Marketing Mumbo-Jumbo, Explained (Sort Of):
So what in tarnation do we mean by "classic American styles brewed with Belgian techniques?" Well, you're forgiven if you assumed it was just some sort of gibberish spouted by our marketing department (note: we don't have a marketing department). Frankly, that's where my mind would go if I heard somebody else saying something similar. Anyway, there are kinda two answers to this question: the technical nuts-and-bolts stuff, and the reasoning behind why we chose to use the phrasing we do (also known as "it turns out marketing is harder than we'd thought"). I don't know which of these is more interesting/relevant, so I'll start with the technical stuff because that's a little more straightforward.
If you wanted to make a broad, sweeping generalization about what characterizes Belgian beer (and, in this particular case, I do), you'd say that Belgian beers tend to be dry (as opposed to sweet) and exhibit a lot of yeast character. That's way oversimplified, and there are a jillion counterexamples, but that's more or less what Americans tend to think of when they hear "Belgian beer" (by way of contrast, English beers tend to be malty, American beers tend to be hoppy, and German beers tend to be clean-tasting and balanced). So from a process standpoint, we're looking to do things that result in a highly attenuated beer (i.e. one with little residual sugar, i.e. one that's dry as opposed to sweet). The first step in this process is to create a highly fermentable wort, which is influenced by things like grist composition (we don't shy away from using things like sugar or corn, despite their (undeservedly) bad reputation) as well as mash temperature, time, and thickness (we use a thin mash at a low temperature for a long time, which encourages complete breakdown of complex sugars). Next up, we use a yeast that's very good at its job (its job is to eat a bunch of sugar and then hang out in beer without dying, not a bad gig) in order to ferment out as completely as possible. We also ferment at slightly higher than normal temperatures in order to get our yeast to produce all those delightful aromatic esters that we like so much (and many of those esters tend to fight with bitterness, so a lot of our beers are a little lower on the IBU scale).
Pretty straightforward, right? So why don't we just call ourselves a Belgian brewery and be done with it? We thought about it briefly, but there are two big sticking points there. First and foremost, we're not Belgian, so that feels a little disingenuous. While we could use "Belgian style," the problem there is that we don't brew what are generally considered to be Belgian Styles*. In fact, two of our mainstay beers (Extra Naked Premium Cream Ale and Shut Up Kelly Robust Porter) have much stronger roots in pre-prohibition American brewing, and we generally think that's an equally (if not more) important talking point.
Extra Naked illustrates my point a little better, so I'll use that as my example. Most of the recipe comes from a (now mostly defunct) style known as Classic American Pilsner (see the Poorly Remembered History Addendum for more information on this style). Much like its namesake, it's light in color and body, crisp, and a little hoppy. But a true Classic American Pilsner is supposed to be a very clean tasting (i.e. no yeast-derived flavors) lager that's been fermented cold, whereas we use a pretty expressive yeast and ferment at warmer temperatures. So what the hell do we call that? We can't use anything involving the word "pilsner," since people have strong opinions about what beers using that name should taste like, but we also can't give an accurate description of the beer because that makes us look like pretentious dweebs (trust me, by the time you get finished saying "well, it's loosely based on..." everybody has stopped listening). It sort of loosely fits into the saison/farmhouse category, but a) "saison" has similar issues to "pilsner," and 2) we don't brew on a farm. Since our yeast originated in Belgium, some of my old coworkers took to calling it "Belgian Cream," but that doesn't sit right with me for reasons I've already mentioned. For a while I took to just calling it a "cream ale," but our focus group** strongly associated that phrase with a certain green-canned beer from upstate New York, so that's out too. There is a style called "Classic American Cream Ale," but for acronym's sake we're not going to use that. Eventually we settled on "Premium Cream Ale" because the beer is in essence a cream ale, it's just, y'know, better***. It's a bit awkward, but we've yet to find a descriptor we like more (we've also toyed with, and still occasionally use, "Premium Ale" for brevity's sake; but it's an uncommon enough term that it kinda sounds like we're trying to invent our own style name, which was definitely never the goal).
That's just one example, but it's pretty representative of our whole terminology issue. It's not that we're doing anything that's vastly new and unique and different, it's just that there isn't yet a word for the specific way in which we operate (well, restaurants do similar stuff and they call it "fusion" but I'm pretty sure that if I was given a choice between calling our beer "Belgo-American Fusion" and ripping my own arm off and beating myself to death with it, I'd at least strongly consider the latter).
If you wanted to make a broad, sweeping generalization about what characterizes Belgian beer (and, in this particular case, I do), you'd say that Belgian beers tend to be dry (as opposed to sweet) and exhibit a lot of yeast character. That's way oversimplified, and there are a jillion counterexamples, but that's more or less what Americans tend to think of when they hear "Belgian beer" (by way of contrast, English beers tend to be malty, American beers tend to be hoppy, and German beers tend to be clean-tasting and balanced). So from a process standpoint, we're looking to do things that result in a highly attenuated beer (i.e. one with little residual sugar, i.e. one that's dry as opposed to sweet). The first step in this process is to create a highly fermentable wort, which is influenced by things like grist composition (we don't shy away from using things like sugar or corn, despite their (undeservedly) bad reputation) as well as mash temperature, time, and thickness (we use a thin mash at a low temperature for a long time, which encourages complete breakdown of complex sugars). Next up, we use a yeast that's very good at its job (its job is to eat a bunch of sugar and then hang out in beer without dying, not a bad gig) in order to ferment out as completely as possible. We also ferment at slightly higher than normal temperatures in order to get our yeast to produce all those delightful aromatic esters that we like so much (and many of those esters tend to fight with bitterness, so a lot of our beers are a little lower on the IBU scale).
Pretty straightforward, right? So why don't we just call ourselves a Belgian brewery and be done with it? We thought about it briefly, but there are two big sticking points there. First and foremost, we're not Belgian, so that feels a little disingenuous. While we could use "Belgian style," the problem there is that we don't brew what are generally considered to be Belgian Styles*. In fact, two of our mainstay beers (Extra Naked Premium Cream Ale and Shut Up Kelly Robust Porter) have much stronger roots in pre-prohibition American brewing, and we generally think that's an equally (if not more) important talking point.
Extra Naked illustrates my point a little better, so I'll use that as my example. Most of the recipe comes from a (now mostly defunct) style known as Classic American Pilsner (see the Poorly Remembered History Addendum for more information on this style). Much like its namesake, it's light in color and body, crisp, and a little hoppy. But a true Classic American Pilsner is supposed to be a very clean tasting (i.e. no yeast-derived flavors) lager that's been fermented cold, whereas we use a pretty expressive yeast and ferment at warmer temperatures. So what the hell do we call that? We can't use anything involving the word "pilsner," since people have strong opinions about what beers using that name should taste like, but we also can't give an accurate description of the beer because that makes us look like pretentious dweebs (trust me, by the time you get finished saying "well, it's loosely based on..." everybody has stopped listening). It sort of loosely fits into the saison/farmhouse category, but a) "saison" has similar issues to "pilsner," and 2) we don't brew on a farm. Since our yeast originated in Belgium, some of my old coworkers took to calling it "Belgian Cream," but that doesn't sit right with me for reasons I've already mentioned. For a while I took to just calling it a "cream ale," but our focus group** strongly associated that phrase with a certain green-canned beer from upstate New York, so that's out too. There is a style called "Classic American Cream Ale," but for acronym's sake we're not going to use that. Eventually we settled on "Premium Cream Ale" because the beer is in essence a cream ale, it's just, y'know, better***. It's a bit awkward, but we've yet to find a descriptor we like more (we've also toyed with, and still occasionally use, "Premium Ale" for brevity's sake; but it's an uncommon enough term that it kinda sounds like we're trying to invent our own style name, which was definitely never the goal).
That's just one example, but it's pretty representative of our whole terminology issue. It's not that we're doing anything that's vastly new and unique and different, it's just that there isn't yet a word for the specific way in which we operate (well, restaurants do similar stuff and they call it "fusion" but I'm pretty sure that if I was given a choice between calling our beer "Belgo-American Fusion" and ripping my own arm off and beating myself to death with it, I'd at least strongly consider the latter).
Poorly Remembered History Addendum
(author's note: as the title of this section would suggest, the information I'm presenting here draws pretty heavily from books that I read at a time we'll call "not recently," as well as a touch of, um, "creative speculation." But honestly, this probably isn't any less factual than much of the beer history you've read, it's just wrong about different stuff. For the real-deal information and/or some straight-up interesting reading, check out the fantastic Ambitious Brew by Maureen Ogle. I'd also highly recommend And a Bottle of Rum by Wayne Curtis)
In early America (circa the end of the colonial era), Americans weren't brewing or drinking much beer. The problem was twofold: the native hops had flavors that people found unpleasant, and the barley had too much protein. The latter of these resulted in a beer that was too dang heavy and thick for most people's palates, in particular the wave of German immigrants who were used to things more along the lines of helles and Bohemian Pilsner. Importing ingredients was possible, but it proved prohibitively expensive. So for a while, the drink of choice in the States tended to be rum or, barring that, hard cider.
Beer didn't really start to take hold in America until somebody (I forget who) started playing around with using corn and/or rice in the brewing process. This is harder than it sounds, since the starches in these new grains aren't readily available like they are in barley, so they needed to be cooked separately before mashing in order to gelatinize the starches. Neither rice nor corn has much by way of protein, so using them in the brewing process served to lighten the body of the beer without adding much/any flavor (corn adds a mildly sweet flavor, rice is more neutral). The resulting beer was much more palatable to the aforementioned German immigrants, so they took this new brewing technique and ran with it. This eventually led to several German families developing those huge brewing empires that you've come to know and love, but it also led to widespread proliferation of Classic American Pilsner (which probably definitely went by a different name at the time).
Beer didn't have a great shelf-life back then for a variety of reasons, which necessitated a huge number of local and regional breweries. Since CAP was the most popular beer style, most of these breweries focused primarily or exclusively on brewing that style. It's easy to romanticize the past and assume that, with 2,500 (or however many) operating breweries in pre-prohibition America, there was a hugely varied and vibrant beer culture like what we have today. But the reality is that it was more homogeneous than you'd think (fun fact: Budweiser was a pioneer in creating shelf-stable beer to be shipped long distances. In its heyday, it was a luxury item that was known to sell for an inflation-adjusted $18 per bottle).
But wait! There's more! In the late nineteenth century, there were a few large brewers that were in fierce competition with each other - the Busches, the Pabsts, and the Uhleins, if memory serves (it doesn't. I'm pretty sure there's one more). The competitiveness and squabbling got to such a point that when, in 1893, the World's Columbian Expostion was being held in Chicago, the festival organizers mandated that they would forego the type of beer competition that was normally present at such events. Beer would be featured, there just wouldn't be any competitive aspect to it. Seeking to one-up each other, the breweries devised a scoring and/or ranking system that isn't entirely clear to me, and may not have been clear to anyone ever. After some contentious judging, some arguably-impartial scores were assigned and the Uhlein brewery won. Pabst didn't like that decision, and independently declared themselves the winners. They were so proud of their "accomplishment" that their flagship product still bears its name.
In early America (circa the end of the colonial era), Americans weren't brewing or drinking much beer. The problem was twofold: the native hops had flavors that people found unpleasant, and the barley had too much protein. The latter of these resulted in a beer that was too dang heavy and thick for most people's palates, in particular the wave of German immigrants who were used to things more along the lines of helles and Bohemian Pilsner. Importing ingredients was possible, but it proved prohibitively expensive. So for a while, the drink of choice in the States tended to be rum or, barring that, hard cider.
Beer didn't really start to take hold in America until somebody (I forget who) started playing around with using corn and/or rice in the brewing process. This is harder than it sounds, since the starches in these new grains aren't readily available like they are in barley, so they needed to be cooked separately before mashing in order to gelatinize the starches. Neither rice nor corn has much by way of protein, so using them in the brewing process served to lighten the body of the beer without adding much/any flavor (corn adds a mildly sweet flavor, rice is more neutral). The resulting beer was much more palatable to the aforementioned German immigrants, so they took this new brewing technique and ran with it. This eventually led to several German families developing those huge brewing empires that you've come to know and love, but it also led to widespread proliferation of Classic American Pilsner (which probably definitely went by a different name at the time).
Beer didn't have a great shelf-life back then for a variety of reasons, which necessitated a huge number of local and regional breweries. Since CAP was the most popular beer style, most of these breweries focused primarily or exclusively on brewing that style. It's easy to romanticize the past and assume that, with 2,500 (or however many) operating breweries in pre-prohibition America, there was a hugely varied and vibrant beer culture like what we have today. But the reality is that it was more homogeneous than you'd think (fun fact: Budweiser was a pioneer in creating shelf-stable beer to be shipped long distances. In its heyday, it was a luxury item that was known to sell for an inflation-adjusted $18 per bottle).
But wait! There's more! In the late nineteenth century, there were a few large brewers that were in fierce competition with each other - the Busches, the Pabsts, and the Uhleins, if memory serves (it doesn't. I'm pretty sure there's one more). The competitiveness and squabbling got to such a point that when, in 1893, the World's Columbian Expostion was being held in Chicago, the festival organizers mandated that they would forego the type of beer competition that was normally present at such events. Beer would be featured, there just wouldn't be any competitive aspect to it. Seeking to one-up each other, the breweries devised a scoring and/or ranking system that isn't entirely clear to me, and may not have been clear to anyone ever. After some contentious judging, some arguably-impartial scores were assigned and the Uhlein brewery won. Pabst didn't like that decision, and independently declared themselves the winners. They were so proud of their "accomplishment" that their flagship product still bears its name.
*That in and of itself is kind of weird because Belgian brewers generally don't give a shit about beer styles - that's more of an American thing. I'm under the impression that they think it's weird that we feel the need to categorize everything instead of, y'know, just drinking it.
**My roommate Tony and that one weird friend he had over that time.
***The irony here is that, assuming you follow the BJCP guidelines, "Premium Lager" is basically just a wimpier version of Classic American Pilsner. We're willing to ignore that.
**My roommate Tony and that one weird friend he had over that time.
***The irony here is that, assuming you follow the BJCP guidelines, "Premium Lager" is basically just a wimpier version of Classic American Pilsner. We're willing to ignore that.