Budvar staying Czech-owned … for now

There are few stories that raise the hair on the back of a good beer geek’s neck as fast as those about the ongoing battles between American Bud and Czech Bud.

Thus Evan Rail’s report that the often-rumored privatization of Budejovicky Budvar won’t be happening for at least two more years should produce a few smiles.

The government still plans to transform the company into a joint-stock company in preparation of future privatization, but will own 100% of the shares. It will be left to the government that emerges after the 2010 elections to decide about privatization.

I can’t march in lockstep with the “American Bud bad, Czech Bud good” crowd, so maybe I think this is a good news for a different reason. As Rail suggested in one of his first post at the appropriately named Beer Culture blog were Budvar privatized then Anheuser-Busch might be the best fit.

Just look what has happened when classic brands have ended up in the hands of SABMiller and InBev. And make no mistake, if the brewery is sold it will be a brewing conglomerate.

It’s a Czech beer. It should belong to the Czechs. It’s good news that it’s going to continue that way — at least for now.

Roll out the barrels, Part I

Cambridge Brewing barrels
Stephen Beaumont and Jon Abernathy have added their voices to the chorus singing the praises of barrel-aged beers.

Let’s hope everybody is right and more barrel-aged beers are on the way. Right now I’d settle for larger production runs of what’s available.

After writing a story about blending for Imbibe magazine and one about barrel-aging in the current DRAFT magazine I’ve got notebooks full of information that didn’t quite fit and I need to tell somebody about.

Even though I’m still in research mode.

I suggest you start with the DRAFT article. It may be all you need, but should you want more here’s the first of a couple posts on the subject (for now).

There’s not enough to go around

I pointed out how rare these beers are last summer and received several e-mails and comments from people alerting me to barrel-aged beers I might not have known about.

In fact, the number of individual beers being aged in barrels would be quite staggering. Problem is that we are talking a few dozen barrels from a microbrewery here, maybe a single one from a brewpub there. When I was at Berkshire Brewing in Massachusetts last summer I was startled to walk around a corner and see 11 used bourbon barrels (each full of beer) on metal racks.

But the short version of the math I did for DRAFT: Each weekday in USA Today Jerry Shriver recommends a wine. He only chooses wines with a case run of at least 8,000. Why send people looking for something they’ll never find? There isn’t a single barrel-aged beer produced in that quantity.

Consider two upcoming releases.

On Monday, Deschutes Brewery will release the second edition of The Abyss, an imperial stout aged in French oak and bourbon barrels. The first batch (December 2006) disappeared in the blink of an eye. And that’s before the beer was named “Best Stout in the World” by Men’s Journal and won gold medals in several major competitions.

On Saturday, Port Brewing/Lost Abbey will sell Red Poppy Ale for the first time. There are but 60 cases of 375ml bottles, each bottle priced at $15 with a limit will be four bottles per customer. The only way to get the beer is to visit the brewery. Think they’ll have any trouble selling out?

There are barrels and there are barrels

We commonly talk about beer production in terms of barrels, each one amounting to 31 gallons. “The Imperial Brewery just installed a 30-barrel brew house” or “New Belgium Brewing sold 485,000 barrels last year.”

Wood barrels that once contained wine or spirits — or in some cases are being used for the first time — generally hold between 50 and 65 gallons and will yield about two beer barrels.

You might say I lied about nobody producing comparable to 8,000 cases. Firestone Walker ran about 5,000 beer barrels through its Union system last year and sold hundreds of thousands of cases of beer with a measure of oak flavor. The brewery began the year with 36 wood barrels in the Union and boosted that to 42 because of demand.

How it works: The base for what will become Firestone Walker Pale and FW Double Barrel ferments in steel. Approximately 20% is transferred into the Union after the first day of fermentation and that remains in wood for seven days. What’s blended back with beer fermented in steel becomes Double Barrel Ale. The brewers then blend about 15% of Double Barrel with un-oaked pale ale to create Firestone Walker Pale.

It most accurately should be called a barrel-fermented beer, but one that perfectly showcases some of what wood adds. Firestone has released two barrel-aged beers, the cleverly named Firestone 10 and Firestone 11.

There are barrels and there are chips

Firestone Walker UnionTo produce 5,000 (beer) barrels of oaked ale to use in blending brewers at Firestone &#151 these are people at work, because this is not a matter of hitting a switch and watching beer flow magically from one container to another — must rack beer into wooden barrels well over 2,000 times, then rack it back into steel after a week.

It is ridiculously labor intensive and of course a some beer is lost along the way. It’s hard to believe they can do this and only charge $6.99 to $7.99 a six-pack.

Barrels are a pain in the butt. When I walk into either of two wineries near my house I know I won’t see any barrels. Both use “chips” in the aging tanks to add wood flavor to their products (both red and white wines). They aren’t really chips but wood blocks. The winemakers don’t want too much surface area (which you get with smaller chips) or they’ll end up with excess wood character.

Is this a shortcut? Sure. But it beats the heck out of paying more than $1,000 for a French oak barrel (the going price) and dealing with getting large volumes in and out of barrels that hold 60 or so gallons.

That’s why Anheuser-Busch ages its Winter’s Bourbon Cask Ale in tanks along with bourbon barrel staves rather than the thousands of barrels it would otherwise need. Speaking of people at work, somebody still has to lay those staves in the massive tanks and take them out when the beer is done.

Fine beers are produced using chips, beers like Great Divide Oak Aged Yeti Imperial Stout (French and toasted oak chips) and Stone’s Oaked Arrogant Bastard (which to my taste fares better after it has some time in the bottle).

Oops, that’s more than I intended to write and covered less ground. We’ll resume this soon.

Hops shortage? What hops shortage?

This from the Monthly Mash, a regular dispatch from Avery Brewing in Boulder, Colo:

As most of you have probably heard by now, the craft beer industry has been hard hit by a global hop shortage this year. The chronic oversupply that characterized the hop market for the 90’s and much of this decade is officially gone, taking with it the low hop prices that microbreweries like Avery have enjoyed for so many years. For most breweries 2008 will be a year of compromise. Brewers will have to tackle the undesirable task of tinkering with their most prized recipes to try and figure out how to get the same flavors using fewer hops.

While some observers may posit that the hop shortage is a good thing, forcing brewers to become more efficient and prudent with their use of hops, we at Avery tend to disagree. Hops are the heart and soul of our beers and we refuse to compromise our recipes or our flavors. Even more, as if to scoff in the face of common sense and basic brewery economics, we decided to increase the hops that were added to this years New World Porter. The 2008 batch is truly a black IPA.

The beer debuts in just two hours at the Avery Tasting Room. Alas, it’s more than a seven-hour drive from here.

Brace yourself: Extreme beers in the NY Times

Pouring an extreme beerEric Asimov prepares us: “My column in Wednesday’s paper is on American extreme beers, a topic that I think is fascinating whether you’re a beer drinker or not.”

We’ll find out more tomorrow, including what beers the New York Times panelists liked. (Here’s the link, and you must check out the photo.)

The place for comment then will be Asimov’s blog. As I type there is but one comment, from the constantly entertaining Fredric Koeppel, but this is a topic that should generate scores more.

How many do you think? 50? 100?

I’ll be content to sit back and read. We’ve already talked this to death in the beer blogosphere.

But words from Koeppel, Asimov and Michael Jackson nicely frame what will surely follow tomorrow.

From Koeppel: “In beer, wine and food, the elements of balance, harmony and integrity mean everything.”

From Jackson (in the introduction to Beer-Eyewitness Companions): “Tomorrow’s classics will evolve from a new breed of American brews that are categorized by their admirers as ‘Extreme Beers.’ These are the most intense-tasting beers ever produced anywhere in the world.”

And from Asimov (after all, it is his blog): “Beauty often springs from the creative dynamic between the Old and New Worlds, in which the tension between tradition and liberation holds it all together.”

(The photo at the top is believed to document the first pouring of a pre-Prohibition Double IPA, brewed with twice the flaked maize of a traditional pre-pro beer and four times the amount of Cluster hops.)

The Session #12 announced: Barley wine

The SessionJon would like us to call it barleywine while some would call it barley wine. In any event, he’s announced that’s what we’ll be tasting for Session #12.

Is this the time to haul out the 1968 bottle of Thomas Hardy’s Ale? Probably not.

But perhaps a vertical of newer versions, or maybe six Sierra Nevada Bigfoots, going only with the odd years so we can span 1997 through 2007 and still be able to walk.

Speaking of Bigfoot, Rick Sellers has the rundown on special packaging to celebrate 25 years of Bigfoot.