The craft beer conundrum: What does it mean?

Beer on the mindI looked up the word conundrum to make sure I was using it appropriately (a question or problem having only a conjectural answer). I already knew I couldn’t look up “craft beer” – thus the conundrum.

We’ve debated the challenge of defining craft beer in this blog and maybe 80 percent of those listed to the right, as well as at Rate Beer, Beer Advocate, the Real Beer community and in at least 1,387 American brewpubs. Good bar talk – as witnessed by the scores of comments in the most recent discussion started by Lew Bryson.

A lot of good – and important – reading, but I don’t see a succinct definition emerging. It’s pretty obvious that debating the meaning of craft beer could occupy an entire semester of Beer Philosophy 101 and still there’d be no conclusion.

I can live with that. I spent a good portion of my working life as a copy editor and supervising copy editors. Writing and editing is a lot easier when you’ve got a dictionary to fall back on. And have I little choice but to use the term craft beer in some stories that I write. I just did a quick search in a story I filed last week for New Brewer, the publication that goes to Brewers Association members, and I see I used the phrase three times. In all three cases, even though the definition is imperfect, no other would have worked as well.

So perhaps whenever I type craft beer here I should include a link to the 50th comment, posted by Mr. Bryson himself.

The real subject is beer, or as Lew writes the beer in the glass.

Which takes us back to where the discussion started, a Anheuser-Busch Beach Bum Blonde Ale tasting note, and Lew’s column earlier in the month about the benefits of tasting beer blind.

I have this blog with a name – that to many people doesn’t exactly make sense – predicated on the idea that where your beer comes from (way before it gets in your glass) and how it is made changes what is in the glass and how you feel about it. So I think it’s OK to give extra points (were we scoring the beer – which of course we don’t do around here) to New Belgium Mothership Wit beer because it’s organic or because of the brewery’s commitment to sustainability or because you like bicycles.

But you are shorting yourself if you don’t objectively evaluate what’s in the glass. That means you don’t give a brewer you like a pass when he or she conjures up a below average beer. It means that if you see a good reason to try a beer from a brewery you’re not a fan of that you give yourself an honest chance to like the beer.

Craft is not a synonym for good or an antonym for evil empire.

I started to write a comment to meet Lew’s request to describe the “characteristics (of craft beer) that you can see, taste, and smell in the glass” before I realized (d’oh) the description wasn’t about craft beer, but just beer itself.

Great Divide Samurai: Do not fear the rice

Great Divide SamuraiI suspect more than one “beer geek” will be surprised by Samurai, a new bottle release from Great Divide Brewing in Denver.

Some might just grab a six-pack because of the name (after all, a samurai is a warrior), the excellent packaging and the fact it comes from Great Divide, best known outside of Colorado for its big and bigger beers.

Instead Samurai is lightly golden (as in this picture), a little cloudy, not hoppy, brewed with rice, a modest 5.2% abv and founder Brian Dunn even describes it as “an accessible, super-quaffable beer.” Those are sometimes code words for bland and boring.

Not this beer. Stephen Beaumont waxed romantic about Samurai last year when it only sold on draft and just in a few locations near the brewery. I would simply add it has an elusive spiciness with some wheat beer substance (perhaps because it is unfiltered) though it turns cleanly crisp where a wheat beer might finish with a bit of twang.

Not surprisingly Samurai goes well with fish and Asian food. Great Divide first brewed it as the house beer for a local sushi restaurant. “Then we got busy and quit brewing it,” Dunn said.

The brewery also quit making two of its lighter beers, Whitewater Wheat and Bee Sting Honey. “I thought people were confused about who we were and we decided to narrow the brand focus,” Dunn said. Its stronger beers – four of them 9% abv or more – all rank highly at Rate Beer and Beer Advocate.

“All of a sudden we had no light draft beer,” Dunn said, “and we lost a lot of lines.”

That’s when Great Divide resumed brewing the beer – no longer just for sushi restaurants, but for Denver accounts who wanted a lighter Great Divide beer to sell on tap. It proved popular enough that distribution will widen to all accounts and include bottles.

Because Great Divide’s bigger beers earned the brewery substantial “beer cred” I hope that this beer receives a more open-minded reception than it might otherwise. That’s not because I like it – although I do – but because it is a flavorful alternative.

That’s what small-batch brewers give us.

Aromas, culture and sorting out what we taste

Beer flavor wheelClass will be in session next week when Mike Steinberger launches a three-part series on sensory perception and wine at Slate, the online magazine.

Steinberger warms up with a discussion of why wine writers use the descriptions they do.

What does this have to do with beer? The wine flavor wheel and the beer flavor wheel (click on the image to enlarge) are different, but the fact is that flavors are flavors and aromas are aromas.

The parallels are not perfect. Steinberger talks about the evolution of how the wine writers describe wines, but I’ve never see a similar history of beer tasting notes. But when he documents that there are scientific explanations – that is, fermentation byproducts that can be measured – for flavors and aromas he could just as well be talking about beer.

That’s why I’m looking forward to the series.

Reading his story sent me rifling through notes taken while reading Emperor of Scent.

The book relates mostly to the perfume industry, though there’s plenty about the disagreement (and politics) within the academic community about how we smell. You realize that Luca Turin, the protagonist, doesn’t perceive aromas like you and I. Just as different people perceive beer differently.

Early on Turin says, “You know perhaps the edge I have in turning smell into language is that for me smell has always had an utterly solid reality that, to my utter astonishment, it doesn’t seem to have for other people. Every perfume I’ve ever smelled has been like a movie, sound and vision …”

He also says, “France is a country that understands that, much as in music an orchestra is not just violins, the range of smells that makes life interesting includes some rather severe ones.

“Your taste and smell is part biology and part culture…. When they smell (rotten cheese) Americans think, ‘Good God!‘ The Japanese think, ‘I must now commit suicide.’ The French think, ‘Where’s the bread?'”

As the parent of a 10-year-old American who has developed an affection for stinky (and not cheap) cheese I can tell you that is changing.

Updated June 21: Steinberger so far has examined the age-old stoner’s question: Do you taste what I taste? Then whether or not he’s a “supertaster.” And tomorrow, he’ll explore whether being a supertaster helps you evaluate wine. Some good stuff (good read it), but I’m waiting for all three parts comment. Since I’m off to the National Homebrewers Conference in Denver it will be the beginning of next week before I can.

New Beer Rule #4: Variation is not a flaw

Looks good to meNEW BEER RULE #4: The god of beer is not consistency.

Full credit for this rule goes to Mark Dorber, the venerable British publican who uttered these words in 1996 at the first Real Ale Festival in Chicago.

He was speaking specifically about cask-conditioned ale, but the rule applies fairly to most small-batch beers.

This doesn’t mean that a beer needn’t be consistently good; only that it doesn’t have to taste the same every batch. Or in the case of cask beer, the same the second day it is on dispense as the first. Or in the case of a beer that you might cellar for a few years the same two years into the process as five years in.

Look, same is OK. It’s what most people seem to want. That’s why Anheuser-Busch goes to incredible lengths to make sure beers such as Budweiser – brewed in 12 different plants in the United States and other around the world – taste the same no matter where they come from. They don’t want us commenting on the nuances of Newark (New Jersey) Bud versus those of Fort Collins (Colorado) Bud.

Small batches lend themselves to greater variability. Hop varieties taste different not only from year to year, but from lot to lot – depending, for instance, if they are grow high on a hill or in the lowlands of a rolling hop district. The same may true for barley that will be turned into malt. (And then there are process differences, etc., but let’s keep this short).

Large breweries may blend to minimize differences. Not so small-batch brewers. “We’re going to have variability from batch to batch,” said Great Divide Brewing founder Brian Dunn. “I think the flavor profile doesn’t change enormously, not enough that drinkers necessarily notice.”

This is why it is silly for Consumer Reports to rate beers (see what Ron at Hop Talk has to write about that), and just another reason that assigning a number to a beer doesn’t work for me.

Back in the 1980s, Michael Jackson discussed consistency with Roger Schoonjans, then brewing director at Belgium’s famed Brasserie d’Orval. “People should not want our beer to taste exactly the same every time,” he said. “They want the gout d’Orval (flavor of Orval), for sure, but they want to be able to chat about it: ‘I think this one is a little more hoppy — yesterday’s was rounder . . . .’ In that respect, they treat it like wine.”

You don’t have treat your beer like wine to appreciate that worshiping at the foot of consistency means that you’d be giving up something you should not want to.

Olympia brewery tradition survives

Olympia stubbyThis is the sort of “blast from the past” we all should appreciate.

The Olympian reports that Fish Brewing has revived the tradition of blowing a steam whistle at 5 p.m. to mark the end of a workday, just as the Olympia Brewing Co. did for years in nearby Tumwater.

The Olympia brewery whistle last blew with its full-blown authority June 20, 2003, and then was donated to the city of Tumwater by brewery owner/seller Miller Brewing Co.

Tumwater officials were reluctant to sell or lend the whistle to the Fish Brewing Co., so about six months ago, the Fish brewers scraped up $1,000 to buy their own brass whistle. It used to blow at a Tacoma plywood plant.

Without any fanfare, the brewery employees mounted the whistle on the brewhouse roof, connected it to the steam boiler, rigged up a pull chain in the boiler room and started tooting it for five seconds at 5 p.m.

“The brewery was boring without the whistle,” Fish chief executive officer Lyle Morse said in jest the other day as 5 p.m. drew near.

On some days, brewery employees go across Jefferson Street to the Fish Tale BrewPub and bring a patron over to blow the whistle.

Probably not good business for Fish to begin bottling some of its beers in the famous “stubbies” Olympia used to use (pictured above). Not certain it might make the guys at We Want the Olympia Beer Stubby Back would be happy (they likely want Olympia inside the bottle), but it sure would be interesting.