musing

The Session #39: Collaborative learning

The Session
Kelly Ryan spoke with a surprising sense of purpose considering this April evening had just turned into tomorrow in a Chicago hotel room, and lord knows what day it was 8,000 miles away in Auckland, New Zealand, where Epic Thornbridge Stout was still conditioning.

“I think it needs more time in the tank,” Ryan told Luke Nicholas after tasting the beer for the first time since they brewed it in February. He liked what was in his glass, but his experience with brown malt — a key ingredient in the recipe and one Nicholas had not used before — told him it wasn’t time to bottle the beer. Nicholas reassured him that what he was tasting had been bottled weeks before so he could bring some to Chicago. The rest was still maturing.

Luke Nicholas and Kelly RyanThat’s what’s called collaboration.

The theme for the 39th gathering of the Session today is collaboration — Mario Rubio is this month’s host and will have the recap — and I expect various bloggers to come at it from many directions. Let’s just hope we don’t hear the story of Avery/Russian River Collaboration Not Litigation Ale too many times.

I’ll try to keep it simple. Nicholas is founder and chief bottle washer at Epic Brewing in New Zealand. Ryan, also a native of New Zealand, is brewery manager at the Thornbridge Brewery in England. They met last year when Nicholas was in England and ended up brewing a collaboration that melded, although that might not be the right word, Epic IPA and Thornbridge Halycon.

Since Ryan would be in New Zealand in February for his brother’s wedding they decided to brew another beer, in this case a stout, a style Nicholas had never made. This was also his first experience with brown malt and two English hop varieties, Target and Bambling Cross.

“I woke up excited to go to the brewery,” Ryan said. “(The process) energizes you. A mass of information goes back and forth.”

The resulting beer is plenty stout, 6.8% abv with 54 bittering units, and even at a young age in early April full of textured flavors, smooth but complex. Half the batch has been packaged and hit the market last week. Half is aging in American oak barrels that previously held Epic Armageddon IPA and likely will be released at the end of August.

Both Nicholas and Ryan judged in the World Beer Cup in Chicago in April, and they spent plenty of time together during the following days at the Craft Brewers Conference. Information flowed freely, but not necessarily the way it would formulating a recipe or standing over a mash tun in the brewery. Nicholas calls what happens during brewing collaborations a cross pollination of ideas, and it breeds better brewing.

Collaborations are good business, good marketing, good fun and often result in interesting beer. They also make for good stories in print and cyberspace for those who haven’t already heard them a thousand times. When they start to seem old remember the stories may be repetitive, the experiences are not.

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The photo above was taken at CBC. Luke (on the left) is mugging for one camera, Kelly for another, and that object between them is an unlabeled bottle of Epic Thornbridge Stout they are about to open. Clearly a historic moment. You might find pictures documenting the brew day more informative. Details about the beer itself are here.

Do we blame the beer or something else?

We interrupt the silence here for two quick links.

In fact I’d collected a bunch of stories during the last several days that I put the much of the beer world at arm’s length (in other words, I could still reach for a pint). I planned a “beer linkorama” today. There’s the madness in San Diego to comment on, Slate’s take on the Miller Lite ad campaign, several interesting blind tastings, more on corks, etc. But you’ve probably already seen those things.

Instead I suggest you start with Pete Brown’s “CAMRA’s noxious culture of entitlement.”

Read the comments, give it some thought.

Before you dismiss such boorish behavior as specific to a few bearded oafs in the UK consider the question it provokes from Alan McLeod: “Where Else Hides The Culture of Entitlement?”

This isn’t just about beer and I don’t think it is a generational thing, but I suspect you can easily add to Alan’s list of five.

25April2010: Beer linkorama

Before moving on to beer-related links here’s one about one of my favorite topics I try not to bore you with too often: the state of journalism.

The synopsis: 18 years ago a librarian penned a tongue in cheek “survey” about librarians and sex for a humor column in a library bulletin. Nearly two decades he’s retired and blogging. Blog readers suggest he publish the “survey” again. Now it’s being treated as new news (it is neither) by bloggers and more traditional media alike. Will Manley has stirred up craziness on many levels, and it seems to still be growing tentacles in the blog world, on Facebook and everywhere else. So here’s one of his questions:

Here’s what really blows my mind. The newspapers are following the lead of the bloggers in presenting this story. In other words professional journalists are getting their news from blogs that may or may not be reliable. Don’t they care that this survey was a tongue in cheek attempt at humor? Does this worry you about the news industry and journalists in general?

Back to (mostly) booze:

  • Bill at It’s Pub Night in Portland examines “The Bomber Price Penalty.” He doesn’t pull any punches, concluding “The fact that no other product is priced with a volume penalty instead of a volume discount leads me to believe that bomber pricing is simply a swindle.” He backs this up with numbers, comparing bomber prices to a six-pack equivalents.
  • And because Oregon has a beer blogging culture as rich as the beer scene Patrick at the Oregon Economics Blog riffs on Bill post by examining Beeronomics: Non-Linear Pricing. Put on your thinking cap and learn about high demanders (probably you when it comes to beer), low demanders and how high demanders may benefit from price discrimination.
  • Beer styles. Still in Oregon, Jon Abernathy examines indigenous American beer styles, linking to this from Mario Rubio and “600 Words About Beer Styles” by Brian Hunt of Moonlight Brewing in California.
  • Beer history. Ron Pattinson compares brewery output in in London and Vienna in 1865. “Of course, Vienna’s breweries were later overshadowed by those of Bohemia and Bavaria. Their role in the development of European brewing, in particular the spread of bottom-fermentation, has been largely forgotten. Much as the Viennese style of amber Lager has retreated into obscurity.”
  • More connecting the dots. Brewers on the continent, particularly in Belgium and even more particularly those who brew and blend lambics, often lament the growing appeal of sweet drinks. Yvan De Baets put it quite succinctly in Brew Like a Monk: “One of the main goals of Belgian brewers should be to fight against the Coca-Cola flavors and those kind of gadget tastes. We should be about cultural tastes, not animal tastes.” This link is a couple of months old — some items get bookmarked and not read for a while, sorry — but Salon gets right to the point in Sugar high: Why your food is getting sweeter. Bottom line: “Regardless of everything we have learned, however, our food just keeps getting sweeter and more sugary.”
  • Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. This review calls Daniel Okrent’s book “the most persuasive and best-documented explanation as to why and how America decided to ban alcohol.” And you thought all he knew about was fantasy baseball.
  • For the record. The best place to be in America on Saturday was not Munster, Indiana. It was in New Orleans for Jazzfest. The festival continues next week, but getting a room will be a challenge because a big convention is also in town: it’s Digestive Disease Week. I imagine they chose New Orleans for the restaurants.