When Brettanomcyes Sneak In

For the most part, American breweries are now happy to tango with brettanomyces--at least on their own terms.  There are a few who have no interest in wild yeasts, and Full Sail is one--at least, I don't recall any forays they may have made into the funk. Or anyway, intentional forays.  I discovered last night that they have made at least one unintentionally.

Earlier this year, I went out to the brewery to see the latest year-old Top Sail Imperial Porter come out of the barrels.  As you know, every year, Full Sail puts a strong dark ale in barrels and lets them sit there a year; then they blend the barrels together and release them as Top Sail or Black Gold Imperial Stout.  When I visited, they were tasting beer as it came out of the barrel, flagging any batches that had gone south.  Barrels are not precise instruments, and in a certain percentage of them, something goes wrong.  Anything that tasted a bit funky got this treatment:

But here's the thing.  Brettanomyces work very slowly.  I've been in three different barrel rooms where a brewer has discovered a cask that a resident colony, heretofore unbeknownst to the brewery, has begun souring the beer inside.  It takes months for them to reproduce enough that they make their presence known.  it's easy to miss them until they've affected the beer sufficiently.  Their elusiveness is compounded in a process like Full Sail's, where all the barrels are blended together before bottling. 

After my visit, Jamie Emmerson gave me a couple bottles of vintage beers from Full Sail's own cellar.  One of the bottles was an '09 Black Gold, which I cracked last night.  It's no secret where I'm headed.  In 2009, one of those barrels had a bit of the wild culture going on--and after three years, it finally expressed itself. The bottle I had was still fairly mild--just a bit tart and vinous--but it was unmistakable.  Indeed, the flavor was probably not far from the historic London porters of the 19th century.  It had a certain refined quality to it that I quite enjoyed.  Full Sail probably won't be excited to hear it, but that's what happens when you use old whisky barrels--sometimes they harbor wild things.

If anyone else has '09s laying around, I'd be interested to hear what they taste like.
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PHOTO: DOCTOR ROSE

Birth of a Porter

In an annual rite, brewers at Full Sail opened the barrels of aging Top Sail Imperial Porter yesterday. The beer had been gestating for a year (four days shy, actually, if you're a stickler for precision) in those barrels, and what came out was not only different from what went in--but different from what was in the next barrel over.

This year Full Sail used 18-year-old barrels of Maker's Mark, Wild Turkey, and rye from Jim Beam. The idea is to get a blend of flavors from different types of barrels. Last year, Full Sail used two types of barrels, and for a short time they had examples of all three variants on tap at the Pilsner Room--a blend of all barrels, and then one each that came from the two different types. (Here's my review from last year's iteration.) Yesterday, though, I got to sample the beer as it was coming directly out of the barrels, pre-blend (pic here of the blogger in action). This is slightly different because, while the different types of barrels contribute a character of their own, each barrel also has its own character.

Barrel-aging is an organic process. The brewer's work has been completed by the time the beer goes into the casks, and what happens next is uncontrolled biochemistry. The beer pulls the liquor from the wood and it blends together, adding alcohol and aromatic compounds. Oxygen slowly seeps through the grain of the wood and interacts with the beer. The various compounds within the beer continue to evolve and interact. Each barrel becomes a singular ecosystem for these changes, and at the end of a year, each one has a unique character. Cracking those barrels open after a year is a fascinating study in biology.

In general, the Maker's Mark barrels produced a decadent beer--extremely rich and loaded with chocolate and cherry flavors. The Wild Turkey was, as you might expect, hotter and thinner, with a sharp edge. The rye barrels were my faves overall--they were earthier, spicier, and drier. Those were just broad contours, though. Barrel to barrel, flavors varied quite a bit. Some were more aromatic, some flatter, some richer, and some, sadly, had gone wrong. One was full of aldehydes and a vicious higher alcohol and one had the beginnings of what I argued might be a tasty funk (though there was a troubling solvent note). Both got dumped, and I captured the tragedy with my trusty camera.

The beer is headed for a tank where it will rest and settle for a period before bottling and it should be available next month. Meanwhile, the next batch of bourbon casks are headed to Hood River, awaiting the 2013 vintage of Black Gold Imperial Stout. They've been doing this every year since 1998, and now they alternate the stout and porter every other year. I will be most fascinated to see how the final blend tastes.

Something Wild in Deschutes Brewery

Yesterday, Deschutes posted a most interesting explanatory note on their blog:

We have detected in our lab a similar condition to The Abyss 2009 where some (not all) of the bottles have brettanomyces in them. It is interesting in that there seems no way to tell short of general tendencies in storage conditions where the brett will develop to sensory detection levels.

This is a fascinating situation. A huge percentage of breweries have now moved toward barrel-aging programs, and Deschutes' experience may be the tip of a big, sour iceberg. Wood is a fantastic material for aging beer. Casks breathe, and they contribute tannins and, if they have recently been used for wine or liquor, flavor and aroma from those substances. But porous wooden barrels are also, of course, a marvelous habitat for wild things. Yeasts and bacteria inhabit the cracks between staves and even the tiny fissures in the wood itself. This is exactly the reason American breweries abandoned them in the first place (despite claims of "beechwood aging"). Stainless steel, properly cleaned, harbors no foreign creatures.

I haven't done a proper study of this phenomenon, but my sense is that first-generation wooden barrels are mostly pretty sterile. These are the juicy casks that contribute so much wine or bourbon character to beers. But left for further cycles of aging beer, they become susceptible to contamination. Ron Gansberg discovered a rogue barrel that had turned from among his collection (to his eminent, brett-hating credit, he released that beer for the brett fans before removing the barrel to a secure destruction site). Lompoc had a pinot barrel go sour and it made the single best pour I've ever had from the brewery. And now Deschutes has some funk running wild.

This will be a challenge to breweries who want control over their beer. Mirror Mirror and the Abyss were conceived as high-gravity beers that would age gracefully and allow the notes to commingle over time. The kiss of brett will take these beers in totally unpredictable directions. Personally, I love the idea of soured Mirror Mirror and Abyss. Neither of these is among my favorite Deschutes beer, but soured versions? They would instantly be hugely attractive.

Historically, all beer was aged in wood. The old ales and strong ales meant for aging would all have been infected. This was where the historical distinction between "mild" beer and aged beer ("old," "stale," "stock," etc.) came from. Mild meant sweet and fresh. Older beer had that dry, sherry-like finish of infected beer.

Deschutes' solution is to pasteurize bottles the wood-aged portion [see comment from Gary Fish below] of the beer in Abyss and Mirror Mirror after they exit the barrels. (They'll also arrange for shipment and refunds of returned bottles of soured versions, too. Or, you could give them to me. You know, either way.) I guess that's a good solution for keeping the beers as Larry Sidor and his team envisioned. But there are lots of possibilities here. Deschutes could release unpasteurized bottles in small lots to folks who hope for the tang of brett. Or they could actively encourage their brett populations and produce traditionally soured old ales. Old British breweries commonly blended their lots to produce different versions of beer. Publicans would mix old and mild beers at the bar. Possibilities abound.

It's a brave new world, and breweries with barrel houses are about to discover that they have sour programs under way--whether they intended them or not.