musing

Is the Sam Adams glass really better?

A couple of years ago Boston Beer founder Jim Koch was talking about innovative beers.

“. . .(A) product has to be truly superior and good on its own,” he said, later adding, “We’re not trying to make a pet rock of beer, but new styles that are cherished 100 years from now.”

He made a similar point a few minutes later. “It can’t just be a marketing gimmick. It has to be rooted in product difference. Typically, it’s not just better, but uniquely so,” he said.

Boston Lager glassI thought of that conversation when we were talking about the new tasting glass commissioned for Samuel Adams Boston Lager. To introduce the glass to the press the company sent out a package with two bottles of beer, a Samuel Adams branded shaker glass and the new Samuel Adams Boston Lager glass. It was no contest, but other than the spill factor, pouring Boston Lager into cupped hands might also have been better than a shaker glass.

Is this glass not only better, but markedly so? In fact, I think so, but we’ll get to that.

Koch said that Boston Beer spent several hundred thousand dollars developing the glass. (The details are here.)

“This had to be a legitimate, bona fide, verifiable improvement,” he said. “So much of this can be smoke and mirrors.”

By the 1700s “the proper glass” began to take on meaning with wine drinking types (in other words, all “proper society”), and by the 1800s each type of wine was to have its own glass. For purposes of form, not function.

Thus Champagne was poured in a coupe – a shallow, wide-mouthed glass – although it was the perfectly wrong vessel. Even today, when we know a flute best serves Champagne, you still see it served in coupes because that’s the way it is pictured in somebody book of etiquette.

Just a generation ago American wine drinkers didn’t pay that much attention to glassware, but producers – most notably Austria’s Riedel – have done a great job of convincing drinkers they need a different glass for every style of wine. To persuade us, Riedel promoted the so-called “tongue map,” which is about 100 years out of date.

So Koch approached the project with a proper amount of beer drinkers’ skepticism.

“I wanted this to be rooted in science,” he said. He turned to Tiax, a Boston-area company that’s been combining technology and sensory testing since the 1920s.

“Jim’s approach was unique,” said Jonaki Egenolf, manager for technology marketing at Tiax. “He really wanted true objective analysis. That was different than just trying to leverage expertise within the industry.”

Sarah Garretson Lowery, the sensory analyst for the project, added, “It was unique to see somebody who wasn’t new to an industry come in with such a fresh eye.”

A blogger for Food & Wine magazine wrote the resulting glass looks “like the offspring of a lantern and a goblet, with a narrow base, bulbous center and outward-turned lip-like a translucent Alfred Hitchcock, I guess.”

But that outward turned lip (see the illustration) really seems to work, and the glass persistently delivers great aromatics (so credit that funny bulbous middle).

Koch has found the perfect line – “PBR (Pabst Blue Ribbon) is not going to taste like Sam Adams in this glass” – to make his point that this glass is designed to make Boston Lager taste better, not with other beers in mind. But that doesn’t mean we can’t take a few other beers for a test run.

I did. Ales and lagers. Hoppy beers and not. Some were a little better, some significantly better. Of course, I often could have done just as well with another glass from the cabinet.

And not every beer tasted better. I tried an India Pale Ale that I previously found not particularly well balanced. It was worse. The hops were harsher and even more out of balance.

I didn’t try PBR. There’s only so much I’m willing to do in the name of science.

‘Me too’ in Portland? Not

Following up on Stephen Beaumont’s lament on “me too” pubs.

John Foyston (Warning: reading a blog about the Portland, Ore., beer scene may leave you severely depressed unless you live in Portland) reports that long beer journalist- publican-brewer Jim Parker and brewer Lorren Lancaster are opening a new brewpub called the Green Dragon Ale House & Bistro.

It’s in an area with four microdistilleries, three brewpubs and a bunch o’ good pubs. Just a typical Portland neighborhood.

Here’s the nut:

“Being a publican is a higher calling than just being a barkeep,” Parker said, “and I’m telling distributors that I don’t want flagship beers, I want the beers they’re having the hardest time selling. If you can get the same beer down the street, I don’t want to pour it because I want Portland’s smartest beer drinkers to come to my place. If I serve them just the standard beers, I’m not giving them any credit for their knowledge and sense of adventure…”

The pub is due to open in June. Parker is looking for people to join the Founders Club: Loan him $2,500 for five years and you get your own barstool and a guaranteed place at the bar; and your first beer free and 10% off your bill on every visit.

Beer sommelier redux

Salt sommelier? Water sommelier?

These job descriptions make beer sommelier seem like less of a stretch, don’t you think?

The Los Angeles Times has a story about how the food business is booming, “and with it, there’s a boom in jobs you’ve never heard of.”

Consider the specialty Christina Perozzi has carved out for herself. She calls herself a beer sommelier, doing for microbrews what a traditional sommelier does for Super Tuscans. She says she “geeked out” on beer while working at Father’s Office in Santa Monica, a bar known for its extensive selection of beer, and now her “biggest passion is teaching people how beer pairs with food.” And so she helps restaurants and bars develop beer lists and train their staffs, organizes pairings with chefs at public events and teaches beer classes.

Perozzi has a blog (christinaperozzi.com), is writing a book (“Beer 4 Chx”) and says she would also like to branch out into beer tours, any one of which would have been job enough at one point in time.

Personally, I’d like to nab a job as an “affineur.” It refers to the person who improves the flavor of a cheese through aging for a few months or enhancing by some method such as washing in brandy.

Or maybe beer?

These are our beer glory days

Catching up after 10 days offline (and often off the grid), I see that Eric Asimov of the New York Times devoted his column Wednesday to Overcoming a Frat Party Reputation, an even-handed look at modern day beer culture.

He framed the story by venturing to Boston to share beers with Todd and Jason Alström of Beer Advocate. Asimov writes correctly:

Each of the Web sites has its partisans, and crossover is common, but at beeradvocate.com, discussions seem to get louder, arguments rage more fiercely and passions flow close to the surface.

Asimov repeatedly gets to the point: “. . . the real action in beer culture takes place on a far more visceral level, in the rants about why so many good restaurants have wine lists as thick as books but only carry three beers, or whether beer lovers have a bias against big breweries, or whether high-alcohol extreme beers are great or ruinous.”

And I really like what he notices at the end (go read it). But – and you knew this was coming – there’s something that bugged me.

“One of our main goals is trying to raise the image of beer as a whole and bring back the beer culture,” Todd said. “We had a beer culture but Prohibition kind of reset the button.”

Not exactly. Maureen Ogle surely grimaced if she read this, because in Ambitious Brew she endeavored to correct the oft-told (but factually inaccurate) tale that America had a booming beer culture before Prohibition and that big, greedy brewers flattened it after the Noble Experiment failed.

Bob Skilnik further substantiates that this is a myth in Beer and Food: An American History (more on that book later in the week).

Beer itself began to change in the 1870s – lager took over, beer factories took over, beer brewed with adjuncts took over. And the places where people drank beer also changed. Both Ogle and Madelon Power (Faces along the Bar) document the role the Anti-Saloon League in the ultimate success of those in the Prohibition movement. The Anti-Saloon League would not have succeeded if saloons had not provided plenty to be against.

Bevo MillIt’s not like brewers didn’t know what was going on. In 1916, August A. Busch – the second member of his family to guide Anheuser-Busch – built the Bevo Mill in St. Louis as part of an effort to associate beer with something other than wicked saloons.

Kind of a Here’s to Beer of the early twentieth century. By then, Busch had already launched Bevo, which took its name from the Bohemian pivo (beer) and contained less than one-half percent alcohol. The Bevo Mill, a replica of a Dutch windmill, was a high-class restaurant, with beer and wine (no hard liquor) available only at tables. There was no bar. No sawdust. No bawdy women.

Yes, you could say he was battling windmills with a windmill. That didn’t hold off Prohibition, as you know, but the restaurant still operates today.

My point would be that we are not returning to the past glory days of American beer and beer emporiums. These are the glory days. Peruse the Brewers Association Beer Style Guidelines, all 41 pages, and ask yourself how many of those styles were available in 1870 or 1915. And that’s before we get to the matter of quality.

It’s only been 30 years since Jack McAuliffe launched the short-lived New Albion Brewing Co. so we’re at what? Chapter Two? Chapter Three? This is creation, not re-creation, which is why matters like ingredients, batch size, shaking the frat boys image, and so on are important.

Have you heard about Bud Dubbel?

The SessionHow excited must the people at Anheuser-Busch be about the advent of The Session?

Certainly they must have been disappointed that nobody blogged about Bare Knuckle Stout for the first round of The Session.

Apparently they don’t want to be left out again.

Is it coincidence that Alan McLeod has chosen dubbels as the topic for April 6 and A-B seems to be brewing a beer to that style?

They are. Really. OK, we won’t be looking for it before April 6. Instead of pretending they did it for us it’s time to remove tongue from cheek (thus making it easier to properly taste beer).

Miller’s Brew Blog reports that A-B filed a certificate of label approval application with the Treasury Department’s Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau for three new beers under the Faust banner. Of course that doesn’t guarantee anything, particularly widespread distribution.

The beers are Faust Belgian Style Dubbel (7% abv), Faust Dortmunder Style Lager (5.5%), and Faust Early American Pilsner (5%). (And how about a collective hmmm for that last one?) The brands are attributed to the Beechwood Brewing Group.

The SessionA-B first created a Faust beer for the Oyster House and Restaurant, naming it for its owner, A. E. Tony Faust (best friend of brewery founder Adolphus Busch). In the 1990s the brewery experimented with a series of specialty beers called American Originals. These included American Hop Ale and a golden colored lager called Faust.

The Brew Blog has a long list of other A-B products recently killed or possibly in the works, but these Faust beers look the most interesting.

Even if the Dubbel isn’t in time for what Alan’s calling the “Son of Session.”