Category: Uncategorized

Let me start out by saying, I don’t quite get Saisons.  They are pale, spicy, sometimes floral and busy and after Belgians, in general, they seem to be the snob appeal of beer geeks.  Kind of like Linux is to computer nerds.  Perception is reality so do not try to out argue me in this.

I stopped by Brewforia, my oft mentioned favorite local beer retailer,  after watching the Boise State vs. University of Idaho game at a friend’s, for a pint and the see what interesting items were in the cooler, since I hadn’t been in for a few days at least and I hate when I find out that something rare or exceptional came and went w/o me even knowing about it.

I spotted this Saison and looked it up on RateBeer, saw that it was in the 99th percentile rating for the style and decided I had to take it home.   At 6.5% it is a little on the strong side as far as my rather limited experience would tell me, for this style.  Further research tells me that Saisons are/were traditionally brewed in farmhouses in the French-speaking region of Belgium and timed to be ready to refresh farm worked in the harvest time of the year.   Men’s Journal magazine reportedly called out this beer as the “….best beer in the world..” in its July 2005 issue.   Typically made with pale and/or pilsner malts the color is usually light golden and cloudy although some darker and more amber examples exist.

The caged and corked packaging was a good start in my cross-over closer to beer snobbery and I quickly succumbed to the condescending prejudices against common twist off or even typically capped bottles.  I was well on my way, into the fray that is this little known style to us Americans.

The cork popped with a loud report and had I not held onto it, it would have likely put a dent in the ceiling and possibly woke up some of the people sleeping upstairs.   Although I poured it as gently as I could, the first ounce or two created solid white head from bottom to top of the 8 oz glass I had ready.   Literally nothing but white foam.  Letting that calm down a bit I tried to sneak a few more ounces in the glass.  I was still presented by a huge white puffy head that when it slowly reseeded it left oddly shaped formations of stiff meringue like clumps as the bobble s dissipated unevenly.  Like some kind of rock formation weathered by the random effects of weather and time.

This remarkable snowy white head was maintained but the very active and persistent effervescent activity that its carbonation level betrayed.  I would guess over 3.5 volumes or so.  The pale hazy light straw colored beer seemed a bit dingy to my taste that is accustomed to clear and often filtered beers.

The aroma was quite mild and lightly fruity.  The specific Saison yeast and the Goldings hops used are mainly responsible for the notes of lemon peel and light spice and some hints of dust and fresh baked bread.  Very light pale malt flavors and some more of that light lemon zest, and mild spiciness with a little musty barnyard character thrown in.  It has a pale pilsnerish almost watery background to it and the late trailer is surprisingly bitter for how the initial flavor would lead you to expect.

It is a light, somewhat busy, lightly spicy beer that it refreshing but distracting if you are not into the complexities and subtleties of a Saison.  I must confess, I don’t think I am,  but this is eye-opening and I need to have a few more good examples of the style to round out my experience with it.

+++ Every Autumn I feel like I am paying my own little homage to Charles Schultz when I crack open the first of what is usually a series of a half-dozen or so fall seasonals from various craft brewers around the country.  This time of year it is the Pumpkin Ale.  Some of the “heavys” in this genre are Elysian’s “Night Owl”, DogFish Head’s “Punkin'” and Buffalo Bills Pumpkin Ale.

+++ Today I am trying a new one from a (somewhat) local brewer.  Beer Valley Brewing is located in Ontario, OR, about 40 miles from me here in Boise and since they opened a few years ago have done pretty well, going outside of the typical 6 or 7 basic safe beers that lots of brewers stick to.  Their “Leafer Madness” double IPA and the “Black Flag” Imperial Stout are decent.

+++ This is the Jackalope Imperial Pumpkin Porter.  At first glance it is clearly an Imperial Porter, big very dark pour and a dense creamy mocha colored head.  Very attractive. Big roasted sweet campfire aromas with a  little licorice and bakers chocolate.  A touch of seasonal spice but it you hadn’t told me this was a pumpkin ale I might have missed it so far.  It tastes also like an Imperial Porter.  A good one.  Big full bold roasted flavors with plenty of that tang that is a bit astringent and tart.  This character is what I think is one of the main differences that distinguish the imperials, Porter and Stout.  The very modest pumpkin flavors here are pushed back and are more like roasted pumpkin seeds and definitely far from its style brethren that flaunt and showcase the good gourd.  this is NOT a pumpkin pie in a glass.  It is an Imperial Porter with a dash of Pumpkin thrown in.

+++ It is said that Winston Churchill once said that the perfect martini was pouring a glass of gin and “LOOKING” at a bottle of vermouth.  This is a Porter first and looking across at a can of pumpkin pie filling would give me about the same amount of flavor.

+++ Still, a fine beer and I glad to see something seasonal, unique, local and this good on tap at my favorite beer place, though I do feel a little like Clara Peller,when I sip it.

The Weisenbock I made a few months ago is not quite what I had hoped.  I’ll have some more tasting notes posted later and will likely bring a bottle or  two to this months meeting of the local Home-brewing club, and get some other opinions and feedback.  A strange sourness and poor head retention leads me to suspect an infection of some kind.  Also too, the effect seems to slowly be getting worse over the last few weeks.

This move is also to make room in the keggorator for  my  IronBrewer entry, the homebrew contest I entered a couple months ago.   It is a Baltic Porter made with licorice and has been in secondary for a few weeks now.  Pretty sure I have enough time to keg and carbonate, before I have to bottle some and ship out to the other participants.  The fact that the tasting date has been pushed back a week to Oct 12th, will make this easier.

I have found that it is well worth while to stop by my favorite beer bar/retailer on a regular basis as the tap selection, modest though it is at the moment, rotates frequently. One of there 4 taps changes nearly every day. Usually regional micros, sometimes an import or east coast gem, but always an I treating selection of styles. A little birdie told me that the number of taps may well double soon. So I got that going for me….which is nice.
Today’s new arrival is an Eisbock made by Redhook Brewing. Now in my experience Redhook is what I call a “safe” micro-brewer. Meaning that other than their standard run a d a few seasonals, which are decent, they do not experiment much. Economically this can be risky, but in the craft beer business, you will have trouble  developing the kind of loyalty among beer nerds if you don’t wow them occasionally with some unique offerings occasionally.
I considers RedHook to be in the category…but maybe nit anymore. Or maybe I just wasn’t paying attention. In the fairly recent past, brews such as Trebblehook, Big Ballard IPA and Expedition 8-4-1 have been released to compliment their standard lineup.
Today I stumble led upon their most recent, Eisbock 28.
Eisbocks are a curious style. They start out as a malty, slightly sweet lager, sometimes a little dark. After its slow cool fermentation is finished, the beer is chilled to the point where it starts to freeze. The alcohol and remaining sugars freeze at a lower temp than the water that makes up 93-95% of the beer so when the remaining solution is drained and some of the now frozen water is left behind, what you are left with is a sweeter, richer, higher alcohol beverage that is very tasty. Essentially it is a form of distillation and Eisbocks typically are atoms 10-12%ABV but can be much higher.
This one is 10% and it will be my “dessert” after the flatbread and pale ale I had for dinner.
A clear deep reddish amber and a dense light tan head with lots of sweet Carmel and brown sugar in the aroma. Softly carbonated the smooth rich feel just slides down leaving a little alcohol burn in the after taste. I would almost call the flavors sugary and barring some of the back-sweetened fruit “lambics” I’ve had, this might be the closest to beer candy of any I’ve tasted.  Malty and sweet, with some holiday spices.  Cinnamon, nutmeg maybe and gingerbread. If anything, I’d trade a little residual sugars for another ABV point but all in all this is a tasty sipper that fit the bill for my dessert while watching game 5 of the ALDS.

The wife and I were in the San Diego area top attend a friends wedding last weekend and anyone who knows me would fully expect us to make a few side trips as Southern California is one of the Craftbeer hotspots in the country.  We flew to LA and drove the remaining 100 miles or so, and strangely enough, our route took us right past Lost Abbey and Stone.

I had never been to either and had only seen pictures of Stones (relatively) new place in Escondido, where we planned to have lunch.   Lost Abbey, is it is just a “tasting room” would be first.

Lost Abbey is an offshoot of Port Brewing which has a few sites in SoCal.  It is kind of Port’s more experimental wing where most of what they produce are Belgian styles and barrel aged beers.

Essentially it was there brewery and aging “warehouse” as workers were pressure washing the floors around us and steel racks of oak barrels were everywhere. tucked in one of the front corners just inside a overhead garage door was the “tasting room”.  A “L” shaped bar that sat about 15 or so with barrels to sit on with a sack of grain on each to make them the appropriate height.

As you can see, there are quite a few to choose from.  A couple were out but for 1$ you can get a 4oz sample of any that are on tap and they had bottles of several others.  Includeing the exquisite “Angels Share”.  I am ashamedto say, I did not pick one up as I was on a pretty tight budget and that little beauty is 15$ for a 375ml…thats a touch over 12oz !

So, while my wife waited in the car in the parking lot reading her book, I managed to take care of 4 samplers n the 20 minutes or so I felt I was alloted   When asked I said, give me something that you are pretty proud of right now.  The “High Tide” fresh hop IPA fit this bill apparently and it was very nice.

A hazy orange and big pine slightly grassy hop aroma and flavor.  The others I tried were the “Hop 15” an IPA that has 15 additions of hops during the boil.  That works out to about every 4-5 minutes, somebody is dumping a few pounds of hops into it.   Red Barn is a Saison and it was light, and I thought had some Hefeweizen flavors in it, and “Devotion”, a Belgian that was clear golden with a perfect dense white head.  It was pretty light and the Belgian yeast flavors were subtle and soft.

I would have liked to pick up a T-Shirt or hat but for 3$ the logo sample glass was good enough and I headed out.  It would be nice to stop by again sometime when I have a little more time.

One of the best microbrews I have ever had was a DoppleWeizenbock at Walking Man Brewing in Stevenson, Wa a few years ago.  A rich, slightly sweet, pretty strong ale that had flavors of brown sugar, raisins, buttered wheat toast and a little cinnamon and spices.  A thick slick feel and a little late burn from the 9%+ ABV.  It was 4 years ago, nearly to the day and I can still taste it and have not yet had a similar style beer that even came close.

Earlier this week as I was cruising for recipes on one of my favorite Homebrew sites   www.themadfermentationist.com I saw a Weizenbock recipe and knew I had to try it.  Not being a “Dopple” (double) it will not be as strong as the one I remembered that day in Stevenson, but hopefully it will bring back some fond memories.

Sticking pretty close to the recipe I found, but substituing a couple of small items, here is the grain bill for mine:

• 8#  Wheat
• 4#  Dark Munich
• 2#  Marris Otter
• 1# Vienna
• 1# Pilsner
• 1#  Crystal 120l

Mashed at 152F and batch sparged for a total of 8.25G of run off.  Boiled this donwn for about 45min then hopped with 1.75oz of  leaf  Saaz for 45min which should give me about 20 IBUs.

Starting gravity on this one was 1.072   A little lower then I had hoped but my “efficiency” is always pretty low.  If I can get it to ferment down to 1.016 that will come out to about 7.5% ABV which will suit me just fine.

I noticed that it was at 78F right after I transferred it to the fermenter.  That is quite a bit too high so I put the wet T-Shirt on it. Within an hour it was going at about 60 bubble per min and the temp was 76F  Still to high.   Wetted down the t-Shirt some more and put a fan on it.  Need to get that down another several degrees if I can.

EDIT – –

09/07/10

Just kegged this one. when I transferred to secondary it was a disappointingly high 1.034 so I ignored it for nearly two months. today it is at 1.021 which is a decent 6.8% ABV It tasted a bit too bitter from the sample I snagged as I was siphoning it into the keg but the flavors were OK. Its got a nice clear light mahogany color, which is about what I was shooting for. We’ll see after it chills and carbonates a bit.

A couple few years ago I began fancy-ing myself a bit of a beer snob and began accumulating decent craft beers from around the country  Mostly Imperial Stouts and Barley Wines.  Now that I look back it was just as much out of a desire to “posses them” that it was to drink them.    lately I have been going over my modest inventory and thinking…this Stone 6th aniv (2004)   Porter is definitely NOT getting any better.   So I pulled several items and put them in the fridge and invited a couple friends over to help me cull the herd, as it were.

One attendee is a fairly experienced beer geek and the other, not so much.  But to the credit of the latter, he was open to trying new things, and I expect when he got the call to come over, he knew it would be something fairly interesting.

Started off with something fairly light and of a style that I knew would be new for the rookie.    New Belgium’s Eric’s Ale is a sour ale that is brewed with peaches.  It is dry and tart, but as far as the style goes, pretty mild.  It was a hit.  that was just an introductory to the La Folie that I brought out immediately after.  More consistent with the traditional style of a “Sour” it was still pretty popular.

A couple of my own home-brews were next, an Eisbock I made about 2 years ago that turned out quite nice, if I do say so myself, and was the favorite of the evening to our newcomer.   A raspberry wheat that was one of the few left over from a late last summer wedding that I made it for.

Lastly was the 12th anniversary North Coast Old Rasputin.    The 500ml corked and caged top was a classy touch and the beer was very nice.

Beatles and Led Zeplin on itunes and good friends and good conversation for a couple hours on a Tuesday nite is really going to help me get through the week.

Good times…

so glad I made it to the tasting tonight. about 8 of us there and we got through about 15 brews. some very good stuff. much thanks goes out to Toby who hosted this one.