The Joys of Small Beer (… and cheap food)

The term ’small beer’ refers not to the size, but rather, to the strength of the beer. Typically, these beers are made from the second or even third runnings from a batch. Alan over a A Good Beer Blog recently wrote a nice post on the subject, and I thought I’d add in my $.02. I don’t claim to know the in-depth historical facts, but I do know that squeezing everything out of your ingredients is a practice most brewers have engaged in to some degree in every brewing tradition- it’s just good business sense. Though low in alcohol, small beers need not be low in flavor or complexity, and as such, they are great session beers but also ideal partners to your midday meal.

Commercially, however, you don’t find too many of these low-abv beers on the shelves. Best to look through the imports, because among American craft brewers, the trend is for bigger, stronger beers. Too bad, but you can always make your own, as I did from the second runnings of a warm-lagered (Wyeast 2112, anyone?) Steam-style beer I made in the spring. The inspiration was actually one of the great commercial examples, Anchor’s small beer, although my main batch was not intended to mimc Anchor at all (And anyway, they make theirs from the second runnings of their Old Foghorn Barleywine).

The main batch was mainly Breiss Pale Ale malt, with another pound of 40L Caramel, a smidgeon of English wheat (protein for head retention!), and some victory and honey malt for accent. I bittered it with NZ Hallertau, and used high AA Galena’s for flavor & aroma, including dry hopping. It had an starting gravity of about 1.051, which was only a bit off from my predicted OG. It’s turned out to be a fine beer itself. However, after collecting the first wort, I refilled the tun and sparged off another 2 gallons or so of wort which came out at around 1.028. This I boiled separately, hopping it with East Kent Goldings all the way through, and also added 7 oz of honey at knockout, giving me an initial gravity of 1.032. Voila- an extra two gallons of beer! Both batches were fermented with Wyeast 2112 at the same temperature and bottled, mainly in flip tops (as rapid consumption was considered!)

The small beer pours out with a good, 1.5-finger head what sticks around and leave a nice lacing. THe color is bright gold, and though there is no chill haze, some yeast particles are ruining the “crystal clarity” of it all: I don’t filter my beers. Yet. Honey is evident foremost in the aroma, which also gives up some buscuit and faint floral hop volatiles. A light DMS aroma comes to me as well, but it’s clean of buttry diacetyl, and neither do I detect any yeasty phenolics, though a hint of fruity esters–slightly orangy–come through. The sip takes you through a honey-accented malt sweetness that starts to bitter about mid sip and finishes with a combined zing of carbonic and hop bitterness; it lingers into the finish; that this is not a “real” lager is revealed here. The mouthfeel is spritzy and medium thick- near chewy, but not quite; wheat proteins and the aforementioned yeast see to that.

I had mine today with a double turkey cheeseburger with honey mustard and curly-q fries with malt vinegar on the side, from my favorite local corner-grill, Louie’s (if you are from Buffalo and do not yet know know & love Louie’s, we need to talk). It’s definitely not haute cuisine, but it’s a great lunch under $10, if you’re drinking your own beer along with, under $7. I liked the way these two foods melded with the beer in totally different ways. With the turkey burger, the beer’s honey note complimented and accented the honey mustard- and turkey is a good, low-impact (low flavor, low fat) meat for conveyance of these flavors. The cheese was a little rough on the beer and I might do without in the future, but the relatively high carbonation did a great job (in the absence of much alcohol) to strip the palate of grease and prepare the next bite. With the fries, however, the acidic malt vinegar played the part of contrast to the sweet beer, the two sort of canceling each other out and leading to a more pronounced perception of the hop bitterness and flavor in the beer. Malt vinegar meant that the whatever sweetness remained in the vinegar was complementary, but here the pairing did a neat trick of neutralizing a bunch of flavors and bringing totally different perceptions to the fore.

All in all, I have to recommend drinking–and making–more small beers. Really, if you want mid-day-to-quitting-time beers, they’re the way to go. And, if made and paired sufficiently carefully, can helpfully complement many lighter lunch dishes.