Recipe and Tasting Notes: Simcoe Single Hop Pale Ale

Brewery: Bear Flavored

Style: American Pale Ale
Brewed: 3.31.2013
ABV: 5.3%

Appearance: pale copper / bronze, good clarity, fluffy head, good lacing
Smell: pine needles, citrus, peach, soft mellow berry, perfume
Taste: pine, soft bitterness, peach, citrus, soft mellow berry

Mouthfeel: soft, light body, crisp finish, medium carbonation, mild bitterness

Most of the experiments I perform, I do so because I think they have the potential to lead to great, interesting beer that few commercial breweries are even attempting. Beer has so much room for growth and creativity, and judging by many of the talented, creative homebrewers I follow, homebrewers are often leading the charge. But not all experiments are leaps into the unknown — many are simply to shore up my own incomplete knowledge. Single hop beers rarely make for the best possible beer, and as such, they're often an educational tool more than a stab at recipe perfection. But I view them as necessary stepping stones in the path to beery Valhalla. Since I've somehow never brewed a single hop Simcoe ale before now, it was time to notch that one off my list.

I brewed a handful of single hop beers in 2012 (Galaxy, Rakau, Nelson Sauvin, Belma), but it's been a while since my last "basic pale ale / IPA" brew, so it's nice to see that my technique and process have come a long way in the meantime (especially since I've begun treating my water). This beer hits all the points in terms of style, and shows significant improvement over my hoppy beers from a year ago. Does that mean it's a perfect pale ale? Nope. I'd still like to be extracting more hop character and aroma than I am for the amounts I use. Pale ales are a little more forgiving than super-hopped IPAs (in that a lack of intensity isn't a flaw, and isn't the point), but it's certainly possible to make a better pale ale than this with other hops in the mix. Simcoe is a very interesting hop, with a character that most drinkers could by now recognize as quintessential to American hoppy beers. As such, its flavor is actually hard to describe: it's so recognizable, so quintessential, that it almost tastes like a hop blend. While some hops have a very specific flavor that almost everyone agrees upon (Nelson Sauvin, for instance), Simcoe seems much more subjective, with descriptions ranging from pine to citrus to mango to cat-piss, and more. Regardless of its intangible character, I at least like Simcoe in this pale ale quite a lot.

Given that Simcoe tastes pretty much like "classic American IPA" all by itself, I was lucky enough to hit the right notes with this beer. The color, carbonation, head, lacing and clarity are all very close for a quintessential pale ale. I'm still tweaking the grain bill and color for my pale ales, and this is a bit closer to a pale copper than the glowing, amber-gold I seek with such beers. The good clarity is more dumb luck than any change in technique, but I'll address that more at the end of the post. Carbonation — when bottle conditioning, anyway — is also a lot of estimation and luck, but I've been getting better at hitting the right levels. 

The first bottle I cracked of this had one of the best aromas I've smelled from my own beer, and the batch has followed a fairly standard progression since then. Over the three/four weeks since I started drinking it, the clarity has improved but the aroma has diminished — the usual progression, except that almost a month out, it's still holding up much better than my hoppy beers used to. One thing that's struck me about this batch is that I'm able to pick out significantly more complexity in the nose than the flavor profile. I get all sorts of soft fruit nuances in the aroma — there's a subtle berry character that I haven't heard many people ascribe to Simcoe before. After my experiences with Belma, a hop that many people described as extremely mellow but I got an intense strawberry character from, I'm wondering if my tastes buds are super sensitive to certain flavors from certain hops, and thus I taste lots of "berry" character that others interpret differently. I've gotten this berry-like character before in very soft, subtle IPAs like the excellent Maine Beer Lunch and Zoe, but I was never sure if it was from Simcoe or Columbus hops in those brews. Having now had a couple single hop beers featuring both varieties, I'm guessing it's actually both, but aggressive bittering (or treating your water too aggressively) will drown out this delicate character. I kept the bittering pretty mellow on this one, with only FWH and flameout additions, and added enough gypsum to nudge my water profile just out of the super soft range. This has a very subtle, almost perfume-y undertone from the Simcoe, and I love it. In an imperial IPA, I imagine it would be extremely hard to draw out this subtle nuance without the beer being too plain to earn its style status, but in a pale ale, the subtlety comes through without the beer seeming as if it's missing anything.

As usual, I will end on a more technical note. I fermented this batch with Conan, which has been observed by a number of homebrewers to drop in attenuation from generation to generation. I have been seeing this too (and in fact, my second harvest must have been a late-gen to begin with, as the attenuation never got above 80%), but Conan is still a nice yeast even when it's not super attenuating. Mashing at 155 F, I got about 78% attenuation, which is still pretty great. Still, I noticed that the distinct peach apricot character of Conan is less apparent in this batch than other previous batches, and the yeast seemed to flocculate much more quickly, explaining the unusually good clarity I'm seeing in the glass. So, in terms of this beer, the mutations don't hurt anything, though I think my stock of Conan is past the point where I'll see much of its unique, exceptional benefits. Time for another trip to Vermont and a prayer that the Heady on the shelf is swimming with fresh young Conan on that day.

Recipe-
3.5 Gal., All Grain
Brewhouse Efficiency: 78%
Mashed at 155 F for 65 minutes
Fermented at 64 degrees F
OG: 1.052
FG: 1.011

Malt-
82.7 % 2-row malt
7.9 % Cara-Pils
7.9 % Munich
1.6 % honey malt

Hop Schedule-
0.5 oz Simcoe @FWH
1 oz Simcoe @5 min
2.5 oz Simcoe @0 + hop stand for 20 min

3 oz Simcoe dry hop for 4 days

Yeast-
The Alchemist Conan

Unity Vibration - K.P.A (Kombucha Pale Ale) Review

Brewery: Unity Vibration (MI)
Style: Sour Beer / Kombucha
ABV: 7%
Grade: A

There are a surprising number of kombucha beer hybrids out there now for a style that hardly anyone is aware of — many craft beer drinkers I speak to have never even tried kombucha itself. But given the sudden popularity of sour beer, it makes perfect sense that brewers are seizing upon the overlap between these two delightful beverages. Brewers like New York's Beyond Kombucha are pioneering tasty, malt-free, lambic-like creations, while others are actually blending lambic and kombucha together together. As a new concept — with half a dozen different ways to go about it — brewers have only begun establishing the mold for this fledgling style. The potential is there, and it is exciting.

Meanwhile, out in Michigan, they're already getting weird with it. Not content to do something so unique as a mere kombucha / beer blend, this "Kombucha Pale Ale"  is double hopped, aged in bourbon barrels, and blended with juniper berries and a touch of grapefruit. Clearly no one has warned Unity Vibration against doing too much at once — K.P.A. sounds wild enough to put Dogfish Head to shame. Almost more bizarre than that description is the fact that this hybrid brew is actually really good, a perfect marriage of flavors showing not-a-sign of its seemingly over-complicated recipe. Tasty, balanced, and totally coherent, this is work as both a kombucha and a beer, and even better as a hybrid of both. 

The nose is floral and fruity, and while I can't parse out much hop aroma, there's a creamy oaky sweetness that leaves no doubt as to whether this was barrel aged. In the taste, this is even sweeter — surprisingly so for a kombucha-based beverage — with more of that creamy, oaky character, and subtle vanilla. Both hops and juniper hit as a bit of sharp spice, adding a distinct bite and bitterness that immediately sets this apart from any other kombucha I've had before. Carbonation is high, head retention is low, and K.P.A. is decently full bodied for both a kombucha and a sour beer. Sourness is relatively mild, more of a tartness, but the addictive kind that's best matched with high carbonation. The contrast between sweet and sour and creamy and dry gives this a really beautiful balance. Using both hops and juniper still seems kind of redundant to me, but the herbal bitterness is a nice background contrast to all the other rich, strong flavors playing off each other. 

While the sourness is understandably not as complex as that of a great sour beer, it's unique enough to justify K.P.A.'s existence, and tasty enough to ensure that it disappears rapidly from my glass. Mr. Wizard up there isn't messing around. Too bad I had to drive to Maine to buy this bottle — if Unity Vibration were in New York, I would absolutely pick this up again soon.

Availability: 16 ounce bottle.

Lazy Beer Writers Are Ruining Craft Beer for the Rest of Us — Hops Are Just Fine

A brewer at Cantillon in Brussels adds hops to lambic... a style of beer which does not taste remotely
hoppy or bitter. Photo via Facebook.

Yesterday morning, I began skimming The Social Medias over coffee when an article titled "Against Hoppy Beers - Hops Enthusiasts Are Ruining Craft Beer for the Rest of Us" appeared on my Twitter doorstep like so much flaming poop in a paper bag. I knew it was going to be trollbait when I saw that headline, but the bait was too strong. I read it. And as I did, my blood pressure rose, the sarcastic quips and exasperated rebuttals soon piling up in my mind.

Normally, I just forget about this sort of click-bait "journalism" after a few minutes. The article — by Adrienne So, appearing on Slate.com — was intended to get people's attention, to get people talking, and it succeeded at that. Here I am, hours later, taking the time to write out this rebuttal. But this particular article bugged me more than most of the sloppy beer journalism that's sloughed off by big mainstream publications, who typically assign wine writers to elaborate on beer styles they don't even enjoy. Maybe these lazy articles are just building up over time — a crust of stale, uniformed laments. But in this case, from an author who says that she likes hoppy beers herself, it's not just the laziness or ignorance of brewing techniques that bothers me: it's the missed opportunities. Where there was an chance to open dialogue about why people like what they like, Adrienne So's Slate piece instead enters a bizarre, misguided blame game. It starts right there in the title: Hops Enthusiasts Are Ruining Craft Beer for the Rest of Us. And so the message seems to be: You should feel bad for liking what you like so much, because not everyone likes it. Sadly, this is the common thread with many of these articles. Rather than admit their tastes are simply different from others, writers too often try to cast their preferences as some fault of the thing they don't enjoy. If only IPAs tasted more like fermented grapes...

Let's peel back each layer of why this is so ridiculous, one by one.

1. First, apply this thesis to, well, anything else. Replace hops with "chocolate" and craft beer with "cupcakes." Imagine you had a friend complaining that they couldn't enjoy their blueberry lemon-swirl cupcake because chocolate cupcakes were just too popular. The horror.

2. Beyond starting with a misguided accusation, the article ultimately fails because it offers no helpful dialogue — there's no concrete, addressable problem identified, and therefore no solution. Is the author suggesting that IPA-drinkers should try to like what they like a little less? "Please stop enjoying IPAs so much"? It's hard to complain about any one style of beer being too beloved these days when we live in the most diverse era of beer styles and beer variety in history. Let's appreciate the craft beer Renaissance, rather than bitching that a couple styles are having slightly more of a Renaissance than forty other styles.

3. Again, to be clear: not everyone is required to like everything. That's fine. No one should think less of you for not enjoying hoppy beers. And this is not exclusive to hop-heads, or sour-heads, or stout-heads, or Grätzer-heads, or whatever. There are plenty of beer styles to go around, and plenty of room in the beer-world for those who don't enjoy them. Let's work on making people understand how varied beer is, rather than fearing their prejudices.

4. Sadly, the article misses the opportunity to address some issues that might be real. A complaint could be lodged about bars that lack appropriate diversity in their menu. If your taplist is almost entirely any one style of beer, and it's not some special event, sure, you'll alienate some drinkers. That's just poor planning. Likewise, most half-assed, half-craft bars are simply disappointing by nature, and likely always will be, loaded with their mass-market wheat beers. A bar with a couple old, stale IPAs is no fun for anyone, Hop Heads included. But such is life. Casting the blame on hop lovers doesn't help anything.

5. It would be absolutely legitimate to complain that some breweries put out IPAs simply because it's a popular style, because those brewers think they have to. Chances are, those IPAs aren't going to be very good. Don't brew beer you aren't passionate about — now there's a case you could make that's relevant and necessary.

6. The beer world moves fast, and so far as I can tell, diversity has usually been the result. For example: I can't think of a single brewery that makes exclusively IPAs (The Alchemist doesn't count). I'm sure there must be one or two out there at this point. However, off the top of my head, I can think of breweries focusing in plenty of other styles exclusively. Stillwater, Funkwerks, The Bruery, Logsdon Farmhouse Ales, and many others brew almost exclusively Belgian and farmhouse inspired beers, with nary a double IPA to be found. Jolly Pumpkin brews a dozen delectable sours, and bottles nothing else. Are we going to start complaining about the over-use of Belgian yeast next? It's a big, diverse market, with literally thousands of breweries in the U.S. alone. To imply that hops have some sort of monopoly can be nothing but an exaggeration.

7. The Slate article also implies that the popularity of IPAs is in jeopardy if we don't all calm down. We're scaring people. Yet all the evidence seems to point to hoppy beers growing more popular, and more accepted — how does that work, then? So far as my research has revealed, the Illuminati is not funneling millions of advertising dollars to push IPAs on the unwilling masses. The government is not giving secret tax cuts to The Alchemist to prop up Heady Topper's success. (Thanks, Obama!) If IPAs are popular, it's an organic popularity. And it's a hard-earned, underdog popularity. (Unlike, say, Blue Moon, which has a mega-corporation and millions of dollars behind it, and can afford to build artificial popularity over time by simply being everywhere). Thirty years ago, hardly anyone would touch a hoppy beer. IPAs had to fight to be accepted, much less consumed, much less popular. And now they're too popular? You think Hop Heads are just pulling your leg? Choking down bitter beers just to convince you to like them? No, the passion is genuine, and it's not going anywhere.

8. What really saddens me — the ultimate missed opportunity in starting a flamewar like this — is the effort that could have instead been spent educating people. For all its casting of blame, that silly article was the only thing hurtful to craft beer. It told people to be narrow-minded, to set up boundaries rather than broaden horizons. Don't do that. You don't have to like hoppy beers; really, it's fine. Some people will never be okay with bitterness at any level. But as with any style, not all IPAs are created equal  — you'd be amazed how much variation there can be.

The author makes the common mistake of correlating IBUs with hop flavor, even making the totally inaccurate insinuation that because the human threshold for IBUs drops off at a certain point, Hop Heads are just wasting their flavor potential on most hoppy brews. Humans do have a threshold for bitterness (around 80 to 100 IBUs), and it's true that hops provide bitterness, along with flavor. But that doesn't mean hop flavor levels out on every beer over a certain IBU level — that's not how it works, at all. This is important, Beer Writers and Mainstream Journalists of America, and I too often see it confused, so take note: hop bitterness (IBUs) and hop flavor are not the same thing. Hops provide bitterness, and hops provide flavor, and they can provide both, or one or the other. It's up to the technique and skill and preference of the brewer. The author had a great chance to lay out what makes a beer bitter, and what hops can taste like other than bitter. What do hop lovers love about hops, after all? Why is the style so popular? Those who don't understand this passion often think of IPAs as harsh, grating beers overloaded with vegetal preservatives, rather than the nuanced, fruity, exotic elixirs the rest of us enjoy. Rather than casting blame on those that enjoy them too much, one could illuminate the many ways hops can be used — clarifying that you can brew IPAs that are full of hop flavor and hardly any bitterness. Believe it or not, you might even convert a few new Hop Heads this way.

Since the author relies on anecdotal evidence, so will I: I've brewed beers that, on paper and by quantity, were exceedingly hoppy, but I brewed them in such a way that even my hop-fearing friends enjoyed them — and never once described them as "bitter" when asked. Focus on the flavor, and what brings that flavor, and you'll grow the ranks of beer lovers. When you've shown them something different, explain why it was different, and what they should look for in the future. With new hop varieties and new flavors appearing all the time, there's something for everyone. The best way to alienate people is to make them feel bad — no matter what kind of beer you, or they, enjoy.



If you enjoyed this article, please check out my exploration of what hops will taste like next.

Recipe and Tasting Notes: Rye Porter II

Brewery: Bear Flavored

Style: Porter
Brewed: 3.3.2013
ABV: 6.8%

Appearance: black with slight brown at edges, surpising lack of head retention
Smell: chocolate milk, coffee, roasted malts, bitter dark chocolate, toffee
Taste: dark chocolate, coffee, dry roasted malts, cherry, sweet toffee, bitter finish
Mouthfeel: silky, full body, smooth, creamy, low carbonation

Many brewers are going wild with the experimentation and imperialization and barreling-aging of stouts these days, but interestingly, there seems to be an unstated consensus that porters are to be kept humble. Part of this is the interchangeable nomenclature between porters and stouts — if there's no consensus definition that makes a porter a porter, and you decide to take your recipe a bit over the top, I think most people will instinctively call that a stout. Likewise, if it feels like a porter, you call it a porter. Relatively sessionable, a little more malty; smooth and straightforward. Once I style that I overlooked, I've since come to really appreciate the porter's humble nature. I could have probably gotten away with calling this brew a stout, but rye stout doesn't sound as good as rye porter, and I wanted this to drink like a porter. So a porter it is; who's going to know? 

So, as you may have guessed, this batch didn't involve any crazy experimentation — it was instead the rare occasion where I returned to a fairly basic concept/recipe to work on perfecting it. The main question going into this batch was simply how much rye to use, and of course, what sort of ratio of dark malts would get me closest to that perfect chocolate/coffee flavor I love (without actually using chocolate or coffee). Should I use enough rye malt to officially call it a "rye porter," or should I simply brew a porter that happens to have some rye for mouthfeel? Should I try out chocolate rye malt, or keep the chocolate and the rye separate? One year previous, I brewed the first iteration of my rye porter, with both recipes simply based on whatever I thought sounded good at the time. Both have come out well, but that first iteration had a bit too much of the dank earthy dark malt character I associate with baltic porters, and plus the bottles over-carbonated. This second batch is a nice improvement over the first round, and excepting a few minor issues, extremely close to the ideal humble porter I was shooting for. 

Carbonation is on the low side — which is stylistically fine — but leads to a spritzy head that's gone within moments. With two pounds of oats and one pound of chocolate rye malt, this definitely doesn't lack mouthfeel, but once the head is gone, the beer utterly still, and could use more liveliness, even for a porter. Rye is generally great for head retention, so where the hell did it go here? This doesn't really affect the flavor much — other than feeling flat after a few minutes — but it's really confusing me. Do some brands of oats contain head-killing oils? I would love to hear some thoughts on what might be causing this.

But beyond the lack of head, the mouthfeel is how I like it for a porter, decadent and oily. One of my "ventures" for this was to try out chocolate rye malt instead of regular rye malt, and so much as I can pick it out from everything else (as in, I can't), I like it. But I'm once again leaning toward making this a rye-heavy porter, so next time I'll probably use plain old rye in a larger percentage, and sub out the oats for a pound of chocolate wheat malt (gotta get that head retention back).

With a body rich in chocolate and coffee nuances, and really nicely balanced between sweet and rich and dry and roasty, this batch has great balance, yet it's not a balance that comes at the expense of complexity. Rye and Munich do their thing without the cloying sweetness of crystal malts, and roasted barley offers those wonderful coffee / chocolate flavors without nudging the beer too far in either the dry or sweet direction. 

Perfecting a beer recipe is a lot like that math problem where you shoot an arrow that covers exactly 50% of the distance each time, and therefore, eventually, gets imperceptibly closer without ever actually reaching the target — though it may appear to, from your perspective. There are a handful of perfect beers out there, perhaps, but almost anything can be improved... marginally. I doubt I will brew the same porter recipe twice until I have tried a dozen more combinations, taking into account a dozen other variables like water profile and yeast selection. I could brew this to a higher final gravity, and increase the bitterness to compensate. I could try to amp up the rye character, or even see what a larger, crazy percentage of chocolate rye malt would do. I could toss in some oak chips next time, and I just might. But for now, what I have is a very nice porter, and I like that quite a bit.

Recipe-
4.75 Gal., All Grain
Brewhouse Efficiency: 78%
Mashed at 152 F for 60 minutes
Fermented at ambient room temp, 70 F

OG: 1.069 / 16.8 Brix
FG: 1.012

Malt-
58.7 % 2-row malt
17.4 % oats
8.7 % chocolate rye malt
8.7 % Munich

6.5 % roasted barley

Hop Schedule-
1 oz Northern Brewer @60 min
1 oz Brewer's Gold @10 min

Yeast-
Wyeast West Yorkshire (1200 ml starter)

Stone - Enjoy By IPA Review

Brewery: Stone (CA)
Style: Imperial IPA
ABV: 9.4%
Grade: A (5.17) / A- (4.1)
Age at Drinking: 10 Days

Stone's "Enjoy By" series is a very clever idea — IPAs that make it absolutely clear whether or not they are fresh; that are released on a limited, rotating basis to ensure they disappear from store shelves fast. This particular review is of the 5.17.2013 release, though I also wrote a preliminary review of the 4.1.2013 release. As far as I can tell, each "release" of Stone's Enjoy By is brewed to the same recipe, though having had two rounds to compare, I wonder if unavoidable differences (such as hop variation and availability) end up making each round a little different. Unless my memory is tricking me, I think I like the 5.17 quite a bit more than the 4.1.

Right off the bat, the big aroma wafting out of the glass reminds me what's so often missing from the west coast breweries that distribute to the other side of the country; their beers doomed to the purgatory of shelves for weeks, possibly months, before finding their way into my welcoming fridge. While the 4.1.2013 release struck me as having a more 'traditional,' herbal character than I was expecting from a fresh-n-trendy new IPA, this 5.17 version brings the profile back around to what I was looking for: juicy and succulent and ripe with tropical fruit flavors, with a nose full of Nelson Sauvin and Galaxy. Berries, tart citrus and grapefruit, with an underlying base of American C-hops. Pertinent to both vintages, I will say: the aroma on this seems to dissipate fast. What was a cornucopia of beautiful tropic hops for a few minutes faded about two paragraphs into reviewing this, slinking into something a bit minerally and subdued.

Though the bitterness is initially pretty tame — nowhere near the full-frontal assault of many West Coast IPAs — Enjoy By finishes dry and a slightly dank, with just a bit of pine. It's not quite the kind of bitterness that sticks around and coats your tongue, but it's firm enough to maintain Enjoy By's double IPA status. Sweetness and bitterness coexist here, like the tongue-sapping quality of citrus zest; a trick that only a good IPAs can pull off. As big bad IPA's go, this is one of the most balanced I've had in recent memory. Another check in the plus column. 

Stone's marketing approach for Enjoy By is definitely more than a clever gimmick; it's an important reminder of how IPAs should be consumed. There's a lot of hype being slung about this beer recently, and I'm happy to report that it's extremely solid, fully-flavored, and a proud standard-bearer. It's absolutely a treat; a lesson in exactly how IPAs should be brewed, shelved and sold.

Availability: Stone releases these on a rotating basis, only in certain markets. There's a handy count-down calender on their website for tracking when the next "date" of Enjoy By will be sent out. It tends to go fast.