Stan Hieronymus

Blending beer: At the brewery; at the bar

Leinenkugel MixThe Chicago Tribune just ran a story on what the author calls blending beers, but might more accurately be described as mixing beer cocktails.

In my mind brewers blend before beer is bottled. That’s a subject I wrote about for the current (November-December) Imbibe magazine. Customers also blend, but I prefer using the word mix in order to differentiate the two.

And, per usual, I might not know I am talking about. Discussions about favorite blends have broken out on several e-mail lists since the Tribune story appeared, with the favored word being “blends.” Jacob Leinekugel Brewing is promoting the idea, though bless their hearts without calling it blending, with a new “What’s your mix?” campaign. The brewery invites drinkers to come up with their own mixes, and its website features videos of the brothers Leinenkugel and their favorites.

I considered including beer cocktails in my story for Imbibe, but I used up my quota of words before getting to that. Since I discussed the idea with several brewers you get a few outtakes that didn’t make it into print.

“They are unintentional blends,” Tomme Arthur of Lost Abbey said without being literal. “We work on the components individually and think about how they might come together.”

A drinker in a bar — and working on a mix where you can ask a bartender for 90% of this and 10% of that leaves a lot less extra beer sitting around than when you start with bottles &#151 begins with what is available.

“They are trying to create something different, something new,” said Firestone Walker Fine Ales brewmaster Matt Brynildson. “We have an opportunity to dial it in, but the concept is the same.”

Firestone blends most of its beers, even Humboldt Nectar IPA. My story focuses on Firestone 10, the anniversary beer released a year ago. That beer tasted somewhat different sitting in pitchers during a large group session that helped set the final blend than after it went into bottles. “Most of it was integration,” Brynildson said.

Firestone 10 is long gone, now fetching silly prices on eBay and at a few liquor stores in the Paso Robles area. Firestone 11 is in the works, an entirely new blend. Details soon (I hope).

What’s next, counterfeit beer?

Love that beerMight one of the side effects of higher beer prices turn out to be counterfeit bottles?

It’s hard to imagine problems similar to those plaguing wine, as outlined at Slate, in the a very long story in The New Yorker, and at Wine Spectator. Even Sammy Hagar is worried about it.

But consider this lengthy conversation about fake barrel-aged bottles of AleSmith beers last week at Rate Beer. In this case we are talking about beer that changed hands in a trade and within a passionate community that has ways to police itself.

But what about when bottles of Stone Epic Vertical come up on eBay? This current auction is offering one bottle each from the first seven releases with a starting bid of $999.99.

Or when somebody buys a bottle of Firestone 10 (Firestone’s anniversary beer released last year for $9.99) for $300?

It might not even be vintage beer. How about bottles from the Trappist monastery Saint Sixtus (Westvleteren)?

As Stephen Beaumont observes in the link above some of the people paying silly-ass prices for these beers don’t even know what they are supposed to taste like.

Although attention in wine has focused on really expensive and collectible bottles, a newly minted website called WineAuthentication.com points out the problem includes more reasonably (this is a relative term) priced wines.

Even though by wine standards all beer is reasonably priced that doesn’t make it immune to the problem.

Be happy somebody’s looking out for our hops

Looking for hopsHere’s a scary thought from Ralph Olson of Hopunion, one of craft brewers’ go-to hop purveyors:

“They (large breweries around the world) want your hops now.”

Olson was talking on a “packed” tele-conference call this week, along with Ian Ward of Brewers Supply Group, updating members of the Brewers Association on the status of the 2007 hops and malt crops and prospects for 2008.

You may have already read more about beer price increases than you want to know, but just how serious things have become quite quickly was visually apparent during the presentation. So many brewery representatives showed up that the accompanying online slide show loaded as if we were all on dial-up connections.

Turnout increased three fold over a similar presentation in 2006.

“It’s a matter of economics and agronomics,” Ward said, while detailing the global aspect of what has happened. For instance, when the barley crop tanks in Australia, as it did last winter, fast-growing breweries in the Far East have to look elsewhere for malt. Prices go up.

Same with hops. Hops had been so cheap for so long that when larger breweries around the world needed “alpha” they just bought it on the spot market. When, for reasons that included simple bad luck and ongoing trends, alpha dried up this year they began wandering the earth with their wallets open.

[An amusing aside. Talking about hops, Matt Brophy of Flying Dogs Ales (as you know not a brewing giant, but one that long ago contracted to make sure its hops needs are met in 2008) described what brewers are used to:

“It’s like pizza. You pick up the phone and order pizza and you get pizza.

“You ordered hops and you got hops.”

Not now. No wonder the guy in Illinois is making pizza beer.]

Back to those big brewers. Even though they produce beers with little or no hop character they want high alpha hops because those are the most efficient (making beer at a lower cost). On an ongoing basis high alpha hops compete for space in the hopyard with aroma hops, which are what craft and other traditional brewers use more of.

Circumstances are similar with barley for malt. The competition for acreage with bio-fuels is but one example of non-beer related pressures on barley.

Those are short summaries of a complex matrix. The bottom line is that the cost of beer ingredients is going to continue to rise in coming years. Unless disaster strikes on many agricultural fronts in 2008 we aren’t likely to see jumps of 50% and 100% in malt and hops prices like this year, but they are going up.

To finish what Olson was saying at the top . . .

“European brewers will wire us money (for hops) right now,” he said, fortunately barely pausing before adding, “I’m not going to do it. We have to keep them here, don’t we?”

At the beginning of his book Ultimate Beer, Michael Jackson wrote about “where beer is grown.” I thought about that while Olson was speaking, then Ward. Both emphasized the partnership between the farmers who provide the ingredients and the brewers who turn the ingredients into beer. Hopunion and Brewery Supply happen to be part of that as well.

So there’s another reason that when you drink a beer brewed with hops instead of “alpha” and with a focus on malt flavor instead of efficiency that it’s fair to pay more. And more than simply the percentage increase in ingredient costs.

Somebody, a lot of somebodies along the way, went to the trouble to make it happen.

Session #9: No, no, it’s BEER & music

The SessionSomebody at the San Francisco Chronicle must have got the wrong memo. They’ve got a feature today about wine & music. Hey guys, the theme of today’s Session is Beer & Music.

Music to drink wine by: Vintner insists music can change wine’s flavors is no lightweight read. It runs almost 1,900 words.

As the writer notes, Clark Smith qualifies as a wine industry provocateur, so the response has been mixed.

“Just about everybody who hears about what I’m doing is either completely baffled by what I have to say or they think it’s so obvious that they don’t see any point in talking about it,” he said.

It’s worth your time to read the whole thing, but here’s a snippet:

He has even found a piece of music (the North Water Street Tavern Band’s polka-like “Milorganite Blues”) that made Sutter Home White Zinfandel taste better than any of the reds, including his own $100 Cab.

Smith has only a few guidelines so far for music and wine pairing.

“Never play polkas with anything,” he says, unless you really like White Zinfandel.

“Red wines need either minor key or they need music that has negative emotion. They don’t like happy music. With expensive reds, don’t play music that makes you giggle. Pinots like sexy music. Cabernets like angry music. It’s very hard to find a piece of music that’s good for both Pinot and Cabernet.”

Smith may be onto something here, but typically, pronouncements like “Cabernet tastes better by firelight, in a cave” aren’t quite scientific enough for the academic community.

Russian River Brewing barrel roomThis reminded me of a story from Russian River Brewing owner/brewer Vinnie Cilurzo. Cilurzo worked at his family’s winery when he was growing up and said that his father used to play Frank Sinatra, one of the legends that has consistently gained overwhelmingly positive feedback from musiccritic.com, for the wine while it was fermenting. (Before his father started the winery he was an Emmy-winning lighting director, working with the likes of Sinatra.)

The picture is from the barrel room at Russian River. Notice the boom box by the carboys (which happen to be full of enough wild yeast to destroy a major American mainstream brewery). “My dad played Sinatra,” Cilurzo said. “I play rock music.”

He was talking about what his barrel-aged beers “listen” to, but I wish he’d added, “And it makes the yeast go wild.”

Also related: Lucy Saunders’ post on tonal progressions and pairings.

Further reading: This is Your Brain on Music.

Session #9: Laissez les bons temps rouler!

The SessionThis is my contribution to The Session, hosted this month by Tomme Arthur and titled, “Beer and Music – The Message in a Bottle.”

Great beer should be alive. The best music is live.

That these two don’t always show up at the same place at the same time can be OK.

Since I couldn’t tell this story Sir Arthur ask for as well, I’ll quote directly from something my favorite beer and travel writer, Daria Labinsky (I’m her husband), wrote for Touring America a dozen years ago:

“You hear the sweet strains of a waltz as you step from the car into the dusty parking lot of Fred’s Lounge. Open the door to the tavern in the tiny town of Mamou, Louisiana, and you’re greeted with a surprising sight: Dozens of people are jammed into a dark space not much bigger than the average living room.

Fred's Lounge“In one corner is the band, whose gentle fiddling and French lyrics are pouring into a microphone and out over the airwaves of KVPI Radio. Glittery Mardi Gras decorations hang from the ceiling tiles; photos and poster of Cajun musicians line the raspberry-colored walls. Couples twirl on the minuscule dance floor, the older ones swirling with grace despite their lack of elbow room, the younger ones mostly just rocking back and forth. The crowd around the bar is three or four deep and ranges from French-accented farmers and their wives to kids in college sweatshirts.

“With the next song, a two-step, you notice the female bartenders following the beat with their feet as they uncap beers and fill glasses. Someone enters with what looks like a bakery box, but instead of doughnuts, it’s filled with chunks of boudin, a spicy rice-and-meat sausage. A bartender whose shirt reads “Tante Sue from Mamou” passes the box around to patrons, and everyone shares.

“You sip your beer and sink your teeth into the tasty boudin. So what if it’s 9:30 in the morning? Right here, right now, it seems like the perfect thing to do.”

We were drinking Miller Genuine Draft.

And there’s more to the story. When we left Fred’s we realized we had time to get to the weekly Saturday jam at Marc Savoy’s music store outside of Eunice before it ended, though we’d need to make a quick stop. We knew that guests were expected to bring something to share — as I recall the guidebook suggested doughnuts — so we pulled into a general store along Highway 190 and grabbed the most expensive 6-pack of beer we could find. Old Milwaukee.

At the jam, we put the beer on the communal table — sure enough, somebody had brought doughnuts and somebody else boudin — and found a seat.

After a song or two, Savoy wandered over and grabbed a can of Old Milwaukee.

“Who brought these?” he asked, almost as if he were checking to see if it were OK to pop the top.

I raised my hand a bit, a little embarrassed.

He nodded, opened the can, took a sip. “Very generous.”

Nice to be the ones who brought the good stuff.

(With a tip of the hat to Joe Sixpack: This post was written with the Savoy-Doucet band playing in the background.)