Weyermann Braumanufaktur Bohemian Pilsner Shows the Versatility of Its Pilot Brewery

Weyermann Braumanufaktur Bohemian Pilsner   Abv        4.7

                Weyermann is deservedly best known for its malts.   With few exceptions, when we visit good small breweries in the United States and all over Europe, there are bags of Weyermann malt ready to make excellent beer.   Bamberger smoked malt is probably the most famous, but the range of malts that come out of their classic read brick facility is staggering.   They also maintain another malt manufacturing facility that specializes in larger batches of pils malt.  We assume that the pils malt used in this beer came from that facility, but the beer was brewed in Weyermann’s tiny brewery in Bamberg.

No trip to Bamberg is truly complete without a visit to Weyermann’s maltery – a short walk from the train station (use the tunnel under the tracks and walk away from the city center.)   It’s also an easy stop on the way to Keesman and Mahrs Brau if you read the bus maps carefully.   Public tours are only once a week, though if you’re in the brewing trade you can get a better and smaller-group tour at other times.

Barley arrives at Weyermann’s Malt Factory in Bamberg Germany

Even without a tour, however, it’s worth a visit.  The gift shop is open most days although it tends to close fairly early in the afternoon.   The gift shop sells the usual branded material, but there’s a refrigerator that stocks a wide range of beers from the on-site pilot brewery.   These can range from quite traditional beers like the pils we feature today, to ideas that “just might work.”

One note:  bottle deposits are enormous; we think they make much more on bottles that are not returned than they do on beer.   Get your bottles and find a piece of grass outside to try the beers, or visit the place twice so you can get your Euros back.   The pils is an excellent value if you only pay for the beer.

Tasting notes:  Spicy hops jump out at the start with a floral zing and end the taste with a long back-side bitter.  Clean pale malt rides far underneath but is firm enough to give good support to the hops.  It’s certainly hoppier than lots of Bavarian Pilsners, but the balance makes it moreish from the first to the last sip.

Food Pairings:  Spit roasted chicken is a can’t miss choice, but a pilsner with as much taste as this has can match a huge range of dishes.   Asian dishes such as potstickers, Indian curries, or good old American barbeque all benefit from the pilsner’s cool and clean feel.   Post #0075   201702

Today Our Weekly “Hopping Around” post features ten pictures of Bamberg that we couldn’t fit into the book. We’ll continue to feature some of Bamberg’s best and most distinctive beers on our “Beer of the Day” blog this week.

THESE COOKIES ARE NOW OUT OF THIS WORLD

Name  Scåssenes (previously Ecaussinnes) Cookie Beer, Ecaussinnes, Belgium          Abv   8

                   Don’t think scientists lack senses of humor.   The group that found Trappist-1, the star that has earth-like planets orbiting around it, has launched a project to find new worlds capable of sustaining life.   Their “Search for habitable Planets Eclipsing Ultra-cool Stars” produces the acronym SPECULOOS, a Belgian cookie that has become a source of national pride. The cookie is a mix of vanilla, shortbread and spice that some descriptions call cinnamon but tasted more to us of ginger snaps.  The cookie spawned a range a range of Speculoos products that include a somewhat disconcerting breakfast spread and, of course, beer.

               Today’s post honors a beer from the recent past.  We tasted it in 2012 — the same year a small brewery opened in the Belgian town of Ecaussinnes.   That brewery struggled and passed on to a new management team in 2014 which renamed the brewery and discontinued the range of Ecaussinnes products in favor of a single theme — the Revolution of 1830 that resulted in modern Belgium– and three themed beers.

Speculoos Cookie Elephant

              The Scåssenes brewery was still calling itself Ecaussinnes when we tasted it at Brugges’s Cambrinus Beer Restaurant.   The brewery either couldn’t get or couldn’t afford the rights to use the name Speculoos, so they simply called it “Cookie Beer” and everyone in Belgium knew exactly what cookie they are referring to. If it weren’t for the astronomers, we wouldn’t feature such a gimmicky beer so close to our visit to Beaver Land on Friday, but it actually wasn’t as bad as it should have been.

Tasting notes:  There’s nothing subtle here – it’s a cookie beer.   Shortbread, some vanilla and lots of ginger snaps with just enough malt character to occasionally remind that it is beer.   The aftertaste, however, stays cookie.

Food Pairings:  Obviously you can “complement” it with a plate of Speculoos cookies.  It would work with ginger snaps in the same way.  Other than maybe a good cup of coffee, which isn’t exactly a pairing, he “contrast” is either something of a challenge or no challenge at all.  Almost anything savory would give you the contrast, but you’d have to have a sweet tooth to like what it’s doing to your palate.  Pierre Zuber’s Belgian beer blog gives specific suggestions, and they’re as good as any, but we think whatever you choose will involve a good deal of speculation.  Sorry.       Beer Review #0074   20170227

Tomorrow Our Weekly “Hopping Around” post features ten pictures of Bamberg that we couldn’t fit into the book. We’ll feature some of Bamberg’s best and most distinctive beers on our “Beer of the Day” blog this week.

TRAPPIST IS A SMALL SUN IN SPACE BUT A SHINING STAR ON EARTH

Spencer Trappist Ale, Spencer,         Abv  6.5

                We chose the beer of the day in honor of a dramatic astronomical discovery that was front page news a few days ago.   A relatively small star – about one tenth of the size of our own less than gigantic source of light—has an active solar system with several planets close enough to it to provide conditions that might make life possible.  The Belgian astronomers who discovered it named it Trappist-1 and removed all thoughts that it might only refer to an order of monks by naming their quest for additional life supporting planets after a Belgian cookie (see tomorrow’s post).

Dining Hall at St. Joseph’s Abbey

Spencer Brewery Brewhouse

Choosing a Trappist beer for today’s post was a challenge.  We’ve had over 40 Trappist ales – from all the Trappist Breweries other than the 2014 newcomers in the Netherlands and Italy.  We hope that the sky high ratings we gave Westvleteren weren’t the result of beer snobbery – they weren’t blind tastings, but they surely tasted good.

Since the theme is otherworldly, though, we thought the right beer for this column would be the one and only Trappist brewery in the United States.   The Saint Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, has been around since the 1950s, but only began brewing in 2013.   All Trappist Abbeys are required by the order to fully support themselves, with any unneeded funds used for charitable projects. Years ago Father Robert at Chimay explained to us that the Trappist calling was to “take God’s gifts and make them useful to others.”    St. Joseph’s has done well over the years with a highly respected range of jams and jellies.   As their community grew – and aged—the need for additional income brought them to the decision to brew.  After a couple of years touring established Trappist breweries, they opened in 2013.

Brewer at Spencer Brewery

Like the longer-established abbeys in Belgium, they’ve named the beer after their location rather than the abbey.  Like other Trappist breweries, they try to keep the brewing a secondary activity to their religious commitments.  They do not offer tours because tours would disturb the contemplative life of the monks, and we suspect, diminish the distance between what they do and a regular commercial business.

The beers are worth seeking out.   They’ve had a great deal of help in developing a definitively Trappist ale, yet one that isn’t a copy-cat either.   They say that a beer geek should be able to identify the yeast they’ve used; it didn’t seem so obvious to us, but we do know they finished their research with a long stint at Westvleteren.

Tasting notes:  A full-bodied ale with a fruity-candy sweetness and just a bit of the light funk that’s typical of abbey beers.  It has a creamy feel as it drinks with very ripe apple. The brewery claims some banana notes, but we didn’t find many. Not quite a “farmhouse” beer, but most Trappist abbeys are indeed farms.

Food Pairings:  Cheese.  Get something local, or find something slightly funky at a good market.   Mussels are an obvious choice and we think it would go well with a range of seafoods.   Review #0073    20170226

Tomorrow: We we continue our tribute to the year’s biggest astronomical find– Trappist-1, a star that supports several earth-like planets that may be capable of supporting life. The group that discovered it plans to continue their search for planets that might sustain life. Their organization “Search for habitable Planets Eclipsing Ultra-cool Stars” produces the acronym SPECULOOS, a Belgian cookie.  We review a Belgian beer brewed to taste almost exactly like that cookie.  

TAINTED LOVE BY OLDE MOTHER: THE END OF CREATIVITY?

Olde Mother Tainted Love, Frederick, Md.    Abv 6

        Note: we’re going to leave this up one more day.   (Feb 25).   We think the poor beaver who worked his tail off to give us this beer deserves the extra 15 minutes of fame.   Also, we kind of like the idea of posting an Abbey beer (Spencer Trappist) on Sunday in hopes of some kind of redemption.)

A brewer we know described the plan as a “crazy promotion”—Cupid’s Curse or Cupid’s Revenge Tasting, an event in which several Maryland brewers would bring something of an anti-Valentine to a Valentine’s Day event to bask in a presumably enthusiastic press response.  It may have worked better than anyone expected.  Brewers all over the country have been “jumping the shark” to produce a beer no one else has done.  Olde Mother has jumped a shark, a pool of barracuda, and a Great White Whale with one batch of beer.  Oh, and it jumped a beaver too.

Olde Mother is a brewery we’ve reviewed here before.  We love the place.  They were having some issues with their chiller when we visited; most of the beers were sessionable, though there were certainly more sophisticated beers to be found in Frederick.  Still, the place was packed with both two- and four-legged enthusiasts savoring the joys of a true local as much as the actual beer.

We were glad to have another chance to try an Olde Mother beer at the bottle share at the Blue and Gray beer show at Dulles just a few days after Valentine’s Day.  A brewer friend of ours brought a crowler and assured us it was one of the last available samples of Olde Mother’s Cupid’s Curse entry: Tainted Love.  It tasted like a Raspberry Porter, perhaps with an echo of artificial flavor; I’ll never know what we would have thought of it if we hadn’t know what was actually in the brew.

One of the last crowlers of Tainted Love

We don’t know how anyone ever learned this, but the castor gland next to the anus of a beaver produces a substance that tastes remarkably like raspberry.  [Digression:  When we came back with Hop Pocket from St. George, one of the two negative reviews on DC Beer wrote “tastes like ass.”  It was one of the few and greatest acts of restraint on my part not to enter below in the comment section, “Just exactly how do you know?”]  Castoreum, the substance, has, we understand, received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration and is actually used in some raspberry yogurts.

Danged if it wasn’t good—actually the best of the beers we’ve had from Olde Mother and worth drinking even without the gimmick.  The title?  Well, if you don’t know, we’re not going to tell you here.  You’ve got a computer—go to Urban Dictionary and learn a definition of “taint” that’s probably known by more 8^th graders than adults.

“What AM I DOING in a beer column???!

Tasting notes:  Full body with roasty malts and a quick and sustained raspberry that includes something that is definitely raspberry, but not definitely fruit.  The turbidity [Jeff Browning, founder of Brewport Brewing in Connecticut, said I really should use the word in this review] seemed to add to the complexity.  A bit of bitter balances nicely and the dark fruit end is surprisingly moreish.  We hope the beavers were raised in humane conditions.

Food pairings:  It’s so hard to avoid humor here; besides, <anything> we suggest at this point is going to invite howls.  So, yes, beer lovers.  Cheese.  Ellie suggests stinky cheeses, though I think a soft brie would do just fine.  Chocolate might be a bit redundant, but we think it could match a dessert that wasn’t overly sweet.  Ellie suggests venison, though we’re not likely to get a chance to test that theory.  And the obvious:  for only 120 bucks you can order online a beaver’s hind leg; bone in, of course.  We’d suggest a slow roast for maximum tenderness.    Review #0072   20170220

On Sunday: We honor the year’s biggest astronomical find– Trappist-1, a star that supports several earth-like planets that may be capable of supporting life.  Our tribute will be, of course, a Trappist Beer — this one from Europe’s “New World” — the USA.  Spencer’s Trappist Ale from Spencer, Mass.