Brewers get extreme as they create new beers

Brewers get extreme as they create new beers By Jeremiah McWilliams ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

Dan Kopman, chief operating officer at St. Louis Brewery Inc., likes to go to beeradvocate.com, a website for beer geeks, to keep his finger on the pulse of the market.

One time, he checked the comments directed at his brewery's Schlafly Export IPA. The English-style India Pale Ale is made with extra hops and packs 60 percent more alcohol per bottle than Budweiser. In other words, it's not for the faint of heart, or belly.

But it's hard to push the envelope when the range of brewing creativity and boldness keeps expanding. Some beer enthusiasts didn't raise a digital eyebrow, labeling the IPA a nice "session beer" — a tame brew, fit for drinking several in a session. Yawn.

"I'm thinking, where is this ­going?" Kopman said of beer drinkers' changing tastes and expectations.

One place is the domain of "extreme beer." Like genius, extreme beers defy easy classification, but you know them when you see them: barley wines ranging above 10 percent alcohol by volume, ultra-hopped ales and wood-aged beers — the traditional turf of wine and whiskey. Although "extreme" beers often have been linked to strong alcohol content, brewers say the label also applies to offbeat ingredients and zany brewing and aging processes.

Extreme beers can raise credibility and boost a little brewery's cachet among serious craft beer drinkers, those hard-to-impress folks who can casually discuss a brew's "balance," "gravity" and "hoppiness." But to see the beers as sales-boosters would miss the main point, brewers say. Mostly, the creative beers are just fun to make, offering the chance to heed their creative Muse.

"Brewers are really brewing for their own palates," said Sam Calagione, founder of the Delaware-based Dogfish Head brewery and one of the godfathers of the extreme beer niche. "We're brewers first and business people second." MULTIMEDIA REPORT Extreme beers TALK: Have you gone extreme?

Ah, but neglect not the business proposition of attention-grabbing beers. Brewers say the growing extreme beer niche is enticing consumers beyond beer geeks — like wine connoisseurs able to discern nuanced flavors such as port and tobacco in a barrel-aged beer.

"It's really encouraging because beer has suffered from this reputation as a simple beverage," said Calagione. "Beer deserves its place at the white-tablecloth dinner."

BLUEBERRIES

and Jim Beam

St. Louis is not known for its extreme beer credentials, but local brewers are dabbling in the niche. Square One Brewing in Lafayette Square churns out a "Spicy Blond" Belgian-style ale spiced with lemongrass and ginger, as well as a "Belgian Tripel," clocking in at 9 percent alcohol by volume.

At St. Louis Brewery, the sales volume of what could be classified as extreme beers is "tiny," Kopman said. But the company, which typically ships its beer within a 300-mile radius of St. Louis, sniffs a wider market for some of the strongest beers in its collection. The brewery will start sending the "Schlafly Reserve" series — in oak barrel-aged barleywine and bourbon barrel-aged imperial stout, packing more than 10 percent alcohol by volume — to distributors at far-flung beer festivals.

The company also plans to expand its line of bottled-conditioned beers beyond its current "Bière de Garde," marketed as a French farmhouse-style ale. The beer gets a secondary fermentation as it sits at cellar temperatures inside 750-milliliter Champagne bottles, ending up with 7.5 percent alcohol by volume.

By the end of the year, the company plans to sell "tripel" and "quadrupel" bottle-conditioned beers, at about 9 percent and 12 percent alcohol, respectively.

Schlafly brewers are mulling ways to create different flavors in barrel-aged imperial stout, based on the Jim Beam liquor barrels' differing amounts of "toasting."

When the barrels were first made, they were "toasted" over a fire, darkening the barrel and caramelizing sugars still left in the wood. The darker the barrel, the more oaky and vanilla-like flavor is created in the beer, Kopman described. The barrels came from Jim Beam's distillery in Clermount, Ky.

"Obviously, there's a lot of interest in all this," Kopman said. "We're going to try some things and make it really interesting for the consumer."

O'Fallon Brewery in O'Fallon, Mo., is about to roll out oak-aged smoked porter aged in Pappy Van Winkle whiskey barrels.

"It adds a lot of the bourbon characteristics, a lot of the vanilla and charred oak flavors," said brewmaster Brian Owens, who scored the Pappy barrels — and got around a waiting list — by calling the distiller's gift shop.

"It's just something different," he said of wood aging. "It's interesting. I happen to be a big bourbon fan."

Even St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch Cos., whose flagship Budweiser and Bud Light are 5 percent and 4.2 percent alcohol by volume, respectively, tested the upper range of its brewing spectrum last month, announcing it was selling a blueberry-flavored lager nationwide.

Wild Blue, 8 percent alcohol by volume, is "not suited for timid or reserved beer drinkers," the country's biggest brewer advised in a news release.

"It lives in a much different world than most of the beers we deal with," said Pat McGauley, vice president, innovation at A-B's domestic beer subsidiary. Wild Blue helps A-B match its offerings to each drinker's particular mood, he said: Wild Blue might be ideal for drinkers in a small-group setting who want to savor one or two beers.

NOT JUST ALCOHOL

Out in Escondido, Calif., Stone Brewing Co. has carved out a reputation for bold beers. It churns out brews called Double Bastard and Vertical Epic, made with higher alcohol — "big," in brewing parlance — partly because they are meant to age longer than standard beers.

But Stone Brewing also tries to make beers with a lot of flavor — not necessarily the high-alcohol beers that traditionally have had a specialized following, said Mitch Steele, head brewer and production manager. He points out the brewery's amber ale, a dry-hopped brew with a pronounced bitter hop taste. Dry-hopping is the process of adding hops to fermenting or aging beer.

Similarly, John Bryant argues that the understanding of "extreme beer" shouldn't focus only on alcohol content.

"I'd equate extreme beer with extreme creativity," said Bryant, chief operating officer of Odell Brewing Co. in Fort Collins, Colo. He oversees the making of an ale brewed with whole flower hops — a somewhat rare step among brewers, many of whom use hop pellets. Odell also ages beers in roasted oak barrels, blending the brews to get nuanced flavor differences. That ability to tweak the beer's profile unleashes brewers' creative juices, said Bryant.

"It's really that artisan craftsmanship, like painting," he said. "If you asked painters to paint the same thing 50 times a day, they'll struggle to keep their head in it."

Marc Gottfried, brewmaster at Morgan Street Brewery on Laclede's Landing, has experimented with ingredients like maple syrup and pumpkin mash cooked in crock pots. His next project: a naturally purple beer brewed with a Peruvian beverage.

"That's the fun of it — chasing that kind of stuff," he said. Local brewers "all give each other props for doing crazy stuff like this. … It's all in the name of making cool beer."

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