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
:
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!

Brett Beer!

Today I'm brewing my favorite type of beer to brew... Beers fermented with Brettanomyces! This is our first take on a Brett beer at Tombstone and it features a Brett blend that I developed with the help of a small yeast lab. This particular beer is being fermented with Brettanomyces only. No bacteria and no Saccharomyces.

One of my favorite things about brewing Brett beers is the look of shock on other brewer's faces when I tell them that we're bring Brett into the brewery. While cross contamination of yeast is a concern for all breweries, the simple fact is that Brett is just as easy to kill and clean as any other yeast as long as certain precautions are taken. At Tombstone, we actually go a step further than many people might expect. We use color coded gaskets for various types of yeast and we're very careful to ensure that we're not having cross contamination even within our various Saccharomyces strains. Every fermenter is checked with an ATP Luminometer in at least 3 locations on the tank and spot checking is done on all the smaller pieces of equipment. Anything that can tolerate heat is also autoclaved for full sterilization.

Another thing I love about brewing with Brett is that so many people still have false impressions of what Brett actually is. Normally when I hear people describing what a Brett beer is, they say it's a sour beer. I think the reason for that is because Brett is frequently used with bacteria or with other yeast strains to make interesting flavors, sometimes described as earthy, mushroom, funky, leather, or horse blanket. The beer we're brewing today is none of those. Since we are using only Brett, we will be getting flavors that are actually pretty similar to clean ale yeast strains, with the addition of pineapple and stone fruit esters. The beer will be very fun to watch age as it will change rapidly in the first 3-6 months. At that point, the flavor development will slow, but continue on for many years to come.

Although it is becoming more common in recent years, 100% Brett beers are still pretty rare to come by. The first known 100% Brett beers were brewed just over 10 years ago, so it's also new enough that brewers are still finding out what can be done with Brett and many strains are still being isolated and propagated every year.

Other than the fear of cross contamination, one of the most frustrating things for brewers is that 100% Brett beers typically don't have a mouthfeel comparable to what we think of beer feeling like. The reason is that Brett can not create glycogens which contribute creaminess or silkiness to mouthfeel. In order to keep the beer feeling dry and drinkable, but still have a mouthfeel that isn't thin, we are using a large quantity of flaked oats to replace the missing glycogens.

Our first batch of Brett beer should be ready in about 4-5 weeks and will be heavily dry hopped with Lemondrop hops to compliment the pineapple character from our Brett blend!

Lemondrop Helles

Until the time that I went to Germany for school, I didn't have much of an affection for Helles or Pilseners. I had a thought that German brewers were stuck in the past and that the Helles and Pils styles should have evolved to keep up with other modern styles. In a way, the German light lagers have changed over the years, but I would argue that they have actually taken a step in the opposite direction of American craft beer and instead have followed a trend of making the styles even less hoppy in recent years. Good luck telling a German brewer to change their ways though... It wasn't until I tried Augustiner Pils that I really began to change my mind about these styles.

Augustiner Pils is a great hopbursted pilsener and features a lot of lemony, spicy noble hop characters from the use of what I was told was Hallertauer Mittlefrüh. It was the first German Pils that I had where the brewer deviated from the norm and created a beer that really stood out in its class. After drinking that beer, I dedicated most of my spare time in Germany talking with my professors about what goes into making a world class Pils and Helles. I realized that the hopbursted Pils idea was something that could be received well by American craft beer drinkers that normally would pass on the style and I set out to create a Pilsener that I thought would resonate well in the Southeast and used all traditional Pils ingredients. Now, I'm excited to be brewing a Helles that I think is the direction that German brewers would have gone with the style if brewers followed the same trends that we have seen in America: Essentially taking the style and using new techniques and ingredients to create something still recognizable as being a Helles, but upgraded.

One thing that I found interesting about brewers in Munich was that they took great pride in the appearance of their beers. So many hours were discussed about the importance of creating the palest beer possible (as my professors would say, it should not be yellow or gold, but the color of straw) with fast rising bubbles that feed a thick, lasting foam. It would seem that the answer would be simple: use the lightest malts available and carbonate to a high level. However, there are so many more factors that influence color. Perhaps most importantly after the ingredient selection is the equipment used and water chemistry. In Munich, their water is fairly hard with an elevated pH level and doesn't allow for them to brew beers that are quite as light colored as in other areas of Germany or in the Czech Republic. Luckily for us though, we have our reverse osmosis water allowing for us to have a blank slate to start from and a fairly low pH off the bat. For the water, I added only a slight bit of calcium, sulfate, chloride, and magnesium. It was really the smallest amount of each mineral necessary in order to have an effective mash and to have good yeast flocculation. The target pH level was right on at 5.2 without the need for any adjustments.

For the malt, I went with a widely used Pils malt from Schill Malting in Osthofen. Their pils malz is the lightest fully modified malt I have found available at 1.2 degrees lovibond. It was obvious when I opened the bags that the malt was very consistent and light colored and its moderate protein levels should allow for a great head retention. The mash temperature was low and the mash was long to encourage more simple sugars to create a dry easy drinking beer. The wort was very light colored going into the boil kettle and I'm fortunate to have a steam jacketed boil kettle to create a very gentle rolling boil which helps to minimize darkening of the wort.

Up until the boil, everything was mostly true to style (other than the soft water) and what would likely be expected of a German brewer. The boil is where the deviation occurred. Instead of using traditional noble hops, I wanted to use a hop variety that has a lot of the character that I expect from noble hops, but without the earthy, spiciness. A recent varietal, Lemondrop, is perfect for this. It has a true lemon like flavor and is unmistakable. Although it is an American variety, a few progressive German brewers have had success in brewing Pileners with it. In addition to using a newer American hop variety, the only hop addition for our Lemondrop Helles was a whirlpool addition. As a result, the hop flavor and aroma will be more pronounced than what would me expected of a malt forward German Helles. It will almost blur the lines for hop aroma between a German Helles and a German Pils, but the bitterness level will be exactly in line with a Helles at 18 IBU as opposed to a Pilsener at 30-35 IBU (or if you're my German professors, you might say 33 IBU, no less, no more, is the perfect bitterness for a modern Pils).

The yeast strain we used is the lager yeast from Augustiner and it is very distinctive for being able to fully attenuate a beer, but still leave an impression of maltiness. It is a yeast strain that I have used almost exclusively for lagers for a few years now. The Lemondrop Helles will be ready by early December at the latest and should be one of the beers we have on tap at the grand opening of our taproom. Prost!