Beer Sherpa Recommends: Gigantic Kiss the Goat

Gigantic Brewing has one of the more interesting approaches to beer in America. Their regular line of year-round beer consists of exactly one brand: IPA. Everything else they make appears just once (almost all of them) or annually (Massive! is the only example I can recall of a recurring beer.) They number each new release and contract with a well-known artist to create the label. Sometimes they even have an associated musical tie-in. This would seem to violate all the rules of branding and brand-building I know: there's no consistency across either beers or labels, and each bottle is a crapshoot for their customers. If one of these beers becomes a treasured fan favorite, too bad: you'll never get to taste it again. And yet as far as I can tell the brewery is flourishing. Brewers/owners Van Havig and Ben Love are doing so well that half the time they seem to be in Tokyo or Turin promoting their latest project.

I have loved three or four of the 39 editions of this experiment and probably disliked twice that number. (The rest I enjoyed in varying degrees.) This means Gigantic is the perfect brewery for the Beer Sherpa: when a good one comes along, it's almost mandatory that I point it out.

Kiss the Goat is to this point my favorite of all the Gigantic beers. It tickles my fancy on absolutely every level. The beer itself is a titan of flavor and balance. I am often accused of favoring low-abv beers, but this is not entirely correct. I often dislike bigger beers because breweries sometimes feel that lots of booze demands florid flavors and creative indiscipline. What I really like are strong beers that keep it together and manage to lure me in for an ill-advised session with their big, bad selves. Kiss the Goat is a perfect example. Havig, who knows I have a thing for Czech beers, says it reminds him of a cerne (a Czech black lager). The brewery called it a "black doppelbock," which is a pretty good description, too. It has a spine of roastiness, but lobes of sultry malting and a gentle layer of alcohol. Because of its strength, there's a lot of all of this, but the brewers have exercised restraint, so it tastes full rather than intense and encourages you to drink the entire 22-ounce bottle. (It's 8%, just borderline strong, which means you accept the encouragement.)

But a new Gigantic beer is a multimedia release, too, and the label earns this special Sherpa attention as one of the most entertaining in recent memory. The artwork is by Portlander Jon MacNair and features a TTB-defying scene of dark happenings. It recalls the 1980s basements of my teenage youth. The soundtrack to those years was often the kind of silly metal that scared Tipper Gore--and which sounded a lot like the accompanying 7" single Sons of Huns created specially for this beer. (You might think Clyfford Still, who is quoted on the label praising the color black, is connected somehow to Aleister Crowley, but in fact he's an American abstract expressionist.) Pure sensory pleasure, from eye to ear to tongue, this fine beer supplies in spades.

You definitely want to track down a Kiss the Goat or three. This is one of the Gigantic beers we'll miss when it's gone.

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"Beer Sherpa Recommends" is an irregular feature.  In this fallen world, when the number of beers outnumber your woeful stomach capacity by several orders of magnitude, you risk exposing yourself to substandard beer.  Worse, you risk selecting substandard beer when there are tasty alternatives at hand.  In this terrible jungle of overabundance, wouldn't it be nice to have a neon sign pointing to the few beers among the crowd that really stand out?  A beer sherpa, if you will, to guide you to the beery mountaintop.  I don't profess to drink all the beers out there, but from time to time I stumble across a winner and when I do, I'll pass it along to you.

Beer Sherpa Recommends: Gigantic IPL

Yesterday's post was, I suppose, a bit of a distraction on one point.  Although I used Gigantic's newest beer to illustrate a wholly unrelated point, I didn't much discuss the beer itself.  Now to rectify that oversight.

Very often, you come to understand a beer the less you know about it.  The Green Dragon, where I sampled the Gigantic, has a great taplist that, perversely, gives the drinker zero information beyond a name.  They don't even list the ABV. That leaves you with nothing else but your nose and mouth to figure out what you're drinking. It makes a session a bit more random, but when you find a gem, it also happens to make the experience more rewarding.

When IPL arrived, I was startled at its appearance, which might have passed in a line-up of Blue Ribbons.  It is pale.  Nothing India about that.  But then, lifting it toward my nose, I caught a plume of the aroma, which was very India indeed.  There's a sweet, fruity underlayment and then something that first seems like pine but drifts toward the Alien OG.  The effect of the appearance and aroma produced a kind of dreamlike discontinuity.  The strange pleasures continued as I added my tongue to the mix.  IPL is a very delicate beer, with little wisps of malt and no perceptible alcohol (turns out it 5.6%).  And amazingly, the hop intensity, though sunshiny and resplendent, did not overwhelm the rest of the beer. 

I tried to order another pint but, no shock to me, the keg had blown.  We're stuck in the middle of one terrible long sunny nightmare*, and this was an amazing tonic.  It looked and behaved like a helles, but had the aroma of an IPA and the flavor of a vivid pale ale.  I would have liked to test its durability, but I can say that it performed very well over the course of a pint.  I expect it did just as well over two or three.  Get it while the sun still shines.

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*To Portlanders and hairy black dogs, weather over 90 is painful, and we've endured weeks of the stuff.


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"Beer Sherpa Recommends" is an irregular feature.  In this fallen world, when the number of beers outnumber your woeful stomach capacity by several orders of magnitude, you risk exposing yourself to substandard beer.  Worse, you risk selecting substandard beer when there are tasty alternatives at hand.  In this terrible jungle of overabundance, wouldn't it be nice to have a neon sign pointing to the few beers among the crowd that really stand out?  A beer sherpa, if you will, to guide you to the beery mountaintop.  I don't profess to drink all the beers out there, but from time to time I stumble across a winner and when I do, I'll pass it along to you.

Meet the New Brewery: Gigantic

One of the most-anticipated new breweries opened in Portland a couple weeks ago--Gigantic Brewing, the new project by Ben Love (Pelican, Hopworks) and Van Havig (Rock Bottom).  How anticipated?  So much that when I was visiting there yesterday, a constant stream of people were trying to get into the tasting room including--I kid you not--a woman who fell to her knees in supplication when she realized it was closed.  Gigantic isn't a brewpub, has no food, and the tasting room's window is limited to six hours, five days a week.  Ben and Van didn't figure a production brewery in the industrial Southeast would get a lot of visitors. 

The Project

Not that Ben and Van didn't do a lot of figuring.  Gigantic is built on a totally novel business plan that starts with just a single regular beer--an IPA.  This they will bottle, along with a constantly rotating series of new releases, two a quarter plus the odd specialty releases.  Each beer will be different, and they'll come in numbered bottles that will stay on shelves until the next series displaces them.  This follows a trend in the market toward seasonals, but takes it to a whole new level of evanescence.

Ben looking at the label for IPA.

Counterintuitively, Ben and Van are focusing on the bottle market--which makes producing new packaging for every beer a seeming nightmare.  That was actually part of the plan, it turns out.  They are working with a third member of the team, Rob Reger, who is acting as an art director.  The Emily the Strange artist made the label for IPA, but he is soliciting art from other artists for new labels.  Each label has a central panel that looks like a comic book, fully illustrated by the guest artist.  The only consistent element is the "Gigantic" banner and the Gigantic "G" in the right corner.  Even the "Brewing Company" under the name is different each time. J. otto Seibold, Olive author, did City Never Sleeps and Jay Howell did Axes of Evil.  (You can see the art here.)  Gigantic gives the artists an additional boost by putting up original pieces in the tasting room.

Ben told me he hoped to take the concept even further and work with bands and artists to make original music connected with each release, and maybe even put a QR code on the bottle that takes you to a video of the band performing the piece--which might have additional animation from the artist.  "We don't really have an ad budget--we'd rather give it to [label] artists."

The Brewery and Beer

Ben Love and Van Havig appear to be an unlikely pair.  Van fizzes with energy, and his mind generates 9.2 deadpan jokes a minute.  Ben, by contrast, is an eye of still peacefulness in the Havig storm.  They seem to have a mind meld when it comes to beer, though.  During our tour, they would regularly finish each other's sentences.  The IPA, which will probably constitute over half their total production, could have been a fraught beer.  They each went off and drew up their ideal recipe and came back together to see how far off they were.  Not far, it turned out: the only difference was bittering hops--they had all four of the same late-addition hops.

Built with room to grow.

Between them, they have 24 years of brewing experience.  That was a big advantage in setting up the brewery, which Metalcraft built to their specs. It's a 15 barrel system, but tweaked so it has a decidedly English flair.  (I think it's coincidental, but Van spent a year at the London School of Economics.)  It starts with a homebrewed version of a Steel's masher, which wets the grist as its coming into the mash tun--more fully, according to Havig.  The mash tun is built to produce a floating mash for greater efficiency.  A direct-fired kettle produces noticeable caramelization, and the wort goes through a proper, English-style hop back, a flourish that adds up to an hour to each brew but saturates the beer in hoppiness. Gigantic is currently using a yeast from Sunderland's famous, now-defunct Vaux Brewery.  To coax esters from the yeast, they built fermenters at a 1:1 ratio of height and width (the pressure in tall fermenters represses ester-production). 

Gigantic isn't trying to become an English-style brewery, but because it's a small system, Ben and Van relied whenever they could on tried-and-true methods.  That it borrows from English systems is more a matter of function than tradition.  (Indeed, with a rauchweizen, imperial saison, and no beers under 5.5%, you can find little evidence of Englishness in the final products.)  The point is underscored when you go into the cask room and discover a 660-gallon (21-barrel) foeder (or foudre, in French).  It's a fifty-year-old wine vessel that now holds a batch of beer that will begin to encourage a wild ecosystem.  (We have to wait 12-18 months to try that beer.)

The beer is very good.  The IPA has already developed a loyal following.  The first batch was cloudier than intended but has a green, spritzy liveliness that belies its heft (7.3%).  Ben and Van focused on the nose and hop flavors to produce a beer that's not hugely bitter but vivid with fresh hoppiness.  The City Never Sleeps is an imperial black saison that has a bit of rustic yeast character but scans more as an imperial stout, and a wild experiment called Rauchweizen and the Bandit (they were screening Smoky and the Bandit on the new DVD player when I arrived), a 40% rauchmalt weizenbier.  It's as if a Schlenkerla Rauchbier Urbock collided with a Bavarian weizen.  Finally, my fave is a rich pale ale called St. Tennenholz, named for the OLCC agent who helped smooth the process for Gigantic.  Amazing creaminess and bright aromatics.

There's a lot more texture I could add--like why there's a gun, boar, and axe mounted on the walls, for example.  But best you go down and check it out yourself.  Mind you go at the proper times, though--hump day through the Lord's day, 3-9pm.  Even genuflection won't get you in outside those hours.

As always, more photos below the fold.