beers of conviction

Ron Pattinson posted a bit of history Thursday about lagers from Barclay Perkins, plus a recipe for 1932 Draught Lager. And Kristen England added notes about brewing the version from Bent Distillery he’ll pour April 22 in St. Louis at LagerFest.

Cool stuff. Also this week, I’ve been trading email with other brewers about the lagers they made for the event. More cool stuff. But the highlight of the week was discovering that the Bolzen Beer Band has been added to the program. Only the addition of Brave Combo and some sort of battle of the alternative polka bands could make it better. They might bring down the brick walls at Urban Chestnut Brewing Company.

Pattinson provided most, but not all, the recipes used to make the beers that will be served. Here’s the log from the December day that August Schell Brewing in Minnesota brewed an 1879 Kulmbacher Export. When I asked David Berg at Schell’s why he picked this particular recipe he replied, “My love for Oberfranken.” Although the recipe targets 80 IBU this beer is closer to the high 40s and “pretty dang bitter.”

For further reading he suggests digging into “Beer Brewing in Bamberg, 200 Years Ago.”

We saw Jason Isbell (and The 400 Unit, with James McMurtry opening; pretty good deal) in concert last week. The playlist included his song, “Different Days,” and although the lyrics have next to nothing to do with what follows I heard his voice singing “Those were different days” when I came across this passage today.

It appeared in the May/June 1998 issue of The New Brewer magazine, at the time the journal of the Institute of Brewing Studies, the predecessor of the Brewers Association. The “Industry in Review” included a few paragraphs titled “Running Out of Novelty Flavors.”

This seems to be the case, and maybe it’s not such a bad situation. The short history of U.S. craft brewing contains an incredibly long list of different, non-traditional grains, herbs spices, fruits and a few vegetables that commercial brewers have put in their beer. Sometimes it’s more for fun and excitement—to create a special or novelty beer—and other times it’s more for profit—to participate in a growing category. Alternatively, it gives a brewery the distinction of being the “first” to brew with a particular ingredient, a claim to fame that usually far outlast the product itself. A notable example is the story of McMenamins Mars Bar Ale, which has achieved industry folk legend status, even though it was one batch of beer more than a decade ago.

In a market full of porters, stouts, bocks and wheat beers, brewers are still trying hard to come up with new beers to distinguish themselves from other competitors and crave out their own niche. In 1997 a few brewers made beer using hemp seeds and a few others made the first vanilla beers. Now that the list of all conceivable ingredients being in drinkable beer—within reason—seems close to being exhausted, the trend of trying to invent the new novelty may be ending.

That notwithstanding, craft brewing will continue to be a safe realm for creating new flavors and experimenting with different grains, different yeast, and new combinations of ingredients never before attempted. In addition, the whole world of indigenous beer styles brewed by different cultures still awaits the more adventurous micro- and pubbrewers.

No, I did not find this while researching pastry stouts.

Somehow, Uwe Kalms occasionally managed to get a word in edgewise during an evening at Krossbar Bellavista in Santiago, Chile. They hosted judges and speakers for Copa Cervezas de América last week when they debuted their newest beer — you guessed it, an NEIPA.

Ron will be posting plenty of details about the trip, the competition, the conference, and whatever else crosses his mind. In an email exchange yesterday he said he had already written 5,000 words. Expect it to be entertaining.

You might have overlooked this bit of news yesterday from Molson Coors: “Molson Coors and Heineken announced today that MillerCoors later this year will start distributing, marketing and selling the Mexican import Sol in the United States.”

Shrug, be excited, whatever. For me this provdes an excuse to tell a Larry Bell story. And Larry Bell stories are the best kind of beer stories. It comes from 2009 and appears in Brewing with Wheat.

About five years after Bell began brewing a wheat beer called Solsun he discovered the cloudy summer seasonal had taken on a life beyond the glass. The sororities at Western Michigan, also in Kalamazoo, used the beer’s logo on 600 T-shirts for fall rush.

“I realized I better get some trademark protection,” Bell said. When he filed the papers Mexican brewing company Cerveceria Cuauhtemoc Moctezuma, which brewed a beer called El Sol (the Sun), opposed the application. Since Moctezuma had been around since 1899 Bell’s lawyer suggested he could spend a million dollars fighting for the name and still lose. The good news was Moctezuma would let Bell keep the distinctive logo.

He picked Oberon as the new name in 1996 because, in part, it also has six letters and the label was easy to change. “Oberon was sort of goofy, had some connotations,” Bell said. “If you look at the Latin root it means they wander or go astray. That seemed appropriate.”

Additionally, when Bell was a sixth grader in Park Forest, Illinois, he played the part of Oberon, the fairy king, in Shakespeare’s “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

“I still have dinner with Queen Titania. She’s looking pretty good,” Bell said.

License plates at Bell’s Eccentric Cafe in Kalamazoo.