All About Beer Magazine » oud bruin

Sour Ale

Rick Lyke — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:00:00 +0000

With this issue All About Beer launches a new column called Your Next Beer. The goal of this column is to look over the horizon – or at least down the bar – at trends that are taking hold in beer and brewing. Craft beer fans are always looking to try something new and with Next Beer we’ll take a closer look at what you are likely to be drinking next.

Most beer drinkers fall into two broad categories: hop heads or malt mavens. We have all been taught from our earliest brewpub visit, order an IPA if you crave hop bitterness or go for a doppelbock if you want some sweet malt. There is now a growing subculture of beer fans that want to pucker up: call them the sour patch kids.

Oud bruin, Flanders red ale, lambic, gueuze, gose, saison and Berliner weisse are styles that have been around for centuries so how can these be considered “new?” How can something that emerged during the seventeenth century be your Next Beer? Start counting the barrels. The corners of some breweries are starting to look more like Napa wineries or Kentucky rackhouses.

“We’ve been looking for something that people tired of getting slammed with hops might enjoy,” says Ron Gansberg, the talented brewer at Cascade Brewing in Oregon, pointing out that his sour beers are a unique northwest style and don’t try to mimic Belgian sours. “The thing about these beers is they provide an intense sensory experience that is something other than hops.”

That “sensory experience” emerges in the form of an acidic sourness that comes from a spontaneous source of fermentation that in most beers would be considered a major defect. Under normal circumstances the presence of Lactobacillus, Brettanomyces or Pediococcus in a brewhouse is a cause for concern. But for makers of oud bruin and Flanders red ale these organisms are welcome guests.

Keith Schlabs, food and beverage director for the 13-location Flying Saucer Draught Emporium chain, says his locations are selling more of these beers as they become available from importers and craft brewers. Most of the time it is in the bottle, since these beers still don’t sell consistently well enough to move kegs at the peak of freshness.

“Sour ales require a hand selling process, because there is a bit of ‘shock factor’ to the flavor. It is difficult for some people to get their arms around the taste of these beers. Until recently only serious beer connoisseurs really sought them out,” says Schlabs. “There is a time and a place for these beers, and there are some pretty good ones on the market. We see people sharing bottles quite often.”

Belgium: Diverse Beer Styles, Delectable Brews

Charles D. Cook — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 17:00:00 +0000

Walk into a good multi-tap bar these days or, especially, a good beer retail store, and Belgium rules. A beer lover shopping for new flavors is confronted with bewildering choices: bottles that are corked and wired in the manner of champagne, beers that claim religious connections and others with fruit incongruously depicted. The labels, written in Flemish or French, may display examples of the cartoons for which the Belgians are famous, but the high prices of some of these brews are no joking matter. Faced with expanding choices, how to choose?

Belgium may be a small country within Europe, but it is huge in the world of beer, with every village seemingly hanging onto its own individual brewing tradition. The result is a diversity of beer styles unmatched in any other traditional brewing nation. With so much variety, it’s not possible to define Belgian beer, per se. However, many Belgian styles can be clustered together in a relatively small number of categories according to their dominant flavor character. With some guidance, whether the beer is brewed in Belgium, brewed elsewhere but inspired by Belgian brewing, or brewed in Belgium with foreign inspiration, it’s possible to make an educated choice and select a new beer you’ll enjoy.

Spices and Citrus: The White Beers

Let’s say you’re in a local watering hole, and you see patrons enjoying a cloudy, blonde-colored beer. The bartender says it’s a Belgian brew, and that it’s kind of spicy and citrusy, but not too strong.

You have just discovered “white” beer. It’s also called witbier in its native region of Flanders, and bière blanche in French-speaking Wallonia, the southern part of Belgium.

Belgian white beers originated in the town of Hoegaarden over five-hundred years ago. The last white beer brewery in Hoegaarden closed in the late 1950s. Pierre Celis resurrected the style in 1966.

Wit beers are fine warm weather thirst quenchers. They typically contain about 5 percent alcohol by volume (ABV), and are noticeably spiced, often with coriander and curaçao—a remnant of Belgium’s role in the spice trade. The wheat gives the beer its spritzy, almost lemony character. A good Belgian witbier should be easy drinking, yet still satisfying.

Some of the best Belgian examples are Troublette, from Brasserie Caracole, Blanche de Honnelles from Brasserie de Rocs, St. Bernardus Witbier, Watou’s Witbier from Brouwerij Van Eecke and Saisis from Brasserie Ellezelloise. Here in the United States, some especially fine white beers include Allagash White from Maine, Great Lakes Holy Moses White from Cleveland, Lakefront White from Milwaukee and Ommegang Witte from Cooperstown, NY. Have you been drinking Blue Moon? That Coors product is also an example of a wit beer.

Herbal and Earthy: Ale Brewed in a…Farmhouse?

Truthfully, most Belgian “farmhouse” ales aren’t literally brewed in a farmhouse. This style family, referred to as saison in Belgium and bière de garde in Northern France, is thought to have originated primarily in Hainaut province, a rural area of Wallonia where both farming and brewing have been important economic activities for centuries. Session beer-strength saisons (3 to 5 percent alcohol) were brewed in the winter and spring, to be consumed by farm workers in the summer heat. Stronger versions of farmhouse ales were brewed for winter enjoyment.

“Farmhouse ale” is a sort of a convenient catchall term to describe saison beers that are aromatic, dry, earthy and fruity. Saisons can also be spicy, but these notes suggesting anise, pepper or green herbs most often come from the yeast, not from the actual addition of spices, and the beers display a light to medium tartness. Some saisons are, however, spiced with various ingredients. Bitterness ranges from pleasantly hopped to highly hopped, by Belgian standards. Translation: don’t expect any farmhouse ale to knock you over the head like a double IPA.

This style is very wide-ranging, and encompasses beers such as Saison Dupont and Avec les bons Voeux de la Brasserie Dupont, which are both world classics and benchmarks of the style. The often very idiosyncratic ales of Brasserie Fantome in Soy, such as Black Ghost and Noel, are also farmhouse ales—though these beers may seem to have little in common with the Dupont brews. Taste ‘em and decide for yourself.

Other standout Belgian Farmhouse ales include the superb Saison d’Epeautre and La Moneuse from Brasserie de Blaugies, Saison de Erpe-Mere from Brouwerij de Glazen Toren and Saison de Pipaix from Brasserie a Vapeur, the last solely steam-powered brewery in Belgium.

Excellent Belgian-inspired U.S.-brewed farmhouse ales include Pecore from The Brewer’s Art in Baltimore, Bullfrog Brewing Beesting Saison from Pennsylvania, Iron Hill Saison, Jolly Pumpkin Bam Bière, Red Barn from Lost Abbey in San Diego and Ommegang Hennepin.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Randy Mosher — Thu, 01 Jul 2004 17:00:00 +0000

The first thing one notices when surveying the vast landscape of beer is how much it is all the same. Like a great sandy desert, vast swaths of it have a numbing sameness. Well over 90 percent of modern beer is brewed from the same handful of ingredients, to about the same strength, with more or less the same brewing techniques. Fizzy, yellow, a kiss of hops in the better brands.

It’s hard to say exactly how we got ourselves into this predicament, but technology, marketing, taxation and war have all played important roles. In this country, anti-German sentiments stirred up by WWI followed immediately by Prohibition shredded much of what could be termed “beer culture” in America. Lacking a richer social context, beer followed the model of soda pop, a commodity product in branded packaging. In this form it utterly dominated much of the 20th century.

But, like the desert, if you peer into the cracks and crevices, the beer scene teems with life. Specialty shelves in American liquor stores now bulge with a variety of characterful and delicious products. And when one squints into the depths of the past, a nearly psychedelic profusion of startling beers appears out of the mist.

Peering into the Past

As early as ancient Sumeria, 6,000 years ago, many varieties of beer existed. We have written references to strong, weak, sour, sparkling, aged, fresh, black, red and light (whose name, ebla, literally means “lessens the waist”) beers. A profusion of medicinal and culinary plants was available, but the ancient brewers, like modern ones, were reluctant to give up all their secrets. We will have to wait for some future chemical discovery to flesh out the recipes.

Early beer is unquestionably connected to religion, ritual and even spirituality. It is no fluke, for example, that one word for alcohol is “spirits.” Everywhere there was beer, a god—or more likely, goddess—was attributed to it. In Sumeria, Ninkasi was her name. In ancient Egypt, the legend of Sekhmet tells the story of how a beer saved the world of humans from destruction. The Goddess of Destruction was on one of her rampages, but a timely swig of a beer laced with the stupefying narcotic root, mandrake, calmed her rage. Never mind that this beer would have reeked of garlic; such psychoactive beers were widely used for ritual (and possibly medical) purposes in the ancient world.

In 1957, archaeologists digging in the region of ancient Phrygia (now Macedonia) broke through a shaft and discovered an intact royal burial, complete with the remains of a grand funerary feast. The occupant of the tomb turned out to be no less than King Midas himself. The profusion of elaborate ware used for the drink attested to its central role in the ceremony.

Traces of food and drink recovered from these ancient containers remained mute for decades. Then, in 1997, a University of Pennsylvania researcher, Patrick McGovern, submitted some of the scrapings to chromatographic analysis. Chemical markers for honey, grapes and malt were all in evidence, the makings of a strange and wonderful beverage.

McGovern teamed up with Dogfish Head Brewery’s Sam Calagione to produce a beer to serve at a celebratory dinner recreating the king’s funeral banquet. The resulting beer was such a success that Dogfish Head continued to produce it as a specialty product. A pale orangish gold, with a perfumy nose of aromatic grapes, honey and a wisp of exotic saffron, Midas Touch has a delicate crèmant champagne quality.