We had reached the subject of malt selection, and Dylan Mosley was just getting started. The cofounder and brewer at Civil Life in St. Louis was talking about brown malt, a now-obscure ingredient that once characterized London’s porters.
“Crisp’s lends not only a different color overall, [but it] kind of bends just a little bit softer and a little steelier, and definitely has a kind of a hazelnut quality,” he says of the malt—which they use in other beers, but it wasn’t quite right for their flagship American Brown Ale. For that beer, they use the brown malt from Thomas Fawcett & Sons.
Fawcett’s, Mosley says, “can come across [with] a little bit more of what I think of in terms of tobacco pouch or burnt caramel. I want to use all these intense words, but the flavor isn’t quite as intense. It’s just toned down. It’s like, there’s a richness of tooth.”
Base malts, caramel malts, roasted malts—whether from the United States or Britain—he discusses all of these and their roles in turn. American Brown isn’t just one of Civil Life’s beers; it’s their flagship—and, perhaps uniquely in the United States, they sell more of it than any other beer. So, it makes a lot of sense that Mosley’s relationship with these malts goes deep—his enthusiasm for them informed the beer’s creation and development. The variety of available malts and their interactions are so vast that he seems almost overwhelmed thinking about the possible variations.
And that’s the thing about brown ale: For many people brown ales are, like their color, inherently unexciting. Brown is a background color; it’s easy to overlook. Yet for those who love brown ales, they are almost too complex—in that brownness, they see virtually infinite possibility.
Like the brown malt Mosley described, that complexity is never flashy or showy—brown is a background color. These are pub beers, meant to be drunk in ease and volume. Trying to capture that paradox, my editors here at Craft Beer & Brewing Magazine® may have coined the perfect definition for the whole style when they described Civil Life’s American Brown Ale about six years ago, naming it one of their Best 19 Beers of 2019: It is “an extraordinary ordinary beer.”
Tasting the English in an American Brown
Brown beers have a long and august history in Europe, where they dominated until the past couple of centuries.
Remnants such as Belgian dubbel and Bavarian dunkel stand as testaments to that history, but American brown ale traces its lineage to Britain. English ales inspired many early microbrewers, and at upstart U.S. breweries in the 1980s and ’90s, brown ales became a hue in the chromatic range—pale, amber, brown, black—often found at the nearest brewpub.
Given how scarce amber and brown beers are on American tap lists these days, it’s a little surprising to think how popular brown ales were 30 to 40 years ago—and going a bit further back, that also applies to Britain. Michael Jackson, writing in his 1977 World Guide to Beer, makes an almost unbelievable assertion: “Surprisingly, while the popularity of brown ale has declined with that of mild, it continues to be universally produced. Almost every British brewer produces at least one brown, and often several.”
Even if brown ales weren’t tremendously popular five decades ago, they were at least very present in Britain. As a consequence, at least two notable examples made it to U.S. shores at the dawn of the microbrewing era: Newcastle Brown Ale and Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown Ale.
Pete Slosberg, who would go on to make what surely became the most popular brown ale in American history—Pete’s Wicked Ale—was directly influenced by one of those imports.
“I came across Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown Ale, and I just go, ‘Wow. This is heaven. This is the best beer I’ve ever had.’”
His reaction wasn’t unusual. For a generation of Americans raised on a diet of fizzy light lager, it could be stunning to find beers with color, malt flavor, and body. Slosberg jokes that when he started Pete’s with a brown ale, he thought, “What if we fail?” He says he took comfort in the fact that he would be happy drinking through the inventory of a beer that tasted like Smith’s Nut Brown.
Homebrewers founded many of the first small breweries of the 1980s, and British ales were a major influence on them. Not only were the beers a sharp departure from domestic American lagers, but they were relatively easy to make—single-infusion mashing and simple fermentations set the tone for American homebrewing.
Slosberg contracted with professional breweries to produce Pete’s Wicked Ale, but other startups were cobbling together provisional breweries that didn’t have the sophistication for step mashes or lagering. If you could make a brown ale as a homebrewer, you could probably make one at a brewpub.
Photo: Matt Graves/mgravesphoto.com
The Malt Bill Makes the Brown
“Brown ale” or even “American brown ale” is a nebulous category that includes everything from 4 percent ABV pub ales to sharply bitter, hoppy beers and strong, barrel-aged ones laden with flavor adjuncts.
Yet the image that most readily springs to mind is still that classic 1980s style inspired by English pub ales. That’s essentially what Civil Life makes—as does Matt Gallagher, founder of both Chicago’s Half Acre and his more recent startup, Suncatcher, which offers a 3.8 percent ABV Brown Ale.
“It’s very simple,” Gallagher says. “Just mash in, aiming for about 152°F [67°C]. It is a very ingredient-driven beer.”
As the industry gets more sophisticated, so much of brewing is focused on process, but brown ales are still more about the malts. Slosberg, limited by the malts available in the 1980s, says Pete’s Wicked was a simple beer: “The malt bill, if I recall, was 70 percent base malt, 29 percent caramel, and 1 percent chocolate.”
Yet the simplicity of process allows for more complexity in the grist, especially with the wider variety of malts available today. Mosley—who’s been brewing Civil Life American Brown for 15 years now—splits his base malts between Maris Otter and North American pale malts. Fawcett’s brown malt is the driver of the flavor profile, while he uses dark malts for color.
Suncatcher sources all the malts for its Brown Ale from Sugar Creek in Indiana. “My overall ethos is just working within what’s available from Sugar Creek, an intentionality in limiting the choices,” Gallagher says. He says he likes Sugar Creek’s rye malts, and Suncatcher Brown has both caramel rye and chocolate rye. Sugar Creek offers a regular pale ale malt and a slightly darker one called Ye Olde Pale Ale, and Gallagher says he’s used both. He’s also brewed it with and without oats.
It’s worth taking a moment to note one malt that characterizes American browns, as it once characterized many American craft beers: the now-dreaded caramel malt. It’s an almost ubiquitous addition, then and now, providing elements fundamental to the flavor and texture of an American brown ale.
The “American” Part? Hops, Of Course
American breweries may use fruitier English yeasts or more neutral ones such as Chico, depending on their goals, but hops are where brown ales become properly “American.”
That was also the case with Pete’s Wicked Ale. Slosberg first used Cascade before shifting to Brewer’s Gold—and during his brewing trials, he hit upon dry hopping. “I added more hops and then dry hopped it,” he says. “It was just starting with Samuel Smith’s and trying to get more balance of hops with the malt, and then dry hopping it for aroma.”
In the 1980s and ’90s, Willamette and Cascade were the go-tos. For my book The Beer Bible, I surveyed some popular browns of the early 2010s—Abita Turbodog, Avery Ellie’s Brown Ale, Brooklyn Brown Ale, Sierra Nevada Tumbler, Smuttynose Old Brown Dog, and Surly Bender—and five of the six included Willamette.
Gallagher says Suncatcher gets Nugget, a wonderful hop that can provide bitterness as well as spicy, earthy, or even lemony notes. Those American hops can take the beer in a totally different direction, too.
Mosley says he uses Cascade with “some reverence. The bracing that it does against the American Brown palate is, in my mind, just exactly what we wanted. It’s like when you have coffee, you get an espresso, and there’s just the trimmest, smallest cut of lemon rind.”
The Decline and Rise of the Noble Brown
Brown ales declined pretty quickly. Twenty years after he wrote that British breweries were making it almost universally, Jackson wrote that just “a few still do.”
They were also starting to decline in the United States by the late 1990s. After growing it to become the second-biggest craft brand, Slosberg sold Pete’s in 1998. In 2011, its new owner Gambrinus retired the brand.
Yet brown ales haven’t gone away. They remain an unexpectedly magnetizing style for many drinkers. On a podcast I cohosted for several years, our episode on brown ale was the third-most-popular show we did.
“There’s not a need for brown now, I don’t think,” Gallagher says. “But there’s certainly a desire for them.” Those with the desire may not be great in number, but their passion is strong.
Decades ago, Jackson sent the world down a blind alley when he tried to distinguish between Northern and Southern schools of English brown ale. But he may have gotten closer to the mark in a forgotten comment he made in 1977: “Many a young man remembers brown ale, with rather more affection, as his gentle introduction to beer-drinking, and many an old man returns to it in his later years.”
Perhaps that’s true of the American market as well. Brown ales are simple, comforting beers, accessible to the beginner and reassuring to the old hands. Maybe more breweries should tuck one into their lineups.