After my first sip, I was hooked and had a thought: global brewers on the lookout for new exciting flavors with sustainability in mind, should be looking to brew with caju. 

The unknown familiarity

Cashew, the nut, has enjoyed a run of popularity over the last several years as more consumers and nutritionists seek out superfoods. The crescent shaped, easily halved nut is used in butters, milk, and all manners of dishes. As ubiquitous as it is in snack packs and mixed cans, the cashew nut is actually a relatively small seed in a shell attached to a large juicy fruit, which is technically the fibrous stem of the cashew tree. People call it cashew apple, or caju in its homeland of Brazil. 

It’s also considered a waste of nut production. Since the cashew production industry is interested in the nut only, the fruit is considered redundant and discarded. Every single nut generates fibrous waste of approximately 10-12 times larger in volume.

Brazil and India are the world’s leading cashew producers. Brazil produces about 330,000 metric tons of cashew nuts, which equals 2.7 million metric tons of cashew apples per year, with only 12 percent of them being processed. Caju juice production accounts for up to 8 percent. The probiotic juice is consumed as is and considered a minor superfood. It can also be used in cocktails like the Caju Amigo. 

The flavor of caju is intriguing and complex. Think of a persimmon having a child with passionfruit. It is sweet, redolent of pink grapefruit, pleasantly tart, and mouthwateringly tangy at the same time. It lends itself perfectly to Brazil’s popular Catharina Sour beer style, a kettle sour featuring local fresh fruits. 

One of the defining features of caju is a slight sulfuric whiff, not dissimilar to New Zealand hops like Nelson Sauvin, Motueka, or Riwaka. It is highly recognizable to most beer drinkers, but difficult to describe. This is one reason why it works so well in IPAs. With all the flavorful riches of the fruit, it’s mind-boggling to think it is mostly going to a compost dump. 

Cajuring the magic 

Brazilian breweries utilize the fruit because it’s cheap, the flavor is highly enjoyable and it is instantly recognizable locally. That seems to do the trick: beers containing the ingredient pop up regularly in taprooms and at competitions across the country. Cervejaria Unika, located in Rancho Queimado of the Brazilian State of Santa Catarina, was awarded gold for its “Caju e Pitanga” in the Catharina Sour category and silver in the best of show for the same beer in 2022’s Concurso Brasileiro de Cervejas, one of Latin America’s biggest competitions. Three other beers with caju received medals in the 2023 edition of the competition.

Daniel Diehl, the head brewer of Brazil’s Cervejaria Narcose, explains how he first took caju into the realm of international collaboration. 

“The beer with caju came to be as a collab with Sebastian Sauer from Freigeist Bierkultur of Germany,” he says. “We agreed on Gose, a style that he is used to brewing, and I haven’t brewed one yet, with a twist of adding a Brazilian fruit. The drinkers’ feedback was very positive. This is one of our most famous beers, it sells quite well, and we do yearly versions of it — one with Scotch bonnet peppers grown around here and one with ginger.” 

Given caju’s funky flavor, it would also work well in a saison recipe, says Diehl. 

In the United States caju still remains an obscure ingredient. 

“We spend a lot of time letting our curiosity guide us and lead us down new paths, especially in the world of fruit,” says Bret Kollmann Baker, the chief operating officer at Ohio’s Urban Artifact. Whether we use YouTube, first-hand travel, or through word-of-mouth from our suppliers, if there is a new-to-us fruit out there we try to get our hands on it. Caju specifically was great as it hit a couple of key things necessary for success: it’s sustainable and relatively readily available and cheap, and the flavor intensity is high. And the fact that it would otherwise be a waste stream is amazing.”

“Drinking a bottle of juice over several days helped me to get a good impression on what layers of flavor caju could contribute,” he said. “Personally, the beer was above my expectations.”

Lost in translation

Will the fruit also put a spell on a larger group of beer drinkers? 

“There’s a wonderful amount of customers who are down for anything we make, no matter how weird, like garlic, mushroom, asparagus, onions, tomatoes,” says Baker. “At the end of the day, if you want it to be a success, you need to have it rooted in flavors or concepts that people already understand. Mixing the caju with guava and mango, and calling it ‘tropical’ creates an understandable foundation for people to relate to.” 

Still, he says, caju is hurt by the English translation, “cashew apple”. 

“People think it’s two things combined, being cashew and apple, and that is most definitely not the case,” he says. “So in this instance calling it by its local name, Caju is preferred, but that also has its own intrinsic hurdles to climb in a country where the majority of people speak only English.”

Thomann agrees saying that when he served his beer to family and friends and was able to explain caju it was well received. “When I sent the beer to local competitions, comments were more cautious, like ‘something different’, ‘interesting’, but eventually it did not get good ratings. I’m uncertain if it was the beer itself or the caju though.” 

Outpacing the time

In Brazil, cashew harvest season runs from November to January. If the nut is removed from the fruit, its shelf-life is reduced to six hours. With the nut intact, packaged, and stored at 41°F (5°C), the shelf-life of caju can vary from four to 21 days. After arriving at the processing plant, caju is deep frozen at 1.4°F (-17°C ) allowing it to be kept all year long for processing. 

Brewers in the Northeastern states of Brazil have access to very cheap fresh fruit; for brewers like Diehl in the South, juice is preferred. Urban Artifact uses caju purée for the added pop of color and flavor from the fruit skin, in addition to the juice. 

Researchers reported that gas chromatography−mass spectrometry analysis of a Brazilian cashew apple revealed numerous volatiles, including esters (40% of all volatiles) and terpenes, Limonene, and Bergamotene among them (20% of all volatiles). The use of hop terpenes extracted by the supercritical CO2 process has gained a certain following among IPA-focused breweries in recent years. 

I wonder if extracting terpenes from a waste product can be worth investigating by the companies currently producing oil extract. Who knows, maybe we will see caju extracts coming to the market shortly, but that’s the space for scientific experiments, not excited geeky speculation.

Since the plant requires a frost-free tropical climate, planting in the United States is limited to extreme south Florida, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. With no commercial production in the United States yet, cashews are grown in botanical collections and private landscapes, creating a unique opportunity for breweries in those areas to reach out and explore the collaborative prospects, turning something people will get rid of into beer. Flavorsome and sustainable beer, for that matter. 

Wherever or however brewers can procure caju, it will save the fruit from landfills, promote sustainability and upcycling, cut costs, and introduce drinkers to something fun and exciting.

Maybe, just maybe, a cashew apple can become the apple of the brewer’s eye.

Since 1979 All About Beer has offered engaging and in-depth articles and interviews covering every aspect of brewing and beer culture. Our journalism needs your support. Please visit our Patreon Page to show your appreciation for independent beer writing. 

The post Not a Monster: Caju is the Fruit Your Beer Needs first appeared on All About Beer.

Or could it?

The undergrad Heissner wondered. Knowing organic waste is primarily composed of cellulosic material (or simply, structural types of sugar), he saw untapped potential to reuse the pomace in the further production of alcohol. Nearly 40 years later, after a deliberately circuitous career, Heissner, now 60, is ready to show the beverage industry that its biggest pollution problem could become a boon. In October, Heissner and a business partner, Brian Hollinger, launched Zenso Labs, an innovative biotechnology company and consumer brand, that proves it’s possible to repurpose organic waste as more sellable liquid. The unique Zenso process converts spent grain fiber into drinkable alcohol by adding a proprietary combination of enzymes that are able to break down previously impenetrable structural carbohydrates.

The industry’s current leading solutions for spent grain—shipping it off as animal feed, composting it or recycling it as energy, and reusing it as a culinary ingredient—make use of the protein, vitamins, and minerals in the material. Organic waste also contains carbohydrates, like sugars, starches and lignin, explains Thomas Shellhammer, the Nor’Wester Professor of Fermentation Science at Oregon State University (OSU). Shellhammer was a classmate of Heissner’s at UC Davis and has helped Zenso Labs do some proof-of-concept testing at OSU’s state-of-the-art research brewery. 

Humans can’t digest the fibrous husks of grains like barley the same way many animals can, because the sugars are indigestible to our metabolic system, Shellhammer explains. It’s similar in fermentation. “But if we treat these spent materials with enzymes that can actually break down these indigestibles, we can create a new stream of smaller carbohydrate molecules,” aka sugars, Shellhammer explains, which can be used for a variety of biological applications.

For the last year or so, Heissner has been experimenting with turning those sugars into hard seltzer. Zenso Labs currently has two different drinks available at Heissner’s taproom and brewery, Barrel House Z in Weymouth, Mass. Recently, the production team there began packaging Zenso-branded beverages in 12-ounce, slim-can six-packs, with the trademarked slogan “sustainable sipping” ringing the top of each sticker label.

Seltzers hovering around 4.5% and higher proof ready-to-drink cocktails are currently the best vehicles for this fledgling biotechnology, Heissner says, because the liquid sugar the process produces comes “with some unusual flavors. It’s a little sour,” he says. “I have some fine-tuning to do before we get to broader applicability for breweries.” But eventually, perhaps as soon as mid-2024, the technology will be available to license by other producers. 

The problem in perspective

Spent grain comprises upwards of 80% of the solid waste generated by breweries and distilleries, research and reports show. “On the commercial scale, every batch is going to produce anywhere from a few 55-gallon tubs up to filling up an entire silo in just one day,” says Bob Galligan, a former head brewer, director of innovation and sensory specialist, who now serves as the director of industry relations for the Minnesota Crafts Brewers Guild, which maintains a spent grain directory to connect farmers who need animal feed or compost to breweries looking to dispose of spent grain. 

An agricultural waste-management arrangement works well enough for operations that are close to farmland, notes Shellhammer, and can create “a nice little circular economy.” For instance, in November, Portland, Maine, restaurant Central Provisions hosted a full circle dinner and tap takeover with Olde Haven Farm and Cushnoc Brewing Co. Spent grain from the brewery in Augusta traveled just about eight miles to the farm in Chelsea, where it helped feed a pig that the chefs at Central Provisions then transformed into five different pork dishes to pair with a lineup of Cushnoc beers. 

But, there are also drawbacks. Raising livestock and making compost both emit methane, a leading contributor to our warming planet. And for more remote breweries, an agricultural partnership just isn’t possible. Shellhammer points to Alaskan Brewing Co., which developed a first-of-its-kind steam boiler entirely fueled by spent grain to generate its own energy. Previously, like a lot of breweries, Alaskan dried then shipped off its spent grain to be reused in the Lower 48. “People do spend a fair amount of carbon to ship spent grain around,” Shellhammer says. 

Increasingly, there are avenues for breweries to sell, donate, or reuse their spent grain with greater economic value. Anheuser-Busch has developed EverGrain, a technology company that’s repurposing the protein from spent grain into new ingredients, and is making it available to other producers (similar to what Zenso Labs intends to do with the fiber). Spent grain protein has various culinary uses, such as enhancing breads and pizza dough, creating nutrient-rich drinks and snacks, and producing dog treats. 

Collectively, culinary uses for spent grain “might be able to make a dent,” according to Heissner, “but it doesn’t really solve the problem,” since there is still cellulosic material leftover once the protein is extracted. By combining the Zenso process with a commercial use for the protein, Heissner estimates that his 1,000-barrel brewery could minimize the amount of spent grain it has to deal with by 80%. That savings is exciting, but the ultimate driver of Zenso’s potential, he says, is that it uses less grain to make more alcohol—and thus, to make a producer more money.

An aptitude for ethanol

After extracting every last drop of liquid from the pomace at Domaine Chandon, 22-year-old Heissner would drive the debris out to the fields to deposit it. Thinking “there’s got to be a better use for this than turning it into dirt,” he says, “that ended up being a guiding principle for my career.”

Back at UC Davis that fall, Heissner began a course of directed research around converting sugar into fuel ethanol. Upon graduation in 1986, he was tapped by the fledgling Harpoon Brewery to be head brewer and Employee No. 1 in Boston, so he put his hypothesis on hold. Unable to shake the idea of upcycling organic waste, Heissner left Harpoon a few years later and for the next three decades worked to develop biofuel technology.

After his employer was acquired and subsequently shut down by petroleum giant BP, Heissner returned to brewing in 2016 by opening Barrel House Z, located about 15 miles south of Boston. A taproom with a modest production brewery, behind the scenes it’s been a continuous testing ground for Heissner’s experiments in ethanol—this time, for drinking it, not driving with it.

Shortly after opening the brewery, Heissner negotiated licensing the technology he helped develop to use it to make beverage ethanol. “I went back to BP and said, ‘I’ve got some cellulosic material that’s a big problem for breweries and distilleries, and that’s spent grain.’”

During the economically difficult years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Heissner returned to bioengineering as a consultant with Boston-based company, Gingko Bioworks, while his wife, Mary, held things down at Barrel House Z. He maintains his role as director of business development with Gingko. In May 2023, a commercial partner of Ginkgo Bioworks called Ferment Co. invested to help launch the Zenso company.

The technology still needs refinement, says Shellhammer. But initial findings prove “there are ways to get more value out of the material that’s stuck inside spent grain,” he says.

So Heissner remains in the lab at his own, local brewery. Putting Zenso on draft and in cans at Barrel House Z “is all in service of showing it’s possible,” he says. “It just so happens, we’re selling a lot of it.”

This article was made possible by Yakima Valley Hops, which believes in a free and independent press. Through its sponsorship of All About Beer, Yakima Valley Hops ensured that the creators behind this content were compensated for their work. Great beer needs great journalism. Supporters like Yakima Valley Hops make that possible. Learn more about how you can help journalism in the beer space and All About Beer here.

The post Is This New Biotechnology the Missing Link to a Sustainable Spent Grain Solution? first appeared on All About Beer.

If you were to ask a brewer to name a barley variety – not a malt type – chances are the first one they name is Maris Otter. This famed British barley variety is prized for its bready, slightly nutty flavor. For this reason, it commands a premium price sufficient to offset the notoriously low yield the variety produces on the farm.

Maris Otter was first introduced in 1966. Unlike hops, where new, flavorful varieties capture the attention of brewers and drinkers every year, in the opinion of many brewers, no new barley variety in almost 60 years has been able to supplant Maris Otter on top of the flavor pyramid.

Modern barley breeders hope to change that. Using new technologies, including genetic analysis and sensory analytics, breeders are finding out what makes malt taste good and using that knowledge to develop new barley varieties for the modern farmer and the modern brewer.

“Barley varieties that dominate the market today were not bred for positive contribution to beer flavor,” says Patrick Hayes, who heads a research team at Oregon State University. “They were bred to meet farmer expectations, like yield and disease resistance, and maltster needs, like protein levels, enzyme package and dormancy.” 

A new breed of barley might get removed from further trials if it tasted odd, but no new breed was chosen because it tasted uniquely good. This is because, for decades, barley breeding has been driven by the large brewers, who want barley to produce neutral flavor and as much extract as possible with a high enzyme package, so they can add low-enzymatic adjuncts like corn or rice.

Although there has been talk of barley flavor, it is very difficult for breeders to pin down. “In breeding, we can select for any attribute,” says Hayes, “But we need a definition and a means to measure it.” 

New Tools Allow Testing of Smaller Amounts of Grain

Hayes wanted to answer the call from craft brewers to provide a barley that had better flavor, but that concept was so far removed from the prior decades of breeding, it was hard to determine where to start. He overcame practical issues such as how to consistently malt as little as 500 grams of barley per cross and how to make consistent beer from it (it is essentially a single bottle of beer) and how to conduct sensory analysis on hundreds of beers at once. 

Now, by combining trained sensory panels and computer analytics, metabolomic analysis and DNA fingerprinting, Hayes can not only confirm that different barley varieties provide different flavors, but that those different flavors can be described and quantified.

Armed with these tools, Hayes and his team went about creating two new barley varieties. Starting in 2012, the OSU team began breeding one variety where Maris Otter was a parent and starting in 2014, they began breeding another where Golden Promise – probably the second-most lauded British barley variety – was a parent. The result: Lontra and Oregon Promise, respectively.

Unfortunately, the malthouse that received the Oregon Promise barley ceased operations in 2023 before the first brewery-sized batch could be tested. That grain remains in storage, awaiting a malthouse willing to assist the OSU team evaluate it. But the Lontra was malted by California’s Admiral Maltings in two batches, one floor malted and one pneumatic malted, and used by Deschutes Brewery in pilot brews.

These pilot brews were assessed by a panel of tasters including Master Brewers Association of the Americas members, and staff from Deschutes Brewery and pFriem Family Brewers. These were compared against beers brewed with floor- and pneumatic-malted malt of another new Oregon State barley named Thunder.

“The panel liked the floor-malted Lontra the most,” says Curtis Davenport, head maltster and co-founder of Admiral Maltings. “Flavor differences are subtle,” he says. “It’s more of a likeability factor.” The panel described the flavor of Lontra with words like “cereal/bready” and “caramel/honey” followed by “sweetness,” “grassy/herbal,” “floral,” “fruity,” “citrus” and “nutty.” Some even said Lontra had vegetal aromas and bitterness.

Barley breeding takes a long time – at least a decade from initial cross to registered variety – and if Oregon State’s work is any indication, payoffs are incremental. Thankfully, the idea of breeding for flavor has taken hold with breeders across North America, so Hayes and his team are not the only ones working on it.

Montana State University and Metabolites

At Montana State University, Jamie Sherman leads a breeding team trying to identify genetic markers that show good flavor. The key to their program is malting their barley at an earlier stage, often after just one generation in the field. 

“We can then taste the wort and get an idea of the differences,” says Sherman. “I was surprised by how much different varieties taste different from each other.” 

Sherman’s team then measures and analyzes the metabolites in the different barley breeds. While the jury is still out as to whether metabolites necessarily result in better tasting beer, metabolites are an objective measure that breeders can make crosses for. 

“We need something we can measure,” Sherman repeats. “Now we have to make a connection between the metabolites and people’s tastes.”

Montana State University has registered Buzz, a barley variety that has a lot of maltol, a metabolite which Sherman’s team says is the flavor compound malt is known for.

“We’re stoked about how it plays in hoppy beers after using Buzz pilsner as our primary base malt for a couple of months,” says Audra Johansen, head brewer at Seattle’s Ravenna Brewing Company. “Sensory-wise, it has a solid structure, well-suited for West Coast IPAs, allowing the hops to shine and giving the finished beer a crisp edge […] Buzz has solid technical performance for brewers while working well for farmers and maltsters, and it’s fantastic to see how farmers are helping drive innovation in craft malt.”

Breeding Efforts in Canada Finally Turn To Flavor

In Alberta, Canada, Flavio Capettini has bred barley for over 35 years, most recently with the Field Crop Development Centre in Lacombe, Alberta. “I always saw differences in the flavor of different barley varieties,” he says. “But you have to prioritize your resources in breeding.” 

Those priorities were always agronomics.

“As time passes, we have more tools and can work in more detail,” says Capettini, who was able to finally turn his attention to flavor several years ago. Working outside of his mandated research, Capettini used his academic freedom to pursue a genetics-driven flavor project, working with over 20 heirloom varieties and with the community support of the nearby Hamill Family Farm, which is also home to Red Shed Malting. 

The Hamills are willing to dedicate valuable acreage to trialing new varieties and have the ability to malt small batches so local breweries can evaluate their flavor. One variety, dubbed Lowe, has shown promise in the field, malthouse and brewhouse.

Blindman Brewing, located in Lacombe, near the Field Crop Development Centre, has made a couple of beers from Lowe (seeded and swathed using horses and antique equipment, no less). “Lowe barley has a very nice malt flavor,” says Shane Groendahl, co-founder at Blindman. “The flavor has a base grain-y note, that I find is fairly distinct. It has some soft honey notes and finishes with a lingering chewy sweetness.”

“We’re still growing it, but it has not been adopted very widely in the field,” says Capettini. “But brewers love it. The bottom line is: breeding for flavor can be done.”

This article was made possible by Yakima Valley Hops, which believes in a free and independent press. Through its sponsorship of All About Beer, Yakima Valley Hops ensured that the creators behind this content were compensated for their work. Great beer needs great journalism. Supporters like Yakima Valley Hops make that possible. Learn more about how you can help journalism in the beer space and All About Beer here.

The post Barley Breeders Return to Flavor first appeared on All About Beer.

The crosses showing positive attributes need to then be propagated, eventually being grown in trial plots in various agricultural areas so their agronomic performance in different soil and weather conditions can be assessed. And this has to happen over several years, since all of the agronomic indicators need to be assessed in different weather years. Over the years, a handful of barley kernels of the most promising crosses are propagated up to dozens of pounds worth of grain.

After between 10,000 and 30,000 trial plots, a single new barley breed is presented for registration; only registered varieties can be certified and grown by farmers. A seed company then buys the rights to grow and market the seed, which needs to be further propagated before enough is available to sell to farmers who then supply it to maltsters and then to brewers.

By the time a new barley variety is in your glass, at least 10 years has elapsed from the initial hybridization in the lab.

Read more: Barley Breeders Return to Flavor

This article was made possible by Yakima Valley Hops, which believes in a free and independent press. Through its sponsorship of All About Beer, Yakima Valley Hops ensured that the creators behind this content were compensated for their work. Great beer needs great journalism. Supporters like Yakima Valley Hops make that possible. Learn more about how you can help journalism in the beer space and All About Beer here.

The post The Long Path to New Barley first appeared on All About Beer.

About three miles away from the brewery, and far below the streets of Grand Rapids, 14,000 barrels of beer quietly age.

The barrels are located in former gypsum mines once owned by the Alabastine Mining Company, and now by Michigan Natural Storage. The mines maintain a steady temperature of 50 degrees Fahrenheit or lower, which makes them ideal for storing a number of products—especially beer.

“The level that we’re on, we’re 85 feet below the surface of the earth and it’s about 38 million years old,” says brewery co-founder Dave Engbers. “I asked if they found fossils or stuff like that, and they said where we were predates any living organisms. The ceiling is under an old lake bed.”

The brewery stored its first barrels in the mines around 2004 or 2005, estimates Engbers. Founders had started aging beers in barrels just a few years before, and soon after the barrels were taking up space at the brewery that needed to be used for additional fermentation capacity.

Engbers and co-founder Mike Stevens had a friend at Michigan Natural Storage who proposed aging barrels there, which made a lot of sense given the facility’s proximity to the Grand Rapids brewery. Now, some of the brewery’s most well-known beers—like KBS and Backwoods Bastard—spend time maturing in the mines.

The underground aging program at Founders may be novel, but aging beer underground is nothing new. Whether manmade or natural, more brewers are going underground with their barrel-aging programs.

A Return to Tradition

In the days before refrigeration, brewers—especially those specializing in lagers, which ferment at lower temperatures than ales—sought out underground spaces to age their beers. It was a common practice at breweries across Europe, and when German immigrants built breweries in the United States, many of them looked for underground cellars that could provide the cooler temperatures needed.

August Schell was one such brewer. Schell left Germany for the United States in 1848, and in 1860 built the Schell’s Brewery in New Ulm, Minnesota. Schell had cavernous cellars beneath the brewery dug out, creating a space to store barrels of the brewery’s lager.

Jace Marti remembers cleaning out the caves as a boy—and not fondly.

“I think that was one of those things that my dad did a little as punishment, but also as an initiation thing,” recalls Marti with a laugh. “There was no light down there, it was terrifying as a kid.”

Now, as a sixth-generation brewmaster at August Schell Brewing Co., he uses the caves to age his own beers. In 2015, the brewery reopened the caves, where currently 55-56 bourbon barrels reside.

True to the brewery’s heritage, these barrels almost always contain lagers of some kind—though they are quite different from the styles August Schell brewed so many years before. The base beers, says Marti, sometimes don’t fit neatly into style guidelines, but usually they are a “big, malty lager in the 10 percent range.”

The caves typically stay in the upper 30 degrees in the winter, and can reach 50 degrees in the summer. Marti says that the differences in temperature between the seasons imparts differences in the character of the beers—namely, that in the summer months the warmer temperatures help extract more flavor from the barrels.

“I think what we’re trying to achieve is more than a standard lager beer,” says Marti. “Having some variations in temperature is good for what we’re doing. A lot of the yeast is pretty much gone, and now we’re just trying to pick up residual spirit character and barrel character. It’s very different than what we were trying to accomplish 100 years ago.”

The Challenges of Aging Underground

Having access to a subterranean space, while rare, is just the beginning for breweries wishing to age underground. The unpaved floors, jagged walls and inconsistent dimensions of these spaces often necessitate a more labor-intensive process than simply storing barrels in a warehouse.

Michigan Natural Storage renovated its gypsum mines with elevators and concrete floors, but getting barrels to the facility still requires a lot of work from Founders.

“The barrels are on racks so they get unloaded from our facility, then brought over to their facility,” says Engbers. “And then they’ve got two industrial elevators. All of that adds to the cost and the labor.”

But at least Engbers has forklifts, and racks on which to store the barrels. The caves at August Schell Brewing Co. aren’t as accommodating.

“It’s a monumental pain,” says Marti. “We have to use different sections of the cave. We take half of the barrels in from one entrance, and the other half through another.”

Laborious though that that process is, work was much harder for the generations of brewers that came before Marti. In the late 19th century, teams would cut ice blocks from the nearby Cottonwood River and pull them by horse up the hill and into the cellars, where the ice would help maintain the necessary temperatures to lager the beers through warmer months.

Marti’s brother tried to replicate the experience once, pulling the old ice tong’s right off the wall of the brewery’s museum. He went down to the river with a chainsaw and lugged a block into the cellars, only to see it melt in a matter of days.

“We won’t be doing that again,” says Marti.

And, of course, another challenge when it comes to aging underground is having the space in the first place. Not every brewery is located miles away from mines that go far below the Earth’s surface, or above cavernous cellars.

At Santa Fe Brewing Co., founder Brian Lock decided to make his own underground cellars, though “underground” here is used a little more loosely.

“They’re not very far underground, they’re inside a bermed hill that they’re put up against,” says Lock. “But they do get a lot of the thermal consistency from being underground. The temperatures are pretty stable, which is great for barrel aging beer.”

Lock had six shipping containers leftover after building his taproom in Albuquerque, and wanted to put them to good use at the Santa Fe location. So they dug out the hill and placed the containers on concrete footings, then sprayed insulation and backfilled around the containers.

The brewery is located in the high desert, notes Lock, but with an elevation of 7,000 feet it’s cooler than many people realize. The six 40-feet-long containers stay at a pretty consistent 60-65 degrees Fahrenheit in the summer. In the winter, the brewery uses space heaters to ensure the containers don’t get too cold.

The underground portion is used to age the brewery’s sour beers, and there’s a small tasting room for sampling. In the future, says Lock, there will be a cave bar that the brewery will open up for special occasions.

The Future is Dark

Despite the challenges that come with aging beers underground, there are breweries eager to carry on the tradition. Earthbound Beer opened last year in St. Louis, Missouri, a city that is no stranger to underground cellars; Anheuser-Busch and Lemp Brewery both were built above the tunnels of a natural cave system. Earthbound inherited cellars of its own, as it now occupies the former Cherokee Brewery space. While the nascent brewery has but a few barrels stowed away at the moment, the owners do have plans to expand their cellars (with the possibility of bringing a foeder and coolship below as well).

Even breweries that don’t have natural caves running below the property are experimenting with underground aging. Brewery Ommegang of Cooperstown, New York, once stowed away Hennepin and other beers in Howe Caverns of upstate New York. Though the brewery no longer ages beer at the caverns, the partnership could serve to inspire other breweries.

Wabasha Brewing Co. is located less than half a mile from the Wabasha Street Caves in St. Paul, Minnesota, and actually produces a beer by the name of Cave Stout, with imperial and bourbon-barrel-aged variants. The plan has always been to age that beer in the nearby the caves, says co-founder and head brewer Brett Erickson. While he has received permission to do so from the caves, Erickson wants to wait until the brewery’s barrel-aging program has grown before moving any production.

And even though Founders has an astonishing 14,000 barrels of beer aging in the former gypsum mines, there may even be room there for a few more players.

“This was kind of our little secret after a while,” says Engbers. “Then the word got out and next thing you know there’s a couple other breweries that store stuff down here.”

For Engbers, it might be easy enough to store thousands of barrels beneath the streets of Grand Rapids. Hiding them is another thing altogether.

Daniel Hartis is the editor of All About Beer Magazine.

The post Keeping Cool: As Barrel-Aging Trends Up, Brewers Go Below first appeared on All About Beer.

Last October, at Jameson Irish Whiskey’s Love Thy Neighbor festival, a small collection of brewers coalesced in the Duggal Greenhouse located on Brooklyn’s waterfront. Outside, Dave Quinn, the head of whiskey science at Jameson, guided patrons through the production (and thematic pairings) of the event’s focus—stout-barrel-aged Jameson Caskmates whiskey. Inside, brewers showcased specialty Jameson barrel-aged beers alongside standard offerings, as drifting patrons snacked on pretzel necklaces, bánh mì-inspired fried chicken sliders and lettuce wraps to the tune of live music and falling jumbo Jenga stacks.

“You’re either going to make some memories or lose some,” says one festival-goer.

As a prominent and popular debut for Jameson’s new Caskmates whiskey, the event spoke to an increasingly intimate relationship between spirits and beer. Coming on the heels of programs from Rogue Ales and Spirits, New Holland Brewing, Anchor Brewing Co., Deschutes Brewery and many others, Jameson’s move to tie its brand to the craft beer industry isn’t novel. It is, however, notable due to the distillery’s status as an international player.

What Jameson’s Caskmates represents, instead, is how much consumer awareness and interest has expanded relating to the coming together of beer and whiskey—an expansion that can be seen, too, in the recent rollout of Goose Island’s collaboration “Bierschnaps” (aged in former Bourbon County Barrels) with Rhine Hall Distillery in Chicago, as well as in the unveiling of Two Lanterns Whiskey, which is distilled from Samuel Adams Boston Lager by Berkshire Mountain Distillers.

“Every whiskey, at its core, is basically distilled beer,” says Alan Dietrich, the chief executive officer of Bendistillery, which partners with Deschutes Brewery to make Black Butte Whiskey from the mash of the brewery’s signature porter. “Just like brandy is distilled wine, and vodka and gin are distilled grains, whiskey is a distilled malt beverage.”

Highlighting the Connection Between Beer and Spirits

New Holland Brewing and Artisan Spirits anticipated consumer interest when it first released its Beer Barrel Bourbon in 2012. Inspired by the flavor variations and nuance of Scotch aged in barrels that formerly held sherry, New Holland president Brett VanderKamp decided to age the distillery’s whiskeys in barrels that once held the brewery’s Dragon’s Milk stout.

“The brand [Beer Barrel Bourbon] came out in 2012,” wrote Layne Keuning, marketing coordinator for New Holland.

“The first year we sold about 500 nine-liter cases [of the Bourbon] and this year we will be closer to 7,500 nine-liter cases.” Next year, she adds, New Holland anticipates sales closer to 10,000 cases.

New Holland’s Beer Barrel Bourbon is intimately related to its frothier brethren in multiple ways. The malt bill has an uncharacteristically high barley content, though it still meets the necessary grain requirements to be legally classified as a bourbon (which is to say corn constitutes at least 51 percent of the mash). And while not all Dragon’s Milk batches are aged in New Holland’s used whiskey barrels due to scale—there are five barrels in the Dragon’s Milk program for every one barrel in the Beer Barrel whiskey program—all Beer Barrel Bourbon is aged in barrels that housed Dragon’s Milk and then blended, like Dragon’s Milk, for consistency.

“It adds a layer of complexity, it adds more mouthfeel, and it kind of just smooths some of the rougher parts of the bourbon off,” explains VanderKamp. Joel Armato, retail beverage specialist at New Holland, adds that subtle notes of vanilla and cocoa and sweetness carry from the stout to the whiskey, too.

Dave Quinn, the head of whiskey science at Jameson, detailed similar effects of the beer barrel-aging process throughout his educational seminars at Love Thy Neighbor.

“The new whiskey combines the triple distilled smoothness of Jameson Original with the richness of stout beer, adding notes of coffee, cocoa and hops for a truly unique finish,” he wrote in an email following the event. Following last year’s stout-barrel-aged whiskey, Jameson also released a Caskmates whiskey aged in barrels that once held IPA.

To both capitalize upon and promote this heightened consumer engagement, New Holland offers and even encourages customers to try Dragon’s Milk and Beer Barrel whiskey side-by-side to discover the products’ singularities and similarities in its taprooms.

At those taprooms, patrons can try the whiskey as samples or small pours alongside beers like Dragon’s Milk, or they can order the spirit on its own, as part of flights, and in cocktails such as The Dude, which combines the Beer Barrel Bourbon with a Dragon’s Milk reduction, chocolate bitters and cream, and the Beer Drinkers’ Old Fashioned, which substitutes that same beer reduction in place of simple syrup and uses chocolate bitters alongside more traditional orange ones.

“For us, it’s taken a minute to really find the ways to highlight the brands like Beer Barrel Bourbon and get them in front of people in a variety of ways that capture their attention,” says Armato. “We realized the value of a sample and how far a sample can go for someone.”

To many, the experience of beer and whiskey together—a shot and a beer, a boilermaker, or “hauf-an-hauf”—has long been associated with an efficient if perhaps lowbrow experience of alcohol delivery. But, similar to the theme of the Jameson event, New Holland’s idea of that experience is something slower, a moment of drawing connections in flavors and processes from one beverage to the next.

“There’s a little bit more thoughtfulness that comes with that order,” says Armato. “And that’s a big reason why it’s a bit of a slower, sip and enjoyment kind of thing, rather than crush a beer and throw the shot back.”

Following Armato’s instruction, I simulated the experience at home using a pour of Beer Barrel Bourbon and a six-ounce pour of Dragon’s Milk. Starting with the beer, then transitioning to sips of the whiskey, I could clearly follow notes of cocoa and vanilla from one beverage to the next, though the other flavors of nuts and dark fruit carried over in a more subtle presence, too, subdued beneath the boozy punch of the whiskey. Texturally, it felt like a layered coating of the tongue in a single palette of flavors that altered in volume and emphasis. And, perhaps dangerously, the alternation made my consumption of each far easier by creating balancing refuges of heat and sweet richness.

“Warming your palate up to all of the flavors that are in that beer are important, and finding all the nuances that are in that bourbon as well,” Armato adds.

The Rise of Beer-Barrel-Aged Whiskies

The economics of shared ingredients and processes fosters a natural relationship between beer and whiskey. It can make it easier to work with local breweries, as it has for Oliver Mulligan, founder of Great Wagon Road Distilling Co. in Charlotte, North Carolina. His neighbors at The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery handle his mash production, which saved him from purchasing the necessary equipment. Instead, he lets the brewery handle the mash, which is then trucked just a few hundred feet over to Great Wagon Road to be distilled.

“We do all the mashes for Great Wagon Road, and then we pass them off to them and they ferment everything,” says Jocelyn Ruark, marketing manager for The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery. “They put it into the barrels to age, and once that’s done aging, they give us the barrels back and we age our barrel-aged brews in those barrels.”

Mulligan’s Rua whiskey uses 100 percent malted barley—a principal ingredient in beer. Though it once used an identical mash bill to Olde Meck’s Fat Boy Baltic Porter, Mulligan has since adjusted his recipe to use only pilsner malt. Those early batches made with the Fat Boy mash, according to Ruark, were “deeper […] all the flavors times two.”

“When you taste the Rua you get to taste that beautiful char from the barrels, the caramel that comes out of the oak, that nice little barley note and a light chocolate finish,” Mulligan says. Darker specialty malts, he explains, overpowered those more subtle flavors.

Dietrich, of Bendistillery, sees that kind of evaluation as beside the point, however. When it comes to beer-barrel-aged whiskeys, he sees them rather as an entirely separate and new product, “a uniquely American malt whiskey” with its own characteristics distinct from standard ryes or bourbons.

“I’ll tell you, we did not have any preconceived notions about what we wanted the finished product to be, other than that we wanted it to taste great,” says Dietrich.

“We have numerous plans as the volumes grow to experiment with finishing the product in used barrels, letting the product age longer […] really it’s a making-it-up-as-we-go-situation,” he continues. “We are constantly tasting the product, and discussing with Deschutes what we want to do.”

New Holland recently rolled out a Beer Barrel Rye to expand from its Beer Barrel Bourbon, and Mulligan is currently aging Rua on barrels that previously held barrel-aged Fat Boy. Though the casks were originally going to be converted into furniture, Mulligan says the barrels “smelled so good there was no way I wasn’t putting whiskey in them.”

Bendistillery and Deschutes, in the meanwhile, are aging a collaboration Abyss whiskey, though on a timeline beer drinkers probably aren’t accustomed to.

“I can confidently tell you the Abyss will come out within the next 2-10 years,” says Dietrich with a laugh. “We’re making whiskey man, you don’t know when you’re going to get something until you get it.”

Bo McMillan is the former editorial assistant for All About Beer Magazine, and is currently pursuing his PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

The post Full Circle: Breweries and Distilleries Share Barrels first appeared on All About Beer.

That changed in 2014.

“As time went on, from the definition being in place, I think there came a heightened sensitivity to the fact that things aren’t so black and white,” says Julia Herz, the craft beer program director at the Brewers Association.

To define adjuncts: In all cases, they are unmalted sources of fermentable sugars and can include grains, honey, fruits, agave nectar and more. So, yes, barley can be an adjunct, while rye usually isn’t (it’s most frequently used in the form of rye malt).

Some of the ideas about them are true: Adjuncts can make beer cheaper to produce, and even the early brewers who embraced them drew a flavor line. But adjuncts have been a distinct characteristic of American beer since the industrial age because they made beer better.

“I think there’s a lot of name and quality and emotion wrapped up in the use of adjuncts,” says Aaron MacLeod, who has studied brewing grains as director of the Hartwick College Center for Craft Food and Beverage in Oneonta, New York. “I think that the U.S. has a long and proud history of adjunct brewing, especially with corn and rice.”

It’s a statement with which Herz agrees, and part of the reason adjuncts now comply with the “traditional” totem of the Brewers Association’s definition.

“Adjuncts played a huge role in the history of beer styles in the United States,” she says.

The following sections explain how some of the most common adjunct grains emerged and provide a little information as to what they add to—rather than detract from—beer.

Corn

“In North American brewing, if we look at the history up to craft brewing, the major adjuncts were corn and rice,” says Paul Schwarz, a professor at North Dakota State University who studies malt and cereal grains. In the Americas, corn’s ubiquity and high starch content made it an easy choice for brewers looking to lighten up lagers made with high-protein (and limited) barley. Even some Colonial brewers turned to corn to make beer, according to Schwarz.

Anton Schwarz, a Czech-born brewery consultant and manager (of no relation to the above-mentioned professor), began advocating for the use of corn in industrial brewing in the 1860s and was highly influential in its current relationship to brewing. In 1868 he immigrated to the United States, where he opened Schwarz Laboratories for research and training and edited The American Brewer.

Appropriately, it was Schwarz who recommended brewmaster J.F. Theurer to Pabst—Theurer was behind Pabst’s famous exposition-winning (and corn-including) beer in 1893.

“In theory, the starch in corn is similar to the starch in barley. So in theory you could make a beer with malt and corn that has a similar carbohydrate profile to a beer made with 100 percent malt,” says Schwarz, the North Dakota State professor.

Corn appears in classic American adjunct lagers such as Yuengling’s signature beer (now considered craft by the Brewers Association), as well as in newer-wave beers like Fullsteam Brewery’s El Toro cream ale and 3 Floyds Brewing Co.’s Corn King IPA. Corn lightens body and color while maintaining alcohol content and can be used in brewing in the form of grits, flakes or syrups.

Anthony Accardi, brewer at New York City’s Transmitter Brewing, uses corn for a cheeky twist on a farmhouse ale in his brewery’s F6.

“Basically [it’s] in some ways mimicking High Life as a reference point,” Accardi says. “We’re adding some Brettanomyces to it that would give it some funkiness or earthiness that would never be appropriate to an American light lager.”

Rice

As an adjunct, rice was used frequently among brewers in industrial America. Due to rice’s limited availability and its fussiness, however, corn overtook it in large measure toward the close of the 19th century.

Rice, like corn, is low in fats and protein and high in starch, making for beer that is lighter in color, flavor and body. But while most corn is fairly easily converted into fermentable product by the extra enzymatic activity of barley, rice needs a little something extra (higher cooking temperatures, extra bacterial enzymes) to be added into beer.

For one of the most classic beers made with rice, look no further than Anheuser-Busch InBev’s famed Budweiser. Like corn, rice’s utility is also being rediscovered among smaller producers. For instance, Melvin Brewing Co. and Monkey Paw Brewing Co. partnered for a double IPA called “This One Goes to 11,” brewed with sticky rice and Minute Rice, as a gibe at big beer.

At Transmitter, Accardi works with rice as part of a wider effort “to use all the colors on the palette” when it comes to brewing with grain. “To me there aren’t rules to what a beer should be or shouldn’t be,” he says.

Transmitter’s S8 saison uses rice to keep the beer’s body and color light and refreshing, with the rice providing a gentle canvas for the spicy saison strain and German aromatic hops in the ale.

“Some people feel like they taste a little bit of sake-ness to it. … I’m not sure that I ever perceived that,” says Accardi.
Stillwater Artisanal has also used rice to make its Extra Dry saison (though that brewery’s beer is meant to call to mind sake), and Bayou Teche Brewery uses rice to keep its snappy Ragin’ Cajuns Kölsch light and fluffy.

Wheat

Wheat’s high protein content—and also the soluble nitrogen found in wheat flour—has made it a go-to choice for brewers looking for greater head retention. Unmalted wheat helps constitute lambics and witbiers, and provides a more pronounced cloudiness and raw, grainy taste over malted wheat. That cloudiness is one reason flour has occasionally been used in making New England-style IPAs like Tired Hands Brewing Co.’s Milkshake., a collaboration with Omnipollo.

Wheat didn’t initially take off in American brewing, professor Schwarz says, because it was too valuable of a food crop to justify turning it into beer. Now, though, brewers are going beyond standard wheat to heirloom varieties like spelt to add a new level of rusticity and complexity to their beverages.

Let’s be clear: German hefeweizen and Berliner weisse beers predominantly use malted wheat, not adjuncts. But in the cases of beers like Blue Moon or Lindemans Cuveé René, unmalted wheat helps produce the fluffy head and bready taste.

Oats

Some papers suggest the use of oats in European brewing was fairly present until the Reinheitsgebot (the German beer purity law). It would make sense given the context of how other adjuncts emerged: Oats are a hardy crop that grow well in the cold and wet climes of countries like Finland, Germany and the United Kingdom.

The most common style of beer to which Schwarz has traced the use of oats would be the British oatmeal stout, where he has found references dating back to the 1800s. A distinctly smooth and creamy style, the beer has a distinguished mouthfeel that comes from oats’ high levels of a non-fermentable fiber called beta-glucan, Schwarz says. Beta-glucan not only produces viscosity in beer, it also happens to be the thing that Cheerios advertises as heart-healthy.

The oats in Terrapin Beer Co.’s Rise-n-Shine coffee oatmeal stout, which is aged in Tennessee whiskey barrels, serves as an example of how oats can give what might otherwise be a syrupy beer a lighter texture similar to aerated cream. Oats also serve as a base to the beer’s intense nose and flavor profile, laying down an oatmeal-like canvas to bind together notes of bittersweet chocolate, dark fruit and warming booze.

Recommended usage levels of oats are low in beer. One 1943 research paper argues that around 10 percent in the mash is adequate, and only with “good malt.” And Randy Mosher, a columnist for this magazine and author of books such as The Brewer’s Companion and Radical Brewing, has suggested in his writing oat usage of somewhere between 5 and 10 percent.

Accardi says he adds oats to beers like his G2 Belgian pale ale if “we want to give it a little extra something in terms of how it feels.”

“We try to consider all the aesthetic angles,” he continues. “We’re still using mostly barley, ’cause that’s what
beer is.”

Buckwheat, The Pseudo-Grain

Though occasionally mentioned in the same breath as spelt, emmer and durum, one ingredient showing up in beer recently, buckwheat , isn’t actually a grain at all.

“It could be considered a pseudocereal,” said Prof. Paul Schwarz of North Dakota State University. Cereal grains come from grasses; buckwheat does not. However, buckwheat does call to mind a profile similar to rustic wheat in beer, and can be malted or used as an adjunct.

“Buckwheat is really beautiful […] with an earthiness and nuttiness that are not really found in the same way in much else,” said Brian Buckman, co-founder and head brewer of Illuminated Brew Works in Chicago, Illinois, whose 2016 Pareidolia Belgian Pale Ale incorporates unmalted buckwheat, Asian pears and amchur (dried mango powder).

Buckman described buckwheat as “a very big, bold flavor,” and bold it is indeed (it’s also the reason Buckman uses pears in Pareidolia as a balance). Close your eyes while drinking Pareidolia, and it’s easy to imagine a freshly cut hunk of whole-grain levain bread in place of your beer glass.   

What About Rye?

Rye use dates roughly back to medieval times, appearing in German roggenbiers and assorted Scandinavian fermented beverages. But given that most rye used in beer is malted, rye is not usually an adjunct.

The usage of rye in Europe fell out of favor around the start of the 20^th century, said Paul Schwarz, because rye is notoriously difficult to work with. It has a similar high protein content to wheat, which increases the difficulty of sparging, and also contains high levels of pentosan, a complex carbohydrate that makes rye wort “thick and sticky.”

U.S. brewers are re-embracing the grain for its distinct spiciness, adding it to beers from stouts to saisons and IPAs for balance and complexity.

Anthony Accardi, of New York’s Transmitter Brewing, adds rye to his NY1 Danko Rye saison for “a little edge.”

“In terms of layering the spice from the grain and the yeast choice, and then maybe picking a hop that has a peppery finish to it […] you’re blending distinct but various layers of a certain flavor,” he says.

Bo McMillan is the former editorial assistant for All About Beer Magazine, and is currently pursuing his PhD in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

Beers Brewed With Rice

The post Beyond Barley: Embracing Alternative Grains first appeared on All About Beer.

Operated by the Wisconsin Historical Society, Old World Wisconsin in the town of Eagle allows visitors to explore more than 60 historical structures across hundreds of acres of Midwestern landscape, staffed by volunteers depicting daily 19th century life. To commemorate the ties to historic farm brewing, an exhibit was established in partnership with the Milwaukee Museum of Beer & Brewing and various local breweries, which showcases a typical farm brewery operation.

Next year, Old World Wisconsin will begin raising funds for its forthcoming Sudhaus, which will feature a larger production brewery and beer garden.

“A fully operational brewery and beer garden, planned for since we opened in 1976, will be part of a reconfigured park entrance designed on a village-on-a-green theme,” says Dan Freas, director of Old World Wisconsin.

Until that new Sudhaus is built, the museum offers demonstrations that show how 19th-century farmers would have brewed.

Dressed in authentic period clothing today is Gary Luther, a retired principal brewer of the Miller Brewing Co. and current member of the Master Brewers Association of the Americas.

Luther begins brewing 15 gallons of cream ale by heating well water to 180 degrees Fahrenheit in an open-air kettle. He uses a hand-cranked grist mill to grind a mixture of Caramel 10 and pale malted barley. As the grains hit the water, the air fills with an earthy, malty aroma, reminiscent of breakfast oatmeal.

Farmers of the 19th century brewed a variety of recipes. Some were brought over from the old countries and handed down through generations, others shared by neighbors, and even a few discovered by experimenting with nontraditional ingredients. Some farmers used corn or rice as adjunct grains with molasses, pine needles or spruce tips as flavoring agents, but many used their own grains and hops and brewed with equipment purchased locally or homemade. From start to finish, brewing in the 1850s was a hands-on affair, and Old World Wisconsin replicates
that experience.

Luther stirs his mash in a wood lauter tun that uses a false bottom to siphon the wort, which sits covered for an hour while enzymes convert starch into sugar under a watchful eye.

Hot water from the boiling vat is added in calibrated amounts to help in sparging, whereby the sugar-rich wort is recycled, bucket by bucket, back through the mash until a clear liquid is gained. The mashed meal is saved for animal feed.

Next, the wort is transferred to a separate open-air brewing kettle and boiled for 75 minutes. First hopping happens 10 minutes into the boil to add bitterness, and this distinct, pungent aroma foretells the beer’s ultimate flavor. A second hopping is added 10 minutes before the end of the boil. True to history, Luther measures the hops by hand (historic recipes often include “by the handful”).

Boiling complete, the wort is transferred into a kuhlschiff (also known as a coolship or cooling pan), by ladling it into a trough and screening the spent hops. Well-to-do farmers owned a copper pan for this purpose, as that metal promotes flash condensation and quickly, and critically, reduces the wort’s temperature. Otherwise, wort sat overnight to cool in covered vats.

As part of its final journey to becoming beer, the wort is now transferred into fermenting tubs and the yeast pitched at 60 degrees F. Farm brewers knew fermentation was successful when they saw the frothy foam known as krausen develop on the wort’s surface. After fermenting for several days, the yeast produced alcohol, generated carbon dioxide and developed a multitude of aromas. At the end of fermentation, priming syrup is added to ready the beer for storage. Typically, yeast was harvested for another brew. Now transferred into small kegs, bunged shut and stored in a cool place, this table beer—unlike lager, which required lengthy cold storage—was ready to drink in just a week or two.

Farm brewing was a continual process in order to keep a steady supply for the family, friends and neighbors. Excess beer was often sold to local taverns. On the farm, beer was consumed at every meal and by all family members—including children. Beer was not only a refreshing beverage, it was also considered a foodstuff and necessary part of the diet. At a time when milk was unpasteurized and water often contaminated, beer was safe to drink due to boiling and fermenting, and, as long as equipment and supplies were kept sanitary and vermin-free, drinking it in moderation caused no ill health effects. As one brewing apprentice notes, “It was the drink that didn’t kill us.”

At Old World Wisconsin, beer is brewed with equipment, materials and recipes found on an 1850s farm, with minor concessions to modern methods. Hops and barley are grown, harvested and processed on-site, and well water is used along with locally propagated yeast strains.

And what will come of Luther’s cream ale? For now, government licensing stipulates that until an actual brewery is constructed, only brewing demonstrations are permitted—serving is verboten. Soon a park renovation will expand this prototype brewery into a full-scale Sudhaus, which will offer not only demonstrations and workshops but also tasting and sales of historically brewed beer.

“We share a passion to provide an experience that will educate and preserve the heritage and history of Wisconsin’s brewing legacy,” says Jerry Janiszewski of The Milwaukee Museum of Beer & Brewing. “A fully operational brewery will create an interactive experience and give an opportunity to have fun while learning about the historic brewing process.”

Brian Wettlaufer is a freelance writer in Franklin, Wisconsin. He can often be found enjoying a beer in his backyard and is always found at www.blwwrites.weebly.com.

The post New Brewing in Old World Wisconsin first appeared on All About Beer.

Peroni Nastro Azzurro had quite the summer last year.

The pale lager was spotted at rooftop pools and patios at luxury hotels on South Beach and in Beverly Hills, and was snapped by paparazzi at The House of Peroni event during New York Fashion Week.

Those photos showed the beer not in its iconic green bottle, but rather in a new slim can more appropriate to these outdoor occasions. The white 11.2-ounce cans were available in only a few select test markets in 2016 before being launched in additional locations throughout the United States this year.

But there was one location where those stylish new cans were absent: Italy.

While Peroni does have cans in its home country, the brewery considers Nastro Azzurro a premium product. As was the case in the United States before craft brewers popularized them, cans are seen as down-market in most of Europe and reserved for the economy segment of beer.

“I think it’s going to need something like the craft movement to help that happen,” says David Schmid, who represents Peroni and other brands as the director of prestige imports at Tenth and Blake Beer Co., the craft and import division of MillerCoors.

Consumer perception aside, another reason cans have yet to catch on throughout Europe is that most countries there have strong returnable bottle markets, wherein consumers can return glass bottles for a deposit.

While slow to move in their native countries, breweries have begun exporting canned offerings to the States, where there’s no such stigma against putting a premium product in cans. And though cans are en vogue across America, breweries across Europe are not always going lightly into the package.

Making the Case for Cans

Finding an American saison in cans isn’t a tough challenge. But if you’re looking for a saison from Belgium, you’re apt to find it packaged in large, 750 mL bottles, often adorned with a cork and a cage.

That’s how Brasserie St-Feuillien packaged its saison until 2013, when Artisanal Imports—the brewery’s U.S. importer—proposed putting the beer in cans, citing the popularity of the package in the craft segment. Lanny Hoff, the senior vice president of Artisanal Imports, believes it was the first Belgian saison in a can.

“The sheer beer geekery of it was awesome for us,” says Hoff, who persuaded brewery owner Dominique Friart to bring the beer into cans. “It took a little bit of explaining to her and her team that cans were no longer viewed as the down-market, cheap package that they were at the time in Belgium.”

There are cans in Belgium, of course, and they’re not only reserved for what some might see as “economy” or “down-market” beers. Cans of Rodenbach Classic can be found at concerts and other outdoor occasions, despite the Flanders red ale not being an obvious choice for the package.

“But in its home geography of West Flanders, Rodenbach is an alternative to pilsners,” notes David van Wees, founder of Latis Imports, which imports the brewery’s beers to the U.S. “People drink the Classic Rodenbach as one would a pilsner here. It’s a very refreshing beer.”

Whether cans of Rodenbach Classic are distributed to the States depends partly on the success of Fruitage, a 4.2% ABV blend of young and foeder-aged Rodenbach, with cherries and elderberries. The bright, slender 8.5-ounce cans are a departure for the brand, which packages many of its beers in large bottles. Still, the company didn’t hesitate to introduce a new beer in a new format earlier this year.

“The interesting thing about Rodenbach is it is of course an import from Belgium, but it somehow has an appreciation or an ability to transcend craft or import,” says Van Wees. “I think the ardent specialty craft drinker would respect that Rodenbach has this ability to have this dual personality between being an ultra specialty craft and being imported.”

Brouwerij Van Honsebrouck started canning Kasteel Rouge for sale in its native Belgium in 2014, but just this year introduced the cans to the American audience. The cherry-liqueur-infused quad is now available in four-packs of 16-ounce cans, some of which are packaged in small coolers. In addition to a strong start in the United States, the new format is also doing well in Russia and France, according to brewery sales manager Marc Schrauwen.

After a successful first year of sales for St-Feuillien Saison, Hoff was able to point to its success as a case study for other brands. Just this year, Artisanal Imports helped introduce Germany’s Pfungstädter Weizen Radler and Grevensteiner in cans. The latter, a kellerbier from Brauerei C. & A. Veltins, had previously been exported to the U.S. in short “steinie” bottles. Despite the new cans being a drastic departure from those distinct bottles, Hoff says it wasn’t a tough sell to persuade Veltins to put the beer in cans.

“That was a really easy thing to do,” says Hoff. “The German guys understood that there’s no particular reason for cans to be inferior from a quality perspective. That was easy to make the case to them.”

It doesn’t hurt, says Hoff, that cans weigh far less than bottles and stack better than glass. For Artisanal Imports, that means it can ship more beer for less money.

“Logistics is a big cost, and cans are a lot cheaper to ship,” Hoff says. “I think the numbers are anywhere between 25 and 30 percent cheaper. And that’s not nothing, man. That’s quite a lot.”

A Changing Global Perspective

When Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. started packaging its beers in cans, brewers across Europe took note, says Hoff. For many, seeing an industry leader embracing cans helped erase the idea that the package was reserved only for lower-quality beers.

“When we can point to well-regarded breweries that are known globally, that helps a lot,” says Hoff. “When Sierra Nevada started doing cans, that was something that everybody in Europe noticed. The brewers are admitting that they can see a global influence on packaging and can say to themselves, ‘You know, the can actually kind of makes sense.’”

It’s easy to make the case for Pfungstädter Weizen Radler in cans as well, given the success Austria’s Stiegl has had with its own canned radlers. Stiegl bottles its popular grapefruit radler, but cans of this beer (as well as a new lemon version) have taken off in the U.S. and Canada.

“We were in the right time and the right place with that product,” says Claudia Nussbaumer, product manager export for Stiegl. “We created a category. The flavor was well-received in the states and people loved it. I think the can was just a door opener in retail.”

While Stiegl doesn’t share specific sales numbers, Nussbaumer says that the cans constitute the vast majority of the company’s total radler sales. But in the brewery’s native Austria, Nussbaumer says, cans in general are more of a niche offering given the country’s bottle deposit system.

Like Stiegl, Binding-Brauerei AG in Frankfurt, Germany has had recent success exporting cans of radler—in this case the brewery’s hefeweizen mixed with grapefruit juice. While cans haven’t caught on in their native Germany, where they’re not seen as a premium product, Schöfferhofer recently moved the Hefeweizen Grapefruit into four-packs of 16.9-ounce cans as well as 12-packs of 11.2-ounce “slim” cans for export to the U.S.

In Germany, many drinkers are familiar with the brewery’s standard hefeweizen. Rather than exporting the unadulterated version or new flavors to the U.S., however, the brewery is focusing solely on the grapefruit version.
While that beer has been distributed to the U.S. in clear bottles and 16.9-ounce cans, the brand recently added 12-packs of 11.2-ounce cans (the same “slim” cans used by Peroni).

“We saw the success of the big can, but wanted to introduce something new,” says Armin Buehler, head of marketing for Radeberger Gruppe USA. “We introduced our 12-pack this year. It’s doing extremely well. It’s a liquid that really fits well in this format.”

The Decade of the Can

Mexican-style lagers, like the aforementioned radlers, are well-suited to cans. Easy drinking and lower in alcohol, these beers are ideal for summer sipping and outdoor occasions—which has long been a hallmark in how the beers are advertised. Considering there’s no stigma surrounding cans in Mexico as there is in many European countries, why has it taken so long for Mexican brands to move into cans?

TRENDING: Mexican-Style Lagers

European breweries like Brasserie St-Feuillien carefully thought about the ramifications of putting its beers into cans. It wasn’t much of a consideration for Pacifico. The brand introduced 24-ounce cans in February of 2016, and earlier this year launched its first ever 12-ounce cans.

“We really didn’t have any trepidation over moving to cans,” says Matt Escalante, senior brand marketing director for Pacifico. While Escalante notes that some consumers prefer bottles for high-end beers, others are content to drink premium beers in cans when the occasion is right.

But if you’re a brewery like Corona, whose marketing and branding is so tied to a distinctive bottle, investing heavily in cans might give you pause. Few are the people who haven’t seen the iconic bottle featuring prominently in the brewery’s commercials, waves lapping the shore in the background.

“Corona’s clear bottle is iconic to the brand, and we will always be a bottle-forward brand,” says John Alvarado, vice president of brand marketing at Constellation Brands. “There’s so much equity and so much consumer love in our bottle, when we decided to do the major relaunch in the cans, we said, ‘OK this has to be on top of that.’”

Corona has been putting its beer in cans for years, but according to Alvarado “no one really knew about them.” Two years ago, after much research into consumer preferences, Corona relaunched its can business by redesigning the cans to more prominently feature the typography and branding drinkers associate with the bottles.

They promoted the beer at several music festivals, and this year the can even got a commercial of its own. The commercial shows a can of Corona Extra as it slips from a six-pack and rolls from person to person before finding its way to the beach.

Since the relaunch, Corona’s can business has doubled, according to Alvarado. And while it’s not a phrase they use in any consumer-facing marketing, employees in-house refer to these efforts as just part of the “decade of the can.”

“It’s an easy way internally for us to wrap our heads around it,” says Alvarado. “We have big ambitions. We intend to continue, first and foremost, to drive our Corona bottle business, but then also over the next decade we will continue to grow our can business in a big way.”

Breweries across the globe will look to do the same by exporting more cans to the United States, where the stigma that once surrounded cans has all but disappeared, thanks to their popularity among craft brewers. In their home markets, though, cans can still be a tough sell.

You won’t find cans of St-Feuillien’s saison in Belgium, or packaged Grevensteiner’s cans in Germany. But as is the case with beer styles, says Hoff, packaging continues to evolve.

“That kind of evolution, to me, is one of the most fascinating things about the beer business,” Hoff says. “The same thing is happening with packaging. It’s happening in Europe very slowly, but they’re starting to come around.”

Daniel Hartis is the editor of All About Beer Magazine.

The post New-Look Imports: From Green Bottles to Premium Cans first appeared on All About Beer.

American brewers, untethered to the Reinheitsgebot, the German beer purity law, had grown accustomed to often incorporating the supplemental flavors during production—either in the kettle or aging barrel—experimenting well beyond the two traditional flavors and colors.

Creature Comforts Brewing Co., of Athens, Georgia, has produced a range of limited-release, fruit-enhanced variations on its year-round unflavored Athena Berliner Weisse. The Athena Paradiso line has included everything from a raspberry and cranberry version to a more tropical spin with passion fruit and guava.

“When we’re thinking about Athena flavors, we want to think particularly about the acid balance of the fruits,” says Creature Comforts co-founder and brewmaster Adam Beauchamp. “One of the fruits, passion fruit, is really, really acidic, and the base beer has some tartness to it as well. I don’t think that that particular Paradiso release would have been quite as nice if we didn’t have the guava along with that fruit to really balance out the aggressive acidity of the passion fruit.”

Smuttynose Brewing Co.’s Short Weisse is a popular blank canvas for the brewers working on its experimental Smuttlabs projects. Cherry, Smoked Cherry and Smoked Peach are a few of the directions Smuttlabs has taken the base Berliner-style brew, and, as far as head brewer Charlie Ireland is concerned, the sky’s the limit.

“I haven’t found a fruit that doesn’t work with the style,” Ireland says. “I’ve been coming up with some fun combinations, so we’ll see in the near future.”

Naturally, as drinkers discover these combinations, they get a bit more curious about their more traditional German roots. And, considering the fact that we’re living in the “customize-everything” age, mit Schuss may be poised to have its American moment.

That would be a welcome development for beer industry veteran Mary Pellettieri, who applied her chemistry and botany background to her latest project, Top Note tonics, a line of fruit-, root- and herb-based tonic concentrates.

Pellettieri, who spent eight years as quality manager at Goose Island Beer Co. and wrote the book Quality Management: Essential Planning for Brewers, developed some syrups for ABV Social, a bar in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, specifically for use in Berliner-style weisse ales and based on the traditional German accompaniments. And “traditional” doesn’t necessarily equate to “easy.”

Making a raspberry syrup in particular, Pellettieri notes, is a bit more challenging than it might sound.

“We used a lot of raspberry, balanced with a little cranberry for tanginess but not acidity, knowing that there’s acid in the beer,” she explains. “It’s simple in thought, but difficult to make cooked down. We cooked down about 3 pounds of raspberries per batch—it’s almost like making wine from raspberries, but for only one account.”

The cranberries also served to localize the flavor, giving a nod to Wisconsin’s abundant cranberry crop.

ABV Social general manager Jamie Shiparski also requested a woodruff syrup, which involved another set of challenges. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration stipulates that woodruff (a sweetly aromatic herb more formally known as Galium odoratum) may only be used in alcoholic beverages. That may not sound like a problem since this is beer we’re dealing with, but it means that it may not be sold as a separate product. So you’re not likely to find it at other bars, and you can also forget about buying it to take home to flavor the Berliners in your fridge or your homebrews.

“I still made the syrup. We just limited it to [the bar] using it in alcohol, and we’re not making it commercially available outside of that,” Pellettieri says.

Shiparski personally prefers woodruff (hence his request), but notes that raspberry is the bigger draw at ABV Social. It’s still a bit of a foreign flavor for most American drinkers, but it does become something of a conversation piece when people see a bottle of the bright-green syrup on the bar shelf.

“It’s really an homage to the way it was traditionally served in Germany,” Shiparski says.

He also went with an über-traditional example of the style for the base beer, Friesing, Germany’s Professor Fritz Briem 1809 Berliner.

The bar also stocks a bitter orange syrup, a flavor he says might not be the first to come to mind when someone requests “mit Schuss,” but it plays remarkably well with the brew’s wheat and yeast.

The flavors aren’t simply a lure for beer geeks looking to connect with German beer-drinking heritage. They also offer a bridge for those who may spend more time in other alcohol categories.

“When someone comes up to the bar and says, ‘I want to try something new, but I don’t really like beer,’ [flavored Berliners] are really approachable and approachably mild,” Shiparski explains. “We don’t have much of a wine program, and all of the people drinking wine all the time need something, and they don’t want to go straight to cocktails. They want to try something in the beer world.”

Shiparski expects the Berliner-plus-syrup combo to be a bigger draw this year than it was last summer, when the bar first opened and guests were just starting to get used to the concept.

And other bars, breweries and brewpubs across the country are beginning to ponder the opportunity. When Creature Comforts first launched Athena (in its unadorned form), its tasting room offered a very limited volume of syrups, more or less as a novelty for visitors.

“We haven’t gone too deep down that route; it was something we did in the beginning when we had a few syrups we’d gotten from Germany,” Beauchamp says. “I think people enjoy mixing their own—they feel they have a creative component that they can control themselves. I would love to do it a little more.”

He’s actually somewhat surprised that the mixing concept hasn’t really been a big part of drinkers’ cultural knowledge around Berliner-style beers, at least not in the Southeastern part of the country where his brewery calls home.

“In Germany you would never drink the Berliner without the syrup,” he says. “It’s kind of bizarre that [the style] has been able to catch on without the rest of that.”

The post Mit Schuss: Fruit and Herbal Flavors are the Unsung Heroes of Berliner-Weisse Style Ales first appeared on All About Beer.