On Saturday, July 17, I attended the noon session of the 18th Annual Vermont Brewers Festival, at Waterfront Park in Burlington, Vermont. The numbers go like this: 39 breweries present, of which 19 were from Vermont alone, 188 (at least) different brews to taste, 10,000 people expected to attend the three sessions over two days. So much more than numbers, however.

I barely got tickets – I was reminded Tuesday night by my son that tickets were likely to sell out in advance, so I got online and checked – panic! – the website said they were already sold out for the noon session! I emailed several people, including the festival organizer herself, hoping someone could point me towards a couple of tasting tickets and a designated driver entry. While my homebrewer friends searched, I found out from the festival folks that the website had a bug, and that the session was not, in fact, quite sold out, although there were no DD tickets left. I grabbed two tickets quickly and decided to worry about the DD at the gate.

photo by Rick Scully

Saturday came, my wife and I picked up our friend RickMy neighbor, my colleague, my webmaster, my friend, my house-husbanding yard stick. at a mutually arranged parking lot and off we went. Arriving in Burlington, we got in line (with a couple thousand kindred spirits) and waited for the opening. When we got to the gate, after about 20 minutes in line, there were, in fact, no DD tickets available at all. My poor wife was forced to go kill 4 hours shopping instead, while RickMy neighbor, my colleague, my webmaster, my friend, my house-husbanding yard stick. and I talked to brewers, tasted beers, and generally enjoyed a beautiful sunny July afternoon. Enjoy we did. For $25, we got a 3 oz. glass and 15 beer tickets. We decided early on to choose different things from each brewery and swap so as to double our potential tastings. Over the next three and a half hours, I managed to taste 23 different beers from 15 breweries. Some were quite memorable, others not so much, but I can honestly say that I did not spit any out or dump any on the ground. I took hasty notes on each beer, thinking that some day I might want to develop recipes to clone them.

Among the highlights of the day were conversations with the brewer at Pioneer Brewing (Fiskdale, MA) who claimed to have used my book as a resource; with Patrick Dakin, brewer at Jasper Murdock’s Ale House (Norwich, VT), our nearest neighbor brewery; and a conversation, in French, with a guy from Brasserie Benelux of Montreal who was pleased that I ordered a beer correctly… Along the way, we ran into almost 40 of our regular customers from the Market, a few friends and neighbors, a few other old acquaintances from my old Seven Barrel and judging days, and got to hang out with my son and his girlfriend and a couple of their friends… All in all, an outstanding festival and a great afternoon.Turns out the evening session on Saturday was shortened due to dangerous thunderstorms, forcing people to leave with unused tasting tickets and some real frustration. We were glad we went to the early session, of course! Hope the organizers are thinking about a way to refund or otherwise make it up to those who missed out…

A list, then, of beers I tasted (as best I can remember) with a quick 1-5 scale rating:

Three Needs – Scotch Ale (3/5)

Pioneer Brewing – Industrial Pale Ale (4/5)

Brooklyn Brewing – Blast (Stong IPA) 4/5   &    Local 1 (Belgian Strong Golden) 3/5

Beau’s All Natural – “Grolsch” style lager 4/5

Perfect Pear – Porter 3/5  &  IPA 3/5

Harpoon - 100 Barrel Series “Landbier” (Vienna Lager) 2/5

Alchemist – Ball & Chain IPA 4/5  &  Your Mother Pilsner 5/5

Jasper Murdock’s – Fuggle Pale Ale 4/5   &  Dark Humour (Black Witbier) 4/5

Northshire Brewery – Battenkill Ale (brown ale) 2/5

Benelux – Ergot (Triple Rye Saison) 4/5  &  Strato (Black IPA) 5/5

Dieu Du Ciel – Aphrodite (Vanilla/cocoa stout) 5/5  &  Pionnière (black IPA) 5/5

Bobcat Café – Pocock Pilsner 4/5

Zero Gravity – Macerator Dopplebock 3/5  &  Solstice Gruit 3/5

Peak Organic – Espresso Amber Ale 3/5

Le Trou Du Diable – La Buteuse (Abbey Tripel) 4/5  &  La Penurie (IPA) 3/5

Naturally, there were many many more beers we would have liked to try, but a 4 hour session with 3000 people in line

photo by Rick Scully

doesn’t allow unlimited access. I noted the ones I missed and we are beginning to plan a couple road trips to make up for our gaps. If I had to pick a top three (of what I tasted) I would have to say, for now, that my favorite beers (not necessarily in this order) were:

Your Mother Pilsner from the Alchemist

Strato Black IPA from Benelux

Aphrodite Stout from Dieu du Ciel

So, did you go to the Fest? What were your favorites? The dialogue begins here…

The idea of cloning a beer dates back to the earliest days of home brewing. I mean, ever since it’s been possible to brew your own beer at home, we have done so at least in part to try to replicate something we tried and liked that someone else brewed. The late Dave Line, a British beer writer of the 1970’s, is the guy I credit with the most influential pioneering work on the subject, simply called “Brewing Beers Like Those You Buy” (1978 Argus Books). Line researched and developed recipes for over 100 different beers from around the world (primarily British, to be honest, but..) and fostered the idea that a home brewer could not only save money by making his or her own at home, but could also make it as well as, if not better than, the big breweries… Dangerous concept!

I began writing for Brew Your Own a few months after the magazine’s inception in 1995. The original editor, Craig Bystrinski, was a college classmate of mine, and I signed on to do the occasional feature article and a monthly column, eventually titled “The Replicator”. Each month I offered a recipe for reproducing a personal or a reader’s favorite beer. The column grew out of an early feature which we called “Clone Your Own”, replete with pictures of Dolly the Sheep… In 1998, Storey Books brought out Mark & Tess Szamatulski’s Clonebrews, and I was asked to do the follow-up, North American Clonebrews, which came out in 2000. I will devote a post some other time to the method I use for cloning a beer, but I wanted to get the history out of the way before launching into the recipe for the beer I brewed yesterday.

My good friend RickMy neighbor, my colleague, my webmaster, my friend, my house-husbanding yard stick. (aka the Webmaster) and his wife Sarah went up to Montreal a few months back and while there hit a brewpub called “Dieu Du Ciel”, “God In Heaven” – a vaguely Belgian inspired place, with a nice variety of beers, cool atmosphere, etc… and they also bottle. RickMy neighbor, my colleague, my webmaster, my friend, my house-husbanding yard stick. tasted and apparently fell in love with one of their beers, and brought a bottle back to me to see if I could help him brew it. The beer was called “Péché Mortel”, “Mortal Sin”, and it was/is delicious. A big Imperial Stout, about 9.5% abv, brewed with coffee. Rich, dark, dangerously smooth, a wow of a beer. So naturally I set out to devise a recipe. I brew all-grain, so my recipe is not extract-based. RickMy neighbor, my colleague, my webmaster, my friend, my house-husbanding yard stick. is gently being nudged in that direction, but still brews mostly with extracts and some steeping grains. I had to work out an equivalent recipe for him. So what follows are two different versions of the same beer. RickMy neighbor, my colleague, my webmaster, my friend, my house-husbanding yard stick. brewed his last week, I brewed mine yesterday, they’ll both be ready about the same time (in June or July?) and we look forward to tracking down a bottle of “the real thing” and opening ours and comparing.

Mortal Sin
5 gallons, all-grain

Ingredients:

• 12 lbs. Maris Otter 2-row pale malt
• 1 lb. torrefied wheat
• 1/2 lb. chocolate malt
• 1/2 lb. roasted barley
• 1 lb. dark crystal malt (120°L)
• 1/2 lb. coarsely ground French roast coffee beans
• 21.2 IBU’s Northern Brewer hop pellets (2 oz. @10.6% aa)
• 12.5 IBU’s Galena hop pellets (1 oz. @12.5% aa)
• 5.1 IBU’s Tettnang hop pellets (1 oz. @5.1% aa)
• 3 cups Dieu Du Ciel yeast slurry (recultured)
• 2/3 cup dry malt extract for priming
• 3 tbsp. dark roast instant coffee

The night before brewing, crush grains. On brew day, heat 18 quarts water to 165°F, mash in grains and coffee, hold 90 minutes @153°F. Heat another 14 quarts to 170°F. Begin runoff, spargeProcess of rinsing mashed grains., collecting approximately 26 – 28 quarts of sweet wort.

Bring to a boil and add the Northern Brewer hops. Boil 30 minutes, add the Galena hops. Boil another 25 minutes, add the Tettnang hops. After 5 more minutes (60 total), turn off heat.

Chill the wort to 80 – 85°F, take a hydrometer reading, pour with some splashing into your sanitized primary fermenter. Pitch the yeast slurry, seal up and ferment at 65 – 68°F for 2 weeks or until bubbling in the airlock slows down to once or twice a minute. Rack to secondary and prepare to be patient. Age at 50° – 55°F for 6 weeks or so (check to make sure your airlock doesn’t dry out at any point!). Bottle, priming with the DME and adding the instant coffee at the same time. Bottle condition for at least a month; longer is better.

OG: 1086 – 90
target TG: 1018 – 22
expected abv: 8.5 – 9%
IBU’s: 125 (not really – see note)

Note on hops: the hop utilization factors I use (see earlier post) are calibrated for worts with an OG around 1050. In higher gravity worts like this one, hop utilization diminshes by as much as 20%. This beer probably ends up with more like 100 IBU’s, but it’s a very complicated calculation and not really all that important!

Note on yeast: Hopefully, one of the keys to getting this one “right” is  the yeast. I saved the dregs from the bottle RickMy neighbor, my colleague, my webmaster, my friend, my house-husbanding yard stick. gave me (it is a bottle-conditioned beer), and gradually over a couple weeks fed the yeast and built up a culture big enough to brew with. I brewed a 2-gallon amber ale just to further grow the yeast colony, then put it aside. I will post about yeast-saving and reculturing at a later date… Anyway, I built up enough of a slurry that I could divide it and give RickMy neighbor, my colleague, my webmaster, my friend, my house-husbanding yard stick. some to use, and I also used it yesterday. If you want to brew this beer and can’t get the DDC yeast, you can probably get close enough results with any fruity Belgian ale yeast, or even an Irish yeast, in a pinch.

Extract-based version:
Instead of mashing the 12 lbs. of pale malt, start by steeping 1/2 lb. each malted wheat, cara-pils, chocolate malt and roasted barley, all crushed, and the crushed coffee beans, in 3 gallons of water. Use a mesh bag to hold the grains for easier removal later. Raise the heat gradually to 165 – 170°F, cover, turn off the heat and hold for 30 minutes. Remove the grains and coffee, turn the heat back on. Bring to a boil, and add either 10 lbs. amber dry malt extract or 12.5 lbs. amber malt extract syrup. This is a lot of extract for 3 gallons of water, so be careful to stir it in and not let it stick/burn on the bottom of the kettle. When it comes back to a boil, add the hops as in the all-grain recipe. After the hop and boiling schedule, chill and add to your sanitized primary fermenter along with enough chilled pre-boiled water to make a little over 5 gallons. Mix gently and take a hydrometer reading. At 80 – 85°F, pitch the yeast, seal, ferment and condition as above.