|BACKGROUND|

The history of beer is long and convoluted, not unlike a George R.R. Martin novel. Turns out that people have always liked getting drunk.

But there is a particular style that gives us a small glimpse into the past: the adambier.

Don’t get me wrong, Dogfish Head has done some amazing work in their Ancient Ales series, in collaboration with archeologist Dr. Patrick McGovern, but there’s always a bit more to the story. Plus, a lot of the things they used as inspiration for their brews are “beer-like”, but not actually “beer”. The most ancient form of “beer” is considered to be from ancient Sumeria, made in honor of the goddess of brewing, Ninkasi, and fermented mostly out of bread, not unlike a kvass. I’m still not sure I’d consider the first beer, though.

To discuss the progenitor of what we know today as beer, it’s best to look back through the annals of time into Germany’s history of brewing in Dortmunder.

Many of the technological advancements that we have today as brewers didn’t exist. Germ theory as a whole was still in its infancy, with Louis Pasteur starting his research in the late 1850’s. Stainless steel fermenters weren’t even twinkling in the imaginations of metal workers yet, since wooden casks worked wonders. Even then, most malting was still done in smokehouses and with open flames, meaning that most malts were both dark and smoky. It was a wild time to brew beer, at least what I’d actually consider beer, instead of just something that happened to be fermented.

To call it the origin of modern beer would not be a misnomer, as the “adam” part of the name does derive from the Adam of biblical nature. A precursor of our familiar ales and lagers, the style of adambier itself is a strange one, to be sure. Dark, tart, smoky, and probably woody, it proceeds other “extinct” styles of beer like the grodziskie and the lichtenheiner. It’s also very clearly described as a heavily hopped, strong, top-fermenting ale. Ron Pattinson has a great expose on historical evidence of the beer on his blog. Even so, he can only find so much information about the original beers.

However, we are lucky to have some more modern interpretations as well, despite the fact that the BJCP struck it from their guidelines as an official style in 1998. The most famous of these takes on the style is Hair of the Dog’s aptly named Adam. Owner/Brewer Alan Sprints has been very open with his recipe of Adam and it for sure was a great influence on my take on the style as well. Even more recently than Sprints’ take, which they’ve been brewing since 1994, Sebastian Saur, of Freigesit Bierkultur, has taken his own stab at the style. Under the moniker of The Monarchy, he’s been pushing to experiment with recreating the historical beer styles of Germany. The iteration Saur has come up with is Methusalem, a self-described “strong, sour altbier”, which also has its own variants, like the Holundheimer, which gets some elderberry juice into the jam. That beer is another strong influence on what I decided to make.

Admittedly, I’m not a super religious person. That’s neither here nor there, but there’s an interesting argument that comes into play with the whole story of Adam and Eve; was the fruit from the tree of knowledge really an apple? There are some people who argue that it might have been a pomegranate. Heck, it’s even mentioned to be a fruit in Moses’ time, and there’s already a strong link to the pomegranate and knowledge in Greek mythology and the legend of Persephone. Most Hebrew scholars agree it probably wasn’t, if any of that ever happened, but it’s still part of my choice to use it as an ingredient for my proto-beer. I’m not one for conspiracy theories or urban legends, but the pomegranate idea is at least harmless.

As per usual, I wanted to keep with a fun little theme on this batch. The forbidden fruit, the origins of life… well, beer. But what other “life” themed ingredients could I come up with? As per the style, I wanted some sort of wood quality, and what better than lignum vitae, the wood of life – Palo Santo. Once again throwing back to Dogfish Head, I knew already that Palo Santo wood goes quite well in a beer, especially darker ones, since Pale Santo Marron is another bold, brash offering from them, aged in the unconventional wooden tanks.

To go further, another twist in the ride of the “life” beer was to imbue the Palo Santo chips with liquor – specifically, Aquavit, the water of life. It’s a little hard to describe aquavit to people who aren’t cocktail junkies because it’s a pretty unique liquor. Essentially a caraway-dill-anise infused Norwegian potato vodka, Linie is a particularly interesting distillery because they also put their aquavit into sherry casks, throw it on a ship, and sail the liquor across the equator – twice. It has a rye-esque flair to it and, at 80 proof, it’s not dainty. Perfect to stand up to the bold beer I wanted to brew.

I had also had a beer from Haandbryggeriet, a Norwegian brewery, that they had aged in aquavit casks. It was an iteration of their Dark Force, a “double extreme imperial wheat stout”, and I gotta say, it was damn tasty.

After all the thought about the beer itself, I was still struggling with a name for it at the end. As per the “not religious” aspect, I’m also not a new age holistic hippie-dippie type either. As an art person, however, it’d be impossible of me to not have heard of sacred geometry, more specifically Metatron’s Cube. In sacred geometry, Archangel Metatron, the angel of life oversees the flow of energy in a mystical cube, which contains all of the geometric shapes in God’s creation and represents the patterns that make up everything God has made. It not only gave me a jumpstart on the label design, but also a pretty interesting name to boot.

Thus was my quest to recreate the smoky, strong, dark, and sour beer, complete with it’s own little M. Night Shamylan twists, as per usual.

Them Digits

Batch Size: 5.5 gallons

Mash Temp:

152 F for 60 min. (mash #1)

154 F for 60 min. (mash #2)

Boil Time: 60 min. + 60 min.

Batch Efficiency: 72%

Original Gravity: 1.086 // 20.7 P

Final Gravity: 1.030 // 7.6 P

Estimated ABV: 8.0%

IBUs: 52 IBU

Color: 87.6 EBC // 44.5 SRM

Recipe

Malts

Mash #1

6# Pearl Malt | 100%

Mash #2

12# Pearl Malt | 80%

1# Dark Chocolate Malt | 6.7%

.5# Peat Malt | 3.3%

.5# Melanoiden | 3.3%

.5# Crystal 120L | 3.3%

.25# Midnight Wheat | 1.7%

.25# Carafa II Special | 1.7%

Hops

1 oz. Northern Brewer (6% AA) @ 90 min. | 20 IBU

2 oz. Northern Brewer (6% AA) @ 40 min. | 32 IBU

Yeast

1L starter of Wild Pitch Yeast Co. YH73 (Fermented solo for 2 days at 70F, then mixed ferm)

1x packet of GigaYeast – Scotch Ale #1 (Fermented at 70F, pitched in sequence after 2 days)

Spices and Stuff

1 kg Pomegranate Puree

4 oz. Palo Santo Chips, soaked in Linie Aquavit (5 days contact)

Water Shit

4 mL 88% Lactic Acid (2 mL per mash)

2 tsp CaCl (1 tsp per mash)

|BREW LOG|

A few days before the brewday is technically where this tale starts, as I made a nice 1 L start with the first yeast strain this beer was going to get hit with. I had reached out to Matt over at Wild Pitch Yeast a few weeks before Mike Tonnsmeire actually posted about his experiment with lactic-acid fermenting yeast. Great minds and all that.

Working with him, I ended up ordering two different yeast strains, both of which were isolated from Pennsylvania. I felt like that was only appropriate to use “local” yeast in my beers. Using a 1/3 pound of DME, I propped up my vial of YH73 three days ahead of the actual brewday. Not that I had my doubts, but the starter itself had a nice lactic twang on the nose, meaning that my yeast was happy, healthy, and doing the damn thing. My strains were also different from what Mike had used, meaning that I was also not going to have any sort of reference for what they could contribute to my batch (and future batch), aside from the notes that Matt had provided to me before ordering. Included in that was also a list of apparent attenuations. While the YH156 strain could go as high as 70-100%, the YH73 was listed as a hard 55%. To me, this was a nice safety net that, in case something went screwy, the beer would most likely not ferment out entirely before getting to add the second pitch of yeast and would strike more of a balance than having one strain dominate the other.

The night before, I took my handy-dandy Palo Santo chips and started infusing them with the aquavit liquor. By the next morning, it smelled (and tasted) absolutely amazing. Off the bat, I was excited to see how this beer was going to turn out, just from that. It’s nice to see the hypothetical pieces of the puzzle actually come together in practice.

Due to the fact that the grain bill was so massive, I knew that I’d have to do two separate mashes. I decided against doing a reiterated mash, opting instead to just do two separate mashes. The main reasoning behind that was time – I wasn’t exactly feeling a 90 minute boil on top of two different mashes as the tail end of the usual double brew day, but I had also come up with a clever way around that. To get both concentration and some extra Maillard reaction flavors, I was also going to do two boils, in tandem.

The first mash was simply with the 6 pounds of pearl malt all by itself. The goal was to get as concentrated a wort as possible with as little volume as possible. I ended up mashing with 2 gallons of water, landing my temp at 152F and with minimal water adjustment because of it being such a low volume to try and adjust. Temperature and pH were on point and, after sparging with a minimal amount of water as well, I collected roughly 2.5 gallons of wort in my secondary kettle. The goal became to reduce this down as far as possible while the second mash was going.

Since I also needed to get a decent amount of bitterness from my “90 minute” addition, during this “first boil”, I added in the first charge of hops during the first boil, at the 30 minute mark, since it was still going to get boiled for an additional 60 in the “real” boil/second boil.

While I had been sparging and lautering the first mash, I had already started heating up the 4.5 gallons of water for the second mash. The usual water adjustment and mashing followed, with the caveat that I also overshot my adjustments. I thought had been pretty clever in the fact that I caught the run off water that I had used to chill the first batch of beer that day, but that also meant that I was working with a completely different water profile instead of my tap water. Turns out that, in combination with the dark/roasted malts that I used in the second batch, I had slightly overadjusted my water, which caused my pH to come in slightly on the lower side, a hair under 5.2 pH, at 5.16. Close enough. The temp came in right on the money at 154F, which is higher than the first mash, but I also wanted the larger mash to make more non-fermentables than the first.

Since I also wasn’t going to waste the time or water to chill the first boil down, which would only really achieve the end of isomerizing the alpha acids of the hops, I just collected the wort from the second mash directly into the kettle with the wort from the first mash/boil, effectively lowering the temperature down below the 180F threshold and stopping the process until I brought it back up to a boil. I guess it almost got treated like first wort hops for a brief moment. This does mean that my IBU calculations are going to be slightly off, but with a low AA% hop like Northern Brewer, I’m not going end up exponentially off target from what I’d wanted.

With all the wort collected into the kettle, about 7.5 gallons worth, I was surprised to find about a gallon’s worth of second runnings still in the mash tun, which clocked in at around 1.044 itself. Not having the yeast, fermentation vessel, or real desire to do anything special with it, I simply emptied out the tun. A pre-boil gravity for the batch came in around 1.078, which was great, because, according to my calculator, I was right on target for hitting my target gravity of ~1.100. Or so, I thought.

The boil was relatively uneventful. I had the one kettle addition of hops at 40 minutes, but other than that, it was just letting it roll at a grueling pace. It was a pretty vigorous boil, including a little bit of boiling over, despite going heavy handed with the FermCap too. WhirlFloc and a little bit of yeast nutrient went in around 15 minutes left.

The only other real prep work that needed to be done was sanitizing the carboy and adding in the pomegranate purée, which was more akin to just being pomegranate juice that I feel like I overpaid for. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Boiron purées, and typically I feel like I get my money’s worth, but their pomegranate was almost entirely just a liquid. I could have just gotten a bottle or two of Pom for like half the price.

Once the kettle temp was at 68F, I racked the wort into the carboy, atop the pomegranate, as is my typical procedure at this point. I hit the 5.5 gallons of wort with pure O2 through a .5 micron air stone for 90 seconds I like to make sure that high OG beers get properly aerated for fermentation. After that, it was simply a matter of pitching the starter into the wort and letting it ride.

Checking what my final gravity was, my heart sank a little. The beer only came in at 1.086 (1.084, adjusted), which was well below the anticipated gravity. Normally, I beat myself up less about things like this, but the fact that I hit the pre-boil gravity and post-boil volume without getting the target gravity, or at least being closer than ~15 points off, is quite bizarre.

With all I could do being to throw my hands up in the air in exasperation and saying “I guess”, I let the beer to start fermenting. For its initial fermentation with the YH73 strain, it maybe hit a 1/2″ krausen with some airlock activity and some visible yeast rafts on the surface. At pitching the Scotch ale yeast, it had a noticeable lactic smell, but not tart enough to wrinkle the nose hairs. Oddly enough, the Scotch ale yeast went gangbusters right out the starting gate and, despite Matt’s hesitancy with doing a co-pitch instead of the sequential pitching, it seems like the lactic acid production actually kicked up slightly more after adding in the second yeast strain.

YH73 krausen Scotch ale krausen

There ended up being some kinks in the schedule with regard to finding a good bottling date, which gave this batch a few extras weeks to ferment, ensuring that it would go until completion. 5 days before bottling, I had my dad drop the infused Palo Santo chips into the carboy using a sanitized hop sack and some marbles. That was all she wrote until bottling day actually arrived.

The first step, as usual, was to make the priming solution for the batch. I used 4 oz. of sugar (~.5 cup) to make a simple syrup, shooting for the 2.4 vol/CO2 that’s par the course for an altbier. I racked 5.5 gallons out of the fermenter into the bottling bucket, stirring to ensure even mixing. At this point, after tasting the beer, I was a little disappointed in the fact that the pomegranate was mostly subdued and the wood chips were pretty much front and center to the party. I mean, it was still good, just not quite what I had in mind. Checking the gravity, the beer was clocking in at 8% abv, resting at comfortable 1.030 (1.028, adjusted), which was actually close to my target FG. Putting the batch into bottles and labeling them, all that was left was a well deserved rest for the yeasties to (hopefully) do their thing. While not an overly high ABV, I was slightly nervous about carbonation, since the last higher octane offering was a little recalcitrant about carbing up quickly. Opening a bottle a week later, my fears were assuaged.

|TASTING NOTES|

Out of the bottle, the beer pours a dark, almost inky, black-brown, all the while throwing up an ecru colored head that lingers for days and laces its way down the glass like a Victoria’s Secret model.

Automatically, you know some shit’s about to go down just from the nose itself. Upon a whiff, the nostrils are assailed by the palo santo woody goodness, followed by a sharp twang of caraway, some stonefruit, and a hint of smoke, cinnamon, and something slightly medicinal or herbal.

The taste somewhat follows the nose, but the depth of flavor is ridiculous. To try and summarize it, this beer tastes very similar to Fernet Branca, or some other types of amaro liquors, to the point where this could possibly be a digestif. Maybe Drambouie? Up front, the beer starts with a nice tartness, very clean, definitely not enamel peeling. From there, it moves into the middle of the palate and suddenly, the woodwinds pick up and all the flavors of the palo santo blooms, the aquvit staccatos, and the pomegranate slowly holds tempo. At the back of the palate creeps in the smoke and the dagger, the peat straggling in like prodigal son with a light twang of hoppy bite coming through to pierce the veil, both lingering slightly after the swallow. Pretty much, it’s complicated and their’s a lot going on, kinda like a Flaming Lips concert. As a whole, this beer lights up the palate like a Jumbotron, taste buds firing in weird sorts of ways because there are few foods that should set off all 5 flavors simultaneously.

The mouth feel is great. Despite the high finishing gravity, the beer is somehow svelte and well-rounded. The slightly mild carbonation level allows the beer to rest on the tongue like a pillow but stops shy of being too heavy. There’s no booziness or overly drying tannic qualities from the wood.

This beer is crazy, borderline too much going on. I think the only real issue I could say that I have with it is that I should have treated the palo santo chips a little bit before infusing them. Giving them the old boil ‘n broil like I do with oak could have reigned in the flavor and kept it from being super domineering, but I also kinda like it that way too. While it may lack the alcoholic oomph that the beers it is inspired by have, this doesn’t feel like it’s missing anything. With the high intensity, it’s a bit difficult to drink more than 8-10 oz. of it at a time but… this is definitely a cigar beer, especially for fans of a good ol’ rusty nail.

Having the ability to put it beside bottles of both Hair of the Dog’s Cherry Adam from the Wood and The Monarchy’s Methusalem Holundheimer, I’m actually really impressed at how true to form this batch is. It leans much more closely to the Methusalem, but it still keeps its roots from Sprint’s recipe.