When it comes to beer, color matters. It’s often indicative of beer characteristics: lighter might mean lower ABV. Darker usually suggests you’re in for some roast. Amber equals caramel. You have your outliers that don’t conform, of course – Belgian Tripel, Munich Dunkel, and Oktoberfest belie the color-ist assumptions above, respectively – but they’re still suggestive. What interests me more is when color actually changes expectations within a style. Saison v. Dark Saison. Stout v. Pale Stout. And, of course, the many-hued variations of Biere de Garde. In this post, we’ll dig into what differentiates the Amber (or, as it sounds so much better in French, ambrée) from its lighter and darker category-mates, and how to strike the balance between them.
STYLE
Biere de Garde (BdG) enjoys more flexibility than most, as a style. Not only do the component style descriptors give ranges (as they do for most styles), it also allows for three distinct (uncredited) substyles based on color: blonde, amber, and brown. Broadly speaking, hopping level is inversely related to color, but that’s just one metric, and our recipe construction and process should take more than that into account!
Amber is the trickiest of the three. By the guidelines, all of them should be “malt-oriented,” but that’s easily overdone in the Amber. As a target, I find the best approach is to increase malt complexity while keeping a firm hand on the brake on malt density. This should still be a fairly light beer, in the mouth, but if you start thinking “malt-first” it becomes very easy to create a beer that is too heavy, sweet, and clunky. We’re going to maintain our hopping load here, but increase the volume and impact of our character malts, which effectively reduces the perceivable hops character in the beer. We’ll also keep a very close eye on body and perception of body.