Drinkability is a term that comes up frequently when we’re talking about our future Black Star beers, and with the majority of our recipes, I’ve tried to tweak them to be more “drinkable.”
From a recipe standpoint, this usually means lower finishing gravities, slightly higher carbonation levels (although this is debatably more drinkable), use of wheat, and a balance of maltiness, hoppiness, and alcohol. I would say drinkability is made up of mouthfeel, refreshinicity (yeah, you heard me), and inebriatability.
Mouthfeel is an easy one. What is easier to drink, maple syrup or Miller High Life? Correct, maple syrup. High Life just feels wrong in the mouth. However, the viscosity and sweetness of maple syrup drastically lowers the overall drinkability. The same goes for beers. A beer with lower finishing gravity (the density of the beer after fermentation) tends to be more drinkable because there’s usually less residual sweetness, less malty compounds, and a thinner body. Waterloo has a finishing gravity around 1.004. That’s 1.004 times the density of pure water, which is, for all intensive purposes, about the same density of water. There are very few residual sugars or lingering maltiness, and this makes the mouthfeel light and easy to drink. Carbonation is also a contributor to mouthfeel, but I’m going to save that for the next category…
Refreshinicity. I tend to be able to drink more of beers that are crisp, tart, and bouncy. A good wheat beer, IMO, has maximum refreshinicity. Crispness is kind of hard for me to define, but I think it comes from a dryness and pleasing “sharp” bitterness. Not sharp in the 120 Minute IPA way, because the maple syrup mouthfeel of that one overrides the good crispness. Tart is easy…acid! Organic and inorganic acids lend sourness and its more appealing verbiage—tartness. Lemonade on a hot summer day is awesome because the citric acid lends a sharp, refreshing bite that nicely balances the 8 pounds of sugar in every glass of Country Time. I like bouncy things in general, but in this case I’m referring to the lively effects of high carbonation rates. Flatter beers feel heavier on the tongue (back to mouthfeel), and the more carbonated they get, the sharper the beer feels on the ol’ licker. Anybody care to guess why that makes beverages more refreshing? (As a side note, too much carbonation makes me all burpy and full feeling…negative refreshinicity.)
Inebriatability is a scientific principle first documented in the time of Aristotle. This principle states that the more alcohol in one beer, the quicker you’ll get inebriated, and the less of that beer you’ll consume. Take for example, my weekly routine of going to the Draught House on Tuesdays for pint night where I drink two and exactly two pints of Arrogant Bastard. The alcohol is somewhere around 7%, but the point is my aging liver can only take 2 of those Bastards before I stumble back to my designatedly driven car.
Taking this lengthy blog submission back to the future Black Star beers, there’s an intention, even in the bigger beers like Aleph Null, to make them more drinkable. By adding kettle sugars in beers like Double Dee, Cul Sec, Aleph Null, Recalcitrant Dockhand, High Esteem, and Rover, I try to reduce the mouthfeel by lowering the final gravity. With high carbonation rates, acidulated malts, and minimal residual sugars, Waterloo and Cul Sec weigh in high on the refreshinicity scale. Ok, Ok, Ok….lower alcohol levels aren’t something I’m necessarily good at, but I promise we’ll shovel more than 2 beers down your throat and still get you home safely!
I came to Austin (for the second time) for two reasons: 1) to get back with an ex-girlfriend from the first time, and 2) to open a brewpub. Within a week of being here in Austin, I hooked up with the beginnings of Black Star Co-op (then, “Black Star Pub”), and didn’t hook up with the ex. So now after two years of working closely with the other Black Starians, I get my own brewer’s blog!
I’d like to consider this blog as the written form of the conversations that go on at the bar towards the end of the night…when the good beers have gotten your mind feeling right and the cheap beers are now economically keeping it going. You know, when you come up with ideas like pingpongdungeon.com–the underground ping-pong fight club where…oh wait, we don’t talk about pingpongdungeon.com.
I surprisingly don’t get to talk about our future beers enough. We now have a catalog of 10 recipes with beers like Double Dee, Epsilon, Recalcitrant Dockhand, and Cul Sec. These beers have come a long way, but I don’t always get to talk about where they come from! Some of the people that have been in the co-op since the inception have seen many incarnations of these beers.
Recalcitrant Dockhand was probably the first beer I made with the intention of turning it into a future Black Star beer. It used to be called “Grandma’s Smoked Porter” and tasted not unlike a pint of roasty peanut butter. Which I kinda liked! After experimenting with blackstrap molasses for a while, I’ve decided blackstrap sucks. It always left a really dry, astringent flavor on the palate. Meh. So, I went back to Grandma’s Molasses like in the first time I brewed it and wow, a yummy, complex, rich, robust beer emerged! (as a side note, thanks to Steven and Johnny for making it the hardest to pronounce beer name in our catalog…people at our Beer Socials take a look at the name on the chalkboard, pause for a minute, then just ask what kind of beers are on tap!)
Cul Sec! That term was given to me from Pierre, the son of the mayor of the famous Belgian Trappist brewing town Rochefort. He was staying with me for a bit in Birmingham, Alabama and when we’d take him out he’d bitch about our (America’s) lack of beer pouring skills–no head! So he’d always get a fork, “fluff” the Hoegaarden to form a good foamy head, hold up the pint to us, say, “Cul Sec!” and down the beer. That was fun the first few times…and then a BLAST the next few times. 
So, in honor of him and thirst quenching Belgian wit biers, I wanted to come up with a beefed up wheat beer that will quench your thirst without sacrificing the unique flavors of the Belgian yeast strain. That has proved very difficult…it’s still a work in progress (I HATE phenolics, but understand their place in this world…unfortunately though, the higher the alcohol in these beers, the more likely the spicy phenolics will run amok). I suppose I should also say, Cul Sec directly translates as “ass dry.” Pierre also taught me a phrase I only know phonetically–”fist-eh-put”…don’t ever say that to a waitress that took four years of French.