Mixed Culture Wet Hop Saison - Hop Harvest Collaboration with the Brewery at Bacchus

The northeastern US, plucky go-getter that it is, will have a whole lot of hops in the coming years. In five years, ten years, the entire country's hop industry could start to look very very different as new growers, new flavors, and even more new varieties start hitting the market at scale. This is old news, of course, but it still feels like we're waiting to observe the real impact of the restored northeastern hop growing region, and we'll be waiting a little while longer.

There are two big primary questions yet to be answered, from my perspective:

1. How will these new hops taste? Plenty of beers have been brewed with northeast hops now, but even the most established hop farms in the region are still quite young, and thus, I'm guessing the character of the hops will only really begin to take up an identity in the next few years. We'll hopefully start to see new varieties (or renamed varieties) with flavors distinct to this region.

2. How will breweries be able to use the hops? This seems like a fairly mundane logistical question, but it's going to be pretty significant in what kinds of beers these hops are used to make. Pellet hops are much, much easier for most breweries to use — conversely, leaf hops can be almost impossible for some breweries to use at different stages of the process. But pelletizers are expensive, and at the moment, inaccessible to most hop growers in the region.

What we're left with is a lot of mildish leaf hops. And a lot of leaf hops means a very large mound of hops indeed — hell, another reason it's not practical for us to use leaf hops at Kent Falls is that we'd simply have no space to store what we'd need. While the go-to strategy to dispose of any large pile of hops would typically be to throw them in an IPA, you'd have to be very deliberate when taking this approach. Wet hop IPAs have become a huge thing every harvest season of the last few years. But even an IPA blasted with a comically-large pile of hops may turn out with a surprisingly mild flavor. The returns, in other words, maybe be somewhat disappointing in proportion to what went into the beer. There's also the fact that wet hops simply taste very different from traditionally-used dry hops, and this needs to be taken into consideration when adding a wet hop IPA to a brewery's profile. If all of Kent Falls' other IPAs are juice-forward, an earthy, mild, grittier harvest IPA may stand out as a bit odd next to the rest of the lineup.

Barry and I were talking to Mike from the Brewery at Bacchus (editor's note: Mike and Jay, who have been brewing the beer for Bacchus for a couple years now, will soon be taking the lead at Hudson Valley Brewery, in Beacon, NY, so watch out for their stuff to hit the market in a big way soon) about doing a collaboration, and it quickly arose that we should do something based around our hop harvest in early September. From there, we decided that a wet-hopped farmhouse ale was the way to go. Both Bacchus and Kent Falls brew a lot of saison-ish beers, and we decided that the communal nature of the hop harvest was a very fitting start for a collaboration. For fermentation, we literally mixed together our cultures — saison yeast, lactobacillus and Brettanomyces from both Kent Falls and Bacchus went into the batch. There's quite a variety in this batch, though the cultures here are very aggressive. Fermentation was quick. While Tiny House has had several months to age and condition since we brewed it, the turnaround on a beer like this can be much faster than conventional wisdom used to have it. Such sourish mixed culture saisons rarely need more than three months before they can be packaged, in my experience — but obviously, different procedures, cultures, gravities and other extenuating conditions have to be taken into account.

The brewday itself for this beer was quite fun — as some of you may know, as there were a hundred plus people in attendance, and maybe you were there yourself . We're going to be hosting a hop harvest festival every year, and to make it Fun For The Whole Family, we make a big to do out of it. Pig roast, live music, beer, etc, and the general good vibes of a community gathering. Lots of fun, etc. All day long, the hops being harvested were thrown directly into the beer. I mentioned that leaf hops / whole cone hops are quite difficult to use in our setup, and the only place we can practically toss in such large quantities of vegetable matter without an epic bagging nightmare are the lauter tun. Fortunately, this is quite easy — I cleaned the spent grain out of the lauter tun real good, and transferred the wort out of the kettle and into this vessel instead. The false bottom allowed us to dump close to a hundred pounds of wet hops in without fear of clogging anything. At the end of the day, I simply knocked out as I normally would, and cleaned up the used hops as if they were a soggy mass of spent grain.

The resulting beer is simple but delicious — a well-balanced sour farmhouse ale with a good blend of acidity, Brett funk, and tannic rustic earth-notes from the hops. It's extremely complex for its low weight of only 4% ABV. I'll be looking forward to brewing something like this each year. If you would like to try this beer and are / know someone who is in the western Connecticut area, we will be releasing this at the New Milford farmer's market (indoors, basement of the school) this Saturday, January 16th. Keep in mind that while you may think I am a hack and my beer is all dumb, this *was* a collaboration with the Brewery at Bacchus, and those guys are pretty legit, and have never really bottled much before. So! Also, thanks to Mike's fiance Natalie for the lovely beer label. She knows how to art it up real good.

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

There Are Too Many IPAs On the Market - Here's Why I'm Adding a Few More

Awkward Hug IPA - the first non-funky beer released at Kent Falls.

It's pretty well established that there are just way too many IPAs on the market. We beer drinkers can't shut up about IPAs — especially if we happen to think the style is overrated. Great flamewars are wrought in the embers of the hatred some bear for hoppy beers, and the fact that some believe they're ruining craft beer. (In addition to gose, which is also supposedly ruining craft beer, leading me to believe that one of my favorite non-styles of beer, dry-hopped gose, is extra super duper killing craft beer).

The IPA category (and its offspring) grows determinedly year after year, continuing its domination as the most popular style in craft beer. And while AB has yet to release Bud Lite India-Pale-Ale-Rita, even the big guys have found ways to jump in on the craze here and there, with offerings like Blue Moon White IPA, Yuengling IPL, and for a truly perplexing example, Guinness Blonde Lager (which makes the interesting assumption that the type of consumer who would wish to buy a "blonde lager" brewed by Guinness would really be sold by the presence of Mosaic hops in such a beer).

That is the weird conundrum that IPA finds itself in these days, when undeniably there are many breweries that feel compelled by a demanding and thirsty market to produce an IPA that they may have little interest in making otherwise. No brewery, big or small, should feel compelled to make a beer they don't want to make. But when it comes to IPA, it's never just some vague guesswork at what the market wants. Many people will tell you, accounts will tell you, flat out, that you need to brew an IPA. (Especially in a market where the phrase "sour beer" is largely met with blank stares). In this sense, the sense of demanding that all breweries make an IPA even when they have no interest in doing so, yes, there are too many IPAs. There are absolutely too many IPAs on the market. It's gotten a little crazy over here.

I've gotten into this conversation a couple times now, recently. As often as you catch the "everyone has to brew an IPA or die," viewpoint, you'll hear the exact opposite, argued from an individual's own tastes. At a recent dinner conversation, someone tried a test batch of a saison I was working on and remarked how they liked the different path my beers took. They said: "Just please don't do an IPA."

If you have been reading Bear Flavored for some time, it's not a surprise to you that I (really, really) love hoppy beers. My focus has always been this: one part funky weird beers, one part clean juicy hoppy beers, and one part funky weird juicy hoppy beers. These are the things I like to drink so they are therefore the things I like to brew.

For better or worse, I'm still brewing with this same mindset as a commercial brewer. Focusing on tart and funky farmhouse beers for the Connecticut market probably isn't the smartest idea on paper. But all I really know how to do is brew the beer that I want to drink (as I said; for better or worse), and hope other people like it too. And if they don't care for that type of beer, honestly, it doesn't bother me too much. Tastes differ! And also I'm an incredibly selfish person so there's that as well.

There aren't currently any other farmhouse breweries in Connecticut, and hardly any breweries here are doing any kind of farmhouse / funky beers, so I'm curious if it will seem disingenuous for us to brew IPAs. If the mission of Kent Falls was explicitly, say, "Belgian-inspired beers," having a series of Northeast-style IPAs be our only "American" offering might seem kind of cynical. Fortunately, we haven't actually debuted all that many beers just yet, so we're still in the early stages of defining ourselves, and shaping what people expect from us (even the wildest and most experimental breweries want to have a common through-line). The framework, at least in my head, is to simply brew in the farmhouse mentality: refreshing beers that are satisfying to drink after a long day's work. And really, I think, that's pretty much saying the same thing as: "we brew whatever we feel like drinking." Because whatever you feel like drinking is that which is going to satisfy you after a long day's work.

So that's one reason I feel the market should have more IPAs: if a brewer is really, genuinely super passionate about a particular style, I think they should make that style.

The second reason I don't feel even slightly bad about adding more IPAs to an already-crowded IPA market: IPAs are like bread. Hear me out. Every town in America could have a bakery and everything would be just fine. No one would get into arguments about the Bakery Bubble. We understand, fundamentally, that bread is better fresh, even if we've entirely abandoned buying it so. I haven't counted how many towns there are in America lately, but I'm pretty sure there would be at least, like, 45 bakeries in this one-bakery-per-town situation. I don't know. Maybe half a million? Literally anywhere in that range sounds reasonable to me. Point being, good bread made right is really, really, really best fresh, and therefore you could never really have enough bakeries, if everyone switched to only buying freshly-baked bread from good artisan local bakeries. If everyone switched to only buying freshly-baked bread from good artisan local bakeries, the whole bread world would be revolutionized, and good bread would become far more accessible to the average person by supporting and allowing such bakeries to be ubiquitous and accessible. (American bread currently, in case you were wondering, is largely atrocious. I wish very much and desperately that the same movement that fixed beer would please get around to fixing bread on the whole).

IPAs, like bread, are best very, very fresh. (At least, a large number of people these days would say so). Yes, in spite of the old semi-stretched-truth story of IPAs being sent to India for their powers of preservation. Just because an aggressively hoppy beer may stave off infection in a boat to India for longer periods of time, that doesn't mean this is the best way to drink it. (Besides, their IPAs were likely totally different from what we're brewing now anyway). Most IPA fans today seem to be gravitating toward incredibly super extra fresh IPAs, and I'm right there with them. Hop oils break down quickly, and even in the best storage conditions, IPAs can lose some of their magic spark within a couple weeks, leaving nothing but bland uniform bitterness with no nuance. Industrial bread bakers could find ways to cheat around the freshness of their bread, but ultimately, having access to fresh bread is always going to be better. Some large breweries like Sierra Nevada, Stone and Lagunitas have figured out the logistics of hauling IPA all around the country and maintaining quality, and god bless them. I have infinite respect for the big breweries that do it right. But all things considered, it's simply easier to ensure that a beer is fresh if you're producing small quantities of it, sold quickly, within a local market which will consume it fast. And that is my goal: whatever it takes to ensure the drinker of such a beer receives the freshest and best IPA possible.

So yes, I do think there is room in the market for more IPAs. Not if everyone wants to grow to the size of Stone or Lagunitas or Sierra Nevada, no: they're already playing that game way better than most of us ever could. But if every town in the country (or world!) had a great little bakery and a handful of small-batch, fresh IPAs, always going out the door so quickly that they were always consumed super bright and aromatic? That wouldn't be such a bad world to live in.

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.

Equinox Single Hop IPA - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: IPA
Brewed: 11.08.14
Kegged On: 11.21.14
ABV: 5.8%

Appearance: hazy orange/copper, thick foamy head, lacing for days
Smell: sweet berry fruits, melon, cantaloupe, candy fruit, tropical weirdness, the color green
Taste: candy fruit, berry, melon, floral, sweet cantaloupe, sweet green pepper, berrppers
Mouthfeel: light-to-medium body, high carbonation, clean finish, low-med bitterness

Let's be super duper clear about something: beer is and forever will be highly subjective. Gather a group of people in a room — especially a crowd that varies widely in both drinking experience and brewing experience — and ask them to write down tasting notes for a beer without conferring with each other or listening to each other's feedback, and you will receive a dictionary's worth of responses..

Not so with the wide world of hop flavors. Hop flavors — second to nothing but perhaps Brett character — can get real wacky. Watch when a new variety is released, how scatter-shot the tasting notes are. In most cases, this is because the adjectives describing the hop are a literal hodgepodge collected from whatever aroma / flavor notes were tossed out by a sniffing panel. It takes a while to form some sort of widespread consensus on what a hop more-or-less tastes like, and until we've all drank enough of the stuff to reach a consensus, you get flavor-note buckshot. Sometimes, it's a bit weird. Lots of new hops seem to be staking their reputation on being "The _____ Hop."

Alongside the typical tropical and fruity descriptors that normally accompany new hop releases like this, Equinox got a distinctive flavor note with which to mark its fame: green pepper. I was very curious how a flavor note such as green pepper might taste among a smorgasbord of exotic fruitiness, and frankly, figured it'd be another red herring, another weird note some guy picked up and they tossed into the description for the sheer weirdness of it. But lo and behold: my first pour, I could swear I got it. Green pepper...(?) Or something like vaguely like green pepper? Maybe green pepper, if green peppers were a sweet juicy fruit rather than a savory vegetable, if that makes sense. What the hell? This makes no sense. Clearly, the power of suggestion, right? In the past, I have concluded that this is how Mosaic got labeled the 'blueberry' hop, and probably an explanation for those mystical sounding "chocolate coconut" hops going around the other year (which I still haven't gotten to try). And now that I try more and more pours of this beer (all the pours, so good), the more confused I become. What does this goddam hop taste like? Is it green pepper? Papaya? Strawberry? Okay, none of those flavors are remotely similar. This shouldn't be this hard.

And yet every single person who tries this beer has had across-the-board scattered reactions. That's just how this works. We're going to have to spend a lot of time arguing about what these things taste like. Maybe enough people will reach a consensus that the rest of us will be tricked into finding that flavor too, because it's been incepted into us. Maybe we'll have to invent or apply nonsensical new vocabulary words to cover these flavors. Who knows.

One theme that I've managed to parse out, though: whatever kind of fruit or weird vegetable-but-if-it-was-a-fruit this Equinox IPA of mine tastes like, the beer bears a candy-like aura, apparently. That's the most common description I've heard. Candy-like fruit. What the fruit is, of course, varies greatly, a mystery unsolvable as Serial (are you guys listening to Serial?). But okay, candy-like at least gives us a smaller pool of suspects. (What the hell is the deal with Jay, right?) Candy-like-one-of-four-things. We're getting closer: if green pepper was in the berry family of fruits but then someone made a candy to taste like that and then this is a natural recreation of that candy as a hop. Mystery solved.

Underneath the candy-like-green-pepper-berry-fruitness, at other times I can glimpse some earthy sort of character in here. A few people gave variations on 'earthy' as their primary notes, though to me it's barely a minor undertone. Pine was tossed out. So, sure, why not. Maybe this tastes like chocolate coconut? I don't know. I can't tell if Adnan is guilty. He seems so genuine! Ugh. I can't tell what Equinox tastes like. Fuck it, I give up.

No, wait!

Hold up. I got this. I can tell you guys definitively what Equinox tastes like: hops.

Anyway! I really like this one. Right mouthfeel, low/balanced bitterness, all the focus on aromatic and exotic hop flavors. I've been very happy with how my IPAs are coming out this year, particularly with my new dry-hopping process. I realized after the fact that I only gave this batch 12 days from brew to keg, but this rushed timeline (I was trying to have the beer ready in time for a party) didn't seem to hurt it at all. Hell, in retrospect, you probably could make it to the Best Buy parking lot in under 21 minutes with a beer like this.

The real fun with Equinox: what other hops do I want to blend these with?

Recipe-
5.25 Gal., All Grain
Single infusion mash at 148 F
Fermented at 68 F in temp control fridge
OG: 1.054
FG: 1.010
ABV: 5.8%

Malt-
78.3% [#9] Pilsner malt
8.7% [#1] wheat malt
4.3% [8 oz] Cara-Pils
4.3% [8 oz] corn sugar

Hop Schedule-
5 ml Hop Shot @60
2 oz. Equinox whirlpool @200 F
2 oz. Equinox whirlpool @180 F
4 oz. Equinox dry hop for five days

Yeast-
Safale US-05 American Ale

Brewing With Local Hops / Brewer's Gold Pale Ale - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Pale Ale
Brewed: 10.21.14
Kegged On: 7.31.14
ABV: 6.2%

Appearance: pale orange/gold, good clarity, moderate head
Smell: mild fruit medley, melon, berry, floral, mild earth, mild spice
Taste: sweet mild fruits, melon, berry medley, floral/citrus note in finish, low bitterness
Mouthfeel: medium body, low-med carbonation, clean finish

I still don't think anyone fully understands why hops became the unquestioned poster-child of the revitalized beer movement. Logically, I suppose, it had to be something; something to focus on, to differentiate these new beers from the mass-market old. Water wouldn't work; too mundane. Yeast (and bacteria) are finally getting their day in the sun, but brewers have always had a habit of minimizing their importance, or misunderstanding it altogether. So it had to be either grain or hops.

I've noticed, through working at Beacon Homebrew and leading brewing classes and workshops this year: people just gravitate toward hops. Growing them, brewing with them, making tea with them, making pillows out of them, filling bouncy castles with them, and so on. Grain, for whatever reason, doesn't inspire much fascination. (And in fact, a lot of people will look at a bucket of barley malt and ask: "Are those hops?") New York has a rich history of hop growing, and the hop bines are finally returning to the region. I've talked to dozens of people growing hops that don't even know how to brew beer; or who have come to a brewing class to learn how to brew, primarily because they just want to grow hops and need something to do with them. Hops catch and hold people's attention. And I guess, to be fair, hops are considerably more exciting and odd (and aromatic) up close than a barley kernel is.

So in the future, a lot of us are going to have local hops available to brew with. Many of you are probably growing them yourselves. I've made a few different beers with different local hops since this harvest, and have been trying to get a feel for this growing but immature category.

It's often difficult to explain why 'local', when it comes to hops, doesn't work quite the same way as 'local' when it comes to the quality of produce. Freshness is important with hops, obviously, but a few weeks discrepancy isn't going to be nearly so important as how they're packaged. The big growers in the Pacific Northwest aren't some agri-corp pressing hop pellets made from pure GMO gluten and MSG out of molds in a factory — they are farmers with a ton of experience who really know what they're doing, because they've been doing it for a while. Most home-growers and small farms with a couple plants are still gaining that expertise. It's important to make a distinction between hops grown for fun, to be maybe thrown in a wet-hop beer in the fall, and hops expected to be put to use on a regular basis throughout the brewing year. There's more to well-handled hops than simply throwing them in a vacuum sealer. Me and a few friends got Cascade hops from a local grower that didn't seem to have been properly dried; once in the wort and beer, they had a near-magical ability to clog everything they touched. I've never seen hops have such a clingy, magnetic, port-stuffing ability — I was half afraid they would stick to me and smother me in my sleep.

But the main concern when brewing with local hops, I think, is that hops take a number of years to mature, and so much of what's out there is still quite young, and therefore mild. This is simply the nature of a fledgling industry, and means that the next few years, and the next decade especially, will be very exciting. Young hop farms are finding what grows best, and experimenting with new breeds like Neomexicanus and Tahoma. We'll start to see more variation between the same hops grown and adapted to different regions. Even between Eastern and Western NY, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont, something as classic as Cascade will no doubt taste subtly different from farm to farm.

But for now, local hops are still finding their footing, as would be expected. Those Cascade hops (the cloggers), they basically disappeared into everything brewed with them. I brewed a wet hop ale with a large basket full of fresh-off-the-vine hop cones — of another variety, from another farm — that tasted like a kolsch. Good flavors, nothing weird, but just super mild. Again, these are all hop plants that have a lot of maturation to do. Give them a couple years, and hopefully they'll bear their own uniquely local flavors.

The best beer I've brewed with local hops so far is one that, oddly enough, uses an old and under-appreciated variety. You rarely hear any talk of Brewer's Gold as a flavor/aroma hop, but doing a single hop with this variety has been on my docket for a couple years now. It wasn't as high priority as brewing with exciting new stuff like Azacca, but I suspected BG had potential. As juicy and dank hop flavors didn't become acceptable until a couple decades ago, I've always assumed some of those past-century hops utilized heavily in early American brewing had more going on than we modern Citra-lovers realize. How could so many people describe Ballantine India Pale Ale as tasting like a modern IPA, when it couldn't have used modern hops? Cascade didn't just pop up out of thin air; it was part of an evolution in American hop terroir.

Well, Brewer's Gold is a worthy hop, if this batch is any indication. These particular hops (leaf, from the 2014 harvest) are from Camps Road Farm, the first modern commercial hop farm in Connecticut. In a super light and clean pale ale, yes, they are mild, but not in the sense of some of others I've used — not in the sense that they don't give off much flavor. It's just that the character is not exaggerated or aggressively bold in any particular direction; it seems like a summary of hop flavors, an encapsulation of a whole bunch of different things, none of which are turned up to 11. Which, it turns out, makes me for a very nice and very drinkable beer; I'm enjoying this far more than many IPAs on the market with a more intensely pungent character. It's just that I'm having an insanely difficult time pinning specific flavor descriptions upon it. Adjectives just slide off every note that I grasp at. I can barely get more specific than "fruit(?)". Maybe, uh.... floral? ... Hoppy? It might be one of the hardest-to-describe beers that I've made. But quite possibly, that intrigue is a big part of what's keeping me interested, too. It's complexities are on the subtle side, but there are certainly complexities.

In the right context, in the right base beer, there's a lot still to be said for the overlooked flavors of the past, and for the new farms in old regions newly growing old hops. One new hop farm a town up from me found a thriving, vigorous bine of (at least) 100 year-old hops growing on its property. Obviously, I demanded a sample to brew with. What will hops that have been left to nature for at least a century taste like? I have no idea, but I can't wait to find out.

Recipe-
5.25 Gal., All Grain
Single infusion mash at 148 F
Fermented at 68 F in temp control fridge
OG: 1.058
FG: 1.010
ABV: 6.2%

Malt-
85.7% [#9] Pilsner malt
9.5% [#1] wheat malt

4.8% [8 oz] Caramalt

Hop Schedule-
1 oz. Brewer's Gold @FWH

3 oz. Brewer's Gold @whirlpool

4 oz. Brewer's Gold dry hop for five days

Yeast-
Safale US-05 American Ale

Azacca Single Hop IPA - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Beer: Killshot IPA - Azacca
Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: IPA
Brewed: 5.10.14
Kegged On: 5.26.14
ABV: 6.8%

Appearance: pale golden yellow, hazy, ample head, good retention
Smell: melon, grapefruit, peach, bubblegum, fruit candy, tart apricot
Taste: orange rind, grapefruit, apricot, tangy / tart fruit, slightly grassy / earthiness
Mouthfeel: light body, medium carbonation, crisp finish, soft bitterness

Each year around the summer, I find myself knocking out a couple of single-hop IPAs and pale ales to test out the various hop varieties that have caught my attention. They're not necessarily as exciting as a multi-hop IPA with a carefully engineered recipe, but they're still valuable in tweaking the base recipe below the hops, and of course, for finding out how to use these hops in the future. While I don't often re-brew exact recipes, I have been aiming for a target and inching closer with every variation. The hops may change, but I must find the perfect vehicle with which to deliver them

Having said that, the more I brew, the more I feel like recipes are nothing more than a framework; ultimately fairly arbitrary when it comes to most styles. There are many paths to reach a similar end, and many other things that affect the resulting beer. Beyond your handling of water and yeast, there are still other factors that come into play for a homebrewer: a chaotic or interrupted brew-day, an oversight of some important addition down the road, and the packaging method you employ. I'm happy to say that my Keg Brite Tank ----> Serving Keg methodology is now working just about flawlessly. And this brew-day went very smoothly, despite it being a totally out-of-my-element demonstration at a local hop farm, Dutchess Hops. Brewing beyond the comfort of your own kitchen (or driveway), it's very easy to realize you forgot something crucial: a thermometer, oven mitts, maybe even all your hops. Leading a demonstration requires focus and organization, and it's probably inevitable that you'll miss something or other and have to improvise. Given that, this one... actually went really well. The hop farm was a beautiful venue for a brew-day, and we had a gorgeous day and a nice crowd. Other than the stress of loading my entire laboratory into my tiny car, I could get used to brewing like that all the time.

In fact, every part of this brew came together pretty perfectly. Of the other variables, with this batch I tried out a new yeast strain I'd been curious about: Wyeast's new West Coast IPA strain, which I've heard said is the Stone strain (given the name, that would make sense.) I don't have too many thoughts on it; it fermented out fine, it's nice and clean, hit the expected attenuation, and would probably make a fine substitute for 1056, though I doubt you'd be able to pick out any major differences between them. Unlike my IPAs fermented with Conan, this one is finally starting to clear after two and a half weeks in the keg. Not that I mind the haze.

That said, this is a [mostly] single hop IPA, and those will rise and fall based on the hop they showcase, of course. (My single-hop IPAs are rarely true single hops, because I strongly feel that these elusive, expensive, highly popular flavor hops are completely wasted as a bittering addition.) Given the chance to shine in one of my most-solidly-brewed IPAs to date, Azacca is really impressing me. It's not quite another Citra or Simcoe, but it's lovely and unique and crazy aromatic, and right now, that's what I'm looking for. In fact, it's one of the rare IPAs I've brewed where the nose is maybe better than the flavor — it's explosively juicy, full of sweet fruit notes, almost candy-like, as described above. Unlike some comparable varieties, Azacca isn't so much tropical as just ripe and tangy. One friend described it as "tart apricot," and went on to suggest that such a profile is a running theme in my beers, which is probably true. But he wasn't the only one to get apricot character out of this. So let's go with apricot as the main theme. There's a bit of grassy and earthy character towards the back, and I think how you structure your beers will affect how high the different volume knobs were set. I'm favoring the fruity character here, with a very clean malt base, low bitterness, and a touch of sweetness to accentuate it, but Azacca has more depth than just that.

Most importantly, I think Azacca will pair well with a number of hops. Citra immediately springs to mind, Apollo, Centennial, just about any C-hop, probably Simcoe, though Amarillo sounds a bit redundant to me. Time to order another pound.


Recipe-
5.25 Gal., All Grain
Brewed 5.10.2014
Mashed at 148 degrees for 60 minutes
Fermented at 68 F
OG: 1.061
FG: 1.009
ABV: 6.8%

Malt-
84.4% [9.5#] 2-row malt
6.7% [12 oz] white wheat malt
4.4% [8 oz] Golden Naked Oats
4.4% [8 oz] corn sugar

Hop Schedule-
0.5 oz Warrior @FWH
4 oz Azacca hop stand for 45 minutes
1.5 oz Azacca dry hop for 5 days [primary]
2.5 oz Azacca dry hop for 5 days [brite tank]

Yeast-
Wyeast West Coast IPA

Shrunken Heady Topper - Tasting Notes

Beer: Shrunken Heady Topper
Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: Session IPA
Brewed: 3.23.2014
Kegged: 4.14.2014
ABV: 5%

Appearance: hazy orange, murky, thick creamy head, good retention
Smell: rich fruity hops, peach, mango, berries, melon, very little dankness
Taste: fruity hops, peach, melon, berry, subtle sweet malt, mild bitterness, lingering richness
Mouthfeel: medium carbonation, medium body, light, soft finish

For all the excellent advice dropped by John Kimmich in interviews, perhaps the most important statement he made was something no homebrewer can really account for in their recipe planning. With fields of hops devoted exclusively to Heady Topper, the Alchemist's beer will theoretically find more consistency and grow incrementally further apart from other IPAs brewed with the same types of hops. As homebrewers, most of us don't take into account the variety within varieties, because most of the time... how could we? We know that noble hops grown abroad and domestically will not taste the same, but what about different Simcoe crops from different farms around the northwest? (What about when patents start expiring years from now and we can grow Simcoe and other popular hops in the northeast US?) Homebrewers don't generally have personal relationships with our suppliers, and short of stock-piling large quantities of a good crop from a single source, we're usually not in a position to be too picky.

Add to that the complications of storage and supply: I buy most hops by the pound now, which means I can keep many of the hops I really like in stock, but this often leaves me with a few dubiously-packaged (vacuum-sealed) ounces that I just can't use up as fast as I maybe should.

Point being, cloning beer is a rather complicated undertaking, adding a whole bunch of factors when you're trying to hit two targets (good beer, and good beer that closely resembles an existing good beer.) Consistency is doubly hard when you aren't brewing the same thing consistently.

[To paraphrase Tenacious D: "This is not the greatest beer in the world, no. This is just a tribute."]

I don't feel too bad about this not being a perfect clone of the basic Heady essence, but it does make me wonder whether the major changes needed here (with the goal of more accurately capturing the Heady essence) are to the recipe itself, or just to the various techniques and tools and fumbling start to kegging that go into making and serving [my] beer. But after I gave a pint of this to a friend and asked them to describe it — without said friend having any idea what the batch might be — and their first thought was "it kind of reminds me of that Alchemist beer," it's reassuring to think that the ratios and timing of my hop bill are at least on the right track. Let's say 92%, this time.

Aroma-wise, Actual Heady strikes me as pretty heavy on the Columbus and Simcoe, more dank and resinous than any of my versions have been. Heady drinks so juicily, especially when fresh, that I often forget just how dank it actually is — but evoking a comparison [to this lighter, softer beer] definitely draws out the dank. That dankness is contained mostly within the aroma, with the flavor dropping that juicy succulence that sticks with me. Fresh Heady is like a cold bubbly glass of juice smoothie, with a heavy focus on creamy orange and rich melon, mango and grapefruit. There's just enough bitterness to balance it out, but it's hardly over the top.

Shrunken Heady is a bit like all of that, but slighty re-arranged, a recognizable but imperfect facsimile. Anyway, since I was only trying to capture the spirit of Heady Topper in a smaller, more sessionable form, I'm not going to put too much weight into the side-by-side comparison. The main differences come in Shrunken Heady Topper with the mouthfeel and drinkability; it definitely doesn't have the same bite or bitterness, and as a result the taste seems a little... subtler. You could call it cleaner, or you could call it muted, but it's obvious that it's a much lighter beer, and it finishes more rich than bitter. Dankness and resin is almost non-existent. The less crisp bitterness, with less heft and bite at the end, means the body comes across as... not thin, but smoother. This is more juicy, more focused on the citrusy soft fruit character — though notably the same juice smoothie blend of creamy orange, rich melon, mango and grapefruit, just in slightly different arrangements. The bitternesss could be dialed up maybe just a notch, to help provide some more footing once the aromatics begin to fade a few weeks in.

And I'm afraid they have — my kegging technique is still not perfect. Surprisingly, and a little frustratingly, the aroma in the first kegged IPA I made held up better over time, and that beer may have actually been better overall. How does that happen? I clogged the diptube of that beer four times before I got it to pour, which is telling of the amount of hop matter that remained in the beer during its whole cycle. Here, I over-compensated, filtering the hop matter out at every opportunity, and perhaps squeezing too many hops into too little space a few times, all for the sake of, you know, being able to pour the beer in the end. There doesn't seem to be an easy solution from my perspective — the ability of the hop character to fully permeate the beer clearly suffered from stuffing the hops into muslin bags (in the boil) and a stainless steel mesh filter (for the dry-hop), which are I things I have never really bothered with before. This is one of those beers where you throw an obscene amount of hops into it and, despite the great flavor and aroma, you can't help but have that nagging thought: that's all I got out of those?

Kimmich says that he doesn't add nearly the amount of hops that he sees in some clone recipes, so maybe we're still over-compensating. I wonder if that over-compensation helps to make up for process differences, or if whatever it is he's doing to dry-hop is even possible to duplicate on the homebrew scale. I wonder what I'm going to do with the insane amount of hops in my freezer before they get old. I wonder if I need to learn something from every batch, or just be happy with having a couple gallons of a beer that tastes great. Even if this does fade a bit, I'm quite happy with its proximity to Full Size Heady. I feel like only a few small tweaks are really needed to really get there — if the full Heady is what you're after.


For the recipe and original notes on this beer, click here.

Shrunken Heady Topper Recipe, Plus New Tips from John Kimmich

There are always a number of factors at work when a beer explodes into the craft beer consciousness, shooting up the rankings and dominate "top" lists. There are a lot of factors and explanations and circumstances that allow some beers to fare better — and spread faster — than others. Heady Topper, The Alchemist, and John Kimmich all have a complex and fascinating story. But I think the reason Heady has the huge following it does now is as straight-forward as it is complex. This is a beer that has it both ways.

Heady Topper rewards the type of beer nerd that sits down to analyze and elaborate. It is deep, it is multi-layered, it is unique and welcomes you with a unique hop personality that other IPAs may imitate, though they don't quite get all the nuances and inflections right. When you get a really good can of Heady Topper (and certainly, you don't always), it represents the IPA's true self, pristine, and other IPAs veer into the uncanny valley of imperfect facsimile. Yes — I really enjoy a can of Heady Topper, to the point of going on record waxing poetic about it. Not necessarily because I think it is the best beer in the world or anything. You see, for all its juicy hop glory, Heady is also among the most refreshing and drinkable beers I know. Set a fresh can of Heady in front of me and I will be challenged not to empty that beautiful silver cylinder in an easy five minutes. Forget pilsners — this imperial IPA is my perfect summer camping beer. Or lawnmower beer. Or whenever beer. (Though narrowly shut out of my favorite beach beer.)

Except, whoops, it's still an 8% ABV imperial, and you'll notice sooner or later. Heady Topper drinks like a session IPA that forgot it's supposed to leave you intact for the rest of the session. So my inspiration for creating a beer called "Shrunken Heady Topper" should be pretty obvious, right?

I've had this idea for a long long time — I think almost since last summer's homebrew club attempt to clone Heady. The resulting brew from that collaboration was promising, and delicious, but the recipe was not quite there yet. We'll likely do another group attempt this summer, hopefully trying a few different variations on an updated Heady recipe. But before we get to that, I wanted to do a riff on Heady that wouldn't punish me too much for accidentally killing a fourpack in one night (if my beer came in fourpacks.) I waited, biding my time, until I got a kegging system and improved my technique for aroma preservation in IPAs, treating last month's Troika IPA as something of a test batch. I wanted to do this right. When Troika IPA was a pretty solid success, I decided it was time to give Shrunken Heady Topper a go.

The timing turned out to be perfect, as Chop & Brew recently posted a video of John Kimmich speaking in  Nashville, TN, October 2013, for the Music City Brew Off.

So the changes to this recipe are coming from three directions: the need to shrink the ABV of Shrunken Heady Topper down to around 5% while maintaining a similar body and presence, to improve upon the closeness of the hop bill based on my hunches from the last recipe, and to incorporate whatever new info we've gleaned from Alchemist mastermind Kimmich.

Collected from the video, here's a few things we've / I've learned:

Conan is also known as VPB-1188, and the strain was originally sourced from an English beer / brewery that Greg Noonan was particularly fond of. Kimmich makes it sound like the yeast had been with Noonan since opening the Vermont Pub & Brewery in 1988. (My guess: "VPB-1188" simply indicates the date and place when Conan first began its American conquest.) Kimmich has been using Conan for some 20 years now, which is pretty incredible to me. Almost since I started culturing the yeast myself, I've wondered where exactly The Alchemist gets their re-ups from. Even now they're probably not big enough for a full in-house lab, and they certainly wouldn't have had one in the early brewpub days. Larger yeast companies serve as yeast banks as well, and it seems likely that White Labs (or some other yeast bank... anyone know what other companies might even be options?) has had Conan in its vaults for 20+ years, potentially. They probably can't sell it themselves due to the proprietary nature of yeast banking, but someone has it. (This leads to the interesting scenario of other yeast companies harvesting Conan independently, from cans of Heady Topper, and banking it at White Labs separate from the original isolates of Conan. Which leads to some interesting ownership questions: at what point could White Labs [or another large yeast company] start selling it themselves from outside sources, or are they locked into mere banking of various incarnations of the same strain?)

Kimmich recommends a few yeast strains that he finds close to the character of Conan. First off is "Wyeast British Ale III," which I don't believe is the exact name of a strain, so far as my Googling can dig up. I believe he perhaps meant to say London Ale III, a strain offered by Wyeast that rumors say Hill Farmstead may use — and Shaun Hill apparently once also had access to Conan, as I've also heard, so that would kind of make sense? Kimmich also recommends German Ale for a similar character, and even just based on the Wyeast page for it, this sounds worth trying. At some point in the future I'll hopefully get to do a split batch comparing these various strains in one base beer.

On to water. Kimmich acknowledges that he slaughters a virgin in every brew before mashing in, but for most of us, this is already standard process. (Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Brettanomyces R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn.) He says to aim for a mash ph of 5.1 to 5.3 — presumably he means at mash temps, as 5.4 - 5.6 ph is considered standard at room temp measurement. Having just bought a ph meter, I'm still getting the hang of recording my actual mash ph (as opposed to the mash ph as simply calculated by Bru'n water), but he makes it clear that any beer over the proper mash ph will be a "muddled piece of shit," and it's best to err on the low side. Fair enough.

As far as the hops: you'll maybe remember that that last recipe my club brewed, based mostly on the intrepid work of Signpost Brewing and HomeBrewTalk members, used a massive amount of hops, something like 1 pound per five gallons. Kimmich immediately debunks the statement that Heady uses "tons of hops," suggesting that the ratios he's heard from some clone recipes are far higher than what the brewery actually adds to the beer. Part of this is almost certainly scale and technique — as one might assume from a brewery at the top of its game, Kimmich alludes to "proprietary techniques" he's developed for dry-hopping, though it's left pretty open what those may be. He does say concretely that they dry-hop for 4 to 5 days, never more. Whirlpooling lasts for about an hour. The Alchemist uses only pellets, never whole hops, and does not add any hops during the boil, only CO2 hop extract (and all the hops after flameout.) I seem to be all out of Hop Shots, so I just used a fraction of an ounce of CTZ for FWH.

Almost all those pointers fall under the category of "general advice," and none really help us to lock down the unique makeup of Heady Topper. But that's fine — if I were in a position like Kimmich is, I'd give advice of the exact same sort. Having a mystery neatly unraveled for you is no fun, and if he can teach improved brewing techniques to those seeking simply to clone his recipe, it's ultimately best for everyone.

The main take-away, for me, is that my hopping techniques can always be improved, though dry-hopping in a secondary "conditioning" keg purged with CO2 is a fine start, and at least puts me on the same general plane as most breweries in regards to the oxygen-thwarting tools available to me. While I scaled down the total amount of hops in Shrunken Heady Topper already due to that whole "shrunken" part, I'm probably still using more than Kimmich would, from the sounds of it. I'm okay with that. Efficiency isn't as good at the homebrew scale, and I also don't have access to the freshest, highest-quality hops that the Alchemist is now contracting for. To a homebrewer, a few extra bucks and an extra ounce or two of hops isn't all that big of a deal. Not if it makes 5 gallons of beer emulating a world-class IPA.

Assuming I don't screw anything up here, and the results are anything close to actual Heady Topper (but lower ABV), the real question is: can I make the keg last more than one highly unproductive weekend?


Update: Tasting notes posted here.


Recipe-
5.33 Gal., All Grain
Brewed 3.23.2014
Brewhouse Efficiency: 76%
Mashed at 150 degrees for 65 minutes
Fermented at 66 F, let warm slowly to 70 after 3 days
OG: 1.049
FG:
ABV: 5~%

Malt-
85.3% (8 lbs) Pearl malt
10.7% (1 lb) white wheat malt
4% (6 oz) CaraMalt

Hop Schedule-
0.2 oz CTZ @FWH
0.5 oz CTZ @0
0.5 oz Simcoe @0
0.5 oz Apollo @0
0.5 oz CTZ @ whirlpool
1 oz Simcoe @ whirlpool
1 oz Amarillo @ whirlpool
0.5 oz Apollo @ whirlpool
1 oz CTZ dry hop
1 oz Simcoe dry hop
1 oz Apollo dry hop
1 oz Amarillo dry hop

Yeast-
The Alchemist Conan Ale Yeast

Citra / Centennial / Apollo IPA - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Beer: Troika IPA

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: American IPA
Brewed: 1.29.14
Kegged On: 2.16.14
ABV: 5.7%

Appearance: orange gold, soft lingering haze, ample head with good retention
Smell: bright citrus hops, orange, tropical fruit, mango, grapefruit, slight dankness
Taste: orange citrus, tropical rich fruit, mango, sweet creamsicle, creamy malts
Mouthfeel: full body, creamy presence, medium carbonation, very soft bitterness

In spite of their ubiquitous presence in craft beer bars and the style's unrelenting popularity, it's actually not all that easy to find a really great IPA — unless you happen to live close to the right breweries. (In my opinion, anyway.) Non-fans are quick to dismiss IPAs as an easy style to brew, because you can just dump a bunch of hops in to cover up flaws. On some level, this is true: it's easier to brew an average / acceptable IPA than with most styles. Still, I maintain that it's incredibly hard to brew a great IPA — as evidenced, in my humble opinion, by the fact that there are so few breweries doing so. The market is littered with thousands of average IPAs.

Not all of this is the fault of brewer's exactly. The dirty secret of IPAs is that packaging and freshness can cripple an otherwise solid IPA just as readily as brewing flaws.

So, needless to say, I'm still chasing the harpoon-studded tail of the Perfect IPA, and likely will be for some time. But I'm getting closer. At the risk of sounding full of myself, let's just say that it's getting harder and harder to go the bar and order an IPA that doesn't leave me feeling disappointed. 

That's not entirely me being a smarmy pretentious beer snob, though: we homebrewers have a few advantages when it comes to brewing IPAs. For starters — and this is a big one — there's no guessing as to how fresh the beer is. No shipping, no sitting in a cellar, no getting neglected at the bottom of a tap list for weeks until someone kills the keg. (Hopefully no dirty taplines, either.) And more importantly, any beer we brew is going to be exactly catered to our own tastes. So long as we have the skill, we can make the beer we want to drink far more specifically than any commercial brewer ever could.

But there are cons, too — significant cons in the case of IPAs. While I think that my IPAs have generally gotten better and better over time, there was always something naggingly not-perfect about the hop character, something in the aroma that didn't jell quite as coherently as I knew it could, and some lack of vibrance that made the beer fall apart far too soon. However good they were for the first week or two, there was something that seemed to 'muddle' the hop character and hold it back from transcendence. I always suspected that that muddling, limiting factor was oxygen. O2 is Kryptonite to hops, and regardless of the CO2 blanket that helpfully protects our beers during and after fermentation, oxygen is going to get into your beer once you start dry-hopping and bottling. 

And this, ultimately, is why I started kegging. Not convenience, not the time-saving, but simply to have more tools to protect my IPAs from oxygen-pickup. 

Troika IPA, a showcase of a three-hop combo that I'm quite fond of, was more of a test batch than anything, and I tried to use up some old-ish hops I had sitting in the freezer just in case I screwed something up and turned my keg into a beer fire hose. Which is not to say that it was a throw-away recipe: the combination of Citra, Centennial and Apollo hops is incredibly appealing to me, and I think one of the many secrets of great IPAs is finding a few complimentary hops that work to enhance each other's best qualities, rather than competing for attention. Citra is a bit funky, Centennial is distinctly New American, and Apollo is extremely dank, but all are very fruit-forward hops with a bent toward orange citrus character. Each adds tropical touches and a juicy character, but together they cohere wonderfully, creating a flavor that's distinct and memorable while also super refreshing. Fermented by Conan yeast and with a decent percentage of wheat in the grain bill to give the brew a creamy mouthfeel, there are definitely shades of Heady Topper in this one — both beers I get a pronounced "creamy orange citrus juice" quality from. The Citra, Centennial and Apollo hop combo is one I will be using again — as far as IPA concepts go, I think "Troika" has been firmly established in my roster.  

Which is not to say it still can't be improved. I would be neglectful if I didn't mention a few shortcomings with this batch that were mostly the result of me being scatterbrained lately. As I mentioned, I dashed this one off quick just to test out my new kegging techniques and equipment, so I was careless with a few things. Intended to be a stronger IPA than it came out, I had meant to add some corn sugar to this after a few days in primary. Not only did I forget that addition, but the reliably-unreliable Conan yeast decided to finish a few points high on this batch. With a terminal gravity of 1.014, it's noticeably fuller than it should be, finishing with a touch of lingering sweetness that the low level of bitterness doesn't tame. I love the soft creamy mouthfeel of the beer, but I need to achieve the same thing with a lower FG and less residual sugar. The wheat is already there to pull off that trick, so it shouldn't be hard to fix most of these issues with the next rebrew.

While I still have a few adjustments to make to my technique (I clogged up four dip-tubes with this batch), my new CO2-blanketed dry-hopping technique is already paying off. There was a noticeable improvement in the hop aroma here, both in coherence, vibrancy and longevity. It's the best put-together IPA I've made so far, and one of my favorite-tasting batches of beer. Perhaps the best indication of its quality: I killed this keg a week before I published this post about it. That marks the first time I've ever finished drinking an entire batch before I could actually blog about it... and that's saying something.


Recipe-
5 Gal., All Grain
Brewed 1.29.2014
Brewhouse Efficiency: 76%
Mashed at 150 degrees for 70 minutes
Fermented at 66 F, let warm slowly to 70 after 3 days
OG: 1.057
FG: 1.014
ABV: 5.7%

Malt-
87.8% (9 lbs) 2-row malt
9.8% (1 lb) white wheat malt
2.4% (4 oz) Caramalt

Hop Schedule-
0.25 oz Apollo @FWH
0.75 oz Apollo @0
3 oz Citra @ whirlpool
2 oz Citra dry hop for 6 days
2 oz Centennial dry hop for 6 days

Yeast-
The Alchemist Conan Ale Yeast

New Hops Alert: Azacca, Vic Secret, ADHA 484 / 527 / 529 / 871 / 881

Why am I making a whole separate blog post about a couple new hop varieties when Bear Flavored's illustrious and comprehensive "Ultimate Guide to Hop Varieties / Hop Cheat Sheet" already exists? Well, since I first published and researched my hop guide all those years ago, many new hops have hit the scene, and I've debated how to best aggregate all these experimental varieties with little info and negligible documented brewing experience.

The problem with including experimental hop varieties into an ever-changing online guide is that many of them will be discontinued after a few growing seasons. These hops will pop up in test batches of some commercial pale ales over the next year, find their way to a few online retailers, and maybe even stick around long enough to be given a name. Sometimes, an HBC 369 turns into Mosaic and officially blows up the brewing world. Other times these hops will be beta tested for a growing season or two and then quietly disappear. But as homebrewers, we actually have some power to affect the fate of these hops, as their unofficial beta-testers. So let's see what the future of hops looks like this year.

Most of this round originates from the American Dwarf Hop Association, and one of them, ADHA 483, is apparently already significant enough to get that big push into having an actual name.


Azacca (ADHA 483)

AA Range: 14 - 16%
Beta: 5.4%
Cohumulone: N/A
Total Oil: 1.8 ml/100g
Characteristics: Fresh citrus, tangerine, mango, grapefruit, piney, spicy, pineapple.
Other Notes: Sounds like this is the best-suited of this new lot (from the ADHA) for American IPAs, so it's no surprise that it's the first to get an actual name.

ADHA 484

AA Range: 11 - 12%
Beta: 3.5%
Cohumulone: 46.8%
Total Oil: N/A
Characteristics: Cedar, wood, bubblegum, spice.
Other Notes: Intriguing descriptors here. Sounds appropriate for English beers, or oak-aged beers.

ADHA 527

AA Range: 14 - 15%
Beta: 4.5%
Cohumulone: 36.8%
Total Oil: N/A
Characteristics: Anise, licorice, spice, mint, floral.

ADHA 529

AA Range: 11%
Beta: 3.2%
Cohumulone: 25.5%
Total Oil: N/A
Characteristics: Sweet coconut, lemon, mint, green herbal tea.

ADHA 871

AA Range: 13.4%
Beta: 4%
Cohumulone: 27.4%
Total Oil: N/A
Characteristics: Floral, citrus, strong mint, herbal, mellow spice, sage, slight lemon.
Other Notes: Should be a contender for some saisons.

ADHA 881

AA Range: 16.3%
Beta: 7.3%
Cohumulone: 35.4%
Total Oil: N/A
Characteristics: Banana, pear, peach, herbal, spice.
Other Notes: First time I've seen banana as a hop descriptor!

Vic Secret

AA Range: 14 - 17%
Beta: 6.1 - 7.8%
Cohumulone: 51 - 56 %
Total Oil: 2.2 - 2.8 ml/100g
Characteristics: Pineapple, passionfruit, pine. Earthy when used in boil. "Lighter and less dominant than Galaxy."
Other Notes: The grower notes: "the clean, distinct fruit and pine characters of Vic Secret are best accessed by dry hopping or whirlpool additions." Also, not really the best name for a hop.

Mosaic / Nelson Sauvin / Columbus IPA (Solipsism #2) - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: American IPA
Brewed: 10.08.2013
Bottled On: 10.28.2013
ABV: 5.6%

Appearance: amber gold, chill haze darkens hue, ample head, good retention
Smell: soft sweet berry fruit, peach, floral, tropic citrus, kiwi, dank
Taste: soft berry fruit, tropic citrus, kiwi, creamy candy peach, dry dank finish 
Mouthfeel: thin-ish body, sharp / over-carbed bite follows soft mouthfeel, crisp bitterness

Sometimes your best batches of homebrew can also be the most frustrating. When you come extremely close to the target you wanted to hit, the tiny, avoidable distractions become head-slappers rather than lessons learned. I love the hop character in Solipsism, my latest stab at an American IPA, and ultimately, it's one of my favorite-tasting batches in a while (as I hoped and suspected it would be). But it's not perfect, and its silly imperfections nag me.

Ever since brewing my Columbus-hopped brown ale and Mosaic single hop IPA earlier this year, I've wanted to double-down on berry-ish hops with a combination of Nelson Sauvin, Mosaic and Columbus. There was really no chance I wouldn't love how they worked together: Mosaic provides a unique, super-fruity berry character that can't quite be pinned down; Nelson still reigns as my favorite hop, combining tangy tropic fruit with a funky dankness; while Columbus is both dank and fruity in entirely different ways from the others. So to get it out of the way early, the ultimate focus of this beer is an easy success: I really enjoy this hop combo. The timing of the additions will get some re-arranging next time, but I think I'd stick with the same combination for this beer. I'm getting closer — really close, possibly — to that Ideal IPA I have floating around in my head.

But for me, the real question when brewing an IPA is usually: did I get my money's worth? Could the hop character be clearer, more vibrant, more explosive? Part of this is refining recipes (which I'll get to in a minute) and water profiles; honing in on the target you want. The timing of hop additions is certainly important, as is the balance of bitterness against your hard/soft water profile, and the body provided by your malts. But when it comes to keeping hoppy beers in their best state after all that recipe formulation (ie, free of oxygen) sometimes it seems my equipment is just getting in the way.

For example: yep, I'm still bottling with my ol' bottling bucket, like some kind of luddite. The hoppier a batch of beer, the greater the likelihood that it will suffer from the oxygen exposure that homebrew typically encounters when you can't flush with CO2. I grow more and more concerned about this with each hoppy beer I make, though perhaps it's the defensive ego part of my mind cushioning myself again the eventuality that my beers aren't nuclear powerhouses of world-class hop clarity. (Gotta keep reasonable expectations, you know?) So even though I have no means of actually serving beer from a keg at this point, I did start buying up random articles of kegging equipment, including a CO2 tank. This CO2 tank was used to sort-of-flush the bottling bucket before racking this beer for bottling. I'm already questioning how much this helped — the hop character here is really tasty, and it doesn't seem to be fading as quickly as some of my IPAs have, but I can't say that it enabled any extra consistency.

Those silly mistakes I mentioned? I had designed this recipe, originally, as an IPA around 7% ABV. At the last minute, I decided I didn't need to brew such a strong IPA, figuring a session-ish version would suit me just fine. Which is all well and good, but I didn't adequately adjust the recipe to accommodate this change. Conan typically gives me a fairly creamy mouthfeel, which I had counted on somewhat, but it's clear that that yeast has a mind of its own. The result is a beer with the character of a full-blown IPA, but a body that's just a bit too thin. Again, not the hugest flaw in the world, and easily fixed in a re-brew, but irksome. My second annoyance isn't even a complaint, but a random inevitability of bottling homebrew on a small scale. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, carbonation varies from bottle to bottle. Most batches, this doesn't happen. When it does, I just kind of chalk it up to the arbitrary whims of the Yeast Gods. But it happened here, and every so often I'll open a bottle that's annoyingly close to flat, or pours with an annoyingly dense, huge head.

None of these things, however, are stopping me from drinking this batch in near-record time.

Recipe-
4.25 Gal., All Grain
Brewed 10.28.2013
Brewhouse Efficiency: 76%
Mashed at 148 degrees for 70 minutes
Fermented at 67 F, let warm slowly to 72 after 4 days
OG: 1.053
FG: 1.011
ABV: 5.4%

Malt-
88% (7 lbs) 2-row malt
6% (8 oz) Golden Naked Oats

6% (8 oz) Caramalt

Hop Schedule-
5 ml / 50 IBU Hop Shot @60
2 oz Mosaic @0 min + 30 min whirlpool

2 oz Nelson Sauvin @0 min + 30 min whirlpool

2 oz Nelson Sauvin dry hop for 7 days

1 oz Mosaic dry hop for 7 days

2 oz Columbus dry hop for 3 days

Yeast-
The Alchemist Conan Ale Yeast

DC Brau - On The Wings Of Armageddon Imperial IPA Review

Brewery: DC Brau (DC)
Style: Imperial IPA
ABV: 9.2%
Grade: A

So many considerations go into a beer that it's refreshing to see some brewers still list the basic ingredients (varieties of malts and hop) on their website or packaging. It gives you an idea what to expect, the over-arching theme, but it doesn't give away every secret layer of nuance. There is definitely something to be said for those elusive, top-secret beer recipes, products of years of mixing and matching obscure ingredients. Some beers may never be unraveled. But there is rarely only one way to make a great beer, and others rely on a few malts, a single hop, and are still perfect. 

On The Wings Of Armageddon, an imperial IPA (happily presented in cans) from DC Brau Brewing Co, is brewed with Falconers Flight hops, and a grain bill of pale malt, C-60, Cara-Pils and wheat. Pretty typical for the style. Now, Falconer's Flight is technically a blend of many of the most popular American "C" hops, so calling it a single hop beer may be a bit misleading. But whatever blend of hops Falconer's Flight contains, it's hard to think of a better cross-section of American hop flavors than what OTWOA brings.

A quintessential IPA in its general character, ripe with pine, grapefruit, citrus, the usual, etc., and so on, there's happily still an undercurrent of nuanced, delicate flavors here. Beyond a blast of dank bitterness, there's still a quieter berry / melon character that I've come to expect from Simcoe and Columbus hops (at least one of which I'm guessing is represented in that blend). OTWOA finishes dry and substantially bitter, but without stepping into the over-saturated realm of cloying, or stickily resinous. This Armageddon is a hop-bomb, but it' real quick about wiping out your palate; no unnecessary cruelty here. And that's just how I like my taste buds destroyed.

Availability: Rotating release. 12 ounce cans.

100% Brett Trois IPA - Recipe & Tasting Notes

Brewery: Bear Flavored
Style: 100% Brett / IPA
Brewed: 8.31.2013
ABV: 5.8%

Appearance: pale yellow gold, slight haze, minimal head but good retention
Smell: tropical fruit, musty pineapple, mango, sweet berry, citrus hops, mild funky esters
Taste: dry tropical fruit, fruit-flesh, guava, mango, pineapple, citrus hops, clean finish
Mouthfeel: light body, slightly thin, low-med carbonation, crisp

I may not get to them often, but I actually have a pretty solid idea of what my "house beers" would be — if I had the time and capacity to get to them more often. One of my main brews would definitely be Cairn, a concept I thought up as soon as I heard about Brett Trois, described as intensely fruity and ideal for 100% Brett fermentations. Trois is a relatively new (to us) Brettanomyces strain isolated from Drie Fonteinein (it's also known, less obscurely, as "Drie" in some circles). The goal with Cairn is a beer that's fairly pale, light-weight and balanced, and thus highly drinkable, but that pairs the complex juicy-fruitiness of Trois with bright, dank hops.

My first brew of Cairn, roughly a year ago, was one of the most pleasant surprises up to that point in my brewing career, so I didn't have a ton to "correct" from that recipe. My main concern with 100% Brett beers is the relationship between yeast and hop flavor — Brett seems to get a little bit combative when you dump much of anything else in a beer, and chomps up a lot of hop character very quickly. I've noticed this in all my hoppy + Brett beers, and I've noticed it in commercial 100% Brett beers, like Crooked Stave's Hop Savant, and some local examples popping up around New York. And I'm not talking bitterness, here — it's the really pleasant, subtle hop nuances that Brett seems to chew through, sadly. The stuff I'm ultimately looking for. It's not that you can't tell these beers were brewed with a healthy dose of hops, but a huge chunk of the expected hop flavor is clearly missing, replaced by the intense tropic fruitiness of Trois. Certainly not a bad trade, but the real jackpot, in my opinion, would be getting both in full force. 

So, one of my big goals in refining Cairn, and any other subsequent hoppy 100% Brett beers, is to bring out the best qualities in both the Brett and my hops. My strategy here was to knock out as much Brett in suspension as possible prior to dry-hopping. Whirlpool hopping still goes a long way in adding some background hoppiness here, and I will definitely always throw a few ounces in at flameout. But when Brett is chomping away during primary fermentation, a lot of that flavor is going to be lost no matter how many hops you hit it with. Drop out some of that Brett post-ferment, hit it with a big dose of dry hops, and then your aromatic hop compounds might stand a chance.

That's the idea, at least. To achieve this, I waited about two and a half weeks for the beer to hit final gravity (100% Trois beers don't take long), then used gelatin and cold crashed at 38 degrees for three days. Prior to the cold crash, my Trois had formed a nice funky pellicle. Afterwards, the beer was clear as sunbeams over a mountaintop, and in went the hops. To improve upon this technique even further — if you have a kegging setup (or even just a spare carboy), you could rack upon hitting terminal gravity, cold crash + gelatin in a CO2-flushed keg, and then dry hop. After racking off the initial yeast cake and then crashing out the Brett, there's less chance it'll rise up again to disturb those precious hop aromatics.

The technique was a success, though a limited success. One of my most trusted friends and beer tasters told me that this is the hoppiest-tasting 100% Brett beer he's ever had, and while I'm not entirely sure I would claim the same thing, but it's definitely in contention. (I can think of a few Brett IPAs with a much punchier hop bitterness, but that wasn't what I was aiming for here). So even if this is the hoppiest I'll ever manage to get a 100% Brett beer like this, I'm quite happy with the results: the pairing is just so pleasant and refreshing. A few minor tweaks remain to the core recipe: more wheat or body-enhancing malts might still be a good idea, and I undercarbed this batch slightly, though that's a minor fix. As far as my original goal goes —an ideal hiking beer — I really couldn't be much more satisfied. I took this one across the country to Colorado on a recent trip, hauled it upstate and up a few mountains, and it was entirely worth it.

One final evaluation, and this is an important one. So, I've established that hops don't quite come across the same way when strained through a 100% Brett fermentation: their character gets transmogrified into something different. With previous batches, I've still gone the route I would for a "regular" IPA of this ilk, selecting hop varieties that are intense and tropical and complimentary. With this batch, I used quite a bit of Nelson Sauvin, which remains one of my very favorite hop varieties, and a variety which compliments the flavor of Trois exceedingly well. Nonetheless, I'm starting to think it's just not worth using such an exceedingly rare, pricey hop, when the Nelson character becomes muted in many ways. Nelson, Mosaic, Galaxy, Citra — all will taste great, and would be fun to use as a big dry-hop dose, but you aren't going to get the same bang for your buck. And at this point, I've basically concluded that Cairn should perhaps stick to some of the more classic varieties — albeit intensely flavorful varieties like Columbus and Centennial — and leave those expensive, scarce All Stars to shine on their own.

Recipe-
4.5 Gal., All Grain
Brewhouse Efficiency: 80%
Mashed at 148 F for 65 minutes
Boiled for 60 minutes
Fermented at 70 degrees F
OG: 1.054
FG: 1.009
ABV: 5.8%

Malt-
62.5% (5 lbs) 2-row malt
25% (2 lbs) White Wheat malt
12.5% (1 lb) CaraHell

Hop Schedule-
0.25 oz CTZ @60
1 oz CTZ @ hop stand for 30 min

2 oz Nelson Sauvin @ hop stand for 30 min
2 oz CTZ dry hop for 8 days

1 oz Centennial dry hop for 8 days
2 oz Nelson Sauvin dry hop for 4 days

Yeast-
White Labs Brett Brux Trois