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donderdag 28 mei 2015

HoppySlosh Innovation: Leuven Innovation Beer Festival hits the ground running

Fate is a fickle bitch.

Ain't it just so?
One day you're running a brewery in the hinterlands of Brabant, the next your looking at its smouldering ruins while the devil shits hot coals down your spine.

In January 2015, a fire laid waste to the buildings in which Hof ten Dormaal housed its brewery. Even though most of the equipment was salvaged from the flames, a large part of the brewery's stock was lost. Things looked pretty bleak for the brewery, and its future looked as promising as a republican during the pre-election tour.
And slighty less cheerful.
A bitch she may be, but fickleness comes in forms not always unpleasant. Even as the ashes were still smouldering, the beer community reared up. Incentives were launched, crowdfundings initiated, and brewers the world over reached out to lend a hand.

Instead of rejoicing at their competitor's misfortune, brewers from around the globe came to their friend's rescue, and before the end of winter, the brewery's future was more or less secured. Flame and fire and a shitload of bad luck later, Hof ten Dormaal was still in business, and the display of compassionate camaraderie in the face of such misfortune was a sight for sore eyes in these seemingly callous times of selfish capitalist opportunism.

Long story short: in the wake of all that's happened, André decided to launch a festival. Tired of Belgium's somewhat sad reputation as the Land of Blonde, Dubbel and Tripel, he decided the theme of the festival was to be Innovation.
Hence, perhaps, the name.
As I have lamented about before, Belgium doesn't seem to be too keen on foreign beers, but will you just look at that list of attending breweries? 

BeerBert and I attended the last day of festival, in the stunning venue of Leuven's historical brew house De Hoorn. 
"You've got style" achievement unlocked.
The venue alone would be a reason to visit the festival all by itself, even if there was no actual beer present, but sometimes fate smiles on us, and we can have our cake and eat it too.

Because who would lie about cake?
But there was beer (*), and some of it was really quite innovative (°).

*) obviously. Wouldn't be much of a beer festival if there wasn't, right?
°) obviously. Wouldn't be much of an innovation beer festival if it wasn't, right?

We started things off with a visit to Siren Craft Brew's, stall. They embrace a brew philosophy which I've come to think of as the New Wave of British Brewing, which is somewhere in the middle between present-day contintental craft brewing and contemporary USA attitude. This translates to beers like the wonderfully refreshing Calypso, a Berliner weisse hopped with Comet and Simcoe. I remember having the Amarillo version earlier this year (°) but this iteration was decidedly more rounded and complete, blending the lactic sourness of the Berliner weisse with the American craft vibe of Simcoe and Comet. Deelish. 

°) Praise be unto Saint Arnoldus for specialty beer stores (De Caigny in this particular case). If it weren't for them, we'd never have proper foreign beer in Belgium at all.

Beerbert had the  7 Seas, a black IPA (*) with 7 C hops. 

Clever beer needs a clever name.


*) I know. It makes no sense until you drink one. 

From there on, we headed over to Goose Island. Yes, friends and neighbours, Goose Island showed up at a Belgian festival. I was sceptic about the obvious tie-in with InBev (*) but honestly, I was happy to see them.

*) Seriously. When you exit the Leuven train station and take a right, just walk donw the road for 5 minutes. Before you know it, you will find yourself inside InBev Citadel. It's like mini-Europe with Leffe posters plastered all over it. Pretty weird, a craft beer festival in the middle of enemy territory.

BeerBert had their Sofie, which, despite being called a farmhouse ale, tasted more like an up-state wit. Loads of orange zest, with a faint lactic/wheaty zip in the back. Classy, but not my taste at all. I went for the Class of 1988, a complex beer with tonnes of oak and grape. 

Much much later, Goose Island brought forth their flagship brew in the form of the Bourbon County Brand Stout and its Vanilla Rye variant. The Constant Reader may recall my infatuation with both the 2011 edition and the Vanilla edition, but it saddens me to say that time has made me a difficult geek to please. I found the the BCBS 2015 and the Vanilla Rye both to be overly sweet. Syrupy brews, both bordering on liquid ice cream desserts. Oodles of flavour, yes, but the sweetness got the better of me very quickly. Festivals like this are a dream for beer geeks though, because they provide an opportunity to taste rare(°) brews which would otherwise remain unobtainable to them. In this case, quite a few visitors where possitively creaming themselves in aticipation to snatch a sample of BCBS, to the further glory of All Things Craft. Say what you will, but Belgium's just not kitted out for this kind of stout violence.

°) and sometimes pretty damn expensive.

Lunch then. 

Hell yeah.
De Hoorn hosts a pop-up restaurant where we were served a nice meal, which we washed down with some brews by De Molen, recommended  by John & John. BeerBert had the Cuvée#3, a blend of thisses and thats, aged in various barrels. I think my exact words, upon sniff ing the beer, were "Even if I never got to taste this, I'd still be happy knowing just how amazing it smells". It has that signature Molen-smell all over it: roast and coffee and chocolate and booze and leather and vanilla and lots and lots of other things all just screaming at you to be drank. Spectacular brew again, and empiric proof that you can't go wrong with De Molen's stouts. I went for Groot&Sterk, a beer which was described by various people as "that ham beer". A smoked barley wine with a spicy chili bite, this really was a lot like prosciutto in a glass. The fleur de sel was a nice touch as well, emphasising the meaty character of the beer, without turning into beery broth. Awesome, and well into innovation territory.

Think this, minus the actual meat.
Heading back inside, we bumped into Kjetil, the gentle viking and CEO of Norway's Nøgne ø brewery. Whilst sampling his outstanding Vic Secret IPA (gotta love those NZ hops) as well as the Aurora Australis (°), I goaded him into commenting in my homebrewed fenugreek porter.

°) Aurora has an amazing story behind it. Apparently, it is a Norwegian tradition to send alcoholic beverages across the globe in order to benefit from the temperature fluctations as they cross the equator. How much of this is yippy-talk I cannot say (how many Norwegian alcoholic beverages can you name?), but in Aurora's case, the beer (a Belgian-style quadrupel) is brewed in two locations. A batch is brewed in Grimstad, Norway, where Nøgne ø is located. The other is brewed in Beechworth, Australia, where friendly brewers Bridge Road are located. Kjetil racks his batch into whisky barrels and sends them to Australia, where it's bottled as Aurora Borealis. The guys at Bridge Road rack theirs into red wine barrels and ship to Norway where it gets bottles as Aurora Australis. Wonderfully complex and vinous, and another fine example of International Innovative Intoxication I mean Inventiveness.


Interludium : fenugreek & festivals

Really, there is no better way to get feedback on your own brews than by asking a brewer his opinion about it.
So every time I attend a festival, I make sure a haul a couple of bottles along with the express purpose of harrassing brewers and anyone interested until they voice their opinion. If they think it's shit, I'm counting on them telling me. And while the "It's shit and this is what's wrong with it" comments are invariably priceless in terms of learning and upping one's game, secretly of course, there's always that eager kid inside hoping for approval from the big guys.
So, pepper fenugreek porter this time, and a single bottle of Zwarte Madam with raspberry. For the heck of it.


Done Interluding

Kjetil seemed to genuinely appreciate my porter, which made me all fuzzy and glowy on the inside. Until (and I kid you not) he asked for seconds! Which made me all glowy and fuzzy on the outside as well! 
I was all, like, wiiiiiiiii!
John&John seemed to like it too, so I must be doing something right. 

Back to the actual attendees, whose limelight was in no danger of being eclipsed by yours truly's homebrews. 
We headed over to Tiny Rebel, where we sampled the vowel-less cwtch, a Welsh red IPA which I thought had a bit of lager-funk going on. I've said it before and I'll say it again: IPAs tend to not work well for me in a festival setting. There's only so much hoppiness I can objectively compare before my brain and palate seem to fuse into a single alpha-acid saturated lump of lupulin. I'm sure the cwtch would have fared better had I tried it earlier though, as it was a very decent brew. I got a taste of the Dirty Stop Out which was a solid smokey brew.

Stillwater Artisanal's Surround is a coffee-flavoured beer and delivers its coffee in spades. Reminded me a lot of cafe con hielo which I like having on hot spanish mornings whilst on vacation. 
Sidling over to Freigeist Bierkultur for quick primer to what's brewing in Germany of late, we got ourselves some Nosco's Café, another coffee infused brew which reminded me a bit of my own Yog-Shotoddy, which is both a good thing ("Hey this could have been brewed by me.") and a bad ("I'm not sure I'd want that particular brew to be on display at a festival"). 
Later on, I tried their Atlantis Gose, a beer which seems to drive home the fact that I am underwhelmed by most goses. This one was a mildly lactic, refreshing and uncomplicated brew. I can see myself using this as a reward for mowing the lawn: easy, quenching  and interesting without being complex.


Wenn ich meine Rasen gemähet hatte, möchte ich gerne eine Gose trincken bitte. 
Ja?

Heading out for more sun, I dragged out two brews by Foglie d'Erba. HopFelia is a an Americo-Italian IPA, hopped with USA hops and, surprisingly, Tettnanger in dryhops. Freewheelin is its DIPA counterpart, using pretty much the same ingredients but in a double version of the HopFelia.
Perhaps it's just me and festival-IPAs again, but I found myself a bit underwhelmed. There was a certain lingering undercurrent to both beers which I've started to associate with Italian IPAs, and which doesn't seem to agree with me.

Kees!  was there!
And he brought (among others) his intensely roasty Export Porter 1750. A robust, bitter, but very smooth brew which impressed me no end. The nutty flavours which I detected in the batch he brought to ACBF earlier this year were gone, and I think what Kees has produced now is pretty much as authentic a porter as we could hope to get without actually drowning an entire borough in it.

Horror, even without metric conversion.
Brekeriet were present, and I had their Rye Whiskey Sour which brought a big smile to my face. Daring to the point of being brash, the beer was assertively sour, with the rye and the whiskey bringing an smoky touch to the whole. The best weird sour I had that day. 

Time to head over to the award ceremony; walk this way please!

No, not that way.

Interludium : brewing contest

Realising how homebrewers have ever been at the forefront of innovative brewing, André organised a competition, inviting attending homebrewers to submit their most novel brew.
I hastened to oblige and submitted Good Girl Ginger, figuring a ginger-hibiscus radler-saison hybrid would be adequately innovative to have the jury sit up and take notice.

Meta never felt so good.
Long story short, I did not win but got honourable mentions for innovativity. The beer needs work (quite of few of my beers do) but the idea seems solid enough to explore it further. Which I will, and you will read about it when I do.

This Honorable Mentions thing, together with what seemed like genuine approval from whoever I subjected to my brews is certainly invigorating, and an incentive to step up my game.

Congratz to the winner and the runners-up! Pity we never got to sample each other's brews though.


Done Interluding Again


A couple of post-ceremonial samples later (*), BeerBert and Yours Truly settled on the terrace with a final serving of Cuvée#3 (°), whilst chatting about beer and nationality and whatnot with the amiable Mikkel .

*)Zure van Tildonk was a pretty classy lambic-ish brew, and the Revenge of the Raspberry was revealed to be a beer re-racked onto raspberries, which imparted a solid falvour without the color. Definitely one of the more innovative ideas I saw explored to great effect that day.

°) Someday, I'm going to post something deep and meaningful about "the final beer of the festival" and what this says about both the beer and the festival, but today is not that day.

In spîte of being relatively below-radar, this was a fantastic festival, crammed with nice people, nice beers, in a setting which was just awesomely spectacular.

André, this was a blast. May friends, good cheer and good beer be ever with you, even in the face of chaos and the fickleness of fate.

Greetz

Jo

woensdag 20 mei 2015

Brewsflash: Dog arses and make-believe citrus

Bottling time!

I've been too busy brewing and not busy enough bottling lately, leading to a production bottleneck (see what I did there?) in the shape of too few carboys.

Nothing makes my day like a confusing Google Image Search.
As I reported recently, I brewed a medlar saison a couple of months ago, and it was about time I got it bottled bottle lest it never get druk. Drank. Consumed. Whatever.

Medlars are a fascinating fruit. Related to the hawthorn, medlar trees grow golf-ball sized fruits, which are hard, tannic, and not very pleasant unless they're bletted.

That means rotten, only more poshly so.
I am endlessly fascinated by weird and slightly(*) yucky foods, and the medlar is a favourite of mine pricesely because (°) it is a rare example of a fruit which effectively has to spoil in order to be edible.

*) or very. Or very very. Or will you fuckin' stop already!

°) also because it gets charmingly nicknamed things like "open arse" and "dog butt". Good thing the Internet wasn't around when the medlar got its nick, or else I'd be gargling goatse(^) beer soon. 

^) Oh and for the love of god don't google goatse if your don't know what it is already. The internet should come with a warning sticker that says "Don't google goatse". The medlar's nick should be ample warning, but apparently it isn't.

Using about two dozen properly bletted medlars (courtesy of the amazing Marloes & Martijn), I made a syrup which I froze until I was ready to use it in a brew.

Early February, I brewed a basic(*) saison, and in a spontaneous act of generosity, I'm sharing the recipe with you, Constant Reader.

Or just because.

*) I promise to one day lay out my understanding of what a saison was, what it now is and what it should be, but for now, let's assume there actually exists such a thing as a basic saison.




Technical stuff below; skip unless you like technical stuff, numbers and beergeekery



Made a 5 gallon batch, comprising 36% Pilsner, 36% pale and 28% wheat malt. 
Mashed on the low end at 150°F, where it gradually petered down to about 140 (my mash tun needs an insulation coat). 
70' boil. 
0.5 ounces of Citra @ 70'         (26 IBU)
1.0 ounces of Citra @ 10'         (6 IBU)
1.5 ounces of Citra @ flameout (0 IBU)

5g of black pepper corns and zest of 1 lemon @10'.

Cooled to 68°F and pitched with French Saison (second generation 3711, kindly donated by Frankenbuddy). 
Fermented at 71°F, ramping to 77 over the course of a week; dropped from 1.063 to 1.002.

Racked to secondary and split in three batches. 


Technical stuff all done now, resuming normalcy


Three batches then, from a single brew. Not only did I not have enough medlar syrup to flavour an entire 5 gallon batch, I also wanted to be able to define the specifics of the medlars' contribution. 

It will end in tears one day.
  1. basic version. Just the above recipe, no further shennanigans applied.
  2. Cul de Chien: added syrup I made from about 2 dozen bletted medlars, half a lemon, and sugar.
  3. basic + Orval dregs for Brett funk and rustic saison character.
Then I moved all three to the cellar and tried to forget about them for a few months.

Until yesterday.
Batch 1 and 2 were bottled by yours truly yesterday, which means I'll be able to taste them properly in a couple weeks' time. So far, the prognosis looks good. Solid saison profile, with Citra really doing its utmost to bring refeshing hoppy citrus notes and the yeast tying it all together. The Cul de Chien version had a bit of extra lemony zing to it (I may have overdone things lemon-wise when I made that syrup) and a certain je-ne-sais-quoi which probably the medlars. Even if the beer tatstes nothing like medlars at all, it's still going to be a great brew. 

Yeastie Boy is buzzing with anticipation.
Batch 3 will be bottled sometime soon. My understanding is that the Bretts will take a long time before they become noticeable, but will impart a bit of that rustic Old Orval vibe, which I think will add more complexity and authenticity.

Because all authentic saisons were brewed with citra and Dog's Arse.
More news when the brews are sampled.

Until then, I part with a fitting Chaucer quote:

We olde men, I drede, so fare we:
Til we be roten, kan we nat be rype;

May our bletting be long in the waiting.

Greetz

Jo

dinsdag 12 mei 2015

HoppySlosh gets a taste of ye olden dayes!

It's a funny world.

Well...maybe nog haha-funny, but still.
Pretty funny.
One day you're happily slurping beer and blabbing about it on some beergeek forum or other (*), and the next you're sipping a 50-year old beer with a complete unknown.

*) Another manifestation of the funniness of the world is that, if you can possibly conceive of an interest, however obscure or far-fetched, there'll be a forum (^) about it on the Yinterwebs, populated with people (°) with an encyclopedic knowledge about it. 

^) and porn. But I digress...

°) and trolls. Trolls are everywhere (%).

%) except under bridges. But I digress...

Anyway, following a post I made about my interest in old beer and a specific brew called Goudenband, I received a PM one day from a new member who seemed to've registered with the singular purpose of PM-ing me.

A PM made especially for me?
Why, thank you, Google!
For the elderly, the recently-returned-from-a-trip-around-Saturn, and the otherwise illiterate: a PM is a private message (hence the acronym) sent between members of an otherwise public messageing board.
No kittens were harmed in the process of writing this blog post.

Anyway.

A PM.

If I was interested in obtaining two bottles of very old Goudenband.
Very, in this case, meaning "dating back the first days of the country of Zaire.

Let me explain (°).

Belgium, like every civilised country in the world, got rich by ruthlessly exploiting her colonies. In Belgium's case, we're talking about Congo, Rwanda and Burundi.

Collectively known as Belgian Congo.
More accurately, Congo was the private property of the king of Belgium. His back yard so to speak. Belgium, as a nation, started shopping (*) for colonies almost as soon as it became an indepent nation, and almost landed a deal on Hawai, Crete, Cuba, Chihuahua and fucking Fiji.

Behold, the Belgian Mastiff
*) yes. Literally shopping. As in "Honey, I'm going out for groceries, do we need any more colonies to keep up with the Joneses?"

With colonisation cames expatriation, which brought my generous new friend's ancestors to Africa.
Time passed, and by the mid-1950's, the local people had had enough of the white opressor. Decolonisation was accelerated by the (often not very voluntary) repatriation of the white Congolese populace, and by 1960, it became unfashionable to even call the country Congo any longer.

The rest, they say, is pop history.
Whatever she was doing here (and all jest aside, many people living in Congo around the 1960's quite simple just lived there and were only peripherally involved in its colonial nature), my generous new friend's grandmother found herself evicted to a strange and cold new country, called Belgium. Mercifully, someone decided she could use a pick-me-up and gave her a couple of fancy bottles. Two of them being, you guessed it, Goudenband.

°) Seriously, whenever I explain to people who make fun of my passion for beer that I've learned more about world history by studying beer than anything anyone ever taught me about anything at any one time, I need only mention that single bottle of Goudenband.

Which brings us back to the bottle.

Ye Olde Bottle
Back in the sixties (and until I get more conclusive data on this specific bottle I'm going to ballpark it
to back in the sixties), standardisation wasn't a big thing yet. We've long since mended our ways, which is why we have things like GPS and the metric system.

Oh.
Wait.
But back in the sixties, beer apparently came in oddball denominations, like this 80cl bottle, which, even back in the sixties, was uncommon enough to not even merit a name.

Let's call it a plus-qu'un-demi-Magnum then.
As long as we can tell, the Liefmans brewery (or its proprietors) have (hand-)wrapped the bottles of their Goudenband (*) and Kriek (^) in stencilled silk paper, and this bottle is no exception.

*) another historic clue is that the beer is already labeled as Goudenband instead of the older (and less noble name Ijzeren Band")
^) now called Cuvée Brut which is neither a cuvée, nor a brut. 

The bottle is stoppered with an actual (natural) cork, synthetic corks being very much science fiction back in the sixties. Liefmans started using champagne corks at some point but this is an ordinary wine cork, and it's supposedly stamped with the bottle date (or at least the vintage), but the one bottle we opened had a cork so brittle it disintegrated to the point of illegibility.

Final clue is the price tag, which puts this bottle down at 35 Belgian Franks (*).

These were notes when I was young.
A rough calculation involving inflation and Frank-to-Euro transition translates this to about 60 euros per bottle now, which makes these quite facy gifts back in their heyday.

But the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the same holds true for beer. Only you drink it, because eating it would be stupid. And messy.
Apologies for the lack of actual pictures from the tasting soirée but my battery died on me.

Poor battery.
May you rest in aaaaaand he's back again.

When we got the cork out (which meant in pieces), we were able to pour a classic-looking Oud Bruin, minus the head. After more than 60 years, it should come as no big surprise the beer was utterly flat.
Apart from a waft of cork (again no surprise there), we got a good whiff of oak and mild lactic sourness. No cardboard, no wet paper, just wholesome, if somewhat corky Old Bruin.
Remarkably, the beer tasted about as fresh as a well-conserved younger bottle would: the vinous character of the beer apparently is very forgiving on Father Time, and while it wasn't a stellar pour, the beer was still quite enjoyable, if perhaps a bit worn out. If it weren't for the complete loss of carbonation and the notable presence of cork both in the nose and on the palate, you would not have been able to guess or even approximate the age of this bottle. 

Which, I guess, is a bit underwhelming, perhaps. I mean, don't get me wrong here, I'm happy the beer was still drinkable at all, and hadn't turned to horrid cardboard-infused goop as the decades went by, but perhaps I'd expected it to have gained much more complexity. Then again, I really need to find out more about the brewing and bottling process of Goudenband. I've heard tell that it was (and still is) bottle-conditioned (*) which may partly explain how it has kept so well throughout the years. 

*) for the uninitiated: bottle-conditioned means the beer has undergone a (limited but important) final fermentation in the bottle, where the remaining yeast in suspension converts what little sugars it can find to CO2, thus carbonating the beer. An alterntative would be force carbonation, where a (typically pasteurised) beer is saturated with CO2 during the bottling process. The presence of live yeast in bottle conditioned beer is reportedly beneficial to its preservative qualities. 

There's more(°) to this beer, and I assure you all that one day, you'll read more about that final bottle on these very pages.

°) Cor blimey! I haven't even properly walked y'all through the utterly riveting history of the Liefmans brewery, or of the beer nor even of the glorious and almost-extinct beer style we call Oud Bruin and how utterly incomparable it is what the Dutch claim an Oud Bruin should be, but that'll have to wait until another time.

Until then

Greetz,
Jo

PS: a warm and beery hug of gratitude to Stefaan for getting in touch and for sharing this treasure with me. May good things happen to you, wherever you go!