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...