Reviewing Beer: Describing

Describing food and beverages is brutal business. It makes the tasting and assessing look like child's play by comparison. Every beer drinker knows why this is. Try to describe a beer to a friend. The conversation goes something like this:

"Tried the new Hopworks strong ale?"

"No, what's it taste like?"

"It's pretty hoppy, citrusy. It's boozy. It's good."

If the friend trusts your palate, he may try the beer, but he certainly has no idea what to expect. Language often fails us when we're trying to communicate the experience of certain flavors and tastes. We have to come at it sideways, by simile, or are reduced to using bland, general terms. Everyone who has written more than a few reviews has written bad ones. Sometimes we just can't find the words. But those of us who have read Michael Jackson know it can be done. I'm not sure how other reviewers do it, but when I pull off a good review, this is how I do it.

Specificity
It's easy to fall back onto vague adjectives. Here's what I wrote about MacTarnahan's Grifter: "It has that characteristic MacTarnahan's clarity, the light fruitiness, and the gentle, unassuming hopping." This could describe half the beers on the market right now. Not so hot. Now, here's Double Mountain Kolsch: "They have overhopped it for style, but selected hops that draw out a lemongrass note, complementing the tartness." In the Grifter review, my adjectives are too general, and don't communicate anything that would help the reader imagine the experience. The Kolsch sentence is better--adjectives like "lemongrass" and "tartness" tell a fuller story.

It is a fascinating quirk of the English language that most of the adjectives we use to describe flavors and aromas are other flavors and aromas. We say a beer is "nutty" or "piney." Well, how else can you describe something that smell of pine? Although I don't often hit the mark, it is possible to do better. Rather than just say "nutty" and leave it at that, why not get a little closer with "roast almonds," say, or "hazelnuts." Wine reviews have given a bad name to this kind of specificity. So often useless and pretentious (I saw a pinot gris described as "linen"), they are mock-ready. But, going back to the tasting section, if I had the presence of mind to investigate the "nutty" malt, perhaps I saw something that would take it out of the bland and uninformative and give it a more vibrant clarity.

Evocative
In India, there's a theory of art known as rasa, which is the mood of a piece. Music is grouped by rasa--romantic, melancholy, joyful, etc. Many beer reviewers don't like to evoke a sense of the feeling of drinking a beer--perhaps they feel this is an ornamentation that intrudes rather than clarifies--but I think it's useful. Beer, like haiku, is associated with season; this is one dimension. In the toolkit of the reviewer, we find only words. The more evocative ones, that help point to the experience of drinking a beer, I find most useful. I was pretty happy with my description of Duvel, a beer that inspires me:

The instructions on the bottle say "pour unhurredly," but unless you've got a large glass, you can't pour slowly enough to stop the massive head from rushing to the rim. You pour in increments, steadily building the pure white froth up like a vanilla cone. The beer is pilsner pale (made in fact with pilsner malt) and roils with bubbles. Still, it's not at all viscous, evidence of ample added sugar that gives the Devil its juice.

Avoid Beerspeak Wherever Possible
Perhaps most controversially, I hate the language of the Beer Judge Certification Program (BJCP) which has come to dominate beer reviews. It goes like this:

Flavor: Moderate to high hop flavor from American hop varieties, which often but not always has a citrusy quality. Malt flavors are moderate to strong, and usually show an initial malty sweetness followed by a moderate caramel flavor (and sometimes other character malts in lesser amounts). Malt and hop bitterness are usually balanced and mutually supportive. Fruity esters can be moderate to none. Caramel sweetness and hop flavor/bitterness can linger somewhat into the medium to full finish. No diacetyl.

These technical outlines may be useful in trying to determine whether a beer has been brewed to a style or not, but they violate the two earlier rules. Brewers like them because they map to methods and ingredients familiar to him. But I don't write beer reviews for brewers. For a non brewer, this language is useless. It may tell what's in a beer and how it's brewed, but not what makes it distinct from other examples or whether it's any good or not. I don't like to read reviews written in beerspeak, and I try to avoid them.

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So there you have it. If I manage to write a successful review, what appears on the page will have been the result of a careful tasting, reflective assessment, and evocative, specific descriptions. I hope readers walk away with a good sense the beer's context, style, and brewing process as well as my experience of drinking the beer--and clues to how their own experience may differ. I probably succeed half the time or less. (You be the judge.) Beer writers are a minor player in the ecosystem of brewing, but I like to think we can be useful. The world of beer unfolded for me by virtue of reading Jackson as I started drinking micros. Without his research and descriptions, I would have spent a lot longer wandering the wilderness. So, with luck, we bloggers and beer writers do contribute something.

Thanks to blogs and the ratings sites, many of you also review lots of beers. Feel free to throw in your two cents in comments.

World (Cup) of Beers: North Korea

Although the Beeronomist has most of our soccer- football-related posts taken care of, I will remind you that most of the participating countries brew their own beer. (Discussion topic: what is more ubiquitous, soccer or beer?) Even North Korea:



Goooalll! (Or maybe not.)

Reviewing Beer: Assessing

On the way to a review, the reviewer (or this one, anyway) has to not only taste a beer, but assess it. Assessing a beer is a process that involves drawing information number of external sources and synthesizing everything to try to give meaning to your review.

What Were They Shooting For?
I don't know where I read it, but someone once recounted the story that Michael Jackson used to ask breweries, "What were you shooting for with this beer?" This is important, because a commercial brewery won't necessarily be trying to brew to style. If I don't have the brewer handy to consult, I start by reading what the brewery says about it. The virtues of the internet age--something MJ didn't have. Knowing what the brewery was trying to accomplish makes it a lot easier to assess how well they did.

What Ingredients and Methods Were Used?
I generally try to taste a beer with as little information as possible. It's nice to see what you can pick up from your senses alone. But afterward, it's critical to find out how a beer was brewed and what ingredients were used. I may well pick up a lot of information in the tasting, but the details are important. Bourbon-barrel aging is usually obvious, to take one example, but it's useful to also know how much of the final product had been barrel-aged and for how long. Most breweries do something interesting to their beer, and a reviewer must have that info.

What Else is Out There?
I suppose if you were judging a beer in competition, it would be possible to ignore the larger landscape. I had the very good fortune to sample three of Allagash's spontaneously-fermented beers on Tuesday (a gueuze, kriek, and framboise). It would have been inconceivable to try to write about these beers without reference to the Belgian inspirations. Regional variation can be important--is the IPA brewed to the West Coast style, or a more general American style? Or is it an English IPA? This is useful not just for the reviewer, but for the reader. It also helps establish my bias. To use the IPA example, if I were to write dismissively about "Colorado IPAs" (which I would never, ever do), you could judge my bias accordingly.

Did it Work?
Once I have gathered together this information, I think back to the tasting and ask whether the whole thing came together or not. Every time a brewery makes a new beer, their goal is the same: excellence. No one brews a beer thinking, "You know, I think that just may be adequate." But only a few new releases ever actually achieve greatness. I look back at the goal, the ingredients and methods, and other similar beers and make a judgment about how well the beer succeeded. In my mind, I hope that after I've shown all my work, a brewery will admit, happily or grudgingly, that I've made a reasonable assessment.

Did I like It?
My own opinion about the beer is easily the least important assessment, but I think readers deserve to know. For what it's worth, only about half the time is my own opinion about a beer consistent with my assessment of it. Like anyone, I have my preferences.

Tomorrow: Describing the beer.

Reviewing Beer: Tasting

Last week I tossed off a little post called "Woe is the Reviewer" that highlighted the difficulties in reviewing beer. In tossing it off, I missed an opportunity to go a bit deeper, though. Reviewing a beer is a unique exercise--different than tasting it on one's own or judging it for a competition. A review is a communication that depends on a series of assumptions. When you review a beer, you are taking into account more than just the elements of style. You're trying to figure out where the beer fits in the context of the market--how does it compare to other beers; what does it add to the public conversation; what will people used to drinking other similar beers think? Many reviewers opt for the homebrew-judge model, or a purely descriptive one, but when I read reviews, I like a little more context. So that's how I do reviews.

To come up with a review I think will be useful and informative, I go through three stages, and I'll take these in turn over the next three days: tasting the beer, assessing the beer, and finally describing it. Let's start with the tasting.

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Look at the Beer
Your eyes can tell you a lot. If you pour a beer from a bottle, you can see its viscosity as it comes out, its level of carbonation, and whether or not yeast dribbles out at the end. These are useful clues. A thick, gloppy beer is one with lots of residual sugars. Carbonation levels may be a clue to style or brewing method. Does a head come easily or do I have to pour quickly to rouse one? The yeast indicates bottle-conditioning, which doesn't say a lot about the beer, but is better at preserving it. (If I don't see any, I look in the bottom of the bottle to see if there's any residue).

It's a bit more difficult if you get a draft pour, but you may see some clues in the head. Nitro heads produce bubbles so small the head is like cream (think Guinness). Cask heads are often quite flat, and you may even see just a skiff of largish bubbles. A flat cask pour may mean we're past the expiration date--or just that it's not really fizzy. Some cask pours use a "sparkler" which gives a nitro-like head, which can be confusing.

Of course, there are obvious facts about how a beer looks. Color will give you clues about the malts. Some beers are brewed to be pretty, and it's nice to pause a moment and appreciate. But there's a lot more information than color. Clarity is a big one. Haze could come from hops, proteins, or yeast (and the nature of the haze could be a clue to which). If a beer is especially clear, that's also telling, too. In some cases, breweries filter out any large molecules, leaving their beer very bright but often with less flavor-imparting floaties.

I keep looking as I'm drinking the beer. I swirl and watch the head structure. Does it stick around or vanish? I look to see how light refracts though the glass as the level goes down. I see if it remains effervescent--does it hold a bead? My eyes may lie to me, but that doesn't mean I don't use them. I can put meaning to my observations later.

Feel the Beer
One thing I hate is overly cold beer--and mostly draft beer is overly cold. To combat this, I try to warm my pint up with my hands. I usually am able to get it toasty by the time I reach the bottom of the glass--60 degrees or higher. This isn't ideal for many styles, but looking, sniffing, and tasting as a beer warms can tell me a lot about what's in it. Even over-warm, I'm getting interesting data.

Smell the Beer
For me, the most important part of the process is smelling. Human taste is dictated largely by what we take in through our nose. Plug your nostrils or sample beer with a bad head cold, and you can't really taste it. I've found that if I stop to really sniff and snort the aroma of a beer (provided it isn't too cold), it will help guide me to flavors when I taste it. Very often, the clues I pick up in the nose tell me what to look for in the flavor. In particular, I run through an inventory and try to assess each of these dimensions:

• Hops. Hops contribute all kinds of aromatics, and later, when I taste the beer, the aroma will tell me something about when they were added. I'm getting fairly adept at identifying hops, so I sniff to see what kind they seem to be. To the extent possible, I try to differentiate the various compounds--the citrus, pine, spice, flower, and so on.
  
• Malt. Malts and grain offer more subtle smells than hops, but they are generally evident. Again, sniffing to see if I can find nuts or toast or tobacco or coffee can be useful later on.
  
• Alcohol. Alcohol isn't an aroma so much as a chemical property--it vents off a beer with a sharp, umm, alcoholic quality. (This is an example of the difficulty of description, which we'll discuss in more detail in part three.)
  
• Yeast. Are you about to taste a Belgian dubbel, a NW amber, or an Oktoberfest? Sometimes your nose can tell you what your eyes can't. When a yeast is lagered cold, it produces low amounts of chemical compounds. But the warmer the fermentation temperature, the more esters, phenols, and "character" yeasts produce. In Bavarian weizens, a chemical called isoamyl acetate makes a banana flavor--a dead giveaway. Phenols are peppery or clovey. And esters can be fruity or spicy. Of course, soured beer has lots of different characteristics, and a "barnyard" aroma suggests one kind while a vinegar aroma suggests another.
  
• Off-aromas. Mostly these should be absent in commercial beer, and identifying them is hard if you don't brew. Guides are suggestive, but I didn't understand them until I'd screwed up a batch of my own.
  
• Adjuncts. Not all adjuncts can be smelled, and some can only be smelled. But if you think you're getting a blackberry note, take heed--it could be blackberry.
  

Again, I continue to smell the beer as I drink it, particularly if it starts out cold. Alternating between smelling and tasting as a beer warms can continue to inform you. (And the truth is, I often can't really get a sense of a beer's character if I don't have a full pint and sample it slowly as it warms.)

Taste the Beer
Finally we come to the tasting. And with me, it is honestly a "finally"--I may spend a couple minutes or more inspecting and sniffing. Because of that, tasting is in some ways the easiest part. If you swish a beer around aggressively in your mouth, it gives you a better sense of mouthfeel and causes vapors to go up your nose. I do that and usually follow the first sip up quickly with another one to give the flavors a chance to build.

With any luck, I've picked up some of the signals that guide me along my tasting. This can also be a moment of surprise; sometimes scents or sights mislead. Maybe the lush hop aroma disguises a low-bitterness beer. Or maybe a very bitter beer failed to exhibit much nose. Some qualities, like those given by yeast, are more perceptible on the tongue than nose. Essentially, though, I'm going through the same process, tasting for identifiable qualities.

After all of that, I begin to have confidence in what I've tasted. It's a slow process, but something about having hundreds (thousands?) of people reading what I observed makes me strive for accuracy. Of course, even with that, I sometimes miss things. But this process seems to work pretty well.

Tomorrow: Assessing.

Expanding the Definition of Beervana

BridgePort has two new videos out (they're called TV spots, but about where they're airing, and when, I can't say) that are very close to each other. Here's the second one--see if you notice anything interesting.



I'm actually pretty cool with an expanded definition of "Beervana." I know it properly refers to just the city of Portland. I'm also cool with that. But if you look at regional culture, the Pacific Northwest constitutes a single zone. Portland and Seattle have far more in common than they have in contrast.

Now, about that video. The visuals are cool and the music is tolerable (though not ideal). The voice-over? Not good. One has the sense that BridgePort's trying to hard--way too hard. Too bad they didn't just trust the images. They tell the whole story on their own. A longer and better version--with two seconds of pretty racy material--is here.

Damn Rain

I just checked, and Portland, Oregon has received 7 inches of rain since May 15, and three inches in the past week. If that doesn't drive you to drink, what will? No wonder this is Beervana--what else to do but sit in a pub and watch the sheets of water hammer down?

Don't Call Them Beers

A number of folks were linking to an interesting article about the current arms race to make the strongest eisbock. As recently as 2007, Boston Beer's Utopias had the record for alcohol strength at 27%, but beginning last year, two breweries struggled to best each other, pushing the record all the way up to 43%. The principal competitors are Scotland's BrewDog and Germany's Schorschbräu. Apparently the ultimate goal is 50%--well above the typical alcohol percentage of a bottle of liquor.

The article, which does a nice job charting the history of strong beer, is intriguing--but the arms race less so. The road to a 43% beer involves a kind of distillation, not brewing. In brewing, alcohol is produced by yeast; it's actually yeast's excrement, a chemical byproduct of the conversion of sugars. At high enough levels, alcohol becomes toxic to yeast, so there's a natural ceiling for the amount of alcohol you can get through normal fermentation.

The process of making eisbock--which is what all these super-strong beers are--involves dropping a beer to a temperature below the freezing point of water but above the freezing point of alcohol. What results is a half-frozen cask. Remove the ice and you've taken just water, leaving more concentrated liquor behind. (Normal distillation involves heating liquid to separate compounds--but this violence would damage beer in a way freezing can't.) In order to get beer as strong as liquor, you have to refreeze a batch over and over again. Here's Georg Tscheuschner, the record-holding brewer at Schorschbräu:

“To create the 43% beer, I had to filter around 15 times”, said Tscheuschner. “I actually lost count, but I think it was 15 times. You end up with only 50 litres from the 800-1000 liters that you started with. You need to do a lot more filtering to get a beer from 32% to 43% alcohol because whereas in the first filtering (of the ice), you might add say 5 or six percent ABV, but towards the end of the filtering process, it's maybe even less than 1% additional ABV for each filter. Towards the end it becomes very difficult.”

I don't have any problem with eisbocks, but their increasing popularity means we're hearing more and more about 80-proof "beers." These aren't beers. Scotch begins with an unhopped beer and goes through distillation; we call it whisky. When beer is subjected to freeze distillation and is transformed into a liquor of 43% alcohol, it's not beer anymore. Too bad the term "malt liquor" has already been used. Beer liquor? I don't know; just don't call them beers.

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GRAPHIC: GIZMAG

Friday News Roundup

Note: post has been corrected.

Lots of tidbits of news lately, and I've packaged them up in today's digestible roundup. Here we go.

Washington Beer Tax
In order to help patch a gaping budgetary hole, the Evergreen State legislature hiked excise taxes on big breweries. Both Washington Beer Blog and Seattle Beer News report. This a significant development because Oregon will inevitably take up a beer tax next year, and Washington's effort will probably serve as a model. Thumbnail recap: it raises taxes to by $15 to $23.58 a barrel for any brewery selling 60k barrels a year in Washington and on all beers of over 10% abv. For small breweries and their sub-10% beers, no change.

Produce Row Reboot
Not every event warrants a mention, but new owners of Produce Row have earned one. This is one of the most important pubs in Portland history, a critical building block in establishing the pub culture that would evolve into Beervana. I haven't been there in years, which is probably typical. Next Friday is the kick-off, and if you don't make it for that, try, as I will, to stop in for a beer in the near future. There will be a bit of synergy soon as Hair of the Dog opens nearby. The old Fruit District is getting some life.

Foursquare
Brady has a post up about how BridgePort used the social networking site Foursquare to promote a pub crawl by the Hop Czar (who has apparently taken corporeal form as some kind of Burger King-like mascot). Foursquare? Yet another social networking site that seems almost wholly devoted to getting people to note their every move so ... actually, I have no idea. It seems horrible and appalling. But Brady makes the case that breweries may well find use for it, and I think he has a point. (I hope not, though--I'm getting social media-ed out.) But anyway, consider yourselves apprised of the phenomenon.

Beer Blogger's Conference
The first annual beer bloggers conference has been set for November 5th in Denver (of course). If you are now are will be a blogger, details here.

Weekend Best Bets
It's been a long time since I've mentioned eye-grabbing beers going into the weekend, but here's a few. At Bailey's Terminal Gravity's Cascadian Dark Ale (collect the whole set!), Eric's Peach Ale, a Lips of Faith series from New Belgium at Belmont Station, Molten Lava by Double Mountain, which I hope is still on tap at the Horse Brass. As always, taps change, so drinker beware.

I leave you with random photos snapped on a stroll yesterday during the brief window between the incessant, maddening rain.

Migration, We Have a Problem

Migration Brewing is a relatively short walk from my house. (Short walks now being defined by the literal stone's throw distance separating myself and soon-to-open Coalition.) As such, it was a very welcome arrival. When they opened, they hadn't gotten their own beers up and running, so I waited until they had a pale on tap. It was ... not good. No worries; it had been brewed at Lompoc, and I figured, let them get their own system going before making hasty judgments.

The good news abounded. The food was tasty, the space is fantastic, and the other taps were occupied by an extremely well-selected (if small) group of beers. If the dismal weather ever ceases, they're going to have wonderful seating--lots of picnic tables out front, and a garage door on one wall that will turn the inside out. All of that still stands.

But last night I went and had another pint and it was ... worse. They're currently pouring two beers, that pale and the one I tried, promisingly called Little Bitter. Rather than go in whole hog, Sally and I tentatively ordered the bitter and an Upright Four (which distressingly makes rarer and rarer appearances as other Upright beers supplant it). Good call. The Little Bitter was literally undrinkable. From a good six inches away, my nose picked up the diacetyl, but the really appalling thing was the strange, lacerating bitterness. I want to say it was a tannic bitterness, but that's not quite right. More like some kind of weed extraction. Looking at the website now, the stats suggest it would be painfully, undrinkably bitter (75 IBUs in a 4.5% beer), but this was beyond hop bitterness.

I note no other bloggers have actually commented on the beer, which I take to be the silence of kindness. I'm not interested in marking Migration with a scarlet letter, either, so consider this an intervention. Migration, I have confidence you can brew good beer, but you need to get on the stick. In Beervana, bad beer is a death sentence, and I want you around the neighborhood for a good, long time.

This CDA Thing Appears to Have Legs

For weeks now I've opened my fridge and looked at the bottle of Deschutes Hop in the Dark, a beer they proudly tout as Cascadian Dark Ale (CDA). For weeks, I've said, "maybe later." Last night, I said, "oh, all right."

My relationship with the style is not wildly positive (see here and here), which is a shame for someone as baldly parochial as I. And it's not for lack of trying--I do want to like the CDAs. The clash of flavors, roast and hop bite, have heretofore been too much to overcome, however, so I regard them with the reviewer's eye, never enjoying them with the drinker's tongue.

I have to confess: Hop in the Dark isn't quite as far outside my wheelhouse as I expected. According to the website, it took Larry Sidor and Cam O'Connor 22 batches to perfect the recipe. (That's one of the reasons I think breweries need to get the yeast for Cheers to Belgian Beers as soon as possible--but let's not get off into the weeds.) One stroke of brilliance is oats, which gives the beer an impressive creaminess. You'd think this would further confuse matters for an already schizophrenic style, but it actually helps bridge the gap between coffee bitterness of the darker malts and hop bite. Like a friend who tries to smooth things over between adversaries.

Deschutes also decided to just go for it with the hops; they're a nuclear 75 BUs, and taste every inch of it. Generally CDAs try to find the balance point (which is like finding a balance between orange juice and toothpaste), but not Hop in the Dark. It's a hop bomb. One other thing I've finally tumbled to: somehow the combination of lots of hops and noticeable roasty malt creates the impression of pine. And not mildly. I have previously believed this to be a function of hops, but with Cascade, Citra, and Centennial, the pine clearly comes from elsewhere. My guess is that two compounds--one from malt, one from hop--conspire to fool the tongue. (Sally detects it only if I prod.)

I can't really judge these things on the "good" to "bad" scale, but I can say I would drink another pint if offered one. For me, that's saying something. No doubt the brewery will hasten to add that to their promotional materials.

Sucks to Be Macro (English Edition)

A rather nice piece by MSNBC about the growth of micros across the pond. There, the attendant form is cask. (Sigh.) But for the macros, it's even worse. Have a look:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Sucks to Be Macro

"I've never seen so much red ink on a spreadsheet in all my years in this business. It's really disconcerting."
~Harry Schuhmacher, publisher of Beer Business Daily

This is a stat no one in the macro trade can regard without a measure of palsy: only four of the top 30 tin can beers saw sales rise in the most recent month. The big three, Bud Light, Coors Light, and Miller Lite all tanked.

Industry shipments are down 4%, according to the Beer Institute. Several factors play into the trend, key among them the recession. MillerCoors Chief Marketing Officer Andy England said that unemployment remains particularly pronounced among the 21- to 35-year-old men who are the primary targets of beer companies, and also among Hispanics, another key segment. In many cases, they're opting for cheaper brews, or saving their consumption for a special occasion by splurging on craft-style beers. As a result, the "premium" lights are being squeezed by moves in both directions.

A few facts about which I was unaware:

• Bud Light accounts fro 40% of A-B shipments, and was down 5.3% for the year;
• Coors Light and Miller Lite account for half of MillerCoors' business, and while Coors Light is just flatlining, Miller Lite is down 7.5%;
• Bud Light Golden Wheat is a bust.

Of course, the bigs aren't taking this lying down. No sir, they've got big plans. Take, for instance, Miller's counter-offensive:




How can Oregon's brewers possibly compete with that level of brewing innovation?

Book Review: Brewing With Wheat

Brewing With Wheat
Stan Hieronymus
Brewers Publications, $17.95

The books in Brewers Publications' back list form a rich trove of information for those who choose to dig in. BP has hit on a successful formula that combines history, style exploration, and brewing tips on a given topic--pretty dense stuff that won't appeal to everyone. But for those to whom they are aimed--pure manna. The latest is Stan Hieronymus's Brewing With Wheat, and for beer geeks of a certain temperament--like me--it should be considered a must-read.

It's not a brewing manual, a point Stan is quick to note at the start--but in some ways, it's more valuable because of the historical information. Stan digs deeply into the background of wheat brewing (which was once more common than it is now) and this provides a wonderful context for his discussion of styles later on. I was fascinated to read about grain rivalries and how this affected brewing. (The wheat-eaters claimed highest status; rye-eaters looked down on oat-eaters.) Taxes, bans, consumer preference--all these played a role in the waxing and waning of wheat's popularity among brewers.

The table set, Stan begins loading it with full glasses--Belgian wits, goses, weizens, deceased styles and emerging ones (the Widmers get a section). These are fascinating and so full of info that I can't imagine most readers not finding buckets of new info. Like:

• The various forms of witbier that existed before WWI (they looked markedly different from the beer Pierre Celis revived in the sixties).
• How the shape of a fermenter--and whether it has a lid--affects the production of isoamyl acetate and 4-vinyl guaiacol in hefeweizen.
• What 4-vinyl guaiacol is.
• How to give gose the thing that makes it swing.

Stan traveled around quite a bit doing research (poor bastard), and the information is parted out through interesting anecdotes from brewing characters he found in a Brussels apartment, a Bavarian village he identifies as Petting/Schonram (where the Weihenstephan-educated brewer is from Wyoming), Portland, Maine, and someplace called Pacific City, Oregon--among quite a few others.

I was inspired enough by the book that when I brewed a spring pale ale, I used 33% wheat. It was designed to be just a regular pale, but to employ the wheat to draw a fresh softness. I had that pound of Nugget hops from Steinbarts ($14), which I used liberally throughout, including in the carboy. It worked--the wheat made it light and soft and more spring-like. As I looked around my basement afterward, I realized that almost every recent batch of beer I brewed also used wheat: lambic, farmhouse grisette, and an old ale. Apparently, I like to tuck a bit of wheat into my recipes. Reading about the grain made it likely the trend will continue.

Great book. Those of you who will be interested know who you are--go buy it.
_________________
Full disclosure: although I've never met Stan, I admire his blog and I regularly trade emails with him; BP also sent me a copy of the book for review.

Woe is the Reviewer

Pete Brown has a nice post about the difficulty in reviewing beers:

[D]escribing the flavour of a beer ... requires two separate skills: identifying flavours on your palate, and translating those flavours into text that conveys a sensory experience reasonably accurately in a way that will be meaningful to your reader.

Man, ain't that the truth. Although the range of beer flavors is pretty broad, the range for any specific element is not. Pale malts, for example, don't give you kumquat notes--you're limited to bread, cracker, biscuit and the like. And that's if you're even perceiving the cracker in the first place:

We're all born with a certain number of flavour receptors in our mouths, and that number varies widely from person to person. And like most people who prefer a hop bomb or Imperial stout over a perfectly balanced session beer, the simple truth is I'm a poor taster - I have fewer taste buds than average. That's why I also prefer hot curries and strong cheeses. At the other end of the scale, 'super tasters' have loads of taste buds, and can find the hop bomb I love almost physically painful.

I'd add that the nose is critical. I'm not a supertaster, but perhaps owing to being blind as a bat, I've got a pretty good sniffer. If you can suss out the aromas in beer, you're a long way to the flavors.

Fortunately, the beer review generator is a great time-saver. You do realize that's how I write my reviews, right?

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Coalition Brewing

I guess I have to share Coalition Brewing with other bloggers. Both Angelo and Ezra have full-scale interviews with Elan, Kiley, and Deschutes-poached brewer Bruce MacPhee. And both even have videos. They detail the beer, the philosophy, and the menu, so you should want for nothing. Grand opening is June 23.

My two bits are these: they've been brewing regularly over the past week, sending plumes of lovely aroma out into the neighborhood. Coalition is located between my house and the intersection of Burnside and 28th, a regular target destination for my strolls (there's a grocery store, Chinese restaurant, and pizza thereabouts). It's going to be three weeks before they throw open the doors, but I'm already relating to Coalition as a working brewery. Nothing is so fine as the smell of brewing beer--it's going to be great to have them bubbling away, just blocks from my house.

Studies: Any Alcohol Is Bad for Kids

It is a painful thing when long-held beliefs run into cold, hard data, but that's what happened this morning when I listened to NPR's report on kids and alcohol. I have long subscribed to the "European school" of child rearing: the theory that acquainting children to alcohol in the home environment demystifies it, leading to healthier behavior later. My own experience seemed to suggest that the kids who really got into trouble were those who, suddenly unchained from restrictive rules, went crazy with booze in early adulthood. All of this, apparently, is anecdotal noise or wishful thinking. According to research, the best system is complete abstinence:

[Penn State alcohol researcher Caitlin Abar] studied how parents deal with their high school teenagers regarding alcohol use while still at home, and she then checked after the teens' first semester of college. Her study of 300 teenagers and their parents was published recently in the journal Addictive Behaviors.

"Parents who disapproved completely of underage alcohol use tended to have students who engaged in less drinking, less binge drinking, once in college," Abar says.

And conversely, a parent's permissiveness about teenage drinking is a significant risk factor for later binge drinking...

But, it was parents' rules that had the strongest effect, says Abar. Complete disapproval of teen drinking by parents was the most protective, even more than when parents allowed a limited amount of alcohol consumption.

And for those who admire the European model, like me, bad news:

Research studies by Wood, Abar and others challenge the common parenting practice in much of Europe where kids are socialized to drink at the family table, with the expectation that they'll learn to drink responsibly. Dutch researcher Haske van der Vorst has studied this "European drinking model."

Unfortunately, she says, based on her research, the European drinking model isn't working. "Not at all actually," she says. "The more teenagers drink at home, the more they will drink at other places, and the higher the risk for problematic alcohol use three years later."

All of this is very important, because brain researchers have found that alcohol has a profound effect on the young, developing brain--and "young" means people up to 25 years old. Even fairly modest drinking can affect thinking and memory.

I don't have kids, but most of my friends do, and we have all been pretty convinced by the European way. We regularly enjoy beer in the kids' presence, sometimes at pubs. This research makes me question whether this is a good idea.

There are societal implications as well. I've long felt that well-lit family brewpubs were healthy not only for communities (I see no reason to doubt that), but for children who see responsible behavior modeled there. If you buy into the European school, family brewpubs are not only fun places to visit, but they're also useful in reducing addictive and dangerous behaviors. But if the European model is hogwash, as these studies suggest, the very idea of the family pub is thrown into question.

This is going to provoke some deep thinking on the subject. Probably not good to make rash decisions, but it would be worse to ignore these findings--especially those of you with kids. Your thoughts?


Upon further reflection. It's worth adding one comment here. There's no reason to doubt the results of these findings in the aggregate. But parents need to use their judgment when working with real live individual kids. As Sally and I were talking, it occurred to me that the reason I've always found the European model so persuasive is that the "zero tolerance" policy would have definitely driven me straight to the bottle. I have a goat-like character flaw that resists "zero tolerance" anything. But apparently, I'm not typical. Your kid may not be, either.

Los Angeles Discovers Beervana

Based on the number of emails I received, I'm guessing you've already seen the fluffy travel piece in today's LA Times ("Achieving Beervana in Portland, Ore"). Nothing new in it, but it did cause random thoughts to fire inside my brainpan:

• Both bi-coastal Times (NY & LA) ran stories about the beer scene in Portland in their print editions. Online polls or no, we definitely have poll position on beeriest city.
• It doesn't hurt that we call the town "Beervana." Good branding.
• If the Tugboat stepped up and brewed Beervana-worthy beers, it would be in a fantastic position to start making money hand over fist. As it is, every article that discusses the Portland beer scene mentions Tugboat--one of only two downtown breweries.
  
• Upright gets amazing press.
• Christian Ettinger is not Elvis. He's a member of the second wave--way too young to be the King (though he has the sideburns). I'd have called him Colin Meloy. I give the Elvis nod to John Harris.

Happy Memorial Day--

Random Fragments

Item: Rain doesn't make you depressed
In a study by The Netherlands' Maastricht University, researchers looked at nearly 15,000 people to see if they could correlate rainy weather and depression. They could not. And it's not just clinical depression. They couldn't even find a correlation between weather and mood. In fact, the highest rates of sadness occurred in the summer and fall.

Item: Oregonians are smart drivers
GMAC Insurance released the results of GMAC National Drivers Test, which tests driver knowledge of laws. Oregon ranks second behind Kansas. We got more than 80% correct on the test, along with only three other states.

Although I don't immediately see a way to link these two findings to beer, I suspect the link is there nonetheless. Has to be.

Ted's Excellent, Oddball Adventure

There are a lot of ways to sell beer in this state, but the easiest is to make them big and hoppy. It helps if you're conveniently located in East Portland--though Eugene seems like a pretty good location, too. A sure-fire business model includes a pub/taproom and capacity to distribute 22-ounce bottles and/or kegs to alehouses around the Northwest. Do that and your road is lined with rose petals.

Ted Sobel, master of the all-cask Brewers Union Local 180, has not chosen the easy way. He makes small beers with low levels of hops. His pub is three hours from Portland, in Oakridge. He brews real ale, sold exclusively by firkin, and only really trusts one other pub to handle his beer. To reach the Portland market, he must load the casks into the back of his station wagon and drive them up himself. For his trouble, he earns less per firkin than he would if he sold the beer in his own pub. In the term of art, Ted has not yet figured out how to "monetize" his vision in the way other pubs have. His road is thorny, cold, and lonely.

(As a writer who has failed to adequately monetize my efforts--did I mention there's ad space available?!--I can appreciate this. Sometimes you gotta follow your bliss, even when it's a meager bliss.)

Last night, Ted brought two classic cask offerings to the Green Dragon--Cwrw Welsh Mild and a classic English porter. Or, as he describes them, "plain, ordinary, mundane session beer." Actually, the porter was of a kind that is directly in most Portlanders' wheelhouse. It was smooth, roasty, and lively. Cask ale isn't innately a better form of beer, and there is honest disagreement over the method. But even non-cask drinkers would have gobbled this one down--maybe without even realizing it was casked.

The mild, not so much. Ted used a tiny amount of peated malt, but a tiny amount's enough--it imparted a smoky, slightly sour note. Cwrw was creamy and soft--Sally called it "milky" and wondered if there was lactose ("no," said Ted)--and clearly low-alcohol. This is where I think Ted has his biggest hurdle. Craft beer drinkers have become accustomed to that sharp, anesthetizing tingle on their tongue. The difference between a mild and a stronger beer is the difference between apple juice and hard cider. To absent that quality from a beer is, I'm afraid, to move into a radical philosophical space that questions the nature of the drink. At least for most people. The mild had all kinds of flavors going on--but no amount of appreciating can will the flavor of alcohol into being. Can people put aside their expectations and appreciate the flavors that are in a beer rather than focusing on the ones that aren't? That's the big question.

As for "Cwrw" (pronounced kuru, with a roll of the "r"), I think you'll find adequate clarification here.

If you missed these beers, stop by Belmont Station this afternoon to try a special bitter called "Quid Hoc Sibi Vult?" Pours start at three and run until the firkin's gone. My high school Latin's a bit rough, but the Google tells me this idiomatic expression is generally translated as "what does this mean?" I suppose we could read this as a question Ted ponders, elbow on knee, about the difficulty of the path he's chosen. (Or which has now chosen him.) A less idiomatic translation, apparently, is "what does this want for itself?" I like this one better. What does Oregon real ale want for itself? Appreciation, clearly. Ted told me last night that he expects there to be ten cask houses in Portland in ten years. This is what the real ale wants.

I hope you're right, Ted.

Belmont Station, Saraveza in New York Times

So here I am brushing my teeth, reading the New York Times on the iPhone and what do I see? In the list of most-emailed stories, a curiously titled article: "Tastings With Craft Beers." The lede talks about some pub in Oakland with a lot of taps. Not particularly newsworthy, I'm thinking, but it's cool the Times has taken notice. But then these eye poppers:

The cultivation of gourmands is a common goal for the outfits, which put a premium on education. Belmont Station (4500 Southeast Stark Street; 503-232-8538; belmont-station.com) in Portland, Ore., which stocks more than 1,200 different beers alongside a 26-seat taproom, offers one or two free tastings a week. “Over the course of the year you can taste well better than 500 bottled beers,” said Carl Singmaster, the owner.

And

Food and beer pairings play a central role at the brick-walled Saraveza (1004 North Killingsworth Street; 503-206-4252; saraveza.com), which opened in Portland at the end of 2008. The kitchen turns out housemade sausages and a different special pasty, a savory pastry similar to a calzone, every few days. To accentuate the mildly spicy curried lamb and cauliflower creation on a recent menu, Sarah Pederson, the owner, recommended a lightly hopped pale ale from Amnesia Brewing in Portland. Then she said other pairings were possible: “It depends how you’re trying to drink and how you’re trying to eat.”

Whoa! (Eugenies will be pleased to see that the Bier Stein and Ninkasi also get a shout-out.) Nice work, folks--