Beer Education Archives - Page 4 of 6 - Craft Beer Blog from The Beer of the Month Club

Beyond the Bottle: What’s Your Favorite Barrel for Beer?

November 15, 2017 by Ken Weaver

The Rare Beer Club is featuring two barrel-aged beers this month: Nebraska Brewing Co.’s HopAnomaly, aged in French-oak Chardonnay barrels, and American Solera’s The Ground Is Shaking!, which spent eighteen-plus months inside of Vin Santo wine casks from Italy.

It’s pretty remarkable to consider how much the act of barrel-aging beers has taken off over the course of 25-ish years. Before I left All About Beer this fall to get back to freelancing, we had Jeff Alworth take on the history of Goose Island’s Bourbon County Brand Stout, which was the first barrel-aged beer of its kind when it was created in the early 1990s. (Jeff has been doing great stuff in his Classic Beer column, and this one is definitely worth checking out for a deep-dive into barrel lore.) We’ve quickly gone from a time when aging beers in barrels was a pretty weird thing to do—even the now-conventional stuff, like bourbon, brandy or rum—to our rather different present circumstances. You’ll find beers aged in Fernet barrels, Grand Marnier barrels, maple-syrup barrels and tabasco barrels. It’s approaching true that any food-ish product that gets barrel-aged itself has had some of its resulting barrels used to age beer.

So, aside from tabasco, obviously, what’s your favorite type of barrel for beer?

My first thought was whiskey or brandy, just considering all of the exceptional BA imperial stouts and barleywines over the years. I’ll often get a lot of chalkiness from Brett beers aged in red-wine barrels, and tequila and I have an evolving relationship—so no to both of those. While I rarely drink Chardonnay (we’re generally Pinot people), it’s Chardonnay barrels that I’ve personally found most intriguing expressed in beer, especially with a pale base. Russian River’s Temptation. Side Project’s Saison du Fermier. Anchorage Bitter Monk. Yes, please.

American Beer Day

October 27, 2017 by Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

With so many beer celebration days now, it’s hard to keep track which one is coming next. With International Stout Day just around the corner (The first Thursday in November), we have more than enough beer to talk about in the next few weeks! Today’s focus, though, is National American Beer Day.

To join in the celebration, I wanted to review a bottle from our friends at Shmaltz: Jewbelation (17): REBORN. With over 20 years of brewing, Shmaltz produced this beer in celebration of their end of contract brewing and the opening of their own brewery location in Clifton Park, NY back in 2013.

This beer pours a crazy dark mahogany with a persistent tan head. On the nose there is quite the complexity from the 17 malts with notes of heavily roasted coffee, brown sugar, and chocolate dancing over forward layers of fruitiness – figs, plums, and stewed apples. The 17 hops have faded in the last four years but you can still see some of their life in the very end of the nose with a light waft of hop spice. Underneath it all is a welcomed whisky-like booziness just to remind you that it is 17%.

On the palate, you basically experience the nose in reverse. The whisky note comes front and center, but is balanced out with some fresh roasted coffee notes and chocolate. The flavors linger out to the fruits shown in the nose but settle on a warming baking spice finish. The body on this one was so massive, it was basically a meal in of itself. Overall, an awesome beer experience and I hope I can find one more bottle to cellar to celebrate an American Beer Day in the future.

Thank you America the Beautiful and God bless our amber waves of grain!

~CJ

Beyond the Bottle: What’s Your Favorite Trappist Beer?

September 15, 2017 by Ken Weaver

The “Authentic Trappist Product” designation for beer is well regimented, with 11 breweries currently allowed to use the labeling. The ATP hexagon identifies beers made inside Trappist monasteries while adhering to certain key requirements—such as being brewed by monks or under their supervision, and generating profits used solely for monastic upkeep, or charity.

The majority of us become familiar with Trappist beer through one of the Belgian breweries: Achel, Chimay, Orval (Michael Jackson’s presumed favorite), Rochefort, Westmalle and the much-esteemed Westvleteren. There’s also Austria’s Stift Engelszell, La Trappe and Zundert in The Netherlands, Tre Fontane in Italy (with piddly distro), and Spencer here in the U.S. A twelfth, Mont des Cats in France, is technically a Trappist beer but it gets brewed at Chimay.

So, think back… Which of the above has made the biggest impact on you? Personally, I recall ideal pairings of Chimay Blue + Ashton VSG cigars back when I lived out on the east coast (and still smoked cigars). Orval’s pretty much always difficult to pass up. Westy 12’s proven world-beating or meh depending on the batch, while Westvleteren Blond is wholly different and pretty great in its own right. Plus, the Achel and Westmalle golden and brown beers are otherworldly and actually easy to find… But man, I’d put Rochefort 10 up against anything: epic malt depths and caramelization, but absurdly smooth and crisp. What’s your favorite?

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: 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: 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: Group Projects

October 14, 2016 by Ken Weaver

We’re in the thick of festival season at All About Beer—every brewery rep on the east coast I’ve talked to today has cursed October’s existence, and not without justification—and we’ve got two festivals of our own plus the next issue overhead. Thankfully, this job includes good distractions, and I was lucky enough to get behind the scenes for two recent group projects.

First: I got to be one of the blenders for Firestone Walker’s XX Anniversary Ale—usually a spot reserved for local winemakers who actually know how to blend things. I didn’t, but my bread-making/blending partner Arie caught me up to speed quickly—and we decided on a solid blend to compete against eight other teams of Paso-Robles winemakers. Our mix (30% Parabola and 15% Bravo, scribbles suggest…) wasn’t the winner, but the top blend—via one-man-blending-show Scott Hawley of Torrin Winery—was delicious and debuts October 29^th.

Second, as another group project, I got to hang with some great folks for The Search for the Rare Barrel down at Berkeley’s The Rare Barrel, judging a flight of their various blonde sour ales to help find a very special combination of yeast characteristics (to serve to ferment many future barrels of beer). The winning barrels from our preliminary flights were then judged by panelists from The Rare Barrel, Lauren Salazar from New Belgium, and Vinnie Cilurzo from Russian River. (If you’re heard of the famed barrel pH1, that’s what this project was about.)

The winning barrel gets released the last week of September. Back to spreadsheets! #festlife