Barbara, my wife, loves to shovel snow. Light dusting? She’s out there with a broom and a light shovel, clearing things off. Couple of inches? No problem – “good core workout,” she says, while breaking out the heavier shovel with the metal blade and getting down to work. Then, one day, in the first year at our new place with the longer driveway and the plowed-in entrance on the corner (which means twice as much sidewalk to clear), she found out what happens when you get 8+ inches of wet, heavy snow. The next day, we were buying a snow blower. As intensity of a thing increases, you can hit a tipping point where incremental change to the way you’ve “done things” at lower intensities is no longer sufficient.
That’s Brown Biere de Garde for me. We can’t just step up certain aspects of the Blonde and the Amber to make this beer darker, because doing that makes it harder to get the style’s overall character right. Instead, we need to redesign the recipe to make it do what the brown BdG requires. We need a snow blower.
STYLE
The guidelines tell us that as Bieres de Garde move toward the darker end of the spectrum, the malt complexity and intensity increase, and hops receded. Since we’re going full-on brown here (I know the SRM max is 19, but this pushes the envelope on that a bit), hops cease to be a major concern. They’re a noticeable and vital component in the blonde, supplemental and valuable in the amber…and hardly relevant at all in the brown, in my humble opinion.