The Steady Morphing of "Craft"

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

Have a look:

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

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

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

The lines blur on...

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

Drink This Beer: Walking Man Memorial Fund ISA

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

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

Does she sound spectacular or what? 

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

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

Book Review: Beer Britannia by Boak and Bailey

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






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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Budweiser Ironies

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

But what really caught my eye was this paragraph:

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

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

Jim Bicklein at the brewery in St. Louis

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

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

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

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

Well, this is embarrassing

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

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

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

And reference that suggests Seattle and Portland are not identical.  

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

The whole article is well worth a read.

Morning News, Heat Wave Edition

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beer ice cream?  Who's crafty now?

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

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

But Boneyard fans already knew that.

McSorley's, 1940

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

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

and

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

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

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

and

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

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

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

Beer Sherpa Recommends: Gigantic IPL

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cantillon Adds New Building; Will Double Production

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

Dear Friends,

Great news, Cantillon is expanding.

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

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

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

Cheers,
Jean

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

What Idaho Can Teach Us About Beer

I just spent the better part of a week in the state of my birth, Idaho.  Much of Idaho rests under the shade of vast pine forests, but the part where the people live is in the high desert in the south, land of brown, sage-covered hills with river valleys quilted with squares of green potato fields.  Idaho, like Washington and California, borders Oregon, and so there's every reason to believe it should be a great beer state. 

It is not.

Southern Idaho

It's not that there aren't that many breweries--at 35, it boasts a brewery for every 46,000 citizens, which is more than Wisconsin.  Rather, it's the way local beer is completely marginalized in favor of large brands.  Taplists feature mass market brands with only a gesture to the craft segment with a tap from one of the bigger, out-of-state producers like Sierra Nevada and Deschutes.  (Or in many cases, just bottles from these breweries.)  Grocery stores might have two or three Idaho brands, but no more.  Unless you've traveled through or live adjacent to Idaho, you will almost certainly not be able to name a brewery there.  I would be gobsmacked to learn that any brewery in the state makes more than 5,000 barrels. [Note: see comments below, and consider me gobsmacked.]  In Idaho, breweries are mostly brewpubs, and they live the tenuous existence of restaurants, and failure is a very real possibility.  Earlier this year, TableRock, the state's oldest brewery, was dumped in favor of a burger joint. 

TableRock, which opened in 1991, is a seminal part of Boise's craft-beer scene. But it struggled in the past few years. TableRock Brewing Co., which operated the brewpub, filed for bankruptcy in 2008 because of a failed bottling plant. Chris Nelson took over the brewpub in 2009, eventually putting TableRock up for sale. Multiple head brewers have come and gone recently, leaving Nelson to brew TableRock's beer.

There's a lesson here: culture rules all.  There's a band running about a hundred miles wide (sometimes narrower) down the west coast of the US.  It is one cultural zone.  The next thousand miles or so have an entirely different culture, one that transcends state lines and geologic regions.  The culture of Boise, Idaho is a lot like Cheyenne, Wyoming and Missoula Montana.  It's closer culturally to Phoenix than it is to Portland.

The vast areas of the Mountain West are mostly rural and white, and therefore conservative.  You'd think this would make them bastions of capitalism--and maybe they are, if you're in the business of harvesting crops or beef--but local businesses of all stripes struggle.  Portlanders default to locally-made products and even regard products shipped from as close as Washington with suspicion.  In Idaho, national brands rule.  I was near McCall for part of the time, a pretty resort town on the shores of Payette Lake.  Though a tourist town, it gives nothing away to Portland in terms of parochialism; according to legend (about which the Google is mute), locals once tried to ban Californians from buying property there.

With just 3,000 people, McCall can support two local breweries.  And yet, despite their relative health, they have no presence outside their own walls.  You can't find McCall Brewing's beer on tap around town, much less down in Donnelly, ten miles south.  The parochialism doesn't extend to being boosters for local businesses like it does in Portland.

Aside from its innately fascinating differences, there's a pretty big lesson in the way Idahoans regard locally-brewed beer.  They are never going to be a big craft-beer market.  It doesn't matter how many local breweries open, they are never going to be more than marginal players making a few hundred barrels (at best) a year.  This is true across large swaths of the US.  I don't know a ton about the South, but only three of the largest fifty breweries are located there--even though it has a third of the country's people.  Geographically speaking, most of the country is never going to embrace locally-brewed beer in anything like the way people along that hundred-mile band along the Pacific Ocean do.

Politicos often use the description "two Americas" to describe the US.  If you were to map red and blue states, I think you'd find a fairly strong correlation with this cultural affinity for locally brewed beer.  It's just one of those things that makes the United States such an odd and interesting place to live.

Update:  A brewery insider just sent me some internal numbers from IRI.  These are incomplete numbers, but they demonstrate how different the states are.  In Oregon, only three breweries are from out of state in the "craft" segment (New Belgium, Sierra Nevada, and Lagunitas, the 8th, 9th, and 10th best sellers).  Of the top ten sellers, 84% of volume are locally brewed.  In Boise (no state numbers available), only three are local (the 5th, 6th, and 8th).  Local craft beers only have a 20% share in Boise.  Also interesting: Portlanders spend about 30% more on cider than people spend on craft beer in Boise.

Read more here: http://www.idahostatesman.com/2014/05/16/3188733/goodbye-tablerock-boises-oldest.html#storylink=cpy

On Kolsch

It has been a couple years since I passed through Cologne--and probably that long since I blogged about the city's signature style. Yesterday, I encountered something that made me think it was time to revisit these light, crisp pale quintessentially summery beers. As easy as they seem to understand, it turns out there's still confusion about kolsches:

Did you spot the problem?  Germany and Bavaria are not synonymous (this confuses the history of Bavaria's ancient Reinheitsgetbot, too); Cologne is nowhere near Bavaria. 

But there is another issue, more subtle, more confusing. Is it an ale or lager? When I tweeted out that menu picture last night, a number of people said it was not just a mistake to call kolsches Bavarian, but to describe them as ales, too. They're sort of right--but that doesn't make them lagers, either. As with so many things German, the categories have been sliced more precisely:  

This middle-space, Obergäriges Lagerbier, indicates a top-fermented beer that has been lagered--a lagered ale. This distinction is useful to the extent that it illustrates the dual nature of the word "lager," which designates not only a yeast type (a noun), but also the practice of cold conditioning beer (a verb).  It harkens back to the era when yeasts were only dimly understood, but practices very well known. 

But as much as I respect Ron Pattinson and his knowledge about German beer, this is a needlessly pedantic distinction--and one I had a hard time finding Germans observe. When I was in Cologne, I asked about Obergäriges Lagerbier, and got curious looks for my trouble.  When I was touring the Kolsch brewery Reissdorf, I had an exchange with a brewer where I tried making Ron's point--and it was his point; I'd boned up on his vast treasury of blogging before my trip--but the brewer dismissed the distinction. "No," he told me, "it's an ale."  I think the world has shrunk enough now that the notion of ale as Americans understand it is typical, even in Germany. 

So you may call a Kolsch an ale without worry, or if you want to impress your friends, you can call it Obergäriges Lagerbier.  You might even argue that since it's a lagered ale, the word lager can be used in describing kolsches (though not by itself). 

 Just don't call it a Bavarian ale. 

Cider Saturday: The Gorge Flows With Cider

I have been pointing the nose of my Toyota east and shooting down the Gorge the last couple weeks.  That's the newest hotspot for Oregon cider, although most of the cideries are so new very few people have heard of them.  Over the next few weeks or months, I'll be giving them the full Cider Saturday treatment, but for now, here's a picture essay and a thumbnail description of each cidery.  In the meantime, you can organize a tour for yourself if you wish.  All the cideries mentioned here have regular hours and welcome the public.  Click the links for details.

1.  Gorge Cyder House

Stefan Guemperlein operates the tiniest cidery from the back of his Ovino store in Hood River.  A German who recalls drinking cider in Bavaria in his youth, it was actually his love of Italian wines that brought him to the apple.  Now he makes naturally-fermented cider, slow-aged to rich complexity.



2.  Foxtail

You want cider?  The orchardist Bob Fox and his cider-making partner Justin Cardwell have cider--eight varieties when I visited.  Many include fruits gathered elsewhere on the farm (the best-seller is a peach cider, Fuzzy Haven), but I like the English-style dry, Docklands.  Stop into their really nice taproom just north of Hood River to sample.


3.  Rack and Cloth

I think Mosier is about to go on the cider map--it's about five miles east of Hood River, and it's where you find Rack and Cloth.  They have a cool little tasting-room/restaurant, and you can get not only their cider there, but food made from the produce of their farm.  Right now supplies are in very short supply, so visit early.  Silas has parceled out one five-gallon keg for each day they're open until the new cider is in, and when it's gone, you have to drink beer.  (Horrors!)  By the way the sheep on the far right is PommePomme, the cidery's mascot.



4.  Draper Girls

At the moment, Theresa Draper only makes sweet cider--that is, pre-fermented.  She is edging toward a cidery and tasting room to showcase the nine acres of heirloom fruit she grows, but that's down the line.  But here's the thing: that sweet cider is unpasteurized.  That means if you want to ferment it out yourself, with the Drapers' own Parkdale yeast, all you need is a carboy.  In October, I'm definitely making a trek out to pick up my five gallons.


5.  Hood Valley

Hood Valley is located across the street from Solera Brewing in downtown Parkdale.  Cider maker Brian Perkey has a long history in brewing, and brings his experience to the endeavor of producing a high-quality off-dry draft cider--the equivalent of a good session ale.  Both he and his ciders are enormously effervescent, and chatting with him is as fun as drinking his product.

A Few Quickie Recommendations at the OBF

Source: @RogueAles

I braved the liquid skies and mud bogs for opening day at the Oregon Brewers Festival yesterday, and aside from the very unusual weather, things went just as you would expect.  Lots of people, nice conversation, and good beer.  One of the topics of conversation begins with the question, "what have you had today that was good?"  In the spirit of that, here are my (necessarily incomplete) answers.

• Boneyard Bone-a-fide.  You have certain expectations about Boneyard: a sweet malt base that lifts up an intense infusion of hops.  Boneyard meets your expectations.  At 5.5%, it's a perfect festbier.
• Boundary Bay Double Dry Hop Mosaic.  Very much in the  Boneyard mode--vivid but not oppressive washes of hops.  They build through mid-palate, and you expect a shattering finish, but no, it fades out into a sunny, fruity finish.
• Heathen Megadank.  This is listed, wrongly, at 120 IBUs.  It's actually not hugely bitter, but it is saturated in hops--dank, slightly fruity hops.  
• Klamath Basin Breakfast Blend.  A coffee IPA that is just a notch below the best I've ever had, but which nevertheless demonstrates the potential of hops and coffee (which just shouldn't work).
•  Sierra Nevada/Ninkasi Double Latte Coffee Milk Stout.  The name pretty much says it all, and it really hit the spot as the rain was hammering down.

We don't all have the same palates, so I'll throw out a few more that were good--and perhaps in your mouth, great.  Bayern Amber (a graduate course in rich malting), Crux Off-Leash Session Ale (a Crystal hop special that will probably show better under hot skies), Ecliptic Crimson Saison (interesting balance, but my palate was gone), Payette Blood Orange IPA (more IPA than blood orange, but good), Logsdon Straffe Drieling (just had a sip, but it seemed really impressive), Sixpoint 3Beans (a bit hot, but rich and creamy).

I didn't encounter any disasters.  There were beers that didn't hit me in the happy spot, from Upright's overly spiced (those damn pink peppercorns again) saison to Caldera's coconut porter (too coconutty--but others were going crazy for it).  Even Laht Neppur's latest non-beer confection, a peach pie beer that tasted 100% of the former and 0% of the latter, was well done for what it was. 

That's the report; go forth and enjoy--

Twenty-odd Years at the Oregon Brewers Festival

I have been attending the Oregon Brewers Festival every year since somewhere in the 1990-1992 range.  (I have a spectacular inability to remember the years things happened.)  Just to put that in perspective, we're talking about the Bush administration--the first Bush administration.  Not only were there no real cell phones (and consequently no vintage selfies to offer), but the internet didn't yet exist.  (!)  Neither did the Pearl District, Voodoo Doughnuts, or food cart pods.  You could, however, smoke wherever you wanted, and there was a kick-ass old brewery wreathing downtown in the scent of wort and hops.

The OBF did exist, however, and the experience was almost identical to the one you can enjoy over the next five days.  There have been a few changes on the margins--it has gone from two to five days, and those old opaque-plastic mugs were finally dumped in favor of glass.  But the experience has not changed.  The fest is still located on a green ribbon between the buildings of downtown and the mighty Willamette River.  It's still "always the last full weekend in July."  There are still north and south constellations of trailers, each with eight taps manned by smiling volunteers.  You still saunter up to one of those volunteers and offer a $1 wooden token for a pour (four for a full glass), and take it back to your clutch of friends, standing in a circle in some shady spot.  As inflation eats away at that dollar, the real price for a pour has been roughly halved since the first fest.

In three hours, I'm going to meet friends for the annual ritual.  We always went on the opening day, and fortunately, we're all old men who have managed to get jobs that allow us to take a Wednesday off to go drink beer all day--when we started, the first day was a convenient Friday.  We'll still stand around in a circle and tell each other familiar old stories.  (Next year, a friend's son will be old enough to join us if he wishes.)  Wars and famines have come and gone, regimes have risen and fallen, the world has shrunk and sped up, and yet each year in July, Portlanders can step into a bubble where time has been frozen--and where the beer is always fantastic.

I made this little video back in 2006, and except for those plastic mugs, there are very few clues to suggest it wasn't made last year (or next year, if you're feeling quantum).  If you're a lucky old (or young) man (or woman) and are heading down today, say hello--

Beer Sherpa Recommends: Old Town Red Ships of Spain

It doesn't make any sense.

Belgium is such a tiny country that it usually surprises people to learn that there were several regions within its cramped boundaries with distinct brewing traditions.  Even today, when you consider the wheaty beers associated with Hoegaarden and Brussels or the rustic farmhouse ales in the south, you see vestiges of these traditions.  Or when you pass through Flanders, the northwestern part of the kidney-shaped country.  There you will find dark ales, sometimes rich and rounded, as made by the monks at Westvleteren, or acidic and fruity, like those at Verhaeghe and Rodenbach. 

These go back at least two hundred years.  When he toured Belgium in the 1840s, the brewer Georges Lacambre found different kinds of brown beers all across the region.  The ales got dark not by the addition of roasted malt, but because they boiled the worts for insane lengths--from 12 to 20 hours (!).  Over those great lengths, the malts caramelized.  Everyone felt at the time that only good beer came from long, "healthy" boils, and the color was proof of process.  (Nevertheless, Lacambre wasn't impressed.  He said “far from being very pleasant indeed, for it is bitter, harsh and somewhat astringent.”)  Many of the beers were barrel-aged and tart, but there is also a long tradition of these rich, velvety darks that dance on the line between roasty and sweet.

All of which brings me to Old Town Brewing's newly-released Red Ships of Spain, a beer made with the Leuven yeast strain (Brasserie du Bocq) selected for this year's Cheers to Belgian Beers.  Brewer Bold Minister calls it a "Belgian pale," but at the color of Rodenbach (at least in the mood lighting of the old town location), it reads more dark than pale to my eye.  But it is the flavor that gives away the game.  This is no crisp, delicately spiced pale in the mode of a Taras Boulba (Smeirlap!).  No.  It has much deeper, exotic aromas, like I would imagine drift out of Turkish spice markets.  The folds of malt envelop the tongue, and there is a distinctly chocolate note.  I also picked up a warming phenolic sensation that was the physical manifestation of those spicy aromas. 

As I gulped it--Red Ships of Spain, at 6.8%, is a quaffer--I was having clear flashbacks to my stay in Watou, when I drank brewery-fresh Pater 6 at St. Bernardus's Brouwershuis.  The two are kindred spirits.  But because Pater 6 is a somewhat more perishable beer, I've never found it in that fresh state here in the US.  Now, for as long as Red Ships plies the waters of old town, you can experience the joy of an old Flanders dark ale, just like they do in Watou. 

(Red Ships of Spain?  "This is the second in my Robert Goulet series," Bolt said.  And then he went on to explain something obscure about an SNL skit.  We're talking very deep cuts in the reference department here.  Google it if you want to lose a half hour.)

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

Oregon Brewers Fest By the Numbers

What is that deep rumble I hear shaking the earth like a refrigerator-sized subwoofer?  Why, it's the sound of beer trucks trundling toward Tom McCall Waterfront Park for the annual Oregon Brewers Festival.  And as surely as those trucks make their trek, so do I journey deeply into the database of beers to provide you with a by-the-numbers look at the grandaddy of American beer fests.

For those of you who are too busy to read the details, two trends that will amaze and astonish: there are more beers using fruit (23) and almost as many flavored beer (18) as there are IPAs of all types (21); the huge trend last year in Dortmund exports (3) seems to have run its course.  Also, for the first time, the OBF is styling itself the Oregon Brewfest.  Dunno what you want to make of that.

The Numbers
This year, the specialty tent returns (formerly called the "Buzz Tent"), but we don't calculate those in the figures.  (I am nevertheless delighted to have it back.)   Also note that in the numbers below, the bolded text refers to 2014, while the text in the (parentheses) are last year's.  Here we go...

Years since inception: 27
Total beers: 88 (84 in 2012)
Total breweries: 87 (82)*
States represented: 14 (12)
Percent Oregon: 58% (57%)
Percent California: 14% (14%)
Percent Washington: 11% (14%)
All Others: 17% (15%)

Total styles (by broad category): 25 (28)
Lagers: 6 (13)
IPAs: 24% (14%)
__- Standard IPA: 10 (9)
__- Double IPA: 4 (1)
__- CDA: 1 (2)
__- Fruit IPA: 4 (N/A)
__- Flavored IPA: 3 (N/A)

By style:
__- IPAs: 21 examples (12)
__- Fruit Wheats: 11 (10)
__- Pale ale: 10 (9)
__- Pilsner: 3 (3)
__- Berliner Weisse 3 (N/A)
__- Abbey: 3 (0)
__- Stouts and porters: 3 (0)
__- Kolsch: 1 (3)
__- Gluten-free: 2 (2)
__- Dortmund Export 0 (3)
__- Witbier: 1 (3)


Beers using spices/flavors: 23, 26% (14, 17%)
Fruit beers: 18, 20% (16, 19%)
Belgian styles: 13% (12%)
German/Czech styles: 15% (18%)
Totally weird beers**: 8% (15%)

ABV of smallest beer (Cigar City Blood Orange/Dragon Fruit Florida Weisse): 3.5% (3.5%)
ABV of largest beer (Dogfish Head Oak-Aged Strong Ale): 11% (10%)
Average ABV: 6.11% (6.0%)
Beers below 5.5% ABV: 31 (31)
Beers above 7% ABV: 21 (14)
Fewest IBUs in Fest (Beer Valley and Elysian): 0 (8)
Most IBUs at the Fest (Heathen Megadank): 120 (116)
Average IBUs: 40 (38)
Beers between 0 and 40 IBUs: 50 (58)

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*In past years, the Fest allowed some breweries to surreptitiously double up--like Rogue and Issaquah.  This year the only double is Widmer and gluten-free Omission--which is nearly permissible.  (But  I doubt Harvester would agree.)
** A big caveat here.  A ton of these beers are brewed to no style whatsoever, and about half have either fruit or flavors added.  But there's a "black wit" and a few oddballs like that which, even by today's free-and-loose standards, are totally weird.  To me, beers like this year's smallest, Cigar City Blood Orange/Dragon Fruit Florida Weisse, is not totally weird.  Your mileage may vary.

Book Review: Gilroy Was Good For Guinness by David Hughes

Gilroy Was Good For Guinness
David Hughes
Liberties Press, 256 pages
$40 hardcover






How about a nice off-speed pitch?  Today's review touches only tangentially on beer.  Almost everyone, beer fan or no, is familiar with the iconic ads from the twenty years on either side of midcentury: My Goodness My Guinness, Guinness For Strength, and Lovely Day For a Guinness.  The main illustrator behind those ads was John Gilroy, an English artist whose Guinness ads started appearing around 1930.

Self-portrait.

The book's central focus are those illustrations, though it does touch on his full career, which included fine art as well as commercial art.  Although he was never able to fully ascend to the highest echelons of the fine art world, he did do some very accomplished portraiture work, capturing the vitality and spirit of his subjects.  But the book only acknowledges this element of his career; Hughes is much more interested in the Guinness material.

What interested me most was not the familiar art (though flipping through the pages and seeing rough sketches and discarded ideas is fascinating) but the amazing grasp Gilroy and Guinness had on the brand--in decades long before ad men used the term.  This part of the story is only hinted at, and yet with each new illustration, you see how the clarity of the vision led to an iron-clad sense of the brand.  One of Gilroy's most memorable series involved a zookeeper whose stouts kept getting purloined by different animals.  In one, a satisfied-looking ostrich has a pint glass descending his long neck.  In another, an upside-down kinkajou cradles the glass.  Gilroy suggested a theme with a cobra and a snake charmer--the rough sketch is included--but Guinness rejected the pitch because snakes weren't cuddly enough.  It's a great idea, and it must have taken some soul-searching to discard it, but such was the clear-eyed sense of what the company wanted to project.

Hughes doesn't do a spectacular job with the text.  The long introduction spends way too much time on Gilroy's personal life and way too little time on his life as an artist.  Except for my reading of Peter Schjeldahl, I have very little sense of art.  It would have been useful for Hughes to have covered the artistic side of Gilroy.  I would also have liked a sense of the Guinness ads in a larger context--what was their influence?  What kind of art was typical for the time?  How did Gilroy influence other illustrators and ad men, and what was the legacy of the Guinness ads?  Hughes skips all this.  

The art does speak for itself, however.  We learned earlier this year that a cache of Gilroys revealed some unsettling illustrations for export ads to Nazi Germany.  In the context of his full scope of work, though, they look pretty typical.  Gilroy was asked to adapt a lot of his themes for foreign markets, and--remember, these are advertisements meant to sell beer--he played on national and cultural themes of the countries in question.  That a 1936 campaign for exports to Germany involved Nazi images is not incredibly surprising (they were never produced commercially).  Nevertheless, they are fascinating and add to the narrative.

It's a full-color book that captures the richness of the Guinness campaign.  It's not a cheap book, but the money is well-spent on the reproductions.  Those who enjoy commercial art, and especially the fans of breweriana, would probably appreciate having this on their bookshelf.

In July, You Can't Swing a Dead Cat Without Hitting a Beer Fest

Click to enlarge.

July used to belong to just one beer fest, the giant kegger-by-the-river that kicks off in five day's time.  Then the international beer fest muscled its way onto the calendar (though this year it's coming in August). That made room for other fests, big and small (Puckerfest, Belmont Station's celebration of sour beers, is still one of the best).  This weekend we'll have the formerly in-house McMenamins Roadhouse Brewfest, and it will compete with the new and still-shiny White Owl Lagerfest on Saturday and Sunday.

I have no idea if Lagerfest will join the pantheon of beloved classics, but it's relevant in 2014 not only because it's something new, but because lagers are making a big return to the west coast.  Why I find most fascinating is that these aren't lagers in ale drag, all bejeweled with subtle esters and way too many hops.  They cleave to more ancient traditions and are sessionable in both strength and hop intensity; there are German pilnsers and helleses gallore, along with an occasional Vienna lager, schwarzbier, and maibock.  Unusually, the fest has different taplists both days, and of the two, you'll find more hard-to-get lagers on Sunday, including more from beyond Beervana.  But both days have great line-ups, and for the lagerheads and lager-curious, it looks like a really nice time. 

Book Review: The Craft Beer Revolution by Steve Hindy

The Craft Beer Revolution
Steve Hindy
Palgrave Macmillan, 250 pages
$25

Steve Hindy's new book is a serious and important work.  It contains some incredibly revealing details about the long history of brewing--particularly the history from 1988 onward, after Hindy co-founded Brooklyn Brewery and entered the history books.  It is also a wandering, unfocused narrative that contains two competing threads: early craft-brewing hagiography and an insider's guide to the unkempt, sweaty inner workings of an industry.  One half is disposable; the other half is indispensable.

The hagiography occupies the first section of the book, and it reads like many forebears.  Hindy clips through the pantheon of greats--Maytag, Grossman, McAuliffe, Papazian, Michael Jackson, and so on.  There is little here that's new, and Hindy treats the founders with a reverence we've come to expect in these kinds of books.  As he gets further along, to when he enters the picture, things start to pick up speed, though, and we see hints of things to come.  There is an absolutely fascinating section where he takes on the early, carnival-barker years of Jim Koch's rise at Boston Beer.  But then it loses focus again when he devotes a chapter to the class of '88, the ostensible goal of which is to illustrate the diversity in approach among the craft brewers.  But that was the year he founded Brooklyn, and he gives his own brewery a little biography along entries for Goose Island, Deschutes, Great Lakes, Rogue, and others.

Before he was a brewing magnate, Hindy worked as a correspondent for the Associated Press.  The Craft Beer Revolution benefits from his skill as a reporter.  He ably weaves history and anecdotes (his and others') into a compelling narrative.  But I think that reporter Hindy would have made a different decision about how to approach this book than brewery-owner Hindy did.  You can either write a business memoir or a straightforward history, but blending the two mars the history.  Hindy can't write about Brooklyn dispassionately (who could?), and for large stretches of the book, those competing impulses weaken the narrative.

Hindy shifts gears midway through, however, and the book becomes a revelation.  Here Hindy starts talking about the inside of craft brewing, the blood-and-guts reality that has been largely airbrushed out of the canon.  He treats the flood of money in the mid-90s with more details and insight than I've seen anywhere.  It's a blend of big-picture trend analysis and anecdotes that reveal the more human aspects of that time.  Oregonians may remember a mysterious brand that appeared briefly on shelves called Oregon Ale.  It was a contract-brewed stealth product by Boston Beer.  Hindy describes the situation and gets nice quotes from Oregon brewers--and then shows how Oregon responded to the threat.  These kinds of examples go on and on.

He goes into the tensions among craft brewers and between craft brewers and larger brewers.  Hindy describes the painful strife that led to the creation of the Brewers Association, with folks like Deschutes' Gary Fish on one side, glowering at Charlie Papazian on the other.  As an inside observer to the industry, he also understands the role distribution played in preserving large-brewer dominance, and devotes two chapters to describing the politics of changing the old arrangement.  (Old timers from Oregon who remember AB's vaunted distribution network and it's "100% share of mind" moment in the 90s--which led to the union with Widmer--will find that story placed in a larger, understandable context.)  These chapters about what really happened, with protagonists and antagonists, is absolutely fascinating.

For anyone interested in the beer business (which is to say anyone interested in beer), I would recommend picking up a copy.  It has large sections of the kind of writing we don't need--congratulatory (and sometimes self-congratulatory) prose about the great and wonderful American craft brewers.  You will have heard of these saints before.  But the other half is full of the sinners, the real people and the real stories behind the glossy promo--people you know a lot less about.  And that half makes this book quite a read.