March 28th - Hopworks Urban Brewery

March 28 – Hopworks Urban Brewery

Hopworks opened last Tuesday and apparently was mobbed on the first day. Since they had our El Diablo on, we wanted to get over and taste it. We had planned on getting there at about 5:00pm and were hoping to beat the rush, but I got delayed at work and didn’t get there until about 5:30pm. My brewing partner was already there at the bar when my wife and I got there.

They’re serving the El Diablo in goblets, which is good since it clocks in around 8.5% alcohol. The nose is spicy with good candy and honey notes. Although it tastes fairly full on the palate, assistant brewer Ben Love, let us know that it had a terminal gravity of 1.3 plato (about 1.0005) which makes it drier than most pale ales. It’s one of the best domestically produced Belgian Golden’s I’ve had. Yes, I’m biased, but I was really surprised at how authentic it tasted. It’s considerably drier than most of domestic Belgian style ales. I was also delighted to get a couple of bottle to bring home.

In addition to the El Diablo, I tasted through a fair amount of the other beers. The HUB lager is still one of my favorites. I’m very fond of the pilsner at Max’s Fanno Creek, but the HUB lager is no slouch. It’s a little lighter in body than Max’s, but is very clean with a great hop bite and is full of Saaz flavor and aroma. After the El Diablo, it may be my favorite of Hopwork’s beers. The Crosstown Pale is a hoppy but incredibly drinkable pale. It’s got an assertive hop character but doesn’t spill over into IPA territory. It’s a terrific food beer, because it has a lot of character but isn’t big and overwhelming. The Velvet ESB is more English style with a great malt character and a more subdued hop character. The Survival Stout, with its grain bill of barley, wheat, Oats, Amaranth, Quinoa, Spelt, and Kamut, is a great beer as well. It has an intense coffee and roast/black malt nose, but has a smooth, rich, round character to it. IPA is still a hallmark NW style and Hopworks is a great example of the style. It’s got a great malt backbone to stand up to the hops, but the emphasis is still hops. I had tried the beer previously at last year’s Oregon Brewer’s Festival, when the beer was being brewed at Golden Valley in McMinnville. The current version brewed on-site at Hopworks seems more balanced and more intense though.

When we had brewed with them, the test pizzas that their chef was working on had been impressive and the large pepperoni we ordered was actually very good. I’m form NY originally and in NY we’re pizza snobs. Luckily their chef learned to make pizza on the East coast and the pizza is really good. I ended up eating entirely too much, which was probably OK since I ended drinking too much as well (my wife wasn’t drinking and she as driving). I’m looking forward to going back, but am going to wait at least a few weeks until the crowds die down a little. If you haven’t been, you should. It’s well worth it.

March 25th - Beer Update

March 25, 2008 - Beer Update

OK, I haven’t added anything here in quite some time and for no good reason other than laziness. Just to get going again I thought I’d start with some beer related updates.

On February 14th, we were able to brew our Belgian Golden Ale at Hopworks Urban Brewery with owner/brewer Christian Ettinger and assistant brewer Ben Love. The grain bill recipe was pretty straight forward: 86% pilsner malt and 14% organic sugar (by weight, but that means about 25% or more of the fermentables are coming directly from the sugar). We mashed in somewhere around 146-148 degrees or so because we wanted a very dry style of beer. They used Magnum hops for the bittering (about 10 IBU’s there) and then two later additions of French Strisselspalts for flavor and aroma (total of about 10 IBU’s between the later additions). The yeast was the Chouffe yeast which is one of my favorite strains. The original gravity was around 18 plato and I haven’t heard what the terminal gravity was, nor have I been able to taste the beer yet. But Hopworks opens today, so I’ll taste it soon. What we were designing was a very dry, almost Duvel-like beer but with more of the Chouffe spiciness to it. They started the fermentation in the mid-60’s and were going to let it rise naturally to whatever temperature it wanted. They also under oxygenated it to push for more esters. My brewing partner and I had a great time and want to thank Christian and ben for putting up with a couple of homebrewers in their way all day. They also fed us a bunch of their pizzas which their chef, Andy, was still in the process of perfecting. Andy is a talented chef and definitely knows how to make great pizzas (maybe because he’s originally from the East Coast).

Assistant brewer Ben Love came up with the name El Diablo, which I think is a great name for it. It will be available at Hopworks on draft and was used as one of their entries into the World Beer Cup which will be held in San Diego in mid-April. El Diablo will also be Hopworks entry into the local Portland Cheers for Belgian Beers festival to be held at Roots Organic Brewery on Saturday April 5th. The Portland Cheers for Belgian Beers festival is an interesting idea. About a dozen different breweries all brew a Belgian style beer but use the same yeast strain and then go and taste each other’s beers. It gives everyone an opportunity to learn more about that yeast strain and how it behave with different malts, fermentation temperatures, etc. It’s all done in fun and proceeds go to charity.

On the homebrewing front, I have a couple of new beers on draft. The English bitter and all the Belgians are gone, and the molasses porter is down to the last gallon or so. We brewed a Bier de Garde several weeks ago. Bier de Garde is an obscure and fairly misunderstood style of beer. It’s French in origin and comes from the farmhouse brewing tradition of Northeastern France (French Flanders). It’s a style that had almost completely died out but is having a bit of a Renaissance thanks to the growing popularity of craft beer. Bier de Garde’s are generally amber beers with a full malt flavor, but with a dry finish. They often have some subtle herbal notes as well, but the big malt nose and flavor are in the forefront. They are often brewed with lager yeasts but at fairly warm temperatures (58-60 degrees), so they have some esters, but still have that clean lager crispness. Ours is brewed with pilsner, Vienna and Munich malts, with a small portion of aromatic malt. It ended up slightly sweeter than I had hoped but is still a very good beer. It’s slightly alcoholic (about 8%) and is drying out a little bit as it sits and lagers. In competition it may do better as a Bier de Noel, which is stronger and often sweeter seasonal version of Bier de Garde.

Using the same lager yeast, we brewed an updated Portland style steam beer. The grain bill is similar to the legendary Anchor Steam Beer, but we used a combination of Centennial, Summit, and Sterling Hops. It has a little more bitterness than the Anchor version, plus a lot more hop aromatics. It was just kegged a few days ago, so it will need a few more days to come around, but is already, a nice, moderate strength beer with a great hop nose. Since we were completely out of Belgian beers, we had to brew another Belgian Golden Ale (since it is one of my favorite styles and a great food beer). This version is being brewed with the same combo of the Chouffe and Duvel yeasts that we used last time. Next up with in the brewing queue is a Saison using the same yeast. We won a Widmer Collaborator competition with our Saison several years ago and realized we hadn’t brewed that recipe in about two years or more, so it’s time. Plus Saison is another favorite style and a versatile food beer. That’s a quick update on the beer front. I’ll try to get something about food up here soon as well.