place/local/ingredients/sensory

Monday links: CBD beers, lawnmower beers, tasting terroir

BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 07.09.18

The Short History and Uncertain Future of CBD Beer.
a) This appeared in The Ringer, a sports and pop culture website.
b) True fact: Breweries experimenting with CBD beers are taking a risk by simply hoping to slide under the regulatory radar. “Of making sure Coalition’s CBD beers stay in compliance, (Elan) Walsky grinned and said, ‘We probably put our lawyers’ kids through college four times over.'”
c) New Belgium Brewing uses an experimental hop known has HBC 520 in The Hemperor. No, you won’t be the first to suggest it should have been called HBC 420.

Keeping it local: how UK brewers are tapping into provenance and terroir.
It only appears I am contractually obligated to link to every story that mentions beer terroir. I actually pass on a few. This one raises an interesting question. “Even if it is hard for the average consumer to taste the difference, they will understand the general principle that natural products grown in a particular area will take on a unique set of characteristics, and that is a concept I can see becoming increasingly popular in the future.” If you can’t taste the terroir is is really terroir?

So They Brewed Their Own Beer — The Northern Clubs Federation.
This is what can happen when breweries get bigger. “What becomes clear is that the Fed (the club brewery) quickly grew into a very substantial concern with plenty of money sloshing about, wood-panelled boardrooms, colossal egos, and in all that more or less indistinguishable, at least in cosmetic terms, from the private breweries its founders had set out to overthrow.”

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Session #136: How you gonna keep ’em down on the farm?

The topic for The Session #136 today is Farmhouse Brewing. This is excerpted from the fourth chapter of Brewing Local, so was written n 2016.

Piney River Brewing

Brian Durham was listening to National Public Radio on his drive to work one morning when he heard a report about preserving Pawpaw French, a disappearing dialect in the Ozarks. “I thought, ‘That’s it. We’re getting some pawpaws, we’re buying some French (saison) yeast,'” he said. Piney River Brewing was going to brew Paw Paw French Saison.

Joleen and Brian DurhamPiney River is located on a farm five winding miles outside of Bucyrus, Missouri, because Brian and Joleen Durham live on the farm. They bought their house in 1997 and the rest of the 80 acres they live on five years later. They raise beef cattle on the property, but were too busy with the brewery in 2015 to get around to selling any. They feed spent grain to the cattle and a sign on the long gravel driveway leading to the brewery warns, “Caution, cows may be drunk on mash.”

They are not afraid of wordplay. When they renovated a 75-year-old barn that became their brewery tasting room they christened it the “BARn.” Each of the beers has a name that connects it to the Ozarks, and a story to back it up. Float Trip Ale, which won a gold medal in the 2014 World Beer CupSM American-Style Wheat Beer category, is the most obvious example. It makes perfect sense to those who frequent the Ozarks, but not necessarily to residents of New York or Los Angeles. Their description: “A float trip is the quintessential Ozark experience. A canoe, kayak, raft or tube and a pristine spring-fed Missouri stream creates a lasting memory of our wild and beautiful outdoors. Our hand-crafted blonde ale is the perfect accompaniment to your day on the river or to simply bring back float trip memories.”

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Best beer awards ceremony. Ever.

Find a good DJ. Book an indignante band. Invite Argentine brewers. Provide beer. This will happen.

It will be electric.

This short low quality video shot with my phone at Cerveceria Nuevo Mundo in Lima, Peru, just after the final awards for Copa Latinoamericana de Cervezas Artesanales 2018 were handed out does not begin to capture how vibrant (or deafening) it was.

Copa Latinoamericana de Cervesas 2018 winners

There was beer on tap, but most attendees grabbed bottles (some iced down, others not) left over from judging. Sometimes you won the lottery, sometimes you did not. But there was always that beat in the background, provided by the DJ or band before, during and after the awards. And an occasional outbreak of dancing. Those who attended the Craft Brewers Conference in Denver in 2014 might remember how the Argentines took over the front of dance floor during a Funky Meters concert sponsored by Lagunitas Brewing. Those are mostly, but not entirely, Argentine heads bobbing up and down in the video.

During the day some people talked about when the awards ceremony would begin, others about the starting time for the party. The people who used the word party understood what was coming.

Ales Through the Ages II

Sorry, this event has been canceled.

Some of the world’s brightest beer scholars and I will be returning to Colonial Williamsburg for another round of Ales Through the Ages. The last one was terrific (read Martyn Cornell’s recap) and the next one is Oct. 19-21.

My brochure arrived yesterday.

Ales Through the Ages, Colonial Williamsburg
Here’s the speaker lineup (there are also receptions and speakers roundtables Saturday and and Sunday):

FRIDAY, October 19
5:15 p.m. – Keynote presentation. Pete Brown.

SATURDAY, October 20
9 a.m. – From Caelia to Celctic Brews & Brigid to Benedict: Beer Beyond Roman Rule. Travis Rupp.
9:45 a.m. – The Sexual Habits of Hops: How They Changed Beer, and Changed It Again. Stan Hieronymus.
(Pardon the whining, but I also followed Travis last year. This is a lousy position. He is an engaging speaker who actually knows what he is talking about.)
11 a.m. – British Fungus: Brettanomyces in British Brewing. Ron Pattinson.

2 p.m. – Messing About with Old Ale & Beer. Marc Meltonville.
2:45 p.m. – Pale Ale Before IPA: The Birth of a Legend. Martyn Cornell.
4 p.m. – Speakers Roundtable.

SUNDAY, October 21
9 a.m. – Gruit: Back to the Future of Brewing? Butch Heilshorn.
9:45 a.m. – Molasses Beer, Hops and the Enslaved: Brewing in 18th Century Virginia. Frank Clark and Lee Graves.
11 a.m. – Albany Ale: 400 Years of Brewing in New York’s Hudson Valley. Craig Gravina.
2 p.m. – The Nobel Failure: How Vermont’s Period of Prohibition Shape the Present Culture and Landscape. Adam Krakowski.
3:15 p.m. – Speakers Roundtable.

Meet me in Asheville

Hops for the future, beers from the past. My kind of weekend fare.

Mike Karnowski at Zebulon Artisan Ales in Ashville, N.C., has invited me to ramble on at a couple of events during Asheville Beer Week. So we rounded up a bunch of experimental hops to try in beers one evening, and grabbed some recipes from Brewing Local and elsewhere that Mike turned into beers I’m certainly looking forward to tasting the following afternoon. He’s done the hard part.

We’ll taste beers made with sexy hop names like CF212 and Auss 016 from 5 to 7 p.m. May 27 at Zebulon (details). The lineup of 1800s beers (1-3 p.m. May 28) includes early American porter, Albany Ale, Brilliant ale, pro-Prohibition pilsner, Kentucky Common and Swankey. Yes, the elusive Swankey. (Details.)

In case you are wondering, a clip from the Newport, Pa., News, March 24, 1910:

Swankey clips