place/local/ingredients/sensory

I don’t know if the Onion is incredibly on top of things or just lucky, but Monday a story in The New York Times asked, “Last Call for the Beer Bar?” It began by recounting the demise of Falling Rock Taphouse in Denver. And Tuesday, the Onion came back with “City Of Denver Shuts Down Bar For Operating Without A Brewery.”

The Falling Rock owners announced they would close the place little more than a month after we sat on the patio there to fill out the paperwork (on a phone, of course) to place a bid on the house we now live in. Fans came from far and near to say goodbye. I talked to some of the more local ones about where they would go most often now. Two names I heard more than others were Rino Beer Garden and Finn’s Manor. Finn’s has a shorter tap list — curated, as the kids say — and a cocktail menu. Rino has more than 60-plus taps.

Would both be classified as beer bars?

Pat Baker provided a definition in his “Beer & Bar Atlas” in 1988. His classifications included classic bar, neighborhood bar, beer bar, Irish bar, German bar, English Pub and fern bar. (Yes, neither wine bar nor sports bar.)

He described a beer bar as “a bar whose main claim to fame is a large range of beer. Frequently, the bar sports and attractive beer can collection, or other vestiges of breweriana. Because of the interest in beer, the beers can be well served, but the wide range brings with it the risk of old beer.”

And, because I bet fern bar grabbed your attention, he wrote, “The sobriquet for the trendy hang-outs of yuppies, almost always decorated with hanging plants. While usually a derogatory term, it is not unknown for a fern bar to offer good beer, or to be interesting!”

More from the “Beer & Bar Atlas” Friday and perhaps a bit of reminiscing about Suds Kroge and Dregs Donnigan.

Scratch Brewing founders Marika Josephson and Aaron Kleidon talked about brewing beer in a wood-fired kettle on a recent Craft Beer & Brewing podcast. It is not as simple as flipping a switch, so I won’t try to summarize and instead suggest you give it a listen.

In the first photo below, from 2013, you can see where they split tree wood to fire their first (much smaller) kettle. Josephson is feeding the fire while Kleidon tames the boil. However, toward the end of the conversation Kleidon mentions now that they have a much larger kettle (under a roof, by the way) the wood for their fire comes from a local company that makes pallets. This is more environmentally friendly than chopping down the trees that surround the brewery.

Not quite as romantic, I know. I remember visiting Weissbrau Freilassing in 2008, said to be the last wood-fired brewery in Germany, and seeing the pile of wood that would be used for brewing (second photo below). Most of the wood is second-hand, although some is chopped. Although this makes perfect sense, I wasn’t expecting it. Curiously, there no wood flames under the kettles at the G. Schneider & Sohn in Kelheim to the north, but but the brewery has its own wood-chip-fired heating system. Kelheim is located in the midst of a forest, where chopping down trees does make sense.

The third photo is from Brasserie Caracole in Falmignoul, said to the last wood-fired brewery in Belgium. To be honest, that’s not wood in the photo, but paper crumbled up to provide a prettier picture when I visited in 2004.

The final photo is from three years ago, on Bjørne Røthe’s farm in Dyrvedalen Valley in western Norway. There it is nice to know that this is not the last wood-fired kettle still being used in Norway.

I defer to the malt expertise of Ben Keene and Jeff Alworth, but the map the Craft Maltsters Guild displayed at the Craft Brewers Conference earlier this month is one of those “picture is worth a 1,000 words” things.

The guild defines craft malt this way:

Small – A members malthouse produces between 5 metric tons and 10,000 metric tons per year.

Local – More than 50% of grains are grown within a 500-mile radius of the member malthouse.

Independent – Each member malthouse must be independently owned by a 76% majority of ownership.

Looking at the map, Hannah Turner, chair of the guild’s technical committee, volunteered there is work to be done in South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas — where they know a little about growing grains. That noted, the availability of locally produced malt and hops since the Brewing Publications brewing elements series* was produced is stunning.

* A bit of disclosure. I wrote the hops book.