End of an Era: Last Mass Tasting

Several years ago, I had a great idea.  The Hamilton College Oratorio society had me thinking about settings of the mass.  Whatever your religiosity or irreligiosity, it's a beautiful text, and composers have taken it as an inspiration for tone painting of the highest order.  As long as there was this sacred music tradition and this sacred beer tradition, I said: Why not combine them?  Brew a series of beers in Belgian styles corresponding to the movements of the mass. It took forever to brew them all and opportunities to drink the six-pack in sequence have been few and far between.


Yesterday was the last one, and the tasting was appropriately punctuated by weeping.


Kyrie: A five-year-old house Saison, this was wonderfully creamy.  The yeast (Wyeast French) contributes, at this age, a richness and depth that is extraordinary.  A beer that is soft, but weirdly austere, it was designed to accompany the often medieval simplicity and sparseness of Kyrie settings. Not a lot of text, not a lot of ingredients...


Gloria: Settings of the Gloria are light, bright, and clear: Glory to God, in the highest, so I went light here, with a monastic table beer, or single.  Despite the conceptual clarity there, at this age, the beer is all cellar character, with a wonderful earthiness and depth.  The cork, incidentally, almost killed someone.  The effervescence was genuinely glorious. This beer has been my favorite overall, through the years, and has thankfully been re-brewed already.  Footnote, I just chilled "Gloria Redux."  The youthful sample is more like what I originally envisioned. You can imagine it's cellar-y, earthy future, something 3787 excels with, but the beer is also exceptionally bright, clear, quaffable. People should remember that Belgian beers are not all nine percent...


Credo: This is a tripel.  It had to be, as it was inspired by the massive Credo of Anton Bruckner's Mass in F minor.  It's always been a stunning beer, remarkable in particular for its crazy final gravity, 1.002.  At a relatively old age, and with over ten percent alcohol, it is meady, very, very meady. It used to be brighter, but the combination of honeyed aromatics, earthiness, and serious attenuation is remarkable.


Sanctus, I am sad to say, had to be made twice.  Sanctus I was infected, but it did become a helpful blending beer for fruited lambic-ish beers.  Sanctus II has a little hint of San Francisco sourdough in the nose, which I love. Toast and caramel character are perfect--it's a sort of Belgian amber.  And I must return to both this nice, Vienna-centered grain bill, as well as the wonderful yeast, Wyeast Leuven. It aspires to the lyrical tenor line in Gounod's mass.


Settings of the Benedictus, in my limited experience, are usual sort of warm and dark, if that makes any sense.  So I brewed a beer thinking of a Bruckner bass line, which turned out to be a huge Quad. It smells of rum-raisin, cognac, grapes, wine.  For all that it is a massively rich beer, it's pretty drinkable as Quads go and I'm very proud of the recipe. The only question is how I get a hold of the yeast again, which is the now unavailable Flanders Golden, purportedly the Piraat strain.


Finally, an Agnus Dei beer must be strong enough to round out the tasting and follow the Quad, but soft enough to vaguely evoke lambs.  The solution is a wheaty tripel, sweetened up a bit with Belgian Aromatic.  It is creamy, fruity, rich, soft, just a tiny bit off dry.


Amen.

End of an Era: Wilds and Sours

I obviously forgot about this blog for a good three years.  Two of those years saw me in brewerly survival mode:  I chucked together a string of basic pale ales and IPA's, punctuated with the occasional Belgian, just enough to keep the kegerator up and running maybe half the time, with Belgians stashed in the basement to keep stocks from vanishing.


About six months ago, I kicked up the activity level, making a bunch of new Belgians and a string of hoppy beers, converting to pellets and incorporating some new procedures in search of bigger aromas and flavors (inspired by things like Knee Deep Simtra and Stone Enjoy By).


Today we bid adieu, or nearly adieu, to a series of antiques.  Tasting with me are Lisa, Andrew Rudd, and Benjamin Rudd.


1.  Flanders Red, last bottle, brewed 11/13/05.  Batch 44.  Over the hill, but still special.  Little touch of vinegariness.  Both aromatics and palate a trifle thin, particularly the palate.  Earthy brett, ultra dry.  Again, thin...  But this recipe could be reproduced with no need for tweaking as far as I'm concerned.  Probably peaked in year six?


2.  Vinification, Chardonnay Ale, brewed 2/9/08.  Batch 139.  This was pitched with lambic blend AND Roeslare.  Interesting.  This is the penultimate bottle.  Brett brux character reminds me of my all-Brett beer, half sour leatheriness and so on...  The winey quality is uncanny.  The vanilla-ish oak character is key, but I think the yeast has more to do with it than the Chardonny oak-soak.  Delicately tannic quality.  This is a really distinctive beer.


3.  Frambozen.  Is this batch 145F?  From 2008?  I'm not sure.  But once upon a time I combined infected bock, infected kolsch, and infected dubbel, and added raspberries, one time adding extra Weizen wort that wouldn't fit in a carboy that spontaneously fermented in a spare bucket.  Who knows?  Holy shit, it's pushing balsamic vinegar.  The nose is a little stinky, cheesy; the palate is full of tart pie elements.  134F and 138F are other candidates.  Whatever it is, it's around six years old, and, if you like sour sours, it's pretty amazing.  Long ago, I had a string of infections due to being an idiot and mis-diluting BTF iodophor.   The saving grace was these weird blends, which were often delicious.


4.  Amalgam, N.Y. Lambic.  Batch 39, brewed 10/2/05.  Ultra skanky.  Always been too much.  Should really be a blending beer.  It blends very well with a younger, draft raspberry beer.  This unblended lambic, which still exits in some quantity, could be an astonishing accent for a younger, less remarkable beer.  Make this 25% of some blend, soon-ish...


Interlude:  Barbequed country ribs, smoked meatloaf, and salt potatoes find a mediocre old pilsner for accompaniment...


5.  Moreval, Batch 109, 1/15/07 brewdate.  This is one of multiple beers inspired by Orval.  This one is seven years old or so, and the brett has taken over completely.  Pineapple.  Horseblanket.  Roeslare blend is an interesting choice with these.  You never know what you'll get, and the beer can go through really awkward phases, but when the balance is right, it's right.  This balance, brett-centric with hops in the extreme background, is surprisingly pleasant.


6.  "Orval-ish thing," batch 200, 5/2/10.  A younger version of the above.  Roughly the same recipe formulation, though totally different hop varieties.  Rather than Roeslare, this used Wyeast 3789.  Barnyard character is slower to emerge, under a little fruit, but it's there.  Little bit more winey somehow.


7.  New version, "XX-inspired," (needs a name), brewed 7/1/14.  Like the two above, but with no crystal malt and better hop choices, and super fresh, just a scant month in the bottle.  French Saison dries it out, and brett makes an appearance later, with liberal dry hopping (Santiam and German Brewer's Gold).  Lighter and brighter than the above, but I imagine it should age just as well.

8.  Oaky Saison:  Red-wine soaked oak chips and brett accent a super strong saison.  Mead aromas, hints of leathery brett.  Good stuff.