musing

There’s more than flavor in a flavor wheel

Lauren SalazarBefore we get to the Slate three-part series on sensory perception and wine a few words of wit and wisdom on that topic from Lauren Salazar of New Belgium Brewing, who spoke Friday in Denver at the National Homebrewers Conference. (That’s her on the right, during a mock judging last year in Seattle, staged for the shooting of American Brew.)

Things I learned I would have added to the earlier discussion here about the mysteries of how (and how we might measure what) we smell and taste:

– To those scientific types who argue that senses of sight, touch and hearing are concrete and smelling and tasting are not her answer is simple. “Yes they are,” she said. “Seeing is not believing. Smelling and tasting is where it’s at.”

– There a second “flavor” wheel (I put the quotation marks around flavor because we’re really talking flavor and aroma), this one just for byproducts of oxidation. If you’re sitting on a tasting panel at New Belgium and call out a beer for being oxidized you can’t stop there – you have to be more specific. This goes to quality control, and more about that in a few paragraphs.

– She presented four samples of Fat Tire dosed with chemicals that reproduce flavors such as acetaldehyde (green apples) and diacetyl (butterscotch; buttered popcorn at higher levels). Although we often cite these as off flavors when judging beer (there are even boxes to check on a BJCP scoresheet) they aren’t inappropriate in every beer.

A bit of green apple in Budweiser is part of its flavor profile. Hints, heck more than hints, of butterscotch make British ales taste like British ales.

“Diacetyl is one of the first words you learn (in judging beer),” Salazar said. “We are American brewers. We are paid to hate diacetyl. You know how much British brewers hate us for that?”

When I posted the flavor wheel last week, Jonathan wrote that the majority of the descriptors on the wheel don’t describe particularly pleasant flavors. Yep. And I think figuring out how to keep the good ones in and the bad ones out – sometimes in beer that is going to be shipped across the country and maybe mishandled along the way – is a craft.

During the lengthy discussions of “what is craft beer?” (start here) I’ve seen it suggested that Sierra Nevada Brewing and Stone Brewing were craft but no longer are because they grew into production breweries.

That’s poppycock. Both Sierra Nevada and New Belgium have new state-of-the-art bottling lines that will take your breath away, but we’re back to the early question: Is the Big Foot (or Mothership Wit) in the glass any different because it passed through a technically superior bottling line?

Salazar and her husband, Eric, oversee the New Belgium barrel program. La Foile is essentially hand bottled. That beer is something we expect from a great brewery.

Salazar also administers a quite sophisticated quality analysis program at New Belgium, with 24 tasters sitting on her in-house panels. A couple of months ago at the Craft (my italics) Brewers Conference Matt Gilliland of New Belgium talked about “Total Oxidation: Exposure and Increased Flavor Stability.” One measure of success is that after beer changes hands several times over the course a few weeks in the distribution system it is still “true to brand” in the glass.

That’s something else we expect from a great brewery.

The craft beer conundrum: What does it mean?

Beer on the mindI looked up the word conundrum to make sure I was using it appropriately (a question or problem having only a conjectural answer). I already knew I couldn’t look up “craft beer” – thus the conundrum.

We’ve debated the challenge of defining craft beer in this blog and maybe 80 percent of those listed to the right, as well as at Rate Beer, Beer Advocate, the Real Beer community and in at least 1,387 American brewpubs. Good bar talk – as witnessed by the scores of comments in the most recent discussion started by Lew Bryson.

A lot of good – and important – reading, but I don’t see a succinct definition emerging. It’s pretty obvious that debating the meaning of craft beer could occupy an entire semester of Beer Philosophy 101 and still there’d be no conclusion.

I can live with that. I spent a good portion of my working life as a copy editor and supervising copy editors. Writing and editing is a lot easier when you’ve got a dictionary to fall back on. And have I little choice but to use the term craft beer in some stories that I write. I just did a quick search in a story I filed last week for New Brewer, the publication that goes to Brewers Association members, and I see I used the phrase three times. In all three cases, even though the definition is imperfect, no other would have worked as well.

So perhaps whenever I type craft beer here I should include a link to the 50th comment, posted by Mr. Bryson himself.

The real subject is beer, or as Lew writes the beer in the glass.

Which takes us back to where the discussion started, a Anheuser-Busch Beach Bum Blonde Ale tasting note, and Lew’s column earlier in the month about the benefits of tasting beer blind.

I have this blog with a name – that to many people doesn’t exactly make sense – predicated on the idea that where your beer comes from (way before it gets in your glass) and how it is made changes what is in the glass and how you feel about it. So I think it’s OK to give extra points (were we scoring the beer – which of course we don’t do around here) to New Belgium Mothership Wit beer because it’s organic or because of the brewery’s commitment to sustainability or because you like bicycles.

But you are shorting yourself if you don’t objectively evaluate what’s in the glass. That means you don’t give a brewer you like a pass when he or she conjures up a below average beer. It means that if you see a good reason to try a beer from a brewery you’re not a fan of that you give yourself an honest chance to like the beer.

Craft is not a synonym for good or an antonym for evil empire.

I started to write a comment to meet Lew’s request to describe the “characteristics (of craft beer) that you can see, taste, and smell in the glass” before I realized (d’oh) the description wasn’t about craft beer, but just beer itself.

Aromas, culture and sorting out what we taste

Beer flavor wheelClass will be in session next week when Mike Steinberger launches a three-part series on sensory perception and wine at Slate, the online magazine.

Steinberger warms up with a discussion of why wine writers use the descriptions they do.

What does this have to do with beer? The wine flavor wheel and the beer flavor wheel (click on the image to enlarge) are different, but the fact is that flavors are flavors and aromas are aromas.

The parallels are not perfect. Steinberger talks about the evolution of how the wine writers describe wines, but I’ve never see a similar history of beer tasting notes. But when he documents that there are scientific explanations – that is, fermentation byproducts that can be measured – for flavors and aromas he could just as well be talking about beer.

That’s why I’m looking forward to the series.

Reading his story sent me rifling through notes taken while reading Emperor of Scent.

The book relates mostly to the perfume industry, though there’s plenty about the disagreement (and politics) within the academic community about how we smell. You realize that Luca Turin, the protagonist, doesn’t perceive aromas like you and I. Just as different people perceive beer differently.

Early on Turin says, “You know perhaps the edge I have in turning smell into language is that for me smell has always had an utterly solid reality that, to my utter astonishment, it doesn’t seem to have for other people. Every perfume I’ve ever smelled has been like a movie, sound and vision …”

He also says, “France is a country that understands that, much as in music an orchestra is not just violins, the range of smells that makes life interesting includes some rather severe ones.

“Your taste and smell is part biology and part culture…. When they smell (rotten cheese) Americans think, ‘Good God!‘ The Japanese think, ‘I must now commit suicide.’ The French think, ‘Where’s the bread?'”

As the parent of a 10-year-old American who has developed an affection for stinky (and not cheap) cheese I can tell you that is changing.

Updated June 21: Steinberger so far has examined the age-old stoner’s question: Do you taste what I taste? Then whether or not he’s a “supertaster.” And tomorrow, he’ll explore whether being a supertaster helps you evaluate wine. Some good stuff (good read it), but I’m waiting for all three parts comment. Since I’m off to the National Homebrewers Conference in Denver it will be the beginning of next week before I can.

Olympia brewery tradition survives

Olympia stubbyThis is the sort of “blast from the past” we all should appreciate.

The Olympian reports that Fish Brewing has revived the tradition of blowing a steam whistle at 5 p.m. to mark the end of a workday, just as the Olympia Brewing Co. did for years in nearby Tumwater.

The Olympia brewery whistle last blew with its full-blown authority June 20, 2003, and then was donated to the city of Tumwater by brewery owner/seller Miller Brewing Co.

Tumwater officials were reluctant to sell or lend the whistle to the Fish Brewing Co., so about six months ago, the Fish brewers scraped up $1,000 to buy their own brass whistle. It used to blow at a Tacoma plywood plant.

Without any fanfare, the brewery employees mounted the whistle on the brewhouse roof, connected it to the steam boiler, rigged up a pull chain in the boiler room and started tooting it for five seconds at 5 p.m.

“The brewery was boring without the whistle,” Fish chief executive officer Lyle Morse said in jest the other day as 5 p.m. drew near.

On some days, brewery employees go across Jefferson Street to the Fish Tale BrewPub and bring a patron over to blow the whistle.

Probably not good business for Fish to begin bottling some of its beers in the famous “stubbies” Olympia used to use (pictured above). Not certain it might make the guys at We Want the Olympia Beer Stubby Back would be happy (they likely want Olympia inside the bottle), but it sure would be interesting.

A prediction nobody would have made in 1962

Holy Beer!What if the American beer clock had stopped in 1962?

(It’s a silly notion, because there’s that time marches on thing always happening. But stick with me.)

Anheuser-Busch was the largest brewing company in the country, but not by much (it commanded less than 10% of the market). Next were Jos. Schlitz Brewing, Falstaff Brewing, Carling Brewing, Pabst Brewing, Ballantine & Sons, Hamm’s Brewing, F & M Schaefer Brewing and Liebmann Brewing.

The 10 largest brewing companies controlled 52% of the market.

Whatever small breweries there were operated under the radar. This question came to me when I was looking something up in Stanley Barron’s Brewed in America. This is a terrific history of American beer, except it stops in 1962 (when the book was published).

In it Baron describes how hard (almost impossible) it was is for a brewery with capacity of less than 100,000 barrels to compete. He writes, “Probably the smallest of all commercial breweries in the United States is the Earnest Fleckenstein Brewing Co. of Fairbault, Minnesota, with a capacity of around 20,000.” Of course, Anchor Brewing was probably smaller – by the time Fritz Maytag’s investment in 1965 kept Anchor from closing the company brewed only about 600 barrels a year.

Brewed in AmericaA quick aside: Beerbooks.com has reproduced Brewed in America, making life much easier than when I had to hunt through many used books stores before I found it. Those who chafed when Maureen Ogle left out 200 years of ale brewing history in Ambitious Brew – for perfectly logical reasons already discussed more than enough – will like this book better.

Like Ambitious Brew and Beer & Food, but long before, Baron nicely details how lager beer, then lighter lager beer became the American alcoholic beverage. Perhaps those of us who enjoy beer outside the mainstream wouldn’t consider the beer future as bright as he did, but that’s another matter.

His final words are particularly interesting:

“If any changes occur in the product it will be because they contribute either to swelling the sales total or slimming down the cost of manufacture without compromising the product.

“Curiously, one of the means by which beer sales have been pushed to record levels in recent times has been the successful campaign to bring beer back to its original social position: a universal beverage. It is no longer the workingman’s drink, it is no longer a German drink, it is no longer exclusively a man’s drink … most of those temporary labels have been removed by one method or another, and the acceptance of beer is closer than ever to where it was at the beginning. The kettle in the kitchen has given way to the tremendous factory covering several blocks, but the drink in the glass fills the same purpose it always has.”

That was 1962. Beer’s image took a beating, and it’s taken the work of mostly small brewers – now joined by Anheuser-Busch’s Here’s to Beer campaign – to begin to restore it.

But what if the clock had stopped? Baron knew it wouldn’t. In his introduction he writes of expecting without making real predictions:

“There is no telling what sort of beer will be most popular in 1975 (two years, it turns out, before Jack McAuliffe sold his first New Albion beer). Though imported lagers constitute only a tiny fraction of the American market, even that small popularity may indicate that a taste for more of the hop-flavor is reawakening. The rise in sales of ale may prove a significant factor. It has taken a hundred years to arrive at the beer most popular today, and it may take just as long to develop any noticeable difference. This is an industry which has never been given to tampering with its product and changes dictated by consumer preference have been cautious and slow.”

Seems like he was on to a few things there – but wrong about it taking 100 years.

That’s because of breweries smaller than anybody could imagine in 1962, and brewers who weren’t thinking first about “swelling the sales total or slimming down the cost of manufacture.”