Last Friday afternoon, with the heat wave broken and late-afternoon boozing on the brain, my friends and I were driven to Heavy Woods on Wyckoff Avenue to quench our thirst. Of the bar’s fourteen taps, we must have sampled at least half in search of the perfect summer afternoon brew. There were some strong contenders on draft, but it was Heavy Woods manager and bartender Kiki who hooked us up with the most stellar libation of the afternoon, which came (surprisingly!) from a bottle: the LA-31 Boucanèe by Bayou Teche Brewery.
Kiki admitted she tends to drink Modelo in a can when she opts for beer (normally preferring whiskey and tequila), but we could see why she liked the Boucanèe straight off: as my friend and photographer Dane said, it definitely has the taste of a whiskey about it. Pouring a beautiful deep amber with a light head, the Boucanèe is a smoked wheat ale brewed by the Louisiana-based Bayou Teche Brewery. Wheat beers are a go-to in the summer as they tend to be mild and refreshing – a quintessential example being Blue Moon, which often comes with a sliver of orange wedged in the bottle. But what made this beer our star of the day was the unique, almost BBQ-y smokiness present from first sniff to lingering aftertaste, giving it a lot more oompf then your standard wheat ale.
In last week’s column I focused on the unique hop found in Newburgh’s Ace’s Wild Double Cream Ale, but this week it was another variable in the beer trifecta (hops, malt, and yeast) that made this beer a keeper – the malt. Malt is grains that are allowed to sprout, but are dried as soon as they bust out of their casing. In the brewing process malted grains are hydrated and heated to release sugars which are then boiled with hops and infused yeast to ferment. In fermentation the yeasts, which are living microorganisms, eat the sugars from the malt and essentially poop out two of my all-time favorite bi-products: booze and bubbles, also known as alcohol and carbon dioxide (dad, if you’re reading this, my apologies for my crass unscientific description, everyone else, you get the gist).
