Goldfinger #6: Bałtycki by Goldfinger Brewing Co.

As related previously, my tireless search for Goldfinger's Winter Lager led me to their brewery as a blizzard approached Chicagoland. But the great and the good of the western suburbs couldn't care less as they were packed into the tasting room while the beers in the nearby lagering tanks were gleefully awaiting the approaching storm and its attendant drop in temperatures. I was disappointed to find that the sign at the counter didn't list cans of Winter Lager as being available; however it did note that cans of Bałtycki, their Baltic porter, were on offer.

My mind did the hedonistic calculus.

Intensity: At 8.4% A.B.V., likely fairly intense.

Duration: A 4-pack of potent brew? A few hours.

Certainty or uncertainty: It's Goldfinger. It'll certainly be tasty.

Propinquity or remoteness: As soon as I get back to the hotel.

Fecundity: High probability of feelin' good.

Purity: I won't get drunker than a barrel of monkey so the aftermath will be fine.

Extent: The drinking of this beer will affect only me.

Forecast: Blizzard ahead! Beer needed.

Having done Jeremy Bentham proud and it having been determined that buying some Bałtycki would have high utility, I did so.

Like all Baltic porters, Goldfinger's had that Stygian dark brown color that was very hesitant to let any light through lest anyone mistake it for an amber. With the requisite color, I was happy to see that it had that viscous motor oil look to it like Baltika #6 and Żywiec as I poured. My glass was adorned with a big, frothy head of light brown foam. It was like the color of roux when it just turns the corner and you know it's headed for a nice milk chocolate color that will make your gumbo mo' bettah. I really couldn't tell but I am going to assume this stuff was clear as one would expect. The aroma was equally luscious with a prominent roastiness to it along with a stone fruit scent that alternated between plum and cherry in the part of my brain that register beer smells. French roast coffee, a verdant hoppiness, and a wonderfully decocted toastiness rounded things out.

Darkly roasted coffee along with a touch of dark chocolate were the most prominent flavors. The beer's medium-heavy body tasted really smooth underneath generous doses of fizz and hops of a spicy nature. It was a sweet beer but not cloying. The malty sweetness lingered for a spell on the finish but was eventually replaced by a not-insignificant wave of bitterness & astringency. Gotta tame all that malt somehow, I guess. Despite the potency of the acerbity, dryness was rather mild.

Bałtycki was one tasty brew. I was surprised to not get much of a boozy burn despite an A.B.V. of 8.4%. Just as Oceania and Eurasia are locked in perpetual war in 1984, so too are malty sweetness and hops/fizz in the Baltic porter. You want a big, thick roasty malt extravaganza but you also don't want the drinker's tongue bogged down in treacle so you've gotta be generous with the hops and make it fizzy. Goldfinger did a great job here letting my palate enjoy the dark malty goodness yet not drown in a cloying syrupy mess. That bitter finish sure did reset my tongue for the next blast of barley. Without the boozy heat, this stuff went down easily. A bit too easily, if you ask me.

Junk food pairing: Baltic porters not only demand a junk food with complementary flavors but one with a hearty amount of them to get themselves tasted through the big flavors of the beer. Pair Bałtycki with a big bag of Jays Smoky BBQ Ridges potato chips. A thicker chip means more spud goodness and grease while the ridges mean more surface area for the smoky BBQ flava.

Winter is not done with us yet so we have beer

Last night I had the pleasure of taking dinner with my father-in-law. We dined at Vintage out on the west side once again. I indulged myself and had a pint of Ionic Bond as I am all over rye beers**.

It was very tasty. 

It had a body that was fairly light for the style, i.e. - it wasn't very viscous as if it were motor oil like takes on the style by Baltika or Żywiec. However, it was delicious. Full of coffee, roasty goodness undergirded by a rye earthiness. Plus a stiff dose of hops to balance all those malts. A fine way to chase away the late winter chills.

**As long as they're not IPA's. 

My refrigerator is full of beer

While down in Chicago's western suburbs last week, I went a bit overboard in my beer buying. I had a list of brews to seek out with Goldfinger's winter seasonal at the top of the list. It is a rye lager and I just could not resist. My stop at Binny's yielded nothing but I would not be denied. So I drove to the brewery one evening but they too were out. Thankfully I found some at Sal's Beverage Emporium or whatever it's called.

While Goldfinger was out of rye lager - not even a drop to be had on tap - they did have another brew suitable for winter, Bałtycki. Why yes it is a Baltic porter. 

I also found Rauchbier, my first ever brew from Art History, I do believe.

Old Irving Brewing is a new favorite of mine. While they brew IPAs that hold no interest for me, they do other styles more appealing to my tastes and do them well. I also think it helps that they are in a neighborhood near where I grew up.

Lastly, I grabbed a 4-pack of this Polish-style pilsner from Revolution in concert with Moor’s Brewing whom I'd never heard of until I saw this beer. A leftover from the summer, it was a mere $5.97.

One man's Baltic Porter is another man's Imperial Russian Stout: Baltic Porter by Dovetail Brewery

When I think of Baltic Porter, I think of crusty, disheveled 17th century fellows sitting at a tavern in Gdańsk on the shores of the Baltic Sea reminiscing about the good ol' days of the Hanseatic League and bitterly lament how the Atlantic trade with its cheap goods from America has just ruined everything. Over flagons of this hearty brew, they revel in the glory days when Finns traded saunas for Latvian pickled herring, the Germans traded their artisanal salt to the Swedes for potash in order to make industrial strength beer glasses, and the Poles offered honey and rye in exchange for silk for all the lovely Polish ladies to wear.

Also when I think of Baltic Porter, I think of a pitch black brew that looks like motor oil when poured into a glass. And it has a viscous feel to it when drank. A nice, full body. (Hint hint. Nudge nudge. Say no more! Say no more!) You know, Baltika #6 and the stuff from Żywiec. But when your Baltic Porter is just a hair from 10% A.B.V. like Żywiec's or Third Space, maybe it's become a Russian Imperial Stout. Baltika #6, on the other hand is only 7%. Looking at other Polish porters - Baltic Porter is a Polish invention, as I understand it - I see 7-8%.

I was thrilled to be able to find some Baltic-style porter from Dovetail on a recent trek to Chicagoland as I just don't recall seeing any here in Madison. It is my impression that it's their late fall specialty, something to enjoy with the cooler autumn temperatures now that you've drunk all of your Festbier and are impatiently waiting on Jenny Pfäfflin to get that Holiday Bock out of the lagering tanks.

The label said it was 6.6% A.B.V. which was less potent than the Okacim Porter which lines Polish store shelves throughout Chicago while being significantly easier going than Żywiec Porter which is 9.5%.

Whatever strength a Baltic Porter may be, it will always be like a black hole in your glass. If you had giant glass vat of the stuff, you could stand behind it and no one would be able to see you. A fine beery hiding spot. My pour produced a lovely, but fast-fading, dollop of tan foam atop the Stygian suds. In addition to looking like its brethren, it smelled just as expected too with coffee and dark chocolate at the fore with a honeyed sweetness and something green bringing up the rear.

The medium-heavy body tasted somewhat restrained and did not simply make my tongue feel as if I had accidentally sipped from a quart of Valvoline. A firm fizziness probably helped. I tasted coffee, dark chocolate, raisin, and a little caramel while a herbal hoppiness proved to be just the right amount to balance those malty flavors. The coffee, chocolate, and mild sweetness lingered on the finish until the hops mustered just enough gumption for a bit of dryness here and a smidge of bitterness there.

Dovetail did a very, very nice job here as this is great stuff. The coffee and chocolate flavors were positively delicious and they didn't have that ostentatious look-at-all-the-black-malt-we-used-here bitterness. And it was hopped perfectly. Enough counterpoint to the roasty flavors but without trying to steal the show. I loved how it was as full-flavored as any counterpart yet, unlike some, one of these just isn't enough to last you throughout Advent.

Junk food pairing: Grab a bag of Utz's Pumpernickel Pretzel sticks and a big jar of spicy mustard for dipping to go with Dovetail's finest.

How zaftig! How Żywiec!: Baltic Porter by Żywiec Brewery

It wasn't all that long ago that winter had just given way to spring and I was reviewing a different Baltic porter. That one was made right here in Madison. It had a strong stone fruit flavor, too much, in fact, for my taste. Well, today we have another big, dark lager, one that you will likely find in the all the taverns and inns from Międzylesie to Lubin. Or Lublin, for that matter.

My previous encounter with this style was with one brewed in collaboration by Giant Jones Brewing Company and Working Draft Beer Company. While it had all of the requisite flavors, they were out of balance for my palate, with a taste akin to plum leading the charge while coffee and dark chocolate, my favored Baltic porter flavors, came in much smaller doses. These tastes are provided by dark malts and add bitterness which, in combination with hops, acts as a nice counterpoint to the sweeter aspects of the beer from the paler malts. I rather doubt that the Giant Jones/Working Draft brew was extraordinarily sweet, as in I don't think it had more sugars in it than the imported Baltic porters that I recalled. But having a fruitiness as the primary flavor tricks my brain into tasting more sweetness than is actually present.

Hoping that my memory wasn't failing me, I figured I ought to trust but verify.

It having been quite some time since I'd last had a Baltic porter brewed somewhere near the Baltic Sea and having had a couple domestic versions that didn't appeal to me all that much, I sought out an imported version. I think Madison's eastern European population lives mainly on the west side so it was off to Woodman's West. I noticed that there wasn't any Baltika like I remembered being there previously with "previously" likely meaning 10+ years ago. Plus, they used to carry 2 liter plastic bottles of Russian beer, as I recall, as well but I saw none of those. Was this a boycott of Russian beer because Putin invaded Ukraine? Or the result of making more room for craft beer? Perhaps Russian beer is simply imported less and harder to get a hold of. Regardless, I was able to find Żywiec Porter, the only imported Baltic porter they had on hand. It is Polish so points for going back to the motherland on this one.

According to the vast repository of all human knowledge, Wikipedia, the Żywiec Brewery dates back to 1856 and the town of – quelle surprise - Żywiec which currently resides in far southern Poland. There was no state of Poland in 1856 and instead the town was part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. Today the brewery is owned largely by a corporation, holding company, or some other legal entity that has the word "Heineken" in it and, also according to Wikipedia, has a capacity of 5 million hectoliters which apparently comes out to a little over 4 million barrels.

Besides being a brewery that still uses green glass bottles, Heineken is a brewing leviathan. It's a multinational company that makes a gagillion barrels a year in facilities around the globe. I get the impression that Żywiec is to Heineken as Leinenkugel is to MillerCoors or AB-InBev or whatever conglomerate owns them these days. And just as Leine's corporate overlords have ensured that Summer Shandy is found in every state in the Union, Żywiec's have willed that their beer be available in Madison, Wisconsin.

I am getting better at pouring and was able to get a big head of tan foam in my glass. It was moderately firm stuff. The liquid was a deep, deep mahogany and of fine clarity as I was able to see a fair number of bubbles inside. The aroma was heavenly! Full of cherry and chocolate, it smelled like it had been brewed in collaboration with CocoVaa as it was as if I had just taken a deep whiff over a box of chocolate truffles. There were also hints of coffee and tobacco.

So far, so good.

One drop was all it took to know that this was a big, rich beer. It had a heavy body like the proverbial motor oil. My tongue got a goodly dose of malty sweetness that was a little caramel, but more like honey. Cherry lingered in the background as other, non-fruity flavors kept the sweetness at bay. Coffee flavors lent bitterness while some fizz and spicy hops did their part. Much to my delight, it was also faintly smokey. The cherry and sweetness slowly faded after swallowing which allowed notes of coffee and a hint of bitter chocolate to take centerstage. Those spicy hops returned as well, adding bitterness to make for a rather dry finish. A healthy alcohol burn also aided this effort.

Oh, it left a lovely bit of lacing in my glass.

This is an archetypal Baltic porter. For me, anyway. There was a lovely cherry taste to be had here but it never overpowered the other, more savory, malt flavors. The coffee taste was great and I really enjoyed how it, the fizz, etc. worked together to keep the beer from being a cloying mess. This stuff is a heady brew at 9.5% A.B.V. and it tastes like it. My whole body began to feel warm after half a glass, which was rather nice on a chilly spring evening.

Free of vanilla and with subdued stone fruit flavor, this is the Baltic porter I remember, that I prefer.

Junk food pairing: Żywiec Porter is a big, rich brew with a complex mix of flavors and so deserves to be paired with something endowed with an equally intricate set of gustatory components. Start with a plateful of Super Pretzel Mini Pretzel Dogs and smother them with warm Cheez Whiz.

It is the middle ground between ale and lager, between Baltic and porter: Baltic Porter by Giant Jones Brewing & Working Draft Beer Co.

 

It wasn't all that long ago that there was snow on the ground and I was reviewing another Baltic porter. But that one had vanilla in it. Too much, in fact, for my taste. Well, today we have another big, dark lager just like you'd find in the all the taverns and inns of Tallinn, but without any vanilla added.

This one is a collaboration between two relative newcomers here in Madison: Giant Jones Brewing Co. and Working Draft Beer Company. As the bottle notes, both breweries opened in the same year, 2018, and, since they are located only about two blocks from one another, a collaboration was inevitable.

I will refer the reader to my review of Lakefront's vanilla Baltic porter for more but the abbreviated story behind the style is thus: the Poles got hooked on English porter in the 18th century and started brewing it themselves. A hundred years or so later, lager brewing was in vogue so they applied it to their beloved porter and voila! They ended up with Baltic porter, although the Poles didn't call it that. They probably just called it "porter". It was some late-20th century beer nerd with a taxonomy fetish who gave it the appellation we have today.

Most, if not all, brewing collaborations I've witnessed or been given the behind the scenes scuttlebutt by a participant consist of the brewmasters standing around drinking while brewing minions of the host brewery do all of the work. Once that's done, the brewers join their superiors in the quaffing. I have absolutely no idea what the collaboration here consisted of but, since I don't think Giant Jones has much capacity for lagering whereas Working Draft does as they release a new pilsner every week, it seems, these days, my guess is that brewmaster Jessica Jones and her crew walked down the street to Working Draft on brew day.**

While most of the press Giant Jones garners centers around the fact that the brewery is owned by women, the really neat aspect for me is that Giant Jones is an organic brewery. As CEO Erika Jones explained,  "All our ingredients and anything that has the potential to come into contact with our beer (such as no-rinse sanitizers) must be approved under the National Organic Program." Add in that GJ's beers are all 7%+ A.B.V. and you've got yourself some very niche products.

Organic beer hasn't taken off in the way other organic foods have. Go into your local food co-op and you're spoiled for choice when it comes to organic junk food. Organic cheese puffs? They've got them coming out of their tattooed, lobe gauged ears. Organic beer? Not so much. From what I've read, organic barley and hops are fairly rare. Still, Giant Jones offers a wide variety of beers at prices that are not ungodly so that situation may not be as dire as the articles I've read make it seem.

In an age when cans rule the packaging roost and hard seltzers and non-alcoholic beers are ascendant, Giant Jones with their big, organic brews in half liter bottles appear to be swimming against the tide. Let us hope they don't get eaten by a bear. You know, like some horny salmon do while swimming upstream.

My cat Grabby looked on as the loose, tan head atop my pour dissipated quickly leaving a glass of deep brown liquid with a red tint. The beer was clear! Still, it was too dark to discern any bubbles floating about inside. Cats have very good olfactory senses but, since she cannot speak Human, I have no idea what she was able to smell. For my part, I caught plum, malty sweetness, dark chocolate, and something like carob.

My first sip revealed a medium-heavy body with a sturdy fizziness. It didn't taste as sugary as the aroma hinted that it might be but there was some caramel sweetness from the malt. Chocolate, carob, and a rather strong stone fruit flavor were present as was a touch of roasty malt taste. On the finish, most of those flavors faded away and a little coffee, which I expected to taste earlier, faded in. Spicy hop flavors made themselves known at last and helped make for a very dry finish. There was that boozy heat to help the dryness cause as well. The beer is 8.2%, which is fairly substantial, but not deadly, yet my mouth had this strong astringent feeling and I felt as if I could breathe fire.

This was not what I expected. The coffee and chocolate flavors which I had anticipated to be more prominent were instead relegated to supporting roles. For me, coffee and bitter chocolate flavors should be at equal or greater strength than fruity ones in this style. Otherwise it had a clean lagery taste. Admittedly, it had been a while since I'd had a Baltic porter that was brewed anywhere near the Baltic Sea so perhaps I was misremembering...? Plus, there's more than one way to brew a Baltic porter, right?

However close this beer is or is not to, say, a Polish take on the style, it's got too prominent a fruity taste for my, er, taste. It should be a co-equal flavor to coffee and dark chocolate, not its superior. Still, this is by no means an awful brew and, if you are, say, a big fan of Placek ze Śliwkami, then I recommend this one for you. For me, my half a snifter above was enough.

Junk food pairing: Pair your Giant Jones/Working Draft Baltic porter with a bag of Kettle Brand Korean Barbeque potato chips. Their sweet-salt combo goes perfectly with this beer.

**My guess was wrong. See this tweet. 

Did you know "vanilla" comes from "vagina"? No, really.: Baltic Fire by Lakefront Brewery

Yesterday I wrote about the advent of coffee beer in 1994 just 25 miles to my south in New Glarus. And today I have read that the term "Baltic porter" was first used that very same year by Bill Yenne in his book Beers of the World although it was über beer geek Michael Jackson that seems to have popularized the term 4 years later. There truly was more to the 90's than grunge, cargo pants, despair, and indifference.

While Slavic food is severely underrepresented in the Madison dining scene today, a restaurant called Russia House spent much of the 1990s evoking images of Sean Connery romancing Michelle Pfeiffer and dishing out borscht and vodka to folks downtown. I was sad to see it go but was very happy to see the opening of Arbat Russian Restaurant in nearby Fitchburg sometime the following decade. I have fond memories of chasing away the winter chill there with hearty platefuls of pelmeni and stuffed pork loin. And to wash it all down I was able to choose from a full array of Baltika beers with my favorite being #6, their Baltic porter.

English beer historian Martyn Cornell has written about the history of this style so credit is due to him for what follows.

The short story is that the Poles developed a taste for English porter in the 18^th century with a particular fondness for something called the "double brown stout" which sounds like it was a much, um, stouter porter than its more workaday cousin. I suppose it isn't surprising that the Poles had a taste for a stronger brew considering their hostile neighbors. You too would seek out a more potent potable if the Prussians, Russians and Austrians invaded your country and wiped it off of the map as happened in 1795 when the state of Poland was terminated and would not reappear for 120+ years.

Fast forward to the 19^th century when lager brewing was all the rage and some entrepreneuring Polish brewers applied it to their beloved porters. And voila! The Baltic porter was born.

Until an international standards committee comes up with a mutually agreeable definition of what exactly constitutes a Baltic porter, I will continue to labor under the characterization of a beer that is a dark lager around 8% A.B.V. that is otherwise a porter.

It's a fairly uncommon style here in Madison, as far as I can tell. When I am at a liquor store in Chicago, the shelves have Baltic porters from various large Polish brands such as Okacim, Zywiec, and Perła in addition to Baltika, which is a Russian brewery. Unlike Chicago, Madison does not have a large Polish/Polish-American population and so those beers don't show up on our shelves. Thankfully some craft brewers are happy to help fill the gap. Last winter I tasted a Baltic porter from Milwaukee's Third Space Brewing called Ice Bear. And late last autumn another Milwaukee brewery, Lakefront, gave us Baltic Fire, a Baltic porter with vanilla.

Lakefront is one of the progenitors of the Wisconsin craft beer industry having opened in 1987. Their Riverwest Stein is not only tasty, but also a stalwart of the beer scene here. It's one of those brews that does a yeoman's job in places that don't have menus that are printed in a typeface so small you need a magnifying glass to read because they need to fit in all the trendy IPAs and hard seltzers they serve on a single sheet.

While I am inclined favorably towards Lakefront, my Spidey senses tingled when I saw that their new Baltic porter was made with vanilla. Additives in beer can have some tasty results but American brewers tend to use them with all the subtlety of Donald Trump at a beauty pageant. So, I was a bit leery about this Baltic fire stuff yet I tried it anyway because a Baltic porter with vanilla sounds delicious.

Baltic Fire looked dark brown with a slight reddish tint. Its clarity allowed me to see lots of bubbles bopping around inside. My photo, as usual, doesn't capture the beer in all of its glory as the big tan head exited stage right hastily. As someone who enjoys dark beers, I can say she was a looker and had me chomping at the bit to take a sip. Taking a whiff, I caught vanilla. Lots of it. "This must be what it's like working at the McCormick vanilla extract factory," I thought to myself. Subsequent sniffs revealed some stone fruit and coffee smells.

My first sips revealed a good fizziness – recall all of those bubbles – and a medium bodied dark lager with a hint of coffee and a large dose of vanilla. As in, had I just fallen into a vanilla extract vat at that McCormick factory? Heavens to Murgatroyd, that was some potent vanilla! Not surprisingly, that taste lingered after I swallowed though a little fruitiness emerged along with a hint of dark chocolate. Then I tasted some hoppy bitterness and a rather unpleasant extracty astringency.

Sadly, my additive-induced wariness proved correct. This beer was not for me. The vanilla was just too much and suffocated the wonderful porter flavors. Those coffee and chocolate bits need to breathe! I hope that Lakefront tries again and uses a lighter touch when it comes to the vanilla because I think there are some complementary flavors here that are simply out of balance.

Junk food pairing: Pair Baltic Fire with something that will replace some of the lost porter flavors. Go with a bowl of Brownie Supreme Chex Mix Muddy Buddies.