Session #2: Chama River Demolition Dubbel

The Session(This is my contribution to our monthly Session. Alan McLeod will be recapping them all.)

One Sunday last May, Ted Rice lifted a glass of beer homebrewed in the spirit of a Belgian dubbel.

“That’s the aroma I’m looking for,” he said, putting it to his nose.

This was literally one of the first batches brewed with the dark candy syrup that Brian Mercer (www.darkcandi.com) was just beginning to import from Belgium. Mercer had shipped samples to a few homebrewers and we invited them to enter their beers in the Enchanted Brewing Challenge. We’d judged the homebrew competition the day before at Chama River Brewing Co., where Rice is the brewer, and today we were drinking the leftovers while sitting on the deck at Il Vicino Brewing.

The dark syrup contributes rich caramel, rummy and dark fruit aromas we associate with beers brewed in Belgium. Westmalle started used caramelized sugar syrup in its Dubbel in 1922. (More about the syryp.)

Ted RiceNot surprisingly, it wasn’t long before Rice (shown at work in this un-glamorous photo) brewed a dubbel with the syrup. He’s since brewed two more, the latest of which is on tap now.

Tasting it as it matured, the consensus has been that it is the best Demolition Dubbel yet (to our count, this is the sixth edition since the first won a gold medal in the 2004 New Mexico State Fair). So I intended on Tuesday to ask Rice: “Are we there yet?”

I took along the previous version, bottled last summer for entry in the Great American Beer Festival and stored in a temperature-controlled chest freezer since October (we don’t have cellars in New Mexico). The GABF version was bottled-conditioned, meaning fresh sugar and yeast were added to kickoff re-fermentation in the bottle and carbonate the beer to a level not generally available on draft.

And it was carbonated, much more than when I last tried a bottle six months ago. Beer came surging out when I opened the cap, onto Rice’s desk in the brewery and the floor, leaving just enough in the 22-ounce bottle for three of us to sample. We quickly assured ourselves that an infection wasn’t to blame.

We didn’t find any off flavors or sourness, but one friend picked up a bit of tinny thinness in the finish and much preferred the one on draft. Even though the bottled version was cloudy (yeast in suspension) Rice and I decided we liked it better because of spicy character contributed by the yeast (this version was brewed with a different yeast than last). A bit of a surprise.

Is there a point (or are there points)? For one thing that when you brew in small batches not every edition has to taste the same.

For another, earlier this week Andrew at Flossmoor Beer Blog mentioned that American brewers “try to do a little of everything” (there’s more in his post worth commenting on, but that will have to wait). Well, Rice has won seven medals at GABF or the World Beer Cup in five different beers styles. None of which are among the six regular offering at CR, so brewing an every changing lineup for the other four hasn’t affected quality.

I’m not sure when we’ll next see Demolition Dubbel, but I do know that it will be different again.

“I could do this the rest of my life (and still be working on it),” Rice said.

‘Me too’ in Portland? Not

Following up on Stephen Beaumont’s lament on “me too” pubs.

John Foyston (Warning: reading a blog about the Portland, Ore., beer scene may leave you severely depressed unless you live in Portland) reports that long beer journalist- publican-brewer Jim Parker and brewer Lorren Lancaster are opening a new brewpub called the Green Dragon Ale House & Bistro.

It’s in an area with four microdistilleries, three brewpubs and a bunch o’ good pubs. Just a typical Portland neighborhood.

Here’s the nut:

“Being a publican is a higher calling than just being a barkeep,” Parker said, “and I’m telling distributors that I don’t want flagship beers, I want the beers they’re having the hardest time selling. If you can get the same beer down the street, I don’t want to pour it because I want Portland’s smartest beer drinkers to come to my place. If I serve them just the standard beers, I’m not giving them any credit for their knowledge and sense of adventure…”

The pub is due to open in June. Parker is looking for people to join the Founders Club: Loan him $2,500 for five years and you get your own barstool and a guaranteed place at the bar; and your first beer free and 10% off your bill on every visit.

Beer sommelier redux

Salt sommelier? Water sommelier?

These job descriptions make beer sommelier seem like less of a stretch, don’t you think?

The Los Angeles Times has a story about how the food business is booming, “and with it, there’s a boom in jobs you’ve never heard of.”

Consider the specialty Christina Perozzi has carved out for herself. She calls herself a beer sommelier, doing for microbrews what a traditional sommelier does for Super Tuscans. She says she “geeked out” on beer while working at Father’s Office in Santa Monica, a bar known for its extensive selection of beer, and now her “biggest passion is teaching people how beer pairs with food.” And so she helps restaurants and bars develop beer lists and train their staffs, organizes pairings with chefs at public events and teaches beer classes.

Perozzi has a blog (christinaperozzi.com), is writing a book (“Beer 4 Chx”) and says she would also like to branch out into beer tours, any one of which would have been job enough at one point in time.

Personally, I’d like to nab a job as an “affineur.” It refers to the person who improves the flavor of a cheese through aging for a few months or enhancing by some method such as washing in brandy.

Or maybe beer?

These are our beer glory days

Catching up after 10 days offline (and often off the grid), I see that Eric Asimov of the New York Times devoted his column Wednesday to Overcoming a Frat Party Reputation, an even-handed look at modern day beer culture.

He framed the story by venturing to Boston to share beers with Todd and Jason Alström of Beer Advocate. Asimov writes correctly:

Each of the Web sites has its partisans, and crossover is common, but at beeradvocate.com, discussions seem to get louder, arguments rage more fiercely and passions flow close to the surface.

Asimov repeatedly gets to the point: “. . . the real action in beer culture takes place on a far more visceral level, in the rants about why so many good restaurants have wine lists as thick as books but only carry three beers, or whether beer lovers have a bias against big breweries, or whether high-alcohol extreme beers are great or ruinous.”

And I really like what he notices at the end (go read it). But – and you knew this was coming – there’s something that bugged me.

“One of our main goals is trying to raise the image of beer as a whole and bring back the beer culture,” Todd said. “We had a beer culture but Prohibition kind of reset the button.”

Not exactly. Maureen Ogle surely grimaced if she read this, because in Ambitious Brew she endeavored to correct the oft-told (but factually inaccurate) tale that America had a booming beer culture before Prohibition and that big, greedy brewers flattened it after the Noble Experiment failed.

Bob Skilnik further substantiates that this is a myth in Beer and Food: An American History (more on that book later in the week).

Beer itself began to change in the 1870s – lager took over, beer factories took over, beer brewed with adjuncts took over. And the places where people drank beer also changed. Both Ogle and Madelon Power (Faces along the Bar) document the role the Anti-Saloon League in the ultimate success of those in the Prohibition movement. The Anti-Saloon League would not have succeeded if saloons had not provided plenty to be against.

Bevo MillIt’s not like brewers didn’t know what was going on. In 1916, August A. Busch – the second member of his family to guide Anheuser-Busch – built the Bevo Mill in St. Louis as part of an effort to associate beer with something other than wicked saloons.

Kind of a Here’s to Beer of the early twentieth century. By then, Busch had already launched Bevo, which took its name from the Bohemian pivo (beer) and contained less than one-half percent alcohol. The Bevo Mill, a replica of a Dutch windmill, was a high-class restaurant, with beer and wine (no hard liquor) available only at tables. There was no bar. No sawdust. No bawdy women.

Yes, you could say he was battling windmills with a windmill. That didn’t hold off Prohibition, as you know, but the restaurant still operates today.

My point would be that we are not returning to the past glory days of American beer and beer emporiums. These are the glory days. Peruse the Brewers Association Beer Style Guidelines, all 41 pages, and ask yourself how many of those styles were available in 1870 or 1915. And that’s before we get to the matter of quality.

It’s only been 30 years since Jack McAuliffe launched the short-lived New Albion Brewing Co. so we’re at what? Chapter Two? Chapter Three? This is creation, not re-creation, which is why matters like ingredients, batch size, shaking the frat boys image, and so on are important.

Write it again, Sam: Another book

The things you learn reading the Wine Enthusiast Online: Sommelier Marnie Old and Dogfish Head Brewery founder Sam Calagione are writing a book called He Said Beer, She Said Wine. It’s due in the spring of 2008.

Vinnie Cilurzo & Sam CalagioneCalagione (pictured here in plaid; that’s Vinnie Cilurzo of Russian River Brewing with him, not Old – and that’s beer in their glasses, not wine) and Old recently have been conducting a series of dinner competitions.

They each pick a beverage to go with a series of dishes from star chefs. Diners sample both a wine and a beer with each of the dishes, make a selection as to which choice was better, and turn in a ballot voting for their preference.

The Wine Enthusiast explains:

While this was the eighth time Sam and Marnie had gotten together for their “He Said Beer, She Said Wine” Event, the outcomes have always been quite similar. “It always seems to come down to the last match,” Marnie notes, “but our main goal is to get wine lovers to appreciate good beer and beer lovers to appreciate good wine.” With the vast assortment of Dogfish Head brews and fine wine selections chosen by Old, that did not seem to be too difficult of a task.

Dogfish Head sales were up 37% in 2006, but Calagione is still able to churn out books almost as quickly as beer. The first – Brewing up a Business – targeted entrepreneurs; the second – Extreme Brewing – homebrewers; and this one from the prestigious combination of Penguin and Dorling Kinderlsey may reach the widest audience yet.