BEAR-ly Getting Started 15.1 - Maifest Lager

In this series, entitled Let's Talk Lagers: Jack's Abby Edition, Jason and Craig explore the story behind one of America's premier craft lager breweries while diving into the traditional German Maibock style. Learn about decoction mashing, natural carbonation, and what makes this spring seasonal lager so crisp, balanced, and food-friendly as the series kicks off with a toast to classic brewing techniques.

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Intro: The Buffalo Brews Podcast.

Jason: Let's Talk Lagers. Jack Abbey. Edition. Jack's. Abbey edition. Jack's. Abby.

Craig: Yeah. I used to think it was Abby. Like Abby. Al. But I believe there's a person named Abby potentially married to Jack. So it's Jack's Abby.

Jason: That's a and there's a there's an apostrophe in there. So it's his Abby.

Craig: Yeah, yeah, it's it's his Abby.

Jason: And by that, we're meeting Jack Hendler. And so the the brothers. Jack. Eric. Sam. Brothers. Right.

Craig: I believe three brothers. Framingham, Massachusetts. The Hendler family owns quite a few brands now and has grown. And when I was grabbing lagers off the shelf, I noticed they had quite an array from Jack's Abby. Some are collaborative brews, but I was like, you know what? I've got four styles I'm not sure we've done. Or at least there's variants of the styles that we haven't done before and make good episode and we can shed some light on Jack's. Abby. There's a really wonderful woman that represents their brand of their portfolio of brands. And Emily, I do a couple events with her and sometimes things just speak to you on the shelf. And when I saw four and they were all lagers, and rightfully so, because Jack's Abby focuses on lagers, they basically are craft lager brewery, and they also focus on traditional methods from malting to how they mash, to how they even collaborate with other breweries.

Jason: And I believe that Jack's Abby was also the first lager only brewery opened in America. Uh, they might have been the first or at the time the only in twenty eleven makes sense.

Craig: Twenty eleven. That is your second real wave of the craft beer boom. You know, the eighties into the nineties, that's when home brewers were basically going into the public sphere and it was more than just come over and try this beer from my garage. Some legislation changed where they could then legally sell their beer, and they started opening up pubs and, you know, different production facilities. Probably all small at the time, but the, the ones that made it became the Goliaths that they are today. But everybody kind of rode that craft beer wave all the way until the early two thousand. So the late nineties and early two thousand, there was a crash and basically a consolidation. And then it started to rise again around twenty ten twelve. And Buffalo, we I kind of think we felt it the thirteen and fourteen. And it kept rising for about another ten years. And then we started to feel a little bit of a consolidation, and we're kind of going through that again. So it is very cyclical. So be ready for another boom in about five six years hopefully. But I could see it in twenty eleven with the rise of craft beer again, someone coming out with a strictly lager focused brewery.

Jason: Yeah. The, uh, the, the info I have on them, they it's a six zero zero zero square foot warehouse on the south side of Framingham, Massachusetts. And, uh, yeah, this is twenty eleven is what it pointed to. So a perfect time for the, the craft, the craft boom.

Craig: Beer goes back ten thousand plus years. So I'm sure there's plenty of it's always been a staple. And when we talk about a decline, we're just saying less openings than there are closures and consolidation. I'm going to segue this back to Jack's Abby, because they did acquire Night Shift Brewing, which is a very good brewery. And then they have, uh, I just looked it up, but it's it's a brewery I never heard of. I think it's just a regional brewery. The other one that I believe is in New York State Brewery and Sloop. They purchased the managing stake. So they're the majority owners of Sloop now, I believe. So all of those are kind of in this brand portfolio. And that's what happened with some of the earlier craft breweries that, hey, we're doing well. We have a great product. What ends up happening, the lesser quality brands that are out there don't stand the test of time. Right now. There's equipment for sale. Taprooms are opening up. So breweries that are doing very well can find themselves a reasonably priced taproom to kind of expand. And then unfortunately, some expand too much and then that's their demise. But people that do it properly and they have a good brand, uh, tied obviously with a great product and also good strategy and business acumen. They're the ones that stand the test of time and, and they end up acquiring. So you're seeing even in Buffalo, even, you know, a couple of years ago with CBW Community Beer Works, acquiring Thin Man Brewing Company. And they they are one umbrella now. And you'll see that with a lot of brewing companies out there. And it's basically, let's maximize our assets and optimize our brewing capabilities, keep these brands alive, maybe do a little less from each brand, keep the SKUs down, but keep the quality up. Right.

Jason: Pressure drop. Pressure drop name acquired by Ellicottville. I was just at Ellicottville over the weekend. Uh, they have, uh, dank Sinatra back there, which I'm very excited about.

Craig: On the shelf here. We just got in, I saw that, got excited myself. I delivered this past Friday. Uh, but even most recently, one of our most popular and, you know, historic, so to speak, recent history.

Jason: Original six.

Craig: Yeah. Uh, flying bison. They, uh, ended up being sold brand, not the assets, but the IP. The intellectual property was sold to Hamburg Brewing Company. So Buffalo based brewery, the first production brewery since prohibition in Buffalo that is now being brewed, manufactured and owned by Hamburg Brewing Company.

Jason: So rusty chain out of the can. Not bad at all.

Craig: Yeah. They're doing they're doing a fine job and always seeking to improve. And I know Tim Herzog is helping out. I talked to him about it when he was in here sipping a saison, and he was mentioning that he was helping out with some quality and, you know, making sure the recipes were up to snuff.

Jason: Still sporting the million dollar mustache, probably.

Craig: Yes. He is. Um, he is quintessential.

Jason: Yeah. All right. Well, let's let's talk about what what's up on deck here.

Craig: Yeah. We always we always get off on a tear when we haven't met for a while. That's great though, but we're going to start, um, because I came up with this and like I've said in previous series and seasons, I squirrel away some beers because I don't have all of these beers available on the shelf. That's one of the tough things. People hear about it. You might not see it on the shelf because some of them might be seasonals, but even if I don't have them, some of them might be somewhere else. In this case, I doubt there will be many of these left. This is a my first lager from Jack's Abby, and it's actually a part of their Best of Both Worlds series. So it's a collaboration and it's with VAR Steiner. We've done plenty of beers from VAR Steiner out of Germany. Oh yeah, so they've brewed a beer with VAR Steiner. It's a product of the USA, so brewed here and it's a manifest lager. So do you know much about Maifest lagers?

Jason: Well, I don't know a lot about my first lager, so that was going to be my first question is not knowing much about it. What can you tell us.

Craig: So let's talk.

Jason: That was not scripted by the way.

Craig: Yeah. No. Sometimes I gotta throw some, you know, I gotta throw a little little questions because you do come well prepared. Um, so Amethyst locker lager um, is basically like the opposite of Oktoberfest or it's kind of the ying to its yang. So Oktoberfest typically comes out, uh, end of September into the Oktoberfest season, which is basically the last week all the way up till the first Sunday of October. This comes out in spring. So this is the counterpart. My fest may is my is for May. So this is basically a welcoming of spring. And when I kind of squirreled these away, it was around the spring time and it was perfect to start talking with the warmer weather. We have had quite the heat wave. So about two, three weeks of, uh, temperatures that feel like the hundreds are in the high eighties, low 90s, but we are definitely cooling off today with some rain. And then the forecast looks like we're getting some nice eighty degree solid weather for the next couple of weeks, but my fist is basically a pale colored lager. Sometimes it's got elevated ABV. Typically, lagers are around the four and a half to five, five and a half percent, but you can see my lagers getting a little higher in ABV, especially if it is a Helles bock. Okay, so some of them are created like a festbier. So a quick synopsis of Festbier. Again, Festbier was a lighter, paler ale meant for sorry, lager meant for festivals and traditionally Oktoberfest time in Munich, Germany. It was a lighter color. And then they were starting to use. Oh, sorry. It originally was a murcheson style beer, so it was darker, slightly copier cop, more copper in color and is a little bit higher ABV because those beers would be stored and released in March, hence Murcheson. So it was March beer. It was brewed in March and meant to be released after the end. Basically, when you had to stop brewing. So that was the beer that they were storing. They were making sure that they had beer when they couldn't brew beer anymore. And alcohol is a preservative. So they would brew a higher ABV. So anything that's a bock is basically a higher ABV version of the base style. So there's Dunkel's Bock, which is just a basically single bock, which is a darker beer. Um, so if you hear bock during spring time, you're going to think of a slightly darker maltier beer. However, there is the Helles Bock or my bock, which we're going to try today, which is a light colored bock, but still higher ABV. There's Doppelbock, which is a double bock. Typically those are very dark, very similar to like a Belgian double or even a quad with, you know, dark raisin and very dark bread, dark bread crust kind of flavors more of a celebratory beer, liquid bread, almost. Then you have your eyes bock, which actually illegal to produce in America. It's um, distillation almost with freezing of the beer and removing the ice. So it just keeps getting higher and higher in ABV. Oh, and there's definitely a few other box out there, but those are the main ones. You know, your, your single bock, which is a multi bock, your doppelbock, your Eisbock, and then this Hellas box. So they have a little bit about the brewing process. It is pilsner malt and noble hops. So pilsner malts can be very crisp cracker clean your basic pilsner quintessential malt for slight sweetness without being overly sweet, but then balanced by those nice noble hops. A little bit of, uh, German and Czech Republic hops that have a slight nice, uh, even minty, but a little bit herbal at times, balancing that sweet malt. And then this is decoction mashed. So decoction mash is where they take a long time ago they would just take bucketfuls. You would get the mash. The mash process is when you're adding the hot water to the grains to kind of kickstart the catalyst that creates an enzymatic reaction of changing the starch and the sugars. So then we can cool it down, hop it, you know, it's hopped in the boil, dry hopped after the heat's left, and then you add the yeast. We need sugar for that yeast to ferment. Well, there's ways to do it. You can just keep the heat source going and let it get really hot and lower the temperature a little bit by removing some of the flame. Uh, the other methods, sometimes we're dropping in hot stones and those would help bring the temperature up. And that would really kind of create a Maillard reaction where it was, you know, caramelized and have these dark toffee like notes a little bit. And then decoction was, okay, let's take out big buckets of the mash, the thicker part of the mash, and we're going to bring that to a boil. Okay? The mash isn't typically boiling. It's higher temperatures, but it is not, you know, typically it's like eighty five degrees, I believe. And it depends on what type of beer you're brewing. But I think seventy to about eighty five. So to boil that mash, you're gonna get that real, real hot. Now you got a small portion of your mash being boiled. It's a higher temperature. It's creating those caramelized Maillard reaction type flavors. So it really brings out, um, some, some deeper toffee like flavors and caramel notes and toasted bread notes, you know, nothing, nothing too roasty or anything. We're not changing the color. We're just basically changing the flavor. And we are going to add that back into the mash, bring that temperature up. And they would do that a few different times to get the temperature to where they would need it to be, because there's different stages of what happens with the changes within the starches, and you want to let the beer rest at certain temperatures so that you end up creating the best possible wort for the yeast to ferment out. So decoction mashing is an old school way, and it often brings a little bit more caramel and toffee notes to summarize that long tangent.

Jason: No. That's alright. Uh, you know, there are two thoughts that came to my mind of that one you were talking about putting stones into to create those, those, some of those caramel notes. Um, I know there's a brewery in Pittsburgh called the Church Brew Works and it's an old, uh, it's an literally built into an old cathedral and they heat, they superheat meteorites that they put into some of their beers to, uh, create that caramel note in it. MM. And the moment that you said that, it just, I don't know why that just came to mind. And then I feel like we should have like, a giant dry erase board with, like, I don't know what Bill Nye is doing these days, you know, and bring him in here and talk about the science of beer and like.

Craig: Yeah, this.

Jason: Was almost.

Craig: Bill Nye or like an Alton Brown or somebody just kind of explaining because I remember hearing the Maillard effect. I think Alton Brown was the one that taught me on Good Eats. I used to really, that's one of the shows that got me really into cooking. And okay, there's lots of stuff you learn in that, that, you know, a lot of brewing is very similar to baking. So when you learn certain stuff from that world, it translates into the brewing world. And yeah, I mean, it was easier to keep a bunch of rocks hot sitting there. And then they would hold their temperature for a long period of time. So instead of burning through wood nonstop, it was like, add another rock, add another rock, keep that temperature up because you basically wanted to mash for a while. And depending on the beer, you would do a sixty minute, ninety minute mash. Um, some, you know, only thirty minutes or so depending on what the desired outcome is. Sure. So what we should be looking for with this hairless Bark My Fist lager fest beer, if you will, for the spring time coming of spring light. Very pale, golden, effervescent, the bread aromas. Very light colored bread. Maybe a hint of bread crust again, you know, kind of from that Maillard and decoction mashing process that they're using. Uh, Jack's Abbey is a very good brewery and a vast diner, one of the best in the world. So I would expect a nice, thick, tight head. Part of that's going to be how well I pour and how clean our glasses are. But, um, you know, it's our job to serve beer and store beer properly. It's the Brewers job to make it well. So I trust them to make it well and I trust myself enough. And let's do that celebratory fest. Beer. Crispy crack of the can. That was a good one.

Jason: That's a nice one.

Craig: Yeah, that's a.

Jason: And that bad boy.

Craig: Take a quick look. So not going to be as pale as like an American pale lager, but it should look like a pilsner Hellas. Look at that. Good, sir.

Jason: Is that nice?

Craig: Yeah. So Pilsner is going to always be light in color. Hellas being from the Munich.

Jason: I'm gonna hold that up to the camera there.

Craig: Because the Bavarian.

Jason: Understand the importance of a clean glass right there. That's what you're talking about.

Craig: So a little bit of cloudiness might be just from the fact that the beer is pretty cold. But, you know, you could see your fingers through the glass pretty easily. Like I said, nice little tight head, very small bubbles. You know, it looks like a nice beer. It looks like what you would expect from a lager. Very light. Now we've had, I believe, Hellas before, maybe a polymer, I can't remember.

Jason: Yeah. I got the, uh, the, uh, the lists here. I mean, if I were going back, I guess to get the most approached.

Craig: Probably always get the most approached whenever we did the other. Let's talk slugger. Yeah, the polymer pills, some of these.

Jason: two point two for the episode on that uh. VAR Steiner we did the Dunkel. So that's seven point one on that callback. Nice.

Craig: So there's some lagers Hellas in particular that are just crystal crystal clear.

Jason: Oh, Hellas. Fine.

Craig: Yes. Yeah. So I wouldn't say that this is crystal clear, but it is definitely a clear brew. It has um, slightly bridging to gold. It's between yellow and gold in my opinion, but it's, it's a golden lager. Um, and again my head's sitting there, I give it a twirl, keeping a nice little tight foam to it. Take a couple sniffs and let's not forget to cheers and then take a sniff. So smells like like nice little crusty bread, right. Nothing too crazy kind of smell. A little bit of sweetness.

Jason: A little biscuity.

Craig: A little bit of yeah, biscuits, a good word for it. So let's cheers and get to sipping. Now this is a five point nine percent beer. So slightly elevated. Usually a bock or a single bock would be around six percent. So this is a bock territory.

Jason: Nice light sweetness to that.

Craig: Yeah. That's going to be from your your pilsner malt. And then again, you know, that little bit of almost.

Jason: Like honey, you know.

Craig: That, that that's a little of that decoction. It's like it's just a little bit more sweet. You know, you've got, you know, kind of kind of like when you, when you caramelize something, it goes from sugary sweet to like a honey or even like, like, you know, you think like barbecue with like the burnt ends, you know, it's obviously a little lighter than that, but it brings on that amber hued type sugar versus simple, simple syrup and your white table sugar type flavor.

Jason: Their description is when two family owned businesses unite by love for German brewing and join forces. The result is best of both worlds. The. This manifest celebrates craftsmanship, quality, and the joy of perfectly brewed beer. Crafted in collaboration with VAR Steiner, which. Brewing since seventeen fifty three and showcases classic Pilsner malt noble hops like you said before, and a decoction mash again, what you were mentioning and honoring tradition and while brewing for today Festival with the worlds malty, crisp, perfectly balanced and hope that you raise a stein. Prost. Prost.

Craig: Well, not quite Steins. We've got three more beers to go, but, uh, yeah, this is one of those beers for festivals. And you could see yourself holding half liter to a liter of this. As it warms up slightly, that sweetness will just become a little bit more pronounced. It's not like super sweet where it doesn't. It still finishes slight dry where you want more sips of it. You don't want to drink this and be like, oh, I'm done with it. This is this is a beer meant for being outside, listening to your music, eating your sausages paired perfectly with German foods. Tons of different versus, uh, sausages and big pretzels. Your, uh, schnitzel, big old pork knuckle mustards, you name it. This this just the crisp.

Jason: What's the last time you saw somebody just gnawing on some pork knuckle?

Craig: Pork knuckle? Uh, I don't know, man. I was in Jersey, and there was this beer hall and they were selling it, and I was watching this couple go to town on it. And I really wish my wife would have gone for. I was like, what else are we going to try some pork knuckle? And, uh, I think it's a hock, ham hock or whatever it is. Yeah.

Jason: It's literally like you see it in the cartoons growing up? It's literally that ham on a bone that they just grab. It looks like a giant turkey leg.

Craig: And you know, it's it's when you think festival, you think of stuff like that. You know, when we think Renaissance fairs and things like that.

Jason: Yeah.

Craig: Uh, the other thing, I think this is naturally carbonated, which means, you know, forced carbonation is just CO2 tank. You read how much it's the volumes of CO2 that's in beer. You want it to be a certain level for the style that you're brewing for this one, probably a little higher, probably around a two point five volume two point six maybe. And long story short, you can fill that tank up with CO2, so much so that it gets into the beer and it becomes soluble within it.

Jason: Okay.

Craig: Or you do what's called canned conditioning and you put the beer in with enough. This is what a lot of home brewers are doing. Sure, they're going to bottle make sure they're still viable yeast, aka it's alive, it's still living. And then there's enough sugar in there and it's a calculated amount of sugar. Too much sugar and that bottle may go boom. Too little sugar and the yeast might not even be re-awoken to, uh, continue. You know, it's not going to really make much more alcohol. However, it'll do enough to create some CO2. You don't need much in there. So they're actually calculating how much headspace is in a bottle. In this instance. A can you know, they know that they're trying to fill the can up to, you know, it's probably within the ninety nine percent, but there's a certain amount of air still left in there, right? So they want to make sure they replace that with the CO2. If, um, you know, that's naturally created from the fermentation process and they know how much yeast to put in there based off of that, or if they need to add more sugar, where to leave the sugar content so that it also helps scrounge any of the oxygen, you know, that yeast is going to take any of that oxygen, convert it to CO2 and sugar along with the sugar, and convert it into CO2 and alcohol from the sugar that's in there. And with doing so, carbonating the beer within the can. And if it does it too much, we'll end up with a little geyser. And it does it too little. Yeah. You kind of know sometimes when it's can condition it's you grab the can. You're like, oh, there's a little too much give to this can. It's either a short pour and they just didn't fill it all the way or they miscalculated something. And it's not as carbonated as it should be. Right. And one of the best balances of beers like this, especially, you know, it's been for festivals and there aren't tons of nuanced flavor. Well, there's tons of nuanced flavors, but not, you know, adjuncts. So you're, you're just getting very little hints of hops and the little slight sweetness and that little change into like that honey caramel vibe from the decoction, like that's what you want to notice. And a part of that balance is carbonation makes it crisp, clean. If there wasn't a ton of carbonation, maybe it comes off a little too sweet. Maybe you start tasting a little that five point nine percent versus when you know, you're used to a four point five percent. So carbonation is a big aspect to a well-balanced beer. And, you know, if you like the can says we live for lagers. And if you tout yourself as a craft lager brewery, you really want to nail every aspect.

Jason: You want to be the best of the best.

Craig: Yeah. So not any, not only every ingredient, but the process. So introducing things like decoction, doing the can conditioning and the natural carbonation, you know, we're drinking beer the way. That's why it's traditional method. Hopefully this is similar to the best producers and you know, breweries doing well when Vastator is like, sure, we would love to make beer with you.

Jason: Right? Yeah. Right. Um, and, and then, uh, you know, to, to end this episode here, you know, just to, if you go back to, I mean, we got another, uh, another one that's going to be in this series here. But if you go back, their collaboration series is pretty deep of the number of places that they've worked with over the years. Um, I think they still, uh, was it, uh, there's a place in Tampa that they work pretty closely with to, um, it's one of the places that was on my Tampa list and, and now all of a sudden I didn't write it down and that's my bad. But, uh, their collaboration series is unlike other places who, you know, you could go to like an arcane and they work with, they've worked recently with Nautilus. But, um, I, I feel like that the collaborations that Jack's Abby does, you're not going to find them anywhere else. Nobody. They're not going to work with other, the place they work with don't work with other breweries as well. Yeah. I guess you would.

Craig: Say there's, there's a focus, you know, Jack's, Abby's focused on lagers and the quality of their beer. So they're going to, they're going to collaborate with other people that are focused on that.

Jason: Yeah, we want to we're going to go to yeah, these guys.

Craig: You're not going to go to somebody that's just known for their IPAs and say, you want to make a lager together, you know, because then it comes across as, all right, This is a marketing or publicity thing. Whereas when you're dedicated to a craft and you're dedicated to a certain style, a couple other breweries out there, like Schilling, they're they're very much into their lagers. And what they do almost. I think, I don't know if they only do lagers, but I think they're another one out there. And then also dovetail. I carry a lot from them. Oh yeah. They don't do just lagers. They do a nice hefeweizen. I do think they came out with a saison, but their traditional continental European brews. So people focused on the traditional brewing beer, you know, beer that tastes like beer without having to add a million and one different things to, you know, change what it is. It's make it the way it's supposed to be made, but make it as best as possible. And there's a reason these recipes have been around and these styles have been around for hundreds of years.

Jason: Perfect. I mean, this is a great start to the series. You know, we're talking about this is let's talk about lagers. This is the Jack's Abbey edition. Uh, so episode one in the books. I can't wait to. I can't wait to get to the next one because all four of these are are really great ones. Uh, so this is a great start.

Craig: Yeah. Make sure you check out the next episode because I'm not going to do it in this one. But I really didn't just talk about where the lager actually is. Right, right, right. We spent more time talking about Jack's Abby and a little bit about box, but stay tuned and I'll touch base a little bit more on what makes a beer and lager in the next episode.

Jason: There you go. You are listening to Barely Getting Started. I am Jason here with Craig. And to you, we all say cheers. Cheers.