Month: August 2012

Starting from the bottom. The table is covered with labels from BrewDog Punk IPA bottles. There was a BrewDog beer on tap.

The coaster is from Carlsberg. Big brewery.

The glass is from Mahou, one of Spain’s largest breweries. I tried one beer from Mahou, because you should do that sort of thing in Spain. Very sweet, no hops that you would notice.

The beer is Fort American Pale Ale from Fort Cerveza Artesanal, one of the “next generation” breweries in Barcelona.

We stumbled upon Cat Bar in the Old Town area our last day in Barcelona. We were looking for a Christmas tree ornament, not beer. Turns out this place has a pretty good following in the vegan community (“Vegan artisan beer bar and restaurant featuring 30+ Catalan craft beers”) as well as beer folk.

The owner, Ron (“Just Ron”), happened to be talking to the woman pouring beer about scheduling for the follow week. Very quickly he told me:

– Cat Bar opened in January of 2011 and business has improved at a constant rate.

– That the distributor who handled BrewDog beers had gone bankrupt, which was pretty disruptive.

– That breweries like Fort and Llúpols i Llevats (Glops beer) are a second wave. The first wave isn’t 20 years old, but he said many drinkers find the beers, brewed mostly to mimic classic styles, somewhat pedestrian. Not every beer from the newcomers is all that good, he said, but they certainly are interesting.

I would have liked more bitterness from the Fort APA. A brochure on the bar said it has 20 bitterness units, although pretty obvious late hopping gives it a solid hop presence (Centennial – hmmm, good). OK, and little less caramel malt sweetness.

The day before in a liquor store a local had warned us away from buying Fort, because he said it wasn’t nearly as good in the bottle as on draft. So there’s work to be done. Saw beer from several American small breweries there as well. Including Great Divide (in this case not so) Fresh Hop Ale. Sitting nice and high, where the light could pound every day. Whoever ends up buying that vintage bottle isn’t going to taste the same beer consumers did something like 10 months ago in Colorado.

But that’s another story. Cat Bar, great vibe.

If you have it in you to consider another 2,000-plus words on the subject, “craft brewers as authors” at Ken and Dots Allsorts provokes a few thoughts. Like with Boak & Bailey’s Ten signs of a craft brewery, Ken chooses to criteria other than size and doesn’t try to do the impossible, which would be to make quality part of the definition.

Bottom line:

I think we should understand the relationship between craft brewers and the beer they produce on the model of the relationship between authors and their works. That is, we should see craft brewers as authors. The relevant characteristic of authors for the purposes of this comparison is that authors have a large degree of control over and responsibility for the ultimate form of their work. But there’s more to it. Because the ultimate form of the work is very much their decision, they have a lot personally invested in it. An author wants to write popular books, but they want that to happen because people like the books they write rather than because they research what people already want and write something like that.

This makes it relatively easy to explain (at least to me) why a brewery can be quite large and still make beer the man or woman on the street will call craft.

In other words, what matters for craft beer is the organisational structure of the brewery. This is not a question of absolute number of employees. . . . but the more people there are, the less likely it is that anyone will stand in a properly authorial relationship to the work produced. This is why craft breweries tend to be small, because as breweries get bigger they lose that relationship. Size is a matter of organisational structure.

I like that phrase, authorial relationship to the work produced. Although my view of who contributes to the authorial process might be broader that yours. I’m inclined to give creative credit to more than just the guy who writes the recipes.

Perhaps I also find it easier to find “proper” authorial relationships (honestly, I don’t know), and thus to understand why a single tank at Sierra Nevada Brewing may contain as much beer as the average brewpub makes in a year — and the ones at New Belgium are even bigger. (Got more time? Read SF Weekly on the The Artisanal Irony: The Mass-Produced Hand-Crafted Food Dilemma.)

Six years ago, after Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Craft Brewery invited a group of five other brewers (who Dick Cantwell of Elysian Brewing would then call the “Brett Pack”) to visit Belgium with him I sat in the middle of a roundtable discussion that ended up being a story in All About Beer Magazine. One of my questions was, “Can you still say the beers, the recipes, are your own as you become a larger brewing company?”

Rob Tod of Allagash Brewing answered, “As you business grows you have to have more good people making decisions. The problem with the big breweries is they may have great brewers but their company culture is to dumb down everything they do (to reach a broader audience).”

I want beers from a brewery where the people who work there don’t know any better, as opposed to those from a place where that know what doesn’t work.

And I think all of this aligns with a conclusion Ray Daniels seems to have come to recently during a series of tweets.

Granted, there is a danger of taking this too far, of turning everybody who touches a hop into a rock star (search for “rock stars” at a Good Beer Blog to see what Alan thinks of that) because beer has become part of the “artisan” movement. Joel Stein pointed this out brilliantly (in a slap-your-knee-while-you-laugh way) a while back in Los Angeles magazine.

First, we idiotically agreed to learn every chef’s name. Then every species of fish, every variety of apple, and every type of heirloom wheat. Now farm names—even those of the specific farmer—are expected cultural knowledge, edging out any chance for poets, painters, and people who rant in magazines about food trends. What will we have to memorize next—the names of the guys who pick our fruit? “Oh, Juan Hernandez picked the strawberries in the sorbet? He’s got a very delicate hand!”

In fact, we don’t need to know the name of every brewer (sorry, Jared) who has a hand in each batch produced at [fill in the name of the brewery of your choice]. But I like knowing they are there and that they are allowed to make a difference in the beer that ends up in my glass.

Earlier this week “Garrett Oliver on the Crimes Against Beer” generated the flurry of tweet and blog posts you’d expect in reaction to an article with that headline. And Ray Daniels tweeted “Cicerone is here to help!”

Today Bloomberg Businessweek posted a feature on Daniels and the Cicerone Certification Program. It’s short and it’s a business story (“If I had tried to start this business 10 years earlier, I would not have had the credibility to carry it off. It needs to be the right time, and you need to be the right person.”) But it’s an excuse to talk about beer education.

The story points out that 15,000 people have passed at least the first level Cicerone exam and the number of participants is growing exponentially (thus a new website, rumored for debut next week).

And it’s not the only game in town. The Master Brewers Association of the Americas began hosting Understanding Beer Flavor seminars last year and so far 1,600 have attended classes around the country. Like the Cicerone Program, the MBAA certifies stewards through an examination process.

Yes, those of you itching to comment, I know there are still more. And I could also point out The Brewers Association has just fancied up its Draught Beer Quality website.

Instead back to the MBAA program. Karl Ockert, probably best known as former brewmaster at BridgePort Brewing and now the MBAA technical director assembled the program. Jeff Alworth wrote about it here.

The MBAA has a couple of seminars upcoming, one in Cold Spring, Minn., Sept. 7 and one Sept. 15 in St. Louis. Perhaps they could have chosen a better date in St. Louis. That’s an official beer holiday here because Schlafly’s Hop in the City is that day.

Here’s some of what will be covered, according to a flyer for the seminar:

* Describe beer styles, flavors, and aromas
* Learn how raw ingredients and the brewing process affect beer flavor
* Understand how to maintain beer freshness
* Use the appropriate glassware for each beer type
* Assist customers with pairing food with beer
* Build a vocabulary that goes beyond “malty” and “hoppy”
* Enhance the image of beer

See, somebody’s looking out for Garrett Oliver’s beer.