Sundays are Fun Days when Spent at the Green Bench Brewery

What a delightful way to spend Sunday.  We are in the beer garden at Green Bench Brewery in St. Petersburg, Florida. (http://greenbenchbrewing.com/on-tap-and-to-go/) It’s just a little after noon so the sun is almost directly overhead, fortunately there is a slight breeze blowing from the north to mitigate the sun’s effects. There are families with dogs and children dotted around the grass, this could almost be the garden of an English country pub if the weather was colder and damper.

It’s lunchtime and we bought a picnic with turkey, cheese and tomato sandwiches made with Nan bread and fresh Plant City, Florida, strawberries and oranges. The Green Bench Brewery provided a comfortable table and chairs, beverages to wash the food down and music from the guitar and violin duo, Hot Club SRQ, to keep us entertained.

The brewery name - Green Bench – is a reminder of St. Petersburg history. In the early 1900’s a real estate dealer painted a few benches with advertisements and placed them near his business.  The idea took off and more benches appeared until in 1916 a city ordinance was passed making all the benches green.  Eventually there were more than 7,000 benches placed on the streets of St. Pete and the city became known as the “City of Green Benches” with the benches a symbol of the city’s hospitality.  Old postcards show people sitting on the benches and passing the time of day (http://postcardy.blogspot.com/2012/03/famous-green-benches-st-petersburg.html)

The benches were removed in 1967 - 1969 as the city council promoted a more youthful image for St. Pete but the memory lingers on at the Green Bench Brewing Co, where people gather, not just to drink beer, but to pass a few pleasant hours in conversation with friends and neighbors.

In his book “Tampa Bay Beer” Mark DeNote gives credit to Green Bench Brewery owners – Steven Duffy and Nathan Stonecipher - as the trail blazers in the brewing industry in St. Petersburg.  They were the first microbrewery in the town, their owners work with the city council changing zoning ordinances and use codes paved the way for the other six breweries that have opened in the city.

Enough of the history lesson, let’s talk about the breweries raison d’etre – the drinks.

We drank three different beers as well as a delightful non-alcoholic lemon-ginger thirst quencher for my mother-in-law.

I obviously wasn’t paying enough attention when I ordered the first beers. I asked for an IPA and an easy to drink lager and I thought the lady tending the bar said the IPA was the Founders IPA and the other was a Blonde ale.  Neither of these are listed on the Green Bench web site so you’ll have to take my word for it.  The IPA (on the right) and the Blonde (the two pint glasses on the left) are shown in the picture below, along with the sparkling lemon-ginger in the snifter on the rear of the table.

The ‘Founders‘ IPA was a lovely red-orange, the color of fall leaves, and poured with a slight head. The first long swig was delightful, a nice medium bodied ale with the slightest hint of citrus in the background.  As I put the glass down the bitterness from the hops and the moderate alcohol content left a pleasant flavor in my mouth that went well with strong taste of the real English Cheddar cheese, Smoked Turkey and Dijon mustard on my sandwich. The combination with the beer could only have been made better with the addition of a pickled onion or two.

The ladies in our party were not beer drinkers, but they enjoyed the light, easy to drink Blonde beer.  The color was gold, like a nice ripe papaya, and came out of the bar tap with a slight head. The taste was light and summery, with hints of tropical fruits overlaying the hops.  An easy to drink beer that went well with the smoked turkey, tomato and humus sandwiches.

After the sandwiches were eaten I wanted to try something different that I could drink while enjoying the music from Hot Club SRQ. 

The choice was Les Grisettes.

The Green Bench website says this about Les Grisettes: “the first beer of our 100% Brettanomyces line.  At under 4%, Les Grisette is a traditional style farmhouse ale brewed with Spelt, Buckwheat, Rye and Oats fermented on our house mixed culture of wild yeasts. Grisettes were originally brewed for coal miners in the Hainaut region of Wallonia, Belgium. The name refers to the “gray” garments the women wore that delivered the beer to the miners. They were known as Les Grisettes” 

I enjoyed this beer.  It was satisfyingly different. This tasted like a beer that could be drunk by the farmers in the English countryside.  It is light in body and has a dry finish. The beer is golden-orange color with little or no head and not much fizz.  A slight fruitiness with a hint of ginger spice on the tongue.  It’s a beer to drink in big mouthfuls, not a beer to sip delicately and would probably work wonders with a traditional ploughman’s lunch – crusty bread, pork pie, hard-boiled egg, a piece of cheese and a pickle or two.

Those that have read my blog know that I like beer a lot and have written notes on over 540 of the beers I have drunk. Though Les Grisettes was not my first taste of a farmhouse ale, I obviously did not spend enough time researching the few I have drunk, so now I am going in search of further information.

Two of the four main ingredients of beer (water, malt, hops and yeast) are mentioned in the description of Les Grisettes on the web site. 

First the yeast.  Brettanomyces is a species of yeast that when used injudiciously imparts unpleasant flavor to a beer. Hence it is unwelcome in most breweries.  However, 100% Brett fermentations typically create a fruit forward beer.  This is the wild yeast they mention. (http://www.milkthefunk.com/wiki/100%25_Brettanomyces_Fermentation)   

The second ingredient mentioned are the grains that make up the malt.  Brewers often use different grains to change the characteristics of beer. Green Bench are using Spelt, an ancient grain that gives beer a nutty flavor.  In my younger days while working in Holland, I drank significant quantities of Dutch Jenever which is distilled from spelt, so I know a lot about nutty flavor. Oats help create a fuller bodied beer and Rye sharpens flavors and can add a subtle spiciness.

Buckwheat, though is not a cereal grain and has nothing to do with wheat. It is actually a fruit seed that is gluten free. It has lots of nutrients and has a nutty, earthy flavor that is slightly bitter.

However, it is impossible to say what effect any of these grains/seeds had on the final brew without knowing the percentage of each in the malt. I can say that the brewer did a great job and produced a beer that is different and enjoyable.  What more can we ask for a beautiful Sunday afternoon in the Green Bench beer garden.