Scottish Ale FestIn my haste to post news of coming events, I forgot one of the most important--Cascade Brewing's inaugural Scottish Ale Fest this weekend. (They're calling it the "first annual," but I think you have to have a second one before it's "annual.") Reason enough to go is the opportunity to see Ron Gansberg's band play, but you might also like the beer line-up:
Cascade Barrel House
Saturday, January 29, 3-11pm
939 SE Belmont
The beer lineup includes Black Raven Brewing’s Splinters Bourbon Barrel Aged Strong Scotch Ale, Cascade Brewing’s McShagger Scotch Ale, Wee Ane and Black... Sheep Stout, Coalition Brewing’s Brigadoonery Scottish Ale, Fearless Brewing’s Strong Scotch Ale, Lucky Lab’s Scottish Holiday, Migration Brewing’s Old Silenus, Rock Bottom Brewery’s Highland Courage, Schooner EXACT Brewing’s Hoppy the Woodsman, and Upright Brewing’s House.I'll be out of town, so you have to go on my behalf. I am particularly interested in the Washington breweries. (And, is that Rock Bottom beer a Havig origional? Could be a special one.) I charge you with trying the beers and reporting back. Please!
roke of genius your PR people suggested.) It's the color of dirty water, sells for $3 a sixer, and is apparently awful.As a result, I am excited to announce that I will be leaving the blog in the trusted and capable hands of Nicole. I knew I had made the right decision when I learned the depth of Nicole's (and her husband Paul's) passion for craft brewing. On top of that, she knows many people in the Portland craft beer industry and is ever present at most beer events. Nicole has been interested in craft beer for over 10 years, including judging home brewing competitions. Living in New York and Vermont further fueled her passion for good beer. Nicole and her husband moved to Portland to take advantage of the excellent beer and food culture and opportunities offered here.By way of introduction, she has an excellent piece on the life of a working brewer--in this case, Casey Lyons at Lucky Lab. If she's able to continue in this vein, we may be able to survive Jason's departure. Seriously, very good stuff. Go have a read.
Eagerly, I tallied up the production numbers for the four quarters of 2010, and am delighted to declare that we have busted the 100 BBL mark. For 2009 we only cranked out 92.07 BBL. 2010 witnessed a staggering production of 104.64 BBL, an increase of 14%. Cask ale is on the rise.Excellent news! Ted's shooting for 200 barrels in 2011, and to that I say, Godspeed. Spread the gospel of cask, Mr. Sobel!
As the budget approaches, the beer industry is bracing itself for yet another duty increase. Duty on beer increased by 26% between 2009 and 2010, and is due to carry on increasing. The Tories have committed themselves to sticking with Alastair Darling's policy of increasing duty on beer by 2% more than the rate of inflation. Which means that this year, just a couple of months after a 2.5% VAT increase, we look set for an increase of 5.7%.That's the nut of the piece, but I encourage you to click through and read the whole thing.
Starting around – and I say around because the facebook page for the brewery just reminded everyone that there’s no firm date – January 24th, the brewery will be selling custom-printed scratch tickets that offer a chance to buy a bottle of Kate [the Great] for $2 each. Now, before you bristle about the brewery capitalizing on demand and making their own lottery, you have to hear part 2 of the plan. They’re going to take all the sales from the chance tickets and give it to a local charity.Kate the Great is, along with Three Floyds Dark Lord and a few others, one of the hottest properties in the beer world. Portsmouth will sell 10,000 tickets and of these, 900 are "winners." The winning tickets, of course, just allow you the opportunity to buy the beer at the full price. So in a decidedly coercive way, the brewery is raising $20,000 from its most loyal fans--90% of whom don't even end up with the beer. Donating money to worthy nonprofits is admirable; holding your customers hostage to do so is ... not charitable.
"We decided to make a traditional English-style IPA. It has half the bitterness and hop charge that some popular west coast or American IPA's have, but hey, it's a start.... The Willamette hops that we got from the 2010 harvest were especially nice, and so it was an easy decision to make the English-style IPA with them as the sole flavor and aroma hop. Roughly 40-45 ibu's, not excessively hopped or carbonated for that matter, yet still displaying the wonderfully woody and floral Willamettes in the forefront. "What Alex neglects in this description is the minerally structure that really signals a British-style IPA, achieved through amendments made to Portland's unadulterated, feather-soft water. You notice this on the tongue as a slightly chalky character; it makes the beer a bit more bracing and brings those relatively low levels of bitterness into sharp focus. It's a fascinating beer, a standard deviation or two beyond what's considered normal on the West Coast, and therefore a respectably offbeat offering from Upright.
Alex wrote at length about it at the Upright blog--too long to excerpt here, but worth checking out. To summarize briefly, it starts as an 8% strong ale made with a blend of caramel, mild, black malts, and a touch of molasses to create a rich, sweet base beer. It's aged in pinot barrels with brettanomyces clausenii, the native strain isolated in England a hundred years ago. There it sits for a year, developing acidity and character (and another percent of alcohol). Alex conditioned it with a new batch of Billy to keep carbonation levels low. It won't be still, but like a nice English ale, it will neither be lively.Arctic Ale and other super-strong English 'stock' ales were brewed to lie in wooden casks or vats for at least a year, often longer, where they would be worked on by Brettanomyces-type yeasts lurking in the wood, which took over from the standard brewing yeasts to consume the more complex sugars found in quantity in strong beer worts. Indeed, 'Brett' yeasts were first isolated by the Danish brewing scientist Niels Hjelte Claussen in or just before 1903 from an English 'stock beer.'Ganum's mixture of malts, use of an English strain to ferment the first wort, and the process of aging in barrels with the English brett are all perfectly consonant with the old way of producing English stock ales.
"What a joke. It looks like an Imperial Stout that was severely watered down, probably a one part stout, two parts water ratio."I had a pour of this at the Collaborator release a week ago, but I didn't take notes and it was the third in a line. A review will come later. But my impression is that Widmer was aiming for something specific and very different from, say, Abyss. Reading through the negative comments, one has the sense that people weren't tasting KGB for what it was, but rather measuring it against a beer in their minds Widmer had no intention of brewing.
and
"Moiuthfeel is very thin, to thin, it is about as thick as a lager really, a bit of carb, but leaves a very dryness afterwards. Overall, I really hope this is just a dumb'd down for the masses version of from what I heard was a great beer."
"A beer to bring to a dinner party as it won't offend or put off many beer drinkers or overpower the food served."Again, these reviews seem not to be judging the beer for itself, but compared to some bizarre standard--like a double IPA. It's hard to imagine any beer below 50 IBUs and 6.5% alcohol getting any kind of nod from these drinkers.
and
"Ok on the palate ,i suppose quite thin and watery near the end. Very very average beer."
Anyway, a session beer at 4.9% ABV?! There's no way you could pass off rocket fuel like that as a session beer in a British pub.It's true, we have vastly different standards. To find a beer with an alcohol percentage beginning with the number four is a trick. I haven't done a study, but I'd say 90% of the beer brewed on the West Coast is 5% or higher. At a minimum. Personally, I'd love a selection of tasty session ales with ABVs starting with threes and fours. Unfortunately, breweries don't seem to be able to stay in business selling them to me (and, of course, Ted Sobel). So we go with the flow and call our bruisers "sessions."
Brighton council bans super strength beer to combat street drinkingThe idea is to curb the knife fights, brawls, and general mayhem caused by these super-strength beers. And not a minute too soon, I say! What are are these diabolical brews, these menaces threatening to rend this Southern English city to pieces? Oh, you know, beers with more than 6% alcohol. Hide the children!
Super strength beer will be banned from an off-licence as part of an ongoing campaign against street drinking.
Like Hop Czar, Kingpin is very big (7.5%) and hoppy (65 IBUs, nowhere near as hoppy as the Czar). In an email, new master brewer Jeff Edgerton--who replaced founding brewer Karl Ockert last year--described what he was shooting for:This beer resulted from my wanting to do a beer that had a unique look and featured a hop variety that I really like, Liberty. Liberty hops are grown in Oregon (some in Washington, too) and we already had a relationship with one of the local hop farmers that grew it. So we contracted to purchase a large quantity of Liberty hops and designed our recipe to be a double-red, triple-hopped (kettle, hopjack, and dry-hopped) beer that uses rye in the grist to give a unique mouthfeel and flavor to this beer. I’m really pleased with this beer, and I consider this to be my personal first (as brewmaster) year-round recipe with BridgePort.Liberty hops are one of the old-generation low-alpha American hops, developed in the early 80s from a Hallertau Mittelfruh and unnamed male. To get a sense of it, related hops include Mt. Hood and Crystal. They're mild, lightly spicy, and generally deployed in noble-hop-using lagers. I've heard some brewers say they have a "traditional" flavor, by which I think they mean a less funky American quality typical in that first generation of US hops.
Here's what Jeff wrote about the genesis of this beer:Karl and I reformulated our base Porter a few years back and were always hoping that we could find a way to distribute the beer to a wider audience. After Karl left, our owner asked if we could do a coffee porter based on our pub porter recipe. So we bought a bunch of coffees from local roasters, figured out a cold-infusion process, and tasted a bunch of coffees infused into our Porter to figure out which coffee would compliment our beer the best. We settled on blend from World Cup Coffee (on NW 18th and Glisan) and established a relationship with them to begin buying freshly roasted and ground coffee. We made minimal changes to the Porter recipe and then had to design a “system” for cold infusing coffee in our existing tanks. This is much more difficult than one might think. But we figured it out and the result if Café Negro.Whether there's room for one more dark coffee ale on the market remains to be seen. Before moving onto the notes, though, I would be remiss in not mentioning the name, also a bold choice. The word "Negro" here means black and is uncharged in languages like Spanish and French. In American English, however .... Language is funny, and emotional resonances can produce unintended consequences--or not. Anyway, an interesting choice.
It's a great beer, unusual, and very drinkable. Of the three new beers BridgePort has on offer, this is the one that kept popping up in my mind days after I drank it. Here's how Jeff described the backstory:Nightcap was an idea that started with the fact that when I was Karl’s Asst., I filled some empty bourbon barrels with some excess Ebenezer that we had, mostly to keep the barrels hydrated. We kept the beer for nearly a year, and when Dan Wecker asked for something special for an account that he had, we racked off some of the beer into kegs. Everyone loved it. So last January we filled about 38 Maker’s Mark barrels with beer and held them until this past fall. We were looking for a winter warmer type of big brew, so I suggested that we brew an amped-up version of Ebenezer and blend with the strongly bourbon-barrel flavored beer that we had in the barrels.Tasting Notes. Pours out a murky russet, which I considered promising--the look of something rustic. Ahough overall the aroma is subdued, there are some biscuit and caramel notes in the nose, a touch of bourbon. The palate is sweet and malty, with strong overtones of wood (cedar more than oak) and bourbon. Slight cherry note and coconut, perhaps produced by the wood tannins. Also a bit of spice, perhaps from the Chinooks. The sweetness is balanced fairly nicely. More winter warmer than old ale. Blending the beer provides the character of the barrel-aging, but without being bludgeoned by bourbony booze. High marks: A-.
CHICAGO—MillerCoors LLC plans to launch a lemonade-flavored version of low-calorie beer MGD 64, the latest effort by a big U.S. brewer to rejuvenate slumping sales....A couple of thoughts:
The company expects the brew to attract new consumers to the beer category, and to capitalize "on the growing consumer interest in flavored beers," Andy England, chief marketing officer for Chicago-based MillerCoors, said in a memo to employees Friday.... MillerCoors also will unveil a new marketing campaign for the main version of MGD 64 later this year as part of an effort to strengthen the brand, Mr. England said in Friday's memo. [bold added.]
MillerCoors's beer shipments to distributors, a measure of sales volume, fell 3.4% last year.... The announcement of MGD 64 Lemonade comes at a time of declining sales volumes for mass-market brews in the U.S. The industry has been hurt by stubbornly high unemployment and rising competition from wine, distilled spirits and small-batch "craft" beers.At the moment people are turning to full-flavor beer and away from gimmicky swill, MillerCoors has a lightbulb moment: more gimmicky swill!
Brewer Jason McAdam was a little worried about overdoing the smoke, so this first batch displays a light hand. (Still, it took fourteen hours to smoke the malt.) It's gently smoky, more of an accent note, with a light, fruity body and soft mouthfeel. At only 8 BUs, McAdam also ditched the "rough, bitter" hops. The beer uses kolsch yeast, but the wheatiness makes it taste more like a weizen, despite the lack of phenols and banana/bubblegum notes.
Spanish researchers said moderate consumption of ale and lager can reduce the risk of diabetes and high blood pressure and can even help people lose weight. They added that the infamous British beer belly can be blamed on an Anglo-Saxon culture characterised by eating fatty takeaways and drinking too much....Color me skeptical that a high-calorie beverage helps you lose weight (a couple pints and you've downed 500+ calories), but hey, the PR's nice.
Dr Estruch said Spanish beer drinkers did not resemble their British counterparts who 'drink large quantities, almost without moving from one spot, while eating fried chips and sausages.'
Here's a couple other metrics to consider. People buy roughly 210 million barrels of beer in the US every year. Of that, just 10 million are craft-brewed. Most of these new breweries will hope to sell modest amounts of beer (like all craft breweries)--say a couple thousand barrels. At that rate, the entire new batch of breweries would add only a million barrels of production to the US total--point four percent of America's annual production. The last fact? After a drop-off a few years ago, there are still 11,000 Starbucks in the US.
y celebrating its first night of business with a packed house. On tap was one Willamette Dammit from Oakshire, a part of the brewery's single-batch series. A super simple recipe, with just Maris Otter and Willamette hops (the old workhorse bred in the 70s from English Fuggle hops), a session of 4.9% heft. What a joy.Alabama: 6 breweriesIf my fears are borne out, please refer to this post as a pick-me-up. In the meantime, Go Ducks!
Alabama pop: 4.6 million (3.2 mil 21+)
Alabama breweries per-capita: 1 in 767,000
Oregon: 112 breweries
Oregon pop: 3.8 mil (2.5 mil 21+)
Oregon breweries per-capita: 1 in 34,000
Auburn, AL: 0 breweries
Auburn pop: 58,000
Auburn brweries per-capita: 0
Eugene, OR: 5 breweries
Eugene pop: 155,000
Eugene breweries per-capita: 1 in 31,000
Alabama per-capita beer consumption: 30.3 gallons/yr
Oregon per-capita beer consumption: 30.8 gal/yr
One of Oregon's most innovative brewers, Van Havig, is suddenly at liberty today after leaving Rock Bottom Restaurant and Brewery, a national chain of brewpubs, after nearly 16 years with the company. "I just don't fit with the company," he said today, "I've been asked to leave."John's story is worth a read, so consider this effectively a referral to his nice reportage. But I'd just like to add my regrets. Oregon is blessed with an embarrassing richness of good brewers. Van is that, but beyond brewing, he's one of the real characters in this region, a guy who injects joy and wit (dry, Beckett-like wit) into everything he does. I have no doubt he'll land on his feet, but it's a sad statement about a company going through corporate re-shuffling that they would decide a guy like Van doesn't "fit." Guess who just ended up on Beervana's shit list?
Interestingly, while these days most societies are monogamous, polygyny(1) has not completely disappeared. Looking around the world, a few societies and cultures still allow and/or practice polygyny. There are some societies, such as some African indigenous tribes, where men have multiple wives. However the most well known cases that still practice polygyny are parts of the Muslim world and parts of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) – more specifically the so called Mormon Fundamentalists.Of course, you're asking the obvious question: "But correlation isn't causation, so is there any evidence one begets the other?" Right you are. And actually, no, the Belgians concede, it doesn't really appear that there's any connection at all. ("We conclude that there is no direct causality in either way, but that other factors cause specific changes in both alcohol use and marriage arrangements.") Although this is only implied and not literally written in the paper, the authors add, "However, writing about booze and sex is a sure-fire way to get a lot of attention, and so we felt the paper was nevertheless a good use of our time."
What is intriguing is that these two groups are characterized by another distinguishing characteristic: they do not consume alcohol. While these groups are not the only social groups in the 21st centuries which do not consume alcohol, alcohol is widely consumed around the world these days – and in virtually all monogamous societies. Hence, it is intriguing that the two main social/religious groups which still practice polygyny also do not consume alcohol.
(1) 1 Since the term “polygamy” is often use instead of “polygyny”, an important distinction should be pointed out: polygamy (from Greek : πολύ - many, and γάμος – marriage) refers to the case of an individual (male or female) having several partners at the same time; polygyny (from Greek : πολύ - many, and γυνή – woman) occurs when a man has multiple women at the same time; polyandry (from Greek : πολύ - many, and άνδρας – man) when a woman has multiple men at the same time. However, since polyandry is very rare, many authors often use polygamy when referring to polygyny.
