St. Patrick’s Day = Green brewing = Good

Welcome to the obligatory St. Patrick’s Day post.

(Not to be a curmudgeon — Ireland, Irish-Americans, Irish pubs in Ireland, Irish-inspired pubs in America, Irish beers, Irish-inspired beers, St. Patrick’s Day parades . . . are all good things. But do we really need a drinks company passing around petitions to make it a national holiday?)

Anyway, let’s get it out of the way comfortably before the main event. And by following a growing crowd writing about “green beer, no not that green beer, but the environmentally friendly stuff.”

Start with Slate’s “Eco-guide to responsible drinking,” a stunningly complex investigation of glass versus cans. It reminds me of The New Yorker’s look at carbon emmissions (“It’s easy to confuse morality and science.”) a few weeks ago. In the first case, there’s more to the equation than weight. In the latter, there’s more to a carbon footprint than coming up a label for everything you buy at the grocery store.

It’s far easier to understand what these three breweries are doing:

Long Trail ECOBREWlLong Trail Brewing in Vermont: They’ve even set up ECOBREW as a separate website. Serious stuff, from the heat recovery program to using biodegradable cups for outdoor events. Best factoid, though, is that most breweries use six gallons of water to produce one gallon of beer. Long Trail has that down to 2:1.

Mad River Brewing in California: Founder Bob Smith built the brewery in 1989 with recycled materials and has since earned multiple awards for its waste reduction programs. Mad River reuses 98% of its residuals and generates just one cubic yard of trash a month while producing about a quarter million gallons of beer annually. Damn good beer, too.

Eel River Brewing in California: The first certified organic brewery in the country. When the brewpub expanded in 2007, adding a production brewery in nearby Scotia the company took over an abandoned mill. The new brewery is 100% powered by biomass – “all the power used to brew the beer Scotia is produced from mill leftovers such as wood chips, bark, scrap lumber and clippings.”

For further reading track down the January 2008 issue of All About Beer magazine (before it gets recycled) for a comprehensive roundup from Jay Brooks.

What do ‘image seeking’ beer drinkers pick?

IPA - Woman and hopsMerlot does not suck.

Oh, sorry, this is a beer blog. But before returning to beery talk this wine fact just in: Merlot made up 20% of the wine purchases made by a group labeled “image seekers,” called that because they like to others to think they know a lot about wine, according to a 18-month study called Project Genome, conducted by The Nielsen Co. and released by Constellation Wines.

It seems that not everybody saw the movie Sideways. Or maybe consumers talk one way and buy another. Project Genome defines “image seekers are consumers who use the Internet to harvest factoids about wine and like to experiment with trendy wines and packaging.” However, when they bought wine for home it was merlot.

So what’s the beer of image seekers?

According to IRI the best selling craft style nationally is Pale ale. But in various parts of the country the leader may be Pale ale, wheat beers, bock or amber lagers.

Sour beers? Those red-hot Italians? Barrel aged? Nowhere to be seen.

How about IPA? Fifth in three different regions and fifth overall — with a bullet (up 34% in supermarkets in 2007).

Perhaps the next merlot.

Palo Santo Marron: A beer and a movie

So would you pair Palo Santo Marron (shortened to Palo Santo for the rest of this post), the latest release from Dogfish Head Craft Brewery, with popcorn?

Probably not, but it is tempting simply because the beer comes with a movie. Dogfish Head has enclosed “Take Time” with the first 10,000 four-packs of Palo Santo with a note that the length (19 minutes) of the documentary about making the beer coincides with the optimal time it takes to finish a snifter of the 12% beer.

As you can see, Dogfish made the video available on YouTube in two parts. I put the second part here because you get right to the nuts and bolts. Start at the beginning if you like.

Watching it (while drinking the beer, of course) the thought occurred to me that had there been DVDs and YouTube in the 1970s this is something Robert Mondavi would have done. Sorry to introduce wine and marketing but it’s relevant. The story behind this beer won’t fit on a neck label or in a Twitter feed.

Watch them head into the back country of Paraguay and shoot bullets at the tree this wood comes from. Or listen to Bill Wehr talking about the largest wooden brewing vessels (holding 10,000 gallons) built in America since Prohibition.

Now back to the beer. Were I to play the “describe this beer in one word” game with Palo Santo that word would be “bark.”

Not in the sense of a dog howling at the moon. Bark as in wood. Aromatic and intense, unlike anything I can remember, blending with a boatload of flavors that test the list of beer descriptors posted yesterday. Add chalky, charred and gritty for starters. That’s meant as a compliment.

Words to describe the beer you are tasting

More adjectives: 107 words to describe hop aroma and flavor.

Until robots take over our tasting world we’re left to consider how to communicate the aromas and flavors we experience with beer.

A review of “Perfumes: The Guide” in the current New Yorker magazine makes that point.

The words and the references are really useful only to people who have had the same experiences and use the same vocabulary: those references are to a shared basis of sensory experience and a shared language. To people who haven’t had those shared experiences, this way of talking can seem like horse manure, and not in a good way.

The book was written by Tania Sanchez and Luca Turin, and since Turin was the protagonist in the delightful book “Emperor of Scent” five years ago it gives me an excuse to quote this vaguely relevant passage:

“Look at beer, which is a very interesting cultural product. Beer smells like a burp. Gasses from someone’s stomach. Lovely. Again a product of fermentation, which is to say decay. Decay enhances smells and flavors, yet we have a sharp ability to identify decay, because decaying things will kill you. Bacterial and yeast decomposition.

“Which can give you ‘I wouldn’t touch that in a million years’ and, at the same time and in the same culture, mind you, ‘I will pay great sums to consumer Rodenbach,’ which is a miracle of a beer from Belgium. A miraculous, powdery apple flavor. Those Rodenbach yeast have an I.Q. of at least two hundred. Fucking genius yeast.”

Returning to the point. A shared tasting vocabulary serves a certain purpose. So I pass this along to do with as you please. It comes from the Merchant du Vin newsletter.

1. Words to describe malt flavors: Malty, biscuity, breadlike, grainy, rich, deep, roasty, cereal, cookie-like, coffeeish, caramelly, toffee-like, molasses-like, malt complexity, smoky, sweet, autumnal, burnt cream, scalded milk, oatmeal, rustic, layered.

2. Words to describe hop flavor and bitterness: Piney, citrusy, grapefruity, earthy, musty, spicy, sharp, bright, fresh, herbal, zippy, lemony, newly-mown lawn, aromatic, floral, springlike, brilliant, sprucelike, juniper-like, minty, pungent, elegant, grassy.

3. Words to describe fermentation flavors deriving from yeast: Fresh-baked bread, clovelike, bubblegum, yeasty, Belgiany, aromatic, tropical, subtle, fruity, clean, banana-like (and for some sour or extreme beers) horseblankety, earthy, musty.

4. Words to describe conditioning (carbonation): Soft, effervescent, spritzy, sparkling, zippy, pinpoint, bubbly, gentle, low carbonation, highly carbonated.

5. Words to describe body & mouthfeel: Rich, full, light, slick, creamy, oily, heavy, velvety, sweet, dry, thick, thin.

6. Words to describe warm ethanol (alcohol) flavors from strong beer: Warm finish, heat, vodka, esters, pungent, strength.

E-tongues & e-noses; Are e-hops next?

The Washington Post reports a Japanese consortium hasy released a Health and Food Advice Robot that can distinguish among 30 kinds of wine, as well as various cheeses and breads, and “has the irritating capacity to warn its owner against poor eating habits.”

The expert taster sat silently in the brightly lighted room, surrounded by 53 samples of ruby-red wine.

Fifty-three sniffs and 53 sips later, the judgment was in: a hint of black cherry . . . some acid . . . a floral nose. Every one of the wines, the taster reported, was an Italian Barbera, and all were made from exactly the same variety of grape.

But there was more. The grapes used for 23 of the bottles were grown in one region of northern Italy, the expert asserted, while those in the other 30 bottles came from a different region – a region, it turns out, just 60 miles from the first and featuring only minor differences in soil and sunlight.

I’m wondering how this robot might do next month at the World Beer Cup, given that the judges have 2,931 beers to evaluate in two days.

And what do you call a robot who is a hop head?