Tag Archives: crystal malt

All Aboard! Steam Porter

AllAboardSteamPorter22aw

Anchor Brewing Company of San Francisco gets credit for reintroducing Porter beer to the world, after its production declined to essentially nothing in the place of its birth, London, England. Strictly speaking, because Anchor owns the trademark for the term “Steam” as it refers to beer, this beer is not named Steam Porter.

The “steam” part refers to the yeast it uses, namely, White Labs WLP 810 San Francisco Lager. Plus, I can still remember the Coast Daylight steam train that ran from San Francisco to Los Angeles in the 1950s, and the porters that worked on it. A romantic beer in memory of romantic days. All Aboard!

Shasta Daylight

There’s no record of what the original porter beers tasted like, apart from descriptions dating from Edwardian times calling them “sweet, bitter, and a bit burnt all at once. Very warming.” The workers of the time, including porters, accustomed to a bland diet, are thought to have been attracted to the robust, astringent and bitter flavors rarely encountered in their everyday consumption.

Some information exists though, regarding what they were made of. The earliest available recipes, dating from around 1750, show that the most prominent ingredients were pale malt and brown malt. This was not the same as the brown malt that is available today. Back then, the malt was processed by turning it out on a metal floor above a fierce wood fire. Despite its dark character, it retained a lot of sugar and malting enzymes, making it suitable for assuming a large proportion of the mash.

Today’s brown malt is an English product still, but processed in drum roasters like its darker cousins the black malts. Black malts themselves now provide a significant addition to modern porter recipes. But porter is still distinct from stout. Significantly, historically accurate porter should not be opaque black. Rather, it is a very dark ruby red when it is brewed properly, as All Aboard! is.

Besides a hefty addition of modern brown malt to provide a nice rich nutty flavor, All Aboard! uses five grades of crystal malt, plus Melanoidin malt to add more red color to the brown. Small additions of chocolate and black malts create layers of complex flavor. Munton DME provides the base sugars, and flaked barley creates a thick head.

Historically, all manner of strange ingredients were added to create distinctive flavors, most notoriously Nux Vomica. Hangovers were inevitable. This recipe ventures less far. Instead, for interest it settles for 4 grams of gypsum, 2 grams of cracked Grains of Paradise and 12 grams of sea salt.

Traditional Golding and Fuggles English hops provide bitterness and flavor, and homegrown Willamette hops add aroma. With a start at 16 Plato (1.064) this is a beer up to the demands of the most hard-working porter in Londontown.

Aromas of nutty toasted grains combine with nice floral notes. Its malty-full richness, with a chocolaty bitter tang, contrasts with its residual sweetness. At 7.7% alcohol by volume it is an assertive but not hot beverage. Delicious and inebriating, it makes me want to pick up my bags and head for the station.

ZBO: A New Style of Extreme Umami Brew

Zeer Bruine Oude
The name of this beer, Zeer Bruine Oude, or ZBO, reflects its original inspiration from a type of Belgian beer called Oud Bruin–sometimes known as Flanders Brown. The Oud Bruin beers are typically a dark red-brown color, with medium body and very little bitterness. The “Oud” part (old) refers to the long aging these beers undergo, so that their yeast and bacteria content can develop an interesting sweet/sour flavor.

But because this beer draws inspiration also from Guinness Stout, is is a “Zeer” (very) Bruine Oude. It is an extremely dark red-brown color, with an aroma of dark fruits and malt. In the tradition of Guinness, about 3 percent of the wort was soured by incubating it with lactobacillus delbrueckii from White Labs. To this I added about 7ml of Bio-K+ L. Caesi L. Acidophilus blend in rice extract. About 700ml of wort was drawn off from the main batch, inoculated with the lacto bacteria, and incubated at 27 C (81 F) for 72 hours. This mildly sour wort was then pasteurized at 80 C (177 F) for 30 minutes and returned to the main batch, which was fermenting with White Labs Edinburgh Ale yeast. I felt it appropriate to use Scottish yeast because legend has it that Scotland provided the original Belgian yeast strains.

A complex beer demands a complex grain bill, and this is one of the most, incorporating cara-crystal wheat, chocolate wheat, black prinz malt, cara-pils, cara-aroma, and a Belgian blend of cara-Munich, Special B, biscuit and honey malts. Breiss extra-light dry malt extract provided the base. About 225g of Brewcraft Belgian extra-dark aromatic candi sugar helped boost the original gravity to 22.5 degrees Plato (1.090).

Typically, Oud Bruin beers have little to no hoppy character. This one does, though the hop additions are moderate in deference to the original style. About 12 HBU of bitterness are provided by a boiling addition of Warrior and Perle hops, and a flavor addition of German Hallertau. No aroma hops were added.

The result: a nicely sweet/sour beer reminiscent of Scottish Wee Heavy strong ale, Irish Stout and Belgian Oud. Mildly estery with flavors of malt and dark fruit, an intensely malty aroma, complex malt flavors and a bit more hop assertiveness than either the traditional Bruin or Heavy styles offer. The blend of caramelized wheat and barley malts provide an umami backbone that creates a nice, chewy, satisfying meal out of a pint of beer.

A year after the original brew date, and with three months in the bottle, this beer has a long cellar life ahead of it, during which the flavors will continue to meld and blend. It should be an amazing winter quaff next year!