The Session #29 - Return to Flathead Lake

Recently, this comment appeared on a post that I published last year:

Just saw your comment on working through the pain from last year...good comments and helpful hints, except the Flathead Lake Brewing comment "not all craft beer is brewed equal"...this is true, but not in the way you presented it: Flathead Lake Brewing has won every award for brewing in the state, beating out all the big guys, and has actually brought home two World Beer Cup awards, which are the most prestigious awards in brewing. As far as "we've run out of beer, again"...well that's just crap, as an employee there, we have never "run out of beer", we have just run low because we sell so much of it to local accounts...so yes, not all craft beer is brewed equal...if it was, Glacier Brewing, Kettlehouse, and some of the other beers you mentioned would be winning international awards and running low on beer as well...
Anyhow, my two cents...keep up the good work...just keep it accurate. :) Cheers!!! - Info

To which I replied with this:

Info (if that is your real name!), I appreciate getting feedback from employees at breweries I've mentioned, and apologize if it seemed I was ragging unfairly on Flathead. My comment about them running out of beer stems from two separate visits I made back in the summer of 2007, when I was refused growler service because as the person working stated, they were "running out of beer". Without speculating further on what was going on at Flathead back in '07, I will say this: A return visit this past summer showed a *very* different brewery, one that had on tap a number of great beers, some fun experiments in the works, and absolutely no problem filling up a number of growlers for me with some excellent sustenance with which to spend my evening staring at the lake. I apologize for not putting that positive update on this post earlier.

The truth of the matter is, you're put at a serious disadvantage (and I'd be curious to hear what Stan has to say on this) whenever you try to establish an informed opinion about anything, not least of which a brewery, based off brief, singular visits.What's been said about first impressions often haunts the words of blogs (and Info, that's "blog" as in "web log", not to be confused with a travel guide, nor something that anybody reads anyway), capturing quick observations, often read divorced from the greater timeline, one that can frequently be misconstrued as concrete, permanent, final judgments. Unfortunately, though, most blogs, this one included, oftentimes neglect to amend their stance on particular experiences regardless of a change of heart on a subsequent visit. Something tells me if I'd be more proactive in expressing my pleasant return to Flathead last summer, Info wouldn't have felt need to comment in such a way that seems a little disparaging to the other local breweries in his/her community.

This month's Session pertains to tips and strategies on the road of beer travel. Lesson learned? Simply, don't be shy about voicing your impressions, but alternately, be prepared to reevaluate those impressions after repeat visits. And that said, be willing to revisit places that may have disappointed the first time around, because there's really nothing more rewarding than being proven wrong. Ultimately, I'm certainly looking forward to revisiting Flathead Lake Brewing again this summer (if only to fill another growler with that Flanders brown of theirs) to see what fresh surprises they have in store. This time: more pictures, more notes, and a promise to make good on updating our impressions. I'll hunt out for Info, too, if just to apologize in person.

The Session is a blog carnival originated by Stan Hieronymus at Appellation Beer. This month's party is being hosted by Gail and Steve of Beer by Bart. For a summary of the Sessions thus far, check out Brookston's handy guide. You can also follow folks' entries on twitter by searching for posts marked with the #thesession hashtag.

Fermentation Friday - Riding the heat wave

The requisite farmhouse accouterments

Night in Day

The night never wants to end, to give itself over
to light. So it traps itself in things: obsidian, crows.
Even on summer solstice, the day of light's great
triumph, where fields of sunflowers guzzle in the sun--
we break open the watermelon and spit out
black seeds, bits of night glistening on the grass.

-Joseph Stroud

With the longest day of the year having just past, the inevitable severe weather alerts warning of impending heat waves have begun to crop up. After an abysmally dry year, the hills are already crackling with dry brush, the deer eerily shedding their typically protective secrecy of their young fawns, bringing the whole family out from under cover in pursuit of green food and fresh water. It's an atmosphere that summons the chef away from the fire of the kitchen, preferring instead to let the heat of cooking to dissipate and mingle with the vapors of evaporate waving off freshly watered plants and heady trimmed grass. To my mind, the activity that aligns best alongside the bbq, the requisite lidded yellowjacket-proof bierstein, and the passive deep tissue massage of mellow, warm humidity, is the act of brewing, throwing yet another funnel of steamy aroma into the cloudless sky.

Ironic, then, isn't it, that while doing a bit of brewing makes for the perfect mid-summer's daydream, those same exceedingly high temperatures can easily spell doom for most beers during the subsequent fermentation stage, what with the yeasts most commonly employed for brewing ales preferring a summer in San Francisco's seemingly static sixty-something degrees. But we don't live in San Francisco anymore, and while yeast character in some brewing styles tend to be more subdued by the use of cooler temperatures, particularly those that employ the use of lager yeasts and long periods of cold storage, yeast itself can actually behave like a secret ingredient in many specialty styles, not the least being saison, a beer that happens to often employ a yeast that thrives at stunningly high temperatures. And with the mercury here hovering in the mid-eighties with the promise of high nineties in the near future, it's the perfect time to let nature take its course, and prepare to get your farmhouse funk on by brewing something where the yeast will truly benefit from being cooked, yielding that otherwise elusive level of orchard fruit, pepper spice, and lingering dryness that helps define how we currently think of saison.

Quite simply put, our response to this month's Fermentation Friday topic could be summed up, oddly, thusly:

Q: "How do you beat the summer heat?"
A: "Why beat it when you can join it?"

Brewed as the third installment in the increasingly ludicrously named Aleumination series, a sort of online collaborative open source brewing experiment, the recipe below [this is our version, mind you, and should in no way implicate the other homebrewers involved or imply anything about their talents at composing recipes] is a unwieldy weird beast, one that I'm not entirely promoting you all rush out to replicate. But for all intensive purposes (ie, that of being imbibed to fend off dehydration and give summer yard/farm work a smeary air of rustic delight), it's working out just fine, taking prime advantage of these long, hot days to work itself into condition.

Admittedly, the grain bill is ludicrously redundant, ill-measured, and disproportionate, but I gave it the green light by convincing myself it's true to (some variation on) the historical nature of saisons for them to consist of a variety of farm grains and little else. The real reason though: An interest in brewing something all-organic led me to purchase our ingredients via Santa Cruz's Seven Bridges co-op, where, as it turns out, they just happened to be having their summer sale, at which they were offering up a nicely discounted 15lb sampler pack of their different malts. Long story short, pretty much everything that seemed to fit the "farmhouse" bill made its merry way into the grist, with little worry for measurements or balance. When it turned out to be a full seven pounds worth of specialty grains, though, I put away my bags of spelt, kamut and oats for another day...

Summer Saison 2009, aka "The Insatiator"

Grains:
4.40 lbs. Generic Liquid Malt Extract (Light)
1.00 lbs. Pilsener
1.00 lbs. White Wheat
1.00 lbs. Wheat Malt
1.00 lbs. Cara-Pils Dextrine Malt
1.00 lbs. Pale Malt (2-row) America
1.00 lbs. Pale Malt (2-row) Great Britain
1.00 lbs. Flaked Soft White Wheat

Hops:
60 min 1.00 oz. Opal
30 min 1.00 oz. Tettnanger Tettnang
10 min 1.00 oz. Opal
0 min 1.00 oz. Tettnanger Tettnang

Yeast:
WLP565 - White Labs Belgian Saison I

Notes: Mash for 60 minutes at 149°. Pitch yeast when wort has cooled to 90°. Allow to ferment in a space where temperature doesn't drop below 75°. Rack onto oak in secondary fermenter and bottle when gravity has dropped to below 1.010.

Have at it, if you're game (and happen to have the Seven Bridges sampler pack in your fridge). Of course, none of this pertains to the "you think it's chocolate milk but it's watered down Belgian imperial stout" which we'll be brewing this weekend (except for it consisting of the remainder of the aforementioned sampler pack), but that's where having a cellar that never gets above 60° comes in awfully handy.

Many thanks to John at Brew Dudes for hosting this month's Fermentation Friday, a monthly blogging carnival gathered around the topic of homebrewing, originated by Beer Bits 2.

Local brewery (temporarily) expands

Optimistic bottles: Not half empty, but half filled...

I am seldom late for work, even by the obligatory rive minutes; I live far to close to the office to ever establish a genuinely feasible excuse. But, then again, I also seldom find my (albeit unlawful) bike route through town obstructed by a fully operational industrial beer bottling operation, sitting in the middle of the sidewalk, noisily huffing through cases of bombers, which is exactly what I encountered yesterday. And but oh, what a brilliant scheme it is. For those of you who have ever wondered, how exactly does a modestly sized brewpub manage to dispatch bottles of four of their releases to accounts far and wide without painstakingly doing it by hand well past the 25th hour of the day, or by utilizing a contract brewer, here's your answer: a door-to-door bottling line:

No bikes or skateboards, fancy mobile bottling machines a-ok

That's right: The whole kit and caboodle rolls right off the back of a truck, plugs in to the tank line, and away it goes. Place labels on roll, empty bottles on the one end, caps on the crimper, and some waiting arms and empty cases on the other end, and you're off. Plenty of folks have seen what a bottling line looks like, but encountering a system like this running at full tilt in the middle of the street is nothing short of a spectacle.

Lining them up while the Altman crew looks on

Of the many good things Christian Kazakoff has brought to Iron Springs, it would seem his dedication to a bottling program has had the greatest apparent impact. Hard at work well before most folks were even up, he, Phil and Mike were already well on their way to filling the 200 cases of empty bottles that had arrived that morning, and by the time I rode past on my way home, there was nary a trace anything fishy had taken place, all the gear packed back up onto the truck, cases put away, but for a stray bottle here and there.

Bottle labels boasting a beer's water source have a long tradition

It's a beautifully reasonable solution, too, one that allows a brewery to flexibly make decisions about expansion without levying the enormous risk inherent in moving beyond "being a brewpub" and "getting on shelves". If it turns out to be a successful venture, you can always stage an encore performance with higher case numbers, and if it ends up applying too much pressure to your bottom line, you can simply write it off as an experiment to revisit later on. There's no equipment to learn, maintain, and pay for, no space to rent, and no fear of outgrowing the scale of your operations. At the end of the day, it's back to business as usual.

One down, 199 cases to go...

Fermentation Friday - Free Improv

Joy is adding hops whenever your kid thinks it'd be fun.

For a length of time I'm reluctant to calculate for fears I'll have to confront quantitative evidence of just how single-minded (and old*) I am, I've been damned near certain my life would be spent as a musician. How exactly, on the other hand, has been a more nebulous decision. There have been numerous iterations defining musicianship over the years [Um, hello - DJ? What the hell was I thinking?], but one constant has remained. Regardless of what was going to define "being a musician", it was bound to reflect the dominant aspect of improvisation. Whether as a guitarist or a composer or an electronic musician or an arranger (or even as a what the hell was I thinking man that's a lot of expensive gear DJ) there has always been a need to incorporate the element of spontaneous musical composition, because ostensibly, it's only when you loosen the reins and allow the truth of the moment to materialize that you can really embrace the livingness of the art form. In the Shona music of Zimbabwe, for instance, regardless of the fact that musicians play known pieces with names and moods associated with them, they often lack specific beginnings and ends as they see the act of performing akin to making a telephone connection to the spiritual world, and that effect of simply "tapping in", much like turning on a tv in mid-show and turning it off just as arbitrarily, along with a degree of a jazz-like spontaneous interpretation, reflects an ethos that embraces the notion of music as a separate animate entity that we have access to and through which we can communicate our emotions, amplified and transmuted. That "it's there if you're listening for it" approach to creating musical sound can lend to a fascinating viewpoint on what level of control one feels they ever truly have over the creation of their own musical art.

Even musicians trained in the most rigid Western classical traditions respect and acknowledge the discrete variations between various performances and aim for - even under the auspices of cohesively following the written instructions of the composer and/or how they're being translated by a conductor - a performance that transcends the printed page, referring to successful interpretations in terms of being alive, of their emotional resonance, and of their ability to "communicate". And outside of that rarefied sphere of purpose-driven musicianship, in the world of popular, blues, jazz, even now including dance and electronic music, the idea of improvisation as a method whereby a musician can actively exploit the use of time as medium and sound as materials to unveil music that already exists, but which simply needs to be tapped into in order to be brought to light, is such commonly understood routine that discussions over what truly defines improvisation are often eclipsed by the more immediately gratifying discussions over how to do it successfully.

The prevailing argument states that there's no such thing as true spontaneity in improvisation. Any music made on the spot is going to be influenced by so many mitigating factors - previous performance experience, muscle memory, preconceived notions about stylistic guidelines, imitative gestures, unconscious mimicry - that outside of a tiny circle of free improvisers who've made it their guiding discipline to try to divorce themselves from those binding detractions and play from a purely ascended level not unlike a state of trance, all improvised music is pre-composed to some certain degree. Where that line is drawn (not to mention how broad or thick or porous or opaque that line is), between what defines a piece of music and what elements of it have been spontaneously manipulated is where the discussion of improvisation - particularly from the point of view of the composer - becomes richly rewarding, far beyond the talk of "who takes a solo when" or "what scale should I use", breathing life into music by opening the door to the chaotic nature of possibility and potential.

It's near certain that my evolving philosophy on the creation of music has rewired the rest of my brain to the extent that it affects the way I approach pretty much anything that comes up in a given day, with understandably mixed results (let us never again speak of the savory French toast experiment). It should come as no surprise, then, that brewing in this house incorporates a good level of improvisation, for good and for bad, and which brings us to the topic of today's Fermentation Friday. Simply said, the thing that brings me the most joy and the most pain is one and the same: the fact that I can't get through a single brewing session, whether it's in the composing of the recipe or the methods used during the brew to last-minute deviations in hopping to fermentation temperature changes to bottling, kegging, or conditioning choices, it's become quite clear that I'm anything but the type who "leaves nothing to chance". That's all I leave it to, most of the time. And you know what? The beer turns out pretty good. Near disasters provide opportunities to get quickly creative, and unintentional moments of brilliance can make an entire session memorable. Ad-libbed triple decoction? Pain. Spontaneous mini-decoction? Joy. Cutting short a boil time without considering full wort evaporation rates? Pain. Deciding to extend a boil for an extra hour because the weather's nice? Joy. In the end, though, my tolerance for pain is pretty low. Which is why we do so much homebrewing around here: It really is quite simply a joy.

Here's tonight's recipe. I'll post back if anything changes.

* Additional criteria of concern: Adding a power carpentry tool to my Amazon wish list alongside completely unironic enjoyment of the piano music of Handel.

Many thanks to Ted at Ted's Homebrew Journal for hosting this month's Fermentation Friday, a monthly blogging carnival gathered around the topic of homebrewing, originated by Beer Bits 2.

Absence makes the hops grow fronder

It's heartening to know that despite my absence over the past month, Pfiff! readership has continued to clip along at a reasonably regular pace. Likewise, it's heartening to see that despite my inattention in the garden lately, the hops are diligently following their own course of nature by whatever means available.

We'll be returning to quasi-normalcy soon.

The Session #27 - Tyranny Undercover

Not the same. But easier than trying to make it from scratch.
 

There's no denying the truth behind the old saying about best laid plans, which is precisely how someone could find themselves in a situation like this, on a drizzly morning in May, staring at a dust-ridden bottle of Torani Amer and a folder full of unsent email drafts, wondering how these self-imposed writing deadlines can arrive so unexpectedly, and how those once grand statutory visions are often reduced, by necessity and  panic, to hardscrabble dirt and mud golems imbued with the hot breath of its composer's hope that it too might live and walk and keep momentum going for just another day. It's all the more shameful when the gifts all seem to align themselves in a row - gifts of the cocktail persuasion! - offering up easy riches in the form of a puckish topic, affable co-conspirators, and the burblings of some potentially avant mixology. It's all past potential now, though, and truly, it isn't even morning by the time this sentence has been typed, another interruption likely on the horizon (how prescient, now that this bit is being typed nearly 12 hours past its inception, that light drizzle having been replaced by a whipping downpour, and my thoughts squarely with those slogging their way into the deep end abyss of Boonville to pitch their muddy tents) and odds even that the publish button below won't even get clicked, despite, as I said, the best laid plans. Certain folks will have to stow their cabinet of tinctural curiosities for a later date, curtains drawn back over the mysteries of the unrealized, and the wings of rootless fantasy clipped and grounded. What could have been, isn't. Let's make us a drink, shall we?

So even though it's already been done, both here (and even before) and now already in this month's Session, we're going to keep it simple with this very brief reflection on a little drink called the Picon bière. The recipe, if you want to call it that, isn't much to speak of. But as our host this month is a neighbor of sorts, he deserves a little more. It was three or four years ago, in the redwood enshrouded grand Victorian dining room of the Lark Creek Inn, an arguably classic dining establishment crippled and shuttered by economic woes, those weird tendrils of financial panic that've traveled even up into the toniest, most insusceptible neighborhoods, a restaurant doomed to soon be resurrected as "affordable", or heaven forbid, something more ghastly like "family friendly". They had - and I hope this doesn't change - a serious, adult, fantastic bar. And it was here that I had the most unlikely of cocktails offered to me before dinner one night, as our waiter recognized my middling response to their beer list (and as for why I was glancing over their beer list, I probably wouldn't have even ordered a beer in an establishment like this, wrought of good, heathful digestifs and aperitifs and punishingly delicious whiskeys, but it's a habit - I always look at beer menus, because there are often surprises, sweet buried treasures cellared away by one discriminating chef who knows that no matter what the others think, his poached sole goes better with that Moinette than any of the wine they've got gathering dust down there) and offered to make me a cocktail made of their Urquell and a dash of Amer Picon. Little did I know how much I'd love it. Littller did I know how much I'd regret making its acquaintance when I discovered that true Amer bitters were entirely unavailable in this country and that the few bottles they'd had on hand in the bar had made their way back across the Atlantic in somebody's luggage. Granted, there are instructions on how to replicate that magical ingredient in the solace of your own home, but they're frankly not much simpler than building an ultralight aircraft in your garage and using it to fly across the North Pole to pick up a bottle of the authentic item. So we have this: From the people who brought you the the flavor du jour in your trendsetting latte, Torani's very own Amer mixer. It tastes only vaguely correct. But it will do.

Mia's working on taking over the photg job here.

Blended with a continental lager, this cocktail makes sense, as the flabby taste impression that old, ship-worn and light-struck bottles leaves little to be excited about, the strange, orangy, botanical, somewhat vegetal elixir of the Picon carrying the drink into a nearly Campari-esque realm, with a gut-stirring astringency and a snap of old fashioned, resuscitative, rejuvenated medicinal edginess. The florals of the hops are accentuated. Front end bitterness is restored. Weird hints of woodsy, rooty, dirty darkness lurk on the edges. But there's as little traditional lager in this house as there is true Amer Picon. And that's how we arrived here, with a bottle of the already lively and wicked Lagunitas Undercover Shutdown ale, a beer that hardly calls for adulterating, being spiked with a splash of Torani's finest 78 proof bitter buddy. In a satanically crimson body it comes off like chugging on a jar of homemade marmalade, a pungent whack of orange sweetness, all fringed in a pithy bitterness that somewhat masks the dangerous level of alcohol. Would I mix one up again? Maybe. But does it compare to that sun-sprayed June afternoon in Graton years ago when a bottle of the stuff disappeared into cup after cup of shabby homebrewed "kõlsch" as our friends wedding spun on around us? No, but that's a whole other story.

And as much as I'm usually not afraid of embarking on increasingly embedded diversionary topics, now it's not even Friday anymore. But it's still raining. Does this really count as a Session post now, being as late as it is? No matter, Mia would be sad if I didn't take the opportunity to show off her new shoes.

The Session is a blog carnival originated by Stan Hieronymus at Appellation Beer. This month's party is being hosted by Joe of Beer at Joe's. For a summary of the Sessions thus far, check out Brookston's handy guide. You can also follow folks' entries on twitter by searching for posts marked with the #thesession hashtag.

Fermentation Friday - But I don't even know her

Note to mom: Hi mom! Now that you've gotten cozy with your new iPhone and are regularly checking this site to see what your son's up to and whether or not there are any photos of (or by) your granddaughter, I thought it was be a good idea to give you a little "heads up" on today's writings. See, on the last Friday of every month, folks all around the globe post their thoughts on a common theme relevant to the hobby of homebrewing. I have a bad habit of writing seriously off topic items on these occasions. With that, consider yourself forewarned: This one gets pretty "inside baseball", if you will. There are no pictures of Mia, either.

When stuck in a particularly pessimistic mood, this whole "writing about beer" arena can come off as mighty insular at times, insular in a "pop will eat itself" sort of way, all Ouroboros-like in its circular back-scratching and back-biting, that pessimism perversely amplified during a week that's seen the beer blogosphere (which I'm beginning to wonder is just one big centrally located beer blog with one singularly big beer blog brain, based off the sheer amount of déjà vu one gets scrolling through their feeds over the morning coffee) all taking sides in a genuinely retarded debate around the cultural significance of a piece of filmwork whose title may remind you of a certain low-budget space opera from the disco era, alongside the near incessant reposting of another video piece that can't help make me think of a certain Nike campaign.

Thankfully it rarely takes more than something like a kit-bashing puddytat to alter one's perspective on things.

And thusly, one can view this little self-congratulatory micocosm of beer obsessives with a bit of charmed affection. Despite how the collective musings of a beer obsessed army can at times display what appears to be an alarming lack of perspective and a dangerous level of short-sightedness, there's an undeniably sunny song in there, one evangelizing the diversity, quality, and culture that the craft brewing movement brings to the table. And if you zoom in on that happy little planet of malt aficionados, you'd see a sub-population, racing across the surface, doing something for themselves, the worker bees, the oft-maligned but dutifully persistent homebrewers. Granted, they're equally - if not more - insularly referential, but unlike the folks taking up my precious "cats playing drums" bandwidth with redundantly embedded videos and press releases copied so quickly out of their email that there's little bits of broken html floating about the edges, homebrewing bloggers actually spend their spare time making stuff. And then when they write about it online, they typically help explain to others how they, too, can make their own stuff. That's pretty much all that's able to pull me out from under the cloak of blogging invisibility today. Proactive thinking. Let's make some booze, people.

And today's roundtable topic concerns the wonderful world of liquor (cue the dancing bottles). Safe to assume that we're not talking about the heated water that's used for rinsing the grains in your mash tun, liquor, better known as "booze that isn't beer" being put into service in brewing in order to add tints, shades, and shadows of other alcoholic beverages is not uncommon. The word "bourbon" alone appears five times on the BeerAdvocate Top 100 list (four times on the RateBeer Top 50), and the concept of reusing castoff whiskey barrels to age beers has become a stereotypical shortcut for brewers looking to cash in on "special edition" versions of their beers. In drawing inspiration from the craft beer world, a homebrewer has little to go on regarding the use of liquor outside of what would appear to be a conspiracy from the all-powerful secret cabal of coopers (yes, all four of them). Simply put, to most folks, liquor in brewing means barrels. We homebrewers soak oak chips in bourbon and brandy and maybe even get our club to all pitch in and try to fill one of those 31 gallon monstrosities, topping off the angel's share every so often while praying that it ends up tasting even close to its namesake.

Far be it from me to preempt what's guaranteed to be a far superior discussion on the topic, bolstered by one presenter's quantitative research, professional experience, and within an arena where one can even get some hands-on experimentation with the matter at this year's National Homebrewers Conference, let me simply say this: Don't limit yourself to attempting to imitate barrel flavors. Fun for a while, but easy to overdo and frankly, if you're a true hipster, it's totally played out. Instead, consider these two gateway scenarios:

- Once you've divorced the barrel character from the source liquor (and if you allow yourself to stretch "liquor" beyond the confines of simple distilled spirits, allowing for a more all-welcoming family of booze), consider what other flavor components exist in different varieties and how they can best complement what you'd like to achieve in your beer. Take a scotch ale, for example, in which you decide you want to add a particularly peaty character. What would happen if you complemented your addition of peated malt with the distinctively Islay aroma of something like Laphroaig? Or what if, in a an old stock ale, you wanted to add a hint of casky oxidization, and added a touch of musky Amontillado sherry? Or if in a stong, dark Belgian style ale, you wanted to emphasize the dark fruit characteristics of the yeast profile by dosing it with a spot of late harvest zinfandel?

- Beyond even that, think of the excellent extraction properties a high-alcohol solution can provide. The spirit you use need not be the end, but also the means by which you add character to your beers. Tinctures (like those pictured above*) offer a measurable, sanitary, and pleasantly controlled vehicle with which to gradually adulterate your beers. We've always sworn by the technique whereby you prepare herbal tinctures in a neutral vodka base, but in the end, many "spirits" that we know are nothing more than neutral grain spirits with various botanicals infused in them, like sloe gin. Consider the "infused vodka" rage: There's no reason why you can't use the exact same technique to add a touch of orange to your citrusy double IPA, some licorice to your Baltic porter, some lemongrass to your wheat beer, or some juniper to your holiday ale.

I hesitate to think of what might become of combining those two concepts into a third, hybrid gateway, but there's little doubt that the more experimental amongst us aren't afraid of crossing the streams. I'll be first to admit a certain stupid fondness for the odd bourbon-aged this or brandy-aged that , but in the meantime, step back for a minute, and just consider what simple, strange, mystical concoctions you could unearth by simply thinking outside the barrel.


* From left to right: saffron and black pepper; ginger, myrrh, white pepper, and curacao orange; and the ubiquitous whiskey-soaked oak.


Congratulations. You've made it this far! More on the topic, from the archives:

- Miscellaneous musings on the boozy tango between beer and liquor.

- Our first foray into reverse-engineered cocktailesque beers, the Old Fashioned. (With a followup here.)

- The story of Tokyo Fog, the beer who loved bourbon.


Many thanks to Northern Table for hosting this month's Fermentation Friday, a monthly blogging carnival gathered around the topic of homebrewing, originated by Beer Bits 2.

Belgium comes to 94117

Just over a week ago, on a clear and cool Sunday morning, I slipped into the pre-dawn air armed with a freshly sharpened chef's blade and a fully fueled butane torch, cruised quickly along the empty trellis roads that connect the scattered hamlets of central Marin, and scaled the Waldo Grade only to quietly descend into a still-slumbering and peculiarly vacant Lower Haight, through those fabled Dutch doors, to receive word of my next instructions. After having harvested one of the meal's ingredients the day before, my last directives had been simple: pack a nice blade and get a good night's rest. And thus it began.

Holding the key to my cheese n' beer loving heart.
 

To backtrack a little... It's Belgian beer month, which means the taps at Toronado are currently loaded with things like, oh Cantillon Grand Cru, Ellezelloise Hercule, and Struise Tsjeeses. It was but a year ago when, in assuming that we'd be the early birds, first in line to tap a flight of David Keane's annual cornucopia of imported wonderments, Des and I headed down to Toronado at our first free moment only to find it shuttered up, thanks to some mysterious and hitherto unknown special event. But based off the scraps of information we were able to glean from some considerably bent and slurry patrons, who shared lusty tales aside proffered dregs of some truly luminous rarities, it was then that I declared I'd find some way - by whatever means, if you want - to be on the other side of those locked doors when the following March's lambs and lions had marched through: in April of 2009, I was going to somehow be inside that kitchen.

More abbey cheese than you can shake a censer at.

And as it so happens, with the rusty tubes of my waking synapses gradually flickering to life as the caffeine made its steady course into my consciousness, that was the spot I found myself: Inside a bar still resonating from the nightlife that had only just departed scant hours before, alongside some familar and equally tired faces, with the unprecedented (and encore) privilege of joining Mr. Sean Z. Paxton for what was to be the culinary equivalent of the Ring cycle, a six-hour long gustatory bonanza nearly a year in the making (that is, since the last one).

Stinky gnomes and Westvleteren. As it should be.

Sean, as a man considered by many to be the premiere visionary in the realm of marrying beer with modern haute cuisine and molecular gastronomy,  is no stranger to the spotlight in the foodie-beerie circles. A well-known mercenary chef-for-hire, regular contributor to BeerAdvocate magazine, a speaker at the National Homebrewers Conference, and one who's consulted regularly by publications looking to get edubacted in the art of cuisine à la bière and beer and food pairing, his moniker of "The Homebrew Chef" alludes to his simultaneous passions of brewing, cooking, and finding harmonious inroads between the two. Here, under the auspices of Toronado's Belgian beer month, he's made it his mission to pull out all the stops. In a way, it's his tribute to Dave Keane's fearless ambassadorship of the challenging, palate-expanding beers of Belgium, aside from being a chance to flex some creative muscle for patrons who like having their culinary horizons broadened.

I imagine he's still airing out the suitcase all this arrived in.

First, the beer: Not only were there twenty beers with which to pair, but another twenty beers with which all the courses were prepared. And lest you think we're talking beercan chicken here, note that some of the world's most highly regarded and sought-after beers - Scaldis Noel, Fantome La Dalmatienne, De Ranke Pere Noel, Halve Maan Brugse Zot - never even made it to the table for folks to taste, only existing as ingredients within each of the twelve courses. Lest anyone be concerned that the day's events were going to be a retread of the classics, though, the day began with the first public West Coast tapping of a keg of Duvel Green, the new filtered, non-refermented, draft version of the quintessential Belgian strong golden ale. The next five hours saw a parade of Belgium's rainbow of beer diversity make its way to the tables, from the light and hoppy to the dark and strong through all iterations between, with the closing bookend on the day the 2007 Saucerful of Secrets that Sean brewed himself with Firestone Walker.

Well, that's certainly a lot of caviar. Or is it?

And then, the food: One course which I got to have my hand in (hence the freshly sharpened knife) was the cheese course, consisting entirely of Belgian, mostly abbey cheeses hand-carried by Sean himself in a single, 60 lb. suitcase just days prior to the event. And thanks to the beauty of sous vide cooking techniques, much of the actual cooking had already been taken care of, with curing, infusing, marinading, and pickling all having been done in sealed plastic bags, which was a comforting convenience as Toronado, in case you'd never noticed, doesn't actually have a kitchen.

My, my, what are you going to do with all those black truffles?

Ah, but of course.

That's correct. Somehow, some way, the entire twelve-course meal for seventy-odd diners with prepared with nothing more than an immersion heater and a couple of propane burners. And if there's a real bit of artistry at work in a dinner like this that needs to be spotlit, I think it has to be the orchestration of such a massive culinary undertaking with such limited resources. Sure, there was the "wort honey", a batch of pre-hopped homebrewed beer that Sean made, reduced to a caramel-like consistency, and blended with a local honey. And sure, there was the homemade pork pate and duck rillettes. And yeah, there was the aforementioned Cantillon Iris and bone marrow gastrique. But seriously, managing to supervise an amateur staff in a room primarily designed for drinking, coordinating the delivery of the equivilant of 900 dishes of five-star cuisine via a space the Toronado staff lovingly refer to as "the birth canal", and singlehandedly bringing this menu to life with not much more than a pot of hot water, a couple tanks of propane, a crack torch and a syringe?

Now that, my friends, is kitchen professionalism.

If you haven't already, go ahead and mark off April 4, 2010 on your calendar, as you've now got plans that day.

Because if you were duck fat aioli, you'd be smiling, too.

18 Reasons and at least as many homebrews

Before we finally get around to completing the now nearly two-week old saga of the Toronado Belgian beer dinner, a quick interlude of the homebrew variety: This Thursday evening, we'll be joining a few other local recreational fermentation enthusiasts for a tasting at 18 Reasons, an arty foodie non-profit space in the Mission as part of the monthly SF Beer & Cheese group we've been semi-regularly attending. Jesse, whose brett-spiked witbier I had the unexpected pleasure of sampling this past weekend, will be pouring some of his wares alongside David, the SFB&C co-founder who introduced me to the group at last year's wild ale tasting, who will have his robust porter to sample, and a couple other brewers bringing the likes of a Belgian dubbel, saison, Simcoe IPA, and a Belgian strong dark ale aged with prunes.

But what are we bringing? In the spirit of Choose Your Own Adventure, I'd like that to be a decision best left to others besides the authors. Like chance music for the belly, the whim of teh internets will dictate what'll be crawling up from the cellar Thursday night. I've embedded a little poll below in which you can vote for as few or as many as you'd like on exhibit. Here's a quick reference guide to the options:

Imperial Pilsner - Just seeming to hit its stride now, a 9% lager based off a strict pilsner malt base and with a fresh bit of dry hopping in the keg. Pictured above with its little hoppy friend.

Black Lav - Definitely further up the dark end of the experimental alley. It's a saison. But it's black! There's some history behind this one here.

Oatmeal Raisin Cookie - The most recent of our "tastes like" explorations, this one's finishing up as this is written, and is a but of a wild card in terms of what it'd taste like as young and green as it is. Details on its origin story can be read here.

X'07 - Our annual holiday ale, this Belgian-inspired dark one from the winter of 2007, which Jesse referenced in his post about last weekend's debauchery, amazingly hasn't all been emptied yet. We wrote a little bit about it back in August.

X'08 - Same idea, different beer. This past season's batch.

The Indoctrinator - Before the Inoculator (the last of which disappeared into the sun-warmed gullets of this past Sunday's Golden Gate Park denizens), there was the Indoctrinator. I bottled a couple magnums when we finished this Belgian-style dubbel back in October and have been sitting on them waiting for the right occasion. Is this it?

Old Ale - Nearly guaranteed to be nasty, it's a two (three?) year (m)old stock ale aged on oak that's seen some serious and strange refermentation in the bottle. Will probably explode. I still have some left.

Appelwoi - A cider. This one. Not beer, but not water either!

Go on, now. Vote!



And sure, it's just 48 hours away, but mark your calendars!

From trellis to table

Just thought it would be fun to take a minute here to illustrate one of a million elements that goes into coordinating a brilliant dining experience, one thread intertwined with the likes of a 60lb suitcase full of cheese, an impromptu propane tank replacement, a last-minute veggie sausage, and the looming thread of an imminent power outage. In seven acts:

Cutting the red bines, like something out of an Millet painting.

The target crop of our day, Moonlight Farms' baby Cascades.

There's only about a two week window per year you can do this.

"Belgian asparagus" is tender enough to eat raw, leaves and all.

Less than 24 hours earlier, these guys were still pushing the soil.

The prep work's not much other than checking for stowaways.

A little butter, a little water, a little bone marrow gastrique...

And the finished product? You'll just have to go either here or here to check it out.

PS - I'll likely get around to posting a more detailed account of my most recent evening with "The Homebrew Chef", but couldn't resist leading in with this little tale of one the dinner's ingredient's heroic journey from the dusty back country of the Russian River Valley to the tables in Lower Haight.