beers of conviction

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.

Sahti and beyond: Viking Age Brew

Ancient Viking BrewHeikkie Riutta, a farmer in the Finnish municipality of Sysmä, won the Finland’s National Sahti Competition in 2006. He brews in the tradition taught to him by his father, one he will pass on to his sons. Sysmä is barley-centric, and like others in the region, Riutta brews his sahti without rye. Lighter color and lower alcohol strength are also typical for the region, and Riutta focuses on drinkability over alcohol strength, making beers in the 6-8% ABV range.

In contrast, Veli-Matt Heinonen makes a stronger, sweeter sahti, like others found in the Padasjoki region where he lives. He learned to brew from his mother in the 1980s and the recipe, which contains about 10% dark rye malt, hasn’t changed much since. Before adding hops he puts them in a bucket and pours boiling water over them to reduce the bitterness.

Mika Laitinen provides recipes from these two and others in Viking Age Brew: The Craft of Brewing Sahti Farmhouse Ale, the recipes supporting his assertion early on that sahti may be called a beer style but not by those who favor narrow style guidelines.

“Farmhouse ales always pose a challenge for those who want to categorize beers by style,” Laitinen writes. “Brewer-specific variation is enormous, and regional preferences may be overshadowed by ‘noisy’ individual examples.” In addition, these beers were not brewed to be shipped to a bottle share somewhere in the middle of the United States. Freshness is a gigantic variable. “The ale can taste different on the same day, depending on whether the pint was drawn from the top or the bottom of the fermenter.”

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#FlagshipFriday #2: Alaskan Smoked Porter

Glacier field, AlaskaSmoked Porter is the first beer from Alaskan Brewing Company that I ever drank.

In Twilight of the Gods, author Steven Hyden writes, “The experience of discovering an artist after he’s built a body of work is much different than following an artist as that work is created in real time. For people who grew up with (Paul) McCartney, it’s the hits that matter, because those are the songs that soundtracked your life. But if you come to an artist later, after all that music is released and initially assessed, the perspective often skews away from hits, which seem overfamiliar, and toward the lesser-heralded gems, which are fresher.”

The other day, I thought about these things in the context of considering flagship beers while looking over the pretty decent beer selection at our local Kroger grocery store (in Atlanta). We all come to a brewery’s beers at a different time in their history and a different time in our own histories. Our Kroger sells just one Victory Brewing Co. beer, Golden Monkey, a 9.5% ABV Belgian tripel. If I hadn’t read Bryan Roth’s story last year I would not have known that for several years Golden Monkey, not HopDevil IPA, has been the brewery flagship, the best-selling beer that introduces new customers to Victory.

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Experiencing beer out of (historic) order

What if we tasted beer in some sort of historic reverse? That is, starting with a particular type of beer as it is brewed today, and following it with previous episodes of the same beer.

I ask this, and ask it this way, because the Game of Thrones returns Sunday, and like Zak Jason I didn’t start watching the series when it debuted in 2011 and haven’t since. This has saved some time, not just hours that would have been spent watching 67 episodes broadcast so far, but still more for reading (think The Wire or Breaking Bad). And in recent weeks there has been plenty to read, including an intriguing article Jason wrote in Wired about binge-watching GoT backward. He wanted to experience it spoiler first, then learn what caused what he was seeing.

This “is much closer to how we encounter people in adult life when they play DE Nokzeit games,” he writes. “We don’t meet new colleagues or acquaintances via origin stories with swelling violins or rumbling timpani telling us how to feel about them. We meet them as testy, anxious, or guarded humans with many other quirks tied to unknown histories that require patience to uncover.”

In the process, he found he began “to pick up on things other viewers may not.”

Beers are not people, and I couldn’t tell you what episode of beer history we are on, or which one would feature Albany Ale, or Geronimo’s favorite fermented grain drink, tiswin, or whatever. But I do think it is relevant that origin stories have been an important part of beer marketing (be it Budweiser or Anchor Steam), and may not matter for a beer like Rhinegeist Cobstopper (a gose brewed with peach, vanilla and lactose and packaged in a can with nitrogen gas).

I met gose, so to speak, at Bayerischer Bahnhof Gasthaus and Gose Brauerei in Leipzig in 2008, and the next day had Döllnitzer Ritterguts Gose at a nearby cafe. There is an origin story. In 2010, Tiny Bubbles, a gose from Hollister Brewing in California, won a silver medal at the Great American Beer Festival. There were other goses out and about by then, some of which tasted more like Ritterguts and Tiny Bubbles than others. Fal Allen chronicles the evolution that followed, one he helped instigate with beers at Anderson Valley Brewing, in Gose: Brewing a Classic German Beer For The Modern Era.

The path from Bahnhof Gose to (potentially, should I encounter it) Cobstopper, with several stops along the way, is different than the path from Anderson Valley Blood Orange Gose to Cobstopper with various beers between. And the experience of drinking Cobstopper first, then Perennial Suburban Beverage is different than starting with Westbrook Gose and moving on to Creature Comforts Tritonia with pineapple and lemon. Change the order, change the experience and the understanding.

Just think of the fun you could have with IPA.

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There must be a variation of this game that includes several different types of beers from an era, similar types (call them styles if you must) from another, and from another, and so on. I’ll leave it to you to write the rules. It might also be fun to, if you can find the beers hiding in cellars somewhere, to mix and match the officially sanctioned Game of Thrones beers. Brewery Ommegang began collaborating with GoT to produce these 2013.