Breakside Blends Stouts
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Few breweries are more associated with hoppy ales than Breakside—which, given the trends in American brewing, is a pretty good thing. Such an association does have its downsides, however. For years, Daniel Hynes has been toiling in the barrel room across from the production brewery in Breakside’s Milwaukie location, helping make complex barrel-aged and wild ales often overlooked by hopheads. They’ve won awards and respect, yet at a brewery where IPAs win even more awards and are the central focus of both brewery marketing and customer interest, they’ve had a hard time breaking through.
Yet as with so many things in the past year, the Covid pandemic created an unusual opportunity to focus time and thought on the barrel program. The earliest fruit of that work is appearing in bottles now in the form of blended, barrel-aged stouts, which now complement the wild program in size and scope. These beers borrow a key practice from the wild program as well: blending, which creates beers with more subtlety and depth than earlier barrel-aged efforts. Not only is Breakside working with time as one element, but beer as well. To prepare the project, brewers made sixteen base beers—all porters and stouts—to fill those barrels. Much as wild ales achieve balance and harmony when brewers blend different vintages from different barrels, Hynes and company will compose their blends from different barrels containing different base beers, carefully constructing flavor profiles from their broad liquid palette.
A gift From Covid
Breakside used to make its bourbon barrel stouts and strong ales in a streamlined process. Brewers would make a batch and it would be placed in bourbon barrels straight from the distillery. As Goose Island was the first to recognize, this means some of the bourbon trapped in the staves leached into the beer, flavoring it a bit like a boilermaker. Once ripened, brewers would blend it back together in a single batch and package.
In a visit I made a couple weeks ago, Dan and brewmaster Ben Edmunds and I sampled a couple older beers made that way. The Oligarch, their imperial stout, had a familiar profile. Even at three years, it was still hugely bourbon-y. The whiskey and beer were still not fully integrated. Some drinkers like this half-and-half profile, enjoying the tussle between the two partners. It’s a brute-force experience, though, and even fans would have to admit the flavors weren’t integrated. “It’s a short travel across the palate,” Dan said.
The challenge for the project Dan and Ben envisioned was time. Each batch took twelve hours from milling to fermenter, including a four-hour boil. (“Wanderlust, for example, takes four hours,” Ben reported.) They could squeeze one of those days into a production schedule every now and again, but devoting sixteen full days to prepping the program just wouldn’t have been possible before Covid freed up the brewhouse. Going forward, they can replenish the stocks slowly, replacing emptied barrels with new one after bottle releases.
Daniel Hynes in his woody lair.
Borrowing From Brussels
The idea that breweries would borrow a technique from one style of beer and apply it to another seems intuitive enough, but in practice, things tend to work in rather the reverse—a hidebound commitment to the way things have always been done. Breweries are delightful, quirky places because these traditions develop, and it’s from them that styles have emerged slowly over the generations. Younger breweries have scrambled that formula and the craft brewing era has offered an unprecedented moment for them to throw everything into a blender.
For a brewery used to thinking like that, it is a short mental leap to turn from the wild part of the barrel room, look at the stout aging in whiskey barrels, and wonder about blending them the same way. Belgian brewers in Flanders and the Pajottenland developed very sophisticated blending programs well over a century ago. Working with the vagaries of wild yeast, they knew that any given barrel might be especially acidic or sweet, funky or fine. Blending was a way of taking beer that would have been undrinkable on its own and using it to flavor and scent a blend. They also realized age was an important dimension. Older and younger beer tasted and behaved differently. By blending young, uncomplicated, but lively beer with older, more intense beer, they got the best of both. Over time, they learned blending was an art, and they could make the most accomplished beer in the world—and, critically, take control over the flavor profile rather than leaving that to the microbes.
The wild side, located in the adjacent room.
That’s the theory behind this new project. “We used to blend to average them,” Ben said of the old barrel-aged stouts. Instead of that approach—blending to homogenize—they considered the inverse. “Why don’t we square this on the blending side?” He asked. With 350 casks, the brewery can avoid “typicity” and embrace improvisation. The idea is to create a more three-dimensional, integrated profile. Not only will they blend different beers, but different ages, and this will allow just-released beer to be fully formed, without rough edges that need further time to smooth. With this approach, blenders have many levers to pull as they build a new blend.
The base beers were made with variety to maximize blending opportunities. In an email, Sales and Marketing Director EK MacColl offered an overview. “Among the stouts, we have versions that are rye-heavy, versions fermented with different yeast strains, and ones that vary in sugar composition. The porters include both lagers and ales, beers with a hint of smoke, and others that focus on particular grain flavors, like wheat and oats.”
Dan described the barrel room like a library, and likened himself to a librarian. “I’m the guy who keeps the records. I know what each barrel tastes like.” Right now, the card catalogue is pretty easy to manage. Most of the barrels came from Heaven Hill and date to the same year. Over time, it may get complex indeed, as the types of beer, their ages, and the barrel types proliferate. But that will allow for ever more precise blends.
Photo: Breakside Brewery
”When it’s There, Everyone Agrees”
Batches of the first beers are out now. Cute Metal is a chocolate milk stout and Space Music, which Dan calls “the belle of the ball,” is a classic imperial stout. The blending team, which also includes Jacob Leonard, arrives at a finished product by what sounds like epiphanic consensus. “When it’s there,” Dan said, “everyone agrees.” Given the strength and intensity of these beers, it was useful to have tried the older Oligarch first. By comparison, the new beers showed their subtlety.
Space Music, the imperial stout, is made with a Russian imperial stout aged 22 months (44% of the blend), a strong milk stout aged 8 months (35%), and an American stout—presumably aggressively bitter—aged just 5 months (21%). It’s a muscular, boozy beer heavy on bourbon flavors. Unlike Oligarch, though, they are fully knitted into the flavors of the base beers. The sweet vanilla notes melt into the chocolatey dark malts, and the more overt bourbon flavors suffuse the rich stout.
For my money, Cute Metal is the more interesting of the two beers. Made with a majority of that eight-month-old milk stout (60%), it also has portions of a strong chocolate stout (25%, eight months old) and the Russian imperial stout (15%, 22 months). Made with vanilla and chocolate, it nudges into the neighborhood of pastry stout. Yet the goal is decadence, not reproducing flavors in food as in many dessert stouts. “I don’t want to taste the adjuncts,” Dan explained—and if they are obvious to the drinker, they’ve used too much.
I like this one because the bourbon has been dialed back substantially. Its flavors present as more culinary than spiritous, with vanilla and butterscotch. It is a very decadent beer, and you’ll definitely want some company to finish a bottle. Yet it is quite satisfying over the course of 6-8 ounces. The brewery favors dry beer and that’s a huge asset here. While the beer is no means “dry,” it’s as attenuated as the style allows. That’s critical, because the liquid fudge experience at mid-palate is dialed to 100%, and if it finished too sweetly, the beer would turn sickly.
The tasting room at Milwaukie revs up as Covid’s malevolence wanes.
These are beers aimed at modern drinkers. They court sweetness, and at least acknowledge the trends in popular pastry stouts. Within that context, however, Breakside is shooting for refined complexity. They are rich and decadent, but much more subtle than the old Oligarch.
The approach produces beer that is noticeably more accomplished, and gives Breakside a lot of control over the beers they release. My sense is that this is still a rare practice among breweries (though surely not unprecedented). As no good idea remains unborrowed, I don’t expect it to remain obscure. Indeed, this is almost certainly a glance into the future. If you’d like to taste that future, Space Music and Cute Metal are available now.