|
One late spring day more than a year ago, members of the Oregon Brew Crew toured the Widmer Brewery. The homebrewers and the Widmers struck up a conversation about some of the obscure beer styles that are still not brewed, or are brewed very rarely, in America--styles like Belgian saisons, Bavarian Kellerbier and English milk stouts. During that discussion, no one would have imagined that the two groups would have a jointly created product on the market a year later. Nor would they have imagined, once things got rolling, how hard it would be to actually brew the beer. A Rare Union
The Widmers, who already had a plate full of projects, didn't have the time to invest in brewing the rarer styles of beer. Instead, they told the homebrewers to give it a shot. "We gave them the yeast and told them to go crazy," Rob Widmer says. Eventually, the homebrewers wanted the freedom to use a variety of yeast strains, and the initial arrangement grew. In the resulting project--now called Collaborator--the groups set up something like a beer co-op. Together, they decided which beer styles to target, and then the homebrewers went out and brewed the beer with ingredients paid for by Widmer. Once a number of sample brews were ready, members of the Brew Crew and Widmer Brewing got together and tasted them, selecting one recipe to be brewed at Widmer's 10-barrel Rose Quarter facility. Finally, a third partner--Maletis Beverage (Widmer's distributor)--signed on to deliver the beer to Portland pubs. Milk stout was the first style targeted, and the process went without a hitch until it came time to take the winning homebrew recipe and brew it in a large, professional brewery. That beer came from a batch brewed by Jeff Brinlee, Ken Bietschek and Jeff Langley, a variation on a 2-year-old porter recipe. Made with high percentages of oats and wheat, not to mention the addition of lactose--the "milk" in the name--the recipe was unique by any standard. It was so unique, in fact, that it caused the brewers at Widmer to blanch. "They weren't used to brewing anything like that," Brinlee says. Moreover, the partnership also exposed some of the problems associated with taking a homebrew recipe and making it in a commercial facility. In order to get the recipe right, the Widmer brewers had to tinker with the balance among the ingredients, increasing some ingredients, decreasing others. In the case of the milk stout, getting the right amount of lactose was especially problematic. Finally, thinking they had the recipe in shape, the Widmers introduced the beer at their Rose Quarter brewery back in March. It had taken so long for the milk stout to get underway that the second style, an English brown ale, was also ready. Both were sampled, and though no one complained about the brown, the milk stout didn't satisfy the homebrewers. As they went back to the drawing board once more, tensions were high. "It got to the point where they were worried about the whole project," Brinlee says. Fortunately for all, it only took a short while before the brewery had two more test batches for tasting and comparison, and one of these was selected as the final version. While Brinlee describes it as sweeter and lacking some of the chocolate notes of the original, in the end everyone was satisfied. At long last, the milk stout is done
After months of effort, Collaborator Milk Stout is now available. Although it wasn't intended to be released this late in the year, summer may best serve to showcase the strengths of the milk stout. On a hot summer day, the idea of stout may be anathema to some--pilsners and pale ales being the undisputed champs of the season--but Collaborator's version is surprisingly light and quaffable. All the oats and wheat give the beer its sweetness, creamy mouthfeel and frothy head, and because many of the ingredients don't convert during fermentation, it's relatively low in alcohol. As the number of pubs carrying Collaborator mushrooms (at last count, the figure was up to 24), it appears that the project will continue along at full steam. The English brown is waiting in the wings for release sometime in the fall, and homebrewers are at work on the next style now. Given the difficulty everyone had in producing this lone beer, it's likely that other breweries won't be quick to recruit homebrewers for their own R&D. On the other hand, now that the troubles are behind Collaborator, we can expect to see more good beer, and rare styles, in the future. |
|
