Microbrewed Adventures - Charles Papazian [10]
Packaging. This is a tricky one. Can packaging alone define the basis of a style? As beer enthusiasts we’d hate to consider it, but the realities of the beer world may preclude our own preferences. Let’s consider many of the sweet fruit lambics that are making their way into the market. They simply could not exist without special considerations during packaging; sweet fruit juice or flavoring is added at packaging time. The beer is then pasteurized to prevent fermentation in the bottle, a process identical to the making of some classic English-style sweet stouts. Millions enjoy these sweet fruit beers and sweet stouts. Packaging more than anything else is the basis of these styles, more so than the specifications of malt, hops and yeast. Would you agree?
Special ingredients. Herein lies the beer that may not be considered classic by most beer enthusiasts—yet. In this day and age, special ingredients have come to overwhelm the character of many beers. Belgian Wit (wheat or white) beers almost qualify for consideration on this basis. Their unique blend of orange peel and coriander and the quality of the yeast seem to be the principal basis of Belgian-style Wit beer. Chili beer, pumpkin beer, spiced holiday-cheer beer, cranberry beer and cherry beer all may represent a style whose basis is a specialty ingredient. Perhaps special ingredients are a catchall second-string basis for all those beers that are in their early stages of evolution. We don’t know which of the first seven characteristics to categorize them under—yet.
Say you are considering 30 or 40 other classic styles of beer. Under which category would you place them? And why would I want to go through this exercise anyway? It helps me better understand what and why I am brewing. Brewing as a craft involves these kinds of thought processes. It inspires a thirst. If I didn’t think about these kinds of things, I’d be pumping out “just” beer. I’m not into that kind of brewing.
The downside of thinking about the essence of brewing is that it can get downright confusing. I especially get confused after relaxing and enjoying one of my own homebrews, homebrews conceived and concocted from creative cauldrons of kettles and mind. On November 26, 1973, I brewed my first honey lager, a beer brewed with 40 percent honey. My friends thought it normal that I waved real monkey hair over the inoculated wort; but the weird thing was using honey in a beer. No doubt honey had been used in beer way before I ever thought of it, but the fact is I had never heard of such a thing. Thus was born Rocky Raccoon’s Honey Lager, and as “Rocky met his match and said, ‘Doc it’s only a scratch,’” we “proceeded to lie on the table.”
Yes, it was strange; so were my fruit beers, pale ales and lagers with pounds of fresh fruit added. They were considered “weird” beers, fun, tasty, but not seriously considered by any professionals, unless they were microbrewers.
Michael Jackson, at our 1986 American Homebrewers Conference, thought I’d really gone nuts when I introduced my commemorative conference beer. It was called Blitzweizen Honey Steam Barley Wine Lager. My intention was and still is not to make fun of beer traditions, but to peer over the edge and goose the creative possibilities. I have to admit there was no one basis upon which I brewed this beer. It was, rather, a celebration of all styles.
Little does Michael know that he is in part responsible for one of my beer style “gooses,” pushing the stylistic envelope. It was at one of the Philadelphia Book and the Cook festivities, where I was handed an absolutely delicious locally brewed imperial stout. With that in hand I was invited to attend Michael’s beer tasting being held in the adjoining hall. I quietly entered in the middle of his presentation, happening to sit among a few homebrewers. I still had quite a bit of tasty imperial stout in hand. Michael was halfway through his beer-tasting session and pouring Celis White, a light Belgian-style wheat beer spiced with coriander and Curação orange peel.
I looked all about