Obscure historical styles seem to be gaining more traction
among craft brewers. There was a time
when practically every style of beer could be considered “obscure” amidst the
homogenous American brewing landscape, many of which have gained substantial
footing & a renewed life in today’s climate – like the anachronistic “India
Pale Ale”, for instance. Thank the
benevolent beer gods we now have hundreds (thousands?) of barleywines, stouts,
pale ales, witbiers, saisons, tripels, et al. brewed stateside. American brewers have flexed their creative
muscles with these styles, continuing their evolution – I believe in the
evolution of beer at least as much as its “authenticity”. You think the English preferred their porters
sour? One might argue that the “traditional”
English porter enjoyed a tartness, but this was a side effect of less advanced
storage, not exactly a desired flavor.
My guess is that most would have preferred their porter sour-free, given
the option.
It’s an interesting conceit to try to recreate “accidents”
in beer. A couple examples come to mind:
New Glarus brewed a “traditional” sour porter some time ago; & just this
past spring, Full Pint & Lavery collaborated on an “old world” IPA, made with
brettanomyces to simulate the effects of outdated preservation methods. A curious venture, trying to recreate what,
by all accounts, would have occurred by accident in the old days, but it’s an
intriguing one nonetheless. There’s that
question of “authenticity” again: how do you capture & synthesize
chaos? And why try to un-control what those who dealt with it
“authentically” probably desperately wanted to
control?
By the same token, the question arises as to whether brewers
are embracing the idea of “happy accidents” a little too happily. Part of me fears that, with the rising
popularity of sour & wild beers, brewers may start to feel they have carte
blanch to release whatever beer happens to get contaminated or screwed up in
some other way. We’ve seen way too many
barrel-aged beers fall prey to insidious bugs.
Deschutes’ Abyss from 2009 was notorious for infection, to the point
that they offered refunds in what must have been a big money-loser, not to
mention a public embarrassment. Sours
are hot – why not just slap a “wild ale” label on that mother & sell it to
the super-geeks? Call me old-fashioned,
but I still feel like there ought to be some intentionality in the final
product – a sour ale should begin as a sour, not get derailed &
reconceptualized along the way. As
always, though, I’m happy to have my mind changed.
Back to the idea of “authenticity” & the fervor for
historical styles: digging into the annals of beer history, craft brewers have
come up with increasingly obscure ones.
Maybe spurred by Dogfish Head’s Ancient Ales series, maybe by Randy
Mosher’s book Radical Brewing,
brewers seem eager to resurrect & tackle recipes for these esoteric
novelties. Proposed revisions to the
BJCP guidelines include Sahti, Gose, Lichtenhainer, Gratzer/Grodziskie,
Kentucky Common, & Pre-Prohibition Porter in their “Historical”
Category. Granted, there’s a thirst for
exploration at work here, & part of me finds it exciting that these styles
are being unearthed & played with.
Another part of me wonders, though, how much is lost in translation,
& how the American beer scene can really know about something from a bygone
era & culture. What BJCP judge feels
they’re well-versed enough in Sahti to judge it? How many commercial examples of Lichtenhainer
are even out there now? There’s such an
effort to resurrect & catalog all these defunct styles, but who has the
authority to reach consensus as to what a Kentucky Common “should” taste
like? There was a dust-up between the
Brewers’ Association & consummate beer historian Ron Pattinson over the
latter’s classification of Gratzer, with the authoritative BA ultimately
conceding & changing their guidelines.
There are not a tremendous number of Gosen (an arcane German sour wheat
with salt) on the market, but it’s a style that’s beginning to trend up, &
the overwhelming majority are made in the US.
My bet is that very few Germans
know what a Gose is (aside from a river), & of the handful of Gosen I’ve
had, only one has been German. It seems
strange that most of the drinkers who may be trying these brews for the first
time are given practically no old world examples as benchmarks, creating a sort
of weird echo chamber with no baseline.
Personally, these old, obscure styles fascinate me; it’s a
cool undertaking trying to recreate something that exists only as a recipe,
maybe even pieced together from archaeological findings. It’s the intersection of brewing &
anthropology. Dogfish Head’s experiments
in this vein usually yield some interesting results, but they seem to be very
upfront about their beers being based on
an old recipe, with some tweaks to make it relatively palatable & recognizable
to modern drinkers. To this day, I can
say I’ve never had an authentic Sahti.
To see an actual trend of brewers adopting these old styles that few
have heard of & almost none have tried, & then calling it a Broyhan, for instance, seems like a stretch. Who knows?
Maybe they’re hitting the nail right on the head, & that’s exactly
what this extinct brew tasted like way back when. And sometimes it’s fine to just let the past
be the past. Good beer is good beer, no
doubt, but vying for authenticity can be a slippery slope. And, of course, it all depends on how much
weight you give to “authenticity” in the first place.
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