Month: August 2016

IPAs, dive bars, a craft definition & more beery links

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING, 08.08.2016

We Changed The World … For This?
[Via All About Beer]
An American Story.
IPAs as National Tradition.
[Both via Beervana]
I pointed to all of these Friday during The Session, when the topic was pilsners. But this is also about place. Hops might be an American story, but let’s not forget the Albuquerque story or the Bucyrus story.

What makes a dive bar?
[Via DRAFT]
The Real Drinker’s Guide to St. Louis’ Best Dive Bars.
[Via Riverfront Times]
Maybe the Riverfront Times doesn’t answer Joe Stange’s question, but it does provide 63 examples. I particularly recommend the photo from the San Bar Tavern on page 4 of this epic.

Stop the presses: the definition of craft beer.
Before you think “here we go again” scroll down to the comments to find an up-to-date definition: “craft beer n. orig. N. Amer. a beer made in a traditional or non-mechanized way by an individual or a small brewery.” So simple it is elegant. [Via Pete Brown]

The secrets to Cloudwater’s success.
A long, long read, as in north of 9,000 words. “Settle down with a beer,” Martyn Cornell writes. It may take two. And there is this candid thought, “It’s clear why they are so popular: almost all were sharply focused, clear, clean and faultless. Faultless to a fault, almost: ‘beautiful’ is not the same as ‘characterful’. But I need to drink more Cloudwater brews over more evenings to decide if this is a valid criticism.” [Via Zythophile]

The tale of two Stone Go To IPAs
The Haze and the Hops — A Tale of Two Go To IPAs.
Fascinating story and splendid reporting from John Verive. However, if big chain markets are such a bad place to buy beer why do breweries continue to sell their beer there? [Via the Full Pint – Photo by John Verive]

The Beer Museum, Where Brewery Meets History, Opens in Austin.
For now its a pop up museum, but they have plans … [Via PorchDrinking.com]

WINE & OTHER DRINKS

Stability of olfactory ability over time.
Really interesting questions posed here that are obviously relevant to beer as well. And one more thought (from the first chapter of “For The Love of Hops”): Although olfactory skills begin to deteriorate when most people are in their forties, many perfumers get better as they age. So it is not inevitable. [Via jamie goode’s wine blog]

Scientists Get Closer to Harnessing the Health Benefits of Red Wine.
The key point here is that it will take a pill to make this work. Because the daily dose it takes to be effective against Alzheimer’s is equivalent to about 1,000 bottles of red wine. It’s the same as those stories about how compounds in hops may have health benefits. Yes, but there are obvious side effects when you have to drink 1,000 beers a day to enjoy them. [Via Wall Street Journal]

America’s First Drinks Writer: G. Selmer Fougner.
Frank Prial also wrote about Fougner in Decantations, including that Fougner calculated he replied to 300,000 mail queries in eight years. [Via The Daily Beast]

Donald Trump’s World Atlas of Wine.
Pardon the instrusion of politics, but this is Ron Washam (the HoseMaster) at his funniest. [Via Tim Atkin MW]

FROM TWITTER

So you think you want to be a hop farmer …

And if you somehow missed this …

The Session #114: A St. Louis pilsner

The SessionWe Changed The World … For This?
[Via All About Beer]
An American Story.
IPAs as National Tradition.
[Both via Beervana]

Whoa! What’s all of this have to do with The Session #114, given that Alistair Reece has asked us to write about pilsners? But what Jeff Alworth has to say about the use of American hops and about how American brewers, and now brewers around the world who are mimicking them, is relevant.

Urban Chestnut Brewing Forest Park PilsnerThere is such a thing as an Americanized pilsner out there that has nothing to do with Miller Lite. Who You Callin’ Wussie from Arrogant Brewing* is an example. It is a well made flavorful beer, brimming with lots of aromas and flavors, some of which you won’t find in an old world pilsner. Basically, it’s kind of loud and it bangs into the furniture. That’s OK, as long as it is adding diversity, not eliminating choice. These are the sorts of things you should be thinking about when you read Lew Bryson’s column in All About Beer.

*Yes, this is the same brewery as Stone, although I find the explanation exhausting.

I’m not sure any beer can get inside your bones like certain music — let’s say just about any song from Son Volt’s Trace — but one like Stammtisch from Urban Chestnut Brewing just up the road from us, or Live Oak Pilz, or Marble Pils, has a better chance than any IPA I can think of. Or a pilsner like Wussie, which ranked seventh in a blind tasting of pilsners conducted by Paste magazine. Stammtisch was first, and Pilz and Pils apparently were not tasted.

Paste praises Urban Chestnut for brewing “superlative German beer styles.” I understand this, but maybe because I’ve been in St. Louis almost as long as Urban Chestnut (and Daria has been here longer) I figure I’m drinking St. Louis beer, not German beer. Part of the attraction of Stammtisch is that it has become a familiar flavor, just as Trace is familiar. Oh, and that drinking a liter isn’t a challenge. It’s more like humming along when Jay Farrar sings, “Ste. Genevieve can hold back the water, but saints don’t bother with a tear stained eye.”

*****

The beer in the photo is Urban Chestnut’s Forest Park Pilsner, which is brewed with six-row barley malt, corn, and Cluster hops. I wrote about in the August/September issue of Craft Beer & Brewing.

Step one: Heat 800 pounds of rocks

Six brewers and 800 pound of rocks. There was no efficiency on display Monday at Scratch Brewing outside of Ava, Illinois.

Visitors from Jester King Brewing inn Texas — co-founder Jeff Stuffings, head brewer Garrett Crowell, and production manager Averie Swanson — joined Marika Josephson, Aaron Kleidon, and Frank Wesseln of Scratch to make 60 gallons of wort. It is fermenting now in a used wine barrel and soon will be beer. Details later, beyond the facts that is was mashed in a barrel and filtered through cedar branches, boiled in barrels, contains a variety of botanicals, and is fermenting with Scratch’s sourdough bread yeast.

Any single one of these things would make a beer unique, but the true inefficiencies are realized by bringing wort to a boil with rocks. It is like viewing history live, but makes it clear people must really have wanted to drink beer when it took this much work to make it.

Building a fire to make stone beer (stein bier) at Scratch Brewing
Step 1: Bury stones in a pile of scrap wood and set it afire.

Jeff Stuffings delivers hot stones to boiling barrel at Scratch Brewing
Step 2: Haul heated stones, one at a time, to the boiling barrel.

Lower hot stones into wort at Scratch Brewing

Lower hot stones into wort at Scratch Brewing

Lower hot stones into wort at Scratch Brewing
Steps 3-4-5: Submerge stone.
Stein bier (stone beer) boil over at Scratch Brewing
Step 6: Watch for boil overs. Oops.

That dream beer job? There’s a job element

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING, 08.01.2016

Brewing Historians…Way More than Beer.
Fred’s beer: a sampling of what he left behind.
If you are an archivist who has written about beer, as Daria is, or a journalist who has written about the history of beer, as I have, when a story appears that may be headlined “The Smithsonian Will Pay Someone $64,000 a Year to Drink (and Research) Beer” you are going to see multiple versions of it show up in your inbox. The first post, from Susan Evans, director of Smithsonian Food History programs at the National Museum of American History, provides a better explanation of what the job is really about than most of the headlines. The second post, from Tiah Edmunson-Morton, archivist at Oregon State University, is a snapshot of what it is like to be an archivist, why preservation matters, and as a bonus includes lots of details about the Fred Eckhardt Papers.

“So I encourage you all to engage in the history that is meaningful to you and represents the places you live. Engage in preserving, collecting, and sharing the history of your communities – and find a place for those materials to live, safely, so that we can keep them accessible for future generations.” [Via Oregon Hops & Brewing Archives ]

‘Beer shaming’ is a real thing.
Sad. [Via OnMilwaukee]

Are Craft Breweries in Colorado Reaching the Saturation Point?
The “how many breweries is too many breweries?” question really is a local one, isn’t it? [Via Fermentedly Challenged]

Cream Beer Before Cream Ale In 1820s New York City.
Francis Perot Brewed 116 Times In 1821 to 1822.
It will be interesting to see where this leads. [Via A Good Beer Blog]

Ready-to-Sell Brewery Bought, Surprising None.
“Here in Oregon, no one is gnashing her teeth.” If a beer (or the brewery where is is made) hasn’t connected with drinkers in the place where it is brewed can it elsewhere? [Via Beervana]

Why You Should Be Skeptical About The Purported Health Benefits of Beer.
Every week there are stories about the healthy or unhealthy consequnces of drinking beer. It’s probably best to approach them all — positive or negative — with certain skepticism.[Via Homebrew Academy]