Laurelwood is Ten

Laurelwood 10th Anniversary Celebration
Friday, March 18, 5-11 pm
$2.50 pints, live music, new beer releases

Typically, old men like me say things like, "wow, I can't believe Laurelwood's been open ten years already; it seems like they just opened up." (Relatedly: last night Angelo shot a photo of John Foyston and me, explaining, "I want to get a picture of you guys before you die." Hurry!) But actually, this time my reaction is the opposite: just ten years, really? Laurelwood has become one of those bedrock Portland breweries, synonymous with the town. To think that it post-dates the Clinton administration (which to old men like me seems very recent) is hard to believe. But there it is.

To celebrate the event, Laurelwood is releasing a couple new beers which act as a nice metaphor for the event. The first, Workhorse Imperial IPA, is a beer for the moment. The second decade of the 21st century will be remembered for the big beer craze--an imperial IPA is almost a requirement. Enough said.

The second beer is called (at least provisionally) "Big O" Organic Pale Ale. It's a perfect metaphor for a brewery that regularly resists trends. In terms of American craft beer, pale ales are ancient, the least trendy of all beers. At least 73,000 of them are brewed in America. Yet the Big O is stellar; that very rare example of a fresh take on a familiar style. Hopped with Centennial, Cascade, and Fuggles, it has the classic, saturated quality of a Northwest ale--but the hops are mostly flavorful and aromatic, not bitter. They provide bright top notes and make Big O a sunny beer with a bit more zing than you except. One of my favorite beers from Laurelwood was Piston Pale Ale--which they scrapped some years back. Big O is a great--and overdue--replacement.

You could do worse Friday night than stopping by to drain a pint in celebration of this surprisingly young Portland institution.

Adjunct Nation

Let us climb into the wayback machine and travel to that distant time of 1990. Many of you will have been too young to drink then (half the population was 17 or younger at the time), and probably the rest of you were drinking Hamm's. The Americans who had discovered craft beer resided in that fiery, fundamentalist stage of the just-converted. In their backlash against additive-laden tin can beers, they were Reinheitsgebot-curious, allowing exemptions for wheat, say, but little else. Breweries dabbling with fruit and honey were regarded with suspicion, if they were regarded at all. Other ingredients were dismissed with a sneer as "adjuncts." It was an article of morality.

Ah, how things have changed. I haven't run the numbers, but my guess is that something north of 75% of the brewpubs around town have a beer on tap with some formerly-suspicious contaminant. Last week, I stopped in to Laurelwood and discovered their Bay Laurel Pale. Last night, I moseyed over to Coalition for a pint of maple porter--one of my new fave beers. Ales adulterated with chocolate, coffee, pepper, herbs, and fruit are so common they don't even register as something to consider. The change has become so complete that even corn and rice make their way into beer--the two grains no brewer would ever have considered using twenty years ago.

Historically, of course, adjuncts were ubiquitous. Read through descriptions of some of the crazy English or German styles, and you realize that at one time, a barley-hops-water-yeast beer would have been an austere curiosity. The use of other ingredients seems more natural and obvious when you think about it; while malt and hops offer fair diversity, if a brewer wants to draw out certain notes, why limit himself to just these ingredients?

When brewers first used spices in their beer, they were considered gimmicks. Many times, that was the goal. But brewers have learned how to use a pinch of this and a dash of that the way a chef does, and the results are generally quite good; they add subtle notes that fill out the flavor profile.

Take Laurelwood's Bay Laurel Pale. I asked for a taster first, because I was worried the bay leaves would overwhelm the beer. Rich in essential oils--particularly eucalyptol--bay leaves have a dangerous menthol-like quality. But brewer Chad Kennedy essentially dry-hopped with them, and this quality is more suggestive than acute. I ordered Laurelwood's Space Stout chicken to comfort me during that false autumn we were having last week. The Bay Laurel Pale went brilliantly with it--an autumnal tour de force.

As for Coalition's Loving Cup Maple Porter--you can tell just from the idea that it's a winning combination. The darker amber grades of maple syrup are caramelized in a manner also directly on the continuum of malt flavors. Coalition's porter features that note along with the light aroma and flavor of maple. It's a dry porter--nothing oversweet about it--and the maple adds just depth and flavor. A perfect combination (and it will be a perfect winter beer).

My guess is that we're just seeing the latest stage in an evolution. In cooking, chefs are often reluctant to divulge their secret ingredients. Brewers are a bit more exhibitionist, and include all the salient details of recipe and craft. I could imagine a time, however, when breweries were less forthcoming. If I ask a brewer, "Is that cardamom I'm tasting?", they are happy to let me know. Perhaps in another twenty years (when I'm way, way past the median age), I'll just see a twinkle in her eye and get a shrug instead.

Summer's Perfect Beer: Rye Pale Ales

Rye is a weed. Or was, anyway, 3,500 years ago, when it infested the wheat and barley fields of Southern Asia. As a consequence, it co-evolved with these other grains long before it was accepted in its own right. Its heyday as a bread, according to Stan Hieronymus' Brewing With Wheat, was the middle ages before dying off in the time of Victoria. It remained only in certain precincts where people were made stupid and dull by its hearty density, so said snotty wheat-eaters. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder--the possibly apocryphal discoverer of hops--sneered at rye, saying it was "a very poor food and only serves to avert starvation."

In beer, rye has mainly been yoked to darker beers, to spice them and make them hearty. But counter-intuitively, certain breweries also put them in pale ales, and the result is a spicy, dry, quenching beer perfect for a summer day. In the Northwest, the first credit for the style probably goes to Redhook, which brewed a light rye ale more than 15 years ago. It didn't sell well and died out. (Revived for one season a few years ago and then killed off again.) This summer, I note that at least three versions were available: Oakshire Line Dry Rye, Laurelwood Wry, and Three Creeks Stonefly (a regular in their line-up). It could be that these are also flash in the pans, or that we're seeing the shoots of a new fixture in Beervana. I hope it's the latter, because the style is absolutely perfect on a hot day.

Three Creeks Stonefly Rye
The difficulty with rye is that it's a husky, ornery grain, and has been the ruin of many a young beer. Fleming Threee Creeks wisely pairs it with wheat here--they actually seasons a wheat beer with rye--and the result is a light, refreshing beer with a lively, spicy note. I found bright and tart notes (lemongrass?) but the beer wasn't aggressive or grinding--as it can be if you extract too many tannins from the rye. Of the Three Creeks beers I've tried, this is the most accomplished and also my fave. (4.6%, 28 IBUs) [Note: I just pasted this description in from my earlier review, failing to catch the bit about Dave Fleming, the founding brewer at Three Creeks who has since left. A sharp-eyed reader emailed to point this out.]

Oakshire Line Dry Rye
Oakshire substitutes honey for Three Creek's wheat. Poured very cold, the spice of the rye and the resin of the hops create a slightly aggressive flavor that seems at turns soapy or piney. But with a bit of warmth, the honey sweetness emerges, and the honey seems to provide a voluptuous creaminess that offsets the sharper notes nicely. I am re-painting my house, and after a few hours of scraping and sanding, I poured this out last night and was so happy to have a refreshing, light beer to slake my thirst. (5.5% 35 IBUs)

Laurelwood Wry Ale
My favorite rye ale comes from Laurelwood, though there may not be any left. This year's batch was on tap only briefly at the brewery, but they did bottle some, too--but you can bookmark it for next year. A drier beer than the first two, the spiciest, and most astringent. Rather than balancing it with wheat or honey, Laurelwood goes with Cascade and Amarillo hops; their citrus marries perfectly with the spice. As you can see from the picture, there's an indelible image on the label. I always forget what the actual name is; to me, it's always Hayseed Rye. (5.6% 40 IBUs)

A bit of summer yet remains. Go forth and have a rye.

Spring Saison (A Few Words on Farmhouse Ales)

Goose Island's Matilda has got me thinking. American breweries are constantly experimenting with styles, trying to figure out when one's moment is right. It isn't always obvious. Tastes don't evolve linearly, light to dark, sweet to bitter, or small to big. Styles just pop up and find a constituency. Belgian wits, coffee stouts, red ales--all have had their moment. Yet in the US, Belgian styles (wits excepted) have never seemed to make it over the hump--no matter how much beer geeks and breweries love them.

I wonder--could farmhouse ales be the ones to break through?* I had a pint of Laurelwood's saison last night and considered the idea. The problem is, many Belgian beers are challenging. Even leaving aside the sour ales, the others have a reputation for being--well, often when I offer someone a Belgian of which I'm fond, they take an exploratory sip, give a hesitant nod, and agree, "Yes, it's a Belgian." I know then that I'll be (happily) drinking the rest of the bottle by myself.

(I've seen the same look on the faces of visitors who've just taken a pull on one of our radioactively hoppy local beers.)

Farmhouse ales, though, are really approachable. Take Laurelwood's saison. Brewed with wheat and oats, it is a gentle 5.2% alcohol and sports a mere 12 IBUs. Yet what depth! I don't know which yeast Chad used or how he made the beer (typically saisons need warmth and age), but he produced a beer with a lush yeast character--spicy, dry, and warm. You'd think that 12 IBUs would leave a beer treacly, and although the beer is on the sweet side, it seems to emerge from the esters--as you swallow the beer, it dries up on your tongue, leaving a quenching, clean finish. Saison yeasts tend to be very efficient. They gobble most available sugars, but produce sweet-tasting compounds in the process--the best of both worlds. It could be that I'm too far out in the weeds of weird styles to know what Joe Craftbeer likes, but I can't imagine anyone finding Laurelwood's saison challenging.

Beyond that, the class of beers is almost infinitely variable. Bières de garde can be sweet, saisons can be very hoppy, either style can be of mild strength or quite robust. The available yeast strains are quite versatile (Dupont's finicky version does pose challenges, however)--as Upright's range demonstrates.

Part of the issue is cultural: Belgian beers seem alien to Americans. Yet don't farmhouse ales fit neatly into the Northwest's farmer's-market fed food culture? As is our preference, farmhouse ales focus on the natural, local, and traditional. I don't expect to see actual fams start brewing, but getting local ingredients, organic ones, and adding local spices and flavors--that's already happening in most breweries. Why not the style that really celebrates local and handmade? Finally, farmhouse ales are among the best styles for pairing with food--and don't beg for traditional pub fare like stouts and pale ales.

In a few weeks, the Oregon Brewers Guild will sponsor the annual Cheers to Belgian Beers festival, wherein Oregon breweries make their own styles of beer from a single yeast strain. The past couple years have been rough--the yeasts were neither approachable nor versatile. But this year, the yeast is a saison strain. Perhaps at least one or two knock-your-socks-off stellar beers makes an appearance. If so, it will be a great chance to test my theory about their potentially broad appeal.

One can hope!
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*I like the phrase "farmhouse" better than the more specific "saison" or "bière de garde." Since the styles have few parameters, using these names doesn't much help in describing a beer. And French words are just generally a bad way to try to sell things in America. "Farmhouse," though--there's a word we can all rally around.
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Three Winter Ales, Tasted Blindly

In prep for my media appearance next week (you like how I'm trying to pique interest here?), I blind-tasted three winter warmers last night. I figure we need to do one pretty traditional NW winter warmer. This was really one of the first sophisticated beer styles to achieve fruition, and I have always loved the season's beers as a result.

For my tasting, I chose three I know I like and which are available in the bottle: Deschutes Jubelale, Full Sail Wassail, and Laurelwood's Vinter Varmer. I figure rather than just pick one at random, I should taste them and let the winner emerge. I had Sally pour them out and I tasted them blind. Below are my notes:

All beers are roughly the same color—dark, amber highlights, off-white heads. Of the three, beer one is more straight brown, beer two redder but lighter, beer three red but darker.

Beer one
Mild aroma, tiny yeast quality, tiny hops. Flavor—extremely creamy and rich. Lovely. On the sweet side, but the hops keep it in balance, perhaps fading just a touch green and sharp at the end. Could use a bit more age. Frothy. Malt is candyish. Quaffable, comforting.

Beer two
Frothy head with batter-like head of mixed size bubbles. Sweet, cola-like aroma with just a bit of orange zest. Another very creamy beer, but with a lush hop character--though without bitterness. Earthy, and the cola in the aroma comes across in the palate as a beguiling rooty note. As the beer warms, it strengthens as the hops open up.

Beer three
Tight head of slightly darker color. Again, sweet malt in the nose, but roasty. Palate is likewise roasty. A malty beer with character nodding in the direction of a dry stout. Has a more substantial body. Very nicely balanced; the roast doesn’t overwhelm. At the end you arrive at a tripartite malty sweet, hop bitter, and roastyharmony.

All three beers were great. I was able to guess pretty easily that beer three was Vinter Varmer, a beer characterized by its roastiness. Jubelale and Wassail have always been brothers from another mother--so close, so lovely, two of my very favorite beers of all time. I guessed that beer two, with its lush hop character and sweet body was Deschutes, while the more assertively hopped, sharper beer one was Wassail, from hop-loving Full Sail. Turns out I was correct.

Although I like all three, as they warmed up, the Jubel really began to sing. It has always been a crowd-pleaser, and it's because the profile is so approachable. There's nary a hard edge here--it's like a hot chocolate on a cold day. But for the beer geeks, the layered quality of malt and hop, especially later-boil hops, give it quite a high "beer IQ." So for Tuesday, Jubel it is.

On Black IPAs

On Saturday, whilst craning my neck to see the Blazer game from a poorly-situated booth at the Laurelwood, I sipped "Arctic Apocalypse," Chad Kennedy's black imperial IPA. As he promised, it tasted more or less like a regular imperial IPA, though the dark malt(s) added what I'd call a malt-o-meal note (wholesome, rib-sticking, breakfasty). It's a neat trick, something to appreciate on the level of sleight of hand. But it raises more pertinent questions: why, for example, does the world need a black IPA? Are we similarly deprived for lack of a pale stout? Hmmm.

I have spent some time trawling the internets for an origin story for this trend (please, let's refrain from calling it a style just for the moment, shall we?), and came up empty. Someone thought of it, brewed it, and the meme was released. Now we have several dozen examples, and a few Oregon breweries have dabbled with stained IPAs. The idea doesn't appear to extend beyond coloring a standard style--sort of like green St. Patrick's Day beer--and the trick is to achieve darkness without changing the flavor.

This brings us to the why. Although I have commented dyspeptically in the past about style creep, I'm actually a big fan of innovation. Yet the idea isn't to change the nature of the beer, just its color--isn't that gimmickry, not innovation?

None of this is to slag Acrtic Apocalypse (though how about "Black Bombay" or "Dark Delhi" or somethinng?), which I enjoyed. Chad may have hit on one of the ways to accomplish the trick--add 100+ IBUs of hops and blast away all the maltiness. AA is a massive beer, and the hops come in a wall of brutish force, bouyed by a lot of thick, malt alcohol. If you're a fan of the imperial IPA style, you'll like this beer. (Although if you're more into nuance, try the British Daily Ale, which also just went on tap. It's a brown, full of flavor and aroma, but a session tipple. More of the Blazer-watching beer I was looking for.)

So how about your thoughts: black IPAs, gimmickry or grooviness?

Fresh Hops: Laurelwood and Rogue

I am beginning to run out of adjectives to describe fresh hop beers, so I'm going to cut to the chase a bit on these two.

Rogue Independence Ale
Let us stipulate: the hop additions in Rogue's beer are mysterious. They contain either Centennial, Millennium, and Willamette (per the bottle) or Centennial and Cascade (the website) or Willamette and Centennials (Brewers Guild). Probably it's Crystal and Perle. Well, no matter, at 80 IBU, who can tell? Independence is a sticky, resinous beer that holds little evidence that it was made with fresh hops. The nose is grapefruit and ganja (seriously). It's a thick, syrupy beer, which is good, because the body holds up nicely against the gale-force hops. I found none of the "decomposition note" I've complained about, but also none of the soft herbal notes you'd like in a fresh hop. (Well, maybe way down below the bitterness, but I might have been hallucinating.) A pretty traditional Rogue offering, satisfying therefore to traditional rogues.

Interesting trivia: there's a spot of wheat malt in the grain bill. Betcha can't taste it. (The haze in the beer, easily chalked up to hoppy particulate, might be a contributor.)

Laurelwood Hop Bale
I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that this Liberty-hopped ale is a pretty standard, middle-of-the-road fresh hop ale. It is brewed in the (now) traditional pale continuum, and does feature the "decomp note," albeit in a minor, non-fatal way. In this beer I get a cooked squash taste. As Sally noted with a shrug, "it's neither here nor there." Yup.

The good news is that Laurelwood also has an Oktoberfest on tap, and it's wonderful. If beer were cookies, Oktoberfests would be chocolate chip: common but surprisingly tasty and universally-loved. You want your o-fest to have an autumn-maple leaf hue, spiciness in the palate, and a rich, warming, sweetness. Laurelwood's delivers the goods.