You want more funk? Be patient

Boulevard Brewing in Kansas City released this video to promote Smokestack Saison Brett, its Brettanomyces-spiked delight that is headed for store shelves this week. I draw your attention to it for two reasons:

1) Steven Pauwels talks about the aroma and flavors you’ll find in the beer right now, but also those that emerge as it ages. If you want more funk, he says, let it sit. I think we might have to open a 2011 bottle tonight.

2) Just yesterday, The New York Times suggested saisons might be the perfect summer beer. This inspired a riff from Alan McLeod (“Is It Really Pronounced say-ZOHNS?”) you should take the time to read. And the author suggested five beers to try, including Saison Brett.

However, if you want Saison Brettdo not hesitate. It is released but once a year, and ne’re do wells like myself tend to grab an extra bottle or two from the shelf to stick in the cellar, you know, just like Mr. Pauwels suggests. So one more tip, in case you don’t see any Saison Brett. Tank 7 Farmhouse Ale, which Pauwels also mentions, is much easier to find (there are joints around me where it is always on tap), and is an excellent alternative.

Bonus material

Here’s what Pauwels had to say about Saison Brett a few years ago, when I wrote about it in Adrian-Tierney Jones’ “1001 Beers You Must Taste Before You Die”:

“The inspiration came from some of the great Belgian saisons and also from my childhood when I grew up on a farm in Belgium. We would help out farmers during hay harvest. The dusty smell of hay when we were loading it on the field and the barn smell when we were unloading it are completely different but very unique. The beer doesn’t smell like these memories but I tried to get the fresh hay smell through dry hopping and the barn smell with the Brett.”

What’s wrong with this picture?

Jean-Pierre Van Roy adds hops at CantillonThe editors at Slate used this photo to illustrate a provocative story headlined “Against Hoppy Beer: The craft beer industry’s love affair with hops is alienating people who don’t like bitter brews.” 1 In the picture, Jean-Pierre Van Roy is adding hops to a brew kettle at the Cantillon brewery in Brussels. The choice is amusing because Van Roy has aged the hops so they are not bitter.2

Back to the story. It’s good to call for balance in beer, and too bitter is too bitter. Although perhaps there could have been a little more, well, balance. Maybe more about why there’s more to “hoppy” than bitterness. I suggest you go look for yourself.

And consider the nut graph.

That’s when I realized that I had a problem. In fact, everyone I know in the craft beer industry has a problem: We’re so addicted to hops that we don’t even notice them anymore.

She’s not drinking with the same people I am.3

*****

1 If you email the story the recipient gets this headline: Hops Enthusiasts Are Ruining Craft Beer for the Rest of Us. And if you save it the bookmark reads says: Hoppy beer is awful — or at least, its bitterness is ruining craft beer’s reputation. Somebody just couldn’t decide which snarky headline was best.

2 There are several practical reasons for this, and a conversation about them is exactly like the others the author pleads for at the end of her story.

3 Of course, I don’t consider myself a member of the craft beer industry. Observer, yes. Member, no. But I do drink with card carrying members.

Hop aroma impact

Bert Grant smells fresh Cascade hopsUK hop merchant Charles Faram & Co. includes an interesting twist in providing basic information about the hops its sells.

Of course, its chart lists alpha acids and has a few descriptors (“molasses, chocolate, spicy” or “herbal, pineapple, resinous”) but there is also a column for “flavour intensity.” Those numbers are quite subjective. But, just as the colored meters DRAFT magazine featured about six months ago, they are useful as long as you also accept not everybody’s sense of smell is the same.

Also remember intensity is not necessarily the same thing as impact.

For instance, the Faram chart lists Galaxy as an 8, but it surely has as much pop as 9-rated hops like Citra, Amarillo, and Cascade> More than Admiral.

It seems painfully obvious, but how brewers use the hops and how much they use, well, that’s important.

Drink a Marble Brewery Pilsner made with Hersbrucker (6) or a Firestone Walker Brewing Pils with Spalter Select (5) and Saphir (5) for proof.

*****

That’s the late, great Bert Grant at the top. Those as Cascade hops in his hands.

The Session #76 announced: Compulsion

The SessionGlenn Humphries at beer is your friend has announced the topic for The Session #76: Compulsion.

Oh, boy, a chance for more baring of the soul.

He provides a few suggestions related to the topic: Why keep buy beer when you have a cellar full? (And what lengths do you go to hide this?) Why keep making more homebrew than you possible drink and maybe even give away? If you’re on holidays and you drive by a brewery, are you compelled to stop in?

Ticking, what about ticking? Shouldn’t that be on the list?

Session #76 in June 7 and open to any bloggers who want to participate. Simply add a link to your post in the comments following Glen’s announcement.

German beer drinkers: Here come Americans to the rescue

Who will decided what the next generation of German beer drinkers likes?Why would a German beer drinker pay the equivalent of $4.20 for a 12-ounce bottle of Brooklyn Lager? It’s an excellent beer, but that’s quite a markup over what it costs in the United States and considerably more than Germans pay from any of several outstanding beers.

I don’t have an answer.

Maybe it is somehow related to the fact Berlin Is a Haven of Hip. Consider this from a Washington Post story that got a lot of attention last week: “At a recent tasting in one Berlin bar, guests sipped craft beers out of special vessels shaped like wineglasses that helped concentrate the aromas of the brew. The bar was furnished in a decidedly Berlin style — it was a subterranean lair where beakers of bubbling fluorescent liquids served as decoration, the tables appeared to be made from welded-together car parts, and fake stalactites hung from the ceiling.”

Not quite like drinking beer in Franconia.

That’s not actually what struck me first when I read the story, and compressed a bunch of words into something almost meaningless on Twitter. It was the simple arrogance of this.

“The German beer industry has to reinvent itself in a hurry, or it’s going to be a small fraction of what it is now,” said Eric Ottaway, the general manager of Brooklyn Brewery, which has been expanding in Europe and has been exporting its beer to Germany through Braufactum, which sells a 12-ounce bottle of Brooklyn Lager in upscale grocery stores for the equivalent of $4.20 — almost three times its typical American price.

And this.

“This was simply to fill a void,” he said. “We feel as if we’re teaching a lot of Germans things about their own beer culture that they’ve forgotten.”

He is Matt Walthall, one of three American expats who have launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise enough money to open a brewery.

German drinkers sure are lucky those guys showed up.

OK, that was snide. Steam blown off. A lot of good in that story, and to be fair, Ottaway has a point. Reinvent itself is a bit strong, but German brewers need to make changes. Oh, wait, some are. Those particular ones just aren’t in this story. So a few links to fill in the gaps:

– Sylvia Kopp’s excellent story from five years ago in All About Beer magazine: Ruled by the Reinheitsgebot?

– The (Real) Beer Nut’s up-to-date report from Munich called The shape of things to come.

– An article in the 2012/2013 edition of Hopfen (a pdf) about the Bier-Quer-Denker workshops gives you a good idea of who well attended they’ve become.