Category Archives: Beer

Vermont Brewers Festival

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We headed up to Burlington last weekend to visit family and go to the Vermont Brewers Festival.

From the beginning, the festival showed signs of careful planning.  Online ticketing went smoothly, even though the tickets sold out in a few hours.  There were three 4-hour sessions planned over the course of the weekend.  Each attendee received a number of tickets, so the beers were limited.  And the food/merchandise area opened 30 minutes earlier than the beer booths.  So we arrived early, had a quick lunch, and pored over the taplist while waiting for the main event.

When the beer started flowing, long lines quickly formed at three booths: two breweries you may have heard of, and one we hadn’t heard of (the only booth that we saw run out of beer).  The benefit of the multiple sessions and those long lines was that the other lines were pretty short, ranging from at most ten minutes to no wait at all.  So we were able to leisurely make our way through nearly 30 beers (15 tickets each).  Some of our favorites:

  • Lost Nation Petit Ardennes – a spicy, fruity saison — perfect on a warm day.
  • Alchemist Crusher – a sweet, resiny big brother to Heady Topper.
  • Brasserie Dunham Saison du Pinnacle – a tart saison with nice Brett funkiness.
  • Foley Brothers Fair Maiden – a big woody IPA with pungent grapefruit hopppiness.
  • Mystic Chardonnay Saison – a fine wine-barrel fermented saison, with notes of honey.

And of course, it wouldn’t be a festival without some strange beers you’d never try otherwise:

  • Burlington Beer’s Folklife – a gruit which tasted exactly like a nice loaf of rosemary bread.  Not unpleasant, exactly, but pretty far from what I normally expect from beer (even with a pretty liberal definition).
  • Kingdom Brewery’s Jack Piipa – a pumpkin IIPA, very rummy and hot.  One of the strongest beers I saw at the festival too.

Overall, one of the best festivals I’ve been to — short lines, good portable bathrooms (not portapotties), good food, a great variety of beers and plenty to go around.  The setting in the park right on Lake Champlain was fantastic.  The only shortcomings I can think of is that there wasn’t much shade, and water was only available over at one side of the site.  Unlike Florida, you don’t have to have coolers full of water at every booth to prevent heatstroke.  But it definitely would improve the experience.

Hopshire Farm & Brewery

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We’ve decamped to upstate New York for the rest of the summer, and determined to visit a few of the farm breweries that are popping up all over the area.  So we headed over to Hopshire Farm & Brewery, planning to taste their beers and have a picnic dinner.  We were excited to see hop bines growing in the front of the brewery, but disappointed to see the picnic tables mentioned on their website were just off the parking lot, and in full sun.

Coming in the front door, we entered a cozy square taproom.  On the left was the brewery, and on the right was a small side room with a table and some toys for kids.  Luckily, we were there early and were the only ones there, so we were able to eat in the side room.

At the back was a bar with seven beers on tap, divided into mellow, middling, and mighty:

Mellow

  • Beehave: a light and refreshing ale, made with local honey.  It has a nice sweetness (without the heavier body of maltier beers), and reminds us of a honey cream ale from back home we quite like.
  • Brambles: a straw-colored wheat beer, with just a hint of earthy raspberry.  Has more wheat twang than I care for, but Wind quite liked it.

Middling

  • Daddy ‘O: an English pale ale, but with more fruity yeast character than typical, and a nice Fuggles finish.
  • Shire Ale: not as dark as the typical near-black Scottish ale you often see, but with more malt complexity.  In particular, this beer has more dark malt roastiness than typical.  This was another beer that Wind liked more than I did. 
  • Hamlet of Varna: a 5% session IPA.  This seems like a popular style this summer and we’ve just had a few of these (like Southern Tier’s Farmer’s Tan).  I do appreciate the trend away from big IPAs, though they do suffer in rapid-fire tastings because, at the end of the day, they are weaker beers.  So I liked Hamlet of Varna quite a bit, but NearVarna even more.

Mighty

  • NearVarna: a wonderful American IPA in the malty East-coast style.  Especially immediately after the milder Hamlet of Varna, this is a fantastic hop showcase.
  • Sympathy: a rich, full-bodied Belgian golden ale with characteristic estery profile.   My favorite of the bunch, and the strongest.

After we’d eaten and enjoyed a couple of half-pints, we got a couple of growlers filled.  By this time, the taproom had filled up, but the wait wasn’t long.  Alas, even though they seemed to be sealed properly, both growlers were undercarbonated.  We had the first the same night, and the second the next night.  The beer still tasted fine, but obviously not as good as in the taproom.

 

LeeRoy the Red Imperial Amber Ale

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Our luck with the GrassHoppers Club keeps on rolling, and a bottle of LeeRoy the Red Imperial Amber Ale showed up on our doorstep recently.  I’d been looking forward to this for a while, since I met Gabe in person at Hunahpu’s Day, and was promised a bottle as soon as it was done dry-hopping.

It was worth the wait.

Unlike the other beers we’ve had from GrassLands, which have tended towards the lighter side, this beer was a high-gravity (9%), hop-forward powerhouse.  It is rich and malty, and manages to avoid being boozy or overly sweet.  The hoppiness is very spicy and resiny, with the tasting notes listing Columbus, Cascade, Mt. Hood and Citra hops.

At 75+ IBUs and 9% ABV, I’d call this an IPA instead of a hoppy amber.  Though it doesn’t have the characteristic dank and funky hoppiness that I usually expect from Florida IPAs like Jai Alai or Big Nose.  The hops are more what I expect from an American IPA, but with more maltiness.  So maybe “Imperial Amber” isn’t too far off the mark.

Of the GrassLands beers I’ve tried so far, LeeRoy is my favorite so far.  It’s a little too potent for everyday drinking, but I look forward to being able to have a few of these in the fridge when I’m in the mood for something stronger.

A Kindler, Gentler Beer Fest

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We went to the 3rd annual Hogtown Craft Beer Fest yesterday.  And, particularly with the Hunahpu Day fiasco fresh in our memory, we found it to be a very pleasant, well-run festival.

First of all, the venue is fantastic.  Instead of a parking lot (which is a terrible place for an event) or a patio (like the sour festival at Cajun Cafe on the Bayou in Tampa), this festival is in the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens.  So there was a bit of a scrum around the pouring stations, but we just had to get outside of that to enjoy lush scenery with plenty of shady benches.

The beer selection was pretty good.  There were a few larger breweries phoning it in (like Cigar City who, as far as I can tell, only brought a few of their year-round cans).  But for the most part, it was lots of small breweries from around Florida pouring 3-5 beers each.  There were plenty of heavy stouts and double IPAs.  But there were also a fair few saisons, kölsches, and other lighter beers too.

And, most importantly, the lines were short.  The longest lines we saw were for the food (a small plate from each “pod” was included in the admission price, so that contributed to this).  But all the beer lines were short and moving pretty quickly.

Hunahpu Day 2014: A Fullsome Apology & Some Unsolicited Advice

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When I got home, I had an apology from Cigar City waiting for me in my email:

So, today did not go as expected. We realize that there were a lot of issues with duplicate tickets, way too long waits in lines, and all of that. We can promise 100% that we are going to make it right, whether it be refund, or whether we brew a batch of beer that we will bottle and make completely free to all attendees that had issues today. We’re completely sorry for all issues that happened today. It really sucked. We completely understand how much it sucked and hate how much it sucked. We don’t want it to suck ever again. We will do what we can to make it right.

I don’t expect anyone, lest of all craft brewers, to be perfect.  It is a lot more important to me that they recognize when they’ve made mistakes and do better next time.  So this apology goes a long way to making things right for me.  And for the record, things went well-enough for me today:

  • I showed up shortly before 11am (as encouraged by Cigar City on twitter, etc.) and I had to wait more than 45 minutes to get in.  This is longer than I would have liked, but tolerable.
  • I bought my three bottles that I was allotted based on entry to the festival, plus another case.  But I spent several hours standing in line to accomplish this (and there were a ton of people around me in the scrum who still had their wristbands, meaning they hadn’t gotten their 3 bottle allotment yet).
  • I was very happy with the changes in procedure this year.  There were many more pouring stations, the small pours made it a lot easier to try more beers, and not having to pay each time made things flow much more quickly.

That said, the lines were still crazy, and there were just too many people for the space.  The last time I looked at the line to get in to Hunahpu Day was around 1:30pm (because I was basically in line for bottles the rest of the time I was there), and the line was still around the corner, down the block and out of sight.  I’m willing to bet many of those people didn’t even get in until it was too late to get bottles they were promised.

As 4pm rolled around, the crowd of people in front of the packaging hall started to get worried that there weren’t going to be enough cases to go around (or any cases at all, as one person said as they passed back through the line with their 3 bottles).  Everybody was still being nice, but some people were clearly spooked.  It all turned out fine for me, and I hope Cigar City can make everybody happy.  But it could easily have been much worse.

So, for the advice: please move this event.  I’m sure it’s great to have a huge festival at the brewery for many reasons, but there just isn’t enough space to do it responsibly.  There’s a giant football stadium right down the road with a gigantic parking lot — maybe they could help you out?  I’m sure there are a ton of other larger venues in town that could handle 3,500 people much more gracefully.  Because there was plenty of beer.  There were plenty of pouring stations.  There was plenty of goodwill and good cheer.  But there was simply not enough room.

Update: Just to clarify: by “plenty of beer” above, I mean there were plenty of beers on tap and pretty reasonable lines for those.  I don’t know how many bottles of Hunahpu there were, but I suspect there were enough for everybody who bought a ticket to get their allotted 3 bottles, and for there to be some cases left over for people to at least have a chance to buy more.  I don’t think it was a shortage of beer that caused the problems today — it was the lack of space and lack of active management of the bottle line.

El Catador Club

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The initial run of Cigar City’s reserve society, El Catador Club, has come to an end.  It lasted about 7 months, with one bottle each of 5 barrel-aged beers included in the $120 membership price, plus opportunities to buy additional bottles of those and a few other beers, first dibs on buying tickets for Hunahpu Day, and a t-shirt.  There were also some other goodies I didn’t make much use of, such as member-only growler fills at the taproom, discounts on purchases at the taproom, etc.

We wound up buying a total of 12 bottles of 7 different beers:

  • Forgotten Island – a 15% monster quad, with a ton of rummy sweetness melding well with the standard quad profile of raisins and plums.
  • 110K+OT Batch #6 – a good mix of raspberry tartness and roasty dry coffee
  • Illuminating the Path – like an IPA that’s been aged until it became a sour porter — just a hint of sourness.  Very divisive in the reviews I’ve seen.  I really liked this, but there are a lot of people who hate it too.
  • Don Gavino’s Big Guava – nice and fruity, not overwhelmingly sour, but a good tartness to it.
  • Good Gourd Almighty – I don’t like regular Good Gourd much, and I’m not a big fan of pumpkin beers in general (I find they usually taste more like a spice rack than pumpkin).  But this was really nice — a lot of the overly sweet, vanilla flavor is softened and it wound up being a pretty nice fall beer.
  • Amplitude – very tasty, very boozy and sweet.  The sales were put on hold at first when Lactobacillus was found by their QA process.  But the bottles were saved by pasteurization.
  • Double Barrel Hunahpu – black and boozy, little bit of chile heat and rich chocolate.  Even more intense than Hunahpu, though the sweetness is moderated a little too.

Overall, we are very happy with the first round of El Catador Club, and will probably sign up for the next round.  The biggest benefit was being able to buy beer online and pick it up when it was convenient for us.  This is a huge improvement over the usual system of having only a few days notice and having to stand in line.  And in many cases, having the special beer run out before we got any (this happened more than once in the last couple of years).

The price wound up being about $20 per bottle, which seems very reasonable for high-gravity, small batch, barrel-aged beers.  And they have already announced that the second round will have its own website to automate buying and picking up beers — this will be a big improvement over the current system of buying on a third-party website and signing off on the beers being picked up in a huge binder in the tasting room.

The one addition we’d like to see in the second round is inclusion of some of Cigar City’s harder-to-find seasonal beers.  They may be easier to find in Tampa, but Cucumber, Big Sound, and especially Marshall Zhukov are very hard to find in Gainesville.  We called every bottle shop in town within a few hours of hearing about Marshall Zhukov being released, and nobody had any left.  Even with some of their more common beers, like their new Hopped on the High Seas IPA series, we weren’t able to find any of the first few batches in Gainesville (one shop told me their distributor laughed at them when they asked if they would be getting any).  So we would love the chance to buy a few bottles of those online and pick them up at the tasting room.

Speaking of Sours…

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We brewed a batch of saison in September and split it into five 1-gallon batches two months ago.  One batch was plain, one batch had Brett. Bruxellensis, one batch had Lactobacillus, one batch had both, and the fifth batch had White Labs’ sour mix.

I’m trying to be patient, and I’ve read that it often takes six months or more for the Brett. and Lacto. to work their magic.  But it has been two months, so we took some samples today to see how they’re going.  The first three batches were a little disappointing: they weren’t sour at all and had a definite sweet note, despite having attenuated pretty well (SG 1.014, 6.5%).  The fourth batch (Brett & Lacto) was lacking the sweet note and was just a tiny bit of tangy.  The fifth batch (White Labs’ mix) was decidedly sour.

So that’s promising.  We’ll park the growlers back in the pantry and check back in another few months, and try to be patient…

There’s Sours, and Then There’s Sours

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We’re both big fans of sours.  When we were in the Netherlands and Belgium, we tried basically every gueuze, kriek and framboise we could get our hands on.  The best, like Cantillon’s Rosé de Gambrinus are truly divine.  Even the mediocre kriek you find in gas stations (this is Belgium we’re talking about) are not too bad.  And there are a lot of American breweries making good sours too, like Cascade, Cisco, and occasionally Cigar City.  But one kind of sour we’ve never liked as much is Berliner Weisse.

I first had Berliner Weisse at the Cajun Cafe on the Bayou Sour Fest.  There was a whole section of Berliners and I tried a handful, and they ranged (in my opinion) from just-barely-drinkable down to the worst beers I’d ever tasted.  Several did not get even a second sip.  They were going head-to-head with fantastic beers from Hanssens, Cascade and Drie Fonteinen, so I put it down, at least in part, to the comparison.  But it was not a good first impression for a style that I was hearing more about all the time.  They’re trendy and I see them around when we go out, so I’ve tried them every so often, but I’ve never had one that I liked very much.

So I was a little anxious when I learned that we were going to receive a Grassland’s Big Bend Berliner Weisse.  We’ve really liked the past beers from GrassLands we’ve reviewed, so I had cause for optimism.

Big Bend Berliner WeisseThe beer looked innocuous enough — it came in a plain unlabeled brown longneck bottle that would be familiar to any homebrewer.  It was well-carbonated with a solid, but not excessive, glossy white head.  It poured typically golden and cloudy, much like a Hefeweizen.  There was almost no aroma, even in a snifter.  The first drink was as noticeable for the mouthfeel as the flavor: rich and luxurious, rather than the typical light body I expect from pale, wheaty beers.  But the taste was very nice — sour but not dramatically so, very smooth and almost creamy.  There was some sweetness like tropical fruit.  And, most importantly, it had none of the off-putting funkiness I’ve tasted in most Berliners I’ve had.  The tasting notes mention that they plan to infuse this beer with juice from local wine grapes, and that sounds like it could be a very nice complement.

Although it’s not a very high bar, I’d say this is the best Berliner I’ve had.  And another solid beer from GrassLands Brewing.

A Few Bottles from Sussex

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Wind went back to England on business, and picked up a few bottles (all from Sussex) to bring back:

We’d heard of Harveys — their brewery is in Lewes, which we visited many times when we lived in Brighton.  In fact, the last time we visited England (in 2008), we walked right past their brewery.  There was quite a bit of controversy back then when Greene King bought a local pub that is half a mile from the brewery and stopped serving Harveys beers.  But neither of us had ever had any of Harveys beers before.  Neither of us was very impressed by the Golden Sussex Ale, though.  It reminded us both of a very clean lager, with just a touch of honey sweetness.  It did have more hop bitterness in the finish, at least — though not much hop flavor or aroma to go with it.

I liked the Goodwood Sussex Ale better.  It was still a pretty light, clean beer with a touch of honey.  But it seemed much richer, with a little bit of twang.  I hadn’t heard of them before, but Goodwood Farm seems like an all-around organic farm producing meat, dairy, and (more importantly here) their own barley.  It looks like the beer is actually brewed by Hepworth in Horsham.

Which brings us to the last beer — Hepworth’s Curious IPA.  Like the Goodwood beers, this looks like a collaboration (this time with Chapel Down winery from Kent).  I liked this much better than the bitters, with a much more pronounced hop character, tending towards dry herbal reediness.  This reminded me of Het Ij’s Zatte tripel.

These three beers, taken together, remind me that the English beer scene is really focused on different issues than us Americans.  There is much more emphasis on cask-conditioned beer, brewed in traditional styles and served in the traditional way.  Which is to say, mostly lower-gravity beers, without strong hop character, with a lot less carbonation than I’m used to.  Even the most hop-forward beer, the Curious IPA, has very restrained hoppiness compared to the typical American IPA.

Sour Experiment

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Fresh off bottling our latest batch of cyser, we brewed another batch of saison on Labor Day.  This is happily burbling away in the pantry right now — burbling a little too happily, in fact.  It gunked up the airlock, so I replaced it with a blowout tube feeding into a gallon growler.  But then that blew out and got yeast gunk all over the floor and our shopping bags…

Anyway, we’re using the same grain bill we’ve used for saison in the past (Pilsner base, Munich/Vienna for a little color, and some candi sugar), an ounce of leftover low-alpha hops from our IPA, and our go-to Belgian yeast (WLP 530, supposedly from Westmalle just like Achel and Westvleteren use).

The boil was pretty much the same, except for omitting flavor and aroma hops entirely.  I did try one change on wort chilling (having ready several forum posts saying you could just rack to a plastic fermenting bucket and wait a day for it to drop to yeast pitching temp): I skipped the usual wort chiller and tried just racking through an ice bath:

Alas, it only cooled the wort by 5° or so, so hardly worth it.  Maybe if I had a coil…

The plan is to split the batch into five 1-gallon growlers and try a few different souring agents.  We’ve tried a few of these before — the first time we brewed saison, did three different Bretts (Bruxellensis, Lambicus and Claussenii), plus White Labs’ sour mix (which includes Brett, Lactobacillus, and Pediococcus).  We definitely got different kinds of funkiness, but nothing like sour.  Turns out, we just need to wait longer.  Years longer.  So the plan is to try more aggressive souring agents (like Lactobacillus culture) and add some honeycombed oak planks to help the bugs grow.  Then we’ll just park the gallon growlers somewhere out of the way and wait for something sour to happen.  We’ve bottled almost all of our batches this year, and we’re tired of it.  So I think we’re going to be happy to leave those growlers souring for a year or two, and get back to making full batches and kegging them.

Speaking of waiting a while, our next batch will be our 18th, and our 18th anniversary is coming up next April, so we were thinking about brewing something we could leave fermenting until then.  We know lots of beers that benefit from years of aging, but we’re still thinking about what would like 6 months.  We thought about brewing a stout, but couldn’t agree on a recipe (she likes dry stout, I like sweet).  Maybe a Tripel?