Yes, that’s beer

It’s taken a lot to convince people that the contents of the container below does in fact contain beer. 

Folks are less tripped up by the appearance than the description. A Belgian saison spiked with 46 ounces of sauvignon blanc grape juice concentrate, yielding a beer-wine crossover known as Antithesis Saison du Vin. 

More than a year ago when I brewed my first tripel my first impression was that it tasted like cognac, so the Belgian brew + wine made sense to me. It does not seem to make sense to just about anyone else.

“What is that?” said EM with a furrowed brow when I described this concoction. My mom just sort of whistled into the phone when I explained it. Wish I knew how it actually tastes – it needs at least another month in fermentation before I’ll know.

About a year into my brew hobby/habit/problem, I’ve come across a natural tension between making flavorful beer and engaging in self-indulgent experimentation on the fringes of libation. A few months back I decided to keep things simple - a cream ale, a basic IPA, and a brown ale known by the charming moniker Caribou Slobber, all of which were widely enjoyed by friends and family who have no pretensions of beer snobbery. Thing is, what first got me into brewing was an effort to escape the watery, generic, predictable Pilsners whose most salient characteristics tend to be the color of their bottle. I’ve come to realize that the problem with these beers is not that they’re simple (the problem is that they’re crap). Nonetheless, I’m constantly being sucked toward the complex, experimental and often overdone side of brewing, perhaps in some unconscious rebuke of this polar bear and this upstanding young lady.

This one, for instance, caught my eye. Would you drink a beer fortified to the strength of wine?  Or a Belgian quad with 10 percent alcohol by volume that tastes like cherries and molasses? You may have heard of a coffee stout – what about a Turkish coffee stout flavored with cardamom? An agave Belgian wit? A beer so intensely hopped that its description includes phrases like “sorry about your tooth enamel” and “your dentist doesn’t want you to drink this”? Fortunately I’m aware that many of these brews are significantly beyond my technical capacity, and that the chances of royally screwing up something like this are never far away for a newbie like me.

My current projects are not quite that far into outer space but still a good ways from what most folks think of when they hear the word “beer.” In two weeks, I’ll bottle this Bourbon Barrel Porter, which has been sitting for nearly a month with 16 ounces of Knob Creek and 2 ounces of toasted oak (flavoring it as if it had been conditioned in a bourbon barrel). This week I made Denny’s Wry Smile, a fortified rye India Pale Ale that will probably need a good two months before it’s mellowed out enough that the alcohol content won’t embalm my intestines. And of course there’s my Sauvignon saison that’s been generating strange glances even before it’s gotten out of the carboy.

You’re forgiven if your first reaction is “Dude, can we get back to the land of the living here?” For someone who just wants a cold beverage on a hot day, this sort of thing smacks of avante-guarde pretension in much the same way that ethereal performance art and minimalist painting (think the white canvases with the single black line down the middle) makes eyeballs roll.

The true brewing narcissist would be unfazed by such reproach.

I’m not.

I’m possibly the world’s biggest lightweight and mankind’s cheapest date that ever took up homebrew, so I give away considerable quantities of each 5-gallon recipe I make. That means there needs to be someone to foist it on. Even the true alcoholics in my environs are going to start to lose interest as the experiments stray too far.

Next week I’ll start bottling the brews in fermentation, which will replace my diminishing stock but also leave me without much on the “drinkable” side of things. Much as a simple “lawnmower beer” makes my inner brew snob squirm, it’s nice to be able to offer folks something they genuinely like. That avoids the awkward unspoken exchange that goes something like God, what’s wrong with this guy, he thinks this is beer? while I think something like Pearls before swine, of course, I can’t be letting this stuff go to waste on the uninitiated.   

My split-the-difference solution comes in the form of homebrew clones of commercial beers. With a few clicks at Austin Homebrewer I can choose from kits with the malted grain, hops and yeast to make knock-offs of hundreds of different beers. I’m in the process of seeking to acquire (yes, cross-border grain shipments get complicated) a clone of Blue Moon, which is my wife’s favorite beer. This is probably going to be the first time she’ll be excited about me hijacking the kitchen for six hours. That’ll probably be followed by a copy of something from North Coast, which makes some of my favorite beers.

When I think about living the US, which someday will happen, I can see how this quandary would return. Would I really want to brew something that a person could buy down the street at their liquor store or their hip neighborhood brewer? I don’t know how I’d square that particularly circle, but for now making commercial clones in the middle of a proverbial “beer desert” will let me keep splitting the difference.