Crisp Heritage Malts Add Depth to American Session Beers
We all know the saying, right? Less is more.
There’s no shortage of reasons for breweries to make session beers. On the consumer side, session beers help diversify your tap list and appeal to a wider range of beer lovers with their increased drinkability and approachable balance. On the production side, of course, brewers can benefit from a lower cost and amount of raw materials. There is also the idea that these are the beers that brewers themselves want to drink, dialing things back to embrace a simpler yet delicious beverage. And for brewers who love a challenge, session beers are their own summit to scale.
Rise to the Challenge of Low-Gravity Brewing
Brewing a lower-alcohol beer is not as easy as just dialing back on ingredients. There are techniques brewers can execute to produce flavorful beers. That effort begins with developing recipes that won’t finish too watery and thin, starting by selecting the right malts. We’d like to suggest you utilize English malts for creating American-style session beers that don’t compromise on flavor or body, specifically malts from Crisp Malting Company’s line of Heritage Malt. Think of these malts as secret weapons in the brewhouse, loaded with character and expressiveness to punch well above their weight.
To get down to brass tacks, we talked with Josh Wurzbacher, the North American brewery sales rep for Crisp Malting Company. Formerly, he brewed at Yards Brewing Company in Philadelphia, where he gained experience using malts like these in a wide spectrum of beer styles. For some brewhouse inspiration and to learn more about session beer techniques, we look at three recipes for styles ranging from 2.5% – 5% ABV, each highlighting a different floor-malted English base malt. Below you’ll find recipe breakdowns with thoughts from Josh.
Note: With lower alcohol beers like these Josh suggests brewers consider carbonating the beer slightly lower, perhaps around 2.5 volumes of CO2, to leave the beer less crisp on the front of the palate and provide a smooth, maltier finish on the back of the mouth.
Session Beer Recipes + Pro Tips
Crisp Chevallier West Coast IPA
Crisp describes this beer as the best of British malts meeting the best of American hops. Chevallier Heritage Malt gives the beer a lovely golden color and provides a deep maltiness with marmalade-like sweetness and subtle fresh bread character that stands up to the hop load for a beer that is bold and hoppy, but won’t wallop you over the head with alcohol. This recipe is built to be as drinkable as possible. It’s a little bit lower gravity than you might see in many West Coast IPAs, but the IBUs stand firm to bring an almost traditional or old-school West Coast IPA level of bitterness and piney/citrus flavor compared to some current interpretations of the style that lean softer on the palate and more tropical and juicy fruit on the hops. Just a touch of wheat malt (or dextrin malt) for body and head retention is all that is needed.
Josh’s Notes:
“You want to use a more flavorful malt variety when brewing these lower-alcohol beers because it’s much harder to build flavor and body when you’re starting with a lower gravity. Using a variety like Chevallier brings a noticeable depth of flavor. Because many of these landrace malts are slightly less modified than modern varieties – and don’t attenuate as well as some modern varieties – they leave a touch of sweetness and have a maltier backbone.
The hot-side hopping of this recipe is designed to build your bitterness as well as hop complexity as hot-side hop aroma tends to be more shelf stable. I always like to do a few hop additions throughout the boil instead of just one at the beginning and one at the end.
Cooling the wort for the late hops (also called a hop stand) is a newer technique a lot of brewers are employing. Brewers chill their whirlpool down to roughly 180°F before adding the post-boil hops so they aren’t driving off all the aromatic and volatile compounds. They’re also not picking up a ton of IBUs either, so you can add more hop load. It can be a challenge for a lot of brewers, especially in smaller brew houses where they might have to add cold water to bring that temperature down – which I’m not a huge fan of. I’d much rather see it pass through a heat exchanger and back into the whirlpool; it’s more sanitary and gives it a better flavor. And for the dry hop, I’m a big believer in dry hopping with 1° Plato left in fermentation. That will help drive off some of the myrcene and caryophyllene, those more resinous, bitter compounds that aren’t necessarily very flavorful.”
No. 19 Session Ale
The simple grist of No. 19 Floor-Malted Maris Otter and Wheat Malt provides unique bready, slightly earthy flavors with medium body to build the perfect foundation for the fruity New Zealand and American hops. Crisp still suggests a 60-minute boil on this beer to drive off any possible DMS, but the beer achieves the combination of lower IBU and wonderful hop flavor by adding hops only at 10 minutes before knockout and then as dry hops in the fermenter near terminal gravity. SafAle™ US-05 is a great choice of yeast for this style; it leaves a clean neutral yeast flavor and finish that lets the No. 19 shine.
Josh’s Notes:
“Adding El Dorado® at the 10-minute mark leads to some hop isomerization and also maintains more of that hop character. With session beers like this you want to maintain the simplicity, so definitely dry hop it, but be wary of over hopping the beer to where you can’t taste the malt at all. Some brewers might choose to split dry hops into two or three doses throughout fermentation; that’s not my style. I’m a fan of not touching things too much. Just let it be. Sometimes the best it can ever be – is right before you mess with it.
These heritage malts have a role in helping brewers take existing recipes to another level. The focus used to be more on hops, which would mask a lot of the nuance of malt. I’m almost remiss to say ‘malty’ all the time because people might think that means dark, rich, sweet. That’s not what I mean at all. I mean the biscuit, bread, and cracker characters, that when you take a sip it’s refreshing, not too heavy, not too sweet. Malts like Maris Otter, Chevallier, and Haná allow brewers to take those core brands and elevate them to another dimension. If you look at the recipes for a lot of beers that are winning gold medals they are using some of these heritage malts to bring an added layer of complexity.”
Crisp Table Beer
We’ve saved the least for last! Clocking in at a relatively tiny ABV, this table beer is an amazingly drinkable beer boasting citrus and floral hop flavors. As Josh explained, brewing a good table beer is no small feat (pun intended?) because they can often end up very thin and lacking in mouthfeel. The key is to have lots of non-fermentable sugars to add body to the beer, which is exactly what you’ll achieve with Haná Malt and a hefty addition of Dextrin Malt.
Josh’s Notes:
“A 2.5% ABV beer is always going to be a challenge and you have to pull out some different tools to get it to have the body, texture, and finish that you want without being too thin. Haná Malt brings a lighter color and flavor, but still has depth. The dextrin malt is what’s going to give this beer its body; it’ll leave unfermented sugars and give it a silkier mouthfeel.
Your mash regime is key here. I would suggest adjusting your water-to-grain ratio to 2.5:1 for a thinner mash, which allows for better conversion efficiency. When creating a low-ABV style beer, having precise control over your gravities is crucial so that you do not over- or under-attenuate and hit your final OG exactly where you planned. With a beer this low gravity you have to be careful that it doesn’t end up watery. Mash in around 156-158°F to leave more unfermentable sugars, so that your finished product is drinkable but not sweet or cloying.
Fermenting with a lager yeast helps keep it clean, neutral, and malt-focused. That doesn’t mean it has to be fermented at traditional lager temperatures, especially if you select the right lager strain. I have used SafLager™ S-23 with great success at 60°F. Brewers do need to be aware no to ferment too warm as to avoid diacetyl. Using California Common or steam beer yeast strain could also be very cool. It’s just another way to add complexity when you’re working with overall less ingredient material – and is thinner with a bit less body – to elevate all the flavors. Maybe drive some esters from that yeast.”
The Case for Session Beers
We here at RahrBSG agree with Josh that the modern craft beer consumer is educated enough to know what a “brewer’s beer” is and that’s what they want to reach for. That’s why lagers are rising in popularity, and even IPAs are constantly getting more drinkable with decreased alcohol and IBU. “I don’t think it’s about having the lowest IBU or ABV possible,” Wurzbacher said, “I think it’s more about balance. Every brewery I’m talking to right now is making a Czech lager, or Mexican lager or rice lager. These beers are just more drinkable to more people. I think beer culture is cyclical. We’ve gone to these extremes and now we’re rounding it back out with people drinking cask milds and Czech lagers. I hope we settle here for a little bit and appreciate what got us into beer in the first place.”
We encourage you to consider using Crisp’s line of Heritage Malt to bring a new flavorful dimension to your brews. Contact your RahrBSG rep today!