I was able to get my hands on a pure Fantome Yeast Culture from a friend and I have been looking forward to using it as the Primary yeast strain on a blonde beer, which I finally got around to doing several months later.  I spent a long time stepping this Yeast up in a starter, using some of it for secondary on another beer, and the yeast seemed quite viable when I pitched it.  I took the grain bill from the “Wild Brews” book, which gives a recipe suggested to use when fermenting with 100% Brettanomyces yeast, and adjusted it slightly for what I had laying around Hop and Grain-wise.  I ended up with:

13# Maris Otter / 1# Acid Malt / 2# Wheat

1 oz Centennial at 90 mins / 1 oz Cascade at 10 mins

90 Minute Mash @ 148 degrees / 90 Minute Boil

Pitched 750ml of Brett slurry at 70 degrees

Very smooth brew day in all, came it at around 5.25 hours including a longer mash and boil than I usually do.  Vigorous fermentation with high Krausen at 24 hours, lots of gas being kicked out of this already.  Fermenting nicely in my kitchen next to my Mead that’s been going for about a month.

As usual I’ll try to post results as they come in.  I plan on primarying this for 2 weeks at room temp and then conditioning it a bit colder for 2 more weeks before bottling it with priming sugar and letting it age for a while.  I’m still trying to figure out what to brew next –  I’m thinking of working on my first Lager.

Drinking Holiday Beer with Mr. Beer Santa

Winter Beers aren’t really my favorite category — Winter Warmers, Christmas Beers, whatever you call them, they can be overspiced, cloying, and just plain weird when you get the wrong combination of ingredients together.  Unfortunately for me, my birthday falls in the heart of Christmas Beer season, and since birthdays are the time when you get together and make people buy you beers, I usually end up drinking a lot of them.  Fortunately for me, my friends are mostly beer geeks, and I spent my birthday at Spuyten Duyvil, not some shithole bar with no choices, so all of the christmas beers I drank that night were awesome.

The Sturdy Brewers from De Struise went for it with their Winter Beer and called it “Jesus.”  Sure, it’s actually Tsjeeses and is in Dutch, and has another meaning, but for me, it’s Jesus beer.  Like the other beers I’ve tried from De Struise, J-word presents an extremely complex package of flavor and aroma.  It pours a cloudy, thick yellowish/amber color, and smells positively heavenly as soon as you bring it to your grill.  I smelled oxidized sherry flavors, white wine and grapes, spicy, and sweetness.  Tasting it was a similar experience, with the characteristic malty Struise flavor, mixed in with ground spices and intense malt sweetness.  A bit of bitterness keeps this balanced for the most part, but it’s intense.  Worthy of the name for sure, and a hell of a way to keep warm in frozen NYC.

Fantome’s “Noel” beer is one of the few I haven’t had the chance to try that I know about, and I’m pretty sure I drank a fresh bottle, though I’m not sure.  It had a smoky, black appearance, and a smoky black taste.  A Dark Saison is a rare treat, and since Saisons are all that Fantome brews, that’s what we have.  Brewer and artisan Prignon likes to tuck special ingredients into his seasonal brews, and with this once I got lots of dry malt sweetness, the classic Fantome barnyard action, and a big hit of smokey chocolate.  Nice.  A Stout by way of Belgian Farmhouse un-Orthodoxy? Another wonderful Fantome creation and a great experience — a really wonderful bottle.

The Norweigan brewery Nøgne Ø’s Peculiar Yule rounded out the trio of Darkness that I entered into on my birthday night, and it definitely packed a hell of a wallop.  The first, second, and last thing you notice about this beer is the crazy amount of ginger on the nose and on the pallette.  Inbetween there is a rainbow of dark malt, deep fruit, and a nice hit of bitterness as well.  Normally I wouldn’t be so craazy about such a spicy beer but this really hit the spot — it was dry enough, weird enough, and drinkable enough that I could really get into it.

Spuyten Duyvil did a public service by highlighting so many excellet Winter Beers (and giving me a great reason to take a year off from drinking them), and as usual I was rewarded for trying things I “wouldn’t normally” drink.  I drank a lot of beer on my birthday night/weekend/week — more to come from the “first of 09″ selections.

Brasserie Fantome, a small brewery started in 1988 in Soy, Belgium by Dany Prignon is in many ways the quintessential Belgian “farmhouse” brewery.  Fantome produces a variety of beers, all of which can be safely classified as “Saisons.”  What a Saison is, as a style, is a lengthy description better left to the experts, but essentially it’s a historical style which was created by any one of the myriad of home farmhouse breweries in Belgium in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  Farms made beer to sustain themselves and workers who would come to work on their farms, as beer was a safer (and clearly more delicious) alternative to drinking water for hydration and health.  Saison was typically a low ABV beer, but this has changed over time.  As farms faded away, breweries consolidated, and the tastes for beer became more mainstream, Saison as a style became more rarefied.  Today it means any number of things, and Fantome does everything it can to blur these definitions.

I’ve recently been lucky enough to sample two offerings from Fantome, which produces beers that are apparently never made the same way twice, and widely vary in quality and ingredients.  The Chocolat is a Saison made with Hot Peppers and Chocolate, and pours a beautiful orange color with a quickly dissappearing head.  The “Heat” from the Peppers was all but gone by the time I got to his Chocolat, but the chocolate was present in the aftertaste of this amazingly weird beer.  Tartness is nicely balanced by a full bodied brew that goes down smooth and continuously changes as this beer sits out.  Stinky and I shared a bottle of this while we were camping and I was amazed at the different notes that come out of this beer as it warms up — everything from cheese, chocolate, sweetness from the malt, to a touch of bitterness from the hops comes at you when you sniff, which I did quite a lot.  The flavors are the same, mysterious, beguiling, but very pleasurable.  A hard to describe beer that is very worth grabbing if it crosses your path.

The Brise-BonBons (or “Ball Breaker”) is an apparent message to the “Tough” people of the world who insist on breaking balls, talking shit, and not doing anything about it.  Farm from an empty threat, this beer, which I sampled on tap at Spuyten Duyvil in Brooklyn, is quite a statement.  Supposedly “hoppier” than Fantome’s other offerings, this beer still lacks much bitter bite, but presents a fuller and more clear approach to the sour Saison style.  Funky all the way through, but crisp and full-bodied, the Brise-BonBons suffers from none of the “Light Struck” qualities that Fantome’s beers often possess, packaged as they are in green bottles.  Because there was no skunk to be found, the full range of flavors shines through, which I am currently at a complete loss to describe.  So don’t worry, or listen to my descriptions anyway, just track the beers down, and pretend you’re in the Belgian countryside.  It’s windswept and idyllic, and you’re tipsy on true artisinal beer.  What more could you ask for?