The Far Reaches of Beerdom

When you're an old man like me, the pace of change sometimes takes you by surprise. Last night, I had BridgePort's latest, Summer Squeeze. It has come to the place where if a brewery doesn't throw something exotic into the kettle or conditioning tank, drinkers will wonder: what's the point? Summer Squeeze is a pale with lemongrass added to the hopback and Yuzu fruit juice (an East Asian citrus, though Yuzu is the Japanese word) in the conditioning tank. I mean, if you're not throwing Asian fruit into the tank, you're not really trying. As a bonus, it's hopped with super-obscure Auroras.

A fascinating beer. I was sure there was a wheat base, but the brewery makes no mention of it. The beer is otherwise a pilsner blond with a huge citrus nose. In this case, the word "citrus" is not evocative or metaphoric, but quite literal. Brewer Jeff Edgerton describes it as Mandarin, but I get more a lemon note (but perhaps that's the lemongrass, confusing me). I expected something like a shandy, but actually, it tastes more like a Mexican beer with a huge squirt of lime. The citrus is assertive and resinous enough to stick around long after you've swallowed. I'm not sure what to make of it. Very crisp and refreshing--like a soda with a twist of citrus--and no doubt perfect on a summer day. But I do wonder, at what point will we have transgressed beyond the essential beeriness of a thing and into a different category altogether? I'll be considering that well after the next three trends come and go.

I had another beer last night, too--actually, just a single swallow. It was also an extreme and strange beer, but if Summer Squeeze was a future visitation, this one came from the distant past. The style of beer was Burton Ale, one I've read a great deal about but never had occasion to try.* That's not a surprise: Burtons haven't really been brewed since the Second World War--and even then they had gone through some substantial change. Burton is an old style, and it seems old-timey to our modern sensibilities. They started out as brown in their proto-phase, and then got amberish by the 19th century. They were brewed at massive gravities, but then finished out quite high, too. They were extensively hopped to balance the inevitable sticky sweetness. The result? Here's Martyn Cornell:

But while they had some success with the recipe as brewed for the Baltic in pubs in places such as Liverpool, Manchester and London, "those who admired its flavour and its purity, and who wished to drink more of it," according to the journalist John Stevenson Bushnan, writing in 1853, "found it too heady, too sweet, and too glutinous, if not too strong. Indeed it was so rich and luscious that if a little were spilled on a table the glass would stick to it."

The one I had was a homebrew, and it was made very much in this vein. It was hugely rich and very sweet, though a decent wallop of hops were trying to balance things out. The balance point was well beyond modern palates' preferences for drier beers. It was disorienting. I would have liked a whole glass to savor, to see what the long-term effects were.

Of the two beers, I would say the Burton, a famous style once brewed for centuries and sent on ships to far countries, was the wildest. Yuzu is one thing, but man, Burtons are wild, strange beers.

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*Writers like Cornell insist that certain beers brewed today are roughly in the Burton style, but I am not convinced. The beers they write about from the 18th and 19th century were different beasts than the kind of beers brewed today.

PHOTO: FOXEARTH AND DISTRICT LOCAL HISTORY

The Beer Bible

Ten years ago, the wine educator Karen MacNeil published a book called The Wine Bible (Workman Publishing). I'm not especially clued into the wine world, but by all accounts The Wine Bible was a massive conceptual and commercial hit. Conceptually, it's brilliant: 900 pages, with sections arranged by region, it covers every conceivable topic a layperson might be interested in. Yet it was released in paperback, with black-and-white photos, at the bargain price of $20. Add MacNeil's voice, simultaneously lyrical, accessible, and authoritative, and you have a fantastic book. It has been in print for those ten years--in its first edition--and is still the best-selling wine book at Amazon, and currently ranked 1,600 among all books Amazon sells (though it's usually around 3,000).

I mention this because about 15 months ago, I learned that Workman was considering a companion piece on the topic of beer. The idea for The Beer Bible would be to recreate the elements that made The Wine Bible so successful (though, as an editorial comment, I'll note that it's hard to imagine any beer book selling as well as the best-selling wine book). For over a year, I was one of the authors vying for the chance to write The Beer Bible (proposal, table of contents, chapters), and this spring, Workman decided to give me the shot.

The Beer Bible will be structured around beer styles in the way The Wine Bible used wine regions, with an exploration of the history, brewing techniques, style characteristics, and current evolution, as well as a handful of examples of each style. I actually started writing it in earnest six weeks ago, and you might have noticed some style-based themes on the blog (the question of foundational pale ales, the surprise success of brown ale in the form of Pete's Wicked, and the malts in porter); guess which chapters I was working on when I wrote those posts? The contract runs for two years, and I'm supposed to produce something on the order of 650-700 pages.

I alluded to all this a couple months ago and speculated that it might affect my frequency of blogging. Turns out, I don't think it will. But it is likely to affect the content of blogging. I'll be spending more time on general themes and less time on the Oregon scene. At some point, I'll travel to Europe to do research--and that should produce blogging of an entirely different variety. Finally, I'll continue to bounce things off you as I do research for this book. Collectively, you know a lot more than I do, and as a resource, you've been invaluable. I hope the blog, while it may change a bit, stays interesting.

Now, back to those porters....

When the Porters Died

Some facts fail to register the first time. Later, you encounter them again and your world tilts on its access. Try this one on for size: porters died out in Britain. Absolutely and utterly. Kaput. Apparently Jackson, writing about them in the 70s, was doing forensic work. Given porter's near-ubiquity in American brewpubs, I would say the style is in no immediate danger of re-extinction. On the other hand, it makes me hopeful for gose.

Battle in the Badger State

I really, really tried to avoid blogging on this. But all the articles, emails, and Facebook comments have worn me down. So, with apologies, we will now talk about an obscure issue in a distant state: my one-time home of Wisconsin. First, let's do our best to outline the issue.It is nested in proposed legislation that's part of the Governor Walker-backed budget (that be famous Governor Walker, the one who precipitated two weeks of vitriolic protests for attempting to end state unions). It would do the following:

Under current state law, a brewer of any size can also obtain wholesale licenses, which are given out by municipalities. The budget provision would change that by combining the brewer’s permit and wholesale and retail licenses into one permit under state control. This new state permit bans brewers from owning a wholesale distribution business.

Proponents of the bill, including MillerCoors, the Wisconsin Beer Distribution Association, the Tavern League of Wisconsin and the Wisconsin Grocers Association, are big players in the beer industry. [Ed note: MillerCoors is worried that newly mighty A-B might sweep in and establish a monopoly.]

The Wisconsin craft breweries, led by geek darlings New Glarus, are hopping mad. Deb Carey puts it starkly: “Everything in this bill is designed to make it harder for small craft brewers to grow. It is a slimy piece of legislation.”

Terrible, right? Not that I can see--which is why I've been keeping my head low. From the same article:

Under current law, brewers who sell 50,000 barrels of beer or less annually do not need to use a wholesale distributor to resell their products to a retailer. Because of their size, they can sell directly to retailers, if they so choose. But in an effort to satisfy concerns from members of the Wisconsin Brewers Guild, the committee voted to increase the size of craft brewers who are not required to sell through wholesalers from sales of 50,000 to 300,000 barrels a year.

Umm, oh. Furthermore, Carey believes New Glarus should be to distribute other breweries' beer through their wholesale business. (There's a pretty nice but unembeddable local news piece about the issue here.) What she seems really peeved about is losing a wholesale distribution opportunity, not anything as draconian as limits that would affect the brewery.

Now, I may be missing something, but there seems nothing out of the ordinary in this proposal, nor anything that would damage small breweries--and certainly nothing to prevent them from growing. So, let me observe provisionally that this seems like a little bit of the old bait and switch: New Glarus and some of the other small breweries seem to be ginning up outrage against an unpopular Governor so they can keep a sweet carve-out in the business code. Hey, I got no problem with that: politics ain't beanbag, and I'm all for a little of the ol bare knuckles. But I do think innocent bystanders like good beer fans should avoid being dupes in an issue that has very little to do with beer.

I would be happy to eat crow if I'm wrong. Someone more familiar with the issue, holler if I'm out of line.

A final, barely related comment. Earlier this year, Governor Walker and the newly-elected legislature decided to make an assault on the public employees in Wisconsin. This wasn't especially shocking: governors of other states have been doing it right and left. But they weren't Wisconsin, which has that rare combination of being highly pro-union and hair-triggered with their inclination toward public demonstration (and tailgate parties). Governor Walker has won the battle, but he's almost certain to lose the war The Dems are energized and stand to overturn it once they get back into office--the normal state in the normally blue state. Worse, Walker's name is now known enough that obscure battles about beer can become national news. Political scientists will be studying this for decades--and they would do well to look at the craft beer angle as another data point in how things have metastasized.


Update. It occurs to me that I should be guiding you to some commentary by bloggers on the scene. The Madison Beer Review has an exhaustive look a the bill, and Jeff Glazer concludes that it's "a terribly written motion that will likely become a terribly written piece of legislation." That gives me pause.
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PHOTO: ISABELLE DONOVAN

Curated Fests and the Beers They Highlight

This weekend's Fruit Beer Fest got me thinking. Despite reports of a few hitches in the execution, it illustrated a couple of ways in which the good beer world continues to evolve. Let us recall that as recently as just several years back, the typical fest was designed merely to highlight craft beer. Breweries were invited to attend, and they would send one of their standard beers. This was novelty enough.

The fruit beer fest is an example of a more recent incarnation--the "curated" fest, where a single organizer works with breweries to come up with a diverse range of beers that more deeply explore a theme. In the Fruit Beer Fest, Ezra secured soured beers, dark beers, and hoppy beers as a way of showing the myriad ways fruit can be employed. For most people, there was at least one revelation to be had. Give Preston Weesner credit for pioneering this at the Holiday Ale Fest, where he collects a wide range of styles to flesh out the concept of "winter beer." I always hate to pick on the venerable Oregon Brewers Festival, but it's a stark example of an old-school fest that is only very slowly turning toward this model of beer selection.

The second trend was evident in the beers themselves. Once upon a time, a brewer made a batch of beer, put it in steel tanks, waited a period of days, and then packaged it. Nothing wrong with that, but now most breweries have barrel-aging programs, which give them a whole new level of control. I mentioned Block 15's Psidium, which brewer Nick Arzner made by blending an aged sour with a freshly-brewed guava farmhouse ale. Breweries have been aging and blending for hundreds of years, but it takes cellar space and foresight to have the tools in place. I particularly enjoyed the notes of oak and wine added to Coalition's wheat beer and was surprised at how much oak tied together the cherry and roast in Ninkasi's cherry-aged Oatis.

Ten years ago, only a handful of breweries had barrel programs; now most breweries squirrel away a cask or two for special brews. And fest curators are taking advantage of the trend by designing special, one-time beers. These are twin trends illustrative of how good beer continues to evolve. Blessed are we who live in these highly-evolved times.

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By the way, here are some great pics of the fest, via Matt Wiater (I recommend the slideshow option).

Gang Agley

In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley.

I was locked on for the Cider Summit, but a line-of-scrimmage audible sends me to the Portland Fruit Beer Fest. (Keenan, I owe you.) The tweets for the Fruit Beer Fest (#pfbf) are getting me all excited, so it's not the end of the world. See you there--

Friday Flick: Ezra Discussing the Fruit Beer Fest

This week's Friday Flick is a no-brainer. One of our own got on KOIN to promote the Fruit Beer Fest this weekend. (Hat tip to Brady, who posted this yesterday.)



Also remember that the Cider Summit is Saturday, so plan your weekend accordingly.

Larry Sidor Leaving Deschutes

This is huge news, and a serious blow to Deschutes brewery. From a press release:

Deschutes Brewery announced today that Larry Sidor, Brewmaster, is leaving the company at the end of the year to pursue a lifelong dream of starting and running his own brewery. Sidor has been at the brewery for eight years, following 23 years at Olympia Brewing Company, in development and production at a Yakima hop dealer and creating a small winery.

With Sidor at the head of the brewing department at Deschutes , the company has added many new brands to the portfolio including Hop in the Dark, Red Chair Northwest Pale Ale, Inversion IPA, The Abyss, The Dissident, and several barrel-aged specialty beers. Sidor will continue on at Deschutes Brewery through the end of 2011 while the company integrates a new brewmaster over the next several months.

This is a pretty big deal. Larry Sidor has done as much consistently good work at Deschutes in his tenure as any brewery in the country. Deschutes has been on a growth spurt powered in no small part by the raft of fantastic beers Larry's put out (which the list only starts to hint at). The brewery will thrive without him, no doubt, but let's not downplay this news: Larry's a massive, massive asset, and he will be missed.

Of course, as beer drinkers, were can be excited by the prospect of what he does next.

Where Hops Don't Belong

Just in time for Father's Day, two seemingly misguided products.

1. Hop Candy
Father’s Day is not gleefully anticipated by chocolatiers, except, perhaps, by a company called Beercandy. The owner, Steve Casselman, a brewer in Santa Clara, Calif., began experimenting with beer-based candy more than 10 years ago with lollipops.... He also makes Hop Drops, flavored with the oil of American Cascade hops for a citric flavor. His latest treat is beer-flavored taffy.

2. Hop Cheese
[C]elebrates the Rogue Creamery’s 75th Anniversary (1935-2010) and will be paired at SAVOR with Rogue Farms Freedom Cheddar cheese, a cow’s milk cheddar cheese hand-mixed with Freedom hops from the Chatoe Rogue Micro Hopyard in Oregon’s Wigrich Appellation. Whole hop leaves are de-stemmed by hand, steeped in hot water, mixed into the curds and eventually pressed into blocks.

(Aren't cheesy hops a bad thing?)

Ninkasi's New 4-Pack Strategy

Here's the great paradox in the beer business. Most breweries achieve stability by selling large proportions of one or two labels to a broad, loyal consumer base. That's good, but it doesn't lend itself to clever hooks for bringing attention to the brand. So what do you do to make noise? Some breweries have a specialty line or a barrel-aging program; others have test breweries to produce experimental beer. Ninkasi, which has neither, has conceived a novel strategy with their summer four-packs.

Inside, you get four different 22-ounce beers: the best-selling label (Total Domination), the summer release (Radiant), the beer geek's delight (Maiden the Shade), and one beer you can only get by buying the four-pack (Nuptiale). In addition, Ninkasi has included info about how to download music they promote, which is not only an added bonus, but alerts people to the fact that Ninkasi is in the music promotion biz. (In a parallel universe, brewer Jamie Floyd is the front man in a hardcore funk band.) Finally, there are blotches on the box that, when scanned with a cell phone, will take you to videos of Jamie discussing the beers. (You can also find these vids the old-fashioned way, by browser. Here's the Nuptiale video, for example.)

This is all clearly a form of gimmickry--but it's a good gimmick! Ninkasi has always sold their 22s at a bargain, and in this form they work out to $3,50 each (a six-pack equivalent of $11.45). You get four solid beers at a very good price--reason enough to buy. But adding in a rare beer is quite clever. I've wanted to try Nuptiale since I first saw it appear on the Ninkasi website. For Ninkasi, it puts more than just Total Dom in the consumer's hand, which may broaden their other beers' appeal. And, while Ninkasi's taste in music does not mirror my own, the free song downloads are pretty cool, too. (That they further the brewery's rock 'n roll brand is also pretty smart.)

Some sales strategies are strange and mystifying, others just silly. Ninkasi's summer four pack is one of the rare birds that is both good business and also a great deal. I hope they do more of this kind of thing.

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Oh, one more thing: the Nuptiale. It's called a cream ale, and for the most part, Ninkasi plays it straight. It's a bit robusto (5.7%) and a bit hoppy (26 IBUs) in relative terms--but quite subdued compared to what Ninkasi fans may expect. I think everyone wants to like cream ales more than they actually do. Recognizing this, Ninkasi used an all-malt grist (no corn or other adjuncts) and spiced the brew with a classic, neutral hopping. It's tasty, smooth, and summery. It won't knock anyone back, but on a hot day, you'll enjoy it more than a Total Dom.

Porters and Brown Malt, Continued

I wrote rather breezily last week about brown malt and its use in the old English porters of yore. Ah, but which brown malt? I quoted from Henry Stopes 1885 account. It describes blown malt, wherein the maltster stokes the fire to a mighty blaze at the end of kilning so that the "grains burst like popcorn." In comments, Beer and Coding's Kevin made an obvious point:

I'll go ahead and confirm Jeff's presumption that you cannot make a historic porter using 100% modern brown malt. Modern brown malt has no enzymatic activity, no diastatic power.

Quite true. Since everything I know about historical British brewing I learned from Cornell and Pattinson, I went to them. Ron to the rescue:

Before the hydrometer revealed that pale malt was far more economical, Porter had been brewed from 100% brown malt. That in itself tells us that the brown malt of that time was very different stuff to that of the 19th century onwards. Later brown malt had no diastatic power. It didn't need to, because there were sufficient enzymes in the pale malt base. The purpose of brown malt in a brew had changed. It was just being used for flavour and colour, as Carr wrote.

That earlier brown malts were highly dried, but not flashed with searing fire like the brown malts a century later. Moreover, their quality depended on the source of fuel. Again, via Pattinson, a contemporary observer:

"The brown Malt is the soonest and highest dryed of any, even till it is so hard, that it's difficult to bite some of its Corns asunder, and is often so crusted or burnt, that the farinous part loses a great deal of its essential Salts and vital Property"

and

"Brown Malts are dryed with Straw, Wood and Fern, etc. The straw-dryed is the best, but the wood sort has a most unnatural Taste, that few can bear with, but the necessitous, and those that are accustomed to its strong smoaky tang; yet it is much used in some of the Western Parts of England, and many thousand Quarters of this malt has been formerly used in London for brewing the Butt-keeping-beers with, and that because it sold for two shillings per Quarter cheaper than Straw-dryed Malt."
(London and Country Brewer, 1736)

Hope that clarifies things.

The Lessons of Stumptown

Sunday evening, Willamette Week broke the news that Stumptown Coffee had been sold to a New York investment firm. (Stumptown denies it, but WW's further reporting confirmed the story.) I had what I assume was a pretty standard reaction across the Rose City: that sucks. Yet predictably, we get this kind of reporting on the story:

Many of the Stumptown's fans in Portland fell in love with its indie and irreverent roots as much as its flavor. For them, turning to an investment banker -- one with ties to now collapsed Bear Stearns, notes one local blogger -- flies in the face of its underground underdog image....

"Any kind of growth like that will benefit them on the national level," Milletto said. "A lot of companies grow, I just think that the reaction in Portland will be a little different... Here, everyone loves their local brand."

This story is about a coffee roaster--but it might well be about a brewery. In fact, two months ago, Goose Island sold out to Anheuser-Busch in the first of what I assume will be a steady trickle of similar acquisitions. I think there's a lesson here, but the analysis by Laura Gunderson (a great reporter) is off the mark.

First of all, let's identify the transgression. It's not that Stumptown is trying to grow big--if Stumptown maintained its commitment to great coffee and continued to spread across the country, that would be one thing. In the beer world, this is like Sierra Nevada, Deschutes, or Widmer getting big. So long as they give the same attention to the beer, who cares whether they're selling in Arkansas? No, the problem is that the new parent company has a tendency of making companies generic and mall-ready:

Stumptown and TSG also may have partnered in such a way that the New York firm, which has invested in VitaminWater, Famous Amos Chocolate Chip Cookie Corp., and Mauna Loa Macadamia Nut Co., takes on a certain market. For instance, Sorenson could remain in charge of roasting operations and certain locations in Portland, while TSG owns new stores and ventures.

The examples above are akin to Blue Moon, a somewhat distinctive beer made generic so it would appeal (or more accurately, not offend) a broad audience. Selling-out isn't the same as growing; selling out means sacrificing an ethos of serving a particular clientele for one of serving everyone. That's why I find Gunderson's framing a little condescending. She makes it seem like an issue of appearance: hipsters who feel jilted because their cool indie thing is going national. In fact, Gunderson reports on real changes Stumptown has in mind, and it's a lot more than appearance:

Finance experts say it's probably a good thing that Stumptown is able to attract an investor, especially if it has big hopes for the future. Which indeed it does. Lounsbury last week rattled off Sorenson's wish list, which include growing Stumptown's store base in existing markets, blazing new ground in markets such as Chicago and San Francisco, and creating a line of chilled coffee in stubby bottles.

To the extent people feel jilted, they do so not because they're lovelorn, wounded locals who have had the image of their beloved coffeeshop shattered; it's an actual case of how Stumptown will have to change if it wants to become national. It's quite reasonable that locals would lament the lost of a business with products they like for a business with products they don't. (And all of that leaves aside the obvious fact that Stumptown--Stumptown--has branded itself as a hyper-local, hipster coffee shop. Who's changing the rules here?)

All of which is to say what? With Stumptown, my concern is that a NY investment firm isn't going to pay the kind of incredible detail to coffee that the founding Stumptown owners did. This isn't a matter of attitude or "irreverence," it's a matter of coffee. I'd say the same is roughly true for good beer and brewing, too.

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PHOTO: 80s BABY

The Must-Attend Fest of 2011: Fruit Beer Fest

Let's try a little thought experiment. I say "fruit beer" and you think _____________? If you're like me, you think of a light, sweet liquid that straddles the line between beer and alco-pop. I'd like you to put that image out of your mind and consider this weekend's Fruit Beer Fest anew.

Fruit offers to beer many things: a source of fermentable sugars, color, aroma, and flavor. Used ham-handedly, you get a sugary mess. Used skillfully, fruit can add layers of subtle flavors and aromas impossible with grain and hop alone. For the Fruit Beer Fest, Ezra Greenough-Johnson has assembled a collection of specialty beers that demonstrate how versatile fruit can be: small beers, stouts, sours, and, yes, hop bombs all transformed by the additions of fruit. Nearly all of the beers are rare, and many are one-time batches produced specifically for the fest.

You can read about all the beers here, but I wanted to highlight a few just to illustrate how seriously the brewers have embraced this fest, both in concept and execution:

• Block 15 Psidium. The name of the beer is the name of the fruit you'll find in it--guava. Nick Arzner's idea was to brew a pretty straightforward farmhouse ale. After his initial order of guavas failed to ripen, he found puree instead and produced a beer he felt was too flat and one-dimensional. To liven it up, he added 20-25% soured ale he'd had in a barrel for 21 months. The effect is totally misleading though; Psidium doesn't taste like a sour ale. Rather, the blended beer works with the fruit flavors to create the sense of a fruit skin astringency. When I tasted it, I was certain what I was tasting was skins.
  
• Hopworks Chupacabra Chili and Fort George Badda Boom Stout. Stouts are a fantastic substrate on which to project fruit flavors, as these two illustrate. Ben Love put three infusions of two chilies into Seven Grain Stout to create a wonderfully lush beer. You initially taste the chili heat, but it fades into the flavors of the chilies, smoky, sweet, and a tiny bit tart. The heat completely fades in the swallow. Badda Boom is made with cherries and raspberries, and tastes like a dark chocolate truffle. The fruit is an understated note in the center of the beer. Their sweetness melds into the chocolate roast of the stout and harmonize into an intense, long finish. It's liquid decadence.
• Alameda Huckleberry Hound and Breakside Mango IPA. Hops contribute far more than bitterness; they add flavor and esters, both of which are often likened to fruit. Why not take intensely hoppy beers and accentuate their hop-fruitiness with actual fruit? That's what Alameda and Breakside have done. Huckleberry Hound is an imperial IPA that was sweetened with honey and sugar as well as the hops. It is surprisingly gentle. We didn't have a chance to try the Mango IPA, but tropical fruit should enhance notes in the Citra, Cascade, and Ahtanum hops in the beer.
• Upright Gin Barrel Strawberry Four. The name tells you a great deal about this beer. What it doesn't tell you is what the beer tastes like. The strawberries express themselves principally in the aroma. They're fermented out so that the resulting beer is bone-dry and heavily influenced by the gin botanticals. It tasted a bit like bitters to me.

These are just a few examples. Fifteen beers will pour throughout the fest, and another 16+ rarities will rotate in and out (some of these are five-gallon kegs). Full event details are here, but here are the highlights:

Fruit Beer Fest, June 11-12
Saturday, 11-9pm, Sunday, 11-6pm
Burnside Brewing, 7th and East Burnside
The event is free, glasses are six bucks, tickets for regular 4-ounce beers $1, special beers cost 2-3 tickets. Kids are welcome. As you would expect with an event hosted at Burnside, the food looks fantastic.

In short, you should really try to stop by if you have the chance. This is one of the new breeds of specialty fests, and everyone involved has worked to make it a special one. If you feel insufficiently convinced, have a look at what Bill and Rachel have to say about it.

Best of the West Coast

This has been zipping around the internets, but I thought I'd throw it out for discussion. In their most recent issue, Beer West has released their "best of" list. They've adopted the idiosyncratic approach of advocacy rating: "We went behind the scenes to look at the history, people, and influence the beer or place has had on the industry as well as their community." I'm reminded of Derek Avent's best breweries of Oregon list a couple years ago--when he selected Block 15. Since any system subjective, highlighting the lesser-known is as valid a criteria as any. (Though that begs the question: why is Vinnie Cilurzo the best brewer? He's about as unknown as the New York Yankees.)

Their Big Five
1. Best Brewery: Prodigal Son
2. Best Brewer: Vinnie Cilurzo, Russian River
3. Best City: San Francisco
4. Best Pub: Beveridge Place, Seattle
5. Best Beer: Bridge Creek Pilsner, Silver Moon

There are gobs of other awards, including a nod to the brewery deepest in the boonies, which goes to Ted Sobel's Brewers Union. Go have a look. I have no real complaints, except that in a list of obscure top fives, an underappreciated brewer would have been nice.

Your thoughts?

A Taste of the Past: Cluster Hops

We spend a lot of time thinking about beers of the past, but this almost always means Europe's past. If you want to keep your historical excursions on this continent, one place to start is the venerable Cluster hop, a strain that goes back as far as many of the world's venerated strains. Those of you who went to the Single Hop Fest at Amnesia this weekend were treated to one tour-de-force example, Double Mountain's Clusterf#%k. But we'll come to that in due course.

First, a bit on the history of American hops. The first British settlers, beer-oriented as they were, had hops in the ground by 1629 and there was a commercial market for them by 1646. These were English hops--or possibly English and Dutch--but they were pretty quickly crossed with local natives. (I doubt anyone knows if this was intentional or accidental.) What ultimately emerged from these early crops was Cluster. By the turn of the 20th century nearly every hop grown in the country was Cluster (96%). After Prohibition, Clusters continued to dominate; in 1935, they occupied 90% of the market.

American hops weren't prized; they had high alphas, high cohumulone, and were regarded as pungent and harsh. Brewers used American hops for bitter charges and then scented and flavored their beers with the sweet nectar of low-alpha, low-cohumulone hops from Europe. For 350 years, American brewers bought in to the notion that their local hops, which definitely differed from European hops, were inferior. As that all changed, mainly when American craft brewers began to discover that local hops were indeed tasty and aromatic, and the Cluster hop--the original "C" hop--faded from sight.

I was dimly aware of all this history and assumed that one of the reasons no one knew US hops were so good was because Clusters lacked their cousins' virtues. Fast forward to Saturday, when I tried Double Mountain's Clusterf#%k, an IPA that uses the old hop in a way Henry Weinhard never dreamed of. With 75 IBUs of lip-smacking hoppiness, CF didn't nestle the hops in a subtle admixture of malt and yeast. No, this beer is all Clusters--and what a wonderful opportunity to see the old hop shine. It has all the American character you would expect, with intense citrus that was a dead ringer for passionfruit. It kicks off a lot of tropical fruit essence as well, suggesting mango or guava. It is every bit as sticky and vivid as you expect from US hops--and distinctive, too.

The Cascade will probably be the American hop for the next 350 years; Cascade Brewing sent a pale saturated in their namesake hop that was a perfect demonstration of why it's so beloved. It's got a pure, clean character full of floral, citrus life. Few hops anywhere can match if for elegance and versatility. Yet the Cluster shows that America has long produced great hops--if only we'd known to make beer in which you could actually taste them.

Obviously, you should try to make it out to Hood River for a pint of the Clusterf#%k. I doubt seriously Double Mountain wants a fourth IPA regular in their lineup.

Friday Flick: Westmalle

Okay, I promise this isn't going to turn into Friday Blog at the Monastery, but I couldn't resist one more. A bit over-produced, but the visuals are pretty sweet.

Bragging Points Event

Boston is, sadly, a pretty crap town for breweries (though it's not a bad beer city). Nevertheless, this Red Sox fan is red with envy to be 3,000 miles from an extremely cool event:

Kevin Youkilis is hosting a Night at the Harpoon Brewery on Sunday to benefit his charity, Youk’s Kids. In addition to tours of the brewer, food from Davios and the silent auction, there will be the opportunity for an exclusive tasting of Youkilis’ own special brew. [Itals mine.]

Of course, it's $200, so there's that. Still, Youk beer!

The Portland Calendar is Heating Up

I am no good at tracking the myriad events happening around Beervana. For that you should always visit Brewpublic. At the same time, it would be remiss of me not to highlight a few that have really caught my eye--and in the next couple weeks, there are lots and lots.


Saturday, June 4

Single Hop Fest, Amnesia Brewing, noon-8pm. As you know, hops have distinctive aromas and flavors. But do you know which hops contribute which aromas and flavors? The way to learn is by sampling single-hopped beer, and Amnesia has ten examples that all use different hops. It's not just a beer fest, it's an education.

Collaboration Fest, Breakside Brewing, noon. Brewer Ben Edmunds invited a few non-brewers into his brewery to create the beer of their dreams. Lisa Morrison, John Foyston, the staff from Saraveza, and Ladies of Lagers and Ales founder Margaret Lut. They came up with a beet ale, a steam, a Meyer lemon kolsch, and an American amber--but you have to guess who brewed which.


Sunday, June 5

Coalator release and new nano sneak preview, Coalition Brewing, 3pm. There's a new nano in the works--Humble Brewing. Brewer Chad Freitag worked with Coalition and their system to make his Dusseldorf Alt, a sort of sneak preview.


Friday & Saturday, June 10-11
Fruit Beer Fest, Burnside Brewing, starts 11am both days. I am always leery about fruit beers, many of which taste like spiked fruit punch, but Ezra has curated a fantastic line-up for this fest. There's a media tasting tomorrow, and I'll have a fuller preview next week. But put it on your calendar--there will be some special beers there.

Cider Summit, Saturday only, Elizabeth Caruthers Park (South Waterfront), 11am-7pm. Wo/man cannot live by beer alone. This fest features two dozen ciders from five apple-producing states, England, and France. Producers will be on hand to discuss their products. Tix are $20 advance, or $25 at the door.

And all of that is happening in just the next ten days. Imagine what the summer holds!

19th Century Porters

One nice thing about doing research for a book: it forces you to absorb information that would otherwise just wash through your brain. For example, although I have read Martyn Cornell's great history of porters, it didn't sink in until this morning what he was actually saying. Porters have been around for nearly 300 years, but the ones we drink now don't taste the same as ones brewed in London in 1800. Why? It's the malt.

"It also used highly dried brown malt, which gave a roast flavor to the beer. Henry Stopes, a nineteenth-century malting expert wrote in Malt and Malting, of the making of 'brown, blown, snap, or porter malt,' talking about how the porter malthouses .... burnt faggots of beech-wood or oak under the wet malt to dry it, going slowly at first until almost all the moisture has been driven from the malt, then building up the firs so that the sudden violent heat makes the malt grains burst like popcorn."

Porters throughout most of the 1700s were brewed entirely from brown malt. From about 1790 on, the recipes called for a declining percentage of brown malt, but it was still a key to the character of porter. In 1817, Daniel Wheeler invented a method of roasting malt at 400 degrees to make a black malt; he took a patent out on the process, and that's where we get "black patent" malt. This made it possible to stain a beer black with only a tiny amount of dark malt--the balance could be made up in brown and pale malts. The percentage of brown malt used in the grist continued to decline over the 19th century as mild ale began to supplant porter.

So, forget that silly recent news about Washington's porter. If you wanted to brew an actual Victorian porter, you'd need to track down some of that funny old brown malt (different, I assume than this brown malt). Or make it. And you'd also need to find a cask somewhere and put the beer in there with some brett* for about a year (or more) if you wanted the really authentic stuff.

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*As Osh points out in comments, this is an unnecessarily oblique reference. I've been swimming in this stuff lately, and I forget not everyone is looking over my shoulder and absorbing the same things. This refers to the wild yeast brettanomyces, which was resident in wooden vats of British beer until sometime in the 20th century. It actually takes the name from Britain ("brett"), where scientists first isolated it. It takes awhile to kick in, so beer aged briefly or not at all ("mild" or "running") would have been unaffected.

Law and Beer

I was recently working on an article about new breweries for Draft Magazine, and it took me to Alabama, where a couple of guys are trying to open Avondale Brewing in Birmingham. Alabama, population 4.7 million, currently has six breweries. In general, the South has trailed the rest of the country in good beer production, and I've always assumed there was a cultural explanation for this. But in talking with Coby Lake at Avondale, I learned that state law plays a huge role.

For example, until last night, it was both illegal for a production brewery to have a tasting room and for a brewpub to sell its beer off-site. Seriously. An organization called Free the Hops led a charge to change this, and it managed to get through the Alabama legislature yesterday. (Good thing for Avondale, too--they were building a bar in the brewery on the hope that the law would pass.)

That's not all. Until 2009, it was illegal to brew beer stronger than 6%, and it's still illegal to sell beer in bottles larger than 16 ounces. And last but certainly not least, it's illegal to homebrew in Alabama, one of only two states where that's the case (Mississippi's the other).

Imagine where California, Oregon, Colorado, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania would be if they still had laws like this. Laws have a huge effect in shaping how business evolves, and in turn shape how craft brewing evolves. Now, as the Yellowhammer State starts to loosen these 19th century laws, what do you think the effect will be? How a burst of new breweries? In addition to Avondale, seven more are planned--which would more than double the current total.