There Are No Good Arguments For Overpaying

Yesterday's light post--part of my only half-serious whinge series--provoked a surprising amount of very serious pushback.  A few of the comments appeared here, but far more on Facebook--the platform to which most discussion seems to be moving.  That pushback flowed down three main channels, and we shall deal with them all in due course.  However, just so we don't bury the lede too deeply: they're all wrong.  In this omnibus response, I explain why.

Filling Bombers is Ungodly Expensive
This is the most superficially persuasive case. In comments below, Frank White (who sent us unnecessarily down the rabbit hole of the culture wars), puts it this way:

A small brewery using a third party to bottle beer in small batches -- beer that cost the small guy a lot more per oz to produce, due to diseconomies of scale -- is going to have WAY higher costs of production than even a good-sized craft brewery. Try 2x.

On Facebook, TS, a brewery insider, statted it out:

For reference, let's consider a 10 BBL system. Considering grain, taxes, labor the cost per BBL is approx $105.00  Adding the costs of bottles, crowns, labels, packaging labor (assuming $12.00/Hr) this extrapolates to approx. 1,800 22 ounce bottle sales units.... If we use $5.58 as a retail price point for the 22 ounce bottle ... that yields the following Gross Marginal Profits: $10,064.29 per batch bnd Net a Marginal Profit of $6,644.86.

I truncated the quote because he also gave the stats on ten barrels converted to six packs (net marginal profit of $4,684.44 per batch).  Others made similar points, but these are the most cogent.

I think it's pretty clear from TS's numbers that 22s are plenty profitable.  But that's actually beside the point.  It's irrelevant what it costs the brewery.  If a certain package is twice as expensive as a competing package for the consumer, then it's too damn expensive.  Why on earth should anyone pay twice the cost for the privilege of drinking someone's beer?  If your business model depends on selling in a package that is twice as expensive as a competing package, maybe you need to rethink your business model.  But that is, in no case, the consumer's responsibility.  


You Need to Pay More or Risk Losing Your Fave Little Brewery
This is related to the point above, at least in spirit, but it is no more correct:

Here's an interesting thought, if the market says a 22 is worth $5.50 and your a small brewer struggling to make every dollar count, why would you price your beer less? Ever hear the one about an artist who wasn't selling any paintings until he tripled his prices?

I think everyone needs to reconsider this idea that small breweries are such hopeless business ventures.  There are struggling breweries in Oregon, but their numbers are dwarfed when compared to businesses struggling in any other market system.  You are a customer, not a brewery owner, and you need to think of your own interests. You are not responsible for keeping them in the black.  There's an obvious reason breweries are opening so fast: they're very lucrative businesses. If you want to frequent your corner brewpub to make sure they stay around, great.  But don't feel like you need to pay extra to subsidize breweries who would otherwise instantly be forced to make Hamm's.  



Other People are Paying a Lot for Beer, so You Should, Too
That title pretty much rebuts itself, but I'll go ahead and give you the arguments first:

Isn't all pricing based upon what people can get?

and

The people in just about every other major city in the country must be laughing hard at these PDX price complaints. Beer is more expensive just about anywhere else, and we shouldn't be surprised that as our city gets more media attention, more people move here, and property values, costs, etc. increase, that the beer prices will too.

This point contradicts the first point, which contended that small breweries have to charge a lot or face doom.  Here the argument is, "breweries can get away with huge mark-ups, so why are you bitching?"  Well, yes, they are getting away with large mark-ups.  That was the point of my earlier point--it feels price-gougey and I'm not high on it.  Arguing for price-gouging is an odd position to stake out.


Who Cares About a Few Bucks?
Some folks apparently have lavish beer budgets and so don't mind over-paying.  They think you shouldn't mind, either:

If you're pinching pennies to such an extent where you're seriously worried about a dollar here or there going toward supporting the bottom line of breweries you like (those guys aren't exactly getting rich and rolling in money), you should probably consider cutting beer out of your budget altogether.

and

Oh, FFS... people pay $5.50, or even $8.99, for a bomber because it simply isn't worth quibbling over the spare change between that and what they "ought" to charge. Is it less than 2 pints at the pub? Yes. Do they like the beer? Yes. Buy it, drink it, stop whining. If you're really that price sensitive, maybe you should be drinking water instead.

Okay, first of all, there are a lot of people pinching pennies.  We've just come out of the worst recession since the 30s.  Young people are living at home and working three part-time jobs.  They do not have tons of extra money laying around in piles on the floor.

But there's a reason everyone should care about this.  One of beer's central selling points is that it's a working class, everyday drink.  You buy a sixer for the week, you go to the pub after work.  It's affordable.  Craft beer is enjoying a moment of huge popularity right now that is almost certainly evanescent.  How long the moment lasts depends in some large part on how long people continue to invest in it.  All this excitement and growth depends on consumer interest.  If you start pricing beer like wine, you will lose the bottom half of your consumer base.  Beer has always swung back and forth between being a commodity product and a craft product.  We're in a craft phase right now, but there's absolutely nothing that says we have to remain in it.  If breweries start charging the same amount for a bottle of beer that good wineries do, the jig is up.  Price inflation is bad for beer, not good.  

I await your merry agreement in comments--

I HAVE A MINOR COMPLAINT: The Bombers Are Too Damn High

Bill Night has his latest survey of Portland beer prices out this week, and I want to draw your attention to one of his findings:

• 22-ounce bombers: $5.58

Five-fifty eight for 22 ounces of beer?  That's too damn high!*  It's almost exactly twice the cost per ounce as the average six-pack and getting perilously close to the average pint of a pub pour.  In fact, it's the same price as an average happy-hour pint. Due to a weird quirk in his sample, the bomber price actually down from last quarter, too.   For the visually-oriented:

Pints, of course, carry with them the costs of the structure in which you enjoy them and the paycheck of the barkeep (among others) who's pouring them.  What justifies the exorbitant price of a slightly larger bottle with no six-pack cardboard carrying-case?  Not that these are specialty beers made expensively or priced for rarity; nope, they're standard locally-made beers.  There can be only one reason: that people will pay it.   Stop it!

It's highway robbery and I for one planning on shaking my fist impotently at the bomber section of my local beer retailer until prices come down.

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*If you don't get the reference, you've missed something special.

Exciting New Blog!

I wanted to alert you to a new project of mine.  Once a week, I'll be doing a blog over at All About Beer.  My debut post dropped today (every time people are trying to hype something, they say it "dropped) and you can find it here.  It begins:

Every beer-drinking country has a particular relationship to the beer it brews. Germans treat their lagers as a sacred trust, and breweries often have the text of Reinheitsgebot posted like a prayer on the wall. Italians are the quickest to think of their local ales as part of the gastronomic landscape—they brew with an eye to the dinner table. Americans have replaced a focus on quantity for one of quality, but in both cases there’s a maximalist orientation; now we count IBUs instead of empty cans.

The Czechs are the most interesting...

Please go and read the whole thing.  I'd love to affirm AAB's confidence in me with decent traffic, so help a brother out and click through.  Tom Acitelli has been doing some great history pieces, and John Holl even weighs in from time to time.  I'm hoping we can build a bit of a following for the online work we're doing over there.  Go have a look.

Incidentally, that blog is lightly linked to my (forever) forthcoming opus, The Beer Bible, and it shares the title.  I'll keep alerting you when posts go up there, at least for the near future.

Hey, what are you doing still reading this blather--go check out my post.

The Dark Side of Booze

The Washington Post's Wonkblog has a great piece up today about American alcohol consumption patterns.  In particular, they include this graph, which illustrates two things very clearly:

First, almost all Americans have a healthy relationship to alcohol.  Second, a minority have a really unhealthy relationship.

Seventy percent of the population barely even drink.  Even looking at the 81-90th percentile, that group consumes just a bit more than two drinks a day.  (For men, two drinks a day is actually--if inconclusively--associated with positive health outcomes.)  But then we get to that last decile.  People in that group consume over 10 drinks a day--or three times as much as the bottom 90% combined.

This is the dark side of alcohol, and one those of us who make or write about booze should consider seriously.  The great majority of the alcohol consumed in the US--and I think this trend is typical worldwide--is being consumed by just a few people, probably all of them alcoholics by any definition.  The uncomfortable reality, as Philip J. Cook (Paying the Tab) describes in the article, is this:

"One consequence is that the heaviest drinkers are of greatly disproportionate importance to the sales and profitability of the alcoholic-beverage industry," he writes writes. "If the top decile somehow could be induced to curb their consumption level to that of the next lower group (the ninth decile), then total ethanol sales would fall by 60 percent."

(It's worth acknowledging that consumption patterns by those drinking Cantillon and Château Latour are probably different than drinkers of Popov vodka.  Because it is a relative luxury, I would guess that good beer is the choice of more people in the 60th-90th percentiles than the chart above reflects.  But as it gets more popular, it will naturally come to resemble national trends.) 

Just something to remind ourselves every now and again.

What We Write About When We Write About Beer

Over the past month, I have been part of a four-person team judging magazine articles for the North American Guild of Beer Writers' annual contest.  We had 34 entries that were published in probably ten different publications, and they ranged from very short reviews to lengthy pieces on styles, equipment, or process.  One entry on a bit of brewing history ran on for thirty pages.  When you immerse yourself that deeply into something, you have a chance to see patterns and habit--not all of them good.  (I've written a few articles this year, and I recognized my own culpability in this.)  So as a public service, here are a few takeaways about how we can write more interesting, less repetitive stories.

• Vary the structure.  This is how the vast majority of stories unfold: 1) anecdote about how a brewery does something, 2) expository about the subject of the article, 3) more brewery anecdotes that buttress the theme.  This is a classic form, and it's going to be hard to break the habit, partly because we like stories.  But so many of the anecdotes are repetitive--they start with a description of how some brewery does something, as if it's a wholly unprecedented.  Craft brewing is no longer new and exciting--we need to seed our articles with something more unexpected.   

• Vary the quotes.  Gary Fish is doing something right.  He was quoted in tons of the articles we reviewed.  So were Ken Grossman, Jim Koch, and Sam Calagione.  We really need to do a better job of finding different voices to speak for the brewers.  

• Be more critical. Critics rightly fault writers for fawning over breweries, but we do it subtly and inadvertently.  Many of the articles we write begin with the narrative as brewers would tell it, and then unfold from their point of view.  We select a topic, go interview a bunch of people, and then write what they say.  This is reportage, but it's not great reportage.  As writers, we need to figure out a way to write about beer so that it's not just a kind of soft promotion.

• Find new ways to talk about beer.  The extended world of beer has a nearly infinite number of subjects to discuss, and yet we tend to pull out the same tired templates to discuss things.  I haven't quite figured out how to address this one, but it's a real issue.  If we were to go back in time to before Michael Jackson wrote about beer and entirely reinvent the way we write and talk about beer, what would it look like? 

For those of you who read beer books, magazines, and blogs, what would you like to see change?  Where do we need to go as we evolve?

The Nature of Saison

Suffering under some serious deadline pressures early this week, so blogging is (not unusually) crappy just now.  Nevertheless, I stumbled across this quote, which I haven't shared and don't think will be going into The Beer Bible.  But it's way to good to moulder on my hard drive.  The speaker is Olivier DeDeycker, the brewer and one of the owners of Brasserie Dupont.  I believe the phrase "microbiological intervention" is one of the loveliest I've ever encountered.

_______

Photo by Chuck Cook.

“With this barley malt they are brewing some beer, and that beer had second fermentation in wood barrels.  It was drunk in the summer by the people who worked in the fields.  So we speak of a beer with a low alcohol content, high bitterness, no residual sugar, so a refreshing beer.  It was what we call in Belgium bière de saison, saison beer, brewed in the winter and drunk in the summer.  They were brewing in the winter for microbiological reasons, to avoid [inaudible]--but with wood barrels, with the basic materials they had, of course I am sure they had some lactic.  It could improve the refreshing character of the product.  At this time they would have beer that was totally different from another one from the next year due to microbiological intervention.  We have to have something more standard, which is why we work with cultured yeast and we try to avoid any parasites.  In Dupont we work with a mix of different yeasts so we can have some difference--but that we [can] accept.”

Beer Sherpa Recommends: Únětická 12°

Source: Prague Beer Garden

The following post should be treated something like a public service announcement for travelers to the Czech Republic.  The beer I'm about to recommend can't be had for any price in the US, and isn't entirely easy to find even in Prague, near to where it is brewed.  And yet, should you find yourself in Prague, this is the beer you should seek.  Others might guide you to Klášterní Strahov or Kout na Šumavě (or any of a dozen or more reasonable candidates), and I enjoyed those, too--enormously.  But in the end, the one that kept calling out to me--the one that still calls out to me--is a 12° pale lager from a little brewery about 10 miles north of Prague.

The Únětický Pivovar is housed in a building where monks from Prague started brewing beer in 1710.  Brewing activities eventually stopped, but in 2010, local businessmen in the town of Únětice decided to turn it back into a brewery.  The first beers were brewed in 2011, and were instantly popular.  When I visited Prague back in 2012, Max Bahnson took me out to the brewery where we had lunch and a quick tour.  I was incredibly sick and nursing a sore head from the previous day's tour with Max, and sort of shuffled through the brewery tour.  But then we emerged into the restaurant to have lunch, and I sat down and drank a glass of the stuff.  (In the classic Czech meal, you get a meaty entree drenched in gravy and a row of thick, doughy disks which are called, curiously, dumplings.  They're unlike dumplings as we imagine them, but they're spectacular for soaking up beer and gravy.  And, it turns out, battling the flu.  I instantly put them to work that day.)

Production is small enough that they were still at the
grain-sack stage in 2012.

What followed was one of those clouds-parting-and-sunbeam-shining-down moments of transcendence that beer drinkers experience only on very rare occasions.  I think I was actually drinking the 10° that day, though I've since had more of the twelve.  It's difficult to describe exactly why this half-liter had ascended into that rare upper atmosphere of specialness.  There wasn't anything particularly unique at play: it had the same homey, fresh-bread malt base and tangy Czech-malt zing that the best světlý ležáks have.  It was just better.

The restaurant

I've come to recognize Únětická 12° by a rusticity that has something in common--at least in spirit--with saisons.  When the brewery first made the beer, they only let it lager about three weeks in order to get product out to people.  It was unfiltered and had a shimmering haziness.  Through Max's translation, they told me “We realized that if the 12º lagers for longer than a month, it will get too clear and in the pubs they will complain that it is too clear.  They want more yeast.”  As a consequence, they now lager it only three weeks.  Perhaps one of the things going on is that the elements are not quite as smooth as they are in beer lagered over a month--the malts are a bit grainier, the hops a bit more vivid.  The beer is very dry and there's a hard-water mineral note that sharpens those hops.  The best beers have an ineffable (and indescribable) character of harmony, and that's the final element of Únětická 12°. For my money, it's the best beer in the Czech Republic.

Look for it if you go to Prague.

_______________________
"Beer Sherpa Recommends" is an irregular feature.  In this fallen world, when the number of beers outnumber your woeful stomach capacity by several orders of magnitude, you risk exposing yourself to substandard beer.  Worse, you risk selecting substandard beer when there are tasty alternatives at hand.  In this terrible jungle of overabundance, wouldn't it be nice to have a neon sign pointing to the few beers among the crowd that really stand out?  A beer sherpa, if you will, to guide you to the beery mountaintop.  I don't profess to drink all the beers out there, but from time to time I stumble across a winner and when I do, I'll pass it along to you.

The Birthplace of Modern Beer

There are a number of very cool breweries in the world, and I have been fortunate to visit some of them--the foeders of Rodenbach, the koelschip of Cantillon.  I've stood under Crown street at the sprawling Greene King brewery, where beer is pumped to the packaging plant.  Uerige still uses a baudelot chiller; Schlenkerla smokes their own malt--and I got to see both.  But there is no brewery that has had a greater impact on brewing history than the one in Plzeň, České republice.  It's not even close, actually.  When the brewery we now call Pilsner Urquell first made a pale lager 172 years ago, it changed the course of brewing forever.

Pilsner is the world's most popular beer, by miles and miles.  It's made in every country where beer is allowed, and owns something like--just spitballing now--90%+ of the total world production.  It's almost never the case that we can trace some seismic event back to a single place and know the single moment, but with pilsner's birth, we can. No doubt everyone in blogland knows the story, but here's a few sentences to set the stage.

Back in the late 1830s, the beer in Pilsen (about sixty miles southwest of Prague) was bad.  So bad, in fact, that in 1838, local officials rounded up 36 barrels of the stuff and dumped it.  For the most part, Czechs made ales then, but they were aware of lagers and wanted some of their own. Local burghers--citizens with special rights to brew--decided to take action.  They hired a local architect and sent him off to Munich to learn about how lager breweries were built, because they aimed to step up their game and make it as well as the Bavarians.  To make sure the beer was properly made, they even hired a Bavarian brewer to make the beer.  As a final touch, they built a kiln at the brewery "equipped in the English manner" that could produce pale malts.

The rest is history.  That brewer, Josef Groll, brewed his beer on October 5, 1842, and it was released on November 11.  (We even know the date!)  The first truly pale lager was born, and the revolution was under way.

The brewery itself should be considered a world heritage site--at least to those of us who value such things--and is one of the prettiest breweries on the planet.  The last time I traveled through the Czech Republic, I didn't really blog about it.  (Budvar got a better account.)  So when Mark Dredge sent me an email about a month ago asking if I'd like to go tour it again--on Pilsner Urquell's dime--what do you think I told him?  It gave me another chance to give a proper account of it, one I wasn't going to miss.

The Beer
It sometimes happens that a beer has such dominion over a style that subsequent examples are a half-step back from the original.  Eventually, the original can start to seem slightly out of step with what is "typical."  It's the case with dark, spicy Schneider Weisse, and it's the case with Pilsner Urquell.

Compared to other světlý ležáks, Pilsner is an odd duck.  It's roughly a 12-degree beer, but comes in at just 4.4% alcohol.  Yet it's also quite hoppy, with IBUs in the upper 30s.  It's got a caramelly backdrop and comes, at least in Czech, with a two-inch pile of snowy foam.  The most curious thing, though, is that dollop of diacetyl in the middle that is key to the beer's character.  For contrast, Budvar is 5%, but only has 22 IBUs--and no diacetyl.  This odd balance point--lots of residual sugar, lots of hops--makes for a rich, full-flavored beer.  That diacetyl center adds a sensual creaminess that makes it such an easy drinker.  It's altogether an unusual beer, even for the Czech Republic.  As I sampled my way around, I found that dryness was by far more characteristic of the pale lagers there--indeed, I think of dryness as being a hallmark of that type.  But not for Pilsner Urquell.



The City

If you arrive in town by train, as I did on my first visit, you can be fooled into thinking Plzeň (let's go with Pilsen henceforth, shall we?) is a tiny town.  In fact, it sprawls out distantly beyond the town square and has 170,000 people.  But the inner core is compact and contained, and you can walk from the train station to downtown in ten minutes.  The two central landmarks are the spires of St. Bartholomew Cathedral, begun at the end of the 13th century, and the minaret-like water tower at Pilsner Urquell--and they seem to wave at each other from across the Radbuza river.  (I'm not totally up on my religious history--with the Prague twice serving as the seat of the Holy Roman Empire and also the earliest Protestant rebellion, it's rich--but Pilsen is known as a Catholic town.  You see crucifixes in the brewhouse.) It's a great town for strolling, and beer geeks might find themselves drawn again and again from the town square back to the brewery.

The Brewhouse
Pilsner Urquell rests on a plot of land that stretches for acres.  Bound by buildings and gates, it forms a cloistered, spacious campus, with different functions located distant enough from one another that the guides whisk tourists around on buses.  The brewhouse is at the center of the action, both physically and psychically.  Once, rail cars came right into the center of the campus, and you follow the tracks from the visitor's center toward the brewhouse building like it's a trail. 

If you take the public tour, they walk you through the process and ingredients before you arrive at the active brewhouse.  I'll skip most of that except for offering a couple notes.  One of the coolest things on the tour is the original kettle used by Josef Groll, which was twice hidden by burial during wars to protect it from pillaging.  In the photo of it, you may apprehend for the first time why it must have been so hard to make delicate, pale lagers.  Look at that thing.  Leaving aside the rivets and seams, look at how wide and flat it is.  If fire was underneath that whole thing, it must have gotten heavily caramelized.  (I don't doubt that some of the 19th century batches were probably sublime, but let's dispense with the romance of age: beer now has got to be miles better than it ever was when brewers had to work with such crude, imprecise equipment.)

Pilsner Urquell still decocts their beer three times and uses open flames to fire the kettle and mash cookers.  As I understand it, most Czech breweries now use single or double decoction.  And for good reason.  We know so much more about malting now that there's no reason to use such a laborious process.  It's expensive, time-consuming, and except for subtle effects on the beer, mostly unnecessary for most breweries.

Nevertheless, the brewery's Robert Lobovsky says triple decoction is still critical to the profile of Pilsner Urquell.  "We need to do triple decoction for two reasons.  One, to get the golden color out, and then to get the caramelization to take place."  He added this fascinating tidbit.  "They've got the copper chains inside--you saw them in the old brewhouse when you looked in--and they [scrape] them on the bottom, so when you're 700 degrees from your heat, you're scraping up the caramelization so you don't burn the sugar."  (If he means celsius--sorry, I didn't clarify!--that's 1300 degrees F.)

One of the more amazing things about the brewhouses is that there are actually two, side by side.  The old one is no longer in service, but the brewery keeps it polished and in perfect shape.  They currently produce about 2 million hectoliters, and could expand capacity up to three million if they brought the old brewhouse back on line (a real possibility).  Both are gorgeous, but the older one is, purely from aesthetics, the prettier of the two.  I've toured dozens of old breweries, and few have a brewhouse as beguiling as the old one at Pilsner Urquell.  

The new brewhouse.

 

The old brewhouse

The Cellars
Pilsner Urquell has a fully modern building for fermenting and conditioning their beer, but no one ever cares about seeing it.  The place to go is down, to the mostly-obsolete cellars that honeycomb the earth underneath the brewery.  A hundred years ago, Pilsner Urquell was brewing a million hectoliters of beer, and it all needed to sit for weeks in wooden casks to ripen.  At one time, there were over five miles of cellars devoted to the purpose.  It was an amazing operation, with coopers and cellarman rolling gigantic barrels in and out while other wooden giants sat silently, burping slowly as their worty bellies turned to rough beer and rough beer turned to liquid gold.

The cellars alone weren't cold enough to keep the beer at the right temperature, so the brewery used a form of crude refrigeration.  They filled up these enormous caves with ice, and circulated air over them and throughout the cellars.  (It's icy down there today, but they use modern cooling, not ice.)  When you visit now, you can still see the high-ceilinged rooms with apertures at the top where ice came in.  Elsewhere, walls are painted white in lime to retard the growth of mold (it works, too--the place doesn't smell musty), and everything is damp and moist.  The cellars are like a labyrinth, and it wouldn't take a lot to get lost if you wandered off in the wrong direction.

For most people, this is the pièce de résistance, not least because the tour ends with a sample of beer from the wood.  There are a number of ways in which that tipple delivers something different than the beer made 150 years ago.  Changes in agriculture have brought improvements to barley and hops, and the brewhouse enjoys the benefit of modern technology.  (The yeast, though, which was first tested by a lab in the 1870s, is the same.)  It's easy enough to fool yourself when you see that fresh, foamy beer cascade from the barrel, though.  Many people claim moments of transcendence when they taste that beer, but I think it's mostly due to the transporting experience they've just enjoyed.  (I prefer a fresh pint of unfiltered at a pub, personally.)  But I'm not going to argue with them.

This time around, rather than descend into a reverie about what the beer might have been like, my mind turned to the remarkable way it has more or less stayed the same.  There are older breweries in the world, and perhaps a few older beers.  But Pilsner Urquell has been making just one beer at that site since it was ruled by the Austrian empire.  Over 17 decades, it has continued to make just a single beer, the same beer (more or less), as world events have crashed across the country like a wrecking ball.  The Czech lands became independent, then suffered under the oppression of two terrible empires, but all the while, Pilsner Urquell continued to make that beer.

It's a remarkable tale of continuity and even more remarkable to experience first-hand.  Beer lovers should put the Czech Republic at or near the top of their wish list (it's as cool as Belgium, honestly), and if you have the good fortune to go, definitely stop in and see this brewery.

The Nature of Indigenous

Boak, Bailey, and Stan have been considering the nature of indigenous beers--what and whether they are, and how that is distinct from "local" beer.  I know Stan has been mulling a high-concept book related to this subject, so I hope the discussion will continue on for years.  In one way, it couldn't matter less--beer is beer and almost no styles exist sui generis, separate from the influences of all others.  On the other hand, it's a critical question in a world in which information, education, and raw materials are unmoored from place.  The great thing about the 21st century is that we can pretty much access anything in the world, so our daily lives are enriched by multinational, multicultural influences.  But it also means that the local and weird may be trampled under the homogenization of international preference.  By spreading each other's materials and cultures, we may endanger them.

As it happens, I've been thinking about this for a long time.  Seven years ago, I wrote a post about this very topic.  A lot of my seven-year-old posts don't bear re-reading, but I may have been onto something when I wrote that one.  You can read the whole thing, but the piece I want to repost (and actually, rewrite a bit--it's not free of mistakes and miscues) involves the elements of indigenous beer:

• Ingredients. People have made beer for thousands of years, and the grains they used were those that grew in nearby fields: wheat in Egypt, rice in India, sorghum and millet in Africa, barley in Europe.  Many indigenous styles include local additives, from the dates of Egypt to the gruit of Europe, to the cherries in kriek.
• Method. Some breweries have funky ways of brewing, and these help define style. The slate squares employed in Yorkshire breweries; the spontaneous fermentation of Pajottenland; the smoked lagers of Bamberg; or the lagers fermented warm to create steam beers in San Francisco.
• Yeast. Many of the world's classic beers emerged from the decades- or centuries-old strains of yeast. In many (most?) cases, yeast strains are connected to locations where they originated and consequently are one of the chief elements that define styles.
• New Variations. Sometimes styles emerge by remixing the ingredients, methods, or yeasts to produce a beer recognizably different.  Stan mentions American pilsner as a possible indigenous style, and it would fit under this clause.  It was a style that couldn't be adapted to the US, with its harsh barley, without the addition of local corn.
• "Localness." What has guided many brewers through time wasn't necessarily a desire to be innovative, but restraints of locality. They used what they had. In the age before industrialization, hops, grains, adjuncts, and water all had to be local. The character of the beer has historically been a reflection of the place it was brewed. The physical imperative is gone in the age of globalization, yet artisanal beers are still predominantly local products.

 Stan's got a nice discussion going on, so check out the comments if you visit his post.

A Brief Primer on Czech Lagers

Sometimes I skip posting information that I know exists elsewhere on the internet, as if the mere existence of information somewhere means people everywhere are consuming it.  You can find descriptions of Czech lagers from people far more versed on the subject than I--Evan Rail and Max Bahnson (the Pivní Filosof) are your English-language starting points.  (Unfortunately, Evan's old blog, a mighty archive of great data, is now offline.)  Nevertheless, it is sometimes useful for a person to gather together and repeat some information for those who are coming later to the party.  In that spirit, here's a brief primer on Czech lagers.

Only One Pilsner
You do not order a "pilsner" in Prague (or anywhere else in Czech).  You could order a Pilsner, though.  In the Czech Republic, the word pilsner is a proper name reserved for Pilsner Urquell.  All other pale lagers are referred to by either their proper name or by category (see below).  I have gotten several different answers for why this is the case, but my sense is that it has mainly to do with tradition.  Josef Groll invented pilsner at the old burghers' brewery in 1842, and other breweries show great deference to this brewery (now called Plzensky Prazdroj, or Pilsner Urquell).  That beer is the ur-Pilsner, the one that begat the rest.  It is also the beer from Pilsen--not the only one, but obviously the big one--and so for these reasons it is the only one people call pilsner.

The Categories of Beer

The Czech system for grouping beer runs along two axes--strength and color.  If you imagine a table in your mind, on the one side you would have beers of different strength categories based on the Plato scale, and on the other a continuum of color running from pale to black.  So you might have a 10° pale beer or a 12° amber or a 14° dark.  But you might also have a 12° dark. (On our tour, Evan Rail mentioned that while there are no hard and fast rules, if you see a brewery list that includes a 10, 12, 14, and 18, the average Czech would assume the two smaller beers are light, the two bigger ones dark.)   

Let's start with the legal designations, which refer to Plato categories.  These changed a bit in 2011, so if you find lehké on an old list, note the change.  Also, those are my best-guess pronunciations you find.  Fluent Czech speakers may offer corrections or denunciations in comments.

Update: Indeed, the wisdom of hive mind is speaking loudly in comments, with corrections, questions, and clarifications.  Definitely have a look.

• Stolní pivo, table beer up to 6° P.  (I've never seen one of these in the wild.)  The pronunciation is roughly stole nyee Pee voh. 
• Výčepní pivo, from 7° to 10°.  Strangely, výčepní comes from the word for taproom and the term literally means “draft beer.”  It is applied to all beer in this range, irrespective of package.  Pronounced vee chep nyee Pee voh.
• Ležák, from 11° to 12°.  Again, to add to the confusion, ležák literally means lager—and again, it applies to all beer in this range whether lager or ale.  Pronounced leh zhak.
• Speciál, strong beers above 13°.  Pronounced spet zee-al.  

The colors are more straightforward--pale, amber, and dark, though for etymological reasons, I'm going to list them out of order (you'll see why):

• Světlé, or pale-colored.  Pronounced svet lee.
• Tmavé, or dark.  Pronounced t’ma veh.
• Polotmavé, which literally means semi-dark or half-dark, referring to a color in the amber band.  Pronounced polo t’ma veh.
• Černé, or black.  Pronounced cher neh.

When you're ordering these, you would mix and match.  That 12° amber would be a polotmavý ležák.  A 10° pale would be světlý výčepní.  Of course, you could also just order the beer based on its gravity, which is the easiest for Americans in whose mouths these words gurgle like giant balls of peanut butter.

Bright, Unfiltered, or Yeasted?
So far, so good, yes?  Now comes the more tricky part of the whole thing.  Not only do you have this taxonomical tangle, but you have an additional stratum of information regarding how the beer was prepared.  In addition to just regular old beer like you might find in a bottle, the beer might be unfiltered or served kräusened.

• Kvasnicové, literally yeast beer.  It is a specific preparation that involves adding yeast or fermenting wort to fully-lagered beer right before kegging.  It brings a liveliness to the beer that has Czech beer geeks in a swoon.  Pronounced kvass nitso veh Pee voh.  
• Nefiltrované or unfiltered beer.  Slightly confusing because both kvasnicové and nefiltrované will appear less than perfectly clear in the glass, and both may enjoy the benefits of richer, brighter flavors.  Unfiltered beer is not kräusened.  Pronounced ne filtro vanay Pee vo.   
• Tanková, or tank beer.  Just means it's served from a large, 5- or 10-hectoliter tank underneath the bar.  What's significant is that this beer is unpasteurized, which means the flavors are sharper and more vivid.  Pronounced tank o va.

All right, are you ready to head out to the pubs?

The Ease of Misunderstanding Czech Beer

This photo, captured on my camera, was actually taken
by Max Bahnson--a better photographer than I.

The golden lagers of the Czech Republic are at once the easiest and most elusive beers in the world.  They are easy because, unlike goses and gueuzes, they are imprinted on our brains as the most basic form of "beer."  Frothy, sparkling, pale--no instruction manual required.  We even have two of the most important and tasty examples at hand in Budvar and Pilsner Urquell, which means we don't have to put our brains through a remote intellectual exercise to appreciate them.  A quick visit to a decent grocery store or any bottle shop, and we can be drinking some of the world's best Czech lagers in a half hour.

But the ways in which they elude us are much more important and, after four days of intense remedial study in the Czech Republic, where I found the true story lies.  From a great distance, all Czech pilsners--světlé pivo, "pale lagers" in Czech--look alike.  If pressed, you might admit that hoppy Pilsner Urquell, with its very round body and dollop of diacetyl, isn't actually all that like the drier Budvar, with its subtle kiss of bitterness.  But, eh, really, they're yellow and fizzy and mostly all the same.

An analogy will due to dispel this poor reasoning.  Put your mind on hoppy American ales, which from a great distance also appear a lot alike.  Now, imagine the perspective of a foreign beer drinker--a Czech, say--who believes he understands the style well enough because he has ready access to Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA and New Belgium Ranger.  Would you say he has an adequate understanding of hoppy American ales?

Given a simple template, it's possible to make beers that are startlingly different. That's as true with pilsners as IPAs.  I spent last week in Prague and Pilsen on a mini odyssey of discovery (on, full disclosure, a junket financed entirely by Pilsner Urquell), where I reacquainted myself with favorites like Únětické 12° (possibly the best pale lager in the world) and Pilsner Urquell (the unfiltered version is a revelation), and discovered new delights like Kout na Šumavě, Pivovar na Rychtě, and U Tří růží.  If you don't have access to the range of these beers, you can't appreciate how diverse they really are.  Once you start adding the different presentations--served with live yeast, unfiltered, from the "tank"--the dimensions grow like new galaxies. 

Over the next couple weeks, I'll try to unpack what I learned on the trip, which ranged from the pubs to the hop fields to a the top of the old water tower at Pilsner Urquell.  I may even make a comment or two about Czech dumplings, which were a minor feature of our travels.  It is a world that can't be fully accessed with the mind--you need your tongue and nose--but perhaps it will inspire a trip to the Czech lands or two.  Half liters only cost a buck and a half!

More to come--

In Czech

I have had an incredibly full schedule on my blitz through Czech. (Hmmm, that may not be the best wording.)  There's too much to discuss briefly, so here are a few pics instead. 

We spent a day in Prague before arriving in Plzen, site of a significant brewery. 

At Pilsner Urquell, we got to see two of the seven staff coopers in action. 

Then we ascended the old, now disused water tower. It was a rare treat. 

And the view from the top. 

And then to assorted other sites at the brewery. 

The old brewhouse. 

In the cellars ...

Where they still do a bit of open wood fermentation. 

Much more to come...

To Czech

No more than a couple weeks ago, I got an offer for perhaps the greatest junket imaginable.  Mark Dredge at Pencil and Spoon does work for Pilsner Urquell.  They thought it would be nice to have some writers come and check out the Saaz crop in nearby Zatec, and asked him to put together a list of folks.  When the invite came down I was relieved to see the schedule was open, and tomorrow I'm off.  I'll also see the brewery (again) and some other cool stuff.  I'll try to blog and post pics on Facebook, but it's going to be a blitz.  I'll be home Sunday. 

The Steady Morphing of "Craft"

I have a sense that an emerging theme of blurring lines is going to play a major part of my blogging over the next few years.  It's the slow mutation of what we would have formerly called "craft" beer into something that looks a lot like mass market lager--if not in type, then certainly in branding approach.  The latest example is Austin Beerworks and the 99-pack they released to great attention this week. 

Have a look:

This isn't identical to the kind of ad you'd see during a random Seahawks game, but notice how closely it sidles up to that form:

1. Pitched at a mass audience ("light, balanced, refreshing," "a beer for anyone")?  Check.
2. Young people enjoying beer in nature? Check.
3. Inexpensive?  Check.
4. Conforms to Sally's rule ("beware a company selling packaging, not beer").  Check.

There are a few cues to the brewery's craft provenance, as well--beards, quirky comedy, irreverent images (in a brief cut, you'll see a shot of two cans recently employed in shotgunning).  In all ways that matter, though, this is effectively a little guy doing everything possible to grab some of that may-be-shrinking-but-still-gigantic mass market.  Huge brewing conglomerates are working very hard to enter the craft segment, and the little guys are trying to hop into the mass segment.

The lines blur on...

Update.  This has sparked entertaining discussions on both Twitter and Facebook.  Because, you know, blogs are nearly a dead medium.

Drink This Beer: Walking Man Memorial Fund ISA

Shari Landers was a woman I would have loved to meet.  Here's a tiny bit of her story:

She became the first woman pipefitter in Louisiana, as well as a welder, carpenter, pot farmer, crypt caretaker, small business owner, Kool Aid mom, longshore-woman, Bering Sea fisherwoman, a life long purveyor and connoisseur of the finest drugs, and an amazing mother. Her nonconformist disposition made her an outlaw in the Hunter S. Thompson sort of way (as well as the normal outlaw kind of way) leading her to many adventures throughout her life. She held a “DIY" attitude close to her heart and it allowed her to accomplish anything she set out to do no matter who or what stood in her path. Shari’s spirit had her hitch hiking across states when she was 10, deported from Canada when she was 12, and building a cabin in Alaska when she was 13.

Does she sound spectacular or what? 

Sadly, Shari died of cancer last month.  Her son is James Landers, the Head Brewer at Walking Man, and he's asking for a little help on medical bills left over from the last weeks of her life.  To help pay them off, Backwoods Brewing donated ingredients for a beer made at Walking Man called Memorial Fund ISA.  You can buy a pint at either location, and a dollar  of the cost will go to help pay the bills. 

I can't think of a more wholesome beer to spend you money on--

Book Review: Beer Britannia by Boak and Bailey

Brew Britannia: The Strange Rebirth of British Beer
Jessica Boak & Ray Bailey
Aurum Press, 298 pages
$20 






Considering the long history of British brewing, most historians have focused on London or Burton and their respective great eras of brewing.  Few have turned their attention to the most recent forty years, a depressing time when ales lost out to lagers and breweries consolidated and collapsed by the legion.  But it's possibly the most dynamic period in Britain's brewing history, and certainly one of the most interesting--and these are the decades Jessica Boak and Ray Bailey consider in their engrossing new book, Brew Britannia.

The narrative they tell is equal parts straight history and ethnography.  The events are fascinating because they're so English. (The title of the book is slightly misleading; this is really a story about England, and nearly all the protagonists are English or live and brew in England.)  The story starts out describing the activities of two different citizen groups, both devoted to preserving some part of English life that seemed imperiled by the churn of modernity.  The first didn't have a huge impact on the course of events, but the second, the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA), did.

For the first time, I finally understood the context that gave rise to CAMRA and the effect it had in English life.  And, given that the switch from ales to lagers continued to plug along unabated through the 70s, 80s, and 90s, CAMRA's impact really does seem to mostly cultural.  They did not so much restore real ale as they did change a nation's understanding about it's place in society.  If cask ale did not displace lager, it at least came to be seen as local, as English--a powerful shift that may have at least allowed it to survive.

Boak and Bailey then describe how small breweries started popping up in the 70s and 80s.  Americans who (like me) imagined this development paralleled the US microbrewing trend of 1980s will discover they are mistaken.  Again, the contours of this story are entirely English.  The first small breweries made cask ale.  It would take a couple decades before breweries started making the stuff we think of as "craft beer," and yet even that part of the story is particular to the situation in the UK.

Boak and Bailey did scads of research and talked to tons of people in assembling the book.  The arc of Brew Britannia is told through the stories of scores of individuals--activists, beer drinkers, and brewers--which makes it a hugely propulsive read.  We've enjoyed a number of good beer books in the last few years, but none can touch Brew Britannia in terms of pure entertainment.  If you have even the slightest interest in English beer, you'll really enjoy it.  (Even people who are interested mainly in American craft breweries will find it interesting because of the contrast it offers to our story.)  And for people like Ted Sobel (and me), it is an absolute must-read.

__________________________
Addendum.  As I read the early chapters, marveling at the way the English seem to naturally form clubs and campaigns, I wondered why we don't do that here in the US North America.  The Brewers Association has effectively seized the space occupied by CAMRA in the UK, and they have taken it in a very particular direction.  It's not that CAMRA is a flawless organization (in fact, it's got so many problems that CAMRA-bashing is something of a national pastime), but it is a consumer organization.  They do not represent the interests of the breweries, but the people who drink beer.

If we in the US North America formed our version of CAMRA, I doubt we would spend so much time obsessing about who owns which brewery, seemingly the sole concern of the Brewers Association.  In framing the conversation in the UK, CAMRA in some ways invented English beer--or at least the idea of it.  If consumers made an American-beer advocacy group, what would they focus on?  I don't have any ideas, but it would not be the issues that so interest the Brewers Association.

The Budweiser Ironies

A couple weeks ago, Pete Brown posted a wonderfully nuanced piece about Budweiser--both of them--in London Loves Business.  He argued that the two Buds were about as well-made as any on the planet and that, while you may not enjoy the American Bud, you could not doubt its quality.  He's correct. As sensory experiences go, American Budweiser is not a particularly thrilling ride.  (When I visited the St. Louis plant, brewmaster Jim Bicklein took me to the cellars, where we had a zwickel from the huge conditioning tanks.  On every previous occasion when I've been offered a tank-fresh pour, I have found depths and delights in a beer I missed in the store-bought incarnation.  I held my breath and sipped the cool, sparkling lager through a skiff of snowy head and ... it was just Bud.  Very, very fresh Bud.)  But the brewing process is exacting and there are no shortcuts.  It is intentionally unthrilling.  (And millions of drinkers like it that way.)

But what really caught my eye was this paragraph:

One of the most famous battles in Beerworld is the epic David and Goliath tussle between the world’s biggest brewer – Anheuser-Busch Inbev – and the small, state-owned Czech brewer Budweiser Budvar. In 1876 Adolphus Busch stole the name Budweiser from the town of Ceske Budejovice – or ‘Budweis’ in German – and over the ensuing decades agreements were reached about who had the rights to the name in various parts of the world. When the Czech Republic disappeared behind the Iron Curtain after the Second World War the American brewer tore up the arrangements it had agreed to and made American Budweiser the world’s biggest beer brand. 

There are a few stories about the Budweisers, and this is the one only a fraction of beer drinkers know.  It is not the one they tell in St. Louis.  However, even this version isn't exactly right.  The real story is much more interesting and filled with irony.

Jim Bicklein at the brewery in St. Louis

The town of České Budějovice [pronounced, roughly, ches kay bud ye-oh vit sa] is located in the south of Bohemia.  Bohemia being located in the Czech Republic, you will not be surprised to learn that the people there speak Czech.  But this also the crossroads of some very important empires, and in centuries gone past, the region was controlled by a German-speaking population, who called it Budweis. Beer brewed there, as it has been since the 13th century, was therefore either Budějovický or Budweiser—literally, beer of the town of Budějovice or Budweis.  Fast forward to the period following the success of Josef Groll’s 1842 pale lager in Pilsen.  Other Czech breweries began making pale lagers, too.  The Civic Brewery in the town then called Budweis was one of them.  A supplier to the court of King Wilhelm II, the lager earned the nickname “the beer of kings.”  Ring a bell?      

By the 1860s an enterprising American brewery, enchanted by the idea of Bohemian beer, decided Budweis’s were the best.  It was no easy task to make those kinds of beers in the United States, but Adolphus Busch of the Anheuser Brewery had managed to do it and in 1876 debuted his own Budweiser beer.  Busch was selling beer for twenty years under the Budweiser name before a new brewery opened back in Budweis as a rival to the older, German-owned company.  This new brewery, the Joint Stock Brewery, was one of a wave of new Czech-owned businesses to spring up as a part of the Czech National Movement of the late 19th century.  Eventually that brewery became known as Budějovický Budvar.    

The fascinating part of the history is that the claims and counter-claims the two companies hurl at each other are generally founded in fact.  As it happens, Adolphus Busch did find inspiration for his beers from Budweis and did spirit away both the type of beer and the name.  But it’s also true that he brewed his beer before Budweiser Budvar even existed.  He did also apparently appropriate “the beer of kings” and turn it into “the king of beers”—one of the most valuable corporate slogans in the world.  (Budvar disputes the history of “beer of kings.”)  But the brewery that inspired Busch is no longer in existence.  And in the most wry of ironies, neither company has a clear historical claim to the name Budweiser: Busch obviously borrowed and rebranded it with absolutely no connection to the town or people; on the other hand, except as a valuable trademark, why would the people of České Budějovice want the name?  Budvar remains state-owned and is an artifact of the Czech National Movement.  “Budweis” was the name the city has abandoned.      

Pete points out that the dispute hasn't exactly been terrible for Budvar.  Picking a fight with the world's most famous and popular brands has its upside.  But the real story is actually more interesting, and the clean lines of the narrative a bit more smudged. 

Well, this is embarrassing

It looks like it's been a week since I posted, and peering into my crystal ball reveals that the coming week is going to be just as bad.  It's not the usual doldrums of August, but rather a thicket of unexpected activity that has kept me off the site.  A week from now and things should start getting back to normal.  (I may--may--have some very cool travel blogging coming up, too, but it is not final enough to announce.)

In the meantime, I offer you this actually-pretty-fascinating article about beer at baseball stadiums.  If it convinces me of anything, it's that the hegemony of mass market lagers has come to an end.  A tease:

The average Major League team this season is offering 50 different beers from nearly 25 breweries.

And reference that suggests Seattle and Portland are not identical.  

About 70 percent of Safeco Field’s 700 beer handles are devoted to “good, quality craft beer,” according to Steve Dominguez, the general manager of Centerplate's operations at Safeco Field. Sales of craft-style products crush those of domestic-style mass market beers, by a ratio of about 4-1. The stadium bought three cask engines this year to allow for cask-conditioned ales throughout the stadium, and they offer a hearty list of 22-ounce craft bombers from breweries like Pyramid, Oskar Blues, No-Li and Rogue.

The whole article is well worth a read.

Morning News, Heat Wave Edition

As the mercury climbs for the latest in a series of heat waves (this is going to be an interesting hop crop), and hot on the heels of the news that Bear Republic may have to relocate because of persistent drought, I find my blogging energies dwindle.  But never fear--news marches on without me.

1.  Bud Establishes a Crafty Unit in Chi-town
I, perhaps alone, am fascinated to see how the two remaining American giants plan to tackle a tricky future.  Americans are drinking less beer overall, even while the craft segment explodes.  That means ever falling sales of mass market lager.  AB InBev's latest move?  Lean on Goose.

The brewer, whose U.S. headquarters are in St. Louis, will establish a new Chicago outpost to oversee premium craft and imported beers, which have been a bright spot in the overall sluggish U.S. beer industry.

Mainly, it seems like a marketing move, which is probably not going to be a long-term solution.  It's hard for bigs to sell beer in the craft market, and the obstacles can not be surmounted by a bigger PR wing.  

2.  Craft Breweries Expand Beyond Beer
In a doomy Bon Appetit article, Sam Calagione warns, "there's a bloodbath coming."   The answer would not shock executives in St. Louis: diversify!

On the fest circuit, Lagunitas runs the roving Beer Circus, and New Belgium operates the whimsical, bike-focused Tour de Fat. For its recent brand expansion, Pennsylvania’s Victory recently unveiled a lineup of cheese spreads, as well as ice creams concocted from its unfermented beer. “Strategically, that broadens our brand impact,” says cofounder Bill Covaleski. “It puts our flavors and brands in places where they’ve never been.”

Beer ice cream?  Who's crafty now?

3. They Could Have Save a Lot of Time
...and just asked a beer geek.  Instead, researchers actually did the work to prove that you can't taste the differences among light beer brands (.pdf).

 Participants were then asked to consume the beers at home, and rate each of them. Some of the six-packs had beers with labels, while others were unlabeled. When the beers were labeled, participants rated the beers differently, and as expected, they rated their favorites higher than other beers. When unlabeled, however, participants showed virtually no preferences for certain beers over others. In the blind tasting condition, no beer was judged by its regular drinkers to be significantly better than the other samples. In fact, regular drinkers of two of the five beers scored other beers significantly higher than the brand that they stated was their favorite.

But Boneyard fans already knew that.

McSorley's, 1940

One of my regular tipsters, BB, was taking advantage of the New Yorker's momentary open archives when he found this remarkable article from 1940 on McSorley's Old Ale House in 1940.  McSorley's had already been open 86 years (it's been another 74 and the place is still open).  It's a fly-on-the-wall story, panning around the old place and zooming in from time to time on a few historical photographs.  It gives you such a rich sense of a different time.

It is equipped with electricity, but the bar is stubbornly illuminated with a pair of gas lamps, which flicker fitfully and throw shadows on the low, cobwebby ceiling each time someone opens the street door. There is no cash register. Coins are dropped in soup bowls—one for nickels, one for dimes, one for quarters, and one for halves—and bills are kept in a rosewood cashbox. It is a drowsy place; the bartenders never make a needless move, the customers nurse their mugs of ale, and the three clocks on the walls have not been in agreement for many years. 

and

[John McSorley] patterned his saloon after a public house he had known in Ireland and originally called it the Old House at Home... In his time, Old John catered to the Irish and German workingmen—carpenters, tanners, bricklayers, slaughter-house butchers, teamsters, and brewers—who populated the Seventh Street neighborhood, selling ale in pewter mugs at five cents a mug and putting out a free lunch inflexibly consisting of soda crackers, raw onions, and cheese; present-day customers are wont to complain that some of the cheese Old John laid out on opening night in 1854 is still there. Adjacent to the free lunch he kept a quart crock of tobacco and a rack of clay and corncob pipes—the purchase of an ale entitled a man to a smoke on the house; the rack still holds a few of the communal pipes.

There's even a word or two about the ale, like:

In warm weather he made a practice of chilling the mugs in a tub of ice; even though a customer nursed an ale a long time, the chilled earthenware mug kept it cool. Except during prohibition, the rich, wax-colored ale sold in McSorley’s always has come from the Fidelio Brewery on First Avenue; the brewery was founded two years before the saloon. In 1934, Bill sold this brewery the right to call its ale McSorley’s Cream Stock and gave it permission to use Old John’s picture on the label; around the picture is the legend “As brewed for McSorley’s Old Ale House.” During prohibition McSorley’s ale was produced mysteriously in a row of washtubs in the cellar by a retired brewer named Barney Kelly, who would come down three times a week from his home in the Bronx. On these days the smell of malt and wet hops would be strong in the place. Kelly’s product was raw and extraordinarily emphatic, and Bill made a practice of weakening it with near beer. In fact, throughout prohibition Bill referred to his ale as near beer, a euphemism which greatly amused the customers. One night a policeman who knew Bill stuck his head in the door and said, “I seen a old man up at the corner wrestling with a truck horse. I asked him what he’d been drinking and he said, ‘Near beer in McSorley’s.’ ” The prohibition ale cost fifteen cents, or two mugs for a quarter. Ale now costs a dime a mug.

and

In the centre of the room stands the belly stove, which has an isinglass door and is exactly like the stoves in Elevated stations. All winter Kelly keeps it red hot. “Warmer you get, drunker you get,” he says. Some customers prefer mulled ale. They keep their mugs on the hob until the ale gets hot as coffee. 

But mostly, it's a snapshot of the past taken in 1940--a glance at what a New York alehouse might have looked like in 1920 or even, possibly, 1890.  It's a long article, but very much worth the read.

McSorley's in 1937.  There's the onions on the bar and the stove--
sans warming beer--and the earthenware mugs. [Source]

Beer Sherpa Recommends: Gigantic IPL

Yesterday's post was, I suppose, a bit of a distraction on one point.  Although I used Gigantic's newest beer to illustrate a wholly unrelated point, I didn't much discuss the beer itself.  Now to rectify that oversight.

Very often, you come to understand a beer the less you know about it.  The Green Dragon, where I sampled the Gigantic, has a great taplist that, perversely, gives the drinker zero information beyond a name.  They don't even list the ABV. That leaves you with nothing else but your nose and mouth to figure out what you're drinking. It makes a session a bit more random, but when you find a gem, it also happens to make the experience more rewarding.

When IPL arrived, I was startled at its appearance, which might have passed in a line-up of Blue Ribbons.  It is pale.  Nothing India about that.  But then, lifting it toward my nose, I caught a plume of the aroma, which was very India indeed.  There's a sweet, fruity underlayment and then something that first seems like pine but drifts toward the Alien OG.  The effect of the appearance and aroma produced a kind of dreamlike discontinuity.  The strange pleasures continued as I added my tongue to the mix.  IPL is a very delicate beer, with little wisps of malt and no perceptible alcohol (turns out it 5.6%).  And amazingly, the hop intensity, though sunshiny and resplendent, did not overwhelm the rest of the beer. 

I tried to order another pint but, no shock to me, the keg had blown.  We're stuck in the middle of one terrible long sunny nightmare*, and this was an amazing tonic.  It looked and behaved like a helles, but had the aroma of an IPA and the flavor of a vivid pale ale.  I would have liked to test its durability, but I can say that it performed very well over the course of a pint.  I expect it did just as well over two or three.  Get it while the sun still shines.

__________
*To Portlanders and hairy black dogs, weather over 90 is painful, and we've endured weeks of the stuff.


_______________________
"Beer Sherpa Recommends" is an irregular feature.  In this fallen world, when the number of beers outnumber your woeful stomach capacity by several orders of magnitude, you risk exposing yourself to substandard beer.  Worse, you risk selecting substandard beer when there are tasty alternatives at hand.  In this terrible jungle of overabundance, wouldn't it be nice to have a neon sign pointing to the few beers among the crowd that really stand out?  A beer sherpa, if you will, to guide you to the beery mountaintop.  I don't profess to drink all the beers out there, but from time to time I stumble across a winner and when I do, I'll pass it along to you.

How the Word "India" Came to Mean "American"

Last week, I ordered a pint of Gigantic's new beer, IPL, sight unseen.  I was at a pub that listed nothing but the name.  A few minutes later, the waiter dropped a glass of something pilsner-pale and conditioned-clear in front of me.  I had assumed--correctly, it emerged--that the name of the beer stood for "India Pale Lager."  The beer in front of me had almost nothing to do with IPA, though.  Indeed, I later discovered that Ben and Van (brewmaster and master brewer) also call it a "Northwest pilsner," and it's a lot closer to a pils than anything to do with English or American ales.  It's 5.6%, has a pilsner malt bill, and is, not unimportantly, a lager.

During that same session--possibly just after the arrival of the Gigantic--one of my friends complained that IPA no longer had any meaning at all.  He ticked off the various offenses against a once-knowable style: black IPAs, white IPAs, lagered IPAs, session IPAs, fruit IPAs.  (He actually ordered a rye and double IPA that night.)  It had nothing to do with the original IPAs and has devolved into little more than a marketing gimmick, he argued reasonably.

As someone who has complained about this very phenomenon, I should have been sympathetic, but here's the thing: to the average drinker, slapping the word "India" on a label communicates a very specific, easily-understandable meaning.  It's shorthand for "saturated in the flavors and aromas of American hops."  Gigantic IPL, for all the ways it wasn't an IPA, instantly met the expectations I'd had--it was decadently perfumed and soaked in Simcoe and Citra hops.

Beer taxonomists and history prescriptivists miss this truth that is so obvious to the casual drinker.  The qualities that separate the 19th century English originals--or the middle 20th century English or even late 20th century American versions--from these myriad permutations (Belgian, black, imperial, etc.) are vast.  But that's because there's now a contemporary definition and it does a pretty good job of characterizing things.

Until something like thirty years ago, the hoppy beers typical in American brewpubs today did not exist.  There were hoppy beers, but they didn't have the kind of hopping Americans now use--which is partly a function of the method but mostly a function of the hops themselves.  And those qualities, begotten by vigorous kettle hopping and profligate late and dry-hopping of American hops, is what "India" (or "IPA" or "IP-whatever") now refers to.  It's sort of like the catch-all term "Belgian," which means anything with vivid yeast character but can be applied to any imaginable style (except, I suppose, lagers).  One of the great revelations of my foreign travel was to see that this shorthand was well-understood by breweries in the UK, Italy, and the Czech Republic.  "American IPA" or "American-style" always meant super-hopped with American hops, whatever the beer style.

I've stopped overthinking this.  Breweries want customers to know what the beer is going to taste like.  If they attach the word "India" to it--whether it is just a hoppy pilsner or witbier or stout--customers know what they mean.  It's pedantic to insist that there's something wrong with how this artifact of language has evolved.

Cantillon Adds New Building; Will Double Production

This is flying around Facebook, and for good reason.  Below is the text of what Jean Van Roy (a non-native English-speaker) posted a few hours ago:

Dear Friends,

Great news, Cantillon is expanding.

Since last year, we are looking for a new space and we got it.  The new building is located at 300m far from the brewery and, as you can see on the picture, it welcomed till the sixties a Lambic blender, Brasserie Limbourg. The new space is big enough to dubbel the Cantillon's production.  

Because we can't disturb the balance between new and old Lambic in our blend, we will increase the production each year to finally dubbel it in the four next year.  The wort, brewed at the Cantillon's brewery, will be transfered the day after the coolling and will matured for years in the new location.  As you know, we need at least two or three years to produce a beer. In this way to work, the next production increasing will take place during the season 2016-2017.

The building will be at our disposal next October, more news will follow.

Cheers,
Jean

The Van Roys (including Jean's father, Jean-Pierre) have been fierce protectors of lambic's heritage, and have a small museum in their current brewery.  (And in fact, their current, ancient brewery is a museum itself, of sorts.)  That they managed to find a building that once housed a blendery must by a huge source of satisfaction.  Cantillon has all but disappeared from American shelves, so with luck, maybe we'll see a bit more in a few years.