What’s Brewing 7/22/19

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.

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.

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!

Reiterated Mash Imperial Stout

Yesterday, we canned the biggest beer (15.5% ABV) I've brewed in almost 10 years and with all of our social media posts, I've been getting a bunch of questions about it. I realized today that I never did a blog post about it and with a beer like this, it doesn't do it justice to just release it and not talk about it. This is one of the most insane beers I've ever brewed. Somehow, when I get excited about the potential of brewing something like this, I never remember to think about how much the process might suck. Then when I'm miserable I declare I'm never doing it again, only to find myself drinking the beer a few weeks later and thinking about how I can't wait to brew another beer in a similar manner... It's a vicious cycle that has resulted in my desire to increase our wet hop and fresh hop beer production every year, and now has resulted in me wanting to further explore the technique that made this beer possible: Reiterated Mashing.

Many homebrewers that brew with the "Brew in a Bag" technique are familiar with the concept of reiterated mashes. What many people don't realize though is that this technique is an old one that is rarely practiced commercially anymore. The basic idea is that all brewhouses have a maximum extract yield with a single mash. For most brewers, if they want to brew a higher gravity beer than their brewhouse allows, they add malt extract or sugar to boost the gravity, or they use very long boils to evaporate as much liquid as necessary to concentrate the wort. In our case, we did our normal mash and lauter routine, collecting 500 gallons in our boil kettle. We then took that wort and transferred it from the boil kettle, back to the mash tun, where we mashed a second round of malts. 

Brewing with a reiterated mash allowed us to use a little bit of every normal technique for high gravity beers. After the second mash, the wort was so thick with sugar that it formed chocolate syrup like consistency and it was difficult to get it to run through the false bottom of our lauter tun and feed our pump. As a result, these brew days took us 18 hours to brew a single batch. Normally in 16 hours, we can have 3 batches of beer brewed when we're using our normal brewing techniques. With all that extra time that it took to do our second mash, we were able to boil down about 100 gallons of wort in our kettle to 50 gallons which concentrated the flavors of the malts from the first batch. 

Brewing this beer was definitely a challenge and formulating the recipe was almost as challenging as the physicality of the brew day itself. A big problem exists when trying to brew this way in that in addition to doubling the amount of potential fermentable sugars, you also double the amount of long chain, unfermentable sugars. While we want a big imperial stout like this to be thick and chewy, without some form of simple sugar added, this beer would be perceived as being extremely unbalanced with intensely crude malt flavors. To help dry the beer out a little bit, I didn't want to add simple sugars like sucrose or candi sugar. I wanted a form of sugar that would add flavor while also helping to shift the balance of the beer towards a more dry character. As a result, we used 660 lbs of Vermont Maple Syrup using late harvest sap concentrated to make a very dark, robust maple syrup. The goal was never to make a beer that tastes like maple syrup beer, but rather to use a form of sugar that would provide flavors that would meld with the malts and provide balance. The flavor influence of the maple syrup is not distinguishable as maple syrup, but rather it provides a mildly nutty flavor compound as part of the complexity of this imperial stout. 

Beyond the brew day itself, brewing a beer this big is a challenge for the yeast too. We take a lot of pride in being able to brew beers free of the burning fusel alcohol character that is present in almost every extreme beer available. In order to make a beer this strong, you will inevitably end up with some fusel alcohol character, but frequently, I find beers like this to be undrinkable because of the burning sensation. To avoid that, we used a yeast strain that is known to handle higher alcohol levels, propagated a large amount of yeast from a small pitch so that we were using a pure, first generation culture, fed it with yeast nutrient, and kept our aeration rates relatively low to keep the fusel alcohol production to a minimum. 

The result of using these somewhat extreme techniques is a deceptively strong Imperial Stout since it does not have the burning alcohol sensation that you might expect. Instead it is rich, chocolaty, creamy, and thick, but proceed with caution as the elevated alcohol content may take you by surprise.  In fact, if you drink two cans of this beer, it gets gradually more difficult to write a coherent blog post and it takes 2-3x longer than normal... Don't ask me how I know.

Wet Hops, Fresh Hops, and Turning Disappointment into Excitement

Normally these blog posts result from hours of thought about something that I want to share with the world and they serve as a way for me to get something off of my mind. Today though, I haven't had much time to think about this post as it's been hectic at the brewery all day long. The topic of this post really stems from a stretch of unfortunate circumstances that have lead to a pretty exciting opportunity for the brewery.

Every year, I look forward to September as it's the only time of year we get to brew with wet hops. Wet hops need to be used within 24 hours of harvesting and the best quality hops in the USA are not grown anywhere near Tombstone. This creates a huge logistical challenge to brewing those beers in a timely manner. All of our hops are supplied from Oregon and Michigan now, so wet hops need to be harvested, put directly onto a plane or refrigerated truck, and delivered to the brewery where a full kettle awaits their addition. That was the manner in which our Wet Hop Pale Ales (released on Saturday) were brewed. Brewing with wet hops is difficult, expensive, and very time consuming, but it can only happen once a year and the unique flavors from hops directly off the vine makes all the effort worth it.

When I was placing orders for wet hops a few months ago, my intent was to release a third wet hop beer using Idaho 7 which would be our Wet Hop IPA. Idaho 7 is a variety that matures weeks later than most other hops, so it looked like the timing would work out perfectly with our production schedule which would have had the beer being brewed tomorrow. Unfortunately, today I received bad news... The Idaho 7 we were planning on using was already browning and would not survive the delivery to Tombstone. It is great to have the confirmation that our suppliers won't sell us an inferior product and we have to be understanding of the change since this was the result of nature... there was no way to predict or avoid this situation. When I was informed of the issue, I immediately began looking for another variety that we could use as wet hops, but this late in the season, the harvest is basically complete and other than a few varieties I was not interested in using, nothing would be harvested from this point on.

Disappointment and panic both set in pretty quickly when I found out there was nothing I could do about getting wet hops. We already have a pallet of cans with Wet Hop IPA labels on them and we were missing out on an opportunity to provide a rare type of beer to our customers (plus, being a bit greedy... I really love drinking wet hop beers straight from the fermenter). As the disappointment began to really hit, I got a call from both of our hop suppliers letting me know that we could actually do something even a little more unique... Fresh hop beers!

Fresh hops differ from wet hops and the differences have been a source of confusion for years now as the terms have been used interchangeably by some brewers. Wet hops are (obviously) fresh, but fresh hops are not necessarily wet. When hops are harvested, they are cut from the vine and the hop cones are transported to a kiln where the hops are dried. Typically, after the kiln the hops are baled and put into cold storage where they are kept until they can be pelletized. While the hops sit in the bales, the aroma changes quickly in the first week before they become a (mostly) stable product. Fresh hops are not allowed to sit in the bales. The kilning process tends to concentrate the flavor of the hops and as the moisture is removed, the grassy, chlorophyll flavor dissipates with it. If the hops are used within a few days of being kilned, the highly volatile aromas remain in the hops.

Freshly kilned hops are a unique ingredient that few brewers have the opportunity to experience. One of my favorite beers, Celebration Ale by Sierra Nevada, is the most readily available fresh hop beer in America. Other than Celebration Ale though, I can't think of another commercially available fresh hop beer that I've tried. A year ago I asked our growers about the possibility of getting freshly kilned hops and I was told that they weren't set up to ship hops that way, except for maybe if I could take 200 lbs of a single variety. At our size, that's out of the question. Most breweries that are at a production volume to deal with that quantity don't have the ability to do one off releases or to block off portions of their schedule to allow a window of opportunity in order to be flexible for the changes in the hop harvest.

In many ways, this schedule change is actually more exciting to me than brewing another wet hop beer. I've never had the chance to brew with freshly kilned hops before and I've wanted to do so for years. The timing was somewhat coincidental too... We already planned on brewing a single hop Idaho 7 IPA using hops from Crosby Farms, the cans are already in the brewery, and now that beer is being turned into a fresh hop Idaho 7 IPA. The Wet Hop IPA is being changed to a fresh hop beer using Chinook and Cashmere from Hop Head Farms in Michigan and since the cans were already printed, there will be a sticker on the cans to indicate the change. The working title is "Almost Wet Hop IPA." I'm not sure I'll ever get the chance again to use freshly kilned hops from such high quality growers, so now that we've jumped through all the hoops to alter our schedule, I almost can't believe how lucky I am to have the chance to use such a rare hop product!

Lagers for Today's Craft Beer Enthusiasts

It seems like for the last three or four years, during almost every discussion panel, podcast, interview, etc. I've participated in, the question "What is the next trend in craft beers?" has been asked. So frequently, the answer I hear is "Lagers." However, during that same 3-4 year span, lagers haven't really taken off. With every beer trend that begins, I always wonder what is pushing the trends forward. Frequently, it is brewers trying to find the next big thing rather than customers asking for what the brewers are producing. As I was working through our production schedule for the next 3 months with Matt, I couldn't help but think about this supposed impending lager boom that's been on the horizon and why it hasn't really taken off.

I can't help but think that as an industry, we craft brewers keep shooting ourselves in the foot when it comes to lagers. Too frequently brewers think of lagers as being cheap beers and as a result, not a lot of effort gets put into them. I look at all the Amber lagers brewed with heaps of caramel malt being labeled as Dunkels and all the Pilsners brewed with American Pils malt, old hops, etc. and I can't help but think that as an industry, we aren't introducing high quality examples to the market.  I can admit that I was part of that problem when I first started brewing lagers without a really good understanding of how to make them properly. There are notable exceptions of course (Jack's Abby and Bierstadt Lagerhaus come to mind immediately), and with those exceptions, there comes some real excitement from craft beer drinkers that may have thought of lagers as dull, boring beers. Another reason that the lager boom hasn't taken place is simply due to the time it takes to produce them which results in it not being worth the time for a lot of brewers to mess with.

As I type this, I can't help but remember certain beers that influenced my career. I was among the many craft beer geeks that thought I didn't like lagers even in the first few years of my professional brewing career. The first lager I remember being intrigued by was Sam Adams Noble Pils in its first year of production, sometime around 2009. I remember that first year as being exceptionally hoppy for a Pils and a distinctly complex grassy, floral flavor from the hop combination. Then the next year, I remember being let down by it and that was kind of the end of my excitement towards craft lagers for a while.

Then, in 2014 when I was about to head to Doemens for the World Brewing Academy, I was kind of dreading the beer selection that I would be looking at for the next 6 weeks... No IPA's, not really any funky options, no stouts, basically no ales other than hefeweizens (which I also thought I hated). Instead, we'd be in Munich where Helles and Dunkels dominate the beer scene. Those six weeks in Europe opened my eyes. Being in a place where lagers have been perfected over the course of around 200 years was a completely different experience. The intense maltiness of the lightest colored Helles brewers could produce was shocking. The assertive ester character from Augustiner's yeast was exciting to me. The complex malty flavors void of candy like sweetness from overuse of caramel malts and soft mouthfeel of Andech's Dunkel was eye opening.

As I began experiencing this, I spent a lot of time talking with my German teachers at Doemens about what makes those beers special and I started writing out recipes and keeping a journal of thoughts about how these beers could be introduced to American craft beer drinkers in a way that would get customers excited. Then I had two beers that really changed the way I looked at lagers entirely: Augustiner Pils and a small batch Rauchbier brewed at Weyermann's pilot brewery.

In both cases, I felt like it was obvious that there was a place for those beers with American craft drinkers. The Augustiner Pils was like an extreme version of my memory of that first year of Sam Adam's Noble Pils. It was dry, crisp, refreshing, highly carbonated, and filled with noble hop flavor that was floral and grassy, with the intensity of a heavily hopped pale ale. The Rauchbier at Weyermann was delicately smoky with beechwood smoked malt, very full bodied, and it had a beautiful, deep amber color. Pairing that beer with smoked salmon trout (I'm still not entirely sure what that fish actually is, but it was delicious) was one of the best beer and food pairings I've ever experienced.

Now, years later, I do believe it is time for some lager styles to boom in the USA, but I don't think it will necessarily be traditional, sessionable lagers that start the lager craze (although, for a brief span it did look like Vienna Lagers disguised as Mexican Lagers would take off). But rather, I think we can learn a lot from traditional lager brewers as we introduce styles more suited for the craft beer enthusiasts here. Now that we have our lager tanks in Tombstone, we will be producing significantly more of them going forward. We started with a new hop bursted Pilsener and a traditional schwarzbier (Black Lager) which we introduced in cans last week, and now we are moving on to a round of three lagers that is likely to generate a little more curiosity.

The beer I'm perhaps looking forward to the most from this round is a style that even the geekiest of craft beer geeks is unlikely to have heard of before: Kulmbacher. The style originated in Kulmbach, a city in Upper Franconia, Bavaria, and there is a lot of room for confusion here. Today, there is a brewery that shares the name of the style and further complicating things, the Kulmbacher brewery is actually 4 breweries from Kulmbach that merged together in the 1980's, and they don't brew the traditional Kulmbacher style. The city of Kulmbach has a brewing history that dates back almost 670 years to 1349.  Located in Upper Franconia, the city is sometimes referred to as "The Secret Capital of Beer" and it has the largest amount of breweries per capita of any city in Germany.

As with most German cities, Kulmbach had its own style of beer that it was known for in the late 1800's and early 1900's. The Kulmbacher style was known for being dark with a rich malt flavor and heavily hopped. Several things lead to the phasing out of the interesting style, but two things are most notable. First, around 1900, breweries in Kulmbach received warnings that they were breaking the Reinheitsgebot due to the use of caramel coloring to make the beer appear darker. Also around that time, German palates began to shift in favor of beers with less bitterness. The Kulmbachers being produced at that time were strong beers at 6.0-8.0% ABV and it was not uncommon for the bitterness to be up around 80 IBU's. I recall discussing this style with one of our teachers at Doemens when we were learning about "extinct" German styles.

Recently, an article was written by a beer historian, Ron Pattinson, and published on BeerAdvocate.com. When I saw the article, it reminded me of that talk and how at the time I wanted to attempt brewing one. I went back through my brewing notes and found the recipe that I had written down after that discussion. My take on the style is something that I think will suit modern palates well while still maintaining historical accuracy. The malts we used come from Weyermann which opened its doors during the Kulmbacher heyday in 1879. The basemalt used at the time would have been similar to what we know today simply as Munich Malt. However, when recreating a historical style, there are many factors in regard to ingredient selection that need to be thought about.

About every 10 years now, advances in barley varieties result in old varieties getting phased out in favor of varieties with better agronomics. Unfortunately, flavor can frequently suffer in newer varieties as the focus is more on the growing habits than flavor. On occasion, maltsters will realize that a variety is getting phased out and will intervene in order to preserve varieties that they think of as being worthy of continued use. Weyermann realized the special flavor qualities of Barke barley and convinced a few growers in Bavaria to continue planting it. It is now listed as an heirloom barley variety and is notable for its richness and depth of flavor. The Barke Munich malt has an incredible classic Munich toasty flavor and is very similar in flavor to what would have been used 150 years ago (although, malting technology has gotten so much better now that the quality control and consistency is going to be significantly improved).

One of the intriguing things about the Kulmbacher style also was that the breweries there used their own unique type of decoction mash schedule for these beers. Instead of a 3 step mash, only one decoction was used and it was not so much for flavor development or even for the necessity of modifying the malt further. The brewers there would decoct the mash, take the decoction and begin boiling it as is normal, but then they would leave a small amount of the liquid in the boil kettle and do their first hop addition. Sometimes referred to as "hopfenrosten" or "hop roasting." The utilization of the hop acids would have been very poor, but the goal of that technique is not that different from utilizing a first wort hop addition which is how we went about recreating that particular part of the style without a decoction mash.

Perhaps the most interesting part of this style from a historical perspective is that when the brewers were warned about the use of caramel coloring, the beers had to have changed drastically. To still get the same dark color brewers had to switch to roasted malts which would have increased the roastiness and astringency. Not so coincidentally, in 1902 Weyermann released a special additive, Sinimar, which is completely Reinheitsgebot compliant. It is made from their dehusked roasted malt, hops, and yeast, and concentrated via evaporation, sterile filtered, and packaged. Due to their unique process, it has a pleasant roasted chocolate flavor with even less astringency than you would find in dehusked roasted malts. The use of Sinimar in our version creates a very dark brown, almost black appearance.

Overall, it would be appropriate to describe our version of the beer as a sort of Brown IPL (or India Brown Lager if you hate the oxymoron) with 100% traditional German ingredients. We used a comparable hopping rate to the norm of original examples, but we used a hopping schedule more similar to our lowly bittered, highly aromatic Pils. Other than the small First Wort Hop, all the hot side hops were added in the whirlpool and the beer will be dry hopped. 100% of the ingredients we used were grown and processed in Bavaria with the hops being the traditional Hallertauer Mittelfruh. The Barke Munich was malted just 37 miles away from Kulmbach and our yeast came from one of Bavaria's oldest and most well known lager breweries. With our RO water, we were able to recreate exactly the moderately hard water profile that would have been used in the early 1900's. Reintroducing styles like this is one of my favorite things to do as a brewer.

The second beer we brewed this week was a Double India Pale Lager. This beer is using fruity, American grown hops just like we would use in our NEIPA's: Idaho 7, Citra, and Mosaic. Sticking with my thought of keeping some traditional lager elements, I used another very traditional type of malt. For this beer, the majority of the malt used was Floor Malted Bohemian Pilsner Malt grown and malted in the Czech Republic. The terroir for this growing region results in a very soft mouthfeel from the barley and the floor malting is a traditional malting method that results in more depth of flavor and a richness that has not yet been created with modern malting techniques. This beer will feature many elements that you would expect from a Tombstone Double IPA with an insane hopping rate, but will have a crisp, well lagered mouthfeel.

The final beer we brewed this week was a Doppelbock which also features a large amount of Barke Munich Malt, Floor Malted Pils Malt, and Sinimar. We brewed 30 BBL of the doppelbock and half of it will be lagered in a mix of bourbon and other spirit barrels while the other half is released in cans.

Prost!

Let's Get Funky!

I think that every serious craft beer drinker gets to a point when they feel a lull in their drinking experiences and nothing seems to wow them anymore. Nothing seems hoppy enough, every hyped bourbon barrel stout just tastes boozy and muddled, and every exciting sour beer just tastes like the brewery dumped acetic acid into the fermenter, added fruit and called it a day. The usual advice for curing palate fatigue like this is to go back to drinking session beers, pilseners, or styles you normally don't drink on a regular basis until your senses come back to you. Unfortunately, when you're a brewer and you're constantly having to brew and taste your beers, it can be hard to come by a break. You either deal with the disappointment of palate fatigue, or you push your beer to the next level of extreme. That's how beers like "Most Hops" are born... And even then when you drink it the thought is still "That's not as intense as I expected. I'll have to figure out how to do more." Matt is frequently telling me that I've gotten myself into an arms race with no one when we talk about this phenomenon.

A few years ago, I was in the middle of about a year long stretch where no beer was exciting to me. Brewing was turning into a job rather than a passion and I wasn't feeling very inspired by much of anything. While I was brewing at Blue Pants, our Tennessee sales manager requested that my assistant brewer and I go to a small beer fest in Memphis: Cooper Young's Beer Fest. I have never been the type of person to get excited about festivals, but this was a good opportunity for the brewers to get out and meet the people that sell our beer and develop relationships. I reluctantly agreed to go and it was at this fest that I had a beer that would change my perception about what beer could be.

The beer came from an unlikely source. After walking around and trying various beers and feeling like I'd had all of the exact same tasting experiences at every beer fest I'd ever attended, I saw a strange beer name on the board at a booth: "Brett... Not Sour" from Yazoo Brewing Company. It was very direct and to the point. Brettanomyces is a species of yeast, not bacteria and as such it doesn't make a beer sour as is commonly claimed. I gave it a try and I was floored by the flavor combinations, complexity, and drink-ability of that beer. I spent the rest of the afternoon walking between our booth and the Yazoo booth getting more samples of the same beer... Forget the festival and the hundreds of beers on tap. That was the one for me. Every glass I drank of it was better than the last. It had a huge tropical fruit aroma, intense mango flavor, lots of tangerine, some pineapple, it was dry and just incredible.

After drinking that beer, I began to realize that the way the beer community thinks of Brettanomyces is just flawed. For most beer enthusiasts, if you ask them what flavor you get from Brett, they'll use descriptors like "horse blanket" or "Leather." Sometimes people just use "Funky" and occasionally "Cherry Pie." Those are all fine descriptions for flavors that Brett can lend to a beer, but that is really just the tip of the iceberg. There are new Brett yeast strains being discovered constantly and despite huge steps forward in the studies of Brett in recent years, there are still a lot of unknowns.

After that day in Memphis, I started playing with different types of Brett fermentations myself and spent a lot of time researching ways that Brett can be used. It has now been almost 15 years since the first beers credited as being fermented completely with Brett were brewed by Russian River, Lost Abbey, and New Belgium. In that time, Brett fermentation still hasn't evolved much commercially whereas most brewers still think of Brett as a long term yeast used mostly for secondary and aging. During my research and development, I ended up working with a yeast lab to develop a blend of Brett strains that hits on a lot of flavors that are highly desirable for IPA breweries, but typically to get those flavors, brewers use hops. The blend is notable for its intense pineapple, peach, nectarine, and even watermelon flavors. Brewing Brett beers like that is one of the most fun things for me to do in the brewery.

In fact, when Matt and I had our first meetings during my interviews for the brewmaster position in Tombstone, a large part of our discussions revolved around the importance of brewing the next trendy styles. At one point in the conversation, I said "Screw it... If that's what we want to do, let's just do an all Brett brewery with Brett IPA's and fruited Brett beers." I think there was about a week long period where the idea was seriously considered, but I think that we determined that the time wasn't quite right for that type of plan, especially with the brewery's location in Tombstone and our reliance on selling beer on site to tourists and locals. If Arizona wasn't ready for it then, get ready now because it is coming.

With the addition of our temperature controlled Brett facility, we can safely keep the funky yeast away from our clean strains and have the best of both worlds. This week we will be brewing our first all Brett beers to be available on a large scale. We will have four fermenters where we will be able to split batches into different variants. The first batches will be IPA's with two fermenters being filled from one batch and dry hopped differently. The other two fermenters will be filled with a historical style, Dortmunder Adambier, with one of them being fermented with cherry wood and finished with cherry fruit, and the other being left as the base beer to be aged in oak barrels for six months to a year as would be normal for the style hundreds of years ago.

One of the cool things about doing Brett fermented IPA's is that the beer will evolve rapidly over the course of the first year in bottles. When fresh, the beer will feature the intense peach, pineapple, and mango flavors that the Brett provides as well as the intense hoppy aromas that we've become known for with our selected lots of hops. Brett is very good at scavenging micro oxidation, so the hop flavors will persist for a longer period of time than you would expect to find in our NEIPA's. After about three months in bottles, the pineapple flavor will develop more along with a subtle cherry flavor. The beer should never really get phenolic or spicy with this yeast blend, but will only alter the types of fruity esters over the course of a year. Eventually, years down the line the beer will develop some of the classic funky horsey qualities that are commonly associated with Brett, but not in a very intense manner like you would find in a beer that is fermented with Saccharomyces and aged with Brett. Beers fermented with Brett are typically perceived as being less bitter than the same wort fermented with Saccharomyces which is a quality that our NEIPA drinkers will be able to relate to easily. Since Brett does not produce glycogens like our NEIPA yeast strain does, we will be adding a large percentage of oats to keep the mouthfeel full, although the beer will be very dry like you expect in an old school West Coast IPA. Unlike our NEIPA's, I would recommend hoarding bottles, drinking a few fresh, and aging a few, trying them every couple months to watch the beer change.

The Dortmunder Adambier is a style that I wouldn't expect many people to have heard of. In fact, when I've talked about the style to some beer enthusiasts before they try to correct me like I'm a moron that calls Altbier by the wrong name. Perhaps the most well known example is Hair of The Dog's "Adam." This will be my second attempt at an Adambier after my first attempt won a silver medal at GABF and a bronze medal at World Beer Cup a few years ago. Adambier is a style that is considered to be extinct that originated in Dortmunder. The style was a high ABV beer that would almost certainly have been contaminated with Brett when it was aged in barrels for a year before consuming. One of the notable characteristics of the Adambier style is the lightly smoky flavor that would historically have come from malting grains over a beechwood fire. We will be using a moderate amount of beechwood smoked malt to achieve the same effect. Instead of an incidental Brett contamination, this beer will be co-fermented with a Saccharomyces strain similar to a Kolsch strain and Brett Lambicus. The Lambicus will continue to develop the classic Brett funk along with cherry pie over the course of many years. The version fermented with cherry wood and fruit will be best fresh, but could develop some interesting flavors with long term aging in the bottle. The version that is aged in oak will be available whenever the beer tells us it's ready which could be anywhere from six months to a year down the line and will be an excellent candidate for even more long term aging if maximum funkiness is what you desire.

Imperial Stout and Giving the Customers What they Want

Ever since we opened, I've been telling people that even though we brew so many IPA's, I hate the idea of being thought of as an IPA only brewery. It seems like lately we've been just cranking out the hazy IPA's and it has definitely been fun experimenting with different flavors we can get, but it's been forever since we've brewed an Imperial Stout.

I always think about how homebrewers brew whatever it is they want to drink. I think when I first started brewing commercially I was in the crowd of brewers that said I would brew beers the way I wanted to drink them and that the sales would come along from the niche drinkers that want well balanced, drinkable beers, but the truth is, after a while that gets kind of boring... There is no challenge there. In the last sixteen months, I think I've stuck to my guns a little bit too much from time to time when it comes to my stout recipes. My preference has always been to have an Imperial Stout that is complex and chocolatey, but still well balanced. While our stouts are generally given good remarks and compliments, it is clear that I'm not brewing what gets people excited like we've been able to do with IPA's. So in a similar fashion to our IPA project of getting those beers dialed in exactly the way our customers wanted them and maximizing every aspect that we could quantify, today I set out to begin a series of Imperial Stouts with a few things in mind.

It has become very obvious that in the last couple of years, the stout enthusiasts are after the biggest, thickest mouthfeel that they can get. Some of the beers that have received the most praise in the last year or so have been imperial stouts that have a terminal gravity higher than a lot of beers starting gravity. In addition, just like IBU levels in IPA's, the amount of bitterness in stouts has been on the decline.  In fact, when I first started brewing at home, the advice on all the homebrew forums for imperial stouts was to mash at a low temperature, use a bunch of roasted barley, small amounts of multiple types of caramel malts, and use enough hops to get to 100 IBU's. That's not too different from the way that I've continued to brew stouts up until today. As I reached the realization that my stout recipes might be a bit dated, I decided that it was time to go in a different direction.

Today, I brewed the biggest beer that I have brewed as a commercial brewer. I loaded the mashtun up with the most flavorful English malts we can get, included a ton of chocolate malt, and other specialty grains that would give a high percentage of unfermentable sugars, mashed at a high temperature, and boiled the wort for four hours. For the yeast, I used a very flavorful English Ale yeast with a low attenuation rate, and used a slightly low pitching rate and high aeration rate to maximize the fruity esters that this strain is known for.

Half of this batch is going into calvados and rum barrels for our barrel society and the rest will be limited to draught only. This beer is going to be the thickest, chewiest stout I have brewed and I can't wait to taste the final product. Even though this was the biggest beer I've brewed to date, I couldn't help myself from thinking the whole time about how to go to yet another level next time. This is going to be a fun evolution of ridiculous imperial stouts in the next few months!

Two New IPA's, Same Hops, Different Yeast

What a busy couple of months it has been. Unfortunately, I have not had time to write many blog posts and when I have had time, I felt like I didn't really have anything to say. At this point, I feel like most people that follow my blogs have read about my brewing philosophies for all the styles we have brewed, so even though we were brewing new beers, there wasn't necessarily anything new to say about them. Now we are brewing some newer beers that have some major differences from what we've become known for. This weekend we canned two new IPA's. At first glance, that doesn't sound  like anything new since we've brewed new IPA's and DIPA's every two weeks and we have canned them. This time though we experimented with new hops and after tasting the beers, I'm really anxious to share them with our fans. In fact, I think these might be my two favorite IPA's that we have released.

Both of these new IPA's are brewed with exactly the same hop bills but they feature two different, very distinctive yeast strains. These hops are new to us and probably will be new to most beer drinkers as well. We used Grungeist and Hallertau Blanc which are both German grown hops. One of the things that made this so fun for me is that German hops are rarely used in hoppy American ales. In recent years, German hop growers have been trying to gain traction with US craft brewers by breeding new varieties. Most of the new varieties are bred from Cascade and they feature flavors more similar to what we expect from fruity, citrusy hop varieties in America. Most of the new varieties are great for brewing new age pilsners, kolsches, helles, etc. but they haven't really gained much traction for the more extreme IPA's and DIPA's that are all the rage in America. Hops like Mandarina Bavaria and Hull Melon have the flavor profiles that we look for in IPA's, but they are too subtle to be featured in American styles in most cases.

Hallertau Blanc was the first German hop that I sampled and thought "This needs to be used in an IPA." My friend Tom from Hop Head Farms brought me a sample of a pale ale brewed at Three Floyds that used it and I was blown away by the wine like character that the beer had. It was more winey than any beer I've had brewed with Nelson Sauvin and the idea of brewing an IPA with it has been burning at me for months now. Grungeist was the second German hop variety that floored me and it was in a beer brewed by Pipeworks. It had an awesome floral aroma, gooseberry, pineapple, and lemon. Both of the hops are also low alpha acid varieties, so it's easy to get all that flavor and aroma without much bitterness at all.

The more I thought about those hops, the more I wanted to feature them together in IPA's. I also wanted to give brewing with Kveik (Norwegian Yeast that was handed down for generations of brewers) another shot. The idea of having the Sauvignon Blanc character from the Hallertau Blanc, the floral and berry flavors from the Grungeist, and the lemon-lime esters that can be achieved with Kveik, I thought we had an opportunity to brew something with completely new flavors. I also wanted to showcase the difference of Kveik and the English yeast we use in our New England style beers. One thing I always like discussing is that in every single beer we drink, there are approximately 1,000 flavor compounds at varying concentrations. Of those flavor compounds, 900 of them are produced by yeast during fermentation. The English yeast strain gives a notable peach ester and also is known for producing a lot of glycogens which in turn helps to create the soft, creamy mouthfeel. In contrast, the Kveik gives a huge citrusy aroma, ferments a beer very dry, and results in a very crisp, refreshing mouthfeel.

Now that the beers are canned, I couldn't be happier with how either of them turned out and I love that everyone that tries them will get to see how much influence yeast plays in the flavor of beer. They both have some wine character, pineapple, and berry, but the dry, crisp, lemony qualities from the Kveik make for an incredible contrast to the full bodied, peachy flavor of the English yeast. In addition to that, the more you drink of the beers, the more you begin to realize just how complex the hop flavor really is. The thing that I found most striking was that the terroir influence on the hops really shines. There is a distinctive floral quality that I find in all of the high quality hops grown in the Hallertau region. I remember the first time I noticed that flavor was when I was brewing Pilseners at Blue Pants and it was a distinctive flavor that I found in Mittelfruh, Hallertauer Tradition, and Hallertauer Gold. The same varieties of hops grown in other regions didn't have it. The flavor works great in these beers and the more you drink, the more it becomes noticeable and since the bitterness level of these IPA's is so low, you don't really have to worry about burning your tastebuds out and losing the ability to discern the more subtle flavors.

Citra IPA and Hoppy Pale Wheat Ale

It seems kind of crazy to me to think that we have brewed so many single hop beers at TBC, yet until yesterday, we hadn't released a single hop Citra beer even though Citra is the hop variety that we use the most. The reason we decided to do it now was because we stumbled across the best quality Citra that I have seen since 2009.

In recent years, Citra has been a bit of a problem for me. First, price jumped out of control and then when it was available, there seemed to be a weird onion/garlic character in half of the Citra I tried. It actually spawned a myth that over using Citra results in onion flavors... What's true is that low quality Citra has a tendency to display onion flavors. By the time Tombstone started production, I had learned which hop suppliers I wanted to work with and which ones I wanted to avoid, but the ones that I wanted to work with didn't offer Citra. Our first batch of IPA used Citra from the only supplier that had it that I felt that I could trust, but I knew that even with them I was taking a gamble. While it turned out well, it still didn't have the intensity of aroma that I remembered from the early years of Citra's development.

After we had been producing beers with that Citra for a few months, the supply ran out. We faced a tough decision... Should we stop using Citra and discontinue production of our IPA? Fortunately, as I came close to making that decision, one of my trusted hop suppliers contacted me to let me know that they got Citra for sale for the first time in their company history. Knowing that I could trust their quality, I asked for a contract for a few hundred pounds to get us through the year. When the first box arrived, I opened it up and immediately was ecstatic about our agreement. The aroma was the same huge punch of tropical aroma that I remembered from years previously before Citra production grew. If I had to describe the perfect harvest for Citra, it would be exactly what I smelled when I opened that box. Right away, I knew we had to brew a single hop IPA with it to show off what Citra is really capable of.

The Citra IPA features the same malt base that we use for our original IPA, but instead of Simcoe and Amarillo paired with it, this IPA has nothing but Citra. As always with our NEIPA's, it is very low in bitterness while still showing off a huge hop character from large whirlpool and dry hop additions. I feel like this beer really shows off what makes Tombstone beers special... Our never ending quest to use the highest quality ingredients, no matter the cost or the difficulty with which they are acquired. This is a difficult task as a small brewery that normally gets the last pick of a year's hop harvest, but thanks to our friends at Hop Head Farms, we have the best Citra available to us that we could ask for.

In addition to the Citra IPA shipping yesterday, we managed to get a "surprise" beer put on the truck for deliveries. I say it's a surprise because it was not a beer that we planned on brewing. Freight shipments are very difficult to deal with in a small town like Tombstone and two weeks ago, I planned on brewing another batch of Pilsener. The day before the brewday, the grains arrived, only to find out that half the order was missing. Due to our tight production schedule, if I didn't brew the next day, we would miss the opportunity to brew anything into that fermenter that was supposed to house the Pils. Instead of skipping a brewday, I went through the ingredients we had and found that I could brew a Pale Wheat Ale.

Pale Wheats seemed like they were the style of the future years ago when 3 Floyds released their awesome version, Gumballhead back in 2003. For the next few years, a lot of breweries brewed their versions of Pale Wheat Ales, but frequently, they left a lot to be desired. It's a style that I have enjoyed many times but drain poured more often. I've wanted to take a stab at one for a while now, but hadn't thought of brewing since TBC opened until we brewed Biffhorific Amber. After brewing the Amber, I couldn't help but think "What if Pale Wheats made a resurgence?" As I went through our material inventory, I was thinking to myself "This is my chance! Matt isn't here to tell me no!"

Our version is similar to a New England Style Pale Ale... Low bitterness, huge aroma, hazy, soft, creamy mouthfeel, and lots of esters. It was brewed with Amarillo and Simcoe and fermented with our IPA yeast strain. It's more drinkable than an IPA, but has much more hop aroma than your typical pale ale. The result is something that I would love to see more breweries producing and hopefully it's something that enough people will enjoy that it won't be a one time beer for us. I personally would love to have it available in cans for those late summer hikes in Arizona. Cheers!

Insanity Ensues: Canning, Fresh Hop Ales, Hop Selections, GABF, Oktoberfest, Pils

As I began to write out a proposed production schedule last week, I quickly realized that I was signing myself up for a hell of a couple of months. It seems like every idea I've had in the last year though, the more I'm excited about it and the better of an idea I think it is, the more of a pain in the ass it is. As we get closer to our canning line arrival, the more ridiculous the schedule becomes. As it would be, the upcoming beers and events have me more excited than I think I've ever been about what we've got on the horizon.

Perhaps the most exciting bit of news is that our canning line ships tomorrow! The canning line was something that we've been talking about since my first interview with Matt and something we've been wanting since we opened. As I look back on the first year's worth of our beer evolution though, I am actually a little bit relieved that we took this long to get the line...

I've been proud of every batch of IPA that we've brewed and while I originally thought that the first batch we brewed was as good as I could make it, every batch has actually received very minor tweaks to get us to this point. When I say minor things, it really has been extremely small tweaks... The first batch had a different water chemistry that left a little bit of a mineral character (which was intentional at the time, but after experimenting with water chemistry in other beers, I realized there was a better way to brew this beer) in the final product and has since been altered to make the mouthfeel as soft as possible. The fermentation temperature and yeast pitching rate were changed a few batches ago making the beer just a little bit juicier. Most importantly, in our first months we were working without hop contracts, buying everything from other breweries. While we were very selective about the breweries that we bought from and we took into account which hop growers and suppliers they bought them from themselves, we have since been able to source our hops on contracts from the two hop suppliers that I consider to be the best in the country. The batch that is in the fermenter now and getting canned on August 9th is undoubtedly the best batch that has been made yet. I think the beer in the tank now is the peak of what our IPA can be and it comes at the perfect time as it will be the first batch to go into cans. In addition to the IPA being canned on August 9th, one of our other most popular beers, Dank Fruit, will be canned on the same day. One week later, Over and Out (hoppy sour dry hopped with Citra) will be available in cans. The next canned beer after the first round will give us the opportunity to really show off our new hops with as Single Hopped Citra IPA.

After the first round of beers, it won't be until the end of August that we can the Citra IPA because of our competition schedule. We entered our Pilsener, Kellerbier, Oktoberfest, and one of our upcoming Wet Hop Pale Ales into the competition and the lagers need to be brewed immediately after emptying the batches of canned beers so that they can have enough time to condition before the competition. This batch of Pilsener will be the last time for a while that we brew the same Pils recipe and will also be our first Pilsener batch in cans. It will kick off a series of experimental German style Pilseners which should be canned about every 3 weeks starting in late October.

The other lager on the schedule, Oktoberfest, is one that I'm particularly excited to brew and compete.  After Pilseners, Oktoberfests are probably my next favorite style to brew and thanks in large part to Sierra Nevada's Oktoberfests the past few years, American craft beer drinkers have really started to appreciate the pale Oktoberfest style that I prefer to brew over the amber colored O'fests that dominated the craft brewing landscape for so many years. The way that I prefer to brew Oktoberfests had been more common in Germany for many years, but not too many versions of the style have been exported to the USA which has led to the misconception that O'fests are amber colored, sweet, malty lagers. Our Oktoberfest will feature all traditional German ingredients including Vienna and Munich Malts from Bamberg. While the color may be pale, the rich malty characters do still dominate the flavor profile and the lager yeast we use is the same strain used by one of the oldest, most popular breweries in Bavaria which creates a ton of flavorful esters but still leaves a super crisp finish.

Around September 1st is when the brewing schedule really becomes crazy... We are planning a fresh hop festival for the 3rd week in September which will feature the release of 3 different fresh hop beers. We are going all out for these beers in a way that many people might consider to be a bit silly. Our distance from the best hop farms in America be damned, we are not allowing that to deter us from acquiring the best quality fresh hops in the country. On September 1st, Amarillo is being harvested in Oregon, being put immediately onto a plane, and arriving in Tombstone in less than 12 hours from the harvest where I will have a full kettle waiting for immediate use of these hops. On September 7th, Chinook and Cascade from Michigan will arrive in the same manner which will allow us to dry hop the Amarillo Pale Ale with fresh hops and again, a full kettle will be waiting for these hops immediate usage. The Chinook from Michigan is particularly exciting as our growers there have discovered that their unique soil conditions and climate make some intensely pineapple-y Chinook free of the spicy, pine characters that are normally exhibited by Chinook grown in the Pacific Northwest.

For the Amarillo Pale, it will feature 100% fresh hops. To feature nothing but fresh hops is actually a fairly uncommon practice due to the logistics of the schedule. Fresh hops really need to be used as quickly as possible (most people agree less than 24 hours), so dry hopping a beer with fresh hops only works if you use hops from two separate harvests. Most fresh hop beers use them in the whirlpool or the dry hop, but not in both and if used in the dry hop, they rarely get packaged due to the incredibly short shelf life. Because of the short shelf life, anything that is not sold at our wet hop fest will be distributed and available at retail accounts less than 72 hours after the cans are filled.

Immediately after these fresh hopped beers are dry hopped, I'll be making a super quick trip up to Portland for an afternoon to select our Amarillo lots for next year. This is something that I consider to be critical for high quality hoppy beers and will serve to help us take a giant leap forward in our hoppy beer quality for the 2018 brew year. I never realized just how important lot selections are until I did my first one last year for Cascade which was the main hop in our highest rated beer this year. With lot selections, it allows the brewer to get one step further up the chain and closer to the growers. What a lot of people don't realize is that a single variety can taste completely different from one grower to the next and that the differences can be large enough to make the same variety from different growers be completely unrecognizable. By doing a lot selection, we are getting the hops before the lots are all blended together so that we can ensure that we only have the very best of each variety without "filler" lots diluting the quality. While that does hurt the year-to-year consistency, it guarantees that we only ever have the absolute best available for each year.

Right when I return from the hop farms we will begin packaging the wet hop beers, throw a wet hop party, brew a round of beers that will feature an oak fermented porter, ESB, and Amber for draught only so that we can have some variety on our menu for our first anniversary party. After brewing those beers, we'll have another quick trip to Portland to select our Idaho 7 lots for 2018, followed by a final round of beers before our first anniversary which will be celebrated on October 21st with Double Dry Hopped IPA, Another Exercise in Mediocrity, and Little Baby Wyatt all in cans.

On Deck: Amber Ale

It seems that everytime I sit down to write a blog post, I know pretty much what I want to say. However, I never know how to introduce it. I never claimed to be a writer... I'm just here to make beer and tell people about it, so for this one I'm just going to jump right in with a commentary on our new Amber Ale:

Everyone that has been following craft beer for the last few years can easily tell you the number one selling craft beer style in the USA is IPA. However, not many people would accurately guess the second best selling style. Depending on the study (and excluding studies where Shocktop and Blue Moon are included as craft beer), the second most popular craft style is either Pale Ale or Amber Ale. For some reason though, Amber Ales seem to get a bad reputation as being "beginner" or "gateway" craft beers, despite the fact that there are some truly terrific Ambers being brewed that can appeal to even the most advanced craft beer drinkers.

I'll admit that there was a time when I fell into the bias against ambers, but I think that part of the reason is that "Amber Ale" has really become a catch all category for anything darker than a pale ale and lighter than a brown ale. Many breweries have fallen into the trap of "We need to have something to please the ________ crowd" mentality and as a result, we see a lot of boring examples of a few styles with Amber Ales potentially being the poster child of boring beers. It seems that the formula for an Amber Ale lately has been to make something very sweet, loaded with crystal malts, little to no hop aroma/flavor, and around 5% ABV. For a while though, the trend was to make Ambers with complex flavors and a balance with hops in mind. In fact, even Anheuser-Busch got in on it with their American Ale in 2008 which was an Amber Ale loaded with Cascade.

As the style has kind of slipped more towards these sweet, malty examples, I started to think about what the style would be if it had continued down the path that pale ales and IPA's have. The three Ambers that I think of as the quintessential American Amber Ales being Bell's Amber, Modern Times Blazing World, and Troegs Hopback Amber, I couldn't help but wonder what would happen if the style followed the same path that those breweries went with more hop forward examples. With that concept in mind and following the trend of the New England style IPA's, I decided to explore what I think of "Biffhorrific Amber." Essentially, what would have become of the Amber Ale style if it had followed the trends of Pale Ales and IPA's.

For our Amber Ale, I applied a lot of lessons learned from our NEIPA's in regards to hop schedule, water chemistry, yeast strain, and mouthfeel. It will not be hazy like a New England style IPA (mostly because hazy amber beers just look really gross), but it does feature the same velvety mouthfeel, low bitterness, and (relatively) large hop aroma. Looking at old Amber recipes, one thing that stands out is how much higher the hopping rates were for Amber Ales at the beginning of the most recent craft beer boom. The hop dosing rates were nearly identical to those of Pale Ales. This was at a time when most pale ales featured 1.5 lbs of hops per barrel and IPA's featured around 3 lbs of hops per barrel. Now, as hopping rates have increased, our pale ale recipe is more in line with what many people think of as hopping rates for IPA's and our IPA's reach DIPA territory. I wanted to follow along with that concept in my theory of the "Biffhorrific Amber." As a result, this beer is loaded with the classic Amber Ale hop: The last of our award winning Cascade hops. It is then dry hopped with Citra which brings the total hop usage rate up to approximately what would have been common for an IPA a few years ago, however we also followed our modern hopping schedule which attempts to minimize bitterness. This Amber is surprisingly aromatic with huge tropical fruit aromas from the hops, lots of peach esters from the yeast, complimented with a pleasant biscuity malt flavor, and no cloying sweetness. This experiment in the alternative future from Amber Ales of 2008 has been a lot of fun for me and I hope that our consumers enjoy it as much as I have!

Continuing to Roll Out New Beers

It seems like every time Matt and I get the opportunity to get out of the brewery, hang out with other brewers, and stay up late drinking beers, we have the best brainstorming sessions about the future of Tombstone beers. Every time we get these chances, I always come back super excited about what we've got coming up. Our most recent opportunity to have this time of marathon brainstorming session happened this last weekend when we went up to Phoenix for a beer dinner followed up with our first collaboration brew with Wren House and Pueblo Vida. Getting to brew a collaboration with these breweries that we have so much respect for was a great time, very educational discussing how we each do things a little bit differently, and it was awesome to have the opportunity to hang out with other brewers instead of continuing our feeling of isolationism so far away from the brewing action in Phoenix and Tucson.

When we got back from our trip, I was looking forward to sampling our most recent round of beers which had been dry hopped just before leaving town. Typically, I like to write blog posts the day of the brewday or a few days before brewing. However, I struggled a lot to write this post. Each time I thought about what I wanted to write, I ended up going on multi-hour tangents in my head about the use of the word "session" and how "Session IPA" is admittedly a dumb name for a style, but also how the basis of people's arguments about using the word is also kind of ridiculous. Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to make myself write this blog post without a rant first... If all you want to do is read about the beers we brewed, skip ahead a few paragraphs!

There seems to still be a lot of discussion about whether or not Session IPA is a style with some people claiming that a Session IPA is really just a pale ale, others saying that "session" is defined as being less than 4.5% ABV, low IBU, mildly carbonated beers because that's the expectancy of English session ales, and others blindly touting that it's clearly not a style because the BJCP doesn't recognize it.

Starting with the last argument... The BJCP guidelines exist as a way of giving parameters to a style. If styles were never invented, the BJCP would never create guidelines. The BJCP also has a lot of issues with their guidelines that spread misconceptions about various styles and they exist for competition use. I brew beer that I think is going to taste great and if it happens to fit into a style guideline, we will consider competing with it. However, I would never sit down with style guidelines in front of me while I develop a recipe with the goal of brewing a style within a flawed system's parameters.

As far as the definition of session in England: I hate to be "that" guy, but... this is America. Basically since the beginning of craft beer in America, the overwhelming majority of American ale styles have evolved from English styles. The most obvious differences typically include higher alcohol content, more IBU's, and higher carbonation levels. Styles like pale ales, IPA's, and brown ales have entirely different expectations between American and English styles. The only way they're being differentiated now is when people specify which regional style they are attempting to brew. So if we continue with American craft brewing traditions, should we just start saying "American Session Ale" and then we can agree that the word has different meanings when used in that context?

The most reasonable argument for people saying that using Session IPA as a style name is that the style is really just a pale ale. While I understand why people would say that, I do think there is (or should be) a notable difference. When I think of the classic American Pale Ale, like Sierra Nevada's, those types of beers are really well balanced. But with a Session IPA, I think the balance should shift towards being dramatically more hoppy. In my opinion, the goal is to take an IPA and pack the same intensity of hop flavor into the beer, but bring the alcohol content down to a range where you can drink more of it without becoming too intoxicated after 4-5 pints.

With my highly opinionated view on the style, I set out to brew a session IPA that I felt would be noticeably different from a pale ale, less than 5% ABV, and fits within the standards that our customers have come to expect from our IPA's. The problem that I think a lot of brewers face when attempting this style is the perception that low ABV beers are watery. I take a lot of pride in the soft but full mouthfeel of our IPA's and I wanted to create this beer to continue on with that. As a result, we used a very flavorful Pilsner malt that gives off a slight honey characteristic, increased the ratio of oats used in this beer, used very soft water, a high mash temperature, and a very small amount of dextrin malt to make sure that there would be residual unfermentable sugars to give the beer body. My thought was that if I gave the hops a big enough stage, I'd be able to use a higher quantity of hops per barrel than if I had brewed this with the same techniques that we brew our higher gravity hoppy ales.

With the malt backbone in place, I began working on the hop bill. We were so impressed with the intensely peachy flavor we got from Idaho 7 in our pale ale that I decided to make that a feature in this beer too. I paired the Idaho 7 with another new hop variety: Cashmere. The Cashmere beers that I've sampled have all had a great cantaloupe/ripe melon flavor that I thought would pair perfectly with the peach aroma of Idaho 7. Keeping in mind the difference in balance that I believe sets apart Session IPA's from Pale Ales, I decided to revisit some old wisdom, but this time with a twist.

When I first began brewing IPA's in 2009, the most common advice for balancing an IPA properly was to use a specific IBU to gravity units ratio of 1:1. For example, if the beer had a specific gravity of 1.060 then the target IBU's should be 60 IBU's. As the trend has shifted in the last few years to lower bitterness with more hop flavor and aroma, I knew that this was a beer that could easily be considered unbalanced if the hop schedule wasn't perfect. In the past couple years, I've actually begun to think of IBU's as a side effect of hop additions rather than the primary goal of hop additions. I believe that a third unit should be brought into play that could be referred to as an "Aroma Unit." The small hang up with trying to maximize aroma units is that the more aroma you try to achieve from hops, the more bitterness you will get as well. I ended up shortening the contact time for the hops by decreasing our whirlpool time to stop the utilization of bittering acids while maximizing the oil extraction.

After sampling the beer for the first time yesterday, I'm very happy with the end results. The beer is 4.9% ABV, extremely aromatic, has really awesome head retention, a full, creamy mouthfeel, and is very juicy, almost like candied peaches. I believe that it holds up very well to the standards we've created with our IPA and that it will be a great alternative for people at a bar when trying to hang out drinking with friends for longer periods of time than would be possible with the IPA.

The second beer brewed in our most recent round of 3 beers is a new and improved Double IPA. The first batch of Double IPA was a beer that I enjoyed a lot, but I felt that it was missing something. It was like the amarillo in that recipe couldn't get out of the shadow of the Simcoe and Citra, so it really didn't bring anything to the beer. It was a strange thing to notice since the original DIPA used the same hops as our IPA and we don't have that occurrence with the regular IPA. This time around, the Amarillo was replaced with Mosaic lupulin powder for the dry hop. The use of Apollo hop oil, plus an extra bag of oats really put the finishing touches on the original recipe. The aroma is incredibly intense from the sample I pulled yesterday and although it is 8.2% ABV, the drinkability remains very good.

The 3rd beer is another new beer for us: Coffee Milk Stout. The coffee being used is a great Ethiopian coffee from Ground Control which gives a really nice low level of roastiness paired with an intense blueberry coffee flavor. I'm typically very picky about coffee in stouts because I frequently find them to taste like green pepper after a short period of time. Testing this coffee in a cold brew, we got the intense blueberry flavor and none of the acidic, tannic, or peppery flavors that I find off putting in beers. At 7.5% ABV, the base stout is thick without being overly sweet or cloying. I can't wait to try the finished beer after the coffee has been added.

All 3 of these beers should be ready by early next week, so if you're one of the people saying that our beer keeps disappearing too quickly before you have an opportunity to get it, stay tuned around Tuesday or Wednesday to find out where these will be available!

Barrel Society Update

With all the interest in our Barrel Society, I thought that I would go ahead and try to answer the most common questions all in one place
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First of all, I want to give a big thank you to everyone that has signed up so far! We're off to a really good start and with the interest we've had, we're starting to get a better picture of just how big we can make this. Today we went ahead and ordered two 40' refrigerated shipping containers that we are going to use as our first barrel facilities! In each one, we should be able to house at least 75 barrels easily and with a little bit of modification, we could stretch that up to 105 barrels. It is going to be a long time before we have a need for 210 barrels, but we wanted to have two of them so that we can keep our funky beers separate from the clean beers.

Probably the most asked questions have been about what beers will be released through our barrel society program. The reason we haven't released an official list is because we want to remain flexible. Every day we are looking for more sources for barrels and certain types of barrels are unpredictable in their availability. If a rare type of barrel pops up for purchase, there is a good chance that we will be buying it even if we don't necessarily have a beer planned for it. As a result, we don't want to release a definite list of beers and then find a more exciting type of barrel randomly become available without the flexibility in the production schedule to buy it. Our goal is to always find the absolute best barrels and if something super awesome comes available, I would hate to miss the opportunity to use it because we are committed to a predetermined list of promised beers.

That said, there are a few beers that we will definitely release that we can go ahead and disclose. The first beers that will be released to the Barrel Society will be an English Barleywine aged in Port, Red Wine, Woodford Bourbon, and Woodford Rye Whiskey barrels. We will also have our Imperial Stout with Piloncillo aged in Woodford Rye Barrels. These will all be ready in about 2 months and will be released to everyone that signed up for the Basic Membership. Each of these initial variants will be just about guaranteed to have extras after the allocations, so barrel society members will have 3 months of exclusive access to the extra bottles.

For our Funky Bunch members, we have between 3 and 6 months for the first allocations to be ready and the first release will include a Sour Wheat aged in toasted oak with Mango and Sour Cherries. We also have a 100% Brett fermented beer using a proprietary Brett Blend that gives intense pineapple and stone fruit flavor. That beer is now aging in Sauternes, Chardonnay, Toasted Oak, and Charred Oak barrels. We are also working on setting up a small yeast lab (in my home office!) where I will be able to propagate wild yeast strains and bacteria for the Funky Bunch. One idea I have is to cultivate yeast from the world's largest rose bush, which just happens to be in full bloom right around the corner from the brewery, and use it in a fruited sour.

For the top tier of membership, I'll be picking my favorite barrel from the barleywine variants and transferring that barrel into a second barrel of the same type. It is likely to be one of the Woodford Rye barrels. That barrel will age for just one month to take on more of the flavor of the whiskey before being transferred to a 3rd barrel which will be an unused, charred oak barrel where it will age for 3-6 months. If a triple barrel aged barleywine isn't exciting enough for you, one of the beers that is planned (and not yet brewed) will go through a similar process. It will be a HUGE imperial stout that will never touch stainless steel after the boil. It will be fermented entirely in new toasted oak barrels where it will ferment for 3-4 days before being transferred into a variety of barrels (including, but not limited to: French Apple Brandy, Bourbon, and Armagnac) for extended aging. Once again, I will select my favorite barrel and transfer into a second one of the same before transferring into a charred oak barrel... a quadruple barrel aged Imperial Stout.

While all of the transferring of barrels will be a lot of work, I believe it is going to be well worth the trouble. I got the idea about a year ago when I was working on a presentation about advanced dry hopping techniques which included a theory I've had about how to achieve the "complete" aroma of hops. That theory is based on the fact that every hop addition that you do has a trade off. The basic thought is that kettle hop additions destroy certain compounds in order to create other compounds and that the lost compounds can be reintroduced to a beer with post-boil additions and pure hop oils. Then when a beer is dry hopped during fermentation you get some bio-transformation of hop compounds meaning once again, the compounds that were transformed are lost and can be reintroduced at a later point in the process and then when serving beer, hops can be infused to capture the most volatile of compounds that would never survive the conditioning time frame, thus achieving and maximizing every possible hop flavor compound being present in the glass.

Around that time, I was working hard on planning the barrel regimen that we will be using and I started thinking that the same principles could be applied to the barrel aging process to create the "complete" barrel flavor. My thought was that the first barrel being used for primary fermentation would lend a very low level of barrel flavor that would mostly be vanillans and a lightly smoky phenolic character. More important than the flavor of the barrel itself though, the yeast will behave differently in a barrel fermenter due to the different dimensions and the micro-oxygenation that occurs. I've often thought about how almost every brewery in the United States uses the same basic fermenter design and how differentiation can be achieved by changing the shape and size. In a barrel, there will be very little pressure put on the yeast and as a result, the esters produced will be of much greater intensity than in cylindro-conical fermenter. In addition, the yeast will produce more glycogens which will act to enhance he creaminess of the mouthfeel and create a fullness that can't be achieved in stainless steel.

The next barrels being spirit and wine barrels will impart a lot of flavor of the spirits themselves, but some of the flavor will have already been "taken" from the barrel, so the final conditioning barrel is an unused barrel that will bring back those lost compounds. In a new barrel, the amount of barrel flavor is very intense and with all the enzymes in beer, it only takes 3-6 months to impart all of the character of the barrel. Since we will have already taken flavor compounds from a toasted oak barrel during primary fermentation, we will use the charred oak to achieve a greater depth of flavor and we will be able to specify the level of char with our cooperage to match the flavors that we want to pair with the individual beer.

This is all super exciting for us and the daydreaming about what we can produce for our barrel society members is non-stop these days.

Upcoming Beers for March: Kveik, Pils, Gose, Dry Hopped Sour and more

After a crazy month in February packed with events, bottle releases, and our taproom grand opening, I'm excited to get back to just focusing on brewing in March. In the coming month, we've got the beers that I've been most excited about brewing ever since we started brewing back in October. While we've had a blast brewing the hazy Northeast Style ales, I'm ready to start adventuring into some other styles and trying out some new things.

The beers that will probably be the most unique beers that we've produced thus far will be fermented with some really interesting yeast, also known as kveik. If you've never heard of kveik, there have been some really cool articles written about these yeast strains, which come from Norway and were used by Norwegian farmhouse breweries for many generations. These yeast strains have a really interesting back story where the yeast was typically kept within a family brewery and was saved in dried yeast rings in open air. While that sounds like a method that would harbor contaminants, and when you consider how old the yeast collections are, lab analysis has confirmed that various breweries have managed to avoid contaminants and that the yeast strains have evolved very little. What's interesting to me about that is that these yeast strains are known to have been passed from brewer to brewer with very basic methods, no labratory equipment of any kind, the yeast was spooned from beer into glasses, stored for months, and reused for centuries. Now with modern technology the cultures are analyzed and found to be pure Saccharomyces yeast cultures, no bacteria, no brett, etc. More info can be found here if you are interested in reading more about the lab analysis.

Recently, a few small yeast labs in America have begun to propagate cultures of a few kveik strains and the beers are getting rave reviews. The flavor profile from these strains is described as slightly earthy with pronounced citrus esters, most commonly being described as an orange peel flavor. To add to the intrigue, instead of fermenting in the normal ale temperature range (about 60-72 degrees F) the kveik strain we're using is known to ferment well up into the high 90's, create a very dry beer, and maintain a clean fermentation profile, free of phenols or fusel alcohols. Even more bizarrely, after finishing fermentation the yeast falls out of suspension quickly and is described by many of the early users as being the most flocculant yeast they've ever brewed with.

The first beer we'll be brewing with the kveik is slated to be an IPA with our award winning Cascade hops, Lemondrop, and Citra: basically all of our most citrusy hops to compliment the citrus esters from the yeast. Unlike our normal IPA, this beer should be very clear in comparison to what our customers have come to expect from us. It will also be very dry, so we will use a generous amount of flaked oats to help improve the mouthfeel.

After harvesting the yeast from that first batch, things are going to get fun. We will reuse the yeast in a sour, salty interpretation of Gose and we'll also brew another dry hopped sour with it. This time, instead of going with a lightly tart acidity the way we did with our first dry hopped sour, we will be more aggressive with the acidity on these batches. The type of lactobacillus we're using for these (L. Plantarum) is notable for giving a very pleasant acidity and creating a bit of a citrus flavor as well. While most yeast strains do not create much of an ester profile in sour worts, I'm hoping that we will still be able to get the orange peel or lime esters from the kveik yeast by sticking with a low pitching rate and fermenting all the way up near 100 degrees.

While the beers fermented with kveik are probably the most exciting to talk about, the beer that I'm actually even more excited to brew is a German Style Pilsener. While in brewing school, I dedicated my time in Germany to learning as much as I could about German Pilseners. Upon my arrival in Germany, I was actually not a big fan of the style, but drinking Augustiner Pils was a real eye opener for me. With perfect clarity, an extremely pale straw color, fine carbonation rising up to form the perfect foam in a footed Pilsner glass, their beer was highly aromatic, with lemongrass aromas, and insanely drinkable. After doing some research, I learned that their Pils was actually hopbursted with Hallertauer Mittelfruh, which is a pretty unique technique for a German beer. I would consider that beer to be the perfect German counterpart to an American Pale Ale as far as the perception of hop aroma.

We'll be using the lightest color Pilsner Malt available from Weyermann Malting. Their malts are great because in addition to being extremely pale, the rich, sweet flavor of their Premium Pils Malt is a flavor that I consider to be rivaled by none. Hops from Hop Head Farms are some of the most aromatic noble hop varieties I've ever seen and in addition to using 100% Hallertauer Mittelfruh in the whirlpool as our only hot side hop addition, we will also utilize a very light dry hop with a noble hop noted for its subtle lemongrass aroma. With the use of very soft water out of our RO system and a gentle boil in our steam heated kettle, I can't wait to put all of the studying in Germany to use again.

Lastly, in addition to all those new beers, we will be moving our 100% Brett beer, which currently has an intense pineapple flavor, into a variety of white wine barrels, new oak barrels, and charred oak barrels where it will sit for a few months before bottling. This month is the stuff of dreams for a brewer wanting to turn the brewery into a playground for beer experiments!

February Beers

After brewing some lagers and Brett beer in December and January, things seemed like they had slowed down for a while at the brewery. Following the release of those beers, I had to get caught back up on brewing our IPA and Imperial Stout again and I felt like I hadn't had anything to blog about in a while. That is all going to change in February. In the coming month we are set up to see some exciting new releases and they will all be coming available in a very brief time span.

First, we wanted to make sure that we had a good lineup for Arizona Beer Week and due to the popularity of our hoppy ales, we decided to add a few more to our lineup. This week will see a new version of a Double IPA, this time brewed with some newly released hop varieties, Denali and Eureka. The new double will be packed with the most intense hop aroma/flavor we can muster. We've got a few tricks up our sleeves to make sure that we can pack even more hop flavor into this recipe than our last double IPA and we will be able to reduce the bitterness even a little bit more. 

In addition to the Double IPA, we will be releasing a second single hop pale ale, this time featuring Cascade hops. However, this is not your average Cascade. Right before I made the move to Tombstone, I had flown out to Oregon to select a lot of Cascade. For those that don't know, what we normally buy as small breweries is blends of varieties grown on different farms. Especially with the popularity of Cascade, any one box of hops may have Cascade grown on 10-15 different farms. While the growers typically say that the hops come from Yakima Valley, that is slightly misleading, since most brokers are blending hops from Yakima, Idaho, Michigan, and New York. While these blends are great for year to year consistency, it kind of sucks to think that great quality, highly aromatic hops from Yakima are being blended with subpar hops from Idaho.

So in September when I flew out to Oregon, my goal was to find the best Cascade I could. In my mind, I imagined the perfect Cascade as having an intense floral aroma and a grapefruit or orange peel aroma to compliment. The floral part being important due to our desire to utilize biotransformation of Geraniol (the hop oil that gives hops a rosy or floral aroma) into Beta-Citronella (which has the aroma and flavor of candied orange peel). Upon making my selection, I was informed by Crosby Farms that the lot I selected was the winner of the 2016 Cascade Cup and it was the first time that a farm from Oregon had won the competition. This specific Cascade lot is considered to be the best Cascade grown in America by a panel of expert judges and I was lucky to be able to get my hands on the last 3 boxes available. 

As if those two beers weren't enough, we will have our first releases from our steadily growing barrel program which will also be our first bottle releases.. Our INTENSELY smoky Strong Scotch Ale aged in Islay Scotch Casks (I hope you love Scotch, because this beer delivers it in bundles) will be available in 500 mL bottles. Following that release, we will have our Imperial Stout aged in Woodford Rye Whiskey barrels, Breckenridge Bourbon Barrels, and a Woodford Bourbon Barrel. The stout barrels have been tasting great and it has been fun to give friends samples to see which barrel they prefer most. I have taken a liking to the Woodford Rye which gives a great vanilla character from the barrel and pairs really well with the rich chocolate character of the base stout. The Bourbon Barrels seem to have taken on more of the character of the liquor itself, likely due to the way the cuts are made at the distilleries as they try to get more of the character of the mash in their bourbon. The bottles of each barrel will certainly make for a good side-by-side tasting and I think we will see that the consensus will be split among the three for which is best.

The last of the barrel aged beers is one that many people might find a little more unique: Berliner Weisse aged in Medium+ Toast White American Oak barrels. The oak character is really coming through well in that beer and is possibly the one that I am most excited about from our barrels so far. That first Berliner Weisse will be a preview of things to come for when we are ready to release fruited Berliner variants that have been aged in the same barrels a few weeks after the first release.

Now that we are back in the groove of brewing ales on a regular basis, stay on the lookout for a lot of exciting new hazy, hoppy ales in the next couple months!