musing

10 years of Falling Rock

Chris BlackDon Younger is going to stop by. Will you?

Granted, Younger – the venerable Portland, Oregon, publican who founded the Horse Brass Pub in 1976 – has his own stool at Falling Rock Tap House in Denver, but he seldom uses it in June.

He’ll be in Denver this week because Falling Rock celebrates its 10th anniversary.

The circumstances will be grander than when the multi-tap (69-75 tap handles operating, depending on the day, and “No Crap on Tap”) opened June 9, 1997. Chris Black (above), one of three founding brothers, didn’t realize that many of the distributors would deliver beer warm, so the bar was open for about four hours that day, then closed to organize and cool beer for the next day.

Black has different special beers planned for each days the celebration, and Belvedere Belgian Chocolate Shop is creating different chocolates to go with each beer. The first 50 customers each evening get a bar with a label that list the participating brewery as well as how many days the Falling Rock has been open.

Chris BlackThe beers are all locally brewed, and Black helped in production of several. For instance, Saturday he’ll be pouring a batch of La Foile he helped blend. New Belgium Brewing typically uses beer from two or three of its 10 foders (four 60- and six 130-hectoliter wood tuns) for a La Foile release. Black sat down with Eric Salazar of New Belgium to taste samples from all 10 tuns, and together they came up with a special batch.

The party kicks off the day before with Mr. Hoppy, made by Twisted Pine Brewing in Boulder. Gordon Knight founded Twisted Pine, where he brewed on New Belgium’s original five-hectoliter brewhouse. He later sold the company, but eventually was reunited with the brewing system when he started the Wolf Tongue Brewery in Nederland. That’s where he created Mr. Hoppy, a beer that Jim Parker (then the Wolf Tongue GM) called “hop water.”

There are a lot of reasons to post this at Appellation Beer (as opposed to Beer Travelers), but the best might be to remember Knight. He epitomized what I want to write about.

Knight was a Nebraska native who earned a Purple Heart as an Army helicopter pilot in Vietnam. He moved to Boulder in 1988, and soon turned from homebrewing to professional brewing. He also worked as a professional helicopter pilot, most often in fire fighting. He died in 2002 when his helicopter crashed while he was fighting a fire near Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

Reflecting on Knight’s life, brewer Brian Lutz said: “Gordon didn’t have jobs, Gordon had passions. Gordon’s job was his passion and visa versa. That’s a good way to live and I thank him for challenging me to do the same.”

Let’s hope a few Coloradoans with good memories raise a glass of Mr. Hoppy in his memory on Friday.

Just a few of the others beers:

– Great Divide’s Hades (strong, golden and Belgian) makes its official debut on Sunday.
– Black Triple 6’s from Wynkoop on June 12. This is a variation on a beer brewed 6/6/06 by Wynkoop, which Chris helped make this time. Brewed in the manner of a Belgian tripel but with coffee in the recipe.
– Chris brewed a batch of Odell Double IPA with Doug Odell on the brewery’s five-barrel pilot system for June 15. The recipe includes a new high alpha (18.8 AA) hop called Apollo.
– June 16, Avery Salvation (a Belgian strong golden) aged since September in Eagle Rare Bourbon barrels.

The celebration runs through June 17. Then we can start resting up for the 20th anniversary of San Francisco’s Toronado in August.

How do you overlook 100 million cases of beer?

Better image for beerHere’s a multiple choice question:

a) Beer is an industrial product.
b) Beer is an artisanal product.
c) Wine is a pastoral/agricultural product.
d) Wine is an industrial product.

Which if these choices do you think Field Maloney chose in a story that appeared the web magazine Slate? I’ll give you a hint. The headline read: Beer in the Headlights. Sales are flat. Wine is ascendant. How did this happen?

He wrote about a) and c). We know – and I’m pretty sure he does, too – that the correct answer is “all of the above.”

I’m hoping that Jay Brooks gets around to a complete critique of this story (looks like he did), because a beer guy can find a lot to object to – whether it is the way that he uses a genuine beer expert like Lew Bryson to add beer cred or the less-than-accurate description of how beer is made.

(Or the fact that he writes “A Google search of beer and passion yields 1.48 million entries, while wine and passion yields four times that.” When I did that a minute ago the numbers were 1.7 million and 2 million.)

Much of what Mr. Maloney writes is correct. The largest American breweries have an image problem, although projects like Anheuser-Busch’s Here’s to Beer may be helping. Connoisseurship, passion and lifestyle are increasingly important.

However, I’m not buying into the wine/hand-crafted and beer/industrial premise. Consider these facts:

– Two Buck Chuck, called Charles Shaw wines in better company but still selling for $1.99 in California and a bit more elsewhere, last year accounted for 5 million cases of sales in 274 Trader Joe’s across the country. In California, wine heaven, eight out of 100 bottles of all wine sold are Two Buck Chuck. So growth hasn’t been fueled only by the “fine-wine industry.”

– The ascendance of fine wine and fine dining is generally linked to Northern California in the 1970s. That’s when Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley and vintners from Napa and Sonoma scored their victories in the “Judgment of Paris.” It’s ALSO when Fritz Maytag modernized Anchor Brewing, effectively making it the first American microbrewery. Soon Jack McAuliffe founded New Albion Brewing, then Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi started Sierra Nevada, and we were off and running.

Last year the breweries we call craft produced comparable to 100 million cases – all less generic than Two Buck Chuck.

Hey, Slate, how did this happen?

Flying Dog plans ‘open source’ beer

Beer Open Source ProjectFlying Dog Ales – which has more happening on the Internet than any other brewery I know of – has launched its own Open Source Beer Project.

The idea is to allow beer drinkers and homebrewers to create or recommend modifications to a Flying Dog recipe.

The Open Source Beer Project will start as a Dopplebock but the style may evolve as participants offer ideas and tweak the recipe. “We are encouraging input on every part of the recipe, down to how what variety of hops we should use, how much we should use and when we should add them,” said Flying Dog Head Brewer, Matt Brophy.

The open source beer will be Flying Dog’s latest “Wild Dog” release and hit stores in October.

Kudos to Flying Dog for creating an RSS Feed for the project. The brewery has embraced the Internet. Just a few examples:

– It regularly updates its website, and sends out frequent e-mails for contests like a Ralph Steadman Signed Gonzo Bottle drawing.

– It has more friends (8,607 at this moment) than any other craft brewery in/on MySpace.

– It has a Squidoo page.

– The brewery continues to add new videos at YouTube.

Is this marketing? Yes. Should be be wary of marketing? Probably, but a thread runs through the way Flying Dog appears in each of these spaces. The videos are of actual employees – like president/”lead dog” Eric Warner and his truck.

If these aren’t real people behind real beer then it is a heck of an act.

Brewing for the American market

Whether you embrace *xtr*m* beers or not, there’s little argument that Americans’ willingness to try experimental beers has captured the attention of brewers from other countries.

Case in point, Roger Protz visits the Nethergate Brewery on England’s Essex-Suffolk border, which has earned its reputation with excellent mild cask ales.

What does he find brewer Tom Knox working on?

“Belgian beers have helped the appreciation of bottle-conditioned ales in Britain,” Tom said. He plans a 10.5% beer with 85 bitterness units for the American market: it will be finished with Champagne yeast. The range of bottled beers will come in a variety of shapes and sizes, including some with corks and wire cradles in the Belgian fashion.

Twenty years ago you wouldn’t have heard many British, Belgian and German brewers talking about “brewing for the American market” and if they did they certainly weren’t talking about their more flavorful beers.

Is there a winery on the way to the brewery?

GrapesDon’t forget, next Friday is Session #4 and it’s all about drinking local (or regional, or as local/regional as you can be). (How The Session started.)

This will be easier for some than others, but the Brewers Association happily points out the average American lives within 10 miles of a brewery. You probably have seen the numbers: In 1984 there were just 83 breweries operating in the US, down thousands from 100 years before. Today there are more than 1,400.

But beer’s not alone. Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story about the United States of Wine (subscription required) in which is describes the “remarkable expansion of wineries to unlikely places.” Check out these numbers:

There are 5,110 wineries in the country — 1,773 outside of California, Washington, Oregon and New York, according to the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau — and many of them are new. In Texas, 24 wineries opened in 2006, up one-third in just one year, says industry-tracking firm Wines and Vines. Last year, Colorado went from 48 wineries to 70.

Makes sense to me. It takes less than half an hour to walk to the brewpub in the village where a l live, but before I’m half way there I’ll pass a winery.

So my point would be that interest in better beer is not happening in a vacuum. It’s been linked to similar affection for quality food and wine for more than 30 years. It took some people longer to figure that out, but it’s hardly a secret now.