A few hundred years as North Germany’s favorite beer, yet it’s disappeared virtually without a trace. What was it exactly, and why has it been so thoroughly forgotten?
Catherine the Great had a passion for the brownest, strongest Porter from London’s great Anchor brewery. It was this ale that would eventually evolve into possibly the grandest of all beer styles.
You might be surprised at some of the multitude of forms Mild Ale has taken. Many were about as dissimilar from the modern version as you can imagine. But let’s get one thing straight first: The name Mild has nothing to do with low gravity or low hopping rates.
CDA must be something more than a simple IPA that happens to be black, and must be brewed with the Northwest’s distinctively aromatic hops, including Amarillo, Centennial, Chinook and, yes, Cascade.
Just because the American craft beer industry produces a lot of beers in traditional styles doesn’t mean they’re anything near world-class in quality. The only shame in brewing traditional beers is doing them poorly or without care or thought.
If India Pale Ale gets its name from its legendary ability to withstand the month-long sea voyage from England to Bombay some 200 years ago, what should we call the new breed of super-hoppy American IPAs?
The stuff they’re drinking today throughout the region is a pale, light-bodied, mostly uninteresting industrial brew that’s known roughly as Asian lager.
A bartender, explaining the appeal of Bock, told one newspaper reporter simply, “It makes a feller feel good sooner.” It was enough to put a smile on your face, even in the midst of the Great Depression.
Often, the grain is used to give a new twist to a classic style. When you get it just right, its spicy tang plays on a nutty, chocolate-like background with just a touch of coffee.
As brewers at the GABF continue to experiment and push the definitions of beer and the boundaries of the drinking public, it’ll be interesting to see what results in the tug of war between the American and British brewing models in another 25 years.
While new brewers and beers appear with much splash and fanfare in places such as Scotland, Denmark and Japan, a small group of Bavarian brewers quietly carries on the nearly 600-year-old brewing tradition of zoiglbier.
Added in the final stages of brewing to accentuate their aroma, the hops boldly announce their arrival by smothering the nose with a fresh wallop of citrus and freshly cut grass. Their grapefruit-like flavor rides proudly above the malt, biting the palate in an unapologetically bitter finish.
The good news is that, even without all that cloudy yeast and wheat sediment, crystal-clear Kristall Weiss still offers much of the signature aroma and flavor of a German wheat beer.
Also know as Flemish Brown Ale, the variety is marked by a distinct piquant tartness that is produced by Lactobacillus, an aggressive bacteria that infects the ale during fermentation.
In the absence of technological obstacles, such as sufficient cooling resources, it’s more than a touch peculiar that we can’t enjoy year-round examples of many classic beer styles, some of which are lager beers.
