Month: January 2013

Another beer flavor/flavour wheel

Beer Flavor Wheel, Beer Flavour Wheel

Mark Dredge posted this new Beer Flavor Wheel today at Pencil and Spoon. (If you click on the image you’ll head over to his blog, where the wheel is a bit larger).

This is a much more drinker friendly wheel than the traditional one, created for Dredge’s new book, Craft Beer World, which just went to the printer. As mentioned here before, the beer flavor wheel was developed in the 1970s by the Master Brewers Association of the Americas and the American Society of Brewing Chemists following the lead of Danish flavor chemist Morten Meilgaard. It was one of the first such wheels. A wine aroma wheel came later, as did the Flavour Wheel for Maple Products, a South African brandy wheel, and a variety of other fun dials.

The Beer Wheel was not designed for consumers but to provide reference compounds that can be added to beer samples to represent the intended flavors. It continues to grow in size, and there is every possibility that the committees working on its redesign will settle on several subwheels.

Also mentioned here, and pictured in For the Love of Hops
the Hochschule RheinMain University of Applied Science created a Beer Aroma Wheel (actually two wheels) with the goal of providing terms more suitable for communicating with consumers and focusing less on defects.

Panelists who helped develop the terminology used aromas of fruits, spices, everyday materials, and other foodstuffs to describe their sensory impression. Because there is the rare occasion where 4-vinyl guaiacol is appropriate in conversation, but rare remains the best adjective. Clove works much better in mixed company (geeks and non geeks).

Who will write the ‘local hops’ success story?

Hops, in a water soaked field that must be harvestedEarlier today, Win Bassett pointed to a story about interest in hop growing in North Carolina (which led to a lengthy Twitter exchange of which I was a part and should have done a better job of keeping educational).

To its credit, the story examined the challenges of growing hops in North Carolina, including that the state is closer to the equator than major hop producing regions, so the days are shorter than ideal for hop growing.

This bit, however, is a little troubling. North Carolina State University Horticulturist Jeanine Davis, who has prodded along some excellent research, might reconsider the idea that growers are going to tell brewers what hops to use, and by extension drinkers what hops to drink.

Davis points out there are now some hops varieties that are more daylight neutral and require less daylight than varieties grown in most areas of the world.

“These day-length neutral varieties, bred in South Africa, are the ones we need to use in North Carolina,” she says.

“Brewers will likely ask for more commonly known aromatic hops, but any new grower should grow hops varieties suited for production in North Carolina, and then convince the brewer to use these varieties,” she adds.

“There are some indications that growing day-length sensitive varieties here in North Carolina is severely limiting our yields. In some cases, we may be losing up to 85 percent of potential yield, just because we are trying to grow the wrong varieties.”

Within a few years, Sierra Nevada Brewing and New Belgium Brewing will be making a lot of beer in North Carolina. Right now, they make a lot of beer in California and Colorado, respectively, and they use only a little bit of California- or Colorado-grown hops, respectively. There’s a lesson there.

In 2011 (removing all numbers related to China because it is relatively insular) farmers in Germany and the American Northwest produced 85 percent of the world’s alpha/bitter hops and 67 percent of the aroma. The Czech Republic sold another 16 percent of the aroma. Scores of other countries grow hops, often just for their home market, but the Northwest and Germany set expectations for price, quality, and variety.

This doesn’t mean that farmers in North Carolina, Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, even southern California can’t succeed in selling a certain amount of local hops. But success won’t come overnight. Breeding new hop varieties, perhaps some more suited to local environments and day length, takes time. Goofy as it sounds, that organic hops naturally result in lower yields and are more expensive to produce sort of levels the playing field — or at least reduces the advantage farmers have in the dominant hop growing regions. So maybe organic hops, grown on low trellises, will be part of the equation.

It will take time, patience, education, luck, all that stuff, and then we will see what happens.

Gorst Valley Hops in Wisconsin has been out front of all of this, working directly with growers, supporting them throughout the process that starts with planning a yard and continues through building their own version of an oast house.

“Some people perceive local as having value. Local’s great, but it can’t be the only part of our plan,” said James Altweis of Gorst Valley. “If a brewer doesn’t see the improvement, then he’s not going to pay the higher price.”

And higher prices must be part of the equation. “We have to look for what we can do on process that adds value, that creates differences apparent in the final beer,” Altweis said.

I don’t mean to be a curmudgeon, although I suppose I am, who points out the challenges every time a local hops story appears, but growing hops is hard and that chance for a bad ending shouldn’t be overlooked. For farmers or brewers (how would you like to contract for a chunk of hops with a single farmer and have the crop go kaput?). Nearly one-third of Polish hop farmers quit growing hops in 2010 and 2011. There were several reasons, including that Polish breweries apparently quit buying as much Polish hops, but one-third, and in an environment well-suited for hops.

The Session #71 roundup posted

The SessionShowing the organization you might expect from a homebrewer, as long as that homebrewer is not me, John at Homebrew Manual has posted and neatly organized the roundup for The Session #71: Brewers and Drinkers.

I too quite enjoyed Darren at IDREAMOFBREWERY’s “biology lesson on the sub-sets of brewers and drinkers” and the Venn diagram that I’m not quite sure was related to the topic but you want to look at.

The Session #71: A life lesson from brewing

The SessionJohn at Homebrew Manual made Brewers and Drinkers the topic for the 71st gathering of The Session today, and suggested many directions a post might go. However, I kept coming back to this: “(It) is about your relationship with beer and how it’s made.”

(In his post, The Beer Nut writes, “. . . when The Session rolls round, I try and twist the theme to whatever I’m currently interested in or am already thinking of blogging about.” Perhaps that is what I am doing here, pulling that line slightly out of context.)

My relationship with beer and how it is made might be more complicated than yours. I don’t spend my working hours focused on that, but instead on other people’s relationships and how they make beer, or grow ingredients, or analyze results, or run a bar, or whatever. By the end of the day, introspection that includes beer has little appeal.

I’ve learned a fair amount about various aspects of beer, from history to science, by reading. A lesser amount by doing; that is brewing at home. And far more by listening and observing. Sometimes all those experiences come together.

I’m pretty sure I’ve already told the story here about a late morning or early afternoon (I might have been hung over, so details get fuzzy) at Cantillon in Brussels. I was talking with Leonardo Di Vincenzo, founder of Birra Del Borgo in Italy, a brewer who has done collaborations with Cantillon, at the time.

The conversation stopped when Jean Van Roy poured something he had hauled out of the cellar.

Leo looked at my face when I took a sip. “Humbling,” he said.

Making beer is humbling. But so is life.

If it turns out well, I did a good job of staying out of the way. If it doesn’t turn out well, then I did something wrong. Humbling.

So this is why they called their first born ‘Wheat Ale’

Co-founder Tom Schlafly, and I guess everybody else at the St. Louis Brewery (which makes Schafly beer), suddenly put this brewery-turning-21 stuff into an entirely new context.

In this case as well as the importance of context there’s the matter of repercussions. Schalfly Beer turned 21 years old last week. Sometime after that a child would have been conceived under the influence of likely more than one Schlafly beer. The company would like to make sure that bit of history isn’t lost, as Schlafly explained in the employee blog.

As most remaining ARs (adult readers) realize, Schlafly Beer celebrated its 21st birthday on December 26, 2012. Thus, according to my calculations, the first baby conceived by one or both parents under the influence of our beer is likely to celebrate his or her 21st birthday sometime in the fall of 2013. The obvious way to recognize this individual would be to buy him or her a beer on his or her birthday. The problem, however, is that this person is not yet old enough to drink legally. As a socially responsible company we are not allowed to market to this person, whoever he or she may be. We can, however, reach out to the conceiving parents, which is exactly what we’re doing.

If any of you amorous readers (yet another kind of ARs), think you may be the parents of the first baby conceived under the influence of Schlafly Beer, we encourage you to share your story by sending it to questions@schlafly.com. I’m not exactly sure what kind of recognition we plan to give to the individuals involved (conceivers and conceived) and would welcome recommendations on this point from other ARs. Depending on the response, we may post parental recollections of moments of conception on line and let ARs help us decide what kind of recognition would be appropriate. It might even be worth posting maternal and paternal memories separately and comparing them for consistency. Embarrassed offspring will not be allowed to comment until after they’ve celebrated their 21st birthdays, by which time their parents’ stories will have gone viral and it will be too late.

Benjamin Braddock: Goddamn, that’s great. So old Elaine Robinson got started in a Ford.

*****

Why “Wheat Ale” rather than “Pale Ale”? See Stephen Hale’s explanation.