American Farmhouse Ale

Post updated below (11:45 am, 4/5/16).

I was about to shoot the following thoughts and questions to Stan Hieronymus, who will release an excellent book called Brewing Local  in September (I've seen an advance copy). In it, Stan considers the nature of local beer, a straightforward question that turns out to be as solid as smoke, drifting lazily out of reach. You start poking that question with a few others--local ingredients? local styles? local tradition?--and it drifts ever further away. Of course, Stan doesn't just pose the questions, he tries to answer them, and you can read his conclusions this fall.

I've long planned to brew an American farmhouse ale, adapting the spirit of the old 19th century Belgian saisons to America. They were one of the products that came off the farm, made with what the farmer had on hand. They made those beers the way Belgians of the time did, with crazy-long boils and coolships, and I don't intend to make a beer like that. Indeed, I don't want to make a throwback beer. Imagine a modern farmer who happened to have a small brewery on-site. What would he make?

• Corn is a must for an American beer, wheat seems like basically a must. Six-row barley might be in order, though I'm not trying to brew a 19th century beer--a modern farmhouse is likely to be growing modern barley. Oregon State recently released Full Pint malt, which is available at my local homebrew store.
• Sugar beets are commonly grown in Eastern Oregon, so a pound of White Satin seems in order.
• Hops are local to Oregon, but I figure a farmer who planted them for his own crops would be concerned about yield. Super Galena, Crystal, and Cascade are the most productive varieties. (I've never seen Super Galena for sale, so that's out--plus, Galenas are pretty rough hops.) Neomexicanus hops would be one choice, too--but they are not to my knowledge grown in Oregon nor, based on where they are grown (New Mexico) would they be much suited to Oregon.
• Oregon now has a couple yeast suppliers, Wyeast and Imperial, though neither make a locally-obtained strain. Actually, Imperial has a yeast called Citrus that was harvested wild--I suppose it could be from Oregon. In any case, the strain should be pretty rustic if we're shooting for a farmhousy effect.
• Other fruits/vegetable/spices could be thrown in, but I'm interested in doing one without them at the outset.

The one thing I think needs to be in play is the American penchant for late hops. This has become our national tradition, and it deviates quite a bit from the way the old Belgian farmers made their beers. So: a potpourri of grain including corn (mandatory), some sugar beet sugar, Cascades and/or Crystal hops, and a rustic yeast strain. That's as far as I got. What I was going to ask Stan, but what I'll throw out to hive mind instead (including Stan!), is this: how would you make it? What would characterize an American farmhouse ale? Is this exercise even valid--or at the very least interesting? I think so, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.

Update. Folks have been mentioning that there is no tradition of American farmhouse brewing and that trying to brew to that tradition is folly. I agree halfway. I'm thinking of "farmhouse" in a broader context than the saisons of Belgium. What would a rustic local beer made in America look like?--that's more the exercise. If it were made of ingredients grown on a farm (in, in my case, Oregon) and brewed on an imprecise, small-scale farm brewery, what would we expect to see? Farmhouse breweries predate the Belgians by a lot, and beer was made this way for millennia. There's no reason it couldn't be made this way in the US, but if it were, it would draw on the brewing tradition here as well as the local ingredients. That's really what I'm shooting for.

American Wild Ales Evolve

This past weekend, Ezra Johnson-Greenough mounted the third Farmhouse and Wild Ale Fest in Portland, and I finally managed to attend. I expected to find great beer from the growing cadre of breweries devoted to funk (Jester King, Crooked Stave, De Garde, and others). What I didn't expect was to find a similarity across the beers that pointed to distinctly American provenance. When we think of "American," what springs to mind are hops. This vein of brewing is so prominent that American IPAs are brewed all over the world now, from Prague to Mexico City to Auckland.

American wild ales, by contrast, aren't even well-known in the US. But if the beers at that fest are any indication--and I think they were a pretty good cross-section of what's available--wild ales may be more distinctively American than IPAs. (When you sit down to a Matuška IPA in Prague, you realize how well other breweries have learned to imitate them.) Two other countries have a solid tradition of wild ales, and they're instructive for the ways they contrast American wilds.

Belgium, of course, is the standard-bearer for the category.* Belgium kept the traditions of spontaneous fermentation, mixed fermentation, and wood-aging alive, and it's hard to imagine there being any wild ales had lambics, tart flanders ales, and assorted oddball beers died out before the current revival. Belgian wilds have two distinctive features--complexity and balance--that make them unique. This comes partly from spontaneous fermentation, but more from the varied ecosystems that inhabit the old wooden foeders in places like Brussels and Roselare. Take gueuze, which for my money is the world's most accomplished style. Not only does it come from lambic, which is the product of a zoo of wild creatures, but also different vintages of lambic. The old blends are dry, austere, and still, the medium blends richer with yeast compounds, the young blends still lively and sweet. A gueuze is tart but not overly so; the flavors are so nuanced and varied that you can fall into a meditation as you experience them. Beers like Rodenbach are more tart--aged, unblended Rodenbach is very sour--but they also have tons of layers. You'll find rich esters, rounded, balancing sweet notes, that characteristic balsamic note, and on and on.

Italy has, like the US, really taken to wild ales, too, but they have an entirely different orientation. Most of Italy's breweries are in the North, in wine country, and this influence is profound on the beers. Wild ales there are lightly acidic but never puckeringly sour. (I used to include a sour-o-meter when I did reviews, and rarely would an Italian ale go past two on that chart.) Balance is the hallmark of all Italian beers, though unlike German beers, in Italy they may be extremely complex and full of flavor--just never too much. My suspicion is that this has to do with cuisine; the beer is meant to go with food, and as such it's meant to remain in harmony with food. As a result, you find few face-melting palate-wreckers.

The US? The wild ales do very often approach face-melting intensity, but even more notable is how certain notes dominate. It may be an exceedingly dry quality from Brett or sharp sour, but they are mostly not brewed for subtlety.  They often seem to lack complexity for this reason; it's difficult to maintain complexity when one quality dominates.  (There are exceptions. Block 15 continues to make the best wild ales I've tasted in the US. They are balanced, complex, and extremely approachable. Like gueuze, I think most of Block 15's wilds would be as welcome by sourheads as by novices or those who don't normally like sours. That's a real trick.)  This may all be inexperience.  Wild ales are an art, and a very advanced one. Belgians have had centuries to gauge the effects of oxygen and age on beer and to learn how to blend--knowledge that comes slowly at best.

There is one development that is quite promising: hoppy wild ales. It also follows a classic pattern of the way styles mutate and develop. Americans know hops inside and out. We know how to coax all kinds of different flavors out of them, and when we brew beers, we always keep one eye on how hops will inflect the other flavors. (For decades, this was considered a naive fault of Americans, that we couldn't brew anything without over-hopping it.) Because Americans are so good with hops, they naturally started seeing how those citrusy, fruity flavors would harmonize with sour ales (which have native citrusy, fruity flavors themselves).  Americans can use hops to add spice, zest, aroma, and flavor, and they can do it precisely. When they add hops to wild ales, they're adding that depth and complexity I miss with the extremely acidic or dry beers. 

In Belgium and Italy, the complexity comes through fermentation. In the US, wild ales may one day get theirs from hops. It's a good trend, one that makes American wilds distinctive, and one that may actually expand the appeal of wild ales beyond a purely niche audience.

____________
*And let's not get too anal about our definitions. Wild ales are not a style, but a broad family that includes any beers made with Brettanomyces, pediococcus, lactobacillus, or other wild yeasts and bacteria--whether or not they were spontaneously-fermented or pitched.

Farmhouse Ales: More State of Mind Than Style

Farmhouse ales are the most inscrutable creature in the beer bestiary.  They can be strong or weak, pale or dark or more likely, ambrée.  They may have spices or not, be hoppy or sweet, be made with bunches of oddball grains or just pilsner malt.  They are everything all at once--but does that mean they are nothing, stylewise, too?  Tomorrow I'll be discussing a visit I recently had to The Commons, essentially a saison house.  It seemed like a great time to explore this "style" and see if we can come to some clarity.


The Olden Days
If you go back far enough, all beer was made on the farm.  Before specialization, brewing beer was a domestic activity, slapped together with whatever was on hand.  Eventually, maltsters and brewers and gruiters began to specialize as commercial brewing emerged.  Farmers never abandoned beer, though, and in the 19th century, they were still pretty common around Belgium.  We tend to romanticize rusticity, and when we think of farm-fresh products--pies on windowsills, plump loaves of bread, buttermilk, rich sausages--we imagine them as the highest quality.

It was not really so with beer.  Farm breweries were crude affairs that got used rarely.  Farmers malted their own barley and added unmalted grains in whatever amounts they had on hand.  They weren't trained brewers and didn't practice the art much.  The beers they made were "rustic" in the sense that they were made with undermodified malt on obsolete equipment by people who were in the best of cases part-time homebrewers.  The beer was unrefined, and that means in most cases not especially good.  A lot of it had to be actively bad.

 
Farmhouse Not Necessary
Modern saisons are revival beers.  They date back to the post-war period, when small Belgian breweries were trying to compete with more sophisticated products arriving from Britain and Germany.  They were made strong and bottled to communicate a kind of sophistication, and, to convey that, breweries had to clean them up and make them presentable.  What survived of the old tradition--and the lineage narrowed to just a few breweries--created the general blueprint for what we now call saisons.

Modern saisons embody that romantic notion we hold of farms.  Quality, for sure (among gourmands and beer geeks, saisons are très haute), but also intensity.  Products from the farm are made at the height of ripeness and express distinctive terroir; they aren't shipped, don't suffer the indignity of being stripped down or refined.  Saisons have those qualities, too--the inverse of highly-processed, factory-consistent beers.  The word "rustic" means "from the land," and in a saison, you should locate at least something of the farm.  Like:

• Interesting grain character, which could mean a wheat softness, a silkiness from oats, or the nuttiness of spelt. In American saisons, why not a bit of corn?
• A hazy appearance that might come from a variety of causes—grains or starches, hop matter, or yeast. When breweries started to be able to make perfectly clear beers, it was a signal to the customer that there were no infections or quality problems. A bit of haze suggests handmade ales of the pre-filtering age.
• A spiciness that may derive from actual spices or come from hops and fermentation. 
• A crisp, refreshing dryness.  Effervescence, minerality, hops, and/or yeast character may figure into the equation.  Most rustic ales have a vinous character that comes from their highly attenuative yeasts.
• Finally, and non-negotiably, a pronounced yeast character.  "Rustic" can almost be read as code for untamed yeasts and the wild, fruity or spicy compounds they produce.  

Call Them "Rustic"
When I was putting together my chapters for The Beer Bible, I had to deal with the taxonomy of saisons and bière de gardes.  Having shared a distant history, they are often lumped together.  Anyone tasting a saison next to a classic bière de garde will wonder: these are similar, how?

It was WWI.  Prior to that horror, the area bordering Belgium, the Nord/Pas-de-Calais region, made saisons indistinguishable from Belgium's.  The war cut right through that region--if you tour the great bière de garde  breweries of France, you'll see memorial after memorial--destroying all the breweries and preparing the soil to accept the seed of lagers afterward.  Because lagers became the standard, ale breweries adapted their own style to match, and a classic bière de garde has much more in common with bock than saison.  These ales are silky, sophisticated, and extremely clean--and are lagered or "garded" in the manner of lager.  They are nothing to do with rustic.

Conversely, there are also plenty of rustic beers out there that we don't call saisons.  One of my absolute favorites is Kerkom's Bink Blond, which has a cakey malt depth leavened by assertive, rosemary hops and tangy yeast. Orval is one of the best examples, hiding in plain sight.  (When I visited Brasserie Dupont, Olivier Dedeycker told me he'd just put a case in the cellar for private consumption.)  Caracole, with a wood-fired kettle, is another.  For this reason, I think of this realm of beers as "rustic ales" rather than saison (which nobody understands) or farmhouse (which focuses, wrongly, on the place, not the beer).


It's the Yeast

Temperature gauges for the fermenters at Dupont.  The lowest
 is roughly 70 degrees Fahrenheit, the highest 95.

Ultimately, the thing that makes a rustic ale rustic is the yeast.  Brasserie Dupont makes the world's signature saison, and it is made with no spice and nothing but barley in the grain bill.  What it does have is immense yeast character--sometimes zingy and citrusy, sometimes herbal to spicy (variability is no liability for rustic ales).  It gets this flavor from a yeast that is tended by Dedeycker's wife, a microbiologist.  Famous in the brewing world, it works by rising to unthinkable temperatures in Dupont's shallow, square fermenters.  That's where the compounds of flavor--fruity esters and spicy phenols--emerge.  The yeast is available from Wyeast, but few breweries bother using it--the idea of letting a beer rise to blood temperature freaks most brewers out.  Yet if the yeast doesn't go that high, it will fail to produce the rustic character and usually stop working before all the wort's sugars are eaten.  It's a hothouse yeast.

Other breweries use different yeasts and get different flavors.  Blaugies has a hint of wild in its beer, an electric current of balsamic running down the middle of things.  When I can get it, I love Jandrain-Jandrenouille, which is a tropical fruit fiesta, keyed by lychee.  Brasserie Thiriez, a brewery just on the French side of the border, makes both standard bière de gardes and rustic ales.  His yeast (the "French Farmhouse strain from Wyeast) lends a peppery flavor in which I sometimes identify fresh celery and parsley. 

Breweries sometimes use actual wild yeasts to enhance their saisons, and that's fine, too.  But even the regular, un-wild rustic yeasts are actually a bit wild.  Modern brewing has evolved to remove yeast character, allowing the malt and hops to express themselves cleanly.  Even in American ales, this is more or less true--the "Chico" strain so common in the US does little more than add a bit of gentle fruitiness.  Rustic yeasts are untamed and natural.  They produce strain-unique compounds that give each rustic ale a distinctive house character.  They are particular, identifiable. They vary so much that you really just have to sample broadly if you want to get a sense of their nature.  And that, I can guarantee, is about the most pleasant work you'll find in this life or the next.