Last Round Cures Hangovers? Not Really

Forget mousetraps. You want to get rich, find a cure for baldness, cellulite, or hangovers. These mountainous accomplishments would make Viagra look like the Kansas cornfields. It's impossible, of course--baldness, cellulite, and hangovers are part of the human condition. They are not solvable any more than the need for living humans to breathe. Yet still we have tonics, salves, and creams. I received a batch purporting to cure hangovers a few weeks ago from HerbaSway Laboratories. Biding my time until Oregon Craft Beer Month, I then put them through a rigorous clinical trial.

Last Round comes in 2.5-ounce bottles containing a solution of foul-tasting herbs, the scariest of which is Kudzu extract. Says HerbaSway: "You just down one before you go to bed – before a hangover sets in – and the all-natural herbal blend erases your “sins” by detoxifying and breaking down alcohol while you sleep. And when you wake up, you will actually feel good."

That kudzu is apparently the "active" ingredient--search the Google and you find stories about how this traditional hangover remedy from Asia deploys isoflavones to keep you daisy-fresh. Or something.

Anyway, in my own experiments, I was left with a foul taste in my mouth and no appreciable benefit in the morning. In fact, I felt worse than had I used my own remedy, a pint of Gatorade and Ibuprofen, which generally nips the worst trouble in the bud. The 2.5 ounces of liquid left me parched, and the kudzu worked no miracles. I awoke creased, creaky, and growning, feeling every bit my 40+ years. On the positive side, the kudzu didn't appear to kill me. So there's that.

A six-pack of bottles (the amount I received), sets you back $18, or the price of two Old Lompoc Bob's Memorial Braggots. One tastes horrible, the other sublime. Neither will make you feel very good in the morning. I'll allow you to draw your own conclusions about which is the better buy.

No, Jimmy Carter Did Not Save Beer

A curious meme passed around the blogosphere last week. Not the beer-o-sphere, though, the polit-o-sphere. It went like this:

If you’re a fan of craft beer and microbreweries as opposed to say Bud Light or Coors, you should say a little thank you to Jimmy Carter. Carter could very well be the hero of International Beer Day. To make a long story short, prohibition led to the dismantling of many small breweries around the nation. When prohibition was lifted, government tightly regulated the market, and small scale producers were essentially shut out of the beer market altogether. Regulations imposed at the time greatly benefited the large beer makers. In 1979, Carter deregulated the beer industry, opening the market back up to craft brewers.

I found this odd. Two of my great passions are politics and beer. I am one of 472 Americans who think Jimmy Carter's presidency wasn't so bad. I'm even a bit of an amateur beer historian. And yet never have I heard of this monumental legislation. Surely someone would have mentioned it before now. Yet late last week, scads of blogs--many from the MSM--picked up the story and ran with it. Carter's a hero! Forget the Camp David Accords, he brought us good beer!

I bookmarked the page, determined to get to the bottom of this. Fortunately, my cause was abetted by Alexander Mitchell, whose mind had been running down the same track. His conclusion? The original blogger, Balloon Juice's ED Kain, conflated Carter's much-praised legalization of home brewing with "deregulated the beer industry." After a lot of digging, Mitchell concludes that it's a classic case of urban myth running wild on the internets:

What I discovered is that, as of this moment, "Jimmy Carter deregulated brewing" is on track to replace "Ben Franklin said 'Beer is proof that God loves us and wants to see us happy'" as THE most popular "urban legend" regarding beer, thanks to people online citing the New Republic piece.....

Kain, for what it's worth, admits that there was no legislation in comments to the post. ("Actually Carter's deregulation of home-brewing was a deregulation of the beer market. I'm still failing to see how that doesn't count. " And that, of course, is the problem.)

I'll add one more piece. If you go to the original souce, you see a graph charting the growth of craft brewing in America; follow the link and it takes you here, to a March blog post about craft brewing (lesson: follow your links!). It's a long article making some point about " distributed biological production." But the key point, and the ur mistake that led to a thousand mis-appropriations, is this passage:

In 1979, Jimmy Carter signed legislation reopening the market to small brewers. This is an interesting and crucial point, because as far as I can tell nothing else substantive changed about the market. Deregulation reopened the market to craft brewers and the industry blossomed through organic growth and the preferences of consumers.

Very small brewers, as it happens. The author apparently didn't realize the law legalized home-brewing. (Amusingly, it did lead to a heated debate between libertarians and liberals about the advantages of deregulation on the one hand and Jimmy Carter on the other.)

Of course, laws did have to be changed: state laws. Bert Grant lobbied the Washington legislature to make brewpubs legal, as did the McMenamins in Oregon. States have tinkered more, liberalizing distribution laws to allow small breweries to get their product to market. But these had nothing to do with Jimmy Carter. He was cool, he just wasn't that cool.

Another Beervana Story

When I moved to Northeast Portland in the latter days of the last century, the quadrant had many virtues. Among them was not, however, a surfeit of good beer. Things have changed. Over the weekend, I visited the formerly-barren stretch along Williams Avenue now inhabited by Lompoc Brewing's Fifth Quadrant and Sidebar. I wanted to get a pour of that brown ale braggot while it was on tap.

Digression>> The Sidebar rocks. I'm almost reluctant to mention this, because on the two ocassions I've visited, it's been nearly empty. While that's a lousy business model, it's fantastic for cranky hermits like me. The space has been imbued with the aura of a medieval pub. Barrels of aging beer line the walls (through and open doorway, you can see a cask warehouse stretching off into the darkness), a fire crackles merrily on one wall (even in the summer!), and very little light manages to sneak in. It is going to be a real balm to the suffering soul round about November. Oh, and they have a taplist comprised entirely of specialty, barrel-aged beers, always rotating.

Digression >> The braggot rocked. It was a delightfully dry, spicy variant totally unlike the Widmer's, the only other braggot I've ever tasted. Where the Brothers' was bright and light-bodied (though stiff), Lompoc's was darker and more comforting (though also stiff). I picked up a couple of 9-dollar 22s, and learned there were plenty more. That's quite a value for such a rare beverage (despite my encouragement, it seems unlikely they're going to go through the effort to make another batch), and well worth your shekels.

The street along Williams has really exploded, so we took a stroll to see what was shaking. It's amazing how quickly a neighborhood can be remade, and the complex across the street housing the much-lauded Lincoln Restaurant looks like it's been there for decades. We passed Lincoln and headed on to Eat, an Oyster Bar, which was charming enough that we decided to dine there. What a find! The ambiance is fantastic, and it turned out the food was, too. Sally had a light, elegant jambalaya, and I had the fiery gumbo.

But here's the interesting part (talk about burying the lede): they had a fantastic tap list. Just four beers, but so well-selected: Trumer Pils (always solid with food), Double Mountain Vaporizer (intensely-hopped, but not overwhelmingly so), Upright Five (a maltier alternative to the hoppy Vaporizer, and BridgePort Hop Czar (okay, this isn't such a great choice to accompany food). After an agonizing decision, I went for the Vaporizer, which turned out to be the perfect accompaniment for the gumbo. The spicy challenger hops found some kind of kinship to the gumbo's pepper--like two lost cousins finding each other unexpectedly.

The final step in Oregon's evolution to full beer nirvana is finding exceptional, well-selected beer at good restaurants. We should expect to find beer selections designed to accompany the menu--not just three or four of the best-selling beers. This is a hopeful sign that the transition is underway. Kudo's to Eat.

The Abbey Ales of Sierra Nevada and New Clairvaux

Here's a fascinating development, via Beer News:

In 2011, Sierra Nevada and the Trappist-Cistercian Abbey of New Clairvaux are working to bring this centuries-old tradition to America with Ovila—the nation’s only authentic Trappist-style Abbey Ale.

A dubbel, saison, and quadrupel are slated to be released seasonally, with proceeds going to the California abbey. These won't, apparently, be authentic Trappist ales. Sierra Nevada will actually brew them--resulting in "abbey" ales. Before you dismiss it as a gimmick, though, check out the project these beers will fund:

Proceeds from this project will benefit the monks of the Abbey of New Clairvaux in their efforts to rebuild an architectural marvel—a 12th century, early-gothic Cistercian chapter house—on their grounds in Vina, California a few miles north of Sierra Nevada’s home in Chico. The medieval chapterhouse—Santa Maria de Ovila—was begun in 1190, near the village of Trillo, Spain.

Cistercian monks lived, prayed, and worked there for nearly 800 years. In 1931, California newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst purchased the abbey and shipped it to Northern California. Hearst’s plans were never realized, and the stones fell into disrepair. In 1994, the Trappist-Cistercian monks of the Abbey of New Clairvaux, gained possession of the ruins, and began the painstaking stone-by-stone reconstruction of the historic abbey.

Cool.

A Beervana Story

I don't generally post emails, but this one from Harth Huffman really caught my eye. I asked if I could post it and he agreed.

Recently, my buddy and I were planning our cycling adventure for the summer and I suggested Oakridge. He had never heard of it and asked if it met the requirement of having a good brewery or pub and I sent him some info on Brewers Union, based mostly on your reports. Well, we returned from our trip yesterday, and I want to tell you that Brewer's Union Local 180 is a real gem in the heart of Beervana!

I, too, love cask ales, so this was on my radar since your initial reports, and the beer did not disappoint. In fact, it exceeded my expectations. They had six house cask ales on tap and several excellent guest taps (though we didn't bother trying any of them because house house brews were too good to pass on). Not only was the beer notable for the flavors and nuances all across the board, but it was refreshing (literally and figuratively) to find such quality beer in the 4.5 - 6% abv range. The IPA was excellent and unlike any I've ever had. On our last night, they changed the stout tap (which was also very nice) to a brown ale. I don't usually care for that style because it can be a bit too sweet for me, but I did not want to stop drinking this version, which had a nice hop balance to the rich malt, something normally restricted to beers much higher in alcohol content.

Again, we are talking about damned good beer here. Add to all this a limited but high quality pub menu with affordable prices (cheap, even), great staff hospitality, a homey, classic atmosphere in a nicely executed design, and some colorful locals while surrounded by mountains and a clear summer sky, and it adds up to an unforgettable beer experience, even in a region that regularly offers great beer experiences. The owner mentioned you hadn't been there yet, and I wanted to write to encourage you to make the trip (there is a nice hostel right up the street and great streamside camping two miles down the road). You will not be sorry.

As for my own visit--soon! I have been planning to get down for months. First my dad had his injury, sending me to Idaho four times (he's made a complete recovery), and then I decided to paint the house. So, September for sure. Anyway, maybe others can act on Harth's advice in the meantime.

CDA in the WaPo; Braggot in the Side Bar

Abram Goldman-Armstrong may be winning the fight. Check out this article in Tuesday's Washington Post:

"Black IPA" would be a contradiction in terms: How can you be both black and pale? "India black ale" would be more accurate; however, at least one brewery has had that term struck down by federal labeling authorities for not being an accepted style. But "Cascadian dark ale," or CDA, is gaining currency, especially in the Pacific Northwest, where the style has proved popular.

I have no idea whether Abe's version of history is true or not, but he's winning the battle to have it canonized as the authentic one:

As with most emerging styles, there is a debate over who got there first. "The question is a sticky one," allows Abram Goldman-Armstrong, a beer writer from Portland who organized a Cascadian dark ale symposium in January to help draw up parameters for the style. Goldman-Armstrong asserts that the "first true CDA" he ever sampled was Skull Splitter from Rogue Ales in Newport, Ore., a special release for the 2003 Oregon Brewers Festival. He credits a home-brewing friend, Bill Wood of Seattle, with coining the term Cascadian dark ale.

For what it's worth, I think the claim is tenuous. Greg Kitsock, author of the article, suggests one earlier version, but there are other, far, far earlier examples, too. But who cares? Abe's on the road to establishing CDA, and I say more power to him. Claim one for Cascadia.

In the other bit of random news, I would like to highlight this, at the Lompoc's Sidebar:

Bob's Memorial Braggot
Brewed in the summer of '08 and blended and bottled in March '09, this beer is 2.25 parts mead to 1 part brown ale. The late Bob Farrell, one of the true gentlemen of the Oregon craft-beer world, was a great fan of braggot, and helped blend this before his untimely death from cancer. We raise our glass to Bob when we drink this! 7% ABV

Looks very cool, and worth a stop if you've got the time.

Comparing Britain and the US

A couple of days ago, judges at the Great British Beer Festival unanimously called Castle Rock's Harvest Ale Britain's best. The beer is a 3.8% blonde ale (or, variously, a pale or bitter) of apparently balanced hopping (read: modest). Last year, the GBBF designated a 4.4% mild its champion beer. In 2008, it went to a 3.8% beer, in '07 to a mild, in '06 and '05 to the same 4% pale, and so on.

The United States has no equivalen. At the Great American Beer Festival, beers are awarded by category only; there's no grand champion. Still, it is extremely difficult to imagine a scenario in which a beer of less than 4% would ever receive such a laurel in the US. (There were only 17 entrants in the mild ale category last year, one of the least competitive in the GABF.) Americans do not prize small beers. Were the GABF to designate a champeen (and they should), it would almost certainly go to a robust, probably barrel-aged beer. That's how we roll.

Obviously, part of this is structural. CAMRA conducts the GBBF and consequently hosts the judging, and CAMRA is keenly interested in the promotion of small, cask-friendly beers. We have nothing like that in the US. But it's not all structural. Castle Rock's Harvest Pale isn't the art-house pick of snooty critics--it's also a wildly successful beer:

In the last 18 months Castle Rock has been brewing at capacity due to the popularity of Harvest Pale, he added, and a new brewhouse will open in two weeks time, which will treble capacity.

Now, imagine the release of a modestly-hopped 3.8% blonde ale in the United States. See sixers of it sitting there, gathering dust, on grocery shelves? Look, there's your hand reaching for beer. It pauses briefly at the golden, but--impossible, you can't do it. May be a great beer, but you palm the relatively burly Mirror Pond instead. A 3.8% beer? No one would buy it.

Some folks lament the direction of American brewing toward the ever stronger, more intense beers. Hell, there were twice as many imperial red ales entered at last year's GABF than milds. American brewers make these beers because they sell. I don't lament it at all. It is, by very slow accretion, the emergence of our national character. It's very cool that Britain produces and consumes lots of lovingly-crafted wee ales. It's so British. But it's also cool that the Americans, brash, lacking subtlety, the volume perpetually at 11, love their crazy hop bombs. It's who we are.

Vive la différence.

Summer's Perfect Beer: Rye Pale Ales

Rye is a weed. Or was, anyway, 3,500 years ago, when it infested the wheat and barley fields of Southern Asia. As a consequence, it co-evolved with these other grains long before it was accepted in its own right. Its heyday as a bread, according to Stan Hieronymus' Brewing With Wheat, was the middle ages before dying off in the time of Victoria. It remained only in certain precincts where people were made stupid and dull by its hearty density, so said snotty wheat-eaters. In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder--the possibly apocryphal discoverer of hops--sneered at rye, saying it was "a very poor food and only serves to avert starvation."

In beer, rye has mainly been yoked to darker beers, to spice them and make them hearty. But counter-intuitively, certain breweries also put them in pale ales, and the result is a spicy, dry, quenching beer perfect for a summer day. In the Northwest, the first credit for the style probably goes to Redhook, which brewed a light rye ale more than 15 years ago. It didn't sell well and died out. (Revived for one season a few years ago and then killed off again.) This summer, I note that at least three versions were available: Oakshire Line Dry Rye, Laurelwood Wry, and Three Creeks Stonefly (a regular in their line-up). It could be that these are also flash in the pans, or that we're seeing the shoots of a new fixture in Beervana. I hope it's the latter, because the style is absolutely perfect on a hot day.

Three Creeks Stonefly Rye
The difficulty with rye is that it's a husky, ornery grain, and has been the ruin of many a young beer. Fleming Threee Creeks wisely pairs it with wheat here--they actually seasons a wheat beer with rye--and the result is a light, refreshing beer with a lively, spicy note. I found bright and tart notes (lemongrass?) but the beer wasn't aggressive or grinding--as it can be if you extract too many tannins from the rye. Of the Three Creeks beers I've tried, this is the most accomplished and also my fave. (4.6%, 28 IBUs) [Note: I just pasted this description in from my earlier review, failing to catch the bit about Dave Fleming, the founding brewer at Three Creeks who has since left. A sharp-eyed reader emailed to point this out.]

Oakshire Line Dry Rye
Oakshire substitutes honey for Three Creek's wheat. Poured very cold, the spice of the rye and the resin of the hops create a slightly aggressive flavor that seems at turns soapy or piney. But with a bit of warmth, the honey sweetness emerges, and the honey seems to provide a voluptuous creaminess that offsets the sharper notes nicely. I am re-painting my house, and after a few hours of scraping and sanding, I poured this out last night and was so happy to have a refreshing, light beer to slake my thirst. (5.5% 35 IBUs)

Laurelwood Wry Ale
My favorite rye ale comes from Laurelwood, though there may not be any left. This year's batch was on tap only briefly at the brewery, but they did bottle some, too--but you can bookmark it for next year. A drier beer than the first two, the spiciest, and most astringent. Rather than balancing it with wheat or honey, Laurelwood goes with Cascade and Amarillo hops; their citrus marries perfectly with the spice. As you can see from the picture, there's an indelible image on the label. I always forget what the actual name is; to me, it's always Hayseed Rye. (5.6% 40 IBUs)

A bit of summer yet remains. Go forth and have a rye.

Good Blogs

Back in the olden days of blogging, we had ugly, junky blogs. We larded the side-columns with text no one ever read, including a thing called a "blogroll." These were links to blogs we bloggers read and each was a little shout-out, a recommendation to the wee trickle of readers who inadvertently wandered onto our sites. Modern blogs are streamlined and pretty and foresake this old grassroots tradition. But I, a dinosaur, maintain my old jalopy of a site, and I keep to the old ways.

I've just finished updating the blogroll, and on the off-chance you are not a dinosaur and haven't seen the changes, let me be more direct about drawing your attention to some of the new ones (handily designated with an asterisk (*) for your convenience):

• Lisa Morrison, the Beer Goddess. Google the words "Beer Goddess" and you find a lot of other citations. But those of us in Portland recognize only one goddess, and her name is Lisa Morrison. All others are false goddesses meant to confuse and mislead. Lisa's the one.
• Billy Brew. Especially good on homebrewing. Today, for instance, you will find a post on yeast-washing. Cool.
• Beer Wench. Apparently the beer blogosphere is the Beer Wench's and we just inhabit it. Easily the hardest tweeting blogger in the beer-o-sphere.
• Lost in the Beer Aisle, Beer Babe, and Seacoast Beverage Lab. New England for some reason gets less national attention that its beers deserve. This trio of blogs may help spread the word.
• Mutineer Mag Blog. Magazines rarely take their blogging seriously. Mutineer does. (Though it's a drinks mag, not just beer.)
• Hoperatives. This looks like the Cincinnati Beervana. Not to give offense, or anything. If you happen to be from the lower Midwest, check it out.

There are others, and keep in mind that every link in the blog roll is a recommendation, so you should check them all out--at least once. As always, send me a link if you have a blog you'd like to be added. (Though a word to the wise: your traffic volume will move almost unappreciably.)


Update. Okay, a few more added: Beer Cave, A Pint for Dionysus, Brewlimination, Girl's Guide to Beer (London writer Melissa Cole's excellent blog). Oh, and I added back one zombie blog that seems to have awakened from the dead.

International Beer Day

Surely you have big plans. I expect you'll be attending one of the many events around the country. I mean, today is International Beer Day, after all. What, you didn't know that?

Neither did I.

Inauspiciously, the website is currently down (9:09 am), but Wikipedia tells us this much:

International Beer Day (IBD) is an August 5 holiday invented in 2007 in Santa Cruz, CA. As opposed to Oktoberfest, which is in the cold months and largely European, International Beer Day is meant to be celebrated across the world while it's still warm enough for cold beer.

International Beer Day is celebrated by drinking beer, drinking beer with friends, and buying beer for others. While there are various other traditions, these seem to be the key attributes. The suggested way to greet someone on International Beer Day is to hand them a beer and say "I bring you the gift of beer". As a general rule, you can't refuse the beer.

I think "International Beer Day" was invented by students at UC Santa Cruz with rare and coveted access to the intertubes. Or maybe it's a put-on. This business about drinking beer "while it's still warm enough for cold beer" strikes me as ... suspicious. (The average high temperature in Santa Cruz in January is sixty degrees.) But if they are having us on, they've managed to get mass media coverage, so good for them. Hoodwinking a journo is its own reward.

In any case, I am prepared to be won over. I will accept gifts of beer all day long. Happy IBD!

The Big Business of Small Breweries

For anyone in and around Portland, there was little surprise in yesterday's announcement that Widmer/Redhook's (Craft Brewers Alliance) had purchased Kona Brewing. The companies have long been working together, and the resulting collective will operate in much the same way. In terms of where breweries are located and who is designing and brewing the beers, not a whole lot will change. It may give most good-beer drinkers pause, but this is the artifact of ugly mergers from an earlier era. In fact, the CBA-Kona merger tells us a lot about how much things have changed since the bigs started plucking up breweries like Henry's and Rainier.

To rewind the tape, if we go back to the 1950s, regional breweries were still a fixture in the American brewing landscape. Schlitz was the top brewer, but only produced 7% of the country's beer--and the top ten breweries only produced 38%. Lots of little breweries still made beer for their home markets. In the sixties and seventies and early eighties, this all changed as the major breweries started to achieve massive dominance and control vast percentages of the total market. When these behemoths took over small breweries, they were buying brands, not breweries. They sold off the breweries and moved production to their larger, more modern and efficient breweries elsewhere. So names like Henry Weinhard became just another brand in a huge brewing operation. Generally speaking, the beers themselves also changed, so the name really was the only thing left. This all makes good economics, but it's depressing.

(Pabst, beloved of hipsters, isn't even a brewery--just a name. Milwaukee's most important brewery shut down in 1996 and PBR is now contract-brewed by Miller.)

This kind of merger has happened in craft brewing, too. Back in the 90s, particularly, lots of dying little micros managed to sell themselves off to bigger micros just before they bought the farm. In Portland, Saxer bought NorWester, closed the brewery and kept making beer under the NorWester name. Pretty soon then-Portland Brewing bought both Saxer and NorWester, closed the Saxer brewery and made the brands at PB Co. But this was folly--micros are not "brands" in the way Henry's was. The names don't mean much, and they have little value. In craft brewing, what matters much more is what's in the bottle, not what's on it.

The modern mergers aren't made between two struggling breweries, they're made between strong ones. When they merged, Widmer and Redhook were both top-ten sized craft breweries. Kona is a very healthy and expanding brewery, and is (amazingly) the 13th-largest craft brewery. The merger leaves all players intact--brewing operations continue apace in pre-existing breweries. The resulting collective will still trail Boston Beer, the largest craft brewery, by a long way (based on John's numbers, the new company will oversee 583,000 barrels of production--just a fraction of Boston Beer's 2 million), but it will benefit from increased efficiencies and marketing heft. Yet they'll remain distinct entities.

This is the big change. At this moment in time, anyway, craft breweries benefit from being distinctive and place-based. It is a strength to have diversity. As the industry matures, mergers are going to become the norm--if they aren't already. Once breweries reach a certain size threshold, those efficiencies, access to far-flung markets, and marketing heft mean the difference between stagnation and growth. But unlike the dark old days of macro mergers, most of them won't matter a whole lot to the average consumer.

______

Relatedly, a friend had a sixer of Fire Rock Pale last night, and it was quite tasty. Minerally, very crisp. Pipeline is a regular go-to beer for me as well. I said above that these mergers won't matter a whole lot to consumers, but for those who have new access to these beers, that's not entirely true. And that's another reason not to fear mergers--for now, anyway.

Widhook Acquires Kona Brewing

Wow.

Portland, Ore. (August 3, 2010) – Craft Brewers Alliance, Inc. (CBA) (Nasdaq: HOOK), has entered into a merger agreement that will strengthen a nine-year partnership with Kona Brewing Co. (Kona).  As a result of the merger agreement, Kona will become a wholly owned subsidiary of CBA and have the opportunity to expand its brand and distribution while maintaining its craft brewery operations in Hawaii....

Following the merger, Davis will continue to serve as president and CEO of Kona and will work closely with Michaelson to nurture the authenticity of the Kona brand and position it for long-term growth on the U.S. mainland. In addition, the current owners of Kona will receive an equity stake in the combined entity.
 
Rich Tucciarione will remain Brewmaster at Kona and the brewery’s operations will remain in Kailua-Kona on Hawaii’s Big Island, where the company takes an active role in supporting community events like the annual Kona Brewers Festival. Kona also takes proactive steps to minimize its impact on the natural resources of the island community, adopting programs that focus on solar energy, waste minimization, resource conservation, and support of local farmers and agriculture.

I do love me that Kona Porter...

Honest Pints in Olympia

This is a pretty shocking fact, but true: the Project had as of this morning not certified a pub in the Evergreen State. Fortunately we now rectify this terrible oversight. In Olympia, the three-month-old Skep And Skein Tavern joins the certified club.

Skep and Skein Tavern and Meadery
Certified Purveyor of an Honest Pint
2106 Harrison Ave NW B 14
Olympia, WA 98502

Since it's so new, there's not a lot of info, but Dave Ross sends along some details:

We opened on April 23rd of this year and are located on Olympia's "Westside" which is on the hill above downtown. We have 16 tap handles of which 14 are rotating regularly. We are trying to carry beers that are not always readily available in Olympia, which has been a lot of fun. We are also a bonded and licensed meadery with our own meads on draft scheduled for sometime this fall. In the mean time we have been selling Redstone Mead from the bottle and these have been well received.

So next time you're zipping up (or down) I-5, stop in for a pint--an honest pint. And tell us what you think. Good luck, Dave, may the place prosper--

Women Are Craft Brewing's Future

I recently spoke to a journalist doing a story on the future of craft beer. (A worthy topic for a post, but not this one.) He was interested to know how much growth craft breweries in the Northwest might be expected to enjoy. A lot can be said there, but I highlighted one factor I thought has gone relatively unexamined. Per capita beer drinking has remained pretty steady over the years, fluctuating only slightly year by year. Different states consume beer at different rates, but the trendline for individual states remains steady, too. Therefore, all things being equal, if craft breweries want to increase market share, they must take it away from macros and imports.

Ah, but all things are not equal. The other way they can do it is find new segments who don't currently drink beer. And there's a HUGE one: women. They constitute half the drinkers in America, and they barely sniff the stuff. Ladies prefer cocktails and wine. I posted results of a Gallup poll last year showing that only a fifth of female drinkers cited beer as their preferred beverage. (Men, of course, prefer beer--58% will choose it over wine or liquor.)

I just got an email from Gallup pointing me to this year's poll. Guess what--it looks like we're already seeing some substantial movement.

Women Citing Beer as Preferred Beverage

_____________________2009____2010__Change
All__________________21%_____27% ___+6%
Under 49 years old___25%_____35% ___+10%
Over 50 years old____15%_____18% ___+3%

This appears to be real movement. The margin of error is 4%, and the trends are all consistent. While we can't be certain those numbers are exactly accurate, we have to assume the actual movement toward more beer-drinking is. Moreover, if women were taking to beer, you'd expect to see the trend emerge among younger women--and so it is. The really big finding: in the past year, younger women have made a serious move toward beer as their preferred beverage. A year ago, it was the third-most preferred beverage; this year it was way out in front of liquor, and only trailing wine by 4%. It's not unreasonable to envision a future when beer is the preferred beverage among men and women.

Gallup doesn't break consumption down by type, so for all we know, these women might be Pabst drinkers. Surely some are. But you have to imagine that craft beer is picking up a disproportionate share of that shift. The beer is better and more vivid-tasting, and the marketing is far more woman-friendly than the still borderline misogynistic macro campaigns.

If I were a craft brewery, I would be extremely aggressive about trying to market to women. You may convert a few Bud men to your Sang Noirs, but it's going to be a lot easier to convert pinot women.

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PHOTO: DAILY MAIL

Why Do Restaurants Discriminate Against Beer?

Last night I was sitting in Fonda Rosa, a well-regarded, upscale Mexican restaurant along the 28th Avenue restuarant row. Comes the menus: food, specials, drinks. I look over and see four taps and a row of bottles--mostly Mexican--on the bar. I'm thinking maybe a Pacifico, but I wonder what those taps are. I look at the drinks menu and find the usual list of specialty cocktails and small wine list. Beer? Nada.

This is common. You go into a nice restaurant in Portland and despite a decent tap list (generally three or four well-selected choices), there's zero mention of the beer. Lots of talk of wine and booze, but nothing on the beer. Of course, this is Beervana, so when you look around one of these restaurants, you see that at least a third of the people are drinking beer. Sometimes almost everyone is. (Fonda Rosa attracts a beer-friendly crowd.) What the hell?

If I were a more activist type, I might try to start a project. You know, Beer Transparency in Restaurants or something. Fortunately, I leave that kind of thing to others.

Anyone have a theory why restauranteurs slight the beer they sell and leave it off their menu?

Bailey's Third Anniversary

You never want to leave this town. The second you do, something cool happens. Like, for instance, Bailey's big third anniversary blow out, featuring a stellar line-up of rare beers--some made especially for the event. In a town studded with impressive good-beer alehouses, Bailey's may have taken the pole position (though partisans of the Horse Brass may dispute the claim). In any case, Ezra and the New School have up their reviews. Go have a look if you, like me, had the misfortune to miss the event.

(And put the date on your calendar: August 6, 2011. I know where I'll be.)

My Craft Brewing Manifesto

Note: I'm away from the computer for a few days, so I'm reposting some of my favorite items from recent years. Regular posting will resume tomorrow, but here's a final Sunday post.

Buy local, buy good, drink on tap.

Back in the 1970s, Charlie Papazian founded the Association of Brewers--and the more well-known American Homebrewers Association--as advocacy groups for fledgling brewers. The mission grew out of the particular circumstances of that time and place, and was, for at least a decade, clear, accurate, and important. There were two categories of beer: insipid, tin-can beer and handcrafted, artisanal beer. The former had eaten its own, stamped out diversity and quality, and was busily consolidating itself into a single, monolithic product where the only distinction could be found in the color on the label. The latter cared about beer, brewing history, and beer styles, not money. The Association of Brewers therefore had an easy task: support the little guy, support good beer, support independence. It was a moral as much as business crusade.

Unfortunately, the Brewers Association (as it it now styled) still holds to these values, and they no longer have clear, obvious referents. Breweries can't easily be divided into good beer/bad beer, big/little, and independent/multinational. The brewing industry is a market, and markets grow like amoebas. Trying to contain them in boxes is of no use. And markets are by nature amoral.

I have not particular interest in how American breweries organize themselves politically. Presumably, those that are small and local have more in common with each other than they have with Anheuser-Busch. But does Hair of the Dog have more in common with Widmer/Redhook than it does with Maine's Gritty McDuff's? Probably.

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We are midway through Craft Beer Week, a promotional event of the Brewers Association. The Charlie Papazian multiverse dominates everything in American craft brewing, and so we must dutifully turn toward Denver this week. But while we do so, I'd like to offer my counter-manifesto to his outdated one. His has become a political organization. The following manifesto is designed to create the conditions for the production of good beer and a sustainable market. It could also be said to be a blueprint for how Beervana became Beervana. These things, rather than a series of ever less explicable categories of being, are what we want to nurture.

Buy Local
Show me a town where the beer drinkers are avid fans of good beer, and I'll show you a town with local breweries. It makes sense, right? If locals are buying your beer, you're inclined to make them happy. But it's not just small breweries that have this effect: look at the great brewing regions, the areas around Portland, Seattle, Denver, Philadelphia--have or had large, regional breweries located nearby. Beer is local. If you have a beer city, it means you have beer people. If those beer people buy locally, they'll have access to good beer.

Charlie has focused on the independence, but this misses the point. Markets require masses. Towns with breweries have those masses. The problem with consolidation in the 60s and 70s was that local brewing culture died out--vast swaths of the country, lacking any local beer, drank whatever was cheapest, further fueling consolidation. It's counterintuitive, but even bigger regional breweries help smaller ones flourish because they make the market even that much bigger. You don't have to be xenophobic about it, but spare a copper or two for the local guy(s).

Buy Good
Of course, it's not enough to only buy local--consumers have to demand good beer. Rather than descending into a long philosophical dispute about good, let's use the Judge Stewart rationale: we know it when we see it. Minimally, it's a beer brewed with quality ingredients and attention to style. The reason we should support good beer--whether or not it comes from a small brewery--is that this creates the market for good beer. If consumers always eschew the good for the cheap, they'll get the cheap. If they spend a bit more and buy the good, they'll make it possible for breweries to continue to brew the good. And round it goes.

Drink on Tap
You can buy many of the world's greatest beers in bottles. You can buy brewery-fresh local beer in bottles. But from time to time, you should go to your neighborhood pub and plunk down a five spot on a pint (an honest pint, naturally). The brewing ecosystem is large and diverse. If we don't support pubs, we fail to support the incubators of beer culture. Seeing others in a public space, sampling different kinds of beers, talking with your local publican (who may be the brewer), these things are the fertilizer for healthy markets. When people go to pubs, they support local beer and local business. By creating an additional market for beer, they allow non-bottling breweries to flourish--all of which makes the brewing ecosystem as a whole more sustainable.

Buy local, buy good, drink on tap. Do these things, and good beer will continue to be brewed in your neighborhood. After all, isn't that's what Charlie Papazian is really after?

Beer Tasting Is Subjective

Note: I'm away from my computer for awhile, and I'm re-posting some of the more interesting items from recent years. The one I'm posting today actually had an amazing influence on my appreciation of how different individual palates are. Also, the links appear dead, but the point is still valid.

Let's try a thought experiment. Imagine you assembled a list of a city's best beers. Then you polled a bunch of people to find the consensus of which of these they would recommend. Here's the experiment part: how many of those beers would have high levels of agreement--say 75% or more?

I would have guessed you could get at least a couple beers in every style--essentially broad agreement on the "best beers." Well, Matt Wiater at Portlandbeer.org actually did this, and guess what: not much agreement. Of the top 15 beers, only two met my hypothetical standard. Mostwere recommended by only a bare majority of people. Mirror Pond, for example, surely one of the more famous, beloved, and best-selling beers in all of Greater Beervana, managed a recommendation from only 50% of the people.

So who were these half-wits? Bloggers, mainly (including me).

The lesson is clear to me: there is no "best" of anything. "Bests" are reserved for track meets, where you can actually measure performance. In beer, the master is the taster. What's best is what your tongue likes. I tend to think we can talk about some general standards of quality, but specific beers?--clearly this isn't so easy to figure out.

So the next time (and there will be a next time) we get in a spat about a specific beer, we should recall this lesson. Different strokes, folks. And ain't it nice we have so many breweries to serve these different tongues?

What Sours a Beer?

In yesterday's post about Devil's Kriek, Samurai Artist sparked a conversation about the souring properties of brettanomyces. Since sour beers are becoming more common, it's a timely discussion. Sourness may be tart and clean as in a Berliner Weisse, dry and austere as in some lambics, our face-puckeringly intense, as in some Flemish reds. These different qualities come from different microorganisms, and it's worth spending a post mentioning a few of the biggies.

My source material here is Jeff Sparrow's Wild Brews, which I recommend highly for anyone interested in a deep understanding of sour beers. Let's start with a pithy opening from the start of his fourth chapter, "Beer-Souring Microorganisms." Here, he describes the actors that create the funk:

"Four dominant types of microorganisms commonly ferment and acidify wild beers: brettanomyces, lactobacillus, pediococcus, and saccharomyces. Sever other important players also merit a mention, including acetobacter, enterobacter, and various oxidative yeasts."

Now, in this next pithy passage, he describes the particular nature of the funk those actors produce:

"The acids most important to wild beers include lactic and acetic acid. Acetic acid, present in copious amounts in vinegar, is sharp, pungent, and greatly increases the perception of sourness. Lactic acid, found in spoiled milk, is less objectionable and contributes a 'tangy' character, sometime perceived as 'sweet' by brewers in contrast to other acids."

(There are actually a host of other acids that contribute flavor like caproic acid, which Sparrow says gives a "goaty," "sweaty," or "zoolike" character. But you can read his book if you want the full monty.)

Brettanomyces
This wild yeast inspires the most awe and fear among brewers. It will eat anything, including dextrins and sugars that other yeasts find unpalatable, achieving nearly 100% attenuation. (Brewers joke that it will start eating the glass in a bottle if you leave it long enough.) Attenuation is the percentage of available sugars a yeast will eat. Wyeast's Northwest ale yeast, a non-brettanomyces yeast, attenuates at about 70%, for example. Brett will produce both acetic and lactic acids, but the former only under certain circumstances. There are at least five species of brettanomyces and many strains within each. The most common is brettanomyces bruxellensis, named for a strain from Brussels.

Lactobacillus
Lactobacillus is a type of bacteria that gives Flanders beers (red and brown) their character, as it does to some German ales like Gose and Berliner Weisse. It is not a major player in lambics, however--the lactic there comes from pediococcus (see below). As the name suggests, lactobacillus produces lactic acid. Lactobacillus is far more finicky than brettanomyces, preferring warm temperatures, a low-oxygen environment, and low levels of hop acids.

Pediococcus
As alluded to above, pediococcus is the beastie that gives lambics their lactic, not lactobacillus. This is mainly a function of the life cycle of a lambic. Pediococcus ferments in beer with little or no oxygen; likewise, it gives off no carbon dioxide. In a lambic, the pediococcus kicks in after 3-4 months when, fascinatingly, the wort is exceptionally sour as a result of early enterobacter production. The pediococcus begins when the lambic warms up, creating "long strands of slime" on top of the wort. You can drink the beer at this stage, but it's oily and known as the "sick" stage. But from the sickness comes the lactic, and eventually, the slime is reabsorbed as the brettanomyces begin gobbling up everything that's left.

The upshot? "Sour" isn't a fixed flavor. Different beers have different compounds and acids that contribute characteristics that define style. Brewers have very different attitudes to the kinds of sour beers produce. When I was at Allagash last year, Jason Perkins and Rob Tod described their efforts to cultivate native brettanomyces. On the other hand, Ron Gansberg doesn't want brett in his brewery; he's a lactobacillus man. Matt Swihart is a brett man, but is he only a brett man, or will future batches exhibit the character of other funky bacteria? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

By the way, Sparrow reproduces a lot of very cool graphs he got from Raj Apte, and you can find those at Raj's site. One I particularly enjoyed is a graph showing the waves of activity in lambic fermentation, particularly in the first year. Click on it to see an enlarged version. You'll find more cool stuff if you follow the link to his site, too.


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PHOTO: Cantillon casks, Thom's Beer Blog / link

Rise of the New Regional Breweries

Note: I'm away from the computer for a few days, and so have re-posted some of my favorite items from recent years. Today's post was occasioned by the In-Bev purchase of Anheuser-Busch. I have added an update below the post.

When I was a kid, my cousin--whom I idolized in the way an eight-year-old inevitably does with a 20-year-old cousin--used to name his dogs after beer. He was a farmer out in Eastern Oregon, and there was something about driving tractors that was irresistible to the young city slicker (from that vast metropolis, Boise). I never stopped to consider why he had a lot of dogs, but maybe the life of a farm dog isn't always a long-lived one. In any case, the reason he thought it was cool to name his dogs after beer companies was because there were a lot of regional beer companies, and they had identities. It wouldn't occur to a young man to name his dog after a brewing company now, but in the era of "I seen 'em" and "Raaaaai-neeeeeeir Beeeeeeeer" and "Blitz Country," it made perfect sense. His St. Bernard "Oly" was my favorite.

I am reminded of all of this as I consider the demise of Bud, the last of the independent American brewing titans. Now all we have left are "brands"--labels on cans all containing the same, indistinguishable pallid product. Breweries are gone, replaced by "plants," just as faceless as the beer they make. I suspect there's still a little pride in Colorado of Coors and in Milwaukee of Miller, but it must be a vestigial, nostalgic pride. There's nothing about Miller that says Milwaukee anymore--the association is purely reflex memory.

On the other hand, a lot of growing craft breweries have become pretty big deals. Boston Beer Company is now the largest independent brewery in the US. Sierra Nevada and New Belgium probably fit the standard of "regional brewery"--something like a million or more barrels. Maybe Widmer does, too. Deschutes and Full Sail are now in the top 20 (.pdf)--certainly not out of spitting distance. (There is a massive drop off from the top 3-4 to the next few, to be sure, but these companies are gaining.)

It's interesting to think of these, rather than the regional breweries ascendent back in the 60s (Ballantine, Hamm's, Blitz-Weinhard, Schaefer), as the next cohort of regional American breweries. We're still in the mode of thinking of them as "micro." But really, if the sale of Budweiser tells us anything, it's that the macros are looking like dinosaurs, while the erstwhile micros are creating broad regional markets that might well carry them into the future as major players. It's hard to imagine that Budweiser's pre-eminence will continue. They've held it for decades, but in business, no one stays on top forever. Ask GM.

Before 1970, there was a lot more parity between the major breweries. In 1950, Schlitz was "king," but just by a nose. They produced only 7% of the nation's beer and the top ten brewers only made 38%. A-B was king a decade later, but they still only produced 10% of the country's beer. And there were a still a lot of regional independents:

RANK	BREWER	BARRELAGE
1	Anheuser-Busch, Inc.	8,477,099
2	Jos. Schlitz Brewing Co.	5,694,000
3	Falstaff Brewing Corp.	4,915,000
4	Carling Brewing Co.	4,822,075
5	Pabst Brewing Co.	4,738,000
6	P. Ballantine & Sons	4,408,895
7	Theo. Hamm Brewing Corp.	3,907,040
8	F & M Schaefer Brewing Co.	3,202,500
9	Liebmann Breweries	2,950,268
10	Miller Brewing Co.	2,376,543

Total Barrelage Of All U.S. Brewers in 1960: 87,912,847 barrels.
Top 10 Brewers' Percentage of Total U.S. Barrelage: 52 percent.

I don't have the numbers for Budweiser, but it has long accounted for about half the beer sold in the US. If the brand erodes here, as Coors and Miller's have, Americans will be drinking more of something else. In another 20 years, we may see Boston Beer on top, with Bud relegated to second, Miller and Coors perhaps off the list. It's not inconceivable that eight or nine of the ten largest US breweries in 2025 are what we now call "craft breweries." I mean, it's already beginning:

1. Anheuser- Busch Inc.
2. Miller Brewing Co.
3. Coors Brewing Co.
4. Pabst Brewing Co.
5. Boston Beer Co.
6. D.G. Yuengling and Son Inc.
7. Sierra Nevada Brewing Co.
8. New Belgium Brewing Co. Inc.
9. High Falls Brewing Co. (Genesee)
10. Spoetzl Brewery

The brewing world has always been marked by vicissitude, even when things appeared static year-to-year. But now we may be in a very serious moment of change that will require us to rethink what we mean by "micro" and "macro."

Interesting times.

Update. Since I posted this, we've had some movement on the top ten list. Have a look at Brewers Association's list from this April:

1 Anheuser-Busch InBev St. Louis MO
2 MillerCoors Brewing Co. Chicago IL
3 Pabst Brewing Co. Woodridge IL
4 D. G. Yuengling and Son Inc. Pottsville PA
5 Boston Beer Co. Boston MA
6 Sierra Nevada Brewing Co. Chico CA
7 New Belgium Brewing Co. Fort Collins CO
8 Craft Brewers Alliance, Inc. Portland OR
9 Spoetzl Brewery (part of Gambrinus) Shiner TX
10 High Falls Brewing Co. Rochester NY