At the risk of repeating myself . . .

A) If you want to start a heated online conversation then making beer rating the theme seems to be the way to go. Witness the dust up at Beer Advocate that was followed by commentary in 718 722 beer blogs. Or the 57 comments (so far) following Stephen Beaumont’s Sh*t Online Beer Raters Do (But Shouldn’t) post.

Several of the comments in the second focus on serving size. Well, I checked and it turns out NEW BEER RULE #3: You must drink at least two servings of a beer before you pass judgment on it is almost four years old.

B) Yesterday Alan McLeod wrote about the arc and width of beer. His essay drew upon several blog posts and a multi-contributor Twitter conversation. Give it a read to to make complete sense or settle for the conclusion.

When industrial brewers – or, for that matter, any brewers who believes that beer should only taste as they conceive – demand our obedience we are being asked to believe. To believe there was a mythical big bang of flavour when it was truer and more perfect is to believe that you are not a participant in the process.

The latest from wine columnist Matt Kramer seems relevant here.

Today, if you want to experience a wine that is at all different from anything that might be understood as “mainstream,” you have to drink “small.” Put simply, big wineries are all about predictability.

I’ve written about this phenomenon before, suggesting that today’s wine landscape is divided between what I call “wines of fear” and “wines of conviction.” True, small wineries can be fearful and make their wines accordingly. But mostly they don’t, while big wineries almost invariably do.

And, by golly NEW BEER RULE #4: The god of beer is not consistency seems to apply. (And I will be sure to file this in the Beers of conviction category.)

It makes me think I should be writing about something new. Except for many people only recently more interested in beer these topics are new. And there are new revelations within the conversations for and from those who’ve been chatting away a while — witness the Twitter exchanges Alan refers to.

Certainly, there are new areas to explore. In fact, as soon as I hit publish here I must return to examining why two people can smell the same dry hopped beer and one will describe exotic tropical aromas and the other cat pee.

Mark Dredge at Pencil and Spoon raises the question of using hop extracts and oils in the brewing process.

Part of me think it’s a bit strange to use extract but the other part doesn’t mind if it’s done to be able to give the best flavour or bitterness possible – extract seems to give a cleaner type of bitterness than flowers or pellets. It’s no different to adding chilli extract instead of chopping up fresh peppers – you just get a different type of flavour which you will struggle to match with fresh ingredients.

Go comment there, if only to say you are on board with the idea or that you think it totally sucks. An answer somewhere between is of course acceptable. I’m curious to see what people think.

I must resist adding a single word, because it would lead to 3,000 before I knew where the day went.

‘Tis the season for predictions. The Future of Beer, or at least for 2012. The rise of gluten free beer, discovering gruit, more hoppy beers, fewer hoppy beers, old school beers, new fangled beers.

There are more where those came from. They can’t all be right in 2012, but they could be in the long run. Because that’s the way beer works. Consider this from Hop Culture in the United States, published in 1883. The subtitle, Practical Treatise on Hop Growing in Washington Territory, pretty much summarizes the contents. (The pastoral image at the top, showing a family comfortably picking hops, is taken from the book.) The back of the book includes a variety of statistics and contributions from elsewhere. The sources aren’t always obvious, but this was surely written by somebody in England.

Influence of fashion on the use of hops

“The brewing industry is not exempt from the influence of fashion. A careful survey of the types and descriptions of beers in vogue at different times, will show that fashion has had something to do with our trade. Without going back to the olden days, when our Saxon forefathers imbibed freely of ale and mentheglin made from barley and honey, without any admixture of flavoring herbs, we may refer to the period when the introduction of hops into this country gave quite a different character to the national beverage; instead of the sweet and mawkish ale, a true beer, flavored with aromatics essence of the hop, came into fashion.

“This took place in the sixteenth century, since when, hopped beers have been more or less in fashion. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, there was a great rage of black beers, and so great was it that our metropolitan brewers found their trade rapidly increased by the production of this article; porter was consumed in enormous quantities, and it seemed at the one time as if light-colored beers would become things of the past. We know now that fashion for porter and stout is in the decline. Large breweries, at one time engaged solely in the production of these specialties, have altogether discontinued the brewing of black beers.

“Toward the end of the last century and at the beginning of this, the taste of the public inclined to very strong ales. The old-fashioned stingoes and strong stock ales were consumed in large quantities and with thorough relish at this period, probably because the habits of life which then prevailed, caused the physiques of the people to be stronger than the present times. In those days, beer was brewed regardless of cost in many a household, and the modern private trade brewer had scarcely started into existence. Gradually the taste for lighter and cheaper beers grew, until the year 1851, when the great Exhibition marked an era in brewing, as it had done in other industries. The splendid productions of Messrs. Bass and Allsopp, then attracted much attention, and from that time the taste for high-hopped beers has gone on increasing until lately, when there has been an evident tendency to fall back again upon milder and less bitter beers.

“During the last two or three years, brewers have experienced a demand for beers of very low gravity, and containing less of flavor of the hops than was fashion on some twenty years since, and of course it is their bounded duty to comply with the dictate of fashion in this respect. We will not further refer to the threatened introduction of lager beer into this country, than to say fashion takes strange freaks, and it will be well for brewers to be prepared for all eventualities.”

Their bounded duty to comply with the dictate of fashion.

Think you know where in the beer world this photo was taken?

Please leave your answer as a comment.

This one should not be too tough, despite my slightly blurry effort using the camera in my phone. But if you can’t read the last item under Red Wine that really is Opus One.

If you’d like to see what my head looks like on a platter, you might try to reconstruct¹ the happenings on Twitter last week when I naively noted: “Sorry, but it seems strange to call an unconfirmed rumor one of the ‘Top 5 beer stories’” of the year’” along with this link.

Because this was the final post in a multi-part series, I hadn’t seen the first, which included a bit of an explanation: What follows is a list of stories that either resonated with Beernews.org readers or got coverage in the mainstream media. I guess I should have understood the story wasn’t just the substance of what Anthony Bourdain suggested — that “Big beer” was responsible for Discovery Channel pulling the plug on the Brew Masters program — but that he tweeted it and it got retweeted. A lot. This was made clear to me.

(In this case, my vision was clouded by the fact that Bourdain’s² tweet was as stupid as if he had typed “Harwood invented porter”³ and considerably more irresponsible. That’s really an aside, but I did a lousy job of explaining myself in the 140-character exchanges that followed.)

I’m not oblivious to the importance of social media (even though I might appear clueless trying to balance Twitter, Facebook and Google+), nor the importance of what proceeded these virtual water coolers — water coolers themselves. I worked at newspapers back when people spent enough time with them in the morning to get their hands inky black. I sat in on a dozen meetings a week during which we debated how and where to display stories that were “important” versus those that people were talking about around the water cooler.

These days there are ways for people to talk about stuff they really care about that didn’t exist before, and ways to track/measure those conversations. Is following them pandering or simply remembering the news consuming public ultimately decides what is news? That’s a discussion for another space. As well as one about what is news? or even what is beer news?

OK, a bit more about the last one, and a quick example of what one day can bring. Saint Louis Brewery founders Tom Schlafly and Dan Kopman announced last Wednesday that a group of local investors had bought a 60 percent (thus, controlling) interest in the brewery. This was not a surprise, because they said more than a year ago they were looking for buyers, and wanted the brewery to remain locally owned. The big picture news will come when we find out if the new owners plan to build another brewery, since the current one (pictured at the top) is at capacity. The same day, Paul Harden at The Wine and Cheese Place posted a note he had received a shipment of Firestone Walker Union Jack that had been bottled only a week before. That’s fresh IPA a 20-minute walk from my house. One a short term basis, just as big.

Coincidentally, a few days before I considered what do people read? from a different perspective. Because I spent not as much time around here the second half of December, rather than dumping comments Akismet flagged as spam on a daily basis I got to them every three days or so. There’s something startling about seeing 10,000 comments from users calling themselves names like acai berry pure, ugg and stealth hid pile up in less than three days. In the course of looking to see if there was any rhyme or reason to what posts attracted such love I ended up with a semi-accurate list of 2011 most popular posts. And no clue about the spammers.

The list is not perfect, because some/many of you read these posts via a feedreader, some when they are fresh, some when they are older. I’m too lazy to sort that out. You might notice some of the best read stuff is from years past. I’m not sure how I should feel about that.

Anyway, the list:

10. What the heck is a nano brewery?
9. Book review: Tasting Beer.
8. Pierre Celis: That was one long shadow.
7. So Americans no longer drink Budweiser?
6. 10 beers that changed America.
5. Who is the world’s most influential beer writer?
4. Blue Moon: Peter, Paul & Mary or Trini Lopez?
3. Reinheitsgebot or Einheitsgebot?
2. The beer that launched 1,600 breweries.
1. Session #49 – Regular beers are part of the revolution.

1 I should probably be able to do that for you, but I blame cognitive failure, being well past 45 years old.

2 That’s not to say I don’t find Bourdain entertaining. How can you not like a guy who appreciates Louisiana as much as he does? I’d be happy to spend a drunken afternoon with him.

3 See The Oxford Companion to Beer: a dreadful disaster? and scroll down to Harwood.

It’s Monday, so a few links. Big picture and 2011 recap stuff. Some are lists.

* The boom continues. In Chicago, in New York, and in Longmont, Colo. Maybe this is why I spotted a beer delivery truck advertising Dale’s Pale Ale in Manhattan.

* Big Eddy. Don Russell makes Leinenkugel’s Big Eddy Russian Imperial Stout Joe Sixpack’s Beer of the Year. He writes, “Some readers will cringe at my selection, partly because Leinenkugel is technically part of the Big Beer Axis of Evil. Indeed, MillerCoors’ new Tenth and Blake specialty division has raised fears of a price-cutting incursion on the little guys’ vulnerable wholesale flank. I’ll leave that worry for another day. For now, I’m calling Leinenkugel’s Big Eddy Russian Imperial Stout my Beer of the Year, and I’m counting 2011 as the year Miller finally saw the light.” Interesting thoughts.

* ‘No list is every 100% correct or wrong.’ In fact, I’ve seen some that are all wrong. But Bryan Koselar (that’s his quote at the front) gets more than a few right. Including Buzz Breweries, Craft beer themes, and a Top Ten list (ouch; just bit my tongue).

* But Stephen Beaumont goes 0 for 6. I might be kidding (my sense of humor is an acquired taste). You’ll find the necessary links in the last, where he puts the European crown on Brouwerij de Molen.

For The Session #59, host Mario Rubio provides these marching orders: “Let’s talk about what we drink when not drinking beer.” Alan doesn’t approve, and — to be honest — I’m feeling challenged.

We do drink other stuff in our house. We had Tom & Jerry’s when we decorated our tree, enjoyed homemade eggnog on Christmas, chatted at length over a wonderful bottle of Italian wine a few nights ago. But those aren’t things I’m keen on writing about.

When The Session began nearly five years ago the premise was pretty basic. Pick a theme, write about it, maybe focus on a specific beer. Not sure how to do that with eggnog.

So let’s talk beer, pretending this one qualifies because winemakers played a major role in creating it. Firestone Walker XV. Which — like for X, XI, XII, XIII and XIV — a bunch of otherwise grape-oriented guys help blend. I wrote about X for Imbibe magazine, and a some of the others here. Most notably XI, with more fawning here.

Now that I’ve stocked up on XV I’ll fess up. It might be as good as XI. Of course, this is totally my palate talking. You might not agree at all. I’ll let you know how the two compare in a couple of years, assuming I can actually stand open that last bottle of XI. Looking at the blend for XV — 76% barley wines, no dominant anchor, Double Jack (fueled by dry hop aromas that are bound to fade) — I wasn’t all that optimistic. But there’s already deep dark character beyond the rich fruitiness that’s downright beguiling. And hints there’ll be something different next year, then something altogether different the next.

Fifteen Paso Robles area winemakers showed up this year to contribute their opinions about the blend — or perhaps simply to drink beer — and Firestone Walker brewmaster Matt Brynildson set them off in groups of two and three. Each group came up with a favorite mixture, brewery workers replicated the blends and the winemakers voted to determine their favorite.

Brynildson now has 600 barrels to draw from, and emptied almost 200 for XV. I’m pretty sure that means there’s going to be a XVI and that plenty of winemakers will show up to help.

This afternoon Jeremy Danner (@Jeremy_Danner) of Boulevard Brewing “mentioned” (via Twitter) a story a wrote a little while ago for CraftBeer.com that was published today.

I’d kind of forgotten about it, and that I planned to post some outtakes here. So before I resume deciding how many words to allocate to hops from Caucasus one more post for 2011 (despite my previous claim).

a) That’s Dave Logsdon at the top, formerly the yeast guru at Wyeast and now a partner at Losgdon Farmhouse Ales in Oregon. Just wanted you to see a picture of a guy lovin’ what he’s doing.

b) This is Phil Wymore, founder of Perennial Artisan Ales in St. Louis. He really helped put the story in focus. It’s a challenge to describe beers inspired by Belgian brewers but made by Americans (with the help of yeast that previously went to work in Belgium). At least when you’re addressing style-obsessed Americans.

Beyond what he said, a little background and a little more detail.

At the time I wrote the story, Perennial had recently released Strawberry Rhubarb Tart and Peace Offering was in the fermenter.

Strawberry Rhubarb was inspired by strawberry rhubarb pie. Strawberries and rhubarb are available locally in the summer, so if the beer appears again that’s when it will. A witbier yeast turned it from wort into beer.

Peace Offering was a spiced squash ale. The base beer is an American Brown (6.3% ABV) with about 200 pounds of maple-roasted cushaw squash, which was pureed and added to the beer during primary fermentation. It was spiced with cinnamon and clove prior to packaging. An American ale yeast fermented that beer.

And Wymore had this to add about what to call these beers.

“The other element of brewing ‘our own versions of Belgian-inspired beers,’ is that we do not want to be held responsible for mimicking all the techniques (e.g. turbid mashing, aged hops, cool ships, open fermentation, etc.) depending on which style we are making. We are not trying to clone our favorite Belgian beers, nor do we have the resources to make them all true to style. Rather, we are choosing our favorite styles and doing our best to create great base beers — to our liking — and layering them with other ingredients to create some complexity — all the while being mindful of striking a thoughtful balance amongst the flavors in the beer.”

c) More from Matt Potts of DESTIHL Restaurant and Brew Works, the Bloomington-Normal, Illinois, brewery whose sour beers had lines clogging the aisles of GABF. He provided geeky process details:

“. . . essentially all of our sours go through a standard primary fermentation with ale yeast, but then we do a spontaneous/wild secondary fermentation and aging in barrels of various types (whether spent bourbon barrels, wine barrels, etc., anything except for the poor unfortunate barrels cut in half and for sale at Menard’s). We use the barrels as our cool ships by leaving them open for some time to expose them to our apparently wonderful downstate Illinois wild farm air. Each barrel is thus truly unique as we do not blend or inoculate the barrels with any lab cultures, for doing so takes away from the spontaneous philosophy of our St. Dekkera Reserve Sour Ale series. There is something about blending that, to me, destroys the fun, uniqueness and genuineness of spontaneous fermentation/aging. If we were to blend, then we just as well inoculate with lab cultures too.

“One question we have for ourselves going forward is whether the beer connoisseur will prefer the uniqueness of spontaneous fermentation in each barrel and each bottle as we grow or if they will prefer to know exactly what to expect (i.e., expect the same) from each bottle of St. Dekkera . . . thus requiring blending and inoculation. Perhaps some day we will have to do that with some of the mainstay sours, like Sour Strawberry, Sour Hawaii Five-Ale or Flanders, but I hope not. Even without blending, our wild air here in Normal, and our process produces sours that have the same underlying very refreshing/thirst quenching, ‘brighter’ sourness/tartness on the palate and balanced natural acidity.

“Each barrel is aged for at least one year and up to three-and-a-half years in the case of our oldest Framboise and Lambic barrels. The average age of the beers at GABF was two to two-and-a-half years old, except for the Framboise . . . a true tart bomb.”

Although Potts referred to “each bottle of St. Dekkera” DESTIHL does not package its beers. That’s in the planning state, so perhaps next year.

This arrived in the mail Saturday, a pleasant reminder this is the season for happy surprises.

But also that I have a book to finish.

So I’m swearing off Appellation Beer until some time in January. I might post a few comments and photos on Twitter, because there are fun events (like this and this) on the horizon. But I won’t be publishing my annual best of the year lists. You’re on your own.

The Saint Louis Brewery Tap Room, the brewpub where Schlafly beers were first brewed, at this moment serves a beer called Optic Golden Ale. It was made with floor malted Optic barley grown in Scotland and Aramis and Strisselspalt hops from the Alsace region of France.

Will The Oxford Companion to Beer provide further detail?¹

Indeed, the book delivers. You can look up:

- Floor malting.
- French hops.
- Optic (barley).
- Strisselspalt (hop).

Additionally, the index indicates the entry about Kronenbourg Brewery has information about Strisselspalt.

One question. Four (or five) answers. The Companion’s breadth is apparent. Upon further reading, however, a question arises. On page 377, the French hops entry states, “Strisselspalt is the region’s main cultivar, but its origins are rather obscure.” On page 522, the Kronenbourg entry states, “The flagship brand is Kronenbourg 1664 . . . brewed with Alsace’s native Strisselspalt hops.” And on page 772, the Strisselspalt entry states, “Its profile resembles Hersbrucker Spät [from Bavaria], also a landrace, from which Strisselspalt is thought to be derived.”

To recap: a) it’s native to the Alsace, or b) it’s the child of a Bavarian hop or c) nobody knows. Which is it?

Within its own pages The Companion includes contradictions that undermine the notion it is as authoritative as it is comprehensive. A reader doesn’t need to know much about beer or have visited the OCBeerCommentary to come to that conclusion. This is disappointing because, at least within the niche inside of a niche I sometimes find myself, it has changed the conversation.

The Companion does an excellent job of telling the story of beer today. It can provoke fireside-beer-sipping contemplation. It provides ideas to take to the pub for further debate. To repeat myself, the breadth is impressive. So is the academic rigor. At least most of the time. I think. Well, let me look that one up.

My apologies, but one quick personal story that addresses my personal bias. When I was 17 years old and working my first summer fulltime in the sports department at the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette I filled out my work week by doing “rewrites.” That is typing handwritten missives from correspondents in outlying small towns. Mostly news about upcoming church picnics, who was entering what in the county fair and upcoming high school reunions.

Bill Schmelzle was the city editor and he scared me a bit. Maybe it was the cane, or that I sensed he didn’t like mistakes. One Sunday afternoon not long after I started we were alone in the newsroom. It was hot, the windows were open and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. This made him even more intimidating.

He held up a sheet of newsprint. He asked if I used the slug “hiero” on the rewrites I typed. What was I going to do, say I didn’t? I gulped and said yes. “Did you check the names?” he asked. I went to look for the handwritten copy. No, he said, against the phone books in the office “library.” The rest of the summer you can be sure I was going say yes if I was asked that question again.

A few years later I became city editor. This was a long time ago, when stories were cast in lead on linotype machines, proofs were drawn and people who worked in typesetting read the proofs. Most of them were women who could have been my grandmother, who lived in the surrounding small towns and otherwise might have been the correspondents whose work I typed up. One time one of them came out to the city desk. She explained to me that she was tired of correcting a particular name that kept popping into the news. Turns out we were checking it against the phone book. Problem is the phone book was wrong. She knew this because he was her neighbor.

Mistakes happen, and when you are writing a book they happen in ways that you can’t imagine. Something might have been correct the first 54 times you looked at it, a well meaning editor “corrected” it and you just didn’t read it carefully the 55th time. But in a book of this weight shouldn’t somebody have noticed? Not just little stuff, but big, and big picture.

The conversation changes.

It doesn’t change for those unaware of the book’s shortcomings. That’s not altogether bad, because at its best this is a damn fine book. Just not one that should be appearing in the footnotes of somebody’s doctoral thesis.

*****

One more aside, about the OCBeerCommentary. In order for it to have “value” you really need to own the book. And, in fact, it does have additional value beyond correcting errors. Alan McLeod noted at the outset he hoped contributors would add detail that goes beyond the book, and they have. It’s also interesting that there was chatter early about the rate of pay for entries. And now those just interested in seeing beer history “done right” are putting in considerable effort for no pay.²

1 In case you were wondering, this is not a set up. When I drank the beer I thought, “I wonder was The Companion might tell be about this.” I didn’t look for examples until I found one that suit my purposes. Although I’m not above that.

2 It’s also been suggested it would be best to wait for the next edition (three years or more). In fact, Oxford could clean up a ton of inconsistencies and small fact errors by making the sort of changes that are easily done from from one printing to the next. Hope they send Alan a thank you card.