Ales Through the Ages redux

Ales Through the Ages

You will be forgiven if you think we must be on Ales Through the Ages III or even IV by now.

The first one was in 2016. Read Martyn Cornell’s recap here.

The second was to be in 2018, but was canceled.

Then the second was to be last year, but the in-person conference was postponed until this year.

A shorter virtual conference was held instead.

So I’m not sure if we call this II or III, but it is happening Nov. 11-13 in Williamsburg. The agenda is here.

I might have been a bit optimistic when I provided a title for my presentation — Breaking the Lupulin Code. Scientists are still working on mapping hop genomes, complicated by the fact there isn’t just one and each of them is larger than the human genome. And then there’s the reality that hops may not follow Gregor Mendel’s principles of inheritence. But I’ll do my best to explain why Citra is so much different than her grandmother, Hallertau Mittelfrüh. And to answer Frank Clark’s question about what modern hops are most like those colonial brewers would have used.

Registration information is here.

Steam beer yeast, circa 1911

Matthew Curtis has written 5,500 words at Pellicle to define what IPA “means in terms of modern beer.”

I hung in there for all of them, primarily to see if he mentioned Cold IPA, one of my favorite versions of IPA.

He did, and wrote in part: “The beer is then fermented using a bottom fermenting yeast at warmer temperatures (not unlike a California common, or steam beer).”

I’ve recently been visiting, or revisiting, articles and books about the quest for authenticity. And were a brewer interested in producing a steam beer using the same yeast breweries did more than 100 years ago, well, that might be a problem.

In 1911, while conducting tests as part of another project at the University of California, T. Brailsford Robinson discovered just how different steam beer yeast acquired from California Brewing in San Francisco was from lager strains. “The yeast of the steam beer has accommodated itself to these conditions (warmer fermentation and the clarifier) to such an extent that it can no longer be employed for the preparation of lager beer, while lager-beer yeast may without difficulty be used for the manufacture of steam beer,” he wrote. “The cells of the typical steam-beer yeast are somewhat smaller than those of lager-beer yeast.”

(Should you want to read a history of steam beer that may not totally align with what you’ve read before I would suggest Brewing Local. Disclaimer: I wrote it.)

‘Massively decentralized iteratively developmental simulator’

Read last week: What Would Beer Taste Like Without The Internet? – A Rebuttal, from Jordan St. John, replying to a post by Jeff Alworth.

I pass it along not only because I think the combination of five words at the top should be put to music, but because it helps explain why the speed at which beers that don’t taste like beers that came before are being introduced.

Fifty years after Fritz Maytag bought control of Anchor Brewing Company in 1965, he talked about the importance of tradition, at least in his mind. “Mind you, there was no beer in the world more traditional than ours. Pure water, good yeast, malted barley, hops. Period,” he said in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. “No additives, no chemicals, no nothing. That was a theme we felt strong about. To make old-fashioned beer in a pure, simple way.”

Although I might like the beers being referred to, I also have reservations about the phrase “beer flavored beer.” Mr. Tradition shouldn’t act as a gatekeeper.

With that in mind, from St. John:

“[Today] you’ve got tens of thousands of brains working on creation in concert in what may as well be a massively decentralized iteratively developmental simulator, sharing their data with each other in real time via social media. The technology has turned us into a computational device.

“When you see a brewer or brewery post on social media telling you about their product, whether it’s the strength, technique, malt bill, hop varieties, hopping rate, etc, they’re not only trying to position it to the consumer, they’re participating in a larger evolutionary discourse that is extant across an entire industry which has more participants than at any point in global history.”

You might also find these interesting:

– When friends actually did let friends drive drunk.

– Josh Noel confesses he owns 147 hard plastic beer can holders. I’ve always taken them back to breweries (not necessarily the ones they came from) when I was buying beer at their door. I would be happy to trade them for a pour.

– Interesting observations in a story about the young bosses of Silicon Valley who rode their unicorns to fame and fortune. May apply to some brewing industry members.

A reckoning. “Patience for visionaries wore thin. Founder-led companies started to seem like liabilities, not assets.”

A familiar attitude. “In start-up lore, Mark Zuckerberg pioneered the modern boy boss. Carrying business cards that read, “I’m C.E.O., bitch” and ruffling Wall Street feathers with his ‘disrespectful’ hoodie . . .”

Beer predictions from 1998 that are not embarrassing

All About Beer Magazine 1998

I did not find what I was looking for earlier this week thumbing through wrinkled pages of All About Beer magazines (a reminder of the time it rained a lot in New Mexico — shout out to “Better Call Saul” fans — and our garage flooded), but I did find a story from 1998 making predictions about what’s next.

(Being old and a creature of habit, I will likely continue to dig through boxes of paper, magazines included, when I am poking into the past. You don’t have to. The resurrected All About Beer archive, which as I type this goes back to 2002 and continues to grow, will serve you better.)

I love these sorts of stories, because they get things wrong and make us laugh. Except this one actually stands up surprisingly well.

Here’s the tl;dr version:

1. Macro micros are out; local beers are in

2. Lagers, lagers everywhere
Some came true faster than others

3. Domestic imports
”Foreign” beers would be brewed in the US

4. Here come the Corona clones

5. New beer hot spots, and must-have beers

6. Blurring the distinctions between micro-breweries and brewpubs, between contract breweries and brick-and-mortar breweries.

7. Mergers and buyouts will continue

And now, Greg Kitsock wrote, “let’s go out on a limb . . .”

8. Great availability of craft beer in cans

9. Non-alcohol craft beers

10. Small brewery-distilleries

He picked the right limb.

Prelude to a beer

Maypop plant at Scratch Brewing

This is a maypop flower. The picture was taken a couple of weeks ago at Scratch Brewing in southern Illinois and showed up in my email this week when I asked how this year’s “crop” is looking.

Scratch Maypop is one of the best beers I’ve had this year. It is simple, but not-simple, not as sweet and juicy as passion fruit, but with a how-do-I-subscribe-this fruit flavor moderated by elusive “wheaty” character, more tart than sour. It is not as electric as the flower, which is fine.

I drank it in a brisk March day, with fruit from 2021 harvest obviously, and it tasted like summer.

Maypops (Passiflora incarnata) are native to the United States, grow wild in southern Illinois and can become invasive. Scratch harvests them in the woods surrounding the property the brewery sits as well as from vines growing on the building.

The flowers bloom from early July through mid-September. “The fruit will ripen from late August until mid October,” said co-founder Aaron Kleidon. “The fruit is hollow until it’s nearly ready. Then it turns yellow and shrivels a bit. At this point the fruit loses most of its tartness and begins to have tropical flavors. It will fall from the vine and we harvest it from the ground. We scoop out the pulp and freeze it as they all ripen over the month.”