Chama River

Session #4: I’ll have green chile with that

Chama River Class VI Golden

Corrales Bistro BreweryWhen we started The Session in March I was hoping each monthly host would not feel constrained to make the theme a particular beer style, so kudos to Snekse for making the June theme Drink Local.

If New Mexico has a state beer adjective it is hoppy, and the state beer style would be India Pale Ale. As I headed down the hill from my house to the Corrales Bistro Brewery for lunch, conversation with my friend Ron and a beer I was thinking “good day for an IPA.”

The temperature was nearing 80 – this is a great time of year in the Rio Grande Valley, with windy season mostly over and morning temperatures still in the 40s, lots of sun and afternoon highs looking at 90 – and I was looking forward to sitting out on the back deck with a clear view of the Sandia Mountains.

As I’ve written before, the most basic route to “downtown” Corrales takes me past the Milagro Winery, so you get a bonus picture of part of its vineyard. Mission grapes were first planted in Corrales in the 1880s, but most were gone by the 1930s. This vineyard was planted in 1985 with more traditional vinifera.

Milagro Winery

If you look at the menu board (above) you’ll note – as I did upon arriving – that no IPA is available. Sometimes the Bistro will have one from Turtle Mountain (up the hill in Rio Rancho), and sometimes from Chama River or Il Vicino (both in Albuquerque). No. 10 is blank because the keg of Turtle Mountain IPA ran dry.

The surprise was that the Bistro’s first brew was available. Understand that the brewery is not the top priority here – owner Fritz Allen wants to run a taproom featuring New Mexico beers, and you won’t find any other place with quite the cross-section of beers (all local) that the Bistro offers.

The brewery is a stitched together three-barrel system that doesn’t include a way – other than the help of nature – to control fermentation temperatures. That presents a brewing problem most places, but particularly in New Mexico. Thus, at the suggestion of Il Vicino brewer Brady McKeown (who lives in Corrales), Allen decided to started with a farmhouse ale brewed in the manner of a saison and with a yeast that likes higher temperatures.

He studied Phil Markowski’s Farmhouse Ales before tackling the project.

Simply called Summer Farm Ale, this beer is light in color and body and didn’t suffer in fermentation (no band aid!). It’s lightly spicy – the brewery serves it with a lime – though not brimming with yeast character.

The picture at the top is the other beer I drank, the Class VI Golden Lager from Chama River (simply called Helles on the board here). I’ve written about that beer before.

It went quite nicely with a pastrami and green chile sandwich wrapped into a tortilla.

I didn’t really mind the State Beer wasn’t available, but I sure as heck was going to have a basic local dish (the green chile, not the pastrami).

Session #2: Chama River Demolition Dubbel

The Session(This is my contribution to our monthly Session. Alan McLeod will be recapping them all.)

One Sunday last May, Ted Rice lifted a glass of beer homebrewed in the spirit of a Belgian dubbel.

“That’s the aroma I’m looking for,” he said, putting it to his nose.

This was literally one of the first batches brewed with the dark candy syrup that Brian Mercer (www.darkcandi.com) was just beginning to import from Belgium. Mercer had shipped samples to a few homebrewers and we invited them to enter their beers in the Enchanted Brewing Challenge. We’d judged the homebrew competition the day before at Chama River Brewing Co., where Rice is the brewer, and today we were drinking the leftovers while sitting on the deck at Il Vicino Brewing.

The dark syrup contributes rich caramel, rummy and dark fruit aromas we associate with beers brewed in Belgium. Westmalle started used caramelized sugar syrup in its Dubbel in 1922. (More about the syryp.)

Ted RiceNot surprisingly, it wasn’t long before Rice (shown at work in this un-glamorous photo) brewed a dubbel with the syrup. He’s since brewed two more, the latest of which is on tap now.

Tasting it as it matured, the consensus has been that it is the best Demolition Dubbel yet (to our count, this is the sixth edition since the first won a gold medal in the 2004 New Mexico State Fair). So I intended on Tuesday to ask Rice: “Are we there yet?”

I took along the previous version, bottled last summer for entry in the Great American Beer Festival and stored in a temperature-controlled chest freezer since October (we don’t have cellars in New Mexico). The GABF version was bottled-conditioned, meaning fresh sugar and yeast were added to kickoff re-fermentation in the bottle and carbonate the beer to a level not generally available on draft.

And it was carbonated, much more than when I last tried a bottle six months ago. Beer came surging out when I opened the cap, onto Rice’s desk in the brewery and the floor, leaving just enough in the 22-ounce bottle for three of us to sample. We quickly assured ourselves that an infection wasn’t to blame.

We didn’t find any off flavors or sourness, but one friend picked up a bit of tinny thinness in the finish and much preferred the one on draft. Even though the bottled version was cloudy (yeast in suspension) Rice and I decided we liked it better because of spicy character contributed by the yeast (this version was brewed with a different yeast than last). A bit of a surprise.

Is there a point (or are there points)? For one thing that when you brew in small batches not every edition has to taste the same.

For another, earlier this week Andrew at Flossmoor Beer Blog mentioned that American brewers “try to do a little of everything” (there’s more in his post worth commenting on, but that will have to wait). Well, Rice has won seven medals at GABF or the World Beer Cup in five different beers styles. None of which are among the six regular offering at CR, so brewing an every changing lineup for the other four hasn’t affected quality.

I’m not sure when we’ll next see Demolition Dubbel, but I do know that it will be different again.

“I could do this the rest of my life (and still be working on it),” Rice said.