Love Good Beer

Visiting Cantillon in Brussels

Saturday, January 29th, 2011 | Beer | 1 Comment

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

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 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

The barrel room at Cantillon

Bottle Room at Cantillon, they bottle age for years

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

A dirty bottle, in more ways than one

Time for a taste

Tags: brussels, cantillon, framboise, geueze, Lambic, storm, wild yeast

Beer and Waffles

Friday, June 19th, 2009 | Beer, Food and Recipes | 3 Comments

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

Tags: Beer and Waffles, geuze, Lambic, lindemans framboise, mort subite kriek, strawberries, swans berry ale, Waffles, wittekerke rose

Seasonal Beer

Monday, June 15th, 2009 | Beer | 2 Comments

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

Tags: aarbei geuze, BC Strawberries, Beer and Waffles, Belgium, brewery creek, firefly, Fruit Beer, Fruli, Lambic, Waffles, Wit Beer

Okay, I’ll admit it – I love yeast

Saturday, March 7th, 2009 | Beer, Food and Recipes, Homebrew | 10 Comments

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

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

Tags: Beer, ESB, Esters, hops, Lambic, Malt, Phenols, Sourdough, Yeast

Real Trappist Beer

Friday, March 6th, 2009 | Beer | 5 Comments

I sometimes flinch when people say they do or do not like Belgian beer.  A year ago, I might have said something similar, but I’ve since learned that Belgium is country and not representative of a beer style.  In fact, Belgian beer comprises a vast and diverse collection of very delicious beer styles.  The most interesting moniker attached to a category of Belgian beer, to me at least, is Trappist.  Trappist is also not the name of a beer style, but signifies that a beer has been brewed under the control of Trappist monks.  Trappist beer is available for sale, but the monks use any proceeds to carry out their monastic lives, not for profit.  I find this pretty freaking cool, that I can drink beer made by monks in the same way they’ve been making it for hundreds of years.  Check out the Wikipedia page for more info on Trappist history.

There are currently only seven Trappist breweries remaining in the world, six in Belgium and one in the Netherlands, and all are currently attached to active monasteries.  They are Chimay, Orval, Rochefort, Westmalle, Westvleteren, Achelse Kluis, and Koningshoeven (the Dutch one).  Trappist beers were traditionally brewed with greater strength to help sustain the monks during their fasts (which may or may not explain some saintly visions).  Today, Trappist ales can generally be categorized among the dubbel, tripel, Belgian pale ale, or Belgian strong ale styles.  Many confuse Belgian beers sporting the abbey label with trappist beers.  The abbey label arose around the same time that Trappist beer became popular, but abbey is only a competitive marketing term.  Abbey and Trappist beers are generally brewed in the same styles, but the abbey label does not necessarily signify that a beer was actually made by an abbey, not that it really matters.  There are many fine examples of excellent abbey beer (Unibroue in Quebec brews some of the finest belgian trappist/abbey style beer in the world), but you can be sure that authentic trappist beers are of the finest quality.

The seven Trappist Beers

I for one am excited to get into the stockpile of Westmalle, Rochefort, and Chimay authentic Trappist beers I have recently amassed.  A Belgian tasting night might be in order, complete with sasions, browns, wits, lambics and more.  If you haven’t tried any Belgian beer styles, I highly recommend you do so.  There will definitely be at least one that strikes you as lovely, and you don’t want to be missing out.

Cheers,

Chri

Tags: abbey, achelse kluis, belgian, chimay, dubbel, koningshoeven, Lambic, orval, rochefort, sasion, trappist, tripel, unibroue, westmalle, westvleteren, wit

Beer & Bread

Friday, December 19th, 2008 | Food and Recipes, Homebrew | 1 Comment

I have been unemployed for three weeks now and have a lot of free time on my hands. With nothing else to do, I started to bake bread – I love bread. So far I have made quite a few loaves of focaccia bread, a loaf of braided French style bread, dinner rolls, croissants and standard white bread. Baking bread is dead simple and incredibly satisfying, plus it will make your house smell amazing. If you haven’t made bread before you must give it a try.

Making bread is very similar to making beer. In ancient Egypt, it is suspected that brewing and bread baking took place is the same place and possibly by the same people. In Egypt, a brew master would also be a baker. After all, the ingredients are almost the same, including grain, yeast and water. Hops are the only ingredient that separates beer from bread; however, hops are a recent addition to brewing and would not have been available to Egyptian brewers.

Baking and brewing, siblings at birth, have sadly been torn apart for thousands of years, and now I, Erik Wolfe, am going to reunite them together again. We shall once again have balance in the world. To do this, I have decided to go back in time and use the same baking & brewing techniques that Egyptians may have used thousands of years ago.

The first bread ever eaten would have been an unleavened flatbread made from an ancient grain such as farro. Without cultivated yeast, which was not available at grocery stores back then, bread will not rise and beer will not ferment. Fortunately, wild yeast is floating in the air all around us just waiting to eat some sugary grain. Early forms of leavened bread and beer would have been fermented with wild yeast. In present day, bread made with wild yeast is called sourdough bread and beer fermented with wild yeast is called a lambic beer. Once a baker or a brewer has fermented their beer or bread, they can cultivate the yeast by continuing to feed grain (sugar) to the yeast, allowing the yeast to be reused again and again. In the form of bread, this is somewhat difficult without refrigeration, but beer is easy to store and is shelf stable at standard room temperatures. By adding beer, instead of water, to grain flour the bread receives a healthy dose of cultivated yeast allowing it to rise and turn into bread.

Beer-Sourdough Bread Starter - Yum!

To recreate a piece of food history, I made a sourdough starter by adding 1 part wheat flour to 1 part beer, my own home brew of course. The starter has been sitting and being fed grain for three days and is bubbling away nicely smelling just like fermenting beer – only brewers enjoy the smell of fermenting grain. The yeast from the beer will continue to eat the flour creating more yeast. Once it has been a few more days, and I have a good amount of yeast in my starter, I will add it to a standard bread recipe and make bread as usual. I will keep you all posted, including the recipe when it is complete.

Erik

Tags: Baking, Beer, Bread, Brewing, Farro, Lambic, Sourdough, Yeast