Dancing Gnome Brewery embraces trend toward turbid beers

Last July, an older man who happened to be a dead ringer for the actor Tommy Lee Jones stopped into the Dancing Gnome Brewery and couldn't seem to stop insulting the beer.

“He just was railing on how it was super yeasty and it was very, really had tannic character to it, yeast bite,” recalls Andrew Witchey, the owner and brewer at Dancing Gnome in Sharpsburg. “And I was like, the beautiful thing about beer, man, is you don't have to like mine. I don't expect you to, but I 100 percent promise you that that is a bias on your side and not what you're tasting.”

Witchey makes cloudy beers. Intentionally. And if he sounds a little defensive, it's because that experience last July wasn't the only time he's had to defend himself against what he perceives as unfair criticism. I don't know if you could call turbid beers a “style,” but it's certainly an emerging trend that is dividing the craft beer world.

Here's the thing: Witchey's “ugly” beers aren't going away. In fact, he and many other brewers (including Braddock's Brew Gentlemen ) have staked their fortunes on convincing even the snobbiest of drinkers to embrace their murky pale ales and IPAs.

Most people by now are familiar with hazy hefeweizens and wheat beers, which started going mainstream in America back in the 1990s with brands like Harpoon's UFO.

The trend toward turbid beers is something different.

You may have heard the term “New England IPA,” a reference to a style pioneered by Vermont brewers such as The Alchemist (owned by Gibsonia-native John Kimmich, who makes the world class “Heady Topper”) and Hill Farmstead , which are known for producing intensely aromatic hop-forward beers that are also softer on the palate and do not bring the bitter punch of 100+ IBUs like some West Coast IPAs.

I lived in New Hampshire for nearly a decade and enjoyed some of these delicious New England beers before many people outside the region had a name for them. And I don't recall that anybody seemed to mind or notice that they were cloudy. Heady Topper's success helped establish their legitimacy, but even then I think Kimmich was a bit hesitant to have consumers examine his beer in a clear glass. His pint-sized silver bullets of hop juice implored drinkers to “Drink From the Can,” which he argued was to preserve the flavor. I actually believe it was also about keeping novice drinkers from seeing how ugly it was, lest they be frightened by the chunks of hops floating in their glass like jellyfish.

It wasn't until I left New England that I realized how many people still had hang-ups about clarity. And to be fair, they had good reason to be skeptical.

Beer can be cloudy for a number of reasons, among them that the yeast is still in suspension. Generally, that's not a good thing, and can lend a harsh bitterness or fatty aspect that most of us find off-putting, if not repulsive. It's a sign that an impatient — or inexperienced — brewer packaged the beer before the yeast had finished its job.

Then there is haze caused by proteins contributed by non-malt adjuncts like wheat, oats and rye.

That is what is at the center of this latest turbid beer trend and is the foundation for Dancing Gnome's approach to the craft. Witchey uses a lot of oats and wheat, sometimes accounting for 30 percent of the grain.

“I think it's a more approachable style,” Witchey says. “You can have hop heads still say this is an IPA and it has a ton of hops in it, but you can have people who are hop averse in their minds come in and have it and say, ‘Oh, this is really good.' ”

There's some debate about what the addition of wheat and oats contribute to hop-forward beers. Generally, those grains can soften the mouthfeel to dial back the harsh astringency created by the hops. They also help with head retention, which may help “push” the hop aromas out of the glass and make the beer smell more lively.

And yet, it remains a divisive issue in craft beer. For proof, just check out the review on BeerAdvocate for “Hop Hands,” a pale ale from Tired Hands Brewing Co. in Eastern Pennsylvania.

This sessionable 5.5 percent hop-forward pale ale earned a score of 91, considered “outstanding,” from the collective reviews by Beer Advocate contributors. The guys who run the website, known as the Alstrom Brothers, tore it to shreds, giving it a “poor” score of 64.

“(E)xtremely cloudy and a mess to say the least,” they wrote. “Staff at the pub should not be pouring it. Milkshake beers are not a trend or acceptable with traditional or even modern styles.”

Witchey couldn't disagree more.

“I love Tired Hands, it's one of my favorites now,” he says. “And Hop Hands especially, just a straight crusher of a beer. Here's this great brewery that people all over the place know about and want to seek out and those guys want to tear it down.”

There are always going to be “those guys.” And it's perfectly legitimate to use a beer's appearance to evaluate the skills of the brewer. But at what point should that prevail over what we taste?

Even Witchey has his limits for how cloudy a beer can be. An early version of Dancing Gnome's “Jam,” a red ale, looked like it had been tapped from a sewer pipe. Witchey says even he couldn't get past the appearance.

“I still want to look at a beer and be like, man, that's a beautiful beer.”

Standards for beauty change. Most of the time, when Witchey looks at one of his turbid beers, he sees something beautiful. Perhaps, one day, Tommy Lee Jones' doppelganger will see the same.

Chris Fleisher has a turbid beer on tap in his basement and, no, he did not tap the sewer pipe. He believes it to be a thing of beauty. Follow him on Twitter @brewsreporter.