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!