Making Summer Brews: Tips from the Pros
There’s nothing more synonymous with summer than a tasty seasonal brew. It’s the beverage you enjoy at the beach, after mowing the lawn, at a barbecue or just because it’s hot. This issue, we asked two professional brewers responsible for a few of our favorite summer brews how to capture the essence of the season in a beer and what advice they have for making a summer recipe.
Brewer: Bill Covaleski, Victory Brewing Company in Downington, PA
My overall goal for making a summer beer is refreshment. This requires clean and well-defined flavors over murky complexity and low to medium body. Color has a lot of psychological impact, and lighter colored beers are favored in the summer as they tend to convey a sense of refreshment. Warm summer weather also requires beers that are lower in body so that they can serve as refreshers — often in volume — which means alcohol levels also need to be dialed back.
The process of creating a refreshing summer beer begins with ingredient selection, of course, and moves along into methods. For example, our Whirlwind Witbier is mashed for a bigger, grainy mouthfeel as we try and pull more proteins from the wheat and barley malt grist. In this way we can create a refreshing ale that offers citric snap up front, and a fleeting, evaporative finish but with a more substantial middle to satisfy us demanding craft beer lovers.
Tradition plays a role in creating a summer beer, as well. Long before we had the comforts of reliable heat and air conditioning, brewers were creating comfort in our drinks. So, the problem of weather extremes has been one that brewers have been addressing for centuries — so there is no reason to throw that knowledge away now. At Victory, we have avoided any gratuitous, heavy-handed twists to traditional recipes. We only seek to improve in areas where we feel there will be rewards gained. Prima Pils is a perfect example of this. Yes, it reaches higher IBUs than traditional European Pilsners would aspire to, but in selecting whole flower hops there are significant gains in both hop flavor and aroma made. Therefore, we have not just delivered more bitterness, we have wrapped that quenching dryness in the beauty of more pleasing aroma and more juicy hop flavor. We felt that is how a traditional beer with summertime appeal could be improved upon.
As for ingredients, our best summer beers stick to noble hops to deliver the more integrated flavors of fresh grass and herbal spice that we feel are more appropriate for summer over the citrus, pine and grapefruit of some well-known American hops. Yeast is another story, and I would advise researching the style requirements well and rely on the practical advice of your fellow homebrewers or local professionals to make the right selection for the perfect summer brew.
Though we have yet to use them commercially in any of our brews, I have made ales that incorporate grains of paradise for spectacularly refreshing results. However, not to ignore the obvious, wheat malt can find its way successfully into most summer brews either in a leading role or as a supporting player.
If you’re thinking about making a summer beer, my advice is to quantify the flavors that you want the beer to deliver and be specific and narrow to start rather than trying to accomplish too many flavors at once. This may be a learning process rather than a bold-stroke success. Keep in mind that balance and nuance are more refreshing than a lingering, tip-of-the-tongue complexity.
If your soul searching tells you that you want a fruit-accented beer, follow that lead with proper malt and yeast selection. If your senses tell you dryness, focus in on the malt, mashing and hopping. Maybe after successfully accomplishing both brews, you sense a middle ground that you might want to approach.
Brewer: Todd Charbonneau, Harpoon Brewery in Boston, MA
For summer beers, I look for a light to medium body with a crisp, refreshing character and a fairly dry finish. I think consumers feel very strongly about beer color, especially for these types of beers, so a golden or straw color is most appropriate.
We employ a low mashing temperature with no dark, dextrinous specialty malts to make the perfect summer beer that has a crisp, dry malt character. The limited use of those darker malts will keep the color of your beer light. A low (150 °F/ 66 °C) mash temperature will give the beer a light body and texture through a complete fermentation. Your yeast selection will play a role in this, whether it is fruity and estery, or a clean lager strain. Remember that a complete fermentation with a low finishing gravity will result in a drier, more refreshing character and finish. Also, look for highly attenuative yeast strains.
For hops, steer clear of over-bittering a summer beer. Ample bitterness can be achieved without going into the puckering, cloying bitterness category. It’s great to brew an IPA for the summer, but design it with drinkability in mind.
If you are looking for inspiration for a recipe, there are many styles that are refreshing and light in nature that brewers have taken to brewing for the summer months. American wheats, Pilsners and fruit beers are just a few examples that are used successfully by brewers all over the country. For our summer beer at Harpoon, we took a traditional German style, Kölsch, which is traditionally associated with lager characteristics but brewed with an ale yeast, and put our signature influence into it. We use our own ale yeast strain, which lends a fruity character and develops some nice, estery notes, which mingle well with the American-grown German varietal hops that we use. The finished beer is a light-bodied brew with a crisp, dry finish and a straw-golden color.
My advice is, as with any new brew, to keep it simple when you’re starting out. Consider drinkability when you’re designing the recipe and keep the body and color light. If you do that, and keep the bitterness moderate, the beer will be approachable and refreshing.
