beers of conviction

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.”

Brewing by hand and by app

The brew deck at Oakham Ales

That’s hop dust below.

The photo shows the brew deck at Oakham Ales in Peterborough, located an hour (by train) north of London. The green underneath is the hop dust. Much has been automated at Oakham, so automated a brewer can sit in the local pub and use his phone to control some brewery operations, but not everything.

Breaking up hops at Meantime BrewingThat includes adding hops to the brewing kettle and the hopback. Oakham uses a good share of hops, American hops, in whole cone form.

After the hops are shipped to the UK in bales, hop merchant Charles Faram repackages them into 5 and 20 kilogram packages (called freshpacks). About 55 percent of the hops Faram sells are in cone/leaf form (compared to 90 percent in 1989). The hops in the freshpacks end up quite compact, so brewers cannot simply open a package and dump hops into the kettle.

That’s why the workers pictured to the right (in this case at Meantime Brewing in London) have to break up the hops by hand.

And not everything ends up in the kettle.

Oakham is bigger than what’s defined as a microbrewery in the US — production this year should be 14,000-17,000 UK barrels, the equivalent of more than 20,000 US barrels — and soon some of its beers should be available in the US. John Bryan, whose official title is production director, was the first in the UK to brew with Citra, cleverly calling the resulting beer Citra. It has been immensely popular, as has its second all-Citra beer, Green Devil IPA.

With size has come automation, and almost any aspect of the operation that is automated can be controled by mobile phone. For instance, a brewer could start the mill and fill the grist case from home, although Bryan prefers somebody be around in the event there is blockage. Likewise the brewhouse, although heating brewing liquor on a Sunday so it is ready to go Monday morning makes the week start easier (using the large scale supplier for industrial heating parts, quite innovative).

It’s particularly handy for monitoring fermentation, and changing temperatures if necessary.

Even on a Saturday night, or perhaps Sunday afternoon, from the pub. Whether that’s a good idea, and how much you want to show off for the others at the pub . . . it’s best, Bryan says, to take into account how much beer has already been consumed.

Whatever happened to ‘extreme’ beer?

Did I miss the memo?

Stories about — and therefore praising, because almost all stories about beers not brewed by large corporations include a certain amount of praise — “extreme beers” seem to be appearing less often.

(And, yes, I’m aware that the Beer Advocate “Extreme Beer Festival” recently concluded. That’s one reason for the question.)

Maybe my radar needs adjusting. Or maybe they’ve been drowned about by tales of passionate nano-brewers.

The subject popped up again yesterday when Adrian Tierney-Jones wrote about the Charles Wells/Dogfish Head collaboration beer DNA New World IPA. Sam Calagione (who wrote a book titled Extreme Brewing) was there for the roll out, of course, and Adrian talked with him.

And afterwards I had a few words with Calagione and asked the question that was bugging me. Extreme beer? ‘It wasn’t about strength but innovation and flavour. I’m not hung up on nomenclature.’

And in that millpond the ripples keep spreading.

I’m still trying to wrap my head about this DNA beer, and understand just what “a reduction of our 60 Minute IPA” means, but it sounds like something that would have been called “extreme” not long ago.

Beer innovation #2416: Nip size cans

21st Amendment Lower De BoomSee that sleek, gold can on the right that looks like it’s waiting to make an appearance in Super Bowl commercial? Brilliant idea. It contained1 8.4 ounces (248ml) of Lower De Boom barleywine from 21st Amendment Brewery.

Lower De Boom is 11.5% alcohol by volume. I can’t count how many 22-ounce and bigger bottles my local beer shop has full of barleywines and other beers just as strong. No wonder they call them bombers. I get the concept that bigger bottles are for sharing, but Daria and I shared 8.4 ounces.

I don’t have much more to say the De Boom itself — it’s a bit American/pungent on the nose, but a dessert beer; rich, plenty of caramel and some dark fruit character, a little sweet, but it may dry out as it ages, or do you lay down beer in cans? And it comes with a back story. 2

*****

1 Yes, past tense. 21st Amendment spent far more sending the the beer to me than it would cost in a store. If I could buy it in St. Louis I would.

2 Cornelius De Boom was a Belgian-born ship owner who made it to San Francisco in time for the gold rush in 1848. De Boom Street, named for him, is the alley which runs alongside 21st Amendment Brewery. The brewery’s De Boom Street entrance is often referred to as “lower De Boom” by brewery employees.

Bell’s Hopslam described (catty alert)

Bell's Hopslam

Bell’s Hopslam is in the house, meaning our house. This is a good thing. It’s 10% alcohol by volume and plenty of hops were used to make this beer. We will drink some this evening, but there will be no taking or posting of notes.

Instead, the arrival of Hopslam in St. Louis — 50 cases at The Wine and Cheese Place that may already be gone (or spoken for) — is an excuse to post the perfect description of the beer. From John Mallett, who is the production manager at Bell’s.

Mallett1 is also president of the Hop Quality Group, a non-profit organization of brewers who recognize the need to communicate their interest in hop aroma to hop farmers. The tagline on the the HQG logo reads “oils over alpha,” although any particular member is as likely to say “aroma over alpha” when talking about the short history of the group.

At the 2012 Craft Brewers Conference in San Diego, Mallett and other members of the group explained just why the group was formed and described their goals. Mallett talked about the importance of communicating to growers that brewers’ needs have changed because drinkers’ tastes have changed. Aromas considered undesirable, literally for centuries, are now desirable. He used a Bell’s beer, rather obviously Hopslam, as an example.

Twenty years ago — a time, by the way, that hops such as Simcoe and Citra were already being developed, but weren’t about to find immediate popularity — there wasn’t a brewer on earth who would have gone to the annual Hop Growers of American convention and said, as he did, “I’m going to have a beer that we make 4,000 barrels of, one time a year. It flies off the shelf at damn near $20 a six-pack, and you know what it smells like? It smells like your cat ate your weed and then pissed in the Christmas tree.”

*****

1 Mallett is also the author of what will be the fourth book in Brewers Publications ingredients series, this one containing everything you could want to know about malt.