Once Again, Whose Culture?

Follow-up posts are like newspaper corrections: only a tiny percent of the people who saw the original error will ever notice the correction. Nevertheless, the conversation following that post along with Stan Hieronymus' comments convince me there's another juicy bite to be had from this apple.

I erred in using Zoiglhaus as the point of reference for a more general point I wanted to make. The Zoigl tradition is unusual in that it is a vestige of traditional culture rather than a style. I don't actually have a strong opinion about whether an American brewery should use the name--but am pretty amenable to the argument that because of its special status, care should be taken.

My bigger point was really to argue that Europeans consider American culture on its own terms. If we're using an example, let's return to the other one I did mention in that post--when people born in the United States refer to themselves as "Irish" (or "Swedish" or "German" etc). This surely sounds odd to the ear of someone actually from Ireland or Sweden or Germany, and Irishman John Duffy comments:

Like with my Irish-American interlocutor above, there doesn't seem to be any ability or willingness to hear themselves from the other person's point of view; that empathy is a risk to be avoided. It's like the correct perspective for an American to have is an American perspective and that's all that matters. You could understand it if we didn't live in a world which is much smaller than it was 25 years ago, where we have instant real-time access to each other's cultures and viewpoints. The viewpoint you're defending just seems a bit manifest-destinyish to me. It's not that it's offensive, or that anyone is offended, but it does look like poor manners.

I will defend to the death John's right for this to seem like poor manners. But I do think it's a an incomplete view of what's actually happening. It's the Irish view. But an American does not have, like John, a sole national identity. To demand that we use this lens of national birth is itself a cultural position, one that fails to recognize the actual cultural context of 300 million people living in a place to which their ancestors all immigrated from somewhere else.

When an American says "I'm Irish," it has nothing to do with Ireland. It's an American telling you something about his own identity. That's how we think. Should we think otherwise? That's not really a question that any culture can adequately respond to. Should the Spanish eat dinner earlier? Should Indians have a shorter sense of time? Should Canadians hunt less?

This plays itself out in manifold ways in the United States. Almost nothing that is a part of American culture--the language, religions, art, music, government, cuisine--came from this place. Asking us to mind our manners is a way of asking us to defer to the European definition of identity. And my big point here is just to point that out. It is a European mental model. When we "appropriate" things, very often it is an expression of our identity, not a slight to other cultures. Our parents or grandparents came from a place and we claim that piece of heritage as our own. When Europeans ask us not to use fixtures of "their" culture, I think they forget that it's part of ours, too.

Sometimes that means we do awkward things that offend people and sometimes--many times--we engage in cultural theft (though this is hardly the sole province of Americans). No apologies for any of that. But if we only use the culture of the offended group to adjudicate what we do, we leave out the important element of America's own cultural context, of our ancestors, of our strange, pieced-together shared history. This is a view not often stated nor much understood in Europe, and so as an American I wanted to make it explicit.

Lessons From Speakeasy's Closure

Update: I finally had a chance to correct that egregious typo in the title. So many apologies.

Yesterday afternoon, San Francisco's Speakeasy Brewery shuttered their doors. A tweet came out followed by this announcement:

"Speakeasy Ales & Lagers has been forced to immediately cease brewing, packaging, and tap room operations at their San Francisco brewery for an indefinite period of time. Difficulty securing capital investment and outstanding debt obligations led to this difficult and painful decision. The company’s primary creditor will determine the future of the brewery and brand, and no decision or further information is available at this time."

"According to Speakeasy founder and CEO, Forest Gray, 'The brewery has worked with multiple investment banking groups and have had numerous meetings. One fact has become central to the process, and that is the company is financially insolvent and requires new capital to move forward. Whether that will happen is unclear, but I do hope the brewery and brand will persist.'"

It was an unexpected announcement and I haven't seen any description of the particulars, but I think we can infer quite a bit from this:

In 2015, the company announced an ambitious $7.5 million expansion project, financed by Union Bank, that was slated to increase its production capacity from 15,000 barrels to 90,000 barrels. At the time, the company’s products were sold in 14 states and Gray had projected sales of 50,000 barrels.

Speakeasy was a big brewery. In 2015, it was the 86th largest craft brewer--or among the largest 1%. Small breweries close all the time--and have, even during that growth boom in the past few years.  Not every business plan is well-conceived, not every brewery capable of making good beer. But Speakeasy has been around 20 years and understands the business of making and selling beer. 

Some people link this, misleadingly, to 1,200-barrel Valiant Brewing, which also closed last week. But Valiant was founded in 2013, and was a typical closure. Over the past five years, a brewery closes every week in the US on average. Most were small and meh, so we rightly pay no attention. 

Without details, we're left speculating, but Speakeasy fits a pattern we saw--well, just about the time it opened in the late 1990s. That was during the first craft beer "shakeout," which wasn't a shakeout at all, but a flattening of growth that stranded breweries that had overleveraged themselves based on expected steep growth. Any time a brewery expands, whether that's from a nano scale to a seven-barrel system, or the leap that Speakeasy took, there's risk. It's hard to lose when the market is growing at 15%; breweries can exploit whatever level of market they plan on entering. But carrying millions in debt when sales flatten out can end a brewery. 

In the late 1990s, that's exactly what happened. Breweries made the jump to large facilities capable of producing a quarter million barrels just at the moment they flat-lined at sixty thousand. This led ultimately to high-profile failures or buyouts. Here in Oregon, Full Sail, BridgePort, and Portland Brewing all spent the late 90s and early aughts trying to survive expansions. 

Speakeasy will certainly not be the last casualty of the current tightening. Their timing was unfortunate, but far from unique--many breweries of all sizes are looking uneasily at their sales figures and wondering what the future holds. Craft beer plateaued in the late 1990s and didn't start growing again until the mid-aughts. When it did, the industry looked a lot different. If this is a second plateau, it may last for years. If so, Speakeasy is just the first of many failures to come.

Louis the 14th Tavern, 1985, The Widmer Brothers' First Account

Over the course of the coming year, I hope to post these kinds of things from time to time. Below is a short audio clip of Kurt and Rob describing their first sale. It captures the rawness of experience, both of young brewers and also bars used to dealing with familiar distributors, but also of a different time in Portland. I spent a bit of time trying to find any photo--or even mention--of the Louis the XIV (14th) bar, which was located on Sandy, but all record of it seems to be lost. We have to use our imaginations--and the tale below is suggestive.

Anyway, this is a wonderful story, well-told. It's just two minutes, so give it a listen.



Full disclosure: I am working on a biography of Rob and Kurt paid for by the brewery.

Whose Culture?

For the most part, modern beer is a European expression. The styles available in nearly every commercial setting issue from a handful of countries in a plot of land that would fit inside California. So any time an American or New Zealand or Japanese company makes a beer, they are (pick one) borrowing from, referring to, or ripping off the culture of Britain, Belgium, Germany, or the Czech Republic. Makers of the most popular beer style in the world originally tried to protect the name of their creation, but courts denied their claim. Nevertheless in a very real sense, every time someone makes a pilsner, they are disrespecting the people of Plzeň and the brewery that made it famous. Yet howls of outrage by defenders of cultural protection do not follow.

All of which I offer as preamble to Ron Pattinson's response to a tweet of mine this morning announcing that Zoiglhaus was bottling their beer:

There followed a spirited debate about whether the people behind this brewery were knowingly offending, inadvertently offending, or somehow vaguely violating some kind of norms that were never exactly identified. (The threads splintered, so I can't provide a single link to them all.)

I've already done my best to clarify where I think it makes sense to be careful about appropriating the names of beer styles (see here and here). Understanding the history of beer, beer styles, and national tradition are generally wise for anyone making beer.

But I'd like to turn the tables on the Europeans and ask them to be a bit more sensitive to our culture.

The United States is almost entirely an immigrant nation (Native Americans now constitute less than a percent of the population). The ancestors of the people who live here now came from other places, and the culture of the country continues to evolve as new groups arrive. I'll skip past the part about how the Irish were once so alien they were not considered "white," but it serves to show that what we are is what we have absorbed. We are a country composed of little bits of culture pieced together by people who bailed on their former countries, adding their cuisines and couture and music and beverages to what it means to be "American."

What we have now is a hodgepodge of different influences (some would call it a pastiche), and over time it mutates. Europeans often see this mutation as a debasement of their culture rather than the expression of our own culture. I am reminded of a story John told me about encountering an American who called himself "Irish." A few of his ancestors had come here generations ago, of course--he was no more Irish than I am. This irritated (mystified?) John, who felt that it disrespected what it means to actually be Irish. But here's the thing: that person wasn't talking about Ireland; he was talking about his own identity as an American. This is what happens when a giant population leaves one place and goes to another--the descendants of the immigrants become something different than their grandparents were. This is not the fault of the descendant.

So when we refer to things European, it is refracted through the lens of our own culture. Zoiglhaus's Alan Taylor is a massive Germanophile. He studied German in college and grad school and moved to Berlin to study a medieval variant of the language. He studied brewing at VLB in Berlin and worked as a brewer in several breweries around Berlin and in Bavaria. He married a German and he and his wife only speak to their children in German at home. He is insufferable about German pronunciation. And so, when he was looking to start his own brewery, it was of course going to be hugely influenced by Germany. He chose the Zoigl tradition because he admired it and felt importing it would enhance Portland's beer culture. He wanted to elevate the coolest thing in German beer culture and so chose the Zoigl tradition as his inspiration.

Alan is on the right. More here.

 
This kind of thing happens all the time. We are mutts who have to draw on the fractured lineages that go back to Europe or live as orphans with no history at all. I actually don't care if Europeans are gravely offended by these things we do, nor even if they accuse Zoiglhaus--as a couple people did--of behaving offensively. People get offended by a lot of stuff and there's not a lot you can do about that. What I do care about is that Europeans acknowledge that in many cases Americans are neither ignorant or intending to offend--they're just behaving as all people do, by expressing their own culture. It's just that our culture picks up and includes the stuff that happened after our shared ancestors decided to move from there to here. We are allowed to both have our own American culture and to have a culture that draws on a shared history without exactly reproducing the culture as it exists elsewhere.

Americans have plenty to apologize and feel guilty for. Plen-ty. Our own culture is not one of those things.

Update. One other wrinkle in this whole business occurred to me as I scanned the comments this morning. American culture is not just made up of the fragments of culture brought here in the steerage compartments of ships--it is made up of fragments of the culture carried by the people who in large or small ways were rejecting their countries of birth. It is no surprise that the anti-monarchists who bailed out of England in the 17th and 18th century begat a country full of anti-monarchists. Nor is it particularly surprising that Europeans who remained would be stauncher protectors of their own culture. We are a country settled and renewed by expats, and so it's not surprising that we place less value on the fixtures of culture in the places our ancestors quit. I think this is one of those places of friction--our irreverence is seen as more a behavior than a piece of our culture by those outside it.

Vignette #13: Ken Grossman

Brewer vignettes feature quotes from brewers I picked up in my travels around the world.

“I was an avid homebrewer, starting back in 1969, and brewed through the seventies and ran a homebrewing supply store that I founded in 1976. I had brewed a range of pale ales and when we were thinking about starting the brewery I wanted to do something that was not British, that was American, and wanted to feature American ingredients wherever possible and so chose the Cascade hop as about the only signature American aroma hop at the time. I blended a little bit of brewing technology and history from England with my homebrewing and some US ingredients and came up with pale ale. It was my familiarity with that hop and the distinctive nature of the aroma—the piney citrus—that I appreciated and enjoyed and wanted to incorporate into our pale ale.”

The following answer was in response to a question I had about the durability of Sierra Nevada's Pale Ale.

“Well, I’ll take some credit as—I wouldn’t say we invented it, but we certainly focused in on and honed a style of pale ale that had a forward hop profile, which the English styles don’t so much have, and a more robust character, higher bitterness units, and higher alcohol than most of the British pale ales. So I think it’s certainly a variation on a theme—as all beers are, in reality. I mean, you’re brewing with a handful of basic brewing ingredients. We bottle conditioned. We did some fairly unique things for American breweries—not that they weren’t being done a few places in the world and by homebrewers—we also put that out there as one of our signatures. ”


I particularly love that second quote for its modesty. This is a man to whom I credit largely with inventing the American tradition. With Pale and later Celebration, Grossman fixed the DNA of the American palate. I gave him a chance to take a victory lap and celebrate this singular accomplishment, but he downplayed it the whole way.

source

Why We Will Never Abandon Our IPAs

Yesterday afternoon, I tansferred two half-batches of beer to into kegs. They contained a pale ale--and an experiment. One had been infused with two ounces of Simcoe hops (pellets), one two ounces of Yakima Chief's soon-to-be-released hop product called lupulin powder from Simcoe hops (backgrounder here). The notion is simple (though it took Stan Hieronymus to suggest it): how do they differ? 

I'll be looking for a few things. Does the quality of aroma differ? Bitterness (remember the humulinones!)? Intensity? Durability of these qualities? Diagnostically, the experiment should offer some clues about how to use lupulin powder going forward. I will of course report back. 

That's not really the point of this post, though. The remarkable thing about both batches (but especially the lupulin powder), was the way the aromas exploded out of the carboys. Simcoes are famous for being grapefruity-to-piney, but the aroma--especially with the lupulin powder--was intensely fruity. Not like any existing fruit, but a heretofore undiscovered, I imagine fleshy, tropical fruit that might, to the most careful of sniffers, suggest hop. But only just. It was mesmerizing; I can't imagine any human being who wouldn't be instinctively drawn to it. Even from the inch-wide aperture at the top of the carboy, it was like incense pouring out. 

This is why we like IPAs. This is why IPAs have evolved as they have. One whiff of hops like the scent coming from my carboy would make a believer out of even the most hardened Germanophile. Brewers across the country have sampled that aroma and become magnetized (because how could you not?), and have then spent their careers trying to infuse the beer we drink with something as potent. I'm not an IPA fanatic, and yet about half the beers I brew are in that general tradition and end up with hops in the carboy so I can experience that wafting succulence.

This thrills me in part because the experience is something new under the sun. Beer dates back at least 11,000 years, but hops only go back a thousand. Dry-hopping is not new, but the strains capable of producing these aromas are. East Kent Golding is a spectacular hop, an ancient hop, a hop long used in dry-hopping, but it doesn't have the oomph of a Simcoe (or Citra or Mosaic, etc). American brewers had the dawning recognition of the potential of their native hops, and followed them to their natural conclusion. This is the same process that Bavarians followed, using local barley, hops, and their unique fermentation. And the British, with their fruity-earthy hops and floor malts, and on and on. 

As I scented those Simcoes, I was encountering something Josef Groll, Arthur Guinness, and Anton Dreher never experienced. That scent is in some ways undiscovered--or just-discovered. It is wholly modern and wholly American. It is irresistible--even for people like me who revere gueuzes and bitters and světlý ležáks.  And it's why we Americans are as likely to walk away from our IPAs as Munichers are from their helleses.

The Riddle of Bitterness

Scientists long ago figured out the mechanism through which hops turn beer bitter: the alpha acids in the lupulin glands become isomerized over the boil--a process that allows the bittering compounds to become soluble. There's a mathematical curve that demonstrates the process, and the amount of bitterness is a direct function of alpha acids plus boiling time. This all beer geeks know.

But now we come to the riddle. American brewers have developed a new way of brewing that exposes very few hops to the long boiling process. Most of the hops are added at the very end of the boil, are used after the heat is turned off so they steep like tea leaves in the wort, or are added to cold, fermented beer as dry hops. Accordingly, these beers contain very few iso-alpha acids. And yet, amazingly, they still taste bitter. How can this be?

In one of the most remarkable moments in our interview with hops researcher Tom Shellhammer a couple of weeks ago, Patrick and I learned why. This strikes me as one of the most important findings in recent research, and something we're going to have to learn a lot more about as a result of our new practice of using vastly larger quantities of hops in our American IPAs. Here's Tom (with a transcript slightly edited for clarity):

"There are some beers, like Kona Big Wave, a beautiful beer, but there are homeopathic levels of hops in the kettle. When it comes out of the brewhouse, it's got like 7 BUs. Or less! And then they just load it full of hops and they dry-hop it. But it's not 7 BUs. The BU level creeps up. BUs--and the sensory bitterness--is creeping up in dry-hopping or late-kettle hopping or whirlpool hopping for a number of reasons.

"Probably the most significant reason is that there are oxidation products in hops that prevent the hops from isomerizing. If that isomerization process doesn't occur then the bitterness isn't there. But it turns out that the oxidation products of the alpha acids themselves are bitter. And so, just like isos [iso alpha acids] are more soluble in beer than the alpha acids are, the oxidation products are more soluble as well. And so as brewers add hops that have some degree of oxidation--and all hops will have some degree of oxidation ... they are extracting the fairly water-soluble hop oxidation products.

"Right now in our lab we're trying to hunt bitterness and figure out what things are driving bitterness in really hoppy beers. It turns out that if you track isos like you would in lager beer you're about 90% of the way there. Maybe even 95%. And with really hop-forward beers, if you just track isos in some cases you may only be about 40% of the way there. There's other stuff that's adding to bitterness. And we've found in the last year or two that these oxidation products, these humulinones, in some beers are there in higher amounts than the isos.

"So if you think of a typical beer ten or twenty years ago the hopping--even if you think about Jever [a German pilsner], which is a hoppy beer--the hopping level, which is just a front-end kettle hop addition, compared to a beer that's kettle hopped, whirlpool hopped, and dry hopped, you might have twenty to forty times more hops being used in those beers than a traditional lager beer. So even though you may have a small amount of oxidation products, the fact that you're using forty times as many hops means that you just can't avoid it. These things impart bitterness in beer."

"Polyphenols as well to some degree. Like when you make tea at home, you can get bitterness from that. You could think of it like a tannin. As these things polymerize they can create some degree of bitterness. When they're really small they can taste a bit more astringent, as they isomerize or polymerize large enough they drop out of solution. So these polyphenols can contribute to bitterness as well, but we found that that contribution is much, much lower than the contribution coming from the oxidation products. And the BU [measurement] will capture that, but not entirely."

This may seem like a weird little cul-de-sac in the world of hop bittering, but for brewers it's massive. We've been making beer with hops for a thousand years, but no one has ever used them the way Americans (and now everyone else) now do in their IPAs. The amount of bitterness that did not come through the boiling process was so insignificant that, even during the last hundred years when we understood brewing chemistry, nobody bothered to consider other sources.

So when brewers started shifting away from kettle hops to late-addition, post-kettle, and dry hopping in IPAs, they expected them to be low in bitterness. That's what the manuals said they'd be, and when you plug in your hop schedule to a formula that calculates BUs, they come out very low. But brewers found that it was wrong--their beers were bitter, sometimes pretty sharply so. When I spoke to Ben Edmunds about hops for my (soon to be released!) homebrew book, he told me:

 “I think all the formula out there are nonsense. It’s simply not true. We really need to retool what we use as our utilization for whirlpool and late kettle additions across the board for all the beers. The thing it opened our eyes to was that from a balance point of view, we were way higher in BUs than we wanted. So we started peeling away, peeling away. And the beers all got better. So the way we calculate it is that the 60 minute addition should add no more than 5-10 BUs.”

And so brewers are adding less kettle hops, but not because more iso-alpha acids are being absorbed into the beer than we thought, but because these formerly-marginal sources of bitterness were now being added in such volume that they became the majority source. Soon we will literally be re-writing the books.

As always, if you missed our interviews with Tom, track them down on Soundcloud. These quotes come from our second interview, which has several moments of similarly enlightening wisdom. Give it a listen for sure.

Oregon Beer Awards

The Oregon Beer Awards were handed out last night, and there were a few surprises. The first came when Wolf Tree (Seal Rock) won the first gold medal. Wait, who? That happened several times throughout the night, as obscure breweries took home medals: Freebridge (the Dalles), Back Pedal (Portland), Salem Ale Works, and Wild Ride (Redmond). Wolf Tree, incidentally, "is one of very few breweries operating on a working cattle ranch." I have no doubt about that.

Meanwhile, some high-profile breweries got mostly elbowed off the podium--pFriem, Block 15, and The Commons took home just four medals combined. That kind of thing happens when you have a blind-tasting competition. (Upright, a member of that often-lauded tier, pulled a hat trick, getting a bronze, silver, and gold, so some order was restored to the universe.)

The big winner, by a country mile, was Breakside, which took home ten medals total, including four gold. There were only 22 categories, which means Breakside managed to win a staggering 15% of the awards--in a competition with over 900 beers from 114 breweries. Tourists visiting the city often overlook Breakside or seem surprised when I suggest they go visit--this is a pretty good example of why locals keep buzzing about it. (Though from the perspective of optics, there is something slightly awkward about seeing the festival organizer, Breakside's Ben Edmunds, trot up on the stage so many times to pick up hardware.)

Maybe the best moment of the night was the short film put together by Lucas Chemotti and Ezra Johnson-Greenough to honor the late publican Don Younger, who was voted into the hall of fame:



Two years ago, when the OBA asked for nominations for the hall of fame, they forbade us from choosing posthumous candidates. Something like 75% of us ignored that and nominated Fred Eckhardt anyway (they relented and he was honored). Don is a worthy follow-up. Now maybe the organizers will get their wish and we can start honoring the living legends.

A couple other odd notes. Of all the beers submitted, 140 used Lactobacillus. 140! This is a trend no one could have seen developing even a decade ago. Related to that, Cascade Brewing, which is famous for using only Lactobacillus in its sour ales, won gold in the "Wood + Barrel-aged Sour + Brett category." Ron Gansberg is so opposed to Brettanomyces he used to dump barrels that had been wood-inoculated. I don't know if Framblanc 2015, the winner, had any Brett, but even winning the category is jarring.

Oh, and Ezra wore a tie.

Finally, a comment to organizers of the ceremony. Waiting outside in line for thirty minutes is not acceptable to get into a pre-ticketed event. The venue at Revolution Hall is great--for a crowd half that size. It's a rolling mosh pit with ten-minute beer lines. The ceremony is an awkward blend of awards-show pretension and in-group humor. I really felt for the poor MC, a comedienne whose jokes fell flat in a crowd where guys from a hop farm got a giant roar from the audience. The awards show itself doesn't know whether it wants to be for the industry or the public, and striking the unhappy medium between the two just isn't working. It's still a lot of fun, but that part needs to be tweaked.

Congrats to all the winners, the organizers, and the judges.

Big Beer Makes a Big Move

Each year, General Distribution's Jim Fick closely tracks the sales of Oregon beer in Oregon, and he very graciously forwards me the spreadsheet with the numbers. Frustratingly, the OLCC, which tracks these numbers, has gotten fairly lax and the figures aren't terribly reliable. One obvious example is that they somehow don't capture CBA's sales (Widmer/Redhook/Kona)--one of the two largest breweries in the state. Some of their other numbers are suspect as well. Given these troubles, I figured 2015 would be the last year I commented on these, but there are a couple things that leap out so profoundly I can't help but comment on them. Actually, commenting may not even be necessary--just look at these two graphs.

and

To put precise numbers to these--excluding GoodLife, for which the OLCC had no numbers in 2015--the two beer companies owned by multinational corporations grew 18,161 barrels in 2016, and the other top ten breweries grew 10,851. Combined. And even that sort of understates matters. Have a look at the top gainers in 2016:

ABI and MillerCoors account for 40% of all gains among the ten breweries growing the fastest. There is probably a lot of context one could provide to explain why these two brands grew so much (discounting, distribution, etc), but the fact is they did. Oregon has one of the most parochial markets in the country, and they still posted these remarkable increases. Two of the top five best-selling brands in the state are owned by companies in Wisconsin Chicago and Leuven, Belgium.

Things change. Who knows if this is a stable trend and whether 10 Barrel and Hop Valley will continue to grow--or even keep their share (look what happened to BridgePort). But for the moment they're selling like hotcakes, and I doubt there's a brewer in the state who's not unsettled by this development.

Troubles With Travel

If you were to name the four or five hottest breweries right now, measured in beer geek coolness points, Boston's Trillium Brewing would have to be on that list. They are makers of many different types of beer, but are famous for being one of the charter members of the New England IPA movement, with all the requisite rarity and excitement. Well, despite having failed to find any of their rare offerings when I was back in New England in November, I got to try my first can when friend-of-the-blog Mason Astley spent his hard-earned time and money securing Fort Point Pale Ale and sending one my way.

I was very excited about this because, while I think there's no special style* to be found here, I have been mighty impressed by the work New Englanders have been doing with hops. Places like Maine Beer Co, Bissell Brothers, and Hill Farmstead understand our little friend, Humulus lupulus. Maybe not uniquely (I could point to a few guys around here who have passing familiarity), but decidedly. And by all accounts--including Mason's--Fort Point is one of their best beers. (Not that these things matter too much, but it is a top-ten pale as rated by BeerAdvocates).

So it was to my surprise and disappointment to discover this waiting for me:

So murky as to be dark pouring out. Very much a pond water rather than Orange Julius cloudy. Poor head, gone in 30 seconds. Aroma is orange passionfruit with a hint of sweat underneath. Flavor is fairly sharp bitterness with a rindlike astringency. Mouthfeel is fluffy to gritty. The tropical notes present far more on the nose than palate. Very little malt character. Slight burnt rubber aftertaste. 

Those are not the tasting notes of a world-beater. Those are not even the tasting notes of a particularly good beer. I sent them to Mason last week and he was surprised and chagrined--this was not the beer he knew. There's no accounting for taste and I could just be missing the subtle genius of this beer. I don't think that's what's going on here; I believe were Mason to have tried this beer, he would more or less agree with the notes. So what's going on?

Beer is inherently unstable. Brewers tease chemical compounds into an arrangement that will not last. They begin interacting with each other and that particularly nefarious enemy oxygen will begin to stale the flavors. This happens in all beers, but not at the same rate. Some beers are incredibly fragile, ready to collapse like a house of cards into a pile of decomposing, once-brilliant flavors. Among the most delicate elements are hop flavors and aromas, which are driven by volatile compounds that begin degrading immediately even in the best circumstances. Send a beer across country, where it may be subjected to temperature fluctuation and agitation--two accelerants to degredation--and even a relatively young can might well end up like the one I received.

This is an important cautionary tale about modern IPAs. So much of the hop character comes not from the more stable iso-alpha acids formed during longer boiling, but volatile compounds in the oil. We know how evanescent those flavors and aromas can be from observation, but I don't know how much study has been done on trying to stabilize them in the package. Moreover, we're in a realm of brewing that is out in front of the science. When we were in Corvallis last week, hops researcher Tom Shellhammer mentioned that perceived bitterness and astringency may also come from other sources (polyphenols?--I can't find the passage from our interview) than iso-alpha acids. How do these astringent elements change with time, agitation, and heat? I was picking up sharp, prickly notes that had a quality of astringency, like citrus rind. Was that present in the brewery-fresh version?

The category we now call IPA is hugely broad, and at one side of the spectrum can be made so that it's pretty shelf-stable. But on the other side--the side that tickles the beer geeks' fancy--it's not clear that this is the case. What happens when a brewery like Trillium scales up and has the capacity to start sending their beer around the Northeast? Can they find a way to package the freshness so that it lasts even 30 days? I have my doubts. And interestingly, I kind of hope it's not possible to stabilize this. If breweries have to sell their beer at the source to ensure these flavors and aromas survive, that means people will have to continue to patronize them there. That means I won't be getting any brewery-fresh Trillium in Oregon, but I can live with that if it encourages a market for hundreds of small breweries nationwide serving fresh beer.

The Beer There: Olde Mecklenburg (Charlotte, NC)

Periodically--too infrequently, if you want my opinion--a friend of the blog will feel inspired to send me beer from their distant location. When breweries send me beer, I make no promises to review or ever even comment on them (though I will drink them; I'm not a halfwit), but when a person spends hard-earned cash to purchase and send beer from a brewery, my hard and fast rule is: always review them.

Today we have three beers sent from Daniel Warner, who lives in the far Carolinas (I use the plural because while I believe he lives in South, he regularly drifts to North). Daniel and I have developed an e-bromance over our shared love of German and Czech beers, and one of his go-to breweries is Charlotte's Olde Mecklenburg. They make not a single IPA or cucumber sour; in fact, the only beer not drawn from the German oeuvre is a Baltic porter--which is not much of a heresy as those things go. This is interesting if not quite unheard of--our own Occidental and Heater Allen follow the same prescription. What is unusual is their success with this model:

"OMB started to build a dedicated following that’s never really stopped growing. Today, in a new, larger space that features a spectacular eight-acre German-style Biergarten, a state-of-the-art 60-barrel Brewery (largest locally owned craft brewhouse in the state), and a dine-in Brauhaus."

That says ... something about North Carolina, though I'm not sure what. Even Urban Chestnut has conceded hoppy ales to their customers, and St Louis is about as lager-friendly as you're going to find. And to add further intrigue to this mystery, their flagship beer is an altbier. What in the blue hell? North Carolinians, I do not get you.

All right, enough with the anthropology--let's move on to the beer.

Copper (altbier)
The flagship, I hate to say, would not be mistaken for a Düsseldorf alt. It looks like one: its a gorgeous beer, with a deep copper and perfect clarity that seems to make it almost glow from the inside. But in flavor profile, it's distinctly American, with a slightly syrupy caramel note offset by rather sharp hopping. In Düsseldorf, the alts are characterized by a downy softness and even in the hoppy Uerige, the bitterness is rounded and lacking bite. The real key to a altbier is a minerality that I believe comes from hardened water; Daniel obscurely believes this to be a function of the yeast (feel free to debate that in comments); whatever, it ain't here. It's a nice beer, but a bit too bimodal for me--thick caramel offset by sharp hops, rather than a harmony between the two.

Capt Jack Pilsner
This is an interesting and unusual pilsner. It has a surprisingly sweet malt note up front, and this is balanced by pretty assertive hopping. I don't recognize the malt, which is more candylike and less grainy than is common. It is perfectly clear again--I'm beginning to get a sense of the house preference here--and pale as January sunlight. Olde Mecklenburg gives zero info about their beer, so I'm left to guess at the last element--a touch of diacetyl. I would guess this is an intentional homage to Plzeň, and it is both nicely integrated and subtle. But that's only a guess. Definitely a cool little beer and unusual, which is what you want with a style that can seem generic if handled badly.

Hornet's Nest (hefeweizen)
One should always save the best for last--and this was my fave of the three. I forgot to rouse the yeast and it had of course settled, so I got just a haziness rather than dense cloudiness. (User error.) I was also surprised at the low level of effervescence, which is far lower than the Bavarian examples. These are quibbles, however--it's a wonderful beer. Very spicy and almost absent banana, which is my preference. I speculated that they don't use the Weihenstephan yeast, which produces banana like a Panamanian jungle, but Daniel replied that he believes they ferment very cold, which would suppress ester production (the banana comes from isoamyl acetate. The spice is, additionally, intriguing in its complexity. There's definitely clove there, but black pepper and something that reminds me of apple tannin. It has the soft, fluffy mouthfeel you want and expect. It is, over all, a wonderful beer and my fave of the lot.

Based on photos, the place looks like a spectacular, very German, beer hall and it will be my first stop if I ever make it to Charlotte.

Understanding Hop Aromas and Flavors

We have a very special episode of the Beervana Podcast for you this week, and I want to tease it by quoting from a section of the interview. Patrick and I visited the labs and brewery of Tom Shellhammer, who is a professor of fermentation science at Oregon State University and one of the world's leading hops researchers. Before we did the interview, he took us around his labs, stopping at one point in front of stacks of small bottles containing aroma compounds found in hops. He uses these in classwork as a way of giving students a pure, condensed version of these aromas. We took a whiff of the "stone fruit" and "catty" bottles.

As we spoke about the catty scent, Tom referenced a class of compounds that have started to get more attention--thiols. These are sulfur-containing aroma compounds in hop oil that are responsible for both the deeply tropical aromas in many recent hop varieties, but also aromas some of us find objectionable (sweat, onion, garlic). Here's Tom, in a quick-and-dirty transcript from the podcast:

Thiols are a class of chemical compounds that have sulfur in them. So that sulfur part is what makes the compound a thiol. Not that all sulfur compounds are thiols, but a thiol has sulfur in it; that's the key component to that. Myrcene and linalool don't have sulfur in them. Myrcene is a hydrocarbon. [Describes the chemical structure.] Linalool is an oxygenated version of that, so it's got an oxygen component in it that does things to its functionality and its solubility. Hydrocarbons as a class tend to be more woodsy, herbal, and somewhat floral. They oxygenated versions of these things like linalool and geraniol tend to be floral and fruity. And then we move to this thiol class.

The hydrocarbons make up to 75 to 90% of the hop oil, the oxygenated fraction makes up almost the rest, and then less than 1% are these sulfur compounds. Tiny, tiny amount. But the thing about them that make them so important is the aroma-detection thresholds of these things are three to four, maybe five, orders of magnitude lower than these other compounds. With myrcene, you need about 300-500 parts per billion. Sounds like a small amount, but not quite a part per million. And the thiols, their aroma thresholds are parts per trillion. A little goes a long way with a thiol.

The thiol compounds can be stinky like onions and garlic but they can also be potent tropical fruity, citrusy, but also animal-y, stinky, sweaty/BO. 

One of the reasons some people absolutely love hops like Summit and Nelson Sauvin is because they're getting the fruit. But I am apparently hyper-sensitive to thiols, and I get the onion and sweat.

This podcast, I'm pleased to say, is filled with gems like this. (It's part one of our visit down there. Next week we go to the test brewery at OSU and join the head brewer there, Jeff Clawson. Hop talk continues as we sample beer students made in the brewery.)  Definitely give it a listen:


Finally, if this all seems irresistible to you (and how can it not??), Tom and Jeff Clawson are leading a two-day course in Portland for those of you who'd like access to some of the content he presents in his coursework, but who don't have the time or money to take a class in Corvallis.

Our Origins of Beer Flavors and Styles workshop is an experiential sensory course that will guide you through the brewing process from raw materials to finished beer. Through hands-on instruction, participants will learn how the main raw materials used in brewing process (malt, water, hops, and yeast) impact beer flavor and aroma. Participants will work through standards and exercises with the goal of highlighting how each of these materials impacts beer flavor. Guiding tastings, focused with a historical lens, will also walk participants through on how these raw materials have impacted beer styles historically overtime. Over this two-day course, participants will evaluate 8 beer styles and over 35 beers.

Friday, March 17 - Saturday, March 18, 2017

If memory serves, a part of the class will involve those little glass vials of hop aromas. Soon you, too, will be able to distinguish thiols, hydrocarbons, and oxygenated hydrocarbons from one another. Follow this link to register.

How Doomed Are We?

Raptor of death.

Pete Dunlop has an excellent but alarming post in which he warns:

AB is quietly implementing a plan designed to bury independent craft brewers. And they might just pull it off...

You might not know it, but the High End kicked ass in 2016, a pretty lousy year for craft beer. The High End's growth rate hit 32 percent, easily trumping the craft segment's single digit growth. Bigly. Every High End brand grew and they're all showing continued growth into 2017.

High End is of course ABI's portfolio of erstwhile American craft breweries (Goose Island, Elysian, 10 Barrel, Breckenridge, et al).  His post led to a spirited debate on Facebook in which two camps formed: 1) we are so screwed, and 2) don't overreact; it's not as bad as it looks. Since you know me as a man of subtle and restrained opinion, I will refrain from identifying my own camp. Rather, I'd like to point out a few variables to consider as you decide which team you'd like to join.

The Emergence of Craft Tiers
 Until pretty recently, when you went to the grocery store all the beer in the craft segment (hereafter "craft beer" for brevity) was about the same price. Some sixers might be on periodic discount, but this was a retailer decision. Not too long ago, we saw the emergence of an upper tier of beer that was noticeably more expensive and shortly thereafter, a tier of cheaper craft. This was inevitable, as brewers began to segment and find sales in different pockets of the craft segment.

Guess where ABI's High End products mostly live? Sure, Goose Island still has a giant barrel program, but they're all about mainstreaming Goose IPA as the national mass market IPA. They do this through the efficiencies of their giant plants and distribution network, and they use it to drive down costs. The margins get thinner and thinner, but that's okay so long as the volume's going up. But most craft brewers will stick to the middle tier or gravitate to the upper tier. I've already talked about "mass craft," and when we look at Pete's numbers, we're seeing an explosion within that segment.

Retailers Follow Customers
There are no end of stories about the ways in which big companies attempt to pervert the market. In the 90s, Bud initiated a power play against craft beer by demanding its distributors only sell their products--something it toyed with again recently. Pay-to-play rumors are ubiquitous, and more than a few turn out to be real. Most recently, I have heard a rumor this week that Kroger, which owns a substantial amount of Portland's grocery outlets, was going to start radically paring back their 22-ounce offerings, apparently a sop to ABI.

I have no doubt that ABI will use its increasing might to control things at the distribution and retail level--they've done it in the past, and it is a great way to increase market share. There are many legal mechanisms for this kind of thing, which is exactly why we have antitrust laws. But here's the thing: retailers service customers, not manufacturers. Big breweries will try to limit the offerings on the shelves, but retailers aren't going to sacrifice business just to please a big partner. In competitive markets like Oregon's, it would be bad business indeed for a grocery chain to limit the sale of locals in favor of a giant section that includes Goose Island, Devil's Backbone, and Four Peaks. The reason AB's distributor-loyalty program collapsed in the 90s was because customers wanted variety and Bud couldn't provide it. 

Don't Over-value Current Trends
Humans can't help themselves. We over-value current trends. If you Google "craft beer sales" and limit the search to 2013, you find article after article trumpeting the unstoppable juggernaut that is craft beer. (Sample title: "Craft beer sales to triple within 10-year period, says research group.") In those heady years, everyone was writing the obituary of ABI.

Today we're seeing similar numbers from the High End (32% growth!), and our minds begin to accept that as a stable trend. Likewise, we hear that some of the bigger craft breweries had years of stagnation or decline, and that also seems stable. Never mind that craft grew at something like 7% overall, which is a much more impressive figure, given the size of the segment, than the High End's growth spurt on its much-smaller base.  Indeed, you'd sort of expect ABI's brands to get quite a jump-start given 1) that many of them were relatively small to start with, 2) ABI has a nationwide network and the might of the biggest beer company in the world, and 3) ABI appears willing to exchange profit for growth, at least in the short term.

______________

On Facebook, I argued pretty strongly for one of the camps (doomed vs not doomed). The truth is neither I nor anyone else can see into the future. Pete thinks the market is headed in the direction of mass craft, and that the number of drinkers who want high-quality locally-made beer is going to lose out. I'd bet against it, but I wouldn't bet much. 

Still, I do think nearly all of the analysis is a reaction to current trends. So far, we have seen no brand in the craft segment grow over a couple million barrels (I think that's roughly where Blue Moon is, but they're pretty secretive about those numbers). It's easy to grow at 50% or even 100% when you're making 100,000 barrels of beer. But where's the ceiling? If I squint hard enough, I can see a world in which Goose IPA stops all comers in their tracks. But that takes an awful lot of squinting. I wouldn't bury craft just yet.

Oregon Breweries Get Political

Yesterday, the President of the United States stood before the press and told them: "We got 306 because people came out and voted like they've never seen before so that's the way it goes. I guess it was the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan." This was for an election in which he received fewer votes than his opponent that happened three months ago. This kind of disconnect with reality has provoked heretofore apolitical entities into action--including a group of Portland beer fans who formed into a group called the Beer Party PDX. On Monday, they host their inaugural initiative:

The Beer Party PDX Launch Event takes place on Monday, February 20 at participating businesses. 100% of the revenue from purchased kegs will go to the ACLU. Participating bars include Bailey’s Taproom, Bazi Bierbrasserie, Beer Mongers, Belmont Station, Imperial, Lombard House, Roscoe’s, Saraveza, The Thirsty Sasquatch, The Upper Lip, Tin Bucket, and Uptown Market. Participating breweries include Baerlic, Base Camp, Bull Run Cider, Burnside, Cider Riot!, Coalition, Crooked Fence, Culmination, Double Mountain, Heater Allen, Machine House, Matchless, Montavilla, New Belgium, Ninkasi, Pfriem, Ruse, The Commons, Three Magnets, Uptown Market, and Vertigo.  

Since Trump's election, the once safely-sequestered world of politics has been aerosolized and released into the environment, where it touches everything. I guess it will have to be a running theme here on the blog, since every week seems to bring another example of the way in which breweries have entered the political fray. As recently as a few months ago, this wouldn't have seemed like a realm breweries would eagerly enter--partisan politics divides, which means shrinking your potential customer base. But as unprecedented as a President who flagrantly lies about an election we all just witnessed, so is the reaction against him. With Beer Party PDX, we're seeing the contours of how they're trying to take a stand without falling down a partisan tunnel.

As far as I can tell, nowhere does the group use the words "Trump," "Republicans," or "Democrats." Instead, it's mission is "to organize members of the PDX beer community in order to effectively protect and promote basic civil rights including voter access, freedom of speech, and equal rights." In regulating political speech, the courts have regularly allowed nonprofits to organize around specific issues but not partisan candidates. It's a line we've come to recognize as separating the inner and outer core of political action. Beer Party PDX's issues are clearly political; they're not partisan. A brewery can far more easily join the political conversation when the discussion revolves around speech, ballot access, and civil rights rather than the President himself.

It's also worth noting that smaller breweries have greater latitude here. Donald Trump managed just 17% of the vote in Multnomah County, where Portland is located. A small brewery with no plans to sell much outside the cities in Oregon doesn't have a lot to lose by speaking out. Larger breweries like Deschutes, Craft Brewers Alliance, and Rogue, which have distribution in many red states, may be more cautious--though it's therefore impressive to see New Belgium and Ninkasi take the plunge and join this event. Not every brewery has leadership with clear political preferences, but among those that do, more and more are speaking out. It's really a remarkable moment.

I'm starting a new label, "The Trump Effect," for these kinds of posts--I have a hunch this is far from the last one.

How to Tank Spectacularly in the New Market

Update. By some cosmic serendipity, Patrick and I went to Corvallis yesterday to record an interview with Tom Shellhammer--a hops researcher and professor in the Fermentation Sciences program at OSU. As we were touring their test brewery, he mentioned how supportive BridgePort has been, and that Carlos Alvarez had cut them a check for $100,000 to support their projects. This doesn't change any of my analysis below, but it certainly adds an important layer to the BridgePort story.

(l-r) John Foyston, Dick Ponzi, Carlos Alvarez

Over at Willamette Week, Matthew Korfhage has an article about Oregon's tightening beer market. The story is an Oregonized version of one we've seen applied to the national market a number of times over the past couple years. Thumbnail: in a tightening market, it's harder for the biggest players to maintain their barrelage even while small and mid-sized breweries continue to post big numbers. This is, in fact, what you'd expect in a mature market and it's not particularly surprising. Korfhage's case-in-point in the article is BridgePort, which is busy imploding before our eyes--but I think this illustrates a different lesson: in a tightening market, a brewery can no longer make a series of stupid decisions and expect to avoid tanking spectacularly.

We have to go back a ways to tell the story. BridgePort is Oregon's oldest extant brewery, and was for the first 20 years of its existence synonymous with the city of Portland. Its flagship beer was named after the city's beloved bird (Blue Heron), it had one of the best pubs in the city--a pilgrimage site for beer travelers. It cemented its connection through things like Old Knucklehead, a barleywine that featured a prominent local beer guy on the label. And then, in 1996, the brewery released its IPA, a beer that changed the course of brewing in Oregon. BridgePort was, ten years ago, one of our healthiest; it sold 24,000 barrels in Oregon, making it the third-largest seller in the state.

But it was about that time that the consequences of a decision made a decade earlier started to become evident. In 1995, Gambrinus, a Texas-based Corona importer, bought BridgePort. It took owner Carlos Alvarez a while before he started tinkering heavily with the direction of his Portland acquisition, but the first real danger sign came when he renovated the pub, turning it into a generically upscale restaurant and destroying one of the company's chief assets.

His next step was to begin tinkering with the beer lineup (only one beer, IPA, survives from a decade ago). This was inevitable and smart, and most breweries have followed a similar course. But BridgePort's approach was haphazard and bizarre.* They killed off brands like Old Knucklehead and Blue Heron that had strong niche followings. They introduced a series of random beers that had no native connection to BridgePort's identity. Some were good (Hop Czar), some not (Cafe Negro) (seriously, that was one of their great ideas). They let the IPA languish. The approach seemed to be: let's release whatever's a year out of fashion and hope to catch the dregs of a wave. 

How's that working out? Here's their Oregon sales numbers, via the OLCC:

Three years ago, Alvarez and his executives came up to Portland for a dog and pony show celebrating the 30th anniversary. It was without a doubt the weirdest event I've ever been to. Alvarez was aggressively out of touch with Portland and seemed to go out of his way to emphasize that we were doing it wrong. The restaurant chain Chili's came in for a lot of praise, and that seems to be the model he's attempted to place on BridgePort. He was happy to trademark the word "Beervana" and promulgate the slogan "keep Portland beered," but he seems to dislike anything actually weird. I doubt "Portlandia" occupies a lot of space on the Alvarez TiVo.

In my review of the newly renovated pub back in 2006, I wrote this, rather more hopefully than subsequent events warranted:

But it is not a classic, nor does it reflect anything intrinsic about the brewery or Portland. Styles will change and so, presumably, will the brewery. In ten or fifteen years, as aesthetics have changed, it will have the dog-earred, slightly embarrassing aspect trendy restaurants inevitably acquire. And then Gambrinus can update it. I hope, for the sake of the brewery and the city, that the company recognizes the beauty and history resident in the massive beams that still span the old warehouse and restore some of the old Portland funkiness. That may seem a long wait, but hey--I recall the brewery of 1991, and it doesn't seem that long ago. The beams will still be there.

It turns out that wasn't a one-off; it was a signal of the future direction. And indeed, the pub hasn't aged well.

Craft breweries have to connect to their local market to succeed. There are a few rare exceptions--Rogue sells 84% of its beer outside the state--but even breweries like Widmer and Deschutes depend enormously on local sales. The Texas-based ownership of BridgePort has not just neglected its home market, but seems actively antagonistic to it. Until recently, it was possible for BridgePort to bumble along and still hang onto its local volume, which was basically flat from 2006-2013. But mature markets are not kind to bumblers. Why is anyone going to gamble on a six-pack of ORA (Oatmeal Red Ale) when there are twenty other much safer bets at the store? They're not. The numbers starkly demonstrate this point.

Ten years ago, BridgePort was one of Oregon's best and best-selling breweries. It had the kind of credibility you can't manufacture. It was indelibly connected to the city and seemed to be one of the most stable, reliable breweries in the country. Today it teeters on the edge of failure. If we were running a dead pool now, it would be at or near the top. It's main function now seems to be as a cautionary tale about how not to run your brewery.

_____________________
*Based on conversations with people inside the brewery and direct observation of the way Alvarez treats his employees, I think this comes entirely from San Antonio. I have long admired the work people do at the brewery, who have to turn out quality products in spite of the terrible leadership from above. My criticism is for the decision-makers, not the brewers.

Valentine Sherpa: Love Potion #9

No beer sounds better on paper than a fruit stout--and that's where I first encountered the idea. It appeared in the recipes section of Charlie Papazian's classic Complete Joy of Homebrewing (in print since 1976!), and seemed so obvious. What goes better with cherry than chocolate? Alas, no beer more often fails to live up to our expectations than a fruited stout. I have had maybe five in the last twenty years that were good, but none that fully lived up to the simple obviousness of the concept--until now.

Just in time for Valentine's Day, Block 15 has released a seductive treat equal to its billing. Love Potion #9 is a raspberry rather than cherry stout, and melts like a chocolate truffle on the tongue. The challenge to this style is finding the balance, of ratcheting back the flavors so they don't overwhelm each other. The effect of the beer should be decadence; brewers almost always shoot too high, though, finding excess instead. Love Potion succeeds because the intense, silken dark chocolate that floods the mouth is immediately followed by the slightly tart berry. That acidity is key; it adds structure and restraint to the various sweet notes swirling around. The beer is, for its style, dry; another key to success. As you can see, I had a pint, and never did the berry-and-chocolate sweetness begin to collect on my palate. Each sip was an infusion of intensity but never excess, allowing my senses to revisit the sensation of a liquid truffle over and over again. It is almost impossible to imagine that I would not only drink a whole pint of this stuff, but consider going in for a second. But there it was.

This is the beer I imagined when I read about it all those years ago.

________________
"Beer Sherpa Recommends" is an irregular feature.  In this fallen world, when the number of beers outnumber your woeful stomach capacity by several orders of magnitude, you risk exposing yourself to substandard beer.  Worse, you risk selecting substandard beer when there are tasty alternatives at hand.  In this terrible jungle of overabundance, wouldn't it be nice to have a neon sign pointing to the few beers among the crowd that really stand out?  A beer sherpa, if you will, to guide you to the beery mountaintop.  I don't profess to drink all the beers out there, but from time to time I stumble across a winner and when I do, I'll pass it along to you.

A Drive Down the Coast

The view from The Horn in Depoe Bay

The Oregon Coast is slowly filling out its compliment of breweries. In the near future, it should be possible to drive Highway 101 from Astoria all the way to Brookings and get a beer from a brewery in every town along the way. I have driven a chunk of that coast this winter (by far the best time to visit the Oregon Coast) and visited three new or newish breweries. Below are my findings.

Public Coast Brewing, Cannon Beach
Twenty-six miles south of Astoria, you come into Cannon Beach, and one of the first structures you pass is Public Coast, a brewery named for Oregon's law that prohibits private ownership of beaches. It's in a building once occupied by the Lumberyard restaurant, and it follows that place's general vibe and approach, which is to say, upscale mainstream. It's a beautiful space, keyed by the presence of the fermenters and bright tanks that seem to peer in from the brewery. Their height lends an air of grandeur to things.

Public Coast is owned by Ryan Snyder, whose background is in resorts. That's the feel you get here. There's a ton of wood, and the pub goes from cozy and shadowy on one side to bright and sunny on the other, spilling out into a large patio scattered with tables. It is nevertheless a bit faceless, and TVs flicker with sports. The menu is similar, featuring basically burgers and fish and chips. They are muy expensive--I got the most stripped-down cheeseburger with fries and it set me back $15; they can range up to $18 sans fries. They're also fairly average. (The five dollar onion rings are well below average--avoid.) It's not bad food, but nothing to make a special trip for.

The beer, made by erstwhile chef and homebrewer Will Leroux, is more promising. He's got a traditional slate of hoppy beers, but dabbles with experimental projects like a peach wit (perhaps his best beer) and a sour blackberry stout. I presume it's kettle-soured, and it's tart; fruity notes help soften the electric current, and soft roastiness helps offset it. I ordered a pint and quite enjoyed it. For my hoppy selection, I chose a Simcoe-hopped pale ale that had a fair amount of diacetyl, but never mind. These are above-average beers, and a good reason to stop in.

Depoe Bay or ocean view; your choice.

The Horn Public House, Depoe Bay

A horn, spouting.

A hundred and twenty miles south of Astoria you come to Depoe Bay, a rocky crescent that captures the sea in a roiling cauldron of energy. As it has smashed into the lava rock over the millennia, the sea water has carved out channels and tunnels. Sometimes a wave enters one and sends surf skyward through vents in the rock--"spouting horns" in the local vernacular. Since 1951, one of the most popular hangouts in Depoe Bay had been a restaurant called The Spouting Horn. When long-time proprietor Betty Taunton decided to retire in 2014, no one was prepared to take it over, and it closed. In homage, the new brewpub in town, located in the same building, calls itself The Horn.

Vignette #12: Michael Schnitzler (Uerige)

Brewer vignettes feature quotes from brewers I picked up in my travels around the world.

Two unrelated quotes today from Michael Schnitzler, the Weihenstephan-trained owner of Hausbrauerei Uerige. To go with them, I'll show you two photos, one of Michael, and one of the brewery. It contains, as you will see, one of the more unusual anachronisms still in use in Germany.

On Altbier's Health
“In general, the altbier is in bad condition. The smaller breweries are successful, that is not a problem, but if you remove the big breweries that were far more original Düsseldorfer breweries—now Frankenheim for example is with Warsteiner, Diebels is with Anheuser-Busch, Schlösser is somewhere, nobody knows really, then altbier is [not doing well].”

“The former biggest Düsseldorf breweries, they started twenty or thirty years ago to quit brewing in the town. [Real estate] prices are so high that everyone says, come on, it’s not [worth it] to sell beer. Let’s put it out to rent. The same with Munich—it’s even worse than Düsseldorf.  So the breweries were sold to Warsteiner—Frankenheim—to Anheuser Busch; so where is the echte Düsseldorfer brauerei, the real Düsseldorf brewery? That’s the problem everywhere.“

Wooden Casks
(It is typical to find altbier served from wooden casks perched on the bar; I asked about this.)

“It is just the traditional style of presenting the beers in a nice way. We tap it manually and then we put the barrel on the bar; this is the special way we do it, but there is no fermentation; there is nothing for the taste.”  (They're lined.) He went on to tell the story of why all the casks only have red-painted metal bands when once they came in all different colors. “Now every barrel has a red ring [metal band]. A couple of years ago we had a green one, a yellow one, something like that.  Nobody knows why. The regular customers they saw the barrels with the green ring on it and said, “oh no, we cannot drink this one; the red [ones] have the best beer.”

The coolship at Uerige. They also use a baudelot chiller.

In Defense of Clarity

I like bright beer and I cannot lie...

What humans prize is inversely proportional to what is common. Is this a need to desire what others don't have? Do we have a gene that tells us the rare is useful to survival? Whatever the reason, it's an iron law, and one we follow, in the manner of self-parody, back and forth across the decades.

Take for example the industrial age. Machines allowed us to make objects of perfect lines and proportions--by the millions. Where once we made crude cut-shank nails and left saw marks on our wood, now we make perfectly straight and measured boards and hold them together with machine-made nails that will last centuries. At first, these innovations were greeted with greed: dispensing with the evidence of the human hand was a way of transcending our own imperfection. Eventually, of course, mass-production reduced costs and made these products ubiquitous. Soon our ardor cooled. These once-perfect objects began to seem cheap and disposable. When the artisanal movement emerged as a reaction against the impersonal factory age, products again revealed the makers' hand--and made customers' eyes gleam with desire. Where once we saw imperfection, now we see character and personality.

Which brings us to brewing. The very idea of "craft beer" is a reaction against mass-produced factory stuff. There's a lot of romance involved with this (almost entirely false) dichotomy between craft and industrial, but it is powerful. The more a beer can be tied to images of barns, a sea of swaying barley stalks, and a brewer deep in a mash tun with a canoe oar, the more we can attach that romance to it. In the glass, however, a beer is a beer is a beer. Some may be good, some bad, but it's impossible to look at a glass of beer and know the size of brewery it came from.

I'm pretty sure this is where the current fetish for cloudy, hazy, milkshakey beer comes from. It's a visual cue that says: I am craft. A perfectly brilliant beer not only looks like something that comes from a factory, it is in many ways the product of decades of technical improvement. Most of what causes haze is not desirable in beer, but a lot of it was unavoidable or at least hard to remove in centuries past. Lager-brewing was prized in part because the process produced a bright beer that stood as testament to the brewer's skill. Any beer that was perfectly bright would be likely be free of infection and age. In a real way drinkers could see the quality.

Over time, though, that clarity became associated with lackluster flavor. People began to imagine that the brewer was intentionally trying to filter out anything tasty. To people drinking modern ales, a bit of haze represented the flavor a brewer left in the beer. And, if a bit of haze suggests more flavor, a beer perfectly opaque with chunks must have the most flavor, you feel me?

Patrick, overcome with lust.

This post, now already five hundred words long, is not actually about taking sides. I don't dispute that there's something strangely attractive about the most cloudy beers--they're like an orange milkshake topped by a scoop of vanilla ice cream. (It's no wonder Bavarian weissbiers have been rolling along for four hundred years.) Rather, I'd just like to put in a plug for clarion, haze-free beers.

As a matter of aesthetics, the perfect beer is somewhere between gold and ruby, luminously vitreous, and stippled by a cascade of pinpoint bubbles. I also like darker beers that appear opaque until you hold them to the light and see that brilliance within, like light refracting through a jewel. It's a secret the brewer's hidden for the careful drinker to discover. Anyone who's brewed so much as a batch of homebrew knows that clarity is hard, and so the mind naturally wants to see it as a symbol for good process. I don't mean to praise clarity through that lens, though. A bright, coruscating beer is a gorgeous thing on its own. People who know nothing about beer can stop to appreciate its beauty. Remove beer entirely from all context--if it's bright and limpid, it's as gorgeous as a mountain lake, something anyone with eyes can appreciate.

Incidentally, that beer at the top of the post is a pilsner brewed by Grain Station out in McMinnville. I took that picture at the end of the year and have been meaning to get around to writing this post. It was such a gorgeous beer, so elegant and lovely, and it's stuck in my mind for six weeks now. (It was also very well made and tasty--sort of a hybrid Czech and German pils.) I guess my message here is not to be too blinded by lust for cloudy IPAs that you cannot stop to admire the captivating beauty of a perfectly clear beer.