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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whatever it is, I could live inside this beer.

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Yeast-
House Lactobacillus cultures
House Brettanomyces cultures

Other-
15 g sea salt

Can You Pinpoint the Moment Your Tastes in Beer Changed?

Ghosts convene around the 2012 batch of Allagash Ghoulschip, haunting it with spooky souring microbes.

When you like something a lot, and you find other people who also like that thing a lot, it's easy to create a basic sense of community. Beer happens to be an exceptionally easy thing to bond over, especially if you brew it, but sometimes you want to dive a little deeper into a conversation than just listing some beers you've drank. In any passionate group of 'enthusiasts,' it's easy to kick off a conversation by asking the basic: "How did you get into this?" question.

Many people develop their love of (obsession with) beer over time, but I firmly believe that beer inspires such devotion largely because it is an acquired taste. We all have some vague story about how we got into beer, but these anecdotes and personal histories can often be long and a little tedious — maybe more fun to ramble about in person. I could write a very long blog post (I mean, longer than usual) about how I first discovered craft beer. But for all those years of developing my palate, discovering new things, and switching style allegiances, one night in particular stands out to me as the moment my tastes in beer really changed — or maybe solidified.

This was a few years ago, sometime in October, I think. One particular detail kind of nails the timeframe, and adds a nice bit of semi-irony that is perhaps the entire reason I remember this particular evening so well. Me and a few good friends were out for some beer events in NYC, and our first stop brought us to Blind Tiger, a wonderful (if perpetually-packed) beer nerd haven in the West Village. I forget what the exact nature of the event was, but I think it may have been an Allagash tap takeover. In any case, me and my friends were all about the Allagash Ghoulschip, an extremely rare one-off sour pumpkin beer thingy. It was a killer beer, and everyone at the table agreed that this sour beer thing was pretty neat. I had had sour beers many times before, and am one of those people that was hooked after one taste, but it was around this night that I finally began to pinpoint the specific flavors and nuances that I enjoyed about them. You know that moment when you suddenly find yourself able to go beyond "I sure do enjoy the flavor of this!" to being able to talk about it in specific beerwords?

As we sipped our spooky sours, I glanced over at a table near the window and observed two gentleman who just gave off an air of "knowing about beer." (They must have had particularly illustrious beards.) While everyone else in the room was busy killing these rare kegs trotted down from Allagash, these guys were drinking beer out of a can. What first seemed like sheer madness soon clarified, slightly, when the BeerPulse-reading portion of my mind recalled the significance of the cans in their hands. It was a beer from Vermont called Heady Topper, and the brewery that made it had just been wiped out by devastating floods only a few weeks prior. The brewery just happened to have opened a separate canning facility around the same time, and thus survived as a production brewery making only a single canned beer. I remember thinking at the time: "What a crazy situation, I hope those guys can rebound. I think I've heard that beer is pretty good, too." While we briefly considered getting a can, we had other destinations in mind, and continued on our way. One of my friends went back to the next day to see if they still had any cans. They didn't. It would be another year or so before Vermont really took over the world, and the potent double-thread of Alchemist / Farmstead would have me dreaming of northern-bound roadtrips, along with everyone else on the East Coast.

But this remains, mostly, the night that I decided I was obsessed with all things sour and funky. After our goblets of Ghoulschip at the Blind Tiger, we headed to Brooklyn for a sour beer night at a bar called Mission Dolores. There were five or so Flanders Redish and Oud Bruinish beers on tap, and it was this massive acid punch to the tongue — following the already impressive Allagash stuff — that led me to conclude these sour beers might just be my favorite style. Flanders Reds in particular really get me with their unrivaled balance of sweet and sour, the insane complexity brought out with hints of cherry, vanilla and oak. Where previously I had tried sours only to forget their names the next day, that was the night I tried Cuvee des Jacobins Rogue and decided it could not be the last time I had such a beer. I would be watching tap lists closely from then on. For when you gaze long into the sour, the sour also gazes into you.

Editor's Note: Okay, perhaps these anecdotes don't make for the most interesting stories ever, and this was kind of boring. Later on, I found a dollar, just right on the sidewalk. It was crazy.

Anyhow, there's something satisfying to me about being able to trace interests and obsessions in such personal detail. How often do we actually know why we like what we like? How many of the things we love were found when we were young, and those particular moments — the sparks of interest that lead to a hobby, or even a career — lost over time? Brewing is a unique hobby in that most people don't or can't get into it until they are older, and have already discarded a dozen previous hobbies from youth. It's a recipe for a passion and a hobby unlike any other.

Am I the only one with these lame memories, or can you trace your own personal history of changing tastes?

The Great BBA/EBY Brett Experiment - 5 Strains - Recipe & Brew Day

Update: tasting notes have been posted here.

I have always said that I want to be the equivalent of a Crazy Cat Lady when I get old(er), only with yeast instead of cats. Or maybe both, I do like cats. Regardless, I definitely want to be known around town as that weird old guy whose house is absolutely lousy with Brettanomyces. (They say you can't even set foot in the kitchen without stepping on yeast poop.) Every Halloween, I will give out vials of Brett to Trick-or-Treaters. I've at least got the crazy beard part down, so I think I'm well on my way.

However, it would seem that there are some people out there who are well ahead of me. For instance: Switzerland-based brewer Sam, who runs the blog Eureka Brewing. That dude is currently rocking around 100 strains of yeast and bacteria in his home lab — seriously impressive. Many are Saccharomyces strains from commercial sources, while many others are isolates from commercial wild ales — wild bugs in a commercial package, the content of which is anyone's guess. Well, Sam has isolated about 20 strains of Brett from these varied sources, and most of these have probably never been brewed with in isolation before, by anyone. Crazy. 

But what does one do with 100 different strains of yeast and bacteria, especially when it is not Halloween — and thus judgmental, close-minded neighbors might not think so highly of you handing vials out to children? (Fermenting stuff is a great Science Faire experiment, guys). Enter Jeffrey Crane of Bikes, Beers, and Adventures, who you may remember from that time he gave me some Custersianus. 

In Sam's words, from his original blog post on the Great Brett Experiment: "Since I haven’t actually brewed with any of the strains yet and kind of postponed the testing part for later on, we both agreed on an experimental setup to test all the different Brettanomyces strains in a single Brett-beer experiment. The basic idea is to brew a rather simple beer, split the batch and ferment the split parts with individual Brettanomyces strains only."

Basically how I test out multiple new Brett strains normally, only Sam was rad enough to mail these out to brewers all over the world. I was hesitant about joining in on this awesome experiment for about two or three minutes because I knew there was no way I could possibly manage all 20 strains at once. I typically brew a little more than 4 gallons of beer per batch, and 5 gallons would be all I'd want to tackle in one go. In retrospect, I feel like a bit of a wimp, but oh well. I picked out five strains pretty much at random, and Sam shipped out these super-tiny 1.5 mL Eppendorf tubes to all the participants in August. Sam's generosity and coolness for putting this huge undertaking together cannot be understated.

The first starter was done with small 8 oz mason jars. Each strain was pitched into a starter of ~200 ml low gravity wort; the lids to the jar were screwed on about a notch or two away from "tight"; the jars were then shaken intermittently. All strains showed signs of activity within a week. These starters were held as-is for a few weeks, due to me traveling. A week before brew-day, I stepped these starters up to 800 ml, again using (larger) mason jars with lids not-quite-sealed. On brew-day, the wort was split between 5 one gallon jugs, aerated for 75 seconds in the kettle with pure O2, and then the entire starter of each Brett was pitched. 

From my experience brewing with a variety of Brett strains, pitching Brett around lager rates is a good rule of thumb, and from my experience using Dmitri's BKYeast isolates from Cantillon, really wild yeasts (yeasts that have spent years lurking in oak and lambics) may need an even more comfortable fermentation environment. These are strains which have never in their genetic history fermented an entire beer on their own; they are used to a very different environment, a very different process. While I likely over-pitched, it paid off: four out of five jugs had a healthy krausen forming or already underway within 36 hours. (One strain, EBY038, was actually fermenting by the next morning). So, everything looking good so far.

Given that these Bretts are harvested from so many different sources, it'll be interesting to see if any of them closely resemble existing strains. In Sam's collection, there were eight different Bretts isolated from Cantillon sours, so it's reasonable to assume that some of those may resemble, or even duplicate, the three strains harvested by Dmitri for his BKYeast collection. I've always had good luck with my Brett experiments so far, but there's certainly no guarantee that every strain here will be good for 100% Brett fermentations. With the sheer number of unknowns, this is definitely one of the most exciting experiments I've stumbled into so far, and even more interesting with many other homebrewers logging their own results.

Recipe-
5 Gal., All Grain
Brewed: 11.5.2013
Brewhouse Efficiency: 76%
Mashed at 152 F for 70 minutes
Fermented at ambient room temp, ~70 F
OG: 1.050 / 12.3 Brix
FG: —
ABV: —

Malt-

5.5 lbs Pilsner malt 

2 lbs white wheat malt

1 lb Munich malt 

Hop Schedule-
1 oz Styrian Goldings @60 min
1 oz Saazer @10 min

Yeast-
EBY001 Brettanomyces girardin I
EBY013 Brettanomyces cantillon VII
EBY020 Brettanomyces jurassienne I
EBY038 Brettanomyces cantillon VIII
EBY048 Brettanomyces italiana II


Here's my follow-up post for this batch with tasting notes for each strain.

What Will Hops Taste Like Next?

Hop descriptions are getting a little crazy.

I can't say with certainty that this is a new trend — I haven't been around long enough. In the early 2000's, were hop breeders releasing dozens of experimental hops with weird and wild descriptions? Even if they were, the hop industry wasn't set up the way it is now; internet merchants were not established, and homebrewers were not as abundant. Today, it seems, we homebrewers have the opportunity to act as beta testers for all the wonderful things happening in the beer world. It's a great time to be brewing beer.

I certainly can't imagine any other point in history when hop farmers would consider releasing a hop described as "chocolate coconut." Yet here we are.

I also don't think it's over-simplifying things too much to say that, for most of brewing history, hop flavors fell into a few limited realms. Historically, hops — Europe and the UK providing most of the world's varieties — fell into various combinations of floral, spicy, and earthy, adding up to the general sum of "hoppiness," or whatever you want to call their base flavor. These few specific flavor profiles were cultivated, and errant varieties were discarded. Again, at the risk of over-simplifying: many of those traditional, old-world hop varieties offered a similar profile with the same basic settings — those settings just being adjusted to different levels. I often describe red wine in this way (usually when explaining why it doesn't really interest me very much): a consistent base flavor, but with one knob turned down a little, another turned up a little, another knob at its medium setting, and so on. Differences tend to be subtle, as the available flavors are different shades of one color; nuanced implications of something outside itself. It's got to be hard to grow a grape that will taste like a mango. Or strawberries. Or grapefruit.

But for some reason, hops seem to have transcended the limitations of nuance, the boundaries of "tasting like what they are." I can't really think of anything else out there like hops — anything that has such a dynamic range of potential flavors. Is there another naturally-occurring flavor-creator as multi-faceted as this wonder-flower? This is why IPAs are the most popular style of craft beer right now. One of the most intriguing portions of For the Love of Hops, by Stan Hieronymus, is the chapter on hop-breeding programs, showcasing the amount of effort and time that goes into developing new varieties; the shifting emphasis (and obvious excitement) that hop farmers and researchers show today for new varieties; and the implied optimism for a future full of new and exotic flavors. Because, after all, we have only to look at the past to see how quickly these new flavors — variations on the basic, classic hop theme — came out nowhere.

Two hundred years ago, we had floral, earthy and spicy hops, mostly from those prized varieties out of Germany and England. American hops were considered inferior, with a distinct "American tang" and a flavor profile described as black currant and catty. Only in the last thirty years has the potential of American hops been embraced, much less unlocked. Cascade hit the scene, and all of a sudden the default character of hops (in the eye of the craft beer drinking public) shifted from spicy European hops to citrus and grapefruit in American pale ales. This opened up a beachhead, seemingly, and most new varieties followed in this direction, flooding the market with hops echoing variations of citrus flavors, and soon, tropical fruit, mango, peach and melon were new shades on the color wheel. Pine became a staple of American IPAs, and where once the synthesis of hop flavors suggested something herbal and flowery, of the earth, the new movement evoked dank and juicy flavors. Once we got there, with third wave hops like Simcoe, Amarillo and Citra, hop growers wasted no time in developing the fourth wave, adding new colors to the palette like lemon (Sorachi Ace), lime (various NZ hops), cherry candy (El Dorado), blueberry (Mosaic), and gooseberries and white wine (Nelson Sauvin). The IPA I brewed this last winter with Hops Direct Belma hops — enhanced by the steroid-like power of Conan yeast — tasted unbelievably like strawberries for the first two weeks. And — as briefly alluded to in For the Love of Hops — there are those rumors of a new experimental hop variety that tastes like chocolate coconut. Yep.

Of course, not every new experimental hop is going to be laser-focused on a specific new flavor; many of them are going to be subtle nuances, rather than outright flavor transformations. Nuance means that different people may have different interpretations, and if a description of a hop sounds like a crazy menagerie of characteristics, it just might be.

While I haven't tasted anything brewed with these experimental hops yet myself, it looks like we can add either chocolate, coconut or watermelon to the flavor wheel. Basically the same, right? I suppose it's also possible there are two separate varieties popping up here, one of which tastes like chocolate coconut, the other tasting like watermelon and coconut. Either way, it's interesting, and unique.

Most exciting of all? We're literally just getting started. Hop breeding programs are slow, expensive, and labor intensive propositions. Much of the research is being done in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, but old-world hop growing countries like the UK and Germany are starting to release some interesting new varieties as well. New Zealand has been pushing out some incredibly unique new hops, and the acreage devoted to hop growing in that country is quite small — I'd love to see a future where hops are one of New Zealand's main exports. Growing the same hop varieties in different countries — or even different regions within a country — will never achieve the exact same flavor, due to changes in the growing conditions. It's called "terroir," and it's hugely important to hop growing as well as wine. Simply developing breeding programs in new parts of the world will open up a new range of flavors that would have been impossible under old markets. This is why I am extremely excited for the new hop farms appearing right in my backyard, in New York (the state which was once the hop growing capital of the country, we'll be quick to remind you). New farms like Dutchess Hops won't be able to grow proprietary varieties like Simcoe, Citra, Amarillo and Mosaic (at least not for a while), but may hopefully develop new breeds of their own. Dutchess Hops has already expressed an interest in hunting down and testing out wild hops from long-defunct hop farms in the area. Another lesson from For the Love of Hops: Amarillo, one of the hottest hops out there today, was not bred intentionally, but was found just growing on a random hill.

It's impossible to imagine what the brewing-world will look like in 50 years. The ingredients that will be available to us then won't look like the list of hops we have today. There's only one thing I can guess at with certainty: it will be face-meltingly awesome.


Consider this an entry in what will be an ongoing series, "Why Beer Is Unequivocally the Pinnacle of Human Achievement."