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