beers of conviction

The Chicago Tribune just ran a story on what the author calls blending beers, but might more accurately be described as mixing beer cocktails.

In my mind brewers blend before beer is bottled. That’s a subject I wrote about for the current (November-December) Imbibe magazine. Customers also blend, but I prefer using the word mix in order to differentiate the two.

And, per usual, I might not know I am talking about. Discussions about favorite blends have broken out on several e-mail lists since the Tribune story appeared, with the favored word being “blends.” Jacob Leinekugel Brewing is promoting the idea, though bless their hearts without calling it blending, with a new “What’s your mix?” campaign. The brewery invites drinkers to come up with their own mixes, and its website features videos of the brothers Leinenkugel and their favorites.

I considered including beer cocktails in my story for Imbibe, but I used up my quota of words before getting to that. Since I discussed the idea with several brewers you get a few outtakes that didn’t make it into print.

“They are unintentional blends,” Tomme Arthur of Lost Abbey said without being literal. “We work on the components individually and think about how they might come together.”

A drinker in a bar — and working on a mix where you can ask a bartender for 90% of this and 10% of that leaves a lot less extra beer sitting around than when you start with bottles &#151 begins with what is available.

“They are trying to create something different, something new,” said Firestone Walker Fine Ales brewmaster Matt Brynildson. “We have an opportunity to dial it in, but the concept is the same.”

Firestone blends most of its beers, even Humboldt Nectar IPA. My story focuses on Firestone 10, the anniversary beer released a year ago. That beer tasted somewhat different sitting in pitchers during a large group session that helped set the final blend than after it went into bottles. “Most of it was integration,” Brynildson said.

Firestone 10 is long gone, now fetching silly prices on eBay and at a few liquor stores in the Paso Robles area. Firestone 11 is in the works, an entirely new blend. Details soon (I hope).

How do you decide when tweaking a recipe what makes a beer, a bowl of soup or a pot of mash potatoes better? Or, put another way, how many brewers is too many in a brewery?

This seemed like a good question to ask the crew at Flying Dog Ales upon the release of Wild Dog Collaborator Doppelbock, a result of the brewery’s The Open Source Beer Project.

In case you missed it, here was the premise:

“Open source” is a term most commonly used in the software industry and refers to any program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit. In this case, Flying Dog’s Open Source Beer Project will allow beer drinkers and homebrewers to create and recommend changes and modifications to the recipe.

The Open Source Beer Project will start as a Dopplebock but the style may evolve as participants offer ideas and tweak the recipe. “We are encouraging input on every part of the recipe, down to how what variety of hops we should use, how much we should use and when we should add them,” said Flying Dog Head Brewer, Matt Brophy.

“Many of our recipes are already collaborations from our brewers in house,” Brophy said while we sampled the beer. This beer turned into something more along those lines than what results with open source software. For one thing, there won’t be another version before next year. In contrast, WordPress makes this blog go, currently Version 2.2.1, and has been since Version 1.5.

So what if another brewer — figure it would be an amateur, also known as a homebrewer — grabbed the recipe posted by Flying Dog, made revisions and brought samples to the brewery? Might the changes end up in another version of the beer? (There won’t be another until next year, at the earliest.)

“If it is better, that’s what we’re all about,” Brophy said.

Were this a cartoon, you would have seen a light bulb go on above the head of Josh Mishell, creative manager. “People should send us that beer,” he said.

“We send beer to people,” said Neal Stewart, director of marketing. “Why can’t people send beer to us?”

Now that would be a gimmick.

So, to one of the questions in the headline, was this a gimmick?

Stewart explained that his goal is to make sure each Wild Dog release has a hook. “This series is designed to build some credibility with the beer community and the high-end liquor stores,” he said. “And we truly did want to engage homebrewers.”

It seems curious to listen to Stewart talk about striving for credibility. After all, president/”lead dog” Eric Warner is Weihenstephan-trained and has written books about brewing.

“We have this stigma of being gimmicky,” Stewart, pointing to the Ralph Steadman labels on Flying Dog beers and the brewery’s association with the late Hunter Thompson. “Some consumers think we had to do this to hide bad beer.”

It would be hard to be more transparent than Flying Dog has been with Collaborator Doppelbock. “We didn’t hold anything back,” Brophy said.

So to another question at the top. Is the beer better?

We don’t really have Version 0.9 or v1.1 to taste it against. Some will like the fact that it is spiced with American hops, one of the tweaks that came from website suggestions. Some won’t.

Maybe you can’t taste the intangibles, but Brophy knows they are there. “It was fun, a fun project,” he said. “It created excitement. Not just externally but internally.”

Oh, yeah, the third question: Is it free?

The recipe is. The beer isn’t. But then you knew that.

Commenting in another thread, Stonch asked: I’d be interested to know what the top ten selling American craft beers are? Does anyone have that info?

The lists I put together got too long to put in a comment. They are not perfect. They are based on data from Information Resources Inc. (IRI), which uses scanner data to track sales of consumer package goods in a variety of channels, but not every drop of beer sold. Their strength is in supermarkets, drug stores and convenience stores, which is where most people in the United States buy beer.

They don’t count everything sold in specialty retail stores (though some) or on draft (and certainly not in brewpubs, which account for about 10% of craft sales). They are not the only source out there — you will often seen Nielsen quoted — but supply data that corresponds quite well with the yearly figures the Brewers Association supplies. So I think they can be trusted.

BEST SELLING CRAFT BEERS
1 Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
2 Samuel Adams Boston Lager
3 Blue Moon White
4 Samuel Adams Seasonal
5 New Belgium Fat Tire
6 Samuel Adams Light
7 Shiner Bock
8 Widmer Hefeweizen
9 Samuel Adams Brewmasters Collection
10 Redhook ESB
11 Pyramid Hefeweizen
12 Deschutes Mirror Pond Pale
13 Redhook IPA
14 Alaskan Amber
15 Deschutes Black Butte Porter

For perspective, seven imports outsell SNPA (Corona Extra, Heineken, Corona Light, Tecate, Heineken Light, Guinness and Modelo) and Newcastle Brown is nipping at the heals of Boston Lager. Also, Rolling Rock and Killian’s Red would rank fourth and fifth on the list above.

Pretty much an aside: The top two selling beers in the “super premium” category (high priced beer but seldom costing as much as craft beer) are Michelob Ultra Light and Michelob Light. The original Michelob ranks seventh on this list (behind Michelob Amber Bock), selling basically the same amount of beer in these channels — and I suspect not quite as much overall — at Fat Tire.

Think about it. The flagship from small brewery founded in the basement of a Fort Collins, Colo., house in 1991 now outsells what was once the super premium beer in America. Hold that smile — even after you read the final list. [End of aside.]

The best selling styles, recognizing that few beers even broadly described as “extreme” reach these channels (I can buy Stone Ruination, the Jolly Pumpkin beers, Avery and others at Whole Foods but not Albertson’s):

1 Pale Ale
2 Seasonals
3 Amber
4 Amber Lager
5 Wheat
6 IPA

Finally, a bit more perspective . . .

BEST SELLING BEERS OVERALL
1 Bud Light
2 Miller Lite
3 Budweiser
4 Coors Light
5 Corona Extra
6 Heineken
7 Natural Light
8 Michelob Ultra Light
9 Busch Light
10 Miller High Life

Miller High Life sold three times more beer in the first half of 2007 as Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

It’s time to bid a fond farewell to Great American Beer Festival coverage, so a few notes from the tattered pieces of paper I found in the pockets of my jeans after their official post-GABF washing:

No, it won’t be GABF East: Ten years after the Great American Beer Festival on the road didn’t play well in Baltimore (at the time Stephen Beaumont wrote “What If We Gave a Beer Fest and Nobody Came?”) the Brewers Association will give it another try on the East Coast, but not with something that looks like at all like GABF.

Plans for (savor) an american craft beer & food experience were announced just before the awards ceremony Saturday. The event is May 16-17 (2008) at the Mellon Center in Washington, D.C. One brewer said he had heard it will be a “high end, food-oriented event.”

Schlitz retro rumor: Word is Pabst will re-launch Schlitz beer using a throwback recipe. Pabst and Schlitz, of course, were two of the breweries that made Milwaukee famous in the 19th century.

Now Pabst, itself a contract brewer, owns the Schlitz brand. Schlitz was the second largest brewing company in the world in the early 1970s and still second in the U.S. (to Anheuser-Busch) in 1976 when the company made two incredibly stupid decisions. By 1982 it was out of business, although the brand has continued to be brewed at other breweries and sold as a low-price beer. The resurrected recipe is said to be from well before the 1976 missteps.

More wood at New Belgium: Brewmaster Peter Bouckaert of New Belgium Brewing seemed on the verge of giggling at the thought that a) his crew can finally take charge of the new bottling line and b) they have new barrels to play with.

Barrels? Like the four 60-gallon bourbon barrels a brewery near me is picking up? Like the first wine barrels he began infesting with critters back in 1998?

“No, 130 hectos,” he said smiling broadly. Most of us would call the 130-hectoliter vessels tanks, since they’re the same size as six other 130s the brewery added in 2001. They hold about 3,400 gallons each.

Overheard: Volunteer after being asked a question by a festival goer. “It’s fermented with Brett. Does that make it a barley wine?”

Best post I haven’t linked to yet (Because it wasn’t up yet): From Matt Van Wyk of Flossmoor Station.

You don’t want it to end (b/c work awaits you Monday), but I hadn’t seen my two kids since they groggily dropped me at the airport Tues. at 6 AM, waving at me the whole time the train departed for the city. It’s funny that no matter how many medals I win, no matter how many colleagues I meet or made anew, no matter what I did wrong this weekend, Nick and Ella sprinted to me shouting “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy”. I love that gold medal I won this weekend, but I’d surely trade it for that experience coming home Sunday afternoon. (I told you it was a roller coaster of emotions-now go ahead and cry, you big tough guy!)

Alpha King results: Bell’s Two-Hearted Ale, the original Alpha King winner, returned to the victory stand this year by placing second. Pliny the Elder from Russian River was first, and El Camino IPA from Pizza Port San Clemente second. None medaled in the GABF judging.

Beer I enjoyed most: AngelsShareCeriseCasseZwickelbier-
IchBinEinBerlinerWeisseKiwandiCreamAleOrodeCalabazaBlindPigIPA-
GoldenArmPilzHopSueyWatermelonFunkSigdasGreenChiliPrimaPils

or maybe it was

OtisAltTheGreatPumpkinRed&WhiteBoscosFlamingStoneBeer-
InterludeSaisonBrettPennWeizenStormcloudIPABeerHunter-
Brooklyner-SchneiderHopfen-WeisseOompahLoompahChocolateBeer

There were others as well.