the session

Session #102: The Landscape of beer

Budville, New Mexico

WE’RE NOT IN BUDVILLE ANY MORE

 

The SessionJack Perdue has posted the roundup for The Session 101 (“Bottles, Caps and Other Beer Detritus”) and Allen Huerta has announced the topic for the next Session will be “The Landscape of Beer.”

He provides several suggestions (“How do you see that landscape now? What about in 5, 10, or even 20 years?”) for a potential post, but the title itself provokes several ideas. For instance, it could be an opportunity to review The Geography of Beer: Regions, Environment, and Societies. Or to dig into one of the chapters, such as “Microbreweries, Place, and Identity in the United States.” Or to use suite of stories from the spring issue of American Brewer (“Tectonic Shift: The Changing Landscape of Brewery Ownership”) to add context to last week’s Duvel-Firestone Walker deal.

The next Session is Aug. 7.

The Session #100 topic announced

The SessionJack Perdue has announced the topic for The Session #101 will be Bottles, Caps and Other Beer Detritus.

Here is the premise: “While the number and quality of our beer choices has certainly improved over the recent decade, have you paid any attention to the rest of the package. Those things we normally glance over and throw away when we have poured and finished our beer. These are sometimes works of art in themselves. Bottle caps, labels, six-pack holders, even the curvature of the bottle. For this month’s The Session theme, I’m asking contributors to share their thoughts on these things, the tangential items to our obsession.”

For some people they are not the tangential items but the obsession itself.

Session #100: What makes a beer historically accurate?

Phoneix Kentucky Komon

Reuben Gray hosts the 100th gathering of The Session and asks blogs to write about “Resurrecting Lost Beer Styles.” Visit his site for links to other contributions.

The SessionWhen David Pierce set out to brew the first commercial batch of Kentucky Common in, well nobody knows how many, years “it was still back when we all thought it (had been) a sour beer.” That was 1994 and Pierce was brewmaster at Bluegrass Brewing Co. in Louisville.

We’ve since learned the idea that the process used to brew Kentucky Common in the early years of the twentieth century included a sour mash is just plain wrong. But, going on the best information anybody had to offer, Pierce began with a 100 percent sour mash, mashing in hot one night and arriving to a horrific smell at the brewery the next day. It was not an easy beer to sell. Roger Baylor at Rich O’s Public House in New Albany, across the Ohio River from Louisville, did his best to support a beer he thought was historically important. He promoted it as “beer formaggio.”

Pierce made the beer periodically in the following years before he left BBC to work for Baylor at New Albanian Brewing. He refined the process, souring only part of the mash, creating a beer than wasn’t as pungent. He thought the fifth, and last, batch was probably the best. “We couldn’t give it a way,” he said. Then somebody suggested they call it a Belgian sour brown ale. The last seven barrels (14 kegs) sold out in a week.

In the years since, meticulous research by Leah Dienes, Dibbs Harting, and Conrad Selle established that if Kentucky Common occasionally turned out sour in the marketplace in the years before Prohibition it wasn’t on purpose, and it certainly wasn’t made using a sour mash. That is reflected in the recently released BJCP Style Guidelines. Kentucky Common is in Category 27, Historical Beers, and the guidelines even specify “Enter soured versions in American Wild Ale.” That works fine for judging in a homebrew competition, particularly in a historic context, but what about modern day commercial beers? Kentucky Common now has a 20-year history in which a sour mash is used in the brewing process.

Granted the modern history is limited. However, if you are looking for a “Kentucky Common” brewed in Kentucky and sold outside of Kentucky it is going to be Against the Grain’s Kamen Knuddeln, which is a blend of a young sour-mashed beer and a barrel-aged stout. Jerry Gnagy gets a lactobacillus starter from Four Roses Bourbon for the sour mash. It makes perfect sense that had Kentucky Common been brewed continuously for a hundred-and-some years that it might evolved or at least different versions would have emerged. Using lacto from a nearby distillery? Makes sense. Include a portion of beer aged in bourbon barrels? Also indigenous.

Last month, as part of the Derby City Brewfest it hosted, Bluegrass Brewing invited participating breweries to make a Kentucky Common. Eight Commons ended on offer, some sour, some not. Because we were in Kentucky the following week I got a chance drink several of them. I certainly could have wasted a larger chunk of an afternoon than I did drinking New Albanian’s Phoenix Kentucky Komon and chatting with Baylor (who has currently stepped away from the business while he runs for mayor of New Albany). It is not an easy beer to make, and the brewery does it just once a year on its smaller four-barrel system — yes, four barrels a year; like I wrote, a pretty limited modern history. “It’s one of my roughest mashes of the year,” brewer Ben Minton said, in this case because of the percentage of corn and temperamental false bottom in the mash tun. “It comes out a little different every time.”

Apocalypse Brewing, Louisville

Two historic (in other words, not sour) versions I had at Apocalypse Brewing were equally delightful. Dienes had her Oertel’s 1912, which is based on the records in Oertel’s brewing logs and the only example of the style in the BJCP guidelines, on tap. Harting brought his homebrewed version. It is the only beer he struggles to keep on tap. “Oh dad, can I take a common home?” Harting said, quoting one of his children. “I’m sure it was a fabulous bucket (growler) beer,” he added.

This works for me. Kentucky Common of the past. Kentucky Common of the present. Kentucky Common of the future. There doesn’t have to be just one.

Session #100 announced: Resurrecting the beer dead

The SessionThat The Session has persisted for 100 months seems pretty astonishing to me. It apparently has outlasted Wine Blogging Wednesday. Coincidentally, the 100th edition of Beer Advocate magazine recently shipped to subscribers and beer friendly establishments where it is available. It includes a timeline with highlights from years beginning in 2007 — at that time, the Brewers Association defined as craft beer accounted for 3.8 percent of the market and Ray Daniels was just starting the Cicerone program.

Host Reuben Gray’s choice for Session #100 — Resurrecting Lost Beer Styles — leans heavily on history, so it seems like a good one for marking a milestone. He writes:

There are many of them (lost styles) that have started to come back in to fashion since in the last 10 years due to the rise of craft beer around the world.

If you have a local beer style that died out and is starting to appear again then please let the world know. Not everyone will so just write about any that you have experienced. Some of the recent style resurrections I have come across in Ireland are Kentucky Common, Grodziskie, Gose1 and some others. Perhaps it’s a beer you have only come across in homebrew circles and is not even made commercially.

I’ve probably already written too much about Gose and Grodziskie and after visiting Louisville and Lexington last week I know too much about Kentucky Common. Here’s the brewery cat at Apocolypse Brew Works sleeping on brew logs Conrad Selle brought to share, and — pro tip — I’m the guy to avoid at the party in the days right after a productive research trip. You won’t have to buy the next book; you will have already heard it.

Brewery cat snoozes at Apocolypse Brew Works in Louisville, Kentucky

But while I was talking to brewers in Kentucky a nagging thought returned. These beers disappeared, or nearly disappeared, because not enough people were buying them. So why should they be commercially viable now?

*****

1 Gose, Grodziskie and Kentucky Common are among the beers described in Historical Beer (Category 27) in the 2015 BJCP Style Guidelines released last week.

The Session #99 roundup posted

The SessionAllstair Reese has posted the roundup for The Session #99: Localising Mild.

It is reminder to find yourself a beer from a brewery participating in American Mild Month. I haven’t yet.

Also, be on the lookout for Reuben Gray’s official announcement about the topic (the preview: it “will be about lost/almost forgotten beer styles”) for the June Session. After all, it will be No. 100.