beer & food

This week New Orleans hosts Tales of the Cocktail.

We went last week.

Not because we have anything against cocktails, but because that’s when the birthdays fall. In fact, we drank hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s and cocktails at the Carousel Bar in the Hotel Monteleone. We also had pretty good wine with dinner at Irene’s Cuisine.

But mostly we drank beer. Finding flavorful beer in New Orleans has been relatively easily for a long time. Thank the students at Tulane for supporting places like Cooter Brown’s and The Bulldog. However the city was, and is, the poster child for BMC (Bud Miller Coors) markets. “When we opened a year and a half ago (they) accounted for 95 percent of beer sales,” said NOLA Brewing founder Kirk Coco. “I don’t mean all light lagers. Just beers from Bud, Miller and Coors.”

NOLA (New Orleans Lager and Ale) hasn’t even begun to approach the status of Abita, but the fact that Crescent Pie & Sausage, located in Mid-City and one of the city’s hip new dining spots, offers three NOLA beers on tap signals that change is at hand.

We built our itinerary around eating, and there was much to be said to finding Abita or NOLA beers available at almost every turn. Beer and food should go together in New Orleans, Coco said. “We have the right attitude. We’re not afraid of calories.”

He pointed out New Orleans’ shortage of diet po-boy shops and promised, “You’ll never see a NOLA Light, not as long as I’m alive.”

These are not necessarily “Big Ass Beers” (as seen on signs throughout the French Quarter). NOLA Blonde, 4.9% abv, outsells all the others three-to-one. Coco’s favorite is NOLA Brown, at 3.9% abv tame but rich. A beer some would surely describe as quaffable.

Hopitulous IPA — the brewery is located on historically important Tchoupitoulas Street; Tipitina’s is at the corner of Tchoupitoulas and Napoleon and if I need to explain Tip’s please just Google Professor Longhair — was supposed to be a seasonal, but proved too popular not to keep brewing. It’s more about hop flavor than bitterness (60 IBU, calculated). Brewmaster Peter Caddoo, a veteran of Dixie Brewing, adds Nugget hops while running wort into the kettle. He uses Warrior for bittering, Columbus and Cascade for flavor, Simcoe late in the kettle, then more Simcoe in the whirlpool. He dry hops it with Simcoe and Amarillo.

It’s a fine food beer. I might just mail in “eating the Mixed Grill (a plate of house-made sausages) at Crescent Pie and Sausage served Hopitulous” as my entry for The Session #42. Each made the other better.

*****

Two other bits I should probably save for future stories, but can’t resist passing on:

– When did Peter Caddoo begin homebrewing? “The day John Lennon died.” That was Dec. 8, 1980 and he was a student the the Culinary Institute of American in Hyde Park, N.Y. He and the other students made “Lennon Lager” and drank it on New Year’s Eve.

– Although Cooter Brown’s, The Bulldog and d.b.a. (in the Marigny/Bywater neighborhood) remain fine places to drink and have been joined by Bulldog Mid-City, The Avenue Pub on St. Charles has vaulted to the top of the class.

This joint has been around forever (maybe the nineteenth century). Story is that more recently celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse played pool in the back room after he go off work. When we first visited several years ago the beer was OK, and sitting beside one of the windows looking onto St. Charles was pretty terrific. However, a few years ago (not long before Katrina and on a Jazz & Heritage Festival weekend) somebody suggested it hard turned into a dive.

Not today. After her father died Polly Watts turned it into as good a beer place as any of us should need. For instance, Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery is in town this week for Tales of the Cocktail so the pub is featuring special Brooklyn beers all week. Oliver will make an appearance Friday.

Perhaps he heard that Craig and Kim Giesecke of J’Anita’s took over the kitchen after their place on Magazine closed. They’re not afraid of calories.

Last Wednesday, just hours after arriving in Chicago for the Craft Brewers Conference, I dutifully posted a photo of Halltertau hop queen Mona Euringer, linked it to via Twitter and Facebook and after that pretty much went back to 1998 or some other CBC in a different technological era. Blog? Tweet? I didn’t even attend the seminars on social media. Sorry.

I did use Google maps on my phone when those of us on the “bus from hell” finally seized control after an obviously clueless bus driver drove around in circles for more than an hour and a half before delivering us to a destination less than 5 miles from the hotel. As an aside, I was on the bus that got lost (not quite an hour extra that time) at the 2008 Craft Brewers Conference. Charles and Rose Ann Finkel were on also on both buses. The takeaway? Never get on the same bus with the Finkels and I at CBC.

This wasn’t exactly planned. I expected to blog and tweet a little more. And it didn’t happen because wi-fi in the host hotel was fleeting and cell reception in the trade show worse yet (both true). Or because there was a rather high level of social activity each evening (obviously true). It’s just that I don’t transition well from information collection mode to dispersal mode. And when I wasn’t at a seminar (like “Proper Storage, Shipping & Handling of Hop Pellets”) there was a conversation awaiting. I particularly like CBC in the even years because of the World Beer Cup competition — judges from 27 countries attended this year.

I’ll be years (yes, really, another book project, details soon) writing about what I learned, so for now here’s one overarching observation from the conference, after the promised report from my conversation with the hop queen and the truth about Bavarian-style pale ale.

Euringer, who turned 23 during the conference, still works on the family farm (hops, corn, and sugar beets — about 38 acres of hops) but also is studying business in school. Her great grandfather was the first in the family to grow hops, but her father has told her that she and her brother, Simon, are free to pursue whatever careers they want.

Since Todd asked . . . Euringer, who began drinking beer when she was 16, likes the fruity flavors hops add to beer. She’s serious. She put in five hours each day at the trade show, often refreshing her glass with one of the five beers showcasing Halltertau hops that Victory Brewing made for the conference. “I can’t drink so much bitter beer,” she said.

I asked her about Schönramer Pils, a 40-plus IBU beer that won gold at European Beer Star Awards last fall. “I like it because of what it tastes like,” she said. “But I can’t drink five bottles of it.”

The day before the conference began she visited New Glarus Brewing in Wisconsin with the rest of the Halltertau hops contingent, and particularly enjoyed the new Two Women pale lager.

Since Ron asked . . . The “Bavarian-style pale ale” created for the conference is a beer description, not a new style. A little confusing because for logistical purposes what we tasted was brewed in Pennsylvania, but it is Bavarian, pale and an ale, fermented with Weihenstephan #68, a top-fermenting yeast otherwise used to create weiss beers.

The grist is 100% pale Franconian barley malt, and it was mashed (single-decoction) for a high attenuation. It was hopped with Hallertauer Mittelfrüh, Hersbrucker, Tradition, Select, and Smaragd in five separate additions. The starting gravity was 16 ºP, the final abv 7.2% and the IBU about 45.

Now the observation, which is not exactly new, given that “microbrews” have been with us a while and these days the CBC seems awfully grown up (most of the sessions I attended focused on making beer, but options included “Craft Brand and SKU Proliferation: Great Opportunity of Great Danger” and “Intellectual Property law: Options and Protections for the Brewing Industry”):

Sales wouldn’t still be growing if somebody didn’t want to drink all these beers. But the beers wouldn’t exist at all if people (we call them brewers) weren’t excited about what they make and how their work is received.

Part One. Beer and food. I’m with Alan when he writes about the “need to ‘pair’ beer with food.” But shortly before the Gala Awards Dinner (for the World Beer Cup) on Saturday I spent a few minutes with Randy Mosher and Sean Paxton, who together created the menu that Sean then executed.

Sean’s attention to detail and creativity defy description (hop scented hard boiled eggs in the salad, just amazing). But, as Randy pointed out, the meal stuck to the notion that beer shouldn’t be fussy, and therefore beer meals shouldn’t be either.

Two evenings before Goose Island treated conference attendees to an equally amazing food experience, inviting more than a dozen Chicago chefs to create special dishes that were served with a couple of dozen of Goose Island beers. There were also a dozen variations on Bourbon County Stout served with a dozen chocolate desserts. All in the midst of about 1,000 barrels.

My point would be that this food and beer thing excites brewers, just like Part Two.

Part Two. Beers aged in barrels, sour and otherwise. Attendees filled the chairs, lined up along all the walls and took seats in the aisles for Vinnie Cilurzo’s talk called “Toothpicks, Garlic and Chalk: Three Key Ingredients to Any Brewery’s Barrel-Aged Sour Beer Program.” (In the photo on the right Cilurzo is using those tools to plug a leaking barrel at the Russian River brewpub.)

It seemed like half those in the room raised their hands when he asked if they’d like to attend a pre-conference seminar next year (when CBC in in San Francisco) on barrel-aged sour beers. These beers intrigue brewers. They want to make them, and sometimes that’s all that matters.

Again, not exactly new territory, but Friday afternoon I was reminded about the traits shared by people who make beer and people who drink beer when Mike Kallenberger of MillerCoors was talking rather specifically about craft beer drinkers (“What’s important to them when they’re not drinking beer, and why it matters when they are”).

Summarizing Kallenberger is never easy, because he tends to tackle complicated subjects, so I’m going to grab one thread and hope I don’t tangle it. Craft-beer drinkers take risks because they they think they are worth taking, if there’s such a thing as a “responsible rebel” that’s them, and they see themselves as “making their own rules” rather than simply “breaking the rules.”

Because they know they are right.

Didn’t we just describe brewers as well? Recipes-by-focus-group don’t work for them on any level. Not telling them what new, new flavor drinkers will embrace. Certainly what they can’t do, what wouldn’t work, what people wouldn’t drink.

They know better.

Some are wrong. Some will fail. Some will make horrible, unbalanced beer. But I think we can tell the difference.