Author: Professor Good Ales

While the upper U.S. West coast has a beer style to call its own (Cascadian Dark Ale), it appears that the craft beer movement in Florida has spawned a new style of beer: the Florida Weisse.

The second annual Berliner Bash on the Bay in Gulfport, Florida, was recently held on April 20 and several Florida brewers took the opportunity to showcase what exactly the Florida Weisse is all about.

A regional sour wheat beer that originated in Northern Germany, the Berliner Weisse is not superpotent –ranging anywhere from two to five percent alcohol-by-volume. Like the Berliner Weisse, the Florida Weisse is low-alcohol too. A low-ABV beer may not sound attractive compared to 13 percent-plus imperial stouts, but remember that alcohol is only a small part of its character.

Whereas a heavy emphasis is placed on hops in West coast-style ales, the Florida Weisse is different. Based on the traditional German Berliner Weisse beer, the Florida Weisse is brewed with lots of fruit–particularly tropical fruit–rather than just simply having fruited syrup added to the glass when the beer is poured. The sweetness of the syrup is supposed to balance the acidity of the beer.

“That’s the traditional way of doing it,” said Johnathan Wakefield, Miami home-brewer and owner/founder of J. Wakefield Brewing Company. “But we’re not doing anything traditional.”

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The R&D lab where Long Trail brewers perform their experiments is inside a drafty old farmhouse about a five-minute walk from the main brewery in Bridgewater.

It is an unpretentious little facility and the brewers like it that way.

“This is about as free form as it can get,” said Brandon Mayes, a Long Trail brewer. “Any ideas that the guys have, they should be free to pursue.”

The “pilot facility” was a small white room where four stainless steel kettles sat on burners, and bags of grain were stored nearby in the barn. Head brewer Dave Hartmann was standing inside with his colleague, Sam Clemens, who was hand-cranking a mill filled with malted barley.

On this particular Tuesday, Clemens and Hartmann were making two different batches of beer. One was a wheat IPA. The other was a black walnut dunkelweizen.

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We can’t help the fact that we’re sometimes attracted to bright, shiny objects. It’s why we do occasionally judge a book by its cover, and it’s also why we may order a beer we don’t know based on the really awesome tap handle associated with it. This doesn’t happen all the time, but we’re pretty sure it would be hard to pass up the suds coming from these guys.

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I was sitting in the shade enjoying the lovely Belgian ale on tap when someone asked me what I thought about two-row barley. I am lucky enough to live in a region where I can get either six-row or two-row most of the time, so I adjust my grain bill to the recipe at hand, rather than the other way around. Many brewers prefer two-row barley for its greater extract value; on examination that’s interesting, since the difference is 1 to 2 percent, hardly noticeable at the homebrewer level. I generally prefer two-row, but I’m not sure I could quantify why, since both types appear in many of my favorite beers. Maybe we all think two-row is just more chic.

Two-row or six-row? It’s a very American question. Most of the rest of the world uses six-row barley only for livestock feed, not for beer. I thought six-row barley had been bred especially to increase output, but it turns out to be a naturally-occurring result of a pair of mutations, one dominant and one recessive. Both two-row and six-row barley have been around for a long, long time.

Breeding efforts of the last half-century have reduced and perhaps functionally eliminated most of the differences between the two types of barley. Economies of scale at big breweries make many of their differences moot. There are still distinctions between kernel size, extract, protein and enzymes—all this information can be found online, depending on your tolerance for technical detail.

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Ohio Gov. John Kasich signed a controversial brewery bill Tuesday afternoon that benefits craft brewers and was blasted by Anheuser-Busch InBev.

The legislation creates a new liquor permit for breweries that make less than 31 million gallons a year. The new permit, called an A-1c, will replace the A-1 permit for small brewers and reduce their annual licensing fee from $3,906 to $1,000.

Craft brewers have praised the legislation, saying it will allow them to invest more money into their breweries.

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Note: while this article if from a wine blog, certainly hombrewers can find useful information too.

Many people, when asked what a hydrometer does, will answer, ‘Measures alcohol’. Some will say, ‘Measures sugar’. Neither answer is true. Hydrometers compare the the ratio of the density of the liquid to the density of water, and that’s all. It’s what we can do with this reading that’s useful to us.

If we use a standard home winemaking hydrometer on our must before fermentation, the liquid will be very high in sugar, and thus will have a density higher than that of pure water. Depending on the wine type, it could by anywhere from 1.070 to 1.110 times as dense. After we pitch yeast and the fermentation is ongoing, the sugar will be metabolised into carbon dioxide and alcohol. As the sugar levels drop, the density of the must will go down and the hydrometer won’t float quite as high. This drop shows us the progress of fermentation–which is why it’s important to record the initial gravity reading, so you can compare it. More on this below.

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Profiled by Ken Carman for professorgoodales.net

Nose: oak, a little sweet. Mouthfeel sweet with some oak clinging to the roof of the mouth. Bourbon in still in the mix, but lighter. A little bourbon cling, but not as dominant. In #1 barrel aged the spices were obvious, though background. In number two I think the oak, with the bourbon almost perfectly counter balanced, made the spices kind of disappear.

Once again brown with great highlights, clarity good and head lingers: pillow. SRM high 20s.

I did find spices in the nose, but slight and hard to perceive. Oak is stronger, bourbon behind that. Mouthfeel is just a little more bourbon focused: sweet coats the back of the mouth. Medium body, hint of caramelization, good clarity with brown/ruby highlights. Soured orange sense, which I’m sure is the bourbon, on the palate.

What happened here is balance is actually working against us. With the bourbon just a hint on top, but the rest firmly beneath, it was superb. With the bourbon and the oak mostly in balance the spices seem less important, the oak and bourbon arguing so loudly on the palate the spices almost might as well not be there.

A very pleasing quaff, but, honestly, I didn’t enjoy it as much as the first, though it’s still is very, very good.

I wasn’t tempted at all to give this a 5 out of 5, but it still deserves 4. Maybe even 4.5, though I do feel the balance is so even the flavors are battling for attention a bit too much.

Welcome to the PGA beer rating system: one beer “Don’t bother.” Two: Eh, if someone gives it to you, drink. Three: very good, go ahead and seek it out, but be aware there is at least one problem. Four: seek it out. Five: pretty much “prefecto.”