The Funk's in the Stink 2

Last September, a trip to Portland, Oregon opened my eyes to a type of drink I'd previously found too difficult or plain weird: lambics and gueuzes, or sours as they are known in the States. These are beers which have undergone long, wild ferments, allowing yeasts such as Brettanomyces to develop, giving the beer distinctly funky, stinky aromas. They are also aged in oak over a period of time, sometimes together with fruits, to make the complex, difficult character of the beer yet more individual.

In June, I presented a masterclass on Belgian beer and it was amusing to see the customers react to Cantillon, one of the great beers of the world, exactly as I had when first tasting sours in Portland: with a mixture of horror, disgust, and disbelief, but with an almost involuntary compulsion to smell and taste the beer over and over to make sure the senses weren't playing tricks on the brain. Yes, the beer really does smell like that. And yes, it should. And yes, it's great, isn't it?

It can take some convincing to say yes to the final question, but once persuaded this is a world of beer that invites a neverending exploration, particularly in the States where imaginative, involved beers are evolving all the time. On my recent trip to Seattle, I tasted four more - one from Belgium and three from the Pacific Northwest - which once again demonstrated the possibilities of this wonderful, whacky style of beer.

the line up

tasting

Drie Fonteinen Golden Doesjel 6%

It's important to remember that Belgians don't churn out this stuff just because they're Belgian, or even because there are a number of American beer geeks drinking it like it's fizzy pop. Lambics and gueuzes are two of the most difficult styles of beer to make as well as sell, and it takes real dedication to battle against fashion and time to continue to make them.

Drie Fonteinen, one of the classic Belgian producers of lambics and gueuzes, is a case in point. For many years, the family blended lambics from three other breweries, Boon, Girardin, and Lindemans (hence the name of the brewery, "three sources") at their restaurant to make gueuze, before setting up their own brewery in 1998. Disaster struck in 2009 when there was a huge explosion at the brewery wiping out 80,000L of stock. The enterprise was only saved by volunteers mopping up all the beer to collect for distillation. Making and blending lambics was already a labour of love, and it only took heavy persuasion and help from the world's beer community to restart the business.

It's clearly worth it. The Golden Doesjel ("Snoozer") is an old, oak-aged lambic and a magnificent example of the complexity of lambics that somehow comes out as fresh, delicate, and delicious. Bottled well over two years ago, there's an old-sock funkiness to it, of course, with sour apples and blue cheese, but there's also a refreshing acidity and an incredibly long finish. This is a beer you could drink quite a bit of over the course of an evening, while all the time wondering at its complex flavours.

Collage Conflux Series No 1 11.8%
Belgian beer is famed for its high alcohol, but the lambics and gueuzes are often relatively restrained, especially in comparison to their American counterparts - the three we tasted tonight were all pushing 12%.

This beer is the first in a series of collaborations between two major Oregon brewers, Hair of the Dog and Deschutes, combining four of their beers: "Fred" and "Adam" from the former and "The Dissident" and "The Stoic" from the latter. It's interesting that two breweries should hook up to do this, but I'm not sure it quite works. A major part of the problem is that these are four very distinct beers, high in alcohol, and all aged in particular ways: the tasting notes for the beer state that it has been aged in "Rye Whiskey, Cognac, Sherry, Pinot Noir, Bourbon, new American Oak, and new Oregon Oak" casks. Whatver the genesis of the drink, that's far too many casks.

A dirty brown colour with a stinky nose - "offensive to at least two of the senses," in the words of @drinkaddition - it is surprisingly clean, if a little obvious, on the palate - malt, caramel, toffee, and treacle, creamy to the point of being described as like a milkshake. An interesting experiment, but difficult to drink more than a glass of.

The Dissident 2012 11.4%
Fascinating to try this straight after the previous beer, of which it formed a part. In the blend, the complex qualities of the beer were lost; here, they stand out for themselves. Aged in Pinot Noir barrels with Oregon Montmorency cherries, this is a great, balanced beer. An orange-brown colour, with flavours of citrus fruits (orange, tangerine), developing into more complex notes of coffee and chocolate, all overladen with the cherry backbone. Despite the alcohol, it's not too sweet, as it's balanced by the rich aromas and the bitter finish.

Cascade Bourbonic Plague 2011 12%
There is quite a fad for ageing beers in Bourbon casks, which I'm not quite convinced by. I've tasted beers which seem to have been left in the oak as if that were enough, producing sickly sweet beers that the brewer hasn't had enough control over. This beer shows what a skilled brewer can do, though it still left me wondering if beer should be treated like wine to this extent.

It's been aged in oak for two and a half years - 18 months in Bourbon and wine casks, then for another 12 months with dates and spices. The result is a heady, sweet beer that should be drunk like wine - slowly and with gradual appreciation. A very dark brown colour, the immediate flavours are of wood or wood related - charred wood, sandalwood, charcoal, smoke, tar, tobacco leaf - followed by sweet red fruits; on the palate, the dates and sweet spices become very apparent, the dates making the beer quite chewy.

The overall impression was of an aged, sweet red wine: powerful and alcoholic, with oak and dried fruit flavours. Given a choice between this and a recioto or a port, though, the beer would come third. As engaging and involving as it is, the flavour profile is upfront and obvious compared to the great sweet wines. If this criticism seems a little harsh, then this beer warrants it, for it's trying very hard, and coming very close to succeeding, in being an ageworthy, truly outstanding drink.

This brief tasting underlined that what's going on in Belgium and the US is quite different, even if the underlying principles are the same. The very best Belgian beers are drawing on decades or more of tradition to continue to create some of the world's great beers, while US brewers are experimenting, with a great deal of success, to redefine how we think about beer. Either way, these beers will change your palate forever.     

Russian River Brewery

California isn't just about wine, and the first place I visited on my trip was Russian River Brewery, on the recommendation of @drinkaddition who rates it as one of the best American craft breweries there is. The impression he gave me, though, was of a small-scale microbrewery surrounded by upscale wineries, fighting for beer in the middle of wine country. Instead, what I found was a thriving brewpub in the Sonoma town of Santa Rosa; @winebizkid and I had to wait forty minutes to get a table and it was clear everyone was in the mood for beer and not wine. 

This reflects the status of craft beer in the US at the moment. When I visited Portland, Oregon, last September, the crowds at craft breweries and brewpubs were similar: packed with young and old, men and women, all happily exploring flights of beers of intense flavours and extreme styles. American craft brewing isn't just about IPAs, but porters and stouts, wheat beers and blondes, and full-on Belgian-style sours.

In fact, so successful has Russian River Brewery been, it has had to cut back on its availability: demand was too great for it to meet and now it doesn't supply outside of the area, probably explaining why so many are flocking to the brewpub itself. They make too many beers to mention here - we tasted 18 - so I'll just focus on the most representative styles. 

an afternoon's work

IPA

A style which developed in the nineteenth century to preserve beer for long periods of travel, IPA is a dry, hoppy, and sometimes maltier beer than a classic English bitter. An American IPA is even drier and hoppier, with lots of pine nut and grapefruit aromas, with spices coming from the American hops. The two IPAs we sampled were good examples of the American style. Blind Pig IPA (6.75%) was hoppy and very aromatic, with a tangy finish. Pliny the Elder (8%) is the brewery's most popular beer and takes the IPA style to an extreme. They call it a Double IPA, meaning more malt and hops, which gives the beer a very dry finish, with strong pine aromas, and not as fruity. This is a fantastic beer, but that bitter hoppiness is intense. 

My favourite beer, perhaps because it was so English, was the Row 2/Hill 56 (5.8%), made from Simcoe hops from Yakima, Washington (where most American hops are now grown). A pale ale, rather than an IPA, it had many of the characteristics of the above IPAs - grapefruit, pine nuts, a dry, dusty finish - but the hoppiness was more subdued and balanced, making it a great drinking beer. 

Porter/Stout

The difference between porter and stout is a difficult one to distinguish. Part of the confusion comes from the difficulty in defining porter: it's an historic term which has meant different things at different times. It can be brown to dark, hoppy, malty, or neither, medium or high alcohol. If it's black, roasty, and intense, then it may as well be a stout. Stout is more carefully defined - it's a strong black beer - but it's the Irish version that we all think of - made from roasted barley to avoid taxes on malt, making it creamier and more coffee like. 

The OVL Stout (4.5%) was more in this Irish style, with its toast, smoke, roast, and coffee aromas, but its low alcohol meant it was balanced and not too overpowering. Shadow of a Doubt (9.86%), an "Imperial Porter" ("imperial" referring to a higher alcohol beer exported for the Russian monarchy), had that roast coffee flavour, but because of the high alcohol was much sweeter, with caramel and toffee. 

Belgian Style

After my last trip to the US, I wrote about the increasing popularity of "sours" - stinky, funky beers made in a similar manner to lambics in Belgium - so it's no surprise that Russian River make excellent examples in a whole range of styles. The Little White Lie (5%) was a classic Witbier, an historical style dating from the eleventh century when it was the first kind of beer to be hopped. Now, however, the flavours in a Witbier come from spices, as well as the unmalted soft wheat used in the recipe. This Little White Lie had been spiced with bitter orange peel, coriander, and cumin, making it like a creamy, wheaty gin and as ideal for a warm, summer's afternoon.

The rest of the complex range of Belgian-style beers all have similar hard-hitting religious names - Perdition, Damnation, Defenestration, Rejection, Salvation, Sanctification, Supplication, and Consecration. We tasted all of these, but here are my favourites: Salvation (8.75%) is a strong dark ale, with malt, roast, smoke, spice, and lots of complexity, a long, drying finish lingering on to plum flavours. Sanctification (6.75%) is brewed with a long, cool fermentation, using only the funky Brettanomyces yeast. Those stinky aromas were well in balance, with sour citrus flavours. The final two beers were full-on, complex, and mature. Supplication (7%) is aged for 12-15 months in old Pinot Noir barrels alongside sour cherries; the long ageing allows different yeasts - Brettanomyces, Lactobacillus, and Pediococcus (the latter two yeasts really contribute to any stinky, old-sock aromas in a beer) - to develop. The last and most complex beer of the extensive line-up was Consecration (10%), aged for 4-8 months in Cabernet Sauvignon barrels, with the same putrid yeasts. Whereas the Pinot Noir flavours in the Supplication were masked by the sour cherries, the Cabernet aromas were apparent - tobacco, cedar, spice, and dried fruits (the beer had been aged with currants in the barrels).

While waiting for our table, I popped into the nearby Barnes & Noble and purchased a copy of Tasting Beer: An Insider's Guide to the World's Greatest Drink by Randy Mosher (real name, I can only assume). Perusing this book while tasting 18 beers in a range of styles traditionally made all over Europe and the USA was education brought to life. Going to beer school on a Saturday afternoon is a lot less like detention and more like a whole lot of fun.

The funk's in the stink

The man behind the beermoth counter looked at the bottle, looked back at me, and asked, "You do know what this is, don't you?"

"Yes," I nodded. And I'm still buying it. 

The beer was Cantillon, made by a legendarily maverick Belgian producer whose beers are made in the lambic and geuze styles. 

Lambic and geuze (pronounced kurrs), probably the two most difficult and challenging styles of beer out there.

And I still bought it.

why?

Last September, I was in Seattle visiting @drinkaddition. My mission was to get him drinking lots of great Washington and Oregon wine with me (which you can read about here); his was to get me drinking lots of great Washington and Oregon beer with him. No problem with that I thought, until he introduced me to sours...

what?

I've been to Belgium a few times and drunk great beer there. Beers at 9% I could cope with until I fell asleep; lambic and geuze beers I just couldn't. These are beers that are fermented for several months so that the beer becomes a weird wine; this prolonged fermentation encourages the monster yeast Brettanomyces (familarly known as Brett), a strain of yeast completely anathema to wine. There's no control over how the yeasts develop and the beer often ends up smelling of a diseased sewery. So, obviously, there are lots of hipster Americans making beer in this style. 

why? 

Good question. No idea. Imagine sitting down and saying, "I'm going to make a beer that smells like a diseased sewer. Because that's what the Belgians do."

Cascade Brewery in Portland, Oregon pretty much did exactly that. They make almost exclusively sour beers and it was there that, 5,000 miles from Belgium, I understood the appeal of these stinky beers. (The official term is "funky".)

Beers aged for 18 months in old Chardonnay casks; beers made to look and taste like ruby port; beers made to look like goats grazing in a field - wait, that was across the road.

This is a not a sour beer, but I was drinking one when I took the photo

These beers were, at the very least, intriguing; difficult, yes; involved, yes; memorable, yes; unique, yes; and, yes, good enough, to make me buy beers of a similar style over here in the UK, drink them, and write a blog about them. 

what?

A lambic beer is, the way I follow the story, one that has had yeast thrown from the heavens down upon it by the angels. Given how a lambic tastes, and my belief in angels' bodily humour, it's the story I'm going to keep on telling.

The point is that the development of a lambic is a random process over which the brewer has little control, apart from ingredients, acidity, and fermentation temperature.

Lambics then form the base for several drinks: Faro (brown sugar is added; this is a style even Belgian beer aficionados are sceptical about), Oude Geuze, and fruit lambics, in particular cherry and raspberry. It's these latter lambics that I've found too sweet in the past.

Geuze or Oude Geuze is a blend of lambics, where, like Champagne or blended whisky, the skill of the blender is integral to the quality of the drink, and is beer at its most extraordinary, its most aged, and its stinkiest (sorry, funkiest).

Sours - this is how Americans refer to their versions of these beers. What's the difference? Not really sure; as far as I can tell, it allows hipster Americans to claim a style of drink for their own without using confusing European terms like lambic or geuze. It also allows, however, for a huge degree of experimentation - the flight of sours I tasted at Cascade in Portland all had the stink in common, but had remarkably different, individual characteristics that came from the many different ingredients in each beer and different casks used for ageing. This New York Times article gives an overview of the increasing popularity, both with drinkers and brewers, of sours in the US.

what I tasted 

Drie Fonteinen Oude Geuze (6%; 375ml)

My tasting notes were succinct: "smelt of apples rotting in a toilet, tasted like a fresh, appley cider."

That aroma, strong to the point of violent, causes you to jerk your head back in a mixture of shock, disgust, and disbelief. And then you can't help but smell it again. Did that really smell of apples rotting in a toilet? And you smell it again, approaching the glass more delicately this time. Yes, that's really what it smelt like and those aromas are going nowhere.

So what on earth does it taste like? Dare I even taste it? And it turns out to be full of beautiful, delicate, crisp, fresh, citrus and apple flavours. How can a beer stink so much and drink so subtly?

looks harmless, is harmless, but smells of rotting apples

Stillwater Artisanal Table Beer (4.7%; 650ml; beermoth £11.55)

Much of the beer I tasted in Washington and Oregon is unavailable in the UK as far as I can tell. Besides Cascade and its sours, the brewery I would recommend checking out if you're ever in the Pacific Northwest is Deschutes, from Bend, Oregon, who also have a separate brewery in Portland. They produce an impressive range of individual and consistently high quality styles of beer. To my surprise, beermoth do stock one brewpub I visited in Portland - Rogue - though I found their well-presented beers good without being particularly exceptional. So, when in beermoth choosing some funky beers, I opted for this interesting looking bottle from South Carolina which the label says has "the light funk of Brettanomyces."

The authentic CAMRA glass aided the tasting experience

In a stinky sense, this was quite disappointing: on the nose, there was a faint citrussy lambic whiff, followed up on the palate by crisp citrus flavours, with a lightly hoppy structure. In a purely beer sense, though, this was an extremely interesting and well-executed beer: unexpectedly lager-like bubbles and colour, with a really unusually combination of light stink/funk and hops, all balanced enough to allow the citrus fruit flavours to be at the front of the taste.

£11.55 is quite a price for a bottle that's less than a litre, but for a hard-to-find artisanal beer I just about understand the price - and this beer is subtly unique. The balanced combination of hops, fruit, and funk is both refreshing and complex, and, although full of familiar flavours, not like something I've encountered before. And I have to say I'm impressed how the brewer has used the Brett to create flavour but not an overpowering stink.

Cantillon 100% Lambic Geuze (5%; 375ml; beermoth £5.65)

The grandaddy of Geuze...  

you know a beer's serious when it needs a corkscrew

The aromas of this beer are subtle and complex: like tangerines that have been left out in the warmth but haven't started to rot - no way near as aggressive as the Drie Fonteinen, but still earthy, developing into aromas of muddy potatoes lying on the ground. The smell of it alone is like the veg from a roast dinner: pumpkins, butternut squash, and potatoes, with a marmalade sauce. A sweet smell, but underpinned with a rich earthiness.

The taste is sweet, a sweetness I've previously found off-putting when trying these styles of beer, but it's balanced by earthy apple flavours. Like the Drie Fonteinen, this is reminiscent of a proper cider, even though it's not made from apples. 

In terms of complexity and depth of flavour, this is a beer that comes as close to wine as I have had - and it claims to be drinking till 2030. The label is terrible, though: the Belgians really need to get over the Manneken Pis. A little boy pissing in the air: it's just weird.

well, this Manneken Pis isn't peeing in the air...

do I want more?

@drinkaddition clearly trained me well during my trip to the Pacific Northwest, for I no longer find these styles of beers that extreme. They're an acquired taste that take some getting used to, and I still wouldn't drink them that often, but the complexity, the unpredictability, and range of styles mean that from now on I will always be keeping an eye out for them.

My old copy of The Good Beer Guide to Belgium & Holland, which is one of CAMRA's more open-minded publications, sums the crazy, unforgettable style of Geuze well and I think it applies in general to these styles of beer:

"Many of the people who have come to regard oude geuze as one of the great taste experiences of international drinking will tell you that all that kept them going through that first bottle was a sense of duty to history. At the end, they congratulated themselves on finishing their task and determined to move on. But decided on another bottle, just in case they missed something." 

Will I learn to appreciate Oude Geuze - and its New World alternatives - as one of the great taste experiences of international drinking? Well, I'm thinking about buying some more bottles...