New Beer Rule #5: It is only beer

Credit for this one goes to Don Younger, publican of the Horse Brass Pub in Portland.

Exhibit A: Last week’s Session, in which the guys at Hop Talk challenged bloggers to write about atmosphere. We’re talking about dozens of folks who take the time to write about beer several times a week.

And what did they focus on?

Early on, it became quite clear that there was a nearly universal theme as to what made for a good beer drinking atmosphere: people.

Exhibit B: Don Younger and the Horse Brass Pub. Now we’re talking people.

There are various stories about how Younger acquired the Horse Brass, but what’s certain is that it wasn’t until after he owned it that he decided to find out just what an English pub was. So he headed to Great Britain in 1977. “That’s when I knew,” he said. What, he wasn’t yet sure, “but I was going to do the pub thing.”

Fast forward to 1995, the evening of the last day of the Oregon Brewers Festival. We had arrived in town before the festival started, and spent an intense several days visiting pubs and brewpubs in the metropolitan area, some with Don and many more he suggested. He talked about influences, about history, about Oregon brewers (some gone), about pubs. Several times over.

We didn’t expect to see him at the Horse Brass that evening. We’d just stopped by for one last pint before leaving town. But he showed up at our table and had a seat. Soon it seemed half the people in the pub had stopped by and the conversation naturally centered on beer. What do you think of Portland’s bars? The brewpubs? What beers did you try at the festival?

Then at one moment Younger leaned back in his chair and smiled. You could see him almost eavesdropping on scores of conversations taking place around him, most of them not about beer.

“After all,” he said, “it is only beer.”

How’s that for perspective?

Session #6 announced: Fruit beers

The SessionGreg Clow has made the call and the theme for the next session, Aug. 3, is Fruit Beer.

Aside from the stipulation that it be a beer brewed/augmented with fruit (or fruit juice or extract), there are no other rules or guidelines. Anything is fair game, from a tart and funky Kriek or Framboise, to a sugar-laden “lambic”, to a Blueberry Wheat or Raspberry Ale from your local brewpub.

We’ll be in Massachusetts on that Friday, so I don’t know if I’ll wait and go for something local and fresh – you’ll be thinking that way after you read how Greg settled on the theme – or with an old favorite.

Beer and innovation

Just a quick thought for the weekend.

Recurring questions that resulted from the epidemic of lists in the last week (yes, you can blame me) were which came first, which were truly influential and eventually which were innovative.

In that light I found a little Q & A with Jonathan Schwartz is the CEO and President of Sun Microsystems, pretty relevant.

What really drives innovation in technology?

Courage. Courage to challenge conventional wisdom, to wholly commit to an idea or ideal, to lead and inspire those around you, whether they’re collaborators or customers.

Quite honestly, when I look at my personal list what ties the beers together not so much is the idea you’d call them innovative, but that they are wholly committed to an idea, that they are beers of conviction.

There are a lot more out there, with new ones being brewed every day.

Yes, Alan, “beers of conviction” does sound like a good topic for The Session.

Don’t blame Congress for bad beer

Gotta love that headline. It appeared at Earthtimes.org in what was basically a pointer to a longer story in The Hill, a Washington newspaper, about the House Small Brewers Caucus.

The 35 members of the caucus (they hope to have 100 by the end of the legislative session) promote small breweries, trade beer-making advice and drink a few beers together. They even have a website with information about brewing and tips on pairing food with beer.

Not surprisingly, legislators from Oregon head the caucus. The story begins with the fact that Democrat Peter DeFazio brews at home. Both he and co-chair Greg Walden, a Republican, display a link to the caucus website on their home pages.

Just another sign of a different attitude about beer gaining traction with (some) lawmakers.

Malt (and barley) matters: Part II

The SessionAnd now – taking a break from our swim in the pool of listmania – we return to our regularly scheduled conversation about what makes the beer we drink different.

So time for Barley Part II (you knew I had another old image I was itching to show you).

In his Great Beers of Belgium, Michael Jackson writes about how Brother Thomas – then the brewing director at Westmalle – favored malts from Beatrice-Gatinais in France because of their softness, but the varieties he chose each year varied. That would indicate he was more concerned with quality than consistency, but that is another conversation. The point would be that he recognized that not all two-row pilsner malt is created equal.

Jackson describes how important this was to Brother Thomas: “In discussing a malt from elsewhere, widely used by other brewers, I asked whether he thought it was perhaps a trifle harsh. ‘It’s brutal!’ he replied, thumping the table.”

Brother Thomas may have been a little harsh himself, but the fact is that two different varieties of barley – let’s say Optic and Scarlett – kilned to the same color and then used precisely the same way in a recipe may produce beers that taste noticeably different. One might showcase hop bitterness, another a richer malt character. One isn’t necessarily better (or the other “brutal”) but they are different.

Weyermann Malting® in Bavaria proved this to a panel of industry members, including many brewers, a few years ago. Weyermann brewed four pilsners on its pilot system, each with malt produced from a different barley, and in a blind tasting the panelists had no trouble telling them apart.

As a result, some breweries have since begun ordering pilsner malt made from a specific barley. This isn’t necessarily realistic for your average small brewery and certainly not for the local brewpub you should be stopping by tonight.

So maybe I don’t have a point, but it seems like information you should have.

Barley Part I (in cased you missed it).