Raise A Glass… “Something More Than Night”
Written By: M. Thomas
Raise a glass… of “Something More than Night,” an imperial smoked porter by Printshop Beer Co.: a powerful beer that drinks delicately
The poetry: One beer often leads to another. A few good pints can produce much more than empty glasses. There is the community feeling that comes from sharing a brew with friends. There is the memory of a special beer tied to a specific time and place, especially in today’s ever-changing craft beer landscape. There is energy and creativity.
Whether we’re always aware of it or not, the taste of beer, in all its complexity and variety, is essential to fostering memory, community, and creativity. Long before the craft revolution in American brewing, long before Prohibition crushed the flourishing American beer industry, the epochal French novelist Marcel Proust made the bond between the five senses and human memory the stuff of literature in his voluminous masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time. In the most famous scene from the novel, the protagonist bites into a madeleine, a cookie-sized sponge cake in the shape of a shell, dipped in an herbal tea and is immediately transported in memory to his childhood by the taste of sweet, airy cake crumbs saturated with aromatic, slightly astringent liquid, just like his aunt used to share with him on Sunday mornings before mass.
This celebrated literary episode gave rise to a new expression in French, a “madeleine de Proust,” or a memory that arises surges up unbidden. For many, these involuntary memories are more meaningful than the things that we consciously remember, which are often colored by a desire to shape the way we see ourselves and appear to others.
While Proust used writing to show how sensation can trigger memory, for me, an exceptional beer makes me want to write so I will remember it later. I could call this involuntary writing, driven by a depth and richness of flavor that calls for remembrance.
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The poet: This desire to transform the liquid in the glass into ink on the page is the inspiration to Raise a Glass…. I want to focus on the essential role played by the sensory experience of beer in local community and creativity. I will be writing about beers in and around Knoxville that capture my imagination, making me want to remember them and share my feelings about them with others.
I’m a beer enthusiast and homebrewer, but not a trained critic or professional. My intention is to simply to celebrate beers, as well as the brewers who make them and people who drink them, in writing that is accessible, yet still detailed and precise.
I will be writing subjectively about beers that I like: not what is good or bad, but on what tastes good to me and how it tastes to me. I am curious about all beer and open to all flavors. My personal preferences tend toward the malty profiles of longstanding styles, like English milds and bitters or German lagers and bocks, as well as the funkiness of farmhouse, saison, and Belgian traditions. I admit that there are styles I don’t drink regularly, including Hazy IPAs, despite their current popularity. Still, I am always interested in a beer that knows what is about and promises a robust flavor profile. I will do my best to span the gamut of what’s brewing in Knoxville, celebrating what is truly an incredible craft beer scene. I was immediately impressed by the size, creativity, and diversity of Knoxville brewing when I moved here from Chicago a few years ago. Since then, I’ve been especially inspired by the focus on collaboration and on the taproom as the heart of a community. Those connections make each pint more meaningful.
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The liquid: Now that I have philosophized, let’s get to the beer. The truth is that one beer more than any other has led me to begin this series: let’s raise a glass of “Something More than Night,” an imperial smoked porter by Printshop Brewing Company at 1532 Island Home Avenue in South Knoxville. This beer has entranced me from the first sip – and, believe me, I have had many more since it came on tap in late Fall 2021. It is so beguiling that I’m afraid the last keg will drain before I fathom its rich complexity. Not wanting it to fade into a vague memory of a sensation stored away until some other winter to come, I have continued drinking it into the spring. I can confirm that it pairs just as well with March breezes and April showers as well as a January snowstorm, especially with the late evening sunsets behind the Gay Street Bridge over the Tennessee River as seen from Printshop’s patio.
“Something More than Night” is a beer composed of powerful flavors that drinks delicately. It pours as a dense black that reveals itself to be a very deep reddish-brown at the base of the glass. The dark color common to porters and stouts belies the way that this beer transmutes the intense flavors of smoked oats, roasted malts, and more than eight percent alcohol by volume into a singular flavor that is much more than the sum of its parts. I would wager that many drinkers would never guess there is a smoked ingredient in the beer, nor would they immediately point to the roasted coffee or bitter chocolate flavors that typify many examples of this style. This isn’t a beer where you can say that it tastes like anything else. It takes other flavors and melds them into something new. And that something is a wonderfully harmonious, rich, subtly complex sensation that spans from the very fine cherry and smoke smells that waft off the glass to the magnificently balanced body – substantial but not heavy, never overwhelmed by the elevated alcohol percentage or the strong individual ingredients – to the finish that lingers and lingers, delivering a distinct sense of smoke and roast in an ever-changing play over the tongue that nearly resembles the powerful tannins of a French red wine.
There is a secret ingredient in this beer, which I have alluded to: Cherry Maple Smoked Streaker Oats from Riverbend Malthouse, a craft malt producer located just across the Great Smoky Mountains in Asheville, North Carolina. Riverbend, like many craft maltsters that have opened in the wake of craft brew’s expansion across the country, works with local and heirloom grain varieties. Riverbend’s grains come mostly from Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, offering brewers and drinkers the opportunity to experience the terroir of the mountain Southeast, not unlike the way that wine grape varieties are distinguished by their origin.
Printshop is a Craft Malt Certified Brewery, which means that at least 10% of the grain used in the brewhouse is purchased from a craft maltster. Prinsthop co-founder Jim Civis says the brewery uses closer to 50% craft malt across its operations.
“Night” uses Riverbend’s Cherry Maple Smoked Streaker Oats for just under 10% of its grain. Jim Civis describes this as a cautious approach to a smoke ingredient, so it doesn’t overwhelm the beer or lend to much acridity, but it is a substantial amount of an “adjunct” ingredient, which means anything other than water, malted barley, hops, and yeast. Despite the outsider label, adjuncts are brewing staples, from traditional styles made with wheat like Hefeweizen to the corn and rice that typify your average domestic light beer or the heightened percentages of oats or wheat in contemporary styles like Hazy IPA, which may sometimes be almost entirely made of wheat.
Riverbend’s 2021 batch of smoked oats are the warp to the weave of “Something More than Night,” shaping the smokiness, the cherry and other ripe red fruit flavors, and the hint of nuttiness that Riverbend describes as the main flavor component of its North Carolina-grown Streaker Oats. They also provide the characteristic silky texture that oats lend to a beer.
The smoked oats highlight how one single ingredient with a flavor defined by a growing region and changing harvests can define a beer. At the same time, just as important to the astounding balance of “Something More than Night” is the rest of the malt bill. It begins with a huge portion of Maris Otter, an English base malt that offers just a touch more substance and flavor complexity to the body of a beer, compared to American base malt varieties. After the oats, each other addition is carefully measured to yield the chocolate and subtle roast notes and the dark color. It’s a calculated equilibrium between malted grains that have undergone a range of processes. Malting involves wetting grains so that they germinate, then ending the growing process by applying heat. How hot you heat them and for how long determines in large part the flavors they will impart. Grains for pale malts are heated in the range of 170-180° F, while darker malts are produced by roasting at higher temperatures, often in the 300-400° F, all of which can give off lovely flavors ranging from caramelization to a long-simmering Sunday roast to the pleasant acridity of dark coffee.
Like a baker using bitter chocolate for a cake, the brewer’s task is to balance the malted ingredients to produce the desired color and flavor profile. The dark malts that give porters and stouts their color tend to taste of roast, bitter chocolate, and coffee. Delicious as those flavors are in the right context, there is much more to Printshop’s “Night.” This beer is sparing with the traditional dark malts, supplemented by a small portion of Midnight Wheat, a dark malt that ensures the proper color while only imparting a very slight roast flavor. This is because wheat lacks the heavy husk of barley that produces bitter flavors at high roasting temperatures. The other malts add chocolate and toffee notes without either excess bitterness or sweetness. The resulting contrast between the expectation that the ink-black body sets for the drinker and the divinely smooth liquid that touches the tongue initiates this beer’s intrigue. And that delectable enigma only develops from the nose to the tongue to the lingering fizziness of the nitro pour on the back of the tongue that, to me, is somehow all at once like sweet sarsaparilla, bitter herbs, and tannic roots.
I admit, my hopes that writing would finally plumb this enigmatic beer have not yet been realized as I write the last paragraph of my third, fourth, or maybe fifth draft. The beer has changed over time, too; the yeast has continued to do its work and amplified the red fruit flavors on the finish. But if I have initiated a few readers into the mystery before the last keg is gone, then perhaps I will have done enough, at least until “Night” falls again and the first sip sends me back to where it all began.
Until then, dear reader – as a novelist of yore would have addressed you –, à la vôtre; cheers!
Written by M. Thomas
