Harder to spell? Amyloglucosidase or Reinheitsgebot?

One of the secrets to brewing the reigning beer of the moment, Brut IPA, isn’t really a secret. Many brewers give full credit to the enzyme amyloglucosidase, which plays a significant role in producing bone dry beers. Its not unusual to read that craft brewers have been using the enzyme “for a while” in “big” beers like imperial stout.

But just for the record, the enzyme was first used by breweries that don’t fit the definition of craft to make light beers. And only a few years ago the people who work at breweries that do fit the definition mostly talked among themselves about using enzymes. Jack McAuliffe and Fritz Maytag might have something to do with that.

When Frank Prial of the New York Times visited McAuliffe at New Albion Brewing in 1979 he wrote:

Jack McAuliffe boasts that his beer is a completely natural product. “We use malt, hops, water and yeast,” he said. “There are no enzymes, which the big breweries use to speed up the process of mashing and aging; there are no broad-spectrum antibiotics, which they use to stop bacteria from growing, and there are no heading agents to create an artificial head. The proteins which are filtered out of most beers are what make the head. We don’t filter.”

In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle in 2015 that marked the 50th anniversary of when he bought controlling interest in Anchor Brewing Company, Maytag said, “I wanted to be holier than the Pope.”

Mind you, there was no beer in the world more traditional than ours. Pure water, good yeast, malted barley, hops. Period. No additives, no chemicals, no nothing. That was a theme we felt strong about. To make old-fashioned beer in a pure, simple way.”

Times change.

Monday beer links: What if the King hadn’t been dethroned?

BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 07.16.18

Farewell To The King
A decade after Anheuser-Busch’s sale, beer still pours from St. Louis brewery but much has changed.
Beer in America changed, July 13, 2008, when Anheuser-Busch agreed to a takeover from InBev. Before getting to the “what ifs” there is this new story, one published when the deal was finalized, and one that tracks how the story played out on the front pages.

At the time, columnist Bill McClellan asked, “If the brewery is sold, how will we know who we are?”

I remember interviewing a man who had just been fired from some dead-end job. I asked about his background. “My parents were both bottlers at the brewery,” he said. I said something to the effect that those were pretty good jobs. He nodded. “But I wasn’t raised to think I was better than anybody else,” he said.

If you’re not from St. Louis — or haven’t spent years here — that might seem like a strange thing to say. Why would the child of blue-collar workers even think of saying such a thing? But if you’re from here, you understand. Brewery jobs have always been special.

Read more

Community

Two men in a pubIn Monday’s links I pointed to one where Martyn Cornell wrote, “Let’s be clear. There is no ‘craft beer community’, any more than there is a ‘Stella Artois community’ or a ‘Nescafe community’ or a ‘sourdough bread community’.”

Boak & Bailey chose to disagree on Wednesday, writing “The Community Is Real, Even if You Don’t Go to the Meetings.”

I don’t have anything new to say, because the topic has come up more than once before (which is not to say the reminder Cornell started with is not worth the reminding). Three previous thoughts:

– There is a symbiotic relationship that develops when brewers care about what their friends will be drinking, and consumers take pride in consuming beer made by people they know. This occurs within a larger (but likely still small) community. Indeed, butchers, bakers and others whose job titles do not begin with b may develop the same relationships.

– The time Shaun Hill said, “I’m still trying to figure what the best way is to build community, or interact with the local area.” And I quoted Bowling Alone.

– It seems we had a rather lengthy discussion on this topic here nearly seven years ago, provoked, no surprise, by Alan McLeod. Do not be put off by the occasional snippy exchanges along the way, because the final comment from Jan Biega is worth your time.

(Just so you know, comments are turned off for that post, as they are for all older posts here, because they become magnets for spammers.)

Hunting for the next great beer experience

In April, there was a link on Twitter to a news story about a “Bavarian ‘beer world'” that caused me to ask Stephen Beaumont and Mark Dredge, both of whom have recently written books about beer adventures, if they have been to Kuchlbauer’s Bierwelt.

Dredge responded first, “I drove near it when going to drink zoigl but decided not to stop there!”

And Beaumont followed, “Can’t say I’ve ever been or, having read the article, are inclined to go. Animatronic beer gnomes?”

Not long after, Joe Stange — who lives in Berlin — added, “Kuchlbauer… The beer is fine but Hundertwasser is the real attraction.” Hundertwasser is the tower within the park.

All three of these men spell flavour with a u, but they’ve earned my trust and their most recent books merit attention. That Beaumont and Dredge have written ones called Will Travel for Beer and The Beer Bucket List respectively is something of a coincidence that illustrates it must be time for such a travel books (or books), along the lines one of those one hundred and one or one thousand and one before you die titles. That this is the eight edition of Good Beer Guide Belgium, which Stange co-wrote with Tim Webb, since 1992 points to a dynamic that isn’t just about Belgium.

Read more

Monday links: CBD beers, lawnmower beers, tasting terroir

BEER AND WINE LINKS, MUSING 07.09.18

The Short History and Uncertain Future of CBD Beer.
a) This appeared in The Ringer, a sports and pop culture website.
b) True fact: Breweries experimenting with CBD beers are taking a risk by simply hoping to slide under the regulatory radar. “Of making sure Coalition’s CBD beers stay in compliance, (Elan) Walsky grinned and said, ‘We probably put our lawyers’ kids through college four times over.'”
c) New Belgium Brewing uses an experimental hop known has HBC 520 in The Hemperor. No, you won’t be the first to suggest it should have been called HBC 420.

Keeping it local: how UK brewers are tapping into provenance and terroir.
It only appears I am contractually obligated to link to every story that mentions beer terroir. I actually pass on a few. This one raises an interesting question. “Even if it is hard for the average consumer to taste the difference, they will understand the general principle that natural products grown in a particular area will take on a unique set of characteristics, and that is a concept I can see becoming increasingly popular in the future.” If you can’t taste the terroir is is really terroir?

So They Brewed Their Own Beer — The Northern Clubs Federation.
This is what can happen when breweries get bigger. “What becomes clear is that the Fed (the club brewery) quickly grew into a very substantial concern with plenty of money sloshing about, wood-panelled boardrooms, colossal egos, and in all that more or less indistinguishable, at least in cosmetic terms, from the private breweries its founders had set out to overthrow.”

Read more