Beervana

Bière Blanche de Paris

2012-01-27T09:14:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the Beer Nut wrote in comments: "Spare a thought for all the styles that didn't make it." I did a bit of that last week, but the Nut reminds me of one style I didn't mention--bière blanche de Paris. Of all the old styles Lacambre mentioned, this one sounded the most intriguing (far better than some of those lime-poisoned, 15-hour boil jobs they were making in Belgium).

It was a relatively new style to Paris at the time, and his information about it was incomplete (also partly because the brewers were secretive. It was made with wheat and followed the usually somewhat-convoluted mash procedure of the time. (The Franco-Belgian brewers were not big spargers.) It went through a trifling boil for the time-- 2 1/2 hours. Paris White was a pretty strong beer, weighing in at 1.066 and was made with coriander and elderflowers. Lacambre specifically mentioned that brewers used the finest floral hops--presumably to accentuate the spice. There was one offbeat ingredient--a starch syrup extracted from potatoes. Meant to be served fresh, it was available from the cask a week and a half after brewing or in bottles within three weeks.

Here's my cleaned-up version of a Google translate rendition of Lacambre's original (which is to say, consult the original if you want something more authoritative).

“It is very white that is to say, very little colored and very clear without being absolutely transparent, foam very strong and persistent and very pleasing to the eye and it moistens the palate pleasantly. This beer whose production has grown significantly and very significantly improved in recent years is very enjoyable, especially in summer, and deserves to be mentioned as one of the best known white beers.”

I have endeavored to entice Breakside's Ben Edmunds into brewing this beer and we have a tentative plan to put something together in June. I'm thinking maybe honey in place of the potato-starch syrup (however alluring that might otherwise seem) and of course, we both instantly thought of a saison yeast. More to come on that score.

End of Gueuze

2012-01-26T13:03:00.000-08:00

Things are about to get meager around here. I woke up on Monday and it occurred to me that I have a May deadline coming up. That may sound like a long ways off, but I have to write as much between now and then as I have between now and last May. Yikes. So you'll probably get stuff like this...

I was listening to my audio tape of Frank Boon, and he made this observation:

“In the 1950s and 1960s, this was a time when breweries were closing and all the local styles were disappearing. Everywhere in Belgium. Louvain white disappeared, Peeterman disappeared, [others?] disappeared. If gueuze had disappeared in the 1960s, nobody would ever have imagined to make such a beer. It’s an absolutely crazy way to make beer.”

It never really occurred to me, but it's probably true that lambic was at one time on the verge of extinction. It's not a massive segment now by any means, but it's thriving in its small way. Whew.

Decided: West Coast IPA is ...

2012-01-25T09:09:00.000-08:00

The definitions are in. West Coast IPAs are:

1) no caramel malts 2) unbalanced (really, no desire to be balanced), leaning heavily toward hops, both of these contributing to 3) a drier ipa than non-wcipas.
A heavily hopped IPA with at least 6 percent alcohol and 60 IBUs.
The key is a complete lack of balance, no strong malt backbone competing with the hops.
It is used to describe an IPA that is high on the bitterness scale and that typically exudes citrus, grapefruit, pineapple, and other fruits. It is thrown around pretty loosely.
Gloriously lacking in balance. Just a liquid hop delivery vehicle.

On the other hand, they are also:

Just IPA made on the West Coast.
If a "West Coat IPA" is all of the things that has been mentioned in this thread, what, then, is an American-style IPA? Do we honestly believe there's enough of a difference between the two to the extent that "West Coast IPA" should be substantiated as its own style?

And finally, Jim F characterized how I was feeling about all of this when he wrote:

I think the term West Coast IPA charitably implies that NW IPA's have intense hop flavor (exceptions exist, but to me NW IPA's are characterized by balance). ["West Coast"] really ought to be California IPA, because that, to me, is where the hop bomb was popularized.

Ultimately, I think you have various flavors of the same fruit. Even if we grant that West Coast IPA is a low-malt, dry, super-bitter hop bomb, it's not really enough to peel it off from the IPA category. It's a step further out on the spectrum, but it's part of the family. I hope (but have no confidence) that the style lords in Denver never decide to add this "style."

That said, I do think that whatever this beast is we're pointing to is very much a species of California. We have scads of IPAs here in the Northwest, but these descriptions just don't fit. (Lots of Northern California IPAs are in the NW camp, too.) The balance point on a beer like Ninkasi Total Domination or Fort George Vortex--or hell, even Hair of the Dog Blue Dot--may be toward hops, but they never jump off a sweet, balancing hop base. Those beers are also deeply aromatic and flavorful, not just bitter. You don't get those juicy. funky/citrusy aromas and flavors if it's cranked too far toward bitterness.

So there: sort of a style, but not enough of one to start arguing about names.

It Has Come to This: a Black Pale; Plus Two New Ones From Widmer

2012-01-24T09:09:00.000-08:00

BridgePort's new beer is called Dark Rain. It is a hoppy brown ale or, in the fashion of the day, a black pale ale. But let us not dwell overlong on the terrible collapse of the English language.

Instead, let's consider the beer, which is actually damned nice. The whole black pale is meant to suggest something, and Dark Rain delivers. Pale ales feature the toothsome marriage of lightly sweet malts and pleasant, aromatic hopping. American pales are usually at turns caramelly, citric, and floral. So a black pale would suggest those characteristics but also a roasted note balanced right on top of everything else. Which is a pretty good description of Dark Rain, a roasty-smelling, tangy beer. The roast does have a tinge of that thin, metallic bitterness you find in a cup of Starbucks, but otherwise, this is an interesting, unusual beer and a good one.

_____________

If it's January, it's time for a new Widmer W' Series beer. The Brothers now have lots of non-core side projects: this one, the Rotator IPAs (see below), the Brothers' Reserve, and seasonals. Last year, Widmer brewed sixteen different brands, and this year it will be 23 [!]. The '12 W beer is a Dark Saison, brewed with Wyeast's French Saison yeast, about 10% wheat, and some malts dark enough to stain but not deepen the beer. I attended a release party, and the assembled crowd of writers was largely ho-hum about the beer (I think--we can watch the blogs and magazines to see), but I think it is pretty nice. Brewer Joe Casey fermented it at a relatively low 75 degrees, which meant the esters never really got revved up. Nevertheless, it does have a fair amount of zesty character. The series gets a nationwide release, and so it will be the first saison many Americans taste. If they move on from it to Dupont, say, they will note the family resemblance. W '12 isn't the most characterful saison on the market, but it's tasty and authentic.

We also got a chance to take the next Rotator IPA out for a test drive. The brothers reached out to QUAFF, a San Diego homebrew club to do what was in effect a collaborator beer. The beer they ultimately chose was Spiced IPA, made with a chai blend from Tao of Tea. In a reverse of the saison experience, the room lit up with this beer--while I found it a bit ... spicy. Actually, the spices are mainly aromatic. It was the asharply-astringent tea itself which I found off-putting. Weirdly, no one I spoke to could even taste it. It's made with a black tea and an assortment of spices--ginger, star anise, cardamom, clove, and black pepper. These are infused into water which is then mixed with the beer in the conditioning tank at a rate of a pound per ten gallons. A fascinating experiment. I will be interested to hear how it's received.

What Is This Mysterious "West-Coast IPA" of Which You Speak?

2012-01-23T11:21:00.001-08:00

Leaving aside the debate about who brewed it first--and I very much want to leave that debate aside--a more salient question arises: what the hell is a West-Coast IPA? If that which-is-first debate shed any light, it was, I think, on the insubstantiality of this "style." There is India Pale Ale. Even an anti-style guy like me admits it, and its perameters are pretty well-established: strongish, hoppy, pale. Not quite a strong ale, but more than a pale.

West-Coast style? You tell me. I think people mean some combination of five things:

1. Made on the West Coast
2. Strong(er than regular IPAs)
3. Made with American hops
4. Juicy with citric flavors and aromas
5. Bracingly bitter

But how do these things differ from any other American IPA? With the exception of place--made in CA, WA, or OR--how do these characteristics particularly distinguish IPAs made in San Diego or Muncie? Everyone makes beers like this now--even in Europe. American hops are a worldwide phenom, and citric juiciness pretty much defines American IPAs, not a regional variation. Surely we're not going to argue that every style gets its own regional title just because it happens to be brewed there--Midwest wheats, New England stouts, Southern browns. That's not style, it's boosterism.

But I'm open-minded. Tell me what you think it is. If everyone in comments agrees, I'll be happy to concede the point. (No I won't--I'll be dyspeptic and profane, but I'll concede.)

Do tell--

Greg Koch Responds

2012-01-22T14:04:00.001-08:00

I called out Greg Koch, founder and impresario at Stone Brewing, last week over historical comments he made in a video over at the New School. I got the long response to that you see below. I'll leave the comments open, but watch them pretty closely. If you want to take a personal shot at Greg, me, or anyone, have the courage to sign your name--otherwise I'll delete it. Greg has taken the opportunity to open this up to conversation--and I appreciate the time and effort--so let's keep things on the high road, shall we? I'll give this post over to Greg and respond in comments.

__________

Jeff (and everyone), thanks for the conversation. I find conversations about my favorite subject (craft beer of course!) to always be invigorating and intriguing. And, on some, but-usually-quite-rare occasions, to be controversial. In this case, it seems to be the latter, but should it? Did my comments really qualify? Well, let’s take a look…

First off, you state “Many people have voiced criticisms of Greg because of his tendency to voice thoughts as they appear in his brain without the slightest filter--very often impolitic thoughts.” It’s certainly true that I’ve gotten some critiques over the years. Such is the reality of putting yourself out there on a regular basis. However, I actually try NOT to say controversial things most of the time. Some might be surprised, but one of my personal challenges is wearing my heart on my sleeve a bit. I think I allow myself to get too bummed out by critiques and mischaracterizations to be honest. Even small ones sometimes kick me to the curb. I lay there a bit, stew occasionally, but then get up, brush off, and remind myself its just part of the equation. My other choice is to just stay home, or perhaps to pretend that I’m less passionate about this biz than I am and keep outta the conversation. Faced with those choices, I guess I’d best just continue to learn how to take the hits, ‘cause I’m just not the type to stay home or be a shrinking violet.

But really? “Without the slightest filter” and “very often impolitic”? I think my occasionally “out there” persona coupled with naming a beer “Arrogant Bastard Ale” back in 1997 may be skewing the perception of me a bit, but alas, so be it. I do wonder what examples you might cite however. Of the easily over 300 vids I’ve shot and uploaded to the interwebs over the years (this being one of the first), or others have, probably less than a dozen involve a megaphone or crowd surfing, and probably only a small handful more have me saying anything that 9 out of 10 folks would be considered controversial.

Regarding my statement in Ezra’s interview about Arrogant Bastard Ale:

Forgive me for being an old-schooler here, but I suppose I could have referenced the current GABF category and what they now call an “Imperial Red Ale” rather than what used to be called an “American Strong Ale.” The latter, as a style description, has become a bit wide in its perception, and thus has been narrowed-down with more specific style categories. I am well aware of Hair of the Dog and their terrific beers. Hair of the Dog Rose was the first beer I ever consumed at our “not yet ours” warehouse/future brewery location on Mata Way in San Marcos, CA when I had the keys to it for the weekend in late 1995 (so that Steve and I could draw chalk circles on the warehouse floor to help us determine how we might lay out our brewery if we were to sign a lease on the space). Years late--around the year 2000--we started distributing other brands of beer in SoCal in addition to our own, and I was able to convince Alan Sprints to allow us to represent his terrific beers in our region (sadly, due to perhaps being too far ahead of the curve, either in our learning curve as a young wholesaler or in the knowledge curve of SoCal craft beer consumers, we were not able to make a success with HotD…sure wish we had the privilege to represent those great beers in our portfolio today). All that being said, suggesting that a 7.2%abv super hoppy red ale with elevated IBUs (Arrogant Bastard Ale) is in the same category as a 10% deep golden ale with more modest IBUs (Fred) is a stretch I wouldn’t make.

When it came out, Arrogant Bastard Ale was the only uber-hoppy (for the time in 1997 that is, not so much considered “uber-hoppy” by today’s standards) strong red ale of its kind that I am aware of (we didn’t have BeerAdvocate or RateBeer available to us back then to help us know the details of nearly every beer that was being brewed in the US). Is it possible that there was another big, hoppy, strong red ale being brewed somewhere by someone? Absolutely. Was Arrogant Bastard Ale the first one that really hit the radar? Yes, I believe so. When it came out, it was a very unique beer. There was very little at that time that occupied the space between the pale ales and red ales and barley wines.

On my statements about Stone IPA

In the interview I said…
“Stone IPA is the longest full-time production west coast-style IPA on the planet. We first came out with it in 1997 and have been producing it ever since. I don’t think that there are any other west coast [style] IPAs that have been in production, full time, longer…that I’m aware of. But I could be wrong and I always accept that if there’s some piece of information out there that I didn’t know.”

A few moments later I said: “I was always influenced on the way. I can’t ever say that we’ve done things that weren’t influenced by others.”

First, of course, it would depend on one’s definition as to a “west coast-style IPA.” Does Bridgeport IPA (a longtime favorite of mine, by the way!) at 5.5%abv & 50 IBUs fall into that category? The company must not have thought so, as according to their website, in 1997 they chose to enter it into the GABF in the “Classic English Style Pale Ale” category winning a Gold medal, and in 1999 they entered it into the GABF’s American Style Pale Ale category and won a silver. Presumably they likely entered it in other years as well, but under what categories I do not know. Bridgeport’s own website describes the beer as “…citrusy aroma and full hop flavor, while downplaying the bitterness.”

I don’t think most folks feel that a “west coast-style IPA” downplays bitterness.

Currently, the GABF does not have a “west coast-style IPA” category, so we’ll need to look at the “American Style IPA” for our reference in the matter. ABV range is 6.3%-7.5% and IBUs range from 50-70, which, interestingly, puts Stone IPA out of the range of those style guidelines since it’s around 77 IBUs (and one of the characteristics IMO, that puts it into the “west coast” style range).

Click to continue reading...

To give them their due, and they are due a lot IMO, Anchor Brewing calls their 5.9%abv Liberty Ale “…the first modern American IPA brewed after prohibition…” However, BeerAdvocate calls it an “American Pale Ale” as does RateBeer. Clearly, interpretations vary. A quick web search told me that a few folks peg Liberty Ale’s IBUs at about 47, which is just under the range identified by the GABF, but I couldn’t find an official statement from the brewery in that regard. A search tells me that Liberty Ale won four GABF medals (all between 1988 – 1993), two of which were for the Pale Ale category, and two for the India Pale Ale category. There was not yet an “American Style IPA” category at that time, as far as I know.

So what do I think a so-called “West Coast-style IPA” might be? Essentially I see it in the space between American Style IPA and American Style Double IPA, which means abv that’s at the upper end of the American Style IPA range, and IBUs that extend into the American Style Double IPA range. Citrusy, piney and ‘dank’ aromas and flavor are also elevated past what one might expect in the American Style IPA category. With the “lupulin shift” that my friend Vinnie at Russian River (who created what was arguably one of the first-ever beers of the style: Blind Pig IPA) has oft commented on, Stone IPA might be considered now at the more ‘modest’ end of the West Coast-style IPA category.

BTW, during my research for this post, I discovered that the GABF has a great search engine for medals.

And FWIW, Stone Brewing has won a mere six medals over the years, which would not be considered a very high amount.

Regarding the idea that in the grand scheme of brewing history “…there’s nothing really new under the sun, right?”:

Actually, not so. While it’s entirely possible that malt bills and hopping rates of many of craft brewing’s “new” styles might have had occurrences in the past for which records are poor, incomplete or just plain lost, historically brewers could NOT have brewed beers that we’d be able to directly compare to some of the popular craft brewing styles today. Why? Ingredients. There are simply varieties of malts and hops available to brewers today that are, in a word, new. These newer varieties are creating flavor profiles that weren’t really available to brewers of yore. Hell, the venerable Cascade hop only came into usage in the 1960’s I believe. Combinations of malt and hops in the way they are used today, but using instead the varieties (including malting techniques) of, say, a hundred years ago, would have yielded beers that are so dramatically different that we’d say that they were different styles. IPA is a simple example. One of the key characteristics of the “American IPA” is not just how much hops are used, but the fact that the bitterness, flavor and aromatic profile is centered around newer American varieties of hops.

To paint a short analogy, while ostensibly all notes and note combinations in music were played before the advent of the electric guitar, I would support the argument that Rock and Roll, and it’s many offshoots, is actually NEW music that could not/would not have been possible during the age of what we now call Classical music. New instrumentation created the possibility for new styles of music. Similarly, new varieties of malt and hops created the possibility for new styles of beer to occur (not to mention yeast combos that while historically ‘possible’ wouldn’t have happened due to the fact that brewers didn’t have a catalog from which to order any particular strain they might want).

Regarding Ezra’s approach in the interview
Ezra, I had a great time talking with you, and I don’t mind debating a few points, but it does seem that you were really looking to grind an ax with me. Personally, my axes to grind are with some of the beers and industry practices of the fizzy yellow industrial giants, not with other craft brewers. I’m not a big fan of in-fighting. Differences of opinion and healthy debates over a couple great beers? Sure! Mudslinging and calling others in the craft brewing world to the mat? I’d rather opt out. That being said, I think we managed in our conversation to keep it, even at its most dramatic, within the “healthy debate” range. Let’s try to continue that!
A few random points about me and Stone to help get a better picture what we’re all about & what things I/we think are important, in no particular order:

I have been a Slow Food member since I first attended the organization’s Salone del Gusto in Turin, Italy in 2000. I served on the Board for our local chapter for a couple of years. Slow Food philosophies have greatly influenced many decisions I’ve made at Stone, especially in our restaurant.
The Stone Brewing World Bistro & Gardens is the largest restaurant purchaser of local small farm organic produce in our region. I think this may actually be the stat that I am proudest of.
I am an unabashed environmentalist. I cancelled the trash service at my house years ago, as I generate so little. I either compost or recycle nearly everything, and I consume so little overall that my year’s recycling fits easily in my trunk…save for beer bottles of course. I drive a Volt. Before that I had a Prius. I take public transportation when I can. I signed a pledge years ago at to not consume plastic bottled water, and I’ve stuck to it. Those that follow my tweets know that I think it’s a big deal that more and more of us eschew plastic bottled water. Yeah, I’m a geek. I admit it.
I was invited to give the Keynote speech last spring to an Environmental Symposium at Cuyamaca College (9,000 students). I used my megaphone for part of the delivery of the speech, and strong images in my Powerpoint presentation. I just got a call from them this week telling me that my speech “is still being talked about,” and they asked me to give the Keynote Commencement Speech to their graduating class this coming spring. I am hugely flattered, and a bit nervous. I’ll probably leave the megaphone at home for that…but no promises, I might change my mind at the last minute.
Stone has won sustainable business of the year awards from: The California Center for Sustainable Energy, the City of Escondido, and from our County Supervisor. We’re pretty proud of that. We put a lot of energy into sustainability (no pun intended).
The Stone Anniversary Celebration & Invitational Beer Festival is one of the largest craft beer fests in SoCal. Last year alone we featured over 40 guest breweries and raised more than $250,000 for charity. Over the years the total raised for charity has easily surpassed $1,000,000.
Stone participates in at least 350 charitable events a year, and donates well over $250,000 in beer each year to these charitable events. If it’s a legit 501(c)3, they have the proper legally required licensing, and they give us a little advance notice, we say “yes” 95%+ of the time.
Our restaurant, the Stone World Bistro & Gardens, features 32 beers on tap. At any given time, we average about eight Stone beers on tap. The rest are Guest beers. Of our 130-bottle list, perhaps two are Stone beers and the rest are Guests beers. We do this because we love to showcase the beauty and the glory that is the wide world of great craft and specialty beer. We feature a new “Guest Cask” every single week, and one Stone Cask as well, giving equal billing to each. We feature a Keep The Glass each Wednesday eve, 80% of the time it is a Guest beer. As one might expect with us, there are no Domestic or Imported industrial fizzy yellow beers on our beer lists.
We feature three “special beer fests” in our Gardens every year: Oakquinox, Sour Fest and the new Pour It Black. These fest feature at least 50 special Guest beers at each one, showcasing the awesome range of variety and character available in each of the fests’ featured categories. Add to this our “Rare Beer Breakfast” during San Diego Beer Week, and I suppose you could say we have four special beer fests.
Our little-know distribution division (we don’t really have a public face for it, but everyone in the beer retailing community in SoCal knows about it), distributes beers for about 32 great craft and specialty brands. For many of the brands, we are either their #1 wholesaler (The Bruery, AleSmith, Lost Abbey / Port Brewing, Iron Fist, Black Market, Eagle Rock) or their #1 wholesaler outside of their home market (Avery, Oskar Blues, Russian River, Bear Republic, Maui), or in their Top 5 wholesalers in the US (Ommegang, Paulaner, Great Divide, Mad River, Victory, Duvel), just to name a few. In the past several years, we have grown our distributed brands in SoCal at a faster rate than we have grown Stone (admittedly, Stone has had a larger base). We have given a presence in SoCal to many great brands that might not have had interest from larger wholesalers.
I love craft beer and the craft brewing industry so much that I made an “homage” video called I Am A Craft Brewer I intentionally did not brand it in any way for Stone Brewing.
I am passionate about ethics in the craft beer retailing world, and made a video extolling the profitability benefits of bars and restaurants selling craft beer. I intentionally did not brand it in any way for Stone Brewing, other than to identify myself at the beginning so the viewer would know who was speaking.
I was the co-founder and first President of the San Diego Brewers Guild in 1996.
I have had the honor of serving as the Chair of the Brewers Association’s Events Committee (Great American Beer Festival, SAVOR, Craft Brewers Conference), and on the Brewers Associations Board of Directors. I like actively participating in the brewing community, along with many of my peers.
My first homebrew was in 1991. My biz-partner (and Stone co-founder & Brewmaster) Steve’s was 1984 or 85 I think.
When we started Stone, I thought we were too late to the game to be able to make any real mark. I now believe that there are many opportunities for new breweries to make their own marks (The Bruery, Ninkasi and Brewdog would be great examples of just the past few years).
I’m an overachiever and I try too hard. Who knows, maybe because I was picked last for dodge ball / baseball / everything when I was a kid. I’ll leave that to others to muse on. Since then I’ve helped build a company that employs 425 amazing people (150+ more expected to be hired in 2012), done my best to move forward an industry I’m passionate about, helped raise and donate a couple mil to charities…and, yes, talked a little braggadocio from time to time.

Cheers from a lazy Sunday and a big, strong pot of black coffee…time to head out and go join some friends for an equally lazy afternoon beer,

Greg
Sunday, January 22, 2012, 1pm

"Taste of Summer"

2012-01-20T09:19:00.001-08:00

I promise not to keep inundating you with commentary about this Lacambre text I've been reading this week--though I won't promise this is the last post. But one thing is too juicy to let pass. Lacambre was writing in 1851--just six years before Louis Pasteur published "Mémoire sur la fermentation alcoolique," his revolutionary paper that identified the role of yeast in fermentation. Lacambre, a brewer himself, knew that environmental effects played a pivotal role in the quality of fermentation. Everyone knew that warm weather was bad, and during hot snaps in the Belgian summer, breweries knew to take the day off.

Unlike British and French breweries that were by the mid 19th century using wort chillers, Belgians were still cooling all their beer in large pans known as "coolships." Lacambre emphasized that a "viscous fermentation" came when the temperatures were too high.

“The cooling of the containers must be prompt, the condition is most essential, especially in summer because that is very likely to alter it in the hot season. The taste and smell, which are spread by contact with the greatest ease...from a profound alteration suffered by some of the wort often on the end of cooling.”

He relates an experience he had as a brewer when during a summer storm, a batch of cooling beer "became disturbed"--I think by crashing thunder, but it's not clear--and had become bubbly. He tried to save the beer, but it was putrid. He didn't understand the mechanism, but he knew the result of contamination was highly contagious worth that would spoil other wort it came into contact with. This is what he concluded:

“The result was strongly affected the taste and the more or less nauseating odor which is the true character of this kind of alteration. The smell is so characteristic that an experienced man can easily...recognize this kind of alteration simply smelling beer that has received the slightest breach of versoemer or taste of summer.... This kind of alteration, which always produces the bad alcoholic fermentation which many brewers have given the name of wild fermentation, because it still offers the symptoms unrelated to a good fermentation.”

Lacambre was convinced beer, or at least wheat beer, needed to rest in coolships to "release nitrogenous material"--whatever that meant. He classified different types of fermentation based on their qualities: "the alcoholic fermentation of glucose, lactic acid, acetic acid, viscous and putrid." He was so close to having figured it out himself. In just six years, Pasteur identified the mechanism:

"In 1856, a man named Bigo sought Pasteur's help because he was having problems at his distillery, which produced alcohol from sugar beetroot fermentation. The contents of his fermentation containers were embittered, and instead of alcohol he was obtaining a substance similar to sour milk. Pasteur analyzed the chemical contents of the sour substance and found that it contained a substantial amount of lactic acid instead of alcohol. When he compared the sediments from different containers under the microscope, he noticed that large amounts of yeast were visible in samples from the containers in which alcoholic fermentation had occurred. In contrast, in the polluted containers, the ones containing lactic acid, he observed "much smaller cells than the yeast." Pasteur's finding showed that there are two types of fermentation: alcoholic and lactic acid. Alcoholic fermentation occurs by the action of yeast; lactic acid fermentation, by the action of bacteria."

The "taste of summer" was buggies, allowed more time to infect a more slowly-cooling wort. Less poetic, but a revolution in understanding how beer ferments.

Greg Koch is Wrong

2012-01-19T09:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, Ezra posted the first part of an interview he did with Stone Brewing's Greg Koch--the irrepressible, irreverent face for the rock n roll side of craft brewing. Many people have voiced criticisms of Greg because of his tendency to voice thoughts as they appear in his brain without the slightest filter--very often impolitic thoughts. This is not one of those criticisms. Rather, I take issue with his history:

"Stone IPA, is the longest full-time production West Coast-style IPA on the planet. We first came out with it in 1997 and have been producing it ever since. I don't think there are any other West Coast style IPAs that have been in production full time longer. That I'm aware of, and I could be wrong."

This is just not right. There are enough caveats in this statement that it's hard to know what Greg's claiming here, but in the inventory of my own drafty memory I can pull one out--BridgePort IPA, introduced in 1996. Perhaps this doesn't meet the narrow definition Greg wants to claim, but if he's looking to place Stone in the place of ur-IPA and craft beer influencer, it's just not persuasive. He continues:

"Arrogant Bastard, considered to be the progenitor of the American strong ale category, Stone Ruination IPA, the very first full-time production double IPA on the planet. Stone Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale, one of the most popular black IPAs and a beer that is credited for helping to popularize the segment. We were not the first by any stretch--of course Greg Noonan in Vermont in the early 1990s was creating black IPA. But we have had the opportunity to do some things that stuck and became perhaps somewhat influential in the craft brewing industry."

Again, from the memory attic, I trundle out Alan Sprints and his work with strong beers in the years before Stone, including Fred. American barley wines had been been been around years and years. The concept of "double IPA" is an American invention and narrow enough perhaps to support the claim Greg makes--but strong hoppy beers have been around forever and certainly weren't invented by Americans. And I have no doubt that if we had something more reliable than my memory, we could probably find examples of American beers that were earlier than Stone--after all, I came up with examples off the top of my mind. To his credit, Greg cites the history of dark, hoppy English ales made over a hundred years ago as evidence that black IPAs are nothing new. Surely he recognizes that there's nothing really new under the sun, right?

It is a peculiarly American instinct to want to be the first at anything. There's something alluring about staking your place in the short history of American craft brewing, and no harm in that. But to substantiate these claims requires ignoring the centuries of brewing that happened before American craft beer came on the scene, and probably excluding early examples by some other brewery--now perhaps defunct and unable to defend itself--that fails to meet the narrow definitions of style or region. Greg Koch helms one of the most successful breweries in the world and one of the most admired. That's pretty good.

Deeper and Deeper Into the Surreal World of Belgian Brewing

2012-01-18T15:35:00.000-08:00

Okay, I have now completed my survey of non-lambic beers produced in mid-19th century Belgium. The tour guide was one G. Lacambre, a man in possession of prejudices but lacking an editor. He would sometimes discredit certain styles of beer, some he even admitted were renowned, and offer biting commentary about the methods of the brewers. It goes without saying that Lacambre was himself a brewer, and this is exactly the kind of thing you expect (modern brewers are just the same). But he was also strangely imprecise, offering conflicting data or using different measures across styles. (Hops, for example, were sometimes measured by the barrel, sometimes by the hectoliter. Fair enough, except that barrel sizes weren't standardized.) All that accepted, he highlights some absolutely amazing stuff. To wit:

Every beer style he mentioned spent time in a coolship. The procedure varied a bit--sometimes beer would get filtered first, sometimes not. Usually breweries pitched yeast, sometimes (Leuven dobbel gerst, Hoegaarden wheat ales) not. (Sometimes he didn't specify.) But here's the point: no beer sits overnight in coolship without picking up scads of bugs. Every beer was infected in 19th century Belgium.
Lacambre lists about 18 styles and sub-styles, and the average boil length was nine hours. Only four of those were boils of three hours or less, and five were over ten hours (the longest was twenty).
Only one style--a cluster of three substyles from Leuven--was made entirely from barley. Two others were usually 100% barley, but often had wheat and oats. Nearly all of the beers had wheat, and a large number (11) used oats. One beer, the saison from Liege, was usually made with a majority of spelt.
It seems the Belgians were into poorly-modified malts that resulted in pretty sweet beers. Lacambre doesn't give a lot of final gravities, but the ones he does give are in the 1.020s and 1.030s.
Blending, as in gueuze, was common, and many styles had blended variants. The act of blending beer was “a special art entrusted to special men who should have a truly exceptional palate.”

Below are the beers Lacambre details, with very brief comments:

Antwerp Barley Beer. An aged beer that was blended with young beer and sounds much like modern gueuze.
Uytzet. Came in two strengths, ordinary (about 4%) and double (6%). One of the famous beers Lacambre slagged, saying “uytzet is an amber beer, fairly dark yellow, and very good quality when well prepared but but ordinary uytzet generally has a particular dry and more or less sharp taste."
Flemish Brown Beer. The beer boiled up to twenty hours, similar to uytzet but darker. Locals loved it, and for this reason Lacambre begrudgingly admitted it might be an acquired taste. For his purposes, "far from being very pleasant indeed, for it is bitter, harsh and somewhat astringent."
Leuven biere de Mars, enkel gerst, and dobbel gerst. These were the beers Lacambre made himself, and shockingly, he thought they were the best. Made from all barley, and divided into four runnings of the same mash. The first two made dobbel gerst, the final two biere de Mars, with enkel gerst being a blend of the two.
Biere de Maestricht. A brown beer made largely in Holland about which Lacambre was vague. Popular.
Wallonian barley beer. An amber to brown beer that was boiled to sharp bitterness.
Bieres blanche of Leuven. Light, refreshing beers that sound like a cross between lambic and witbier.
Peeterman. Similar to Leuven white beers, but brown and made with gelatin usually taken from fish skin. Tasty! Lacambre: "“viscous, very brown-coloured and has a slightly penetrating and aromatic bouquet." One of the more famous of the lost Belgian styles.
Biere de Diest. A strong golden ale (1.066-1.082) that sound sweet and delicious. Lacambre offers this left-handed compliment: “a very sweet and pleasant taste; their creamy flavour slightly sweet, and has something honeyish which is highly sought after by aficionados, amongst which we must count the majority of women and especially wet nurses who find in them a drink which is comforting and nutritious, as well as healthy and pleasant to drink.”
Mechelen Brown Beer. This sounds like a precursor to the sour ales of Flanders (which is to the west of Mechelen). They were aged up to two years and blended with a quarter to a third fresh beer--much like modern-day Rodenbach.
Hoegaarden beer. This is effectively a lambic--a spontaneously-fermented partially-wheat ale. Strangely, it was served fresh, not aged, apparently to great effect. Lacambre: “This beer is very pale, very refreshing and strongly sparkling, when it is fresh; its raw taste has something wild which is very similar to that of beer from Leuven which it resembles in many respects.”
Lier Beers (two versions). A stronger, paler export version and a darker version for locals. Not a lot of info.
Liege Saison. A beer often made largely of spelt and aged at least four months and often up to two years. Lacambre didn't like the methods of brewing and seemed to regard this as a crude beer whipped up by bumpkins.
Liege Biere Jeune. A lighter version of the saison served fresh after a couple weeks.

I must now leave the translation Randy Mosher made of these texts and delve into the one I made via Google Translate--which though less elegant, is remarkably coherent. I am especially interested in his thoughts on "lambicks." He also discussed the beer of other countries, which also ought to be interesting.

Why Wikipedia is Down Today and Why It Matters To You

2012-01-18T09:29:00.000-08:00

The big news today is that Wikipedia's down, and I suspect 93% of the country is largely mystified about why the titans of Silicon Valley are battling the titans of Hollywood over obscure copyright law. The truth is, we all have a dog in the fight. The thumbnail background is this: to combat foreign copyright infringement, content-producing companies--mainly in the film and video industry--promoted legislation in Congress (PIPA in the Senate, SOPA in the House). There is a real issue here, because movies get ripped off and streamed illegally all the time. When Warner Brothers spends six jillion dollars making an exploding boat movie, they have a right to want to earn money when people watch it.

Here's the problem:

Under the current wording of the measures, the Attorney General would have the power to order ISPs to block access to foreign-based sites suspected of trafficking in pirated and counterfeit goods; order search engines to delist the sites from their indexes; ban advertising on suspected sites; and block payment services from processing transactions for accused sites. If the same standards were applied to U.S.-based sites, Wikipedia, Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Google and Wired could all find themselves blocked.

Regulation isn't as easy as it seems. The past ten years have seen rather extraordinary changes in the way information is delivered. Until about the year 2000, if you wanted your voice heard, you had to go through gatekeepers in print, radio, and television--or set up your own magazine, radio station, or cable channel at insane cost. Now you can literally do it for free. Sites like Blogger, YouTube, Ustream, and Twitter have made it possible for people to get their voices online in exactly the same manner CBS, the New York Times, and NPR do.

Let's take beer blogs as one case in point. I started writing about beer for print sites in 1997--when some of them didn't even have websites. If you wanted beer news in 1997, you picked up an Oregonian or Willamette Week--or Zymurgy or All About Beer. In a certain sense, it was very cool to be a writer in that era--I had an audience orders of magnitude larger than I do now. But look at how we get beer news now: blogs, BeerAdvocate, tweets, direct communication from breweries via Facebook, and on and on. As people interested in beer, the current system is way, way better. We're awash in information--most of it archived and available any time we want to do a Google search. Magnify that effect across all fields and media and you can see the transformation.

The problem, of course, is that big media companies don't make money when you and I blog and tweet. Their profits have crashed since 2000. They don't want a free flow of "user-generated content." Their bottom line depends on eyeballs and eyeballs have lately been wandering elsewhere.

I don't want to overly inject this post with politics, but one way media companies can mitigate losses is not by adapting to changing environments and competing, but rather by using the force of law and regulation to rig the game. Copyrights are so valuable that authors hold them decades after they're dead. Music companies get revenues almost in perpetuity on art they had nothing to do with--but to which they own the rights. Disney has perverted copyright law profoundly all so it doesn't lose the chance to be the exclusive retailer of Mickey Mouse tchotchkes. For this, we have sacrificed an enormous amount of control over the creative and information realm.

Now big media is making yet another grab that will further bind up creative expression. They have some rights over the content they create and should have recourse in the face of theft. But they shouldn't have the power to stifle the rights of everyone else. [Cue cheesy, overwrought music] So, if you value your favorite beer blog, cat fancy website, or Joss Whedon tribute page, please stand with Wikipedia and oppose SOPA/PIPA.

We now conclude this public service announcement and return to our regular programing.

And You Think Belgian Beers Are Strange Now

2012-01-17T09:19:00.000-08:00

I have now left the island of Great Britain, traveled across the English Channel and found myself in 19th century Belgium--metaphorically, at least. After several months reading the past practices of British breweries, it is phantasmagoric to dive into the Belgian archive. The old British brewed more or less like the current British. Even strange old techniques like parti-gyling and the use of Burton union systems hasn't died out. But Belgium? Wild, wild stuff.

Take for example the practices described by G. Lacambre, whose 1851 Traité Complet de la Fabrication des Bières is the source for much of what we know:

"Boiling of these beers is longer and stronger than uytzet: commonly the boiling of these beers is 15 to 18 and even 20 hours in many breweries."

"When the colour is produced purely by a long boil, there is certainly no great harm, but unfortunately there are many breweries today that reduce the boiling time and force the colour using lime which is sometimes, as we have seen, very detrimental to the interests and even the health of consumers."

Or my favorite, which is just the second of six paragraphs on the mash schedule for Leuven white beer:

"As soon all the liquid has been extracted, they remove the baskets, of which there are eight to ten for a tank of 100 hectoliters, and by the underback, they refill the mash tun with completely cold water in summer and lukewarm water.... Once there is enough water in the mash tun it is stirred again very strongly, then they extract the second mash in the same way as I have described the first, and it also goes in boiler no. 1. Once there is no more liquid on the top, the liquid contained between the two funds is drawn off, then, always through the underback, a third infusion is added. The water used for the third mash is drawn from boiler no. 2, which is at this point filled with boiling water. The third mash is mixed until the warm mixture is perfect, then by means of baskets, and operating in the same manner as the first two mashes, they extract the slightly white wort which is poured into boiler no. 1 until the liquid reaches 40 or 45 centimeters from the top; the rest of the mash being drawn from the bottom of the mash tun, is placed in the clarification tank."

In sum: breweries regularly boiled their beer for 8-20 hours to achieve a darker color (or other mysterious, unidentified qualities) unless they dosed them with toxic calcium hydroxide. This followed mash schedules (in some beers) so baroque they took dozens of steps and required six vessels. I guess you can see why the lime seemed like a good idea.

Study questions:
1. What happens to hops after a twenty-hour boil?
2. Had they never heard of dark malts in Belgium or did they just like that tweaky lime buzz?
3. Extra credit: was the production of lambic a short cut for slackers tired of 29-hour brew days? (Provide corroborating evidence.)

Cantillon's Jean Van Roy, Mystic Brewer

2012-01-16T11:09:00.001-08:00

I'm finally getting to my recordings of Belgian breweries. Last night, I transcribed portions of my visit to Cantillon--the first brewery I visited in Belgium. The next day I toured Brouwerij Boon and got a totally different presentation (more on that later, probably). Frank Boon is the consummate scientist--to the extent possible, he has tried to understand the processes involved in making lambic beer. Just north, Jean Van Roy has a totally different approach.

"I know my beer. I feel my product. The beer is alive. I really have contact with the beer. I feel, I smell what the beer will accept or not"

When I found him at the brewery, he was elbow-deep in a little kettle straining out loose hops. He has the ascetic, hard-working quality of a monk, and his affect is monklike as well. He doesn't mind you wandering freely around the brewery, but he has work to do. He speaks precisely as he works. We were talking about the nature of lambic, and he described the experience of tasting barrels of his Bruocsella [pronounced BROOK sella], the three-year-old lambic.

"I had really great beer, and when we taste such a lambic we are so proud--for me, but also for the product itself. No one, no brewers on the earth can have the same rapport, the same feeling with his beer. In French we have a sentence. We say, tout est dans tout.* If I translate it: 'Everything is in everything.' In this brewery, everything is playing a role in the final product. Everything."

Incidentally, I forgot he told me the following, which may count as some kind of scoop. It also fits in nicely with his thoughts on lambic.

“The next [inaudible word] will be a top-fermentation beer. So we will work here with filtered yeast. But, in such an environment, you will always get a wild inoculation as well. The goal will be to produce a tripel but make it like two or three hundred years ago. They worked with filtered yeast, but they didn’t have real control.” [I then asked whether he’d age the beer or release it young. He must have smiled enigmatically because I started laughing and I said, “Right, listen to your beer, huh?” And he started laughing, too. Then he continued.] “First production. And then for the rest … ah. The goal I hope, between six months and one year. No more. I hope the beer could be ready for September, October 2012. We brew it in December.”

Okay, back to work--

_______________
*I don't speak French, and that was my best effort, using Google Translate, to render what he said.

Open Thread Friday: Most Characteristic American Breweries

2012-01-13T12:18:00.001-08:00

One of the things I'd like to do in The Beer Bible (the Beer Bible--even I don't know) is give a verbal tour of certain breweries that offer insight into a country or style of brewing. For those of us who have had the opportunity to go on actual tours, it's wonderfully educational--I thought it might be in print, too. For example, I wrote about Fuller's to describe both British ale brewing but also parti-gyle brewing--a relative rarity in the beer world. I'll write about Rodenbach and Boon/Cantillon and Orval.

I'd like to include an American brewery or two (or three). The problem: there are 1700 of them and the ones I've seen are largely in Oregon. So here's your charge, should you be willing to take it: offer your choice and tell me what makes it illustrative of American brewing as well as somehow unique. A couple examples I've been thinking about.

1. Double Mountain. Reasons: the brewery is a great example of a classic American craft brewery on the one hand--they do lots of beers wholly characteristic of the region (pick an IPA, any IPA), and tend to put an American twist on every style they brew. Double Mountain is also a brewery evolving into something distinctively local. Owner/brewer Matt Swihart has orchard land--in one of America's premier fruit-growing regions--and has begun to incorporate his own fruit into Double Mountain's beer.

2. Anheuser-Busch. There's nothing quite so American as a titantic brewery, and there's no brewery quite so titantic as A-B. But more than that, A-B has been a leader in a number of technologies going all the way back to the use of adjuncts in the 19th century. Macro lager might be easily dismissed gastronomically, but as a fixture in the brewing world, it's a little hard to match.

You see how I'm thinking about these things? Give me your ideas--particularly those from beyond Beervana.

Birth of a Porter

2012-01-13T09:09:00.000-08:00

In an annual rite, brewers at Full Sail opened the barrels of aging Top Sail Imperial Porter yesterday. The beer had been gestating for a year (four days shy, actually, if you're a stickler for precision) in those barrels, and what came out was not only different from what went in--but different from what was in the next barrel over.

This year Full Sail used 18-year-old barrels of Maker's Mark, Wild Turkey, and rye from Jim Beam. The idea is to get a blend of flavors from different types of barrels. Last year, Full Sail used two types of barrels, and for a short time they had examples of all three variants on tap at the Pilsner Room--a blend of all barrels, and then one each that came from the two different types. (Here's my review from last year's iteration.) Yesterday, though, I got to sample the beer as it was coming directly out of the barrels, pre-blend (pic here of the blogger in action). This is slightly different because, while the different types of barrels contribute a character of their own, each barrel also has its own character.

Barrel-aging is an organic process. The brewer's work has been completed by the time the beer goes into the casks, and what happens next is uncontrolled biochemistry. The beer pulls the liquor from the wood and it blends together, adding alcohol and aromatic compounds. Oxygen slowly seeps through the grain of the wood and interacts with the beer. The various compounds within the beer continue to evolve and interact. Each barrel becomes a singular ecosystem for these changes, and at the end of a year, each one has a unique character. Cracking those barrels open after a year is a fascinating study in biology.

In general, the Maker's Mark barrels produced a decadent beer--extremely rich and loaded with chocolate and cherry flavors. The Wild Turkey was, as you might expect, hotter and thinner, with a sharp edge. The rye barrels were my faves overall--they were earthier, spicier, and drier. Those were just broad contours, though. Barrel to barrel, flavors varied quite a bit. Some were more aromatic, some flatter, some richer, and some, sadly, had gone wrong. One was full of aldehydes and a vicious higher alcohol and one had the beginnings of what I argued might be a tasty funk (though there was a troubling solvent note). Both got dumped, and I captured the tragedy with my trusty camera.

The beer is headed for a tank where it will rest and settle for a period before bottling and it should be available next month. Meanwhile, the next batch of bourbon casks are headed to Hood River, awaiting the 2013 vintage of Black Gold Imperial Stout. They've been doing this every year since 1998, and now they alternate the stout and porter every other year. I will be most fascinated to see how the final blend tastes.

Damage Control

2012-01-12T08:53:00.000-08:00

This is a rather remarkable statement from a brewery:

We know Punk IPA have been a little inconsistent of late. Here is why and here is what we are going to do about it.

However before we get onto that, 2012 is going to see an evolution of BrewDog. We have definitely created loads of buzz over the last couple of years but the main aim this year is to get people speaking about what is in their glass as opposed to all the other stuff. No fighting with CAMRA, no falling out with Germans, no punishing animals with sticks and no legal battle with the Portman Group.

BrewDog has definitely spent more time than any brewery I know trying to get attention. They do just about whatever it takes to make sure you're thinking of BrewDog--except, apparently, keeping their eye on the important ball, their beer. I find what follows to be implausible: they blame the poor quality of their flagship Punk IPA on variations in malt quality and hop supply. But brewers deal with this ever year, and it's part of the business to make sure you have the recipe you want before the beer goes out the door. But leave that aside.

Craft breweries face tough times when they grow. There are certain moments in growth that seem particularly dangerous--from small to medium-sized or medium-sized to large. The systems strain and wheeze, and sometimes beer quality suffers. It's an incredibly dangerous moment, coming when the brewery is trying to solidify a larger customer base--exactly the wrong time to be putting out substandard beer.

Rarely does a brewery admits mistakes and (more or less) owns them, promising to do better. It will be interesting to see what happens with BrewDog. Like that ADHD kid in the back of the classroom who's willing to eat his own boogers to get attention, the brewery has definitely stayed in the spotlight. Now they promise they'll do their homework and turn in their assignments on time. Let's see what happens.

____________

Errata. This is, incidentally, somewhat related to the recent kerfuffle over Sam Calagione's response to critical comments on BeerAdvocate--an issue I've assiduously avoided mentioning til now.

Ahead of His Time

2012-01-11T10:40:00.000-08:00

How early did the idea of pitching brettanomyces occur to someone? Almost instantly:

The holder of the patent is N. Hjelte Claussen, the scientist who discovered brettanomyces at Carlsberg. I'm going to go ahead and hazard the observation that the Wiki site on his strain--brettanomyces claussenii--is wrong; it says he discovered the strain in 1904. Nice trick securing a patent on this technique a year before he discovered the actual strain.

I'll hazard a second observation as well: Claussen's scheme to pitch brett into lagers doesn't seem to have taken off. Sour lager (sauerlagern?)? Someone should give that a shot--there's a gold medal at the GABF waiting for the first brewery to perfect it.

It didn't really pan out for English beers, either, though you could credit Claussen with amazing foresight. It only took commercial breweries a century to start pitching brett after he suggested it. Wonder if that patent's still good?

Update: In comments Ron Pattinson writes:

It didn't take 100 years for someone to pitch brettanomyces. Courage were doing it with Russian Stout in the 1970's and probably started a good bit before that.

I've also an East German Porter recipe from the 1950's that says to add brettanomyces for secondary conditioning.

What's Authentic? -- The Scotch Ale Example

2012-01-10T09:09:00.000-08:00

Have you ever considered a thing so long that you came back to where you started from the other side, thinking maybe you had it all wrong in the first place? I've been thinking. The topic remains Scotch ale, a style that seems pretty clearly invented by Americans. Therefore, we consider this an inauthentic style, one invented from ignorance.

In the early days of American craft brewing brewers had only fragmentary information about world beer styles and the history of beer. Drinkers had even less. Many of the early beers were not brewed to style nor made with methods appropriate to style. (Old-timers will recall "pilsners" made with ale yeast and American two-row malt.) The market has matured, though, and now brewers and drinkers have a far better sense of style. Breweries were doing some pretty terrible things in the eighties, so this was an important corrective.

On the other hand, “authenticity” isn’t as obvious as it looks. Consider this thought experiment. What if, in the 1980s when Scotland was enjoying its own craft brewing renaissance, the first breweries had decided themselves to add peat-smoked malt to their grists? It would have been a perfectly native instinct—malteries were already producing the product for distilleries. What if Scottish breweries had tried to distinguish their beers from English beers with this small change? We would surely now be discussing the necessity of using peated malt in the recipes for authentic Scottish ales. Instead, it was Americans who did it, and the whole thing now strikes some people as a shameful example of brewing juvenilia. But is it, really?

There's an interesting complication to all of this. Peaty American Scotch ales are pretty tasty--and popular. For Americans, a bit of smokiness is what defines Scotch ale and what they expect. Because of this, I can't imagine breweries abandoning peat-smoked malt, at least not in those pretty popular extant brands. Which likely means that in two or three decades, peaty American Scotch ales will have been around so long no one will remember or care that there was something embarrassing about all of this. They'll just enjoy the beer and think nothing about its ahistoricity. We'll have a new style, and it will have become as authentic as any other.

That Old-Timey Old Ale, Billy the Mountain

2012-01-09T09:09:00.000-08:00

Once, very early in my homebrewing career, I tried to brew an imperial stout. Unfortunately, the recipe included too little dark malts and what I got looked like iced tea. Consulting Jackson, I concluded that I had brewed an Old Ale. Thus was I introduced to the style.

The designation "old ale" is itchin' for abuse. Anything can be old. Old as in "sitting at the back of my fridge too long" or "made a long time ago, like Blitz lager." Even in England, where the style should have some meaning, breweries regularly take liberties with the style. Adnams has a beer they call an Old Ale, but it is just 4.1% and is "a mild ale style beer brewed with East Anglian pale ale and Crystal malted barley and Boadicea hops." An old ale that is a mild. Hold that thought a minute.

Breweries have long made very strong beers. Humans love intoxication, and there will always be demand for heavy hitters. Back in the day, the British referred to these with affectionate names like "crackskull," "stingo," and "huffcap." (Huffcapping was big in the winter of 1749-50. Kidding.) These beers were not only strong, though, they were also aged for months or years in oak. Old ales had other names like "stale" for this reason. After a year on wood, Old Crackskull would have taken on lots of character from wild yeasts. It would have gotten that sere, leathery quality we now associate with Belgian beers. In this context, the "old" referred to the time the beer had spent lounging around in barrels. Like stinky old cheese.

The opposite, of course, was "mild" ale, the fresh stuff breweries sent out lickety-split so publicans could start pouring it before the brettanomyces got busy. Old and mild were opposites. (Now, back to that Adnam's Old Ale. Their use of old to describe a mild is therefore a beautifully perverse turn of phrase. Adnams wishes to evoke a sense of the kind of beer old granddad may have enjoyed in the pub back in the fifties--you know, mild ale. One could say--and I would support it--that this use of metaphor is no less useful or poetic to the average punter in Southwold.) It was, however, regular practice to blend the two at the pub in order to spice up a mild with a bit of tartness from old ale. This may be where the word "stock" came from, yet another euphemism for old ale.

There are almost none of these kinds of old ales left in Britain. The two that spring to mind are Gale's Prize Old Ale (now made at Fuller's) and Greene King's Strong Suffolk. Americans have never really taken to the style, preferring their own super-hopped take on a barley wine. (The difference between old ales and barley wines? Damned little. Or anyway, semantic. Barley wine was a much later name used to help move product.) In America, actually right here in Portland, however, Upright's Alex Ganum, has shown an admirable enthusiasm for the kind of old ale you might have found in the days before microscopes had detected the existence of yeast.

Billy the Mountain
The name comes from a half-hour-long Frank Zappa song, incidentally--I think that's Ethell the tree on the label. The image I have omits the side text, which reads "a regular picturesque postcardy old ale"--a wink to the lyrics, which describe Billy as "a regular picturesque postcardy mountain." It's a psychedelic song in which Billy, flush with royalties from posing for postcards, goes on adventures that involve the draft, red-baiting, and Las Vegas. Good times. Anyway, we're here to discuss beer, so on to the other Billy the Mountain.

The first batch of the beer in 2009 was inoculated with brettanomcyes. Alex experimented in 2010 by blending 80% of the brett-inoculated Billy with a portion of sweet mild Billy. This year he's completely switched the ratio--just 20% brett-inoculated. By chance, I happened to have a year-old bottle at our annual holiday party last month. They strain Upright uses is a pretty gentle brett (I'm 90% sure it's claussenii, which is purportedly a British strain and therefore the one to make a beer like Dickens drank). Even after a year and even with an 80% blend (robust), I found that it "added a lovely tart snap to an otherwise hearty, sweet, English-style ale." In other words, not a face-melter.

I wondered if this year's would therefore be sweet--it doesn't have a lot of soured beer in it nor have those yeasts had a chance to do much to the base beer. But it was quite impressive. Here were my notes:

Balsamic nose, with a bit of berry jam. Reminds me of a Flanders brown. There's a tart undercurrent that has that balsamic tartness, but its enclosed in a dense, sweet, gingerbread beer. A touch of oak, too. Heavy and still, it would cloy if it were not brightened by the lovely tartness. There's some spiciness in here, and a long, port-like finish.

It's easily one of the most interesting beers around, and one that will age for years. Given the amount of sugars left in the bottle for the wild yeasts to snack on, I expect it will change enormously over those years. If you drink a whole bottle yourself and listen to Zappa, you too will go on adventures. Oregonians are fortunate to have so many wonderful historical recreations around, and this is one of my faves.

____________
Full Disclosure: the brewery gave me the bottle of this year's beer to taste, which is why I didn't throw it in the cellar, as all my instincts begged me to do.

Friday Flick: The Samuel Smith Cooperage

2012-01-06T11:42:00.000-08:00

The video's quite rough, and you may have to put your ear next to the speaker to hear some of the conversation--but still, it is rather rare footage of an almost-extinct profession.

Of course, at one time, every brewery had a team of coopers on hand to make vats and casks. I haven't made enough of a study to know for sure how many working full-time coopers are still on staff in Britain's breweries, but it is certainly no more than the number of fingers on your two hands. If I had to bet, though, I'd say this is the footage of the last one.

Unpacking the OLCC's History

2012-01-06T10:00:00.000-08:00

Last week, Brian Boe, executive director of Oregonians for Sound Economic Policy, wrote a very nice piece on the Oregon Liquor Control Commission in the Oregonian. In my periodic imprecations against the agency, I often fail to give the context of my pique. Keying off Washington State's recent efforts to change liquor laws, Boe does a great job providing background about how and why the OLCC was (mis)conceived:

When I first sought to study why the current system was adopted back in 1933, I quickly discovered that OLCC had very limited historical information.... Gov. Julius Meier in his remarks to the special session of 1933 asked the Oregon Legislature to study the "Rockefeller Report" and adopt its findings on liquor regulation as the 18th Amendment was about to be repealed. Produced by and written at the direction of the Rockefeller Foundation, the book was titled "Toward Liquor Control," by Raymond Fosdick, personal counsel to John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Utilizing European systems of liquor regulation as study guides, Fosdick patched together two systems of liquor control for the states to consider in their post-Prohibition deliberations. The regulatory model of least intrusion was called the "license system." The second model, and the one that Oregon ultimately chose, is known as an "authority or control system," in which the state retails liquor directly to the public.

The problem, Boe describes, is that no one really knew what the hell they were doing:

Other holdovers from 1933 include the requirement that grocers and restaurants pay cash-on-delivery for liquor rather than the 15- or 30-day terms they enjoy for all their other supplies.

Additionally OLCC insists on literal interpretations of rules that prohibit retailers from taking delivery of beer or wine into a warehouse and then transporting it to their stores with their own trucks. Such inflexibility hurts the environment (prompting double delivery trips where one could suffice), but also provides no tangible public benefit or protection. It is, like so many of the OLCC statutes, outdated thinking attempting to anticipate problems that have never occurred.

It's absolutely amazing that Oregon has never revisited the question of how to regulate alcohol sale and distribution. When I do go on my rants, it's not because I don't think the state needs to regulate alcohol (it does), but because the OLCC seems to be doing such a terrible job at it. Boe's backgrounder was really useful in laying out why the agency has always been hamstrung. It was badly conceived, and as a consequence, it's bad at that regulatory role. Good stuff.

Did Americans Invent Scottish Ale?

2012-01-04T14:41:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking a lot about Scottish ales over the past week or two. Like everyone else who's ever written a book about beer, I had a chapter planned on Scottish ales. But when I went to Scotland, I was mystified to find very little in the way of the beers we so often describe as "Scottish." For example, Google the style and this comes back in the top position:

The Scottish style of ales break down into Light, Heavy and Export. In the 19th century Scotland, a nomenclature, based on the now obsolete shilling currency, was devised in order to distinguish each. 60/- (light), 70/- (heavy), 80/- (export), 90/- to 160/- for Scotch Ales.

Scottish Ales traditionally go through a long boil in the kettle for a caramelization of the wort. This produces a deep copper to brown in colored brew and a higher level of unfermentable sugars which create a rich mouthfeel and malty flavors and aromas. Overall hop character is low, light floral or herbal, allowing its signature malt profile to be the highlight. Smoky characters are also common.

And then I read. Fortunately, Ron Pattinson has been obsessed with the beers of Scotland for going on five months (I use "obsessed" as a compliment). If you start reading through his research, you begin to see that the current state of Scottish brewing is roughly equivalent to former states: yes, it's a bit different from English brewing, but that's if you average out all the different regional styles of England. If you take them all separately, Scotland looks a lot like a distinctive regional expression of British brewing. You find little support for almost any of the "information" I quoted--and evidence that disproves quite a lot.

(Scottish ales may have been classed by shilling cost, but this had little to do with style--and it changed as prices fluctuated--they didn't go through long boils and were therefore not darkened or caramelized by long boils, and "smoky characters" may now be common, but that's because people mistakenly believed Scottish malts were smoky or peaty. I think smoky characters are far less common now that you can't smoke in pubs.)

Scottish brewers made Edinburgh ale, a beer that sounds a lot like Burtons. They made a range of pale ales. They made stouts and porters. Looking through Ron's brewing logs, I don't see anything very much different from English styles. It is worth noting some variations: Scottish brewers added dark malts to their pale ales for color. They did ferment their beers at colder temperatures, and this gave them a lager-like quality. (George Howell at Belhaven's confirmed that yeast never used to be significant. When he worked for Tennent's in the 70s and 80s, they used to give their yeast to other area breweries. Whatever was on-hand was fine because the temps were low enough that ester production was minimal.) But really, none of this justifies a separate style.

I blame American's tendency to romanticize foreign lands. We started thinking about Wallace, Burns, and haggis, and the bare mention of shilling ale got us spinning yarns. I'm writing a chapter about Scotland's ales. I don't think there will be much in there about Scottish ale, though.

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PHOTO: The new brewhouse at Belhaven, constructed outside the building to avoid running afoul of local codes that protect the main building--which will be 300 years old in seven years.

Most Interesting Brewer 2011

2012-01-03T09:45:00.000-08:00

A post over at the New School jogged my memory about one final year-end post I had in mind. It was written by Breakside's Ben Edmunds, and he was discussing the various exotic ingredients he tossed into beers.

In all, we’ve made 92 different beers at the pub this year, learning lots about the various ingredients we’ve incorporated along the way. Some of that includes the fun of working with different base malts, the challenges of finding substitute hops when our supply of Citra and Amarillo ran dry, and the learning curve with bringing in a new yeast strains. It also includes all the Reinheitsgebot–forbidden ingredients that I love to use in the brewery. Over the last few months, it seems like we’ve been on an especially adjunct-heavy kick using a number of less common fruits, herbs, spices, and so on in some of the beers. (At the same time, we’ve also been making a series of traditional lagers, for what it’s worth.)

Ben has an almost unique situation at Breakside. It's a three-barrel brewery with owners willing to completely cede the brewhouse to their brewer. The small batches allow Ben to experiment endlessly even while keeping the house range on tap. As a consequence, Ben can brew beers that are hugely experimental. Larger breweries can't afford to gamble as much. It creates a virtuous cycle: Ben is now well-known for being able to pull off experimental beers, and that makes people eager to try them.

Beyond making some of the most interesting beers over the past year, Ben has also done more than any other brewery on the education front. He blogs at the New School, regularly brews authentic revival beers (his Devon White Ale this year is one of the all-time highlights of Oregon brewing), and has collaborated with various bloggers, writers, and groups to design and brew their own recipes. (A personal highlight of mine was brewing a grisette--a low-alcohol saison--with Ben.)

Breakside may be a tiny brewery in a remote quadrant of the city, but Ben's made it a destination. I can't think of any brewer who did more interesting work in 2011 than he did. Kudos--

Badgers and Ducks

2012-01-02T09:18:00.000-08:00

On this New Year's Day (observed), I retreat to concerns of a lower order. Man can not live on beer talk alone--he must occasionally satisfy his baser urges. So as my Wisconsin Badgers gear up for what I fear will be a shellacking by the flashy Oregon ~~Nikes~~ Ducks, I will take this day to stop and reflect on football. "Reflect" meaning, of course, wallow.

For those of you who wonder how it is that I would forsake the team of my home state, an anecdote. In 1993, I was on my doomed excursion to America's dairyland in search of a Ph.D. In the decade prior to my arrival, the Badgers had amassed an impressive 32-68 record, including two 1-10 seasons. In my department of assorted linguists, theologians, and communists (the once-vaunted South Asian Studies department), people could easily take the high ground against football. I purchased a season ticket in 1993 for $30 (five games, six bones per) and absorbed jibes from classmates who instantly doubted my bona fides.

This derision wavered, though, as the Badgers went on an improbable run, tearing through teams and building up a Big Ten-leading record. In the middle of the season, the Badgers pulled a classic Badger blunder, losing to the Golden Gophers. Smugness returned. The next game was at home versus Michigan, then a terrific national powerhouse. As always, alums drove from all over the state and converged on Camp Randall stadium. My West Coast mind was blown to see gigantic effigies of Michigan players hoisted for ridicule. (In Wisconsin, losing had become so routine that the fans had developed a sense of ritual that rivaled anything from the Vatican. It included a "fifth quarter," a soused dance party hosted by the band that was the reward for sticking through another loss.)

You know how the story goes: we won. It was such a stunning upset that the fans. (There was an ugly end to the game. Like protesters listening to Hosni Mubarak's resignation, Badger fans had no idea what to do. They started rushing the field, cascading down the steep slope of Camp Randall like a gout of mountain water. In their (our) inexperience, we trampled those in the front who were trapped against the restraining wall. Only the long honed sense of fan communication--Badgers were expert-level call-and-responders--did the crowd managed to get back in time so that no one was killed.) After that win there was one more home game--with the dark lords of Columbus. When I went to classes that next week, all pretense was gone. Tickets couldn't be had for love or money, and people were begging me for mine. Ha! Good luck, suckers!

We ended with a slightly dissipating tie against Ohio State, but it was good enough for a Rose Bowl birth. Off we went to populate Pasadena with a sea of beer-swilling, red-shirted fanatics. (One report said a bar near a hotel full of Badger fans ran out of beer.) In a tight, thrilling game, coach Barry Alvarez got Wisconsin the win over UCLA and the program has never looked back.

So today, as these salts of the earth take on a tarted-up, corporate-backed Oregon team (did I write that out loud?), I will recall the ascent of the program and my tiny role.

I will have found my mind again tomorrow and ended the sports blogging so many of you hate. In the meantime, Go Badgers!

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PHOTO: MADISON.COM

Happy New Year

2011-12-31T16:15:00.000-08:00

Be safe tonight--

Events Note

2011-12-30T11:08:00.000-08:00

Lots happening this weekend, and here's a slightly-better-than-Twitter bullet list:

Tonight, Friday 4pm to close. Roscoe's Fifth Anniversary Bash.
Saturday, 8-midnight. Combo One-Year Burnside Anniversary and Two Year New School Anniversary
Monday, 1:30pm. Saraveza for the Rose Bowl. As a Badger fan, it is my sincere hope that this will be the one cheesehead-friendly good-beer bar in the city. Go Badgers!

And the 2011 Satori Award Goes To ...

2011-12-30T08:59:00.000-08:00

The Satori Award
In Zen Buddhism, satori is the moment of sudden enlightenment when the mind realizes its own true nature. The Satori Award, now in its sixth year, honors a debuting beer that in a single instant, through the force of tastiness and elan, produces a flash of insight into the nature of beer. I award it for the beer released in the previous year (roughly) by an Oregon brewery (roughly) for a regular or seasonal beer. The inaugural winner was Ninkasi Believer followed by Full Sail Lupulin (2007), Cascade Apricot Ale (2008), and Upright Four (2009), and Prodigal Son Bruce/Lee Porter (2010)--all of which, I'm pleased to see, are still on the market.

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Now that I've been doing this thing a little while, I'm starting to see a pattern emerge. In three of the five years, I've chosen a beer from a new brewery. You could throw Cascade into the mix, too, because it was effectively a new brewery--a separate name and entirely separate brewing philosophy from the Raccoon Lodge. Even Lupulin honored the novel--the emergence of fresh hop ales as a fixture in the Northwest brewing calendar.

All of which led me to believe I'd be choosing from one of the new breweries to hit the scene--Burnside, Logsdon, or Boneyard (I might have been convinced to name GoodLife or Occidental had there been a tide of support, too). Then I began winnowing and thinking. Finally, it came down to three. And I was surprised to see which emerged as The One.

Logsdon Seizoen Bretta
This would have been a pretty easy choice. The beer geeks were clamoring for it, saison is one of my favorite styles, and the story behind the brewery is fantastic. The problem is the beer. I have to back into my complaint. Over the course of four days in my recent trip to Belgium, I had an epiphany. It came after about my 14th gueuze, the style that makes the Brussels area famous; it occurred to me: sour beer should never, never be harsh. In the US, we love extremes. If alcohol is good, more is better; if a little hop bite is good, melting faces is better. With sour ales, if funk is good, psychedelic funk has got to be better. What results is a staggering range of sour beers, some of which have lots of flavors one might charitably call "interesting" but never pleasant. Solvent, band-aid, burning plastic, extreme, saliva-sucking aridity, and painful harshness. True: they are natural. We like sour ales because they have unexpected character. But these flavors aren't pleasant.

Which brings us to Seizoen Bretta, a beer that announces its prickly nature with its unpronounceable name. Dave Logsdon uses a secret strain of brettanomyces to sour his saison, and one would expect nothing less of the founder of Wyeast Labs. But it's not a gentle strain. A style fascist might demand both malt character, preferably rustic, and some funky fermentation notes like you find in Dupont. I will resist the urge and approach the beer on its own terms. Yet what I find is not a pleasant, interesting brett character, but one that is exceedingly dry and has a long, tongue-scraping citrus-rind bitterness. To me it's out of balance, a beer bludgeoned by brett So, while I will no doubt incur the wrath of the fans who love it, I am passing over this early Logsdon effort.

Burnside Sweet Heat
Next we have a beer in the category of experimental flavored beers. (Bend's Ching Ching, a beer I considered almost as strongly, is another example.) This category of beer is the future of beer, and one area where American breweries are in the forefront--not alone, but definitely right there with the Italians and maybe a step in front of the Belgians. It makes a lot of sense to choose a beer that represents this style of brewing as a way of acknowledging its arrival, and I almost did.

I love Sweet Heat. This is a reprise of a beer Jason McAdam brewed when he was at the now-defunct Roots Brewery, Calypso Ale. A light wheat beer, it finds balance by contrasting Scotch Bonnet peppers with apricot--a high-concept recipe designed to evoke the cuisine of the Caribbean. McAdam pulls off the trick in a light session ale, which is a doubly impressive achievement. The future of flavored ales depends on the examples that manage not to be gimmicky but cohere into something that is truly beery. Sweet Heat does exactly that. Even more importantly, it passes a truth test for whether I really like a beer: do I crave it from time to time and feel like I just need to go buy a pint? Sweet Heat brings the crave.

In the end, it was that element of pure craveability that won me over and which brings us to the last beer I considered. I chose because, not only do I regularly crave it, but it falls into a category of beer we just have too little of--tasty light session beers, especially lagers.

2011 Satori Award Winner: Fort George 1811 Lager
I loved this beer the first time I had it, and wrote:

I hope customers are so mesmerized by the shiny blue cans that they ignore the prominent word "lager" and don't read blogs like this. Because, if they manage to get the beer into their glass, they're in for a treat. Despite people's expectations about canned lager, this is quite a lively and assertive beer. I'm not sure what the hops are, but noble sounds about right--or maybe Sterlings or a mixture of nobles and bastard American varieties like Mt. Hood. In any case, it's zesty and spicy, but buoyed by a lovely, summery sweetness. As is de rigueur for an Oregon beer (nod to Stan Hieronymus), it is as cloudy as November Portland skies. And, although it is packed with flavor, the volume doesn't blast at IPA levels, so it has that moreishness you want from a summer tipple.

Many cans and pints later, I'd add a few more notes. It's not a subtle beer. The hops (which were at the time confirmed to be Saaz and Centennial) are American-strong. It's certainly not balanced in the manner lager fans will expect. There's a decidedly sulfury nose that combines with the hops in a way that does not delight one and all (a friend of mine recoiled and said "woo, skunky"). Even in the lead-up to this post, a number of people called it their fave while commenter Shawn wrote "I heard the hype, bought one, took a few sips and had to give the rest away. Yuk. I like some lagers (Heater Allen, especially), but the 1811 was undrinkable." As all those fans of Logsdon's saison will no doubt agree, assertive beers divide people.

But hey, the heart wants what it wants. Fort George is one of Oregon's best breweries, and their wish to honor the founding of their home town, Astoria, makes all this a lot easier. The pub is one of the nicest anywhere, and I would call Sunrise Oatmeal Pale Ale, Vortex IPA, and Murky Pearl Oyster Stout Beervana must-haves. They even have a sweet new website. So congrats Chris Nemlowill, Jack Harris, and the brewing crew from Fort George--you made a hell of a beer.

Errata
Mike Wright recently launched his post-Beetje Brewery, the Commons. I'm going to consider all beers from the new brewery eligible for the 2012 Satori rather than this year. I didn't have a chance to try them, and I'd like to give Mike a chance to get the line up and running on the new system. Looking forward to get over there.

Ben Engler of Occidental Brewing. early new year's resolution: I will come see you soon. Promise.

Special shout out to Laurelwood for their new Organic Pale, which qualified as the most tasty of all the new beers released this year. It's hard to make the case for what is, after all, just a perfectly executed example of the country's most common style, but it deserves recognition for being a fantastic--if not quite Satori-ish--beer. Kudos to Chad Kennedy, and good luck, man.

I also totally loved Deschutes Chainbreaker, which used sage to bridge the flavor spectrum between spices and hops, and I'd like to put out a special appeal to the brewery to bring it back. Extremely tasty beer. Don't leave me hanging, guys.

Trends in Beer 2011

2011-12-29T12:23:00.000-08:00

A few years ago, it was fresh hops; a couple years back it was sour beers, last year it was CDAs (or black IPAs or bitter darks or whatever). Like birds in flight, when one body inclines in a different direction, the whole flock changes course. What are the trends this year? Which birds are driving the flock? It occurred to me that the list I compiled for the Satori candidates does a great job of summarizing four of the more interesting developments in the world of beer. Here they are.

1. Strong ales
This is admittedly the most inconsequential of the year's trends, but one worth noting. With the release of Kingpin in six-packs, BridgePort solidified a trend that has been emerging over the past year or two: very strong beers released in six-packs at standard (that is, non-specialty) pricing. BridgePort had already scored success with Hop Czar, and Kingpin joins the lineup as another 7.5% giant. GoodLife Descender IPA (7%) and Boneyard Hop Venom (10%) are in the same vein. BridgePort is an appropriate marker for the trend because when they released one of the earliest IPAs back in 1996, they thought it needed to be a sessionable 5.5% to sell. They wouldn't make that decision today.

2. German Revival
When craft brewing started thirty years ago, the early pioneers wanted to work in a non-German milieu (except in the Midwest). German tradition--or its sad descendents--had dominated American brewing for over a century and craft brewers were looking for inspiration elsewhere. Folks like the Widmers had little luck exciting people about their rich German heritage. Lagers were commercial death (literally, in some cases--Saxer RIP). You might sneak a doppelbock into your line-up, but no one was interested in anything carrying the whiff of macro. With the arrival of Occidental and Fort George's delightful 1811 lager, there are signs people might be ready to give the Germans another go. (Yes, 1811 is based on a pre-prohibition American lager, but that style came from the breweries of the wave of German immigrants who remade the industry in the second half of the 19th century.)

3. Saisons
I think I may have cited this as a trend in past years, but I continue to be amazed by how many saisons are on the market--and 2011 was another banner year. There were 65 entries in the saison category at the GABF, more than all but ten other categories (of 83). BeerAdvocate list 982 saisons ... and just 924 German pilsners. This is a staggering turnaround for a style Michael Jackson declared nearly extinct 30 years ago. It may seem crazy for someone to build a brewery on the idea of farmhouse ales, but Dave Logsdon is riding the wave of one of the hottest styles in brewing. I once thought there were a lot of saisons because brewers like them, not customers, but that's becoming harder and harder to believe. In fact, when I interviewed Avondale, a brewery that opened in Birmingham earlier this year (Alabama's fourth), I wasn't even that shocked to learn that their flagship was slated to be a 7.5% saison. Well, why not?

4. Strange Ingredients
Perhaps the biggest trend of the moment is using non-standard ingredients to make beer. We have two beers on the Satori list that are useful examples--Bend Brewing's Ching Ching, a pomegranate and hibiscus Berliner weisse, and Burnside Sweet Heat, an apricot and pepper wheat ale. (Throw Deschutes Chainbreaker in there, too.) American craft breweries--not to mention breweries over the span of history--have often wandered into the fruit, spice, and veggie aisle for added flavor oomph. But often, the additives were there to mask the beer. The current trend is an evolution in brewing where the beer's nature is accentuated and bent in the direction of fine cuisine. Not every experiment works, but those that do are helping to redefine the way we think about beer. I expect this trend to continue and fundamentally change beer. It could take decades, but I think it's irreversible and inevitable. Oh--and good.

I've had to consider the Satori hopefuls in light of these larger trends and I've come up with a winner, which I'll announce tomorrow.

People's Choice: Logsdon Seizoen Bretta

2011-12-28T10:00:00.000-08:00

I have been busy tallying comments, emails, and Facebook posts on the question of which beer should enjoy the hugely coveted Satori Award title.* It's actually a bit closer than I expected, but the clear winner is Logsdon Seizoen Bretta. This is impressive for a couple reasons. In past years I've posted polls, but the winner has always been the brewery with the biggest market share or, in one case, the biggest twitter following. That makes sense--beers that sell a lot are, definitionally, popular. The fact that Logsdon's beer won--easily the most obscure on the list--is impressive. It's also not an easy beer, so not everyone will have loved it (more on that in a couple paragraphs).

I have already expressed huge excitement over the arrival of this brewery--anyone who homebrews has already developed an appreciation for Dave Logsdon's work, and I'm no exception. I've even visited the brewery, which impressed me all the more. "Farmhouse" is a poetic invocation, not an accurate description of the places most beers are made. But Logsdon's beer is literally made in a farmhouse. I continue to have great hopes for the brewery, and Dave has a long view about what he wants to do. The reviews have been very positive, and as the voters in this little poll illustrate, it's already a well-loved beer.

Because I've been drinking too few local beers, I was prepared to rely on you all to pick the Satori, and if you'd voted for Boneyard in sufficient numbers, I might even have selected a beer I've never tried. Unfortunately, I'm not a huge fan of the Seizoen Bretta, and I had another bottle last night just to make sure. Yup, not for me. It's one thing to pick a beer I've never tried on the strength of beer geek love, but choosing a beer I'm not fond of is maybe asking too much.

But here's the thing: beer flavors are subjective. Especially with a beer like Seizeon Bretta. It was designed to have lots and lots of intense flavors and slowly nurtured and coaxed into developing them. It's exactly the kind of beer that will divide opinion. That means some won't like it, but others will adore it. A different blogger, a different Satori winner. And, whether I liked it or not, I'd encourage everyone to try a bottle. At ten bucks, they're quite a value (keeping in mind the time it took to make). You may have the same reaction I have, or possibly it will confer upon you that moment of Satori--as it did for about 40% of the people who voted. Pretty good odds, eh?

I'll announce the Satori tomorrow or Friday.
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*By which I mean that when/if they hear about it, winning brewers usually offer a confused look and a shrug.

Brand Dissection: Pyramid's New Look

2011-12-27T09:09:00.000-08:00

Among the venerable American craft breweries, Pyramid has had a relatively stable brand identity and line-up. The brewery, founded in Kalama, just across the Columbia halfway between St Helens and Rainier, was actually first called Hart Brewing. The Pyramid came when they started naming their beers--first with Pyramid Pale Ale in 1984 and then Pyramid Wheaten in '85 (an important early American wheat beer). Snow Cap came in '86 and Hefeweizen replaced Wheaten in '93--a rebrand of the wheat ale designed to respond to a certain Hefe further south. The next year they added Apricot Ale and within the first decade, Pyramid's line was already much as it is today.

The next decade were as rocky for Pyramid as they were for a number of mid-sized breweries that grew fast while the market was still immature. When the market did mature during the mid-aughts, Pyramid was stuck in a familiar dilemma. They had the reputation of an easy-drinking craft beer and their sales were supported by more casual fans who liked drinkability, not the modern hop fanciers who were launching a new generation of aggressive breweries like Stone, Dogfish Head, and Lagunitas.

Breweries can respond to this quandary in a number of ways, and Pyramid chose the sure-fire loser: trying to rebrand itself solely by changing its image. In 2009, Pyramid released catastrophically bad new design abetted by cringe-inducing names (Apricot Ale became "Audacious Apricot," Hefeweizen became "Haywire Hefeweizen")--or in their words "inject a new attitude" with "energy" and "activity." Are words like that ever accompanied by good design? But this wasn't just bad, it was brand suicide:

I actually awarded it a DMS Award for Worst Accomplishments in Beer (which, unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'm going to have time to compile this year) for terrible labels. The problems were many (opaque design, failure to communicate product identity, etc.), but mainly, they radically undermined the brand. Pyramid is a Northwest brewery, emphasis on brewery. The packaging made them look like a sports drink. I suppose the idea was to communicate "dynamic" to overcome the image of a staid, possibly bland product, but this beamed "corporate" and "inauthentic." It didn't seem to have anything to do with place, and it barely had anything to do with beer. A poor way to reach out to a guy stroking his chin in the supermarket beer aisle.

Forward to the Past
In the past month, Pyramid has rebooted the brand, and they've very wisely gone back to basics. When you're approaching 30 years in a 35-year-old industry, you want to communicate a sense of history. Beer is, more than most things, a product of place, so the brand should signal its Northwest roots. Finally, the brand should at least nod in the direction of the product itself, beer. Pyramid found salvation in the company archives, and the new label looks a whole lot like labels from the first epoch back in the 1980s:

Name
Pyramid's one of those too-clever-by-half names. For people who know their brewing history, it's a charming little nod to the past, particularly given the flagship is a wheat ale. But most people don't know Egypt had anything to do with beer, and the pyramids on the label have always been obscure. That's probably another reason the company was keen to put a snow-boarder on the label: no more answering questions about the Egyptian theme. (Ninkasi, which is even more obscure, works because people don't have any context for the name. They don't know what it means, but they don't care--it sort of sounds cool and that's good enough.)

Unfortunately, that's the brand. For over two decades, people saw pyramids on the label and whether they figured out what they allude to, they are at least familiar. Recognition is critical to branding, so if they were sticking with the name, Pyramid had to stick with the images, too. It wasn't so bad that it hampered the company from becoming one of the country's biggest.

Look
The new labels are very much in the lineage of labels the brewery used for most of its existence. The pyramids are back, the font is back, the original names are back. This is a tune-up, for sure. It's more modern, cleaner, and the colors are used to clear effect than in some earlier iterations of a similar look.

What I particularly like is that the six-pack containers really track as old fruit-crate labels--a great touch for a state that produces tons of fruit. The simplicity of the design and the colors instantly evoke decades of local design:

The best design works on multiple levels, and in recalling a long history of commercial design is one way of tapping into local sentiment here in the Northwest--where the brand is strongest.

Product
The last element is the product itself. When Pyramid rebranded three years ago, they just changed the names of the beer and I didn't see a lot of movement in the product line. This time, the branding comes as Pyramid solidifies its "Ignition Series" (silly name, but fine), continues to add seasonals, and plans new "exclusive" beers. Of the 14 beers on the active roster, six will debut this year. It is not yet a hugely adventuresome line, but Pyramid seems to be making a play for the beer geeks. The brewery will still be a hefeweizen house, but it may yet shed its reputation for caution.

Final Appraisal
Returning to the old brand was a great move. If you have the history Pyramid does, it's wise to use it, not flee from it. The new designs are aesthetically pleasing, and they communicate all the things Pyramid wants: history, connection to region, and quality. It's even a bit daring; after wandering away into total brand confusion, Pyramid had the presence of mind to cut its losses, retool, and return to the thing that made them the company they are. Good stuff all around.

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FRUIT CRATE PHOTOS: THE LABEL MAN

Slow Blogging

2011-12-26T13:05:00.000-08:00

I appear not to be blogging a lot this week. I'll try to get back in the swing of things tomorrow, and I'll do my best to get the Satori awarded this week (the list is down to four--when I hit three, I'll announce). Meantime, if you wish to do any lobbying, now's the time. Logsdon has gotten the most love, but Bend, Boneyard, and Burnside have their adherents.

Anyway, I hope you're taking it slow, too. A belated happy holidays--

Update: A tweet from Ft George produces a minor flood of email votes. 1811 rising!

A Semi-Final Satori Award List: Vote Now

2011-12-21T16:18:00.000-08:00

Thanks to help from contributors, I have pretty good list of beers I'm considering for the Satori. This year, instead of selecting it solely based on my own preferences, I'm going to ask you all to vote for the one beer you'd call the best debut Oregon beer this year. Rather than do a poll, which is so easily skewed, send me an email with your choice in the subject line (the_beerax at yahoo dot com) or vote via comments at my Facebook Page. I'll keep a running tally and use those to weight my own preference--which could be key with beer from breweries I haven't yet had a chance to sample.

Here's the list, with brief comments. You may obviously vote for a beer I didn't mention here.

Bend Brewing Ching Ching
Jon Abernathy says it's good, says I said it was good, and that's good enough for me. Sadly, my one experience with the beer came at the Beer Bloggers Conference at the end of a long day of sampling, and my memory is foggy. A pomegranate-hibiscus beer that took bronze in this year's GABF.

BridgePort Kingpin
Bridgeport released a whole raft of new beers this year after the departure of founding brewer Karl Ockert. Kingpin seems to be the consensus fave.

Burnside Brewing Sweet Heat
Burnisde made a great debut this year, joining Portland's growing group of eclectic new breweries (I'm looking at you, Ben and Alex). In an inversion of norms, I found Jason McAdam's offbeat beers--the harder ones to brew--to be the special ones. The pale and IPA I could leave. The Gratzer, Berliner Weisses, and my fave, Sweet Heat, were fantastic.

Boneyard Hop Venom
Boneyard has made some serious noise this year, and I regret I haven't tracked down a pint yet. Although they have fans of many of their different beers, Hop Venom, a double IPA, seems to be the fave of faves.

Coalition Wheat the People
This isn't going to win--I know that. It's a small, elegant little wheat ale, not a booming hop monster, aged sour, or funky experimental beer. But it is a fantastic beer and it deserves to be on the list.

Deschutes Chainbreaker*
Putting this beer on the list is a bit of advocacy on my part. It grew out of the collaboration experiment with Boulevard that produced a white IPA. This is more a white pale, and it was the better of the two versions. It shouldn't work, but it did, and I loved the way the spices and hops worked together. Maybe Deschutes will bring it back.

Fort George 1811 Lager
This is a bit like Wheat the People--probably too ordinary a beer to be crowned king. Yet in a state blessed with far too few lagers, 1811 was a joy. I drank a lot of it over the summer and admired how it stayed true to the roots of the style while also gave a strong nod to hoppy, ale-loving Oregonians.

GoodLife Descender IPA
Another beer I haven't tried, but which seems to be getting some fine notices. Has a dab of Galaxy hops, which are the current rage.

Logsdon Seizoen Bretta
A truly rustic beer made in a true farmhouse, Wyeast founder Dave Logsdon's brett-aged saison is the odds-on fave to win the Satori this year. The only handicap? I wasn't a huge fan. The brett (a strain from Dave's private store) is quite aggressive, bordering on violent. Turns out brett is hard to use in saisons--Boulevard's absolutely exquisite Tank 7 (possibly America's best saison) sees all its rustic malt and yeast character crushed under the brett influence. Nick Arzner manages it in Block 15's saison--he knows how to keep the brett from overwhelming the beer. Seizoen Bretta? I'm not there yet. But I'm willing to be convinced--after all, it is my favorite style of beer. (Today.)

Laurelwood Organic Pale Ale
As with all things Laurelwood, this beer attracted very little attention. But as a parting gift to the brewery, Chad Kennedy couldn't have done better. It is the best pale I've had in the last five years, easy. Vivid hopping, but amazing balance.

Ninkasi Imperiale
A beer where I seem to be out of synch with the beer geek crowd. I found it smoky and lush, others found it sweet and insipid. Of course, I'm right.

Occidental ... err, Cloudy Summer?
I haven't had any beer from this brewery either. But come on--St Johns, German styles? It's got to be good, right? Cloudy Summer, a kolsch, may be their best, if the internet doesn't lie. And I've certainly never found it to.

If I missed any, holler and I'll post them to this list. Otherwise, vote now and let me know what you favor.

Into the Darkness

2011-12-21T16:12:00.000-08:00

The year's darkest night approaches. The perfect time for pub-going.

Bud's Lost Cred

2011-12-21T09:01:00.001-08:00

I wonder just how much damage A-B's sale to In-Bev will hurt the brand long-term. Getting mocked in the funny pages--not good for the brand.

(Click to enlarge)

The Valley of the Lambics

2011-12-20T09:09:00.000-08:00

Not all beers are made alike. It may be uncouth to acknowledge this fact, but some beers are so time-consuming and difficult to make that they're in a separate category--"Beer Plus," say. On the one hand, a typical American or English ale might spend as little as an hour steeping in hot water, another hour in the kettle (with some lautering time in between), and then a week or two in primary fermentation and conditioning before being packaged and sent off to market. Some of these beers are triumphs of accomplishment. But a gueuze, which I would argue is one of the signature achievements in brewing, requires exacting circumstances, years of aging, and the totally separate skill of blending. It's unfair to compare a gueuze to a mild ale or even an American IPA--to both beers. Visiting lambic land confirmed in my mind that no beer is harder to make, nor any better when made properly.

I scheduled my arrival in Belgium to coincide with a relatively rare brew day at Cantillon. Lambics can only be brewed in the winter when the air is cool enough to chill wort overnight. Because lambics spend years in wooden casks, lambic brewers are confined to annual outputs equal to the cask space their breweries allow; Cantillon, a small brewery in a small building in downtown Brussels, has a strictly limited capacity. So brewer Jean Van Roy brews only enough beer to fill his available cask space. (Important tip: if you want to see Van Roy in action, visit between November and March and watch the Cantillon Facebook page about brewing dates.)

Lambic brewing is by design an ancient practice, but even among lambic breweries, Cantillon is the most insensitive to time. The equipment, the brewery, the methods--everything could have come straight from the 19th century. (With one caveat: Germans stole all Belgium's coppers in World War I, so the oldest coppers anywhere only dates to about 1920.) Cantillon has a museum at the brewery as well, but you'll find if you visit that this is a bit redundant. Cantillon is a museum.

Unlike that easy pale ale that goes from whole malt to fermenter in a few hours, a lambic is an all-day grind. The turbid mash, designed to create a wort that can stand up to years of munching by wild yeasts and bacteria, takes hours. Cantillon's equipment is steampunk old, and very hands on. When I arrived, Van Roy was pumping the finished boil through a thing that looked a bit like a hop back, except that it's purpose was to remove hops, not add them. Hops are used in lambics as an anti-microbial, to keep the wilder elements of the wild yeasts from getting out of hand; breweries age them so they're leached of all alpha acids and add no bitterness or flavor. (Except in a beer like Iris, where Van Roy jumps off the road of strict tradition.)

The wort becomes a template for feral yeasts, invited to join the party during the next phase of the process, when it goes up to a vessel called a koelschip (cool ship) that looks like an enormous cake pan. Van Roy has a disarmingly democratic approach to visitors: me brasserie su brasserie. He told me to just go wander around if I wanted to see the rest of the place (he was elbow-deep in the hop-catcher). The koelschip is on a loft above the brewery's top floor, where open windows let in the Brussels air. On a chilly day, the steaming wort creates clouds of ethereal mist that waft through the rafters, and I spent probably fifteen minutes communing with this scene. For an American lambic fanatic, this was ground zero for one of the most remarkable events in brewing.

In the romantic story of lambic brewing, you always hear about the pastoral Zenne Valley, laden with fruit trees and farmers smilingly working the fields. My mind conjured a kind of rural preserve where the wild yeasts were pristine and untroubled by modern life. Wrong. Cantillon is in the city of Brussels (it's called a "suburb," though to American eyes this is a bizarre characterization--the city sprawls unending for miles and miles, and Cantillon is in the middle of a gritty urban tableau.) The wild yeasts have definitely been slumming with some street-wise elements, from which I conclude that it's not mandatory to have untrammeled rural wonderland to make lambic--potentially good news for Americans willing to risk experimenting with spontaneous fermentation.

The most important part of the process happens in the wooden barrels, which themselves have their own ecosystems. What develops in the casks is straight lambic, some of which breweries may sell without blending. You get interesting but variable character from straight lambic. The real triumph of this style of brewing comes when lambic-makers blend the barrels and then add younger, fresher year-old lambic to add liveliness and effervescence to the sharp, dry, and completely still lambics that result after three years.

I followed my visit to Cantillon with a trip to Brouwerij Boon the next day. It was a fascinating contrast of styles. Frank Boon is emphatically not a museum brewer; in fact, he's one of the most microbiologically sophisticated brewers I encountered in Europe. He currently has a traditional old brewery, but Boon is in the process of upgrading everything--well, almost everything. He will install the world's first modern lambic brewhouse, purpose-built to accommodate the rigors of turbid mashing, but designed to create absolutely consistent worts batch after batch. The traditional part of the process--koelschip, wood aging, and blending--will continue as it has for centuries.

The Boon brewery is located in Lembeek, the historic capital of lambic brewing--the famous Zenne is just a stone's throw away. (It's tiny.) This is a much more rural location than Cantillon's, but it's still just 13 miles from Brussels' Grand Place--in what Americans would actually call a suburb. Boon told me that valleys were important for lambic brewers--and dangerous to regular breweries, which like to locate themselves on high ground. Valleys create pools of still air, and microfauna collect there. River valleys are even better, because the fog and humidity help keep the wild buggies from drifting away. Even though it's just around the corner from Cantillon, the wild yeasts are definitely different near Boon--as anyone who's tasted beer from the two can readily attest.

Another area where Boon and Cantillon differ is their casks. Cantillon uses wine barrels, but Boon uses vats. They aren't as big as Rodenbach's but they're in the ballpark--and 20-40 times bigger than wine barrels. This has a substantial effect on the beer. The volume of beer exposed to wood is greater in a smaller barrel, which affects the density of resident microfauna and amount of air that permeates the staves. I mentioned to Frank that I've seen Raj Apte's analysis of which yeasts become active in the life-cycle of lambic and asked if his followed the same pattern. Boon has been working with a university microbiologist to learn more about his yeasts--likely the most far-reaching studies into the biology of lambic ever done. He gave me a Cheshire Cat grin and said that Apte's charts don't apply to his yeasts--but he wasn't prepared to divulge how Boon lambic differs.

As with Rodenbach, my tour of Boon was spent disproportionately in the impressive cellar. We sampled lambic at different ages to see what character it would give to a gueuze. On their own, they were all less complex than the finished gueuze--one two-year-old batch was pretty tart and sharp, one was more fruity. The year-old lambic was sweet and uncomplicated.

Just before I left Cantillon, Jean pulled out a bottle of 2006 Gueuze, which was one of the highlights of the trip. It was practically glowing with sharp lemon notes. Boon makes a gueuze called Mariage Parfait, which has always been among my very favorite beers in the world--it's got layers and layers of fruit and sour flavors, a tiny bit of saltiness, and a towering effervescence. Drie Fonteinen, which is in between breweries, uses Boon's lambic in its blends, and that brine really pops. It's actively salty, but also has a kind of umami note.

Lambics, and especially gueuzes, live in that strata of artistic accomplishment that includes stinky cheeses, opera, and abstract art. It's very difficult to come to a gueuze cold and appreciate what's going on with it. If I had three beer wishes, I'd ask that people try several different gueuzes in at least ten sessions--different brands and ages. Unlike a lot of American sour beers, gueuzes don't have super challenging flavors--there's no band-aid, solvent, or burning tire. Because of the blend of young and old beer, they're not intensely dry nor sour, and the effervescence nudges them toward sparkling wine. Once you get past the shock of the experience, you begin to understand the flavors and how they work together. Moreover, sampling a bottle from different breweries makes it instantly clear what role the wild yeasts play. Gueuzes are a bit like dog breeds--they are distinctive and unique, and people have their preferences. I'm a Boon man, but I know people so devoted to Cantillon, Drie Fonteinen, or Girardin that they consider the preference for others a minor blasphemy. That kind of devotion is a testament to just how profound these beers can be.

Below are a few more photos:

Cantillon

The undisturbed cobwebs at Cantillon.

Faro, a sugared, low-alcohol, young lambic, is now all but extinct. (Even Cantillon's is well stronger than the traditional 2-3% ABV.) Still, Jean Van Roy serves it from the clay pitcher that at one time would have been found in cafes all around lambic land.

The soon-to-be-replaced mash tun at Boon.

Every lambic brewer has a mark that identifies a cask of their beer when they send it out to blenders. The stylized "L" at the top is Boon's.

Brouwerij Boon.

Your Nominations for the Satori Award

2011-12-19T09:10:00.000-08:00

I had hopes that the Portland beer bloggers would get together and issue annual awards en masse, but it doesn't look like we're getting our act together in time. So for a sixth (and ideally final) year I'll run the Satori Award. Here's the usual boilerplate:

In Zen Buddhism, satori is the moment of sudden enlightenment when the mind realizes its own true nature. The Satori Award, now in its fourth year, honors the beer that in a single instant allows the drinker to realize brewing magnificence. It is that moment when the sheer force of tastiness produces a flash of insight into the nature of beer. I award it for the beer released in the previous year (roughly) by an Oregon brewery (roughly) for a regular or seasonal beer. The inaugural winner was Ninkasi Believer followed by Full Sail Lupulin (2007), Cascade Apricot Ale (2008), and Upright Four (2009) and Prodigal Son Bruce/Lee Porter (2010).

I could use your help this year. Due to a book project, I've been devoting a lot more of my palate-space to beers brewed outside Oregon. I have no doubt that I've missed some of the best releases this year (for example, I haven't tried anything from Occidental, Good Life, or any of several other tiny start-ups from 2011). I've had precious little beer from a few well-regarded newbies like Flat Tail and Boneyard. So, in designating this year's Satori, I'm going to have to rely heavily on the hive mind, possibly even substituting a people's choice for my own if it appears clear there's some movement toward beers I haven't tried (and can't easily get my hands on).

So please offer your suggestions and arguments. Keep in mind that the beer should have been released this year and it needs to be a beer joining a brewery's regular or regularly-recurring seasonal line-up. The idea is to select beers people can actually go back and try.

Nominations, anyone?

Michigan and Honest Pints

2011-12-16T14:31:00.000-08:00

A comment that got caught in my spam net posted a link to this cool bit of news from the Michigan legislature:

House Bill 5034 (2011)

Liquor; retail sales; selling glass of beer as a pint if it contains less than 16 ounces of beer; prohibit. Amends 1998 PA 58 (MCL 436.1101 - 436.2303) by adding sec. 1006.

Well done!

The OLCC's Latest Gambit

2011-12-16T09:19:00.000-08:00

Harry Esteve, writing in today's Oregonian:

The Oregon Liquor Control Commission, which regulates all sales of distilled spirits in the state, is proposing two significant rule changes. One would allow far more liquor stores to become "non-exclusive," meaning they would be allowed to expand into beer and wine sales.

The other, which could have even broader consequences, would allow corporations to become liquor agents. The idea is to make it easier for big grocery chains, such as Safeway or Fred Meyer, to open "store within a store" liquor outlets. Buy the cantaloupe in the produce section, then head over to a separate area for the vodka or gin to make fruity martinis.

The OLCC is running scared because last ~~year~~ month Washington state voters passed a ballot measure allowing supermarkets to sell liquor. They're trying to get in front of things to protect their fiefdom--or as Merle Lindsey, OLCC Deputy Director says, "from the control model."

As I have said many times in the past, the OLCC is a terrible agency. It's innately conflicted, having been put in place out of a post-prohibition way to enact moral codes on a drinking public while being responsible for liquor laws. Their rules and rulings over the past few years have been legendarily bad. But, like any entity, they have a sense of self-preservation, and the Washington law has them scrambling. As always, I'll end with my usual plea: scrap the OLCC and join the 21st century.

How Does the United States Stack Up?

2011-12-15T09:10:00.000-08:00

In the niche-y world of craft brewing, American boosters love to proclaim our place in the world of good beer. (I am not immune.) True, only 5% of the American market is composed of good beer, but never mind--we have Pliny the Elder and ~~Black~~ Dark Lord, so step back. Well, having just been to Britain, France, and Belgium, I'm now in a slightly better position to evaluate America's place. The results are fascinating. (I have yet to hit Germany, Czech Republic, Italy, and Ireland, so bear with this provisional assessment.)

The sad reality is that ales aren't doing so hot. The "ale" countries of Belgium and Britain now produce and drink way more boring, international lager than their traditional styles. In Britain, lagers have a stunning 86% share (according to Fullers' John Keeling). Belgium's a little better at 30%, but they've been stuck at that figure for decades, a period that has seen a precipitous drop in beer consumption (according to Rodenbach's Rudi Ghequire). Britain has roughly 800 breweries (according to Adrian Tierney-Jones' latest article in All About Beer--a great piece, by the way), Belgium has about 125, and the US has 1700--or to adjust for population, per-capita densities of one brewery for 77,500 in the UK, 87,200 in Belgium, and 176,500 in the US.

But the stats don't really tell the story. Each country has its own potpourri of pluses and minuses, qualities that make it surpassingly beery, but others that make it suspect--and this includes the United States. Here's how I'd break it down--of course with the acknowledgement that a month in Europe doesn't make me an expert.

Britain
By far the most impressive thing about the UK are the number of pubs. What I loved was the knowledge that if I set out walking, I would come to a pub in no time at all--big city or tiny village, it made no difference. In those pubs one always finds at least a good pint, if not a variety of great ones. You have to contrast that with the US, where vast stretches of the country have few pubs, and the ones you find serve two or three varieties of industrial lager. As a population, the British are far more knowledgeable about their beer than Americans and it forms a much more substantial part of British culture. Where Britain falls down is variety--and this is a function of that same strong culture of drinking. You'll find bitters and lagers in a put and rarely anything else. Worse, there's an embrace of a depressing trend toward "extra cold" beer. Often pubs will have two versions of the same tipple, one frozen to the point of tastelessness.

There's a lot of excitement in the market, though, and craft breweries are starting to have a real impact on the market. To a person, every brewer I spoke to said this was the best moment in their careers for beer. There's a lot of excitement for flavor and experimentation, and anyone who reads the English bloggers will recognize names like Marble, Thornbridge, and Kernel as leading-edge experimenters. Interestingly, though, the styles of beer these new breweries make are heavily influenced by American craft breweries.

Belgium
Even more than Britain, in Belgium, beer is a major source of local pride. In the tourist districts of the big cities, you'll find chocolate, lace, waffles, and beer. These are the markers of national identity. It seems taken as a given by locals that Belgian beer is the best. People are even more knowledgeable about beer in Belgium than Britain (though perhaps not as knowledgeable as they think themselves to be). Everywhere you go, you'll find a selection of decent beer, even if you pop into a corner pizza joint. Things are dire if you only have a half dozen beers to choose from.

The downside to this is a complacency. Unlike British brewers, Belgian brewers are depressed. Sales for good beer continue to decline as an absolute figure; worse, for small breweries, they're declining faster because the Stellas and In-Bevs are seizing an ever bigger portion of the market with macro-ales. (And this is where the knowledge thing backfires a bit, too; macro breweries play on consumers' sense of history with made-up heritage and antiquity. Tons of marketing dollars help them swamp the little breweries.) The result of all of this is that while there's still amazing beer in Belgium, it's not a healthy market and some of the beers that we revere most are in jeopardy.

France
Obviously, France can't stack up to the major beer countries, but it's worth noting that there's a lot of excitement there. People will be surprised to learn France has more breweries than Belgium, and new ones are opening up all the time. The market is similar to what it was like in the US in about 1988--breweries are experimenting, trying to find their place in the brewing world. In two decades time, the country will actually be a real player in brewing, and it's a pleasure to watch.

America
Which brings us to the US. The country's greatest strength is diversity--we brew anything. Since there's no national tradition of brewing here, there's no consumer expectation, and that frees breweries to do whatever they want. When I mentioned this in an earlier post, some non-Americans took exception. Sorry, guys, it's true. This is America's great virtue in the brewing scene--absolutely amazing varieties of styles.

American recreations may not be identical to the styles brewed in other countries, but that's totally predictable. That's the story of style development. And that very experimentation is what has inspired breweries in other countries. I managed to tour craft breweries in all three countries I visited, and it's really hard to underestimate the influence of Americans on these folks. Of course, the craft brewing movements in other countries will evolve in ways unique to those countries, deviating from the American model much as our beer deviated from the Belgian and British beers that inspired it. Round and round the cycle goes.

The US is so big that the geographic majority of the country has been barely touched by good beer. This is different from Belgium and Britain, which have good beer in every corner and cranny of their countries. To talk about American wild ales is absurd in North Dakota or Mississippi. When people criticize the US as lacking a true beer culture, this is what they point to, and they're right. On the other hand, there are pockets--the NW, New England, Colorado, the Bay Area and San Diego, Pennsylvania--where beer culture is every bit as developed as the UK and Belgium. I think people in those countries may not be aware of how far things have gotten in certain pockets here.

It makes the US slightly hard to characterize and categorize. It is simultaneously one of the best good beer countries and one of the countries most bereft of good beer. But I now feel more confident in saying that in those good beer pockets you'll find more good beer and more varieties of good beer, than nearly anywhere else. Whether they're stable and whether they will spread is impossible to say, but they are impressive even by world standards.

Tweet of the Day

2011-12-14T10:00:00.000-08:00

(No, I won't get into the habit of harvesting tweets for cheap blog fodder, but this really is great news.)

John Keeling @FullersJohn
Sales team want more Past Masters and more Brewers Reserve- good. Prize Old Ale also on the agenda.

The Harmonic Convergence of Thursday Night

2011-12-13T11:05:00.000-08:00

Thursday marks one of those bizarre harmonic convergence of events that makes you wonder if Jung was onto something. It actually makes me wonder if people should coordinate a little better, but hey, that's a different rant. In any case, you should probably plan to head out that night. To which location is the more difficult call.

Oakshire Skookumchuck Release
Belmont Station, 5-8pm

Matt Van Wyk will be on hand to launch a new line of Oakshire beers, the Brewers Reserve Series. First in the line is Skookumchuck, "It is a blend of three different beers (Belgian Golden with Brett, a Farmhouse Ale with Apricots and Brett, and an American Wheat Ale with lacto) all aged in Oregon Pinot Noir Barrels for 18-24 months." You can buy a bottle, or it will be on tap along with Ill Tempered Gnome and Hellshire II (an imperial stout). 4500 SE Stark

Christmasakuh with Sierra Nevada
Hop and Vine, 5-8pm

Sierra Nevada reps are on-site with eight special beers: Life and Limb, Black Hop Rising, Celebration, Foam Pilsner, Base Camp Beer #45 (Blackaliscious), Ovila Dubbel, Saison (which rocks), and Quad. Bring a can of food or a buck to get in, and bring a new toy for the Metro Toy Drive and receive a free Ovila chalice. 1914 N Killingsworth.

Occidental Tap Takeover at Bottles
Bottles, beginning at 6pm

Occidental is the groovy new St Johns brewery that focuses on German styles. Which, with great shame, I admit never having tried. They'll have six of their beers on, including a doppelbock and a tripel. (I'm guessing they'll have their regular line on beyond these two: an alt, kolsch, hefeweizen, and dunkel.) 5015 NE Fremont

The Remarkable Rodenbach Brewery

2011-12-12T09:09:00.000-08:00

When Rudi Ghequire, the master brewer at Rodenbach, took Sally and me on a tour of the brewery, we spent less than ten minutes in the actual brewhouse. We spent a similar amount of time on the history of the brewery (history is a big deal at Rodenbach) and a few minutes on fermentation. But our tour lasted two hours. The remainder of our time? We spent it inside the maze of cellars that contain the massive vats of aging beer.

This is not incidental. Rodenbach takes care making its beer--the new owners, PALM, just spent a boatload of money on a beautiful new brewery--but what happens in the mash tun and kettle aren't primary. The real action happens in those famous wooden vats. Rodenbach brews a single base beer--a sweet, red ale made with 20% corn and roasted barley. Fresh, it is very sweet, and in fact, the hops are used to retard bacteria, not balance the beer (they fall below the threshold of taste). A portion of the beer is then put in the vats and left to age there for a full two years. When it has fully ripened, it's blended back with fresh beer to make regular Rodenbach (25% aged beer) and Grand Cru (67% aged beer). What makes Rodenbach Rodenbach is what happens in those vats.

There are 294 of them altogether, and they're housed in ten vast cellars that can hold up to 33 each. Many of them are very old--the brewery says "older than 150 years" but they've been saying that for awhile. The three oldest date back to the 1830s, if I'm hearing my audio tape correctly [!]. The brewery has its own cooperage, not for building the vats, but maintaining them. This is how their version of an acidified red ale has been made for well over a century. Inside the vats, a happy little colony of wild yeasts work away for months, adding lactic acid to the beer and dropping the pH. This is where Rodenbach is truly made.

For those who know their history of English brewing, Rodenbach's methods will be familiar. It's how the great London porter breweries made beer two centuries ago, aging their beer in immense vats until wild yeasts had given it a refined, mature finish. I was surprised and delighted to learn that this isn't a coincidence; in the 1870s, Eugène Rodenbach went to England and learned to brew porter. He brought the techniques he learned there back to Roselare, where they're still practiced--long, long after the English abandoned those methods in porter-brewing.

When it comes time to bottle the beer, Ghequire leads a team of tasters who blend the vintage beer to get the character they want. Each vat is its own ecosystem, so the beer coming out will taste different vat to vat. (Brettanomyces is not the main culture in the vats, though when we tasted beer from one, Rudi detected it in the sample. It was too subtle for me to locate, but he knows his beer pretty well.) Once they have a final blend of vintage stocks, they will blend that back with fresh beer to make Rodenbach and Grand Cru.

Rodenbach's baroque production methods would only be worthy of a footnote if the beer were ordinary. Of course, they're not. Rodenbach is a lovely session tipple that has surprising versatility with food (the sugars and slight acid work in tandem to team up with a wide variety of flavors) and Grand Cru is simply one of the world's best beers. Americans are adept at recreating most styles, but approximating Rodenbach is tough; Rudi believes this is entirely due to the wood. Without the interaction of wild yeasts and the tiny bit of oxygen that permeates the grain, beer can't develop the depth and character Rodenbach has.

Of all the breweries I toured in my three weeks in England, Scotland, France, and Belgium, Rodenbach was the most awe-inspiring. Every older brewery I visited discussed the balance between tradition and efficiency--such an important consideration for a commercial enterprise. Rodenbach is off the charts in terms of the expense and inefficiency it takes them to produce a single bottle of beer. No modern company would or could consider the Rodenbach model. The vats alone cost thousands (tens of thousands?) of dollars, never mind the cellar space. Add to that the notion of vatting beer for two years--it's an absurdly expensive venture. And yet here the brewery is, putting beer in vats and then trying to compete in a marketplace where industrial lagers can be made for a tiny fraction of the cost.

It's no surprise that the sour beers of Flanders are on the endangered species list. Very few make authentic sour red (or red/brown) ales, and none make them the way Rodenbach does. (De Struise, though it makes a tiny amount, produces a totally traditional, wood-aged sour called Aardmonnik that gives me hope--it's authentic and an exceptionally good, complex beer.) It is almost impossible to imagine any brewery will join Rodenbach in the near term, either. If we could designate breweries "world heritage" sites that could somehow never fail because of commercial pressures, I'd put Rodenbach at the front of the list. In the world of beer, there's nothing like it, and we are fortunate indeed it has survived the vagaries of wars, depressions, and modernization. If you haven't had a bottle recently, go find one and remind yourself what a remarkable beer it is.

Here are a few more photos of the brewery:

The modern brewhouse overlooking the historic brewery compound.

From the right comes "bier" (fresh, unaged) and on the left "oud bier."
They are blended here before being sent to packaging. (click to enlarge)

Like many old breweries, Rodenbach used to malt its own grain.
(Like many old breweries, the maltery used to catch fire.
Now they buy their malt.)

Oak drying before being milled into staves for the vats.

Cellar Report

2011-12-11T17:00:00.001-08:00

We've been hosting a holiday party for a number of years, and three or four ago, I started busting out some gems from the cellar. As my cellar gets fuller over the years, the annual roll-out gets more and more extravagant. Yesterday, boosted by some of the beers I brought back from Europe, we had quite the blowout. Below are some comments on a selection of the bounty.

Westvleteren Blonde, 2011. I was not much impressed by the famous 12 at the brewery, But the blond was a treat. It was even better out of the bottle. A light, spritzy beer with a notable saison yeast character. I have no idea why this beer isn't the legendary one.

Fuller's Vintage Ale, 2000. John Keeling, the master brewer at Fuller's, pulled this out of his own cellar when we visited--and it was definitely the highlight of the night. Eleven years is pretty long for an 8.5% beer, but Keeling designed this for the long haul. (Amazingly, it's still available for just eight pounds--the best deal in brewing.) There is, predictably, lots of dark fruit and smooth, caramel notes. The immediate impression is port, though. The taste of age, chemical changes and very slight oxidation, is on perfect display here. It is a crucible for cellaring beer: if you don't like this beer, cellaring is not for you. Our crowd greeted it with astonishment and delight.

Upright Billy the Mountain, 2010. I didn't get a lot of this one--just enough to take note. Alex has changed the process for this beer, but he might want to reconsider. After a year, the brettanomyces have added a lovely tart snap to an otherwise hearty, sweet, English-style ale. they've thinned the beer a bit, but it's still rich and still has a fair amount of sweet, candyish malt. If you have a bottle, consider drinking it now--it's really nice.

Block 15 Ferme De La' Ville Provision, 2011. I love this beer and wanted folks to try it while it was still fresh and bright. In my view, one of the best saison made, and the very vest made with wild yeast.

Deschutes Dissident, 2009. I bought a case of this, and I wish I'd drunk it quicker. It's just on the edge of passing too far. Already, the Brett has eaten a hole in the center of the palate--and it seems almost to pull moisture out of the cells of your mouth by osmosis, so dry has it become. Still quite a tipple, but I remember what it was like last year.

Fuller's Past Masters Stout, 2011. Another real joy, this stout was made from an 1893 recipe and ingredients as authentic as the brewery could procure. It is a roasty, meaty stout, but one broadly similar to current recipes. No brett, but otherwise a trip to Victorian England.

Widmer KGB Stout, 2010. Speaking of roasty, I was amazed to find this beer had changed very little in a year's time. I think it could easily go another five years.

Full Sail Doppelbock, 2008. Just a hair past its prime, with a stewing that goes a bit flaccid in the middle.

Hair of the Dog Doggie Claws, 2008. I had only a mouthful of this--enough to confirm it remains in perfect, tasty form.

There were several more, but those are some of the more interesting highlights.

Friday Flick: John Bexon and Greene King's Five-X Vats

2011-12-09T09:08:00.000-08:00

In Britain, "head brewer" is the term used for the master brewer, and in the larger ale breweries that usually means a man in loafers, not rubber boots. They oversee operations, head new product development, buy raw ingredients and so on--they don't haul grain sacks. The head brewer at Greene King over the past decade has been John Bexon, the man who took me on a tour of the brewery when I was there last month.

Despite some scorn locals heap on Greene King (too big, to acquisitive), it is one of the most traditional breweries in England, and to my American eyes, a real treasure of brewing history. The brewery recently spent 3 million pounds to replace old equipment, but unlike Adnams, decided to stick with old, quirky coppers. "We could have gone mash-filter, we could have gone lauter, but no, we said we’re staying with what we know. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Okay, we could have gotten a bit more efficiency by doing it, but I think you lose the authenticity." At a certain point in the last thirty years, every old brewery in Britain had to make a decision about whether and how to modernize, and they all answered the question a little differently.

Greene King went with tradition: an old tower brewery that does literally tower above the beautiful town of Bury St. Edmunds (see pictures below), beer is made much the same here as it has been for decades. One of the signature products--and one of the most important beers brewed in England--is Strong Suffolk Ale, sold in the US as Olde Suffolk. The beer is a part of living history, made by blending a young (mild) ale with vintage, 12% strong ale vatted two years on oak. This is a tradition that goes back centuries, but what makes Strong Suffolk important is that the vatted ale, called XXXXX, takes on the character of the wild yeasts that are resident in the wood of those old vats. Thankfully, more breweries are experimenting with wood-aged beer, but since Gale's has moved up to Fuller's, none from England have the continuity of using original oak vats like Greene King.

It's a remarkable product, one actually designated by the government by covenant--like Stilton cheese, which must be brewed in one of four counties--that can only be produced in Suffolk. Blended with between 10-17% old ale, Strong Suffolk has a malty base leavened with a vinous balsamic character. It's rich, warming, creamy, and elegant, like a Burgundy. If you can locate a bottle, you'll have a perfect winter ale to enjoy next to a roaring fire.

When we arrived at the vats, I asked John to stop and speak for a moment about them on video.

Some photos:

The view from atop Greene King over Bury St. Edmunds.

At Greene King, this counts as "push-button" brewing.

The mash tun.

Greene King has a campus of 44 acres, and subterranean pipes connect the brewery underneath Crown Street.

Square fermenters are common in British ale breweries--and are the norm at Greene King.

The tasting cellar.

Beer Snobbery Gone Wrong

2011-12-08T08:45:00.000-08:00

Amusing:

The singer’s rider also reveals a fondness for certain beers. It states that she requires: “12x selection of bottles of best quality European lager beer. ie Beck’s, Stella Artois, Peroni etc. North American beer is NOT acceptable.”

The singer in question is Adele, the latest soul-inspired English singer to roar to massive stardom. She's all of 23, so this seems about par for the course. And maybe this accounts for something, too:

She [also] asks for two bottles of posh red plonk and a packet of Marlboro Light fags and a lighter.

Someone ought to sneak an American IPA in with the Peronis and see what happens.

Adnams and the Question of Technology

2011-12-07T16:49:00.000-08:00

In Britain, one of the things I was most fascinated with was the way traditional ale breweries handled the question of whether to upgrade their equipment. On the one end of the spectrum is Greene King, who basically has stuck with its old tower brewery and classic old coppers. On the other is Adnams, who went for the most cutting-edge tech I've ever encountered. What follows is an interview with the owner, Jonathan Adnams and the brewer, Fergus Fitzgerald, as they walk through their new system.

It's as close as you'll come to getting a brewery tour without going on one, and embedded in it are a ton of illustrative points about technology and beer. Reading through it, I hope you have the reaction I had listening: there are just so many factors that go into a batch of beer. It's technical and fine-grained for the average fan, but I think geeks will appreciate it. Mostly, it just felt too interesting to keep secluded on my hard drive. I've slightly cleaned up the language so it flows. Enjoy.

____________

Fergus Fitzgerald: When we want to start a brew, then, we select a recipe, and [the brewery] weighs out the right amount of malt and it will put in specialty malt, whatever you’ve loaded into those silos. From there it goes into the malt hopper and below that then is the mill—and this is what’s called a wet-conditioning mill. So basically the malt sits up here [gesturing to the computer screen] and in this little chamber here we spray it with a small amount of water. What happens then is the husk of the barley takes up that moisture so when it goes through the mill--these two big rollers--the husk is a bit more pliable so it doesn’t break up quite so much. This is important for two reasons, because the husk is what does the filtration when it’s in the lauter tun—the more intact you keep that, the better filtration you get. But also, you can leech a lot of harsh tannins coming out of there; so the more intact you keep it, the less of those tannins you leech out into the beer.

We add water at this stage. The water we use is town’s water. Like most breweries, at one stage we would have had our own well, but that got contaminated with salt water in about 1940 and since then we’ve been on town’s water. We put it through the carbon filters and then we Burtonize it. Again, because of the age of this brewery, when we started making the majority of the beer, the beers coming out of Burton on Trent would have been the iconic beers of the age. And like lots of breweries we Burtonize our water to try to give it that sort of hop [clarity].

From there into the mash tun, which is this vessel out here. Jonathan Adnams, from later, during the tour: As [the malt] comes out from the bottom of the mill, in goes the brewing liquor to eliminate oxygen from the grist right at that point of exiting the mill. And then it literally flows up underneath [into the mash tun] so there’s no splatter splatter. It’s very important in bottled beers to eliminate oxygen right at an early stage. FF: The less oxygen you create at this stage, the less oxidative reactions you’ll get in the kettle. You don’t want to add oxygen and heat together because that’s going to give you staling compounds later on. Everything’s filled from the bottom to try to keep that out.

Fergus Fitzgerald: [There are] steam jackets on the outside and a big stirrer. All the mash goes in, sits in there for about an hour. We can temperature program mash so we can do protein stands and bring them up to 65, 66 degrees [149-151 F]--which is something we could never do on the old system. We basically put it in at one temperature and it got gradually colder after that.

Typically after an hour we check that the starch is all gone and then it goes into the lauter tun. It's fairly well automated; we take all the first wort off and then we sparge and then we take some second wort off. All that wort is then going to a pre-run tank, which is really just a holding tank. [Jeff: how big are your vessels?] In terms of grain capacity we can go up to about seven and a half ton and down to about two ton, so it’s got a reasonable turn-down ratio. In terms of volume, we’re between about 100 and 300 barrels. That’s quite a good turn-down for that size brewhouse. So, lauter tun usually about three hours.

[Next, it goes to a "pre-run tank", which is] basically a holding tank and then it goes on into the kettle. We boil for about an hour. We have four dosing vessels over here, so we load three of them with hops and those hops go in at different stages—obviously bittering, aroma, and some really late aroma hops. And then one of them we use for copper finings [Irish moss/carrageenan]. So those get dosed in at different times, which is really quite an advanced form from where we used to be. They all used to be added by hand, so there was a bit of variation, particularly on the aroma hops. With this system it gets added at exactly the same time every time—which gives us greater control over the consistency of the beer.

One of the major advances we put in was the energy-recovery system. In the old brewhouse all the steam just went up into the atmosphere and made some nice, fluffy clouds. Whereas here, we can capture all the steam going up off the kettle, use that steam to heat a hot-water tank, which we call our energy-storage tank, and on the next brew, as the wort’s traveling from this pre-run tank into the kettle, it goes through this heat-exchanger which picks up the heat from that energy-recovery tank. Typically we can heat up from 72 degrees to about 93,94 degrees [162 to 199-201 F] just using the steam that previously would have been blown away in the wind.

Jonathan Adnams adds We’re the only brewery in the UK that can do this kind of energy-store, capture-and-storage system, bringing it back at a later date. So even for the last brew on Friday we can hold that energy to first thing Monday. And we can do the same thing with cold energy, too.” FF “We can still get up to 88, 89 degrees Celsius [190-192 F] on the first brew Monday.

Fergus Fitzgerald: So it boils in there for an hour. We control the amount of steam we put in. In the old brewhouse we had basically two big steam controllers that we could open by hand. JA adds “We’re evaporating at about five percent" and then FF takes over We’re now at five percent; we used to be anywhere upwards of ten—not because we wanted to do, just because we had very rudimentary control of how much steam we put in. It was a quarter of a turn for a gentle boil an three quarters for a big rolling boil. So you had big variation between one person’s quarter turn and another person’s quarter turn. It’s also a whirlpool, so at the end of the boil we do the whirlpool stage and then from there through the wort cooler and then into the fermenting room.

We aerate either with air or oxygen depending on the gravity of the beer style—higher gravity stuff we use oxygen, lower gravity’s air. We have cooling capacity, too. There’s this two-stage cooler: part of it’s cooled just using mains water, off the mains, and part of it’s cooled using chilled water tank. At different times of the year we use more—obviously if the water from the ground is running colder we have to use less of the chilled water.

Jonathan Adnams It's a highly automated brewhouse, switches itself on at four in the morning, there’s no one here, it literally runs—I mean, the first thing we do is take an iodine test. The manpower now is mainly about monitoring the process, taking samples, taking back to the lab to analyze. The computer’s running the kit so you get repeatability time after time. All the recipes are in the computer; they can load up the recipes for the week and the computer will run. We generally run two to three brews a day. So three brews go through in 16 hours, so you can have three brews in this brewhouse at any one time.

PHOTOS: Fergus Fitzgerald at top, Fergus and Jonathan Adnams below.

The Role of Star Power in Beer Appreciation

2011-12-07T09:06:00.000-08:00

Connoisseurs are a funny bunch. And I mean here connoisseurs of anything--wine, dog breeds, indie rock. Embedded in their identity is a conflict of interest: on the one hand, they believe themselves to be the final arbiters of objectivity in their particular realm; on the other, there's a constant instinct to one-up everyone else by finding the new "best" or the obscurest rarity, but this can only be endorsed by the fellow traveler who is also in the know. Tribal objectivity; an oxymoron, but innate to connoisseurship. A few weeks back, the New Yorker had a wonderful piece on coffee, and writer Kelefa Sanneh captures its essence here:

Batlle resists snobbery, as any good evangelist must; she thinks that coffee salvation should be available to anyone who seeks it. But the coffee community she loves, where everyone knows everyone, wouldn't exist if the number of converts weren't so small. In order for connoisseurs to exist, they must be outnumbered by philistines, and if the connoisseurs are honest they will admit that they enjoy this state of affairs. The citric flavor of a Kenyan coffee might seem unpleasantly sour to a novice, and so loving Kenyan coffee is a way to show you are not a novice.

So it is with beer. Certain breweries have such bullet-proof cred among the geeks that their products enjoy a halo effect. Others are so scorned that everything they make is tarnished. This phenomenon was in play over the weekend at the Holiday Ale Fest--I think. You can weigh in if you think I'm off base.

Even before attending, I knew that the barrel-aged Velvet Merkin from Firestone Walker was going to be a buzz beer. Barrel-aged black ales are always loved, and few breweries enjoy such a solid reputation (an earned one, I'm happy to acknowledge) as Firestone Walker. Indeed, it was the fest's big buzz beer, and it was tasty.

It wasn't, in my mind, a perfect beer. The bourbon was overwhelming on the nose, and on the palate it was pure vanilla. I quite enjoyed it--the brewery describes it as "milk chocolate, smooth dark cherry, vanilla and coconut infused," which sounds absolutely delicious. I'd have preferred a bit more roast and beery balance, less Starbucks treat, personally, but hey, your mileage may vary. I enjoyed it, but.

Then I tried a beer from poor McTarnahan's, a brewery that suffered from years of wandering and neglect before finally finding its groove under some great brewers. Among beer geeks, few breweries have less juice than Mac's.The beer Mac's sent bore much resemblance to the Firestone Walker--a bourbon-barrel aged black beer, their Ink Blot Baltic Porter, steeped in Jack Daniels' barrels for a year. It was also not quite perfect--at 6.3%, it was a bit underpowered and thin. But overall, it was a quite lovely beer--the whiskey was milder and more integrated, the beer rounder and more complex. Of course, it got very little attention, and I, a classically conflicted connoisseur, ignored it most of the time I was at the fest.

Both were crowd-pleasing, tasty, slightly-less-than-perfect beers, and they had a lot in common. My guess is that if Preston Weesner had switched the kegs before the fest, the "Firestone Walker" would still have been the buzz beer. Loving Firestone Walker is a sure mark of the connoisseur, and the Mac's was a fantastic beer, so who wouldn't have been happy to laud it? We'll never know, but that's my guess.

As always, your dissents are welcome.

A Great Stocking-Stuffer: Beervana, the Book

2011-12-06T12:12:00.000-08:00

It was about ten months ago that I simultaneously celebrated this blog's fifth anniversary and, to celebrate, released a book of the best posts. Sometime after the first of the year, I'll pull the banner ad down and call it a good run. In the meantime, let me flog it for the holiday season. It's ideal for that beer geek in your life! Below is the original post announcing the book, with relevant information and, I hope, teases enough to lure you in to gift buying. Happy holidays!

________

And so we arrive at the grand day: this blog's five-year (also, wooden) anniversary. This means Beervana is now eligible to attend kindergarten. Actually, in blog years, it means Beervana is ready for a gold watch and a wistful pat on the back. Only a few beer blogs are older, but none are as creaky or forgetful. Beervana, in short, has aged badly.

What was I saying? Oh right, anniversary. Yes, well, as many of you know, I am a hermit, and so there will be no party. I leave it to the spry youth, Angelo and Ezra for example, to throw anniversary bashes. Instead, I will celebrate in the manner of a blogger-hermit, which is to say in a quixotic fashion: by releasing a collection of the best posts from the blog, bound for all time in the warm, corporeal covers of a book.

A book!

Why, you might ask (as my mom did yesterday), would you bother turning a blog into a book? Good question. Partly because I love books and I thought it would be cool. But also because amid all the crap here, there are actually some good bits. The barley isn't always easy to separate from the chaff, so now you have them, all in one handy, elegant package. Or, to quote from the back cover:

In the past five years, he [sorry, the slug text is in the third person] had written roughly 1,900 posts and over a half million words. This book is a collection of the best of those posts, including:
Over 130 beer reviews
Reviews of 60+ breweries, brewpubs, and pubs
Considerations of fifteen obscure(ish) styles
An all-new "best-of" section that has never before appeared in print
Typos, errors, factual improbabilities
Rumor, gossip, speculation
Poorly-sourced reportage, and
No posts about Oregon's beer tax!

Important Questions Answered
The book will set you back $18 and can only be ordered online at Lulu. Yes, eighteen bucks ain't cheap, but Lulu charges a lot to print them out one at a time. More importantly, you're asking yourself, "why the hell would I buy a book when everything's available here for free?" You are a reader of this blog, and therefore astute and wise, and I expected you to ask. So:

Books rock, and this one has a nice layout and substantial heft in the hand.
There are over a hundred names listed in the index, and maybe one is yours--but you'll have to buy a copy to find out!
It's relatively cheap when compared with the four pints you're going to go drink tonight at the pub and it will be there on your shelf in the morning, unlike those IPAs. Plus, no hangover!
The proceeds of this endeavor will go to me, and like a lot of good causes, I can really use the dough.
It's a fun and festive thing to do to celebrate the blog's anniversary.
[Real answer]. Despite the fact that it's a collection of posts, the elements actually hang together very nicely. It's not comprehensive, but I honestly think that anyone who reads it will have a very good sense of this place we call Beervana.

Order your copy today!

Even if you decide to pass on the book, raise a pint to all the brewers, brewery workers, and readers who made this blog possible. I know I will--it's been a great five years.

Meantime, an American-English Brewery?

2011-12-05T14:55:00.000-08:00

I began transcribing my audio tapes today, and I'm going back in order to the places I first visited--so today I worked on Fuller's and Meantime. There's a huge, huge amount of fascinating stuff here. A lot of it is at such a fine level of detail that I won't be able to use it in the book--but of course, it's ideal for a blog. So expect a fair amount of quoting in the weeks to come. (Plus I still need to write about some amazing breweries I haven't gotten to yet, like Belhaven, Boon, Rodenbach, Orval, and a couple others.)

In any case, today's quote is actual a story that details Meantime's intellectual development under its founder Alastair Hook, and it describes the evolution of the entire craft brewing movement going back to the time he drank Anchor Steam and Mendocino beer in San Francisco in the early 1980s. It includes a rather amazing comment about American brewing toward the end--one I take slight issue with, and certainly one British, German, and Belgian breweries would dispute. But his point and the narrative is quite fascinating. Enjoy.

______________

I was working for the San Francisco Boys and Girls Club camps. Having grown up in London drinking cask ale, being part of the CAMRA movement, thinking that cask—good cask—is everything (everything else is just crap industrial). I have a North German family; I’ve got North German cousins who got me into beer up in Lubeck and Hamburg, places like that. So I started to drink beer young, on the continent. I went to Belgium Interrailing [riding the train], I went around Europe when I was 17 with Michael Jackson’s guide to beer. And then I went to the states and worked, and suddenly my whole perception of what was right in beer and what was special changed completely—because I got exposed to Germany, Belgium, and the United States. The United States in ’82 was emerging. It was hard to find decent beer.

I did my postgrad at Munich at Weihenstephan. By the time I got back to England in 1989, I had a very different view of the brewing world—and it wasn’t an English view (and I’m a South Londoner, I’m as London as it gets). So I set up a brewery called Packhorse [where we brewed lagers]. Now in London at the time, in the early 90s, sixty percent of the beer drunk was lager—and yet it was all crap. It was all tasteless, flavorless. The British lagers at the time, the ersatz continental lagers, were just awful. They’re still pretty poor now.

Then I set up a brewery in Fullham called Freedom in 1994. Again, bottom-fermented, fresh-brewed lagers. And then I went to the states in ’95 to judge and that of course changed—it just re-invigorated me. It blew my—I think even then there were fifty styles. And you start this collegial judging process where all the people are interested in is the beer and the beer’s qualities.

The craft beer revolution is a worldwide phenomenon that was started in the States. But the big difference between the craft brewers in the United States and those in the UK is that the Americans understood the need to get beers technically sound. There was a bit of a rough ride, but now they’ve come through that, [they’ve] got the best brewers in the world.

[To this, I asked, surprised, "You think so?"] Oh yeah. In terms of specialty, with the provenance and history, you can’t beat, for example, Orval. You know, they’ve got everything. They’ve got the specialism, they’ve got amazing technology, they’ve got all the history, they’ve got a unique beer. And that’s the holy grail for many Americans, and they make their pilgrimages. But it inspires them, and they’ve become the custodians of European brewing heritage for the last 20-30 years. But it’s great. It will have a beneficial effect on Europe and it is, already, and we feel we’re a part of that.

So that’s where we are. We’re here to change the way people think about beer. To do that, you’ve got to meet people who don’t drink beer or people who are drinking very poor beer which has no character. They’re the people we focus on. The London Pale Ale and the London Lager are very much stepping stones to the big, weird and wonderful beers that are day-to-day in the States. The world is working it out. World-class craft beer and the revolution that is craft beer is the best thing that ever happened. And for me, after 25 years as a brewer, to start to see—I’m glad I hadn’t retired and become bitter. I’m glad I’m still in the thick of it at the age of 48 and being able to see it happen all around me.

Rose Bowl? Call It the Beer Bowl Instead

2011-12-05T09:10:00.000-08:00

This year's Rose Bowl pits the Oregon Ducks against my Wisconsin Badgers in what may be the most entertaining game of the season. (I predict a final score of 83-65.) But beyond two entertaining teams, there's this: has a major bowl ever featured two teams from more beery states? In terms of brewery count and exotic and tasty beers, Oregon has the clear edge--even with New Glarus on the red team. But you have to give Badger drinkers, who have been known to drain a pub dry*, a huge edge on enthusiasm. No one loves beer more in these United States than the residents of the dairy state.

If I were one of the governors, I would propose a friendly wager, the stakes of which would be tasty, tasty beer. Say a mix case of 24 of the finest brews from each state. According to the fish wrap, at the moment both coaches are all lovey-dovey about each other's programs, and these two historically weak teams have had no opportunity to build much of a rivalry. Put some Wisconsin Belgian Red up against Adam from the Wood? Now that's something to play for.

A Small Raspberry for the Holiday Ale Fest

2011-12-04T12:08:00.000-08:00

There are always a lot of reasons to praise and criticize the Holiday Ale Fest, and this year, the steep entrance fee was the number one target. Personally, I don't mind the cost ($25 bucks gets you in with a mug and eight tokens; essentially half the price is an entry fee). Once you'd paid up, you could come back with your mug and buy more tickets at the usual price of $1 a pop. This had two effects: 1) it depressed attendance a bit on the two days I was there, making it a far more pleasant place to be than in past years; 2) it rewarded people who sampled broadly and came back a time or two--because the more samples you tried, the lower the per-pour price became. All cool so far.

But they also charged designated drivers $5 to get in the door, which is itself a stupid disincentive to any Samaritan good enough to volunteer to chauffeur. But worse, yesterday a pregnant friend of mine and a designated driver begrudgingly agreed to the usurious entry fee on the promise of soda. They got there at 11 am--i.e., opening. Soda? Nada--they'd long run out. But thanks for the five bucks--have a great time!

It's the kind of unforced error that permanently turns people off fests, and one I really, really hope HAF avoids repeating. And come on, guys, let the drivers in for free.

Your Friday Bad Beer Quiz

2011-12-02T14:04:00.000-08:00

Ignoring my warnings, a friend ordered a beer last night at dinner. It was a poor beer, but not without its charms. The bottle text was priceless:

"[Beer name]: superior malt, aromatic hops, yeast, and crystal clear water are transformed by the skill of the brewmaster into a beer fit for you, the connoisseur.

[Beer name] goes through a long and special maturing process. This gives [beer name] its full-bodied, malty taste, making it the only truly royal beer."

Anyone care to hazard a guess as to which beer my friend unwisely ordered?

The Surprising Worthington Revival

2011-12-02T09:09:00.000-08:00

I toted home a number of beers from Europe, but all but one from Britain were given to me. The last was so interesting I had to buy a bottle myself: Worthington's famous White Shield. Worthington is an ancient brand, and it has been brewed by different breweries over the decades; now it's back in Burton in a little test brewery inside the National Brewery Centre (though the flagship White Shield is brewed at the massive Coors plant that looms over the city). Pete Brown calls the beer "one of the best beers in the world" and he's not wrong. Beyond best, it's one of the most interesting and a wholly unique Burton product. We'll get to that in a moment, but first, a bit of history from Pete:

It traces an unbroken lineage back to the 1830s as one of the genuine IPAs brewed in Burton on Trent and sold in Calcutta. When I was researching Hops and Glory I found records of it being imported to the Calcutta docks. It was dwarfed in size by Bass and Allsopps. but did steady business. Allsopp's is no more, and Bass is in trouble. White Shield has certainly had its ups and downs, almost disappeared after brewing was contracted out from Burton, but was rescued and revived by [brewer] Steve [Wellington] about a decade ago. Since then, it's won Champion Bottled Beer of Britain and Steve has been named Brewer of the Year.

What's especially unlikely about the beer's revival is that it was guided and funded by Coors--now the dominant brewery in the famous old city. (Marston's, with its old Burton union system, is another big brewer, but Coors is the latest king of industrial brewing in the city that invented it.) Coors spent a million pounds and three years on the brewery, and for their trouble they got one of the strangest, most characterful beers in the market. A great bargain from my side, but not one you'd expect Coors to strike.

The Beer
Burton water is famous not only for its hardness, but a distinct diabolical, brimstone quality. A true Burton beer, one that has been pulled up through the gypsum-rich wells, should exhibit the "Burton snatch"--a whiff of unmuted sulfur. For the most part, Burton beers have the snatch engineered out of them; Burton Bridge, a local micro makes lovely, but sulfur-free cask ales, and Marston's, in spite of the union system, is another bland tipple. Worthington's, though, are the real deal. Each beer in the line has the sulfur, from the Bass revival called "E," to Red Shield, a pale, but especially in White Shield, the closest thing you'll find on the planet to a historic IPA.*

Sulfur comes in two varieties, one that smells like a burned match (strange but broadly unobjectionable) and one that smells like rotten eggs (objectionable). I was shocked to find the Worthington line has the latter--a whiff of which will send the unprepared sniffer into involuntary recoil. Amazingly, the nose attunes itself to this assault. The hard water gives a strong mineral structure to the beer that works well with a fairly malty body. It's hoppy, but the hops work in tandem with the salts. I've long heard how Burton water draws out hoppiness, and it's true; the minerality is stiff and crisp, and it frames the hop bitterness. Together, the flavors make one of the most complex beers I've ever sampled. In fact, there's something almost Belgian about the way the aromas, texture, and flavors harmonize. By the end of my pint (and I'm afraid a pint fresh at the brewery is going to be far better than any other mode of delivery--probably far, far better, if the reviews on BeerAdvocate are any measure) I found I was actively enjoying the whiff of sulfur.

A hundred and fifty years ago, Burton was the center of British brewing, and the character of the beers was considered paradigmatic. Other regions despaired of brewing decent pale ales (or despaired of selling their decent pale ales to a public confident they could only be brewed in Burton). I have always understood this intellectually, but sitting down to try Worthington in situ, I finally experienced it. I get it. The flavors are strong and unusual but beguiling. I brought a bottle home with me, but from this side of the ocean, that looks to be a woefully inadequate supply. A truly original beer, and one you must seek out if ever you find yourself in the middle of England.

_________________
*Relatedly, Alan's got an interesting post up about revival styles and how and when they can or should be considered "authentic." The post and comments are worth a read.

A Man Walks Into a Bar ....

2011-12-01T09:09:00.000-08:00

One of the more interesting things about foreign travel is how the unnoticed, little aspects of life you take for granted shift and change when you cross the sea. Going to a bar involves all kinds of specialized knowledge that we've long forgotten about, but visit another country and you're reminded of just how many little social agreements there are. Take, for example, the word "bar." This is an Americanism, and it isn't specific. We may use it as shorthand to describe a place with no food, a pool table, and cheap beer or a high-end restaurant with $20 entrees and $6 pints. (Oh, entrees? In French that means first course, not main course. See what I mean?) We use "pub," "tavern," "bar," "lounge," and "brewpub" to describe different kinds of drinking establishments, and we know that they can mean slightly different things. Imagine the confusion to a foreign visitor.

(I suspect our system reflects America's conflicted relationship to booze. We've ended up with so many euphemisms because, as a culture, we've never been comfortable with alcohol. Someone's always trying to inhibit its consumption, and others are trying to consume. So we have a system of oblique signals that shield the offended from the activities of the offenders. There's an old tavern down in Westmoreland--or used to be, anyway--called the Semaphore. I've always thought it was a perfect tongue-in-cheek nod to the issue.)

In Britain, the standard unit of measure is a pub. Unlike the baroque system we use in the US, a pub is a pub is a pub. Everything is very straightforward. You walk up to the bar, order your pint and food, and take it back to your table. Or, if you prefer, stay at the bar and chat with the locals who are invariably gathered around. It's ideal for the half-introvert like me; I can decide whether I want company or not. If you're out with friends, it's typical to rotate buying rounds, a process that encourages one to stay on past the first pint. Tipping is not typical, but a Londoner I spoke to said that if you spent an evening in a pub, you might throw in a pound or two after the final round for thanks.

In the south of the country, a pint will be poured au naturel, straight from the cask. In the north, they use a "sparkler" to produce a creamy head. (Ted Sobel, whose heart resides in Cumbria, in the north, will pour a sparkled pint if you visit him in Oakridge.) This is the subject of no small debate. Full disclosure: I'm a no-sparkler man.

In Belgium, you walk into a cafe. As with the United States, you can choose to sit at the bar, but if you sit at a table, you order through a waiter. I mentioned yesterday that most beer sold in cafes is available via bottle, and the waiter plays no small role in serving these. Presentation is a big part of the experience, so each beer might be handled differently. A gueuze may be poured from its own little basket. Effervescent beers require special care in pouring. In every case where I ordered a bottle at a cafe, the waiter made a special effort to put the bottle next to the glass--always a glass with the brewery logo--and rotate it so I could see the label. It reminded me of the way wine is served in the US. The waiter will likely not decant the entire bottle so as to avoid rousing the yeast in the bottom; the result is a clear, bright pour, typically with a beautiful, billowing head.

You don't tip in Belgium, either, unless you want to make a special point of your appreciation. Once, when we were in Watou near St Bernardus and Westvleteren, we found a restaurant completely empty except for the owner. Watou is a tiny town, and it rolls up at night like it's expecting a siege; we were so thankful that the guy was willing to cook us a meal (mussels, the biggest pot I've ever seen, with a local Hommel Bier) that I offered a rather hefty tip. I still wonder if I offended him--but it was one of the best meals we had in Europe.

So there you have it--three countries, three ways of doing things. I enjoyed them all, and I especially enjoyed that they all differed. Even in a pub you can tell you're in a different place.

Holiday Ale Fest Notes and Stats

2011-11-30T11:14:00.000-08:00

The Holiday Ale Festival, arguably the signature event of the year, kicks off downtown today. It features 41 regular beers and another 16 that are released at 2 pm every afternoon of the Fest--four a day--except today, when the special release rolls out at four. Another slot is occupied by a rotating Lips of Faith beer from New Belgium. What makes this fest special are the beers, the majority of which are special, one-time releases. Scanning the list, I see only one beer that's available year round (Cascade's Sang Noir) and only a handful that are regular seasonals. Mostly these are gifts to the beer geeks for making Portland such a special place.

Stats
Total number of beers at the fest: 63
Number appearing any given afternoon: 46
Average alcohol content: 7.9%
Average IBU: 48
Least alcoholic: Breakside Cranberry Biere de Table (3.3%)
Most Alcoholic: 2005 Samiclaus (14%) - pouring today only

Styles
It's rough to break the beers down by style, but let's try. Looking just at the regular beers, I'd say they look roughly like:

7.1% - Porter
7.1% - Old Ale
7.1% - Sour ales
9.5% - Barley Wines
9.5% - Belgian styles
14.3% - Winter Warmer
16.7% - Strong ales
16.7% - Stouts

You may ask: what's the difference between a winter warmer and an old ale? Or an old and a strong? Or a strong and a barley wine? Or -- enough. I suppose you could say it's 23.8% porters and stouts, 47.6% strong ales, plus some other stuff. But this is my blog and so I assert (capriciously) that there is a difference between barley wine, old ale, winter warmer, and strong ale.

It's always fun to try to suggest beers, but since I didn't go to the media tasting, I have no idea what most of these taste like nor can I predict anyone's particular preferences. And anyway, you'll follow your bliss. What interests me are these:

Breakside Cranberry Biere de Table. It's a session saison with a bit of cranberry acid and spice for fun. Sounds a lot like the kind of beer I asked to brew with Ben for Mighty Mites, and that's pure Jeff-bait.
Collaborator Hallucinator English Old Ale. Not the first time Hallucinator's made an appearance, and I recall past editions being mighty tasty.
Double Mountain Chimney Stout. Brewed with rye and oats, the brewery promises a touch of sweetness up front and a long, dry finish. If so, I'll love it.
Firestone Walker Bourbon Barrel Velvet Merkin. I can feel the buzz all the way in SE Portland. I will have to give it a try just so people don't badger me.
Hopworks Kentucky Christmas. At least the third year they've made this, and I've loved past editions immoderately.
Laurelwood Bonaparte's Retreat. Having just been to France and Belgium, this would be a must-try in any case, but it's made with roasted chestnuts, perhaps like the packet I bought in York, which is doubly enticing.
Lompoc Cherry Christmas. A witches' cauldron of blended beer; I will overlook one of the ingredients ("a two-year old Gueze"--gueuze is made by blending different ages of lambic) because the others, blends of soured and/or barrel-aged beers, sound delicious.
McTarnahan's Barrel-Aged Ink Blot. A Baltic porter aged on Jack Daniels barrels. Worth a token to see how it turned out.
Ninkasi The Little One. A true parti-gyled small beer, made from the second runnings of Critical Hit barley wine. Though the nerd in me thinks they should have called it "Double Damage" Small Beer.
Rusty Truck Belsnickle Strong Ale. Rusty Truck? Rusty Truck? What the hell is Rusty Truck? It's apparently from Salem. Who knew?
Upright Provision. A mix of biere de garde and brett-soured English old ale. Sounds like a huge degree of difficulty, but if it works, it probably really, really works.

If you're looking for more advice, Pete and Angelo have made their selections as well.

Belgian Beer in Belgium

2011-11-30T09:09:00.000-08:00

Although I'm back in the US and need to attend to things local (Holiday Ale Fest, anyone), I still have a fair amount of content I didn't get to address on the road. I'll be mentioning it over the course of the next few days or weeks. Other people's travel stories are never that interesting, but I'll do my best to make them relevant.

First up, the terrain of beer styles as they actually appear in Belgium. My sense was that Belgium would be like Britain and the US: a binary market of macro lagers on the one hand and a rich tapestry of different "good" beer styles on the other. I was half right. The beer market is both structurally different, and also distributionally different.

Macro lagers (Jupiler, Stella, etc) control 70% of the market, as expected. On the "good" side, though, there's serious homogenization, too. Go to any cafe in Belgium, and you'll find that the "good" beer side is also dominated by the same familiar names--Leffe, Grimbergen, Duvel, Orval, one of the krieks*, etc. Some of these are macros with middling character, some indies with great character. But you'll be hard-pressed to find more than two or three smaller breweries available. It's more like a three-tier system, where there's the macro lagers, the large ale producers, and everyone else.

A big part of this dynamic is that Belgian breweries largely bottle their "good" beer--particularly the strong, robust ales we think of when we think of "Belgian beer." Cafes will always have lager on tap, and they may have a handle or two for ales. But mostly, if you order a specialty beer, you'll get a bottle, not a pour. This is intentional; Belgian brewers design their beers to go through a secondary fermentation in the bottle. Many don't even keg their beer. Typically, a beer will spend a week in primary, then some longer period in conditioning (often a long period of lagering) and then spend time in a "warm room" after bottling to finish out the secondary fermentation. When you're served a beer in Belgium, the waiter will bring the appropriate glass (breweries often have a different glass for all their beers), decant it for you, and leave about a half inch of beer in the bottle with the lees. He will turn the bottle toward you so you can see the label. Very elegant.

All of this is the inverse of British brewing, where the good stuff is designed to be served on cask. In Britain, this means you're always finding beer from local breweries (though you may find national brands, too). In Belgium, you have to seek the beers out, either at specialty cafes or bottle shops. The former are much less numerous than they are in the US, the latter much more, at least in medium-sized cities. In local towns, markets are harder to find. In bottle shops, you do find the local stuff, though. So if you go to Belgium, make sure you visit them, not just the cafes. It's where you'll find the beer you're looking for. Go to cafes, too, but content yourself with a bottle of Du Bocq Gauloise Brune or Rochefort--something interesting, but probably not obscure.

____________
One of the most disappointing developments in Belgium is the debasement of kriek. While there are a few extant examples of real lambic-based kriek, by far the more common concoction is a sticky substance that reeks of cough-syrup-cherry flavor. In fact, it seems like the word "kriek" has gone through a transformation so that this is the meaning of the term. At this time of the year, you can also get it warmed up (gluhkriek), which only volatilizes those horrible aromas. Serve someone a very dry, complex 100% spontaneously-fermented kriek and they'd probably sue you for poisoning. A shame.

Home Sweet Portland

2011-11-29T13:35:00.001-08:00

Sometime on the way to our false night--we left Belgium in the pre-dawn hours, flew into the daylight out of Amsterdam and through the night only to land at PDX at noon on Tuesday--we flew over Greenland. It was so far north I think it was technically still daytime, just that twilight that comes at midday.

There's nothing to do with beer there, but it was still cool.

Trappists

2011-11-28T22:46:00.001-08:00

I am now in the Amsterdam airport (free wifi!) waiting for my direct flight home. Yesterday we had quite a day. Rochefort in the morning, Orval in the afternoon. Much as with Dupont, I was already quite familiar with the breweries in 2-D; all that remained was to experience brewing in an ecclesiastical setting. And also to pick up a few odd tidbits I'd either forgotten or missed.

If I were given ten slots for beer I could only drink the rest of my life, Orval would surely be among them (along with Saison Dupont, Rodenbach Grand Cru, and Boon Mariage Parfait--other breweries I was able to visit). So spending time at Orval was, if not enormously educative, an important ritual stop. Plus, the monastery is absolutely stunning. Rochefort's brewhouse, though, is the more attractive and contemplative. More on the breweries I visited later. Now, I'll gird for the flight home.

__________
Photos: Orval at top, Rochefort below.

The Unholy Abbey Beers

2011-11-27T01:51:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons you go to a country is to understand the beer from the inside. It's not enough to find bottles on a shelf in Oregon to understand a country. So much of what makes it to the United States goes through a filter of nostalgia and expectation. To sit in a cafe and discover how hard it is to find the kinds of beers Americans think of as Belgian--good luck finding a saison anywhere--while be assaulted by Jupiler and Leffe signs is a revelation. Our tidy belief in regional brewing is shattered, too, by visiting a village and failing to find the beer brewed there. And then talking to breweries is fascinating, too, because you hear what it's like to inhabit a market not on skewed by industrial titans (every country has that) but ones that disguise their beers in the homespun fabric of the humble monastery. This is uniquely Belgian.

Indeed, everywhere you go, you'll find dubbels and tripels and sints and saints, and brewery brands with dates like "anno 1023." Belgian consumers believe themselves very educated about beer, but as one brewer told me, "ask ten Belgians where Leffe is brewed, and nine will say in an abbey." The Trappists have done an amazing job of bringing attention to Belgian beers, but their success has skewed the market so that authenticity is often seen through the crack in a monastery cloister, not the slow development of style and process in actual commercial breweries. Huge industrial breweries make arrangements to associate a bland product with a non-brewing abbey in some cases; in others, the mere existence of a historical abbey is enough to justify the name on a label and a date that has nothing to do with brewing operations.

I heard this complaint again and again in the breweries I visited. I mean to do a post on Rodenbach soon, and it's a great example of the contrast. This is a brewery that has been making beer in the same way for decades and which has a tradition of cask-aging red ales that goes back nearly two hundred years. It is one of the most impressive breweries in the world, and certainly one of the most traditional, and yet it is easily dismissed for a lack of "abdij" provenance. Meanwhile, Grimbergen enjoys the halo of sanctity.

In the United States, this isn't such a big problem because it's easy enough to shift products around. If you happen to have a brewery that makes a traditional ale--particularly if, like Rodenbach, Cantillon, or Boon, the brewery has been designed only to make a certain kind of beer--you're not in a position to chase fads.

Unlike the British market, where breweries are now feeling excited about a rejuvenated market, in Belgium they are gloomy. Traditional breweries depend on foreign markets like the United States to meet capacity, and they're not sure how to increase sales locally. Some, like Dupont and St. Feuillien (which I visited yesterday) are thriving and growing. But others are finding it much harder. I'll follow up with a post about what strategies these traditional breweries have adopted, and what their prospect for success is, later on. But since I'll be visiting two Trappist monasteries tomorrow (Orval and Rochefort), it's worth mentioning how they've managed to monastacize the Belgian specialty beer market.

Probably we have Stan Hieronymus to blame.

Brasserie Dupont

2011-11-25T05:38:00.001-08:00

The first time I visited New York in the early 90s, its terrain was as familiar to me as a neighboring city's. I'd been encountering it for over twenty years in sources as varied as Catcher in the Rye and Taxi. yesterday, in the waning light of a slate midafternoon, I had a similar experience at Dupont--possibly my favorite brewery in the world.

It's one of the world's most famous, and has been written about so extensively that the tour was mainly the act of putting three dimensions to the two I've been working with. Yet still, it was surprising and remarkable. Brewer and part-owner Olivier
DeDeycker fired up the burner under the copper. He's had to spend tons of money maintaining this old system--the coppers date to 1920, as do all the oldest ones in Belgium, because the Germans stole the earlier ones for their war machine--which creates a convective boil and caramelizes the beer. (It would have been cheaper and way more efficient to use steam-jacketed modern equipment.)

Then we went to the fermentation room, where Dupont's famous yeast gobbles maltose in wide, square fermenters. Anyone who's worked with this yeast knows the reputation: Dupont lets it free-rise almost as hot as it wants to go, way past where any other yeast would produce gasoline. When we visited, the electronic monitor showed the fermenters in a range of stages, from the modest 22 degrees Celsius (70 degrees F) to a robust 35.3 (95 F). But fear not, at 39 (102 F), they intervene to prevent the yeasty bacchanal from getting out of hand.

Then we finished the tour and sampled beers--most of which I know so well. One nice treat was a pilsner the brewery's been making for decades--and which carried them through lean times when the saison style had effectively died out. It's femented in their square fermenters and has a lovely, rich grainy quality that itself seemed rustic. We also tried the new stout, an Irish version that was tasty but left me ready for a different saison.

Finally, over samples, Olivier mentioned other initiatives he's got on the back burner. (Actually, Dupont's about to go from a max capacity of 15,000 hectoliters to 50,000. Dupont is fortunate to have an architect in the family--as well as a graphic designer who has worked on the labels. Oliviers's wife is a microbiologist who works in the lab.) One is absolutely amazing, but I've been sworn to secrecy. A scoop I can't use! Beer geeks, though, will be wagging their tongues mightily in 2-3 years.

Anyway, a first visit that felt like a return home. Perfect.

Cascade Bests the Belgians

2011-11-23T22:25:00.001-08:00

Odd to see the New York Times' Eric Asimov raving about Cascade Kriek as the finest sour ale while I'm here in the land of its inspiration--but. I can't disagree.

I do wish they'd included a bottle of Rodenbach Grand Cru in the flight, though.

En France

2011-11-23T09:09:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, I zipped across the border for a quick tour of St Germain/Page 24 and Castelain/Ch'ti. (Ch'ti is pronounced, incidentally, with a quick "shh" followed by a brief verbal pause, and then "tee.")

The French brewing scene is at full metastasis, but it's apparently about where the US was in, say, 1994; lots of breweries, but very spotty quality and no sense of overall direction. The French embrace biere de garde as te indigenous style, but I don't see agreement on what the philosophy behind the beer should be.

Ch'ti, located in the same brewhouse since 1926, is a keeper of the traditional flame. They use a lager yeast and lager their brands for 6-12 weeks. The result is a line of exceedingly smoothy, silky beers focused directly on malty easy drinking. ("Keeping" is done at the brewery--drinkers should enjoy the beer fresh.)

I think Page 24 may have the idea about where the style should go, and I was hugely impressed with their line. The have a tripartite brewing/ownership structure, and the three brains have decided that localness is the key to "style." So, they use only ingredients sourced locally, including hops at nearby fields. (Locally grown barley is malted elsewhere, but this seems like a permissible deviation.)

Unlike Ch'ti, Page 24 beers feature a lovely herbal hoppy character. It carries through each of their beers and makes them quite recognizable. Page 24 brews with sugar from local beets, and uses chicory and rhubarb in two of my favorite beers.

French brewing is going to change a lot in the next two decades, and I'm reluctant to guess which direction it will take. (One bug challenge is wine, which is not only dominant culturally, but cheap Stephane at Page 24 told me a good bottle is roughly the same price as a bottle of their beer.) But it's fun to visit a place where things are exciting and growing.

How Do I Get a Check in This Country?

2011-11-21T13:22:00.001-08:00

Just got back from Rodenbach and I'm still reeling a little. No time to reflect beyond this:

But I will ask: how do you get the check after a meal here? It's almost like everyone's too polite to want to sully our experience with anything as crass as the bill.

To bed. France tomorrow.

Mmm, mm

2011-11-20T11:18:00.001-08:00

Duivels Bier

2011-11-19T05:12:00.001-08:00

I spent a good six hours with Frank Boon yesterday afternoon and evening, and I'm still absorbing all that he told me. (One factoid: Boon is building a new brewery that will be unique for having been designed specifically for lambic brewing and turbid mashing. It's overdue; his current system is cobbled together from 90-120 year old pieces.) I'll do a full post later on, but here's one of those curious little local stories that may not shake the earth, but is fascinating nonetheless.

The beer below is brewed at Boon, but it's not a lambic (that's Frank in the background, incidentally):

It's a dark beer that's something akin to a dubbel, with a little borrowing from Edinburgh. The name goes back as far as Boon's mash tun--at least. You'll note that the name "Duivel" bears more than a passing resemblance to another gothic-scripted beer (Duvel). Indeed, they have the same infernal inspiration.

In the case of the older one, it goes back to the era when pilgrims visited Halle (near Lembeek) and its stunning cathedral which dates to the 13-15th century (it took a long time to complete). My memory of the exact details of the story fray here, but somehow this type of beer was brewed and named "the devil's beer"--I think because its heartiness and lusciousness distracted the faithful from the spirit and led them to cater to their flesh.

Boon recreated the beer from historical documents just to be brewed locally. Of course, the larger Moortgat, located on the other side of Brussels, took note. But nothing doing--when Boon referred to the historical record, Moortgat (whose own devil, Duvel, is spelled according to a local dialect) relented.

So now if you go to Halle, you have to specify either dark or light Du[i]vel or say Duvel Moortgat. Without a qualifier, you'll get the local product.

Lambic "Terroir?"

2011-11-18T15:12:00.001-08:00

I'm sitting in the Drie Fontenein cafe pondering something that came up when I was at Cantillon yesterday. Just had the Oude Geuze here, and of course it's quite different than Cantillon's. (I'll tell you by the end of the post how different it is from Boon's, where I'm due in a half hour.) The thing is, these beers don't differ because of the recipes, but because of the bugs.

has a pronounced lemon rind quality, while Drie Fonteinen's blend (they stopped brewing in 2009 but hope to find a kettle and get back to it) is salty and boasts what I'd call an umami note. These differences come from theaction of the yeasts, who are their own craftsman.

So what do we call this? It's like terroir, but not exactly. (Jean agreed; he said, "It's not exactly like that--terroir Is in the ground, lambics are in the air," and then he gestured to the space around him.)

Shouldn't there be a name for this? Suggestions?

Cantillon

2011-11-17T12:38:00.001-08:00

I managed to navigate the streets of Brussels today and find parking just two blocks (and I use that term generously--the streets of the city writhe like snakes, so what lies between them is rarely rectilinear--away from the legendary Brasserie Cantillon. To top it off, owner and brewer Jean Van Roy was brewing today, and as I arrived, he was pumping steaming wort into the koelschip (cool ship). Since Cantillon is one of the world's most famous breweries, and since he has an open-door policy to all who drop by, everything I could write is already well-documented.

So instead I'll tell you three things that surprised me.

1. The brewing season, which depends on cool temperatures to drop the wort to fermentation temperatures in the koelschip by morning, is getting shorter. It runs from roughly late October to early April, but this is down by a month since Jean's grandfather brewed. (Capacity, not available brewing days, are the limitation for the brewery.)

2. Faro is strangely malty. Cantillon's is as historic as you'll find (though strong), but I've never had the chance to try it before.

3. Unlike in Britain, where a renaissance in brewing has excited the market (without exception, every brewer expressed optimism and excitement for the future), the same isn't happening with lambics. In the US, we're crazy for sour beers. Jean said Italians are even ahead of Americans. But in Belgium, not so much.

Jean let us try a 2006 bottle of Gueuze before I left and it was stunningly good. Cantillon's fauna sometimes produce beers too dry for my taste. This one was absolutely perfect. It was alive with citrus rind and a lavender delicacy. The souring was more acid than vinegar, and the resemblance to wine was marked. It would be a useful mile marker for new world brewers looking to find the sweet spot for sours. They don't have to be extreme to exhibit amazing complexity, and they don't have to have (indeed shouldn't have) excessive Brett harshness or exotic solvent notes. I mean, we should know that the taste of burning tire is bad, right? This beer's a reminder.

I will see Frank Boon tomorrow.

Pictures

2011-11-17T09:09:00.000-08:00

I've been loading a selection of pictures onto my Flickr page. Here are some slideshows:

Samuel Smith's

Thornbridge

Adnams

Greene King

Fuller's

The Enigmatic Samuel Smith's

2011-11-16T13:31:00.001-08:00

I have been to ancient lands--India, China. It's not uncommon to encounter a building that has stood witness to fifty generations of us evanescent beings. The effect is telescopic--events in the rear-view mirror appear closer than they were. This happens with families, too--that, say, pass along the Rig Veda father to son for centuries. In the town of York, Romans run around the countryside and Vikings still adorn buses. On Sunday, I stood on the ancient wall in the city while the cathedral bells rang and in that dense moment was able to feel the dimmest tingling in my spine of the antiquity around me.

In Tadcaster, the keepers of the Vedas are brewers and their names are Smith. The lineage goes back to one family and it's still obvious the Smith name is an important one when you drive into town. At one end, the one named for John rises magnificently above the village much like Greene King stands over Bury St Edmunds. But while J Smith may own a larger market share, it's the other line, Samuel Smith's, where the true family lineage resides. (John Smith's is an industrial plant where Newcastle Brown--now mostly an export--and other supermarket brands are brewed.)

The street front for Samuel Smith's is a kind of metaphor for the brewery: its tiny face is as pleasant as it is inscrutable, and conceals everything about the brewery, which sprawls quite impressively, out of sight. Smith's is a fiercely private company, and they apparently don't open their doors often for visitors--so it was a real pleasure to have the opportunity to see it for myself.

So, how traditional is Smith's? Except for adopting a few technical innovations that have come along during the past century (a lab, for instance), almost everything is unchanged. Steve Barrett, the long-time head brewer, took us to the stable first, to meet William. Standing 18 hands tall, he's one of two immense work horses that deliver the cask beer every day. That set the tone of the tour.

We went to the base if the old Victorian brewery to where the well is located--and which still draws us the hard, gypsum-rich water the brewery uses. We passed the coal bin, next to the boiler that steam-heats the brewery. A bit sheepishly, Steve nodded to the soaring smokestack typical of breweries this age--except Smith's was still sending a thin smudge of smoke into the air. (The brewery has used a bit of technological advancement there to make the coal fire compliant with environmental law.)

At each step, I grew more and more amazed. This wasn't a brewery that couldn't be bothered to move into the 21st century--it was a brewery spending a great deal of bother to maintain the practices of the 19th. The brewery proper was a classic tower, and we hike up the five stories to the grain and mill room and worked our way down. (Smith's was a pioneer in organics, even using organic hops, and when I mentioned this to the shadowy figure, he said, "yes, but organic is very traditional, isn't it?") The mash tuns and coppers are beautiful and huge, and the India Ale even flows over and old chilling contraption that dribbles the wort from a trough over a vertical stack of coils with cold water running through them. It's collected at a second trough and heads off to the fermenters. (This was when I learned there was a lab--even Steve is a little wary of the system. But the lab says it comes out bug-free.)

Of course the beer then goes to the famous Yorkshire squares--though they aren't actually much different than other systems still in breweries around the country. (Caledonian's, though made of modern stainless, are identical.) Square fermenters, in various configurations remain, if not the norm, at least quite common.

In fact, the most remarkable part of the brewery comes after the squares--when it's time to put the beer on cask. Some goes in regular casks, some in bottles. But the Smith's Old Brewery Bitter goes into actual wooden casks. Even more remarkably, the casks are made and maintained on-site by the brewery's cooper, whom we visited next. The casks are built to last, and Steve said there are staves in some of the older casks that go back decades.

(Which raises a question, doesn't it? I asked Steve about it, but he says no wild yeasts have moved into the wood--though this seems incredible to me. I was left to wonder; was this the last extant example of true mild ale--young beer, drunk too quickly to pick up any funk? If so, I can confirm that served in the lovely old pub next door--coal fire burning in the hearth--it exhibits nothing but freshness.)

Finally, the tour was over and we were graciously bid adieu. There has been some talk lately of the old "gentlemen brewers" of the old times. These were very proper men who wore suits and ushered the activities of the brewery in a formal elegance. As the old guard of this generation were just getting started, there were a few of them left. Except that I felt that way about Sam Smith's too, and its formal, proper brewer, Steve Barrett. He retires next April, and someone new--although maybe not new to the Smith family--will take the reins. I feel doubly fortunate to have had the opportunity to meet Mr. Barrett.

There's a lot more I could say to lend texture and detail to the visit, but I've rattled on long enough. I'm finishing this post in Belgium, where I've somehow managed to arrive without incident. Although the drive over was a little shocking: what the hell are all these Belgians doing on the right side of the road?

More to come from the Low Countries--

Sainsbury's House Beers

2011-11-16T07:26:00.001-08:00

As I was waiting for my laundry to dry this afternoon, I sauntered over to a nearby Sainsbury supermarket to scope the beer scene. The UK has a few giant retailers that exercise enormous control over the beer industry; two, Tesco and Sainsbury, seem to have a Walmart approach to stacking it deep and selling it cheap. So in I went.

The beer aisle would have been broadly familiar to Americans. The largest portion was devoted to international mass market lagers. The smallest, about the size of the craft beer section in a decent-sized city, was upscale ales. There was another section devoted to mainstream ales like Greene King (and which may further that sense among drinkers that it is not rare and prized.)

Up to this point, nothing really surprising. But then I noticed, tucked in with the good ales, two under the Sainsbury label. These were intriguing. One was a Yorkshire bitter weighing in at 5% that had been brewed at Black Sheep--a brewery I aspired to visit. The other was an IPA brewed by Marston's at a hearty 5.9% (sounds "meh" to Americans, but I've now seen three "IPAs" in the mid-to-high threes). Both come in handsome bottles that both signal quality and contrast the generic canned 2.1% "bitter" and "lager," which signal--in orange flashing lights--cheapo.

I have no idea If the beers are any good, and I didn't pick them up--I am flying out of the country today. But as canary-in-coalmine indicators, it appears Sainsbury's is still betting on quality. Or the perception of quality, anyway: the sale prices (pounds 1.77 and 1.89) were over 50% cheaper than some of their neighbors.

I'd be interested to hear from British readers whether they've tried these and what they think.

Edinburgh

2011-11-15T13:06:00.001-08:00

A lot of Edinburgh breweries today, not a lot of Edinburgh. I'm not sure that's entirely right, but there it is. For the first time, I will pass through a town without exploring it much at--which is a shame given my long fascination with the country.

Still, I did get to see two classic Scottish breweries--a decided treat. I'm a bit too exhausted to blog, but I will refer you to the Tumblr page on the odd chance you haven't been visiting--there are sights there to go with these words (in some cases standing in for them).

To Belgium tomorrow--

Greene King

2011-11-14T13:19:00.001-08:00

It is difficult to understand the biases and preferences of a country without first understanding the larger context. In the US, if you want to brew and sell a beer in most states, all you have to do is file the paperwork. With third-party distribution, small breweries have a decent route to entering the market. When beer drinkers walk into a pub, they'll find beers the publican has learned his customers like--no matter which brewery made the beer.

Right. In Britain, the waters are muddied by a system that puts small breweries at a grave disadvantage. The majority of pubs are owned by breweries. In these you will find guest taps, but you'll also find a lot of the host's beers. A pretty small minority (perhaps readers know the figure) are "freehouses"--independent, and able to serve any beers the like. The big breweries and pub companies own hundreds or thousands of pubs, and tend to dominate regions. (For the visitor, that last part is pretty cool; you find yourself in different "catchment areas"--Fuller's in London, Green King in Suffolk, Marston's around Burton, and so on. Thornbridge even has four.) Very often, these pubs are the picture of the quintessential English pub--lots of wood, a cozy fire, cask engines, and opinionated punters sitting at the bar. I am molecularly drawn to these places and can, like a hound, detect one even around corners and down the road. It will gnaw at me to lose these when I return.

A secondary problem is grocery sales. There are a few companies that control most of the grocery trade, and these outlets want beer at rock-bottom prices. While they do pass these along to the consumer, it means breweries make next to nothing per unit. Only extremely high-volume breweries can afford to make money this way. The little guys can actually lose money.

Which brings us to Greene King. The brewery now operates over 2000 pubs and has acquired several brands--Morland, Hardys and Hansons, and Ruddles. It owns Belhaven--which we're visiting tomorrow--though the latter is still independent. Their size and ubiquity, the prevalence of a few brands like Old Speckled Hen and Abbot Ale, and their own flagship, a 3.5% bitter called "IPA" are things that rankle certain folks. On my way to Bury St Edmunds from London, I kept hearing quite harsh criticism. I expected to find one of those uncomfortable corporate environment where everyone's used mandated jargon so long they don't realize it sounds creepy to outsiders. I expected focus-grouped, insipid beers and a sterile, lifeless brewery.

Instead, I found quite the opposite: Greene King is a hodgepodge of facilities and eras, and it feels like a small town unto itself. A traditional tower brewery, it features old coppers and the least interference by technology of any facility we've seen. They vat a 12% strong ale in ancient wooden vessels that slowly sour the beer over the course of two years--the only extant use of this practice I know about. It links their current operation to a lineage that dates back hundreds of years--worthy of historical recognition and protection. Strong Suffolk Ale is a gem in beer's treasure chest, and to my mind puts the brewery rarefied company. Even the despised IPA is a fabulous beer, a tour de force of flavor and balance for such a small beer. (The name is, obviously, unfortunate.)

The irony is that Greene King is hated for being a kind of destructive force--ruining beers and breweries on its way to world dominance--rather than the preserver of tradition and craft. It's a very strange paradox for the visitor--Americans in particular are suckers for tradition. (Our country was 23 years old when Graham Greene's great grandfather founded the brewery.) Yet I understand that there are other concerns, and whenever any one brewery begins to dominate a market, it has a distorting effect. Still, there seems to be little of that--Greene King brews about half as much beer as Sierra Nevada and has a tiny slice of the British beer market. I don't know the particulars of their various buy-outs, but it appears that in some cases, they were picking up breweries in the process of collapse (not uncommon in England, sadly).

From the outside, it looks like this. The British beer market is in the midst of serious churn. On the one side are producers of light lager that sell for nothing in the grocery stores. This is a direct challenge to pubs, which support ale brewers. Whatever a person's opinion of Greene King (and CAMRA's position seems absurd), it's impossible to think of them as the foe of small ale breweries. The real foe makes cheap beer without concern for taste, tradition, or culture. Small craft breweries and traditional ale breweries are on the same team. Know your enemies indeed, and that means knowing who's not.

Trip to Jerusalem

2011-11-13T11:06:00.001-08:00

On our way North from Burton to York, we stopped off in Nottingham (the same--there's a statue of Robin Hood at the castle). In addition to being a lovely little medieval town (and a modern one, too), it has what purports to be the oldest pub in England. I say purports because it's always wise not to treat the owners, who obviously have an interest in this claim, as historic authorities--but it may be. In any case, it's definitely one of the most interesting pubs.

The city is built around a historic walled castle that tops a hill. The pub is built at the base of the hill, and, it turns out into the hill. It is a honeycomb of rooms, many natural caves with supple, curving walls and ceilings.

I'm writing this on the fly without benefit of the Internet--which has been damned elusive here in the Midlands. (Burton, rich with history, has fallen on hard times.) anyway, forgive the errors where you find them.

Poor Wi-Fi

2011-11-11T13:11:00.001-08:00

I am in a beautiful little pub and guest house called the Unicorn Inn along the legendary Trent River--and across from Burton. There is not a thing wrong with this place ... except the wi-fi connectivity. I should be able to get a post or two up, but bear with me.

Numerology

2011-11-11T00:06:00.001-08:00

Today is 11/11/11, as you know, and we'll be visiting Thornbridge at--auspiciously--eleven. So, when it's straight elevens (11:11), we'll be at what one source called Britain's best brewery.

Adnams and the Modern-Traditional Paradox

2011-11-10T15:17:00.000-08:00

Tucked away in one of the prettiest towns I've visited is Adnam's of Southwold, a traditional maker of cask ales. In what has now become a familiar story, this traditional brewery confronted the question of whether to double down with tradition and keep their old equipment or go through a full-scale remodel. We've visited three famous traditional breweries, and all have had a similar decision. Fuller's upgraded, but kept their original brewhouse and left their old equipment as a living museum, Greene King (which will get a full post at some point) has mainly continued on with the same brewery, upgraded periodically, and Adnams scrapped the entire thing and started from scratch.

Their brewery is a state-of-the-art Huppman system that is so automatic it will start brewing at four in the morning before anyone has arrived at the brewery. (That's brewer Fergus Fitzgerald gesturing to the computer that controls it all.) They pre-program the system with all the brews they'll be making throughout the week and the system just plugs along on its own. So this is an abomination, right?

I guess if you've seen as many breweries as I have, you begin to think that the old funky coppers, while gorgeous, have lots of drawbacks. And I don't mean for the poor bastard who has to come in at 4 am to start hauling grain sacks to the mill. Old systems are always touted for their quirky qualities which, purists believe, are the very things that a brewer can use to coax rarefied flavors and aromas out of his beer. There's some truth to this. Old systems are all one-offs, unique to the way the particular brewery was built. A brewer who pays very close attention to his process and equipment, a person who listens to the beer, can work wondrous magic with such a system. The problem is that it takes years or decades to perfect and is not versatile.

A system like Adnams' has been engineered to put full control in the brewer's hands. He doesn't have to work around the limitations of his system, but can harness the technology to dial in every single parameter in the brewing process. This gives him enormous versatility and the ability to brew any beer exactly as he envisions it.

After the tour, we had some beers over lunch, and although I don't have the best-trained palate in the world, I felt that Adnams' cask ales were wonderful and traditional. Fergus Burtonizes his water and the bitter is a fantastic beer--sharp and quenching, with very clean, articulated hop character. It's a perfect tipple and quite a bit different from an example like Fuller's, which is silky and soft.

Adnams is also expanding into spirits (vodka, gin, and whisky) and this precision is useful in producing washes (essentially unhopped beer used in distillation) to exacting specifications. I've already talked about the Adnams biogas digester and I learned today of other uber green initiatives they're pursuing. All of this has that same dichotomous sense--traditional and modern.

At the end of the day, the drinker cares only about the beer. But how it gets into the pint glass isn't incidental, as I'm becoming more and more aware of. Anyway, Adnams was big fun. More later--

Whew

2011-11-09T12:47:00.001-08:00

Our big days continue. This morning at a well-regarded micro in Sussex (directly south of London). It's named after a Grateful Dead song (sort of apocryphally, as it turns out), which made it a great location for Oregonians. In fact, there's no Dead-headiness about anything. What there is is very good beer made in a kind of fusion between traditional cask ale and American craft brewing.

The beer reminded me a bit of Double Mountain--recognizable beer styles tweaked a half turn. Their Best Bitter has a dash of smoked malt, a touch that creates the impression of an old, traditional beer. Their flagship is a low-alcohol extra pale shot through with a stiff dose of Cascade and Amarillo hops.

My favorite was an exceptional imperial stout full of yeast character. Fruity, plummy, figgy, with an underlayment of chocolate. One of the better imperial stouts I've tasted.

The second stop was Greene King, an apparently controversial brewery among some of the geekier set. But now I'm tired and a post on GK will just fail to do it justice. (Though for anyone wondering how far under the bus I'm willing to through them, consider that it's one of the last breweries in England to vat a strong ale [with requisite wild microfauna] for two years. What sell-outs!)

Anyway, more later. Meantime, here's the vista from atop the brewery, which rises above the town of Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk, east of London.

Fuller's Errata

2011-11-08T15:01:00.000-08:00

By the way, my last post didn't mention Derek Prentice, John Keeling's right-hand man, and the brewer at the former Young's Brewery. He is super knowledgeable and a wonderful tour guide. Didn't mean to short him in the last post. I also met a Fuller's brewer name Brandon Bray who is in his 46th year at Fuller's. He helped train John and brewed on the old system--which gives the brewery wonderful continuity. Also, consider 46 years. He might have given young Fritz Maytag advice when he was starting Anchor. He had been brewing 14 years when Ken Grossman founded Sierra Nevada.

Spent too little time with Alastair Hook, the man behind Meantime Brewing. (He's too busy to arse around with the likes of me.) A fascinating contrast to Fuller's in terms of business model.

Later, my shadowy partner and I got to rendezvous with Brewer's Union's Ted Sobel for a pint of cask ale in London, which now binds us as true brothers of the ale. A joy. The synchronicity that would lead us both to plan trips for the same slot is rare indeed. I can't imagine any brewer on the planet I'd more enjoy having a pint of cask ale with.

Off to bed-

Is Fuller's Craft Beer?

2011-11-08T02:37:00.001-08:00

I'm kidding, halfty. We've already had far too may armchair philosophers and linguists weigh in on the question. And yet, on a day that included an absolutely glorious tour of the venerable Fuller's Brewery here in Chiswick, London (that's chizz-ick to you yanks) and a craft-brewery pub, the specter haunted us.

Fuller's is a 166-year-old independent brewery that produces a stellar line of cask ales as well as uber crafty offerings like strong ales and their "Past Masters" series based on historical recipes from the vaults. (The flagship is London Pride, one of the finest best bitters I know and, despite its modest strength, possibly my favorite.) They're one of the larger cask ale producers, but they're roughly the size of Widmer or Deschutes.

They are a perfect example of the difference between the US and British markets, though. Because, while no American would exclude them from the "craft" category, that's the bias they face in England. At the craft brew-focused pub we visited last night, they scoffed at Fuller's: too old.

That age is a huge part of it's virtue. I sat down with John Keeling and the shadowy figure with whom I'm traveling (he gave me permission to out him--some of you know him as the beeronomist--but shadowy figure amuses me), and listened to the history of Fuller's transformation thirty years ago into a modern facility.

Fuller's was until that time brewing beer on an ancient system--one the brewery preserved as a kind of museum-within-a-brewery. This is one of those decisions I take it the tradition-steeped British don't take lightly. Yet here's what British brewers confront: a steadily declining market for ales (currently 14%, according to Keeling) in which cask is just one niche (the famous "flat, warm" beer of England now commands just 8% of the whole market). For the first time in centuries, the proportion of beer consumed in pubs dropped below 50% this year. Those who hew exclusively to tradition in this market risk the oblivion of such titanic names as Bass, Whitbread, and Courage.

Fuller's modernized the brewery, which now looks like a standard American craft brewery. But interspersed throughout the modern stainless steel tuns and tanks are the earlier relics--copper equipment with the burnished patina of age.

Keeling offered a bit of analysis that parsed the "craft" question nicely. You want the beer to be clean and consistent on the one hand, flavorful and characterful on the other. Industrial breweries emphasize the former but not the latter. The antiquated coppers delivered the latter, but it was harder to achieve the former. Weirdly, I think this means the ultratraditionalists also ding Fuller's.

From my perspective, Fuller's is the model craft brewery. Eventually, the current crop of craft breweries won't be new anymore. Then they'll be judged purely on their beer. If they work hard and are very lucky, they'll be mentioned in Fuller's company.

Touching Down in London

2011-11-07T00:15:00.001-08:00

After a long-than-expected flight, I made it to London yesterday afternoon local time. I'm traveling with a shadowy figure who may want to remain slightly anonymous (he dozes or I'd ask) and who has a relative studying architecture in town. We found her at her school and she took enough time off a project to join us at The Jack Horner, Pies and Ales, a Fuller's pub around the corner in Bloomsbury. I started the trip off with a pull of London Pride (unsparklered), which sang with flavor. It barely bears mentioning that the version we get in the US (a different recipe) can't match fresh, live ale on cask. I will pop over to the brewery in four hours and hear more.

Cheers--

Think Out Loud (Again)

2011-11-04T12:32:00.000-07:00

I normally wouldn't flog this a second time, but I have an apology to make. This morning I appeared on OPB's Think Out Loud (audio here), hoping to offer samples of three beers. We only got to one--a bottle of Jubelale I pulled out of the basement. I had gone hoping to promote a standard fave of mine, Hopworks' Abominable Ale (review here) and the newly-released Ninkasi Imperiale Stout (review here). The Imperiale isn't even available in single bottles yet (ETA next Tuesday) and so Morgan Miller spirited one over to me before the broadcast. I also had several others I wanted to name-drop: this year's Winterhook, Fort George's new North V (which I haven't had a chance to try), Pelican's Stormwatcher and Mother of All Storms, Double Mountain Fa La La La La, and--bone to the lager lovers--Bayern's Doppelbock.

Moral: twenty minutes is nowhere near enough time to discuss winter ales.

To Europe: 24 Breweries in 24 Days

2011-11-04T09:09:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow at 12:47 pm (8:47 pm London time) I board a plane for Europe. I'll be there most of the month, returning Nov 29. I'll roughly split my time between Britain and Belgium, with the balance going to a day and a half in France--all research, tax-deductible research [!] for the Beer Bible (I am appropriately happy/amazed at this fact). I don't want to give away too much of the itinerary beforehand, because I do hope to keep up a travelogue here. But as a teaser, I'll mention that I will be touring these breweries and talking with the brewers there:

Fuller's (11/7)
Samuel Smith's (11/14)
Belhaven (11/15)
Rodenbach (11/21)
Dupont (11/24 -- Thanksgiving)
Orval (11/28)

That is but a quarter of the total breweries, and I've left out a few other biggies. (If my experience in foreign travel is any guide, one or two of the less-famous breweries will emerge as one of the best visits.)

In addition to the blog posts here, I've set up a Tumblr page for the Beer Bible where I can post lots of pictures and iPhone videos. In a way, that may be more interesting than me blathering on about what you'll be able to plainly see there. (But blather I hope to do.)

Wish me well, and I wish you all well. See you on the other side.

What's Up With the New Jubelale?

2011-11-03T09:16:00.000-07:00

If you've had a chance to try the Jubelale this year, it may not have matched your expectations. This happens with beer drinkers all the time, largely because their memories are faulty or they have experienced unnoticed palate shift between samplings. With Jubel, though? You're not imagining things.

I've done two blind tastings of winter warmers (the original iteration that gave us Wassail and Snow Cap) over the past few years, and in both cases, Jubel came out on top. It had a candyish sweetness balanced by a perfect blush of peppery hops. It was incredibly smooth and warming, like a hot chocolate on a chill day.

This year's, by contrast, has a much pricklier hide. It's got some roast roughness and what I perceived as a dry tannic note. In fact, it was so dry I suspected that some wood-aged, brettanomyces-soured portion had been blended in. It is a startling departure from the Jubel of my memory. I shot Deschutes owner Gary Fish an email to get the lowdown, and he described the changes:

The original motivation for Jubelale that John Harris formulated was an English Old or Strong Ale.... I had been noticing for several years as our brewing techniques have gotten better and the equipment we were using became more sophisticated, a “drift” of our Jubelale flavoring to becoming, essentially, cleaner and drier (less estery). My comment to the brewers a couple years ago resulted in a project to, essentially, engineer back in the flavors or characteristics our processes were removing, but to do it deliberately, not by accident the way we, and most small brewers, have done things. The result is what you perceive as a change, whereas, from my perspective, we have simply returned to the way Jubelale used to taste, before these “improvements.” It is interesting you perceive wood aging. There is no wood aging in Jubelale, no brett, no oak.

So there you have it.

Fish says the beer is selling well and the customers seem to like the change. For my part, I think it's a step backward. The Jubelale of 2009 and the few years before was in my view a nearly perfected beer. There's not a thing I would have changed, even by the smallest degree. I will damn the new (or return to old) recipe by that weasel word we use in beer reviews and call it more "interesting" than the old Jubel. There is more going on here. So much, in fact, that I was completely thrown off about what was in the beer. Simplicity has its virtues, though, and the seductive balance and approachability of the recipe from a couple years ago was a triumph of clarity and drinkability. The new beer is more challenging, less satisfying and way, way less moreish.

That Deschutes will tinker with sacred cows and risk losing customers like me by reformulating recipes is one of the many reasons I think it's a model for large craft breweries. Deschutes has launched a branding strategy based on the slogan "bravely done," but they've earned it. This is a ballsy move, and the consequence is that people like me will buy less Jubel this year. They've always bet on their own palates, though, and Fish clearly believes they'll earn more customers in the trade-off. (And it may work, if reviews like this are any indication.)

_______________

Relatedly, I had this year's Full Sail Wassail last night, and it is an excellent vintage. (There was one in the early aughts that remains the standard-bearer, but this one's not super far behind.) Wassail is sometimes a bit hoppy for my taste, but this year's is a wonderful blend of chocolate and caramel malts and assertive woody hopping. It is deeper and rounder than some years--my preference in a winter ale. Stock up--this is definitely a beer to have in the fridge for the long nights ahead.

Beer (and me) On "Think Out Loud"

2011-11-02T15:43:00.000-07:00

Update: OPB informs me that they are switching it to Friday--which will apparently give us more time to chat about beer.

Tomorrow (or possibly Friday), Oregon Public Radio is doing a segment on winter drinks on their show Think Out Loud. They tapped me to talk about beer. You can listen to it live beginning at 9am Pacific time (noon Eastern time) here or find the archived show here.

The Honest Pint Project Rides Again; Long Live the HPP!

2011-11-02T09:09:00.000-07:00

If you visit the Honest Pint Project website today, you will not find a dead URL. I am pleased to say that after my post last week, three people came forward who wanted to jump in and save it from certain death. (I'm not sure if they want to go public yet, so I'll leave names out for now.) We've been scrambling to make the transfer, and it looks like everything's running smoothly.

This is uniformly good news. The three have a more sophisticated sense of social media, website development, and nonprofit organization than I do--by a long shot. There's one Oregonian there, but a couple from further afield--giving it a more national presence. So not only will the project be carried forward, I expect to see a quantum leap in terms of organization and activity. Any time a group of volunteers agrees to do a bunch of work, they deserve at least the control over the work they've taken responsibility for. I've let them know that I've always only been interested in the spirit of the thing--transparency in glassware sizes. So, if they wish to change the criteria, the certification process, or the logo, that will be their call and I'll delightedly support any changes. (And if they leave it exactly the same, I'll support that, too. Except for the logo. Someone should improve on my crude efforts.) The main thing is that they are committed to pushing the thing forward and keeping the idea alive.

Huzzah!

Pardon the Metablogging

2011-11-01T09:03:00.000-07:00

Over at the Atlantic, Clay Risen notes quite accurately that it's "not to say there aren't great beer writers, or great beer magazines, books, and blogs. But compared with wine, they're few and far between -- and, to put it as kindly as possible, not exactly aimed at the mainstream, non-beer-obsessed public." Which is why I feel guilty about plunging into the following post, which is total inside baseball, pure metablogging, and of interest to almost no one. But since I was called out in the piece (though not, sadly, by name), I gotta respond. If you can't use your blog for a little navel-gazing every now and again, what good is it?

The issue is the Oxford Companion to Beer ... again. I had intended not to mention it or get re-embroiled in the ongoing debates, but Risen goes after the many small-fry bloggers who have been harping at the book, and he takes interest in my review, and so now I have to talk about the damn thing again. (Throw me a frickin' bone department: one virtue of having a brewer act as editor is that there's a great density of technical entries in the book, all of which seem extremely well-done to me. Most of the criticism has been aimed at the history pieces, but if you want a nice technical reference, it's pretty kick-ass.)

Following a recap about the paucity of good beer books (mostly true), Risen describes it as "viciously criticized" and cites Martyn Cornell's and mine. Cornell he can't actually fault except in tone (and his critique is "more trenchant" than mine). He cites my post as one of the more degenerate varieties that " have made an intramural sport of identifying the book's omissions." He continues by criticizing my criticism of the pretty well-documented NY-centered bias in the book.

Fair enough, but then he goes on to review Christian DeBenedetti's new book and observes this:

Anyone who picks up the The Great American Ale Trail can think of a bar that was wrongfully overlooked. Them's the breaks: this is a guide, not a directory. Still, it's frustrating to see large swaths of the country left out completely. Yes, the best bars and breweries may be in Oregon, Colorado, and New York, and they deserve coverage.

It's exactly the same criticism. (And I find it deeply trenchant.) You review a book, you offer praise and critiques. Look: I've done lots of them. So let's not overstate the significance of one post on a blog with thousands of them.

And Clay, would it kill you to mention me by name in the article?

Sam Calagione and the Other 99%

2011-10-31T09:23:00.000-07:00

There's a great little interview at the blog DCist with Sam Calagione, who apparently channels his inner Jeff Alworth. Or maybe I regularly (and unwittingly) channel Sam. Among the nuggets I found especially satisfying:

[B]eer people are cool people in general. We say our industry is 99 percent asshole free. So I probably do forget one of every hundred names of the person who was underwhelming. But everyone's so nice in this industry so I look forward to seeing them a second time.

Comment: It's smart to say 99% about anything, just to keep a little daylight available. But I do think this will change as the industry moves from being animated almost exclusively by people passionate about beer to containing a mixture of those people along with others who just want to make a buck. For the moment, Sam's right--it is an incredibly likable group of people.

But the women I know don't want to be separated from the beer loving populace, in general. They want to be part of it.... I know tons of women who are way huge hop heads, and love dark, roasty beers. So I worry it perpetuates a stereotype that women's palates are less attuned to the more aggressive flavors in beer.

Comment: This is one area in which craft breweries are decades ahead of macros. Of all the ways in which the "craft" and non-craft side differ, I'd say the biggest and most important is the enthusiasm craft breweries have in welcoming women.

I always have Saison Dupont in my house. I turned on my friends, who are not necessarily beer friends, who live in Lewes, the town I live in, to be excited when we pop a few corks of Saison Dupont. So that's definitely a favorite of mine.

Comment: Anyone who loves Saison Dupont has unimpeachable taste in beer. It will be one of my highlights when I visit Europe to tour the brewery, which I'll do, rather poetically, on Thanksgiving day.

I play on an adult hockey league team. And every week it's one of my teammate's job to bring a 30 pack of cheap, cold cans of lager. And whatever one it is, whatever brand it is I look forward to having it. There's nothing like that light lager for refreshing after a hockey game. There's really not any other occasions in my week where I'm craving that kind of beer. But I'm a beer geek, not a beer snob. And all beer is good. And there's a time and place for any kind of beer.

Comment: This will probably shock 120 IPA fans more than anything else Sam could say. There are lots of light lagers I still buy and enjoy, too, and it's nice to see a defense of them. Every summer, I drink a fair amount of Pacifico, which is certainly not a highbrow tipple. I recently had Sapporo for the first time in years and was reminded how much I love Japanese lagers. And I'll never turn down a Singha Beer ("Singha Beer, don't ask no questions; Singha Beer don't tell no lies").

The Guild Publc House Closes Today

2011-10-29T11:47:00.001-07:00

My friend Jesse Cornett started the Guild Pub a bit under a year ago. It was a cool place with a great vibe, always had an excellent selection of the best local beer, but was, unfortunately, awkwardly located. The confluence of main roads has the virtue of putting lots of cars in proximity to your pub, but it cuts what would otherwise be a neighborhood pub off from its neighborhood. Parking was a problem, as was the largely commercial district to the west, which offered no base of walk-in traffic. I expect the Little Depression didn't help matters, either.

So Jesse's closing the doors this weekend. Today's the last day, and to add bittersweetness to the occasion, it's also his 36th birthday. To celebrate, he's selling Oakshire's Ill Tempered Gnome for $2 a pint and $5 for a growler. The growler deal extends to Vortex IPA or Natian's Old Grogham. $5. You can pop in now for the growlers, and the pub opens for regular business at four.

Here's Jesse on the closing:

After nearly a year in business, we’ve realized that we’re unable to continue the business if we’re going to have the lives we value.

I’ve joked many times that the MPA I earned in grad school doesn’t stand for Master of Pub Administration. I miss the ability to work to support causes that help the public good and look forward to returning to my passion, regardless of whether I remain in the private sector or return to the public realm. Molly does great work supporting those in need and our closure will mean that she can have greater focus and less distraction.

Warm Regards,

Jesse Cornett

Cheers, brother, may you rebound quickly and look back on this as a fantastic experience.

New Beers: Ninkasi and Widmer

2011-10-28T09:46:00.000-07:00

A new season means a new tide of seasonals, and they have been washing up on my doorstep with delightful regularity (I mentioned the scrumptious Redhook Winterhook already). For consideration today, Ninkasi's new Imperiale Stout and two from Widmer. With alacrity, since I know many of you resist reviews....

Ninkasi Imperiale Stout
I have spent three years trying to like Oatis, Ninkasi's longtime oatmeal stout. It is well-loved by many trustworthy stout fans, and I consider it a strange personal failing that I don't enjoy it more. (An overwhelming roast bitterness spoils the experience.) The new Imperiale, sold in the seasonal 22-ounce four-pack with Total Dom, Believer, and Sleigh'r, is the stout for me. The modern world of imperial stouts is one of unnecessary excess--gargantuan beers soused in bourbon and thick enough to lose a race with molasses in pouring speed. It need not be so. A stout brewed at 8-10% without bourbon-aging can actually be a beer of balance and subtlety, and so it is with Imperiale. With a grist of eight malts (including flaked and roasted barley), Imperiale achieves a layered palate that I absolutely swore had a dollop of rauchmalt. Nope, it's the roast, vamping as smoke and giving the beer a satisfyingly antiquated quality. Lots of plum and dark fruit, too, of the kind found in aged beers. But since I got the smoked malt bit wrong, I won't assert that the brewery's been letting this beer ripen. On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised, either. An excellent stout.

Widmer O'Ryely IPA
You have to hand it to Widmer: they like what they like. And what they like are Nelson Sauvin hops, which the brewery embraced a few years back and have become sort of a house character. They are intense hops that run a continuum from fruity to musky and they're as difficult to ignore as a sweaty linebacker: you like 'em or you don't. I don't, so there you go. O'Ryely is the third in the series of Rotater IPAs, and a definite departure from the old-school Falconer and new school X-114 (made with Citra). What I will say is that the rye malt adds a welcome earthiness that does cut back on the musk. If you're a fan of Nelson Imperial IPA, you'll enjoy his little brother, O'Ryely.

Brothers Reserve Lemongrass Wheat Ale
The newest entry to the boxed, one-time-only Brothers Reserve series is a nicely experimental beer made with muscat grapes, lemongrass, and champagne yeast. The aroma and initial taste suggests a wheat wine, but then the grapes arrive, sweetly, sending the beer off in an entirely different direction. To my tongue, lemongrass doesn't taste like lemons--it's a more herbal flavor, a light complement that doesn't overwhelm a beer. Where the beer didn't thrill me was in its wet, heavy finish. The use of grapes, so sweet already, in a delicate, wheaty ale, tend to amp up the sugars. The thick alcohol notes accelerate the effect. I wondered what a version of this brewed to about 5% would have tasted like--or a version without the grapes. It's an interesting beer, and one worth investing ten bucks in, but its conceptual promise may leave you wishing for a version 2.0.

Widmer also sent me Brrrbon, the barrel-aged version of Brrr, but it's really not for me. I was never a fan of the base beer, which is in a style I'm also not a huge fan of, and bourbon-barrel aging it (a practice with which I've developed a love-hate relationship) didn't help matters. There's a reason they're bringing it back though: most people disagree with me. So go enjoy.

We also have the issue of the new Jubelale, with its reformulated recipe. But that deserves a post of its own.

Deschutes' New Brewmasters

2011-10-27T16:14:00.000-07:00

Clarification: Jon Abernathy, master of all things Bend, tweets:

Today:

Deschutes Brewery has promoted Cam O’Connor and Brian Faivre to two newly formed brewmaster positions. The two, who have been instrumental in the development of such game-changing brews as Hop in the Dark, Red Chair NWPA, Gluten Free Ale, the soon to be released Chainbreaker White IPA, and others, were chosen for their abilities to both innovate and lead.

Good choices. Actually, I don't know Brian, but Cam seemed like an obvious choice. He worked in the brewery and was putting out really exceptional beers in the Deschutes mode. I think we'll see lots of continuity here. As a long-time admirer of the brewery, I am quite pleased with this news.

Cam was the first brewer at the Portland pub when it opened in 2009, has been responsible for crafting many of the exclusive experimental beers served there. He has also worked on labors of love like Hop in the Dark, which wasn’t released formally until it had gone through 22 rounds of tinkering. He joined the company in 2004 after spending a couple of years with Sierra Nevada Brewing Company. Cam holds a bachelor of arts in biology with a minor in chemistry, and has completed the University of California Davis Master Brewer Program.

Brian has been with Deschutes Brewery for five years and worked in various roles in the brewing department, most recently as assistant brewmaster for production technology. With a background in computer science and software development, Brian brings this precision to the brewhouse - optimizing recipes and developing operating procedures. He holds a bachelor of science in computer science and has also completed the University of California Davis Master Brewer Program.

The Coming Craft Beer Boom

2011-10-27T09:43:00.000-07:00

Have a look at the graph below, provided by the Economist magazine. It reflects the spending habits* of people during the current "little depression," and the results are predictable. Where people can avoid spending, they do (click to enlarge):

This includes, of course, alcohol, which is down more than 15% in real terms. Those who follow the craft beer market may understand instinctively that this is good news for the industry. Craft sales have continued to enjoy double-digit growth right through a recession in which beer sales fell. The Economist characterizes it this way:

During the good times of 2003-06 consumer spending rose by 8.2%. In that time, Americans boozed more and bought more cushions: spending on alcohol and household furnishings increased by 19% and 13% respectively. Contrast that with 2007-10 when spending on these items fell by over 16%.

So, when the economy comes back and people start spending more on alcohol, sales should spike even more.

I think it's even better news. I have no reason to think that the trend observed by the Economist didn't affect buyers of craft beer. True, they may be wealthier, and their spending may not have fallen as steeply as the population as a whole. Still, during hard times, people spend less when they can. So why did the craft segment continue to grow? Because it was adding more customers. Individually, people were buying less; as a group, they were keeping growth humming along.

That two-fold effect should result in an impressive and more stable bump when the economy comes back--which is yet another reason I'm not particularly worried that there are too many new breweries coming on line. If anything, the health of the craft market may be understated. (Input from real economists welcomed.)

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*The Economist: "Between 2007 and 2010, average annual consumer spending per unit—defined as a family/shared household or single/financially independent person—fell by 3.1% to $48,109. Average prices over this period have risen by 5.2%, so real consumer spending has fallen by almost 8%."

The French Connection

2011-10-26T09:42:00.000-07:00

Brains are funny, faulty things. Take, for example, mine. It knew that I planned to make a trip to Britain and Belgium, and so my brain dutifully locked in these coordinates, booted up Google maps, and began helping me plan my trip. At some point late in the process, one of the technicians that resides there happened to notice that France is right there next to Belgium and one of the more interesting French breweries, Thiriez, is a mere 20 kilometers from where I'll be staying in Watou. Thus did I scramble to include not only Thiriez but Castelain and St Germain in my plans. Whew.

Which got me thinking. If you scan the materials on style, you find damn little reference to France. Here's what it says in the Oxford Companion to Beer, in the section penned by Phil Markowski, who wrote the excellent book, Farmhouse Ales: "Considered the only widely acknowledged French contribution to specialty brewing, Biere de Garde..." And indeed, I find no fault in this sentence--biere de garde is the only widely acknowledged French style. It is by no means the only style brewed in France, though, and this is the problem.

(For the purposes of this post, let's pretend that the style biere de garde is a coherent one that might actually refer to a range of similar styles. I don't think that's true, but let's leave the quicksand of style debates to another post.)

Have a look at the range of beers produced at just the three breweries I'll be visiting (France now boasts hundreds):

Thiriez. A blond and an amber in the biere de garde class, a hoppy pale (the fields at Poperinge are just a few miles down the road), a black ale, a Flanders red.
Castelain (aka Ch'ti). Two blonds in the biere de garde class, an amber I won't try to characterize, an organic pale, and various browns and wheats.
St Germain (aka Page 24). A session blond, wit (maybe), three biere de gardes, a rhubarb beer, and a chicory beer.

The ratings sites shoe-horn these beers into various styles or use biere de garde as a catch-all. Yet while I've tried only four of them, I'm going to go out on a limb and say this is just lazy. If adding black malt to a beer gives you a wholly new, Brewers-Association-certified style, the idea that there's only a single indigenous style in France strikes me as improbable. Some of these are lagered, some made with lager yeasts, others not. The variation among just the few beers I've tried has been substantial. My guess is that, like so many other places in the world the evolution of brewing styles has outpaced old categories in France.

Of course, this is why visits are so valuable. I'll have a chance to talk to the brewers about their beers, their philosophies, and their methods. I won't really have a chance to dig deeply into French brewing this trip, but even speaking with three brewers can be revelatory. Thank god the old brain woke up in time that I didn't miss the opportunity.

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PHOTO: BRASSERIE THIRIEZ BY ON THE ROAD

The Honest Pint Project is Dead; Long Live Honest Pints!

2011-10-25T09:09:00.000-07:00

Not super long after I started this blog, I stumbled into the thicket of unregulated glassware sizing. Mentioning the crime of the cheater pint, I inadvertently sparked a great outcry. This led to an online petition, some local press, and ultimately, a half-assed advocacy campaign to bring transparency to glassware sizes. Miraculously, the Honest Pint Project led to some amazing things:

We certified 47 pubs in eight states as Purveyors of Honest Pints.
The Wall Street Journal did a long, in-depth piece on the Project.
NPR covered it (twice!).
It got a fair amount of other press.
The Oregon legislature considered creating a law to enshrine the Honest Pint Project into law (and it made it fairly far along before dying in the Oregon Senate).
We sold swag.
We irritated some people.
I'd like to say we sparked the minor trend of marking the 16 oz line on glasses, but I'm not totally sure we deserve it.
We inspired women to go on a glass-measuring rampage in Oklahoma City. (This may have brought me the most joy.)

Alas, I was always the wrong champion for this endeavor. It needed someone with real moxie and drive. I imagine where we'd be if, say, Angelo, Ezra, or the Beer Wench had stumbled onto it as I did. Cheater pints would be a thing of the past. The project was important enough that it deserved someone like them.

Anyway, the website is about to go dark. The lease on honestpintproject.org runs out on November 1, and my silent--and very important--partner and I have decided to let it go. As bad as I was before about crusading against cheater pints, at least I used to feel guilty about it. Now, as my life has taken a different direction, I don't even have the time to feel guilty. It was a noble project, but died, as they all do, from inattention.

Raise a pint--an honest one, please--to the Project this week. It was good while it lasted.

Update. I just got an email from someone interested in carrying the HPP forward. I'm totally cool with that. Email [the_beerax(at)yahoo(dot)com] if you also wanted to be included. Perhaps more hands means a lighter load.

The Latest Outrage From DC: $7 Pints of Beer

2011-10-24T09:09:00.000-07:00

Before I get into the substance of today's post, a brief program note. In a little less than two weeks, I'll be headed off to Europe for nearly a month, visiting something on the order of two dozen breweries. As a consequence, I'm not doing any of the normal blogging about Oregon and Portland I'd like. Brewpublic just celebrated three years with a typical Angelonian bacchanalia, breweries are busy releasing new seasonals, and events stack like cord wood in the ol' Google calendar. I apologize for this breach and assure you that I'll be back on track with the Holiday Ale Fest--which starts the day after I return.

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I'm not totally sure what to make of Tammy Tuck's 3700 word inquiry into a simple question at the Washington (DC) City Paper. She describes the joy of buying beer for $4-5 a pint in San Francisco (also typical for Oregon and Washington) and then describes what it's like in the District:

Yet, in Washington, where drinkers can now sample D.C.-brewed beers for the first time in 50 years, even the local brews aren’t particularly cheap. DC Brau Public Ale costs $6 on draft at The Big Hunt. At Tonic in Mt. Pleasant, the price is $7. The local brewery’s second effort, DC Brau Corruption, runs $6.50 on draft at both Meridian Pint and ChurchKey. All this for a brew that doesn’t even have to cross the District line!

The subject of the piece is captured in the slug: "Why is craft beer so expensive in Washington?" What follows is a strange journey through an alternate craft brewing world where Tuck's informants lead her to passages like this:

One of the biggest factors in how much you pay for locally made beer is the scale of production. Each of the District’s breweries is technically operating at a “nano” level, meaning the amount of beer they make is minute, even compared to others defined as microbreweries.
“We have a 15-barrel system while a much larger brewery like Flying Dog makes 50-barrel batches,” DC Brau’s Brandon Skall says. “We have to brew three times to accomplish what they do in one brew.”

Chocolate City’s seven-barrel system is even smaller, producing just 30 or 40 kegs a week. “As small as we are, we can’t afford to drop the prices of our kegs right now,” Irizarry says. “If our volume were to grow significantly, if we were to jump up to 100-barrel fermenters, I could more easily guarantee that the price will come down.”

(Good reporting can sometimes result in bad information. It's preposterous to call a 15-barrel brewhouse a "nano," as anyone passingly familiar with craft brewing knows, or to suggest that such a system is so inefficient as to cause prices to spike 50%. But that's what the local brewers apparently told Tuck. The article includes a series of similarly bogus justifications for customer-gouging.) Ultimately, she arrives here:

It’s outrageous to have to pay more per pint than suds-sippers in super-pricey San Francisco. No matter what the excuse—the kegs are too damn heavy, the rent is too damn high—there’s no justification for the significant price discrepancy between such comparably expensive and sophisticated cities.

A magnum opus on beer pricing, and we come up with no real explanation. My guess is this: craft beer is in its novel, exotic phase in DC and there isn't a huge amount of competition. As a consequence, the small group of consumers who are supporting the local breweries are willing to shell out a huge premium on a price of beer. If the market were healthier, bigger, and more competitive, those prices would drop like a stone.

Take, for example, Portland, Oregon's. Thanks to the work of Bill Night, we have excellent data over the past two years to see how prices have changed. Every three months, Bill assembles the Portland Beer Price Index to see how prices have changed for various packages of beer. He began in the fall of 2009, giving us two full years of data. In that first tabulation, Bill found that the average price of a pint of beer in Portland was $4.27. In last month's report, the price was up to $4.33. Two years, 1.4% increase--that's stability. The reason, of course, is that if a pub hits you up for five bucks a pint, you're going to consider very carefully the prospect of wandering two blocks to the next pub, where a pint's $4.25. No doubt every pub would love to make seven bucks a pint, but you would be out of business in a month if you tried.

At a certain point, the DC market will mature to the point where there's enough supply that pubs will compete on price. Pints will dip to five, five and a half bucks. DC is an expensive city where a lot of people have expense accounts, so probably it's never going to get as cheap as it is on the West Coast. In other words, it's basic market dynamics. The solution, as with all things, is to make and drink more beer.

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PHOTO: FADO IRISH PUB

Blogspot Still Eating Comments

2011-10-21T14:51:00.000-07:00

Apparently they're aware of the problem:

We're investigating reports of users not being able to comment on IE8/9 from the embedded form. We hope to have a fix out shortly, but in the meantime we encourage admins to switch to either the full-page or pop-up forms which should be working without issue.

Thanks for your patience, and we'll make sure to update this post as soon as we have more info.

I have made the change they recommend.