Hoppy Halloween! Sudsy Samhain! Festive Fall! Merry Malting!

Losing leaves are the nakeding trees. Seasonal yeastwork. Plants’ vascular adapting and converting like sugars during fermentation. Fractal trees and complex flavors. Beer and rain begin to simultaneously increase on the gravities in which they pour. Boos and brews and cloud formations sometimes replaced by just one giant cloud. Dark mornings, darker nights increase. It can be harder to get warmed. But it is welcoming to be near a heat source. Perhaps soon looking forth to the next solstice bringing light back. Spicy seasonals, Oktoberfests, gourd brews, other fruit beers, doppels, dunkels, hearty browns, ambers, and even barleywines. Beware of ghouls and stale piwo. The light will return just as the longer warmer days, but now is the entrance to darker, bolder, and more assertive times. Enjoy the long spells of grey, contracted daylight hours, and even snowfall could conjur the need for items something spicy and robust. Enjoy the life of colorfully distinct seasons in Beervana. The changes we certainly welcomed and find necessary and most importantly, an undeniable excuse to brew, drink, and demand different kinds of beer.

The interest for microbreweries and flavours from our terroir Québecois is still growing. Sunshine and mild temperatures have attracted a crowd of 65 000 visitors (2008 data) to the 8th edition of the unique Chambly Flavours Festival, an event which every beer lover should attend. I do not remember exactly, but I’m quite sure that I’ve attended every edition of this festival.

Deschutes Brewery sent out their most recent Bitter Truth Newsletter this month.  It is an informative, colorful, and well-designed update of many of their happenings around Bend and Portland.  It also lists several newly released and soon to be released beers of interest.  Among these are the Luckiest Lager, a German style lager with a bountiful supply of hops , the Old Samhain (Sah-win) Halloween nitro brew, six different fresh hop beers, and the Big Red Double Cinder Cone barleywine.  Perhaps, the most intriguing new offering to soon be released is a Wild Plum Stout brewed with sour wort and tart plums.  Mmm.  If the puckeringly sweet flavor of the Dissident Oud Bruin was any indication of how well Deschutes does sours, then this could be nothing short of spectacular.

I phoned Deschutes’ brewmaster Larry Sidor at the brewery in Bend this morning to find out more.  Sidor informed me that the Wild Plum Stout will be release soon and will be a pub only brew.  “We made about twelve and a half barrels of it” said Sidor.  “The plums are from our refrigeration mechanic.   He grew them in his yard and we felt it was something we should work on.”  So, about 20-25 pounds of plums were handpicked and run through a wine grape crusher.  The hand-cranked quarter-inch press extracted the sugar and tart qualities from the fresh fruit.  “(The stout) has a sour wort with a Lactobacillus culture in it.  We put about two or three gallons into the mash.”  So how did it come out?  Said Sidor: “When I tasted it, it was pretty darn tart.”

Larry Sidor Deschutes brewmaster

Rogue Brewers

Rogue Ales’ Dry-hopped Saint Rogue Red claimed the title of America’s best red ale, leading a three-medal finish for Rogue at the 27th Great American Beer Festival in Denver, Colo.

Dry-hopped Saint Rogue Red, first brewed in 1989 for famous Seattle ale-house Latona Pub, won the gold medal in the American-style Amber/Red Ale category, topping a field of 65 entries. Rogue’s American Amber won the bronze medal in the same category.