Mike Lynch of Burgers and Brews has posted the roundup for The Session #46: An Unexpected Discovery. Be sure to read beer.bobarnott.com’s account of discovering Bir & Fud in Rome — a restaurant where your drink choices are Italian craft beer and water. One more suggestion: After dinner at Bir & Fud drift across the way to Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fa’.
David Jensen of Beer 47 will host Session #47 (you can’t plan stuff like that, folks) on Jan. 7. The theme is “Cooking with Beer.”
This is the wood. And . . .
This is From the Wood.
Pretty nifty packaging, don’t you think?
The current Draft magazine features “The Top 25 Beers of the Year.” You can view the list here, but you have to pick up the magazine itself to see nice all the bottles and labels (The Lost Abbey Angel’s Share Grand Cru, Saboteur, Brooklyn Sorachi Ace, Dogfish Head Bitches Brew, et al.) in their glossy glory. Although From the Wood is among the 25 beer chosen it is not pictured. You can probably figure out why.
It was available on draft only, and there wasn’t really much of it. In that sense it stands as proxy for thousands of small-batch beers sold this past year in the United States. Some terrific, some terrible, most somewhere between.
Ted Rice, director of brewing at Marble, took a bit of From the Wood to the Great American Beer Festival because he likes to have something out of the ordinary to serve to attendees. That meant he was required to bottle enough beer for the Professional Judge Panel (the people who decide who wins GABF medals) evaluate. He packaged a few extra bottles to have to taste when the judge sheets came back. The bottle pictured was the last of those. The beer inside was good, but I didn’t take notes. They wouldn’t have been as evocative as those in Draft, so a bit of the description that appeared there:
“Figs and plum immerse the tongue before simultaneous waves of spicy bourbon and funky Brett wash back. Instead of battling for attention, the bourbon’s vanilla notes meld seamlessly into the flavor, achieving a stunning level of sophistication.”
This beer wasn’t just a happy accident. Rice put a strong dark beer brewed with a yeast strain that hails from Belgium in bourbon barrels he’d used twice previously, so the bourbon character was muted. He added Brettanomyces, but not with the intention of creating a “yeast gone wild beer.”
Curiously, or perhaps not, the beer did not advance past the first round at GABF, where judges evaluate a dozen beers and pass three on to the next level. Rice entered it into Category 12, Experimental Beers, because he decided the presence of Brett excluded it from the wood- and barrel-aged category, but that it didn’t qualify as “sour” (the alternative barrel choice).
One judge thought it should have been entered in the barrel-aged category, another in the sour barrel category. The third wrote, “. . . very drinkable for as much as it has going on.”
In the photo at the top Rice is taking samples of beer aged in “fresh” bourbon barrels, the contents of which will be blended into Marble Reserve (if they are ever ready, sigh). Then the barrels will be used again. Eventually, perhaps on third use, Rice might see about replicating “From the Wood.”
Beers that spend time in wood are a small percentage of a percentage point of Marble’s business, and Marble (which will brew a little over 8,000 barrels this year) is a brewery that few people outside the immediate area have even heard of. That makes it like most of the breweries (including brewpubs, obviously) in the nation. A GABF medal or a mention in a national magazine doesn’t have the financial implications that it does for nationally, or internationally, distributed brands like Dogfish Head and Duvel (also on the list).
But it validates the beers for customers (“I knew that was a good beer”) and makes brewers smile. So I asked Rice a totally unfair question: Which would you prefer, having a beer, specifically this one, win a GABF medal or be named one of the 25 beers of the year by a magazine on newsstands across the country?
He thought about it over night before emailing his answer:
“Having won several GABF medals, I know it’s a thrill. After reading the review of FTW in Draft magazine, it gave me chills and a certain glow, much in the same way a GABF medal does. What’s special about the Draft Top 25 is the colorful review for all beer lovers to see, that a judge’s tasting notes or gold medal could not convey. For this beer, which did not neatly fit in a style guideline, I’ll take the Draft Top 25. From the Wood was selected amongst the beers and breweries of the world, not just one style or country. That’s pretty special.”
Several years ago, Saint Arnold Brewing owner Brock Wagner compared the business of multi-national breweries with his own, today much bigger but still tiny by most measures.
“We’re trying to add 10 customers at a time. The big brewers are trying to add a million,” he said. “We’re in different businesses. We both make something called beer, but they don’t really taste much alike. The big brewers are of a completely different mindset. A-B has more in common with Coca-Cola than they do with us. That’s not to say their beer is bad. It’s just different from what we make.”
Wagner worked as an investment banker before founding Saint Arnold. The skills he learned no doubt serve his business well, but any story about his brewery starts with beer. In contrast, beer is not at the center of Dethroning the King: The Hostile Takeover of Anheuser-Busch, an American Icon. The book details the takeover of one brewing giant (A-B) by another brewing giant (InBev). Lots of hostile fire, some flirtations, plenty of intrigue, all of it happening at a stunningly fast pace.
Beer itself is barely at the periphery through much of the book. It’s most prominent when author Julie MacIntosh turns her attention to the Busch family, notably the uneasy relationship between August III and August IV. Almost every review of this book has pointed out with some surprise that the family controlled so little A-B stock by 2008. Few add that although the Busch family did not have it in their power to block the takeover it came together during a rocky economic time in 2008 and could easily have fallen apart. Had August III not pushed for the deal, and her sources certainly indicate he did so with a capital P, the financing window could have closed before InBev had everything in place.
Again, Dethroning the King is about the deal. How it happened, and pretty much why it happened. It’s not about the relationship between the city of St. Louis, its corporate and spiritual home, and the company. Recently, stories in The Washington Post and Bloomberg have examined how the takeover opened the door for smaller brewers in St. Louis. MacIntosh barely touches on such matters.
Not to make fun of her, but an example from the early pages indicates how little of St. Louis — more time spent in boardrooms than barrooms, plus the various locations (notably an airport hangar) where meetings were held — she got to know. Writing about the “Wassup?” advertising campaign she describes August IV giving the spots a final test run on “a well-known hill in St. Louis where a pack of Italian restaurants was concentrated.” This, of course, is not a hill but The Hill, one of America’s more famous Italian neighborhoods.
OK, it’s not fair to judge a book by what’s not in it. However even though A-B became a global company, and even though it operates a dozen breweries all over the United States we always understood that if Budweiser was the king the throne had to be in St. Louis. What does the change mean there? On the national scale, why all the attention to the fact that a foreign operation officially owns what was already an international company?
Those questions, as well as others of global impact, will be more easily answered after additional time has passed. This book, full of financial details, was ready to be written. It’s likely one historians will consult for years.
For instance, MacIntosh points repeatedly to how the company spent lavishly for travel and various amenities on the corporate side. Such “fat” that could be easily eliminated made A-B vulnerable, because InBev (and previously Ambev) has been famous for rewarding stockholders by ruthlessly improving the bottom line.
Although she doesn’t explain that the company spent just as freely when it came to acquiring the best ingredients that too was part of the Busch philosophy. Since the deal closed the new company has divested itself of many contracts with hop growers from the south of Germany to the American northwest (honorably it should be pointed out). Wouldn’t you think this has implications for A-B InBev beers? As significantly it may affect what hops are generally available, plus their quality, for all brewers. More for history to sort out.
*****
Order Dethroning the King from BeerBooks.com (and support an independent bookstore).
German brewer’s in the medieval period brewed beer in its most pure form. German beer purity law of 1516 (Reinheitsgebot) prohibited use of any additives in beer. The only ingredients added in beer were malt (rice or barley), hops, yeast and water.
(I added the bold — the bad grammar and omission of the word Reinheitsgebot belongs to Buzzle.com.)
What macro brewer financed that research?
The list of preservatives in beer is not complete, but is already scary enough.
This month Mike Lynch of Burgers and Brews hosts The Session #46 and asks us to write about “An Unexpected Discovery.”
In the summer for 1995, Bozeman, Montana, was more of a beer destination than Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. Few had heard of Dogfish Head (located in Rehoboth Beach) or knew the face of Sam Calagione. Spanish Peaks Brewing distributed its beer nationally and Chugwater, the dog on the label, was sort of a star. Ribbons he had won in various competitions covered the walls at the Italian Cafe, the dining room attached to the brewery.
So we found ourselves at a stop light in downtown Bozeman. We didn’t have a GPS, let alone a phone app that would connect us to The Beer Mapping Project. But Daria was pretty sure we were supposed to turn right in a couple of blocks when, coming out of the light, I took a hard right to get into the parking lot we’d just be sitting in front of.
“What are you doing?”
“Look up.”
Above us the sign said Cat’s Paw Casino and advertised “microbrews,” guaranteeing 20 beers on tap at $1 each. Sure enough, they had beers from small breweries in Washington and Oregon, as well as California, and several imports. Each 10-ounce pour cost a buck.
If you were compiling a guide to places to find flavorful beer, as we were at the time, this was quite a discovery. As a beer drinking experience not quite so exciting. It was pretty much a dive bar (still is, apparently), with some pool tables and gambling machines in the adjoining room.
So a great and surprising experience? A few notes from a trip to California in December of 1994.
We were winding out way north on route 9 from Santa Cruz — and we do mean winding. This is not a road to attempt after a barley wine tasting. The late-afternoon fog hanging in the redwoods was delightful, but by the time we were north of Boulder Creek darkness had set in. We spotted a neon sign as we came around another turn, read the word “Bass” as we headed by and before we were around two more turns had doubled back.
We had found the White Cockade, a Scottish pub set in a log cabin. The fireplace crackled as Big Band music played softfly. Couples sat snugly at dimly lit small tables in a room paneled in knotty pine. A cat named Moggy wandered around. Sitting at the small bar, which was bedecked with World War II memorabilia, we were please to see Fuller’s London Price on tap. But our attention was quickly diverted by two other beer we had had on this trip. Double Dragon and Fuller’s ESB on nitrogen dispense. “Who’d have thought,” Daria said, “that we could got into a pub that had London Pride on tap and find two beers we wanted more than that.”
Sitting next to us was a local who watched with some interest as we ordered. he asked what we thought of British ales. He wanted to try them, but already knew California ales were too bitter for his taste. Since we had been to the altar of Cascade hops — Sierra Nevada’s taproom — just the day before, to hear a Californian talk this was as a reality check.
Sometimes the menu included fresh salmon, landed by the landlord from his own fishing boat, but last we heard the White Cockade was closed.