lb (0.45 kg) caramel/crystal malt (60 SRM) HOPS SCHEDULE
1 oz Centennial at 60 minutes.25 oz Amarillo at 30 minutes.25 oz Cascade at 25 minutes.25 oz Amarillo at 20 minutes.25 oz Cascade at 15 minutes.25 oz Amarillo at 10 minutes.25 oz Cascade at 5 minutes.25 oz Amarillo at 0 minutes.25 oz Cascade at 0 minutes
DIRECTIONS
Mash for 60 minutes at 152°F (67°C). Boil for 75 minutes, following the hops schedule. Ferment at 65°F (18°C) until final gravity is reached.
YEAST
Wyeast 1056 American Ale
CB&B RECIPE
City Boy APA ALL-GRAIN
This single-hops pale ale showcases the versatility of high alpha-acid Citra hops as both a bittering and aroma hops.
Estimated OG: 1.058Estimated FG: 1.017Estimated IBUs: 42Estimated ABV: 5.3%
MALT/GRAIN BILL
11 lb (5 kg) pale malt (2-row)2.5 lb (1.1 kg) caramel malt (10 SRM)1 lb (453 g) caramel malt (20 SRM) HOPS SCHEDULE
1 oz ( 28 g) Citra at 30 minutes1 oz ( 28 g) Citra at 15 minutes1 oz ( 28 g) Citra at 0 minutes1 oz ( 28 g) Citra at dry hop
DIRECTIONS
Mash at 151°F (66°C) for 60 minutes. Boil for 90 minutes, following the hops schedule. Volume after boil should be 6 gallons to allow for absorption of liquid by the hops in the dry-hop stage. Ferment at 65°F (18°C). Dry hop for 1–3 days.
YEAST
White Labs WLP041 Pacific Ale
Recipes are built to yield a batch size of 5 gallons and assume 72% brewhouse efficiency unless otherwise noted.
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PALEThe Power of
Ale
THERE’S NO DENYING THAT the farther west one travels in the United States, the hoppier the local IPA will be. I expected the same for pale ale, but when I tracked down craft brewers from the west-ern, midwestern, southern, and north-eastern United States to speak to their respective quadrant’s pale ale, I found that wasn’t always the case.
Close to KölschHere is the condensed spectrum of Amer-ican pale ales according to Colby Chandler, the executive director and specialty brewer at Ballast Point Tasting Room & Kitchen in San Diego, California: The pale ales made in the United States get hoppier—often from the addition of nouveau hops—and drier as you head west. They lose some of the malt profile that’s more apparent in En-glish-style pale ales and take on the profiles of traditional German pale ales, inspired by crisp, refreshing Kölsch ales.
For Ballast Point, pale ale was a bridge beer from light macro lagers to beer that’s not too
bitter and still incredibly flavorful, Chandler explains. The brewery came out of the gate with its original Pale Ale that uses American and Munich malts and German hops. This beer is hopped like a lager and fermented like an ale to create a smooth, bright taste that has just a hint of fruit and spice.
A later addition to Ballast Point’s beer lineup was the Grunion Pale Ale, an Inter-national Pale Ale brewed with two modern American hops varieties, Mosaic and Calyp-so. Much like its Kölsch-style sister, this pale ale has a light grain bill of Marris Otter and Carapils malt. Its hops aroma and flavor are that of cantaloupe and green melon.
“We’re getting to the point where regular single pale ales are starting to taste more like IPAs—they’re losing the malt base and boosting the hops aroma,” says Chandler. “The pale ales in the West, and especially in the San Diego area, are bright with strong hops aroma imparted from the late addition of hops into the ket-tle or into the fermentor for dry hopping post-fermentation.”
Gushing With Hops“Generally speaking, the pale ales on the West Coast are very hoppy and dry and the pale ales on the East Coast are more ‘Brit-
THE FULL SPEC TRUM OF PALE ALE
Are pale ale differences a regional thing or an old-school/new-school thing? Four craft brewers share their thoughts on today’s pale ales … By Emily Hutto
Brewers’ Perspectives:
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THE FULL SPEC TRUM ish’ [and malty] in style,” says Chris Bog-gess, the head brewer at 3 Floyds Brewing Co. in Munster, Indiana. “Nowadays, these style differences are getting more blurred with most of the new breweries making huge hoppy beers,” he continues. “At 3 Floyds we like really hoppy beer balanced with some malt character.”
Enter Zombie Dust, the 3 Floyds pale ale done justice by its package descrip-tion: “This intensely hopped and gushing undead pale ale will be one’s only respite after the zombie apocalypse.”
Zombie Dust is brewed with European malts and hops from Germany and the Yakima Valley. It weighs in at 50 IBUs and 6.2 percent ABV. “A beer like Zombie Dust would have been one of the hoppier IPAs on the market back in the mid ’90s when I started brewing,” says Boggess. “[Today], some pale ales are just as hoppy as IPAs.”
The Everlasting Patio BeerWill Golden, the head brewer at Austin Beerworks in Texas, thinks that craft breweries are creating pale ale for the regions in which they live. In Texas, it’s all about drinkability. “Most of the pale ales in Texas are going to be extra dry with less bitterness. There is much more emphasis
on the aroma and dry hops,” he says. Most recently, Golden has been experi-
menting brewing beers with no bittering hops at all. “It makes that drinkability just a little bit higher,” he explains.
Golden was a professional brewer in Maryland (at Frederick Brewing before it became Flying Dog Brewery and then at Flying Dog before running the Barley & Hops brewpub) before landing at Austin Beerworks. He confidently says that the pale ales brewed in the South are session-able and much lighter on hops bitterness
than anywhere else in the country. In the South, he explains, beers are often brewed to counteract the sweltering heat.
“When I brewed in Maryland, we went heavy on the malt in pale ales, and often included crystal malt. That required more bitterness to make up for that caramel and residual body,” says Golden. “There’s an amber, almost caramel color to a lot of the pale ales in the East, while pale ales from the West Coast tend to be pale in color and, of course, much more bitter in every way.”
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PALEThe Power of
Ale
Five on FivePale ale is a popular beer style among brewers, some of whom couldn’t just pick one favorite. Here
are five craft brewers on more than five pale ales.
Compiled by Emily Hutto
Jeff O’NeilBrewmaster at Peekskill Brewery, Peekskill, New York
I really love Victory Headwaters, and Ballast Point Brew-ing’s Grunion is great, too. It won the gold medal (to our NYPA’s silver) at the 2014 Great American Beer Festival.
Will GoldenHead Brewer at Austin Beerworks, Austin, Texas
The first pale ale I had was Anchor Liberty Ale. It holds a special place in my heart. I’d never had any-thing like it before, and I was blown away. It started my downward spiral toward pale ales and IPAs.
Bryan GreenhagenFounder of Mystic Brewery, Chelsea, Massachusetts
Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. Perfect balance makes this beer irresistibly drinkable while being refreshing and invigo-rating. It is a great American example of a style-defining beer that has stood the test of time and is now both leg-endary and accessible. There are very exciting new pale ales out there resulting from the explosion in aromatic hops varieties, but few have the breadth of achievement embodied in a glass of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.
Bob SylvesterFounder & Brewmaster at Saint Somewhere Brewing Company, Tarpon Springs, Florida
There would be no American pale ale without Sierra Nevada. It’s still my favorite, and it’s a great introduction to American hops. For English pale ales available in the United States, I’d have to say Fuller’s London Pride. It’s much different from Sierra Nevada, with a richer malt character. The hops character is there, grassy and woody, but it’s in balance with the caramel maltiness. It’s tough to beat one of the standard bearers.
Brian RossQuality Assurance Specialist at Alaskan Brewing Co., Juneau, Alaska
A great pale ale that sticks out in my mind is the Fire-stone Walker Pale 31. I think it is just exemplary of the style—a really full-flavored pale with everything in the right place. It’s one of the rare beers that you really can’t find any fault in, where you taste it and think, “There is just no way this beer could be any better.” It is so well composed, with a wonderful whole-cone herbal note and remarkable hops brightness, as well as an extreme-ly pleasant floral quality. It’s a very impressive and timeless beer and one of my favorite pales.
Old School, Newer School“I don’t know that I’d say that there’s a palpable regional take on pale ale,” says Jeff O’Neil, the brewmaster at Peekskill Brewery in New York. “I would say instead that there’s a movement toward really expressive hoppy beers that aren’t necessarily bitter, especially among new-er breweries without long-established flagships.” He adds, “But I don’t think I can say it’s a regional phenomenon.”
Peekskill brews the Amazeballs pale ale, a single-hops pale ale hopped with Galaxy hops from Australia. This American pale ale is extra dry, both from its light grain bill and the use of clean American ale yeast.
Amazeballs is vastly different from the Captain Lawrence Brewing Co.’s Freshchester Pale Ale (a citrusy, piney pale ale with a noticeable bitterness and a strong malt backbone for bal-ance) brewed just down the road from Peekskill in Elmsford, says O’Neil. “It’s very different—I’d say more ‘tradition-al’—from what we’re doing with beers such as Amazeballs.”
O’Neil echoes the other brewers’ sentiments that there are two domi-nant stylistic profiles of pale ale in the United States: dry and aromatically hoppy; and malty and hops flavor- forward. He doesn’t qualify these two schools of pale ale as regional differ-ences, though. “I’d say that there’s that older-school approach in the style of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (an amazing beer!) and a twenty-first-century style that’s only been made possible by the amazing aroma hops that have been bred and become available lately.”
Brewers’ Perspectives, cont’d
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BEYOND BITTER: DEFINING IMPERIAL PALE ALE
Imperial pale ale is a derivative style, one that could easily be defined less by what it is than what it isn’t. But in the liquid arts, as in those visual,
incredible beauty is to be found in the negative spaces.
By Dave Carpenter
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PALEThe Power of
Ale
THERE WAS A TIME, not so long ago, when one could go all the way from American pale ale (APA) to India pale ale (IPA) without running across a single other beer style. You’d leave APA at about 5 percent ABV, set the cruise, and let the specific gravity points fly by. By the time you hit IPA at 6 or 7 percent, the land-scape had lost some of its malty texture, but dense, expansive lupulin forests more than compensated the senses.
Those days are long gone. APA and IPA are still there, of course, and better than ever, but where once there were vast open spaces in between, now styles blend together into an endless sea of pale ales. Breweries variously refer to this sub-Bur-ton sprawl as double pale ale, imperial pale ale, strong pale ale, extra pale ale, or any number of other vaguely defined terms. As craft brewers continue to slip the surly bonds of stylistic constraint, a whole new class of pale ale has emerged.
What Is Imperial Pale Ale?Neither the Beer Judge Certification Pro-gram (BJCP) nor the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) guidelines have much to say on the matter of imperial pale ale. The GABF offers a starting point in American Strong Pale Ale category:
“ American Strong Pale Ales are deep golden to copper… Low caramel malt aroma is allowable. Fruity- ester aroma should be moderate to strong. Hops aroma is high, exhib-iting floral, fruity, citrus-like, piney, resinous, or sulfur-like American- variety hops characters. Low-level maltiness may include low caramel
malt character. Hops flavor is high, exhibiting floral, fruity, citrus-like, piney, resinous, or sulfur-like American-variety hops flavors. Hops bitterness is high. Fruity-ester flavor is moderate to strong.”
The description toes a predictable line between classic APA and IPA, but it doesn’t really tell us anything we couldn’t reasonably deduce from the name of the category. The style’s numerics are, however, more illustrative. Take a look at the original gravity, alcohol by volume, and bitterness ranges (Table 1) that the guidelines suggest for APA, American strong pale ale, and American IPA.
Reflecting upon the numbers, we see that American strong pale ale isn’t so much a style description as it is a place-holder to close the gap between APA and IPA (although a 5.5 percent ABV pale ale would appear to have no home). We can’t really infer a stylistic definition other than through a kind of “yeah, but” formulation.
Perhaps more illustrative of the style’s elusive nature is that both AleSmith (San Diego, California) IPA (7.25 percent ABV, 73 IBU) and Bear Republic (Cloverdale, California) Racer 5 (7.5 percent ABV, 75 IBU) have medaled in the American Strong Pale Ale category at GABF. These are both phenomenal beers, of course, but they could just as easily have won as American IPAs. And, in fact, they have.
So while American strong pale ale offers a much-needed venue in which to judge beers that might otherwise fall between the stylistic cracks, it doesn’t necessarily define a genre. In search of more infor-mation, I did the only thing one could
reasonably be expected to do. I headed out to sample some beer.
Voluminously HoppedThe drive along Colorado Highway 119 from Boulder to Longmont, Colorado, features high-tech companies, rolling pastoral farmland, and an unnervingly large number of spandex-wrapped cyclists. Upon reaching Longmont, the first thing you encounter is a seventy-year-old silo that has been transformed into a 40-foot tall can of Dale’s Pale Ale, a sure sign that you’ve reached the home of Oskar Blues Brewery, which has crammed big, bold beers into little aluminum cans for more than a decade.
Dale’s Pale Ale is Oskar Blues’s flagship product and the first major craft beer to be sold in cans. Widely distributed from coast to coast, Dale’s is the best-selling pale ale in the Centennial State. But, true to Oskar Blues’s go-big-or-go-home approach, this beer refuses to remain within the bound-aries of the classic APA. Billed as “a huge voluminously hopped mutha of a pale ale,” Dale’s typifies a style-bending approach that moves a beer out of one category with-out fully depositing it into the next.
“We’ve tried entering Dale’s into compe-titions in different categories,” says Oskar Blues Colorado Head Brewer Tim Mat-thews, “but it’s a hard beer to catego-rize.” At 6.5 percent ABV and 65 IBUs, it’s stylistically closer to IPA than APA, but numbers don’t tell the whole story.
“Dale’s has classic American pale ale qualities that are out of place in an IPA. While it’s definitely
Where once there were vast open spaces in between APA and IPA, now styles blend together into an endless sea of pale ales. Breweries variously refer to this sub-Burton sprawl as double pale ale, imperial pale ale, strong pale ale, extra pale ale, or any number of other vaguely defined terms.
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MAKE IT
Rye Must You Label Me? ALL-GRAIN
Heftier than your typical American pale ale, but not quite claiming IPA status, this rye imperial pale ale features the sticky, resinous flavor of Chinook hops, plus piney Simcoe and citrusy Centennial in the finish. If rye tends to give you stuck mashes, include the optional rice hulls to keep the wort flowing.
OG: 1.062FG: 1.014IBUs: 50ABV: 6.3%
MALT/GRAIN BILL
9 lb (4 kg) pale malt1.5 lb (680 g) rye malt1 lb (454 g) flaked rye1 lb (454 g) Simpsons Caramalt (35 SRM)6 oz (170 g) Simpsons Extra Dark Crystal (160 SRM)
0.5 lb (227 g) rice hulls (optional)
HOPS SCHEDULE
1 oz (28 g) Centennial at 60 minutes1 oz (28 g) Centennial at 5 minutes1 oz (28 g) Chinook at 5 minutes1 oz (28 g) Centennial at dry hop 7 days0.5 oz (14 g) Chinook at dry hop 7 days0.5 oz (14 g) Simcoe at dry hop 7 days
DIRECTIONS
Mash for 60 minutes at 152°F (67°C), sparge, and boil for 60 minutes, following the hops schedule. Chill, transfer to the fermentor, and pitch yeast. Ferment at 65°F (18°C) for 10–14 days or until final gravity is reached, then rack to secondary and add dry hops. Package in bottles or kegs after 7 days of dry hopping.
YEAST
White Labs WLP001 California Ale or Wyeast 1056 American Ale or Safale US-05
a hops-forward beer, all of those pine, citrus, resin, and berry aromatics come in on the hot side, so it doesn’t have quite the same character you’d find in a dry-hopped IPA. Munich and crystal malts lend a rich malt complexity that contrasts with many IPAs, especially West Coast IPAs, which tend to focus mostly on pale malt.”
Tim’s observations bring us to an im-portant distinction that helps define this category more than any set of numbers can: An imperial pale ale showcases a bolder hops profile than standard APA but retains the APA’s complex malt backbone. It’s this substantial malt bill that keeps Dale’s 65 IBUs from overwhelming the palate.
Silver JubileeBrent Cordle has a wonderfully verbose job title. As the Barrel Aging, Cellar Series, and Pilot System Manager for Odell Brewing Company in Fort Collins, Colorado, Brent oversees Odell’s exten-sive barrel-aging program and helms the five-barrel pilot system from which the brewery’s 5 Barrel Pale Ale takes its name.
And Odell knows a thing or two about pale ale. Their 5 Barrel has thrice medaled at the Great American Beer Festival, and Odell IPA took home gold in 2007. The brewery also releases St. Lu-pulin every summer, a 6.5 percent ABV,
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PALEThe Power of
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46 IBU hops fest it deems an extra pale ale. In contrast to Dale’s Pale Ale, much of St. Lupulin’s healthy hops load is infused into the brew post-boil. When I met up with Brent in the Odell taproom, I had originally planned to discuss St. Lupulin, but, as luck would have it, something even more special was in store.
The brewery had just released Silver, a collaboration brew with Kansas City–based Boulevard Brewing to celebrate the two breweries’ twenty-fifth anniversaries (Odell and Boulevard opened within 24 hours of one another in 1989). Available on draft in Odell’s eleven-state distribution footprint and in 750 milliliter bottles in the twenty-nine states to which Boulevard distributes, Silver echoes Tim Matthews’s assertion that malt-hops balance is a distinguishing feature of imperial pale ale. At 7.3 percent ABV and 40 IBUs, Silver is well beyond pale ale territory, but this is definitely no IPA.
“We were aiming for a kind of cross between a pale ale and a strong ESB,” says Brent. “Odell strives for big aromas and a huge nose. That aroma is the first thing you experience when you bring a beer to your mouth. It makes you want more before you even take that first sip.”
In Silver’s case, it’s a decidedly fruity, al-most strawberry-candy-like burst of aroma hops. It’s a big beer, but with only 40 bal-ancing IBUs, it doesn’t feature the punch-you-in-the-face bitterness so common with IPAs. And Silver’s pale bronze hue is a visual prelude to the serious malt that lies underneath all of the hoppy goodness.
“Our customers have an unquenchable thirst for hops, but they don’t always want the bitterness that accompanies them,”
Brent notes. “That’s why Silver and St. Lupulin don’t break 50 IBUs even though they have an incredible hops nose.”
For comparison, 5 Barrel, a classic English-style pale ale features 36 IBUs, while Odell IPA boasts 70. And in this context, Silver’s modest 40 IBUs bring us to another important quality of this cate-gory: Imperial pale ale delivers hops without fatiguing the palate.
So, What Is Imperial Pale Ale, Really?Having discussed this elusive style with brewers who produce world-class pale ales and IPAs, I think the style is best expressed not in specific gravity units or international bittering units, but rather more holistically:
Imperial pale ale is a pale ale whose hops aroma, hops flavor, and alcoholic strength have more in common with IPA than pale ale, but whose malt profile and overall drink-ability have more in common with pale ale than IPA.
As brewers continue to push boundaries, it’s likely that even more subtle distinc-tions will crop up to differentiate different sub-styles, even among imperial pale ales. Think of the possibilities: Imperial Belgian pale ale, imperial black pale ale, and imperial barrel-aged pale ale all seem likely candidates for experimentation.
Imperial pale ale might frustrate those who insist on keeping things in nice, neat, little categories. But for those willing to accept a little ambiguity, it’s a great reason to just sit back and enjoy the ride.
TABLE 1
GABF Guidelines for Pale Ales
American Pale Ale
American Strong Pale Ale
American IPA
OG 1.044–1.050 1.050–1.060 1.060–1.075
ABV 4.4–5.4% 5.6–6.3% 6.3–7.6%
Bitterness 30–50 IBU 40–50 IBU 50–70 IBU
Editors’ Picks: Imperial Pale Ales
Hill Farmstead Brewery Abner Double Pale AleAfter reading Jeff Baker of the The Farmhouse Grill’s writing in the Burlington Free Press on the need for a “Ver-mont-style IPA,” we’re on board for a language around pales that ex-pands beyond the overly reductive “East Coast is malty, West Coast is hoppy” binary. Abner is a strong argument for that broader lexicon, taking the soft mouth-feel, radiant citrus notes, and hazy golden body of Vermont DIPAs, yet eschewing the need for IPA classification.
Half Acre Brewing Double Daisy Cutter Pale AleThis “imperial” version of Half Acre’s Daisy Cutter pale ale retains the grapefruit-like citrus notes of its namesake with a beefed up malt backbone and a more accessible bitterness level compared to the hops bombs in the (admittedly almost overlapping) double IPA category.
PHOT
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BOG
NER
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Magazine®
SAVE THE DATE:
Pale ales led the American craft-beer revolution through the 80s and 90s, but a new generation of brewers has firmly planted their own creative stamp on the style. Join us as our blind-tasting panel tastes through the best commercially available American Pale Ales and English Pale Ales in the United States.
TastedBEERANDBREWING.COM | 89
INSIDE CB&B
How We Taste & TestReviewing beer may sound like a dream job, but our tasting and re-view panel takes the role seriously. Composed entirely of Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) judg-es who have all studied, trained, and been tested on their ability to discern characteristics in beer, our panel is independent and doesn’t include any CB&B editors or staff. The panel tastes all beer blindly—they do not know what brands and beers they are tasting until the tasting is complete.
Our goal is to inform you about the strengths and weaknesses of these beers as well as their rel-ative differences (not everyone has the same taste in beer, so accurate descriptors are more valuable than straight numerical values). The quotes you see are compiled from the review panel’s score sheets to give you a well-rounded picture of the beer.
As our reviewers judge, they score based on the standard BJCP components: Aroma (max 12 points), Appearance (max 3 points), Flavor (max 20 points), Mouthfeel (max 5 points), and Overall Impression (max 10 points). We’ve listed these individual component scores, and the bottom-line number is derived from adding then dou-bling these component scores to produce a rating on a 100-point scale. Note that we’ve rounded the printed component scores to the nearest whole number, so the math won’t necessarily add up.
Our judges use the following scale in valuing scores:
95–100 » Extraordinary World-class beers of superlative character and flawless execution90–94 » Exceptional Distinguished beers with special character, style, and flavor85–89 » Very goodWell-crafted beers with note-worthy flavor and style80–84 » Good Solid, quality, enjoyable beers75–79 » Above AverageDrinkable and satisfactory beers with minor flaws or style deviations50–74 » Not recommended
We’d like for you to keep one thing in mind as you read these reviews—your perception of a beer is more important than that of our review panel or edi-torial staff, and reading reviews in a magazine (or on the Web or in a book) is no substitute for trying the beer yourself.
3 Floyds Yum Yum
| ABV: 5.5% | IBU: N/A | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Welcome to flavor country. This pale ale has just the right malt backbone to support an explosive juicy hops profile … derived from a new blend of proprietary hops.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “An intense candy sweetness that is utterly unique and new to my beer experiences—like Starburst candy on the nose or like the sweetened milk left after eating a bowl of sweet cereal. It’s a crazy, unique hops aroma that smells like candy or bubblegum and hops, or even more accurately candied hops.”Flavor: “The juicy hops character carries through the beer from the start to finish with lemon, orange, grapefruit, and an almost bubblegum sweetness. The malt body is bright with a clean, crisp finish. Wild candy sweetness and flavors range from citrus, to banana, to a butter rum hard candy with a touch of bitterness to balance the sweetness.”Overall: “One of the most uniquely fla-vored beers that I’ve tried, without the addition of any adjunct or specialty in-gredients—this beer broadens the hops flavor lexicon. I love being surprised by beers, and this one surprised me in the best way. Seek this one out.”
3 Floyds Zombie Dust
| ABV: 6.2% | IBU: 50 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“This intensely hopped and gushing undead Pale Ale will be one’s only respite after the zombie apocalypse.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Some wonderful fruit notes of blackberry, peach, fresh blueberry, mango, and pineapple balanced against light onion notes and an almost white-wine character. Very resinous, catty, and fruity offset with a dank and grassy earth character.”Flavor: “Hops present complex fruit notes with a little more citrus character. Juicy hops flavors up front, reminiscent of grapefruit and pine, along with tropical fruit notes, faint onion notes, and an appropriate level of bitterness. Finishes dry and clean.”Overall: “A very creative beer with a unique, beautiful, and delicious hops profile. Dry, balanced base with backbone to support (but not crowd) the hops. Gorgeous hops profile that showcases both piney, resinous, dank flavors with classic American citrus notes and tropical fruit hops flavors, and a very clean fermentation profile to boot. Buy by the case—it’s an excellent example of the style.”
92 99 99AROMA: 12APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 20MOUTHFEEL: 5OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 18MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 9
AROMA: 12APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 20MOUTHFEEL: 5OVERALL: 10
3 Floyds Alpha King
| ABV: 6.66% | IBU: 68 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“A bold yet balanced American Pale Ale with slight caramel sweetness and aggressive citrus hoppiness. This is our flagship beer.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Grapefruit rind and citrus peel up front, very juicy with a nice subtle caramel malt sweetness that pairs nicely. Dry piney notes are bal-anced by citrus and tropical fruit hops with prominent mango and lemon-zest notes.”Flavor: “Grapefruit and citrus hops notes pair well with a subtle malt sweetness. Very balanced with both sweet and bitter flavors shining through. A juicy hops flavor with an intriguingly crisp malt bill that finishes slightly sweet. It may get a little sweet for the style, but the piney and resinous hops flavors balance the fruit notes while the malt backbone supports the hops flavors.”Overall: “A very nice, classic APA with a touch more sweetness than most that works to pull the beer together. The malt backbone adds depth and support for the array of hops flavors without overshadowing them—it’s a creative take on the style.”
| AMERICAN PALE ALES |
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90 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
9487 93 87AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 19MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 10APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 17MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 12APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 18MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 10APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 17MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 9
Alaskan Brewing Freeride APA
| ABV: 5.3% | IBU: 40 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Alaskan Freeride APA features a lush, green, almost tropical hops aroma paired with the unique taste combina-tion of Cascade, Citra, and Centennial hops, making it both full in flavor and crisply thirst-quenching.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Presents a hops character that’s mostly floral with moderate esters, citrus fruit aromas with some stone fruit, and pine hops in the background. Sweet caramel buttery notes in the malt. Hops aroma drops fairly quickly.”Flavor: “Earthy, grassy hops flavor with a touch of spicy. Bitterness is here but not pronounced. Reasonable malt backing provides medium sweetness against the prominent fruity hops pro-file. Finishes dry with a nice bitterness. Peach and orange hops flavor is more subdued than the aroma promises.”Overall: “A nice example of a less hops-centric take on the style. Tasty beer, easy drinking, and not too assertive. Nicely done representation of the style—balance is appropriate as is lingering bitterness. Very nice, on the sweeter/maltier end of the American pale-ale spectrum.”
AleSmith XExtra Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.25% | IBU: 35 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Fresh American hops are abundant but carefully balanced by a light, crisp body and smooth bitterness. Notes of citrus and pine combine with a delicate malt sweetness to create a flavorful drinking experience.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Subtle cracker malt aromas and clean yeast fruit esters blend with the forward floral/citrus hops aroma. Hops candy and sweet resin play against a spicy hops aroma with hints of apricot and lemon hops.”Flavor: “Light malt flavor lends a dry, crisp finish. Strong carbonation really makes the clean and well-defined hops flavor pop out! Assertive hops flavor is spicy with some grassy-citrus notes and a bitterness that lingers just enough. Very light, spritzy body.”Overall: “Crisp, clean, light, and re-freshing—just what I want after work. A great take on the style with plenty of character all around, but easy to enjoy more than one glass. Pleasant example of style—very easy to drink. A very light-bodied APA with an effervescent character where the hops dominate and the straightforward malt is only there to support.”
Bear Republic Grand-Am
| ABV: 6% | IBU: 45 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Grand-Am is a sessionable yet asser-tive American Pale Ale that balances both classic and new American hops varieties with a distinct malt backbone.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Resiny, juicy hops notes with pine and lemon/grapefruit/orange citrus at the forefront and mild biscuit toasty notes from the malt.”Flavor: “Citrus and pine hops flavors dominate with nearly no malt or yeast character. It leans more toward bitter, both in flavor and finish, than some of the others we’ve tasted. The hops grapefruit sweetness is evened out with a touch of grapefruit bitterness and lemon notes that add depth. The finish is refreshing and dry.”Overall: “A classic version of an APA with entertaining hops complexity. Leans toward the bitter side, but still drink-able—very tasty and worth seeking out. This beer was very refreshing, juicy, and sweet. Nice showcase of the hops and a great example of the style. A solid beer.”
Boulder Beer Hoopla Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.7% | IBU: 40 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“A collaboration among Boulder Beer brewers and Kyle Hollingsworth, key-boardist of The String Cheese Incident, Hoopla Pale Ale is dry hopped with generous amounts of Glacier hops for a fruity, floral hops aroma and flavor.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Moderate hops aroma is re-strained with mild citrus hops—orange and grapefruit—and light caramel, biscuit, and toast notes. Juicy citrus peel with notes of grapefruit, lemon zest, and tangerine. Hops dominate.”Flavor: “A moderate hops bitterness, balanced by a decent malt backbone and slight mineral character. Light on the body, and the juicy orange and bitter grapefruit hops character carries through to a dry and crisp finish. Balanced and just slightly bitter but doesn’t linger long in the finish.” Overall: “It doesn’t take many risks, but this pale ale showcases the hops and finishes slightly juicy and sweet, which leads to the next sip. While not quite as exciting as other examples, this is a well-executed APA with an accessible hops profile and just the right amount of bitterness—a great APA that is worth seeking out.”
BEERANDBREWING.COM | 91
Drake’s 1500
| ABV: 5.5% | IBU: 48 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“A hops-forward American Pale Ale. Loads of Simcoe and Amarillo hops are blended in the fermentor just after fermentation has finished to impart a huge aroma of pine and juicy citrus.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Strong hops in the nose—grassy and earthy with sweet grapefruit and citrus notes and an almost vanilla undertone. A very unique and wonderful aroma that persists—the hops almost jump out of the glass. Slight cattiness to add complexity, but subtle.” Flavor: “The hops are present and showcased but not overpowering. It’s a clean pale that allows the hops flavor to dominate and shine with overripe citrus (mostly orange) and very nice resiny, piney hops notes. Finishes slightly dry with a lingering grapefruit sweetness and slight bitterness.”Overall: “An amazing beer that’s a master course in hops presentation. The hops are expertly showcased using a perfectly crafted base beer that’s bitter, dry, and yet remains balanced—all characteristics that accentuate the hops and keep the beer very drinkable. This beer showcases how APAs can be a great canvas for hops.”
Epic Brewing Element 29 Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.2% | IBU: 35 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“This hops-forward APA highlights Am-arillo hops’ sweet, ripe citrus aroma and flavor reminiscent of Valencia oranges and tangerines. It has a medium body with a malt character ranging from light crust to mild graham cracker.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “A bit muddled in the nose with some mercaptan/sulfur that fades as it warms. Medium fruity hops aroma with slight breadiness and some melanoidin notes. Pear or peach esters. Moderate hops nose with a bit of pine needle and earthy weight.”Flavor: “Very nice malt/bitter balance. Toasty crust with a touch of brown sugar and medium-high hops flavors of grass and flowers, lingering into the finish. Sweeter malt backbone provides ample room for hops to play. Hops bitterness is clean and restrained. Hint of oxidation tints the flavor.”Overall: “A tasty example of the style. Sulfurs are distracting (maybe a young bottle?), so let it breathe a bit. Lower carbonation lends a smooth mouthfeel, accentuating malt. A pretty-solid beer—hops character is nicely blended with malt backbone. This would go well with a roast beef dinner.”
9287 97 82AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 20MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 18MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 17MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 9
AROMA: 9APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 16MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 9
Deschutes Brewery Mirror Pond
| ABV: 5% | IBU: 40 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Cascade hops and more Cascade hops give this tawny-colored ale delicious hops-forward aroma and flavor. Pale malt allows the hops to linger, not overpower.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Classic Northwest hops citrus nose with notes of sweet orange juice and a touch of resin. Light malt sweetness with notes of honey (like Bit-o-Honey candy), but not overpow-ering. Fruity yeast esters hint at apple, strawberry, and pear. Ester aromas are strong—the fermentation character is almost stronger than the hops aroma.”Flavor: “Medium body for an APA, me-dium to high carb. Honey character and citrus tartness return in the aftertaste. Reasonable bitterness but could use a bit more hops flavor. Balance is a bit on the malt sweet side, but the lack of bitter is made up in hops flavor.”Overall: “Predominant orange creamsi-cle character is interesting. It’s a more malt-focused pale ale that wanders a bit into “winter warmer” territory and borders on ‘English’ in terms of yeast character. There’s enough malt complexity and richness here to back up a bolder showcase of hops.”
Boulevard Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.4% | IBU: 30 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Boulevard Pale Ale is a smooth, fruity, well-balanced beer. A variety of caramel malts impart a rich flavor and amber color, while liberal use of whole hops adds zest and aroma.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Medium-high notes of peach marmalade with light pineapple and bread notes way in the background. Yeasty fruit aromas blend with the hops. Slight malt sweetness on the nose accentuates hops fruit notes of strawberry, cherry, mango, and peach.”Flavor: “Big hops flavor up front. Hops bitterness and malt sweetness are well-balanced, and stone fruit abounds. Malty hit with just a touch of tart. Bitterness is appropriate and well-balanced. Low astringency, finish is quick and inviting. Moderate hops flavor and a big ester punch.”Overall: “Yum. It’s light on the late hops character that defines more contemporary APAs, but it’s very well-balanced with pleasing notes of strawberry, mango, and other fruits (even a touch of olives). Phenolic finish slightly distracting.”
| AMERICAN PALE ALES |
92 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
Evil Twin Hipster Ale
| ABV: 5.5% | IBU: N/A | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Perhaps you heard of a beer-move-ment that tributes favorite hipster neighborhoods across the globe. If you feel excluded because you’re hip but your city isn’t, this hip-without-border pale ale is an homage to you …”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “A muddled citrus (orange and grapefruit) character with signs of age—metallic, floral, and earthy. Some nice pine and resin notes as well, but no malt or yeast character.”Flavor: “Slighty sweet hops citrus notes contrast with a strong bitterness (for a pale ale) that lingers through the finish and verges on IPA bitterness without the sweetness for balance. Appears to have some age on it, so flavors may be more subdued. All hops all the time—bitter hops flavor lingers in the finish.”Overall: “The hops in this beer are assertive and bitter for a pale ale. Enjoyable and tasty but the bitterness overtakes the subtle character of a pale ale. Has all the makings of a great APA in the hops profile, but the base beer lacks enough malt sweetness and balance to make it work. Needs the bit-terness dialed back a bunch, especially in the finish.”
Firestone Walker Pale 31
| ABV: 4.9% | IBU: 38 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Floral and citrus hops aromas greet the nose with undertones of lightly toasted malt. Crisp pale and crystal malts offer a hint of sweetness. Subtle hops bitterness offers a refreshing finish.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Very mild nose with medium-intensity hops aroma but no prevailing character. Peach and strawberry contrast with forest aromas—woody hops with some flowers in the undergrowth. Sweet malt notes of caramel or biscuit balance notable esters.”Flavor: “The fruity, estery character dominates the flavor. Pilsner malt comes through over time. It’s moderately hoppy and sweet with strong peach, apricot, and strawberry character. First taste is of stone fruit and refreshing light malt toast. Low bitterness and delicate toast work well.”Overall: “It’s missing the typical burst of hops, but is very drinkable and pleasantly sweet and fruity throughout. This beer would go great with a holiday meal—enough body to stand up to food and enough sweetness to balance other flavors. It’s complex but not overwhelming in hops character, almost delicate, yet easy to love.”
Flying Dog Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.5% | IBU: 35 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“The alpha of the pack, Flying Dog Pale Ale complements a wide range of foods. Flavor notes: Grassy, citrus, and slight perfume hops aromas with subtly sweet malt body.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Intense tropical fruit notes with medium cattiness over musky and floral notes that complement the other hops flavors. Toast and biscuit malt character in the back with a hint of grassiness.”Flavor: “The intense citrus and tropical fruit flavor shine, while the malt does enough to keep it interesting and bal-anced. Similar flavors as displayed in the aroma. Bitterness is spot on. Juicy hops flavors come through as resiny, dank, and a touch musty. Incredibly balanced and finishes clean, making it extremely drinkable.”Overall: “A fine pale ale that showcases the hops very well while still providing a malt counterweight to keep the beer drinkable and engaging. A very proto-typical pale that’s put together well. It’s a great APA with tons of hops complexi-ty beyond the typical citrusy varieties common to most APAs. Very drinkable and extremely well-executed.”
Fort Collins Brewery 1020 Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.3% | IBU: 40 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“1020 Pale Ale has a citrus aroma with underlying tones of pine and grapefruit zest that inhabit the flavor, while a smooth, light body and crisp, clean bitterness from Magnum, Cascade and Chinook hops leave your palate refreshed and liberated.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Mineral malt and strong bready yeast aromas at the forefront with a touch of peppery spice and esters of pear and peach. Hops are less pronounced than some examples and yield a fairly subdued nose overall.”Flavor: “A straightforward pale malt bill with strong bitterness and mellow citrus hops notes. Hops flavors tend toward grassy, with a bit of grapefruit accentuating the bitterness. Very light bread flavors, some sweet esters detract from crisp finish.”Overall: “Delightfully restrained and drinkable beer on the ‘extra pale’ end of the category. Hops character is un-usual for pale ale, but fun, clean, and enjoyable. There’s more sweetness in the aftertaste than the color indicates. Crisp bitterness keeps me coming back for another sip.”
9478 91 89AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 19MOUTHFEEL: 5OVERALL: 9
AROMA: 12APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 18MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 10APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 15MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 8
AROMA: 10APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 19MOUTHFEEL: 3OVERALL: 10
BEERANDBREWING.COM | 93
Founders Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.4% | IBU: 35 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“A testament to Cascade hops in a bottle, this medium-bodied pale ale has a citrus flavor and a floral hops aroma due to the aggressive addition of hops during fermentation. You’ll notice a slight malty sweetness with a balanced hops finish.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Hops are not assertive—what’s there smells floral, like spring-time. Notes of red apple and grass with a touch of telephone pole resin. Moderate esters, mild hops, and light, toasty, biscuity malt notes.Flavor: “Clean malt barely balanced with crisp hops bitterness. Clean fer-mentation produces light fruit esters, and malt is bready and fairly complex for style. Finishes fresh and inviting—pleasantly mild hops flavor and a clean bitter finish that leans a bit toward the British style.”Overall: “Enjoyable if somewhat malt-focused pale ale. Hops aroma could use a bump to bring it to the level of its contemporaries. Pretty well-bal-anced except for the odd apple ester. It could benefit from more hops, and specific American-style hops, to kick up a more inviting aroma. Very drinkable.”
Goose Island 312 Urban Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.4% | IBU: 30 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“We are from the city that invented the skyscraper. We constructed our Urban Pale Ale on a balanced malt backbone, so the citrus hops aroma and crisp flavor can stand tall.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Honey and navel-orange notes up front with a low bready malt aroma. Sweet, like the initial mash-in—grainy with notes of water crackers and toast but a low hops aroma. Big melanoidin malt aroma—just like a bock.”Flavor: “Super rich malt character with just enough bitterness to balance. Sweet and sunny with enough hops to keep the rich malt from being cloying. Nicely balanced APA with strong fruity esters. Low-in-the-mix hops offer some floral and bitter notes despite being buried under raw grainy malt. Tastes a bit like they used a decoction mash or a very long boil.”Overall: “A bit sweet for the style, but not so much as to keep you from enjoying a full pint, as the bitterness backs up this big example of APA. An enjoyable beer, but the malt character is not expected from a pale ale—it’s as though someone added pale ale hopping to a bock.”
Grand Teton Sweetgrass APA
| ABV: 6% | IBU: 60 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Sweetgrass APA is a Pale Ale of distinction! 2009 Great American Beer Festival Gold Medal winner in the Amer-ican Pale Ale category, this crisp and fragrant beer is hopped and dry hopped for a citrusy, resinous spiciness.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Grassy, earthy, dank, and resiny hops character gives way to citrus notes and mild biscuit notes from the malt. Piney and spicy hops character is quite a departure from other pale ales.”Flavor: “Grassy dank character carries through in the flavor. Unique hops flavors, a bit like pine and passion fruit, give way to a crisp, dry finish. Malt back-bone helps support without interfering. Similar spicy and floral hops notes in flavor as indicated by the aroma.”Overall: “Slightly bitter, but a little more layered than some pales. Unique take on an APA with a nice variation on the typical hops profile and a properly supportive malt bill. This pale takes its own approach, with different hops choices that allow it to stand out from the crowd, while still delivering some fruity hops character and a solid level of bitterness.”
9284 88 88AROMA: 10APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 17MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 19MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 9APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 17MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 9
AROMA: 10APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 18MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 9
Fremont Universale Pale
| ABV: 5.6% | IBU: N/A | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Universale Pale Ale offers a distinctive Northwest twist on the classic pale ale, using a select blend of pale roasted malt and Old World malts balanced with classic Northwest hops to achieve a beer of rich malt flavor and hops spice.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Enjoyable lemon and citrus hops plus a light malt sweetness. The hops aroma is a bit restrained, but piney, floral, and grapefruit-rind notes come through.”Flavor: “A slightly muted pale, with nice malt complexity and interest-ing hops flavors, but everything is restrained. Ripe, juicy grapefruit and pine hops notes with a bit of musk and dankness. Missing some body, causing the hops bitterness to come off slightly astringent. Completely balanced with the bitterness trailing off immediately.”Overall: “A very well-put-together pale ale. The sweet citrus character came through nicely, and the finish was great—excellent flavor and pleasantly crisp. Extremely drinkable with the only gripe being just a touch of body thin-ness. The well-crafted base beer uses its dry finish and balance to accentuate the ripe, juicy hops flavors.”
| AMERICAN PALE ALES |
94 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
Half Acre Daisy Cutter Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.2% | IBU: N/A | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“A West Coast Pale Ale chock-full of dank, aromatic hops. This one’s a screamer; hoard it.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Clean hops aroma evokes everything from pitch, pine sap, faint tobacco, and resin to citrus, flowers, and tangerine. A faint earthiness and bready, cracker-like malt sits in the background. Esters are middle of the road and complement the hops aroma with notes of peach, biscuit, slight banana cloviness.”Flavor: “Very even malt/bitter balance with low bread notes and plenty of grassy and floral hops flavor coming through that wasn’t apparent in the nose. Same fruits as nose—peach, slight banana. Strong clean bitter hops bite with a bit of resinous hops char-acter. Malt is not as sweet as expected given the aroma.”Overall: “Super tasty. This well-crafted pale ale showcases the brewer’s skill at keeping everything in balance. The strong hops flavors contrast with the maltier-than-typical backbone, pushing this right to the line between pale ale and IPA. But the result is delicious.”
Lagunitas New DogTown Pale Ale
| ABV: 6.1% | IBU: N/A | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“A big and malty pale ale with a thirst-quenching hops flavor and a crispy clean finish.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Juicy, resiny hops prevail, with nice pine and grapefruit notes and a touch of must. Malt and yeast are mostly absent in aroma. Bright citrus and cattiness play well together.”Flavor: “Very juicy and citrusy with lemon, orange, and tangerine notes—the aroma promises, and the flavor over-delivers. The hops fruity sweetness carries through to the dry and clean finish. The complex floral and spice-rack pungency in the hops flavor is beautiful and yet quite different from what was suggested in the aroma. Very carbonic and juicy yet dry.”Overall: “A bright, juicy APA that smells and tastes like fresh hops resin; this beer beautifully showcases the hops. Very, very enjoyable. It’s quite an unexpected and delicious beer with unique hops choices that allow it to showcase and shine light onto new hops flavors. It’s very carbonated and dry, very tasty, and probably one of the best we’ve had.”
Mad River Steelhead Extra Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.6% | IBU: 26 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“A bright golden-hued ale of medium body with a spicy floral hops character and very mild bitterness. 2008 and 2012 Gold Medal and 2010 and 2013 Silver Medal winner at GABF in the Golden and Blonde Ale category.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Earthy hops character is over-shadowed by sweet candy with a slight vanilla, butterscotch, and graham cracker character—smells a bit like a Werther’s Original candy. It’s interest-ing, but slightly out of place for a pale. Hint of oxidization in the nose detracts from grapefruit and pine notes.”Flavor: “Malt is definitely the most interesting thing about this beer, which isn’t always the best thing said about a pale ale. Hops character is muted and subtle but some notes of grapefruit creep through. Toffee and butter character lead to a finish that’s a little sweet for a pale.Overall: “An odd pale ale, with minimal hops depth but plenty of malt complex-ity. A bit more classic in its approach than some of the new pales, but still tasty. The dialed-back bitterness helps the malt character shine—maybe a bit too sweet for the style, but pleasant.”
Mission El Conquistador Pale Ale
| ABV: 4.8% | IBU: 44 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Pale golden color with soft lemon and melon esters and a bready malt body. Dry hopped with Centennial and experi-mental hops from the Yakima Valley.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Medium hops intensity hits piney, leafy, and slight citrus notes. Esters of stone fruit include apricot notes. Clean ale yeast character sits atop caramel and candy sugar malt underneath, lending mild nose overall.”Flavor: “Moderately hoppy with a piney and leafy character—balance tilts hoppy over malty, but both are a bit one-dimensional. Clean and light malt flavors eschew caramel or darker malt to leave it bright. Finishes pretty dry—sharp and bitter, ready for another sip. Bitterness lingers with a touch of smoky phenol.”Overall: “Overall an interesting beer with a few characteristics I’m not a fan of. Quite hoppy yet light in color and malt body—as a result, the bitterness is accentuated. An ‘extra pale’ ale, as in a very light body that causes the bitterness to be somewhat over emphasized—it could benefit from a bit more backbone to counter the hops bitterness. This is a hops-lover’s beer.”
9996 78 84AROMA: 8APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 16MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 8
AROMA: 12APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 20MOUTHFEEL: 5OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 20MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 9
AROMA: 10APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 16MOUTHFEEL: 3OVERALL: 9
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BEERANDBREWING.COM | 95
New Holland Paleooza
| ABV: 4.4% | IBU: 33 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Our classic Pale Ale, with Michi-gan-grown Cascade hops. Bright hoppiness and pleasant aromatics are framed with balancing sweetness of pale malts.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Medium-low hops aroma is full of citrus—lemon and tangerine. Fruity esters complement the complex and inviting hops aroma. First hit offered a touch of DMS, but resolved into a pineapple-grapefruit mix.”Flavor: “Highly carbonated, slightly sharp carbonic bite up front. Balance leans toward malt instead of hops but flavor remains bright through the finish. Grassy hops character with a bit of orange peel and moderate bitterness (but not very strong in the mix). Body is thin and simple, and it finishes very dry with a lingering bitterness.”Overall: “There was a lot of subtle low-level complexity, but it lacks some of the bold qualities that make a great APA, such as a dominant hops character. Hops bitterness lingers in a good way and it’s easy to drink with a light and refreshing finish, but that simplicity can be read as ‘boring,’ depending on your point of view.”
Schlafly Dry Hopped APA
| ABV: 5.9% | IBU: 50 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“The pine/citrus aroma characteristic of American hops balances the full body provided by North American malts. After fermentation, the beer cir-culates through a bed of Cascade and Chinook hops, boosting the distinctive hops aroma and flavor.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Citrus and pine with notes of grapefruit peel and tangerines and no real malt or yeast character. Interest-ing, yet straightforward hops choices. Nice and piney, with a light dankness and some pleasant citrus character.”Flavor: “Grapefruit and orange rind with a bit of pine and lemon sits atop a clean fermentation and very little malt backbone. Finish is dry and a touch bitter but doesn’t linger. Put together well with nice bright flavors, hops, and malt that play off each other nicely.”Overall: “Pretty classic example, with just a bit more bitterness than is typi-cal for the style, but not overwhelming and still enjoyable. Lots of citrus and a bit less hops complexity as a result, but great for the style. A nice bright beer with conventional hops, but well executed and quite drinkable. Great example of the style.”
Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.6% | IBU: 38 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Pale Ale’s unique piney and grapefruit aromas from the use of whole-cone American hops have fascinated beer drinkers for decades and made this beer a classic. It is all natural, bottle- conditioned, and refreshingly bold.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Light grapefruit, lemon, and floral notes with a slight grainy sweet-ness behind the hops aroma. A little restrained for style, but still pleasant. Light sweet malt notes with a touch of biscuit malt. Mostly clean with low esters and just a hint of sulfur.”Flavor: “Nice up-front hops, balanced wonderfully with a soft malt character. Citrus rind dominates hops flavors with some floral notes. Restrained yeast notes provide a subtle fruitiness that works well. Light and carbonic—very drinkable. Definitely hops forward but not out of balance, with a slight lingering bitterness.”Overall: “This is your dad’s pale ale—a pretty classic-style pale ale that’s rounded out with no intense sharp edges that hits straight down the middle. All ingredients play well together, but nothing really sticks out. A clean, quaffable pale ale.”
8482 94 88AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 19MOUTHFEEL: 5OVERALL: 9
AROMA: 10APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 16MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 9
AROMA: 10APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 16MOUTHFEEL: 3OVERALL: 9
AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 17MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 9
Oskar Blues Dale’s Pale Ale
| ABV: 6.5% | IBU: 65 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“This voluminously hopped ‘mutha’ delivers a hoppy nose and asser-tive-but-balanced flavors of pale malts and citrusy floral hops from start to finish.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Nice hops character and citrus sweetness with muted piney, earthy, and floral hops notes with just a touch of malt sweetness in support.”Flavor: “Sweet clean hops citrus character with juicy grapefruit and orange complexities, though everything is a bit restrained. Sweet, nutty, and slightly fruity hops flavor balanced with pine and a higher bitterness that helps to mitigate the sweetness.”Overall: “This beer was crafted well but the hops character is somewhat muted and a bit too one-note. It’s an okay beer, though muted or a bit muddy, and more malty than some. A tasty APA with a nice hops flavor and supportive base beer and malt sweetness. A bit lacking in complexity but still very tasty.”
| AMERICAN PALE ALES |
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96 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
Ska Brewing Euphoria Pale Ale
| ABV: 6.2% | IBU: 45 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“A big backbone of malt, with plenty of caramel sweetness and just a touch of chocolate and toast. It’s the epic grapefruit hops aroma and flavor, provided by a huge dry hops addition at the end of fermentation, that makes this beer shine.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Toasty malt and citrus/grassy hops character, though overall relatively subdued for a pale ale. Some malt complexity can be parsed out in the aroma—fresh bread crust, slight caramel. Hops are a bit subdued but still present, coming through as citrus.”Flavor: “Malt sweetness balances well with the hops. The hops come through more in the end with some bright citrus notes and a little grass-like character as well. Finishes slightly bitter but still clean. Hops flavor are much brighter than the aroma suggested—more juicy, tropical fruit flavors than in the aroma.”Overall: “A more malt-forward pale ale that still showcases some nice citrus hops character. A bit more malty and sweet than is currently in vogue for APAs. A delicious beer that has a wonderful flavor with a mild aroma. ”
Southern Tier Live
| ABV: 5.5% | IBU: N/A | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Bottle Conditioned Pale Ale. Light copper color. Ample, fine carbonation. Sweet malts, citrusy hops, pine aroma. Hops dominate the flavor, then mingle with the malts. Dry finish.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Strong hops aroma of citrus (intense orange rind and over-ripened orange flesh) and pine. Malt biscuit notes are just enough to hold up the hops profile (but not much more). Some tangerine and catty notes and bright, juicy lemon notes up front with a bit of pine and grapefruit.”Flavor: “Hops jump in at the front and are sweet and juicy to the finish. The malt character only stands behind to showcase these hops. Wonderful intense sweet orange and lemon hops notes contrast with a perfectly balanced bitterness set against slight malty sweetness. Complex hops flavors are accentuated by the dry finish of the beer, without being too bitter.”Overall: “This is a refreshing and delicious pale ale put together very well—an assertive hops aroma and flavor knocks you out with orange and tangerine. Cleverly crafted to showcase bright and exciting hops flavors.”
Stone Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.4% | IBU: 50 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Our Southern California take on the classic British ale. Deep amber in color, this beer’s bold malt character is comple-mented by a judicious amount of hops, lending it a subtly enticing aroma.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Delicate floral element almost makes up for lack of aromatic volume. Very faint nose, with mild apricot, peach, and citrus. Clean yeast aromatics. Malt has a biscuit character, verging on caramel and dark bread with a bit of orange-blossom honey.”Flavor: “Rich bread and caramel/burnt sugar malt flavors underpin a slightly woody, resinous, and crisp hops flavor that’s much more assertive than the aroma. Bitterness hides underneath the malt richness, giving support without lingering in the finish. Carb and balance are spot on.”Overall: “A rich full-bodied pale ale that seems like a perfect beer to drink in a basement pub. Lots of English notes (sweeter, fuller body, woody hops), but with an American level of bitterness. Clean fermentation, big and interesting malt character. A well- designed APA that needs a bit more hops on the aroma.”
Sweetwater 420 Extra Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.7% | IBU: N/A | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“A tasty West Coast Style Pale Ale with a stimulating hops character and a crisp finish. Brewed with Munich, 40L, and 2-Row malts and Centennial and Cascade hops.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Clean citrusy hops aroma with a slight malt sweetness. Woody, floral hops with a light citrus edge evoke or-ange peel, mild vanilla, and black pepper. Light bready malt notes in the back. Grapefruit comes out as it warms. Nutty yeast aromas and spicy phenolic notes.”Flavor: “Slightly bready malt bill balanced to style by classic West Coast citrusy hops. Spicy, almost Belgian phe-nolic yeast character with a light wheat tartness, decent floral hops flavor under the spice, pineapple. Peach and cranberry notes. Lingering bitterness in finish without harshness.”Overall: “Good example of a West Coast pale ale in terms of hops character and overall balance. Leans toward the phenolic character of a Belgian pale ale, but very tasty. Caramel sweetness may be a bit high for style, but the layers of malt and ester flavors add in-terest. A full-flavored, excellent choice to pair with richer dinners.”
9185 88 93AROMA: 10APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 18MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 12APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 19MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 9
AROMA: 10APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 17MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 8
AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 18MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
EDITORS’
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BEERANDBREWING.COM | 97
Terrapin Rye Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.5% | IBU: 35 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“By using an exact amount of rye, the Rye Pale Ale acquires its signature taste. Made with five varieties of hops and a generous amount of specialty malts, it offers a complex flavor and aroma that is both aggressive and well-balanced.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Piney and citrusy hops notes up front work well with the malt spici-ness. A touch of malt sweetness comes through, maybe with a hint of caramel. Medium yeast notes of plum and apple cider. Pine and citrus hops give it a slightly earthy character.”Flavor: “A bit more subdued on hops flavor than most APAs, with the hops flavors competing a bit with rye. This pale doesn’t make the hops the star of the show; it’s more a bit player behind an intriguing maltiness with bread crust, caramel, and biscuit notes. Earthy and spiced notes of rye add complexity.”Overall: “The rye malt layer is great, but might work better with more spicy hops, such as Chinook, since the citrusy hops don’t seem to play as well with the rye. Enjoyable—a different take on APA. The spice and malt character blend well with the hops. Very drinkable.”
Uinta WYLD Extra Pale Ale
| ABV: 4% | IBU: 29 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Aggressively dry hopped to showcase fresh hops flavors and aromas. Begins with slight malt flavor with a subtle sweetness. Hops character pounces with citrus and pine notes. Finishes dry with an infusion of sweet hoppiness.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Huge tangerine raw hops aroma, with notes of resin, grainy malt, and low stone-fruit fermentation aromatics. Very strong hops aroma—piney, res-inous, citrus rind, slightly grassy. Light clean pale malt aromas.”Flavor: “Perfectly balanced malt and bitterness. The raw hops flavors are a bit over-the-top but fun. Low caramel notes in the finish keep it interesting and refreshing. Heavy hops flavor, again very resinous, with that fresh-hops-just-dropped-into-the-boil smell.”Overall: “Not sure I could drink very much of it—hops character seems over-ly raw and a bit astringent in the finish. It’s a fun beer with no process flaws and a nice recipe—a bit like chewing on hops cones, but I like the hops flavor in the finish. Beer is clean and well bal-anced for an APA, but a slightly higher carbonation level would accentuate the hoppiness and clean up the finish.”
Upslope Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.8% | IBU: 36 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“This clear, crisp, dry pale ale is our signature beer, the one that started it all! Its refreshing characteristics and signature dry finish blend smooth malt flavors with a unique spicy hops bitterness.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Strong lemon on the nose with sweet citrus and light biscuit malt. Slight, yet interesting mineral character and a nice Smarties candy aroma. Hops are a bit subdued but come through as pine and resin. A touch of malt sweet-ness follows the hops notes.”Flavor: “A very unique grape-juice-like flavor with some intense gooseberry and tart cherry notes. Similar mineral profile in the aroma. A mix of citrusy hops and a touch of malt sweetness and perhaps even a perception of sweetness from the hops (maybe tropical fruit) work to balance this one out, both in flavor and finish.”Overall: “A unique beer with some very interesting and new hops flavors, though restrained, that work well. The hops character is complex and unique with just enough malt backbone to keep things balanced with a distinct character in the hops selection.”
9183 91 84AROMA: 12APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 17MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 12APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 17MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 10APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 16MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 9
AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 18MOUTHFEEL: 5OVERALL: 10
Tröegs Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.4% | IBU: 45 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Tröegs Pale Ale is an American-style Pale Ale that is aggressively hopped with Northwest Cascades and balanced with crystal malts to create a hoppy, crisp, copper-colored ale. Simple and classic, yet full-flavored and sessionable.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Green onion, savory, spicy lemongrass on the nose with low malt aromatics and medium esters that complement the hops. Esters pull out notes of pineapple, kiwi, and peaches and cream oatmeal.”Flavor: “Malt sugary sweetness peek-ing out from behind some intriguing hops flavors—green onion, tama-rind, and fenugreek. This is a weird, well-balanced, not-a-typical-APA beer. Malt is fairly simple with some subtle biscuity undertones. Finishes clean.”Overall: “VERY interesting aromas and flavors going on. This tastes a bit like an Asian curry dish—I’m enjoying it, but it’s definitely unique! They hit the sweet spot between malty and bitter and deliver great balance. Light esters complement overall flavors without demanding attention. Nose is weak for the style, but the unique notes draw you in. Balance is nicely executed.”
| AMERICAN PALE ALES |
98 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
Victory Headwaters Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.1% | IBU: N/A | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“This firmly crisp and aromatically arous-ing pale ale integrates a softly supportive malt base that underlies streams of herb-al hops complexity. Shifting impressions of lemon aroma and flavor intermingle with leafy, tea-like earthiness.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Floral hops aroma meets medium sweet malt with biscuit notes verging on caramel. Light esters of pear or peach and very subdued citrus notes sit atop tasty honey-bread crust malt.”Flavor: “Full bodied with a sweeter malt finish and hops bitterness to match the body. Moderate hops flavor—peach, pear, some cherry, and pine, with a proper bitter finish. Initial flavor is much more simple than aromatics suggest—a good surprise. Lovely.”Overall: “Well-crafted, balanced pale ale. Hops flavor lingers into the after-taste with juicy citrus notes and fresh pine boughs. Right down the center of the style, an archetypal example. Carb makes the hops pop, and then the bitterness lingers. Great West Coast hops character—nicely balanced beer. Stylewise it may be a bit bitter overall, but the malt complexity backs it up well.”
Firestone Walker DBA
| ABV: 5% | IBU: 30 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“DBA opens with a biscuity toasted malt aroma and a hint of oak and vanilla. Pale malts create a smooth malty middle with ribbons of caramel, English toffee, and toasted oak. A tribute to English pales traditionally fermented in cask.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Spicy hops aroma is very herbal and almost medicinal, with some dark cherry esters. Nice sweet caramel and toffee malt aroma. Hops aroma is subdued, floral and earthy.”Flavor: “The hops character in this beer is earthy, woody, a bit spicy, and floral, with mild bitterness—more than the nose would suggest. Notes of cara-mel and toffee come through well with a light body. Hops flavors clash with the fruity yeast esters, though as it warms these work better together. Bitterness is a little low for the style, allowing the malt to linger a little too long.”Overall: “Nice example of the style. A decent English pale ale, but hops choices don’t quite harmonize perfectly with the malt complexity and yeast esters. Plenty of hops to keep things interesting—perhaps more than would usually be found in England—this is an American take on a British style.”
Full Sail Pale Ale
| ABV: 5% | IBU: N/A | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Our English Pale Ale is not a West Coast hoppy pale ale, but more malt forward. There is a toasty caramel from the malts, and it finishes with a touch of earthy hops.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Fruity and bready, well-blend-ed and slightly sweet. Hops are mostly absent, adding just a touch of spicy background. Esters are moderately assertive, with notes of plums or sweet cherry. Sweet, orangey hops.”Flavor: “Big malty caramel burnt sugar up front, balanced with a blunt bitter and nice grassy hops flavor. Very British in character and effect. Rich melanoidin finish—overly complex for the style but tasty. Hops bitterness has a hard time contending with the malt. Malt is bready with caramel and strong crystal notes. Lightly bitter finish.”Overall: “Enough malt throughout to slightly cover up the hops, especially in the aroma. A touch sweet throughout, but the finish is bitter enough to clear most of the sweetness off. Woody hops flavors in background. It’s definitely a British Pale with the volume of malt sweet and caramel. But good regard-less—nice ‘yum factor.’”
Great Divide Denver Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.5% | IBU: N/A | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“DPA is a world-renowned classic pale ale with a malty middle and an equally hearty complement of hops aroma, flavor, and bitterness.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Slight earthy and herbal hops notes, but yeasty esters quickly come out to dominate the aroma. Apple cider, overripe pear, slight mustiness of a fallen apple set out in the sun too long. A mild caramel malt note. As it warms, a slight cheese-rind aroma emerges.”Flavor: “The hops come through with nice earthy and spiced character and moderate bitterness. Smooth round malt flavors, caramel and dark crystal notes with a nice clean finish for an English pale. Mid-level hops bitterness balances well with the malt body. There is a noticeable amount of herbal and floral hops flavor, but they aren’t allowed to shine behind the very British yeast character.”Overall: “Enjoyable pale ale. The malt character was nice and provided some richness without overtaking the beer. The earthy spiced hops were showcased well. Sweet malt aroma is appropriate for EPA. Nice beer for enjoying by a fire reading a good book.”
8796 83 85AROMA: 10APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 16MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 9
AROMA: 10APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 17MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 9
AROMA: 12APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 19MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 9APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 17MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 9
| ENGLISH PALE ALES |
BEERANDBREWING.COM | 99
Heavy Seas Powder Monkey
| ABV: 4.8% | IBU: 29 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“A traditional English-style pale ale with our own East Coast twist: UK Fug-gles and Goldings hops dominate the flavor but it has subtle notes of citrus and flower from Cascade hops. Distinct bitterness and a slight malt sweetness characterize the taste.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “An interesting mix of hops and malt that competes for attention. Nice biscuit and bread-crust malt notes with an interesting pungent orange marmalade and floral lavender hops character with some light fruity esters.”Flavor: “A curious and delicious balance of bready maltiness with light toffee and caramel notes and an assertive bread-crust flavor. The fruity and floral hops flavors work perfectly with the malt, and just a touch of yeast esters add to the complexity. Overall: “An enjoyable beer—tastes like an East Coast pub ale with Ring-wood yeast. The malt body provides a nice counterpoint to the spicy and earthy hops character. An old-school American interpretation of British pub ales that encompasses all of those rich English malt flavors—bread crust, biscuit, and toast with jam. Overall very nice.”
Samuel Smith Organic Pale Ale
| ABV: 5% | IBU: 31 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“A classic malt-accented, copper-colored pale ale in which subtle fruity esters from the Samuel Smith yeast strain interact with caramel flavors (from organic crystal malt) and fresh hops.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Sweet caramel, toast, and toffee notes with a floral and earthy hops character. Esters evoke fresh-cut Red Delicious apples or an orange grove after the rain. Not much hops aroma, but other components more than make up for its absence.”Flavor: “Caramel and toasty malt sweetness with a touch of floral and spiced hops. That blend of fruity yeast esters plays off the delicious malt profile—apple and pear flavors work wonderfully with the bread crust. Lin-gering bitterness is just a touch harsh.Overall: “Very enjoyable malt-forward pale ale with subtle floral and earthy hops. The bold fruit flavors and sweet malt make this both a warming and re-freshing treat. Finishes medium sweet with some tartness in the aftertaste. Tastes like caramel apples—a won-derfully complex and tasty beer with flavors not often found in this style. Unusual, well done, and welcomed.”
Schlafly Pale Ale
| ABV: 4.4% | IBU: 25 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“A smooth, balanced, copper-colored session beer with mildly spiced flavor and aroma from the East Kent Goldings hops. The bready, lightly caramel malt complements the hint of fruitiness contributed by the London Ale yeast.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “A slight sourdough bread note up front, with mild floral, herbal, and spicy hops character underneath. Malt is reminiscent of toasted graham crackers with Bit-o-Honey candy-sweet notes.”Flavor: “This beer definitely leans more toward the malt than the hops. Interesting malt notes—bread crust, graham cracker, and some biscuit. Hops flavors of citrus and orange are almost absent with just enough bit-terness to provide some balance. Crisp and carbonic with a dry finish.”Overall: “Enjoyable, although the malt needs definition to shine through. Hops play a supporting role—this is more like an English bitter or even a slightly more flavorful mild than a ‘true’ EPA. Good balance of malt sweetness and hops character that did not seem to get in the way of each other. Excellent example of an EPA—very enjoyable with an appropriate level of bitterness.”
9395 93 88AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 19MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 19MOUTHFEEL: 5OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 19MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
AROMA: 10APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 18MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
Odell Brewing 5 Barrel Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.2% | IBU: 36 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“We treat 5 Barrel Pale Ale to an infu-sion of fresh whole hops flowers in the hops back and the fermentor, as well as four hops additions during the kettle boil. We like how this gives the beer a fresh, lively flavor and aroma.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Big hops aroma with a mix of earthy/floral notes and an overlay of citrus. Perhaps it’s dry hopped with American variety? Very floral in the nose with some slight biscuit toast character in the back.”Flavor: “Hop-tastic initial blast of flavor races ahead of the malt. Medi-um-high carbonation accentuates hops impact. Hops are floral and earthy, with some sweet citrus fruit notes as well. Bitterness is well-balanced against a medium body of complex malt, with bread crust, biscuits and jam, and light caramel.”Overall: “Tasty, juicy, hops-focused pale ale. Medium malt level allows for high hops bitterness without harshness. A well-executed and enjoyable beer where the hops and malt character come together and blend well. A tasty hybrid of American and English character.”
TOPRATED
EDITORS’
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100 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
| ENGLISH PALE ALES |
Sierra Nevada Pale AleAt the brewers’ after-party at the Shelton Brothers Festival last October, we watched a room full of some of the most celebrated brewers in the world clean the bar out of the venerable Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. It may not be the sexiest pale, but it was one of the very first to celebrate U.S. hops varieties, and Sierra Ne-vada’s focus on consistency and quality has earned them respect from the best of their peers. It’s the standard by which all others are judged.
Southern Tier LiveBottle-conditioned and bright, Southern Tier Live became a favorite in the Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® office fridge as we put this issue together. With a perfect balance of crisp malt and well-defined contemporary citrus hops profile, Live never feels like it’s trying too hard—the elements play well together, and the dry finish sets up each new sip.
Lagunitas Born Yesterday Pale AleThis bottle from Lagunitas arrived after our review panels for the issue wrapped up, but that didn’t stop the team from enjoying the exquisite fresh hops profile showcased by Born Yesterday. At 7.5% ABV, it’s at the very top of what could be considered an imperial pale ale, but the very light body and balanced bitterness let the aroma and flavors hops push forward.
Samuel Smith Organic Pale AleWe cut our teeth on bottles of Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout in the mid-90s when it was one of the few widely available, but recent experi-ences with the brand left us wishing they would take a few more steps to appeal to modern taste buds. Organic Pale Ale took us by surprise with strong fruit flavors driven by yeast esters working together with the hops. In contrast to many beers in the style, it’s a great winter- season pale ale.
3 Floyds Yum Yum Pale AleThere’s that moment when you crack open a beer you’ve never had before, and the fla-vors hit you in a rush that’s a mix of excitement, confusion, and wonderment. So it is with Yum Yum, where 3 Floyds has extended its mastery of aroma and flavor hops deep-er into the pale ale territory with this beer that evokes strawberries, melon, and the most wild fruit character we’ve enjoyed since that last bottle of Fantôme.
New Holland PaleoozaWhile the review panel searched for bolder notes in New Holland’s Paleooza, the editorial team enjoyed the subtle berry notes from the Michigan-grown Cascade hops. It hints at the unique juicy fruit flavors of 3 Floyds’ Yum Yum, but with a subtle malt profile that’s more com-forting than crisp.
Summit Extra Pale Ale
| ABV: 5.2% | IBU: 45 | SRM: N/A |
What the brewer says“Summit EPA has been gracing the pint glasses of serious brew lovers since 1986. Bronze color. Gold-medal- winning flavor. With caramel, biscuity malts balanced with an earthy hops bite and juicy citrus.”
What our panel thoughtAroma: “Pleasant floral aroma, almost like honeysuckle. Subtle sweet orange marmalade notes. A light biscuit malt undertone, with slight toast and caramel malt notes as well. Esters are medium-high and fruity verging on tropical.”Flavor: “Assertive bitterness up front that mellows with a nice malt bread-line. Hops flavor takes a little work to discern behind the bitterness and malt, but floral character remains. The beer finishes and lingers on the tongue with some biscuit malt sweetness with the floral hops notes. Very dry with medium-high carbonation.”Overall: “Enjoyable EPA with a nice showcase of hops and a light body at the base. Finishes medium dry. An American take on EPA—one probably would not find a beer this bitter very often in England. A tasty and complex beer that showcases this hops profile quite nicely. ”
92AROMA: 11APPEARANCE: 3FLAVOR: 18MOUTHFEEL: 4OVERALL: 10
INSIDE CB&B
Editors’ PicksThe review scores in this (and every) issue of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® are a result of blind tasting by our in-dependent panel (staff do not participate in the scoring of the beers). But our editorial team tastes the same beers, and we have our own opinions of the brews. Most of the time, those opinions coincide with the review panel, but occasionally they diverge, so we’ve used the “Editors’ Pick” flags on the reviews in conjunction with this sidebar to point out some of our editors’ favorites from this issue.
BEERANDBREWING.COM | 101
ASK THE EXPERTS
Belgian Yeast StrainsOur “Ask the Experts” column poses your homebrewing questions to industry experts. In this issue’s column, we asked Phil Leinhart, brewmaster at Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown, New York, for some advice on Belgian yeast strains.
ture, but all other things being equal, attenuation is a good metric with which to compare two yeast strains. All yeasts are different, but as a general rule, Belgian strains tend to be big attenuators relative to other broad classes of yeast.
Flocculation refers to a yeast strain’s ten-dency to clump together and drop out of suspension. Highly flocculent yeast cells readily fall to the bottom of a fermentation vessel at the end of fermentation, leaving behind brilliantly clear beer. Less floccu-lent yeast, on the other hand, may remain in suspension even after fermentation has come to an end. While Belgian strains tend to be mildly to moderately flocculent, this certainly isn’t a rule.
“We ferment Brewery Ommegang’s Glimmerglass, a Belgian saison, with a very flocculent yeast strain,” notes Lein-hart. “The cells readily clump together into a slurry on the bottom of the fermen-tation tanks.”
Flocculation and attenuation are loosely correlated in that yeast cells that remain suspended are more likely to fully ferment than yeast cells that drop out. The rela-tionship isn’t absolute, but it’s a good rule of thumb.
To compare these technical specifica-tions, Leinhart recommends contacting major yeast suppliers such as White Labs, Wyeast, and the Brewing Science Institute. These microbiology labs publish yeast per-formance characteristics on their websites and are always happy to answer questions about every brewer’s favorite microbe.
A CRAFT BEER & BREWING READER recently asked us the following question:
What are the differences between the vari-ous Belgian yeast strains? How do I choose the right one?
With the vast number of yeast strains available to today’s homebrewer, it’s easy to get confused. “Belgian yeasts are incredibly diverse. The best place to start is to identify the technical performance characteristics you want for your home-brew: things such as optimal fermentation temperature, attentuation, and floccula-tion,” says Leinhart.
A yeast’s optimal fermentation tempera-ture is actually a range of temperatures at which that yeast strain performs best. Aiming for a temperature below this range may stall the fermentation, while ferment-ing substantially above the temperature range can encourage the yeast to create unwanted flavors and aromas. Belgian yeast strains tend to work well at typical ale temperatures, 62–68°F (16–20°C), but some saison strains can tolerate temperatures approaching 100°F (38°C)!
Attenuation is a value that indicates the percentage of available wort sugars a yeast strain is likely to ferment. Highly attenua-tive strains can eat through 90 percent or more of the available sugars, while low- attenuating yeasts might barely get through 60 percent. Attenuation also depends on other factors, such as wort composition and fermentation tempera- PH
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102 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
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While published profiles can offer some clues to the unique flavors and aromas a particular strain will lend, a yeast’s complex interaction with wort composition, hops aromatics, and even fermentor geometry means that some trial and error is often in order.
104 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
| ASK THE EXPERTS |
Yeast selection, of course, isn’t just about numbers. Stylistic considerations are also important, and the difference between a good beer and a great one can easily come down to yeast selection. While published profiles can offer some clues to the unique flavors and aromas a particular strain will lend, a yeast’s complex interaction with wort composition, hops aromatics, and even fermentor geometry means that some trial and error is often in order.
“You just have to practice and discover what works best for you,” Leinhart emphasizes.
Keep in mind that Belgian is a broad term that includes a great number of distinct styles and that some strains are best suited to certain kinds of beer. Belgian saison, for example, showcases a spicy phenolic char-acter (think cloves and pepper) that is large-ly a by-product of yeast selection (some saisons are actually spiced, but this need not be the case). Fermenting a tripel with the same strain would no doubt produce an excellent ale, but it probably wouldn’t turn out a classic tripel.
Belgian pale ale (See “Pales in Com-parison,” page 74) is fermented with a relatively clean yeast strain that shares more similarities with Chico (American and California ale) and lager yeasts than it does with abbey-style varieties. One could ferment any ale with such a strain, but the expected esters won’t present in the desired amounts for, say, a wit.
We can divide Belgian yeasts into a few categories, according to the beer styles for which they’re best suited.
▪ Belgian pale ale strains are fairly neutral and can be hard to find. White Labs WLP515 Antwerp Ale and Wyeast 3655-PC Belgian Schelde Ale, available as seasonal strains, are both good choices. In the absence of these, a relatively clean American-ale strain is a good choice.
▪ Abbey and Trappist strains deliver the signature fruity esters and spicy phenols that characterize what most
beer drinkers instantly recognize as “Belgian.” Start with WLP500 Monas-tery Ale (formerly Trappist Ale) and WLP530 Abbey Ale from White Labs or 1214 Belgian Abbey and 3787 Trappist High Gravity from Wyeast to get a feel for what you like and then try some of the other strains.
▪ Belgian Strong Ale yeasts can tolerate the high alcohol of golden and dark strong ales. White Labs WLP570 Belgian Golden Ale and Wyeast 1388 Belgian Strong Ale are classics, but Abbey and Trappist strains can turn out great exam-ples as well.
▪ Saison strains include a spicy compo-nent that can come across as peppery and clove-like. They also tend to leave a distinctive dry tartness. White Labs WLP565 Belgian Saison I and Wyeast 3724 Belgian Saison are reported to have been sourced from Brasserie Dupont, but both are prone to stalling at around 1.035. Raising the fermen-tation temperature to as high as 95°F (35°C) can get you over the hump, or try Wyeast 3711 French Saison, which is so aggressive that you might think it will ferment through the carboy itself.
▪ Witbier yeast offers up a tart, fruity flavor that makes it the ideal accom-paniment to the coriander and citrus typically found in Belgian whites. Classic strains for that refreshing, thirst-quenching characteristic include White Labs WLP400 Belgian Wit and Wyeast 3944 Belgian Witbier.
There are of course, plenty of other strains, including any number of lambic and sour blends, but starting out with one of these basic options will place you squarely on the path to Belgian bliss.
If you have a question for the experts, email us at [email protected] or visit our website at www.beerandbrewing.com.
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BREW TESTDigital Hydrometers & RefractometersA new generation of digital tools makes reading gravity more precise and easier than ever. Our test lab tried two—The STM eDrometer and the Misco Digital Refractometer—to find out just how well they work for pro brewers and homebrewers alike.
STM Instruments eDrometerWhat it isAn affordable accurate digital hydrometer that offers a wide variety of measurements (standard gravity, density, °Brix, °Plato, °Baume, potential alcohol, and more) with built-in temperature compensation in an easy-to-clean form factor.
Test lab notesPROS: Our testers put the eDrometer through its paces and found that it offers quick measurement response time, very precise measurements (measures to the thousandth of a point), and a wide range of units of measure to choose from (it’s useful for everything from brewing to wine making to distilling). Testers were very happy that the unit measures actual density, not just refraction. Nine-volt battery power makes it portable, yet the base is stable and self-supporting. It offers digital performance for a fraction of the price of typical commercial units. CONS: Our testers found that the unit does take some time to stabilize if you move it from a warmer to a colder environment (or vice versa), and it can yield slightly variable results if ambient temperatures fluctuate. The sample size, while significantly small-er than what an analog hydrometer test jar requires, is roughly 25ml—a larger sample than a refractometer requires.
VerdictThe eDrometer is a nice piece of technology, derived from an expired Anton-Paar patent and can fully replace a hydrometer as a homebrew, lab, or brewery tool. Its very slight variability in results is a drawback, but it’s worth considering if it will be set up in a stationary location.
Details$395. Available online at stm-instrument.com.
Misco Palm Abbe RefractometerWhat it isA convenient, handheld digital refractometer with multiple pur-chasing options depending on the measurement scales needed. Test unit included °Brix, percentage of dissolved sugars, gravity, and propylene glycol freeze point.
Test lab notesPROS: The Misco unit is useful in both commercial and home-brew environments, with the tiny sample size being ideal for homebrew-scale batches. It delivers immediate results (5 seconds on average), and units can be purchased with up to five separate measurement scales (pricing depends on the number of scales one needs). For commercial breweries, the option to include measurements such as glycol freeze point adds another layer of utility to the device. It proved accurate and consistent when mea-sured against other calibrated devices. Handheld device is easy to move around a commercial environment.CONS: Because it’s a refractometer, you will need to use a brewing calculator to determine gravity once fermentation begins. Only the manufacturer can install additional scales.
VerdictThe Misco PA203X is clearly designed for industrial use, and per-forms well at a fraction of the cost of other commercial units. It’s a highly accurate refractometer, and multiple independent scales provide a variety of uses around a commercial brewery. Since it’s not truly a hydrometer, it’s most useful before fermentation or for cases that don’t require a physical measurement of density.
DetailsPrice ranges from $335 (for a unit that measures only °Brix) to $535 for the tested unit. Available online at misco.com.
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108 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
-A-
acetic >> vinegary aroma caused by acetic acid bacteria; common in sour beers.acetaldehyde >> chemical present in beer that has the aroma and flavor of fresh-cut green apples or green leaves. acid >> a pH value between 1 and 7.acrospire >> the barley shoot that develops during germination and malting.adjunct >> any non-enzymatic fermentable material that will feed the yeast. Common examples are rice, corn, refined sugar, raw wheat, flaked barley, and syrup.aerobic >> a process that occurs in the presence of oxygen.aftertaste >> the flavor that lingers after beer leaves the mouth.aldehyde >> a chemical precursor to alcohol. In some situations, alcohol can be oxidized to aldehydes, creating off-flavors.ale >> a beer brewed using a top-fermenting yeast at 60°–75°F (15°–24°C) for a relatively short time (2–3 weeks). The ale family includes pale, amber/red, strong, and dark.aleurone layer >> the outermost layer of the endosperm of a barley grain, containing enzymes.alkaline >> a pH value between 7 and 14.alpha acid >> a class of chemical compounds found in hop cones’ resin glands that is the source of hop bitterness.alpha acid unit (AAU) >> a homebrewing measurement of hops that is calculated by multiplying the percent alpha acid of the hops by the number of ounces of hops. American Society of Brewing Chemists (ASBC) >> the organization that sets standards and test methods for brewing materials and processes.amino acids >> a group of complex organic chemicals that form the building blocks of protein. amylase >> an enzyme group that converts starch to sugar. attenuation >> the degree to which the fermentation process converts residual sugars to alcohol and CO2.anaerobic >> a process that occurs in the absence of oxygen.
autolysis >> self-digestion and disintegration of yeast cells that can cause off-flavors if beer isn’t racked from dead yeast after primary fermentation.
-B-
°Balling >> one of three units that are used as the standard to describe the amount of available extract as a weight percentage of cane sugar in solution.barley >> cereal grain, member of the genus Hordeum. Malted barley is the primary ingredient in beer.barrel >> standard unit in commercial brewing. A U.S. barrel is 31.5 gallons; a British barrel is 43.2 U.S. gallons.Baumé >> hydrometer scale, developed by the French chemist Antoine Baumé, used to measure the specific gravity of liquids.beerstone >> a hard brown scale (calcium oxalate) that deposits on fermentation equipment. beta glucans >> a group of gums that are produced in the malting process and can, if present in excess, cause problems with runoff and fermentation.biotin >> one of the B-complex vitamins found in yeast.blow-off tube >> a tube used during vigorous fermentation to allow the release of CO2 and excess fermentation material.Brettanomyces >> colloquially referred to as “Brett,” a genus of yeast sometimes used in brewing. In a glucose-rich environment, it produces acetic acid.
-C-
calcium >> mineral ion important in brewing-water chemistry.caryophyllene >> one of four primary essential hop oils. Also found in basil, caraway, cloves, oregano, and pepper.chill haze >> cloudy protein residue that precipitates when beer is chilled but re-dissloves as the beer warms up.citronellol >> a monoterpene alcohol that is primarily biotransformed by yeast from geraniol when high levels of linalool are present.
| BREWING GLOSSARY |
cold break >> rapid precipitation of proteins that occurs when the wort is rapidly chilled before pitching the yeast.coolship >> a large shallow pan used to cool wort using outside air temperature. During the cooling process, naturally occurring yeast from the air inoculates the wort. Then the cooled wort is transferred into fermentors.conditioning >> a term for secondary fermentation, in which the beer matures. cone >> the part of the hops plant used in brewing.corn sugar >> dextrose. Sometimes added as an adjunct in beer to raise alcohol percentage and lighten the color of the beer.
-D-
decoction >> a mashing technique that involves removing some of the mash to another pot, boiling it, then returning it to the mash tun to raise the temperature. dextrin >> a complex sugar molecule, not normally fermentable by yeast, that contributes to body in beer. diacetyl >> a powerful flavor chemical with the aroma of butter or butterscotch. diastase >> an enzyme complex in barley and malt that is responsible for the conversion of starch into sugars during the mashing process. dimethyl sulfide (DMS) >> a powerful flavor chemical found in beer, with the aroma of cooked corn or cabbage. dough-in rest >> the process of mixing the crushed malt with water in the beginning of the mash operation. dry-hopping >> adding hops directly to the fermenter at the end of fermentation to increase hop aroma without adding bitterness.
-E-
endosperm >> the starchy middle of a barley grain that is the source of fermentable material for brewing. enzymes >> proteins that act as catalysts for most reactions crucial to brewing, including starch conversion and yeast metabolism.
Brewing A-Z
BEERANDBREWING.COM | 109
esters >> aromatic compounds formed from yeast’s complete oxidation of various alcohols and responsible for most fruity aromas in beer.ethanol >> the type of alcohol found in beer, formed by yeast from malt sugars.ethyl acetate >> a common ester in beer.European Brewing Convention (EBC) >> Most commonly encountered as a term applied to malt color. °EBC is about twice °Lovibond/SRM.European Bitterness Unit (EBU) >> equivalent to International Bittering Unit (IBU).extract >> concentrated wort in dry or syrup form.
-F-
farnesene >> one of four primary essential hops oils. Although farnesene makes up a very low percentage of total oil in most hop varieties, it is considered significant because it makes up a substantial proportion of some noble hops.fatty acid >> among the secondary elements that are produced during fermentation and create much of a beer’s flavor.fermentation >> yeast’s biochemical process involving the metabolism of sugars and the release of CO2 and alcohol. finings >> clarifying agents that are added post-fermentation to help pull suspended yeast, malt proteins, and polyphenols out of the beer. firkin >> British cask containing 10.8 U.S. or 9 Imperial gallons (40.9 liters).first runnings >> the first few quarts of wort that are drained off at the beginning of runoff until the draining wort is fairly clear. flocculation >> the clumping together and settling of the yeast out of solution. fusel alcohol >> a group of more complex alcohols that esterify under normal conditions. In beer, fusel alcohols can be produced by excessive amounts of yeast.FWH >> “first wort hopping” is a process that involves adding finishing hops to the boil kettle as the wort is drained from the lauter or mash tun.
-G-
gelatin >> one of several fining agents.gelatinization >> the process of breaking down the starch granules in corn or other unmalted cereals to make the starch accessible for conversion into sugar. geraniol >> one of many hop compounds. Researchers have determined that citronellol is primarily generated from geraniol when high levels of linalool are present.germination >> the process by which the barley shoot begins to grow and emerge from the hull.glucanase >> an enzyme that acts on the beta glucans of unmalted barley, oatmeal, rye, and wheat.
glucose >> corn sugar or dextrose, the most common type of sugar. gravity (specific gravity) >> describes the concentration or density of malt sugar in the wort. grist >> ground grain ready for brewing.
-H-
hardness >> a term indicating the presence of water mineral levels. hops >> a climbing vine of the Cannabacinae family, whose cones are used to give beer its bitterness and characteristic aroma. hopback >> a sealed container that is filled with whole hops and inserted in line as the wort is transferred into the fermenter. The hops add aroma and act as a filter for removing the break material. hot break >> (also known as hot trub) the rapid coagulation of proteins and tannins that forms a brown scum on top of the wort as the boil begins.humulene >> one of the chemicals that give hops their characteristic aroma.husk >> the outer covering of barley or other grains. hydrolysis >> in homebrewing, the process by which the addition of water breaks down proteins and carbohydrates.hydrometer >> a glass instrument used in brewing to measure the specific gravity of beer and wort to calculate alcohol percentage and fermentation status.
-I-
IBU (international bittering unit) >> the accepted method of expressing hop bitterness in beer. impact hops >> also called “special flavor hops.” Hops varietals bred to exhibit such flavor and aroma attributes as pine, pineapple, grapefruit, mango, lychee, and gooseberries.infusion >> a mashing technique where heating is accomplished with addition of boiling water.Irish moss (also called carrageen) >> a marine algae used to promote the formation of break material and precipitation during the boil.isinglass >> a fining agent that comes from the clear swim bladder of some fish.iso-alpha acid >> predominant source of bitterness in beer. Derived from the hops during the boil.isomerization >> the chemical change during wort boiling that causes hop alpha acids to become more bitter and soluble in wort.
-K-
kettle >> boiling vessel, also known as a copper.kraeusen >> as a noun, the thick foamy head on fermenting beer. As a verb, a priming method where vigorously
fermenting young beer is added to beer during secondary fermentation.
-L-
lactic acid >> a tart, sour acid that is a by-product of Lactobacillus.Lactobacillus >> large genus of bacteria. Some species are used in the production of yogurt, sauerkraut, pickles, and some beers.lactose >> an unfermentable sugar that comes from milk. Traditionally used in milk stout.lag time >> adaptation phase after the yeast is pitched during which the yeast begins a period of rapid aerobic growth.lager >> a beer brewed with a bottom-fermenting yeast between 45°–55°F (7°–13°C) and given 4–6 weeks to ferment. The lager family includes light, pilsner, amber, bock, and dark. lautering >> a process in which the mash is separated into the liquid wort and the residual grain. lauter tun >> traditional vessel used to separate the wort from the residual grains.lightstruck >> a skunky off-flavor in beer that develops from exposure to short-wavelength light. linalool >> one of many hop compounds. Although linalool constitutes a tiny percentage of hop oils, combined with geraniol, it strongly affects the aroma of beer. lipid >> types of fat in animal and plant matter.liquification >> the process by which alpha amylase breaks up the branched amylopectin molecules in the mash.°Lovibond >> a method of measuring beer and grain color, superseded by the SRM method for beer, but still often used in reference to grain color. lupulin >> hops’ resiny substance that contains all the resins and aromatic oils.
-M-
Maillard browning >> a caramelization reaction that creates malt’s roasted color and flavor.malt >> barley or other grain that has been allowed to sprout, then dried or roasted.maltose >> a simple sugar that is the predominant fermentable material in wort.mash >> the hot-water steeping process in which starch is converted into sugars. mash tun >> vessel with a false bottom in which mashing is carried out. melanoidins >> the strong flavor compounds produced by Maillard browning.milling >> grinding or crushing grain.modification >> the degree to which the protein-starch matrix breaks down during malting.mouthfeel >> sensory qualities of a beer other than flavor, such as body and carbonation.myrcene>> one of four primary essential hop oils. Also found in bay, wild thyme, and parsley.
110 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
-O-
original gravity (OG) >> measure of wort strength expressed as specific gravity.oxidation >> chemical reaction that occurs between oxygen and various components in beer.
-P-
parti-gyle >> to get multiple beers out of the same mash. The brewer boils successive runnings separately and, ideally, blends them to different strengths.pasteurization >> the process of sterilizing by heat.peptidase >> an enzyme that breaks up small proteins in the endosperm to form amino acids.peptide >> a short fragment of a protein. pH (potential of hydrogen) >> the scale used to express the level of acidity and alkalinity in a solution. Neutral is a value of 7; most acidic is a value of 1; most alkaline is a value of 14. phenol >> chemical family responsible for spicy, smoky, clove-like, and other aromas in beer. pitch >> adding yeast to the fermentor.°Plato >> European and American scale of gravity based on a percentage of pure sugar in the wort. A newer, more accurate version of the Balling scale.polishing >> final filtration before bottling that leaves beer sparkling clear.polyphenol >> tannins that contribute to haze and staling reactions.polysaccharide >> polymers of simple sugars.ppm >> parts per million. 1 milligram per liter. Most commonly used to express dissolved mineral concentrations in water. precipitation >> a chemical process involving a material coming out of solution.primary fermentation >> initial rapid stage of yeast activity when maltose and other simple sugars are metabolized. priming >> adding a small amount of sugar to beer before bottling to restart fermentation and give the beer carbonization.protein >> complex organic molecules
involved in enzyme activity, yeast nutrition, head retention, and colloidal stability. proteinase (protease) >> an enzyme that breaks proteins apart into smaller, more soluble units. The breaking up of the proteins is called proteolysis.protein rest >> during mashing, a rest that allows remnant large proteins to be broken down into smaller proteins and amino acids and any remaining starches to be released from the endosperm.
-R-
racking >> carefully siphoning the beer away from the trub to another fermenter or to bottles.Reinheitsgebot >> Bavarian beer-purity law, enacted in 1516 decreeing that beer can have only three components: water, barley, and hops.runnings >> wort that is drained from the mash during sparging.
-S-
saccharification >> conversion of starch to sugars in the mash through enzymatic action.Saccharomyces >> scientific genus name of brewer’s yeast. sanitize >> to reduce microbial contaminants to insignificant levels.secondary fermentation >> after the primary fermentation, beer is racked to a sterile container for a slower phase of yeast activity during which complex sugars are metabolized. session beer >> a beer that is lighter in gravity and alcohol (usually less than 4.5% ABV).set mash >> during sparging, when the grain bed plugs up and no liquid flows through it.six-row >> the type of barley most often grown in the United States and used in the production of American-style beers. sparge >> rinsing mashed grains with hot water to recover all available wort sugars.specific gravity >> a measurement of malt sugar density in the wort, expressed relative to the density of water. SRM (Standard Reference Method) >> the measurement of beer color.
starch >> complex carbohydrates that are converted into sugars during mashing.starch haze >> suspended starch particles that cause cloudiness in beer.steep >> soaking barley or wheat in water to begin malting.step mash >> mashing technique that uses controlled temperature steps.sterilize >> to eliminate all forms of life by either chemical or physical means.strike >> adding hot water to the crushed malt to raise the temperature and begin mashing.
-T-
tannins >> polyphenols, complex organic materials with an astringent flavor, extracted from barley husks and hops.terpenes >> the flavor chemicals in hop oils.trub >> the hot and cold break material, hop bits, and dead yeast sediment at the bottom of the fermenter.two-row >> the most common type of barley for brewing everywhere except America.
-U-
underlet >> adding water to a mash from below to encourage quicker and more thorough mixing of the grains and water.
-V, W, X, Y, Z-
Vinnie nail >> attributed to Vinnie Cilurzo from Russian River Brewing. Made of stainless steel and typically 1.5"– 2" long, these are used to plug the small hole that is drilled into a wooden barrel to retrieve a sample of aging beer. whirlpool >> a device that separates the hops and trub from the wort after boiling.wine thief >> an instrument used for taking a sample of wine or beer from a fermenter. wort >> the sugar-laden liquid from the mash.wort chiller >> a heat exchanger that rapidly cools wort from near boiling to pitching temperatures.yeast >> a large class of microscopic fungi, several species of which are used in brewing.zymurgy >> the science of brewing and fermentation.
| BREWING GLOSSARY |
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BEERANDBREWING.COM | 111
Homebrewing, Start to FinishOnce you’ve decided on a recipe or ordered your kit, follow these eleven steps and you’ll be drinking great beer in no time!
1. THE MASH (AND STEEP)This process extracts fermentable and non-fermentable sug-ars from the grains as well as valuable color, flavor, and body.
2. THE BOILBoiling not only concentrates the wort into a delicious sugary liquid, it also pulls bitterness from the hops and causes reactions that are necessary for rigorous fermentation. 3. ADD HOPSHops are generally divided into two cate-gories—bittering hops and aroma hops. The longer you boil hops, the more bitterness you extract. Aroma hops are added later in the boil process to preserve the essential oils that contribute their distinct aromatic profiles. 4. ADD MISC (OPTIONAL)Toward the end of the boil, recipes may call for adding other ingredients such as brown sugar, spices, extracts, or herbs. Clarifying agents such as Whirfloc or Irish moss may also be added at this time.
8. PITCH YEASTMake sure that your yeast and wort are both at room tem-perature and then add the yeast to your fermenter. 7. OXYGENATE WORTOxygen plays a key role in jumpstarting the yeast’s fermentation ability. While not mandatory, adding oxygen to your wort via an aeration stone or 0
2 tank is recom-
mended.
6. TRANSFER TO FERMENTER
5. CHILL WORTRapidly chilling the wort helps add clarity to the wort and gets the wort to a temperature where it will be ready to accept yeast. Rapidly chilling also decreases the chance of potential bacterial infection of the wort.
9. RACK TO SECONDARYAfter primary fermen-tation is complete, beer is racked to a secondary fermenter. This removes the beer from the trub left in the bottom of the primary fermenter, which has the potential to produce off-flavors.
10. DRY HOPAn optional step based on the style of beer and personal taste, additional hops are added to the secondary fermenter after primary fermen-tation is complete. This process adds hop aroma without bitterness. 11. BOTTLE/KEGOnce fermentation is complete, the beer can then be racked to either a bottling bucket or keg. If bottling, priming sugar is added to the beer, giving the yeast material with which to carbonate the beer in the bottle. If kegging and force carbonating, no additional sugar is required.
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C R A F TC R A F TC R A F T B E V E R A G E SB E V E R A G E SB E V E R A G E SC R A F TC R A F TC R A F T B E V E R A G E SB E V E R A G E SB E V E R A G E S
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T R A D E S H O W + C O N F E R E N C E
U N L I M I T E DU N L I M I T E DU N L I M I T E DU N L I M I T E DU N L I M I T E DU N L I M I T E DT R A D E S H O W + C O N F E R E N C ET R A D E S H O W + C O N F E R E N C E
SPIRITSSPIRITSBEERBEERWINE
Full Details at CraftBeveragesUnlimited.com. You must be at least 21 years of age to attend.
A TRADE SHOW THAT BRINGS CRAFT BEER, WINE & SPIRITS TOGETHER UNDER ONE ROOF!
(formerly Wineries Unlimited)
We’ve got the perfect recipe for a dynamic craft beverage event:
EXPERT SPEAKERS who specialize in the skills and know-how needed to run a successful business in today’s regional marketplace.
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TASTINGS, NETWORKING, AND SOCIAL EVENTS on and off the trade show � oor. Add these elements together and you’ve got the winning cocktail for success!
NEW DIRECTION, NEW NAME! We’re going “full beverage” by adding wine, beer, and distilling. Previously called Wineries Unlimited, now we’re CRAFT BEVERAGES UNLIMITED.
Media PartnerBrought to You ByREGISTER NOW!CraftBeveragesUnlimited.comor call 888-273-4533
Marketplace
BEERANDBREWING.COM | 113
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Marketplace
Advertise In The CB&B Marketplace!The Cra� Beer & Brewing Marketplace o� ers cost-e� ective ways to reach an engaged cra� beer and homebrewing audience. To discuss advertising options, contact:
Alex Johnson (Media Sales Manager)888-875-8708 [email protected]@Cra� BrewAL
114 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
Are you new to brewing, or do you want to improve your brewing skills? Cra� Beer & Brewing’s new online learning platform can help you become a better brewer, one video lesson at a time. Seven classes, led by CB&B sta� or brewers from renowned breweries, are now available for purchase, either as individual classes or through a low monthly subscription price that gives you access to all classes:
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LEARNTO BREW
Please visit one of these fine shops wherever you are.
If you would like to be listed in our directory, please contact Rachel Szado,[email protected], (888) 875-8708, ext 705.
Baycrest Wines & Spirits(949) 293-3609333 E. 17th Street Suite 1Costa Mesa, CA 92627
HopTech Homebrewing Supplies(925) 875-02466398 Dougherty Rd., Ste 7Dublin, CA 94568hoptech.comOperated by 2 passionate home brewers. Over 60 hops, loads of grain and extract. Equipment and ingredients. Military and AHA discount!
Humboldt Beer Works(707) 442-6258110 3rd Street Suite DEureka, CA 95501humboldtbeerworks.com
O’Shea Brewing Co.(949) 364-444028142 Camino Capistrano, Ste. 107Laguna Niguel, CA 92677osheabrewing.com
Beltramo’s (650) 325-28061540 El Camino RealMenlo Park, CA 94025beltramos.com
Murrieta Homebrew Emporium(951) 600-000838750 Sky Canyon Dr., Ste AMurrieta, CA 92563murrietahomebrew.com
J&M Brewing Supplies(415) 883-7300101 Roblar Dr. Suite CNovato, CA 94949jmbrew.com
The Bearded Brewer(661) 418-63484855 W. Columbia WayQuartz Hill, CA 93536
NorCal Brewing Solutions(530) 243-23371768 Churn Creek Rd.Redding, CA 96002norcalbrewingsolutions.com
The Cellar(949) 212-6182156 Avenida Del MarSan Clemente, CA 92672thecellarsite.com
Alabama
Wish You Were Beer(256) 325-99927407 US Highway 72, Suite GMadison, AL 35758wishyouwerebeer.net
Alaska
Brew Time(907) 479-020029 College Road Suite 4Fairbanks, AK 99701
Alaska Home Brew Supply(907) 863-00256033 Westview CircleWasilla, AK 99654alaskahomebrew.com
Arizona
Brew Your Own Brew Gilbert(480) 497-0011525 E. Baseline Rd., Ste 108Gilbert, AZ 85233brewyourownbrew.com
What Ales Ya Homebrew(623) 486-80166363 W. Bell Rd., Ste 2Glendale, AZ 85308whatalesya.com
Brew Your Own Brew Scottsdale(480) 625-42008230 E. Raintree Rd. #103Scottsdale, AZ 85260brewyourownbrew.com
Brew Your Own Brew Tuscon(520) 322-50492564 N. Campbell Ave.Tuscon, AZ 85719brewyourownbrew.com
Arkansas
Hydro & Brew(479) 268-34232906 Bell Vista WayBella Vista, AR 72714hydroandbrew.com
California
CRAFT Beer & Wine(510) 769-94632526 A Santa Clara AveAlameda, CA 94501craftalameda.com
Fermentation Solutions(408) 871-14002507 Winchester Blvd.Campbell, CA 95008fermentationsolutions.com
The Homebrewer(619) 450-61652911 El Cajon Blvd. Suite 2San Diego, CA 92104thehomebrewersd.com
Pacific Brewing Supplies(800) 448-2337240 S. San Dimas AveSan Dimas, CA 91773pacificbrewingsupplies.com
Boynton Liquors(408) 823-01053680 Stevens Creek BlvdSan Jose, CA 95117www.site.boyntonliquors.com
Seven Bridges Co-op Organic Homebrew(800) 768-4409325 River St., Ste ASanta Cruz, CA 95060breworganic.com
Simi Valley Homebrew(805) 583-31104352 Eileen StreetSimi Valley, CA 93063simivalleyhomebrew.com
Valley Brewers(805) 691-9159515 4th Pl.Solvang, CA 93463valleybrewers.com
Colorado
The Brew Hut(303) 680-889815120 E. Hampden Ave.Aurora, CO 80014thebrewhut.com
Avon Liquor(970) 949-4384100 West Beaver Creek BlvdAvon, CO 81620avon-liquor.com
Boulder Wine Merchant(303) 443-67612690 Broadway StBoulder, CO 80304boulderwine.com
Hazel’s Beverage World(303) 447-19551955 28th St.Boulder, CO 80301hazelsboulder.com
Boulder Fermentation Supply(303) 578-00412510 47th St. Unit IBoulder, CO 80301boulderfermentationsupply.com
Castle Rock Homebrew Supply(303) 660-22751043 Park StreetCastle Rock, CO 80109castlerockhomebrew.com
Fermentations(719) 598-11646820 N. Academy Blvd.Colorado Springs, CO 80918fermentations.biz
Cheers Liquor Mart(719) 574-22441105 N Circle Dr.Colorado Springs, CO 80909cheersliquormart.com
Acme Liquor(970) 349-5709510 Belleview Ave.Crested Butte, CO 81224acmeliquor.com
Park Avenue Wine & Spirits(303) 477-57003480 Park Ave W., Ste EDenver, CO 80216parkavewineandspirits.com
Argonaut Wine & Liquor(303) 831-7788760 E. Colfax AveDenver, CO 80203argonautliquor.com
Beer At Home(303) 789-36764393 S. BroadwayEnglewood, CO 80113beerathome.com
Rambo’s Longhorn Liquor Mart(970) 586-85831640 Big Thompson Ave.Estes Park, CO 80517ramboslonghornliquor.com
Mile High Ace(303) 531-23752800 W. 104th AveFederal Heights, CO 80234milehighaceandgarden.com
Al’s Newsstand(970) 482-9853177 North College AveFort Collins, CO 80524
Hops and Berries(970) 493-2484130 W. Olive St. Unit BFort Collins, CO 80524hopsandberries.com
Savory Spice Shop(970) 682-2971123 N. College Ave. #100Fort Collins, CO 80524myecard.pro/savory
Retail Shop Directory287 Craft Spirits(970) 377-05575846 S College AveFort Collins, CO 80525287discountliquor.com
Pringle’s Fine Wine & Spirits(970) 221-17172100 W. Drake Rd.Fort Collins, CO 80526pringleswine.com
Hops and Berries(970) 493-24841833 E. Harmony Rd. Unit 16Fort Collins, CO 80528hopsandberries.com
Old Town Liquor(970) 493-0443214 S. College Ave Suite 1Fort Collins, CO 80524
The Welsh Rabbit Cheese Shop(970) 443-4027216 Pine StreetFort Collins, CO 80524thewelshrabbit.com
Tom’s Brew Shop(303) 232-5347883 Parfet St., Ste JLakewood, CO 80215tomsbrewshop.com
Barley Haven Homebrew(303) 936-23371050 South Wadsworth Blvd. Suite BLakewood, CO 80226barleyhaven.com
Warhammer Supply(970) 635-26021112 Monroe Ave.Loveland, CO 80537warhammersupply.com
Quirky Homebrew(303) 457-3555425 W 115th Ave Unit 6Northglenn, CO 80234quirkyhomebrew.com
Bruin Spirits(303) 840-167811177 S. Dransfeldt RdParker, CO 80134bruinspiritsinc.com
Big Bear Wine & Liquor(719) 561-85422037 S. Pueblo BlvdPueblo, CO 81005liquorstorepueblo.com
Barley Haven Draft n’ Still(303) 789-23374131 South Natches Court Unit BSheridan, CO 80110barleyhaven.com
116 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
Ski Haus Liquors(970) 879-72781450 S. Lincoln AveSteamboat Springs, CO 80477
Applejack Wine & Spirits(303) 233-33313320 Young� eld St.Wheat Ridge, CO 80033applejack.com
Kitchen & Homebrew Supply(719) 687-0557118 W. Midland Ave. Woodland Park, CO 80863kitchenandhomebrewsupply.com
Connecticut
Stomp N Crush(860) 552-4634140 Killingsworth Turnpike (Rt.81) Clinton, CT 06413stompncrush.com
Maltose Express(203) 452-7332246 Main StreetMonroe, CT 06468maltoseexpress.net
Zoks Homebrewing and Winemaking Supplies(860) 456-770418 North St.Willimantic, CT 06232homemadebrew.net
Florida
Brew Story(239) 494-192320451 S. Tamiami Trail #11Estero, FL 33928
Hanger 41 Winery and Brew Shop(239) 542-946310970 South Cleveland Ave., Unit 304Fort Myers, FL 33907www.timetomakewine.com
Hop Heads Craft Homebrewing Supplies(850) 586-762626C NW Racetrack RoadFort Walton Beach, FL 32547hopheadsfwb.com
Biscayne Home Brew(305) 479-26917939 Biscayne Blvd. Miami, FL 33138biscaynehomebrew.com
Sanford Homebrew Shop(407) 732-6931115 S. Magnolia Ave.Sanford, FL 32771sanfordhomebrewshop.com
Carters Beer and Wine Crafters(941) 753-00111070 Whit� eld Ave.Sarasota, FL 34243
Georgia
Wine Workshop & Brew Center Inc.(404) 228-5211627-F East College AveDecatur, GA 30030wineworkshop.net
Taps Craft Beers(404) 996-69391248 Clairmont Rd. Decatur, GA 30030tapscraftbeers.com
Beverage World(706) 866-56441840 Lafayette Rd.Fort Oglethorpe, GA 30742ourbeers.com
Operation Homebrew(770) 638-83831142 Athens Hwy #105Grayson, GA 30017operationhomebrew.com
Hops & Barley Craft Beer(912) 657-2006412 MLK Jr. BlvdSavannah, GA 31401hopsandbarleysav.com
Savannah Homebrew Shop(912) 201-98802102 Skidway RdSavannah, GA 31404savannahhomebrew.com
Barley & Vine(770) 507-59981445 Rock Quarry Road #202Stockbridge, GA 30281barleynvine.comCraft Beer (draft/bottled/kegged), Wine, Cider, and Mead. Supplies to make your own beer, wine, cider, mead or cheese.
Idaho
Brewer’s Haven (Boise) (208) 991-46771795 S. Vista Ave.Boise, ID 83705www.brewershaven.com
HomeBrewStuff(208) 375-25599165 W. Chinden Blvd., Ste 103Garden City, ID 83714homebrewstuff.com
Brewer’s Haven (Nampa)(208) 461-31721311 12th Ave. RdNampa, ID 83686www.brewershaven.com
Rocky Mountain Homebrew Supply(208) 745-0866218 N 4000 E.Rigby, ID 83442rockymountainhomebrew.com
Illinois
Bev Art Brewer & Winemaker Supply(773) 233-757910033 S. Western Ave.Chicago, IL 60643bev-art.com
Brew & Grow(312) 243-000519 S. Morgan St. Chicago, IL 60618brewandgrow.com
Brew & Grow(773) 463-74303625 N. Kedzie Ave. Chicago, IL 60618brewandgrow.com
Brew & Grow(815) 301-4950176 W. Terra Cotta Ave. Suite ACrystal Lake, IL 60014brewandgrow.com
North Shore Brewing Supply(847) 831-05701480 Old Deer� eld Rd Suite 15Highland Park, IL 60035northshorebrewingsupply.com
Perfect Brewing Supply(847) 816-7055619 E. Park Ave.Libertyville, IL 60048perfectbrewsupply.com
Windy Hill Hops(312) 834-4677139 Windy Hill Rd.Murphysboro, IL 62966www.windyhillhops.com
Brew & Grow(630) 894- 4885359 W. Irving Park Rd. Roselle, IL 60172brewandgrow.com
Home Brew Shop Ltd.(630) 377-1338225 W. Main St.Saint Charles, IL 60174homebrewshopltd.com
Indiana
Great Fermentations(317) 268-67767900 E. US 36 WestAvon, IN 46123greatfermentations.com
DIY Coffee and Ale Supply(574) 370-2578114 East Washington St.Goshen, IN 46528facebook.com/diycoffeeandalesupply
Brewhouse Supplies(219) 286-72851555 West Lincolnway, Ste 102Valparaiso, IN 46385brewhousesupplies.com
Iowa
C & S Brew Supply(515) 963-1965315 SW Maple StAnkeny, IA 50023www.candsbrewsupply.com
Kansas
All Grain Brewing Specialists LLC(785) 230-21451235 NW 39thTopeka, KS 66618allgrainbrewing.biz
Kentucky
Winemakers & Beermakers Supply(502) 425-16929475 Westport Rd.Louisville, KY 40241winebeersupply.com
Louisiana
Baton Rouge’s Premier Liquor Store(225) 364-22483911 Perkins RoadBaton Rouge, LA 70808
LA Homebrew(225) 773-91287987 Pecue Lane Suite 8-HBaton Rouge, LA 70809lahomebrew.com
Brewstock(504) 208-27883800 Dryades St. New Orleans, LA 70115brewstock.com
Brewniverse(318) 671-4141855 Pierremont Rd. Suite 124Shreveport, LA 71106brewniversebeerstore.com
Maryland
Nepenthe Homebrew(443) 438-48463600 Clipper Mill Road 130ABaltimore, MD 21211nepenthehomebrew.com
Maryland Homebrew(888) 273-96696770 Oak Hall Lane #108Columbia, MD 21045marylandhomebrew.com
Flying Barrel(301) 663-44911781 N. Market St.Federick, MD 21701� yingbarrel.com
Massachusetts
Craft Beer Cellar Belmont(617) 932-188551 Leonard St.Belmont, MA 02478craftbeercellar.com
Baystate Foods & Spirits(617) 232-25871418 Beacon St. Brookline, MA 02446
Homebrew Emporium(617) 498-04002304 Massachusetts AveCambridge, MA 02140beerbrew.com
Cork’s Fine Wine & Liquors(508) 337-9463309 West StreetMans� eld, MA 02048corks� newine.com
Strange Brew(508) 460-5050416 Boston Post Rd. East (Route 20)Marlboro, MA 01752Home-Brew.comVisit New England’s Largest Retail Home-Brew Store! Save 10% off Craft Beer & Brewing online courses with coupon code “strangebrew”.
Craft Beer Cellar Newton(617) 916-02441243 Centre St.Newton, MA 02459craftbeercellar.com
Austin Liquors Shrewbury(508) 755-8100 20 Boston Turnpike Rd. Shrewbury, MA 01545austinliquors.com
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Retail Shop DirectoryBall Square Fine Wines(617) 623-9500716 BroadwaySomerville, MA 02144ballsquare� newines.com
Craft Beer Cellar Winchester(781) 369-117418 Thompson StreetWinchester, MA 01890craftbeercellar.com
Beer and Wine Hobby(781) 933-8818155 T New Boston StWoburn, MA 01801beer-wine.com
Austin Liquors Worcester(508) 852-8953117 Gold Star BlvdWorcester, MA 01606austinliquors.com
Michigan
Adventures In Homebrewing(313) 277-27396071 Jackson Rd.Ann Arbor, MI 48103www.homebrewing.orgServing HomeBrewers Since 1999. We specialize in Beer Making, Wine Making and Kegging.
Siciliano’s Market(616) 453-96742840 Lake Michigan Dr NWGrand Rapids, MI 49504sicilianosmkt.com
Bell’s General Store(269) 382-5712355 E. Kalamazoo AveKalamazoo, MI 49007bellsbeer.com
Capital City Homebrew Supply(517) 374-10702006 E. Michigan Ave.Lansing, MI 48912capitalcityhomebrewsupply.com
Pere Marquette Expeditions(231) 845-72851649 South Pere Marquette HwyLudington, MI 49431pmexpeditions.com
Cap N Cork Homebrew Supply(586) 286-520216776 21 Mile RoadMacomb, MI 48044capncorkhomebrew.com
Minnesota
Natural Harvest Food Co-op(218) 741-4663505 N. 3rd StreetVirginia, MN 55792naturalharvestfoodcoop.com
Mississippi
Brew Ha Ha Homebrew Supply(601) 362-02014800 I-55 North Suite 17AJackson, MS 39211brewhahasupply.com
Missouri
Brew & Wine Supply(636) 797-815510663 Business 21Hillsboro, MO 63050brewandwinesupply.com
Grains & Taps(816) 866-5827224 SE Douglas St.Lee’s Summit, MO 64063grains-taps.myshopify.com
Montana
Hennessy Market(406) 723-309732 East Granite St.Butte, MT 59701hennessymarket.com
Rock Hand Hardware(406) 442-77702414 N. Montana AveHelena, MT 59601rockhandacehardware.com
Summer Sun Garden & Brew(406) 541-8623838 West Spruce StreetMissoula, MT 59802summersungardenandbrew.com
Nebraska
Kirk’s Brew(402) 476-74141150 Cornhusker HwyLincoln, NE 68521kirksbrew.com
Nevada
BrewChatter(775) 358-04771275 Kleppe Ln. Unit 21Sparks, NV 89431brewchatter.com
New Hampshire
Kettle to Keg(603) 485-2054123 Main StreetSuncook, NH 03275kettletokeg.com
New Jersey
The Brewer’s Apprentice(732) 863-9411865 State Route 33, Ste 4Freehold, NJ 07728brewapp.com
Love2Brew(888) 654-55111583 Livingston Ave. Unit #2North Brunswick, NJ 08902love2brew.com
New York
Astoria Beer and Brew(718) 606-07792176 21st StreetAstoria, NY 11105astoriabeerandbrew.com
Dunkirk Homebrew Supplies(716) 679-79773375 East Main RoadDunkirk, NY 14048dunkirkhomebrew.com
Arbor Wine and Beer Supplies(631) 277-3004184 Islip AveIslip, NY 11751arborwine.com
Pantano’s Wine Grapes & Homebrew(845) 255-5201249 Rte. 32 SouthNew Paltz, NY 12561pantanosbeerwine.com
Saratoga Zymurgist(518) 580-9785112 Excelsior Ave.Saratoga Springs, NY 12866saratogaz.com
Hop & Goblet(315) 790-59462007 Genesee StUtica, NY 13501
North Carolina
Bull City Homebrew(919) 682-03001906 E. NC Hwy 54, Suite 200-BDurham, NC 27713bullcityhomebrew.com
Atlantic Brew Supply(919) 400-90873709 Neil StreetRaleigh, NC 27607atlanticbrewsupply.comWhether you homebrew, new to the commercial brewing scene, or expanding, Atlantic Brew Supply is ready to set you up!
Ohio
The Hops Shack(419) 617-77701687 Marion Rd.Bucyrus, OH 44820hopshack.com
Wolf’s Premium Nuts & Crafts(419) 423-13551016 Tif� n Ave.Findlay, OH 45840wol� esnuts.com
The PumpHouse Homebrew Shop(330) 755-3642336 Elm St.Struthers, OH 44471pumphousehomebrew.com
Oklahoma
High Gravity(918) 461-26057142 S. Memorial DriveTulsa, OK 74133highgravitybrew.com
Oregon
The Brew Shop(541) 323-23181203 NE Third StreetBend, OR 97701thebrewshopbend.com
F.H. Steinbart Co.(503) 232-8793234 SE 12th AvePortland, OR 97214fhsteinbart.comF.H. Steinbart, America’s oldest home brew supply store, offers products and services from starter kits to professional draft equipment.
Above The Rest Beer & Wine Homebrewing Supplies(503) 968-273611945 SW Paci� c Hwy, #235Tigard, OR 97223atr-homebrewing.com
Pennsylvania
In and Out Beverage(717) 264-26141106 Sheller Ave.Chambersburg, PA 17201
Simply Homebrew(570) 788-23112 Honey Hole Rd.Drums, PA 18222simplyhomebrew.com
Wine, Barley & Hops Homebrew Supply(215) 322-4780248 Bustleton PikeFeasterville Trevose, PA 19053winebarleyandhops.com
Windsor Distributing(610) 562-2474800 South 4th Street.Hamburg, PA 19526windsordist.com
Hamlin Distributors(570) 689-2891590 Hamlin HighwayHamlin, PA 18427hamlindistributors.com
Scotzin Bros(717) 737-048365 C North Fifth St.Lemoyne, PA 17043scotzinbros.com
Weak Knee Home Brew Supply(610) 327-14501277 N.Charlotte StPottstown, PA 19464weakkneehomebrew.com
Bailee’s Homebrew & Wine Supplies(717) 755-75992252 Industrial HwyYork, PA 17402baileeshomebrew.com
South Carolina
Liquid Hobby(803) 798-2033736-F St. Andrews RoadColumbia, SC 29210liquidhobby.com
Tennessee
Rebel Brewer(615) 859-2188105 Space Park NorthGoodlettsville, TN 37072rebelbrewer.com
118 | CRAFT BEER & BREWING
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Advertiser Index
For more information about advertising in Cra� Beer & Brewing Magazine™, please contact Media Sales Manager Alex Johnson at [email protected] or 888.875.8708 x707.
21st Amendment 67Allagash Brewing Company 53Atlantic Brew Supply 5Barley & Vine 113Barley Haven 51Beer Loved 113Beer Snap 113BH Enterprises 55Blichmann Engineering, LLC 1Brew & Wine Supply 33Brew Heads 113Brew Organic 61Brewing Tools 53Brewmation 43Cicerone 27Clawhammer Supply 23Colorado Brewers’ Festival 88K. Malt Inc./Corosys Kellerworks 25Cra� Beer Hound 33Electric Brewing Supply 35Epic Brewing 23Five Star Chemicals 72Fort Collins Brewery 7Garage Monk 113Grandstand Inside Back CoverGreat Fermentations 55Grog Tag 41High Gravity 67Krome Dispense 27Label-Nator 87LD Carlson 10Le� Hand Brewing 2Love2Brew 35Mad River Brewing 35Millars Mills 39Misco 67Mr. Beer 10Muntons Inc. 33New Belgium Brewing Back CoverNightclub & Bar Show 105NorCal Brewing Solutions 114Odell Brewing 13Ohmbrew Automations 53Pangea Designs 114Rodenbach/Latis Imports 15Ruby Street 39Salt City Brewing Supply 114Saranac Brewing 61Ska Brewing 55Society of Beer Travelers 114Southern Tier Brewing 9Ss Brewing Technologies 51Tap ‘n Handle 61Tappecue 114The Home Brewery 33Thirsty Dog Brewing 39Total Beverage Inside Front Cover SolutionTria Taproom 114Vander Mill/Elite Brands USA 87Vin Table 55Wild Goose Canning 31
Our advertisers help make it possible for us to bring you great content from the best contributors, issue after issue!
Bernoulli Brew Werks(256) 273-97662881 Poplar Ave.Memphis, TN 38111bernoullibrews.com
Texas
Stubby’s Texas Brewing Inc.(682) 647-12675200 Airport Freeway, Suite BHaltom City, TX 76117txbrewing.com
Black Hawk Brewing Supply(254) 393-0491582 E. Central Texas ExpresswayHarker Heights, TX 76548blackhawkbrewing.com
DeFalcos Home Wine and Beer Supplies(800) 216-27399223 Stella Link Rd.Houston, TX 77025defalcos.com
Texas Homebrewers(855) 744-27393130 North Fry Rd., Ste 800Katy, TX 77449texashomebrewers.com
Yellow House Canyon Brew Works(806) 744-1917601 N. University Ave.Lubbock, TX 79408www.yellowhousecanyonbrewworks.com
Cypress Grape and Grain(832) 698-140224914 State Hwy 249 Suite 145Tomball, TX 77375cypressgrapeandgrain.com
Utah
Salt City Brew Supply(801) 849-0955750 E. Fort Union Blvd.Midvale, UT 84047saltcitybrewsupply.comCall us with your brewing questions and make whatever beer you want with our selection of hops, yeast, and grain.
Vermont
Brewfest Beverage Co.(802) 228-4261199 Main St.Ludlow, VT 05149brewfestbeverage.com
Craft Beer Cellar Waterbury(802) 882-80343 Elm St.Waterbury, VT 05676craftbeercellar.com
Virgina
My LHBS(703) 241-38746201 Leesburg PikeFalls Church, VA 22044mylhbs.comHuge selection of ingredients and equipment conveniently located inside the Beltway. Check out our unique and delicious store recipe kits!
Wine and Cake Hobbies(757) 857-02456527 Tidewater Dr.Norfolk, VA 23509wineandcake.com
Washington
Olympic Brewing(360) 373-10942817 Wheaton Way #102Bremerton, WA 98310olybrew.com
Homebrew Heaven(425) 355-88659121 Evergreen Way.Everett, WA 98204homebrewheaven.com
San Juan Island Cheese(360) 370-5115155 Nichols St.Friday Harbor, WA 98250sjicheese.com
Whidbey Island Homebrew Supply(360) 682-50113161 Goldie Rd., Ste HOak Harbor, WA 98277whidbeyislandhomebrew.com
Sound Homebrew(206) 734-80746505 5th Place S.Seattle, WA 98108soundhomebrew.com
International Customers
Belgium
Malt Attacks32 (0) 471/66.10.69Av. Jean Volders 18Brussels 1060
Canada
Canadian Home Brew Supplies(905) 450-019110 Wilkinson Rd. Unit 1Brampton, ON L6T 5B1homebrewsupplies.ca
The Vineyard Fermentation Centre(403) 258-15806025 Centre Street SouthCalgary, AB T2H 0C2thevineyard.ca
Germany
Hopfen und mehrRudenweiler 16Tettnang 88069www.hobbybrauerversand.deIn Germany? We’re the exclusive distributor of CB&B magazine here! Check us out!
New Zealand
BrewShop64 7 929 4547PO Box 998Hamilton 3240brewshop.co.nzBrewShop is the exclusive distributor of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine™ to independent retail shops in New Zealand. Contact us today!
Norway
Bakke Brygg ASplus sign 47 73 20 16 40Fjordgata 9BTrondheim S-T N-7010bakkebrygg.no
Portugal
O� cina da Cerveja+ 351 911 555 851Rua Bernardim Ribeiro 59Lisbon 1150-069www.o� cinadacerveja.ptVisit our website! We’re the exclusive distributor of Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine™ to independent retail shops in Portugal.
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| CHILL PLATE |
PHOT
OS: K
IRBY
LEE
FOR
FLO
CAST
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The Craft Beer MileHistory was made on December 3, 2014, in Austin, Texas, as Beth Herndon set a new women’s world record in the beer mile. Herndon, 29, chose to drink four cans of New Belgium’s Fat Tire Ale en route
to her winning mile time of six minutes and seventeen seconds at the Flotrack Beer Mile World Championships. Watch a replay of her impressive performance at flotrack.org/beermileworlds/ .
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