Drinking in a Winter Warmer Land

Warming: These Ohio-brewed beers are exceptional

“Go big or go home” was the unofficial theme at this year’s 4th Annual Winter Warmer Beer Festival held Sunday the 21st at Rock Bottom Brewery in The Flats. Rock Bottom Brewery hosted this midday beer tasting attended by 12 local and regional breweries and hundreds upon hundreds of craft beer enthusiasts.

It was a showcase of the richness of the craft beer culture in Ohio. Among the 12 breweries were Hoppin’ Frog, Great Lakes, Buckeye Brewing, The Brew Kettle, Fat Heads, and Main Street Brewing out of Garretsville. It was also a showcase of so-called “high gravity” beers. High gravity is a term referring to the original concentration of fermentable sugar before the beer is fermented.  It refers to many different styles of beer, but they are generally rich, malty, flavorful, made in smaller batches, and, as a consequence of the high sugar, they are higher in alcohol. These are super-beers. Beers known as barleywine, strong ale, old ale, and any beer with the word “Imperial” before the rest of the title are known as high gravity beers. What ends up in the glass is pure beer heaven.

This is the haute couture of the brewing world. Mainly because these beers are very high in alcohol and extremely rich, they are not the quaffing-style that the American palate tends to expect. Few of these beers could be considered refreshing, but that’s not the point. They are, like haute couture, a study in the heights to which brewing can aspire.  They are sipping beers, dessert beers, and, sometimes, so over-the-top bitter that they completely collapse one’s ability to taste anything else afterwards.

Ohio brewers like Buckeye Brewing operate at the haute couture level with a beer known as Zatek. Zatek is a high gravity beer that defies definition. It’s an American Strong Ale, but it has also been described as a dark Imperial IPA (India Pale Ale).  The Zatek poured at the Winter Warmer Festival was brewed in 2008, so it had plenty of conditioning time, providing the drinker with a very mellow nuttiness and a toasty biscuit type of flavor. Another biscuit-like concoction came from Fat Heads Brewery in North Olmsted, which offered the monstrous Double IPA called Hop Juju. This is a beer with very strong herbal, hop-dominated aromas that follow onto the palate, but are somewhat foiled by a sweet, biscuit or cookie-like maltiness. The large amount of fresh hops that are used to make this beer contribute to its floral and citrus freshness, as well as its mouth-puckering bitterness.

The Brew Kettle, located in Strongsville, is in the midst of their annual Ogre Fest which celebrates barleywine-style beers and other high gravity favorites.  At the Winter Warmer Festival, they brought three of their heavy-hitters:  a Belgian-style Tripel, the Dark Helmut Imperial Schwarzbier, and my favorite, Old 21 Imperial IPA.  Old 21 is an”Imperial” IPA which means that it’s big – 9% alcohol..  Bigness also describes the body of the beer.  This style of beer has some heft to it.  A heavy dose of malts are necessary to balance the huge addition of hops, in this case, Simcoe hops.  Old 21 is dangerously drinkable, brightly citrusy, and surprisingly refreshing.  It’s another home run hit by Strongsville’s The Brew Kettle.

Fred Karm’s Hoppin' Frog brewery in Akron makes some of the richest, most luscious, most award-winning beers in Ohio. Among the large variety of brews Hoppin' Frog poured at the festival were barrel-aged BORIS Imperial Oatmeal Stout and the Hop Dam Triple IPA.  Hoppin’ Frog’s website says drinking Hop Dam is “like kissing a hop,” but it’s more like kissing the hop’s distant cousin cannabis (not that I would know, firsthand). Its very herbal qualities come from huge hop additions, rumored to be 100 pounds of hops per 10 barrel batch, at various points in the process which creates ample hop aroma and flavor. All that hoppiness is balanced by a creamy malt texture and tight carbonation. BORIS is the barrel-affected version of Hoppin’ Frog’s Imperial Oatmeal Stout. This is a dessert beer. At the Hoppin’ Frog’s table, BORIS was poured through a cylinder of whole coffee beans – not for the faint of heart!  A taster asked, “Will this keep me up tonight?” Karm enthusiastically replied, “Yes!!” The addition of coffee beans to an already super-rich, chocolate cake-like beer makes it the perfect after-dinner beer.

The most interesting offering at the Winter Warmer festival must have been Main Street Brewing’s Aphrodite Ale, described as “Belgian, chocolate, maple, oatmeal, Imperial Cream Stout aged on oak chips soaked in Cognac.” Wow. Now, that’s the kitchen sink-style beer. One could detect many of the ingredients used in making the beer, such as the 10 pounds of cocoa powder per three-barrel batch, the maple, and the light hint of oak. Otherwise, it showed like a Belgian-style stout, finishing dry and being lighter in body.

The English once called high gravity beers “winter warmers.” Rock Bottom Brewery and a dozen great Ohio brewers dazzled Clevelanders with their own winter warmers, the very highest expression of brewing possible.