Month: June 2007

The Ballantine stops here – would you open it?

There’s another Ballantine Burton Christmas Ale on eBay – and this one was brewed for Harry Truman.

Here’s the history of these ales – coveted by beer lovers interested in tasting what’s inside the few remaining bottles even though the beers were brewed 60 and 70 years ago.

What’s different about this one is that the label states that this one was brewed on May 12, 1934 and bottled for President Harry S Truman in December 1949. This bottle comes with a note citing its provenance written on a White House note card with the presidential seal. The card is written by Mrs. M. Esperancilla, whose husband was chief steward on the presidential yacht, the U.S.S. Williamsburg.

So what makes this bottle more valuable – the Burton Ale is inside or that it was bottled for a president?

There other question. Why didn’t he drink it?

There’s more than flavor in a flavor wheel

Lauren SalazarBefore we get to the Slate three-part series on sensory perception and wine a few words of wit and wisdom on that topic from Lauren Salazar of New Belgium Brewing, who spoke Friday in Denver at the National Homebrewers Conference. (That’s her on the right, during a mock judging last year in Seattle, staged for the shooting of American Brew.)

Things I learned I would have added to the earlier discussion here about the mysteries of how (and how we might measure what) we smell and taste:

– To those scientific types who argue that senses of sight, touch and hearing are concrete and smelling and tasting are not her answer is simple. “Yes they are,” she said. “Seeing is not believing. Smelling and tasting is where it’s at.”

– There a second “flavor” wheel (I put the quotation marks around flavor because we’re really talking flavor and aroma), this one just for byproducts of oxidation. If you’re sitting on a tasting panel at New Belgium and call out a beer for being oxidized you can’t stop there – you have to be more specific. This goes to quality control, and more about that in a few paragraphs.

– She presented four samples of Fat Tire dosed with chemicals that reproduce flavors such as acetaldehyde (green apples) and diacetyl (butterscotch; buttered popcorn at higher levels). Although we often cite these as off flavors when judging beer (there are even boxes to check on a BJCP scoresheet) they aren’t inappropriate in every beer.

A bit of green apple in Budweiser is part of its flavor profile. Hints, heck more than hints, of butterscotch make British ales taste like British ales.

“Diacetyl is one of the first words you learn (in judging beer),” Salazar said. “We are American brewers. We are paid to hate diacetyl. You know how much British brewers hate us for that?”

When I posted the flavor wheel last week, Jonathan wrote that the majority of the descriptors on the wheel don’t describe particularly pleasant flavors. Yep. And I think figuring out how to keep the good ones in and the bad ones out – sometimes in beer that is going to be shipped across the country and maybe mishandled along the way – is a craft.

During the lengthy discussions of “what is craft beer?” (start here) I’ve seen it suggested that Sierra Nevada Brewing and Stone Brewing were craft but no longer are because they grew into production breweries.

That’s poppycock. Both Sierra Nevada and New Belgium have new state-of-the-art bottling lines that will take your breath away, but we’re back to the early question: Is the Big Foot (or Mothership Wit) in the glass any different because it passed through a technically superior bottling line?

Salazar and her husband, Eric, oversee the New Belgium barrel program. La Foile is essentially hand bottled. That beer is something we expect from a great brewery.

Salazar also administers a quite sophisticated quality analysis program at New Belgium, with 24 tasters sitting on her in-house panels. A couple of months ago at the Craft (my italics) Brewers Conference Matt Gilliland of New Belgium talked about “Total Oxidation: Exposure and Increased Flavor Stability.” One measure of success is that after beer changes hands several times over the course a few weeks in the distribution system it is still “true to brand” in the glass.

That’s something else we expect from a great brewery.

The craft beer conundrum: What does it mean?

Beer on the mindI looked up the word conundrum to make sure I was using it appropriately (a question or problem having only a conjectural answer). I already knew I couldn’t look up “craft beer” – thus the conundrum.

We’ve debated the challenge of defining craft beer in this blog and maybe 80 percent of those listed to the right, as well as at Rate Beer, Beer Advocate, the Real Beer community and in at least 1,387 American brewpubs. Good bar talk – as witnessed by the scores of comments in the most recent discussion started by Lew Bryson.

A lot of good – and important – reading, but I don’t see a succinct definition emerging. It’s pretty obvious that debating the meaning of craft beer could occupy an entire semester of Beer Philosophy 101 and still there’d be no conclusion.

I can live with that. I spent a good portion of my working life as a copy editor and supervising copy editors. Writing and editing is a lot easier when you’ve got a dictionary to fall back on. And have I little choice but to use the term craft beer in some stories that I write. I just did a quick search in a story I filed last week for New Brewer, the publication that goes to Brewers Association members, and I see I used the phrase three times. In all three cases, even though the definition is imperfect, no other would have worked as well.

So perhaps whenever I type craft beer here I should include a link to the 50th comment, posted by Mr. Bryson himself.

The real subject is beer, or as Lew writes the beer in the glass.

Which takes us back to where the discussion started, a Anheuser-Busch Beach Bum Blonde Ale tasting note, and Lew’s column earlier in the month about the benefits of tasting beer blind.

I have this blog with a name – that to many people doesn’t exactly make sense – predicated on the idea that where your beer comes from (way before it gets in your glass) and how it is made changes what is in the glass and how you feel about it. So I think it’s OK to give extra points (were we scoring the beer – which of course we don’t do around here) to New Belgium Mothership Wit beer because it’s organic or because of the brewery’s commitment to sustainability or because you like bicycles.

But you are shorting yourself if you don’t objectively evaluate what’s in the glass. That means you don’t give a brewer you like a pass when he or she conjures up a below average beer. It means that if you see a good reason to try a beer from a brewery you’re not a fan of that you give yourself an honest chance to like the beer.

Craft is not a synonym for good or an antonym for evil empire.

I started to write a comment to meet Lew’s request to describe the “characteristics (of craft beer) that you can see, taste, and smell in the glass” before I realized (d’oh) the description wasn’t about craft beer, but just beer itself.

Great Divide Samurai: Do not fear the rice

Great Divide SamuraiI suspect more than one “beer geek” will be surprised by Samurai, a new bottle release from Great Divide Brewing in Denver.

Some might just grab a six-pack because of the name (after all, a samurai is a warrior), the excellent packaging and the fact it comes from Great Divide, best known outside of Colorado for its big and bigger beers.

Instead Samurai is lightly golden (as in this picture), a little cloudy, not hoppy, brewed with rice, a modest 5.2% abv and founder Brian Dunn even describes it as “an accessible, super-quaffable beer.” Those are sometimes code words for bland and boring.

Not this beer. Stephen Beaumont waxed romantic about Samurai last year when it only sold on draft and just in a few locations near the brewery. I would simply add it has an elusive spiciness with some wheat beer substance (perhaps because it is unfiltered) though it turns cleanly crisp where a wheat beer might finish with a bit of twang.

Not surprisingly Samurai goes well with fish and Asian food. Great Divide first brewed it as the house beer for a local sushi restaurant. “Then we got busy and quit brewing it,” Dunn said.

The brewery also quit making two of its lighter beers, Whitewater Wheat and Bee Sting Honey. “I thought people were confused about who we were and we decided to narrow the brand focus,” Dunn said. Its stronger beers – four of them 9% abv or more – all rank highly at Rate Beer and Beer Advocate.

“All of a sudden we had no light draft beer,” Dunn said, “and we lost a lot of lines.”

That’s when Great Divide resumed brewing the beer – no longer just for sushi restaurants, but for Denver accounts who wanted a lighter Great Divide beer to sell on tap. It proved popular enough that distribution will widen to all accounts and include bottles.

Because Great Divide’s bigger beers earned the brewery substantial “beer cred” I hope that this beer receives a more open-minded reception than it might otherwise. That’s not because I like it – although I do – but because it is a flavorful alternative.

That’s what small-batch brewers give us.

Aromas, culture and sorting out what we taste

Beer flavor wheelClass will be in session next week when Mike Steinberger launches a three-part series on sensory perception and wine at Slate, the online magazine.

Steinberger warms up with a discussion of why wine writers use the descriptions they do.

What does this have to do with beer? The wine flavor wheel and the beer flavor wheel (click on the image to enlarge) are different, but the fact is that flavors are flavors and aromas are aromas.

The parallels are not perfect. Steinberger talks about the evolution of how the wine writers describe wines, but I’ve never see a similar history of beer tasting notes. But when he documents that there are scientific explanations – that is, fermentation byproducts that can be measured – for flavors and aromas he could just as well be talking about beer.

That’s why I’m looking forward to the series.

Reading his story sent me rifling through notes taken while reading Emperor of Scent.

The book relates mostly to the perfume industry, though there’s plenty about the disagreement (and politics) within the academic community about how we smell. You realize that Luca Turin, the protagonist, doesn’t perceive aromas like you and I. Just as different people perceive beer differently.

Early on Turin says, “You know perhaps the edge I have in turning smell into language is that for me smell has always had an utterly solid reality that, to my utter astonishment, it doesn’t seem to have for other people. Every perfume I’ve ever smelled has been like a movie, sound and vision …”

He also says, “France is a country that understands that, much as in music an orchestra is not just violins, the range of smells that makes life interesting includes some rather severe ones.

“Your taste and smell is part biology and part culture…. When they smell (rotten cheese) Americans think, ‘Good God!‘ The Japanese think, ‘I must now commit suicide.’ The French think, ‘Where’s the bread?'”

As the parent of a 10-year-old American who has developed an affection for stinky (and not cheap) cheese I can tell you that is changing.

Updated June 21: Steinberger so far has examined the age-old stoner’s question: Do you taste what I taste? Then whether or not he’s a “supertaster.” And tomorrow, he’ll explore whether being a supertaster helps you evaluate wine. Some good stuff (good read it), but I’m waiting for all three parts comment. Since I’m off to the National Homebrewers Conference in Denver it will be the beginning of next week before I can.