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Buffalo Brews Podcast
BEAR-ly Getting Started 15.2 - Export Lager
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Jason and Craig continue Series 15 of Barely Getting Started: Let’s Talk Lagers with an Austrian-style Export Lager collaboration between Von Trapp Brewing and Jack’s Abby. They explore what defines a lager, the history and purpose of export lagers, and the beer’s crisp, dry, snappy character. Along the way, they discuss tasting notes, food pairings, collaboration brewing, and the science behind lagering.
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The Buffalo Brews Podcast. You are listening to Barely Getting Started, part of the Buffalo Brews Podcast, Brewing Conversations, one sip at a time. And I'm sitting down with Craig Altobello of Magic Bear Beer Cellar. So we're talking Let's Talk Loggers, Jack's Abbey Edition. How was that for the second time? I like it. I like it a lot. It was definitely better than the first time.
SPEAKER_00Fantastic. No, we're on a roll. See what happens. You start with one beer, and we're still before. Oh, we're at two o'clock. Now it's official beer drinking time. That's right. You don't feel like, you know, anything. Before noon's crazy. Between noon and one, it's like two o'clock.
SPEAKER_01Two o'clock's happy hour. If somebody were to come into Magic Bear right this second, what kind of Jack's Abbey would you have in the cooler?
SPEAKER_00To hand to 'em? Ah man. I I don't have a ton left from Jack's Abbey. We went through a lot of it. I think I still have some of the um porch fest. This is the Porch Fest time of year. We're gonna do that coming up next series, next episode. Nice.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Porchfest is that's where it's at though. Yeah, it's summer summer. There's house lager and porch fest when I think of Jack's Abbey. Well then, and of course, they're you know, when we get an Oktoberfest, because I have my I still have my Stein from Oh yeah, Copper Legend.
SPEAKER_00Copper Legend. They got a fest beer. But no, Jack's Abbey does a lot of good stuff, and the last beer we did was Collaboration with Barsteiner, produced in USA, so it was made. So when a collaboration ends up happening, one brewery's often one brewery makes it, and both names are on the label, and there's input, insight. Hopefully they actually got together. But sometimes it's just, you know, talking about it. It's more the marketing and coming up with the brand.
SPEAKER_01That's interesting because we get that question a lot on the podcast. It's like when they were talking about people don't understand how collaborations work. It's like a collaboration is so you know, two people. I mean, locally, I'm sure two people are putting their heads together and going, Hey, let me bring do this component, I'll bring it to you, and then you know, mix and match. So people said, What happens in the long distance thing? Do you ship it on a truck, send it up there? No, it's two people coming together usually with ideas. Yeah, it's still a collaboration, but one person's, you know, and they might send the financial report uh support for it, like, hey, just let us know what our split is on that. And then you're both canning it because you're making the same recipe.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, you know, I I don't know if that last beer got shipped to Germany and uh Varsteiner was pushing that beer. I mean it'd be well worth it. It's very fantastic beer. Um, but with two American breweries with Von Trapp, the collaboration here is Von Trapp. Love their music. Yes, yes, out of uh Vermont, and Jack Saby out of Boston, so some basically New England area. I know Vermont sometimes doesn't like to be tossed in with the New England, uh, but they're New England state.
SPEAKER_01They're New England, they're original 13. So that's what I said.
SPEAKER_00But this is a VTB, so Von Trapp brewing collab series. So this one is a collab with Jack's Abbey, brewed by Von Trapp. Now, whether or not Jack's Abbey brewed some, I don't know. But the one we're gonna drink today was brewed at the Von Trapp brewery. In Stowe Vermont. There you go. And it is an Austrian style export lager. So we have not had export beer, export lager yet, but we are going to talk lagers. So I did promise in the last episode that I talk a little bit about lagers, and I won't go on too crazy of a tangent. Try to keep this to the 30-minute or less mark. We didn't really talk about lagers. We're talking lagers, but not what an actual lager is. Because a lot of people say, I think a lot of people equate Pilsner with lager. And yes, Pilsner is a type of lager. So all pilsners are lagers, but not all lagers are pilsners. It's a family of beers. Basically, without getting into too many tangents and nuances, there's two styles of beer or two family beers if you go to the top of the beer family tree, and it's a lager or an ale. And the basic thing that determines one or the other is the type of yeast you use. One is a lager yeast, one is an ale yeast. Lager, you don't want much yeast flavors. You want the carbonation, you want the alcohol, you don't want a ton of phenolics or esters. Some of them are welcome, but not a lot of them. It's a showcase for the wrong ingredients and not the byproducts of fermentation. Whereas ales, some of them want a little bit, some of them want a lot. If you start thinking like the Belgian ales, the only real German beer that wants a lot is Hefeweizens. That is an ale, one of the few ales that the German culture produces or came up with, and it has tons of clove and banana. And you should not get tons of clove and banana from your lagers. You should get it from your Hefeweizen. Yes. Or you do what some people say do, and just say, Alright, I meant to brew X. It tastes like a Y. Tell everyone you were trying to brew Y, and it comes out, and you basically sell it as a beer style that you didn't intend to in the beginning. Lagers focus more on the malt and some hop bitterness to balance that malt. Um, the water pays a big and uh important role in the production based on the minerals. Is it hard water, soft water? So for a while, all lagers were kind of dark. A lot of almost all beers were dark because we just were malting grain and we went from unmalted to oh boy, it's dark. Uh and then, you know, talked many times about Daniel Wheeler's roasting drum. Allowed us to do a slow, steady tumble roast and malting process, which would allow you to get Pilsner malts and pale ale malts. So very pale, malted grain, and you have a light colored beer. Uh, a lot of things kind of came together for the Czech Republic in the town of Pilsn, and they're the ones that came up with Pilsner, and it was Pilsner Urkel, meaning the original Pilsner. So Pilsner is a showcase for the Pilsner malt, very light malt, very light cracker, maybe a hint of biscuit, but it's mostly very light white bread and crackery in taste and finish. So you need some very subtle hopping notes to balance it. So usually it's a nice crisp, slightly bitter finish with some um Czech Saz hops or some German uh Hollertau Mittelfru or Tetan Tetanning. This will be on the quiz at the end of the series. Those are a few of the I told you I wouldn't go on too many. So I'm gonna reel it back in. And this is an Austrian style. So uh I believe they're calling it an Austrian-style export lager because they're using both Pilsner and Vienna malts. So Vienna uh from Austria. Vienna, you've probably heard of Vienna Lager. It's a little darker, not anything like a dunkel, not gonna have any real roast note to it. It gives like a little bit of a reddish hue, not like a red ale or anything like that. Right. But just enough. I mean, I think uh Dose is a Vienna style lager, a lot of uh German uh influence on some of the um South American uh brewing and Mexican beers as well.
SPEAKER_01You got some of the Vienna styles in Buffalo that are more popular, your rusty chain. Um Buffalo Brewing Company up the hill here uh does a pretty nice Vienna.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, as opposed to the last beer where we would have a nice pale, we saw dark straw, light gold, you know, a yellowish gold brew. This should be maybe a little bit more red undertone, bringing it like a hint of copper. Um, I would think uh a well-balanced version of this was still gonna be pretty pale yellow, but to me it should be a few shades darker in the SRM. But what is an export lager? So we know what a lager is. Lager yeast. Uh lagers are bottom fermenting yeasts versus ales are top fermenting, which basically means where do they end up in the brewing process? Do they float to the top or do they sink to the bottom? And when you use a lager yeast, you have to do a lagering step. There's a little bit of lagering in all beers, but a lager like it means to store or to keep. And what you're doing is you're allowing it to rest, let the yeast clean up the beer, we call it. So, what does that mean? It's kind of eating up any of those off flavors or any of those esters that come about. And if there's any like all beer has a few off flavors, and sometimes you're tasting them because a brewery didn't let it lager long enough, didn't let it rest, it put it into the market faster than it should have. And some of that is like a green apple or a slight peppery flavor, like green pepper, not super spicy, but a little vegetal. And if you allow the the other one is kind of butterscotchy, diacetal. If you allow the yeast to fully do its job and lager long enough, one, it becomes clearer and clearer because it falls to the bottom, and then you take it from the top or you pull it from the bottom. That's called racking. Same with if you did wine, cider, meat, it's the uh clearing or making the liquid more clear by letting it rest and getting those particulates out from the bottom and having the top part be nice and clear. So it helps with that. You know, there's some agents that you can add that help fine, it's called the fining agents, help clear the beer, but really you would just let it rest. Let it rest. That's what that's what lager means to rest. And that's what we would have brewing a lager. And then why is it an export lager, you say? Well, I'll answer that, don't worry. Export my mind. Yes. Export export lager, uh, originally Dortmund, Dortmund, uh, Germany. And they were usually called a Dortmunder, or you might have heard a Dortmund Gold made uh popular by I think Great Lakes Brewing Company makes Dortmund Gold. So it is a beer meant for exporting. Goal figure, the Germans being very to the point. But export was also a part of like their taxation system. Um, you see stuff like that in some of the English ales as well, and you know, the Scottish Ales. There's a Scottish export. Export usually means hey, it's slightly higher ABV. ABV helps for uh the aging and preservation properties of beer. It's a nice, basically you know, natural preservative. So when you're shipping it and it's gonna have some more time, you know, especially if it's you know being shipped via ship and it's gonna take a while to get to its destination, you want it to taste good when it shows up and not stale. So they would brew it at a little bit higher ABV and then they would be taxed appropriately because the higher the ABV, um, especially with the English and the Belgian. Belgian actually, it's how much malt you cram in your uh your fur your your mash tun. So a lot of different people have come up with different styles based on how to avoid the most taxes. So some of uh some of the greatest invention comes from necessity, but export lager is going to be a little bit higher ABV, so let's take a look at what we have here. It's 5.6%, so not as much as that 5.9 Hellis Bach. So this wouldn't really fall into the Bach category, but that 5.6 versus a 4, 4.5%, that extra 1%. Sometimes that's you know, 15 to 20% more alcohol than what normally was when we're at these low percentages of ABV, it is going to add a little bit of that preserved uh essence and you know allow this for good shipping. Nowadays, the shipping techniques are much faster, it's shipped cold, it's all of those good things, so it's more to just replicate the flavor, the taste, and von Trapp, similar to Jack's Abbey, very traditional beer styles. They're going to be focusing on lagers with some one-off owls here and there. But uh, you know, I'll just read from the can because it's a very simple statement. But it's an Austrian-style export lager, so brewed with Pilsner and Vienna Malz, Continental Noble Hops, and fermented cool with our housed lager yeast. So this uh, and and a lot of times when you look at a collab, whatever the first uh brewery is, is usually the one that's taking lead. It's not for all cases, it's just one of the things that I've come to find. And I also do when I'm doing a collaboration. I'm not gonna say it's a magic beer X brewery beer. It's no, it's the brewery first. They're the one that's doing the heavy lifting. And in this case, it's brewed in Vermont at their facility. They're doing the heavy lifting. Not sure if Jack's Abbey brewed any at theirs, but I'm sure uh they received a shipment and probably had some kegs on in the tap room and helps for marketing. And it's also if you're gonna put your name on it, you're stamping it with your dedication to quality. And if Jack's Abbey lives for lagers, they are trusting that Von Trapp is going to uh live up to that. And Von Trapp is a very reputable brewery in itself, so I expect nothing than a delicious Austrian style export lager. So any questions or notice?
SPEAKER_01This is the one that I was able to do the least research on because it's uh you know it's it's something that it comes out from Von Trapp. I even looked through their library, couldn't find anything on it, looked through Jack's Abida as far as their collab series, they didn't have anything on it either. Here it is. Ooh, what a nice perfection. You know, we talked about in the last series about doing the um uh the ruler, and I've got a I've still gotta uh produce the um por ruler for us there. Look at that. Well, I think that's about perfect right there. Look at that.
SPEAKER_00Look at that. So, yes, probably because we we should be looking up through Von Trapp, not through Jack Sabby. So this is a Jack Sabby Let's Talk Loggers, but in this case, I believe Von Trapp took uh front seat. Now looking at this beer, still pretty clear, not as clear as the last one. Definitely can see through it. Again, it might just be that cold haze, but definitely not crystal clear. Slightly darker? Yours is well, you're holding it up against a brown wall. So yours looks a little darker than mine. It looks different through the window in hand. Doesn't yours look slightly darker? Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01I don't know, maybe you're just more tangled. Now they look alike because uh you know behind the camera here is the windows facing Seneca Street.
SPEAKER_00So I'm catching some rays here, like Madonna. The uh, you know, I wouldn't call this an amber or a copper. Uh very similar to the last beer we had. So it all depends on how much of each grain is in there. I knew it. Without fail.
SPEAKER_01Without fail. So let's mute that phone. Sorry, folks.
SPEAKER_00People are trying to get that Austrian style export. I want to know if we have any more. We do not have any of this available on the shelf. Went rather quickly, but just like the other beer, nice sustaining head. Um, no real bubbles sticking to the glasses. That's that magic bear quality uh control when it comes to our glassware washing. But when you take a look at this, another tight, dense foam head. When we first poured it, it was a little bit more um wasn't as tightly packed as the first beer. So Bon Trap versus Jack Sabby. Not that one's better than the other, but what I like is a nice sustaining head. When you see it dissipate, usually, you know, that's the serving and keeping of the beer. That might be a dirty glass. If your beer can withstand a head, and if you spin it a little bit and it foams back up and holds on to it, you know that it's being served properly as well as made properly. So as per tradition, a couple sniffs, let's talk about what it smells like, a couple of sips, a couple, you know, cheers before, and uh dissect our flavor profile and hopefully don't repeat something 14 times.
SPEAKER_01Right. So it doesn't have as much aromas as the last one.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, as the other one smelled more like a beer. Right.
SPEAKER_01This one is um Yeah, I mean I get very little on the nose with this.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think the last one with it, that decoction matching mashing, we got a little bit more sweetness. Like you can kind of smell almost like that honey or sugary. It's hard to say. What does sugar smell like, right? It smells like to me, it's like if it's super malty, it's fresh baked. If it's uh sweet, it's like a fresh-baked cookie versus a fresh-baked loaf of bread. Um so this has a little bit a little bit, but it's that malt, you know, just kind of smells like some bread. Just a little bit of bread crust, but no, no real sweetness to it. Just just nice crusty bread and um something that again I would love to pair with just traditional style foods, your fattier meats, um, Vienna style lagers I always love with a fish fry. You know, this good chicken wing beer. Um Vienna isn't gonna bring uh too much additional sweetness. It's it's not, you know, any uh it's not like a crystal malt that has uh more caramelized sugar flavors, but it does bring um a nice drinkability with it. So a little cheers. Cheers. Tasty. I'm gonna let you tell me your tasting notes and compare it to the last beer we just had, and then I'll uh either him or ha.
SPEAKER_01So last beer, uh biscuit, fresh bread. Uh I think I may I think I noted that uh it was a little sweet, almost like honey from this one here. So this is a little bit more drier on my palate. Um still get I still get like more like the bread crust. Okay. Uh not so much fresh bread crust. So indicative of the aroma. Yeah, so it's very close to the aroma. But this is to me, I mean, this is it's simple because I mean if I'm drinking again, Rusty Chain or if I'm drinking the Vienna from up the hill, very comparable. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00No, I agree with all your notes. And it's it is always nice to just hear someone else's take before, you know. When I drink beer and people are expecting me to say a lot. And uh don't worry, I won't disappoint. I talk a lot. But yeah, uh, you know, you feel like you have to uh fill the void of the space in between things. That's what editing's for. Yeah, there you go. I listened to a couple episodes, I was like, wow, I was quite fast, and you told me how it cuts out any dead space. And I was like, oh, alright.
SPEAKER_01He's he's trying to cut that three minutes uh and I widened that setting too so that it didn't sound like you were talking on top of yourself.
SPEAKER_00You do a very fine job. Where what? This is season 17? Oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_011 million 14? 1 billion um 15 is. Is this the 15th inner? Uh we're gonna find out here in just a moment.
SPEAKER_00Well, then I'll start rambling again. Uh, one of the things, yes, this does drink uh very dry. This it's it drink it drinks drier, doesn't have that residual sweetness. Not that the first beer had res the first beer in this series was sweeter. We could say that. Not that it was a sweet beer, but more sweet. This is fifteen? Fifteen. Cheers to a milestone. Every iteration of five, I feel it's like a milestone. Fifteen. So when we're done with the next two, we're gonna be at sixty-two episodes, right? Sixty two. Times four plus two.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah, the IPAs for days.
SPEAKER_00We gotta get a couple more in there to get back to an even number. I don't know, the Belgian beer, the very first one we did. I think you were you were just like, what's Craig gonna do to me? Did you think we're gonna do 15 seasons? Like, it's nice, it's been fun and glad we're keeping it going.
SPEAKER_01You know, I learned so much about this. I mean, we're not you know even these two episodes, we're we're getting into some of the sciences of of beer that I don't think we've touched on before. So I I think that's something that people could pick up. Like, you know, the difference between drawing from the top versus pulling down when it comes to you know canning and bottling. It's you know, I don't think a lot of people know that. They just know that it comes in a can, I drink it. So hopefully it's cold.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Some people don't care. I've had people take beers off the shelf. It's supposed to be warm, right? I'm like, mmm. I mean, depends on what you mean by warm. Should it be cellar temp? 50-55 degrees? Yes. Would I drink that at 70 degrees? If I really, really was thirsty. Um, but to each his own. Right. The one thing I did notice with this, um, and I think maybe when you were talking about it being a little bit more dry, it's got a little bit more bitterness, a little bit uh residual bitterness, not in a IPA or you know, some lagers that we're actually not gonna talk about in this series, the dry hop lagers. You see, like some New Zealand-style pilsners or Italian pilsners. A lot of beers dry hopped regardless, but some beer focuses on adding more hops or specific types of hops or is looking for a specific flavor when they're dry hopping, whereas most people are just trying to add some of that, you know, fresh hop flavor and aroma versus just the bittering that comes from hopping your beer, which is the primary focus of adding the hops to balance them out and create some bitterness. So this one's got like that dry. Uh, I've talked about it in previous episodes. Uh couldn't tell you which ones, but snappy. Uh snappy to me is it's got a little bit of bitterness, but it's kind of like a clean, fresh bitterness, uh, and it finishes kind of dry. You know, it's not that grapefruit. Or tree bark bitterness that just stays in your mouth for a little while, and the only thing to cure it is another big gulp. Hence uh why I think a lot of people really enjoy IPAs. It's kind of like the IPAs to me is drinking is eating a hot wing, right? Like, what's the cure for a hot wing? Another hot wing. Don't tell me milk. It's another hot wing. Just keep it going. Right. The very most I'll take is blue cheese. Dunk it in the blue cheese. And that's gonna help with the spice. When it comes to something being pretty bitter or pretty hoppy, and I was just having this conversation with a guest because she would say, it's such a hoppy beer, but I love the New England or the hazy IPAs. And I'm like, well, what do you mean by hoppy? Because to me, hoppy could mean a lot of aroma and flavor, not necessarily the bitterness. And I think a lot of people confuse hoppy with bitter. And she clearly does not like bitter beers. However, I think she really likes hoppy beers, hop forward when it comes to the flavor and the aroma.
SPEAKER_01So a double and a triple isn't her speed, but a New England because she probably likes citrus, a little pillowy. Yeah. Something soft on the mouth.
SPEAKER_00A little bit of oats and wheat in that grain bill to kind of make it easier, and then a nice palette, you know, not like a like a canvas palette for um the uh the hop flavor. So in this one, I think I don't know if they had it on there. I think it's yeah, I think it's Slovenia was uh what I was reading. Somewhere, and I don't even think that's Austria anymore, but it's in their region. So, yeah, I think it's uh Slovenia Stirian Goldings is one of the hops they use. So when you you start hearing these hops that you've never heard before, they're using it for its specific flavor component or an aroma that you get. And in this beer, similar to a lot of Italian Pilsners uh that use a specific type of hop, um I think pearl hops they use a lot of, it provides that like snappy aftertaste. And to me, that that brings on the dryness, it creates the drinkability, it helps it stand up a little bit more when you're you know eating dinner or you're enjoying food along with your beer. So this is another good one that would pair very well with um many things, you know, light light meats like this is great for your pork, your sausages and schnitzels, but then when you bread it and the schnitzel has that nice crust on it, this has enough carbonation and that little bit of bitterness to kind of cut through all of that. Then it also has enough for darker meats, you know, when you're drinking your or sorry, when you're eating your beef or your lamb, and then when you have these slow braised hams and pork knuckles, it's another one that's gonna stand up to those, and I think really kind of just cleanse your palate so you can kind of keep eating, keep drinking. Um, I could see myself enjoying this as a festival as well. Another just warm weather type beer, good year round, um, export, so it's definitely uh meant to be spread around and not kept in a centralized location.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00As we both take our final sips, couldn't have scripted that better. Yeah. Two classic style beers, uh, very tasty. Um I would probably say I I like the first beer a little bit better. I think just that little bit of sweetness, especially the time of year. Yeah, it just just adds that summertime, uh that little bit of honey, just kind of you know, it had that like spring vibe to it, where this is very good, but uh it's a little bit more hoomph with that uh hoppiness and uh dryness to it. So if I were just drinking beer upon beer, which I try not to do as much anymore, I think I would go with the fest beer, so aptly uh uh made for that type of consumption. If I was doing a dinner beer or a beer I was just having one or two of, I would definitely reach for this one.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, uh yeah, like you mentioned earlier wings is is a big one. I think uh wings and again, you know, like if you know rusty chain around here, that's what I'm grabbing if I'm eating wings because I want to enjoy it, but at the same time I want to get the flavor out of what I'm what I'm eating, and I feel this lends uh a lot of all around uh flavor, uh maximizing the amount of flavor out of your food. Yeah. And then getting something that's still quenching.
SPEAKER_00You know, it's not gonna it's gonna put up a fight towards those wings. You know, it's not gonna get totally overshadowed. It it allows you to enjoy the wing because it's cutting through the wing, so you can so you need a little bit more wing. Right. Versus if the wing, you know, just had that lingering sauce and heat, you know, the beer would not be as influential in your choice to grab another wing. I do think that uh this is also a good burger beer, you know, cut through all of the uh flavors of a burger, but also any of those toppings, whether it be bacon or uh the LTO lettuce, tomato, onion trio, nice little bit uh mayo or ioli on there, a little bit of bitterness to cut through that, and the carbonation to kind of just cleanse your palate every single bite.
SPEAKER_01Well, we've uh we've knocked out both of the collab uh beers in this series here, and uh we're looking forward to what's uh what's about to come up here next. I know there's a pretty hearty main event coming.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, we're gonna try. I was trying to, you know, had to go back to the spring, the MyFest lager. And I was like, let's keep it in the same vein with this. Uh now we're going to get a little bit more summary with our Porch Fest, and we'll finish it out with a darker version of a lager.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Uh in the meantime, hey, you are listening to now series 15 of barely getting started. We're talking lagers, the Jack's Abbey edition. I am Jason, and we're here with Craig to you. We say cheers. Cheers.