place/local/ingredients/sensory

My new favorite beer style? Vera

Jeff Alworth yesterday used to news that the Brewers Association added seven new beer styles to the Beer Style Guidelines in advance of the Great American Beer Festival to rage about how there are too many beer styles.

This is one another of those discussions I feel like I’ve been part of more than enough times already, so just two thoughts.

I am happy that there is a defined category for West Coast Pilsner. Highland Park Brewery has won three GABF medals for the beer they call Timbo Pils at their website and describe as a West Coast Pilsner. Timbo has won as an American-Style Pale Ale, an India Pale Lager and in the India Pale Lager or Malt Liquor category.

The first GABF competition in 1987 included a dozen categories: Ales, Alts, Cream Ales, American Lagers, American Light Lagers, Bock/Doppelbocks, Continental Amber Lagers, Continental Pilsners, Porters, Stouts, Vienna Style Lagers, Wheat Beers. Where would you have entered Timbo Pils?

Vera Charles, mycologist
Vera Charles*
Second, I’ll write more about the hop named Vera in Hop Queries this month. Meanwhile, the announcement that the 2025 competition will include a special category featuring beers brewed with Vera (formerly known as W1108-333 or HRC-003) caused me to imagine a festival that will never happen.

The fest would include beers named only after the hop “providing the leading role” in their aroma and flavor. In the GABF Vera competition, brewers will declare the underlying style. Not at this festival. Festival attendees could ask about other ingredients in the beer, about supporting hops, about the yeast, fermentation temperatures, lagering time, IBUs, whatever they wanted. Except style.

There could even be a competition. Similar to Juicy/Hazy IPA at GABF, the most entered hop category would be Citra.

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* Vera Katherine Charles (1877–1954) was an American mycologist. She was one of the first women to be appointed to professional positions within the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Charles coauthored several articles on mushrooms while working for the USDA.

Beer’s past, future, Grodziskie, farmhouse yeast, the Gaia concept . . .

Marcin Ostajewski of Browar Grodziskie in line for breakfast at the 2024 Craft Brewers Conference in Las Vegas.

That’s Marcin Ostajewski of Browar Grodziskie in line for breakfast at the 2024 Craft Brewers Conference in Las Vegas. In a little more than two weeks he and brewery president Krzysztof Panek will be talking about all things Grodziskie in Utrech, the Netherlands, during Carnivale Brettanomyces. The “yearly wild beer festival dedicated to deviant fermentation of all kind” is, in fact, about more than oddball fermentation.

The headline here hints of how diverse the talks will be, so I will leave you to explore the entire list on your own. These sorts of gatherings and exchanges of ideas are how beer culture avoids turning into the monoculture American beer seemed to be headed for in the 1970s.

One example, Aiden Jönsson’s examination of beer and the Gaia hypothesis: “Take a sip of beer and you will notice aromas and flavors that remind you of the world around you. Some of these play crucial roles in our physical environment by interacting with the atmosphere, oceans, and geology. We will explore some of the ways common compounds in beer reflect natural processes in our environment and climate, and how life could have evolved to use those compounds to regulate the environment to its benefit in Gaian ways.”

Bet you wish you could be there.

Session #144: The best beer to drink at home right now

A glass half full of beer from Scratch Brewing in Southern Illinois

The Session logoPerhaps because my brain is pretty much fried every day by the latest shenanigans elsewhere, even after reading Boak & Bailey’s broader explanation of how we might approach the topic for the Session #144 the headline (“The best beer to drink at home right now”) was not leaving my brain. Best beer. At home. Right now. So the Tuesday afternoon the announcement posted I checked to see what my options were. At home.

We don’t cellar beer (other than Big Foot, a habit we started long before the brewery quit using twist off caps in 2008) in our house, but we do have small fridge that was intended, by the maker, to hold wine. Beers meant to stand up to time may linger in there for a while, but seldom long enough that when opened scream, “You should have drank me last month.”

In the fridge I found a bottle of Scratch 131 tucked between, like it was hiding, bottles from Primitive Beer here in Colorado and from Fort George Brewing in Oregon. Daria and I first drank the 131 at the brewery two days after Christmas of 2023. We brought three bottles home, opened one when spring arrived and another as fall neared because I knew it belonged on my Craft Beer & Brewing Best in 2024 list. For The Session, I decided to be sure it is still terrific. It is.

I have only one thing to add to what I wrote at the time. I should have included that the ingredients were foraged from the wooded land that surrounds the brewery.

“Fresh flower petals, dried petals. Fresh herbs, dried herbs. Fresh roots, toasted roots. Inhale to recall a fall hike through the woods surrounding the brewery, exhale for memories of a similar spring ramble. One-thirty-one—a reference to the number of ingredients included in the recipe — is a beer of all seasons, and an advertisement for retronasal pleasure.”

It happens to be Scratch’s 12th birthday tomorrow.

Makes me wish I had a fourth bottle of 131 to open. Fortunately, there is a happy ending. We’ll be back in the Midwest a few days next month, which means we’ll be at Scratch.

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Visit Boak & Bailey for more contributions to The Session.

Not exactly a dive bar

Hopper Pub & Pizzeria, Rio Rancho NM

Hopper Pub & Pizzeria, Rio Rancho NMFrom NYC’s craft beer scene faces sobering challenges as closures and mergers reshape the industry:

In the early years, many breweries were so beer-centric, they ignored decor, food concepts and beverages beyond their own beer and refused to even hang televisions — an approach that is no longer effective, said Aaron Gore, who has consulted with over 70 breweries on three continents.

He said while the spate of New York City brewery changes now feels jarring, it’s actually a “typical adoption curve.” Approaching a decade since its peak, craft beer is now a “normal good” that can be found even at many dive bars, said Gore.

The Hopper Pub and Pizzeria is not a dive bar, but it is also not what Suds Korge and Dregs Donnigan would have called a fern bar. It’s located in a strip mall behind a gas station in Rio Rancho, N.M. (shout out to Glengarry Glen Ross), and the walls are decorated with silly signs as well as beer signs and neon. A particle board floor is utilitarian.

However, the crust on their wood-fired pizza is perfect and the beer list has something for pretty much everyone. That they post the names of the beers are listed sans breweries indicates a certainly level of customer knowledge. Bone Shaker? From Second Street Brewing in Santa Fe. You know if you know.

There was live music last Monday, Veteran’s Day. That, it seems, is celebrated year round at the Hopper Pub.

Monday beer reading: Lager yeast, sexism & premiumization

Lager fermenting at Brauerei Schönram

Lager fermenting at Brauerei Schönram in Bavaria

A Washington Post story yesterday discusses how “scientists in Chile harnessed the biodiversity of Patagonia to make novel yeast hybrids, potentially paving the way for new lager beer flavors.”

Early on, the principal investigator (that means he has skin in the game), says, “All the lager beers that we drink now come from a single event from a yeast generated 500 years ago. That makes most of the lager beers quite similar.”

Coincidentally, last week Good Beer Hunting posted almost 4,000 words about lager yeast.

My nit to pick in the first is that lagers don’t have to taste quite similar. In the second, this is not what I think the best brewers do: “When we think about the history of lager, we’re talking about the history of brewers and scientists trying to understand how to get yeast to do what they want.” My experience is that the real skill is figuring at what yeast want and giving it to them. That’s when the magic happens.

The strains coming out of Patogonia may well produce unique flavors, but that’s no excuse to diss what brewers are already using. In “Modern Lager Beer,” the authors point out that there are “notable difference even within lager strains bearing the same 34/70 moniker.”

Two brewers traveled around Bavaria sourcing yeast directly to assist Brewing Science Institute mapping out variations. The samples they selected displayed differences in maltotriose fermentation, attenuation, sulfur production, acetyaldehyde production, diacetyl removal, and ester production. The authors also cite research that confirms that lager strains adapt to their environment, finding that chromosomal variations can begin to occur within a dozen generations.

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LEDE OF THE WEEK

DEI is so 2021. For many in the beer industry, as well as in the wider world, diversity, equity and inclusion has become old news, no longer worthy of column inches.

“I believe that the progress of social advocacy work in craft beer is in danger of stalling out completely or even rolling backward,” academic, activist and DEI professional Dr. J. Jackson-Beckham stated in a post on Crafted For All in September 2023. It echoed the feelings of many other DEI activists and advocates in the industry: One of powerlessness, frustration, and lack of support and progress has led to large-scale burnout.

— From Apathy Has Rained On Me — On DEI Burnout in the Beer Industry

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