Imbibe's Beer Categories

Over the past several days, Imbibe Magazine has been throwing out teaser tweets to lure followers into picking up their latest copy, which touts the world's 99 best beers (the link takes you to just nine). Of course, any such endeavor requires a certain amount of sorting, and I am somewhat intrigued by the categories they came up with:

• Beers to drink with a burger
• Hop monsters
• Different but good
• Small beers
• Beers to serve your friend who claims to be a beer snob
• Beers to drink with dessert
• Organic beers
• Barrel-aged beers
• Beers to cellar
• Seasonals

They've selected an admixture of functions in their categories: general type (barrel-aged beers, hop monsters), beers for specific occasions (beers to accompany food), and beers that serve certain functions (impressing beer geeks, cellaring). The idea of using all three types of categories is misguided--they become non-exclusive, and don't dictate where you'd put, say, Roots' heather ale. Different but good? Organic? (It would be fun to see if you can find a beer that fits every category--though a hop monster dessert beer would be a challenge to locate). But I do like the categories themselves, which escape the general-type trap.

One day, in the not-too-distant future, someone will hold a beer competition with radically different categories, and it will be a hoot for everyone who enters. And some brewery will be able to say, "Voted best beer to drink with breakfast," or somesuch.

New Bottle Shop: Beermongers

Some of you may be familiar with the iconic "banana" building at the corner of Southeast 12th and Division. It is now home to a new bottle shop named Beermongers. It opened just this Saturday, and I didn't make it down for the grand opening. Click on the name to see the website; follow them via Twitter here. According to Google maps, this puts me almost exactly equidistant between Beermongers and Belmont Station. What fortune!

I heard the opening day was a bit slow--the misfortune of holding your grand opening the day a tropical storm hits. Anyone stop by?

A Prost: To Brewery Workers on Labor Day

In order for a bottle or pint of beer to appear in front of us in a pub, a lot of people have to do a lot of hard work. Enthusiasts like me tend to focus on the results of recipe design, but the real work comes when its time to put perspiration to inspiration. Brewers often rise three or four cracks before dawn so they can begin the laborious process of making a batch. There's grain hauling and tun-cleaning: sweaty, hard work. People clean, fill, and haul kegs. Other people man bottling lines and then haul cases. (There's a lot of hauling.)

Breweries are places of hard work. During the long industrial period, breweries offered good jobs, too. Places like Henry's employed hundreds of workers, often in union positions. When Henry's shut down, Portland lost (if memory serves) 200 middle-class jobs with benefits. Most of Oregon's breweries are post-industrial, small businesses, but they employ far more than Henry's ever did: 5,200 people, according to the Brewer's Guild. No one gets into brewing to strike it rich (that's for the Bud distributors); instead, people accept long days for the satisfaction of producing some of the finest pints in the world.

So to every master brewer down to every keg-washer and everyone in-between, here's a hearty cheers. Thanks for all that hard work--we really appreciate it.

Subjectivity of Taste

There must be something in the air, because through no special searching of my own, I found reference to yet another study that has bearing on the question of price, sales, and the perception of quality (see past posts: Does expensive beer taste better? and Cost and experience). This latest study may be the most devastating, because it undermines the very idea that we are able to distinguish good from bad at all.

Looking through results of 13 wine competitions, researchers found:

Of the 2,440 wines entered in more than three competitions, 47 percent received Gold medals, but 84 percent of these same wines also received no award in another competition. Thus, many wines that are viewed as extraordinarily good at some competitions are viewed as below average at others.

It gets worse: the likelihood of winning a gold medal was no greater than chance alone.* To conclude, the report asserted:

1. there is almost no consensus among the 13 wine competitions regarding wine quality,
   
2. for wines receiving a Gold medal in one or more competitions, it is very likely that the same wine received no award at another,
   
3. the likelihood of receiving a Gold medal can be statistically explained by chance alone.
   

Now, it should be noted that wine is not beer. Beer, made with multiple ingredients, is more like food. Poor oenophiles have only the very subtle differences between the flavor one batch of grapes produces in wine to another. You might be judging pinot noirs grown from grapes on adjacent properties. Beer, on the other hand, is made with different ingredients which even disagreeing judges can perceive and identify. (Cascade hops just don't taste the same as Saaz, and assessment aside, beer tasters can tell the difference.)

Still, the study is quite useful at highlighting how subjective taste is. Experience is potently persuasive, and if we think X tastes better than Y, we probably believe in our experience quite strongly. In an existential sense, that's fine: we can't drink scholarly research papers, so we should drink whatever we happen to enjoy in the moment. On the other hand, we shouldn't be fooled into thinking that our strong experience of quality makes it so. We take in subtle information that we don't even appreciate (yes, including price), and our "experience" of the wine--or beer--is an admixture of observation, expectation, and perception. But it's not a fixed, accurate representation of some external thing.

The world, alas, is neither fixed nor entirely external. Our assessment of it is hopeless confused by myriad subtle interactions, many of which we aren't even aware of. Charlie Papazian, the sage, had it right the first time: "Relax, don't worry, have a homebrew."

__________________
*In the denser language of the report: "Thus, in binomial terminology, if the probability of receiving a Gold medal in a single competition is equal to 0.09, the expected number of Gold medals to be obtained in five competitions is almost identical to the observed frequency. For the 375 wines entered in five competitions, one would expect by chance alone (for p = 0.09), 234 wines receiving no Golds, 116 receiving a Gold in just one competition, 23 receiving Golds in two competitions, two receiving Golds in three competitions and no wine receiving Golds in more than three competitions. The observed frequencies closely mirror these numbers."

Cost and Experience

Yesterday I hypothesized that price plays a role in how consumers feel about high-end beer. It prompted a reader to send me the results of a 2007 study that tested this same hypothesis among wine drinkers. Upshot? Price definitely affects appreciation:

We tested this hypothesis by scanning human subjects using functional MRI while they tasted wines that, contrary to reality, they believed to be different and sold at different prices. Our results show that increasing the price of a wine increases subjective reports of flavor pleasantness as well as blood-oxygen-level-dependent activity in medial orbitofrontal cortex, an area that is widely thought to encode for experienced pleasantness during experiential tasks.

While I'm feeling a little sheepish about the experiment I suggested yesterday (a market-based model dependent on a beer company), this does lend credence to the original hypothesis. The study model was fascinating. First, they asked people to taste the same wines and told them they were different and cost different amounts ("reported pleasantness was correlated with wine prices"). Eight weeks later, they had them taste all the same wines blindly, with no information ("ss expected, in this case, there were no reported differences among the wines").

Two interesting side notes. The researchers acknowledge one confounding factor: the test subjects may have been influenced in their opinion of the wines by the scientists conducting the experiment, "deeming it inappropriate to report to the experimenter that a cheaper wine tastes better." And yet they also found in the brain scans a mechanism analogous to the one observed in the placebo affect--suggesting that the subjects actually experienced the wine as better.

The paper concludes with these thoughts, which I also find interesting:

We show that, contrary to the standard economic view, EP [experienced pleasantness] depends on nonintrinsic properties of products, such as the price at which they are sold. It then follows that marketing manipulations might affect subjective perceptions of well being. This raises several difficult questions for the field. Should the effect of prices on experienced utility be counted as real economic well being or as a mistake made by individuals? To what extent are measurable differences in preferences based on intrinsic differences between products and price effects we have identified? What happens to the efficiency of competitive markets when firms can influence experienced utility by changing the price of items?

In other words, what happens if everyone jacks up the price of their beer to $20 a bottle? Would it damage the overall high-end market? (It raises a related question in my mind. Why don't breweries charge different amounts for their own beer based on cost, availability, and subjective factors like tastiness? I assume it's because they don't want to damage sales of other products, but I nevertheless wonder.)

The full pdf is here if you'd like to read it.

Coverboy

I don't subscribe to BeerAdvocate's print magazine, but after seeing this, I'm reconsidering:


Horse Brass owner Don Younger, legend of the Portland pub scene.

Does Expensive Beer Taste Better?

Some time ago, we discussed the economic principle behind charging more for a product as a "signifier" of quality. The case in that point was Rogue, who seems to charge more for their beer than other local brands. I was reminded of that discussion when I read a report about how it works for college pricing:

For liberal arts schools, tuition makes a big difference.

Traditional economics would suggest that raising the price of an item (such as a college education) would reduce demand for it. But instead this study found that raising tuition — as well as instructional expenditures — actually improves the demand to attend liberal arts schools and schools in the bottom half of the top 50. For example, for liberal arts colleges ranked 26th to 50th, a $1,000 increase in tuition and fees was associated with a 12.9-point increase in SAT scores and a 3.5 percent increase in the proportion of top freshmen admitted.

This is because such costs “serve as markers of institutional quality and prestige,” the authors write.

This got me thinking. Last night I sampled a Stumptown Tart (finally!). Stumptown is a part of BridgePort's "big brews" lineup and a 22-ounce bottle sells for a modest five bucks. This is comparable to Full Sail's"Brewmaster Reserve" lineup, but quite a lot cheaper than Deschutes "Reserve Series," where bottles regularly are priced at north of $10. And Deschutes is cheaper than other national micros that sell special beers for twenty backs or more.

Here's what's odd. Take these contrasting examples: BridgePort Raven Mad and Full Sail Black Gold Bourbon Imperial Stout on the one hand; Deschutes The Abyss and Allagash Interlude. All four are world-class beers, and all four have different price points. The Raven Mad is the cheapie in the group--five bucks. I can't recall exactly what I paid for the Full Sail, but it was between five and ten bucks. Abyss, when you can get it, generally runs about eleven or twelve bucks. And I paid something like twenty bucks for the Allagash when I was at the brewery last year.

Preferences vary, so calling these beers comparable will provoke dissent. (My least favorite among them is the Abyss, at least when it's less than two years old. Though after that....) Yet the Abyss has a kind of stature that compels people refer to it sotto voce, as if in a cathedral. It sells out almost before it hits the stores. Raven Mad, on the other hand, was on shelves forever (and at five bucks, I kept stocking up). What role did pricing have? Had BridgePort taken the same beer, bottled it in a jet black label with a name weighted with gravitas ("Molten" or "Chasm" or "Oracle"), and priced it at twelve bucks, would it now be selling on eBay for $112?

This is where signifiers seem very important. High-gravity beers are generally rated for the intensity. If you look at the big beer ratings on BeerAdvocate and Rate Beer, they're uniformly the highest scores. (Though BeerAdvocates raters are far more subtle and nuanced.) The intensity actually makes judgment more difficult: there's so many very strong flavors that you're left with an impressionistic reaction to the overall force of the beer. Factors a drinker might easily take in include bottle presentation and price. I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that drinkers responded more positively to more expensive beer because, seeing the price, they assume it must be rarer and more sublime. As with liberal arts tuition, the way to sell expensive beer may be to make it more expensive.

(A final parenthetical. Wouldn't it be wonderful if a brewery secretly ran this experiment? Divide a batch of very good beer into two bottlings, one cheaper and more downscale-looking, one austere and expensive, and see which sells best? No brewery would risk this, because it's a PR catastrophe waiting to happen. But wouldn't it be fascinating?)

Spread 'em out to avoid spreading out

Study after study comes out, and never a nice word for binge drinking. The latest: drinking beer in binges gives you a larger belly than drinking it moderately, over time.

Men who binged had a waist size 2.3 inches (6cm) bigger than men who drank the same overall amount of alcohol but spread it out across the week, the study found.

In women the effect was even more pronounced, with binge drinkers having a waist four inches (10cm) bigger than non-bingers.

Experts say a waist circumference of 40 inches or more in men and 35 inches in women increases the risk of heart disease an diabetes...

There was no significant different in overall body weight between bingers and non-bingers, showing that the effect was not due to bingers being heavier in general.

Binge drinkers were defined in this study as consuming 80g to 100g of alcohol, which is ten to 12 units of alcohol - the equivalent of a bottle of wine or five pints of beer - in one sitting at least once a month.

But wait just a second: booming headaches, morning sweats, blackouts, drunk-dialing--surely these are enough to exonerate binge drinking?

August 31 is Not Winter

[I've messed up the html, and so now this post just runs on forever with pictures. At least they're accurate--including a change on 2007's.]

Okay, this is insane: Jon just got a care package of Jubel from Deschutes.

It’s seems a bit early for Christmas, but Deschutes Brewery sent me something anyway: three bottles of the 2009 edition Jubelale, their Winter Warmer.

Actually, though, unless Jubels start appearing in stores, this is a very good thing. It means that the brewery is ahead of the game and allowing the little darlins to pass out of adolescence in time for delivery. Nothing's more frustrating than green winter ale.

In any case, Jon has the scoop on what this year's artwork looks like, and you'll have to visit his site to see the '09 labels. (I'd give them a B minus; not the best-looking labels ever, but in keeping with the look of recent years. The art bespeaks Jubel.)


Update. Below the jump are Pictures of the last decade plus of Jubel labels are below.

Update #2. From a press release that my spam folder netted:

local artist Tracy Leagjeld had fresh snow in mind when she designed the label for this year's Jubelale, the playful holiday brew from Deschutes Brewery.

Brewer John Abraham describes this year’s Jubelale as having a spiced nose, with hints of citrus, brown sugar and pine.... Five malts and seven varieties of hops lace smoothly through the last sip.

Both the Portland and Bend Pubs will host Jubelale release parties on October 1. The Portland Pub’s celebration will feature Jubelale art through the years, as part of Portland’s monthly “First Thursday” Gallery Walk.

Okee doke. Now we know.

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

Why Bud Has Many Plants

Back in April, I reviewed Dogfish Head Festina Peche. I had purchased a bottle, intent on identifying a Dogfish product I could unconflictedly praise. The beer that poured out of that bottle was not good. My description:

The trouble began right away--it was nearly flat, even when I tried to rouse it with a tall pour. A stray bubble or two--to call them a proper bead would be overstating the point--rose languidly to the surface. The nose was faintly sour, but tinny and hollow like canned fruit, which more or less describes the beer.... [T]he final sentence of my notes: "Like a flat soda that has been sitting out in the sun for a few hours."

Over the weekend I had this same beer on tap at the Green Dragon and it was a revelation. An excellent rendition of style, light-bodied, sprightly, and more that a tad tart. Putting peach in a Berliner Weisse is an inspired move: the fruit's sugars had mostly been gobbled by yeasts; what remained was a gentle essence joined perfectly with the beer's sour. The style can be a little aggressive naked; that's why it is often dressed with a bit of sugary syrup. The peach is a better solution; it keeps the nature of the tart beer intact, but adds a summery, fresh note that softens it just enough. Dogfish Head can definitely take a bow--this is a hell of a beer.

But what then explains the difference between the bottle and the keg?

This is one of the problems with shipping your beer--once it leaves your brewery, you have no idea what happens to it. A distributor may leave it on a pallette in the sun or it may languish on the shelf of a store that rarely sells anything but Hamm's. From time to time I'll read a harshly critical description of a Rogue beer I like on BeerAdvocate--inevitably, the sampler picked up the bottle far from Oregon. Like my Festina Peche bottle, they were tasting the death of a beer, not a beer.

(This can be the brewery's fault, of course. A poor batch or poor packaging can ruin an otherwise tasty beer.)

I don't know whether Dogfish is culpable for the condition of the bottle I tried, but I sympathize with them in any case. Getting beer to Oregon (2850 miles, according to Google Maps) is no easy task. This is why Redhook opened a brewery in New Hampshire back in the 90s, and it's why Bud has them scattered all over the country. The closer a brewery is to the point of sale, the more likely it is that the beer will arrive like it left the bottling line.

I suspect there's a beeronomics post in there somewhere, but for the beer enthusiast, it's a good reminder. And I will be more charitable to Dogfish henceforth.

MacTarnahan's Future

The release of Lip Stinger prompted much speculation about the future of MacTarnahan's. John Foyston throws a tidbit out for speculators to digest:

Mac's brand manager Mark Carver said that more special beers are on the way from Bleigh and crew (which now also includes the talented brewer Vasili Gletsos) including a new porter and an oatmeal stout as the year wanes...

Bleigh is Tom Bleigh, Pyramid head brewer. I read this to mean that he's getting credit for the Lip Stinger--whether or not he designed it. Porter and stout? Not revolutionary, but welcome.

Even the Professor Can't Argue With This

I see no flaws in this logic:

WASHINGTON—Despite ongoing economic woes and a jobless rate that has been approaching 10 percent, U.S. unemployment projections drastically improved Monday after the consumption of five beers.

"It's going up," leading economist David Singleton said confidently, indicating the predicted growth in jobs with an upward wave of a Bud Light bottle. "All the way up. By the end of the month. No problem."

According to analysts, both long- and short-term forecasts showed signs of recovery between the third and fourth beer, but the fifth alcoholic beverage was the point at which the employment rate began to close in on 100 percent.

Joblessness was not the only domestic problem that began to appear eminently solvable after the rapid downing of five beers. Also substantially improved were projections for the housing crisis, the affordability of health care, getting hot wings later, and being able to drive home just fine.

Though most on their fifth beer showed unbridled optimism—and in some cases outright cockiness—in terms of the employment landscape, those who greatly exceeded that number said they saw the current job market as hopelessly bleak. Contrary to the rosy prospects he had described earlier in the evening, economist David Singleton, after imbibing nine beers and an unknown quantity of Wild Turkey, lamented that there would have to be a comprehensive shift in the nation's entire economic structure before any lasting improvement could be realized.

As Homer Simpson said, alcohol is the cause of, and solution to, most of life's problems.

Start of the Hop Trip

Deschutes just posted photos of their trip out to Groschie Farms to pick up the hops for their annual fresh hop ale, Hop Trip.



Lots more photos here. Go have a look.

(Is it me, or is this an early harvest? Seems like it was September in past years.)

Trust-Busting the Macros?

What happens when two corporations that control 80% of a given market decide to raise prices at the same time, by the same amount? The feds get interested. It looks like collusion and price-fixing:

Anheuser-Busch InBev — purveyor of the president’s preferred brew, Bud Light — and MillerCoors, a joint venture between SABMiller and Molson Coors, are raising prices at the same time, during a recession and while beer demand is slumping. With 80 percent of the market between them, the move almost begs for an antitrust review.

The problem, of course, is that consolidation has left us with just two owners. When there are three or more, the companies have to compete on prices for market share. When there are only two? Well, all that competition gets in the way of profit margins.

After South African Breweries bought Miller in 2002, it set out to take market share from Bud. Its bigger rival responded by slashing prices. The others were then forced to match. This competition fostered a better outcome for consumers — indeed, the summer of 2005 was a beer drinkers’ dream.

That’s all changed. SABMiller and Molson Coors kicked off a joint venture last year that combines the market powers of the second- and third-largest players. InBev, meantime, has no stomach for a price war after its $52 billion debt-financed splurge on Anheuser.

By historical standards, this is pretty outrageous. In 1966, the Supreme Court prevented the 10th and 18th largest breweries--Pabst and Blatz--from merging. All of which has inclined Obama to have a look, and the Justice Department may review these Bush-era mergers.

As an editorial aside, the idea to raise beer prices seems totally boneheaded. While it's true that they control 80% of the market, that share isn't growing, thanks to micros. Sales are way down this year for tin-can beer, and further alienating off your already-wavering customer base seems like a bad long-term strategy. And all of that is before the question of price-fixing arose. We are often lectured by certain segments of the political spectrum about the genius of business, but there are moments when you have to wonder.


Update.
Patrick Emerson riffs on my post, rebutting my suggestion that the macros are behaving stupidly. Rather than have a two-blog debate, you can read his post there, and my response in comments.

The Riddle of Lip Stinger

[Note: A sharp-eyed reader noticed a repetitive use of the word "weed," which I've adjusted somewhat. Also, my latest copy editor has been beaten and fired.]

MacTarnahan's, the forgotten brewery.

Really, when was the last time you had a pint of an erstwhile Portland Brewing beer? With a reputation of safe, pedestrian beer and a flagship that now looks like a daisy in a field of craft brewing's exotic orchids, MacTarnahan teeters. Recent seasonals have done nothing to stem this impression (Grifter, Slingshot Pale) ... until now. Of all the major breweries most likely to release a saison, MacTarnahan's had to be the least. Yet here it is, Lip Stinger. The whole thing is mystifying. Including, it turns out, the beer itself.

It is a light saison, just 4.8%, but with a pretty pointed 32 BUs. Although the early buzz is positive, I found it an odd beer. Not timid, but strangely incoherent. The aroma is funky and phenolic. If the brewery didn't use a saison yeast, they did a good job of disguising the fact. Yet the beer is as clear and golden as a pilsner, which creates a kind of cognitive dissonance. Sniff: Belgiany, funky, saison. Look: gently effervescent, clear, bright, and filtered. Well, no matter: try a sip to resolve things. Except it doesn't. The palate is all tang and medicine. The Saaz hops are strong enough that it adds to the pilsnery aphasia, yet the yeast is estery, fruity (apricots?), and effervescent. Then there's the peppercorn addition, which comes across as a grating bitterness, almost like menthol. In the end, the needle was pointing in a positive direction, if provisionally. I would recommend this beer selectively, and only to the the experimental.

The riddle does not stop at the glass, however.

1. Why "Lip Stinger?"
Let's start with the name, which is terrible. The brewery used four kinds of peppercorn (a traditional saison spice), but there's nothing stinging about the beer. Which is good, because who wants stung lips? The pepper isn't peppery, though; I find it weedy and medicinal. It's not necessarily terrible, but "weedy and medicinal" will appeal to only a niche audience. It's subtitled a "farmhouse" ale, which is better. People relate to the word "farmhouse" positively. The word is vague, though, and only by tasting this dry, effervescent, spicy beer do you know that it's properly a saison. I get why the brewery would choose the more consumer-friendly "farmhouse" than saison; why then did they choose the consumersbane "Lip Stinger" as the topline name?

(There is a French wine grape known as picpoul--"Lip Stinger." It produces a very crisp, tart, food-friendly wine, and so the sense in French, apparently, is "lip-smacking." Whether this is an allusion to that grape, or a direct translation of the French, I can only imagine. Still, if this is the case, we're into the very deep grass in terms of naming arcana.)

2. Why is Lip Stinger Filtered?
This is a minor quibble alluded to in my description, but come on. Farmhouse ales are supposed to be "rustic." Rusticity is not a quality easily described, but we can infer from it a certain lack of polish. It comes from the Latin rusticus, for "open land"--it suggests "country" and "handmade." Filtering, an invention of industrialization, is definitely not rustic. The passion for clarity is a modern one. For once, couldn't MacTarnahan's have resisted filtering a beer?

3. Why Saison, of All Styles?
MacTarnahan's has, over the years, dabbled in a variety of styles. One of my faves was a traditional hefeweizen they made back in the mid-90s. They had a widely-lauded pilsner called Zig Zag. But except for a quasi-Belgian beer they made for the millennium, I don't recall any Belgian styles. Lately they have specialized in even more anodyne beers than usual, suggesting a slow fade into the kind of beers corporate brand-managers concoct. (Not to say that's what was actually driving things.) So to go for a Belgian beer, and even more a saison (quite a jump into the deep end of the Wallonian pool)--how did they get from there to here?

4. Why Only 3,000 Cases?
This is not actually a riddle: the answer is pretty self-evident. You don't bet the farm on a beer so radically different from the rest of your line. I ask it rhetorically: why not really try to make a splash. Putting these out in sixers for a month would have at least been a nice advertisement that MacTarnahan's is stepping up. Casual drinkers might have been persuaded to buy a bottle (or maybe not; see #1) and even if they found it shocking and gross, they would remember it. Sometimes that's a good thing. But putting it out in such a small batch and in 22s means that only the beer geeks will discover it. Ah well, baby steps.

You should go buy a bottle for the novelty and see what you think. MacTarnahan's effort is worth at least a bottle.

First, a Quiz

Have a look at the beer at right. The photo isn't the greatest; I took it with my cell phone. Nevertheless, it should be functional for our purposes. Now, upon visual inspection alone, identify the style of beer. (That blurry quality on the bottom half of the glass is condensation, not haze.)

1. German pils
2. Saison
3. Kolsch
4. Abbey ale
5. Pale ale
6. Imperial stout

I'll give you a hint: it's not six.

Click for the answer.

The beer in the photo is MacTarnahan's Lip Stinger. If you answered an odd number, you had reasonable expectation of being correct. If you answered 2, saison, you have entered a philosophical thicket, for this looks like no farmhouse ale I've ever seen. I will post a fuller treatment of the beer (which doesn't look exactly like a review--much as Lip Stinger doesn't look exactly like a saison) in the next day or two.

Rediscovering Sheaf Stout

Although I don't welcome my incipient obsolescence, accompanied as it is by more frequent failures of this jalopy I call a body, it does afford me a benefit or two. One is a memory of standing in front of a beer case that did not contain microbrewed beers. (Or very few. My 21st birthday was in 1989, but this post-dated the event I describe. In the mid-80s, it is likely Oregon grocery shelves contained the first vanguard of the micros--Redhook, Sierra Nevada, and certainly Anchor--but I don't recall them specifically. The first locally-brewed micro appeared on Oregon's shelves in 1987. Whether my standing in front of these shelves pre-dated that, well, some facts are more interesting when presented as mysteries.)

Instead, Oregonians encountered most of their early micro on tap, so when they visited grocery stores, their taste buds enlivened by Widmer, McMenamin's, and BridgePort, they had only strange-looking imported beers to entice them. The Mexican beers did not count, but beyond that, we had little to sample. One of the most exotic I bought--though admittedly we're getting off into the weeds here--was Russkoye, a Kiev-made beer from the Soviet Union. I was shocked by this discovery, a Ukrainian beer just short months (years?) after Chernobyl. A terrible beer, but one of the crown jewels of my bottle collection.

One of the beers readily available was Sheaf Stout, a beer originally brewed by Tooth and Company (original name: "Tooth's Sheaf Stout"--even more peculiar). In those early days, I was a huge fan of Terminator Stout, which seemed as close to being the opposite of Hamm's I could find. My life-long love affair with stouts was in the infatuation stage, but I might have forsaken the style were it not for Sheaf. I recall it as being a hell of a beer. Even burlier than Terminator, not a bit sweet--casual drinkers thought it punishing and beyond the pale. I was also a big fan of industrial music, and one wouldn't have been out of line in accusing me of just trying to be cool.

And yet I did love it. I loved it enough that on Saturday night, when I saw a bottle in a grocery store in Manzanita, I paused every so briefly before buying it. (Sally and I made an impromptu trip to the coast over the weekend, and perhaps I was in an adventuresome mood.) The trouble with beers one discovered in the 80s and loved is that, twenty years on, they almost always disappoint. Our palates change and our memories lie and we end up feeling wistful, like we'd lost something valuable from our youth.

The story has a happy ending, though. Even as we drove back to our hotel room, I began ratcheting down my expectations. By the time I took my first sip, I expected something like a fizzy lager with a dash of caramel coloring. Of course, it wasn't. It was as intense as I recalled, if different. I remembered it as huge and malty, whereas it's actually a sharp dry stout (5.7%). It's got a luxurious bitter, equal parts tar and tobacco and a touch of sourness. I suspected that it was brewed with a lager yeast--it finishes out very dryly and there's not a hint of ester. Jackson says no, or did, a decade ago. The intensity is such that each mouthful pulls your attention back, but not so much that you don't almost immediately want another pull. It's not exactly a session stout, but it's in the ballpark. Two pints and you wouldn't suffer in the morning.

I will put it on my short list for satisfying stouts. After twenty years, it's back in the rotation.

More Texture in the Beer Sales Numbers

Coupla days ago I mentioned that the craft beer segment managed to grow over the past six months, even while the economy jumped off the cliff. Today there's news that the macro market, on the other hand, has joined the economy in freefall:

• Overall beer volumes are down 4.1%.
• Bud Light volumes down 8.6%, losing an entire share point. Pricing up 67 cents per case.
• Budweiser down 13.8%, losing an entire share point. Pricing up 78 cents a case.
• Miller Lite down 11.5%, losing 0.6 share, with pricing up 79 cents per case.
• Corona Extra down 4%, flat share, but with pricing down 74 cents a case.
• Heineken down 12.8%, share 0.2, with pricing up 34 cents a case.

The trend is described a "more ghastly" than anything "since the doubling of the federal excise tax in 1991." But not every company is getting killed:

Maybe the third leg that holds the stool up is the two in-between brands that defy categorization, the brands that are neither premium nor craft nor sub-premium nor import. I'm talking about Yuengling and Pabst Blue Ribbon, and both are doing great. Yuengling and PBR are both up 31% in July on similar off-premise bases, with Yuengling up 85 cents a case and PBR up 90 cents a case.

As a discussion point, let's hear theories about why Pabst and craft beer are doing well while Bud and Corona are tanking. Don't get too cocky, either: for added points, you must explain why Coors Light has avoided Bud's fate and managed to eke out a 1.1% gain. Good luck!

(Hat tip: Lisa Morrison)

OLCC and Happy Hours

Portland takes its happy hours seriously. We are a city that does sleep, so a post-work pint is ideal for our schedules--not to mention wallets. The Oregonian, sensing the seriousness of the topic, put a story about happy hour advertising on the front page of today's paper.

Happy hours are booming in Oregon restaurants and bars in tough economic times, but no one is very happy with the way the state regulates them -- including state officials.

That's why the Oregon Liquor Control Commission today will consider revamping or tossing a rule adopted 24 years ago that bans the advertising of discounted alcoholic drinks.

I'm all for it. I wasn't actually even aware that such a law existed and further, I'm so insensitive to advertisements that I would never have noticed this was illegal. I did learn about it a month or so ago, thanks to Twitter. A friend pointed out that certain establishments were tweeting happy hour deals there, and he wondered if this ran afoul of the OLCC's rule. Turns out the loopholes are pretty substantial. So long as you're not advertising the price of drinks, you can use the word "happy hour." You can also promote other events not called happy hour, too, like ladies nights.

But now the problem that that pre-brewpub law was supposed to address is suspect:

The law was adopted to prevent happy hours from promoting binge drinking, but Linda Ignowski, OLCC regulatory director, said in her 14 years, she has seen no connection between happy hours, which are usually earlier in the evening, and excessive drinking. Intoxication usually comes later at night, she said.

The OLCC has no particular info on this meeting, though it's possible that this is it (.pdf agenda). Needless to say, I'm all for scrapping this law. The OLCC should be regulating alcohol, not advertising. It's a stupid law and they're right to consider scrapping it.

Hodgepodge

Again, the blog grind and the no time means inadequate (and probably inadequately-worded) posting. However, inadequate is better than nothing.

Item 1: Lip Stinger Saison
Thanks to Bulls and Brew, I was alerted to a recently-released MacTarnahan saison. Yes, shocking as that sounds, a MacTarnahan saison. (Foyston mentioned it, too, but I missed that. I've been missing a lot lately. Inadequate, didn't I tell you?) You have to go back to the era when Brett Porter was manning the kettle to find a bold release from the then-Portland Brewing. (It was just Portland/Norwester/Saxer, the uncomplicated days before Pyramid/McTarnahan's.) Says Cidermaster of Bulls and Brew:

It is a farmhouse style ale brewed with peppercorns. The taste, and interest, was far beyond the 4.8% ABV that the label suggests. It is funky enough to stand proudly in line with other farmhouse style ales, even (gasp) the most excellent Upright Brewing.

Says MacTarnahan's, which styles the beer a "farmhouse ale"( the one thing it's not):

Malts: 2 Row, Pilsen, Wheat
Hops: Mt. Hood, Saaz
Spice: Malaysian and Indian 4 pepper blend
Bitterness: 32 IBU
Alcohol By Volume: 4.8%

This is a brewery famous for filtering every beer to within a molecule of pure water, so the idea that it's now producing "farmhouse ales" is a bit rich. But at 4.8% and 32 IBU, I will buy "saison," and one not wholly dissimilar from the one I am in the process of brewing. Says I: intriguing.

Item Two, World Beer Awards
Via Stan, results from the World Beer Awards. The World Beer Awards, you say? Yes, and Stan explains:

This is the competition organized by Beers of The World, the UK publication that recently ceased its print edition. Obviously a well conceived way to judge the beers with excellent judges (Roger Protz headed it up), but of course the winners are really “World’s Best [Fill In The Category] That Paid To Enter Our Contest.”

The judging took place over five months and three separate tasting rounds, and the organizers were not slavish to style. ("No letters, please, about ale yeasts being used in cold fermentation, or about why this standard pale ale is stronger than this strong pale ale.") They just wanted to identify this year's best beers ("they're constantly changing" and "it's like trying to catch smoke in a net.") And the results? Well, have a look for yourself. Mostly this British-held competition admired British-brewed beers. But not always.

The "World's Best Pale" is Rogue Dry-Hopped Red. (I've never had it fresh, but I've heard it spoken of in hushed tones from visitors returning from Newport.) It's also the world's best red. The Dissident (Deschutes) is the world's best Oud Bruin. Rogue Smoke is the best smoked ale. It appears that only Rogue and Deschutes entered beers, but they were cited a number of times for beers that were "highly recommended" (and beat out some amazing world standards).

There are some who yawn at our old standards, hyperactively hoping for something novel. Not, apparently, these judges. It's a good reminder; we should periodically loop back and remind ourselves of just how good some of our standards are.