Firkin Gravity Festival April 5th

For those who like cask beer, there is a Firkin Gravity Festival in Berkeley next week. 

For those who aren’t sure what the hell a firkin is, here’s a quick intro:

A firkin is an 18 gallon wooden barrel, a quarter the size of a standard beer barrel, also called a cask.  Cask ales are beers that have not been filtered, pasteurized, or artificially carbonated or nitrogenated. 

Beer is made when you add yeast to a wort, which is a solution of grain sugars in water.  The yeast eats the sugar and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide as its outputs.  In most brewing today, much of the carbon dioxide produced is released through a pressurized valve from the fermenter, and then the beer is artificially carbonated during bottling.  Cask beer, or cask conditioned beer, is beer that does not need to be artificially carbonated because it goes through a secondary fermentation, in the cask it will be served from.  Active yeast is added to the cask with the beer, and it continues to convert sugar to alcohol and CO2 in the cask.  This CO2 is retained in the cask and naturally carbonates the beer.  This same explanation applies to bottle conditioned beer, in which a small amount of yeast is added to the bottle before capping, so that fermentation will continue in the bottle until it is opened and drunk.

Cask beer has a lot of highly enthusiastic proponents.  This is because naturally carbonated beers are not as fizzy and full of CO2 as artificially carbonated beers.  The result is that more of the molecules from the beer itself, those that give the beer its flavor, hit your tongue with each sip, instead of a bunch of CO2 bubbles. 

Cask beer is also often served somewhat warmer than keg beer because a very cold beer numbs your tongue and taste buds, preventing you from tasting all the flavors in your beer.  It’s funny to think about the fact that macro-brews really hype how cold their beers are, frost-brew liners and all, when a lot of beer fans know that they only time you’d want a really cold beer is when you don’t want to taste what you’re drinking.   It’s like advertising, “Our beer is as bad as the next guy’s, but you’ll taste ours less!” 

With all this said though, I haven’t really come around to cask beers yet.  Maybe it’s just what I’m used to drinking, but they taste warm and flat to me.  I recognize that I’m missing some flavors in my beers when I drink them chilled and artificially carbonated, but I think that what you gain in this trade-off is a more pleasant texture and mouthfeel.  I’m trying to open up and appreciate more cask beers, but I’m not quite there yet. 

For more on cask beer check out:

New York Times Article (10/24/2007)

Washington Cask Beer Festival, Seattle (3/22/2008)

Firestone and Lagunitas Nights @ Toronado

So it’s been a very beerful week so far, as Toronado was hosting brewer’s nights for Firestone on Tuesday and Lagunitas on Wednesday.  In the future, I plan to post these events ahead of time so those interested can actually attend, but these came up quick, and my reflexes sent me off to the bar instead of to the blog. 

Firestone night was amazing.  They were serving all oaked beers, some oak-aged, some oak fermented.  They had:

• Union Jack – Oak fermented IPA
• Abacus – Oak aged barleywine
• Saucerful of Secrets – Oak aged Belgian strong dark ale
• Velvet Merkin – Oak aged oatmeal stout
• Saucerful of Merkin – Oak aged blend of the Belgian and the stout
• Parabola – Oak aged imperial oatmeal stout

I got the Abacus Barleywine to start and my first thought was, “Whoa, this is NOT a barleywine.  They must have given me the imperial stout.”  It was SO dark, and the oak gave it a creamy mouthfeel and vanilla flavor that I just wasn’t expecting, though I should have.  And this isn’t just oak we’re talking about, these are bourbon oak barrels they use, which imparts a whiff of bourbon to the beer.  It was really hard at first to believe this was a barleywine, and it was so rich, I thought I wasn’t going to be able to finish my glass.  But as it warmed up and I kept drinking it, I started liking it more and more.  By the time I had finished my glass, I was about ready for another, and might have gone in for one more if it hadn’t been 11% alcohol (!!! And that wasn’t even the top end of their spectrum, their Imperial Stout was 13%!).  It’s a FANTASTIC beer, but it caught me off-guard.  I’ve been drinking very hoppy west-coast Barleywines, and this was not that type of beer at all.  I will DEFINITELY order it again, if I can find it, but not when I’m looking for something light and refreshing.  You could drink this with dessert.

The second beer I had was the Saucerful of Secrets Belgian Strong Dark Ale.  It too was fairly dark, and since it too had been bourbon oaked it had some of the same flavors as the barleywine.  However, this beer had higher carbonation, as expected from a Belgian, and more prominent hops.  It was not quite as complex or interesting as the barleywine, but a more easily drinkable beer.  I spent each sip with the barleywine trying to figure out how the hell they made it taste that way, which I think is exactly what a good beer does.  With the Belgian, I sat back and enjoyed. 

I didn’t get to meet the brewers, though they were around for a long time, or at least their reps were, because it was pretty crowded and they were a justifiably hot commodity.   Highlight of the night might have been about midway through my second reasonably strong beer when one of the partners from my firm, my boss on my last case, walked in.  Hi Joe!  I didn’t even notice at first because I was too worried about the fact that Justin had just left and now Kathleen and I needed to ditch the weirdo at the table next to us who was trying to chat us up despite being old enough to be our dad.  This problem was solved when he got up to get a beer, we gave away our table to a big group, and squeezed onto the weirdo’s little table with my boss and his 8 months pregnant wife (who, luckily for all of us, the rest of society included, was just having root beer).  It was fun to sit down with one of the partners over a beer, and not at some pre-engineered bonding over lets all go go-kart racing-type event.

The other highlight may have been when I realized I was eating Kathleen’s sausage instead of my own only after tears were POURING down my cheeks due to the hot peppers. 

Lagunitas night had great beer as well, almost as good as the Firestone beers, and an even more fun social setting.  Toronado opened up the secret back room that sits halfway between their bar and Rosamunde.  I had always wondered what was back there.  Turns out, more seating!  Why isn’t this open every night?  The sales and marketing guys from Lagunitas were there with cheese and vertical tastings of several of their beers going back to 2004!  I love the whole concept of vertical tastings but had never actually done one before. 

The beers offered in verticals were:

• Brown Shugga - American strong ale (9.9%)
• Hairy Eyeball - American strong ale (8.8%) - but also spiced, almost an Imperial Winter Warmer
• Olde Gnarlywine - American barleywine (9.7%)
• Nuevo Noir - Belgian strong drown ale (6.3%)
• Possibly others I missed…

There was a somewhat different line-up available out front on tap:

• Lagunitas #10 - Saison
• Lagunitas IPA - American IPA
• Hop Stoopid - American Imperial IPA
• B2K - Eisbock
• Hairy Eyeball 2008 - see above

I’ve had the hairy eyeball before and really enjoyed it, served it at the Beer 101 seminar we had at my apartment in fact, but I came in a little carsick from reading Sunset in the car on the way home from PA (no, I wasn’t the driver, and yes, I read Sunset, and yes, I know I’m a weird mash-up of the interests of 50-year old men [homebrewing] and 50-year old women [regional lifestyle magazines], so I guess the only thing that’s clear is I’m an old person in a much younger body).  So, the upshot of that long parenthetical is that I got the Saison.  I thought it was very good for a Saison.  It was hoppy and highly carbonated like a pilsner, but with the slight twist that comes from the Belgian yeast. 

We then made our way to the back and I went through the line 2x to get 2 tastes and decided that despite my enthusiasm for vertical tasting in general, that I wasn’t up for it in this crowded an environment, where I’d have to balance my many tastes in my hands and try not to spill while being jostled every which way.  So I tried the 2004 Gnarlywine and the 2004 (I think) Nuevo Noir.  I can’t remember the Noir - just that it was tasty but couldn’t match the Saucerful from the night before, with all it’s bourbon oak accents.  The Gnarlywine was sweet and syrupy, very raisiny and figgy, a more classic Barleywine than the Abacus from the nigth before. 

My favorite of the night though was the B2K.  I had never had an eisbock before, I don’t think.  Bocks are strong beers with malty flavors and German-style Munich & Vienna malts.  They are light to medium brown with a large, creamy head.   Eisbocks are a special style of bocks that are distilled, not something you see in beer often at all, to increase the concentration of alcohol and flavor.  As a result, they have a darker brown color than other bocks and a higher alcohol content (9+% instead of 6 - 7%).  

The B2K was my favorite of the night.  It had a deep rich, mildly sweet malt profile and citric hops, and the high alcohol content kept it all interesting.  It’s retired, but it you can find it, buy it up fast!

A big hello to Felice, Justin, Matt, and Peattie for coming out and joining me.  I think I’m going to need to join Peattie’s entourage as he seemed to know everyone at Toronado. 

Washington Post Beer Madness

For those who haven’t yet seen this, the Washington Post is running a March Madness bracket on beers.   Their bracketing systems could use some refinement (PAs thrown in with IPAs? Half the lagers are macro-brews? Why the bizarre selection of beers to represent each category, particularly the fruit/spice beers? Probably sponsors), but it’s still a pretty cool idea.  Maybe next year I should run my own so I don’t have so many complaints.

Beer of the Week 03/24/2008: The return of the blog!

After several months on hiatus, I’m back at it.  In order to keep this sustainable for me, the postings will probably short at first, but I’m sure they will grow back to their usual size before long. 

Anyway, without further ado, I give you the Beer of the Week: Duchesse de Bourgogne. 

Why?  Because this stuff is on a roll!  This is a Flanders Red Ale, which is a pretty unusual style, and one you don’t see too often, but I’ve now run into it 4 TIMES in the past TWO WEEKS. 

(1) First it was at Spork, where the waiter described it condescendingly as tasting like “wine mixed with coke”, which it kind of does in the best possible way, and recommended that I not order it.   He clearly didn’t know what he was talking about or who he was dealing with.

(2) Then it was at Bar Crudo, where the bartender called it one of his all time favorites.  I feel like we bonded over this, even though I didn’t order it this time.  I did, however, discover other soon to be favorites including Gouden Carolus Tripel and St. Bernardus Abt 12 (a quadrupel). 

(3) Then it was ON TAP at Toronado!  Now they have all kinds of stuff in bottles, but a Flanders Red on tap?  This must be unprecedented.  Again, I chose other beers (a Tripel I don’t remember the name of and the Lagunitas Hop Stoopid, which was decent, but not a favorite), but had to ask, “Had the Duchesse distributor just come through town on a whirlwind tour?”  The barkeep gave a non-committal answer, I think he suspected I was some kind of industry type or competitor a this point, rather than a thirsty blogger.

(4) Finally, I ran into it again, and tried it again, at La Trappe.  It was one of seven beers picked to be in a Line Up of Belgians in the beer tasting run by Stu Stuart of Belgian Beer Me.  I could not believe it!  It was really tasty, complex, and better than the first time I had it.  I think it takes a couple tastes to really enjoy it, and a server/pourer who knows what he/she is doing. 

I recommend this beer especially to my non-beer drinking wine friends.  It’s not that it is the most accessible or easy to like beer, but it does taste a lot like wine because it is aged in oak casks. 

So, look for it around town and look for more posts on this blog!