Putting it mildly, Gose is not a beer style that Americans grew up with, or were even aware of until relatively recently. I first heard of it in passing back in 1992, when my then wife, who was and is a curator at the Seattle Art Museum, and I were out to dinner with a visiting German art historical dignitary. Being German, our visitor was interested in the fact that I was a brewer, and he spoke fondly of a beer he recalled from his younger days in his hometown of Leipzig. The beer was flavored with coriander, he told me, and had salt in it. I don’t remember whether he mentioned its tartness specifically. In any case, I was intrigued, said that it sounded like fun to brew, and filed it away in the part of my brain that serves as a funny little backwater of brewing, right next to where Pennsylvania Swankey resides.
At that time I was working alongside Fal Allen at the tiny, roughly 800-square-foot Pike Place Brewery, where we turned out about 1600 barrels of beer a year in three-and-a-half-barrel batches. (We were somewhat chagrined that there was an even smaller licensed brewery in Kalamazoo, Michigan run by Larry Bell.) But with the pressures of producing our signature pale ale and not much else, there would be no Gose brewing for us, no Pennsylvania Swankey. We did develop an IPA, and once a year brewed barleywine, along with an occasional batch of stout. Once, for a visit by Michael Jackson, who was good friends with the brewery owners, Charles and Rose Ann Finkel, we brewed a ginger molasses brown ale. It was a simpler time. Those of us who were working at Pike Place continued to be avid homebrewers, where we were able to take advantage of the interesting imported malts sold down the street at our sister homebrewing shop, Liberty Malt Supply, to brew styles of beer that the constraints of professional brewing didn’t allow into the schedule. Still, none of us brewed a Gose.
But we did experiment. At one point, having been inspired by Dutch still lifes of dead fowl, oysters, cut lemons, and glasses of beer, I set out to brew a historically accurate seventeenth-century Dutch beer, and served it, with a label that Charles made specially, at a Seattle Art Museum opening for a show devoted to the golden age of Dutch painting. And Fal used to have Polynesian-themed parties at his house near the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle. He would brew a beer in an open bucket, using everything in the house he could find that was fermentable, its excesses evened out by prodigious fistfuls of hops. It was required that everyone drink the resulting beer from a coconut shell. I also recall that Fal, asserting his Hawaiian bona fides, was the only one to wear a sarong.
Fast forward to the later stages of our careers. . .
In his first stint at Anderson Valley Brewing Company, Fal pretty much brewed the party line—classic beers, such as golden ale, amber ale, and oatmeal stout, boldly rendered in the California style, but representative of the chromatic Holy Trinity of craft brewing’s early days. Anderson Valley did do new beers, mostly for sale at the brewery tap room in Boonville, and it came out with an IPA for general sale. But no Gose. Not yet.
When Fal lit out for Singapore to brew at Archipelago Brewing Company within the Asia Pacific Breweries behemoth, he was encouraged to experiment and develop new beers, either new styles altogether or quirky variations on the familiar. He came to Seattle to brew some test batches with me, since at Elysian’s Tangletown location I had a three-barrel brewery on which I fooled around, developing beers made with jasmine, rosemary, yuzu, and occasionally pumpkin. At one point I remember Fal being impressed that I had brewed a Berliner weiss and run the wort directly to the fermentor without bringing it to a boil. Fal was planning to introduce common or indigenous Asian ingredients to appeal to adventurous craft drinkers in Singapore. Later, his blog entries, posted from all over south Asia, were downright Bourdainian in their search for exotic ingredients and experiences. One of the experimental batches we made was a nominally Belgian-style witbier; it had coriander and orange peel, sure, but the orange peel was Chinese, and there was also lemongrass and tamarind. Another was a brown ale made with either regular ginger or galangal and gula melaka, a type of coconut sugar. Later, when I finally visited Fal in Singapore, I drank a lot of Archipelago’s Straits Pale Ale. It was one of the first beers I had that used Nelson Sauvin hops.
After five years, when Archipelago’s experiments were determined to be maybe too edgy for the Singapore craft masses—to say nothing of the corrupt system of kickbacks from bars that didn’t support anything particularly innovative or odd—and he was no longer permitted to spread his creative wings quite so much, Fal returned to Anderson Valley. (Happily, I was able to buy all the unused and unwanted Nelson Sauvin from Doug Donelan at New Zealand Hops Ltd for an IPA I had come up with, which was first called Idiot Sauvin and later changed to Savant.) This time around at Anderson Valley, Fal’s experimenting side got heavily into wood-aged beers and some of the other labor-intensive and quirky styles that the craft world had come to love and demand. One of my favorite happy accidents from this time, both conceptually and to actually drink, was a sour wheat beer called Horse Tongue, aged in wood and supposedly, famously, inoculated by a horse licking around the barrel’s bung. It kind of reminded me of the time when we were traveling in England doing research for the book we wrote together on barleywine and opened a bottle of geuze in which a couple of maggots were floating—we fished them out and threw them away, but we drank the beer, for sure.
It’s funny how often the things we come to be known for don’t even originate with us, or fall into our laps innocently and sometimes even grudgingly. The first pumpkin beer we brewed at Elysian was because one of my brewers, Markus Stinson, nagged me to brew one (I figured we’d do it once). The idea for Avatar, the jasmine IPA I used to make at Elysian, came from my first-ever Great American Beer Festival® (GABF) judging session, when Mark Dorber, one of my fellow judges and the then proprietor of the White Horse in Parsons Green, commented that one of the IPAs we were judging reminded him of jasmine tea. Similarly, as well-known for their Goses as Anderson Valley is these days, it wasn’t Fal who first came up with the idea to brew one. As Fal describes in this book, it was a local homebrewer named Mike Luparello who suggested it, and the rest is California brewing history.
These days no brewer or brewery can rest on their laurels, their past accomplishments and portfolios of beers merely delicious and well-crafted. Those who do may end up with nothing but their memories to grow old with, or perhaps get to the ripe old age of five or six years of professional operation. Fal deserves a lot of credit, if you ask me, for bringing Anderson Valley into the modern age. And with the Gose lines Anderson Valley has created and brought to market, the world has been shown variations on this old style that could only have been possible in the ferment, so to speak, of New World craft brewing. And now, from not even having considered brewing one, Fal has become one of the world’s leading experts on Gose.
If you don’t know him or haven’t picked up on this already, Fal’s is an inquiring mind where brewing exploration is concerned, figuring out what’s what and sharing it with his fellow brewers. Hence this book, and hence some of the most interesting discussions I’ve had as a judge at the GABF and World Beer CupSM have been with Fal, judging in categories variously called indigenous or historical beer. These are eggheaded, conceptually driven styles, harking back to beers exhumed from brewing’s footnote graveyards, styles like momme, hond, Grätzer, grisette, and Adambier, like Pennsylvania Swankey, like Gose. Or they are new beers, fantasy beers, crafted from whole geographical or historical cloth, beers which might once have been, and are irrefutably now, in your hand and in your face. The trick with many of these, as with many Goses, is to build an idea into a delicious beer, despite not having many of the source materials and benchmarks from which to work. Now, with this book in your hand, Fal’s research and travel should provide some of that. The raw materials are the easy part, Reinheitsgebot purists be damned; to me the interesting stuff covers the various methods of inoculation for these very interesting and, these days, very popular beers. For who would have thought just a few years ago that even non-beer geeks would stride confidently up to the bar in a craft brewery taproom and ask, “Do you have any Goses?”
Well, do you? You might. But after reading this book you almost certainly will.
Dick Cantwell
Magnolia Brewing Co., San Francisco