BoiseBrewBlog

Fall is a great season for beer.  Oktoberfest and pumpkin beers head the list of what makes it so awesome.  Early in the season we have Harvest ales and “fresh Hop” ales and about a month later, as the days continue to get shorter and the nights cooler, the late fall offerings begin to come out.

Oktoberfest is a festival that goes for 16 days, in Munich and has been for  over 200 years.  It is typically associated with large quantities of mild lagers and the malty smooth session-able light brown style of beer that bares it’s name.  About 2 million gallons are consumed that that festival every year.

Pumpkin beers are the other harbingers of fall for most of us, and are a more wide open genre that, as long as it has pumpkin in it of any kind…qualifies. Some famous contemporary examples are Southern Tier’s”Pumking”..which I’ve had, and Elysian’s “Night Owl” which I have also had.  Both were very good, I thought.

Pumpkin can be a component in many different styles.  Less bitter and more malty beers are usually better carriers for the autumn gourd. Porters and stouts are not uncommon and Elysian’s “Dark o’ the Moon” is a good example of a Pumpkin Stout

Today I’m at 10 Barrel Brewing in Boise for their (first) annual “Pumpkin Fest”  They’ve got several pumpkin beers on tap and for an entry fee you get 6 tokens that you can spend on a little snifter of any of them. They’ve got some live music and a few jockey boxes pouring the special beers for the occasion.

The “Pumpkin Crush” tastes suspiciously like the recent Berlinner Weisse they had on called German Sparkle Party. A light sweet-Tart kind of beer with a touch of pumpkin thrown in.  Tasty.  The “Coconut Curry” which was more like a stout with..again..just a hint of the pumpkin spice added in, and the Gourdie LaChance, which had a lot of the fall spice but not so much pumpkin.   The “Punkin Brewster” was kind of an amber with a touch of the gourd and I was not a big fan of, but it was “sessionable” as they say.

There was also a beer that was not on the list, described by the server as the “Punkin Brewster” made with cocoa nibs.  That one was interesting but i would be surprised to see it show up on the chalkboard.

It finished up at 6pm and I finished it up with the Bull Moose Brown ale..and a couple extra tokens..I guess I’ll use next year.  Maybe then the “Pumpkin Beers” will be a little more Pumpkin-y

I’ve written before about all the new breweries showing up here is the Boise area, and “Edge” is one of the newest.  As of this writing the building is being gutted and remodeled and I over heard that they plan to start brewing in November.

HomebrewStuff’s  Marcus Bezuhly is behind this venture and former Table Rock head brewer Kerry Caldwell will be making the beer.  Apparently TR didn’t too much care for their folks, moon-lighting.  Hard to think that in an industry known for brotherly (or sisterly) camaraderie, that they maybe felt a conflict of interest was brewing. (sorry)

Evidently Edge is going to be a full restaurant if I overheard correctly the other day while picking up some ingredients for my Berliner-Weisse. A recent Statesman article quotes Marcus stating there will be seating for over 80 and something a bit up from pub-grub will be served.

This is the same general area of town as the new Sockeye site and it will be nice to have a couple destinations like this on the west side after so much growth in Garden City and down town.

An eclectic range of brews are expected to come out of “Edge”  as many of the backers of Edge are experienced home-brewers and beer judges.  20 gallon est batches” will go on some of the taps at Edge and the more popular ones will likely get a full scale run on their 15 Barrel system.  I hoping for some really interesting stuff, and I’m sure there will be a lot of one-offs and experimental that I think will be Edge’s calling card and their mark on the exploding craft-beer scene in the Boise area.

September is a great time of year.  NFL is starting up, the kids go back to school, the 95 degree days without A/C in your truck and pretty much gone and it is hop harvest season.  Essentially a little green leafy pine-cone type flower, hops are what add the bitterness and sometimes the piney citrusy flavor to beer.  Without them, beer would taste like malty alcoholic kool-aide.

About this time of year, a type of beer shows up in tap-houses and store shelves that is by definition a “seasonal” if any style every was.  The trick is to make a beer, generally a light to medium bodied recipe that you intend to hop up anyway, and pick a truck load of hops and dump them right in to the fermenter that same day..or even within a few hours if you can.  It’s kind of the idea of cooking a trout on a campfire 20 minutes after you caught it with your 2 lb test spinning rod, with a #0 Mepps Black fury.

IPAs and Pale Ales lend themselves best to “Fresh Hopping” simply because they are intended to have a lot of hop flavor anyway, but you could do it to anything I suppose.  There can be some logistical issue to account for however, as hops are generally used in a dried or pulverized and compressed “pellet” form most of the time.   Since freshly picked hops are approximately %80 water..or more and since a typical IPA may have up-to a pound of dried hops per 5-Gallon batch, and a 10 barrel brew system makes over 300 gallons at a time, that’s 60# of hops in dried form or about #300 fresh/wet.

That’s several wheel-barrel loads at least.

I was just at 10Barrel Brewing in Boise the other day and they had 4 separate “fresh hop” ales on tap.  Each likely brewed a week or two before with hops picked probably that day.  All were good, but a couple really stood out.

There are more than a few times during the year that coincide with beer happenings but the end of summer has “Fresh Hop” beers, Octoberfest and…closely following them both…”Pumpkin Beers”.  But that is another post coming soon.

I felt like I fallen behind a bit in keeping up with what was new and on tap in the Boise area.  After work today I started to rectify certain inequities in that area.

I’ve posted before about how Friday afternoons are kind of special at TableRock Brewing and today was no exception.  I arrived a little after 3pm and the “Friday special” was a Belgian Double IPA that was on the “beer engine”   It was listed at 119 IBUs but it sure didn’t taste like it. Big rich malty taste and body, and the Belgian yeast was not very prominent.  The high bitterness of a Double IPA probably over powered that a little, which is fine.  It went together very well.

There was no sense in leaving now as downtown rush hour was just cranking up…so I ordered another.  This time it was their new Imperial Russian Stout.   According to Ratebeer.com it was the only IRS they have made.  It was good, not over-the-top huge but black, a nice dark roasted bitter bite and enough bittering to keep everything in check and balanced.
I chatted with the Brew-Mistress briefly and figured I still had a little catching up to do so I headed to Payette Brewing.

Payette had a couple new ones on and they were both “fresh hop” beers or “Harvest Ales”.  More on that later. “Wet and Wilder” and “So Fresh and So Clean” was what they called them and apparently they were the same recipe but each made with different hops added at the end.  Chinook and Centennial, respectively.

Both were good, and Payette has little 8 oz glasses of their offerings so it is easy to try a few with out getting tanked or running up a big bill at $4 a pint or so.   While I was there I got to watch the first half of the BSU vs Fresno St game.  All I can say about that is I’m kind of glad I left before the heart breaking end.

Crooked Fence Brewing was a little further down the road but I saved them for the next day.

Can’t hit them all at once….people might talk.

A few of us HomeBrew buddies had a great idea a while back:  What if several of us pitched in (no pun intended) and brewed 5-10 gallons each and combined the finished, fermented brews into a single 60 gallon oak barrel that we sourced from a local winery. Then inoculated it with the dregs of a few well known and at least one not so well known commercial sour ales and..well…see what happened.  The theory then, would be that every 6 months or year, we “harvest” 5-10 gallons, bottle it and replace that part with a fresh batch of “new” beer.  Thus continuing the cycle..En Purpetuum..ad infinitum..ad nauseum… etc…

So, in the early Spring of 2011, that’s what we did.  We all agreed to make a similar recipe of a pale Belgian ale, I made a 10G batch as my contribution, and by late February we had the barrel filled.  Several weeks later, a peek in the bung hole confirmed that a pellicle had formed and after a few more months, several gallons were racked off and some of that was separated and fruit was added.  A “fresh” batch of beer was then added to replace the amount that had been removed.

The samples I got as part of my participation were pretty good.  The ones that had the apricot or raspberry were very good, but the plain ones were a little off. I’ve managed to go through the 12-15 12oz bottles that were my share already, making some of them last for over a year and enjoyed all of them, even the so-so ones.

A few of them (the fruited ones) were so highly carbonated that after opening them, the carbonation action would stir up the sediment at the bottom so vigorously that you had to open and pour quickly before the remaining beer in the bottle just turned into a self fueled murky foamy mess.  This got me only 8-9 ounces out of each of those.  They were the tastiest ones though.  I think the sugar in the fruit contributed to some unanticipated additional bottle conditioning.

Documentation of the project went by the wayside a bit,  but it is still going.  The idea is that this is an ongoing project, and every 6 months or year, 5-10 gallons are racked off and bottled, with some of those bottles possibly being saved and aged.  I’ve been thinking of doing one for myself but these barrels are typically 60Gallons or so and I can only make 10G at a time with my current setup.    My basement would be the perfect place to store one of these though.  I can just see it sitting there…souring away when I close my eyes…mmm   sourness…

The Mad Fermentationist documented his Solera project here, it’s an interesting read and he goes into a lot of detail.