Month: November 2011

When Yvan de Baets speaks, I listen

Yvan De BaetsWendy Littlefield took a few seconds from her busy schedule getting ready for Tuesday’s Coast to Coast Toast to drop me a link to a story about what brewers in Belgium think of AB InBev’s Belgian Beer Cafes OPENING SOON IN AN AMERICAN CITY NEAR YOU! For that I thank her.

A few paragraphs into the story I was thinking it would be better if the author talked to Yvan De Baets. I’m biased, because Yvan made important contributions to both Brew Like a Monk and Brewing With Wheat (including the foreword). I try not to go back to the same experts for every book, but he’ll also be contributing to For the Love of Hops because nobody makes more sense to me when we are talking about the integrity of beer.

So as I scrolled down into the story and first saw the top of a photo of Brasserie Verschueren, which is located in the neighborhood where he lives, I smiled. Two more clicks and there he was in front of it. Of course, he totally nailed it.

He says he understands and supports In-Bev’s Belgian Beer Cafe idea from a financial point of view, but not from a human one.

“You don’t build create a Belgian beer cafe in five minutes,” De Baets says. “It’s generations of owners and customers that build the place, and then give a soul to it.”

De Baets likens In-BEV’s Belgian Beer Cafes to the “Irish pubs” that sprung up around the world in the 1990s. It’s a gimmick, he says, it’s kitsch, and he wonders how outdated they will look in a few years.

The beer menu, he notes, features well-known InBev heavy-hitters like Stella, Hoegaarden, and Leffe. It also has Westmalle, and Chimay, two beers still brewed by Trappist monks.

And while those beers are part of the Belgian brewing heritage, Da Baets says, he thinks the Belgian Beer Cafe could do better.

“It’s beers in which all the angles have been rounded. There is no character, no real personality. I hope this is not the real image of Belgian beer,” says De Baets.

It’s not 10 a.m., but I find myself suddenly thirsty for a Brasserie de la Senne Zinnebir.

Local beer? For sure, but how does it taste?

Let’s cut directly to the press release.

The Weeping Radish, North Carolina’s oldest micro brewery, will debut its first beer produced from all locally grown hops and malt.

A year ago, the brewery began producing the first beer dry hopped with the first commercially available hops grown at Ecoview Farm in Weaverville, NC. Named IPA 25, in order to celebrate 25 years of micro brewing in NC, this beer has a unique fruitiness which comes from the young hops plants grown in the North Carolina mountains.

Now the Weeping Radish has expanded the local ingredient list of its annual Christmas Beer to include malt grown at Chris Hoffner’s dairy in Mount Ulla, NC. This would not have been possible without the groundbreaking work of Brent Manning and Brian Simpson, the founders of Riverbend Malt House in Asheville.

“We are proud to have received the malt with the ‘Invoice #1’ from Riverbend,” says Uli Bennewitz, owner of the Weeping Radish. “The 20 barrels of Christmas Beer are currently aging at the brewery’s cellar.”

This very special batch will be launched at the Carolina Farm Stewardship Conference in Durham on Nov. 12. “This is the most appropriate place to launch this beer” according to Uli. “This organization has been in the forefront of the sustainable farm movement for over 20 years, growing from obscurity to being one of the leading organizations in the country.”

“We did not limit ourselves to 20 barrels because we wanted to be coy, we had to because that was all the local malt which we could get at this time,” said Nick Williams, the brewer.

The trend towards a more “local” based economy is catching on all over the United States. From an explosive growth in farmers markets and local food systems, to “made in the USA” stickers on manufactured goods to a doubling of members of the N.C. Department of Agriculture and Consumer Service’s “Goodness Grows in NC” program. All of these signs point to the fact that consumers are seeing the value of local products.

The micro brewing industry has also received a boost by the fact that the two brew giants, controlling by far the largest share of the U.S. beer market, are now in foreign hands.

And the truly “non planned” twist of the story: Chris Hoffner, who grows the barley, also works with the Weeping Radish’s Master Butcher, who turns some of the beef from Hoffner’s dairy into delicious local hot dogs and beer brats. What a story: Christmas Beer and Beer Brats with ingredients from the same farm in North Carolina! The local movement has truly arrived!

Goodness, I’m all for local beer. I even own a related domain name, drinklocalbeer.com (don’t bother, you’ll just end up back here). I appreciate when a brewer allows his or her beer to express a bit of terroir. And part of the reason I started this blog was to rag on the importance of ingredients.

The Weeping Radish — now officially Weeping Radish Eco Farm & Brewery — had been around 25 years, so obviously is not in the gimmick business (my bullshit antenna start twitching when the word trend creeps into the conversation). A few more details about the ingredients, other than they are “local” would make that clear. For instance . . . I’m ornery enough to want to know all sorts of things about growing conditions and processing. But a good place to start would be a press release that includes descriptions of the varieties of barley and hops in the beer.

When ‘craft’ is your dad’s beer . . .

“We’re not new. We’re not small. We’re not young. And that makes the story less interesting to a lot of people. It’s the way of the world. That’s a challenge for the craft beer breweries of our generation. There’s a lot of pressure to constantly be reinventing yourself for new generations.”

              – Steve Hindy, co-founder of Brooklyn Brewery

Hindy is a really smart guy. If you are silly enough to think you want to open a brewery the book he and co-founder Tom Potter wrote about their experiences, Beer School: Bottling Success at the Brooklyn Brewery, is essential reading.

Links take me to dozens of stories a day that I don’t finish. I read the Nona Brooklyn interview with Hindy to the end.

Sure it’s a business story, but with lots of sensible thinking about how an enterprise can still be local even after it’s no longer small. And how a brewery can still offer customers experiences that are new after not everything is new; beers for the generation that made it a going concern and for the generation that will keep it in business.

Alaskan Smoked Porter – Nothing fishy here

Alaskan Smoked PorterAlaskan Brewing co-founder Geoff Larson tells a good story. One you want to listen sitting next to a roaring fire on a Juneau beach.

Like the one about what he learned not long after Alaskan brewed its Smoked Porter for the first time in 1988; a beer that recently won its twentieth medal at the Great American Beer Festival.

Larson smoked the malt he used in Smoked Porter at Taku Smokeries, at the time located across the road from the brewery (Taku since moved to a bigger plant and Alaskan bought the old facility, using it smoke malt for the once-a-year release). He had a few reservations going in, most notably about fish oils somehow ending up in the beer, changing the aroma and killing the head. Those concerns disappeared when he tasted the beers and it sold out in a matter of weeks, then . . .

A customer told Larson the beer tasted of salmon. “I took it inappropriately and defensively,” he said, measuring his words and making it clear how bothered he was. It was months later before he had a conversation with the late Greg Noonan of Vermont Pub & Brewery about Noonan’s version of smoked porter that he learned something important about aroma and memory.

“Greg talked about first using hickory and customers would ask if he put hickory smoked ham in the beer,” Larson said. “Then he used maple and they asked, ‘Hey, did you start throwing sausage in your beer?'”

Larson began to understand the powerful memories smoke evokes. He realized it wasn’t salmon that drinker noticed but the alder wood both the malt and fish were smoked over. In Southeast Alaska smoke from alder wood conjures up memories of campfires and smoked salmon, while elsewhere maple smoke reminds consumers of Jimmy Dean Sausage.

(And in the upper Franconian region of Germany where beechwood is used to smoke pork as well as malt to brew the local rauchbier some drinkers describe the more intense of these beers as “liquid bacon.”)

“One smoked malt is not the same as another smoked malt. You can taste the difference between woods,” Larson said.

Last week Alaskan released the 23rd vintage of Smoked Porter. Alaskan doesn’t sell beer in Missouri, so we opened a 2009 bottle we bought a couple of years ago in Arizona.

Still smoky, from the start to the finish. But for us, the real pleasure? It smelled just like Alaska.