beers of conviction

Hop aroma impact

Bert Grant smells fresh Cascade hopsUK hop merchant Charles Faram & Co. includes an interesting twist in providing basic information about the hops its sells.

Of course, its chart lists alpha acids and has a few descriptors (“molasses, chocolate, spicy” or “herbal, pineapple, resinous”) but there is also a column for “flavour intensity.” Those numbers are quite subjective. But, just as the colored meters DRAFT magazine featured about six months ago, they are useful as long as you also accept not everybody’s sense of smell is the same.

Also remember intensity is not necessarily the same thing as impact.

For instance, the Faram chart lists Galaxy as an 8, but it surely has as much pop as 9-rated hops like Citra, Amarillo, and Cascade> More than Admiral.

It seems painfully obvious, but how brewers use the hops and how much they use, well, that’s important.

Drink a Marble Brewery Pilsner made with Hersbrucker (6) or a Firestone Walker Brewing Pils with Spalter Select (5) and Saphir (5) for proof.

*****

That’s the late, great Bert Grant at the top. Those as Cascade hops in his hands.

German beer drinkers: Here come Americans to the rescue

Who will decided what the next generation of German beer drinkers likes?Why would a German beer drinker pay the equivalent of $4.20 for a 12-ounce bottle of Brooklyn Lager? It’s an excellent beer, but that’s quite a markup over what it costs in the United States and considerably more than Germans pay from any of several outstanding beers.

I don’t have an answer.

Maybe it is somehow related to the fact Berlin Is a Haven of Hip. Consider this from a Washington Post story that got a lot of attention last week: “At a recent tasting in one Berlin bar, guests sipped craft beers out of special vessels shaped like wineglasses that helped concentrate the aromas of the brew. The bar was furnished in a decidedly Berlin style — it was a subterranean lair where beakers of bubbling fluorescent liquids served as decoration, the tables appeared to be made from welded-together car parts, and fake stalactites hung from the ceiling.”

Not quite like drinking beer in Franconia.

That’s not actually what struck me first when I read the story, and compressed a bunch of words into something almost meaningless on Twitter. It was the simple arrogance of this.

“The German beer industry has to reinvent itself in a hurry, or it’s going to be a small fraction of what it is now,” said Eric Ottaway, the general manager of Brooklyn Brewery, which has been expanding in Europe and has been exporting its beer to Germany through Braufactum, which sells a 12-ounce bottle of Brooklyn Lager in upscale grocery stores for the equivalent of $4.20 — almost three times its typical American price.

And this.

“This was simply to fill a void,” he said. “We feel as if we’re teaching a lot of Germans things about their own beer culture that they’ve forgotten.”

He is Matt Walthall, one of three American expats who have launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise enough money to open a brewery.

German drinkers sure are lucky those guys showed up.

OK, that was snide. Steam blown off. A lot of good in that story, and to be fair, Ottaway has a point. Reinvent itself is a bit strong, but German brewers need to make changes. Oh, wait, some are. Those particular ones just aren’t in this story. So a few links to fill in the gaps:

– Sylvia Kopp’s excellent story from five years ago in All About Beer magazine: Ruled by the Reinheitsgebot?

– The (Real) Beer Nut’s up-to-date report from Munich called The shape of things to come.

– An article in the 2012/2013 edition of Hopfen (a pdf) about the Bier-Quer-Denker workshops gives you a good idea of who well attended they’ve become.

Session #75: Making beer & making money

The SessionChuck Lenatti at Allbrews hosts The Session #75: The Business of Brewing. He’s looking for comments and observations from those who have first-hand knowledge about the complexities and pitfalls of starting a commercial brewery.

Nineteen years ago this week Daria and I sat down at the bar in Armadillo Brewing on Sixth Street in Austin, Texas, and ordered beer. The brewing tanks were right behind the bar, so close that the bartender had to step around the brewer, who was drawing a sample from the mash tun. The brewer proceeded to squeeze an eye dropper of iodine into the sample to see if starches in the grains had converted to sugar (and the wort was ready to boil). Basic homebrewing stuff, but something I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen in a commercial brewery.

But how was the beer? Lousy, but not infected. The guys behind the bar, apparently owners, had a copy of Steve Johnnson’s On Tap: A Field Guide to North American Brewpubs and Craft Breweries in hand and were talking about where they might open their next brewery.

When we checked a year later Armadillo was out of business. Eventually, another owner gave brewing a shot in the same building, opening Katie Bloom’s Irish Pub. That didn’t work, although Katie Bloom’s continued to operate after selling off the brewing equipment. One time when we were in Texas we drove by and the storefront was vacant. Today Pure Ulta Lounge “brings the excitement of Miami’s South Beach” to 419 E. Sixth Street.

The beer was better at the Armadillo than Babe’s: The Brewery in Des Moines, a large downtown restaurant that added a brewery because . . . actually, I’m not quite sure why. Every beer we tried there was buttery, and some of it was sour as well. A pleasant level of diacetyl is one thing. This was something else.

As we admired the duct tape used to repair a tear in the fabric of our booth we listened to a customer at the bar. He was leaving town for an extended trip and talking about how much he’d miss the beer, because he knew he’d find nothing he liked as much while traveling.

The Brewers Association’s Guide to Starting Your Own BreweryCoincidentally, Babe’s was located at 417 Sixth Avenue. However the lesson here is not to avoid opening a brewery in the 400 block on a Sixth street. It is to know what the hell you are doing and be careful who you listen to. In announcing the topic this month Lenatti wrote, “Making beer is the easy part, building a successful business is hard.” Yes, it’s important to understand that there’s more to the business than brewing beer. But you really need to know how to make great beer, and then to assure it is great clear to the consumer’s glass.

The best advice I can offer somebody thinking about opening a brewery is don’t. But if you must, consider reading The Brewers Association’s Guide to Starting Your Own Brewery (revised edition) before doing anything else. [See disclaimer below.]

The Table of Contents should convince you. The updated version ships in June and both Brewers Publications and Amazon are taking preorders now.

*****

Diclaimer: Brewers Publications published three of my books — For the Love of Hops, Brew Like a Monk, and Brewing With Wheat — so we have something of a relationship.

‘Native ales’ and ‘Spokane Style’

Christopher Staten writes about “native ales” in the current DRAFT magazine (March/April, “25 Unexpected Getaways” on the cover). Even though the tagline here reads “celebrating beer from a place” I have to pause when considering his conclusion.

But in terms of the big picture — that “what story will they tell in 200 years?” question — native beers have the potential to define the American craft beer industry’s legacy.

That’s bold.

Although Lakefront Brewery’s Wisconsinite is made with all Wisconsin ingredients this is really a story about yeast.

Case in point: Vinland One. For the series’ first release, [Mystic Brewing founder Bryan] Greenhagen isolated a yeast strain from a Massachusetts plum he bought at a local farmers market. Called Winnie, the wild yeast imparts plum, mango and touches of spice to the saison base, giving it character more akin to wine. Technically, One isn’t an ale or lager; it’s something unique. Greenhagen’s also working on developing yeast cultures from blueberries in Maine for Vinland Two, slated for release this September, and berries and grapes from a family farm in Vermont. While the lack of local ingredients suited for his recipes (mainly noble hops) prevents him from brewing a complete native beer, his use of local, wild yeast makes Vinland exclusive to his region.

“Biodiversity can help us make our own unique beer,” he says. “Even though we work within the Belgian tradition, how can we bring that back to make things that are actually distinctive and, in some cases, beer you couldn’t make anywhere else?”

Hold that thought.

Now consider the news earlier this month that No-Li Brewhouse in Spokane, Washington, successfully lobbied for the “term and beer classification Spokane Style.” Spokane Style beer must be brewed and packaged in Spokane by Spokane residents and use all ingredients exclusively to the region (meaning from within 300 miles).

So just what is ‘Spokane Style’? “Like the Matrix, no one can be told what Spokane Style is”, said [co-founder John] Bryant with a laugh, “but you must taste.”

“When you pride yourself on using only the finest ingredients and the greatest attention to detail”, said co-founder and Head Brewer Mark Irvin, “you know what Spokane Style is. You can taste it.”

Can you taste it?

Why?

Does it matter?

These, in fact, are the questions I’ve been asking here for more than seven years. Maybe it’s time to get serious about finding some answers.

Micro-malting: Is ‘local’ a good enough reason?

Is there a future for local malts in beer?

I don’t have a clue, but a story in Modern Farmer suggests micro malt houses could work.

Andrea Stanley, part of the husband-wife team who owns Valley Malt, is starting a craft maltsters guild, and estimates there are five more coming in New York state alone.

“This isn’t just a flash in the pan,” says Stanley. “It’s a real industry.”

They’ve got tiny staffs, and even tinier margins. (Colorado Malting Company, for instance, produces 13,500 pounds of malt a week, compared to the 15.6 million put out by Rahr, one of the country’s biggest malthouses.) But these micro-maltsters are hoping to be the Davids to the Goliaths of the massively consolidated U.S. malting industry.

And hey, why not? It happened with beer.

“In many ways this parallels where craft brewing was in the ‘70s, when we had less than 40 small breweries in country trying to make something different. And today we have thousands of small breweries,” says John Mallett, Director of Operations at Bell’s Brewery, in Kalamazoo, MI, who is writing a book on malt. “We’re starting to see these [malting] entrepreneurs asking a lot of questions, and trying to start something up, and it’s an exciting time.”

John Mallett is a lot smarter than I am, so I’m going with whatever he says. (The book he is writing will be the fourth in Brewers Publications’ ingredients “brewing elements series” — my hops book was the second.)

Notice that Mallett doesn’t say it will be enough for these malts simply to be locally kilned. They’ll need to be in some way special, because local maltsters can’t compete on price and the “taste of local” can be ephemeral. The new wave of regional hop farmers (meaning those not located in the Northwest) face the same challenge.

Perhaps Modern Farmer will publish a story about them next. The magazine just hit the newsstands this week, leading to an amusing review in the Wall Street Journal: “Glossy Acres: A Magazine’s Lush Take on Farmers.”

Think of it as Gourmet crossed with Dwell and sent to “Green Acres,” as veteran editors from Manhattan’s largely livestock-free magazine world try to tap into the interest in back-to-the-soil living.

Put another way, doesn’t seem like they are targeting drinkers of “regular beer.”