What if there were only 4 beer styles?

Although these days it sometimes it seems if there is only one beer style — IPA — more often it seems like there are way too many, starting with the Black, White, Imperial, Session, and Belgian variations on IPA.

But reading Matt Kramer’s “Advice to a Newbie” made me think how nice it would be to classify beers as succinctly as he does wines, dividing them into ust four types. And, no, I wouldn’t agree that ale and lager constitutes succinct. Also, I have no problem with the fact that although he writes this is advice for a newbie that context (thus some working knowledge) helps make sense of it.

His four are fruit wines, soil wines, climate wines, and creativity wines.

That’s it. Beer should be so simple.

*****

In case you missed the noise on Twitter today, IPA Day Round 3 is Aug. 1. And perhaps you are thinking, “IPA: What’s the Big Deal?” That’s the topic for the Session #77 on Friday.

‘Taste and Believe’ – Should you?

Mount Angel Abbey

Friday, Jeff Alworth at Beervana posted the news that the monks at the Mount Angel Abbey plan to build a brewery on their hilltop that overlooks the town of Mount Angel and surrounding farmland, much of covered by hop plants this time of year. And Teri Fahrendorf commented:

I am very happy to hear this. I love visiting Mt Angel Abbey, especially in the spring when the stately chestnut trees are blooming. The flat abbey hilltop is a place of respite and peace. There’s a great bookstore, vespers brings you back to in time to the traditional spirit of medieval Europe, and there are benches to enjoy your picnic lunch while you gaze out across the hop fields. I began visiting when I was brewmaster at Steelhead in Eugene, and I always thought they should have a brewery there. I am very pleased the monks think so too.

That might be all we need to know right now.

However, Jeff has plenty more details that don’t need repeating here.

Of course there’s going to be considerable chatter. And certainly skepticism, starting with the slogan “Taste and Believe.” Believe what? In the quality of the beer? In the spirit behind it? In the role the monks will play in the decision making process and eventually brewing? In a time that marketers have pretty much made words like “tradition” and “genuine” unusable is it enough for monks to explain they live by the rule of Saint Benedict? It was written about A.D. 530 and has a pretty good track record. It calls on monks to be self-sufficient through their own labor. It really is that simple. The brewery will be small, but it will be one more way the monastery sustains itself.

As Jeff wrote, the monks invited us to visit the monastery last September. Among other things we sat in on discussions about branding (more about the “swanky brand identity” at BeerPulse.com) and listened to members of the community discuss in all seriousness everything related to getting into the business of brewing.

I thought about this when I was reading the third installment in Evan Rail’s Triplebock: Three Beer Stories. He emphasizes in the afterword that all are fiction, but that, of course, truth is sometimes best revealed through fiction. “The Brewery at Stelsov Abbey” is the story of a small community of monks who, basically out of desperation, strike a deal for the production of beer within their walls. They do not exhibit the due diligence Jeff and I saw last fall. And the story does not end well.

All of this seemed as if it should have been written down somewhere . . . We could have learned in advance how much Abbey Strelsov would have been asked to change, and we could have seen the price of rushing after money, and how it was not to be treated as an implement or utensil, but as something else entirely. And somewhere, in some missing second volume or torn-out appendix, we could discern the future of our beloved cloister, whose future now is sadly not so clear.

There’s no guarantee that the brewery at Mount Angel Abbey will be a success, but chances are that it will remain the “place of respite and peace” that Teri Fahrendorf remembers.

Further, I would guess that the beer will taste like it comes from that particular place, rather than being from nowhere or anywhere. We’ll find out in a year. Or maybe two. There’s a funny bit of wisdom I once heard visiting another monastery: “If monks had been building the pyramids we’d still be working on them.” They take a long view. From the hilltop on which Mount Angel Abbey sits that’s a particularly long view.

A 5 Grodziskie day, and pictures from Poland

Glass of GrodziskieSo this was the fifth of five Grodziskie beers I had to drink last Friday in Poland, poured from a two-liter bottle by Andrzej Sadownik, who brewed the beer at home.

It was good, but then they all were.

Much has been written about Grodziskie (or Grätzer) and there’s more story ahead. Meanwhile, a few other beer-related photos (I have many non-beer ones from Sunday in Krakow, a very photogenic city) taken during three-plus days in Poland, most of it in Zywiec or nearby.

Beers for sale at Festiwal Birrofilia

I’ve mentioned bits in pieces about Festiwal Birofilia in various posts during the last year, so won’t list everything again. Instead, visit the festival website. Random photo #1 provides just a glimpse at the very wide range of beer available to take home, and also explains why so many people showed up with crates. There were plenty of beers from the United States we never see in St. Louis (which gets plenty you can’t buy in other parts of the country).

Food at Festiwal Birrofilia

Random photo #2. Food. It was amusing to walk around the tourist area of Krakow on Sunday and see so many places advertising, in English, “authentic Polish food.” There’s fake Polish food out there? Pretty sure everything at this stand in Zyweic was real.

Roasting malt at Zywiec Brewery

The Zywiec brewery was open for tours throughout the festival, as was its museum. You didn’t have to join an organized group to visit the demonstration where a couple of brewery workers roasted malted barley for use in Zywiec Porter, a splendid beer. This is not how Zywiec does it today, but is it a cool piece of equipment. It would take something larger to roast all the brewery needs to make 30,000 hectoliters annually at its smaller Cieszyn brewery (the Zywiec brewery produces 5 million hectos a year).

Festiwal Birrofilia beer judging inside Czeslaw Dzielak’s Imperial India Pale Ale won grand champion, which means it will be brewed at the Cieszyn brewery, released Dec. 6 and distributed nationally. You can read about Dzielak here (easier if your browser has some sort of translation mode). Polish homebrewers seemed equally excited to a) see Dzielak win and b) that a beer definitely outside the Polish mainstream would be available through Zywiec’s distribution network.

The brewhouse at Pracownia Piwa

Andreas Richter, quality manager at Weyermann, has been traveling from Bamberg to judge beers at Festiwal Birofilia for six years. He keeps coming back because he’s enjoyed watching the interest in beers beyond pale lagers grow, now exponentially.

Like everywhere, it seems, Polish brewers are struggling to define “craft beer” and “craft brewery.” Restaurant breweries have been around for a while, but quality (apparently equipment as well as beer) is an issue. One alternative is contract brewing. In some cases that simply means handing a brewery a recipe and leaving the rest to its brewers; in others considerably more work (Jan Szala, who has started Browar Szałpiw along with this father, said that his day before the festival included shoveling out a mash tun).

Browar Artezan is the first small Polish brewery founded by homebrewers, opening just in time for Festiwal Birofilia last year. The portfolio has grown since, including even a Grodziskie as well as its impressive Pacific Pale Ale, which appropriately enough shared a tap tower with Anchor Liberty. Pracownia Piwa became the second homebrewer-goes-pro-in-his-own-digs brewery a few months ago.

That’s the Pracownia brewhouse above, a bit of equipment previously used for food processing modified to make beer. Good beer. Stepping into the brewery just outside of Krakow is exactly the same and totally different than walking through the doors of a hundred different small U.S. breweries 15 to 20 years ago.

There’s a dream. The words of the late Greg Noonan echoed in my memory. “When the homebrewers stop entering the profession, and the backyard breweries are squeezed out, then it will become stagnant. You gotta keep getting the guys who say, ‘Cool, I can sell the beer I make. I can do it.'”

Co-owner Tomasz Rogaczewski explained that three years ago he didn’t know it was possible to brew beer at home. Not much more than a year later he had decided he would open a brewery, “to make my dream.”

Rogaczewski seems to always be smiling, and certainly was throughout the festival, pouring his beer inside the main tent, with a good view of the stage when the homebrewing awards were handed out. He was the first to reach Czeslaw Dzielak — who he calls a mentor, finding an even bigger smile explaining most brewers expected Dzielak would have already claimed the prize a year or two before — on the phone and inform him his beer was grand champion. Dzielak was driving at the time, telling his friend not to kid. Then he saw texts begin to fill his phone. “Now I have to pull over,” he told Rogaczewski (in Polish, of course).

Otherwise there’s no pulling off the gas for small breweries right now in Poland. An equipment manufacturer at the festival told Richter he had more than a half dozen orders for small brewing systems in Poland to fill in the next year.

Cue up Sam Cooke.

There been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long
But now I think I’m able to carry on
It’s been a long, a long time coming
But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will.

*****

Read more about the competition and the festival here and here (I agree that Dwa Smoki, or “Two Dragons” and named for Rogaczewski’s newly born twin sons, was one of the festival’s standout beers).

Session #76 roundup; #77 announced – IPA: What’s the Big Deal?

The SessionGlenn Humphries has posted the roundup for Session #76: Compulsion. Thirty takes on the same topic; excellent reading.

And Justin Mann has announced the plan for #77 on July 5. The topic is “IPA: What’s the Big Deal?”

I’m just wondering, why all the hype? What is it about an IPA that makes craft beer enthusiasts (CBE) go wild?

He wonders about still more, but then it seems like just about everybody has something to say about IPA these days (currently recommending The Myth of the Authentic IPA at Boak & Bailey’s Beer Blog). The Session #77, open to all bloggers, is July 5.

Would you like to drink a beer with these people?

Of course you would.

I posted this “I am A homebrewer” video back in 2010, long before I had any idea I’d end up in Zywiec last year judging beers made by some of these Polish brewers, and meeting a lot of people with names harder to pronounce than Hieronymus. I’m headed back to Festiwal Birofilia this week and excited about trying more beers brewed both in homes and a growing number of small breweries.

Also looking forward to seeing several others — Bruno Reinders, Andreas Richter, Conrad Seidl, Don Jeffrey, and Ian Hornsey — who are traveling some distance, if not quite 5,000 miles, to drink these beers and eat enough to gain about a pound a day.