Have you ever met my funky friend Brett?
For beer lovers who like their glass to contain a bit of barnyard or horse blanket
A bit of funk can liven up your evening.
No, we’re not talking about George Clinton, though the grandmaster can still groove with the best of them. (No, we’re not talking about Bruno Mars, either).
Instead, the funk we’re talking about here is produced by the artist known as Brettanomyces. Never heard of Brett? Then you clearly haven’t been hanging out with the cool kids. At least not the brewing ones.
Brett’s original name, Brettanomyces, is Latin for “British mushroom.”
Brewers know Brett as a yeast responsible for producing beers with an intriguing complexity often described as “barnyard,” “horse blanket” or simply funk. In wine terms, it’s usually considered a spoiling agent. In many modern brewery settings, it would be too.
But increasingly, craft breweries are using it to add a dose of complexity to their brews, either in combination with more standard brewing yeasts, bacteria which add acidity, or simply on their own.
Brett beers can be marvellous on their own as aperitifs. But they also do an excellent job accompanying shellfish (mussels in particular), or funky cheeses (say, a ripe old brie, or an ultra gooey chèvre).
Here are a few examples you can find on the shelves in Ontario:
Exchange Brewery Golden Ale $13.50 per 750 mL bottle While this brewery in the heart of wine country (Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., to be precise) makes decent examples of the usual IPAs, porters and wheat beers, it’s this one which is the best of the range.
One suspects that might be because Exchange’s brewmaster Sam Maxbauer is a veteran of Michigan’s Jolly Pumpkin brewery, which specializes in funky and sour brews.
The pale, golden-coloured brew has a herbal aroma, with notes of mint and fresh-cut grass. Those notes also come through in the flavour, along with a bone-dry finish. This beer is the best pure expression of Brett character I’ve had in a long time.
Goose Island Sofie $10.15 per 765 mL bottle Yes, yes. I know some craft beer folks have had a hate on for Goose Island ever since they were taken over by AB-InBev, which produces roughly one out of every three beers sold on the planet.
But guess what? Goose Island still makes some good beer, including this one. Even though in some recent tastings it has seemed a touch less complex than it once was, it’s still plenty respectable. If you are a hardcore funk lover already, you might want to consider offering this beer to someone who’s experiencing the joys of Brett for the first time.
Orval $3.45 per 330 mL bottle This ale, brewed at a Trappist monastery in Belgium, is one of the most well-known Brett beers on the planet. It’s a unique beer even among the full-of-character array of Trappist ales.
Orval has a complex aroma and flavour, with hints of apricot, citrus peel and, yes, some barnyard funk.
It’s also got substantially more hop aroma than most Belgian beers, thanks to the use of an English technique called dry hopping, by which hops are added to the beer after brewing.
No less an authority than noted beer author Michael Jackson once came perilously close to calling it his favourite beer.
Along with the funk — which increases with age — there’s also more body to Orval than in most Brett beers. josh@thestar.ca