Sting and Cure IPA's rolling out this week

The idea of taking an invasive farm weed and using it to flavor a beer is one that has interested us for a while. Anyone who has tried our spring seasonal Dandelion IPA can attest to the unique aspects that unconventional bittering agents can bring to an IPA.

Very much in the same vein of our dandelion beer, we wanted to brew a beer bittered with fresh nettles. If you're familiar with nettles, it's probably because you've been stung by them. That's their most commonly known characteristic, but a lesser known tidbit is that they are related closely to hops and were formerly used as an ingredient in English beers (Thanks, by the way, to The Homebrewer's Garden as the inspiration for many of our unique ingredient choices and their interesting origin stories).

We struggled with the nettle concept for a while, and now we've came up with an angle that excites us: Our idea is to brew two beers, two big IPA's - one with nettles, one with mint - that we can mix together at the tap to complement each other and create something new, something that is more than the sum of its parts.

Evan told me a piece of backwoods and botanical trivia that really made this concept work: the pain of a nettle sting can be alleviated by rubbing mint on it. The two often grow close together in nature. Nature provides both the sting and the cure.

Mint as an ingredient is delicate and difficult to pull off. It evokes images of rich, dark beers: mint chocolate chip stout-type images. One does not necessarily arrive at 'IPA' quickly. American IPA's are beers known for two things however: assertive bitterness, and big aromatics.

Sting is a Burton-on-Trent English-style IPA, bitingly bitter with a minerally character. Cure is a softer, partially wheat-based American IPA with a minty aroma. The idea is that when we mix them, we end up with something better, or at least different, than either of the two base beers. You can find everything you need for the sting and the cure growing on the edges of our North Plain Road hop farm, and in many other places throughout the Berkshires. Cheers! 

- Ezra

Glass Bottom Kickstarter Grand Cru (A pilot batch)

I decided this beer is actually a grand cru, rather than a barleywine. Why? What's the difference? It's a complicated question in this case because they're both jumping of points. A barleywine is basically a more balanced, higher alcohol version of an American or English IPA. A grand cru is kind of a catch-all for Belgian high alcohol specialty ale. I'm using a Belgian yeast for the estery/phenolic complexity it will layer on top of everything else; it's a kitchen sink beer, essentially. The yeast makes it a Belgian.

All the elements that make a good barleywine are present in this beer however. The malt character is upped quite a bit from a standard beer – I've used 25% Belgian special B, a dark crystal malt that should leave the beer just shy of cloyingly sweet. The hops are upped as well – nugget for bittering, and ahtanum for flavor and aroma. Ahtanum in my experience is more fruity and floral than the typical American IPA hop, which is all piney/resiney character, and somewhat boring to me simply by virtue of familiarity. The hops were not increased in direct proportion to the malt, so while there will be some hop bitterness to balance the increased maltiness, it's ultimately going to be a malt-forward beer.

There are some special adjuncts added to this batch as well (remember the kitchen sink):

• Rhubarb. This is a sort of offshoot of a test batch we did in fall 2013. The idea was to make a sweet beer and complement it with the addition of sour rhubarb, the same way that a strawberry rhubarb pie is better than just a strawberry pie or rhubarb pie. Here it's the same idea – sweet beer, sour rhubarb - the basic principle behind most alcoholic beverages, especially beer and wine, being balance.

• Lemon zest. This is something that should simply add a layer of citrus-like complexity to an already complex, fruity beer.

• Rose hips. Evan and I both agree that rose hips smell like a good cigar – that kind of sweet, fruity, leathery aroma that may be how tobacco actually smells, or may be something that tobacconists add to cigars for flavoring. Unfortunately, I don't know how much rose hip flavor was absorbed into the beer. I made them a flameout addition, and in hindsight I don't think that was the correct usage. A 10-minute steep in the boil would probably have been the right call.

That's the concept anyway. Execution is another (horror) story.

Questions or comments?

A history of the farm: Kickstarter supplemental reading.

To the disappointment of the general public’s imagination and the press staff hoping to tell our story, when an idea is born it’s not always an ‘ah-hah moment.’ The farm as a defining point of Glass Bottom Brewery is such an example. 

Since its ideological inception, Glass Bottom Brewery has been about the collaboration of two friends trying to find a meaningful life of work that seems worth doing. For me, Evan, that work is outdoors, in the elements, hands and tools shaping the natural world into something productive for people and sustainable for the world’s future. When Ezra made it clear he would be happy to make delicious, interesting beer as his life’s work, my challenge was to figure out what agricultural and mechanical system could fit into that model. While hops production is an easy choice on paper, it is a challenge in the field. 

Upstart farming with no land, almost no machinery, and a hazy understanding of the desired crop (as a result of its relative local scarcity) is the kind of proposition no one could recommend for a fledgling business. That’s the hop yard at Glass Bottom. What follows is a history of repairing the lacks described in the first sentence of this paragraph in order to fulfill a commitment to a farm-brewery business in Massachusetts that actually lives up to the ‘farm’ part of that title.

Farms where hops grow lack the pleasantly bucolic image conjured by the average landowner who thinks of waving grain or neat green vegetable rows or peaceful cows out to pasture: so the first challenge was a sales pitch. I’m a notoriously poor salesman (just ask some local restaurant and bar owners), therefore I strove to be as honest as possible with the landowners I spoke to while looking for a place to build a 1-3 acre trellis to support the 18 foot tall mature hops. The best description I had for the trellis structure (built in the beefiest way possible for wind, rain, and mature plant loads of about 90,000 pounds per acre) was a telephone pole yard. Hardly bucolic. I spoke with and presented my plan (called an enterprise budget in farm business management lingo) to three landowners before finding Dale Culleton on North Plain Rd in Great Barrington. He thought that despite my description, the yard would look interesting and be a unique part of the local scenery. Location challenge completed. 

Building the trellis to support growing hops plants is an exercise in appropriate engineering for weight loads. Dale’s property had black locust trees, known as the last good source of rot-resistant wood in New England (RIP, American Chestnut). Since the trellis is at its core a series of posts that support a grid of cable, and the hops plants are perennials boasting 7+ years of mature cone production, longevity of the posts that are sunk into the ground (4 feet to get below the level of frost heaving) is crucial. Having locust on site to use as posts (which were on average 24 feet, 20 above and 4 below ground) was a essential to preserving the bottom line of the construction of the overall trellis. Even still, each post costs, and I used 60 in one acre, four of them corner posts weighing twice as much as the center posts. To tie them together the appropriate weather-resistant material is called ‘aircraft cable’: stranded galvanized wire almost a half an inch thick. And most importantly, all the posts and cable need to be counterweighted outside of the actual growing space of the trellis. These counterweights, called anchors, need to be buried deep in the ground with the slanted end posts of each row connected to them via cable. Since the posts were more than $2000, the cable about $1500, and the labor and machinery to dig holes for said posts, install them, and put us in the air high enough to secure the cable was looking like another $7000, our $10,000 budget for the farm (~ 10k per acre being a textbook rate for hops trellis set-up) was already bulging. Getting back to the anchors, the standard in-ground anchor system relies on poured concrete ‘dead-men’ blocks. As it was one of the last logistical considerations, and so much had been devoted to budgeting the more obvious parts of the farm like posts and cable and machinery, I was desperate for something low-cost. Since the anchors are also essential to counterbalancing the weight of the plants that hang from the trellis, cutting corners wasn’t an option. In the end, the black locust provided a solution. Simulating dead-men blocks using locust chunks with rebar set through them and welded together allowed for a labor-intensive (drilling holes in each piece of hard locust, hammering through the rebar, and welding it) but virtually free anchor that could be buried six feet deep and ensured to last the lifetime of the trellis.

Having gotten through the challenge of finding land and building a trellis during the 2012 season, I was left with no time to plant hops. We were in mid-summer and the appropriate time to get the young rhizomes (root pieces) established was three months prior. The next challenge was getting the soil ready with hand tools, an ATV with a wagon, a neighbor’s borrowed tractor, and a good friend’s rototiller. Since farming is about creative solutions given generally unfavorable conditions, the ATV, wagon, and a few friends served as a dump truck for soil amendments. While rototilling should never be a first choice for primary tillage, using what you have is better than doing nothing at all. The weeds, sod, and soil structure were pounded to bits, but no weeds and no soil structure is better than massive weed competition for a fledgling plant. Other challenges included how to maneuver within a field that was filled with regularly spaced posts and what to do to keep the rototilled, pulverized soil from blowing away now that no roots were holding it to the field. With a lawn-tractor spinner-spreader towed behind the ATV I laid down winter rye seed from a local farm where I once worked and hoped that the rye would find a way to dig in without anything but the mild churning of a shallowly set rototiller. 

The next spring rye was growing and I had to find enough hops to plant commercially without the capital to purchase commercial bulk rhizomes. Some long-term planning on our part had led to a decently sized backyard garden full of hop cultivars interesting to us: German Perle, and American Willamette and Cascade. Another backyard grower, Bob Galisa of Cheshire, MA, contributed cuttings of his own plants to supplement ours. With a free stock of rhizomes and a spring that looked green and orderly at the hop farm, we undertook extra compost hauling with our makeshift dump-truck system and hand planted 500 rhizomes in half the field. The next two months were without any substantial rain, and I hadn’t installed irrigation for the plants yet, assuming cooperation from the New England Spring that always results in field inundation. Dale’s soil had amazing drainage and human-added nutrients, it just needed water. Over the next two months, as the rhizomes dried out and I futilely walked around with a garden hose, I realized that I would have to replant over half of the field. That is what happened: drip hose irrigation eventually went into the planted rows, fed by a water tank and a homemade pump setup (involving a domestic well pump, a generator, and a down-home series of shrink-tight electrical connections) from Dale’s spring pond 40 feet below the level of the field. From the planting season I learned that preparing for the worst and spending extra time at the beginning often prevents the kinds of heartache involved in pulling out hundreds of dried shriveled rhizomes that never got enough water in Dale’s wonderfully well-drained soil. While it’s an easy lesson on paper, the inclination is always to just make a start at a project with what you have and sort out the lacks later on down the road. Since farming is often cash and time limited, there may have been no choice but to plant the rhizomes without having money or time to set up irrigation prior to planting, unless I had blocked that time and money out during the previous season when the trellis structure was under construction. 

The hops grew! The timing may have been months later than a commercial yard in a place like Oregon or Washington, but they grew and as they grew, out of the soil sprang everything else that could grow. At this point in a field’s development, the standard farmer would start looking for commercial sprays and tillage equipment. I went for a walk-behind BCS tractor and no herbicide, thinking that weed pressure could be controlled mechanically. BCS tractors are Italian made and notorious for longevity in their motors, gearboxes, and simple bicycle-style mechanical controls. I bought one used, figuring as many do who know machinery more peripherally than intimately that a good track record means nothing to fear with any individual unit. Our facebook page tells a brief picture story of my hubris and the subsequent disassembly of the BCS tractor into each individual part, both transmission and motor needing a serious inspection and about $1000 in replacement parts.  The upshot was I learned that equipment is only as good as the operator that cares for it. While the repairs were ongoing the hops grew but the weeds grew faster, given a hot rainy summer as cruel follow-up to the dry spring for any plant hoping to compete with a seed bank of weeds in the churned soil. This year, the BCS with its Italian cultivator, plow, harrow, and mower attachments will need to actively bring down weeds in order for the yard to go from a state of surviving to a state of thriving. This challenge is not yet surmounted, and may be my kryptonite as I continue to use small machinery without backup equipment close on hand. Kickstarter money, sheep for weed control (they don’t eat the hops once the plant gets to a certain height) and extra attention are my current ideas for solutions.

While many other challenges face the Glass Bottom Hop Farm, including integrating the public with signage and tours, preparing for a commercial harvest with drying and vacuum sealing equipment, and managing the yard as it diversifies in cultivars and the plants establish their vast root systems, the casual reader will have long abandoned this history of challenges, and even you, devoted readers, hopefully feel satisfied that the farm has been many trials from inception to execution. Remembering that this project is my labor of love is what brings me back to it each week to manage my compost, inspect my plants, scheme for the future, and marvel at everything involved in such a complex and diverse undertaking. When I’m at the hop farm, despite these myriad challenges and uncertainties, I feel content.

-Evan

Trail Magic: A walk through

Trail Magic is a beer that we've been brewing for a while now, both as home brewers and professionally. It was on tap at the Firefly in Lenox, and it's currently on tap at the Gypsy Joint in Great Barrington. Like all the beers that we brew, we strive to make it equal parts conceptual and delicious.

The concept comes from the AT tradition of planting a cooler of beer on a tucked-away spot along trail for weary through-hikers to find in an hour of need. This magically appearing cooler should lift their spirits and propel them on their journey from Georgia to Maine. Such encounters are known as “trail magic.” Well, we aspire to make Trail Magic happen. If you are hiking the AT next year expect to run into a cooler of this beer somewhere in the Berkshire stretch.

The beer is designed to mirror trail mix, the common trail snack. A mixture of nuts, dried fruits, and melt-in-your-mouth-not-in-your-hands M&M's is a pretty standard combination. We're trying to combine all of these flavors in a hoppy, refreshing American pale ale that you could drink in three thirsty gulps on the trail, or sit down for refined sips in order to enjoy all the intricate flavors.

To achieve this complex flavor profile we use a compliment of malts that mimic the desired flavors. We also use actual fruits, nuts, and chocolate. The nuttiness comes from British amber malt, as well as a sunflower seed extract that we made from real sunflower seeds. The fruitiness is derived from dark caramel malts that provide a dark fruit character, and ‘craisins’ added late in the boil (craisins are back-sweetened with refined sugar to make them taste more like naturally sweet raisins, and refined sugar is not something we want to introduce into secondary fermentation). We also add cocoa powder, which adds a unique bitterness, and oddly, more nuttiness.

Our website updates with current draft lines (http://glassbottombrewery.org/find), so if you keep checking in you’ll know when and where to find Trail Magic. Or stop by the brewery for a sample and a growler fill come 2014. Cheers.

Move over pumpkin beer

Glass bottom brewery is proud to offer a new style to the beer world: parsnip beer. This idea is something that Evan and I have been talking about for over a year now, and it constitutes glass bottom's first true farmer-brewer collaboration. The parsnips were grown in raised beds on Evan's property, and the beer was conceptualized by the minds that brought you TeaSB and Forest Farmer Brown.

The base beer style is a Belgian tripel, a light colored, high alcohol beer in which Belgian yeast provides much of the flavor. They usually offer a complement of spicy and fruity notes. The grain bill for our recipe calls for 100% pilsner malt, and the hops are kept mild.

The other half of the equation is a play on parsnip wine, one of the more flavorful country wines that certain adventurous people will brew in small batches in their kitchens. Evan has been brewing his own parsnip wine for years now. Parsnips are a root vegetable like a carrot. Their taste is a very unique spicy/earthy melange. We utilize the parsnips in the boil as a 30 minute steep. It was a bit like making soup.

Because country wines are often concoctions of just sugar and various flavor compounds and not at all the nutrient rich liquid that unfermented beer is, instructions often list an acidic citrus component - usually orange or lemon juice - to help fermentation along. Purely for the sake of tradition we added fresh ginger, grown in a greenhouse in New York State. The spicy and citrusy characteristics of fresh ginger will hopefully fit well into the tripel/parsnip theme.

Nuts! And Christmas Beer.

Every year around this time breweries come out with their Christmas offerings, beers loaded with ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and other spices designed to evoke a certain “festive” spirit of the holiday season. I think most people like these beers come December, but wouldn’t want to drink them throughout the winter, let alone the rest of the year. My goal here was to reimagine Christmas beers as something seasonal and warming, without overloading the beer with spices. 

One image that sticks in my head when I think of Christmas is “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” (feel free to sing along). Incorporating nuts into beer is a delicate proposition I’ve been working on. While nuts do have significant amounts of carbohydrates (good for beer), they tend to be high in proteins and fats (bad for beer). Chestnuts are that rare breed of nut that is relatively high in carbohydrates and low in proteins and fats, making it ideal for brewing. It’s rare in another respect, in that many trees in the US were wiped out by a chestnut blight in the early 20^th century, resulting in a relative scarcity. 

The chestnut itself, contrary to my prior assumptions was more sweet than starchy, and thus roasting resulted in more “cooked sugar” flavors, i.e. caramel/molasses than “baked bread” i.e. malty/toasty ones. While not planned, I hope this will add an interesting complexity to the beer. The actual nut character when preparing the chestnuts was quite impressive as well, evoking a strong peanut-y aroma, the kind that tells the primitive hunter-gather mind that this is a valuable food resource capable of sustaining the body, and is therefore irresistible to us.

The chestnuts were roasted, pealed, soaked, and then added to the mash.

Rounding out this recipe is spruce (nothing says Christmas quite like the smell of fresh spruce) and mint (my “festive” compromise). This is a big beer (coming in at around 7%) with abundant sweet, malty, and nutty flavors; just the thing to stay in and hibernate with all winter long. Brew date 12/5/2012.

Blue Corn Blonde

I came up with the idea for this beer about a year ago. It was meant to be something that would combine the two aspects of our philosophy - the local agricultural side and the spirited use of unconventional ingredients side. I asked Evan to plant some for me and he was on board. Unfortunately the crop did not turn out, and we didn’t end up with much of use. I got a little impatient and decided to brew a first draft with blue corn meal I purchased online for a first run test, brewed 11/18/2012.

The basic premise of this beer is to throw off the conventionality of light colored beers and brew something with bold and abundant flavors. Of course, there are IPAs, an abundantly flavored pale ale, but by in large this cross section of beers seems a little thin. Corn as an ingredient is sometimes used in these beers to lighten them further. The base sugar in corn, dextrose, is 100% fermentable, so the flavor you taste when eating an ear of sweet corn does not translate into a sweeter beer, but a more alcoholic one. Thus, it creates a very dry and neutral tasting beer. The challenge for this beer then is to use the corn in ways that brings out its flavor while still remaining somewhat true to the base style.

In the same way that the inner part of bread tastes different than the crust, raw corn meal tastes different than a toasted corn tortilla. A complicated chemical process called the maillard reaction is responsible for this difference, as well as many of the varied flavors we enjoy in conventional beer. When you cook a starch or sugar, you are producing new flavors. The ultimate goal will be to incorporate those toasted corn flavors, which of course are distinct from toasted barley, wheat, oats, etc.  

This beer is obviously a work in progress. One of my hopes is to smoke whole ears of corn, both to toast them, and to impart an added dimension of smokiness into the final product. If a lightly colored smoked blue corn tortilla beer doesn’t change some minds about light beer, I don’t know what will. I’m also toying with the idea of incorporating roasted bell peppers somehow, but my gut tells me vegetable beers are a whole other can of worms.