Motueka, New Zealand
“These are my moisture meter,” said Brent McGlashen, a fifth generation hop grower, well into a day last week punctuated with frequent grabbing, breaking and smelling of freshly picked hops being kilned on one of the Mac Hops farms.
“For drinkers to enjoy the foam, it needs to stick around. Although the foam lasted the longest for the highest temperature and pressure studied, the relationship wasn’t as straightforward as it was for foam formation. For pump pressures of 1 bar and 0.5 bar, the foam stability was higher at the intermediate temperature of 10 °C than at 15 °C.
“The reason is the distribution of bubble sizes. At lower temperatures, the bubbles have a fairly uniform size, but at higher temperatures, the sizes vary. The pressure difference between neighboring large and small bubbles causes the large bubbles to siphon off the small bubbles’ gas until the small bubbles wither away. And thus the foam dissipates faster.”
Programming notes: Travel in the next many weeks means Monday recaps of the beer week that was will be intermittent through early May, and probably brief when they do show up. This next weekend I’ll be at the Ohio Hop Conference. Wednesday the 22nd I’ll be talking, virtually, to members of the America Homebrewers Association about New Zealand hops and otherwise answering questions about all things hops. If your are a member, please stop by.
Upfront, Weed v wine: The aesthetics and terroir of cannabis presents this question: Is weed ready for the same connoisseurial approach as wine? Why not beer? Why not consider the fact that weed and hops share many of the same odor compounds. Why isn’t the word dank used even once in this story? Seriously, California is rolling out an appellation system for cannabis. As I prepare to post this, the domain name appellationweed.com remains available.
Cask beer
– Around the world, Part 1. Who drinks in pubs around the world serving cask beers? What kind of experiences are they looking for?
– Stateside. “There has been no noticeable shift in cask beer consumption. Maybe that’s a good thing. It’s not getting better, but it’s also not getting worse.”
No avoiding AI
– This might be AI week upcoming at Beervana. So be on the lookout, because I won’t be here next Monday to remind you.
– An AI created brewery taproom menu. Scroll down a bit. Personally, I want a bit more than a hint of hop character in a classic pilsner.
– A chat bot does drink reviews. “I paired this Pinot Noir with a home-cooked meal for my dog.” Oh, boy.
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– An everyday beer. “I don’t really want to break it down into its constituent parts, and the sun shining through the window behind me is warm, and I am comfortable and in good company.”
– This one-woman brewery brings Middle Eastern flavor back to craft beer. “I thought I was a pretty good chef; brewing can’t be that hard.”
– Sustainability. A business in Yokohama in Japan has started upcycling brewers’ malt lees waste to produce “craft beer paper.”
Scratch Brewing has been one of our favorite places to be since Daria and I first visited nearly 10 years ago Simply to be. Full stop.
So it seemed a bit jarring Wednesday when James Beard Award semi-finalists were announced to see Scratch as a contender for “Outstanding Bar.” They have a bar top, but eight tasters will fill up half of it. (There was a ninth glass to the left; when you can only visit once every 15 months or so, in this case last February, you order everything on tap and buy bottles to go.) And they have beer.
But people go to a bar to watch the Super Bowl. I’ve been at Scratch on Super Bowl Sunday, but there is no TV, and the people playing Cards Against Humanity did not seem to care. People scribble graffiti on the walls in bar bathrooms. Not at Scratch.
There is an explanation. Scratch co-founders Marika Josephson and Aaron Kleidon were semi-finalists for “Outstanding Beer, Wine and Spirit Producer” in 2020, the year the Beard Awards were canceled. They canceled 2021 at the same time and since then there have been many changes. Last year there was Outstanding Bar Program category and this year there is simply Outstanding Bar. The criteria: “This award is presented to a wine bar, beer bar, cocktail bar, coffee bar or any other business whose primary offering is beverage and that demonstrates consistent excellence in curating a selection or in the preparation of drinks, along with outstanding atmosphere, hospitality, and operations while contributing positively to its broader community.”
Scratch definitely qualifies, but I still would not call the brewery on a farm a bar. And I don’t think the people who were there two days after Thanksgiving of 2020 would either.
An interesting thought from Alister Reece.
“This also got me thinking about how so many of the beer styles we love and take for granted are a combination of location in a physical sense and locale in a population sense.”
I’m in the process of assembling a lengthy recap about what I’ve previously written “hop terroir” for the next issue of Hop Queries. Much of the research focuses on geographical differences, but there is more.
The first question asked here, back in 2005, was, “Does it matter where a particular beer, any beer, is brewed?” In thinking about this way too much in the years since, I’ve returned often to something Amy Trubek wrote in “The Taste of Place: A Cultural Journey into Terroir.”
“This broader definition of terroir considers place as much as earth. According to this definition, the people involved in making wine, the winemaking tradition of a region, and the local philosophy of flavor are all part of terroir. Unlike the narrow view of terroir, this humanist point of view is not really quantifiable. Terroir speaks of nature and nature’s influence on flavor and quality, but here the human attributes we bring to ‘nature’ are cultural and sensual rather than objective and scientific.”
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– Changing colors. We were New York City last weekend (the photo at the top is the set for “Death of a Salesman”; they were pretty specific about the rule against taking photos during the play) when I read this story about how New Belgium is making over Fat Tire. Had we been at home in Colorado, perhaps I could have tracked down a can of the beer and provided drinking notes. I will put that on my to do list.
– The Meaning of Dry January. I was wrong last week when I typed the link I posted then would be the only one to a story about Dry January. Beer drinkers may choose to quote this, “One takeaway from my research is that lower-alcohol-content beverages are better. It’s easier in a social situation to drink and continue drinking and not worry about your consumption.” They should read the rest of the story.
– What are the elements that make a beer memorable? Context. Context. Context.
– The shelf turd abides. A “a vessel of ironic detachment.”
– You Were Never Going to Go to Noma Anyway. I spent too much time in the week reading about changes at Noma, the hyperlocal Copenhagen restaurant, blah blah blah. Because I’ve been reading too much about the place since I wrote “Brewing Local” and wondering about how fine dining, beer and inclusivity (or exclusivity) fit together. So I’d also recommend you take a look at “Noma and the Fizzle of Too-Fine Dining,” “Noma’s closing exposes the contradictions of fine dining,” and “How much does our food tell us about who we are?”