musing

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.

Other historic beers on my wish list

As I type this nobody has come up with the starting bid of $1,500 for eight bottles of Ballantine Burton Christmas beer, and it’s not going to be me.

Sure, I wish I had a chance to try the beer. It’s intriguing that it would have stood up all these years, but as long as we are wishing for impossible things … I’d like to have a taste of what it was like in the 1960s or ’70s, when Fritz Maytag and other new wave brewers tasted it. It likely influenced where a new generation of beers was headed.

There are other beers like that – I’m not interested in old bottles that turn up, but what they tasted like at their prime – but I’ll start with a simple 6-pack.

1. Ballantine Burton Ale. For reasons already stated.

New Albion sign at Russian River Brewing

2. New Albion Ale. New Albion was the first American microbrewery built from scratch and you simply cannot measure its impact. The Brewers Association this year honored founder Jack McAuliffe. Michael Jackson wrote that this was the “truest to the (English ale) model in its hoppy bitterness and well-attenuated body.”

(The photo is a sign that used to hang at New Albion and now sits above the window looking into the barrel room at Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa.)

3. Cartwright Portland Beer. Cartwright was Oregon’s first micro, and Don Younger of the Horse Brass Pub tells wonderful stories about the excitement surrounding the arrival of its first beer. Problem is Cartwright beers weren’t very good (Jackson refers to “some technical” woes). The second micro, BridgePort, was much better, and you know the rest about what happened in Portland.

4. Newman’s Pale Ale. Bill Newman opened the first micro east of the Mississippi in 1981 and kept it running until 1987, exerting influence mostly forgotten 20 years later. He was devoted to the English model, fining his beer in casks and serving it at cellar temperature. In Beer School, Steve Hindy and Tom Potter write “he refused to compromise with anything modern.”

5. Shiner “Old World Bavarian Draft.” Locals still talk about the dark Bavarian-style beer that brewmaster Kosmos Spoetzl brought with him from Germany in 1915. It was brewed into the 1960s but had different names after Prohibition. Spoetzl had a strong German consumer base, but it is still interesting that he was able sell an all-malt German-style lager at time (pre-Prohibition) the rest of the country was drifting toward lagers lighter in color and flavor. After all, Shiner is in Texas (south of San Antonio).

6. Anchor Steam (circa 1965). Maytag readily admits the beer was sour and not very good when he first tasted it and bought a controlling share of the brewery. The American beer revolution hasn’t been driven by steam beer, but without that (then) sour beer …

Forget those tasting rooms in Texas

The bill in the Texas Legislature that would allow microbrewers to sell their product on the premises of their breweries appears to be dead.

Brock Wagner of Saint Arnold Brewing told the Austin Chronicle:

Our bill was opposed by Mike McKinney of the Wholesale Beer Distributors of Texas, and with him opposed to it, we were not able to even get a hearing on the bill in committee.”

Makes no sense to me. If you take the tour, begin to appreciate the place where the beer is made, maybe have a free sample, and then want to buy a 6-pack to take home shouldn’t you be allowed to?

Can you ‘nail’ a Belgian style?

Dan CareyIn all fairness to Todd Haefer – who writes a Beer Man column that appears in many newspapers part of the Gannett chain and already catches enough grief for some of his comments – he didn’t write the headline and the term didn’t appears in his copy, but here it is:

Beer Man: New Glarus nails the Belgian style

The headline made me giggle. Haefer is writing about New Glarus Belgian Quadruple, part of brewer Dan Carey’s “Unplugged” series. Quadruple is simply a word you don’t hear Belgian brewers use. It became a term of convenience – meaning dark and very strong, ala Westvleteren 12 or Rochefort 10 – after Koningshoeven began shipping LaTrapppe Quad to the United States in the mid-1990s. That Trappist monastery is located in The Netherlands.

So not only does the headline insinuate that any style is something so specific that it can be “nailed” but that a Belgian brewer or consumer would cotton to the idea.

Speaking of styles serves many good purposes, but testifying for the other side here is Carl Kins, a Belgian beer enthusiast who has judged several times for the Great American Beer Festival and World Beer Cup. “We Belgians do not like categorization that much. Whether it is strong blonde ale or abbey style is not very relevant, as long as the beer tastes good,” he said in the chapter called Matters of Style in Brew Like a Monk.

Last week Stephen Beaumont wrote about this beer and Enigma, another in the “Unplugged” series. Spend a little time with his descriptions and it becomes apparent that Carey is more focused on “nailing” a great beer than capturing, or recreating, a style.

Beer geeks and bookworms

So how come we don’t call beer geeks beerworms? Maybe because it sounds gross, but then why doesn’t bookworm?

Blame Stone Brewing in California – those otherwise sometime arrogant folks – for this question. Stone next month (June 4) initiates a Book & A Beer Club On the Grass at its modestly named World Bistro and Garden.

From the press release:

If this seems suspiciously similar to the type of activity enjoyed by little old ladies at the neighborhood Rec. Center, guess again. Instead of tea and biscuits—32 taps of beer and Arrogant Bastard Onion Rings! Imagine the possibilities…

CS Forester and BallantineI’m a sucker for the beer and book connection. It’s so civilized. After all, Brother Joris – the monk in charge of brewing the coveted Westvleteren beers – is also the librarian at the abbey Saint Sixtus where the beers are produced.

Back in the early 1950s, Ballantine Ale sought endorsements from many famous artists, including Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. This one is from C.S. Forrester, with his answer to the question “How do you put a glass of Ballantine Ale into words?”

“There’s always a first time for everything. And I still remember my first Ballantine Ale.

“I had ordered my first helles in Munich, my first bock in Paris. As a rather bewildered young man in New York, I did a two-hour sight-seeing tour before being shipped to Hollywood, and in the half-hour before my train was to go, I had my first Ballantine Ale.

“So my first recollection of Ballantine is linked with the Port of New York, the Empire State Building, and Grand Central Station. All of them were different from anything that had ever come into my experience – and all of them great.

“Even then, I realized that the flavor of Ballantine Ale was unique. I thought it better than any brew I had met in Europe’s most famous beer gardens. I still do.”

Back to June 4 at Stone.

The first book up is The Omnivore’s Dilemma, the best book I read last year. Michael Pollan’s examination of industrial corn (the first section) seems to become more important daily (jeez, even affecting beer prices), but the second section (pastoral grass) is my favorite part of the book.

If you live close enough to Escondido to consider dropping by they’d appreciate an RSVP.

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