Jack's Abby: Bringin' Lager Back

A year or so ago there were rumblings about craft lager’s “rise”.  The forerunners of this great movement saw that lager had been on the upswing, & called for more craft brewers to take on bottom-fermented brewing.  Um…hello?  How about PA?  Our collective craft brewers can boast the majority of the decorated craft lagers in the country.  Here in Pittsburgh, we’ve got Penn Brewing, the state’s oldest craft brewer that used to deal almost exclusively in lagers, and Church, who are also no slouches in that department, having brought home numerous medals for their Pious Monk Dunkel.  Across the state, Victory Prima Pils, Stoudts Pils, Troegs Sunshine Pils, Sly Fox Pikeland Pils, and Penn Kaiser Pils are on many short lists for some of the best US-made pilsners around.  So as far as a “lager revolution” goes – welcome to the Craft Lager State, people!

This place somewhere in New England was catching some attention, though, for brewing all lagers.  Big deal, right?  Been there, done that.  They’d get mentioned alongside Alchemist, Lawson’s, & even Hill Farmstead for places to watch in the upper Northeast.  Okay, some mighty fine company, but I still didn’t think it worth paying much mind.  What really grabbed me - & a lot of others – by the collar was this: this place entered a barleywine competition & came in first.  Jack’s Abby, out of Framingham, MA, brewed a 13% ABV barrel-aged “lager wine” that beat every other conventional “barleywine-style ale” in the Cole’s 10^th Annual Barleywine Competition earlier this year.  Lager, boring?  Lager, conventional?  Hell no!

It dawned on me when I heard this that craft lager-brewing could represent a paradigm shift in modern craft brewing, the way that pale ales, top-fermenting yeast, & Cascade hops did in the late ‘70s.  Or at the very least, open up a lot of creative doors.  Lager yeast offers a different flavor profile than ale yeast, so what happens when you apply what’s typically a clean, “backseat” kind of yeast strain & long, cold conditioning to a broader array of ingredients?  We’re seeing what’s happening with the surge in IPLs (of which Jack’s Abby all makes several) – where else could saccharomyces pastorianus take us?  This could also be a big step in the public’s aware of how prominent the role of yeast is in forming flavor & aroma (it’s not all about the hops & malt).

The House is very excited to host the first Jack’s Abby tap takeover on Friday, July 19^th.  As much as I’d love to taste a 13% barrel-aged lager wine, that monster is brewery-only.  But dry your eyes - we’ll have plenty to choose from, with eight of their innovative lagers on tap, including:

Framinghammer, a Baltic porter.  Not everyone realizes that most Baltic porters are made with lager yeast, an evolution of the imperial porters made in the Baltic region over time.  So last time you had Victory’s Baltic Thunder or Duck Rabbit’s Baltic Porter, you were drinking a lager!

Smoke & Dagger, a black lager that straddles the fence between a roasty Schwarzbier & a smoky Rauchbier.

Mass Rising, double India pale lager, with hop additions in the kettle, hopback, & dry-hopping.

Hopstitution, an extra pale lager utilizing a rotating hop profile.  This is #8, featuring Chinook & Lemon Drop.

Sunny Ridge, a more traditional continental pilsner, with a big, herbal Noble hop nose & dry finish.

Jabby Brau, a session lager weighing in at 4.5%, using locally sourced ingredients.

Leisure Time, a spiced wheat lager in the vein of a Belgian witbier, seasoned with coriander, orange peel, lemongrass, & chamomile, with a citrusy hop presence.  Good for deck-drinking, for sure.

Maibock Hurts Like Helles, a traditional springtime specialty, with a golden color & strong malt presence.

So just because we’ve been doing lager forever here in PA doesn’t mean there isn’t new ground to be broken.  Hope you can join us this Friday, & here’s to the continuing evolution of craft beer.

Smell & Context

Ah, parenthood.  It’s an olfactory smorgasbord, right?  Last Saturday was a big reminder for me, as the family & I were on our way back home after grocery shopping.  I don’t know if it was the winding route, or if breakfast was a little too rich, but the little guy’s belly couldn’t take any more & he launched pretty good all over the car seat & himself.  After stripping him down & wiping the child seat off to where it was usable, we continued home to bathe the boy & give the rest of the works a good hosing down. 

My wife took the kiddo inside, which left it to me to unload the groceries & take care of the vomit detail.  Leaning over a barfed-on car seat in a hot garage, you can imagine what the smell was like.  After I go it a whiffs, though, & got over my reflex nausea, it took me somewhere else.  I realized that the smell was not unlike that of a famous local cheese counter.  The deep, funky smell of organic by-products, so repulsive where I was at that moment, could be, in a different context, really delicious & inviting.

It made me think of how many times I’ve smelled something in the context of beer that was pleasant – even delicious – that also sounds disgusting on paper, or in its original context.  How many times I’ve had to qualify a descriptor with “not-in-a-bad-way”.  The big one for a lot of folks is cat urine, that pungent, ammoniacal smell that makes you reel from a litter box, or a Craigslist loveseat.  In a dank IPA, it’s pretty tasty & supports the pine, citrus, & tropical notes very well.  But there’s just no other word for it – “catty” gets thrown around a lot as a light euphemism.  It actually has a chemical identifier (p-methane-8-thiol-3-one). 

Similarly, how often have you caught hints of sulfur, skunk, or even rotting vegetables in a pilsner or pale lager?  It's not uncommon for European-style beers to carry these kind of notes, such that some consumers even demand it.  Folks got used to these smells in imported lagers, packaged in green bottles, & without it they just weren't the same (so I hear).

Evil Twin’s Soft DK, a vanilla stout, was actually born of the joys of new parenthood.  Jeppe, the Bjergso bro behind Evil Twin, had fathered his first & was changing a diaper when he caught a buttery, vanilla-like aroma.  Voila – Soft Dookie (its original name)!  The beer’s very tasty, but can be a little challenging if drank with its origin story - & accompany inspiration – floating around in your head.

The world of sour & wild beers really opens up this experience – think of all the funky, organic smells created by wild yeast & bacteria.  A wild ale can yield notes of mushroom, sauerkraut, musky sweat, barnyard, enteric smells – there’s so much possibility.  On some level, it’s because they are actually fermented with similar organisms, the way that Limburger cheese emulates armpit because it contains the same bacteria that causes B.O.  In real life, in their “natural habitats”, these odors repel us - & for good reason.  Amid the background of a complex, earthy beer, with other balancing factors, they can add to the depth & richness of flavor, heightening the experience. 

I still can’t say that a vomit-flavored beer appeals to me (though I’ve tried a few of my own creation that have come close), or that I look for notes of sewage when I bring the glass to my nose.  But these gross-on-paper facets are just one more piece of what makes beer cool & can give it character.  So many things go into making a good beer more than the sum of its parts, even if they aren’t always pretty in &  of themselves.