Is there a winery on the way to the brewery?

GrapesDon’t forget, next Friday is Session #4 and it’s all about drinking local (or regional, or as local/regional as you can be). (How The Session started.)

This will be easier for some than others, but the Brewers Association happily points out the average American lives within 10 miles of a brewery. You probably have seen the numbers: In 1984 there were just 83 breweries operating in the US, down thousands from 100 years before. Today there are more than 1,400.

But beer’s not alone. Today’s Wall Street Journal has a story about the United States of Wine (subscription required) in which is describes the “remarkable expansion of wineries to unlikely places.” Check out these numbers:

There are 5,110 wineries in the country — 1,773 outside of California, Washington, Oregon and New York, according to the U.S. Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau — and many of them are new. In Texas, 24 wineries opened in 2006, up one-third in just one year, says industry-tracking firm Wines and Vines. Last year, Colorado went from 48 wineries to 70.

Makes sense to me. It takes less than half an hour to walk to the brewpub in the village where a l live, but before I’m half way there I’ll pass a winery.

So my point would be that interest in better beer is not happening in a vacuum. It’s been linked to similar affection for quality food and wine for more than 30 years. It took some people longer to figure that out, but it’s hardly a secret now.

Other historic beers on my wish list

As I type this nobody has come up with the starting bid of $1,500 for eight bottles of Ballantine Burton Christmas beer, and it’s not going to be me.

Sure, I wish I had a chance to try the beer. It’s intriguing that it would have stood up all these years, but as long as we are wishing for impossible things … I’d like to have a taste of what it was like in the 1960s or ’70s, when Fritz Maytag and other new wave brewers tasted it. It likely influenced where a new generation of beers was headed.

There are other beers like that – I’m not interested in old bottles that turn up, but what they tasted like at their prime – but I’ll start with a simple 6-pack.

1. Ballantine Burton Ale. For reasons already stated.

New Albion sign at Russian River Brewing

2. New Albion Ale. New Albion was the first American microbrewery built from scratch and you simply cannot measure its impact. The Brewers Association this year honored founder Jack McAuliffe. Michael Jackson wrote that this was the “truest to the (English ale) model in its hoppy bitterness and well-attenuated body.”

(The photo is a sign that used to hang at New Albion and now sits above the window looking into the barrel room at Russian River Brewing in Santa Rosa.)

3. Cartwright Portland Beer. Cartwright was Oregon’s first micro, and Don Younger of the Horse Brass Pub tells wonderful stories about the excitement surrounding the arrival of its first beer. Problem is Cartwright beers weren’t very good (Jackson refers to “some technical” woes). The second micro, BridgePort, was much better, and you know the rest about what happened in Portland.

4. Newman’s Pale Ale. Bill Newman opened the first micro east of the Mississippi in 1981 and kept it running until 1987, exerting influence mostly forgotten 20 years later. He was devoted to the English model, fining his beer in casks and serving it at cellar temperature. In Beer School, Steve Hindy and Tom Potter write “he refused to compromise with anything modern.”

5. Shiner “Old World Bavarian Draft.” Locals still talk about the dark Bavarian-style beer that brewmaster Kosmos Spoetzl brought with him from Germany in 1915. It was brewed into the 1960s but had different names after Prohibition. Spoetzl had a strong German consumer base, but it is still interesting that he was able sell an all-malt German-style lager at time (pre-Prohibition) the rest of the country was drifting toward lagers lighter in color and flavor. After all, Shiner is in Texas (south of San Antonio).

6. Anchor Steam (circa 1965). Maytag readily admits the beer was sour and not very good when he first tasted it and bought a controlling share of the brewery. The American beer revolution hasn’t been driven by steam beer, but without that (then) sour beer …

Would you drink a $200 bottle of beer?

Ballantine Burton Ale

Well, I guess he first question is if you’d pay $200 for a bottle of beer.

That’s because eight bottles of Ballantine Burton Christmas Ale are up for auction at eBay. The starting bid is $1,500 (none as I type), the “buy it now price” is $5,000 and the auction closes May 28.

From the auction description:

The labels state that the ale was brewed for Edward Boghosian on May 12, 1946. Seven (7) of these were bottled in November 1960 and one (1) was bottled in November 1959.

This ale was never sold to the general public and only given to special celebs, friends and employees during the Christmas season. This batch was made for a local Rhode Island TV executive. The bottles are all intact and in overall excellent condition. Some labels may be a little loose and a few caps have some oxidization. Please refer to photos.

I auctioned off one Ballantine Burton ale bottle a few weeks ago for $130+. I was able to recently obtain the remainder of the bottles which are now being auctioned off here. There are no further bottles available once these are gone.

As any Internet search will show you, these Ballantine bottles have a well deserved reputation. Back in 1994, Steve Kemper wrote a story for BeeR the Magazine titled “Pub Crawling New York with the Beer King” detailing in evening spent in several of Manhattan’s historic barrooms with the late Alan Eames.

They finished at Bahama Mama, where Eames had a bottle of Ballantine Burton Ale delivered to the table. That particular beer had been aged in wood from 1946 until 1966 and had been in the bottle for 25 years. After Eames explained how he came to own the bottle, he said: “This is the Dom Perignon ’55 of beers, and God sent it to me.”

Another beer in that lot he came across sold for $400, and Eames suggested the one they opened could be the last bottle in existence. He was wrong about that, because the bottles keep showing up. But eight at one time, and with a display box, should take your breath away (and your pocketbook if you intend to own the lot).

From the story: “He poured. The color was coppery, the head fleecy and alive. We tasted. Eames moaned with joy. I joined him in chorus. The ale tasted of wood and caramel and roasted grain and humus. Our please was complicated by the pain of loss that always accompanies the impeding disappearance of something fine. Eames poured out the last of it, and we drank.”

You may recall that eBay briefly outlawed selling vintage beer, then relented by setting forth several rules, starting with “The value of the item is in the collectible container, not its contents.”

Perhaps. But we all want to know what the beer inside tastes like. What the heck – if you bought eight bottles it wouldn’t hurt to open one.

Added May 29: The auction closed without any bids.

Forget those tasting rooms in Texas

The bill in the Texas Legislature that would allow microbrewers to sell their product on the premises of their breweries appears to be dead.

Brock Wagner of Saint Arnold Brewing told the Austin Chronicle:

Our bill was opposed by Mike McKinney of the Wholesale Beer Distributors of Texas, and with him opposed to it, we were not able to even get a hearing on the bill in committee.”

Makes no sense to me. If you take the tour, begin to appreciate the place where the beer is made, maybe have a free sample, and then want to buy a 6-pack to take home shouldn’t you be allowed to?

Drinking in place – German delights

Today’s New York Times features a must-read story on the front of the travel section headlined On a German Beer Trail, One More for the Road. Evan Rail (who recently also wrote about Czech beer innovation) set out with a definite purpose:

I wanted to try those German brews that had maintained a sense of local flavor, beers that were produced in their hometowns and, more or less, nowhere else.

In Cologne, I would drink Kolch, a light and fruity pale ale, one of the few beers protected by an appellation of origin as if it were a wine. In Leipzig, I would seek out Gose, a spiced amber beer that was out of production for two decades and that is just now making a small comeback. And in Bamberg, I would try the elusive rauchbier, a beer made with wood-smoked malt that is said to taste like liquid bacon.

Other beer pilgrims could have just as easily chosen other cities with great brewing histories “Dusseldorf, Dortmund and Munich come to mind,” but my trio seemed to offer the most promise and variety.

He starts in Berlin, where there were once 700 brewers of weisse beer and now the last two major producers have merged. But this isn’t a story about tracking down some ancient beers before they disappear – much as a blues fan might have headed to the Mississippi Delta a few years ago to see Frank Frost or Junior Kimbrough in a real juke joints.

The point of this story – to me, at least – is not history, or even tradition. The point is place.

Rail drinks Kolsch in traditional pubs where the average patron is “73 1/2 years old” and also goes clubbing with a much younger crowd in a packed club playing hip-hop at high volume. Even before getting there he finds another young and diverse crowd, favoring the local beer.

Why beer, in such a slick place? And why Kolsch?

“We’re proud of it,” Mira said. “I’m not necessarily proud of being German, but I am proud of being from Cologne. This is our beer.”

Reading this I couldn’t help thinking about tasting a wonderful Kolsch-style beer brewed in North Scottsale, Arizona. At an upscale brewpub decorated in a cowboy motif, where nobody talked about the fact that the beer was different or local. (And the brewery is long gone.)

We know, historically, that the Kolsch evolved into the style that it is for practical reasons (involving such arcane matters as brewing water).

But something else also happened along the way because it is brewed in Cologne and because it is different when you drink it in Cologne.

That’s why you should read this story.

(And we haven’t even got to the smoked beers of Bamberg or Leipzig’s Gose – tomorrow, perhaps.)