March 2007
“News About Brews”
Mmmmm...BarleyWine (-Style Ale)
Well, it was another great meeting, hosted by Frank White. He pulled out all the stops to host us, including adding a new shelf along the wall to accommodate more people, getting running water in his sink and steamed hot dogs! Thanks Frank.
The Barleywine entries for the club competition were excellent. Good job fellow brewers! And Jim Bowser's presentation on the style was informative and tasty, with several samples. Thanks Jim!
Finally, we've got the South Shore Brewoff coming up next month so make sure you drop off your entries at a drop-off location by March 30th. Also, next month's meeting will be at the British Beer Company in Walpole, and the topic is beer memorabilia and brewing gadgets. Don't bring any homebrew please, but as a special treat Earl is getting a cask of Gale's Prize Old Ale for us! Good times...
Brew On!
Jimmy B
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Index
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At a Glance (next meeting, events, quote and trivia) | ||||
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Sip by Sip (meeting minutes) | ||||
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It's All in the De-T-Ales (articles, reviews, etc.)
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At
A Glance…
Things
You May Want To Know, Or Not
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Club Events
April 10th – SSBC meeting at British Beer Company in Walpole (directions)
April 14th – SSBC's South Shore Brewoff competition
Check the club calendar for more details on these and other upcoming events. |
Area Events
March 27th – Greene King Beer Dinner @ British Beer Company in Walpole (tickets are limited, buy in advance at the restaurant) (details)
May 2-5th – New England Real Ale Exhibition (NERAX) (details)
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Next MeetingDate: April 10th Location: British Beer Company, Walpole Directions: click here Agenda: Beer memorabilia and brewing gadgets, Gale's Prize Old Ale cask |
Beer Quote and Trivia“Give my people plenty of beer, good beer and cheap beer, and you will have no revolution among them.”
What brewery introduced the first beer in pull tab cans? In what year?
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Sip
by Sip
Minutes
of the Previous Meeting
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Date: March 13th, 2007
Location: Frank White's in Middleboro, MA
Number of Members Attending: 22
For this meeting, the Barleywine presentation preceded the Club Business.
Business
| The April meeting is on the 10th at the British Beer company in Walpole. The topic will be brewery memorabilia and brewing gadgets, so bring 'em if you got 'em. Show up at 6:30 if you want to eat dinner first. The BBC will try to have something interesting on cask for us. (Update: the cask ale is supposedly going to be Gale's Prize Old Ale). |
| April 14th is the South Shore Brewoff at Bob's. There will be a morning and afternoon session and a Best of Show round. Get prizes if you've got contacts in any beer-related business. We need a food coordinator, and Steve took this 'opportunity'. |
| Club apparel: Roger brought a catalog and passed it around to get an idea of what types of items people would buy. He said the setup would be $120 or less. |
| May 12th is the annual club Group Brew. Scott fro Rock Bottom is looking into the cask for us. Jim B. will follow up. The barrel will be stored at Bill's, so that sounds like the place to do the brewing as well. |
| It looks like the best dates for the Western Mass. Pub Crawl are June 2 or 9. An e-mail will be sent to the club to get consensus. |
| The club Colorado trip will be June 23-25th for the NHC and possibly the Colorado Brewer's Festival. Fly out on Thurs, the NHC goes from Thurs. to Sat. Let Kevin know soon if you are interested, and look into booking a room as they will fill up quickly. |
| March 24th there will be a small group brew session at Bill Tredo's. The participants are planning to brew a Pale Ale and split it up, each using different yeasts as a sort of experiment. Let Bill know if you'd like to show up. It will be an opportunity to see some all-grain brewing, for any new members who have not seen this or just want to get more exposure to that process. |
| The Wort Processor's club picnic will be on June 23rd, and SSBC members are invited. This date conflicts with the Colorado trip. The Wort's will discuss if they can move it in order to avoid this conflict. |
| The Wort's have a yearly clone contest, where they try to most closely match a commercial beer which is available in bottles around the area. The winner each year picks the beer to be cloned the next year. Fred won last year, and chose Buzzard's Bay Black Lager as the target beer for this year. The Wort's want to open it up to include SSBC members, so feel free to brew up a clone and see how close you can come. The brewery is opening their doors to us for the judging in Aug. In fact, the brewer gave Fred the recipe for 53 barrels, which he scaled down to 5 gallons. You can find this posted in the Recipe of the Month section. |
| NERAX (New England Real Ale Exhibition) is May 2-5th, featuring nothing but cask ales. This year the attendance will be more limited than in the past. You can buy tickets ahead of time at www.nerax.org, and if you'd like to volunteer you can do so through that page as well. |
| The May club meeting is a food and beer pairing event. We need a place to have it, with kitchen access and plenty of room for maybe 30 people (including table and elbow room to eat). Bill offered his place possibly (Update: Bill's house may not work for this - need other options). |
| Anyone who brought Brewoff contest entries to the meeting, give them to Kevin at the end of the meeting. |
Barleywine, presented by Jim Bowser
The first mass-produced Barleywine was Bass #1, and it is still being made 104 years later. English barleywines have less of a hop/bitterness aspect to them than American barleywines, being balanced more towards the malt. In America, barleywines need to be labeled as 'Barleywine-style ales' due to concerns about the use of the term 'wine' in the description of a barley-based product.
Jim and others shared many samples of English and American barleywines (mostly American), and here are some of them:
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Old Nick, Young's |
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Holidale, Berkshire Brewing Co. |
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2007 Bigfoot, Sierra Nevada |
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Old Ruffian, Great Divide Brewing Co. |
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Monster Ale, Brooklyn Brewing |
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10th Anniversary Ale, Climax Brewing |
Barleywine Club Competition
There were 8 entries for the Barleywine competition - 6 American and 2 English. All were very good.
And the winners are...
3rd Place - Roger (American Barleywine)
2nd Place - Bill Adams (American Barleywine)
1st Place - Jim Bowser (12-year old English Barleywine)
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Recipe of the Month
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Buzzard's Bay Black Lager
(target of the Wort's 2007 Clone Competition)
from: Buzzard's Bay (scaled down from 53 barrels by Fred)
SSBC members are encouraged to participate in the Wort's yearly clone competition. This recipe comes from the brewery, and is a good starting point for trying to clone this beer.
11.5 # Canadian 2 Row Malt
3.6# Vienna Malt
0.4 # Roast Barley
0.4# Chocolate Malt
1.2 # Munich
0.8 # Carafa III
Initial hops 1.75 oz Magnum 60 minutes
Next 1/3 oz Perle and 1/10 oz Bramling Cross 15 minutes
Final ? oz Perle ? oz Bramling Cross - at end
"A good Lager Yeast"
I make no guarantee of the exact amounts, but those are the malts and hops used.
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It’s
All in the De-t-Ales…
Articles,
Reviews and Information
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Contents:
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Wort's Clone Contest Information
by Fred
The clone contest has been going on for at least 10 years. Rules are simple - closest to the target beer - not better or worse.
Winner picks for next year. The beer has to be available in bottles in this
area. I won with a Reissdorf Kolsch last year. We have done:
1991 San Miguel Dark, Tom Gorman
1992 Castleain Biere de Garde, Eric Haas
1993 Pilsner Urquell, Jay Hersh
1994 Sam Smith's Oatmeal Stout, Jim Fitzgerald
1995 Anchor Liberty Ale, Mike Biblyk
1996 Old Peculier, Shekhar Nimkar
1997 Pete's Wicked Ale, Mike Biblyk
1998 BigFoot Barleywine, Mike Biblyk
1999 Fullers ESB, Shekhar Nimkar
2000 Sam Adams DoubleBock, Ken Jucks
2001 Brewery Ommegang, Hennepin, Ken Jucks
2002 Victory, Prima Pils, Jim Dexter
2003 Allagash White
2004 Brooklyn Double Chocolate Stout, Andrew
2005 LaChouffe, Ken Weber
2006 Reissdorf Kolsch, Fred
2007 Buzzards Bay Black Lager
Buzzards Bay Black Lager
Clone Contest
One of the ideas for a clone contest that worked well was going to the
brewery to have the brew master help judge the clone. There are several
microbreweries around here that do make interesting beers. One of the
styles we haven't done was Black Lager and Buzzards Bay has a very interesting one as part of the line. Sam Adams also makes that style.
I stopped at Buzzards Bay in Westport and the head brewer was very
supportive of the idea. He said he would be glad to host the tasting and
even gave me the recipe for 53 barrels. I think the consistency and the
beer have improved lately. If you have never been there, it is owned by
the same people that own Westport Vineyards and is just around the corner.
It would make a nice day to stop at both the winery and the brewery.
by Bill Gassett
Mild Ales
This isn’t so much a story about a specific style of beer as it is a story
about a term used to distinguish one style of beer from another.
And it goes like this.
In the 1700’s the term “Mild” was not being used to describe a
certain style of beer which we now use in reference to an English
low alcohol, low hopped beer. It was used to differentiate a beer
that was served only weeks after it was brewed instead of a beer
that was stored for up to 6 months or more. It was also used in
reference to a porter, the most popular beer in he late 1770’s, but
this was only to distinguish a new porter form a “stale” porter. The
stale porter being beer that was aged in the keg.
In the 1800’s there was a change in the taste of beer drinkers.
More and more beers started to be served new or fresh after the
brewing process. These beers were sometimes called mild. Even
by the middle of the 1800’s there wasn’t an actual style designated
as mild ale. This is due to the fact that most brown beers were
simply called ales, as long as they weren't stouts or porters. The use
of mild to designate a new beer was being used less and less
because almost all ales were brewed to be drunk relatively new.
Ales that were to be aged were called stock ales.
There was a big development in English Brewing in the 1820’s with
the development of IPA’s. Pale Ales had been around for awhile but
weren't as popular as as the old tried and true brown ales. The
development of India Pale Ales changed all that. Within 30 or 40
years lots of brewers were brewing pale ales of one kind or
another which meant that popularity of porter and stout waned
drastically. So another name for their brown non-porter beers
was needed and the term “mild ale” was chosen. Still at this time
there was not a specific style of beer know as Mild Ales. Porter
faded in popularity to almost non existent while pale and mild ales
increased in popularity. Milds being the favorite.
Around 1900 the strength of beers in general diminished. This was
mainly due to an Act of Parliament that taxed beer according to
the original gravity. Lower original gravity meant lower taxes and
weaker beers. When WWI broke out the shortage of materials also
meant weaker beers. This was probably the hay-day for beers
falling into the mild ale style. A relatively cheaper, easy drinking
beer that one could be consumed in large quantities, if one wanted
to.
After WWI beers grew in strength somewhat but probably not back
to what they used to be. Milds continued to be the beer of choice.
Things didn’t change much until the end of WWII. At this time
bitters became more and more popular as tastes changed and
drinkers became more affluent.
In the 60’s bitters surpassed milds as the most popular beer in
Britain and continued to grow popularity. In certain areas of
Britain milds still ruled but they were never to be the beer of
choice as they once were. Still, at this time there was not a specific
style of beer known as mild. Mild was a general time for lighter
brown ales.
But alas, the rein of bitters was not to be a long one. The
consumption of lagers was on the rise and sometime around 1990,
lagers surpassed bitter as the most drunk draft beer.
“THE ONCE-MIGHTY MILD ALE HAS NOW DWINDLED FROM BEING THE
STAR TO BEING JUST A BIT-PLAYER WHOSE PART COULD BE QUICKLY
WRITTEN OUT OF THE PLAY.”
But have no fear. Mild ales have not gone away completely in
England. Pale ales are still popular. Stouts and porters have stage a
come back. Bitters can be found everywhere and milds are still
being brewed. Somewhere along the line, mild ale finally did get
recognized as a specific style of beer. Numbers were assigned.
3.0% to 3.5% in alcohol. 10 to 25 IBUs. SRM 12-15. Usually light in
color and almost always light in taste. What probably started out
being the “common mans beer”, eventually rose to being the
dominate beer in Britain, only to be replace by a newer, faster and
stronger model. This replacement has since been replace itself by
a new and improved version of beer. How long will it be before it is
replaced. Time will tell.
I look at mild ales as, in a way, as England’s answer to Budweiser.
Sure one is an ale, the other a lager. But they are both brewed for
one purpose. As a beer you can sit down and pound down.
Beer
Trivia Answer
What brewery introduced the first beer in pull tab cans? In what year?
Answer: Pittsburgh Brewing, 1962