This series is a collection of musings and meditations on beer.  

Any long-time follower of Buzzards Bay Brewing will know that I have a love affair with grain. Amidst a brewing world infatuated with the use of abundant hops, brewers like us are not rare but are undoubtedly underrepresented. 

 We purposefully avoided brewing hoppy styles, like India Pale Ale, until our 12th year in business. I blame my parents. I was sixteen in 1982 when the rents took the entire Russell clan, grandparents and all, to our ancestor’s homeland: Österreich. The trip was fantastic, not only because of the incredible sights, sounds and flavors of Austrian food but also the wine and beer. During one overly hot evening in Salzburg, the family planned to enjoy a marionette show (think the Sound of Music tour). At sixteen, I had no desire to spend an evening with puppets. Tarnishing any, albeit slight, sense of cool that I had earned was not something I looked to do.  

Fortunately, our Austrian guide Fred, suggested that he could take my bro, Rob, and me for dinner and show us around. My parents, wise old souls, knew two brooding teenage boys would ruin their evening and agreed to Fred’s plan. Fred’s proposal was an excellent idea: a monastery, Kloster Mülln, the Benedictine Abbey of Salzburg.

Kloster Mülln is an ancient place where, at the foot of the Mönchsberg, in Salzburg’s Mülln neighborhood, beer has been brewed and then enjoyed since 1621. They have a wonderful outdoor beer garden where we sat down. 

Fred ordered the only beer available, the only beer they brew: ein Märzenbier, a Märzen. I watched our waitress disappear with our order to where the beer is decanted. Drawn from wooden barrels, it is served in liter ceramic steins.  

She smiled as she served us; Fred said something in German. Her laugh sparkled like the sunlight twinkling through the swaying trees. 

I stared at the large ceramic stein in front of me. It was quite a warm evening; the beer was at cellar temperature. An aroma of malty caramel floated on the slight evening breeze, the mild sweetness like a soft caramel apple kiss delighted my lips and took my breath away. Light angled against the yellow stone building. Shadowed arches continued to dispense waitresses with trays loaded with stone steins. 

Friends, families chatted and giggled in a language I had not yet to come to know. I was, in every way, enchanted. Each sip from the stein brought more profound delight: caramel became toasted pecans became honey became blue sky dotted with white clouds became wheat toast became pie crust became a swirl of dirndl became an empty stein.

Love had poured herself into a stone stein in Salzburg.  

Seven years later, in the late fall of 1989, I began making wine. That’s not entirely honest. I started making wine during 1984, my freshman year at Boston College. I used a five-gallon glass carboy to “accidentally” allow some properly re-constituted-home-winemaker-concentrate to ferment. As a freshman biology/pre-med student, I felt entitled and indulged myself with the experiment. The result? A beverage that not a single under 21 freshman could suffer more than a sip. The carboy sat un-consumed with a small hand-written sign on it: “needs more time”. For all I know, that glass jug resides to this day under the desk in room 119A, Loyola Hall. And, if so, I bet that the sign remains the truth.  

Despite my disastrous trial batch, I accepted my Dad’s offer to chaperon Westport Rivers’ first vintage from grape to wine. Within a week of moving to Westport, I discovered Crosby and Baker, a local homebrew and winemaker supplier (that became a national brand and ultimately morphed into Brewers Supply Group). C&B allowed wholesale customers to purchase dented cans of malt extract at 50% off wholesale price. For about $2.50, I could brew a five-gallon batch of beer. That’s $1.12 per case. I decided to take my developing knowledge of yeast-wrangling to beer.  

“Winemaking is 90% cleaning,” Eric Fry, our consultant advised, “the other 10% is mainly ripe grapes and assuring a problem-free fermentation.” If that is the case (and indeed it is quite good advice), then brewing is 100% more of both. With a sherpa named Discount-dented-cans as my escort, I never knew what trail I’d be blazing toward the malty summit. I wouldn’t know what to brew until I looked through the small stack of dented tin. It was as random an investigation as you might imagine. I brewed and sanitized my way through batches of robust brown ales, pitch-black stouts, chewy porters, an award-winning Kolsch. That’s how I began my attempt at mastering the flavors of malt, with dinged up cans of homebrewing malt syrups. Eventually, I purchased a small electric mill and made my own system for brewing from the wonderful grains themselves.

My winemaking mentor and homebrewing friend, Eric, could have cared less about what I was doing. He was using crazy New Zealand and Australian hops with off-the-charts alpha acids. I did not understand why someone wanted hops to dominate their beer. Eric’s bitter monstrosities earned a shrug from me. My heart settled on revealing the mysteries hidden in malt.

Grain gives us the sugars needed for fermentation. It also lends color. In various forms, it can be the palest of shades creating a beer the color of white straw. It can also be dark as night creating the pitch-black beer known as stout. And, as we all know, the variety in between.

And malts create a dizzying variety of flavors. The sugars, both in their fermentable form and as converted to various roasted styles, are the source of the warmth of Märzen and Bock, the crispness of Pilsner and Golden Ale. Those same sugars are consumed by bacteria to create clean, deftly balanced sours.

Brewers scribe sonnets to malt and call them recipes. We take malt by her hand, guiding her through conveyer and mill. We dance waltzes with malt(zes) in the mashtun. She is bathed with gentle care through the lautertun.

In lagers she’s the wind in sail; the heart and soul of every ale.

Beer Writing