Hops Are Not a Problem

Yesterday Portlander Adrienne So penned a provocative piece in Slate called Against Hoppy Beer.  It created a predictable amount of hubbub on the intertubes and didn't seem to warrant a post from me, so I Facebooked it, whereupon a debate broke out.  The issue is nicely summed up by a slugline to the Slate piece is "the craft beer industry’s love affair with hops is alienating people who don’t like bitter brews."  Well, is it? So, arguing for the prosecution, offers this evidence:

Thanks in part to Grossman’s pioneering influence, the pale ale, and its hoppier sister, the India pale ale, grew massively in popularity. (Today they’re the third-best- and best-selling craft beer styles in the country, respectively.) This was a positive development, but some breweries went overboard. By the 1990s craft breweries like Rogue, Lagunitas, Stone, and Dogfish Head were all engaged in a hop arms race, bouncing ideas and techniques off one another to produce increasingly aggressive, hop-forward beers....

Most beer judges agree that even with an experienced palate, most human beings can’t detect any differences above 60 IBUs. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, one of the hoppiest beers of its time, clocks in at 37 IBUs. Some of today's India pale ales, like Lagunitas’ Hop Stoopid, measure around 100 IBUs. Russian River’s Pliny the Younger, one of the most sought-after beers in the world, has three times as many hops as the brewery’s standard IPA; the hops are added on eight separate occasions during the brewing process.

With respect to Adrienne (and Alan, who defended the position on Facebook): hogwash.  This is one of those cases of the beer geek mistaking the bubble for the world.  Most of the best-selling beers in the "craft" segment are all modest beers: Boston Lager, SN Pale, Fat Tire, Blue Moon (which to the average consumer is a craft brand), Widmer Hefeweizen.  Those beers alone account for something like four million barrels of production--something on the order of a fifth to a quarter of the entire segment, depending on how you characterize it.  Add to that the ton of wheats that sell like hotcakes (Oberon, Gumballhead, 312, Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat) and you're taking another big chunk of the market.  To think that the craft market is awash in only the Plinys and Lagunitases, you have to live in ... Portland.

Three other quick points and then I'll knock it off:

• Bitterness is relative.  Adrienne begins by using mass market lagers as her baseline and notes that SN Pale was "one of the hoppiest beers of its time."  But that's only because at the time there were no other types of beer in the US.  A 37 BU beer isn't going to shock residents of Britain or even Germany.  That it shocked Americans was a testament to our debased state at the time, not Pale's hoppiness.  What humans consider normal changes over time.  Sometimes we like beers quite hoppy, sometimes we don't.  There is no Platonic ideal for the "right" amount of hoppiness, so it's impossible to norm it out.  (So's story begins with a Kentuckian shocked at 30 BU Hopworks Velvet English.  Ask yourself: who's out of step with hopping levels in this story?  If your baseline is Bud Light, 30 IBUs are shocking--but there's no world in which Bud Light should be the baseline for anything.)  Also, as a technical point, 60 BUs is nowhere near the threshold of human perception, and there's the further issue of the density of the beer.  A 60 BU barley wine is no hop titan.
• Hoppiness isn't just bitterness.  Hop flavor and aroma can be intense, and when we say "hoppy," sometimes we don't mean bitter.  I wouldn't be surprised if the Kentuckian in the story was just shocked at the type of beer he was served.  Americans are making more richly layered, hop-forward--but not necessarily bitter--beers.  Recently I've heard young beer fans describe IPAs and pales not as bitter, but "sweet"--so rich are they in the fruit flavors of modern hops.  We have to define our terms.
• Regions have different styles.  You could easily go to Brussels, order up that unpronounceable "gueuze" thing and declare it "too tart."  You could go to India and declare the food "too spicy."  These are preferences, not, again, some kind of measure against a Platonic ideal.  The United States appears to be developing a taste for hops, and I believe we may one day find ourselves with a hop-centric brewing tradition.  It's way too early to make that case now.  The opposite is true.  We are the most style-promiscuous country in the world, probably in the history of the world.  

 If you look around you and all you see are ultra hoppy triple IPAs and imperialized whatevers, you're very deep in the beer geek bubble.  In most of America, a surfeit of hops is not yet the central problem confronting beer culture.

The American Beer Market in Three Charts

Yesterday I was fooling around with Brewers Almanac statistics and came across three data points I think are critical if you want to understand the beer market in the United States.  I have put them into visual form for your consumption pleasure.  First up, we have the total beer market in the US (smoothed to avoid the chaos from 1919-1933) in millions of barrels.  You'll see it follows a nice upward trend before plateauing around 1980.

From the post-prohibition period to about 1980, you have an expected incline for a country on the move.  (We went from 150 million to 226 million.)  But then note the trend, even while the country continued to grow (roughly 310 million now) thereafter, when the total beer US market stayed right around 200 million barrels.  How is it possible?  We started to drink less:

That's a little bit bad if you're a brewer in the US, but not terrible.  As long as people keep coming, you can at least hold firm.  Except that you can't.  Since 1980, purveyors of beer have gotten quite a bit more numerous.  Behold what happens when you take into account the effect of imports and craft breweries*.  Then the number for the mass market beers looks a whole lot worse.

In the years I've been writing about beer, Anheuser-Busch has managed to sell about half the beer in America, and I think they're still doing that, more or less.  But you can see from these figures that they're only able to do it by cannibalizing or absorbing other mass market brands.  Imports now constitute nearly 28 million barrels--14% of the market--and most of that is stuff like Pacifico and Corona, which helps explain why AB InBev was so keen to snap up Modelo.  The amount of mass-market American lager has now dipped to about 150 million barrels--the amount they were selling 40 years ago when there were 85 million fewer Americans.  If the trajectory continues, that segment could well fall below 100 million barrels in the next forty.

Interesting times, no?

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*These are a bit hard to estimate.  The Brewers Almanac gives good numbers on imports, but doesn't parse out "craft beer."  I've used Brewers Association members, which are exact, and added an estimate of extra-craft beers like Blue Moon and Shock Top and those breweries the BA has ejected from their membership roles (though I've probably low-balled it). 

Price of a Sixer, Adjusted for Inflation

The Brewers Almanac is quite a lot of fun if you love arcane statistics.  (Excise taxes broken down by state and by beer strength?  Check.  Percentage of beer sold in cans in 1962?  Check.)  This one was especially interesting: the estimated price of a six-pack of beer using BLS consumer price index figures.  "Six pack" here means national brands (those selling for around $5 now).  They used actual prices, so I ran them through the BLS's inflation calculator and came up with the following figures, based on current 2013 dollars. 

1955: $7.73
1960: $7.39 (-.39)
1965: $7.17 (-.22)
1970: $6.54 (-.63)
1975: $6.23 (-.31)
1980: $5.57 (-.66)
1985: $5.43 (-.14)
1990: $5.22 (-.21)
1995: $5.28 (+.06)
2000: $5.11 (-.17)
2005: $5.09 (-.02)
2010: $5.21 (+.12)
2011: $5.12 (-.09) (last available year)

Except for short blips where the price was essentially flat, beer prices dropped an average of about 70 cents a decade between 1955 and 1990 and have been flat since then.  The big question is whether Bill's adjusting his Portland Beer Price Index for inflation.  

Maybe This Beer's Just Not For Me

It has been five years since BridgePort first released Stumptown Tart, and in that time they've changed brewers and much of their line has turned over.  I therefore assume that Stumptown Tart is popular enough that they've brought it back for a sixth iteration.  Originally, the idea was to create an actual tart fruit beer with, you know, acidity.  Then-brewer Karl Ockert consulted with New Glarus' Dan Carey, who of course has his own pretty-popular tart fruit ales.  They used native Marionberries and brewed a large beer but, alas, just dumped in some lactic acid to achieve the tart part. 

It was a flop, but they retooled the recipe and next year came back with a fruit beer minus the tart.  Ockert used sour cherries in an effort to add a bit of acid, but it had wandered away from the wild-yeast sense of tart the geeks expected.  In subsequent years, BridgePort reissued the beer with a rotating variety of fruit, and the '13 vintage was brewed with blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries.  And like the beers in the post-tart period, it's fine. 

It's a vibrantly-colored beer with a soft, blossomy fruit nose and a light, sweet palate.  The fruit is fresh and sweet and the beer is delicately wheaty.  I did find the finish, with a slightly tannic-bitter note, less than ideal, but it's a minor note.  Although the fruit changes year by year, there's a real coherence in the line.  If you like the Stumptown Tart, you'll like it every year no matter which fruit the brewery chooses. 

I, of course, want the tart.  Nothing showcases fruit so well as a little acidity.  In regular beers, the malt competes with the fruit, which becomes a little duller and more flaccid.  Acidity preserves flavors and aromas and deliver the fruit to one's mouth almost as if it were coming straight off the bush.  As I was drinking it, I was thinking: why not add a touch of acid malt or even do a sour mash?  I know the brewery doesn't want to make a wild ale, but this would surely give it some depth and distinction.

At one time, I would have been confident to say that these choices would make a "better" beer.  Something about traveling around the world and seeing how palates differ really highlights the subjective nature of "better," though.  If BridgePort took my advice, they'd very likely sell less beer.  More people, in other words, like it the way it is than would like my "improvements."  It's easy enough to dismiss the masses as untutored, to actually use this as evidence that it's a lesser beer.  But geeks are slaves to their own preferences, too; they love imperial stouts but give a shrug to helles.  The things different people like sometimes reflect different levels of discrimination and education, but a lot of times, it just reflects base prejudice.

So Stumptown Tart is not for me. Let's leave it at that.

Which Ingredient Exerts Greatest Influence?

I once said offhandedly to another beer fan (who may out himself if he wishes) that hops had the most influence on a beer. He contended the point, I believe arguing for malt instead. The issue came back into my consciousness last night as I tried a beer I was certain would be dominated by the malt flavors.  Instead, the yeast took the floor and muscled poor malt to the side. More on that beer in another post.  In the meantime, which is it--malt, hops, or yeast?

MALT
Argument for:  body of beer, the sugars, the hooch. No malt, no beer.
Argument against: as a matter of flavor, something of a pipsqueak.

HOPS
Argument for: the mighty spice, rebuffer of infection, bringer of bitterness, flavor, and aroma.
Argument against: you can have a beer without hops, but not without malt or yeast.

YEAST
Argument for: lagers, ales, and wild things; yeast determines beer's very nature.
Argument against: yeast schmeast; people made plenty beer before they even knew what it was.

The correct answer?  Water. Because, you know, yeast, malt, and hops piled up amount to compost. I kid. The actual answer is *.  All three are enormously expressive and their influences are easier to see in different beer styles. 

Hops are the biggest blowhards, no doubt.  They have the greatest capacity to overwhelm a beer--but in many styles they are nearly disposable.  Yeast provides the alchemy that makes beer spirituous, and they are the deep-thinking philosophical members of the trio because they do determine a beer's nature.  They are not far behind hops in their capacity to make a big impression, either.  Malt is the hardest case to make, but the gluten-free movement does an excellent job.  Barley malt's presence is subtle and you can easily overlook it, but the parade of sorghum counterfeits, thin, sour, and unbeery put proof to its importance.  

It is a debate with no answer, but a fun one to have.   Your opinion?

Better Alternatives to "Spokane-Style" Designations

Washington's No-Li Brewhouse recently made news by successfully winning federal approval for the designation of "Spokane-style" beer.  The definition of this "style" is that it must be brewed and bottled in Spokane and made with ingredients from within 300 (!) miles.  In other words, it's a federally-approved marketing gimmick.  Good for No-Li, I guess, but it's bad in just about every other way.  It conflates style and region and, with the 300-mile ingredients loophole, makes a mockery of "locally grown."  Instead of moaning, though, let's think how the idea might actually be retooled to bring some value to the general concept.  The first thing we need to do is split style and geography.

Beer By Geographical Indication
Although it is not quite so elemental as in the case of wine, ingredient sourcing is an important component of beer.  Barley and hops do turn out differently depending on where they're grown.  Ingredient-based certifications are common and pretty easy.  Here's how the US Patent and Trademark Office describes it (pdf): 

“Geographical indications” (“GIs”) are defined at Article 22(1) of the World Trade Organization’s 1995 Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights as “indications which identify a good as originating in the territory of a Member, or a region or locality in that territory, where a given quality, reputation or other characteristic of the good is essentially attributable to its geographic origin.” Examples of geographical indications from the United States include: “FLORIDA” for oranges; “IDAHO” for potatoes; and “WASHINGTON STATE” for apples. 

In the beer world, this is really handy.  When I visited France, young craft brewers at St. Germain resolved to only brew with French ingredients.  There were trade-offs: limited hop varieties and no organics.  Still, they applied for certification and now bottles have the government seal designating the Page 24 Hildegarde line as all-French. 

Americans could follow suit and designate their beer by region.  (States make sense, but I suppose you could have "Yakima Valley" as a designation if you could source the ingredients from there.)  This has many obvious downsides: 1) only Northern, barley-growing states could ever receive the designation (and even if states in the South could coax a hop crop into producing, it would never be a commercial prospect), 2) except for Oregon and Washington, it would sharply limit the variety of hops brewers could use.  On the other hand, it would have some substantial benefits, too.  It would: 1) encourage local crop production and create interesting opportunities for farmers, 2) bring biodiversity to brewing, including some probably wonderful new flavors to malts and hops, and 3) give brewers an additional hook to promote their beer locally.

[There would be a few issues to hammer out: yeast and malting.  In France, you can win approval if the barley is grown locally, even if it's malted elsewhere.  That seems sensible.  Yeast is an organism and in no way a product of terroir--so sourcing it from Washington or California doesn't seem verboten, but I suppose you could demand that the yeast be propagated on-site.]

Beer By Regionally-Specific Style
The other way to go is something they call "Traditional Speciality Guaranteed" (TGI) in the European Union.  This requires not only that the product use traditional (though not necessarily local) raw materials but also made in a traditional processing method.  An example is gueuze, one of the few beers granted a TGI.  To be called an oude gueuze, a beer must satisfy all of these conditions:

• Use 30% unmalted wheat (that's part of the traditional raw materials piece).
• Employ spontaneous fermentation.
• Use hops aged at least one year.
• Be refermented in the bottle.
• Contain certain compositional elements measured by a lab, including the presence of brettanomyces, absence of isoamyl acetate, and the presence of other volatile acids (this test confirms the process and aging of the beer).
• Contain one-, two-, and three-year old beer.  

This is an extremely high bar, and other styles have had a harder time agreeing on qualifying criteria.  To go back to the France example, breweries couldn't agree on how long the beer needed to be garded (aged) to qualify as bière de garde.  In Flanders, breweries couldn't agree how long red/brown beers should be aged on wood.  (Rodenbach led the charge but was also a stickler for high standards others couldn't meet.)

I could imagine the US establishing guidelines that would qualify certain beers for "specialty" designation.  Corn is the unique native ingredient in American (north and south) beer, and could be a key feature in this designation.  The US has a trove of old corn-using styles to dig into--cream ales, sparkling ale, steam beer, American weissbier, Kentucky common--should we want to offer such a designation.  Given the standard for gueuze, steam beer might be the best place to start.  Designating beers using corn would meet the ingredient criteria (but would, ironically, exclude Anchor), and there are several important elements to the process: the use of coolships, warm-fermenting with lager yeast, and krausening.  Kentucky common, championed by a brewery like Bluegrass for example (it was originally a style of Louisville), might be in a prime position to claim the designation. 

These designations tend to link the style to a place--Lambics to the region around Brussels--which is a big downside.  Should only San Franciscans be able to make steam beer?  Should Louisvillians be the only brewers to make Kentucky Common?  Doesn't seem quite American.  But then, when you restrict, you restrict.  No-Li didn't mind that everyone outside Spokane was cut out of their definition (poor Cheney).  It might be worth designating some of the old styles if only to revive them.

_____________

The Spokane case is a bad one: god forbid we have a separate, useless designation for every city with a brewery in the US.  (Wait, is that Milwaukie beer or Milwaukee beer?) But it might be nice if it sparked interest in something more valuable.  These are a couple options.

The Politics of Beer

Below is an astounding takedown of an American politician using the fulcrum of beer.  I'm going to quote it at length, but I'd like to point out that it's not actually partisan.  The charges leveled here could apply to any congressman or senator in the country.  There's just two pieces of info you need to know to understand the context.  The first is that the politician is from Wisconsin, where Miller is the sacred local brewery. (The dynamic is identical to Detroit and GM.)  The second is the precipitating event, when said Wisconsin pol turned up at Belgian gastropub in DC and was chagrined to learn that the 115 different available beers didn't include Miller Lite.  Then comes the takedown:

Such a man of the people!¹

It's worth noting that [the politician's] tastes in alcoholic beverages do not always run along such downscale lines. In 2011, [an opponent] confronted him drinking a $350 bottle of wine at Bistro Bis², a swanky French restaurant catering to the political elite³. ("Its regular guests include Senators, Congressmen, celebrities and powerbrokers looking to dine in the ambiance and luxury of one of Washington's most popular restaurants," boasts its website.)

Bistro Bis probably does not serve Miller Lite⁴, which likely forced [the politician] to instead order $350 wine as a fallback, as most Miller Lite fans do when their beer of choice is unavailable. And you can see why he mistook a Belgian brewery for a French restaurant. The one time he was publicly confronted at Bistro Bis is probably the only time he has ever patronized a European restaurant of any kind, and he probably naturally assumed that all European restaurants are French^{5, 6}. 

 Let's break this down:1) beer is the people's drink, the tipple of the (choose your meme) 47 or 99%.  2) Wine is the drink of the upscale, though permissible if vinted in, say, Fon du Lac, WI, and French restaurants are, it goes without saying, suspect.  3) Especially when patronized by political "elites," a term of art politicians only use when referring to the opposition party.  4) Ordering Lite was an especially nice touch, as its workingman cred is as unimpeachable as its likelihood of being on tap in a gastropub is remote.  5 and 6) This is a deft slam by the writer, who simultaneously evokes American crassness and our ignorance of the foreign world--hanging it around the politician's neck--while reminding readers of a time when America inexplicably targeted France as History's Greatest Monster in the period before the Iraq war. 

This is why I do my best to avoid dragging tarnished politics into the wholesome beer world.  It's more amusing when politics tries to drag beer into its world in an effort to polish things up.

The Battle for the Mass Market: Coors Batch 19 and Kräftig

The mass market is definitionally the thing people buy the most of.  Wonder was the king of breads once; now its parent company is bankrupt.  Since prohibition, very light, sweetish lagers have been the mass market style, but they're slipping.  One of the ways big beer companies have responded (aside from the constant stream of gimmick products and packaging changes) is to enter the "craft" segment and beat the insurgents at their own game.  But this has the effect of hastening the demise of their extraordinarily valuable base brands.  The other option?  Double down and keep the mass market right where it is.  Beer companies that want to own that segment are doing it by moving toward stronger, more flavorful beers--the opposite direction they've been going in the last forty years.

This year marked Budweiser's extremely high-profile roll-out of Black Crown, very much a legacy product. There are a couple other recent entrants that are a little lower-profile.  One finally made it to my grocery store shelves this year: Coors Batch 19.  Looking for a way to make a fuller-flavor beer that is still recognizably Coors, the brewery started digging around the archives and found a beer from 1919--the last gasp before Prohibition--that was to their liking.  What they found in basement logs was reworked to become Batch 19.

It was a beer made with Chevalier barley, an English type that was grown in California in the 19th century.  It was apparently not a great barley and was almost commercially extinct by 1919.  One source compares it to Scottish bere/bygg, a landrace variety optimized to grow on the sides of crags in the Scottish moors (I kid ... slightly). The varieties of hops, which might well still be available, were not listed.  Coors maestro Keith Villa, in an interview with Lew Bryson, said, "Hops, we didn’t know what they were using. They didn’t note the variety of hops until the 1940s... The hops were only noted as 'imported' and 'domestic.'"  The domestic hops were almost surely Clusters, which are still available, but not prized.  Imported could be anything, but if they came from Germany, they would still be available or, if not, decent substitutes could probably be found. Coors didn't go that direction.  If you look at the label, you'll see Hersbrucker and Strisselspalt.  Lew, doing some nice reporting, got Villa to admit there's a bit more, too: "I stuck in a little bit of Cascade to round out the fruitiness. There’s a little Mt. Hood, and some Hallertauer Select. They added hops at the beginning, towards the end of the boil, and right before the end of the boil."

The beer Coors made would definitely never be confused with a typical mass market lager.  (In the accompanying photo, we compared it to Pabst.  You see the difference.  While I'm huddling here in the safety of this parenthetical, I'll explain why we were drinking Pabst.  Sally has been mentioning our great mass market tastings and everyone kept asking about Pabst, which I didn't include.  So we got one so she could try it.  Pabst is ... basic.)  The malts are the most characteristic.  Villa calls his malt "Moravian," but it's not only grown in Idaho, it's "improved every year."  Well, it tastes American to me: husky and rough. This is a seriously full-bodied beer.  That is, of course, what the geek wants, but I'm not a fan.  Perhaps Germany spoiled me, but to my palate rough malts are bad malts.  Nevertheless, it does taste very American, and my guess is it does probably taste a bit of the old Chevalier.  This is a beer designed to both appeal to a craft-compromised palate and also keep the focus firmly on American lagers.  The rollout has been slow and deliberate, and it will be most interesting to see if it succeeds.

The next product is every bit as fascinating.  One of the famous Busch family has opened a new brewery to make exactly the kind of beers his family has always made.  William K. (Billy) Busch is one of the sons of August "Gussie" Busch Jr.  He only worked briefly for the family brewery and then was part-owner of a distributorship in the 90s.  He sold his portion, though, and was therefore not party to the non-compete clause signed by the Busch family when InBev took over Anheuser-Busch in 2008.  Which means he can proudly link his new beer, Kräftig, to the family heritage.  There are two beers and although they are brewed to the standards of Reinheitsgebot--no cereal grains--they are firmly in the American mainstream.  It's currently contract-brewed in La Crosse, WI, but Busch plans to build a large production brewery in St. Louis.  Kräftig is a 5% lager with 13 IBUs, and Kräftig Light is 4.2% (exactly standard) and 9 IBUs.  This video pretty much lays out every talking point in the business plan--including some not-so-subtle shots at the guys across town.




So what's at stake? Anheuser-Busch brews 15 million barrels of beer at their St. Louis plant--more than all the craft beer produced at the 2000+ craft breweries in the country.  They have 20 plants in North America.  Then you have MillerCoors, which adds tens of millions of barrels more to the equation.  Mass market lager is huge business.  If you have this kind of volume, you really don't want the market to turn to IPAs because your brand is not IPA.  I have long expected mass market lagers to become more flavorful as they compete in a market where people expect flavor.  These are just the two data points, but it looks like the big companies are thinking the same thing, too.  They need to save the segment they dominate.  And they ain't gonna do that by brewing IPAs, shandies, or witbier. 

A Tune-up and a Question

At long last, I have had a chance to swab the decks on this garbage scow of a blog.  In a radical move, I've dumped the blogroll over in the left-hand column.  This was how we did things back in the early 2000s, when the internet was still run on a telegraph-based electronic chassis.  It was a stupid way to link between sites, and I mean that in the technical sense; it was not dynamic.  Links sat over there as the source sites mouldered or went off line.  No one clicked on them.  I have joined the late 2000s by adding the dynamic blogroll, which will take you to newly-updated posts.  Two categories, local and not local.  You might actually use the new version, and other bloggers will appreciate the traffic.

I'm also sorta halfty considering throwing the adsense widget back onto the site to see if I can earn my $4.93 a year.  As a now-unemployed writer, I can't sniff at a potential free pint of beer, even if it is just once annually.  The question is: how irritated would this make you on the following scale:

1. I will refuse to come here so long as you have that abomination staring back at me.
2. I think it's junky, cheap, and lame, but that's the nature of the internet.
3. I probably wouldn't even realize you'd added it.
4. I love this blog and not only do I support the idea, but I'll click the links so you can earn more money, you big, beautiful genius.

 I'd post this as a poll, but polldaddy has gone Wordpress and I don't have the time to find a widget.  But I would appreciate the feedback.

A Return to Regionalism?

Let us review: long ago, beer was a local product.  It was made in a town and drunk largely in that town.  Rare was the beer from another place--and it was just too expensive to make and ship to displace local beer.  Came the 18th and 19th centuries and their attendant technological breakthroughs, and beer got big.  Porter circled the globe.  Breweries powered by steam grew geometrically.  Even then, local beer dominated.  Then in the 20th century mass markets won out.  Regional breweries declined and multinationals seized counties, countries, continents.  In the US, everything became inverted so that the presence of a tap handle by a regional brewery was the rarity--mostly it was the standard national brands in every bar from Portland to Portland.

A few weeks ago, Harpoon sent me a press release announcing the 20th anniversary of their IPA.  Twenty years!  For an IPA, that's quite a thing.  I distinctly recall the first time I tasted this beer.  It was round about 1996 and I was meeting my future wife's family.  Mainers, they had mostly migrated south to the capital of Red Sox nation.  Sally's brother fetched a beer from the fridge and it was brightly-colored and bore a name perfect for Massachusetts (I thought of white whales).  There was no Sam Adams in the house--this was not regarded as an authentic New England tipple.  Harpoon IPA, that was the city's beer.

By modern standards, Harpoon is a pale ale, not an IPA--just 5.9% and 42 IBUs--but it was impressively ahead of the curve back then.  Dry-hopped with Cascades, it's round and caramelly (tres 1993) but quite sprightly with hops.  I think both he and I had placed a lot of faith in that bottle.  We both wanted it to meet with my approval, to illustrate that Boston had a Portland-worthy beer.  We were so pleased it did.

In England, if you travel more than 100 kilometers in any direction, the beer changes.  Actually, the crap beer is drearily the same no matter where you are--icy Kronenberg and Guinness and so on--but the cask beer reflects the place.  The entire island of Great Britain is no bigger than Minnesota, so I found this surprising.  I got Fuller's in London, Harvey's in Brighton, Greene King in Suffolk (okay, you can find Greene King everywhere, but this subverts my thesis so let's move on), Marston's in the Midlands and so on.  I was charmed by that and thought it one of the ways that Britain was superior to the United States, but it occurred to me much later that the United States is actually now very British.

If you go to a pub in Boston, you'll find mass market lagers, probably Sam Adams (a brewery that, no matter what locals think, is loath to cede the city), and Harpoon.  If you go to Chicago you'll find the mass markets, Goose Island, and what, Three Floyds?  (It's been too long.)  You come to Portland, Ore, and you'll actually be lucky to find a mass market beer in some places--otherwise it's a sea of locals.  The interesting thing is that you can't get Harpoon in Chicago,* and you can't get Three Floyds in Portland, and you can get almost nothing brewed in Portland outside the Pacific NW.

When I visit Boston, I always want a Harpoon.  It's a beer I associate with the city.  I know there is a ton of great beer in New England, and I also have a bird-dog's sense of flushing out something new.  But the first thing I want is the standard, the tuning fork for the region.  It's pretty hard to maintain the kind of dominance that was possible in the 90s, so probably Harpoon's flagship is no longer the Boston beer.  But it's one of them, and I have to wait until I'm on the East Coast to get a bottle.  And having to wait, having the beer be a part of that very particular point on the globe, makes it all the more special when I finally do.

Happy anniversary old boy, I hope you're around another twenty.

___________________
*I see Harpoon has made it to a half dozen pubs in Chicago, but again, as this subverts my thesis, let's forget it.

Old-School Barley Wines and Other Thoughts

Fred with the BridgePort Old Knucklehead that bore
his likeness.  Credit: Norm Schoen.

In the year of Deschutes' birth, 1988, I was twenty years old--which is to say well into my drinking career.  The Northwest was getting into hops by then, but the trend hadn't cohered into the categories we have now.  When breweries wanted to stagger you with hops, they tended to go big and brew barley wines*.  In retrospect, this was an interesting layer in the sediment of craft brewing.  By today's standards, those early barley wines weren't especially huge--seems like nine to eleven percent was the range--but they were crazy unbalanced.  The hops were screaming banshees of grating Chinooks placed atop a gelatinous goo the flavor and consistency of caramel sauce--everything was baled together with the razorwire of higher alcohols.  A lot of these came in wee nip bottles, which was a kindness to the customer who had to handle the damn things with tongs and gloves.  Let them age a few years and they softened into the texture of worn saddle, but that was as gentle as they ever got. (Old Crustacean is still made to what looks like a pretty classic recipe.)

So that was barley wine. 

A few weeks past, during the time my blogging was quick and cheap, I got a bottle of Deschutes collaboration Barley Wine Ale.   The conceit of was that:

Deschutes Brewery, North Coast Brewing Company and Rogue Ales have teamed up to create a traditional barley wine as the first in Deschutes Brewery’s Class of ’88 collaboration series. Each of the three breweries working on the project brewed their own interpretation of that original recipe. The Class of ’88 Barley Wine was based on the guide lines published in renowned beer connoisseur Fred Eckhardt’s The Essentials of Beer Style, which was originally published in 1988.

I must report with ambivalence that Deschutes' reboot isn't the least bit old school.  It's much more along the lines of what we now, in this much more taxonomically-precise era, would call a double IPA.  Barley Wine Ale has a snickerdoodle malt base and a rich fruitiness that is accentuated by melon-papaya hopping.  (In 1988, melons and papaya were available mainly in fruit and candy form, and certainly not humulus lupulus.  We also had to walk barefoot in the snow for 14 miles to get to a pub in order to procure a bottle of molten barley wine.)  The alcohol is very well hidden, coming in just at the end, when the hops turn spicy.  It has a mousse-like satiny body, quite rich, which is the one way in which it deviates from the modern imperial IPA, but it is not a caramel bomb, as beers of the 80s inevitably were.

If you actually want something that evokes the 80s--in a palatable 2013 kind of way--you might prefer Babylon, a beer Ninkasi calls a double IPA.  The malt bill, though, which relies heavily on bready Maris Otter, actually makes Babylon more reminiscent of those crazy old barley wines.  It's not an exact match: there's no caramel (the rest of the grist is a melange of malts from different brewing traditions) and the hops are a lot more marmalade-y than alley-catty.  There are El Dorados and Horizons--modern--but also old-timey EKGs, Fuggles, and Targets, which also remind me of the old days.  But it is quite a bitter blast, and the malting is thick and syrupy (if short of gelatinous).  For those of you who are younger than me--something like 60% of the population--and who live the terrible, benighted lives of plenty, Babylon isn't a bad place to start.  Throw in a splash of gasoline for the full effect.

As a last comment to the geezers, I invite you to mention your own recollections of the 80s and their hoppy beers.  Perhaps I'm just misremembering the beers of the day.  This is unlikely, but I'll entertain the question.

_________________
*Barley wine, not barleywine.  That latter term came about because the government wouldn't allow Fritz Maytag to properly label his first batch of Old Foghorn.  Apparently they believed it would confuse consumers, who might mistake it for Chardonnay. 

This First Thing Isn't Good, But This Other Thing Is

I'm in lounging mode, so expect blogging to continue to limp along lamely for a few more days.  In the meantime, here are a couple of things that caught my eye.  First up, from Yahoo, an article on "dying careers" young people should avoid and the new, glamorous jobs you should pursue that are taking their place.  Number two on their list:

Dying Career #2: Reporter

They say a species must adapt or die, and with the trend of the Internet replacing print journalism (you are reading this on the computer, after all), media folks who don't adjust might not survive too much longer. In short, many reporters could be going the way of their typewriters soon.

Projected Decline: Reporter and correspondent positions are expected to decline by 8 percent from 51,900 jobs in 2010 to 48,000 in 2020, for a total of nearly 4,000 jobs lost, says the U.S. Department of Labor

Why It's Dying: The Department of Labor says that because of the trend of consolidation of media companies and the decline in readership of newspapers, reporters will find there are fewer available jobs.

So, if you have a hankering for writing, you might look into...

Alternative Career: Public Relations Specialist

In the new world of Facebook, Twitter, and all things Web, the public image of a company has never been more important, and so the role of public relations specialist is a vital one...

This is so rich with cynical self-parody that I don't think further comment from me is necessary.

Our next topic is a good deal less bleak--indeed, it's downright hopeful.  Hat tip to Stan and Alan.



I love the idea of "farm breweries" and wonder if that couldn't work in Oregon, too?  The idea is cool:

Farm brewery license holders must use New York raw materials. Through 2018, 20 percent of the raw materials must come from the state. In 2023, that jumps to 60 percent, and after that, it goes to 90 percent. The phase-in period recognizes that New York hops and barley growers and malters can’t yet meet demand.

And it might even justify something that, in the Spokane case, just seems absurd.

Done.*

Yes, it's that long. 

_______________
*Context, for those of you who don't live in my brain.

Do Not Ask Me to Lie to My Readers

Man, this stuff really raises my dander.  In almost no case would I post a private email sent to me, but this--which obviously Dave also got (a follow up email apologized for the cut-and-paste error)--deserves a little disinfecting light. What the emailer is requesting is illegal.  It's skeezy.  And for god's sake, it's lazy.  Five minutes of cruising around my blog and this guy would have realized that I'm not going to be writing about auto law.  Crikey.

Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2013 3:58 PM
Subject: Sponsored Content Placement on Dave Knows Portland

Good Afternoon Dave,

My name is [redacted] and I represent an agency that specializes in online search engine optimization. I came across your blog while searching for popular blogs by Oregon locals. One of our clients is an auto law firm based in Oregon and is interested in placing content on various trusted blogs and websites. We are looking to place 2-3 permanently linked keywords with “dofollow” tags within the text of a post. The content placement requirements are as follows:

• Word count: 300-400 words
• General article about topic/keyword
• Unique content only (no copying from websites), paraphrasing/rewriting content is ok
• Anchor text should be in content body.

We can create a guest post or forward our links to bloggers who prefer to create their own content, we will also provide monetary compensation via PayPal to all bloggers.

If you’re interested please respond with rates and terms of agreement.

If you have any questions or concerns feel free to contact me.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Have a great day!

Regards,

Name redacted |  SEO Specialist

W E B M E T R O^®

Driven to Outperform^™

 

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This email message, including all attachments, is for the sole use of the intended recipients and may contain confidential and privileged information. If you are not the intended recipient, you may not use, disclose, copy, or disseminate this information. Please contact the sender by e-mail immediately and destroy all copies of the original message including all attachments. Your cooperation is greatly appreciated.

Incidentally, don't spam me, ask me to do something that violates federal law, and then append a confidentiality notice warning me not to disclose the "privileged information." 

John Harris's New Brewery: Ecliptic

Yesterday afternoon, in a fascinating location at the far northern end of Mississippi Avenue, John Harris (who? oh, come on, John Harris) unveiled the name of his new brewery--Ecliptic.  If you're looking south by southwest, you have a fantastic view of downtown and the Fremont Bridge.  Due south to south by southeast, you see a magnificent industrial tableau representative of the neighborhood that continues on for dozens of blocks through tangles of freeway and rail track.  The building itself is a huge and pretty modern warehouse (1976, according to Portland Maps) that will offer Harris tons to work with.  The name, as you'll hear, has a metaphoric component.  Everyone who knew the word "ecliptic" raise your hands.  (Mine's at my side.)

Below is his announcement captured with murky audio on my iphone, and below that some clearer photos.



John Harris's New Brewery from Jeff Alworth on Vimeo.

Spokane-Style Beer?

This topic is now bubbling up (see here, here, and here), and it's one I'd like to address more fully.  I throw it out there mainly to fire up the rage engine:

No-Li Brewhouse has been crafting beer in the Northwest since 1993. Their branding pays homage to their love of Spokane and the region. Now, No-Li has put Spokane on the map as a major force in the world of craft brews. Earlier this week No-Li announced that they have gotten federal approval for a new style of craft beer. Spokane-Style.

What makes a beer Spokane-Style? Well, first off it must be brewed and packaged in Spokane. But the origin of the beer goes beyond that. To be classified as Spokane-Style all the ingredients must come from within 300 miles of the city.

For the moment, I'll leave you with these questions: How does the federal use of the word "style" change its meaning?  Is 300 miles the right radius for a local style beer?  Why not 100?  500?  Is this a good precedent?  Will designations like "Spokane style" be a boon or curse to consumers? 

Big and Little News of the Day

I somehow missed this:

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

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

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

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

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

What's next--Peeterman?  Doble doble?

Irresistible To All: Mass Market Lagers Compared (Part 2)

My survey of mass market lagers continued last night (part one is here), with more revelations and insights.  Minor ones, perhaps, but insights nevertheless.  Yesterday's batch was clustered much more around the median beer than the first, which featured impressive winners and losers--and glory of glories, we had only one skunked beer in batch two.  I'll list the beers again for you, and you can consider which came out on top. (Countries listed are origin, not necessarily where the beer was made.)

• Coors (US) "The legend since 1873"
• Kirin Ichiban (Japan) "One of the world's most unique beers"
• Kona Longboard (US) "Island lager"
• Miller Genuine Draft (US) "Fresh draft taste/frescura y sabor"
• Pacifico (Mexico) "Imported beer/brewed in Mexico"
• Sapporo (Japan) "Irresistible to all ... masterpiece of the brewer's art"
• Singha (Thailand) "The original Thai beer"
• Spaten (German) "Premium lager" 

Now, while you're considering those, let me mention that this batch contained three beers I'm quite familiar with, and as I was drinking them, the role of familiarity and nostalgia came into focus.  I can't drink a Miller without thinking of my youth.  Miller and Hamm's were two of my go-to cheapies, and that spritzy corn beer holds a lot of associations.  Singha I drank in Thailand, one of the nicest countries on the planet, and its slightly rough malt and lemongrass character remind me of heat, humidity, and Phad Thai.  Finally, Pacifico is my current go-to beer for hot days.  There's something similar among the Mexican beers, and of these, Pacifico is my fave.  Maybe it's the sunny yellow label or the association I have with it as a summer beer, or the slight exotica it brings with it when it comes across the border.  In each case, it's actually impossible for me to decouple the mental associations from the flavor.  This is our boon and our curse as humans--we have big, flamboyant brains that we use for silly things like investing meaning in cheap beer and remembering lyrics to bad songs.  C'est la vie.

Anyway, to the beers.  The easy winner was Longboard Lager, but I wouldn't call it a ringer.  It is very much brewed to be a mass market lager.  It's the kind of beer I could hand to my father and he'd agree that it was beer.  Perhaps rich and "European" tasting, but beer.  It's got just 20 IBUs and 4.6% alcohol, and could never be mistaken for a pilsner.  Yet it is very full in flavor, with a kiss of toast on a grainy malt bed and a bright, slightly lemony dusting of hops.  (Full Sail Session Lager, by contrast, really isn't brewed to compete with these beers.  My dad would politely have one and then head back for a can of Busch.)

The Japanese acquit themselves nicely.  Kirin, which I have drunk very rarely, was hugely floral--Sally said Gardenia--and had a sweet honey malt base.  It was lush and tropical.  Sapporo started out tropical, with a touch of lychee, but then warmed into that classic very dry, toasty profile I associate with the Japanese.

Miller Genuine Draft is spritzy but a bit thin.  When cold, it has a subtle white wine note (Riesling?) that fades into a more pronounced corny flavor as the beer warms.  If you want to really get a sense of American beer and the effect of corn, Miller's your beer.  Coors has more body and is crisper, but is fairly neutral on the palate.

Pacifico is surprisingly full-bodied in comparison with these others, especially the American beers.  You think of hot-climate beer and you think crisp and light.  The malts are toasty and I couldn't find any cereal malts with my tongue and nose; anyone know what the grist is?  Singha beer (don't ask no questions, Singha beer, don't tell no lies) has a flavor that I pick up in many Asian beers all the way to India, and I would love to know what it is.  It's a bit rough, a bit grassy.  Singha is distinctive, but not in uniformly positive ways.  Nevertheless, I am powerless to resist its charms.

Spaten was skunked.  (Though I've had the beer fairly often, and it's a good one.  Spaten Lager is not exactly a helles--it's fizzier and has less prominent malt character--but does have the density and richness you'd expect from an all-barley beer.)

The survey was by no means complete.  Mexico and Canada were under-represented; Japan probably over-.  But this wasn't a bad start.  Perhaps I'll make another round, but perhaps not.  At a certain point, you come to the place of diminishing returns. 

Your thoughts?

Beer Sold at the Grocery Store is Fair Game

In response to my mass market tasting, part one, Jack writes:

re: lightstuck Stella and Beck's
For fairness, you should seek non-abused beers for comparison. Eg, a bottle from the middle of a light blocking cardboard carton box or canned beer.

Absolutely not.   I made sure to purchase the beer at a high-volume grocery store (Freddy's), but I bought the samples in a manner I could afford (twenty half-racks, just to get one beer from each that's not lightstruck, is crazy).  Where possible, I tried to determine how fresh the beer was, though not all breweries make that easy.  And come on: American breweries have figured out that if you're going to package your beer for appearance, you use hop extracts that lack the compound that gets lightstruck.  If you're going to sell me a bottle of beer in a green bottle, you can't say it's "unfair" of me to have noticed that it's skunked.  There is a lot that is out of a brewery's hands once a palette of beer leaves the brewery, but not that.

Indeed, it's naked contempt for your customers to sell them beer in a green bottle.  The brewery knows it's going to get skunked, but makes a calculation that the customer can be won over by a big ad campaign, anyway.  I want to give every brewery a fair shake.  I strongly reject the false correlation of brewery size and beer quality.  But if you don't want beer writers to excoriate you for selling skunked beer, don't sell the damned stuff in green bottles.  It's very fair for me to taste the beer the brewery puts on grocery shelves. 

Mass Market Lagers Compared (Part 1)

I have always intended to do a survey of mass market lagers, and there's nothing like a book chapter to bring urgency to such a plan.  So on Wednesday I went out and rounded up a bunch of them (there are tons, more than you probably imagine) and last night Sally and I cracked open the first chunk.  To make this interesting, I will list the beers I tried and you can guess which were the tastiest.  I'd put one head and shoulders above the rest, another two were quite nice, two were skunked (green bottles!) but somewhat discernible, and one was really quite bad.  So the challenge--which was the really good and which the really bad?  (I've listed the countries of origin, not necessarily where they were produced.)

• Asahi Super Dry (Japan)
• Beck's (Germany)
• Carlsberg (Denmark)
• Foster's (Australia)
• Heineken (Netherlands)
• Peroni (Italy)
• Steinlager (New Zealand)
• Stella Artois (Belgium)
• Warsteiner (Germany)

Mass Market Lagers

Note: Post has been updated.

As you may have guessed from my most recent brewery tour, I'm working on a portion of the book involving what we variously call "macro" lagers.  Nomenclature and taxonomy are interesting here.  For some reason, people have felt it necessary to make separate categories for a ton of beers that consumers think of as one continuum--examples like Budweiser, Bud Light, Singha, Foster's, Stella Artois, Kirin, Pacifico, and so on.  Most countries have these beers, and the similarities far outweigh the differences.  Yet distinguish people do.

Here's how the BJCP does it:

• "Lite" American lagers (why does the BJCP use that spelling?)
• Standard American lagers
• Premium American lagers
• Helles
• Dortmund export

For reference, Kirin would be a "standard American Lager," while Singha would be a premium.  Clear?

BeerAdvocate, which speaks for the mind of the beer geek, does it this way:

• American Adjunct Lager 
• American Malt Liquor 
• American Pale Lager 
• Light Lager

By their lights, Budweiser is an adjunct lager while Kirin (also made with rice) is an American pale lager.

In my book, I have decided to dispense with these categories.  There's something supremely bizarre about using American brewing and its attendant prejudices to conceptualize style.  It's just silly to call a Japanese lager made with rice an "American lager" (standard or pale) while Budweiser, an American lager made with rice, is an adjunct or "premium" lager.  Those divisions of standard and premium (along with super-premium) are marketing artifacts of the pre-craft brewing era that the large American companies used to distinguish between pretty well indistinguishable beers.

The beer geek framework is equally dubious.  "Adjunct" is propaganda, too.  It's what the Brewers Association used to distinguish their membership from the big companies--more marketing--but it's ahistorical and misleading.  There's nothing wrong with adjuncts.  In saisons, the beer geeks' beer, we celebrate them.  But in our own indigenous beers, where corn and rice are as American an expression as invert sugar is in English brewing, they are somehow the stain of shame. Don't buy the hype.

The story of how there came to be mass-market beer is much like the stories of how there came to be mass-market everything: the industrial revolution made it possible to mass-produce beer, which led to mass marketing and mass distribution, the practices of standardization and preservation. In this way, beer isn’t much different from meat or bread or cheese. The development of mass markets make it possible to manufacture and distribute a product cheaply, putting it in front of the largest number of people possible. Tailoring products for huge populations, in beer as much as other product categories, necessarily meant appealing to the center of the bell curve, where most people’s tastes congregate. When made to serve the median palate, products lose their thorns and idiosyncracies and become a more generic, bland version of the thing. More or less, that was the story of the 20th century in beer just as much as it was in other products.

Kirin reflects the mass tastes of Japan the way Budweiser reflects the mass tastes of the US and Singha the mass tastes of Thailand.  To try to distinguish these in terms of their taxonomy misses the forest for the trees.  To add a moral component by focusing on ingredients is also a matter of putting on blinders.  These are a category because they evolved to appeal to the largest group in a population.  That's what distinguishes them.  There are a few wrinkles we can argue over, like light beer and malt liquor, but I'm defaulting to "mass market lagers" when I can see no other reason to try to sort beers like Singha, Budweiser, and Foster's.


Update.  In a case of synchronicity, Pete Brown has posted a fascinating video illustrating my point.   For what it's worth, my own experience at Budweiser was completely different.  In several hours of my tour, the only question anyone dodged was about future projects--which isn't actually a dodge, but prudence.  I would use the video to illustrate the nature of the product, not the perfidy of the makers.  Had the filmmaker been speaking to a brewer, this would have been a very different video.

The Mothership in St Louis is ... Gorgeous

There were a few things I didn't anticipate about the main Anheuser-Busch brewery in St Louis.  I've never seen a 15 million barrel brewery, and somehow in my imagination, it was appropriately scaled up--mash tuns as big as city blocks, fermenters that could do double-duty as oil tankers.  That was silly and naive, a mistake I recognized the minute I saw how AB does it.  (A complex matrix of big but not insane vessels that dance through intricate choreography to push through lots of beer in a day.)  But it was not naive of me to imagine that the place would look like an industrial plant.  I've been to smaller big breweries that did.  Paulaner does five million hectos and it's beautifully steampunk fused with 70s utilitarianism. 

But no, the Budweiser brewery is gorgeous--probably the prettiest I've ever seen:

It's a turn-of-the-(20th)-century gravity brewery with a soaring atrium, chandeliers made to look like hop vines (they were made for the 1904 St Louis World's Fair), tiled artwork, and incredibly gracious space.  You can see the equipment peeking out to the left in the picture above; here's what it looks like at eye-level:

And here was my tour guide, the gregarious and affable Jim Bicklein, master brewer at the St Louis brewery (AB has eleven others in the US and 8 more in Canada), standing in front of the equally-impressive building exterior.  

I'll try to give a report of the visit in a couple weeks--when my brain can handle a little blogging.  It was eye-opening and intriguing, and like nearly every brewery I've visited, made me think more deeply about the nature of beer.

Next Stop St Louis

It is exactly 24 days until the manuscript for the Beer Bible is due (current length, 211k words), which means blogging is going to get extremely bad for a period closely corresponding to that period.  Yes, yes, I know: how will you be able to tell?  Badda boom! 

If there is any blogging to be done, it might relate to a trip I'm taking on Thursday and Friday to tour the mothership in St Louis.  I should also get a chance to try some beers by local craft breweries (Perennial, Urban Chestnut, Schlafly's).  On the other hand, it's a blitzkrieg trip and I will be either busy or wrecked most of the time, so you never know.

Credit: Dave Ibison

I leave you with some final thoughts I had in an email exchange with Dave McLean at Magnolia Pub and Brewery this weekend.  Magnolia, for those of you who aren't familiar with your Haight Street breweries, is a place for session ales on cask.  Magnolia has multiple bitters (the biggest clocks in at less than 5%) and two milds.  I have not had a chance to visit Magnolia, but I've weirdly been lucky enough to try the milds, which is what we were discussing.  I wondered how he could sell these little lovelies when here in Oregon our sessions start at 5%.  He said:

I guess the short explanation has something to do with the if you build it they will come notion. These kinds of beers have been some of my earliest inspirations as a brewer and from day one at Magnolia, I set out to brew them, turn people onto them, and educate about them. I think we make it such a focal point of what we do and train our staff to spread the good word about them, too, that in the end, we've managed to somehow convert a lot of people and become known for these styles of beer more than any other.

That's hopeful--now I just need to con a brewery to follow Dave's lead or con Ted to open a Brewers Union in Portland.   But he also said this, and I'm wondering what you think:

I agree that it is a little like swimming upstream against a massive current of hops and high abv's but it's working for us and I think maybe we're poised to take advantage of the second look session beers are starting to get. 

Sessions rising?  Is this true?  Wishful thinking?   Consider it an invitation to opine.

Do We Need a State Microbe?

No one doubts that Wisconsin is America's Dairyland (except in Tillamook County), nor that Georgia is for peaches in much the way Idaho is for russets and Maine for lobsters.  But will Oregon be known for microbes if state representative Mark Johnson has his way?

Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a Latin mouthful commonly known as brewer's yeast, could become the official state microbe, joining the ranks of the beaver, western meadowlark and the thunderegg as an official state symbol. Rep. Mark Johnson, R-Hood River, brought the idea to the Legislature as a way to celebrate the state's microbrew movement. His district is home to some of the state's most popular breweries.

(Incidentally, I'd like to point out that it's April 4, not 1.  This is not a fake.)  Someone should probably have pointed out that the microbe does triple duty; it ferments wine as well and is also the organism that gives bread dough a rise.  Come on, Representative Johnson, get your blocs together! 

The real questions are these: 1) do state symbols really do anything, and 2) is this really more pressing than higher ed funding and PERS reform?  As to the first question, I suppose a small number of state symbols do benefit homegrown industry: probably hazelnuts and cranberries get a boost by local boosterism.  It is difficult to imagine that a creature no one can see with their naked eye (except in the collective) and a name no one can pronounce could be of much use.  Wyeast Labs would probably be pretty psyched, though.  (Take that, Chris White!)  As to the second: no. 

Ah, it's a slow beer news Thursday, isn't it?

Where America's Cultural (and beer?) Boundaries Lie

I have long been fascinated by American culture.  I grew up in the Mountain West, a flinty, hardscrabble region where life is as spare as the high desert, and the people are as tenacious as sagebrush.  When people say the "Pacific Northwest," they often include Idaho, my birthplace.  It's absurd--Boise is five hundred miles from the sea.  You can drive from Munich to the Czech Republic and then to Austria, detouring into Slovakia and then drop into Budapest, Hungary in the same distance.  What would the cultural Pacific Northwest look like?  How about this:

What you're looking at is the result of some very interesting research.  A physicist named Dirk Brockmann was looking for sources of data to show mobility within the US.

[H]e stopped by the home of his old friend Dennis Derryberry in the green mountains of Vermont. Over a beer on the porch, he told Derryberry about his research. Derryberry asked: "Do you know about WheresGeorge.com?" You can think of WheresGeorge.com as a primitive FourSquare for $1 bills. "Georgers"--as users call themselves--"check in" their bills by entering the zip codes and serial numbers, then write or stamp "wheresgeorge.com" on the bill. If someone finds the bill and enters it again, they get a "hit."

What he deduced from those data were a theory he calls "effective boundaries"--those natural regions defined by affinity, not lines on a map.  The Northwest, you'll note, looks exactly like you'd expect it to.  It captures Northern California, as Jefferson Staters always knew it should.  That chunk of Malheur County where most of my family comes from in Eastern Oregon is properly aligned with Idaho--as I experienced the region in my youth.  Northern Idaho--Sandpoint, Coeur d'Alene--are part of the Spokane region, not the Boise region. Behold the rest of the country:

I have a strong suspicion that if you could map beer affinities, you'd find a map very similar to this one--at least here out west.  To the rest of the world, it's West Coast whatever (pale, IPA, red).  But everyone north of California sort of hates the Golden State (recall the Henry's ads?), which in turn thinks of Oregon roughly as often as it thinks of British Columbia.   Colorado roughly stands alone--as it does in the beer world, too.  California is part of a giant sunbelt.  I'm surprised to see a bright line separating Wisconsin and Minnesota, but not at all surprised to see that New England is one unified Red Soxistan.  That's exactly what it feels like there.

At the end of the day, it's all culture.

Pope Francis to Trappists: No More Beer

I don't follow the papacy too closely, but it's been a high-profile two weeks for the new pontiff, from his casual manner to washing the feet of Muslim girls.  But now he's gone too far.

In his first message to monastic communities across Europe, Francis urged a "less mercantile" approach to financial independence.  He praised Benedictine and Trappist monasteries for their welcoming, engaged approach to surrounding communities, but warned that the Catholic Church should not get too involved in "retail" enterprises.  Many non-profits, he pointed out, raise funds easily enough without resorting to cheese and jelly sales.

Francis also singled out the handful of Trappist monasteries producing beer in Europe, adding that anything that "interfered with clear devotion" was not a proper function for Church brothers.  Church traditionalists, already in turmoil over early actions by the new pope, were left reeling by the news.  

You think Westvleteren is expensive now?  Wait until they they quit making it.  The black market will be huge.