This week, our retailer Downtown Wine and Spirits hooked us up with an amazing beer that reflects the spirit of exchange and collaboration so revered by our entrepreneurial community. The beer is called Stingo Collaboration No. 3, and it is brewed by Cambridge’s own Pretty Things in close collaboration with Boulevard Brewing Co. of Kansas City, MO.

The two are an odd match: Pretty Things employs four people and tenant brews on a 50-barrel system, while Boulevard is one of the largest craft beermakers in the US, boasting a state-of-the-art 150-barrel brewery, and employing over one hundred people. The brewers met at the American Craft Beer Fest in June 2011. During the Belgian Beer Festival in Fall 2011, Boulevard brewmaster Steven Pauwels suggested a collaboration between the breweries as they imbibed at Lord Hobo in Cambridge. Pretty Things’ Martha Holley-Paquette, a native of Yorkshire, offered the idea of the historical sour English ale (or is it the original Flanders Red?). The collaboration would push the envelope for both breweries: Pretty Things had never done a collaboration beer before, and Pauwels, a native Belgian, had not brewed an English-style beer, or considered English ingredients, since arriving at Boulevard over 10 years ago.

Together, over a series of emails, Pretty Things and Boulevard developed a recipe that combined English beer ingredients and brewing history with current Belgian beer brewing styles. The recipe called for 100% Yorkshire malts, a Yorkshire ale yeast, and a few different English hop varieties. Pauwels remarked that his brewery once threw out some of these hops due their extremely odd aroma.

In April 2012, the Pretty Things brewers traveled to Kansas City to brew Stingo: “We milled in, blended the preliminary batches, tweaked the ageing and ingredients, and most importantly ate more barbecue than any four people should ever eat.” Since Boulevard at the time did not work with foeders – very large wooden tuns used in Belgian brewing – the team created the beer’s “sting” with bacterial fermentation in the brewhouse, adding dry ice to the brew kettle to lower the temperature, thus encouraging bacteria to flourish, producing the “souring” lactic acid. Over the next few months, the brewers experimented from afar with different blends of Stingo batches to arrive at the final product.

Stingo tastes like a dry, brown ale, with a subtle sour “sting” upon sipping, followed by a dry and balanced finish. Pauwels describes Boulevard’s Collaboration No. 3 as “bold and full-bodied, with a big malty nose, hints of dark malt, chocolate, licorice, and black fruits, and just the right amount of tartness in the finish. It pairs exceptionally well with wild game, smoked meats, strong cheeses, and heavily seasoned dishes.”

Allow these brewers to entice you to venture beyond your own venture, and visit the Café this Thursday for a taste of collaboration.

Yeasts are the living stars of the beer brewing process. Their work remained a secret for hundreds of years of brewing, but once brewers discovered their microorganism partners, they learned to use different yeasts’ characteristics to their advantage.

Yeasts are eukaryotic microorganisms, mostly unicellular, and vary largely in size from about 2 µm in diameter to 40 µm. They are classified in the kingdom Fungi, and have diversified to approximately 1500 different species. For the most part, yeasts reproduce asexually through mitosis, and often new yeasts may simply form as an outgrowth of existing yeast through “budding.”

The work that yeasts performed secretly for so long in the brewing process is called fermentation. It is the process by which they convert carbohydrates (sugars from the grains) to carbon dioxide and alcohols. Historically, brewers recognized that fermentation took place, but they did not understand the details of the underlying mechanism. Beer was exposed to the open air, which allowed natural yeast and bacteria to “infect” the beer, consuming the sugars and producing alcohols. One natural yeast is the Brettanomyces Lambicus strain, which produces sour beers descended from the lambic traditions of Belgian brewing.

Scientists in the 1800s began learning more about yeasts’ role in the environment in general as well as in brewing. In 1837, Theodore Schwann showed that yeast was alive, and by 1860, Louis Pasteur was able to connect yeasts to the fermentation process. He demonstrated that yeasts exposed to oxygen simply multiply, but when deprived of oxygen, cause a fermentation. Pasteur invented pasteurization to kill yeast, thus halting fermentation, which allowed more control over a number of food and drink production processes. Pasteurization was applied first to wine in 1864 at the request of Emperor Napoleon III to save his ailing wine industry, and about a decade later to beer (Pasteur authored his Etudes sur la Bière in 1876).

Later, brewers noted that the two main types of beer yeast are ale yeast (the “top-fermenting” type, Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and lager yeast (the “bottom-fermenting” type, Saccharomyces uvarum). The former operate at temperatures ranging from 10 to 25°C and rise to the surface during fermentation to create a thick yeast head. The latter work best at temperatures ranging from 7 to 15°C, and tend to settle at the bottom of the fermenter as their work progresses.

Today, brewers take advantage of yeast by-products in addition to alcohol, which impart much of the flavor and aroma on beer. Examples of these flavor compounds include acetaldehyde (green apple), esters (fruit), diacetyl (butterscotch), 2,3-pentanedione (honey), organic acids (sour or salty), fatty acids (soap), and dimethyl sulfide (cooked sweet corn). Brewers choose particular yeasts for their fermentation processes based on these byproducts, according to their desired aromatic and flavor profiles for the beers. For instance, German Hefeweizens often have distinct hints of banana courtesy of isoamyl acetate, the same ester found in abundance in one of the most popular fruits on Earth.

Next time you appreciate a good beer, take a moment to consider all the hard work accomplished by the yeasts, and imagine which ones were used to create the particular profile of the beer. They worked unappreciated for so long, so it’s up to us to celebrate their accomplishments – after all, they have supported networking and the creation of social connections for centuries.

Much like Venture Café, Portico Brewing Company sees itself as an accessible entryway into another world. For Portico, that world is craft beer. This Thursday, Alex Rabe, co-founder of Portico, will visit Venture Café to conduct guests through that delicious entryway.

Named for one of the most ubiquitous architectural structures in the world, Portico Brewing Company focuses on the unassuming nature of its beer and markets its product to the everyday consumer who is considering a taste of craft beer. Like their logo, the Portico beer tap handles – one of which we will display this Thursday – reflect an emphasis on minimalism, featuring the brewers’ favorite pieces of architecture with a black and white design.

Portico arose from a love of entrepreneurship and beer. It was founded in the summer of 2012 by three Babson MBA graduates: Alex Zielke, Alex Rabe, and Ian Chester. The team spent over a year home brewing, incorporating Zielke’s skills as a certified Berlin Brewmaster, and hosting tastings with their friends. After several strategy sessions to figure out how three Babson MBAs should go about founding a brewery, they began to brew “gypsy style” at Watch City Brewing Company just down the road in Waltham, Massachusetts.

To date, Portico has produced four beers: a Belgian inspired Kolsch called Fuzzy Logic, a summer sour named Rendition, a fall Farmhouse Ale dubbed Saison Charrette, and a winter Scotch Ale christened Sett Seven. We will be serving Fuzzy Logic, Portico’s flagship beer, in the Café on Thursday. Kolsch is a traditional German beer from Cologne, Germany, but Portico’s version combines North American barley and wheat with German hops. This combination results in a balance of citrus and sweet malty flavors, with only a slightly bitter hop profile. The brewers use Belgian yeast, which makes Fuzzy Logic “Belgiany,” creating a fruit and floral aroma. The result is a smooth, refreshing beer, tasty to the everyday consumer or the craft beer aficionado.

This Thursday, walk through the portals of Venture Café to taste Fuzzy Logic, and to meet one of its makers. You might just learn about two Venture Café favorites: entrepreneurship and craft beer.

What could be a better St. Patrick’s weekend activity than brewing beer? I experienced my first taste of home brewing on Saturday, courtesy of my friend Tom, who acquired the relevant equipment and ingredients. The goal for the day was to make the recipe for a pale ale featuring citra hops. The first step was to mash malt that had already been run through a roller mill and crushed. The process of mashing combines the cracked grain with hot water, allowing enzymes to convert the starch in the malt into sugars. It’s like steeping tea.

Next, we added both liquid and dry malt extract. Some brewers favor an “all-grain” approach to brewing, wherein they essentially make their own extract and are able to exert more control over the brewing process. For beginners, however, buying ready-made extract is a nice shortcut because it saves time and requires less equipment.

The next step was to add the hops – both Nugget bittering hops and Citra flavoring hops. This phase of brewing requires occasional stirring with timed periods of heating at set temperatures between adding ingredients. We also added Irish Moss to prevent the beer from becoming cloudy.

Finally, it was time to take our concoction off the stove to cool it. The mixture has to be cooled to under 80 degrees so as not to kill the yeast when it is added. The cooling technique was quite low-tech: we gave the whole pot a cold bath.

Once our brew was sufficiently cool, we poured it into a sanitized container and added water up to the 5 gallon mark.

Tom took the initial gravity reading for the beer. Gravity refers to the density of the wort, which is largely dependent on its sugar content. Tom will double check the gravity of the beer before declaring the fermentation process complete, because a high reading could indicate that the yeast organisms have not yet finished their job – and the resulting beer will be too sweet.

After funneling the brew into its final (sanitized) storage container, Tom pitched the yeast.

The end result of my very first home brewing experience:

The tube and water bath serve as a low-tech but sanitary way of allowing release of carbon dioxide produced from the fermentation process, but preventing other gases or potential contaminants from entering the storage container. I was informed this morning that the yeast were happily eating and reproducing, as evidenced by bubbles in the water bath.

Hopefully, in about a week and a half, Tom and I will bottle a delicious beer.

The Mystic Brewery inhabits the Mystic Valley in Chelsea, Massachusetts. Although the Mystic Valley has served as the backdrop to many winter New England traditions, including sleigh races and the Jingle Bells song, Venture Café has procured a taste of summer from the Brewery as a juxtaposition to the wintery weather – and beers brewed for darkness – of the past week.

The Mystic Brewery focuses its attention on history – that of its home Valley, and that of brewing beer. The Brewery takes pride in its location in the path of Paul Revere’s ride across the Mystic Valley to warn the Minutemen that the British were coming, and named its house yeast – Wigglesworth – after a 1600’s best-selling Mystic Valley author (and relative of the Founder) who wrote Puritanical doomsday pieces that contained rants about everything but beer. The Mystic Brewery preserves the brewing methods practiced before modern industrial processes became preferred by most its peers. Inspired by Belgian brewers who still adhere to historical traditions, Mystic makes “living beer,” stepping out of the way to allow microbes to do their job in creating flavor, aroma, and complexity.

Mystic Brewery’s dedication to the “living beer” tradition is embodied in its mashing step, which converts the starches in grain to sugar. The brewer pours water into crushed, malted grain and allows it to steep, releasing sugars from the grain. Because highly uniform malts are available today, modern mashing often requires nothing more than the addition of carefully temperature-controlled water to the malt. This infusion mashing can be accomplished all at once or through a stepwise process by adding water of different (generally increasing) temperatures over time. However, Mystic Brewery, like many Belgian farmhouse breweries, prefers more variance in its mash, resulting in a more complex, multidimensional product. Mystic brewers light a fire under a pot containing malt and warm water and stir it for over an hour until the conversion is complete, a technique known as gradient mashing. While gradient mashing requires the brewer to relinquish some control over the process, Mystic believes that it sets its beers apart.

The Renaud Saison currently in our kegerator is an example of a Mystic Belgian style beer, from a line that Mystic designates as 16°. 16° refers to degrees plato, which is an historical measurement of the amount of sugars in an unfermented beer, still popular in Central Europe. The 16° beers tend to be strong at approximately 7.0% ABV and thus pair deliciously with food. The Renaud is a summery beer made with pilsner malt and Saaz hops, resulting in Belgian beer with notes of spice and fruit.

This Thursday, journey through the Boston winter to Venture Café, to take advantage of old traditions and a delicious taste of summer.

This Thursday we are looking forward to enjoying some Fade To Black at Venture Café. No, Metallica is not our Special Guest, but I would like to think if James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich were to drink some of this delicious beer from Left Hand, they would have found life slightly less dark.

Dick Doore and Eric Wallace started the Left Hand Brewing Company in the early 1990s, after several years of homebrewing and roaming the Earth in pursuit of tasty beers. They incorporated in Colorado as Indian Peaks Brewing Company, in honor of the nearby wilderness area that is the historical home to several Native American tribes. Doore and Wallace converted a former meat packing plant on the St. Vrain River near downtown Longmont into their dream brewery. They hit a bump in the road when they discovered that “Indian Peaks” was already being used by another brewery for a beer name, but again found a solution rooted in the Colorado land and its history. They decided to change the name of their brewery to honor Chief Niwot, whose tribe had once frequented the Indian Peaks Wilderness Area, and whose southern Arapahoe name can be derived to be mean “left hand.” They opened their Colorado doors on January 22, 1994.

Fade to Black is a seasonal beer at Left Hand, and refers to “that time of year when the light fades away. Brewed for the darkness, Fade to Black speaks in volumes.” The current brew is Volume 4, a Rocky Mountain Black Ale that pours pitch black with an off-white head. It offers aromas of citrus and roasted malts. The taste is balanced by sweet malts (2-row, Munich, Dark Chocolate, Crystal and Carafa), citrusy hops (Centennial), bitter hops (Columbus), and Italian herbal Amara. The result is smooth, complex, and perfect for the dark months of winter.

While Metallica’s song may focus on the fading of life itself, the beer’s name reflects the quickly fading light of the winter sky. However, since the beer is seasonal, its closing line is the same as the song: Now I will just say goodbye. Thus, come to Café this week to sample this beer before its winter song ends.

For months, Venture Café searched high and low to find and procure the Spice of Life.  After much networking, negotiating, and yes, begging, it now lies in wait, in our very own tiny kegerator.

The Spice of Life comes to us from Sixpoint Brewery in Brooklyn, New York.  It was founded in 2004 but traces its true origins to the beginning of history, as the “Sixpoint Brewers’ star” (also called Bierstern, Brauerstern,  or Zoigel Star, depending on where said history was taking place) has served as a code of brewing for centuries.  While the origins of the association between the Sixpoint and beer are unclear, many agree that the brewer’s star was intended to symbolize purity, advertising that a particular brew was free of additives, adjuncts, and other beer “contaminants.”  Thus, the six points of the star may represent the six aspects of brewing most critical to beer purity – the water, the hops, the grain, the malt, the yeast, and the brewer – but other accounts associate it with the three “elements” involved in brewing (fire, water and air) and the three ingredients known to early brewers (malt, hops and water).  Today, the Sixpoint Brewery maintains these traditions with a “mash-up of professional brewing experiences, global brewery influences, and unbridled homebrew proliferation.”

The Spice of Life Series at Sixpoint is a controlled experiment focusing on one agreed point of the star: the hop.  Hops are the dried ripe cones from the female flowers of the twining plant of genus Humulus.  These cones contain signature oils and acids that impart particular aromas and tastes on different beers.  More oil typically results in a stronger aroma, whereas more acid increases the bitterness of a beer.  To demonstrate how the hop may influence a beer, Sixpoint has been producing a different single-hop IPA each month: except for the featured hop, the other ingredients and processes remain the same.  The brew is fermented dry to accentuate the hop flavor and aroma.  The Spice of Life in our kegerator features the Nelson Sauvin hop from New Zealand, said to offer notes of tangy fruit and white wine, along with moderate bittering.  In this second year of the Spice of Life series, the Nelson Sauvin hop is part of an effort to showcase lesser-known hop varieties to American craft beer drinkers.

The long-awaited Sixpoint Spice of Life featuring the Nelson Sauvin hop will be on tap this Thursday at the Café.  I advise you to carry on a centuries-old tradition of brewers and imbibers everywhere: spice it up.

While some like to experiment and explore beyond the tried and true, the Germans prefer to keep it pure.  Thus, in 1516 in the city of Ingolstadt, Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria enacted the Reinheitsgebot, or the German Beer Purity Law, to protect the purity of German beer through government regulation.   The Law dictated the ingredients for beer as well as its prices, and those who brewed impure beer were subject to uncompensated confiscation of their product.

The original Law stated that the only ingredients that could be used in beer were water, barley and hops.  At the time, Germans knew that the barley provided the color and some sugars while the hops balanced the brew with bitterness and served as a natural preservative.  Blind to the world of microorganisms, they did not yet know about yeast and its role to the fermentation process.  Before Louis Pasteur’s work with microorganisms in the 1800s, brewers typically transferred sediment from a previous fermentation to the next without understanding that the process provided the microorganisms necessary to perform fermentation.  In addition to the original three natural ingredients, the 1993 revision of the Purity Law specifies that yeast may be incorporated into bottom-fermented beer (lagers), and that different kinds of sugar and malt may be used for top-fermented beer (ales).

Throughout history, there have been various reasons for enacting and maintaining this Law:

• Brewers had a tendency to use cheap grain substitutes in beer, which resulted in an inconsistent and lower quality product.  The Law ushered in a new era of pride and enthusiasm for German beer.
• Bakers complained about competition with brewers for basic ingredients like wheat and rye, and consumers wanted to ensure that they they could buy affordable bread.  The wheat beers brewed today (hefeweizen) are not compliant with the original Reinheitsgebot, but are allowed under the 1993 revision.
• In 1871, Bavaria asserted the Reinheitsgebot as a precondition to German unification, to prevent competition from other regional brewers who used a broader selection of ingredients.  This protectionism led to the extinction of many German brewing traditions, including the North German spiced beers and cherry beers.  The broad reach of German beer protectionism ended in 1987, courtesy of a ruling by the European Court of Justice stating that beer imported into Germany does not have to abide by the Purity Law.

Modern German regulations allow for a broader range of ingredients (at least in ales), but those with a penchant for experimentation have searched for ways to escape their remaining purity shackles.  One team of scientists at the Technical University of Munich has focused on yeast as a “loophole” to even the Reinheinsgebot of 1516 (although I am sure that genetically modified ingredients also would have been verboten, had regulators known about them).  Their team created a process wherein they insert different genes into various strains of yeast to create substances like caffeine (stimulant) and limonene (lime flavor) during fermentation.  So far, their experiments have shown that their genetically modified yeast can grow in the relevant environment of hops, malts and water in sufficient amounts necessary for their experiments.  Further, they discovered that they may need to take steps to preserve the genome integrity of the yeast strains in their “SynBio Beer”: first brewing attempts revealed no difference in limonene content between the beer with genetically modified yeast and the control beer, perhaps due to loss of the plasmid that encodes limonene synthase.  Regardless of their experimental results, the scientists’ main goal is to “involve, interest and inspire people to reconsider preconceived ideas and encourage them to openly engage in a broad discussion weighing pros and cons of genetic engineering in foodstuff.”

In summary, some like it pure, some like to mix it up, and some like to circumvent the issue by applying scientific principles.  Like Venture Café, the world of beer caters to a diverse range of tastes and perspectives.

Last week in the Café we had a “Second” and a “First,” with the same beverage at the same time.  Due to its popularity on its debut night in the Café, we featured Bantam Wunderkind Cider for the second time.  For the first time, co-founders Dana Masterpolo (Co-founder and Head Storyteller) and Michelle da Silva (Co-founder and Head Taster) joined our session to share their story of how they created their very American small business and their very Massachusetts “Modern American Cider.”

With day jobs in insurance and architecture, the co-founders spent about 18 months experimenting with batches of home crafted ciders and enlisting their friends and families as tasters.  Insisting on blind tastings, they compared different recipes of their own as well as other ciders on the market.

Their end product is a dry, crisp cider, with a focus on local ingredients and local production.  They chose to use a blend of four varieties of apples, each adding a different element to the cider: McIntosh (aroma), Cortland (body), Empire (spice), and Green (tartness).  The apples are grown at five farms across Western Massachusetts, and then pressed at Carver Hill Orchard in Stow, Massachusetts.  The fermentation and blending process takes place at Westport Rivers Winery in Westport, Massachusetts.  Westport Rivers Winery is specially suited to produce cider – which some drinkers consider the middle ground between beer and wine – because these wine makers also operate Buzzards Bay Brewing, a brewery focused on local agriculture and farm fresh ales.

In addition to apples, Bantam incorporates into the mix a sparkling wine yeast and organic flower blossom honey to create a dry, balanced taste and mouthfeel.  These characteristics make the cider pair especially well with cheeses and spicy foods, including Indian and Thai dishes.  The co-founders also encourage cooking with the cider, particularly in marinades and with pork.

The Bantam Wunderkind Cider will be on tap at the beginning of the Café session this Thursday.  Please stop by and give it a try. You can rest assured that it will be tasty, locally sourced in Massachusetts, and quintessentially American.