Hazy IPA too often serves as the whipping post for any cold takes by grumpy old craft beer cowboys. Now I’ve long been a critic of hazy IPAs, largely because of the sameness of many iterations of the style, which comically present themselves as different beers. (Cue the joke, “This one was hopped with Citra, Mosaic, and Galaxy. And we hopped this one with Galaxy, Citra, and Mosaic. And this one has Mosaic, Galaxy, and Citra.”) 

I also find many versions of the style not to my personal taste and that’s totally fine. I personally would love to see bitterness and balance make a return to craft beer supremacy but there are still plenty of non-hazy IPAs available in nearly every tap room from coast to coast, so no need to complain. I still drink hazy IPAs on occasion, but we would all do well to keep in mind the maxim of “drink what you like.” 

The Hazy IPA Conspiracy Begins

The criticisms cited in the Just Drinks piece, while hardly new in craft beer discussion circles, are representative of long held grievances against a style that has seemingly buoyed the industry during what otherwise would have been even tougher times. Holding hazy IPAs up as the culprits behind craft beer’s stagnation in recent years is more based on vibes than reality. 

Even criticizing the uniformity of the hazy IPA experience seems a little rich as it’s not like the amber, brown, and pale ales that once dominated craft beer were all that different from one another. Just as with modern hazy IPAs, some were produced poorly, some expertly, but flavor and aroma wise, they were also all pretty similar. That’s the whole point of beer styles.

That some or even many brewers don’t themselves love hazy IPAs hardly matters. Unlike the 1990s and early 2000s when craft beer was personality driven (RIP the “rock star brewer” era), consumers today don’t connect with breweries on an individual or personality level. They don’t know, let alone care that the brewer doesn’t like the style. 

As a rare voice of sensibility relating to hazy IPAs, Lee Lord, brewmaster at Narragansett in Rhode Island, counseled in Just Drinks that brewers need to “keep an eye on emerging and young consumers and see how we can help each other get a new generation excited and passionate about craft beer”. 

Another common conspiracy theory is that the emergence of hazy IPAs caused thousands of new breweries to open that otherwise shouldn’t have. As an industry, craft brewing is no stranger to trend-chasing outsiders jumping into the beer business with dollar signs in their eyes. Hazy IPA didn’t cause the huge rise in the number of craft breweries in the past fifteen years, though its vibrant sales helped sustain many new breweries.  

Nano Breweries Changed Everything

Individuals looking to see when things changed for craft beer should go back a few years before the emergence of the hazy IPA style and reconnect with the most significant and influential change that craft beer has experienced in the past fifteen years: the rise of the nano. Largely forgotten in craft beer lore, nanobreweries changed the DNA of craft beer. They radically altered the business model, which went from battling it out for space on liquor and grocery store shelves and bar and restaurant tap handles to an own-premise model where small breweries pivoted to selling beer through their own taprooms, keeping more of the profits in-house. 

The modern nano-brewery trend (putting aside pioneers such as New Albion, Dogfish Head, and other OG small start-ups) started around 2010 with the emergence of dozens and then thousands of small brewery players who only intended to sell beer in their own taprooms. 

The first I can recall visiting was Hess Brewing in San Diego, which debuted its tiny brewing operation in 2010, starting in an 800 square foot industrial space. Founder Mike Hess started a blog, appropriately called the Mike Hess Brewing Odyssey, that chronicled in real time the process of opening his tiny brewery. The blog, which recounted everything from the banalities of navigating municipal bureaucratic regimes to sourcing raw ingredients for brewing, became required reading for hundreds of individuals looking to open their own small breweries around the country. 

On entering the tiny space, complete with a small bar fronting a few tap handles, Hess felt to me more like a curiosity than a harbinger of things to come. But nanos helped create the future of craft beer in which we live. It’s not that today’s landscape is filled with thousands of nanos. The founders of these tiny operations quickly learned that while opening such small spaces kept the capital expenditures down, the math just didn’t work to make them successful businesses. Brewing a 1 or 3 barrel batch takes roughly the same amount of time that a 20 or 100 barrel batch does. But consumers run through that beer at insanely quick rates, requiring a lot of effort to replenish quickly depleted stocks. 

So the nanobrewers, including Hess, quickly learned they needed to vastly scale up their operations if they were going to stay in business. By 2013, Hess had opened a 30 barrel brewery and tap room and has gone on to open several more locations. But it all started with a dream, a little money, and a few barrels of beer at a time served right to his customers in his own shop. 

At the time Hess opened in 2010, there were only 1700 breweries in the United States and it felt like a lot. For most of craft beer’s existence, roughly the same number of breweries opened as closed in a given year. In 2010, 63 opened, and 51 closed. That would be the last year these numbers were roughly on par until 2023. By 2011, 91 opened, and 28 closed. By 2018, 461 breweries opened, and 99 closed. Brewery openings would spike, while closures remained low, until COVID hit. In 2023, 165 breweries opened, while 145 closed. 

Nano breweries and their own-premise model paved the way for the modern craft beer business. 

While the nano model may not have survived, the idea of selling beer in your own tap room took hold, and this was the single biggest change in craft beer in decades. Instead of distributing beer widely across a region or even the country, and trying to sell a handful of common and popularly agreeable styles, brewers could experiment more. They could also act responsively to consumers, who gave them invaluable and immediate face-to-face feedback in contrast to faceless consumers in far flung states. 

Who’s In Charge Here?

At the heart of this debate appears to be a seemingly straightforward yet hard to answer question: should craft beer be brewer directed or consumer directed? 

Brewers long loved to boast that they “brew the beer we want to drink.” But that slogan only made sense in a time when flavorful beer was trying to differentiate itself from macro produced beers. Once craft beer infiltrated the mainstream and became ubiquitous in bars, restaurants, and package stores in the farthest reaches of the country, the idea behind that shibboleth ceased to exist. After routinely receiving direct feedback from customers, that brewers chose to be responsive to popular views, especially in the case of hazy IPAs, is hardly something to criticize. It’s simply good business. Others decry that “marketing” has negatively impacted craft beer. This argument also feels like a strawman for the old “brewer-driven” approach to craft beer that many claim has disappeared.

In one laugh out loud moment in the Just Drinks piece, an “anonymous veteran brewer” blamed craft brewers for their predicament. 

“A large segment of beer drinkers only wants to drink ‘hop juice’ because that’s what they’ve been told they want and breweries became obsessed with making the ‘latest and greatest’ beer that they could charge a lot for. All that stymied innovation and creativity.”

Again, brewers seem pissed that consumers don’t share their palates and style preferences. The level of griping from brewers over the alleged death of the “brewer-driven” model would be laughable if it didn’t have such serious real world consequences for an industry that can’t seem to plot a direction for its future. 

The popularity of consumer products, including beer, wine, and spirits, ebbs and flows over time. In just the past decade, we’ve seen the rise and fall of cocktails, cider, hard seltzers, and many others. Each will continue to play some role in the drinking landscape but no drink has a right to the public’s attention. Craft beer has many issues but chief among them is a generational disconnect. The audience for craft beer continues to age, younger folks make fun of craft beer dads and their beer samplers on TikTok, and the industry stands in a corner publicly wishcasting for the return of “beer-flavored beer.” 

To criticize an active and engaged audience of hazy IPA drinkers just because you don’t personally prefer the style or think they should be drinking helles is self-defeating. Hazy IPA has helped connect younger drinkers to craft beer. Unless you want a taproom occupied by a handful of 55 year old dudes grumbling about the good old days on RateBeer and BeerAdvocate, I’m not sure that shitting on hazy IPAs makes any sense.

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The post Hazy IPA Conspiracy Theories first appeared on All About Beer.

“It’s a sweet blonde ale—we can’t really call it a stout per se,” says Rodger Davis, brewer and co-founder of Faction Brewing Co., whose Anomaly White Stout shows up every summer in the brewery’s taproom in Alameda, California. “The goal is to mimic exactly what a stout would taste like.”

White stouts are more of a blip than a movement. From Faction’s Anomaly to Noble Ale Works’ Naughty Sauce, to examples from breweries in the Carolinas and Cascade Brewing Co. in Oregon, the style has reared its enigmatic head on more than one occasion.

Davis first encountered the idea of a white stout via brewmaster Steve Altimari of High Water Brewing Co. Though he initially scoffed at the concept, it grew on him over time and, after testing out an iteration at his old position at Triple Rock Brewery in Berkeley, California, he sculpted his idea into the Anomaly found at Faction today. A large piece of his inspiration has to do with challenging preconceptions—as Faction proudly displays on its website, its name is a nod to individuals that divert from the common thoughts of a larger group.

“We kind of got inspired by all the people that say they don’t like dark beers,” says Davis.

Unwilling to try a dark beer solely because of the color? “Well here’s all the flavor compounds [in a blonde ale] since you’re close-minded,” he says.    

At Noble Ale Works, in Anaheim, California, head brewer Brad Kominek takes a similarly cheeky tack with the brewery’s Naughty Sauce White Stout. “There’s nothing wrong with stouts with roasted malt and the normal look of stouts,” wrote Kominek. “We were just trying to do something different, and perhaps give the drinker a little mind-f***. We liked the idea of someone saying, ‘How does it look like this, but taste like THIS?!’”

To pull off the “red plastic cup” trick (i.e. eluding visual rejections) at Faction, Davis loads Anomaly’s blonde ale base with cocoa nibs and cold brew coffee, as well as star anise, in order to mimic the roasted malt characteristics of a traditional stout. He also adds lactose to round out the beer with sweetness, and nitrogenates the beer for a creamy stout-like texture.

“There’s a lot of people that get their minds blown,” says Davis. “With the lactose in there, it can taste like an ice cream melted in your glass.”

Noble, meanwhile, uses residual sugars from the malt bill, oats, coffee, and a “decent amount” of lactose, along with nitrogenation, for a stout-like effect. “Having some residual, unfermentable sugars make the body seem pretty full,” wrote Kominek. “The coffee roast level is medium-ish and we only use light colored malt. Most malt character, such as cracker or biscuit, are mostly stepped on by the coffee.”

At Legal Remedy Brewing Co., in Rock Hill, South Carolina, head brewer Zach McNeely uses what increasingly appears to be defining “white stout” flavor anchors—coffee and chocolate—to induce the code switch in its World Court Mocha Blonde Stout. Legal Remedy’s version uses white chocolate natural flavor in place of cocoa nibs, directly steeps whole coffee beans in the beer, and does not include lactose. Flaked oats and flaked barley give World Court more body, like a stout, as well.

“We brew it with basically all the ingredients that you would put into a stout minus the roasted barley or the black malt or all that,” says McNeely. “It’s a popular drink, or at least ours is, among the crowd that drinks those Starbucks mocha drinks. Because it honestly tastes a lot like one of those.”

To be specific, the beer is redolent of Starbucks’ White Chocolate Mocha, and (in my opinion) is better the fresher you drink it, as the coffee component of the beverage is best at its brightest. The carbonation is a little more pronounced than I would have imagined, but despite that, it was easy to pull the “red plastic cup” trick on more than one person using World Court.

Legal Remedy makes more of this beer than any other—about 1,200 gallons per week. McNeely says that both those new to beer and more experienced drinkers alike find appeal in the beverage. More experienced drinkers find the beer intriguing, he says, while those newer to beer enjoy the familiarity of flavors like coffee and chocolate.

Kominek, who describes Noble’s Naughty Sauce as being on “the sweet side,” says that since Noble gets heavy traffic from sports events, “a sweet beer that tastes like a latte has a broader appeal than an IPA for the general, non-craft-beer-drinking public.”

“Naughty Sauce is often our best seller every week,” he continues, though sales, he says, are closely followed by Noble’s IPAs.

The post The Delicious Deception of White Stouts first appeared on All About Beer.

Maybe because “hoppy” can be a catch-all term that easily points toward particular flavor profiles or, as IPA accounts for about a third of “craft”-defined dollar sales, the piney, tropical or juicy flavors of the style offer familiar choices.

Whatever the reason may be, people aren’t shy about filling up their glasses with a classic India pale ale or one of its many variations. IRI, a market research firm that tracks retail sales data, now maintains eight categories for IPA, including the wide-open “other” for whatever hop-forward concoction a brewer can dream up.

But for all the style’s success, the shine on one of IPA’s sibling styles is now looking a bit dull. Once a hot trend, the black IPA isn’t what it used to be.

“It’s definitely died off over the last couple years,” says Pat Brophy, beer buyer for Binny’s Beverage Depot, an Illinois alcohol retailing chain. “It was the hot new thing in IPA in 2008 or 2009, but IPA lovers are constantly trying to find the hot new thing. People who were once interested in trying the next black IPA are now waiting for the next fruited IPA or the next single-hop IPA.”

There are relatively few mysteries in beer, truth generally coaxed out through science or sales data. But one question—what’s up with the black IPA?—seems to have different answers.

Several measures point to a decline. In the first seven months of 2016, the dollar value of black IPA sales tracked by IRI was down nearly 16 percent, the only substyle of IPA to slip. After black IPA grew in number of supermarket-tracked brands from 2011 (15) to 2014 (43), the total number of brands remained steady in 2014 (43), 2015 (46) and 2016 (43). During that same time, all styles of IPA added nearly 400 new brands in supermarkets.

It’s the same story on Untappd, the app that allows users to check into beers they’re drinking. In 2014, 1.2 percent of all check-ins were black IPAs, dropping to 1 percent in 2015 and 0.8 percent through November 2016.

Meanwhile, in both number of brands in supermarkets and Untappd attention, the session and fruit IPA substyles have continued to grow alongside the long-tenured American and imperial versions of the style.

But just because black IPA is down, that doesn’t mean it’s out.

In fall 2016, Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. unveiled labeling for its own black IPA, part of a January 2017 release in an IPA variety pack. Full Sail Brewing Co. also announced its Shortest Day Cascadian Dark Ale, available November 2016 to February 2017, as part of its Brewmaster Reserve series. Style names for black IPA can be interchangeable and can also include Cascadian dark ale and American dark ale. Sales of the style have proved strong enough for Circle Brewing Co. that the Austin, Texas, brewery will shift its seasonal Tuxedo Tshirt black IPA to year-round status.

“For some reason, black IPA tends to play to a much larger crowd in Texas than its darker counterparts because it associates with the IPA style and people are willing to give it a shot,” says Ben Sabel, president and co-founder of Circle.

Tuxedo Tshirt’s transition to a core beer presents a unique situation in Austin, where many of the city’s most popular beer brands skew lighter or less-focused on big hop flavor, including pilsner. More than 75 percent of Circle Brewing’s sales come from two brands, Blur Texas Hefe and Envy Amber Ale, so Circle’s black IPA presents a unique option. Sabel says the beer has potential to fill a void for drinkers who recognize what “IPA” means, but may be looking for a different version of the hop-forward style. After producing 120 barrels for its run in 2016, the Tuxedo Tshirt will increase to at least 600 once it transitions to a core brand sometime in 2017.

Success has been mixed for Idaho’s Grand Teton Brewing Co., which until 2016 had seen strong interest in its Trout Hop Black IPA. The brand started off as a one-time Cellar Reserve debut in 2010 and was brought into seasonal rotation in 2013. In January of 2017, the brewery announced it will discontinue Trout Hop in May. Sales of all Grand Teton’s seasonals have slowly declined, even though Trout Hop easily sold out its 150 barrels during a three-month 2016 lifespan. Before the brewery discontinued Trout Hop, Rob Mullin, brewmaster and COO, said those results prompted discussions of whether it would be viable to discontinue seasonal brands, which include an imperial IPA, an imperial red ale and a Berliner-style weisse alongside its black IPA.

“As IPAs have taken over the craft beer market, it doesn’t surprise me that some hoppy styles are taking a little bit of a back seat to others,” Mullin said. He knows from first-hand experience.

In 2016, Mullin spent months formulating Grand Teton’s first American IPA recipe to add to its core lineup. From the start, the process involved focusing on late hop additions to boost aroma and flavor—a popular tactic for today’s IPA. Whether Trout Hop stayed or was discontinued remains part of a larger discussion around the brewery’s hop-focused beers and Grand Teton’s ability to give consumers what they want.

“Other people are doing IPAs with different fruits and new hop varieties every few weeks, and in a way, those might have taken the place seasonals once had in consumer’s minds,” Mullin said. 

Strangest of all in the ongoing tale of black IPA is the disappearance of two of its most prominent examples. In 2015, Stone Brewing discontinued Sublimely Self-Righteous Black IPA, citing declining sales. In 2016, Firestone Walker Brewing Co. put its Wookey Jack into “hibernation” along with two other Proprietor’s Reserve beers. Firestone made 4,000 barrels of Wookey Jack in 2013 and 2014, but reduced this to 3,000 barrels in 2015.

The loss of those two black IPAs, mentioned by brewers and drinkers alike as defining versions of the style, is an uncommon end in today’s industry.

“It is strange and a little scary to think about pulling successful beers like Wookey Jack out of the lineup, but things evolve rapidly in the craft beer world,” says Matt Brynildson, Firestone Walker’s brewmaster. For him, the loss of some beers means more attention can be paid to creations from the brewery’s research and development facility or the ever-changing recipe of Luponic Distortion IPA, one of the country’s top-selling new beer brands in 2016.

Black IPA isn’t “dead,” Brynildson says, but the dark, hoppy beers “certainly don’t fit into every occasion.”

That is, not unless you’re spending time at Greenbush Brewing Co. in Sawyer, Michigan, where Anger Black IPA holds a prominent position among the brewery’s IPA-heavy lineup. It’s one of four IPAs that make up the brewery’s best-selling brands, alongside Star Chicken Shotgun IPA, Dunegräs IPA and Brother Benjamin Imperial IPA. Anger is also one of the highest-rated, regularly available black IPAs found on online rating sites, including Untappd.

“The popularity of the style has gone down, and you don’t see as many black IPAs the past couple years, but this is our mainstay,” says Jake Demski, head brewer at Greenbush. “It’s definitely something we need to keep on.”

Sidestepping current IPA trends that focus on fruit or haziness, Demski attributes the success of Anger to its appeal to a wide audience. At Greenbush’s taproom, he’ll talk up the roasted malt character to new drinkers; to experienced hop heads, he’ll point out the 1.5 pounds of dry hops per barrel, consisting of Summit, Cascade and Columbus hops.

As Stone and Firestone’s black IPAs have gone away, Brophy, the beer buyer from Binny’s, says Anger has acted as the style’s “lead dog” in his stores. Even though national names like 21st Amendment Brewery (Back in Black) and Uinta Brewing Co. (Dubhe) still ship their black IPAs across the country, he can’t recall the last time a shopper specifically wanted the style.

“It’s not necessarily a style somebody comes in asking for,” Brophy says. “It seems kind of strange to call black IPA a ‘classic’ style, but with the speed of changes and trends, it’s almost the case at this point. Fruited IPA has sort of taken its place, for sure.”

The post Are Dark Days Ahead for Black IPAs? first appeared on All About Beer.

True lambic is produced only in Brussels and Senne River Valley (the Pajottenland-Zennevallei) in Flemish Brabant. Its brewers adhere to a royal decree drafted in 1965 that states it must contain at least 30 percent unmalted local wheat, ferment spontaneously, use aged hops (surannés) and be brewed in Brussels or within 15 kilometers. Lambic that is brewed to these strictures are labeled as “oude,” a confirmation of traditional methods. Lambics are unfiltered, desert-dry and can be archived for years.

The name lambic has enigmatic and equivocal etymology. It may refer to the Zennevallei town of Lembeek (Flemish) or Lembecq (French), derived from alembic, a type of distilling apparatus, or lambere, Latin meaning “to sip.” 

Few beers travel such an intriguing and transitive journey from birth to maturity. Every turn is unorthodox; attention to venerable methodology and a close rapport with nature are essential. Lambic is not only a type of beer itself, but also serves as the base for blended lambic, or gueuze; fruited lambic; and sweetened faro. Brewing is only done in cool months, and age is measured in summers.

Lambic begins with roughly 1/3 local unmalted wheat and 2/3 pale barley malt. The grist is mixed with warm water, then a portion of the murky wort drawn immediately, boiled and returned to the main mash. This drain/boil/return cycle is repeated until the mash is sufficiently converted. This prolonged schedule takes the mash stepwise through critical enzymatic temperature points and dismantles components into simpler microbe-friendly compounds.

The boil lasts from three to six hours, greatly concentrating the wort, promoting further breakdown of starches and proteins and deepening the color from straw gold to light amber. Aged hops, devoid of flavor or aroma but effective antiseptic agents, are added during the boil.

Post boil, hot wort is sent to coolships (koelschips)—shallow, open basins in the upper reaches of the brewery—and cooled overnight. Windows are opened and the wort is ambushed by the native mosaic of microflora wafting in from the surrounding countryside. The drafts also circulate microbes from the interior building structure, perhaps centuries in the accumulating.

After overnight cooling, the teeming wort is drained into wooden barrels that serve the dual purpose of fermentation and aging. The barrels themselves are a virtual microbiological reservoir, the tiny grottoes on their inner surfaces home to invisible magicians from batches past. The barrels are oak or chestnut wood, formerly used for wine. They range in size from 250 to 9,000 liters.

The wort then succumbs to yeast and bacteria, some 100 strains strong, opportunistically pouncing as conditions, such as pH and residual or metabolic byproducts, successively favor one over the other. All leave their own unique calling card, and they work symbiotically. The workhorses are several Saccharomyces and Brettanomyces yeast strains, as well as bacteria such as Enterobacter, Lactobacillus and Acetobacter.

The fermentation and aging last several months to several years, depending on the fate of the lambic.

Saccharomyces strains provide “normal” fermentation and attenuation. Acetobacter (vinegar bacteria) strains then use ethanol from primary fermentation as their nutrient. After a few months, lactic-acid bacteria, Pediococcus and Lactobacillus get their chance to sour the lambic. Finally, Brettanomyces lambicus and bruxellensis (named for the beer and the city, respectively) toil during maturation, furnishing the coveted musty character, working alongside oxidative strains.

The base straight lambics are generally reserved for cafés around Brussels and can be casked, bottled, young (jonge) or old (vieux). Cantillon is one exception, as it exports Grand Cru, a straight, unblended lambic.

Some lambic producers purchase cooled inoculated wort from other breweries and ferment, age and blend it themselves. These “blenderies” are known as geuzestekerij, or gueuze blenders. They distinguish themselves by house conditions, barrel type and the skill of the blender. De Cam, Oud Beersel, Tilquin and Hanssens are geuzestekerij, while Boon, Lindemans and Girardin are wort producers and blenders.

Gueuze is blended lambic generally consisting of three different summers. Each batch of lambic is unique, and the blending of gueuze is the work of a skilled artisan known as a steker (blender). Sometimes more vintages are used for the desired character. Jonge lambic provides lively effervescence and energy, the vieux lambic lends its fully aged, mature character, and the middle-aged lambic rounds things out. Usually, jonge lambic makes up the majority and vieux the minority.

For fruit versions, one-summer lambic is racked into a barrel containing fruit, kickstarting a secondary fermentation. The most common fruit lambics are cherry (kriek), raspberry (framboise), black currant (cassis) and peach (pêche). Kriek is made with sour Schaerbeek cherries, a stellar sweet-sour complement to the vast tapestry that is lambic. Faro is blended lambic sweetened with dark candi sugar, filtered and pasteurized. It is a darker, sweet, bright version of lambic.

Lambic breweries are beer preserves, wild and woolly, but kept under control by their keepers. Lambics have never been more popular, and have spawned a broad corollary brewing movement in North America of wild, sour and barreled brews. There is nothing, though, quite like the originals, the finest work of Old World artisans, brewing as nature intended. 

The following beers were tasted by K. Florian Klemp. 

The post Lambic: The Pinnacle of Natural and Native Brewing first appeared on All About Beer.

Winter Warmer

In centuries past, brewers were beholden to the vagaries of climate, harvest and manpower, as brewing was always seasonal by nature. Stronger beers, naturally more stable and sustaining, were made for and kept until cooler months. Today’s winter warmers, modern conveniences aside, are no less tailored to the season. They are modeled on strong English ales that include old ale, barley wine, Yorkshire Stingo and Burton ale, all closely related, nearly interchangeable brews of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Burton ale is noteworthy in this legacy, with a rather direct lineage from historical versions of winter warmer to those we recognize today. Originally crafted at Burton-on-Trent (later the epicenter of IPA) for export to Baltic aristocrats in the 18th century, Burton ale was well-aged, sweet, somewhat hoppy, relatively pale (given the color of its contemporaries) and, of course, strong. It also became favored as a winter warmer back home. Old ale and Burton ale would become essentially synonymous terms.

Draft Burton ale was a common cask offering in Britain until just after World War II, but by the 1950s and ’60s, it met an inexplicable, precipitous fall. Ballantine’s Burton Ale, aged up to 20 years in oak before bottling, was brewed in the U.S. during the same period. It met a similar fate.

One of the few vestiges after the demise was Young’s Burton Ale, whose name was changed to Winter Warmer in 1971, aimed at rebranding the floundering style as a distinct seasonal. Samuel Smith’s Winter Welcome was introduced to  the U.S. in 1990. These imports helped provide some impetus to American microbrewers to explore new stylistic seasonal brews and in some small measure helped reinvigorate an endangered family of beers.

Winter warmers, from either side of the pond, still favor the old ale/Burton ale pedigree. They feature 5.5 to 8% ABV, bitter/sweet balance, chewy, nutty dark malt, dried fruit notes and often sugar adjuncts, such as honey or brown sugar. Odell Isolation Ale and Boulevard Nutcracker Ale are some of the best examples brewed in the U.S. 

English winter warmers well worth seeking include St. Peter’s Winter Ale (rich and creamy, with notes of dates and toffee); Fuller’s 1845 (authentic Burton ale, bottle-conditioned, fruity, relatively hoppy and earthy), Theakston’s Old Peculier (dark, vinous and treacly old ale) and Samuel Smith’s Yorkshire Stingo (bottle-conditioned, aged for a full year in oak barrels before release, with notes of vanilla, brown sugar and raisin).

Holiday Ale

Another perennial winter favorite is spiced holiday ale. Just as pumpkin beers begin to fade, along come these savory, robust, aromatic ales to pick up the slack. Holiday ales may have also been influenced by British ancestry, those ales of yore spruced up to celebrate the Solstice, Christmas, New Year’s and Twelfth Night.

Old British winter customs included serving warm ale that had been variously spiked with spirits, eggs, sugar and whatever spices or botanicals were available or preferred. One such beverage was known as wassail, named for the medieval English salutation wæs hæil, a toast of good health and fortune.

Wassail was served from a communal bowl and was quite an impressive concoction, with ale as the main ingredient. Wassail could also be mulled wine or cider, while “wassailing” refers to the Twelfth Night offering of thanks and respect to the orchards for a successful harvest, both past and future. 

Modern spiced holiday ales, though, have a more recent inspiration, invoking the spirit of wassail, and fueled by the innovations of the modern American brewing Renaissance. 

Fritz Maytag of Anchor Brewing Co. counts among his many groundbreaking American microbrews the famous, and eminently influential, Anchor Christmas Ale, introduced in 1975.

The Anchor Christmas Ale recipe changes from year to year and is first and foremost a malt-forward spiced ale. The label annually features a different honorary tree, the quintessential symbol of winter festivity. Christmas Ale brims with holiday ambience and can be cellared for years.

Anchor Christmas Ale stood alone for a while, but American brewers began padding their portfolios with unique winter seasonal offerings in the 1980s and ’90s, building on Maytag’s seminal, ingenious brew. There are now dozens to look forward to each year. 

Holiday ales are generally graced with many of the same spices and flavorings that we encounter in the season’s cuisine, especially desserts. Nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla, orange peel and anise are frequent additions. Highland Brewing’s Cold Mountain Winter Ale, Anderson Valley Winter Solstice and Full Sail Wassail are three that capture the essence of the holiday spirit. 

The post Winter Warmer and Holiday Ale first appeared on All About Beer.

Düsseldorf, founded in 1288, is in North Rhine Westfalia, 25 miles north of Cologne (Köln). Rhineland brewers were less beholden to aristocratic interests than Bavarians and, hence, more independent. Unlike the Bavarians, they used top-fermentation and cellaring methods, similar to the Belgians and British.

Northern Germany had numerous indigenous and regional beer styles into the 19th century, many now extinct. Leipziger gose, Münster altbier and Berliner weisse survived relatively unscathed, anachronistically featuring wild influence and raw or malted wheat.

Kölsch and altbier became more-refined versions of these old styles, uniquely acclimated to the temperate environs and honed by technological innovations of the 19th century: pure yeast isolation, precision malting and refrigeration. With this methodological rigor, beer could be brewed year-round with the option of cold conditioning.

Kölsch and altbier were similar until pale lagers crashed the party, with first mention of them as two distinct styles coming in the late 19th century. Cologne brewers shifted to very pale malt (a concession to the unrelenting popularity of golden lager), whereas Düsseldorf brewers stuck with darker Munich-style varieties. The designation of “altbier” was a firm, defiant nod to heritage (minus the lagering period, of course) that boldly set them apart.

The most dynamic area of Düsseldorf is the Altstadt (Old Town), home to 200 taverns proudly pouring altbier. There are three brewpubs (hausbrauerei) here, and another just east. Zum Uerige (The Grouch), Im Füchschen (The Little Fox) and Zum Schlüssel (The Key) reside in Old Town, and Schumacher just outside. All feature house altbier. The other taverns serve these or altbier from two other local breweries, Schlösser and Frankenheim.

At the brewpubs, hustling köbes (waiters) deliver altbier in small cylindrical glasses, served from oaken casks fetched from the cellar, breached with mallet and tap and dispensed under gravity. The culture is entertaining, friendly and steeped in tradition, but the real star is in the glass.

Düsseldorf altbier is made with German lager malts, its orange-copper color extracted from proprietary blends of pilsner, Munich, caramel and/or roast. The fiery autumnal hue and malty aroma is instantly recognizable as Munich malt, whose toasty footprint graces dark bocks, dunkels and Märzen.

The base grist may be entirely composed of Munich or blended with lighter pilsner malt. In either case, the malty character is as aromatic and flavorful as any German lagerbier. The body is lean, slimmed by low mash temperatures and attenuative yeast. Residual sweetness is low, as is a biting, lingering bitterness, in spite of high hop rates of 35 to 50 IBUs. Spalter hops, a noble variety grown in Spalt in Bavaria since the 14th century, is the traditional cultivar. Other noble varieties such as Hallertauer and Tetnanger may also be used. And while altbier is not a hoppily aromatic brew, the mellow, herbal noble background impeccably flatters the svelte malty flavor and aroma.

Unique yeast, culled over time under fermentation conditions particular to altbier and Kölsch, is yet another crucial contributor. It toils at low top-fermentation temperatures where others would struggle to thrive, 55 to 60 degrees F. Fermentation is clean and thorough. Original gravities of 11 to 12 degrees Plato give altbier an ABV of 4.5 to 5%.

Slow, steady fermentation is followed by a few weeks of near-freezing lagering. This cold conditioning supplanted cellar aging after the invention of refrigeration. Did the brewers change to emulate the ubiquitous and popular lagers, or is it a side benefit afforded them to store beer after the invention of refrigeration? Either way, altbier is called obergärige lagerbier (top-fermented lager beer), a hybridized brew native to the Rhineland.

Special or seasonal versions are made by Düsseldorf brewpubs periodically. They are more robust all the way around than the brewpubs’ standard offering. Zum Uerige’s is called Sticke (secret); Zum Schlüssel’s Stike (also secret) and Schumacher’s Latzenbier (beer from the wood). Im Füchschen offers its as a Christmas specialty, Weihnachtsbier (Holy Night beer).

Other notable altbiers include Frankenheim and Schlösser of Düsseldorf and Diebels of Issum. All three were once available in North America, but are now rare or absent. Thankfully, Zum Uerige’s triumvirate of regular altbier, Sticke and Doppelsticke, can be purchased in the U.S.

Münster has a long tradition of brewing top-fermented wheat beer, and that lives on in its unusual, but authentic, interpretation of “old” beer. Pinkus Müller organic altbier contains 40 percent wheat, is golden and hazy. The fresh hoppiness, bright malty character and neutral yeast are in keeping with the Düsseldorf style, albeit much lighter in color.

American altbiers are, curiously, a rather underrepresented genre of the style. Alaskan Amber of the Alaskan Brewing Co. in Juneau is the most famous of them. It’s copper-brown, very malty and robust, with somewhat reserved hop bitterness. Olde Mecklenburg Brewery in Charlotte, North Carolina, may make the best, most true-to-style altbier in America.

Maybe the popularity of Kölsch, gose and Berliner weisse in recent years will inspire our brewers to brew more altbier. Brewers do, after all, hate a vacuum. Stay vigilant: Altbiers do appear on menus from time to time. 

Editor’s Note: In an earlier version of this story, several beers were attributed to the wrong breweries. Correct attributions are as follows: Im Füchschen brews Weihnachtsbier, Zum Schlüssel brews Stike, and Schumacher brews Latzenbier.

The post Altbier: A Nod to Heritage first appeared on All About Beer.

Our obsession with black beers is undeniable. Porter and stout are stalwarts, and newly cobbled styles, such as black IPA and saison, more trendy. But the eldest and most anachronistic of them all is German schwarzbier (black beer), a vestige from the cradle of European brewing and perhaps the longest-running beer style. The style has attracted long-overdue attention in recent years.

The most convincing evidence of black beers of millennia past comes from the 9th century B.C. in Southwest Germany. An archaeological dig near Kulmbach in Franconia, Northern Bavaria, unearthed an Iron Age Celtic amphora containing the charred remnants of wheat, a raw material of prehistoric beer. This primeval discovery is the oldest evidence of brewing in Central Europe, and since the beer was black and brewed in Kulmbach, we might deduce that it is the ancient ancestor to schwarzbier, the “Lucy” of European beer.

The region where Germany, Bohemia and Austria converge fostered several modern beer styles (Munich dunkel and helles, pilsner, rauchbier, schwarzbier and Vienna lagerbier), but, more importantly, was innovative on a grander scale. The embrace of hops, technical bottom-fermentation refinement and the development of distinct, utilitarian continental malts over time were significant developments.

Prior to that, many beers were quite similar, composed of coarse malt and raw grains, top-fermented, smoky, murky and undoubtedly with a wild influence. Schwarzbier is a survivor of that medieval brewing scene and largely is brewed in Kulmbach and the former East German states of Thuringia and Saxony.

Kulmbach came of age as a brewing center some 800 years ago. A charter letter penned by the bishop of Bamberg in 1174 references Kulmbach’s brewery. Further documentation comes from a manuscript describing the brewery of the local Augustine monks in 1349. These were top-fermented brews since bottom-fermentation would not become common until at least a century later.

Another German black beer of the era was Braunschweiger mumme. Mumme was strong, sweet, heavily hopped and widely exported. Brewed since at least the 14th century, it became one of the most favored beers in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Mumme was also brewed in Thuringia. Plain porter has also been brewed off and on in Germany, and Baltic porter is still made in Eastern Europe. Was schwarzbier influenced by mumme, or is the Kulmbacher style just a coincidental type, given contemporary ingredients and methods? More likely, Kulmbach’s brewers were equally influenced by those of Munich, who also made dark beers. At some point, Kulmbacher schwarzbier and Munich dunkel diverged stylistically, the former favoring roasted malts and the latter Munich-style malts.

It might also be surmised that neighboring Bamberger rauchbier and Kulmbacher schwarzbier were historically similar, both using smoke-cured malt. Bamberg brewers abandoned the roasted malts, but retained the old method of curing malt over beech wood.

All of this adds to the mosaic of aboriginal beer from that region. The final piece to the puzzle was a switch from top to bottom fermentation, essentially transforming old styles into modern ones. Schwarzbier is often tagged with “Kulmbacher-style.”

Schwarzbier is certainly a “black” beer relative to other familiar lager styles, but falls far short of the dark color that we associate with stout or porter. Not opaque, schwarzbier casts a bright mahogany-black color. The roasted character is meant to complement rather than dominate, giving both hops and base malt an opportunity at expression.

Of course, it is the roasty component that makes schwarzbier unique. The barley used is malted and often dehusked, mellowing the contribution somewhat and offering some depth and finesse that roasted, unmalted barley cannot.

Pilsner and Munich malts make up the majority of the grain bill. Classic German schwarzbier is medium-bodied, and pilsner malt helps keep the mouthfeel and residual sweetness under control, while the Munich malt offers up the toasted, malty flavors and aromas that we expect from dark German lagerbier.

Hops are a bit more pronounced than one would find in a Munich-derived brew, common in Northern Bavaria, with one brewer going so far as to call itself the “black pilsner.” The dosage is evident, with a bit more background bitterness, but an especially firm blast in the aroma. As always, German noble varieties are requisite, adding to that distinguished German profile.

The bottom-fermented, fully lagered smoothness is always a part of the picture, and gravity falls between 4.8% and 5.8%.

Schwarzbier has been on the radar of beer aficionados for decades now, but has enjoyed more popularity quite recently. Several authentic German brands are available, and Americans have also taken a shot in recent years. Those from America may have more of a roasted flavor than the German versions, but generally follow the original template.

The post The Resurgence of Schwarzbier first appeared on All About Beer.

There are 50-odd breweries in town and 100 more in the state, so there’s invariably a lot of noise in a market with hundreds of beers sloshing around. The Rose City went through a brief gose phase, had a black IPA moment (a city that inspired “Portlandia” of course demanded that these beers be called Cascadian Dark Ales) and flirted with radlers. In the past couple of years, locals have started to notice another quiet development—delicate, well-crafted lagers, usually pilsners. Curiously, they often seem to issue from the kettles of breweries around town known for ales—Upright Brewing, The Commons Brewery and Breakside Brewery.

These lagers were in sensory terms the opposite of the burly IPA: They were built on a delicate base of softly grainy pilsner malt, and they used hops, like the dusting of ground pepper on a green salad, in a supportive role. Unlike IPAs, which stun palates and then seem to fade with familiarity, these lagers gain force over the course of a pint or three, as the understated flavors imprint themselves on the palate. And unlike the gose wave, these lagers aren’t just a Portland phenomenon. After winning awards for several years, Chuckanut Brewery & Kitchen finally started winning converts in Washington state, while down south in California, Firestone Walker Brewing Co. released year-round Pivo Pils. In Oregon, the principal driver of the current revival is Ninkasi Brewing, which made a startling leap into the lager market three years ago with a traditional helles.

Where Lagers Come to Die

When the United States’ modern brewing age was in its infancy, it was in no way obvious to early breweries which way the market would flow. Anchor Brewing Co. had staked a claim on San Francisco steam beer and Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. on pale ale. Bert Grant and Jim Koch looked to family traditions and started selling, respectively, a Scottish ale and an amber lager. Other early pioneers dabbled in brown ale (Pete’s Wicked Ale), ESB (Redhook Brewery), and wheat ale (Widmer Brothers Brewing). In parts of the country where lager brewing survived in the form of regional breweries—the Midwest and East Coast—new breweries managed to keep lagers in front of craft beer fans.

Philadelphian Lew Bryson, who has spent two decades writing about beer, describes how lager brewing survived on the East Coast. “Out here, though, three of the earliest craft brands—Stoudt’s, Penn, and Brooklyn—started as lager brewers for heritage reasons, and also contract brewed at pre-Prohibition lager regionals like Pittsburgh, The Lion and Matt’s, where lagers were old hat. They staked their territory early, in the late ’80s, and got established. Victory’s arrival in 1996 only helped.”

The story was much the same in the Midwest, where the descendants of German immigrants had been raised drinking Stroh’s, Schell’s and Leinenkugel. Dan Carey says that’s the world he entered when he founded New Glarus Brewing in 1993. “We started out with a beer called Edel Pils and our second beer was Uff-da Bock, so we did not start making ales until some years after we started. At that point the two biggest craft brewers in Wisconsin, Sprecher and Capital, were lager breweries, and that’s what people drank.”

That was decidedly not the case on the West Coast, where lagers never really found an audience. The Pacific Northwest, like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, had a history of local breweries. In the early ’80s, Rainier, Weinhard, Olympia and a number of smaller brands were still made here. But it didn’t seem to matter—people wanted ales. In fact, that’s probably exactly why they did want them—people originally migrated to the West Coast to escape tradition. They prized the new and cutting-edge.

In the 1980s, West Coast drinkers were dabbling in a variety of ale styles—light wheat and fruit ales, porters, stouts and amber ales. The most popular was the style that would eventually point the way—the fresh, citrusy pale ale typified by Sierra Nevada. Pale’s DNA—strong, perfumy, saturated hop flavors balanced by a ribbon of caramel malting—began to take over the market. IPAs followed pales, and now hoppy ales—of all their many and varied stripes—dominate tap lists and grocery shelves along the West Coast.

As that transformation happened, whatever air lagers might have drawn was sucked from the room. Will Kemper, possibly the only American ever to attempt two lager breweries, watched Thomas Kemper Brewing struggle to find an audience. He thinks the weather may have been part of the reason his Puget Sound brewery was doomed. “In the Northwest, with the dampness and coolness and all in the wintertime, you know—well, lagers can be too light.” More likely was the zeal of the new converts and their distaste for anything that smacked of the kind of beer they were turning away from.

In Oregon, the story was similar. Saxer, another all-lager brewery, complete with a German system and German-trained brewer, won many awards but lasted only a few years. The Widmer Brothers, drawing on their German heritage, could find no traction with lager bier, and watched as customers went for their hoppy wheat beer instead. (They’re currently doing a 30-year retrospective, and lagers figure prominently among those early offerings.)

California has been more favorable terrain for lagers. Gordon Biersch Brewing Co., using a brewpub model, managed to build a successful business, and breweries like Lagunitas Brewing Co. and North Coast Brewing Co. have long had pilsners in their lineups. But the West Coast, where people arrive to escape the old ways, is not the place to build on tradition. By the dawn of the 1990s, ales were firmly entrenched, and IBUs were on the rise.

The radical shift—and development of the West Coast culture—came after the new millennium. (Memories are tricky. If you thought IPAs were a big deal in the ’90s, think again. They didn’t start to appear until the middle of the decade, and then usually just at brewpubs. Jennifer Trainer Thompson’s The Great American Microbrewery Beer Book from 1997 cataloged bottled beers available at the time; of the 182 beers she listed, only eight were IPAs.) In the past five years, hoppy ales have so swamped the market that when breweries want to dabble with other traditions, they have to cloak them in hops and smuggle them in as Belgian IPAs, white IPAs or India pale lagers.

So why are beers so self-consciously not IPAs, pale lagers, catching drinker’s fancy now?

Brewers Lead the Way

Blame the brewers. Although they may be famous for their big, brassy ales, privately, many brewers pine for something softer, more balanced and more accomplished.

Three years ago, at the height of Ninkasi’s rapid explosion—built on ales iridescent with lupulin—co-founder Jamie Floyd made an odd decision. He released a 5%, 20 IBU helles bier. A fan of the metal pun, he called it Helles Belles—and fans of Sleigh’r and Maiden the Shade were probably startled to find a low-intensity lager in their mouths. Yet Floyd has loved lagers since he was homebrewing in the early 1990s, and it has always been a plan of his to make them at Ninkasi. “I developed an affinity for lagers when I was fairly young. Lagers are a lot more interesting for me if I’m going to be on the lighter side of the palate. For me, I love classic lagers, and unfortunately for us, we don’t get to taste them fresh coming from Europe. It changes the experience quite a bit when people get to taste the beer as crisp and fresh as it was intended.”

Since debuting Helles Belles, Ninkasi has developed the three-beer Prismatic series that rotates the helles (now called Lux), a pilsner (Pravda), and a Dortmund lager called Venn throughout the year.

The example of how brewer Matt Brynildson brought a pilsner into the regular lineup of Firestone Walker was, if anything, an even bigger long shot. “I wanted desperately to make a pilsner beer,” he said. “No one else in the organization had ever made it; didn’t want to do it.” And no wonder—Firestone Walker is famous for its English-inflected ales, a family that has earned the company as many awards and accolades as any in the world.

The brewery had actually done a lager for several years, but discontinued it in 2007. Over the years, Brynildson traveled to Europe and learned more and more about lager brewing. He found a friend and kindred spirit in Agostino Arioli, founder of Birrificio Italiano, one of Italy’s oldest craft breweries. Arioli is a lager specialist, and his flagship is a dry-hopped pilsner that, even more than German pilsners, really inspired Brynildson. “More than even the German brewers, Ago was my real inspiration for [Firestone’s pils,] Pivo. Ever since I tasted [Italiano’s] Tipopils, I thought, ‘I need to make that beer.’”

Brynildson pitched the idea to one of the Firestone Walker owners. “When I spoke to David Walker, he said, ‘Yeah, we’ll let you do that.’ I think in the back of his mind he was thinking, ‘It won’t do that well, so we won’t have to worry about it.’ ” Like Tipopils, Pivo is dry-hopped, but it is otherwise a straightforward German example, with pilsner malt, Spalter Select and Saphir hops, and a German lager strain.

When asked what he saw in the market that made him think Pivo’s time had come, Brynildson wasn’t sure it had: “It’s not necessarily a case of brewing what we saw the market wanting as much as just brewing what we really wanted to drink.” This is a key to the lager phenomenon—it’s coming from the brewers, not the market. “The longer you brew and the more you try to hone your technical skills as a brewer, the more you get led to lager beer,” he said. There’s something in the simplicity of a pale lager that makes a good one such a thrill to an experienced beer drinker (as all brewers are)—with so few ingredients, you can create a beer that is at once lush and complex but paradoxically easy and approachable.

Charlie Devereux puts it even more bluntly: “My anecdotal evidence is that I also feel that brewers lead. What brewers like, eventually people come around to.” Devereux was one of the co-founders of Double Mountain Brewery, leaving last year so he could pursue his own project—which he thought might involve a lager-centric brewery. Earlier this year, he went on a trip through Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic and came back even more inspired by what he found in the cellars and beer halls of Munich and Pilsen. He’s got plans to open a brewery that will not only serve lagers, but also try to replicate the feeling of drinking in Munich or Prague.

“We’re missing out by having a monoculture. For one, we’re getting older. If 7% alcohol is the new five, there’s some issues right away in terms of drinkability and livability. And then in terms of the curve of palate sophistication—becoming sophisticated often means becoming more nuanced. I think that the younger consumer might be more sophisticated than we were at their age, and that might actually make them more open and less impressed with gee-whiz beers.”

A Pilsner on Every Tap List

The gamble seems to be working. Ninkasi and Firestone Walker have had success with their lagers—something that as recently as five years ago would have been hard to imagine. Back in 2008, Widmer Brothers had a Dortmunder on at its Portland pub that was absolutely gorgeous. But as recently as six years ago, Widmer saw no way to break the iron grip of hoppy ales. Rob shook his head wistfully and said, “You can’t give lagers away.” He wasn’t alone in thinking these kinds of beers were never going to sell.

That was exactly what Will Kemper was finding as he launched his new brewery, Chuckanut, that same year. When he founded Thomas Kemper in the 1980s, Kemper encountered the same resistance as all the recent start-ups—it was just hard to sell strong, full-flavored beer to bars used to Rainier. But, “Being away and then coming back, what we discovered is that the beers we did, lagers, met another form of resistance. Talking to accounts, and they said, ‘Well what do you mean, it’s not an IPA?’”

Chuckanut won Brewpub and Small Brewery of the Year at the 2009 and 2011 Great American Beer Festival—but Kemper was shocked at the reaction in the local paper. “After we won, I forget which one of those, we thought the community would be supportive of us. But then when the newspaper told about us winning the national award, the comments, about half of them were negative. ‘How could they win with those types of beers?’ We weren’t doing beers like they thought we should do.”

But by this summer, everything had changed.

“This year is absurdly crazy,” he said. “We don’t distribute anything but pilsner because any of our other beers, we just can’t dedicate the space for them.” It probably didn’t hurt that this was one of the longest, hottest summers in memory, but nevertheless, Chuckanut was maxed out. “Lord, we should have Helles going out, Kölsch going out, a lot more of those this time of year, but we just don’t have the space for it.” Kemper’s feelings may still be a bit tender from the slow early days, but now Chuckanut’s “potential is many, many times what we’re presently producing.”

Brynildson and Devereux think that not only have lagers come of age, but that pilsners are going to become as ubiquitous as IPAs on tap lists. “Pilsner’s a no-brainer to me,” Brynildson said. “I think every craft bar lineup needs to have at least one pilsner beer. You need to have an IPA, you need to have a pilsner on draft. The pilsner filled a void.” Devereux echoed him almost verbatim. “It’s not going to be very long before every place has a pilsner. I think that’s the next thing. I think every bar … will have an IPA, a pilsner and then a bunch of other stuff.”

The Apex of Appreciation

So why are lagers—especially well-made, unadulterated pilsners—coming into their own? There’s an old theory about beer appreciation that assumes people’s preferences will evolve to ever more intense and challenging flavors. A zingy dry-hopped pale ale? Good. A saison inoculated by Brettanomyces? Better. A barrel-aged imperial stout? Best. But it doesn’t really work this way. The true apex of appreciation is the ability to locate the sublime in any style. The drinker has to fine-tune her palate to appreciate the difference between a helles that has dull, simple malt flavors and one that has rich, fresh and complex malt flavors. Once she does, she begins to find depths in those beers that were invisible when her palate was being bombarded by hop grenades.

Devereux decided to talk lagers at a newish German-themed pub that has 18 imports on tap. Over a half liter of Ayinger Jahrhundert export lager, he explained how it’s possible to fall through the looking glass when considering such apparently simple beers. With the current love of IPAs, “it’s about exciting hops, it’s about punchy flavors,” he said. “Because you’re working with these very bright paints, there’s a very wide palette within that realm. But with German beers you’re talking about more subtle things like texture; you’re talking about balance and viscosity.”

He paused and then shifted to a different lesson, gleaned in a discussion with a winemaking friend. “He described the greatest difficulty as ‘mid-palate texture.’ It wasn’t so much about the most aromatic wines, though aroma was important, it wasn’t so much about the weight of the wine, though it had to be in the right spot. It was really about silkiness. That was the next level; it took his wines to a place that some other winemakers might not be able to go.” Devereux paused to swallow a healthy mouthful of export lager. That’s how it was with really exceptional lagers, he suggested. “It’s not flashy, it’s not some extreme experience; it’s just right. So for me, lagers are the next big challenge.”

It is madness to predict which types of beer will become popular, and that includes guessing about whether lagers have a future on the West Coast or not. They currently function as an IPA alternative, and there are many suitors for that role. But listening to brewers talk about these lovely little beers, there’s reason to nurture some optimism. Brewers like them, and they want you to like them. As a consequence, they are making the most polished, delicious lagers we’ve ever seen here in ale land. They’re not strong and they’re not hoppy. And you might just grow to love them.

Read tasting notes on lagers.

This story appears in the January 2015 issue of All About Beer Magazine. Click here to subscribe.

The post The New Age of Lagers first appeared on All About Beer.

Stout originally meant any beer of fortitude, no matter the color. There were pale and brown stout, the latter the forerunner to porter. Proper porter, brewed entirely with brown malt, emerged in the early 18th century. Brewed to a multitude of strengths, stout porter, or a similar derivation, would have been the stronger version.

By the end of the 18th century, stout mostly came to describe strong versions of porter only and eventually a style itself rather than an adjective. A normal hierarchy of names, according to British beer writer Martyn Cornell, was common porter, best porter, stout or single stout, double or extra stout and imperial stout, but there were numerous other designations. The former pale stouts would evolve into barley wine, Burton ale, wee heavy, old ale and such.

London and Dublin became the pre-eminent porter and stout brewing cities by the mid-19th century. Dublin was dominated by Guinness, prosperous through far-sighted, ingenious promotion, innovation and above all, high-quality products.

Guinness may be famous now for its draft, extra and foreign extra stouts, but before getting into the stout business, it brewed ale and porter. Guinness was founded in 1759 by patriarch Arthur Guinness, who leased the dormant brewery at St. James’s Gate in Dublin. The newly constructed Grand Canal made for convenient shipping of incoming supplies and outgoing casks of ale and porter.

This ideal situation gave Arthur Guinness solid footing from the start and, coupled with his vision and shrewd business acumen, took Guinness swiftly to the top. He brewed the last Dublin ale in 1799 to concentrate on porter, not because of the popularity of the style in London, but because London porter was chipping away at Dublin’s local market. In 1801, the first Guinness West Indian Porter was brewed for export. It is now Foreign Extra Stout.

In Dublin, Guinness representatives in 1810 encouraged publicans to push a “stouter kind of porter,” one originally called Superior Porter, later Extra Superior Porter and eventually the now-famous Extra Stout.

In 1819, Daniel Wheeler’s revolutionary black “patent” malt was made available to brewers. Guinness was among the first to use this product, discovering it could make suitable porter and stout by using only pale malt and a small amount of patent malt. This was a departure from previous recipes composed of pale, amber and brown malts. It also lent a distinctive, signature roasted flavor. Using this new formula, Arthur Guinness II finalized the Extra Superior Porter recipe in 1821, cited above as the precursor to Extra Stout.

This is where the Dublin and London stouts diverged over the next few decades, according to some observers. Dublin stout, using the Guinness template, came to mean a marginally drier version, made only with pale and patent malt. The attenuation was largely due to the exclusion of less fermentable amber and brown malts. London stout, truer to precursors, used pale and brown malts, but often a bit of the newly minted patent malt and perhaps amber and crystal malt. Some brewers eschewed the patent malt altogether, relying on the traditional brown malt. Irish brewers often “gyled” theirs with a dose of lively, fermenting beer for conditioning. These ubiquitous, high-quality Irish and English porters and stouts became dominant beers of the 19th century.

Porter and stout could be brewed from a single recipe, using an equivalent amount of malt, but varying the volume of brewing liquor to produce the different strength beers or modifying hop levels. Records also show that some were tailoring recipes for individual brews using pale, amber, brown and/or patent malts. Generally speaking, stouts (and porter) from all destinations were rather similar, brewed with largely the same ingredients, crafted to the preferences of the individual breweries. It was a situation of wealth and relative diversity that any beer lover would crave. 

London brewers were by now exporting their product, mostly porter, worldwide, and Guinness was doing the same with stout. By the mid-1800s, Guinness products could be found from the United States to New Zealand, and were called single stout (porter), double stout (extra stout) and Foreign Extra Stout.

Between 1830 and 1880, beer was taxed by ingredients, namely malt and hops, rendering unmalted grain illegal. The Beer Tax of 1830 gave way to the Free Mash Tun Act in 1880, which taxed the original wort gravity, allowing inclusion of adjunct grains and sugars. Many brewers switched from roasted malt to cheaper roasted barley, a move likely noticed only by the most discerning palates and traditionalists. Guinness made the alteration around 1929 or 1930.

By the early 20th century, porter had essentially run its course in England and was replaced by stout as the dark beer of choice. Along the way, stout had also lost its meaning as a strong beer, but simply a black beer chiefly brewed in England and Ireland. The dry stouts contrasted greatly with sweet milk stouts favored at the turn of century. Sweet stouts became England’s preferred roasty beer, leaving Ireland chief domain of the dry version.

Guinness, always keen on innovation, continued to evolve. It replaced some pale malt with flaked barley some time in the 1950s, and in 1959 introduced the “draught” dispense system, using a mixture of carbon dioxide and nitrogen. The draught dispense was designed to duplicate the “high and low cask” method of blending lively young beer with flat mature beer from separate casks. This serving method brings the impressive surge that settles into a tight, tenacious, long-lasting head. It has been copied by many brewers seeking to emulate the soft flavor, mouthfeel and presentation in stouts, porters and ales. The can widget, a more recent invention, offers the same effect.

Though Irish stout has become synonymous with dry stout, most brewed today emulate the historical versions from Dublin and London, and not the modern Irish type.

Most plain dry stouts are now are brewed to modest gravity, with a diverse malt bill, and fuller character than Irish dry stouts.

That radical Export Stout brewed by Guinness in 1821 and its London counterpart help cast the die for the most active stout-brewing market in the world, North America. American brewers especially gravitated to stout early on, and it continues to be standard fare.

American-style dry stouts are stylized with the typical affection for American hops, including heavy aromatic additions, and fermented with neutral American ale yeast. They usually have complex grain bills liberally augmented with crystal and chocolate malts, with up to 10 percent black malt or roasted barley/malt. Brown or amber malts are used on occasion. Gravities range from 5.5% to 7.5%.

Those designated “English” stouts are similar to the Americanized version, especially with regard to malt/grain, but use English ingredients where appropriate or feasible. There is a firm base of bittering hops and more subdued aromatic additions. English ale yeast gives them an authentic footprint. They are a nod to tradition and are generally made pretty well. Strength would be roughly the same as American stout.

Those made to the modern Irish template would be of lower gravity (4-5%), contain adjunct grain, minimal character malts, a copious addition of roasted barley or malt, well-dosed with bittering hops and fermented with an attenuative Irish yeast.

Trends come and go in brewing, but our hankering for plain old stout will never wane. Raise a pint to all of the brewers who keep these styles alive.

The post The Evolution of Dry Stout first appeared on All About Beer.

Not too long ago, saison was considered rare and somewhat endangered, a stranger to all but the most enlightened. Things couldn’t be more different today. Those from Belgium are rightfully well-regarded, and North American-brewed versions are among the hottest styles. Saison, French for season, is perfectly emblematic of venerable Belgian and flourishing North American brewing culture; individualistic, locally spirited and widely interpretive. Saison, no longer a product of necessity and sustenance, still evokes rustic, unpolished vibrant personality born of agrarian roots.

Saison is the specialty of French-speaking Wallonia, especially the western Province of Hainaut. The region was one of agriculture, villages and farmhouse brewing. The economy was localized, folks making do with what could be cultivated or easily acquired. Imagine the variability from one town or farm to the next, with house character and recipe unique to each.

Brewing was usually done between December and March, when conditions favored relatively predictable fermentation. Immediately after the fall harvest, grain, hops and botanicals were at peak quality, and farmers had time to devote to brewing. Medieval farmhouse or village brews would have included barley, oats, wheat, buckwheat and spelt. Some grains were malted; others were not. Hops were a vital ingredient in provisional beers, especially for their antiseptic qualities during storage. Conveniently, there was a thriving regional hop-growing industry, one developed centuries ago when village, monastic and farmhouse breweries were the norm.

Indigenous botanicals, a remnant of pre-hop brewing, and later more exotic spices were also used. Coriander, anise, cumin, peppercorn, sage, ginger and orange peel, among others, were popular, savory supplements.

Similar to some other beers of Northern Europe of the era (witbier, Berliner weisse, gose, and lambic), fermentation and maturation included a mixture of primary yeast and secondary organisms. Old saison would have had sour and musty notes lent by Lactobacillus, Brettanomyces, Pediococcus and a menagerie of others yeasts that resided in the brewery, in wooden barrels and on dry-hop additions. Some were likely spontaneously fermented.

These wild, endemic organisms would work on the wort through spring, summer and into the following autumn. The refreshment was enhanced by the sour tang, earthy Brettanomyces and high attenuation.

Across the Border

Saison and French bière de garde are kindred farmhouse beers, a vestige of old brewing methods. Generally, both arose from similar beers in historical Flanders (comprising portions of France, Belgium and The Netherlands), and evolved into separate “styles” during the 18th and 19th centuries.

The French apparently preferred something malt-accented, stronger, darker and sweeter. Belgians desired something lighter, hoppy and more refreshing. As with most organic transformations, this evolution was gradual, generating two distinct farmhouse styles over time because of local ingredients, preferences or both. They remained largely regional and rustic, indifferent to the torrent of industrial brewing in 19th-century Europe.

Eventually, brewers would have to give in to the trends in order to survive, transforming saison from primitive to contemporary. Small breweries gave way to larger, more mechanized operations in the late 19th century and became more commercialized, but wisely kept their homey, unique image alive.

Lighter, more fermentable malt altered the color and attenuation of the wort, but the affinity for adjunct grains remained. Hops from England, Germany, Slovenia and Czechoslovakia joined those from France and Belgium in the kettle. Brewing became a year-round enterprise, goading yeast strains to adapt to warmer fermentation temperatures.

As microbiology became integral to brewing, multi-strain (spontaneous or otherwise) fermentation largely disappeared. Proprietary cultures adapted to conditions, morphing into house strains that came to define the new variety of saison.

Since saison was no longer necessarily for the saisonniers, brewers could boost the strength from its former 3 to 4% to 5% and above. Both farm (weaker) and tavern (stronger) versions were brewed.

As the influx of British and Continental beer increased in the early 20th century, Belgian’s brewers were faced with either aggressively marketing their unconventional brews or losing ground on their home turf.

A shift to paler malt helped offset the threat of ubiquitous pale lager, but the brewers kept their flavorful top-fermenting yeasts. Saison was proudly marketed as a local or regional specialty, packaged in corked bottles.

By the 1920s many operations had fully embraced modernization. Unlined wooden barrels, alive and full of flavor, gave way to stainless steel. Consistency took precedence over capriciousness. This philosophical shift transformed old, true farmhouse brews into more stylish versions, and ultimately led to the closure of many small rural breweries. Saison brewers never fully abandoned the features that made them unique in the first place, though, a policy that would serve them well in the future.

Enough Wallonian breweries survived after World War II to keep saison viable, a testament to regional loyalty that buoyed craft brewing before the recent renaissance. But saison remained an esoteric, rare style even after the cultural rejuvenation of the 1970s and ’80s brought traditional beers back into the spotlight.

The Modern Farmhouse Ale

The Brewery Ommegang opened its doors in 1997, modeled on the farmstead heritage of Belgium. Among its first offerings was Hennepin, a golden saison considered the first brewed in North America, and an outstanding introductory representative.

Within a few years, saison was cropping up everywhere. Saison Dupont Vieille Provision was finally getting its due. True to the farmhouse ethos, it is a simple brew that coaxed unparalleled nuance and complexity out of every ingredient.

New World brewers are artfully arcing the style back to its roots, inoculating them with Lactobacillus, Brettanomyces and even culled wild yeast, and using wooden barrels, completing a perfectly grand circle of retro-brewing. Brewers exploring saison today are evoking the individualistic nature of the style with a passion to be distinctive and an eye toward the seasonal aspect. Fittingly, many are being made with locally sourced ingredients.

Saison grain bills tend to be simple blends of pale malts and adjunct grains. Pilsner malt is the undisputed workhorse, providing lithe body and lean mouthfeel. Vienna malt, and to a lesser degree, Munich or light caramel, are other typical constituents, lending burnished and orange tints and malty aromatics. The trend in North America is to keep the color rather on the lighter, golden side. Other grains, malted or raw, include wheat, oats, rye, buckwheat and spelt. Sugars or honey are also used in some.

Hop profiles can be rather deep, with low-alpha-acid, aromatic European cultivars the best suited.

Brettanomyces and Lactobacillus can also lend a pleasant background, and brewers are increasingly incorporating those into their strategy. Wild yeasts, culled from the local flora, have also found a niche among saison brewers.

If that isn’t enough, many brewers, including some from Belgium, dose their saison with spices and herbs. Even the strength of saison varies widely, with 5% ABV versions as common as 7.5% ones, and if properly brewed, saison should be heady, rambunctious, well-attenuated, naturally conditioned and unfiltered.

Today’s wide-ranging selection of saisons is nothing short of amazing, given where they were less than 20 years ago. The style is fertile ground for experimentation, which is often, ironically enough, a reversion into its history and roots. The provocative future of saison is in its past.

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