Ask for Zimmer 3: Hopfen

Zimmer 3: Hopfen

Fritz TauscherThe guest rooms at Brauerei und Gasthof zur Krone in Tettnang in the southwest of Germany are thoroughly modern, with hardwood floors, whitewashed walls and sleek amenities; yet properly spare. The building, on the other hand, has been around since before the last Montfort, Count Anton IV, lived here in the 18th century.

The Tauscher family bought the brewery, which sits directly behind the hotel, in 1847 and Fritz Tauscher (right) is a seventh generation brewer. The Kronen-Brauerei is the last of 26 breweries that used to operate in Tettnang. It produces about 6,000 hectoliters (something more than 5,000 barrels) a year, about 60 percent of that sold in bottles labeled “Tettnanger.”

Tauscher is one of nine brewers in a group they call “Brauer mit Leib and Seele” (Brewers with body and soul). “All are owners of breweries in the hands of the their families,” he explained. “The beers are brewed with our hands.”

Tradition obviously matters, but Tauscher talks as much about the importance of quality. He buys his hops directly from two nearby farms, one organic and the other not. He uses only cones, storing the bales in one of four lagering rooms eight to nine meters below the brewery yard. He begins fermentation of his lagers between 8° C and 9° C (other breweries might start higher to speed the process). He lagers his beers for six to eight weeks (Berliner Kindl Pils lagers for two weeks). He uses less efficient (smaller and horizontal) tanks because he can taste the difference.

Tauscher attended the Craft Brewers Conference in San Francisco last spring. He drank plenty of new wave American beers, packed with alcohol and aromatic hops. He’s not just being polite when he talks about how much he enjoyed them.

“I can imagine I will brew one or two beers with those (sort of) hops,” said Tauscher, who is 31 years old. “But not yet. The German beer drinkers are not ready for the explosion of flavors.”

Tauscher adds only Tettnang Tettnanger hops to the beers he sells (he recently brewed a special batch for hop growers that included four additions of Tettnanger and then Saphir at the finish). Tettanger has served perfectly well for special celebration beers, such as for Tettnang’s 700th anniversary party and the brewery’s 150th anniversary (a “fresh hop” beer in 1997).

When Tauscher does begin using other varieties they will still be from Tettnang. Tettnang farmers also grow Hallertau Mittelfrüh and Tradition, Perle, Saphir and Herkules, and there will be others. One might well be a variation on Tettnanger. The German hop research center at Hüll this year began a project in partnership with the Tettnang Hop Growers Association and Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Rural Development to breed a new variety with Tettnang Tettnanger as the mother. If a new hop results it will still be 10 years before it’s ready for brewers to use.

At Brauerei und Gasthof zur Krone that doesn’t seem like such a long time. It sits in the center of town, on a square that will be overflowing for a band concert on a Wednesday evening in summer. Although the town may be best known for hops its population is growing because of high tech businesses and tourism. Old world and new world coexist comfortably.

The hotel serves tourists and business travelers equally well. Each room has its own name — thus Bierbrauer, Bärenpltaz and Brau Wasser as well as Hopfen — decorated to that theme.

You can probably guess which one I stayed in.

Session #55: When bits of paper come with memories

Curtis at HopHeadSaid hosts The Session #55, asking contributors to to write about “fabulous world of beer art found on coasters, labels and caps.” This is my contribution. Check out what everybody else has to say in his roundup.

The liquid is gone. Bits of paper and vivid memories remain.

As much affection as I have for table tent from Bell’s Brewery that reads “Pierces your tongue without the nasty metal taste” and sits on a bookcase in the corner it doesn’t soothe my soul like the coaster pictured below. Make no mistake, we love Bell’s beers and during our grand adventure they let us camp in the brewery parking lot. But the table tents (the other reads, “Not tested on animals. Probably because we get so many volunteers.) are not connected to a specific memory.

Where in the beer world?

This one is. The photo first appeared “Where in the Beer World?” nearly three years ago, and you’ll find the basic story there. It was taken during a memorable evening with Evan Rail that included several stops. This was the special one, and we might have lingered longer. However, when the conversation in Russian behind us started to get louder Evan suggested it was time to move on. “I think they might be in the mob,” he said.

Anyway, we’ve still got the coaster.

We don’t really collect coasters. We grab them along the way, toss them in a drawer, use them, weed them out from time to time. It would be even more dangerous to collect bottles (and the labels), so the rule is “new one in, old one out.” The only permanent fixture is the empty bottle of Thomas Hardy’s Ale from 1968.

1968 Thomas Hardy's label

I wrote about opening the bottle here and here. It was produced at the Eldridge Pope Brewery, which is connected to still more memories for us.

The SessionI’ve already taken a look at the roundup (growing as I write) and some of the artwork is wonderful.

For instance, the new labels Left Hand Brewing introduced in 2010 are flat out stunning. But we’re not ready to throw out our old-style Left Hand coaster. Got it at Mike O’Shay’s Restaurant in Longmont.

But that’s another story.

Which beer community are you talking about?

Deep into a discussion at A Good Beer Blog that has a bit of everything — cyclical malaise, math, hop breeding, Stephen Beaumont, blog comment of the year from Bailey — host Alan McLeod added another topic.

(Editor’s note: A Good Beer Blog moved since this was written, so the links don’t work but the post and comments have been archived by Wayback Machine. Or you can visit the post in its new home.)

I still don’t believe in beer community. Not one person has shown up to help me move the furniture. Pity the person who confuses people who sell you stuff for their best friends.

I commented that perhaps he should give that thought a thread of its own (before I did). He replied, “You start it and, in response, I will both bolster the point and yet confuse it with other tangential baggage that makes it lose its way.”

At the time I was reading a post by Rob Fullmer’s at Beer PHXation about the Phoenix beer blogging community, which obviously includes a discussion of the local beer community and why “our beer culture seems incomplete and disconnected.” At the end he writes, “Let’s build a community.”

So a few thoughts and/or questions jump out:

– Is Alan serious?

– Do people consciously build beer-centric communities or does beer end up playing a larger role in an already existing community?

– Do the beer communities of Asheville, N.C., and Bamberg, Germany, overlap or exist in separate spheres?

– Are brewers (or breweries) and beer enthusiasts part of the same beer community?

– Are brewers (or breweries) and beer enthusiasts part of the same community? My answer to that one is brewery owners need to understand how important that is. At least at the basic community level, that being the one in which show up to help move the furniture is part of the discussion.

Are weird beers part of the ‘attention economy’?

Today at Grantland, Michael Kruse examines how those wild and wacky uniforms have helped turn the University of Oregon into a national college football power.

. . . the head of a think tank and a visiting scholar at Berkeley’s Center for Research on Social Change gave a wonky talk at a conference in Cambridge, Mass. “We are headed,” Michael H. Goldhaber said, “into what I call the attention economy.”

Economics is the study of the allocation of resources that are scarce. These days, more and more, information isn’t scarce. Stuff isn’t scarce. What’s scarce is attention. The companies that win in an attention economy are those that win the eyeballs of people who have too much to look at. Too many ads. Too many screens in too many places. Too many games on too many channels on too many days of the week.

“This new economy,” Goldhaber said in Cambridge in January 1997, “is based on endless originality.

“If you have enough attention,” he added, “you can get anything you want.”

The uniforms got the attention of talented high school football players from across the nation. That’s where the story begins and ends, but there are other things to consider along the way. These are relative to beers that are different; weird, wacky, extreme if you like, but maybe only as different a pumpkin beers.

At times this might be a little unsettling.

“If attention is now at the center of the economy rather than stuff, then so is style,” UCLA professor Richard Lanham wrote in The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information. “It moves from the periphery to the center. Style and substance trade places.

“Push style to the extreme,” Lanham wrote, “and it becomes substance.”

I can’t decide if this sounds like an endorsement for extreme beer or an Onion headline.

Book review: A Pisshead’s Pub Guide

“Those were the times when I thought ALL Czech beer was great. That slowly started to change, but I would still drink pretty much anything that was brewed in this country.”

– Max Bahnson

Prague: A Pisshead's Pub GuideThere is much more to Prague than beer, but for a beer oriented visitor there never seems to be enough time to discover all the pivo the city has to offer.

Sure, start with a pilsner, because when you order a pilsner in Prague it will be Pilsner Urquell. That’s the law. And many, probably most, tourists leave town happy to have enjoyed what beer experiences luck gives them.

Then there are the rest of us. We want to know about Výcepní Pivo and Ležák — “Hey, these aren’t listed in the Official Beer Geek Style Guidelines (ABGSG)” — and the yeasty difference between Nefiltrované and Kvasnicové. We want to know the best places to drink in situ; the best revivalists beers featuring pilsner malt and Saaz hops as well as cutting edge beers (stouts and IPAs in Prague, indeed).

We need books like Evan Rail’s Good Beer Guide Prague & the Czech Republic and Prague: A Pisshead’s Pub Guide by Max Bahnson. I’ve previously recommended Evan’s book, and in suggesting that Prague is a two beer guidebook city must include a small disclaimer related to the Pisshead Guide.

When he was writing the book, Max sent me some sample pages. I enthusiastically endorsed the content and the style. It would be a dirty trick for me to turn around and criticize it now. But honestly, I can think of only one thing I’d change. It would be cool if the hand-drawn maps were on napkins or coasters you could rip from the book.

I expect a guide book to be easy to read, long useful information and amusing. Because this book is organized by pub crawls it can take an extra few minutes to find a single destination, and an index would help. But how much you enjoy the Pisshead Guide really depends on if you enjoy the writing. I do, and originally pulled out some quotes from the book to illustrate. Then I realized it is better to suggest you visit his blog and read at least until you’ve come across a paragraph or three that you figure would piss off somebody. Then you’ll have a better idea if this book is for you.

You can buy it here.