beers of conviction

Don Russell has an excellent little interview with Boston Beer founder Jim Koch today.

As well as everything you could want to know about Samuel Adams Light he addresses the matter of rising beer prices. As always, Koch offers some great sound bites:

– “But you can’t reduce costs by taking ingredients out. People will forgive us for raising the prices 5 percent. They won’t forgive us for taking 5 percent of the malt or hops out of the beer.”

– “For 6 cents on a bottle, are you going to switch to Natty Bo?”

Also some legitimate perspective:

“In 1950, when people were drinking cheap beer, bad wine and nasty spirits, the average American spent 3.5 percent of their disposable income on alcoholic beverages. Fast-forward to today, when we’re drinking craft and imported beers, fine wines and good liquors, the average American is spending 1.5 percent of their disposable income on alcoholic beverages, and per capita consumption is relatively level.”

Read the whole interview.

Our next local beer will be from Alaska. Good deal.

We’ve been seeing beer from Alaskan Brewing since we hit Idaho, but it wasn’t the local beer then. Instead we bought an Idaho Riesling (instead of Alaskan Amber) in a gas station — an idea that turned out to be about as good as we expected when we did it. We saw lots of Alaskan in Washington . . . but still not the local beer.

Tonight we drank wine, Piety Flats Mercantile Red that we picked up in Yakima Valley. Fruit forward and pretty oaky, so very new American, but enjoyable. The winery is located across the road from an abandoned hop kiln (here’s a picture), and the plan was to call it the Hop Kiln winery until the owners discovered there was already a Sonoma County winery (situated in old hop kilns) using that name. We think the “hop kiln” wine in Yakima is better.

The Slow Travelers currently are bunking just west of Smithers, B.C., with an Internet connection that feels painfully dialup. Where’s Smithers? A long way from home and a long way from the northern “top” of our trip. Tomorrow we head for Prince Rupert, to catch a ferry that heads up the Inside Passage.

The government liquor store in town has plenty of beer, including mainstream, imports and craft (however you want to define the last). Unibroue costs the same as at home ($5.95 for a 750ml), but hardly qualifies as local since it is produced at the other end of the world’s second largest country. Most six-packs are in the $11 to $12 range, including those from B.C. breweries such as Granville Island, Phillips and Tree.

And just in case you were wondering, Stella sells for $22 a 12-pack. Wouldn’t be tempting even if it were local.

Peek behind the curtain and you’ll see Terminal Gravity Brewing in Northeast Oregon is bursting at its micro-seems, but you aren’t required to look. The pleasure here is, well, right here.

Every seat inside the pub-restaurant was taken within half an hour after it opened Saturday, although that only amounted to about two score customers. When a damp, chilling wind isn’t blowing there’s more outdoor seating at picnic tables or on the front porch than inside.

Steve Carper and Dean Duquette built the place themselves – including fabricating the brewing equipment – in 1997. When it opened, they leased space to a baker and built a USDA-approved sausage kitchen. “We’re the brewer, the baker and the sausage maker,” Duquette said at the time.

The house that was the brewing operation is now surrounded in back and off to the side by a growing brewery.

Demand obviously comes from farther than the pleasant village of Enterprise (population 2020) or from tourists traveling to Lake Wallowa and the Hells Canyon recreation area. From the time the Horse Brass Pub in Portland put Terminal Gravity IPA on tap it’s been one of Oregon’s defining IPAs.

But the business of beer wasn’t a thought for three generations of a family occupying what feels like a living room upstairs — they sat in two couches, two easy chairs and the patriarch on the coffee table. They were talking about hiking and other outdoor activities.

We ate beside the foosball game (Sierra reigned there), on a wooden table built for card games. Sierra had macaroni and cheese, Daria ate a salmon sandwich and I enjoyed the pesto pasta. All were excellent. The beers share a certain similarity — like the grapefruity IPA they are generally a bit chewy. That didn’t serve the seasonal tripel as well as it did the breakfast porter (roasted nuts, coffee and cream, wonderful texture).

The beers are good enough to drive all the expansion going on in back, but they aren’t going to taste as good anywhere else as they do here.

Those are Michigan hops on the right.

How can I tell? It’s a trick. I shot the picture in 1995 when we were on our way to visit Kalamazoo Brewing, as it was known then, and talk with founder Larry Bell for a story Daria was writing for Brew magazine. We stopped at a roadside farm stand, chatted with the woman selling produce from her farm and she mentioned she was also grew hops for Bell.

Not enough for even a decent size batch of beer, but that wasn’t the point. A few years later Bell bought some six-row barley — you know, the stuff America’s largest breweries use &#151 grown on Michigan’s “Thumb” to brew a batch of Homegrown Ale.

So a recent transaction seems perfectly consistent. “I’m becoming a farmer,” he told the Kalamazoo Gazette after signing a $400,000 sales agreement with a farmer near Mount Pleasant who will grow two-row barley for Bell’s Brewery, as its known these days.

A subsidiary of Bell’s Brewery Inc., called Bell’s Brewery Farms LLC, purchased an 80-acre farm in Shephard. Bell said that land is being prepared to grow soy beans as part of a regular crop rotation. That land should produce barley by next year. Turnwald has already used 40 acres of another nearby property to grow barley for Bell’s.

That barley will most likely be used for a new specialty brew, Bell said.

“Our preliminary plan right now … is to introduce a new brand in November and it’s not for sure at this time, but it would be a Christmas ale made with Michigan barley and, partial, Michigan-grown hops,” said Bell.

Isn’t it winemakers who are supposed to be farmers?