The Untouchables

There's been a bit of chat lately about whether some of the more revered new-wave UK craft breweries are now "beyond criticism" - whether they're so widely respected that no-one's willing to risk saying a bad word about them for fear of being torn apart by the fanboys.

There's a fair objection that this rather depends how deep into the bubble you operate - being rude about the current in-thing is also a quick way to position yourself as a straight-talking speaker-of-truth-to-power. But it does hit a bit of a nerve regarding the craft scene's relationship to criticism - this is also a scene where people seriously argue that you shouldn't tweet your dissatisfaction with a bad pint until you've given the relevant pub or brewery a chance to respond privately. And to me, this doesn't seem like a healthy attitude in the long run.

I think the real issue here is that brewers and drinkers are both very bad at dealing with the fact that taste is subjective - that not everyone likes every beer, and that one person not liking some particular beer doesn't mean that no-one else does or that the brewer is incompetent or dishonest. As a punter, I generally try to avoid contributing to this when I'm talking about small breweries by putting a comment in context if I can - saying that I don't like this beer as much as their others, or as much I used to, or as much as everyone else seems to - or at least by trying to keep the language subjective. On the flip side I'd hope that brewers (and fanboys) can deal with the fact that sometimes someone just won't like one of their beers, and that saying in public that they don't like it doesn't necessarily mean they're being a dick about it. It's important that we can do this because fundamentally, if you've only got nice things to say then you haven't got much to say at all.

The Style Council

A comment on this recent post on Tandleman's blog brought up the issue of the BJCP style guidelines - the judging guidelines for the different style categories recognized in American Homebrewers Association competitions.

I've not yet entered a homebrew competition myself, partly because that sort of thing isn't really my bag and partly because, if I'm honest, I suspect that the results would be pretty embarrassing at the moment. However, I do have some idea of how competitions work.

As in the comments on Tandleman's post, the BJCP guidelines often get stick for being a) overly prescriptive and b) wrong. But while there's some truth in this, I think that it misses the point of them a bit. Their goal, as I understand it, is to give some semblance of order to homebrew competitions, and enable them to test how much control the brewer has over the results of their brewing process. If you brew a Märzen for a competition, for instance, then as well as just brewing something that the judges enjoy drinking, you also have to demonstrate that you have the technical chops to make it malty but balanced with a moderately dry finish and a medium body. It's a bit like playing scales and arpeggios in a music exam; they don't represent everything you could ever want to do, but they do let you demonstrate your technical competence in a relatively controlled format.

This is fine, and it seems like a pretty good learning exercise for a homebrewer to go through - a bit of rigor and attention to detail never hurt anyone. The problems come when people lose sight of that, and start treating the BJCP guidelines as a guide to what beer styles actually mean out in the wild, and what they definitively ought to be like. The divisions between different porters and stouts are what the complaint that inspired this post was about, and the complaint is a valid one - for example, the Charlie Papazian has admitted that the division between robust porter and brown porter was basically an artifcial way of splitting an overly broad category, but it's a division that's now reflected in the names of commercial beers as well. There's plenty of other shonky stuff in there as well that I'm sure gets treated as authoritative well outside of its original intended context.

In spite of this, I've been guilty of consulting the BJCP style guide when planning my own decidedly non-competitive brews. And why? Because it's easy. The BJCP document is readable online, and you know that if you keep your recipe somewhere within the its guidelines then you've got a reasonable chance of ending up with something that's drinkable and in roughly the style you'd expect, and from where I'm currently at at least that counts as a result. If you want to know more reliably how style terms are actually used in their proper contexts and how they've evolved over time then you start needing to consult specialist books, or try to pull out the bits that you currently need to know from long and information-dense articles and blog posts, assuming you can find anything authoritative on the subject anyway. And while doing either of those is a fine way to spend a rainy afternoon, there are times when you just want to get on with brewing, and a quick dip into the BJCP document lets you do that.

So what would help?

Well, homebrewers - and professional brewers, and drinkers, come to that - could do their research properly. It'd be great if everyone who tried a bottle of Westmalle Triple and thought "hey, that was nice, I'd quite like to brew something like that" went out and bought a copy of Brew Like A Monk and read it from cover to cover. But realistically that's unlikely to happen.

Another thing that would help is better pre-digested sources of information about beer styles. Something with about the level of detail that the BJCP provide - typical gravities and IBUs, typical ingredients and so on - but properly sourced and with more of a slant towards reflecting how terms are used in the wild and how they've evolved over time rather than towards simply providing a workable format for competitions. I might have a punt at this myself, but given my normal rate of posting, it'll be a while before I get much coverage.

Or is this just something that we're going to live with? Accept that Robust Porter is a new style classification in the late 20th Century just like India Pale Ale was in the 19th, and that every now and then, your meticulously sourced account of the history of Bavarian brewing is going to be met with someone insistently pointing you to Category 8A (Munich Dunkel)?

Generic Response to a Brewery Selling Out

Okay, so the latest big corporate beer buyout - Beer Hawk - was a distributor rather than a brewery. But it seems unlikely to be the last, and it's a good opportunity to put together an all purpose "here's what I think post" that I can re-use repeatedly in the future.

i) I'm not angry at the owners for "selling out".

It's their business, they've put the hard work into building it up, and if they want to get filthy rich out of it then that's their prerogative and, all else being equal, I'm happy for them.

If they've made a big thing out of their independence-or-death credentials and (particularly) if they've slagged off other people for "selling out" in the past then I might still think they're dicks, though. Sure, this is how marketing works, but I like to think that the people involved in small breweries are more like normal, decent, averagely honest people and less like the marketing departments of large amoral corporations. I still don't think they shouldn't have sold out, but I do think that they shouldn't have made a big thing of convictions and commitment that they didn't have.

ii) I don't think it's a good thing for their beer in the long run, though.

Once you're part of a big multinational, you're part of a money-making machine, and making as much money as possible is your job. Just right now, they can probably make more money out of you in the long run by staying at arm's length and letting you focus on quality and keep on building up your reputation and all that stuff. In the future, that could change, and they might want to start cashing in a bit on your reputation, and people might start turning up to ask whether you really need to use quite so many expensive hops and those long lagering times and whether you couldn't stop brewing all the weird shit that doesn't make any money and focus a bit more on milking your flagship brands. And when that happens, your "we're still in charge" talk won't mean a thing.

iii) I won't stop buying their beer, but I might choose a beer from a still-independent brewery instead if there's a roughly equivalent alternative available.

This isn't an ideological point, it's a pragmatic one. If I give some money to an independent brewery then they'll spend some of it on beard-care products and new tattoos and, in one way or another, invest the rest back into making the brewery bigger and better. Or at least into keeping it in business. If they're a brewery that I like then this is in my interests. If I give some money to the craft wing of a drinks multinational then for all I know the profit will go to fund the marketing campaign for a new alcopop they're launching in South America. This is not in my interests. All else being more-or-less equal, I'd rather support an independent whose other stuff I generally like than a multinational whose other stuff I generally wouldn't touch with a bargepole.

iv) Finally, can we cut out all the "strategic partnership" crap?

If you want me to believe, despite a globe-spanning megacorp giving you shedloads of money in exchange for the ownership of your brewery, that "nothing's changed" and that you're still honest and authentic and all that stuff, then the first thing you could do is actually announce that it's happened in an honest and authentic way rather than using whatever marketing-approved wording your new corporate masters have given you. Since it's clearly not fooling anyone, it does more to undermine your credibility than to defend it. So why do it?

Book Reviews

Being a bit of a geek, I tend to accumulate stacks of books about most subjects that interest me. Here, to inform and entertain, I've reviewed the various books that I've read so far about homebrewing.

Randy Mosher - Mastering Homebrew

Randy Mosher is a well established and well respected homebrew writer, and Mastering Homebrew is his entry into the "comprehensive general tome" market. In keeping with Mosher's creative approach to brewing, it sets out to teach you how to design your own recipes, not just follow existing ones. There's a great section on how to build up a complex grain bill from scratch and the roles different malts can play, as well as extensive catalogues of grains, hops and other ingredients and discussions of when and how to use them. This approach extends even to the introductory extract brew "recipe", which is actually more of a template, instructing you to add different combinations of steeping grains, hops and yeast depending on the effect that you want to achieve.

There's perhaps a bit too much time spent on wacky ingredients for my taste, particularly in the recipes (which there aren't many of to start with...), but most of the other stuff that you want to know is in there as well.

The book is clearly written with beginners in mind and covers pretty much everything you need to know to get started. On the other hand, there's also a lot of depth in there, and I suspect that it's one of those books that I'll keep finding useful little nuggets in for years.

Jamil Zainasheff and John J. Palmer - Brewing Classic Styles

This actually makes a great companion to Mastering Homebrew. The focus here is on brewing "classic" beer styles by-the-book - something that Mosher has limited time for - with a recipe and some general advice being given for each BJCP-recognized style. I haven't tried following any of the recipes precisely, but they make good starting points for tinkering with. The recipes are mostly given for extract brewing with steeped grains, but each one is followed by a full grain bill and mashing instructions for all-grain brewers.

Graham Wheeler - Brew Your Own British Real Ale

A good set of general brewing instructions and a solid stack of recipes for trad British ales. The focus here is on following recipes, not on creating them from scratch, though, and as the title suggests, the book is very much about traditional British ale styles - American hops are more-or-less explicitly dismissed as universally inferior to Fuggles and Goldings. Wheeler seems a bit less fastidious in his approach than a lot of homebrew writers, which makes for an interesting alternative perspective at times.

Phil Markowski - Farmhouse Ales

This is divided into two parts - Biere de Garde and Saison. In each one, it covers loads of historic and cultural context, leading into a description of what the beers are like to drink, followed by a general discussion of how they're brewed and then some specific recipes. Some people might find that there's more information here than they really need, but if you like digging into this sort of stuff then it's fantastic.

Most people are probably going to buy this book for the section on saison, but I'd be surprised if all the talk of "rustic, malty ales" didn't tempt a few of them into trying their hand at the odd biere de garde as well.

Mother Styles

One hallmark of French haute cuisine has always been its dizzyingly huge and diverse range of sauces. One of the first attempts to impose some sort of order on the whole proceedings was made by the great 19th Century chef Marie-Antoine Carême - the Heston Blumenthal of his day - who determined that in fact, a great many of them could be seen as being derived from four "mother sauces" - espagnole, velouté, allemande, and béchamel. Under this system, a Mornay sauce could be described as a béchamel with cheese and an egg yolk added, while a sauce chasseur was a sauce espagnole beefed up with mushrooms and shallots.

Carême's original list has been modified over the years - sauce allemande has been demoted to be a derivative of velouté, while sauce tomate and sauce hollandaise have been added - but the idea of the mother sauces remains one of the foundations of French cooking, and mastering them is an essential element of a French chef's education.

I've recently started to wonder whether a similar approach could also help a beginner homebrewer like me to navigate the maze of beer styles and recipes. Rather than starting from scratch with every style and every recipe that we try to brew, can we look at a lot of them as being basically variants on another style that we've already tried? Does beer have "mother styles"?

What constitutes a mother style would probably vary from person to person - an American hophead might see US IPA and American Amber as mother styles in their own right, whereas I treat them as basically derivative of American Pale Ale - but at the moment, most things that I brew are basically variants on one of:

• American Pale Ale
• Euro-hopped Blonde Ale
• Porter
• ESB
• Saison.

That isn't to say that I have a single APA recipe that I tweak when I want an American Amber or a US IPA, but it does seem helpful that when I brew one of those things, rather than thinking about stuff that I already know and about new lessons that I learn as being specific to that style, I can think about them in the broader context of American Pale derived beers. Similarly, for anything dark and roasty I can start off by thinking about how I'd get there from Porter.

Does this way of thinking ring bells with anyone else? What would your "mother styles" be?

Basic Brown Beer

I've got quite interested in "single malt and single hop" beers - SMaSH, for short - as a way of learning about malts and hops while still producing alright beer. It appeals to the science part of my brain to try to learn about a process by observing the effect when you change just one or two of its parameters, and the results so far have been encouraging.

On the other hand, "single malt" beers are obviously pretty limited when it comes to experimenting with darker malts.

What would be nice for that is a Basic Brown Beer recipe - a base recipe that allows for simple variations to showcase different character malts. The base recipe needs to have enough character to support the new addition, but not so much that it overwhelms it. Similarly, I'd like to keep the recipe as simple as possible. It would also be useful if it was fairly drinkable on its own, as a basis for comparison.

My first stab at a recipe is as follows.

• Grist:
  • 85% Pale Ale Malt
  • 10% 80L Crystal Malt
  • 5% Chocolate Malt
(Quantities depending on batch size (or vice versa), for an OG of 1.050)
• Mash at 66C
• 60 minute boil
• Hops:
  • use whatever English hops are to hand at 60 mins to make 25 IBU
• Yeast:
  • Danstar Nottingham (or similar)

Possible variations would be:

• sub Crystal Rye, Carafa or similar for Crystal Malt
• more chocolate malt
• add other dark malts
• sub other dark malts for Chocolate Malt
• sub Amber Malt, Brown Malt, Dark Munich or similar for some of the Pale Ale Malt
• add dark sugar or molasses.

I'm probably going to have a go at something like the basic recipe this weekend. But this is going to be the first dark beer that I've brewed, the first malt-forward beer I've brewed, and the first time I've used any malt darker than medium crystal. So I might be barking up the wrong tree entirely. Any thoughts?

All Grain!

The more you do extract brewing, the more you end up reading recipes and articles and forum posts where all-grain brewers talk enthusiastically about Maris Otter and Carafa Special III and strike temperatures and protein rests, and if you've got anything like my urge to tinker with recipes then you rapidly realize that you're going to have to get around to all-grain sooner rather than later.

All grain - or at least, some grain.

I'm not going to write about the generalities of all grain brewing - that's been covered very well elsewhere - but I am going to write about what my setup is and why.

I started off by considering (and rejecting) the following standard options:

• Brew-in-a-bag - simple, but it seems hard to get reasonable volumes out given the size of pan that I've got to mash and boil in. Also requires a lot of attention and stirring.
• Pre-converted picnic cooler - these seem like a good idea, but tend to be far too big for my purposes.
• Home converted picnic cooler - this is probably the Right Thing To Do in the long run, but I'm crap at Making and would probably make a balls of it.

What I've ended up with is a brew-in-a-bag-in-a-picnic-cooler system. The equipment comprises one Igloo 19l picnic cooler and one grain bag. The process is as follows:

• Put milled grain in bag in picnic cooler.
• Add strike water, stir well, check / adjust temperature and leave for an hour.
• Remove the bag slowly and dunk it in some more hot water in the boiling pan.
• Stir the grain, take bag back out, and leave it somewhere to drain.
• Add the wort from picnic cooler to the pan, crank up the heat and get boiling.

Since my crappy electric stove can only keep about ten litres at a rolling boil, I'm currently starting the boil at a high gravity and diluting in the fermenter.

This has some downsides - you get limited sparging to keep the pre-boil volume down to ten litres, and unpredictable efficiency as a result - I tend to guess at the amount of grain to use, check the volume and gravity pre-boil, and adjust the hopping and post-boil dilution accordingly. You also can't vorlauf properly. The risk of hot side aeration is higher than if you do everything with spigots and tubes, but opinions seem to be divided as to how much of an issue that is.

In general, though, this approach seems pretty practical and I'd recommend it to anyone who's trying to brew mid-sized all-grain batches without a proper boiler.

Rugged yet colourful.