beers of conviction

Here’s a game we used to play here 10 years ago, when people chatted in blog comments as often as on Twitter. Now it is a question asked more often on Twitter, but that takes a patience for following divergent threads I don’t have.

The goal is to identify the outlier and explain why it doesn’t belong on the list. There may be more than one answer, although I happen to have a specific one in mind.

I’ll be back Monday, shrug when I find nobody has left a comment and provide my answer, along with the reason I asked the question to begin with.

All five of these breweries made beer for the Urban Chestnut Brewing Company’s LagerFest in 2018. But there is something (recently) different about one of them.

a) Bierstadt Lagerhaus Brewery
b) Olde Mecklenburg Brewery
c) Live Oak Brewing
d) Dovetail Brewery
e) Urban Chestnut Brewing

March 1: The answer is Olde Mecklenburg. Here’s the reason why.

Jay Brooks broke a bit of news Thursday in his Flagship February post about Anchor Brewing. There is a new history of the brewery on the way that includes hundreds of archival photos.

The official publication date is May 2, 2023. That seems like a long time to wait to see if the book will provide a definitive reason why steam beer was/is called steam beer. Here are some of the contenders (I kind of like the “Doctor Steam” version myself):

– What looked and sounded like steam was generated by the pressure resulting from highly carbonated kegs.

– Steam hung above rooftop vessels that initially cooled the beer.

– Pete Steam invented the process.

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“Smoke taint,” an undesirable result of fires in grape growing regions that has plagued winemakers for years, came to hops in 2020. I wrote about the topic for All Access subscribers to the Brewing Industry Guide and will report more in Hop Queries next week.

Most important, this is bad news for farmers affected because it reduces the value of some of their crop. But brewers should be aware that tainted hops could make their way into the supply chain. As one grower told me, “Here’s hoping we don’t see a rush of rauchbier’s coming into the market.” Unlike many people, I like rauchbiers, but I’m not looking forward to being surprised by a juicy IPA that tastes like licking an ash tray. (“Licking an ashtray” being a phrase used to describe wines made with smoke-tainted grapes.)

There is a time, however, that smoke and hops belong together. So returning to one of my favorite topics, I’ve recently tasted two very excellent smoked wheat beers, a style that through the years has been known both as Grodziskie and Grätzer. (A bit of disclosure, the breweries involved shipped me these beers.)

The photo at the top is Chuckanut Grodziskie, poured into a glass Browar Grodzisk had made when they opened on the site of a former brewery in Grodzisk in 2016. That’s a stock certificate for United Grodzisk Breweries, the lone brewery in Grodzisk for most of the 20th century. Welcome to the full 21st Century Grodziskie Experience.

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Words of wisdom from Fred Eckhardt.

In case you missed it, Anchor Brewing unveiled new labels this week. Many words have been spilled analyzing the new look, what this means, Whether it was a good idea, and so on. I will not be adding any.

Instead, here are two of six frames from a tri-fold brochure the brewery produced in the 1970s. Beer should be fun. This is.