whatchudrinkin?

I went to a new-ish Portland area brewery yesterday where they had not one, not five, but ten different hazy IPAs on tap. Yes half of them were doubles, and one or two had fruit added, but ten different hazy IPAs? Really? Imagine walking into a brewery a third of their menu was variations on Pilsner. No not like a dozen lagers. I mean Pilsner. That’s how specific we’re talking.

There was a taster tray with three hazy IPAs on it. And honestly, I couldn’t tell them apart. Okay. I could tell they were three different beers, but they were so similar it seemed like they could easily be batches of the exact same beer. At a larger brewery, making twelve variations on a theme is how recipes are developed. But usually, you pick the best one and scale it up as a Spring seasonal. Here, they just had twelve hazy IPAs on tap, and a taster tray where three of the four beers on it were hazy IPAs, they were all available in cans to-go. 

The novelty cravings in beer has become so insane that a brewery can make basically the same beer five times, slap a different kooky name on it and send it out. Whether people like it or not is irrelevant because there will be another five of the same beer coming down the pipe next week. 

Well, no. We skipped a few freshies this year. There’s only so many fresh hop beers you can try in a month. We found almost twenty different canned and bottled options, and they are still being released. But harvest season is over, and there’s a chill in the air. It’s about time to switch to something darker. In the meantime, here are ten more freshies to hold you over.

Hopicana is Old Town Brewing’s hazy fresh hop hazy. Hopicana is juicy, full of orange and mango. Fresh mosaic hops give it a melony flavor and a zesty tingle. If you want a real good, balanced hazy, Old Town knows what’s up.

Double Mountain were pioneers in fresh hops, but their signature pair, Killer Green and Killer Red, are tasting less bombastic than in past years. KIller Green features fresh Simcoe and Brewer’s Gold hops. It’s really bitter. It’s spicy like arugula, but only only presents a tiny zest of citrus. Killer Red looks almost identical in the glass. Which goes to say the two bases, an IPA and an IRA, are not so different. Killer Red is full of fresh Perle and Centennial hops, but the darker malt dominates. It’s toasty. The bitterness is more aggressive, like dandelion greens. The only fruit note is a raspberry. Both beers are nice, but a little old school.

Machine House Brewery from Seattle specializes in old school beers, session strength English ales served on cask. Their Fresh Hop Simcoe Session -- very creative name -- is only about four percent alcohol, but packs in the hops. You really get the orangy notes of Simcoe with the bite of pith in the finish. The middles is very green, like kaffir lime leaves.

Gigantic Brewing also stuck with Simcoe for their fresh hop pale ale. The Simcoe Awakens is the seventh beer they’ve made with fresh Sodbuster Farms hops. Gigantic draws out more dankness from their Simcoe. It’s got a greener flavor, more pine. The citrus notes are still their, but taste less ripe. Under all the hops, it the bones of a nice pale ale, too.

Stormbreaker Brewing’s Handfuls of Fresh Hops is almost offensive. The scent is overpowering. It’s not sweaty. But it’s not exactly dry. There are oranges in their. There are flowers. But they are rotting or something. Sarah liked it though, so what do I know.

Thundercone was probably the first fresh hop beer I ever tasted. McMenamins gets a lot of flack for being old and ubiquitous, but they can make a real nice beer. This year, Thundercone feature fresh Simcoe hops. It’s got a really fresh, green scent. It’s a little orangey. It’s a little bitter. It’s just like putting your face in a freshly opened ziplock full of hops. Very nice.

Rogue grew their own hops for Coast Haste. It’s got that Mosaic quality everyone seems to love. It’s got a lot of haze. It’s melony. It’s juicy. It’s very on trend. A little too heady for for my taste. They could lose a few points on the ABV. Good for Rogue though, doing something new.

Crux named Dr. Jack for the breeder of America’s favorite hop, Cascade. But for some reason it doesn’t taste at all like its namesake’s creation. Dr. Jack the beer is weirdly juicy. Cascade shouldn’t be juicy, right? It’s odd. It’s sweet. I don’t like it.

Fresh hops! Get your fresh hops! It’s that time of the year, the sun is sinking southward and the bines are heavy with juicy cones. The harvest window is short, and the hops are fragile. But before they are all dried and doled out for another year, a few lucky brewers can get their mitts on those oily little buggers.

Once again, the first beer into cans came from Ex Novo. They must have inside information on the harvest schedules, because I wasn’t even thinking about freshies when Fresh Hop Eliot showed up earlier this month. It was a great reminder how fresh hops are different from the usual dried varieties. This beer reeks of hops. Taking a whiff is like standing behind a long haired dude at a crowded concert. It’s skunky; it’s sweaty; it’s perfumy; it’s actually kind of nice.

That same week, Level Beer -- that newer brewery out by the airport -- combined two seasonal trends in their fresh-hopped Oktoberfest beer. Level combines the malty richness of Oktoberfest with an unexpected fruitiness. It’s got that tingly flavor I only find in fresh hops.

Crux’s first freshy has an odd name and brings out soem odd flavors. I’m not sure it was really fresh. None of that green freshness, lots and lots of fruit. And this is supposed to be made with fresh Centennials? It’s lacking the funky, dank flavors I was expecting. It tastes incredibly clean, with a lager-like finish. Odd.

And the hits kept coming when Baerlic brewing put out fresh green cans of their Punk Rock Time IPA. It’s got that fresh herb melody floating over a dank, oniony bassline. this is more what I expect from Centennial hops. But it was made with fresh Strata, so what do I know.

Little Beast took a different tack with their fresh hops, making a sour ale and added a ton of freshies. It tastes different too. It’s pungent at first, and then it gets funky. It’s intense in too many directions, really. A noble effort, if a little flawed in execution.

Occidental went and added fresh hops to their Pilsner. It’s got a nice balance. The malt flavor has depth and the hops add a little fresh citrus to the herb party.

Reuben’s Fresh Hop Crikey IPA tastes kind of old, and plasticy. Maybe it’s fresh upfront, but the back end is rough and bitter. 

Apples and Apricots and Some Other Stuff

Nat West isn’t your usual cider maker. He got his start making backyard cider from old crab apples, traditional dry ciders. But being in the beer haven of Portland, West saw that cider flavor didn’t need to come just from apples. In Cider Made Simple, Jeff Alworth writes that Nat West approaches fresh pressed apple juice like a brewer approaches wort. He adds spices, fruit, and chooses his yeast to create a cider that is tastier than any single ingredient alone. 

Reverend Nat’s was also an early pioneer in dry hopped ciders. Hallelujah Hopricot is based on a Belgian Witbier, with additions of coriander, grains of paradise, and bitter orange peel. It’s fermented with a Saison yeast strain and finished with apricot juice and cascade hops. It’s as far from traditional cider as one can get, but should raise the eyebrows of fellow beer geeks. 

A Coin Toss and a Barrel of Pickles

In 1845, on the banks of the Willamette River, Asa Lovejoy and Francis Pettygrove flipped a coin. They were trying to decide on a name for their new settlement. Lovejoy was from Boston, and thought it would be a perfect name for his new home in Oregon. Pettygrove prefered his own hometown in Maine, and when the coin fell in his favor, Portland, Oregon was born. 

In 2015, Tim Hohl opened Coin Toss Brewing in Oregon City, where Pettygrove beat Lovejoy in the best of three tosses. It’s a small, suburban brewery focusing more on drinkable styles like lagers and red ales and the like. Solid dad beers. I’d forgotten about the brewery, because I forget about most breweries, but something jogged my memory when I was perusing the “light” section at my local bottle shop. Between the pilsners was a bottle bearing a familiar penny. Oh! I thought to myself, That sounds nice, a good pils from a new-ish brewery. 

Somehow, I’d not really understood the name on the label, Caught in a Pickle. That’s a baseball thing right? Baseball. Lager. Sounds good. Somehow I ignored the barrel of pickles on there, too. I brought my selections up to the counter, more excited about an obscure old English ale than what I thought was just another pilsner. But the women at the cash register singled out that green label. “Ooh! Getting the pickle beer, eh?” she said. “Ha-ha,” I replied. But my face said, what? A three minute conversation about salty Gose and drinking shots with a pickle back and it looked like I meant to buy a beer made to taste like a pickle.

I should’ve known. It was right there on the label. This dill-cious beer is a blend of our house lager and bread-and-butter pickle juice. Goes great with a hot dog! Well. I’ll drink any beer once. And reader, I can tell you honestly, it wasn’t bad.

I braced myself as I brandished the bottle opener. It poured out normal enough It looked golden like a light lager. It smelled fairly normal, if dill is normal for you. It smells herbaceous and floral. And it tastes, ummm, it tastes pickle-y. But it’s not the vinegar-y mess I was fearing. It tastes briney. It’s got a salty kiss. It’s not bad. It’s alright. But never again. 

Black Apple CIder

Apples come in more colors than just red and green. Some are red all the way from skin to seed. Others come in with a orange tinged flesh. And some are just aptly named. Arkansas Black is a dark, dark red. No, not purple. Like red paint mixed with black. No. More black. There you go. It would look perfect in still life. A bowl, some black apples, a single candle, a witches hat, a broom.

Arkansas Black apples originated in the mid nineteenth century in, where else? Arkansas. The apples have recently caught on in the midwest and further afield. Like Hood River, Oregon where Double Mountain made them into cider. 

Another Norwegian IPA

Norwegian IPA

This is my second homebrew with kveik. Same recipe, except this time I used Cyitra hops and attempted dry hopping for only the second time ever. Yeesh it made a mess. I tried my best, but that last bottle was so full of floaty hop matter I had to pour it down the drain. The other bottles were less chewy, but full of that Citra scent – you know, oranges and stuff. It tastes incredibly contemporary. 

Aside from the occasional green fleck floating on the foam, I wouldn’t be surprised to find this beer on tap anywhere in town. It’s got that smack you in the face scent, it’s fruity and crisp on the tongue. And I don’t actually like it that much. I get why everyone loves Citra, but I want to try something that let’s the other ingredients shine through more. 

Apple Singles

Traditional English cider making is a hands off affair. The apples are crushed and pressed, and the juice is left alone to ferment. Apple juice is full of tasty nutrients, so yeasts and will eat all the tasty sugars they can get. The finished cider is bone dry and usually near six and half percent alcohol. French cideries purposefully stress the yeast, taking away their nutrients so they leave behind residual sugars. The process, known as keeving, leaves a cider as weak as three percent alcohol and tasting sweet. American cideries combine elements of both traditions with a winemakers focus on single varieties. American ciders feature Cortland, Gala, or Russet right on the label. The goal in these ciders is not to create the perfect balance of tannins, acids, sweetness, but to let the individual flavor of the apple shine.

What makes it special?

Last week we stopped in Astoria to visit the sea lions on our way to the beach. Buoy Beer Company is directly on the pier, making it a prime location for gazing at the tankers lined up on the river, and the diving cormorants. Sadly, the sea lions were absent from their usual post under the plexiglass floorboards.

But they did have beer. Quite a few beers actually, in a vast range of styles. When Buoy first opened, I’d pegged them as a lager and lighter ale brewery. They still make a real nice Cream Ale and a legit Dunkel, but the offerings have spread. Sarah sampled three different IPAs, ranging from the classic Northwestern to the Mimosa Brut. While not all to my taste, each was well made and drinkable. The cucumber infused Gose tasted exactly as you’d think –sour, summery, salty – but I didn’t like it. There was even a Belgian ale aged in wine barrels with Brettanomyces. It was more my thing, and I liked it, but I was annoyed. 

What’s the point of traveling and sampling new breweries if ultimately they’re all the same? Every brewery these days makes every style of beer with little variation. There’s a Pilsner for the lighter beer drinkers. Five kinds of IPA ranging from the bitter stuff to the hazy. There is always with fruit. There is always something sour. Everyone has a few barrels. The one thing that seemed to set Buoy apart is that nothing on the menu exceeded 7.5% ABV, but that’s just a seasonal fluke. 

Craft beer, whatever that means, is becoming increasingly uniform across the country. A craft brewery is a place where every sort of beer is made, and made increasingly well as more people have access to courses in brewing and fermentation science. As soon as a new style takes off in one corner of the country, it’s being imitated in every other. Of course, their are idiosyncrasies to every beer, but the standard deviation is becoming ever slimmer. 

What sets one brewery apart from another these days has less to do with the beer they are making than the cans they put them in. Aesthetics have more influence on whether a brewery does well than the beer they make. People like fancy cans. Finding the right graphic designer seems more important than hiring the right brewer. 

A Different Sort of Farmhouse Beer

Huh! I don’t know if my Kveik brew tastes Norwegian, but damn if this isn’t some good homebrew. 

First of all, the Hornindal stain from Omega Yeast does not throw off phenols. You know, those spicy notes a decade of Saison have tied to the idea farmhouse beer. This is really… clean? The Cascade hops – chosen for that beery baseline – are showing their best, pine and grapefruit and all that. Bright and fresh and delicious, but the fruity citrus esters from the package aren’t coming through. The kveik makes it a little different from your basic pale ale, but it would take an excellent palate to taste it. That’s not a knock on the strain, but as extreme as Kveik may be on paper, it actually makes a very crushable beer. We drank a gallon of the stuff this week. Don’t worry, I’m already planning my next batch. 

Pears for Your Heirs

Perry is like cider, but with pears. Making perry is as traditional as cider in southern England, but it’s fallen out of favor because pear trees are just hard. According to Cider Made Simple, pear trees take decades to mature and bear consisten fruit, they’re taller and harder to harvest, the fruit is more prone to pests and the juice more susceptible to bacterial infection, and the fermentations take longer. Perry is a huge hassle, but it’s dang tasty. 

Cider Made Simple

Since I started this blog some eight years ago, I’ve been regularly interested in cider. Like every two years or so I have a bottle and think, whoa! This stuff is really good. But the very next one I’d try would be garbage, sweet and flabby with too many additives like cherries and cranberries and ginger. No thanks. 

But the other day, I read on Beervana about Jeff Alworth’s trip out to Double Mountain Brewing’s cider operation. He sounded super impressed, and Jeff wrote a book about cider so I figured he would know. I decided to finally give cider it’s proper chance and picked up said book, Cider Made Simple, from my local library. It’s a thin volume which describes how cider is made in a few different locations, primarily southern England, northern France, and the Basque speaking region of Spain. 

The thing about making cider? It’s actually pretty simple. You crush the apples, you press out the juice, and you wait. That’s it. In traditional ciders, fermentation starts with just the natural yeast present on the fruit. It takes some time, but in six months or so you get delicious, complex cider. 

The real difficulty is choosing the apples going into the press. Many commercial cider in the United States taste bland because cider makers are choosing shitty apples. Red Delicious apples are cheap and full of fermentable sugars, but they don’t add much else to the cider. You need a blend of apples to get the right amount of acid and sugar and most importantly tannins. Apples for eating straight off the tree had all their bitterness bred out. Making good cider with dessert apples is hard. It takes more engineering, more fussing. Instead of letting fermentation happen naturally, every yeast is controlled. Instead of carbonating it naturally, they pasteurize it. Instead of selling it completely dry it’s back sweetened with extra flavorings.

Double Mountain’s Estate Heirloom Cider is made with apples grown on owner Matt Swihart‘s orchard near O’dell Oregon. The apple varieties that go into the blend are not the sort you’ll find in the grocery store. They have names like Foxwhelp and Brown Snout and probably taste kind of nasty in a pie. But that’s the point. On their own they are bitter, but in a blend they add depth and counterbalance the sweetness of a Braeburn.

Death to Sour Beer

Sour beers are out. The prefered nomenclature is now “mixed fermentation,” not “sour.” And acids, the chemicals that makes a sour beer sour, are also on the wane. For a while there, every brewery was experimenting with something sour. But things got too expensive and too tart. I guess average drinkers didn’t want to invest in bulk Tums. So breweries are getting better at blending bacteria and yeast for a more balanced profile. Here in Portland, Upright Brewing has been at the forefront of brewing with wild yeast and bacteria for nearly a decade now. I doesn’t matter if it’s lambic-esque like Ives or uses tons of fresh fruit like Fantasia, Upright makes a nice, quaffable beverage that balances sour, sweet, and bitter. 

Locally Grown

I find myself more and more interested in ingredients than in beer itself. Making an IPA with the freshest Yakima Valley hops and premium German malts is easy if you have the money. Making good beer with ingredients grown in Maryland? That’s going to take a little more creativity. But the result is a more -- I hate to say it -- authentic product. Arguing about authenticity is not cool. I hear you. No one likes the guy who loudly proclaims the popular brewery as a sellout. But if the goal of craft brewing is to make local beer, you have to start with local ingredients. 

In Oregon, we are spoiled for local ingredients, and always have been. Between the Yakima and Willamette Valleys, the Northwest grows the vast majority of American hops. Grain has been malted right across the river in Vancouver, Washington for nearly a hundred years. It’s hard not to brew beer in Portland. But other parts of the country, especially in the South, no one made beer for a long time, so no one grew the ingredients.

We all know George Washington and his ilk made beer and cider and mead up and down the eastern seaboard back in the day. Books have been written on the subject of brewing in the colonies. But it’s a hundred of years since New York’s hop fields were taken out by downy mildew and the Midwest became the bread basket for the rest of the country. Finding a local source for brewing supplies is hard. 

That’s what makes places like Milkhouse Brewery in Maryland so interesting. They try there damnedest to make beer locally. That means with hops grown on their own farm and grain malted just down the road.

The beer is conservative, leaning toward more approachable, more sessionable styles. Take Local Lager, it’s 3.9% and even your grandpa would recognize it as beer. It tastes like macro beer, malty and sort of corny. But there’s a subtle fruitiness that cuts through, white grapes and nectarines. It’s easy to drink, but has a certain depth you wouldn’t find in a Yuengling.

The most adventurous beer on offer at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival was probably the golden Biere de Garde. It smells of strawberries and has a hint sort of tart finish. It’s not sour, but it has a sharp something on the backend that cuts through a the agave nectar sweetness. Even a little flat from the crowler, it tasted great.

But the beer I think really captures the rustic spirit of Milkhouse is Goldie’s Best Bitter. It’s a 4.2% ale brewed with honey and Maryland grown Cascade hops. where you might expect a lot of grapefruit and pine, you get a rush of grassy freshness. It tastes dirty, earthy, fecund. It tastes of spring, damp soil, new growth. If they had used Yakima Valley Cascades, I doubt it would have the same flavor. It would probably taste like a lot of the old American Pale Ales you’re used to. But because Milkhouse grows their own hops and keeps their own bees, a simple pale ale can express flavors wholly unique.

Yeast Craze

I’ve been fascinated with kveik for a few years now, but not as long as Lars Garshol. He's the expert on the farmhouse brewing traditions of Eastern Europe. When most of us hear the term farmhouse beer, we imagine a golden yellow beer featuring flavorful yeast from Belgium. But people have been brewing on farms all over the world for millennia. Kveik is a kind of farmhouse yeast used brew in Norway. It’s basically undomesticated yeast that has been handed down and for generations. The yeast was traditionally collected on wooden rings and dried to be used again.

It’s a very strange yeast. Kveik can go hot and fast, tolerating temperatures over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit and finishing fermentation in a matter of days. Oh, and it can handle up to sixteen percent alcohol. Unlike Belgian yeast strains which are spicy and phenolic, Kveik is more fruity with big ester notes. White Labs recently launched a new Opshaug strain, isolated from a kveik sample provided by Garshol, and they aren’t alone. Interest is building in these idiosyncratic yeast, and I’ve finally got my hands on a commercial version.

Discombobulated was brewed in collaboration with Vancouver, BC’s Brassneck Brewing using kveik yeast with citrus and cocoa nibs added. I wish it was a straightforward beer, but beggars can’t be choosers. The nibs mask the yeast flavor at first, all bitter and chocolaty on my tongue. But the nose is something different. It’s kind of dusty and musty like brettanomyces, but with a bright citrus scent. That could be coming off what citrus was added to the beer, but I like to believe it’s the yeast. It’s surprising how well the cocoa nibs and citrus meld over time, but I’ve like to taste the kveik itself.