Sterling Job!

Two of my favourite things right now involve the world 'sterling'.

First up is Raheem Sterling, who plays for Liverpool, and has had an outstanding season terrorising many a defence in the Premier League. The other is called 'Of. By. For.', the latest beer from Three Notch'd Brewing.

'Of. By. For.' is one of those beers that I always insist on trying, but always dread, an American made pilsner. If you've followed my witterings for any reasonable amount of time, you will know that I go on ad nauseum about my love of pilsner, and how it is so difficult to find well made representations of the style on this side of the Pond. Thus it was that I lurched up to the brewery on Friday after work, a man on a mission...

To perfectly honest I don't remember much about those first pints, they slipped down so easily, and I was in something of a dash to get home. On Saturday afternoon Mrs V and I were in town, running errands, when she commented that she 'fancied a drink'...well, we were in the neighbourhood anyway, and the football was on, oh and Derek was there, so a couple of hours, and 6 pints, later I knew I had fallen in zythophilic love with Dave's latest offering.

As you can see from the picture, it pours the perfect wan golden that is expected of such a beer in the Czech Republic, with a slight haze, and a voluminous pure white head, oh I was transported back to the beer halls of Prague, Plzeň, and Brno. The aroma was laden with lemon blossom, freshly mown grass, and that cracker graininess that pilsner malt delivers. Given that Sterling has a healthy stock of Saaz its heritage it was very much in the ballpark I was expecting. But what about the important bit, the drinking itself, it was lovely. Dry without being thin, zingy without being overly bitter, and packed, I say packed, with hop flavour. If there is one criticism, it is that at 5.6% it is a touch boozy, but it is incredibly moreish so you can happily banish that particular thought.

I see many pints of this wonder in my future....many pints, and not infrequent litres.

Rolling Back the Years

A few weeks ago, as you may recall, I spent a very pleasant Friday at the Blue Mountain Brewery brewing an iteration of a beer style that is all but dead. Once upon a time, Burton Ale was popular enough to be lauded as one of the four types of beer being brewed by British breweries. Today you may as well go looking for the faerie folk as try to get a Burton Ale in your watering hole of choice. Unless of course, your watering of choice is Blue Mountain Brewery this Friday.

Friday sees the release of Sensible Mole, our recreation of Courage Brewery's KKK from 1923, and named for a scene in The Wind in the Willows. While it is one thing to take a historical recipe and re-brew it, the question remains, is this how it would have tasted? Unless you happen to have someone for whom Burton Ale was a regular part of their drinking life around, it's difficult to answer with much real confidence. However, looking at the numbers involved in the brewing, and a knowledge of how the beer was made, can give us some pointers. Let's start with some numbers:

• Original Gravity: 18° Plato
• Terminal Gravity: 6° Plato
• Alcohol by Volume: 6.5%

6° Plato is a very high finishing gravity for an 18° beer. Usually beers of that strength attenuate out in the range of 8-8.5%, so we have a lot more residual sugar to give the beer sweetness and body. Expect then a beer than has a thick, full mouthfeel, and plenty of lovely malt sweetness, which is just as well, considering the following number:

• IBUs: 102

102 IBUs, or about 3lbs of hops to the barrel, is seriously, seriously bitter. If you remember from the post I wrote about the brewday itself, most of the hops went into the boil right at the beginning. The dominant hop in the beer is one of my favourites, Goldings, so don't go expecting the grapefruit and pine resin thing of 'hoppy' beers in the American context to be the dominant feature, think Seville oranges and great hefty dollops of spice. We also used Goldings for the dry hopping, so again expect a thoroughly British aroma to the beer, more spiced marmelade is the order of the day. The original recipe called for Cluster for the 30 minute addition, but we had to substitute that out for Nugget, so expect some floral characteristics from that, and maybe a trace of grapefruit. The combination of Goldings and Nugget has me thinking of taking wildflower honey and mixing it with your favourite thick cut Seville orange marmelade....yum. But don't forget the bitterness, it'll be there in abundance.

To quote Kristen England on his version of this recipe:

Big, dark, and hoppy as hell. Herbal hops, spicy endive, cedar, hints of grapefruit and sweet lady fingers flow into a rippingly tannic, crisp finish. A nourishing British, hop-centric, cracking pint for all you 'op 'eads from days gone by.'

Sensible Mole promises to be a beer unlike anything I have ever tried over here, and I for one am very much looking forward to a glass or two come Friday.

Speaking My Language

Just a moment ago, Melissa Cole tweeted about some comments Garret Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery made on a post over at The BeerCast.

Naturally I popped on over and read the original article, which is interesting reading in it's own right, but Garret's comments almost had me shouting 'amen' at the top of my voice, and so I reproduce the entire comment here for liked minded souls' edification, and I encourage you to read the original article as well:

Whoa. I must admit that although I’ve spent a lot of time drinking craft beer in the UK the past few years (and 20+ years before that), I have never heard of Brewmeister. Nor have I tasted their beer or knowingly spoken to anyone who works for them. So, essentially, I know nothing about them. However, if the “charges” made are true, they are simply the latest of a new breed of brewers that we’ve seen here in the U.S. all too often lately.

Welcome, then, to the age of the “clown brewery”. I won’t name names – you know who they are. Instead of making beer to be delicious, instead of making public statements and representations that will lift all our boats, instead of standing ready at all hours to assist their fellow brewers….they put on the clown show. “Our beer is the strongest in the world.” “We have higher IBUs than any beer ever produced.” “We made a beer at the bottom of the ocean, in a cage filled with snakes.”

So let me be 100% clear. Not only do such people laugh at us beer fans, all day, every day….these people don’t even LIKE you. Do you understand? They think you’re a dupe. And like every con artist, they have nothing but contempt for their “marks”. They want fame, and they want money, plain and simple. And there’s always someone who’ll give them both. As Kurosawa said in his film title, “the bad sleep well”. Are you surprised at a lack of apology?

The current hot climate of craft beer breeds a lot of weeds. Craft brewers who speak ill of other craft brewers. Brewers whose beers are heavily flawed or have no consistency, not because the brewers are uneducated, but because they think that quality doesn’t matter, and we’ll drink anything with a cool or shocking name, story or label. Even better if it’s “rare”. A lot of them will say “hey, we’re just like punk rockers, we do things our way.” No, you’re not a punk rocker, you’re a leech and a poseur. I took the Ramones bowling. No one can tell me anything about punk – I was there and lived it. And the Ramones could PLAY. I know – I produced shows with them. So no, there are no excuses, and these people are not “punk”. There’s a big difference between artistic freedom and narcissistic cynicism.

At this year’s Craft Brewers Conference, there were 9,600 attendees. Last year there were just over 6,000. We have, in the US, 1,800 firms that have filed for federal brewer’s licenses and plan to open in the next year. From the stage, Paul Gatza, head of the Brewer”s Association, told the crowd that our culture was being threatened by new brewers who had a greater commitment to themselves than to their customers. As he pointed out, we’ve built a great thing in craft beer. Finishing his statement, he said ‘Guys…don’t fuck it up.” Here here, Paul. Only you, the beer fans, can make sure that the newbies, who we welcome with open arms, come correct.

There are also great newbies out there. Wonderful people making wonderful beer. Each one of them has left an easier and more secure path of life, leapt into thin air, and tried their best to make beers worthy of your table. I have nothing but mad respect for them. Support them, each day, every day. If they’re local, buy a pint of their beer before my beer, as a matter of principle. I hope you buy our beer too, but the new good brewers need you. The clown brewers detest you. Understand that. You know what to do.

I have no idea who the “Richard” is who posted here, but while I cannot speak to the veracity of his specific statements, I can certainly see the tide of crappiness, both organoleptic and spiritual, that some people hope to bring us. It’s dangerous to speak out these days, and some people may well take isolated quotes from this post and try to hang them around my neck. But yes, there are bad people abroad in the land. Thankfully, their ranks are small, measured in dozens, if that. They are no match for you. Send the bad ones back whence they came, plain and simple.

Garrett Oliver
Brewmaster
The Brooklyn Brewery

Getting Raucous

I spent Saturday drinking homebrew. No shock there you might think, but it wasn't my own brews I was imbibing, I was judging at a competition.

The competition was a very small affair, just six entrants, but the winner is to have their beer brewed on the big system at Three Notch'd. I have to admit I was somewhat worried about the judging as the chosen style for the competition was IPA, a style that I rarely brew myself, and then it is usually so I can dodge the style at other competitions I am judging. I am also not a huge fan of drinking IPAs, though I think our local breweries in Central Virginia actually make some damn good ones, especially Devils Backbone's 8 Point, Three Notch'd 40 Mile, and Starr Hill Northern Lights - maybe I just prefer the East Coast way of doing the style...

Anyway, the winner of the competition brewed a beer which was simply delightful. Boatloads of malt complexity and a real balance from the hops, this was no tooth enamel stripper and it was all the better for it. To add some creativity to the brew, she added honey and orange peel, that actually had me thinking she had used Goldings hops at first. The drinkability of the beer, and it was bloody delicious, belied its 7.88% heft. The beer was called Raucous IPA and I am very much looking forward to it being available around Charlottesville. From my experience with Session 42, it is such a great feeling seeing your beer in restaurants and bars.

The standard of the entrants got me thinking about how this part of Virginia seems to have a real wealth of brewing talent, whether doing it for a living or as a hobby - I love Levi Duncan's, formerly of Starr Hill and now at Champion, thoughts on brewers, whether you are a pro or a homebrewer is irrelevant, we are all brewers. One of the members of the homebrew club I go to, the Charlottesville Area Masters of Real Ale, recently won a gold and two bronzes in round one of the NHC, and our club regularly does well in competitions like the Dominion Cup and Virginia Beer Blitz.

Brewing in such a well stocked area for talent definitely makes a brewer have to strive to improve all the time, which can only be good the brewing community as a whole. Not only is it a good time for the beer industry, it's a good time for brewing your own as well.

A Taste of the New

It seems crazy sometimes, but it is almost 5 years since I drank my first ever Starr Hill beer. It was in May 2009 that a friend of mine brought a bottle of the much missed, at least in my world, Starr Hill Pale Ale back to Prague with her. A few months later, having arrived on these shores, I was working in the Starr Hill tasting room, and drinking a fair bit of the Pale Ale, and the Dark Starr Stout as well.

Fast forward to April 2014 and I still work at the tasting room a few weekends a month, and I still wish the powers that be would resurrect the old Pale Ale. I haven't worked since the beginning of March for one simple reason, the tasting room has been closed for renovations.

This weekend, that all changes. The tasting room will once again be open for business, though it is hugely different from the old days. Gone is the simple wooden bar with industrial kegerators behind it, replaced by a custom built bar with lines that run directly to the cold store, so no more lugging kegs from the cold store to the bar on a trolley I guess. Gone is the stifling heat of summer, and the frozen backsides of winter, we now have a closed in, temperature controlled space which looks out on the production floor of the brewery itself.

A couple of weekends ago we had a team meeting to be introduced to the new space and, to put it simply, it is stunning. The guys that designed the space have done an amazing job, and incorporated some neat touches from the old days of Starr Hill when it was a brewpub in Charlottesville.

To say I am looking forward to getting back behind the bar is something of an understatement, and what a glorious bar it will be to be working behind!

The grand opening is this Saturday, but I will be working on Sunday, so come on down, enjoy the new space, and of course drink the beer!

Vive La Difference?

There was a recently a story in a local newspaper that Stone Brewing are looking at building their second brewing facility (sounds so much more 'craft' than 'factory' don't you think?) in the Charlottesville area, specifically near Crozet. Of course this caused much excitement, and likely no little disappointment should they choose to go elsewhere. It also got me thinking.

Let's imagine that the powers that be bend over backwards to bring Stone to this part of Central Virginia, tempting them with all manner of sweeteners, tax-breaks, and sundried incentives, and behold in a couple of years Stone II is open for business. Central Virginia is already becoming something a must visit area for beer tourism, just look at all the award winning breweries we have here, and Devils Backbone picked up more bling at this year's World Beer Cup. Naturally people will want to visit Stone, and I am sure they would in their droves.

There is a question though that nags away in the back of my head, would it not be utterly disingenuous to consider Stone a 'local' brewery, or their beer as 'local'? Sure it would be 'locally brewed', and having access to fresh Pale Ale would most assuredly be a 'good thing', but would it have the same sense of place as Full Nelson from Blue Mountain, Starr Hill's Grateful, or Three Notch'd 40 Mile? I realise that the very concept of 'local' beer is a massive misnomer given ingredients pour into breweries from around the world, and even the water has its localness stripped out quite often. However, there is something romantic about drinking beer made by breweries born and raised in your local area.

The same goes for all the big breweries in the process of setting up secondary plants on the East Coast, Sierra Nevada and New Belgium in North Carolina, and Green Flash in Virginia Beach. Sure it'll be great to have fresher beer, but I don't think I will ever be able to think of it as local, it'll just be another national brand made in multiple factories, likely by the very latest in technological brewing plants. In fact it will be no more local, in my mind, than Blue Moon being made just up the road in Elkton, or Budweiser down in Williamsburg.

If someone could just explain to me, in words of one syllable or less, how exactly the likes of Sierra Nevada, Stone, and New Belgium doing pretty much exactly what Anheuser-Busch did about 70 years ago is different? Enjoying the growth of the post-war economy, producing more than 3 million barrels a year, Anheuser-Busch opened secondary plants to bring fresh beer to their consumers. Oh, and by 'explanation' that doesn't include kraft-aid giveaway phrases like 'crafty', misleading consumers' 'tricking' or anything else that attempts to set up the straw man that Sierra Nevada, Stone, and New Belgium are anything other than big brewing concerns. Just because 'craft' is trendy doesn't make their doing exactly the same as AB all those years ago any different, or better, or worse.

It's just business.

My Name is Rat, and I Approve This Ale

1923.

5 years since the Armistice brought the Great War to an effective end, the man that would become George VI married the woman I only ever knew as the Queen Mother, and the Irish Free State joined the League of Nations.

At the Anchor Brewhouse in Horsleydown, the Courage Brewery was making a beer which in the pubs of London was known as Old Burton, though in the brewery itself it was called KKK. Burton Ale has become something of an obsession of mine, rich as it is in history and brewing possibilities. Like all beers, Burton Ale has evolved, changed, and been understood in different ways throughout its history, and today it is all but ignored.

When I wrote a post called 'Time For Burton' at the end of last year, I suggested that Burton Ale was just the kind of beer that the 'craft' beer world should revive, much as is happening with Grodziskie. A comment on that post inspired me to comment on Facebook that it really was suprising that Burton Ale, big, boozy, and bitter, wasn't being made by 'craft' breweries, and would any of my pro-brewer friends be willing to pick up the baton?

Enter Blue Mountain Brewery in Afton. It's fair to say that I have a very big soft spot for Blue Mountain, they make one of my favourite pale lagers in the US, Blue Mountain Lager. They make one of my favourite winter beers, Lights Out. They make probably the only strong pale lager in the US that doesn't make me want to lament a total absence of balance, Über Pils. Yes, it is very fair to say that Taylor and co know what they are doing. About half an hour after my post, Taylor had responded and initiated the traditional back and forth via email that eventually lead to last Friday's brewday, when we recreated Courage's Old Burton from 1923.

We were forced into a slight change for our version of the beer. For some reason brewing supply companies on this side of the Atlantic don't seem to stock invert #3, the dark version of invert sugar syrup which gave the original much of its colour. Unfortunately British brewing supply companies that carry invert sugars don't have distribution or their products in the US, can't imagine why. What to do, what to do? Baker's invert sugar syrup was the answer, fully inverted, but also clear, so we upped the black malt a tad to adjust the colour.

By the time I turned up at 8am, the mash was already done and sparging was underway. Patrick, the brewer, had got in at 5am to get started, and with a 3 hour boil ahead of us, it's just as well he did. The colour of the wort was startling, deep, deep brown, but it lightened up with the sparging, and adding 10 gallons of clear invert syrup lightened it further so that it ended up a rich red/brown shade.

Another shock was the amount of hops we chucked in for the bittering addition. 22lbs of East Kent Goldings, for 15 barrels of beer! With the other additions of Nugget, and the Goldings used to dry hop the beer, we used something like 3lbs of hops per barrel, or a calculated 102 IBUs - take that, random IPA!

There are few things I enjoy more than a day in a brewery, the ceremonial dumping of the the hops, the chat about beer and brewing, discovering that one of the reasons the brewery wanted to do this project was precisely because it took them our of their comfort zone, and of course digging out the mash tun. Call me crazy, but that really is something I look forward to getting stuck in to.

Anyway, we ended up with about 15 barrels of dark, bitter, so very bitter, wort, which is being fermented by the McEwan's yeast and when it hits the taps at the brewpub will be about 6.5% abv, rippingly bitter, with plenty of residual sugar to take the edge off the hops. Simply put, it will be like nothing out there at the moment. Taylor is also planning to put some in some of his barrels to age for a year or so...

The name for this most auspicious brew....Sensible Mole, obviously.