Ken Weaver, Author at Craft Beer Blog from The Beer of the Month Club

Beyond the Bottle: What’s Your Go-To Gose?

August 16, 2017 by Ken Weaver

The gose style of beer has been through some worse days. The 20^th century saw this German style of beer—typically quite tart, with additions of coriander and sea salt—completely cease production on more than one occasion. Ron Pattinson put together a particularly compelling history of the style over on his blog Shut Up About Barclay Perkins about ten years back, which also serves double duty as being a snapshot of what the gose scene was like in 2007. (Spoiler alert: ‘Scene’ is a strong word.) At the time, Pattinson wrote: “For the first time since before 1939 there is more than one brewery currently making a Gose, two in Leipzig itself. It’s still easier to find Kölsch in the city, so Gose hasn’t been restored to its former popularity, but the style is more secure today than it has been for any time in the last 50 years.”

Today, there are hundreds of examples. Some authentic. Some authentic-ish. And some with additions of prickly pear, or dry-hopping, or aged in tequila barrels and over 10% ABV. The combo of lactic tartness (particularly as kettle-souring practices continue to spread) with the tempering additions of salt and coriander (plus a myriad of other things) has helped fuel lots of creative attempts in this general style space in recent years. Our sense of gose broadened.

So, what’s your favorite? Personally speaking: Westbrook’s Gose (from South Carolina) has been a reliable go-to (in cans!), offering assertive tartness that aims at authenticity. Upright’s Gose (from Oregon) is another delicious U.S. take, but employs French saison yeast instead of focusing on lactic acid—resulting in more of a curious wheat beer. And while purists may shake their heads at Perennial’s Suburban Beverage out of Missouri (using Key limes, Meyer lemons and Valencia oranges), it’s exactly the interpretation of ‘gose’ I’d want at the beach.

Whether traditional or (may the brewing gods have mercy on our souls…) barrel-aged, we’re curious what you’re digging on the gose front. What’s hitting the spot lately? Let us know on Twitter: the Rare Beer Club’s over @RareBeerClub, and you can find me @kenweaver.

Beyond the Bottle: What Was Your First Sour Beer?

July 17, 2017 by Ken Weaver

Sour beers can be a shock to the system for newer beer drinkers. So much so that it’s hard to forget your first. Couldn’t tell you my first IPA, first stout—even my first smoked beer (I’m pretty sure it was a Schlenkerla, tho). Sieve memory. But I do remember my first sour beer.

It was a 750mL bottle of Cantillon’s Lou Pepe Kriek. I’d snagged it from a nearby institution of alcohol known as Chevy Chase Wine & Spirits, in DC. It was where you’d go, especially a dozen years ago, for the weird stuff: cold-shipped Finnish Sahti (thumbs up), ice cider from Quebec (thumbs up), and pale lagers from places you’d never heard of (wiggly thumb). The damn thing cost like $25, which was ludicrous. It smelled like vinegar. My wife (now entirely fond of sour beers) was like, You’re on your own. It was awful and I drank the whole thing.

Revisiting that beer three years later (in 2008): One of the best things I’d ever tasted.

Dear Readers: What was your very first sour beer? (Ideally not said Lou Pepe.) Was it great? Was it harrowing? Have you revisited it since? Hit us up on Twitter: Rare Beer Club’s exactly that (@RareBeerClub), as am I (@kenweaver).

Beyond the Bottle: American Sour Beers

May 15, 2017 by Ken Weaver

This month’s featured Space Ace Oddity is bottle-conditioned with Brettanomyces, which adds significant layering of tropical flavors and aromatics to that beer. I recently finished reading a sample copy of Michael Tonsmeire’s American Sour Beers (Brewers Publications), which heads into a serious and wisely focused study into how the most influential U.S. sour-beer brewers are handling things like different combinations of Brett strains and souring bacteria, aging on wood (and elsewhere), spontaneous fermentation (and wild-yeast wrangling), and a great deal of the process-based nuance and personal flair that goes into making these complex beers. It also has a detailed section about how ten key places—New Belgium, Jolly Pumpkin, Russian River, Lost Abbey / Pizza Port, Cambridge, Captain Lawrence, The Bruery, Cascade, Ithaca, and Allagash—approach sour beer production (including production-schedule flowcharts).

It’s pretty geeky and glorious stuff. And, in the context of The Rare Beer Club, many of these are familiar names. I rummaged through my collection of rare empties to see what I’d tasted and kept around that was mentioned in the book, snapping photos for Instagram, obviously, but my oldest experiences with at least a few formative beers in the book came from orders I must have placed with The Rare Beer Club like a dozen years ago. My first taste of Pizza Port Cuvee de Tomme—a hugely influential beer with raisin puree, sour cherries, and three house strains of Brettanomyces, created by Tomme Arthur—was through The Rare Beer Club back in March 2005. Ditto for Rodenbach Grand Cru, a feature in January 2006, and Jolly Pumpkin Bam Noire (August 2007) and Weizen Bam (July 2008). Either I or someone else in our DC tasting crew snagged it via The Rare Beer Club. While I’d shortly thereafter leave the country and subsist on Nicaraguan lager for a number of long months, these and similarly formative beers were a big part of why I started writing about the drink professionally when I got back. If you’ve been digging the sour stuff for a bit—Tonsmeire’s book offers top-notch nostalgia.

Cheers!
Ken

Beyond the Bottle: WTF is a Braggot?

April 15, 2017 by Ken Weaver

Braggots are relatively unfamiliar turf for me: beer plus honey, with everything beyond that a mystery. The Oxford Companion of Beer adds that they’re made with malt and honey, ideally the honey in greater abundance, to separate them from honey beers; braggots reside in the space between beers and meads. OCB: “Historical references suggest braggot is a Celtic drink from at least the 12^th century; it is mentioned in The Canterbury Tales.” (A modern-ish version reads: “Her mouth was sweet as bragget or as mead / Or hoard of apples laid in hay or weed.”)

Romantic stuff. In The Beer Bible, Jeff Alworth adds that “Braggot […] is ancient. There is no strict definition beyond honeyed beer, and by that description, braggot goes all the way back to the Sumerians. Archeologists have discovered honeyed beer in pottery from Phrygia from 700 BCE […] and in Gaul during roughly the same time period.” In his Radical Brewing, Randy Mosher quotes the Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus, speaking about the Germanic people: “[They] lie on bear skins and drink mead or beer brewed with honey from large drinking horns. They can bear hunger and cold weather easily, but not the thirst.”

Braggots are not the easiest things to track down. The well-regarded Brother Adam’s Bragget Honey Ale from Atlantic Brewing Co. (“named for Brother Adams, a monk from Buckfast Abbey who is credited with saving the bee industry”) was the lone encounter with the style I’ve got notes on. Kuhnhenn Brewing Co. in Warren, Michigan has made a bunch of these over the years, including a Dry Saison Braggot, Imperial Raspberry Braggot, and Heights of Sterling Braggot (dry-hopped with Sterling). If you’re lucky, your local might have a one-off.

Beyond the Bottle: International Encounters at RateBeer Best

March 15, 2017 by Ken Weaver

There’s a whole lot of cool stuff going on beer-wise in Canada these days. I recently finished up a roundup of grisettes—a wheaty, near-extinct style originating around Belgium’s Hainaut province (the style’s been seeing a whole lot of brewing activity lately)—for my column over at All About Beer. I’ll typically reach out to breweries for maybe a dozenish samples to try and get a sense of the substyle’s terrain, and these grisettes tended to be pretty darn tasty overall.

A key challenge is always sourcing beers from afar. One standout, a delicious take on grisette entitled Ping Pong Wizard—with perfect balance of spice, citrus and honey—was brewed at Brasserie Dunham in Quebec (in collaboration with the fine folks at Cambridge Brewing Co. in Massachusetts). Given the surprisingly diverse number of issues one can have shipping in beer internationally—breakage, unexpected custom fees, leakage, no-explanation returns, any number of tedious middle-man calls to the effect of “Is this yeast samples, or something?”—we’d opted to source that grisette via handoff at the recent RateBeer Best Fest in Santa Rosa.

Brasserie Dunham (RateBeer Best’s 2016 top Canada brewery) and Bellwoods Brewery (the year’s top Ontario brewery) were both in attendance—pouring delicious sours, strong beers and hop vessels—and I swung by on media passes with our mag’s managing editor Jon Page. My long, complicated, so-not-for-this-column history with RateBeer aside, they did a heck of a job (again!) curating, especially showcasing international creatives: Beavertown, Cloudwater and Buxton from England; De Struise (from Belgium), Kiuchi (from Japan), Omnipollo (via Sweden)—plus some breweries I got to hang with down in Brazil: Dum Cervejaria and Way Beer. As I try to regularly remind myself: there’s so much creative stuff happening elsewhere in the world—even if it isn’t the easiest to track down. Make a point to remind yourself, too.

Beyond the Bottle: The Magic Tap

February 17, 2017 by Ken Weaver

I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Steve and Barri Altimari—creators of this month’s featured Aphotic imperial porter with cacao nibs—for nearly a decade now. Steve’s previous brewing work at Valley Brew crossed my radar while I was still living back on the opposite coast, and I’d been actively trading for limited releases like Effinguud (a tart strong ale aged in French- and American-oak port barrels), Überhoppy Imperial IPA, and Decadence Grand Cru 2007 (a Belgian-style quad blended with “pomegranate lambic”) long before I met their makers.

Here’s what I remember of that first meeting. My wife and I were traveling in from northern Nevada, scouting out possible places to settle down along the way, and Steve’s brewing spot at the time was our first major stop in California before heading farther north. We hung out at their production facility, sampling through a surprising number of stellar beers from a tiny brewery, many pouring through what was readily deemed “the magic tap.” This consisted of one single stainless-steel faucet mounted to the outside of a gigantic cold-storage room—and every half hour that tap would be changed to pouring a different beer from Steve’s stockpile of barrel-aged offerings. One fellow taster was a snake geek, and I learned firsthand there’s a challenge to drinking with a ball python on your head. The beers were precise. The company was kind. And I’m grateful that that initial stop set the tone for our time in California since.

We drove up to Ashland, Oregon afterwards—my wife driving safely, while I snoozed in the passenger seat—and by the time we would finally settle in NorCal for good, Steve and Barri would already be in the process of transitioning to their next venture. High Water’s proven a far better outlet for them—it’s been refreshing to watch the creativity they generate together. While I prefer High Water’s lack of snakes, I still dream of having my very own magic tap.

Beyond the Bottle: This Year’s Beers

January 17, 2017 by Ken Weaver

I tend to avoid annual predictions because they tend to sound like they could have been true last year, at least in beer. Every brewery’s done an imperial stout, double IPA, an oaked beer, some form of questionable sour, and (soon!) a series of hazy IPAs. Most ingredients that are even remotely acceptable in brewing have been used. Every non-technical hop pun has been taken. Things doing well get piggybacked quickly. Exhibit A: fruit IPA. Exhibit B: hard soda.

But! In the spirit of the new year, some looks forward: Hazy IPAs are blowing up, inevitably. Kettle-sour approaches will probably also hit a peak in 2017, with knowledge of the practice spreading to anyone who wants to have a go, though I doubt most are in it for the long haul. These beers have a rough lactic edge more often than not, and complexity usually isn’t there. For producers of more traditional sours: a kettle-sour fallout likely can’t come soon enough. A friend works with South African hops, and (from everything I hear) they’ll be popping up more frequently next year, with strong debuts in beers by folks such as Firestone and Bottle Logic. Interest in newer varieties—and awareness of hop-variety relevance—have probably never been higher. I’d prefer to see hard sodas fizzle. 2017 won’t be the year of the dunkel.

If we haven’t already, we’ll likely reach Peak Tropical in 2017, as we’ve had so many inroads in that direction as of late: lots of breweries with fruit IPAs, tons of interest in new tropical-inclined hop varieties (from New Zealand, Australia, etc.), beers that emphasize ‘tropical’ in their marketing (with or w/o fruit additions), countless new IPAs named via some tweak of the words “juice” and/or “juicy”, etc. We’re all looking for our tropical beach somewhere.