Catch Me At These Events for The Fermented Man This Summer

The Fermented Man will start hitting stores and releasing through online retailers next week. If you haven't yet, now is a perfect time to order yours through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or saunter on down to your local bookstore and pick up a copy there.

Undoubtedly, after you have hungrily devoured The Fermented Man in one sitting like a person coming off of an arbitrary meta-diet and experiencing guacamole again for the first time in a year, you might have some questions. Things that come to mind that you wish to discuss with me. Given that I am absolutely terrible at responding to emails, what means of exploring these questions could be left to you? How about asking me in person, at one of the many events I will be hosting / attending this summer to promote the book? My busy calendar includes everything from Kent Falls beer nights at fine drinking establishments, to fermented food and beer pairings, to bookstore speaking engagements, to a fermentation workshop on the world's largest rooftop farm, to fermentation festivals, to a hop harvest festival, to me keeling over in a parking lot from exhaustion.

This schedule is, of course, not entirely complete just yet. I am open to suggestions, and if you know of a place / business / organization that might be interested in coordinating an event with me, please feel free to reach out at bearflavored [at] gmail [dot com]. More distantly on the agenda, but not yet organized, is a trip to Vermont in the middle of October, and a trip to Louisville, KY around the Shelton Brother's Festival, October 28 and 29. If you live in either of those areas and would like to coordinate an event, hit me up!

Finally, after all this is over, having been working on this project for some three and a half years, I will be throwing down a smoke grenade, abruptly vanishing into the night, and spending the next several years in a cabin on some remote mountain peak in Colorado or Oregon, never to trouble myself with the concerns of human society again. At least until I write a book about it.


July 29 - Inquiring Minds, New Paltz, NY
7 pm going until 8 pm — I'll be doing a reading, followed by Q&A. Facebook event with more details here.

July 30 - Beer Belly, Albany, NY
Kent Falls beer event, where I'll be answering questions and slinging copies of the book. Fingerprint wild ale will be making an appearance.

July 31 - Oblong Books at the Rhinebeck Farmer's Market, Rhinebeck, NY
Stop by from 11 am to 1 pm as I'll be there with books to sign, as well as answering all your fermentation questions. Event page here.

August 4 - DeCicco's Market Armonk, Armonk, NY
Kent Falls beer event, where I'll be answering questions and slinging copies of the book. Fingerprint wild ale will be making an appearance, and many other cool beers besides.

August 9 - Brooklyn Grange, Brooklyn, NY
Brooklyn Grange is an insanely cool project -- it's currently the largest rooftop farm in the world. From this amazing setting, I'll be leading a fermentation workshop and answering questions to a handful of attendees. This is a smaller, ticketed event, so reserve your spot now. [Just got word that this is already sold out! Will update if any spots open up.]

August 13 - Burial Beer, Asheville, NC
I actually don't have any particular specific events schedule at the moment, but we will be in Asheville to brew a collab beer with the fine folks at Burial, and thus hanging out in their taproom quite a bit. Come say hi!

August 20 - People's Food Co-Op, Portland, OR
More details TBA.

August 21 - The Kitchen at Middleground Farms, Wilsonville, OR
More details TBA.

August 22 - Powell's City of Books, Portland, OR
More details TBA.

August 28 - Boston Fermentation Festival - Boston, MA
Cool festival that's also a great market for picking up fermented goodies, with lots of different information sessions. I'll be participating in the Fermented Reading Room, signing books, as well as at the Fermentation Help Desk, answering your fermentation questions.

Sept. 8 - Spotty Dog Bookstore, Hudson, NY
Signing books and answering all your fermentation questions.

Sept. 10 - Kent Falls Hop Harvest Festival, Kent, CT
Last years first annual Kent Falls / Camps Road Farm hop harvest festival was a really super fun day, actually, This year's should be no different -- we'll be brewing up another wet-hopped farmhouse ale, hanging out and chilling in the brewery while demonstrating the process, picking hops (obviously), and ending the day with a pig roast. Beer is available, hanging out on the farm is available, asking me fermentation questions and such is available, and I'll be in the brewery with copies of the book as we're brewing.

Sept. 11 - Berkshire Fermentation Festival, Great Barrington, MA
More details TBA.

Sept. 12 - City Beer Hall, Albany, NY
Beer dinner with Kent Falls and Grimm.

Sept. 18 - Brooklyn Book Festival, Brooklyn, NY
More details TBA.

Sept. 25th - Golden Notebook Bookstore, Woodstock, NY
Reading and Q&A.

Sept. 25th - Inquiring Minds Bookstore Saugerties, Saugerties NY
4 pm — I'll be doing a reading, followed by Q&A.

About That Time I Ate Nothing But Fermented Food For One Year (The Fermented Man Pre-Order)

In two months, on July 19th, The Fermented Man will finally be released, so I think it's time for a little update on the book. Many of you have no doubt been waiting for The Fermented Man these last few years as ravenously as the masses anticipate a new Star Wars film, so if you don't require any further elaboration from me, I'll here point out that the book is already available for pre-order. For more details, please read on!

In Case You Don't Know About the Book-
During the year of 2014, I lived off of nothing but fermented food for the entire year. Yes, an entire year consuming only things which were fermented. However, this isn't a new lifestyle diet I'm going to be endorsing on Dr. Phil, but more of an experiment (a thought experiment turned into a challenging reality), and a means to journey through the world of fermented food in an interesting and immersive way. I wanted to write a book that would be entertaining and informative for any reader, whether you know a lot about fermentation already, or absolutely nothing at all.

Even though fermentation is as old as civilization itself, studies into our microbiome and our relationship with microbes are only recently entering the public consciousness. One might be tempted to conclude that probiotic foods are just another new health fad, but fermentation is anything but. It is a fundamental element of the culinary world. So fundamental, you could even, just for example, live off of nothing but fermented foods. The influence of fermentation really does permeate just about everything.

There are many excellent guides to making fermented foods at home out there. In fact, that is primarily how the publishing world has dealt with fermentation thus far. I wanted to write a different type of book, one for hobbyists and general readers alike. Maybe you can't even pretend that you'll ever be motivated to go home at night and spend a few hours packing cabbage into a jar to make sauerkraut. That's totally fine — not everyone needs to be (or has time to be) a hobbyist, and fermentation is far more important (and interesting) than as just as DIY activity for foodies. Maybe you've spent most of your life convinced that you need to slather your hands in sanitizer gel to lead a healthy lifestyle, and are simply fascinated that anyone would risk eating food crawling with living bacteria, much less a whole year of it. After all, we go to great lengths to eradicate microbes in almost every area of our lives. Why would we want more of them?

This is a book for those terrified of microbes, and those who love them.


What To Expect From The Fermented Man-
The Fermented Man is a narrative non-fiction journey into the world of fermentation. Living off of fermented foods for a year posed a host of challenges and educational opportunities alike, and allowed me to structure the book as a walk-through of the entire world of microbe-made foods, as well as an exploration of the very nature of diets. You will hopefully learn a lot. You will probably read some thoughts about diets and health that you weren't expecting. You will hopefully be entertained, and get a few chuckles out of my ordeal, here and there. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll be inspired to post passionate memes on Tumblr demanding a sequel. In the back of the book there is even a brief recipe section, so after traveling with me through this eye-opening culinary realm, you can try your hand making a few of my favorites at home, if you are so inclined.

When Does The Fermented Man Come Out?-
The book will be released (both online and in bookstores) on July 19th.

How To Get a Copy Of the Book-
The Fermented Man will be available through all the typical channels that books are typically available.

You may guess that authors generally take home more money when you order from the author directly, rather than, say, Amazon. And while I could probably make a few more bucks by setting up a sale for the book through my merch store and encouraging everyone that reads this blog to order the book that way, it's actually probably better for me in the long run if you just order the book from a regular store — either your local bookstore, or Amazon. While I might make less on each sale, Amazon is also a very powerful marketing platform, in a sense, and the more visible my (or any) book is on Amazon, the better it is likely to do. So, it's probably ultimately better if Amazon sees that my book is selling well, versus trying to squeeze out a few extra dollars by selling a bunch of copies myself. Likewise, your local bookstore can always really use your support, and their interest in my book is also supremely helpful. So, please visit them and ask if they'll be getting copies of The Fermented Man in. If they are not already, you can always request that they do so. A win for everyone!

One more thing: after you have read the book, please consider doing me a huge favor. I mentioned that Amazon also essentially works as a marketing platform. Along those lines, the more reviews a book has, the better for its visibility to other shoppers. So please consider doing me a major solid and adding a quick review to the Amazon page. Even a short review is immensely helpful to an author — especially a new, unknown author like myself.

How Many Copies Of the Book Should I Order, Just To Be Safe?-
At least four or five, but up to 10 if you really want to improve your social standing. Copies of The Fermented Man make excellent gifts for any family member, friend, significant other, or all 527 of your Facebook friends!

How Can I Order Copies To Sell At My Store?
If you work at a bookstore, you'll be able to stock the book as you would any other. However, if you work at a store that isn't able to order this book through your usual distribution channels, you can email Ross Gerstenblatt at my publishing company (Overlook Press), who will set you up.

Will You Be Doing Events To Promote the Book?
Indeed I will. I don't have a ton of details on this front that I can announce just yet, so I'll save this stuff, mostly, for another post.

Will You Be Doing Any Events That Are On A Big Roof?
One event that I can reveal now is a fermentation workshop I will be doing with Brooklyn Grange, who operate the world's largest rooftop soil farms. That workshop will be on Tuesday, August 9th. This will be a really fun, very unique event, and you can sign up now by clicking here.

Will You Do An Event At My Venue, Please?
Possibly! If there is some place you know of, work for, or run that would like to organize an event with me, please get in touch with me at bearflavored @ gmail dot com.

What If I Donated To Your Indiegogo Campaign?
You are truly a hero, and thank you for helping to make a vital section of the book possible. If you were one of the supporters on my Indiegogo campaign back in 2014, I will already be mailing you a copy of the book directly. If you also got a t-shirt through the campaign, I will eventually ask you what size and stuff you want, or go ahead and just let me know now.

What If I'm Impatient, And Wish To Hear More Right Now, But In Audio-Only Format?
I'm glad to hear you are so eager. Go ahead and listen to a podcast I just did with Fuhmentaboutit, a lovely fermentation podcast that interviewed me on a broad range of book-related subjects.



Thank you all very much for helping to support my writing career and fermentation education efforts. July 19th will be here very soon! Until then (and after then), follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more regular updates.

Maple Imperial Stout - Recipe & Tasting Notes

In retrospect, I guess it is a little weird how long I went without brewing any dark beers at Kent Falls. I do love stouts and porters quite a bit, and we had always intended to add them to the lineup. But winter snuck up fast, and with the many many many many things I'm juggling all at once, even just orchestrating the timing of releases to their appropriate weather patterns sort of slipped from my attention. There are many ideas I've been working on, and concepts I would like to try out in the future, and a lot of those fall into the neglected dark beer realm. You'll see more stout/porter-type stuff from us next winter, and especially whenever we're able to expand our barrel cellar. (So far, we haven't put a single clean beer into barrels). Different stouts, different porters, different flavors touching up those simple bases, and perhaps even different barrel-aging processes to create something new and #extreme. Like, has anyone even ever tried putting a stout in a barrel before? A barrel-aged stout? I can't say I've heard of it being done. It's probably just too crazy to work, but I'm at least willing to approach the concept on a purely theoretical level, before abandoning it as an absurd idea.

Eventually, maybe I'll even repeat something like this recipe: a 15% ABV maple imperial stout. Maybe. If you've encountered many Kent Falls beers in real life, you'll know that that's about triple the average ABV of the beers I brew here. The anarchist in me kind of wants to avoid brewing anything super boozy, but if there's one thing I'd buck my own conventions for, it'd be a beer like this.

One of my brewing white whales is perfecting this vague ideal I have of a maple imperial stout. It's weird: I generally haaaaaaaate sweetness in beers. In many cases, it can completely ruin a style I should otherwise appreciate. I've come to realize that I just... don't like imperial IPAs anymore. I could probably go the rest of my life without drinking another barrel-aged barleywine. Malt bombs just aren't for me, I guess. Basically every beer I brew is super dry, and rare is the beer that finishes above 3 plato that I would consider acceptable. Their grain bills are super stripped down and simple for a reason. Yet, oddly enough, imperial stouts very often slip through the cracks of my preferences. I think it may be that the roast and depth of flavors balance out the caramel raisin sweetness that I can't stand in other boozy malt-focused beers. Some additional adjuncts can still send these beers too over-the-top, and I'm getting a little burned out on the bourbon barrel-aged stout thing as well, but maple? Maple is one of my favorite flavors in the universe. Maple is a Trojan Horse into my heart and soul. God help me if maple becomes the next pumpkin, because I am helpless to resist it. Thus, I will always be chasing the perfect maple stout, a beer that balances a subtle sweetness with those earthy maple notes, roasty malts and coffee and vanilla undertones.

Having already written about the troubles of imparting maple flavor into beer (the TL:DR: it's just way too fermentable for the flavor to really stick), let me go on a bit of tangent. Let me talk briefly about the brewing-foibles along the way for my grandest Maple Beer attempt. I wanted this beer to be big, incorporate an absolutely ludicrous amount of maple syrup, have a bit of oak backing it up, and hold up as something I could age for years and years and decades to come. Born in the driveway of a homebrew shop, it was later carried home half a mile to my old apartment, where it was fermented and aged. It then endured one of the most miserable packaging experiences of my homebrewing career, thanks to the wonders of leaf hops.

Leaf hops are like this vegetative homing missile designed to find things that can be clogged, and clog them with supernatural vigor. And they follow no rhyme nor reason, either; sometimes they will decide to grant you mercy, and leave your things unclogged; other days, they will decide just to clog all your shit right to hell. Immediately before trying to keg this stout (the plan was to age further in the keg, then bottle off of the keg), I transferred a Brewer's Gold single-hop pale ale that had used leaf hops for every stage and had zero issues. All the beer went through fine, and the leaf hops stayed right where they were supposed to be.

Then I tried to transfer my imperial stout. There were considerably fewer hops in my imperial stout than in my Brewer's Gold pale ale; I'd used a mix of leaf and pellet hops for bittering and late additions. Not for any particular reason, but because it was what I'd had on hand, and I hadn't thought about it too much. But despite the small addition of just a few ounces, these leaf hops decided they were going to clog my auto siphon. Aggressively. I tried unclogging. I tried pumping harder. I remember the moment where the end of the hose popped out of the keg due to some kind of pressure build-up and sprayed syrupy imperial stout all across my room. The auto siphon I was using was so clogged I could not get any beer through it. I would pump and it would just shoot blanks. I separated the hose from the siphon and tried siphoning the old fashioned way, to no avail. I tried sucking the beer through the hose to start it; clogged. I tried a second auto siphon, and it immediately clogged. I tried one of those mesh straining bags around the end of the siphon: this did a great job of siphoning noisy angry air pockets through my hose. I tried creating a small wormhole in the bottom of the fermentor to draw the remaining beer through dimensions, summoning it into my keg with arcane magicks: clogged. These goddam things were so maliciously intent on clogging every piece of brewing equipment in my house, I'm fairly sure that they actually devised means to travel back in time and kill the parents of my auto-siphon. I'm sure that if I had just tried pouring the liquid from the bucket into the keg, these leaf hops would have found a way to clog the air itself. If they'd had these leaf hops available on the Titanic when its hull was ruptured by that iceberg, the ship would have never sank.

But I digress.

At some point I was standing there, half my apartment sprayed down with a thick mist of imperial stout, broken auto-siphons littered about me, and I was seething with rage. These mere five gallons of imperial stout contained, I'd guess, at least $100 worth of ingredients, and for whatever stupid reason or curse or personal incompetence, I could not move it from one vessel to another. Just physically... couldn't. The laws of gravity were broken that day. I gave up. Sealed up the keg, purged. Purged the carboy with CO2 and sealed that back up until I devised a better plan. Or had access to a better filter. Something that those leaf hops could not defeat. That turned out to be my patent-pending Bear Flavored Dry-Hop Keg device, and in the end, I did eventually successfully get to package this beer.

I had a terrible fear that this stout would come out oxidized or infected after all the abuse that it endured, but it's now been in the bottle for a year, and it's holding up very well. It's sweet, certainly, and trending more towards the typical imperial stout sweetness as it ages. The maple is there, but considering the tremendous amount of maple syrup that I used — two thirds of a gallon Grade B syrup in 4.25 gallons of beer — the flavor is still not as prominent as I would have liked. Part of my hope in making this beer so high in alcohol was that the yeast would tire out and just stop fermenting the stuff while there was still a little maple character left, or that the fermentation would proceed slowly enough that all the delicate nuances wouldn't get scrubbed out. [Edit: the first comment on this post raised some questions that I really should have addressed to begin with, regarding the fermentation. Getting a big beer like this to attenuate is obviously a concern, and by adding the maple syrup in staggered additions, following primary fermentation, I figured the gentler fermentation would help maintain some maple character, but also ensure the yeast didn't get hammered too heavily, and would thus be able to finish this beer out to the degree I expected. Fermentation-wise, especially as a homebrewer, I think this always the best strategy for high-ABV beers]. This worked, to an extent, but if you really want a dynamic maple bomb, you'd have to go to even more extremes. Which is insane to suggest. Clearly there is a point at which just adding more and more maple syrup ceases to become practical, and I think with a touch of oak and maybe even vanilla beans, you would get some magnification of some of the maple characteristics. I did add an ounce of oak chips in the carboy as this aged, but they weren't enough to come through. In retrospect, I wish I'd done more along those lines — a more prominent oak backbone would be good here.

Then again, subtlety is a beautiful thing. The only downside of the beer tasting as balanced and restrained as this is, is the cost of maple syrup. It's... not cheap. So either you have access to a maple source yourself, and cost doesn't matter, or else you're going to be throwing down a lot of money for little reward. What's a little nuance and complexity worth to you?

And maybe that right there explains why something like the "pumpkin spice everything" craze became what it was, and hasn't happened yet with maple. At least in terms of beer, pumpkin and maple both come through extremely, teasingly subtle. In a market that really hasn't had a whole lot of interest in subtle, that's not gonna fly. But pumpkin has those spices to back it up, And man, those spices sure don't have to be subtle. You can load up on the spices. Maple has no such cohort. It is a natural and independent flavor. It is pure of heart. Noble. Humble. And that is why I'll keep chasing it.


Recipe-
5.0 Gal., All Grain
Brewed: 9.24.14
Bottled On: 3.14.15
Fermented at 66 F
OG: 1.093 (before maple addition)
FG: 1.028
ABV: 15%

Malt-
38.8% [#10] 2-Row malt
27.2% [#7] Grade B maple syrup

15.5% [#4] oak-smoked wheat

7.8% [#2] chocolate rye

7.8% [#2] flaked oats

2.9% [12 oz] Carafa III

Hop Schedule-
2 oz CTZ @FWH

Other-

1 oz medium toast American oak chips

Yeast-
British ale yeast

New Hats, Plus Restocked Hoodies

Hello! It's me again, Derek. You may remember me from the other week, when I was guiltily addressing the fact that I have not written very many blog posts recently, and wondering what I should write about next. Well, I'm working on that! In fact, I hope to have a couple new blog posts very soon.

In the meantime, I'm happy to reveal that I have a new product in my webstore: hats! Yes, I took the "mash paddle pentagram" from my most popular t-shirt design, and had it transmogrified into hat form. Now you can take this very clever idea — again, mash paddles that form a pentagram — and put it on your head! Your head, being the most visible part of your body, will allow a maximum number of people to observe this new garment and its design which you have personally selected.

In addition to those hats, I have also restocked most of the t-shirt designs, as well as the "Black Metal Brett" hoodies. It is very soon going to be winter and thus a hoodie would be a very good idea, especially a hoodie as grim as this one.

Finally, thank you to everyone who has ordered my dumb merchandise so far! I greatly appreciate it. And I apologize for those times when it takes me a week or two to mail things out. Sometimes I can't keep up. Would anyone like to buy my webstore and t-shirt designs? You'd probably be much better at this than me. Urban Outfitters? You guys interested? Hot Topic? Old Navy?

What Should I Write About On This Blog Thing Next?

Photo courtesy of Fuj.

Hello!

My name is Derek. You may remember me as the guy who used to blog here on bear-flavored.com about farmhouse ales and Brettanomyces and juicy IPAs, sharing my experiences via long, rambling posts jam packed full of questionable information, dumb jokes, and unprovoked existentialism.

I have not posted all that terribly much this year, which I feel very bad about. Sorry about that! At this point, I still don't want to make any promises about hitting a certain time frame during which I'll be able to blog again regularly. As it turns out, after spending the vast majority of my time making beer, it's very hard to muster the energy to then spend my few remaining free minutes further thinking and writing about beer! As anyone could guess, at that point, all my brain really encourages me to do is pour myself a nice tall glass of bourbon, throw on a movie, and question every decision I've ever made in my life. So who knows if I'll ever be able to post again as often as during those blissful days past as a care-free homebrewer with all the time and energy in the world, but I do not plan to ever give up on the blog, and am always pondering and considering and brainstorming what I can write about next.

On the plus side, I am now done with all significant writing work on The Fermented Man, which should still be on track for release next spring / summer. Get excited! It's going to be real great! In fact, I can all but promise that The Fermented Man will be your new favorite book about a person living entirely off of fermented food for a year. But seriously, I'm really happy (and immensely relieved) by how well it came out, and I will hopefully be sharing more specific details very soon.

In preparation for hopefully being able to write a few more blog posts on a semi-regular-ish basis, maybe, eventually, at some point, I would like to first humbly ask what you all might be curious to read about?

I can of course continue to think of the usual dumb ideas that I tend to think of, and will even go so far as to share some of the possible future dumb ideas I have thought of for future blog posts, so you can tell me if you would particularly like to read about any of them. But if there is something that you are curious about — related to homebrewing, commercial brewing, running a brewery, starting a brewery, farmhouse brewery peculiarities, hiking up mountains, the inexorable nature of life, etc.  — I am more than happy to address them.

First, though, here are some things I've been wanting to write about, but have not posted about yet. Some of these I may post about very soon; others will be discarded as pretty stupid ideas. Some of these are half-written posts in my draft folder; others I have not yet attempted to write at all. Just to give you an idea of some of the things that may be coming along soon, if I can muster the energy:

- Imperial Maple Stout - Tasting Notes

- Sour Black Ales - Tasting Notes

- 5 Methods for Spontaneously Fermenting Beer with Wild Microbes

- Where Am I? What Is This Place? What Year Is It?

- Kettle Souring vs. Mixed Culture Fermentation - My Thoughts On the Greatest Controversy of the Modern Age

- Do We Overestimate the Time Brettanomyces Needs to Complete Fermentation?

- A Day in the Life of a Modern Farmhouse Brewery

- Hazy IPAs and the New Wave of Extra Pulp Hop Juice - Addressing the Greatest Controversy of the Modern Age

- How Can You Objectively Know If Your Beer is Any Good?

- Something Else About Yeast Cultures, Or Possibly Barrel Aging, I Guess?

- What Is It Like to Transition From Homebrewing (5 Gallon Batches) into Large-Scale Commercial Brewing (1000 Gallons at a Time)?

- How Does One Maintain a Healthy Dating and Social Life When Trapped On a Remote Farm Working Absurd Hours? (Please, I'm Begging You, Someone Tell Me)

- 5 Pros and Cons of Commercial Brewing vs. Homebrewing

- The IBU Arms Race is Over, and That Pleases and Sparkles with Me

- Beer Hype - Some Reflections on the Greatest Controversy of the Modern Age

- My Experiences Developing the Beer Lineup for a New Brewery

- Is the Era of Flagship Beers and Core Lineups Over?

- Thinking About Opening Your Own Brewery? Just Pause For a Second - Have You Considered the Bottled Water Business, Instead? Or Perhaps Becoming a Hedge Fund Manager? I Have Friends Who Do Graphic Design, and That Seems Like A Really Nice Thing To Do For a Living



Please leave your suggestions and desires now so that I may continue to stall for another week or two before having to do any real work. Hit me!

Buckwheat Sour Saison - Recipe, Brewing with Unmalted Adjuncts, & Cereal Mashing Techniques

Let's explore our memory banks for a moment. Even as hombrewers, making beer can get pretty stressful when lots of things start to go wrong. What's the worst brew-day you've ever had?

If I thought about it really hard, I could probably come up with a couple epically annoying brew days in my short career as a brewer. But the one that stands out foremost is the day I brewed this buckwheat sour saison and tried to package an imperial stout at the same time. I can remember it distinctly, because: that day sucked. Hey! Why don't I tell you about it?

I've been fascinated by buckwheat for a while, especially after trying eye-opening beers like Hill Farmstead Le Sarrasin, and reading some intriguing things about the chemical precursors it may set up for microbes to transform. I love stuff like this, the sympathetic magic of fermentation, able to take one simple input and really surprise you with its output. No one seems to completely understand how all of this alchemy works just yet, which makes it even more intriguing to those of us, like me, obsessed with obscurities and unknown horizons.

It's also really nice when things turn out in spite of bothersome complications. But that's like, half of all homebrewing.

For this brew, a 5 gallon batch that I made last fall, I picked up 3 lbs of buckwheat groats from a local health food store. It was probably not wise to brew this on Halloween, inviting some kind of curse down upon me, but whatever, I went for it. With so much unmalted buckwheat in the grain bill, I knew that I wanted to try a cereal mash. At 21%, it seemed like too much to use without trying to extract the sugars. Plus, I was simply curious to try out a cereal mash; I'd never used the technique before, but I knew the modifications we were getting on our brewing system at Kent Falls would make such elaborate mashing procedures at least somewhat easier for future brews. (We have rakes in our kettle that allow us to mash into the kettle, step mash or cereal mash, and transfer into the lauter tun).

Most homebrewers have little reason to ever cereal mash. The large majority of ingredients we use simply don't require it. When unmalted, many raw grains will not release their starches in our typical single infusion-style mashes. But on either the homebrew or the commercial scale, a cereal mash is a ton of effort, and most grains can be obtained in a malted form, or thrown into the recipe in smaller percentages without using a cereal mash simply to steal their flavor qualities, without much concern for their fermentables. If you do want to obtain those fermentables, you need to process the grain in a way that will unlock them. Within a certain temperature range, a cereal mash will gelatanize the starches in the kernel / seed / whatever, by destroying the structure, and thus allowing mash enzymes to later access these starches. It's sort of the "nuke the site from orbit... it's the only way to be sure" of mashing techniques. The exact range of gelatinization varies from plant to plant, but a spread between 120 F to 140 F (50-60 C) will hit it for most grains used in home brewing. Like so:

Unmalted Barley: 140-150 F (60-65C)

Wheat: 136-147 F (58-64 C)

Rye: 135-158 F (57-70 C)

Oats: 127-138 F (53-59 C)

Corn (Maize): 143-165 F (62-74 C)

Rice: 154-172 F (68-78 C)

I haven't been able to find this info for buckwheat, just this generalized summary from a research paper: "The gelatinization temperature of buckwheat flour is higher than that of wheat flour, its gelatinization resistance is greater, the water absorption of its starch granules is stronger, the viscosity is higher and increases quickly during cooling." Looking back at the bullet-chart above, one can surmise (okay, guess) that the gelitinization range of buckwheat is probably similar to that of rice.

For most of those grains listed above, much easier for the homebrewer is simply buying flaked or torrified versions. Commonly available through homebrew supply shops, these two options also gelatinize the grain by breaking down its cellular structure through heat and pressure. Buying grains processed like this is a whole lot easier than cereal mashing, and if you have that option, there aren't too many situations in which there's reason not to take it.

Buckwheat, being fairly obscure, is not easy to obtain malted, especially not at the homebrew scale. Unsurprisingly, flaked buckwheat and torrified buckwheat are not common features on homebrew shop shelves either, or even easy to obtain for commercial breweries (though there is one source). Speaking of obscure, here are some fun facts about buckwheat: it's not a grass or related to grain at all, and is actually related to rhubarb, except the seeds are the part consumed (rhubarb is a vegetable where the stalks are eaten — not a fruit, as you might think by its frequent placement in pies).

Procedurally, a cereal mash goes like this:

1). Mill the cereal adjuncts down to a fine grist, and supplement with about 15% of the overall total malted barley base malt. The malted barley will help to add the enzymes necessary for conversion, which many cereal adjuncts lack. 2). Add hot water at 3 quarts per pound. You want a thin mash here, because you'll be edging it through a boil later, and don't want an overly-gummy soup that'll scorch (as I would later find out). First, though, you're targeting a simple infusion-style mash, so 3). bring the temperature to within the gelitinization range and hold that for 20 minutes to allow the gelitinization to occur. 4). After the geli stage, you can raise your cereal mash up to a gentle boil. Here's where I ran into trouble: the mash will go from a soup of loose grains to a thick, porridge-like gruel. But my understanding of the procedure on brew-day was different: I had thought I was meant to hold the temperature of the boil for an additional 20 minutes. So upon reaching a gentle simmer, thinking this light boiling was that which would ultimately destroy the starches, complete gelatinization, and achieve great success, 5). I kept stirring feverishly. This was actually unnecessary — 6). upon hitting the boil, apparently I could have added the cereal mash right into my main mash — but I stood there and diligently blended the congealing porridge goo with a wooden mixing spoon for another 20 minutes, 7). like some kind of asshole.

Long story short: my cereal mash got a little bit scorched. Just a little though.

Coming out of a cereal mash — especially one that got cooked for longer than necessary, a mildly-toasted extra-thick porridge — buckwheat muck is super mucky. Added to my standard mash of pilsner malt, it got really extra muckity muck. And I got a stuck sparge. A stuck sparge like I've never seen before. I think this was a stuck sparge so stuck it actually went back in time to find my run-off and kill its parents, thus altering the time-space continuum so that my run-off never existed at all. 

I stirred in some rice hulls. The buckwheat muck went back in time again and killed the parents of rice hulls. Rice hulls no longer exist. When I write the words "rice hulls," you have no idea what those symbols on your screen are even meant to represent, because the concept of rice hulls no longer exists in our world. For a moment, or a minute, I just stood there fuming and perplexed. I momentarily considered just dumping the batch, thinking I would never manage to extract any liquid out of the quagmire.

Long story actually-not-that-short, I had to shovel my entire mash tun over into another vessel, add another like a truckload of rice hulls (what? rice huh?) to the bottom of the tun all over the screen until it had an impenetrable security blanket. I then scooped the mash back on top. From there, things finally actually went smoothly. With this beer. Also on that day, I was trying to keg an imperial stout. Have I mentioned how much I hate leaf hops and their tendency to clog things? Anyway, that's a story for another time.

I fermented this guy in my 6 gallon homebrew barrel that's home to one of my house cultures, which, upon taking residence in the barrel, has definitely grown more and more sour over time. Something else that I mean to write about another time: how mixed cultures can change in their performance after repeated repitchings. This was about the third use of this particular house culture, and the lactobacillus in the barrel clearly were ready to leap out ahead and get to work — over the four months I let this age, it's developed a nice strong acidity, but firmly in the lactic side of things. No acetic, and nothing harsh, fortunately. In fact, the very subtle smoke character imparted by scorching my mash a bit didn't hurt the beer at all, to my great surprise. You can taste it in the background, but it tastes just like a very subtle smokiness, to the point where I enjoy it as an incredible complexity, rather than a flaw. That, in addition to whatever nuances the buckwheat added (it grows harder and harder to determine what came from where), make this taste like a much older sour than it really is; I find it to be excitingly complex for a beer so young. It's far more multi-layered than other young sour saisons I've had.

Coincidentally, yesterday I brewed a buckwheat saison on the commercial scale. It'll be going into a 10 bbl stainless tank and getting a new construction of my mixed house cultures. Needless to say, I didn't try to emulate exactly the same mashing procedure — but writing about this new batch is an entry for another time.



Recipe-
6.0 Gal., All Grain
Brewed: 10.30.14
Bottled On: 1.17.15
Fermented at room temp, 72 F
OG: 1.065
FG: 1.004
ABV: 8%

Malt-
77.5% [#11] Pilsner malt
21.1% [#3] buckwheat
1.4% [3.2 oz] acid malt (pH adjustment)

Hop Schedule-
1 oz Brewer's Gold @flameout

Yeast-
White Labs Saison II
House Sour Saison Culture - White Mana

Should Northeast-Grown Hops Be Renamed? / Brewing an IPA with Century-Feral New York Wild Hops

Running a brewery on a real actual operating farm, complete with its own hop yard, I'm very much interested in the quality of local (northeast) hops, and putting them to the best possible use. I can't wait to see what comes of the resurgence of the industry in this region. Of course, the quality of the local hops that I've brewed with so far can vary widely, which is to be expected. I don't take that as a knock on local growing: many of these are from incredibly small operations, basically hobbyists, and local hops are much like a fledgling homebrew scene: some surprisingly good, some need some troubleshooting. But done right, I've seen promising cones.

And generally, where it gets really interesting is that everything I've tasted, when turned into beer, is quite different from its namesake varieties grown in the northwest. So here's something that I think will become a major question in the beer community in the near future: should hops from new regions like the northeast, which diverge dramatically from the character of their western counterparts, be renamed as something new and unique? Are these the same hops? When is Cascade no longer Cascade?

I'm not quite bold enough to raise such a question and then try to answer it myself right now, but I do hope to see some discussion on this subject soon. It is the time to start thinking about such things. Hop farms, particularly in New York, are teetering at the threshold. Right now, many of these farms are prepping for their third-year harvest, an important milestone in the lifespan of a hop yard. Hops generally require a few years before they hit peak maturity, and you'll often hear that the third harvest is the one where they really come into their own. Very few serious operations in New York have been around much longer than this. The same, I imagine, is true for New England in general. As far as we know, the hop farm at Kent Falls Brewery on Camps Road Farm is the only commercial hop growing operation presently in the state of Connecticut (we're also the first farm brewery in the state of Connecticut). Our hops are, in fact, entering their third year. I'll be very interested to see how they perform in 2015. (No pressure whatsoever, Farmer John).

But what's really, really cool and exciting to me is that there are hops growing in the northeast which have been around for far longer than any of the modern batch of hop farms. Decades before farm bills were being contemplated, decades before the craft beer movement was even a twinkle in Ken Grossman's eye, hops were growing wild in the Northeast. Because as you probably know, New York used to be hop growing capital of the Americas... before Prohibition tripped it up, and blight clotheslined it in a vicious and unfair tag-team. All across this region, derelict hop farms were abandoned, hops left to grow feral. This is fascinating to me: all over the state, and nearby states, potentially grow hops that have been wild for almost a century. Hops that may in fact be hundreds of years old, all-told. Hops that have absorbed the character of the land and made it their own. Truly unique, more-or-less native hops. Forgotten, and awaiting rediscovery.

Obercreek Farm, in Wappingers Falls, NY, found such hops growing on their property. Obercreek is one of the many small farms / growers in New York to put in just an acre or few of hops, but these weren't part of the business plan: they were already there, for what Farmer Tim estimates to be about a century, if not more. And with a hundred years to acclimate to the soil, it's no wonder they're the strongest and most aggressive growers of Obercreek's lot. Besides them growing well, I was hoping for stronger flavors than I've gotten from immature local hops, too. And in this aspect, they showed what unique regional hops are capable of. The IPA that I brewed with these New York feral hops may not be game-changing for a contemporary IPA, but it shows off the varied potential for a little-explored type of hop. The flavors were indeed stronger than other local hops I've used, and far more complex. Unique, too.

While the general framework of the recipe was that of an IPA (nothing fancy, there), this doesn't quite taste like any IPA I have ever had. The primary character is something like orange marmalade, but with less citrus. It's rounder, smoother, softer; more suited to a well-balanced pale ale than an IPA, perhaps. The flavor isn't necessarily as striking as some really juicy hop varieties, but it also fills out a spoke on the flavor wheel that I've not exactly encountered — and that sort of uniqueness is always welcome. Smooth orange marmalade: I can work with that.

And who knows what hops this wild variety originally descended from. A safe guess would be that Cluster or perhaps Brewer's Gold might be involved. Another safe guess would be that these hops were not descended from Mosaic. And in any case, they do shelter a hint of the English ancestry that might have preceded them, or at least influenced popular hops at the time, but with that 'American tang' shaping most of what's there. And whatever their background, if we brewers end up using more hops like these, we're going to need to start brainstorming some new names. East Coast Cascade or something a century older: they're just not the same.

A school near the brewery is said to have hops that have been growing wild for 300 years. Now those I really want to brew with.

Kent Falls Brewing - Connecticut's First Farmhouse Brewery, and Certainly It's Most Bear Flavoredest

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Where to Find the Beer

I've been neglecting to tell you guys something, and I'm very sorry. It's exciting news. (At least for me!) News that's going to give me a lot to talk about in both the near and distant future. And as such, news that I needed to hold off on until I have some glimpse of hope that I'm about to get my head above water, with everything going on in my life. This whole last year was extremely difficult, stressful, exhausting, et al. These last few months I've had to devote almost every waking moment of free time to working on this whole book thing that is soon due. There were rotten shark adventures to be chronicled, cheeses to be eaten, sleeps to be deprived, and more. I'm inching slowly but surely closer with the book, thankfully. And while there's still plenty more editing to be done, and it'll be a while before I can get a good night's sleep, it's about time I talked about the second big adventure consuming my daily not-free time.

I really didn't want to just casually drop that I'm now a professional brewmaster (I mean: lol) and then not have the time or mental energy to write about it at all for four months. Granted, it's not like I'm really going to have much more time to write in the next few months even once I am done with a draft of the book, but I'll try my best. Starting up a new brewery is an exhausting endeavor all on its own, but I'll do my best to talk about everything there is to talk about, of which there is a lot. Not much should change here at bear-flavored.com — I'm just going to continue to have a ton of weird brewing stuff to write about, plus catching up on posts from my backlog of homebrew batches and experimental batches. New adventures, new experiments, new opportunities, and a lot of new things for me to learn, this time with some economic pressure not to fuck up. Woo!



But about the brewery.

However you feel about homebrewers starting up new breweries by the coat-tails of their boot-straps, I have to say first off that I did not start this brewery. And thank god — do you have any idea how much work is involved in opening a brewery? It's insane. Couldn't do it, myself. I got off crazy easy: brewery manager and co-owner Barry, who launched the brewery project here at Kent Falls, has born the brunt of the work. You hear how opening a brewery is like 2% brewing beer. This is true. And people talk about how much cleaning is involved. This is also true. What you do not hear is that the other 90% is spent on the phone. Mostly yelling at people. Or sweet-talking people. Or whatever. There's always a lot of red tape involved in opening a brewery, and in Connecticut, they seem to come with a few extra rolls of red tape. There are always unforeseen challenges and hiccups and setbacks. In building a new brewery from the ground up on a swampy farm in the middle of nowhere, there's a million things that can go wrong. Or just set you back month after month.

Pictured: a good working environment.

Barry is very good on the phone; problem solving, networking, and working out general business machinations. This is wonderful for me because I would probably suck at all those things. I just brew the beer, which frankly is maybe the easiest part of running the business.

Our set-up is an interesting one, and a set-up that hooked me immediately, when Barry first approached me in spring of 2014. The brewery is one part of a multi-tiered effort. Kent Falls Brewing Company is located on a farm, but the farm operates independently as a separate business — Camps Road Farm — and includes a 1.4 acre hop field. We are the first farm brewery in the state of Connecticut, and as far as we can tell, also the first commercial hop growing operation in the state. We're growing six varieties: Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, Brewer's Gold, Northern Brewer, and Willamette. In addition to hops, the farm grows a whole bunch of stuff in greenhouses, raises sheep, raises chickens, sells eggs, and will expand its livestock options to include pigs (and I hope goats, because I desperately want a goat sidekick brewer's assistant named Brett. So badly). The farm is gonna grow a whole bunch of different berries that I want to throw into beer, squash, various herbs and spices, and just lots of fun other stuff. We're looking for every possible way to meld the worlds (and economics) of small-scale farming and small-scale brewing. Farmer John is relentlessly productive and impressively skilled at what he does, and I can't even describe how exciting it is to run a brewery that's not just situated on farm property, but on a working, productive, autonomous farm operation. Did I mention my life goal of having a goat for a brewer's assistant?

The third tier of the business is a distillery called NeverSink Spirits, located about an hour away from the farm and brewery, in Port Chester, NY. They'll be doing apple brandy and whiskey, among other stuff. We'll be collabearating on things in the future. I will snatch up their barrels when they aren't looking. Once again, this is unbearably cool. Having a source of barrels, having partners who can take one product we make and transform it into another, adding options, adding knowledge. Adding barrels. Barrels!

Barrels! They patiently await funky dry Brett saison.

Barrels: so far we don't have any whiskey barrels. I will eventually put stuff into whiskey barrels and do some fun stouts, absolutely. But those types of beers are not going to be a focus of the brewery initially. We do have sixteen wine barrels to start off with, which will be home to funky farmhouse ales and sours. In fact, without ever actually sitting down and consciously deciding upon it as a particular focus, it seems most of the beers I will be doing in the first six months or so are all pretty sessionable. With most of my beers, I will be aiming for something juicy and drinkable and expressive. Often, weird. To get an idea of the sort of things I'll be brewing at Kent Falls, see: my blog.

Under construction.

Something that's probably obvious from the recipes I post here: I love my IPAs. In the future, I hope to do lots of IPAs, and we're honing in on a final recipe for a sort of flagship clean IPA that I'm very excited about in a few regards. Securing hops to do the IPA you really want to do can be a huge challenge. That, and juggling a number of house cultures, means it'll probably be some time before you see significant quantities of Kent Falls IPA hitting the market. I'll talk about all that more in the future — I find the juggling you have to do as a commercial brewer developing recipes to actually be very fascinating.

In the meantime, we are, to my great delight, going to be brewing two extra-dope-but-not-clean IPAs: Waymaker, a Brett IPA, and Alternate World, a "sour IPA" or dry-hopped gose, depending how you wanna roll. We're planning to can both beers in 16 oz-ers, which is maybe the most exciting thing of all. I'm hoping we'll be able to get the canning going by late summer / early fall, just in time for peak hiking season. I'm gonna need to get in some serious relaxation this fall, and nothing in the world could be more exciting to me right now than having my own vision of the ideal hiking beer, designed specifically to be drank on top of mountains, on top of a mountain, out of a can. Is this the Matrix?

We have a pond.

All these beers will get their own post eventually, but our first beer to be released, Field Beer, definitely deserves more words than just a brief paragraph here. Until then: it is a saison, it uses all local malts (and will eventually use all local hops), its recipe will rotate based on the season, and it necessitates a somewhat complicated brewing process to get some nice tart funk all up in there. More on Field Beer soon.

Besides being on a farm, what is this brewery like, you may wonder?

It's a good size. I say that having seen firsthand the trend of nano-brewing that's emerging all over the place, and in the Northeast especially. We've got a 15 bbl Prospero compact brewhouse. Two vessels, with the lauter tun on top of the hot liquor tank. Rakes built into the kettle, so we can do all sorts of stuff in the mash (when mashing in the kettle) before pumping over to the lauter tun. This is good, because we'll be using decent quantities of unmalted local grains for certain beers. All our batches will be double brews to start, however, as we currently employ three 30 bbl tanks. In addition to those, we have 8 red wine and 8 white wine oak barrels, and, most interesting of all, an old milk chiller from the 50 acre property's previous incarnation as a dairy farm. The milk chiller holds about 7 bbl, or a little over 200 gallons. The idea is that we'll set it up to use as a coolship (I mean, milkship), which would be really fun — but even using the thing as some kind of open fermentor would be fantastic for now, too.

Moving the milkship out of the old dairy barn.

You may be wondering how a mere homebrewer such as myself stumbled into the brewmaster position at such a bitchin-sounding new brewery operation. This would be a very good question, and I'm not entirely sure myself. Though if I had to guess, I would assume it involves some really effective blackmailing. I will say that such an undertaking would be complete madness without a very good, effective consultant to help you get up and running on the equipment and processes. (You wouldn't believe how many valves are involved in making this beer). While all the recipes are of my design, I'm not sure how they would've ever made it to the tank intact without the wisdom and reassuring McConaugheyian cool of someone much smarter and more experienced than me. While this is still a totally insane venture, the help of our consultant has taken this from "coma-inducing levels of stress inspired by disaster" to merely "mental blackout eyeball bleeding levels of stress necessitated by unmanageable work load."

What else? There are so many things to write about, I know I can't cover them all right now and I'm not even going to try. Various observations and experiences will give me great fodder for many blog posts to come, certainly. I mean, what do you guys want to know? What are you curious about, on the front lines of an experience and opportunity like this? I'll be writing about it all, just hopefully distilling it down one topic at a time. Let me know what you're wondering about and I'll be sure to address it. At some point. Once I finish the book. And get some sleep. Good god I'm exhausted I didn't realize it was physically possible to drink this much coffee.



Our very first beer is hitting the market like... well, right now. I mean literally this afternoon. Partly, honestly, I was waiting to 'announce' my role at Kent Falls until our beer was on the market and thus everything actually felt... real. (The twist though is that currently still none of this feels real to me). We're self distributing in Connecticut to start, mostly in the central / western portions of the state. Barry is driving around today and tomorrow delivering kegs. We'll be in New York sooner or later too... hopefully sooner. Connecticut and New York are going to be our primary regions of focus. One of the most unfortunate quirks of this operation is that there's no taproom or tasting room on the farm, and we'll have to go through a bit of a process in order to even sell beer here. To start, a bar or beer store will be your place to find Kent Falls beer. (I'll write some more updates about that tasting room situation later).

We've put up a convenient Google Maps dodad to help you track down our beer. By tomorrow (Friday, March 13th), a decent number of accounts should have our beer. Right now you'll be able to find Field Beer, our locally-grown saison, but obviously the map will be updated as new beers are released. Waymaker Brett IPA and Farmer's Table saison are up next after Field Beer.

Since we don't have a taproom, and therefore can't have a big opening celebration bash at the brewery, we're working on putting something together at one of our favorite local taverns in April. More on that as we get the details ironed out.

Thanks for following along with all my adventures so far. Thanks for supporting the Bear Flavored Merch store and helping me to put cheese on the table throughout the harrowing and hectic last year. Thank you for not laughing at me too hard at this new turn of events, my highly presumptuous decision to try to make a career out of this beer nonsense. There sure are a lot of new breweries opening, haha! It's unnerving, it's terrifying, it's destroyed my ability to get a good night's sleep, and whatever remains of my sanity is highly questionable, at best. Regardless, I'll be here in the trenches (the very muddy trenches), trying my damndest to make the best beer I can, and writing about it as often as I'm able. Bear with me.

Yes.

Barrel-Aged Sour Saison on Doughnut Peaches - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Sour Farmhouse Ale / Saison
Brewed: 4.24.14
Bottled On: 9.24.14
ABV: 5.6%

Life in a barrel, round two.

The first thing out of my beautiful new-to-me (used) 6 gallon oak barrel was a weird concoction, partly just to see if anything even weirder than what I was planning would arise. So I aged a 14% ABV Brett cyser in the guy. When that checked out, clearly its next passenger would have to be beer. And since its previous inhabitant had been funky, its next inhabitant would be so too. I'd committed this barrel to funkdom for life.

Many homebrewers don't get the chance to mess around with barrels. Small barrels have this annoying tendency to be both aggressively over-priced, and yet less practical in use than their bigger brothers, due to the drastically increased ratio of surface area. Which means they'll set you back a lot of dough, and yet you can't easily age in them the types of beers a brewer would be most inclined to age in a barrel. Like long-aged sours.

Fortunately, I brew a lot of sour farmhouse ales that only take a couple months to finish up. Just about perfect for small-barrel aging.

Sour saisons have become big lately, and I wonder if it's just because saisons in general really took off, and obviously we're going to try to sour just about anything, or if everyone realized the same thing at the same time: you can ferment out a sour saison in much less time than a lambic-like aged sour, and yet still achieve a beer that's complex and interesting enough to be worth the effort. Saison yeast are so highly attenuating that there's generally not a lot of residual sugar left for the other microbes to work on — meaning, theoretically at least, less time required. And sour saisons generally don't invite the entire complex ecosystem that most aged ferments have, so there's less of the long-term breakdown of complex sugars; more big pushes of initial primary fermentation. Since I incorporate Brettanomyces in mine, you still have at minimum the standard aging process of a Brett beer. But that's a matter of months, not years. Some sour saison blends use only Saccharomyces and lactobacillus, and those could probably finish up in weeks.

I've been tempted to move a long-aging sour into this barrel, believe me. I have a few going that would be solid candidates. The problem then, is, your barrel is now permanently an aged-sour barrel, as far as the cultures inside go. So you've either got to keep moving aged sours in and out of it, keep an aged sour in it for a while (until another is ready to fill it) and risk an ingress of too much oxygen, or else leave the barrel empty of beer for long spells in between brief aged-sour excursions. (Even writing all those logistical concerns out hurts my head). I've given this much thought, trying to decide what cultures I wanted to have a home inside this wood permanently. The sour saison culture (White Mana) living within now is, I'm pretty sure, the best possible tenant.

One of my favorite souring cultures, a barrel that had already proven to be reliable and trustworthy, and a good base saison. What else could a beer need?

Fruit, maybe?

And so I ventured to Fishkill Farms, one of my favorite local growers of Food, where I've also done a few homebrew demos and sauerkraut workshops. They're good people and take their shit seriously, so I knew they'd have something for me. Sure enough, I found not just beautiful peaches, but a type of peach I didn't even realize existed before: doughnut peaches. Look if you're just going to go ahead and combine two of my very favorite things together in one weird looking fruit, I am so on that.

Adding fruit to a beer in a barrel is a royal pain in the ass. The easy way would have been to cut the peaches into cubes and jam them through the bunghole of the barrel. For some reason that is no longer clear to me but was clearly the result of sheer stupidity, I felt strongly at the time that puree'ing the peaches would be the way to go. Cubing and dropping would have been much faster. But I got out my blender and spent a lovely Thursday evening covered in peach detritus as I blended, two liters at a time, and poured the puree into the empty barrel. Once the peaches were all blended up real nice and inside the barrel, I finally transferred the beer on top of them. Piece of cake doughtnut!

Actually, I remember now: I figured turning the peaches into puree would save me the trouble of potentially having peach cubes lodged in my barrel afterwards, impossible to remove. Shit, that was actually smart. I take back portions of the last paragraph. There might just not be a good way to easily add fruit into a barrel. At least this was just one 6 gallon and not dozens of 225 liter barrels. It's the small things in life.

Peach is notoriously subtle in beer, hard to express even in tame sours. An average for fruit in sour beer is probably somewhere around 1 lb per gallon. With peach, some brewers go as crazy as 4 lbs per gallon. I went with half that. The result, and the success, is subjective... as with so much in brewing. At first I felt this still didn't come out with enough peach character. Many I gave it to said that it had the perfect amount of peach character. As it aged, I came to agree: sure, it could be peachier, but the subtle nature of the flavor is perfectly balanced by the gentle acidity and smooth, richer oak character. Oak and peach together seems like a no-brainer to me, with the vanilla and lingering tannic structure from the barrel positioned just enough to compliment the fruit character, you've established one of the quintessential flavor pairings of the culinary world (peach and vanilla). And I think this is part of the reason that the peach itself doesn't have to be overwhelmingly present, but just present enough. What you want here is the third corner of a well-balanced triangle. There's a brisk, clean acidity, and some residual funk from the last occupant of the barrel: I'm actually quite surprised how much of the cyser carried over. It takes this maybe from a three-pointed beer to a four, but as all of the elements exist in harmony, I find it works quite well even with this unexpected additional dimension.

I found the main down-side to this "fruit in a barrel" business the hard way, when it came time to drink this batch. Pureed fruit still leaves lots of little bits and pieces, which mostly settle to the bottom of the beer by the time it's ready to package. But it would be impossible to avoid sucking them up entirely, and suck up many pieces of peach I did. As a result, the "late fills" off my bottling bucket received huge amounts of sediment. And as a result of that crazy amount of sediment, the bottles all gushed (tons of nucleation points for CO2 to start foaming) and poured like sour peach smoothies. The majority of the bottles, which have only a typical amount of sediment, are perfectly carbed. Except for the ones I bottled in these weirdly-shaped Belgian-cap bottles I love, which, apparently, my Belgian crown capper does not love. And as a result of that, some of those bottles pour basically flat. As a result of all of these things, this may be the most inconsistently carbonated batch of beer I've made in years. Sours are always a pain in the ass to carb properly and consistently, but my main takeaway: always use something to filter out fruit chunks. A fine mesh straining bag, or a steel screen like I use in my dry-hop setup, would both make a huge difference in the amount of gunk that ends up at the bottom of your bottles.

Then again, a sour peach saison smoothie isn't the worst thing in the world, either.


Recipe-
5.0 Gal., All Grain
Brewed: 4.24.14
Bottled On: 9.24.14
Fermented at room temp, 72 F
OG: 1.048
FG: 1.005
ABV: 5.6%

Malt-
72.7% [#6] Pilsner malt
12.1% [#1] rye
12.1% [#1] white wheat

3.1% [4 oz] acidulated malt (pH adjustment)

Hop Schedule-
0.5 oz Citra (old leaf hops) @FWH

0.75 oz Citra (old leaf hops) @flameout

Yeast-
White Labs Saison II

House Sour Saison Culture - White Mana

Other-
10 lbs Doughnut Peaches

1 Oak Barrel

Barrel Aged Brett Cyser (Cider + Mead) - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Fact: Americans mostly have pretty awful taste in cider.

Americans tend to like things that are overly, grossly sweet.

This is bad and we should feel bad.

Few things have fallen to such homogeneous victimization of our terrible enthusiasm for crazy sugary shit than cider. Up until very recently, cider was viewed as little more than a gluten-free substitute for beer, or a fruity option that wouldn't get you drunk as fast as wine. Complexity and innovation came later, but fortunately, it is coming. Cider is the fastest growing segment in the drinks business right now, probably because it's a business that grew from virtually nothing, and was able to tap into the same consumers that have already made 'craft' beer a huge phenomenon. For example, if you are like me, and like experimenting with new combinations of flavors, you will probably also be inclined to dabble in cider and mead as extensions to your playground, if not simply additional ingredients for some beer. For others, cider may not be looked at as a possible avenue for weirdness, but as just another interesting and quaff-able beverage that's maybe sometimes barrel-aged or dry-hopped or spiced.

Makers and drinkers are recognizing it as a familiar yet distinct playground. And with this shift, it was only a matter of time until American cider got better.

While most large cider makers tend to produce stuff that tastes like the thin sugary filtered apple juice that I remember my younger sister drinking (and drinking nothing else) for her entire childhood, (despite big cider makers' hilarious attempts to market their juice as if it's some kind of brutal Viking fuel), there are some good American ciders. Places experimenting. And a few making ciders that aren't grossly sweet. The cider market is growing in leaps and bounds, and as it's a much younger movement than 'craft' beer, most folks making good cider are just getting started.

My main gripe, at this point, is the lack of anything with real wildness. Where's the funk?

For all the American cider makers I do enjoy, hardly any of them makes weird, funky cider. This is disappointing. Even our driest ciders are generally clean and relatively tame. Where are the funky Spanish and Basque style ciders, made in America? Apples host yeast in abundance, and many funky European ciders take advantage of this with their native fermentations, their Brett-embracing, over-carbed feral character. Either our apples are just arbitrarily host to cleaner yeast strains here in America (an explanation that may not be as ridiculous as it sounds, actually, as I do know of some cider makers producing native-yeast fermented cider that turns out incredibly clean), or else the widespread embrace of funky beers just hasn't lapsed over to cider yet.

As my grandma always told me, if you want a weird funky cider with Brettanomyces that clocks in above 14% ABV and is aged in an oak barrel for a summer until it ferments to dryness, sometimes you just have do it yourself.

Cyser is a combination of apple cider and honey — a blend of hard cider and mead, depending how you want to view it. The main reason I went this route was simply to build a stronger beverage that would survive for years to come, and boosting the ABV with simple sugars is easy enough. Rather than cheap table sugar or corn sugar, might as well throw in some local honey and make it real Viking fuel. Maybe even let some local microbes hop on board from the diluted honey. Cider and mead are simply two complimentary flavors: cyser is a no-brainer, if you ask me.

So I started with 5 gallons of cider from a local orchard, Fishkill Farms. Fermented that out with champagne yeast, in a carboy. Transferred into a barrel that the gentlemen of the Brewery at Bacchus were kind enough to donate to me. The barrel had gone through a few previous lifetimes, so I didn't expect to get a ton of oak character out of it, which proved to be true. What little I did get just added some nice balance to this hefty beverage and made a home for the Brettanomyces. Fishkill Farms does UV pasteurize their cider, but UV pasteurization is only a stopgap measure against fermentation, in my experience. Most UV treated cider that I've picked up will eventually start to ferment on its own — amazingly, even if you keep it in the fridge. I've set aside many a cider for two weeks only to find the container bulging and ready to erupt. (Side note: I've always wondered what yeast could be native to these apples that is capable of fermenting at chilly fridge temps. Are apples naturally host to lager yeast? Are other Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains able to ferment this cold, and just haven't made their way into brewer's toolboxes?) So, while the champagne yeast that I pitched was probably able to out-compete most of the native stuff, it's likely / possible something already in the cider was left to make its own impression.

Once the fermented-out cider was nestled in its barrel, I kept a steady fermentation going by slowly adding wildflower honey, as well as a few Brettanomyces strains. An alternate method would be to simply ferment the mead and the cider separately, then blend, and that could work fine too. But here was my theory: by fermenting the cider first, I had a nice healthy yeast culture ready for a boost in alcohol. By slowly adding the honey pound by pound, I kept the feast going, creeping up to the high ABV levels without shocking anyone with a big ol' surge of sugar. If you simply blended mead and cider, one of them would have to be high in alcohol on its own to reach a high ABV blended beverage. Here, the creep from 8% to 14% could go slow.

Apparently, this strategy worked incredibly well. Some very experienced drinkers have tried this concoction, and when I ask them to guess the ABV, no one has thought that this would be over 8% ABV. So that's something. The slow trickle of sugar surely helped with that. Honey doesn't ferment out quite as quickly as other simple sugars, either, giving the Brett the opportunity to work on it slowly. And to bring the funk. As dry as this finished, down to essentially zero residual sugar, the Brett still had the opportunity to work up some weirdness.

What this particular weirdness tastes like is pretty hard to describe. There's a big punch of weird funk in the aroma, while the taste is a bit cleaner, and more fruit-forward. As it warms, it shuffles a bit closer to the direction of a clean mead and cider hybrid, with the crisp flavors of both present, complimentary, and actually nicely refreshing for something so big. I think part of the reason the ABV is so well hidden here is the balance. The oak helps, and likely adds some backing to the weirdness, giving it a rich quality despite the dry base. The crisp character helps cut through the weirdness, at the same time; cider and mead are obviously both very tasty when not clouded by distracting excess sugar. And the weirdness does what it does, being weird, because it's just weird, and whatever That Flavor or That Aroma is, it's another layer you don't typically find in American ciders. I enjoy it. I wonder how many Normal cider drinkers would, though.

Weird, or whatever, the character here isn't exactly like that I've gotten from other funky ciders, and fairly unlike the character most commonplace in aged Brett beer. I used mostly the same strains that I've used in beers, so I wonder if that's a result of something lurking in the cider itself, something that took residence in the barrel, or merely a combination of all these things together resulting in something new and odd.

Maybe just the latter. That's why we experiment: you never know when new weirdness will result from recombining old elements.

Recipe-
"Brewed" on 2/22/14
Bottled 7/15/14
0 Plato | 14% ABV

5 gallons cider
Champagne Yeast
Brettanomyces - BKY C2 + BKY C3
Add raw honey until desired ABV is reached (5 lbs-ish)

Nelson Sauvin Dry-Hopped No-Boil Sour Ale / Sour IPA - Recipe & Tasting Notes

All the pictures I took for this photo session came out with this weird hazy quality. Fortunately, this is very thematically appropriate for this particular brew.

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Sour IPA / Gose
Brewed: 11.10.14
Kegged On: 1.17.15
ABV: 4.9%

Appearance: golden yellow, haze, ample head, good retention
Smell: tropical fruit, bright lactic tang, funky citrus, guava, lychee, passion fruit
Taste: star fruit, lychee, yellow Gatorade, lactic sour, tropical funk, slightly briny finish
Mouthfeel: med-high carb, light body, crisp, puckering lingering sour in finish

It grows ever harder to label a beer like this without sounding ridiculous. Are names sacred immutable historic markers that shall never be blasphemed, or merely vague markers to give a beer the most context available? Sure, sometimes you'll get yelled at for labeling a beer some nonsensical, contradictory, hybrid style, but if you're not taking things too seriously, there's some effortless fun in the unanswerable questions like "How can an India Pale Ale be black?" Sure, why not.

Recently, a bunch of brewers have finally realized that sours are pretty dope when dry-hopped with some viciously fruity tropical hop varieties. I'm not sure why this took so long, other than, I guess, that sours in general weren't all that commonly made until recently. (New Belgium, as far as I know, set the trend a few years ago with Le Terroir, and it's caught on considerably since). "Dry-hoppped sour" works as a label, because it's descriptive of a process. But it doesn't tell you the full story. What type of sour? Are we talking a sour mash / kettle sour situation, or are we dry-hopping a full-on aged lambic-esque sour? Cause there's quite a bit of difference in those two things. "Sour" in general could be so many things. We could be dealing with a dry-hopped Flanders situation, a sour stout, a sour saison, an IPA that got infected, and so on. This batch, for instance: without the hops, you would call the base a gose.

At least, due to the fact that lambic-esque aged sours are way more time intensive to produce, you can usually assume that such hoppy sours are of the "quick sour" variety. (If it's an aged sour, they'll be sure to let you know). This batch, for example: I soured it quickly (not exactly a kettle sour, but we'll get to that). While it was a no-boil and no-hop batch up until the end, I did then dry hop it with an aggressive 5 ounces of Nelson Sauvin, and it drinks like it. Remarkably so. Is it a hoppy sour? A sour IPA? Or is it still a gose, as the base beer would have been had I never added hops?

Whatever it is, I could live inside this beer.

I love the concept of dry-hopped sours, in general. As I toyed with above, you can go in so many different directions with the concept, and if you're not pulling out bitterness, you have little clash of character to fear. A whole range of hop aromas seem to work well over the base of a sour, but the tropical fruity notes of new-wave modern hops are particularly well suited.

I suspected that Nelson Sauvin would go like gangbusters over a tart juicy gose foundation, and it really, really does. Nelson is one of my all-time favorite hops, but it's so unique and distinct that I find it doesn't always pair well with others. It's one of the few hops that I feel often works best as a single-hop addition, because it's already crazy complex, crazy distinct, and there are just very few other hops that can even squeeze within its realm of flavor. Specifically, I usually get a tart gooseberry fruit character from it, dry and succulent — the reason you hear those white wine descriptors tossed about for it. Since there's no bitterness, there's no clash between the hops and the sourness whatsoever — they work  in perfect harmony, tart and juicy characteristics enhancing the best of each other. I find it interesting how well-preserved and distinct the character of the Nelson remains: in Brett IPAs, the yeast almost always rearranges and chews through the hops, ultimately shaping them into something different. Here, the hops still come out the other end as they were before. Weird old Nelson retains its weird old Nelsonishness.

As with my last batch of gose, which got fruit instead of hops, I did not sour mash this or kettle sour it, the way you typically would. I just pitched my house culture of mixed lactobacillus strains, let those go on their own for two days at room temperature, and then followed up with a pitch of Brettanomyces to ferment the beer to terminal gravity. This one finished low, much lower than my last gose, and so the ABV ended up on the high side of what I was planning for. The cooler temps (room temp is pretty cool compared to what most would sour at), but I find the final result ends up right where I want it. This isn't the most acidic thing ever, but it's got a solid lactic sourness to it, moreso than most gose or Berliner Weisse. While you may not be pumping the lacto up at their max temp for the max effort, the resulting sourness seems a bit smoother and more complex.

Nothing special about how I added the hops. To keep things simple and clean, I didn't run this one through my normal dry hop tank, but I did purge the carboy with CO2 when I added the hops and transferred into the keg. Like I said, the hop character just held up amazingly well, for whatever reason. Nelson Sauvin might be one of my favorite hops, and this might be the best use I've found for it so far.

I don't know that I can pick a favorite between this and my last batch of gose, the kiwi lime zest version that never received any hops at all. Both wildly different beers, both very distinct, but both a wonderful application for the gose base.

As I said with the last one: BRB time for a keg-stand.


Recipe-
5.0 Gal., All Grain
Fermented at room temp, 72 F
OG: 1.040
FG: 1.003
ABV: 4.9%

Malt-
41.4% [#3] Pilsner malt
41.4% [#3] white wheat malt
13.8% [#1] Cara-Pils

3.4% [4 oz] acidulated malt (pH adjustment)

Hop Schedule-
5 oz Nelson Sauvin dry hop for 6 days

Yeast-
House Lactobacillus cultures
House Brettanomyces cultures

Other-
15 g sea salt