Liquid Sunshine

There is nothing like a crisp Pils after a long day in the sun. Pilsner has a proud heritage, but the name was sullied by Miller Lite and its ilk. Pilsner was a buzzword, appended to boring beer to make it seem exotic. It’s taken decades, but now Pilsner is regaining its proper place. Authentic Czech Pilsner is on grocery shelves. Breweries across the country are making faithful recreations of the European originals. And a few are adding their own twists.

Seasonal Affective Disorder

There are somethings that just don’t make sense this time of year. Colds for one and barrel aged barley wines for another. But childhood disease vectors don’t act rationally, and anniversaries fall on the same day every year. That’s why I’m sitting here surrounded by snotty tissues and writing about Breakside’s Old Lord Chubby Cheeks.

Breakside Brewery turned seven last week while my son turned three. The former celebrated with a “wheatwine” aged in rye whiskey barrels, the latter had chocolate cake with a side of microbes. The homemade chocolate cake was great, but the wheatwine was a little rough. 

Old Lord Chubby Cheeks is nearly twelve percent alcohol and it tastes like it. It’s a burly beer. Despite being brewed with heirloom wheat, it tastes more like a classic barley wine than anything – a blend of chewy malt and bitter hops. The rye barrels add a lot of character, a certain spiciness and a spirituous tang. It’s rough around the edges, abrasive. I asked Sarah was she thought. She took a sip and said to ask her again next winter. 

Controlled Demolition

Sometimes when I drink a new beer, especially an IPA, I get anxious about how long it’s been on the shelf. I’m scared I’m not getting the optimal product. Freshness has become the rallying cry of the modern brewer. “Best before yesterday” is literally printed on cans of Sticky Hands. So if I don’t like the beer, it’s my fault, right? I should’ve opened it earlier, bought it on tap, drank it in the brewery. 

Breakside Brewery takes a different approach. Head brewer Ben Edmunds knows the beer will be different in twenty days, thirty days. And instead of throwing his hands in the air, he decided to engineer his recipe to taste good whether the bottle has been on the shelf a week or three months.

He explained the evolution of flavor to Jeff at Beervana a last year.

“If you take Wanderlust as an example, the first fifteen days is all Mosaic and then it goes through this adolescence and between day 15 and 30 and what’s happening is this weird interference with Mosaic dropping out, but around day 30 the Amarillo starts to come forward and it becomes this new beer around day 30. When you have that beer from day 30 to 45, it has a little bit of tropical dankness, but essentially all that Mosaic character is gone and it becomes more bright, citrus peel, marmalade. I like to think how a hoppy beer is going to last on a shelf, and I don’t mind it going through this evolution.” 

Golden

In the early days, a double IPA was a mixture of pungent hops, brutal bitterness, and, for balance, a syrupy malty sweetness. Over time, high alcohol malt bombs changed lanes from DIPA to barleywine and a new, more sophisticated version emerged. The new DIPA focused more on hop aroma and flavor, and malt moved into the backseat along with the yeast. These are the classic West Coast IPAs. Now there is yet another DIPA, a cloudy, fruit flavored New England IPA.