Session 77 – IPA: Why it’s a big deal

The SessionToday the topic for The Session is “IPA: What’s the Big Deal?” What follows is based mostly on what’s occurring in the United States, although IPA Madness doesn’t stop at the U.S. borders, which you’ll see by visiting today’s posts (look for the links at the bottom of the announcement).

Nearly eighteen years ago, beer author-brewer-consumer Randy Mosher presented a travelogue of a recent trip to the world’s largest hops growing regions to listeners at Oldenberg Beer Camp in Kentucky. At one point he tilted his head back as if he were taking a big drink, reaching his hands into the air and grabbing fistfuls of imagined hops, then bringing them back down to his mouth.

“Americans have been starved for hops so long,” he said, “that right now we’re just shoving them down our throats.”

The implication was this would pass. It has not. I’ve cited this from Hop Culture in the United States before, but 140 years later it is still relevant:

“The brewing industry is not exempt from the influence of fashion. A careful survey of the types and descriptions of beers in vogue at different times will show that fashion has had something to do with our trade,” the author wrote. He described changes in beer dating to back before hops became an essential ingredient, and considered what might be next in England. “We will not further refer to the threatened introduction of lager beer into this country, than to say fashion takes strange freaks, and it will be well for brewers to be prepared for all eventualities.”

At the beginning of 2008 pale ale was the best selling craft beer style in supermarkets, followed by amber ale, amber lager, wheat beers, and then IPA. Yes, wheat beers, then IPA.

In the four years between the end of 2007 and end of 2011 sales of IPA increased 260 percent and it became the No. 1 craft style. The next year sales increased 40 percent again. This gets harder to measure, because now we have Black IPAs, White IPAs, Belgian IPAs, Session IPAs, and Cider IPAs.

And late Thursday, Harry Schuhmacher passed long the boldest of predictions.

All this reflects still growing interest in aromas and flavors being discovered in hops — or more accurately, created during the brewing process. IPA has become a synomym for hops. When Mosher made his 1995 Hop Tour these are a few of the varieties that weren’t yet commercially available: Amarillo, Apollo, Bravo, Calypso, Citra, Galaxy, Mandarina Bavaria, Mosaic, Motueka, Nelson Sauvin, Riwaka, Saphir, and Simcoe. For starters.

More than once last week at the National Homebrewers Conference I was asked what the next hot aroma/flavor would be? My best guess is more variations on this theme. No doubt there will be new varieties released, maybe touting a little more gooseberry, a lot more blueberry, a subtle melon, more lime, even coconut. But, and I hope I am not just being pie-in-the-sky optimistic, brewers also have an opportunity to blend varieties already in hand — often rich in compounds that breeders and farmers worked to keep out of hops as recently as 40 years ago — to create something new.

As Alex Barth, president of hop merchant John I. Haas has pointed out, “This love craft brewers have for hops refocuses attention on the plant.” IPA deserves some of the credit. It hardly seems likely it will fall out of fashion soon, but that’s no reason to be pissed off about the attention it is getting.

Two examples. The popularity of Union Jack India Pale Ale has helped fund expansion at Firestone Walker, which is why you can get Pivo Hoppy Pils, dry hopped with generous portions of Saphir. Likewise at Marble Brewery in New Mexico. Its IPA drives growth, so beers like Marble Pilsner — brimming with perfumey Old World Hersbrucker hops — end up getting packaged. These are good things.

I seem to have wandered off topic. Hops will do that. Lord know what I’ll write about on IPA Day. Maybe coffee-infused wood-aged extreme saison IPAs.

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.