With college football season over, the list of reasons to get up on Saturdays can get mighty short. So a couple weeks ago we fabricated one — a Linkery field trip to Pasadena. Instead of the Rose Bowl, however, we went to visit the brewer of some of our favorite beers — Mark Jilg of Craftsman Brewing Company.
I first had Craftsman’s 1903 Lager at Father’s Office in Santa Monica, and it made a big impression on me as a great, well balanced and flavorful lager. I’ve since enjoyed a couple other of their brews at various spots in California. I particularly like Mark’s “Honesty Ale” a sour beer infused with cherries, but with a much smoother character than many kriek beers.
Steph, the Linkery Beer Tsarina, with Mark Jilg of Craftsman Brewing.
During our trip, we learned quite a bit about Mark and his style of brewing. Craftsman is definitely a brewery, like Moonlight or Firestone Walker, that pursues balance and drinkability rather than potency or a signature character. In fact, Mark told us that, as a home brewer, he had become interested in bittering beer with ingredients other than hops, and many of his beers include bittering ingredients such as orange peel (as part of whole Valencia oranges from a nearby farm) or grape skins (as part of whole Cabernet grapes from Paso Robles). The varied bittering can counteract the sweetness of unfermentable malt sugars while adding complexity and balancing hoppiness with other, unusual flavor elements.
On the topic of hoppiness, Mark had an interesting (and, in my view, compelling) take on San Diego styles of beer, particularly IPA. In Mark’s view, the two key characteristics of IPA are hoppiness and dry-ness. San Diego’s big IPAs, by virtue of their high original gravity (i.e., lots of grains to start out with), end up with a lot of residual sugar. That sweetness is counteracted by the brewers by adding corresponding amounts of hops, but its strong, malty characted is unmistakable, and a signature of many of the big San Diego IPAs, IIPAs, and the like.
Mark suggested that it was a mistake to label these beers as being a part of the IPA tradition when they are distinctly not dry. In his mind, our local brewers would be better off characterizing these types of beer as “San Diego Strong Ale”. I thought this was a very compelling suggestion because, to my palate, the drinking experience of, say, Dorado, Hop 15, Arrogant Bastard, Stone Smoked Porter, and Old Numbskull have more in common than, say, Dorado and a typical English IPA or even, say, Nectar IPA. Anyway, I thought Mark’s idea merits some serious consideration.
Craftsman is a small brewery and has limited availability, particularly of their seasonals. Right now we have their Heavenly Hefeweizen, which may go on draft sometime tonite. We expect to have a couple of the beers on cask soon, and maybe even a keg of their Honesty Ale, which is seasonal to Valentine’s Day, natch.
Craftsman Brewery