TWTBWTW: Tree beers & other reasons to ask what is beer

Best of show beers Copa Baja

What on tap at El Sume in Mexicali

Welcome to MLX Beerfest in Mexicali

Yes, there is a lot of IPA out there, but as the photo at the top illustrates there were beers of many colors on the best of show table last week at Copa Baja in Mexicali, Mexico. And 17 of the 24 beers on tap at El Sume (where the bottle list is also pretty dang impressive) were not IPAs. The third photo? Well, welcome to the MLX Beerfest that followed two days of competition in Mexicali, Mexico.

Another busy week, so another quick list of reading suggestions:

What is beer? No seriously. Pete Brown wrapped up is keynote at Ales Through the Ages by quoting Hilary Mantel: “History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organizing our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record.” This post is more fodder for that conversation.

Strictly speaking. During the final session of Ales Through the Ages, in which some presenters took questions from attendees, the topic of beer styles came up. And how we should view them at a time when, as Brown wrote on Instagram, “The very definition of beer is highly debatable.” Pretty good timing that Em Sauter posed a similar question – “Do Strictly Defined Beer Styles Still Have Value in the Modern Craft Landscape?” – one day later.

Birch trees that soon will provide water for beer at Scratch Brewing

Liquid assets. Speaking of beers made with alternative water sources, I am reminded of “single tree beers” from Scratch Brewing in southern Illinois. The photo above was taken in the woods outside Ava, Illinois. Those are birch trees and the sap in the buckets ended up in a beer Scratch made in 2015. That’s the first year the brewery took all tree beers to the Great American Beer Festival.

In a place. I write often about “from a place,” but that is only part of the place story. As always, I wonder how what Jeff Alworth writes about might change the beer in our glasses and the places we might choose to gather to socialize over beer.

The Costco indicator. “This time around the Costco gurus looked hard at their customer base … and blinked. They decided to pass on a fee increase, which could mean a lot of things but might mean that they believe even their affluent member base is feeling the economic heat. And that’s not good news for wine, since these are the customers driving the U.S. market these days.” What might this mean for beer?

Corn in Chocolate City. “As the city has changed [in recent years] then the beer culture [has come to] reflect the newcomers.”

And from Twitter:

Real, natural, authentic, and local

The Atlantic has a story about pawpaws, the “quintessentially American fruit,” and why they are so hard to buy.

This is not news to brewers.

“Brewing Local” includes a recipe from Fullsteam Brewery in North Carolina for making a beer with pawpaws and a story about why Piney River Brewing in Missouri has made a beer called Paw Paw French Saison. Here’s a bit of the Piney River story:

Brian Durham was listening to National Public Radio on his drive to work one morning when he heard a report about preserving Pawpaw French, a disappearing dialect in the Ozarks. “I thought, ‘That’s it. We’re getting some pawpaws, we’re buying some French (saison) yeast,’” he said. Piney River Brewing was going to brew Paw Paw French Saison.

Piney River is located on a farm five winding miles outside of Bucyrus, Missouri, because Brian and Joleen Durham live on the farm. They bought their house in 1997 and the rest of the 80 acres they live on five years later. They raise beef cattle on the property, but were too busy with the brewery in 2015 to get around to selling any. They feed spent grain to the cattle and a sign on the long gravel driveway leading to the brewery warns, “Caution, cows may be drunk on mash.”

Pawpaws (do not) not scale. “You find it all around here in the river bottoms. Good luck getting them before the critters,” he said. They buy their pawpaws from a farm in Ohio.

Pawpaw French is far rarer than the Cajun French that is essential to the culture Bayou Teche is intent on preserving. It is considered a linguistic bridge that melds a Canadian French accent with a Louisiana French vocabulary. The French originally settled Old Mines, Missouri, around 1723, back when the area was part of Upper Louisiana. “My father and mother spoke French very fluently, but they didn’t want us to speak it because it (caused) such trouble in school,” said Cyrilla Boyer, a lifetime resident who was interviewed for the NPR report. She said in the 1920s and 1930s teachers would smack students’ knuckles for speaking any French in the classroom. Pawpaw French persisted in Old Mines primarily because the town is so remote.

Historian and musician Dennis Stroughmatt is Pawpaw French’s ambassador to the outside world. He first visited Old Mines back in the 1990s, and there were still hundreds of pawpaw speakers. “It’s like eating candy when I speak Pawpaw French. That’s the best way I can say. It’s a sweet French to me,” he said. He knows better than to expect the language to make a comeback, but hopes parts of it will survive, and that kids will learn some phrases, and will understand the area’s slogan: “On est toujours icitte,” which translates to, “We are still here.”

The Atlantic reports on efforts to breed “a better pawpaw.”

It might be best to pause and consider this: “It may not be the worst thing in the world for pawpaws to play hard to get. Even if it was possible to scale production and ship the fruit nationwide, doing so would be at odds with the urge for local, sustainable food that fueled the pawpaw boom in the first place. Planting huge pawpaw orchards might just add to the ecological toll of mass farming. Breeders could use genetic modification to improve the fruit, Brannan said, but ‘that’s 180 degrees from what people think of the pawpaw. The pawpaw is real, natural, authentic, and local.’ For all the weird, frustrating aspects of pawpaws, they are a reminder of just how far food science has come in a century-plus.”

Steam beer yeast, circa 1911

Matthew Curtis has written 5,500 words at Pellicle to define what IPA “means in terms of modern beer.”

I hung in there for all of them, primarily to see if he mentioned Cold IPA, one of my favorite versions of IPA.

He did, and wrote in part: “The beer is then fermented using a bottom fermenting yeast at warmer temperatures (not unlike a California common, or steam beer).”

I’ve recently been visiting, or revisiting, articles and books about the quest for authenticity. And were a brewer interested in producing a steam beer using the same yeast breweries did more than 100 years ago, well, that might be a problem.

In 1911, while conducting tests as part of another project at the University of California, T. Brailsford Robinson discovered just how different steam beer yeast acquired from California Brewing in San Francisco was from lager strains. “The yeast of the steam beer has accommodated itself to these conditions (warmer fermentation and the clarifier) to such an extent that it can no longer be employed for the preparation of lager beer, while lager-beer yeast may without difficulty be used for the manufacture of steam beer,” he wrote. “The cells of the typical steam-beer yeast are somewhat smaller than those of lager-beer yeast.”

(Should you want to read a history of steam beer that may not totally align with what you’ve read before I would suggest Brewing Local. Disclaimer: I wrote it.)

Prelude to a beer

Maypop plant at Scratch Brewing

This is a maypop flower. The picture was taken a couple of weeks ago at Scratch Brewing in southern Illinois and showed up in my email this week when I asked how this year’s “crop” is looking.

Scratch Maypop is one of the best beers I’ve had this year. It is simple, but not-simple, not as sweet and juicy as passion fruit, but with a how-do-I-subscribe-this fruit flavor moderated by elusive “wheaty” character, more tart than sour. It is not as electric as the flower, which is fine.

I drank it in a brisk March day, with fruit from 2021 harvest obviously, and it tasted like summer.

Maypops (Passiflora incarnata) are native to the United States, grow wild in southern Illinois and can become invasive. Scratch harvests them in the woods surrounding the property the brewery sits as well as from vines growing on the building.

The flowers bloom from early July through mid-September. “The fruit will ripen from late August until mid October,” said co-founder Aaron Kleidon. “The fruit is hollow until it’s nearly ready. Then it turns yellow and shrivels a bit. At this point the fruit loses most of its tartness and begins to have tropical flavors. It will fall from the vine and we harvest it from the ground. We scoop out the pulp and freeze it as they all ripen over the month.”

TWTBWTW*: Novelty, beta projects & consistent hitmakers

* That Was The Beer Week That Was (TWTBWTW) will be on hiatus until May 16.

Goschie Farms (known for hops)

Feel free to compare and contrast.

NOVELTY & CREATIVITY
The Novelty Trap

We have a creativity problem

What separates Blind Melon from Shania Twain?

My comment two weeks ago about Lew Bryson’s “Stop Drinking New Beers All The Time” post stands.

Outer Range Brewing makes beer about 60 miles west of ut. A lot of IPAs. They are very good at what they do, so there is no, “Hey, you should get better at this (or that)” first. A new IPA shows up, I might buy it. It will be interesting, something new, a little bit different. But it will still taste like an Outer Range beer. As humans we like what is familiar, but also what is different. Just not too different.

PLACE MATTERS
What do consumers deserve to be told?

A certain space

An estate beer

A farm brewery grows in Brooklyn
Other Half Brewing and Threes Brewing deserve all the beer geek love they get, but if there is time for only one stop in Brooklyn you’ll find me at Strong Rope. Blame founder Jason Sahler.

“When I am giving tours I am the face of the beer,” he told me a few years ago. “But I tell them all of this is not possible without farmers. The farmers do all the work before (ingredients) touch our deck. It’s easier for me to explain that on a small scale. There’s something more tangible to me when it’s local.”

BECAUSE . . . EARTH DAY
Customers expect these initiatives

Where sustainability and technology meet

And this . . .