"Sour" Beers, Craft's Dark Secrets, and Yeast--Three Interesting Stories

August is reliably the deadest month on the calendar. The excitement of summer has passed, but no one wants to confront all these Oktoberfest releases the marketing people are trying to promote. True to form, this August started slow, but there have been a few recent articles out there that piqued my interest. I think you'll have thoughts as well.

1. The New York Times Botches "Sour" Beers
Eric Asimov, the wine writer for the Times, has offered more misleading, confusing information about beer to more people than anyone on earth. I know he's an astute guy with a great palate, but for some reason, beer is so far beneath him he can't actually be bothered to report it properly. Last week he did a round up of "sour beers," and made a predictable hash in framing it. I don't mind particularly that he combined every tart style, from gose to lambic, in one category. In sensory evaluation, it's fine to blend categories of like beers. But then he writes this, and my patience evaporates:

Many of these characteristics are a result of a brewing process seemingly derived as much from wine as from beer, in which the beers are aged in barrels after fermentation. As they rest, they undergo additional transformations as bacteria like lactobacillus and pediococcus interact with the beer, contributing lively acidity as well as tart flavors and increased complexity. Some are vintage dated.

And:

My guess is that few commercial sour-beer brewers choose to allow the sort of spontaneous fermentations that shape Belgian lambics. More likely, they are inoculating their brews with selected yeast strains, including brettanomyces, anathema to winemakers as it can be the source of funky flavors great and small. If unwanted in wine, it can be great in beer styles like gueuze, a Belgian blend of young and old unflavored lambics.

Ugh. To make explicit the crimes here: 1) in the first paragraph, he conflates the production of beers like gose (kettle soured) with barrel-aged beers. Goses (and most Berliner weisses) do not spend months in barrels. People are confused enough about this already; there's an entire debate raging about the cheat of making "quick sour" beers that's fueled entirely by ignorance about style and technique. Asimov inadvertently feeds this. 2) In graf two, he reveals that he's never even bothered to pick up a phone to inquire how the beers he's evaluating are made. Are some breweries inoculating while others are using spontaneous fermentation? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  It's a mystery!

(Asimov's favorite beer was Cascade's Kriek, and he loved it. He also admired a Logsdon beer. So I can't be too disappointed in him, I guess.)

2. Craft Beer's Dark Secrets
An article on Thrillist has gotten a ton of attention as an anonymous insider ("someone who's worked in the industry for six years and currently works in marketing for a well-known brewery") dishes on all the terribleness happening in craft. I have seen it reposted quite a bit with nods of acknowledgement. (Stan, for example: "Many of the points are valid. That some are less valid does not invalidate the story.") It's a pretty long laundry list of stuff, so I'll skip trying to pull representative quotes. A lot of the observations are anodyne or wrong (competition is increasing; consolidation is happening; there's a bubble), but there are others that are more serious and potentially accurate: working brewers get paid badly; the beer world is sexist; jobs in beer are hard and pay badly.

The big problem I have is that we have no idea from where these "secrets" emerge. The beer industry employs hundreds of thousands of people, and it follows that individual experiences vary widely. Some breweries are great to work for, while others are Dickensian hell. What does this tell us about "craft beer?" General, anonymous statements supported by anecdote are rumor, not fact or even reportage. I would bet my life that there are dark secrets in craft brewing--we already know about pay-to-play, as one example--and I would love to read a serious report, backed by numbers and on-the-record accounts. This is not that report--reader beware.

3. Yeast, the "God Particle"
Jason Notte has another excellent piece out, this time on the yeasty Dave Logsdon (founder of Wyeast Labs as well as the yeast-forward Logsdon Farmhouse Ales). You should go read the whole article, but one graf jumped off the page to me. This is Logsdon talking about his spontaneous program.

We’ve let those go spontaneously and haven’t tried to isolate and identify them. I don’t see a need to anymore. After spending a career in a laboratory, one of the things I wanted to do was get away from the strict, stringent protocol that was necessary. Even though we have a lab here and do our testing and stuff, it’s done on a more as-needed basis than a controlled management. With the 10 strains we do manage, I’m experienced enough to know what the right protocol is. 

I have written about this before, but there's something very, very different about inoculating wort with wild yeast and letting beer make itself spontaneously. The end results, so similar a NYT columnist can't distinguish them, belie the huge act of will it takes to get out of the way and let nature take its course. Dave has spent a career corralling and controlling yeast. It's a testament to the life transition he experienced when he put down the test tubes at Wyeast and installed a coolship. It may look like an obvious step, but I think it was anything but.

Of Tart IPAs and Podcasts

For this Friday, before I follow the course of the mighty Columbia to the sea, I leave you with some tasty morsels for the weekend. First up: a brand new pod! On this week's episode, Patrick and I walk through a beer tasting to illustrate just how much you can learn about the ingredients and process from your senses alone. It is of course also available via iTunes.


 As a side comment, I'll add that I think the most valuable lesson people can learn about beer is distinguishing among the flavors contributed by malt, hops, and yeast. Old-timers sometimes forget how mystifying these flavors are to the uninitiated.

Next we go All About Beer, where I discuss a beer that really needs a new name. It's a further evolution on fruity IPAs, but uses a dash of kettle-soured acidity to add structure:

Let’s go back to the juiciness of ripe fruit. What makes it taste like it does is not just the sweetness and distinctive flavor, but acids. Even in fruit we don’t think of as tart, the fresh, “alive” qualities come from a foundation of acidity that firms up the flavors and sweetness. A few breweries have discovered that adding just a touch of acid to a standard IPA has the effect breweries were going for when they started adding fruit—it makes them seem somehow more fruity.

But don't call them "sour" or "tart" IPAs, which is totally misleading. And, based on the scores of comments on AAB's facebook page reacting to the link, viscerally offensive. (But would it kill people to actually click through and read an article rather that just responding mindless to the links that flash before their eyes? Apparently.)  Go have a look.

And finally, I leave you with this photo, which I just liked.

From Cartwright to Session IPA in 272 Words

I'm a bit short for blogging time this week, though there is a remarkable post over at Oregon Hops and Brewing Archive that will feature prominently in (hopefully very near) future posts. A trove of documents reveals what the state of brewing was like in the late Carter administration as Chuck Coury struggled to make one of America's first microbreweries a viable enterprise.

Original Cartwright site.
source

I don't want to step on that blogging too much, but suffice it to say that what brewers and drinkers understood then--a long time by one measure, but well within living memory--was shockingly primitive. That article contrasts nicely with a piece that provoked a lot of debate on the nature of Session IPAs. In that post, Londoner Mark Dredge argues that there's nothing sessionable about this style. Unsurprisingly, his British commenters all offer their hear-hears (as did Alan, in a thread that sadly took place on Facebook). I'll leave aside for a moment my strong dissent of Mark's point--"sessionable" may be a British word, but which flavors Americans choose for their sessions is not under British oversight*--but what's striking is the distance between Cartwright and Session IPA.

We've gone from a time when Americans neither knew how to brew beer nor what most beer tasted like to a time where we argue about "sessionability" and "session IPAs"--two concepts that would have been abstruse to the point of gibberish just 36 years ago. I have a decent shot at being alive in another 36 years, and it's hard to even imagine what world we might inhabit then.

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*Okay, I didn't entirely leave it aside.

Wine's "Session Beer" Moment

A great piece in the Times Magazine about a backlash building against super boozy wines.

To Parr, and a growing number of like-­minded colleagues, such nuance becomes impossible to achieve when the wines are too alcoholic; it’s as if the lilting flutes and oboes of a symphony have been drowned out by a slash of electric guitar. He prefers an alcohol concentration below 14 percent and often far lower, depending on the grape variety, as opposed to the 15 percent and higher that is common in California. 

Sound familiar? It allows me to link to similar comments I've made about beer. Go read the whole thing--it's well-written and engrossing. Even if you're not much of a wine person, I suspect you'll like it.

Friday Odds and Ends

I've been trying to think of a hook for this story, but I got nothin'.

But one [distillery] has found a work-around. It's come up with a chemical process that ages bourbon not in years — but in hours. The innovation is unsettling an industry that is long-soaked in history and tradition....

Terressentia's website says its process uses ultrasonic energy and oxygenation, which "finishes chemical reactions that failed to complete in the distillation stage," and results in a "smoother mouth feel."

Interesting, though.

Next, I'd like to direct you to the latest All About Beer blog post, in which thinking about the validity of regional IPA subtypes (West Coast, East Coast, etc.) leads me to consider regionalism:

So, if we think there’s a style effect going on, it’s more likely a brewery effect. They don’t drink a lot of Dortmund export in Cleveland because of some exotic local preference (I’d find it mighty surprising to see the Dortmunder style pop up anywhere else)—but because the favorite local brewery, Great Lakes Brewing Co., makes a great version of that beer. Here in Portland, one of the U.S. cities most famous for hops, our best-selling craft beer is a wheat ale. But that’s not because Portland is a wheat ale town (they’re pretty rare), but because Widmer’s flagship is Hefeweizen, and Widmer’s our hometown brewery.

And finally, a personal note: the Beer Bible apparently went to the printer today. They're doing two versions, hard- and soft-cover, though the former is mainly just for the library market. (Just 1,500 copies, but you can pre-order one--no doubt for a Limited! Time! Only! from Amazon.) On the inner flaps of the dust cover, the publisher has written really nice copy. To celebrate the imminent tangible manifestation of the book, I'd like to share it with you. (An indulgence, and I appreciate it.)

Never in the long history of drinking have beer lovers had it so good, with a brewing renaissance happening around the globe. And never before have beer lovers who also have a thirst for knowledge had it so good—The Beer Bible is a lively, comprehensive, authoritative, and purely fun-toread guide to beer in all its glory.

The Beer Bible celebrates the pleasure of discovery, for readers new to beer, and the pleasure of connoisseurship, for old hands ever eager for more information. It’s a book built on the premise that the best way to learn about beer isn’t by trying every one out there, but instead pouring your favorite and studying it. That’s what opens the doorway to history, culture, and craft, the influences that make each style of beer unique.

Like bitter, for example. Its origins in the twin discoveries of hops as a spicing agent and modern kilning, which allowed for straw-colored malts. How it took several more centuries to displace the great porter epoch. The influence of mineral-rich Burton water. The Zen simplicity of how bitter is brewed. The quality called “moreish”—a distinctly British adjective extolling the virtue of being pleasant over the course of a full evening at the pub. And the fact that it really needs to be drunk straight from the tap or cask.

To top it off, Jeff Alworth’s ever-engaging style: “British bitters are characterized by a definite hop presence, but they have no violence in them. The hops ride atop a gentle biscuit sweetness and add marmalade and spice.” And so it goes for bocks and lambics, schwarzbiers and Vienna lagers, saisons and Pilsners, weisses, weizens, and witbiers.

Welcome to beer heaven.

(That last sentence even seems to be a subtle tip of the hat to this blog.)

Good Reads

All About Beer lives up to its name today, with three articles you'll want to check out. The first comes from Oxford-based writer Tim Hampson and concerns the latest developments in English hops.

“The British climate is maritime with even fairly even rainfall throughout the year. The majority of other hop-growing regions in the world are much hotter in the summer and much colder in the winter, and all require irrigation. It is the terroir created by our unique climate that produces hops with lower levels of myrcene than in the same hops grown elsewhere in the world. Lower levels of myrcene deliver a more delicate aroma and leave room for more of the other hop oils, which provides the complexity of flavor."

Next we have a Cinco de Mayo post from Jeff Cioletti on mezcal. It's tequila's more rustic cousin, and it is by far more interesting and tasty (in this drinker's humble opinion). It's the smoky Islay malt to tequila's Highland.

Before the agave is fermented and ultimately distilled, artisans bake the heart of the plant in underground charcoal-heated ovens, imparting the not-so-subtle smokiness. Tequila distillers, on the other hand, steam their agave, which has no such effect on its taste.

Finally, the last bit is a piece I wrote about the wild, wonderful cocktails of centuries past, now documented and reproduced by local Portland mixologist Jacob Grier. You ain't drunk cocktails 'til you drunk a mulled, curdled-milk cocktail made with eggs.

I think it’s human nature to believe that the olden times were boring and monochromatic. The people were more innocent, their interests less racy, their choices few and limited by what would grow on the back forty. That may be true of most things, but not beer. Beam back 300 years, and you’d find an orgy of exotica inhabiting the average pint glass. One of my favorite descriptions, from a 17^th-century source, suggests starting with wheat and oats and “one bushel of beans.” It continues: “once fermentation begins thirteen flavorings are added, including three pounds of the inner rind of a fir tree…” Another source, from the 1500s, mentioned laurel, ivy, henbane (a poison) and chimney soot. Tasty! 

Perhaps some reading you can do over your lunch hour.

Two Odd Things

Odd Thing #1: Biggest Breweries List
Each year, the Brewers Association releases lists of the biggest US breweries--and today they put out the 2014 lists. The first one contains all breweries, the second one "craft breweries." But that second one is becoming increasingly bizarre and baroque. Let's just compare/contrast:

• Craft Brewers Alliance, an association of three independent craft breweries with a minority stake by Anheuser-Busch, is not on the list.
• The Belgian conglomerate Duvel Moortgat, owner of Boulevard and Ommegang, Gambrinus, an importer that owns a menagerie of beer companies, and North American Breweries, owned by--not making this up--Cerveceria Costa Rica, a subsidiary of Florida Ice and Farm Company, are all on the list.
• Yuengling and August Schell are on the list--after years of being excluded.
• Boston Beer, a giant company that makes Twisted Tea and Angry Orchard, is on the list.

The "craft brewers list" is nothing of the kind: it's a "Brewers Association list." I hope journalists completely ignore it when they talk about relative size and refer only to the list of all breweries. It's the only one that has any meaning whatsoever.

Odd Thing #2: Powdered Alcohol
A bill in the Oregon state legislature would ban powdered alcohol, which was recently approved by the FDA.  Apparently this is a thing, powedered alcohol. The company that brought it to market, is vigorously (but in my view not entirely effectively) fighting back. Their arguments include: 1) if you ban it, people will want it more; 2) once the black market gets going, you'll lose control of it; 3) don't waste precious government money fighting the black market!; 4) Alcohol is... well, this argument is so nakedly self-serving it deserves a quote in full.  "Alcohol misuse and abuse is a real problem. People can abuse any product and there's no controlling what a person does with a product. What's the solution? We know that you can't legislate behavior so banning Palcohol is not the solution. We have to educate people on the responsible use of alcohol."

I have no opinion on the matter except that the Palcohol company needs to hire a decent political strategist and communications director immediately.  

A Grab Bag of Interesting

Let's skip the usual preamble and launch straight into the many interesting tidbits I have collected for you.

1.  I have both a new post at All About Beer and one I think I forgot to tease.  The new one concerns how London's beer scene looks a lot like ... Portland's (or any American city).  They love them some American-style IPAs--but it leaves me wondering who will champion cask.  It has already provoked one rebuttal--or call it an addendum--from Boak and Bailey.

The earlier post I forgot to mention emerged from Gigantic's Massive! barley wine, a beer that endures a nine-hour boil.  It gave me an opportunity to haul out my old Lacambre and throw around words like "maillard reaction."  Read it here.

2.  While we're on All About Beer, you might consider checking out this post about the proposed new Mikkeller brewery slated to go into San Diego later this year.  Interesting experiment.

3.  A beer fest in Reykjavik features two Oregon breweries (of 13 total)--Hopworks and Breakside.  From the press release:

“Our focus has been on breweries from Oregon simply because we like the way people from Oregon think and how the craft beer movement has been developing in that particular state,” said Ólafur Ágústsson, restaurant manager at KEX. “We feel that we can connect to people from Portland and all of Oregon. Reykjavik has a lot in common.”

The next question is: how do I swing a junket to Iceland?

4.  The rare brewers dinner that features multiple breweries.  It's at Higgins and it ain't cheap, but you get the Commons, Crux, Boneyard, Barley Brown, and pFriem in one meal.  And Higgins is never cheap, anyway.  I do wish more restaurants would do this kind of thing.  Italian beer dinners, German beer dinners, sour beer dinners--there are many organizing principles one can deploy that don't involve one brewery.

5.  We drink less beer.  Ron Pattinson has a fascinating group of charts showing how much less we drink now than we used to.  In the past fifty years, per-capita beer consumption has fallen markedly:

• Belgium, -38%
• (West) Germany, -6%
• UK, -25%

The US is slightly weird because of prohibition, but another chart, in which he looks at the last six years, is equally interesting:

• Belgium, -12%
• Czech Republic, -9%
• Germany, -4%
• Ireland, -20%
• Netherlands, -11%
• UK, -21%

So the period corresponding to the biggest worldwide brewery boom in--well, forever--is also the period in which per capita consumption is tanking.  (True in the US, too, though numbers are lagging.  Consumption fell 7% from '08 to '11.)

6.  According to my Facebook alerts, February 18th is the birthday of Crux's Larry Sidor, Pink Boots' Teri Fahrendorf, and Double Mountain's Matt Swihart.  That seems like a damned impressive coincidence.

Experts Versus Hive Mind

As my weekly blogging over at All About Beer becomes a routinized thing, I'll alert you to posts more rarely.  However, you might be interested in today's post, which addresses the issue of expert opinion versus the wisdom of hive mind.  In terms of beer evaluation and review, I argue that we don't want to throw the former out entirely.

It is characteristic of this moment in American history that we hold experts in contempt and valorize the global hive mind. Critics are vanishing faster than tropical reefs, and we now rely on sites like Yelp and Good Reads and Amazon to tell us what to buy or read or patronize. There are many reasons why these sites have made us better consumers and, in some cases, better-educated. But the hive mind has a tendency to elevate mass opinion and codify conventional wisdom (even when that “wisdom” is grossly errant). The phenomenon is so pernicious it can even infect non-crowd-sourced information. If you trusted BeerAdvocate with the authority to decide on Burton Bridge’s Olde Expensive, you’d have been sent down a blind alley.

In making the argument, I pivot off the words of local beer luminary Bill Schneller, so go have a look and see what you think. 

Are You Ready for Lifestyle Beer?

My latest post at All About Beer concerns a growing phenomenon in beer--and a brewery that serves as the perfect case-in-point:

The splash page for Saint Archer Brewing Co., a San Diego company founded last year, is curious. On a recent visit to the page, there was nothing but a six-and-a-half minute video that began in grainy black and white and looked something like the early French new wave. It turned out to be a short promo doc about a guy who makes surfboards in San Francisco. Wait, what?

Welcome to the most ambitious lifestyle brewery in America.

What's "lifestyle beer" and why is St. Archer it's patron saint?  Go have a look.

Your Controversy of the Day

Submitted for your discussion: Maine, not Oregon or California or Colorado, is brewing the country's best beer.  That's the thesis of my latest post at All About Beer, and I'm only being very slightly hyperbolic.

Maine obviously can’t compete on numbers. The population is the lowest of any least-densely populated state east of the Mississippi, and most of the towns are crowded down in the south and along the coast. It’s only got 47 breweries. People acknowledge that it has good beer, but it’s never placed among the most glamorous and it won just a single GABF medal this year. Nevertheless, in the ways that matter, Maine is at the beery vanguard. Good beer has saturated the culture and pubs—as Bray’s demonstrates—regularly have interesting, unexpected beer. None of this was unfamiliar to me—it’s been this way for years. What was striking was the degree to which breweries are now pushing the envelope on innovation and quality. As an Oregonian, I’m used to measuring cities by the number of years their beers trail ours. Maine’s scene isn’t trailing anyone, though, and their Portland may now be the equal of Oregon’s Portland. Seriously.

Go read the whole thing.

Stale Beer and Fresh Cider

For your Friday surfing pleasures.  Over at All About Beer, I have a two-parter about beer freshness: part 1 discusses why beer gets stale and what breweries do to ensure fresh beer and part two discusses why you still find stale beer on shelves and what you can do to avoid it.

I've also launched a website to accompany my forthcoming cider book.  Both are called Cider Made Simple, and while the book won't be out til next fall, the website--still a work in progress-- is here now.  (Fans of Cider Saturday may recognize some of the content.)

Ross-on-Wye Cider and Perry, Herefordshire, England

The New Yorker Cover, Interpreted

I really tried to ignore the new New Yorker cover.  I kept seeing posts on blogs, Facebook, and Twitter fly by, and the wave just gathered steam. I thought I could ride it out.  But it's safe to say that I have never seen anything attract this much of the beer world's attention since the dawn of the social media age, and now I have to join in.  Let's start with the cover:

“Hip Hops,” by Peter de Sève.

Over at All About Beer, editor John Holl has a roundup of some of the commentary (but by no means all of it).  Most of the analysis focuses on the semiotics of the setting, which ticks off cultural symbols like a Census-taker noting down demographics: tats, flannel, beard, multiracialism, hipster hats, a snobby sommelier contrasted with a downscale burger, and on and on.  It touches a raw nerve for many beer people--suggesting that working class, guileless, unpretentious old beer is being taken over by hipper-than-thou scenesters in Portland, San Francisco--and of course, Brooklyn.

But don't over-interpret it.

When they work, New Yorker covers are so delicious because they are are not didactic; they don't have an agenda.  They just reflect something in the cultural zeitgeist and become a mirror.  Recall six years ago, there was the famous fist bump cover.  In much the same way, it ticked off symbols.  Obama fans read it as delicious satire; his foes saw it as a take-down of the wannabe terrorist-in-chief. (And a lot of people were just angry that the slant wasn't clearer--they weren't sure who to be mad at.)

In much the same way, some people love what the current cover has to say, and some don't. Having been a subscriber for 15 years, my belief is that it doesn't have anything to say.  Good covers capture a moment in time, spark recognition and humor, and induce the reader to pick up the magazine.  They remain enigmatic for a reason--an obvious cover is like a bad pun.  Don't overthink it, just enjoy.

____________

A final comment (update). 

I got to thinking through my fingers over at Oliver Gray's blog, and after consideration, felt the comment would have made this post stronger.  So I'm adding it here.

I also think it’s an oblique insult to an artist to be too reductive. There are certain art forms–visual art, poetry, music–that are able to express complexity non-conceptually. We can reduce the meaning we take into words, but we are then creating a smaller, less-complex simulacrum. If we’re open to it, the power of a cover like this happens in the nanosecond before we begin the process of assigning meaning, when emotions and curiosity are the sum of our experience. When we then move to “meaning,” we’ve gone to a slightly different place than the artist intended.
I think, anyway.

Fresh Hops, Neomexicanus Hops, and No Hops

Hot on the heels of a bottled Lagunitas fresh hop beer, two from Deschutes arrived at Casa Beervana, Chasin' Freshies (still the worst name in beer!) and Hop Trip--and two more chances to disprove my skepticism that fresh hop flavor can be bottled. 

(As a side note, Chasin' Freshies plays a prominent role in my skepticism.  One recent year, I was down at Deschutes sampling fresh hop beers, and Chasin' Freshies was on tap.  It was the first year they made it, and I assumed it was just one of the many one-offs they do during fresh hop season.  It was one of the best examples I'd ever had, though, and so imprinted itself on my brain.  A couple hours later, I arrived home and found a bottle of the same beer waiting for me.  That Chasin' Freshies was nothing like the beer served on tap and yet was, presumably, as fresh as the brewery could make it.)  (As a side note to the side note, I'll add that I've only previously had one fresh hop beer worth a damn--BridgePort Hop Harvest.) 

So back to Deschutes' 2014 bottled fresh hop offerings.  Did they manage to bottle the flavor?  Must I revise the theory?  Our findings are inconclusive: Chasin' Freshies (22 oz bottle) was superlative.  Fully alive and green and fresh-hoppy.  Hop trip (12 oz bottle) was a dud--very little hop character at all, and therefore a sweetly malty soup with no zip.  My advice: if you want the experience of fresh hop, get on down to your favorite grocer, buy a 22 of Chasin' Freshies and drink it tonight.  You might even risk waiting until tomorrow, as you hand out chocolate to small fiends.  I wouldn't wait longer than that.  Skip the Hop Trip.


The Neomexicanus Hops Are In
Stan Hieronymus has an update on some monk-grown native hops that will soon be available to the home beermaker.  Step lively if you want to get in on the action.


In Lieu of Hops
Finally, let me direct your attention to my latest post over at All About Beer.  Today's offering involves Eric Steen's project Beers Made By Walking, wherein Eric and brewers go on a hike and forage ingredients to use in a beer, along with my consideration of which of those ingredients seem like candidates for regular use. It starts:

Artemisia douglasiana, also known as California mugwort, grows along stream banks up and down the West Coast. Dried and—particularly—burned, it has a distinctive aroma similar to another plant famous in the region, Cannabis sativa. Perhaps for this reason, it creates a pungent, hop-like quality when added to the conditioning tank of a light ale. The flavor is anything but subtle; it is sticky and musky and surprisingly bitter, reminiscent of some of the more exotic modern hops in vogue. I discovered it in a gluten-free beer by Portland’s Ground Breaker Brewing, the result of a project called Beers Made By Walking in which brewers go out and forage for local ingredients they later use in a beer.

Go read the whole thing.  (Please!)  

Lastest AAB Post: What a Portlander Found in Victoria, BC

More content to come today, but I wanted to direct your attention to my latest All About Beer post, of which this is a tease:

It’s possible to think your hometown is in step with larger trends—IPAs are popular everywhere, saisons and barrel-aged beers are reliable beer geek bait. But all it takes is a little travel to upset this sense of sameness. A couple weeks back, I spent the weekend in Victoria, BC, which is roughly as far from my home in Portland as Boston is from New York. In the West, that counts as neighbors. I ended up visiting six breweries while I was there, and by stop number four, I felt like I’d gone through the looking-glass: I was definitely not in Oregon anymore.

As always, please like and share it if you do actually like it and think it's worth sharing.  I'm still trying to make sure they don't regret giving me the platform.  In any case, do at least go have a look.

"A Whores' Market"

Alan McLeod alerts us to a fascinating story on Esquire.

Source

What’s “pay to play”? It’s when breweries bribe bars under the table to stock their beers and freeze out competition and is, according to the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau regulations, an illegal practice. [Pretty Things' Dann] Paquette even dared “name names,” accusing some popular Massachusetts’ joints such as Bukowski’s Tavern and The Lower Depths of accepting this dirty money. Paquette further noted, “Ever heard the term ‘committed lines’? This is what it means. Breweries buy draft lines so their lame beers aren't irrelevant.” He didn’t name any of these “lame” breweries though he hinted at one, saying “Right now one of the hottest newish brewers in MA pays for lines all over the place....”

But, in fact, it’s not just Massachusetts where this is a major issue. In 2010, a Crain’s investigation found that a trendy Chicago hotel bar had been taking payouts and other bribes from a powerful MillerCoors distributor. Deb Carey of New Glarus Brewing went so far as to call the city of Chicago “a whores' market,” noting, “Everyone has a hand out and everyone wants some cash, (free) beer or a discount.”

I have no idea whether this is a real thing or not.  Accusations are not facts.  Much as Dann Paquette is respected by beer geeks, this is nothing but rumor-mongering.  Based on the reactions, I have a strong suspicion it is happening--but I wish Dann had some actual evidence to offer.  The issue is a rich one, and if you want to get a sampling of opinion the issue has sparked, look here. 

I'm interested in informed thought on this, as well as straight-from-the-arse opinion.  I only have the latter, but to get a conversation started, here it is.  Although this practice sounds bad, I wonder how big a problem it actually is, at least in mature markets.  In towns along the West Coast (and I suspect this applies to Boston, too), pubs would be making a poor decision to take uninteresting beers along with a small handout.  The competition among bars is such that those offering anodyne choices aren't going to attract many customers.  It doesn't really matter how much a brewery is paying you under the table if no one's coming to drink your beer.  Seems like the market would be self-correcting.

If anyone has had direct experience with this and wants to chat on or off the record, you can shoot me an email at the_beerax (at) yahoo.com.

Your thoughts?

Locals and Tourists

My latest All About Beer post is up--a survey of five Prague pubs to visit that will get you up to speed on the current moment in Czech brewing.  This is how I framed my choices:

But if you happen to have the good fortune to visit you’ll find one of the easiest cities in the world to navigate, a feast for the eyes and surprisingly cheap travel. And within two days, the scales will have fallen from your eyes and your entire understanding of Czech beer will have blossomed.

In any town with as many drinking holes as Prague, there is always going to be room for disagreement.  And indeed, on Facebook, a Praguer (please tell me residents of Prague are Praguers) lodged his complaints:

U Fleku is full of tourists. Which is not always a bad thing. But in this case it's full of tourists because no locals would ever go there. The single beer they serve is nice enough, but it's ridiculously overpriced, and totally not worth the money...

Strahov is okay for a brief visit on the way past, but again, overpriced because only tourists really go there, and they don't care about the price because they're happy to pay for the experience of drinking beer which is supposedly brewed to an ancient monk memory...

This raises an interesting division between what locals and tourists value.  It's an especially sharp divide in Prague, which is perpetually awash in tourists and where the standard beer, so commonplace to locals, is new and rare to visitors.  (And where, ironically, the more exotic beer--IPAs, stouts, sour beer--is fairly old hat to American beer geeks.)   The reality is, the needs of locals and tourists differ.

As much as tourists to a country want to be in the know and want to avoid tourist traps, a certain amount of that is critical.  You must understand the basics before you can get a feel for the subtleties. The first time I went to Prague, I skipped U Fleku because of its reputation as ground zero for tourists.  But it's ground zero for a reason!  The brewery has been there since 1499, which makes it far and away one of the oldest in the world.  Perhaps even more impressive, the dark lager has been brewed there roughly the same way and to the same formulation, since the year after Josef Groll first brewed Pilsner.  For obvious reasons, locals probably don't frequent a place with just one beer and throngs of tourists; that doesn't mean beer geeks should skip it, too.

It's possible some people visit Strahov because of a silly invented story, but I guess I'm immune to those.  Trying to embroider a brewery's rep with ecclesiastical thread is so common I always tune it out.  The reason to go is for the beer.  Locals may despair at the price, but once you've spent thousands of dollars to travel half way around the globe, you're not about to let the marginal expense of a pint dissuade you.  As someone who chafes over the price of Rogue and the McMenamins in Portland, I get why price is a relevant factor for locals.  It's just not a reasonable objection for the tourist. 

All of this comes to mind in part because I'm about to start writing about the beer and beer scene in Victoria, BC.  It will necessarily be an outsider's perspective: I'm an outsider.  But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.  It's okay to try to cover the basics when you visit a new town, to try to interpret things for those who have a baseline of zero experience back home. But Praguers and Victorians (another great demonym) will have to forgive me.

Anyway, go check out the piece at All About Beer if you missed it.

Ballantine IPA: Rebuilding a Legend

My latest All About Beer post went up on Friday--sorry about the delay in posting a link.  A teaser:

A couple years ago, Pabst’s master brewer, Greg Deuhs, started wondering about that beer. The brand is still owned by Pabst, but that doesn’t mean anyone knows how Ballantine IPA was made. “With all the acquisitions related to Ballantine, none of the records made it to me. All the records you’d expect just aren’t there; no one handed me a couple boxes and said, here are the recipes.” He was still intrigued by it, and researched it the best he could through the fragments of information that still exist. Eventually, he started five-gallon test batches to see how hard it would be to rebuild from memory, educated guesswork, and incomplete records. A couple of months ago, Pabst launched a new-millennium version of Ballantine IPA, and I spoke to Deuhs to find out how he’d reconstructed it.

Read the whole post here.   If you enjoy it, do all those social media-y things that help share the piece and put it in front of a larger audience.

Incidentally, All About Beer has really stepped up their online game.  Great recent posts include:

• An insider's account on judging at the GABF by John Holl.
• A bit of GABF history from Tom Acitelli: moving the fest from Boulder to Denver and the fest's evolving style categories.

Definitely put the web-only site on your radar.

Exciting New Blog!

I wanted to alert you to a new project of mine.  Once a week, I'll be doing a blog over at All About Beer.  My debut post dropped today (every time people are trying to hype something, they say it "dropped) and you can find it here.  It begins:

Every beer-drinking country has a particular relationship to the beer it brews. Germans treat their lagers as a sacred trust, and breweries often have the text of Reinheitsgebot posted like a prayer on the wall. Italians are the quickest to think of their local ales as part of the gastronomic landscape—they brew with an eye to the dinner table. Americans have replaced a focus on quantity for one of quality, but in both cases there’s a maximalist orientation; now we count IBUs instead of empty cans.

The Czechs are the most interesting...

Please go and read the whole thing.  I'd love to affirm AAB's confidence in me with decent traffic, so help a brother out and click through.  Tom Acitelli has been doing some great history pieces, and John Holl even weighs in from time to time.  I'm hoping we can build a bit of a following for the online work we're doing over there.  Go have a look.

Incidentally, that blog is lightly linked to my (forever) forthcoming opus, The Beer Bible, and it shares the title.  I'll keep alerting you when posts go up there, at least for the near future.

Hey, what are you doing still reading this blather--go check out my post.

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--