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.

What's the Best Way to Add Coffee Into Beer?

It's always fun to think about how many people have, in their combined efforts, produced a staggering number of variations on beer throughout history. Brewers will commonly remark that few things we make today are truly original ideas — that some historic brewer, somewhere along the way, has already tried just about everything. But there must be at least a few inventions unique to modern brewers. We throw some weird stuff into beer. Coffee, one of the more common and less weird things thrown into beer of late, is a pretty obvious and logical adjunct. Not only does it compliment flavors already present in certain beers, but most of us brewers drink just about as much coffee as we do beer. The notion of throwing coffee into a beer seems like something very particular to our modern sensibilities, but who knows? I've never heard anything indicating that coffee was ever used as a flavoring in beer before the 80's/90's, but while it certainly wasn't traditional, it's not impossible that someone tried it hundreds of years ago.

Now, of course, coffee beer is all the rage. (I could swear I recently saw some statistic about coffee beers being one of the largest categories of beer in competitions, but now that it would be useful, I can't find it). There's hardly a style of beer that we haven't tried adding coffee to. Dark beers hardly warrant mention, but I've also seen coffee sours and coffee saisons. Coffee IPAs are not totally uncommon, and at Kent Falls, we took that trend a step further and add coffee to our Brett IPA — which, as far as I know, is possibly the only beer of its kind. 

When we first started producing Waymaker (the aforementioned Brett IPA), we realized we were limited in what we could brew in those first few months by the esoteric yeast cultures I had chosen for our house strains. We wanted to get as much diversity as possible out of a few beers with similar foundations, and easy-to-add ingredients that could spin a new beer off from an existing base was a common sense way to accomplish that. Thus, Waymaker Brett IPA, with the addition of coffee, could become a second, distinct beer: Coffeemaker Brett IPA. Obviously, we were only going to pursue the concept if it worked. And in this case, it worked wonderfully. We partnered with Irving Farm Coffee Roasters — not only one of the best coffee roasters in the region, but one whose roasting facility happens to be a short (only 40 minutes, about as close as anything gets around here) drive from our farm. Together, we tested out a number of roasts and ratios until we had a combination of beer and coffee that we enjoyed for its complexities and uniqueness. 

Since we were doing only small runs of Coffeemaker to start out, figuring out how to actually add the coffee into the beer wasn't hard. The knowledgeable folks at Irving Farm recommended adding the coffee late in the process, and not using cold brew, which wouldn't extract the full range of flavors. We settled on using a 2x coffee concentrate liquid, which could be pumped into the brite tank under CO2 pressure minutes before packaging the resulting blend. No oxygen, just maximally fresh coffee. You could achieve the same effect on a homebrew scale by pouring 2x strength coffee (at an 11% ratio) directly into the keg. 

This method works great when you're splitting off a batch and only turning a small fraction of it into a coffee beer. (It also works great when you don't have to concern yourself with making 15-30 gallons of coffee yourself). We could have easily employed this method with 6 bbl, up to about 12 bbl volumes of beer. But then we started talking about brewing full-sized batches of Coffeemaker, on its own. Potentially up to 30, even 35 bbls. That's a hell of a lot more coffee. That's a volume of beer that would require potentially 80+ gallons of coffee. Can you imagine 80 gallons of coffee? That's an insane amount. That's almost four times what I drink during the average day. How do you make that much coffee? 

We spent about a month brainstorming methods for brewing 80 gallons of coffee. Irving Farm offered us an old giant coffee maker that could brew 6 gallons of coffee at a time, which is a lot when you're thinking of coffee in terms of just drinking it, but bizarrely undersized in terms of a beer that can suck up a bathtub's worth of the stuff. 

Then we took a trip out to San Diego for Modern Times' Festival of Funk. Modern Times established themselves early on as a leader in the coffee beer game by becoming the first brewery in the country to have an in-house roaster. After that, they started barrel-aging coffee beans, not only to sell to the public to drink (I've bought a few bags; they're trippy cool and tasty) but to add back to beer, and complete some kind of insane beer-barrel-coffee Ouroboros loop. Unsurprisingly, while hanging out at Modern Times, we gleaned a few useful methods from their extensive coffee-related shenanigans.

Many brewers add coffee beans directly into their beer, but we'd theorized that it would be best to avoid this method for a few reasons. First, we didn't want to add the coffee too early in the process, before fermentation. Fermentation transforms things, and both the Irving Farm folks and us Kent Falls folks felt that we would get the clearest, most stable coffee flavor the later in the process the coffee went in. Right into the brite immediately before packaging is about as late as you can get, but the volume of liquid then becomes the issue. So why not just add coffee beans into the brite tank or fermentor, in a bag, you may be thinking? Certainly, that could work, and is probably an alternate solution. But there's a degree of control you may have to give up with this approach, as the amount of contact time between the beans and the coffee are now dictated by the time it takes you to package the beer. Plus, we had been worried about the alcohol pulling undesirable flavor compounds out of the beans, especially with that extended contact time. And then there's the simple matter of scale, once more: when you're Modern Times size (much bigger than Kent Falls, and Kent Falls isn't even that small in the grand scheme of things), how many pounds of Stuff do you want to be shoving into your gigantic tanks? If you reach the point where you're brewing a 200+ bbl batch of coffee stout, say, do you really want to be dropping several hundred pounds of coffee beans into your tanks? What are you going to put all that coffee in? How are you going to keep it out of the packaged product? How are you going to fish it back out?

Modern Times had figured out a nice sort of hybrid approach. I've now adapted it here at Kent Falls, and utilized it for one of our most recent beers, a Coffee Milk Stout. This was indeed the first batch of coffee beer that was all what it was — a full-tank, full-volume batch, thus requiring quite a bit of coffee. (Ultimately, I did end up filling some bourbon barrels with the stout before adding the coffee, so the final ratio was a 23 bbl batch of beer that got about 23 lbs worth of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee). Rather than adding the coffee beans into any of the tanks, I thoroughly cleaned one of our half-barrel yeast brinks, which have butterfly valves on the bottom and top for yeast collection. I poured the whole beans into the keg and set up a loop from the bottom of the fermentor (after clearing it of trub), into our cellar pump, into the coffee-keg, out of the top, then through a hose and back into the racking arm of the fermentor. On the out of the keg containing the coffee, I attached our hop filter, which is basically a torpedo-like tube with two inner stainless steel mesh filters, and which in this case would prevent any coffee beans from riding the beer wave out of their holding vessel. (A smaller type of mesh screen that fits inline would work as well, probably better, as this set-up made for an awkwardly vertical hose arrangement). With this loop, the beer gets pulled out of the tank, runs through the coffee, and returns to the tank, cycling a constant mixture of coffee-beer through the vessel(s). I let this cycle run for a little under a day. When the beer was ready to transfer into the brite tank, I simply reconfigured the hoses so that all the beer from the fermentor would pass through the coffee keg once more along the way.

You could replicate this approach on a homebrew scale quite easily, either with my trusty ol' dry-hop keg set-up, or using a simple bag to contain and filter the coffee before transferring. You wouldn't be running a cycle/loop, but the basic idea would be the same.

Either method — coffee liquid, or calculated contact time over whole beans — could be the easier for you depending on your set-up and scale, at least assuming you're a homebrewer or smaller-scale commercial brewer. Above 20 bbls or so, you probably have no choice but to add beans right into the beer. Result-wise, there are also pros and cons either way. I liked how "present" the coffee character remained, even over time, with the direct liquid injection method. The immediacy and purity of the coffee addition seemed to bring about the clearest, most stable coffee character. But with certain roasts, we also noticed that the coffee character would shift over time and develop an interesting note often described as "jalapeno." The flavor never disagreed with me, and I found it more of a subtle shading with a curious flavor association, but it did shift the profile away from pure coffee, even if the beer as a whole remained pretty vibrantly coffee-forward. With the loop method, based on my impressions so far, I think the result will be a smoother but mellower coffee flavor, and I'm curious to see how it holds up over time.

My favorite part of making coffee beers? With all the experimentation and blends and testing and friends made in the coffee industry, you somehow or another end up with a lot of coffee on hand. I remember the days, years ago, when I couldn't even drink coffee after 4 pm without dooming myself to lay awake in bed all night. Haha. Oh man. How young and much healthier I was back then.

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

Barrel-Aging Techniques and Process: Second Nature Peach Sour Saison

There are a number of reasons that writing about beer for this blog has become more challenging since jumping into the commercial side of things for Kent Falls Brewing Co. Surprisingly, it's not even so much that the actual brewing process has changed. I found it relatively easy to scale everything up — that transition is something I want to write about more, and will, but I almost don't know what to say. Most brewing to me is a matter of intuition, and while there are plenty of technical and logistical things to work out, my answer to how I scale up my old concepts most of the time would be a big ol'  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

More challenging, in terms of writing about brewing, is that you start to think about each beer and the process behind it differently. Or at least, that's been the case with me, but the last year and a half of my life have been one never-ending mental breakdown, so who knows. Regardless, as a homebrewer, each batch felt more distinct, more of an individual project. One batch at a time, everything I made was a focused reservoir of my attention. It seems like it should be the opposite, but as a homebrewer, I felt way more obsessive about each beer I made, and for better or worse, far more inclined to poke and prod at it as I waited anxiously to know how it would come out.

I'm sure plenty of commercial brewers feel this way about every one of their commercial brews too, so maybe it's just the delirium and crushing existential crises warping my attentions, but brewing now feels more like a ride that I'm trying to steer than some little pet project that I'm micro-managing obsessively. Actually, though, I think homebrewing for long enough inevitably trains you for this too, especially homebrewing sours. You have to learn patience at some point. You have to accept that some batches, of the many carboys that once took up space in my incredibly nerdy and fascinating-to-visitors Beer Room, just have to be ignored for a good long while, and any attention you give them will probably do more harm than good. Scaling up to the point of having a thousand gallons plus of beer in barrels, this effect is exacerbated even more. No longer is this beer a singular, isolated project, but now a chain of events, a chain of 8 - 12 hour work-days, a series of vessels to transfer liquid between. Your attention becomes divided between numerous projects and a hundred points of stress and worry. For the same reason, some of these beers would be impossible to "clone," because there are so many unique steps and variables involved. You could mimic the process, but never the exact circumstances.

But here's the story of one such beer, the first real aged sour beer we've released at Kent Falls. I've done a couple different gose, our seasonal tart saison, and one previous barrel-aged release, a Brett saison with grapefruit zest. But we're finally just starting to dip into the whole barrel-aged sour thing, now that most of our barrels have contained liquid for at least half a year. To start, the barrel-aged saisons are going to fall into two releases. "Nature" will be a mixed-culture barrel-aged saison, always created from some new blend of barrels, and likely a bit different with each release. We'll release that possibly twice a year, or maybe just once a year, to really go for an annual vintage thing. Any fruited barrel-aged saisons will fall under the "Second Nature" name — again, pulling from the same selection of barrels, I'll pull some aging saison to receive fruit.

Even when homebrewing, replicating any one barrel-aged beer is going to be incredibly difficult without blending. Add to that the fact that I'm not necessarily going to try to recreate the exact same beer every time, and I have two dozen barrels to choose from (a very tiny number compared to many breweries) and you're starting from a baseline of endless variation: living beer in a living environment that's going to change and evolve over time. Like most of the barrels in the brewery right now, the two barrels that I selected for this peach sour were filled with liquid from our earliest batches of saison. Probably the most interestingly-different thing about my process for these beers is that the base beer was fermented out to a very low gravity before being transferred into the barrels, like 1.5 plato. Conventional wisdom is generally that you'll want to leave some residual sugar in the beer for the Brett and bacteria to munch on. Brett, however, really doesn't need much to eat to create its distinct character, and even just the autolysis of the yeast around it may be enough to feed it, especially in the oxygen-friendly environment of a barrel.

As a result, the beer resting in the barrel after four months of aging was not crazy sour. It had the pleasant flavor qualities of an aged sour, just minus the bracing acidity. This is pretty much what I was going for — "balance and approachable" seems to be an unstated theme of Kent Falls' beers, so I'm not trying to push my barrel-aged sours to be tongue-savaging acid monsters. I figured the beer would pick up a bit more acidity once it was on the peaches, though, and it did. We have two plastic holding tanks that serve as our fruiting tanks, for now. Some fruit I'm adding straight into the barrel: we picked some 80 lbs of local cherries for another such barrel-aged saison that's been aging since late summer. The cherries can stay in that barrel for as long as they want, as far as I'm concerned. Peaches, though, seemed like a royal pain in the ass to stuff into a barrel, so a plastic secondary tank was the solution we came up with for now.

This lead to one of the most fun (read: not fun) days of my brewing career. A few days before our hop harvest festival, during one of the busiest weeks of the year, and after spending a full day already brewing, I sat around hand-dicing 200 lbs. of peaches and throwing them into the plastic holding tank. I actually just slit the peaches in quarters but left them on the pit, so they held together as whole fruit, but with their flesh exposed. I figured as whole fruit, they'd be less likely to clog something up (a whole peach is larger than the opening of a butterfly valve), but slit, so the inside surface area would still be available to the beer. Anyway, that took until 3 in the morning, even once there were two of us going at it. Really fun, let me tell you.

The beer fermented out on the peaches surprisingly fast, hitting 1 plato terminal gravity in less than two weeks. We only left it there for about 5 weeks before bottling it.

And yet more variables that would be hard to replicate at home: I did absolutely nothing to sanitize the peaches, figuring it'd be nice to pick up whatever local microbes happened to be along for the ride. As a result, the beer went through a really happy pediococcus phase during bottle conditioning, which added complexity and enhanced acidity, rounding out all the flavors to great benefit. Now that it's ready for drinking (the pedio phase cleared up after about 6 weeks, thanks to the Brett hanging around), Second Nature - Peach has one of the best noses on a peach beer that I've had recently, with a perfect marriage of oaky vanilla character (much more than I expected to get out of these wine barrels, to be honest) and juicy fresh peach.

I'm very, very happy with how this one came out, and very excited to share this with everyone once we release it (at the New Milford farmer's market, December 19th, if you happen to be in the area). However, I have no clue how I'd share a recipe for this beer that wasn't utterly meaningless. Hopefully discussing the process (which really is the recipe, in this case) is somewhat helpful, at least. Beers like this, the product of scale-brewing and production schedules and McGuyvering and improvising and last-minute decisions and luck and timing and patience and terroir, are less like painting a portrait, one careful and deliberate brush stroke at a time, and more like some Jackson Pollock expressionist bullshit, dangling from a wire above a canvass, with a bucket of paint, just flinging shit in all directions and trusting that it's going to look pretty cool in the end.

Popular Science Interview: What Are You Doing For Thanksgiving?

Here's a crazy thing that happened: the other day, I talked to Popular Science for a "What Are You Doing For Thanksgiving?" series, alongside a whole roundup of people way more famous, successful, knowledgeable, and interesting than me. Nonetheless, I think my interview was pretty interesting, thanks to a fun starting premise: what weird things are you doing for Thanksgiving this year due to your particular occupation and interests. Basically, I seem to be the "fermentation guy" in this roundup of notable food folks.

You can check out the whole list of responses with that first link, and my interview right here.

In the interview, I mention a wild beer I fermented with nothing but squash. Rather than viewing squash or pumpkin as a flavoring ingredient, I thought it would be more fun to use the stuff as a source of native wild microbes. (The fermenting squash is in the header picture above). Obviously, there's a lot to delve into there, and I'll be writing more about that beer in the future.

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

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)