Towards
the end of the festival, I got a chance to talk to Scott Manning of Vintage
Brewing. Scott brought two of my three favorite
beers from the fest, so it was great to talk to him about them. Sadly, one was a fest favorite and it ran out
early and I wasn’t able to snag another glass while we spoke, but we did enjoy
a few beers during our discussion!
Thanks Scott!
WIBG - What did you
guys bring today?
Scott Manning - We have nine different beers
on tap, although we are down to seven at this point. We’re moving a lot of Hibiscus Saison and
the Dubbloon was a pretty popular one too, that’s our Abbey Dubbel aged for seven
months in a Yahara Bay rum barrel. So,
there’s a whole lot of complexity of flavor, almost barleywine like as far as
the depth of maltiness.
WIBG - Yeah, I keep
sending people over here for Dubbloon, I should probably stop doing that.
Scott Manning - Yeah you probably should,
although you can send them over here for Square Pig, that’s another good
one. It’s our hoppy Rye Ale. We’ve got a new beer called Crooked Grain, which is an India Brown Ale, so it’s as hoppy as an IPA, but it’s as rich as a nice brown ale, it’s kind of a hybrid. We’ve got our Schwarz bier back on tap now
and our Kolsch, so a couple of really stalwart German styles. I’m drinking a Schwarz bier right now, it’s dark, but at the same time it’s very light on the palate and refreshing. Our Day Tripper is our Summer Ale, there’s a
whole lot of summer flavors going on right now.
Whipoorwill is our Belgian Style Wit, which is really palate pleasing on
a warm summer day.
We also have our Grätzer which is
100% Oak smoked wheat as the grist bill.
So it’s quite smoky, but also quite hoppy. We tried to replicate the Marynka hops from
Poland, we enlisted the help of our friends over at Gorst Valley to match the
oil content and build it. So it has some
Saaz and some English hops that matched up well with what we think Marynkas
might taste like, without being able to get some. It’s a really archaic style, Grätzer haven’t
really been popular since the 1800s, and only around the little town of
Grodzisk. It’s our lightest beer in
color, and our lightest beer in alcohol, but it drinks soo big. It’s got all this oak, smoked flavor, and
this wonderful hop flourish right up front and then its gone from the
palate. It reminds me a little of
sausages, and that’s a very complimentary thing to say for a smoked beer in my
world, but we don’t want to call it the hotdog beer necessarily. But, when you first sniff it, there’s
something in there that reminds you of a great mild sausage.
WIBG - Would it be
possible to try some of that?
SM - Oh, yeah sure.
(Scott filled my glass with Grätzer)
WIBG - Oh, Nice!
SM – Isn’t that beautiful? It has awesome head retention from all that
wheat. There’s tons of protein so you’ve
got this big sticky head that just stays there and leaves a nice lace in the
glass.
WIBG - Well, it
definitely is a hot doggy, smoky kind of beer.
SM – I brewed this for the first time
last year and I thought, “there’s no way that the public is going to go for a
weirdo, archaic, Polish smoky beer, but they went ape-y for it, it was great! The Isthmus, a magazine out of Madison named
it their best beer for the year for Madison, for Wisconsin. It was unbelievable. Not that it doesn’t deserve
that, I just feel like there is an awful lot of great beer in this state.
WIBG - Well yeah,
it’s a great archaic style, Zymurgy did a write-up on Grätzer, four or five
issues ago
Scott Manning – That’s true, ours debuted right
before that issue came out, so it made us look like superstars, like “Wow,”
somehow we invented this thing. We like
to stay just one step ahead if we can. I
hear that at GABF this is the first year that Grätzer is going to be judged as
its own style.
WIBG - So, are you
going to be submitting this?
Scott Manning – We’ll see. It won’t be judged up against the smoked porters or smoked rauchbiers, it’s going to be its own thing. I think in previous years Grätzer was not
well understood. It takes a few good
articles and some good modern research to help redefine and learn the facts.
WIBG - It was
almost a dead style, right?
SM – The way I heard it, and it
may be from the Zymurgy article, is that a few brewers were left over from the
breweries that still produced Grätzer.
The old brewers were still lingering around and a new home brewing
movement is going on in Europe, just like it is here. So there are a lot of young brewers, bringing
it to these old guys and asking if this is what they remember. It really was kind of rescued from the grave
almost. But a true Grätzer, as I
understand it would be a lot lighter than this even. So it should start around 7 or 8 degrees
Plato, which is very easy on the grain, so it should dry right out and be a
3-3.5% beer. It’s really a thirst
quencher, something that you could still maintain while you are working.
This
one is a bit beefy for a Grätzer at 10 Plato, so we’re talking 1.040 specific
gravity, but I think, at least for us in our pub that I don’t want to put out a
beer that’s so small we have to discount it in a weird way because then the
perception is well, why is this $3 when everything else is $4, so I just made
it a little bit bigger. It’s an Imperial
Grätzer, if you like.
WIBG - This is
really good, thanks for brewing this, and thanks for bringing it. Thanks for helping to revitalize old styles!
SM - It’s one of the things we like
doing, and I like doing. Being forward
looking as far as modern American brewing, but at the same time with a name like
Vintage we have to level it out. We have
a bar full of great old console TVs and cool little knick knacks that we
remember and even a few things that our folks remember, and even older than
that. So it makes sense for us to really
be curious about the past.
We did
a Gruit with Sweet Mullets Brewing Company, the Toil and Trouble. And that was a lot of fun, to get your imagination
going, do a little bit of research and speculate on what things would taste
like in the middle ages knowing that they didn’t have any understanding of
yeast really, as far as the microbes that were doing clean fermentation. You know it would have been sour, it would
have been like how do you get a pleasing sourness with no hops and the kind of
rustic malt bill they might have had. So
it’s the kind of thing I really like doing.
It’s not punch the clock and come in to brew beer, it’s more about “how
do we bring new and interesting flavors to our locale.”
That’s all for today, check back
soon for another post. And if you
enjoyed this post, I am working on scheduling a full interview with Scott!
Happy Drinking!