Session #73: A different sort of beer audit

Thomas Hardy's aleSee that cork? There was a time, not long before the photo was taken, that the top of the cork and the surrounding glass were dead level.

Occasionally a beer like this will reach out, smack you upside the head, and make a gesture like this, essentially screaming, “I’m 40 years old, drink me.”

More often, you’ll screw it up. Stick a beer behind some others in the cellar. Let it sit long enough you hate to part with it. Eventually you’ll have a collector’s item. Valued at auction only for the bottle itself and label. (Yes, a wink and a nod in the direction of eBay.)

Years ago, a friend’s sister died. She had a few cases of wine she’s tucked away when he husband died several years ago. Our friends wondered which of these might be particularly good to drink now (understand that “now” was then). They asked me to look at them. I don’t really know that much about wine, but I brought along a couple of vintage books — the ones that list which years are good for which regions. I didn’t need the books. These were obviously old bottles of cheap wine, some red, some white, like it mattered.

Age does not make most wine better. It certainly does not make most beer better.

The SessionHold that thought as we consider the topic of The Session #73: Beer Audit. Sort of consider, because to be honest, what follows does not come from the list of suggested topics.

Not that long ago beers like Thomas Hardy’s Ale, the one so determined at the top of this post to pop the cork, were an anomaly. Beers weren’t as strong, packaging technology wasn’t as good. There were lots of reasons not to cellar beer.1

The beer world has also changed in other ways, ultimately because what drinkers want is different (or at least broader). Not only are there more strong beers, but more beers packed with all sorts of ingredients, more beers aged in barrels, more crazy beers, more beers you might as well lay down because they sure as shit aren’t drinkable right now.

Check out the links that will pop up at Pints and Pubs today. I suspect there will be plenty of photos of drop-dead beer collections. And beyond the relatively few participating in The Session there are hundreds (thousands?) who have even more impressive libraries. And there’s every chance that some of the bottles we’re talking about will be better with five years or ten years on them than most Thomas Hardy’s were at five and ten.

The first vintage of Hardy’s was brewed in 1967 and released in 1968. Think of the movies finished in 1967 and up for the Oscars in 1968. Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In The Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Doctor Dolittle.

Aside from the last one — anybody up for laying down some cans of Pabst to watch along with Doctor Doolittle? — those are classics, if occasionally dated. They age better than beer. I saw them on the screen then (even DD) and I’ve seen them relatively recently (except for DD). I didn’t drink a Hardy’s in 1968, but I did taste the contents of that 1968 bottle in 2008.

So given that the topic today is beer audit I’m thinking about my relationship with beer, why I choose to drink what I do at particular times, why I choose to occasionally cellar a few beers, why I pick the ones I do, why I decide to haul one out.

That’s all, just thinking about it.

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1 In case you feel the need to educate me about the history of cellaring, I know there have long been some beers to lay down, including lambics and others with considerable heft. If you want to read more about the latter, I suggest you buy a copy of Amber, Gold & Black: The History of Britain’s Great Beers for a proper footnote.

Beer innovation #2416: Nip size cans

21st Amendment Lower De BoomSee that sleek, gold can on the right that looks like it’s waiting to make an appearance in Super Bowl commercial? Brilliant idea. It contained1 8.4 ounces (248ml) of Lower De Boom barleywine from 21st Amendment Brewery.

Lower De Boom is 11.5% alcohol by volume. I can’t count how many 22-ounce and bigger bottles my local beer shop has full of barleywines and other beers just as strong. No wonder they call them bombers. I get the concept that bigger bottles are for sharing, but Daria and I shared 8.4 ounces.

I don’t have much more to say the De Boom itself — it’s a bit American/pungent on the nose, but a dessert beer; rich, plenty of caramel and some dark fruit character, a little sweet, but it may dry out as it ages, or do you lay down beer in cans? And it comes with a back story. 2

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1 Yes, past tense. 21st Amendment spent far more sending the the beer to me than it would cost in a store. If I could buy it in St. Louis I would.

2 Cornelius De Boom was a Belgian-born ship owner who made it to San Francisco in time for the gold rush in 1848. De Boom Street, named for him, is the alley which runs alongside 21st Amendment Brewery. The brewery’s De Boom Street entrance is often referred to as “lower De Boom” by brewery employees.

Good hop reading, because we all love hops with numbers

Peter DarbyMark Dredge has an excellent post on a couple of English hop varieties that were once rejected — so officially, I guess, they never became varieties — that now may get fully developed.

They’ve got numbers, GP 75 and OZ97a, and who doesn’t feel special brewing with hops before they have names? (Citra was so cool it had two numbers, X-114 and HBC 394, before it became a named hop.) This is potentially good news for English hop growers, who can use all the good news they can get.

There’s a sense among brewers that there’s something different about growing conditions in the Yakima Valley and the southern Hemisphere that makes hops from there more vibrant. That’s not so good for hop growers in England, or in Oregon, for that matter. Maybe not for Germans either, although the Society for Hop Research in Germany recently came up with varieties that seem to have the bold aromas and flavors brewers want. We’ll see how those are doing later this year.

We’ll also see if OZ97a can really deliver “apricot, pineapple, lychee, grapefruit, melon and tangerine.” The photo at the outset is of Peter Darby of Wye Hops in Kent, who is at the center of English hop research. “There’s a lot good already out there. It needs to be rediscovered, almost,” he said in 2011, and he was already at work on it then.

Again, the link for more from Darby.

The Cluster hop, landraces, and breeding

Alan McLeod asked a question a while back that, to be honest, points to a liberty I probably should not have taken in For the Love of Hops.

A question about “landrace” however. I understand it represents as a word the division between husbandry and wild. A word of the 1700s perhaps. When you looked at Cluster and described it as a landrace, would you only use the word if the hybridization occurred in the wild as Dutch plantings met their New York forest cousins? Or does it include the potential for intentional 1600 Dutch hop breeding in the Hudson?

His question resulted from a) others he has related to Albany Ale and the Dutch settlement of the Hudson Valley, and b) a headline I wrote on a sidebar in FTLOH: “Cluster: America’s Landrace Variety?” Bad headline, because who notices the question mark? It was a mistake to go beyond what I wrote in the body: “in a sense selection was much like the landrace varieties on the Continent and in England.”

A mistake because there’s enough lack of clarity looking backward, trying to sort out the origins of hop varieties, that mucking with the definition of landrace only makes it worse. Obviously, there’s more detail in the book, but here are the basics in short order:

Breeding and landrace hops

From the time hops were first cultivated more than a thousand years ago farmers chose to grow varieties, first found growing in the wild, based on their brewing and agronomic qualities. They were simply clonal selections, but different varieties emerged as plants naturally cross-pollinated. The best endured and are called landrace varieties by hop geneticists. The short list includes Saazer types, Hallertau Mittelfrüh, Fuggle and Golding. An argument could be made for others like Hersbrucker and Strisselspalt, but that is tangential.

What’s important for clarity is that these are all hops of European origin. The plant has been around at least six million years, likely originating in Mongolia. European types diverged from the Chinese varieties more than a million years ago, American types more like a half million years ago. American varieties contain compounds that may create odors that result in aromas and flavors once considered undesirable but now highly sought after.

Modern hop breeding, that is hybridization, did not begin being until the twentieth century. Research by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel in the mid-nineteenth century (which went unrecognized until about 1900) established that, contrary to Charles Darwin’s theories, certain traits may occur in offspring without any blending of parental characteristics. His principles laid the foundation for plant breeding programs that created entirely new varieties, including hops.

Perhaps it would have happened anyway, but we can point to a time when hop breeding changed and therefore hops themselves. Not long after E.S. Salmon took charge of the program at Wye College in England in 1906 he set out to combine the high resin content of American hops, including some found growing wild, with the aroma of European hops. This eventually resulted in hops with more than 20 percent alpha acids, compared to four percent common at the beginning of the century, and a much wider range of aromas.

Clearly the Dutch and others growing hops in America in the 1600s were not breeding in the modern sense. But they were doing just what farmers were in England and on the Continent — always trying to identify the best plants and further propagate them. These likely were a mixture of imported European varieties and wild American types. None persevered, however, unless as part of the Cluster variety.

Cluster hops

Here’s what Steiner’s Guide to American Hops had to say about Late Cluster in 1973:

“The Late Cluster is the oldest American variety grown continuously in the Northwest. Known as the Pacific Coast Cluster, it was widely grown at the turn of the century and was the leading cultivar, until the decline of acreage in California and Oregon was counter-balanced with the growth of the hop industry in Washington, where the Early Cluster became dominant. The origin of the Late is obscure, but it was probably originally derived from the native North American hop.1 It may have been a selection from these, or resulted from a cross with introduced varieties brought over by colonists, or from a cross of native western varieties with stock brought by settlers who established hop growing in the Pacific Northwest. The Late Cluster was similar to but more vigorous than the Milltown, and other strains of Cluster grown in New York State, after the Prohibition Era.”

One other important note from Steiner: “Any cultivar grown widely and continuously over a long interval of time, will, if not occasionally reselected, accumulate a large number of mutations. … Thus the Late Cluster is actually a collection of similar clones rather than a distinct homogeneous cultivar.” Early Cluster, given that name because it matures earlier, likely was a mutation of Late Cluster, and more widely grown. Together the accounted for almost 80 percent of American hop acreage forty years ago.

I suggested calling it an “American landrace” variety because it resulted from clonal selections and remains around today (amounting to less than 2 percent of the American crop). In that way it is much like Fuggle, itself shrouded in some mystery, or Saaz. However, genetically, it is much different. And that’s a difference to pay attention to.

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1 Genetic studies since proved that Cluster is a cross between European and American varieties.

The Session #73 announced: Beer audit

The SessionAdam at Pints and Pubs has announced that the topic for The Session #73 with be Beer Audit.

Time to check out your cellar, or whatever passes for a cellar, beer fridge, and any place else you store beer.

I’m interested to know if you take stock of the beers you have, what’s in your cellar, and what does it tell you about your drinking habits. This could include a mention of the oldest, strongest, wildest beers you have stored away, the ratio of dark to light, strong to sessionable, or musings on your beer buying habits and the results of your cellaring.

Per usual, anybody is welcome to participate in The Session. Simply post on March 1 and send Adam a link. He’ll write a recap that appears a few days later.