beers of conviction

Ales Through the Ages redux

Ales Through the Ages

You will be forgiven if you think we must be on Ales Through the Ages III or even IV by now.

The first one was in 2016. Read Martyn Cornell’s recap here.

The second was to be in 2018, but was canceled.

Then the second was to be last year, but the in-person conference was postponed until this year.

A shorter virtual conference was held instead.

So I’m not sure if we call this II or III, but it is happening Nov. 11-13 in Williamsburg. The agenda is here.

I might have been a bit optimistic when I provided a title for my presentation — Breaking the Lupulin Code. Scientists are still working on mapping hop genomes, complicated by the fact there isn’t just one and each of them is larger than the human genome. And then there’s the reality that hops may not follow Gregor Mendel’s principles of inheritence. But I’ll do my best to explain why Citra is so much different than her grandmother, Hallertau Mittelfrüh. And to answer Frank Clark’s question about what modern hops are most like those colonial brewers would have used.

Registration information is here.

Prelude to a beer

Maypop plant at Scratch Brewing

This is a maypop flower. The picture was taken a couple of weeks ago at Scratch Brewing in southern Illinois and showed up in my email this week when I asked how this year’s “crop” is looking.

Scratch Maypop is one of the best beers I’ve had this year. It is simple, but not-simple, not as sweet and juicy as passion fruit, but with a how-do-I-subscribe-this fruit flavor moderated by elusive “wheaty” character, more tart than sour. It is not as electric as the flower, which is fine.

I drank it in a brisk March day, with fruit from 2021 harvest obviously, and it tasted like summer.

Maypops (Passiflora incarnata) are native to the United States, grow wild in southern Illinois and can become invasive. Scratch harvests them in the woods surrounding the property the brewery sits as well as from vines growing on the building.

The flowers bloom from early July through mid-September. “The fruit will ripen from late August until mid October,” said co-founder Aaron Kleidon. “The fruit is hollow until it’s nearly ready. Then it turns yellow and shrivels a bit. At this point the fruit loses most of its tartness and begins to have tropical flavors. It will fall from the vine and we harvest it from the ground. We scoop out the pulp and freeze it as they all ripen over the month.”

#nottwitter 14 (post-craft beer)

What qualifies as luxury beer?

Asked because in the second paragraph of this story you will find the term “luxury wine.”

And there is also this statement: “Robert Mondavi’s vision was to create wine from Napa Valley that could stand among the best in the world. Once he actualized that goal with his namesake winery, he had a new vision: for everyone in America to be able to afford a good bottle of wine.” During the past 40 years, a new wave of breweries have established beer brewed in the United States can stand among the best in the world.

And, to quote Steve Earle, who will be singing at the Boulder Theater next week, “You know the rest.”

Which one is the IPA?

Which one is the IPA?

If you guessed the beer on the far right, sorry, you are wrong.

The styles, left to right at Angry James Brewing Company in Silverthorne, Colorado, are: IPA, a hoppy light lager, German pils, and hefeweizen (a very good one, in fact).

When I asked, before ordering, if Tricentric IPA (the beer on the left) was a see-through beer the man behind the bar did not hesitate. “West Coast IPA.” That’s the world we live in.