Sierra Nevada

Hops, hops, hops

55,000 pounds of hops at Loftus Ranches

You are looking at more than 25 tons of hops on the cooling floor at Loftus Ranches in Washington’s Yakima Valley last Friday. This is what they mean when they say “green gold.”

I was in the Northwest last week first of all to speak at Hop Union’s Hop & Brew School (“Hop Aroma & Flavor: BC [Before Cascade] and AD [After Dank]). Since Hop Union paid my way to get there I added a few days to visit hop farmers in both Washington and Oregon and get an update on the brewery at Mount Angel Abbey. A five-barrel brewhouse is due to arrive before the end of the year, which might be before the brewing space it ready. The monks should be pleased if they have beer to sell when Mount Angel hosts is massive Oktoberfest next September.

But back to hops, and a few links.

– Sixpoint Brewery in Brooklyn used Mosaic (readers’ choice) for a “wet hop” beer called Autumnation, and a wrote a bit for their blog. I’ll let you know what I think of the beer after I taste it.

– It seems there are stories about “wet hopped beers” at every turn these days. I like this one from Long Island, even thought it is not at all clear we can call “small-scale hop farming economically viable.”

– Shepherd Neame will host the first UK Hop Symposium on Oct. 3. Tony Redsell, Peter Darby and a day in and around Faversham, Kent — wish it weren’t 4,000 miles away. In addition, Eddie Gadd of the Ramsgate Brewery will talk about the Kent Green Hop Beer Fortnight.

– Roger Protz profiles Ali Capper, who is determined to keep British hops relevant to brewers in the UK and elsewhere (particularly the US).

– You may have already read about it, but Sierra Nevada’s first Single Fresh, Wet & Wild Harvest Festival (sorry, you’ll have to fill in your birth date) next month will bring even more attention to the to unkilned hops.

– Although breweries from all over the country are shipping beer to the Sierra Nevada party if Scotty were to beam me to one festival it would be the Hood River Hops Festival. Beers from breweries almost all right the middle of Hop Country next Saturday (Sept. 28). For an idea of what might be served, Jeff Alworth is keeping a running list of what’s being served in Beervana.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Jean-Pierre Van Roy adds hops at CantillonThe editors at Slate used this photo to illustrate a provocative story headlined “Against Hoppy Beer: The craft beer industry’s love affair with hops is alienating people who don’t like bitter brews.” 1 In the picture, Jean-Pierre Van Roy is adding hops to a brew kettle at the Cantillon brewery in Brussels. The choice is amusing because Van Roy has aged the hops so they are not bitter.2

Back to the story. It’s good to call for balance in beer, and too bitter is too bitter. Although perhaps there could have been a little more, well, balance. Maybe more about why there’s more to “hoppy” than bitterness. I suggest you go look for yourself.

And consider the nut graph.

That’s when I realized that I had a problem. In fact, everyone I know in the craft beer industry has a problem: We’re so addicted to hops that we don’t even notice them anymore.

She’s not drinking with the same people I am.3

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1 If you email the story the recipient gets this headline: Hops Enthusiasts Are Ruining Craft Beer for the Rest of Us. And if you save it the bookmark reads says: Hoppy beer is awful — or at least, its bitterness is ruining craft beer’s reputation. Somebody just couldn’t decide which snarky headline was best.

2 There are several practical reasons for this, and a conversation about them is exactly like the others the author pleads for at the end of her story.

3 Of course, I don’t consider myself a member of the craft beer industry. Observer, yes. Member, no. But I do drink with card carrying members.

Under the radar, all things are relative

Marble Brewery in Albuquerque recently installed three more fermenters (above, on the left), each holding 45 barrels (almost 1,400 gallons). Marble brews mostly ales, so running 26 batches through each fermenter over the course of a year would constitute a leisurely pace and still yield more than 3,500 barrels.

Now consider this. When Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi founded Sierra Nevada thirty years ago the business plan called for production to max out at 3,000 barrels. “We figured we could make money at that, we wouldn’t get rich but we’d get by,” said Grossman, now the company president. Sierra Nevada produced 1,500 barrels the first year (1980) and passed 3,000 in its fifth. It now brews nearly 700,000 annually.

All things are relative. Yesterday Stephen Beaumont pointed to a Wall Street Journal story about U.S. beer sales volume falling. He suggests this is a victory for boire moins, boire mieux (drink less, drink better). I’m certainly on board with the drink better part.

He writes that the WSJ “doesn’t see this because they’re used to looking only at the large, public corporation side of things.” Indeed, 3,000 barrels here, 3,000 barrels there . . . nothing to the global beer powers. But 3,000 barrels equals close to one million 12-ounce bottles. To those of us buying niche beers that’s a lot of bottles.

Before 2009 no New Mexico brewery since Prohibition (and we don’t have numbers from before) had brewed 5,000 barrels. Marble made 5,200 last year, an increase from 1,950 in 2008 (the brewery began selling beer in April that year). The increase was a ridiculous 267 percent, the actual growth 3,250 barrels.

OK, you never heard of Marble. That’s part of the point. Also Great Divide Brewing in Colorado grew a little over 3,000 barrels (34 percent) in 2009 to about 12,000 barrels. And sales at Saint Arnold Brewing in Texas increased 13 percent (production rising not quite 3,000 barrels) to nearly 26,000 barrels.

We’ll never know how much Bud Light Lime A-B InBev sold in the Albuquerque area in 2009. Maybe it was more than 3,000 barrels, but it’s still just another brand passing through. Before that it was Miller Chill. Nothing changes.

But things have changed in the cooler at the only market in the village where I live. Corrales is an anomaly, long and narrow with about 8,000 people and no stop lights. Albuquerque and Rio Rancho are hard by and that’s where most people shop. Drive two miles past Frontier Mart and there’s a full-size grocery store with cheaper milk and a fully stocked liquor store.

Still, Frontier always had a solid, if limited, wine selection and the usual “craft” beer suspects. Then this fall they squeezed soft drinks into one cooler facing, making room for many more beers. Instead of just offering Sierra Nevada Pale Ale they have Torpedo. Always something from Deschutes and Full Sail. More than Fat Tire from New Belgium. And at least four New Mexico beers.

A-B InBev still owns the floor display, including its lineup of beers brewed in Belgium, but this is real change. Change not so easily measured by numbers.

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Of course we’re headed back to number season, and there’s every chance figures for 2009 may not look as glossy as recent years. We know Boston Beer production was up 1.6 percent in 2009, and Samuel Adams sales seldom stray far from the rest of craft (in no small part because they account for more than one bottles sold out of every five). In 2008 the category was up six percent, Sam Adams six percent. In 2007, Sam Adams 14 percent and “craft” 12 percent. You get the idea.

 

Finding nuance at a bargain price

What does the phrase “beer is the new wine” mean?

Using it as a chapter heading in The Big Book of Beer, Adrian-Tierney Jones favors the idea that beer will claim a place at the British dining table where glasses of wine currently reside. Other writers refer to a sense that beer has taken on an aura of sophistication, or that if you want to spend $10-$15 for an interesting (750ml) bottle of an alcoholic beverage that hunting for beer has become as interesting as hunting for wine.

Todd Wernstrom doesn’t use the phrase in a column in the February/March issues of Wine News, but the idea fits in perfectly with his discussion of wines at this price lower in food stores (a price range considered high end for beer). He writes: “What matters now isn’t what’s in the bottle but what’s on the bottle: labels with little animals; labels with bright colors; labels with names that range from the silly to the vulgar.”

He’s just getting started.

… if I have to see one more collection of pretty people with impossibly straight and white teeth exulting the moment while hoisting a glass of some $8 wine that glints in a prosaic sunset, I’ll end up sideways with stomach cramps. These so-called “lifestyle” shots are an even more cynical selling strategy than using bodacious babes to sell cheap beer. Even the most obtuse Bud drinker knows deep down that putting away a six pack will get him nothing but drunk.

In a publication where the word beer is almost never used, he discusses “looking again for nuance.” Then he writes, “Beers that actually capture the essence of what has been lost in everyday wine are largely made by the micro-size brewers. Names like Sierra Nevada, Firestone Walker, Brooklyn Brewery, Victory, New Belgium Brewing Company and Allagash are now well known in my house and among my friends.”

He makes several points:

– They are all unique.
– The embrace their terroir – and although the idea of beer terroir is even murkier than wine terroir (but worth exploring later) he defines it as a function not of where beer is made but of the choices made by the brewmaster.
– They convey their sincerity and genuineness in their marketing efforts.

The bottom line: “The best part of all these beers is that they are bargains when compared to the vapid entry-level wine we are being peddled.”

Here we might part company. Bargain is a tricky word. He would argue fairly that an expensive bottle of wine is a better choice than beer because he prefers wine to beer. Here the view is that beer often surpasses the best wine in many situations.

However, I share his frustration with marketers, no matter the alcoholic beverage.

Sadly, the advertsing whizzes just don’t think we’re smart enough to make choices based on something other than pretty pictures, and the winemakers don’t think we can taste the difference anyway.

By the way, the column was headlined, “Make it real.”