Experimental & Speciality Beers

by Michael Donaldson

Modern craft beer can sometimes feel like a parody of itself – like when a brewery creates a beer with yeast found in the brewer’s beard, or in the lint from his bellybutton. Both of these are sadly true and there are other “ingredients” that have gone into beer that are not worth mentioning here.

These gimmicks can lead some people to think the worst when they hear the word “experimental” or “speciality” but the truth of it is – like many things in life – a bit more mundane.

Truly experimental beer can be as simple as using a new strain of hops – or using New Zealand-grown hops in an American Pale Ale. Or aging a beer in a sauvignon blanc barrel. Or adding a vanilla pod to the fermenter.

We all know the phrase: necessity is the mother of invention. Well, it turns out one of New Zealand’s best loved IPAs was created through desperate experimental measures to fix a problem with a brew.

Back in 2012, the founders of Parrotdog, Matt Kristofski, Matt Warner and Matt Stevens, had created a homebrew beer they thought could work as a commercial release. They took the recipe to Mike’s Brewery in Taranaki to get it made as 1200 litre batch to sell at Beervana.

The problem with scaling up a home brew recipe is that it’s not a linear equation – the efficiency of the brew house at Mike’s meant the fledgling Parrotdog beer turned out too bitter. But the young Parrotdog crew had invested their small parcel of life-savings in the brew and against the advice to “dump it” they tried to save it by adding a bunch of Nelson Sauvin hops to the fermentor. This hop – used in this fashion –  creates a perception of sweetness and the beer was drinkable enough to release at Beervana.

As Kristofski explains: “It was originally going to be called Parrot Dog IPA but we had Beervana coming and you had to register a name so we thought `what’s a really stupid name we can put on it to and try to recover some money we’d spent’ and have another punt at it.”

Stevens adds: “The whole brew was a bitch – in scaling up the recipe to 1200 litres we got much better hop utilisation and much more bitterness.”

It was a bitch of brew. A bitter brew. So Parrotdog Bitterbitch was born, and with it a brewery as the beer won the people’s choice award at Beervana and created a cult vibe around the young brewery. Today Bitterbitch is a much more refined beer but it remains one born of experimentation.

New Zealanders have always been innovative with beer – though for a period in the middle of last century our innovation centred on finding ways to make as much beer as cheaply as possible – but it’s long been accepted that the idea of adding oysters to beer was a Kiwi concoction from around 100 years ago. Nowadays oyster stouts are going through a revival as are variations on the theme with clams and crayfish (and dried fish!) added to wort (raw beer) during the boiling process to create a briny edge. Check out Bach Brewing’s Crayporter – made with actual crayfish – and enjoy the salted chocolate flavour profile.

Kiwi brewers Yeastie Boys are renowned for their innovation and experimentation with many of their beers unclassifiable in traditional judging competitions because they break style boundaries. They came up with New Zealand’s first hoppy porter – Pot Kettle Black – as well as the world’s first beer made with 100% peat-smoked malt – creating a Rex Attitude, a love-hate beer that tastes like a whisky. But my favourite deviation from the norm is their Gunnamatta IPA – made with the addition of Earl Grey tea. The idea came about as an antidote to coffee being used in stouts. Yeastie Boys brewer Stu McKinlay decided to add Earl Grey to an IPA and the effect is dazzling. Yeastie Boys Gunnamatta has all the qualities of an IPA but layered on top of that is a tannic, orange blossom, tea flavour that enhances the beer and transports the drinker to a different place.

IPA is one style of beer that brewers are always playing with – there’s even been coffee IPAs, which are kind of hard to handle as they can be quite bitter. But we’ve had fruit IPA, cloudy IPA, Black IPA … the list goes on (cross reference back to IPA blog?)

Of late, there’s been an emerging style known as Brut IPA. As the name suggests this is an extremely “dry” IPA – it has an extremely light, delicate body but still packs in a heap of hop flavour. The effect – best exemplified by Urbanaut’s Copacabana Brut IPA – is created with the addition of an enzyme post-fermentation. This enzyme gobbles up any residual sugar in the beer to create a body that’s not far removed from water. Getting the balance right in these beers is a real art.

Other modern experimental beers start life with brewers trying to reimagine an old style beer. Take Gose for example – a salted beer that almost went extinct after World War Two.

If you’re of the right age you may remember your grandfather (or grandmother) putting salt in his or her beer.

Salting beer wasn’t an uncommon practice in the early part of last century – between the wars. There’s no definitive reason why people added salt to their beer but there are theories. The most popular is that salt crystals act as a nucleation site for carbon dioxide. The dissolved CO2 hits the salt and is released as foam. This takes the CO2 out of solution and you don’t get bloated and gassy. (As an aside, if you do get bloated when drinking, pour the beer into a glass with a vigorous action to get the CO2 out … drinking from the bottle will quickly fill you with gas).

Other theories for salting beer include reducing bitterness, adding mouthfeel and enhancing flavour – possibly the beers of 100 years needed this. Others think the practice can be related to hard manual work and the idea salt prevents cramping if you sweat a lot (sodium, along with potassium, does play a key role in muscle contractions).

There’s also the cultural practice in Mexico where lime and salt were traditionally added to the rim of a beer glass – which is probably where the lime in the neck of a Corona comes from. Finally, perhaps people acquired a taste for salty beers because breweries or publicans would add salt to beer to make people thirsty so they’d drink more. When the practice was outlawed drinkers had acquired a taste for a salty beer.

There’s one place where adding salt to beer is celebrated – Leipzig, Germany. The beer is known as gose (pronounced go-zah). It originated in the town of Goslar, beside the Gose river, more than 1000 years ago but became huge in neighbouring Leipzig in the late 1700s.

Production of gose almost stopped during World War Two and the cleaving of Germany into east and west was almost the death knell for the style as Leipzig was in the east and the beer didn’t go far from the one brewery which kept alive the style from 1949 thanks to a family recipe. The fall of the Berlin wall and the curiosity of modern brewers brought gose back to life.  The beer, brewed with salt, coriander and lactic acid on a wheat base, is being reinvented across the world, with some stunning outcomes. A great example is Deep Creek’s Gose.

In a similar vein to gose, another old style out of Europe is being reimagined exceptionally well in New Zealand – it’s known as Saison, which means season.

Saison historically was a bit of mongrel beer – whatever ingredients (malt and hops) were available at the end of the harvest were thrown together to make a beer that was stored over the cooler months and then drunk during the next summer – think of it as beer made with leftovers.

Typically, it was a slightly tart, refreshing style as it was designed to be drunk after a long day in the fields. One of the best Kiwi interpretations of this style is Sparks Prospector Farmhouse Ale. As we move into spring this is a brilliant beer to try for the first time – an aroma of hay and honey is followed with a tropical fruit note from the Kiwi hops and it finishes dry and zesty.