10 Cane

The auto industry in Europe is hurting.  Since the scrappage schemes barely holding volume producers up have expired, manufacturing plants on the continent have been operating at under 80% capacity with the possibility of falling even further.  GM is weighing its options for getting out of Opel-Vauxhall even though restrictive labour laws mean closing it could cost roughly €8 billion.  But some car makers are doing well.  The premium brands are making a killing off of the newly minted wealthy in developing countries.  What we're left with is a market in which the modern decedents of the Yugo can barely turn a profit while Mercedes Benz is sitting pretty.  It looks weird but we've seen it many times before (think growing craft beer sales in a contracting beer industry), albeit for diffuse causes.  Rob Bryans, VP of the 10 Cane brand hopes this industry makeup will prevail for liquor through the recession.  10 Cane has put a lot of effort into developing a production process that will differentiate itself from other rums for the better.  Bryans claims this has provided some insulation from market forces.  Always interested in the purported "finer things" in life, I pulled out a snifter and put it to use on a drink closer to what it was originally made for.

When a rum producer wants to go for the top shelf, he will usually fiddle with the aging process.  This spirit goes the other way, focusing instead on the up front inputs.  Instead of using molasses like most companies, 10 Cane uses (can you guess it?) first pressed sugar cane.  The fermentation takes about five days, which means it's a lighter bodied rum.  The brand touts a double distillation but it seems like distilling twice is just as special as adding hops three times.  To claim that as a mark of quality is pure marketing.  After the distillation, it goes into oak barrels for a year, which is where it gains its yellowish tinge and supposedly picks up vanilla notes.  If the tasty crystalized bean made an appearance in what I drank, it definitely wasn't like what you'd find in a vanilla porter or other such beer.  It mostly acted as a softening element, yielding a smoothness I had not before experienced with rum.

10 Cane has received good reviews from liquor professionals but also meh reviews from forum posters.  One blogger probably fingered the culprit when he gave 10 Cane 3 out of 10 as a rum but 7 out of 10 as a cachaça.  To that I say "Are you kidding me?"  You have to be able to enjoy something on its own merits, not what you expect.  If Greg Koch hadn't given that very advice to Steve Wagner when he messed up a batch of pale ale, we'd have no Arrogant Bastard today.  Overall, this Trinidadian liquor was quite pleasing and I would highly recommend it.  But what do I know?  I'm a beer guy.

The mystery of Leftovers Beer

One of the most common questions I get upon telling people I brew my own beer is "What do you call it?" This sounds silly to me.  I don't call it anything.  I don't have labels.  I don't even bother to remove the labels from recycled bottles.  When I share, I just say "Here's a red ale" or "Here's an IPA."  I have little to nothing off of which to base names and most likely I'll never make that recipe again, so I don't really care.  But I have named one.  This is because I wasn't sure what kind of beer would come out the other end, since I formulated the grain bill and hop profile from what I had sitting around after previous batches.  This was my Leftovers Beer, which has become my most peculiar batch yet.

This beer was meant to be one big experiment but it soon got out of hand.  First, the grain bill pushed the limit of stability by being a little over 21% specialty malt.  Then I threw in an unnecessary protein rest just to see what it would do.  It sat in the primary three whole days before bubbles first appeared.  The secondary lasted almost a full month, three weeks of which saw sustained highs in the mid 90s, meaning the cellar probably topped 80º a few days.  The bottle conditioning was closer to the right temperature range, but probably also spent a good deal of time in the mid 70s.  The first bottle I opened produced a huge head but every bottle after that was completely flat, like this...

Oh no!

I figured the yeast had probably died before bottling but that didn't explain why the first bottle was so foamy.  Oh well.  All the flavor was there and it was quite good, but you just couldn't get to it because of the lack of carbonation.  So it sat, only slowly diminishing because I wouldn't give it to other people.  Who wants to share something that tastes hollow?

But then it changed.  A few months into it's frigid exile, every one I opened came with a healthy amount of foam.

This is the exact same beer!

Suddenly a whole new body and treasure trove of flavors were released, with no explanation as to why.  The aromas harbored yeasty notes and even a faint hint of figs.  Maybe the priming sugar didn't mix evenly throughout the bottling bucket, but it wasn't a hit or miss thing.  Half way through drinking the batch, it decided to be carbonated.  Of course the flavors continued to develop over the next few months as the hops died out and the malts came to the fore.  Constant access to bottle conditioned beer (read, getting to watch your beer grow and change) is one of the perks of brewing your own.

Ultimately I'd say experimentation is a good thing.  But if you're going to experiment, do it correctly, only change one variable at a time.  That way you'll actually learn something rather than create a mystery.

Sunday School: Pouring Beer

Whenever someone raves about Best Buy, it's because of the company's employee training record.  The big box electronics store so highly esteemed by stock market watchers, especially those looking for successes from the early 2000s, is known for using the knowledge of its floor workers as a point of differentiation.  It's a lesson oft repeated by business professors.  If your front-line employees are fluent in your products and the language of the industry, customers will get what they want.  A restaurant I went to a while back was a good example of this lesson not being taken to heart.  The business' core competency is its beer selection, which is quite expansive, but the waiter brought the bottle to me sans verre (without a glass).  I ordered a craft beer and no food.  Do I seem like a guy who's planning on drinking straight from the bottle?  I had to ask for a glass.  I don't know who's to blame, the waiter or the bottle suckers who made him think that was okay.

That might sound a little harsh, but when you don't pour a beer into a glass you miss out on so much of the brewer's craft.  They worked hard to achieve the color, clarity and most importantly, the aroma.  By drinking straight from the bottle, you're depriving yourself of much of the beer's flavor.  Now you might say those Guinness guys told you drinking straight from the bottle was "brilliant."  That's because Guinness' Bottled Draught Beer is specifically designed to be consumed directly.  So if your drink is any other beer, you should probably pour it into a glass.

This brings up some discussion, though.  How should a beer be poured?  How do you keep the head from overtopping the glass and making a mess?  How do you get a good head when it's just not foaming?  What about that crud at the bottom of the bottle?  Well YouTube is full of videos willing to help!

This guy explains the fundamentals of controlling the head in his brand specific video.  Every beer is different in how much foam is best, but by adjusting the three tools he teaches you can get really good at producing just the amount you want.  Plus, his accent is cool and he makes funny faces.

This guy kind of rehashes what the last guy said, but also shows one of the common wheat beer pours (the fun one).  Notice his pours include the "glucking" eschewed by his predecessor.  I've found that it's best to avoid it, but if you're coming up flatter than you should "glucking" can be a useful backup.

I mentioned the wheat beer pour you saw was one of two common types.  Here's the other one (not as fun).  Also, please don't garnish with a slice of lemon.  It doesn't add, it negates and masks.

Finally, you may have seen this Bud Light commercial trying to get people to pour straight down the middle.  What do they know about beer?  Pouring down the middle is stupid!  Where did they find a bar that serves bud in an actual pilsner glass?  Not so fast.  For most beers pouring down the middle is the surest way to produce way too much foam.  However, Bud Light is a pilsner.  This style is highly effervescent and benefits from such a pour as long as it's not done too hastily (gluck gluck).  So they're not flat out lying to you, although pouring technique may not apply when you're drinking a beer like Bud Light.

Anyway, there are a variety of pours but they pretty much all go after the same concepts.  In the end I recommend practice.  Lots of practice.

Dark Truth Stout, Boulevard Brewing Company

The United States has often been referred to as a melting pot, alluding to its ability to take materials from all over the world and produce something entirely new.  It was popularized by the play of the same name in 1905 which, from the framework of Romeo and Juliet, followed the love of a Russian Jew and the daughter of a Tsarist officer who directed pogroms back in the motherland.  In the end, the cultural blending of America is strong enough to defeat the animosities of the old world.  Quite touching.  Of course today we're told the "melting pot" is more of a "salad bowl" where cultures coexist but don't disappear in a burst of fusion.  However, that doesn't mean the term is dead.  It still applies if you know where to look.  Take corn dogs for example.  It's just a sausage, that's German, but slide it onto a stick and coat it in cornbread and you've got an American icon.  Or try a Mexican pizza.  I don't think a description is even needed.  The name is pretty self-explanatory.

Today's beer is a living example of a melting pot.  It pulls together bits and pieces of recipes that would otherwise never meet in the same fermenter.  What will be the result?  Something only an American brewery would spend time achieving.  Dark Truth Stout is the this blog's third smokestack series beer and its first stout.  I'm not sure why I haven't done a stout yet.  I find a well poured Guiness to be one of the most beautiful drinks and look foreword for months to have a Mephistopheles, so I really am surprised.  I guess it's fitting that this particular stout is surprising on its own.

So the color, black, and head formation, belatedly growing out of what seems like nowhere, are just right for a stout.  Nothing unduly weird or unusual here.  That smell though, there's something else in it.  That would be the Belgian yeast strain Boulevard uses.  It's kind of out there but works quite well, like when I fry my eggs with curry and put them on cheese pizza (so good, by the way!).  The fruity Belgian aromas actually complement the dark roastiness of the stout malts.  Speaking of which, the description provided by Boulevard Brewing Company's website names barley, wheat, rye and oats.  That makes for a very complex grain bill and an exceedingly nuanced maltiness that tantalizes your nose and tongue.  The last point of departure from your typical stout recipe is the hops.  Boulevard went with German varieties instead of the British ones usually employed.  These aren't as different as using a Belgian yeast because the common hop types found in stouts are often seen as cousins of the German nobles.  What they gained by using the hops they did was not a novelty hybrid brew, but one that is beautifully balanced between heavy hitters from both side of the boxing ring of beer.

What did we find?  A beer that is positively delightful even though part of you feels a bit unnatural.  Kind of like how I can't listen to Made of Bricks without Kate Nash's voice being doubled by my own an octave below her.

Dancing at discos, eating cheese on toast!

Now Kate Nash uses a number of hemiolas, which are a gateway drug to 20th century music.  Might this beer be a gateway to a new 21st century stout?  Maybe, maybe not.  To moral of the story though is you should combine weird things because you never know when they might produce something wonderful.  Case in point, did you know that music from Ireland and Bayaka music from Africa fuse incredibly well? Who would have thought?  See for yourself.

Ebel's Weiss, Two Brothers Brewing Company

It's funny how something that's been around for a very long time can become famous for tangentially related activities.  The most famous example of this is the swastika, which had for thousands of years served as an evocation of auspiciousness before being catapulted into the history books as a symbol of fascism.  Another example comes to us from Austria via Rodgers and Hammerstein.  That would be Edelweiss.  This furry little flower that grows at moderately high altitudes in limey soil became famous by the smooth, baritone voice of Christopher Plummer in the movie adaptation of The Sound of Music.  The flower is a persnickety plant, requiring just the right growing conditions before agreeing to bloom.  Rodgers and Hammerstein made sure their song lived up to the flower's name by taking a hard line on copyright infringement.  In the 1970s it became common for some churches to use the Edelweiss tune with different lyrics as a benediction.  Rodgers made it clear that using the tune with different lyrics would result in legal action and his estate continues to uphold this wish.  Regardless of how utterly ridiculous it sounds that someone would sue a church for using the melody to sing "May the Lord, Mighty God, Bless and keep you forever," it's the law.  So you won't be hearing any rendition of Edelweiss other than how it appears in the musical until 2054.  Unless of course Disney steps in again to get copyright protection extended.

Anyway, today's beer keys into this fame with its name, Ebel's Weiss, and comes to us from Two Brothers Brewing Company.  The monicker is a pun between edelweiss and the surname of the brothers, Ebel.  The "weiss" doubles in the pun to indicate the style, weißbier, or weizen, as it is know outside of its home region.

The color and head are just right for a hefeweizen.  I was a little nervous because I had seen it poured before with only about a finger of head, so I used the upside-down pour instead of the pour, swirl and top off method.  I still haven't explained those...  Um...  I'll post on pouring techniques eventually.  I promise. The beer is unfiltered, as is made clear by the sediment at the bottom of the bottle, so it truly is a hefeweizen.

Do ya see it?

The aroma holds cloves, bananas, a touch of citrus, blah, blah, blah.  Everything about this beer is what you would expect.  In Ebel's Weiss the brothers have produced a beer I could see being described as average or run-of-the-mill, that is, by someone living in Southern Germany.  I image Two Brothers starting out like Founders, brewing beer to just get by.  But "getting by" for former ex-patriots (ex-ex-patriots?) is very different than "getting by" for plain old American homebrewers.  What opened my eyes to truly good beer was time spent in Bavaria and Ebel's Weiss tastes like it would fit right in.  This is probably why it has garnered a reputation for being a bit of a "gateway" beer, leading drinkers away from the big breweries.  It's mundane in a universe where mundane means superb.  If it weren't for the fact that I've had a number of good wheat beers already, I would state here that I'm not a wheat beer guy but I still like this brew.  (But really, deep down, I'm not a wheat beer guy but I still like this brew.)

Moving on the punny name.  I for one appreciate puns with my purchases and Ebel's Weiss is solid in that respect.  Unfortunately this is an anomaly.  The only other label from Two Brothers that is sufficiently punny is Cane and Ebel, which refers to its sugar content and brewers' surname with Biblical characters.  I encourage Two Brothers Brewing Company to come up with more puns for their beers.  Even if they only play with "Ebel" that leaves open several opportunities.  Might I suggest "Ideas and Ebelities," "Ebelsalt Gose" (too obscure?) and a line called "Ebel Bodied Beers?"  Feel free to build from those too.  They're perfectly fermentEble.

Double Wide IPA, Boulevard Brewing Company

When we find something and deem it good, we have a tendency to want more of it.  This is what gives us chocolate chocolate chip cookies.  Does it really need chocolate chips?  It has also brought us into a world where you can sit down and pick from hundreds of channels.  You pay for that?  Sometimes the results are quite disastrous, as when we develop a taste for tanning.

Am I cool yet?

It seems we always pursue good things until they become at best silly and at worst monstrous.  But this doesn't have to be the case.  Today's beer is a Double IPA (DIPA).  It would be really easy for this style to be a catch-all for hop bombs and many DIPAs are just that, but not all.  Many times, brewers get it right and Boulevard Brewing Company got it right with its Double-Wide IPA.

That's my new glass.  Ain't she a beaut?

This is my second beer from Boulevard's Smokestack series, a collection of beers meant to explore the broad horizons of brewing.  The smell is coy in its subtlety.  Not in your face, but not faint either.  It's fruity like you would expect from an IPA, but the breadiness holds its own quite well for being out of its element.  The flavor is all hops.  I bet this is what the makers of all those unbalanced hop bombs are going for.  They just don't hit it though.  Double-Wide effortlessly delivers the biting hoppiness and tart mouthfeel you crave without sacrificing a full body or drinkability.  Drinking it affords you a taste of a genuinely extreme beer but unlike the girls in the picture, you won't look back with regrets.

So far this Smokestack series is showing that the world of imperial beers can be larger than just stouts and barley wines.  Like The Sixth Glass does for quadrupels, Double-Wide helps raise DIPA's standing to fine zymurgic art.

That's yeast painting.  In case you're a little lost.
Looks kind of Damien Hirst.

Sunday School: Secondary Fermentation

I bottled my most recent batch of homebrew today.  The largest part of bottling day is cleaning and sanitizing.  It seems that a lot of brewing is those two things.  And it's true.  Once the floor has been swept, the counter has been cleaned, the equipment has been sanitized and everything's had time to dry, you finally get to start on the first step of actually bottling.  For me that means transferring from the secondary fermenter to a bottling bucket.  Seems like a pretty innocuous task that wouldn't spur debate in any way, but this thread on Homebrew Talk went on for a good month, sometime quite heatedly, refuting one word in that last sentence.  Secondary.  It all stems from the evolving nature of common knowledge.

Secondary fermentation probably goes back to the days when open fermentation was common.  When the yeast are highly active and producing a lot of CO2, the layer of gas protects the beer from any oxygen that could get in and cause problems.  Yes the airlocks we all put on our primaries are a little redundant, but when it comes to five or ten gallons of delicious liquid bread, can you really be too safe?  Anyway, when yeast activity slows, the chances of oxygen getting in rises, so everything needs to be kept somewhere with no exposure.  Basically the primary would act as an aerobic fermentation while the secondary acted as an anaerobic fermentation.  Of course this practice is a bit anachronistic when you factor in modern home brewing equipment wherein the only aerobic difference between the two is the amount of headspace.  So the primary starts out with more oxygen  but it's still a closed system.

Faced with its own impending obsolescence, this is where secondary fermentation blurred the line between itself and lagering, the practice of storing beer at cooler temperatures.  The case for secondary fermentation was made by claiming it produced a clearer drink.  Which makes sense when you take into account that the most famous lagers styles are incredibly clear.  It was also claimed that the carcasses of the previously vibrant yeast would decompose and impart off flavors.  This is called autolysis and is often thought of as yeast cannibalism even though such an act is physically impossible.  It's less like chewing off your limbs and more like stomach acid spilling out onto your other organs.  However, as you see from the previously mentioned Homebrew Talk thread, many brewers have found that if you skip the secondary, the yeast will take care of any negatives associated with this macabre process for quite some time and ultimately produce a better tasting beer.  Plus, it saves you time and sanitizer while reducing the risk for contamination.  Win win win!

So what do I do?  I'd like to experiment with a long primary but I'm ultimately going with racking to a secondary.  But with all these reasons not to, why?  My answer is one word.  Acetaldehyde.  This chemical compound, also known as CH3CHO, is produced by our bodies naturally when we drink alcohol.  But just because our bodies make it doesn't mean they like it.  It comes from breaking down ethanol and is immediately turned into acetic acid.  When your liver can't keep up, that's when you get a hangover.  Getting the wort off the lees, you avoid adding extra acetaldehyde to the eventual beer.  Okay, beer with less hangoverage, is it really worth it?  No.  But acetaldehyde doesn't stop with hangovers.  The pesky little compound happens to be a known carcinogen.  It also damages DNA directly and has been found to boost the addictiveness of nicotine.  I'm all for mitigating its prevalence!

Of course you might say I'm being a bit too cautious by letting this sway my decision, but you still put that airlock on your primary.

Hennepin, Brewery Ommegang

Over four fifths of Americans and almost three quarters of Europeans live in cities.  In many ways these cities are mankind's crowning achievement.  The stark differences between nature and metropolis lead Agent Smith from the Matrix to deem humans not mammals.  But for some reason we look to rural life and pine for its simplicity.  It's easy to forget that we probably had good reasons to move out.  We picture a rural life that used to look like this,

Home made crepes with toasted walnuts and hazelnut spread.

when it really looks and probably has always looked more like this.

Broccoli omelette with cheese.  (At a restaurant.)

The point is, we connect rurality to high quality when quite often it's the other way around.  Now our image of the idyllic, wholesome countryside is not all in our heads.  There are places where it does exist, but it feeds off the productivity of city dwellers, either through sales or via the equipment that makes economies of scale in farming possible.  Today's beer is a saison, which is a style that lives in this idyllic countryside.  An alternative name for saison is farmhouse ale, referring to the agrarian Belgians that created it as a drink for summer and harvest days spent out working the fields.  However, to believe their farmhouse ales are the same as the ones we have today would require you to ascribe to the idea that people in the past were fundamentally different than those in the present.  I think it's the beer that's changed.  The beer I will be tasting was made in New York by Brewery Ommegang, not Belgium, but it'll represent the modern state of saison.  After all, Ommegang is owned by Moortgat, the Belgian makers of Duvel.  If it's good enough for Duvel, it's good enough for me!

Brewery Ommegang's Hennepin

First off, take a look at that glass.  Does that look like the kind of glass you have just sitting around in you knapsack while you cut wheat or detassel corn?  The aroma is incredibly complex.  The yeast produce bready notes and the lemony, fruity fragrances of Belgian beers.  For a field hand of any era, these smells are a far cry from those found in the bud lights of today's working man.  Time for the sip.  ...  Oh dear.  ... I don't think I can go back to work.  It's just so good.  The balance is masterful.  It's like a balsamic vinaigrette in that the flavors are intertwined, but don't completely blend together.  There's a sharp bite and a smooth maltiness but they don't counteract each other where they overlap.  Instead, you've got dueling sensations that meet more like a choreographed dance than a fight.  Think Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.  It'll take my entire lunch break to finish it and then I'll just want another.  Which leads to the next reason this can't be the original saison.  At 7.7% ABV this beer is definitely not sessionable.  I'm not going to down two or three of these and go back to work at full productivity.  No, the saison of old Belgium clocked in more around 3.5% or lower.  Finally there's the price.  Ten bucks a four pack is not exactly gonna get you picked up and taken to a work site.  So if the modern saison is a working man's beer, that working man is now a CPA or lawyer.  And that very well could be the case.  Only 2.6% of Belgians live in rural areas today.  Maybe that's why the style is so hoity toity.

But seriously, this is a really good beer.

Red Banshee, Fort Collins Brewery

Today's post is all about synesthesia.  Well, there's a little in here about unsolved mysteries too.  No, wait, it's about beer.  Totally all about beer.  I would never stray from the topic.  I came across an article in the Economist last night about a study which found people actually perceive sound when they smell and taste things.  We also sense flavors based on what we're listening to at the time.  So while we may not have latent telepathic abilities, we seem to have latent synesthetic ones.  Maybe that's why we can hear this.

We are so powerful!  Or crazy.

Some of you out there probably don't hear anything when you watch this gif.  Here's where I would explain why, but that's today's first unsolved mystery.  I couldn't find any explanation for this aural-optical sense blurring.  I'll just have to ask an expert sometime.  Moving on!

I thought I might try this out on my V8 juice and came up with some interesting sounds.  The first thing I heard was low double reeds, but bassoons have a clearer sound than vegetables so I figured some bass clarinets were involved to get that Miles Davis smoke-around-the-tone-center sound.  But what are they playing?  Maybe it's just the legato flavors talking here, but I'm hearing a Debussy flow.  Actually, I thinking specifically of Jack Horkheimer's Star Gazer show I use to see all the time on PBS.  That would probably be because the theme music is Arabesque no. 1 by Claude Debussy.  So ultimately V8 juice tastes a little like this video.

Anyway, this blog isn't about V8 juice.  It's about beer, and today I'm trying Fort Collins Brewery's Red Banshee.

At first I can't hear anything over the dark, roast chocolate, but the sounds show up eventually.  The Economist article mentioned that bitter flavors produce low pitches so I made a concerted effort to hear high notes out of basal skepticism, but it didn't work.  I have to say that Red Banshee is just like Princess Vespa in Spaceballs.  She's a bass.  But unlike the song the future Druish queen sings in her cell before being rescued by Lone Starr and Barf, this beer is in minor.  To be more precise, I would peg it as Phrygian.  If you had a music teaching ballsy enough to teach little kids a song about bears eating babies and girls getting hit by trains you might know the song Benjy Met The Bear.  That's Phrygian.  That's Red Banshee.  That sounds worse than it really is.  Phrygian provides you with all the minor tonalities but the lowered second imparts a sly aloofness, like it knows something and is toying with you.  Perhaps it does.  Before this beer took its name from an Irish omen of death, it was known as Retro Red.  And there's the other big unsolved mystery.  Why?  Did something terrible happen to the red wagon from the old label?  Is the beer in the witness protection program?  Did our malty yet bity Red Banshee used to be a Red BanHE?  If that's the case, you go girl!

Centennial IPA, Founders Brewing Company

When I was in sixth grade, I played for my school's basketball team.  Maybe that's why we lost every game that season.  Anyway, our last game of the year saw us pitted against a team that was way out of our league.  We couldn't get anything past them.  Finally, in the last four minutes when we knew we were gonna get creamed, our coach told us to forget about it and just have fun.  Those last four minutes were the best we played that entire year.  This story is more than just a real life example of a cheesy sports flick, its message of letting your hair down and enjoying yourself to succeed is mirrored in the makers of today's beer.  Founders Brewing Company was founded in 1997 by a pair of avid homebrewers who had recently graduated from college.  For some reason, they decided to make average beers.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe they thought they'd ease in to the better beer world.  Anyway, this wasn't working and they found themselves on the brink of bankruptcy.  It was at that point they chose to let loose and brew something they personally liked and the company took off.  Since then, Founders has consistently produced highly acclaimed beers and been ranked as one of the world's best breweries.  One of those beers is its Centennial IPA.

A word you hear thrown around beer reviews quite often is "citrus."  Citrus flavors like grapefruit can come from the yeast strain used or the hops.  Whenever it comes from hops though, the word is a little off.  We use it because it's the closest thing, like translating between different alphabets.  We refer to pre-revolutionary Russian rulers as tsars (Don't let anyone tell you it's czar.  They're liars!) because we don't know how to say цар.  We say citrus because we don't know how to say ____ (I can't type it for you because that would imply that we actually do know how to say ____).  I might describe ____ as eating a stick that's been rubbed with a lemon or if flowers were made out of vinegar.  Okay, maybe citrus is the best word after all, but the stick idea conveys the resiny quality.  This comes from the fact that hops contain resins.  Duh.  So I guess I'll label the aroma citrusy and sticky (as in the "What's brown and sticky?" joke).

Centennial IPA has a lot of reviews posted online already.  They run the gamut from a 240 pixel video of what appears to be an unenthused football fan who knows what he's talking about to an HD video of a woefully improper pour.  In one video, the reviewer doesn't like it because it's too malty for an IPA, but malty is not an adjective that immediately comes to mind.  It claims 65 IBUs and makes full use of every last one.  I'm actually surprised that Founders was able to build a grain bill large enough to support 7.2% ABV while maintaing such a strong bite from a relatively modest IBU score.  There is a very strong malt backbone, but it supports the hops, rather than trying to steal the limelight.  Maybe the store from which this guy bought his bottle had kept it for a long time, allowing the unfiltered beer to condition into a milder brew.  With the exception of this review, they were all very positive and justly so.  RateBeer gives it 99 out of 100 both in its style and overall.  BeerAdvocate gives it 92 from users and 99 from "The Bros."  Probably the most impressive endorsement is that it is often used as a benchmark for judges in contests.

Many reviewers pointed out that this beer doesn't taste as alcoholic as it is.  One even goes as far as to posit it as a session beer.  I am  convinced that  people use the term "session beer" far too often.  They sound like nerdy third graders that just learned the words equilateral, scalene and isosceles.  They don't normally talk about triangles so much, they just want to show off their big kid vocabulary.

It's a right triangle.

But even though that reviewer's use of the term "session beer" was unjustified, it illustrates how smooth this beer is.  Perhaps it tricks you into attributing some of the alcohol's bite to the hops.  However it does it, the result is a beer that's easy to drink.

The best part of all these reviews is that Centennial IPA is not the most highly rated beer from Founders.  That intrigues me more than when a friend from China told me that Kung Fu Hustle was Stephen Chow's worst movie.  What else is out there?

By the way, the punch line for the "What's brown and sticky?" joke is a stick.

Sunday School: Water

The search for life on Mars is a search for water.  Scientists can't wait to get under the icy outer layers of Europa to explore the oceans they believe to be there.  All life on our beloved blue planet would be impossible without the presence of the neutral, clear liquid.  Water is ubiquitous.  Anyone from anywhere in the world can go anywhere else and expect the people there to know what the stuff is and have some.  But water is not like its gaseous companion in the necessary-for-life business, air.  I would liken it to run-of-the-mill Chinese restaurants.  Any community with at least 2,000 residents has a Chinese restaurant.  Most of these restaurants are either buffets or take out with the same menu wherever you go.  You know the one I'm talking about, red font, categories by meat or noodle type, specials and family meals have a border, spicy dishes get an asterisk/pepper/bold...  But because these establishments are independent of each other, the food they produce varies from place to place.  Sometimes it's subtle and you don't catch it, but other times it's right in your face.  Did you know you can get philly cheesesteak egg rolls in the city of brotherly love?  You can go anywhere and expect people to know where to get Chinese food, but it's not all the same.

Welcome to the world of water chemistry!  Atoms are the building blocks of everything you see and many of the things you don't.  They bind together so tightly it seems like they'll never let go, but ultimately they are fickle creatures given the right setting.  Let's take a look at a sodium chloride molecule that has just moved into a watery neighborhood.

Na:  Chloride, we need to talk.

Cl:  What is it, hon?  Is something wrong?

Na:  I'm leaving.

Cl:  What do you mean?

Na:  I want dissolve this union.

Cl:  Is it Oxygen?  I knew it!  But she's so negative!

Na:  Like you're much better!  Ever since I met you, my blood pressure has been through the roof!

Cl:  What about our baby, Table Salt?  We made that together.  Are you just going to walk away from our baby?

Na:  No.

Cl:  You're taking it!?

Na:  Only what's mine.

Cl:  But that'll kill it!  We should have never moved here!

Na:  I'm leaving.

Cl:  Fine!  I'll just call up Hydrogen.  He's looking.

All this atomic home wrecking is rough business and produces hard water.  The harder the water, the darker the beer, but not always.  This is because the optimal ph for the mash is lower than many municipal water sources.  Maybe I should explain mash... Meh, I'll get to it some other time.  I will do ph, though.  The ph scale measures the acidity or basicity of a liquid with acidic at 1 and basic at 14.  The numbers come from the exponents in the measurements (scientific notation), hence the odd range.  Pure H2O would be completely neutral at 7.  Hard water has higher numbers while soft water has lower numbers.  Got it?  Good.  Anyway, the malts add acidity and dark malts add a lot of acidity.  That's why hard waters make good dark beers.  Using soft water for a dark beer or hard water for a light beer could leech unpleasant flavors from the grain or even kill the yeast.  That would be a zymurgency.  Ha!  Obscure brewing pun!

There's a lot more that goes in to water chemistry but I've laid out the basics (and acidics I guess) here.  Hope you find the information interesting, or even useful.  Happy drinking and happy brewing!

Dunkles Hefe Weizen, Tucher

Down with the 1%!  They are endangering us all with their recklessness!  The needs of the many should outweigh the needs of the few, not the other way around!  I wonder if that's how the 99 sheep felt when their shepherd left them to go after the one.  But really, what's up 1%?  Not cool.  I thought we were friends.

In reality, we are.  It just doesn't always look like it.  Today's beer is an example of something good the 1% has given us.  Weißbier.  The literal translation is "white beer, " which refers to the fact that its color was substantially lighter than other beers made at the time (pilsner didn't exist yet).  Before the advent of pale malt, this light color was achieved by using wheat in the grain bill.  But this beer comes from the birthplace of the reinheitsgebot, which stipulated only water, barley and hops were allowed.  How did it survive?  The 1%!  The royal family had a monopoly on wheat beer production at that time, so it weaseled itself into a nice little loophole granting it what basically amounted to a copyright on an entire style for a number of centuries.

Bavarian Fat Cat

Today's beer comes from Nuremberg, a city that was not originally in the kingdom of Bavaria until annexation in 1806, so it enjoyed a substantial period before it had to deal with legal smudging to get through the reinheitsgebot.  This is Tucher's Dunkles Hefe Weizen.

Weak head totally my fault.  Usually I'm a pro, I swear!

I had never had a dunkelweiss before, so the color really stood out to me.  I smell the banana bread about which I have so often read and it is quite enjoyable.  I'm generally not that in to wheat beers, but the addition of dark malts helps me be a fan.  It gives the brew a slight caramely flavor, just enough to intrigue you into the next sip.  The mouthfeel is pretty thin, letting the beer coat even the most obscure nooks and crannies before falling down your throat.  I'm glad it comes in a half liter bottle, because I would hate to drink just twelve ounces of it.

I don't know if anything good will come out of the shenanigans of the current 1%, if there are any shenanigans, but hopefully they'll find it in their wealthy little hearts to do a service to society on par with that of the Bavarian 1% in the 16th century.  If you're going to bend the law to make yourself money, at least do it in a classy manner, like your South German counterparts.  The history of wheat beer makes you rethink the term "king of beers."

Source Citing on a Blog

As I've been telling people about this blog, a few questions have arisen.  One such question was if you still need to cite your sources in a blog.  I haven't seen any blogs with bibliographies so I went with no, but the question reminded me of all those papers written over the years in school.  So much of your paper writing time is spent refreshing yourself on MLA or APA, picking one, realizing you've just done it all wrong and fixing every single citation.  But who are these acrostic grammarians and why do they battle?

What pleasant weather for a battle to the death!

The Modern Language Association was formed in 1883 to promote language and literature learning.  The American Psychological Association was formed in 1892 to advance psychology as a science.  Of course it makes sense that these two organizations are on equal footing when it comes to grammar, right?  The truth is, they don't really fight each other because they target different fields of study.  Also, they're not nearly the only ones out there.  Just two of many trying to be the authority in writing.  And by writing, I mean all of writing, not just citations.  For example, thanks to APA, I now know I should always use an em dash rather than an en dash to signify aposiopesis (when someone can't finish a sentence because they're too emotional).  This stuff matters.  I know what you're thinking, "matters to who?"  Well first off, don't you mean "matters to whom?"  Secondly, what about all those poor people who are now missing important members of their family simply because they forgot the comma in "Let's eat, Grandma!"  You may say that's silly but apparently disagreements in the importance of punctuation led to the bolshevik revolution.  Do you want to live under the repressive government of a failed socialist society?  I didn't think so.

By the way, the example I found of aposiopesis on wikipedia uses a quotation from Darth Vader.

Oh Darth, what did I say about ending sentences in prepositions?

...

...

...

Gasp!

Breath, breath!

Lord Vader is very nice man and his grammar is perfect!

Speaking of the dark side, there is a more ominous, depressing side to this whole citing sources thing.  That has to do with copyrights on images.  Apparently, there is next to nothing you can do to alter a copyrighted picture so that you're not breaking the law by posting it somewhere online.  How do reddit and imgur exist?  Maybe I should eventually go through my posts and replace all the pictures with originals once I have the skills and resources to do so.  Until then, I just have to hope the owners decide to be decent human beings and tell me to take the images down before going with legal action.

If I got sued for posting this, the irony would almost be worth it.

Eye of the Hawk, Mendocino Brewing Company

Today I'd like to take a moment to talk about where to invest your money.  All the recent hype centers around Facebook's upcoming IPO and its goal of raising $5 billion.  To justify this amount, the company will have to perform quite strongly in the years to come, prompting many observers to warn it is overvalued.  Of course this is to be expected.  A strong stock price is often coupled with a riskier investment, but just 180 miles north of Menlo Park is a strong performer you can count on.  Mendocino Brewing Company's Eye of the Hawk does very well on the taste bud market, which makes sense considering it's a strong ale.

Have you been working out?

My first experience with strong ale was in a cafe in Switzerland just down the street from the swiss army knife/chocolate shop (really, the top floor is all knives and the basement is all chocolate).  We stopped in to eat the chocolate we had just purchased, but I decided to add a beer to the moment.  I went with a Scottish strong and have ever since associated strong ales with Scotland.  Today, the term pretty much applies to any non-barleywine beer over 7% ABV, but the Scots hold a special place in the heart of the style if only for the fact they bothered to give it cool names rather than just "strong ale."  Names like 90/- (spoken ninety shilling) and Wee Heavy simply have a nice ring to them.  Eye of the Hawk may be brewed 7,000 miles away from the imagined home of its claimed style, but it sure captures to sharpness of England's northern neighbors.  Or at least the sharpness of Alex Salmond.

If you like your beer to have color, this is a good one for you.  Its red-orange tinge is not only good looking, but matches the feathers of the hawk on the label.  How nice!  Your nose warns you before taking a swig that this drink comes with a kick.  The flavor is decidedly malty with a sharpness of alcohol you can't escape.  However, that alcoholic bite does not hang around long enough to hurt you.  If it were a spice, it would be wasabi because it runs in, burns everything it touches and then is gone two seconds later.  Once it's gone, you don't know if you're relieved or sad.  A touch of hoppiness lingers in your mouth after you've swallowed your sip, a little reminiscent of the twigs that make up a bird's nest.  I would call this beer linearly complex, lending itself to pensive pauses for contemplation of the long term experience.

Ultimately, the goal of investing is to ensure a better life for yourself and your family.  If you put a lot of money into this Facebook IPO coming up, you could make it big or you could lose it all.  Investing it all in cases of beer from Mendocino Brewing Company might not make you any money, but it will ensure a better life.  Or maybe it will make you money.  I'm seeing an 8.0% printed on the bottle, which looks pretty good compared to a 1.84% return on ten year government bonds...

That's how it works, right?

Sunday School: Balance

Ah, the superbowl.  The most watched sporting event in the United States.  So much work has gone into making the party great.  Tortilla chips?  Check.  Guacamole?  Check.  Cheese dip?  Check.  Spinach Artichoke dip?  Check.  Hummus?  Check.  Vegetables?  Check.  Beer cheese soup?  Check.  Veggie dog pigs in a blanket?  Check.  Wine?  Check.  Friends who don't care about football and resent the fact that you're making them watch a game?  Check.  Beer Analogy?  Coming right up!

Today I'd like to discuss the concept of balance.  In beer, this is generally between malt flavors and hop flavors.  We're going to picture these two on the field with each drive representing a different beer.  The hops will be defense because they're bitter about not having the ball.  Bitter people are mean and everything they do is simply to spite the other side, like congress.  The malt will be offense because it carries the core of the drink to the finish.  Also, hops already took defense.  In this analogy, a Tebow style eighty yard touchdown pass would be a doppelbock while an also Tebow style three and out would be a DIPA.  Man, that guy needs to work on consistency.  Depending on your tastes, you're cheering for one team or the other, but you'd still like your opponents to put up a fight.  Blow outs are boring.

Isn't that right, Maximus?

What we like to see is a close game, something that excites us and gets our blood pumping.  We don't like quarterbacks that just throw or just pass off to the running back, we want a healthy mix.  Maybe even toss in a couple laterals or no huddles to catch the other guys off guard.  Sometimes try faking a kick.  That would be like a beer you think is done, but then hits you with a complex finish.  Likewise, a defense that forces a punt mid field is less interesting than one that stops the ball at the five yard line and then blocks the field goal.  Interceptions evoke some of the most fervent shouts of joy or despair of the game.  Beers are the same way.  If it's going to be super hoppy, it needs some body to back it up.  If you're using fifteen pounds of malt for a five gallon batch, you better have some strong hops.

Another aspect of balance as a football drive is the concept's scalability.  Beer from mega breweries isn't bad necessarily because it's unbalanced.  It could be perfectly balanced and still just be too small, like an evenly matched JFL game.  Imperial stouts and barley wines would then be NFL post season games with most other beers falling in the season games or college leagues (which are much more popular to many people).  If you measured beer by volume, most of it would be bland, small brews, just like there are thousands of high school games but only one superbowl.  Who knew football was so beery?  Sorry Tebow.

You really should try the stuff.

Old Brown Dog Ale, Smuttynose Brewing Company

The first batch of beer I brewed without the convenience of a kit was a brown ale.  I measured out all my own ingredients and cracked all the grain (the first appearance of that wretched rolling pin).  Everything went well and I tucked it away in a corner of the dining room (the basement was too cold).  After a few a few days I realized that we had done something wrong.  The recipe called for grain and malt extract but the extract amounts were to be used in place of the grain.  We had just concocted an imperial brown ale.  Now, if you know beer, that sounds about as silly as a souped up Carola.  The beer was too much for most people who tried it.  This story has nothing to do with Smuttynose Brewery’s Old Brown Dog Ale, but I thought I’d share anyway.

Whenever you order fried eggs or steak in a restaurant and they ask you how you want it, you can’t be honest.  If you say over easy or medium rare, your food will be practically raw.  If you want over easy or medium rare, you have to order over hard or medium.  The same is true with American beer styles.  You can often find the hoppiness of a mild IPA in a pale ale and a craving for a brown ale’s maltiness might require you to go with a bock.  This is because Americanizing a style often means simply increasing the hops and/or alcohol content.  Kind of like adding cayenne pepper to a dish automatically makes it Cajun, adding extra hops to a beer makes it American.  Probably the only difference between “Cajun” food and American beer styles is that micro breweries in the U.S. consistently churn out good products. Today I try one such Americanization of an old English variety.

                             

This beer is a clear example of an “American” brown ale.  My initial reaction is, “Why is this so crisp?  It should be maltier.”  This however is an illusion.  The malts are there and they are wonderful.  Also, the IBUs come in at a mere 15.  Perhaps that crispness has more to do with the relatively high, for brown ale, ABV.  The grain bill for Old Brown Dog Ale includes three different specialty malts, imparting a certain level of complexity.  The chocolate notes in particular linger in the back of your mouth long after you take a drink.  Even if you don’t consciously take note of it, the interplay between the 80L crystal, chocolate and Munich malts intrigue you and pull you in.  I wonder what brown ale tasted like before the switch to pale base malts.  It must have been boring.

                                     

I started the glass thinking I’d have to follow it with a bock to get my sweet fix but by the time it was gone I felt quite satisfied.  When your first impression of something is blatantly wrong, you enjoy it even more once you find its true character because it required a tiny act of mind over matter.  With mere thoughts you were able to triumph over the base senses.  This is why acquired tastes are often the best, or why we get so excited about clever puns.  Like the one near the end of Sufjan Steven’s “Decatur.” I bet you can't find it!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpdL2DLshf4

You have all been challenged.

Doggie Style, Flying Dog Brewery

Pale ale is a term that encompasses multiple styles.  There’s bitter, best bitter, ESB, amber ale, red ale, IPA, etc.  But there’s also pale ale, kind of like how there’s a denomination of Christianity called Christian.  That style is all about keeping it real.  Well, real to someone else.

The water in Burton upon Trent is really hard because of large gypsum deposits in the area.  This is good because no matter how much a brand might tout its super fresh water, H2O in its theoretical purist form would be unsuitable for beer making.  That’s right, just like electrolysis, brewing needs a little gunk in the water.  Furthermore, the chemical signature of the water affects what styles work the best.  For example, as alkalinity rises, so does the darkness of the ideal beer style because more thoroughly roasted malts impart greater acidity to the brew.  The specific chemical composition of the water in Burton upon Trent is perfect for pale ales because the high level of sulfates allow for more hops to be added without causing astringency  This lead to the city dominating the market for several decades until a chemist isolated the helpful minerals so that anyone could “burtonise” their water.  Now you can treat your water to make whatever beer you’d like.

                             

Of course the United States is all about making its own version of everything so in the 80s microbreweries across the superpower began releasing American pale ales (APAs).  Really, the only thing they changed was to use American hops and more of them, taking the style right up to the door step of IPA.  American micros like to be ballsy.  This works for them well but can sometime bite them.  Today’s beer, Flying Dog Brewery’s Doggie Style Classic Pale Ale is a brew that looks ballsier than it really is, saving it from that bite.

                            

I have to say this beer reminded me of the old adage, “never judge a book by its cover.”  From the name and label, I was kind of expecting to be underwhelmed by an unbalanced frankenbeer.  So when it did in fact whelm me, it was a bit of a surprise.  The color is reminiscent of a Bass (the beer, not the fish, or the instrument, or the alternate term for vascular plant tissue) and bubbles are coming out of the woodwork (er... glasswork?).  The flavor is very crisp with with modest but clear citrus.  The mouthfeel makes me think I’m drinking pop but without the body-being-eaten-away-from-the-inside-out sensation.  I find myself very thankful to whoever decided to Americanise pale ale because hops are great and it’s nice to know you can get a little bite without having to go all in with an IPA.

I know I don’t use a scale for this blog but I feel one is in order for Doggie Style.  So on a scale from one to a TED conference after party, this is definitely a bucket of fresh picked strawberries.

So sweet!

Taddy Porter, Samuel Smith's Brewery

I'm babysitting my niece right now, so I've taken the show on the road. I packed up the next few beers and a glass and jumped onto the highway. Speaking of which, if you pass semis on the right, stop it. That is extremely dangerous. I see you.

I don't want to see you die.

Moving on to happy things, how about some beer history?  Porter emerged from the family of brown ales in the early to mid 18th century.  Some claim it was created to approximate a popular drink that was a mixture of three different beers, but there doesn’t seem to be definitive proof of that.  It was originally made with brown malts until the hydrometer was incorporated into brewing.  I should explain that.  Step into my office.

The hydrometer is a device that

measures the specific gravity, or density, of a liquid. The earliest accounts

of the device date back to the

early 5th century.  Common uses

are to measure the amount of

fermentable sugars in a batch of

beer, check the freezing point of

antifreeze and measure the

water to waste ratio in urine.  No

worries though, we each have our own. No sharing.

These measurements gave brewers their first look at the efficiencies of malts and the brown varieties did not do very well.  Producers switched to the more efficient pale malt and relied on burnt sugar to maintain the color until adjuncts were outlawed in Britain.  Thankfully, around that time Black Patent malt was invented, enabling brewers to darken their beers legally.  This basic grain bill is the one used for Porter to this very day.  That said, time to move on to today’s beer.  Samuel Smith’s Taddy Porter.

                                     

Quite often the diminutive is used to express endearment.  Spanish makes this clear with names.  Take a name like Gustavo.  If I make it Gustavito, it means both “little Gustavo” or “love Gustavo.”  This connection is less evident in English, but still exists.  Calling this beer Taddy Porter, after its hometown of Tadcaster, is probably the best way to describe its flavor.  It strikes you as such a sweet, well adjusted beer that couldn’t hurt a fly.  With that head, so creamy and orderly.  The mouthfeel that reminds you all over again what smooth feels like.  The rich maltiness that just plain makes you happy. If beers wore clothes, Taddy Porter would sport an argyle sweater vest and glasses.  Girls would fawn over how “cute” it was.  But this beer isn’t an adorable little baby, it’s an adorable master of the craft.  Taddy Porter is a classic and knows it.  This beer doesn’t need to prove itself by adding extra hops or ramping up its alcohol content.  Samuel Smith sells this stuff by creating a brew with which everyone can identify.  This is truly the working man’s beer.

                                     
Maybe if you had a better tool, you wouldn't have to work so hard.

It is important to remember how closely porter is related to stout.  Stout actually started out as the stronger end of the porter spectrum.  So it is possible to think of porter as a mild stout, which is great considering the problem anyone ever has with a stout is that it’s too in-your-face.  The moral of the story is, you like this beer.