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 I actually started with a slightly out-of-date menu with eleven items--and nine hoppy ales.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.

Defining the Indefinable

There is a cafe in Brussels. It is close and cozy, feminine in a way that is unlike pubs anywhere else I've visited. The walls are so coated in objects and pictures that you are able to confirm their existence largely by inference. The tables are small and dainty, as are the chairs. The beer list is extensive, but I didn't bother to consult anything but the lambic selection. This is the only place on earth they're made, and they've been made here for centuries. When you order one, the waiter arrives with a little basket; once he decants a portion into a pleated tumbler, he lays the bottle so that it reclines with its head resting on the edge--a vision of happy repose.

The beer list is extensive, despite my single-focus, and inside one finds a dozens of offerings spanning the range of local styles. In Belgium, the word "style" is especially fraught, since the local breweries work to make each of their beers different from everything else on the market. But whether we call them a dozen styles or three dozen, they are all there, well-represented. You could visit this pub every night for a month and not drink all the beer on offer.

The lineage of those lounging bottles dates at least to 1400, and they have been so ingrained in this city's heritage that they appear in paintings by Flemish master Pieter Bruegel, the Elder. Other Belgian beers have been brewed by Catholic monks for over a century (with a tradition dating back 1500 years). There is a selection of ambrée and brune beer, which cast back to Belgian brewers' old habit of boiling their worts for many hours to caramelize the wort. There are foeder-aged red ales, which took a lesson from 19th-century London porter, and there are beers called "stout" which have inevitably gone through that unmistakable Belgian cultural distortion filter. There are even the "new" blondes, which started to become popular a few decades into the last century.


What one doesn't find is the latest release from Stone or Mikkeller--or even classics from Weihenstephan or Pilsner Urquell. There are a few places to find these beers, as the international craft brewing movement noses into even places with beer culture as well-established as Brussels--but they are by no means prevalent. And Brussels doesn't need them; the native drinking culture, the living history found in each bottle, the famous brewing school at Leuven, twenty miles from Brussels' Grand Place, the strange way brewers make their beer, the local ingredients they make it from, and even--especially--the respect and knowledge local drinkers have for this fixture of national identity. For a beer fan, casual or fanatic, there are few better places to drink beer.

Surprisingly, this isn't an opinion shared by everyone. There is an argument about what constitutes a good city for beer drinking, and it was on bright display yesterday when Jason Notte made a case that "New York cares more about craft beer than Portland." I spent an hour debating with Jason on Twitter--the second time in the last couple weeks we had this dispute. I'd considered doing a debate-style rebuttal about why I find this such a perverse position to take, but I'll limit it just to the acknowledgement that we understand "good" in very different terms. For Jason,

"...that ignores one of the key purposes of small brewing and craft beer: To try new ideas, to take chances and to explore. Sure, in lager-soaked Manhattan — where beers I had with friends at non-craft bars included Heineken, Labatt’s Blue and Rolling Rock — you have to go a bit out of your way to find a broad selection of craft beer. But those who do are rewarded with some of the best beers that all corners of the country have to offer.

I mentioned on Twitter that by this definition, Copenhagen would be a better beer city than Brussels. He made an adjustment to my comment, but agreed: "No, my argument would still apply: It's not a 'better' beer city, it's a more diverse, cosmopolitan beer city. But the Portland-Brussels parallel is a great one. Both have great beer, both are fairly insular and heavily emphasize local."

It is not possible to square this circle--we think of "best" in very different terms. For Jason, a "truly great beer town won’t be afraid to explore what’s brewing beyond the horizon line." For me, judging a city by how much of the local beer is brewed elsewhere seems a bizarre metric for assessing "truly great." New York and Copenhagen do have lots of foreign beers available in their bars, but it's precisely because locals haven't developed a taste for local beer in the way they have in Prague, Munich, and Brussels--and brewers in Copenhagen, for their part, are actively trying to invent a local tradition like Brussels has.

I'll never convince New Yorkers that their hometown is by most of my metrics one of the poorer beer cities in the country, and I don't know that there's any point in trying. (It's a promising sign that they are defending New York with such gusto!) But would I rather drink a Drie Fonteinen in a Brussels cafe, from a bottle my waiter has decanted and laid in a little basket, or go to a New York City bar that offers a menu of the world's beers, removed from their context and shipped across an ocean?

Rhetorical question.

Considering the Belgian Tradition

Palm Brewery, Steenhuffel

Post updated; see below.

We are quickly approaching the tenth edition of Cheers to Belgian Beers, which comes on May 13-14. The original idea behind this fest was educational, to "help introduce Oregonians to the breadth of style and flavors of beers brewed in Belgium." (That comes from the press release.) Initially, brewers just agreed to use the same yeast strain and brew whatever they liked. As it evolved, the Oregon Brewers Guild, which organizes it, tweaked the structure so breweries didn't all brew the same type of beer; they're now sorted by color and strength.

All good so far, right? Well, I wonder. Does it still serve its mission? Are people learning anything about Belgian beer? As a way of getting ready for the fest, I wondered if it might not be useful to consider some of the hallmarks of Belgian brewing and then see how well the fest reveals these to people.

We think of "Belgian" as a pretty good description for a school of beers ... until we think about them very much. In fact, it's not even so great as describing the two populations, Flemish- (Dutch, really) speaking northerners, and French-speaking southerners. They have never formed a cohesive whole, and for a couple of years recently their troubles were serious enough they couldn't form a government. If you consider the range of native beer styles, you see a similar range of incoherence: Belgian breweries make everything from simple little pale and brown ales to titanic abbey ales, from sweet, heavy, spiced ales to bone dry saisons, stouts, hoppy ales, and of course the several exotic funky styles. Calling all of them "Belgian" is asking that word to do a lot of heavy lifting.

Dubuisson Brewery, Pipaix

If you want to try to tie these up with a single bow, you could say that, in Belgium, the distance between some of the old styles and the new ones is shorter than anywhere else. Reading about bizarre old German ales doesn't make you think of modern ones. But Peeterman, the brown beers of Mechelen, Liege saison? These extinct beers are familiar to fans of certain contemporary products. There's a wonderful old text that describes beers from the mid-19th century, and if you read that and then tour around modern Belgium, you can discern a line between the two.

Another way to group these beers is in the way they're made. From a sensory perspective, the range is too diverse to identify a through-line. But if you visit a few breweries, you see that the beers are made in a similar way, and issue from a national philosophy about what beer should taste like. There are three major hallmarks.

• Yeast character. This is the main thing people mean when they say "Belgian." Ale yeasts are teased to produce as much character as possible, whether wild strains are in play or not. Belgians practice “high fermentation” (warm fermentation), and it is often very warm when compared to other countries—mid-70s for pitching is not unusual, and terminal temps in the eighties or nineties is not unheard of. The result is beer with tons of fruity esters and spicy phenols. Brewers may also stress yeast by under-pitching it, which also causes it to create esters and phenols. (Many times they do both.)
• Secondary fermentation. Nearly every ale brewery in Belgium (from Duvel to Dupont to Rodenbach) has a “warm room.” It’s a temperature-controlled space where bottles ripen while bottle-conditioning. For Belgians, the carbonation is only a secondary effect--the real goal is refermentation in the bottle. That’s when the yeast flavors mature and evolve. It’s why you mostly don’t find Belgium’s famous ales on tap; to properly develop, beer must go through this secondary fermentation.
• Sugar. It’s common for Belgian beers to be strong--7% and higher is completely typical. To keep the beers light on the palate and attenuative, breweries regularly use sugar, often in high proportion. (Occasionally they use adjunct grains, deploying a cereal cooker, to achieve the same thing.) It's also worth noting that nearly all breweries just use dextrose, not whatever it is Americans think “candi” sugar is. Plain old corn sugar is the ticket.

These three things work together, too. Secondary fermentation builds on the yeast character formed during primary fermentation, and the use of sugar creates a thinner body so malts don't mask the flavors produced by yeast. As in all national traditions, once certain proclivities get a toehold, they tend to build on each other. These three elements are not mandatory, of course, but you find them in simple, large-scale breweries, in breweries using wild yeasts, in saison breweries, in monastery breweries. 

Orval

So back to Cheers to Belgian Beers. Does it function as a great way to highlight these qualities? Yes and no. Yeast is the key flavor-driver in Belgian beer, but Belgians consider secondary fermentation a key part of the flavor development. When you skip that step, you lose some of the complexity. Many Americans skip the sugar when they're making Belgian-style ales, too, and this leads the beers further away from their Flemish inspirations. In educational fests like this, subtleties do matter. The goal should be trying to point out all the elements of this tradition so people can begin to recognize them. I've missed the past couple CTBB, so I'll go with this in mind.

If you're interested in prepping your palate, go buy a few bottles of Belgian beer and attune yourself to those fermentation characteristics.

Update. On Facebook, a number of people mentioned mashing regimes as an important part of Belgian brewing. They're correct! I skipped it because it's fairly technical and I figured the average beer drinker wouldn't care. The mention of sugar and highly attenuative beers was meant to point to that. But for the geeks, a bit more. One way Belgians goose their yeast is by adding a ferulic acid rest somewhere in the 113-122˚ F range. Certain yeasts ("phenolic off-flavor positive" or POF+) metabolize ferulic acid to create a phenolic or spicy flavor in beer. This is very common. Belgians also tend to use two saccharification rests, a low one of around 144-145˚ F and a high one somewhere between 154˚ F and 163˚ F, to get maximum fermentability out of their malt. This, along with the use of sugar, is another way they thin the body of their beers.

At St. Feuillien