7

Blending and Culture

Among the esoteric arts associated with brewing’s processes, blending is perhaps the most subjective and idiosyncratic. Brewers often fall silent when asked advice on blending, not so much because they aren’t willing to share ideas, but because it’s so difficult to get started. Proportions, relative flavor thresholds and their balance, personal taste versus what the market might embrace (or pay for, as Todd Ashman of FiftyFifty Brewing in Truckee, California, wryly observes), changes wrought by time once the deed is done and the blend in question sets sail—these are things that vary endlessly, and from brewer to brewer. Not all blenders are brewers, of course. It’s well-known that some lambic producers purchase wort from one or more outside sources to be fermented, aged, tended, and eventually blended according to the methods and preferences of the producer, who then places his or her own label on the bottle or other vessel in question. This is an established and respected practice, and why not? It’s what some distillers do, purchasing wash for ferementation and eventual distillation. It’s what a lot of winemakers do, as well, purchasing grapes from an endlessly variable sequence of plots and each year producing a consciously combined amalgam of what they feel to have been that season’s best.

Blending in the brewery often carries a negative connotation. Blending, to this way of thinking, is something that happens when things go wrong. The simplest and most benign of examples might take a couple of batches of the same beer straddling ideal specification in some way—one too strong and one too weak, or under- and over-carbonated—putting them together in mathematically-verified proportion to yield the ideal and unripplingly saleable usual recipe. That’s the best case. Then there are flawed beers, beers which may carry the sins of diacetyl, DMS, or acetaldehyde—or worse—which it is felt will duck sufficiently undercover if spread among healthier batches. This, it must be said, is generally a bad idea. Bad beer is bad beer, and should simply go away. Blending bad beer with good beer will usually simply make more bad beer.

Then there is wood beer. Even if you’ve started your program with only one barrel, the option exists to blend the result with other beer, whether of the same type or not, in order to soften the intensity of wood or microbiological character, introduce carbonation, or simply to see how far you can stretch things to yield more sufficiently affected beer. Once you’ve amassed a wallfull, however, you’ll no doubt pick up on the inconsistent effect of your barrels on the beer inside them. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. If the result were always the same, you wouldn’t like that, either, would you? Then there’s the effect of blending beers of different ages to come up with something altogether new, even if the beers in question once conformed within production specification, that aside from the factor of time they might be considered the same beer.

Lambic blends are probably among the hardest to pull off. To produce Boon Oude Geuze, for example, multiple three- and one-year-old lambics are tasted and blended, with the one-year-old providing young character and liveliness, as well as the nutrients to bottle-condition an entirely flat older beer to a high level of carbonation. The blender therefore needs to project outward in time, anticipating the flavor change that will be wrought by the introduction of carbonic gas, as well as how the balance of acidity and microorganisms will lead to eventual stability.

Armand Debelder of Drie Fonteinen in Beersel is a legend in lambic circles. At times he’s had a brewery and at others he hasn’t, but his blended geuze (Flemish, French would be gueuze) and kriek, as well as many other projects, are prized by beer drinkers throughout the world. Drie Fonteinen has a couple of times been touched by catastrophe: once in the 1990s when fire destroyed the brewery and sent Armand exclusively back to his blending roots; and again in 2009 when a faulty thermostat led to the ruin of some 85,000 bottles of aging beer. The bottles that didn’t explode were salvaged for production of eau de vie. Amid all of this Armand’s stature continued to grow, but even he sat at the feet of his father, so to speak, as he learned the art of blending. As recently as 1994 Gaston Debelder was in charge of the blending at Drie Fonteinen, and it was at about that time that he finally put Armand in charge of his own blends.

So where does that leave the rest of us? In each other’s company, for the most part, given that US brewing tradition was effectively snuffed out before we all decided to try to make our own beer. It must be recognized that, with all due respect to the few brewers that survived the 1970s and the fact that solid educational opportunities for us exist, we are an industry of collective autodidacts. Hardly a week passes that we don’t ask the advice of some other brewer for something or other that we’ve decided to take on. Like blending. Like fermenting and aging beer in wood. Like everything. It therefore makes sense to us to turn things over to many of you, the people who have invented, reinvented, and tended a tradition. This all may have started elsewhere—and it certainly flourishes in its territories of origin—but where wood and beer are concerned, you’re definitely not just in Kansas—er, Belgium—anymore.

Before we get to the approaches of some of our industry adepts, a few observations should be made on the task at hand. First, there’s the simple fact that blending can have many different objectives. There’s blending for consistency and spec, and there’s blending for one-off transcendence. There’s blending for a new beer, and there’s blending for something that comes back year after year, with or without seasonal idiosyncracy in mind. There’s blending to tone down a particularly strong flavor, and there’s blending that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts, such as the Gestalt approach referenced by Jeffers Richardson at Firestone Walker’s Barrelworks in Buellton, California. And then there are different procedural styles of blending. Probably most common and graspable is the approach of straight percentages—blends, for example, of 10, 15, 20, 25, and so on percent of a particular beer combined with its style compatriot to produce a barrel-influenced version of itself. It’s surprising at times how un-linear a process this can be. Kyle Sherrer at his Millstone cidery no doubt practices a variation on this theme, fermenting single apple varieties and then combining them in different blends. Scott Christoffel at Natty Greene’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, blends in the barrel as it is aging, topping up a number of times to tinker with flavors as they develop. Less explainable to those who haven’t done it is the spirit quest approach of total immersion and intuitive tightrope-walking, where one’s intimate knowledge of each individual beer and barrel is the only tool one takes into the process, naked. Once you’ve done that, as they say, you never come down.

Since he opened Jolly Pumpkin in 2004, Ron Jeffries has never come down. All his beer is aged in wood, and his flagship beer is a bottle-conditioned golden farmhouse ale called Bam, a sour version of which, Bambic, is a blend of the original beer and a spontaneously fermented wort, inoculated from the air in Dexter, Michigan, or as Ron puts it, by Lambicus Dexterius. He follows pretty much every approach when blending beer.

Blending? Well, I guess I could go on about that for a while. We do all sorts, for all sorts of reasons. So how to gel it down to a salient point or two? Hard.

Blends of a single release such as a seasonal: Most of our seasonals are pre-order beers, but within that we usually try to put in a bit of fudge factor for order add-ons, or barrels that don’t make the cut. Foeders are all different sizes, as you know, so what we call 100 bbls varies from 2800 to 3168 gallons. So, when it’s all said and done, for a seasonal release we may have beer in 100 bbl foeders, 60, 50, 20, 10 bbl and a handful of regular barrel-sized barrels. Our BTs are 60 bbls, so I taste them all and create blends of similar flavor for each bottling run.

Blends of a single beer of different ages: Generally for beers like our Oro and Roja. A bunch of samples are pulled, and I blend away until I get the flavor profile I’m looking for.

Blending a new beer from other beers: Kind of the same, only I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. A bunch of samples are pulled. I may have an idea of where I want to go, so will direct the sampling. Then I blend until that crazy synergy of flavors that create new flavors not found in any of the original beers is born, and I’m like Heck yeah, that’s it.

For all these, except La Roja, which is usually from barrels of the same size, I keep track of the relative percentages of each of the component beers. We have an electromagnetic flow meter (well, three), so the cellar folk can recreate my blends pretty accurately. This part is important. Especially when using a really dark, flavorful—or just plain flavorful—beer. A little bit one way or the other can throw the whole blend off. Maybe not ruin it, but also maybe not get that magical synergistic balance, either.

Basically, you have to taste, and think, imagine, blend, taste, think, blend again. Wash, rinse, repeat. I usually create several blends serially at the same time, just swapping out one element for another, or leaving something out, or adding something new, so I can taste them all against each other at the same time. When you get lucky and it works, it’s like Heck yeah, I got this. Other times it’s Holy *#%!, all these beers/blends suck, what the heck am I going to do now?

I usually need to blend after everyone leaves the brewery—fortunately, about 4:00 p.m. most days. I’m not sure what I’ll do when we add a second shift. . . .

Y’all got that? That’s why blending is hard to explain. Ron himself goes on to say that as far as actual execution is concerned, he hasn’t yet found anyone else who can blend to his personal satisfaction. No slight to his crew, whom he trusts to enact the determined blends, but even for approval of individual batches of bottle-conditioned beer for release, he is a one-man band. There’s a lot of that in our industry, Gaston Debelder’s trust in his son notwithstanding. For those of us trying to glean tips on actual practice in Ron’s narrative, there’s a lot of skipping ahead. He’s telling you what he does as plainly as he can put it, and he’d like for you to understand exactly what he tastes and smells and feels—and then come work for him, so that he and his wife can go back to Hawaii one day. Kidding momentarily aside, this is where inspiration lies. You can be told how one person does it, and another, and another still, but you can’t necessarily be told how to do it yourself. (Cue nudging and winking European.)

Lauren Salazar has lately expanded her role at New Belgium to education, but until relatively recently she ran the brewery’s sensory evaluation department in addition to shepherding its continually expanding wood cellar with her ex-husband, Eric. Her little book is legendary, in which she frequently and repeatedly notes the progress of the beer in each of 64 (as of this writing) foeders, as well as various piddling barrel side projects. Over the years she and Eric have conducted numerous blending workshops, at which lucky attendees are allowed to combine any of several beers brought along for the purpose, tasting and discussing among themselves as well as with the masters, eventually creating a growlerful that they are then allowed to take away.

New Belgium’s approach to blending and the creation of new beers is unique in the industry. Rather than creating myriad sour beers standing figuratively on their own two feet, they keep two sour base beers going, Felix and Oscar, light and dark, named for the roommates in Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple.” Lauren, it must be observed, is great with names. Felix and Oscar may once have been built on a couple of well-known New Belgium beers, Biere de Mars and 1554, respectively, but they have been gradually altered to be very much their own beers. Both are lagers. In their purest forms they can probably most closely be identified with the beers Le Terroir and La Folie, but aside from regular, generally yearly production of those two stalwarts, they are more often combined with other beers to yield an unending array of releases, blended to give what is deemed the right touch of sourness and other character derived from the time spent in wood, along with other ingredients to create much-sought-after and unique offerings. Some of these beers have reached the market as Eric’s Ale, a sour peach beer; Transatlantique Kriek, a cherry beer blended over the years with kriek produced at the Boon Brewery in Lembeek and this past year from Oud Beersel; and Pumpkick, a sour pumpkin ale with cranberry.

Lauren has a great deal to say in connection with the sour beers she has had a hand in creating, and about the processes that brought them about. At the risk of taking up some space here, we include the entirety of her musings on her own quest. Every word is worth reading.

My two favorite things in the world are being with the barrels and blending.

Walking through Cache la Foeder when no one is around and just being with the barrels, taking little sips here and there and jotting down notes to myself in a book I’ve had since 2000 (I made the first La Folie blend in 2001), I’ll thumb back and forth through the pages and see how a barrel was doing the last time I tasted it right after I write today’s notes, to get a read on what was, what is, and what will be. I’ve found that if I haven’t tasted through all 64 ladies and gents for a while, I start to feel edgy—like when you leave a sandwich on the counter and go to work—what will Sabbath (our black lab) do? Maybe nothing, maybe eat it, maybe shred it in a million tiny pieces—you just don’t know, but you know you’d better circle back and investigate. They’re like dogs or like kids (I’m told): sure, they’re good, but turn your back for more time than you should—oh boy. Upon completion of a solid week’s worth of foeder tasting, I am cool again, totally in control. It’s a great feeling.

After tasting, I’ll sit down and look over the notes—what do they tell me? Sensory evaluation is an incredibly powerful tool—with one look, a sniff, and a few sips you can completely diagnose your beer/barrel. What’s right and if there’s anything out of ordinary. If you have the sensory skills to ID what is the anomaly (assign a cause) then you can correct the action. Diacetyl= SPD (sick phase diacetyl) or just a normal stage of pediococcus lactic fermentation that tells me “Wait one month and taste again.” Our foeders are not that complicated—we are not fermenting (well, not ethanol fermentation); we are acidifying in oak. That means that I don’t have to wonder if the beer production went well—it did—we checked that on flavor panel before transferring to wood. Instead, I am basically there to see if the barrels need anything—if they are too hot, too cold, hungry, or full and happily making lactic acid. If a barrel is becoming too sour too quick, it might be the temp is too high; if it’s sluggish it might be too cold, or there aren’t enough bugs in the liquid. I can fix both of those things. It’s when the barrel is sour—on time, as planned—then you have another fun project—BLENDING!!!

You must realize, a sour barrel is a hungry barrel. In our case, beer is food. In order to feed the barrel, or more literally, the bugs (wild yeast and souring bacteria within), you must take some or all of the liquid out of the foeder (luxury of a large foeder with a way to fill from the bottom) and replace it with beer (sugar/food). This starts the souring process all over again. Fed and happy, they’ll get back to work. The real fun is how much of which barrel to take out to create a beer from your blend. Pierre from Tilquin told me that he thinks blenders who wax poetic about romantical notions of blending are silly to him. I never told him that was me. I get him: He has one Cantillon barrel, three Boon barrels, four Drie Fonteinen barrels, two Girardin = 10, and that’s how much he makes. Welp, yeah, that’s pretty straightforward and unbelievably delicious every time. And I used to have that same type of “formula” for blending when New Belgium had 20-ish small barrels. It was something like five malty sweet and sour, five big lactic, five interesting, and five lactic/some acetic-ok = blend. Wow, those were the olden days! Acetic?! No, thanks. Really goes to show how little I knew in 2001. But as we grew our foeder cellar, as there were hundreds, then thousands of hectoliters of sour (ready, hungry) beer, that’s when it got interesting.

My blending method is pretty straightforward still. I am always thinking of a date range when I want to release the beer and as that date gets closer an amount of beer I think is feasible to produce. As the months go by I taste through the barrels. About six months prior to the blend I start thinking about it. Then three months before I get a little more serious, a little more dialed. Two months, then one month, I all but nail the exact foeder numbers (or names in our case) and the amounts we’ll pull from them. My tasting procedure goes a little like this: I taste only one base beer at a time, either Felix (pale sour, in the case of a Le Terroir) or Oscar (dark sour, in the case of a La Folie blend); I get samples, write the foeder name/# on the glass, and cap it with a petri dish (damn fruit flies!). Once I have all the samples—32 of each—I do a real high-level drive-by. One sniff, one sip. I jot down one of three letters. W= waiter. W means the beer is not ready, not sour, wait. B= blender. There’s some nice sour in there and still some interesting other attributes left; this can bring complexity to the blend. U= user. Sour, hungry, that’s about it—no food left means pretty much no other flavor, too. I also make one other notation—☺, , or ☹. When put next to a B or U it’s super helpful for the second pass. If I have 10 B/blenders, but only 5 of them with a ☺, why not just let the ride and why in the world use an ☹ over a ☺? Yep, that’s 14 years of running a sensory science lab boiled down to two characters that only mean something to me and the wood cellar guys—silly, but it works. Second pass, I push all the Ws and Bs with and ☹ to the back. I pull all the U☺ and taste one more time—are they really that ☺? If so, I calculate how much volume all the U☺ are in total. That’s the core of my blend, the sour middle. Now, I’ve had some great sour beers that came out of one barrel, but they were just that, sour. When I blend all the sour U☺ the mix is great, stellar, but not complex. It’s the blend that makes the magic.

When I think about blending, I think about drawing a flower . There’s the sour middle, then I take all those B☺ and start placing the petals. Those B/blenders have fun flavors of malt, esters, phenols, and other crazy bretta notes. They’re sweeter and have super interesting noses—fun. But which to choose? I also think about my foeders like crayons. I always have but it’s become more vivid as the years go by. First there were four; I had trouble blending—not enough. Then there were 10; I thought about when my mom first gave me a box of eight Crayolas. I had all the primary colors; I could create ANYTHING! I could put the blue and red together and make purple, then add white—wow, what else could I ever need? Then the box of 16—yep, we then had 16 foeders. I could blend in delicate notes—cool! Then the box of 32—what? Brick Red—love it. When wood cellar one was complete we had 32 foeders. I got it. I started getting sneaky, layering notes, adding hints. We of course now have 64 foeders; cellar two is complete.

How crazy am I about crayons? Well, I once named a dog Periwinkle and constantly traded with other kids for this color as I had a nasty sharpener habit and was always to the nub of this color—that’s Foeder #1 to me. Sure Thing is her name and I use her in EVERY La Folie blend. All she wants to do is make delicious sour beer—who could deny her? The funny thing about the blend also came to me when considering that box of 64: Just because you have 64 doesn’t mean you should use all 64 each time you create. We’ve all done it—add this color on top of that color and eventually . . . You’ve. Got. BROWN. Too much. So, back to the flower. You blend all the U☺ and create that sour middle, then you add a few to several petals and that’s it, you’re done. You keep the main thing the main thing (as they say) and then you add on complexity that becomes secondary attributes. Then you blend it again. Is it the same? Are you on to something? Crayons down, you’re done. Buy it, drink it, taste blender’s intention.

A moment of silence may be in order. You’ve got it now, though, right? The whole thing, it turns out, is simple. In order to make beer like Ron Jeffries or Lauren Salazar, you have to be Ron Jeffries or Lauren Salazar. Or Armand Debelder, or Patrick Rue, or Vinnie Cilurzo, Todd Ashman, Scott Christophel, Ron Gansberg, Tomme Arthur, Will Meyers, or you. It’s worth noting the trust expressed by both Lauren and Ron in the processes that comes both before and after they get into the act of blending, in the work done by brewhouse and sensory staff and those charged with executing the blends.

Lauren isn’t the only one among us who names her tanks and barrels, of course. Metropolitan Brewing in Chicago has tagged just about everything—brewhouse vessels, fermenters, and bright tanks, practically even filters and hose ends—with names of fairly obscure characters from Star Trek’s various iterations. More to our purpose here, New Holland Brewing in Holland, Michigan, has six handsome horizontal foeders inoculated with bugs and acidifying away in various stages named after funk stars: Chaka Khan, Bootsy Collins, Rick James, and others you could probably guess. No Bernie Worrell quite yet.

While the controlled blending of batches and barrelsful of beer is one of the most ephemeral, rewarding, and subjective of the brewer’s arts, the avoidance of unintentional blending in the brewery is a more fundamental subject. It’s what any of us making sour beers of any type should be most mindful of when taking on that challenge. For that matter, it’s what anyone using more than one yeast has on his or her mind when allowing such things to occupy contiguous space, or when using common equipment for doing so. To some extent it’s basic sanitation, but when stakes rise to accommodate large batches of beer and multi-head kegging and packaging lines, specific cleaning and separation protocols should be built into any sour program, and especially when wood is involved.

One basic piece of advice specifically tendered by both Jason Ebel of Two Brothers Brewing in Warrenville, Illinois, and Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa, California, is to keep separate hoses and equipment, including pumps and fittings, for processes involving sour and more conventional beers. These can be color-coded—Vinnie uses a red band about all hoses to be used for sour beers and red buckets for storage of sour fittings. Physical isolation of barrels and other sour-determined vessels from the brewhouse and from grain-handling areas is an obvious—and these days often grandly more common—step to take when trying to avoid cross-contamination (including the exhaust zones from these areas), but some brewers take this separation to the ultimate step of having completely different breweries for the production of regular beers and for sour beers. This was a relatively easy step for Upland Brewing in Bloomington, Indiana; when they opened a second location, they simply dedicated one of them, their first, exclusively to Belgian and American sour production (though both breweries produce beer aged in wood). Ron Jeffries at Jolly Pumpkin in Dexter, Michigan, produces wort for two breweries in a central brewhouse and diverts it, according to plan, either to the fermenters and barrels of Jolly Pumpkin itself or beyond a separating wall to the fermentation area of the allied North Peak brewery taking up correspondent space in the same building. Separate kegging and bottling equipment is also maintained, as well as separate air handling systems, and workers crossing between the two facilities pass through a sort of airlock, in which boots and gloves must be exchanged before even stepping into the other space. At Wicked Weed in Asheville, North Carolina, brothers Walt and Luke Dickinson each keep themselves dedicated to one side or the other of the process. Walt is in charge of the sour wood program, while Luke keeps his distance and heads up regular beer production.

Given the neither-really-clean-nor-actually-dirty aspect inherent in the use of wood vessels, and especially barrels, it isn’t surprising that ranges of opinion and procedure are wide when it comes to what brewers do to their barrels and tanks between fills. No less venerable a brewer than those at Greene King, in Bury-St.-Edmunds, Suffolk, in business since 1799, subjects the wooden tuns in which their 5X Strong Ale ages for two years at a time to no more than a hosing-out with hot water between fills, sulfiting only if leaks have developed. The boys at Upland in Indiana used to rinse their foeders with hot water and scrub them from inside by hand, but now they call it good with a cold water rinse. Gert Christiaens cleans and disinfects the foeders and barrels at Oud Beersel each time they are emptied, choosing to limit spontaneous occurrence to inoculation rather than in the wood, and Khristopher Johnson at Green Bench Brewing in St. Petersburg, Florida, pitched a French saison yeast into his 25 hL Okanagan Barrelworks foeder two years ago and hasn’t cleaned it since. Dick can identify with this, having maintained a pet educational project at one of the small breweries he used to operate in Seattle similarly uncleaned for more than 12 years. Admittedly, it was only a three-barrel tank, so stakes were low, but those among us even passingly familiar with fantasy literature might at this point observe that there are as many different kinds of sorcery as there are sorcerers. It’s tempting to get into a comparison of wands—steam wands, that is—in treatment of barrels, but rather than further freight a silly metaphor let’s hope all that is covered in chapter 4.

Patrick Rue and his crew at the Bruery in Placentia, California, are well-known for crafting a vast range of idiosyncratic and inventive beers, many of which are aged in wood. As we all should, Patrick has taken detailed note of the progress of the Bruery’s education where producing barrel-aged beers is concerned. He’s broken it down into phases, each of which can be marked off from the others by challenges received and met. Rather than paraphrase, we’ll let him tell it.

We’ve gone through many phases in how we age beer in barrels as we’ve learned more about barrel aging and sanitation in general. It’s important to remember barrels cannot be fully sterilized— there’s always risk involved. We’ve always felt the flavor, when done well, is worth the risk. The phases we’ve been through:

Phase 1 (1–3 years into barrel aging): Put it in a barrel and see what happens. We ordered freshly dumped bourbon barrels, removed the bung, removed any excess liquid from the barrel, purged the barrel with CO₂, filled the barrel with a bulldog-style racking wand, put the bung back on, and waited to see what happens. Taste every barrel individually prior to racking. We have a modest lab to be able to plate beer to find common beer spoilers. During this phase, we had a pretty high success rate. Call it beginners luck!

Phase 2 (4 years into barrel aging): We have some bourbon barrel aged beers turning inadvertently sour, and as we build up our lab, especially micro, we start plating each individual barrel a few weeks after racking beer into it (as well as pH), and again a few weeks before racking the beer out of the barrel. This helped us to isolate some barrels, but not every barrel with a micro issue will necessarily have growth on plates.

Phase 3 (5 years into barrel aging): Infection issues rear their ugly head, so we changed the way we treated barrels. We buy a steamer, and steam barrels prior to filling as an additional safeguard. We lease separate facilities for our clean barrel aging from sour barrel aging. All other aspects are the same as Phase 2.

Phase 4 (6 years into barrel aging): We see a moderate improvement, although we’re still not where we should be as far as micro stability. We test the air when we fill barrels. We were filling right next to our brewhouse, which is the area where we mill grain, remove spent grain, and which stays at a balmy 90 degrees most of the year at high humidity. We find a high level of lactobacillus in the air, so we fill in another cellar which has much cleaner air quality. Barrel aging warehouse is humidified, which can increase microbial stability (yet can also introduce mold problems if excessively humidified). All other aspects are the same as Phase 3.

Phase 5 (7 years into barrel aging): We improve our risk avoidance, but find barrels with micro issues are getting past our testing, especially beers below 15% ABV. With larger, 120 BBL packaging runs of some of these beers, we find it extremely concerning to have one bad barrel make its way through to the brite tank. A flash pasteurizer is procured to use on the occasion we do have unintentional anaerobic bacterial or wild yeast presence. We plan on using it only when our testing indicates a sufficient growth of a beer spoiler to impact the quality in package. While we haven’t yet received the flash pasteurizer, our research shows with big, bold bourbon barrel aged beers, triangle testing indicates no discernable difference between non-pasteurized and pasteurized. We’re crossing our fingers. All other aspects are the same as Phase 4.

Seven years isn’t just the extent of the Bruery’s relationship with barrel-aged beers, at this writing it’s as long as they’ve been in business. So there you have it, an entire history of discovery—and recovery—by a brewery well-known and respected in the use of wood for aging beers. Patrick mentions the concern of a single compromised barrel of beer making it past safeguards to affect an entire tankful destined for packaging and distribution, a fear and experience shared by Pete Batule at Upland. Nor is he the only producer of sour and other wood-aged beers to implement some kind of pasteurization. Both New Belgium and Odell Brewing Co. in Fort Collins, Colorado, pasteurize for stability, and who can blame them? The size of their operations demands safeguards against contamination for all the other beers they make. Cleaning protocols for full-fledged packaging lines are as exacting as the French Constitution. We are all here, of course, to give consideration to various programs of beer in wood, but few of us exclusively make our livings from these products. In addition, whether through bottle-conditioning, rigorous laboratory testing, or indeed pasteurization, it’s in all of our best interest to have the beers we produce, sour, wood-aged, or whatever these days passes for ordinary, show up in the marketplace in their best possible condition.

Peter recalls the lesson offered by Antoon Lietaer, brewmaster at the Anglo-Belge brewery in Zulte, Belgium, where he served his apprenticeship. In the middle of a packaging run he trotted off to check a problematical filter, and observed on the way that in order to be a good brewer you have to forget the past from time to time. On his return route after the problem was resolved, Peter asked him what he meant. His point was to build safeguards into the process, making sure that the rest of your wort cannot carry over into the next step, should something be amiss. Some of these safeguards can be simple, such as ensuring that all wort is boiled, even what might sit in a standpipe, fill line, or other dead end. It can also extend to deciding to filter or pasteurize in order to eliminate microbiological uncertainty that could lead to exploding bottles in the marketplace. This may have more relevance in Belgium, where post-brewery warm storage of beer is commonplace, but we have our own issues here, as well. The point is that we all weigh possible risk, and especially with sour and bottle-conditioned beer. With a single degree Plato of residual extract left at bottling, an additional full volume or 2 g/L of CO₂ can be generated in the case of unstable beer. The chances we take involve not only our own reputations but that of all craft beer.

Implicit in all this admission is that beer has been dumped. In fact, if there is a single universal truth to barrel-aging of beer it is that not all of it turns out. Every Jason out there—Perkins at Allagash, Ebel at Two Brothers, Spaulding at Brewery Vivant, and Yester at Trinity—cautions that to get involved in barrel-aging, and especially sour beer production, is to get involved with sending some beer down the drain. Others not named Jason agree with this, by the way, including Jay Goodwin from the Rare Barrel in Berkeley, California. Part of this can be pressed on one. Like a well-trained animal, a foully acetic barrelful can almost find its own way to the drain (or perhaps the cruet), so obvious is its destiny. But sometimes things just don’t shape up. Even a nice tangy aroma can belie a flavorless beer. Our friend Tomme Arthur of Pizza Port and Lost Abbey (both in the San Diego area) related that after a knockout first batch of Lost Abbey’s Angel’s Share, aged in brandy barrels, a second batch run through those same tasty barrels yielded a ho-hum beer. He, too, learned something through that experience, and has since only used repurposed spirits barrels once for the production of that wonderful beer. Along these lines is the observation made by Brent Cordle from Odell Brewing Co. in Fort Collins, Colorado, that the same blends from the same barrels at different times will not yield the same beer. Not all beers, Jason Ebel observes, do all that well in oak, whether because their own flavors are at odds with wood or microorganism or that something about them ungratefully deadens the effect of such loving treatment. None of us, it must once more be observed, need feel compelled to drink uninteresting beer.

Many of us begin wood programs by introducing our regular beers to barrels and checking the variant result. Bourbon-influenced versions of already existing stouts and porters were some of the first barrel-aged beers most of us had, and which inspired us to try it ourselves. Tomme Arthur’s first wood beer, Blackball Imperial Stout, was based on his Santa’s Little Helper and produced at the Pizza Port Solana Beach location, aged in a Jack Daniel’s barrel given to him by Chris Mueller at White Labs and named for the caution flag indicating a no-surf zone. A lot of history there in one sprawling sentence.

Will Meyers of Cambridge Brewing in Massachusetts credits a dream he had—seriously—with resolving an impasse he felt in his career as a brewer back in 1998, which through further introspection and discussion with his boss, Phil Bannatyne, sent him off on what at the time seemed something of a fool’s errand: the most expensive project ever attempted at the brewery, with no assurance of eventual success and the necessity for at least three years of barrel aging before anything would even be saleable. The beer was to be called Benevolence. Its process shows a little bit of everything, with a lot of groping and an eventually happy result.

We procured a set of five used barrels from our friends at Sam Adams, bourbon barrels which were former homes for Triple Bock, and the forthcoming Utopias and Millenium, and brewed a strong (25*P) wort featuring Special B and puréed raisins. After primary in stainless with our house ale and Belgian strains the beer was divided into the five barrels which were laid in a mostly junk-filled, dirt-floored section of the basement in our 120-year-old building. Each barrel was gifted a different additional fermentable—honey, date sugar, cherries, raspberries, raisins—and inoculated with a culture of “bugs” I’d been feeding the collective sediment of a considerable assortment of lambic beers. As time progressed we limited ourselves to tasting the beer quarterly, noting that the beer over time dried out considerably and increased dramatically in acidity. Very little, if any, Brettanomyces flavors developed despite a very healthy pellicle in this concoction which over three years was never topped up. The beer became vinous, with extremely complex caramel notes and hints of sherry-like nuttiness, was pleasantly tart, and intense with oak and char and vanillin and subtle spirit. It was extraordinary but still lacking. It was time to make the fresh beer to blend with the barrel-aged.

We brewed a strong Belgian blonde ale of 18⁰P, unspiced, with invert sugar as adjunct. Upon completion of fermentation in unitank the beer was fabulous. But when we blended it with the dark barrel-aged beer, everything was wrong. It became a hot, phenolic mess. Spicy, sweet upfront but sour and tannic in the finish. Amazingly unbalanced and disjointed no matter how we titrated the blend. In a panic now, we tried the beer in a blend with every other beer we had—Kolsch, Amber, Pale, Porter, Hefeweizen, Tripel, and more—and all failed to do the job. After calming down and attempting to be more focused, we came to the realization that all the beers that at least tasted good in a blend were diluting the complexity of the barrel-aged beer. Those fermented with more assertive yeast strains—high phenol and ester producers—accentuated the high alcohol and odd flavors. What we needed was a clean strong beer with high residual sweetness to add body without diluting the beer’s intense character. One and a half kegs of CBC Blunderbuss Barleywine (aging in our cold box) later (at an 8% blend) and we had a winner. Quite literally, as having taken the local beer world by storm we entered it in the Experimental Beer category at GABF one year later, in 2004. It took home a silver medal in that category, a close second to gold medal-winning Sam Adams Millenium, which was apropos as our beer was aged in the same barrels which previously held theirs. Our beer was polarizing, to be certain. Many was the beer festival-goer who tasted the beer and looked like we had offended their mother and kicked their dog. It was, after all, sour, vinous, raisiny, oaky, wicked strong, oxidative, and spirituous and the average “Microbrew fan” was unprepared. There were others, however, who “got it” and it was with each of these small victories that we felt compelled to continue our pursuits.

More traditionally common is the single base beer brewed for later variation by the addition of fruit, barrel-to-barrel blending, or the construction of Grand Cru versions. This is mainly what is practiced in Belgium to this day, among brewers of lambic and other sour wood beer producers such as De Brabandere, Verhaeghe, and Rodenbach. The variable outcome of different barrels or foeders can in fact be used for different products, or can even turn out to be a key attribute for certain end products. Some ethyl acetate is easy to mask with cherries, for example, and will even enhance the fresh cherry aroma. Possibilities along these lines could be considered endless, with breweries such as Upland using pawpaws and persimmons and grapes. Some breweries borrow from this tradition by producing a base beer used for inoculation. This is the method used at Jester King, outside Austin, Texas, which stores this concoction ready to go in 50-liter kegs, and at Wicked Weed in Asheville, North Carolina, which has a name for this beer, Cassette, and keeps it going in oak barrels for introduction to beers that are otherwise conceived individually.

Most American brewers of beers destined to be aged in wood (including those mentioned above) agree that beers and their recipes should be conceived individually with the influence of wood and its residents in mind, and not simply tinkered with later for differentiation. This plays, no doubt, on the penchant these days among American craft brewers for vast portfolios of beers, in contrast with the traditional European approach to leaner offerings. Naturally, there are exceptions to this analysis. Cantillon, for example, can be counted upon to present new versions of things each time one manages to visit, but even so, they are generally painted from essentially the same palette. New Belgium keeps two sour base beers, Oscar and Felix—dark and light, respectively—but blends them in such endless combination with other beers and myriad treatments that to do otherwise would surely boggle the mind, especially at the scale on which they manage to operate such a program.

Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing takes the one-recipe/one-beer approach while recognizing that there is more than one honorable way:

Just like a non-wood-aged beer you start with your ingredients and the recipe. To me this is no different when making a funky wood-aged beer. I’m going to create the recipe using the malt and hops that I think will best fit the final beer. The only difference is that there are several more steps to consider downstream. For example, if you know you are making a sour beer you probably want to hold back on bittering hops, as a bitter beer, mixed with a good amount of acidity along with some carbonic acid from the CO₂, is going to make a beer that is not pleasant on the palate. I know there are breweries out there that take one of their production beers and move some of it to a barrel to create something new. There is certainly nothing wrong with this practice, and for some small breweries this is the only way they can achieve making a wood-aged beer, but if possible I think it is very important to create a wood-aged beer’s own recipe that was built on the premise that this beer will go into wood, and in the case of all of our wood-aged beers at Russian River will get some degree of Brettanomyces and bacteria.

This is the first of five ways Vinnie breaks down the construction and execution of a wood-aged sour beer, which also include the addition of secondary fermentables, including fruit, the barrels to be used for aging, any secondary yeasts and bacteria introduced for later aging and finishing, and the overall process enacted along the way. His words continue below.

After the recipe is created I look at any potential secondary sugars, which includes any fruit that might be written into the recipe. I learned early on from a very wise brewer that adding unique sources of secondary sugar (which can be a fruit) to a wood-aged beer can lend an even greater aroma and flavor with more personality than without. Of course, there is something simple and beautiful in putting a beer in wood and letting it age with some Brett and bacteria and eventually bottling it. This is the case with our Chardonnay barrel-aged beer, Temptation. But, to achieve some great complexity, a secondary sugar added to the barrel can change a beer.

Of course, the barrel itself is one of the key ingredients when talking wood-aged beers. This is a book on wood-aging beer, so I don’t need to go into much detail here. But what I will say is your barrel source is critical. Of course, being that I am in the middle of wine country, I am in the best position to pick up wine barrels from wineries directly. This allows me to go inspect each barrel if need be, or at least inspect the winery before getting the barrels. Purchasing barrels sight unseen can be problematic but can unfortunately be part of a brewery’s barrel program if they are not in close proximity to the source. For Russian River, I’d say one of our critical successes has been the ability to create direct relationships with the wineries and their crews. A little bit of beer doesn’t hurt, either—after all, it takes a lot of great beer to make great wine!

Another key component for me when designing a wood-aged beer is the secondary yeast and bacteria that will go into the beer. Not only is the specific type of yeast and bacteria being used important but I also make an exact pitch rate of Brettanomyces when adding Brett to the barrel. But for the bacteria I do this all by taste. The specific quantity of bacteria that will go into the barrel will be based not only on how acidic the bacteria going in is, but also how many times the barrel has been used previously. That is because the wood will retain some bacteria, even if we’ve done an intensive cleaning, so this residual bacteria still impregnated in the wood will contribute to the next beer going into the barrel. Wood-aged beer is very process driven and thus process becomes a very important component. This is one of the things I like most about these beers. In many cases you’ll be using equipment and techniques more associated and used by winemakers than by brewers. Your process decisions can start in the brewhouse and cellar with normal day-to-day brewing decisions such as mash temperature, pitch rate, and fermentation temperature. Beyond that you will need to figure out how to add fruit to the barrel, how you will actually fill the barrels, sample the barrels, empty the barrels, and clean the barrels. How you clean the barrels will directly affect the next batch that goes into the barrel. Between filling and emptying the barrels you’ll have more decisions to make such as what type of barrel bung will be used, will you top the barrels to prevent too much oxidation, what temperature will your barrel room be kept at, and, finally, can and will you control humidity.

It would be easy to glance over Vinnie’s mention of barrel bungs, but the point is made by a number of brewers that the pressure-relieving bungs, used by winemakers for more deliberate and protracted release of CO₂ from wine as it is settling down in barrels, are not necessarily suitable for a beverage producing larger and more quickly generated volumes of gas. Nor are the blip-blipping carboy airlocks with which those of us who began as homebrewers are well-acquainted, as Tomme found out early on after an addition of fruit triggered a secondary fermentation and blew the bung—and a lot of fruit and beer—all over the ceiling of his cellar. You hear all sorts of stories about holding a bung in place, from billiard balls placed on the bung, allowing gas to release, to ropes, such as at Cinderblock Brewing in Kansas City (they used a rope around the barrel and over the bung to hold it in place). But such breather bungs mentioned above are liable to blow when called upon to pass frothy ferment, reliably enough to constitute a sort of mental sight gag when reading account after account of such mishaps.

Somewhat related is the story Jason Yester tells of the day Trinity Brewing in Colorado Springs was bottling Brain of the Turtle Petite Cerise, a beer made from coffee, cherry skins, almonds, Lactobacillus, and Brettanomyces. Most of the barrels being bottled were fitted with breather bungs in order to equalize pressure before their removal, but one still bore its non-porous wooden bung. When removed, the barrel pretty much emptied, right into the eye of the guy doing the removal. A likeness of him with a black eye now adorns the label for the beer.

Vinnie’s mention of the importance of barrel sourcing echoes the sentiments of other brewers fortunate enough to live and work in areas that generate an abundance of barrels, such as other winemaking seats and in bourbon country. Unless, like the fellows at Country Boy brewing in Lexington, Kentucky, or Jesus Brisino in Guadalajara, Mexico, you live in one of these areas, or are committed enough to your barrel program to travel for inspection at a cooperage or barrel broker, you’re pretty much at the mercy of what’s available, sight unseen. Tomme has also noticed a general lack of reliability where both the structural quality and microbiological baggage of used rum and tequila barrels are concerned—no doubt having something to do with their relatively exotic and tropical points of origin. With most beginning life as bourbon barrels, perhaps the single-use-conceived method of original construction comes into play, but he also speculates that they are often left lying around, bunged, un-bunged, rained on, and otherwise ignored, until sold and shipped to brewers eager for their use—a shame, since the flavor effects of such previous use can be really interesting. At the very least some maintenance and repair might be in order. With their pretty much yearly acquisition of a single tree kept on the brewery premises and pared away as needed for replacement foeder staves, Rodenbach has this angle all figured out. Not surprisingly, they can trace the provenance of their foeders back to their points of manufactured origin in the 1960s, ’50s, and ’30s. The foederie that once made their tanks sat right where their brewhouse is now.

As with many good things, barrels eventually reach the end of their productive lives. People have different methods and tolerances where such things are concerned, and different levels of daring related to refurbishment and general risk-taking. Where one brewer might see fit to break down, scrape, and even re-toast a barrel, another might skip straight to the bonfire. At his Millstone cidery in Maryland, Kyle Sherrer only gives up on a barrel when it simply won’t hold liquid anymore (ditto Gert Christiaens at Oud Beersel), or if it has developed an off-aroma that he doesn’t like. Pete Batule and Caleb Staton at Upland in Indiana also use their noses to decide whether a barrel needs a rigorous sprayball cleaning, and if after such treatment it still smells off, they’ll reject it for good. Jason Perkins and his crew at Allagash will also get rid of a barrel if it has simply given up the ghost and contributes no flavor at all to the process.

The Fifth Element

After traveling to Belgium in 2004 with my brewing friends, I became incredibly inspired and thirsty to create a barrel-aged sour beer. To create my first sour I knew I needed more than pure inspiration; I needed help from my friends and beer community. There was so much that I had to figure out to lay a beer down for a year in oak and have it taste the way I wanted. Over the course of the next year I called nearly everyone I knew and respected to ask beer questions. I talked to Garrett about bottle conditioning, Dick about Saisons, Mallett about calculations, and I can’t even mention how many times I talked to Vinnie about Brettanomyces, tradition, and more. But that’s not all. Brynildsen was kind enough to send me used barrels to age in. I needed four because my goal was 100 cases. I traveled to New Belgium and tasted all the foeders in their oak cellar, and Lauren sent me a growler of my favorite to inoculate my barrels. Of course we named a barrel “Lauren.”

I read and re-read Phil Markowski’s book, Farmhouse Ales, and Jeff Sparrow’s book, Wild Brews. And every day I would call Dan Burick from Utah Brewers Cooperative, my mentor, friend, and fellow brewer whom I respect immensely, to discuss how all this information might come together in the end. What I realized is that there are not just four ingredients in beer, there are five. The fifth element is our brewing community that we share all our knowledge and passion with to help us create great beer for our local communities. So, thank you to everyone who helped me along the way. I hope you like the beer we made.

Cheers,

Jennifer Talley

Jenny wrote this a number of years ago, sent to those she felt had helped her in creating a beer that, like many mentioned in this book, have won some very nice medals at the Great American Beer Festival. It captures the spirit of much of what we’ve tried to convey. Along these lines, we’re hoping that the metaphor is obvious, in this chapter ostensibly on blending, but really about so much more, that the ideas of many in our industry and movement have come together to combine experience and technique in the interest of instructing ourselves, and each other, in the arts of using wood to make beer. Indeed, the statements of many take time out to make this observation of cumulative culture, and to credit European brewing and international winemaking traditions, as well as individual people whom they feel have been particularly giving in the sharing of information. It might be tempting to compare us to Lauren’s crayons in all this contribution and overlayering, but together we never seem to reach the point at which everything turns brown, that too much nuance has accumulated for clarity and increased understanding. It’s as though our spectrum is endlessly accommodating, broadening as needed to admit the new amid the accomplishments of those longer established. This bears responsibility on both sides, and amounts to a general respect for old ways and new, these ideas combining in a sturdy and living whole, accruing over time—forgive us—like the rings on a tree.