Getting to Know a Beer

The view south from the Astoria Column.

In very rare cases, I order the same beer twice when I go to a pub or restaurant.  Almost always this is the result of poor selection.  If there are beers I haven't tried on the menu but suspect might be tasty (an ordinary circumstance), I feel duty-bound to try them.  This means that I very often pass on a beer I like a great deal.  Fully 78.3% of the time I pass up a beer I know I like, I end up with the lesser one.  It is a huge downside to blogging about beer.

Over the weekend, I was in Astoria under staggeringly blue, warm skies to celebrate my continuing obsolescence.  (Extreeeeeeeemly late 30s if you must know.)  Because I was on a celebratory vaction, I abandoned all regular duties and indulged my native instinct to pursue that which I like rather than that which is novel.  So after less than an hour in town, it was off to one of my fave breweries, Fort George.

Thinking of possibly the annual "North" beer or maybe an 1811 Lager, I decided to at least sample on of the one-off experimental beers, brilliantly named Java the Hop.  It was a coffee IPA, exactly the kind of beer for which I was preparing such adjectives as "abomination" and "horrible miscalculation."  But miracle of miracles: it worked.  The coffee was more an aromatic note than flavor, and the hops were ratcheted way below usual Fort George levels.  Thus did the beer harmonize in a completely unexpected manner.  I always know I like a beer when I think about it the hours or days after I last tried it.  So it was with Java the Hop and, after a day at the beach sunnier and warmer than many I've experienced in June, Sally and I headed back to Fort George.  And then we had another sunny day tromping through the forests around Astoria and another evening at Fort George.  (I should note that Sally was not forced their against her will on account of my birthday trump card; she suggested the third return herself.)

In any case, the point of all this is to say that if you really wish to know a beer, it's not enough to have four ounces or even a pint.  You need to try it on different evenings, in different settings, in different moods.  Only then will you learn its secrets--and your own.  Was it really the beer you liked or the novelty?  Was your mood so good you'd have enjoyed used dishwater, or was it really the beer?  How well does the beer wear?  What more did you discover in the beer after you've tried it on day two or three?  What did you lose?

I am happy to say that Java the Hop remains a remarkable discovery, one I continue to think about even now that Fort George is no longer handily located just down the street.  It will actually come to pain me in coming months and years to think about it because, as a one-off, it will probably disappear from the surface of the planet without a goodbye or longing glance back.  It will reside only as an itch in my brain.  But that's a good thing.  Now I properly gotten to know Java the Hop I, at least, will remember it fondly. And it's also a good reminder that the ADHD attendant with beer geekhood comes clothed in a massive blind spot.  Like bad lovers, we hook up with beers for a few moments, stimulating our adrenal glands before moving onto the next pint for another hit.  This mode may offer pleasures, but they're necessarily different than taking a beer our on several dates and really getting to know it.  You can fall in lust with a beer after a pint; to fall in love you must get to know it more slowly.

Bonus pic 1: the view from Saddle Mountain.

Bonus pic 2: white forest, or the birches
of Saddle Mountain.

New Belgium Now Employee-Owned

Fascinating news from Fort Collins:

It's true, we are. Up to this point (well, December 28, 2012) the employees of New Belgium owned 41% of the total company. The controlling share was owned by our co-founder and CEO, Kim, and her family. Well, we bought it. As of December 29, 2012 the employees own the whole she-bang. New Belgium is now 100% ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan). 

The attached press release also mentions that the future workers in the new North Carolina plant will also be owners.  I've always run hot and cold with New Belgium's beers, but as a company, they make incredibly good citizens. 

Photo: Tracy at The Slow Life.

New Belgium has one of the greenest facilities in the world, and they have long been a leader in supporting charitable activities.  Now that they have hundreds of co-owners, we can add great labor relations to the checklist.

The idea of American "craft-brewing" has always had a quasi-ethical component to it--one I mostly abjure.  It's easy enough to get lost in the weeds of ethics when you're talking about fermented barley juice, particularly when you're trying to use those ethics to carve out special places for those with purportedly superior qualities.  [cough]Brewers Association[cough].

On the other hand, there's absolutely no reason not to celebrate those breweries that really do make an effort to make the world better for their customers, their workers, and their communities.  Full Sail went ESOP in 1999 and is also incredibly green.  England's Adnams actually turns their waste into biogas.  Breweries are really quick to sponsor charity events--Deschutes has been a leader on this score, but you could run down the list and find brewery after brewery participating--often with little fanfare--in charity events.  We can endorse these fine practices by drinking their beer, and I am all in favor of that.  This may be a good excuse to go find a Tart Lychee. 

Louis Pasteur Did Not Discover Yeast

Yesterday I posed a question about the discovery of yeast.  The question sprang to mind thanks to the coincidence of reviewing my discussion with Schlenkerla's Matthias Trum and reading and article by Rob Symes called "Yeast" in the current Taps Magazine.  Symes was discussing Reinheitsgebot and explaining how it was "truly remarkable for one of the ingredients it omits."

The omission wasn't purposeful.  It wasn't until the 1800s that Louis Pasteur (yes, the father of pasteurization) discovered the role yeast performed in fermentation.

This is an inaccurate, but almost ubiquitous statement.  I googled "beer yeast discovery" and they blossomed like mushrooms after a spring rain:

"Without knowing its role or its existence, men have always used yeast."  (Lesaffre yeast)

"The German Beer Purity Law of 1516 - The Reinheitsgebot, listed the only allowable materials for brewing as malt, hops, and water. With the discovery of yeast and its function in the late 1860's by Louis Pasteur, the law had to be amended." (John Palmer, How to Brew)

"Until the mid-19th century brewers knew very little about yeast. To make good beer they had to rely on ancient practice. With the aid of a microscope, Louis Pasteur discovered that yeast was responsible for beer fermentation in 1866."  (Christopher White, Brew Your Own)

And so on.  If you think about this for more than five minutes, you realize it can't be true.  When you brew, you get gobs of stuff boiling off the top of your fermenting wort and lots of "stuff" pooled in the bottom afterward.  The single-celled organism is invisible, but in the billions they are quite a sight.  We also know brewers regularly re-pitched that stuff centuries ago.  Matthias Trum and I got off onto a long, interesting digression about brewing history in which he illuminated much about the German guild system for me.  (He focused on brewing history when he was a student at Weihenstephan.)   He pointed out the obvious and then added:

“About the yeast and the purity law. The yeast is in fact not mentioned, that is correct. You have, again, to put yourself in the mind of a medieval brewer. In the middle ages, they had a profession called the 'hefner.’  So they knew exactly. The purity law lists ingredients, right? Yeast I put in there and I get more out of it. I harvest the yeast at the end and I put it into the next batch. And that was actually the job of the hefner.”

I made my “stuff” point and he continued:  “Zeug. Zeug was the German word, which is stuff. The hefner’s job was to harvest the yeast from the batches, to press out as much remaining beer as possible, which was sold at a low price to the poor, and then the yeast was added to the next batch. You started with a smaller amount of yeast and then you ended with a bigger amount of yeast.”

Indeed, we have records of brewers using yeast from long ago. Richard Unger documents this in his indispensable Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance:

As early as the mid-14th century, a Flemish recipe book mentions adding yeast to beer, and it seems likely that already by 1300 brewers were using some of the foam skimmed off the top of the fermenting beer from the last brew to start fermentation with the next one. By the 16th century, brewers commonly added yeast to wort from cultures which they kept separate and which they controlled and maintained. 

And indeed, it had to be that early, because that's roughly the time when lagering began--a process not possible without knowledge of the function of yeast.  He continues, making the point:

In 1420 a brewer in Munich got permission to use yeast that fell to the bottom and regulations from Nuremberg suggest that bottom yeasts which had been identified and to some degree isolated were already in use in the fourteenth century. 

Pasteur's role was observing the organism and explaining why it produced sour beer.  (He was a big fan of bottom-fermentation and lagering.)  It was a watershed.  But humans, which even a thousand years ago were pretty clever beings, had a pretty good idea of what was causing the beer to ferment.  My guess is that monks were the first to really develop a theory of yeast--they were the first great brewing innovators--but whoever it was came many hundreds of years before Pasteur.

When Was Yeast Discovered?

I have a most interesting response to this question from Matthias Trum, the sixth-generation Weihenstephan-trained owner (and--little-known fact--grad of Bamberg U with an econ master's degree) of Schlenkerla.

But you first.  When was brewing yeast discovered and how do we know this? 

Influential Beers

Martyn is hosting a delightful salon over at his blog on the nature of influential beers. He has assembled a list of the top 20 which is probably as good as any.  (Since "influential" is a moving target, we're never even going to agree on the rules of the game, much less the entrants; however, Martyn does a great job of walking through beer's rich history and making a nice case for his selections.)  I was going to skip it, but there's a minor theme about whether certain "sui generis" beers like Pilsner Urquell, Schneider Weisse, Guinness, Orval, and Saison Dupont should qualify.

About Guinness, Martyn writes, "I really don’t think Guinness is influential: it’s so sui generis, it’s just carried on being itself, without influencing anybody."  In comments, Ace makes a similar case against Schneider: "Why did you choose schneider over Weihenstephaner? Schneider’s hefe is unlike any other hefe, and actually comes closer to being a Dunkelweizen. Weihenstephaner’s hefe is considered the gold standard of all Bavarian hefes."

My minor addition to this debate is that beers that appear sui generis may be the most influential of all.  A beer like Pilsner Urquell is never copied identically.  Breweries were enchanted by pilsner, but they deferred to the original.  Even today, Czechs think of pilsner as a beer, not a style.  That's very much the case with Schneider Weisse, too.  A hugely important beer that kept the thin thread of weizen-brewing alive.  When, several decades ago, breweries finally started seeing a market in wheat beers, their versions referred of course back to Schneider's.  That they didn't use the same amount of dark malt doesn't mean Schneider is less important.

And you can go on: Guinness so dominated the segment of black ales that no one could be roused to challenge it.  Now dark ales are among the most popular and important of the ales brewed.  It's a little early to see if saisons will continue to survive and possibly flourish, but if they do, they will all bow in the direction of Tourpes while never attempting to imitate that beer.  Orval?  Yeah, I think it's the one sui generis beer that really is sui generis.  I'd have to agree there.

Anyway, go have fun at Zythophile, which is at 68 comments and counting.

Czech Lagers in Hood River

Update.  Scroll down to look at the comments where Full Sail's brewmaster, Jamie Emmerson, comments on his background and technique.


The world of Czech lagers is mostly hidden to Americans.  We know of "Bohemian pilsners" and assume that's all there is to the country that invented the world's most famous style.  But the Czech Republic has a brewing tradition as rich as Germany's and if you have the good fortune to visit, you will find more than golden lagers there.  The thing we know as pilsner is called "light lager" in the Czech Republic--světly ležák ("pilsner" is reserved for the beer made at Urquell).  But you'll also find things called tmavé,  černé, and polotmavé in hues ranging from light amber to black.

The Czech system for producing beer runs along two axes--strength and color.  On the one side you have beers of different strength categories based on original gravity (they've changed, so old hands need to update their vocabulary): stolní (table beer up to 6° P), výčepní (7° to 10°), ležák (11° to 12°), and speciál (13° +).  On the other, the definitions run from pale to black: světlé (pale), polotmavé (half dark), tmavé (dark), and černé (black).  Anything on one side may be matched to anything on the other, so you could have strong pales or table darks--or anything in-between.

This all seems academic to the average American, though, right?  When was the last time you saw a tmavé in the grocery store? It might have been more recently than you know.

Several years ago, Full Sail's James Emmerson tried a Czech tmavé and had an epiphany: it would be the perfect style to compliment Session Lager.  "When I had the tmavé, to me that was the yin to Session’s yang, just a perfect beer to pair with the all-malt helles, which is what Session is."  And thus was born Session Black, a stealth tmavé.  I was working on a chapter about dark lager and I called Jamie up to talk about Black, which I knew was inspired by the Czech dark.  I was surprised to learn that Session Fest and the current LTD seasonal--LTD 06--are also Czech-inspired, and that Full Sail has quietly been brewing up a portfolio of Czech beers.

When Session Black was released, I described it as a schwarzbier--and was later corrected.  Last week I called and asked Jamie what he saw as the difference was between German dark and black beers and the Czech versions:

The difference between a dunkel, schwarzbier, and tmavé style is the Munich dark being really malt forward in that Munich malt character. The schwarzbier being drier with that roast character. And then the tmavé was an interesting balance, with that roast being subdued and that malt-forward character wasn’t so surrounded by the Munich malt character. Maybe it’s a different brewing philosophy. The Czech beers in general have a really nice creaminess that [is] different than say the kind of malt character that came from a Munich beer. 

For my money, that last point is really the key.  Czech beers are made with very different malts than German beers.  Czechs use floor-malted grain that is less modified than German malts.  Most larger German breweries have abandoned decoction (though it's more common in Franconia and Bavaria), but it's typical in Czech breweries.  The combination of the less-modified malts and decoction create that creaminess--a quality that runs through all the Czech lagers I tried.  He agreed:

Certainly when you’re using the kind of malt they’re using, it lends itself more to decoction than the kind of malt we’re using. The degree of modification here does a lot of the work for you, but it takes away some of the opportunities as well. The challenge for us it to use American malts and specialty malts to try to recreate those flavors. Is it the same? Probably not—but it’s pretty close. 

Full Sail first released Session Fest last year, and it is probably the country's only regular-rotation polotmavé.  Emmerson: "No roast in it all all—it’s all caramel malts, Munich, and pale malts. It’s got that same kind of creamy mid-palate again. After bringing the Session Black, then, the idea of a polotmavé for Session Fest was a natural."

Okay, we have the half-dark and dark, what about black?  That would be the LTD 06:   "The černé is one I’ve always wanted to do, and the LTD 6 allowed that, because it’s a much larger beer. It’s very dopplebock-y, but that whole dark-roasted thing at the top created an interesting character to that beer."  If you haven't tried it yet, go buy a sixer.  It's pretty spectacular beer.  The balance between the burnished smoothness of the malt with that twist of roast is fantastic, and it's a perfect winter beer.

Emmerson has also made a strong Czech beer, inspired in part by Budvar's Speciální pivo called Bud (not sold, as you may have guessed by the name, in the US).  Emmerson wanted to create "an homage to the Czech thing of super-simple," and LTD 04 was just pilsner malt and Willamette hops.

Of course LTD 03 was the one beer people might have recognized as a Czech beer--it was a pilsner.  Or, as Jamie probably wished to call it, a světly ležák.

So that's pretty much the full range of Czech beers, and you can find them right here in Oregon.  I still think it's worth that trip to Prague you were always planning on taking, but maybe these beers will tide you over in the meantime.

Brewery Categories Defined

I was typing a detailed comment to Alan's recent thought-provoker and thought, damn, why I am burnishing his blog with all this great content?  That's the kind of generous guy I am.  Alan was discussing definitions of different categories of breweries and came up with this list: nano, micro, craft, crafty, and macro.  I think those are a good way to describe the way North Americans think about beer (possibly with the substitution of "brewpub" for "micro"), but my travels around the globe the last two years have completely scrambled the way I think about beer.  Here's the list I have taken to using, one that I think is more universal in its application:

• Brewpub/hausbrauerei: a proper pub that brews its own beer.  

• Production brewery: a brewery that packages its beer for sale largely off-premise.  May have a tasting room, but this doesn't make it a brewpub. 

• Nanobrewery: a production brewery with a batch capacity of less than three barrels. 

• Traditional brewery: a brewery that employs equipment or processes to uphold a certain tradition in brewing.  Decoction breweries, tower breweries, breweries with open fermenters, etc.  Not a precise definition, but I distinguish these from modern breweries that have been optimized to make any type of beer.  A brewery doesn't have to be old or small to be traditional, and traditional breweries don't always make good beer.  

• Independent brewery: Owned singly by one human or a family.  Nothing to do with beer quality.  

• Industrial brewery: a highly automated and efficient brewing facility designed to produce beer as inexpensively as possible.  Again, nothing to do with beer quality.  They tend to be large, but not all large breweries are industrial and some smallish ones are. 

• Large brewery: Any brewery with an annual capacity of 300,000 barrels or more a year.  You want to place it at 100,000 or a million?  I'm mostly cool with that.  Either way, it's worth noting that when you look at the thousands of breweries worldwide, only a small percentage of them make even as much as 100,000 barrels.  And a 300,000-barrel brewery is necessarily a pretty damn big facility.

Dubuisson: a traditional, independent production brewery.

Where I think North Americans get off into the weeds is trying to deal with the ownership structure, size, and configuration of a brewery and somehow try to correlate this with beer quality.  That notion is a uniquely new-(beer)-world view.  It sorta kinda makes sense because by 1980 the US had one category of brewery (industrial), and the beer Americans made ran the spectrum from yellow fizzy to slightly lighter yellow fizzy, from uninteresting to poor.  So anything that came after was "craft."  

That's a culturally-specific definition.  It doesn't work in the places we actually associate with beer, like UK, Germany, Belgium, or the Czech Republic.  If you want to make the tentative argument that large, industrial breweries generally make less interesting beer, I think you're on pretty firm ground.  But once you start talking about traditional, nano, independent breweries and brewpubs and tie these to beer quality, you lose credibility.  Some industrial breweries make superb beer, while lots of traditional breweries make pond water.  Many families use their old breweries as ATMs and ignore quality and I know you've wandered into a brewpub somewhere and been handed a biology experiment that someone mistook for beer. 

Finally: the word "craft" is also culturally-specific and therefore useless.  It means different things in different countries.  In the US, people take it to mean breweries established within the last 30-odd years that are relatively smaller than older macro breweries.  There is a strong (and mistaken) presumption of quality.  In Britain, "craft" means something entirely different.  That could be said about Germany and Belgium as well.  There's really no use for the term and I am going on a personal campaign to eliminate it from my own vocabulary. 

None of this is, I suppose, particularly critical.  But over the coming years as "craft beer" loses its meaning here, we'll be looking for a shared vocabulary, and I think you could do a lot worse than this.  Your thougths?

Forty Liters a Week

Onward and upward.  Today's transcript, the scholarly and funny Matthias Trum, the young, sixth-generation owner of Schlenkerla.  The quote speaks for itself:

“In the Bavarian constitution, beer is still regarded as food and part of the tariff agreement with the brewery workers is that part of the payment is made in beer. Even today.” Me: “So you pay your workers with beer?” Matthias: “Yeah, yeah. They have a certain amount per week—I think it’s something like 40 liters per week, so it’s fairly large—and they get it tax-free, and they get it as part of their pay. Of course these days they sell at least part of it or supply their families with it”

I will leave the math to you.  "Fairly large" is right.

The Language of Beer

Anyone who has attempted to speak a foreign language, especially during adulthood, has encountered the phenomenon of language-as-thought:

For example, the Australian Aboriginal language Guugu Yimithirr doesn’t use egocentric coördinates like “left,” “right,” “in front of,” or “behind.” Instead, speakers use only the cardinal directions. They don’t have left and right legs but north and south legs, which become east and west legs upon turning ninety degrees. Among the Wakashan Indians of the Pacific Northwest, a grammatically correct sentence can’t be formed without providing what linguists refer to as “evidentiality,” inflecting the verb to indicate whether you are speaking from direct experience, inference, conjecture, or hearsay. 

Each language is a reflection of the world as seen by the speakers of that language. As I was reading that captivating article (one of the rare New Yorker pieces posted online in its entirety), an analogy occurred to me.  Beer styles are a bit like language.  Of course, culture in general is, too--cuisine, art, religion, all these things have their own vernacular.  Cultures don't possess different hardware, but the software of culture makes one group like unspiced boiled meats and another fiery curries.  I know I often chalk love of different styles up to an unexamined sense of culture: eh, the Bavarians love their helleses, what are you going to do?

By chance, I had just been writing about Bavarian dunkel lagers, and noticed that Americans on BeerAdvocate weren't smitten.  Not a single dunkel gets a rating of even 4.0.  The analogy of language later presented itself, and I now think it's a pretty good one.  When a culture develops a proclivity for a certain thing, it simultaneously becomes blind to dissimilar things.  When IPA-lovin' Americans get ahold of a dunkel, they don't know what to make of it.  They judge it against their own preferences and, of course, it comes up wanting.  (One can imagine that in an alternate universe where Bavarians dominated a version of BeerAdvocate, the double IPAs and imperial stouts would score dismally.)   But this is the thing--Americans don't speak the language of dunkel lagers. 


How do you learn to speak the language of a different beer style?  Dunkels are a good example.  Ostensibly a style with little range, they could be taken to be an undifferentiated blah style.  Not, however, if you travel around Bavaria and try, say two dozen of them.  Probably ten of those will be undifferentiated blah--that's a pretty standard proportion for any style.  Some will be actively poor, but some will be excellent and, wonder of wonders, as your palate becomes attuned to them, you will begin to understand the differences between these excellent lagers.  They will become vivid to you.  (It really helps if you talk to brewers, too, for they will speak in forceful terms about what makes a good dunkel lager.  It will differ from what the guy down the road says, and it will really differ from what the guy in the next country says.  And in that way, you will further appreciate the distinctiveness of the style.)

I will go so far as to say that if you don't enjoy a style, you're probably not speaking its language.  (Mainly I'll go that far to see if I can provoke some dispute.)  Beers can be bad, but styles not so much.  They have stood the test of time and found converts.  If you encounter a style, you are by definition finding a constituency.  I have spoken to a number of people around the world who don't like American hoppy beers.  It's not that they don't like certain beers; they just think we're idiots who are making a mockery of a fine art.  It's the same thing as Americans who don't speak dunkel. 

So, the next time you feel the inclination to dismiss a style (as I have often wished to do with helles bocks), think of the sea of people who have, for decades, slugged it back joyfully.  What is this strange language they speak, and where do I learn the vocabulary?

Corn's Fraught Status

Pete Dunlop alerts me to what turns out to be a fantastic article on the question of "craft" beer by Jason Notte in The Street.  It's really worth a read if you're obsessed (as, obviously, I am) by the whole craft versus crafty debate.  But what interested me in this piece was how Notte honed in on one practice the Brewers Association frowns upon:

To avoid some messiness, the Brewers Association points to the fact that Yuengling uses corn in its mix and accuses it of cutting corners and trimming costs. The problem is, as fellow blacklisted brewery August Schell Brewing in Minnesota pointed out, older breweries founded by German immigrants tend to use a bit of corn in their recipes because they didn't have access to two-row barley from home and had to cut into the higher protein found in the native six-row barley. 

If you want the full details on that incident in brewing history, check out Maureen Ogle's indispensable Ambitious Brew.  She relates the fascinating story of how brewers pioneered the use of corn and rice to offset the crap quality of American barley.  It was more expensive, made the beer harder to brew, and was an all around pain in the ass--not a shortcut.  Notte points out that that's again the case, and further dismantles BA's reading of the "adjunct" debate.

Given how much craft beer snobs shriek and howl when it's even suggested that a brewery might change recipes when it expands, one would think they'd welcome a brewery such as Yuengling sticking to its original formula for all these years. Oh, and if they think Yuengling's cheaping out, check the price of corn after the biofuel push of the 2000s and compare it with the price of malt. Nobody's getting a break by subbing in corn....

[I]t takes a huge pair of stones for an organization that came into existence in 2005 to call a brewery that's been in existence since 1829, survived through prohibition and is still family owned "non-traditional." 

The status of character-sapping adjuncts has always been a fraught one.  Because, when it saps character, we hiss.  On other hand, there are tons of way to sap character.  Sugar works pretty well.  French brewers used to use potato starch to lighten their beers.  Of course, corn and rice can add character just as well.  I doubt very much, for example, that Steven Pauwels is using corn in his Tank 7 to save money. Corn is an ingredient like any other.  It is not morally suspect.  And it has been an unfortunate scapegoat in the attempt to come up with a definition of bad beer.  And yet, one can't ignore the fairly recent past and how corn was misused, either:

A railcar full of corn syrup in front of
the old Blitz-Weinhard brewery.

Notes from Budvar

Okay, on to the next style.  Today I'm listening through my transcription of my visit to Budějovický Budvar with brew master Adam Brož and Petr Samec.  It was one of the highlights of all my time in Europe, and easily one of the most edifying experiences (though that's partly because I was so wildly ignorant of Czech brewing).  So here are some of the highlights.

Pilsner
I learned that in the Czech Republic, there is only one pilsner.  Everything else is světlý ležák. Confused?   Here's Adam.

“Always there is a discussion of the definition of pilsner lager. It’s really difficult to compete with Pilsner [Urquell] because I think that it’s really the style. It became the style of the pilsner type. We are a bit different in this category because bitterness is really fine, the alcohol is a bit higher than the pilsner has. The Budweiser beer is really different. “You will find in Budvar that the bitterness is very mild—not so low—but mild.” (His emphasis.)

Breweries defer to Pilsner Urquell as being the pilsner.  Others make pale lagers, and they seem keen to point to distinctions.

Decoction
I've been thinking and writing about decoction mashing.  At Ayinger, they installed a new system recently that includes a mash cooker, but they abandoned it.  Too time- and energy-inefficient; a process they describe as old-fashioned.  Budvar takes a different view:

“If you open the Czech brewing books, you will see that the typical process is a two-mash decoction process.  It depends on the beer category you are producing. If you try the lager type, the decoction is very important. We compared decoction versus infusion on the small-scale brewery; always the beer brewed by the infusion process was emptier in its taste—the body was not correct for the lagers. Also the color changed. If you boil during the decoction, you prepare the compounds which cause golden color. So the infusion lagers were yellowish, not so full in its taste.”

The Grant
I became fascinated to see that Czechs are absolutely faithful to a piece of equipment called a grant.  You see it underneath the lauter tun, a recessed pocket with a long array of swan-neck facets and valves.  “These valves served to open or close the lautering manually.  Nowadays it’s controlled by the PC.”  I've seen these still in use in Belgium, but rarely.  The problem, as Brož quickly acknowledged is:  “The side effect is this slight aeration of wort, which is an important thing.”  Really?  Do tell.

“Because sometimes if you open the literature you will see that the oxidation processes are bad for the beer and it’s necessary to avoid them, but there are several articles, especially from Germany, where when the stages in the brewhouse were compared the oxygen was not always bad, especially before boiling with hops. The oxygen has [?] in it in small amounts due to the reaction of polyphenols and proteins. It influences this reaction. So if the sweet wort runs through these valves, a small amount of oxygen is taken in and the reaction between proteins and polyphenols ends well.” 

He believes the splashing of the grant actually improves the beer.

Not just for old breweries: this is the grant in Pilsner
Urquell's state of the art, modern brewhouse.

Brewing Process
On the beer itself, for those who are interested.  It's made with a double-decoction mash (typical in Czech) to 12 degrees P.  All Moravian pilsner malt (though "we call it pale malt," Adam said, laughing), the gold color coming from decoction.  The hopping procedure is interesting.  They use 100% Saaz or Žatec (pn. jha-tetch) hops, whole flower, and the first addition comes as lautering starts  “at the beginning when the bottom is covered.”  Then the second addition comes "when there is a full kettle," and the final addition is at 30 minutes from the end of the 90-minute boil. 

Fermentation and maturation is quite unusual.   “There was a very simple rule: one degree of Plato in the wort means one day of fermentation.  The lager has 12 degrees of Plato and ferments twelve days for main fermentation.”  Budvar then lagers it for 90 days (!), a practice he calls "deep" maturation. 

The End of Regionalism [Sports]

Today my beloved (and much undeserving) Wisconsin Badgers play in the Rose Bowl, which as you all know means it's sports post time.  But this is maybe more broadly interesting than me just talking Badgers.

This afternoon's game features a classic match-up: old teams from the former Big and Pac Tens.  Even odds say it's going to be the last one.  Thanks to the abomination that is the BCS, we've had the minor atrocities of Texas and Florida schools playing in the game.  There's one more year under the current rules, and that means about a 45% chance that it will be marred by interlopers next year.  After that, college football goes to a mini-playoff system and although the Rose Bowl is trying to protect the traditional conference rivalry, but the point is now moot.

For one thing, there's no Big Ten and Pac Ten to protect.  We've moved to conference gigantism, and now Rutgers and Utah are part of the these conferences.  Beyond that, the bowls are now very much financial institutions, not sites of college football tradition, and whether the game at hand is the George Foreman Grill Fiesta Bowl or the Rose Bowl Game Sponsored by Oscar Meyer Hot Dogs matters not a whit to anyone.

Back in 1993, while a grad student at Wisconsin, I spent my $36 on season tickets and joined the students in welcoming Barry Alvarez onto the hallowed turf at Camp Randall Stadium with a obsequious bow and the chant of "Barry, Barry, Barry."  At mid-season, we were 6-1 with visits from Ohio State and Michigan upcoming in the Camp.  I remember that October day when Michigan came, and the ecstatic waves of joy roiling the tailgaters as they waved massive effigies of Wolverine players (leading to a dangerous moment, but that's a different post).  As the game wore on, the chants began: Rose Bowl, Rose Bowl.  They continued through the Ohio State game, which was a tie, securing our trip to Pasadena.

I relate this tired history because I experienced the potency of the old Rose Bowl, when the game itself was everything.  National Championships were important, but in those days before the BCS, Big and Pac Ten teams won them at the Rose Bowl.  There was a symmetry and elegance to the arrangement, and it depended on this tight limitation about which teams could play.

College football has evolved beyond those quaint days.  Now conferences are merely vehicles for eyes on TV and post-season jockeying position.  They are no longer entities of place.  The remaining traditions will all come down to games like the Iron Bowl and Civil War between old rivals.  The Rose Bowl that became a multi-decade institution from 1944 to 2001 is gone.  Maybe by the end of today's game, maybe in one year.  So today I will watch partly to bask in the warmth of the last embers of an old tradition.

I Feel a Veto Coming

Update. I'm not alone. The New School designates this the worst trend of the year.

Brian Leppla has a post on Colorado's weirdest beers.  They are definitely weird, though it is a statement of our times that I saw Denver Beer Co. Swineheitsgebot: Coffee-Bacon Rauchbier and thought: another bacon beer?

That's not right.

A decade or two ago, I decided to reflexively refuse to sign and vote no on all ballot measures in Oregon.  Ballot measures are laws written by amateurs.  There's something delightful about the idea of direct democracy, but the implementation offers fewer delights.  From time to time I do violate this soft rule, but the burden of proof is on the ballot measure.  It must have been written expertly, have detailed all hidden costs and possible unexpected consequences, and be clearcut policy.  So I voted for Oregon's Death With Dignity law but not last year's seriously half-assed marijuana law.  (Steal Colorado's verbatim, put that on the ballot, and you have my vote.)

I think I must institute a similar policy with any experimental beer using crazy ingredients.  I'm going to start from the position that anything that might plausibly be sold as a candy bar, salad, or entree is not worth drinking.  If enough tweets and blogs come through praising the concoction, then maybe.  Meantime, you keep the caramel apple spiced ales and imperial orange cream stouts.  I'll have a nice porter instead.

A Half-Satori to Occidental

Starting back in 2006, I started identifying my choice for the best new Oregon release of the year and called it the Satori Award.  Usual boilerplate:

In Zen Buddhism, satori is the moment of sudden enlightenment when the mind realizes its own true nature. The Satori Award, now in its seventh year, honors a debuting beer that in a single instant, through the force of tastiness and elan, produces a flash of insight into the nature of beer. I award it for the beer released in the previous year (roughly) by an Oregon brewery (roughly) for a regular or seasonal beer.  The inaugural winner was Ninkasi Believer followed by Full Sail Lupulin (2007), Cascade Apricot Ale (2008),  Upright Four (2009),  Prodigal Son Bruce/Lee Porter (2010), and Fort George 1811 Lager (2011).

I am in even less position to claim to know which release was Oregon's best this year than usual.  I had to spend the year drinking a lot of beer not brewed in Oregon and therefore did not sample a lot of beer that was--especially given that 48 new breweries opened in the Beaver state in 2012.*  I managed to get to Pints, Solera, Gigantic, and Crux which was miraculous in itself, but I don't pretend I even began to get a sense of all the new beers that came out.  Fire on the Mountain, no.  Harvester, nyet.  Sasquatch, Falling Sky, Rusty Truck, nein.  And even among those I did visit, it was usually once.  And that, of course, ignores all the new releases by established breweries.

That's a delightful Únětické 12, close in
character to this year's Satori winner. I
took the photo mainly to capture the
Svíčková na smetaně in the foreground--
it's the national dish of the Czech Rep. 

That said, I did try one beer this year that impressed the hell out of me, and it seems a shame not to give it a shout-out just because I was too busy to test it against others for Best In Show.  There's every likelihood it would have prevailed no matter how many beers I tried.  It's appropriate for a second reason, too.

This year I had the great pleasure of cutting a swath through lager country.  I sampled bocks, helleses, and dunkles at their source.  I tried rauchbier and ungespundet.  I went to Pilsen and Ceske Budejovice.  I went to one of the few breweries in the world where malting is done on-site and the light lager made from it is as fresh and grainy as you would expect.  All those breweries have been there for decades, but for me, it was the year of the lager.

The lager I'm about to identify would have fit in with some of the beers I tried.  It was crisp, light, but a bit cloudy; it had a soft graininess and a rich, tangy hop presence.  The beer was named for the unfiltered lagers of Bavaria, but in retrospect--I tried it before making my lager trek--it had more in common with some of the lagers I tried in the Czech Republic. 

Those beers have greater depths than most German lagers.  They depend more on the malt for character, and the malts are a bit sweeter, grainier, and fuller than they are in Germany.  The hops, too, are a mite louder.  I fell in love with the beers there, and it may be that one of the only ways I'm going to scratch my itch to have another is if this brewery makes another batch of Half-Satori-award-winning lager--as the owner, Ben Engler, promised he would.

So here it is, your 2012 (Half) Satori Award Winner: Occidental Kellerbier.  Occidental is off the beaten path for most beer geeks who seem to congregate within fixie-riding distance of Hopworks, Hair of the Dog, and Upright--though I know there's an outpost of you who regularly make it to Plew's.  For everyone who hasn't made it to Occidental, though, make a trek out.  Drink no fewer than two pints, and take a growler with you.  And tell Ben, who I always find pulling pints when I stop by for my own growlers, that he needs to bring Kellerbier back this summer. 

Congrats!
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*Approximate figure. 

Ghost Beer

It began as traditions do, unintentionally, with an ill-defined start date.  The tasting of aged beers over a small (select one as fits your tastes: Christmas, solstice, winter, maybe-we-should-call-it Festivus) party.  Originally I used it as an excuse to raid my own larder, but this year, others brought rarities.  One friend has a batch of Jubel 2000s and gifted one.  I have another friend who, knowing he won't actually be able to leave his own beer alone, gives me some to cellar for him.  And the big treat was a ghost from the past: Roots Epic, vintage 2008 (the fourth in the five-year series--thanks, professor, for the generosity).  Roots died a couple years back and there was no 2010 vintage.  The brewery lives on, for a time, in these last bottles.  (Jason McAdam, one of the two men behind Roots, carries on at Burnside, which is some consolation.)

Epic, you'll recall...

is a truly hand-made beer. The long process begins when [owner] Craig [Nicholls] smokes a small proportion of Munich malt (small by percentage, but 55 pounds in total) over cherry wood that has been soaked in Glenlivet, cognac, and cherries. The final beer finishes out somewhere around 14%.

At first release, Epic is overly sweet.  I once asked Craig when he thought the beer achieved maturity and he guessed five years.  The '08 was just about in its prime then.  If you follow the link above, you'll find my notes on a flight of beers from the release of the last one, in 2009.  I called the '08 the "sweetest of all the vintages."  No more.  The bottle we sampled had become smoky and chocolatey.  There's no point in discussing it in too much depth--you won't be able to get a bottle, anyway.  It was an exceptional treat to end the year, but bittersweet.  Wherever you are, Craig, I hope all is well.

Craig (r) and I from 2009.  More pics here.

 

But I Feel Fine

Well, as you can see, the end has come.  Flames lick from from fissures opening from the pit of Hell and embers streak the sky in orange all to the crackle of gunfire and keening of death.  I kid.  Obviously we're dealing with a far more subtle form of the apocalypse*, an existential end, perhaps.  What is worse that a dramatic, fiery end?  Easy: a life of ennui.  

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work.

Okay, that bit about the muskrats needs updating, but Thoreau was on the same page, too.  Thus, in seeing a fiery-less world out there--one in which, cunningly, deceivingly, the sky is painted a rare eggshell hue, not orange--I can only conclude that the Mayans foresaw something so horrible that no one dare think it.  It is like contemplating eternity--eventually you realize torment is mundane things.

We have the last laugh, though.  For, in the absence of fire and nuclear fallout, we are left--even in our crushing ennui--the option of going to the pub.  A pint of sunshiny IPA and good conversation in a cozy, warm room.  We'll be fine.

Update.  This blog was just cited in one of those best-of lists you see around this time of year (you know, the kind I used to have time to do), which is actually pretty good evidence of the end of the world.  
______________
*Unless you're the Speaker of the House, in which case it may feel more lifelike. 

The Quotable Michael Schnitzler

By now you probably know the drill: I'm working on a chapter and listening to an audiotape of a visit I made to a brewery.  Today we have Uerige and the wry, quotable Michael Schnitzler.  (He's a bit like the German Van Havig.)  It would be nice to be able to knit these into a larger narrative, but they're a bit scattershot.  But worth reproducing for your amusement.

On the question of why his beer costs more at the store than national brands:

“Beer prices are always political. Beer price is not funny; it is a serious thing.” 

On what has happened to Düsseldorf:

“In general, the altbier is in bad condition. The smaller breweries are successful, that is not a problem, but if you remove the big breweries that were far more original Düsseldorfer breweries—now Frankenheim for example is with Warsteiner, Diebels is with Anheuser-Busch, Schlösser is somewhere, nobody knows really, then altbier is [not doing well].  The former biggest Düsseldorf breweries, they started twenty or thirty years ago to quit brewing in the town. [Real estate] prices are so high that everyone says, come on, it’s not [worth it] to sell beer. Let’s put it out to rent. The same with Munich—it’s even worse than Düsseldorf. So the breweries were sold to Warsteiner, Anheuser Busch; so where is the echte Düsseldorfer brauerei, the real Düsseldorf brewery? That’s the problem everywhere.”

On the casks they serve alt in (this applies to many places):

“It is just the traditional style of presenting the beers in a nice way. We tap it manually and then we put the barrel on the bar; this is the special way we do it. But there is no fermentation; there is nothing for the taste.” This reminded him of an amusing story. “Now every barrel has a red ring [metal band]. A couple of years ago we had a green one, a yellow one, something like that. Nobody knows why. The regular customers they saw the barrels with the green ring on it and said, 'oh no, we cannot drink this one.'  Now we only have the red band.”

Genentically-Modified Yeast is Reinheitsgebot-Compliant?

An unidentified emailer (hat tip: anon) sent a link to a story at Chemical and Engineering News:

You often see copies of Reinheitsgebot at breweries like this
one at Paulaner in Munich.

[At Weihenstephan], undergraduate student researchers have slipped biosynthetic genes for caffeine into beer-brewing yeast so that one day we may drink a pint of beer and defy sleep at the same time.  The team has also inserted into the yeast the genes required to make the citrus flavoring limonene. And they’ve tinkered with genes to make xanthohumol, an anticancer agent that additionally blocks hot flashes in menopausal women...

But the project is also radical because genetically engineered food is controversial in Germany. Curiously enough, though, the new genetically engineered yeast could provide a loophole for German brewers who might want to experiment with beer additives without disobeying the Reinheitsgebot...  [I]n principle, brewers of the future could slip all sorts of interesting flavors into beer through yeast. They’d still be able to add the Reinheitsgebot seal to their bottles because the flavors wouldn’t be inserted as additives.

Two things.   One, I think it actually would violate Reinheitsgebot, which has resisted all kinds of innovations and forced brewers to do cockamamie things to, for example, adjust the pH in their mashes.  (No adding lactic acid!--you gotta make it naturally.)  I'm not sure what loophole the chemists think there is (that yeast wasn't originally included as an ingredient, maybe?), but I don't see it passing muster.

Secondly, and more importantly, Reinheitsgebot is, in this European Unionized age, more an artifact of culture and a brewing mission statement than an actual law.  Brewers adhere to it far more because it puts them in a centuries-long tradition of German brewing and because German drinkers themselves put serious stock into the notion of "purity."  There's just no way GMO yeast passes the smell test for being Reinheitsgebot-compliant.   I don't think even think Americans would go for it, much less Germans.

But I'll throw it out there.  What do you think--designer yeasts that make your beer more citrusy, blocks hot flashes, and gives you a caffeine boost.  Kosher?  An offense against God?

Craft Versus Crafty: The Brewers Association Misstep

 Note: Post has updates (and more updates, and more...)

Can you tell if this is a craft brewery?

Yesterday the Brewers Association sent out a press release that rehashed a point they've made many times in the past: big brewers are peddling faux craft and this just isn't fair.  I have no idea what provoked the latest sortie, but this time the complaint has a really tone-deaf quality.  Craft beer already inspires cultish tendencies, and BA plays on that in spades here--right down to some creepy doublespeak.  You can follow the first link to read the whole thing, but I want to cherry pick a few sentences: 

• "An American craft brewer is defined as small and independent."
• "Witnessing both the tremendous success and growth of craft brewers and the fact that many beer lovers are turning away from mass-produced light lagers, the large brewers have been seeking entry into the craft beer marketplace."
• "[I]t’s important to remember that if a large brewer has a controlling share of a smaller producing brewery, the brewer is, by definition, not craft."
• The large, multinational brewers appear to be deliberately attempting to blur the lines between their crafty, craft-like beers and true craft beers from today’s small and independent brewers.

The Brewers Association has for decades been attempting to create the mental category of "craft beer."  They branded themselves that way and have been aggressive in promoting their definition.  But now here they use the passive construction to assert a bland truth about how a craft brewer "is defined," as if this comes a priori from the universe.  You invented "craft brewer," BA, so please own it.

Next they invent another new fiction, the "craft beer marketplace."  There is no such thing.  Large breweries do not have to "seek entry" into this fictive universe.  They sell beer, right there at the tap handle next to the imported Corona and the local micros.  They do not have to trawl the finer precincts where pubs bar the door to their kegs.  Finally, BA makes the unironic assertion that the big breweries are blurring lines.  Really?  Because it looks to me like these lines are pure inventions of the Brewers Association.

The response to this dictat was, even among the hardcore geek community, mixed.  There were articles, sharp blog posts, and lots of social media debate. Perhaps you even participated in it.

Here's what disturbs me.  The two parties involved in this debate are trying to sell me beer.   The BA has crafted a very strong, emotional brand and has attempted to hijack language ("craft brewery") as a way of enforcing it. As I think anyone who reads this blog knows, I am a huge fan of small brewers and a big critic of many of the practices of multinational beer companies.  But I reserve the right to make decisions about how I think about beer.  I get to call Goose Island and Widmer craft brewers if I wish. I decide whether a company makes good beer, and I get to ignore who the owner is. The Brewers Association may attempt to define categories of beer to benefit its members, but we don't have to accept it as fact.

Should consumers be aware that macros are setting up side brands to sell beer to a different target audience than their regular customers?  Yes.  Should the Brewers Association get to set the rules about what good beer is, who gets to make it, and what we should think about it?  That kind of answers itself, doesn't it?  All beer geeks want variety in the marketplace, competitiveness, and exceptional beer.  The Brewers Association is a powerful player in making sure that happens.  But we, as consumers, not the BA, have the final say over what good beer is, what craft beer is, and which breweries get to be called "craft."

___________________

Update: More commentary from around the beerosphere: brilliant post from across the pond; another skeptic; a faux craft brewer responds, appears real enough; and yet another skeptic.

Update 2: The plot thickens, as August Schell gets in on the action.  This is a must-read, and echoes a point I made three years ago.  Eric Steen posts some good thoughts, too.

Update 3:  And the debate continues.  Chris Staten at Draft Magazine, gets nuancey.  Sanjay takes the Brewers Association to task, but Ashley mounts a spirited defense.  Brian Leppla considers the "craft" question, and Stan, who says he has nothing new to add, decides to add something anyway.  The Motley Fool thinks about it in terms beer geeks don't.

To wrap things up, I'll point you to a very nice piece by Eric Gorski in the Denver Post that, more than anything I've read, lays out all the points in the debate.  Several days after the fact, I think it's pretty obvious that as a matter of messaging, last week's press release was a misfire by the Brewers Association.  It was designed to persuade, and it backfired even among many of its most ardent supporters.  I don't think anyone is averse to promoting (or even requiring) clear labeling information about where beer was brewed and by whom.  The mistake was way the message was delivered--surely a misdemeanor, not a felony--and something I hope they address in future communication.

New Books: IPA and For the Love of Hops

For the Love of Hops
Stan Hieronymus
Brewers Publications, 321 pages, $19.95

IPA
Mitch Steele
Brewers Publications, 352 pages, $24.95





Just in time for the holidays, Brewers Publications has two complimentary new books out.  BP publishes multiple series on different topics; IPA is the latest in their style series, while For the Love of Hops is likely to become the crown jewel in the "brewing elements" series.  Complimentary because, obviously, hops are the centerpiece of the IPA style.  I would love to spend more time reading and reviewing these books, but that will put this post well out into the post-Christmas future.  Instead, since these may be in your gift-giving plans, I'll do a quick-and-dirty instead.

For the Love of Hops: The Practical Guide to Aroma, Bitterness and the Culture of Hops
First up, Hops.  It is a very deep dive into the history, genomics, and science of hops and is simply one of the best books about beer ever written.  Stan's a friend of mine, and BP sent me this book, so you should take that statement with the appropriate amount of sodium chloride.  But thumb through a copy and see if you don't agree. The thing about a subject like hops is that there is a ton of related but distinct information: technical aspects about the constituent elements of hops; the science of the way the elements interact not only with each other, but with human sense faculties; agricultural and brewing history and the story of how hop varieties came to be.  It's possible some people have their head around these disparate elements, but they are vanishingly few.  Stan has now given us the keys to the kingdom.  Although Stan's voice is reporter-clear and his descriptions are studded with quotes and stories, this is not an breezy read.  There's a lot of technical information in here, and you sometimes have to read paragraphs twice.  But that's good--Stan hasn't done a lot of filtering here.  He's spent months talking to the people who know the most about hops and in this book you'll find out what they told him.

IPA: Brewing Techniques, Recipes and the Evolution of India Pale Ale
Next up is the style treatment of IPA by Stone's master brewer, Mitch Steele.  It is slightly less revelatory.  Mitch (whom I've never met) has a tougher subject--IPAs are so ubiquitous that even the casual reader knows a lot about them.  There's a very long section on the history (137 pages) where Mitch relies heavily on Martyn Cornell and especially Ron Pattinson (whose charts are reproduced throughout) to get the story straight.  He adds another 15 pages on the history of craft-brewed IPAs. The rest of the book goes toward describing the sub-schools of IPA, brewing processes, and recipe formulation--pretty standard stuff for a BP style book.  Homebrewers are going to find a few tips and insights here, but most will have already spent quite a bit of time practicing the now well-known methods of mash and first-wort hopping, dry hopping, and so on.  The recipes may be the biggest draw--Mitch has selected a wonderfully diverse group (Firestone Walker to Fuller's), including several historical recipes. 

Twelve Twelve Westvleteren Twelve

"But even without the whole story, if you take your time and pay attention to it, then you notice the difference," says Theijs van Welij. "And you really think, this is really one of the few quality beers that you should have tried in your life."
--NPR, "A Sign From Above"

A portion of the Westvleteren grounds open to the public.

Today, in what is likely a once-in-a-lifetime chance, you can go down to your local bottle shop and pick up a "brick" of Westvleteren 12.  The geeks are going crazy!  The cost is dear ($85 for six), but it goes to the monks at Sint Sixtus as a part of their capital fundraising effort to build a new roof.  So you could think of it as a donation in which the monks give you a token for your support.  I would strongly urge you to consider that when weighing the question of "worth."  (You might also compare it against the price of a plane ticket to Brussels.)

But if you do want to descend from the heights of the spirit, I have done a blind tasting of quads that included Westvleteren 12.  You can see how the august beer faired here.  Based on the results, you might think, nah, not worth it.  But wait!  Don't descend too far: there is more to consider when assessing "worth" than mere sensory data.

At eighty five bucks, you probably have a decent shot at getting your own brick, but you best scamper on down to the store with haste just to make sure.  At $14 a bottle, they're at least as cheap as you'll find them online, and you get the glow of knowing you're not dabbling in the gray market.  So go, spend profligately, and feel good about yourself.  You're helping monks.  In Oregon, these are your locations.  (A full list of all the retail outlets in the US is here.)

Corvallis Beer Supply, Corvallis
Market of Choice, Corvallis
Bier Stein, Eugene
Market of Choice, Eugene
16 Tons Beer & Wine, Eugene
Belmont Station, Portland
Beer Monger, Portland
Saraveza, Portland
Hop & Vine, Portland
John’s Market, Portland
Market of Choice, Portland
Market of Choice, West Linn

Oh, and happy 12/12/12.  You won't be celebrating another date like this for another 89 years, so enjoy it.

The Delightful Hans-Peter Drexler

By far the most pleasurable aspect of writing a book about beer is getting to meet the brewers.  It's also the most frustrating, because it's the aspect I can never communicate very well.  I was digging around looking for information a moment ago and stumbled on this fantastic video by Schneider and Sohn which is all hinged to the words of Brewmaster Hans-Peter Drexler.  Every brewery should emulate this model--brewers are easily the best people to speak on behalf of a company's beer.  You get just enough of a taste of Hans-Peter in this that you can probably see what it was like to spend a couple hours with him in Kelheim. 



Introducing TAP X: Nelson Sauvin from Schneider USA on Vimeo.

Your Friday "Hmmmm"

If this is okay, what's so bad about Black IPA?  Just sayin'.

Please Make a Note of It

Ah, December in Beervana.  Most places would be concluding their schedule of events by wintertime, but here we're just heating up.  Nothing a Portlander loves more than heading out into a 42 degree, pitch black rainy night (which seems to start at 3:30) for a pint.

I wish I could spend more time talking about the events below, but time ain't on my side.  You, however, should take the time to click the links and consider attending: all three get my highest recommendation:


The Commons One-Year Anniversary
Today and Friday, December 6-7, 5pm
Mike Wright has actually been selling his beer professionally longer ago than a year, but Beetje moved from the garage into commercial space and got a new name.  In the year since he opened the doors to the Commons, he's medaled at the GABF.  Special beers and a new release on Thursday.  Go say congrats.

Chef's Challenge Beer Dinner, Deschutes Brewery
Monday, December 10, 6pm
Celebrity chefs, local personalities judging them (including noted literati Lucy Burningham), and rare Deschutes beers.  And the proceeds go to Morrison Child and Family Services, so no post-feast guilt.  It's all good.

Humbug Lager Fest, Occidental Brewing
Saturday, December 15, noon
Portland's most overlooked great brewery hosts a fest with the most overlooked category of beers.  Eight beer-geek fave breweries, possible "celebrity" DJ's, and lagers.  You should drink more lagers.

____________
COOL PHOTO BY JOSEPH WIGHTMAN

On America's Influence

It is always controversial to identify the United States as a source of influence or inspiration for brewers in other countries--even when it seems so manifestly obvious.  I was surprised, however, to see that this influence extended even to Germany and some of the most traditional precincts of the brewing world.  It's not that every brewery in the country is racing to embrace double IPAs, but it's also not the case that brewers exist in a black box.  Take for example this story from Hans-Peter Drexler, the master brewer at Schneider and Sohn.  He describes what happened when he took a trip to the US fourteen years ago.

“I saw all these American beers and it was a new beer world for me. When I started in the brewing [industry], people used to say, ‘Oh, the Americans are just like chemists and pharmacists. There are only a few breweries; it’s terrible beer.’ But I remember I was very impressed with the beers of Sierra Nevada. Very, very nice beers. That’s when I found Cascade hops, and I thought it should be easy to match the American citrusy Cascade hops with Bavarian-style weissbier. So we started to brew Edel-Weisse with them.” 

A little later he added:

“Five years ago when we started this transatlantic project [Hopfen-Weisse, with Brooklyn Brewing] I would say nobody was very interested in different beer styles, in American beer and Belgian beer. But now, more and more people talk about beer, they like to taste different beer styles, and they’re really interested in beers. For us, it’s a very interesting new movement.” 

And then a little later, this, which was kind of shocking:

"Some American versions of classic beer styles are more interesting than the European originals.  Marzen?  I found exciting American marzens that are more interesting than European originals.  Every two years I go to the US for judging in the World Beer Cup.  Mostly I had the Bavarian dunkles and marzen and German-style lager.  And then, when I see the results, I am wondering because the winners are American breweries."

He looked slightly exasperated after he said this, and I said, "but you were the judge!" and he laughed.  It prompted him to tell the story of an occasion when he got in a discussion at the judging table with some American judges about what the qualities of a Bavarian dunkles should be.  "And the winner of the discussion was me.  And the result, the gold and silver medals went to American breweries."

Obviously, influences ricochet around the planet and it's hard to ignore the fact that Americans are basically brewing European beer styles.  Americans constantly tap the riches of foreign countries to enrich our own culture--and food and beverage have always been ground zero for reappropriation.  (In the case of the dunkles Hans-Peter judged, you could say we were just trying to out-Bavaria the Bavarians.)  But it's also not true to say that all the influence is going only one direction, anymore. Even when we're talking about Germany.

Maybe Simple is Better

I spent last Friday under unexpectedly clear skies drinking beer at the Holiday Ale Fest.  As usual, breweries outdid themselves to spend special beers--big, barrel-aged, spiced, blended.  I was there with a group of eight people, which meant we did a pretty good job, collectively, of tasting most beers.  Looking back through the list, I see we missed a few, but we did all right.  Of all the beers we tried, two were group faves and also my personal faves: Terminal Gravity Festivale and Fort George's Three Wisemen.

Terminal Gravity held back a vintage 2008, so in one way this was special beer.  But it wasn't the age that made it special; indeed, while there may have been a very subtle melding of malt flavor, the beer tasted quite fresh.  The hops were crisp and sharp.  Fort George's imperial stout was also a bit special--it was aged in bourbon, tequila, and rum barrels.  But they weren't the reason that beer was so tasty, either.  It was just a really fine stout.

There were success all around.  Firestone Walker's Wild Merkin was an excellent beer just kissed with tart; Bayern's eisbock was delicious and not at all cloying; Golden Valley's Black Panther, though I had it late in the day, seemed quite deep and resonant; Coalition's Lost Glove, a no-tricks strong ale, is a tongue-pleaser. Oh, and the Hair of the Dog Jims they were serving ('08 and '09) were an absolute steal at two tickets.

But at the end of the day, as my mouth grew tired from spice (which was largely way overdone across the board), sugar, and fruit, I longed for the simple, clarion delights of beer.  There is something very elegant and wholly complete about malt, hop, water, and yeast that, when mixed in just the right proportions, require no further adornment to be fully realized.

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Update.  In comments, Betty reasonably asks: "So, which beers sucked? I heard there were some real clunkers. Would like to hear about the bad as well as the good."  A fair question.  Bear Republic took the Big Raspberry with Prepare to be Boarded, a beer so saturated in cinnamon and nutmeg you felt violated.  From the aroma alone.  Crux's Snow Cave seemed to have been brewed with Bavarian weizen yeast--anyway there was lots of indistinct fruitiness that seemed isoamylish.  It had a slightly fetid aroma.  I have no idea what was going on there.  (Crux and Bear Republic are breweries I admire a great deal, too.)  Gigantic's offering was not bad, but I was already reeling from spice shock.  Same with Speakeasy's spiced porter.  Oh, actually, Santa's Little Homo, from Walking Man, was also a catastrophe.  Black IPAs clash enough as it is without subjecting them to the further horrors of winter spice.