Uiltje x Beer Temple: Uiltje x Deschutes smuggle in vintage bottles

"A COUPLE OF BOTTLES ARE 10-12 YEARS OLD, IN CRAFT BEER THAT'S VINTAGE"

This is the transcript from a Deschutes Brewing bottle share that took place on May at Beer Temple in Amsterdam. Deschutes brewers Jake and Clay snuck over about 12-15 bottles of vintages never available in Europe. A few lucky beer drinks from the Uiltje community got a chance to taste some incredible beers and, judging by the number of phones glowing hot, their Untappd profiles. 

Paddi: Hey guys, welcome to this special bottle share. We have the team from Deschutes over. I'm Paddi from Uiltje, by the way. I'm a brewer there, and we have Jake and Clay with us, who’ve come over from the US, from Deschutes, as you guys probably know. Deschutes. Yeah. We did a collab back in September with a helles dry hop. West Coast helps because that’s close to the styles doing really well in the US at the moment. There’s a trend there. I think it’s a very interesting style because it’s clean, easy, drinkable, especially in this weather. We’re curious what you guys think.

So we’ll start off with the helles and then Jake will take us through a guided tasting of about 10 or 12 bottles we have from Deschutes. Some of them are ten years old from Jake’s own cellar, by the way. Some really fun stuff. I hope you guys enjoy it. I’m going to hand it over to Jake now so he can say a couple of things.

Jake: Hey everybody. Jake Harper, I’m the head brewer at Deschutes Brewery, our Portland pub location. We are the largest brewery in Oregon, tenth largest craft brewery in the US. Overall, including all the macro brewers like Anheuser‑Busch, we are the twentieth largest brewery in the country. Clay and I get to do all of our research and development at the pub. We’re the ones who get to play, and we have the best jobs in the company. For scale, our company brews about 350,000 hectoliters a year from our production facility. We brew about a thousand hectoliters between the two of us. So we’re research and development. We’ve got some really fun bottles. Nothing mainline. All these beers you haven’t seen. You may have heard of a few of them, but they’re all cellar door, reserve bottles. Some barrel aged, some small batch, kind of a pub club.

Paddi: Jake is the person who started out the cellar program and the cooler program.

Jake: Yeah. At one point we had 10 or 12 foeders, and at one point we had 4000 oak casks of different beer styles. We’ve trimmed that down to about 1000 or 2000. I’ve been working for the company for 25 years, going on in December, and a bunch of different jobs throughout. The opportunity came up in Portland eight years ago. I got my foot in the door there, got my own brewhouse. We’re operating a 25‑hectoliter German Kaspar Schulz system, copper clad and automated. It’s like driving a Porsche compared to other pub systems of that size. I’ll let Clay introduce himself and then we’ll get to some bottles.

Clay: My name is Clay Trout. I’m the brewer in the Portland Deschutes pub under Jake here, as you just heard. The beer we’re drinking right now is Hella Dolcita. We did a collaboration back in September. Turned out great. Hopped with a new varietal hop called Dolcita. It was experimental for a while and just got named late last year. Really fun beer to play around with. Really expressive hop character. That’s what I’ve got.

Jake: We were really trying to get this done. I love that 90% of the hops in the world are grown—if you exclude the southern hemisphere—so they’re all kind of a backdoor. We were going to brew this beer fresh hop because we brew about four or five fresh hops right off the vine into the kettle. We can get hops within 40 minutes. Picked and into the kettle. It’s ridiculous. We decided to do it with T‑90 pellets. It’s basically a classic German helles base, but this hop is something you’d normally throw into a New England IPA or West Coast IPA. Super fruity, peachy. It’s like drinking toasted bread with peach marmalade.

Paddi: Let us know what you guys think.

Jake: We brewed it in the pub. Unfortunately they never got a chance to taste it because we brewed it and then came here. So we made sure the beer was brewed and ready so when we were here, instead of them having to drink it fresh, we packaged it back.

Audience: What is the difference between this helles and the one you brewed in Oregon?

Jake: There were a few minor differences. The water profiles are significantly different. We have some of the best brewing water in the world. Super soft. We don’t have to treat it. We also didn’t have to dry hop it. We just pre‑pump‑over hopped it. We got the hop character we wanted, but the beer dried out a little more than a helles should. It didn’t have as much mouthfeel. Talking with Paddi, they decided to under‑attenuate it a little compared to our version. Still pretty dry. And they used a dry hop to drive aromatics more. Very similar. Theirs has a little more hop character and the beer is super fresh. As it ages, it might get closer to the batch we brewed.

Paddi: I tasted it out of the bright tank and it was super peachy then, but it mellowed out. You guys don’t have racking arms, so that’s a different problem. We tried to be as close as possible. Dry hopping during fermentation tends to dry out the beer more, and that’s what happened with them. So we added a bit more Dextrin Malt because with German styles you want malt, hops, yeast, water, nothing else. We used a little more Dextrin Malt to keep the body. We ended up around 2.1 Plato, which was what we aimed for. I get a lot of lychee out of this beer. I like that it starts hoppy without the green. It starts with white peach, lychee, sweet fruits, but finishes really clean. It doesn’t make your palate tired. Heavy New England IPAs can tire you out. This is meant to be an in‑between beer. Easy drinking at 4.6%. I’m happy with the outcome.

Audience: How do you prevent hop burn in your beers?

Jake: It’s just how many hops you’re throwing. Pounds per barrel in the dry hop. And conditioning time. We don’t can anything. We’re draft only at the pub, so we can lager our beers. Even ales. We let them condition for multiple weeks to let hop matter drop out and eliminate hop burn. You only get hop burn when it’s over‑hopped and really young.

Paddi: Clay and Jake brew at the brewpub, but they win a lot of World Beer Cups every year. Since we’re just past the World Cup, maybe you can tell them about Hachimitsu Mai.

Jake: We’ve had two really successful beers between World Beer Cup and the Great American Beer Festival over the last few years. Our fan favourite is a Japanese rice lager brewed with no hops. We met a guy who started the World Honey Exchange. He gets exotic honeys from all over the world. He’s got like 300 varietals. We picked Chilean Olmo out of Patagonia. It’s incredibly floral and aromatic. Nothing like any honey I’ve smelled. We brewed this rice lager with that honey and figured out a way to get it into the beer without losing aromatics. No hops in the beer. All honey. It’s won 14 gold medals over the last three years. World Beer Cup: gold, gold, gold. This year it won silver for the first time.

We also have a barrel‑aged doppelbock we brew at the end of every year. We let it sit in the fermenter for three months, then into whiskey barrels for six to eight months, then blend it. It hasn’t won gold yet but has medalled four years in a row.

Paddi: The honey idea is amazing. What they do with honey is nothing like I’ve ever tasted. I’m inspired. You can expect something in the next couple of years in a similar way out of our lab series.

Audience: Is there an alternative honey in the Netherlands you could use?

Jake: Absolutely. It doesn’t have to have a ton of honey flavour. It’s more about aromatics. I’m sure you could find something.

Paddi: Going back to the Hella Dolcita, there was a party of Dutch people who came by to drink it, right?

Jake: Yeah. One of the holidays. A Dutch holiday.

Paddi: Could be. Most Dutch holidays are in the summer. Sinterklaas.

Jake: I remember emailing Paddi saying he invited all his friends.

Paddi: Yeah, about 70 Dutch people. Big party. And we had an Uiltje tap handle on. They had it on tap the whole time so people could spot it.

Jake: Maybe say something if someone has a question on the helles, or just a bit of expectation of what’s coming with the bottles. These bottles—there are some good vintage ones. Most are between 8 and 12%. Small tastes. A lot are barrel aged. Nothing from our production facility you’d buy in a grocery store. A couple are ten years old from my garage because I need more people than myself or Clay to drink them. We have a good mix. One or two light ones, but most are big barrel‑aged beers with adjuncts. Chocolate, fruit. We’ll get into it.

Paddi: Okay, let’s bottle up.