If you have been
frequenting The Bruery’s new tasting room since it opened a few
weeks ago, you may have noticed (until recently at least) a set of
beers bearing the name Carmen aged with various fruits. Carmen is a
dark and beautiful sour ale not entirely unlike our sour stout, Tart
of Darkness.
Sour dark ales?! WTF, people who write my paycheck.
WTF, indeed.
Brewing
traditionalists might cry-foul at the mere notion of The Bruery
mucking about in the pantheon of classic styles such as stouts, not
unlike some beleaguered 10 Commandments of a forlorn and forgotten
beer god who still believes in Leave It To Beaver family archetypes
and pisses on the leg of anyone who uses the phrase “welcome to the
21st century”. And to those advocates of the steadfast,
the tried, and the boringly true, I say: “Whatevs”.
Anywho…back to
dark sour ales. Beers like Tart of Darkness and Carmen might sound
strange to some, but believe me, there is some historical precedence.
Brettanomyces, the
yeasts infamously found in Belgian Lambic, Farmhouse, and sour ales
that produce aromas of horse blanket, smoke, and sweat…in a porter
or a stout? You’re darn right.
I have an unhealthy
fascination with historical beers—beers that, were it not for my
propensity to piss off my wife with incessant homebrewed
beer-tinkering, I might never get to try. Porter and Stout are two
such historical brews that have held my carboys and kettles captive
for a long time.
The history of
porter and stout is the stuff of legends in the beer world, and like
most legends, it holds about as much truth as a Ken Lay testimony.
(Incidentally, has anyone noticed yet that my culture references are
severely out of date?) Porter (and along with almost every other
beer style) has had its history passed down through time in a game of
academic telephone to the point that the modern version of the tale
is filled with half-truths and speculation. There are a few things
we can be sure of though, one of which is that Brettanomyces enjoyed
porter just as much as the rest of us.
At one point in
time, porter was a barreled product. And as Bruery fans probably
know by now, Brettanomyces also like to go into barrels (they can
live off the wood sugars). Put the two together and you get one
Mutha’ Funky Porter. Read a few accounts by various brewing
historians and they will all attest to the existence of Brett-based
Porters. In other parts of the world, the Brett characters of clove,
smoke, and horse blanket were actually considered essential
components in British porter. Even a few years past World War II
there was still at least one German brewer who used Brett in his
“British Porter,” claiming that it was absolutely necessary to
get the style right.
Modern accounts can
make for some confusing reading, however. Some describe historical
porter as tart and acidic from the use of Brettanomyces yeasts.
While I’m sure that Brett just dove right into the beer and made a
lovely home for its brood of bizarre flavors and aromas, it is not a
yeast that will produce appreciable acidity in beer. (It can
make a beer VERY dry by eating all the sugars that regular brewer’s
yeasts think they’re too good for, and this dryness can sometimes
be mistaken for acidity, however to most people the two perceptions
are very different.) Brett will produce a fair amount of acetic acid
(the acid in vinegar) if the conditions are just right (properly
cellared barreled beer ain’t it though), but tartness and acidity
in beer are usually associated with lactic acid production, something
that Brett doesn’t do very well. Bacteria like Pediococcus and
Lactobacillus do make a lot of lactic acid, which is why they are
collectively and mundanely referred to as Lactic Acid Bacteria. So
if some of these accounts are to be believed then it’s likely that
producing a traditional porter would require pitching in some of
these guys as well.
Really, I can only
support my theory by extrapolating from statements like those above,
though it would make sense that Brett wasn’t the only thing
influencing historical porters in the barrel. (By the way, esteemed
beer blogger Martyn Cornell has offered some interesting notes on
historical porter flavor worth reading, here.)
A lot of microbes can hang out in barrels, lactic acid bacteria
being among them. Part of my graduate research was based on
complaints from winemakers that whenever they found Brettanomyces in
a barrel they often found Pediococcus as well. Lactic acid
production by these bacteria is fairly strain-dependent, with some
producing enough make your mouth cave in and others spitting out only
tiny amounts. So it’s likely that you would have found some
porters that were not as sour as others, potentially explaining the
discrepancies of reputed sour levels. Also, some strains of
Lactobacillus, though rare, can produce phenolic compounds similar to
Brett yeasts.
So what am I saying
here? While it’s probably not possible for us to ever know for
sure, I think the argument can be made that early barreled porters
had a fair amount in common with American sour beers or even Belgian
Lambic, at least spiritually. It’s fascinating to think about what
these historical beers actually tasted like. It also makes me wonder
about other brews back in the 18th and 19th
centuries. A lot of beers were barreled for shipping purposes or
just to condition for a while. If Brett was a major part of Porter
all those years ago, is it not possible that perhaps the famously
barreled English IPA was also a Brett bomb, or that some of them may
have even had some acidity? (The hops in IPA’s are usually pretty
good deterrents against lactic acid bacteria, though a lot of strains
do have resistance to them.) I’ve never seen reference in the beer
history books about IPA’s referred to as “barnyardy” or “tart,”
but who knows? Maybe the game of beer history telephone has obscured
more of brewing’s oh so funky past. In any case, here at The
Bruery we’re going to keep on keepin’ on, experimenting with
styles and bending the rules. But in the case of Tart of Darkness
and Carmen, I think that in a way we’re just following in the
footsteps of all the famous beer-benders of brewing’s past.
