What's Up With the New Jubelale?

If you've had a chance to try the Jubelale this year, it may not have matched your expectations. This happens with beer drinkers all the time, largely because their memories are faulty or they have experienced unnoticed palate shift between samplings. With Jubel, though? You're not imagining things.

I've done two blind tastings of winter warmers (the original iteration that gave us Wassail and Snow Cap) over the past few years, and in both cases, Jubel came out on top. It had a candyish sweetness balanced by a perfect blush of peppery hops. It was incredibly smooth and warming, like a hot chocolate on a chill day.

This year's, by contrast, has a much pricklier hide. It's got some roast roughness and what I perceived as a dry tannic note. In fact, it was so dry I suspected that some wood-aged, brettanomyces-soured portion had been blended in. It is a startling departure from the Jubel of my memory. I shot Deschutes owner Gary Fish an email to get the lowdown, and he described the changes:

The original motivation for Jubelale that John Harris formulated was an English Old or Strong Ale.... I had been noticing for several years as our brewing techniques have gotten better and the equipment we were using became more sophisticated, a “drift” of our Jubelale flavoring to becoming, essentially, cleaner and drier (less estery). My comment to the brewers a couple years ago resulted in a project to, essentially, engineer back in the flavors or characteristics our processes were removing, but to do it deliberately, not by accident the way we, and most small brewers, have done things. The result is what you perceive as a change, whereas, from my perspective, we have simply returned to the way Jubelale used to taste, before these “improvements.” It is interesting you perceive wood aging. There is no wood aging in Jubelale, no brett, no oak.

So there you have it.

Fish says the beer is selling well and the customers seem to like the change. For my part, I think it's a step backward. The Jubelale of 2009 and the few years before was in my view a nearly perfected beer. There's not a thing I would have changed, even by the smallest degree. I will damn the new (or return to old) recipe by that weasel word we use in beer reviews and call it more "interesting" than the old Jubel. There is more going on here. So much, in fact, that I was completely thrown off about what was in the beer. Simplicity has its virtues, though, and the seductive balance and approachability of the recipe from a couple years ago was a triumph of clarity and drinkability. The new beer is more challenging, less satisfying and way, way less moreish.

That Deschutes will tinker with sacred cows and risk losing customers like me by reformulating recipes is one of the many reasons I think it's a model for large craft breweries. Deschutes has launched a branding strategy based on the slogan "bravely done," but they've earned it. This is a ballsy move, and the consequence is that people like me will buy less Jubel this year. They've always bet on their own palates, though, and Fish clearly believes they'll earn more customers in the trade-off. (And it may work, if reviews like this are any indication.)

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Relatedly, I had this year's Full Sail Wassail last night, and it is an excellent vintage. (There was one in the early aughts that remains the standard-bearer, but this one's not super far behind.) Wassail is sometimes a bit hoppy for my taste, but this year's is a wonderful blend of chocolate and caramel malts and assertive woody hopping. It is deeper and rounder than some years--my preference in a winter ale. Stock up--this is definitely a beer to have in the fridge for the long nights ahead.

Ninkasi Sleigh'r

I suppose we should get this out of the way first: I am not comfortable with the allusion by Ninkasi's Sleigh'r to the thrash metal band Slayer. Afficianados of heavy metal will assure you that Slayer is full of more thrashy goodness than the competition (Metallica partisans notwithstanding). I am not an afficianado. (I'm more of a Ponytail, Eels, Tom Waits, Miles Davis kind of man.)

But I can forgive Ninkasi their musical tastes. Beer, they say, unites all. Sleigh'r is, unexpectedly, a double alt. Ninkasi, like--well, like a heavy metal band--tends to stick to a narrow range of beers. The Ninkasi standard is an ale, large, loud, and muscular. They have dabbled in variants before--Schwag, for example. Sleigh'r is in this mode, a fun one-off.

I have to confess, I judged this beer by its label. I didn't expect much, yet it was absolutely gorgeous pouring out. You think it's chestnut brown until you hold it up to the light and see the Christmas cranberry. It produces a lush, rich head and gives off a wonderful malty nose. In the end, it's a pretty straightforward interpretation of style (which also caught me off guard). The malt body is rich and clean, and there are nicely insistent hops. They're not showy or funky, just assertive, as you'd hope for in an alt.

Overall, very nicely done. I'd give this a B+.

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.

Winter Ales Season

The winter seasonals have been out for some time, but the season doesn't really seem, you know, wintry, until after Thanksgiving. Add to that the Holiday Ale Fest, which kicks off this week, and we're in the season for the big, burly ales that most of us love. But which do you love most?

This is an inexhaustive list, but it captures most of the regular winter seasonals. Add your selection if I missed it (you have to type it into the section after "other.")



Later this week, we'll look at some of the irregular (aka special) winter seasonals, many of which will be on display at the fest.

Green Winter

I stopped in to Roots last night for a pint of Festivus. It is a member of one of my favorite styles of beer--the Northwest winter warmer. While winter warmer isn't itself a category--more a state of mind--in the NW, we're starting to develop something that looks like a more coherent style. It is a red-to-brown strong ale (just north or south of 6.5% alcohol) fairly hoppy, but with a nutty malt base. Enough alcohol to warm you up, enough body to chew on and enough bitterness to keep you interested.

But here's the problem: the hops and alcohol have sharp edges when the beer is green. They need a chance to mellow and combine--to stew like a winter soup. Inevitably, the beers are released before they've had a chance to go through this alchemical process, and the result is a prickly, cold, occasionally harsh beer. I've been told by people I know would love this style that they don't, and I think it's the aging issue.

Last night, I sipped the deep orange, luciously-scented Festivus, about to proclaim it a beer for the rest of us, when it caught in my throat like a frozen burr. Dammit: too green. It will be delightful, this I can divine from the components. In a month.

Ah well, I should know better--it's too early for winter warmers anyway. Now it's still ESB weather.

Roots Winter Beers

I poked my head into Roots last night, where they were having a special on five--count 'em five--huge winter beers: Festivus, Imperial Stout, Epic Ale, a tripel, and a Wee Heavy. I decided to skip the entire flight (I needed to work today), but did check in on this year's Epic as well as the Imperial Stout. Quickie reax:

Epic Ale
To really reach its potential, this beer should probably never be served greener than a year old--which for a brewery is financially unviable. (You can, of course, by an $85 jeraboam, but at 3.3 liters, it presents its own problems.) Anyway, here are my notes: looks like viscous Coca Cola in its little serving goblet. Lacks much aroma--just a thick, barleywine malt faintness. It is rich with dark fruit and candied orange flavor, followed up by a sharp hop bitterness that keeps the beer from cloying. In a year, probably amazing; from the tap, an interesting, very intense ride.
Rating: Good.

Imperial Stout (nitro)
Exquisite. Ultra creamy and misleadingly delicate. A friend described it as an Irish type stout, and I thought he was just being dim. But it's true--the density and alcohol are lost in a froth of chocolatey creaminess. It does finish dry, and is more akin to a dry Irish than sweet stout, but bears no resemblance to an imperial. Never mind, it's amazing.
Rating: Good.

(Incidentally, I also had two mouthfuls of Festivus, which struck me as being a little out of balance and underwhelming. This isn't a reliable review, but you might try the tripel or Scottish first. After the stout, natch.)

Winter Beer Tasting

When I started this blog, I imagined many things. Looking into the future, I foresaw a site bristling with reviews of every beer and brewpub in Oregon; I promised myself glorious prose; I envisioned hosting regular tastings. In my reveries about that latter point, I saw the emergence of a professoriate of the palate, a council so wise and powerful it dictated the preferences of an entire state.

It is with this prologue that I announce the second Beervana tasting, which I conducted on New Year's Eve. A yin to this summer's pale ale tasting yang, we sampled seven dark winter ales. That time, if you recall, the difficulty was that the beers all tasted too much alike to identify. But winter beers are a whole different mug of grog, right? Whoo boy, is that ever not true. They are different enough to distinguish subtle differences, but as far as lining them up to the memories of the same beers in our minds--no chance. So it appears that our wise council is a bust.

Nevertheless, some interesting findings did emerge.

Tasters and Method
As before, we had a person who was not participating pour out the bottles into glasses marked 1-7. From these we all slurped and sipped, medievally, insensitive to germs. We took notes, tried to assign a name to each number, selected a favorite, and then subjected ourselves to the horror of learning how wrong we were. The panel (call us The Chastened) consisted of five seasoned palates with a combined expertise of several decades of beer swilling.

Tasting Notes
Although we all sucked at identification, it was interesting to see how similarly we all described the individual entries. Clearly, we were tasting the same beers and were well-enough equipped to agree on what they tasted like.

Beer 1 (Fish Brewing Winterfish)
Grapefruit hops, fruity. Light-colored, some alcohol.

Beer 2 (Full Sail Wassail)
Floral, smooth. Rich brown. Roasty. Piney hops.

Beer 3 (Golden Valley Tannen Bomb)
Unfortunately, this was a bad bottle. It was sour and fetid-smelling and easily garnered everyone's vote for "worst." Having had a couple bottles already, I know it's not a characteristic of the beer itself. Dunno what happened. It did, however, yield the most amusing quote: "That's the weirdest, grossest beer ever--I can't stop drinking it."

Beer 4 (Deschutes Jubelale)
Creamy, great head. Apples? Deep red. Lots of caramel.

Beer 5 (Dick's Double Diamond)
Sharply bitter. Aromatic. Creamy. Noticeable alcohol flavor.

Beer 6 (Pyramid Snow Cap)
Deep copper. Aggressive. Plummy and sweetish.

Beer 7 (Ebenezer)
Coppery-red. Creamy and gentle. Mild.

Assessments
Except for the Tannen Bomb, we found these all to be pretty fine beers. However, when people were pressed to name their favorites, three came out the winners. With two votes each, Dick's Double Diamond and Deschutes Jubel took highest honors. None of us had ever had Dick's, so factor that in. (Points for novelty? Who knows?) Pyramid Snow Cap picked up the final vote--and by a person who thought it was Snow Cap and who thought he liked Snow Cap the best.

Join us next time for our "Beers that are very different from one another" tasting, wherein we attempt to recapture our identification mojo....

Two More Winter Ales

I continue to work my way through the winter beers, but there is such a bounty that I have my work cut out for me. (Not like it's ditch-digging or anything.) Two of my recent samples hail from Oregon and are a mixed bag.

Full Sail Wreck the Halls
Since Full Sail already had one winter seasonal, John Harris's cult favorite is called a "brewmaster's reserve." But make no mistake, with a name like "Wreck the Halls," you know it's a holiday beer. After Sierra Nevada's Celebration, Wreck the Halls may inspire the most fervent devotion of any winter ale, but of the two, it seems more worthy to me.

Tasting Notes
Pours out a warm bronze with a pretty white head, and bursts with aroma. Bursts, as in an orange, sending its citrus into the air like a freshly-peeled fruit. Almost every winter ale will be better six months or a year after it was bottled, but this is the exception--you want to get a bottle while those hops are still so energetic.

There are two central varieties of winter ale, and Wreck the Halls comes from the minority variety, a lighter, IPA-ish ale that is headed down the road toward barleywine. At 6.5%, Wreck isn't that strong, but it manages to produce the kind of thick, candied quality you like from this style. Perhaps because of the citrus nose, it reminded me of a traditional winter desert from a norther country--with dried fruit and the suggestion of liquor. I don't get the love of Celebration, but Wreck the Halls could inspire devotion.

Rating
Excellent (with room to grow)

Siletz Winter Warmer Ale
This was not a great beer. It was flat pouring out, an indistinct brown with not much in the way of a head, and had a slightly sour, cidery aroma. The flavor wasn't awful, it just wasn't anything. Very little in the way of hopping, but the malt didn't come forward, either--it lacked mouthfeel or texture or any of the kind of qualities you'd like from a malty beer (nutty flavor, creaminess). I've brewed a few batches of homebrew that have this indifferent quality, and I didn't regard them highly.

Rating
Average (at best)

Winter Beers - Never Winter Ale

I am pleased to see David Zuckerman's signature on the label of the poorly-named Never Summer Ale from Boulder Beer. It is a tip of the hat to the person who is arguably Colorado's finest brewer working for inarguably its best brewery. Boulder has long given a little too much weight to the marketing department, who come up with names like Never Summer Ale. Witness the language on the bottle:

Welcome to Never Summer Ale, our version of an aggressive winter seasonal and the 3rd release in our Looking Glass Serious of specialty beers. Deep ruby red, assertively hopped and brewed with dark caramel malt, Never Summer Ale makes even the coldest Colorado peaks seem warm. Thanks for picking up our winter favorite. We invite you to discover all of our award-winning beers at BoulderBeer.com. Celebrate the long nights of winter. Cheers and enjoy!

I have no doubt Dave never laid eyes on this text, but nevermind the label, the name, or the fake homey text. (I think the signature is real.) This is a Zuckerman beer, which is good news for Webfeet--Dave honed his craft at BridgePort and makes great beers.

Tasting Notes
Despite the overwrought language, this isn't a crazy beer. It is in what I think of as the "classic" NW style of winter ales, ala Jubel and Wassail. It pours deep red with a white head--candy cane seasonal. The hop aroma is coupled with a candyish sweetness. It smells like a classic winter ale.

It falls on the lighter end of the winter spectrum (6%), but tastes robust and hearty. I was first put off slightly by the thin body--some winters are thick and creamy, frothed for warmth--but the flavor is as deep and rich as I was hoping for. Nice balance, a promising underlayment of alcohol bite, and a long, slow finish. The website claims there's an unnamed spice in the beer, but it apparently only draws out the hopping; anyway, I can't identify it. Extra points if you know, super ultra extra points if you can identify it with your palate alone. Great beer.

Statistics
Hops: Nugget, Willamette, Cascade.
Malts: Two-row pale and dark British caramel
Alcohol by Volume: 6%
Original Gravity: 15 degrees Plato
Bitterness Units: unkown.
Other: "Top secret brewmaster's spice"
Available: Belmont Station.

Rating
Excellent