Month: April 2010

No, these beers aren’t about marketing

This started as a comment within the conversation following the previous post, but when it hit the third paragraph I thought it better to start anew.

Perhaps I should have made myself clearer.

– This is the opposite of marketing. We now have a broader choice of beers — some obviously better than others, and some pretty terrible — because brewers did not, and still do not, listen to marketers who said/say drinkers will not buy beers with distinctive flavor (America in the 1960s and 1970s). Sierra Nevada Pale Ale never would have got out a focus group.

Which is not to say that some breweries aren’t trying to attract attention by promoting they have the beer with the most this or the most that.

– The Halltertau hop growers started coming to the Craft Brewers Conference in 2007, obviously to promote sales of their hops. They do this by bringing beers that showcase their hops. Eric Toft, who grew up in Wyoming but who has lived in Europe for more than 20 years and been brewmaster at Private Landbrauerei Schönram for almost a dozen, writes the recipes for the beers. Victory Brewing in Pennsylvania brews them because a) Eric has a long-standing relationship with Ron Barchet and Bill Covaleski, b) Victory has contracts for barley and hops with Bavarian producers, and c) the logistics of licensing and shipping.

The pale ale was not created to sell anywhere, but to illustrate to other brewers (mostly American) that Hallertau hops make an excellent addition to beers other than those intended to mimic those from Bavaria. Basing a recipe, let alone a marketing campaign, on my tastes would probably lead to disaster, but my opinion is they are right. I’d much rather try a new not particularly high gravity pale ale made with Saphir or Smaragd (two newer varieties) and one amped up on another addition of Northwest hops. I like those beers, but well-done versions exist and it seems to standout brewers feel compelled to simply dial up the flavor intensity.

Just my opinion, but I’m not sure you will find a better spokesperson for tradition in Germany that Eric. He pitches his yeast cooler and conducts primary fermentation cooler than most, automatically adding time to the production process. He uses only aroma hops, but makes some of the hoppiest (this is a relative thing) beers in Germany. That means more hops, more expense.

Workers at the brewery skim the fermentation every day (open fermenters, also a pain in the brewers’ butt) so the bitterness is more mellow. Schönramer Gold, which won a gold medal in the World Beer Cup, lagers 10 weeks. That’s after the longer primary. You really need to visit the brewery restaurant (it’s not far from Salzburg) because its the only place you can get Schönramer Pils and Dunkel unfiltered.

He believes that drinkers can taste the difference. Landbrauerei Schönram has doubled production since Eric took over (this wasn’t a start up; been around for more than 230 years). At the same time consumption in Germany has shrunk dramatically, so maybe he’s on to something. Just as Ken Grossman and Jim Koch were a while back and Alex Ganum is today.

– The new wave of beer drinkers are asking questions other than “which beer has the most alcohol?” or “which one has the weirdest ingredients?” Some ask just that, but also about where the beer is from, about the ingredients, about production practices. They talk about flavor, and want to try new ones — sometimes “extreme.” But here’s what you should really love about them, Mike. They drive marketers crazy. The don’t just advertisers make things up.

So I met the hop queen – but what else?

Last Wednesday, just hours after arriving in Chicago for the Craft Brewers Conference, I dutifully posted a photo of Halltertau hop queen Mona Euringer, linked it to via Twitter and Facebook and after that pretty much went back to 1998 or some other CBC in a different technological era. Blog? Tweet? I didn’t even attend the seminars on social media. Sorry.

I did use Google maps on my phone when those of us on the “bus from hell” finally seized control after an obviously clueless bus driver drove around in circles for more than an hour and a half before delivering us to a destination less than 5 miles from the hotel. As an aside, I was on the bus that got lost (not quite an hour extra that time) at the 2008 Craft Brewers Conference. Charles and Rose Ann Finkel were on also on both buses. The takeaway? Never get on the same bus with the Finkels and I at CBC.

This wasn’t exactly planned. I expected to blog and tweet a little more. And it didn’t happen because wi-fi in the host hotel was fleeting and cell reception in the trade show worse yet (both true). Or because there was a rather high level of social activity each evening (obviously true). It’s just that I don’t transition well from information collection mode to dispersal mode. And when I wasn’t at a seminar (like “Proper Storage, Shipping & Handling of Hop Pellets”) there was a conversation awaiting. I particularly like CBC in the even years because of the World Beer Cup competition — judges from 27 countries attended this year.

I’ll be years (yes, really, another book project, details soon) writing about what I learned, so for now here’s one overarching observation from the conference, after the promised report from my conversation with the hop queen and the truth about Bavarian-style pale ale.

Euringer, who turned 23 during the conference, still works on the family farm (hops, corn, and sugar beets — about 38 acres of hops) but also is studying business in school. Her great grandfather was the first in the family to grow hops, but her father has told her that she and her brother, Simon, are free to pursue whatever careers they want.

Since Todd asked . . . Euringer, who began drinking beer when she was 16, likes the fruity flavors hops add to beer. She’s serious. She put in five hours each day at the trade show, often refreshing her glass with one of the five beers showcasing Halltertau hops that Victory Brewing made for the conference. “I can’t drink so much bitter beer,” she said.

I asked her about Schönramer Pils, a 40-plus IBU beer that won gold at European Beer Star Awards last fall. “I like it because of what it tastes like,” she said. “But I can’t drink five bottles of it.”

The day before the conference began she visited New Glarus Brewing in Wisconsin with the rest of the Halltertau hops contingent, and particularly enjoyed the new Two Women pale lager.

Since Ron asked . . . The “Bavarian-style pale ale” created for the conference is a beer description, not a new style. A little confusing because for logistical purposes what we tasted was brewed in Pennsylvania, but it is Bavarian, pale and an ale, fermented with Weihenstephan #68, a top-fermenting yeast otherwise used to create weiss beers.

The grist is 100% pale Franconian barley malt, and it was mashed (single-decoction) for a high attenuation. It was hopped with Hallertauer Mittelfrüh, Hersbrucker, Tradition, Select, and Smaragd in five separate additions. The starting gravity was 16 ºP, the final abv 7.2% and the IBU about 45.

Now the observation, which is not exactly new, given that “microbrews” have been with us a while and these days the CBC seems awfully grown up (most of the sessions I attended focused on making beer, but options included “Craft Brand and SKU Proliferation: Great Opportunity of Great Danger” and “Intellectual Property law: Options and Protections for the Brewing Industry”):

Sales wouldn’t still be growing if somebody didn’t want to drink all these beers. But the beers wouldn’t exist at all if people (we call them brewers) weren’t excited about what they make and how their work is received.

Part One. Beer and food. I’m with Alan when he writes about the “need to ‘pair’ beer with food.” But shortly before the Gala Awards Dinner (for the World Beer Cup) on Saturday I spent a few minutes with Randy Mosher and Sean Paxton, who together created the menu that Sean then executed.

Sean’s attention to detail and creativity defy description (hop scented hard boiled eggs in the salad, just amazing). But, as Randy pointed out, the meal stuck to the notion that beer shouldn’t be fussy, and therefore beer meals shouldn’t be either.

Two evenings before Goose Island treated conference attendees to an equally amazing food experience, inviting more than a dozen Chicago chefs to create special dishes that were served with a couple of dozen of Goose Island beers. There were also a dozen variations on Bourbon County Stout served with a dozen chocolate desserts. All in the midst of about 1,000 barrels.

My point would be that this food and beer thing excites brewers, just like Part Two.

Vinnie Cilurzo repairing a barrelPart Two. Beers aged in barrels, sour and otherwise. Attendees filled the chairs, lined up along all the walls and took seats in the aisles for Vinnie Cilurzo’s talk called “Toothpicks, Garlic and Chalk: Three Key Ingredients to Any Brewery’s Barrel-Aged Sour Beer Program.” (In the photo on the right Cilurzo is using those tools to plug a leaking barrel at the Russian River brewpub.)

It seemed like half those in the room raised their hands when he asked if they’d like to attend a pre-conference seminar next year (when CBC in in San Francisco) on barrel-aged sour beers. These beers intrigue brewers. They want to make them, and sometimes that’s all that matters.

Again, not exactly new territory, but Friday afternoon I was reminded about the traits shared by people who make beer and people who drink beer when Mike Kallenberger of MillerCoors was talking rather specifically about craft beer drinkers (“What’s important to them when they’re not drinking beer, and why it matters when they are”).

Summarizing Kallenberger is never easy, because he tends to tackle complicated subjects, so I’m going to grab one thread and hope I don’t tangle it. Craft-beer drinkers take risks because they they think they are worth taking, if there’s such a thing as a “responsible rebel” that’s them, and they see themselves as “making their own rules” rather than simply “breaking the rules.”

Because they know they are right.

Didn’t we just describe brewers as well? Recipes-by-focus-group don’t work for them on any level. Not telling them what new, new flavor drinkers will embrace. Certainly what they can’t do, what wouldn’t work, what people wouldn’t drink.

They know better.

Some are wrong. Some will fail. Some will make horrible, unbalanced beer. But I think we can tell the difference.

The Session #39 announced: Collaborations

The SessionMario Rubio has announced the topic for The Session #39. Collaborations. That simple. But not necessarily that simple.

Feel free to have fun with the topic. Drink a collaborative beer. Who’s brewed some of your favorite collaborations? Who have been some of your favorite collaborators? Who would you like to see in a future collaboration?

As the topic is collaborations, working with each other is encouraged. Look forward to seeing what everyone comes up with.

A collaborative post about collaborations?

An interesting idea.

5April2010: Beer linkorama

Love this lead from the Indianapolis Star: “The rinsed aluminum cans met their destiny on a vibrating gravity slide, where they took a hit of carbon dioxide, got filled with foaming pale ale five at a time, then were sealed with a pop top.”

Sun King in Indianapolis began canning beer last week. Just a few days more than a year after used fermentation tanks were still on their sides and construction workers were putting in drain trenches. That’s when I took the picture at the top. We were there because, here comes the disclaimer, my cousin, Clay, is one of the founders, with the help of my aunt and uncle, Judi and Omar Robinson. So am [insert your favorite obsencity]-ing excited.

  • I already pointed to the long version, but now Martyn Cornell offers the “the executive summary on what we know, what we don’t know, what we can justifiably assume and what we can’t assume about the history of India Pale Ale.” Read it, memorize it, and if anybody ever asks you about the history of IPA, suggests you write a neck label or a description for a beer menu or, heaven forbid a book (yes, Mitch, I’m looking at you) . . . don’t screw it up.
  • Porter’s last hurrah. More history to examine before you type something stupid.
  • Why is it necessary to find a definition of craft beer, and what might that definition be? Yes it feels that we’ve already talked that to death. But this time the questions are asked outside the Brewers Association guidelines because they are delivered with an Italian accent.
  • The Malt Manifesto, intended to help “real ale to appeal to a broader range of people.” Alan McLeod seems to approve, but Pete Brown might be skeptical about the “Guardian’s latest attempt at beer coverage.”
  • Why beer doesn’t matter. Of course it does, or there wouldn’t be 29 comments.
  • The Oregon Economics Blog examines beer often enough I have it filed under “beer” in my reader. Patrick Emerson gets to several key issues in a visit to Upright Brewing, including price. I think he’s wrong that “many” other places wouldn’t support Upright like Portland and Oregon do, but give it a read and think about time as ingredient in beer. And how it adds to the cost of every glass.
  • Sam Adams as the little guy.
  • Nick Matt explains whey the fire at F.X. Matt turned out to be a good thing.
  • It’s not beer (although DUI is mentioned) but we live in the land of “Breaking Bad” — awaiting the episode shot in the bar down the road — so just for fun Better Call Saul.

    • More beer links, but first I digress

    beer Log LogoIt doesn’t take much to encourage me, so a couple of comments following last week’s list of links means a linkorama this week. However, when I started this post I took a quick detour so the buncholinks will have to wait until tomorrow or the next day.

    This is where I started, with this absolutely brilliant sentence from Alan McLeod: “I hate running myself due mainly in its distinction from sitting on a sofa.” I read a lot, beer stuff, wine stuff, tech stuff, political stuff, journalist stuff, music stuff, popular culture . . . and this was my favorite sentence of the week. Just because.

    The day before, Alan celebrated his 2,000th post. At the rate Jay Brooks is going he’ll surely pass him soon, or perhaps already has. But Alan has been at it since 2003, although the Good Beer Blog posts begin in 2004, which is the noteworthy part.

    That got me looking around. I started this blog late in 2005 after I’d used WordPress for a while on our (not currently updated) Beer Travelers blog and on the Real Beer blog. When we began using WordPress at Real Beer we had to leave behind four-plus years of archives generated by entirely different blogging software. OK, we didn’t exactly have to – but looking over several hundred posts it was shocking how many links out had died and it seemed better to let them rest.

    I’ve still got all the posts in an archive, so as an excuse to re-use one of several rotating illustrations (at the top) here’s the first post (and the links still work):

    Monday, March 19, 2001

    Drinking poses: Do you grasp your pint glass like a weapon or do you stare intently into a pint? A new study identifies six basic drinking poses and what they reveal about the drinkers.

    Microbrews, microprofits: The Seattle Times takes a look at “an industry crowded with too much product and way too many companies.” It’s a reminder about how competitive the beer business remains.

    Gary McGrath of Pyramid sums it up nicely: “There’s certainly still some romance in brewing craft beers. We continue to have some very passionate brewers, but we needed a balance. To survive, you’ve got to care about both – the beer and the business.”

    Gee, didn’t this same topic just come up?

    Craft beer sales increased 1.7 percent in 2001. Business is much stronger these days. And there are a lot more beer blogs. Which is the cause? Which the effect?