Sacred Profane's Amazing, Radical Approach to Beer
Michael Fava, pouring Sacred Profane’s Dark.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard of Biddeford, Maine. Even non-Mainer New Englanders might scratch their head on that one. The state’s sixth-largest city has just 22,000 people and is located about a half hour south of Portland (which itself only houses 68,000 souls). Yet one of the most interesting brewing projects in the United States is just over a year into its experiment there, and with any luck, might put Biddeford on the map.
It is the joint project of veteran brewers Brienne Allan, who started at Jack’s Abby before becoming head brewer at Notch, and Michael Fava, who got his start at Dock Street in Philadelphia before becoming Oxbow’s first head brewer. That background alone would be enough to excite serious beer fans. Notch is, of course, the famous traditional lager brewery from Salem, MA that introduced the US to the LUKR side-pour tap. While she was at Notch, Brienne went from beer-famous to famous famous when she began posting about sexism (and worse) in the beer industry on Instagram. Fava may not be the same kind of household name, but among a certain kind of drinker, Oxbow is—and recognized for the same kind of traditional European brewing Notch does, though with an equal emphasis on Belgian brewing.
Yet what makes Sacred Profane truly singular is in the kind of beer Brienne and Mike make—and more importantly, why they make this beer. Visit the brewery and you will have two choices of beer, both lagers, Pale (4.2%) and dark (4%), served from beautiful little copper tanks above the bar. That’s it—two beers. They have ever only made two beers and, at least when I visited just before Thanksgiving, had no plan to ever brew more than two beers.
In the US, most breweries tout innovation and their bold approach to beer. But I have heard of no brewery willing to take this kind of risk. Two beers, both at or just above 4% and neither one an IPA? And in Biddeford, Maine? Okay, now that’s truly bold. I knew I had to visit the brewery when I was in Maine, try the beer, and figure out what was behind their unusual vision for a new American brewery.
It Czechs Out (But Don’t Call it Czech)
I won’t say this is the most curious thing about a brewery abounding in curiosities, but it’s up there: at some point during our walk-through with Mike (Brienne couldn’t join us), as he was describing the Czech malts and Czech hops and Czech yeast and Czech brewing practices of a beer served from the specifically Czech tanks overhead, I made some reference to Czech beer and Mike said, “We don’t say we’re a Czech brewery.”
I am firmly of the opinion that you call people (and breweries) what they want to be called, so I won’t call this Maine brewery Czech. But: if you don’t have plans to visit Bohemia anytime soon and can stop in Biddeford, you’ll find two beers that any Czech drinker would recognize. They are in fact the closest thing to a proper výčepní you’re likely to get without leaving North America.
Process
“We’re career lager-brewers,” Mike said as we took our Darks into the brewery. “Lager is a process beer, and so are these.” As I would learn, it seemed that if there was ever a way to add more complexity into the brewing process, Mike and Brienne chose it. That starts with a triple-decoction mash using Raven malts. Three decoctions is 50% more than almost every brewery in the world uses (Pilsner Urquell is a famous holdout using the antiquated triple decoction). They chose it because Raven’s floor-malted barley, an old heirloom Hana variety, produces a “super under-modified” malt. Their beers are designed to be low-alcohol session lagers, and they wanted a luxurious mouthfeel they couldn’t get by using fewer decoctions and different malts. To get the beers they were shooting for, the malt and process fit the bill.
The Dark starts with sharp, almost sour black-malt roastiness before the sweetness opens up at midpalate. Slight toffee and biscotti notes emerge, and a fullness develops. It finishes with a velvety smoothness. The Pale, by contrast, arrives with hop bitterness up front, but carries with it a tangy, lemony flavor. The malts are dry and cracker-like, but they appear just for a moment before the saturated hopping asserts itself with the satisfying swallow.
Mike described everything in detail, including the grists. When I contacted Brienne later to clarify, she reasonably asked that I be a little bit less transparent about the recipes. The Dark, in particular, does use a grist unlike any I’ve encountered, so I get it. (I didn’t even tell her that I had all the decoction specs as well!) Using under-modified malts and three decoctions “makes it really uniform,” Mike explained. Brewing has evolved to make beer quicker and cheaper to make, and sometimes people assume that means the old ways were cruder and less effective. Yet brewers discovered decoction because it did deliver such excellent consistency—in an era before hydrometers or even thermometers. If you’re willing to put in the time and work with the right kind of malt, you can get results like Sacred Profane using the old ways.
Beyond the decoction, they use first-wort hopping and their Pale, which gets 35 IBUs of bitterness, is the assertive, spiky yin to Dark’s velvety yang. They employ open fermentation and use a Czech yeast that produces lower amounts of sulfur as well as lower attenuation. The beer spends five days in open fermentation before going to conicals and then lagering—eight weeks in all.
Serving
Visitors to the brewery may not find a lot of drama in the beer range—but they will find quite a bit in the way the lagers are served. This includes copper tanks above the bar and a LUKR system of side-pour faucets that allows the publican to create a rich, creamy head. These systems transfixed American brewers more than a decade ago, and they started trickling into the country and winning converts who love the dense, mousse-like heads they produce. At Sacred Profane you can get three levels of foam, all the way to the full glass (the mlíko or “milk” pour).
Techniques in pouring also create the opportunity for a third beer. If you’d like an amber, your server will blend 28% of the Dark with 72% of the pale. I wondered how it was possible to do it in-glass, but Michael explained their trick. “We just fill it to the top of the bottom part of the handle and that’s pretty close.”
The tank system is a step beyond. I first heard about tank beer in 2008 when Max Bahnson wrote about it. The beer goes from the conditioning tank at the brewery into a bag inside the serving tank. Air outside the bag pushes beer through the taps. The system was originally developed by Pilsner Urquell so they could deliver very fresh beer to pubs without pasteurization. It has some virtues as an efficient system—the tanks are larger than kegs so need to be refilled less frequently—but mainly it’s great theater. The second you walk into the brewery, the effect is striking.
Cleaning and refilling the tank (1)
(2)
(3)
Recall how I mentioned that nothing Mike and Brienne do is halfway? It wasn’t enough for the duo to buy a LUKR faucet and practice with it, either. They actually traveled to Prague to get a professional certification at the tapster academy at Červený Jelen (see certificates posted on the wall below). To graduate, there was some kind of grueling test, the details of which I didn’t record in my notes. As the first Americans to enroll, they had to find a translator for the class. As you can see from the mugs Michael poured us, he lives up to the “master tapster” billing.
It’s an obscure accolade, certainly not one most Mainers will appreciate—I’d never heard of it—but is of a piece of their approach to the brewery. To use a metaphor, the two modest beers the brewery makes are the tip of the iceberg, the piece people can see. Underneath them is a tremendous amount of work to achieve that effortless simplicity.
The Unusual Experiment
In case it wasn’t obvious, I was incredibly charmed by Sacred Profane. I have deep respect for the cræft of brewing, and Brienne and Mike are committed to making beer the way they want to, even recognizing it’s out of step with current trends. I’m not terribly surprised to find the brewery in Maine, either, where brewers often prize mastery above virtuosity or ostentation. Still, to the average drinker it does all ultimately result in just two choices.
Certificates of tapping mastery.
A pint of the Pale.
The thing is, it’s not just a gimmick to make so few beers. This gets to the why of their project. Something different happens when you make one or two beers than if you make one or two hundred. You get to know those beers intimately, and over time, that gets reflected in the minute changes that slowly perfect the beer. Something different also happens when you drink one or two beers for years and then decades.
Eleven years ago, I interviewed then-Head Brewer John Keeling at Fuller’s, a brewery known for making their signature bitter, London Pride. He discussed what happens to drinkers who have sipped that beer for decades. “I want people to have a dialogue with that beer,” he told me. “You’re noticing things about that beer and it interests you and involves you because of that. And that’s really what we call character. So when you go into a pub and order a pint of London Pride, you drink it and you recognize it and you make a note of all these things.”
If Sacred Profane survives and becomes a fixture of the characterful little downtown of Biddeford, it will be because locals come, even in January, to have one of those two beers. Not having to think about the beer will free them up to talk to one another, enjoy a meal, or even scroll through their phones in peace. But even in mostly not thinking about the beers, they will come to know them so well that if anything changes, they’ll immediately suss it out. Perhaps they’ll chat with Mike or Brianne about it. Maybe, over time, they’ll get curious about how this beer they’ve been drinking so long is made, and begin to ask questions about tradition and ingredients and process. They will get to know that beer in a way few Americans know the craft beers they drink.
And maybe that’s why they don’t want you to call it a Czech brewery. The ingredients may come from Bohemia, and the techniques, and the serving equipment, but the really important stuff—the making the beer and the drinking it and the dialogue they produce—will happen there on Washington Street. There’s even a delightful parallel with the Czech lagers Brienne and Michael don’t make. The original pilsner, of course, was made on a brewery designed by a Bavarian and brewed by a Bavarian in the Bavarian manner. And look how that turned out.