Troubles With Travel

If you were to name the four or five hottest breweries right now, measured in beer geek coolness points, Boston's Trillium Brewing would have to be on that list. They are makers of many different types of beer, but are famous for being one of the charter members of the New England IPA movement, with all the requisite rarity and excitement. Well, despite having failed to find any of their rare offerings when I was back in New England in November, I got to try my first can when friend-of-the-blog Mason Astley spent his hard-earned time and money securing Fort Point Pale Ale and sending one my way.

I was very excited about this because, while I think there's no special style* to be found here, I have been mighty impressed by the work New Englanders have been doing with hops. Places like Maine Beer Co, Bissell Brothers, and Hill Farmstead understand our little friend, Humulus lupulus. Maybe not uniquely (I could point to a few guys around here who have passing familiarity), but decidedly. And by all accounts--including Mason's--Fort Point is one of their best beers. (Not that these things matter too much, but it is a top-ten pale as rated by BeerAdvocates).

So it was to my surprise and disappointment to discover this waiting for me:

So murky as to be dark pouring out. Very much a pond water rather than Orange Julius cloudy. Poor head, gone in 30 seconds. Aroma is orange passionfruit with a hint of sweat underneath. Flavor is fairly sharp bitterness with a rindlike astringency. Mouthfeel is fluffy to gritty. The tropical notes present far more on the nose than palate. Very little malt character. Slight burnt rubber aftertaste. 

Those are not the tasting notes of a world-beater. Those are not even the tasting notes of a particularly good beer. I sent them to Mason last week and he was surprised and chagrined--this was not the beer he knew. There's no accounting for taste and I could just be missing the subtle genius of this beer. I don't think that's what's going on here; I believe were Mason to have tried this beer, he would more or less agree with the notes. So what's going on?

Beer is inherently unstable. Brewers tease chemical compounds into an arrangement that will not last. They begin interacting with each other and that particularly nefarious enemy oxygen will begin to stale the flavors. This happens in all beers, but not at the same rate. Some beers are incredibly fragile, ready to collapse like a house of cards into a pile of decomposing, once-brilliant flavors. Among the most delicate elements are hop flavors and aromas, which are driven by volatile compounds that begin degrading immediately even in the best circumstances. Send a beer across country, where it may be subjected to temperature fluctuation and agitation--two accelerants to degredation--and even a relatively young can might well end up like the one I received.

This is an important cautionary tale about modern IPAs. So much of the hop character comes not from the more stable iso-alpha acids formed during longer boiling, but volatile compounds in the oil. We know how evanescent those flavors and aromas can be from observation, but I don't know how much study has been done on trying to stabilize them in the package. Moreover, we're in a realm of brewing that is out in front of the science. When we were in Corvallis last week, hops researcher Tom Shellhammer mentioned that perceived bitterness and astringency may also come from other sources (polyphenols?--I can't find the passage from our interview) than iso-alpha acids. How do these astringent elements change with time, agitation, and heat? I was picking up sharp, prickly notes that had a quality of astringency, like citrus rind. Was that present in the brewery-fresh version?

The category we now call IPA is hugely broad, and at one side of the spectrum can be made so that it's pretty shelf-stable. But on the other side--the side that tickles the beer geeks' fancy--it's not clear that this is the case. What happens when a brewery like Trillium scales up and has the capacity to start sending their beer around the Northeast? Can they find a way to package the freshness so that it lasts even 30 days? I have my doubts. And interestingly, I kind of hope it's not possible to stabilize this. If breweries have to sell their beer at the source to ensure these flavors and aromas survive, that means people will have to continue to patronize them there. That means I won't be getting any brewery-fresh Trillium in Oregon, but I can live with that if it encourages a market for hundreds of small breweries nationwide serving fresh beer.

A Deep Dive on the Claims About New England IPAs (Way Nerdy)

Last week, the ever-busy Jason Notte had a great piece on the rise of niche brewing. This is a point I regularly make to visitors coming to Beervana: one of the things that makes the city so interesting is the presence of breweries that don't make IPAs--like Occidental, Upright, and the Commons (among others). It's a city of diversity. For his piece, Notte chose Great Notion Brewing, which specializes in the fraught "New England IPA" category.

Miller and Dugan had spent years home-brewing and swapping beers with friends across the country before realizing that their brewery’s inspiration had to lie somewhere other than Portland. They were taken with the hazier, fruitier India Pale Ales being made by Northeast breweries including Maine Beer Co., The Alchemist and Tree House.

(To be fair, Great Notion is making a pretty broad line, and their puckery beers are for me their real calling card.)

All well and good. Let's not relitigate this particular debate. My bone of contention comes with a comment Great Notion's James Dugan makes--a pillar on which these types of beers seems to rest. The overwhelming trend in American beers now is toward saturated and intense hop flavors and aromas, not bitterness. Somehow the idea is that the New England IPAs have a greater abundance of these qualities due to their cloudiness. And here Dugan doubles down with some science:

People look at our beers and say: “You have too much yeast in suspension.” What it comes down to is educating people that there is some yeast in every beer — we don’t filter, we don’t fine, we don’t centrifuge — but we cold crash all of our beer, drop the yeast out and then do a heavy dry hopping. We dry hop about two and a half to three gallons per barrel. When you dry hop that heavily, you get hop polyphenols that are basically tannins that saturate beer with oils.

Without protein content from wheat or oats, those oils eventually drop out. What we’re finding to be the defining characteristic of our beers is this marriage of protein and hop oil saturation. What’s happening is that those two are binding. You have this hop oil stuck in suspension and when you pour it into a glass, you’re tasting the hop oil. 

This seemed ... dubious. I set about looking into the science, but unfortunately, the mechanism of hop flavor and aroma hasn't been studied much. For decades, all hop research was focused on IBUs and paid for by big breweries who were trying to get ever more bitterness out of ever fewer hops. The state of the aroma and flavor research is still in the gestation state. I spoke with researcher Tom Shellhammer at Oregon State last year about a project to understand the mechanism of dry-hopping. He described it for me:

“What it’s getting at is, if you’re going to use hops for dry-hopping and make a consistent product batch-to-batch, should you as a brewer hop based upon the mass of hops, or the oil content of the hops—or based on something else?”  

This illustrates how little we understand about these mechanisms. But we understand something. We know some of the constituents of hops, like oils and and acids and prenylated flavonoids (yes, I way out over my skis on that last one), and we have some sense of what they do and don't do. In particular, scientists have focused a lot of their attention on the terpenes like myrcene, linalool, geraniol, and so on that give hops their lovely citrus or floral kick. But we also know that hops are incredibly complex and not only are there many other compounds I haven't mentioned, but even the ones I have aren't inert. Some terpenes, for example are "biotransformed by yeast during the fermentation" into other terpenes. The question at hand is whether proteins enhance and preserve the behavior of hop flavor and aroma, as proponents of New England IPAs believe.

It doesn't really add up. There's no mechanism that I understand that would cause the polyphenols in hops to bond the oils to the proteins in grain. (It's not clear why the hops don't bond to the proteins of barley, which are also present in beer, except I suppose there is less of it.) Polyphenols affect the perceived smoothness or harshness of hop flavor, but they don't appear particularly relevant to that "juicy" quality prized by modern breweries. The thing you're worried about with hop oils is degredation from oxygenation, not dropping out of suspension. Terpenes in oils appear to be susceptible to this as well, and they are also volatile and can escape the liquid. There's really nothing we know that suggests wheat and oat haze is going to affect these hoppy properties.

I shot an email to Stan Hieronymus, the writer who literally wrote the book on hops, to find out if this sounded plausible to him. If he'd like to weigh in on this, I'll let him do so in his own words. The one thing he mentioned that seemed really important was this: we "have to get past thinking about oil and think about compounds," he said. Oils are part of the equation, but they're not the whole kielbasa.

For me, the proof is in the palate. I still haven't encountered anything different in these cloudy IPAs in terms of hop flavor and aroma than I do in typical (hazy but not milky) modern American IPAs. It's as easy to make a saturated IPA whether it looks like a milkshake or not.  Dugan--and others, apparently--have argued that there's some science going on in these beers that make them especially juicy. Could be! But point me to the studies that demonstrate it, please. Sciencey language doesn't quite cut it alone. (Otherwise hive mind would let me get away with a lot more BS.)

For now, I think these are standard modern American IPAs with a ton of haze. And a special prize to anyone who managed to read through this post to get to that rather modest conclusion.

The Newly-Coveted Cloudiness

Something weird is going on. In the past six months or so, there has been a mad rush to hefeweizen-cloudy IPAs. Not just IPAs with a hop shimmer, but densely opaque, milky beers. It's odd for a few reasons, but mostly because the cloudiness is a visual symbol for a kind of beer marked by intense fruitiness and hop flavor, generally with low bitterness--qualities that don't derive from the cloudiness. (It's also odd because though hazy IPAs have been around for twenty years, the idea of haziness strikes many people as entirely novel.)  But things are getting even weirder:

Along with Fieldwork's help, we've begun looking at some of the beers under the miscrocope and it turns out that some of them are yeast bombs. There are allegations of flour being added to beers. And then there's a possiblity that *when* you dry-hop is a big deal.  

Well, now one prominent brewer has admitted to using flour. 

Follow the link if you want the lowdown--the brewer in question also uses lactose and green apple puree. I have no idea how widespread this is, but I find it absolutely fascinating. It is a perfect example of culture driving beer style development, and it's happening in real time right before our eyes.

Credit: Kim Knox Beckius

The process must have gone something like this. First you have a beer like Heady Topper, which is a grimy, grungy looking thing, but which has this transfixing quality of hoppiness--fresh and alive, with a bigger emphasis on the flavors and aromas of hops than bitterness, which creates a sense of fruit-juice intensity. Fans go crazy. Other breweries make similar beers (though I think nobody's were as murky as those early Headys), using different hop varieties and balancing the flavors, aromas, and bitterness in different ways. Fans go crazy for these, too. In the drinkers' minds, all the visual, aroma, and flavor elements are fused. The look of the beer is taken to be an important element in creating its taste and smell. We know the human mind is a fickle, lying instrument, and no doubt people's parietal and occipital lobes are telling them that those cloudy beers do taste better, dammit. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that ... murk.

Breweries, in turn, make sure to leave the haze in. Since more is always better, and since the conflation of appearance and flavor has already been made, breweries not only do everything they can to goose the flavor of a beer, but also its chunky appearance. And this, of course, confirms the suspicions of the drinker that the chunkier the beer, the more it tastes juicy and delish. Ta da! Now we have the hand of culture guiding things, an unexpected feedback loop that has created strange-looking beers.

When you wander into something so distinctly cultural as this from the outside, it's obvious. I've spent a bit of time following the debate about the haze's import to the flavor and aroma, and found proponents' arguments unpersuasive. Hops may leave a bit of haze, but not chunks or billowing clouds--that comes from yeast cells and protein. And these help create juiciness how? Whether or not there is some thin reed of science supporting this link, it's sundered with the addition of other chunkifying ingredients like flour. This is purely visual--you might as well be dyeing it green. People like the haze because it seems to have something to do with the other things they like.

And guess what? There's absolutely nothing wrong with weirdness like this. Half of the classic styles we revere are products of cultural weirdness. After a period of outlaw apostasy, these styles become codified as standards, and we add them, like precious gems, to our canonical collection. Hefeweizen with isoamyl acetate and clove phenols--absolutely critical to style. Witbier with coriander--mandatory. Irish stout and roasted barley--yes and yes. Of course, these are actually all preferences, agreed upon after the fact. There is no law demanding they be so, except the ones we put in place after canonization.

I have no idea if the cloudy thing is here to stay, but if it is, there's really no reason why breweries shouldn't add flour or lactose--or who knows, pumice and ash. In fifty years, we'll be describing that flour as a regional quirk that is critical to developing the characteristic mouthfeel that accentuates the juicy flavor profile. Style guidelines will stipulate that only wheat or barley flour may be used, because quinoa or spelt flour would just, you know, be weird.

I guess what I'm saying is, viva la weirdness. This is how things develop, and it's a good thing.