Grasslands Brewing: Groundation Amber Rye

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Yesterday was a good day — not only did we get a call from the insurance company saying they were going to send us money, but we also got another bottle of free beer from GrassLands Brewing‘s GrassHoppers Review Club.  The review club is the best way to help a brewery-in-planning:  We get free beer, Gabe gets good feedback, everybody wins!

This time around, the brew was Groundation Amber Rye.  I’ve been warming to rye beers recently, but I’ve mostly seen it in high-gravity IPAs, so I was excited to see what it brought to a more moderate beer.

The first thing I noticed was the color.  When I think of an amber beer, I think of a beer that’s at least translucent, tending towards a very clear honey color.  But this poured very dark, almost black with hint of reddish mahogany highlights.  The head was solid and tan, and dissipated slowly.  The aroma had a nice spiciness, some sweet maltiness, and just a tiny bit of sourness.

The taste was, as the tasting notes promised, a blend of complementing flavors.  As you’d expect from a very dark beer, there was some chocolate and smokiness, but not overdone like it often is.  Of course the rye gave a nice spicy note, and the hops provided a citrus counterpoint.

Clocking in at 6% ABV, this was lighter than many of the beers I drink.  But it’s solid enough to sip slowly and enjoy the flavors.  Overall, this was a very solid, enjoyable beer.  My only complaint, if you can call it a complaint, is that it differs from my expectations of an amber.  If you asked me what category of beer it was, I would have said porter without hesitation.  Wind disagreed and thought it was fine to call it an amber, though, so maybe I just have an overly narrow definition.

Another Year, Another Batch of Mead

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We’re back home after spending July up north.  And since we’ve got a few pounds of honey from Uncle John, why not make some mead?

Once it had enough time to mature, last year’s batch came out quite nicely.  Hardly even a faint hint of gym sock lingering.  So, this year we decided to change practically everything.  We did like the apple juice base, though, so it’s technically “cyser”.  And the results from last year gave us a pretty good idea of how much honey we wanted to use, but went with new juice (plain-jane Mott’s on sale) and yeast (Lalvin 71B).  We also varied the honey: one batch of Tupelo (which we’re calling Southern Cyser), one batch of molasses-like Everglades (Swamp Cyser), one batch with dark wildflower honey John gave us this year (Wild John Cyser), and one batch with a lighter honey John gave us last year (Old John Cyser).  We had a bigger jar of honey from last year, so we used more, pumping the gravity up to 25 Brix, so we hope it’ll finish dry and get to 12% ABV or so.

The Lalvin yeast is known for getting a quick start, and sure enough it was bubbling along first thing this morning less than 12 hours after pitching.  So with any luck, it won’t take too long to get there.

Water Street Brewing

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Water Street Brewing Flight

We stopped by Binghamton this afternoon, on the way back from visiting Howe Caverns.  The neighborhood has seen better days (we got asked for change every block or so), but we enjoyed walking around and doing some shopping anyway.  We really enjoyed browsing in River Read Books.

We had dinner at Water Street Brewing, and really enjoyed it.  Their menu is somewhat limited, but we liked everything we got.  They had 8 beers on tap, and we tried them all:

  • Their Munich Helles was light and smooth, the way a Helles should be.
  • The Cream Ale was a good example of one of my favorite styles — just a light pale ale, with medium body.  Cream ale is one of my favorites to drink on a hot summer day, and we got a growler to take home with us.
  • I didn’t care for the Southern English Mild — I think I’ve only had dark mild, and this was very different.
  • The Weizenbock was very good, spicy and malty.  There was none of the wheaty tang that often spoils wheat beers for me.
  • The Beyond Blonde ale was a solid Belgian blonde — not my favorite Belgian style, but nice anyway.
  • I didn’t like the Thousand Year Porter much (nice name though).  It was dry and roasty, so not my thing.
  • The Harvest ale was rich and satisfying.
  • The beer I liked best was their Wee Heavy.  It’s one of my favorite styles, and theirs wasn’t too peaty and had a nice caramel note to it that I really liked.   Of course, this was their special small-batch beer, in a small glass and not available for growlers.

All said, a very nice place for dinner and very solid beers.  They had a good variety, and everything was at least a solid effort if not my favorite style.

First Coast Road Trip

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We decided to drive over to St. Augustine and Jacksonville for Father’s Day, and stop by a few brewpubs we’ve been meaning to visit along the way.

We got to St. Augustine mid-afternoon, walked around Old Town, up to Castillo San Marcos, and back down to the center of town.  After a couple hours walking in the hot sun, we were glad to get to A1A Ale Works, which as the name suggests is on State Road A1A, right at the Bridge of Lions which connects downtown St. Augustine to Anastasia Island.  The downstairs was a nice, airy pub where we would have been fine taking our kids for dinner.  But we were much more comfortable upstairs in the restaurant area, with a cozy booth and a nice view of the Intracoastal Waterway.

We got a flight of their 5 year-round beers, plus their seasonal Belgian Wit:

  • The Belgian Wit was pretty similar to one we just reviewed for Grasslands Brewing — a nice, sweeter, fruity wit — but just not quite as good.
  • I’m not a big fan of light lager, so I didn’t like the King Street Light Lager much.
  • The Porpoise Point IPA was a very herbal and citrusy — a solid IPA.
  • Bridge of Lions Brown Ale was roasty and nutty — brown ale is not my favorite style, but this one had more complexity than most.
  • Red Brick Ale is an amber ale which I liked more than I generally like ambers (which I usually find very bland).  This had a mildly resiny finish that I really liked.
  • We finished with A. Strange Stout, very smoky and spicy.

All told, the beers were all solid — though none of them was really outstanding.  The food was also good, but not great.  The prices were pretty expensive, but not outrageous (especially considering the excellent location in a very touristy town).

After dinner, we headed up A1A to Vilano Beach — the quieter coquina beach to the north of St. Augustine and got had a fun hour at the beach before the light started to fade.  We spent some more time at the beach the next morning, then continued up the A1A towards Jacksonville.  We had some car trouble, but it was all sorted out in a few hours.  So lunch at Engine 15 wound up being dinner instead.

Engine 15 is in a strip mall on Beach Blvd, just as you head out of Jax Beach.  So the location is not as impressive as A1A, but on the upside, they have plenty of parking.  They have a pretty good food menu, but the ambiance is more like a bar with a couple tables up front.    They are loosely firehouse-themed, and pretty industrial.  My 5-year-old complained about the “stink”, but we found it nice to be at a brewpub that smelled like a brewery.  They had a good taplist, with a few dozen beers on tap including a bunch of their own.  They had mix-and-match 4-taster flights, so we got 8 of them:

  • (904) Weissguy was a hefeweizen, with less wheaty twang than you often find.  Another style that’s not my favorite, but this one was very good.
  • Rye of the Tiger was a strong rye, which, like most rye, I could barely tolerate. (Wind really liked it, though.)
  • Old Battle Axe IPA was a very piney IPA — we’ve become more interested in hoppy beers and more tolerant of piney/resiny bitterness, but this was pushing it a bit.
  • Route 90 was an IPA we liked quite a bit more, which is listed as a session IPA and is more in keeping with Florida IPA in general, with a solid grapefruit note (we got a growler to take home).
  • 15 Wolves (collaboration with Aardwolf Brewing) was a light saison that we probably would have liked more if we had it before the IPAs — not very sour or funky, and so paled in comparison.
  • Nutsack Imperial Brown: a standard English brown ale (and I’m not crazy about the single-entendre name).
  • Oolong Milk Tea Stout: a creamy, spicy stout we both liked quite a big (growler #2).
  • Grease Monkey Stout: an inky black, with roasty and chocolatey notes.  A very good stout, but not as good as the Oolong.

We also picked up a growler of their Doolittle saison, which we loved when we had it at the Hogtown Craft Beer Festival back in May.

On balance, we found Engine 15’s beers a lot more adventurous and interesting.  We loved their Doolittle saison when we had it — it stood out even among dozens of other beers we sampled at the festival.

Free Beer from GrassLands Brewing Review Club

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Everybody loves free beer, and we’re no exception.  So we were excited when Redbeard heard about GrassLands Brewing — a new brewery just getting started in Tallahassee, which has a monthly lottery to give away samples of the beers being developed.  So, even though he “never wins anything,” Redbeard threw his email into the hat a few months ago, and was selected to receive a bottle of the first test batch of King Oliver’s Citrus Wit in the latest drawing. This was met with joy by Wind (who loves wit beers as a rule) and cautious enthusiasm by Redbeard (who generally doesn’t like wheat beers, but likes wit more than hefeweizen, etc.).

The bottle showed up well-padded in bubble wrap, with a few odds-and-ends and a letter from owner/head brewer, Gabe Grass, describing what he’s aiming for with the beer, and thanking us for our feedback to help him improve the beer before launch.  We don’t think we’ve ever seen anyone so enthusiastic about giving us free beer before. Definitely off to positive start.

The positive vibe continued on to the beer itself. Yesterday, we sat down to give it a proper tasting. The bottle was a plain brown bottle with a plain green cap – amusingly similar to the dozens of bottles still sitting on our kitchen counter from the batch of homebrew that we’d just bottled (post forthcoming).  King Oliver’s Citrus Wit poured hazy and straw-colored, nicely effervescent with a modest but stable head that took a while to dissipate.  The aroma was classic Wit: spicy and estery, fresh and inviting.

The taste was a touch sweeter than typical Wit, with zesty citrus and lemongrass.  The letter mentioned using zest from Florida citrus, and that really comes through.  Importantly for Redbeard, it didn’t have the wheaty tang that usually put him off wheat beers.  Importantly for Wind, it was still very clearly a wit. The citrus taste is strong, and reminded Wind in particular a bit of the radlers that we drank in Koln last year. It seemed to have a little more body than many beers in the 5% range, maybe because of the relatively high carbonation.

Overall, we liked this beer – it’s a very fresh, pleasantly drinkable beer with a lot more character than most easy-drinking summer beers.  It had a delicate, nuanced flavor that was very interesting to sip by itself, but would probably also be good paired with light, summery foods like salads, fruit, and cheese.

Wind especially really liked it – and is already looking forward to enjoying it on our hot, swampy Florida evenings. But, she’ll have to wait — the brewery hasn’t even launched yet, so probably no bottles or kegs around town any time soon.  Still, we’re both forward to tasting their other beers when we get the chance. Thanks for sharing, Gabe!

Florida Pale Ale, Part #2 – Brewing, Dry Hopping

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Brew day went smoothly.  We didn’t get quite the gravity we hoped for, but it was pretty close (1.067 instead of 1.070).  Thanks to some new hardware and the judicious application of thread seal tape, we got almost no leakage from the wort chiller this time around.  We had a little more than 5 gal., so we put 1 gal. in a growler like we often do.

Primary fermentation started quickly and got down to target gravity in about three days.  We just pulled them to secondary today, and added 1/4 oz. of leftover Nugget hops to the 1 gal side batch.  This is the first time we’ve dry-hopped, so we’re really looking forward to how much of an impact it will have.

I did some reading about dry-hopping, and in typical fashion there seems to be a pretty wide range of contradictory opinions.  The traditional view seems to be that you should dry-hop in secondary with low-alpha hops, and not leave them in more than a few days to avoid grassy off-flavors.  But other people seem happy to add hops in primary or directly to their kegs, and point out that many well-regarded IPAs are hopped with high-alpha hops like Simcoe.

Jai Alai, the beer that inspired us to make this batch, is dry-hopped with Simcoe, for example.  We didn’t like that very much, and the hops we liked the best were Nugget.  There is at least one well-liked IPA that’s dry-hopped with Nugget (Troegs Nugget Nectar).  So we decided to give that a try.

Florida Pale Ale, Part #1 – Hop Taste Test

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One of our favorite local IPAs has been in short supply recently (Cigar City’s Jai Alai). This had been my go-to beer ever since it started showing up at our local grocery store in cans (and the fact that it tasted even fresher in cans is a big part of my conversion to can/bottle agnosticism).

Hop Tea #1: Low-Alpha

So of course we decided it was time to complete our transformation to IPA-lovers and brew our own.  We have really grown to like hoppier beers, especially given the almost total lack of hoppy beers in the Netherlands.  And the ones we most like are Florida Pale Ale-style IPAs like Jai Alai and SwampHead’s Big Nose.  These are generally as hoppy as more traditional American IPAs, but with less resiny bitterness and more floral and herbal aroma.  I found a forum post with the Jai Alai hop schedule.  And since there were five different hops involved, I decided to order a bunch of American hops — Cascade, Centennial, Chinook, Mt. Hood, Nugget, Willamette, etc. and taste-test them to decide what we really wanted to use.  Our usual supplier was sold-out of Amarillo, so we wound up with nine 1-ounce packages of American hops.

We made two batches of tea — one pellet of each hop in tiny espresso cups.  The first batch were the low-alpha varieties (Ahtanum, Cascade, Centennial, Mt. Hood and Willamette).  There were some clear losers (Cascade tasted very acrid and resiny, Ahtanum tested very oily), but no clear winners.

The second round had much clearer winners and losers — the high-alpha varieties (Chinook, Columbus, Nugget and Simcoe) had much more pronounced flavors.  We both liked Chinook and Nugget quite a bit, and hated Columbus (engine-fire) and Simcoe (astringent and resiny).

After a quick check of the handy Oxford Companion to Beer told us that Mt. Hood and Nugget were typically used for bittering, we arrived at a hop schedule: Mt. Hood and Nugget for bittering, and Centennial, Chinook and Willamette divided evenly between flavor and aroma.  Going back to the Jai Alai hop schedule showed that we’d basically picked all the hops they weren’t using, and gave us a little pause.  But we decided to plow ahead with what we liked, since we can always go back and copy Jai Alai if it doesn’t turn out.

Hogtown Craft Beer Festival

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We went to the Hogtown Craft Beer Festival — our local beer festival here in Gainesville.  We missed the inaugural event last year, but were glad to make it this year.  It was held in the Kanapaha Botanical Gardens, which are very beautiful this time of year.  Unfortunately, it had been raining most of the day before the fest, so the ground was pretty muddy.  Luckily the rain let up so we didn’t get soaked at the outdoor festival.

The local and regional beer selection was very good.  There were a ton of breweries from Jacksonville (Bold City, Green Room, Intuition Ale Works, Engine 15), Tampa (Cigar City, St. Somewhere), Tallahassee (Momo’s, Pesacola Bay), and St. Augustine (Mile Marker) which I’d heard of but mostly never had any beer from.  There were also several regional and national brewers — it was good to see them represented, but with so much local beer we’d never had, we decided to focus on the new and local.

There was a good variety of styles of beer represented, with lots of IPA, porter, stout, but also saison, rye, wheat, etc.  By far our favorite beer of the event was Engine 15’s Doolittle Rye Saison.  It gets mixed reviews on RateBeer, but we both loved it.  I generally hate rye beers, but this one was a very solid saison, with just a touch of sweetness and not too much rye astringency.

There was quite a crowd, but the lines for beer moved very quickly.  There were around 50 breweries pouring, so it was also easy to shift to a shorter line if anything had a long line.  We only had to wait in two long lines: one for free burgers (which makes sense) and the other was for Swamp Head just after they tapped a special keg of saison.  Other than that, there were at most two or three people ahead of us for any given line.  And many times you could just walk up with no line.

So other than being afraid of getting rained on, I think it was one of the best beer festivals I’ve been to.  There was way more beer than we could drink, and tons of local beer we’d never had before.

Hunaphu Day 2013

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We headed down to Tampa for Cigar City’s release of Hunahpu.  This is no ordinary bottle release — this is their most sought-after beer, the line starts forming up the night before, and if you’re lucky enough to get any at all, you only get three bottles.  In short, it’s more of a festival than a bottle release.

So we got a hotel a few blocks away, and I planned to get up at 5am and walk over.  I couldn’t sleep (strange bed or anticipation?), so I gave up shortly before 4am and headed over.  There was a small line already, with most of the people camped out, and I estimated I was about 75th in line.  There was a steady trickle of people joining the line, which quickly stretched down the block and into the parking lot of the shopping center around the corner.  So they wound up handing out the golden wristbands early (prompting lots of panicked phone calls to people who were supposed to join people in line), and they opened the gates just after 7am.

Cigar City blocked off their parking lot, and setup several trailers to serve beer, in addition to the two bars normally operating in their tasting room.  There were about a dozen food trucks, a few merch booths, live music, and some tents and carnival-style amusements way in the back by their new brewhouse.  The taplist was very impressive.  Everybody was in a good and accommodating mood.

The only problem was the size: there were just too many people in too small a space.  Lines for everything were long, snaking around and into the end of other lines.  Navigating the space was difficult because the lines were taking up so much space.  The police showed up shortly after 6am — I thought they were going to complain about people walking in the street, or drinking on the sidewalk, but they were apparently upset about the line winding around the block, which prompted the early opening.

They’ve already said the event is too big to hold at the brewery, and might be held at a larger venue or spread over several days.  But other than having a larger space, I think there are a couple of other things they might do to help make things go more smoothly:

  • Post the master taplist — I was having my first glass of Hunahpu in the tasting room, when someone at my table noticed a folded-up piece of paper which turned out to be the master taplist.  This was an invaluable source of information for us to figure out which of the serving points had which beers.  Without this, you would have to walk up to each one and read the paper taplist at the bar to figure out where to go.  Maybe this doesn’t get sorted out soon enough to be printed up and handed out to everyone.  But posting it online, or even setting up a bulletin board somewhere so people could consult it would be nice.
  • They required tokens instead of cash for all the outside bars, which definitely sped up service.  But they were letting people get samples and several drinks per person at a time, both of which slow things down.  Of course, more space and more service points is the real solution to the problem.
  • I’m also not a big fan of first-come-first-served-line-around-the-block as a strategy for rare bottle releases.  I think it would make a lot more sense to have a lottery for tickets.  Or auction off a portion of the bottles and/or tickets.  Maybe a combination of all three — they could have a first-come-first-served ticket sale for a majority of the tickets, and then an auction and/or lottery for the rest.  But whatever the method, selling tickets ahead of time would make it much easier to plan for the number of people who were coming.

What’s In Your Cellar? (Session #73: Beer Audit)

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This month’s Session topic is a beer audit: what you have, and what it says about what you drink.  Our “cellar” is actually a wine fridge (that used to contain wine, honestly!) and our kegerator.  Usually, there’s a keg or two in our kegerator, but we’re out of CO2 and the bottles have taken over.

I’ve never done an audit exactly, just checked on a few bottles I was planning on sending to friends.  But I wasn’t surprised that my beer breaks neatly down into four categories:

1. Belgians

We brought more than a case of Westy and Cantillon back with us when we came back from our stay in the Netherlands.  Our stock has dwindled to a few bottles each of Westy 8, Westy Blonde, Cantillon Grand Cru Bruocsella, and Poperings Hommel Bier.

2. Locals

Of course, local beer is well-represented, with a few odd bottles from Tampa breweries like Barrel-Aged Big Sound from different years, a bottle of Pays du Soleil.  From our local brewery, Swamp Head, we’ve got a couple bottles of their first release of Saison du Swamp, somewhat more bottles of the second release, and a half dozen of their Batch 300 Tripel.

3. Homebrew

Of course, our hyper-local brewery (i.e., us) is well represented.  We currently have 20 bottles of barleywine, 35 bottles of cider/mead, 4 bottles of our first try at mead, 7 bottles and a gallon growler of our quad (the growler was filled from the tail end of our last keg after our we exhausted our CO2 tank), and 1 last bottle of our saison.

4. Stuff In The Fridge

And then there’s the stuff in the fridge.  It’s not really the cellar, but some of it sure does hang around a while.  Right now, there’s a selection of year-rounds and recent seasonals from Cigar City (Jai Alai, Maduro, Cubano Espresso, and Sugar Plum), plus an uninspired amber called Rollin Dirty they brewed for the Tampa Brew Bus, some Magic Hat Pistil, a few bottles of Michelob Amber Bock we picked up for our mother-in-law who doesn’t even like saison but brought some from down from Hill Farmstead for us anyway.  There are also a few singles: a Holy Mackerel Special Golden Ale, and two bottles that have slowly migrated to the back: a Shiner Octoberfest and a Magner’s Pear Cider that nobody wants to drink.

 

So, I think there are a few key takeaways from that list:

  • To start with the obvious: the selection is pretty well driven by where we live and where we’ve traveled.  Not just in where the beer is from, but also in the dominance of Belgian-style beers.  Having lived right next to Belgium last year, and living in Florida where there is a strong selection of Belgian-style beers, really shaped what I drink and what I value.
  • There are very few aged or even aging-worthy bottles.  We plan to age our barleywine for quite a while, obviously.  The barrel-aged Big Sound should keep, and I suspect the Grand Cru Bruocsella will last long enough for us to experiment with making our own lambic before we try making some kriek with it.  But the rest of the beers should really be drunk soon.
  • Most of our keeping beer is in our wine fridge — which used to be full of wine.  We were really not big beer fans a few years ago, when we mostly drank French and Californian wine, and maybe the occasional Sam Adams with pizza.  Then I had my first sour beer — Lost Abbey Sinners 09 followed by Cigar City Sea Bass — what an introduction to sours!  Now there are only two bottles of wine in the house (a local dessert wine, and a Merlot we picked up this summer at a winery in New York).  So that’s a pretty big change.
  • Drinking local: and one thing about the beer and the wine: we’ve gotten quite a bit of it directly from the brewery.  That’s true of the Westvleteren, Cantillon, Cigar City and Swamp Head beers, and both bottles of wine.