Brewpubs and ‘beer cred’

First, at Hop Talk, Al suggests what he think are 5 essentials for a good brewpub, starting with “An old building, especially with a lot of exposed brick.”

Then at Beervana, Jeff Alworth discusses Beer Cred in Portland, Oregon.

Beer is a working-class beverage. Drinking beer is a working-class activity. Oregon brewers, who until ’99 had Henry’s as an example, got that. In the 80s, as brewpubs started opening up, they had a gritty look. Breweries were located in Portland’s industrial Northwest (part of which has been overtaken by the Pearl). Tap handles for good beer appeared in working-class bars. It is my suspicion that one of the reasons Oregonians took to microbrewed beer was because it retained it’s blue collar ethos.

And he compares that to “boutique breweries” in other parts of the country.

You simply cannot argue with the success of craft beer in Oregon (11% of volume vs. 4% in the rest of the country). In fact, you’ve got to wonder if the rest of us will ever catch up.

My point? I’m not sure I figured one out. I found these two interesting to read in the matter of only a couple of hours. In his, Alworth concludes, “Yes, that was a random posting.”

This must be as well.

You know you’re a beer savant when . . .

These two words either mean something to you or they don’t.

Cask Fred.

Are you smiling or are you looking a little perplexed?

Hair of the Dog will be pouring cask-conditioned Fred on Saturday for FredFest, a Portland, Oregon, mini-festival of sorts that marks the 81st birthday of groundbreaking beer writer Fred Eckhardt.

Hair of the Dog is the host. The entire lineup looks great, but you really only need to known one thing.

Cask Fred.

The Session #4: Local Brews

The SessionSnekse, of the Gastronomic Fight Club, has chosen the theme for Session #4 and it’s not a style. He wants us all to taste local beers.

His guidelines:

  • You can pick anything commercially made within 150 miles of your house, but try to pick the brewery or brewpub closest to your house.
  • You can select any beer or even a sampler if you want.
  • If you select a single beer, let us know why you choose this beer (e.g. favorite,seasonal,limited edition, best seller).
  • Preferably you’ll shy away from beers with wide distribution outside your immediate area.

    • I like this idea quite a bit, although I have 13 breweries within 150 miles of my house – and this is New Mexico. The Brewers Association last year figured out that the average American lives within 10 miles of a brewery, and next week is promoting the Great American Beer Tour as part of American Craft Beer Week.

    There’s every chance I’ll be walking to Session #4 and drinking a beer available only on draft.

    The Session #3: A Mild by any other name

    The Session(This is my contribution to our monthly Session. Jay Brooks is recapping this month.)

    Britain’s Campaign for Real Ale has designated May as Mild Month – and tomorrow as National Mild Day.

    What does this mean? From the CAMRA web site: “We ask licensees to come on board by stocking this style of beer, encouraging pub-goers to try a few Milds throughout the month and hope that all of our members participate in Mild events up and down the country.”

    Suppose, instead, it were Mild Month in the United States – that the Brewers Association promoted it like American Craft Beer Week. It wouldn’t be enough to suggest pub-goers drop by their local and try the regular Mild, because there’s something of a shortage. (If you look at comments from participants you’ll see finding Milds has been a challenge.)

    It would mean brewing something new, and presenting it as special, which would draw attention to the style. Maybe brewers in a region would get together for mini-festivals. Since Mild truly shines when (properly) served on cask it would be another chance to break out the firkins.

    We’d certainly expect American brewers to explore historical versions of this style. And that would be an opportunity for all sorts of fun.

    In “Brew Your Own British Real Ale,” Graham Wheeler and Roger Protz write, “In the modern sense it means ‘mildly hopped,’ although in the old sense it meant not sour!” They explain:

    The origins of the term Mild ale stem from the early days of commercial brewing. In those days many people did not feel that a beer had matured properly until it was beginning to turn sour, i.e. until an acetic acid taste was beginning to develop. However, the degree of acidity was a matter of individual taste and differences in personal preference were overcome by publicans supplying two grades of beer: Mild beer, which was a fresh immature ber; and Stale beer, which was the same stuff only it had been kept for up to a year and was beginning to turn sour. The customer mixed these in his tankard in appropriate quantities to give him the desired tang. Some moneyed people made a trade of buying mild and keeping it until it was sour and selling it to the publicans at a profit. Stale was therefore more expensive than Mild so many people drank mild on its own and this eventually came to dominate public taste.

    They state that the Milds of 300 years ago were simply immature versions of the standard brown beers of the day. In 1805 a Mild would have had a gravity of 1.085, in 1871 it would have been 1.070 and in 1913 1.050. While we praise Mild as a lower alcohol session beer, they contend that Mild dropped to a gravity of 1.034 for a different reason: “Twentieth century greed.”

    Think what American brewers might do with this information. Some would accept the challenge and stick to beers of 3.2% to 3.6% alcohol brimming with flavor. Others would create something more radical – and clearly not what CAMRA has in mind.

    Guess you should be careful what you wish for.

    Stray thoughts

    – The solution to “saving” Mild probably doesn’t include giving it a new name, but it might help. As Tomme Arthur of Port/Lost Abbey points out in writing about his Dawn Patrol Dark Mild sounds so, well, mild.

    – Last January a New York Times tasting panel picked Ellie’s Brown Ale from Avery Brewing in Colorado as their favorite when they evaluated brown ales. Avery is better known for its range of high alcohol and highly hopped beers, and those are still the ones selling the best despite the NYT publicity.

    “One of our brewers suggested maybe we should change the name (from Ellie’s) to Extreme Mild,” brewery founder Adam Avery said.

    A tasting note

    So the point of The Session is we all taste around a central theme and write about what we taste, so I better give you a tasting note.

    SpicesLike many I can’t stop by the corner store and pick up a proper Mild. So first I thought I’d go with Deschutes Buzzsaw Brown, because at 4.8% it is mild by American standards and because I like it. Then reading Wheeler and Protz convinced me to do something I think I promised not to when we started the Session – write about a homebrewed beer.

    Garden Variety Gruit is brewed in the manor of a gruit ale from the Middle Ages, when the church controlled the ingredients and brewers didn’t use hops. The recipe takes inspiration from Randy Mosher’s Radical Brewing, although true to the author’s wishes I didn’t follow his recipe by rote.

    I used a little more lightly smoked malt than he suggested – and, by golly, Wheeler and Protz talk about smoked malt in early Milds – and the mix of spices was different since I walked around my yard and collected stuff I knew wouldn’t kill you. Even though I cut back on the cardamom it still dominates right now, and might forever. It adds an unfortunate astringent note, not totally unlike a badly hopped beer.

    I figure if I keep bottles stored long enough that might fade. Probably about the time the beer (remember, hops are a preservative) starts to turn sour. Then I’ll have a Stale. Is that on The Session calendar?

    Is your brewer an artist?

    It starts with a quote from Louis Nizer, the famous trial lawyer and author. He said:

    “A man who works with his hands is a laborer; a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsman; but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist.”

    Don Russell paraphrased Nizer to begin a column about making a case for extreme beer. Along the way he wrote:

    Beerwise, the most inspired brewers are not just craftsmen, they are artists.

    If there is an avant-garde movement among these brewers, then it is extreme beer.

    And later, “Session beers, I’m afraid, are Norman Rockwells.” This led to a flurry of discussion at Seen Through a Glass about *xtr*m* beers and session beers, but only a little about brewers as artists.

    Brewer at workSo what about that? And who to ask? How about brewers? I printed out part of Russell’s column and took it to the recent Craft Brewers Conference in Austin. I showed it to a dozen brewers along with another old saying that farmers make wine and engineers make beer.

    I asked them to choose one of four words to describe themselves: artist, artisan, engineer or farmer.

    Eight chose artisan, four chose artist. Most also said it depends on how you read the definitions.

    “Since artisan essentially takes in artist, then artisan is appropriate,” said Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewery.

    Matt Van Wyk of Flossmoor Station Brewing, a school teacher before he was a brewery, suggested a fifth choice. “Some brewers are just producing a product for profit,” he said. “I lean toward artisan.”

    Steve Parkes, the brewer for Otter Creek and Wolaver’s Organic Ales, picked artist, “By this definition.” Parkes is also the owner and lead instructor of the American Brewers Guild. Does that mean he’s in the business of training artists?

    “No, artisans. The artistic component needs to come from them,” he said. “I can’t train that. I can give them the tools, but I can’t teach inspiration.”

    Tony Simmons (call him an artisan) of Pagosa Springs Brewing told an interesting story. He was in a class at Siebel Institute with a woman who worked at Miller Brewing. Out of curiosity, not intent, he asked her what it would take for him to get a job brewing at Miller.

    “You couldn’t,” she told him. “We hire engineers and train them to brew our way.”

    John Graham of Church Key Brewing was part of the conversation. “On tours I tell people it is half heart, half science. You have to follow the rules,” he said. “I’m definitely not an engineer.”

    We decided we might have to track down a German brewer to find an engineer. But that’s wouldn’t be Eric Toft, a native of Wyoming who now brews at Private Landbrauerei Schönram in Bavaria.

    “I got into this because I thought it was artisinal and connected to agriculture,” he said. “You still need to be an engineer to run a brewery.”

    Matt Brynildson of Firestone-Walker Brewing made it clear he envies Toft. “I would call myself an artisan, but I totally wish it could be more farmer,” he said nodding toward Toft. “Or to be as connected as he is.”

    Toft regularly visits farms where his hops are grown and others that produce barley for his malt. All are less than 200 kilometers from the brewery. He uses a single barley variety – Barke – without regard to yield or how easy it is to grow (always a consideration for malt companies), paying farmers more if necessary to get what he wants (flavor).

    Toft was in Austin helping the Association of German Hop-Growers and the Halltertau Hop-Growers Association. They advertise hops as the “spirit of beer,” but I’ve also seen hops referred to as the heart of beer or the soul of beer. Others call malt the soul of beer.

    Does your beer even have a soul? Do you care? The answers could be no, and no. That’s fine. But I suspect if you said yes the fact it is brewed by artists or artisans might be as important as the ingredients used.