SweetWater Brewing Company Twitter

By the time you read this, I’ll have participated in Sweet Water Brewery’s 15th anniversary invite-only brewing party. I’d like to point out that this will be my very first attempt at brewing. Ever. Am I nervous? Eh, kinda.

Oh, it turns out there’s a little more to it than that. My Sweet Water contact informed me that I’m “representing the entire state of Florida” with this effort. Yikes. All of us making beer for the party will return in March for their Brew Your Cask Off event to see how our science projects turned out.

One more thing: The top 5 beers – as chosen by the party guests and the brewing staff – will be re-brewed and featured at Sweet Water’s annual 420 Fest. Yeah… no pressure.
It’s going to be a total blast and the brewery’s generosity is not going unnoticed. They’re throwing wide the doors to their cellar and bringing out a lot of their personal rarities. They’ve put us up in the swanky Artmore Hotel for two nights as well as making sure those of us arriving from far away receive gift cards for gas stations. Heck, just providing enough ingredients for over 100 custom beers is costly enough!

The logistics of all of us brewing over a 2-day period would’ve been an absolute nightmare so instead we’re all customizing one of five base beers. Mine will be a robust porter with cocoa and ancho chili powders, vanilla bean and coriander seed. Secondary fermentation will be due to agave nectar, Sterling hops for aromatics and London ale yeast. How it turns out, we shall see.

(Julio: I’m intentionally leaving out the name of my beer as it’s a little more than inappropriate; Dirty Sanchez. Even if the beer sucks, the brewing staff is gonna love me for that name alone.)

To commemorate their 15 years of brewing excellence, Sweet Water has graced us with a re-do of one of their very first ales. Originally an ESB, the 15 Years of Heady Beers release is now a barleywine packing a buzz-worthy 10% abv yet is very well-masked. Clear caramel with a dense head of tiny bubbles, the 15th gives out nice scents of butterscotch, peach, toffee and a fresh tree-bark that reminds me of walking through the woods right after it’s rained. Flavors of Whitman’s Sampler chocolate covered toffee play with candied orange peel, pine and lemon. The malt is massive but the hops add a bright punch of citrus to keep it in check. The whole thing comes together with a good carbonation bite followed by a slightly creamy mouth coating texture.

Now if only I could brew this well. Cheers to the first 15 years, Sweet Water. Here’s to 15 more.

Rogue Breweries on Twitter

Often times in beer speak an item may carry a name that has nothing to do with what’s inside the glass. Thus is the case with the brown ale category, particularly nut brown ale. However, as everything old is new again and brewers look to innovative methods and additions to set their product apart from the herd, there’s more and more truth in advertising these days.

Originally, the style known as brown ale was brewed entirely from brown malt. This was abandoned once it was realized that pale malt such as 2-row barley, wheat and rye were all more abundant crops from which to choose. By the late 19th/early 20th centuries, there were some in merry ol’ England who missed the style and revived it using pale malt that had been toasted a little longer than that used in, say, pale ale but not as long as those for porter and stout.

As time passes and brewers tinker and experiment with combinations of malt, hops and yeast, it’s noticed that making a beer one style with recipe X turns out totally different than recipe Y. Some of the brown ale being made had a pronounced, natural nutty flavor profile.

Oddly enough it wasn’t until recent years that American brewers began to make beer that included what its name implied. Chocolate stout began to show up with real chocolate in the ingredient list and nut brown ale, surprise, did too and took off like a rocket. Regional breweries Sweetwater and Lazy Magnolia both represent the South with the inclusion of pecan in their browns while the mad scientists at Rogue looked to an Oregon crop for their inspiration.

In 1993, a friend of Rogue’s brew master added Oregon hazelnuts to his homebrew to be featured at that year’s American Homebrewers’ Association convention. Overwhelming praise led to Rogue honoring the effort with their Hazelnut Brown Nectar. With a clear golden brown appearance, much like Coke after the ice cubes have melted, this beer doesn’t keep its fluffy head for very long but that’s okay. The real show is coming next with gorgeous scents of Nutella, vanilla, caramel and straight toasted hazelnut. A seriously smooth body delivers loads of sweet malt, a touch of honey and a big finale of more roasted hazelnut. The beer is kept in check from being too cloying and sweet by a fresh dollop of floral hops.

Anyone who knows me knows that I eschew loud crowds of intoxicated revelers resplendent in their puffy jester hats and plastic Mr. T bling. Call me a curmudgeon but I’m just not that turned on by long waits in line to be the next drunk to impress his friends by ripping the paper towel dispenser off the men’s room wall. And imbibing until it’s re-gifted? Classy. What a grand mal waste of beverage.

I am, however, a good sport and I will play along but by my definition of “indulgence.” For my intent, I’d rather take the time to splurge on some of the finest-made beer in the world. It’s pricey but there’s nothing like Trappist ale.

There is usually some head scratching involved when it comes to certain Belgian ales. What’s up with the numbers? Why is there a 6 or a 12? The answer is two-fold. Initially the number was brewer’s shorthand for the beer’s original gravity, the relative density of wort compared to water in the initial phase of brewing. By monitoring a beer’s gravity, the brewer can extrapolate overall alcohol content for the finished product and determine when the beer has finished fermenting. In shorthand, an OG of 1.068 would be jotted down as a 6.

The other half of the answer owes to the illiteracy of the population in older times. The scores of thirsty laborers knew they wanted a tasty beer but had no idea what the writing on the label meant. They did, however, know their numbers and would simply order their preference based upon that. You see, in most cases the higher the number the stronger the ale.

Rochefort is made by Trappist monks and utilizes the number system on their amazing ales. When beer is this fantastic, who cares about a lot of fancy fluff on the label? I’m aiming my indulgence right down the middle of the pack and picking the Number 8.

This is one of those living ales that proudly contain those funky chunks of spent yeast. You’ll see tan blobs of it swimming around this pond water brown elixir with its mile-high head of dense froth. 8 has incredible scents of fig and dried apple on top of fresh dark bread and earthy Belgian yeast. Flavors run the gauntlet from chocolate/carob, toffee, cinnamon, nutmeg, dried cherry, banana and brown sugar. Each sip is a unique experience. The rather high 9.2% alcohol content provides some warmth to the finish and satisfies the reveler requirements of strong drink.

Speaking of “guilty”… How about that ruling the other week by a federal judge in New Orleans? No, not the one forcing the LSU Tigers to try and score some offense, the one granting 6% of all Gulf Coast Claims Facility payouts to a lawyers’ fund. Really, guys? $1.2 billion on top of the 30-or-so% they’d make for winning a case for their client? Perhaps the judge ruled that way because we all know the few hundred lawyers handling claims are really struggling to put food on the table while those whose fishing and coastal tourist-based businesses are simply booming. Those whose businesses survived the oil spill to begin with, that is.

Atrocious. Words fail me. As a human, I’m embarrassed by such rampant greed. It reminds me of something mentioned in real-life-criminal-turned-author/actor Eddie Bunker’s phenomenal autobiography Education of a Felon. At one point in his younger days, Bunker is befriended by Louise Wallis, wife of famed Hollywood producer Hal Wallis (Casablanca and True Grit, to name a couple of his films). She explains to Eddie that “… rich people have a way of staying rich.”

Thankfully there are those still among us who take it upon ourselves to be truly charitable and considerate of our fellow man. In the case of Abita Brewing, .75c of every Save Our Shores Wheat Pilsner goes to coastal restoration. Hey, it’s a win-win; money for those who seriously need it and you, the consumer, gets a darn tasty beverage.

Normally, wheat beer is cloudy in appearance but due to the fact that this is a bottom-fermented pilsner, what we’re left with is a clear golden beer with a tall head of sticky foam. German Perle hops combine with Sterling, which is itself a hybrid of the noble German hop, Saaz, and Mt. Hood, a noble German clone of Hallertau, to give this pils enough oil for incredible lacing down the glass and plenty of gorgeous floral scents and flavors. Little hits of lemon mingle with grass and bready malt scents while the wheat contributes a little spicy citrus bite on the palate. Subtle herbal flavors follow with some fresh grain and mild bitterness. Texture is creamy with just enough carbonation to excite the senses.

To date, roughly $300,000 has been raised through sales of S.O.S. for coastal relief. Abita Brewing deserves huge thanks for this. In the meantime, there are others out there who should seriously re-think their priorities.

Well, anyone who truly believes in that kind of malarkey can go ahead and have their sugary, flavorless macro brews… their light beer, too. Bitter is certainly not a dirty word in the wide world of beer.

Beer enthusiasts and loyal readers of this column know that a beer’s four essential ingredients include hops. Hops contain concentrations of certain alpha oils that impart bitter flavors of anything from flowers to pine needles. Their role in beer is multi-faceted: preservative, fuel for alcohol production and flavoring agent. Without hops’ bitterness to balance the natural sweetness of malted grain, we’d be left with a low-alcohol wheat Koolaid of sorts.

The British have been making what they call “bitter” for a very long time now. We here in the States know it better as pale ale although the Yank version usually utilizes strains of hops bred here in America such as Cascade, Nugget and Mt. Hood. Folks in England still refer to their pale ales as bitter, mild bitter and premium bitter to distinguish between their preference and other less hopped ales. The use of darker malts in classic bitter, logically, also prevents the style from being truly “pale.”

We usually never see a lot of English-style bitter here on our shores so when Victory Brewing from Pennsylvania began making Uncle Teddy’s Bitter, we had to give it a big try. Turns out, it’s a hands-down winner. It is hazy orange-gold with a huge head that quickly settles down to a thin ring of foam. Traditional scents abound with Uncle Teddy’s: biscuity caramel malts with a noticeable dusting of earthy, citrusy hops. There’s a toasty grain flavor happening here reminiscent of Captain’s Wafers (?) along with nuts, fruit, a drop of honey and the perfect amount of citrus. Hops have been very successfully balanced in this beautiful ale and its rather low abv of 4% all make for a very drinkable beverage.