Stan Hieronymus

Is there a definition for beer bar?

Toronado, San Francisco
I don’t know if the Onion is incredibly on top of things or just lucky, but Monday a story in The New York Times asked, “Last Call for the Beer Bar?” It began by recounting the demise of Falling Rock Taphouse in Denver. And Tuesday, the Onion came back with “City Of Denver Shuts Down Bar For Operating Without A Brewery.”

The Falling Rock owners announced they would close the place little more than a month after we sat on the patio there to fill out the paperwork (on a phone, of course) to place a bid on the house we now live in. Fans came from far and near to say goodbye. I talked to some of the more local ones about where they would go most often now. Two names I heard more than others were Rino Beer Garden and Finn’s Manor. Finn’s has a shorter tap list — curated, as the kids say — and a cocktail menu. Rino has more than 60-plus taps.

Would both be classified as beer bars?

Pat Baker provided a definition in his “Beer & Bar Atlas” in 1988. His classifications included classic bar, neighborhood bar, beer bar, Irish bar, German bar, English Pub and fern bar. (Yes, neither wine bar nor sports bar.)

He described a beer bar as “a bar whose main claim to fame is a large range of beer. Frequently, the bar sports and attractive beer can collection, or other vestiges of breweriana. Because of the interest in beer, the beers can be well served, but the wide range brings with it the risk of old beer.”

And, because I bet fern bar grabbed your attention, he wrote, “The sobriquet for the trendy hang-outs of yuppies, almost always decorated with hanging plants. While usually a derogatory term, it is not unknown for a fern bar to offer good beer, or to be interesting!”

More from the “Beer & Bar Atlas” Friday and perhaps a bit of reminiscing about Suds Kroge and Dregs Donnigan.

‘And I say, brother, help me please’

Jeff Alworth, Betsy Lay, Lady Justice Brewing
Jeff Alworth and Betsy Lay in conversation at Lady Justice Brewing.

This past week in her Hugging the Bar newsletter, Courtney Iseman expressed frustration with beer consumers who continue to support toxic breweries. She also suggests that there are many beer influencers act who should act more responsibly. A code of conduct for influencers — now, that’s an interesting idea.

But to return to the question she asks, “How do we get [consumers] to give a shit?”

Spoiler alert, her suggestion: “All I can think of right now is just to keep the conversation going. Because I do know so many people, who have nothing to do with craft beer and so don’t know all “the news and updates, but who love drinking it, who have been immediately receptive upon learning about issues with certain breweries. So, whenever you’re not too utterly exhausted, keep spreading the word and steering friends and family away from the baddies and toward the breweries and brands contributing to a better industry for all.”

If a change it going to come, that must be part of it. To that end, links to three posts worth talking about:

– An article — published in Civic Eats, so outside the beer bubble — to print out and keep for reference purposes. It is time to help make sure Betsy Lay is right when she says, “The door has been opened. It’s going to be very hard to shut it now.” That’s Lay at the top beside “The Beer Bible” author Jeff Alworth. Alworth was at Lady Justice, where Lay makes the beer, as part of a book tour promoting the second edition of his book. Not surprisingly, the conversation turned to just this topic. The next day, Alworth posted this:

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Wood, fires and brewing kettles

Scratch Brewing founders Marika Josephson and Aaron Kleidon talked about brewing beer in a wood-fired kettle on a recent Craft Beer & Brewing podcast. It is not as simple as flipping a switch, so I won’t try to summarize and instead suggest you give it a listen.

In the first photo below, from 2013, you can see where they split tree wood to fire their first (much smaller) kettle. Josephson is feeding the fire while Kleidon tames the boil. However, toward the end of the conversation Kleidon mentions now that they have a much larger kettle (under a roof, by the way) the wood for their fire comes from a local company that makes pallets. This is more environmentally friendly than chopping down the trees that surround the brewery.

Not quite as romantic, I know. I remember visiting Weissbrau Freilassing in 2008, said to be the last wood-fired brewery in Germany, and seeing the pile of wood that would be used for brewing (second photo below). Most of the wood is second-hand, although some is chopped. Although this makes perfect sense, I wasn’t expecting it. Curiously, there no wood flames under the kettles at the G. Schneider & Sohn in Kelheim to the north, but but the brewery has its own wood-chip-fired heating system. Kelheim is located in the midst of a forest, where chopping down trees does make sense.

The third photo is from Brasserie Caracole in Falmignoul, said to the last wood-fired brewery in Belgium. To be honest, that’s not wood in the photo, but paper crumbled up to provide a prettier picture when I visited in 2004.

The final photo is from three years ago, on Bjørne Røthe’s farm in Dyrvedalen Valley in western Norway. There it is nice to know that this is not the last wood-fired kettle still being used in Norway.

Scratch Brewing

Weissbrau Freilassing

Brasserie Caracole

Farmhouse brewing, Norway

Monday beer links, courtesy (in part) of the Town Crier

Thinking about Monday beer links

True? Not true? Has hard seltzer brought us to this?

In his substack newsletter Fingers, Dave Infante reaches this conclusion:

“[Flavored Malted Beverages] aren’t just changing drinking habits. They (will) also swing beer business’ collective center of gravity away from brewers (“all about the liquid”) and back towards marketers. Or, to put it another way: from craft back to commodity.”

OK, collective center of gravity leaves room for beers left of the dial, but how much?

Also last week, I pointed to a podcast/transcript about “How Hops Got Sommified.” In it, there is some discussion about brewers prominently listing hop varieties.

“That is done under the guise of giving the drinker more information. In fact, you’re kind of making people feel dumb because they don’t know what to do with that information,” says Zach Geballe. “To me, it is analogous to this thing in wine that I find incredibly frustrating, when you go to a winery or event and all the person talking to you about the wine can do is recite the technical data of the wine.”

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Could an obsession with hops be bad for beer?

Hops in Hopsteiner experimental field

Talking about the “wine-ifcation” of beer isn’t new at all. But I don’t think I’d seen “sommify” before Monday, and certainly not in connection to beer or hops.

“How hops got sommified” doesn’t dwell much on the how and instead focuses on if and why.

This is a fair question: “A lot of brewers have taken to labeling their beers with the hop varieties. I tend to wonder if this is actually more polarizing and intimidating for beer drinkers, especially as there are more and more varieties of hops . . . I’ll see a big beer list that’ll say, ‘This is our IPA with Cascade and some other random hop you have never heard of.’ I don’t know what to choose. Is beer going to, unfortunately, make a mistake with this obsession with hops? Or is this a good thing for beer?”

As a person who sometimes gets handed a beer and asked “Can you name the hops?” I understand what it feels like to, well, feel stupid. And I know it may not be healthy to be able to recite the parentage of Citra (50% Hallertau Mittelfrüh, 25% Fuggle, 20% Brewer’s Gold, 5% East Kent Golding and 3% unknown).

However, I am a fan of being informed. Listing all the raw materials that go into a particular beer — including varieties of barley, other grains, herbs, whatever — gives an interested drinker a better idea what to expect when they order a beer. And that list of ingredients may set any particular beer apart from a generic one (i.e. a commodity).

In the second part of the podcast, Ryan Hopkins, CEO at Yakima Chief Hops, talks about the business of growing and selling hops.

There are hundreds of varieties now, but what was true 150 years ago is true today; some cultivars are valued more highly than others. In the last part of the 19th century, hops grown on the European continent could be classified into 10 categories. Those from the towns of Saaz (in what is now the Czech Republic) and Spalt (Germany) constituted Class I and commanded the highest prices. Class IV included those from the regions of Hallertau, Auscha, Styria and portions of Wurtemmberg and Baden. Class IX (northern France, Belgium and Holland) and Class X (Russia) hops sold for between 10 and 15 percent of the most coveted cultivars. What a hop was called and where it was from was most often the same.

Less than 20 years ago many hop varieties sold for less than they cost to grow. In contrast, the hop business, and the IPA business, is booming today because when drinkers know the names of hops those hops are not a commodity.