beers of conviction

Russian River Brewing expansion update

Vinnie CilurzoOne unusual day last fall, Vinnie Cilurzo – owner, brewer and sometimes forklift operator at Russian River Brewing Co. – wasn’t brewing.

He climbed on his forklift when a truck driver showed up with much-needed growlers, took phone calls, planned out the next week of brewing and bottling, and set out tasks for his assistants. All before lunch, so that in the afternoon he could work on a business plan for separate production brewery.

At one point he grabbed a 6-gallon carboy in his left hand hand and a hose in the other, quickly rinsing the glass container and dumping out the water. He swirled his right hand about the brewery, his index finger extended.

“I don’t want to give this up,” he said. “This is the thing I can contribute the most to this company.

“I don’t think I’ll ever give up brewing,” he said. “I’ve had other brewers and brewery owners tell me that eventually I’ll have to.”

He shook his head.

No.

He’s about to find out how easy it will be to run and brew at a production brewery.

He expects the brewery, also located in Santa Rosa, Calif., to be up and running in January. He talked about progress last month after making a presentation at the National Homebrewers Conference in Denver.

He and his wife and co-owner, Natalie, struck a deal in April to buy a 50-barrel brewhouse from Dogfish Head Craft Brewery in Delaware. They’ve acquired property not far from the brewpub and financing, and now are working their way through permitting and construction.

Not surprisingly for those who know the Cilurzos – “We’re conservative,” Vinnie said – they have a well thought out plan. A few of the basics:

Production – The goal is 6,000 barrels in 2008 and 7,000-8,000 in the next few years. “The max would be 12-to- 15,0000 barrels,” Cilurzo said. “I don’t want to get any bigger.”

The hoppy beers – Pliny the Elder (an Imperial/Double IPA) and Blind Pig IPA will be bottled for the first time. “But I don’t know how much Elder we’ll ship in bottles.”

Pliny the Younger (a triple IPA) will be brewed once a year and in 2008 will be draft only.

Cilurzo hasn’t settled on a bottle size for Blind Pig and Pliny the Elder, but is determined not to sell his beers in six packs. He prefers a 750ml-capped bottle or a 16-ounce bottle for those beers.

The non-barrel ‘-tion’ beers – Redemption (a monks’ strength beer at 4.8% abv), Perdition (a Belgian-inspired pale ale) and Salvation (dark and strong) should all be nearly as easy to find as the flagship Damnation (strong and golden). Cilurzo particularly wants to promote Redemption. “It’s everything I believe in, that we need more lower alcohol Belgian-style beers,” he said. “It is something we do at the pub.”

The brewery will us increase production of Santification, a beer 100 percent fermented with Brettanomyces.

All of those are sold in corked and caged 750ml bottles.

The barrel beers (also ‘-tion’) – The barrel room will have the a capacity to produce 560-plus beer barrels (31 gallons each) per year. Cilurzo recently picked up additional used Pinot Noir barrels (for Supplication) and 100 used Cabernet Sauvignon barrels (American oak). He hasn’t decided what fruit he will blend with a base beer (and of course wild yeast) in those barrels. Affordable used Chardonnay barrels are getting harder to find, so there may be less Temptation in the future.

(Just to be clear, when brewers refer to barrels they mean a measure of 31 gallons. Most wine barrels hold 225 liters, a little less than 60 gallons.)

Then there’s Beatification. Once barrels give up their wine character they’ll be used to age Beatification, which is spontaneously fermented using native yeast from within the brewery. Instead of calling it a Lambic, Cilurzo has dubbed it a Sonamic. A single batch may take two years to produce, and multiple batches may be blended for a bottling.

The standard size for the barrel beers is 375ml (again corked).

Distribution – Currently, Russian River sells beer only in California and Pennsylvania. Virginia and the District of Columbia will soon receive beer along with Pennsylvania (Masschusetts would likely be the next state added in the East). In the West, Arizona, Colorado, Oregon and Washington will be the first markets.

One final quick prediction: None will get as much Russian River beer as they want.

Beer and innovation

Just a quick thought for the weekend.

Recurring questions that resulted from the epidemic of lists in the last week (yes, you can blame me) were which came first, which were truly influential and eventually which were innovative.

In that light I found a little Q & A with Jonathan Schwartz is the CEO and President of Sun Microsystems, pretty relevant.

What really drives innovation in technology?

Courage. Courage to challenge conventional wisdom, to wholly commit to an idea or ideal, to lead and inspire those around you, whether they’re collaborators or customers.

Quite honestly, when I look at my personal list what ties the beers together not so much is the idea you’d call them innovative, but that they are wholly committed to an idea, that they are beers of conviction.

There are a lot more out there, with new ones being brewed every day.

Yes, Alan, “beers of conviction” does sound like a good topic for The Session.

Oregon’s ‘influential ten’

Hip, Hip, Hooray.

Jeff Alworth has risen to the task and given us another regional list, calling his Oregon’s Influential Ten.

I love that Henry Weinhard Private Reserve is at the top of the list. And I don’t know how often people in Portland talk about Cartwright but I’m guessing they should more often. Jeff writes, “No one seems to remember what beers Chuck Coury brewed, but they were impressed that he tried . . .”

For the record, here’s a description from Michael Jackson’s first Pocket Guide to Beer (1984):

Cartwright’s Portland Beer (just under 4%w; 5% v) has the characteristics of an ale and is bottle-conditioned, but is fermented with a lager yeast. It is a big beer with a lot of mouth, but its fullness of body is mitigated by a substantial bitterness. Its ale character derives from fermenting at relatively high temperatures and warm-conditioning.”

Jackson gave it one-and-a-half stars (out of 5).

I’ve recounted Jim Robertson’s description before.

10 beers that changed America

Blind Pig Double IPAThinking about Anchor Liberty yesterday got me thinking more.

So here, off the top of my head and before I get to the real work of the day, are 10 Beers That Changed What’s In Our Glass.

Pretty bold, I know. And something I could easily regret, so be gentle with your flames. It’s a list of 10. Not the only 10 or the most important 10, but 10. For fun.

And something that maybe will get you thinking about the ones that changed how you think about beer.

The guidelines were pretty simple. We start with American beers in the modern era (no, not the introduction of the Cascade hop but with Fritz Maytag buying a stake in Anchor Brewing in 1965).

One beer per brewery (a rule I sorta broke) and no “dead beers.” So New Albion isn’t on the list, nor is the gueuze from Joe’s Brewery in Illinois (besides, a lot more people talk about that beer than ever drank it).

The tough call was Celis White, because Michigan Brewery bought the brand and Pierre Celis consulted on brewing the beer at its new home. But it’s not the one first brewed in Texas, and that original was important on so many counts. Would Blue Moon White – maybe poised to become the No. 1 selling American-brewed specialty beer – have followed? A good chance not.

Here we go (the order being when they were introduced):

1. Anchor Steam – Not only did Maytag save this indigenous American style, but Anchor introduced or re-introduced Americans to holiday beers, barley wines, American wheat beer and more.

2. Sierra Nevada Pale Ale – It’s an ale revolution …

3. Samuel Adams Boston Lager – … but the leading ambassador has been a lager.

4. Fat Tire – The beer from New Belgium Brewing that’s so famous on its own that many people think it is the name of the brewery. Co-founder Jeff Lebesch expected Abbey, brewed in the manner of a Belgian dubbel, to be the flagship. Wrong.

5. New Glarus Wisconsin Belgian Red – It seems unlikely there will be a pivotal moment for American beer like the 1976 “Judgment of Paris” was for wine. But Belgian Red besting beers brewed in Belgium in the 1996 Brewing Industry International Awards was a pretty big deal.

6. Pliny the Elder – First brewed in 1994 at a different brewery and with a different name (Blind Pig Double IPA), but by the same brewer. The first Double IPA, and now Double/Imperial IPA is an official style. Served at the 1995 Great American Beer Festival, where the next beer also hit the radar. (The photo at the top is the glass, complete with the original recipe, used to serve the beer on its first anniversary.)

7. Goose Island Bourbon County Stout – A rarity in 1995, but if BusinessWeek is right then barrel-aged beers have reached the tipping point.

8. Dogfish Head World Wide Stout and Samuel Adams Utopias – Yes, a second beer from Sam Adams. In fact, Boston Beer started us down the Extreme Beer path by introducing Triple Bock at the 1993 GABF and to the public in 1994. It continued to brew stronger versions, but in 1999 Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head made a stronger beer. He held the record a few weeks before Sam Adams introduced Millennium (for the upcoming millennium). That morphed into Utopias, now stronger than 25% abv. The back-and-forth focused mainstream attention on the concept of Extreme Beers.

9. Cuvee de Tomme – Michael Jackson’s review in 2000 understates the influence this beer continues to exert.

10. Dale’s Pale Ale – The beer wasn’t new in 2002, but that it was packaged at the small brewery in Colorado and in a can was. How else does a beer from Lyons (a lovely town, but have you been there?) end up in a blind tasting conducted by the New York Times? And win?

Trendspotting: Barrel-aged beers

Barrel-aged beer

It’s one line in a two-page spread – so the impact won’t be the same as if Oprah were to declare her love for IPAs (headlines across the the country scream, “Hops Sales Soar Through The Ozone Layer”) – but the current BusinessWeek reports on The Food and Wine Classic in Apsen, Colo., calling it a leading indicator of food trends.

And those trends would be?

“We’ll be hearing a lot more about Spanish and Greek wine, unusual pairings such as wine with chocolate, hand-cured meats, and barrel-aged beer.”

Before you get too excited, let’s consider how much more – oh, just for instance – Miller Chill there is out there for us to buy than there is barrel-aged beer. Give your favorite better beer store a call. I’ll wait. And they had? Maybe some Rodenbach Grand Cru if you’re lucky. Perhaps Jolly Pumpkin La Roja? Less likely.

The Angel’s Share from Lost Abbey? They had that and you didn’t hang up the phone and get immediately in the car? Shame on you.

So where are these beers going to come from?

You read about barrel-aged beers, but how often do you see them? There were 87 entries in the wood- and barrel-aged categories at the Great American Beer Festival, and some other wood-aged beers entries in other categories (Belgian sour beers in particular).

One of the medalists was Wooden Hell from Flossmoor Station in Illinois. That’s brewer Matt Van Wyk up above. The photo is courtesy of Todd Ashman, formerly of Flossmoor Station and now at Fifty Fifty Brewing in Truckee, Calif., who collected barrel shots from across the nation for a talk he gave last year at the National Hombrewers Conference. This one came from Flossmoor assistant brewer Andrew Mason.

You’ll notice his “barrel room” is on the small side. The city of Rio Rancho, N.M., will go through more Blue Moon White this weekend than those barrels would hold.

With four 60- and six 130-hectoliter foders New Belgium Brewing must have the largest wood capacity in the country. To the best of my knowledge, Lost Abbey Brewing in California is the next largest with 130 wine and spirits barrels, and many of those are waiting for beer. Brewery Tomme Arthur recently authored a delightful blog post about barrel filling season.

(A little background: Most wine barrels hold 225 liters, a little less than 60 gallons. A barrel of beer, the measure we use most often, equals 31 gallons. A barrel of beer will produce about 13.8 cases of 12-ounce bottles, or two kegs. A barrel of wine yields 25 cases of 750ml bottles – but of course that’s almost two barrels of beer.)

When Russian River Brewing’s production plant is up and running (yes, I need to write more about that) the barrel room will hold more than 325 wine barrels so RR could produce 560-plus beer barrels (31 gallons) a year. Given that some beers will age longer, keeping barrels filled takes times, and still other reasons, 400 to 500 barrels a year seems more likely. That’s half the production of your average brewpub – and we won’t see any of it until 2009.

So back to all those GABF entries. Brewers are interested. Heck, New Holland Brewing in Michigan has 50 wood barrels at work right now, and the barrel display at Upstream Brewing in Omaha will take your breath away.

The list goes on. Flossmoor is up to 12 barrels, Jolly Pumpkin continues to add barrels, Cambridge Brewing outside of Boston has a captivating barrel cellar. Maybe I should just post a bunch more barrel-room photos.

But we have still to go looking. Sprecher Brewing in Wisconsin sells (or sold, they may be gone) a wonderful Dopplebock aged in bourbon barrels, but produced only 389 of the one-liter bottles. New Holland just rolled out Moxie, a sour ale aged in wood and only 424 750ml bottles are available.

The same day that Lost Abbey released Cuvee de Tomme the brewery sold all 480 375ml bottles that will be available until the next bottling (in the fall). Obviously underpriced at $15 apiece.

Cheap by Aspen standards – and heaven forbid Oprah finds out about these barrel-aged beers.