beers of conviction

The Session: Quarantine edition

Being There

I like to watch.

Daria and I spent much of July 3, 1995, at Seaside Heights, N.J., on the beach and on the boardwalk. On the way back to Daria’s mom’s house we stopped at Antones in Cranford. It was (was being the operative term, because it was sold in 2008 and converted into an Irish theme pub) a tavern with a wide range of beer and frequented by people who lived and worked nearby.

The regulars played NTN (trivia) and we once saw a couple in a booth picking out wedding invitations. On this pre-holiday Monday these regulars filled almost every stool at the horseshoe bar. They were watching the 6 o’clock news and the weatherman was warning viewers of the danger of sunburn under clear Fourth of July skies.

“What’s UV-9?” one drinker asked.

“It means I have to wear my sunglasses in here tomorrow,” another answered.

Three years ago, I spent a couple of hours in Riley’s Pub, a St. Louis neighborhood establishment, taking notes for a gathering of The Session hosted by Boak & Bailey, scribbling down observations, speaking nary a word other than to order beer.

It’s what I do. I miss it.

The SessionWe said goodbye to The Session a year ago December, but Alistair Reece has summoned us for a special Quarantine Edition. He poses several questions, including “what has become your new drinking normal?”

Normal, what a concept. We live in Atlanta, Georgia — Georgia undoubtedly being the seven letters your eyes focus on. Things are not going to end well for many people in this state. That doesn’t mean everybody has to act stupidly. Most restaurants and brewery taprooms in Atlanta chose not to reopen at this time. Monday Night Brewing shared the results of a poll that indicated that three quarters of beer drinkers would not consider heading to a taproom before June.

Shadows on a wallFor Daria and I, the old normal on a Friday was to eat and drink at a locally owned restaurant, quite possibly a brewpub or taproom. The last time we did that eight weeks ago we had dinner and beer at Best End Brewing, then stopped at nearby ASW Distillery for an after dinner drink.

The windows there look out on the fire pits at Monday Night Garage, one of two brewery taprooms flanking the distillery. We watched people come and go, some with children who dashed happily about outdoors. We saw animated conversations, although we couldn’t hear what was being said (eavesdropping makes observing better). It was a good normal.

This Friday, as we have every Friday since, we’ll continue to eat local and drink local. I will walk to Fox Bros. Bar-B-Q to pick up dinner and on to Wrecking Bar Brewpub, which recently canned a pilsner made with hops from the Seitz Farm in Germany. We’ll dine on our back deck, listen to music (as well as the occasional train rumbling by, though MARTA is running less often now) and watch the shadows track across the bricks on a neighbor’s house.

The new normal is also a good normal, but I’m ready for another normal. One that looks more like the old normal.

How much do ‘we’ need to know about beer history?

Last week, Jeff Alworth struck a chord when he posted a list of “five breweries every serious beer fan should visit.” Lots of interest on Twitter and Facebook. No surprise, I agree that, “Even if you’re just into the standard American craft lineup, your appreciation for those beers will deepen if you visit the breweries that inspired them.”

This got a little more complicated for me: “An insularity is settling in among American craft beer fans, and it is cutting them off from the roots of their own tradition.” I agree that appreciating tradition enriches us. But I don’t know that today’s drinkers are any more insular than drinkers have always been.

That’s just an aside. Because the post turned out to be a prelude to a family of questions.

By chance, the next day on the Music Exists podcast Chris Ryan and Chuck Klosterman discussed, “How much do you really need to know about music history?” Not really all that timely because they were talking about the December dustup that began when Jimmy Kimmell asked Billie Eilish to name any member Van Halen.

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Has hard seltzer given beer the ‘Cross Road Blues?’

Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, risin’ sun goin’ down
Standin’ at the crossroad, baby, eee-eee, risin’ sun goin’ down
I believe to my soul, now, poor Bob is sinkin’ down

– From “Cross Road Blues” by Robert Johnson

Lew Bryson, bless his booming laugh, has written about the soul of beer. In the first years I posted at Appellation Beer the tagline here read, “In search of the soul of beer.” I had to lean on the Wayback Machine to find a copy of the old logo.

Appellation Beer 2007 logo

I changed the tag to “celebrating beer from a place” because I thought it would result in fewer questions like “why appellation?” Also, a lengthy discussion here sometime later documents the sort of trouble a blogger can get into suggesting some beers might have soul and others could be soulless.

Anyway, Bryson writes, “Those pioneering beers were great because of the heart and soul of the people who made them. I don’t want to see the soul go away. I don’t think that the beer world as we know it today could survive that.”

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Why would a beer that was once a fine representative of a style no longer be?

Boak and Bailey provoked what turned into a longread last week by asking “What’s the reference beer for each style? Especially more obscure styles, we suppose.” @BoakandBailey quickly added, “So, to clarify: reference doesn’t necessarily mean the best, just the most representative. If you’d never had style X before, would that beer help you understand it?”

Start at the top, keep scrolling, take your time, feel free to wander off into some of conversations within the conversation. I’ll wait.

At the end, @joelandrewwinn writes, “Curious to see the responses when North America wakes up tomorrow. My guess is there will be opinions.” If comments broke out, I didn’t find them. That doesn’t matter. This isn’t about the best American reference for a mild (although Rocksteady on cask at Good Word Brewing in Duluth, Ga., was awfully good Saturday before last). Or a reference for Americanized or “traditional” German pilsner, or pastry stout or whatever.

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Russian River Brewing ‘bugs’ circa 2006

Russian River Brewing microbes - parts of original mixed cultureBarrel room, Russian River brewpub, Santa RosaThe carboys at the top contain many of the microbes that became part of the “Russian River bacteria blend” that contributes to the unique character of beers such as Temptation and Supplication. Details are in a story posted at Good Beer Hunting.

The photo was taken in 2006 in the barrel room of the Russian River Brewing Co. pub (at the time, its only brewery) in Santa Rosa, Calif. These days, hundreds — heck, maybe thousands — of brewers ferment beers with that they call their own unique mixed cultures. This is relatively new.

(Some might even suggest so new that we should wait to be sure the aren’t racing ahead a bit quickly.)

For “Still Friends After All These Years” I talked with brewers who have kept in touch with the same microbes (known affectionately as bugs or critters) that soured their beers for the past 15 years, and sometimes longer. Included are a few beers you may have forgotten, or perhaps never heard off.

The carboys in the photo are long gone. The blend of microbes Russian River co-founder Vinnie Cilurzo settled on is stored in plastic totes today, although he is using a new process to make Temptation and other brands these days.

He has been, and still is, generous about sharing these Russian River bugs with homebrewers. Twice he has taken wood chips aged along with Damnation, something Russian River does every twenty-third batch, and soaked them in Beatification or Sonambic, then given away “dime bags” of the chips at conferences. He also provides More Beer, a homebrew supply store, with Cabernet Sauvignon barrels that were used to make Consecration. The supplier cuts those into chunks it sells as part of a kit.