A Brother From Another Mother
The world of craft beer can be a pretty subjective place, beer rating sites aside. You can brew a beer, have loose guidelines to dictate how the beer should taste, and beyond that, it’s up to you. If you miss the mark a little, that’s alright, there’s no one that’s going to hold your feet to the fire over a beer slightly out of style, beer rating sites aside. Where this can be a little more interesting, though, is when you have two brewers with the same beer and seeing what happens. How are the beers different, how are they the same? Which is better?
The most famous and readily available example of this would be industrial macro lagers. While we may dislike these beers, it really is an amazing accomplishment that these brewers can create the same tasting beer around the world on numerous brewhouses.
The goal isn’t always to create the exact same beer. Take the Schneider and Brooklyn collaboration for example. Both are brewed with the same guidelines, but a different dry-hopping. Even with the same recipes, different brewhouses will lead to different flavors and fermentations. In this case, the Schneider version finishes at 8.2% while Brooklyn’s comes in slightly stronger at 8.5%.
With a more recent beer, Bison Brewing of Berkeley, CA and Terrapin Beer of Athens, GA took on the task of both brewing a Belgian Scotch Ale for their Reunion beer, an annual fundraiser to raise money for Myeloma research. With similar recipes in hand, both brewers set out to brew with “Belgian Scotch Ale” as the only goal in mind. The results, while within “style,” were strikingly different. The Bison beer was dark with a round soft chocolate banana flavor. At 7%, the beer was slightly heavy for a session, but went down easy. Terrapin’s was more translucent and with a tight carbonation and effervescence not found in Bison’s. Additional, Terrapins finished at 8.5%, pushing it far away from the sessionable territory.
The number one difference in these beers was the yeast being used. Bison used their house Saison yeast while Terrapin unleashed a Rochefort yeast.
Have you found any other examples of different brewers tackling the same recipe? Do you like this practice? Could this be a new trend in collaborations, with each brewer giving it their own attempt?
