Month: May 2016

Monday beer links: Sahti, hyperlocal, millennials, hoplore

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 5.30.16

Sahti – What Can We Learn From a Farmhouse Brewer?
There’s a lot here. For instance: “Since house strains for baking and brewing could have been the same, I have been testing how the traditional sourdough starters ferment sahti. So far I have been able to revive one functional brewing strain from a at least decades old baking strain. This particular strain delivers surprisingly neutral malty taste. I will continue to hunt and test traditional baking strains and hopefully in future I encounter more distinctive strains.” [Via Maltainen, h/T @larsga]

Two Brewers Admit Their Methods for Haze.
On the subject of sourdough strains, the “wild” strain at Scratch Brewing in southern Illinois is in fact its sourdough starter. To use it directly means adding a bit of flour to beer, which sometimes settles out (with time) but other times does not. But I am having a problem wrapping my head around the idea of adding flour to beer for the sake of appearance. Haven’t they heard of Tanal A? [Via BeerGraphs]

We’ve seen the future, and it is hyperlocal craft beer.
This leaves me wondering how hyperlocal and the Next Big Thing coexist. “The whole craft beer market has taken on a certain Silicon Valley (or Kendall Square) vibe. You can see the parallels in Lamplighter. They’ve spent years building their product in dorm rooms and basements. Their market is young, desirable, and growing. They think their product — the sours and Brett-fermented beers — has the potential to be the Next Big Thing. And, without having tasted a drop of their beers, droves of hopeful employees are e-mailing them about job openings, happy to start at the bottom if it means a toehold in the industry. In other words, they sound like your typical new Cambridge business: a hot, young startup.” [Via Boston Globe]

Is It OK Not To Be OK With Brewery Takeovers in 2016?.
So after the hyperlocal brewery that captured your affection grows into a local brewery, then a regional brewery, and then a regional brewery big and popular enough to be acquired . . . what next? The straw man that Boak & Bailey mention, that might be me. At least sort of. I am less focused on whether the beer changes than on what happens to the local connection. [Via Boak & Bailey]

Your Handy Guide to Explain Why Millennials Are So Important to Beer.
If you don’t understand why brewing companies big enough to have marketing budgets want the attention of drinkers of prime consumption age then this is an excellent primer. Ultimately, at least we hope, there has to be more than a marketing message. And if people who have been assigned to this demographic put value on local (there’s that workd again), racial diversity, religion, gender equality, those are things that are hard to fake. [Via This Is Why I Am Drunk]

Living in Isolation: How Elitism is Alienating Macro Beer Fans.
This may be true: “Craft beer fanatics are now considered so insufferable as to have developed into a recurring punch line on television shows. Want to signal to the audience that a character is an unbearable jerk? Put a six-pack of fancy beer in his hand as he walks into the party. Worse yet, have him try and offer one of his high priced beauties to another character and then watch him get flatly rejected.” But television is not real life. And I’m not convinced that it is the “Bud bashing” that offends real people, but the whole idea that beer is so frigging important, because it isn’t to them. [Via Beer Advocate]

Hoplore, a defense of stories.
The question that Tiah Edmunson-Morton asks here isn’t that different from one journalists also need to consider. “There is a bit to pause and think about here: being a participant observer. For her that meant participating in the Agrarian hop harvest as a volunteer and being hired by Agrarian as a paid employee, but also working at Independence Heritage Festival and and doing a community survey. I often feel this same distance as an archivist working with living and evolving social, cultural, agricultural communities. I go to festivals or on tours, but I always have a certain ‘documentarian’ distance. I might attend, but as the curator of this archive do I actually participate?” I wrote about Tiah has year for DRAFT magazine, and in reporting the story I talked to Paul Eisloeffel of the Nebraska State Historical Society, who is an advocate for proactive collecting. “It is important for archivists to be able to look at what’s happening in a culture and start collecting now,” he said. But the act of collecting itself has the potential to change what happens going forward. Tricky balance. [Via thebrewstorian]

The five tribes of US wine buyers and the ROI of social media.
Are beer tribes any different? [Via Harpers]

FROM TWITTER, MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND

Yes, there’s a hop named after Frank Zappa

What’s this about a hop called FZMR2?

It has a “peppery citrus and melon” character according in a story about how the collaboration process involved in creating the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic beer (Pat-Rye-Ot) in the Sierra Nevada Beer Camp Across America 12-pack.

It is described as a wild hop found growing in New Mexico, which is not quite correct. It is a cross between neomexicanus varieties collected in New Mexico, then bred in the same manner as hops are elsewhere. Medusa, the hop in Sierra Nevada’s Wild Hop IPA, was “born” the same way.

First, a quick bit of background. The genus Humulus likely originated in Mongolia at least six million years ago. A European type diverged from that Asian group more than one million years ago; a North American group migrated from the Asian continent approximately 500,000 years later. Although there are five botanical varieties of Humulus, H. lupulus (the European type, also found in Asia and Africa; later introduced to North America)and H. neomexicanus (Western North America) are the two of interest to brewers.

Hops of American heritage, which include some grown in Australia and New Zealand, contain compounds found only at trace levels in hops originating in England and on the European continent. Among them is a thiol called 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-one (otherwise referred to as 4MMP), a main contributor to the muscat grape/black currant character associated with American-bred hops such as Cascade, Simcoe, and Citra. It has a low odor threshold and occurs naturally in grapes, wine, green tea, and grapefruit juice.

It is one contributor to what were described as “unhoppy” aromas not long ago and considered undesirable. Today, of course, this “fruity, exotic flavors derived from hops” has helped drive the popularity of IPAs.

Hop breeding was in its infancy at the beginning of the twentieth century when Ernest S. Salmon, a professor at Wye College in England, set out to combine the high resin content of American hops with the aroma of European hops. This approach took hops in a new direction, and eventually to a broader spectrum of aromas. For instance, the pedigree of Citra contains 19 percent Brewers Gold, the first bred hop that Salmon released in 1934.

More recently, brewers have shown interest in using hops of only American heritage. The problem is that few of them seem to have very interesting aromas and they are agronomically unproven.

Todd Bates did not necessarily anticipate any interest in neomexicanus when he began collecting plants growing wild in New Mexico in the 1990s. Bates, who lives on a farm between Santa Fe and Taos, used them in homeopathic tinctures he made, and secondarily for homebrewing. “I found most really suck bad. Horrible flavors,” he explained. “That’s why I decided to breed from a specific group of plants of pure neomexicanus that were thriving in an area of known high levels of naturally occurring uranium.” He thought that would create potentially beneficial mutations.

Each group he found had different traits, but also certain drawbacks — so he began cross breeding them. He did with neomexicanus alone what other breeders were doing with a combination of lupulus and neomexicanus. He did not simply find Medusa growing on a mountainside. She (the hop plants that produce the cones brewers want are all female) resulted from his personal breeding program, and he selected her because of her unique doublet flowers and high beta acid. He initially called her Multi-head because of her appearance.

In 2011 Eric Desmarais planted two of Bates’ varieties in one of his CLS Farms hopyards in Washington’s Yakima Valley. They looked much different than anything else cultivated in Washington. The cone-to-leaf ratio was higher, the nettles on the bines were much larger, the laterals grew differently, and the leaves were a very dark green and almost waxy. “During the growing season, I have consultants walk the fields on a weekly basis, doing disease and pest scouting,” Desmarais said. “These guys have been walking hop yards for 18 years, and walk most of the US hop industry yards. They see just about everything. I didn’t tell them what these were last year on purpose, to see what their reaction was. They knew they were looking at something very different.”

Bates reports that FZMR2 came out of the “Frank Zappa breeding group, which are an F2 generation of a breeding between Multi-head (Medusa) and a nice Rio (its own breeding group) male, and this is plant 2 of the FZRM group.

“Why the Zappa name? Well, I do love and respect Frank Zappa’s music. I grew up on it and still love it, but that’s not the only reason. I looked at how people have historically named hops. Early on, it seemed the place the hop came from gave rise to the names, out of some form of respect of place. Later, I saw names of hops being after the researchers that developed a given hop, a sort of respect or self lauding gave importance to a person’s name. Later, I saw people naming hops all kinds of marketing names meant to look cool on a label, or attract a brewer/hop buyer. I wanted a different type of name for a hop. With music and beer being so intricately linked, I wanted to honor and show respect to a great American musician by putting that name to a hop, that will go on a label, and I wanted that hop to kick ass like an American musician, and Zappa was the clear winner of my choice. Zappa rules!”

Desmarais has only an acre of FZRM2, and Sierra Nevada bought the entire 2015 crop, but it appears to be agronomically superior to Medusa. If it continues to grow well, and if drinkers respond positively to it (Pat-Rye-Ot it its first real test) then Desmarais will expand acreage in 2017.

*****

One related note: I’ll be hanging at Right Proper Brewing in Washington, D.C. on June 7. That’s the day before the National Homebrewers Conference begins in Baltimore. I’ll be brewing a beer with Nathan Zeender in the morning, and we plan to include Medusa hops in the recipe. Stop by the Brookland (production) facility in the afternoon for something of an open house. You can buy me a beer and shoot the breeze. If there is enough interest, Nathan will even be giving tours.

The Session #111 recapped, #112 announced

The SessionHost Oliver Gray has recapped The Session #111 in two parts (one and two), and in the process noted that rather than calling what he was experiencing a mid-life crisis perhaps it should be called a mid-hobby crisis.

And host Carla Jean Lauter has announced the topic for The Session #112 on June 3 will be “The Other Beer Economy.”

Growing alongside of the boom of breweries are many small businesses that are supporting, or supported by the craft beer industry. Maine is now home to a malt processing facility, and several hop farms. There are multiple beer tourism-focused businesses that help connect visitors to the state’s best beer offerings. There are companies that create beer-related apparel for beer fans, some that have designed unique bottle openers and manufacture them in-state. Maine is also home to a company that manufactures and installs brewing equipment, and another whose sole mission is to clean the lines that serve up that beer to thirsty beer fans.

I would suggest that Ben Keene, managing editor at Beer Advocate, might be mining Session #112 for ideas. BA has an occasional “Will Work for Beer” feature (disclosure: I’ve written a couple) that covers basically the same territory.

Monday beer links: History and dive bars

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 5.23.16

Mega-merger? How About No?
As the headline suggests, Lew Bryson makes his position clear. “One company. Thirty percent of world beer sales. About half of world beer profits.” [Via All About Beer]

Budweiser and the Selling of America.
About those cans labeled “America” … “Today the difference (you might call it an innovation) is that this newer imaginative product sells us—some of us—to ourselves, not to the rest of the world, and is maybe, in this way, evidence of an increasing confusion over our national identity.” [Via The New Yorker]

Remembering the forgotten (and then drinking it).
[Via DRAFT]
A Beer Museum Could Open In Chicago With A Brewpub & Rooftop Bar.
[Via Eater]
The Sensible Regulation Of Beer In New Netherlands.
[Via A Good Beer Blog]
History. Lots of it in the first link. The second link is to a project that will “launch a fundraising campaign this year” so some skepticism
is OK. And the third is an example of history done right. To return to the first and re-configure one of Joe Stange’s sentences: “Many (amateur historians) are shedding light on primary sources and questioning the validity of others—and, I believe, that’s what historians are supposed to do,” but “their rigor varies widely.” I apologize for coming across as a curmudgeon. However, even though there is arguably more well-documented research into the past being posted on blogs than in print publications (“Journal of the Brewery History Society” excluded) there’s something to be said for peer and technical review. Been there, made those mistakes.

What’s Happened to the Great American Dive Bar?

Walking through any city center, however, residents might be led to believe that dive bars are still alive. These faux-dive bars, where imbibers have the option of sipping on a $6 Lagunitas draft, can easily deceive transplants and tourists looking for a real down-and-out drinking experience. From a visual appraisal, they have the cliché signs: neon Budweiser signs, an LCD electronic jukebox on the wall, and maybe some specials for $2 PBRs. But Jeremiah Moss, author of the blog “Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York,” describes them as harbingers of fabricated cookie cutter sameness that derives from the neo-liberal, winner-take-all mindset permeating cities (see: yuppies shrieking with glee at the opening of an artisanal coffee shop, cocktail lounges playing Top 40 hits, kitschy diners serving $13 alcoholic milkshakes).

[Via Easter]

The Bar Where Nobody Knows Your Name.
Related. [Via Punch]

FROM TWITTER

If you click on the date you’ll see a longer thread. I pass this along for two reasons. First, as a bit of disclosure. I was one of the journalists who attended at the expense of the Carlsberg Foundation (a plane flight, two nights lodging, a fancy dinner that the crown prince attended).

Second, Joe Stange asks an interesting question. Is have this little calculator in my head. In this case, the foundation conducts research in all aspects of brewing. Much of this is shared. I know how expensive it would be for a laboratory to do research about the biotransformations of various hop compounds that result from different yeast strains. (In other words, what different hop aromas occur in beer fermented with a yeast used at Fuller’s than one used at Lagunitas? And what changes when you replace Centennial with Mosaic?) I doubt I can find out the total cost of the project, but I will ask. Because I am pretty sure it would pay for a chunk of hop/yeast research.

We all have our priorities.

Monday beer links: The beverage may be race-less, but what about the community?

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 5.16.16

A Czech Influence on Belgian Brewing.
Evan Rail goes digging though the remaining archives of a number of Belgian beer makers and discovers “how Czech brewing has impacted the beer culture in other countries — without being recognized for doing so.” [Via Beer Culture]

What Is the Brewers Association Doing to Address Gender and Race?
What *Should* the Brewers Association Do to Address Gender and Race?
I will only add that we are talking about an association of independent breweries. Shouldn’t some of them have their own programs to recruit minorities? [Via This Is Why I’m Drunk]

The “Reputation” of Beer.
“As a community, we need to stay on offense. The craft beer drinker is a much more diverse group than many know; we need to embrace our diversity. Beer is a gender-less beverage. Beer is a race-less beverage.” [Via Stouts & Stilettos]

Beer to Fish Food: Nonprofit Finds New Use for Spent Grain.
A couple of quick additions to the story, to illustrate how a small brewery can connect with its community. West Sixth Brewing resurrected a 90,000-square foot 1890s building that is called the Bread Box because it used to be a Rainbow Bread factory. As well as FoodChain Lexington (featured in this story) it houses artist studios, a non-profit community bicycle shop, the seafood restaurant mentioned, a distiller, and a coffee roaster. [Via All About Beer]

BIGGER BREWERIES

Historic brewing names Pabst, MillerCoors locked in legal battle.
This story flew under the radar, coming to life while the Craft Brewers Conference was in full swing: “Pabst and its owner, Los Angeles-based Blue Ribbon Intermediate Holdings LLC, claim in a lawsuit filed in circuit court that MillerCoors has breached without warning a long-term agreement to brew Pabst products, after repeated assurances that MillerCoors had sufficient capacity to honor the deal into the next decade.” [Via Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

Budweiser Renames Its Beer “America.”
a quick Google search will lead you to plenty of related commentary, most of it not particularly positive. Budweiser has indeed gone to “to potentially ingenious, potentially absurd branding extremes.” [Via Fast Company]

WINE

The wine tasting that shocked the world — and forever changed what we drink.
[Via The Washington Post]
Would California wine have succeeded without the 1976 Paris Tasting?
[Via Steve Heimhoff]
Fifteen years ago American brewers asked when they’d have their own “Judgment of Paris.” I don’t know that there is a single historic moment to point to, but most would agree that American beer now occupires a “lofty position.”

FROM TWITTER