As I was brewing last week, it struck me that we were brewing a kind of “Greatest Hits” lineup. We’ve got our original IPA, Dank Fruit Double, and All the Hops Triple IPA in the fermenters now.
Every time we brew IPA, it’s like greeting an old friend that you haven’t seen in a long time. It’s crazy to think that it was almost 3 years ago that we brewed the first batch. At the time, hazy IPA’s hadn’t really taken off in the craft beer world to the full extent that they have in the time since. I remember thinking that if we released a high quality example of the style in our first round of beers that we would hit the ground running. Back then, as a new brewery opening in a small tourist town, there was plenty of room for skepticism from potential customers about our beer. We wanted to do everything we could to overcome that skepticism by showing our dedication to quality. We opte to use the highest quality floor malted Maris Otter and we hopped the beer heavily with Citra, Simcoe, and Amarillo. Almost 3 years later and the recipe is same as that first batch, only now we have access to hand selected, premium hop lots and it remains our best selling beer. It’s also the beer that jump started all of our other hoppy beer production and the things we were excited about in that first batch are still featured in almost all of our other hazy IPA’s.
Dank Fruit Double is another kind of throwback beer. Our first batch of Dank Fruit was brewed just a few months after the release of IPA. After brewing a double IPA in our second round of brewing, we wanted to go bigger with our hop rates and make something more intensely aromatic. All of our hop additions were bumped up by 30% and we used hops with the highest oil content we could find. There was no name for the beer when we were brewing it, but on the brew day I smelled the aroma from the whirlpool hops and thought “That smells like what would happen if pot grew on fruit trees and we juiced the dank fruit.” While Dank Fruit has dank components to the aroma, it is at least equally fruity with huge peach aromas to accompany the mango and blueberry resulting in one of the double ipa’s I enjoy brewing the most. The complexity of the hop aroma seems to evolve with every sip.
Lastly, All the Hops Triple IPA was the first triple we brewed in Tombstone. When we got this year’s hops pelletized, I wanted to put them on display with a series of single hop beers, then a series that combines all of our contracted hops. I was a little skeptical about brewing a triple since they have a tendency to be cloyingly sweet and blur the lines of an American Barleywine and a Double IPA, but by eliminating all specialty malts and creating a highly fermentable wort to go along with a very large pitch of highly active yeast, we are able to create a 10% ABV beer that doesn’t have any of the burning fusel alcohol or syrupy sweet flavors that detract from the extreme hoppiness of the beer. Using 10 lbs per barrel of the highest quality Citra, Amarillo, Simcoe, and Mosaic available to us, All the Hops Triple manages to leave no doubt about what style this beer falls under.
Monday, July 22, 2019
Wednesday, March 20, 2019
Not Really a Barleywine, Beer Guy, Bright and Juicy, Pale Lager
It's been a fun week at the brewery! After releasing a new IPA on the weekend, we brewed three entirely new beers that we're excited to share soon.
First up, we have "Not Really a Barleywine." As anyone who has followed Tombstone from our beginnings, lighthearted trolling is right up our alley. In the past, we've named beers "Another Exercise in Mediocrity" and "Over and Out" after dealing with some criticisms online. This time around, we're having a good time with the recent explosion in barleywine popularity.
When I drank my first barleywine back in 2008, J.W. Lee's vintages were all the rage on beer forums. In fact, I think they had 3 versions of it in the BeerAdvocate top 100 when I started following the site. I got my hands on a 1997 Lagavulin Cask Harvest Ale. It wasn't at all what I expected and sadly, my 18 year old self hated it and dumped half the bottle. I thought it was flat, not sweet enough to support the Scotch flavor, and there was a load of sediment in the bottle that I didn't understand how it would get there. So I thought it was a bad bottle.
Over the next couple years, I continued to try bottles of different vintages and grew to love the style and began to appreciate that the carbonation level was low to help with the drinkability. I started enjoying traditional barleywines so much that as a 19 year old homebrewer, I brewed a 5 gallon batch with 100% floor malted Maris Otter, a 5 hour boil, and used only the first runnings of my mash, which resulted in a beer that finished at 15.5% ABV. It aged in a keg for about 5 years when I finally remembered that it existed and I started giving out samples at homebrew club meetings and to friends on special occasions. The last time I tried that beer, it was 8 years since the brew date and I forgot about it and left it in Alabama when I moved to AZ with about 3 gallons of it still remaining. At that point, the aging had turned the beer into something truly special... Still boozy, super bready from the Maris Otter, with hints of tobacco, sherry, and raisins.
When we first opened, I wanted to brew another traditional English style barleywine with 100% Maris Otter, a long boil, flavorful English Ale Yeast, a healthy dose of bittering hops, and low carbonation levels... like the way barleywines had been brewed for almost the entire history of the style. That batch went almost entirely into barrels and was released to our barrel society. It didn't go over all that well with complaints about the carbonation level being low, not being sweet, too thin... All the complaints that I had about traditional English barleywines when I'd first started drinking.
So last summer, we were noticing the growing popularity of barleywines and we thought we'd give it another shot, but we added some caramel malts, carbonated the beer to a higher level, and we brewed it to a higher gravity. Half the batch went into cans, half into barrels, and most of the barrels were released to our second year barrel society with a much better reception. Cans of the non-barrel aged version were reasonably well liked, but we kept seeing comments saying "Good, but not as dark as a traditional barleywine." or "Not really a barleywine, but still pretty good."
I began to question what people thought a barleywine entailed. So I started looking around and what I noticed was that a lot of those reviewers were a.) Newer beer drinkers and b.) were drinking extremely dark, almost black "barleywines" and referring to them as "traditional." It became clear that my preferred way of brewing a barleywine is old school, behind the times, and sadly, not relevant for modern craft beer drinking palates. These new barleywines are something entirely different from actual traditional barleywines. I like them in their own way, but they're almost unrecognizable as being related to the traditional examples. In a lot of ways, the beers we're seeing are more closely related to stouts without as much roasty intensity, or roasty, but non-astringent. So we decided to give in and brew this beer, but being unprepared to give up the "fight" about what makes a barleywine a barleywine, we couldn't help but show people what our definition of "Not Really a Barleywine" actually means!
In a nod to the traditions of barleywine brewing, we used floor malted Maris Otter for the base malt and a flavorful English Ale yeast. We used a very vigorous boil and a combination of specialty malts for rich toffee, sweet caramel, and a thick bodied barleywine that will result in an 11% ABV beer, half of which is going into a mix of bourbon, Jamaican Rum, Scotch (if you dislike peat smoke, stay away!), and Tequila barrels. The other half of the batch will go into cans and a small amount of draught will be available. While we're having a good time with some mild trolling and a little bit of smack talk, I'd be lying if I said I'm not really excited about this beer and the opportunity to brew something a little different from what I've done in the past.
The day after our barleywine brew day we hosted our good friend Ian "Beer Guy" Harwell from Ground Control for a collaboration brew day. Ian had some awesome art work done for the can featuring himself in a wrestling ring with a hop leaf... Probably my favorite can art from us. For the beer, we are using Pils malt from a new maltster (Proximity) that impressed us with their samples. It is highly uncommon that anyone can convince me to try something outside of Weyermann or Crisp malts, but the uniformity of the malting, biscuit and light honey flavors in the samples were exciting and it seemed to me that it would be the perfect base malt to show off some bright pineapple, grapefruit, and light floral/herbal aromas from my favorite Michigan grown hops out of Hop Head Farms.
It was a double batch brew day for us, so batch two of the day was the first beer in a new series of IPA's that we're calling "Bright and Juicy." A few months ago, I was talking with some customers that mentioned to me that they like our style of IPA's, but that they also liked lighter colored NEIPA's with a "brighter" hop aroma. Their comment got me thinking that I do tend to focus on the melon, berry, peach, and dank aromas in our IPA's and I'll use our "bright" aroma hops only for providing balance to the heavier, more intense aromatics. We do have access to several really great hop lots of hops that I would consider to be bright, such as our Amarillo which provides a ruby red grapefruit flavor when we use it in a blend with other citrusy hops.
Being a brewer that is always looking for brewing a wide variety of beers, I wanted to start this series to co-exist with our current IPA's that are a bit darker from our Maris Otter malts, and have the heavier aromatics. This first batch of our Bright and Juicy is featuring floor malted Bohemian Pils malt for a pale color and it has proven to be a good base for other hoppy beers we've brewed recently, such as our Double IPA Dry Hopped with Nelson and Mosaic. Perhaps the most exciting thing about this batch is the hop combo of all Oregon grown hops.
As I've mentioned in past posts, my trip to Oregon last September for the hop harvest was incredible. I found several hop lots that I couldn't believe how great they smelled. Two hops in particular stood out when I smelled them: Comet (which we brewed a single hop IPA with) and Strata. The Comet stood out in part because it's normally not thought of as a very exciting hop, but Crosby Farms first year of growing it yielded a hop that I considered to be special and a testament to their soil conditions and climate. Strata was a new one for me and we were fortunate to get a couple of boxes for this year as well as a contract for next year. This Bright and Juicy will be the first beer from us to feature it and we anticipate a huge amount of passionfruit aroma combined with the ruby red grapefruit of our Amarillo to be the dominant aromas.
Our last upcoming new beer is a pale lager that we intend to be for brewery only release in cans and draught throughout Cochise County. We are fortunate to live in a state where craft drinkers have come back around to appreciating lagers and where the bar is set high, due to many years of craft breweries producing world class lagers. We have our lager tanks filled right now and our process is a little bit unique for these beers in that we fermented them entirely in the shallow lagering vessels. We used a previously released, popular lager (Oktoberfest) recipe and scaled it down to a lower ABV, with a dryer finish, but it still displays all the malty flavor that we get from Vienna and Munich malts in our traditional Oktoberfest recipe. At 4.9% ABV and 7 IBU's, this is going to be a light lager that still packs an intensity of flavor that most people will not expect from a low abv, pale lager, while simultaneously retaining all the drinkability that people look for in a light beer.
First up, we have "Not Really a Barleywine." As anyone who has followed Tombstone from our beginnings, lighthearted trolling is right up our alley. In the past, we've named beers "Another Exercise in Mediocrity" and "Over and Out" after dealing with some criticisms online. This time around, we're having a good time with the recent explosion in barleywine popularity.
When I drank my first barleywine back in 2008, J.W. Lee's vintages were all the rage on beer forums. In fact, I think they had 3 versions of it in the BeerAdvocate top 100 when I started following the site. I got my hands on a 1997 Lagavulin Cask Harvest Ale. It wasn't at all what I expected and sadly, my 18 year old self hated it and dumped half the bottle. I thought it was flat, not sweet enough to support the Scotch flavor, and there was a load of sediment in the bottle that I didn't understand how it would get there. So I thought it was a bad bottle.
Over the next couple years, I continued to try bottles of different vintages and grew to love the style and began to appreciate that the carbonation level was low to help with the drinkability. I started enjoying traditional barleywines so much that as a 19 year old homebrewer, I brewed a 5 gallon batch with 100% floor malted Maris Otter, a 5 hour boil, and used only the first runnings of my mash, which resulted in a beer that finished at 15.5% ABV. It aged in a keg for about 5 years when I finally remembered that it existed and I started giving out samples at homebrew club meetings and to friends on special occasions. The last time I tried that beer, it was 8 years since the brew date and I forgot about it and left it in Alabama when I moved to AZ with about 3 gallons of it still remaining. At that point, the aging had turned the beer into something truly special... Still boozy, super bready from the Maris Otter, with hints of tobacco, sherry, and raisins.
When we first opened, I wanted to brew another traditional English style barleywine with 100% Maris Otter, a long boil, flavorful English Ale Yeast, a healthy dose of bittering hops, and low carbonation levels... like the way barleywines had been brewed for almost the entire history of the style. That batch went almost entirely into barrels and was released to our barrel society. It didn't go over all that well with complaints about the carbonation level being low, not being sweet, too thin... All the complaints that I had about traditional English barleywines when I'd first started drinking.
So last summer, we were noticing the growing popularity of barleywines and we thought we'd give it another shot, but we added some caramel malts, carbonated the beer to a higher level, and we brewed it to a higher gravity. Half the batch went into cans, half into barrels, and most of the barrels were released to our second year barrel society with a much better reception. Cans of the non-barrel aged version were reasonably well liked, but we kept seeing comments saying "Good, but not as dark as a traditional barleywine." or "Not really a barleywine, but still pretty good."
I began to question what people thought a barleywine entailed. So I started looking around and what I noticed was that a lot of those reviewers were a.) Newer beer drinkers and b.) were drinking extremely dark, almost black "barleywines" and referring to them as "traditional." It became clear that my preferred way of brewing a barleywine is old school, behind the times, and sadly, not relevant for modern craft beer drinking palates. These new barleywines are something entirely different from actual traditional barleywines. I like them in their own way, but they're almost unrecognizable as being related to the traditional examples. In a lot of ways, the beers we're seeing are more closely related to stouts without as much roasty intensity, or roasty, but non-astringent. So we decided to give in and brew this beer, but being unprepared to give up the "fight" about what makes a barleywine a barleywine, we couldn't help but show people what our definition of "Not Really a Barleywine" actually means!
In a nod to the traditions of barleywine brewing, we used floor malted Maris Otter for the base malt and a flavorful English Ale yeast. We used a very vigorous boil and a combination of specialty malts for rich toffee, sweet caramel, and a thick bodied barleywine that will result in an 11% ABV beer, half of which is going into a mix of bourbon, Jamaican Rum, Scotch (if you dislike peat smoke, stay away!), and Tequila barrels. The other half of the batch will go into cans and a small amount of draught will be available. While we're having a good time with some mild trolling and a little bit of smack talk, I'd be lying if I said I'm not really excited about this beer and the opportunity to brew something a little different from what I've done in the past.
The day after our barleywine brew day we hosted our good friend Ian "Beer Guy" Harwell from Ground Control for a collaboration brew day. Ian had some awesome art work done for the can featuring himself in a wrestling ring with a hop leaf... Probably my favorite can art from us. For the beer, we are using Pils malt from a new maltster (Proximity) that impressed us with their samples. It is highly uncommon that anyone can convince me to try something outside of Weyermann or Crisp malts, but the uniformity of the malting, biscuit and light honey flavors in the samples were exciting and it seemed to me that it would be the perfect base malt to show off some bright pineapple, grapefruit, and light floral/herbal aromas from my favorite Michigan grown hops out of Hop Head Farms.
It was a double batch brew day for us, so batch two of the day was the first beer in a new series of IPA's that we're calling "Bright and Juicy." A few months ago, I was talking with some customers that mentioned to me that they like our style of IPA's, but that they also liked lighter colored NEIPA's with a "brighter" hop aroma. Their comment got me thinking that I do tend to focus on the melon, berry, peach, and dank aromas in our IPA's and I'll use our "bright" aroma hops only for providing balance to the heavier, more intense aromatics. We do have access to several really great hop lots of hops that I would consider to be bright, such as our Amarillo which provides a ruby red grapefruit flavor when we use it in a blend with other citrusy hops.
Being a brewer that is always looking for brewing a wide variety of beers, I wanted to start this series to co-exist with our current IPA's that are a bit darker from our Maris Otter malts, and have the heavier aromatics. This first batch of our Bright and Juicy is featuring floor malted Bohemian Pils malt for a pale color and it has proven to be a good base for other hoppy beers we've brewed recently, such as our Double IPA Dry Hopped with Nelson and Mosaic. Perhaps the most exciting thing about this batch is the hop combo of all Oregon grown hops.
As I've mentioned in past posts, my trip to Oregon last September for the hop harvest was incredible. I found several hop lots that I couldn't believe how great they smelled. Two hops in particular stood out when I smelled them: Comet (which we brewed a single hop IPA with) and Strata. The Comet stood out in part because it's normally not thought of as a very exciting hop, but Crosby Farms first year of growing it yielded a hop that I considered to be special and a testament to their soil conditions and climate. Strata was a new one for me and we were fortunate to get a couple of boxes for this year as well as a contract for next year. This Bright and Juicy will be the first beer from us to feature it and we anticipate a huge amount of passionfruit aroma combined with the ruby red grapefruit of our Amarillo to be the dominant aromas.
Our last upcoming new beer is a pale lager that we intend to be for brewery only release in cans and draught throughout Cochise County. We are fortunate to live in a state where craft drinkers have come back around to appreciating lagers and where the bar is set high, due to many years of craft breweries producing world class lagers. We have our lager tanks filled right now and our process is a little bit unique for these beers in that we fermented them entirely in the shallow lagering vessels. We used a previously released, popular lager (Oktoberfest) recipe and scaled it down to a lower ABV, with a dryer finish, but it still displays all the malty flavor that we get from Vienna and Munich malts in our traditional Oktoberfest recipe. At 4.9% ABV and 7 IBU's, this is going to be a light lager that still packs an intensity of flavor that most people will not expect from a low abv, pale lager, while simultaneously retaining all the drinkability that people look for in a light beer.
Monday, January 28, 2019
All the Hops Series
For the last couple of months, we've been brewing a lot of single hop IPA's. This has been a way of showing off the quality of our selected hop contracts. Anyone that's been following us for the last couple years knows that raw material quality is something that we take very seriously and these hops are the epitome of that mindset.
Every hop we have contracted now is an individual lot that we have determined to be the absolute best lot we can find of that variety. The varieties we have are Amarillo, Simcoe, Mosaic, and Citra. In order to get the quality of hop that we're looking for, we have minimum purchase orders that are prohibitive for most breweries of our size. Fortunately, we have a tendency to use ludicrous amounts of hops in our IPA's which makes the contract size reasonable for us. When we select our lots, there's typically anything from 4 to 8 different lots to select from and each one has distinct qualities that helps us to make single hopped beers that are unique and that have a complexity rarely seen in single hopped beers. The Amarillo we selected has a distinctive ruby red grapefruit aroma and a dank quality that is notable with our high hopping rates. The Mosaic has a ripe blueberry aroma along with a little bit of a tangerine which, combined with our normal IPA yeast strain, creates a fruit salad aroma in a finished beer. The Citra is very bright, tropical, and has an intense lychee aroma that we've been honing in for a few years now. Lastly, the Simcoe is probably the hop variety that I'm most excited about.
Years ago, when Simcoe was still a hop that was very limited, the aromas it tended to give off were distinctly fruit punch and pine. Over the years, Simcoe has been planted more and more and a large portion of the lots being sold had lost some of that original character. Many people remember a time when Simcoe was "catty" and while its reputation still persists for having that characteristic, it's been years since I've smelled any hops that have that unique aroma. One grower controls all of the Simcoe grown in America, which you'd think would lead to a consistent hop, but with the amount of acreage planted, each lot has varied wildly. It has been more and more difficult for small brewers to get Simcoe that I would consider to be of high quality. This year, about one third of the Simcoe grown is coming off of new vines that were planted from the original root stock. We were very fortunate to be able to get a contract for one of the most aromatic lots I've ever smelled and the aromas are much more typical of what I remember Simcoe smelling like when I started brewing back in 2009.
In addition to those contracted hops, we've also brewed two other single hopped beers (Comet and Idaho 7) with hops that were grown in Oregon, but were too limited in quantity to get individual lots on contract. Hopefully in 2020 the acreage will have increased to the point that we can get those premium lots on contract. All of the hops we've used for these beers have not just been grown in a specific terroir that resulted in these great aromas, but they've also been pelletized with low temperature pelletizers and used large screens to create a loose pellet, specifically designed for oil retention for use by craft brewers that want to focus on intense aromatics which is, obviously, perfect for IPA's and Double IPA's.
The last of our single hopped IPA's (Citra and Mosaic) will be canned at the end of this week and we will move on to a new series of beers that will feature a blend of our 4 contracted hops. Using the results from our single hopped beers, we were able to come up with a blend that we believe will be the perfect blend of hops for this series. Our next round of three beers will be an IPA, a Double IPA, and our first Triple IPA, each one using all of the hops at an obscene dosing rate. Fittingly, this series will be named "All the Hops." Be on the lookout for these beers to be canned at the end of Arizona Beer Week on February 15th!
Every hop we have contracted now is an individual lot that we have determined to be the absolute best lot we can find of that variety. The varieties we have are Amarillo, Simcoe, Mosaic, and Citra. In order to get the quality of hop that we're looking for, we have minimum purchase orders that are prohibitive for most breweries of our size. Fortunately, we have a tendency to use ludicrous amounts of hops in our IPA's which makes the contract size reasonable for us. When we select our lots, there's typically anything from 4 to 8 different lots to select from and each one has distinct qualities that helps us to make single hopped beers that are unique and that have a complexity rarely seen in single hopped beers. The Amarillo we selected has a distinctive ruby red grapefruit aroma and a dank quality that is notable with our high hopping rates. The Mosaic has a ripe blueberry aroma along with a little bit of a tangerine which, combined with our normal IPA yeast strain, creates a fruit salad aroma in a finished beer. The Citra is very bright, tropical, and has an intense lychee aroma that we've been honing in for a few years now. Lastly, the Simcoe is probably the hop variety that I'm most excited about.
Years ago, when Simcoe was still a hop that was very limited, the aromas it tended to give off were distinctly fruit punch and pine. Over the years, Simcoe has been planted more and more and a large portion of the lots being sold had lost some of that original character. Many people remember a time when Simcoe was "catty" and while its reputation still persists for having that characteristic, it's been years since I've smelled any hops that have that unique aroma. One grower controls all of the Simcoe grown in America, which you'd think would lead to a consistent hop, but with the amount of acreage planted, each lot has varied wildly. It has been more and more difficult for small brewers to get Simcoe that I would consider to be of high quality. This year, about one third of the Simcoe grown is coming off of new vines that were planted from the original root stock. We were very fortunate to be able to get a contract for one of the most aromatic lots I've ever smelled and the aromas are much more typical of what I remember Simcoe smelling like when I started brewing back in 2009.
In addition to those contracted hops, we've also brewed two other single hopped beers (Comet and Idaho 7) with hops that were grown in Oregon, but were too limited in quantity to get individual lots on contract. Hopefully in 2020 the acreage will have increased to the point that we can get those premium lots on contract. All of the hops we've used for these beers have not just been grown in a specific terroir that resulted in these great aromas, but they've also been pelletized with low temperature pelletizers and used large screens to create a loose pellet, specifically designed for oil retention for use by craft brewers that want to focus on intense aromatics which is, obviously, perfect for IPA's and Double IPA's.
The last of our single hopped IPA's (Citra and Mosaic) will be canned at the end of this week and we will move on to a new series of beers that will feature a blend of our 4 contracted hops. Using the results from our single hopped beers, we were able to come up with a blend that we believe will be the perfect blend of hops for this series. Our next round of three beers will be an IPA, a Double IPA, and our first Triple IPA, each one using all of the hops at an obscene dosing rate. Fittingly, this series will be named "All the Hops." Be on the lookout for these beers to be canned at the end of Arizona Beer Week on February 15th!
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