Another Retro (or Is It Repro?) Beer
Urban Chestnut Brewing Company’s Forest Park Pilsner (St. Louis, Missouri) was brewed to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Forest Park Forever, an organization established in 1986 to restore parts of the massive park (500 acres larger than New York’s Central Park). Forest Park was established in 1876 and is most famous for hosting the 1904 World’s Fair. For the fair, the city’s brewers constructed the “World’s Fair Tyrolean Alps,” an impressive replica of the Bavarian Alps that operated as the largest dining and entertainment venue in the park.
Forest Park Pilsner has a bit of an “old” flavor, most likely because it is bittered with Cluster hops, and in many ways the recipe is faithful to one a brewer in St. Louis might have written 100 or more years ago. However, Cofounder/brewmaster Florian Kuplent is not interested in judging whether it is authentic. “This is not meant to be a re-creation,” he says.
“I’m sure this is totally different from [what was brewed in] 1904,” says Head Brewer Jason Thompson, who wrote the recipe and might be overstating the difference. “We wanted to do something people would want to drink.”
As were most lagers at the beginning of the twentieth century, Forest Park Pilsner was brewed using 6-row barley malt and adjuncts. The two complemented each other well. Because 6-row has more enzymatic power than 2-row, it can convert the starch in adjuncts into sugar. Because the proteins in the cereals are not solubilized to a great extent during mashing, they dilute the high-soluble nitrogen content of the 6-row to produce a beer with better physical stability. This produced a beer lighter on the palate and brighter in the glass. These days, 6-row barley is not nearly as protein-rich as it was in the early 1900s. Rather than using 30 percent or more adjuncts, which was common at the time, Thompson added 20 percent maize. The city’s most famous brewery, Anheuser-busch, used (and still uses) rice, but many others chose corn. The cereal mash included five temperature rests. Thompson used whole-leaf hops, adding Cluster for bittering and Halltertau Tradition for aroma, targeting 30 IBU.
And the yeast? Sometimes it’s enough to understand how your yeast works rather than to know its family history.