Fresh Trumps Damn Near Everything

A couple of guys from the club and I have been studying for the Beer Judging Certification Progarm (BJCP) exam since last January. In the course of doing so, we've tasted a lot of beers. They've been all over the map in terms of style, age and quality. Most of what we've tried has been out of my wheelhouse in terms of what I'd typically drink and some of what we've sampled has legitimately blown my mind.

The examples of Eisbock and Weizenbock we tried were nothing like what I anticipated. Eisbock is a somewhat eccentric style in which a doppelbock (think a malty, rich, but very drinkable beer) is freeze concentrated up to anywhere between 7 and 30% abv. I expected it to be hot, sharp and far more alcohol focused than the example we tried. It wasn't. It was just richer, maltier, and perfectly balanced. The brewer somehow managed to keep the beer in balance and the net result was just a bigger, more flavorful version of the base style.

On the other hand, we've tried a fair amount of shitty, stale beer. It's tough to get many of the classic examples (at least in the BJCP guidelines) here in the states. A long, bouncy trip across the ocean in a container without any sort of temperature control (presumably), followed by an indeterminate amount of time on a warm shelf in a liquor store just doesn't bode well for freshness.

What starts out as an amazing example of an English Bitter (a low-gravity, balanced session beer) or a fantastic German Pilsner (clean, grainy and assertively hoppy) can both fade into boring, lifeless, cheesy, almost grapey beer. And that's a damn shame. Not only because they're merely a shadow of what they were leaving the brewery, but because they also make it difficult to appreciate just how amazing those beers can be.

Contrast that with taking a trip to your local brewery and trying that same German Pils (Half Acre Pony Pils) or that Bitter (Adam's Best at Revolution this past weekend). They might not be dead nuts on for the style, but they're going to be damn good. You'll get that huge noble hop character and be able to taste the subtle malt complexity before it fades away under the impact of heat and time. Do yourself a favor and try a style you wrote off a long time ago because of a bad "import" example. A great, fresh pilsner can have hop character that might blow your mind.

 (Yes, yes. I know that there are beers that age well and travel better than the examples I cited. But that's not the point. It's about giving the styles that get a bad rap because they don't travel well a chance.)

Water Basics

I had the opportunity to talk about the basics of water as it relates to brewing with the soon to be founder of Panic Brewing at the last Square Kegs meeting. Rather than re-writing the whole talk, I've posted the notes here. Gary took the liberty of adding some of the more technical details based on his education at the American Brewers Guild.

You can check it out here.

Public Service Announcement

(Lifted from Goose's Website.)

Go buy yourself a four pack of Goose Island's Matilda. And don't drink it. Seriously - do yourself a favor and sit on it for at least year.

I live in Chicago and drink a handful of Goose's beers on a semi-regular basis. I've always thought Matilda was a good offering, but never something I'd seek out. Fresh from the brewery it's a bit too sweet and my take was always that Goose was doing a crappy job of trying to produce a Belgian Golden Strong or a Tripel.

I was dead wrong. I hereby apologize to Goose Island for unfairly discrediting them on this effort. Until I really upped the ante on my knowledge of beer styles (through the BJCP and my own brewing) I was sadly unaware of the existence of 'Belgian Specialty Ale', a category created specifically to capture Orval.

As such, I just didn't get this beer. But last summer I got a few four packs and just let it sit in my basement, waiting to offload it onto some family or friends during a special occasion or a gathering at my house. During that year of aging, something magical happened. The brett introduced during barrel aging woke up and went to work. The beer dries out and gains an entirely different dimension of complexity. T distinct barnyard funk and some of the other more distinctive esters from brett become more pronounced and round the beer out.

So maybe it was just my ignorance of this style, the less evolved and less funk-friendly state of my palate, or maybe it was just the fact that I've never had the chance to try a substantially aged sample of this beer. But I was missing out. And if you've never had Matilda after some cellaring, so are you.

It's Already Old News, But...

Tony Magee's announcement that Lagunitas is planning to open up a production brewery right here in Chicago is big news for both Chicago's burgeoning craft beer scene and particularly for the long list of brewery startups seem to be in various early stages of getting beer onto retailers' shelves.

I recently put faces and names to two of the startups on that list at the last Square Kegs meetings I attended - Gary of Panic Brewing and Jerry of Uné Anee Brewery. I'd met both guys at prior meetings and found their breweries on the internet independently of talking to them. They're both pretty experienced brewers, both have invested in professional brewing education, and both seem like pretty genuinely good guys. I'm rooting for both of them to succeed.

And I think that Lagunitas coming here is going to make it just a bit easier on them. Sure, they'll be competing for taps and shelf space with a really well-established player in the market who can produce more beer in a single brew cycle than some of the nano / startup breweries will in a month or a year. But that doesn't really matter all that much compared to what Lagunitas could and hopefully will do for the supply chain and other related businesses that a production brewery relies on.

For example, one of the biggest cost factors in running a brewery is freight. Tony gave that as his singular cost justification to build this massive brewery. Grain has to get from a farmer to a supplier and ultimately to a brewery. That takes a lot of diesel. The same goes for bottles and then for finished beer it's basically the opposite process. The raw materials are cheap, but the freight adds a lot of cost in to the equation. (To put it on a homebrew scale, it costs ~$15 to ship a $50 sack of grain from Northern Brewer to my office in Northbrook.)

Having some big production breweries based right here is going to make it far more attractive for those grain suppliers to throw a single pallet of malt on the back of a full truck or to open facilities closer. It's going to make it easier for Windy City Distribution or Glunz Beer to buy more trucks, pay more sales reps and pick up the new startups with that extra capacity. Every successful (and particularly large and successful) brewery that opens has a positive impact of the ecosystem that supports the industry.

So I'm really excited about this announcement. Not only because I'll be able to go buy growlers of some of my favorite beer, but also because this is a huge leap in Chicago becoming a world class beer city with amazing local breweries dominating our tap handles. Hopefully in five or six years, Jeremy and I will be able to buy a used 15 barrel system off of somebody local who's outgrown it, take advantage of the great infrastructure that's grown to support our local beer industry and have a little bit easier of a time launching a dream because of the people who paved the way for us.

Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks Chicago's beer scene really is awesome...

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/arts-and-lifestyle/2012/02/chicagos-booming-beer-scene-explained/1356/

Big, Medium and Small Porters at Revolution

The fiance and I went to dinner at Revolution last night with a couple of friends. I've been a big fan of their whole operation since trying their beer at a festival early on and the first time I ate there.

I'm a big fan of their Eugene Porter and it just so happened that they had two additional versions of it available last night. "Hugene" and "Weegene", first and second runnings off of the standard Eugene recipe. Eugene is a substantial beer already at 7%, so the Hugene was in fact "huge" at 10.6% and the Weegene was still a 4.7% beer.

We ordered a couple 4oz pours of Hugene after we'd finished with dinner and our server was nice enough to bring us some small samples of the Weegene as well. (And I still had a half glass or so of the standard Eugene.) It was definitely a unique opportunity to try a vertical sampling of different beers all created with the same grain bill.

The Hugene definitely had the hallmarks of a first running-only beer. Massive chocolate, raisin and roast flavors were supported by an appropriate amount of residual sweetness without any hot alcohols or heavy astringency. The Weegene had some of the some chocolate notes, but definitely showed more of the roast / astringency character to be expected from a sparge. Both were well-made beers, but the big version was excellent. I haven't had an Imperial Porter in the recent past, so I also appreciated the difference between that and an Imperial Stout. The highly roasted and grain bitterness character of the stout takes a back seat to the chocolate and dark fruit flavors in the porter, making for a very drinkable beer...

I love the Chicago beer scene.

Drinking Locally and Learning to Love Small Beers

One of the local options here in Chicago I've really come to appreciate over the past six months or so is Half Acre Beer Company. I tried some of their beer early on when they were still contract brewing up in Wisconsin and wasn't really impressed.


However, I came back to Daisy Cutter and Gossamer earlier this year and had a totally different impression than that of the Lager. They're both smaller beers, with the Daisy Cutter as a pale ale coming in at 5.3% and the Gossamer as a golden ale coming in at just over 4%. They're both great examples of their respective styles, although I think that there's a significant difference between canned and draft Daisy Cutter.

In any case, one of the things I really enjoy about both of these beers is that they really work as session beers. The Daisy Cutter has a nice hop presence which makes it a good option to substitute in for an IPA and the Gossamer is just a well-executed, very drinkable beer. There were a few years where I was all about big beers with big flavor and big alcohol, but the more that I've brewed the more I realize that it takes a very particular type of skill to brew a smaller beer that still tastes incredible.

So my hat's off to the brewers at Half Acre. They turn out some great products and it just feels good to know that my beer dollars are going back to a business that is literally three miles from my house.

Now about that four pack of Over Ale in my fridge...