Understanding Hop Aromas and Flavors

We have a very special episode of the Beervana Podcast for you this week, and I want to tease it by quoting from a section of the interview. Patrick and I visited the labs and brewery of Tom Shellhammer, who is a professor of fermentation science at Oregon State University and one of the world's leading hops researchers. Before we did the interview, he took us around his labs, stopping at one point in front of stacks of small bottles containing aroma compounds found in hops. He uses these in classwork as a way of giving students a pure, condensed version of these aromas. We took a whiff of the "stone fruit" and "catty" bottles.

As we spoke about the catty scent, Tom referenced a class of compounds that have started to get more attention--thiols. These are sulfur-containing aroma compounds in hop oil that are responsible for both the deeply tropical aromas in many recent hop varieties, but also aromas some of us find objectionable (sweat, onion, garlic). Here's Tom, in a quick-and-dirty transcript from the podcast:

Thiols are a class of chemical compounds that have sulfur in them. So that sulfur part is what makes the compound a thiol. Not that all sulfur compounds are thiols, but a thiol has sulfur in it; that's the key component to that. Myrcene and linalool don't have sulfur in them. Myrcene is a hydrocarbon. [Describes the chemical structure.] Linalool is an oxygenated version of that, so it's got an oxygen component in it that does things to its functionality and its solubility. Hydrocarbons as a class tend to be more woodsy, herbal, and somewhat floral. They oxygenated versions of these things like linalool and geraniol tend to be floral and fruity. And then we move to this thiol class.

The hydrocarbons make up to 75 to 90% of the hop oil, the oxygenated fraction makes up almost the rest, and then less than 1% are these sulfur compounds. Tiny, tiny amount. But the thing about them that make them so important is the aroma-detection thresholds of these things are three to four, maybe five, orders of magnitude lower than these other compounds. With myrcene, you need about 300-500 parts per billion. Sounds like a small amount, but not quite a part per million. And the thiols, their aroma thresholds are parts per trillion. A little goes a long way with a thiol.

The thiol compounds can be stinky like onions and garlic but they can also be potent tropical fruity, citrusy, but also animal-y, stinky, sweaty/BO. 

One of the reasons some people absolutely love hops like Summit and Nelson Sauvin is because they're getting the fruit. But I am apparently hyper-sensitive to thiols, and I get the onion and sweat.

This podcast, I'm pleased to say, is filled with gems like this. (It's part one of our visit down there. Next week we go to the test brewery at OSU and join the head brewer there, Jeff Clawson. Hop talk continues as we sample beer students made in the brewery.)  Definitely give it a listen:


Finally, if this all seems irresistible to you (and how can it not??), Tom and Jeff Clawson are leading a two-day course in Portland for those of you who'd like access to some of the content he presents in his coursework, but who don't have the time or money to take a class in Corvallis.

Our Origins of Beer Flavors and Styles workshop is an experiential sensory course that will guide you through the brewing process from raw materials to finished beer. Through hands-on instruction, participants will learn how the main raw materials used in brewing process (malt, water, hops, and yeast) impact beer flavor and aroma. Participants will work through standards and exercises with the goal of highlighting how each of these materials impacts beer flavor. Guiding tastings, focused with a historical lens, will also walk participants through on how these raw materials have impacted beer styles historically overtime. Over this two-day course, participants will evaluate 8 beer styles and over 35 beers.

Friday, March 17 - Saturday, March 18, 2017

If memory serves, a part of the class will involve those little glass vials of hop aromas. Soon you, too, will be able to distinguish thiols, hydrocarbons, and oxygenated hydrocarbons from one another. Follow this link to register.

How Doomed Are We?

Raptor of death.

Pete Dunlop has an excellent but alarming post in which he warns:

AB is quietly implementing a plan designed to bury independent craft brewers. And they might just pull it off...

You might not know it, but the High End kicked ass in 2016, a pretty lousy year for craft beer. The High End's growth rate hit 32 percent, easily trumping the craft segment's single digit growth. Bigly. Every High End brand grew and they're all showing continued growth into 2017.

High End is of course ABI's portfolio of erstwhile American craft breweries (Goose Island, Elysian, 10 Barrel, Breckenridge, et al).  His post led to a spirited debate on Facebook in which two camps formed: 1) we are so screwed, and 2) don't overreact; it's not as bad as it looks. Since you know me as a man of subtle and restrained opinion, I will refrain from identifying my own camp. Rather, I'd like to point out a few variables to consider as you decide which team you'd like to join.

The Emergence of Craft Tiers
 Until pretty recently, when you went to the grocery store all the beer in the craft segment (hereafter "craft beer" for brevity) was about the same price. Some sixers might be on periodic discount, but this was a retailer decision. Not too long ago, we saw the emergence of an upper tier of beer that was noticeably more expensive and shortly thereafter, a tier of cheaper craft. This was inevitable, as brewers began to segment and find sales in different pockets of the craft segment.

Guess where ABI's High End products mostly live? Sure, Goose Island still has a giant barrel program, but they're all about mainstreaming Goose IPA as the national mass market IPA. They do this through the efficiencies of their giant plants and distribution network, and they use it to drive down costs. The margins get thinner and thinner, but that's okay so long as the volume's going up. But most craft brewers will stick to the middle tier or gravitate to the upper tier. I've already talked about "mass craft," and when we look at Pete's numbers, we're seeing an explosion within that segment.

Retailers Follow Customers
There are no end of stories about the ways in which big companies attempt to pervert the market. In the 90s, Bud initiated a power play against craft beer by demanding its distributors only sell their products--something it toyed with again recently. Pay-to-play rumors are ubiquitous, and more than a few turn out to be real. Most recently, I have heard a rumor this week that Kroger, which owns a substantial amount of Portland's grocery outlets, was going to start radically paring back their 22-ounce offerings, apparently a sop to ABI.

I have no doubt that ABI will use its increasing might to control things at the distribution and retail level--they've done it in the past, and it is a great way to increase market share. There are many legal mechanisms for this kind of thing, which is exactly why we have antitrust laws. But here's the thing: retailers service customers, not manufacturers. Big breweries will try to limit the offerings on the shelves, but retailers aren't going to sacrifice business just to please a big partner. In competitive markets like Oregon's, it would be bad business indeed for a grocery chain to limit the sale of locals in favor of a giant section that includes Goose Island, Devil's Backbone, and Four Peaks. The reason AB's distributor-loyalty program collapsed in the 90s was because customers wanted variety and Bud couldn't provide it. 

Don't Over-value Current Trends
Humans can't help themselves. We over-value current trends. If you Google "craft beer sales" and limit the search to 2013, you find article after article trumpeting the unstoppable juggernaut that is craft beer. (Sample title: "Craft beer sales to triple within 10-year period, says research group.") In those heady years, everyone was writing the obituary of ABI.

Today we're seeing similar numbers from the High End (32% growth!), and our minds begin to accept that as a stable trend. Likewise, we hear that some of the bigger craft breweries had years of stagnation or decline, and that also seems stable. Never mind that craft grew at something like 7% overall, which is a much more impressive figure, given the size of the segment, than the High End's growth spurt on its much-smaller base.  Indeed, you'd sort of expect ABI's brands to get quite a jump-start given 1) that many of them were relatively small to start with, 2) ABI has a nationwide network and the might of the biggest beer company in the world, and 3) ABI appears willing to exchange profit for growth, at least in the short term.

______________

On Facebook, I argued pretty strongly for one of the camps (doomed vs not doomed). The truth is neither I nor anyone else can see into the future. Pete thinks the market is headed in the direction of mass craft, and that the number of drinkers who want high-quality locally-made beer is going to lose out. I'd bet against it, but I wouldn't bet much. 

Still, I do think nearly all of the analysis is a reaction to current trends. So far, we have seen no brand in the craft segment grow over a couple million barrels (I think that's roughly where Blue Moon is, but they're pretty secretive about those numbers). It's easy to grow at 50% or even 100% when you're making 100,000 barrels of beer. But where's the ceiling? If I squint hard enough, I can see a world in which Goose IPA stops all comers in their tracks. But that takes an awful lot of squinting. I wouldn't bury craft just yet.

Oregon Breweries Get Political

Yesterday, the President of the United States stood before the press and told them: "We got 306 because people came out and voted like they've never seen before so that's the way it goes. I guess it was the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan." This was for an election in which he received fewer votes than his opponent that happened three months ago. This kind of disconnect with reality has provoked heretofore apolitical entities into action--including a group of Portland beer fans who formed into a group called the Beer Party PDX. On Monday, they host their inaugural initiative:

The Beer Party PDX Launch Event takes place on Monday, February 20 at participating businesses. 100% of the revenue from purchased kegs will go to the ACLU. Participating bars include Bailey’s Taproom, Bazi Bierbrasserie, Beer Mongers, Belmont Station, Imperial, Lombard House, Roscoe’s, Saraveza, The Thirsty Sasquatch, The Upper Lip, Tin Bucket, and Uptown Market. Participating breweries include Baerlic, Base Camp, Bull Run Cider, Burnside, Cider Riot!, Coalition, Crooked Fence, Culmination, Double Mountain, Heater Allen, Machine House, Matchless, Montavilla, New Belgium, Ninkasi, Pfriem, Ruse, The Commons, Three Magnets, Uptown Market, and Vertigo.  

Since Trump's election, the once safely-sequestered world of politics has been aerosolized and released into the environment, where it touches everything. I guess it will have to be a running theme here on the blog, since every week seems to bring another example of the way in which breweries have entered the political fray. As recently as a few months ago, this wouldn't have seemed like a realm breweries would eagerly enter--partisan politics divides, which means shrinking your potential customer base. But as unprecedented as a President who flagrantly lies about an election we all just witnessed, so is the reaction against him. With Beer Party PDX, we're seeing the contours of how they're trying to take a stand without falling down a partisan tunnel.

As far as I can tell, nowhere does the group use the words "Trump," "Republicans," or "Democrats." Instead, it's mission is "to organize members of the PDX beer community in order to effectively protect and promote basic civil rights including voter access, freedom of speech, and equal rights." In regulating political speech, the courts have regularly allowed nonprofits to organize around specific issues but not partisan candidates. It's a line we've come to recognize as separating the inner and outer core of political action. Beer Party PDX's issues are clearly political; they're not partisan. A brewery can far more easily join the political conversation when the discussion revolves around speech, ballot access, and civil rights rather than the President himself.

It's also worth noting that smaller breweries have greater latitude here. Donald Trump managed just 17% of the vote in Multnomah County, where Portland is located. A small brewery with no plans to sell much outside the cities in Oregon doesn't have a lot to lose by speaking out. Larger breweries like Deschutes, Craft Brewers Alliance, and Rogue, which have distribution in many red states, may be more cautious--though it's therefore impressive to see New Belgium and Ninkasi take the plunge and join this event. Not every brewery has leadership with clear political preferences, but among those that do, more and more are speaking out. It's really a remarkable moment.

I'm starting a new label, "The Trump Effect," for these kinds of posts--I have a hunch this is far from the last one.

How to Tank Spectacularly in the New Market

Update. By some cosmic serendipity, Patrick and I went to Corvallis yesterday to record an interview with Tom Shellhammer--a hops researcher and professor in the Fermentation Sciences program at OSU. As we were touring their test brewery, he mentioned how supportive BridgePort has been, and that Carlos Alvarez had cut them a check for $100,000 to support their projects. This doesn't change any of my analysis below, but it certainly adds an important layer to the BridgePort story.

(l-r) John Foyston, Dick Ponzi, Carlos Alvarez

Over at Willamette Week, Matthew Korfhage has an article about Oregon's tightening beer market. The story is an Oregonized version of one we've seen applied to the national market a number of times over the past couple years. Thumbnail: in a tightening market, it's harder for the biggest players to maintain their barrelage even while small and mid-sized breweries continue to post big numbers. This is, in fact, what you'd expect in a mature market and it's not particularly surprising. Korfhage's case-in-point in the article is BridgePort, which is busy imploding before our eyes--but I think this illustrates a different lesson: in a tightening market, a brewery can no longer make a series of stupid decisions and expect to avoid tanking spectacularly.

We have to go back a ways to tell the story. BridgePort is Oregon's oldest extant brewery, and was for the first 20 years of its existence synonymous with the city of Portland. Its flagship beer was named after the city's beloved bird (Blue Heron), it had one of the best pubs in the city--a pilgrimage site for beer travelers. It cemented its connection through things like Old Knucklehead, a barleywine that featured a prominent local beer guy on the label. And then, in 1996, the brewery released its IPA, a beer that changed the course of brewing in Oregon. BridgePort was, ten years ago, one of our healthiest; it sold 24,000 barrels in Oregon, making it the third-largest seller in the state.

But it was about that time that the consequences of a decision made a decade earlier started to become evident. In 1995, Gambrinus, a Texas-based Corona importer, bought BridgePort. It took owner Carlos Alvarez a while before he started tinkering heavily with the direction of his Portland acquisition, but the first real danger sign came when he renovated the pub, turning it into a generically upscale restaurant and destroying one of the company's chief assets.

His next step was to begin tinkering with the beer lineup (only one beer, IPA, survives from a decade ago). This was inevitable and smart, and most breweries have followed a similar course. But BridgePort's approach was haphazard and bizarre.* They killed off brands like Old Knucklehead and Blue Heron that had strong niche followings. They introduced a series of random beers that had no native connection to BridgePort's identity. Some were good (Hop Czar), some not (Cafe Negro) (seriously, that was one of their great ideas). They let the IPA languish. The approach seemed to be: let's release whatever's a year out of fashion and hope to catch the dregs of a wave. 

How's that working out? Here's their Oregon sales numbers, via the OLCC:

Three years ago, Alvarez and his executives came up to Portland for a dog and pony show celebrating the 30th anniversary. It was without a doubt the weirdest event I've ever been to. Alvarez was aggressively out of touch with Portland and seemed to go out of his way to emphasize that we were doing it wrong. The restaurant chain Chili's came in for a lot of praise, and that seems to be the model he's attempted to place on BridgePort. He was happy to trademark the word "Beervana" and promulgate the slogan "keep Portland beered," but he seems to dislike anything actually weird. I doubt "Portlandia" occupies a lot of space on the Alvarez TiVo.

In my review of the newly renovated pub back in 2006, I wrote this, rather more hopefully than subsequent events warranted:

But it is not a classic, nor does it reflect anything intrinsic about the brewery or Portland. Styles will change and so, presumably, will the brewery. In ten or fifteen years, as aesthetics have changed, it will have the dog-earred, slightly embarrassing aspect trendy restaurants inevitably acquire. And then Gambrinus can update it. I hope, for the sake of the brewery and the city, that the company recognizes the beauty and history resident in the massive beams that still span the old warehouse and restore some of the old Portland funkiness. That may seem a long wait, but hey--I recall the brewery of 1991, and it doesn't seem that long ago. The beams will still be there.

It turns out that wasn't a one-off; it was a signal of the future direction. And indeed, the pub hasn't aged well.

Craft breweries have to connect to their local market to succeed. There are a few rare exceptions--Rogue sells 84% of its beer outside the state--but even breweries like Widmer and Deschutes depend enormously on local sales. The Texas-based ownership of BridgePort has not just neglected its home market, but seems actively antagonistic to it. Until recently, it was possible for BridgePort to bumble along and still hang onto its local volume, which was basically flat from 2006-2013. But mature markets are not kind to bumblers. Why is anyone going to gamble on a six-pack of ORA (Oatmeal Red Ale) when there are twenty other much safer bets at the store? They're not. The numbers starkly demonstrate this point.

Ten years ago, BridgePort was one of Oregon's best and best-selling breweries. It had the kind of credibility you can't manufacture. It was indelibly connected to the city and seemed to be one of the most stable, reliable breweries in the country. Today it teeters on the edge of failure. If we were running a dead pool now, it would be at or near the top. It's main function now seems to be as a cautionary tale about how not to run your brewery.

_____________________
*Based on conversations with people inside the brewery and direct observation of the way Alvarez treats his employees, I think this comes entirely from San Antonio. I have long admired the work people do at the brewery, who have to turn out quality products in spite of the terrible leadership from above. My criticism is for the decision-makers, not the brewers.

Valentine Sherpa: Love Potion #9

No beer sounds better on paper than a fruit stout--and that's where I first encountered the idea. It appeared in the recipes section of Charlie Papazian's classic Complete Joy of Homebrewing (in print since 1976!), and seemed so obvious. What goes better with cherry than chocolate? Alas, no beer more often fails to live up to our expectations than a fruited stout. I have had maybe five in the last twenty years that were good, but none that fully lived up to the simple obviousness of the concept--until now.

Just in time for Valentine's Day, Block 15 has released a seductive treat equal to its billing. Love Potion #9 is a raspberry rather than cherry stout, and melts like a chocolate truffle on the tongue. The challenge to this style is finding the balance, of ratcheting back the flavors so they don't overwhelm each other. The effect of the beer should be decadence; brewers almost always shoot too high, though, finding excess instead. Love Potion succeeds because the intense, silken dark chocolate that floods the mouth is immediately followed by the slightly tart berry. That acidity is key; it adds structure and restraint to the various sweet notes swirling around. The beer is, for its style, dry; another key to success. As you can see, I had a pint, and never did the berry-and-chocolate sweetness begin to collect on my palate. Each sip was an infusion of intensity but never excess, allowing my senses to revisit the sensation of a liquid truffle over and over again. It is almost impossible to imagine that I would not only drink a whole pint of this stuff, but consider going in for a second. But there it was.

This is the beer I imagined when I read about it all those years ago.

________________
"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.

A Drive Down the Coast

The view from The Horn in Depoe Bay

The Oregon Coast is slowly filling out its compliment of breweries. In the near future, it should be possible to drive Highway 101 from Astoria all the way to Brookings and get a beer from a brewery in every town along the way. I have driven a chunk of that coast this winter (by far the best time to visit the Oregon Coast) and visited three new or newish breweries. Below are my findings.

Public Coast Brewing, Cannon Beach
Twenty-six miles south of Astoria, you come into Cannon Beach, and one of the first structures you pass is Public Coast, a brewery named for Oregon's law that prohibits private ownership of beaches. It's in a building once occupied by the Lumberyard restaurant, and it follows that place's general vibe and approach, which is to say, upscale mainstream. It's a beautiful space, keyed by the presence of the fermenters and bright tanks that seem to peer in from the brewery. Their height lends an air of grandeur to things.

Public Coast is owned by Ryan Snyder, whose background is in resorts. That's the feel you get here. There's a ton of wood, and the pub goes from cozy and shadowy on one side to bright and sunny on the other, spilling out into a large patio scattered with tables. It is nevertheless a bit faceless, and TVs flicker with sports. The menu is similar, featuring basically burgers and fish and chips. They are muy expensive--I got the most stripped-down cheeseburger with fries and it set me back $15; they can range up to $18 sans fries. They're also fairly average. (The five dollar onion rings are well below average--avoid.) It's not bad food, but nothing to make a special trip for.

The beer, made by erstwhile chef and homebrewer Will Leroux, is more promising. He's got a traditional slate of hoppy beers, but dabbles with experimental projects like a peach wit (perhaps his best beer) and a sour blackberry stout. I presume it's kettle-soured, and it's tart; fruity notes help soften the electric current, and soft roastiness helps offset it. I ordered a pint and quite enjoyed it. For my hoppy selection, I chose a Simcoe-hopped pale ale that had a fair amount of diacetyl, but never mind. These are above-average beers, and a good reason to stop in.

Depoe Bay or ocean view; your choice.

The Horn Public House, Depoe Bay

A horn, spouting.

A hundred and twenty miles south of Astoria you come to Depoe Bay, a rocky crescent that captures the sea in a roiling cauldron of energy. As it has smashed into the lava rock over the millennia, the sea water has carved out channels and tunnels. Sometimes a wave enters one and sends surf skyward through vents in the rock--"spouting horns" in the local vernacular. Since 1951, one of the most popular hangouts in Depoe Bay had been a restaurant called The Spouting Horn. When long-time proprietor Betty Taunton decided to retire in 2014, no one was prepared to take it over, and it closed. In homage, the new brewpub in town, located in the same building, calls itself The Horn.

Vignette #12: Michael Schnitzler (Uerige)

Brewer vignettes feature quotes from brewers I picked up in my travels around the world.

Two unrelated quotes today from Michael Schnitzler, the Weihenstephan-trained owner of Hausbrauerei Uerige. To go with them, I'll show you two photos, one of Michael, and one of the brewery. It contains, as you will see, one of the more unusual anachronisms still in use in Germany.

On Altbier's Health
“In general, the altbier is in bad condition. The smaller breweries are successful, that is not a problem, but if you remove the big breweries that were far more original Düsseldorfer breweries—now Frankenheim for example is with Warsteiner, Diebels is with Anheuser-Busch, Schlösser is somewhere, nobody knows really, then altbier is [not doing well].”

“The former biggest Düsseldorf breweries, they started twenty or thirty years ago to quit brewing in the town. [Real estate] prices are so high that everyone says, come on, it’s not [worth it] to sell beer. Let’s put it out to rent. The same with Munich—it’s even worse than Düsseldorf.  So the breweries were sold to Warsteiner—Frankenheim—to Anheuser Busch; so where is the echte Düsseldorfer brauerei, the real Düsseldorf brewery? That’s the problem everywhere.“

Wooden Casks
(It is typical to find altbier served from wooden casks perched on the bar; I asked about this.)

“It is just the traditional style of presenting the beers in a nice way. We tap it manually and then we put the barrel on the bar; this is the special way we do it, but there is no fermentation; there is nothing for the taste.”  (They're lined.) He went on to tell the story of why all the casks only have red-painted metal bands when once they came in all different colors. “Now every barrel has a red ring [metal band]. A couple of years ago we had a green one, a yellow one, something like that.  Nobody knows why. The regular customers they saw the barrels with the green ring on it and said, “oh no, we cannot drink this one; the red [ones] have the best beer.”

The coolship at Uerige. They also use a baudelot chiller.

In Defense of Clarity

I like bright beer and I cannot lie...

What humans prize is inversely proportional to what is common. Is this a need to desire what others don't have? Do we have a gene that tells us the rare is useful to survival? Whatever the reason, it's an iron law, and one we follow, in the manner of self-parody, back and forth across the decades.

Take for example the industrial age. Machines allowed us to make objects of perfect lines and proportions--by the millions. Where once we made crude cut-shank nails and left saw marks on our wood, now we make perfectly straight and measured boards and hold them together with machine-made nails that will last centuries. At first, these innovations were greeted with greed: dispensing with the evidence of the human hand was a way of transcending our own imperfection. Eventually, of course, mass-production reduced costs and made these products ubiquitous. Soon our ardor cooled. These once-perfect objects began to seem cheap and disposable. When the artisanal movement emerged as a reaction against the impersonal factory age, products again revealed the makers' hand--and made customers' eyes gleam with desire. Where once we saw imperfection, now we see character and personality.

Which brings us to brewing. The very idea of "craft beer" is a reaction against mass-produced factory stuff. There's a lot of romance involved with this (almost entirely false) dichotomy between craft and industrial, but it is powerful. The more a beer can be tied to images of barns, a sea of swaying barley stalks, and a brewer deep in a mash tun with a canoe oar, the more we can attach that romance to it. In the glass, however, a beer is a beer is a beer. Some may be good, some bad, but it's impossible to look at a glass of beer and know the size of brewery it came from.

I'm pretty sure this is where the current fetish for cloudy, hazy, milkshakey beer comes from. It's a visual cue that says: I am craft. A perfectly brilliant beer not only looks like something that comes from a factory, it is in many ways the product of decades of technical improvement. Most of what causes haze is not desirable in beer, but a lot of it was unavoidable or at least hard to remove in centuries past. Lager-brewing was prized in part because the process produced a bright beer that stood as testament to the brewer's skill. Any beer that was perfectly bright would be likely be free of infection and age. In a real way drinkers could see the quality.

Over time, though, that clarity became associated with lackluster flavor. People began to imagine that the brewer was intentionally trying to filter out anything tasty. To people drinking modern ales, a bit of haze represented the flavor a brewer left in the beer. And, if a bit of haze suggests more flavor, a beer perfectly opaque with chunks must have the most flavor, you feel me?

Patrick, overcome with lust.

This post, now already five hundred words long, is not actually about taking sides. I don't dispute that there's something strangely attractive about the most cloudy beers--they're like an orange milkshake topped by a scoop of vanilla ice cream. (It's no wonder Bavarian weissbiers have been rolling along for four hundred years.) Rather, I'd just like to put in a plug for clarion, haze-free beers.

As a matter of aesthetics, the perfect beer is somewhere between gold and ruby, luminously vitreous, and stippled by a cascade of pinpoint bubbles. I also like darker beers that appear opaque until you hold them to the light and see that brilliance within, like light refracting through a jewel. It's a secret the brewer's hidden for the careful drinker to discover. Anyone who's brewed so much as a batch of homebrew knows that clarity is hard, and so the mind naturally wants to see it as a symbol for good process. I don't mean to praise clarity through that lens, though. A bright, coruscating beer is a gorgeous thing on its own. People who know nothing about beer can stop to appreciate its beauty. Remove beer entirely from all context--if it's bright and limpid, it's as gorgeous as a mountain lake, something anyone with eyes can appreciate.

Incidentally, that beer at the top of the post is a pilsner brewed by Grain Station out in McMinnville. I took that picture at the end of the year and have been meaning to get around to writing this post. It was such a gorgeous beer, so elegant and lovely, and it's stuck in my mind for six weeks now. (It was also very well made and tasty--sort of a hybrid Czech and German pils.) I guess my message here is not to be too blinded by lust for cloudy IPAs that you cannot stop to admire the captivating beauty of a perfectly clear beer.

Remember to Shoot Video, Breweries

(l-r) Angel Marquez, Ray Widmer, and Kurt Widmer

Over the past month, I have been interviewing people for my current project about the Widmer brothers. Their story arc spans thirty-odd years, but a good chunk of that has happened at the current facility (in different forms) on North Russell Street. As a consequence, a lot of the attention has been paid to the years just before and after the brewery was founded, in an era now preserved chiefly by memory.

One person who has emerged as a critical figure in the story is Ray Widmer, Rob and Kurt's father. He had just retired when they started the brewery, and it was really a three-man show in the early days. Rob joked that they couldn't have hired anyone because they were working so many hours that after the first day they wouldn't have come back. Of course, fathers stick with you.

The first brewery was, as they all were, a cobbled-together system of dairy equipment and castoffs from other breweries. It was not purpose-built, and so everything had to be coaxed to work properly. Ray was the genius of improvisation. He had grown up on a farm and was used to jury-rigging solutions as they arose. There are many tales of his applied ingenuity, but one I kept hearing about over and over was a keg-filling system he'd created. It was inevitably described as both effective but also as something that looked sort of crazy in a Rube-Goldberg kind of fashion. It has served in many tellings as the symbol of what Ray did for the brewery in those first years.

Ray at the keg-filler he designed.

To my delight, I have been able to see footage of video shot at the time. The whole operation is revealed--the filler, the way the swing-arm worked, the process of bunging after the keg was filled. Even better: there's Ray manning the machine. It's 30-year-old footage, and so was shot on blurry video--but you nevertheless feel like you're in the room with them.

There's an hour of raw footage from shoots over the course of the first decade or so of the brewery. It's remarkable to see the brothers as young men. As the brewery has grown, Rob and Kurt have begun collecting a gravitas that came from success; in these earlier videos you get a flavor for the more casual, humorous time they had as DIY brewers when it wasn't clear they were going to be around in a month, let alone thirty years. Listening to people reflect on those times, you can intuit some of this; on video you can see it plain as day. They are absolutely priceless.

Let that be a lesson to anyone who has a brewery today. Film it. Pull out your phone and record the routine activities that seem so unremarkable now. People tend to want to stage things or stand in front of the camera describing them. Better to get out of the way and just let the camera eavesdrop on a day in the life. Do it every few years. One day, when you're older and want to remember back, you'll find those scenes to be the most striking and revealing. You may even find people on the screen who are no longer with you. It's a wonderful way to capture a moment in time, and believe this old man--eventually they do pass, and memories grow scarcer. (And of course, transfer it to computers, hard drives, thumb drives--many places. Decades have a way of winnowing material.)

Careful When You Drag Beer Into Politics

Last week, I noted that AB InBev's Super Bowl ad contained a certain political valence. I wasn't the only one to notice. After the ad aired, it sparked an online effort to #BoycottBudweiser, along with all the usual overheated rhetoric you get with modern politics. (Amusingly, half the people protesting the ad spelled the brewery's name wrong; they probably should have just gone with "BoycottBud.")

The ad was the highest-profile of a raft of similar ads that either implicitly or explicitly promoted immigrants and/or multiculturalism. (A constant feature in advertising for decades, this only looked political because Trump was elected on an anti-immigrant platform.) All of which is perfectly predictable.

A more interesting wrinkle in the story comes via the Weekly Standard, a longtime organ of the neocon right. Today Charlotte Allen writes her own take on the ad, and it's a fascinating inversion of the populism typical of the right. She quotes from a listicle detailing the worst-rated beers on BeerAdvocate and RateBeer, which is studded with ABI products.

How about Busch Light? Oh, and also Bud Light. And Busch Beer. And Bud Ice (not to be confused with Natural Ice). And Budweiser Chelada (how many of those undrinkable products are there?). All at the top of the ghastly list. Even plain old Budweiser, which isn't too awful if you're stuck somewhere with a limited dive-bar menu, doesn't rank very high.

So I ask: Are these really the kind of immigrants we want to let into our country?

Neener, neener, ABI is liberal and it's tres déclassé, darling. But this is all counter-message. Trump's followers are proud of their working-class identity, and that fits in perfectly with Bud's range of products. It's craft beer, like everything scented of hipsterism, that should be suspect. Beer is a potent and emotional product, but if you don't understand its symbolism, best to keep the politics out of things. Yet another example of how politics has crossed into the beer world, however ineptly.

(To further confound things, let's note that Obama was a beer drinker, though mostly a mass-market lager man, and Trump is a teetotaler. Meanwhile, over a third of the members of the Senate and House are in the small brewers caucus. The lines are so confusing!)

Four Interesting Items

Any one of these could be a full, hearty entree, but I think they'll do even better as small plates. See what you think.

My Sponsor Comes to America

For the past year, I've been delighted to welcome Guinness as a sponsor on this blog--this week we learned we could welcome them back to the US as well:

Diageo today announced its intention to build a US version of Dublin’s popular Guinness Open Gate Brewery in Baltimore County, Maryland. As currently planned, the company would build a mid-sized Guinness brewery and a Guinness visitor experience with an innovation microbrewery at the company’s existing Relay, Maryland site. This new brewing capability and consumer experience, combined with a packaging and warehousing operation, would bring the company’s investment in Relay to approximately $50 million. The new brewery would be a home for new Guinness beers created for the US market, while the iconic Guinness Stouts will continue to be brewed at St. James’s Gate in Dublin, Ireland. 

This is not the first time Guinness has come to America, but the previous experiment ended after just six years. The current effort looks like a more ambitious and risky project. Diageo has been trying to figure out for years how to use the Guinness brand as an entry point into the craft market, with notably mixed success. The challenge for any giant brewery with such a strong brand presence is figuring out 1) how to expand without weakening the core product's position, while 2) convincingly appealing to customers in an entirely new segment. Most of the big breweries have concluded it can't be done, so they've followed AB InBev's strategy of just buying breweries in the craft segment. Can Diageo convince people that Guinness means both Irish stout and fullsome, tasty craft beer? Big gamble.

October Debuts
Speaking of arrivals, we have a new entry into the pretty-darn-crowded world of beer chatter.

Today, Pitchfork is proud to announce the launch of October, a digital publication focused on beer with an editorial perspective that speaks to a new generation of beer drinkers. A destination for devotees and novices alike to read about, learn about, and share their appreciation for beer and celebrate the culture around it. The site is being launched in partnership with ZX Ventures, AB InBev’s incubator and venture capital fund that focuses on increasing awareness and excitement around beer and brewing culture.

The tie to ABI caused some sniping on social media, but the project is incredibly transparent. Read a little further and you learn that October is "overseen by Pitchfork’s creative studio and in collaboration with Michael Kiser of Good Beer Hunting, Eno Sarris of BeerGraphs." So far I don't see much that distinguishes the content from any other beer magazine. Kiser even has a think-piece up about where the Budweiser brand sits in the modern beer landscape, a perfect example of the way he brings insight and value to the conversation--while at the same time leaving that question of relationships with funders wide open. Still, the one knock I have on October so far is that it doesn't really seem to have a clear raison d’être that distinguishes it from, say Draft or All About Beer. Indeed, Good Beer Hunting seems to have carved out a clearer viewpoint.

New Branding
Two Oregon breweries sent me emails announcing new branding today, and they are both market improvements. I pass them along as an example of the way breweries are responding to a tightening market. In a world of jillions of brands, you can't have stale or bad packaging around. Rogue, which updates its flagship, had the former and Cascade the latter. Here's Dead Guy:

And the new Cascade.

Yeast and the New England IPA
Finally, because I'm a completist, I want to direct you to the latest Beervana Podcast, and not just out of pure self-interest. Over the past year, we have discussed on these pages and elsewhere the nature of the New England IPA. Yesterday, Patrick and I paid a visit to the Imperial Yeast labs and did a pod with the three principals there. During the course of our interview, Owen Lingley discussed this beer style (they're getting a lot of questions about it from customers) and issued a rather bold, declarative position on the style as involves yeast. You will want to listen to hear his views--and learn all about yeast, which is a subject many of us wish we knew more about.




Happy weekend, you all--

AB InBev Targets Trump?

AB InBev's latest entry in their "hard way" commercial series is ... interesting.


Leave aside the lame myth-making and execrable history. As a story, it's trite and embarrassing. But the text is not the point here--the subtext is. As this immigrant struggles to make his American dream come true, he confronts hostile nativists who tell him "You're not wanted here," and "Go back home." He rides the river with a black man (this is roughly the time of the Civil War). His journey ends as he founds a brewery that will one day sell the world's best-selling beer, the classic American success story--immigrants bringing their skills and talents to our country to make it a richer, more varied, and vibrant place.

Completely coincidental timing, you know.

A marketing executive at Budweiser said the ad is "super relevant today," but he also cautioned that the commercial is not meant to be taken as commentary on the current political climate in the United States.

Of course it's not.

I would love to argue that ABI is a company committed to social justice, but there's a more likely motive here. Anheuser-Busch InBev is a multinational company (its awkward name points to the three heads that still guide things from New York, Belgium, and Brazil) for whom nationalism is bad for business. Tariffs are bad for business. Blocking the free movement of employees across national borders is bad for business. Working up an ad that exalts the history of European migration to the US is a way to both criticize current protectionist policies as well as sending a gauzy, pro-immigrant message to which most Americans will respond well to. It's a warning shot and a bit of Americana served up in a frosty mug.

Still, it's yet another example of the way in which politics have become so dominant that they increasingly define everything--including a simple glass of beer. Whether the politics are naked and raw or submerged and subtle, politics saturate our consciousness. In any other era, this would be a stupid bit of nostalgia bound together by marketing gloss and revisionist history; today it's a sharp (but deniable) critique of a 12-day-old presidency. I am fascinated to see what the reaction will be. Your thoughts?

A Contest of Her Own

This is very cool:

SheBrew Homebrew Competition
This competition is AHA sanctioned and open to any amateur female homebrewer age 21 or older. It is open to all non-commercial, home brewed beers produced by persons of female identity. 

Deadline: February 17th (Shipping) or 18th (Dropoff).  Register here.

Women have steadily become more welcome in the brewing world, but as a hobby, it's hard to find a culture that was once more masculine. I remember attending a homebrew meeting in the mid-90s and feeling incredibly intimidated. It was entirely male, and there was a latent vibe of competition in every discussion, whether about recipes, equipment, or actual competitions. Fortunately that has been changing. The competition is organized by the Oregon Brew Crew, which has made great strides to welcoming women in recent years. This is another excellent way to open the hobby up to a broad audience.

The turnaround is pretty tight, so if you don't have a beer ready, you're going to have to brew it up right quick. Good luck--

American Palates: 82% IPA

Post slightly edited for clarity. 

This past weekend I had the chance to zip down to snowy Bend, and I seized it. On a chill Saturday following a festive brewers dinner, I strolled down a frosted Deschutes River, and thereafter retired to cozy pubs for warming pints. At Worthy, I discovered the beer list you see to the right (click to enlarge). If you scan through it, you'll notice a curious thing: nine of the twelve beers pouring were some version of hoppy American ale. I actually started with a slightly out-of-date menu with eleven items--and nine hoppy ales.


A little later we stopped in at Crux Fermentation Project, a brewery pretty famous for featuring lagers and saisons as well as supporting a robust barrel-aging program. They had 19 regular beer taps pouring (the 20th was devoted to cider)--and indeed, they had three lagers and a saison. But they were also pouring eleven hoppy ales (along with a fresh hop ale, which mystified me). Worthy, born four years ago during the IPA era, has always been plainly focused on hops. Even so, a balance of three-quarters (or more!) hoppy ale to one-quarter (or less!) of everything else is pretty shocking. Crux's list was even more surprising since the brewery is not known as an IPA house, but I think it may have been skewed by the hops conference that was recently in Bend.

The point of all this? Hoppy ales have taken over American brewing, and we're never going back. It's true that the large majority of beer sold in the US is pale lager and that will remain the case for some time. But of the beer that is not pale lager--call it "craft" if you like--the growing majority is IPA. I know this depresses those of us who don't like IPA or like something else too (of the five glasses [not all were pints] Sally and I drank, one was an IPA, a typical percentage), but the era of huge diversity is waning. People want IPAs, and they will continue to hog the handles at your local.

Get used to it. Americans are finding their palates, which is a sign of maturity. This is not a new point here at the blog, but it's becoming more pointed. When a country develops its own beer culture, diversity declines. This is why Belgian and British ales don't taste the same, nor Czech and German lagers. Americans have found their groove, and it is lined with the residue of sticky yellow lupulin.

Politics and Beer in the Age of Trump

I started this blog during an interesting moment in American history. George W. Bush had just finished the fifth year of his presidency. The Iraq war had settled into a slow-rolling quagmire, and Bush had just lost a high-profile battle to privatize Social Security. His poll numbers dipped below 40% and kept falling through the remainder of his presidency. Conservatives weren't happy because their president was flailing; liberals weren't happy because he was still the president. A couple years earlier, I had helped co-found a politics blog that was attempting to overturn GOP dominance in Oregon. It was a grim time for all, a moment of political trench warfare. This blog was actually born as an antidote to politics, a place to write about something uncontroversial and fun.

Adolf Hitler's painting of the Hofbrauhaus
in Munich

Partisan, elective politics is necessarily adversarial; it's a zero sum game of winners and losers. Beer, by contrast has always, or at least as far back as we can see, been a beverage that created community. It brings people together in a social space and its lightly alcoholic nature raises their moods and puts them in a convivial space where they enjoy it together. From the very start I tried to keep this blog out of the realm of politics--for my own mental health--and have been noting for over a decade that "politics divide, beer unites."

In an ideal world, these two realms work symbiotically. We spend the day in our halls of politics fighting about the issues, but retire in the evenings to a pub for a pint together. We know that political choices are usually binary (we cut tax or don't, we enact health care or don't), but that they exist in a larger context of healthy community. We disagree, we fight, but we're family. The context of the battles is our ultimate unity--nation before party. And beer is one of the tools we have of affirming that unity. In a good pub, we're all on team beer.

The world, unfortunately, is not always ideal. There are moments when politics becomes the context for everything else, when it is our divisions and not our commitment to unity that define us.* This is especially true of wartime--the history of beer is punctuated by enormous changes that resulted from bombs, invaders, or resulting famine. But it is also the context of moments before war. Revolution-minded colonists met in New England pubs to conspire against a distant king. Hitler rallied support to a nascent political party in Munich beer halls.

During times of instability, everything becomes a matter of politics. That zero-sum nature of politics can consume countries. When two or more factions agree that their issues are more important than unity, nothing remains free of the division. We may wish pubs were still neutral spaces where we could transcend our grievances, but the best we can hope for is a crowd of fellow-travelers.

Something remarkable and dark is happening in the US right now. We are at an inflection point in politics where that context is in question. For over fifteen decades, we have been secure in our sense that unity outweighs political difference. Things like beer and pubs (and pop culture, religion, business) were safe refuges. But whether you support newly-elected President Trump or oppose him, there's a feeling now that maybe things have flipped. Maybe our political differences will define everything else. Maybe something as benign as beer can no longer be uncontroversial. Maybe our breweries, pubs, and blogs can no longer pretend to be neutral--in 2017 we're either pro- or anti-Trump.

I think we don't know yet. We don't know whether the President will challenge the norms and laws that protect our democracy. And, if he does, we don't know whether our system is strong and stable enough to prevent him from violating them. The last time a president violated the law (Nixon), the ultimate result--it took a few years--was a greater sense of unity and a renewed commitment to the institution of government. The mere presence of a transgressive figure like Trump is not enough to undermine our sense of unity as a nation.

I don't know where we're headed. I really don't want to sacrifice the world of beer and the physical spaces of pubs as refuges of camaraderie and community. But we have entered a moment when it seems like everything has political valence. It is certainly conceivable that we'll have to take sides as beery folk. I'd love this to be my last post on politics on this site for the next four years--and still hope it will be. We'll see.

Interesting times, beer fans. I hope we look back and laugh at how much we were overreacting at the start of the Trump presidency. Be well--

______________________
* "Politics" is a vague and broad term and can mean something as anodyne as holding an opinion on public policy. It is often used to point to social justice--"the personal is political." I use the term to mean the actual activity of electing officials and enacting law. I think it's important to recognize that while a vaguely general political view may not be adversarial, a partisan political view is. By definition and design. Americans often shy away from this truth, thinking that there's some way to adjudicate public policy without a fight. There isn't and never has been. The question is whether that fight exists in the context of a larger commitment to unity or democracy or government, or becomes the context itself. In the latter case, the resolution leads to (sometimes civil) war.

Vignette #11: Dan Carey (New Glarus)

Brewer vignettes feature quotes from brewers I picked up in my travels around the world.

A bit of background on the quotes that follow. I interviewed Dan in 2013 and was curious about why the early lagers they brewed when I lived there--the early focus of the brewery--fell into the background. In The Beer Bible, I highlight Staghorn as one of the best examples made in the US, and I wondered why it and other lagers weren't featured more. (I have hope that the "craft lager" trend will help New Glarus find a new generation of drinkers for these beers.)

“When we came [to Wisconsin] and we made lager beers, the general idea for craft beer was lager beer because that’s what Capital and Sprecher made. What we found was, when you go to Milwaukee and you try to sell your pilsner and you say, ‘hey, try our beer; we make a pilsner.’ And basically the fifty-year-old guy would say, ‘Uh-huh, sure. I’ll have a Spaten.’  He wants to drink a German beer, and I’m not going to change these guys’ minds.”

“And then the other thing that happened: Miller came out with an advertizing campaign. They said: ‘Miller Lite, it’s a fine pilsner.’ So then, if you went into a tavern or a store and said you had a really nice pilsner, they’d say ‘Uh-huh, we already got one. We got Miller Lite.’ And the world started to change as the effect of the west coast and east coast craft breweries moved in. People started to expect craft ales.”

“People might criticize us for one thing or another as if we are in control--and we’re not.  We brewed over 100 different beers and they would all go out into the marketplace. Some would meet with more success than others. It’s survival of the fittest. The ones that meet with success we brew again. As long as people keep buying them, we keep making them, and if people stop buying them, we stop making them. Our customers prefer ales. They expect a craft brewery to make ales with Cascade hops, pale ales, etc etc.  Lagers are a harder sell because the old farts if they want to drink a lager, they drink Spaten.”

Source: Brewpublic

Bitter Old-School IPAs

If you'll indulge me, I'd like to harvest one more experience from the weekend's OBA judging. It was in the category "classic UK and American styles," a catch-all for styles that are so niche in the US there's no reason to devote to them an entire category: milds and bitters, browns (UK and US), US wheat and amber, English summer ales, cream ales, steam beer, etc.

One of the beers was an old-school American IPA. It was nearly brown, thick as honey and sweet with caramel, and so bitter we might as well have been taking a cheese grater to our tongues. Our mouths were still stinging the next round--and I mean this literally. Amazingly, these kinds of beers did once exist. Brewers sometimes added aroma hops, but the attention was squarely focused on causing as much violence to the drinker as possible. Even more amazing: we liked them. Well, some of us at least.

At our judging table, this beer sparked a philosophical reverie: was this actually a classic style? Or was it, rather, an awkward phase along the way to becoming an actual style--the pimply 15-year-old version of a grown-up, fully-developed American IPA? Was it, in other words, an old style fallen from favor, or embarrassing juvenilia?

Much evidence supports the latter, very little the former. Aesthetically, old-school IPAs are a train wreck. It's hard to know what every made us think this was a good idea: "I know, I'll make a tincture of hop so deadly the human mouth won't be able to absorb it, but I'll balance it by using 50% caramel malt so that it's as heavy as glue and sweet enough to rot teeth. That beer will totally rule." It's a strange scenario, I'll grant, but humans have lost their minds in the past and thought leisure suits, tuna casseroles, and brutalist architecture were cool, too.

Certain styles of beer look pretty weird on the merits of aesthetics, though. So perhaps someone could defend these IPAs through some kind of offbeat rationale. But then there's the matter of their disappearance: if they were loved by someone, shouldn't they have hung on, at least to the extent, say, amber ales have? I've never loved ambers, but they possess a certain logic. You can see how someone might like them--and indeed when I mentioned a brewery recently that was making an amber, many people on social media gave it the thumbs up. But truly violent 1997 IPAs--those things are the dinosaurs of craft beer. We know them only through the archaeological record.

Some styles manage to emerge and live a fitful but ultimately fleeting existence, passing without much fanfare. I love reading about them when Ron presents an obscure old text with mention of the extinct relics. But if we mourn them with the tinge of nostalgia, we don't go far as to actually want to drink them. An IPA with a decent punch in the nose--yes, we still like those. But not actual vintage IPAs; they just seem primitive to modern palates. No one today would make these beers without tweaking them (more hop flavor and aroma, less bitterness, way less caramel malt). An evocation of the past, maybe. Beyond that, let that adolescent, with his zits and braces and Twisted Sister posters, remain entirely in the past..

What Brewers Notice

8am--let's go judge some beer!

Judging for the Oregon Beer Awards unfolded over two long days this past weekend in an event space above the Widmer Brothers' pub. It is quickly becoming one of the more serious judging events I'm aware of: over 900 beers entered from 114 Oregon breweries, with organizers pushing and cajoling to make sure big and prestigious players contributed.  It's sponsored by Willamette Week, one of our alt-weeklies, but headed by Breakside brewer Ben Edmunds. What I particularly like about the event is the way the organizers have reconsidered beer categories. Beers were judged in just 22 categories--radically condensed when compared with the 96 the GABF use--159 (!) if you include sub-categories.

The other impressive aspect is the judges, the substantial majority of whom are brewers. Although Willamette Week wants to make this a revenue-generating awards event each year, the design of the competition is aimed squarely at brewers. Each beer receives notes from the judges for each flight it appears in (preliminaries, second, and medal rounds). The judging sessions are audio-recorded, and the recordings are made available to participating breweries. Feedback is not an afterthought--it's the central objective.

During judging, four people were grouped together for three flights in the am and pm on both Saturday and Sunday. This streamlined the process but also allowed the judges to develop a bit of rapport. I skipped the Sunday afternoon session so I could see that debacle of a Packer game, so I judged with three teams. Of the eight other members across all three groups (we had one no-show), seven were brewers. This may have been slightly skewed toward brewers, but indicates how heavily represented they were in the judging.

As an object of study, beer is large and contains multitudes. Homebrewers, writers, historians, beer geeks, chefs, regular drinkers--we all view it through a particular lens or filter. When you judge beer, that filter is laid bare--the things we notice reveal the way we experience beer. I love judging with brewers because they spend time with beer in a different way than the rest of us. They make it week after week, year after year, becoming incredibly sensitized to the specific chemical compounds present in their beer. Make a beer a hundred times and you really get to know it.

Because one of my own filters is to notice what other people are doing, I couldn't help but pay attention to the particular way they talked and thought about beer. Collectively, there were three habits of mind that were broadly shared and which seemed revealing. I'm going to pass them along because it's worth remembering that the people who make the beer may not think about it the way you do. Does that matter? Does it change anything? Perhaps, perhaps not, but knowing it may very slightly tint that lens you use to experience beer.

1. Process-focused
The flavor compounds present in beer come from a blend of ingredient and process. Beer drinkers tend to focus mostly on the ingredients: which malts, hops, yeast were used. Brewers, on the other hand, are incredibly sensitive to chemical compounds--acetaldehyde, diacetyl, DMS, isovaleric acid, autolysis, oxidation--that are clues to poor process or quality control.

The example that jumped out at me was oxidation. This is the constant, unconquerable foe of the brewer, one that will eventually destroy everything they do. From a sensory perspective, "oxidized" describes an objectionable quality of staleness that may either just dull the beer or taste like paper or wet cardboard. But to a brewer, it's a continuum; a beer at one month--well within the "fresh" zone of a beer's life--is more stale than a week-old beer. It's not stale, but it's observably less fresh. Because brewers are always in a battle to put their beer in front of consumers before that objectionable threshold arrives, they are highly attuned to this evolution.

I judged nine flights and probably close to a hundred beers. In that time there were two beers I would have flagged as dull and stale--not even papery yet, just a bit past their prime. But brewers flagged probably 25 beers for having some quality of oxidation. It happened so often that I started to ask them to describe it so I could locate what they were identifying. Eventually I started to. (It's worth noting that in most cases this was a diagnostic comment, not a critical one--see my second point below).

Brewer-judges plucked these chemical notes out forensically, looking for the fingerprints of brewers who'd made the beer. This of course makes perfect sense; it's what they themselves do in their own breweries. Most of those compounds occur naturally in the brewing process and can be eliminated through certain processes. If you make a beer with acetaldehyde or diacetyl, there's a remedy. Brewers are hawks for these flavors because it's their job to make sure they do or don't appear in the beers they make. Regular drinkers are aware of them at a gross level, but only as they impact the flavor composition of the beer. Brewers perceive them at far lower thresholds.

2. Objective over subjective
One of my favorite moments was when a brewer was describing a beer and said (paraphrasing), "The hops taste like dirt. I don't mean that as a criticism." We all laughed, but knew what he meant. There's an unvarnished way brewers use to discuss beer. If they can identify a chemical compound precisely, they use that over a general description. They would use isoamyl acetate rather than banana if that's the compound they tasted, DMS over corn. The reason is because "corn" is more general and may arise from some other source than DMS. (Corn, for example.) "Banana" probably refers to isoamyl acetate, but not always.

But they're also far less likely to use flowery language or language that carries the valence of judgment. A writer trying to communicate that "dirt" note to his reader my render it as "forest floor," which has a far more positive cast. It's also less precise. When you start breaking flavor down into its smallest parts, you encounter things that, were they the dominant note, would be objectionable. No one wants dirt beer. But when it comprises just 1% of the flavor, something like dirt can be a valuable, positive addition. And in this case, it was dirt--a flat, inorganic note that didn't have the complexity of "forest floor" or even "soil."

In the judging process, people--even brewers--will notice only some of all the available flavors, but collectively begin to construct a fairly complete description of the beer. If they were worried about censoring flavors that might be interpreted negatively or gussying them up so they seemed more palatable, that picture would be incomplete or inaccurate. This, again, is a big part of a brewer's life: they get to know their beers incredibly well, and understanding that there's a dirt note in them is far more valuable than pretending it doesn't exist.They know that it may improve a beer, too.

3. Quiet over loud
This last one is not so much a discovery as a confirmation. Brewers tend to gravitate toward subtle, well-composed beers and away from booming, shouty beers. I will not speculate too much about why this is--and nothing in the judging gave me an obvious answer. Perhaps brewers themselves will offer a reason (or a rejection of the thesis). Nevertheless it was true that in category after category, this slight preference revealed itself. I would guess that it's actually harder for the very aggressive beers in a category, no matter how well made, to win the top award than one that's more subdued and balanced.

This is, of course, precisely the opposite of the way beers are rewarded in the marketplace of mass judgment (BeerAdvocate, Untappd and the like). There, subtle beers have a very hard time breaking through. Within categories, it is the most vivid examples that rates highest. "Quieter" examples, no matter how expertly conceived and executed, just don't score as well. (All brewers know this, and sigh in resignation at the fact.)

This results in an interesting paradox: beer geeks often revere favorite brewers, but those brewers' preferences would likely not be the kinds of beers the geeks love. That paradox is one of the reasons I love this competition. Beer geeks may be surprised and even disappointed by some of the results--they were last year--but the fact that such an impressive group of judges participated should at least make them reconsider these beers.

It was a real pleasure to join these fine brewers in judging, and I look forward to seeing the results. If you're interested in attending the awards ceremony on February 28th, you can buy tickets here.

Blog, Pod, and Video

Patrick and I were invited to discuss beer on a local TV station on Monday--in part because of our illustrious Beervana Podcast. Which, serendipitously, I can mention we'll be recording tomorrow in Corvallis. I expect it to be a delight; we'll be speaking with Tom Shellhammer, one of the leading hops researchers in the world. He's going to enlighten us about the way hops affect the flavor and aroma of beer. 

And since I'm doing a bit of housecleaning, let me also mention that this weekend eighty odd brewers and beery people will be judging the second annual Oregon Beer Awards. If the inaugural year was promising, this year's OBA is downright impressive: over 900 entries from 109 breweries in 34 cities. I've written about these awards before, in large part because the categories follow neither the philosophy nor structure of the GABF. They're trying to rethink how we should judge beer, and so far I'm very much in favor of the direction. More on that later.

 

All right, here's the video. (I have a sense that the one below is not going to be especially high quality, but Blogger's not letting me embed it properly. If you want to see a better version, you can find it here.)

How to Do Social Media

This is the life cycle of technology: 1) this is amazing!; 2) man, this really makes my life easier; 3) I can't remember a time before this tech; 4) it's something I have to do; 5) this is nothing but a burden but I can't quit now. Social media was sill somewhere around a 2 before Donald Trump discovered Twitter, and now it's a 4.3. And because my streams are dominated by breweries and cideries, I see a ton of what now largely amount to ads on social media.

But amid that torrent a few companies stand out. My very favorite is Rack and Cloth, a tiny little farm-cidery in Mosier, just east of Hood River. It is a two-person operation, and I'm pretty sure Kristina Nance mans the Instagram account (Silas Bleakley, Kristina's other half, is the principal cider-maker). I wrote about Rack and Cloth here if you want the backstory (it's a good one).

Social media is informal and gives companies the opportunity to do a few things they can't do in other mediums. They can speak with the voice of a human. They can exhibit individual, idiosyncratic personalities. They can connect directly and intimately with followers and build more meaningful connections. They can tell little pieces of their stories in that informal way friends do--which when done well is enormously compelling. Finally, they can communicate important information in an engaging way.

It's not easy, though. As someone who half-asses his own social media about half the time, I know how easy it is to miss the opportunity to really communicate. As a public service announcement, I'd like to direct your attention to Rack and Cloth's work, which is among the best I've seen (click to enlarge them).

The cidery's mascot is a sheep called Pomme Pomme, and it's a real creature. (Dunno if this is her.) This message reminds us that Rack and Cloth is a working farm and connects us to the real, sometimes snowy, activity that happens there.

The little retail outlet in Mosier is a charming building where you can find a pint of house cider and a meal made with farm-grown ingredients. Hanging giant Christmas lights and calling them out with caps is the kind of whimsy you feel when you visit. Everything about this is spot on for the vibe of the place.

Cider-making is mostly not a dynamic process, but there's always a vessel to clean! Kristina's use of the first person creates that intimate connection one loves to see. (And which is really hard to pull off with authenticity.)

This last one was the inspiration for the post; it does everything right--and is delightful writing to boot. Let's go down the list: speaks with the voice of a real human--check. Exhibits a idiosyncratic personality--check (times two, with the #killermike hashtag). Tells a piece of the company's story--check. And communicates important information--check. Telling people "we're closed" is a great opportunity to irritate them. This turns that bad news into something charming and kind.

If there's a lesson here for breweries/cideries who want to maximize their social media's impact, it's finding someone who really knows and loves the company. If you cycle through people who just post basic info, impersonally, like an ad, you're going to reap the meager rewards of such an approach. I suppose it's better than nothing, but look at how much more you can accomplish with the right message and messenger.