Session #78: Stop the elevator, I want to get off

The topic for The Session 78 is “Your Elevator Pitch for Beer.” This presents a problem for me: I’m an old dog and struggle with new tricks. You likely don’t care about that, so feel free to click on the arrow to start the 30 seconds of “elevator pitch” and then move on. The angst is optional.

The SessionYou already have this figured out, but this isn’t really a video or 30 seconds of multimedia content. However, while I would have been more comfortable with a 250-word post (the other option) I checked and it takes me a lot longer than 30 seconds to read 250 words out loud.

I like taking photos (and even occasionally attach them to tweets or post them to Instagram). And our daughter, Sierra, has patiently answered my questions about YouTube and channels. I’d want to better understand how the next generation will get information. But it seems I’m pretty much a 1,000 words kind of guy.

(As an aside, the last time I got on an elevator and somebody was holding a beer it was 5 o’clock in the morning at a National Homebrewers Conference. We didn’t talk. I was headed to the airport. He still wasn’t headed to bed.)

Anyway, making an elevator pitch implies a level of advocacy that doesn’t necessarily fit with the goals here. No doubt what I write in this space, and elsewhere, promotes the consumption of beer, but that’s not why I do it. I started this blog seven-plus years ago to explore when and how the where in a beer matters. There are still as many questions as answers. I’m going to keep asking.

Maybe I’ll eventually come up with a 30-second answer. It doesn’t seem likely. Even then, I promise, it will be safe to get on an elevator with me.

In a better beer world, more beer is local

The SessionThe topic for The Session #69 is “The Perfect Beer World,” a concept I’ve struggled to wrap my head around. How does that fit in with the idea of a perfect world? Can you have a beer utopia without achieving overall utopia? These are the sort of questions you need a beer to help sort out.

So here’s one suggestion for a better beer world, which according to my logic, makes the world a better place in general: More local beer.

I could have typed “in a perfect world all beer is local,” but that would require overlooking the fact that some people here have wanted the beer from there for hundreds of years, and sometimes that beer was from pretty far away.

And I’d also be overlooking the fact that we’ve been waiting for the 2012 vintage of Sierra Nevada Celebration to arrive. I probably rambled on long enough about drinking local during our Great Adventure in 2008 and 2009, but it’s worth adding . . . pardon the interuption, but it appears there is news from the Wine and Cheese Place:

Tweet

Sorry, gotta go.

More about beer from a place; local, if you will

First, a bit of disclosure. I own the domain name www.beerterroir.com (you don’t need to go look; you’ll just end up back here). Collecting domain names is cheaper than owning pets.

DRAFT Magazine has posted the story I wrote for the July-August issues they call “The dirt on terroir.” A little science, a little history, a pinch of opinion and philosophy (not all mine). It’s something I’ve spent a lot of time looking into, and might just be getting started.

I’ve got a lot to say. However, we’re out the door in the morning and I won’t be back for more than three weeks. A little family holiday; a lot of hops. Hop growers, hop breeders, hop processors, hop scientists, brewers, museums, research facilities. I might have to write a book. So things will likely be quiet around here. (There goes the Wikio ranking.)

I’ll leave you with something I wrote for All About Beer Magazine a few years ago. Wrote it sitting in a hotel room in Bamberg, in fact.

December 2008

We are in the midst of a Year of Eating and Drinking Local. Were it going to result in a book – though it won’t – we might call it “If it’s a blueberry ale, this must be Maine” or “If it tastes sour and salty, this must be Leipzig.”

Our family adventure will, in fact, last more than a year, and it wasn’t planned around food and drink. Even if it were, most days the diary entry wouldn’t be about beer. One example: the expansive produce market that occurs daily in Split, Croatia, as impressive a scene as any Czech beer hall. We bought fabulous bread, fresh vegetables and brandy aged on walnut shells (How strong? “Strong!” said the man who made and sold it in a one-liter screw-top bottle for 50 kuna).

My wife, Daria Labinsky, our daughter, Sierra, and I left our New Mexico home last May, first heading to Alaska and eventually to Cape Breton in Nova Scotia. As I file this from Bamberg, Germany, in mid-December, we’re quite near the end of 15 weeks in Europe. By the time we return to New Mexico in August we will have visited 17 countries, 9 Canadian provinces and territories, 49 states and Washington, D.C. (Before you ask – can’t drive to Hawaii.)

Why the interest in eating and drinking local? Beyond the obvious pleasures, and a sense that local is somehow better, there’s little that reveals more about regional culture. To understand how Italians feel about food, you shouldn’t eat in a restaurant near Rome’s Coliseum. Head instead to a small town to the south and visit a pizzeria where pizza arrives as the fourth course of a feast, coming directly after buffalo mozzarella oozing with milk.

And to appreciate the magic of New Glarus Brewing beers in Wisconsin, stop at the first gas station after you enter the state and discover that six-packs of Spotted Cow and Fat Squirrel are cold and ready to go. Or head to the town of New Glarus itself and Roy’s Market, which has a large sign out front declaring Roy’s “Proudly Serves All New Glarus Co. Brewing Products, Only Available in Wisconsin.”

The New Glarus local success story has been repeated enough, but basically Dan and Deb Carey started their brewery in a space designed to produce 8,000 barrels a year. Fifteen years later, after squeezing 65,000 barrels out of that facility in 2007, New Glarus moved into a brand-spanking-new, $21 million brewery that sits on a hilltop overlooking the town. Without selling a drop of beer beyond the borders of Wisconsin.

Spotted Cow serves as a perfect representative of the brewery not only because it accounts for half its sales. Dan Carey created the beer first for himself, after wondering what Wisconsin farmhouse beers would have tasted like in the nineteenth century. He uses indigenous ingredients such as corn, includes a bit of unmalted barley grown on land the brewery owns, and leaves the beer unfiltered. It’s designed to be consumed ice cold and tastes like, well, Wisconsin.

Local can be complicated. I seem to find questions more easily than answers. Does any old beer brewed “in town” qualify as local? Do we think more highly of local beers because they are “green,” because they are fresher, because breweries are locally owned and the profits stay in town, because they use local ingredients? Can you still be a local brewery if ship your beer across the country?

A conversation early on with Alaskan Brewing co-founders Geoff and Marcy Larson provided the first answer. Alaskans love Alaskan Brewing. Neon signs brighten most bar windows. Souvenir shops that cater to cruise ships prominently display Alaskan T-shirts (a local grocery sells an Alaskan T and hat package). Locals wear Alaskan sweatshirts.

But Alaskan Brewing sells 70 percent of what it brews outside of Alaska. Big state; not a lot of people. So I felt a wave of paranoia sweep over me when Marcy asked, “Should we be selling our beers down south?” (Down south being Alaskan for the lower 48 states.) I knew she wasn’t seeking my approval, that this was a question about the integrity of their beer far from home, but still I gulped.

I thought about her question during the next several days, when we hiked to an overlook above the Mendenhall Glacier and when I was negotiating “frost heave” along the Alaskan Highway. I realized that Alaskan beers could only come from Alaska, and not just the ones using local ingredients. The tension between man and wilderness you feel everywhere is also part of the balance in each beer.

So now there’s at least one thing I’m sure of. Local beer comes from a particular place, and local beer tastes of that place.

Balancing nature, tradition and progress in Alaska

It was a winter afternoon in Juneau, Alaska, more temperate than most in the Lower 48 would imagine but cold enough for frozen lakes and plenty of snow. A day of work done, Alaskan Brewing Company co-founder Marcy Larson headed out on cross-country skis with her dog, Jasmine, at her side.

They were headed to the Mendenhall Glacier when they came across Romeo, a black wolf well known to local residents. “People let their dogs play with him,” Larson said. “In my mind that’s a mistake. Then he’s not a wolf anymore.”

Romeo trotted toward Jasmine, signaling he wanted to play, but Larson and her dog moved on. When they reached the cliffs near the base of the glacier Jasmine was the first to spot a mountain goat about 30 feet above them. They paused again.

“We left him behind and went skiing,” Larson said. “But later I thought where else can you ski to the base of a glacier, run into a black wolf and then a mountain goat?”

*******

Life is different in Alaska — you feel the tension between man and wilderness everywhere — and sometimes that means brewing beer a little differently.

“Our goal is to keep growing without having any negative impact by being here,” said Ashley Johnston, who doubles as Alaskan communications manager and sustainability spokeswoman.

That’s put Alaskan on the cutting edge — in 1998 it was the first craft brewery in the country to install a carbon dioxide recovery system, with Sierra Nevada only recently becoming the second — and even in what could be uncomfortable territory.

No, not uncomfortable for Alaskan Brewing. Co-founder Geoff Larson spoke in no uncertain terms last June when the brewery was still in the process of putting a mash filter press online, only the second installed in North America (Molson Coors owns the other). “We’ll extract more from the grains that we want, not what we don’t,” he said.

Mash filter press at Alaskan Brewing

Plant engineer Brandon Smith is pictured with the mash filter press.

But uncomfortable for some other brewers. “In North America, like this is forbidden land,” Alaskan plant manager Curtis Holmes said.

That’s because malted barley grains are milled more finely than in conventional mashing and that more is squeezed out of them. Which is why a mash filter press is more efficient (using about 6 percent less barley malt to make the same amount of beer). The concern I’ve heard when visiting other breweries and talking about the process is that the resulting beers wouldn’t have the same mouthfeel they would otherwise and might even taste astringent.

Grant in action at OrvalIt’s easy to understand the skepticism, because this is a serious break with tradition. I happen to be a sucker for grants myself, like from Orval (right). I appreciate the magical role they play in gentle but efficient lautering (or sparging) — although, just to be clear, few breweries still employ grants as part of the lautering process. I value tradition; it’s in the mission statement and why all the words here about the mash press.

So back to that. What press coverage there’s been about Alaskan installing a mash press focused on news about savings — less water consumed, less grain used, less spent grain to deal with, and less energy used — that are good for the bottom line. Where’s the discussion about what the beer tastes like?

In the lab at Alaskan, as a matter of fact, where a tasting panel of company employees convenes every weekday morning at half past ten. They come from all parts of the brewery, because more than half the people who work at Alaskan are BJCP certified judges.

Panelists first tasted test batches from the mash press back in 2000, which is also when other blind taste testing began. “I think it was 1998 or so when I first heard about mash presses and was curious,” Holmes said. By then there weren’t enough cattle in all of Alaska to dispose of the spent grain Alaskan Brewing was producing. In 1995 the brewery bought a grain dryer – another rarity among craft breweries – so it could dry grain (making it lighter) before it was shipped to Seattle.

In 2000 Meura, which is based in Belgium, sent Alaskan a three-barrel pilot mash filter press to test. “Our biggest issue was flavor. Would it be the same?” Holmes said. “We tested it with our old 10-barrel system, comparing what we got with beers off our 100-barrel system. There were no flavor concerns.”

Alaskan wasn’t ready to make the investment until last year, then spent eight months dialing in the recipes before fully implementing the mash press in February. “We took our time and waited to get it right,” said Dave Wilson, operations manager. The recipe for each brand was tested, then brewed using the lauter tun one week, the mash press filter the next.

The biggest challenge was matching alcohol levels, because the new system is more efficient. “There were no issues with flavor and mouthfeel,” Wilson said. “It was pretty easy to match fully attenuated beers within a month. The maltier beers were a little harder.”

The savings are real: 360,000 pounds of malt a year, one million gallons of water, and 65,000 gallons of diesel fuel. Spent grain now contains less water than in the past, making it easier to dry now and laying the foundation for using a biomass boiler in the future.

That’s good business, but not why the crew at Alaskan initiated this and many other energy saving programs. “In a town where we get 90 inches of rain per year you’re not necessarily thinking about saving water,” Geoff Larson said. “But this is about discharging less waste water down the drain and energy usage.

“In the U.S. we have a wasteful mindset. We’ve had the luxury of living where we do, but that’s changing.”

*******

The Larsons aren’t native Alaskans but clearly they are Alaskans. “There are different elements that affect us, obstacles and challenges we’ll encounter that others don’t,” Marcy Larson said.

She, Geoff and Jasmine are all certified for search and rescue operations. In some of the lower 48 states they’d likely be specialists, called upon for specific emergencies. That’s not the way it works in Alaska. “Our search dogs are trained to do a multiple number of things,” Marcy Larson said. “That’s the way it is in Alaska. There are fewer of us to do more things.”

The day I visited last year I met Jasmine because she had ridden to work with Geoff in his truck. This was not long after an avalanche knocked out hydro power in Juneau, briefly sending electricity prices skyrocketing five-fold. To help companies through the crisis the city sent out energy auditors who then suggested ways to conserve energy. The one who visited Alaskan Brewing told Geoff the brewery was already doing everything he might recommend.

And this was before the mash filter press was operating.

“The uniqueness of our location means we don’t always do things like others,” Geoff Larson said.

Beer from a place, and the place is Alaska

Beers from Alaskan Brewing taste like this:

Alaskan Marine Highway

And like this:

Alaskan totem pole

They taste like they are from Alaska, and once you’ve traveled the Alaskan Marine Highway from one port to another you’ll realize that more specifically Alaskan Brewing beers taste of Southeast Alaska.

Quite honestly I paused for a moment last week when Alaskan co-founder Geoff Larson said that the brewery sells more than 70 percent of its beers beyond Alaska’s borders. After all, we’re at the beginning of our Year of Drinking Local, and know full well that many beers suffer the farther they travel from home.

In the next few hours I realized how well timed this stop in our family adventure — generally not a beer trip but a trip in which we are drinking beer — turned out to be. It put the importance of local and place back in perspective. A local beer that doesn’t reflect where it’s brewed doesn’t interest me nearly as much as a beer that comes from a place, even when we may be far from that place.

Of course you understand that much more easily if you’ve been there.

This particular day in Juneau was a working day. I started collecting Geoff and Marcy Larson’s oral history as well as gathering information for two stories. But the days before and after were at least as important in getting to better know beers I’ve been drinking for 15 years. The there in the beers is on a trail overlooking Mendenhall Glacier, on a ferry traveling through the Wrangell Narrows, chilled to the bone hiking in a “temperate” rain forest, or watching a server set down a plate of massive crab legs in a restaurant.

Alaskan beer is everywhere, clearly a source of state pride. Neon signs brighten most bar windows. Souvenir shops that cater to cruise ships prominently display Alaskan T-shirts (a local grocery sells an Alaskan T and hat package), and we saw how many locals wearing Alaskan sweatshirts?

What percentage of drinkers in Seattle or Phoenix (both good markets for Alaskan beers) have shared these experiences? Probably not a huge number. What percentage care that Alaskan Amber is based on a recipe used to brew a regional beer in the early 1900s? Care that Alaskan Winter Ale features spruce tips from local trees (and a tradition that goes back to when Captain Cook traveled the Inside Passage)? Care that that Native Americans determined hundreds of years ago that alder (the only truly hardwood available in Alaska) was best for smoking fish, and now Alaskan smokes malt for its famous Smoked Porter over adler. Again, not as many as I would like.

They mostly care if the beer is good, rather than thinking of the measures Alaskan’s brewers take to assure that beer sold “down South” (as Alaskans refer to the Lower 48) still tastes of Alaska.

One quick report from their quality control lab: Each batch of beer is plated (scrutinized under a microscope) ten times before it goes into a bottle. Each day a tasting panel (all employees participate on a rotating basis) convenes in the QC lab. They taste finished beers, beers in progress, small batches sold only regionally, smaller batches that never leave the brewery and more.

I’m pretty sure they know just what a beer from Alaska should taste like.