The New Yorker Cover, Interpreted

I really tried to ignore the new New Yorker cover.  I kept seeing posts on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter fly by, and the wave just gathered steam. I thought I could ride it out.  But it's safe to say that I have never seen anything attract this much of the beer world's attention since the dawn of the social media age, and now I have to join in.  Let's start with the cover:

“Hip Hops,” by Peter de Sève.

Over at All About Beer, editor John Holl has a roundup of some of the commentary (but by no means all of it).  Most of the analysis focuses on the semiotics of the setting, which ticks off cultural symbols like a Census-taker noting down demographics: tats, flannel, beard, multiracialism, hipster hats, a snobby sommelier contrasted with a downscale burger, and on and on.  It touches a raw nerve for many beer people--suggesting that working class, guileless, unpretentious old beer is being taken over by hipper-than-thou scenesters in Portland, San Francisco--and of course, Brooklyn.

But don't over-interpret it.

When they work, New Yorker covers are so delicious because they are are not didactic; they don't have an agenda.  They just reflect something in the cultural zeitgeist and become a mirror.  Recall six years ago, there was the famous fist bump cover.  In much the same way, it ticked off symbols.  Obama fans read it as delicious satire; his foes saw it as a take-down of the wannabe terrorist-in-chief. (And a lot of people were just angry that the slant wasn't clearer--they weren't sure who to be mad at.)

In much the same way, some people love what the current cover has to say, and some don't. Having been a subscriber for 15 years, my belief is that it doesn't have anything to say.  Good covers capture a moment in time, spark recognition and humor, and induce the reader to pick up the magazine.  They remain enigmatic for a reason--an obvious cover is like a bad pun.  Don't overthink it, just enjoy.

____________

A final comment (update). 

I got to thinking through my fingers over at Oliver Gray's blog, and after consideration, felt the comment would have made this post stronger.  So I'm adding it here.

I also think it’s an oblique insult to an artist to be too reductive. There are certain art forms–visual art, poetry, music–that are able to express complexity non-conceptually. We can reduce the meaning we take into words, but we are then creating a smaller, less-complex simulacrum. If we’re open to it, the power of a cover like this happens in the nanosecond before we begin the process of assigning meaning, when emotions and curiosity are the sum of our experience. When we then move to “meaning,” we’ve gone to a slightly different place than the artist intended.
I think, anyway.

Fresh Hops, Neomexicanus Hops, and No Hops

Hot on the heels of a bottled Lagunitas fresh hop beer, two from Deschutes arrived at Casa Beervana, Chasin' Freshies (still the worst name in beer!) and Hop Trip--and two more chances to disprove my skepticism that fresh hop flavor can be bottled. 

(As a side note, Chasin' Freshies plays a prominent role in my skepticism.  One recent year, I was down at Deschutes sampling fresh hop beers, and Chasin' Freshies was on tap.  It was the first year they made it, and I assumed it was just one of the many one-offs they do during fresh hop season.  It was one of the best examples I'd ever had, though, and so imprinted itself on my brain.  A couple hours later, I arrived home and found a bottle of the same beer waiting for me.  That Chasin' Freshies was nothing like the beer served on tap and yet was, presumably, as fresh as the brewery could make it.)  (As a side note to the side note, I'll add that I've only previously had one fresh hop beer worth a damn--BridgePort Hop Harvest.) 

So back to Deschutes' 2014 bottled fresh hop offerings.  Did they manage to bottle the flavor?  Must I revise the theory?  Our findings are inconclusive: Chasin' Freshies (22 oz bottle) was superlative.  Fully alive and green and fresh-hoppy.  Hop trip (12 oz bottle) was a dud--very little hop character at all, and therefore a sweetly malty soup with no zip.  My advice: if you want the experience of fresh hop, get on down to your favorite grocer, buy a 22 of Chasin' Freshies and drink it tonight.  You might even risk waiting until tomorrow, as you hand out chocolate to small fiends.  I wouldn't wait longer than that.  Skip the Hop Trip.


The Neomexicanus Hops Are In
Stan Hieronymus has an update on some monk-grown native hops that will soon be available to the home beermaker.  Step lively if you want to get in on the action.


In Lieu of Hops
Finally, let me direct your attention to my latest post over at All About Beer.  Today's offering involves Eric Steen's project Beers Made By Walking, wherein Eric and brewers go on a hike and forage ingredients to use in a beer, along with my consideration of which of those ingredients seem like candidates for regular use. It starts:

Artemisia douglasiana, also known as California mugwort, grows along stream banks up and down the West Coast. Dried and—particularly—burned, it has a distinctive aroma similar to another plant famous in the region, Cannabis sativa. Perhaps for this reason, it creates a pungent, hop-like quality when added to the conditioning tank of a light ale. The flavor is anything but subtle; it is sticky and musky and surprisingly bitter, reminiscent of some of the more exotic modern hops in vogue. I discovered it in a gluten-free beer by Portland’s Ground Breaker Brewing, the result of a project called Beers Made By Walking in which brewers go out and forage for local ingredients they later use in a beer.

Go read the whole thing.  (Please!)  

The Doomed Lagunitas Experiment That Wasn't

Lagunitas's Jack Alger called me last week to see if I would like to participate in an experiment.  The brewery had had a refrigerated truck full of fresh hops shipped from Yakima (Equinox, Amarillo, Mosaic), put them into a beer brewed on the equinox, and was offering to overnight me a bottle the day the beer was packaged--which was yesterday.

I have no idea if Jack knows that I have been assiduously documenting the maturation of fresh hop ales for years or that I am incredibly skeptical of 1) any fresh hops that spend longer than a few hours off the vine, 2) the techniques of breweries distant from the fresh hop epicenter where brewers have learned how to use them, and especially 3) bottled fresh hop beers. If he did, it was a ballsy move.  In my mind, this was an almost certainly doomed experiment.  But, because it was Lagunitas, where brewers are master-level hop wranglers, I figured I'd give it a shot.  I knew it wouldn't work, but I wanted to see for myself, anyway.

Guess what?  It worked.

The beer is called Born Yesterday, and it is in the market now (look here to see if it's in your area).  As with any fresh hop beer, the sooner you taste it, the better, and you should definitely track down a bottle/pint in the next week if you want the full experience (though Oregonians may rightly yawn after having indulged in our annual lupulin bacchanalia).   

There's a chemical compound in fresh hops that does not survive the kilning process.  Well-made fresh hop beers have it, and no other beers do.  The aroma resists description because it only smells like one thing: fresh hops. (Words like "green," "fresh," and "lively" sort of hint at the quality but are completely useless as identifiers.)  I have found good fresh hop flavor in beers without this aroma, but only very rarely. So as I poured out the bottle, I lowered a skeptical nose, expecting nothing--but there it was, the fresh hop smell, wafting mightily off the beer.

In a blind tasting, I'd guess it was Double Mountain's Killer Green.  Both Born Yesterday and Killer Green are IPA-strength (7.5%) and both are aggressively bitter (unusual for fresh-hop beers).  Like Killer Green, Born Yesterday starts with a loaded bitter charge that starts things with a pop.  Then the fresh flavors surge in, full of cannabis.  Sticky but lively and green, with a quality that seems to tickle the trigeminal nerve with the same zing as mint or menthol.  It's all there--a perfectly kosher, honest to goodness bottled fresh hop beer. 

I didn't think it was possible and I still don't think it's advisable (and I don't want to guess what Lagunitas spent making it), but I now know it can be done.  Kudos to Lagunitas.

What Did "Sweet" and "Sour" Mean in the Old Texts?

Lars Garshol has an interesting post on a question that has bothered me for the last four years: how sour were pre-20th century beers?  His post is well worth a read because he tackles it from a few angles.  The portion I'm interested in, though, is the survey of historical materials, which often indicate that 16th-19th century beers were not soured.  For example, Lars cites a typical 16th century Swedish account by Olaus Magnus, an archbishop:

He describes both sweet and sour wines, but of beer he says that people brew it sweet or bitter according to preference. He says winter water is the best, as it never makes the beer go sour. Today we can see what was really going on, but he was right that beer was less likely to go sour in winter, due to lower temperatures. He says winter water is used in the brewing of Danzig beer, "the noblest and healthiest beer". It's clear from the text that to Olaus Magnus, beer is a sweet or bitter drink, and mainly sour by accident.

So here's the thing: I don't trust Magnus.  The problem is that language is not precise, especially in describing flavor, which is by necessity always relative.  We don't have precise language for flavors, except to compare them to other things.  Flavor descriptions build on shared understandings of the way known things taste, and we use those understandings when we describe related flavors.  When we say hops taste "like citrus," we mean to say that relative to other hoppy flavors, they have a few molecules that remind us of orange.  Originally, though, hops like Cascade were so exotic and bizarre when compared to European hops that they weren't always described as citrusy.  People were using a different baseline for hop flavor in the 1970s.

Similarly, if the accepted baseline for beer was always a bit tart (by modern standards), then all the terms writers used would be relative to that reality. We have zero-level thresholds for "sour" because we can control microbiological activity. Did 19th century writers share that threshold? My strong suspicion is no; therefore, beer that was "sour" was relatively sour--that is, sourer than the baseline.  Let me draw your attention to the 19th century writer Georges Lacambre and his famous Traité Complet de la Fabrication des Bières.  He illustrates the point.

In the section on the old style of beer called uytzet,  He quotes the work of another writer who had written about chemical analyses done on uytzet.  That writer, Wauters, described double uytzet as "the most delicate and sweetest of all known beers."  What did he mean by "sweet?"  Fortunately, we have the actual analysis as well, which measured things like "resinous grain," "dry mucilage," and "vinegar" (acetic acid).  In 48 ounces of beer measured, 3 ounces of which were acetic acid.  (The 48-ounce figure come from a conversion Randy Mosher did, which is sadly no longer online.)  Lacambre comments: "However, we agree that Mr. Wauters must be accustomed to such a beer to find it so good, as it contains so much vinegar and so little alcohol."  Even then, language was imprecise enough that writers didn't agree on meaning.  You see this throughout Lacambre's book, where he dutifully explains what locals think of their beers, then savages them with his own less-admiring descriptions. 

When I read sources like Lacambre, I read "sweet" as "not yet very sour," or "young."   It's not the modern definition of sweet, which means "not hoppy."  When writers of this era--and earlier writers, like Magnus--mention "sour," I think they mean what we would call spoiled. It's why they talk about winter and summer brewing--when we know very well thanks to lambic-brewing that winter beers can get very sour indeed without spoiling. 

As a final data point, it's useful to turn to Louis Pasteur himself.  In his seminal work on yeast, Etudes sur la Bière (translated into the English as Studies on Fermentation), he recommended the lager-brewing practice, because ale-brewing so often resulted in soured beer.  “How is it that the use of ice and yeast operating at a low temperature [in lager brewing] so greatly facilitates the preservation of our beer and enables us to secure such striking advantages?  The explanation is simple: the diseased ferments, which we have pointed out, rarely appear at a lower temperature than 10° C. (50° F.), and at that temperature their germs cease to be active.”  This further suggests to me that the ales must have been either sour or had such a short window before they got sour that he discouraged their manufacture.  And indeed, his research was one of the reasons lager-brewing (along with technological advancements) took off at such a rapid clip.

Without being able to taste these old beers ourselves, we can't know the microbiology of pre-20th century beers based on the descriptions of contemporary writers from earlier periods.  But I would encourage readers to exercise a healthy skepticism.  Our assumptions about the way beer tastes is very unlikely to reflect their assumptions--and subsequent descriptions are going to confuse modern minds. 

Cider Saturday: Make Your Own

Rack and Cloth, washed by the last sun of summer.

This past weekend, I made my way down the Gorge on what seems now like an impossibly warm, sunny day for some cider-sampling and juice-buying.  In a leisurely afternoon, you can easily begin your day at Fox-Tail, where I recommend especially Docklands (one of the nicer ciders in Oregon) and Apfelwein.  I expect you'll find fouler weather than I did, but never mind--their tasting room is cozy.  About a mile down the road, you can stop in at the Gorge White House, where they specialize in pear juice (with both a nice perry and an apple-pear cider).  The White House has a food truck with great burgers, so it's also a good lunch stop.

But the place I really want to direct you, especially over the next month, is Draper Girls Farm--about eight miles down past Fox-Tail (driving away from Hood River).  Theresa Draper has nine acres of apple trees, and has planted some nice heirloom cultivars like Spitzenburg, Black Twig, Gravenstein, Harrison, Northern Spy, Winter Banana, and others (and she's recently planted classics like Yarlington Mill and Kingston Black).  She presses the apples herself and makes a rough blend (depending on what's ripe) that includes acid varieties and then sells the juice, unpasteurized, by the gallon.  I picked up three gallons, brought it home, dumped it in the carboy, and this is what's going on now:

I have no idea whether it will be tasty or not, but I love the idea that juice will just ferment itself.  (After some dangerously warm temps the first couple days, the juice has settled down to the mid-fifties.  I may yet be making vinegar, but we'll see.)  If you are feeling less adventuresome, you could always just pitch yeast.  I gotta tell you, pouring three gallons of juice into a carboy and adding a fermentation lock is a whole lot easier than brewing.

I'll let you know how it's coming.

Update.  I was out raking leaves and found the yeast activity evolving.  I have no idea whether this is good or bad, but it sure is exotic.  Have a look.

New, But Not Innovative

I received an email yesterday so brazen and cynical in its scope that it left me briefly stunned.  It begins:

Just in time for the holiday season, Guinness introduces the perfect option for beer connoisseurs and enthusiasts alike with Guinness The 1759, a limited edition ultra-premium amber ale. [Their bold.]

Source: CNBC

In this one sentence are two fascinating details: 1) the name of Diageo's latest is "Guinness The 1759," which I think must be bizarre even in Irish-English, and 2) Diageo announces a category heretofore unknown to beer drinkers, "ultra-premium amber ale."  Surely this must augur even more fascinating details?  It does!  Carrying on:

This latest innovation from Guinness brings artistry and elegance to the beer category by combining  the famous Guinness yeast with both traditional beer malt and peated whisky malt – the very same used in the world’s most deluxe Scotch and Irish Whiskies - for smooth and quality tasting beer.

You know something deeply suspicious is afoot when the fifth-largest drinks company claims to be "innovating," and suspicions mount when the reader discovers that peated malt seems to be the sole innovation.  Let's hold our horses, though--something more must be on the way, right?  Glad you asked:

This unique beer is the first from Guinness that uses a cage and cork mechanism to seal the bottle (typically used with champagne) and packaged in a stylish back velvet lined gift box.  Only 90,000 bottles will be produced, which makes this commemorative release the chance to be part of Guinness’ brewing history.

Wonderful!  In addition to the extremely rare use of whisky malt*, this "unique" ale will be packaged in the same manner as Champagne!  And sold in a gift box!  And will be sold in small quantities for no other reason than to justify an obscene sticker price!  (Thirty five bones.  And so you know that this beer will retain its exclusive, just-for-the-one-percent cachet, Guinness brand manager Doug Campbell promises that "We will brew it one time only and basically throw away the recipe afterward."  Which is quite a statement, given that Diageo also claims the beer is based on a 200-year-old recipe.  Once they're done with this beer, they're throwing out all the old log books!)  But wait, can there be even more?  Yes:

This is the first offering of the new Guinness Signature Series™ which offers a range of limited edition luxury beers. This series gives beer drinkers more options for different occasions, from fine dining to exquisite gifting.   

"Which is to say this isn't rare or special at all, just the first in a series of scams we plan to run on what we imagine are endlessly gullible rubes willing to fork over $35 for an amber ale."  (That last bit is, despite being in quotes, only what I imagine went through the email-writer's head as he put the finishing touches on things.)

This is probably the most shameless email I've ever received, and the beer is definitely in the chutzpah sweepstakes as well.  But this debacle isn't actually Diageo's fault.  It's the poison fruit of wildly over-priced craft beer--resulting from a combination of fan lust and brewer manipulation.  A company like Diageo, with a brand as valuable and important as Guinness, would be stupid not to play the same game.  It represents a moment of decadence inevitable with anything so heavily hyped.

It's a shame, too.  Some beer really is expensive to make and necessarily limited in quantity--Rodenbach, Cantillon, and Cascade (among many other fine and reputable American craft beers).  But you have to know something about beer to appreciate that, and in the not knowing, there is room for the unscrupulous to make quickie beers, pop them into a glitzy package, and jack the price up 500%. 
______________
*Not rare.

Good Beer in Victoria: a Round-up

A few weeks back, Travel Victoria brought me to Canada for a beery weekend.  I got to set the agenda, and managed to visit six of the city's ten breweries while I was there.  What follows is in no way a definitive guide (you might consult Joe Wiebe for that), but a useful starting place if you decide to visit that lovely little city.  (And you should--it's a wonderful getaway.)

Hoyne and Driftwood
2740 Bridge St and #102-450 Hillside Ave

They're this close.

The internet age makes the life of a beer tourist a snap.  When I think about Michael Jackson trying to figure out which Belgian breweries to visit, without aid of GPS and the vast internet archives, I marvel.  Achieving intreptitude (TM, Jeff Alworth, pending) takes no more than a few hours with Google now.  It was in this way that I discovered broad agreement about Victoria's hottest brewery--Driftwood.  But the Google can also fail you--Hoyne gets absolutely no love at all, and had it not been literally next door, I would have missed what I believe to be the city's most accomplished brewery.

Driftwood is definitely in the conversation, though, and they do it mainly because they have Victoria's favorite IPA, Fat Tug.  Brewer Jason Meyer seems most in synch with the kind of brewing we do south of the border, and in addition to the IPA, they do stuff like a saison, gose, wild ale, and fresh-hop ale.  It's clear why the IPA is so coveted--it has managed to become the quintessential Victoria IPA, hitting all the notes locals like, but with greater verve than anyone else.  It has an immensely juicy aroma, indicating the coming fruity flavor blast.  Falsely, it turns out.  The locals like their IPAs bitter, and Fat Tug is intensely so--all that juiciness in the nose evaporates under the alpha assault in the mouth. For my tastes, the Pale is a tastier pour.  Meyer manages to get a softness out of his beers, and it really shines here with more subdued and flavorful hopping.   Their saison uses the Ardennes yeast and black peppercorn and is also quite nice.

The brewhouse at Driftwood

Brewer Sean Hoyne got started at Canoe (see below) before founding his eponymous brewery three years ago.  Even though the beer geeks have overlooked the brewery, the public has not--Hoyne is already making 7,000 hectos (6,000 barrels) a year, the majority of it on draft.  I can see why.  As Dave, one of the brewers, was showing me around, the woman working the tasting room handed me a glass.  I didn't know what was in it and was taking notes and listening to Dave speak.  At a certain point, I distractedly passed the glass under my nose and was instantly rapt: a plume of Saaz hops blotted everything else out.  (There are also Hallertau, Hersbruck, and Spalt, which inflect the Saaz with an herbal note, but it's mainly the Saaz that grip you.)  The flavor was every bit as rewarding--aromatic pilsner malts and hop flavor that matched the the aroma in kind and intensity.  This was their flagship, Hoyner Pilsner.

They do another lager that is Hoyner's equal, called Off the Grid.  They call it a Vienna, but I've seen dunkels this color.  In any case, it focuses more on the rich, nutty, biscuity malts; the Tettnang hops provide a lacy accompaniment, but this is a moreish lager they'd love in Bavaria.  Hoyne, like Driftwood, does an eclectic mix of styles (including, in addition to more standard offerings, a smoked porter, hefeweizen, and espresso stout), but it's their lagers that really sing.

Hoyne's brewhouse

Swan's Brewpub
506 Pandora Ave

Swan's is so far off the radar, I didn't even realize it existed until I strolled by on my way to Canoe.  I can sort of see why: it's a wonderful space that nevertheless feels a bit touristy (it's right next to Chinatown) and the beer is decidedly old-fashioned.  (I don't know if our experience was typical, but on the lazy Sunday afternoon of our visit, the musical selection ran to Jimmy Buffet and Foghat--a choice that didn't make it feel any hipper.)   These things shouldn't condemn it, though: the ambiance is louche English pub (it recalled pubs from The Sweeney), airy but languid, and the old-fashioned beers are the reason to go.

 Swan's does English ales, a fair number of them served on cask.  The US went through an English ales period but has mostly left it behind--even New England's scene is turning more toward national trends.  Part of the reason we left this tradition behind is that we never did it properly in the first place--the beers were too sweet and heavy or just poorly made.  Swan's does them right.  The two standouts are an ESB and a brown, both of which I got on cask.  The ESB is made the way the English make strong bitters--just 5% ABV, with a definite focus on balance.  Hops are a balance between citrus and blackberry, and the malts have an undertone of toffee.  The Brown is geared toward woody, sweet malts.  But in both cases, there's a malt I've never encountered before--somewhere between roast and smoke, with an evocation of Scotch whisky.  It played a minor note in both beers, but really added a wonderful layer of interest.  I could have drunk either one for hours. 

Swan's also does some standards--a pale and and IPA and of course, the classic Victoria lager, with lots of Saaz--and one-offs like a white IPA.  But it's really the cask ales you should be drinking--they make Swan's a great stop.


Spinnaker's
Victoria's oldest brewery was such an interesting place that I'll treat it to a special case study in a future post.



Moon Under Water
350B Bay Street

If you see a theme developing--new style breweries versus old style--it's because that's how it started to seem to me.  Moon is definitely a charter member of the new school.  Unlike nearby Hoyne and Driftwood, which are production breweries, Moon is a brewpub.  The ambiance would be familiar to Portlanders--brewpub industrial.  It's got a casual, cozy vibe.  Along with Hoyne and Driftwood, it's in a slightly gritty industrial part of the city, but is in no way off-putting.  Some of the locals warned us about the neighborhood, but it was no different than large parts of Northeast and Southeast Portland. 

They had some experimental beer going on, including an Earl Gray IPA that was quite tasty.  The mainstays are an IPA and pilsner (naturally) as well as a dunkel, which was surprising.  I'd put Moon's beers a notch below their neighbor's, though they were pleasant enough.  The food and feel was great, and the beer was above-average for a brewpub.  And if you're looking for a place to land for a meal, it's a far better choice for these reasons than the final brewery I visited.

Canoe
450 Swift St

Canoe has one of the best locations in the city, and the space is amazing.  It melds warehouse and lodge, with very high ceilings with exposed trusses and lots of unfinished wood.  The food is also well above average brewpub fare, and I especially loved the moules-frites, which are normally the best beer food going.  

Unfortunately, Canoe's beer was not good.  Like everyone else, they do a pilsner and an IPA, and they augment these musts with a dark ale and a pale--and on my visit, an ESB.  The pilsner was actually very nice.  It was the first place I went, so also the first time I had the classic Victoria pils.  But after that, it was downhill.  The pale was full of diacetyl, the dark was over roasty, and the IPA and ESB had very rough, harsh finishes.  Overall, a poor showing.  It's not a bad place to stop in for the food, and a pint of lager will do you good.  Don't bother with the taster tray, though.

Lastest AAB Post: What a Portlander Found in Victoria, BC

More content to come today, but I wanted to direct your attention to my latest All About Beer post, of which this is a tease:

It’s possible to think your hometown is in step with larger trends—IPAs are popular everywhere, saisons and barrel-aged beers are reliable beer geek bait. But all it takes is a little travel to upset this sense of sameness. A couple weeks back, I spent the weekend in Victoria, BC, which is roughly as far from my home in Portland as Boston is from New York. In the West, that counts as neighbors. I ended up visiting six breweries while I was there, and by stop number four, I felt like I’d gone through the looking-glass: I was definitely not in Oregon anymore.

As always, please like and share it if you do actually like it and think it's worth sharing.  I'm still trying to make sure they don't regret giving me the platform.  In any case, do at least go have a look.

Several Small, Interesting Things

Over the past week, I had a half-dozen moments where something interesting and beer-related floated by on the digital stream.  None warranted a post by themselves, but I can't help rattling them off, along with an opinion or two.  (You'll find some/all of them interesting, too.)


1.  Will Ohio's Fat Head's Brewery Thrive in Portland?

Does that Fat Head logo suggest a cultural
misalignment to anyone but me?

Fat Head's is a popular brewery from suburban Cleveland, successful enough that it expanded to Pittsburgh and then to ... Portland.  [Correction: Fat Head's started as a beer bar in Pittsburgh, then opened their brewery in Cleveland.] It will open two weeks from today in the Pearl District (13th and Davis), ground zero for the city's priciest real estate.  Fat Head's is famous for an IPA they proudly call "West Coast." 

Comment:  This is endlessly fascinating.  Portland has 978 breweries (estimated), and they're all "West Coast."  Portland is legendarily provincial, a place where locals gleefully eschew anything non-Oregonian.  (Forty years ago, a certain local brewery made some hay with that very concept.)  Many Oregonians are erstwhile Midwesterners who left places like Ohio because they wanted to live in a weird un-Ohio town like Portlandia where, presumably, they weren't seeking Ohio beer.  It seems like a steep and rugged climb.  That said, the brewery says it intends to make Portland-only beer on site, and I'm sure the brewers will quickly integrate into the Portland brewing community.  The Pearl is so expensive that there aren't many mid-range restaurants around, which will help get people in the door.

Will Fat Head's fly?  I have no earthly idea.


2.  Is Cheap Beer Good?
Writing in GQ, David Chang (a chef, Google informs this non-foodie) declares his love for mass market lager.  "And there's no drink I love more. I love it more than any great white wine, more than any white Burgundy, which I love very, very much. In my fridge, the only beer—practically the only foodstuff I've ever purchased for home—is Bud Light bottles."

Comment: God bless him.  I know this is total exhibitionist click-bait, but I'd like to use it as an opportunity to come out against beer-shaming.  People like what they like.  It's long past time we stopped trying to get them to drink what we like.  Over the last ten years, I've found myself in countless versions of the same discussion with someone who'd become interested in exploring beer, but was worried s/he didn't like the "right" ones.  There should be no shame in beer.  You love Bud Light or Shock Top: good for you. If so, I might suggest Breakside Pilsner or Allagash White, but I'm not going to look at you with surprised derision and shake my head in sadness.  And I think anyone who does has missed the whole point of "enjoying" beer.

Comment 2:  For some reason chefs often like light lagers.  I have formed theories that relate to their interest in not having strong liquid flavors compete with their subtle chewable ones, but haven't done a full double-blind study yet.

(Stan Hieronymus directs us today to a rebuttal by Garrett Oliver, which is not persuasive.)


3.  Seawater Beer
Vice points us to Er Boqueron, a Spanish beer made with Mediterranean sea water.  The writer is interested in a related study that shows that deep ocean water, partially desalinated, helps speed recovery time after exercise.  Naturally--it is Vice--this leads the writer to believe that it might prevent hangovers. 

Comment: Sea water?  Based on reviews, it must be pretty heavily desalinated.  But at the very least, the phenomenon shows you how far we've gotten into the exotic beer trend.


4.  Beer in the Non-Beer Press
James Fallows is an old-school foreign-policy journalist writing for The Atlantic.  He has developed a passion for craft beer and occasionally blogs about it.  In the current edition of the magazine, he wrote an article about Jim Koch.  I direct you to it because it's interesting to see non-beer people write about beer.  Fallows did a follow-up piece on his blog, wherein he noted how, despite how superficially unimportant beer is, it has a serious impact.  Fallows has been doing a project for the past year looking at the circumstances and problems confronting small American towns.  Connecting his avocation and vocation, he writes: "I know this seems like a running gag, but quite seriously we've come to think that the locally based, strongly locally branded food-and-beverage outfits we've seen from Maine to Mississippi to South Dakota, are significant business operations and signs of civic health."

Comment:  In the Koch piece, Fallows describes him as a billionaire.  This goes back to a point I have been making for some time: beer is a lucrative business.  The happy warrior Fallows describes is the public version, but Koch, like all billionaires, has managed to succeed through a combination of hard-nosed (and often controversial) business decisions, political acumen, aggressive competition, and periodic collaboration with some competitors.  I don't fault Fallows for anything he wrote except the sepia-toned filter that colors the piece with a promotional gloss.  It's a bit Pravda-esque.


5.  47,000 Articles About Pumpkin Beer

Comment:  I hate pumpkin beer.  

Tricks Wholesalers Use, a Pay-to-Play Follow-up

Earlier this week, Dann Paquette made some pretty incendiary claims about how breweries got tap handles in certain Boston pubs: by paying for them.  After I posted on it, a few people emailed to give some insight into their experiences here.  I know all these people and can vouch they are who they say they are--but for obvious reasons they did not want their names associated with their comments.  I think you'll find it interesting, though.

This first comment, from a brewery sales rep working in OR, WA, ID, and AK, summarizes a lot of what I heard:

Pay to play absolutely exists in mature markets like the northwest but it's not typically found in bars except for high volume accounts with few beer choices. You can imagine even if you could convince a buyer at a bar with a great beer selection to put beer on in exchange for money or gifts it would not make the consumer try your beers. The accounts that do this seem to be closer to stadiums and event centers that have huge crowds that pack a place but are not known for beer selection. If you are one of a few beer handles you will pick up some sales. 

But unlike some markets, where it seems corruption is rampant (the source above added "I went on a trip to Chicago a year ago and could not believe what was being asked of me. Buyers asked to buy two kegs get one free. Bartenders asked for money to push our beer"), it's more nuanced in the Northwest.  This comes from a wholesaler:

We do see some of this in Portland, where if distributors don’t give accounts free T-shirts, glassware, kegs etc. then your beer isn’t on.   I know of one distributor that’ll give an out of date keg to an account for free to sell in another tap handle.  Overall it’s not too bad in Portland (& Oregon in general) but it does happen with certain accounts.  My impression is it’s driven by the accounts asking for free stuff vs. distributors pushing free stuff.

We compete pretty hard in Portland but I’m pretty pleased to say it’s mostly above board.  All the OR distributors sit in the room together at OBWDA meetings and get along for the most part.

There seems to be a fuzzy line where breweries are asked to offer inducements of freebies.  (You can see how that would be good for pub business.) A former rep for a NW brewery added a bit of texture.  (The source asked me to paraphrase his comments.)

Wholesalers aren't allowed to give "items of value" to pubs in OR and WA.  You can give things like information sheets or beer mats, but not leather jackets, neon signs or free kegs.  Interestingly, it is legal to give items to customers--things like glassware, given to pubgoers directly, rather than through the pub.  

He went on to describe a practice that is probably not legal, but would be nearly impossible to police.  He actually witnessed this happen first hand.

A brewery was willing to pay $500 to the distributor's representative if he could move ten kegs of the brewery's beer.  This is legal.  As the promotion was about to end, the distributor had sold only eight kegs.  At the last account, he swung a deal so that he essentially dipped into the promo money and sold the two kegs to the pub for the price of one.  (The pub paid for the two up front, and the distributor shared the cost of the keg later.) 

Writing in comments, The Common's Josh Grgas echoed the same thing:

There is a backward pay to play approach some larger craft breweries have taken. In this case, a brewery will provide a cash incentive to distributor's sales reps for each competitors tap handle they acquire. This type of head hunting has happened in Portland, unfortunately. 

Josh added a comment that illustrates how hard it would be to separate pubs who are corruptible from those who just have random preferences:

Committed lines do happen, but it’s not nefarious like in other areas. A bar manager might stock a certain brewery or distributor based on personal preference, superior service or other intangibles. For example, there’s a bar in NE that almost exclusively stocks a certain distributor because the distributor’s warehouse is located nearby and the staff all drink at the bar after work. 

The upshot: Portland and Oregon are probably pretty clean, but every market is different.  We often talk about the ways in which the three-tiered system is so good at preventing market domination--and it is.  But having an invisible layer in between the producer and retailer also offers an opportunity for hard-to-stop corruption.

"A Whores' Market"

Alan McLeod alerts us to a fascinating story on Esquire.

Source

What’s “pay to play”? It’s when breweries bribe bars under the table to stock their beers and freeze out competition and is, according to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau regulations, an illegal practice. [Pretty Things' Dann] Paquette even dared “name names,” accusing some popular Massachusetts’ joints such as Bukowski’s Tavern and The Lower Depths of accepting this dirty money. Paquette further noted, “Ever heard the term ‘committed lines’? This is what it means. Breweries buy draft lines so their lame beers aren't irrelevant.” He didn’t name any of these “lame” breweries though he hinted at one, saying “Right now one of the hottest newish brewers in MA pays for lines all over the place....”

But, in fact, it’s not just Massachusetts where this is a major issue. In 2010, a Crain’s investigation found that a trendy Chicago hotel bar had been taking payouts and other bribes from a powerful MillerCoors distributor. Deb Carey of New Glarus Brewing went so far as to call the city of Chicago “a whores' market,” noting, “Everyone has a hand out and everyone wants some cash, (free) beer or a discount.”

I have no idea whether this is a real thing or not.  Accusations are not facts.  Much as Dann Paquette is respected by beer geeks, this is nothing but rumor-mongering.  Based on the reactions, I have a strong suspicion it is happening--but I wish Dann had some actual evidence to offer.  The issue is a rich one, and if you want to get a sampling of opinion the issue has sparked, look here. 

I'm interested in informed thought on this, as well as straight-from-the-arse opinion.  I only have the latter, but to get a conversation started, here it is.  Although this practice sounds bad, I wonder how big a problem it actually is, at least in mature markets.  In towns along the West Coast (and I suspect this applies to Boston, too), pubs would be making a poor decision to take uninteresting beers along with a small handout.  The competition among bars is such that those offering anodyne choices aren't going to attract many customers.  It doesn't really matter how much a brewery is paying you under the table if no one's coming to drink your beer.  Seems like the market would be self-correcting.

If anyone has had direct experience with this and wants to chat on or off the record, you can shoot me an email at the_beerax (at) yahoo.com.

Your thoughts?

A Beery Overview of Victoria, BC

A couple weeks back, the fine folks at Tourism Victoria invited me to visit their fine city to see what I thought about their fine beer scene.  (Full disclosure: they paid for the trip, but I selected the breweries to visit and was left to follow my bliss while I was there.)  I wish I could do this for every major city in North America: it is so interesting.  Every town has different rhythms, different interests, and the vibe of the beer scene always has a particular local flavor.  Some towns are better than others beerwise, though, and Victoria, after a couple decades of inaction, has really started to blossom.  In today's post, I'll give you an overview of the city and the state of beer, and then I'll follow up with some in-depth posts later this week.

Bend by the Sea?
There are some ways in which Victoria reminds me of Portland: it's a small, insular town that has a bigger, more famous city nearby; it simultaneously knows it's one of the prettiest, coolest towns there is, but also a little anxious because the rest of the world may not realize it.  But even more, it reminds me of a different Oregon town--Bend.  The metro area is 350,000 people, but Victoria proper--the place where all the breweries are--is just 80,000 people.  No city can touch the density of breweries Bend has;  Victoria, with ten breweries, ain't too shabby, though.  Like Bend, the downtown area is compact and walkable, and you can stroll pretty easily from brewery to brewery.  And like Bend, the quality is high across the board (with one exception--Canoe--but I'll get to that in a later post).

Unlike high-desert Bend, though Victoria is all about water.  Locals are keenly aware that they live on an island (one of the Canadian-subtle ways of digging Vancouver is by referring to it as " the mainland").  The town is built around a harbor with geometry like interlocking triangles; because of he way the harbor zigs and zags, you have the sense of water all around you.  Sea planes from Seattle and Vancouver glide in and let travelers off downtown; sea taxis shuttle people from one side of town to the other.  Smaller boats glide across the inner harbor, and giants loom on the horizon.

In terms of the physical city, Victoria definitely feels like a West Coast city--I recognized Astoria in some places, Seattle in others--but also has a strong European quality.  The Parliament buildings have a distinctly British flavor, as does the famous Empress Hotel.  The scale of the streets, the ease of walking around, the ready availability of pubs--these elements reminded me of some of the small English towns I've visited. (It doesn't hurt that there's a giant gothic statue of the namesake queen overlooking the inner harbor.)


Beer Styles and Trends
Victoria was one of the first places in North America to get a brewery when Spinnaker's opened in 1984.  They created the palate for the first generation of Victorians: English-style ales, served on cask.  Five years later, Swan's opened up and followed suit.  (Vancouver Island Brewing, older than Swan's, didn't move into Victoria proper until 1995.)  Call this the first layer of sediment in the Victorian soil. Another batch of breweries opened up about fifteen years later--Lighthouse, Canoe, Phillips--and they moved the city into what you might call "standard craft."  The pales, browns, wheats, and IPAs that persisted until the aughts, when breweries started to branch out and find their individual voices. 

The final group came up in the latest wave of breweries in the last five years.  Second- or third-gen breweries (how long is a brewery generation?), they make the kind of beers we associate with 2014--experimental and hoppy beers.  They are also the breweries that make the most noise in the geek media, led by Driftwood (2008), Moon Under Water (2010, relaunched 2012), and Hoyne (2011). 

I think it's worth knowing about these different layers of sediment, because as you're wandering in and out of pubs, you encounter each one, preserved as if in amber.  This is different from cities south of the border, where the breweries tend to all be pulled together in certain directions.  If you visit breweries, you may find older styles of beer still in production, but walk into a pub, and you'll get a sense of the trends of the moment.  In Victoria, though, you might find a classic English-style bitter or a saison or a super-hopped IPA.  And unlike the US, it seems that when it says "English-style," a brewery means it.  You will find a balanced ale with rich malt character and only modest hopping--not a hoppy fireball that may have been made with Maris Otter.


I wouldn't want to predict which styles will be popular in five years--things are volatile and evolving--right now there are three types of beers I kept finding over and over again: super bitter IPAs (a stable variety), light, Saaz-hopped lagers (a growing style), and balanced cask ales (declining).  There are distinctive features to these styles, too.

The IPAs taste like American versions did in about 1999.  They are cuttingly bitter and buttressed very little by late-addition flavor and aroma hops.  The first two or three places I went, I thought this might be exceptional, but it turned out not to be.  These beers are not considered especially bitter and are brewed the way people expect.  As I smacked and choked after sips of these IPAs, Victorians looked on placidly, as if their tongues weren't dissolving.

A (successful) beggar at Fisherman's Wharf

The second trend, which contrasts quite a bit from the first, are these lovely little 5% lagers everyone seems to make.  They're a hybrid between German and Czech brewing, with the soft, grainy malts of German pilsners, but the deeply saturated, tangy flavor of Saaz hops.  Unlike the IPAs, these aren't bitter--they have loads of Saaz flavor, but run around 30 BUs or less.

The English/cask ales round out the regular offerings, though they are confined more to the breweries that make them.  They are brewed classically and taste almost wholly English: light esters, aromatic, rounded malts, gentle herbal-to-fruity hops.  The one thing I found at both Swan's and Spinnaker's  was a subtle flavor I've never encountered in a beer.  I wrote down "whisky" for lack of a better word--intense maltiness and a hint of peat (not smoke, peat).  I have no idea where it comes from, but it's quite a treat.

You can, of course, get a range of other beers there (we encountered two or three Earl Gray IPAs).  As in the US, the breweries are experimenting with style, ingredient, and method.  Barrel-aging is less common, but coming on.  Saisons are still rare, but appearing more and more.  So far, none of these have become local standards yet--but things are happening fast.

In terms of beer, Victoria is blossoming.  There's a lot of excitement about beer, and it's permeating the whole city.  A few of the breweries are production-only, and when we visited (Sally was along for the ride), troops of growler-toting fans filed through.  They were young and old, male and female--a cross-section of the city.  The brewers are watching beer spike in popularity and are full of excitement about what comes next.  Oh, and this is interesting, too: despite their proximity to Vancouver and Seattle, the town that seems to most inspire the breweries there is Portland.  Rose City beers were far more common than Seattle beers, and the brewers regularly referenced Porltand as a model.

More to come as I get into the specific breweries.

Cider Sunday: Gorge Cyder House, Rack and Cloth

It is that time of year again: the annual Portland Nursery apple tasting (this weekend and next), trips to local pumpkin patches for the October jack-o'-lantern, and treks down the Gorge for freshly-harvested apples and pears.  If you're doing that latter activity--and you should, it's fantastic this time of year--make time to stop into one or three of the local cideries that have cropped up there in the past few years.  They're so new that most people aren't even aware they exist.  Not only do they exist, but they're set up with nice little tasting rooms that make a perfect pit stop. 


Gorge Cyder House
oVino Market, 1209 13th Street (in the Heights) 
Hood River

To the extent anyone knows about the Gorge Cyder House, they're probably confusing it with the Gorge White House--a different cidery.  The entire operation exists in a space the size of a pantry in the back corner of a little wine deli in the upper part of Hood River.  And yet despite this modest set-up, cider-maker Stefan Guemperlein is managing to produce some of the best American ciders I've tasted. 

Guemperlein grew up in Bavaria, where his father made cider non-commercially.  He mentions this mainly as an afterthought; at the time, it didn't capture his imagination.  Instead, a trip to Northern Italy sparked his first love--wine.  He started as a self-taught winemaker, and a few years after opening oVino, the wine deli, decided to expand to cider.

Guemperlein doesn't own his own orchards, and so buys local apples, and "99% are table apples."  He favors Jonagold and also uses Newtown Pippin, Braeburn, and some heirloom varieties when he can get them.  It's the process that makes his ciders special: he uses natural fermentation and lets his ciders develop over the course of a year.  Following the rhythm of the year, he presses in the fall and begins fermentation, which takes a month.  After racking the cider, it slowly develop over the spring and summer. 

"Both slow esters and fruit emerge," Gumperlein says, but it's fermentation that creates the most flavor.  The apples themselves are aromatic, giving some forest floor, but they are simple and appley.  Natural fermentation gives the ciders a richer, earthier aroma and add peach and cherry fruit notes.  Gorge Cyder makes three standard ciders, plain apple, hopped, and a cyser (honey cider).  Of the three, Lost Lake Honey is the real stand-out.  It has a lot of black pepper up front and then turns distinctly almondy.  It's full-bodied and strong (7%), but finishes crisply. 

Great ciders, and a hidden gem in Hood River.


Rack and Cloth
1104 First Ave.
Mosier, OR

Source

No one will blame you if you can't remember where Mosier is.  A little pocket of activity about five miles east of Hood River, Mosier's the kind of place you skip unless you have a reason to go there.  There is a stretch of downtown, though, and along it you'll find a pretty little building that looks like it might have been a coffee shop once.  That's the Rack and Cloth Mercantile, and it was a coffee shop until Silas Bleakley and Kristina Nance turned it into a focal point for the fruits of their farm.

"We're trying to do closed-loop farming," Bleakley explained.  At the Mercantile, you get more than just cider.  Silas and Kristina have an expansive farm, and the food they serve is made from their farm.  As we were chatting, Kristina sliced up fresh veggies and cheese.  The menu follows the seasons.  "We don't make the sauce for the pizza until the tomatoes are ripe," he said. 

This is the approach Bleakley takes into his cider-making.  "It goes beyond cider--it's farming."  Visitors who stopped in for a pint this summer recognized the downside to this approach; last year's stocks were running low so there was a limited amount available each day.  Once the sixth barrel had blown, they were out of cider.  (This year production will triple.)  Bleakley has a background in winemaking, and it's evident in the sophisticated ciders he produces.  The main cider is an elegant, sophisticated cider called Stony Pig.  It reminds me a lot of a pinot gris.  It's acidic and dry and marked by bright fruit flavors of peach and apricot.  There's a vein of minerality that adds a quenching quality.

The nearby farm had a few trees left over, but Bleakley planted two acres in 2008 (he now has 2.5).  "You have to know your fruit," he said, before pointing out the cultivars: Johnagold, Winesap, wild crab.  "Cox's Orange Pippin is my favorite, hands down."  He divides the early harvest into halves and ferments on wood and steel, then blending back in and aging on steel.  There is an actual rack-and-cloth press, and it will be located on a new cidery building near the hundred-year-old farmhouse.  The second harvest goes into wood and ages more slowly.  (It's pretty common that orchardist-cider makers to try to get an early vintage out right after the harvest.) 

Bleakley is never going to make a lot of cider (he referred to Rack and Cloth as an "estate cidery"), so the surest way to try the cider--along with Guemperlein's, the best in the valley--is to trek to the little shop in downtown Mosier.  It's well worth the trip.

Locals and Tourists

My latest All About Beer post is up--a survey of five Prague pubs to visit that will get you up to speed on the current moment in Czech brewing.  This is how I framed my choices:

But if you happen to have the good fortune to visit you’ll find one of the easiest cities in the world to navigate, a feast for the eyes and surprisingly cheap travel. And within two days, the scales will have fallen from your eyes and your entire understanding of Czech beer will have blossomed.

In any town with as many drinking holes as Prague, there is always going to be room for disagreement.  And indeed, on Facebook, a Praguer (please tell me residents of Prague are Praguers) lodged his complaints:

U Fleku is full of tourists. Which is not always a bad thing. But in this case it's full of tourists because no locals would ever go there. The single beer they serve is nice enough, but it's ridiculously overpriced, and totally not worth the money...

Strahov is okay for a brief visit on the way past, but again, overpriced because only tourists really go there, and they don't care about the price because they're happy to pay for the experience of drinking beer which is supposedly brewed to an ancient monk memory...

This raises an interesting division between what locals and tourists value.  It's an especially sharp divide in Prague, which is perpetually awash in tourists and where the standard beer, so commonplace to locals, is new and rare to visitors.  (And where, ironically, the more exotic beer--IPAs, stouts, sour beer--is fairly old hat to American beer geeks.)   The reality is, the needs of locals and tourists differ.

As much as tourists to a country want to be in the know and want to avoid tourist traps, a certain amount of that is critical.  You must understand the basics before you can get a feel for the subtleties. The first time I went to Prague, I skipped U Fleku because of its reputation as ground zero for tourists.  But it's ground zero for a reason!  The brewery has been there since 1499, which makes it far and away one of the oldest in the world.  Perhaps even more impressive, the dark lager has been brewed there roughly the same way and to the same formulation, since the year after Josef Groll first brewed Pilsner.  For obvious reasons, locals probably don't frequent a place with just one beer and throngs of tourists; that doesn't mean beer geeks should skip it, too.

It's possible some people visit Strahov because of a silly invented story, but I guess I'm immune to those.  Trying to embroider a brewery's rep with ecclesiastical thread is so common I always tune it out.  The reason to go is for the beer.  Locals may despair at the price, but once you've spent thousands of dollars to travel half way around the globe, you're not about to let the marginal expense of a pint dissuade you.  As someone who chafes over the price of Rogue and the McMenamins in Portland, I get why price is a relevant factor for locals.  It's just not a reasonable objection for the tourist. 

All of this comes to mind in part because I'm about to start writing about the beer and beer scene in Victoria, BC.  It will necessarily be an outsider's perspective: I'm an outsider.  But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.  It's okay to try to cover the basics when you visit a new town, to try to interpret things for those who have a baseline of zero experience back home. But Praguers and Victorians (another great demonym) will have to forgive me.

Anyway, go check out the piece at All About Beer if you missed it.

I Don't Think This Is Right

I finally got around to reading Greg Engert's Esquire piece this morning.  He makes an argument that we shouldn't valorize local beer just because it's local.  I'm not particularly persuaded by his overall point (though I really wish people drank a lot more imported beer than they do), but it's plausible.  This, however, struck me as dead wrong:

All too often, when locally brewed beer gains prominence, a uniformity of offerings ensues. Bars, restaurants, and retail shops begin to showcase a similar roster of breweries and flavor profiles. These lists are often hop-heavy based on the standard session IPA, pale ale, IPA, and Imperial IPA.

One of the problems in assessing this statement is that I don't live everywhere.  It's absolutely not the case in Portland.  Whether you walk into restaurant with four tap handles or a beer bar like Apex, you're going to be offered a range of beer styles.  I just recently went on a whirlwind tour of Victoria, BC--not true there, either.  In the smattering of restaurants and pubs I've visited in Maine and Massachusetts, not true.  When locally-brewed beer gains prominence, more people are drinking it, which means there's more variety in the market. 

But that's just my experience. Can anyone point to a place where a burgeoning beer scene reduces variety?  I'd like to hear about that.

Chalkboard at the Hop and Hound, Bothell, WA

Book Reviews: Creative Writing With Evan Rail, Max Bahnson, and Alan McLeod

The world of readin' and writin' has been in flux for about a decade now.  The gatekeeper model--print magazine, paper, and book publishers--has broken down.  That means writers now have a more direct avenue to reach readers--one they've happily seized for shorter forms.  In the beer world, the leading pioneer has been Evan Rail; just less than three years ago, he put out Why Beer Matters on Kindle, and suggested that there might be an alternative to the New York publishing mafia.

The emergence of digital publishing has had two important effects.  Books always needed to be a certain length to justify a cover price that paid for an author, several editors, an art department, and a marketing team needed to sell them.  When you're publishing your own pieces directly, you can sell them for a dollar or few, which means they can be short.  Why Beer Matters is just 22 pages long--way too short for a regular book, but too long for a blog post.  In many cases, this frees up an author to either tackle a subject that would never have justified a book, or to skip the inevitable padding needed to fatten up a regular book.  The second benefit is that it also frees up the author--for the same reasons--to try something less obviously commercial and marketable.  We have two recent examples that I've been meaning to review here: Evan Rail's latest, The Brewery in the Bohemian Forest, and The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer by Alan McLeod and Max Bahnson.

___________

The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer
Kindle/Digital only, 149 pages, $4 

We have to start this review, as with all reviews, with Steven Soderbergh.  Back in 1997, he released a movie you may have missed called Schizopolis.  Schizopolis was weird.  It was aggressively noncommercial.  It looked like a student project.  It eventually made a whopping ten grand at the box office (12,000th all time!)  I went to a screening in Portland, and Soderbergh answered questions afterward.  They were mainly of the "what the hell ...?" variety.  It turned out that he had reached a kind of creative exhaustion.  Following Sex, Lies, and Videotape, he made a series of meh big-company movies, and the grind of working in the Hollywood mode drained him of the will to make movies.  He needed a chance to hit the reset, to have 100% control and make a cinematic primal scream.  No one has ever seen Schizopolis, but the movies that followed--Out of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brokovich, and Traffic--are among the best four-movie runs in history. 

The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer is a literary Schizopolis.  The authors are two bloggers you probably know if you read Beervana much: Max Bahnson and Alan McLeod.  They share a distaste for beer boosterism and, even more, dislike how that boosterism interferes with what they see as beer's true joy--the simple pleasures of drinking it and sharing it with friends.  That's a heterodox view in the beer-writing world, and the form Alan and Max chose to express it is nearly as weird as Schizopolis: a fictive dialogue between the two shared in various fictive settings.  Thomas Hardy gets quoted; Beckett gets alluded to (I think).  There's a fragment from Alexander Pope.  In one chapter, we get stage direction and a script.  There are direct message exchanges and Twitter exchanges. 

All of these techniques are harnessed to give voice to a cri de coeur aimed at the myriad offenses of beer geeks.  They don't want to give us a didactic, reasoned argument, they want to give spleen.  The effect is curious:

While Alan looked for the opener, Max picked the bottle to study the back label. Other than the ABV% there was not much that he considered very useful information. It wasn’t until he took a second look at the front label that he noticed the two words: “Imperial Pilsner”.

“F'ing 'Imperial Pilsner'! The ‘style’ born by ignorance and plain stupidity. You brought me here for this?" Alan shrugged in reply. "A bock with more hops and less sense. Don’t you have anything else?” Max continued, complaining, holding the bottle with one hand and his head with the other. With a shrug Alan gave him the opener and let the man do the honours. The Argentine made a big show of sniffing the beer, taking a short sip, he rolled it in his mouth, gargled a bit and declared with mocked solemnity, “not true to style.”

It is actually the didactic argument, but placed in fictional settings--in a work absent any of the usual trappings of fiction, like plot, climax, or denouement.  If you read it either to hear the argument or to be entertained by the settings, though, I think you miss the point.  The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer is a howl, a primal expression.  You are meant to understand the writers' emotion, not pay close attention to their words. Their real point is implicit and concealed--the joy of beer is in the negative space between the words.

As a work, it is aggressively noncommercial.  No publisher on the planet would have touched it.  But that's what makes it a fascinating artifact of the modern age.  I'm not sure who the audience is or how big it is, but for the souls who find pleasure and solace in this work suffice it to say they have little recourse elsewhere.  This is a strange, singular book.


The Brewery in the Bohemian Forest
Kindle/Digital-only, 60 pages, $3.

Evan Rail's contribution is much less mystifying.  Although it is ostensibly a story about Kout na Šumavě, a mysterious, remote Bohemian brewery, it's really a memoir describing a person's relationship to beer.  In this way, it shares something with Unbearable Nonsense.  Evan is more conventionally excavating his own experience to learn what it is, really, that brings beer alive in his life.  Beer is oddly intimate, and Evan uses his interaction with Kout to slowly reveal why.

Evan is one of the beer world's real writing stars.  His prose sings, and as with any good memoir, it's the story that draws the reader in.  There's a central plot point that he uses like a spine to support the body of his story, and in the following short passage, you can get a sense of how he sets up his page-turner:

“Trash still carpeted the furnace room when they arrived, the light coming in through windowless frames and the empty spaces where rusty hinges would have creaked and grated, if only the doors had remained. Around the old steam furnace, thick layers of plaster had cracked open, presumably with the heavy frosts of the previous winters, and the strata of stucco that had been built up around the furnace as insulation lay open and exposed. One of the layers, however, glowed just slightly differently: instead of brick or stone, it looked more like fabric, or even papyrus. The men brushed away the mortar and paint, scratching their own coarse fingers on the equally coarse rocks and crystals in the plaster. Eventually, enough of it gave way, and they were able to remove a thick book that must have been waiting there for many decades, disguised in the thickness of the wall.”

There's a chapter on Anthony Bourdain that doesn't really work and could be skipped entirely, but otherwise, it's a little gem of a book. We are attracted to a lot of lesser things in life--our favorite baseball team, a hobby, movies or video games--but so few of them rouse an emotional response like beer does.  The Brewery in the Bohemian Forest goes a long way to explaining this, at least for one person.  It's the first release of what will apparently be a series of similar pieces in a "Beer Trails" series--and it's a great start.

_____________

For different reasons, neither of these works would have existed ten years ago.  Evan's book is too short, and Max and Alan's is too odd.  But both deserve a chance to find an audience, and I hope they do.  The more diversity we have available for readers, the better.  And as a bonus, little works like this can be had on the cheap--less than the price of a pint.

GABF Analysis: Five States Won Half the Medals

Last update, next day.  Two very interesting analyses came out today that are FAR more interesting than what you'll find here.  Both incorporate the numbers of beers entered per state, which make for a much richer and more accurate picture.  Stats geeks (and Oregon homers) will love them--they're sort of like the sabermetrics of beer.

• Geoff Kaiser uses stats to produce a "medal ratio."   Cool because it shows how many beer entries each state had (962 for CA versus just 214 in WA, for example).
• Brewers Association economist Bart Watson crunches the numbers differently and incorporates the different levels of difficulty in winning different categories.  That gives each state an "expected medal count" and actual medal count.

___________

Update, 11:55 am: Geoff Kaiser posted an incredibly interesting--and potentially revealing--comment about the number of breweries pouring at the GABF.  His figures are probably a lot closer to representing the number of entries per state.  It could explain a lot.

___________

As you are probably aware, the Great American Beer Festival concluded this weekend, keyed by the announcement of the annual awards and a storm of joyful tweets.  As usual, I tuned in to see how the locals did, delighted to see some impressive and unexpected results.  Tiny Arch Rock Brewery in Gold Beach took home a gold in the kellerbier category.  (You first read about that brewery and that beer--" the lager, predictably my favorite, is a rustic, slightly hazy beer more in the Czech tradition than German"--right here on Beervana.)  Barley Brown's once again demonstrated dominance in the hoppy categories (CDA, international pale ale, and gold in fresh-hop), and Portland's own Breakside took honors with a gold in the most coveted of awards, American-Style IPA (a fest-record 279 entries).

My own homerism got me thinking: how are medals distributed?  This was the first year in which a new registration system that vastly expanded access to the Fest.  In 2013, many breweries applied and were denied entry--and about 700 managed to get beer into the fest.  This year, the Brewers Association made room for up to 1400, and over 1300 submitted beers.  That's actually a huge number--right about half of all breweries in existence at the beginning of the year.  In all, an astounding 5,500 beers were reviewed.

I often whinge about the ever-growing number of categories, which ensure an ever-growing number of medals.  There were something like 273 medals possible, but judges didn't award medals in some categories, and in at least one category--Koyt beer--there were no entries.  (Is this proof that you can have too many categories?  I mean, koyt beer?)  Overall, 268 were awarded, which seems like a lot until you consider that only one medal was awarded for every 20 entries.  (Harvard's acceptance rate was higher.)  Of the 1309 breweries in the competition, just 234 managed to medal (17.9%).

And yet for all that, when you look at the medals awarded by state, you see anything but an even distribution.  We don't have numbers on how many breweries entered per state, so the figures only tell part of the story--but it's quite a story.  Just five states won half the medals, and just two states--Colorado and California--account for almost a third.  This is especially impressive for Colorado, which has less than half as many breweries (180ish) as California (381).  Here are the top ten, which constitute nearly two-thirds of all the medals won; the other 40 states managed to collect just 35%.

To add a bit more detail, here's a list, with the approximate number of total state breweries included (and keep in mind, I have no numbers for how many of the state's breweries actually entered the competition).

Medals Won
CA - 46 (approximately 318 breweries)
CO - 39 (180)
85 cumulative medals (32% of total)

OR - 22 (181)
TX - 16 (96)
PA - 12 (108)
135 cumulative medals (50% of total)

IL - 9 (83)
WA - 9 (200)
NM - 8 (31)
VA - 7 (61)
WI - 7 (90)
175 cumulative medals (65% of total)

Other states receiving at least five medals: MI (6), MN (6), MT (6), NC (6), MD (5), OH (5), UT (5).

I would be leery about over-interpreting these results.  Nevertheless, it's impossible to avoid the conclusion that a very few states seem to be way out in front in terms of making making medal-earning beers.