What Is Farmhouse Beer? - Plus, Hoppy (Equinox) Saison Recipe

These days, I get asked this question ("what is farmhouse beer?") a lot. And by "a lot," I mean, during the occasional month in which I interact with a human being, very often that other human being asks me this question.

"Farmhouse beer" and "saison" have been used by modern brewers as somewhat interchangeable terms in the last several years, so let's start there. The confusion begins immediately, because there is no real definition of the entire "farmhouse" umbrella, and "saison" itself can be hard enough to explain. I believe most of us have come to use "farmhouse" as a broader, more encompassing term for a type of rustic beer, of which saison is a slightly narrower subset. So "farmhouse beer" has come to mean any beer emulating beers that, historically, were brewed on farms for farm workers and locals (rather than for mass distribution to a city populace), though theoretically that could be a whole bunch of things, and also BTW most farmhouse ales are no longer brewed on actual farms, or for farm workers. Obviously, this is all rather broad and unhelpful as far as building expectations as to what you're about to actually drink might taste like. In order to make "saison" somehow meaningful, we moderns have little choice but to take a broad historic brewing approach and whittle it down to something more specific. After all, farmhouse is also used outside for beer, for all sorts of vaguely rustic items. How do you define 'farmhouse' in a way that you can actually succinctly explain to someone buying your food product at a farmer's market? To me, 'farmhouse' as a descriptor has always been a bit like defining porn: you know it when you see it.

What is "saison"? Historically, saisons were simply farmhouse beers. Broad. Brewed in certain seasons, adapted to each farm and its terroir and resources, given to farm workers. But we have taken this broad swath of beer and made it highly specific, almost entirely based off of one saison that survived industrialization and went on to inform modern palates: Saison Dupont. From the diverse array of historic saisons, which were rarely defined and rarely thought of as a "style", we have molded a category of beers around an archetypal (and delicious) example: extremely dry, extremely effervescent, fermented with particular French and Belgian yeast strains for a spicy / fruity / phenolic flavor profile, and quite a bit higher in alcohol content than most historic examples likely were.

I like to break down farmhouse beer / saison into three "takes" on the "style" that have been, at some point, common.

1. Neo Saison
What happened was this: by the later half of the 20th Century, very few farmhouse breweries remained in operation, and fewer still that the average brewer or drinker could ever hope to try without a country-hopping scavenger hunt. One saison, though, still did stand, and its relative accessibility meant that it was the first (and only) example of saison that many impressionable American brewers were encountering. What happened next was fairly obvious: Americans became obsessed with this intriguing style, and having a very limited sample size to go off of, basically copied the hell out of Saison Dupont lots and lots of times. So as the saison visible enough to capture our attention and become the quintessential saison, Saison Dupont sort of reinvented what saison was. But being just one example from a previously diverse category, it very likely differs from many of those older beers in pretty big ways. Still, I've never been a stickler for a rigid adherence to styles, so ultimately, who cares? This is how evolution works, and now we have a new style, what I like to call the Neo Saison. Dupont did it early, and arguably best, but Americans have created what you could even consider a distinct sub-genre. While Saison Dupont contains up to six different yeast strains, one major difference of the Neo American Saison from any historic saison are their reliance on only one single culture. Generally, we have isolated the strongest and most desirable yeast from these classic saison examples, creating a narrower microbial ecosystem and a tighter, more streamlined realm of flavor.

2. Sour Farmhouse Ale
Lots of beer got funky and sour historically. There were a measures against this, like aggressively hopping a beer to inhibit bacteria, or simply drinking it young. But farmhouse brewing was not beholden to the rigid market demands of industrial brewing, and terroir was part of the equation. Farmhouse beer was often kept through the winter, thus offering plenty of time for microbial colonization and terraforming — and anyway, those farmhouse yeast cultures were likely a mix of funky stuff in the first place. Farmhouse Ales notes that many European saisons closely resembled lambic, which makes sense. Blending was common. Tartness was an expected characteristic, and as the beers aged with the seasons, a bloom of funk would emerge. Rustic was the name of the game, and arguably this tradition evolved into some of the beautiful sour beers that have survived into today. Everything about these funky, terroirist farmhouse ales was bucolic was f***.

3. Hoppy Farmhouse Beer
Historic farmhouse brewers had a yeast culture — their yeast culture. Like a sourdough culture, these farmhouse brewing cultures were passed down through time, evolving and accumulating identity, and gave every farm's beer its uniqueness. As mentioned above, historic farmhouse ales often turned tart and funky over time. If you didn't want that to happen, one option was to create an aggressively hopped beer — the hops inhibiting the bacteria, and slowing down or preventing sourness from developing.

Hoppy saisons today are not particularly common (in my region, at least), which is interesting, considering how much we like our hops, and inserting them into any and all styles. To be honest, I find hoppy saisons (and their spiritual cousin, the Belgian IPA) can be a very difficult beer to properly balance, and I don't always love the results. An overly aggressive yeast character can become very cloying when paired with hops, highlighting bitterness in some unflattering way. Any sort of sweetness — more commonly found in a Belgian IPA than a hoppy saison, I would hope — and you have three of my least favorite qualities in a beer, and one where too many loud notes are fighting to be heard.

To work, I think a hoppy saison needs to go soft on most of those potentially-abrasive qualities. First, you need a quieter yeast strain, one that plays nice with other elements of the beer. If your saison yeast gets too phenolic, it'll clash. And whatever hops you're using, avoid bitterness as much as possible. The bittering addition, if any at all, should be a splash. Focus on the flavor and aromatics so that the hops can work their nuances in there without banging around, demanding attention. Finally, for the love of god: keep your saisons dry. Stick to a simple, clean malt bill. Take any caramel malt you might find laying around your brewery out back, douse it in gasoline, light it on fire, dig a ditch, shovel the remains into the ditch, and fill the ditch with concrete. Then move somewhere else, because your property might now be haunted by caramel malt.

Considering how hard it is to define farmhouse ales at all, there may only be one practical quality we can point to: they're beers brewed to be dry and refreshing, above all else. But if you can accomplish that, you can brew a great farmhouse ale.


Hoppy Equinox Saison Homebrew Recipe-

5.0 Gal., All Grain
Ambient free-rise fermentation, avg. 82 F
OG: 1.042
FG: 1.004
ABV: 5%

Malt-
100% [#7.25] Pilsner malt

Hop Schedule-
2 oz Equinox @0 (whirlpool for 40 minutes)
3 oz Equinox @dry hop

Yeast-
Here are some saison cultures I like: French Saison, Saison II, Wallonian Farmhouse

Why Is Gose Suddenly the Hottest Style in Craft Beer?

Watching trends can be disorientingly weird when you're deep on the inside of them. Craft beer is now so many levels down the "hyper-niche" rabbit hole that we can have little explosions of importance within the community that are, I would guess, pretty much invisible to the outside world.

Any niche hobby or interest works this way, of course. What can seem entirely played-out to us, the weirdo beer nerd (or weirdo nerd of whatever interest), is still barely scratching the surface of general public awareness. Remember when, once upon a time, there was pretty much one main huge trend in craft beer: IPA? And IPA created enough buzz in the world at large that soon even outsiders had at least heard of the stuff, even if they hated them. Maybe they couldn't tell you what an IPA was, specifically, or what made it so, but lots of people, all over, had heard the term a bunch. But now we're pretty far into this whole craft beer thing, and within a niche, trends become fractal, smaller, more honed in on their audience, and practically invisible to the world at large. Does a random bar-goer with only a passing interest in beer know what an IPA is? They can probably lay down a reasonably-accurate definition. Could they tell you about gose? I'm guessing not. And yet gose has seen such a surge in this world, it's easy to look at yet another brewery producing yet another gose and think: "Great, just ride that bandwagon like you're in Fast & the Furious." Hell, the New York Times just did a piece on gose. It's out there, even if it's only out there as "this is a niche thing for beer nerds."

Modern beer strikes me as a lot like music, in some of the ways it flows culturally. (I maintain that arguing about who's really 'craft'' is the new arguing about who's really 'punk'). Something almost has to get played out to the point of craziness within its original circles before the outside world even hears about it. As someone who listens to indie-folk, you have to be really, really sick of Of Monsters & Men before your mom calls you up and asks if you've heard about this new band and their novel "hey! ho!" vocals.

So now we're in this peculiar situation where lots of breweries are turning out gose, to the point where it may seem to us that every brewery is suddenly making one, but most people will have no idea what this hot new style of gose is (or how to even pronounce gose). Overnight, we're going from hardly any options (when I first heard about the style four years ago, I could only manage to track down one example at all) to, now, I don't know, a reasonable number of options. I'm not alone in noticing this, of course: I've seen Ed Coffey call summer 2015 the "Summer of Gose", and Bart Watson over at the Brewer's Association called out the style's explosive surge in a recent article analyzing "The Next IPA," which we seem to be searching eternally for.

This is where the education side of the industry comes in. Sometimes, we're going to blow things up real fast and have to help the general public catch up to what we're doing. Gose seems to have happened quicker than most. Still, despite a few vocal online haters of gose, I don't think it's any great mystery as to why the style has seen such an upswing.

What is gose? It's a tart wheat beer from German similar to Berliner Weisse, which experienced the same popularity upswing here a few years earlier. Why did Berliner Weisse get suddenly popular? Because sour is so hot right now, there's a huge demand for such beers, but unlike other sour styles, Berliner Weisse can be made quickly, in a standard production timeline. It gives the consumer what they want within the boundaries of what most normal breweries can fulfill. Gose does all those same things, but gose has one major difference from Berliner Weisse, being brewed with salt. That may seem a very slight difference if everything else were the same, but it turns out to be a pretty big difference in flavor. (Some also include coriander in their gose, but I personally don't consider this addition to be integral to the style, and usually leave it out. I'll have to defer to a beer historian like Ron Pattinson to settle how historically ubiquitous this tactic was).

And I wonder if gose isn't just somewhat attention-grabbing in its uniqueness, helping to bounce it up the Styles of Interest list faster than usual. What other beers are brewed with salt, anyway? Historically, this was done simply because the water of Goslar, Germany, where the style originated, was especially saline. Lots of historic styles derive their personality from the water they were brewed with — how that town's water supply inspired or mandated a certain direction of the beer — but gose is more overt than most. A softness of the water in Pilsen doesn't really scream for attention, and drinkers might enjoy the balance and roast of a Guinness without having any clue as to how and why water chemistry made those beers work. But add enough salt to a beer's brewing liquid, and you'll taste it, and know what you're tasting. Gose makes a great case for how one simple addition can really set the shape of a beer into something new and different.

Some may recoil at the thought of putting salt in something that's already sour and kind of funky — people that don't like gose complain that it's like drinking sweat, but I would argue that if you've ever drank sweat, you have bad taste and do not deserve gose. Adding salt to beer makes sense, if you think about it; salt is a flavor enhancer. Much of water treatment, to me, is about bringing forth the brightest and most expressive flavors in a beer, allowing you to take a very simple recipe and light-footed beer, and accentuate its most interesting, nuanced qualities. Gose goes a little further, dialing up the salt to a level where you're actually aware of its presence. That's fairly unique, but still: salt is a flavor enhancer. (It's also a preservative, which, interestingly to me, makes gose perhaps the closest beer style to lacto-vegetable ferments). So not only does it highlight all the nuanced flavors of a simple sour beer, but it adds its own unique dimension, a new quality of flavor. It's refreshing. It makes you salivate. It makes a less complicated beer a bit more complex.

And it makes for a great foundation for many other flavors, as salt and acidity naturally do. Fruit is even better in a gose than in a Berliner Weisse, though both of course work well to draw out the succulent refreshing qualities of the juice. Or throw some zest in there. Or how about dry-hops? Aromatic hops are great over a sour, but why spend all that time aging some mixed-culture sour in a barrel, only to spike it with an ingredient that's best consumed fresh? Dry-hops add a great deal of complexity to a simpler sour character, and from a brewer's perspective, can be turned around almost as if it were any other hoppy beer. Hence why Alternate World, Kent Fall's dry-hopped gose, is able to be one of our core beers.

Gose gets you sour. It's culinary, it's got unique dimensions, it's versatile, it's pairable. I would guess that IPAs are so popular because so many harmonious, distinct flavors can be extracted from hops without drastically changing the foundation of the beer. IPAs can be highly refreshing (depending on the take) and juicy while offering significant variety. Gose offers that same foundation: an accessible, affordable foundation for the sour beer craze. As experimenters, we love sturdy foundations with which to start. We love beers that refresh in their simplicity. That is why we love gose.

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.

When Life Gives You Double-Batch Brews, Make Lemony Kettle Soured Saisons

The label art indicates in which season the beer was brewed. Wowsers!

I've recently found myself in a situation that, while certainly not unprecedented, is definitely unusual. I am far from the first homebrewer to jump into commercial brewing with no prior experience working at a brewery. Personally, I think the lines between "commercial" and "homebrewer" are going to become increasingly blurred over time as far as the Assumption of Quality goes. Newish online communities like Milk the Funk are already a mix of both pros and homebrewers, all interested in pushing fermentation boundaries with experiments that are cutting-edge no matter who is making them or at what scale. A brewer is a brewer, in my opinion. The equipment doesn't matter too much once you know how to use it effectively.

But equipment does matter, whether a homebrewer or a pro, in that you have to do the best you can with what you got. Only have three conicals? Gotta figure out how many house cultures you can juggle — you're not gonna be able to keep brewing like a homebrewer with ten carboys in a side room and a shelf stacked with jars of yeast. How long is each beer going to take to finish? What's your brewing schedule? Packaging schedule? You only have one brite tank — what happens if two batches finish at the same time? What happens if you have to harvest yeast from two batches at the same time and you don't have a yeast keg free? And how do you dry-hop without a top-access manway, anyway? Can someone please make me a huge funnel that flares outwards about two feet and tri-clamps onto a 2-inch port?

There are endless challenges involved in getting a brewery operating smoothly, especially with extremely limited manpower (to be clear: my nickname at Kent Falls is "Manpower"), but I think you have to look at every roadblock as a potential jumping off point toward new ideas. "The friction of challenge is often that which creates the very spark to ignite a blaze of ingenuity," is probably close enough to an expression that people might sometimes say, I assume, and also an important lesson in why you should never come up with ideas during dry season in a forest. #firesafety

It just so happens that Kent Falls Brewing Co. is on an operating farm, and we're trying to embrace the legacy of farmhouse brewing in many different ways. It's always shocking to me how so many beer styles are a product of happenstance. Brewers didn't start decoction mashing because they did some test batches and realized it would improve their beer — they did it because of a change in taxes on their mash tun volume. Farmhouse brewing has always been about using what you have in the best way possible, and we're trying to keep that in the back of our minds all the time, with everything we do here. The old milk chiller in the cow barn? It helped sell Barry on the property back in 2011, when it occurred to him that it could be used as a coolship and open fermentation vessel. Use everything you have in the most productive, most inventive, most coolest way possible.

By the time I got involved in the brewery, the equipment was already purchased. I didn't have to think about what brewing system, what size, how many tanks, how many tanks to start with and how many to aim to end up with, single batch, double batch, triple batch, etc. As with everything in brewing, this could be good or bad or a little of both. I didn't have to spend months contemplating and jotting down pros and cons of different configurations. My challenge was to simply figure out the best way to use what we had: three 30-bbl fermentors and a 15-bbl brewhouse (plus 16 oak wine barrels).

And our earliest, primary goal was to develop Field Beer, our saison using 100% local malt. Eventually Field Beer will utilize 100% local ingredients, once there's a large enough supply of local hops. There are a few blog posts I probably could and should write about Field Beer — about why local is important to Kent Falls Brewing, what it means in terms of quality, logistics, and the context of this specific beer — but my mission began with the basis of the beer already established. Field Beer will rotate with the seasons, the recipe changing to incorporate a different unmalted grain (oats, spelt, wheat, rye) and a different hop variety each season. I've been pleased beyond my expectations with the quality and efficiency we've gotten from these relatively new operations; our growers and Valley Malt nailed it. We had the ingredients we needed to make a great local saison. We just needed to figure out how to make a flagship beer like this as interesting as possible. The recipe itself was always going to be fairly simple: that rotating unmalted grain (oats for winter) as a small (<10%) portion of the grainbill, and Connecticut-grown, Valley Malt-malted Pilsner for the rest.

I am fascinated by the opportunities to blend. But until our barrel program is relatively established, blending in the traditional context will be fairly limited. I debated blending in old barrel-beer with fresh batches of Field Beer, but that raised more logistical issues than was worth considering for our first beer. The idea stuck with me though: in some ways, double batch brewing is a form of blending. Maybe you have to brew twice to fill each conical, but rather than looking at this as twice the amount of effort for the same result, what if you looked at it as an opportunity to add differentiation? What if there was something unique and different you could do because of the double-batch brew thing, and not in spite of it? Like sour just half the batch, to add a dash of refreshing tartness to the whole beer?

The great thing about this strategy is that it doesn't actually add a ton of time, effort or risk to the process of making the beer, yet it has a great impact on the flavor and complexity of the saison. So far, we've brewed three batches of Field Beer. We decided not to sour that first batch, for various reasons, and treated it as a unique one-off First Batch Ever (read all about the madness that went into making that first batch) and was thus a straight-up 'classic' neo-saison, 5.2% ABV, lightly hopped with American Brewer's Gold. Batch 2 was soured, as the beer will always be going forward. (Bottles include the batch number, but I think Batch 1 has pretty much sold out now anyway).

I will continue to refine and tweak the process as I brew more batches, I'm sure, but the basic deal is this: we mash as normal, keep the temp in the kettle above the pasteurization range until run-off is complete, then begin running the wort through the heat exchanger and back into the kettle. While we're doing this, I run CO2 through the aeration stone rather than oxygen. This way oxygen is scrubbed out, and forms a blanket over the wort in the kettle. I pitch my house lacto culture, rather than innoculating with grain. I've been using this culture (a blend of at least five different lacto strains) for some time now, and prefer both the diversity in culture and reliability in performance I've found with it. If you want to get your own house lacto culture going, my recommendation would be to simply acquire a bunch of different lacto strains from various sources and throw them together... maybe culture some from grain as well, if you're feeling extra sassy.

As far as the souring process goes, time and temperature are the main knobs that I'm going to fiddle with: the first batch I cooled down to 115 F before pitching the lacto, and I let it go for 36 hours, until it was at 3.4 pH. Without any additional heat, the temp in the kettle only dropped down to 104 F before we cut it and fired up the kettle to pasteurize.

After both 'turns' of the batch were together in the tank and fermented out by our saison culture, the resulting acidity is where I wanted it, clean, crisp, refreshing, adding brightness to the beer more than any big pucker-punch of acid. You definitely get the whiff of funky lactobacillus fermentation in the nose, but it's free of anything off. Flavorwise, this is balanced well between lemony tartness and the rustic weird earthfruit of a saison. I'm quite happy with how refreshing and approachable this beer is, how well the souring worked, and how very clean the result of this process was.

I should say that, of course, this is not meant to be a perfectly accurate representation of how historic saison was made. We're not trying to do that. We're a modern American farmhouse brewery, though I'm certainly inspired by historic saison. And we're trying to emulate the mindset of those old farmhouse breweries, but not necessarily any exact recipe. So, no, historic brewers probably didn't kettle sour their saisons like this. We're not necessarily aiming to brew a tart saison just because a lot of historic saison was tart. We're aiming to brew a saison that we find enjoyable to drink, and aiming to take the farmhouse philosophy of using what you have in the most productive, most inventive, most coolest way possible.

As you may or may not know, we're self-distributing in Connecticut for now. Connecticut does not have many breweries making sour beer, or funky beer, or wild beer. I hope we can turn a lot of new drinkers into fans of the tart stuff. So far, the results are promising. I find it actually helps to not over-explain these things: non-fermentation geeks don't need all the particulars and complications. Sometimes if you explain too much beforehand, they'll be overwhelmed, and thus mentally braced to kick back against this too-much-new thing they're trying. But if you only explain: "It's tart, which makes it even more refreshing," the response is generally extremely positive. People focus on the fact that a tart beer is refreshing, which it is, and not that it's some crazy shocking new experience, which it shouldn't be, if it's well balanced. And I've heard now, multiple times, maybe the perfect response: "Damn, this would go great with a burger." There we go.

We bottled 60 cases of this here batch of Field Beer, which will be released locally on 4/17. In case you're interested in checking this particular beverage out, our map of places distributed to is right here.

Lactobacillus funkfoam, or view from a spaceship?

A photo posted by Derek (@bearflavored) on Feb 25, 2015 at 10:44am PST

Why We Should Take Beer Styles Less Seriously

Random photo of beer of indeterminable style.

Get ready for some more opinion-based rambling, folks. The views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Bear Flavored Ales' Board of Directors.

I suspect this article may make a lot of people want to throw beer bottles at me. Or I don't know — maybe this is actually a common feeling that we just don't talk about much. The Brewer's Association recently released a massive overhaul of its Beer Style Guidelines for 2014, and it's encouraging to see recognition of rapidly-growing categories of beer, but many entries nonetheless make me think that the effort is largely a shell game. Certainly beer styles do get argued about a lot — wars have been fought over the black IPA; drinkers shruggingly accepting that session IPA is a tad different from a boring old pale ale — but generally, we all seem to be working under the assumption of there being a sacred realm of 'classic and traditional' styles that everyone, thank god, can at least agree on. There's the stable ground of history, and then there's these whacky new styles like 'Brett IPA' and "imperial black rye coffee Kolsch" that are just some nonsense the kids are pulling out of their baggy pants at dubstep concerts with which to spike their Red Bull. 

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the concept of beer styles. Sometimes life needs simplicity and guideposts. We need styles, and we like to argue about styles; I just think we often place far too much emphasis on them. Especially from a consumer standpoint, it's very important to have at least a broad guideline, a rough sketch of what I'm going to drink. It doesn't have to be a classic style; it can be a little blurb, a few descriptive words. (For example: I love how much info Modern Times manages to convey on their cans despite a very minimalist design.) When I pick up a bottle and there's no style or description at all, nothing but a cute name and a government warning, I become so annoyed that I will almost never buy that beer. Give me at least an idea of what the beer is — however you want to do that. That's what styles are for: guidelines, shorthand, a marker to let you know how close you are to town. And as long as we're not taking things too seriously, I think it mostly works out.

Lately — and maybe this is just because I happen to be on a binge of historical-brewing literature — I feel like the concept of "brewing to style" is being chipped away at from both the past and the future. There's going to be some unexpected benefit to the genre of IPA spawning a thousand spin-offs, in my opinion. The names might sound silly, but ideally, hopefully, it'll help to enforce the idea that styles are not immutable and handed down from the Heavens on stone tablets: they're coined after the fact, to classify something that looks like it'll be sticking around long enough to need a name.

The thing is, styles and beers change. Everything changes. In fact, I would go as far as to say that most beer styles as we think of them today did not exist 150 years ago. A brewer from the mid 1800's would probably be at a loss, trying to enter a modern BJCP-sanctioned contest. Classic and traditional? Sure, depending when you want to set the start date.

Think about it: around the end of the 1900's, within a couple decades' time, a great many things happened all at once. There was a sweeping overhaul of fermentation procedure thanks to the work of Pasteur. Two World Wars happened, drastically affecting the availability of ingredients and the taxation system imposed upon European and English breweries. Gravities dropped, processes changed. Lager-mania shifted a new generation's tastes, right when mass industrialization was becoming easier than ever. Oh, and let's not forget, there was that whole Prohibition horseshit. American brewing was perhaps the hardest hit by these few turbulent decades, but the rich historical traditions of English and European brewing were drastically affected as well, something that modern drinkers rarely seem to recognize when touting the legacy of international brewers.

I'll pick one specific example, saison, because I was just leafing through Farmhouse Ales by Phil Markowski again. Something struck me: Farmhouse Ales was released in 2004, following a period where the saison style could have been considered on the verge of extinction. Not so long after that book came out (and this was probably not a coincidence), the style exploded onto the American scene. In 2014, only ten years later, I would say that saisons are one of craft beer's darlings, a style that a significant percentage of breweries brew on a regular basis. As of this writing, there are over 3,000 saisons logged on beeradvocate.com... more than twice as many as any other Belgian style. That's crazy! I had to look multiple times at those numbers to make sure I wasn't losing my mind — how could saisons be twice as common as witbiers, dubbels and tripels? But it seems to be so, perhaps because the style is generally viewed as loose in its guidelines, historically and conceptually open-ended.

But given all that, the vast majority of saisons being brewed today are pale, moderately hopped, highly carbonated, frequently spiced, and fermented exclusively with a Saccharomyces "saison strain." Perhaps no beer defines the modern saison better than Saison Dupont — I mean really defines, in that Saison Dupont, just one example of European saison, seems to have formed the baseline for the entire modern vision of what a saison should be. But Dupont was only one farmhouse ale, one that happened to survive the difficult first half the century with its integrity in-tact, and remain available enough that American drinkers could discover it when they were ready for it. Historically, there were many different farmhouse beers, and they varied quite a lot. Farmhouse Ales describe most as probably being a bit more amber in color due to historic malting techniques, and being either aggressively hopped or distinctly sour. More sour, depending on age, and sometimes blended with lambic, or even spontaneously fermented. Carbonation, before bottling became the norm, was probably low. Alcohol levels were also much lower, because farmhouse ale was largely brewed as sustenance for farmhands working the fields.

In fact, the primary common thread between historic and contemporary saisons is the reliance on a highly-attenuative yeast strains to result in a low terminal gravity; saisons, whatever else they are, should be dry and refreshing. But what started out as a style closely related to lambic is now almost universally fermented by a culture of brewer's yeast, and usually packs a heavy ABV punch. That these strains have been isolated from European saison brewers gives them credibility, but isn't going to match what historic saisons once were. Even allowing for the fact that saisons were varied and open-ended, the general loss of some of their most widespread qualities in modern examples sounds to me like we've basically redefined the baseline of what the style is, to a degree that would cause uproar if done with, say, an American gueuze.

Though it's not on the sour spectrum and its funk is not too extreme, even Saison Dupont still contains a mix of microbes — White Labs found as many 5 different cultures, and other brewers I have talked to (who have done their own culturing) report the same findings. One strain within the Dupont culture seems to lend the vast majority of the character to the beer, however, so this is strain was selected as the "Dupont strain." But does an ecosystem really function the same way when seemingly-vestigial organisms are dropped?

For as fettishistic as brewers are about the purity of other styles, the use of the term 'lambic' or the blasphemy of calling something a 'Black IPA,' I find it little funny that this reincarnation of the saison slipped through without judgement. Especially when Farmhouse Ales probably inspired it, though the book goes to great lengths describing the beer as very different from how most of us are brewing it.

I don't want to sound like I'm just pooping on American saisons (though I would definitely like to start seeing much weirder, funkier, tartier saisons), because it's a style that I (mostly) love regardless of how it's interpreted. To be clear, this is an issue of semantics, not quality. If you brew a monoculture-fermented, moderately hopped, highly carbonated golden ale and call it a saison, you're not doing anything wrong. It is a saison. That's my whole point: we changed what the style it is. Styles are the Matrix, and we are all Neo, #MINDBLOWN #INCEPTIONSOUND

So back to my overall point of brewing to style: how much can it mean when we keep changing what those very styles are? You could run through this whole thing with almost any 'historic' style. Last year I went through this with India Pale Ale: historic IPA, [contemporary] English IPA, and American IPA are all three pretty different things, which makes the sudden proliferation of IPA sub-styles seem a little less ridiculous. I mean, still a little ridiculous in terms of marketing and bandwagoning, but slightly less so.

Everything has basically been tried by someone before and yet everything is new and ever-changing. I'll leave it to future generations to argue about what to call their THC-infused quintuple IPA brewed by a matrix of self-pitching nano-yeast, growler-filtered via cross-secting dubstep vibrational frequencies. I will yell at them to get off my lawn and continue listening to Led Zeppelin.

Taste trumps semantics. I just want my beer to be weird and interesting and tasty and refreshing.






.... Okay, maybe all I'm really saying here is, if I ever have kids, I want them to grow up having very strong opinions about the microbial content of saisons.

Where Are All the New York Wild Ales?

What do disaster movies, romantic comedies, and the birth of hip hop all have in common? Chances are, when you're picking a location, it's gonna come down to either California or New York. The two states have long been seen as either rivals or bizarro counterparts, hotbeds of culture with recognizable skylines for aliens or monsters to blow up real good. The states are similar in many ways even outside of their manufacture of culture: huge population centers anchor the state, while the majority of their geography is farms and mountains and all sorts of pretty scenery (well, I guess California has a few more deserts than NY.)

Unfortunately, the comparison and rivalry hasn't been true of beer, at least not for the last few decades. While New York at one point dominated the industry, and supplied almost all of its hops, it's now playing an (admirably energetic) game of catch up, and the state gov is giving it a real good push. By sheer number of breweries, it's undeniable that the brewing industry in New York is exploding. At the annual TAP NY beer festival, the NY State Brewers Association announced there are currently 154 breweries. In 2011, there were only around 50 in the state. By next year, I wouldn't be surprised if the count tops 200.

Do you remember when I wrote that article about the dudes at The Brewery at Bacchus? Do you remember how I called them the Most Interesting Brewery in New York That You've Never Heard Of? Six months in, those guys are knocking out all sorts of barrel-aged Brett saisons and Berliner Weisse and such, with a number of other sours in the works — which, depending where you live in the country (or the world), may not sound all that remarkable. It's kind of hot right now, that wild stuff, right? It certainly is in sunny California.

The other week, Mike and Jason of Brewery at Bacchus Tweeted this:

Drinking an amazing @AlmanacBeer Reserve Pluot wine barrel aged sour. Great beer. New York neeeeds beers like this pic.twitter.com/VCYfuEDSnM
— Bacchus of New Paltz (@Bacchus462) April 26, 2014

First of all, I personally love the hell out of Almanac. I loved them the first I ever saw their incredible bottle design, I love their model, and I love the beer they make. The sours I've had from them have been world class. So yes, I agreed with Jason and Mike's random musing, and it got me thinking about this lament more... literally.

Where are all the sour beers in New York? And what does that say about our brewing scene?

There's a lot of analysis to be done with what's happening here in general; New York is in the middle of a paradigm shift. I still can't figure out why we're starting out so far behind other states, but regardless, we're finally going from almost nothing, the pack of the back, to a huge explosion in both state attention, local interest, and micros opening their doors. And a bunch of new businesses opening their doors all at once, as the first wave of a trend, tend to follow the most straightforward, conservative business model. Most new breweries tend to be small or medium-small; even now, there are very few in NY that even distribute throughout much of the state. I think there's at least a few articles to be gleaned from this alone, but that's just to set the context.

So almost all these breweries starting up are scrappy nanos with lots of help from friends and family and probably not a ton of funding. In fact, I'd wager that the majority of the breweries that have opened here in the last year are 3 bbl or smaller (super-nano), with probably only a handful over 10 bbl in size. (Conventional wisdom for a while has been that you need to brew at least 7 bbl to survive long term, so we'll see what this nano-craze demonstrates about that.) Now that NY is offering a farm brewery license, many are hungry to just get some beer out there. Most don't have the funding to take big risks or spend extra on things like a barrel-aging program. Most of them, frankly, are homebrewers who splurged on a license and a slightly larger system, and being a homebrewer myself, I don't mean that to sound condescending. Nano-breweries have intriguing potential, even at 20 gallon (yes, gallon) batches, regardless of the economics of it all. But it's a lot of work and very risky. I get it. 

Still, why is it starting to seem like every startup brewery's lineup has to look like some slight variation of this?

 

Not that there's anything wrong with those beers on their own, or even as a majority. For many, the appeal of craft beer is four things: creativity, variety, quality and local-ness. There are plenty of breweries bringing the 'local' angle, but frankly, 'local' can't be the only selling point of a sustainable brewery. I don't want to get into the quality debate today, just the variety and creativity stuff. For a state that's largely farms, and an industry being heavily pushed toward support of farms, it's jarring to me that there's such a lack of sours and mixed culture, farmhouse beers. There's a lot of other stuff missing too, but I'm cherry-picking one type of beer to stand in for brewery innovation (granting that just a well-brewed English mild on cask pump would seem almost as unique and exciting to me). I think it's a useful example. Wild ales strike me as a marker for a certain kind of mindset, an eagerness to break from the Same Six Styles Syndrome. And because playing with Brett & Bugs scares off a lot of brewers, a dedication to producing them regularly seems to also offer at least a slight indication that a brewer has their shit together. (Though tapping just one random batch of a sour, let's say barleywine may just be an indication that, whoops, let's not dump this one batch of infected beer if people will pay money for it?)

Maybe, I'm just really bothered by the seemingly inescapable mindset that every brewery needs to have a few styles we've silently designated as "The Beers Everyone Has to Make to Keep Average Drinkers Happy." It seems presumptuous. Is a fruity, yeasty Brett saison going to be that harder for the average person to swallow than a fruity, yeasty hefeweizen?

I have complained about this for years, loudly and often (to my friends' great delight), but never thought to put it in cold, hard statistical terms. I got curious — is anyone in New York actually regularly producing wild ales? How many brewers in New York actually have some kind of barrel program? From a quick check on Beer Advocate, the state has about as many breweries as neighbouring Pennsylvania. Off the top of my head, without even digging around, I can name at least half a dozen PA breweries regularly releasing wild ales in bottles (which signifies some level of commitment, in my opinion.) In New York, I could think of just one, Captain Lawrence, plus a few "kind-ofs" in various stages of development, or going through expansions and shifts in focus (Ithaca, who has released lots of incredible sours previously, but seems to be shifting their attention elsewhere lately.) But maybe I'm ignorant. Maybe I'm being curmudgeonly and I'm just not looking hard enough. So it's time for some crude statistical analysis.

One recent Friday night, being the hip, socially-ambitious person I am, I spent a few hours clicking through the New York brewery list on Beer Advocate, analyzing every beer brewed in New York... at least that's made it onto the site. (What, like you have something better to do on a Friday night?) Obviously, this isn't perfect methodology, but it was the only realistic and consistent methodology for the moment. We're seeking the NY-equivalent of Almanac, Ale Apothecary, Allagash, The Bruery, Cascade, Crooked Stave, Hill Farmstead, Jester King, Jolly Pumpkin, Forest & Main, Logsdon Farmhouse Ales, Lost Abbey, Night Shift, the Rare Barrel, Prairie, Russian River, Tired Hands, Yazoo, etc etc etc, where the wild-side is obvious and the doors to the farmhouse are wide open. Some very small start-ups might not have all their beers listed on Beer Advocate yet, which leads to some fuzzy categorizing, but for the sake of this article, I'm looking to broadly define "regular producers of sour / wild / farmhouse beer in NY." A beer with only two ratings and no details, that seems to have been released only once, is obviously not something that was a big push.

In addition, there are a number of breweries I'll mention that look to be branching out into these sorts of brews, which is awesome. I don't want this article to come across as overly critical, simply... observational. Even as the market becomes saturated and the Bubble stretches, it is my opinion that there is still a lot of opportunity out there. If in two years this article is completely irrelevant and seems stupid, that's a very good thing. Sound fair?

So after those hours of research, what did I end up with? Not much that I wasn't aware of before I started. The similarity of offerings by small start-up nanobreweries is seriously jarring when you start looking at page after page of them in a row.

Let's phrase it this way: say you have a friend in California and you want to show them what's going on in New York. You want to send them some beer. [How many breweries make a draft-only geuze, anyway?] In bottles, your options for funky and farmhouse fare is... still not much. There's Captain Lawrence, of course. They've had a really good barrel program for years, releasing one or two world-class wild ales a year, on average. So hopefully you can find one of those, because there are only a handful of other breweries in New York putting sours / wilds in bottles, and most of the rest are tiny, or don't seem too committed to the genre. Shmaltz releases He'Brew Funky Jewbelation annually; a blend of different barrels, Funky Jewbelation sounds like it's at least on the sour spectrum, though it's listed as a strong ale. I'm not even sure about that one, as I haven't had it myself. Scaling down considerably from there, if you're one of my neighbors, you can stop at the farmer's market to pick up one of Evan's Plan Bee Brewery creations, which are very small releases, mostly wild yeast and farmhouse-inspired stuff. Evan does a little bit of everything, but I love his mindset, and I love his "hyper-local, self-sourced" model. You've got two more options if you live in NYC, where the very very tiny brewery Big Alice seems to have bottled a few experiments, and Transmitter Brewing opened its doors literally as I was writing this article. Of all the breweries mentioned in this article, Transmitter seems most likely to have the dedication to funk that I'm looking for. But with these small guys, to re-iterate, we're kind of looking into the future: they're just getting started, and can't make enough beer to supply their own neighborhoods right now.

Elsewhere, it's not too hard to find breweries that occasionally do Berliner Weisse and Gose, which are part of a genre I'm calling 'quick sours', beers that employ the sour mash method (or something like it.) Especially if you're just looking for it on draft at the brewery — that's way more do-able. Notably, Peekskill Brewery's Simple Sour is one of the few beers that's always on tap there, and makes appearances at bars throughout the Hudson Valley and NYC. Of the dozen or so other breweries that have done quick sours in New York state, there's still hardly anyone packaging  — Poughkeepsie-area Sloop Brewing are some of the only guys regularly bottling a Berliner-ish beer that I could dig up. So your bottle hunt hasn't gotten much easier, and you'll have to be in the right place at the right time to even to fill up a growler.

What about Brett beers and not-quite sours? You don't always need the acid; maybe you just want some breezy light funk. In bottles, Ithaca and Brooklyn, two of the largest breweries in the state, just released Brett-aged beers of the Belgian bent. Ithaca is an interesting case: the new Luminous seems to be a reinvention of the retired sour ale Brute, though it's unclear how Ithaca will handle their sour program now. Since expanding the brewery, it's been difficult to tell whether they'll keep the same focus on the former barrel program; most attention seems to be on new seasonals. I've also heard that Luminous is not a full sour, but a tart Brett beer, so keep that in mind when looking to drop some acid. (Lactic and acetic acid, I mean.) For now, I'll file Ithaca tentatively under the "irregular sour producer" folder. Another big guy, Ommengang, recently released Wild at Heart, a rich, malty 100% Brett beer that most would mistake for simply another Belgian. One more wild ale option in bottles, though not very wild in the general scheme of things.

All existing brews considered, we're looking at a handful of options, and only a few breweries giving such beers regular attention. As far as my general complaint about variety, yes, there are certainly breweries experimenting and innovating in other ways, and a couple existing breweries have shown interest in embracing the funk as soon as they can. Peekskill, for one, already has a coolship and some wild ale fermenting that's likely to be incredible. Jeff O'Neil will be giving us more than a few delicious sours down the road, so you've gotta (patiently) factor that in. As will a few of the newbies. I have high hopes for Transmitter Brewing, which looks to be perhaps the first NY brewery focused mostly on farmhouse / wild ales. Also in Queens, newly-opened Finback looks to be dabbling in the realm too. I must also mention that their borough-neighbors Kelso of Brooklyn have done limited draft releases of some incredible sours in the past, though they're very hard to find, and I haven't seen any in a while.

Picking out breweries doing sour beer as an indicator of larger trends is slightly arbitrary, and again, I don't want to make it sound like I think wild ales are the only way left to innovate in beer. Even if this is largely just an article about the lack of a certain kind of beer in the New York market, I think maybe it says a bit more than that. If you work at a brewery, you're probably yelling at the screen at me: "Of course none of these small start-up breweries are doing sours, you diptube, they're the most expensive, unreliable, and time-consuming type of beer to produce!" Yes, absolutely fair. And let's be reasonable, in another few years, when some of these breweries have gotten their footing, I suspect we'll have another dozen or so beers to add to this list. You've got half a dozen options and then some pending maybes and beyond that, a lot of pale ales and ambers and flavored stouts and fruit beers with wheat. New York has the resources, the farms, the scenery; it deserves to have the ingenuity too. Right now, I can go to Bacchus or Peekskill and enjoy some world-class, truly creative beer while appreciating the gorgeous surroundings. As we try to change our beer scene from the farm on up, I want to see that sense of terroir and fermentive curiosity expand across the state, and see local flavor come to mean more than just Cascade hops from a vine in the backyard. Are farm brewers really embracing 'local' if they're putting out the same six beers as basically every suburban brewpub in the country?

The notion of the modern farm brewery is a fascinating and exciting vision, to me. I can't believe it's a coincidence that some of the most lauded and sought-out breweries in the world right now have close ties to the farmhouse model. And I can't wait to see it explored further, in New York, and elsewhere. Seeing the local harvest reflected in the ingredients and structure of a beer is awesome. Seeing it reflected in the weird and wild microbial world from which those crops spring — at least some of the time, in some beers — is even better.

India Pale Aged Ale with Brett - Tasting Notes

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Historic IPA / India Pale Aged Ale
Brewed: 1.13.2013
Bottled On: 12.30.2013
ABV: 8.3%

Appearance: glowing gold, moderate head, slight haze, okay retention
Smell: classic Brett barnyard, dry tart fruit, orange citrus, cedar, musty wood
Taste: tangy, tart, funky fruit, orange zest, earth, juicy rich finish
Mouthfeel: medium-bodied, slight slickness, dry and drinkable

Early in 2013, I brewed up an experiment that I've been calling an "India Pale Aged Ale," taking the presumptuous step of coining an entirely new genre of beer to adequately capture the differences between historical IPA compared to its various (many various) incarnations today. While a large number of people have since read my article about the concept — and certainly many more have read Mitch Steele's fascinating book IPA, which inspired it — I'm not sure if the "IPAA" concept has caught on any more in the past year. Don't worry, give it time. We're not making history here, we're rebranding it. At least I can now comment on the results of my experiment.

Two things you're probably wondering. First, how is it? Well, if you've been paying close attention, you may have read about the ho-hum results from the first part of the experiment, in which I bottled a second brew of the original recipe fresh, minus the crucial Brettanomyces. That fresh version of historic IPA was rather disappointing — or more specifically, disappointingly malty, rather than hoppy. These historic IPAs used a massive dose of hops in the brew, and even a scaled down version is a match for any of today's American imperial IPAs. I get into a few theories on why the Brett-less version was less aggressive than I would have imagined over at that first post, but for a serious consideration of how such a beer may have been fresh, I'm going to have to rebrew.

Fortunately, aging a standard English IPA wasn't really the point of this project. One can pretty easily imagine how that turns out. The focus was my original version, aka IPAA, which was aged for almost a year with Brettanomyces before bottling. I'm happy to report: it's tasty. And it came out pretty how much I guessed it would.

It's interesting just how much the classic Brett character dominates this beer. Most drinkers probably first encountered Brett in Orval, or something like Orval, and we think of that profile as the classic, default Brettanomyces character. Well, this IPAA attempt resembles Orval a lot more than it resembles most modern IPAs. Funky barnyard is the first thing you get in the aroma and flavor, and the beer is decidedly tangy — the big citrus notes of orange and pineapple add much more tartness than I expected. This is far from a hop bomb. Brett C, which I chose because it is the originally-isolated British strain, gives the beer a very juicy profile. I harp on about Brett not making a beer sour, but clearly it can make it tart, and this is surprisingly far along that continuum. A medium / moderate level of carbonation allows the mouthfeel to remain mid-weight, still leaning slightly heavy on the malts, but the finish is dry and fairly viscous, leaving a bitter / sour note that's somewhat more aggressive than I've found in other Brett beers. Perhaps the best way to describe this is zesty, like the character of dried citrus fruit skins. For all that, it's fairly clean and pretty easy-drinking — more so than a lot of the heavy barrel-aged Brett stuff most breweries are putting out these days. With higher carbonation, I could certainly see historic drinkers describing this as champagne-like.

So the second thing you are likely wondering — and the most important thing, really — is: how closely does this actually resemble historic India Pale Aged Ale? And naturally, that's the hardest question for me to answer. I don't think any drinkers or note-takers back then used words like "funky" or "barnyard," and the character of Brettanomyces was simply the character of aged English beer, which makes it problematic when guessing at flavor profiles and the evolving language used to talk about beer. Nonetheless, this meets every main requirement as far as terminal gravity and aging conditions (one imagines the English were not drinking IPA that reeked of oxidized, BBQ-tasting hops), and fits into the very vague descriptions of IPAA from the time. And regardless, I'm taking this as another point of evidence that hops play a pretty large role in helping Brett to develop the huge ripe funk it's known for.

EDIT: Extraordinarily helpful commenter Gary Gillman shared an English brewing article from 1902 on the conditioning and carbonation of bottled beers, which briefly describes the character of pale ale stored in wood, then bottled and further maturated: "There can be no doubt but that such beers, brewed and bottled under most favourable conditions, present to the palate a peculiar pungent flavour and an invigorating freshness which is greatly esteemed amongst connoisseurs." I don't remember if Steele may have referenced this same article in his book, but the notes line up with his descriptions and with my own results. Indeed: "peculiar pungent flavour" with an "invigorating freshness" is exactly how I imagine someone in 1902 might describe such a beer. Furthermore, in the last week or so, a number of connoisseurs have tried my beer, and every one of them greatly esteemed it.

So I think I'm on the right track, though I have a few tweaks I'd make based on how the non-Brett version came out, based on some process discrepancies between my brew and the historic journey taken by the beer, and also based on some gut-instinct feelings I have. As mentioned before, the "Pale Ale malt" I used was probably too dark, and it seems Pilsner would actually be the best choice here. The primary yeast is still up in the air, though I wouldn't use West York again. And as hoppy as this batch was, it could have used more — the Brett-less version tasted more like a barleywine than an IPA, even young. India Pale Aged Ale was dry-hopped in the barrel during its voyage to India, something I failed to take into account and never got around to. While I don't know that I'll be able to emulate the barrel-aging process with a rebrew any time soon, it would be interesting to give this a "tertiary" aging period on oak-chips with a healthy dose of dry hops for a few months before bottling.

Given the success of this crude first experiment, I hereby declare brewers recognize that India Pale Aged Ale as its own style. I expect to see a bunch of "Beer Trends to Watch Out For" articles on this very subject in all the beer and food magazines within, let's say, three years. Everyone get on that.

The original recipe can be found here.

Tasting notes for the version of my IPAA without Brett are here.