Streamlined now, I returned to action. My kit included nothing but a camera, a notepad, a pen, the tasting glass they loaned me, and the clothes I hoped to still be wearing by the time I reemerged. I made my way confidently back into Nepenthia. 

Exotic, hand selected beers waited to be found all throughout the facilities at B. United International in Oxford, Conn. - spread across tables staffed by the men and women who made them. If Steve Inskeep’s voice woke me from this dream I was going on a three state rampage. 

I crossed the threshold into BU’s loading bay and saw lines of colorful bottles adorned with the owl of Hitachino. Toshiyuki Kiuchi, owner and brewmaster of Kiuchi Brewery (makers of Hitachno beers) was gesticulating madly with a broad smile on his face, making himself clear, or at least somewhat understood, to a group of bottle shop reps. 
 

“Never,” said one of the Kiuchi workers who had come over from Japan, answering an unheard question. “First time.” Well give me some of whatever that is, I thought. 

“Whatever” turned out to be a few things. The first, Dai Dai, is a new IPA under the Hitachino name. The name means “citrus” in Japanese, but it also sounds like the word for “big.” The IPA is made with mild tardif de bourgogne hops and a kind of Japanese orange whose name translates to “happy camp,” the name for the area where they’re grown. Dai Dai is very mild: the hop bitterness is quite low, and the citrus notes are subtle. This westernmost of IPAs is almost indistinguishable as a member of the style, but it’s delicious. 

I tried a sip of the Hitachino Commemorative ale and found prickly carbonation and heavy spices, especially cinnamon, although coriander, nutmeg and orange zest were also in the mix. Definitely a sipper, that one. 

“Never,” said the rep again. “Only time.” I looked over, and he was pointing at what turned out to be the only keg  of Kurashizuku sake in the United States. The aluminum cylinder was no bigger than a large watermelon, and the dram which found its way into my glass gave off a distinct anise aroma - hot with alcohol in smell and mouthfeel, but sweet and remarkably smooth in flavor. I don’t know much about sake, but I know I like it. I just never know what to order when presented with the opportunity. 

I’ll have a better idea now after trying the above, as well as Asamurasaki, also from Kiuchi. This ”morning purple rice sake” is made from an ancient style of red rice hardly cultivated anymore in Japan but used by Hitachino, as they are wont to do. Behind the gorgeous, almost psychedelic label is a naturally red sake with a more traditional sweet rice aroma, but with an astoundingly exotic taste: it was acidic, with caramel essence smoothing out sour grape notes. How did they do this? Just the rice, they said, and smiled. Toshiyuki Kiuchi’s passion for brewing was readily apparent, and not just because he was practically levitating as he spoke, ten feet to my right. Next!

Scandinavians are not known for their effusive emoting. It was surprising, then, that Michael Smed Brogaard, owner and brewmaster of Dansk Mjød, had gone so far as to swipe bottles of Eibecker pils from BU’s stocks and mix it, (20% mead to 80% pils) with his Vikingerness Mjød. He enthusiastically poured the concoction from a large pitcher, and explained:

“In Denmark we did not always have very much honey one thousand years ago, so we would mix the mead with beer to stretch it out. We call it the world’s oldest cocktail.” This name rings especially true since, intentionally or not, Brogaard had been using beer from one of the oldest operating breweries on the planet, Einbecker having been established in Germany some time circa 1370 A.D. 

Vikingerness is a metheglin-style mead, which means it has flavors added to it through the use of natural additives; in this case, hops. Vikingerness is strongly sweet, but there is a strange peppery waft to the nose. Dansk Mjød had another metheglin-style on hand: Viking Blod. Just mentioning the name has been known to bleach hair blonde and cause spontaneous beard generation, but drink this amazing elixir and you’ll experience not just soft citrus from the hops, but a floral aroma from the added hibiscus flowers which give Blod its pink hue. It’s sweet, but less cloyingly so. There is real spice on the tongue from the hops and hibiscus, and each drink ends with a satisfying bite. I had to get moving before the urge to pillage Lindesfarne grew any stronger. 

B. United’s tanks had sailed to Japan and Denmark, and my next travel (by foot) brought me to the table of Thornbridge County Hall Brewery, from Bakewell, UK. Rob Lovett, head brewmaster, and Simon Webster, COO of Thornbridge we in attendance. I’ve mentioned Thornbridge’s Kipling, which uses the unmistakable Nelson Sauvin hops from New Zealand, in this space before, so I went for their newest IPA, Jaipur. Lovett uses Warrior hops for bittering in this ale, but Cacades, Chinooks, Columbus and Simcoe hops all find their way in at some point in the process. The citrus nature of the hops is huge in the aroma, but there is surprisingly little bitterness to the taste. Beautifully aromatic, but gentle, this is a very pleasant, very accessible IPA. So: let’s get weird, shall we?

Thornbridge has taken it on themselves to revive Bracia, and Iron Age Celtic beverage made with cereals and honey, and referred to in an inscription in 11th-century Haddon Hall. Chestnut honey is sourced from Italy to make this brew, which is further made with several dark roasted malts, and even peated barley. It’s black in a glass, with a toasty nose, and weighty in mouthfeel, but not overly heavy. There is an odd funk, almost a slight sourness, to the coffee notes which are predominant in this not-quite-beer. Sipping on my portion, I couldn’t help wondering if Boudica drank this with her troops before leading them against the conquering Romans. 

Speaking of Italians, they were very well represented at Nepenthia. Full disclosure: until recently, I abhorred beer from the country of the boot. I would still rather have an Amstel Light than a Peroni or Moretti. Recently though, the scales have dropped from my eyes. 

It began, I think, with My Antonia: a collaboration between Birra Del Borgo and Dogfish Head. Then, at Nepenthia, I spent over half an hour with Valter Loverier, owner and brewmaster of Loverbeer, or Marentino, Italy, near Turin. 

Countach! As they say.

Valter is in love with Flemish sours. Fully, deeply, in love - and amore, people, is blessedly infectious. A few examples to illustrate my point:

D’uva Beer is ale brewed with grapes - Valter describes it as having three souls. Grape juice is added to the wort, but the yeast used dies at around 8% alcohol, which leaves some sugar after fermentation. D’uva pours with a riotous fizz, and the sour notes of spontaneous fermentation balance the fruits in the flavor. The process takes a long time to complete, and is partially responsible for the eyebrow-arching price: expect to pay about $15 for a 330mL bottle. Expect, also, to be tremendously upset with yourself for not buying an entire case. [More on how and where to buy all of these later.]

Beer Brugna is Valter’s tribute to kriek lambic, but is made with Damascene plums, also known as Damsons (named for the variety’s ancestral homelands around Damascus),  in place of the cherries in Belgian kriek. Ripe only when fallen, the beer’s label depicts a monk looking to the plum tree while a wise farmer gathers the purple fruit from the ground.  

Brugna undergoes spontaneous fermentation using wild yeasts, then matured in oak barrels for nine months. The results, say my notes, are goddamn amazing.

Dama Brun-A means “brown lady” in Piedmontese, and Valter said he was inspired to make this brown ale by Shakespeare’s Dark Lady sonnet sequence. This young lady matures to nobility entirely in oak: first fermented in vats (slowly, slowly) into which Valter adds caramel and lactobacillus to create a sharp tartness. The resultant beer is then aged in oak barrels, which add a brandy scent to the aroma, to my nose. Smooth and sharp, yet somehow chocolatey, I adored this one. 

Darker still is Loverbeer March L’Re, “the sign of ther king.” The inspiration for this one came from the seniors of Marentino, Italy, who like to sit at tables in the open air, playing cards and drinking coffee with fernet. March L’Re contains Caffe Vergnano and spices like saffron and gentian. This one is non-carbonated, because Valter wanted to keep the yeast strains pure in this one during the year long period of barrel-aging. Not to thick, not too heavy, with rhubarb adding enticing sour notes to the amazing sweet/sour profile, it is absolutely mind bending to drink a sour imperial stout. 

Good god: what else are the Italians doing? Paolo Fontana, a brewmaster at Birreria Le Baladin, was on hand to answer that question. Sort of. 

“You start with something good, then you make it easy,” is how he described his brewing process to me. 

Baladin started with a brewpub in Piozzo, northern Italy, in 1996. They’ve since moved production to a farm, and currently produce a great many styles, most with Belgian (or Flemish) roots.

Wayan is a Belgian-style saison made with barley, wheat, spelt, rye, hops and nine different spices. It’s citrusy with a hint of chamomile to the nose, and predictably makes a great thirst-quencher. There is also a Wayan Sour, in which acid producing lactobacillus had slowly eaten up the sugars and left a biting tartness behind.

Baladin Nora is named for Teo Baladin’s wife, who is partially Algerian. Some leap of Italian logic dictated that her beer was to be made in an ancient Egyptian style, more or less, and uses kamut as a grain, with ginger and orange peel in the recipe, along with a very small amount of hops, but for their preservative powers. Any bitterness in the brew is the result of another ingredient, get this:myrrh. There is a strong, almost peppery ginger nose, with lots of cloudy sediment in the glass. The beer is very smooth and slightly spicy, but with a good, malty base. 

Downstairs in the zymatore room, I had sampled what they called Piedmont Nora Sour, which had been aged in California zinfandel barrels. The experience was revelatory. There was a brilliant, sparkly nose, redolent with oak tannins, and the beer was quite sour from lactobacillus. Champagne-like, but deeper, this was easily my favorite beer I had all day. 

“Nepenthes pharmakon,” its says in the Odyssey. Literally: “anti-sorrow drug,” or “… a drug which eased men’s pains and irritations, making them forget their troubles.” 

Smiles abounded on a hill in the woods of Oxford, Connecticut, as B. United International opened both its doors and taps on a brilliantly sunny day this May for Nepethia, a one-day event. The beverage importer’s stated mission is to bring the most spectacular examples of low volume, hand crafted beer, mead, cider, and sake from around the world to the U.S. The collected industry representatives (and I) weren’t there to forget, though. There was too much to learn. 

I’ve mentioned B.United, and the beers they import, more than a few times here on CTBites, and they’ve been an impressive lot. Home base in Oxford is hardly less impressive: I crested the facility’s driveway to see what appeared to be a series of interlinked red barns, some with flagstone facades, in land cleared of the surrounding hardwoods and, in places, very recently planted with grapes, figs, kumquats… I couldn’t identify everything I was seeing. I could, however, identify one of BU’s signature custom-built tanks sitting on a truck trailer in the driveway, just beyond where a jazz quartet was playing for the invited guests.

I made it about ten feet in that direction before I was intercepted by BU’s sunny Connecticut sales rep, Jie Yu, and given a small, glass tasting cup, and a packet containing info about each of the 80 different styles of beer, mead, cider, sake and spirits available on the day.Nepenthe, hell - this was Valhalla. Workshops on draft beer, food pairing, glassware and the facility itself would be ongoing throughout the day. I hadn’t even had breakfast yet. 

The only reasonable starting point was that tank. I could see men and women leaning casually against it as Ben Neidhart, son of B.United founder Matthias, poured samples which had last seen the light of day in Austria, Bavaria and Switzerland. 

The white tanks are maybe half the size of the kind you see on tanker trucks, and each of the six BU operates is separated into four temperature and pressure controlled compartments. The high volume to surface area ratio of the tanks eliminates the chance of oxidization as they’re shipped - cold, and below the waterline of cross-Atlantic ships - back to Connecticut. The beer therein is either kegged for market or set aside for the witchcraft of B.United’s secondary fermentation experiments. One of the beers destined for BU’s Zymatore room (more on that later) was a Berliner Weisse from Bayerischer Bahnhof. It caught my eye because it was white - honest to goodness white. Ben told me the color was the result of brewing with barley and potatoes, before returning my glass. 

How does yeast eat potato starch, I wondered, as I took my first sip. And then my head caved in. 

Have you seen those YouTube videos parents post where babies taste lemon for the first time? Imagine a really, truly ugly baby, with a beard, and that was roughly the face I made. Expecting smooth and maybe starchy, I was absolutely gobsmacked with the most sour thing I’ve consumed since my last Warhead candy. This experience of having my mind completely blown would repeat itself throughout the day. 

Business coming first, I set off to explore the interior spaces with my camera before further sampling. The first room was an open, unfinished space in white with darkly stained rafters - a physical manifestation of B.United’s ongoing expansion. Reps from Schneider Weisse and Italian micro-brewers Birra Del Borgo and Birra Baladin poured samples. I resisted the urge and kept moving. 

I turned the corner and entered a lab, and actual laboratory, where Jacquelyn Ludeman, BU’s Florida rep, was hosting a tour group. Sinks, beakers, Erlenmeyer flasks, devices for heating and stirring, microscopes and tanks of compounds labeled only with their chemical codes populated the space as she described BU differentiating and culturing strains of yeast. I shook my head like a DEA agent discovering Gus’ pharma-quality meth lab in Breaking Bad and moved on.

My feet carried me around another corner and down some stairs, and I found myself in what looked like a small brewery floor. Immense and gleaming stainless steel fermentation tanks rose from slab concrete as a smiling German man in a bow tie proffered small shots of spirits from behind a folding table. Aecht Schlenkerla - a traditional Frankonian spirit distilled from smokey beer, Uerige Stickum beer eau-de-vie matured in French Sauterne wine barrels, 90 proof pear liquor from Dupont, Edelster Aventinus matured in whiskey barrels from M. Courer… too early for that, I thought and, with some effort, turned my head away.

I spied a huge, and apparently quite old, wooden barrel just beyond, and it grabbed me like a tractor beam. I was close to Zymatore. 

The Zymatore Project is here to destroy and create. The boundaries between beer, wine and spirits are removed as BU’s staff mixes the flavors and aromas of brewed and distilled drinks through wildly innovative barrel aging. Some of the end products are designed to simply enhance and retain the original character of the beers and meads used, but some are completely transformed or rearranged like a piece of music. 

The concept isn’t entirely new or unique: many of us have had a barrel aged negroni at a bar or bought a bottle of bourbon-aged stout, but comparing Zymatore to most barrel-aging efforts is like comparing a Ducati to a razor scooter. I made brief mention of African iQhilikamead aged in French Mourvèdre wine barrels, and many wine barrels rested on huge racks in the cool dark of BU’s Zymatore room, but tequila, rum and whiskey barrels filled with who knows what also stretched to the ceiling. I took a pic of the markings on one, just because I liked the look of the names written in chalk thereon, and later found the barrel was used to age years of Belgian Owl, a craft whiskey from Belgium, and it was filled with Grodziskie, an all-wheat (no barley), sour, smoked beer from Grodzisk Wielkopolski in Poland, close the German border. 

A BU rep was in the room distributing samples of beers, directly from the barrels, which could not be had any place else on Earth. I went for another iQhilika: this time the sweet mead had been aged and refermented in merlot barrels from Thelema Mountain Vinyards in South Africa. The mead had been infused at the source with bird’s eye chilis from South Africa, and had turned from gold to a cloudy, light pink in the barrel. Reportedly super hot when it  arrived, the barrels had mellowed the spice. The iQhilika is sweet, as one would expect a honey-based beverage to be, but there’s also a juicyness from the grapes, and the pepper comes on late, smokey and gentle, like the dying embers of a campfire.  

”Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe” - E.A. Poe

I’ve already strained the limits of most of your attention spans, so my experiences after I stowed the camera and picked up a glass are coming up in part 2. You can find B.United beers, etc. at Harvest, Lol… We have loads of em…

The 10 Types of Craft Beer Drinkers

Join us for a special Harvest Beer Tasting featuring the stouts of Widmer Brewing….

Join Us Tonight from 530pm - 8pm (or until the brews run out)…

842 Farmington Ave., West Hartford, CT 06119

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Join us for Harvest Wines Friday

We’re Tasting from 5:30pm…

842 Farmington Ave., West Hartford, CT 06119

 Featuring…

Concha Y Toro Gran Reserva Serie Riberas

Gran Reserva Serie Riberas is a special selection selection of Gran Reserva wines coming from vineyards located close to different river basins. This translates into unique, distinctive fresher wines.

Tonights Wine Selections…

Gran Reserva 2011 Sauvignon Blanc
From Ucúquer Vineyard, south bank of Rapel river, central Chile. Aged 6-months in stainless steel tanks. Straw-yellow color; vibrant and round with citrus and mineral notes. Clean finish.

Gran Reserva 2010 Carmenere
From Peumo Vineyard, north bank of the Cachapoal River, central Chile. Aged 13-months in medium-toast French and American oak. Dark purple color; bright black fruit, spice, cedar notes. Supple tannins.