Month: July 2013

A Brew’s Who Of The Millennium

Remember last January when First We Feast posted a list of The 20 Most Influential Beers of All Time, inspiring Martyn Cornell, Mr. Zythophile, to counter with The REAL 20 most influential beers of all time?

More than 200 comments followed, and way toward the end somebody suggested, “Perhaps Martyn could start another list of the 20 most influential people!”

And he answered, “I am indeed considering that very thing.”

Every day I get up thinking, “Today will be the day.” Then I check Zythophile. I have learned to live with heartbreak.

Then today, while I was researching a pretty much unrelated story I bumped into the 1999 issue of American Brewer in which Greg Kitsock assembled such a list. “A Brew’s Who Of The Millennium: 25 Of The Most Significant Figures In Brewing Over The Last 1,000 Years” actually includes more than 50 names. He ended up with two lists of 25 (and in some cases had more than one name in a position), dividing them into B.J. and A.J. — Before Jack (McAuliffe) and After Jack. Kitsock explained in the introduction that the focus was on the profession of brewing. And when reading A.J. remember the list was compiled in 1999.

The top 25 B.J.
1) Louis Pasteur
2) Ferdinand P.A. Carre
3) Williams IV, Elector of Bavaria
4) Arthur Guinness
5) Adolphus Busch
6) Joseph Groll
7) Sir William Gladstone
8) George Hodgson
9) King Ludwig I
10 James Watt
11) Ralph Harwood
12) William Bass
13) Gerard Adriaan Heineken
14) Emil Hansen
15) Daniel Wheeler
16) Gabriel Sedlmayr the Younger and Anton Dreher
17) Jean Primus
18) Wayne Wheeler
19) Michael Combrune
20) Maximilian I
21) Jean De Clerck
22) Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier
23) Carl Joseph Napolean
24) Saint Hildegarde
25) Robert Burns

The Top 25 A.J.
1) Michael Jackson
2) Jim Koch
3) August Busch III
4) Bob Lenz
5) Henry King
6) Bert Grant
7) Michael Hardman, Graham Lees, Jim Makin and Bill Mellor
8) Charlie Papazian
9) Fritz Maytag
10) Paul Shipman
11) Paul Camusi and Ken Grossman
12) Bill Coors
13) Robert Uihlein
14) Jack McAuliffe
15) Candy Lightner
16) Dave Bruce
17) Charles Finkel
18) Rich Yuengling Jr.
19) Dave Rehr
20) Pierre Celis
21) Alan Bond
22) Joseph Owades and Karl Strauss
23) Alan Forage and Liam Byrne
24) John Mitchell
25) Bill Owens *

* For this one it seems best to include the explanation, since Owens owned American Brewer. “His Buffalo Bill’s Brewpub was the first establishment of its kind in the U.S. (a bar where beer is pumped directly from the serving tank to your glass). Owens has revived the old colonial style of pumpkin ale, and is publisher of American Brewer, a magazine about the business of beer that bridges the gap between knowledgeable consumer and professional brewer. Most important of all, his of-the-wall style adds some fun to an industry that takes itself too seriously much of the time.”

Session #78 announced: Elevator Pitch for Beer

The SessionJames Davidson from Beer Bar Band in Australia has announced the topic for The Session 78: “Your Elevator Pitch for Beer.”

The explanation is not short, but your post should be.

“30 seconds is all you have to sell your pitch for better beer, before the lift reaches the destination floor. There’s no time, space or words to waste. You must capture and persuade the person’s attention as quickly as possible. When that person walks out of the elevator, you want them to be convinced that you have the right angle on how to make a better beer world.”

And there are rules:

– In less than 250 words or 30 seconds of multimedia content, write/record/create your elevator pitch for beer in which you argue you case, hoping to covert the listener to your beer cause.
– Blog/publish it online on Friday 2nd August, 2013.
– When your contribution has been posted, leave a comment with a link to your post. Alternatively, email, tweet or Facebook James with a link to your post.

Oh, and no footnotes.

Session 77 – IPA: Why it’s a big deal

The SessionToday the topic for The Session is “IPA: What’s the Big Deal?” What follows is based mostly on what’s occurring in the United States, although IPA Madness doesn’t stop at the U.S. borders, which you’ll see by visiting today’s posts (look for the links at the bottom of the announcement).

Nearly eighteen years ago, beer author-brewer-consumer Randy Mosher presented a travelogue of a recent trip to the world’s largest hops growing regions to listeners at Oldenberg Beer Camp in Kentucky. At one point he tilted his head back as if he were taking a big drink, reaching his hands into the air and grabbing fistfuls of imagined hops, then bringing them back down to his mouth.

“Americans have been starved for hops so long,” he said, “that right now we’re just shoving them down our throats.”

The implication was this would pass. It has not. I’ve cited this from Hop Culture in the United States before, but 140 years later it is still relevant:

“The brewing industry is not exempt from the influence of fashion. A careful survey of the types and descriptions of beers in vogue at different times will show that fashion has had something to do with our trade,” the author wrote. He described changes in beer dating to back before hops became an essential ingredient, and considered what might be next in England. “We will not further refer to the threatened introduction of lager beer into this country, than to say fashion takes strange freaks, and it will be well for brewers to be prepared for all eventualities.”

At the beginning of 2008 pale ale was the best selling craft beer style in supermarkets, followed by amber ale, amber lager, wheat beers, and then IPA. Yes, wheat beers, then IPA.

In the four years between the end of 2007 and end of 2011 sales of IPA increased 260 percent and it became the No. 1 craft style. The next year sales increased 40 percent again. This gets harder to measure, because now we have Black IPAs, White IPAs, Belgian IPAs, Session IPAs, and Cider IPAs.

And late Thursday, Harry Schuhmacher passed long the boldest of predictions.

All this reflects still growing interest in aromas and flavors being discovered in hops — or more accurately, created during the brewing process. IPA has become a synomym for hops. When Mosher made his 1995 Hop Tour these are a few of the varieties that weren’t yet commercially available: Amarillo, Apollo, Bravo, Calypso, Citra, Galaxy, Mandarina Bavaria, Mosaic, Motueka, Nelson Sauvin, Riwaka, Saphir, and Simcoe. For starters.

More than once last week at the National Homebrewers Conference I was asked what the next hot aroma/flavor would be? My best guess is more variations on this theme. No doubt there will be new varieties released, maybe touting a little more gooseberry, a lot more blueberry, a subtle melon, more lime, even coconut. But, and I hope I am not just being pie-in-the-sky optimistic, brewers also have an opportunity to blend varieties already in hand — often rich in compounds that breeders and farmers worked to keep out of hops as recently as 40 years ago — to create something new.

As Alex Barth, president of hop merchant John I. Haas has pointed out, “This love craft brewers have for hops refocuses attention on the plant.” IPA deserves some of the credit. It hardly seems likely it will fall out of fashion soon, but that’s no reason to be pissed off about the attention it is getting.

Two examples. The popularity of Union Jack India Pale Ale has helped fund expansion at Firestone Walker, which is why you can get Pivo Hoppy Pils, dry hopped with generous portions of Saphir. Likewise at Marble Brewery in New Mexico. Its IPA drives growth, so beers like Marble Pilsner — brimming with perfumey Old World Hersbrucker hops — end up getting packaged. These are good things.

I seem to have wandered off topic. Hops will do that. Lord know what I’ll write about on IPA Day. Maybe coffee-infused wood-aged extreme saison IPAs.

What if there were only 4 beer styles?

Although these days it sometimes it seems if there is only one beer style — IPA — more often it seems like there are way too many, starting with the Black, White, Imperial, Session, and Belgian variations on IPA.

But reading Matt Kramer’s “Advice to a Newbie” made me think how nice it would be to classify beers as succinctly as he does wines, dividing them into ust four types. And, no, I wouldn’t agree that ale and lager constitutes succinct. Also, I have no problem with the fact that although he writes this is advice for a newbie that context (thus some working knowledge) helps make sense of it.

His four are fruit wines, soil wines, climate wines, and creativity wines.

That’s it. Beer should be so simple.

*****

In case you missed the noise on Twitter today, IPA Day Round 3 is Aug. 1. And perhaps you are thinking, “IPA: What’s the Big Deal?” That’s the topic for the Session #77 on Friday.

‘Taste and Believe’ – Should you?

Mount Angel Abbey

Friday, Jeff Alworth at Beervana posted the news that the monks at the Mount Angel Abbey plan to build a brewery on their hilltop that overlooks the town of Mount Angel and surrounding farmland, much of covered by hop plants this time of year. And Teri Fahrendorf commented:

I am very happy to hear this. I love visiting Mt Angel Abbey, especially in the spring when the stately chestnut trees are blooming. The flat abbey hilltop is a place of respite and peace. There’s a great bookstore, vespers brings you back to in time to the traditional spirit of medieval Europe, and there are benches to enjoy your picnic lunch while you gaze out across the hop fields. I began visiting when I was brewmaster at Steelhead in Eugene, and I always thought they should have a brewery there. I am very pleased the monks think so too.

That might be all we need to know right now.

However, Jeff has plenty more details that don’t need repeating here.

Of course there’s going to be considerable chatter. And certainly skepticism, starting with the slogan “Taste and Believe.” Believe what? In the quality of the beer? In the spirit behind it? In the role the monks will play in the decision making process and eventually brewing? In a time that marketers have pretty much made words like “tradition” and “genuine” unusable is it enough for monks to explain they live by the rule of Saint Benedict? It was written about A.D. 530 and has a pretty good track record. It calls on monks to be self-sufficient through their own labor. It really is that simple. The brewery will be small, but it will be one more way the monastery sustains itself.

As Jeff wrote, the monks invited us to visit the monastery last September. Among other things we sat in on discussions about branding (more about the “swanky brand identity” at BeerPulse.com) and listened to members of the community discuss in all seriousness everything related to getting into the business of brewing.

I thought about this when I was reading the third installment in Evan Rail’s Triplebock: Three Beer Stories. He emphasizes in the afterword that all are fiction, but that, of course, truth is sometimes best revealed through fiction. “The Brewery at Stelsov Abbey” is the story of a small community of monks who, basically out of desperation, strike a deal for the production of beer within their walls. They do not exhibit the due diligence Jeff and I saw last fall. And the story does not end well.

All of this seemed as if it should have been written down somewhere . . . We could have learned in advance how much Abbey Strelsov would have been asked to change, and we could have seen the price of rushing after money, and how it was not to be treated as an implement or utensil, but as something else entirely. And somewhere, in some missing second volume or torn-out appendix, we could discern the future of our beloved cloister, whose future now is sadly not so clear.

There’s no guarantee that the brewery at Mount Angel Abbey will be a success, but chances are that it will remain the “place of respite and peace” that Teri Fahrendorf remembers.

Further, I would guess that the beer will taste like it comes from that particular place, rather than being from nowhere or anywhere. We’ll find out in a year. Or maybe two. There’s a funny bit of wisdom I once heard visiting another monastery: “If monks had been building the pyramids we’d still be working on them.” They take a long view. From the hilltop on which Mount Angel Abbey sits that’s a particularly long view.