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.

What is Brett IPA Supposed to Taste Like?

When I agreed to be the brewmaster at Kent Falls Brewing Co., the first thing that Barry, the co-owner and brewery manger, told me was: "Make sure the beer is as confusing as possible. I don't care what you brew. I don't care what it tastes like. I just want everything to be the maximum amount of confusing."

We're working at all sorts of inventive, cutting-edge ways of confounding beer consumers, like making a lightly-sour saison one of our core beers (for the mainstream Connecticut market), and releasing a refreshingly soft table saison that clocks in at only 3.8% and is dry-hopped with American hops, so if you want to call it a saison, that's fine, but if you want to call it a table beer, that works too, or if you just want to consider it a farmhouse ale, technically yes, it's that also.

Actually, those two beers have been received shockingly well, even the incredibly low-ABV saison. One of my Things lately is that over-explaining this stuff to people from the very start can be detrimental; just give the beer to them, they will taste it and realize it tastes very good, and not have to try to pretend to care about all the style complexities your inner nerd is dying to spit out in exhausting detail at them. Start with flavor and educate based on what they like and their interest level. Unfortunately, though, that only works when you're starting from a blank slate. When the person drinking the beer has half-formed preconceptions, things get trickier.

Brett IPAs are weird. Often, the very people that need to be educated on what a Brett IPA is supposed to taste like, what makes it tick, are those same beer nerds who actually sort of understand what Brettanomyces is. Lots of beer drinkers know: Brettanomyces makes beer funky. It's associated (confusingly, it turns out) with sour beer. But it isn't usually responsible for the acidity in beer, just the funk — and maybe a bigger push of tartness due to the low residual sugars it leaves behind. Brett is as weird and hard to pin down as it is intriguing and complex.

I've written about this before, but now that I'm commercially brewing a 100% Brett beer that, theoretically, thousands and thousands of people (oh shit whoa wait that's weird) are going to taste, I feel like I need to get it out there again: what is a 100% Brett beer supposed to taste like? What is it? Why is it?

100% Brett beers, in general, do not follow the rules that aged, mixed-culture Brett beers do. Being already a mouthfeel, that's hard to explain to someone over a shouted bar order. A year in a barrel with Brettanomyces simply changes a beer in ways that a quick 2-6 week fermentation (our Brett IPA only takes 7 days to ferment out completely, now that the culture has adapted) won't match. Faster, in beer, usually means less intense, sometimes possibly simpler. 100% Brett beers, fermented quickly, are in no way inferior, just different. They bear a different flavor profile. Their funk is a different kind of funk. They're maybe less intense, but their impression of Brettanomyces character is distinct and readily apparent to anyone familiar with it. I've drank enough 100% Brett beers that I think I could still pick one out of a lineup if my hair was on fire and someone was trying to put it out with a dirty hiking sock full of old trash. Trust me, 100% Brett character may be subtler, but it is unique and identifiable, just different from its aged incarnation.

In many 100% Brett beers, you will find crisp notes of zest, possibly some phenols (though most seem to prefer these beers without much of the phenolic notes), usually a hard-to-pin fruit character, and something like dried sweat. That dried sweat is tastier than it sounds, like berries that are cooling off after running a marathon. But this sweaty note, usually what I perceive as the most funky element of a 100% Brett beer as compared to an aged Brett beer, is still fairly tame and subtle, in the way that an anthropomorphic fruit sweating would be far more appealing than an actual human sweating, But, most importantly, 100% Brett beers don't usually approach full barnyard. And they might be mildly tart, at best, but not actually acidic. Brett doesn't make beer overtly sour. It may create an impression of tartness, but a 100% Brett beer is not going to be full-on sour.

That's the general gist, but each 100% Brett beer will of course be slightly different, depending on the brewer's preference and how they steer it. The general consumer is very likely not to know all this upfront, as a lot of confusion regarding Brettanomyces remains. I've heard from many brewers that this has broken them on the style. They've gotten so much misguided negative feedback, often from the very beer nerds that seek out Brett beers, they simply stopped brewing the beer. This is deeply frustrating and sad to hear. And as with any matter of education, it's up to us handsome, knowledgeable few to address this.

Personally, my goal for a Brett IPA is to have that same juicy, aromatic, fruity, refreshing, accessible, not-very-bitter-at-all-actually beverage that I already seek in a good clean IPA, but with a slight edge of Brett pushing the fruit hop character down minor paths tangential from the usual. The brunt of hops, with an undercurrent of something just slightly strange but equally refreshing. I've been working on a Brett IPA recipe for years as my perfect hiking beer, because that's what I want on top of a mountain. Refreshing, but a little wild, a little disorienting. Not cloying or clobbering or overly severe. I want a beer that tastes like a glass of juice from an unknown alien species of fruit.

That, to me, is what Kent Fall's Waymaker Brett IPA tastes like. I'll write more about this specific beer and the history behind my brewing it more extensively in the future, but for now, I just want to write about how it doesn't taste how you might expect. It's probably not nearly as funky as you'd think. While unfortunately I'm sworn to secrecy about the particular strains of Brett we're using (it's a blend of a number of strains, not one single Brett), these particular Bretts are rather clean as a primary fermenter, with just a bit of that funky zest I find in 100% Brett ferments. They work fast: the first batch was a bit funkier due to me knocking out too cold, and the batch taking longer than expected to ferment, but since then, this beer finishes up just as quickly as a Saccharomyces-fermented ale. There's an edge to the beer, like a weird glass of orange juice spiked with some guava juice, but the fruit and the citrus and the juice is very much the focus. It recreates much of the flavors of an IPA, but many of those flavors happen to come as much from the yeast as from the hops. That's the point. I can't decide whether that's the point of a 100% Brett beer to some hypothetical consumer; I can only offer that that is the point of this particular 100% Brett beer to me, as a brewer.

One Untappd review amusingly said, simply: "I've been had." I'm not even sure in which direction they were insinuating they'd been tricked, misled, which is the frustrating aspect of such things: did they think this wasn't enough of an IPA, or wasn't enough of a Brett beer? Too funky, or not funky enough? My favorite thing about this beer is how much it balances both aspects of what it is in equal portions, but maybe that's a negative to you. Either way, in either direction, I really just can't particularly allow it to bother me, because Waymaker tastes exactly like I want it to. And my job, then, is to help show drinkers what a 100% Brett beer can be, what new things it can offer, rather than playing to whatever misconceptions and erroneous goals they may have formed for it. In my mind, this is a style of beer that did not and could not have existed before, I don't know, ten years ago. Naturally, it will lead to some confusion.

What it tastes like is far more important than all the nerdy details surrounding its fermentation. What it tastes like, I hope people agree, is refreshing and juicy and interesting. Wild enough for the top of a mountain, unique enough for a tulip at the bar. So wherever it is that you drink it, whether or not it tastes like a glass of weird orange juice to you too, I just hope that you enjoy it for what it is. The same should probably be true for all beer, come to think of it.

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)

Why We Should Take Beer Styles Less Seriously

Random photo of beer of indeterminable style.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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






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