Brewer’s Perspective: Spice Lessons
Formulating, sampling, describing, reformulating, sampling again—the lessons Forbidden Root’s BJ Pichman learned perfecting first Forbidden Root and later Fernetic are equally useful when making a beer with just a few spices or, in fact, one with none.
Formulating, sampling, describing, reformulating, sampling again—the lessons Forbidden Root’s BJ Pichman learned perfecting first Forbidden Root and later Fernetic are equally useful when making a beer with just a few spices or, in fact, one with none.
RANDY MOSHER’S JOB TITLE
at Forbidden Root Restaurant & Brewery (Chicago) is creative partner and alchemist. Robert Finkel’s title is founder and rootmaster. BJ Pichman’s title is head brewer. Among his responsibilities is making sure nothing gets lost in translation.
Consider Fernetic—a beer Forbidden Root brewed in collaboration with Fernet-branca, the Italian company that has been producing its intensely bitter brand of fernet (an Italian bitter aromatic liqueur) since 1845. It contains more than twenty herbs and spices. A team of six spent an afternoon at the Chicago brewery, sampling different mixtures of even more ingredients, before finding just the flavor that suited them all.
Mosher, who has been writing about how to use tinctures and recipe formulation for more than twenty-five years, took his notes and did the math. He handed the calculations to Pichman and told him, “Here are the numbers. You have to give it the sanity check.” Pichman made some adjustments, in particular considering the size of the pile of star anise that would be added and discarding a portion.
The first pass was 95 percent of what Mosher and Pichman wanted in Fernetic. The second was spot on. Asked if this confirms that Pichman has learned to speak “Mosher,” the alchemist replies, “I’ll say it’s a moving target, and we’re all growing together.”
Not Done until It’s Right
The first beer that Pichman worked on with Mosher was a root-beer beer that shares its name with the brewery. It was equally as complicated as Fernetic, and the recipe took several months longer to finalize. Those two beers are outliers. Although Forbidden Root opened—initially the beer was brewed under contract, and the brewpub came on line in 2016—as the first botanical brewery in Chicago, the brewpub’s beer menu is a mixture of recognizable styles and beers brewed with some—but never as many as Fernetic and Forbidden Root—herbs and spices. The best-selling beer, as at so many other places, is an IPA.
“BJ’S done a great job for us, and the beers just get better and better. We have a mix between these very complex and highly botanical brews and ultra simple styles such as Kölsch and Pils,” Mosher says.
It shouldn’t be a surprise that the lessons learned perfecting first Forbidden Root and later Fernetic are equally useful when making a beer with just a few spices or, in fact, one with none. “Whether it is a crazy collaboration with twenty botanicals or a new IPA, we’re not done until it is right,” Pichman says.
Pichman got to know Mosher when he joined the Chicago Beer Society, a club for both homebrewers and beer enthusiasts, in 2006. He was sitting at the bar at Goose Island’s Clybourn brewpub before a meeting when he saw Mosher walk in. “There’s the guy who wrote Radical Brewing,” he