Big and Little News of the Day

I somehow missed this:

Over the past decade, the alcohol levels of many beers has edged toward — or well into — the double digits. But a couple of new Bay Area brewing companies are betting that bigger is not always better.

Pete Slosberg of Pete’s Wicked Ale fame unveiled Mavericks “Not yet world famous session beers” on Feb. 8. ...Mavericks, meanwhile, is taking a more contemporary approach, with modern styles that include a Belgian-style wit, rye pale ale and chocolate porter. Mavericks is going all-in with session beers by specifically targeting 3.75 percent ABV, but Shelton would like to see them go lower. 

How much credit should go to Magnolia's Dave McLean?  (A lot, probably.)

Now, for something completely different, we turn to Gigantic Brewing, which digs into the archives for the new beer:

Brewers in the midlands of England would boil their barley wine ales longer to intensify their flavors. In making MASSIVE!, we used only British Halcyon pale malt and boiled it for eight hours, giving the beer a deep ruby color and rich malt flavor. Heavily hopped, MASSIVE! is a beer that can be enjoyed now for its intensity, or after years, and years, and years of aging… 12% ABV 

What's next--Peeterman?  Doble doble?

Yet One More Post in Promotion of Small Beer

A fascinating conversation has broken out on the Brew Crew Listserve.* It started with a question of what to call low-alcohol beers given that Full Sail has a trademark on the word "session." I can't imagine Full Sail trying to protect their mark when used adjectively, so I think we should just continue calling this category "session beers." But from there it evolved into a general discussion of the nature of small beers, their value, and commercial viability.

Just for the sake of discussion, I'll throw in my two cents. (By coincidence, I happen to have a blog to facilitate such things.) In my reckoning, there are several issues that thwart the wider adoption of small beers--all to the detriment of good beer culture.

• Small beer costs the same as large beer. So, if you order a pint of 3.9% mild ale, you pay the same amount as if you buy a 6.7% IPA. Guess which beer most people buy? This is true when you buy beer by the bottle, too. I will confess to having, on at least one occasion, been seduced by a $7 sixer of 8% Hop Czar. Who doesn't love a bargain?

• Conventional wisdom maintains the accuracy of these proofs: strong beers = flavorful beers and low-alcohol beers = insipid, lame beers. This is an unfortunate legacy of insipid, lame industrial lagers. It's true that if you brew a beer with corn, rice, and three hops ("triple hop brewed!"), you wind up with uninspiring beer. The lesson seems to have been that the opposite must therefore be true: deploy massive amounts of hop and barley, and you will produce good beer. A logical mistake. Lots of ingredients don't necessarily make for good beer, and few don't necessarily make for bad beer. Many small beers shine exactly because the ingredients are displayed nakedly and allowed to express their intrinsic character without a lot of interference. Small beers can, in many cases, be more flavorful than larger beers, muddied by a surfeit of ingredients.

• Not all small beers are mild ales. (And, as Ron Pattinson would say, not all mild ales are small beers--but that's a different post.) In the world of under-5%-ers, you have a great variety of styles: lambic, saison, Irish stout, Berliner Weisse, bitter, steam beer, and yes, mild ales.

• Cask ales, which Oregon is slowly, slowly beginning to embrace, are a perfect platform for displaying the amazing subtlety of beer flavor. Flavor that is sometimes frankly unavailable when you have higher-gravity beers with more intense hopping. (Not that cask ale is only delightful when the beers are small.)
  

In the US, we've really never tried to seriously brew low-alcohol beers for beer geeks. We instantly default to big beers--preferably barrel aged, with lots of nice liquor to boost the alcohol percentage. There's nothing wrong with big beers, but there is something wrong with the idea that only big beers are tasty.

I recall two experiences with especial vividness. Both happened at the Portland International Beer Fest, where small beers are served in the guileless belief that drinkers will enjoy them. In the first case--the second PIB, I think--I discovered a keg of Cantillon Rosé de Gambrinus. This was sort of early on, and the organizers hadn't hammered out the pricing yet--I remember being shocked at how cheap it was. Anyway, while my friends were off seeking the strongest beers they could find, I was going for pour after pour of the lambic. Ironically, I couldn't get anyone to join me: the Cantillon was too intense for them.

In the second case, I found a cask of Coniston Bluebird Bitter. The brewery ships a 4.2% bottled version to the states, but his was their 3.6% version, a different recipe made with 100% Challenger hops. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven. That beer would easily make my top ten in the world. (And this time, I found some support for the beer when I handed out tasters.)

In any case, I feel duty bound to turn to that great American philosopher Kevin Costner when offering advice to American brewers: if you brew it, they will come. Seriously. Small beers rock. Brew them. (But maybe sell them at a slight discount to offset bargain-hunting.) And don't fear the cask!


Update. In comments, two brewers offer good news. Alan Sprints reports about the future of small beer (that is to say beer made from second running, a special variety of small beer) at his future brewery and Ted Sobel describes how he prices beer at Brewers Union.

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*One of the reasons Portland is known as "Beervana" is because we have the Oregon Brew Crew, a homebrew club who leave their fingerprints on nearly every beery event that happens here. If you see a brewer under 40 years old in Portland, ask if they've been a member of the club--chances are, they were. Their Listserve is one of the finest public services to good beer we have in the city.

PHOTO: BENDIT
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Super Small Beers

A British beer blogger has a post up about an English brown ale that weighs in at 2.8% alcohol:

If you're American, you'd probably laugh it out of town. I doubt they send much - if any - across the Atlantic. Instead, the beer cowers in brown, half litre bottles on the shelves of Tesco stores in Britain. It coyly suggests on its label that it be used for cooking. There's even a recipe for beef stew on the back. It's as if the little chap doesn't want you to drink him.

It appears that the beer in question, Mann's, is a throwback. In the comments to the post, a guy named Paul notes "When we had our beer shop we used to sell a reasonable amount of Mann's brown. I don't ever remember a customer for it being under 60." That, and the suggestion that it's more fit for stew than mug, hint at its status there.

Nevertheless, there is a long and loving history of small beers, going back to the time when they were consumed in greater quantity and at what we might now consider off hours. In our mania for extremes, we extend not even scorn for these kinds of beers now--most craft beer drinkers probably believe that beer under 4% alcohol was made to serve scorn-deserving niches (light beer, non-alcoholic beer).

Well, as a sometimes brewer and all-around beer appreciator, I will go on record as a fan of the little beers. They're the quadruple salchow of brewing--very hard to pull off, so much so that few even bother. But when done properly, they reveal flavors concealed at higher octane. Here in Beervana, we so eschew anything with the macro taint that even our session ales are 5.5%. But in the world of extremes--which make Beervana's heart sing--super small beers are something to consider.

A general call to Oregon brewers: what about trying to knock off our socks with one hand tied behind your back? Something around three percent, style of your choice. Betcha can't.