Hill Farmstead in Photos

I will have to do a fair bit of work before I can give you a proper report on Hill Farmstead, but here's a sneak peak--a photo series on the snowy day I visited eight days ago in remote northern Vermont. Be sure to click the "read more" for more.

The original Hill farmstead

Exterior

The original brewery, dating all the way back to 2010.

Erstwhile Portlander Vasilios Gletsos

Holiday Book-Signing Events Saturday and Sunday

As the incessant thrum of cheery music attests, 'tis the season. If you want to get all your holiday shopping done in one stop, let me suggest two group signings this weekend. Illustrious authors will be in attendance, books and signing pens in hand--and I will be there, too. Come pick up a personalized copy for that beer geek in your life.

Saturday, December 3, 5-7pm - Bazi Bierbrasserie
1522 SE 32nd, PDX
Present at this signing will be Jon Abernathy (Bend Beer), Niki Ganong (The Field Guide to Drinking in America), Brian Yaeger (Oregon Breweries), and Pete Dunlop (Portland Beer: Crafting the Road to Beervana).

Sunday, December 4, 2-5 pm - NWIPA
6350 SE Foster, PDX
At this edition we'll have a similar crew, with myself, Niki Ganong, Brian Yaeger, Jon Abernathy, Steven Shomler (Portland Beer Stories), Matt Wagner (The Tall Trees of Portland and art director for Gigantic Brewing label art), --and possibly more. 

Getcher books this weekend!

The Zoigl Launches

source

When Alan Taylor conceived of Zoiglhaus brewing, it wasn't for the name. In a remote part of Germany, a medieval tradition of communal brewing still hangs on in a few villages. There, locals own a single brewhouse to which they all have access. They go to the brewery, whip up a batch of beer, and take the wort to their homes to ferment. After fermentation, they hang a six-pointed star and invite people to their homes--temporarily restyled as homey pubs--and sell the beer to the public. This was a big part of the inspiration for Zoiglhaus, and this Friday Taylor is launching the first of his Zoigly initiatives. From the announcement:

While you can’t legally sell beer out of your home, you can do the next best thing:  fill up your carboy with freshly brewed wort at Zoiglhaus, take it and a fresh can of yeast home with you to ferment your own beer.  Add dry hops, extra flavorings, or leave it as is.  It’s up to you.  When the beer is done, you can share it with family or friends in the Zoigl spirit.

On December 2nd, Zoiglhaus will brew the first trial batch of ZPA, a hop-focused Pale Ale brewed with all-German ingredients.  The cooled and aerated wort from this brew will be available for purchase between 4 pm and 7 pm.  RSVPs are required, so please call us at 971-339-2374 or drop by the brewery to sign up for this event.

If you don't have a carboy, you can buy them at Zoiglhaus on Friday. The first 30 people to reserve will even get a free dose of Imperial yeast with the carboy. (I'm posting this a bit late, as usual, so that may not be in the cards.) The price of wort if you bring in a five-gallon carboy is $35, which is a pretty typical price for a batch of homebrew. (Five gallons gets you roughly two cases of beer.) Then, a month later:

On January 7th, Zoiglhaus will host the first Zoigl-Wort to Bierfest with a party in the Zoigl-Stube.  All of the participants are welcome to bring in samples of their brew to share with the Zoiglhaus brew staff (apparently they like tasting beer…) as well as the other home brewers.  Each participant will receive a commemorative glass and a free pint of the ZPA on the 7th.  Zoiglhaus is excited to see the creative ideas our fellow brewers come up with!  The People’s Choice will get a free 5 gallon fill of wort at the next Zoigl-Wort event.

I'll give his a shot (it will be a novel experience to begin with a properly-prepared wort), and I'm toying with either something involving fruit, dry hops, a saison yeast strain, or other curious additions. We shall see. Whether I attend the Jan 7 event will depend entirely on how this decision pans out. Seems like a new and fun wrinkle in the expanding tapestry that is Beervana.

The Spontaneous Files: Block 15 Brewing

Other posts in the series: De Garde and Solera

If you ever have a chance to sit with Nick Arzner in Block 15’s new taproom, I highly recommend it. Over the summer I sat with him drinking pints of Gloria!, the new pilsner he’d just released, and literally every person who came in the front doors stopped to chat with him. He greeted them with smiles and warm handshakes and then they traded stories of each other’s families. Nick was born in Oregon and his father coached the South Albany High School swimming team—I had the sense that personal and family connections bound Nick to nearly everyone in Corvallis. My guess is that they enjoy coming to the pub because it’s an affirmation of a local kid done good. I also had the sense that they had absolutely no idea how good that kid had done, or that they were visiting a brewery considered by many to be Oregon’s best.

Block 15 is currently famous for Sticky Hands, its booming double IPA. A half-decade ago, people doted on its stouts with similar affection. I have also considered them one of the premier saison breweries, and I discussed Ville de Provisions in The Beer Bible as one of the few to successfully mesh the expressive flavors of farmhouse and wild yeasts. Less attention is placed on Nick’s spontaneously-fermented ales, but I will happily entertain the argument that they’re his most accomplished beers.

Nick has always found inspiration in European beers, and you find winks and nods to the old countries—but especially Belgium—throughout the Block 15 realm. When he opened a bistro around the corner from the original brewpub, he named it Les Caves—a reference to the pub that sits across the road from Brasserie Dupont. Early on, he released a Belgian pale ale called “Wandelpad,” which referenced a walking path next to the monastery at Westvleteren (the beer itself was an evocation of the monks’ far less famous pale ale). And if you know how the lambic beers around Brussels are made, you might get the reference when you learn his spontaneously-fermented beers are in a line called “Turbulent Consequences.” (Get it? No? Read on.)

Underneath the original brewpub is a honeycomb of smaller and larger chambers that constitute Block 15’s barrel room. On the door of one you’ll find a circle of wood—a barrel head—hand painted with the words “Time does not respect those that do without it.” This is another homage to a similar circle hanging in Cantillon (“Le temps ne respecte pas ce qui se fait sans lui”). Beyond it is the brewery’s coolship, which is both deeper and less wide than typical examples. “When we started this program, I thought we’d just try it and I didn’t expect much out of it,” Nick explained. Hedging his bets, he designed to be extra deep “so we could use it for open ferments” in the case that the spontaneous ferments didn’t pan out.

Fortunately for all, they did.

Unlike Trevor Rodgers at De Garde, who has developed a new mashing regime for his spontaneous ales, Block 15 goes through the traditional, laborious mashing process. “We do it with a nod to the classical beers in the sense of sweating our asses off with a turbid mash and throwing in aged hops, and letting our environment do the work.” The turbid mash is a throwback to a time when local Belgian jurisdictions taxed breweries based on the size of their mash tuns, creating an irresistible incentive to keep them as small as possible. In order to work around undersized mash tuns, breweries developed convoluted mashing systems that survive among the lambic makers—and a few Americans who prize tradition. (It also prepares a wort that will feed Brettanomcyes for months or years as the beer ages.) Turbid mash, Turbulent Consequences—now you see the reference.

Nick begins with cold water and goes through six steps of pulling off part of the mash, warming it, and returning it to the main mash. The whole ordeal takes six hours. His process of inoculation is similar to lambic-brewing, but differs in a couple ways. He lowers the temperature of the wort a bit before putting it in the coolship, and then instead of leaving it just overnight, he lets it rest for a full 24 hours. There’s a lot of mysticism associated with coolships and their placement, and I consider Block 15’s an asterisk to the whole oeuvre. Rather than elevating it and opening louvers to bring in the currents of the fresh breeze, Block 15’s coolship is down in the cellar, exposed to very little fresh air. I suppose it’s a testament to the cleanliness of the barrel room that this does not introduce any nasty microorganisms, but for whatever the reason, Nick gets gentle, balanced beer from his blend of bugs.

So far, he has largely released fruited versions of these beers, and as we stood next to the (empty) coolship, we sipped on a spontaneous peach beer he’d bottled. I found it wonderfully gentle and approachable. The acidity was restrained, but electrified the peaches, which seemed somehow more intense than a perfectly ripe, sun-warmed fruit ever could. Nevertheless, he surprised me by saying, “if I had to be really critical of the program, I wish it wasn’t so zingy. The more mature my palate gets, the more I like balanced acidity, and in the rest of our programs we can balance them. But I do allow this to express itself. It’s an expression of our, of our, of our…”—he struggled for the right word before ending, with a laugh, on “basement.”

When a brewery works with wild yeast and bacteria, blending becomes a pivotal skill. Different barrels produce different flavors, some fruity, some acidic, some woody, some even harsh. The best wild ales are a product of blending these different elements to create a complex and harmonious beer. “I used to do a lot with taking pH, gravity, but I do it all through sensory now. I don’t give a damn what the pH is or the gravity is; what I care about is: how does the beer taste, how does it smell, how does it feel?” Whether we’re talking about the Turbulent Consequence line or other wild beers, this is where Nick really shines. Blending is something like cooking, knowing how flavors will work together, and for Nick it appears instinctive. It probably also takes a bit of steely pragmatism: some of the spontaneous beer just isn’t good. Up to 20% of these beers don’t make the cut and end up in the drain. Such is the risk when you turn your wort over to nature.

We tend to think of spontaneous beers as products entirely of what happens in the coolship, but I’ve now heard from a couple people that there’s more to it than that. Frank Boon has his pilsner malt prepared to his own specifications. Nick doesn’t go that far, but like Boon he disputes that everything happens in the coolship. “That can’t be true. For our spontaneous ferment we use Rahr white wheat—that’s my wheat. If you use whatever—unmalted wheat—it’s different. That’s a difference right there, and it’s gotta come through in the end regardless of what’s going on down here [in the coolship]. So then, can you separate those things, the way I do my turbid mash, which is going to be different than the way anyone else does a turbid mash. How much of that translates to this barrel? Some, there’s got to be some.” I told him about Boon’s specially-malted pilsner malt and he agreed. “So if Boon were to come here and brew here and bring his pilsner malt and use his techniques, his beer wouldn’t taste the same.”

I suggested that he and Trevor Rogers at De Garde swap breweries for a day, preparing their wort the way they normally do, but fermenting in the opposite location. Would a wort prepared by Trevor in Corvallis taste like a De Garde beer, a Block 15 beer, or something else? A Block 15 wort inoculated in Tillamook? How much is the ingredients, the mash, or the wild yeast and bacteria? It would be a fascinating experiment—and perhaps one day they’ll run it.

In the meantime, watch Block 15’s website for announcements of the Turbulent Consequence line. Block 15 will release a blend of 18-month-old barrels conditioned with cranberries called The Bog on December 3rd.  They are an example of a growing number of spontaneous American ales, and they’re some of the best.

Photo of Block 15's "Respect" sign: The New School

The Changing Market

I will be posting spottily this week--and you will probably be reading in the same mode. However, a Facebook post by Stephen Beaumont has been perking in my brain for the past few days:

US Beer numbers: In 2015, AB InBev & MillerCoors together lost over 4.34 million barrels of volume, equal to about 18% of craft beer market. If trend continues, and the US beer market overall remains stagnant, that makes room for 4 new Sierra Nevadas every year.

And will the trend continue? Yes, unless it accelerates.  Let us consider the trends:

Mass Market Lager: shrinking substantially
Imports: growing
Craft segment: slowing growth
Beer overall: shrinking marginally

All of this makes for an interesting and dynamic marketplace, which is the cause of both interest and (for some) anxiety.

Beer Sherpa Recommends: Bayern Doppelbock

Imagine you were looking out over the 4pm darkening sky as the wind rattled bare tree branches together like dry bones. The cold seeps through the window, creating a pocket of chill around you that won't dissipate until May. What you want is something hearty, smooth, and comforting. There are many ways to chase the damp and dark from your spirits, but none surpasses a mug of doppelbock for pure warming potential.

Now, suppose further that you wanted the kind of doppelbock they drink in Bavaria, in cozy, low-ceilinged pubs. You could pick up an import, but I would like to direct your hand instead to that six-pack of Bayern. Not only is it the best domestic doppelbock I've ever tasted, it may be the best Bavarian one, too.

How can this be? Jürgen Knöller. He is the expat masterbrewer at Bayern, and he's been making this doppelbock in the US for exactly 29 years. And he makes it the way he learned how to brew in Bavaria, which is to say in a way they no longer brew. This is one of my favorite quotes of all time, when Jürgen described to me this strange quirk. It is long, elliptical, and amusing, which seems to be typical for Jürgen. Therefore I'm giving you the whole thing.

“I worked for four different breweries in Germany; of those four three are no longer.  The first one was Brauerei Schiff—‘ship’—and we had a very traditional brewery. We are talking a four-vessel brewhouse with a falloff tank—whatever that is in English—it’s a fifth vessel. It had a cool ship, it was beautiful. I mean, that brewery did about a quarter-million hectoliters. And what happened was the owner died and the widow couldn’t run it and a brewery from Cologne bought it and they kind of ran it in the ground. The next brewery bought it up and I switched to that brewery and the next one bought this one up and I switched to that one.”   

“We did beers there that I have never really seen being brewed anywhere else. Decoction beers, for one thing. They did one beer there, one day I’m gonna do, they called Pils Extra. They were just terrific beers.  \The doppelbock they brewed—they left it in the tank for almost a year. Their doppelbock and their maibock, and that’s what we’re brewing here. Their doppelbock, I mean—I went to school in Munich and we had every Munich bock that was ever brewed, and even then, none of them could come close to what we had.”   

“The next brewery I worked for, it was also a very old brewery, they did a really good one, too. It was from the Roden Brauerei. At the Schiff Brauerei we had Pirator—like a pirate—so we called it Pirator Bock. Anyway, what I did, I took from those two breweries, their doppelbocks. When I was looking at the technology available that I had—basically, what kind of machines do I have and what can those things do? You cannot take a Harley and run Superbike with it. You have to run it like a Harley. So what I did was I looked at the—I still had the formulations and everything of both beers—[and looked at my equipment].”

 “Some American breweries have a hopjack. Well we had a copper tank, vertical, that had a screen bottom like a lauter tun. All we were using was flower hops—and trust me, I have baled those things, 220 pounds those things, some of them were even bigger—and that was on the fifth story. Oh, and by the way, the brewery was five stories up and five stories down into the cellars. That’s where you’re really lean and mean, running up and down stairs all the time, pushing, and lifting and shoveling all day long. So with all those flower hops, we ran the hot wort over that so the hot break would be on top of the flower hops. Then we were running from there into a [long conjunct German word I couldn't catch], next open mash where we were separating out the cold break and cooling it down in the cool ship. Well, the next brewery didn’t have that, but it had some other interesting things.”   

“So then I decided, huh, this is what I have to work with for machines, it’s a fixed parameter, how do I get it across that I come up with the same product with what I got to work with?  That’s what we did. Of all the brewers that were brewing that beer, including myself, there are only three guys that are still alive. I took some of those elements but of course I came up with my own—you look at what you have to work with and decide what you can and cannot do.”

A moment later he added:

“I started brewing beer in 1978; I did my three years as apprentice and got my journeyman’s certificate. I was working for another almost four years and then I got my masters degree--I graduated from Doemans. Now, when we were brewing back in those days back in Germany, I mean the Germans have always been the world-champions in efficiency and over the years—well, put it this way: I’m still brewing the German lager beers from 1985. When you go to Germany you have some of the older breweries that still brew the same way, but the bigger ones certainly don’t do anymore. What’s different between our beers here in general is that they’re all probably a little bit stronger, a little bit darker, whereas in Germany they have gotten a lot lighter.”

After all of this, it hardly matters what I say about the beer, does it? You'll want to try it just because the backstory is so interesting. And you should. For my part, I will add that it makes the Sherpa list not because of the story, but the beer. Good doppelbocks are the rare beer that everyone understands. Novices and experts alike can immediately appreciate them. The flavors are accessible and clear: rich, familiar maltiness shot through with the flavors of bread, caramel, and the barest hint of chocolate. The richness is held in balance by the smoothest, lightest finish you'll ever find in a beer this strong. It's an impossible beer to dislike, and so, so easy to love.


_______________________
"Beer Sherpa Recommends" is an irregular feature.  In this fallen world, when the number of beers outnumber your woeful stomach capacity by several orders of magnitude, you risk exposing yourself to substandard beer.  Worse, you risk selecting substandard beer when there are tasty alternatives at hand.  In this terrible jungle of overabundance, wouldn't it be nice to have a neon sign pointing to the few beers among the crowd that really stand out?  A beer sherpa, if you will, to guide you to the beery mountaintop.  I don't profess to drink all the beers out there, but from time to time I stumble across a winner and when I do, I'll pass it along to you.

Vignette #7, Jim Bicklein (Anheuser-Busch)

Brewer vignettes feature quotes from brewers I picked up in my travels around the world.

 “There are six of these mash vessels per brewhouse, so I have 18 mash vessels. Those mash vessels, because we long-brew Bud Light, right?—we’re in the cooker for three hours—so to maintain that mashing cycle we had to have more mashing vessels. We long-brew the Bud Light. This is designed to make light beers with long brewing mashing cycle for the enzymatic activity to break down the starches. In order for the process to break down the sugars in light beers, it just takes time. In light beer, more of the sugars are being broken down. So for Budweiser a conversion cycle might be about 45 minutes; it’s about 210 minutes for a Bud Light.”

“There’s three brewhouses, six of these apiece, and each brewhouse has two lauter tubs, so we have six lauter tubs and six brew kettles. And that will support about 50-60 brews a day depending on production demands. It’s nice that the brewhouses are broken up, because technically I can do three different products at a time. I’ll mash in a Budweiser, and then I’ll mash in a Bud Light, and then I’ll mash in a Natural Light on the other brewhouse; so that’s commonly how we run.”

(Bicklein here is describing the process at the St. Louis brewery; he was the brewmaster at the time I recorded him in 2013.)

The Spontaneous Files: De Garde Brewing

 Other posts in the series: Block 15 and Solera

This past summer, I got sent on assignment to write a piece for Travel Oregon about breweries using native yeasts. The article didn't allow me to say much about the practices of these breweries, so I'm expanding on what I learned here. 

One of the most interesting breweries in Oregon--and the US for that matter--is a little place nestled in a mist-veiled valley near Tillamook. Named De Garde after the French practice of aging beer ("garde" is something like "lager"), it might have been more appropriate to call it "Wild House" or something, for the signature feature of the brewery is that every beer begins life soaking in the ambient yeasts and bacteria in the brewery's cool ship. It is no longer wildly uncommon for breweries to make spontaneously-fermented beers or even to have an on-site coolship. But rare is the brewery that exclusively makes them. I visited last August and had a wonderful tour with Trevor Rodgers, one half of the dynamic duo who run things (along with his wife, Linsey), and learned quite a bit about their practices.

Brewery
Most of the excitement happens later in the process, but building a wort that can nurture wild yeast and bacteria is a critical first step. “Our brewhouse is very rudimentary, a dual-kettle system, indirect fire [system],” Trevor explained. “We’re looking for a very starch- and protein-rich wort for a lot of our beers. For the base for that particular beer, the lambic-inspired base, we want a lot of starch and a lot of protein coming.”

In Belgian lambic-making, brewers do this long, complicated process called a "turbid mash." The goal is to create a nutrient-poor wort that is rich in dextrins and starches. Lambics go through a strangely bipolar ferment. At first, brewers are trying to inhibit things ("things" begin the harsher spoilage bacteria that can ruin a wort) and encourage a slow but healthy initial ferment. But they also want to leave something for the Brettanomyces to chew on later in the process. So it's a starve-the-now-and-feed-them-later approach.

Trevor started experimenting with turbid mashes, but switched to a radical approach that left my jaw hanging open when he described it. He trotted by the process so quickly I had to back up a few sentences and ask him to repeat what he does now. Since it is so unusual, he asked that I not broadcast it to the world, but ask about it if you visit the brewery. Now that De Garde has had a chance to see what longer-aged beer does with the wort, Trevor's satisfied that it is a fine substitute for the traditional approach. (We don't want to get too deeply into the weeds, but that "traditional" approach originally emerged from the way local jurisdictions taxed breweries, so it's reasonable to think alternate methods might be fine for creating the right kinds of worts.)


Inoculation

Most places on the planet are not suited for year-round spontaneous fermentation. During the summer, the temperatures are too high and the wort spends too long in a microbe-friendly warmth. During the summer there are also more microbes about. The result is spoilage, and it was so common that Europeans didn't brew during the summer (and many local governments banned it). Tillamook, by contrast, is one of those places that never gets very warm, so De Garde is a 12-month brewery. “That’s why we pursued the Oregon Coast—as the likely place to have success, given that it is temperate year-round.” Indeed, I visited not long after the hottest day ever recorded in Tillamook, and it still got down to 52 (11 C) overnight. (They didn't brew that day.) But neither does it get icy in the winter; it's a perfect Goldilocks zone of just-right.

A lot of the romance of spontaneous fermentation is vested in the activity of the coolship, but we know more about wild yeasts now, and realize this is only one part of the process. Trevor emphasized that point to me:

“I think there’s a misconception that all the beer’s inoculation is coming from the air, from outside, whereas realistically, most of the inoculates are coming from the brewhouse environment itself. What we look for is a resupply of enteric bacteria from the outside environment because they don’t do as well in even a modestly clean brewhouse environment. They’re essential to get complexity of character. Those early off, you know phenols and characteristics that are undesirable are later broken down and reformulated into something that’s a lot more pleasant and complex. You can get sacch, brett, lacto, and pedio from the brewhouse environment, but you need refreshment regularly coming through.”

Aging
De Garde is located in a large industrial building, the majority of which is dedicated to barrel storage. It's so large, in fact, that De Garde can afford to keep the barrel stacks low for a more consistent temperature. Again, Tillamook's location is perfect for this: it is consistently 55-60 degrees (13-16C) in the warehouse, which requires no climate control (except the coastal breeze). As we stood in the barrel room, I tried to lure Trevor into talking about his approach and philosophy, which is so critical to making these beers. His answer surprised me.

“Our biggest challenge as a natural, wild brewer is to restrain acidity. It’s going to be there, and you need some for the complexity, but it needs to be in balance. It’s like the hops arms race—we are in that phase. The demand for sour beer makes people think sour is good. Like hops are good; bitterness is good. But that shouldn’t be the defining feature of a beer. It should be an element that is essential to produce complexity—not the element defining the beer.”

For me, this is actually the most important element of De Garde's house palate. When the first De Garde beers were released, they weren't restrained at all; some were viciously tart. But recently they have come into remarkable harmony. It's actually no surprise that it's taken the brewery a little time to dial these in--it's a bigger surprise that they managed to do it so fast.


Trevor continued:

“We’re not masters of anything. We make wort, we don’t make beer. That’s very different; we’ve relinquished control for the most part. The one thing we do control is what goes into the barrel, and what gets blended from the barrel. But even after that, because it’s naturally reconditioned in the keg and bottle, you have zero control. I didn’t have any gray hairs when I started,” he said with a laugh (I still didn't see too many). “The taste from that barrel, the complex Brettanomyces interaction, the gentle acidity, you can’t replicate that by adding ingredients into beer, by pitching five dozen different strains of Brettanomyces—it takes a natural interaction.”

De Garde makes  a number of different kind of beers, from their shorter-aged "Berliner weisses" (which are unlike others of their kind), saisons, aged beers and aged fruit beers. My favorites are the ones that have been aged longer and have more layered complexity. They share a similar configuration of flavors you find in Belgian lambics, but they would never be mistaken for them. I don't know what role the native yeasts and bacteria play in this, or whether it has to do with that strange mashing regime or the way they're aged or what, but they are singular. Perhaps one day we will speak of a "coastal" terroir.

Tillamook's about an hour and a half drive from Portland, which make for an ambitious beer outing. The drive is beautiful, though, and if you like complex, balanced, barrel-aged wild ales, it's well worth the time.

The History of Beer is Political

When I give talks on beer, I usually pin them to national tradition. Wine, a similar fermented beverage, is a product of the grape, of agriculture. Beer is a constructed beverage, like cuisine, and is a product of culture. What is culture? I give examples: local ingredients, history, tax laws, famine, war, and those ineffable preferences that make Germans prefer schweinshaxe and the French Coq au vin.

The first Belgian brewery I ever toured was Palm (long story), and I heard a story there that was repeated in visits to breweries elsewhere in the country. The brewing equipment dated to around 1920, even in breweries that were decades or centuries older than that. The reason? During WWI, Germans harvested the metal for munitions.

Post-WWI

The Czech Republic is another fascinating case study. The breweries there are retro; they are all designed around a four-vessel decoction system, which is by law the way one must make any beer called "Czech beer." They often have antiquated equipment like grants. In neighboring Bavaria, where decoction was invented, many modern breweries have abandoned the practice and it will someday be considered a rustic, old-fashioned exception, not the rule that defines lager-brewing. The reason? The former Czechoslovakia was for much of the 20th century an occupied land, and the innovations that visited breweries elsewhere skipped Plzeň and České Budějovice.

Exactly 500 years ago, a Bavarian Duke passed a law mainly concerned with price regulation, but which included a rider designed to protect the wheat supply of local bakers. Today, in a unified Germany, that law has radically shaped the way Germans brew--affecting beer styles, ingredients, and brewery design. The British government had a similar restrictive law in the 19th century, one that changed in 1880 and allowed brewers to use sugars and unmalted grain in their beer. That eventually led breweries in Ireland to include roasted (and unmalted) barley in their grists--an ingredient now considered the most distinctive element in Irish stout.

As a onetime political blogger, I often contrast the experience to writing about beer with the axiom "politics divide; beer unites." And interpersonally, this is undoubtedly true. In front of the taps, we are all on the same team. (Yay, beer!) But politics have had an enormous effect on the way beer, this cultural fixture, develops and evolves. Rarely in the US have national politics had much to do with the world of beer. After the rise of small breweries in the 1980s, a few laws were tweaked, but most of the serious change took place (or didn't) at the state level. But that doesn't mean they can't.

The election of Donald Trump may not change things much--all we can do now is guess at what his policies will be. But the GOP is almost certain to gut environmental regulations to address climate change. This could have very serious consequences, and not least for brewers who depend on both water-intensive crops and water itself for their livelihood (and it's why so many brewers, from Hopworks to Carlsberg, are focused on the issue). His economic policies may affect people up and down the economic ladder--and the economy as a whole. Foreign policy rarely affects breweries--until, as in the case of those Belgian breweries, it does.

I won't be getting into public policy on this blog unless it directly affects the beer industry--and I hope therefore never to get into public policy on this blog. But it's worth mentioning, on a week in which it at least feels like we've had a political earthquake, that elections do matter. And they can affect things as remote and unconcerned with politics as beer. We know this because the beers we drink were in so many ways shaped by politics, near and distant. The history of beer is a political one.

Be well, you all--

Still Processing

Content will resume shortly. I'm still processing the election and I'm finding it hard to focus on beer (except the drinking-of-it part, which is getting a fair amount of my attention).

Source: Robert Jones

Update. In the meantime, you can read this article I wrote for Travel Oregon that apparently just went live: The Terroir of Beer.

What we’re talking about is risky beer making — because obsessive and fastidious brewers must give up a little bit of their influence. If the paradigm of modern brewing is control, this is exactly the opposite. But for those willing to invite nature into the brew house, the result is a unique taste of place.

Go check it out.

Pick Your Poison

When I was 16 years old, driver's license burning a hole in my pocket and all flush with a bad, nerdy case of early-onset political junkyitis, I jumped in the old yellow Karmann Ghia with my friend Steve and we went election-night party-hopping. This was 32 years ago, in Salt Lake City. As such, the scene at the Democratic party site was dismal. The main floor had already drained of activity, and hardcore politicos retired to smaller rooms around the fringe of the hotel's ballroom. (For the youngsters, let me just say that '84 was not a good year for team blue.) In those smaller rooms, we espied rumpled Dems sagging in overstuffed chairs, highball glasses and cigarettes in hand. It was a sordid and depressing scene, and no good advertisement for the wonders of booze.

Next we went to the Republican headquarters, located in a nicer hotel. The ballroom there was flush with people. They were all better-dressed, all wearing toothy smiles on their faces. It was Utah, so there wasn't a lot of smoking and drinking going on. (Dems, godless as usual, were far more likely to be something other than Mormon; not so the GOP.) I do remember a few people with glasses of wine--though perhaps it was Martinelli's. In any case, the festive mood placed their tipples in a far different light.

Twenty years later, buoyed by totally inaccurate early exits that said John Kerry was going to up-end George W. Bush, I stopped off at a liquor store on the way to a viewing party and picked up a bottle of Lagavulin--fit elixir for a magical evening. (I learned in that election the dangers of confirmation bias and the dangers of inhabiting a bubble of liberals.) When the actual results started coming in and it was clear Kerry was going to have a long night, that fine Islay malt became solace rather than celebration.

Today is election day again, and our quadrennial exercise in democracy is underway. In ballrooms and living rooms and bars across the country, it will end in tears or cheers and almost certainly an alcohol kick. It's funny how booze serves the needs of either group. So go forth and choose--Dem or GOP; beer, wine, or liquor. It's America's big day, and we wouldn't want to miss the chance to bless it with something potent.

Don't forget to vote--

Visualizing Beer Styles

How to see the relationships between beer styles. This is a puzzle I've toyed with since 2011, when I was working on the Beer Bible. There's a feature in the book in which, near the end of each style chapter, a sidebar offers other close styles for people to try ("If you like pale ale, try..."). What I discovered was that the flavors of beer styles don't necessarily match the national tradition or broad category (ales and lagers, say). Maibocks and French bière de gardes are very similar, for example.

Over the weekend, I tried yet another version of this (you have been spared earlier versions). It is not a beautiful infographic, because I'm a writer, not a visual design guy. And there's no way to pull this off in two dimensions without overly simplifying it. As a consequence, it will never be a fully immersive and complete way to think about beer styles. People will recognize that "neutral" and "expressive" yeasts correspond to ales and lagers, but the latter terms don't tell you what their flavor differences are. So it seemed to make sense to describe them on the flavor continuum on which they actually run. Have a look (and click to enlarge):

Irish stout, for example, doesn't work so well because it has nearly equal intensities of hop and malt.  You can't very well average the two, since both flavors are pronounced (compared to, say, helles), so I was forced to choose. Most styles do fairly well on the chart, though, I think. This seems better than some of the beeriodic tables and various other visualizers I've seen.

Thoughts?

Why Pubs Don't Do House Beers

A quick follow up on Friday's post about The Commons doing an exclusive beer for Bailey's Taproom. I asked why more pubs don't do this. Turns out there is a small and large reason. The small reason is volume: it would be hard for most pubs to move through a batch of beer before it got stale, unless the brewery made pretty small batches. There are probably some work-arounds for that one.

The big issue is this runs afoul of the law. "The OLCC frowns upon anything that can smack of being a 'private label'" says brewer Ben Edumnds in comments at the Facebook page. He elaborates: " We've run into this issue the vast majority of times when we've tried doing a "house" beer for someone. Toro Red is the exception to this, but John Gorham's restaurant group has 7 outlets to move it at this point. We're able to do Wisco for Saraveza because we sell it beyond us Saraveza and our two spots."

Christopher Barnes, who knows the distributor side of things, elaborates. "The Oregon system is set up to be largely fair to retailers of all sizes. Everyone pays the same price for kegs and cases. There are no special quantity discounts. This allows small retailers to compete with larger retailers. Private labels can be used to circumvent this system by making something that could give larger retailers a competitive advantage."

So now we know.

House Beers for Pubs

Source: DigitalPour

As we ease into the weekend, a little aperitif to whet your whistles. (And the first time I've done two posts in one day in a long, long time.) An email came over the transom about a local project, reminding me of a concept I've been surprised is not more widespread. It comes from Bailey's Taproom, one of the first good-beer pubs in Portland, and long one of the leaders.

Debuting at BelgianFest VII, Bailey's Taproom will feature a rotating house beer, or Hausbier. Brewed by a different brewery each quarter, expect easy-drinking, sessionable styles that fit the seasons and our tastes. The series will be exclusive to both Bailey's Taproom and the current participating brewery.... We invited our longtime friends, The Commons, to collaborate on the debut beer of the series. 

This is such an obvious win-win. It's very cool for a pub, which gets an exclusive and also a beer designed specifically for its clientele. Pubs all have their own vibe and way of being, and this is a way of reinforcing it. Visitors to NYC have long delighted in the unique beers served up at McSorley's--only two offered, and offered nowhere else. It is impossible to imagine the experience separate from those beers. 

But it's a win for a brewery, too. It guarantees not just a handle at a pub like Bailey's (which reserves no handles for specific breweries), but one that will be highlighted and featured. At one time, when breweries weren't used to creating forty or fifty recipes a year, this might have been a challenge, but no longer. Brewers think in terms of new beers, so this fits their model nicely. So long as the brewery doesn't have to make batches in 100-barrel increments, it's a great way to serve your creativity, your brand, and make a little money on the side. Bailey's has long cultivated relationships with breweries, so rotating different breweries through quarterly is a nice "thank you" for these relationships.

Why don't more pubs do this?

The Mysteries of Lambic

The Beervana Podcast rides again. (Sorry for the long delay. Life...)

In our most recent episode, Patrick and I discuss one of the crown jewels in the beer world. We cover turbid mashes, long boils, wild inculcations, and the strange and wondrous samba our friends the microbes dance inside the oaken foeders. We turn to Frank Boon and Cantillon's Jean Van Roy for insight. Give it a listen.

Also, as we get back to a regular schedule on the new All About Beer On-air platform, we're really hoping to develop a conversation with listeners. Get chatty with us, folks. Comment on what we've said, offer corrections or critiques, give us recommendations on beers, breweries, or future podcast, ask questions. Doing a podcast can feel a bit solipsistic, and the best antidote is hive mind. Email here with our thanks in advance:

In addition to SoundCloud, you can find the Beervana podcast on iTunes and Stitcher — or you can subscribe below to ensure you never miss an episode. We’ll send you links to the podcasts as soon as they’re published.

Deep in the Heart of Texas

Without much comment:

New York and Houston, Texas—Today, Anheuser-Busch announced an agreement to acquire Karbach Brewing Co., a leading Texas craft brewer and one of the country’s fastest-growing craft brands. Karbach joins a diverse portfolio of craft breweries within The High End, the business unit within Anheuser-Busch that focuses on its craft and import brands.

Karbach is:

• Five years old
• Growing like a weed (17k in 2013, 40k in 2014, etc)
• On the move--from Houston to Dallas and an even newer bigger better.
• The maker of a generic line-up of beers (two IPAs, a pale, a kolsch, a wheat, a lager) that have a middling reputation.

I guess the one observation I'd make is that the American and international wings of ABI's acquisitions groups seem to have very different approaches. The domestic group has mainly picked up fairly generic breweries. The international group, by contrast, has plucked some real gems. I'm not sure what that suggests about strategy, but there it is.

And of course, we have the updated map as a parting gift.

The Paradox of Choice

I got into an unexpected Twitter conversation two days ago following this exchange:

Maureen's obvious and mild comment then sparked a discussion that ran 51 tweets, was joined by eleven people, and lasted 21 hours before everyone finally got exhausted by the terrible medium and wandered away. (Or anyway, that's how these conversations make me feel.) Along the way, it touched on just about everything that we love, hate, and worry about in the beer world.

Maureen's point was hardly controversial: "Sure, [they're] fun to try, but again, daily basis? I don't need zillion choices." I don't think there are many people who haven't confronted a wall of beer in the cooler and had exactly this thought--which is true at the pub as well. As the conversation went on, Maureen and others started stacking observations to the mix like cord wood:

• When retailers stock many different beers, it's inevitable that some will get stale. (Good retailers and distributors, of course, will remove that stock, but that doesn't happen in every case.)
• The risk of buying stale beer further makes consumers gun-shy.
• The proliferation of beer means a decent amount of it is meh at best.
• Lots of people do want choice, of course; this is true not only of advanced-case beer geeks, but regular consumers (who have made seasonals and mix-packs perennial best-sellers).
• As another data point, pubs don't pull out handles because there's too much choice.
• Breweries love choice, because it's a great way to attract new drinkers, but...
• They also hate the need to continually offer new products and worry when workhorse best sellers flag due to disinterest.
• The churn of choice can be expensive, particularly because not every choice is a win.
• Finally, Joel Winn pointed to this article in which Anthony Bourdain complains that some of this choice seems to feed the thirst of dilettantes: "the entire place was filled with people sitting there with five small glasses in front of them, filled with different beers, taking notes. This is not what a bar is about." 

The truth is, all of this is right. Beer is no longer simple. That is both its great strength and weakness. When I came up, you walked into a bar and there were four taps all pouring the same basic beer. Since all the beer was the same, people made decisions based on loyalty or price. You went to the pub to drink, but not for the beer--it was the opposite of what Bourdain describes. This was a time of simplicity, but it was dismal.

There is no doubt beer drinkers have it far better now, but the world offers no utopias. With choice comes chance--bad beer, stale beer, and of course wondrous beer. This bounty has delivered a new culture and several subcultures. Even those of us who (sometimes) love fussy taprooms with exotic beer and little glasses can sometimes just want a nice session with simple, nuanced beer and no complications. There's a reason craft beer has been subject to satire about twee hipsters. All this choice has given brewers many more customers and sales, but also headaches. Trying to stay ahead of the novelty curve is maddening, and some breweries have had trouble replacing capacity lost when a flagship's sales start flagging.

All of this is why Schell's brewmaster, David Berg, tweeted "the paradox of choice strikes again." These are the best of times--but even still, they're not without their troubles.

Related: Bryan Roth riffs on the same Twitter storm.

Vignette #6, John Keeling (Fuller's)

Brewer vignettes feature quotes from brewers I picked up in my travels around the world.

“On one side of the equation you have to have quality and consistency and that is balanced on the other side of the equation by flavor and character. There are breweries that specialize in producing high quality, very consistent beer—companies like Budweiser and Carlsberg and Heineken. They produce high quality, very consistent beer, but maybe they forgot about the other side of the equation, which is to have some flavor and some character.”

”What I want from London Pride—or any Fuller’s beer—is that when you order a pint of it, I want you to recognize it as London Pride. Yes, I want it to occasionally surprise you—today it’s a little bit more malty or caramelly or hoppy or fragrant or whatever—so that you are having a dialogue with that beer. You’re noticing things about that beer and it interests you and involves you because of that. And that’s really what we call character. So when you go into a pub and order a pint of London Pride, you drink it and you recognize it and you make a note of all these things. You can never make batches of beer that are exactly the same no matter how good you are, and in fact, to try to make them exactly the same, that means taking flavors out because they’re so hard to manage on that consistent basis. That’s why companies that want consistency above all do not produce very flavorsome beers.”

Derek Prentice (l) and John Keeling (r)