Friends, Beer, and Food!

I just got back from the Michigan Homebrew Festival and had an amazing time! The organizers of the event are to be congratulated. The festival is in it's second year and really beginning to define itself as a must for craft beer drinkers and foodies alike. Despite some rough weather the entire event was a success. This year the festival doubled in size, filling up 50 campsites for the duration of the multiday festival.

The addition of the Friday Feast was perfect. Participants created a wide range of foods incorporating beer. There were excellent chili (shoutout to Shawn Richardson), gumbo (kudos to Lee, Kim, and the Cass crew), smoked salmon, pizzas, rabbit stew, pasta salads, and more. It was interesting that there seemed to be no dish done twice; there is a tremendous amount of creativity in the homebrewing community. Of Friday, Redwood Lodge generously donated some of the Mild they brewed with Lee Cruppenink. This beer will also be entered into the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) as a Pro-Am beer. I would not be surprised to see it medal.

However, Saturday still remains the heart of the festival. The Homebrew Festival serves as the host of the Michigan Beer Cup's awards ceremony. The rain whipped up something fierce but brewers are a hearty sort. As it poured down buckets, a member of the homebrew club I belong to, The Brewing Network, took home the highest honor. My buddy Nelson Gomoll hauled in Best of Show for his american pale ale! This is even a greater accomplishment considering the other 706 beers he was up against!

Saturday also features the various Michigan clubs pouring their beers. Several clubs set up booths of varying levels of sophistication. The Cass River Homebrewers took the People's Choice award for their efforts. The BN booth that we had was decidedly less complex, but beer came out of our taps nonetheless. We had beer donations from several homebrewers and it is much appreciated as we spread the word of the Brewing Network.

I was excited to pilot the beers that I have planned for Cranker's Brewery. I poured our Bulldog Red, our American Pale Ale (as of know un-named), and our Munich Helles. The beers were received well with many people asking for beers that others told them about and had many people returning for specific beers. I was able to pour my beers for some pro brewers, homebrewers, and judges that I have a lot of respect for. I am thankful for their honest and thorough feedback. I was actually pretty nervous pouring this year because a lot of people knew about the brewery and I wanted to impress with my beers. Overall it was a blast! A big thanks to Shawn, Nelson, Pat H, Ray, Raybeard, Phil, Jason, Isaac, Mrs. T, Pat C, Lee, Mike, Rachael, and Rockne!

Even when I am pro, I am going to commit to turn out some homebrew and keep pouring at future MI Homebrew Festivals. As always, the best thing about the festival was drinking good beer with good people!

Salute!

To Helles Or Not To Helles

I am a bit of a beer purist. Magnify that by the fact the I teach and love history and you get some pretty old school beer style dogma. I am all for innovation in beer, but the old school styles are something special. Pilsner, munich helles, bock, vienna lager, dortmunder - all are beer styles that organically grew out of the agricultural and environmental necessity of their respective birthplace. I find it fascinating that german pilsner's color, malt, and hop profile are largely a result of creating the beer that went best with the water profile of Plzen (Pilsen). Talk about drinking locally. To me beer is history as much as beer is food (more on that on another day).

Every brewpub has it's light beer. Let me say first of all that there is nothing wrong with a beer that is gently flavored. If you are a BudMillerCoors (BMC) drinker that is fine. Those beers aren't for me and I would argue that they aren't for you either. In my opinion, all BudMillerCoors drinkers should be drinking well made fresh munich style helles. First of all, it tastes like beer. We all have a conception of what beer is supposed to taste like and a crisp helles hits those marks better than the BMC products. Munich helles has a light bready pils malt flavor with just a hint of herbal hop aromas. That leads into a low hop bitterness that provides a gentle malty sweetness that serves as the beer's focal point. It is light, crisp, and easily quaffable. Better yet, it is real, it has roots and history, and it is delicious.

It is a goal of mine to have the light beer of Cranker's Brewpub to be a munich helles. This can be tricky. A helles is a lager. That means that it uses a style of yeast, lager yeast, that is traditionally fermented in the 48-52F range. Ale yeasts ferment in the 60's to low 70's range. Because they work at lower temperatures lager yeast takes a longer time to ferment. As a homebrewer time is no issue. As a pro brewer on a production schedule time is more vital. It will be my challenge to produce a quality lager efficiently.

Now to the beer. I decided to go with all pilsner malt with a small portion of light munich malt. The munich malt is meant to add a slight malt complexity to what is a very straight forward pilsner malt base beer. I have been kicking around different concepts when it comes to hopping. I can either utilize a hop that has great bittering power called magnum, or use a hop that has less bittering power called hallertau. If I use the magnum, I will be adding less hops to the kettle. This will mean less hop mass which will lend less hop flavor and aroma to the final beer. If I use the hallertau, that means more hop mass in the kettle to achieve the same amount of bittering as the magnum. However, the greater portion of hallertau will lend pronounced hop characteristics compared to the magnum only beer. I brewed the beer with hallertau the first time and I feel as if it took the beer out of range style wise due to the hop profile, not that that is a serious concern for a professional brewer. I have kicked around the idea of blending the magnum and hallertau to dial down the hop impression. I am going to go with the all hallertau version for the upcoming Michigan Homebrew Festival and see how it is received there.

That's all for now. In the meantime, drink good beer with good people!

Salute!

Being the Bulldog

My employer Cranker's Brewpub has been interested in an amber ale to be our first beer in package available to the public. Throughout my homebrewing career I always stuck with recipes from a great book called Brewing Classic Styles by Jamil Zainasheff. Jamil was really my brewing mentor. Aside from his book on recipes and beer styles he also hosts a couple of shows on The Brewing Network, a homebrewing podcast that I have spent countless hours listening to. (Did I already mention my 135 mile commute?) Jamil has won every homebrewing award and medal you can win and he is gracious enough to share any and everything he has learned with the public.

As a homebrewer and a father of three, now four, I couldn't brew whenever I felt like it. With the lag time between now and the opening of the brewery, I am branching out with the concepts that I learned from Jamil and forming my own recipes. Case and point: Bulldog Red.

There are a few ways to go with amber ales. Malt driven, hop driven, or a give and take of both. For my own personal preference, and per the style guidelines, I prefer this beer style on the hoppier side. The competition brewer in me is driven to brew that beer because that is what will score best with beer judges. The flip side is that I am not brewing for competition anymore, I am brewing for the public who will pay for my beer (hopefully).

With my first iteration of Bulldog Red I decided to go with a complex malt character achieved by using three different british caramel malts. I have heard from the brewers at Fuller's in England that the british caramel malts carry a different level of complexity than their american counterparts. I decided to go with two hop additions, a sixty minute bittering addition with magnum hops for the lions share of the beers clean bitterness, and a late kettle addition of chinook hops to leave a backing impression of citrus. The beer weighs in at 5% ABV with 25 IBU. I used the WLP007 Dry English Ale yeast from White Labs as it is a workhorse and flocks like mad. This is the ale yeast I plan on using for all of my ales brewed at Cranker's. It is very versatile.

I was pleased with the outcome with this beer but found myself feeding a critter in the back of my mind that was trying to get me to make this beer hoppier. I rebrewed this beer twice. Version #2 was the exact same beer as the first batch but dry hopped with amarillo hops to drive up the citrusy aromas. Version #3 used a different blend of caramel malts calculated to give me the same color as the original batch of beer. The goal here was to play with the caramel impression. I have both beers kegged up in the basement and will be bottling them up tomorrow for my employer. I am looking forward to these beers coming together for a week or two to see how they stack up to the original recipe.

I am really looking forward to the Michigan Homebrew Festival (www.mhfsite.com) in late August. I will be rebrewing the original Bulldog Red recipe and I will share the three versions with some trusted palates and use that feedback in going forward with the beer's formulation.

In the meantime, drink good beer with good people.

Salute!