Crannog Ales

For people who are near the Okanagan Valley in Canada (count yourself lucky)

“Crannóg Ales is Canada’s only Certified Organic farmhouse microbrewery, one of only a handful of such breweries in the world. We brew unfiltered, unpasteurized ales using only organic ingredients, some of which come right from our own farm. All our ales reflect the Irish tradition of brewing full-flavoured, complex ales which are also great session beers.”

This brewery is in the top three of beer sights to see.  I love their ethos and passion.  It is part of why I am drawn to beer.  Brewers and drinkers alike have a passion that is just great to be a part of, very infectious love of doing great things. Plus they have a beer called Back Hand of God.  I love that.

Beer Cocktails

Great post on Epicurious about beer cocktails.

http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/drinking/beer/top5_beercocktails?mbid=RF

I have fallen victim to a snakebite before but I may have to try that again. I have had a shandy before as well and could not drink it.  Same with Berliner Weisse with raspberry.  But the Stout Diplomat sounds intriguing.  I may have to give that a try.

Seaweed Beer

One of my favorite websites, The AV Club has a weekly article called Taste Test. Usually involving something unappetizing like green tea flavored Kit-Kats. This week to my surprise, they had included two beers in their tasting event. The Fraoch Heather beer which I have never had but I have heard good things about and Kelpie Beer made with seaweed.

This leads me to one of my annoyances. Extreme brewing. Now I love an Imperial IPA or a barleywine as much as the next person but, come on, seaweed? Are we to the point where we have fully mastered the brewing arts that seaweed is all that is left to use? There are times when I wish there was an American Reinheitesgebot. That way we can see if a brewer is stripped of tricks whether or not the beer will be solid and flavorful.

I am all for experimenting with brettamyoces or whiskey casks but when you start adding in non-beer related ingredients you might want to pull back from the cliff.

Two NEW beers for you to search for

I sound like a broken record but I just got back from another beer tasting.  Due to distributor snafu’s I got to select one of the beers to try.  I selected the Poperings Hommel Ale.  Excellent.  Tastes like a lager.  Crisp and clean.  Great summer beer to have while watching the NBA playoffs or the start of the new baseball season.  It is a Belgian.  Small brewery that locally sources the hops and barley themselves.

3367664105_fbf543ca1d

The second one you should look for is a honey beer called Biekens.  Strong at 7.5 alcohol but has a lovely touch of sweetness to it.

biekengamma1

Triple Hopped?

This is not meant to be a mean, snarky or rant filled blog. It is supposed to focus on great, craft brewed beer but I feel I would be remiss if I did not at least comment on the latest Miller Lite commercial. They claim to be triple hopped. Now this may be true, technically, but what raises my frustration is that, in spirit, they are lying. A triple hopped beer is Dogfish Head 60 minute IPA or Blind Pig from Russian River. If you can taste any hope bitterness in a Miller Lite then you have a much more sophisticated palate than mine. Instead of spending money on ads, I wish the talented beer makers at Miller were spending their time making good beer not marketable beer.

Great Article on Lambics

From the Wall Street Journal

Tracking an Ancient Belgian Beer
Lambic, a rare, sour brew, uses techniques dating back to man’s first beer. Reporter Charles Forelle visits one of the few remaining breweries

BRUSSELS — Beer is usually not a morning pursuit.

But it was still dark one day last month when I lumbered out of bed and over to the tiny Cantillon brewery, located in a scruffy neighborhood not far from the main train station here.

Industrial brewers can be as secretive as defense contractors — good luck getting inside the mashing room of Diageo PLC’s Guinness brewery in Dublin — but a couple of times a year Cantillon opens its doors to the public.

I had risen early because I wanted to see how to brew lambic, a Belgian specialty so retro its origins go back thousands of years. The early-morning start was necessary because there are no refrigerated tanks or cryogenic chillers at Cantillon; the boiled liquid that will become beer cools in the open air, and it needs a whole, cold night to do so. Thus all the mixing, cooking, filtering and boiling must be completed well before sunset.

Lambic brewing is “a process that has become so rare around the world, but that was once the universal method of making beer,” says Jean-Pierre Van Roy, the patriarch of the family that has owned and run Cantillon for a century. “As with everything rare, we need to be watchful, we need to be able to show this type of industry to our generation and future generations.”

Take sips of two dozen different beers and the lambic will be the one you remember. A traditional lambic is startlingly sour, like plain yogurt, and full of musty and meaty flavors.

Lambic is brewed only in Brussels and a few towns on the city’s western edge — and only a dozen breweries make it. Cantillon makes around 32,000 gallons a year; Anheuser-Busch InBev pumps out more than 1.3 billion gallons of Bud Light annually. Bottles are easy to find in Brussels, but it’s likely to take a committed search anywhere else. (See sidebar, below, on where to find it.)

All beer starts out roughly the same: Some sort of grain is cooked in water to turn its starches to sugar. The brewer then adds yeast to turn the sugars to alcohol.

Brewers of lambic skip that last step. At Cantillon, the cooked grain-broth — wort, it’s called — is pumped up to the attic, then dumped into a giant, copper tub beneath the eaves that looks like a children’s splashing pool. It cools there overnight, picking up the wild yeasts and bacteria floating in the Brussels air.

This is the same method the first human to concoct beer most likely used thousands of years ago. Like true sourdough bread and natural yogurt, lambic is resolutely pre-industrial and is fermented with whatever bugs happen to be nearby.

Belgian scientists have deconstructed lambic and found scores of different species of micro-flora. Two important types are lactic-acid bacteria, which make lambic sour, and yeasts of the genus Brettanomyces, among them B. bruxellensis, which give lambic its characteristic aroma. “Horse blanket” is the term favored by beer cognoscenti. This is not a terribly useful olfactory cue for those of us who dwell in cities, but the scent is of hay and must — and also of something very much alive. It is a weird concept for beer, no doubt, but strangely compelling and astoundingly complex. Needless to say, sour mustiness is a tough sell — don’t look for commercials of sweaty young things dancing to reggaeton and taking swigs from bottles of lambic.

“People have a taste for anything, but their palates have been deformed,” Mr. Van Roy says. “Industrial producers get people used to eating and drinking in a certain way. And when you explain to people what the product is, when you let them taste it, they come to realize that this sourness we have in our products is really a popular taste.”

To at least a small slice of beer fans, it is.

Despite the early hour, professional brewers on a pilgrimage, home brewers with a sense of curiosity and a throng of committed drinkers mingled over croissants and coffee at the Cantillon brewery. The coffee was weak, and by 9 a.m. or so most everyone switched over to beer.

There is nothing modern about Cantillon — no blinking lights or beeping electronic temperature monitors. Barrels are steamed clean by hand in a low-ceilinged, Dickensian basement. A system of flywheels, belts and gears powers what needs powering and turns what needs turning.

The mash-tun — the heart of the brewery, where wheat and barley are mixed and cooked — is a 19th-century model in heavy iron. To fill it, a worker one floor up shovels grain down a chute.

Lambic brewing as done at Cantillon would drive the bean-counters of a big brewery mad. Cantillon can brew only in the colder months, when the weather is right; the brewery gets in about 20 working days a year — if the weather turns suddenly warm, a batch can be spoiled. Most of the product sits in inventory for years before being sold, and the long aging in wooden casks means about a third of what’s brewed is lost to evaporation — the “angel’s share,” as it’s known.

“The angels of Brussels are great gourmands,” the elder Mr. Van Roy says, standing in the attic amid sacks of grain, an orange scarf knotted at his throat.

“The big brewers can’t work like us,” he says. “It’s impossible. They have staff and other expenses.” At Cantillon, “there are no directors or administrators. There’s a father, a mother, children and now grandchildren.”

Around mid-day, Jean Van Roy starts drawing tumblers of wort from the mash-tun, passing around samples in plastic cups. It is warm and sweet. Eventually he is satisfied, and he pulls more levers to begin pumping the liquid upstairs into vats for boiling.

A few hours later, he deems the boiling complete. Visitors crowd up to the attic, clambering on creaky wood stairs for a glimpse of the cooling pool. The wort gushes in, and they give a cheer. Soon the whole, chilly room fills with a warm, beery haze.

Only a few more years, and you could drink it.
What to Drink

Lambic refers generally to sour beers of the Brussels region fermented with wild yeasts. Gueuze is a blend of old and young lambics. Fruit flavorings are common — Kriek is lambic brewed with cherries; framboise, with raspberries.

But a word of caution: Many larger brewers of lambic — and, particularly, kriek — add sugar or fruit syrup to the finished product to appeal to those put off by lambic’s sourness. Beer snobs recoil in horror at this practice. Truth be told, the bigger problem is that the underlying beers tend to be thin and cheaply made. But even good lambics are flattened by sugar. My advice: Avoid. Some breweries will label their unsweetened bottles oude (old, in Dutch). Mort Subite Oude Gueuze is an unsweetened lambic; Mort Subite Gueuze is sweetened.

Cantillon’s beers are uncompromisingly sour, but they reward the patient drinker with deep and perplexing flavor — there are notes of lemon and must and wood and hay. The fruit beers are bracingly tart.

Other names to look for: Girardin (1882, black label); Boon (Mariage Parfait); De Cam (Oude Gueuze); Drie Fonteinen (anything, frankly).
Where to Drink It

Brasserie Cantillon
Rue Gheude 56
+32 2 521 49 28

The Van Roy family will show you around; tours are €5 and include a drink. The current line of beers is sold at excellent prices; we paid around €44 for an assortment of six 750-milliliter bottles that included some rare varieties. If you are looking to take a few bottles home in your suitcase, you could do far worse than the Grand Cru. It is a three-year-old lambic that can age for another 30. Public brewing days are announced periodically; see www.cantillon.be.

Le Bier Circus
Rue de L’Enseignement 57
+32 2 218 00 34

The lighting is too bright and the decor too kooky for this sedate bar — with attached restaurant — to be intimate. But you don’t come here for romance; you come for beer. The list is full of lambics, including old vintages and rare bottlings. Beyond lambics, there are dozens of well-chosen Belgians in a variety of styles. (Try anything from De Dolle Brouwers or Brasserie Ellezelloise, to pick two among many worthy producers.)

Chez Moeder Lambic
Rue de Savoie 68
+32 2 544 16 99

A serious beer bar that doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is out of the city center, in the branché commune of St. Gilles. On a warm night in summer, when the hazy light lingers past 10 p.m., take the 3 or 4 tram from downtown and find a chair outside. The bar is tucked behind the St. Gilles town hall, a delightfully over-the-top Neo-Renaissance castle. Excellent selection of lambics, including some Cantillon beers on tap.

In ‘t Spinnekopke
Place du Jardin aux Fleurs 1
+32 2 511 86 95

Excellent renditions of Belgian classics (waterzooi, carbonnade, rabbit braised in kriek) anchored around food that is cooked with beer. Boulettes à la gueuze — meatballs in a rich gueuze sauce — takes the cake. It has dark and cozy rooms of an old house; in nice weather, there’s a pleasant terrace outside.

Overseas:

Traditional lambics are exported in fairly small quantity. Shelton Brothers imports Cantillon and Drie Fonteinen to the U.S.; see www.sheltonbrothers.com for distribution. Availability can be spotty — several places we called were out of the beers. Prices vary widely, but expect to pay $14 to $20 for a 750-milliliter bottle of Cantillon’s gueuze, and generally more for the more unusual varieties.