New Belgium Sour Blending Symposium

Last month I was invited to New Belgium's Sour Beer Blending Symposium at Saraveza.  The event was a fine Monday night offering during PDX Beer Week: for some background, here is the press release for it over on the New School; here is Jeff Alworth's excellent recap of the session.  It was a really interesting and fun experience which my brain has been digesting about as quickly as brettanomyces digests sugar, and now I'm ready to give you my point of view.

Symposium.  I like it.  It's not a meet-the-brewer, it's not even a seminar, it's a symposium.  I was going to make fun of the snootiness of that word, until I looked up the etymology:  holy crap, in Latin it meant "drinking party", with Greek roots:

syn- "together" + posis "a drinking,"

Say what you will about Fat Tire -- go ahead, I dare you -- New Belgium has a boldness that you have to admire: hiring a brewmaster from Rodenbach, promoting bicycling with the Tour de Fat, and putting on Sour Beer Symposia and/or Drinking Parties around the country.  The Symposium in Portland was headed by the husband and wife team of Eric and Lauren Salazar.  Eric is a brewer at New Belgium, and Lauren is NB's Sensory Specialist, in charge of the blending program that produces the sour beers in the Lips of Faith Series.

The Symposium started off with an hour-long slide show about the brewery, including a virtual tour of the warehouse where they age beer in giant wooden casks called foeders.  All the sour Lips of Faith beers are based on some combination of an Odd Couple of beers called Oscar and Felix.  Oscar is a dark ale that has almost the same components of NB's 1554 Black Ale, minus the black malt; Felix is a lighter-colored strong Belgian.  If you've had Eric's Ale or Le Terroir, those are 100% Felix beers, so you might get an idea of what Felix is about.  The beers are fermented out to be pretty dry -- they don't want a lot of residual sugars in these beers.

New Belgium has some wooden barrels for aging beer, but their real workhorses are the foeders. When a new foeder arrives at the brewery, a certain amount of the wood inside is shaved off, but there may be some residual critters.  Once filled with beer, they are inoculated with the house blend of... well, of what we aren't exactly sure.  Lauren said that they started off with all the stuff that sounds like childhood diseases:  pediococcus, brettanomyces, lactobacillus.  But now she says that what's growing in those foeders is its own little world, and New Belgium doesn't care so much what it is, as how it is.  When people asked her what was growing in the foeders, she said (I'm paraphrasing) "I don't know exactly, but it's a bunch of organisms that love where they're living".

And so the NB blending program doesn't rely on any microbial analysis, the blending is done entirely on sensory perception.  Because there is no particular schedule to the Lips of Faith releases, the brewery has the luxury of waiting until they think they have something worth bottling before they pull it out of the casks.  As the foeders are sampled, they are grouped into three rough categories:  Users (ready to use), Blenders (ready to extend Users), and Waiters (not ready yet).  Every now and then, a beer tastes so good out of the foeder that it is deemed suitable to be bottled without any blending.  These are the beers that occasionally appear as "NBB Love" beers -- if you ever see a New Belgium beer with the word "Love" in its name, it's a single-barrel beer that you should not pass up.

Lauren boasted that she could train anyone to be on her sensory panel; that seemed overly idealistic to me so when I followed up with her by email she said "No one panelist is perfect, we all are going to be more or less sensitive to families of compounds (sulfurs, organic acids, esters, etc). Your panel is your strength and that strength comes from a number of trained and validated panelists that you know their strengths and weaknesses."

After the slide show and infomercial came the audience participation part of the Drinking Pa-, er, Symposium.  New Belgium had brought five firkins to Saraveza, four of which contained beer from various foeders at the brewery; the fifth contained La Folie (an expertly blended sour -- the 2010 vintage if I remember correctly).  Participants were given samples of the five beers -- in plastic cups, sorry Jim -- and asked to sample them and come up with a ratio that they would want to take home in a growler as their own personal blend.

For the record, in Portland our samples were from Foeders 2, 7, 8, and 14, plus La Folie of course.  It was a little bit suboptimal in that the pure items were uncarbonated -- if you wanted a little fizz in your mix, you had to add in the La Folie training wheels.  I've lost my notes on the different samples, but there was definitely a range of funk there, from sweet tart to "did you step in something?".  At our table we were pretty much in agreement as to the nastiest beer -- not that it was totally irredeemable -- and that tended to occupy a smaller part in most of our blends.  Interestingly, one of the NB marketing guys told me that the foeder we eschewed was the most popular in the earlier session.  Where's my tasting panel?

I was pretty happy with the beer I took home, though like Jeff, I think that this blending thing is pretty difficult.  My hat's off to people that do it for a living.  My blend was 8 parts firkin 2, 18 parts firkin 7, 14 parts firkin 8, 16 parts firkin 14, and 8 parts La Folie.  Needless to say, it was flat as a pancake, especially after riding home on the front rack of my bike.  But tasty -- funky, and not too tart.

If you are a fan of sour beers, especially if you are a fan of La Folie or any of the New Belgium Lips of Faith beers, you should absolutely attend one of these Sour Beer Symposia if you get the chance. 

Further reading: Here's an excellent long interview with Lauren on a blog called Embrace the Funk.

Oakshire Brewers' Reserve and Hellshire

Oakshire Brewing brewmaster Matt Van Wyck was at Belmont Station yesterday to promote the brewery's third Brewers' Reserve beer:  a tart blended ale called Skookumchuck, which is available in a very limited number of corked and caged 750 ml bottles.  Skookumchuck is mildly tart -- it won't make you pucker -- with an aroma and flavor much like lighter Belgian geuzes.  It's fairly malty but not cloying, with a little dusty wood in the finish.

The three base beers were aged in wine barrels for varying lengths of time before blending:  a 2009 strong Belgian golden ale was aged with Drie Fonteinen's strain of brettanomyces; a 2010 saison got a dose of La Folie's brett and aged on apricots and plums; the third beer was a 2009 lactobacillus-spiked Berliner weiss that was thrown into a barrel when it didn't work out as a fresh beer.  The beers themselves wouldn't point toward such a close approximation of a Belgian geuze, but I suppose the brettanomyces and the barrels contributed a lot toward the flavor.

You might be wondering what the first two Brewers' Reserve beers were.   They were released stealthily earlier this year, and are now apparently gone.  Green Power Pale Ale was available on draft only, and a Märzen called Land Trust Lager also came out in bombers.  The three beers were a collaboration with the Eugene Water and Electric Board, to commemorate EWEB's 100th anniversary, and all profits from them are donated to the McKenzie River Trust, the source of Eugene's city water.  The beer names were chosen from suggestions by EWEB employees -- "Skookumchuck" is a Chinook word for river rapids, but the literal meaning of "strong waters" is a nice double entendre for a strongly-flavored beer.

Going forward, the Brewers' Reserve line will mostly be blended barrel-aged beers like Skookumchuck, and mostly sold in corked 750s at Oakshire's tasting room.  Releases are not on a schedule: not until a barrel is ready, says Matt, though he hinted that he has a framboise in the works.  Brewpublic has a nice post by Matt talking about the philosophy behind Oakshire's barrel-aging projects.

Speaking of which, Belmont also had Oakshire's Hellshire II on tap yesterday.  Hellshire II is a bourbon-barrel aged imperial stout with coffee.  (To digress for a second, whenever you're looking for a coffee stout, my favorite for the last few months has been Oakshire's Overcast Espresso Stout, especially when it's fresh on tap.  Best of all, it's widely available in Oregon on tap and in bombers.)  Planned for an annual release each winter, the Hellshires are strong ales aged in spirits barrels -- so far just bourbon barrels, but Matt said that they have various other barrels going also.  Hellshire bottles are bottle-conditioned and sold in wife-proofed wax-dipped bottles.  Last year's Hellshire I barleywine was somewhat coolly received by the rare beer crowd that had been eagerly awaiting it based on their fondness for the annual Wooden Hell barleywine that Matt did when he was the brewmaster at Chicago's Flossmoor Station.  I thought the negative reaction was overblown, it's a nice solid beer.  I've got one on hold in the basement right now.

Just like a horror movie sequel, the beer zombies have now come after Hellshire II.  Yesterday Matt was groaning because the recently released stout was getting beat up in a Beer Advocate thread called "Hellshire II Infected?"  Here's where geekiness can outsmart itself:  how are you going to taste a brettanomyces infection in a one month-old bottle of beer?  Now, I haven't tried it from the bottle, but it was beautiful on tap yesterday, with very strong notes of coffee and chocolate.  It's not your usual bourbon-bomb stout -- not that I object to those in any way -- but it isn't by any stretch soured.  Maybe the extra dose of slightly astringent coffee is throwing people off; I thought it all hung together really well, so I'll probably pick up a bottle to hide in the cellar for a year or so.  Matt promised on the Beer Advocate thread to have some labwork done on the beer, so there should be a definitive answer to the question early next year.  [Update 2011/01/05: Turns out there is a lactobacillus infection. I guess some of those geeks are pretty good at tasting these things. Matt's explanation on Beer Advocate and the Oakshire blog.]

At the Skookumchuck tasting yesterday, I expressed the opinion that its mild tartness is more in line with Belgian wild ales than most American-made sour beers are.  American sours -- even ones that I like, such as Cascade's cherry-infused ones -- tend to be so over the top that they can be a challenge to get through.  To test my point, I cracked a bottle of Lindeman's Cuvée René Gueze to try alongside the Skook' (that's the beauty of holding beer events at a bottle shop).  While the Lindeman's did have the edge in sourness, the difference wasn't huge.  Matt said they were far closer than he would have guessed.  The Oakshire was definitely maltier, making me think that one difference might be extra drying-out time by the Lindeman's.  As you can see, the Lindeman's was much clearer, and had a touch of vinegar flavor that I don't remember from last time I tried it, but which is completely absent from the Skookumchuck.  Verdict:  the Oakshire was not as sour, was sweeter and overall more approachable, but with many of the nice flavors and aromas you get from the Lindeman's.

Cascade Sang Noir Vertical

Last Thursday evening I was encouraged to get out of the house when my wife was hosting her book group, so I walked down to the Cascade Barrel House to try the 2007-2010 four-year vertical tasting of Sang Noir they were offering that night.  I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool fan of sour beers, but I do appreciate cherry beers like Cascade's Kriek, and I have a history with Sang Noir, having tried a couple of vintages of it at previous Holiday Ale Festivals (in 2009 and 2010).

It was a small-world evening at Cascade that night.  When I arrived, honorary Portlandians Jim and Joan were holding down the west end of the bar, and I sat at an open barstool not far from them.  You might recognize them as the couple from Alabama that sports their funky beer-patch jackets every year at the Holiday Ale Festival -- I snapped a picture of them for my recap of the HAF 2008.  After a while of talking to Jim and Joan across the fellow on the barstool to my left, I finally introduced myself to him only to find out that he was Dan Engler, the owner and brewmaster of one of Portland's newest breweries, the German-oriented Occidental Brewing.  Then Portland beer expert and Sierra Nevada Beer Camp alumnus Harry Sanger (in the picture) showed up to try the vertical, saying that all the "Sang Noir"s on the chalkboard kept catching his eye and making him think they'd written "Sanger" up there.

Anyway, about the beer.  Sang Noir means "black blood" in French, though it's not noticeably darker than Cascade's Kriek, or even the Sang Rouge. Cascade says it is "a blend of red and double red beers that were aged in Bourbon and Pinot Noir barrels for 12 to 24 months then blended with barrel aged Bing and sour pie cherries".

All of the vintages were extremely tart, with Cascade's characteristic lactic bite.  My favorite was definitely the 2009 -- it was the smoothest and clearest version, and had the strongest cherry flavor.  Dan and Harry both preferred the 2008, which was by far the funkiest vintage of the four:  quite musty and earthy.  The 2010 was probably the simplest of the bunch -- very sour of course, but with a decent cherry flavor.  I thought the 2007 was starting to show some oxidation, though maybe that was just part of the intentional woody funk:  my notes describe its flavors as pomegranate and oak.

When I tried Sang Noir 2010 at the 2010 Holiday Ale Fest, I wrote that it had more cherry and less funk than the 2009 version.  That wasn't the situation Thursday, where the 2009 was definitely the least funky and most cherry of the the four vintages.  It makes me wonder if the dates on these are shifting:  is the 2008 served at the pub the same batch that was called 2009 at last year's HAF?  Similarly, the fruitier, less-funky 2009 at the pub was more reminiscent of HAF's 2010 vintage.

As of last night, Cascade's website still listed the 2010 and 2009 Sang Noir on tap (only 3 oz. tasters of the 2009).  If you're like me, and the cherry interests you more than the sour, I recommend trying the 2009 before it runs dry.

(Good) Brettanomyces in Wine

The last paragraph of this post last week in Lambic and Wild Ale points out an interesting paradox about the slow-growing but tenacious yeast strain known as brettanomyces:

Brewing with brettanomyces, or even 100% brettanomyces, is now quite popular in craft beer brewing. In wine making, brettanomyces is considered a “fault,” even among many natural wine makers. ... I have tasted a number of wines where the presence of brettanomyces was unmistakable — in some wines I agree that it impoverished the wine, in others I think it positively amplified the dark, brooding, and rustic character of the wine. As far as I am aware, unlike beer drinkers, wine drinkers never express an explicit liking for brettanomyces.

You know how wine bottles are usually marked with the warning "Contains Sulfites"? That's all about brett: sulfur is applied in the vineyard to reduce its growth, and wooden barrels that wine is aged in are fumigated with sulfur dioxide to keep it from hiding in the wood. Almost every article written about Russian River's brett-slinging brewmaster Vinnie Cilurzo -- ironically a former winemaker -- mentions the antipathy of vintners towards brettanomyces (here's one that's larded with such anecdotes).

On the beer side, all the cool kids are doing brett.  It's a bit more nuanced than that:  sour-beer powerhouse Cascade Brewing doesn't intentionally use brettanomyces, though they've served up beer that caught a dose from a wanton barrel; similarly, though Deschutes dabbles with brett in some sour ales, they have also offered to buy back 2009 bottles of Abyss and Mirror Mirror, many of which are apparently unintentionally tainted with brettanomyces.  And brett's beer history is not restricted to avant garde Belgian-style sour beers:  before the funky yeast had a name, 110 years ago, its musky flavors were apparently prized in British Pale Ales -- which today we think of as very clean, straightforward beers.

To get back to the original point, it strikes me as strange that sour beers -- many innoculated with brett -- are often touted as a way to get wine lovers interested in beer, whereas brett influence is usually considered an off flavor in wine.  In the quote above, Aschwin hypothesizes that wine drinkers don't explicitly appreciate brettanomyces.  Is that just because they aren't aware of what causes certain earthy flavors in wines they like?  You could easily imagine that the lingering taboo against brett in wine circles would keep its presence from being acknowledged.  That may be changing, though.  Read this 2003 article from a wine magazine about brettanomyces: it includes an interesting story about a collector who sent samples of two vintages of Château de Beaucastel to a lab which confirmed that they both contained a great deal of brett.  Apparently the infected vintages had a complexity that appealed to a lot of wine connoisseurs.

In the article on Brettanomyces on Wikipedia -- sorry to play that card, but bear with me -- brett is mentioned as an important part of the character of two wines: Château de Beaucastel mentioned above, and Château Musar.  Beaucastel is a well-respected Châteauneuf du Pâpe from France's Rhône Valley; Musar is an obscure wine from Lebanon's Bekaa Valley.  I'm not a big wine drinker, but I actually have tried several very nice vintages of Château Musar's red wine, thanks to a wine-loving friend of Middle Eastern descent who is a big fan.  It's a fascinating wine with a beautiful light red hue, slightly dry but not tannic, and a fruit flavor unlike anything else in my limited wine experience.  When I last tried it a few years ago, I knew nothing of brettanomyces, but now I wonder if that contributed to the unique flavor.  My friend's assertion that vintages less than 10 years old were not ready to drink may be more evidence that slow-growing brett is an important part of Musar's profile.

If you're interested in exploring brettanomyces in wine, I see Château Beaucastel on the shelf all the time in Portland, though you might want to cellar it a while to get the most effect.  As for Château Musar, Ya Hala Lebanese restaurant at SE 80th and Stark had it on their wine list as recently as six years ago, though they wouldn't admit to having any the last few times I've been there.  At about that time, my friend bought a case of Musar at Vinopolis downtown, so you might be able to find it in better wine shops, though again, it's best after 10 years or so.

Moeder Lambic Fontainas, Brussels

It was the last night of our European vacation, and we were in Brussels for less than 24 hours.  We took a family stroll around the Grand-Place, and once the girls had been nourished by bland cheap pizza slices, they announced they had no intention of hanging around with Carla and I as we sat around enjoying some Belgian beers on the last night of our trip.

That turned out to be a good thing: with the girls in tow we probably would have just hunkered down at someplace like the Delirium Café in one of the crowded alleys off the main square.  Instead, we dumped them off at the hotel, and wandered over to the stellar beer bar Moeder Lambic Fontainas, around the corner from the famous statue of the little peeing boy.  It's just off a fairly busy boulevard, but separated from it by the sleepy Fontainas square.  The interior was rustic and comforting, but since the weather was finally beautiful for the last day of our trip, we sat outside on the airy patio with most of the other patrons.

As you might have guessed by the name, Moeder Lambic has quite a selection of sour Belgian ales in the Lambic and Gueze categories.  I'm far from expert in those kinds of beers, so it seemed novel and exciting to see on the menu that not only do they have a fair number of those wild ales on tap, they also have several of them served on cask, like the Drie Fonteinen Kriek in the picture here.  If you know what you're after, the bottle list evidently has a lot of good choices also.  A party of serious gueze lovers at the next table from us had a couple of vintage bottles brought out in wicker baskets.

Even if you aren't attracted by the sour selection, there are plenty of taps of other Belgian styles, plus 15 rotating guest taps.  When we were there, the guest taps included a hefeweizen, a rauchbier, and a pilsner all from Germany, a Dutch tripel, an Italian cask ale, and even something from France.  Carla doesn't care for most Belgian beer, and certainly not sour beer, but she lived happily off the rotating taps, first with a Viven Imperial IPA, and then with a Mikkeller Citra single-hop.  Viven is an impressive brewery -- we had really liked the porter when we tried it at Cambrinus in Brugge, and the IIPA was very solid, leaving Carla a little disappointed in her Mikkeller.

Service was very friendly; our waitress replied smoothly to Carla's English, the Flemish of our gueze-drinking neighbors, and my rusty French.  A small bowl of roasted barley appeared on the table as something to crunch on as we drank our beer, but we also ordered a salad and a cheese plate from the menu, and both were excellent and reasonably priced.  Decent portions:  I'm usually a clean plate guy, but I had to leave some cheese behind.

There is obviously a lot more going on in Brussels than just this one place.  I had been hoping to get there early enough to take the fabled self-guided tour of Cantillon, but it didn't work out that way.  There is another, older Moeder Lambic location, but the Beer Advocate reviews seem to favor the Fontainas location we went to.  I recommend it, especially if you're a sour ale fan, but even if you're not.

Portland-based Lambic Blog

Portland has a great pool of beer bloggers.  As Brady noted a couple weeks ago, the Wikio blog-ranking website currently thinks 4 of the top-10 beer blogs in North America are from Portland.  Take that with a grain of salt, of course, but it is a symptom of our blogging prowess.

So, it was with some amount of surprise that I found a Portland-based blog that I had never heard of, that has been updated pretty regularly for about two-and-a-half years, with in-depth, well-written content:  Lambic and Wild Ale.  I don't think I'm alone in my ignorance:  I can't find links to this blog on any other Oregon beer blog.  Talk about flying under the radar.

A little googling finds that the blog's author, Aschwin de Wolf, is a native of Holland whose other interests are cryonics -- yes, freezing dead or terminally ill people for future resuscitation -- and philosophical anarchism.  Uh... wow.  And I thought drinking fancy beer made me somewhat intellectual.

I'm not completely in love with sour beers myself, though I'm expanding my palate a little bit in that direction.  But I'm stunned at the quality of content on Lambic and Wild Ale.  Check it out, especially if sours are your thing.

Cascade Brewing Beer Belly

Following on the heels of the Fred Fest report, here's another opportunity for you to rub shoulders with local beer luminaries, enjoy special beers with good food, and benefit a good cause. You don't even have to wait a year to do it: the EastBurn hosts a new Beer Belly Dinner every month on the 2nd Thursday. It's hard to beat a $35 four-course meal, paired with five beers presented by the brewers themselves. And proceeds go to Ride On, the local non-profit that helps drivers get home with their cars when they shouldn't be behind the wheel themselves.

Thursday's Beer Belly with Cascade Brewing found Carla and I -- and probably some of the other attendees -- slightly out of our comfort zone, in the world of sour and fruit beers.  But if your comfort zone has to be breached, this is the way to do it. Ron Gansberg and Curtis Bain brought along a brilliant set of beers to show off their talents at brewing wild things, then aging and blending them to near perfection.  The weather was perfect on the patio, we had interesting and affable table mates, and chefs Jeff Pagel and Joe Dougherty served up a delicious menu.

The beers on hand were:

• Spring Gose: German wheat beer with salt and coriander
• 2009 The Vine: Belgian Abbey ale barrel-aged with wine grapes
• Busta Nut Brown: mild brown ale
• 2009 Cascade Kriek: Flanders Red aged with cherries
• Noyeaux: Belgian blonde with raspberries and apricot pits (!)
• 2009 Apricot Ale: another Belgian ale, with apricots

The sample of  Noyeaux was an unannounced bonus at the dinner.  Ron introduced it by saying he thinks it's the first truly world-class beer that Cascade has produced.  I think others would disagree that it is the first, as the accolades for their sour beers are starting to pile up, and it really took some chutzpah to make that statement right as the diners were finishing their glasses of the show-stopping Kriek.  Noyeaux was a fine beer with a kind of mingled raspberry/apricot flavor, and the apricot pit adjunct makes it an interesting conversation piece as well as adding almond notes to the smell and taste of the beer.  When I first heard that Gansberg made a beer with the meat from apricot pits, my first reaction was, "Is he trying to poison people?".  Turns out that roasting the pits detoxifies them and leaves you a little almond-like nut (there's a trace of cyanide left, so you wouldn't want to eat a pound of them).  I was glad to get a taste at the dinner, though I did watch Ron take a drink before I tried mine.

Finer palates than mine may pronounce Noyeaux the top of the Cascade line, but for me the highlight of the evening was definitely the Kriek.  I had never tried it, because the 750 ml bottles seemed out of my price range for something I suspected I might not like.  But it was an astonishing beer, rich and lush with dark cherry flavors, and went especially well with the lamb entree.  What is it about cherries that makes them work so well with beer?  I hardly ever think I want to eat a cherry or a cherry pie, but the cherry beers that have come to my attention lately have been wonderful -- Hair of the Dog Cherry Adam, Bridgeport's 2009 Stumptown Tart, Upright's Four Play, and now Cascade's Kriek.  Whereas the lighter Tart and Four Play had more of a pie-cherry flavor, the Kriek was reminiscent of darker bing cherries.  It was an eye-opener for me; I'll be looking for more of this.

There wasn't a bad beer there that evening.  Even Carla liked the Gose, and she didn't like the Goses I plied her with before.  It was my second dose of The Vine that week, though I had to wait for my glass to warm up before it reminded me of how much I had liked it at Fred Fest.

Cheers to Cascade and EastBurn for putting together a wonderful meal.  Definitely keep an eye on the Beer Belly calendar -- they're great events.

Cheers to Belgian Beers 2010

Had a great time Saturday at Hopworks for the 4th annual Portland Cheers to Belgian Beers festival. The upper parking lot was bustling with jovial beer drinkers, but it wasn't over-crowded like a couple of years ago when the Fresh Hop Festival was held at the same venue. The weather was just right, lines were never long, and as far as I know, there were no beer outages by the time I left about 4 PM. There was a nice variety of mostly good beers, tasty snacks in the $3-$6 range were served at the top of the lot, and alphabetical order was adhered to pretty closely. In short, it was everything you could hope for in a beer festival. Congratulations to Hopworks, the Oregon Brewers Guild, and everyone involved for a job well done.

There were 29 beers that used this year's prescribed Belgian yeast, and were thus eligible for the festival's People's Choice award (Kevin has a nicely formatted list of this year's beers). I got around to tasting fewer than half of the 29. My favorites, roughly in order:

• Big Horse Cuvee de Ferme (Sour Saison/Golden blend): sour balanced well with malt, peachy notes.  Grade: A
• Upright Mingus and Monk (Farmhouse Brown): tart, cherry notes, with bitter finish. Grade: A
• Green Dragon King Ghidorah (Biere de garde): funky and full-bodied with vanilla and banana notes. Grade: A
• Deschutes Portland Sinfully Delicious (Dark Strong Ale): nice Abbey dubbel. Grade: A-
• Widmer Biere de Table (Farmhouse Table Beer): very drinkable with light grassy, lemony flavors. Grade: A-
• Oakshire La Ferme (Farmhouse Ale): nicely dry and citrusy, surprisingly bitter for 15 IBUs. Grade: B+

Pretty near everyone I talked to got the Widmer table beer as their first try, since it was a very tame 3% alcohol.  Lots of people have noted a growing trend of trying to produce flavorful beers with lower alcohol levels.  It's a worthy endeavor, and the Biere de Table was a great example of a light, refreshing, food-oriented beer.  Along those lines, the 4.8% Tropisch Bruin from the Deschutes Bend brewery was also a pretty nice table beer, I'll give it a B grade. Cascade's Frite Galois was a 4.6% sour ale that had some nice flavors, but had a chalky finish that I didn't care for.  It gets a B- from me.

I listed the Big Horse sour in first place above -- I thought it had the best-balanced combination of interesting flavors -- but as I left the festival I cast my ballot for the Upright Farmhouse Brown, partly out of personal loyalty to Corey and Alex, partly out of the calculation that I didn't want to risk sending the festival to Hood River next year.  It wasn't much of a stretch, it was a fine beer.  I also think that aging will make Mingus and Monk into an even nicer beer than it was Saturday, and I suspect that Alex will oblige us by bringing a little out at a time as the months go by.

In fact, a lot of the beers at the festival would probably benefit from a few months' aging: I especially thought that the Oakshire and Green Dragon entries were not yet at their best.  It was kind of a common refrain in talking to people about the beers -- "I'd like to try this again in a few months".  Talking to Derek and Josh at the festival, they had the idea that this year's winner should announce next year's yeast immediately to give brewers more time for experimenting and aging.  One of them even proposed scheduling out the yeast several years ahead of time, but I'm not sure the brewers are taking the event quite as seriously as the rest of us are.

To fill in some of the gaps I left in the list, and for valuable second opinions, check out the writeups by other Portland bloggers: Dr. Wort, Derek, Jeff, Angelo, Brady.

Update: The People's Choice winner has been announced: Block 15 Ferme de Demons Black Saison.  Congratulations, Block 15!  Definitely one of the most creative breweries in the state, though I'll admit that Ferme de Demons was one of my least favorites of the festival.  Now the big question is, where will the CtBB be held in 2011?

Coming Soon: Cascade Barrel House

A couple days ago I stopped to visit the future location of Cascade Brewing's new pub, catty-corner across Belmont from the Green Dragon. Brewer Ron Gansberg already has dozens of barrels in the beer-aging section of the Barrel House. The rest of the building is still in demolition mode, waiting on permits to begin construction. The pub will have up to 18 beers flowing at one time, a couple of them drawn straight out of wood barrels. As for food, Ron says that the menu will be short and to the point. No decision yet on whether kids will be allowed, but now that the Green Dragon even allows them on the bar side until 8 PM, it probably makes good business sense. There's not a firm opening date yet -- after all, the real construction hasn't yet begun -- but the plan is for "the first part of 2010".

I was surprised at how much space there is in the pub side of the building. Everything I had read up to now made me think it would be tiny, and the building doesn't look so big from the outside, but there's quite a big area in there. Some of it will turn into kitchen, cooler, and bar space, but it's still bigger than I imagined. It will have that Lucky Lab warehouse feeling -- check out the wooden arches that hold up the roof. Add to that some outside seating below the loading dock, and you've got a place that's going to fit right in to the vibe of the neighborhood pubs.

The original Cascade pub, the Raccoon Lodge, is not that deep into Southwest Portland, but I'm sorry to say that it's enough out of my range that I have never been there. My unintentional boycott has paid off with this pub they're opening within walking distance of my house. I'm excited that we'll now have a range of Cascade's beers in the neighborhood; I guess I better start working on my sour beer palate, since the awards the brewery is harvesting in that category are only going to move them even more in that direction, especially at the Barrel House.

This continuing development of the craft beer scene in Southeast Portland is one of the many things that make me thankful to live in this neighborhood. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

The Sour Wine Craze

There's a new trend in the wine world that might interest you beer drinkers out there. Cutting-edge American vintners are experimenting with ways to overcome the natural sweetness of the grape and produce wines of intense sourness. The inspiration for these sour wines lies in some obscure European styles, but the Americans are adding their own innovations, such as using yogurt bacilli as part of the fermentation process.

Sour wines are admittedly an acquired taste, but sophisticated oenophiles are increasingly willing to pay premium prices for them. Sours are some of the most expensive wines among recent vintages, because of the great technical skill and attention it takes to produce them, and the unpredictable and sometimes lengthy fermentation process.

Only joking. There is no Sour Wine Craze, it's just something I dreamed up as I pondered the sour beer craze. Some tartness is not unusual in a wine, but no one would buy a wine whose sourness stood out over all its other flavors. Can you imagine wine snobs paying, say, $75-$100 -- my attempt to translate $10-$20 beer -- for sour wine? Can you imagine Mt. Tabor Fine Wines holding an event like Puckerfest? I guess those things are imaginable, but in light of the fact that fine wines have a bigger audience to date than fine beers, if it hasn't happened yet it probably won't.

Then why have sour beers caught on? One guess is that a lot of beer connoisseurs are themselves homebrewers, who appreciate the technical finesse and cultural background that goes into sour beers. Or maybe it's simpler to just say there's no accounting for taste -- after all, not everyone shares my enthusiasm for bitter medicinal liqueurs, and I did just recommend that people try the drinking vinegars at Pok Pok.

About a week ago I dutifully went out and tried Deschutes' The Dissident and Roots' Flanders Red on consecutive days. They both are very big beers, 9% or so, and lovely to look at. As you've guessed, I don't particularly like sour beers; that said, I give the edge to Roots, maybe because it was less sour than the Dissident. On the other hand, both breweries have so many beers that are to my liking, that their sour ales are just a curiosity to me.

More of Todd's Beers

Here we go with another installment of beery adventures that took place when my Texas friends were in town a couple weeks ago. In addition to the Isabelle Proximus that we opened July 4th, Todd also brought two more Lost Abbey beers from Port Brewing -- Inferno Ale and Moonlit Sessions Lager -- and a bottle of Russian River Supplication. We had a poker game/beer-tasting the night of July 1st, and those three California beers were supplemented by some Oregon heavy-hitters I'd been saving up to spring on Lee and Todd.

Here's what we passed around that evening:

• Russian River Supplication Batch 003: very sour; not so cherry; dry
• Deschutes Abyss 2007: dry, bitter, and awesome
• Lost Abbey Inferno: sweet like a strong Belgian; tasty
• Lucky Lab Pavlov's Imperial Stout: aged really well (in the fridge); smooth and dark
• Brett's homebrewed 2006 Belgian: delicious candy Belgian
• Hair of the Dog Fred from the Wood 2008: rich; strong alcohol; yeasty bitter edge
• Lost Abbey Moonlit Sessions Lager: black lager; smooth, chocolatey

A lot of work went into Supplication -- a brown ale with four different wild yeasts and bacilli, aged on sour cherries 14 months in pinot noir barrels, then bottle-conditioned -- but sadly all that work is wasted on those of us who haven't caught the sour-beer bug. It reminds me of this anecdote from the liner notes of a CD of Ligeti's Cello Concerto: "A number of the critics present [at the premiere] expressed surprise at the evident disproportion between the enormous difficulty of the work and ... the acoustic result". That's about how I feel about Supplication and Isabelle Proximus -- all that effort for just sourness. But Supplication does have its fans: here's a fresh blog entry (with nice photos) from someone who gets it.

The Lost Abbey beers on poker night were more to my liking. Inferno is in an abbey-style bottle with a champagne cork, but it didn't have that yeasty dubbel/tripel flavor; it seemed to me to be more in the Duvel family tree. The Moonlit Lager was a good poker-game beer; only 5% ABV but with a rich roasty flavor.

It was fun to rotate in the big Oregon beers also. I was happier with the Pavlov's than when I opened my other bottle of it six months ago. Brett's Belgian went over really well, and of course Fred from the Wood and Abyss are slam dunks any time. But the real Oregon success story was Dave's poker game. He was the only native at the table, and he took so much money from the Texans that he decided that Texas Hold'em should be called Oregon Hold'em from now on.

Thanks again to Todd and Andy for the California beers -- Lost Abbey and Russian River are hard for us to get here. And thanks to Brett for the awesome homebrew.

Isabelle Proximus

Our Texas buddy Todd -- well, he was in Portland for a year, now in Cleveland -- is becoming quite the beer geek, despite claiming an allergy to hops. First he goes to Boston and attends the American Craft Beer Fest; then he shows up on my doorstep with an armload of hard-to-find beers from Russian River and Port Brewing's Lost Abbey, courtesy of his friend Andy in LA.

Lindsey and Amy threw their traditional July 4th party, and Brett provided an excellent home-brewed Kolsch. The two five-gallon cans of it were exhausted in record time, which gave us an excuse to crack open Todd's bottle of barrel-aged Isabelle Proximus.

Isabelle Proximus is not simply a Lost Abbey product, but as the label says, an "Allaverdogportrush" ale -- a collaboration between five rock star brewmasters from Allagash, Avery, Dogfish Head, Port Brewing, and Russian River. Rob Tod, Adam Avery, Sam Calagione, Tomme Arthur, and Vinnie Cilurzo, respectively. Whew! That's some lineup. But from the outset there were two things working against this beer for me: first, it's a recently-released bottle-conditioned ale that most aficionados would cellar for awhile before opening; second, with its combination of wild yeasts and other fermenting beasties, it's going to be intensely sour. I reserve the right to one day acquire a taste for sour beers, but it hasn't happened yet.

We shared it around in one or two glasses; it looked right in a Saison Dupont glass that Lindsey had, more or less the same light-golden color as a saison. And, not surprisingly, it was extremely sour, so much so that I can't think of any other description of the flavor. There were no spoiled or medicinal flavors; it wasn't cloying; no hop or fruit flavor... just tartness. It was a big hit with sour-Belgian fans like Corey and Adam, who intoned in solemn Mayor Quimby voices "This is a fine bee-yuh." That is, if intoning is something you do over and over.

One interesting insight was from Tave, who I've known since we were both in the Peace Corps years ago in the West African country of Mali. "It's like dolo," she said -- traditional Malian millet beer. When I've tried to explain millet beer to people, I usually compare it to Bavarian hefeweizens: cloudy and yeasty, a little tart. But Tave is onto something by associating it with sour Belgian-style ale: dolo is fermented in open cauldrons, so at least some of its fermentation is likely due to wild yeasts. You drink it fresh, at room temperature -- which is admittedly somewhat higher than the temperature of a Belgian cellar -- and there are assuredly no hops in it.

So there you go -- some people pay $40 for a bottle of aged sour beer, some people pay a few cents for a fresh gourd of it. If you like a well-made wild ale that is going to age well for many years, Isabelle Proximus is for you. It's not really my cup of tea, but I sure am glad to have gotten a taste of a beer with such an interesting parentage. Salut to Todd and to Andy for generously providing the bottle!