Month: June 2015

Tired of hops? Consider featherbowling

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING 06.22.15

Believe in featherbowling.
My favorite read of the week, maybe month. I’ll admit the beer connection is minimal, but the Cadiuex Cafe was an early outpost for flavorful beer in Detroit. Delightful on the cafe side, fascinating on the bowling side. [Via ESPN the Magazine]

Doom Bar and the Question of Origin.
The quick summary: the popular UK beer Doom Bar is brewed outside of Cornwall as well as in Cornwall, which is not what the brand’s owner Molson-Coors would have drinkers believe. Now that the cat’s out of the bag, Boak & Bailey write, what does that mean? Among other things they “suspect it will take months for most people to clock this news and, even then, many won’t care — it’s a popular beer which presumably sells to the trade at a competitive price and it’s still Cornish-ish, right?” I wish they weren’t right, but I figure they are. [Via Boak & Baley’s Beer Blog]

June Hop Acreage Report.
If You Drink It, They Will Grow: A Changing Landscape for Hops.
More on Hops: Prices and Future Growth.
Peak hop: Obsession with flavour may be dulling our beer palates.
Hops are giving you man boobs? Poppycock.
As I noted last week on Twitter, a few years ago hardly anybody beyond hop farmers paid attention to the USDA June Hop Report. That’s changed. Bart Watson of the Brewers Association analyzes it in depth (first link), the Bryan Roth goes deeper (next two). The fourth link isn’t about production, but beyond reminding us of the new interest in hops dredges up the notion that an obsession with hops keeps drinkers from exploring other flavors in beer. I disagree. The last link is to something I posted Friday, about the silly statement that hops give men man boobs. You’d be dead from alcoholism long before you could consume enough 8-prenylnaringenin to result in estrogenic effects.

Should I be drinking local or sustainable beer?
“Which is greener: beer brewed on wind energy that is trucked 1,000 miles to the consumer, or beer brewed on coal energy with minimal transport needed?” [Via Grist]

New Chinese Beer Saves Rhinos By Using Fake Rhino Horn.
Ingredient of the Week No. 1. [Via Eater]

Carrot craft beer is being brewed in Australia.
Ingredient of the Week No. 2. The beer is called Wabbit Season. [Via Mashable]

How Solid Are The Breweries In Your State?
“The question was which states have the breweries that have the most above-average beers, and which states have the breweries that make the most superlative beers.” Hop science I get, this I don’t. [Via BeerGraphs]

Hops are giving you man boobs? Poppycock

Yes, drink enough IPAs and you could end up with man boobs — so the headline on Wednesday’s much passed around story is, technically, a bit more accurate than the second paragraph: “Yes, you read that right: Hops are giving men man boobs.”

The article relies on “Sacred and Herbal Healing Beers” to demonize hops. The book drew controversial conclusions in 1998, and there considerable research since, unearthing plenty of contradicting evidence.

The villain is 8-prenylnaringenin, a phytoestrogen mentioned in the story. Maybe the villain; not even that is exactly clear. But there is a bottom line; 8-prenylnaringenin is “abundant” in hops only when compared to the average plant. Research in Germany, cited in this 2004 Brauwelt story, notes that “levels in hops are very low. The concentration is below 0.01% and thus e.g. about 100 times lower than that of xanthohumol.” Hop researchers have been studying xanthohumal for some time, trying to promote its health benefits. The problem is you’d have to drink so much beer to enjoy to get the benefits you’d probably die from alcoholism.

Various studies found that between 0.02 and 0.24 mg/l of 8-prenylnaringenin end up in finished beer and that “humans would have to consume more than 1000 liters of beer daily to achieve detectable estrogenic effects.”

Hops add no calories to beer. But drink enough 200-calorie IPAs and you’ve got a good running start on man boobs. Just don’t blame the hops

Thinking outside the brown bottle

Jester King Le Petit PrincePardon the length, but I’m posting the entirety of the email that Jester King Brewery sent out yesterday. Thoughts after the message.

Earlier this year, we began experimenting with packaging some of our beer in green bottles. We started by taking a portion of our February batch of Le Petit Prince Farmhouse Table Beer, and naturally conditioning it in bottles like the one seen in the photo above. After three months of conditioning, we’re quite pleased with the results! We started selling “green bottle Le Petit Prince” in our tasting room this past weekend, and we plan on packaging some of our upcoming batches of Noble King and Mad Meg in green bottles. We’re excited to see where this experimentation takes us! For now, Le Petit Prince in green bottles is only available at our tasting room, and we still have Le Petit Prince available in brown bottles like before.

So why are we doing this?

Here’s our head brewer Garrett Crowell’s explanation:

“My pursuit of the use of green bottles stems mostly from the character of all of my favorite beers. Cuvee de Jonquilles, Blaugies, Thiriez, Fantôme, Cantillon, Dupont, all use green bottles. I’ve had brown bottle versions of some of these beers, and have had them on draft as well and there is an element missing from those versions that the green bottles have. While green bottles permit the risk of light struck/skunky character, I feel they add character, even beyond skunkiness. So many breweries have attempted to mimic the classic Saison Dupont yeast profile, and I feel what is most often missing is the light struck character that is integral to the profile of that beer.

Beer is as delicate as wine. Pasteurized, shelf stable beer has dumbed down beer consumers into believing that something will still taste fresh after leaving it in the trunk of their car, or in the sun, etc. Hopefully, green bottles will emphasize that our beer is a living thing, and that the way it’s treated will significantly alter the experience one can have with it.

I feel that beer is losing individuality through structure, and the expectation to fulfill guidelines. I absolutely like skunky beer, oxidized beer, or “flawed” beer. We allow our beer to pick up “peripheral” character that deviates from guidelines, whether it’s a bit of oak, Brettanomyces, or lactic acidity. Horse barn, goat sweat, and brett character are embraced, yet skunkiness is considered a flaw. If the way I create, and eventually package a beer renders it unfit for BJCP guidelines, then I consider that a success and furtherance of creativity. I feel as though the status quo of brewing is to find a set of guidelines, create a product that fits within them, enter a competition, and receive an award. It reminds me of standardized testing from grade school. Students spend half the year learning how to take a test, and creativity is suppressed for the sake of passing test scores.

I understand that green bottles and light struck character are going to be a challenge for most beer enthusiasts. I think we’re in a unique and important position to break down some of the indoctrination that is present and document something truly beautiful and unique.”

                  — Jester King Head Brewer Garrett Crowell

I think this is brilliant, even though I’m the guy who doesn’t like to buy Saison Dupont “off the shelf.” I usually ask if the store has unopened cases and if I can have a bottle from one of them, and then expect to see it put quickly into a paper bag. I hurry it home and store it in the dark. My dermatologist wishes I was as careful with myself.

(A couple of weeks ago at Country Boy Brewing in Lexington, Kentucky, when customers who had picked up bottles from a special release left them sitting in the sun on another part of the table where we were sitting I unobtrusively shoved them into the shade. And these were brown bottles. Heck, I’m careful where I put glasses of pilsner on a sunny day.)

So my palate doesn’t necessarily align with Crowell’s. Skunkiness generally masks other flavors I prefer from beer — I typed generally because I’m willing to concede that just above threshold it may add complexity. But that’s me. And if I want Petit Prince in a brown bottle I can still get it. Looks like a win-win, because I’m for anything that emphasizes that “beer is a living thing, and that the way it’s treated will significantly alter the experience one can have with it.”

Honored, flattered, absent. That’s me.

To quote from the American Homebrewers Association website:

“Each year, your American Homebrewers Association (AHA) Governing Committee selects a recipient for the annual AHA Governing Committee Recognition Award. The award honors outstanding service to the community of homebrewers, and is announced during the National Homebrewers Conference.”

The 2015 recipient: Stan Hieronymus.

The award was handed out Saturday in San Diego. I wasn’t there. I agree, that seems somewhat rude. But Daria and I went to Washington, D.C., along with our daughter, Sierra, for “Colonial Inauguration” at George Washington University, where she’ll be a freshman in September.

I think I used the words flabbergasted and humbled in the brief video they asked me to make. I expect to remain in that state for some time.

The Session #100 roundup posted

The SessionReuben Gray has posted the roundup for The Session #100: “Resurrecting Lost Beer Styles.”

I’ve already pointed to several of these, but one more thought from Sean at Beer Search Party:

“Not to block someone from attempting a historical beer resurrection, but an authentic California Steam beer would be hard to re-create too and that is in the not so distant past. A Goslar Gose would be a big task primarily because no one from that era could verify it’s accuracy.”

Is it Gose from Goslar or from Leipzig we are interested in? Efforts in Kentucky to revive their version of Common and in Poland to resurrect Grodziskie have focused on what those beers were like at the height of their popularity. Using the same criteria, the choice would be Gose from Leipzig. In the case of Steam, is it the mysterious beer that emerged by the middle of the nineteenth century or the beer as it was brewed when Anchor Brewing opened at the end of the century. At the outset, Steam likely was an all-malt beer, but by the 1890s it most commonly often would have been made with a good dose of corn.