Brewday at Amager Bryghus with Prairie Artisan Ales

On Thursday I was invited to a brewday at Amager Bryghus for a collaboration beer with Prairie Artisan Ales. The Copenhagen Beer Celebration brought a bunch of great brewers to Copenhagen and the area’s most renowned brewery Amager took advantage of the occassion to do some collaboration brews with four of them – apart from Prairie, it was Cigar City, Surly, and Jester King. Since it was an international brewday, and since the CBC is an international beer festival, I’m writing in English – expect a lot of English in this month.

The brewdays are fun days with lots of people invited. Journalists, bloggers and friends of the brewery gather for a day of beer and banter, while Amager’s hired hand René brews the beer. I know I’m invited to promote the brewery and the brew, so let’s just get that out of the way: I write this blog to make you, the reader, enjoy good beer, and it doesn’t bother me to be “bribed” to write about Amager Bryghus – I hope you look forward to taste the resulting beer as much as I do!

The beer being brewed was a single malt, single hop saison, made from Danish pilsner malt and American Simcoe hops. It’s fermented on Bella Saison dry yeast, to be followed by Brettanomyces Bruxellensis in secondary fermentation. Brett fermented saisons are what made Prairie famous, and their standard Prairie Ale is a wonderful saison, though made from a slightly more complex recipe. I had Prairie Ale at CBC and it was still wonderful. Their other beer at the session I attended was Prairie Bomb, a 13% imperial stout with a reasonable amount of coffee and chili that still allowed the beer itself to shine.

While the beer was being brewed, we just hang around the brewery, checking out the beers on tap, meeting old and new friends. Apart from us Danes, USA, Belgium, Sweden and Brazil were also represented on this particular day, and all sorts of beer were enjoyed.

For lunch Jannik and Anne-Mette had fired up the grill and cooked steaks for some outstanding burgers with ramson dressing and smoked cheese. Wonderful food to match basically any beer, and a delicious way to have my journalistic integrity compromised. Thank you Amager Bryghus for a great day in great company. Make sure some of the Prairie saison (and the three other collab brews) reaches Odense, I can wait to taste it. See you next year?