Day: February 10, 2023

We’re finally releasing 80 West.

That feels good to actually type. It’s been a trip with some interesting detours getting to this point.

I wanted to open Twin Span with 80 West almost 2 years ago. I had all the material, the grain was milled and in the hopper, hops and yeast were on hand, and on brew day, the world ended.

The world as we knew it at least. That was the day the US government admitted that this pandemic was a real problem, and everything screeched to a halt. Twin Span wasn’t open yet, but I already had beer in fermenters and grain milled. We had to push our open date back an unknown amount of time. Beer – especially fresh hoppy IPAs don’t like waiting around for unknown amounts of time. So I made the call to reduce the amount of beer made, which would drive up the ABV and make it age better. I moved some hops around in the schedule to accommodate the new beefier malt profile. It was going to be an Imperial IPA (or Strong Ale, or Hoppy Barleywine depending on who you asked) at almost 10% ABV.

Its name changed to “80 North” to denote the change in plans and quirky nature. Local travels know that i80 runs east-west, except where it briefly runs north-south a stone’s throw from our brewery. The beer was very well received (and it’ll return at some point for sure).

I still wanted to brew a true West Coast IPA, but figured it would be too samey to have a smaller version of 80 North on tap at the same time, so I waited, and brewed a few 80 Easts (New England / Hazy / East Coast IPAs). They were also well received.

My partners kept asking when I’d brew 80 West. Eventually, I decided the time was right. I milled all the grain, got the water ready, went to get the hops ready and… the hops weren’t there. I thought they had been received, but they were on back order. I couldn’t really un-mill the grain – and I didn’t want to dump all of the water, so I had to pivot quick. I took inventory of the hops I did have – they were all excellent German lager hops – and I had a bunch of German lager yeast – so I thought I’d give an IPL (India Pale Lager) a shot. After consulting a random word generator online, Tragedy Salad was born.

I’m not a superstitious man, but at this point, I was pretty sure 80 West was cursed. I was still asked to brew it, but I didn’t dare admit to the Universe that I intended to do so. So I waited. I waited long enough that West Coast IPAs started to come back into fashion, albeit slightly modified for modern tastes. Gone were the copper, almost amber hues with aggressive biting bitterness, replaced with pale malt and a gentler hop bite. The style had morphed into something that straddled the line between old school West and the hazy Easts that had taken over the world.

During a family vacation on the west coast – specifically San Diego – I “researched” many new interpretations of this new West Coast IPA that a few have dubbed “San Diego style IPA”. They all followed the pattern of a grist almost entirely of pale or even pils malt, some even including sugar to lighten the color and body even more. All had assertive but not aggressive bitterness with a soft mouthfeel. All packed a hop punch on par with the haze bombs everyone loves – although these typically are a blend of the piney/dank hops that dominated the style in the distant past, and newer, tropical fruit punch notes everyone has expected these past few years.

I developed the recipe for my interpretation of this style in my head during the vacation and when I returned home, I wrote it down. In the blank for recipe name, I hesitated, but dubbed it “80 West”.

The recipe, the style, and the world had changed greatly from where I started, but I finally got to 80 West. Cheers.

There’s no arguing that we’re all a bit hop mad these days. We’re in the midst of a hops arms race, with brewers cramming in as many hops as their tanks can handle, making bigger and bolder aromatics with each turn, collectively moving the needle on the population’s hop threshold. The savvy consumer can even ID the superstar hops such as Citra and Mosaic when they pop up in a new brand. It’s a shame then that more aren’t aware of just how agricultural hops are.

“Hops are to beer what grapes are to wine” – Jim Koch

Jim’s the founder and president of the Boston Beer Company that makes the ubiquitous Samuel Adams line of beers, so he knows what he’s talking about when it comes to beer. I have a nit to pick with that quote, though.

You don’t really ferment hops. Grain provides the sugar and much of the flavor and mouthfeel contributions in a beer. That quote undersells the importance of grain in beer, although I’m sure Jim didn’t intend to do that. Hops are more like a spice or herb you add to a dish. I think what he was getting at with that quote is that hops are an agricultural product – and come with their own unique flavor characteristics based on their breed, soil conditions, weather, etc – in short, they have terroir.

I tried to grow hops once. I say try, because I failed. Everything I had read online and in books said that in the right climate, they’ll grow without any intervention and in fact, they’re difficult to kill off. Iowa is a good climate for them so I guess I’ll blame the soil in my yard or just bad luck on why they died. There were no flowers that first year – as

expected – a smallish crop on year two, an even smaller crop in year three, and they didn’t even come out of the ground for year four. That picture above is one of the bines in year two.

Thankfully, there are Iowans much more skilled at growing hops than I am. One of them invited me to a harvest day celebration back in late August. Buck Creek Hops grows some of their own hops but also sources from other farmers across the state and processes them at their facility outside of Solon. I’ve jealously listened to other pro brewers at big breweries flying out to Yakima Valley in Washington to do “hops selection” – where they rub hop cones and pick out individual lots to later use in their brews. I imagine Solon is about as close to Yakima Valley as I’ll get – for a while at least – so I definitely wasn’t going to miss this.

I pulled off the interstate, onto a highway, through a small town, and then onto a gravel road, surrounded by corn and soybean fields, just like the landscape I grew up in, except I never saw hop fields as a kid. I pulled into an ordinary looking farm alongside a big machine shed and parked. A dog ran up to greet me with his tail wagging. The smell of hops wafted out of the machine shed so I headed in. An enormous pile of hop bines were on the floor in the center of the building. A man was loading them into an even bigger machine that noisily ingested them and sprayed out hop cones on the back end. I chatted with some other Iowan brewers as we all watched hypnotically as hop bines were tossed into the machine and came out the other end. Eventually, a truck came in and dumped out a massive pile of hop bines, more than doubling the size of the existing pile.

The smell. Oh man, it was intense. It smelled like hops, but much more pungent, and in the almost three hours I was there, I never did get acclimated to the smell. You could see hop dust in the air. We joked that you could hold out a beer glass and just dry hop that way. It was wonderful.

We did get to rub a couple hop cones. You take a hop cone/flower, smash it between the palms of your hands and rub them together. You’ll get a sticky, yellow powder and release those aroma compounds. Those who spend enough time around hops can ID which breed they are and can even pick out differences between farms and harvest years. I picked out the dank, piney, and resinous Chinook characteristics any west coast IPA fan is fond of.

After running through the machine, the hop cones hang out in giant bins on the floor until they’ve dried out to the desired humidity level. I somehow resisted the urge to jump into the bins and swim around, Scrooge McDuck style. A device that looks a bit like a metal detector was inserted into various points in the bin to take the readings and see if the hops are ready to go yet. They need at least 24 hours to dry so we wouldn’t get to see the hops being fed into the machine finish up, but thankfully, we could see the next step with hops that were previously harvested.

A big tube was dipped into the bin, which started vacuuming up the cones and sending them into the hopper on top of another machine. That machine compressed the cones into pellet form, which was then spit out onto a conveyor belt and then transferred into a storage bin.

We were handed some of the hops and they were quite hot to the touch and smelled, as you can guess, wonderful.

So wonderful in fact, that I asked if I could buy some of these exact hops. They were Crystal hops, which I hadn’t used in years. I forgot how much I loved them. They have this citrus candy character about them you just can’t quite get from other varieties. The pellets still needed some time to rest before they could be packaged and sold, but I was able to reserve some. I used them a couple weeks later in the Iowaska saison (which as of this writing, hasn’t been released yet, but it is delicious! Those hops really pop).

I appreciate Buck Creek for inviting me to be a part of this wonderful agricultural process. We’re not big enough to get flown out to Yakima, but a short drive up the interstate yielded just as good of results.

Fun in this case is a long overdue trip to the Southwest US. I used to have a few family down there so I’ve been many times, but the wife and kids – not so much. San Diego is a favorite between my wife so that was an obvious stop on our trip, and you haven’t lived until you’ve been to the Grand Canyon (it’s the damnedest thing) so we made sure it was a stop. Sedona and Phoenix were new to all of us, so we had to visit there as well.

Now, I learned long ago not to add too many beer destinations into a family vacation itinerary. My wife and kids are amazingly supportive of that half of my life, but I’m not about to drag them through the hippest and trendiest tap rooms. But if a given brewery/pub has a kids menu and isn’t too far out of the way, we’re good. And dang it, San Diego and Phoenix delivered that in spades.

We hit at least one brewpub per day on our two week trip, sometimes two. I’m not going to review each individually, but a few really stuck out. We visited Stone’s Liberty Station location first. We visited Escondido last time and neither location disappointed. We can get Stone beers surprisingly fresh in Iowa so other than a few pub exclusives, there wasn’t much new for us. They might not get hype like they used to, but I maintain that you must visit them if you’re in the San Diego area.

Moving onto Phoenix, I was sure to stop by Wren House for their GABF winning Hazy IPA and American Lager (those are REALLY big accomplishments). I was blown away by the quality of the lager at Fate Brewing – in particular their hatch chili lager. I don’t normally like chilies in beer, but that beer may have converted me. (Someone wrote “hatch chili lager” on our suggestion board a while back so it might have to happen now…) Last but not least in Phoenix, Four Peaks’ English Pale Ale is so good it’s transcendent. Seriously, it’s the best English Pale Ale brewed outside of England – fight me.

I’ve left some honorable mentions out, of course, and there was only one brewery that I did not think was of very high quality (which I’ll leave nameless). I returned home feeling like we’re on the right track for beer and food. It also inspired me on some future recipes (that Hatch Chili Lager is going to be a challenge, but 80 West is definitely finally going to happen soon). It inspired me to scrap some recipes and gnawing brewing related insecurities as well.

How can you not be inspired when looking at something like this? Cheers

I hang around in a couple Cicerone study groups online as I’m toying around with the idea of going for the next level certification, Advanced Cicerone, but also to help others out with their studying. In one of those groups, someone said they were just getting started studying for the Certified Cicerone test and wanted to know the best way to study a style. Everyone has their own approach, and your mileage may vary of course, but here’s my method – I’m calling “full beer immersion”.

Wall of IPAs

Learn the technical details…

This is where the BJCP really shines. Pop over to their website and look up the style you’re studying (such as British Brown Ale). There you’ll find what the beer should look, smell, and taste like, along with the technical details such as IBU and ABV ranges. This is arguably the definitive source for style information, but it’s not perfect – some excellent examples of the style don’t fit 100% within the parameters, and sometimes styles are introduced without the author actually tasting a real example. Just remember that styles are guidelines and you shouldn’t worry about the exact tech specs (unless you’re studying for a test!).

… but don’t get too hung up on them.

The style guidelines I linked above are dated 2015. Before that, we had the 2008 style guidelines. Before that, the 2004 guidelines, and so on. New guidelines are published every few years because styles are constant falling in and out of popularity. The most current guidelines (2015) don’t list Hazy/New England IPAs. That’s because when they were written, they were still very uncommon. Unlike today, where it seems like every other beer in the store’s cooler is a hazy IPA. In the previous guidelines, no one had ever even brewed a hazy IPA (or at least didn’t market one as such).

And many styles change over time. In 2008, Extra Special Bitter was a thing, yet in 2015, it became simply Strong Bitter. I suspect that was to distance it from Fuller’s ESB and have every homebrew and commercial version of this style be judged against that one beer. Style parameters change over time as tastes change. I wholly expect the bracingly bitter West Coast IPAs to lose some IBUs in the coming years as Hazies continue to take over the world.

Learn the history

Why do some Bitters have fewer IBUs than some Milds? Why are some Porters bigger than some Stouts? These are things you won’t learn from the style guidelines, but they’re key information if you want to really understand a style. So study up on their history. Get a short essay from The Oxford Companion to Beer or simply poke around the web, looking for blogs, forum posts, websites, and videos that cover the history. You’re looking for context on these styles rather than trying to memorize dates and political figures.

 

Drink!

Let’s not forget this step. Back up in the BJCP style guidelines, at the bottom of each style is a list of commercial examples. Seek out as many of those as you can. Invite some (fully vaccinated) friends over and sample as many as you can. Do so mindfully – take notes, have the style guideline printout in front of you, maybe even fill out a tasting sheet. I can say from personal experience that some styles that seem narrowly defined and all examples taste the same (such as Kolsch) vary wildly when lined up and tasted side-by-side. Oh, and if you can find a recipe (actual or clone) for each beer, this is the perfect time to check that out. You don’t even need to know how to brew, but this will help you become familiar with ingredients and their impacts on flavor.

Become a virtual tourist:

The best place to drink a given beer is at its brewery, or at least on its home turf. Of course, this is a challenge for most of us – we can’t just jet off to Germany for a weizen or Dublin for a stout and then pop back home. Modern technology allows us to do the next best thing. If I really want to dig into a beer or style, I visit the brewery in Google Maps / StreetView, I visit their website, and I’ll listen to a local radio station (through something like Radio.Garden). I look at photos from visitors to the brewery and I’ll even virtually walk the streets, looking at nearby restaurants, bars, and hotels. It might seem silly, but this extra layer of context can help tie everything together.

I encourage you to pick a style and try some of these tips. Cheers!