musing

Brewers and breweries doing good

Dale KatechisA trifecta today of stories about the role breweries play in communities:

– Dale Katechis, founder of Oskar Blues Brewery in Lyons, Colo., has been selected as the recipient of the Colorado Restaurant Association’s Cornerstone Humanitarian Award. The award is sponsored by the National Restaurant Association, and Katechis will be considered for the national Cornerstone Humanitarian Award.

Among Oskar Blues’ early fundraising efforts was a 1998 event that raised $25,000 for a local family whose husband/father was stricken with cancer. The following year, Oskar Blues raised a similar amount for two children who lost both of their parents within just a few weeks time.

For ten years Dale and Oskar Blues have hosted a local seniors group (The Golden Gang) each month, providing them with free meals and a meeting space for their gatherings.

Oskar Blues has also hosted local high school bands in its music room, giving young musicians the chance to raise money and play on the same stage that welcomes national and local bands.

“My mom raised my brothers and me with the message that helping out the community is a requirement,” Katechis said. “I’m trying to uphold her high standard. Thankfully I have a staff that shares my love for lending a helping hand. None of the good we’ve done could happen without their help, it’s a team effort.”

This year Oskar Blues donated several thousand dollars toward the building of a new weight room for the Lyons High football team, and a skate park in Lyons.

– Don Russell (Joe Sixpack) writes today about the pub as an urban tonic.

His column focuses on the newly opened Dock Street Brewery & Restaurant in Philadelphia’s Cedar Park section, which community leaders hope will bring new spirit to their neighborhood.

Beer as an agent for positive social change – can you believe it?

Well, yes, if you’ve been paying attention. Northern Liberties took off after the 700 and Standard Tap beer bars opened; the same thing is happening in Fishtown in the vicinity of Johnny Brenda’s, and in the newly minted Newbold section that surrounds the South Philadelphia Tap Room.

This is Community Infrastructure 101: People need a comfortable gathering place to meet and welcome outsiders. A brewpub is ideal in an urban setting because it attracts singles and young families who are in the market for affordable rowhouses. They come for fresh beer and hunker down for life.

Russell describes a pub designed to fit into its neighborhood, one much different than Dock Street’s now-closed original location next to the Four Seasons in Logan Square (long on polished brass and marble).

– The Pelican Pub & Brewery’s fourth annual Brewers Summer Games, held in June, raised more than $5,000 which will be distributed to two local charities: Nestucca Valley Boosters and Caring Cabin. These funds were raised from beer, root beer, food and clothing sales.

Miller Chill Challenge canceled

Last month I suggested it would be fun to conduct a Miller Chill Challenge, having participants taste Miller Chill, drinks (such as Chelada) with recipes Corona is promoting and the new Budweiser (and Bud Light) pre-mixed Chelada’s.

The tasting has been postponed, and likely canceled, due to lack of interest.

The people I hang out with – including many who seldom drink beer and some who drink light beer – are not members of the target audience. Almost every one I suggested this might be fun simply said, “Why?”

And they were right. Quite obviously there is a market for these mixtures – newspaper food sections that would carry stories about beer should be conducting this test – but we are talking about blends built on light lagers.

If I worked for one of them I might feel obligated to do this. I don’t, and there are too many better topics to discuss.

In praise of simply made beers

Here is a wonderful paragraph posted this weekend by Ron Pattinson at Shut up about Barclay Perkins:

Honest beer is what I want. Beer that can look me straight in the eye and not flinch. Beer with heart. Beer that’s like an old friend. Beer you can sit and drink by the pint in a pub with your mates.

Brilliant.

Pattinson writes about an epiphany he experienced while beer touring in Franconia: “The beers that I liked the best were the simplest.”

Makes perfect sense to me. The connection between the simple lives Trappist monks lead and simplicity of their beer recipes was apparent when I did the research for Brew Like a Monk.

Their beers – noted for their complexity – are Exhibit A that “Less is more.”

Simple is good. Simple is often the best choice. But, for the record, it isn’t the only choice.

European brewers are sometimes appalled when they look at the grain (and hop) bills of new wave American beers or – yikes! – efforts to duplicate continental classics. I’ve had interesting discussions about this with both commercial and home brewers (here’s one with Jamil Zainasheff) about this and even those who favor simple sometimes find something with more moving parts turns out better.

I’m don’t contend that complicated automatically results in complex, but I disagree with Pattinson when he writes: “A lot of microbrewed beer now seems frivolous to me. Like pretentious nouvelle cuisine. Too complicated for its own good.” And his conclusion: “Take a look at the beer in your glass. What is it? Honest, or a wee bit pretentious?”

Complicated is not a synonym for pretentious any more than simple is, well, simple.

Blue Moon: Peter, Paul & Mary or Trini Lopez?

Peter, Paul & MaryHad Coors Blue Moon White been a folk artist in the 1960s would it have been Peter, Paul & Mary?

Wait, before you flip the dial, consider these alternative questions:

– Was the group P,P&M more like Pete Seeger or Trini Lopez?

– Is Blue Moon White more like a so-called craft beer or mass market beer?

Among the teens I went to school with in the ’60s the argument about just how “authentic” Peter, Paul & Mary was invoked far more passion than any one about “authentic” and “craft” beer. In one camp you had the “Dylan wrote Blowin’ in the Wind and Pete Seeger wrote If I Had a Hammer and those are the guys that have the right to sing them.”

In the other you had the “P,P&M sound as good as The Weavers, they are singing great songs and they are what we want to sound like around the campfire. They are miles better than Trini Lopez (who also sang If I Had a Hammer).”

History sorted this out for us. The group was at the 1963 civil rights march on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King made his “I Have a Dream Speech” and its members spent the next 40-plus years (sometime together, sometimes on their own) on the right side of causes. In fact, they turned out to be more political than Dylan.

They wrote excellent songs of their own, but just as importantly generously helped promote many other songwriters. They sounded prettier than Dylan singing Blowin’ in the Wind, but that allowed them to broadcast a political messages to far larger audiences than the Weavers every reached.

I don’t mean to equate a lowly beer with the politics of the 1960s, but my friends who labeled P,P&M the equivalent of Trini Lopez were wrong. Will those who dismiss Blue Moon as a craft wannabe be just as wrong?

I’m not saying it’s my first choice of beers when it comes to those inspired by Pierre Celis – or even my first choice at Coors Field, where White is still brewed to the original recipe in the SandLot Brewery. I’d rather be drinking one of the all-grain lagers there.

But if you based your investment decisions on my tastes you’d have been dirt poor long ago. Instead recognize that tons of drinkers prefer Blue Moon to just about any so-called craft beer – and would likely describe it as craft when ordering it.

Earlier today the Brewers Association announced that craft beer sales are still rockin’. But the numbers aren’t as impressive as the Associated Press reported in conversation with Coors’ Keith Villa, the guy who created Blue Moon White.

Blue Moon sales were up 79% in 2005 and more than 100% in 2006. A couple months ago at the National Homebrewers Conference, Villa said: “We’re closing in on Sierra Nevada (meaning the Pale Ale as a single brands) and next year we should get close to Sam Adams (Boston Lager, the brand).”

The Brew Blog, meanwhile, has tossed out the possibility of a Blue Moon light beer, called Pale Moon or Pale Moon Light. This could also be the Chardonnay Blonde that won a medal last year at the Great American Beer Festival, which isn’t “light” in any traditional sense.

Villa promised that beer, which includes Chardonnay grape juice on top of a wheat base and checks in at 7.1% abv, will be back at GABF this year.

I’m not looking to turn this into a conversation about if Blue Moon White is a craft, genuine or authentic. We’re not settling that one. Just read the interview with Villa, or at least this much:

Q: What has allowed Molson Coors to build this craft-style brand without reinforcing the beer’s connection to a large brewing company?

A: The first thing really comes back to the taste and the quality. The second thing is the credentials. I have a doctorate in brewing from Belgium. So it’s not like a group of American brewers got together and did some consumer research and found the best recipe and then developed that. This is right from the ground-up.

Perhaps not Dylan, certainly not Seeger, but maybe Peter, Paul & Mary.

Great Taste might be the best taste

Great Taste of the Midwest Jack Curtin laments that he would have liked to have been in San Francisco this weekend for the celebration surrounding the Toronado’s 20th anniversary.

Agreed it would have been fun, but not where I would most liked to have been yesterday.

Nor was the Great British Beer Festival.

First choice would be the Great Taste of the Midwest, held in Madison, Wis. and the second-longest running beer festival in the country after the Great American Beer Festival. Here’s an early report from The Potable Curmudgeon. And an account of our 1999 visit.

We haven’t been back since 2000. Need to remedy that.