Enjoy by...? It's Complicated

Love it.  Hate it.  Like it.  Don’t like it.  Thumbs up.  Thumbs down.

Sometimes enjoyment can be complicated.  It’s convenient to think of things in black & white terms.  It’s something of a luxury.  But life can have shades of gray, & often we don’t think in terms of absolutes but levels of nuance, with multiple considerations to make.  Most of the time, life is more complex than good or bad.

And by “life”, of course I mean “beer drinking”.  As creatures given to categorization, evaluation, & discrimination, our nature leads us to rate most things that come our way.  And by “things”, of course I mean “beers”.  We have gut instincts that automatically attract or repel, & those instincts are tempered by conscious analysis.  A bartender puts a beer on the bar in front of us, & we have a reaction to its color, clarity, composition, cleanliness.  Smelling the beer allows us to refine our opinion a little more, tasting even more so, etc.  By the end of the glass, we decide whether we like it enough to have another, or to move on.  Our opinion is based on the beer’s perceived pros & cons, how much we liked the various facets it presented, basically how it made us feel.  

We might round up or down to conclude that we enjoyed a beer, or not, but there’s more to the story.  “The flavor was there, but it felt thin & watery.”  “Nice smell, but it had a nasty aftertaste.”  “Great beer, I just can’t put away more than one.”  You rate this beer a 3, & this one a 2.85.  It boils down to enjoying beer A more than beer B, but there’s a spectrum & so much is relative.

I believe that beer itself is an acquired taste, & there are plenty of colors on the beer palette that also take some getting used to.  The roast of a stout, the bitterness of hops, the pucker of a lambic - these can all be turn-offs at first, but grow on people to the point that they enjoy what those flavors bring to the table.  So challenge can be part of the equation, as long as it pays off & you’re justly rewarded.

What if you respect or appreciate a beer more than you enjoy it?  This concept isn’t foreign to a lot of art forms - I appreciate the energy & creative chaos in, say, free jazz, but do I enjoy it?  Is the sound inherently pleasurable or gratifying?  Some of art’s value can lie in it being difficult.  It makes us sit up, or moves us in a way that might not be comfortable.  Can beer do the same thing?

Knowing the origin of gueuze, the far-out process in the beer’s creation, brought my respect for it to a new level.  Were I tasting it blind, I might have been turned off, but the context gave me pause to reflect & consider elements that may have gone unnoticed.  I took the challenging elements into perspective, & realized that the acidity, the funk, the earthy nature of it were not flaws, but a parts of the process that the brewer/blender was intentionally presenting.  

 I remember trying Full Pint’s Rye Rebellion for the first time.  I think it was my first rye stout, & definitely my first rye barrel-aged rye imperial stout.  It was dark: dark color, dark, bold flavors, so deeply roasted, a little tannic, thick & strong with almost no balancing sweetness.  Unyielding, uncompromising.  There was nothing “off” about it, it was just a stoic monolith of a beer.  And I believe that’s exactly as the brewer intended.  The beer said to me “I am as I am.”  I can’t say my enjoyment for it was as great as my appreciation of it (though I didn’t NOT enjoy it, either), & that experience has stayed with me since.

I’ve come to have the same sort of relationship & understanding with the beers of Draai Laag.  I see them almost as works of abstract art, to be engaged on their own terms.  There are only a few Draai Laag beers that hit me on that “pleasure” level: Aureus & St. Angus are both rich & dessert-like, & though they’re not lacking in complexity, are also just plain tasty.  Same with Gouden Brugge, perhaps their most relatable offering.  

So much of their line-up, though, I find stimulating, intriguing.  They’re like Cubist paintings or David Lynch films in a glass.  They take unusual, sometimes disparate elements & combine them in ways that come together to form a whole.  They may clash a bit, they may have jagged edges, but I always get the sense that they’re exactly as lop-sided, angular, or surreal as the brewer intends.  So often I come away from a sip of one of their beers not necessarily wanting to down another right away, but to contemplate what’s in the glass.  I take a taste, let it do its thing, & just reflect on what it is the beer (& by degree, the brewer) wants me to see.  They’re beers that make me go “Hmm..” more than “Mmm…”, & therein lies their beauty

Consider, then, that there’s another kind of dimension on which we can fathom beer, that adds to our overall experience.  What is the beer showing you, & what if it’s more than “just” sensory gratification?  What if it’s getting to your brain through your nose & tongue?  It’s one more aspect of art in which brewers are just beginning to scratch the surface.  

To add to the elevation (here comes the pitch part), The House is thrilled to be hosting Draai Laag for a pairing dinner on April 23rd, during Pittsburgh Craft Beer Week.  We can’t wait to see what Chef Brian creates to accompany these brews.  The gustatory fur will fly.  It promises to be a truly unique experience.

Top 5 New Breweries!

With the beer scene growing at its current rate, it can be hard to stay up-to-speed on whose wares are worth tasting & who can remain in the middle of the pack.  No worries!  We’ve compiled a listicle of the top 5 breweries for the serious beer enthusiast to watch.

Pearls Before Swine Artisanal Fermentarium, Gilead, Maine

Owner/founder/brewcrafter Trent Moyer has made “happy accidents” his raison d’etre at this tiny farmhouse brewery in rural New England.  After brewing his first batch of wort, Moyer called it a day & went to bed, only to awaken a few hours later & realize that he’d forgotten to pitch the yeast!  Panicked, he shot out of bed, hit his head on a beam in the barn loft, & fell into a coma.  Upon emerging two years later, he tasted the beer & found it delightfully tart, earthy, & rustic, with a house character approaching enteric.  Moyer jokes that his farmhouse brewery is “more like an outhouse brewery”.  We get the sense that he’s only kind of kidding.  If you’re into small-batch, wild, artisanal beers in bottles that stuff smeared on them, check out Pearls Before Swine’s funky saison-style ale, Solipsism; wild-fermented table beer En Flusikc Lthdiklks; or the experimental Urge, Urge, Ever the Procreant Urge of the World.

River Dog Mountain Brewing, Greeley, Colorado

This innovative microbrewery is rocking craft beer to its foundation, with handmade libations that take balance to new extremes while capturing the essence of outdoor living!  Tear into their wickedly inoffensive Upstream Blonde; their aggressively moderate Gone Fishin’ Amber; or their Paddle Harder Copper, with just the right amount of both malt & hops.  As if these boldly subtle ales weren’t distinct enough, River Dog Mountain’s eye-catching labels, with hand-painted scenes of waterfalls, rocks, & various North American wildlife, are sure to make them stand head & shoulders above the fray.

Aggro Necktat Brewing, Chula Vista, California

Duck & cover, dweebs, because Aggro Knuckle is gonna bust you in the jaw with alpha acid!  This in-your-face, IBU-heavy, verbally abusive brewery started as a fight club, & now wants to take the brawl to your taste buds!  Be prepared to cry “Uncle!” when you get a face-load of the 100% Zeus-hopped DIPA Hop Proctologist; the 50/50 malt extract/hop extract blend Curb Hopped; or their triple IPA, No Pussies Allowed, brewed with real sweat & blood instead of strike water.  You won’t know what hit you!  

Beaver Patrol Brewing, Lubbock, Texas

What would craft beer be without a dose of ribald humor?  No one would accuse the crew at Beaver Patrol of taking themselves too seriously, & they pour some of that playful, low brow, crypto-misogynist spirit into every bottle.  Take a gander at their Udderly Full-Bodied Milk Stout; leer at their Master Bator’s Doppelbock; & get ready to salivate over their tart plum ale, Prune-Tang.  And if you think the names are full of double-entendre fun, just wait til you get a load of the label illustrations.  Wink!

#walezbro Brewing, Chicago, Illinois

These guys really cut to the chase, brewing only beer that makes hardcore beer geeks lose their shit.  Every bottle is numbered, limited, & can only be obtained through sharing in line at a release for a slightly less-hyped beer.  The names are all acronyms &, to be honest, we don’t know what they stand for.  We’ve heard good things about CYRY & hope to someday try it (though, apparently, the coconut fades, so maybe the “C” stands for coconut); a buddy of ours has some HWTCB coming, which is supposed to be amazing, but you really need to lay it down for a few years; & to really one-up your friends with “generosity” at that next epic bottle share, whip out EGK & its variants FREGK, UREGK, & TAMEGKWP for a side-by-side tasting.  #walezbro is also known for its strict quantity-control measures: every bottle that goes untraded after 48 hours must be drain-poured.  Beer porn ahead!

So don’t get left behind, folks – start seeking out these exciting new breweries that are really going places.  There’s still plenty of room in the pool!

The Uncanny Foresight of Oskar Blues

Sometimes you’ve gotta take a roundabout route to get back to where you started.  Sometimes things are popular because they’re just good ideas to begin with. 

Oskar Blues started the shift to canning craft beer.  They happen to make really good beer, too, & that’s by no means beside the point.  Of course they want to be known for their beer, but everyone knows them because they made cans legitimate as a package for that good beer.  The fame that they earned is because they make good beer, and they put it in a can.  The quality of the beer is necessarily an equal part of that equation, but people didn’t always realize it.

Canned craft beer was an oxymoron until these guys started doing it.  Oskar Blues started as a grill in 1997, then started brewing on-site in 1999, & when a canning system manufacturer approached them a few years later, they said “Sure, what the hell?” & history was made.  That was 2004.  How bizarre was it to consider canned craft beer eleven years ago?  I didn’t buy it myself at first.  The can seemed like a gimmick, & the name ‘Dale’s Pale Ale’ was too corny (& remains endearingly so).  But the beer – I tried it, & the beer was good!  So I thought we might see this one decent beer made by a company I’d never heard of, in a can.  It would remain a novelty, & that’s it.  I remember hearing the guys on Craft Beer Radio say that the cans didn’t even register on their visual field at first – they’d scan the shelves & their eyes would automatically pass over them, a sort of subconscious aversion to the format.  That’s how little respect cans garnered for the good beer vets – at first…

Then Oskar Blues stuck around.  They rolled out Gordon (now called G’Knight), a solid, strong red, & Old Chub, a strong, malty Scotch-style.  We saw the first ever canned imperial stout in Ten Fidy, with a body that fit the name.  These were not light beers for slamming & crushing the can on your forehead.  These were serious beers with some depth & personality.  A few double IPAs followed: Gubna & Deviant Dale’s.  And why not throw a pilsner in there, too? 

So the much-maligned can, vessel of the industrial swill so despised by the New Brew Order, found some redemption.  The myths about the metal “tainting” the beer were dispelled.  More & more breweries - & drinkers – found cans to have some significant benefits: lightweight, recyclable, transportable, protective.  More & more breweries adopted cans as a means of packaging (props also to 21^st Amendment as another big, early proponent).  The world’s highest-rated beer is packaged in aluminum, & actually instructs the drinker to imbibe straight from the can!  Boston Beer Company once said they’d never can their beer, but even Jim’s miraculously seen the light. 

And had the beer been crappy, it would’ve stayed a gimmick.  But Dale & the crew make some damn fine brew, & it showed those paying attention that, yes, this can be done!  I want to stress that the beer saved it from being a gimmick, & now it’s just accepted, part of the norm.  Maybe Oskar Blues didn’t realize what they was doing at the time – the way they tell the story, that first system was purchased as kind of a lark.  One could draw parallels to pop art & connecting the high & low, too, but that’s a whole other tangent…

Of course it’s all about the beer.  Which, by the way, we’ll be featuring at our upcoming pairing dinner this Thursday, when we match the beers of Oskar Blues (served out of giant aluminum cans called “kegs”) with some inventive cuisine.  On hand will be their new Pinner Throwback IPA (“Throwback” as in, “I’m going to throw a few back”), low alcohol with a sweetly dank hop profile; the afore-mentioned Old Chub Scotch-style ale, malty, caramelly, with a hint of smoke; Gubna, their imperial IPA made with a mountain of Cascade hops; Ten Fidy, the OG (get it?) of viscous, canned imperial stouts; & a newcomer in their Belgian-style IPA, Icey PA.  Can’t wait to see how Chef Brian’s menu accompanies this line-up!

So whether they like it or not (& I don’ think they mind), Oskar Blues will forever be known for a formal, technical contribution to the movement.  Rest assured, though, it never would have survived without some good liquid to fill it.

Top Shelf Thursday, March 2015: BIG BEER

As with any trend, craze, or movement, craft beer has a pendulum.  On one end of the arc, it swings toward the conservative - sessionability, cleanliness, simplicity, tradition.  This kind of balance is necessary, lest we get too carried away with ourselves & lose our heads.  The boat rocks in an effort to regain stability & find a center.  The force toward sensible ABV, recipe, scope, etc., is natural &, at times, much needed.  Keeps us sane.

But what would the new world of beer be without the other end of the spectrum?  Craft beer was born of a desire for freedom, to break boundaries & shed the oppressive restrictions of the beer-industrial complex, the tight dimensions of old-style lager.  Craft beer just wouldn’t be itself without the big, crazy extremities!  We gotta embrace the bold, the overstated, the indulgent, & flex those creative muscles.  Most of the time, more is still MORE!  We’re House of 1000 Beers, dammit - why not go BIG?  We chose to roll out our BIG BEER Week to celebrate the aspects of beer that make it fun - BIG flavor, BIG ABV, BIG BEER!  Seemed as good a theme for a Top Shelf Thursday tasting as any, so we highlighted some of the BIG BEERS from our selection (okay, I’ll stop with the caps now).

Belgians know big beer, & American-Belgian intersections are ripe for ramping it up.  We started with a style novel to Top Shelf Thursday - Belgian-style IPA.  Clown Shoes’ Muffin Top showcased some in-your-face American hops, shaped into a whole other animal through the use of Belgian yeast, amplifying fruity esters & colliding worlds.  

One of the grandaddies of big beer is barleywine, a style whose name belies its own heft.  The first in a trio of barleywines this evening, Central Waters’ Kosmyk Charlie’s Y2K Catastrophe Ale hit a pleasant niche between hoppy & malty, with a mellowly citric hop profile & some round, full toffee & caramel notes.  Nogne O’s #100 benefited from time spent crossing the ocean along with some “shelf-aging” - the hops transformed from bitter to a kind of peppermint character, holding up the bready malt base well & showing some of the beauty of a maturing strong ale.  And Great Divide’s Old Ruffian gave us a taste of fresh American barleywine, with an assertive bitterness verging on that of an imperial IPA.

A new little sister to an old name, Gulden Draak 9000 Quadruple was brewed in honor of Gulden Draak’s 25th birthday.  This strong Belgian golden was comfortably homey: sweet, fruity, a little hot, a little doughy, landing it snugly in the territory of many classic, well-crafted Belgian ales.

The tasting’s second half was a barrel roll, as so many big beers marry perfectly with wood.  Thirsty Dog’s delicious imperial stout, Siberian Night, warmed us up with bourbon notes coming through from 11 months spent in bourbon barrels.  The second offering of the night from Clown Shoes didn’t disappoint either.  Ride the Lion matched the caramel notes of a Scotch-style wee heavy to the toasted oak & vanilla of the bourbon barrels in which it was aged.

FiftyFifty Brewing’s Eclipse series required some explanation.  This California brewery takes an 11.9% imperial stout brewed with honey, divides the batch up, & ages it in name-linked barrels from different whiskey distilleries.  We tasted Eclipse in barrels previously used for Four Roses bourbon, a delicious pairing that would make a cool exercise when tasted in sequence with others from this line.  And we played hop frog with stout & wee heavy, landing next on Thirsty Dog’s Wulver.  Whereas Ride the Lion had a strong heat intensity to it, Wulver was all about smoothness & seamless blending, finishing with an aftertaste that just went on & on.

And speaking of blending, the final course showed us what happens when you blend two world-class big beers into one delicious package.  Taking parts from bourbon barrel-aged Serpent’s Stout & brandy barrel-aged Angel’s Share, Lost Abbey’s Deliverance drank like a glass of chocolate cordial, bringing a notable heat to the table but letting it play nicely with the deep malt & barrel flavors.  

This tasting was a prelude to our BIG BEER Week, & by the time this sees light, we’ll be well into a fun week of strong, full-bodied, savorable brews.  Thanks to all who came out & raised a glass to the freedom & pleasure that is big beer.

That Super Bowl Ad

There are two kinds of customers that come into our place, & I can often tell what category someone falls into as soon as they walk in the door.  It usually has to do with how they move.  There are those who take their time, look around, want to scope everything out, ask questions.  They tend to move slowly, contemplate decisions.  Maybe they’re new to this & want some suggestions, or tried something they really liked & are looking for something similar, or want to know what’s new.  They’re frequently open to trying something different & know we have plenty of “different”. 

Then there are those who walk in the door, walk straight to the cooler, grab their brand, usually a 12-pack or tallboys, & head straight to the register.  They move quickly, deliberately, & only hesitate if they’re having a hard time visually locating their staple.  The latter group I’ll refer to as “monovores”; the former, “polyvores”.   Monovores know what they like & stick to it.  Why complicate things?  Polyvores want to expand & see what’s out there.  Maybe they’re just breaking into the wide world of beer, or maybe they’re already craft drinkers & are just mulling over the myriad options presented to them.  If you’re reading this, you probably know who you are.

I choose the (made-up) term “polyvore” as opposed to “omnivore” because a polyvore doesn’t necessarily drink everything.  They do, however, deviate from course at least once in a while.  Maybe someone drinks Classic Ice 90% of the time, but will pick up a Pumking in fall, or a Framboise once in a while.  They’re a polyvore.  And there are no craft drinkers who aren’t polyvores, who stick to just Abita Turbo Dog & nothing else, for instance.  Monovores can become polyvores, but the transition almost never works the other way.

We all know that ad - the one Budweiser aired during the Super Bowl.  That ad pissed a lot of people off.  Hell, it still kind of pisses me off.  But I don’t think it was designed to piss people off, at least not in the way it seemed.  It was aimed at the monovores, and was a call to arms, an appeal to the core.  It aimed to divide, celebrating “us” by contrasting and alienating “them”.    It’s a tactic used in politics constantly, by the Tea Party AND the Occupy movement.  This ad was a rally, a DNC or RNC.  The Two Americas.  This is why you like us, this is what we stand for.  This is why you are us.  And not them. 

Polyvores (like me) bristled at being classified as an “other”, dismissed wholesale as being ponderous & navel-gazing.  But it really wasn’t saying anything negative about craft beer, just reaffirming what everyone knows already & throwing it into sharp relief, proudly.  “This is what we’re about, take it or leave it.  THEY can do what they want.  That’s not US, man.”  And it’s nothing that the craft beer movement hasn’t done a MILLION times already.  How many times have you heard that craft beer is “not just for getting drunk” or “not just to slam”, which implies that pale American lager IS those things.  American lager still has a flavor, & people drink it for plenty of reasons more dignified than the craft world gives them credit.  Since its birth, craft brewing has had to paint big beer as an “other” to sell itself & gain exposure.  To some extent, this implicated big beer’s fans by association, & there’s at least as much of a vibe of exclusion in the perception of craft beer – what it isn’t – than trying to appeal to the monovores.  “We don’t drink like THOSE idiots.  WE CARE about how our beer tastes.”

This ad gives the polyvores a taste of their own medicine.  But it’s also a validation that the “other” is significant enough to be worth reinforcing the division.  Craft is a threat, & big beer needs to rally the base.  By implicitly acknowledging the threat (& by being dicks about it), Budweiser may have actually opened a few people up to craft.  Believe it or not, since that ad aired we’ve gotten requests for Budweiser Pumpkin Peach Beer from people who like the sound of it!  I’m sorry, Budweiser doesn’t make a pumpkin peach beer, BUT can I suggest… 

I find that comedians can often make my point in a way more poignant & succinct way.  Patton Oswalt’s one of my favorites, & one of his most known bits is skewering KFC’s Famous Bowls.  This bit got so much traction that a magazine interviewing the CEO of Yum Brands (which owns KFC) asked how he felt about Patton calling the menu item a “failure pile in a sadness bowl”; the CEO gave a blithe response about how he wishes Mr. Oswalt could “see the smile on people’s faces when they dig into one of our Famous Bowls”.  In a follow-up bit, Patton recounted this interview, with the quip that “I’m actually on the CEO’s side.  All he had to do was say, ‘Who the f*** is Patton Oswalt?  I’m a BILLIONAIRE!’”  See the parallel?  He says it so much better than I do.  I wonder if Budweiser did themselves a disservice by not just continuing to ignore the threat & pretend it didn’t exist, at least on a marketing level.  It’s still the status quo & may have just rocked its own boat.  “Don’t think about a pink elephant, Bud fans.”

Two other points before I wrap this up:  The ad wasn’t hypocritical.  It was an ad for Budweiser, not Anheuser-Busch InBev (& its acquired ex-craft brands).  It was just promoting the “us, not them” angle while a whole bunch of “them” happened to be watching.  And yes, the “brewed the hard way” slogan is bullshit, as illustrated by this counter-ad.

Thanks for tuning in for another timely blog post.  We’re happy to accommodate both the polys & the monos, & trust that you know where you stand.

Top Shelf Thursday, February 2015: Revenge of Valentine's Day

Shaping a tasting theme around a holiday is always a fun challenge.  Each holiday has different associations with it, some of which are more or less conducive to curating a line-up.  Halloween’s easy: chocolate, evil.  We covered that last October – AND the previous October.  This past November was our first “Thanksgiving”-themed tasting, centered around different food stuffs in beer.  There hadn’t been a Valentine-themed Top Shelf Thursday in a couple years, & then we covered chocolate & wine, in the various ways it presents in beer (wine hybrids, wine barrel-aged, barleywine).  Figured it was about time to recycle the Valentine’s theme, but since Halloween was not long ago, decided to push other aspects unique to Valentine’s Day – wine again, but also flowers, & love.  With a small group of beer lovers in attendance, we were all set for a magical evening.

The first in our bouquet of beers for the evening was also one of the few gruits we’ve featured at Top Shelf Thursday: Fraoch Heather Ale from Scotland’s Williams Brothers Brewing.  Based on a recipe millennia old, this ale was low on the hopping, seasoned instead with heather & bogmyrtle, another flowering shrub, & ginger, coming across dry & herbal with a definite ginger twist.

Lost Abbey’s Devotion Ale fit in name, though the devotion referenced is more of the monastic spirit.  A tribute to beers made by Belgium’s hop field-adjacent abbeys, this pale ale struck a nice balance between Belgian esters & a bright, floral character. 

We just got in AleSmith’s My Bloody Valentine less than a week ago, so I couldn’t NOT throw it into the flight, right?  A cousin of Evil Dead Red, this west coast amber ale had prominent piney hop notes, supported nicely by a malt profile that brought subtle dark chocolate & caramel flavors.

Hops are the female flowers of the eponymous plant, so I’d feel remiss if there weren’t a couple IPAs in the mix (plus I just wanted to try these).  Hardywood Park’s RVA IPA had a restrained bitterness & hop character for an IPA that said “east coast” from top to bottom.  Only fitting – the hops for this beer were sourced from the community, grown by Virginia home hop-growers in their own gardens!  

And Stone & Smuttynose joined forces to resurrect the recipe for the original Ballantine IPA, from shortly after Prohibition (WAY before IPAs were all the rage).  Using maize & some old school hop varieties like Cluster & Bullion, Cluster’s Last Stand was a cool look at what the granddaddy of modern IPAs might’ve tasted like.

The remainder of the night was spent in wine territory of one stripe or another, starting with Allagash’s Interlude.  A Belgian strong with a secondary fermentation by brettanomyces & aged in red wine barrels, this definitely satisfied our sour-&-funky pangs for the evening.  And we dug into another collaboration with Terra Incognita (get it – dug?), from Sierra Nevada & Boulevard.  The third iteration of a beer originally brewed for the SAVOR festival, this was quite a mélange, with a portion of dry-hopped young, blended with ales aged in wine & bourbon barrels.  I believe there was some estate-grown pale malt & a wild yeast in there as well, but the result was a well-rounded, malty beer, somewhere between a weizenbock & a barleywine, with a nicely tempered bourbon edge.

We hit the slopes with a pair of barleywines next, first with the Quebecois Brasserie Dieu du Ciel!  Their American-style barleywine, Solstice d’Hiver, had developed some wintergreen notes from the roughly half-year the brewery ages it prior to release.  Uinta’s Cock-Eyed Cooper, aged in bourbon barrels, was sturdy & robust enough to stand up to the wood.  The group concensus was that both of these could have used a bit more age to mellow out the alcohol heat – good candidates for cellaring!

And we landed on some very solid ground with Not the Stoic, a Belgian-style quad from Deschutes with a fraction aged in pinot noir & rye whiskey barrels.  Fans of Belgian quads found this one just right, not too sweet, & sporting both pinot & rye notes very well.

Thanks to all who enjoyed a most romantic Top Shelf Thursday.  Here’s hoping that you spent Valentine’s Day with that special someone, even if that someone is a glass of great beer.  See you in March!

Vanishing Eisbock

The romantic in me bemoans that there are few styles of beer that are truly seasonal.  With modern temperature control & preservation methods, brewers can pretty much make any type of beer any time they want, independent of climate or agricultural cycle.  Some styles can be traced back to their more “Earth rhythm” roots – saisons fermenting at warmer temperatures, for instance – & some just make sense based on what people want at a particular time of year.  A dark, boozy, spicy beer just feels right with Christmas.  4^th of July barbecue?  Not so much. 

A few styles come to mind as actually being seasonally, meteorologically dependent.  We covered harvest ales, made with freshly picked, undried hop cones, here.  The yeast & bugs that get lambic knocked up have less competition during the cold months, so they’re typically brewed from October to May (thanks, MoreBeer.com!).  And though, in this day & age, freezers forego the need for naturally freezing ambient temperatures, Eisbock may be the style most connected to its seasonal context. 

Legend (per The Oxford Companion to Beer) has it that Eisbock was born of a happy accident.  A Germany brewery worker was instructed to move a barrel of bock out of a cold part of the building to a warmer one.  He forgot – with delicious results.  The next morning, the beer was found encapsulated in a block of ice, having expanded & busted out of the barrel.  Fearing it was ruined, the brewer tapped into it & tasted the beer inside.  Eureka!  The freezing process had isolated a portion of the water, concentrating the sugars & alcohol & leaving a strong, sweet beer for the taking.  Its nickname is “Bavarian ice cream”, & before modern freezing & refrigeration, could only be made in the frigid winter months.  A very special beer. 

There’s some debate about whether beers that undergo this process can truly be called “beers”, as it’s seen as a form of distillation.  There are those who argue that, for a drink to qualify as beer, alcohol content should be achieved solely through fermentation.  Remember the arms race a few years ago, between BrewDog & a number of German breweries, to brew the strongest beer?  Those were all made with freeze distilling, squeezing out that meddling water & squeezing the ABV higher & higher (60% sounds about right).  Sam Adams boasts that Utopias is still the strongest beer made by fermentation alone.

But Eisbock still fits in the beer family according to most of the so-sayers who write style guidelines: the BJCP, the Brewer’s Association, etc.  It’s a beer most beer folks know about, but I bet you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who’s had one lately.  Eisbocks rarely show up on our shelves – Schneider’s Aventinus Weizen-Eisbock makes an occasional appearance, & once in a loooong while we’ll get some from Kulmbacher.  Voodoo’s Trapped Under Eisbock came & went a few years ago.  That’s all I can think of.  In my life, I believe I’ve had three, myself (Kuhnhehn’s Raspberry Eisbock was a treat after buying my first house). 

So yeah, it’s strange to see a style so well-known with so little real world representation.  It brings to mind the topic of disappearing styles, & what beers might be on the endangered list or next to go extinct.  Before being resurrected by craft brewers, many styles had vanished from the landscape, presumably by natural selection.  Berliner Weiss, Gose, Grisette, Grodziskie – styles that are making a little bit of a comeback were comprised of just a handful of obscure commercial examples til a few years ago.  Makes me wonder if others will be phased out with time, & fifty years from now some craft brewer or home brewer will read about dry stout or ESB & want to take a crack at reviving this arcane animal.  Part of the beauty of having such a decentralized movement is that people are free to make whatever they want, but there’s definitely some stream-lining, a slow flow toward slightly more conformity (how many kinds of IPAs exist now?).  Some styles may get left behind, or get an identity makeover.  But that’s evolution, right?  I look forward to the day when we’re able to order an Eisbock we haven’t stocked before, but before then it’s up to some brewer to make one. 

Which brings me to a point I meant to make at the get-go – & it’s frickin’ freezing out!  Until someone takes another stab, I guess I could try making my own.