Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Here We Go a-WASSAIL-ing

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Today is the 18th anniversary of the first release of Full Sail Brewing’s holiday beer, Wassail.

Full Sail’s holiday favorite was inspired by the traditional English wassail, which is a “spiced ale or mulled wine drunk during celebrations for Twelfth Night and Christmas Eve.” The word itself’s origin is Old Norse and is a contraction of the Old English toast “wæs þu hæl,” or “be thou hale!” (“be in good health“).

The Wassail Page has some great history and information about wassailing. Their aim is to “seek the true revelry and rant so absent from modern celebration. [They] seek an older time when the human spirit shouted for joy in the winter creating a festive gift which could not be purchased and could hardly be wrapped.”

Traditional Wassail celebrations were most commonly associated with Twelfth Night Eve and Twelfth Night celebrations, though in modern times is has been expanded to include the entire holiday season. In addition to the wassail drink, there are numerous customs surrounding Wassail, including “singing, mumming, guessing games and begging to enter a house.” Three distinct celebrations involving the Wassail are known. In the first, the wassail is used like a loving cup and passed around inside a house while singing carols. Secondly, you can take the wassail from house to house in a group. And the third, though less common, method involves the blessing of nature.

Here’s an old wassail song from around 1833:

The nut-brown ale, the nut-brown ale,
Puts downe all drinke when it is stale,
The toast, the nut-meg, and the ginger,
Will make a sighing man a singer,
Ale gives a buffet in the head,
“But ginger under proppes the brayne;
When ale would strike a strong man dead,
Then nut-megge temperes it againe,
The nut-brown ale, the nut-brown ale,
Puts downe all drinke when it is stale-

From the press release:

“We have brewed Wassail every holiday season since 1988 and it’s now as much a part of the festivities as sharing a roaring fire with our closest family and friends,” reminisced Jamie Emmerson, Full Sail’s brewmaster. “Deep mahogany in color, Wassail is brewed with four different malts and a blend of imported hops, giving it a malty full body and a pleasantly hoppy finish that appeals to both hop and malt lovers alike. In other words, a Christmas miracle!”

Wassail was recently awarded another medal and was rated “Exceptional” at the 2006 World Beer Championships (WBC). It was described as, “Tremendously rich and dry – yet fruity and balanced – with rich roasted malt dry caramel, nuts and light spice… Perfectly balanced. Not too sweet; not too dry. Excellent!” Wassail previously won a platinum medal and a “superlative” rating at the 2005 WBC, a gold medal at the 2004 WBC, and three silver medals in 1999, 2000 and 2001.

New Belgium Frambozen Brown is Back

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New Belgium Brewing‘s tasty Frambozen Raspberry Brown Ale has been released for the holidays again this year, and will be available in select markets until the end of the year. At previous Celebrator tastings, we’ve given it high marks. Last year we described as:

Strong raspberry fruit aroma with red tinged amber color. Rich tart raspberry flavor with good hop presence that nicely balances. Effervescent creaminess and a lingering finish.

And in 2004:

Sweet fruity berry nose and reddish-amber color with a tan head. Great sweet fruit flavor with nice balance and a clean finish.

I always felt the brown ale sweetened slightly with fruit works very well. It’s a nice twist on Belgian lambics, a mix of the idea of those beers with the caramel, often nutty, flavors of a brown ale. I’m looking forward to seeing these samples in the mailbox.

And how about this great quote they included in the sale sheet, from Stephen Beaumont, writing in Esquire.

“More and more American men are downing big, bold, ungirly fruit beers. Typical is the seasonal Frambozen from new belgium Brewing Company, a raspberry brown ale made for Colorado winters, with a massive taste and a face-slapping 6.3% (this year it’s 7%) alcohol.”

From the press release:

Experiencing Frambozen begins with the aroma of fresh red raspberries, followed by the ripe seductiveness of a fruity brown ale with depth and delicate notes. Frambozen, New Belgium’s traditional winter seasonal, is inspired by the Framboise beers of Belgium, where the use of raspberries as a beer adjunct outdates the universal acceptance of hops.

Frambozen is deep ruby in color, with flavors just as rich. With the fruit as the integral ingredient, its name is derived from the Flemish word for raspberries. Every year, New Belgium sends delegates to Salem, Oregon to oversee the process of turning freshly picked berries from northern Washington into a pure juice that is loaded into oxygen-free CO2 tanker trucks that make the journey back to Colorado. The end result is a delicious, complex beer that is delivered on time to complement holiday meals.

“We have made a conscious decision to process the raspberries into a single strength, straight juice with nothing added,” said Bill Hepp, a brewer with New Belgium who takes the journey to Oregon annually. “As a pure juice, it is a whole food, with no taste or aroma lost in the concentration stage, which ultimately makes the beer that much better.”

Frambozen is available in certain New Belgium markets now through the beginning of the New Year.

nb-frambozen

Crossing the Red Bridge

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I have an article coming out next month in New Brewer magazine about gluten-free beers, so I’ve been watching what’s been going on with this kind of beer for many months. In case you’ve missed this growing phenomenon, celiac disease now effects close to 1% of the U.S. population and people with the disease can’t properly digest glutens, a protein in many common grains, including wheat and barley. This means no bread, pizza, pasta or, most importantly, beer. Here and abroad, there is increasing interest in producing a beer that’s both gluten-free and tastes similar to beer. To date, only a handful of American brewers are making one, with several more in Europe and Australia.

My son, Porter, is autistic and many kids with ASD also have some stomach problems similar to those associated with celiac sufferers. As a result, both are put on gluten-free diets with generally positive effects. Over the past summer, I was talking with Dr. Michael Lewis, who pioneered the brewing sciences program at U.C. Davis, about these beers. He mentioned that Anheuser-Busch was also working on a gluten-free beer and suggested a few people there I should talk to about it. Try as I might, I could not penetrate A-B’s bureaucracy beyond a tersely-worded statement from their P.R. department. They seemed genuinely surprised that I even knew about, despite the fact that Miller’s BrewBlog broke the story in early August that A-B had filed a label registration in Missouri for the beer, called Red Bridge Sorghum Beer, and test batch bottles reportedly had been quietly sampled at MBAA meetings. All Anheuser-Busch was willing to say on the matter was the following:

Our goal at Anheuser-Busch is to make sure every consumer can enjoy the kind of beer they feel best about — it’s that simple. That’s why our brewmasters are continually exploring and brewing a variety of beer styles year round. We are currently brewing a beer made with sorghum and without barley, wheat or oats and we’re still developing the final product.

They were unwilling to provide a sample, show me a label, allow me to speak to the person I knew to be working on it, nada. Needless to say, I wasn’t able to include much in the article. This despite the fact that I had seen and tasted a test bottle, seen a label mock-up, and knew they’d both registered the name and picked up the domain name redbridgebeer.com on July 12. To hear the P.R. flacks tell the tale, it was years away from being on store shelves, if ever.

So it was with a gentle smirk that I received the news today — a rumor at best, from an anonymous source — that A-B would be rolling out Red Bridge Sorghum Beer nationally (not in a test market) on December 18. Is it true? I’ll let you know in just under two months.

 

This mock-up may or may not be the label for A-B’s new gluten-free beer, Red Bridge.

Beer Chips

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Also at the Anchor event for Maureen’s book, Ambitious Brew, I had my second encounter with Beer Chips, a new snack food on the market.

I first noticed them at their own booth next to the Sierra Nevada Brewing tent at GABF last month where, at $1 a bag, they were selling like hot cakes. Now I should make yet another confession here from the start. There are few foods I like more than potato chips. I am quite passionate about my potato chips. I can still get worked up about chips that have been off the market for decades; brands like Tommy Dale’s or Uncle Don’s. Where I grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania, the average grocery store carried at least a dozen local brands of potato chips, and some had many more. My favorite chips growing up were a brand called “Good’s Original Chips,” or “Good’s in the Blue” to distinguish them from a rival brand, “Good’s in the Red.” My “Good’s Potato Chips” could be bought only one day a week and, except for visiting the farm, at only one place on Earth, the Shillington Farmer’s Market, which was open every Friday less than a mile from my childhood home. They were made by Mennonite farmers who appeared to make just enough to sell each week (they never made more for the rush during various holidays) and when they sold out, packed up and went home. You could buy them in bags, but the best way was in a returnable can. Every Friday, I’d pick up a 5-lb. can, pay for the chips and a deposit on the can. The following week, I’d return the empty can and get a new one, this time paying just for the chips inside. It was a beautifully simple system, ecologically as well economically sound.

Sadly, they don’t do the cans anymore, not since the company was taken over by a nephew and moved from the farm to an actual plant. Happily, they still taste as good but I must say some of the magic in them is gone. But I bring this up only to illustrate that potato chips are one of the other things I know something about. So when someone makes chips with beer — combining two of my great loves — then attention must be paid.

The creator of Beer Chips, Brett Stern, who’s a native New Yorker, flew down from Portland, Oregon (where he makes his chips) with boxes of his chips in tow. That gave me a better chance to try the chips, and I must say my first reaction is that they’re very tasty and highly addictive. Of course, that may be the added sugar, itself an unusual ingredient in potato chips. Generally, there are only three ingredients in what I’ll refer to as “craft chips” — let’s call it the spudheitsgebot — which are potatoes cooked in oil (either a vegetable oil or lard, most commonly) with salt added. I’m told the beer used is a bock style that is reduced to a powder and sprinkled on the chips during the cooking phase. And for the most part it works. They do seem to have just a hint of beer flavor and happily it’s not overpowering the way it is in barbecue or some other strongly flavored chip. I brought some home for my wife to try and she loves them, as well, and has become quite addicted. Now if I can only get BevMo to get off their bureaucratic arses and carry them in my neighborhod …

Here’s another review of Beer Chips from Chipworld.

These potato chips had a kettle-cooked texture and were crisp with varying levels of crunch. They earned praise around the chip bowl for being quite tasty. Most of our tasters thought that the chips did taste like beer, though some thought the beer taste was most noticeable on first bite and faded away after that. The chips were generally smallish with wiggly, irregular shapes, some folded over.

The Beer Chips table at GABF.

Watermelon Funk is Funkadelic

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During last weekend’s bus trip to Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa, Vinnie brought out a couple of pitchers from the barrel of his collaboration with 21st Amendment that’s been sitting in wood for a year now. Essentially as an experiment, Shaun O’Sullivan gave some of his Watermelon Wheat to Vinnie Cilurzo who put it in old pinot noir barrels and spiked it with Brettanomyces. According to Vinnie, who’s been tasting it every couple of months, it’s been a roller coaster of ups and downs, flavor-wise. But both he and Shaun believe, after a good year, that it will very shortly be ready to unleash on the world. There are only about 50 or so gallons and it will be available only at 21st Amendment and Russian River, and possibly at the Toronado. (As of Saturday Dave Keene had not yet tasted it to give his approval for carrying the beer.) Also, five gallons were sent to Boston, I think for Beer Advocate’s Belgian Beer Festival that starts on Friday. So there are only three, maybe four, places where you can try this beer, and not much at any single place. So needless to say, as a great fan of sour beers, I was thrilled to get a chance to sample it.

It was a little cloudy with a dull golden color and a thick white head. It had sharp, fruity estery aromas though not too pronounced with some of the signature “horse blanket” aromas coming through. Delightfully sour flavors and chewy, with a strong candied sweet-tart puckered essence. At the end, the mouthfeel became very juice-like — or à la Jolly Rancher — and this was the only place that the fruit was identifiable as watermelon as it washed down the back of the throat. Overall, a very complex, sour beer. There’s an awful lot going on in this beer. It may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I quite enjoyed it and hope they’ll do it again soon.

 

The Watermelon Funk, a collaborative concoction.

Stoudt’s Seasonals … and More

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Stoudt’s Brewing of Adamstown, Pennsylvania has announced expansion plans. According to their press release, at the end of the year they will increase the size of their fermentation cellar by 25%.

And by the holiday season, 750 ml cork finished bottles will return with the release of two styles. Fat Dog Imperial Oatmeal Stout and Old Abominable Barleywine, both aged in whiskey barrels, will be available at the brewery.

Also, Stoudt’s holiday seasonal this year will be Chocolate Nut Brown Winter Ale. “This cocoa infused, highly aromatic brew will be tapped in November.”

 

Stoudt’s Brewery in Adamstown, Pennsylvania

Reading About Reading Beer

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Don Russell, a.k.a. Joe Sixpack, had a startling piece of news in his latest Philadelphia Daily News column, my hometown beer is making a comeback! Reading (that’s pronounced “red-ding“) Beer’s advertising and merchandising stuff were about as ubiquitous as it gets for me growing up because I spent a lot of my youth in bars with my alcoholic stepfather (there, now you know). My memory of the beer is that it wasn’t any better or worse than most of what was available at that time. And by the time I was paying attention, it was already being brewed outside Reading, in Fogelsville, which at that time was still a Schaefer brewery, if memory serves.

The Reading Brewery opened in 1886 on South 9th and Little Laurel Streets and closed ninety years later in 1976, when I was a junior in high school. As Don points out, it had a very loyal following in the area. As recently as the late 1990s, I was home for a visit around the winter holidays and went bar-hopping with some old friends who were also in town. Most of the bars we went to not only still had quite a bit of Reading Beer breweriana on their walls but several still used Reading Beer and other local brewery coasters. I must confess I even pocketed a couple of them for myself, I was so taken aback that they were still using them and wanted proof.

So the new Legacy Brewing Co. (who are the same folks that previously owned Pretzel City Brewery) have announced that they will be bringing back Reading Beer in all its adjunct glory. (I confess I’d prefer if it was all-malt, but I won’t quibble.) They’ve even set up a new company just to handle the Reading Beer and keep it separate from the Legacy craft beers. Initially it will be draft only but if it proves popular — and quite frankly I can’t see how it won’t be — then bottles (or better still, cans) will follow in wider distribution. According to Russell’s article, since it was first announced in the local paper, The Reading Eagle, last week, the brewery has been inundated with inquiries.

And I must agree with Jack Curtin when he writes “I definitely like the way these guys think” about brewer Scott Baver’s rationale for bringing back Reading Beer.

“Look, we’re brewers. For me, I just love making beer and being part of the beer industry. But we’re business people, so why not make a product that covers every end of the spectrum?

“If my customer wants it, what am I, an idiot for not doing it?”

I know this was just a regional beer even in its heyday, and that very few people are likely to get worked up about it. But since I’m one of them, you’re reading about Reading here.

The can of Reading Beer that sits on a shelf next to where I typed these very words.

Tastes Great, Less Gesundheit

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Add hay fever to the growing list of maladies that can be helped by the moderate drinking of beer. A new preliminary study released today by Tadao Enomoto at the Japanese Red Cross Society’s medical center in Japan’s Wakayama Prefecture appears to show marked relief in alleviating sneezing and running noses for hay fever sufferers from a flavonol compound in hops. They study’s full findings will be presented next month to the Palynological Society of Japan.

Japanese brewer Sapporo, who co-sponsored the research, has filed for a patent on the process of extracting the hay fever-fighting flavonol, which involves pulverizing the hops and then soaking them in water. By next spring — before the next hay fever season — Sapporo plans to release a new beer containing the isolated hop flavonol that combats hay fever.

Chateau Jiahu from Dogfish Head

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There’s another new beer coming out from Dogfish Head. Sam Calagione’s latest creation is Chateau Jiahu, which is based on an ancient beverage discovered in a pottery jar “in the Neolithic villiage of Jiahu, in Henan province, Northern China.” Approximately 9,000 years old, the concoction was a fermented drink made with rice, honey and fruit. Dogfish Head again worked with Dr. Patrick McGovern, a molecular archeologist at the University of Pennsylvania to faithfully recreate — as far as possible — this ancient beverage.

Dogfish Head explains the process they used:

In keeping with historic evidence, Dogfish brewers used pre-gelatinized rice flakes, Wildflower honey, Muscat grapes, barley malt, hawthorn fruit, and Chrysanthemum flowers. The rice and barley malt were added together to make the mash for starch conversion and degredation. The resulting sweet wort was then run into the kettle. The honey, grapes, Hawthorn fruit, and Chrysanthemum flowers were then added. The entire mixture was boiled for 45 minutes, then cooled. The resulting sweet liquid was pitched with a fresh culture of Sake yeast and allowed to ferment a month before the transfer into a chilled secondary tank.

A very limited number of 750 ml bottles are being produced and should be in stores early next month. Artist Tara McPherson (who also did the label for Fort) did a beautiful label for this beer.

jiahu-dogfish-head

Get Your Freak Out

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Tony Magee, the iconoclastic owner/brewer of Lagunitas Brewing has been a big Frank Zappa fan most of his life and this year marks the anniversary of the release of Zappa’s first album, the Mothers of Inventions’ Freak Out. Tony spoke with Frank Zappa’s widow, Gail Zappa (who runs the Zappa Family Trust), and obtained permission to use the colorful album cover on the beer label for their new Freak Out Ale. Very different in appearance from most Lagunitas labels, the beer nonetheless is in keeping with their rebel chic ethic. And as mentioned on the label, let’s not forget Frank Zappa’s most famous beer quote:

“You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline — it helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.”

— Frank Zappa

Click on the label for a larger view.