Baby, It's Cold Outside

Dude, non sequiturs are logical
fallacies, not literary devices.

Thanksgiving is officially in the rear-view, which can only mean that the Christmas season has officially begun. You can expect more of these blatantly obvious puns, asides, palindromes, and other literary devices to be used to insert Christmas carol lyrics, non sequiturs, and other such holiday cheer into these blog posts.

And since it is quite cold outside this morning, what better topic to address than the seasonal style of beer called the winter warmer.

Winter warmer, by defined style, is an English strong ale that is brewed in the winter months. They are malty sweet offerings that tend to have a big malt presence, both in flavor and body. The color ranges from brownish reds to nearly pitch black. Hop bitterness is generally low, leveled and balanced, but hop character can be pronounced. The primary characteristic is strength; the average alcohol content by volume ranges from 6.0% to 8.0% ABV and some winter warmers reach 10% ABV or more.

Traditionally, the style does not contain spices, and relies on the malt and low amounts of hops for its flavor. It is common today to find a seasonal beer that is heavily spiced and called a winter warmer – technically, it’s not a winter warmer, and the brewer is attempting some marketing hoodwinking. Winter seasonal beers that are spiced tend to follow the "wassail" tradition of blending robust ales with mixed spices, as a nod to the good old days before hops became the chief "spice" in beer. In America, not surprisingly, our varieties of winter warmers have a larger presence of hops, both in bitterness and flavor. Murica!

All bundled up, ready for the cold.

When you think of winter warmers, you often think of Christmas Ales, and for good reason. Christmas beers are similarly strong in alcohol content to their winter warmer cousins and are usually spiced with a variety of unusual ingredients. The exact hierarchical relationship between Christmas ales and winter warmers is difficult to pin down – many would categorize Christmas as a sub-style of winter warmer, while others (myself included) would rank the winter warmers as a sub-style of Christmas Ales. In the end, it doesn’t matter, as the two are always seen together on the shelves and oft-mislabeled anyways. For more on this interesting juxtaposition, consult last year’s blog post on Christmas beers, by clicking here.

In their natural habitat.

Some good examples of winter warmers that I highly recommend are Anchor Brewery’s Christmas Ale, Harpoon Brewery’s Winter Warmer, Starr Hill Brewing Company’s The Gift, and Flying Dog Brewing Company’s K-9 Cruiser. There are, of course, countless fine examples of the style beyond the four I just listed, so don’t feel like it will be hard to find winter warmers to help warm you up this cold, holiday season.

Here’s to craft-brewed happiness… Cheers!

I'm Thankful For Craft Beer

Tis the season for turkey, football, family, blog posts about thanksgiving, and most of all, being thankful. Despite all of my irritations, frustrations, agitations, and other “ations” that don’t need to be expounded upon in this forum, I have it pretty good. There are several, if not plentiful, items on my list to give thanks for, but today, I’m going to focus on just one. Spoiler alert – its beer.

In any language.

Craft beer to be precise. Yes, I know it comes as a shock that this post about being thankful for beer doesn't include the likes of the yellow, fizzy, American mass-produced industrial swill beers, which will remain nameless… if this isn't your first day, you already know my feelings toward those punks. So as I launch into this list of reasons why I’m thankful for craft beer, I do so under the premise that I’m talking about properly made from proper ingredients… beer. American Craft Beer.

So here is the list, in no particular order, of the reasons I am thankful for Craft Beer:

Nor does one care about such nonsense.

1) It tastes great! Not in a 1990s era beer commercial “less filling, tastes great” kind of way, but in a way that can be appreciated. There are so many flavors at work in your average pint of properly made craft beer, it’s almost impossible to pay them all enough attention and truly appreciate them – but trying to do so is half the battle. All together, they are sublime, and when you try to break them apart on your palate, the unique qualities of each shine through. And if you understand what they are and where they come from, they become even better.

2) Versatility! If you drink bad beer, you know of two or three styles of beer. Probably light and dark, which aren't actually styles at all. In reality, there are dozens of beer styles out there that most American beer drinkers have never experienced. They are all different, and they are all wonderful. And with so much diversity, how can you not be captivated?

Yo!

3) Science!!! Just like Jesse Pinkman trying to keep up with Walter White in the lab, the science behind craft beer can be overwhelming, but learning about how it works unlocks a whole new level of appreciation. Plus, there is always something new to learn. If you take the time to immerse yourself in the science, craft beer becomes a hobby, and maybe even a passion.

4) Social Drinking! Don’t have enough friends in your life? Or maybe the friends you have are not of the caliber you would prefer. Becoming a craft beer drinker is a free ticket to a world full of nice people who want to hang out with you! And the more “nerdy” you allow yourself to be with beer, the cooler you will be with these people. Boom – instant friends. Like you’re the high school quarterback… sort of.

5) Okay fine… it makes you feel good. It’s true. And unlike sub-par beers, craft beer usually packs a higher payload of alcohol, so you get drunker on fewer beers – which equals money saved and fewer calories in the long run. Not a bad deal.

6) Health benefits! That’s right, I said benefits! Studies have shown that craft beer has vitamins, nutrients, amino acids, and all kinds of other stuff in it that is good for us, which has been linked to reduced risk of heart failure, lower cholesterol, lower stress, etc. Big beer, on the other hand, doesn't contain these things, as the ingredients they use are of lesser quality and quantity, and more often than not, the good stuff is filtered out in the name of saving money and marketing.

Fascinating.

7) Cool activities! Beer is so much more than bars and man caves – in the craft beer world, we hang out at breweries and brew pubs, where we get to interact with other beer people (see number 3), as well as the brewers themselves. We also get to learn more about the process (see number 2) and see it all in real life. Fascinating. There’s also beer tastings, beer pairings, tap takeovers, etc.

8) Food! Craft beer goes with food better than wine goes with food, and has become a game unto itself. Beer pairings, whether at restaurants or in the comfort of your own home, are very interesting and social ways to learn, drink, and be merry. Plus, it’s delicious! Everybody wins.

9) Merch! Swag! Craft beer-related items like shirts, hats, glassware, signs, etc. So many different things to fill your very own basement bar with and show off to your friends.

10) Cool label art! Big beer, for as hard as they try in the marketing world, has boring labels and boring names for their beer. In the craft community, we pride ourselves on clever names and cool labels, not only from a marketing standpoint, but because we can.

11) ‘Murica! Craft beer is made in America! It’s a source of pride to know that your country now makes the best beer in the world, even though we are still best known for that big beer crap (some of which isn’t even an American company anymore). Plus, if you drink your local brewery’s beer, there’s even more pride in it because you’re supporting your local small businesses and keeping your money in the local economy. Everything you want, nothing you don’t.

12) You can make it yourself! Many of the things I've mentioned already lead you to the day when you decide that you want to learn to make beer and become a home brewer. Even though the processes that commercial craft breweries use are obviously on a much grander scale, they are essentially the same processes. Which means you can recreate your favorites in your own home, or get adventurous and come up with your own recipes. Then, your house will be the one where everyone wants to hang out… instant friends. It’s the circle of life.

This could be your basement, where your new cooler friends hang out with you and drink your beer.

Anyways, I’m sure I've left some out some things, but this list is pretty good. Feel free to add to my list in the comments. And remember – drink craft beer this Thanksgiving. You deserve it.

For more reading, like what craft beer you should serve with your Thanksgiving dinner, click here. If you want to read about how beer fits in to the history of Thanksgiving, click here.

Here’s to craft-brewed happiness… Cheers!

What To Do About Thanksgiving

A veritable cornucopia of beer choices,
a horn of plenty if you will

The good thing about blog writing is that these pesky little posts of mine have dates on them, which means I get a weekly reminder of what the date is. Seriously, without them, I may never remember where on the calendar I am.

So imagine my surprise when I sat down this dreary Saturday morning to write and saw that the date is already November 16th! As in, Thanksgiving is a week and a half away! I don’t know if your family is like mine, but menu preparations are almost as big a deal as the meal itself. With particular attention paid to…

BEER PAIRING!!!

And since it is my yearly tradition and honored privilege to do so, I bring you my 2013 edition of what beers to pair with your traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Free of charge. Because I know how overwhelming menu planning can be from a food standpoint; at least the beer part should be easy. Let’s begin.

Wait, what?!

Ordinarily, beer pairing is accomplished by finding multiple beers that compliments each course individually – as in one different beer per course. The problem with Thanksgiving is, usually the courses are served simultaneously in the form of a literal ton of food placed on the table that we eat at the same time. You could pick a different beer for every food on your table, and bombard people with 6 or 7 glasses of beer in front of them, or you could find one beer that does a “pretty good” job of pairing with everything. But what beer should you pick?

You're welcome.

The Thanksgiving dinner plate typically has serious diversity in flavors, textures, temperatures and weights, making it problematic to pick a single beer to pair well with everything you consume. The key is to find the common characteristic across each menu item, and in this case, believe it or not, the common characteristic isn’t food at all, it’s your oven. All the best stuff on the Thanksgiving table comes from your oven: turkey, stuffing, sweet potatoes, pies, etc.

Generally speaking, when food is cooked in the oven, it undergoes browning and caramelization—just like the darker malts used to create amber and brown-colored beers do when they are kilned and prepared for brewing. The similar flavors created by these shared processes offer a good balance between darker malty beer and oven-roasted food. Keeping this in mind will help you narrow the field to a few beer styles.

Bière de Garde:

Most beer experts recommend Bière de garde as the best versatile style for Thanksgiving. It’s a good call. BDGs, as I call them, are adequately forceful in alcohol and carbonation to stand up to richness but subtle enough in flavor to avoid dominating your delicate Thanksgiving dishes. In fact, the amber (or "ambrée") versions of the style have a more bready, toasty and caramelly malt flavor alongside fruity and spicy yeast character, which go quite well with the autumnal flavors of Thanksgiving. The only problem is availability, but if you have access to a specialty beer store in your neck of the woods, it shouldn’t be a problem.

Some examples of BDGs - so you know what to look for

Dubbel:

Belgian-style dubbels are more common than BDGs and make a statement at the dinner table. They are traditionally bottled in elegant cork-and-cage finished 750mL bottles and look like beers worthy of celebration. They drink pretty well too. Dubbels lift the mouth-coating richness of gravy and dairy-laden mashed potatoes from the palate due to high carbonation and pack a one-two punch of dense dark fruit and peppery, clove-like phenol character that complements sweet potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce and the star-of-the-show turkey itself.

Some Belgian dubbel abbey ales to choose from

Märzen/Oktoberfest:

Characterized by toasty malt dominance, moderate in alcohol and low in bitterness, these beers are an ultra-safe but effective play for your Thanksgiving table. There's nothing here to throw your food out of balance, great examples can be had for cheap, and your guests will probably be at least somewhat familiar with beers of this style already. Dunkel lagers and drier doppelbocks feature a similarly malt-forward flavor and will behave the same way.

Absholutely.

Scotch Ale:

Scotch ales are all about smooth, caramelized malt character. Red grape, toffee, and peat smoke flavors are par for the course here, offering savory and sweet complements to your plate. These beers have some bollucks to them, weighing in with enough ABV to hang with the richer dishes. They can be great with dessert too, but reserve that for sweeter examples.

Brown Ale:

Brown ales have expanded far beyond the scope of one-dimensional Newcastle facsimiles. You'll find toasty, roasty, nutty and chocolatey flavors packed into your average brown ale and many examples (especially the American-brewed ones) feature a significant hop profile as well. Expect a balanced beverage that will fit in comfortably with everything on your dinner plate.

What about desert? Glad you asked. Pairing beer and dessert can be equally cumbersome to pairing beer with dinner, once again due to the diversity. Frequently encountered flavors like pecan, apple, and pumpkin all appear on your plate at once – bombarding your palate with sweet, spicy, tart, rich, bright and weighty, all at once!

Mmmm... pie and beer

The best solution to this great problem to have is a sweet-leaning English-style barleywine. These beers offer a deep malt complexity that works really well with pie. Expect a full range of caramel, toffee, and dark fruit character from these beers, all welcome complements to pecan, pumpkin, and apple pie.

A good milk stout (aka sweet stout) will offer an appropriately-sweet chocolatey counterpoint to your pecan and pumpkin pies as well. Depending on the stout, the sweet chocolate flavor may overwhelm on it’s own, but with pecan and pumpkin pies, it tastes more balanced, offering a satisfying back and forth between the sweets and the beer.

If you’re focusing on an apple pie only route and want to try something different, sweeter dunkelweizens are great with less-sweet apple pies. They are typically packed with banana, raisin and nut flavor, and a zippy clove-like yeast character. They pair brilliantly with the cinnamon-apple flavor of apple pie.

No Duff at the Thanksgiving dinner table

This concludes my 2013 edition of “what to drink at Thanksgiving.” You are now armed to the teeth with good advice on what beers go best with your meal, and really impress your guests with how beer-enlightened you are. In fact, if you memorize some of what I said here, you can serve your beer, and explain why it works, and then they’ll really be impressed with your ability to nerd out. And you’ll be the hero of the day.

Here’s to craft-brewed happiness… Cheers!

The Ryes Have It

Taste: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Sous Brewer. His ongoing mission: to explore strange new beers, to seek out fascinating flavors and peculiar brewing methods, to boldly go where most beer drinkers have never gone before.

These are the voyages

If taste is truly something you covet in your malted-barley based deliciousness, you owe it to yourself to try rye (which technically is a contrary grain to barley, however as most rye beers today are still majority barley, making the barley the base malt, they are still considered barley-based delicious… oh no, I've gone cross-eyed).

Amber waves of grain...

Rye beer, as an industry term, simply refers to a beer in which rye is substituted for barley in a percentage of the mash. It doesn't specify how much of a percentage, but most commercial rye beers average between 10-20% of the mash. Home brewers who really love rye have pushed it to near 50%, but not without driving themselves crazy along the way.

The reason they are often driven to madness by this simple grain is that this grain is particularly challenging to work with. Unlike barley, which is fibrous (resistant to mushiness) and has husks on it through which wort can pass while being lautered / sparged, rye is not fibrous and is husk-less  The result is a mash that becomes a sticky mess and takes FOREVER to lauter / sparge. Thus, the lower the percentage of rye in your mash, the less misery you bring on yourself.

This problem is somewhat mitigated in a commercial setup where the rig is more awesome, but the intense flavor of rye can make for a marketing nightmare if too much is used. While we beer nerds love the flavor of rye, not everyone is ready for it, and unsold beer isn't good for anybody.

Fortunately, rye’s intense flavor allows commercial and home brewers alike to tone down the percentage and still achieve a pretty awesome result.

Masking their hops since 2002

What is this result you ask? Rye beers routinely are spicier, more sour, and dryer than a beer made without rye. The flavor is very obvious (depending on how much rye was used) and usually dominates on the back of your palate. It is so pronounced that many if not most people are not enthusiastic the first time they drink it. But like so many things in the beer world, your palate can be trained, and just because you don’t like something the first time doesn't mean you never will. Believe it or not, I couldn't stand IPAs the first time I had one, but I grew up.

The unfortunate side of this flavor coin, getting back to the commercial brewers shying away from it in order to appeal to mass consumers, is that rye remains a low-key part of commercial operations. The majority of commercial rye use in beer is as a flavoring component used to add complexity to an existing flavor payload, but not as a main flavor itself.

Rye is starting to have a revival in the United States. There is a story out of Georgia that the Terrapin Brewing Company in Athens, GA began brewing with rye in order to mask the hops of their American Pales Ales and IPAs because “people in the southeast don’t like bitterness.” Meanwhile, several breweries around the country are bringing back an old Bavarian beer style called roggenbier, which is essentially a hefeweizen made with rye instead of wheat. In fact, the newly minted Forge Brew Works in Lorton, VA has created a phenomenal roggenbier that I highly recommend to anyone in the Northern Virginia area.

It fit so nice, he said I could keep it.

Speaking of rye-related news in the Northern Virginia area, I am currently in the process of brewing a collaboration brew with the Donnaubles Brewing Company out of Centreville, VA called Dread Pirate RYEberts Rye-P-A. For the recipe, we are using rye for roughly 10% of the total fermentables, which will be a delicate compliment to the hops in the final product. There will be no survivors.

As for your purposes, I highly recommend going to your local package store or purveyor of fine craft beer and look for rye beers. Give them a chance, expand your mind and take the red pill – the flavor is tremendous, and once your palate is ready, you’ll discover a brave new world of craft beer to explore. Trust me, as a traveler who has made this quest and returned to tell about it, it’s worth the trip.

Here’s to craft-brewed happiness… Cheers!

Two New Breweries!

I am going to continue my recent trend of writing about new breweries because, quite frankly, new breweries make me happy. And at the end of the day, that’s what this bloggity blog is all about – raising a glass to craft-brewed happiness (see the tag line at the end of all my blog posts).

I’m starting to think we are blessed to be living in the day and age we live in, particularly here in Northern Virginia, where more and more brewers are honing their crafts and taking their beer making operations commercial. Last time, I wrote about a relatively new nano-brewery in Manassas, VA called BadWolf. Today, I've got TWO MORE NEWBIES to tout, announce, and discuss. Let’s stop wasting time! Let’s get to it already!

Two weeks ago, I caught wind of the subtle announcement that Forge Brew Works in Lorton, VA was finally ready to open, and that they would be having a soft opening that weekend. I, of course, dropped everything I was doing and drove over there to check them out. For those of you who are from around here, they are located in Lorton at the end of Terminal Road (near the Fairfax County Parkway and I-95 intersection). Forge is not very advertised as of yet, so once you find yourself in the clump of warehouses at the end of Terminal Road, you will have to drive around for a minute or two until you see a big banner that reads “Forge Brew Works.” Other than that, there is no way to know that you’re in the right place.

As you may have guessed, Forge is located in a warehouse district, and they themselves have a very industrial vibe going on – inside and out. Their tap room is a wide open warehouse floor with a bar at the end of it and an awkward afterthought restroom jutting out into the middle of the room. There are no tables or chairs (at least, not as of two weeks ago when I went in) and all patrons and employees (including the owner/brew master) are huddled around the bar drinking and chatting.

The beer is phenomenal. You get the obvious first impression from these brews that the brewer (Matt) is very passionate about his craft and talented as well. On flight when I was there was their Petite Saison, Single Hop IPA: Centennial, Single Hop IPA: Galaxy, Roggenbier, Oatmeal Stout, and Abbey Ale.

The Saison tasted like a Saison, which I know sounds like a ridiculous thing to say, but in a world where people are always trying to add things to Saisons to flavor them up, drinking one that tastes like they’re supposed to taste is a welcome change. It is very crisp and quite sessionable at 3.3% ABV.

The Single Hop IPAs were interesting. As you know by now, most IPAs and IPA makers pride themselves on going extreme with hoppiness, seaking either to make a hop bomb that hurts your teeth or going for complex hop bills that have 25 different hops in them. And there is nothing wrong with either of those ideas. But Forge’s Single Hop IPAs (as the name would suggest) only use one, so you get a good idea of what the unique strand of hop used in the beer tastes like by itself, and what sorts of characteristics it imparts. Plus, when you have more than one of them back to back (like I did with the Centennial and Galaxy), you can compare and contract different hops as you drink them. It’s a pretty cool idea.

The Roggenbier was my favorite, partially because I am newly obsessed with rye beers, but also because it is a rare style, and of course, it was delicious. Roggenbier is a German style of beer that is brewed exactly like a Hefeweissen, but with rye instead of wheat. Everything else, from the yeast to the water and hop bill are identical. It gives you a hazy, refreshing beer that is darker than a Hefe and has that coveted rye spiciness to it. It was so good, I had a full pint of it and filled my newly acquired Forge stainless steel growler with delicious Roggenbier so that I could keep on drinking it after I left.

The Oatmeal Stout was excellent. Unlike many Oatmeal Stouts that you’ll find, this one was made with a lot of oatmeal, and that oatmeal was definitely the star of the show. The flavor was very robust and sweet, and the beer sat with you for a moment while you were drinking it. Quite wonderful.

The final brew from Forge was their Abbey Ale, which is Belgian Strong Dark Ale. Like all the others on Forge’s flight, their Abbey lives up to the hallmarks of the style. It hits heavier than the others at 9% ABV, so it’s much more of a sipping beer, but the flavor profile is complex and sublime, and makes you want to go to Belgium.

The current one-barrel pilot rig at Forge, soon to be joined by a 10 barrel production rig

At the moment, Forge is running a single-barrel system, but they intend to install a 10 barrel system here shortly. Once in place, I imagine that their hours will increase, and they may even start distributing locally as 10 barrels of beer is a lot for their current operation. They are open Friday during happy hour (5-8), Saturday (12-4ish), and usually for growler pours only on Sunday (11-12:30). As of last night, they were pouring Petite Saison, Roggenbier, Belgian Pale Ale, Abbey Ale, Centennial IPA, Oatmeal Stout, and Nugget IPA. You can check out their website and Facebook page for more details.

BUT WAIT – THERE’S MORE!!! This is the blog that keeps on giving.

You will never have to fear missing any important beer or beer brewery news. The Sous Brewer is so tuned-in the local beer scene, and so willing to share his findings with all of you loyal readers. Hurray interwebs!

So yesterday, while poking around on BadWolf’s social media exploits, I found a picture of a pint glass bearing a brewery logo I didn't recognize. With a name I didn't recognize. A few grueling moments of Googling later, I stumbled upon the website for a BRAND NEW BREWERY that is about to open in Manassas, VA called Heritage Brewing Company. Heritage is a future 20 barrel brewery that is slated to open in late-fall 2013. They plan to bring both large scale 20 barrel hand crafted batches to the market along with small 1/2 barrel artisanal batches and an oak aged cellar program from day one. Interestingly enough, they are located literally directly across the street from BadWolf, so brewery-crawling in Manassas will be a breeze.

According to their website, their staple beers will be their Revolution Organic American Amber, The Teddy Full Bodied American Pale, Ironsides American Session Ale, and King’s Mountain Scot-American Ale. They will also offer three seasonals – American Expedition (a light bodied American Wheat Ale) in the summer, Bradford (a full bodied amber brown ale with pumpkins, cinnamon and bourbon) in the fall, and Battle of White Marsh (a spiced imperial winter ale) in the winter. Additionally, they will offer limited releases like General Will-A-Mett’s Tar Mouth Porter (which is a chocolate mint porter), Concord (which is an organic oak-aged amber) and Ferguson’s Revenge (which is a Scotch Witbier with Muscat wine).

You can check these guys out on their website or their Facebook page for more details, and I be sure to keep everyone apprised of their pending opening.

Here’s to craft-brewed happiness… Cheers!