That Old-Timey Old Ale, Billy the Mountain

Once, very early in my homebrewing career, I tried to brew an imperial stout. Unfortunately, the recipe included too little dark malts and what I got looked like iced tea. Consulting Jackson, I concluded that I had brewed an Old Ale. Thus was I introduced to the style.

The designation "old ale" is itchin' for abuse. Anything can be old. Old as in "sitting at the back of my fridge too long" or "made a long time ago, like Blitz lager." Even in England, where the style should have some meaning, breweries regularly take liberties with the style. Adnams has a beer they call an Old Ale, but it is just 4.1% and is "a mild ale style beer brewed with East Anglian pale ale and Crystal malted barley and Boadicea hops." An old ale that is a mild. Hold that thought a minute.

Breweries have long made very strong beers. Humans love intoxication, and there will always be demand for heavy hitters. Back in the day, the British referred to these with affectionate names like "crackskull," "stingo," and "huffcap." (Huffcapping was big in the winter of 1749-50. Kidding.) These beers were not only strong, though, they were also aged for months or years in oak. Old ales had other names like "stale" for this reason. After a year on wood, Old Crackskull would have taken on lots of character from wild yeasts. It would have gotten that sere, leathery quality we now associate with Belgian beers. In this context, the "old" referred to the time the beer had spent lounging around in barrels. Like stinky old cheese.

The opposite, of course, was "mild" ale, the fresh stuff breweries sent out lickety-split so publicans could start pouring it before the brettanomyces got busy. Old and mild were opposites. (Now, back to that Adnam's Old Ale. Their use of old to describe a mild is therefore a beautifully perverse turn of phrase. Adnams wishes to evoke a sense of the kind of beer old granddad may have enjoyed in the pub back in the fifties--you know, mild ale. One could say--and I would support it--that this use of metaphor is no less useful or poetic to the average punter in Southwold.) It was, however, regular practice to blend the two at the pub in order to spice up a mild with a bit of tartness from old ale. This may be where the word "stock" came from, yet another euphemism for old ale.

There are almost none of these kinds of old ales left in Britain. The two that spring to mind are Gale's Prize Old Ale (now made at Fuller's) and Greene King's Strong Suffolk. Americans have never really taken to the style, preferring their own super-hopped take on a barley wine. (The difference between old ales and barley wines? Damned little. Or anyway, semantic. Barley wine was a much later name used to help move product.) In America, actually right here in Portland, however, Upright's Alex Ganum, has shown an admirable enthusiasm for the kind of old ale you might have found in the days before microscopes had detected the existence of yeast.




Billy the Mountain
The name comes from a half-hour-long Frank Zappa song, incidentally--I think that's Ethell the tree on the label. The image I have omits the side text, which reads "a regular picturesque postcardy old ale"--a wink to the lyrics, which describe Billy as "a regular picturesque postcardy mountain." It's a psychedelic song in which Billy, flush with royalties from posing for postcards, goes on adventures that involve the draft, red-baiting, and Las Vegas. Good times. Anyway, we're here to discuss beer, so on to the other Billy the Mountain.

The first batch of the beer in 2009 was inoculated with brettanomcyes. Alex experimented in 2010 by blending 80% of the brett-inoculated Billy with a portion of sweet mild Billy. This year he's completely switched the ratio--just 20% brett-inoculated. By chance, I happened to have a year-old bottle at our annual holiday party last month. They strain Upright uses is a pretty gentle brett (I'm 90% sure it's claussenii, which is purportedly a British strain and therefore the one to make a beer like Dickens drank). Even after a year and even with an 80% blend (robust), I found that it "added a lovely tart snap to an otherwise hearty, sweet, English-style ale." In other words, not a face-melter.

I wondered if this year's would therefore be sweet--it doesn't have a lot of soured beer in it nor have those yeasts had a chance to do much to the base beer. But it was quite impressive. Here were my notes:

Balsamic nose, with a bit of berry jam. Reminds me of a Flanders brown. There's a tart undercurrent that has that balsamic tartness, but its enclosed in a dense, sweet, gingerbread beer. A touch of oak, too. Heavy and still, it would cloy if it were not brightened by the lovely tartness. There's some spiciness in here, and a long, port-like finish.

It's easily one of the most interesting beers around, and one that will age for years. Given the amount of sugars left in the bottle for the wild yeasts to snack on, I expect it will change enormously over those years. If you drink a whole bottle yourself and listen to Zappa, you too will go on adventures. Oregonians are fortunate to have so many wonderful historical recreations around, and this is one of my faves.

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Full Disclosure: the brewery gave me the bottle of this year's beer to taste, which is why I didn't throw it in the cellar, as all my instincts begged me to do.

From the Mists of Time, Two From Upright

Imagine the year 2020. We're all flying around in our electric hover cars and communicating telepathically through digital neural implants. Cloned cyborg monkeys do all the physical labor, freeing us up to blog and tweet. You're sitting in one of Portland's 237 brewpubs and a guy walks by in a t-shirt that says, "Upright Brewing, Still IPA-free since 2007." Sadly, it's not to be. Not the cyborg monkeys--those are mathematical certainty--the Upright tee: alas, Upright has brewed an IPA after all.

It's called "Safe as Milk" in homage to the recently-passed Captain Beefheart, and like him, it's not usual--at least, not in these parts. Here's Alex Ganum describing it:

"We decided to make a traditional English-style IPA. It has half the bitterness and hop charge that some popular west coast or American IPA's have, but hey, it's a start.... The Willamette hops that we got from the 2010 harvest were especially nice, and so it was an easy decision to make the English-style IPA with them as the sole flavor and aroma hop. Roughly 40-45 ibu's, not excessively hopped or carbonated for that matter, yet still displaying the wonderfully woody and floral Willamettes in the forefront. "

What Alex neglects in this description is the minerally structure that really signals a British-style IPA, achieved through amendments made to Portland's unadulterated, feather-soft water. You notice this on the tongue as a slightly chalky character; it makes the beer a bit more bracing and brings those relatively low levels of bitterness into sharp focus. It's a fascinating beer, a standard deviation or two beyond what's considered normal on the West Coast, and therefore a respectably offbeat offering from Upright.

While Safe as Milk is a nice beer and worth tracking down, the current vintage of Billy the Mountain, Upright's version of a traditional old ale, is a stunning beer you must track down. Alex wrote at length about it at the Upright blog--too long to excerpt here, but worth checking out. To summarize briefly, it starts as an 8% strong ale made with a blend of caramel, mild, black malts, and a touch of molasses to create a rich, sweet base beer. It's aged in pinot barrels with brettanomyces clausenii, the native strain isolated in England a hundred years ago. There it sits for a year, developing acidity and character (and another percent of alcohol). Alex conditioned it with a new batch of Billy to keep carbonation levels low. It won't be still, but like a nice English ale, it will neither be lively.

What results is a beer I expect is a very authentic recreation of the types of beer you could buy in London a hundred year ago and more. Here's Martyn Cornell, from his stellar book Amber Gold & Black:

Arctic Ale and other super-strong English 'stock' ales were brewed to lie in wooden casks or vats for at least a year, often longer, where they would be worked on by Brettanomyces-type yeasts lurking in the wood, which took over from the standard brewing yeasts to consume the more complex sugars found in quantity in strong beer worts. Indeed, 'Brett' yeasts were first isolated by the Danish brewing scientist Niels Hjelte Claussen in or just before 1903 from an English 'stock beer.'

Ganum's mixture of malts, use of an English strain to ferment the first wort, and the process of aging in barrels with the English brett are all perfectly consonant with the old way of producing English stock ales.

So, what does it taste like? We tend to put beers in boxes and keep them sequestered in our minds from other boxes, and so English old ales and Flanders oud bruins or reds have nothing in common. Except they did--quite a lot. Billy the Mountain has many of the qualities we associate with English strongs--a creamy body with a bread-pudding quality of dark fruits and cake--but also a vinous tartness that evokes the Burdgundies of Belgium. Contra Ezra, the brett here do contribute a sour sourness--not the dry, horse-blanket notes you get from brettanomyces bruxellensis. Yet they're gentle, and marry approachably with the sweeter, fuller notes of the malt and molasses.

It's definitely an A rating beer, but not one that will last forever. I have a couple bottles, one for now and one for the larder, but I may head back down to Upright for another pour. It's a perfect rainy-January ale.