Summer's Perfect Beer: Rye Pale Ales

Rye is a weed. Or was, anyway, 3,500 years ago, when it infested the wheat and barley fields of Southern Asia. As a consequence, it co-evolved with these other grains long before it was accepted in its own right. Its heyday as a bread, according to Stan Hieronymus' Brewing With Wheat, was the middle ages before dying off in the time of Victoria. It remained only in certain precincts where people were made stupid and dull by its hearty density, so said snotty wheat-eaters. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder--the possibly apocryphal discoverer of hops--sneered at rye, saying it was "a very poor food and only serves to avert starvation."

In beer, rye has mainly been yoked to darker beers, to spice them and make them hearty. But counter-intuitively, certain breweries also put them in pale ales, and the result is a spicy, dry, quenching beer perfect for a summer day. In the Northwest, the first credit for the style probably goes to Redhook, which brewed a light rye ale more than 15 years ago. It didn't sell well and died out. (Revived for one season a few years ago and then killed off again.) This summer, I note that at least three versions were available: Oakshire Line Dry Rye, Laurelwood Wry, and Three Creeks Stonefly (a regular in their line-up). It could be that these are also flash in the pans, or that we're seeing the shoots of a new fixture in Beervana. I hope it's the latter, because the style is absolutely perfect on a hot day.

Three Creeks Stonefly Rye
The difficulty with rye is that it's a husky, ornery grain, and has been the ruin of many a young beer. Fleming Threee Creeks wisely pairs it with wheat here--they actually seasons a wheat beer with rye--and the result is a light, refreshing beer with a lively, spicy note. I found bright and tart notes (lemongrass?) but the beer wasn't aggressive or grinding--as it can be if you extract too many tannins from the rye. Of the Three Creeks beers I've tried, this is the most accomplished and also my fave. (4.6%, 28 IBUs) [Note: I just pasted this description in from my earlier review, failing to catch the bit about Dave Fleming, the founding brewer at Three Creeks who has since left. A sharp-eyed reader emailed to point this out.]

Oakshire Line Dry Rye
Oakshire substitutes honey for Three Creek's wheat. Poured very cold, the spice of the rye and the resin of the hops create a slightly aggressive flavor that seems at turns soapy or piney. But with a bit of warmth, the honey sweetness emerges, and the honey seems to provide a voluptuous creaminess that offsets the sharper notes nicely. I am re-painting my house, and after a few hours of scraping and sanding, I poured this out last night and was so happy to have a refreshing, light beer to slake my thirst. (5.5% 35 IBUs)

Laurelwood Wry Ale
My favorite rye ale comes from Laurelwood, though there may not be any left. This year's batch was on tap only briefly at the brewery, but they did bottle some, too--but you can bookmark it for next year. A drier beer than the first two, the spiciest, and most astringent. Rather than balancing it with wheat or honey, Laurelwood goes with Cascade and Amarillo hops; their citrus marries perfectly with the spice. As you can see from the picture, there's an indelible image on the label. I always forget what the actual name is; to me, it's always Hayseed Rye. (5.6% 40 IBUs)

A bit of summer yet remains. Go forth and have a rye.

Good Blogs

Back in the olden days of blogging, we had ugly, junky blogs. We larded the side-columns with text no one ever read, including a thing called a "blogroll." These were links to blogs we bloggers read and each was a little shout-out, a recommendation to the wee trickle of readers who inadvertently wandered onto our sites. Modern blogs are streamlined and pretty and foresake this old grassroots tradition. But I, a dinosaur, maintain my old jalopy of a site, and I keep to the old ways.

I've just finished updating the blogroll, and on the off-chance you are not a dinosaur and haven't seen the changes, let me be more direct about drawing your attention to some of the new ones (handily designated with an asterisk (*) for your convenience):

• Lisa Morrison, the Beer Goddess. Google the words "Beer Goddess" and you find a lot of other citations. But those of us in Portland recognize only one goddess, and her name is Lisa Morrison. All others are false goddesses meant to confuse and mislead. Lisa's the one.
• Billy Brew. Especially good on homebrewing. Today, for instance, you will find a post on yeast-washing. Cool.
• Beer Wench. Apparently the beer blogosphere is the Beer Wench's and we just inhabit it. Easily the hardest tweeting blogger in the beer-o-sphere.
• Lost in the Beer Aisle, Beer Babe, and Seacoast Beverage Lab. New England for some reason gets less national attention that its beers deserve. This trio of blogs may help spread the word.
• Mutineer Mag Blog. Magazines rarely take their blogging seriously. Mutineer does. (Though it's a drinks mag, not just beer.)
• Hoperatives. This looks like the Cincinnati Beervana. Not to give offense, or anything. If you happen to be from the lower Midwest, check it out.

There are others, and keep in mind that every link in the blog roll is a recommendation, so you should check them all out--at least once. As always, send me a link if you have a blog you'd like to be added. (Though a word to the wise: your traffic volume will move almost unappreciably.)


Update. Okay, a few more added: Beer Cave, A Pint for Dionysus, Brewlimination, Girl's Guide to Beer (London writer Melissa Cole's excellent blog). Oh, and I added back one zombie blog that seems to have awakened from the dead.

International Beer Day

Surely you have big plans. I expect you'll be attending one of the many events around the country. I mean, today is International Beer Day, after all. What, you didn't know that?

Neither did I.

Inauspiciously, the website is currently down (9:09 am), but Wikipedia tells us this much:

International Beer Day (IBD) is an August 5 holiday invented in 2007 in Santa Cruz, CA. As opposed to Oktoberfest, which is in the cold months and largely European, International Beer Day is meant to be celebrated across the world while it's still warm enough for cold beer.

International Beer Day is celebrated by drinking beer, drinking beer with friends, and buying beer for others. While there are various other traditions, these seem to be the key attributes. The suggested way to greet someone on International Beer Day is to hand them a beer and say "I bring you the gift of beer". As a general rule, you can't refuse the beer.

I think "International Beer Day" was invented by students at UC Santa Cruz with rare and coveted access to the intertubes. Or maybe it's a put-on. This business about drinking beer "while it's still warm enough for cold beer" strikes me as ... suspicious. (The average high temperature in Santa Cruz in January is sixty degrees.) But if they are having us on, they've managed to get mass media coverage, so good for them. Hoodwinking a journo is its own reward.

In any case, I am prepared to be won over. I will accept gifts of beer all day long. Happy IBD!

The Big Business of Small Breweries

For anyone in and around Portland, there was little surprise in yesterday's announcement that Widmer/Redhook's (Craft Brewers Alliance) had purchased Kona Brewing. The companies have long been working together, and the resulting collective will operate in much the same way. In terms of where breweries are located and who is designing and brewing the beers, not a whole lot will change. It may give most good-beer drinkers pause, but this is the artifact of ugly mergers from an earlier era. In fact, the CBA-Kona merger tells us a lot about how much things have changed since the bigs started plucking up breweries like Henry's and Rainier.

To rewind the tape, if we go back to the 1950s, regional breweries were still a fixture in the American brewing landscape. Schlitz was the top brewer, but only produced 7% of the country's beer--and the top ten breweries only produced 38%. Lots of little breweries still made beer for their home markets. In the sixties and seventies and early eighties, this all changed as the major breweries started to achieve massive dominance and control vast percentages of the total market. When these behemoths took over small breweries, they were buying brands, not breweries. They sold off the breweries and moved production to their larger, more modern and efficient breweries elsewhere. So names like Henry Weinhard became just another brand in a huge brewing operation. Generally speaking, the beers themselves also changed, so the name really was the only thing left. This all makes good economics, but it's depressing.

(Pabst, beloved of hipsters, isn't even a brewery--just a name. Milwaukee's most important brewery shut down in 1996 and PBR is now contract-brewed by Miller.)

This kind of merger has happened in craft brewing, too. Back in the 90s, particularly, lots of dying little micros managed to sell themselves off to bigger micros just before they bought the farm. In Portland, Saxer bought NorWester, closed the brewery and kept making beer under the NorWester name. Pretty soon then-Portland Brewing bought both Saxer and NorWester, closed the Saxer brewery and made the brands at PB Co. But this was folly--micros are not "brands" in the way Henry's was. The names don't mean much, and they have little value. In craft brewing, what matters much more is what's in the bottle, not what's on it.

The modern mergers aren't made between two struggling breweries, they're made between strong ones. When they merged, Widmer and Redhook were both top-ten sized craft breweries. Kona is a very healthy and expanding brewery, and is (amazingly) the 13th-largest craft brewery. The merger leaves all players intact--brewing operations continue apace in pre-existing breweries. The resulting collective will still trail Boston Beer, the largest craft brewery, by a long way (based on John's numbers, the new company will oversee 583,000 barrels of production--just a fraction of Boston Beer's 2 million), but it will benefit from increased efficiencies and marketing heft. Yet they'll remain distinct entities.

This is the big change. At this moment in time, anyway, craft breweries benefit from being distinctive and place-based. It is a strength to have diversity. As the industry matures, mergers are going to become the norm--if they aren't already. Once breweries reach a certain size threshold, those efficiencies, access to far-flung markets, and marketing heft mean the difference between stagnation and growth. But unlike the dark old days of macro mergers, most of them won't matter a whole lot to the average consumer.

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Relatedly, a friend had a sixer of Fire Rock Pale last night, and it was quite tasty. Minerally, very crisp. Pipeline is a regular go-to beer for me as well. I said above that these mergers won't matter a whole lot to consumers, but for those who have new access to these beers, that's not entirely true. And that's another reason not to fear mergers--for now, anyway.

Widhook Acquires Kona Brewing

Wow.

Portland, Ore. (August 3, 2010) – Craft Brewers Alliance, Inc. (CBA) (Nasdaq: HOOK), has entered into a merger agreement that will strengthen a nine-year partnership with Kona Brewing Co. (Kona).  As a result of the merger agreement, Kona will become a wholly owned subsidiary of CBA and have the opportunity to expand its brand and distribution while maintaining its craft brewery operations in Hawaii....

Following the merger, Davis will continue to serve as president and CEO of Kona and will work closely with Michaelson to nurture the authenticity of the Kona brand and position it for long-term growth on the U.S. mainland. In addition, the current owners of Kona will receive an equity stake in the combined entity.
 
Rich Tucciarione will remain Brewmaster at Kona and the brewery’s operations will remain in Kailua-Kona on Hawaii’s Big Island, where the company takes an active role in supporting community events like the annual Kona Brewers Festival. Kona also takes proactive steps to minimize its impact on the natural resources of the island community, adopting programs that focus on solar energy, waste minimization, resource conservation, and support of local farmers and agriculture.

I do love me that Kona Porter...

Honest Pints in Olympia

This is a pretty shocking fact, but true: the Project had as of this morning not certified a pub in the Evergreen State. Fortunately we now rectify this terrible oversight. In Olympia, the three-month-old Skep And Skein Tavern joins the certified club.

Skep and Skein Tavern and Meadery
Certified Purveyor of an Honest Pint
2106 Harrison Ave NW B 14
Olympia, WA 98502

Since it's so new, there's not a lot of info, but Dave Ross sends along some details:

We opened on April 23rd of this year and are located on Olympia's "Westside" which is on the hill above downtown. We have 16 tap handles of which 14 are rotating regularly. We are trying to carry beers that are not always readily available in Olympia, which has been a lot of fun. We are also a bonded and licensed meadery with our own meads on draft scheduled for sometime this fall. In the mean time we have been selling Redstone Mead from the bottle and these have been well received.

So next time you're zipping up (or down) I-5, stop in for a pint--an honest pint. And tell us what you think. Good luck, Dave, may the place prosper--

Women Are Craft Brewing's Future

I recently spoke to a journalist doing a story on the future of craft beer. (A worthy topic for a post, but not this one.) He was interested to know how much growth craft breweries in the Northwest might be expected to enjoy. A lot can be said there, but I highlighted one factor I thought has gone relatively unexamined. Per capita beer drinking has remained pretty steady over the years, fluctuating only slightly year by year. Different states consume beer at different rates, but the trendline for individual states remains steady, too. Therefore, all things being equal, if craft breweries want to increase market share, they must take it away from macros and imports.

Ah, but all things are not equal. The other way they can do it is find new segments who don't currently drink beer. And there's a HUGE one: women. They constitute half the drinkers in America, and they barely sniff the stuff. Ladies prefer cocktails and wine. I posted results of a Gallup poll last year showing that only a fifth of female drinkers cited beer as their preferred beverage. (Men, of course, prefer beer--58% will choose it over wine or liquor.)

I just got an email from Gallup pointing me to this year's poll. Guess what--it looks like we're already seeing some substantial movement.

Women Citing Beer as Preferred Beverage

_____________________2009____2010__Change
All__________________21%_____27% ___+6%
Under 49 years old___25%_____35% ___+10%
Over 50 years old____15%_____18% ___+3%

This appears to be real movement. The margin of error is 4%, and the trends are all consistent. While we can't be certain those numbers are exactly accurate, we have to assume the actual movement toward more beer-drinking is. Moreover, if women were taking to beer, you'd expect to see the trend emerge among younger women--and so it is. The really big finding: in the past year, younger women have made a serious move toward beer as their preferred beverage. A year ago, it was the third-most preferred beverage; this year it was way out in front of liquor, and only trailing wine by 4%. It's not unreasonable to envision a future when beer is the preferred beverage among men and women.

Gallup doesn't break consumption down by type, so for all we know, these women might be Pabst drinkers. Surely some are. But you have to imagine that craft beer is picking up a disproportionate share of that shift. The beer is better and more vivid-tasting, and the marketing is far more woman-friendly than the still borderline misogynistic macro campaigns.

If I were a craft brewery, I would be extremely aggressive about trying to market to women. You may convert a few Bud men to your Sang Noirs, but it's going to be a lot easier to convert pinot women.

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PHOTO: DAILY MAIL

Why Do Restaurants Discriminate Against Beer?

Last night I was sitting in Fonda Rosa, a well-regarded, upscale Mexican restaurant along the 28th Avenue restuarant row. Comes the menus: food, specials, drinks. I look over and see four taps and a row of bottles--mostly Mexican--on the bar. I'm thinking maybe a Pacifico, but I wonder what those taps are. I look at the drinks menu and find the usual list of specialty cocktails and small wine list. Beer? Nada.

This is common. You go into a nice restaurant in Portland and despite a decent tap list (generally three or four well-selected choices), there's zero mention of the beer. Lots of talk of wine and booze, but nothing on the beer. Of course, this is Beervana, so when you look around one of these restaurants, you see that at least a third of the people are drinking beer. Sometimes almost everyone is. (Fonda Rosa attracts a beer-friendly crowd.) What the hell?

If I were a more activist type, I might try to start a project. You know, Beer Transparency in Restaurants or something. Fortunately, I leave that kind of thing to others.

Anyone have a theory why restauranteurs slight the beer they sell and leave it off their menu?

Bailey's Third Anniversary

You never want to leave this town. The second you do, something cool happens. Like, for instance, Bailey's big third anniversary blow out, featuring a stellar line-up of rare beers--some made especially for the event. In a town studded with impressive good-beer alehouses, Bailey's may have taken the pole position (though partisans of the Horse Brass may dispute the claim). In any case, Ezra and the New School have up their reviews. Go have a look if you, like me, had the misfortune to miss the event.

(And put the date on your calendar: August 6, 2011. I know where I'll be.)

My Craft Brewing Manifesto

Note: I'm away from the computer for a few days, so I'm reposting some of my favorite items from recent years. Regular posting will resume tomorrow, but here's a final Sunday post.

Buy local, buy good, drink on tap.

Back in the 1970s, Charlie Papazian founded the Association of Brewers--and the more well-known American Homebrewers Association--as advocacy groups for fledgling brewers. The mission grew out of the particular circumstances of that time and place, and was, for at least a decade, clear, accurate, and important. There were two categories of beer: insipid, tin-can beer and handcrafted, artisanal beer. The former had eaten its own, stamped out diversity and quality, and was busily consolidating itself into a single, monolithic product where the only distinction could be found in the color on the label. The latter cared about beer, brewing history, and beer styles, not money. The Association of Brewers therefore had an easy task: support the little guy, support good beer, support independence. It was a moral as much as business crusade.

Unfortunately, the Brewers Association (as it it now styled) still holds to these values, and they no longer have clear, obvious referents. Breweries can't easily be divided into good beer/bad beer, big/little, and independent/multinational. The brewing industry is a market, and markets grow like amoebas. Trying to contain them in boxes is of no use. And markets are by nature amoral.

I have not particular interest in how American breweries organize themselves politically. Presumably, those that are small and local have more in common with each other than they have with Anheuser-Busch. But does Hair of the Dog have more in common with Widmer/Redhook than it does with Maine's Gritty McDuff's? Probably.

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
American Craft Beer Week
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We are midway through Craft Beer Week, a promotional event of the Brewers Association. The Charlie Papazian multiverse dominates everything in American craft brewing, and so we must dutifully turn toward Denver this week. But while we do so, I'd like to offer my counter-manifesto to his outdated one. His has become a political organization. The following manifesto is designed to create the conditions for the production of good beer and a sustainable market. It could also be said to be a blueprint for how Beervana became Beervana. These things, rather than a series of ever less explicable categories of being, are what we want to nurture.

Buy Local
Show me a town where the beer drinkers are avid fans of good beer, and I'll show you a town with local breweries. It makes sense, right? If locals are buying your beer, you're inclined to make them happy. But it's not just small breweries that have this effect: look at the great brewing regions, the areas around Portland, Seattle, Denver, Philadelphia--have or had large, regional breweries located nearby. Beer is local. If you have a beer city, it means you have beer people. If those beer people buy locally, they'll have access to good beer.

Charlie has focused on the independence, but this misses the point. Markets require masses. Towns with breweries have those masses. The problem with consolidation in the 60s and 70s was that local brewing culture died out--vast swaths of the country, lacking any local beer, drank whatever was cheapest, further fueling consolidation. It's counterintuitive, but even bigger regional breweries help smaller ones flourish because they make the market even that much bigger. You don't have to be xenophobic about it, but spare a copper or two for the local guy(s).

Buy Good
Of course, it's not enough to only buy local--consumers have to demand good beer. Rather than descending into a long philosophical dispute about good, let's use the Judge Stewart rationale: we know it when we see it. Minimally, it's a beer brewed with quality ingredients and attention to style. The reason we should support good beer--whether or not it comes from a small brewery--is that this creates the market for good beer. If consumers always eschew the good for the cheap, they'll get the cheap. If they spend a bit more and buy the good, they'll make it possible for breweries to continue to brew the good. And round it goes.

Drink on Tap
You can buy many of the world's greatest beers in bottles. You can buy brewery-fresh local beer in bottles. But from time to time, you should go to your neighborhood pub and plunk down a five spot on a pint (an honest pint, naturally). The brewing ecosystem is large and diverse. If we don't support pubs, we fail to support the incubators of beer culture. Seeing others in a public space, sampling different kinds of beers, talking with your local publican (who may be the brewer), these things are the fertilizer for healthy markets. When people go to pubs, they support local beer and local business. By creating an additional market for beer, they allow non-bottling breweries to flourish--all of which makes the brewing ecosystem as a whole more sustainable.

Buy local, buy good, drink on tap. Do these things, and good beer will continue to be brewed in your neighborhood. After all, isn't that's what Charlie Papazian is really after?

Beer Tasting Is Subjective

Note: I'm away from my computer for awhile, and I'm re-posting some of the more interesting items from recent years. The one I'm posting today actually had an amazing influence on my appreciation of how different individual palates are. Also, the links appear dead, but the point is still valid.

Let's try a thought experiment. Imagine you assembled a list of a city's best beers. Then you polled a bunch of people to find the consensus of which of these they would recommend. Here's the experiment part: how many of those beers would have high levels of agreement--say 75% or more?

I would have guessed you could get at least a couple beers in every style--essentially broad agreement on the "best beers." Well, Matt Wiater at Portlandbeer.org actually did this, and guess what: not much agreement. Of the top 15 beers, only two met my hypothetical standard. Mostwere recommended by only a bare majority of people. Mirror Pond, for example, surely one of the more famous, beloved, and best-selling beers in all of Greater Beervana, managed a recommendation from only 50% of the people.

So who were these half-wits? Bloggers, mainly (including me).

The lesson is clear to me: there is no "best" of anything. "Bests" are reserved for track meets, where you can actually measure performance. In beer, the master is the taster. What's best is what your tongue likes. I tend to think we can talk about some general standards of quality, but specific beers?--clearly this isn't so easy to figure out.

So the next time (and there will be a next time) we get in a spat about a specific beer, we should recall this lesson. Different strokes, folks. And ain't it nice we have so many breweries to serve these different tongues?

What Sours a Beer?

In yesterday's post about Devil's Kriek, Samurai Artist sparked a conversation about the souring properties of brettanomyces. Since sour beers are becoming more common, it's a timely discussion. Sourness may be tart and clean as in a Berliner Weisse, dry and austere as in some lambics, our face-puckeringly intense, as in some Flemish reds. These different qualities come from different microorganisms, and it's worth spending a post mentioning a few of the biggies.

My source material here is Jeff Sparrow's Wild Brews, which I recommend highly for anyone interested in a deep understanding of sour beers. Let's start with a pithy opening from the start of his fourth chapter, "Beer-Souring Microorganisms." Here, he describes the actors that create the funk:

"Four dominant types of microorganisms commonly ferment and acidify wild beers: brettanomyces, lactobacillus, pediococcus, and saccharomyces. Sever other important players also merit a mention, including acetobacter, enterobacter, and various oxidative yeasts."

Now, in this next pithy passage, he describes the particular nature of the funk those actors produce:

"The acids most important to wild beers include lactic and acetic acid. Acetic acid, present in copious amounts in vinegar, is sharp, pungent, and greatly increases the perception of sourness. Lactic acid, found in spoiled milk, is less objectionable and contributes a 'tangy' character, sometime perceived as 'sweet' by brewers in contrast to other acids."

(There are actually a host of other acids that contribute flavor like caproic acid, which Sparrow says gives a "goaty," "sweaty," or "zoolike" character. But you can read his book if you want the full monty.)

Brettanomyces
This wild yeast inspires the most awe and fear among brewers. It will eat anything, including dextrins and sugars that other yeasts find unpalatable, achieving nearly 100% attenuation. (Brewers joke that it will start eating the glass in a bottle if you leave it long enough.) Attenuation is the percentage of available sugars a yeast will eat. Wyeast's Northwest ale yeast, a non-brettanomyces yeast, attenuates at about 70%, for example. Brett will produce both acetic and lactic acids, but the former only under certain circumstances. There are at least five species of brettanomyces and many strains within each. The most common is brettanomyces bruxellensis, named for a strain from Brussels.

Lactobacillus
Lactobacillus is a type of bacteria that gives Flanders beers (red and brown) their character, as it does to some German ales like Gose and Berliner Weisse. It is not a major player in lambics, however--the lactic there comes from pediococcus (see below). As the name suggests, lactobacillus produces lactic acid. Lactobacillus is far more finicky than brettanomyces, preferring warm temperatures, a low-oxygen environment, and low levels of hop acids.

Pediococcus
As alluded to above, pediococcus is the beastie that gives lambics their lactic, not lactobacillus. This is mainly a function of the life cycle of a lambic. Pediococcus ferments in beer with little or no oxygen; likewise, it gives off no carbon dioxide. In a lambic, the pediococcus kicks in after 3-4 months when, fascinatingly, the wort is exceptionally sour as a result of early enterobacter production. The pediococcus begins when the lambic warms up, creating "long strands of slime" on top of the wort. You can drink the beer at this stage, but it's oily and known as the "sick" stage. But from the sickness comes the lactic, and eventually, the slime is reabsorbed as the brettanomyces begin gobbling up everything that's left.

The upshot? "Sour" isn't a fixed flavor. Different beers have different compounds and acids that contribute characteristics that define style. Brewers have very different attitudes to the kinds of sour beers produce. When I was at Allagash last year, Jason Perkins and Rob Tod described their efforts to cultivate native brettanomyces. On the other hand, Ron Gansberg doesn't want brett in his brewery; he's a lactobacillus man. Matt Swihart is a brett man, but is he only a brett man, or will future batches exhibit the character of other funky bacteria? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

By the way, Sparrow reproduces a lot of very cool graphs he got from Raj Apte, and you can find those at Raj's site. One I particularly enjoyed is a graph showing the waves of activity in lambic fermentation, particularly in the first year. Click on it to see an enlarged version. You'll find more cool stuff if you follow the link to his site, too.


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PHOTO: Cantillon casks, Thom's Beer Blog / link

Rise of the New Regional Breweries

Note: I'm away from the computer for a few days, and so have re-posted some of my favorite items from recent years. Today's post was occasioned by the In-Bev purchase of Anheuser-Busch. I have added an update below the post.

When I was a kid, my cousin--whom I idolized in the way an eight-year-old inevitably does with a 20-year-old cousin--used to name his dogs after beer. He was a farmer out in Eastern Oregon, and there was something about driving tractors that was irresistible to the young city slicker (from that vast metropolis, Boise). I never stopped to consider why he had a lot of dogs, but maybe the life of a farm dog isn't always a long-lived one. In any case, the reason he thought it was cool to name his dogs after beer companies was because there were a lot of regional beer companies, and they had identities. It wouldn't occur to a young man to name his dog after a brewing company now, but in the era of "I seen 'em" and "Raaaaai-neeeeeeir Beeeeeeeer" and "Blitz Country," it made perfect sense. His St. Bernard "Oly" was my favorite.

I am reminded of all of this as I consider the demise of Bud, the last of the independent American brewing titans. Now all we have left are "brands"--labels on cans all containing the same, indistinguishable pallid product. Breweries are gone, replaced by "plants," just as faceless as the beer they make. I suspect there's still a little pride in Colorado of Coors and in Milwaukee of Miller, but it must be a vestigial, nostalgic pride. There's nothing about Miller that says Milwaukee anymore--the association is purely reflex memory.

On the other hand, a lot of growing craft breweries have become pretty big deals. Boston Beer Company is now the largest independent brewery in the US. Sierra Nevada and New Belgium probably fit the standard of "regional brewery"--something like a million or more barrels. Maybe Widmer does, too. Deschutes and Full Sail are now in the top 20 (.pdf)--certainly not out of spitting distance. (There is a massive drop off from the top 3-4 to the next few, to be sure, but these companies are gaining.)

It's interesting to think of these, rather than the regional breweries ascendent back in the 60s (Ballantine, Hamm's, Blitz-Weinhard, Schaefer), as the next cohort of regional American breweries. We're still in the mode of thinking of them as "micro." But really, if the sale of Budweiser tells us anything, it's that the macros are looking like dinosaurs, while the erstwhile micros are creating broad regional markets that might well carry them into the future as major players. It's hard to imagine that Budweiser's pre-eminence will continue. They've held it for decades, but in business, no one stays on top forever. Ask GM.

Before 1970, there was a lot more parity between the major breweries. In 1950, Schlitz was "king," but just by a nose. They produced only 7% of the nation's beer and the top ten brewers only made 38%. A-B was king a decade later, but they still only produced 10% of the country's beer. And there were a still a lot of regional independents:

RANK	BREWER	BARRELAGE
1	Anheuser-Busch, Inc.	8,477,099
2	Jos. Schlitz Brewing Co.	5,694,000
3	Falstaff Brewing Corp.	4,915,000
4	Carling Brewing Co.	4,822,075
5	Pabst Brewing Co.	4,738,000
6	P. Ballantine & Sons	4,408,895
7	Theo. Hamm Brewing Corp.	3,907,040
8	F & M Schaefer Brewing Co.	3,202,500
9	Liebmann Breweries	2,950,268
10	Miller Brewing Co.	2,376,543

Total Barrelage Of All U.S. Brewers in 1960: 87,912,847 barrels.
Top 10 Brewers' Percentage of Total U.S. Barrelage: 52 percent.

I don't have the numbers for Budweiser, but it has long accounted for about half the beer sold in the US. If the brand erodes here, as Coors and Miller's have, Americans will be drinking more of something else. In another 20 years, we may see Boston Beer on top, with Bud relegated to second, Miller and Coors perhaps off the list. It's not inconceivable that eight or nine of the ten largest US breweries in 2025 are what we now call "craft breweries." I mean, it's already beginning:

1. Anheuser- Busch Inc.
2. Miller Brewing Co.
3. Coors Brewing Co.
4. Pabst Brewing Co.
5. Boston Beer Co.
6. D.G. Yuengling and Son Inc.
7. Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.
8. New Belgium Brewing Co. Inc.
9. High Falls Brewing Co. (Genesee)
10. Spoetzl Brewery

The brewing world has always been marked by vicissitude, even when things appeared static year-to-year. But now we may be in a very serious moment of change that will require us to rethink what we mean by "micro" and "macro."

Interesting times.

Update. Since I posted this, we've had some movement on the top ten list. Have a look at Brewers Association's list from this April:

1 Anheuser-Busch InBev St. Louis MO
2 MillerCoors Brewing Co. Chicago IL
3 Pabst Brewing Co. Woodridge IL
4 D. G. Yuengling and Son Inc. Pottsville PA
5 Boston Beer Co. Boston MA
6 Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. Chico CA
7 New Belgium Brewing Co. Fort Collins CO
8 Craft Brewers Alliance, Inc. Portland OR
9 Spoetzl Brewery (part of Gambrinus) Shiner TX
10 High Falls Brewing Co. Rochester NY

Bud American Ale: the Triumph or Demise of Craft Beer?

Note: I'm away from my computer for a while, so I'm re-posting some of my favorite items from the past years. Enjoy--

I finally got my hands on Bud's American Ale, which seems simultaneously to be: 1) over-compensation for a company that's no longer American, 2) an acknowledgement that new products, not just new ads, are the only way to grow in the US market, and 3) a legitimate beer.

Let's start with the third point first. This is a real craft beer, not just a marketing gimmick. Bud has made a beautiful amber ale with a nice caramel malt note and a lightly citrusy hopping. They have dry-hopped it with Cascade hops (whole hops, apparently). I wouldn't call it a transcendent beer, but if you did a blind taste-test with this beer and several other craft ambers, I suspect it would finish in the middle of the pack. It is, for example, Fat Tire's superior--by quite a margin. I'm not a huge fan of ambers, but if I went to a party and this was in the fridge along with Corona, Widmer Hef, and Fat Tire, I'd be happy to grab the Bud Ale. And I'd enjoy it, too.

It's not surprising that Bud has made a good beer. I don't doubt that if Bud wished, its brewers could instantly produce a dozen excellent beers, and probably a world-class lager or six. The best, most well-trained brewers in the world work for Bud. They don't brew world-class beers because they don't wish to, not because they can't.

Three questions spring to mind: why a craft beer, why an amber, and what does it spell doom for craft breweries?

The answer to the first question seems obvious. While the macro market is flat or in decline, the micro market continues to grow and grow. The US beer market continues to grow slowly, but all the growth is in the craft segment. Bud can continue to buy up smaller breweries piecemeal to get a part of that growth, or take the plunge with their own brand and try to bring the market under the Bud name.

Okay, so why an amber? No doubt there's an easy, flip answer--the focus groups liked it best. (And actually, I bet they did. I bet Bud tried a bunch of ales and came up with this one. I would have loved loved loved to have been among the focus groups so I could see what was in the mind of the giant.) But it also makes sense. If you want to build a market for ales, you want to actually brew an ale. The craft market has proven the enduring popularity of the style, particularly as an introductory beer for new ale drinkers. It's nothing like Bud. Amber ales are especially fruity and ale-y. They exhibit a sweetness totally unlike light lagers--and which totally beguiled an early generation of Oregonians. Add a little dry-hopped Cascade citrus, and you introduce drinkers to the flavor of hops without risking turning people off with bitterness. If you want to create a market by priming the palates of for ales, this is a great way to go.

All well and good, but does it spell doom for craft breweries? If Bud makes a great (and cheaper) amber, will people quit drinking Full Sail's? I would love to hear the beer-economist reflect on this question, but my sense is that it's just the opposite: Bud can reach 100 million consumers who will never otherwise consider a craft beer. And once they've begun drinking Bud's ale, they may well enjoy Black Butte Porter or BridgePort IPA or Roots Heather. If Bud's experiment is successful, they will expand the market for craft beer--one they won't ever be able to dominate in the way they dominate the single-product macro market.

I love that Bud has made a serious beer. It looks to me like a trojan horse that millions of Americans may unwittingly invite into their refrigerators. And once dry-hopped ales get in there, they may never leave.

Update. Maureen Ogle points out an obvious analogy (one I nevertheless missed) to the scenario above: the Starbucks phenomenon.

Thoughts When Smoking Was Banned

Note: I'm away from computers this week, and so I'm re-posting some of the more interesting pieces from past years. On January 1, 2009, Oregon banned cigarettes in bars. I posted this reminiscence. 18 months on and I find I have less nostalgia than I expected.

The first time I ever inhaled the dense, smoky air of a bar, it was my father's. It was a little place called GJ's or G and J's below the sidewalk level--like a speakeasy--in the basement of Boise's venerable Idanha Hotel. In a long life in which my father earned a living with his hands, this was the brief period in which his his true calling came to flower. The bar didn't last more than a few months, as I recall (and I recall it dimly and perhaps improperly) because while Dad was great with people and knew how to fill a joint, he sucked with money. It was the early-mid 1970s and I was maybe six or seven years old.

Bars occupy physical space, obviously, but we go there for their psychic terrain. Bars are simultaneously refuges from reality and monuments to it. You could get a beer at a restaurant, but you go to a bar for the intimacy, the darkness, the camaraderie, the viscous air. This was imprinted on me as a boy in GJ's. I never visited during the evening; I was there playing on the floor while sun slanted in through the open door, Dad's Winston curling lazily amid the motes. I don't know if Jim Croce was playing in a loop the times I visited, but somehow the world of Leroy Brown intersected perfectly with GJ's.

A very decent part of my late youth (not all of it post-21) was mispent in bars like the Yukon and the Bear Claw. Friends and I learned how to play adequate bar 8-ball and we drank bottomless pitchers of whatever was most cheaply pouring: Biltz, Hamm's, Rainier, whatever. It was like pretend-adulthood, where big men might knock your teeth out and older women might go home with you at the end of the night, even though none of that ever really happened. You woke up in the morning with a coating of scum in your mouth, your hair stinking of cigarettes, and you felt older somehow. And alive.

As I got older, bars were less like pretend-adulthood than a touchstone. Microbrew replaced Hamm's, and flat screens replaced mounted TVs, but the other ornaments of bardom stayed the same. The essential nature of bars haven't changed a whole lot--you go to a place like the Yukon and it looks like it did in 1988 or 1968. Things change, but not bars. Or not until now, anyway.

Of course, a different kind of bar emerged in the 1980s. With brewpubs came windows and light and children. And fresh, smoke-free air. This has been a natural evolution. In my own lifetime, I've seen restaurants go from all-smoking to having a runty, non-prime, non-smoking section (as if currents of air respected symbolic borders) to having a runty, non-prime smoking section to, finally, non-smoking restaurants. You used to be able to smoke inside office buildings, stores, even airplanes (which in retrospect seems like madness). Now I can go weeks without ever encountering the scent of burning tobacco.

Tomorrow all bars will be smoke-free. When I ran my poll asking who supported this new law, most everyone did, smokers and non-smokers alike. Yet a sizeable minority of non-smokers, about 30% of you, weren't so excited by the idea of the ban. No doubt they'll enjoy going to a place like the Horse Brass and actually smelling their beer rather than the air, but still they oppose banning cigarettes. Why?

If I may speculate, I think what they'll miss is the aspect of the psychic terrain cigarettes contribute. It's fine for a brewpub to go smoke-free. The mood at a place like that is different. But take smokers out of the Yukon, and what happens to the atmosphere? The debate over the ban tends to revolve around drier issues of public policy, but to me the real loss is something more emotional. It's not actually the end of the world for smokers to step outside a bar for a smoke--if that were the only consideration, I think we'd all agree it wasn't much of an imposition. But the real effect will be the permanent loss of that psychic space we all grew to love. We're losing that touchstone bars have offered our whole lives.

Things change. We'll survive the transition to smokeless bars. But those of us old enough to remember will miss them nonetheless. It's a moment to acknowledge and, perhaps, lament.

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PHOTO: BBC

Are Flavorings the Future? Probably

Note: I'm away from my computer for a while, so I'm re-posting some of my favorite items from the past years. Enjoy--

A thought experiment. Imagine that you sat down at a pub to try the new, say, Ninkasi Hopposaurus and were stunned by the aroma--a piquant blend of passion fruit, black pepper, and sea breeze. The flavor is even more amazing: the hops have a quality you've never encountered before--lavender, white tea?--and the body is rich, lustrous, like creme brulee. You wonder how they did this. A new variety of hop, oats in the grist, maybe something more exotic? And then you learn the truth: it's actually a combination of chemical compounds, labda8(17) and gamma-decalatone, added by a flavorist from Cincinnati.

This is what ran through my mind as I read a fascinating article in the New Yorker a couple weeks ago, "The Taste Makers" by Raffi Katchadourian.

"More than half of Givaudan's business--which generates nearly four billion dollars in revenue a year--is built on deceiving our senses when we eat. The consumption of food flavorings may stand as one of the modern era's most profound collective acts of submission to illusion. When you watch a movie of look at photographs or listen to an iPod, you tend not to forget that what you are taking in has been recorded and re-created for you in some fashion....

"Placed in the context of art history, the flavor industry today would be in its modernist phase, somewhere in the waning days of Cubism, for even the most outlandish flavor concoctions take direct inspiration from the real world. Whereas a perfumer can invent commercially successful aromas that are totally nonrepresentational--a Pollock in a crystal bottle--the flavorist must still respect the deeply held conservatism that people tend to hold when it comes to putting food in their mouths. Snapple's use of kiwi-strawberry flavoring in a juice drink may seem unusual ... but we can imagine that the flavor is authentic--that it captures some platonic gastronomic truth."

Apostasy, surely. Treating beer like the latest energy drink is unthinkable, even if it is just to draw out the flavor of hops--even if it just uses some synthetic molecules discovered to be resident in hops. This would take us back to the bad old days of additive-rich, taste-poor macrolager from the 1970s.

Actually, I doubt it. As the article later points out, citrus flavor has already been added to beer (presumably Miller Chill or Bud Light Lime) chemically. Is it really such a long step before Sam Adams or Dogfish or Widmer give it a whirl? And really, if they did, so what--isn't that more or less the history of beer, anyway?

Beer and Additives
You can get alcohol by fermenting malted grain in water, full stop. You don't need gruit infusions or hops. But unspiced beer is undrinkable. So to balance things out, brewers started dumping stuff in. We know that the original debate about additives is at least 500 years old--when Bavarians decided that any spice more exotic than hops (water and malt okay; the later inclusion of yeast came only after brewers discovered its existence) was verboten.

But okay, in the modern era, we're not so Reinhetsgebot. Organic additions are kosher: coriander, cherries, even chocolate. We're still on all-natural footing. What then to make of hop pellets and hop oil?--they're not exactly a natural product. You don't just find hop oil pooling out there in the fields. Still, it's naturalish--no petrochemical juicing or anything unseemly like that.

But what about synthetic hop oil, made to be identical, molecule by molecule, to regular hop oil. Or just synthetic alpha acid, again, molecularly identical to organic alphas. Would that be all right? The line becomes quickly unclear.

And anyway, haven't we already strayed pretty far from "natural?" Barley has been genetically trained to be perfectly suited to brewing. It has gone through generations of training, straying pretty far from the original genome that the first Egyptians used. Hops? Is there even a single native strain used in brewing? If it's okay to tinker with the molecular biology of a plant, why not just skip the biology altogether and go straight to the molecule?

Human Perception
In a certain sense, there's no reason we shouldn't tweak flavors to suit our preferences--it's the same process that got us to food in the first place, except in reverse (we don't evolve to enjoy food, we make food evolve for more enjoyment). Here's a delightful passage from the article:

"Flavor is a cognitive figment. The brain fuses into a single experience the results of different stimuli registered by the tongue, nose, eyes, and ears, in addition to the memories of previously consumed meals. For reasons that are not fully understood, we perceive flavor as occurring in our mouths, and that illusion is nearly unshakeable, as is made clear by our difficulty identifying, with any reasonable specificity, the way each of our various senses contributes to the experience....

"Taste receptors are blunt instruments. With taste alone, one cannot distinguish a grape lollipop from a watermelon one; coffee is like hot water with a bitter aftertaste, and Coke a bland sugary solution. The limits of taste are unsurprising when one considers its evolutionary purpose. Our biological progenitors, living in the wilderness, needed to know only what was worth eating and what wasn't....

"Smell is a more supple and primordial sense, and its centrality is evident in the way the human brain is arranged. Our forebrains evolved from tissues that once focussed on processing smells, and there are three hundred or so olfactory receptors in the nose. When we taste or see or hear something, the information must pass through the thalamus, a kind of relay station in the brain that allows us to attend to different aspects of perception.... Smells, for the most part, are fed directly from the nose to the 'presemantic' part of the brain where cognition does not occur and where emotions are processed."

Flavor is not like sound or shapes--things our senses can perceive directly and about which we can find wide agreement. Instead, it is a nested experience that has the capacity to transport us experientially miles and decades away. In Harold and Maude, Maude owns a machine that can emit aromas. But it's purpose is really to recreate experience:

''Snowfall on 42nd Street!'' Harold inhales. ''What do you smell?'' she demands. ''Subway?'' he asks. She nods. ''Perfume. Cigarettes.'' He coughs . . . then there's a pause. With quiet wonder, he says, ''Snow.''

Beer is not separate from other foodstuffs. We hold an almost Hindu-like view of purity and pollution around the nature of "natural" ingredients, but this is cultural, not innate. If a brewery could evoke not just the flavor of 18th Century England with a version of Entire Butt Porter, but the experience of Victorian England?--it would do it in a heartbeat. Maybe that kind of transformation isn't possible, but subtler evocations are. We already do a pretty fair job of summoning an image of "green" with our native, hoppy beers, what if we could just add a bit of the experience of a fern-floored, old-growth fir forest in for added measure?

Now it is just the macros using the latest flavor du jour to hawk cheap beer. But flavorings could be used to a higher purpose. When the Belgians began dumping weird adjuncts into their beers, the Germans rejected it as a corruption, but the Belgians were just following the flavor. Now we revere their concoctions. Synthetic flavorings are now considered a pollution. But one day? They will probably define what we think of as world class; and from that distant vantage, they'll look back on our crude "natural" beers the way we look back on those infected, burnt beers people made in Medieval Europe.

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Photo: Vanier College

Good Beer Cities

Note: I am away from the computer for a few days. Below are some of my better entries, re-posted for your amusement. In today's installment, I was ruminating on the question of a good beer town--perhaps following the last silly row with Asheville, NC.

Beer is local. In the middle ages, breweries depended on local agriculture and water for ingredients, and these limitations created the distinct styles we now celebrate. In the modern era of globalism, breweries are no longer restricted; a good brewer will have traveled the globe and tried hundreds or thousands of foreign beers, all of which inform his own styles. But even with globalization, beer is local. We have other limitations. The beer you'd wish to drink in the heat of Phoenix, the gloom of Oregon, or the elevation of Santa Fe differs. Our regional and ethnic history contributes to the styles we admire. Finally, local ingredients, even in the age of globalism, can definitely play a role in creating regional styles.

So a city should have a unique beer culture if it's a "beer town." I've got or have had relatives scattered across the Mountain West, and while cities like Boise and Salt Lake have local brewpubs, they're as generic as Applebee's. These are not good beer cities, however good an individual brewery may be. Ask yourself--what's an "Idaho beer?"

A good beer town should have not only the ready availability of distinct, local beer, but a public clamoring for it. I like to check out little Mom and Pop grocery stores to see what beer they stock. In a beer town, they will have a decent selection of micros and imports. I look at the taps in hole-in-the-wall bars and also upscale bars. In a beer town, they'll both have some decent selections. I look to see whether there are regular local beer events--festivals, tastings, brewing dinners, meet-the-brewer events, that kind of thing. You only have those events if the public is demanding them. Are there taprooms in the city that feature a slate of a dozen or more exceptional taps? How many of these places are there? Have some of the local upscale restaurants, influenced by the brewing scene, begun to feature beer along with wine? Here's an especially potent test to run. If I go to a city, can I find any place with a Belgian beer on tap (Stella excepted)? A city can't call itself a beer town if the answer's no.

Looking for the "best" beer town is a fool's errand. Portland, a city of a half million, is clearly the most saturated environment for beer. That's in large part a function of it being the right size--too much smaller and it wouldn't have a critical mass to support all the activities, and too much larger and you'd find a population with more varied interests. Surely there are as many good places to get a pint in San Francisco but, owing to its size, the level of saturation is necessarily less. We can't identify a "best" because it's never going to be an apples-to-apples comparison.

It is possible to identify "good," though. I'd look at some of these indicators I've mentioned. Strip away local boosterism, and there are sadly fewer good beer cities in the country than we'd like. Fortunately, the number is getting larger by the decade, not smaller.

The Session Phenomenon

Note: I will be away from the computer for a few days--probably through Sunday. Rather than just leave the site idle, I've dug around and found some old posts I liked--probably a lot of you won't have seen them the first time. In today's edition, I considered Full Sail's Session. At the time, I was ambivalent, but no more. Session rocks. The thing about "two breweries," though, that's still true. Enjoy--

It was just one week ago, as the Beer Goddess and I were sharing an LTD 03 at the Brewers Games, that I first heard about Session Black. In the span of that time, everyone's heard about it: Full Sail had separate launch parties in Hood River and Portland, and there's yet another release cum meet-the-brewers at Saraveza next Thursday. And today John Foyston has an in-depth article in the Oregonian's Business section. It's a hell of a lot of heat and noise for what we must admit is surely a modest product.

And so here's the question--is it too much noise?

A Brilliant Idea
Releasing Session was a big gamble for Full Sail. So far as I know, no other craft brewery had or has attempted anything like it. The idea was born in 2004, during that period following the 90s shake-out when it appeared that the hearts of the next generation might be lost to PBR. On one side were craft beers and on the other industrial lagers, and the twain never met. What divides them seem as much to do with brand identity and customer loyalty as flavor--if you like a nice IPA and don't mind being seen by your brother-in-law throwing one back at the barbecue, Bud Lite is almost certainly dead to you. But if that fancy bottle and that thick goop inside seem like an unnecessary yuppie affectation--and a damned expensive one at that--you probably aren't about to give up your cooler full of cans.

Full Sail's brilliant stroke was to have a closer look at that macro market and see that it wasn't monolithic. There was the PBR phenomenon. The brand had managed to appeal to younger drinkers not because of its product (obviously!), but because of its downscale authenticity. (Support of indie music helped.) This was the amazing thing. Watch a tattooed 20-something walk up to a beer cooler, and there was a 90% chance he walked away with a half-rack of Pabst.

What Full Sail took away from their study was this: younger drinkers were drawn to Pabst out of a kind of nostalgia for local, regional breweries that had mostly been killed off before they were born. They didn't want micros, which lacked the working-class authenticity of tin-can beer, but neither did they want faceless corporate brands like Bud and Coors. Full Sail created Session to hit all the same notes. Even more, they knew it couldn't be called Full Sail. Foyston quotes Founder Irene Firmat:

"That's the way we planned it because we were trying to break out of the boundaries of being a craft beer. If we'd put out Session Lager in traditional packaging and with the Full Sail logo, we would've had a much harder time drawing in new customers who might find craft beers too big and challenging."

Session is available only in bottles and only in 12-packs -- no kegs, quarts, or six-packs. "We're sticking to that," says Full Sail brewmaster John Harris. "If we put out Session in longnecks or had it available on tap, we'd be just another me-too beer. This way, it stands out."

So now Full Sail has the best of both worlds--a beer to compete with PBR, and the impeccable reputation of one of the most storied founding American craft breweries. Here's where I get a little worried, though--is it possible to keep the wall up between the two?

One Brewery, Two Identities
American craft brewing is relatively young. It has evolved in just 25 years from tiny breweries making niche beers to substantial breweries making beers with large audiences. Imagine a line graph in your mind, with barrels on the left side--as that line keeps going up and up, eventually the sheer barrelage will dictate that breweries make more and more mass-market beers. We don't know what that means. Will more and more people buy IPAs, or will breweries begin offering beer that attracts Bud drinkers? Beer geeks tend to think of a future where craft breweries change the beer market, but what if the beer market changes craft breweries? Full Sail is a test case.

The good news is that Session is a good beer, and it looks like Session Black will be, too:

A Budvar schwarzbier (black beer) sipped on a recent trip to Vienna was the inspiration for Session Black, says Jamie Emmerson, Full Sail's executive brewmaster.... The result is a beer that looks black indeed, but is far removed from the thick, malty, roasty beer that lager drinkers fear. "We worked hard to make it a super-drinkable, balanced beer," Firmat says

The worrisome news? Session now accounts for a third of Full Sail's 90,000 barrel production. If we squint and look forward ten years, what proportion will it be? Twenty? Will the "Full Sail line" be a marginal, neglected sideline for a big, regional brewery? Could happen.

Maybe that's not so bad. So long as I can still get a sixer of Full Sail Pale, what do I care how much Session Full Sail sells? In fact, using my future-seeing squint, I can even imagine a day in which Session makes the Pale possible. Things change, and that's not always terrible. Still, worth watching this whole phenomenon to see how it plays out.

[Update. Okay, I'm sitting in the Pilsner Room with a bottle of Black (it's not on the menu). A very nice beer. This is going to please beer geeks even more than regular Session. A fine Schwarzbier, with a sweet, roasty palate. A year-round beer, it will do very nicely for those January Blazers games.]

[Later Update. There has been some confusion about Full Sail's annual sales. I just got an email from Jamie Emmerson. The 90,000 barrels are all Full Sail brands. They do an additional 50,000 of Henry's. All FS brands are up according to Jamie. Also, the Czech style that inspired Session is called--sorry, no proper diacritics--"Tmave." "Not as malty as Munich Dunkles, but not as roasty as Schwarzbier."]

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PHOTO: Abby Metty, The Oregonian (source)

Honest Pints in Astoria

One of the quandaries of the Honest Pint Projects resides in the type of serving vessels available to publicans. One question I regularly get asked is, "but if the HHP requires 16 fluid ounces for certification, doesn't that mean imperial pints?" Actually, no. Behold Astoria's Fort George Brewing, and their stylish Mason jars. A pour to the neck offers exactly 16 ounces, and leaves a half inch for head. Perfecto!


Fort George Brewery and Public House
Certified Purveyors of Honest Pints
1483 Duane Street
Astoria, OR 97103
503-325-PINT


As readers of this blog know, there are many other reasons to visit Fort George, as well. So consider this just the cherry on top.

Program Note

I will be away from my computer for the rest of the week. It's possible I'll do some phone-blogging, but likely not. In anticipation of this, I've scheduled some re-posts from the last couple years of my favorite items. Lots of people will have missed them anyway, so it's a good excuse to do a few days of best-of posting. Enjoy and I'll see you Sunday--

Jumping the Stoat

As a post-OBF palate-cleanser, I turn to the weekend's news that BrewDog has released The End of History, the newest highest-alcohol beer in the world. BrewDog has been competing with Germany's Schorschbräu for the "strongest beer" title, and every week or two, they trade the laurel back and forth. Now we have "The End of History," a beer Alan McLeod (accurately) calls "dada" because it's sold for more than the average Las Vegas mortgage and packaged in a stuffed stoat. Or, if you prefer, squirrel. Let the backlash begin.

At a certain point, one imagines that this kind of hyperactive desire to keep the publicity cycle churning will collapse under its own weight. I believe this is that point. Good luck fellas--holler when you've brewed an actual beer again.

Further comment. I should have mentioned that the beer is 56% (chemical analysis revealed it's stronger than the 55% reported earlier), only 11 or 12 bottles are available (reports differ), and that it costs roughly $1000 per. For those of you scoring at home, that's the same price as Lagavulin 30-year-old, a different Scottish potable. Your choice.

Yet another comment (and video!). It is axiomatic that a blogger's readers are smarter than he (more brains) and as such, I have been won over by commenters. And also this video:



Long live the stoat.

The OBF Parade

The Oregon Brewers Festival begins with a parade, as the ceremonial cask is ushered into the fest for a ritual tapping. Below is a photo essay. I should also admit, sheepishly, that this was the first one I'd attended. It will definitely not be the last. Big fun--

The ceremonial cask.



Portland's mayor, Sam Adams, who leads the parade.



The parade attracts a surprisingly large number of people.



I always obey the exhortations of t-shirts.



The band was playing a kind a mardi-gras polka, which seemed appropriate.



The mayor taps the keg and then everyone in attendance gets a pour. (Free!)
This year's beer was Deschutes Jubel 2010. That's Fest founder and Raccoon Lodge
owner Art Larrance to Sam's right.



This is Cascade brewer Ron Gansberg. The picture is unrelated to the parade,
but come on, you gotta post that.

OBF First Reactions

It takes a certain kind of person to walk into the Fest with the opening parade and stay through til the taps run dry, and I am that kind of person. There's an adjective that describes this behavior, but you may supply it yourself. In any case, my exploration was fruitful, and I will pass along my discoveries for those of you are yet to visit the Fest.

Duds
Not every beer is going to be a winner, and you have to admire breweries that try something different. Still, honorable failures remain failures, and you shouldn't waste precious stomach space on them.

• Laht Neppur Strawberry Cream Ale. It wasn't shocking that this beer was treacly, but I was surprised that it was such a muddy, indistinct treacle.
• Caldera Hibiscus Ginger Beer. The razor's edge between success and failure is the difference between this beer and Caldera's rose-infused beer at PIB--the best I tasted there. Hibiscus Ginger is overly sweet--a few more hops would have helped--and too gingery. All the ingredients are right, but the recipe needs tinkering

Solid Performers
Generally speaking, the beers at this year's OBF are solid. I got very few poor pours, and spent the day nodding appreciatively. These were highlights for me:

• Boulevard Tank 7 Saison. A complex, slightly edgy interpretation. I like Sofie better, but reasonable people can disagree.
• Collaborator Sunstone Pilsner. A vividly-hopped, rich pilsner. If this were available in bottles, I'd buy it all the time.
  
• Deschutes Fresh-Squeezed IPA. I saved the IPAs for later, so my palate and memory aren't precise, but I was impressed with how multilayered the Citra hops tasted.
  
• Goose Island Sofie. The best head at the fest--dense as cream cheese and just as white. Anyone who's at all interested in farmhouse styles should try it.
  
• Green Flash Le Freak. Possibly the best hoppy beer I tried, but definitely a lot of Belgian character. Quite a bit of fun, and I'm happy to know it's a bottled beer.
  
• Hop Valley Alpha Centuri Binary IPA. I recall this being fantastic, but why? That I don't recall.
  
• Rogue 21. This is just a big ol' homebrew, with all the fun and idiosyncracies left in. I might have brewed it. Probably quite a bit how old ales used to be brewed, too. Burly, sweet, rich, fun.
  
• Three Creeks Creekside Kolsch. Didn't smell as I expected--a bit of sulphur, not much hops, but on the palate it was pure summer. Crisp, fresh, dry.
  

Best in Show
My two favorite beers both came from the Buzz Tent. At two tokens a pop, they were major steals. (Keep in mind that the OBF's token prices have never gone up--they have always been a buck, which means the price for a beer has steadily declined through the years. Two bucks for four ounces of rare beer is a deal I'd take any day.) The terrible downside to the Buzz Tent--and one the Fest must fix in future--is that no one knows what the beers are. They have a name and that's it. As a result, my report is incomplete.

• Oakshire. This was some dark, rich beer aged in a pinot barrel. Man, it was good.
• Full Sail Imperial Stout. The white board said this was from 1997. 1997! I don't know if that's true, but it was an amazing beer either way. (Sally and I got married in '97, so let's just pretend that was the vintage, what say?)

Bill has some comments; so does Matt. I'll update this post if I see more bloggers weighing in. Update. More: Jason, Beeronomist, Angelo, and Dave.

Did you go? What'd you like?

Also: Matt S, John H, Bill S, Matt W, John F, Van H, Bill C, Lisa M, Dave S, Jason W, Angelo, Margaret, Ezra and anyone else I missed--great to see you all.


Update. John Harris emails to confirm that the Full Sail Imperial Stout was indeed a 1997 keg. A man not given to hyperbole, he described the beer as "beautiful, if you ask me." Agreed.

Buzz Tent

I didn't mention the Buzz Tent in my preview because the beers featured there will come and go unpredictably. The list is here. After last year's overly complex system, this year's will be far easier: anyone can go at any time, and you just have to spend two tokens on a pour. The current list will be posted on a white board outside the tent and you can follow updates via Twitter. His Eminence Preston Weesner has assembled the beers, so they ought to be good.