beers of conviction

IPA: The *style* disruption that keeps on giving

There will not be a quiz.

– Jenny Pfäfflin kicked it off last Friday with this tweet that when I last looked had 508 likes.

– Joe Stange followed with this.

As happens, threads shot out in different directions. Feel free to explore.

– Yesterday, Alan McLeod pointed to to all of this in his Beer News Notes, choosing to highlight a comment from Garrett Oliver:

“I don’t ‘know’ a lot about jazz, but I still enjoy jazz. And I really don’t care what a jazz critic thinks I need to know – I’m having my own good time and I will not be fenced in by anyone. I’ve worked to demystify beer for more than 30 years. It’s supposed to be fun. And it is . . .”

– His post alerted Jeff Alworth to all this ruckus and he honed in on another Oliver comment (why in a moment):

“Because once your definitions and terminology mean nothing, your culture is ruined and cannot be recovered. Ask the French how they won. And then take a good hard look at the German brewing industry. Words have meaning (ask the Republicans). And nomenclature is culture.”

– And Stephen Beaumont joined the conversation, choosing still another Oliver comment:

“Yes, and that communication is super powerful. The French know this. Champagne is Champagne, period. Caviar is caviar. Diamonds are diamonds. If your words mean nothing and it’s the Wild West, you lose. Period. Might take a while . . . but you lose.”

[Last dash] Back to Alworth. Wednesday he asked: “What is ‘good’ in the context of a hazy IPA?”

I’m staying out of this. I’ll leave it to Tom Vanderbilt, author of “You May Also Like: Taste in an Age of Endless Choice.” (In Chapter 6 he writes about “beer, cats and dirt,” visits the Great American Beer Festival and talks with judges. They included Oliver, who also shows up elsewhere in the book. Vanderbilt also mentions beer in an opinion piece in The New York Times. But the beer references are not essential to his theses.)

So from the Times article (oops, I lied, more dashes):

– “The human brain is a pattern-matching machine. Categories help us manage the torrent of information we receive and sort the world into easier-to-read patterns.”

– “When we like something, we seem to want to break it down into further categories, away from the so-called basic level. Birders do not just see ‘birds,’ gardeners do not just see ‘flowers’; they see specific variations. The more we like something, the more we like to categorize it.”

– “When we struggle to categorize something, we like it less.”

Not sure this explains the popularity of IPA, hazy IPA or hard seltzer — but maybe I am missing something.

Go for the Limburger cheese, stay for the bock

The skies seem a little bluer, and the tracks look a little newer
And the water tower has more names
The ruts are a little deeper, the gullies a little steeper
Not that much has changed

Not that much has changed, it’s all just rearranged
Like a picture in your mind of a heart you left behind
Not that much has changed

                   – Joe Ely, “Not That Much Has Changed”

Limburger cheese sandwich, Baumgartner Cheese Store & Tavern

The Limburger cheese sandwich at Baumgartner Cheese Store & Tavern in Monroe, Wisconsin, is still served with a mint. A pint of Huber Bock is still sold at a bargain price.

But, you knew this was coming, a few beery things have changed since we first visited Baumgartner’s in 1995 and last were in Monroe in 2008. This isn’t exactly unusual, even in a rural town of 11,000 residents such as Monroe, the county seat of Green County. Yet it is striking to see an Alaskan Brewing neon in the window of Bartels & Co. Tap on the opposite side of the town square from Baumgartner’s.

Curiously, the second oldest (almost) continually operating brewery in the country, established in 1845, is right around the corner from Baumgartner’s. Curiously, because Minhas Craft Brewery, the 19th largest US craft brewery as defined by the Brewers Association, is not a tourist attraction.

Minhas Craft BreweryThe brewery looks like a building, a large building, built in Eastern Europe not long after the end of World War II. A sign the size of one you’d see hanging in front of a small tavern that reads “Home of Huber Bock” is the only nod to the brewery’s heritage. We did not see any Minhas branded beers on tap in Wisconsin bars or for sale in liquor stores.

Tourists come to Green County first for cheese, and second for New Glarus beers, brewed 16 miles up the road. Green County has 400 dairy farms that produce 530 million pounds of milk a year, much of which is turned into cheese at 13 factories in the county. Chalet Cheese Cooperative is the only Limburger producers in the country. A sign at Alp & Dell Cheese store reads, “Here in Green County cheese is life.”

Baumgartner’s has been in business since 1931, selling cheese, beer, sausage, flasks of hard stuff, etc., from a counter in the front of the building and operating the tavern in back. The tall ceiling is covered with dollar bills and the walls include mounted animal heads, breweriana and signs of the area’s Swiss heritage (a Baumgartner played on the 1996 Swiss handball team). There’s a map of Switzerland with information and shields of all the cantons.

The first time we visited there were four beers on tap, all pouring Huber beers (Ravinder and Manjit Minhas bought the brewery in 2006). Today there are 24 beers on tap, including four from New Glarus Brewing.

In 1995, a cheese sandwich cost $2.25 and today it is $5. Huber Bock was $1.45 for 16 ounces, one of the best beer bargains in America at the time. Now a pint of the bock is $4, a bargain price, but not much of a deal because the beer isn’t what it once was. Trust me, that’s not a nostalgia-tinged assessment.

The beer pictured at the top is New Glarus Gyrator Doppel. It cost $5. Accounting for inflation, that would have been $2.75 in 1995. Either way, a high-value bargain.

In search of America’s national beer tradition

Cold beer

Before the second edition of “The Beer Bible” reached store shelves, showed up on electronic tablets or arrived wherever people are reading books these days, Jeff Alworth wrote that national tradition is beer’s Rosetta Stone. Take the time to read his post before moving on.

His book offers a description of the American, German and other traditions that parallel the excerpt about British tradition. Buy the book to read them, but for now a few sentences from his blog post:

The American tradition, which like so many others was a riff on an older one, involves the use of unique ingredients (American hops) and techniques (all the weird ways Americans use them). The hoppy ales developed here are made unlike any beers before them, and certainly taste like nothing brewed in the last 12,000 years. And, like monumentally successful beers of earlier eras—London porter, pilsner, Bavarian lager—they are now traveling around the world and getting reinterpreted in other countries where local brewers will twist and distort them as their own cultures intervene.

It is true that many brewers in the United States and elsewhere are doing this. But it is true that even more are doing something else, and not just beers based on their own longtime national tradition. They are making beers like ones that originated in the United States almost 150 years ago and became globally dominant. Before getting to that . . .

Read more

Time to pull out your favorite Larry Bell stories

Larry Bell, 1994

Monday I wondered about the difference between selling and selling out.

Today, there is a bit of news about Little Lion World Beverages buying Bell’s Brewery. Or as a Kalamazoo radio station put it, “Kalamazoo’s Bell’s Brewery to merge with Colorado-based New Belgium Brewing.”

I do not have great insight into “what does this mean?” Clearly, much will be made of it. Good Beer Hunting’s story points out that Bell’s Facebook page indicates all of its locations will be closed today (Nov. 10) and tomorrow to allow staff to “reflect on the past year and talk about what’s ahead.” Keeping it simple, it looks more like selling to me than selling out.

Expect to read many stories in the next few days about how the small brewery business was different when Larry Bell (pictured above at the brewery in 1994) and others were getting started. More than one will involve post-GABF parties and bathtubs.

Instead, on a personal note, when our family was traveling the country in an RV in 2008 and 2009 we slept in the parking lot of Bell’s production brewery outside of Kalamazoo. I might have stayed up late making phone calls that began, “Guess where we are.”

The Sierra Nevada Celebration shortage of 1995

It seems Twitter has a new algorithm designed to show me every photo posted of Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale. A week or so ago those were often followed by comments from others who seemed to be suffering FOMO because the beer was not yet in their market. This was still October. Were they really worried there would be a Celebration shortage?

This isn’t 1995. Sierra Nevada Brewing makes five times more beer annually than in 1995, with capacity to produce even more. Because priority No. 1 was always to fulfill demand for Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, in 1995 the brewery decided to produce only 35 percent of the Celebration they’d need to “satisfy everybody,” and did not ship it east of the Rockies.

Fans took extreme measures to get some. Ken Fichera, a Brooklyn accountant, used his frequent flyer miles to fly from JFK International Airport to San Francisco and back in the same day to pick up four cases of Celebration. (You remember when we all could just wander onto a plane with a case of beer and put it in the overhead bin, right?)

And when beer drinkers in California learned that only 140 barrels of Bigfoot Barleywine-Style Ale would be brewed in 1996, compared to 11,000 in 1995, they were on the road.

Ken Papai and Charlie Gow, two Bay Area residents, made two road trips to Sierra Nevada’s Chico home to buy Bigfoot. In the first, they formed a three-car caravan with Dan Brown. “Dan couldn’t wait,” Papai said, and as a result, Brown was pulled over by a state police officer, although he didn’t receive a ticket.

Two weeks later, Papai and Gow realized they needed more beer — most of it was earmarked for friends across the country — and headed north again, this time in the same car.

After they filled the car with beer and had a few pints at the pub, they tried to take a shortcut during the 200-mile drive home, missed a turn and ended up stuck in the mud in a wildlife preserve. (Papai’s longer version of this story was quite entertaining, but the tl;dr version is that Gow passed a sobriety test, and the car was towed from the mud.)