books

Gose: Balancing tradition and innovation

Stephen Beaumont tweet

I was already thinking about the speed at which beer seems to be barreling ahead when this tweet from Stephen Beaumont showed up in my Twitter feed early (he’s in Italy) yesterday. The reason being that I’ve just finished reading Fal Allen’s Gose: Brewing a Classic German Beer For The Modern Era. Allen had never heard of the style months before Anderson Valley Brewing made its first one in July 2013. Now he’s written a book about it that fills 221 pages.

Gose: Brewing A Classic German Beer For the Modern EraThat he knew nothing of it is a bit humbling, given that it one of the “wheat beers from the past” I wrote about in Brewing With Wheat, which was published in 2010. Later that year I provided a “how to” guide on how to brew a gose for The New Brewer, the magazine for members of the Brewers Association. The point was that gose was a oddity. Now it is everywhere and includes beers that go well beyond your basic sour German ale with a bit of salt and coriander.

This allows Allen to dig into the history of the beer — yes, I’m jealous — while, as the title suggests, also placing it in a modern context. Are you drinking gose, and a lot of people are, and want to know all about it? This is a book for you. Want to learn everything about how to brew it from somebody who is really good at it. Again, the book for you.

One example. Goslar, where there style originated, was once a brewing center, with 300 breweries in 1500. As Allen writes, the gose origin story “has it that the salinity of gose once came from the mineral-laden water of the Gose river.” Later, as beers from Goslar gained in popularity other brewers added salt to emulate their character.

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Hunting for the next great beer experience

In April, there was a link on Twitter to a news story about a “Bavarian ‘beer world'” that caused me to ask Stephen Beaumont and Mark Dredge, both of whom have recently written books about beer adventures, if they have been to Kuchlbauer’s Bierwelt.

Dredge responded first, “I drove near it when going to drink zoigl but decided not to stop there!”

And Beaumont followed, “Can’t say I’ve ever been or, having read the article, are inclined to go. Animatronic beer gnomes?”

Not long after, Joe Stange — who lives in Berlin — added, “Kuchlbauer… The beer is fine but Hundertwasser is the real attraction.” Hundertwasser is the tower within the park.

All three of these men spell flavour with a u, but they’ve earned my trust and their most recent books merit attention. That Beaumont and Dredge have written ones called Will Travel for Beer and The Beer Bucket List respectively is something of a coincidence that illustrates it must be time for such a travel books (or books), along the lines one of those one hundred and one or one thousand and one before you die titles. That this is the eight edition of Good Beer Guide Belgium, which Stange co-wrote with Tim Webb, since 1992 points to a dynamic that isn’t just about Belgium.

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Book report: ‘Beer is for Everyone’

Once you’ve condensed what might be an entire post to a blurb that fits on the back of a book it may not rehydrate easily, not even with a healthy dose of beer.

So this is what I wrote about Beer is for Everyone!:

“The value of a fresh pair of eyes — or in this case a fresh pair of glasses — is apparent on basically every page. The author, who doubles as protagonist, foregoes making beer formidable and instead invites a newcomer to be comfortable. To adapt a line from page 89, ‘This book was meant for fun.’ ” I wish that I had included Jay Brooks’ suggestion that “it won’t be until later that you realize how much you learned about beer.”

But I think what remains most important is that the book is just plain fun. Author/artist Em Sauter is plenty serious about beer, which is obvious when her character speaks objectively about beer and brewing. It is equally obvious when she speaks subjectively. For example, see pages 104 and 105, where she describes Firestone Walker Pivo. “The beer bombards the senses in an utterly wonderful way. Bready. Spicy. Floral. Woody.” (Appropriate artwork accompanies the words.)

She also offers pairing suggestions: “From sushi to swiss cheese.” No surprise there. But then comes this: “Or from karate to knitting.” Not the way I’d think about Pivo, and maybe something that doesn’t even make sense to me. That’s fine. A discussion about the need for different voices broke out a while back. Listen to one of those voices.

The rehydration of thought stops there, but for more about what is in the book, and additional pages, see what Jeff Alworth had to say.

Miracle Brew: Continuing beer education

Miracle Brew by Pete BrownBeer writer Pete Brown was conducting a tasting of IPAs when a woman in the audience raised her hand to ask a question.

“If these beers have got so many hops in, are they still suitable for celiacs?”

He replied that hops don’t contain any glutens.

“Ah, so they’re not barley hops then?”

He offers this story as a footnote in his latest book, Miracle Brew, writing that “ironically, she could only misunderstand beer so dramatically because, compared to most people she was better informed and more engaged.”

Brown is currently visiting the American northeast in support of Miracle Brew and he’ll likely get similar questions. Plenty of beer consumers are playing catch up, keen on learning the basics but also something that goes beyond. Consider a recent story from NPR about “how sour beer is driving a microbial gold rush.” That’s a conversation several steps removed from barstool discussions about if bock is really just beer left over from the bottom of the barrel (a myth, but it lives on).

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Pay no attention to the man with the big moustache

Jim Boyd, Roy FarmsI apologize, because what follows is strictly American hop industry inside stuff. But I’ve reached the hops section of Miracle Brew: Hops, Barley, Water, Yeast, and the Nature of Beer, which has left me a bit giddy.

In the introduction, Pete Brown writes, “I’ve made it very easy for you to dip in and read first about the ingredient that interests you the most, which is probably hops, but I wouldn’t recommend that.” So I started with barley, read about water, and now I’m surrounded by hops. And page 245 a bigger-than-life character is introduced. Pete never gets around to using his name, but industry types will recognize who it is immediately. And the whole exchange makes me laugh.

Excerpt from

If nobody adds the name in the comments I will in the next day or two.

While you are here, a reminder you might want to sign up for Hop Queries, a newsletter that should appear in your email box once a month. It will contain more useful information than the identity of Giant Moustache.

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