BEAR-ly Getting Started 13.3 - Smoked Porter

In this third installment of the Smokey Sips series , Jason and Craig dive deep into a darker, richer side of smoked beer with Leaning Chimney — a smoked porter from Gray Sail Brewing Company of Rhode Island.

After exploring a Märzen and a smoked Polish wheat beer in earlier episodes, the hosts shift gears to examine how smoke interacts with a more robust base style. Craig breaks down how smoked beers can be created from nearly any grain bill, and how the malt recipe, hopping, carbonation, and base beer style shape the final flavor experience.

The discussion takes listeners on a sensory journey. Comparing different smoke types — Beechwood vs. peat — and how smoke expresses itself differently across beer styles. They touch on porter history, cigar comparisons, barbecue wood varieties, brewing techniques, and how their palates evolve across a horizontal tasting of smoked beers. 

Visit our website at BuffaloBrewsPodcast.com
Email: buffalobrewsPR@gmail.com

Follow us on social media.
Instagram: @BuffaloBrewsPodcast
Facebook: @BuffaloBrewsPodcast
TikTok: @BuffaloBrews
YouTube: @BuffaloBrewsPodcast
X/Twitter: @BuffaloBrewsPod

Transcript

Jason:

It's 7am, you are listening to Smokey Sips. This is Barely Getting Started on the Buffalo Brews podcast. How was that?

Craig:

I like that. I feel like I need a cup of coffee with me and I just, you know, I feel like there should be fog rolling outside and all the things, you know, speaking of looking at the label of this one, it's kind of like, you know, a smokestack on a little charter vessel for fishing or whatnot in the New England area and kind of just feels like it's on the smoky, foggy seas, just one of those, smoking on a pipe, sipping a beer early, early in the morning, salt air, all the, all the things that we do.

Jason:

Maybe I'll put one of those lighthouse fog horns in the background. There you go. Yeah.

Just that. Yeah. Hey, we've, we're just over halfway through this series here and we've talked about beer and we, last episode we talked about a nice lightly smoked wheat beer.

So now we're going to change it up and like you said, at the end of the last episode, we're going darker. So let's, let's talk about what we have here.

Craig:

Yeah. So like I, like I said, in the very first episode of this series, just like you can smoke any food, you can smoke any beer by adding some smoked malt to it. You know, if you ever hear the term, the grain bill, whether it's in distilled spirits like whiskey and bourbon or in beer, the grain bill is basically the recipe of your grains.

And that really is going to take shape of what the final beer is going to taste like because it helps you realize how much sugar you're going to get. So how much alcohol are you going to get? How malty is it going to be?

How dark or how light it's going to be? It likes to do that. Yeah.

We just, so you keep talking, I'm going to adjust this. All right. So it, the malt, the grain bill, that's what I was doing.

We just had some technical difficulties with our camera and me and Jason just did like a double, triple take to the camera and back to each other and I was like, all right, seems like it's happened to you before, but I don't know. It has happened while we've been recording for sure. Yeah.

So the grain bill, if it's darker, okay, what am I going to do with that beer now, right? It's going to be maltier. So what type of hops do I put into it?

How carbonated do I want it? And you know, it really starts to take shape, the final beer based on that recipe, right? It's your core recipe.

You can make a cake and based on that cake and what the inside is, you know, the layers, the frosting inside the layers, the frosting on the outside, any additional flavors, you know, you kind of want things to go hand in hand. So you think about the actual base cake and then, okay, what am I doing? Am I adding a jelly layer?

Am I adding buttercream? Am I adding this? Am I adding that?

And a lot of that just spawns from the base. So base beer can be a lot of things. So we went from a Mertzen to a smoked Polish wheat beer.

So just a light Polish table beer, almost, you know, kind of even just reminiscent without the Belgian yeast profile of a, of a whit beer, but just something very light, simple table beer-esque of a lager. And now we are sipping an ale. So we're going to Rhode Island to Gray Sail Brewing Company of Rhode Island.

It's called Leaning Chimney, is the brewing company, sorry, Leaning Chimney is the name of the beer. It's Gray Sail Brewing and it's a smoked porter, okay? So it is the name of the beer.

That's where, you know, Rauk beer and Grodziskie, it's like, all right, who is there first? Because it's not like it's saying smoked wheat beer or smoked this, smoked that. It's a style within itself.

It's a Grodziskie. It's a Rauk beer. And this is just a smoked porter.

Now it happens to be, it's an American brewery and a newer brewery, so it doesn't have all those traditional throwbacks to it. But smoked porter, one of the reasons I bought this beer is there's this Alaskan smoked porter, I think from, it might be Anchorage Brewing Company, and it's just, yeah, it's world-renowned. It's won like Best Beer Before at the Great American Beer Fest, I think.

It might've been a different festival, but that comes to mind. And it's one of those, I think it's, you know, it utilizes like the same smoking techniques and the same like smoke flavor profiles of a lot of like smoked salmon and they just have such a well-balanced smoked porter. I've read about it.

Again, it's one of those, you know, kind of exemplar beers when you talk about smoked beers. In the chapter or so that I was reading about smoked beers, you know, it spoke to that a lot. Well, I couldn't get my hands on that.

That's a highly sought-after beer and usually you can only get it on the secondary market. It's not widely distributed, but then I saw this available. So Leaning Chimney, I think, takes its name from the picture on the can.

It's like a boat, like a fisherman's boat, like it looks like these guys are in the New England waters going out for whether they're pulling lobster traps or whatever they're doing out there.

Jason:

According to their description, they say, sit on any beach in New England and enjoy the views of rolling waves, glistening waters, and gray sails on the horizon. And it's truly inspiring. And those gray sails inspire us to keep moving forward.

And here we are.

Craig:

There you go. There we are. And the Leaning Chimney part is this boat's a little cocked to the side and the chimney's leaning.

So just kind of trying to paint the picture for you. So a porter. Let's talk a little bit about the porter and then what smoke would do for it, right?

It's a good, you know, the fact that we went from a malty Mertzin to a light wheat beer, it kind of shows you the versatility of just wanting to add smoke to things. And the same thing, right? Like I just talked about smoked salmon and that versus a smoked brisket.

Or you can just smoke some pork chops. I mean, very different base proteins, but they add smoke and then smoke's going to come off differently based on, you know, the protein or whatever it is. I mean, I've had smoked tofu and you can smoke your vegetables and you could do a lot of different stuff.

I was even talking about smoking water for ice cubes. So that shows you the versatility of the smoke flavor. And if you're like me and sometimes you just get lazy or a lot of people, you just buy what's called liquid smoke.

Then you add a few drops of that and it literally just adds smoke flavor to whatever you're adding it to.

Jason:

That's what I do for my barbecue sauce.

Craig:

There you go. A lot of people just throwing that in there to give a little smoky. So a porter.

Porter is an ale. This is, you know, kind of talked about it with Daniel Wheeler, 1700s, got really big with the kind of like the industrial revolution of England where the steam engine was huge. That steam engine basically powered that whole era and you needed a beer to power the people and porters were the dock hands that worked the boats and took things on and off ships.

And they liked a nice, robust, dark beer that was called Porter, named after them. And smoking that is kind of like, you know, just adding a little bit, a little bit more intense flavor to something that already is meant to be a sipping kind of beer. Now, Porter was never meant to be something that was like, like its cousin and what it basically spawned of the stout.

So stout was actually a type of porter for a while, but you can go to our shot for stouts episode to learn more about that because we're barely getting started here on the Leaning Chimney. But Porter and stout were one in the same. It was just a stout was a more formidable porter.

So you can see smoked stouts out there, but taking something that's not as powerful or as roast bitter or as sip worthy as a stout, something that's a little bit more gullible or a little bit more quaffable like a porter where it's got some nice malts. It borders on coffee, not quite espresso, but definitely a dark coffee with some nice chocolate and slight caramel undertones. And now we're just kind of adding a little bit of smokiness to that kind of like the description of that rauk beer of eating a chocolate bar in a with smoke around you.

This is kind of going to be one of those beers that hopefully because I haven't had in a while, just really balances out. You've got some roast from the porter yet not too heavy, you know, not too thick or viscous on the palate. So a lighter beer when it comes to palatability and then the smoke going hand in hand and hopefully not overpowering it, but just nicely complementing it.

So before I crack and pour, it is got a nice little description on the can I'd like to read you guys. It's our robust, sorry, robust smoked porter and it offers a pleasant, complex taste that results from a generous addition of Scottish peated malt. OK, so reading that I'm expecting a little bit more intense flavor now.

I expect some Scotch, some Scotch and American hops perfect for cold nights on the New England. So I'm going to do the old crack. I'm expecting dark beer, a little light brown, bordering black, but in between black and brown versus that Mertzen was brown with some amber and some red.

This is definitely pouring with a nice carbonation to it and the head is definitely a little darker in color. We go from off white to this is a nice beige. So beige with a kind of just that nice dark quintessential porterish stout color that is, you know, at first look it's black, hold up to the light.

This is pretty darn opaque, not much light getting through. It's one of those nice just contrast beers, kind of like a Guinness, where it's really dark and then that beige head. It's a nice rocky.

When we say rocky, it just means, you know, there's a lot of nooks and crannies, kind of like the toasted English muffin look to the top of it. It's not just this super silky.

Jason:

It's what we're trying to do with the camera people.

Craig:

So it is a nice just pillowy head, some color to it and just, you know, like I said, it's not quite black, but it is not see through at all. You put it to the light, there's no real undertones to it. So I mean, this definitely has a high SRM.

I mean, as I'm looking inside the glass, this has, can you see a little particulates in yours at all? I mean, not much, but to me that might be indicative of like the smoked peat that was put in there.

Jason:

Yeah, nothing that I can see, not from my angle at least, but you have a lighter colored wall to work with. No, nothing that I can see.

Craig:

Yeah, it almost just has like a shimmer to it. So take a little sniff. Now, see, this is the least smoky aroma that I'm getting, and a lot of this is because I think it's just such a robust porter.

It's got that coffee vibe to it. I would agree. So now it's battling, right?

It's got something to battle its aroma with the coffee and, you know, that smoked Grodziskie, that smoked wheat malt. To me, it stood out more because it's going against something a little lighter in aroma, lighter in flavor. So let's not forget our cheers.

Jason:

Bad luck if you don't cheers.

Craig:

So just like it smelled, the aromas. That's nice. I get coffee first, right?

Like I don't, the other two beers was, okay, this is a smoked beer, right? Where this one, you're drinking it, it drinks like a porter. It's got this nice cold brew coffee type of flavor, you know, bordering on a dark roast, nothing acrid, you know, nothing that's leaving you with this burnt coffee flavor or like heavy acrid espresso coffee.

And then it has this like a finish that's a little smoky, like a lingering smoke. And I think it's actually pretty pleasantly smoked. When I read that it was, you know, a smoked peated, what did it, how did I describe it?

Scottish peated malt. So when you add peat and you ever have like a really smoky scotch, like sometimes it's just like, you feel like you're just, you know, when I talked about smelling that wood that was once on fire, now it, you know, sometimes it tastes like you're chewing on that wood that was once on fire, and I don't get that with this.

Jason:

When I went camping a few weeks ago, staying in one of the wood stove cabins in Allegheny, so I had to get up like every two hours to like, you know, stoke up the fire and whatever. So yeah, I can get some similarities to that, like that waft when you would first open the door, you know, you open the flue, open the door and you always get that little waft from the air pushing back out. But yeah, so like, that's what the, that Rauk beer, that's what that reminded me of.

But this, like you said, kind of battling the coffee a little, the coffee essences a little bit. So it's not as strong, but it's mild and mild as unpleasant.

Craig:

Yeah. And again, we're doing a horizontal with smoked beers. So it could be we're just more, if we started with this beer, we might've said, whoa, that's a lot of smoke.

Jason:

Sure.

Craig:

Versus now we've had, this is our third rendition of a smoked beer. The base style is a little bit more intense in itself with it being a porter versus the first two styles that we had. So I think a little bit of, a lot of stuff is at play here, you know, a very well brewed beer.

I mean, I still have a nice creamy head looking on mine. It's wrapping the glass as I turn it. So it is nice.

Jason:

It's amazing.

Craig:

Yeah. It is just definitely a, you know, it's a well brewed beer and we've already had two beers with smoke in them. Our palates used to smoke now, so it's not as much as a roundhouse kick to the tongue.

And you've got that strong presence of coffee in here that on itself is not overwhelming. It's not a negative vibe whatsoever. It's just more powerful of a flavor than the first two beers, base styles.

So to me, it really tones down the smokiness in a very good balanced way where I'm like, oh, I didn't know I liked to smoke coffee. Now I'm smoking my coffee beans.

Jason:

What would you say was the Beechwood from the Rauch beer versus this being a Pete smoke?

Craig:

This one's a little, you know, like Pete always kind of like a little bit earthier to me.

Jason:

Yeah.

Craig:

Where, you know, it's like how I talked about that, the Pope smoke, the white, simple, light smoke that kind of just has that, all right, I feel like it's coming from Lightwood. Not that that really matters. It's just this kind of tastes a little bit more earthy and it's hard to describe that through smoke.

I just mean like, okay, this is where Beechwood, I'm like picturing planks of like wood that you would use to karate chop through, right? Like those perfect little boards and you just are smacking them and they're cracking and they're super dry. Yeah.

I don't know why that comes to mind. I don't know why. I like that analogy.

When I picture this, like, yeah, you're stoking the fire and you're throwing these very just light boards onto it and it's just puffing this white smoke and that's the visualization I get when I drink it. Now, when I drink this, I'm like, all right, we just chopped a piece of wood down and we're just, you know, almost like it's a wet log that is crackling and popping and there's some maybe some moss on that log.

Jason:

You always get that hiss when that water in the wood starts heating up there and it starts coming out the pores.

Craig:

Just hear that snap, crackle, pop and, you know, that kind of smoke where it's just got a little bit more oomph to it, but not in a like ashy type smoke type of flavor. Just in this like, man, this is an earthy log that we're burning.

Jason:

That's interesting for you to say that because if anybody's trying to get, if they're just trying to associate smoke just with like burning wood, you know, it's never like an ashy taste. It's just, it's how you would imagine it tasting if it, you know, like when it gets in your nose and so now it's in your nose and you can smell it. But the same thing, like if you, it will line your mouth if you're a mouth breather and you get that in your mouth, there is a flavor to it.

Craig:

Smoking a cigar where you're just keeping it in your mouth and it's just, you know, you could taste it all the way to the next morning when you wake up and you feel like, oh, was I eating a catcher's mitt? Like what's going on here? This is one of the ones, like if you think about barbecue and there's all the different types of wood chips, right?

And I feel like those first few beers that we had were like the lighter flavors, like a mesquite or, you know, where this could be, I don't want to like, it might just be the coffee kind of aspect, but almost like cherry wood or, you know, not anything too sweet like apple. But you know, some of those, you know, hickory doesn't really lend itself because to me hickory just ends up being like that quintessential barbecue flavor. But those just different types of woods impart different types of flavor.

And to me, this is definitely a more, I keep saying earthy, but I'm just not pinpointing what I'm trying to say. I mean, it's kind of when you, when you do have barbecue and it's, this has got that subtle smoke. It might also just be the smoke contact time.

I mean, you are always barbecuing if you're doing it right. Like it's usually indirect heat. It's in the smoke, but not, you know, right on top of it so that you end up with a piece of meat that's so smoked, like there's just a good balance of smoke here.

It's a combination of smoke and water that's going to permeate those membranes. Yeah. And this, this tastes like a heavier smoke, but less of it, if it makes sense, or that might just be the fact that it is the base style as a porter.

So it's got more competition for your taste and flavor and aroma where I feel like the other beers definitely had more of a smoky flavor, but it was like a lighter smoke, just more of it where this is less, but a little bit more, you know, robust smoke. And, you know, I, as I continue to think and continue to, you know, talk about even the words that are coming to mind, it's kind of just leading itself to, hey, you're drinking a porter now instead of, you know, a lighter beer or a Mertzin is still kind of, even though that was very dark in color, it could be more of like an amber copper beer.

Jason:

Right. I mean, this, this lends more to me as a porter with a, with a little smoke flavor and it's not overpowering at all.

Craig:

Yeah. Where that Grajewskia was, smoke was in the forefront, like, I don't think you'd be able to discern what type of, you know, base style it was, you know, you would just say, hey, that's like a light, light lager that's been smoked and this is a porter that's been smoked, but it's just a little bit more.

Jason:

If you didn't know what wheat beer tasted like with that, that, that would lend itself almost to like an American IPA, like a smoked American, like single hop IPA. That's kind of what the vibe I got off of it. Cause you can definitely taste the balance of the smoke and hop.

So that's, like I said, when I saw the 20 IBUs, I'm like, where does the bitterness come in? And that first sip you're like, oh, okay, it has a hoppiness character to it.

Craig:

Cause I mean, if we, you know, once you hit 30, 35 IBUs, that's when you start realizing that, all right, we've got some good hopping here and then heavily hop stuff, kind of like your IPAs, like in West Coast pale ale. Those are more like the 40 to 60 range. And then you get higher and higher with the Imperial IPA and like barley wines, you started getting up into the 60s, upper 60s into all the way up to the 90s.

And then people were going nuts and trying to get to three digits and whatnot. So, you know, it's kind of, we kind of went all over the board, especially with this one. It's a nice third beer to try in this Smoky Stips series because we had two vastly different tasting and that's why we like doing this stuff.

That's why we do episodes like this and series like this, because it's all smoked beers. And that's why I encourage people to do horizontal, you know, a true horizontal would be like, let's try four different Rauk beers or four different Grodziskie. We're trying four different smoked beers to see what can smoke do.

And so far, all three beers, the smoke has come off a little bit differently. Right. And I think a lot is attributed to the base style and I'll repeat it for however many times it is now, if you're counting.

It's definitely, you know, the fact that this is a porter, that robust coffee roast, the richness of the malt, it's bleeding into the smoke flavor where to me now it's more of a robust smokiness. Easy for you to say. Yeah, right.

It's almost like, you know, if you ever did get the Scars, I got the Scars at one point for a little bit and it's just the different types of tobacco leaves, you know, and there's the Connecticut papers. And I don't know if that's anything that connection with the Rhode Island and the New England area. But I realize I like those type of papers versus like if you got a Cuban, like a Cohiba or something, that's just, oh, my gosh.

It's just so harsh and rough. And it's like, you know, if you tried one cigar and it was the punch you in the lungs cigar, you might say not for me. Never again.

Versus, you know, some cigars that I've had when I was a little bit more into that, they were super smooth, super easy. And it was very pleasant. And, you know, I think there's just a nuance to that.

And the different, you know, same there's a difference in malt from light to dark. There's a difference from hops, from floral and spicy to perfumy to just grapefruit pith. There's the same thing is happening here with the smoke.

Yeah. And, you know, it's obviously affected by which type of beer it's in. But I think how long it's been smoked.

And again, like I talked about that grain bill, this just also might have a little less smoked hops in it. So to me, this is a porter with some smoke versus the last beer was a smoked light beer. And then that Rauk beer was definitely a smoked Mertsen.

That's the classic. It was just it's what we were looking for when you come to a balanced malty beer, because it was more malt, less roast. And when I say malt, I mean kind of like sweet.

And this beer here is definitely roast forward with a smoky finish. And it is this does like when people do talk about, oh, it's an evening beer or this or that. I could see this going both ways because early morning on the on the water and or, you know, having a cup of coffee with a porter vibe or, you know, those late evenings on the beach where there's that fire just going and slowly flickering away and you get that little waft of smoke aroma here and there.

It's one of those just kind of easy going beers, nothing too powerful with the smoke, nothing too powerful with the roast. And they kind of counter balance each other where it's not too smoky, not too roasty. And in the end, just honestly, a really, really good beer.

This might be maybe my favorite of the three so far, just as overall. Yeah, it's well rounded. Yeah.

Just the overall balance of what they're doing. Mm hmm.

Jason:

I think that's a good way to tell me because that brings that all the way around for us. We've got, you know, four episodes and I'll let you know now that I do have a little like a bonus little 10 minute thing on the back end after the last episode. So it'll actually be a fifth episode.

And for anybody who's been following along, we just got done with the that golden stout and that was the 50th episode of Barely Getting Started. So we, you know, we've been enjoying these these series as we've been going along. I think one of the one of the fun episodes that we'll have to talk about kind of a just a review of favorites is to look back at some of the beers that we've done in the past, just kind of a brief a brief touch up.

So now that I keep a history book on what it is that we do here, it's kind of great to go back to. I know in the first episode we were talking about because it's it was a Mertzen and then talking about Oktoberfest. And I mean, you got all the way back to series two to talk about German beer.

Yeah. And we're going into our German series about that, talking about Oktoberfest. And and so we were hitting hitting the spot there.

But, you know, this is this is a great way. And I agree with you. This is, you know, a very well-rounded beer for me.

I mean, I do like a rauk beer. Once on some people, some people doing good, some people don't do them so well. You know, if you have places around Western New York that I think do decent rauk beers is you could go up to what's the place up in North Town, Iwanda.

Woodcock? No, the one that's in the one over there by the theater.

Craig:

Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's always happens when you can't think.

But I can't.

Jason:

There we go. Fifty two years old, folks. That's what happens by the at least once an episode.

Yeah. Yeah. Prosper.

Prosper. Yeah. So they do a decent one locally.

And, you know, it's, you know, you go out to Rochester. There's a few breweries out there that put together some decent ones. But for every decent one, there's ones that are like, hey, we're going to make a rauk beer.

And you go, well, that just ruined my taste palates for a while. Ash beer.

Craig:

It's like that guy that's the weekend barbecue guy. You know, he makes OK stuff. But every now and then somebody gives you just like, dude, how long was this on the smoker?

You're just taking a bite. I'm like, this is there's no moisture and I feel like I'm just eating the wood chips at this point.

Jason:

Well, we're definitely not drinking the wood chips. We're definitely not drinking the ash here. We've got some some great flavor.

Three, three up and three down. We've got one more to go. You want to give us a little preview of that one real quick?

Craig:

Yeah, I didn't know if I should go with this one or the next one for the third one, but we're definitely we have a black lager coming up from Jack's Abbey. I'll leave it at that. It's something we featured here at Magic Bear for another event at one point.

Jason:

It's asking questions about that, too.

Craig:

We we we've had it in and out over time. And I was like, do I go to the black lager? I was like, you know what?

Let's switch over to a porter. So we're talking about ales and then we'll we'll go back to a lager because I wanted to see kind of how this third beer stacked up instead of having three lagers and then a porter.

Jason:

Sure.

Craig:

Let's throw a little hiccup in there.

Jason:

All right.

Craig:

And go from there.

Jason:

Well, we look forward to that. The next episode of Barely Getting Started. In the meantime, I'm Jason and he is Craig.

To you, we say cheers.