Professor Good Ales

Written by Franz Hoffer @A Tempest in a Tankard

It’s Friday afternoon, the day after our homebrew club’s St. Paddy’s Day Potluck.

It’s also been a long stretch without a break from translation projects and beer writing projects, a few of which you’ll soon see in print.

And it’s been quite some time now since I posted a recipe. The last time was just as the pandemic hit, when I wrote an article about fermenting cabbage into sauerkraut.

So it’s nice to take a break from writing by … writing. Writing about something completely different for change is actually quite relaxing.

And today’s actually St. Patrick’s Day, so there’s that, too. If you’re like me and have left your food plans till the last minute, you might just get this recipe in time for your St. Paddy’s Day festivities over the weekend. In this case, fortune favours the procrastinators. Even if you don’t cook this for dinner this weekend, it’s still stew season for at least another month.

*I’ve included a number of tips below. These are helpful for any stew you’ll make, from goulash to stoofvlees (Flemish stew).

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YOU’VE ENTERED THE BAVARIAN BREWERY OF OLD…

The Bavarian Brewing Co., Inc., was once the largest brewer in the state of Kentucky and the largest employer in Covington, KY. Out of dozens of breweries that operated during the 19th and 20th centuries in the Cincinnati area, it’s the only one with a remaining structure that was used for former Brew and Mill Houses. This edifice is visible and easily accessible off I-75 at the 12th Street Exit in Covington. (See a location map to visit.) It was formerly Brew Works and Jillian’s, and was re-purposed in 2019 for office use as the Kenton County Government Center. There is also a Bavarian Brewery Exhibit that explores the history of the brewery and it buildings, accompanied with artifacts and Breweriana items on display. A Riedlin – Schott Room (named after the families who owned and operated the brewery), is available for community activities, meetings and events. This room and the exhibit (including the display areas), will be used for brewery tours featuring the history of the brewery. In addition, this website will help augment the brewery’s history, while also documenting the progression of inventions and events that impacted the broader brewing industry.

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Description

If you go, chasing rabbits, may you find yourself in a new realm wonderland juicy-hop filled bliss. Feed your head with this Transcendent IPA using Cascade, Cashmere, Mosaic,
Azacca and Citra hops along with the new Thiol-active Star Party yeast designed to provide an atomic burst of Passion fruit, Pineapple, and Tangerine juiciness that will blow your mind… go ask Alice, I think she’ll know.

Description

Super small batch IPA brewed with experimental malt formulas and hop combinations. These are the most heavily-hopped NEIPA’s we’ve ever made, brewed exclusively for the taproom.

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Written by Steve Body

Fruit…in beer?

Well…okay. I guess.

After literal generations of beer being grains, yeast, hops, and relentless marketing, beer suddenly evolved a BIG Difference – FLAVORS. LOTS of flavors, of all kinds: flowers, spices, bread, cookies, infusions galore, chocolate, licorice…BIG flavors. This difference – derived at first by clever use of grains and very different yeasts and the relative handful of hops variations that existed when craft beer started to Boom – became the hallmark of that alternative school of brewing.

BUT…as with the Big IBU Scare of the early 00s, things like this escalate. We are Americans, after all, and for us Bigger Is Better. Nothing Is Too Much. And very little is ever Enough. Soon, those original fruity beers without infusions didn’t satisfy the craving for fruity beers. As clever people will, clever people began to experiment with ways to shovel up more fruit(ish) flavors – mainly citrus but also various melons, berries, flowers, nuts, anything, really, all of it kinda centered upon the juice boxes on which the new waves of people reaching drinking age were raised. “Tropical” became a core idea. Pineapple, guava, mango, papaya, lychi, citrus, and on and on. Even the exotic mangosteen and dragon fruit have had cameos in the Beer Fruit Thang. Coconut, produced by some newish hops, sticks its knobby little head up, pretty frequently. And, of course, this doesn’t even include the breweries which reasoned, correctly, that you could just, like, dump actual stuff into the tanks and induce whatever the hell flavors you want, without having to wrestle with those complicated ol’ hops and yeasts.

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Beer brewed at Achel Abbey in Limburg will no longer be allowed to bear the name Trappist beer. The abbey is being sold to businessman Jan Tormans and the brewery at the abbey will cut all links with Westmalle Abbey that supervised operations at the Achel Abbey brewery until now. Earlier, when the Trappist monks moved out, the brewery lost the right to display the ATP label, proving Authentic Trappist Product, on its brews. The ATP label can only be used when beer is brewed in an abbey with live-in monks. The name could still be used thanks to the connection with Westmalle Abbey, but with the sale to private hands that now too is a thing of the past.

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~Or, what do Melville’s white whale, a cathedral in Prague, and Weihenstephan’s Vitus have in common?~

I’ve been drinking Weihenstephan’s lush and expansive Vitus for years now, especially when the weather turns cool. I can’t get enough of that subtly spiced honey and orange zest layered over rich banana custard. But I hadn’t ever troubled myself with looking deeper into the beer’s namesake, St. Vitus, despite my fondness for another material object connected with Vitus’s memory: the imposing Gothic cathedral that looms over Prague.

But then I came across what was, for me, a puzzling reference to St. Vitus in Moby Dick. I immediately had to know what connected the dots between Moby Dick, a cathedral in Prague with some of the most wondrous stained-glass windows I’ve seen, and that elegant Weizenbock from Weihenstephan.

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Judging American Wild Ales and traditional European Sour Ales can be a tricky business. Being familiar with the wide assortment and possibility of flavor compounds and a keen ability to understand how they work (or don’t work) together takes experience and training. Which can be challenging when suitable commercial examples are hard to come by in some areas. Additionally, homebrewers that utilize a mixed fermentation, Brettanomyces, and/or souring bacteria in their beers can be a fairly passionate group. Producing beers that can sometimes be years in the making with expression as intricate as stained glass. Given all this, judging can sometimes be hard to navigate for the novice or uninitiated. To help with this, the BJCP Communications Team decided to ask a few experts their views on best practice when judging these styles.

(Please scroll down from author credits.}

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