Archive for October, 2009
Deschutes Brewing Co. Red Chair IPA
I’ve been homebrewing for a few years now, about a year less than the time I’ve spent getting to know the world of beer(s). At first I was operating pretty much in the dark, following recipes to the letter and figuring out how to conduct and understand each step in the brewing process. After a couple of years of homebrewing I’d reached a point where I felt pretty comfortable with the basics, enough to be able to formulate my own recipes and see how they’d turn out.
In particular, it was shortly after I began brewing IPAs that I really began to understand how the final beer in the glass was influenced by when you added hops during the brewing process. I began to understand the role of bittering hop additions (early in the process) versus late-hopping and dry-hopping. The different options you had for when to add the hops and which hops to use was totally exciting, especially for someone enamored with West-Coast style IPAs.
Eventually I hit upon an approach that I came to like a great deal: a primarily late-hopped IPA. By adding the large majority of the hops within the last 20 minutes of boiling the wort, and then dry-hopping in earnest, the result was an IPA that prominently featured the aroma and flavors of hops, without overwhelming the palate with bitterness. I’m all for a crazily bitter IPA here and there, but I really liked this style. Heavily hoppy, but very drinkable.
And so I was excited during our trip out west to get to try Deschutes’ Red Chair IPA, their latest addition to a series of hop-centric beers they call the Bond Street Series. All that I’d read about Red Chair left me with the impression that it was very similar to the style of IPA I had come to enjoy brewing so much on my own. The description on their site reads, “You will find no cloying, mouth puckering bitterness here. In its place a straight up succulent citrus punch to the nose…To say that the seemingly contradictory elements of caramel maltiness and citrusy hops get along would be an understatement; they coexist in blissful harmony.” Definitely a beer that I was excited to try as part of our somewhat beer-centric cross-country road trip.
Shortly after our arrival in Spokane we ran into Red Chair on tap at the spot we went to for dinner, and my expectations were fully realized. The beer was great, and went really well with the meal we had that evening. A couple of pints later I was convinced not only of how good the beer was, but also how much it did indeed resemble the beers I’d been brewing. So at some point while we were in Portland I picked up a bottle to bring home with us to taste later, long after we’d returned from our trip.
Red Chair IPA was first brewed this past Spring, and is available from Deschutes from May to September. It weighs in at 6.4% with 55 IBUs.
It pours amber with a slight chill haze, a fluffy white head, and lots of lacing. The nose has prominent notes of citrus and pine hops, with a little dry malt as well. But really, the nose is mostly hops. The palate has layers of citrus and herbal hop flavors, underscored by warmingly sweet caramel and bready malt flavors. There is very little bitterness, it really only shows at the edges of the palate, helping to make you conscious of the hoppiness but not overwhelming the beer’s balance. Instead, the hop flavor is really well integrated with the malty profile. The beer’s only real bitterness comes into play on the finish, with herbal and pine hop flavors and bitterness really dominating. The malt takes a backseat here, letting the hops take center-stage.
All things told, this is one yummy beer. Well-balanced, but in a way that really showcases the hops that went into it. Very drinkable, and very inspiring. I came away from trying this beer with a desire to try out a new variation of my late-hopped IPA – one that used some darker malts to beef up the beer’s maltiness and balance out the hops a bit more. Let’s face it, any IPA-loving homebrewer has to have an arsenal of hop recipes to call upon!
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Gimme Coffee Ethiopia Amaro Gayo Organic
I’ve been thinking about coffee quite a bit the past two days. It’s been a dominant theme in my thoughts, spurred in part by a conversation that I had about Intelligentsia Coffee with a co-worker. Without realizing it, I haven’t had Intelligentsia coffee for a long time. In the meantime I’ve tasted a bunch of great coffees, no doubt. But there is something about Intelligentsia that really captured my imagination back when I first began getting more serious about understanding coffee.
And so while I was sipping on this cup of coffee from Gimme, I began to think about why roasters such as Stumptown, Intelligentsia, Counter Culture, and Gimme get me so excited about coffee. It’s not necessarily that their coffees are better than any other roasters’. And it’s not the cool-factor that surrounds certain of them, Stumptown perhaps the most. No, it’s neither of those.
What is so exciting about these roasters is how passionate they are about coffee and the people who grow it. If you read their websites, and follow their blogs, what jumps out of the pages is enthusiasm for finding great coffees, establishing relationships with the farmers that grow them, and enriching the exchange between grower, roaster, and the home coffee maker. This kind of enthusiasm is always compelling to me. Whether it is a brewer, a winemaker, or coffee roaster the consistent theme in the people and companies that hold my attention is their commitment to the culture in which they operate.
Gimme is a great example. Yes, they source great coffees. And yes, they do a great job of roasting them. But they also work very hard to reach out to their customers, to educate them about where the coffees come from, the lives of the people who farmed them, and why the coffees taste the way they taste. They fill in the gaps between the many stories that come together to make up the culture of coffee. Through their words you can learn so much about the tapestry of coffee.
So while other coffee roasters also produce very good, and often great, coffees, it’s the companies who make this extra effort that make me interested in coffee at all. Without them, coffee would be another faceless, colorless product.
So what is the story behind this coffee? The beans were farmed in the Amaro Mountains in the Sidamo region of Ethiopia and processed at the Amaro Gayo mill. This mill is owned by Asnakech Thomas, the only female owner of a coffee mill in all of Ethiopia. Not only that, but she’s also the only female exporter in Ethiopia, and owns 250 hectares of coffee farmland as well. The result is that she has near complete control over the coffee that she produces, from farming to exporting.
This coffee was grown organically, and is wet-processed and sun-dried, as is typical for Ethiopia.
The nose has compelling notes of vanilla, coconut, blueberries, and huckleberries. One of the most wonderfully fragrant coffees I’ve had! The palate has a warm, mellow, slightly voluptuous body with a rind of acidity. Flavors of cocoa,raspberries, and blueberries are underscored by a hint of caramel. The finish is somewhat minty, with blueberries once again prominent.
What a remarkably enjoyable cup of coffee, the kind that just brings a smile to your face first thing in the morning. The berry flavors are very reminiscent of other Ethiopian coffees I’ve had, in particular a couple from Barrington Coffee Roasters. Naturally, my mind ends up roaming back to the questions I’ve been mulling over for so long regarding the role of terroir in coffee. A subject that I’ll have to come back to another time…
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Deschutes Brewing Co. Black Butte XXI
As much as I am a bit of a partisan for Hair Of The Dog, in many ways Deschutes Brewing Company symbolizes northwest beer for me. I’ve been lucky enough to travel out to Portland on two occasions and taste a handful of their beers, and have always been impressed by how solid their lineup was, and how top-shelf some of their offerings could be. But more than that, there is something intangible that I can’t put my finger on, and that makes me think of Portland and Oregon whenever I think of Deschutes.
This beer in particular was one that was high on my list of beers to look for during our recent trip out west. Deschutes released Black Butter XXI this past June, and as with all of their Reserve Series beers (a series that also includes The Abyss, The Dissident, and Mirror Mirror) it garnered a lot of attention after its release. And with good reason. Deschutes had taken their solid Black Butte Porter and kicked it up many, many notches.
The Black Butte Porter has been a feature in Deschutes regular lineup since their founding in 1988. They first released a pumped up version of it as part of their Reserve Series in 2008, naming it Black Butte XX in recognition of the brewery’s 20th anniversary. This year’s version nearly doubles the ABV of the Black Butte Porter, rolling in at 11%. The beer’s 55 IBUs aren’t shy, despite the additions of Dominican Republic cocoa nibs from Theo’s Chocolate, dry-hopping with 100 pounds of Ethiopian coffee locally roasted by Bellatazza’s Coffee, and aging 20% of it in Stranahan’s whiskey barrels.
In this case, the question is really: how do all of these ingredients play out in the finished beer? Will it be a train wreck of competing flavors, or a complex, layered beauty?
Black Butte XXI pours medium weight, dark black in color with chocolaty amber highlights and a thin tan head. Enticing notes of caramel, chocolate, coffee, roasted grains, and vanilla rise from the glass. With time and as the beer warms the caramel and chocolate become a bit more prominent, the roasted grains and coffee a bit more subdued. The palate has flavors of cocoa, raisin, vanilla, a touch of whiskey, espresso, and a pervading hop bitterness. The flavors come in waves, with the sweeter flavors, vanilla, cocoa, and whiskey, hitting the palate first, then giving way to the coffee, followed by the hops. The beer has a nice, velvety mouthfeel. The finish is very warming, opening up with hop bitterness that gives way to roasted coffee, anise, and caramel.
Did this beer live up to my expectations? Definitely. While I found the hop presence to be a bit clashing with the other flavors, this aspect lessened as the beer warmed. In fact, it really evolved in the glass, with the barrel aspect becoming slowly more prominent, but never dominating the flavors. The porter flavors of roasted coffee and grains, never entirely went away. I liked the more subtle blending of the flavors from the barrel-aging.
That being said, I shudder to think of how incredible a 100% barrel-aged version would taste. Wow.
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