Month: September 2011

There’s more to beer history than footnotes

Sam Calagione channels Woody Guthrie

I’m not sure if Des de Moor and Alan McLeod were really writing about the importance of brewing history yesterday or something else. Like the role of journalist or the connection between reading about beer and enjoying beer.

But they reminded me I’ve been meaning to mention the latest special edition from The Brewery History Society: “The American Brewing Industry Since Repeal: Large and Smaller Brewers.”

Amy Mittelman (Brewing Battles) wrote the introduction, Sam Calagione provides an imagined history1, Fred Eckhardt a remembered history and Doug Hoverson (Land of Amber Waters) a fully footnoted history2. Just to give you an idea of what’s in the issue. [The contents].

It’s not the compleat history of the industry since 1933, but tells a complete story and is a reminder of at least what I expect from historians. They do more than check facts. They interpret them in a way that history makes sense; maybe even the present and future. For further examples consult Ambitious Brew and The Story of the Pint

1 Calagione’s contribution is an imagined conversation between Woody Guthrie and Charlie Papazian. Several years ago Calagione made Guthrie the centerpiece of a series of beer dinners. In the picture at the top from 2003 he is channeling Guthrie during one such dinner at d.b.a. in New Orleans.

2 A reminder it sure will be nice when he finishes the Wisconsin companion to his Minnesota history.

‘Tis the hop harvest season

Hop at the Seitz farm in Halltertau

These hops will be headed from Germany to St. Louis soon enough, although not in this form. More about that below.

Last month Tony Redsell, who is now in the midst of his 63rd hop harvest, interrupted our conversation to answer a phone call. He patiently and quickly explained the basics of hop harvest, both past and present. “We’re coming to the silly season,” he explained after he hung up. “Every editor thinks, let’s have an article on hops. ‘Hopping down in Kent.'”

Redsell is one of England’s best and best known hop farmers, although hops cover just 200 of the 3,000 acres that make up his various farms in Kent, southeast of London. “I’m not known internationally for my cherries,” he said, laughing. He might have added they are consider some of the best in Kent, also known at “The Garden of England.”

Not everybody agrees how romantic it was for Londoners to “hop on down to Kent” each year to live in huts and pick hops until their hands were black with resin. But it makes a nice story and hops are a great visual, including video.

It makes me realize “Romancing the Hop” might make an even better title for a book than “For the Love of Hops.” My Twitter feed is littered with news about harvest (or “fresh hop” or “wet hop”) beers right now – like this. And the stories aren’t just out of traditional hop growing areas. Jeff Alworth did a nice job of summarizing several yesterday. Throw San Diego to the mix, then consider Jeff’s conclusions.

It’s great fun and exciting. Those hops at the top will be pelletized before they are shipped to St. Louis, but freshly cut (thus “wet”) hops will soon by on the way from Yakima. Next week brewers in several small St. Louis brewers will toss them into kettles, producing beers for the Fresh Hop Beer Festival Oct. 22 at Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood.

Just to be clear, I marked the date on our calendar more than two months ago. We plan to be there, but I’m just as excited about finding out what the Urban Chestnut Brewing beers made with Hallertau Mittelfrüh hops from the Seitz farm outside of Wolnzach taste like.

Before winemakers co-opted the word terroir it meant something more general. Grand dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, Pierre Larousse’s nineteenth-century French dictionary, defines terroir as “the earth considered from the point of view of agriculture.” It describes le goût de terroir as “the flavor or odor of certain locales that are given to its products, particularly with wine.”

Hops bound for Urban Chestnut BrewingNot a month ago Florian Seitz led me up hills and under hop trellises on his family’s farm. His great grandfather first planted hops on it in 1869, and it was a farm even before that. As well as hops they grow corn, wheat and other cash crops, and trees (some become chips, others wood for logs). Florian took over the farm in 2008, but his father still walks the fields regularly and takes charge of drying the hops during harvest.

I’d be a liar if I suggested that in a blind tasting I could say, “This Mittelfrüh came from land I walked on and that one didn’t.” (Heck, Redsell’s East Kent Goldings regularly medal in the Annual Hop Awards and he’ll admit he can’t always tell the difference between his Goldings and those of a neighbor.) But to me it makes a difference that I walked through the hop yards and that the wood beams in the drying barn were hand-crafted in 1904.

I first met Seitz last March in St. Louis. Representatives of the association of German Hop Growers visited Urban Chestnut Brewing after attending the Craft Brewers Conference in San Francisco, Seitz included. It was a good excuse for UCB to throw its first festival, called Hopfenfest. At the time, UCB co-founder and brewer Florian Kuplent contracted to buy Mittelfrüh from Seitz.

Most of those will arrive as pellets, but Seitz is also be shipping a relatively small bale of cones (second photo). “As a grower you are proud when you see what happens with your hops, when the product made from your product is good,” Seitz said.

“For the brewers it is good to see where your products are grown,” he said.

Likewise for us drinkers.

————

Thanks to Florian Seitz for sending the fresh photos.

Session #56 announced: ‘Thanks to the big boys’

The SessionReuben Gray has announced the topic for The Session #56. He’s calling it “Thanks to the big boys” and explains . . .

What I ‘m looking for is this. Most of us that write about beer do so with the small independent brewery in mind. Often it is along the lines of Micro brew = Good and Macro brew, anything brewed by the large multinationals is evil and should be destroyed. Well I don’t agree with that, though there may be some that are a little evil….

Anyway I want people to pick a large brewery or corporation that owns a lot of breweries. There are many to chose from. Give thanks to them for something they have done. Maybe they produce a beer you do actually like. Maybe they do great things for the cause of beer in general even if their beer is bland and tasteless but enjoyed by millions every day.

There is an alternative: “If you honestly have nothing good to say about a large brewer, then make something up. Some satire might be nice, It will be a Friday after all.”

October 7, as a matter of fact.

Book review: The ‘sideways’ view

Wine WarsIf I’m going to finish a book or magazine article (or blog post, for that matter) I expect the author to tell me something new or provoke me to consider something I thought I knew about in a different way.

(Of course it should be well written and focus on a topic that interests me. I sense I’ve read as much about Lady Gaga as I ever will, although I’m sure there’s plenty more that will amuse somebody else.)

I was reminded of this well into Mike Veseth’s Wine Wars when he wrote:

“Well, in wine tasting you learn that sometimes it can be helpful to tilt your glass at an angle and look at the edge of the wine. Sometimes this ‘sideways’ view provides information about the past and clues to the future. It’s time to take a sideways look at the future of wine.”

I was that far into the book (page 195) because Veseth takes a sideways look when discussing “The Curse of the Blue Nun, The Miracle of Two Buck Chuck, and the Revenge of the Terroirists” (the sub-title of the book and the three sections in which is it divided). The first two parts help understand what’s different about shopping for wine at Trader Joe’s and Costco, and that was enough to keep my attention. Veseth is an economist and that’s one of the reasons I subscribe to his blog feed.

(And maybe the history of Blue Nun is special because way back when a friend who knew much more about wine than I did at the time actually sent back a bottle of Blue Nun. Who the hell knows when a bottle of Blue Nun is “off”?)

I wish there were more books like this focused on beer. If you look at Amazon’s list of best selling beer books the “how to” theme is pretty apparent. (The same is true of wine, but those aren’t the books I read.)

That’s why I plan to break away from drinking beer long enough at the Great American Beer Festival to listen to the discussion of “The Evolution of Beer Scholarship” in the Brewers Studio Pavilion (scroll down).

The writing and editorial team of the newly published The Oxford Companion to Beer, will discuss the developing resources in beer education. Compared to a well-defined wine academia, beer education has always been pretty thin, but that’s changing fast. Discussing resources from oral tradition to iPhone apps, Editor-in-Chief, Garrett Oliver, will lead this conversation on the current demand for genuine information and scholarship on beer, and what’s been happening to meet that demand and make brewing studies deeper and more interesting than ever before.

If I don’t make it and you do please tell them you’re pretty sure there is a demand for more information about hops.