Translator: Pik Yan Wong Reviewer: Denise RQ
Hi everybody, I'm Augie Carton of Carton Brewing as she just said,
and I'm here to talk to you about playing with flavors,
primarily playing with the flavors of beer.
I know you're saying, "Playing with beer?
I promised myself I was done with that coming out of college."
I get that, but let me ask you a question:
do you have a favorite steak when you're out in a restaurant?
Do you have a different favorite steak when you're cooking at home?
How many lettuces have you learned the names of
since you made yourself that promise?
How is your coffee order changed in the last five years
or even just since you meet the Rook people this morning?
Do you have a sauté oil in your house and a salad oil in your house?
These are all games you play
that make you experience of life and food better.
I'm just saying beer is part of that, and you should consider it as such.
So right now, a lot of people are talking about beer.
People are saying industrialization and two companies are destroying world,
and they are talking about things like artisanal beer making a local craft.
To you and me what this chart means
is there's a lot more people making beer right now.
There's literally 1,000 people in the last ten years
making ten or 15 flavors each.
There's a lot of things you can be trying,
and if we can consider beer cuisine rather than something different,
it can make your entire time at the table better
because pretty simply, beer is just cuisine.
That's all it is, that's one of the things
you can put with the other flavors at your meal and experiencing them.
So let's talk about it as cuisine.
There are four magic things that comprise a beer:
you have water, malt, yeast, and hops.
Anything beyond these four,
if they are in a beer, they are to taste like they are;
so chocolate's there to taste like chocolate.
These are the four things that work together to make what's possible.
Starting with water -
think of water as water because that's what it is;
it's 98% of what beer is when you're drinking it.
You want to start with good water, you want to be good water.
The brewers can filter it, or salt it, or do things to make it work,
but it should start as something you want to taste.
if you want to play a flavor's trick, play a game while you're out.
When you're traveling, and you check into a hotel,
notice when you take a shower
if it's hard to get the soap to soap up.
if it is, you're in a hard water area,
focus on more amber-colored beers with more hops.
if it's real easy to get soaped up, but hard to wash it off,
drink yellow crisp beers, because soft water works better for those.
Next up, let's talk about malt:
consider malt is the main ingredient, your protein, right?
Your chicken, or steak, or tofu,
or whatever you like to base a dish around.
Malts play that same band.
There are yellow beers, brown beers, black beers, shades of red and orange,
just like with the foods.
You can take a chicken dish and make it a very light dish,
you can take a chicken dish and make it a very rich dish
- a lot of room there.
But you're never going to make a chicken dish as rich as a steak dish;
same kind of things for malts.
You can make a very light brown beer, you can make a very heavy brown beer;
you're never going to make a beer as heavy as a stout,
but that doesn't matter.
Within that confine, don't get stuck thinking it has to taste this way;
there's a lot of room.
So next up, yeast;
let's talk about-- think about the spice, the regional imprint on your dish.
If we take our chicken, and we put cumin, coriander, and cayenne on it,
we're in the American Southwest.
We put cumin, coriander, and fenugreek on it, we're in India.
So yeasts are that kind of thing; they're born of places
there are yeasts people use from Belgium,
there are yeasts people use from Germany
and that's how it goes;
they cooperate, and they give that regional stamp
to what the flavor of the beer will be.
If you use a Belgian yeast,
even if you use entirely other American things
it's going to have a Belgian flavor.
Then the fourth ingredient is hops; think about hops as herbs.
If we go back to our chicken,
if we stuff a big bunch of parsley into the chicken before we cook it,
there will be this ubiquitous greenness to the entire experience.
If we chop it up and sprinkle it on, at the end,
you'll have little pops of chlorophyll, and the flavor of parsley.
Hops work the same way;
if you put them in at the beginning of a beer,
they're going to be through the whole thing -
the greenness and some bitterness;
and if you do what's called dry hopping - sprinkling them on at the end -
they become this big, pretty aromatics.
So now we got the basic rules for the game and some ideas when we're out playing.
Let's practice.
At Carton, we make a bunch of crazy beers;
we make Green Apple Wasabi,
Lemongrass clam, and salt beer, peanut, chocolate, and raisin beer.
We also make a beer that we just want to go with food
because we think that's important.
It's Wednesday night, you don't know what you're cooking
but you know you want a beer.
You don't really want to think about the beer
so what can we do with these four things to make that work, starting with water?
This is the Henry Hudson Springs in the Atlantic highlands
which is where we are.
The water around here -- very iron rich water table
it's kind of salty.
Salt goes with every food you've ever had
so we decided to leave that whole
and let it be what it's going to be.
And that's what we did.
So in the malt world, we knew we wanted it to be a brown beer
because that's in the middle of the spectrum of what beer can be,
but we didn't want to fall into the pits of it if it was too sweet;
we wanted to play with certain things like soy sauce.
Soy sauce pulls sweetness out of food.
if it was too dry, it wouldn't play well with acidic things like goat cheese.
So our thought was bread - bread is made out of much the same things as beer
- there's commonality there -
so we looked to make this beer taste like bread crust.
For the yeast, we liked with bread crust and the salty water we're doing
so we didn't really want to get in the way.
We chose a German yeast called Kölsch
which does a very good job of stitching these flavors together
without being too representative.
So think of saffron in a rice pilaf; there's something connecting
the nuttiness and the rice to the sweetness of the onions,
but it's not really screaming that it's saffron in that case.
For the hops, we chose a French hop called Aramis.
Aramis to us smells like lemon, white pepper, and herbes de Provence.
Keep in mind we're trying to make a food beer.
Those are all food smells.
So we put a little in the beginning and a little at the end,
so there's a little bitterness to offset these malts,
and there's a little herby profile to play.
Later on, when this is over-- and we're at the reception;
I brought this beer along, and you can taste it;
it's OK with me if you hate it, and it's OK with me if you love it,
but play the game when you taste it.
Say, "He says it tastes like bread crust. Do I see that?"
Say I'm nuts, that's fine.
But if it works, you can go out there, and you can play your game.
You you can be somebody-- - think about it as at any level of sport-
you can be a fan who walks into a bar and says,
"Last time when I was out I had a Belgian beer.
I liked it; do you have a Belgian beer I can try?
And that's some level of this game.
You can be a little more geeky
and know the telltale aroma of a Belgian beer is this banana thing.
You can be super geeky
and know that if you ferment warm with that yeast
it smells so much like bananas,
it smells like the circus peanuts you used to eat when you were a kid.
That's up to you; it's your game
but if you're playing it, I kind of promise
your dinners will be more fun;
not every time, have wine Tuesday and have beer Wednesday,
but it's a lot of flavors to this game that should be played with.
Anyway, just a game for us to go out and play.
Now you've practiced, you've got the basic rules, go play it.
Start with a couple of beers I think you should try:
styles if you can find these, do these:
First one's Pilsner, it's made by Ramstein in upper North, New Jersey,
This is the flavor of beer we all think beer taste like,
this is that thing you stole from your dad when you were six
and figured it was just the grown-up drink you should never come back to.
It's also the one that's been so industrialized
that a lot of people have fallen out of love with the whole idea of beer:
well-made, by a good brewer, in your area, with our water
it's a really pretty thing.
You may love it, you may not, that's up to you
but try it just to see
why that flavor's been copied so many times, well and poorly.
it's something to know.
Next up, is kind of the original American craft beer.
35 years ago,
a guy named Ken Grossman put together a beer called Sierra Nevada Pale.
He made it a little more orange than beers were at the time,
and he used a different hop than most people were using,
an American hop called Cascade, and it has this great fruitiness to it.
He started the game we're all playing as brewers today
going a little bigger, with a little more aroma,
became the American craft thing.
When you taste my beers and everybody else's
you're basically hearing a cover of a song Ken wrote 35 years ago.
This is his thing.
It's a beautiful beer, and it's still available.
Next up, double IPA
- this is kind of what becomes of that; this is the beer of the moment.
Double IPAs are super rich, super big,
a big, warm alcohol feeling and a lot of hops.
Mike Kane makes one of those in New Jersey that is fantastic.
There's so many hops in this thing when you smell it that you can hear them.
It's just-- it's all hops, and it's pretty.
So taste it, if you love it, we can stop playing the game
you can walk anywhere you go for the rest of your life
and say I'm a hophead,
and your meal is going to be better.
They're going to know what you want.
In the world of stouts,
I went with one from Flying Fish on the West Side of New Jersey.
This one's out right now;
it's called Exit 1, named after the turnpike exits.
Stouts are pretty amazing.
You can go from that roasted-apple, steel-knife coffee-flavored Guinness
- I'm sure everybody's tried at least once -
all the way up to these big, thick, inky-black beers
that have been aged in bourbon barrels for two years,
and you should really just pour four ounces and sip that over four hours
and really contemplate.
This one's--
(Laughter)
This one's here because it's a dead center of that world;
it's pretty, it's about 6% alcohol, it has a good mouth feel, it's rich,
but it's not too rich - there's chocolateness to it -
the hops are there to make it a little [top];
give it a little line so it doesn't go too nuts.
It's just a great entry point
- if you taste this one, play the game, and think about what it is,
you can go left or right from there; very far.
Last up, we chose a sour beer;
sour beers are about as geeky as you can get.
They're the most fun you can have.
These beers are fermented with the same bacteria
that turn cabbage into sauerkraut, turn cucumbers into pickles,
turn pork into salami, and turn milk into cheese.
There's a funkiness to them;
when they're done well they can be amazing.
if you're a person that knows what applause is,
and thinks every cheese should taste that way
sours are your thing.
The one from Peakskill is a great entry point;
the sourness is just a little bit like lemonade,
it's not crazy teeth-raping acidity,
and there's a little bit of cheese funk;
not sweat socks and Parmesan,
but if you like it, you're headed that way.
If you've liked sour beers, there's a world out there
- you can go deep, and funky, and down a dark road.
if you hate it, again, that's the game.
Put it on the side and just move on and try these other ones;
that's kind of what I'm saying.
Like I said, there's 1,000 new brewers in the last ten years,
there's 3,000--
everybody's making flavors.
When you're playing your game, you're going to have a lot more fun
if you're not excluding beer from that experience.
Anyway, get out there and play.
Thank you, cheers.
(Applause)