The Session #114: A St. Louis pilsner

The SessionWe Changed The World … For This?
[Via All About Beer]
An American Story.
IPAs as National Tradition.
[Both via Beervana]

Whoa! What’s all of this have to do with The Session #114, given that Alistair Reece has asked us to write about pilsners? But what Jeff Alworth has to say about the use of American hops and about how American brewers, and now brewers around the world who are mimicking them, is relevant.

Urban Chestnut Brewing Forest Park PilsnerThere is such a thing as an Americanized pilsner out there that has nothing to do with Miller Lite. Who You Callin’ Wussie from Arrogant Brewing* is an example. It is a well made flavorful beer, brimming with lots of aromas and flavors, some of which you won’t find in an old world pilsner. Basically, it’s kind of loud and it bangs into the furniture. That’s OK, as long as it is adding diversity, not eliminating choice. These are the sorts of things you should be thinking about when you read Lew Bryson’s column in All About Beer.

*Yes, this is the same brewery as Stone, although I find the explanation exhausting.

I’m not sure any beer can get inside your bones like certain music — let’s say just about any song from Son Volt’s Trace — but one like Stammtisch from Urban Chestnut Brewing just up the road from us, or Live Oak Pilz, or Marble Pils, has a better chance than any IPA I can think of. Or a pilsner like Wussie, which ranked seventh in a blind tasting of pilsners conducted by Paste magazine. Stammtisch was first, and Pilz and Pils apparently were not tasted.

Paste praises Urban Chestnut for brewing “superlative German beer styles.” I understand this, but maybe because I’ve been in St. Louis almost as long as Urban Chestnut (and Daria has been here longer) I figure I’m drinking St. Louis beer, not German beer. Part of the attraction of Stammtisch is that it has become a familiar flavor, just as Trace is familiar. Oh, and that drinking a liter isn’t a challenge. It’s more like humming along when Jay Farrar sings, “Ste. Genevieve can hold back the water, but saints don’t bother with a tear stained eye.”

*****

The beer in the photo is Urban Chestnut’s Forest Park Pilsner, which is brewed with six-row barley malt, corn, and Cluster hops. I wrote about in the August/September issue of Craft Beer & Brewing.

Step one: Heat 800 pounds of rocks

Six brewers and 800 pound of rocks. There was no efficiency on display Monday at Scratch Brewing outside of Ava, Illinois.

Visitors from Jester King Brewing inn Texas — co-founder Jeff Stuffings, head brewer Garrett Crowell, and production manager Averie Swanson — joined Marika Josephson, Aaron Kleidon, and Frank Wesseln of Scratch to make 60 gallons of wort. It is fermenting now in a used wine barrel and soon will be beer. Details later, beyond the facts that is was mashed in a barrel and filtered through cedar branches, boiled in barrels, contains a variety of botanicals, and is fermenting with Scratch’s sourdough bread yeast.

Any single one of these things would make a beer unique, but the true inefficiencies are realized by bringing wort to a boil with rocks. It is like viewing history live, but makes it clear people must really have wanted to drink beer when it took this much work to make it.

Building a fire to make stone beer (stein bier) at Scratch Brewing
Step 1: Bury stones in a pile of scrap wood and set it afire.

Jeff Stuffings delivers hot stones to boiling barrel at Scratch Brewing
Step 2: Haul heated stones, one at a time, to the boiling barrel.

Lower hot stones into wort at Scratch Brewing

Lower hot stones into wort at Scratch Brewing

Lower hot stones into wort at Scratch Brewing
Steps 3-4-5: Submerge stone.
Stein bier (stone beer) boil over at Scratch Brewing
Step 6: Watch for boil overs. Oops.

That dream beer job? There’s a job element

MONDAY BEER LINKS, MUSING, 08.01.2016

Brewing Historians…Way More than Beer.
Fred’s beer: a sampling of what he left behind.
If you are an archivist who has written about beer, as Daria is, or a journalist who has written about the history of beer, as I have, when a story appears that may be headlined “The Smithsonian Will Pay Someone $64,000 a Year to Drink (and Research) Beer” you are going to see multiple versions of it show up in your inbox. The first post, from Susan Evans, director of Smithsonian Food History programs at the National Museum of American History, provides a better explanation of what the job is really about than most of the headlines. The second post, from Tiah Edmunson-Morton, archivist at Oregon State University, is a snapshot of what it is like to be an archivist, why preservation matters, and as a bonus includes lots of details about the Fred Eckhardt Papers.

“So I encourage you all to engage in the history that is meaningful to you and represents the places you live. Engage in preserving, collecting, and sharing the history of your communities – and find a place for those materials to live, safely, so that we can keep them accessible for future generations.” [Via Oregon Hops & Brewing Archives ]

‘Beer shaming’ is a real thing.
Sad. [Via OnMilwaukee]

Are Craft Breweries in Colorado Reaching the Saturation Point?
The “how many breweries is too many breweries?” question really is a local one, isn’t it? [Via Fermentedly Challenged]

Cream Beer Before Cream Ale In 1820s New York City.
Francis Perot Brewed 116 Times In 1821 to 1822.
It will be interesting to see where this leads. [Via A Good Beer Blog]

Ready-to-Sell Brewery Bought, Surprising None.
“Here in Oregon, no one is gnashing her teeth.” If a beer (or the brewery where is is made) hasn’t connected with drinkers in the place where it is brewed can it elsewhere? [Via Beervana]

Why You Should Be Skeptical About The Purported Health Benefits of Beer.
Every week there are stories about the healthy or unhealthy consequnces of drinking beer. It’s probably best to approach them all — positive or negative — with certain skepticism.[Via Homebrew Academy]

Hops: A hundred year trend reversed

Hops usage (alpha acids per hectoliter)

This chart is actually one that Alex Barth, president of John I. Haas, showed at the 2015 American Hop Convention. It’s relevant right now because today the Barth-Haas Group released its annual hop report. And it confirms the projection Alex Haas made 18 months ago.

The chart tracks hop usage since 1971. One hundred years ago brewers used the equivalent of 12.6 grams of alpha acids per hectoliter (26.4 gallons or 85% of a barrel). That had fallen to 9.1 grams in 1971 and continued to drop regularly until it was just over 4 grams in 2011. It ticked up to 4.5 grams in 2011 and will reach 5.4 this year.

This doesn’t mean that beers are getting more bitter. It means that brewers are using hop differently and using more of them.

Because of heightened interest in hops much of what is in the report has already been reported. The archives are invaluable if you want to look up how much Strisselspalt the French grew 20 years ago, or if the hop called Record (which is in this year’s Sierra Nevada Oktoberfest) was ever very popular, or what spot prices were in any particular year.

This year’s report begins with a discussion of “How hops have changed the world of beer, and vice versa…”

The central task of hop research used to be “quite simple.” The breeding of new hop varieties focused on yield, alpha acid content and resistance to diseases and pests. This met most of the requirements of both the hop and brewing industry. When, after many years, a new hop variety was finally licensed, the brewing industry accepted it and brewed its beers with it – mostly with success. This went on for years – until a completely new generation of brewers grew up in the United States. More and more breweries were built and more and more people took an interest in brewing beer – not only on a small scale for their own consumption, but also on a large scale for sale to others. Suddenly, hop aroma acquired a totally new standing. The craft brewers had taken a fancy to the aroma varieties in particular. Gradually, they developed their own ideas, philosophies, techniques and innovations with regard to brewing which have meanwhile found their way into the world at large. … At the same time, there arose a growing desire for unusual hop aromas, and within a relatively short period of time new hop varieties with a wide range of flavours appeared.”

That’s why, by their count, in 2012 the number of hop varieties worldwide stood at 180; today there are 250 varieties. That doesn’t include hops been reconsidered when they grow in different regions. For instance, Gorst Valley Hops has renamed Chinook, calling it Skyrocket, because in Wisconsin the hop is less piney and resinous and smells more tropical. And in New Zealand the new name for Cascade is “Taiheke.”

Of course, the most popular varieties are driving growth.

Variety20112015Growth
Cascade1,0022,748174%
Centennial3081,807487%
Simcoe2001,338569%
Citra971,2111148%
Amarillo185683269%
Crystal54245354%

The acreage here is measured in hectares (I know, maybe it should be called hectarage), and there are 2.47 acres to a hectare. A couple of varieties not in the chart because acreage was not reported in 2011: Mosaic 36 ha in 2012 and 728 in 2015; and El Dorado 39 in 2013 and 181 in 2015.

The Session #114: Pilsners

The SessionWhen The Session began more nine years ago — so before half of the breweries now operating in U.S. had opened — it focused on exploring styles.And it will again next week. Host Alistair Reece has asked us to write about pilsners for The Session #114.

What I want folks to do is put down their IPAs, their Belgians, their sours, their barrel aged stuff, and hunt out a few pilsners to compare and contrast, whether they be Czech, German, Belgian, American, etc, etc. Try to get examples of Czech and German in particular to see the differences. Most of all though I just want people to re-discover what I consider the pinnacle of the brewing craft, so off hunting you go.

The next Session is Aug. 5.