Beau’s All Natural Ales and
Kissmeyer Beer ”Venskab”
I met Steve
Beauchesne, Matthew O’Hara and the rest of the Beau’s gang at the Craft
Brewers’ Conference in San Francisco in May 2011, and over a decent number of
beers at the 21st Amendment Brewpub during a memorable afternoon, we basically
created the outlines of the recipe as well as the name - the Danish word for
friendship – for the collaborative beer, which we agreed should be brewed in
connection with the Beau’s Oktoberfest later that year.
Based on our
mutual fancies, we decided to brew a Belgian Style tripel, and as it is always
my desire to give all my collaboration beers a unique and local touch, we had a
discussion on what typical Ontario
ingredients that would work well in a tripel. After another couple of
beers the outline of the recipe was there: A classic dry tripel slightly spiced
with Ontario buckmyrtle and hawthorn (quite common in Denmark) that in its
fresh form gives a very nice tangy tartness. As the ultimate finishing touch, we
decided that the beer should be barrel aged in used Ontario ice-wine barrels.
We were all so excited about the prospects of a great and very unique beer that
we decided to have another pint....
In the time
leading up to my visit to Vankleek Hill for the Oktoberfest and the
collaborative brewing, Matt and I corresponded intensely in order to finalize
all the tiny details of the recipe and the process. Matt had to give up finding
fresh organic hawthorn, so we settled for some dried stuff from Bulgaria (!), as
the search for the ice-wine barrels went on.
Everything
but the barrels was in place when we met on brewday, the 1st of October 2011,
in the brewery in Vankleek Hill to start brewing the beer. Our aim was the
following: a subtly spicy, phenolic, slightly citrusy,
slighly tart and very dry (dryness enhanced by sugar additions during
fermentation)Belgian style tripel with high complexity and sweet, winey notes
enhanced by ice-wine barrel ageing, and a crisp, spicy and sweet finish. The
technical specifications we agreed on were:
20.0 % P, 9.2 % ABV, 30 BU, Colour ~ 15 EBC.
As no
serious brewer would dream of adding unknown ingredients without having tested
them, one of the first items on the agenda of the brewday was to brew some teas
with the dried bockmyrtle and the dried hawthorn and to smell and taste these
teas. The bockmyrtle was fine, so we
agreed on the appropriate dosing of this. However, the hawthorn tea was
virtually taste- and flavourless - certainly
not tart or sour in any way. Even when we started chewing the wet and dry
berries prescious little happened! The decision was consequently not to use
these at all, leaving us with a challenge: how would we then get the decent,
zingy tartness we knew was necessary to balance the sweetness of the beer and
the wine barrels? After a short, intensive brainstorm the decision fell on the
Japanese citrus friut yozu. Not so much because this was just as exotic as
hawthorn, but more so because we could wait with the addition of this till the
beer was in secondary fermentation/maturation, leaving the good people at
Beau’s enough time to track down some fresh, organic yozu in time.
The brewing
went very well, and the fermentation started as it should, the beer also
developing pretty much as hoped thereafter. Even the sourcing of the yozu was a
success, leaving the Ontario ice-wine barrels as the only outstanding item.
And, believe it or not, the zealous Beau’s guys had to give up the search –
either they could not get in touch with the ice-wine people at all, or when
they could these responded negatively to the request of handing over some of
their used barrels. As the ice-wine ageing was not an all together unimportant element
in the desired caharacter of our beer, panic started spreading. My idea was then
to skip barrels all together and simply soak some oak chips in ice wine and add
these to the beer during a prolonged ageing in steel tanks. But as this was
moving out on yet more unchartered waters for both Matt and myself, I consulted
some of the finest experets in the world on barrel ageing of beer: My good
friends Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River, Shaun E. Hill of Hill Farmstead and
Will Meyers of the Cambridge Brewing Co. in Boston. There advice was unanimous:
The character of the beer would be a lot less complex if choosing the proposed
’shortcut’, so again we had to come up with our own solution. This ended up
being actually adding ice-wine soaked oak chips at a low level, and then for
the complexity subsequently ageing the beer in white wine barrels not actually previously
used for ice-wine. For this, we decided upon some local Chardonnay barrels.
A beer of
this nature must, in my book, be bottle conditioned. This process, that
involves adding fresh sugar and yeast to the beer at bottling, clearly made my
friend Matt more than just a little concerned, as this was something he had
never tried before. But in spite of Matt’s many and creative attempts at
suggesting alternatives, I insisted on going ahead with the bottle
conditioning. Matt’s and my dialogue about this topic happened when I was in
San Diego for the 2012 Craft Brewers’ Conference, and there I attended a
session on preciesely bottle conditioning. This was very enlightening, and I
could thus almost in ’real time’ convey the advice from some of the foremost
experts in the field on to Matt. Furhter, my neighbour at the hotel in San
Diego was one of the bottle conditioning panelists, Steven Pauwels of Boulevard
Brewing Co., and Steven very kindly offered to coach Matt and myself in the
process of the bottle conditioning of the ’Venskab’. Thus comforted, Matt went
ahead with the bottle conditioning.
The beer was
bottled late May 2012, and I have thus, at the time of writing, not yet had the
chance to taste the finished ’Venskab’. But I just now for fact that it’s
outstanding, so I can’t wait until Ontario Beer Week later this month where
I’ll have the privilige of travelling Ontario with the Beau’s crew to present
this beer at series of beer dinners.
What a
marvellous way to start a hopefully long and fruitfull ’Venskab’ and brewing
cooperation!
Anders
Kissmeyer