Little Green Men

I was just going through my blog roll while brewing today and read Bill's report on the fresh hop season. This caused me to think that I never did finish that post about our own fresh hop beer. Now I feel I have to rewrite the thing, as it is no longer relevant in the face of the fact that, to be blunt, we drank it all. Here's one of the last pints coming over the bar and soon to be in my possession.

Bill also posted about terminology back in September. "Wet Hops", "Fresh Hops", "Green Hops", "Moist Hops". I don't know that there is universal agreement. I called mine "Green Hopped" as the hops were very shiny and green. Yes, I know, whole cones and pellets are also green, but not green-green, if you know what I mean. Not one to remain caught up endlessly in terminology, I thought I'd just run with it. We've been growing hops up our porch at home for several years now and I never managed to pick them. This year I got up early on a brew day and picked a quarter-kilo of the little green guys.

I have to admit that I don't know what strain they are. My wife thinks they are either Willamette or Cascade, and I'm guessing Cascade based on the shape of the cone and the aroma. I took one of my recipes that works really well on cask for a 5.5% ABV very pale IPA. I used Cascade and Centennial for bittering and Cascade and Simcoe for the finish. The poor little fresh guys got chucked in right at flameout. I didn't really have a name for it until a couple of days later when, while I wasn't even thinking about it, "Little Green Men" popped into some unfashionable outlying region of my cortex.

It came out beautiful. After two weeks sitting in the cask I tapped the first firkin and put it on the bar. It was gone in a day, although it is possible to do that in September when trade is still fairly brisk (as opposed to the dismal season we are heading into now). The effect of the fresh hops is subtle, but I believe it expresses itself better at cellar temperature and without the surfeit of bubbles you might encounter in a kegged or bottled version. I can't help but wonder, though, if a similar effect could be achieved with lawn clippings or dandelion greens, or whether this whole fresh hop thing is simply a marketing gimmick or cry for attention.

Now it's the season to get cracking on the alternatively-bittered November beers, such as my chanterelle, peat moss and wet-big-leaf-maple brown ale, brewed with Belgian Ardennes, cucumber seads and a dash of mace.

No Time Like the Present

I've been waiting for the perfect moment to open my bottle of Colonial Mayhem, brewed in Cumbria last November and hand-delivered to me by some other visiting brewers back in May. That time never came, and so there it sat, until yesterday when I decided that for the sheer joy of still being alive I would celebrate by opening the blasted thing and having a snort. Since my plane ticket to England in November was booked last week, and my Britrail pass arrived on Friday, I suppose I could celebrate that as well.

I know of a number of beery sites that like to give complicated beer reviews. I'm not into that. All I'm going to say is that it poured a bit fizzy, tasted delicious (probably due to pure Millom spring water) and made my barkeep smile (yes, I shared). I understand that a pin of the stuff from a second batch might be stashed away at the brewery for my visit.

The Pub With No Beer

Thanks to heaving crowds the last two weekends, we are almost out of beer. Our proud collection of six hand pulls are still there, but only two of them are burdened by the responsibility of dispensing ale. So, until tomorrow (Wednesday) there is a Best Bitter and a Stout, both sessionable and chock full of yum. On Wednesday there will be a new one-off, six-hopped IPA, and then on Friday the new tweaked recipe of Bridleway, a 3.5% Session Bitter, will be eager to be unleashed on the thirsty masses. See you at the pub.

Fourth Superannuation

In May of 2006, on the West Cumbrian Line from Ravenglass to Carlisle, a silly germ of an idea of opening an English Real Ale Pub and Brewery in a depressed logging town in the Oregon Cascades was born. On August 13, 2008, the Brewers Union Local 180 opened its door. It's now four years later and we're still here. Amazing.

I'm sitting here in the brewery knocking out a batch of stout and trying to let that fact sink in. Who woulda thunk that the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of 1929 would strike a few months after opening. There were many plot points in the last four years where I considered closing or moving. It was bleak. There was scarce trade at first. There was that late and lame winter and that wet spring that kept the mountain bikes off the trails until June. There's still that IRS lien that I've almost worked off. Long hours. No pay. The occasional negative review.

A line from an old Bruce Cockburn song just popped into my head, from "Fascist Architecture":

Bloody nose and burning eyes
Raised in laughter to the skies

Hah! They say it takes three to five years for a new business to become successful. I don't know what measure of success is referred to there, but in the worst of times and a tough town with an unknown product all I can say is we're still kicking. Even better, it looks like we're finally crossing a threshold. Production and consumption is up enough that we had, and were able to, buy more casks and complete a new cask cellar. New problems are arising, such as how to find time to brew and where to find staff as traffic increases in the pub. I've been thinking it might be time to hire a part time house manager. That sort of thing. And better yet, there are rumblings and murmurs along the lines of building another pub or two, maybe even in your small town. I think we are about 40,000 short in this state alone.

So, for today we are offering a special ale called "4th Superannuation Ale", and it will be a $3 Imperial Pint all day long. It's called an Oakridge Red Ale, since we invented the concept of adding a lot of hops to a strong red ale (Millennium, Chinook, Glacier and Armadillo). I think it might even be called a Red IPA or a Cascadian Red Ale now in the BJCP guidelines. Go figure.

Cheers!

Massive Brewery Expansion

Catchy, isn't it? Mayhap you were thinking big chunks of stainless or a new automated casking system or something. Nope - we're talking here about new casks and a new proper cellar.

Truth is, for me it's massive because I've been trying for three years to purchase more casks and have a better place to store them. Yes, that's all I'm talking about: more casks and a better place to store them. So, a shipment of shiny plastic firkins arrived last week, 16 in all, which is enough for two batches. My current inventory of 46 wasn't enough, as it created a limitation for when I could brew. There's no point in brewing a batch of beer and then finding nothing to put it in. I can also now have a larger inventory of ale in the cellar, allow them to mature longer, and do a bit more oak aging. It's also an indicator that trade is up this summer and all you lovely punters are latching on to real ale.

The other problem of storage space is being addressed at the moment as well. Currently our casks share the walk-in cooler (behind the giant wooden door) with the kitchen supplies, kegged beer, soft drinks, wine and my hop shelf. It's been cramped in there. The space next to it if full of junk interspersed with useful things that could likely find a new home in some other part of the building. That space is now being converted into a room tied to the walk-in via a temperature controlled fan system to keep the temperature at a cool 50° instead of the 40° required for the food storage.

The whole deal should be finished in a few days and ready for receiving it's cargo. Meanwhile I've got some brewing to do.

Oh, The Humanities!

I'm going to take a quick break from my ramblings on pubs to announce the availability of the strongest ale ever brewed at the Brewers Union. Not that I am set on this modern West Coast notion that stronger and hoppier beers are cool, as they are (hush, hush, top secret) easy to make and even easier to hide defects in. It's just that one of our local regulars requested a big malty ale and I decided to oblige. And, it has that feel of a momentous occassion like the record-setting going on at the Olympic Track & Field Trials down in Eugene. 7.1% ABV. Plenty of malt. A generous dose of Simcoe at flameout. We're working here with something like a Scottish Ale but without any smoke or peat, and it goes down way too easy.

I had originally decided to bluntly label it "David's Big Malty Ale", being that David is the name of the aforementioned local regular, but as he teaches Humanities down at the University of Oregon it ended up being called, "Oh, the Humanities!". We felt jolly clever about it, and I chuckled all the way to the Adobe Illustrator file that contains the pump clip artwork.

Tapping took place on Thursday. In our case we really do tap them, bona fide, with a rubber mallet and a cask tap. I am frequently amused by the flood of notices on the various beer sites about beer tappings, when all they do is twist down a Sankey tap and open the valve on a tank of CO2. Out comes dead beer. This, on the contrary, is living stuff, where we get to fiddle with it each morning and make knowing comments about how it is changing from day to day and from cask to cask. It is. It really is. Come down today and try a pint, and then return enthusiastically in a couple of weeks and see what I'm talking about.

Tomorrow I'll be brewing small beer again, just like old times. I'm shooting for 3.8% or thereabouts. Then I'll be back to rambling about pubs. There is a juicy comment in the last post that I want to tackle.

RE: Pubs, Part the Second

The first comment from my previous post came from a noted Portland beer blogger who had visited England for the first time back in November, and got to experience his first pubs. Or, was that first visit to the Raleigh Hills McMenamins the first? That's the question; do we have pubs here in America? What is a pub? Is it OK to use it as a familiar synonym for a bar or tavern or a restaurant that brews beer (brewpub)?

I grew up near, in and around Ithaca, NY. When I graduated from college (1985) I moved back, bought a house, and got a job working as a software engineer for Cornell University. On the edge of campus is "Collegetown", a few blocks of streets on a steep hill leading down to the city. It contains all the necessities of off-campus life: markets, apartments, a great bagel shop, coffee shops, restaurants and bars. I quickly took a liking to a pizza joint called The Nines. The best deep-dish pizza I've ever had, cooked in a square pan in an upstairs kitchen and dropped to the bar below in a dumbwaiter. There was a great beer selection for the time, live music periodically, and rough tables scattered around for slouching in for a pint and a good book. I felt comfortable there.

Shortly afterward a couple of lawyers from New York City renovated the old Chapter House and installed a small brewery. It was fantastic, just as I pictured a British pub to be. I could order a slice of pizza from a tiny back kitchen and a pint from the bar and meet my friends, or just sit in a corner over a book with a bowl of the free popcorn from the constantly humming machine. My old jazz band, the Spam Fisted Butchers of Jazz, managed to convince the owners to let us play there a few times. Sadly, the brewery is no longer there, but the last time I was back it still had a pub-like character and I enjoyed my brief stay.

I thought of those places as pubs, but what was it about that first pub outside Victoria Station in London in 1991 that changed my perspective? I'm still trying to figure that out. Having been back and forth to the U.K. numerous times, I still feel like I'm chasing the greased pig as I attempt to define, let alone articulate, the differences. Fragments of "Pubs, Part the Third" are starting to form in my Slowly Decaying Cortex (tm).