Part of my job includes keeping up on the latest reading. One of our Rare Beer Club features this month is a wheat wine aged in Sauvignon Blanc barrels, and the technical beer book I’m currently exploring happens to be Wood & Beer: A Brewer’s Guide, by Dick Cantwell and Peter Bouckaert, which came out this summer. I got my sample copy via the Brewers Association, and this book in particular is nice to finally see. Wood-aged beers have gained massive levels of interest in the past ten years or so (an early page of the book notes 85% of U.S. breweries were using wood to somehow influence their beer in 2015), and this book’s been a long time coming. I recall first hearing about it at least four or five years ago via a barrel-savvy brewer friend up in NorCal—back when he was the one attempting to tackle this book project.

The book takes on everything from heady science to the really hands-on, blue-collar work of creating liquid-tight cooperage. It was particularly neat, going through it, to see how many of the main breweries cited were familiar from The Rare Beer Club. I learned Brouwerij Boon is notable for not only having its own cooper on permanent staff, but also for keeping whole tree trunks on site for the making of new staves. Cigar City’s got a gadget called the Spinbot 5000—allowing them to use recirculating infusion to get more out of various wood additions like American oak and Spanish cedar, in a shorter period of time. And there’s a detailed look into the blending practices of our friend Ron Jeffries over at Jolly Pumpkin, one of our long-time Rare Beer Club supporters, including the challenges of blending foeders of all different sizes. If you don’t know your vanillins from your furfurals, you’ll find some interesting bits.

Cheers!
Ken

I touched upon this very briefly in my last column, but wanted to dig a bit deeper into quick and kettle sours, particularly as The Rare Beer Club’s featuring the slow-process Panil Barriquée.

For my latest Trending column in All About Beer Magazine, I tasted through a few dozen sour beers that had been made via quick- or kettle-souring techniques—which are becoming way more popular as of late. The chemistry gist is this: most sour beers (and most beer generally) is fermented after its boiling process, and takes weeks or years to transform available sugars and such into useful things like alcohol, carbon dioxide, and the tart acidity of a sour ale. In quick- or kettle-sour beers, Lactobacillus bacteria (like in Berliner weisse) is added under ideal circumstances before the boiling process, creating a strong vein of lactic acid in a day or two. The subsequent boiling prevents said Lacto from infecting a brewery’s non-sour equipment, which, beyond time savings, also means you don’t have to invest in actual sour equipment.

Don’t get me wrong. I did manage to track down a few quick-sour beers that are worth the effort, including two really nice (if curiously named) releases from Smog City Brewing Co. in Torrance, California: Cuddlebug (with welcome peach and apricot nuances) and Snugglebug  (showcasing raspberry and boysenberry additions). Two super-good renderings that manage to work around the core limitation of these beers: the quick-/kettle-sour process will, even if you do everything right, only yield a quite simple, pronounced lemon-custard-y sourness that (as far as I could find) works best when tempered by other ingredients… What I’m getting to is probably some form of the following: Looking to rekindle that love of lambics, and other slow-brewed, complex sour beers? Tasting through a couple dozen kettle sours might help.

My role at All About Beer has recently expanded a bit, beyond overseeing our reviews system and managing the beer side of our World Beer Festivals (etc.), to include a new column. It’s slowly|amusingly turned into me taking deep-dives into parts of the beer world I don’t like.

Fruit IPAs, coffee beers (I’m an outlier here) and, most recently, quick-/kettle-soured beers. My beer-loving wife, normally on board for pretty much anything (except smoked beer), has been like: You’re on your own. Fruit IPAs, coffee beers, quick sours: couple dozen at a time. No help. Our sink’s usually drunk. The recycling bin contents makes us look like odd pirates.

Don’t get me wrong. Some folks love these. But I cannot for the life of me say that my heart beats faster when a new kettle sour appears on the shelf. Fruit IPAs still, generally, just make me wish for normal IPAs (ideally loaded with late hop additions). But the newer coffee beers were, surprisingly, pretty great.

(I’ve also been threatened with having to review hard sodas. … Not really. I volunteered.)

Coffee beers: I’ve been jaded by so many iffy ones in the past. But this time around our top picks were stellar—and all from SoCal: Modern Times City of the Dead (barrel-aged coffee!), Stone Americano Stout (seamless) and AleSmith’s new Hammerhead Speedway. All glorious, and making me regret bad words I’ve spoken about coffee beers in the past. (Stone’s Mocha IPA has been a standout new release in the time since then.) With cold-brewed additions and boutique-roaster collaborations like never before, we’re just starting to approach peak coffee.

A few+ years back, I had the opportunity to sample a wide range of different Brazilian beers down in Curitiba, in the Paraná state of southern Brazil. I’d been flown down as, essentially, an ambassador of RateBeer, which was (at the time) one of the main congealing elements of online beer culture in that region of the world. I’ve never met such passionate homebrewers. And, being there to witness that nascent craft beer scene—operating, like many international beer scenes of late, on an accelerated timescale courtesy of lessons learned in the U.S.—well, it felt a little bit like getting a glimpse back in time to an earlier part of our own beer culture.

You could taste potential. You could tell where things were headed.

And one of the main highlights of that trip had been Wäls. Pitch-perfect renditions of tripel, quadrupel and bière brut, in a beer culture more generally inclined to German styles. Various batches of their Petroleum, a chewy imperial stout, were equally on point. Despite Wäls’ sale to AmBev last year and (more especially) Brazil’s current economic crisis, it’s encouraging to hear from Brazilian peeps still planning to open breweries once their economy’s upright, and also to see vestiges of that core spirit of Wäls appearing in places like southern California.

Everyone has their preferences, and while my profession and temperament have me drinking pretty much everything when it comes to beer styles, I tend to gravitate towards just a few if I’m not on deadline. Pale ales and IPAs with a ton of late hop additions comprise a good bit, with beer like Cellarmaker, Modern Times and Firestone Walker’s Luponic Distortion hitting the spot lately. There is always room in this somewhat reasonably sized belly for hefeweizen, like one of those wizard bags you can store a universe in. And anything even vaguely saison.

If you are a saison and you walk into our house, you get what you deserve.

Blackberry Farm in Walland, Tennessee has been doing some really nice saisons lately, with a Classic Saison that’s true to its name and a Noble Cuvee Dry Hop version that’s essentially a bottled meadow. While a couple recent Prairie beers just didn’t do it for me (Ape Snake: you’re all over the place; Phantasmagoria: you could’ve been someone!), returning to their Standard, a hoppy farmhouse ale with Motueka hops, reinstilled any and all faith. Others to look for in this department: Casey Brewing and Blending (Colorado) has been gaining deserved fanfare. Monkish in SoCal has been dropping numerous mics. Cory King and his Side Project: ditto.

Jopen Koyt is admittedly pretty far up there as far as gruits go. But if you’re looking for non-hoppy options, there are still a bunch of really excellent examples to be found, showcasing as wide a range of herb additions as you may imagine. Locally we’ve got Brian Hunt over at the world-class Moonlight Brewing Company creating a variety of herbs-not-hops beers, such as Working for Tips (brewed with redwood tips for bitterness) and Legal Tender (with yarrow, wild rosemary and redwood branches). Check the local folks for an occasional gruit attempt.

Upright Brewing’s Special Herbs is their Reggae Junkie gruit aged in Old Tom gin casks, and the result is an effervescent, lemon-lime-forward nectar that’s wholly its own thing. One can track it down as an occasional bottled offering, with modest distribution. There’s also a 13th Century Grut Bier that’s making its rounds in the States, made with bay leaves, ginger, anise, caraway, rosemary and gentian. (Zero clue what gentian is.) Most interesting-seeming include Cigar City’s cedar-aged Humidor Series Gruit and a beer named Fleur Desay from De Garde Brewing in Tillamook, OR: sour farmhouse gruit aged in Chardonnay oak barrels, of course.

For the truly gruit grateful, International Gruit Day will be here again on February 1st. Since 2013 it’s been pretty much the best time of year to go gruit gathering. Join in via #GruitDay.

One doesn’t really come across many Belgian-styled black IPAs, let alone imperial ones. It’s not often (given what I do for a living) that I find myself drinking a style, weirdo ingredients aside, where I’m like… I really don’t think I’ve had one of these things before, possibly ever. The individual parts are super familiar: Belgium + Black IPA. The combination, a bit less so. These beers often combine firm hop bitterness with assertive Belgian yeast strains (offering notes like pepper, clove, vanilla and fruit). Occasionally there’s dark chocolate, or caramel.

Aside from the Troubadour Westkust, there aren’t many options of this sort available in the states. Brasserie de la Senne’s Brusseleir Zwet IPA might be most common, and I would be inclined to try anything from the folks who made Zinnebir and Taras Boulba. De Struise in Oostvleteren released a barrel-aged blend along heftier lines: imperial IPA + imperial stout.

Ooh, also: De la Senne does another black IPA called Black in Japan, which I have had now that I’m looking at the thing: a Brussels-born black IPA that’s crisp, toasty, and nicely bitter.

Brussels Beer Project also does a “Belgian Black IPA” called Dark Sister, which is kind of a weird name and it may or may not be available outside of limited parts of Europe and Asia.

As far as options from elsewhere: Sierra Nevada’s Beer Camp series featured a Belgian-style Black IPA a while back, but that one seems pretty much kaput. On a smaller scale, there are at least a few dozen examples of Belgian-style black IPAs brewed in the U.S., so keep an eye out if you dug the Westkust. Also of particular note: Great Lakes Brewing (the Ontario one) has a beer that’s apparently called Only 30: The Only Black Belgian Milk IPA in Existence.

There is also, as you may have guessed, an imperial version.