Farmhouse Ale - First Edition

4/1/06 - Farmhouse Ale - Like almost every other brewer who read Phil Markowski's book "Farmhouse Ales" last year I decided that it was time for Smuttynose to try its hand at a saison. An interesting style considering that in reality the guidelines are so broad. There are some classic examples, as well as some interpretations that are becoming so. We began, as all good brewing should, with tasting. Luckily for us our good friend Lindsey Altshul, who runs a beautiful café in South Berwick (SoBo to those in the know) called "Pepperland," has a cellar full of Belgian beers the likes of which would make a grown brewer cry. He brought a dozen or so varieties of saisons including a vertical tasting of Saison De Pipaix, from La Brasserie a Vapeur of which we tried 3, 9 and an 18 year old examples (if my foggy memory serves). If you have the chance to try an 18 year old Pipaix please do, fantastic.

We decided that it was all about the yeast so we had White Labs send us a pitch of their saison yeast, which I believe is in the Dupont vein. Dr. White suggested that we ferment the beer without cooling and let the temperature rise to wherever it wants to go. Easier said than done, believe me.

The grain bill was very straightforward with a bit of Wheat and Aromatic malts for some subtle character and 6% sugar to lighten the body. We used Sterling throughout the hopping. Once fermentation commenced the temperature went up to 92° F or so. The beer itself fermented very quickly but finished around 4° P. I was really hoping for a dryer finish, and will be looking to correct this for next year. We actually brewed this beer in August of 2005, but are releasing it now because we were unsure if the yeast would continue to drop the gravity and cause gushing. No worries, but it ended up a tad sweeter with a fuller body than I was hoping. There's a gorgeous nose from the yeast. No spices added and yet there's a real nice complexity in the aroma.

Malt:
Pilsner Malt
Aromatic Malt
Wheat Malt
Cane Sugar

OG - 17° P
TG - 3.5° P, ABV - 7.4%

Hops:
IBU 25
Sterling - Bittering
Sterling - Flavoring
Sterling - Aroma

Imperial Stout Returns

3/15/06 - Imperial Stout - After a one year hiatus the Imperial Stout is back in action. We figured that after catching a bit of flack for its absence we'd have it return with a bang. We bumped up the starting gravity from 20° P to 24° P. This allowed the beer to finish just over 10% ABV. Like this year's Barleywine, we've decided to play with the hop character, specifically the dry hop presence. Trying to avoid the fiasco of my previous attempt at adding pellets to the fermentor, I did what any good manager would do: I made Charlie add them. He had the advantage of being able to add the hops directly through a top manway and so his besting me in this challenge is not necessarily a sign of his superior brewing skills but more a reflection of my adventurous, try anything spirit (or at least that's the story I'm stickin' to). The Charles added 44 lbs of Cascade, split evenly between two batches, or about half a pound per barrel. We then transferred the beer onto seventy-eight pounds of an even mixture of Centennial and Columbus whole flowers, about one pound per barrel. The beer is a little top heavy in terms of the hopping but it seems to be smoothing out a bit as it's aging. I'd give it six months or so, if you can wait that long. If not, hey, enjoy it anyway.

Malt:
Pilsner Malt
Munich Malt
Crystal 120L
Carastan 35L
Chocolate Malt
Roasted Barley
Cane Sugar

OG - 24° P
TG - 6.3° P

Hops:
IBU 90
Magnum - Bittering
Cascade & Crystal - Flavoring
Cascade - Aroma
Cascade - Dry Hop in Fermentor
Centennial & Columbus - Dry Hop in Bright Tank

Barleywine

2/1/06 - Barleywine - Ye Olde Barleywine. Once again we were interested in playing with the hop profile of this beer. Last year we ended up dropping the IBU's to 80, which we found to be just about right. The aspect we decided to play around with this year was late-addition hops. I've always loved having that bouquet of fresh hops, especially in a beer of this size whose malt profile adds so much character in its own right. The thought (or lack thereof) was to add some pelletized hops into the fermentor after primary before we transferred into a bright tank on top of whole flower hops. My tragic flaw was to try and back flow beer into a keg full of pellets. Once the beer hit the hops the mixture expanded into a slightly damp compact mass of green vegetable matter. Smelled great, but there was no way those hops were heading back into the fermentor. Nothing left to do but empty the sucker. Remember when you were a juvenile delinquent and you lit off snakes behind the elementary school? How the little disc erupted into a cylindrical mess? Imagine the disc being a half barrel and the cylindrical mess being forty-four pounds of Cascades shooting out of the 2 inch opening at the top. Opps, guess I'm still a bit of a JD. We still managed to get some nice hop aroma with seventy-eight pounds of Columbus whole flowers in the bright tank. That came out to be about 1 lb./ bbl of beer. When we first tried the beer there was a definite note of over-ripe peaches (en regalia, as it were).

Malt:
Pilsner Malt
Pale Ale Malt
CaraMunich
Aromatic
Special B.
CaraHell
Brown Sugar

Hops:
IBU 80
Simcoe - Bittering
Santiam & Cascade - Flavoring
Santiam - Aroma
Columbus - Dry Hopping

OG - 23° P
TG - 3.3° P

S'Muttonator Doppelbock

1/10/06 - S'Muttonator Doppelbock - S'Muttonator is once again back on the shelves and perhaps a bit is in the old belly, eh? It's been interesting trying to be creative brewing a style that has a fairly narrow interpretation in terms of historic examples and modern guidelines. My first real knowledge of this style was drinking Optimator. I love that beer. I used to drink three or four while cooking dinner for my housemates at Compound I in Oakland (OakTown Get Down, yeah!) I was working at Golden Pacific (the cellars of hell) and living in a collective warehouse that was in the old Jelly Belly factory. What great karma (or would that be plump karma?) I'd head down to the (original) Berkely Bowl, get my veggies and load up on the Spaten goodness, crank some Ween and proceed to drink my way through making a meal for ten. A drinking cook is a happy cook Mama J used to say. It's such a great sipping beer and a fine complement to food. So with those memories on my mind and palate, I think last years version was really close to what I like in a double bock, big and malty. The main thing I changed this year was to drop the starting gravity from 21 plato to 20. I thought the alcohol presence was just a bit much. I really like the balance now, though I'll probably add some dextrin malts next year to bulk up the body. My biggest issue was with our filter. It just flat out failed us. Not entirely it's own fault, I mean we have abused that sucker for years. And let's face it, it is kind of ugly and sad looking, especially next to our new(er) 8 square meter Velo we procured from Goose Island. Ah, to have real live brewing equipment at my disposal. What a treat. It's like we're becoming a real brewery. Upwards and onwards I guess, eh?

Malt:
Pilsner
Munich Malt
Caramunich
CaraFa II

OG - 20° P
TG - 4.5° P

Hops:
IBU 42
Bittering and aroma - Hersbrucker Hallertau

ABV - 8.5%

Scotch Ale

11/1/05 - Scotch Ale - The Scotch Ale this year is completely unaltered from last year's incarnation. We just didn't see a need to change anything. That being said we will most likely be putting the Scotch Ale on hiatus next year. I guess I'd consider this fair warning if you'd like to cellar a few bottles to tide you over. I know some of you don't want to hear that, but it's just part of the evolution of the Big Beer Series (I'd call it intelligent design, but we are talking about the Smutty crew here.)

A Note about our Wheat Wine

The much-anticipated debut edition of Smuttynose Wheat Wine, brewed and bottled early in 2005, was delayed until September due to problems stemming from the federal label approval process. The Tax and Trade Bureau (formerly ATF) rejected our original label approval application, claiming that use of the word wine in a beer name would confuse and mislead the consumer and retailers. We didn't agree (barleywine, anyone?) and appealed their rejection of our application. Ours is the first, but definitely not the last, wheat wine application the federal government has seen, so they had to create new guidelines regarding the use of this name. At last, the issue has been put to rest, and although there are several outstanding examples of this style offered at brewpubs, we are pleased to say that Smuttynose Wheat Wine Ale is the first, and so far only, commercially bottled beer that carries the name Wheat Wine on the market. We're hoping that more are on the way.

Wheat Wine - the First Edition

8/24/05 - Wheat Wine - Smuttynose Vs. The Feds: or how our heroic brewers spent the summer stickin' it to the man. We finally convinced the bureaucrats that Wheat Wine isn't actually all that confusing, in fact it's fairly straight forward. For those of you who haven't heard, we brewed the Wheat Wine in April and have been waiting on label approval since. The governments intention was that regular folk out there would be unable to understand what a Wheat Wine denotes. As if Smirnoff Ice is obviously not a vodka drink but a malt beverage. Anywho, we finally managed to get ahold of a person of reason who allowed us to use the term, though with a bit of explanation beneath as you can see on the label. The beer however has been aging nicely, though stocks have dwindled thanks to Charlie.

I'd been toying around with the idea of brewing a Wheat Wine for a while now. I first tasted one at the Craft Brewers Conference in Portland a few years ago. Terri Fahrendorf from Steelhead had brought some to the banquet and it was awesome. Best beer I tried out there. I didn't have much of an opportunity to brew one until I was asked to start overseeing the Portsmouth Brewery and helping with some quality issues there. I quickly decided this was the perfect chance to brew a Wheat Wine as well as some other styles I'd been dreaming of trying. As an aside the Hop Harvest we did was spectacular, I wish we could afford to fly out that much unkilned hops for a Smutty sized batch, but alas some things are destined to be brewed in the smaller brewhouses of this world.

The Wheat Wine that Keith Gosselin and I came up with was also very well received. Unfortunately, in another casualty in scaling up in volume, we were unable to use only Golden Promise as our pale malt base, cause both the cost and the physical difficulty in schlepping that many bags up to the mill was a tad overwhelming. Anyway, we backed off the Golden Promise from 45% to 10% with the remaining pale malt being made up with our Pilsner silo malt. It hasn't made too big of a difference but it definitely changed the malt profile. The hopping was done with a mix of Warrior and Liberty and meant to balance the malt profile but not dominate. The biggest character is the alcohol presence. At around 11% ABV this is definitely worthy of it's Big Beer status. With all that alcohol flavor, Graham over at Flag Hill Winery suggested we add medium toast French (or should they be Freedom?) oak chips in with the dry hops to add a bit of that vanilla Chardonnay flavor. I think it added a nice level of complexity to the beer as well as a bit of dryness.

Malt:
Pilsner malt
Golden promise
Cara wheat
Wheat malt
Cara hell

Cane sugar

OG - 23° p;
TG - 3.1° p
ABV - 11.0%

Hops:
IBU 70
Bittering - Warrior
Flavoring - Liberty
Aroma - Liberty
Dry hops - Horizon (plus medium toast French oak chips)

Big A IPA - 2005 Edition

5/31/05 - Big A IPA - After being forced to smell the glove at last years' GABF by judges who declared the Big A just not big enough, Stash decided to see if he would like a true West Coast style Double IPA and went about reformulating. The first thing to change was the malt bill by losing the Belgian malts, which was felt to be too close to the Barleywine in character. The malt additions were just a mixture of Pilsner malt and British Pale Ale malts. The biggest change was jacking the hops up to 120 IBU's as well as increasing the flavoring additions, which was felt to be lacking in last years' version. We kept the Horizon hops for the flavoring addition but added Warrior to the bittering and Sterling in the aroma. We dry hopped with Columbus and Sterling at a rate close to 1 lb. per barrel, booyah!

The nose is full of orange and other citrus, but not quite as pungent as I'd hoped, Stash will have to work on that. The body is nicely balanced with a hint of malt and a bunch of alcohol, perhaps a tad of honey? The beer lingers nicely with beautiful hop dryness.

Well done, Stash.

Malt:
Pale ale malt
Pilsner malt

OG - 21° p;
TG - 2.9° p
ABV - 9.2%

Hops:
IBU 120
Bittering - Warrior, Cascade
Flavoring - Horizon
Aroma - Sterling
Dry hops - Columbus, Sterling