C’mon, smoked lager?

INSIDE Craftsman Brewing, wry, rumpled Mark Jilg watches over a batch of boiling wort, surrounded by gleaming stainless steel tanks. Outside stands Craftsman’s mascot, a bulbous green 1946 Studebaker truck. The brewery’s soul appears to be in some peculiar place between the sleek and the oddball.

Craftsman is one of our embattled handful of local breweries struggling to be known. Though it’s been around since 1995, you may never have heard of it. For one thing, it’s a tiny outfit, producing just 450 barrels a year in a Pasadena industrial park, and it’s not currently available in bottles.

It has passionate admirers, though. “Mark is one of the best craft brewers in California,” says David Farnworth, who keeps at least four of his beers on tap at Lucky Baldwin’s Pub in Pasadena. The 30 bars that offer Craftsman brews include some of the most serious beer palaces in town, such as Lucky Baldwin’s, Father’s Office in Santa Monica and Barney’s Beanery in Pasadena.

But then there’s the oddball side to Craftsman. “I have a lot of contrarian ideas,” Jilg admits, and his brew list shows it.

Besides two pale ales, a lager and a Bavarian-style hefeweizen wheat beer, he makes a number of quite unusual brews. Some are seasonal, such as Triple White Sage, made in the style of a Belgian tripel (strong ale) with a dose of fresh sage. In the fall he makes Cabern Ale, a beer with red wine grapes added.

His Orange Grove Ale contains whole Valencia oranges -- the fruit, the aromatic peel and even the bitter pith, which he substitutes for part of the hops. It’s surprisingly subtle, with a hint of orange peel in the nose and a mysterious richness in the mouth.

“We try to be straightforward,” Jilg says, reclining on a worn chair in the brewery’s office. “If we use fruit, we extract real fruit flavor. Some people expect the Orange Grove Ale to taste more like an orange soft drink, but we want a unique adult beverage, not a sweet lollipop drink.”

“He’s got some great beers,” says Farnworth. “I tell him I want his pale ale, IPA, the Orange Grove and Hefe, and I leave it up to him what else he wants to put on the other taps. You never know. It might be a lager, and the next minute he might change and give me Biere de Blanco,” an unfiltered Belgian-style wheat beer flavored with orange peel and coriander.

For summer, Jilg makes his most offbeat beer of all: Smoked Black Lager. “It’s part of our contrarian style,” he says. “Black beer is hard to sell in Southern California, and in summer it’s even harder. So what do we do? Make a black summer beer.”

The color might be less of a problem than the fact that this is a smoked beer, made from barley that has been smoked over beechwood, as is traditional for the rauchbiers of Bamberg, Germany. Only a few American breweries dare to make a smoked beer, and most of them, such as Alaskan Brewing Co. and Stone Brewing Co. of Escondido, do it as a porter, counting on sweetness to cushion the shock of the smoke flavor.

Jilg, however, makes his as a schwarzbier, or black lager, also an unfamiliar style in this country: dark and roasty but dry. “When people see a dark beer, they expect something sweet and heavy,” he says, “and this beer is very dark -- jet black and opaque. But it’s a dry, crisp lager, and low in alcohol, 5%.”

And smoky, of course, though less aggressively so than most of the rauchbiers imported to this country. This would seem to make it an ideal barbecue season beer. But not for home grillers, because it’s not available in bottles. It could be at some point -- Jilg does have a bottling line, but he hasn’t used it yet.

“One of my failings,” he says, wincing slightly, “is that I’m distractible.” (How distractible is he? On his website -- www.craftsmanbrewing.com -- several links don’t yet work, and one of those is “about the brewer,” which tends to be the first part most microbrewers fill in.)

When he gets the bottling line working, beer drinkers may someday be able to get a smoked lager for the barbecue days of summer. Until Jilg gets his bottling act together, though, you’ll just have to go to one of the bars that carry Craftsman beers to sample Smoked Black Lager. “We pair it with anything off the grill,” says Sang Yoon of Father’s Office, an eager fan. “It’s better than the lighter beers people think of for summer.” Jilg figures on having a batch ready in four or five weeks.

In the meanwhile, Jilg does make other beers, such as that Orange Grove Ale, an India Pale Ale and his “pre-Prohibition style” 1903 lager, which is full-bodied and deep gold in color, with a very flowery nose. For whatever it’s worth, he says the 1903 lager has the same hops-malt balance as the Smoked Black Lager, so it should be rather similar -- except for not being black or smoked, of course.

*

Where it flows

Here are some prominent bars that feature Craftsman beers on tap:

Father’s Office, 1018 Montana Ave., Santa Monica, (310) 393-2337.

Lucky Baldwin’s Pub, 17 S. Raymond Ave., Pasadena, (626) 795-0652.

Barney’s Beanery, 99 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena (626) 405-9777.

Engine Co. No. 28, 644 S. Figueroa St., Los Angeles, (213) 624-6996.

Barbara’s at the Brewery, 620 Moulton Ave., Los Angeles, (323) 221-9204.

-- Charles Perry