Craft beer seems to have been turned upside down with wild, esoteric new styles over the past few years. I've seen peanut butter and jelly beer, banana bread beer, palate-nuking beers that boast 130 plus IBUs, maple and bacon beers, Russian stouts chock full of coffee and vanilla, and all manner of barrel aged and high gravity styles. I don't think there's a traditional style out there that someone hasn't hopped through the roof, made into an imperial, or infused with some rare fruit or spice that's only harvested by the inmates of a Guatemalan insane asylum.
Skilled traditional brewers--guys like Dan Carey--know how to embrace classic styles of beer while still managing to bring something new to the table for the consumer. The mouth-puckering Berliner Weiss that he recently brewed is a good example. It's not a new style by any means, but how often do you see it in America? I know that the Germans typically drink the sour potion with woodruff or raspberry syrup to ease the bite, but I found the New Glarus version to be mild enough to tolerate without any additives. It's lemony, quenching, and especially satisfying on a hot day. With guys like Dan Carey and Brooklyn's Garrett Oliver still shoveling grain into mash tuns, I think the time-honored recipes and methods of yore are safe, and core styles of beer will continue to be made with skill and dignity.
A very different breed of skilled brewer, however, is equally vital to modern craft beer. Guys like Sam Calagione are drawing from the past and looking to the future simultaneously. Dogfish Head resurrected Midas Touch from dusty archaelogy with one hand and and popularized Randall the Enamel Animal with the other. Yes, extreme brewers throw everything and the kitchen sink into their fermenters, but they are not destroying classic styles of beer; they're reimagining what beer can be. I really like Revolution's Rosa and I may never have known how nice hibiscus flowers are in beer if they hadn't tossed them into the wort. The Reinheitsgebot is dead, and no one cares. The iconoclasts aren't ripping down the industry. They're finding ways to make it new and exciting for everyone, and converting followers who didn't even know that they liked beer.
The current trend in imaginative new styles has been redefining what IPAs can be. I remember when I first started seeing the black IPA. It seemed like a novelty or an excuse for an overhopped porter, but some brewers have definitely executed it well. White IPAs seem to be all the craze now. I have really enjoyed them, my two favorites being White Hatter from New Holland and Deschutes's Chainbreaker. They are both essentially witbiers with an IPA hop profile. I was skeptical at first, but both breweries showed a deft hand at boosting the level of citrusy hops without smashing the delicate orange and coriander notes underneath.
I like this style so much that I made a white IPA of my own. I pieced my recipe together from ingredient suggestions that Deschutes recommends for homebrewing Chainbreaker. I also took cues from the Hitachino Nest White recipe from Clone Brews by Mark and Tess Szamatulski. The theory was to apply Deschutes's West Coast hop profile to a fairly standard witbier. I think it's the best beer that I have made to date. I call it White Wizard and I encourage you to try the recipe yourself.
Grains:
12 oz. two row barley
12 oz. torrified wheat
4 oz. rice hulls
It's necessary to mash torrified wheat with some 2 row barley instead of just steeping it like a specialty grain. It needs help from the enzymes in the barley to break down its starches into fermentable sugars.
Place cracked grains and rice hulls in a muslin bag. Steep in a gallon of water from cold to 155 F in an 8 quart pot. Turn off heat, cover pot, and hold temperature at around 155 F for 40 minutes. Meanwhile, heat up 2 gallons of water in your 20 quart brew kettle. When it reaches 155 F, turn off the heat, cover, and hold the temperature steady in that pot as well.
When the 40 minute mash time is up, remove the grain bag from the 8 quart pot. Place it in a strainer and hold it above the 20 quart brew kettle, allowing excess sugars to drain into the water. Sparge grains with a half gallon of 155 F water from the brewpot as the bag drains. Use caution when pouring hot water over the bag; I use a pyrex measuring cup. Discard the grain bag when you are done sparging. Strain the wort from the 8 quart pot into the brew kettle as well. The total volume of the brew kettle should be roughly 3 gallons. Bring it to a boil in preparation for adding the malt extract.
Extract:
6 lbs. Munton's Wheat DME added @ 60 min. (Remove pot from heat before you stir in the DME; if you add it to a boiling pot, you're in for a mess. Keep an eye on the pot as you slowly return it to a boil; lower the heat if it starts to foam up.)
Hops:
1 oz. Columbus (bittering @ 60 min.)
1 oz. Cascade (flavor @ 15 min.)
1 oz. Centennial (aroma @ 5 min.)
1 oz. Citra (dry hop)
Yeast:
Wyeast 3944 Belgian Wit
Other Ingredients:
1/2 tsp. ground coriander @ 15 min
1/4 oz. sweet orange peel @ 15 min.
1 tsp. Irish moss (added with the flavor hops 15 minutes before flameout)
water to top off the wort at 5 gallons in the primary fermenter
3/4 cup of corn sugar boiled in 2 cups of water (to prime before bottling)
The original gravity should be about 1.056 and the final gravity should be about 1.012. Hurry up and brew it so you can enjoy it before summer's over!
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