Surreal Beer. The book. Brace yourself.

Max Bahnson “leaked” this news this morning. He and Alan McLeod are discussing the possibility of writing a book together.

What we are sure of, though, is that it will be something completely different to anything that’s so far been written about beer. The topics we are going to deal with, well, I guess those that follow our blogs can pretty much figure them out, and they will all be wrapped in a fun and perhaps rather surrealist narrative.

Surreal Beer? Beer Surreal? Not sure which is a better title.1 Anyway, can’t wait for the table of contents, let alone what follows.

P.S. guys. Scoop up that www.surrealbeer.com domain name while it’s available.

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1 Of course, the next question is: Will this lead to a new consumer group called The Campaign for Surreal Ale?

Hold it, which Blind Pig beer was one of the first Double IPAs?

Cheers to Martyn Cornell for calling out a list of the most influential” beers that was both embarrassingly America-centric and lacking in historic perspective and replacing it with his own “The REAL 20 most influential beers of all time.”

Given that I’ve sworn off railing against lists I thought I might sit back and enjoy, but reading through more than 100 comments I’m surprised that the inclusion of Russian River Blind Pig IPA has not been questioned. Look, I love Blind Pig. It is one of my favorite beers on earth. Drink it it next to a Double IPA, even one as good as Pliny the Elder, and the phrase “less is more” makes perfect sense. But there seems to be some confusion about chickens and eggs (or, in this case, IPAs and DIPAs) at Blind Pig Brewing.

Let’s start with the entry at First We Feast (where the silliness began):

RUSSIAN RIVER BLIND PIG IPA
From: Santa Rosa, CA
Style: IPA
ABV: 6.1%
Website: russianriverbrewing.com

Joshua M. Bernstein says: “Beer geeks rightfully praise Vinnie Cilurzo’s Pliny the Elder, the double IPA against which all others are judged. Thing is, the path for Pliny was blazed by Blind Pig, an IPA brewed to compensate for a flawed brewery [the beer was originally brewed by Cilurzo at Blind Pig before he brought it to Russian River]. Blind Pig’s equipment was so antiquated, off flavors were all too common. To compensate, he added heaps of hops, setting a bitter template that brewers worldwide now follow.”

Then consider how it ends up in Cornell’s “REAL 20.”

Sierra Nevada Pale Ale I’m prepared to consider, as the pioneer of “hop forward” American pale ales, and the same consideration may be due to Blind Pig IPA, the first “double” IPA.

Blind Pig Double IPAAnd now revisit the story that Cilurzo has told many times about over his first “double IPA.” He brewed a beer he called Inaugural Ale in June 1994, the very first batch he made at Blind Pig Brewing1 in Temecula, California. Indeed, he said, “Our equipment was pretty antique and crude, so I wanted to start out with something that was big and, frankly, could cover up any off flavors.”

The beer contained between 6.5 and 7% alcohol by volume and Cilurzo calculated it had 100 International Bitterness Units (the actual number would have been much lower). It was aged on oak chips for nine months and served on the brewery’s first anniversary. He had special glasses made for the occasion, with the ingredients printed on the side. He described it as a “double IPA.”

“After that, we made it a tradition to make DIPAs for our anniversary. At our second anniversary, the beer was 120 (calculated) BUs. This was almost undrinkable at the time of bottling, but there was a small market for it,” Cilurzo says. “We had a tasting room at our brewery. Customers would bring their Blind Pig growlers back for refills, etc. The last drop of Second Anniversary Ale, out of the brewery’s last keg, filled (Stone Brewing Co. co-founder) Greg Koch’s growler.”

Quite obviously, this was a very influential beer, was one of the first Double IPAs,2 and is the parent of Russian River Pliny the Elder.3

But Blind Pig IPA was a different beer — brewed after Inaugural Ale, first simply called India Pale Ale, with 6% ABV and 75 calculated IBU (Cascade and Columbus), and later They Passed This Way IPA. It was an excellent beer from the get-go, but it did not blaze the path for Pliny or other Double IPAs.

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1 “Vinnie Cilurzo left Blind Pig to brew at Russian River Brewing in northern California, owned at the time by Korbel (the sparkling wine producer). When Korbel decided to get out of the brewing business, Natalia and Vinnie Cilurzo bought the brand name and opened a brewpub in Santa Rosa, later a production brewery. Cilurzo continues to brew Russian River IPA, but revived Blind Pig IPA after moving to Santa Rosa.

2 Mitch Steele revisits the discussion about who brewed the first commercial IPA in “IPA: Brewing Techniques, Recipes and the Evolution of India Pale Ale.” Recommended.

3 Pliny the Elder is 8% ABV and is made with several hop varieties not even available when Cilurzo first brewed Inaugural Ale.

Session #72 announced: ‘How We Love Beer’

The SessionHost Ryan Newhouse has posted the topic for The Session #72: “How We Love Beer.” Sort of a Valentine’s Day theme. The key word in there, he points out, is how.

Think of this topic and discussion in terms of being in a relationship (again, a good primer for Valentine’s Day!). You can say to your partner, “Honey, I love you.” But think of the saying, “actions speak louder than words.” From my personal experience, it’s always better to show your partner the ways you love them instead of saying simply, “I love you because you make me happy.”

How, rather than why. Ryan wants to make that clear: “Again, think of the phrase, ‘actions speak louder than words,’ so I’m not looking for what characteristics beer has that makes us love it, but what we do to show our love for it.”

The Session is Feb. 1. Everybody is welcome to participate. Simply write a post and send Ryan a link.

Another beer flavor/flavour wheel

Beer Flavor Wheel, Beer Flavour Wheel

Mark Dredge posted this new Beer Flavor Wheel today at Pencil and Spoon. (If you click on the image you’ll head over to his blog, where the wheel is a bit larger).

This is a much more drinker friendly wheel than the traditional one, created for Dredge’s new book, Craft Beer World, which just went to the printer. As mentioned here before, the beer flavor wheel was developed in the 1970s by the Master Brewers Association of the Americas and the American Society of Brewing Chemists following the lead of Danish flavor chemist Morten Meilgaard. It was one of the first such wheels. A wine aroma wheel came later, as did the Flavour Wheel for Maple Products, a South African brandy wheel, and a variety of other fun dials.

The Beer Wheel was not designed for consumers but to provide reference compounds that can be added to beer samples to represent the intended flavors. It continues to grow in size, and there is every possibility that the committees working on its redesign will settle on several subwheels.

Also mentioned here, and pictured in For the Love of Hops
the Hochschule RheinMain University of Applied Science created a Beer Aroma Wheel (actually two wheels) with the goal of providing terms more suitable for communicating with consumers and focusing less on defects.

Panelists who helped develop the terminology used aromas of fruits, spices, everyday materials, and other foodstuffs to describe their sensory impression. Because there is the rare occasion where 4-vinyl guaiacol is appropriate in conversation, but rare remains the best adjective. Clove works much better in mixed company (geeks and non geeks).

Who will write the ‘local hops’ success story?

Hops, in a water soaked field that must be harvestedEarlier today, Win Bassett pointed to a story about interest in hop growing in North Carolina (which led to a lengthy Twitter exchange of which I was a part and should have done a better job of keeping educational).

To its credit, the story examined the challenges of growing hops in North Carolina, including that the state is closer to the equator than major hop producing regions, so the days are shorter than ideal for hop growing.

This bit, however, is a little troubling. North Carolina State University Horticulturist Jeanine Davis, who has prodded along some excellent research, might reconsider the idea that growers are going to tell brewers what hops to use, and by extension drinkers what hops to drink.

Davis points out there are now some hops varieties that are more daylight neutral and require less daylight than varieties grown in most areas of the world.

“These day-length neutral varieties, bred in South Africa, are the ones we need to use in North Carolina,” she says.

“Brewers will likely ask for more commonly known aromatic hops, but any new grower should grow hops varieties suited for production in North Carolina, and then convince the brewer to use these varieties,” she adds.

“There are some indications that growing day-length sensitive varieties here in North Carolina is severely limiting our yields. In some cases, we may be losing up to 85 percent of potential yield, just because we are trying to grow the wrong varieties.”

Within a few years, Sierra Nevada Brewing and New Belgium Brewing will be making a lot of beer in North Carolina. Right now, they make a lot of beer in California and Colorado, respectively, and they use only a little bit of California- or Colorado-grown hops, respectively. There’s a lesson there.

In 2011 (removing all numbers related to China because it is relatively insular) farmers in Germany and the American Northwest produced 85 percent of the world’s alpha/bitter hops and 67 percent of the aroma. The Czech Republic sold another 16 percent of the aroma. Scores of other countries grow hops, often just for their home market, but the Northwest and Germany set expectations for price, quality, and variety.

This doesn’t mean that farmers in North Carolina, Colorado, Wisconsin, Michigan, even southern California can’t succeed in selling a certain amount of local hops. But success won’t come overnight. Breeding new hop varieties, perhaps some more suited to local environments and day length, takes time. Goofy as it sounds, that organic hops naturally result in lower yields and are more expensive to produce sort of levels the playing field — or at least reduces the advantage farmers have in the dominant hop growing regions. So maybe organic hops, grown on low trellises, will be part of the equation.

It will take time, patience, education, luck, all that stuff, and then we will see what happens.

Gorst Valley Hops in Wisconsin has been out front of all of this, working directly with growers, supporting them throughout the process that starts with planning a yard and continues through building their own version of an oast house.

“Some people perceive local as having value. Local’s great, but it can’t be the only part of our plan,” said James Altweis of Gorst Valley. “If a brewer doesn’t see the improvement, then he’s not going to pay the higher price.”

And higher prices must be part of the equation. “We have to look for what we can do on process that adds value, that creates differences apparent in the final beer,” Altweis said.

I don’t mean to be a curmudgeon, although I suppose I am, who points out the challenges every time a local hops story appears, but growing hops is hard and that chance for a bad ending shouldn’t be overlooked. For farmers or brewers (how would you like to contract for a chunk of hops with a single farmer and have the crop go kaput?). Nearly one-third of Polish hop farmers quit growing hops in 2010 and 2011. There were several reasons, including that Polish breweries apparently quit buying as much Polish hops, but one-third, and in an environment well-suited for hops.