A prediction nobody would have made in 1962

Holy Beer!What if the American beer clock had stopped in 1962?

(It’s a silly notion, because there’s that time marches on thing always happening. But stick with me.)

Anheuser-Busch was the largest brewing company in the country, but not by much (it commanded less than 10% of the market). Next were Jos. Schlitz Brewing, Falstaff Brewing, Carling Brewing, Pabst Brewing, Ballantine & Sons, Hamm’s Brewing, F & M Schaefer Brewing and Liebmann Brewing.

The 10 largest brewing companies controlled 52% of the market.

Whatever small breweries there were operated under the radar. This question came to me when I was looking something up in Stanley Barron’s Brewed in America. This is a terrific history of American beer, except it stops in 1962 (when the book was published).

In it Baron describes how hard (almost impossible) it was is for a brewery with capacity of less than 100,000 barrels to compete. He writes, “Probably the smallest of all commercial breweries in the United States is the Earnest Fleckenstein Brewing Co. of Fairbault, Minnesota, with a capacity of around 20,000.” Of course, Anchor Brewing was probably smaller – by the time Fritz Maytag’s investment in 1965 kept Anchor from closing the company brewed only about 600 barrels a year.

Brewed in AmericaA quick aside: Beerbooks.com has reproduced Brewed in America, making life much easier than when I had to hunt through many used books stores before I found it. Those who chafed when Maureen Ogle left out 200 years of ale brewing history in Ambitious Brew – for perfectly logical reasons already discussed more than enough – will like this book better.

Like Ambitious Brew and Beer & Food, but long before, Baron nicely details how lager beer, then lighter lager beer became the American alcoholic beverage. Perhaps those of us who enjoy beer outside the mainstream wouldn’t consider the beer future as bright as he did, but that’s another matter.

His final words are particularly interesting:

“If any changes occur in the product it will be because they contribute either to swelling the sales total or slimming down the cost of manufacture without compromising the product.

“Curiously, one of the means by which beer sales have been pushed to record levels in recent times has been the successful campaign to bring beer back to its original social position: a universal beverage. It is no longer the workingman’s drink, it is no longer a German drink, it is no longer exclusively a man’s drink … most of those temporary labels have been removed by one method or another, and the acceptance of beer is closer than ever to where it was at the beginning. The kettle in the kitchen has given way to the tremendous factory covering several blocks, but the drink in the glass fills the same purpose it always has.”

That was 1962. Beer’s image took a beating, and it’s taken the work of mostly small brewers – now joined by Anheuser-Busch’s Here’s to Beer campaign – to begin to restore it.

But what if the clock had stopped? Baron knew it wouldn’t. In his introduction he writes of expecting without making real predictions:

“There is no telling what sort of beer will be most popular in 1975 (two years, it turns out, before Jack McAuliffe sold his first New Albion beer). Though imported lagers constitute only a tiny fraction of the American market, even that small popularity may indicate that a taste for more of the hop-flavor is reawakening. The rise in sales of ale may prove a significant factor. It has taken a hundred years to arrive at the beer most popular today, and it may take just as long to develop any noticeable difference. This is an industry which has never been given to tampering with its product and changes dictated by consumer preference have been cautious and slow.”

Seems like he was on to a few things there – but wrong about it taking 100 years.

That’s because of breweries smaller than anybody could imagine in 1962, and brewers who weren’t thinking first about “swelling the sales total or slimming down the cost of manufacture.”

Book review: Beer & Food

Beer & FoodSo would you call Beer & Food: An American History a cookbook or a history book? This question particularly matters to me because we own a few beer related books and I can waste a fair amount of time trying to figure out on which shelf I put whatever one I am looking for.

And I ask it because the cover promises that the book “includes over 90 beer-related recipes.” Many of these appear in the last chapter and come from modern day breweries. They put a punctuation mark on the statement craft breweries are trying to make that beer deserves a place as the table. They are also fun to compare to recipes, some from hundreds of years ago, that appear throughout the book.

That said, I’m sticking this on the shelf with other books related to beer history and the role of beer in American (and world) culture. Author Bob Skilnik – whose books include The Drink Beer, Get Thin Diet: A Low Carbohydrate Approach and Beer: A History of Brewing in Chicago – seeks to document when and how beer belonged in the home kitchen (and when and why it didn’t).

Readers disappointed that Maureen Ogle did not include America’s ale history in her book, Ambitious Brew, will be delighted to that those years receive considerable attention here. Skilnik, an alumnus of Chicago Siebel Institute of Technology, draws at times on the brewing school’s archives. So we get a little different detail on how adjuncts became to be used in – and eventually define – American beer (another sore subject with some readers of Ambitious Brew).

His description of the manufacture of malt extract is equally educational. He points out the popularity of the products and cookbooks that supported extract. As an aside, it has always amused me to flip through one of those recipe collections, such as from Blue Ribbon Malt Extract, and see all these recipes that called for one or two teaspoons from a three-pound can. Little wonder consumers had to find something else to do with that extract.

Skilnik leans heavily on old cookbooks and “receipts” to track what he calls a “culinary evolution.” There isn’t much about how restaurant chefs would once have used beer – and perhaps they didn’t – or discussions with modern day chefs about emerging trends in their kitchens.

Thus if you are looking for a book with more about the do’s and don’ts of cooking with beer you might want to seek out Lucy Saunders’ book with that title. If you want more on pairing beer with craft food, then Saunders’ upcoming book might better suit you.

But if you want to learn more about how American beer and food have evolved together then take a look at Beer & Food.

Write it again, Sam: Another book

The things you learn reading the Wine Enthusiast Online: Sommelier Marnie Old and Dogfish Head Brewery founder Sam Calagione are writing a book called He Said Beer, She Said Wine. It’s due in the spring of 2008.

Vinnie Cilurzo & Sam CalagioneCalagione (pictured here in plaid; that’s Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing with him, not Old – and that’s beer in their glasses, not wine) and Old recently have been conducting a series of dinner competitions.

They each pick a beverage to go with a series of dishes from star chefs. Diners sample both a wine and a beer with each of the dishes, make a selection as to which choice was better, and turn in a ballot voting for their preference.

The Wine Enthusiast explains:

While this was the eighth time Sam and Marnie had gotten together for their “He Said Beer, She Said Wine” Event, the outcomes have always been quite similar. “It always seems to come down to the last match,” Marnie notes, “but our main goal is to get wine lovers to appreciate good beer and beer lovers to appreciate good wine.” With the vast assortment of Dogfish Head brews and fine wine selections chosen by Old, that did not seem to be too difficult of a task.

Dogfish Head sales were up 37% in 2006, but Calagione is still able to churn out books almost as quickly as beer. The first – Brewing up a Business – targeted entrepreneurs; the second – Extreme Brewing – homebrewers; and this one from the prestigious combination of Penguin and Dorling Kinderlsey may reach the widest audience yet.

Workingmen, beer and St. Louis

In A New Religion in Mecca: Memoir of a Renegade Brewery in St. Louis, among the many topics Tom Schlafly touches on are workingmen and the image of beer (maybe that’s just one topic).

Schlafly, whose Saint Louis Brewery opened as a brewpub in 1991 and grew into a regional brewery, makes a fine point about the price of beer (and thus adds to the discussion about cheap beer) in a pub.

I am constantly mindful that customers in bars and restaurants willingly pay nearly three times as much for a glass of beer as the same amount of beer would cost in a supermarket. Considering that they could be drinking the same beer at home for nearly two-thirds les, what do bars and restaurants offer that’s worth such a premium?

EllieAnd who drinks Schlafly beer? The question is particularly relevant in St. Louis, where drinkers are understandably loyal to Anheuser-Busch and the union workers who work in its factories. When Saint Louis Brewery decided to sell bottled beer in 1996, Schlafly and his partners had good reason to look at their branding, and reconsider the elegant Swiss-looking logo they had chosen for their taproom.

Core, a local advertising agency, quickly took them to task. One of agency’s owners explained yuppies would buy products with a blue collar image, but blue collar workers wouldn’t buy products with a yuppie image. The issue didn’t have to be money. A bricklayer wouldn’t think of buying a Volvo, but would spend more money on a Dodge Ram pickup.

We acknowledged that there were those who regarded beer from microbreweries as “designer beer,” just as Evian was derided as “designer water.” The purveyors of such products were seen as duping consumers into paying exorbitant prices for something that wasn’t any better than the more reasonably priced mainstream version. We therefore made the conscious decision to position Schlafly as a traditional beer for everyone, not as a drink primarily for pretentious, overeducated elitists. We adopted the slog “Beer the way it used to be” as a means of underscoring this message.

The photo of a case box (above) gives you an idea of the result. This isn’t a matter of a brewery trying to “fool” customers. Schlafly writes, “We wanted every aspect of the package to remind consumer that we were offering beers that the mainstream breweries were no longer interested in making.”

Beers that workingmen drank more than a century ago.

Now, about the book itself. Even if you keep a beer at your side throughout you should be able to walk and talk when you are done reading. Schlafly writes in an engaging style and the book is just over 100 pages, without most of the business detail in recent books such at Beer School (Brooklyn Brewery) and Brewing up a Business (Dogfish Head Brewery).

I must note, though, that the book is much more entertaining if you already know the city of St. Louis, the Saint Louis Brewery and its two pubs, and particularly any of the people who work there.

Schlafly writes, “When we founded the Saint Louis brewery, we seemed to attract people steeped in liberal arts. faithful to the medieval preference for artes liberales over artes illiberales, almost no one had had any training that could be consider practical or useful when it came to operating a brewery.

Sixteen years later many of those same people are still there. Working men and women everyone.

When sommeliers meet beer

What To Drink with What You EatDepending on what you drink and where you eat you might have thought sommelier refers to a mythical character in a fantasy restaurant world.

But there seems to be no way these days for a small-batch beer drinker to avoid the concept, and perhaps the physical reality, of a person – whatever you call him or her – handing out expert beer advice.

Of late:

– Don Russell wrote last week that there must be a better name, beginning his Joe Sixpack column with a discussion of the “dreaded ‘beer sommelier.'” Worrying about the “winofication of beer” he suggests instead using the term cellarman (or cellarwoman). “Calling the position cellarman, not beer sommelier, would maintain beer’s proud tradition as a distinct and worthy alternative to wine,” he wrote.

– Stephen Beaumont of World of Beer countered in a post at On the House a single expert might tend to all our drink needs: “So rather than craft a new term, let’s simply reinvent the one we have and acknowledge that the sommelier should be well-versed not only in wines, but in beers, whiskies, waters and cocktails, as well.” Beaumont already teaches Ontario sommelier students the basics of beer in a one-day program that is part of their wine education.

– In What to Drink with What You Eat, James Beard Award-winning authors Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page – both sommeliers – offer not only pairings for wine to go with food but also beer, spirits, coffee, tea and water. They clearly are not yet beer experts and a variety of spelling and categorizing errors will make a beer lover grimace and wonder just how seriously they take beer.

While the authors go into considerable detail, for instance, about wine choices with salmon, they simply write “beer, esp. Belgian ale, pale ale, or Saison, with grilled salmon.”

But Dornenburg and Karen Page have Credentials (with a capital C) and their book just won a 2006 Georges Duboeuf “Wine Book of the Year” award. It is printed on heavy stock with is filled with gorgeous pictures. Quite simply, beer finds itself it good company. Most of the people who buy this book will be wine drinkers who might look at beer a little differently.

This is not the book for somebody who drinks only beer, but for those of us who appreciate both grain and grape. For strictly a beer drinker, The Brewmaster’s Table by Garrett Oliver is a better choice. Or they can wait until next year when The Best of American Beer & Food by Lucy Saunders will published.

In fact, the authors leaned on Oliver for expert advise – and any wine drinker who pays attention to what he has to say about saison should become a convert – if not spelling tips. His suggestions are listed in the “Best on the Best” chapter, which features lists from stars of the culinary world and spotlights the “connect the dots” quality of the book.

This book will surely end up as gift under many wine drinkers’ trees this Christmas because it provides a catalog of proven pairings – first with a chapter on what drinks to pair with various food choices, followed by one starting with drinks and then considering complementary foods. But the introduction and the final chapters offer lessons that go beyond reciting lists. These are the ones that best serve anybody – wine drinker, beer drinker . . . tea (?) drinker – who thinks about flavor, about flavors and about how they interact.

Which takes us back to the opening. Last week in the New York Times (free registration), Eric Asimov wrote that restaurants are practically begging for qualified sommeliers. He was writing about wine types. Now we’re asking those folks to tack on considerable beer knowledge.

What to Drink with What You Eat illustrates the challenges of doing that and hints at the rewards. To their credit, Dornenburg and Page looked over a list of “corrections” related their beer entries and still were pleasant enough to answer questions via e-mail.

Why should you tell somebody (interested in beer) that you take beer seriously when there are a variety of “beer mistakes” in the book?

We’re blaming neo-Prohibitionists.

How did you choose your experts? Oliver isn’t the only one who talks about beer, but he is the only one specifically from the beer world.

Clearly the primarily thrust of What to Drink with What You Eat is on wine, and our primary sources restaurant sommeliers, but we consider our love of beverages democratic and wanted to also include a number of experts to round out such subjects as spirits, cocktails, coffee, tea, water, sparkling juices and – yes – beer.

We attended the IACP Cookbook Awards where Garrett had received his award for The Brewmaster’s Table, which had brought that book – and Garrett himself – to our attention. Our Internet-based research had also unearthed Carlos Solis, described as “America’s first beer sommelier,” whose CIA degree and dual chef-sommelier position made him another interesting choice.

We’ll look forward to the pleasure of interviewing other beer experts in the future.

Do you think its accurate to say that wine gets much more attention in the book? Why is that?

Yes. Readers of our previous books (e.g. Becoming a Chef, Culinary Artistry, Dining Out) tend to be fine dining enthusiasts as well as professional chefs and restaurant professionals, so our primary focus was on interviewing restaurant sommeliers for their expertise. While this is changing to include a fascinating array of beverage pairings (including sake, spirits, beer and non-alcoholic choices), their primary focus is still on wine.

Are there times you think beer and wine mix well on the same table?

Yes – when it’s done thoughtfully. We have personally enjoyed beer as part of a tasting menu pairing with an appetizer or dessert, and appreciated when it’s been served in an appropriate portion size and glassware to allow a smooth flow from one course to the next. Scott Tyree of TRU in Chicago has paired beer with a sausage-based appetizer, and chef Sandy D’Amato of Sanford in Milwaukee served us a dessert course paired with three different beverages – including a beer. During the course of our book tour, we’ve interested audiences in beer by having them taste a Belgian Framboise with cheesecake at the end of the meal, and watched the energy level go up because people just couldn’t stop talking about it!

What did you learn about beer while writing the book?

We both hold sommelier certificates, and generally consider ourselves to be wine-centric (especially Andrew, who grew up in the Bay Area not far from Napa Valley) – but creating this book has helped to make us both more beverage-centric. We’ve learned that there are instances when the ideal match is something OTHER than wine. We once ordered in $10 enchiladas mole from our neighborhood Mexican restaurant and paired them with a $2 bottle of porter – and were absolutely blown away by how fabulous the match was. We swore there was no bottle of wine on earth that could have tasted as good with it!

We’ve also learned how biased many people are against beer, which just makes us want to crusade even harder FOR it. Many people, it seems, have formed their opinions about beer after sipping an uncle’s Budweiser as a kid and being grossed out by its bitterness. Many otherwise worldly gastronomes haven’t even bothered to sample the wide variety of beers that are out there in the world simply awaiting their pleasure – and it’s a shame.

One of Karen’s greatest accomplishments on our book tour was to get a woman TV anchor who said she hated beer to taste a Belgian (kriek) beer on camera, and to admit that she loved it! Wine drinkers can be brought over to become beer lovers, one person at a time – or, in the case of the TV show anchor, whose show is viewed by hundreds of thousands – many more at a time. They just need to try what’s in the bottle.

We’re proud of the chart “If You Like This, You Might Also Like That” on pp. 16-17 of WTDWWYE, which we hope will get more Champagne drinkers sampling lambic beers, and merlot drinkers sampling Chimay Blue, and Riesling drinkers sampling Hoegaarden White, etc.