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Craft Beer Blog from The Beer of the Month Club

A craft beer blog written by the experts of The Microbrewed Beer of the Month Club

Beyond the Bottle: An Endless Descent into IPA Land

August 16, 2018 by Ken Weaver

I first wrote about the hazy-IPA trend a few years back in All About Beer Magazine, and at the time there was still the lingering question of: Are these murky IPAs really going to make it? I had been tasting all kinds of weirdness for my AAB column at the time, as breweries tried to work through every flavor of the month to pay off expansion bills: kettle sours, lifeless fruit IPAs, alcoholic seltzers… In that light, the ascent of hazy IPAs felt like a breath of fresh air.

Fast-forward to the present—which is pretty damn hazy. The beer-trading world has shifted heavily toward brewpub-only hazy IPAs (or New-England IPAs, or Northeastern IPAs—or whatever one’s inclined to label them, as they’re pretty much everywhere now), to the degree that even the once-maligned can has become a point of prestige. Sam Adams, Sierra Nevada, and pretty much anybody paying attention released a canned hazy IPA in the time since. My Instagram feed has slowly simplified into a wall of super-hazed IPA and hasn’t turned back.

But, of course, the IPA pendulum keeps swinging… Out here in California (and apparently at least as far away as Poland already), we’re seeing the emergence of beers labeled “Brut IPAs” that use a brewing enzyme to ferment down to a bone-dry, Champagne-like feel. Though my first (internal) response was, “You mean like Pliny?”, these IPAs seem to be heading towards a space less overtly bitter than typical West Coast IPAs, while also less sweet than hazy ones. The most cynical side of my brain wonders how many more beer styles we can come up with involving the word IPA… But its practical side reassures me the answer is many, many more.

Posted in: Beer Education, Interesting Beer Info, Notes from the Panel

Beyond the Bottle: The Whole Melon

July 15, 2018 by Ken Weaver

One of the two featured beers this month is O’so Brewing Company’s Project LO, a wild ale that’s dry-hopped with Huell Melon hops. I couldn’t remember tasting this particular hop in anything specific, and many of the releases featuring this newer hop tend to be draft-only or limited distro. Firestone Walker’s Easy Jack is one of the more readily available options, and it puts the hop in tandem with various German, New Zealand and American additions. The Cloud from Stillwater Artisanal features Huell Melon hops alongside Hallertau Blanc, Mosaic and Mandarina Bavaria varieties. And Maui Brewing’s latest collab with Crooked Stave, Two Tickets to Paradise, features it in a tart tropical saison with Mandarina Bavaria and Motueka.

Huell Melon was released in 2012 by the Hop Research Center Hüll, a historic hop research institute in the Hallertau region of Germany, and it’s touted for having softer notes of melon and berry—particularly ripe honeydew and strawberry. Brewers Supply Group notes that the hop goes particularly well with the yeast characteristics of hefeweizens and Belgian-style ales, while also suggesting it as a possible standalone hop for summer seasonals or Brett beers. If it’s still a bit under the radar, a lot of breweries have done small batches with this hop. Look for it under the name of Huell Melon, Hüll Melon or (if a little less often) Hallertau Melon.

Posted in: Interesting Beer Info, Notes from the Panel

Beyond the Bottle: Extraordinary Character

June 13, 2018 by Ken Weaver

Researching historical beer styles can be a bumpy ride. Saisons in particular tend to be a very broad, fraught framework of beers to dive into, and I’ll frequently head to the chapter in Phil Markowski’s Farmhouse Ales titled “A History of Saison,” which was contributed by Brasserie de la Senne’s co-founder Yvan De Baets—both a great brewer and a well-regarded historian.

In the context of this month’s featured 100%-Brett beer via De La Senne, this chapter notes how crucial the impact of Brettanomyces yeast was to old-school saisons (before things shifted away from frequent sourness, in favor of the more bitter-forward interpretations of saison). De Baets, in compiling a profile of these older saisons, writes, “An important characteristic was their wine-like character, a sign of aged beers that were properly made. This vinous and sour side [corresponded] to the ‘taste of the North’ (Belgium and Northern France), and was the ‘must have’ of the era. The nose of old saisons was clearly marked by Brettanomyces.”

In concluding his historical deep dive into classic saisons, the De La Senne brewer added, “An authentic saison has a small ‘wild’ side, rustic, indefinable, far from the clean aspect of certain engineered beers of today. In one word, it must have an extraordinary character.”

Posted in: Beer Education, Interesting Beer Info, Notes from the Panel

Beyond the Bottle: The Yeast With a Thousand Facets

May 30, 2018 by Ken Weaver

One of the two featured beers this month—Logsdon’s Rakau Boy—includes the brewery’s house strain of Brettanomyces yeast. Logsdon’s founder, David Logsdon, was also a founder of Wyeast Laboratories when it opened back in 1985, and that entity’s since grown to become one of the country’s two main yeast suppliers. The house yeast character of Logsdon comes after multiple decades of exploring different variations of Brett and other common (and less-common) yeast types. Wyeast currently offers a few strains of Brett commercially, including B. bruxellensis, B. claussenii and B. lambicus: each of which can produce very different results, as flavor and aroma contributions vary considerably between different strains and applications.

One of the best resources I’ve found for those looking for a deeper dive into the world of Brettanomyces is the Milk the Funk wiki, and the main Brettanomyces page is a great place to begin therein. In addition to including a copy of the “Brett Aroma Wheel” from Dr. Linda Bisson and Lucy Joseph at UC–Davis—which includes over 60 core descriptors of flavors and aromas resulting from Brett strains, from fruity to solventy to spicy—this wiki page also has an impressively detailed account of the many different strains of Brett being offered from smaller, niche yeast companies that have been increasingly popping up as of late. Should you be looking to geek out on lesser-used Brett species like B. naardenensis, this is likely your jam.

For those looking for more new Brett-beer options: a Brasseries de la Senne and Monk’s Cafe collab called Major Tom—a strong saison, bottle-conditioned with Brett from De la Senne—is slated to get into distribution starting around June. And for true devotees of wild yeast, the seventh annual Carnivale Brettanomyces in Amsterdam begins its four-day run on June 21st.

Posted in: Beer Education, Featured Selections, In the News, Interesting Beer Info, Notes from the Panel

Beyond the Bottle: The Coolship Challenge

April 18, 2018 by Ken Weaver

Coolship

Libertine Brewing Co.’s Aubree is one of an increasing number of beers being spontaneously fermented through the use of a coolship—a wide and shallow stainless-steel vessel, typically, that allows brewers to expose in-progress beer to the ambient air. This process, once limited to the traditional methods of Belgian lambic, is pretty much the opposite of how one usually brews today: pitching a single homogenous vial (or vat, bucket, etc.) of yeast from one of the main yeast labs, and using a monoculture with near-uniform genetics to reliably ferment said beer. If you’re looking for a challenge, though, fermenting with local yeasts can provide one.

Michael Tonsmeire’s American Sour Beers has a particularly helpful section on using coolships. “The isolated strains of brewer’s yeast that we pitch into our ales and lagers,” he said, “have characteristics that took untold generations for brewers to select for, important properties like alcohol tolerance, flocculation, and desirable flavor profile. Finding a wild yeast strain with all of these same attributes is as likely as dropping a net onto a prehistoric field [!] and having the first animal you catch be as easy to raise and delicious to eat as a modern cow.”

The next time you’re sipping on a spontaneously fermented beer, whether from Libertine or Allagash or Russian River or Jolly Pumpkin, or myriad other international brewers aiming to coax cow-equivalents from the local air, keep in mind the unseen effort that went into them. The dumped batches. The ones that end up too lactic or too acetic, or worse. The months or years of fingers crossed… Digging any new coolship beers lately? Hit us up @RareBeerClub.

Posted in: Beer Education, Interesting Beer Info, Notes from the Panel

Brewiety Merges with The Rare Beer Club

March 30, 2018 by Kris Calef

We are excited to announce that Brewiety, an innovative beer club focused on delivering outstanding beers from the nation’s most respected brewers, has recently merged with The Rare Beer Club®.

After a long drought and having not received a shipment since last year, existing Brewiety members have been excited to learn how their club membership has improved as a result of the merger and were allowed to customize their first shipment from a list of over 15 truly rare, outstanding beers, many of which were brewed exclusively for The Rare Beer Club.

Learn More About The Brewiety – Rare Beer Club Merger

Posted in: In the News, Notes from the Panel

Beyond the Bottle: Foeder Feeders (& Filip)

March 14, 2018 by Ken Weaver

Almanac Beer Company Foeders

I recently got to check out Almanac Beer Co.’s new facility in Alameda, California, which I was checking out on assigment for ABV Magazine. The brand-new Barrel House, Brewery and Taproom (the building itself dates back to World War II…) marks a major shift for the folks at Almanac, who up until now relied on contract or partner brewing to get their beers out into the world. Check out the full coverage and photos in ABV, but suffice to say that Almanac has committed to the sour game. Asking co-founder Jesse Friedman what he was most excited about with the new spot, he replied, “I’m excited to get these foeders filled.”

Foeders, the big barrels often used for aging sour beers, aren’t a thing you, like, impulse buy. Wood & Beer: A Brewer’s Guide by Dick Cantwell and Peter Bouckaert is the best resource I’ve seen for foeder specifics, and the two authors put the general size for these barrels about 600 liters or more (with significant wiggle room, but this is around the size where the production methods change and the barrels go from assembly-line to custom). The smallest foeder sold currently by Foeder Crafters of America is just a little bit larger than that, at seven barrels, or 14 kegs’ worth. For a sense of the size of some of the larger foeders, though, there’s a useful anecdote in Wood & Beer about a broken ladder and a temporarily lost employee named Filip.

Have you gotten to check out any other recent foeder-aged beers? Rodenbach, New Glarus, New Belgium, Side Project, Bruery Terreux and numerous others have been making foeders part of their sour-beer operations, and, at the very least, you’re unlikely to find many foeder-aged beers that breweries are doing just for a hoot. (I tend to read it as ‘probably not a kettle sour’.) Any foeder beers hitting the spot? Join the conversation on Twitter @rarebeerclub.

Posted in: In the News, Interesting Beer Info, Notes from the Panel

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