Beer Glassware

I don't like branded glassware. I find it incredibly tacky and commercial. I have purchased many branded glasses because I like their shape, but I generally remove the brandings with acid. It bugs me to no end that many beer bars devote an enormous amount of labor and shelf space to serving beers in branded glasses.

But it's not just branded glassware. Nearly as irritating to me are those who insist that every beer must be served in a style-specific glass. The only reason pilsners are served in pilsner glasses, while pale ales are served in pint glasses—and not vice-versa—is tradition. Sure, there's an interesting history behind most beer glasses, but with regards to the beer drinking experience, there are only a few aspects of glassware that matter.

Handle: The main benefit of a handled glass is that the beer warms up slower, because the drinker is not holding the glass directly. Therefore, handled glassware is appropriate for large servings of a beer that does not taste good warm. Glass mugs also tend to be thick and sturdy, which is good if you're serving drunk people.

Glass shape: Bowl-shaped glasses (e.g., snifters, tulips, wine glasses) concentrate the beer's aroma. In general, I think beer should be served in bowl-shaped glasses, unless there's a good reason not to.

Glass size: Highly carbonated beers should be served with a good deal of headspace in the glass, so that the inevitable foam can be served, and not dumped down the drain.

Lip flare: Glasses with flared lips (e.g., tulips) make drinking highly carbonated beers easier by allowing the drinker to drink beer from under the foam.

From a functional perspective, therefore, the only types of beer glasses you need are tulips and mugs. I will, however, admit that imperial stouts look funny in a tulip, and prefer to serve them in snifters.

Any glassblowers who want to make me a tulip-stein: hit me up.

How Old is Too Old?

Beer never becomes unsafe to drink, so retailers are under no legal obligation to sell fresh beer. Most people don't think much about beer freshness, so retailers who sell stale beer aren't punished by consumers. However, the age of a beer is vital to its flavor. I don't doubt that some people like the flavors that age and oxidation impart to beer, but I think that most people, like me, dislike these flavors.

Large American lager breweries have spent a great deal of money developing extremely low-oxygen brewhouses and packaging lines to allow their pale, weak beer to last six months in refrigerated storage. Retailers generally understand this shelf life and are able to move these beers on schedule. Craft beers are the problem. Craft brewers produce a huge variety of different beer styles, each of which ages differently. American IPAs are the poster child for beer freshness, since the vast majority of American IPAs are sold extremely stale. Furthermore, craft breweries are often unable to afford refrigerator space in stores, which only worsens the problem.

As my small contribution to fixing the beer freshness problem, here's my impression of the aging potential of various craft beer styles (assuming refrigerated or cellared storage):

American IPA - The most fragile of beer styles. Nearly all of the fresh hop aroma that the brewer has worked so hard to get in the beer will be gone in 1-2 months. The flavors that replace it include molasses, cardboard, and cat piss—none of which I like in beer. Do not age more than six weeks in the bottle/keg.

American/English pale ales - The fresh hop aromas in most American pale ales will fade just as quickly as in IPAs, but pale ales are generally less offensive to drink aged. Nevertheless, don't age them more than three months.

American/English dark ales - Roasted malts are powerful antioxidants. High alcohol stouts are the only beers I brew that actually benefit from extensive aging. Stouts get softer and more complex for at least the first year, and will be delicious for years after, since the roasted malts stave off oxidation. Lower alcohol dark beers don't need as much aging, but will still hold up to a year or two of storage without much trouble.

Belgian pale ales - Tripels, golden strong ales, and saisons have a better shelf life than American pale beers, since they're less reliant on hop aroma, and I think Belgian yeasts have some antioxidant capacity. (Need to confirm.) I'll happily drink a tripel at six months, maybe even a year. I don't recommend longer aging, though some do it anyway. For Belgian pale ales with Brettanomyces, see sour/wild beers.

Belgian dark ales - Dubbels, dark strong ales, and quadruples already have a lot of dark sugar/dark fruit flavors, so oxidative flavors are less obvious. They're not one of my favored styles, so I don't feel qualified to say how long they can be aged, but many people do age them extensively.

German wheat beers - Hefeweizens are known for their banana aroma. The ester associated with this aroma, isoamyl acetate, fades fairly quickly in beer. Less than three months is best with weizens.

Sour/wild beers - Most sour/wild beers take at least a year of fermentation before they're released, so freshness is clearly not paramount here. (Lambics are brewed with aged hops!) But if the beer is pasteurized (as most Flemish sours are), it's best drunk fairly fresh. If unpasteurized, sour/wild beers continue to evolve in the bottle, often becoming more sour and complex. However, aging a live sour/wild beer can also throw off the balance of flavors, and in the case of fruit beers, diminish fresh fruit aromas.

A note on barleywines: One style of beer embraces the flavors of oxidation, just as sherry does in the wine world. That beer is the barleywine. Barleywines don't have roasted malts or wild yeast to protect against oxidation. Nevertheless, they're often aged for many years. Aging does soften the alcohol bite, but it also brings the typical nutty, brown sugar flavors of oxidation. Many people enjoy this in a barleywine. I do not. I don't brew barleywines.

Can't find the date on a beer? For a guide to best by dates and bottling codes, visit http://freshbeeronly.com

Fermented Cabbage

About six weeks ago, I started fermenting what I thought was a small batch of sauerkraut. The recipe was simple: cabbage and salt. I chopped the cabbage and massaged it with salt to release the water. I put it in a mason jar and weighed down the cabbage with marbles*, so that all the cabbage was submerged. The kraut has been fermenting in the mid 60s since.

I used a fairly high level of salt (and, stupidly, forgot to take notes), so the fermentation proceeded fairly slowly. After two weeks of fermentation, the kraut was only slightly sour. So I forgot about it for awhile. Four weeks later, I tasted it again. Delicious. Still not super sour, but incredibly complex. Interestingly, this batch turned out tasting distinctly Asian, with flavors of sesame, soy sauce, and anise, even though no such ingredients were added.

It turns out that adding more than 2-3% salt to a vegetable ferment favors different strains of lactic acid bacteria, characteristic of high-salt Asian ferments like tsukemono (Japanese pickles), soy sauce, and kimchi.

I like the result a lot, but it requires different pairings than normal sauerkraut. This experiment makes me want to try high-salt fermentations of more traditional Asian vegetables like daikon and bok choy.

*I do not recommend the marble technique. Although effective in weighing down the cabbage, they're a huge pain to remove whenever you want to sample the ferment. Zip-locs filled with salt water are much more convenient.

Wedding Beers

For my brother's wedding last week, I brewed six batches of beer. They turned out pretty good. My cousin Spencer made wedding-themed labels for each beer. They also turned out pretty good.

Ale We Need is Love – An American amber ale. Lots of hop aromatics, but low levels of bitterness. Flavor notes: pineapple and jasmine aromatics, caramel sweetness.

IBUs: Some

Hoppily Ever After – An American IPA. Fresh hop aromas jump out of the glass. Very bitter. Flavor notes: grapefruit bitterness, passionfruit and pine aromatics.

IBUs: Many

RachAle – A strong Belgian-style ale. Pale to amber in color, highly carbonated. Flavor notes: black pepper, fresh bread, clove, apple.

IBUs: 26

 

Lovey Weisse – Modeled after the sour wheat beers of Berlin, but with two pounds per gallon of whole blackberries added during fermentation. Very light and drinkable, with a pronounced tartness. Available with or without homemade blackberry syrup.

IBUs: 12 

Homebrewing Book Reviews

One of the great things about being a homebrewer today is the breadth and depth of literature that is easily available. The homebrewing books I've read have been nearly all been well-written, well-researched and focused on issues relevant to homebrewers.

Introductory texts:

How to Brew, by John Palmer. For most homebrewers, the only book you'll ever need. It's written so clearly that it's accessible to nearly anyone, but includes in-depth discussion of all the major brewing issues and techniques.

Brewing science:

Principles of Brewing Science, 2nd edition by George Fix. A slim text, but packed with important information. Dense, but accessible to anyone with a scientific bent (no biochemistry background required).

New Brewing Lager Beer by Greg Noonan. Not just for lager brewers, this book reads like an expansion of Principles of Brewing Science, but benefits from the author's experience as a professional brewer. A must-read for anyone thinking of going pro.

Yeast by Chris White and Jamil Zainasheff. Very good discussion of yeast handling and fermentation practices. Some of the information is very much geared towards professional brewers with tens of thousands of dollars to spend, though.

For the Love of Hops by Stan Heironymous. Far and away the most readable of the science-y texts. More relevant information about hop chemistry, hop growing, and hopping techniques than you can find anywhere else.

Beer styles and recipe formulation:

Brew Like a Monk by Stan Heironymous. Very readable. This book is a great guide to brewing Trappist-style beer. (Also covers similar breweries like Duvel, Karmeliet, etc.)

Farmhouse Ales by Phil Markowski. An excellent guide to brewing saisons and bieres de garde.

Wild Brews by Jeff Sparrow. The only text available on sour and wild beers. Poorly written and short on information.

Radical Brewing by Randy Mosher. Probably the most fun brewing book I've read. A must-read for anyone who likes to experiment with new ingredients.

Designing Great Beers by Ray Daniels. Contains good information, but is quite dated, poorly organized, and not much fun to read. Still, if you want to brew traditional English- and German-style beers, it's worth reading.

Bitterness, Acidity, and Astringency

These three flavors play a crucial role in many of the beverages we consume, and are often confused. All three are essentially defense mechanisms that plants have developed to fend off predators and parasites. Now, ironically, many plants are used precisely because they have high levels of such flavors—a testament to human perversion. But these flavors are not unequivocally desirable or undesirable. In certain contexts they're highly valued, while in other contexts they're considered flaws. In some cases certain types of acidity or bitterness are desirable, while other types are undesirable.

Bitterness is one of the four traditional basic tastes. Since many toxins are bitter, aversion to bitterness confers evolutionary advantage. Beer is one of the few beverages in which bitterness is valued. (Many cocktails also rely on bitterness.) Hops contain compounds known as alpha acids that, when isomerized by boiling, are highly bitter. In low concentrations, this bitterness balances the cloying sweetness of unhopped beer. (Beer is generally sweeter than wine, because barley imparts more unfermentable dextrins than grapes do.) In higher concentrations, this bitterness becomes a powerful, lingering sensation that many Americans have become enamored of. Very bitter beers like American IPAs are off-putting to the uninitiated, but for hopheads, there's no substitute. Other natural sources of bitterness include cinchona bark (quinine), orange peel, artichoke, cascarilla, and many more.

Acidity is a prized attribute in wine, coffee, and certain styles of beer. One of the reasons acidity is so desirable is that, when combined with certain aromatic compounds, it evokes flavors of fruit, nature's only dessert. Acidity also provides a crisp, refreshing quality, and balances out sweetness that would otherwise be cloying—which is why soda is usually dosed with citric or phosphoric acid. However, perceived acidity does not always track pH. People often talk about coffee as being highly acidic, but it only has a pH of ~5, on average. For comparison, that's about the same pH as black tea. A typical beer has a pH around 4, even though beer is not usually thought of as an acidic substance. Wine and sour beer sit in the 3 - 4 range, and anything below 3 isn't something you'll want to consume straight. The main acids found in beverages are citric (lemon), malic (apple), lactic (yogurt), tartaric (grape), acetic (vinegar), and phosphoric (cola), each of which has its own flavor.

Astringency is not traditionally classified as a taste, but as a tactile sensation. The source of astringency is a group of compounds known as tannins, which are a type of polyphenol. When tannins come into contact with proteins, they bind them together. When this reaction occurs in your mouth, it results in a dry, parching sensation. In tea and wine astringency can provide a sense of body to an otherwise thin liquid. Adding milk to tea reduces its astringency, because the tannins in the tea will bind to the milk proteins, meaning there are fewer unbound tannins that can bind proteins in your mouth.

IPA (4/27/13)

Christened Hoppily Ever After, this IPA is probably the best I've made yet.

The last IPAs I brewed turned out too dry, so for this batch I added more specialty malts and raised my mash temperature. I also increased my hop-stand addition significantly, a decision I made based on the success of my hop-stand amber ale experiments.

My current theory on hopping is that some hops are inherently better suited to dry hopping than hop stand additions, while others are the reverse. Simcoe and Nugget, for example, produce beers with high levels of linalool, a desirable aromatic compound. Linalool, which has a floral aroma, is not itself present in hops, but is produced through enzymatic reactions. Many of these reactions are accelerated by the presence of yeast, so adding linalool-producing hops before fermentation should be advantageous.

Other hops, like Cascade and Amarillo, have very high levels of myrcene. Myrcene, which has a pungent resinous and pine-like aroma, is extracted most effectively after fermentation through dry hopping.

In order to take advantage of both these effects, I've loaded up on the linalool-producing hops in the hop-stand, and saved the myrcene-heavy hops for the dry hop.

Vitals:

OG: 1.066
FG: 1.012
ABV: 7.1%
IBUs (Tinseth): 185

Water adjustments: 7 grams of gypsum
Mash temp: 154F
Mash length: 60 minutes
Efficiency: 65%

Yeast: US05
Pitching temp: 67F
Max temp: 72F

Malts Mashed		Amount	%	Max Pts.
2 row		12	84%	36.00
Belgian Munich		1	7%	36.00
Muntons Crystal 60		0.25	2%	34.00
Barley (flaked)		1	7%	32.00

Hops/Additions		Amount	Time	AA%
Magnum		2	60	13.0%
Chinook		1	60	13.0%
Nugget		1	30	13.0%
Simcoe		1	30	13.0%
Nugget		2	Hop stand	13.0%
Simcoe		2	Hop stand	13.0%

5/5/13: Dry hopped with 1 oz Chinook, 1 oz Cascade, 0.5 oz Simcoe, 0.5 oz Citra (leaf).
5/11/13: Bottled to 2.6 volumes of CO2.