beers of conviction

The Ballantine stops here – would you open it?

There’s another Ballantine Burton Christmas Ale on eBay – and this one was brewed for Harry Truman.

Here’s the history of these ales – coveted by beer lovers interested in tasting what’s inside the few remaining bottles even though the beers were brewed 60 and 70 years ago.

What’s different about this one is that the label states that this one was brewed on May 12, 1934 and bottled for President Harry S Truman in December 1949. This bottle comes with a note citing its provenance written on a White House note card with the presidential seal. The card is written by Mrs. M. Esperancilla, whose husband was chief steward on the presidential yacht, the U.S.S. Williamsburg.

So what makes this bottle more valuable – the Burton Ale is inside or that it was bottled for a president?

There other question. Why didn’t he drink it?

The craft beer conundrum: What does it mean?

Beer on the mindI looked up the word conundrum to make sure I was using it appropriately (a question or problem having only a conjectural answer). I already knew I couldn’t look up “craft beer” – thus the conundrum.

We’ve debated the challenge of defining craft beer in this blog and maybe 80 percent of those listed to the right, as well as at Rate Beer, Beer Advocate, the Real Beer community and in at least 1,387 American brewpubs. Good bar talk – as witnessed by the scores of comments in the most recent discussion started by Lew Bryson.

A lot of good – and important – reading, but I don’t see a succinct definition emerging. It’s pretty obvious that debating the meaning of craft beer could occupy an entire semester of Beer Philosophy 101 and still there’d be no conclusion.

I can live with that. I spent a good portion of my working life as a copy editor and supervising copy editors. Writing and editing is a lot easier when you’ve got a dictionary to fall back on. And have I little choice but to use the term craft beer in some stories that I write. I just did a quick search in a story I filed last week for New Brewer, the publication that goes to Brewers Association members, and I see I used the phrase three times. In all three cases, even though the definition is imperfect, no other would have worked as well.

So perhaps whenever I type craft beer here I should include a link to the 50th comment, posted by Mr. Bryson himself.

The real subject is beer, or as Lew writes the beer in the glass.

Which takes us back to where the discussion started, a Anheuser-Busch Beach Bum Blonde Ale tasting note, and Lew’s column earlier in the month about the benefits of tasting beer blind.

I have this blog with a name – that to many people doesn’t exactly make sense – predicated on the idea that where your beer comes from (way before it gets in your glass) and how it is made changes what is in the glass and how you feel about it. So I think it’s OK to give extra points (were we scoring the beer – which of course we don’t do around here) to New Belgium Mothership Wit beer because it’s organic or because of the brewery’s commitment to sustainability or because you like bicycles.

But you are shorting yourself if you don’t objectively evaluate what’s in the glass. That means you don’t give a brewer you like a pass when he or she conjures up a below average beer. It means that if you see a good reason to try a beer from a brewery you’re not a fan of that you give yourself an honest chance to like the beer.

Craft is not a synonym for good or an antonym for evil empire.

I started to write a comment to meet Lew’s request to describe the “characteristics (of craft beer) that you can see, taste, and smell in the glass” before I realized (d’oh) the description wasn’t about craft beer, but just beer itself.

Great Divide Samurai: Do not fear the rice

Great Divide SamuraiI suspect more than one “beer geek” will be surprised by Samurai, a new bottle release from Great Divide Brewing in Denver.

Some might just grab a six-pack because of the name (after all, a samurai is a warrior), the excellent packaging and the fact it comes from Great Divide, best known outside of Colorado for its big and bigger beers.

Instead Samurai is lightly golden (as in this picture), a little cloudy, not hoppy, brewed with rice, a modest 5.2% abv and founder Brian Dunn even describes it as “an accessible, super-quaffable beer.” Those are sometimes code words for bland and boring.

Not this beer. Stephen Beaumont waxed romantic about Samurai last year when it only sold on draft and just in a few locations near the brewery. I would simply add it has an elusive spiciness with some wheat beer substance (perhaps because it is unfiltered) though it turns cleanly crisp where a wheat beer might finish with a bit of twang.

Not surprisingly Samurai goes well with fish and Asian food. Great Divide first brewed it as the house beer for a local sushi restaurant. “Then we got busy and quit brewing it,” Dunn said.

The brewery also quit making two of its lighter beers, Whitewater Wheat and Bee Sting Honey. “I thought people were confused about who we were and we decided to narrow the brand focus,” Dunn said. Its stronger beers – four of them 9% abv or more – all rank highly at Rate Beer and Beer Advocate.

“All of a sudden we had no light draft beer,” Dunn said, “and we lost a lot of lines.”

That’s when Great Divide resumed brewing the beer – no longer just for sushi restaurants, but for Denver accounts who wanted a lighter Great Divide beer to sell on tap. It proved popular enough that distribution will widen to all accounts and include bottles.

Because Great Divide’s bigger beers earned the brewery substantial “beer cred” I hope that this beer receives a more open-minded reception than it might otherwise. That’s not because I like it – although I do – but because it is a flavorful alternative.

That’s what small-batch brewers give us.

Would you drink a $200 bottle of beer?

Ballantine Burton Ale

Well, I guess he first question is if you’d pay $200 for a bottle of beer.

That’s because eight bottles of Ballantine Burton Christmas Ale are up for auction at eBay. The starting bid is $1,500 (none as I type), the “buy it now price” is $5,000 and the auction closes May 28.

From the auction description:

The labels state that the ale was brewed for Edward Boghosian on May 12, 1946. Seven (7) of these were bottled in November 1960 and one (1) was bottled in November 1959.

This ale was never sold to the general public and only given to special celebs, friends and employees during the Christmas season. This batch was made for a local Rhode Island TV executive. The bottles are all intact and in overall excellent condition. Some labels may be a little loose and a few caps have some oxidization. Please refer to photos.

I auctioned off one Ballantine Burton ale bottle a few weeks ago for $130+. I was able to recently obtain the remainder of the bottles which are now being auctioned off here. There are no further bottles available once these are gone.

As any Internet search will show you, these Ballantine bottles have a well deserved reputation. Back in 1994, Steve Kemper wrote a story for BeeR the Magazine titled “Pub Crawling New York with the Beer King” detailing in evening spent in several of Manhattan’s historic barrooms with the late Alan Eames.

They finished at Bahama Mama, where Eames had a bottle of Ballantine Burton Ale delivered to the table. That particular beer had been aged in wood from 1946 until 1966 and had been in the bottle for 25 years. After Eames explained how he came to own the bottle, he said: “This is the Dom Perignon ’55 of beers, and God sent it to me.”

Another beer in that lot he came across sold for $400, and Eames suggested the one they opened could be the last bottle in existence. He was wrong about that, because the bottles keep showing up. But eight at one time, and with a display box, should take your breath away (and your pocketbook if you intend to own the lot).

From the story: “He poured. The color was coppery, the head fleecy and alive. We tasted. Eames moaned with joy. I joined him in chorus. The ale tasted of wood and caramel and roasted grain and humus. Our please was complicated by the pain of loss that always accompanies the impeding disappearance of something fine. Eames poured out the last of it, and we drank.”

You may recall that eBay briefly outlawed selling vintage beer, then relented by setting forth several rules, starting with “The value of the item is in the collectible container, not its contents.”

Perhaps. But we all want to know what the beer inside tastes like. What the heck – if you bought eight bottles it wouldn’t hurt to open one.

Added May 29: The auction closed without any bids.

Drinking in place – German delights

Today’s New York Times features a must-read story on the front of the travel section headlined On a German Beer Trail, One More for the Road. Evan Rail (who recently also wrote about Czech beer innovation) set out with a definite purpose:

I wanted to try those German brews that had maintained a sense of local flavor, beers that were produced in their hometowns and, more or less, nowhere else.

In Cologne, I would drink Kolch, a light and fruity pale ale, one of the few beers protected by an appellation of origin as if it were a wine. In Leipzig, I would seek out Gose, a spiced amber beer that was out of production for two decades and that is just now making a small comeback. And in Bamberg, I would try the elusive rauchbier, a beer made with wood-smoked malt that is said to taste like liquid bacon.

Other beer pilgrims could have just as easily chosen other cities with great brewing histories “Dusseldorf, Dortmund and Munich come to mind,” but my trio seemed to offer the most promise and variety.

He starts in Berlin, where there were once 700 brewers of weisse beer and now the last two major producers have merged. But this isn’t a story about tracking down some ancient beers before they disappear – much as a blues fan might have headed to the Mississippi Delta a few years ago to see Frank Frost or Junior Kimbrough in a real juke joints.

The point of this story – to me, at least – is not history, or even tradition. The point is place.

Rail drinks Kolsch in traditional pubs where the average patron is “73 1/2 years old” and also goes clubbing with a much younger crowd in a packed club playing hip-hop at high volume. Even before getting there he finds another young and diverse crowd, favoring the local beer.

Why beer, in such a slick place? And why Kolsch?

“We’re proud of it,” Mira said. “I’m not necessarily proud of being German, but I am proud of being from Cologne. This is our beer.”

Reading this I couldn’t help thinking about tasting a wonderful Kolsch-style beer brewed in North Scottsale, Arizona. At an upscale brewpub decorated in a cowboy motif, where nobody talked about the fact that the beer was different or local. (And the brewery is long gone.)

We know, historically, that the Kolsch evolved into the style that it is for practical reasons (involving such arcane matters as brewing water).

But something else also happened along the way because it is brewed in Cologne and because it is different when you drink it in Cologne.

That’s why you should read this story.

(And we haven’t even got to the smoked beers of Bamberg or Leipzig’s Gose – tomorrow, perhaps.)