Month: December 2013

Monday beer links, musing 12.09.13

Tuesday is National Lager Day. I didn’t know that either, not until I received a press release on behalf of Anheuser-Busch. It included results of a new survey conducted by the brewer and KRC Research that found drinkers prefer lagers to ales by a large margin.

Key findings include: beer drinkers prefer lagers 2-to-1 over pale ales and 3-to-1 over IPAs and stouts; two-thirds of beer drinkers like the crisp flavor [I added the italics] flavor of lager more than beers with bitter, sweet or fruity flavors; and when it comes to serving style, respondents say enjoying beer in a glass bottle is best (38%), followed closely by beer on draught (32%).

For the press release, A-B head brewmaster Pete Kraemer said: “It’s great to see excitement for lagers reaffirmed through the survey results. They are the most challenging beers to brew, but also the most rewarding. There is nothing I enjoy more than the light, refined flavor complexity of an American lager.”

The press release also points out that lagers account for 75 percent of the beer consumed in the U.S. Those are the facts and that’s a lot of beer.

On to other matters:

– “The Unbearable Nonsense of Craft Beer – A Rant in 9 Acts.” Max Bahnson and Alan McLeod simulreleased an excerpt from their upcoming book. You can read it at either spot, with McLeod’s commentary here, and Bahnson’s here.

– The Session #82 roundup posted. Steve Lamond took no time collecting the “beery yarns” published just Friday.

– Why Do I bother? The lunatic idea that Grodziskie/Grätzer was a sour beer has Ron Pattinson appropriately pissed off.

– What if A-B had “spun off” specialty division in the 1990s? An interesting bit of history from Brew Hub founder Tim Schoen, who previously worked at Anheuser-Busch for 28 years:

“In the 1990s, I was in charge of innovations at A-B, or what we called the specialty brewing group. From that point, I knew there was a groundswell of consumer demand. During that period, I proposed that my group secede from (A-B), and I had a whole plan, moving over to a whole separate building. It was going to be the Specialty Brewing Group Beer Co. It was going to be all crafts and micros. Everyone loved it, but we didn’t do it. I still to this day say that if we would have done it, there would be a different landscape out there, at least for my former employer.”

– “Rare beer? You can keep it.” He’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take it any more.

– Is a Peanut Butter Pop-Tart an Innovation? “Back in 2007, 99 companies in the S&P 500 mentioned innovation…. This year the number was 197.” Perhaps this is relevant to discussions about “innovation” and beer.

Session #82: The sound of silence

The topic for the 82nd gathering of The Session today is “Beery yarns.” Host Steve Lamond suggests that both beery tall tales and gentle recollections are appropriate. I’ve chosen the latter, and what follows is taken almost directly from “Brew Like a Monk” — and written, yikes, going on nine years ago.

Saint Benedictus Abbey of Achel

Inside the brewery café at the monastery of the Saint Benedictus Abbey of Achel, only a single food server and one monk putting items on his cafeteria tray remained when Marc Beirens opened the door and stepped into a chilly December evening.

Beirens, a businessman who has been visiting monasteries since he was a child, took a few strides into a terrace area that was once the abbey’s courtyard. As the sky above turned from dark blue to black, he nodded back toward the brewery, located in a space that once housed the monastery dairy, then to a new gallery and gift shop to his right. Those buildings held pigs and more cattle, before it became obvious agriculture would not sustain the community.

“You should have seen this all a few years ago,” he said, his voice bouncing lightly about an otherwise silent courtyard.

The SessionBeirens appreciates the importance of commerce to the monasteries, and that the six Trappist breweries are part of a larger family. He distributes a range of monastic products — beer is the best selling, but they include cookies, soap, vegetables, wine, and other goods — throughout Belgium and France. His father did the same. “I’ve been visiting monasteries since I was this high,” he said earlier, holding his hand below his waist. That’s why he understands something else about monasteries.

It was dark now, and the courtyard empty.

“I love the silence,” Beirens said. “I used to have a friend who was a monk. He’s gone now.”

We walked along in silence.

“When he was 80 or so, I’d still call him. If I had a problem I could go see him. He didn’t have to say anything and I’d feel better.

“All it took was silence.”

*****

Achel’s is the smallest of the six Trappist breweries in Belgium, yet I can buy its beers a 20-minute walk from my home in Clayton, Missouri. Unfortunately those don’t include the two lower alcohol beers, one pale and one dark, sold only on draft at the pub. The 5° Blond is a particular delight, showcasing subtle fruity aromas and flavors, spicy and properly bitter. It is a reminder how satisfying a relatively “simple” beer can be.

Making sense of beer: Pick your guide

“I think a lot of people who are coming up in the craft brewing world — since, as I mentioned, we’re sort of on the fringe — they’re either hippies or they’re into metal.”

       – Barnaby Struve, vice president, Three Floyds Brewing

I guess that means I’m a hippie, because I’m not familiar with bands like Pig Destroyer and I would not think to pair Jester King’s Funk Metal with “Suck on This” by Primus, although intuitively it makes sense.

In the introduction to “The Brewtal Truth Guide to Extreme Beers: An All-Excess Pass to Brewing’s Outer Limits” author Adem Tepedelen writes “I’ve always equated craft beer drinkers with the segment of the population that isn’t necessarily listening to Top-40 radio and consuming mainstream music.” Me, too. It just so happens my outside the mainstream choices don’t include metal. In fairness, I’m not sure how easy it would be to assemble an entire book pairing alt.country music and beer. (Perhaps you’d start with James McMurtry’s “Choctaw Bingo” and Lagunitas IPA, because when we last saw McMurtry that’s what he was drinking on stage and he does sometimes refer to himself as a beer salesman.)

In the December issue of Beer Advocate magazine Andy Crouch writes about how overwhelming and confusing the beer aisle (which usually occupies a lot more than an aisle) at your favorite store has become. He suggests breweries need to find a sensible way of naming and describing beers to give drinkers a decent idea of what the beers they are thinking about buying might taste like. I don’t see that happening soon. Instead, expect it will be harder to make sense of “beer,” particularly for a newcomer.

That means there’s likely room for specialty books such as “The Brewtal Truth Guide to Extreme Beers” and certainly that we’ll get more general guides. A quick scan through Michael Jackson’s “World Beer Guide,” his “Beer Companion” and later “Ultimate Beer” illustrates there are at least three ways to attempt to organize the topic.

Three recent newcomers include “The Complete Beer Course: Boot Camp for Beer Geeks: From Novice to Expert in Twelve Tasting Classes” by Josh Bernstein, “The Pocket Beer Guide: The Essential Handbook to the Very Best Beers in the World” from Stephen Beaumont and Tim Webb, and “World Beer.” (At this point you might want to skip to the disclosures at the end.)

The Complete Beer Course: Boot Camp for Beer GeeksEach of these books seeks to educate a novice and satisfy the more experienced, but Bernstein is the first to turn the adventure into what could be a semester. In fact, the first class is about the essentials and the last about pairing beer and food, with the middle 10 focusing on styles — working through the spectrum of flavors much as you would a rack of tasters at a brewpub. You own the book, so it’s not like you have to think, “I can’t cut class this week because it’s about IPAs and that’s the real reason I signed up.”

I’m not sure if anybody reads a book like this in a strictly linear fashion, because it’s too tempting to flip ahead and see which American Porters he chose to feature (The Duck-Rabbit Porter and Deschutes Black Butte Porter) or which brewery in the Class 2 (Victory Brewing; the chapter focuses on the “pleasures of cold fermentation”). However, it’s best at some point to flip through every page, because “quick facts” are splattered all about, just waiting to be dropped into a friendly bar conversation.

“The Pocket Beer Guide: The Essential Handbook to the Very Best Beers in the WorldA year ago, Webb and Beaumont organized the beer world geographically in “The World Atlas of Beer: The Essential Guide to the Beers of the World.” Lavishly illustrated with maps and photos that was a coffee table book. “The Pocket Beer Guide” is much smaller, although your pockets need to be pretty good size to hold it (it is 4 1/2 inches by 7 inches, and more than 3/4s of a inch thick; much fatter than any of Jackson’s pocket guides), and the plan is to update it regularly.

It will appear familiar to those who used Jackson’s pocket guides, with quick tasting notes and star ratings, although generally there is a bit more information about each brewery and quite a few more breweries (thus the thickness). The one sentence review: if you are thinking about visiting Lithuania it is an essential book, and otherwise it is pretty dang useful.

“The Brewtal Truth Guide” is less essential, but plenty of fun to read. Tepedelen writes a column for Decibel (America’s only monthly metal magazine) as well as beer articles in more beer focused publications. Each of six chapters includes an interview with a brewery type (including) and a musician type, with a bonus Q & A with Tomme Arthur about the Ultimate Box Set Lost Abbey released last year. More than anything it is an introduction to 100-plus “extreme” beers, each of them paired with a song. Tepedelen explains, “The majority of beer-drinking Americans will never appreciate them, but like the thousands of independent metal bands who … (know) they’ll never sell a million copies or be played on mainstream radio, extreme beers are made for the diehards who are open-minded and want something well beyond the status quo.”

I’m rearranging my bookshelf now to accommodate these books, sliding “Complete Beer Course” into a spot next to Zak Avery’s “500 Beers” and “The Brewtal Truth” between “The Bedside Book of Beer” and “Christmas Beer” because it’s a grab-it-and-read-a-few-pages-at-a-time book. “The Pocket Beer Guide” goes on the reference shelf alongside “Amber, Gold and Black.”

*****

The disclosure stuff. Although I mentioned “World Beer,” it is not reviewed because Dorling Kindersley paid me to write most of the US entries. As you would expect in a DK book it weighty and generally what people call a coffee table book.

Beaumont and Webb also paid me for few dozen entries in the “Pocket Guide” but because it will be ongoing, and likely the best way (at least in print) to track the changing beer world, it deserves your attention. Besides, and more disclosure, I’m more likely to be influenced to write something positive by my friendship with the authors, and that Webb wrote the foreword to one of my books, than what they paid me (let’s just say you wouldn’t quit your day job for the gig). So there’s one more reason not to trust my “review.”

Monday beer links, musing 12.02.13

Good Not surprising to see that the chatter about “craft beer” continued unabated while we were on holiday. Although it seems like I just did a roundup, here some are additional thoughts, followed by a link to a bunch of other links to long reads about [insert no confusing adjectives here] beer itself.

– THIS is the Definition of Craft Beer. [Via Stephen Beaumont, Blogging at World of Beer]

– Another long post about craft beer. Pete Brown follows up on his assertion that “2013 will be remembered as the year craft beer went mainstream.” [Via his blog]

– “O que é craft beer”, ou “quem se importa”? (Or: “What is craft beer”, or “who cares”?) [HT to Pivní Filosof]

– Look Out! There’s a Craft-Beer Revolution Taking Over France. “He opens a bottle of Ernestine, an IPA enriched with rooibos and cola nuts that he bought at the local open-air market Marché Dejean.” What if an entire country devoted itself to brewing Category 23 beers? [Via The Daily Beast]

– And in other beer reading. Boak and Bailey’s Beer Blog invited other bloggers join them in writing “longer than usual” posts last Saturday. Because I’m trying to show some discipline in what and when I post here I jumped the gun a bit, but the timing was otherwise great. I was able to drop them into Pocket and read them during the long trip home. Set aside some time — I figure Ron Pattinson wrote enough alone to occupy travel through at least one time zone.