There have been a lot of new beers happening these past couple weeks. New beers both for the craft beer world in general, beers I've just tasted for the first time, and (just one) beer that I've brewed for the first time. In fact, I had so many encounters with new beer that it took me two weeks just to figure out how to put it all together. Yes, that was my way of indirectly acknowledging that I didn't post last week.
The first of the beers new to the world of craft beer was Friek, brewed by Odell's in Fort Collins. Friek is a blend of Framboise and Kriek. I'm sure, with that information, you can fill in the blanks for why the name is "Friek." As the story has it, the good people of Odell's were taking an inventory of their warehouse, when they came across a 55 gallon barrel that was unaccounted for. The only way they could figure determine what beer was in this barrel was to pull a small sample and taste it. The head brewer took a small quaff, was still for a moment, then slowly, a maniacal, diabolical grin spread from ear to ear across his face; the beer was a long forgotten batch of lambic ale that had been aging on cherries for a year and a half. The next morning, the head brewer came in with fantastic blueprints for what to do with the beer.
I'll just let the label speak for itself:
"Friek is an evolution, an imaginative amalgamation invented by our brewers. Multiple KRIEK Lambic style ales are fermented with WILD yeast and TART cherries and then moved into OAK BARRELS to age and sour taking on the CHERRY flavors. As the beer matures, FRAMBOISES (raspberries) from the Schroyer Family Farms in Fort Collins and handpicked and readied for the beer. The fresh RASPBERRIES are added immediately prior to the final blending. The sweet and tart flavors MINGLE on the tongue with a sparkling dry finish."
I didn't add the emphasis, they did. However, the emphasis does provide a good description of the flavor of the beer. It was delightfully tart, dancing back and forth between a very mature, almost dried cherry sweetness, and the light, playful tartness of fresh wild raspberries. It was very good.
The next beer happening was one of my own creation. I brewed my third batch of beer, an Old Rasputin clone. Simply by having about twice as much malt extract and three times the weight of specialty grains, it's the biggest beer I've brewed to date. It should turn out to be about 8.5% to 9% abv, and will be a very dark brown. Not quite black like I would've liked, but dark brown will work nicely. At bottling, I'm going to add coffee to half of the bottles. I don't know how it will turn out, but it will be fun. Even though I've only brewed three batches, which I know is next to nothing, I already think that brewing beer is as much about the process as it is about getting 32-odd bottles of 22oz bottles of beer after a month and a half later.
One thing that I learned about beer through this is the difference between all-grain and extract brewing. All grain equipment costs a good chunk of money, but brewing beer becomes much cheaper since you don't have to buy malt extract at that point. Extract brewing is far easier, but you pay for the simplicity because malt extract costs a lot more that just grains. Henceforth, until I can afford the leap to all-grain brewing, I'm going to focus on recipes that don't use very much malt extract, and see how much flavor and complexity I can get from steeping specialty grains. The only limit this will impose is that I probably won't be brewing any higher alcohol beers for a while, which honestly is perfectly fine. I'm excited to see what I can come up with.
The next new beer is one that I can't really say anything about, other than it's coming from Great Divide sometime...soon. And it sounds awesome. That's all I can say about that one. ;)
The only way to follow that up is by telling you about an awesome beer that actually does exist. A couple posts ago, I talked about Russian River brewing company, Pliny the Elder (their double IPA), and Pliny the Younger (their triple IPA). In that post, I disclosed that I had not yet had the pleasure of tasting Pliny the Younger. What follows is my account of my first encounter with Pliny the Younger, at Oskar Blues Homemade Liquids & Solids, last Thursday. (Pliny the Younger henceforth shall be called "PtY"):
I got there about 5:20, and there really wasn’t that many people there. I mean, the bar was full, and about ¾ of the tables were full, but there was only 5 or 10 people standing by the bar that I would guess were waiting. I just went to the far end of the bar where there wasn’t anybody standing, and got a beer from the bartender. I asked him what the deal was with PtY, and he said that it’s just whoever’s there. In my mind, I was like “oh, great, a free for all…we’ll see how this goes…” but the bartender knew that I was there for it.
At about 10 after 6, the bartenders were checking with every person at the bar to see who was there for PtY, and counting them. Where we stood, Jesse and I were like the 7th or 8th people that he counted. When 6:15 rolled around, one of the bartenders climbed up on the bar and did the whole introductory speech for PtY. He said that “by our count, we will get 64 pours out of this keg. Unfortunately, that means some of you are going to be disappointed. But have no fear, we’re tapping another keg next Saturday…” he also gave an introduction to Oskar Blues’ newest beer, Mutilator Dopplebock, which they were tapping immediately alongside PtY. Either way, we knew we were going to be two of the 64 people that got a 10-oz pour of PtY. To our surprise, at 6:25, the bartender for our corner came over with two glasses of PtY, and set them in front of the guys sitting at the bar directly in front of us. Then he came back and handed one to me and one to Jesse. After a celebratory cheer, we went and sat outside.
As I smelled the beer in the short and stubby Oskar Blues glass before me, my nose was awakened by the scents of pineapple, passionfruit, and pine/spruce/coniferous forest. There were, perhaps, details pepper and clove underneath, but very subtle.
Lifting the glass and taking a sip, I was greeted with an explosion of hop flavor in the form of pine sap, floral spiciness, and green chili. Yes, green chili. Not the heat, but the flavor. Then the hops gave way to the sweetness of the malt, with a lingering hop resin flavor. After swallowing a sip, the green, resinous flavor sat on your tongue like the haunting memory of the many, many hop leaves that gave their lives for this beer. Jesse and I counted, the aftertaste lasted at least a solid two minutes without fading. It was ridiculous. Ridiculous and awesome.
As the amount of beer in our glass dwindled to somewhere around one ounce each, we decided to let the beer warm up and see how it tasted at room temperature, since it had managed to stay cold for the entire time we’d been drinking it up to that point. Due to the thick glass bases of the stubby OB glasses refusing to change their temperature, it actually took the single ounces of beer a good 5 or 10 minutes to warm up to where we wanted. That’s where it got strange, though. As I took a sip of PtY at what was arguably a more appropriate temperature, I was completely let down. The beer tasted watery and lost most of its intense complexity of flavor. How odd. I suppose even the most highly rated beers still have their demons, their quirks. I guess that’s what keeps them real.
Granted, my buddy Cedric pointed out that, in his opinion (which I happen to agree with), IPAs and hop-forward beers tend to be best at slightly colder temperatures as compared to their "stout" compadres. And granted, my palate had been completely dominated by the amount of hops present in Pliny the Younger, so it's not surprising that I couldn't taste much of the malt complexity. I was still a little surprised though, being an 11% beer and having enough sweetness to balance out 4 separate dry hoppings. All in all, I was definitely impressed and would definitely have it again... if I happened to be at the right place at the right time again.
The next beer is, well, not so much one particular beer, but a series of beers, at a beer happening. A few of my friends and I have put together quasi-monthly beer tastings, going by the name of Brewsday. Actually, when we started doing them, they were on a Tuesday, which inspired the name of this blog, but having a beer tasting on a Tuesday sucks, so we changed it to Friday. We have, up to this point, had brewery-centric tastings, gathering as many beers from one particular brewery as we can for each tasting. This past Friday was the first Brewsday of 2011, and it was a great one.
Thanks to the efforts of Josh and his friends, we had a Surly Brewing Company Brewsday. As (I think) mentioned in another post, Surly is not available in Colorado as of yet. That fact made this Brewsday even cooler, since we were tasting beer that not very many other people in our state have had the pleasure of drinking.
We got to try almost the full range of their beers, missing only a couple out of their lineup. We tried Bitter Brewer (not really a British Bitter), Bender (American Brown Ale), Coffee Bender (Bender + coffee, duh), SurlyFest (NOT a German Oktoberfest Bier), CynicAle (Belgian Style Saison/Pale), Smoke (Oak Aged Smoked Baltic Porter), Darkness (Russian Imperial/American Double Stout), Wet (west coast/fresh hop IPA), Furious (American IPA), and Abrasive (Double Oat IPA).
If there's one thing I can say about Surly after the tasting, it's that all of their beers have a point to get across, and the get that point across well. If there's two things I can say about Surly after the tasting, the second would be that I was impressed with the complexity present in each and every beer that I tried. None of the beers were sub-par or just mediocre, they all had a very polished yet unapologetic point to make. And they made that point quite well.
The big-shots were of course the stars of the show. Smoke had about 6 months on it, so what was surely once a big, awesome puff of campfire straight in the chops had since backed off into a more subdued smoke flavor, letting the complexity of the rest of the beer shine through, with complimentary flavors of dark fruit and licorice making their presence known. Darkness was definitely a surprise for me. Being that they call it a "Russian Imperial/American Double Stout," I was expecting dark, angry, roasty, bitter flavors. Instead, I was surprised with a luscious, velvety mixture of coffee, chocolate, and hints of cherry and raisin. Quite different than I expected, but as such, it really stood out from the (HUGE) crowd of Russian Imperial Stouts. Wet, while having been in a can for the better part of 4 or 5 months, still had a deliciously fresh hop flavor to it, very green and almost having that "grassy" (in a good way) flavor that fresh-hop IPAs tend to have. Abrasive couldn't have possibly had a more fitting name. It was a kick in the teeth with sheer enamel-stripping hop flavor, with a wicked malt backbone to back it up. It was beautiful.
Maybe next week I'll tell you about my upcoming trip to Glenwood Springs with my girlfriend, and my inevitable trip to Glenwood Canyon Brewing (our hotel is right next door for cryin' out loud!). I guess we'll see, I never really know where beer is going to take me. Until then, beer on, and beer often.
Cheers!
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