Going German this Summer (Also, What's Going On at C'est Bon Biere)

EDITED: Gulf Brew will be on July 30th, 2016.

Hello fellow craft beer lovers. I know it's been a while, but if you have kept up with our Facebook updates, you know we have been busy this spring. This weekend, we are shipping bottles of Night Shift Baltic Porter to Baltimore, Maryland for the National Homebrew Competition finals! We are pretty excited to have advanced to finals. Over 7,900 beers were entered this year, and it is an honor to have received a 1st place award in Round 1 (Not to mention both a gold and silver certificate for both beers entered).

Another notch in the C'est Bon Biere belt!

As many of you know, C'est Bon Biere is a "his and hers" brewery. All of the beer styles we brew are decided on by the husband and his better half. That's what the small. 'his' or 'hers' means on the top of every beer label. Many of the 'his' beers are Belgian styles, which are Taylor's preferred, and many of the 'hers' beers are stouts and porters, which are Sam's preferred. We have brewed styles from France, Belgium, and England often, but what about Germany? They have influenced beer styles all over the world for centuries. It is time for C'est Bon Biere to attempt some German style beers. So that's what we are doing this summer.

We will have three great offerings, honoring traditional German styles, adhering strictly to the German Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot) which states that beer shall only be brewed with water, barley, hops, and yeast. Before you start questioning my history, you are right, yeast was not technically part of the Reinheitsgebot in 1516. They didn't know what yeast was. It just magically fermented if you left an open container in the cellar for a few months... And before you question my history again, yes the Reinheitsgebot was updated in the mid 1500s to include barley and wheat. How else do you think beers like weisbier, hefeweissen, and weisenbock became so popular?

So, this summer we will be offering a helles bock, weisbier, and altbier. I See the Light Helles Bock inspired by the the light color and high alcohol content, is our first lager of the year. Add this one to our many Disney inspired beer names (Thank my wife for that one).

Second we have a German wheat beer, weisbier, with strong banana and clove aromas. This may be the first beer where we came up with the name before the recipe.

Sorry Vanilla, but we didn't copy you at all... Ours is different....

Finally, a hoppier German style beer, altbier. It's not as hoppy as many British or American styles many of us are familiar with, but it is much more bitter than the typical malty German beers. This one is named after the Hop Pig, a mascot known in many hop-growing regions in Germany, Belgium, and the Czech Republic. We picture the hop pig as a classy, upstanding individual who enjoys a pint of good craft beer.

Enough about our new beers, let's talk about what you came here for. Where can you try our beers? There are four beer festivals in south Louisiana that we will attend this year. We want to give you plenty of advance notice of when and where we will be, and of course give you a tentative beer list. This may change, of course, but you will be in for a treat regardless of what we are serving.

TOAST UNDER THE OAKS: June 18th at Nottoway Plantation in White Castle, LA
Serving: Weis Weis Baby Weisbier, Chateau Tripel, Night Shift Baltic Porter, Hawaiian Roller Coaster Belgian Pale Ale

GULF BREW: July 30 at Blackham Coliseum in Lafayette, LA
Serving: Belgian Missile Crisis Witbier, I See the Light Helles Bock, and Operation Fortitude Biere de Garde

NOLA ON TAP: September 24 at City Park in New Orleans, LA
Serving: Hakuna Mahopa India Porter, Barley Dog Dubbel, Blueberry Bread Pudding Barleywine, and Belgian Missile Crisis Wittier
BAYOU BEER FEST: November 12, at Southdown Plantation in Houma, LA. This will be our 4th year serving at the 4th annual Bayou Beer Fest. No other homebrewer can make that claim.
Serving: Die Hopfensau Altbier, Guilty Pleasure Chocolate Milk Stout, and Hawaiian Roller Coaster Belgian Pale Ale.

We hope to see you guys at one of these festivals. Be sure to spread the word about us to your friends and family. Give us a like on Facebook too. We love making good beer that people love to drink. Until next time, drink local, drink cart beer. Cheers!

The Thing About Sour Beer...

I know it's been a while since my last post, I apologize in advance. Let's chalk it up to I've been doing a lot of brewing, and very little writing. This year is going to be a year of experimentation and fine tuning old recipes. More info to come on results from National Homebrew Competition, other local competitions, and everyone's favorite homebrew festivals.

I was thinking of making this a Facebook post, but my ideas kept getting longer than a paragraph and a picture (That seems to be the social media limit for attention span). This weekend we brewed 10 gallons of Cat's Out the Bag Cream Ale with the intention of making two separate batches of beer, by pitching different yeast strains.

The first batch is the usual cream ale, which we will add mangos to in the keg. Our cream ale has always been a way to experiment with fruit and spices, because it is a light, crisp, and fruity beer to begin with, a blank canvas for experimentation. Other adjuncts added to our cream ale include peaches, vanilla and lactose, and a combination of lemon, basil, and thyme.

The second half of the batch is where things get interesting. We will be making a sour ale, and pitching fresh apples into the secondary fermentation. Now before I go any farther, let me give some background on the topic of sour beer. Sour ales have a long history in the brewing world, with as wide-ranging of style as IPAs, stouts, and bocks. When you hear sour beer, it could be Lambic, Berliner Weisse, Flanders Red, Oud Bruin, Gose, or any other wild ale.

I'd encourage you to try different styles of sours, IPAs, stouts, etc. before making a blanket about not liking sours, IPAs, stouts, etc. That's a conversation for another post. Feel free to contact me at itsgoodbeer@gmail.com if you ever have questions about beer styles, are looking for recommendations, or any other beer related information.

Quick crash course in microbiology... Typical beer yeast is "saccharomyces cerevisiae". Sour bacteria in beer is "brettanomyces", "lactobacillus", "pediococcus", "acetobacter", or others but I have run out of Latin gibberish.

Now for the fun stuff. What we are brewing is considered a Lambic, a Belgian beer historically fermented in open vats, allowing any bacteria floating around in the air to end up in the beer. It is this unusual process which gives the beer its distinctive flavor: dry, vinous, and cidery, usually with a sour aftertaste.
During fermentation, instead of producing foamy Krausen, sour bacteria produce pellicles, or a thin film, which traps the CO2 gas. Below is a picture of the pellicles formed on our lambic after 24 hours of fermentation.

I know it looks gross, but it's science!

There are many different types of Lambic ales. "Gueze" means to blend aged Lambic (typically dry) with younger Lambic (typically sweet from unfermented sugars), and is usually designated as such on the label. Fruit additions are common, and can include:

Cherry – Kriek
Raspberry – Framboise
Peach – Peche
Blackcurrant – Cassis
Grape – Druif
Strawberry – Aardbei
Apple – Pomme
Banana – Banane
Pineapple – Ananas
Apricot – Abricotier
Plum – Prunier
Cloudberry – Plaquebiere
Lemon – Citroon
Blueberry – Bleuet

Our Pomme Lambic will hopefully be the first of many fruit Lambic. One down, fourteen to go!

If you want to learn more about sour beers, or any other style for that matter, give us a shout. We are always glad to talk beer with people who love good beer.

PS. Spell check hates me after this article...

Beer and Bread: A Merry Christmas from C'est Bon Biere

First of all, we at C'est Bon Biere would like to wish everyone a merry Christmas and happy new year.

We had a wonderful year brewing beer while learning about new beer styles and recipes. It has always been a mission of ours to create "his and her" beers, a friendly competition between beer recipes created by husband and wife. By a 3-1 decision "her" beers were the fan favorite at festivals.

Some of the "hers" fan favorites this year included Guilty Pleasure Chocolate Milk Stout, Just Peachy Sour Peach Ale, and Blueberry Bread Pudding Barleywine. Some of the "his" fan favorites included the Belgian Missile Crisis Belgian Wit, Night Shift Porter aged in a whiskey barrel, and Hakuna Mahopa Black IPA aged in a whiskey barrel.

Overall this year, we brewed about 15 different styles of beer, and have refined some of our favorite recipes. We love going to beer festivals and getting all of the positive feedback from our fans and beer enthusiasts alike.

This weekend marked the last brew of the season. We capped off a great year by brewing the Guilty Pleasure Chocolate Milk Stout and a new Pilsner-style Saison we are calling Jolie Blonde.

SPENT GRAINS

One question we have been asked at many brew days is what do we do with our spent grain? Many commercial breweries produce enough spent grain to create a partnership with local farms where the grains are used to supplement cattle feed. This is a great idea, not entirely practical for home brewers who only produce 10-20 pounds of grain with each 5 gallon batch of beer.

Spent grains from the stout.

We finally decided to do something with our spent grains (granted a small portion of them). We made our very first batch of  Pain Ordinary, or French bread. After all, beer is still referred to as "liquid bread". We added some spent grains from our chocolate stout into the dough to give the bread a touch of roasted flavor.

Two of our delicious rolls of home-made bread

Our home-made bread is delicious, and it pairs well with any of our beers on tap. Making bread from scratch is pretty time consuming, but the results are so rewarding. Beer brewing and bread making are more alike than we thought. Maybe we will start calling bread "solid beer"!

What's in a Beer Label?

Call me an engineer, call me a nerd, call me a geek, but I love beer labels and packaging produced by craft breweries. My fondness of the packaging is only second the contents of the bottle (or can). Many of them have clever names and eye catching artwork to the point where we may be running out of names for different craft beers (warning: exaggeration ahead). Part of the reason for this is creativity that is possible when producing beer at a much smaller quantity. Another reason is small breweries jockeying for a limited customer base. When more and more craft breweries begin to produce beer, that means more beers vying for very limited shelf space. It is becoming increasingly difficult to get enough beers on the shelves, and ultimately into your fridge. But I digress...

Much more colorful than the typical big Brewery's silver, white, and blue cans.

Labeling requirements vary by state, but generally what you will find on most beer labels are the name of the beer, style of beer, name of the brewery, city it was brewed in, alcohol content, and a government warning. I love creating my own labels, and you can see many of them in previous posts. I make mine in Microsoft Paint. All of the labels must get approved by the state agency, and from what I've heard, it is a difficult task.

Other items that I've seen on craft beer cans are OG, FG, IBU, and ABV. I've seen OG much more than FG, and they stand for original gravity and final gravity.

Science time (I can't help it, I'm an engineer):
The OG and FG are measurements of specific gravity of the beer before and after fermentation. Alcohol content is calculated based off of the difference between the OG and FG. Specific gravity is a measurement of density relative to liquid water. Water has a specific gravity of 1.000.  This means that a strong barleywine will have an OG of 1.120, and a light lager will have an OG of 1.028. That same barleywine may have an FG around 1.080, while the light lager will have an FG of 1.008.




Specific gravity is measured with a hydrometer

I know... too many numbers. I bore myself sometimes... What I'm getting at is you can determine how much alcohol will be in a beer based off of the OG and FG. Here is a cool chart showing OG and FG ranges for beer styles.

ABV is an easy one, alcohol by volume (that's usually how you decide between "one more" and "I should not drink a 12% English Barleywine after drinking a six pack of Natty Ice"). IBU is international battering unit, and it describes the hop bitterness in a beer. IPAs have 60-100+ IBUs while light lagers have 10-15 IBUs. Pretty straightforward, especially compared to specific gravity. Now go surprise your friends with some newfound beer knowledge. Beware, you may get called a beer nerd.

Next time you get the latest craft beer in the bar or restaurant, ask to keep the bottle, and take a look at it. The breweries put a lot of effort and creativity into them. It's worth taking a look at. In my unbiased opinion, you can get so much more flavor out of a beer when you understand what you are drinking. With a little help from the beer label, I think you can enjoy your craft beer that much more.

Now what you all came here for: to hear about where you can taste some delicious homebrew from C'est Bon Biere. Our next beer festival will be at the 3rd Annual Bayou Beer Fest in Houma, Louisiana on November 14. C'est Bon Biere is proud to be the only home brewers to be represented at all three years of the festival. Come visit us, and try one of our three beers to sample: Belgian Missile Crisis Belgian Wit, Blueberry Bread Pudding Barleywine, and Chaos Theory Vienna Lager. Since this post was about labels, here is the label for our newest beer:

Be on the lookout for some new equipment upgrades from C'est Bon Biere. Until next time, drink local, drink good beer.



Wedding Bells at C'est Bon Biere

Hey everybody! I know you haven't heard from us much since Hattiesburg, but we have had a busy couple of months at C'est Bon Biere. As many of you probably noticed on our Facebook page, we got great feedback at the Hattiesburg Craft Beer Festival, and gained a few followers as well. We hope to keep all of our fans (Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Colorado, and everywhere else) informed on our plans for brewing and growing.

The last two months we have been brewing entirely for our wedding. That's right, your two favorite home brewers are getting married! What would a wedding between the founders of C'est Bon Biere be without some original good beer from CBB? We will be serving 4 beers on tap, for a total of 25 gallons of good beer.

Belgian Missile Crisis - Our Belgian wit brewed with fresh orange zest and coriander.

Guilty Pleasure - Our chocolate stout brewed with 2 pounds of unsweetened cocoa.

Cat's Out the Bag - Our cream ale blended with a hibiscus and mixed berry tea.

Something Old/Something New - This is our original black IPA recipe (the second batch of beer we ever brewed), aged in a whiskey barrel!

UPCOMING EVENTS:

After the wedding festivities are over, we will go back to the beer festival tour. Our first stop is at NOLA on Tap, September 26 in New Orleans. We will have at least two beers served there.

The next festival of the year is our favorite, Bayou Beer Festival in Houma, Louisiana on November 14. This will be the third annual event, and our third year handing out homebrew. This year we will be serving two very popular beers, the Belgian Missile Crisis and the Blueberry Bread Pudding Barleywine.

We can't wait to see you all there. Until then: drink local, good beer!

Hattiesburg Here We Come

We have been keeping pretty busy over at C'est Bon Biere. Thanks to everyone who came out and supported us at Mellow Brewfest in Covington. We had a great time handing out homebrew, meeting new beer enthusiasts, and making new friends. We even took 2nd place in the People's Choice Contest with our Blueberry Bread Pudding Barleywine! We have the giant crawfish trophy to prove it. Shout Out to our friends in the Swamp Rat Homebrew Club. Beer festivals are always more fun in the club.

Everyone knows that the summer months mean festival season. Our next stop on the wonderful beer festival tour is the Hattiesburg Craft Beer Festival. There are many new breweries and many up and coming breweries in the state of Mississippi that make a great product worth trying. If you ever make the trip to the Mississippi Gulf Coast, you can check out Lazy Magnolia, Crooked Letter, and Mississippi Brewing Company, among others.

In Hattiesburg we will be serving three different brews including everyone's favorite Belgian Missile Crisis, a Belgian Wit brewed with coriander and orange zest. We also will début two new recipes. First, a Baltic Porter aged for three weeks in a whiskey barrel from King's County Distillery. This beer is dark, strong, with a nice whiskey aroma without the bite. The oak flavor from the barrel pairs well with the roasted flavors in the beer.

 

The second new recipe has been in the works for over a year now. We call it Operation Fortitude. It is an amber Biere de Garde, a French-style ale that is similar to the Belgian Saison style. It has a sweet malt flavor with a strong aroma of banana and clove. This beer is much different than the typical amber lagers that most are used to drinking.



 



If you are up for the road trip, you should come visit us in Hattiesburg next weekend, June 13th. We will be sure to keep you posted on how the event goes. It will be great to meet the brewers of the new Mississippi breweries that will be at the festival. We will keep you posted on brew days, so you can stop by to learn about home brewing and enjoy some good beer.

What's Happening at C'est Bon Biere (April 2015)

Hello to all of our fans and craft beer lovers. We have a lot to go over, so bear with me. There are plenty of opportunities to try some homebrewed beer from your favorite Gonzales homebrewers. There is always beer on tap at the C'est Bon Biere headquarters, and we are always welcome to entertaining guests.

If you have any questions, comments, or just want to talk beer with us, we now have a email address just for that. You can reach us at itsgoodbeer@gmail.com. Pretty simple, I know. I'm trying to keep it simple for you guys. Especially after being at a beer festival for 5 hours, you might not have the best short term memory.

MAY 9- MELLOW BREWFEST
Come and visit us at our next homebrew festival in Covington, LA at Mellow Mushroom. The event is on May 9th from 4-9pm. The theme of this year's competition is Louisiana food and ingredients. We will be serving our soon-to-be-famous Blueberry Bread Pudding Barleywine. We will also be serving our Cream Ale brewed with fresh lemon zest, basil, and lemon thyme grown in our backyard garden. Yes, I know your mouth is watering!



His and Her brews will be in a head-to-head battle again at this competition. At Bayou Beer Fest in Houma, the Guilty Pleasure Chocolate Stout was the fan favorite over the I Can't Believe It's Not Butterbeer Cream Ale. Whose brews will you choose at Mellow Brewfest this year? Come and taste for yourself.

 

BARREL AGED BEERS

As many of you are aware, we now have a 5-gallon whiskey barrel for aging beer in. The first experiment begins tomorrow, when we brew a Baltic Porter, then age it for one month in the whiskey barrel. You will be the first to hear about the flavor and aroma that we get from the barrel.

 

Thank the distillers from our neighbor to the west, King's County Distillery

 

BEER FESTIVALS IN MISSISSIPPI

More details to come soon on this front. C'est Bon Biere might be traveling to Hattiesburg in early June for a local beer festival. Beers served there will be our barrel-aged porter and a long-awaited French Saison! Stay tuned on this front.

 

All in all, it's been a great start to the year. Brewing is still a great hobby, and a ton of fun. Everyone wants friends that homebrew. If you are ever interested in learning about home brewing or want to get started, just send us an email at itsgoodbeer@gmail.com. We will be happy to talk about it. Until then, drink local... drink good beer!