Allen - Gose: brewing a classic German beer for the modern era

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR

GOSE

I have over ten years experience in sour beer production, including Gose. There is much I have learned from this book that will continue to help me in my professional career. Fal writes with such simple clarity and depth that brewers of all levels and beer enthusiasts alike can enjoy and benefit from this book.

RON GANSBERG, Brewmaster, Cascade Brewing

There is more to Gose than just coriander and salt. Fal Allen reveals its rich history while giving the reader an in-depth introduction to both modern and historic Gose-style beers, their ingredients, and their quirks. Follow Gose on its journey from the imperial city of Goslar into the Gosenschnke of Leipzig and on to craft breweries in the US and the world.

BENEDIKT RAUSCH,Wilder Wald, http://wilder-wald.com

Fal takes us on a Dickensian journey through time, detailing what was, what is, and what may become of our beloved and mostly misunderstood Gose. Fal covers the depth and breadth of brewing Gose, with tips, clever tricks, and tasty anecdotes along the way. Whether youre a beer newbie or a master brewer, this book is required reading for all.

KRISTEN ENGLAND, Head Brewer, Bent Brewstillery

Brewers Publications

A Division of the Brewers Association

PO Box 1679, Boulder, Colorado 80306-1679

BrewersAssociation.org

BrewersPublications.com

Copyright 2018 by Brewers Association

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission of the publisher. Neither the authors, editors, nor the publisher assume any responsibility for the use or misuse of information contained in this book.

ISBN-13: 978-1-938469-49-7

Ebook ISBN-13: 978-1-938469-50-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Allen, Fal, author.

Title: Gose : brewing a classic German beer for the modern era / by Fal Allen.

Description: | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018020718 | ISBN 9781938469497 (pbk.)

Subjects: LCSH: GoseGermanyHistory. | BrewingAmateurs manuals.

Classification: LCC TP577 .A383 2018 | DDC 663/.3dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018020718

Publisher: Kristi Switzer

Technical Editor: Benedikt Rausch, Kristen England, Ron Gansberg

Copyediting: Amahl Turczyn

Proofreading: Iain Cox

Indexing: Doug Easton

Art Direction: Jason Smith

Cover Design: Danny Harms

Production: Justin Petersen

Cover Photo: Luke Trautwein

Interior Photos: Fal Allen unless otherwise noted.

I would like to dedicate this book to my fellow brewers; to all the brewers who came before usthey are our foundationand to all the brewers who have walked with me for a time along this meandering path. Their generosity and friendship has allowed me to continue the journey.

Putting it mildly, Gose is not a beer style that Americans grew up with, or were even aware of until relatively recently. I first heard of it in passing back in 1992, when my then wife, who was and is a curator at the Seattle Art Museum, and I were out to dinner with a visiting German art historical dignitary. Being German, our visitor was interested in the fact that I was a brewer, and he spoke fondly of a beer he recalled from his younger days in his hometown of Leipzig. The beer was flavored with coriander, he told me, and had salt in it. I dont remember whether he mentioned its tartness specifically. In any case, I was intrigued, said that it sounded like fun to brew, and filed it away in the part of my brain that serves as a funny little backwater of brewing, right next to where Pennsylvania Swankey resides.

At that time I was working alongside Fal Allen at the tiny, roughly 800-square-foot Pike Place Brewery, where we turned out about 1600 barrels of beer a year in three-and-a-half-barrel batches. (We were somewhat chagrined that there was an even smaller licensed brewery in Kalamazoo, Michigan run by Larry Bell.) But with the pressures of producing our signature pale ale and not much else, there would be no Gose brewing for us, no Pennsylvania Swankey. We did develop an IPA, and once a year brewed barleywine, along with an occasional batch of stout. Once, for a visit by Michael Jackson, who was good friends with the brewery owners, Charles and Rose Ann Finkel, we brewed a ginger molasses brown ale. It was a simpler time. Those of us who were working at Pike Place continued to be avid homebrewers, where we were able to take advantage of the interesting imported malts sold down the street at our sister homebrewing shop, Liberty Malt Supply, to brew styles of beer that the constraints of professional brewing didnt allow into the schedule. Still, none of us brewed a Gose.

But we did experiment. At one point, having been inspired by Dutch still lifes of dead fowl, oysters, cut lemons, and glasses of beer, I set out to brew a historically accurate seventeenth-century Dutch beer, and served it, with a label that Charles made specially, at a Seattle Art Museum opening for a show devoted to the golden age of Dutch painting. And Fal used to have Polynesian-themed parties at his house near the Greenwood neighborhood of Seattle. He would brew a beer in an open bucket, using everything in the house he could find that was fermentable, its excesses evened out by prodigious fistfuls of hops. It was required that everyone drink the resulting beer from a coconut shell. I also recall that Fal, asserting his Hawaiian bona fides, was the only one to wear a sarong.

Fast forward to the later stages of our careers...

In his first stint at Anderson Valley Brewing Company, Fal pretty much brewed the party lineclassic beers, such as golden ale, amber ale, and oatmeal stout, boldly rendered in the California style, but representative of the chromatic Holy Trinity of craft brewings early days. Anderson Valley did do new beers, mostly for sale at the brewery tap room in Boonville, and it came out with an IPA for general sale. But no Gose. Not yet.

When Fal lit out for Singapore to brew at Archipelago Brewing Company within the Asia Pacific Breweries behemoth, he was encouraged to experiment and develop new beers, either new styles altogether or quirky variations on the familiar. He came to Seattle to brew some test batches with me, since at Elysians Tangletown location I had a three-barrel brewery on which I fooled around, developing beers made with jasmine, rosemary, yuzu, and occasionally pumpkin. At one point I remember Fal being impressed that I had brewed a Berliner weiss and run the wort directly to the fermentor without bringing it to a boil. Fal was planning to introduce common or indigenous Asian ingredients to appeal to adventurous craft drinkers in Singapore. Later, his blog entries, posted from all over south Asia, were downright Bourdainian in their search for exotic ingredients and experiences. One of the experimental batches we made was a nominally Belgian-style witbier; it had coriander and orange peel, sure, but the orange peel was Chinese, and there was also lemongrass and tamarind. Another was a brown ale made with either regular ginger or galangal and gula melaka, a type of coconut sugar. Later, when I finally visited Fal in Singapore, I drank a lot of Archipelagos Straits Pale Ale. It was one of the first beers I had that used Nelson Sauvin hops.

After five years, when Archipelagos experiments were determined to be maybe too edgy for the Singapore craft massesto say nothing of the corrupt system of kickbacks from bars that didnt support anything particularly innovative or oddand he was no longer permitted to spread his creative wings quite so much, Fal returned to Anderson Valley. (Happily, I was able to buy all the unused and unwanted Nelson Sauvin from Doug Donelan at New Zealand Hops Ltd for an IPA I had come up with, which was first called Idiot Sauvin and later changed to Savant.) This time around at Anderson Valley, Fals experimenting side got heavily into wood-aged beers and some of the other labor-intensive and quirky styles that the craft world had come to love and demand. One of my favorite happy accidents from this time, both conceptually and to actually drink, was a sour wheat beer called Horse Tongue, aged in wood and supposedly, famously, inoculated by a horse licking around the barrels bung. It kind of reminded me of the time when we were traveling in England doing research for the book we wrote together on barleywine and opened a bottle of