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.

It's banana beer!

The concept: Whenever I think of the ideal dessert beverage, I think of stout; that's the jumping off point for this beer. It's easy to pair a rich, creamy stout with a chocolate cake or mousse to create a brilliant complementary dining experience. I recognize the value of pairing beer with food to enhance the quality of both, but the "easy" way doesn't exactly excite me as much as painstakingly crafting creative beers.

With that in mind, I brainstormed a concept that I find fresh and exciting: banana cream stout! The idea is to create a full-bodied, richly textured beer, vaguely evocative of a milkshake, and then load it up with an explosion of banana flavor, making an ideal pairing for either chocolate-y or fruity desserts, or just as a standalone experience.

The execution: The tools at a brewmaster's disposal are many and varied. Often there are many ways to arrive at the same solution. Such is the case with banana.

Funnily enough, the principle chemical responsible for creating the flavor of bananas is also produced as a by-product by certain yeast strains. These banana esters are a prominent flavor component in many German style wheat beers. In fact, I've heard dunkelweizen referred to as "banana bread beer" which is not terribly far off from what we're doing here.

Using a German yeast strain that produces lots of banana esters is only part of the equation here though. This is where I get to bust out my tool belt. After all, it wouldn't really be a banana beer without bananas, would it?

As far as I know, using actual bananas is not often attempted (at least not outside of Africa) by either professional or home brewers, possibly because it's not strictly necessary, and it can be quite messy, but I’m not going to let something like that stop me. In order to get some further value out of the bananas beyond the flavor component, I'll be extracting their sugar content as well (via the same technique used on pumpkin in many pumpkin beers).

When a banana ripens, a similar process to malting occurs: amylase enzymes within the banana convert the fruit's starches into simple sugars. This why the flavor of a banana is not entirely synonymous with the banana ester compound - because the sweetness is inseparable from other elements of the flavor profile. Mashing the bananas in with the malt will help complete the conversion process, extracting the sugars from the bananas into the wort. 

I’m also baking the banana beforehand, hoping to crystallize some of those sugars in order to add to the overall complexity of the beer. I'm hoping this will be somewhat akin to the banana version of caramel malt. I could be trademarking the term "carabanana" any day now. 

An elaboration

Credit goes to my brother-in-law, Aurel, for taking and assembling these panoramic photos.

Glass Bottom Brewery LLC went from here:

to here:

only with, as I have mentioned, the help and advice of many individuals who proved their willingness, beyond any doubt, to help our business start and undergo its process of development. I thought that listing them for posterity might be appropriate at this point. Hopefully they will pardon the use of full names and my unwillingness to put them in any order but the one where their names surge into my head.

Ezra Bloom, the other less overt but equally important half of this business
Eric Williams
Dale Culleton
Matt Barnard
Ben Kreider
Jay Heath
Joe Burkhart
Aurel De St Andre
Bob Sinopoli
Jeff Minkler
Dennis Downing
Matt Blake
Wayne Burkhart
Lin Howitt
Dave Williams
Marylin Geller
Robert Bloom
George Whaling
Dave Shepard
Don Johnson

and others I will likely have to edit in.

For your viewing pleasure, here are more panoramic photos that show the yard in its progression to a (nearly) current state of development. Any questions about this process can be answered by emailing this account, or feel free to show up at the yard when we are present (on 41 north of GB and south of Division St) so long as you remember to park inside the field, not in my landlord's private driveway.

May I just add that having something tangible, even if we have yet to work out the issue of having a sign (due to residential zoning of the leased hop yard), is wonderful for a fledgling business that so far has been fueled only on unfulfilled dreams. In the future the hop yard will progress to being a place of growing plants and grazing animals. I can't wait.

More pictures from Aurel to come.

Evolution of a Hops Yard

Unfortunately hops yards of this magnitude do not spring out of the ground spontaneously, though it may seem that way from these pictures. It requires a lot of hard working and planning. Most of the credit must go to Master Farmer Evan Williams.

 

An empty field on route 41, just north of Great Barrington. 

Cut black locust - extremely strong, rot-resistant wood. Not pictured: countless hours of labor pealing the bark off the posts.

  The outside posts go in slanted away at an angle to help hold up the eventual weight of the plants pulling inward.

An excavator with an auger attachment drilled 5 foot holes into the ground, into which we buried the posts.

 Sixty posts pointed skyward.

Cabling.

Next year it will all be green (knock on wood).

- Ezra