Snekse 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.
When 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.
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).
Here’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 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.
Whether you embrace *xtr*m* beers or not, there’s little argument that Americans’ willingness to try experimental beers has captured the attention of brewers from other countries.
Case in point, Roger Protz visits the Nethergate Brewery on England’s Essex-Suffolk border, which has earned its reputation with excellent mild cask ales.
What does he find brewer Tom Knox working on?
“Belgian beers have helped the appreciation of bottle-conditioned ales in Britain,” Tom said. He plans a 10.5% beer with 85 bitterness units for the American market: it will be finished with Champagne yeast. The range of bottled beers will come in a variety of shapes and sizes, including some with corks and wire cradles in the Belgian fashion.
Twenty years ago you wouldn’t have heard many British, Belgian and German brewers talking about “brewing for the American market” and if they did they certainly weren’t talking about their more flavorful beers.