10 years of Falling Rock

Chris BlackDon Younger is going to stop by. Will you?

Granted, Younger – the venerable Portland, Oregon, publican who founded the Horse Brass Pub in 1976 – has his own stool at Falling Rock Tap House in Denver, but he seldom uses it in June.

He’ll be in Denver this week because Falling Rock celebrates its 10th anniversary.

The circumstances will be grander than when the multi-tap (69-75 tap handles operating, depending on the day, and “No Crap on Tap”) opened June 9, 1997. Chris Black (above), one of three founding brothers, didn’t realize that many of the distributors would deliver beer warm, so the bar was open for about four hours that day, then closed to organize and cool beer for the next day.

Black has different special beers planned for each days the celebration, and Belvedere Belgian Chocolate Shop is creating different chocolates to go with each beer. The first 50 customers each evening get a bar with a label that list the participating brewery as well as how many days the Falling Rock has been open.

Chris BlackThe beers are all locally brewed, and Black helped in production of several. For instance, Saturday he’ll be pouring a batch of La Foile he helped blend. New Belgium Brewing typically uses beer from two or three of its 10 foders (four 60- and six 130-hectoliter wood tuns) for a La Foile release. Black sat down with Eric Salazar of New Belgium to taste samples from all 10 tuns, and together they came up with a special batch.

The party kicks off the day before with Mr. Hoppy, made by Twisted Pine Brewing in Boulder. Gordon Knight founded Twisted Pine, where he brewed on New Belgium’s original five-hectoliter brewhouse. He later sold the company, but eventually was reunited with the brewing system when he started the Wolf Tongue Brewery in Nederland. That’s where he created Mr. Hoppy, a beer that Jim Parker (then the Wolf Tongue GM) called “hop water.”

There are a lot of reasons to post this at Appellation Beer (as opposed to Beer Travelers), but the best might be to remember Knight. He epitomized what I want to write about.

Knight was a Nebraska native who earned a Purple Heart as an Army helicopter pilot in Vietnam. He moved to Boulder in 1988, and soon turned from homebrewing to professional brewing. He also worked as a professional helicopter pilot, most often in fire fighting. He died in 2002 when his helicopter crashed while he was fighting a fire near Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

Reflecting on Knight’s life, brewer Brian Lutz said: “Gordon didn’t have jobs, Gordon had passions. Gordon’s job was his passion and visa versa. That’s a good way to live and I thank him for challenging me to do the same.”

Let’s hope a few Coloradoans with good memories raise a glass of Mr. Hoppy in his memory on Friday.

Just a few of the others beers:

– Great Divide’s Hades (strong, golden and Belgian) makes its official debut on Sunday.
– Black Triple 6’s from Wynkoop on June 12. This is a variation on a beer brewed 6/6/06 by Wynkoop, which Chris helped make this time. Brewed in the manner of a Belgian tripel but with coffee in the recipe.
– Chris brewed a batch of Odell Double IPA with Doug Odell on the brewery’s five-barrel pilot system for June 15. The recipe includes a new high alpha (18.8 AA) hop called Apollo.
– June 16, Avery Salvation (a Belgian strong golden) aged since September in Eagle Rare Bourbon barrels.

The celebration runs through June 17. Then we can start resting up for the 20th anniversary of San Francisco’s Toronado in August.

Session #4 roundup posted

The SessionSnekse wraps up the fourth round of The Session, this one focusing on local beers.

Hitting the road this summer? Might want to check out Local Brews: A Field Guide before traveling.

Many of the contributors did more than offer a single tasting note on a beer that was available locally. You’ll find lots of excellent regional tips.

Session #4: I’ll have green chile with that

Chama River Class VI Golden

Corrales Bistro BreweryWhen we started The Session in March I was hoping each monthly host would not feel constrained to make the theme a particular beer style, so kudos to Snekse for making the June theme Drink Local.

If New Mexico has a state beer adjective it is hoppy, and the state beer style would be India Pale Ale. As I headed down the hill from my house to the Corrales Bistro Brewery for lunch, conversation with my friend Ron and a beer I was thinking “good day for an IPA.”

The temperature was nearing 80 – this is a great time of year in the Rio Grande Valley, with windy season mostly over and morning temperatures still in the 40s, lots of sun and afternoon highs looking at 90 – and I was looking forward to sitting out on the back deck with a clear view of the Sandia Mountains.

As I’ve written before, the most basic route to “downtown” Corrales takes me past the Milagro Winery, so you get a bonus picture of part of its vineyard. Mission grapes were first planted in Corrales in the 1880s, but most were gone by the 1930s. This vineyard was planted in 1985 with more traditional vinifera.

Milagro Winery

If you look at the menu board (above) you’ll note – as I did upon arriving – that no IPA is available. Sometimes the Bistro will have one from Turtle Mountain (up the hill in Rio Rancho), and sometimes from Chama River or Il Vicino (both in Albuquerque). No. 10 is blank because the keg of Turtle Mountain IPA ran dry.

The surprise was that the Bistro’s first brew was available. Understand that the brewery is not the top priority here – owner Fritz Allen wants to run a taproom featuring New Mexico beers, and you won’t find any other place with quite the cross-section of beers (all local) that the Bistro offers.

The brewery is a stitched together three-barrel system that doesn’t include a way – other than the help of nature – to control fermentation temperatures. That presents a brewing problem most places, but particularly in New Mexico. Thus, at the suggestion of Il Vicino brewer Brady McKeown (who lives in Corrales), Allen decided to started with a farmhouse ale brewed in the manner of a saison and with a yeast that likes higher temperatures.

He studied Phil Markowski’s Farmhouse Ales before tackling the project.

Simply called Summer Farm Ale, this beer is light in color and body and didn’t suffer in fermentation (no band aid!). It’s lightly spicy – the brewery serves it with a lime – though not brimming with yeast character.

The picture at the top is the other beer I drank, the Class VI Golden Lager from Chama River (simply called Helles on the board here). I’ve written about that beer before.

It went quite nicely with a pastrami and green chile sandwich wrapped into a tortilla.

I didn’t really mind the State Beer wasn’t available, but I sure as heck was going to have a basic local dish (the green chile, not the pastrami).

How do you overlook 100 million cases of beer?

Better image for beerHere’s a multiple choice question:

a) Beer is an industrial product.
b) Beer is an artisanal product.
c) Wine is a pastoral/agricultural product.
d) Wine is an industrial product.

Which if these choices do you think Field Maloney chose in a story that appeared the web magazine Slate? I’ll give you a hint. The headline read: Beer in the Headlights. Sales are flat. Wine is ascendant. How did this happen?

He wrote about a) and c). We know – and I’m pretty sure he does, too – that the correct answer is “all of the above.”

I’m hoping that Jay Brooks gets around to a complete critique of this story (looks like he did), because a beer guy can find a lot to object to – whether it is the way that he uses a genuine beer expert like Lew Bryson to add beer cred or the less-than-accurate description of how beer is made.

(Or the fact that he writes “A Google search of beer and passion yields 1.48 million entries, while wine and passion yields four times that.” When I did that a minute ago the numbers were 1.7 million and 2 million.)

Much of what Mr. Maloney writes is correct. The largest American breweries have an image problem, although projects like Anheuser-Busch’s Here’s to Beer may be helping. Connoisseurship, passion and lifestyle are increasingly important.

However, I’m not buying into the wine/hand-crafted and beer/industrial premise. Consider these facts:

– Two Buck Chuck, called Charles Shaw wines in better company but still selling for $1.99 in California and a bit more elsewhere, last year accounted for 5 million cases of sales in 274 Trader Joe’s across the country. In California, wine heaven, eight out of 100 bottles of all wine sold are Two Buck Chuck. So growth hasn’t been fueled only by the “fine-wine industry.”

– The ascendance of fine wine and fine dining is generally linked to Northern California in the 1970s. That’s when Alice Waters opened Chez Panisse in Berkeley and vintners from Napa and Sonoma scored their victories in the “Judgment of Paris.” It’s ALSO when Fritz Maytag modernized Anchor Brewing, effectively making it the first American microbrewery. Soon Jack McAuliffe founded New Albion Brewing, then Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi started Sierra Nevada, and we were off and running.

Last year the breweries we call craft produced comparable to 100 million cases – all less generic than Two Buck Chuck.

Hey, Slate, how did this happen?

Flying Dog plans ‘open source’ beer

Beer Open Source ProjectFlying Dog Ales – which has more happening on the Internet than any other brewery I know of – has launched its own Open Source Beer Project.

The idea is to allow beer drinkers and homebrewers to create or recommend modifications to a Flying Dog recipe.

The Open Source Beer Project will start as a Dopplebock but the style may evolve as participants offer ideas and tweak the recipe. “We are encouraging input on every part of the recipe, down to how what variety of hops we should use, how much we should use and when we should add them,” said Flying Dog Head Brewer, Matt Brophy.

The open source beer will be Flying Dog’s latest “Wild Dog” release and hit stores in October.

Kudos to Flying Dog for creating an RSS Feed for the project. The brewery has embraced the Internet. Just a few examples:

– It regularly updates its website, and sends out frequent e-mails for contests like a Ralph Steadman Signed Gonzo Bottle drawing.

– It has more friends (8,607 at this moment) than any other craft brewery in/on MySpace.

– It has a Squidoo page.

– The brewery continues to add new videos at YouTube.

Is this marketing? Yes. Should be be wary of marketing? Probably, but a thread runs through the way Flying Dog appears in each of these spaces. The videos are of actual employees – like president/”lead dog” Eric Warner and his truck.

If these aren’t real people behind real beer then it is a heck of an act.