Blending It Up, the Ashworth Way
Last summer when I was visiting Seattle and Tacoma (and a number of brew pubs in between), I picked up a book by home brew guru Charlie Papazian entitled Microbrewed Adventures. The book is a loose and episodic beery autobiography of one of homebrewing’s most enthusiastic proponents.
About a hundred pages in is a story about a bartender named Judy Ashworth. She had a place called the Lyons Brewery Depot. She kept twenty beers on tap and had a knack for mixing those twenty beers to come up with an almost unlimited combination of blended beers.
Now beer blending is another subfield of beer mixology. I’ve identified at least three different subfields of beer mixology: one, the blending of two or more different beers to produce a new beer; two, the addition of non-alcoholic additives to produce a flavored beer; three, the combination of beer with alcoholic beverages to produce a beer cocktail.
One of Judy Ashworth’s beer blends is called “Foggy Night in the Sierras”: it’s a blend of Anchor’s Old Foghorn barley wine and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. It seems that she had as much fun inventing names for her concoctions as she did experimenting. Of course Ashworth offered the more common beer blends: black and tan, sake bite, half and half, etc. (I’ll be doing posts on all of these soon, so don’t worry if these are unfamiliar to you.)
Based on my reading of the section in Papazian’s book about Judy Ashworth’s principles of beer blending, it appears that blending a heavy beer with a light beer is a good way to make the heavier beer more approachable. Hence the mixing of a barley wine with the pale ale, or a stout with a pale ale or a lager. So if you want to try this at home take a look in your fridge and see what you have that’s a bit heavy or higher in alcohol content (barley wines, tripels, imperial IPAs, etc.) and mix that with some pale ale, pilsener, or amber ale. You could even experiment with the proportions to adjust the blend to your taste.
I’ll be telling you about some my experiments in the weeks to come. In the meantime, let me know what you discover and post a comment here. Then we’ll compare notes. Happy blending!
Where is Judy Ashworth now? Back in the early ’80s we stumbled upon her Lyons Brewery Depot in Sunol (where we also met Boscoe, the dog/mayor) and followed her to Dublin after fire destroyed the original. That pub in Dublin is still there, with over 30 taps but it’s been through at least two ownership changes.