place/local/ingredients/sensory

Book learning: fruity, peach = ethyl octanoate

As mentioned Monday, when asked to contribute a list of “best books” to a new-ish book recommendation website I chose five related to aroma and flavor. You can see my picks here.

Whether the books did or did not specifically mention beer mattered little when I made the selections. However, since you are here for the beer, a couple of beer-related excerpts.

First, from Luca Turin in “The Emperor of Scent.”

“Look at beer, which is a very interesting cultural product. Beer smells like a burp. Gasses from someone’s stomach. Lovely. Again a product of fermentation, which is to say decay. Decay enhances smells and flavors, yet we have a sharp ability to identify decay, because decaying things will kill you. Bacterial and yeast decomposition.

“Which can give you ‘I wouldn’t touch that in a million years’ and, at the same time and in the same culture, mind you, ‘I will pay great sums to consume Rodenbach,’ which is a miracle of a beer from Belgium. A miraculous, powdery apple flavor. Those Rodenbach yeast have an I.Q. of at least two hundred. Fucking genius yeast.”

Second, a rather simple* table from “Nose Dive,” which really is the field guide the full title promises.

Table from "Nose Dive"

* Simple compared, for instance, to the one for “pungent spices: mustards and peppers.”

If you click around the site you will see each entry includes a “closely related book lists.” It pleases me that the one list related to mine is from Gordon Shepherd, since one of his books is among the five I point to. But, dang, I wish there were more lists related to aroma and flavor.

And you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’

Fog

Perhaps the wires in my brain simply got crossed this week. I have no interest in commenting on the news after news after news related to the business of beer that just keeps coming. (Take a look at Brewbound and keep scrolling if you think you missed something. Or, if you recently did something you feel you should be punished for, go directly to Beer Twitter.)

Instead my thoughts keep going back to June of 2020, when economists Lester Jones (National Beer Wholesalers Association) and Bart Watson (Brewers Association) discussed what was going on with beer sales only a few months after the world shut down. Jones planted this seed:

“When you look how the brewing industry has evolved . . . in that 2008, 2010 recession we saw a lot of different business models. We saw people who were a little bit more of the taproom model, where they wanted to be small, they wanted to be local. They had certain business models they were pursuing. Then you had players who were a little more lifestyle oriented, and they were the guys working on their second careers. They were doing it for a lifestyle versus other people who were doing it for a living.

“I think at this point we’re going to see a division in the industry as the people who were in it for the lifestyle of having a small little brewpub in a local community versus the people who were in there with the intentions of growing a real brewing business, widely distributed, with a widely recognized brand. These two business models are going to split off. This is the event that will do it.”

The beer business and culture. Culture and the beer business. Can they be separated?

Beer links: American lager, outdoor drinking & IBU

Which is the Czech pils?

Jeff Alworth wrote about something new he’d like to see develop in 2022: American lager.

He started with a question from Ben Howe at Otherlands Brewing. “(It) feels a bit strange to be making a perfect recreation of a German beer. I wonder what an American lager would look like if we developed a tradition as rich as Franconia’s.”

Alworth has some suggestions, obviously influenced by the concept of “national tradition” he puts forth in the new edition of “The Beer Bible” (if you haven’t bought and read it, you should). It’s no secret that I have some affection for hops and regionally sourced and produced beers, and the eight of you who read “Brewing Local” know I’m an authenticity skeptic who thinks it is a mistake to saddle brewers with somebody else’s tradition.

So I’m mostly good with where Alworth ends up.

“Imagine lagers like this: made with base malts from barley grown and malted locally, a more American hop schedule with local lager hops (soft bitter charge, late kettle additions, whirlpool additions, and small dry-hop additions), aged in a Brett-free oak foeder, served unfiltered and lively with the flavors of all those ingredients. That’s a pretty unusual, pretty American beer.”

I type mostly because I’m not sure what word I’d substitute for American, but I’d rather think in terms of a beer tasting like it is a Birds Fly South beer, or a Good Word beer or a Fair Isle beer.

And practically speaking, because one thing always leads to another, I don’t look forward to seeing American helles or American pils “defined.” Because I know some people haven’t learned anything from the recent blabbing away about style(s), IPA and beyond.

(Should you be curious, the photo at the top appeared here earlier this year. Both of those beers were categorized as Czech pils.)

CURLING
Actually, “beer curling,” which uses small kegs instead of curling stones. PLUS the beer garden at Land-Grant Brewing in Columbus, Ohio, has 15 heated igloos.

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Go for the Limburger cheese, stay for the bock

The skies seem a little bluer, and the tracks look a little newer
And the water tower has more names
The ruts are a little deeper, the gullies a little steeper
Not that much has changed

Not that much has changed, it’s all just rearranged
Like a picture in your mind of a heart you left behind
Not that much has changed

                   – Joe Ely, “Not That Much Has Changed”

Limburger cheese sandwich, Baumgartner Cheese Store & Tavern

The Limburger cheese sandwich at Baumgartner Cheese Store & Tavern in Monroe, Wisconsin, is still served with a mint. A pint of Huber Bock is still sold at a bargain price.

But, you knew this was coming, a few beery things have changed since we first visited Baumgartner’s in 1995 and last were in Monroe in 2008. This isn’t exactly unusual, even in a rural town of 11,000 residents such as Monroe, the county seat of Green County. Yet it is striking to see an Alaskan Brewing neon in the window of Bartels & Co. Tap on the opposite side of the town square from Baumgartner’s.

Curiously, the second oldest (almost) continually operating brewery in the country, established in 1845, is right around the corner from Baumgartner’s. Curiously, because Minhas Craft Brewery, the 19th largest US craft brewery as defined by the Brewers Association, is not a tourist attraction.

Minhas Craft BreweryThe brewery looks like a building, a large building, built in Eastern Europe not long after the end of World War II. A sign the size of one you’d see hanging in front of a small tavern that reads “Home of Huber Bock” is the only nod to the brewery’s heritage. We did not see any Minhas branded beers on tap in Wisconsin bars or for sale in liquor stores.

Tourists come to Green County first for cheese, and second for New Glarus beers, brewed 16 miles up the road. Green County has 400 dairy farms that produce 530 million pounds of milk a year, much of which is turned into cheese at 13 factories in the county. Chalet Cheese Cooperative is the only Limburger producers in the country. A sign at Alp & Dell Cheese store reads, “Here in Green County cheese is life.”

Baumgartner’s has been in business since 1931, selling cheese, beer, sausage, flasks of hard stuff, etc., from a counter in the front of the building and operating the tavern in back. The tall ceiling is covered with dollar bills and the walls include mounted animal heads, breweriana and signs of the area’s Swiss heritage (a Baumgartner played on the 1996 Swiss handball team). There’s a map of Switzerland with information and shields of all the cantons.

The first time we visited there were four beers on tap, all pouring Huber beers (Ravinder and Manjit Minhas bought the brewery in 2006). Today there are 24 beers on tap, including four from New Glarus Brewing.

In 1995, a cheese sandwich cost $2.25 and today it is $5. Huber Bock was $1.45 for 16 ounces, one of the best beer bargains in America at the time. Now a pint of the bock is $4, a bargain price, but not much of a deal because the beer isn’t what it once was. Trust me, that’s not a nostalgia-tinged assessment.

The beer pictured at the top is New Glarus Gyrator Doppel. It cost $5. Accounting for inflation, that would have been $2.75 in 1995. Either way, a high-value bargain.

Beer bars, part II

Max's Taphouse, Baltimore

Following up, as promised, on a discussion about The New York Times article headlined, “Last Call for the Beer Bar?” it seems fair to start with words from Josh Bernstein, who wrote the article that might otherwise been headlined, “The Evolution of the Beer Bar.”

“There is most definitely a place for beer bars that are integrated into a community and serve it well, with well-chosen beer and other beverages,” he wrote on Twitter.

Isn’t that the way it has always been? Flip through the “Bars of Reading” (1988), Pat Baker’s “Beer and Bar Atlas” (1988), either of the two books on the subject Daria Labinsky and I wrote, “Beer Travelers Guide” (1995) and “Beer Lover’s Guide” (2000), or others that have followed in the same vein since and that is pretty obvious.

What's on tap at Northeast Taproom, Reading, Pa.Does the draft selection need to be “better” than the Northeast Taproom in Reading? When Pete Cammarano bought the place in 1983 the draft choices were Budweiser and Schmidts. By the time “Bars of Reading” was published five years later Pete offered the best beer selection in Berks County. Authors Suds Kroge and Dregs Donnigan wrote, “Pete is the answer . . . but we forget the question.”

We first visited in 1994 and fell in love with the place. We went back in 1997 and fell in love again. The beer selection had evolved. Pete sold the place long ago, but this picture from the taproom’s Facebook page suggests beer is still taken seriously.

At the end of 1987 there were 73 U.S. breweries operating that opened after Fritz Maytag bought Anchor Brewing in 1965, plus Anchor itself. Forty-four of the 55 small breweries that began selling beer in 1988 were brewpubs, compared to only 29 brewpubs total when the year started. Several of those brewpubs grew into very large breweries, and they are well known today (Goose Island, Deschutes, North Coast, Great Lakes, etc.).

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