Oxford Companion to Beer -- Juggernaut or Dud?

Note: I have edited the post for accuracy.

The Oxford Companion to Beer debuted this month to fairly brisk sales (it's the number two beer book on Amazon behind Palmer's How to Brew). It weighs in at over 900 pages, runs roughly 700,000 words--War and Peace is only three-quarters as long), and features the work of over 150 contributors. Mario Batali gets the key cover blurb: "If scholarly detail and accuracy for brewing is your thirst, this book will be your definitive go-to over and over again." With the imprimatur of Oxford University Press and a $65 price tag, that's what editor Garrett Oliver hopes it will become.

Oliver is the founding brewer at the Brooklyn Brewery (a fact that will later become relevant), and has lately moved into the "foremost authority" category--bolstered by writing and media appearances.

Noah Webster first started publishing dictionaries in 1806, but it wasn't until 35 years later that his completed masterpiece finally saw print (and, in turn, blew a hole in the world of letters). Reading Oxford Companion to Beer has the feel of peeking over Noah's shoulder in about 1825. It's an almost staggering document. It's probably literally five four pounds, and the dense, very sparsely-illustrated columns of text run along through such arcana as ale pole, drauflassen, and Saladin box. There are deeply technical scientific entries, biographies, style descriptions--well, every category you can think of that's even distantly related to beer. A casual glance suggest that this really is as comprehensive and definitive as the publishers hoped.

The problem is that while the categories are all represented, they are made up of some extraneous information, some essential information, and lack other information for reasons unknown. Take the category of brewery. Obviously, not every brewery on the planet warrants a mention. But doesn't the fifth largest American craft brewery? It's Deschutes, and it gets none. The 25th, Rogue, does get a mention, though. I started comparing the list of the 50 largest American craft breweries to the list in the book. The further west of New York the brewery was located, the less likely it was to be in the book. Notable exceptions omissions include Widmer (top ten), Bell's (8th), Alaskan (12), Stone (14), Full Sail (18), Summit (20). Perhaps not by coincidence, the editor's own brewery, Brooklyn (16), is included.

I questioned my own judgment here--bias runs both ways, after all, and Pac Ten guys always complain that the New Yorkers neglect them. But then I looked at the "brewing regions" Oliver deemed critical to our understanding of beer. It mainly includes countries and a few key cities or regions (Burton Upon Trent, Flanders), but also four five American cities/boroughs. They are: Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Manhattan, and Brooklyn. If your inner researcher is tingling with anxiety, join the club.

Anxiety mounts when you see that Horst Dornbusch is the associate editor and a major contributor to the work--or, at least it does if you're a regular reader of Ron Pattinson's. I will punt on Dornbusch's qualifications because everything I know about the man's work I read in critique of it (akin to understanding my blog through the writing of Doc Wort). Still, it gives one pause. As a consequence, I find myself flipping to the back of the book to see whether I should trust the entry or treat it like I would Wikipedia. So on the acetaldehyde entry, I see "Bev Robertson." Flip, flip, flip: "professor emeritus of physics, University of Regina." Okay, probably good. Bottle sizes is handled by Martyn Cornell--reliable as Portland rain. Brettanomyces, a fave of mine, is given to Chad Michael Yakobson, whom the books describes as "owner and brewer of Crooked Stave Beer Project." Huh. No idea. (I did some research, and the former Odell brewer seems quite knowledgeable.)

And this is the problem. If you're concerned about the authority of each entry, it detracts mightily from the utility of an all-in-one reference guide. Alan McLeod believes this is just fine--the book works as a conversation-starter. But that's what we have bloggers for. If you're going to shell out $65 for a reference book, you want it to be definitive. Hell, if I want some guy spreading misinformation, I can get it for free on my own blog. I purchased the book (it's actually only $38.50 on Amazon) because it's still better than anything out there. It has entries by Tom Shellhammer about hops--and he really is the foremost expert in the field. Pete Brown is in here, and his prose sings, as are historians Cornell and Pattinson, and great journalists like John Holl and Jay Brooks. (There are notable omissions, too, like Stan Hieronymus and Maureen Ogle--who talk about it here.)

But it feels like beta version stuff. A real editor needs to go through, weed out the detritus, add in the important omissions, and clean up the mistakes (crowd sourced here) and release the truly definitive work everyone had in mind when this idea was still germinating.

Beer Tales: St Johns, Portland

Last Friday night, Sally and I drove out to the St Johns Theater to catch the 7:30 showing of 50/50. We drive out to St Johns for movies because (1) it's not a Regal-owned cinema, which means we don't have to pay a premium to be assaulted by ads, (2) it's a nice theater and I like to support independent businesses, and (3) they have several tasty draft beers. So there we were, tix in hand, surveying the tap handles. One was a beer called "Clutch," in what appeared to be the New Belgium font. I inquired. The server told me it was a sour brown ale--which provoked the guy in front of me, departing the counter with a full pint of IPA, to groan with regret. Turns out it's a Lips of Faith series beer, and the theater had scored a mighty coup to get a keg.

All of this probably seems like an average Friday night to those of you who are unfamiliar with the neighborhoods of Portland. But St Johns, while it does boast some interesting culture (Plew's Brews, Vinyl Resting Place), is a place studded with far more old-school cigarettes-and-Hamm's bars like The Wishing Well and the Bluebird. Of course, the smokers are now on the sidewalks, sometimes in clusters larger than those still inside.

It's geographically separate from the city, located about ten miles north of downtown Portland, in the peninsula formed by the convergence of the Willamette and Columbia Rivers. At about the 6700 block, a large, tree-lined rail line bisects north Portland ("the cut"), and it seems as definite a marker of place as the two rivers that mark the other boundaries. It's far poorer than most neighborhoods (23% of the population live below the poverty line) and the median price of a house was $180,000 last year--compared with $319,000 in the heart of the Beermuda Triangle (SE Portland, Buckman neighborhood).

To give you a sense of the kind of place it is, before the movie, Sally and I popped into Du's Teriyaki, which was manned by a single guy. He took the orders, went back and cooked the food, then served it and bussed the tables. At a little after 7, a buddy of his dropped by and he turned off the "open" sign so he could take a break and eat himself.

All of which is to say that, walking into the theater, I'm always pleased to see several great craft beer choices. They rotate seasonally, so you might get a nice pilsner in the summer and stouts in the winter. But one of the primo kegs in Portland? I wouldn't have expected it. But there it was, at $4.25 a glass, same as all the others. The market for good beer continues to spread further and further out, well beyond the upscale crowd in the inner core. It's not a yuppie tipple. (Roscoe's, out near 82nd in the other direction, is another case in point.) I couldn't be happier. In fact, it was such an unexpected surprise that Sally and I went back the next day to catch a showing of The Guard.

Deschutes Hop Trip 2011: Nice

Deschutes sent me three bottles (twelves this year, not twenty-twos) of Hop Trip, one of 37 fresh-hop beers they make (Bill has details). I usually muscle through fresh-hop beers because I love the idea. This beer, made with fresh Crystals and what must be a decent pop of bittering hops, requires no muscling. Lots of caramel in the malt, and lots of pine-to-ganja character in the nose and lively palate, which seems stouter than the 38 IBUs listed by the brewery. Quite a festival for the tongue. I tip my hat in the general direction of Bend, Oregon. Would it insult you if I said this was a fresh hop beer for those who don't like fresh hop beers?

Friday Flick: Adnams of Southwold

In just a shade under a month, I will be in Britain visiting a series of breweries for The Beer Bible. On November 10th, I'll be at Adnams, which is not only a famous family-owned brewery (I'll get to meet Jonathan Adnams, Chairman of the brewery), but also one of the greenest breweries in the world. They have pioneered a technology that converts spent grains into bio-gas (the bioenergy anaerobic digester). Today's flick is a tour of the brewery, including their green tech. It's a bit slickly corporate, but worth a look. Enjoy--

Comments Trouble?

I received a disturbing email today from a regular reader who noticed his comments disappearing. He wondered, quite reasonably, why I was deleting them. This is disturbing because in over five years of blogging, I have never deleted a non-spam comment (definition of spam: touting a commercial product)--including his. Then this:

Huh. Read my message from a couple of minutes ago first, but: I just went back into the blog again and my most recent comment, which I thought had been successful, had disappeared, and the comment count, which was at 10 last time I checked, was back down to 9. Curiouser and Curiouser.

I have no idea what's going on, but if this has happened to you, email, will you? (Or try commenting, though that may be a Kafka-esque trap.) Uggh.

Kickstarting a Brewery: Short Snout

A little while back, I mentioned an oddity about how nearly all the breweries in the Portland metro area are located in the city. Suburbs have none or very few. Last week, I was alerted to a project to help correct this issue--Short Snout's Kickstarter campaign. Kickstarter is a site that puts people with money together with people who need it for creative projects. A project is open for a certain amount of time; if it fails to meet its goal, donors don't give their money. It's a quasi-nonprofit model, because the donations don't earn donors an ownership stake. It's like public broadcasting--you give because you value the project.

Short Snout has a goal of $15,000, and they've raised just over $3600 with about a month to go. No donor has pledged more than $250 [this turns out to be inaccurate--see comments for more.] The project:

Over the past few months, there have been a lot of conversations about how Portland, OR is home to an amazing 40+ breweries, all within the city limits and how the surrounding suburbs could only lay claim to a small handful. It is my quest to help change this, and bring craft beer back to Milwaukie. Short Snout Brewing will be a 1.5 barrel brewery focusing on unique flavor combinations…Blackberry Sage Porter, Harvest Wheat (an American style wheat made with Riesling) just as examples….and high quality, hand crafted beers all based out of Milwaukie, OR.

I'm not necessarily promoting Short Snout, but I find the kickstarter idea interesting. Short Snout isn't the only brewery soliciting funds this way: Broken Bottle (Albuquerque), Whip It and Rogness (Austin, TX), Turtle Stone (Vineland, NJ), Penthouse (Covina, CA), and Flatrock (Napoleon, OH).

Looking through those listings, I'd say the success rate is going to be low--very low. But the idea isn't inconceivable. If you live in an area bereft of local beer (or, I suppose, are a pug lover), tossing a Ben Franklin into the hat isn't such a huge expense. Short Snout looks to have a decent shot. I'll keep an eye on it and let you know how it goes.

Redhook's Latest Sorties: Blueline Series ESB and Winterhook

I remain fascinated by Redhook's ever-evolving beer and branding strategies. In the last couple weeks, I've gotten two beers from the venerable Seattle brewery: a recreation of the original ESB for the Blueline series, and the old standby, Winterhook. We'll address these beers in due course, but we must also contend with an item tucked into the Winterhook package, sans explanation:


Yep, santa tie. Okay, moving right along...

Blueline Series ESB
This beer takes a little explaining. Way back in 1981, when Paul Shipman and Gordon Bowker were trying to cobble together a brewery, they secured an "ale" yeast strain from (if memory serves) the University of Washington.* It was, however, not a pure strain. I never had the pleasure, but early craft drinkers described it as "banana beer," suggesting that isoamyl acetate was at least one of the by-products of fermentation. That the first brewery was located in a former transmission shop and had less-than-state-of-the-art equipment probably didn't help. They had a hard time finding a market for the beer, especially since Bert Grant was putting superb ales into the Seattle market at the same time. They tried to muscle through with the beer, even styling it as "Belgian" after Michael Jackson said it reminded him more of low country beer than an English bitter. Ultimately, they fazed out the banana beer and started making normal ales.

Says the brewery of the re-creation: "Redhook’s second release in the Blueline series is a highly modified version of ESB that replicates the flavor profile of Redhook Ale in the early 80’s, lovingly referred to by Seattle locals as 'banana beer.' To bring out this unique flavor we fermented using a yeast strain that highlights these spicy banana notes."

All of which got me very excited. This is a great homage to the company's history, and now, thirty years later, a measure of the change in American craft brewing. Thirty years ago, consumers didn't even know Belgium brewed beer; now they know what it's supposed to taste like. We have come full circle. (The cap, for the sharp-eyed, is also a nice throwback touch.) Sadly, unlike the crew at the New School, I found the new old ESB damn near undrinkable.

The problem is clashing elements. The Belgian lineage and dark malt character suggests a dubbel and the nose was promising--reminiscent of Chimay Première (red label), it has an earthy breadiness with interesting yeasty phenols. The palate, though, is gratingly harsh. One problem are the 65 BUs; they clash mightily with the yeast-forward quality of the beer. (In Karl Ockert's new classification system, it's a beer at odds with itself--both hop- and yeast-dominated.) The yeast is banana-free, but expresses a lot of phenols. They come off as metallic/medicinal to me, and the aftertaste is a combination of sharp hopping and chemical bitterness.

Winterhook
By contrast, I am pleased to say that the Winterhook is not only one of the best beers I've had from Redhook in recent years, but is easily in the running to be the year's best seasonal. For me, winter ales are best when they exhibit some malt warmth, and Winterhook has loads of it. Redhook used pale, Munich, crystal, and chocolate malts with a touch of oats and rye. It produces a richly aromatic nose, at turns bready and nutty, and a similar palate--almost like a loaf of dark, whole-grain bread. The hops add a light spiciness that pull the beer into balance (Northwest balance, anyway). It's six percent, which is on the light end for winter warmers, but it's wise; this is a perfectly moreish beer and it will be hard for most folks to stop at one (or two). Best that it's not 8%.

As for the tie ...
____________
*This history is recounted in Peter Krebs' book Redhook: A Microbrew Success Story, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998.

Don't Call It "Good" Beer, Either

I know the horse is well and truly dead, but I have a few more licks to get in. The subject is this amorphous category we sometimes call "craft" beer even though it's an inadequate and misleading term. What we really care about is "good," but as Tim Webb writes in the September print edition of BeerAdvocate (perhaps the best mag available), this is no improvement:

"The problem is the British fixation, enshrined in CAMRA's policy, on the notion that for a beer to be 'good,' it must contain live yeast."

He adds Reinheitsgebot and the Brewers Association's definition of craft brewery as other definitions of "good." Indeed, we have some fairly well established, idiosyncratic definitions of what it means to be good, don't we? To Webb's three I've add a few more:

• Small, independent (Brewers Association)
• Hoppy, strong (American beer geeks)
• Alive and naturally carbonated (CAMRA)
• Made with traditional ingredients (Reinheitsgebot)
• Perfectly consistent and fresh (macros)
• Cold and "refreshing" (macro drinkers)
  
• Popular (all breweries)
  

Nowhere to be found in this list is a satisfying definition (never mind a universal one) of what good beer is. Webb concludes his article with the obvious: "The closer you come to defining good beer by a technical specification, the further away you move from being able to appreciate it."

Yup.

The Wrong Beer

This is all terribly wrong:

The makers of Dogfish Head beer love Pearl Jam and their debut album Ten -- both of which turned 20 this year -- so much that they've dedicated a beer to the band.... The brewery describes the beer as a "Belgian-style golden ale [that] is delicately hopped to 20 IBUs and fruit-forward from 10 incremental additions of black currants over a one-hour boil." Which sounds amazing, but perhaps more importantly, the beer is also rock-worthy intense at 7% ABV.

I'll leave aside the inevitable critique that questions the appropriateness of Dogfish Head, a Delaware brewery, making a tribute to a band indelibly linked to a famous beer city across the country. (Or, I guess, not.) The real problem is the beer, which is something perfect for, let's say Tom Jones. Or Serge Gainsbourg. Delicately hopped? Fruit-forward? Has Dogfish ever heard Pearl Jam? Obviously, you gotta go with a CDA here. A roar of screaming hops and deep, troubled dark malt notes.

Delicately-hopped Belgian golden ale with currents. Please.

Oaktober? Oakshire Seizes the Month

The Willamette Brewery was just a toddler when it learned a very important lesson about naming rights and the law: common words have all kinds of legal strings attached. Someone knowledgeable pointed out that if they invented a word, no one could hassle them, and thus did Willamette become Oakshire. I'm thinking the brewery ought to look into putting a mark on "Oaktober," if 2011 is any guide. To wit:

1. Ill-Tempered Gnome release. Matt Van Wyk will be at the Guild on Thursday with the Portland debut of the Gnome on tap--and not just the '11 debut. Apparently, this beer has never poured on draft in the Occupied Republic of Portland. The Guild will have six taps pouring with Oakbrew, including rare Single Batch Series beers. I will test Matt's fealty to reading this blog by asking whether the exceptional Well-Mannered Gnome, a small beer made from Ill-Tempered, will be one of those beers. (Let us know in comments, Matt.) As much as I admire Ill-Tempered Gnome, I have to say that the small beer is one of the best examples of session ales available in all of Oregon. So consider this either a plug a cruelty, depending on whether it makes the trek. Thursday, Oct 13, Guild Public House 1101 East Burnside, 5-8pm.

2. Wildwood Brewers Dinner. The Great American Brewers Festival highlighted food and beer pairings in a special pavillion called "Farm to Table." Just 16 chefs and breweries were invited to attend, and Wildwood's Paul Kasten was one. He demanded to be paired with the Oregon brewery in attendance, Oakshire. The two are reprising the partnership at Wildwood for one of Paul's famous brewers dinners. I have often praised Paul's ability to craft menus to harmonize with beers, so I'll just say: tasty tasty tasty. Friday, Oct 21, Wildwood, 6:30 pm, $65, call Shelly Jones for reservation, 503-225-0130.

At the newly-designed New School, Ezra mentioned that Hellshire II, a barrel-aged imperial stout, will be released in November. A pity; the hat trick would really have been nice for Oaktober.

The Future of Beer Writing

The release last month of The Oxford Companion to Beer has provoked a lot of discussion in the beerosphere--pro and, mostly, con. (I haven't seen it yet, but I am concerned that the publisher's comments begin with that inaccurate quote by Ben Franklin.) Start with this review by Alan McLeod and then read Stan Hieronymus' post and the extensive comments thereafter.

I won't try to summarize the discussions except to say that we seem to have finally arrived, now more than four years after his death, in the post-Jackson era. The Michael Jackson era began in the mid-70s and ended with his death in 2007. In that time, he published the definitive guide to world beer (World Guide to Beer and later the Beer Companion), the definitive ratings guide (Pocket Guide to Beer), and the definitive guide to Belgium (Great Beers of Belgium). He played a role in defining style, and he identified the breweries that continue to be considered world classics. The way he thought about and wrote about beer became the template of his era. (That some people regret aspects of his legacy is another matter.)

Jackson, of course, started writing in a very different time. When he discussed, say, Saison Dupont, very few people had ever heard of it, much less tasted it. Now the beer is available at most grocery stores. When people wanted information about beer, they had next to no sources beyond Jackson--though this obviously changed over the years.

Now we have amazing distribution networks that shuttle the beers of the world around the globe. We have hundreds of writers sharing information about beers. We have programs to teach people about beer. And perhaps most revolutionarily, we have the hive mind of ratings sites like BeerAdvocate and RateBeer coupled with GPS and the larger internet. This last change is key. The Oxford Companion arrives at a moment when very little information is beyond the reach of a Google search. (Based on some of the critiques I'm reading, a Google search may produce more accurate information, too.) All of this was floating in my mind when I read about a Harvard Business School report (pdf)on the impact of sites like Yelp.

For our purposes, I'd like you to look at this graph from the appendix:


Although Yelp tracks restaurants, not breweries and beer, the point is analogous. In this graph, the Zagat/Seattle Times/Food and Wine entries can stand in for a writer like Jackson, while Yelp is the hive mind. If a consumer is looking for information about a brewery or beer, where do they go? In most cases, they'll find the information they're looking for on a ratings site. It won't be as detailed or have the rich context of a Jackson book, but it will be there. You'll get some information and you'll get it fast. In his thirty years of beer writing, Jackson reviewed a monumental number of beers--but probably around 10% of the beers available at any given time.

I think this makes accurate writing about beer more important, not less. Understanding the history, chemistry, and culture of beer is far more edifying than seeing what Dogboy37 from Ypsilanti thought of Bell's Two-Hearted Ale. And yet we will increasingly rely on raters to aggregate and sort information for us. BeerAdvocate is a tool used by an order of magnitude more people than readers of The Oxford Companion.

This post isn't headed anywhere, incidentally, except to note the phenomenon. Jackson didn't write during the age of BeerAdvocate. Writers today do. It is a sure bet that in order to find an audience, books will have deal with this reality and find ways to appeal to folks who are used to finding information instantly online.

Friday Flick: Wells and Young's Re-Release a Venerable Brand

Wells and Young's used the GABF as the opportunity to launch beer that has a lineage going through the centuries and breweries--Courage Russian Imperial Stout. Writer Melissa Cole introduces brewer Jim Robertson. The event took place at Falling Rock in Denver.

Capturing the Brewery: Photography by Matt Wiater

Of Pints and Men

Opening Night: Thursday Oct. 6th, 5:30pm-10:00pm (Show runs through the month of October)
Facebook Event Page
Gigantic Gallery
1720 NW Lovejoy #103

I don't talk about art as much as I'd like on this blog, but this first Thursday (ie, today) gives me a great opportunity to discuss a show at the Gigantic Gallery in Northwest--Of Pints and Men. One of the four people at the show (two artists and two photographers) has arguably been doing more to capture the spirit and flavor of the Portland brewing scene than anyone working in the medium of words. Matt Wiater's photos have that rare combination of beauty and revelation--and I also find in them a fair amount of commentary.

Breweries are a fantastic subject. When I first started thumbing through beer books in the mid-1990s, I was attracted principally by the photos. (Only later did the stories captivate me.) They revealed a strange world that somehow contained both immensity and modernity but also tradition and detail. Matt's bread and butter are photos of breweries and beer, and they are as revelatory about the nature of breweries as any you'll find.

[Roots Brewery]

What I think makes Matt's photos unique is their narrative quality. He largely shoots in black and white, which strips the visual noise from the photos. This allows the compositional complexity to emerge--rarely is the focal point of a Wiater photo ever the whole point. In the corner of the shot of a fermenter, you'll see hoses and buckets, the dribble of water--these are not visual clutter, but evidence of what happens in a brewery. Even a simple piece of equipment, beaded with condensation, tells its own story.

[Deschutes Brewery]

I don't know enough about photography to know what the equivalent of a writer's "voice" is, but in Matt's case, his work is identifiable for its stillness. Even in the middle of a throng of people, Matt's eye is drawn to a point of quiet. When he shows brewers at work, there seems to be something reverential and monastic in their movement.

[Alan Sprints, Hair of the Dog]

Finally--and I think this is what makes Matt's photography especially appealing to those of us who live in Portland--there's a sense of humanity and generosity to Matt's work. In literature, some writers degrade their subjects, while others obviously like all the characters, even their villains. Film directors have a similar relationship to their actors. It can be distance and remove (Kubrick), contempt (Aronofsky), or affection and generosity (Soderberg). Matt is solidly in the Soderberg camp.

[Matt Van Wyk, Oakshire]

[Organic Beer Fest]

The show has its gala kick off tonight, and I hope you can go down and see it. I, unfortunately, have a meeting and will have to drop in later. In my stead, go and tell Matt how great he is (and don't go just because Deschutes will be pouring free Chainbreaker White IPA--that's just icing on the cake); in my case, this post will have to suffice.

GABF Photos

My pics from the GABF. If you want to read the captions to find out whom you're seeing, you might click through to my Flickr page.

Chuckanut Is All That

In four sessions of the GABF, I ventured to the Pacific Northwest section only once. Why sample beer that's readily available at my corner pub? One trip was necessary, though: despite the fact that they're located just a few hours up I-5, I've never had a chance to try the lagers of Chuckanut. This is a great tragedy, for as I age, I pine more and more for the subtle, spare flavors they offer--all while living in one of the most heavily ale-centric regions of the country. So Chuckanut--two-time winner of the GABF's best small brewery in its four years of existence--tantalizes me from across the Columbia River.

One always wonders, though: is a brewery that weighted with heavy medals really that good? Chuckanut makes (or has made) upwards of two dozen styles (including 13 lagers and a kolsch), and I only got to try four. The old researcher in me wants to acknowledge the sample bias, but based on my admittedly non-comprehensive sampling, the answer is yes.

Will Kemper is one of the pioneers of craft brewing, having founded another lager brewery in Washington, Thomas Kemper, in 1985. Since then, he's been involved in start-ups literally all over the globe (US East Coast, Mexico, Turkey) before finally bringing his experience full circle with another small lager brewery in Washington State.

The lagers he's brewing are brewed faithfully to contemporary standards--no amping up the hops or alcohol content to appeal to local audiences. There are no curveballs, just familiar styles brewed flawlessly. His Vienna Lager won a hat trick by taking gold three years running (it failed to medal this year), but the two beers that wowed me were the Helles and Pilsner. The pils was described as "German," but I swear the tangy, spicy hopping was Saaz. It was a delightfully crisp and clear--balanced by a lightly sweet, grainy malt base. (12.5 P, 5% ABV, 38 IBUs)

The Helles was, if anything more impressive. Pilsners are regarded as the crowning accomplishment of German brewing because they require such attention and have such a tiny sweet spot for success. I sometimes feel the Helles style is even more so. Chuckanut's is in perfect balance, again with lightly sweet grainy malt, softer than the pilsner, gentle spicy hopping, and a finish that was just a degree smoother and rounder than the pils. (12 P, 5% ABV, 20 IBUs)

The only complaint I have is an obvious one: why can't Chuckanut send a few kegs to the Beaver State?

________________
PHOTO: Will and Mari Kemper and the Chuckanut crew accept the award for best small brewery at the 2011 GABF.

The Lupulin-Cannabis Connection

British blogger Pete Brown wanders into the thicket of foreign slang when he ponders the word "dank":

Over at GABF last week, I heard people describing hop character as 'dank' - this was a new one on me. I wasn't even sure if it was a descriptor or a new hop variety I hadn't heard of. According to my OED, dank means 'unpleasantly damp and cold', and is of Middle English origin, probably from the Swedish word for 'marshy spot'. And the ever-helpful Stan Hieronymus explained to me that it was being used here to describe a full-on West Coast hoppy character, big on citrus - big on everything - and best exemplified by Simcoe hops.

In this context, dank is only very tenuously connected to its actual, OED meaning. It refers, of course, to ganja. I spent a few minutes scanning the intertubes for an explanation of how a word meaning "damp and cold" became associated with weed, but linguists have been slow to delve into this important matter. My theory: especially strong, rich ganja is heavy and sticky, or "wet."

More importantly, as a spoken word, "dank" has much to recommend it: the "day" that starts the word drops the voice into a low register and it continues on to an "ain" vowel that can be strummed to indicate something dangerous and alluring, and finally the terminal "k," which slams the word down on the table like a provocation. I suspect onomatopoeia has more to do with its adoption than the actual vaguely-evocative definition.

Enter hops, humulus lupulus, related botanically to their dank cousin, cannabis. For the most part, the flowers of the hop vine contribute brighter, more floral aromas and flavors. A few, though, particularly in combination (to Simcoe I'd add Columbus/Zeus/Tomahawk), do offer a distinct ganja quality. It's not citrusy; it's deep, heavy ... dank. (Though personally, I hate the repurposing of a word to describe something for which we already have words.)

Pete's post got me thinking about the connection between marijuana, hops, and the West Coast, all of which have direct ties. The Cascadian corridor, from Northern California up to British Columbia, is famous pot country. I have friends from rural Southern Oregon who remember helicopters flying over forest land to find rogue pot gardens secreted deep among the Douglas fir. The pot that grows here has long enjoyed a reputation of quality and strength (I, of course, know it purely by reputation). When you think of famous pothead culture, you think of the West Coast--a phenomenon dating back to the 1960s.

Enter craft-brewed ales, circa 1980. By chance, the hops that grow in this same corridor are also famous for their strength and quality. (Or maybe not by chance. Although some hate the invocation of terroir, we can't help but note that the region is famous for producing two closely related plants--maybe there is something to this after all.) On some kind of unconscious level, perhaps, the region quickly started to embrace intensely-hopped beers. We were already predisposed to this quality. "West Coast" became an adjective to describe it.

I think culture is wrapped up in this, too. On the West Coast, there's something more to smoking pot than getting baked. The old hippie values still persist; mellowness, community, nature. Craft brewing also champions these values. The bridge between the two drugs is a short one, and it's not surprising that we see all kinds of marijuana references in craft brewing. That a word like "dank" would migrate so naturally from one to the other is perfectly understandable.

I have a character flaw that makes me want to draw overly sweeping conclusions from single data points, but I can't help myself: what percent of the rise of good beer--and particularly that element associated with extreme hopping--goes back to the pot culture of the West Coast? I suspect the number is not identical to zero.

What Distant Northwesterners May Be Interested To Know About the GABF, Final Thoughts

Safe and sound and back under the soothing, wet clouds of Portland, my Denver adventure completed. In the manner of Pete Brown, whom I had the pleasure to meet on Friday, here are some final scatter-shot observations about America's national beer festival.

1. The Beer. I went to the GABF this year with a single goal: sample as broadly from as many different breweries as possible. The structure of the Fest was tailor-made for my purposes; samples were poured in one-ounce increments, and breweries were organized by region. This allowed me to finally taste the beer Lew writes about in Pennsylvania as well as delving deeply into the South. If your goal was to really get to know the beer of a few breweries well, the Fest would frustrate; if you wanted to be introduced in passing to a wide number of breweries, it was ideal. I discovered:

• Cigar City (Tampa, FL). Yes, they're good in that "international extreme" vein.
  
• Fat Head's (Cleveland). Stanky, catty IPAs aren't just for the West Coast anymore.
• Destihl (Champaign, IL). Impressive experimentation with sours.
• Freetail (San Antonio).
• Uncle Billy's (Austin).
• St. Arnold's (Houston). I've long wanted to try their beer, and they didn't disappoint. Great lagers.
• Sly Fox (Phoenixville, PA). Brewer Brian O'Reilly puts out accomplished interpretations of Belgian and German styles.
• Yards (Philadelphia). Well-made colonially-inspired beers

2. Wits. IPAs were easily the most common beers at the Fest, but the place was lousy with wits, too. I don't know if this is because they sell well on their own, or because Blue Moon and Shock Top have created a huge market for them. But everyone brews one.


3. Sours. I remember when New Glarus introduced Wisconsin Red--perhaps the first tart ale in America (certainly among the first). Brewer Dan Carey considered its production a state secret and I don't know to this day how he makes it. But the larger secret's out, and now scores--probably hundreds--of breweries funk up their beers. Most use wild yeasts and bacteria, and an increasing number are cultivating spontaneous fermentations with feral buggies. I admire the trend, but someone needs to point out that sour runs a continuum from the pleasant, beguiling tart to the harsh, industrial acetone. After muscling my way through some of the really aggressive ones (nearly always made admirably, with brettanomyces or by spontaneous fermentation), it was a revelation to encounter beers like Ommegang's Aphrodite, a stunning beer that swaddles its gentle tartness in sensual, sweet folds of raspberry sweetness. Like hop bitterness, we must learn to measure sours on a scale other than pure intensity.


4. Chaos. There's much to admire about the GABF. It is the one national event where brewers from around the country come together to celebrate their product. You get to see all the stars and taste all the much-lauded beers. The downside is that the invitation of 450+ breweries means a site of wild chaos. The Colorado Convention center would fill up with 12,000+ attendees, all full throat. The sound of their voices ricocheting off the cement floors and cinder walls was deafening. It's not a particularly pleasant venue aesthetically, either. So aside from the beer itself, the experience is a bit challenging.


5. Information. The one big quibble I have with the way the Brewers Association runs the Fest is the information available on the beers. In both the huge physical program and the iPhone app, breweries were listed alphabetically, and their beers were listed by name only. The beers weren't even identified by style. Typical entry:

HERETIC BREWING COMPANY
Pittsburg, CA
Evil Twin
Tafelbully
Evil Cousin

Since you had to fight your way through crowds even to approach each brewery's beer, it was impossible to target breweries based on thee styles they brewed. Ideally, I'd love information about every beer there, including style, stats, and description. At a bare minimum, though, each beer should have been described by style, and the app should have been sortable by style.


6. Cuisine à la bière. The Brewers Association is making a serious push to put beer on the best tables in the land. During the Fest, they held an event called Farm to Table which paired selections from award-winning breweries and well-known chefs from around the country. (Our own Paul Kasten from Wildwood joined Oakshire's Matt Van Wyk.) They held a similar luncheon for the media. Finally, the American Cheese Society had a booth set up to illustrate how beer--not wine--is the Ginger Rogers to cheese's Fred Astaire. (Agreed.)


7. Gold Medal Winners. A handy map.

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The GABF is a force of nature at this point, and for four days it washes over the city of Denver in an unstoppable torrent. You either get on or you get run over. I would encourage everyone to go once to see the spectacle. For uber beer geeks, seeing the beerluminaries is a pleasure (meeting Pete Brown and Randy Mosher were among the highlights for me), and the heady experience of being surrounded by all that good beer is enough to make you lightheaded before your first sip. But it's also true that you need to rouse yourself to a state of energy, for the Fest is no place for the timid or weary.

What Distant Northwesterners May Be Interested To Know About the GABF, Don't Mess With Texas Edition

I'm a day late getting this up--when already the world is buzzing about the GABF winners. But we are a more refined group; we care about the journey, not the destination. To that point, I have a couple of Texas breweries that knocked my socks off. The first is a brewpub in San Antonio called Freetail that makes accomplished, experimental beers. There's no better example than Spirulina Wit, made with spirulina, a free-floating filamentous cyanobacteria (aka "algae") known mainly as a dietary supplement. The key prefix in that description is "cyan," because this is one funky looking beer.


It could have totally been a gimmick, but it's a fantastic wit (a muse for Jason Davis, the brewer, who makes several). It's tangy, light, and has the most subtle vegetative note--and my mind tried to tell me it was minty, too, but I knew it was just fooled by the color. An equally impressive beer was Broken Honeymoon, a delightful bitter made with Golden Promise malt and guajillo honey. Davis likes to use offbeat ingredients, but he works solidly within the idioms of standard style. Impressive stuff.

Next we go to Austin and Uncle Billy's, which has three locations. One seems to focus on lagers, one on NW-style ales. Since I live in a city lousy with NW-style ales, I gravitated toward the excellent lagers. But I couldn't help notice this:


(Hey Abe, it's working.)

What Distant Northwesterners May Be Interested To Know About the GABF, Part 1

It's always fascinating when your expectations meet your actual experience in a dark alley. Experience always wins. Coming into the GABF, I had on my Portland beer goggles, which as we well know completely blur our understanding of the rest of the country. Perhaps you wear the same goggles as I, and will benefit from experience-by-proxy.

1. Huge. I have always chafed with parochial slight at the GABF's claim to be the biggest beer fest in America--when in fact the Oregon Brewers Fest is. I'm prepared to change my opinion. The Colorado Convention Center is the size of four airplane hangars, and it's filled with hundreds of breweries offering thousands of beers. The place is so large that I got lost in the aisles looking for beers. The breweries are helpfully arranged by region, but it took me three hours to find the Northwest. The worst thing is you have to really parse your decisions, not only among which breweries to try, but which of their five beers to sample. One nice thing is that they pour beers in one-ounce increments, so you can sample broadly. There are no tickets, so if you want more than an ounce, you just get another pour. And finding people? Forget about it. I saw Angelo entering the fest, let him get out of eyeshot assuming I'd see him again, and never did. Here he is, in my last sighting of him:



2. They don't covet the beers you covet. There are some badass breweries at the fest, as you would expect. I was delighted to finally get to sample broadly from Jolly Pumpkin's line (flipside of the many-decisions downside is that if you want to really sample a particularly brewery's beer to get a sense of it, you can; with the OBF, you don't know if the beer you're tasting is representative). I scoped out New Holland and dropped by Boulevard for a pour of Brett Saison (and saw Steven Pauwels). Getting these beers was no problem. Some breweries had insanely long lines, but they weren't the ones I expected. New Glarus, which has a totally standard lineup, had a line of 100 people before they even started pouring beer. All their beer was gone by nine. (Great brewery, but it was still bizarre.) A Michigan brewery I'd never heard of called Short's was packed. The Venn diagram overlapped at Cigar City, which I also wanted to check out. Here's that crazy New Glarus line:


3. They give the NW a "meh." Because the fest organizes the breweries by region, I was able to see the relative activity by region. The South seemed to be getting the most attention, and the East Coast in general seemed to be popular. The Northwest was getting surprisingly little attention. Toward the end of my evening, I went over to taste some of the Washington beers I've missed--Chuckanut and Black Raven. In our region, these breweries are getting big attention, but that's just the thing: in our region. I've come to think of the Northwest as a little bubble, mostly sealed off from the rest of the country. This did nothing to disabuse me of the notion. (The Chuckanut, by the way, was seriously fantastic. Regular commenter Jack R is my brother in pilsner, and he would love theirs. The Helles, too, was sublime.)

I'll keep posting on what I see here, which I have no doubt will include more minor epiphanies. I leave you with the obligatory Charlie Papazian shot, which is sadly slightly out of focus (the light was horrible).

Hop Varieties Cheat Sheet

Fresh hop season is upon us again, and sadly, the good folks in Hood River have scheduled the premier festival this Sunday--when I'll be returning from the GABF. But in the very likely case you won't be in Denver, you should shoot down the Gorge. (Full details here.)

As a public service, I'm reprinting my hops varieties chart for you to consult during the Fest. No real research has been done into the flavor and aroma these hops contribute when wet, or how their constituents (oils and acids) vary when wet ... or really much of anything. But we can at least compare the wet versions to the dry versions, and so here are the details on standard hops.

Amarillo

• History. Amarillo was discovered growing on Virgil Gamache Farms as a wild hop cross.
• Flavor/Aroma. Described as a “Super Cascade” with pronounced citrus (orange) and tropical fruit character. High in beta acids and a good aroma hop. (alpha acid: 8-11% / beta acid: 6-7%. Total oils 1.5-1.9 ml.)

Bravo

• History. A super-high alpha hop with principally Zeus and Nugget parentage released by SS Steiner in 2006.
  
• Flavor/Aroma. Not much available on this new hop, which is described in generic terms as "fruity" and "floral." (alpha acid: 14-17%% / beta acid: 3-5%. Total oils 1.6 - 2.4 ml.)

Brewer’s Gold

• History. A British bittering hop developed in 1919. Both Brewer's Gold and Bullion are seedlings found wild in Manitoba. It's an English/wild Canadian cross. Many modern high alpha hops were developed from Brewer's Gold.
• Flavor/Aroma. It has a resiny, spicy aroma/flavor with hints of black currant and a pungent English character. (alpha acid: 8-10% / beta acid: 3.5-4.5%. Total oils 1.6-1.9 ml.)

Cascade

• History. The first commercial hop from the USDA-ARS breeding program, it was bred in 1956 but not released for cultivation until 1972. It was obtained by crossing an English Fuggle with a male plant, which originated from the Russian variety Serebrianka with a Fuggle male plant.
• Flavor/Aroma. The most-used Northwest hop, with a lovely mild citrus and floral quality. (alpha acid: 4.5-7% / beta acid: 4.5-7%. Total oils 0.6-0.9 ml.)

Centennial

• History. Centennial is an aroma-type cultivar, bred in 1974 and released in 1990. The genetic composition is 3/4 Brewers Gold, 3/32 Fuggle, 1/16 East Kent Golding, 1/32 Bavarian and 1/16 unknown. Akin to a high-alpha Cascade.
• Flavor/Aroma. One of the classic "C" hops, along with Cascade, Chinook, and Columbus. Character is not as citrusy and fruity as Cascade; considered to have medium intensity. Some even use it for aroma as well as bittering. Clean Bitterness with floral notes. (alpha acid: 9.5-11.5% / beta acid: 3.5-4.5%. Total oils 1.5-2.5 ml.)

Citra

• History. Another of the recent proprietary strains, Citra is a relatively high-alpha dual-use hop that can be used either for bittering or aroma. Purported parentage includes Hallertauer, American Tettnanger, and East Kent Goldings.
• Flavor/Aroma. Lots of American citrus character, but tending toward tropical fruit. (alpha acid: 11 - 13% / beta acid: 3.5 - 4.5%. Total oils 2.2-2.8 ml.)

Chinook

• History. Chinook hops were developed in the early 1980s in Washington state by the USDA as a variant of the Goldings Hop.
• Flavor/Aroma. An herbal, smoky/earthy character. (alpha acid: 12-14% / beta acid: 3-4%. Total oils 0.7-1.2 ml.)

Columbus/Tomahawk/Zeus ("CTZ")

• History. The breeding nursery from which these varieties were bred contained 20-30 female plants from which seeds were gathered. Exact parentage is unknown.
  
• Flavor/Aroma. Hops have a very distinctive skunky/marijuana flavor and a sticky, resinous flavor. (alpha acid: 14.5 - 16.5% / beta acid: 4-5%. Total oils 2-3 ml.)

Crystal

• History. Crystal was released 1993, developed in Corvallis a decade earlier. Crystal is a half-sister of Mt. Hood and Liberty.
• Flavor/Aroma. A spicy, sharp, clean flavor. It is not complex like Cascade but offers a clear note when used with other hops. (alpha acid: 4-6% / beta acid: 5-6.7%. Total oils 0.8-2.1 ml.)

First Gold

• History. A dwarf hop developed in England derived from a dwarf male and a Whitbread Golding variety.
  
• Flavor/Aroma. Similar to Goldings--spicy and earthy. (alpha acid: 6.5-8.5% / beta acid: 3-4%. Total oils, 0.7-1.5 ml)

Hallertauer

• History. Traditional German hop from Hallertau region. One of the classic “noble hops” originating in Germany’s most famous hop-growing region. Many cultivars.
• Flavor/Aroma. Pleasant herbal character with an excellent bittering and flavoring profile. US Hallertau exhibits a mild, slightly flowery and somewhat spicy traditional German hop aroma. (alpha acid: 3.5-5.5% / beta acid: 3.5-5.5%. Total oils 1.5-2.0 ml.)

Liberty

• History. Another cross of the Hallertauer Mittelfrüher, with characteristics similar to those of Mt. Hood, released in the mid-80s around the time of Mt. Hoods' release.
• Flavor/Aroma. Mild and spicy, closely akin to Mt. Hood and Hallertauer. (alpha acid: 3.5-4.5% / beta acid: 3-3.5%. Total oils 1.0-1.8 ml.)

Mt. Hood

• History. An Oregon State University product, Mt Hood was developed in 1985. It is a half-sister to Ultra, Liberty and Crystal. Mt. Hood is an aromatic variety with marked similarities to the German Hallertauer and Hersbrucker varieties.
• Flavor/Aroma. It has a refined, mild, pleasant and clean, somewhat pungent resiny/spicy aroma and provides clean bittering. A good choice for lagers. (alpha acid: 4-6% / beta acid: 5-7.5%. Total oils 1.0-1.3 ml.)

Mt. Rainier

• History. Also an Oregon State University product, Mt Rainiers were bred from a variety of plants, including Galena, Hallertauer, Golden Cluster, Fuggles, and Landhopen (?). It was released commercially in 2008 or '09.
  
• Flavor/Aroma. An interesting hop that contributes a minty or anise note. (alpha acid: 7 -9.5% / beta acid: around 7%. Total oils- NA.)

Nugget

• History. Nugget is a bittering-type cultivar, bred in 1970 from the USDA 65009 female plant and USDA 63015M. The lineage of Nugget is 5/8 Brewers Gold, 1/8 Early Green, 1/16 Canterbury Golding, 1/32 Bavarian and 5/32 unknown.
• Flavor/Aroma. A sharply bitter hop with a pungent, heavy herbal aroma.. (alpha acid: 12-14% / beta acid: 4-6%. Total oils 1.7-2.3 ml.)

Perle

• History. Bred in Germany in 1978 from English Northern Brewer stock.
  
• Flavor/Aroma. Combines qualities of spicy English hops and rich, floral German hops. Excellent, clean bittering and aroma. (alpha acid: 6-8% / beta acid: 3 - 4%. Total oils 1 - 1.5 ml.)

Santiam

• History. A triploid hop resulting from a cross between 1/3 German Tettnanger, 1/3 Hallertauer Mittelfrüh, and an American hop (possibly Cascade). The first seedless Tettnang-type hop. An OSU hop released in 1998.
• Flavor/Aroma. Noble hop character, herbal, floral, but with a little American character. (alpha acid: 5.5-7% / beta acid: 7-8.5%. Total oils 1.3 - 1.7 ml.)

Simcoe

• History. A propriety strain bred by Yakima Chief.
• Flavor/Aroma. Simcoe is best characterized as having a pronounced pine or woody aroma. The cultivar was bred by Yakima Chief in the USA. It is sometimes described as being “like Cascade, but more bitter - and with pine.” (alpha acid: 12-14% / beta acid: 4-5%. To2.0-2.5tal oils ml.)

Sterling

• History. Sterling is an aroma cultivar, made in 1990 with parentage of 1/2 Saaz, 1/4 Cascade, 1/8 unknown German aroma hop, 1/16 Brewers Gold, 1/32 Early Green, and 1/32 unknown.
• Flavor/Aroma. Similar to Saaz in aroma and flavor. Aromas are fine, rustic, earthy, and spicy. Used in this year’s Full Sail LTD 03. (alpha acid: 4.5-5% / beta acid: 5-6%. Total oils 0.6-1.0 ml.)

Summit

• History. Summit is a recently-released super-high-alpha hop variety. It is a dwarf variety grown on a low trellis system. Because the low trellis is not machine harvestable, these hops are picked by hand in the field.
• Flavor/Aroma. Strongly pronounced orange/ tangerine aroma and flavor. A favorite hop of Rob Widmer and used in recent releases (W ’07, Drifter). (alpha acid: 17-19% / beta acid: 4% - 6%. Total oils 1.5 - 2.5 ml.)

Willamette

• History. An older US-bred hop with Fuggles parentage.
  
• Flavor/Aroma. A classic earthy/spicy hop with great versatility. (alpha acid: 4-6% / beta acid: 3.5% - 4.5%. Total oils 1 - 1.5 ml.)

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Information assembled from the following sources: Beer Advocate, Brew 365, Hopsteiner, Yakima Chief, Winning Homebrew , Global Hops

Massive Collapse IPA

Although certain of you strongly disdain my habit of infrequent sports posts, they will continue to dribble out, infrequently. Today's topic is the incredible collapse of the Boston Red Sox--home team of all Portland bloggers, the heart of baseball, personification of all that is true and good. As I write this, they are leading 3-2 over the woeful Orioles while the devil Rays (not Devil Rays, mind you) trail 7-0 to New York. If those trends hold out, all is saved. If they reverse, all is lost. And if both the Rays and Sox win or lose, they go to a tiebreaker (with more potential for all losing or all saving.) What's the story? History:

According to the Elias Sports Bureau, no team has ever missed the playoffs after holding a lead of eight games or more in September. The Red Sox could be the first -- with a game to spare.

At 83-52, the Red Sox entered September with the best record in the American League. They had a 1½ -game edge over the New York Yankees in the AL East and a nine-game lead over the Tampa Bay Rays for the wild card. CoolStandings.com gave Boston a 99.4 percent chance at the postseason when the month began.

It is by any measure it is one of the most spectacular collapses in sports history, and I don't think any Sox fan is surprised. Every year they anticipate this kind of thing and now that it has come, it simultaneously leaves us aghast and comforted. Those two teams who won the World Series. Not typical. This? Typical.

I'm considering a Massive Collapse IPA to celebrate. 297 BUs of pure bitterness. If they make the playoffs, I may knock it back to 203. I will go back to the cringing.

Postscript: And there it is. Paps blew the save in the 9th, a toxic cherry on top of a toxic season. Rays go to the playoffs, Sox go in the history book.

GABF Ho!

The 30th running of the beers will commence tomorrow at 5:30 in Denver as the Great American Beer Festival gets underway. It's an excellent opportunity to reflect on three decades of (pick one: microbrewing, craft brewing, good-beer brewing) in the United States. Charlie Papazian, the pied piper of good-beer brewing, convened the first GABF in 1982, before there really was a whole lot of good beer. Anchor, Boulder, and Sierra Nevada were in the house; Cartwright and New Albion had come and gone; Hale's and Redhook were just christening new breweries. To get a sense of just how different things still were, have a look at the inaugural program (pdf):

If you click on the photo, you'll be able to read Charlie's own hand-written note in the corner: 47 beers and 24 breweries. Most of the breweries weren't small start-ups and most sold fizzy yellow beer--though oddly, there was a lot of porter at that fest. (It's poignant to page through the list and see how many of the participants were about to end their decades-long run as stand-alone regional breweries and become neglected brands in the portfolios of national conglomerates.) This year, of course, there are scads of breweries, beers, and participants (466, 2400, ~50k).

At the time of the first GABF, small-scale brewing was an almost inconceivable venture. Banks wouldn't give brewers money, small brewing equipment didn't really exist, laws were designed to accommodate large-scale production and distribution, no one knew what ales were ... and on and on. Brewers in that first generation were in equal measures hippies who wanted to make an artisanal product by hand of natural ingredients, counter-cultural iconoclasts who decided to build breweries despite the hurdles, and born salesmen who had to invent the market for their product. Events like the GABF were among the few venues they had to get the word out about their beer.

Thirty years on, there's a whole new generation of brewers. What's fascinating is the altered landscape that informed their decision to become brewers. They didn't grow up in a world of cheap, bad beer. They didn't pass around bottles of Ballantine while telling stories of the strong beers of Europe. They grew up in a world of good beer. By the time they started drinking, they knew what IPAs were. So, instead of trying to invent an industry, they came in looking to push it further. Here in Portland, most of the new breweries are the ventures of young people (I won't try to broadcast that truth out and say it's the case everywhere, but I wouldn't be surprised). Their craft beer is not the craft beer of the older generation. To them, barrel-aging is not a radical innovation, but just the way things are done. They don't think of saisons as exotic. Amazingly, most don't even hate the macros--that battle ended a long time ago.

The GABF will be a perpetually evolving festival, reflecting the trends and mores of the brewers participating in it. It will have to stop growing at some point, but it won't stop changing. I'm psyched to finally see the great fest with my own eyes--and maybe when I'm Fred Eckhardt's age, I'll look back at this event and smile at how quaint it was back in the dark old days. Wouldn't that be nice?

Are You A Savvy Shopper or Satisfied Sipper?

In Katherine Cole's Oregonian column today, she interviews Mike Veseth, the Wine Economist, about his new book, Wine Wars. One of her questions involves a breakdown of the wine market by buyer interests--something I think might be highly relevant to good-beer drinkers. I'll link back to one of Veseth's blog posts from 2008 wherein he breaks down the typologies and percentages:

• Overwhelmed (23% of consumers): Like to drink wine, but overwhelmed by sheer volume of choices on store shelves.
• Image Seekers (20% of consumers): Are just discovering wine and view it as a status symbol.
• Traditionalists (16% of consumers): Enjoy wine from established wineries and think wine makes an occasion more formal.
• Savvy Shoppers (16% of consumers): Shop in a variety of stores each week to find best deals and enjoy shopping for wine and discovering new varietals on their own.
• Satisfied Sippers (14% of consumers): Don’t know much about wine, just know what they like to drink and typically buy the same brand.
• Wine Enthusiasts (12% of consumers): Entertain at home with friends, and consider themselves knowledgeable about wine.

Broadly speaking, I suspect good beer's clientele fall into the same categories. What's interesting is that the largest group, the overwhelmed, buy the least amount of wine, while wine enthusiasts and image-seekers buy the most. The goal, obviously, is to flip the overwhelmed, with all their potential purchasing power, into enthusiasts. (The "image seeker" category has an unnecessarily derogatory title. In the beer world, I'd call these "craft newbies" or something like that.)

Folks like Brady Walen, now off to his new job as Marketing Communication Manager at Craft Brewers Alliance, are no doubt keenly aware of trying to appeal to all the different segments of the potential market. It's good for the "enthusiast" (aka "beer geek") to recognize that breweries aren't just selling to them but broadcasting on several channels when they sell their beer. Anyway, good stuff.

How Does Bend Support So Many Breweries?

OPB radio's David Nogueras has an absolutely terrific piece about the Bend brewing scene. (Follow that link so you can listen to it, which is the more enjoyable medium of consumption--or click this link to download it.) He interviews a raft of people for the piece, including Larry Sidor and our man in Bend Jon Abernathy. In a five-minute piece, Nogueras manages to get listeners up to speed on the constellation of issues revolving around Bend and beer.

But the most interesting part is a section where he answers a question I've been asking a lot lately: how in the world can such a small city support so many breweries?

"I think there is but I think you can’t say we have 80 thousand people. I think you need to go talk to Doug and say how many visitor’s do we have coming though in a year," [Sidor] said.

Doug is Doug La Placa. He's the President of Bend’s tourism bureau, Visit Bend.

"Bend receives over 2 million individual tourists a year," La Placa said.

Ah ha: it's the tourists. Of course, whether two million tourists and 80,000 residents can support 47 breweries* remains an open question. One we'll see tested real time.

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*Approximation.

Best New(ish) GABF Category: 14b, Fresh Hop Beers

As you may know, I'm not a huge fan of the ever-widening range of new beers styles judged at the GABF. Blackberry brambles spread more slowly. And yet one category--sub-category, really--is very cool. Lodged in category 14 (experimental beer) is a subcategory for fresh hop ales.

There are a couple reasons this style is a real boon to the fest: for one, while it's not exactly an American invention, commercially speaking, it's really Amero-centric. Here in the Northwest, probably half the breweries make a fresh hop beer--orders of magnitude more examples than anywhere else. Since there aren't so many truly American expressions in brewing, we should really ride this horse.

Second, the GABF is perfectly scheduled to take advantage of these beers*. [And see yet another update here**] Fresh hop ales have zero shelf life. That green, leafy quality that defines the style comes only from just-plucked hops, and it has the life cycle of a gnat. Whatever it is in fresh hops that give these aromas and flavors doesn't last. If the GABF were in July, you couldn't really do this category. But early October is the perfect time--in fact, you could actually really play up the harvest hop beers. The only criticism I have of the style category is that it isn't a stand-alone. Give it a few years.

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Deschutes Fresh Hop Mirror Pond
Speaking of fresh hop beers, I got a bottle from Deschutes of a beer I like to think of as the current owner of the Bill Night endowed chair of fresh hop beers. For Bill, no beers are as sublime as fresh hopped ones, and of this group, Fresh Hop Mirror Pond is king. (Given that each year is different and by necessity pretty much a one-shot deal, I understand this designation may be revoked.) In the case of this year's batch, Deschutes, working with Goschie Farms, went to OSU to find the original root stocks Cascade came from (they call them "heirloom" hops). It raises a separate, but perhaps digressive point: how has the strain changed? We'll leave that until another time.

In any case, the beer rocks. It has a vivid nose, alive with the green fresh hopheads demand. It's a vibrant, spritzy interpretation, not the least bit composty or strange. The quality of fresh hops is not for everyone; they're so green you get an almost weedy intensity out of them (this, I believe, would be considered among fresh hopheads a desirable quality). This beer has it in spades. No mistaking it as a standard pale. It's loaded with flavor. Although I am generally not a big fan of fresh hop beers, this one is in my wheelhouse. It tastes like a freshly-picked flower, still warm with the rays of the summer sun.


*Update: In comments, DJ Paul makes a really good point: "Beers that are to be judged have to arrive in Denver by the first week of September. Therefore the beers have to ship by late August and these Fresh Hop Beers are usually not ready by this time." It seems like there might be a possible fix to this; I'll ask around when I'm in Denver.

**Updated further. Tweet from Daniel Pollard at Pelican: "@Beervana the BA offered an exception to the beer due dates for Fresh Hop beers. Lots of us had harvest related delays to deal with."