Tom Cizauskas has posted the roundup for Session #36: Cask-Conditioned Beer.

Be sure to make to all the way to the end and the links to all the non-bloggers who Tom prodded into contributing. Don’t miss his own post about local hops for local beer.

The United States became a net exporter of hops in the 1870s, so somebody must have liked varieties grown in America. In fact, exactly 100 years ago the U.S. exported 10.5 million pounds of hops and imported 3.2 million. Eighty percent of the exports went to England, while almost all the imports came from Germany and Austria-Hungary (thus Bohemia, where Saaz hops were grown).

Yet consider this from article in The Edinburgh Review from 1862, only a few years before the U.S. began exporting more hops than it imported:

“American hops may also be dismissed in a few words. Like American grapes, they derive a course, rank flavour and smell from the soil in which they grow, which no management, however careful, has hitherto succeeded in neutralising. There is little chance in their competing in our market with European growth, except in season of scarcity and of unusually high prices.”

Think how you’d feel if you were a grower and read that at Rate Hops or Hop Advocate?

Polish homebrewers established the Polish homebrewers’ association (Polskie Stowarzyszenie Piwowarow Domowych) last week and made this wonderful video (with subtitles).

Thanks to I might have a glass of beer for spotting this.

In still another story about gloomy beer sales that focuses on the largest brewers BusinessWeek provides this eye-opening number:

“One segment of the beer industry that has resisted the recession is craft breweries, increasingly popular for flavorful beers made in smaller batches. According to data from the Nielsen Co., craft or microbrew sales rose 12.4% in 2009.”

Nielsen also reports that craft beers now account for 5.8 percent of the overall beer market.

Granted, Nielsen and the Brewers Association define “craft beer” in different ways (the BA is more exclusive) but a gain of more than 12 percent for 2009 would be stunning. The Wall Street Journal has reported Boston Beer production was up 1.6 percent in 2009, and we know traditionally total craft sales seldom differ much from Samuel Adams (in no small part because Sam Adams accounts for more than one bottle sold out of every five). In 2008 the category was up 6 percent, Boston Beer 6 percent. In 2007, Boston Beer 14 percent and “craft” 12 percent. You get the idea.

Additionally, at mid-year the Brewers Association reported “craft” gains of 5 percent for the first six months. It would take one heck of a second half to hit 12 percent.

Exhibit A

Porter City Tavern in Raleigh will now serve only North Carolina beers on tap (tip of the hat to Geistbear).

Exhibit B

Artisinal Imports current newsletter makes a case for diversity. In case the link quits working or you don’t want to take the time, a few highlights:

I’ll leave the thinking and concluding up to you.

SirRon at The Ferm has announced the topic for Session #37, so we begin the fourth year of first Friday drinking with marching orders to write about “The Display Shelf: When to Drink the Good Stuff.”

The explanation:

“The topic is open ended and the rules of The Session are close to nil. You can use your post to be persuasive or therapeutic. You may choose to tell a story of a great bottle you once opened or boast of your own beer collection.”

I’ve been to the “cellar” (we live on sand, a basement is out of the question, so we forego romance, using a temperature-controlled chest freezer) and asked for volunteers.

This is my contribution to Session #36: Cask-conditioned ale that involves actual drinking of beer. Host Tom Cizauskas has the recap (plus plenty himself). I also wrote a little about cask ale in U.S. 15 or so years ago and posted an additional story (from 1997) in The Library.

This seems like a good Valentine’s Day story: Cask ale meets single hop. Together they make beautiful grapefruit and lemon aromas.

It’s a true story. I tasted it.

Marble Brewery in Albuquerque puts a firkin of cask ale on the bar every Friday. Il Vicino Brewery, also in Albuquerque puts a firkin out on Wednesdays. Turtle Mountain in nearby Rio Rancho regularly keeps a beer on cask. Friday I was at Marble because it was the first Friday of the month and time for The Session #36.

The plan Friday had been to serve a porter, but Friday morning it didn’t seem that would be in proper condition (have sufficient carbonation) and a cask of Centennial pale ale was also put on the bar.

The Centennial pale is not a brewery regular. In fact, you often won’t find a pale ale on. From the time the brewery opened less than two years ago Marble IPA has been the flagship. Because the 2009 hop crop has arrived the brewers at Marble made the Centennial-dominated beer to get to know how 2009 differed from 2008 (or 2009 from another field).

The only malt is pale and the beer is bittered with what brewers call CZT (Columbus, Zeus and Tomahawk are basically the same hop). Centennial hops are added 15 minutes before the end of the boil, at knockout and in dry hopping. (Quick aside, doesn’t dry hopping sound like a strange name for something involving liquid?)

“With zero specialty malts we can truly discover what that hop is all about,” said brewmaster Ted Rice. Next they’ll do the same with a Simcoe pale ale. In other words, he wants to know how these hops may best serve Marble IPA, and the occasional Double IPA.

Friday the brewers were trying something different with Amarillo hops in the IPA, adding the Amarillo at different times in two batches in an attempt to get the best (tangerine) out of that hop and avoid the less pleasant (garlic).

Centennial poses no such problems. The pale ale “reinforced what we knew. It’s a flawless hop,” Rice said. “You can use it in the kettle, the whirlpool, dry hop with it, hop the hell out of a pale ale and it retains its drinkability.”

I didn’t think this is the same drinkability Anheuser-Busch InBev touts on billboards. Centennial pale brims with zesty lemon and grapefruit flavors, and of course finishes with a firm bitterness.

This was not a flat out perfectly conditioned cask ale. The foam could have been tighter, the bubbles smaller, the mouthfeel a little fuller, but I suspect Steve Hamburg would have given it high marks. Particularly since a cask pint was as bright as the keg version.

Let’s be honest — plenty of drinkers are going to prefer the keg version, a little cooler, more carbonation, a more straightforward hop experience. And the beer was not designed to be a particularly complex. Not with a single malt, one hop for flavor and aroma, and a yeast that mostly gets out of the way.

However in my opinion time in the firkin and the lack of top pressure made the beer more interesting. The cask version was softer on the palate, fruitier (both malt/yeast flavors and hops). “It allows the hop character to open up, to become more aromatic,” Rice said.

I love happy endings.

It’s Saturday morning and I’m sitting down to write my contribution to The Session #36: Cask-Conditioned Ale. I’m running behind because I just spent the last hour or so reading all the contributions host Tom Cizauskas solicited. Really wonderful and worth your time.

I particularly like Steve Hamburg’s recollections from the early, then later, days of the Chicago Real Ale Festival. He’s not kidding when he writes about how lively (explosive is a proper synonym in this case) some of the casks were. I recall standing with him and Roger Deschner, who also did much of the cellar work, and another member of the Chicago Beer Society in 1997 and listening to Roger explain why there was a large dark circle on the ceiling.

This third CBS member was rambling on about how “big” cask ale was about to become and Steve was politely explaining it was a niche within a niche. It still is, but the Real Ale Festival grew larger and quicker than any sane person would expect and likewise the number of places you’ll find something that at least vaguely resembles cask ale.

Of course, as Hamburg writes, there’s still work to be done.

Unfortunately, too many American beer drinkers have only been exposed to a more false representation of real ale, where the “show” takes precedence over the beauty and elegance of the beer in the glass.

After reading that I went looking for a quote from Graham Tock collected in 1996 or so. I found it in a story written in 1997. Although much of it is dated I think it represents the state of “American real ale” at the time and decided to put article in in The Library.

A week before the first Real Ale Festival I helped All About Beer magazine organize a seminar in a Denver hotel on the Saturday morning of the Great American Beer Festival. Mark Dorber, who would take charge of the cellar the next week in Chicago, and Roger Protz spoke about real ale. We had a few versions of “American real ale” but the stars of the show were to be casks from Fuller’s and Young’s in London.

When I arrived in Denver on Wednesday the cask of Fuller’s was already at the hotel. Following Dorber’s instructions a hotel janitor cut blocks of wood and put it in stillage. Dorber tapped and spiled the cask and set it to conditioning. We propped open the back doors to the room where the seminar would be held and turned it into a proper cellar.

By Friday the Fuller’s was tasting pretty good but the Young’s was still nowhere to be seen. It arrived Saturday morning, an hour before we were to start. Dorber shook his head. No point in even trying. So I rolled the cask to the elevator, took it up three flights, and rolled it to our room. The next day I rolled it back to the elevator, took it to the garage, rolled it to our van and drove it 950 miles to Peoria, Illinois. Two days later I loaded it in the trunk of our Saturn, listening it occasionally bang around during the 150-mile trip to the Goose Island brewpub in Chicago.

Remember the beer had already traveled from London to Denver and been waylayed by customs. It hadn’t exactly been coddled before Dorber took charge of it in Chicago.

Three days later it was pouring and tasting brilliant.

I realized then somebody should market a bumper sticker that says, “Have you kissed your cellarman today?”

Later today: Cask ale in Albuquerque in 2010.

Pardon this brief advertisement. The printer will ship Brewing with Wheat next week, meaning it goes to the distributors and then to stores. It could be in your hands by the end of the month.

The “public service” announcement here is that you can pre-order it for 20 percent off from Brewers Publications, entering the code that is provided at the Beer Enthusiast Store.

I’ll be posting more about the book at Brewing with Wheat, but here’s the excerpt from the foreword by Yvan De Baets that appears on the back cover. Totally relevant to the notion where matters when it comes to beer.

“Tracking those old beers—German, Belgian, whatever—makes one realize that the key to the old styles, probably even more than the recipes themselves, was to be found in the local microflora of each brewery. (Jean-Baptiste) Vrancken reports eighteenth and nineteenth century trials, in which brewmasters were sent from a brewery to another similar one, with all their equipment, raw material, and techniques. Sometimes the grains were even crushed in the first brewery to mimic the process perfectly. They never succeeded in making the same beer in the next village!”

And rather than include another giant image to show you the back cover here are the endorsements:

“In Brewing with Wheat Stan Hieronymus has given homebrewers, craft brewers, and beer enthusiast alike a wheat-fuelled flux-capacitor that will transport them from region to region around the world. This page-by-page journey will satisfy the readers thirst for the knowledge, history, and science needed for producing and enjoying the wide spectrum of wheat beers.”
   - Sam Calagione, founder Dogfish Head Crafty Brewery

“Stan Hieronymus has filled a giant, gaping hole in the beer literature with this book. And once again, he has done it with crisp, engaging prose, loaded with rock solid information, much of it directly from those who brew these delicious, but technically challenging beers every day.”
   - Randy Mosher, author of Radical Brewing and Tasting Beer

We will now return to regular programming.

Added Feb. 17 (just because Alan asked – see below): The book weighs 11.8 ounces.

Not long after Dan Carey of New Glarus Brewing returned from a trip to Germany in 1997 during which he was able to buy a beautiful copper clad brewing system because consolidation squeezed some breweries out of business he made an interesting observation.

He suggested that perhaps the United States was simply ahead of the curve in the middle of the twentieth century (in 1950 the top ten breweries accounted for 38% of production and by 1980 for 93%, with seven of those ten breweries soon to disappear). As America underwent a brewing revival other countries felt the pain of consolidation that had already swept through the U.S.

I thought of what he said this morning when I read this:

. . . the brewery’s owner told how today’s big brands took advantage of the situation to to expand in such a brutal way. They had a huge advantage, they were able to guarantee consistent quality. Many of the regional breweries weren’t in a position to do that. During the previous four decades hardly any investment had been made on their equipment and technologies. So people got used to drinking the brands that to this day enjoy an enormous popularity without realising the gradual drop in their quality.

Today, regional and micro breweries are slowly gaining more market share . . .

The country in question?

The Czech Republic.

Thoughtful commentary about beer culture that could be applied in how many different countries? From Pivní Filosof-Beer Philosopher — go read it.