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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.

Bottling Cyser

Mead, , ,

The cyser has finished fermenting and cleared up, so we bottled it today.  We wound up with nine 12 oz. bottles from each batch.  We saved a small glass from each batch and tasted them after bottling.  We’ve found with past batches that cider/mead/etc. change quite a bit after bottling, and can take 6 months or more to work through some of the sweaty/cheesy off flavors.  But still it’s nice to get a preview of what the different batches will taste like:

The first batch was made with Tupelo honey, and it was bone dry (my refractometer reading may have been off, but I think it was somewhat south of water).  The honey character shone through, though it was a little reedy.  It seemed the like the most prototypical “mead” flavor we’ve produced.

The second batch was made with dark, molasses-like Everglades honey.  The dark, almost smoky flavor was definitely there, as was some sharp green apple flavor.

The third batch was made with wildflower honey from our Uncle John.  This seemed lighter than the others (despite having more residual sugar), and had a velvety complexity that gives me hope it will mature well.

The last batch was made with a lighter honey we got from Uncle John last year (clover?).  Since we had a larger jar of it, we used more and the resulting cyser has the highest ABV of anything we’ve brewed (12.8%).  It had a higher final gravity, with a rich mouthfeel to go with that.  It also had the strongest floral honey flavor, and was definitely the sweetest.

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We were at the homebrew shop to get some priming sugar and some extra bottles (cleaning the labels off of bottles is my least favorite part of brewing — we keg some full batches, but small batches and especially mead/cyser need too long to mature, so bottles it is).  So we also picked up the grain and other supplies for making a sour saison.  We’ve tried various Brett yeasts before, and quite liked the funkiness.  But we never got anything like sourness.  After doing some reading, it looks like we just need to wait longer for the bacteria to do their thing, and add some wood to the fermentor to give them a good platform to live on.  So that’s our plan for the next batch: a single primary fermentation with 5 batches in 1-gallon growlers that we can just leave for a year or however long it takes.

It was also nice to see our local homebrew shop move into a new, larger location.  They even have a nice self-serve grain room now where you can pick and measure out your own grain.  They’ll still do it for you if you want, but I really enjoyed getting to paw through the gain myself.

Cigar City Brewpub

Beer, Food, , ,

We finally made it down to the Cigar City Brewpub recently.  It opened in April, and we’ve been down to Tampa a few times since then, but it didn’t work out until last weekend.

I was a little worried, since I read some pretty mixed reviews online, including complaints about lackluster food and spotty service.  As it turned out, we all enjoyed it and had no complaints.  The food menu had a lot of variety and some nice Cuban influences (we had black bean cakes and a picadillo meat loaf sandwich with yuca fries).  Everything was very tasty.

The beer menu had a handful of standards from the main brewery, but was mostly the beers brewed at the brewpub, including some special variants and one cask option (that sold out just before we got there, natch).  Wind had a light, crisp beer/cider mix (kind of like a shandy/radler), and I had a rich, spicy golden ale and (my favorite) some Beer Myth Bock, which was a lot like a sweet stout.

The atmosphere was nice and relaxed.  The decor was very typical pub — mostly dark wood and fabric, but there was enough natural light coming in to keep it from being cavelike.  They did have a couple of TVs playing sports, but luckily without sound.

We were also happy to see they had a cooler of bottles by the front door, well stocked with Cucumber Saison and Good Gourd.  I’d called all over town earlier in the week looking for Marshall Zhukov Stout and Good Gourd — and the few places that got any sold out in less than an hour, even with 1-bottle-per-customer limits.

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.

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.