Dave’s Spring News

It’s early May and we’re just getting our heads clear from our annual jaunt to the Craft Brewers Conference. This year’s host was the fine city of Boston so there was plenty of Smuttynose flowing throughout town. Luckily the week went without incident and we managed to lose Judi just that one time. We return to blistering weather where we hit 95 degrees in April. Thankfully, we have this year’s Summer Weizen ready to go. The evolution of this beer continues with an addition of chamomile flowers into the end of the boil. We got the idea from our resident cask master, JT. He made a few firkins of Summer Weizen last year that he tea-bagged with chamomile, adding a beautiful and piquant twist on one of our favorite beers.

Our Short Batch Series will soon have another offering. We currently have a Belgian style Triple conditioning on about 25 lbs. of oak chips. The beer’s tasting great right now. The oak character is just starting to show, but there’s a huge fruit nose from the Chimay yeast we used. The grain bill utilized a good amount of Weyermann Pilsner malt as well as some Munich and Wheat malts. We dried it out with the addition of cane sugar, and the beer should finish around 10% ABV. We’re hoping to have it ready in about a month so you should be seeing it out and about this summer.

Dave

Schmutzig Hopfen Weisse, our newest Short Batch

Last fall I received an invite from Dave Brodrick to help celebrate the marriage to his beautiful wife, Iris. Dave (of Blind Tiger renown) asked me to brew a beer for the event. Happy to oblige, I tossed around the idea of several different styles but kept coming back to late-addition hoppy beers. I knew I wanted a session beer for the wedding and had recently been enjoying the Brooklyner Schneider Hopfen Weiss. I wasn’t looking for a beer quite that strong and so dialed back the starting gravity to be inline with a more traditional hefeweizen. The beer itself ended up with a bit too much banana character from the yeast as the ’Shire was hit with a massive ice storm the day after we brewed. We lost power for a day and a half (even that wasn’t too bad as some folk were out of power for weeks) which caused a warmer fermentation than desired. Instead of a nice mix of fruit and clove, it was definitely skewed toward the banana character, but the huge, floral notes of the hops actually balance quite nicely. Think Juicy Fruit. All in all, I think it’s an excellent beer.

Malt:
Pilsner
Wheat
Munich

Hops:
Bittering: Magnum
Flavoring: Sterling
Dry Hop: Sterling & Centennial

IBU: 15
S.G. 15° Plato
T.G. 2.6°
ABV 5.8%

Cheers,

DY

2008 Scotch Ale & Really Old Brown Dog

Well, it looks like we’ve made it through the Summer of Sans Hops. We received our first shipment of 2008 harvested Cascades last week and it was almost enough to make this old brewer cry. The initial reports are of a bumper crop and it looks like we’ve turned the corner on the hop shortage. Of course the prices haven’t come down yet, but I guess expensive hops are better than no hops. Even though new hops are slowly arriving we’re still have a few malt forward beers lined up in the Big Beer Series.

Right now we have our Scotch Ale bottled and in the stores. This is a classic Scottish style ale which we’ve brewed with a touch of smoked grain. Last year we tried peat smoked malt, but returned this year to a beech wood smoked malt as we felt it added a smoother character.

Next up will be the long awaited return of the Really Old Brown Dog Ale. This beer was initially brewed in honor of our friend and mascot, the late Olive Francis Egelston. The original batch was more in the vein of a brown porter / old ale. We’ve revised the recipe to be more like an old ale / English barleywine. It’s fermenting away right now and smells amazing. We’re planning on finishing the beer with a few weeks on some port soaked oak chips. I have really high hopes for this beer and can’t wait to check out the blend of big malt notes with the port wood. As we head into winter here in New England I can only imagine how great this beer will be on a cold evening. You should be able to see this beer in stores by mid-December.

Cheers,

David

Working through the Hops Shortage

So it seems that the experiment with strategic hopping of our Big A IPA worked out well. I think that beer came out great and we’ve been hearing real positive feedback. I’ll be heading down to the Publick House in Brookline for the 5th Annual HopHead ThrowDown this Saturday to personally see how the Big A stands up to this countries best DIPA’s. Man, do I ever stop working? It’s tough, but dern it, someone’s gotta do it.

Luckily we got our creative hop juices flowing as we’re starting to make some changes to our Finest Kind as certain varieties become scarce. After dropping an obscene amount of money we were able to secure an extra amount of Magnum so our bittering addition hasn’t changed too much. We’ve decided to use some Super Styrians as a substitute for the Simcoes we were adding with the Magnums in the bittering addition. This was mostly done to save the Simcoes for the flavoring additions where that hop can really shine. As Simcoes are incredibly tight right now we’ve starting blending some Centennials into the flavor additions. We’ll run out of those and start to look at Summits, Glaciers, and Nuggets depending on what kind of horse trading (or straight up theft) we can do. Our whirlpool addition changed a bit as well as we’re now blending Cascades, EKG’s with the Santiams we’ve always used. The dry hopping has remained the same with Amarillos adding their distinctive aroma. The first batch is tasting great and should be out in the stores in the next few weeks. As we get closer to harvest and supplies run low we may have to make some other changes. It’s certainly been a challenging year but thankfully early indications are pointing to a great hop harvest this year. Maybe even a bumper crop. Hopefully that happens but we’ll just have to keep our fingers crossed.

DY

Note, Dave's post was originally written in mid-July. Recent signs point to an excellent hop harvest, which is taking place at this very moment, but there is still a good deal of uncertainty in the market. Stay tuned...

Big A IPA - 2008 Edition

It’s Big A IPA time of year again and the fearless brewers at Smuttynose have thrown both caution into wind and a vast amount of their ever dwindling supply of hops into the kettle (and fermentor, and bright tank) for your (and our) lupulinic enjoyment. This was our first beer which required a different approach because of the current hop shortage. 

Typically we would contact our supplier and see what interesting hops were available, usually looking at varieties we hadn’t used before, and make the Big A recipe from that starting point. The twist this year was to see what we had enough supply of in our ’07 contract and then build the beer around those hops. I think we’ve succeeded, though I’ll let ya’ll be the judge of our efforts. For our hopping regime we went with Cascade and Nuggets in the boiling addition. Centennials were added every 5 minutes for the last 30 minutes of the boil. We added Crystals into the whirlpool. Dry hopping was done in both the fermentor after primary fermentation and the bright tank. We used a mixture of Chinook, Nuggets, and Sterlings in the fermentors and whole leaf Centennials in the bright tank. 

Hopefully we won’t have to use this kitchen sink approach too many more times, though it’s certainly an interesting creative exercise as well as a unique insight into what Tod Mott must go through on a fairly regular basis at the Portsmouth Brewery.

Baltic Porter - First Edition

2/6/08 - Baltic Porter - I gotta say that it's been a while since I've been this excited about the upcoming release of a new beer. This is our first attempt at a Baltic Porter and it's been tasting great out of the fermenter. Huge body with lots of fruit notes balanced by dark roasty goodness. We've even been getting hints of licorice which I find intriguing.

Our decision to add this beer to our Big Beer Series was based on having a beautiful label that had already been designed by Miss Teen USA, Joanne Francis. Years ago we released a Winter Porter with a great image of Father Time on the label. That beer eventually evolved into our Robust Porter. The label sat dormant, sadly biding its time (get it?) waiting for another shot in the show. Since I'm always happy to add styles to the Big Beer Series I figured it'd be fairly easy to change Winter to Baltic and we'd get a new beer to brew.

The biggest decision in terms of what we wanted this beer to be was whether to brew an ale or lager. There always seem to be conversations about this in the beer world. We decided to take the lager route and I'm glad we did. It adds a nice twist to the big chewy dark beer. Considering that our Imperial Stout is the next release this will be an interesting comparison to taste the two side by side. I hope ya'll enjoy drinking this beer as much as we liked making it.

Malt:
Pilsner
Munich
CaraHell
Dark Crystal 120
Carastan 35
Chocolate Malt
Black Malt

OG - 22.3° p
TG - 6.6° p
ABV - 8.7%

Hops:
IBU 40

Bittering - Magnum
Flavoring & Aroma - Liberty

Short Batch - Smutt-a-Roni

Smutt-a-Roni (first sampled summer'07)
Smutt-a-Roni is a wild rice beer, the recipe of which we stole from the Portsmouth Brewery, which in turn stole from Mike Luparello. Mike is the finest brewer I know currently living in a yurt. He's also a veteran of the Baja 1000. I don't know how that's relevant, but I think it's cool. Anyway, he used to brew at the Portsmouth Brewery and remains both an inspiration and a good sounding board for my own efforts.

The wild rice needs to go through a separate gelatinization than the barley malt, so we took advantage of our decoction capabilities and were able to boil the rice before mixing into the main mash. I used 125 lbs of 100% wild rice, I'm assuming it was Northern wild rice (Zizania palustris.) The typical wild rice package at the supermarket is a blend of wild and white rice. This ended up being about 7% of the grain bill. If I brew this beer again I'll end up bumping up this percentage. The base of this beer is meant to be a real pleasant and somewhat hoppy pale ale. We used Sterling for all the hop additions. Such a nice hop. It adds a really noticeable cherry character to the beer. The wild rice contributes a nutty flavor as well as an earthiness to the flavor.

Malt:
Weyermann Pilsner Malt
Caramel Wheat
Munich
Carafoam
Wild Rice

OG - 14° p
TG - 3.0° p

Hops:
IBU 35

ABV 5.5%

Short Batch - Brett & I

Brett and I (first sampled late '07)
"Brett and I" is a beer brewed in homage to the great Down East humorists Marshall Dodge and Robert Bryan (with Tim Sample getting the honorable mention.) If you haven't listened to the "Bert and I" tapes, go ahead and call LL Bean for your copy. They'll give you a good idea of the daily insanity of living in Northern New England. Of course that begs the question of exactly what I'm doing here. But, oh well, it's a great place to drink beer at least. And Brett and I is hopefully a great beer to drink while talking socialism over the back fence with your neighbor Enoch.

Brett and I is obviously brewed with Brettanomyces. We used Brettanomyces claussenii and in our case we used it for secondary conditioning. The original beer was a Belgian strong ale brewed with the Chimay yeast cropped from The Gnome. Still gave us that nice fruity character and still hasn't dropped bright. We ended up kegging the beer after six months of conditioning, but the brett character is still developing. It gives off an interested pineapple aroma and flavor, which I hope will continue to evolve.

Malt:
Weyermann Pilsner Malt
Munich
Wheat
Acidulated Malt

OG - 16° p
TG - 3.5° p*

*This will drop as the brett continues doing its thing.

Hops:
IBU 35

Bittering - Magnum
Flavoring - Liberty
Flavoring - Saaz
Aroma - Santiam