Tag Archives: Lambic

Seasonal Beer is not Very Seasonal

It seems we have lost touch with when foods are in season. Eating and drinking seasonally is not exactly convenient, it pretty much the exact opposite.  Adapting our dietary habits based on nature’s timing is hard; it takes time, and commitment.  In our modern industrial food culture, where canned, frozen or fresh flown in from somewhere warm, is available year round, seasonal eating is only for the die-hards.  I like to think I have what it takes to let nature control my diet, but my unrelenting food urges, which are not always linked to nature, frequently lead me astray.  One has to give up control of their daily food intake and let the world’s natural timing dictate what and when they will eat.  And that is hard.

We do not control the sun or the rain and we certainly cannot mandate a pumpkin to be ready for harvest come August 1st, – which is roughly when a pumpkin should be harvest-able in order to get pumpkin ale to  market by September 15th.  That is of course if the pumpkin is local, fresh and in season.

I like pumpkins a lot.  I’m a gourd guy I guess.  I eagerly await the pumpkin harvest every year.  Typically pumpkins reach the market starting September 15th, but are considered to be at their peak after they have had some time in the early autumn sun and after a light frost.  Thanksgiving is the best time to start eating pumpkin.  So how is it that I can buy pumpkin ale before the key ingredient, pumpkin, hasn’t reached harvest-able maturity?

Further down this path, In British Columbia Raspberry season starts July 1st.  Many raspberry seasonals also happen to be released starting July 1st.  Something isn’t adding up.

Proper ale takes a minimum of six weeks from start to finish before it can be consider fit for consumption.  With this in mind we should drink pumpkin ale starting mid November and raspberry ale from mid August through to Thanksgiving.  But herein lies the problem; we want pumpkin ale at the Thanksgiving table.  Beer marketers know this, and brewers are forced to source out of season, imported, or frozen ingredients for an upcoming seasonal release.

Some of beer culture’s greatest celebrations are linked to the harvest.  Oktoberfest is a celebration of the summer harvest and the beginning of the brewing season.  Unable to brew lager beer in the summer months, drinkers liberally imbibe in the reaming cave aged Marzen in order to make room for the fresh lager soon to come.  With glycol cooling brewers can lager beer all summer long and this annual celebration is no longer necessary, but it is so much fun we have kept the party alive and well.

Even beer styles have been shaped by the seasons.  Saison, directly translated as season, is a classic example.  Originally brewed in a farmhouse during the autumn and winter months, Saisons were aged into the summer where farm workers quenched thier thirst with a snappy effervescent beer. Refrigeration and digital temperate controls have changed how Saisons are brewed, which I’m sure has changed the flavour profile.

As a beer fanatic and an enthusiastic eater I like to think seasonality has remained a mainstay of modern beer culture, but it hasn’t.  Brewing with what nature provides is not easy.  Seasonal brewing pushes consumer demand to the back seat.  When consumer demand remains a top priority for business owners, the boundaries of the season get pushed.  The idea of releasing pumpkin ale one month after thanksgiving, and even after Halloween, may seem counter-intuitive, but it isn’t.

Optically, yes, beer is very seasonal, but the way we brew and the way we consume is far from it. Like being part of a movement, it feels good to be a seasonal drinker.  We like to feel an emotional connection to Mother Nature, but the effort to make a real connection is too great a commitment for most brewery owners, so marketers fake it.

Industry and nature do not mix all that well.  Marketers love the image, but hate the reality.  To be a seasonal brewery one has to err on the side of nature and quality rather than the timing of consumer demand.

Are there enough die-hards out there to support a seasonal brewery?   I would love to see a brewery say, it will be ready when it is ready, and it will be damn good… when it is ready of course.  It would take guts to say this and it would be a business risk, but it would be cool – it would also be a great point of differentiation.    

Cheers,

Erik

Note:

There are some bright spots.  The resurgence of local hop production in BC has created a hyper-seasonal wet hopped ale trend.  And Belgium’s lambic breweries hold true to the seasonal limitation of wild fermentation.

Visiting Cantillon in Brussels

Cantillon is widely regarded to be one of the best brewers of lambic beer in the world.  Lambic, if you don’t know, is beer that is spontaneously fermented via wild yeasts that just happen to be in the air.  Different regions of the world contain their own unique concoction of wild yeasts floating about, resulting in very unique (horrible) tasting beers.  Brussels, and the area southwest of it, are historically considered to have excellent wild yeast strains optimal for lambic brewing.  Of course, with modern technology, the beneficial wild yeasts have been isolated and can be purchased by any old brewer.  Still, lambic brewing requires a tremendous amount of skill and patience.  Done wrong and the taste is horrible, done well and the taste is still one many would consider to be ‘acquired’.  Lambics are sour, require years to become drinkable, and are often brewed with fruit, the sugar from which cuts the sourness of the final beer.  Cantillon has mastered lambic brewing and continues to produce top notch beers in the last remaining lambic brewery in Brussels.  It’s still family run and they use the same equipment they’ve always used, going back to the nineteenth century.  Obviously we needed to visit this place.

The Cantillon Beer Lineup

The Cantillon Beer Lineup

I’ve heard the name Cantillon bandied about with such high regard over the years that I expected a slick operation.  Instead we found a hole in the wall warehouse in a suburb of Brussels that looked like it was going to fall apart.  It’s old, cold, and there are spiders everywhere (spiders are considered to be great friends of natural brewers because they eat annoying bugs attracted to the sugar in unfermented beer).  Amazingly, the tour was self guided and included two free tastes (gueze and framboise)  for all of five euros a person.  What modern brewery would let you go on an unguided tour?  My favorite part of the tour was the fermentation room, which is a room in the attic exposed to the great outdoors via a few portholes.  In the room was one giant shallow aluminum tub where all Cantillon beers pick up their wild yeast.  I couldn’t believe they would let me in this magic room, especially considering I was a bit sick at the time.  Expect the 2012 vintage Gueze to contain hints of Chris phlegm, imparted by a few careless sneezes.

The Magic Brewing Room at Cantillon

The Magic Brewing Room at Cantillon

The brewery at Cantillon is an amazing place to visit.  It’s encouraging to see such a big name brand operating so humbly by nice people in a small, family run shop.  It lived up to the hype and then some.  If any of your Vancouverites are interested in trying a local lambic, Storm has 12 year aged (forgotten about in the back of the brewery) fruit varieties on sale and they are fantastic.

Cheers,

Chris

PS> If any pretentious North American beer douchebags try to tell you that lambic is pronounced lambeek, ask them why the staff at Cantillon pronounces it lambic?  Let’s leave the bad attitude to InBev, shall we?

Old school brewing at Cantillon

Old school brewing at Cantillon

The barrel room at Cantillon

The barrel room at Cantillon

Bottle Room at Cantillon

Bottle Room at Cantillon, they bottle age for years

Cantillon bottle room, a particular vintage

Cantillon bottle room, a particular vintage, Lou Pepe Kriek (cherry)

Cantillon dirty bottle

A dirty bottle, in more ways than one

Cantillon tasting time

Time for a taste

Beer and Waffles

Does beer pair with strawberries and waffles – well, not really.  With the short seasonal availability of fresh local strawberries, I have been trying to find ways of incorporating them into every meal, snack or a bored moment in my life.  Eating out of boredom is healthy, isn’t it?

As I posted previously, yesterday was strawberry, waffle and beer day.  Growing up, waffles were never a breakfast food, I was raised thinking that waffles for dinner was perfectly reasonable.  Some people seem to find breakfast for dinner a bit odd, those people are truly missing out.  Although eating waffles for dinner was a normal childhood occurrence, beer was never included.

We tried a myriad of different fruit beers with the waffles only to find that beer and waffles just do not work all that well together.  We worked our way through Swans Berry Ale, Wittekerke Rose – “the fruity pink beer”,  Lindemans Framboise, Morte de Subite Kriek, Lindemans Peche(Peach) and Morte de Subite Geuze.  Unfortunately I was unable to find strawberry ale.   Not one of the beers truly complemented the meal – the beer was either too grainy or too cloying.  The Framboise was over the top sweet and overpowered the strawberries, in contrast Swans Berry Ale tasted too much like beer.  The berry ale also had a distinct cheese flavour and reminded me of eating raspberry jam with processed Kraft singles on top of my grandma’s homemade bread – good memory, bad flavour.  The top beer of the evening was Wittekerke Rose, described as “the fruity pink beer… with a sensual body” I kid you not; it really says that on the label.  The beer flavour was subdued as was the fruit flavour – perhaps this is why it didn’t taste terrible with waffles and strawberries.

In hindsight, my approach for selecting the beer was critically flawed.  When eating a sweet meal, fruit punch is probably one of the last drinks to reach for.  Instead, a drink that helps to balance the sweetness, my choice has always been milk, is a more appropriate choice.  Drinking a fruit beer with waffles is no different than drinking fruit punch with waffles.

I think it would be a real struggle to find a beer that works with a sweet fruity meal.  Finding a beer that cuts through the sweetness of waffles and strawberries while providing a complementary contrast would be a struggle for even the most knowledgeable beer aficionado.  This may be the one meal where beer stays in the fridge.

Cheers,

Erik

Seasonal Beer

Good news, delicious red-centered BC strawberries are now in season. Strawberry season in BC signifies the start of BC’s bountiful harvest. For those British Columbia who choose to eat large, watery California strawberries all year round, I beg you, please switch to local berries. Local BC strawberries are far juicier, sweeter and overall more flavourful than generic imported strawberries. They are only available for a few weeks, so get your fill while they are still here.

Fresh local strawberries mean one thing in my house, waffles with strawberries. Now here is the challenge, pairing beer with waffles & strawberries. Beer has such a diverse flavour profile from style to style, that I image there must be a beer that works with strawberries.

My first thought is to match this seasonal breakfast-for-dinner or “brinner“, with one of the many local fruit beers available. BC brewers offer a good selection of beer brewed with the inclusion of fruits such as Peach, Raspberry, Blackberry and Pumpkin . Unfortunately I have not been able to find a single brewer in BC offering a strawberry beer. A friend and former brewmaster told me that strawberries impart an unpleasant flavour post ferment, but this cannot be true.  Abita Brewing in Louisiana brews what is rumored to be a good strawberry beer. Unfortunately I don’t think I will be able to find Abita’s Harvest Strawberry Lager in BC.

The other option I am considering is a Belgian fruit geuze, a wild fermented lambic beer brewed with fruit – the fruit helps add sweetness to the beer. An aardbei geuze, a strawberry geuze, seems an obvious choice. The only problem could be the geuze overpowering the fresh strawberry flavour. I want the beer to complement the fresh strawberries, no compete. A Belgian Fruli, a Belgian wit beer with strawberry juiced added is also a good option, but from what I have read, Fruli is closer to strawberry soda than strawberry beer.

Please feel free to make recommendations on beers that complement strawberries.  I will be making a trip to Brewery Creek and possibly Firefly tomorrow to see what I can find. This Wednesday will be the big strawberry waffle day, I’ll keep you all posted.

Cheers,

Erik

Okay, I’ll admit it – I love yeast

The world of beer aficionados is generally divided into two camps; hops heads and malt lovers.  This particular part of the world, the Pacific Northwest,  is chock full of  hop heads and rightly so – Washington State is one of the world’s greatest hop growing regions.  But as much as I enjoy  drinking an over the top Imperial IPA, I’m not a true hop head.  Neither am I a true malt lover – although I can’t image ever turning down a malty Southern Brown Ale.  So where does this leave me – will I forever be lost in this state of limbo? No, for I am a yeast lover.

Yeast is such an under-discussed and unappreciated ingredient – without yeast beer would not exist and the world would be worse for it.  Beer was brewed without hops for centuries and although beer  would not be the same without malted grain, a whole plethora of sugary ingredients are out there just begging to be added into the brewing process, but yeast cannot be replaced or substituted.  Baking Powder just will not do in this situation.

Yeast can be a completely neutral ingredient, imparting almost no flavour at all in its creation of alcohol and carbon dioxide, which is desirable in many beer styles.  On the opposite side, yeast can create esters, and phenols and many other compounds that add a  range of fruit flavours and spicy complexity to beer.  Not only can yeast create flavour, but it can also add mouthfeel and can  draw out or hide the maltiness of certain beers.

The Belgians are masters at controlling spicy, fruity, sour and almost sweet flavours that yeast can create,  Germans have brewing with neutral lager yeast down to a science, the English know how to control malt flavours with yeast, and North Americans have embraced a whole gamut of yeast strains to brew with.  Brewers understand the importance of yeast, but that understanding does not make it to the consumer often enough.

Yeast is a living, breathing organism that is responsible for the creation of beer and I think these creatures deserve a little more attention in the world of beer.  A knowledgeable beer drinker should be able to determine the different hop varieties in a beer and perhaps even the different malts, but I believe only a select few could determine the style of yeast used to ferment the sweet wort into beer.

My obsession with yeast has grown to new heights.  So far I have collected two wild yeast cultures; one for bread and one for brewing my very own authentic West Coast Lambic.  The third yeast culture was harvested from my last homebrew and is essentially an IPA flavoured Wyeast 1968 ESB yeast.  Instead of brewing with this yeast, I think I will try to make pizza dough with the yeast.  Add some heat to the pizza sauce and I would imagine the the pizza would pair perfectly with an IPA – both sharing the same yeast.

Harvested Wyeast ESB Yeast; Wild Yeast for brewing; Wild Sourdough Yeast

Harvested Wyeast ESB Yeast - Wild Yeast for brewing - Wild Sourdough Yeast

Wild Yeast for an Lambic expierament

Wild Yeast for a Lambic experiment

If you only take away one thing from this post I hope it is this:  Yeast creates beer, and without beer where would the world be -  would happiness as we know it exist?

Cheers,

Erik