Wicked Good Beer

With the House’s annual Halloween Party less than a week away, we’re all getting excited.  Halloween is such a fun holiday, & we at the House always try to step up & put on a good show.  This year, we’ll be celebrating by tapping 7 pumpkin beers, some never before seen at the House.  The costume contest is always a good time, with some cool prizes up for grabs.  And starting October 22^nd, we’ll be giving away a Rogue Dead Guy Ale glass when you order Dead Guy on tap.  With each pour of Dead Guy, you can be entered into a drawing for a Rogue Dead Guy homebrew kit, so you can clone your own Dead Guy in your homebrew laboratory! 

All this Halloween talk got me thinking about some beers blessed (or cursed) with creepy names that are also scary good, to boot:

Night of the Living Stout, by Full Pint Brewing, an homage to Pittsburgh’s zombie heritage with really cool label art.  We’ll also be tapping this strong, roasty stout at our Halloween party!

Pumking, Southern Tier’s perennial favorite, is considered by many to be the standard-bearer for imperial pumpkin ales.  Legend has it that the ‘Pumking’ name refers to a wicked pagan harvest spirit, & this devilish ale will be making an appearance during our party as well.

Nosferatu , from Great Lakes Brewing Co., has been categorized as an imperial red ale or a stock ale, depending on the source.  Named after the original film vampire, this beer has a “bite” from the use of pungent Simcoe hops.

Hobgoblin’s brewery – Wychwood – should tip you off that this is a beer with something sinister in mind.  This dark English mild won’t turn you white, but it’s enough to cause some mischief.

Ichabod, from New Holland Brewing, is an ale brewed with pumpkin & spices.  Taking its namesake from the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, this is one pumpkin ale to lose your head over!

The Beast, a big Belgian-style Grand Cru from Avery Brewing, is seductive & mixes truth with lies, namely in how smooth it is despite its 16.8% ABV.

Maudite might not sound frightening to us English-speakers, but translates to “the damned” in Quebecois.  Unibroue named this Belgian-style dark ale after a folk legend in which eight lumberjacks make a deal with the devil, & are depicted on the label rowing to the underworld.

Witch’s Wit caught a lot of flack for Lost Abbey from the Wiccan community due to its label, which depicts a witch-burning.  Far from soulless, the beer inside will still cast a spell on you.

Honorable mentions go to Helltown (makers of Insidious, Mischievous, Sinister, Devious, & Extra Sinful Bitter), Fantome, Reaper Ales, Surly Darkness, Three Floyds Dark Lord & Zombie Dust, AleSmith Evil Dead Red, Clown Shoes Vampire Slayer, Duvel, Lucifer, about a hundred other devil-themed beers, & plenty others I’m not thinking of.  So grab a good brew & let the dark side come out & play for a spell.  See you October 27^th for the party, & don’t forget your costume!

The Other Barrel

Oak & barrel-aging has become a standard in American brewers’ repertoire.  What was probably a given in the days before stainless steel packaging has turned into an artisanal statement among today’s craft brewers, & for good reason.  Aging the right beer on oak or bourbon barrels can contribute so much flavor: vanilla, caramel, whiskey, tannins, nutty, toasty.  Delicious.  Brewers often choose bold, robust styles that the wood can compliment: the original Bourbon County Stout from Goose Island remains a standard-bearer of the style to this day, & aside from imperial stouts, brewers age barleywines, Scotch ales, double IPAs, & other strong styles in wood to elevate the beer to that next level.  Whiskey barrels seem the perfect match to many of these rich, full styles, & represent a hallmark in American experimentation.

But there exists a whole other dimension of barrel-aged beers, one with a history much longer than the bourbon-barrel behemoths.  As I sat down to write today’s blog, I sipped on a glass on Stillwater’s Barrel-Aged Stateside Saison.  The beer I enjoyed was complex, tart, earthy, spicy, hot, challenging, & quite different from, say, a Bourbon County Stout.  My attention shifted to the vast world of barrels used in brewing outside of American oak.  In Belgium, for instance, barrel-aging a beer brings about an entirely different character than the ones we American beer drinkers are used to: dryer, more sour, more vinous.  The barrel’s previous inhabitants have so much influence on the product – in the case of the Stateside, French Chardonnay.  This saison shared a lot of characteristics with a dry wine or even champagne.  A barrel’s resident microflora – bacteria, yeast, other ‘critters’ – can develop, really altering the fermentation process & characteristics of the beer once it’s exposed to them.  So much of lambics’ & Flemish sours’ personality blossoms in the barrel from its contact with these benevolent little beasties.  And, as the barrels are not airtight, oxidation plays a part in transforming the flavors over time, contributing notes of sherry, dark fruit, even a pleasant ‘mustiness’.

While the more ubiquitous robust oak character will probably remain the dominant one in American brewing (no complaints here), more & more American brewers are using oak to add sour & wild components.  Russian River’s excellent wild ales all use barrel-aging.  Jolly Pumpkin stores 100% of their beers in barrels, which are host to their resident strains of critters.  And locally, Helltown has been cultivating sour ales in French wine barrels since about the time they opened (can’t wait to try these!).  These beers are slow in the making, take some care, & are acquired tastes, so they’re not the cheapest & definitely not ‘crowd-pleasers’.  But for many who venture into this ‘alternate dimension’ of barrels, the unique appeal of these beers is hard to shake & can be deeply rewarding.  So take some time to consider the other wood, & you might find something beautiful you never knew was there.

Old School Pumpkin Beer

Being early fall, pumpkin beers are on a lot of beer-drinkers’ minds & palates lately.  The House just got a “second wave” of pumpkin ales in this past week, including some perennial favorites (Southern Tier Pumking, Dogfish Head Punk’n, Weyerbacher Imperial Pumpkin) along with a few newcomers (Elysian The Great Pumpkin, Evil Genius’s varieties).  Even the more “softcore” among us gravitate to the rich, spicy, warming flavors, which are really more evocative of pumpkin pie & the spices used than actual pumpkin: nutmeg, cinnamon, allspice, vanilla, ginger.  Locals East End even brewed a beer last year that openly embraced that irony, brewed with all the seasonings & no pumpkin, & named “Nunkin” to reflect that assertion.

Pumpkin ale wasn’t always this way, a spicy, sweet, cozy beer.  18^th century colonists in America used pumpkins as a pure source of starch & sugars (of which there are plenty) in their beer, taking the gourd as a substitute for barley when supplies were low.  Flipping through The Oxford Companion to Beer (thanks once again to eternal source Garrett Oliver), I came across an old recipe for pumpkin ale – from 1771, to be exact – that made no mention of malts at all.  It’s full of old timey English, which referred to pumpkins as “pompions”:

RECEIPT FOR POMPION ALE

Let the Pompion be beaten in a Trough and pressed as Apples.  The expressed Juice is to be boiled in a Copper a considerable Time and carefully skimmed that there may be no Remains of the fibrous Part of the Pulp.  After that Intention is answered let the Liquor be hopped cooled fermented &c. as Malt Beer.

This “ale” is essentially pumpkin juice, fermented & hopped, closer to a cider than a beer.  One wonders how this kind of drink would stand up nowadays, served alongside the modern, evolved form of pumpkin ale.  It would be interesting, no doubt, but probably something worth a few sips, a few “hmm”s, & then headed for the dump bucket.  As fun an experiment as this trip to the past would be, I’m sure folks are happy that pumpkin ale is where it is today. 

In honor of 21^st century pumpkin beer, we’ll be tapping no less than seven on Oct. 27^th for our Halloween party, some of which will be brand new to the House.  In addition, there’ll be other festivities, like prize giveaways & a costume contest.  So come join us for an old school good time while celebrating the new!