musing

Ground zero for beer?

Beer giantWhere is the center of the beer universe?

I ask that question because tomorrow I’m headed to Austin, Texas, for the Craft Brewers Conference. Hundreds of brewers will be there, the folks responsible for beers that are getting written about in the Wall Street Journal, Food & Wine magazine, Condè Nast’s new and stylish Portfolio and all sorts of surprising publications.

So will Austin be the center of the beer universe (or should that be Beer Universe?) the next few days?

Every other year judging for the World Beer Cup is held in conjunction with the Craft Brewers Conference. Then you’ve got more than 2,000 beers, plenty from outside the United States, and also brewers from around the world who’ve come to judge (and perhaps pick up medals at the awards ceremony). Those years it’s even easier to argue that CBC is at the center of the beer universe.

For instance, next year the CBC/World Cup combo will dance in San Diego. Some folks in San Diego would argue the region might already be some sort of beer epicenter, so they have no doubt about April of 2008.

This is probably a rhetorical question, although you are welcome to suggest an answer.

Tasting notes: Different approaches

Hey, cowboy, what are you drinking?In the course of the conversation that sprung from my post about a review of Three Floyds Dreadnaught Imperial IPA I promised to post what I think are interesting style of “tasting note.” Too long for a comment, so – cowboys and others at the bar – here goes.

Style 1: The experience

Ben McFarland, twice Beer Writer of the Year in the UK despite his tender years, and fellow Brit Tom Sandham recently spent 30 days in California working on a book for CAMRA about where to drink beer on the West Coast. Toward the end of a story McFarland wrote for the Celebrator he describes judging beers at the Bistro Double IPA festival in Hayward.

This was not intended as a tasting note, but I think would much the same if McFarland first wrote that he had tried Pliny the Elder, Lagunitas Hop Stoopid and Ballast Point Dorado and was describing them. Here you go:

Double IPA is a beast of a beer style, the hoppiest, most high-octane in the world. But it’s quintessentially California and, well, we thought we could handle it.

We couldn’t. In a dank, grim cellar in Hayward, our brains pleaded with us to put the glass down and step away from the potent potions. But it was too late. The devilish liquid had adopted a Vulcanlike grip on our souls, entwining our senses like poisonous ivy and with all the insidious charm of liquid crack.

Brimming with hops, hops and more hops, the IPAs flooded our nostrils with their resinous, herbal fumes; puckered and pickled our taste buds; rendered our mouths drier than an Egyptian’s flip-flop; and left and aftertaste that stayed longer than the mother-in-law.

Entertaining as all get out, conveying a sense of what it is like to drink hop monsters, but not long on sensory evaluation.

Style 2: Sensory notes in story form

For Beer Talk in All About Beer magazine writers have space for 75-100 words He’s what Michael Jackson wrote about Grand Teton Black Cauldron Imperial Stout:

The mountains can do things to a man’s mind, and Wyoming can be a lonely place. A brewery with a mammary name, in a place called Jackson Hole, makes a beer called “Black Cauldron.” Sounds like a witch’s brew, but in a style closer to Catherine The Great. This Imperial stout has a good burnt barley aroma, and some espresso and cocoa. The body is more liqueur-ish (Bailey’s?). The palate reminds me of Sambuca, and the finish suggests cherry liqueur chocolates. Rather sweet and innocent, after all that innuendo.

I taste on the same panel with Jackson (not too intimidating) and chose to focus on the fact the beer is relatively low in alcohol (7.5% abv) for style and the sensory consequences.

Style 3: Experience first, with tasting note

Warning, this is a wine review from Alder Yarrow, one of the best known wine bloggers. The tasting note at the bottom is not short (about as long as Jackson’s above) but the experience/background portion clearly is the star. (Extra credit for the food pairing).

I think this is an excellent template, although I’d like it better if he didn’t assign a score (but that’s another topic).

Stephen Beaumont provides a Taste of the Month at his World of Beer site, also contributes to All About Beer’s Beer Talk and you’ll find his tasting notes a variety of other places. So his notes may seem chameleon-like.

I like the format his has chosen for participating in beer blogger’s monthly session. In April he wrote about Brother Thelonious from North Coast Brewing in California. Instead a number at the end you get useful facts/opinion.

As long as I mentioned The Session, Lew Bryson contributed my favorite post of April. Not sure how to classify it, mostly just wanted to draw it to your attention.

Drinking in place: Pub appreciation

Ideal pub

Earlier this year Donavan Hall began sort of a running diary – officially an online book right now, with a print version in 2008 – about drinking in a pub he has adopted as his local.

He’s accumulated enough posts now that he has a Table of Contents that I can link to, and that means enough posts that you can dig in to.

I quite like the leisurely pace at which he is proceeding and the mix of beer, pub and patrons. Here’s a beery example:

One of the interesting things about drinking in one place, and especially about drinking the same beer day in and day out, is that you get to track the development of the keg as it ages. At Callahan’s they have about five different taps. One of the taps pours the local microbrew, Blue Point Toasted Lager. You can tell if a keg of Blue Point Toasted Lager has been sitting on the tap for along time when you detect a faint but detectable degree of smokiness in the finish. …

Last week I went into Callahanâ’s and sat down at the bar. Stephanie, on of the bartenders, asked me what I would be drinking. I asked for the Blue Point Toasted Lager. She poured me a pint. I detected that signature smokiness of a well aged Toasted Lager. I was having lunch that day, so I ordered a second pint. And since there are no other microbrews on tap, I had a second Blue Point Toasted Lager. While Stephanie was pouring this second pint the keg ran out. Stephanie called into the back and asked someone the switch the keg. Within a few minutes a new keg of Blue Point Toasted Lager was on and she poured me the new pint and brought it to me.

“I’s on the house,” she said. I like this custom of getting of free pint if you finish a keg. Very civilized.

This second pint of Blue Point Toasted Lager drawn from the fresh keg had none of the smokiness associated with the aged keg.

My previous post (on tasting Three Floyds Dreadnaught) was about evaluating a beer as it exists in the glass. But the appellation in Appellation Beer refers to place, which can mean where the beer is enjoyed as well as brewed. Sometimes magic happens outside the glass, and who are we to complain?

In the The Great Good Place Ray Oldenberg writes about the tavern as a “third place.” Third places (after home, first, and workplace, second) provide informal gathering spots essential to the survival of any community.

Hall has named his adopted third place Callahan’s (after a couple of months of reading about the place I forgot he made the name up). Blue Point Toasted Lager is a damn fine product, so it’s not like he exiled himself to a year of boring beer, but if you drop in you’ll soon realize there’s more to a good local then 30 taps pouring exotic beer.

What makes a good tasting note?

Beer umpireThis review of Three Floyds Dreadnaught Imperial IPA tickled the heck out of me.

Jay at Hedonist Beer Jive gave it a 3.5 out of 10 and explained why. After reading his comments (please take the time to read the whole thing) my only question would be, “Why so high?”

He’s pretty persuasive, writing among other things: “What I do have a beef with is the exaltation of extreme beers that taste like garbage, simply because they’re BIG and DARING and OUTRAGEOUS.” Can I have a Hallelujah?

So I’ve got an assessment from somebody whose palate I find myself in alignment with more often than not, a blogger I take the time to read because he doesn’t always follow the crowd. Does that mean I should pass on Dreadnaught?

Since I’ve had the beer I could tell you that it would have been a mistake. I don’t love Dreadnaught as much as the legions at Beer Advocate or Rate Beer, but I enjoy it.

Does this mean this is not a good tasting note? Or perhaps not a good one for me, but a good one for you?

(I think we can agree Nick Floyd wouldn’t like it.)

Is the Sam Adams glass really better?

A couple of years ago Boston Beer founder Jim Koch was talking about innovative beers.

“. . .(A) product has to be truly superior and good on its own,” he said, later adding, “We’re not trying to make a pet rock of beer, but new styles that are cherished 100 years from now.”

He made a similar point a few minutes later. “It can’t just be a marketing gimmick. It has to be rooted in product difference. Typically, it’s not just better, but uniquely so,” he said.

Boston Lager glassI thought of that conversation when we were talking about the new tasting glass commissioned for Samuel Adams Boston Lager. To introduce the glass to the press the company sent out a package with two bottles of beer, a Samuel Adams branded shaker glass and the new Samuel Adams Boston Lager glass. It was no contest, but other than the spill factor, pouring Boston Lager into cupped hands might also have been better than a shaker glass.

Is this glass not only better, but markedly so? In fact, I think so, but we’ll get to that.

Koch said that Boston Beer spent several hundred thousand dollars developing the glass. (The details are here.)

“This had to be a legitimate, bona fide, verifiable improvement,” he said. “So much of this can be smoke and mirrors.”

By the 1700s “the proper glass” began to take on meaning with wine drinking types (in other words, all “proper society”), and by the 1800s each type of wine was to have its own glass. For purposes of form, not function.

Thus Champagne was poured in a coupe – a shallow, wide-mouthed glass – although it was the perfectly wrong vessel. Even today, when we know a flute best serves Champagne, you still see it served in coupes because that’s the way it is pictured in somebody book of etiquette.

Just a generation ago American wine drinkers didn’t pay that much attention to glassware, but producers – most notably Austria’s Riedel – have done a great job of convincing drinkers they need a different glass for every style of wine. To persuade us, Riedel promoted the so-called “tongue map,” which is about 100 years out of date.

So Koch approached the project with a proper amount of beer drinkers’ skepticism.

“I wanted this to be rooted in science,” he said. He turned to Tiax, a Boston-area company that’s been combining technology and sensory testing since the 1920s.

“Jim’s approach was unique,” said Jonaki Egenolf, manager for technology marketing at Tiax. “He really wanted true objective analysis. That was different than just trying to leverage expertise within the industry.”

Sarah Garretson Lowery, the sensory analyst for the project, added, “It was unique to see somebody who wasn’t new to an industry come in with such a fresh eye.”

A blogger for Food & Wine magazine wrote the resulting glass looks “like the offspring of a lantern and a goblet, with a narrow base, bulbous center and outward-turned lip-like a translucent Alfred Hitchcock, I guess.”

But that outward turned lip (see the illustration) really seems to work, and the glass persistently delivers great aromatics (so credit that funny bulbous middle).

Koch has found the perfect line – “PBR (Pabst Blue Ribbon) is not going to taste like Sam Adams in this glass” – to make his point that this glass is designed to make Boston Lager taste better, not with other beers in mind. But that doesn’t mean we can’t take a few other beers for a test run.

I did. Ales and lagers. Hoppy beers and not. Some were a little better, some significantly better. Of course, I often could have done just as well with another glass from the cabinet.

And not every beer tasted better. I tried an India Pale Ale that I previously found not particularly well balanced. It was worse. The hops were harsher and even more out of balance.

I didn’t try PBR. There’s only so much I’m willing to do in the name of science.