Four Interesting Items

Any one of these could be a full, hearty entree, but I think they'll do even better as small plates. See what you think.

My Sponsor Comes to America

For the past year, I've been delighted to welcome Guinness as a sponsor on this blog--this week we learned we could welcome them back to the US as well:

Diageo today announced its intention to build a US version of Dublin’s popular Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Baltimore County, Maryland. As currently planned, the company would build a mid-sized Guinness brewery and a Guinness visitor experience with an innovation microbrewery at the company’s existing Relay, Maryland site. This new brewing capability and consumer experience, combined with a packaging and warehousing operation, would bring the company’s investment in Relay to approximately $50 million. The new brewery would be a home for new Guinness beers created for the US market, while the iconic Guinness Stouts will continue to be brewed at St. James’s Gate in Dublin, Ireland. 

This is not the first time Guinness has come to America, but the previous experiment ended after just six years. The current effort looks like a more ambitious and risky project. Diageo has been trying to figure out for years how to use the Guinness brand as an entry point into the craft market, with notably mixed success. The challenge for any giant brewery with such a strong brand presence is figuring out 1) how to expand without weakening the core product's position, while 2) convincingly appealing to customers in an entirely new segment. Most of the big breweries have concluded it can't be done, so they've followed AB InBev's strategy of just buying breweries in the craft segment. Can Diageo convince people that Guinness means both Irish stout and fullsome, tasty craft beer? Big gamble.

October Debuts
Speaking of arrivals, we have a new entry into the pretty-darn-crowded world of beer chatter.

Today, Pitchfork is proud to announce the launch of October, a digital publication focused on beer with an editorial perspective that speaks to a new generation of beer drinkers. A destination for devotees and novices alike to read about, learn about, and share their appreciation for beer and celebrate the culture around it. The site is being launched in partnership with ZX Ventures, AB InBev’s incubator and venture capital fund that focuses on increasing awareness and excitement around beer and brewing culture.

The tie to ABI caused some sniping on social media, but the project is incredibly transparent. Read a little further and you learn that October is "overseen by Pitchfork’s creative studio and in collaboration with Michael Kiser of Good Beer Hunting, Eno Sarris of BeerGraphs." So far I don't see much that distinguishes the content from any other beer magazine. Kiser even has a think-piece up about where the Budweiser brand sits in the modern beer landscape, a perfect example of the way he brings insight and value to the conversation--while at the same time leaving that question of relationships with funders wide open. Still, the one knock I have on October so far is that it doesn't really seem to have a clear raison d’être that distinguishes it from, say Draft or All About Beer. Indeed, Good Beer Hunting seems to have carved out a clearer viewpoint.

New Branding
Two Oregon breweries sent me emails announcing new branding today, and they are both market improvements. I pass them along as an example of the way breweries are responding to a tightening market. In a world of jillions of brands, you can't have stale or bad packaging around. Rogue, which updates its flagship, had the former and Cascade the latter. Here's Dead Guy:

And the new Cascade.

Yeast and the New England IPA
Finally, because I'm a completist, I want to direct you to the latest Beervana Podcast, and not just out of pure self-interest. Over the past year, we have discussed on these pages and elsewhere the nature of the New England IPA. Yesterday, Patrick and I paid a visit to the Imperial Yeast labs and did a pod with the three principals there. During the course of our interview, Owen Lingley discussed this beer style (they're getting a lot of questions about it from customers) and issued a rather bold, declarative position on the style as involves yeast. You will want to listen to hear his views--and learn all about yeast, which is a subject many of us wish we knew more about.




Happy weekend, you all--

"Sour" Beers, Craft's Dark Secrets, and Yeast--Three Interesting Stories

August is reliably the deadest month on the calendar. The excitement of summer has passed, but no one wants to confront all these Oktoberfest releases the marketing people are trying to promote. True to form, this August started slow, but there have been a few recent articles out there that piqued my interest. I think you'll have thoughts as well.

1. The New York Times Botches "Sour" Beers
Eric Asimov, the wine writer for the Times, has offered more misleading, confusing information about beer to more people than anyone on earth. I know he's an astute guy with a great palate, but for some reason, beer is so far beneath him he can't actually be bothered to report it properly. Last week he did a round up of "sour beers," and made a predictable hash in framing it. I don't mind particularly that he combined every tart style, from gose to lambic, in one category. In sensory evaluation, it's fine to blend categories of like beers. But then he writes this, and my patience evaporates:

Many of these characteristics are a result of a brewing process seemingly derived as much from wine as from beer, in which the beers are aged in barrels after fermentation. As they rest, they undergo additional transformations as bacteria like lactobacillus and pediococcus interact with the beer, contributing lively acidity as well as tart flavors and increased complexity. Some are vintage dated.

And:

My guess is that few commercial sour-beer brewers choose to allow the sort of spontaneous fermentations that shape Belgian lambics. More likely, they are inoculating their brews with selected yeast strains, including brettanomyces, anathema to winemakers as it can be the source of funky flavors great and small. If unwanted in wine, it can be great in beer styles like gueuze, a Belgian blend of young and old unflavored lambics.

Ugh. To make explicit the crimes here: 1) in the first paragraph, he conflates the production of beers like gose (kettle soured) with barrel-aged beers. Goses (and most Berliner weisses) do not spend months in barrels. People are confused enough about this already; there's an entire debate raging about the cheat of making "quick sour" beers that's fueled entirely by ignorance about style and technique. Asimov inadvertently feeds this. 2) In graf two, he reveals that he's never even bothered to pick up a phone to inquire how the beers he's evaluating are made. Are some breweries inoculating while others are using spontaneous fermentation? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  It's a mystery!

(Asimov's favorite beer was Cascade's Kriek, and he loved it. He also admired a Logsdon beer. So I can't be too disappointed in him, I guess.)

2. Craft Beer's Dark Secrets
An article on Thrillist has gotten a ton of attention as an anonymous insider ("someone who's worked in the industry for six years and currently works in marketing for a well-known brewery") dishes on all the terribleness happening in craft. I have seen it reposted quite a bit with nods of acknowledgement. (Stan, for example: "Many of the points are valid. That some are less valid does not invalidate the story.") It's a pretty long laundry list of stuff, so I'll skip trying to pull representative quotes. A lot of the observations are anodyne or wrong (competition is increasing; consolidation is happening; there's a bubble), but there are others that are more serious and potentially accurate: working brewers get paid badly; the beer world is sexist; jobs in beer are hard and pay badly.

The big problem I have is that we have no idea from where these "secrets" emerge. The beer industry employs hundreds of thousands of people, and it follows that individual experiences vary widely. Some breweries are great to work for, while others are Dickensian hell. What does this tell us about "craft beer?" General, anonymous statements supported by anecdote are rumor, not fact or even reportage. I would bet my life that there are dark secrets in craft brewing--we already know about pay-to-play, as one example--and I would love to read a serious report, backed by numbers and on-the-record accounts. This is not that report--reader beware.

3. Yeast, the "God Particle"
Jason Notte has another excellent piece out, this time on the yeasty Dave Logsdon (founder of Wyeast Labs as well as the yeast-forward Logsdon Farmhouse Ales). You should go read the whole article, but one graf jumped off the page to me. This is Logsdon talking about his spontaneous program.

We’ve let those go spontaneously and haven’t tried to isolate and identify them. I don’t see a need to anymore. After spending a career in a laboratory, one of the things I wanted to do was get away from the strict, stringent protocol that was necessary. Even though we have a lab here and do our testing and stuff, it’s done on a more as-needed basis than a controlled management. With the 10 strains we do manage, I’m experienced enough to know what the right protocol is. 

I have written about this before, but there's something very, very different about inoculating wort with wild yeast and letting beer make itself spontaneously. The end results, so similar a NYT columnist can't distinguish them, belie the huge act of will it takes to get out of the way and let nature take its course. Dave has spent a career corralling and controlling yeast. It's a testament to the life transition he experienced when he put down the test tubes at Wyeast and installed a coolship. It may look like an obvious step, but I think it was anything but.

Louis Pasteur Did Not Discover Yeast

Yesterday I posed a question about the discovery of yeast.  The question sprang to mind thanks to the coincidence of reviewing my discussion with Schlenkerla's Matthias Trum and reading and article by Rob Symes called "Yeast" in the current Taps Magazine.  Symes was discussing Reinheitsgebot and explaining how it was "truly remarkable for one of the ingredients it omits."

The omission wasn't purposeful.  It wasn't until the 1800s that Louis Pasteur (yes, the father of pasteurization) discovered the role yeast performed in fermentation.

This is an inaccurate, but almost ubiquitous statement.  I googled "beer yeast discovery" and they blossomed like mushrooms after a spring rain:

"Without knowing its role or its existence, men have always used yeast."  (Lesaffre yeast)

"The German Beer Purity Law of 1516 - The Reinheitsgebot, listed the only allowable materials for brewing as malt, hops, and water. With the discovery of yeast and its function in the late 1860's by Louis Pasteur, the law had to be amended." (John Palmer, How to Brew)

"Until the mid-19th century brewers knew very little about yeast. To make good beer they had to rely on ancient practice. With the aid of a microscope, Louis Pasteur discovered that yeast was responsible for beer fermentation in 1866."  (Christopher White, Brew Your Own)

And so on.  If you think about this for more than five minutes, you realize it can't be true.  When you brew, you get gobs of stuff boiling off the top of your fermenting wort and lots of "stuff" pooled in the bottom afterward.  The single-celled organism is invisible, but in the billions they are quite a sight.  We also know brewers regularly re-pitched that stuff centuries ago.  Matthias Trum and I got off onto a long, interesting digression about brewing history in which he illuminated much about the German guild system for me.  (He focused on brewing history when he was a student at Weihenstephan.)   He pointed out the obvious and then added:

“About the yeast and the purity law. The yeast is in fact not mentioned, that is correct. You have, again, to put yourself in the mind of a medieval brewer. In the middle ages, they had a profession called the 'hefner.’  So they knew exactly. The purity law lists ingredients, right? Yeast I put in there and I get more out of it. I harvest the yeast at the end and I put it into the next batch. And that was actually the job of the hefner.”

I made my “stuff” point and he continued:  “Zeug. Zeug was the German word, which is stuff. The hefner’s job was to harvest the yeast from the batches, to press out as much remaining beer as possible, which was sold at a low price to the poor, and then the yeast was added to the next batch. You started with a smaller amount of yeast and then you ended with a bigger amount of yeast.”

Indeed, we have records of brewers using yeast from long ago. Richard Unger documents this in his indispensable Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance:

As early as the mid-14th century, a Flemish recipe book mentions adding yeast to beer, and it seems likely that already by 1300 brewers were using some of the foam skimmed off the top of the fermenting beer from the last brew to start fermentation with the next one. By the 16th century, brewers commonly added yeast to wort from cultures which they kept separate and which they controlled and maintained. 

And indeed, it had to be that early, because that's roughly the time when lagering began--a process not possible without knowledge of the function of yeast.  He continues, making the point:

In 1420 a brewer in Munich got permission to use yeast that fell to the bottom and regulations from Nuremberg suggest that bottom yeasts which had been identified and to some degree isolated were already in use in the fourteenth century. 

Pasteur's role was observing the organism and explaining why it produced sour beer.  (He was a big fan of bottom-fermentation and lagering.)  It was a watershed.  But humans, which even a thousand years ago were pretty clever beings, had a pretty good idea of what was causing the beer to ferment.  My guess is that monks were the first to really develop a theory of yeast--they were the first great brewing innovators--but whoever it was came many hundreds of years before Pasteur.

"Taste of Summer"

I promise not to keep inundating you with commentary about this Lacambre text I've been reading this week--though I won't promise this is the last post. But one thing is too juicy to let pass. Lacambre was writing in 1851--just six years before Louis Pasteur published "Mémoire sur la fermentation alcoolique," his revolutionary paper that identified the role of yeast in fermentation. Lacambre, a brewer himself, knew that environmental effects played a pivotal role in the quality of fermentation. Everyone knew that warm weather was bad, and during hot snaps in the Belgian summer, breweries knew to take the day off.

Unlike British and French breweries that were by the mid 19th century using wort chillers, Belgians were still cooling all their beer in large pans known as "coolships." Lacambre emphasized that a "viscous fermentation" came when the temperatures were too high.

“The cooling of the containers must be prompt, the condition is most essential, especially in summer because that is very likely to alter it in the hot season. The taste and smell, which are spread by contact with the greatest ease...from a profound alteration suffered by some of the wort often on the end of cooling.”

He relates an experience he had as a brewer when during a summer storm, a batch of cooling beer "became disturbed"--I think by crashing thunder, but it's not clear--and had become bubbly. He tried to save the beer, but it was putrid. He didn't understand the mechanism, but he knew the result of contamination was highly contagious worth that would spoil other wort it came into contact with. This is what he concluded:

“The result was strongly affected the taste and the more or less nauseating odor which is the true character of this kind of alteration. The smell is so characteristic that an experienced man can easily...recognize this kind of alteration simply smelling beer that has received the slightest breach of versoemer or taste of summer.... This kind of alteration, which always produces the bad alcoholic fermentation which many brewers have given the name of wild fermentation, because it still offers the symptoms unrelated to a good fermentation.”

Lacambre was convinced beer, or at least wheat beer, needed to rest in coolships to "release nitrogenous material"--whatever that meant. He classified different types of fermentation based on their qualities: "the alcoholic fermentation of glucose, lactic acid, acetic acid, viscous and putrid." He was so close to having figured it out himself. In just six years, Pasteur identified the mechanism:

"In 1856, a man named Bigo sought Pasteur's help because he was having problems at his distillery, which produced alcohol from sugar beetroot fermentation. The contents of his fermentation containers were embittered, and instead of alcohol he was obtaining a substance similar to sour milk. Pasteur analyzed the chemical contents of the sour substance and found that it contained a substantial amount of lactic acid instead of alcohol. When he compared the sediments from different containers under the microscope, he noticed that large amounts of yeast were visible in samples from the containers in which alcoholic fermentation had occurred. In contrast, in the polluted containers, the ones containing lactic acid, he observed "much smaller cells than the yeast." Pasteur's finding showed that there are two types of fermentation: alcoholic and lactic acid. Alcoholic fermentation occurs by the action of yeast; lactic acid fermentation, by the action of bacteria."

The "taste of summer" was buggies, allowed more time to infect a more slowly-cooling wort. Less poetic, but a revolution in understanding how beer ferments.

Upright's Amazing Apparent Attenuation

Last night, Upright held a press event at the brewery to celebrate their first anniversary and launch of two celebratory beers. (Reviews to come.) Press events, for those of you who haven't had the pleasure, generally follow a pretty standard script: a pour of beer upon arrival, a tour of the brewery and subsequent pours, and all the while Q&A as things progress. I find that the questions generally elicit the most fascinating information, and so it was last night, when Upright's Alex Ganum talked about how finicky his yeast is.

Alex uses a French farmhouse yeast strain, and these are notoriously difficult to work with. The most famous, and famously difficult, is Dupont's, which requires high fermentation temperatures (over 85 degrees; regular yeasts do better below 70) and then craps out before it's fully done, requiring a brewery to nurture and coax it along for days or weeks. Alex's isn't as bad, but it bears some of these hallmarks. He ferments it in the mid-70s, and then has to wait while it meanders along--sometimes for three weeks in the open primary fermenters. Other yeasts would take less than a week. But even then, the fun's not over. Once it goes into the tank, the beer keeps evolving.

Alex knew the yeast was efficient even a year ago when I first visited the brewery; it's attenuation was on of the attractions. After a year of working with the beer, though, he's started to realize that it may be too much of a good thing. Because those yeasts keep munching, he can't bottle or keg for a long while without worry of foamy pints or explosive bottles. He prevailed on the Widmers to do a lab analysis for him (which they happily did, and gratis, contrary to the suspicion some hold that they wish to crush the competition) and the results were shocking. Upright's beer was reaching levels of attenuation in the mid-90s, sometimes as high as 97%.

What is attenuation, and why is this remarkable? Let's start with the science. Here's White Labs, a commercial brewers yeast company:

Yeast consume the sugar in wort, and turn that sugar into CO2, alcohol, and flavor compounds. When yeast finish the fermentation process, they shut down, clump together, and fall to the bottom of the fermentor, or "flocculate." When yeast flocculate, it is easy to see that fermentation is done. But how can the brewer be sure? What if the flocculation is minimal, and yeast and CO2 stay in solution. How does the brewer really know when fermentation is done? The answer: by testing the degree of attenuation. Apparent attenuation percentage is the percentage of sugars that yeast consume. Attenuation varies between different strains. The fermentation conditions and gravity of a particular beer will cause the attenuation to vary, hence each strain of brewers yeast has a characteristic attenuation range. The range for brewers yeast is typically between 65-85%.

Typical ale yeasts are comparatively inefficient. The kinds of beers most appreciated in Beervana will have an attenuation of around 70%, give or take. Lager strains are roughly the same. Most Belgian strains--wild yeast excepted--are more attenuative, but still, few get out of the high 70s. So, a beer with an apparent attenuation of 97% would have almost no residual sugars.

Alex's yeast is the Energizer bunny--it just keeps going. As a homebrewer and craft beer fan, I find this charming. So farmhousey! But I imagine it's driving Upright crazy. For one thing, it costs a lot of money to let beer just sit in a tank. If it takes a beer twice as long to finish fermenting, a brewery can only produce half as much beer per tank. Beyond that, Upright can't risk letting any beer but the most bone-dry out of the brewery for fear that it will continue to ferment in kegs and bottles. From a business perspective, you want predictable and fast, not idiosyncratic and farmhousey. Charming is not a prized characteristic in the behavior of yeasts.

On the other hand, the yeast produces some amazing beer. The Four Play, in particular, really benefits from this strain, for reasons I'll mention in my future review. Most beers with this kind of attenuation would taste thin and bone dry, but somehow the production of esters counteracts the dryness. And how the beer remains creamy and silky--never thin--is a mystery to me. Chemists out there, please weigh in.

When Alex founded Upright, he wanted the beer to be marked by the character of the yeast and the qualities of farmhouse brewing--local ingredients, handmade beer, idiosyncratic styles, and a flavorful rusticity. A year in and he and co-brewer Gerritt Ill have managed to pull this off. I wonder if sometimes they feel this yeast is punishing them for their success. Ah brewing!
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Dupont Yeast: Early Discoveries

Yeasts are funny little buggers. They have radically different preferences and behaviors. Ultimately, they all nosh on sugars and excrete alcohol, but the ways in which they do this is a wonder to behold. Case in point: the yeast of Brasserie Dupont, makers of saisons. Beginning last week, I began cultivating the dregs from a bottle and simultaneously picked up a batch of Wyeast's version (just to be safe). I brewed my wee saison (1.035 OG), aka "petit saison" aka "grisette" yesterday and got a chance to see the yeast in action. Just to be safe (again) I decided to pitch both yeasts, which by 3pm amounted to a substantial quantity. Still, not substantial enough to account for what came next.

Dupont's yeast is famous for a number of reasons. The brewery ferments its beer at between 85 and 95 degrees fahrenheit--a shocking fact, given that most breweries keep their beer cool (at least 20 degrees colder for similar ale strains) so it will be smooth and clean. And then, famously, the yeast craps out on you. It races along in sweaty fury until the beer is mostly ready, and then activity screeches to a near halt. You have to be patient and let it finish out--and it will finish out, with attenuation rates above 90% (another amazing fact). One theory holds that the strain was originally a wine yeast, but this may be an apocryphal story added later by homebrewers who had to come up with a rationalization about why the heat didn't ruin their beer, why it could still be called yeast and not pack off the women and children in the night.

Still, what unfolded was astonishing to behold. Within four hours I had a heaving two-inches of foam. Yes, heaving--the damn thing looked like it was breathing. I had swaddled my 85-degree beer in a flannel shirt and taken it upstairs, where the house is the warmest, but I didn't expect such vigor so early. I was sort of glad it was a smaller beer, but even still, at 5 am I was up examining it, just to make sure it hadn't gone walkabout on me. A yeast like that, you never know.

Things that go boom in the heat

I got an email today from a reader who wanted to pass along this info:

This winter I bought a couple bottles of Roots Epic to cellar. I had one about a month ago and it foamed out of the bottle like it had been in a paint can shaker. I should have known then to get the other in the fridge because last night I found my second bottle had exploded. I keep my beers in my basement, but with this hot weather even that is in the mid-low 70's. I was hoping you might be able to get the word out to anyone else who bought a bottle of this to get it in the fridge. Nothing like seeing sticky shards of glass that used to be a $20 bottle of beer.

Yup, warmth + overcarbonation = Boom! (Roots bashers, now is your moment. Personally, I'm going to protect my bottle with my life.)

Speaking of overcarbonation, I've been meaning to relate something I learned recently about yeast. I have been trying to breathe life into a particular beer involving disparate ingredients that will, until the beer is perfected, remain unidentified. They are not germaine to this particular story.

I wanted to dry this beer out as much as I could without resorting to wild yeasts. Using a standard ale yeast (Whitbread, if memory serves), I had gotten it down to about 1.018. It might have gone as low as 1.012, but I wanted to juice it with something drying, so I used Wyeast's Duvel strain just to finish it off. I didn't want much of the character of this strain, but I figured: there's so little sugar, what could happen? (Whenever you append to a brewing experiment the phrase "what could happen?", you should know things are about to get interesting.)

Well, I ended up with a beer that by all appearances was made exclusively by this yeast. It's got a massive head, lots and lots of effervescence, and that amazing Alka-Seltzer roil. To you long-time brewers, I pose the following question: what's the moral of this story?

1. Duvel's strain, the Leroy Brown of yeasts, will bludgeon anything that gets in its way.
2. The second yeast always dominates the profile.
3. Whoa, 1.018, what were you thinking? If you'd finished it out more, the Duvel wouldn't have gone crazy.
4. Some of the above.
5. None of the above.

I await your experience and insight with interest.

Evolution of Lager Yeast - Mom Was an Ale

The parents of lager yeast? Ale yeast:

It all started with some unhappy Bavarians. Dissatisfied with the quality of beer brewed in the summer months, they forbade brewing the beverage when the weather was warm. However, colder winter temperatures inhibited fermentation by the ale yeast that had been used for hundreds of years and fostered an unlikely pairing with a second, heartier species-producing an unusual crisp, clear brew that became today's lager.

Sherlock, an assistant professor of genetics, and Barbara Dunn, PhD, a senior research associate at the medical school, studied the genetic sequences of 17 unique lager yeast strains from breweries in Europe and the United States. They used customized DNA microarrays capable of analyzing the relative contribution of each parent, combined with limited DNA sequencing, to determine that the hybridization event actually occurred not once, as previously speculated, but twice. This genetic encore suggests that each partner brought specific, unique advantages to the match.

"It's possible that the ale strain provides a certain flavor profile, while the second strain conferred the ability to ferment at cooler temperatures," said Dunn. "Mixing them together is a nice way for the yeast to double its genetic options...."

As often happens, the offspring of such an unconventional union exhibited abnormal amounts of genetic material. Sherlock and Dunn believe that one lineage began with approximately equal amounts of each yeast's genome, whereas the other has between two to three more times S. cerevisiae than S. bayanus DNA. Studying the spread of the two groups provides a genetic snapshot of lager brewing in Europe during the past 600 years: one lineage is associated primarily with Carlsberg breweries in Denmark and others in what is now Czechoslovakia, while the other group localizes to breweries in the Netherlands, including Heineken.

Hat tip: John.

Ancient--and I mean Ancient--Yeast

Have you guys heard about Fossil Fuels Brewery? It's a company that got started this summer brewing beer with 25 million-year-old yeast. I kid you not:

A day before that movie opened in 1993, Cano announced that he had extracted DNA from an ancient Lebanese weevil entombed in amber, just as the fictional employees of InGen do with a mosquito to create their dino-amusement park. One newspaper account said the "achievement" refuted "the long-held view of many biologists that DNA of so great an age" couldn't be preserved.

But Cano was less interested in extinct reptiles than in Homo sapiens now roaming the earth. He next revivified ancient bacteria from the gut of an amber-encased bee and hoped to turn the strains into new antibiotics. That didn't work, and Cano, who has a doctorate in medical mycology, put his 1,200-specimen organism collection on the back shelf and returned to more fruitful microbial endeavors, like assessment of petroleum-degrading diversity in sand dunes and the bioinformatics of Lactobacillus acidophilus....

Of the science behind the suds, Cano says, "It's just like the Rip Van Winkle effect. What they are doing, they are remaining dormant -- the bacteria or the yeast and generally spores of some sort -- and then when you take them out of the amber, they reawaken and continue to reproduce. So they are alive."

Ultimately, he managed to culture the yeast and has actually brewed beer with it.

The result is Fossil Fuels Brewing Co., which ferments a yeast strain Cano found in a piece of Burmese amber dating from about 25 million to 45 million years ago. The company -- in which Cano is a partner, along with another scientist and a lawyer -- introduced its pale ale and German wheat beer with a party last month at one of the two Bay Area pubs where Fossil Fuels is made and served.

How's it taste? Beery types will not be surprised that it shares some qualities with style using older yeast strains:

William Brand, the Oakland Tribune beer critic, says the ancient yeast provides the wheat beer with a distinctively "clove-y" taste and a "weird spiciness at the finish." (The Washington Post's Style section's summer beer critic pronounced it "smooth and spicy, excellent with chicken strips.")

"I was impressed with the flavor that the yeast brought out," said Orvil Kirby, a patron who tried the wheat beer at Kelley Bros. Brewery, where it's made. "My first taste of it, I thought they might've added some cloves to the beer."

Unfortunately, you have to go to California to try it. Maybe the folks from Belmont Station will agree to take a road trip.

[Update: the brewery split a batch in two and fermented with their yeast and a standard yeast. This guy reports on the difference.]

The Irish Stout Experiment

Some time ago, I wrote about a forensic study I was doing into the characteristic tang that makes a Guinness Extra Stout so tasty. One theory, as I reported, was that wild brettanomyces yeasts resided in the 100-year-old wooden mash tuns at St. James Gate. My experiment was to reverse-engineer the process by brewing up a classic Irish Stout and then finish it with a culture of brett and see if I could replicate the taste. A month ago, I did that, and about a week ago, I bottled it.

Well, early reviews are in and I can make one statement confidently: brett doesn't make the stout. What I've ended up with is something like a stout lambic. Even though I just added the brettanomyces during secondary fermentation, it has radically soured the beer. This ain't no subtle funk, it's pucker-face sour. When I transfered the beer, it was magnificent, and I grew slightly leery of throwing in the brett. It now appears I should have trusted my first instinct.

On the other hand, I can now offer you the results of my scientific study, so I got that goin' for me. Whatever Guinness uses to sour the stout, it's not our friends, the robust little brettanomyces.

Now, time to go brew that beer again ... without the final ingredient.

Mmmm, Brettanomyces

My experiment in using a brettanomyces culture to try to evoke the twang of Guinness Extra Stout (described here) continues apace. Last night I added the funky yeast and this morning, their activity was visible. I almost lost my nerve: when I transfered the beer into this carboy, I tasted a bit, and it was marvelous. Sally asked if I was sure I wanted to risk screwing up such a wonderful beer, and I'll admit to a bit of second-guessing. But hey, worst case is I brew another batch and forget the brett.

In any case, I write all this as an excuse to post a picture of the stout, so you can see the yeasties in action.

Guinness, Brettanomyces, and Me

The St. James Gate Brewery in Dublin produces a beer called Guinness--you might have heard of it. Actually, it produces a whole bunch of beers, and they're all called Guinness. They vary from the light-bodied draft beer you get in pubs to a strong Nigerian version that employs sorghum rather than barley. My favorite--and one of the best beers in the world--is the strong version you can find in bottles with the name "extra stout." What makes it delightful are not the virtues of density and creaminess (though virtues they are), but a characteristic sour tang.

Jackson attributes this to funk resident in the crevices of the 100-year-old wooden tanks at St. James Gate in which only the strong stuff ages. Diageo, the parent conglomerate, denies this, but something's causing it. Rumor (and Jackson) credit a certain strain of yeast known as Brettanomyces. In the brewing world, Brett cultures have notorious reputation and are mainly regarded as contaminants. So profound is Brettanomyces (the cool kids call it "Brett") that brewers regard porous equipment (plastic, rubber, cork, wood) as permanently defiled and useable only in beers where Brett character is tolerated. On the other hand, Orval, the extraordinary lambics, Belgian browns and reds and others include it in their world-reknowned recipes. So you can't throw the Brett out with the bathwater.

I have decided to test the theory. I am in the midst of brewing up a batch of Irish stout, a fairly standard recipe that employs roasted barley, as appropriate to style. But after an initial fermentation with a standard ale yeast (I eschewed an Irish strain, rogue that I am), I'm going to dump in a Brett culture to finish it off. Brettanomyces are apparently voracious eaters and can gobble down sugars regular Saccharomyces (ale yeast) can't digest. Brettanomyces--the goats of the yeast world. My intention is to give the beer a wee taste of the sour without overwhelming it. We shall see.

In any case, I will report back as the experiment evolves. I don't know that I can prove what lives in the vats at St. James Gate, but you never know. I may also prove what doesn't live there. Stay tuned.

The Great Saison Disaster

I suspect few of you care about my homebrewing foibles, but drama compels me to relate a story. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I successfully cultured yeast from a bottle of Saison Dupont recently and made a batch of my own saison with it. For those of you familiar with the style, you know it's marked by its effervescence--great rocky bubbles roil as it cascades into a glass.

Turns out that comes from a rather slow-developing yeast. As usual, I left the beer in the carboy for two weeks and then bottled, never bothering to consider whether the yeast had finished gobbling malt sugar. Two weeks has been perfectly adequate for every beer I've brewed, no matter how strong. All is well and good. I taste the beer going in, and although I went heavy on the botanical additives, the cultured yeast remained unpolluted and it tastes clean and fresh. All good.

Except that the yeast wasn't done. My lovely wife approached me yesterday with the information that she suspected a little creature was trapped in the basement--she found a pool of yellow liquid on the floor. When I descended the stairs, the aroma that greated me wasn't acrid, but nice and beery. I nostalgically recalled the smell of the dorm on a Saturday morning. And sure enough, there was the first exploded beer, pooled on the floor. I tried to pop a couple of the beers and dump the batch, but they were so explosive I feared that even rousing them would cause them to blow like grenades in my hand. Instead, I hustled them outdoors, wrapped in towels, and will wait for nature to take its course.

It's supposed to be 85 today. Boom!

Yeast

To arrive at beer, you need a minimum of four ingredients: malt, water, hops, and yeast. The first three contribute various elements to the finished product, but it's the last one that actually makes things swing. Yeast is a living, single-celled creature (a fungus, actually) that rather miraculously gobbles up the sugar in the malt and excretes alcohol and carbon dioxide.

We tend to focus quite a bit on the kinds of malt and hops that go into a beer (sometimes even the water), but the more you learn about beer, the more you realize what a profound effect yeast has on the final flavor. It is also the one secret ingredient--as a living culture, yeast strains change and evolve and become part of the signature flavor of a brewery. I've had brewers give me a scandalized look for even asking what kind of yeast they use. Yet it is the yeast, as much as anything, that gives a brewery's beer its character.

The fascinating thing is that, as a homebrewer, you can sometimes just appropriate that ingredient whole cloth. Many breweries bottle-condition their beer, relying on the living yeasts in the beer to produce just enough waste for carbonation. After the fermentation process has ended--yeast has turned all the convertable sugars it can into alcohol--breweries dose the beer with just a dash of sugar or malt before they throw it in the bottle, to give the yeast a little more to work with.

It's actually possible to take that small amount of yeast and culture it up to quantities large enough to pitch in homebrews. After wondering for years how well this would work, I've taken the plunge, and have started to work up the yeast from that bottle of Saison Dupont I reviewed a couple days ago. So far, so good. I started out adding about 2 ounces, and yesterday bumped it up to about ten times that amount. One more stage and it should be adequate to pitch in a standard five-gallon batch.

I also picked up a bottle of bottle of Panil, which is actually an Italian version of a Flanders Red (purpoted to be every bit as good as Rodenbach, which I couldn't track down), and Cantillon Organic Lambic for additional culturing. Reviews of those as I need new yeast.