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in the purported "finer things" in life, I pulled out a snifter and put it to use on a drink closer to what it was originally made for.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.