Get Your Coat Love

I have said it plenty of times on here as well as my various socials, I am an abysmal beer tourist. You see, I have this tendency to find a place that I like, that does the kind of beer I like, and I am then a happy camper and a loyal customer. Nearly two years ago I got my act together to visit a few local Charlottesville area breweries that I had heard glowing reviews of, including Selvedge Brewing in their old Woolen Mills location.

The driving force behind that first visit was that they had recently hired a new brewer, who had previously worked at Champion Brewing (remember them?) and was a fellow fan of central European lagers. Naturally then, Josh and I talked at length that visit about decoction mashing, extended lagering, and the joys of doing things the old school way. Oh, and the beer was good too. That first beer was their Oktoberfest style beer, Tracht, and it became a regular tipple that autumn, as did the first iteration of their Munich Dunkel, Tweed.

About a year ago, I think, Josh mentioned to me that Selvedge would be moving to the other side of Charlottesville, to a venue in Ivy, and that they would be shut over a chunk of the winter and early spring. When they opened the new spot a couple of months ago, I knew I would be getting over there on opening weekend, that had after all put an ordinary bitter on their new beer engine - yes you read that right, a central Virginia brewery with a functioning, and being used, beer engine!! Speaking of dispense methods, the majority of the taps are standard flow control faucets, while they also have a pair of Lukr taps.

Since they re-opened, Selvedge has become a regular haunt of mine, especially as Josh is now able to do decoction mashing on his central European lagers, the first being Loden, his recent Vienna Lager...

Just look at the glorious pint, topped with a veritable fountain of foam! Oh and willibechers are my favourite glass by a country mile. Not only did it 100% look the part of a classic 100% Vienna malt lager, it tasted on the money as well, redolent with toasted malt and a lovely spicy Saaz finish that made it simply moreish, and more and more and more. Simply put, it was delicious, and my go to pint for as long as it was available.

From time to time though I would change things up a little, with their Italian pilsner above, Poplin, or sometimes more of the dunkel, or maybe even the remnants of the ordinary bitter, Houndstooth, served through the Lukr tap - serving top fermented beers through a Lukr tap is becoming something of a thing in Central Virginia, with Decipher Brewing also pouring their 80/- through it now as well.

It was then, with no little excitement that last Friday came around. A few weeks back Josh did a double decoction with Moravian malt, chucked some Bohemian hops into the boil, and even got hands on the lauded H strain of yeast from Pilsner Urquell to make Coat Czech, his version of a 12° světlý ležák (pale lager to you). Josh was recently in Czechia, visiting many of the best pubs and breweries in both Prague and Plzeň - I may have given him several pointers - and this beer was the outcome of drinking in the home of great pale lagers.

Straight from the Lukr tap, in the hladinka style pour - while I have your attention, please, please, please can we stop bastardising the Czech language by asking for multiple hladinkas? Hladinka is singular, hladinky is plural for between 2 and 4, and if I remember my grammar correctly, more than 5 would be hladinek. Facts matter people.

Anyway, what a storming, storming 12° Coat Czech is. 4.8%, 40 IBUs, this is the most on the money Czech style pale lager I have had since getting back from my last trip to Prague. All of that Saaziness is there, lemongrass, a spiciness that initially had me thinking cinnamon, but also perhaps a kind of coriander thing, but maybe that is the lemoniness messing with my head. Oh and it's bitter, proper bitter, like proper beer should be, bracing without being overpowering, I could happily drink this beer all day, every day, and that would stand if I were in Czechia with all the options available there. Yes, it is that good.

I think I was on my third, and chatting to Josh at the bar, when I commented that it reminded me most of the gorgeous 12° at Únětický Pivovar, to which Josh responded with "that's because that was the inspiration". Inspired, for sure.

As long as it is on tap, I know exactly what I will be drinking for the next few weekends, and if it is still on tap when it is time to head for the annual holiday in Florida, then I might just load on crowlers too.

Of Bostonian Beer...

 A couple of weeks ago I was up in Boston for a work related conference. Having only ever been to the city for a few hours previously, to visit the aquarium with friends and our kids, I hadn't really had much chance to sample the various beery delights that the city has to offer. With a total of four nights in the city, sans famille, I drew up a list of places that I definitely wanted to try, and if you've followed Fuggled long enough you will know that list was dominated by the lager brewers of the world.

One of the things about going to conferences though, especially when several of your vendors are also at the event, is that it can be tricky to find some time to yourself in order to sit with a beer or three and just chill out. Due to the vagaries of flight timetables and conference workshops I wanted to attend, I actually ended up in Boston the evening before the conference started. Having checked into my hotel in the Seaport area of the city, I headed to the first place on the list to visit, Notch Brewing in Brighton.

I've enjoyed several Notch beers in the last few years, but never had the opportunity to get to one of their two venues, and I chose Brighton simply because it was way cheaper than Salem to get to. Having been dropped off by my Uber driver and wandered past the trellis tables and benches in the courtyard, I already knew which beer would be my first, their 10° Czech style pale lager...

What a thing of absolute beauty eh? Obviously poured from a Lukr tap, and while I get pissy with the whole "traditional" and "proper" nonsense that gets spouted about Lukr taps, as if the 50 odd years since the original side pull taps were ripped out in a fit of "modernity" never happened, beer poured this way is a delight. So naturally I had several, and didn't take notes. With a fair few desítky happily sloshing around in my system, it was time to jump across the border to Germany.

I was gutted earlier this year that Port City decided not to release their Franconian Kellerbier, but Notch's version of the same style, monikered Ungespundet, more than made up for that. Loads of beautiful crusty bread, spicy hops, and a lingering clean, crisp finish, this was another stellar beer, and at only 4.5% abv, it is the kind of beer that I could happily just sit and down all night long, but I needed to head to the dark side before closing time.

Whilst not exactly rare back in Czechia, a 12° tmavé is always a nice sessionable treat as opposed to the heavily, and more common 14°. It hits many of the same high notes as its stronger variants, well toasted rustic bread, without tipping over into the world of burnt toast, a very pleasant dry finish, and just plain tasty. All it all it rounded out a wonderful session, enjoying the more temperate weather of Massachusetts when compared to Virginia, where the joys of the hot humid summer are already making themselves known.

As I was researching breweries and pubs I wanted to visit while I was in Boston, somehow I had overlooked the fact that right behind my hotel was the Fort Point location of Trillium Brewing. When I perused their beer menu online, I noted that they had an eponymous Pilsner, brewed in the German style rather than the Czech, so naturally when I popped in after a company dinner on the first night of the conference itself, my choice was easy.

At 4.7% it is a touch lower in alcohol than many other German style pilsner, but it more than made up for it in the aroma and flavour departments, with a lovely floral hop aroma and crackery dry malt finish that just insists on another, and another, and ok then another. What I hadn't noticed, tucked away on the opposite side of the menu was a helles lager called Central Artery.

This is the beer that had me coming back to Trillium each night I was in Boston, it was just the perfect helles lager, and as I have mentioned before, poroper lager isn't fizzy and this was far from being a sea of bubbles. As a counterpoint to the crackery dryness of the Pilsner, Central Artery has a pillowy soft maltiness that put in my mind of a lightly toasted biscuit/savory scone, finished with a firm, though unobtrusive clean hop bite, that makes helles one of my favourite styles - make a good helles and you have a fan for life in me.

Talking of making a good helles, I enjoyed several pints of "Worker's Pint" helles at Democracy Brewing over dinner one night, though didn't take any pictures, come on folks, I was at dinner with clients and taking pictures of your booze really isn't a good look in that context. The beer itself though was very nice.

It was just a flying visit for work, so I couldn't really go deep into the breweries in Boston, but just skimming the surface has me keeping an eye out for future conferences that are relevant so I can get back and try more, and finish every evening again at Trillium over pints of Central Artery.

Best Beer Ever!

Shock, horror, a new post at Fuggled!

Yes, it has been a while, but mitigating circumstances, I have been heads down writing my first book, which is due out in the autumn hopefully, oh and building A.I. type tools in my day job - yeah, it's been busy.

Just before things went a little wild though, I found time to brew a beer for my new fermentation and lagering chamber - yes, sir, I bought a small chest freezer and temperature control to allow me to brew lagers whenever I felt like it. It also means that I can now lager outside of my kegerator, so while I have a lager going in the in the freezer, I can have quicker to make top fermented beers on tap.

Anyway, that beer that I brewed for the first run of the lagering chamber was a Vienna lager. It was a very simple recipe, a SMaSH Vienna as I used just Murphy & Rude Vienna malt and Tettnang hops, the yeast was Wyeast 2308 - Munich Lager, oh and I made no changes to my water at all, because I never do - not even when this weekend I brew my first double decoction Czech style 10° pale lager.

The Vienna was my first double decoction brewday, and thankfully I hit my target gravity of 13° right on the nail. Sure, my calculated IBUs were a tad high at 32, but I wasn't all that bothered by that fact. Eventually, after 14 days in primary, 2 days for a diacetyl rest, 28 days lagering, and 7 additional days being gently carbonated, I got this delight:

And delightful it certainly was, given how quickly it flew out the tap. I didn't take any detailed notes, but my first beer after the keg kicked was Olde Mecklenburg's superb Munzler's Vienna Lager, and it was pretty similar, so was happy. It was definitely the best lager I have ever brewed at home, and would probably be somewhere in my top 3.

Of course, if I have a great brewday this weekend with my desítka, who knows where things will stand...

Homebrew - Cheaper than the Pub?

The price of beer has been on my mind a fair bit lately.

At the weekend I kicked my first keg of homebrew for the 2024, a 5.1% amber kellerbier that I brewed on New Years Eve. The recipe was nothing spectacular:

• 6.5lb Murphy & Rude Vienna malt
• 3.5lb Murphy & Rude Munich 9 malt
• 0.5oz Magnum
• 2oz Saaz
• 1oz Hallertauer Mittelfrüh
• 2 packets Saflager 34/70

If anything were out of the ordinary about this beer, it was that it marked the first time I did a decoction mash. The beer that eventually came out of the tap was lovely, and looked like this:

Admittedly I was somewhat gutted that it had kicked so quickly as it was a lovely, lovely beer, still I am planning my next brew of it, especially as I finally caved and bought a chest freezer to set up as a fermentation and lagering chamber.

As I said though, the price of beer has been on my mind. Part of me was a little confused as to why the keg kicked so quickly, after all a 5 gallon keg is supposed to be about 40 pints. Yes, when I filled the keg, I think there was only 4.5 US gallons in the keg itself, which is 17 litres for the cool, modern, kids using metric, even with a 10% wastage factored in, that would be about 35 beers. It was then I had a brain wave and remembered that by far and away I do most of my drinking from half litre glasses like the Tübinger mug in the picture, so maintaining 10% wastage, we are down to 31 half litres, but if I actually fill my keg with 5 gallons/19 litres, with wastage it becomes 34 half litres, or 36 US pints.

If I were to drink 36 US pints at current standard prices in the Charlottesville area, that would be $252 for a full keg, but with only 4.5 gallons in the keg, it becomes $230. I decided then to calculate how much said beer cost to make, and it break down something like this:

• grist: $25.84
• hops: $12.22
• yeast: $17.98
• total: $56.04

My water is free as I have a well, but if I include that at the rate of $1.30 for a gallon of Walmart bottled water, I used 8 gallons for a total of $10.72, making our ingredient total $66.76, or $2.15 per half litre of beer. Now, it would be completely disingenuous of me to say my beer only cost $2.15, as I haven't included costs for labour and buildings, etc.

My single decoction brewday for this beer consumed about 7 hours of my time, so if I calculate that at $14.30 per hour as the lowest hourly rate for a brewer in Virginia. Apparently the average in Virginia for a professional brewer is $18.25 per hour. My keg has now cost me an additional $100, so we are at $166.76. Brewing the beer though is not my only labour here, I also have to serve it to myself and my friends. So let's say at a party, a 5 gallon keg of beer kicks in about 3.5 hours - based on my experience of providing kegs to parties - at the minimum wage for Virginia tipped employees of $12 per hour, that would add $42, so we're at $208.76 for brewing and serving a 5 gallon keg of a fairly standard beer. I haven't even factored in rent for my few square feet of garage where I do my brewing and store the product while it is fermenting, but let's call that $10 a month based on the size of my house and my mortgage, with bills chucked in there too. So now my keg has cost $218.76 to brew, store, and serve. If I get a full 34 half litres out of that, we are at $6.43 per half litre.

Thankfully, I don't have to pay myself to make beer, neither do I pay myself to serve the beer, and so the real cost for a half litre of my own beer at home is about $2. One thing though that is really clear to me from this little exercise is that ingredients are not the bulk of the cost of making the beer, it is a the people, equipment, and place to do so. Obviously I am also not able to take advantage of the economies of scale that a commercial brewer (sorry idealogues, if your favourite beer is made by a company that does so for a living it IS a commercial brewery), especially when it comes to non-linear increases such as the ingredients, and don't forget to factor in that a single decoction brewday in my garage takes about as long as a single decoction brewday at a professional brewery with the appropriate kit. 

It is ultimately scale that makes such comparisons effectively futile.

Is it enough to make me give up brewing my own beer because what is the point in saving less than a dollar a pint? Not in the slightest, because here in the real world it is a hobby where I just so happen to make beers that I really enjoy brewing, drinking, and sharing with friends. I also feel that reducing the hobby down to just the financials is to lose sight of why I brew - to have on tap beers most US breweries don't touch with a ten foot barge pole, the creative urge to develop and improve recipes, and when you live in a place where the absence of walkable pubs is stark, being able to have a draft beer whenever you feel like it - is to miss the point at the end of the day.

A Loss for Virginia

The Virginia brewing scene is a poorer place today.

Do we still have around 350 breweries in a state with a population of 8.6 million, giving us a brewery for approximately every 24,000 people? Yes we do. Can you go in pretty much any decent sized store and get beer brewed in Virginia? Yes you can.

Still, the Virginia brewing scene is a poorer place today.

"Why?" I hear you ask...

Yesterday, Josh Chapman, owner and brewer at Black Narrows Brewing on Chincoteague Island announced that they have decided to close their doors - their final weekend in operation will be February 16-18th. You may, or may not, know that I wrote a profile of Josh and his brewery for Pellicle just last year.  It was also just last year that their magnificent malted corn lager "How Bout It" was awarded a Good Food Award - the corn in the lager being an heirloom variety, grown on the Eastern Shore, malted by Murphy & Rude in Charlottesville, and fermented with a yeast strain derived from a Chincoteague oyster. Beer does not get much more local than that.

My few hours on Chincoteague with Josh was a shot in the arm for me. Here was someone making beer in ways that deeply resonated with me, on equipment that wasn't state of the art, in a manner that seemed to encapsulate the early pioneers of craft beer. Josh's hops were mostly from the Eastern Shore, he only used Murphy & Rude malt, which is all made from Virginia grown barley, he did interesting things, like using pine needles, oyster liquor, and eelgrass in his beer. He supported his community by taking what they could offer, and returning it to them in the form of insanely tasty beer.

Black Narrows was a local brewery in perhaps the purest sense of the word.

In announcing the closure, Josh noted that "we watched our ingredients, equipment and labor costs increase. It was all too much". In the end, the finances of being a hyper local, community supporting brewery just couldn't sustain the business, when I interviewed Jasper Akerboom noted that "If you start a brewery, you are not going to get very wealthy". Prescient words perhaps.

Thankfully, the beer scene on the broader Delmarva Peninsula is not losing Josh entirely, and there is something new in works, and when it opens you bet your life I'll be trekking up past northern Virginia to get there - and how much I hope the corn lager will be part of this new adventure.

I am not generally a sentimental person when it comes to the business of brewing, but when it came to Black Narrows, I genuinely wanted them to succeed and thrive as their vision of what local, community, brewing means is something I can readily sign up for, where a company is not just a local brewery, but a brewery for locals.

Dark Thoughts Abound

Tmavé, the Czech style dark lager, has been on my mind a lot recently.

Not just because Morana is available at Devils Backbone Basecamp at the moment, I don't believe it is on at either of their other locations, Outpost in Lexington or Back Yard in Charlottesville, but hopefully it will be at some point. Also not just because I am planning to brew my own version of Morana, that I call Černý Lev (that's Black Lion for the non-Czech speakers), at some point in the nearish future as I have started doing decoction mashes with my homebrew. These two facts though are related to my pondering...but first a quick jaunt back in time, to last November.

I went back to Prague, which you probably know as I posted about some of the beers and pubs I went to, but I didn't write about every pub or even every beer I had in the pubs I did write about. While I did write about the perfect session at Hostomická Nelevarna, I didn't mention that I had a couple of half litres of Hostomice's delightful Fabián Tmavý 14°. To my mind it is one of the best dark lagers being brewed in Czechia today and certainly one of my favourites. As my group of friends and I discussed the finer points of Czech beer in general, it was mentioned that Fabián Tmavý is not a classic Czech dark lager, because the proportions of Pilsner and Munich malt are reversed.

In my homebrew version of Morana, which is basically the same other than using CaraMunich I rather than CaraBohemian, which I can't see to find in any of the online homebrew stores, the grain bill is:

• 74% Bohemian Pilsner
• 11% Munich
• 11% CaraMunich I
• 4% Carafa III Special

Initially, I was shocked at the idea of using so much Munich malt in a tmavé, but also deeply intrigued by how such a beer would turn out. I imagine it would be richer, with a deep malt character, a more intense breadiness, and would probably take an extra wallop of hops to give the balance I would expect. As I was pondering, and reading the Pivovar Hostomice description of Fabián Tmavý, a phrase jumped out at me, that I think I probably just glossed over previously, "Tmavé speciální pivo bavorského typu", which translates as "special dark beer, of the Bavarian type". The description continues...

"K výrobě tohoto speciálu bylo použito čtyř druhů sladů, což zaručuje plnou, výrazně sladovou, chuť a však bez sladkého doznívání většiny českých, tmavých, piv. Toto pivo je nečekaně výrazně chmelenoa výrazná hořkost udílí tomuto pivu nečekanou pitelnost. Tmavé pivo, které Vás překvapí."

Which translates as:

"Four types of malt were used to produce this special, which guarantees a full, distinctly malty taste, but without the sweet aftertaste of most Czech dark beers. This beer is unexpectedly very hoppy and the strong bitterness gives this beer an unexpected drinkability. A dark beer that will surprise you."

So, we still have the 4 types of malt, just with more Munich than Pilsner from what I was told, and big dose of hoppiness and bitterness to make the beer more drinkable. For reference, Morana has about 25 IBUs. I decided to create a new recipe for Černý Lev, taking into account the markers laid down by Hostomice, so here goes:

• 70% Munich
• 15% Bohemian Pilsner
• 10% CaraMunich I
• 5% Carafa III Special
• 25 IBUs Saaz for 60 minutes
• 13 IBUs Saaz for 30 minutes
• 2 IBUs Saaz for 5 minutes
• Saflager 34/70 Yeast

My aim would be to keep to 14°, as that seems to be the sweet spot of the modern tmavé, including the direct inspiration for Morana - the much missed Kout na Šumavě.

There is, however, a question that keeps pottering through my mind, and I am being vaguely cynical with this question. As I plan to get back into entering homebrew competitions this year, do I enter this particular beer in the Czech dark lager category or do I take my lead from Hostomice and enter it as a Munich Dunkel, given the phrase that this is a dark beer "of the Bavarian type"? 

Rauchbier Revival?

Tis January, so 2 things must be true, I am taking the month off the booze, and I am diving into the Austrian National Library's online newspaper archives looking at the sometimes weird, but often wonderful world of brewing in Central Europe prior to World War 1.

I really don't take a structured approach to my, ahem, "research", usually preferring to just to enter a keyword or phrase, select the publication I want to look at, and start scanning through images. Just a side note, I find these kind of publications so enlightening about the brewing, and broader, world at the time, as opposed to reading technical brewing treatises. In particular I love trade ads in journals like Der Böhmisches Bierbrauer, Gambrinus Brauerei und Hopfen Zeitung, or Saazer Hopfenzeitung und Lokaler Anzeiger as they give you a picture of the ingredients, machinery, and assorted allied products being made and sold in Central Europe.

Anyway, purely on a whim, I decided to see what I would get if I typed "rauch" into the advanced search, pre-filtering to Der Böhmisches Bierbrauer. There were 115 results returned, and so I decided to sort further by searching on "rauchbier" specifically, which gave me this single result from October 26th 1909:

The headline in bold there declares there is a "Re-emergence of "self-malting"", going on, quoting an article from Bamberg in the "Allgemeine Anzeige für Brauer und Mälzer" which, assuming the translation is reasonable accurate goes on to say:

"The depressed situation of the small breweries is now leading them to return to the old arrangement of malting themselves. Over the years, people have gotten used to getting the malt ready from the malt factory. Today's cheap (?) barley price offers the hand for a return to the old system and so the old Bavarian smoked beer will soon appear again. Whether this will prove successful remains to be seen in the future."

If this report is correct, smaller breweries in Bavaria were going back to malting their own grains because the cost of the raw materials was sufficiently low to make this economical again, rather than buying their malt from the likes of Weyermann, whose maltings is massive pile right next to the railway station in Bamberg.

What jumped out most to me though was that the relative low cost of barley could lead to the return of "the old Bavarian smoked beer". This raises the question then, did rauchbier die out in Bavaria in the latter 19th century and only revive when breweries starting taking back the ability to make their own malt, as, for example, Schlenkerla continue to do so to this day?

Another question this raises is, were malting companies such as Weyermann not providing rauchmalz and thus the beer died out? Was there customer demand for rauchbier to the extent that any other malting company at the time was providing rauchmalz?

As ever, more questions than answers at this point, but if we can take this report at face value, it looks possible that rauchbier as we know it today could so easily have gone the way of grodziskie, broyhan, and Braunschweiger mumme, but for the alleged fact that barley was cheap in the years running up to World War 1.