Get Your Holy Hops While the Gettin's Good

Source: Holy Hops

This is the best story in homebrewing since October 14, 1978: native, American neomexicanus hops grown at the the Benedictine Monastery of Christ in the Desert in Abiquiu, New Mexico went on sale today to homebrewers.  They have precious little stocks, and therefore the hops are mighty expensive.  Nevertheless, this is an extremely cool prospect for nerds like me (I wisely ordered my 3.5 ounces of Latir before writing this post) for whom the idea of indigenous hops--even ones grown thousands of miles away--are irresistible.  It's a bit of a pig in a poke, flavor-wise, but here's what's on offer:

• Amalia (4.5% alpha acids).  "Citrusy, tangerine, slightly minty"
• Latir (7.2% aa).  "Spicy, herbal, flowery"
• Tierra (5.7% aa). "Minty, citrusy, very slightly grassy"
• Chama (7.3% aa). "Citrusy, herbal, fruity"
• Mintras (4.1% aa). "Herbal, minty"

If anyone does pick up some of these hops and wishes to do some bottle-trading down the line, I'd be happy to participate.  I'll be doing a relatively low-alcohol (~5%) neutral pale ale or lager with my Latir, hoping that the hops have a chance to express themselves in that format. 

Better Alternatives to "Spokane-Style" Designations

Washington's No-Li Brewhouse recently made news by successfully winning federal approval for the designation of "Spokane-style" beer.  The definition of this "style" is that it must be brewed and bottled in Spokane and made with ingredients from within 300 (!) miles.  In other words, it's a federally-approved marketing gimmick.  Good for No-Li, I guess, but it's bad in just about every other way.  It conflates style and region and, with the 300-mile ingredients loophole, makes a mockery of "locally grown."  Instead of moaning, though, let's think how the idea might actually be retooled to bring some value to the general concept.  The first thing we need to do is split style and geography.

Beer By Geographical Indication
Although it is not quite so elemental as in the case of wine, ingredient sourcing is an important component of beer.  Barley and hops do turn out differently depending on where they're grown.  Ingredient-based certifications are common and pretty easy.  Here's how the US Patent and Trademark Office describes it (pdf): 

“Geographical indications” (“GIs”) are defined at Article 22(1) of the World Trade Organization’s 1995 Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights as “indications which identify a good as originating in the territory of a Member, or a region or locality in that territory, where a given quality, reputation or other characteristic of the good is essentially attributable to its geographic origin.” Examples of geographical indications from the United States include: “FLORIDA” for oranges; “IDAHO” for potatoes; and “WASHINGTON STATE” for apples. 

In the beer world, this is really handy.  When I visited France, young craft brewers at St. Germain resolved to only brew with French ingredients.  There were trade-offs: limited hop varieties and no organics.  Still, they applied for certification and now bottles have the government seal designating the Page 24 Hildegarde line as all-French. 

Americans could follow suit and designate their beer by region.  (States make sense, but I suppose you could have "Yakima Valley" as a designation if you could source the ingredients from there.)  This has many obvious downsides: 1) only Northern, barley-growing states could ever receive the designation (and even if states in the South could coax a hop crop into producing, it would never be a commercial prospect), 2) except for Oregon and Washington, it would sharply limit the variety of hops brewers could use.  On the other hand, it would have some substantial benefits, too.  It would: 1) encourage local crop production and create interesting opportunities for farmers, 2) bring biodiversity to brewing, including some probably wonderful new flavors to malts and hops, and 3) give brewers an additional hook to promote their beer locally.

[There would be a few issues to hammer out: yeast and malting.  In France, you can win approval if the barley is grown locally, even if it's malted elsewhere.  That seems sensible.  Yeast is an organism and in no way a product of terroir--so sourcing it from Washington or California doesn't seem verboten, but I suppose you could demand that the yeast be propagated on-site.]

Beer By Regionally-Specific Style
The other way to go is something they call "Traditional Speciality Guaranteed" (TGI) in the European Union.  This requires not only that the product use traditional (though not necessarily local) raw materials but also made in a traditional processing method.  An example is gueuze, one of the few beers granted a TGI.  To be called an oude gueuze, a beer must satisfy all of these conditions:

• Use 30% unmalted wheat (that's part of the traditional raw materials piece).
• Employ spontaneous fermentation.
• Use hops aged at least one year.
• Be refermented in the bottle.
• Contain certain compositional elements measured by a lab, including the presence of brettanomyces, absence of isoamyl acetate, and the presence of other volatile acids (this test confirms the process and aging of the beer).
• Contain one-, two-, and three-year old beer.  

This is an extremely high bar, and other styles have had a harder time agreeing on qualifying criteria.  To go back to the France example, breweries couldn't agree on how long the beer needed to be garded (aged) to qualify as bière de garde.  In Flanders, breweries couldn't agree how long red/brown beers should be aged on wood.  (Rodenbach led the charge but was also a stickler for high standards others couldn't meet.)

I could imagine the US establishing guidelines that would qualify certain beers for "specialty" designation.  Corn is the unique native ingredient in American (north and south) beer, and could be a key feature in this designation.  The US has a trove of old corn-using styles to dig into--cream ales, sparkling ale, steam beer, American weissbier, Kentucky common--should we want to offer such a designation.  Given the standard for gueuze, steam beer might be the best place to start.  Designating beers using corn would meet the ingredient criteria (but would, ironically, exclude Anchor), and there are several important elements to the process: the use of coolships, warm-fermenting with lager yeast, and krausening.  Kentucky common, championed by a brewery like Bluegrass for example (it was originally a style of Louisville), might be in a prime position to claim the designation. 

These designations tend to link the style to a place--Lambics to the region around Brussels--which is a big downside.  Should only San Franciscans be able to make steam beer?  Should Louisvillians be the only brewers to make Kentucky Common?  Doesn't seem quite American.  But then, when you restrict, you restrict.  No-Li didn't mind that everyone outside Spokane was cut out of their definition (poor Cheney).  It might be worth designating some of the old styles if only to revive them.

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The Spokane case is a bad one: god forbid we have a separate, useless designation for every city with a brewery in the US.  (Wait, is that Milwaukie beer or Milwaukee beer?) But it might be nice if it sparked interest in something more valuable.  These are a couple options.

Kona Brewing: Pioneering Local Beer

As we all know, brewing goes back a long, long ways--perhaps to the dawn of civilization. It goes at least back at least to the Sumerians, over six thousand years ago. In all that time, up until about the mid-19th century, beer was a purely local product. Industrialization, railroads, and refrigeration made it possible for beer to travel. To the people before then, there was no style, only beer--the stuff you could make yourself. Of course, this is how styles evolved--in a small, regional context where the climate, laws, local tastes, and external factors like war dictated what was possible.

Modern American brewing is slightly odd in that we reproduce styles that emerged in other places. Had brewing started here organically, we wouldn't have had to reproduce what our ancestors brewed in Europe. I've been fascinated by the idea of indigenous American beers, wondering what they might look like and how they would differ from European lineages. Perhaps the best clues are offered by Kona Brewing, which has done more to incorporate local ingredients in their regular beers than any brewery in America. Their three seasonals include locally-grown coconut, Kona coffee, and passion fruit (lilikoi).*

Koko Brown
The newest release is Koko Brown, which has finally made it onto store shelves. It's a fairly standard brown ale--5.5%, 28 IBUs, made with six malts and four hop varieties. The base beer would be an excellent brown, but it has been enhanced by the inclusion of coconut. Kona adds coconut flesh to the mash (which may actually provide fermentables) and coconut essence during conditioning. The result is a beer that is strongly aromatic, almost perfumy, but only mildly coconutty on the palate. The nutty malt flavors blend perfectly with the soft, mildly sweet coconut to produce an amazingly drinkable beer. If it seems conceptually gimmicky, a pint dispels all fears; like Pipeline Porter, Koko is a perfect session ale, and when I've polled people, they have to a person given it very high marks. (It's also one of those beers that appeals almost equally to beer geeks and beer novices, which makes it a great sixer to take to a party.)

Wailua Wheat and Pipeline Porter
Koko Brown is just the latest incarnation of the model Kona beer. The brewery has a great knack for matching flavors that exist in beer with local ingredients. The city of Kona is located on the western side of the Big Island, very close to the famous coffee plantations that borrow the town's name. Kona is a distinctive bean, produced by the unique circumstances of that small growing region (the combination of volcanic soil, sun, and temperature make it impossible to replicate with trees grown elsewhere). Its character is different from the kind you find in most espresso shops in the US. Best at a medium blend, it has a mellow, rounded flavor--not sharp, bitter, or intense like French and Italian roasts. When the brewery made a recipe for porter to go with the Kona beans, they chose a light, mellow recipe like Black Butte Porter. The result is a bright, sunny porter that, like the Koko Brown, makes a perfect session ale.

Perhaps the most interesting is Wailua Wheat, a very simple beer that uses lilikoi (passion fruit) not as a sweetener, but a spice, like hops. Lilikoi are amazing fruits. They look like a yellow egg and have a seedy custard filling that is as intense to eat as a lime. It's so intense that lilikoi is almost always used as a flavoring in other beverages or dishes. What's fascinating is that the flavors are similar to the citrus of hops. I'm still trying to catch up on my understanding of the chemistry of hops, but I know enough to recognize one compound found in lilikoi--linalool, which researchers say gives a hop a "harmonious" citrusy aroma and flavor. (Interestingly, in the Wailua Wheat I had in Hawaii, the citrus character seemed more vivid. I don't know if this is due to the effects of climate--where mild tastes pop more--or the different systems used to brew there and on the mainland, but it's worth noting.)

The three beers are a great example of how local ingredients can--and in my view, should--be included in recipes. The industrial age is an anomaly; beer is local. Recipes should reflect local ingredients. Kudos to Kona for leading the way.

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*These ingredients are not native to Hawaii, which had almost no native edible plants. They have been grown there for over a hundred years, though, and can certainly be considered "local." Coconuts, in fact, were probably brought by the first humans who visited from "nearby" islands. (They weren't that close--just closer than anything else.)