Each year in September we hold a series of
Michael Jackson Memorial tastings to honour and remember the life of the father
of modern beer writing. Michael pioneered the modern age of beer writing by
writing about beer with respect to how it is made, about its social context and
always with a good dose of humour.
Each year Geoff Griggs and I select some
beers from Michael’s Desert Island Top 24 list of beers for the tasting. This
year we decided to add a couple of beers to the tasting that Michael either
would have liked and also one beer that he would most likely have been involved
in the brewing of if he were still with us. On the Friday night we were joined
by Caitlin and Jane Tiller from Marlborough’s
Isabel Winery which made for an entertaining night and sparked some great
discussion.
We kicked off this years tasting with a
glass of Emerson’s 1812 as Geoff introduced himself, told us a little about
Michaels career and recounted some tales from the time Michael spent in New
Zealand.
The first beer of the night was the classic
tart bitter Trappist ale from the Orval Abby in the province
of Luxembourg in the south of Belgium. Orval
is a unique beer that combines the fresh zesty hop character of an English Pale
Ale and the tart wild ferment notes of Belgian sour ale. Orval is bottled with
a dose of the wild yeast Brettanomyces and as a result the beer changes
significantly as it ages becoming dryer and more austere and it also loses some
of the fruity zesty hop character that it displays when it’s young and starts
to present some of the tangy horse blanket notes from the Brett. The bottles we
had for the tasting were just at the point where the beer starts to turn from it’s
hoppy fresh incarnation into an altogether more funky wild beast.
Pouring a slightly cloudy light amber hue with
a big enthusiastic head Orval presented aromas of light citrussy hops, a hint
of a tangy earthy roses lime, and a note of perfumy rose petals. In the mouth
the beer offered up a hint of malt sweetness early before a rush of firmly
bitter hops and a tart dry finish.
Next up we tasted Sierra
Nevada 30th Anniversary Imperial Heller Bock. This is a
beer that Michael never got to taste as it was brewed this year long after he
had passed away. This beer forms one part of a range of 30th
anniversary beers that Sierra Nevada are
releasing through out the year to mark their 30th birthday. Three of
the four Sierra 30 beers have been brewed as a collaboration between the team
at Sierra Nevada and several of the key pioneers who helped launch the
independent brewing industry and craft beer culture in the US. In the late 1970’s Michael
played a huge role in championing the burgeoning American craft beer scene and
his writing played a big part in influencing the brewers who pioneered the
industry. Geoff and myself are sure that if Michael were still with us he would
have been involved in the brewing of one of the Sierra 30 beers.
The recipe for the Imperial Heller Bock was
formulated by the ‘godfather’ of modern homebrewing Charlie Papaizian, the
idiosyncratic beer writer Fred Eckhart and Sierra Nevada
founder Ken Grossman. Despite the German reference in the name this beer is all
about America.
At Sierra30.com you can watch a film about each of the Sierra 30 beers and in
the one about the Heller Bock Charlie and Fred reveal how the beer is a homage
to the very first homebrews that they attempted after Congress and President
Carter legalised homebrewing in the late 1970’s. When they started brewing beer
the only beer they knew was American premium lager of the sort produced by
Anheuser Busch, Millers or Coors, so their first brews were attempting to make
beers of that style but with more malt flavour, more hop aroma and more
character. The Imperial Heller Bock is a big strong festive celebration of
those early beers.
Pouring
a mid gold hue with a tight white head the Imperial Heller Bock offered up
aromas of sweet caramel malt, light red apple esters, a hint of spicy
citrus-like hops and a touch of honey. In the mouth the beer was rich and
medium bodied with a complex fruity note from both new world hops and
fermentation esters. The beer was warming but still impressively smooth for its
8.3%abv.
Next up we ventured into the old world with
a classic Bière de Garde from the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region of France. 3 Mont
comes from the Brasserie de Saint-Sylvestre in the flatlands in the very north
of France and the name is a joke referring to the three bumps in the area that
are referred to as mountains. This beer was on Michaels Desert
Island 24 and is a
personal favourite of mine. Bière de Garde is a farmhouse style that arguably grew
out of farms needing to preserve grain by turning it into ale and was often
used as a way of paying farm workers much in the same way as cider was used in
the west country of England.
3 Mont poured a very light
golden hue with a big fluffy white head and definitely marks the pale end of
the style. Aromas of sweet nutty malt, a light hint of herbal hop and a tangy
earthy cellar note all vie for attention in the nose. In the mouth the beer was
rich with loads of nutty pale malt flavour some light spicy hop notes, subtle
fermentation fruitiness and a tangy dry finish.
One of Michael’s gifts was that he seemed
to be able to always sum up not only how a beer tasted but also the wider
context in which it was brewed. Alaskan Smoked Porter is a very special beer
from a very special place so it’s no surprise that it ranked in Michaels top
24. The Alaskan Brewery is situated in Juneau
one of the most isolated cities on earth. All the raw ingredients for the beer
has to be to be transported up to the brewery from the Lower 46 States of
America by barge. Once the beers are brewed and bottled the majority of
production is then towed on barges back down to the major American markets.
Alaskan Smoked Porter is one of the most
famous new world smoked beers. The beer is produced with a range of malts some
of which are cured over alder smoke at a local food smoker.
Smoked porter pours a slightly vicious
black with a thick tan head. Aromas of smoky barbeque and bonfire char nestled
in amongst chocolate and caramel. In the mouth the beer is full bodied with a
good dose of smoke flavour followed up by rich caramel, chocolate, a hint of
fruity hop flavour and a long complex smoky finish.
We included Oaked Epic Armageddon in the
tasting as we felt that it was a beer that Michael would have enjoyed and also
it was produced with a process that he championed, namely barrel aging. Earlier
this year Epic brewer Luke Nicolas decided to buy several new medium toasted
American oak barrels in order to barrel age some of his beers. The move was a
bit of a departure for a brewer who up until then had emphasised the striking
aromatic hop combinations in his beers rather than using yeast, malt or barrel
to create the dominant flavours. New oak is particularly unusual in the
production of barrel aged beers as it tends to be prohibitively expensive. More
often beers are barrel