Dayton Brewvet Practice Ride #1

So today I took a spin from Dayton down to Miamisburg as a test run for one of the Dayton Brewvet rides. What is that, you ask? You’ll find out soon enough, so have no fear. Not surprisingly, it will combine bike riding and beer. And if that isn’t a win win situation, I don’t know what to tell you. So be prepared: I’ll expect all of you to be ready to jump on those bikes and ride when the time comes!

My plan was simple enough. Ride down to Star City in Miamisburg, have a beer, and then ride back home. Sadly, nothing was in the mood to cooperate today. First, it was like a gazillion degrees out today. Second, there was a headwind all the way down to Miamisburg (well, at least the return trip was easy with the tailwind all the way home). And third, Star City was closed. Yes, I should have seen that one coming. But since I always just assume beer will be freely flowing at all hours, I was still a bit shocked. While they did open at 4:00, I didn’t think that hanging out for two-plus hours on their patio was a proper investment of my time. So I instead headed for home in the sweltering weather, wondering why bad things happen to good people. Actually, that’s a bold-faced lie. I really wondered about what beer I would have when I got home as a reward, and then thought about this blog post and my waiting lunch, all three subjects far more promising (and interesting) to speculate upon than the nature of evil.

Finally, as you can tell from the Strava map (at least maybe you can tell—my phone does a terrible job of mapping my ride, making it look like I ride straight direct lines over rivers, lakes and highways), besides the trip to Miamisburg, I put in some extra miles on the bike path for fun, and also rode around my neighborhood looking for apartments for rent for a friend moving to Dayton. The trip to Miamisburg and back covered about 25 miles of my 40 mile ride. Not that all the rides will be this long, mind you. But the occasional long ride is good for you! More soon!

(6/17/2014)

Rockit Cup California Common Recap

Rockit Cup is back up in your face again, although it was another intimate affair with just three brewers. Even I missed this one, although in my defense, I missed it because I was in Grand Rapids attending the AHA NHC. Good enough excuse? Not really? Oh well. Anyway, I put Vanderglas in charge, and he proceeded to win. Well, according to him. So if the following results don’t jibe with what the rest of you remember, please feel free to provide your own commentary! And so, without further ado, the results:

1st: Jon Vanderglas
2nd: Chris Baumann
3rd: Jim Scofield

Thanks to all that participated! Stay tuned for the August Rockit Cup recipe!

(6/13/2104)

Telephone 28: Pucker Up, Buttercup

           Last weekend, I attended Upland’s Sour + Wild + Funk Beer Festival in Indianapolis. Normally, I’m not one for beer festivals; while the variety is wonderful, the crowds, lines, and drunkenness are not. Still, I can be beguiled when the conditions are right. And a beer festival that is small in size, has limited tickets, and focuses on sour beers is not to be missed, even by a curmudgeon like myself. Especially when many of the beers were made specifically for the festival! Sour beers have been growing exponentially in American craft beer over the last several years, thanks in part to perennial figures like New Belgium, Russian River, Allagash, and New Glarus, as well as more recent breweries like the Bruery, Jolly Pumpkin, Goose Island, and Crooked Stave. This growth means that many breweries are producing sour beers as special offerings or starting barrel programs intended to build their reserves of sour beer. Hence, as they might say, a festival of one’s own.
            Many of the usual suspects were at the festival. Upland, the host, has a well-established sour beer program, and had six of their fruit lambics available, along with a couple of other blended beers, although to be technical their lambics are neither spontaneously fermented nor are they from Belgium, so they are actually American wild ales. While they undoubtedly followed Belgian protocol—a lambic is a single, unblended batch of beer that is generally more aggressively sour and served uncarbonated, a gueuze is blend of one, two, and three year old lambic that is highly carbonated, and a fruit lambic is generally, like gueuze, a blend of multiple years and batches aged on fruit—a lambic, like champagne, is geographically (appellation) specific. I’m a critic, dear reader, so it is my job to point these things out to you. After all, if not me, then who? Anyway, many of the flavors in these beers were good, but they were sharp, young, and aggressive; they could have used more time in the bottle to come together. New Belgium, which is the biggest producer of sour beers in the United States, was also there. They age their sour beer in foeders—large wooden tuns—for multiple years before blending them to make their different individual beers. The two main beers that go into the foeders are Oscar, a darker ale, and Felix, a lighter colored ale. La Terrior, for example, is all Felix that is dry-hopped with Amarillo and Citra, while La Folie is mostly (but not all) Oscar. New Belgium also has the benefit of having Peter Bouckaert, who worked at Rodenbach before becoming NB’s Brewmaster. I was excited to try La Terrior, as I had never had it before, and it did not disappoint: it was fruity, dry, and earthy. Goose Island and Rodenbach were also in attendance, but since I am familiar with their offerings, I skipped over those tables. Sorry, but I was interested in the smaller breweries from Indiana that I hadn’t tried before. Thus, I thought it best to sup their wares.
            Amongst the Indiana breweries present, there were several that I had been to previously, but had not tried the specific beers they brought to the festival. Brugge brought Once In A Lifetime; if you are ever in Indianapolis, and would like some good Belgian beer, fries, and mussels, I can’t recommend them enough. Same with Flat 12; their Funk-A-File Dundee, which was the Walkabout Pale Ale fermented with Brettanomyces and aged in used Easley red wine barrels (made from Indiana oak!), was crisp and delicious. As well, there were a couple of breweries I had heard of but had not tried their beers. Foremost among these was DeStihl, which brought several selections from the Saint Dekkera Reserve collection, their spontaneously fermented unblended single barrel beer series. I tried the Kriek (cherry), which had good fruit flavor to balance the acidic, earthy flavors in the beer, and the Paw Paw, which was interesting but overly aggressive—it had a smoky enteric character that got in the way of other elements of the beer. Still, I’d he happy to try a few more of their beers to get a better sense of their offerings as a whole. After all, they are doing interesting things, and developing a good sour program takes years at best.
            The most interesting beers were from breweries I had not heard of before the festival. While Indianapolis and Indiana are not that far away from Dayton, the rapid growth in the number of breweries out there does make it difficult to keep track of them all! My favorite beer of the day was Tin Man’s Zero Out of Fifty. Zero began as a Belgian Pale Ale brewed with Centennial hops and fermented with Ardennes yeast; once fermentation was complete, Brettanomyces bruxellensis was added in the secondary and it was warm-conditioned for five weeks. The results were fantastic: the nose was minty and herbal with hints of grass and hay. There was a slight citrus flavor in the body—most likely the remnants of the Centennial hops with a touch of the Ardennes yeast—and earthy and cracker-like components in the finish, while the bright carbonation gave the beer a dry, peppery bite. All in all, Zero was fresh, bright, and balanced. It was a study in harmony and subtlety that was both restrained yet complex, and slowly unpacking the harmonious flavors was an exercise in deliciousness. Sorry if that sound smarmy, but I did go back to sample and re-sample this beer multiple times, so waxing poetic is appropriate. And nothing makes me wax poetic like good beer.
            When I asked Keenan Zarling, the Brewhouse Operations Manager from Tin Man, about the name, he had this to say: “prior to pitching the Brett in the beer, this was a fantastic Belgian Pale Ale. However, the addition of Brett (and the warm conditioning) drastically reduced (or at least changed) the Belgian yeast profile as well as the hop character. Some of my own personal bitterness (pun intended) came through when I was thinking up a name; what had started as a great BPA was now something ‘else’ and totally not to style. A BJCP tasting score for beer is typically out of 50, with it being very hard to make less than 8/50 if you are in the correct style category and made something potable. So logically, a ‘contaminated,’ warm conditioned, and ‘old’ BPA would not score very high, something like Zero Out Of Fifty. And it was a little tongue-in-cheek fun, too. Most breweries put a lot of energy into telling people how great X beer is, and why it’s a unique and wonderful experience. We decided to go a different route with the description and just trash-talk this contaminated BPA and entice people at the festival to come check it out and maybe have a chuckle about it.” Zarling was correct—there wasn’t much of the original BPA left in the beer I sampled. Still, I find it hard to imagine that it was better than the final product, which was exquisite. I guess I’ll just have to take his word for it.
            My favorite overall lineup was the four beers brought by Daredevil; they included blended primary fermentation versions of their Lift Off IPA and Vacation Kolsch, a blended secondary version of their Carnival Saison, and a soured version of the Vacation Kolsch with Lactobacillus. The first two beers were blends of the regular version of the beer with one fermented only with Brett; as brewer Michael Pearson describes, “For me, these experiments were about seeing how I could utilize an accessible Brett strain in primary to create something interesting and different. I tasted both the straight Brett Lift Off and Brett Vacation and then blended them to a ratio that I thought would allow the base beer to have a presence where anyone who’d had either would recognize them.” The Carnival Saison added Brett and lemongrass in the secondary to build a more complex, rounded beer, while the Vacation Kolsch soured a portion of the wort with Lactobacillus before blending it with already fermenting beer. Of the four, the Brett Lift Off IPA was the most interesting; it was dry and earthy, but still had some residual body. While it was young—Pearson told me the beer was about three weeks old—there was certainly elements of both versions that went into the beer. Compared to other Brett IPAs I’ve tried, this one combined Brett flavors with body in the beer along with the hop characteristics you’d expect in an IPA. Taken as a whole, it was a well-balanced and delicious combination.
            The festival as a whole was a delight, enough so that I’m even considering attending next year. For those of you that would like to find out more about sour beers, I’d recommend picking up either Jeff Sparrow’s WildBrews: Beer Beyond the Influence of Brewer’s Yeast, or Michael Tonsmeire’s soon to be released American Sour Beers. Both are geared more towards homebrewers, but there is a lot of pertinent information and history for the average beer drinker as well. Plus, reading about beer and brewing is always useful. Or you can let me know if you have any questions.
            Next time, some more beer.

Telephone 27: Putting the Craft in Craft Beer

          The term craft beer is a many-headed hydra. While I understand that most people want the definition of craft to be simple, clear, and easy, it is not. Even basic questions like “what makes a beer good?” are influenced by numerous considerations outside of the beer itself. For example, how does the producer influence your perception of the beer you are drinking? And how does the production process influence the final product that goes into your glass? The most obvious and oversimplified answers to these questions are that Big Beer is evil and craft beer is good, but this tautology ignores the shifting parameters of craft beer as an economic, political, and social entity over last thirty years.
          Before getting too far into these questions, I would like to take a moment to distinguish between quality and intensity. Often, beer geeks and new craft drinkers alike focus on intensity, allowing intensity to stand in as a marker of quality; this can be seen by the status accorded to massively-hopped imperial IPAs and Russian Imperial Stouts in most craft beer circles. In and of itself, however, intensity is not a marker of quality; there is not a pre-ordained hierarchy of beer styles marked by an increasing level of intensity—a Great Chain of Beer, if you will. Instead, quality refers to the beer itself, not the scale or intensity of it. Big does not always equal better. A lager can be as well-made as an IPA, heretical as that may sound. When the focus shifts to the beer itself—rather than the assumptions that consumers bring to beer as an overarching whole, like the admonition that adjuncts, like macrobreweries, are evil—we can ask different types of questions. 
          The Brewers Association—the trade group that represents craft brewers in the United States—defines a craft brewery as “small, independent, and traditional.” Their definition of “small” is “annual production of 6 million barrels of beer or less (approximately 3 percent of U.S. annual sales).” 6,000,000 barrels. And a barrel of beer, in case you were wondering, equals 31 gallons. So that’s 186,000,000 gallons of beer. While I understand the increase of numbers regarding annual production in recent years to allow the Brewers Association to continue counting breweries like Boston Beer as a part of their yearly statistics, this number still goes beyond that which reasonably counts as small. After all, while 3 percent of U.S. sales is far less than, say Coors or Miller, it is still well beyond the numbers most craft breweries will ever approach. As a comparison, the only Dayton brewery with the current capacity to produce more than a 1,000 barrels of beer a year is Warped Wing. So in this scenario, as long as you are no more than 6,000 times bigger, you are still considered craft. As economies of scale go, that is a pretty large spectrum.
          Next comes independent. Redhook gets kicked to the curb by the Brewers Association for the 25% stake it sold to Anheuser-Busch in 1995, which provided Redhook with access to A-B’s national distribution chain and the money to open a second brewery in Portsmouth, NH. Widmer followed in 1997, selling A-B a 27% stake for distribution access; Redhook and Widmer themselves merged in 2007 to form the Craft Beer Alliance. While both have been vilified for their decisions, as has Goose Island in 2011, I’ve always had difficulty reconciling the differences between their actions and the similar brewery expansions pursued by Boston Beer in Cincinnati, OH and Breinigsville, PA, and more recently the second wave of these expansions by Sierra Nevada and New Belgium in Asheville, NC, and Lagunitas in Chicago, IL. Sure, these breweries have maintained their “independence,” but they are all moving towards the business model espoused by the supposed enemy, Big Beer, with multiple breweries across the country intended to maximize distribution, production, and profit. The notion of independent is further complicated in the case of Boston Beer; while initially critical of Redhook’s actions, it had its own IPO stock offering in the mid-90s, raising $60 million dollars in capital that allowed Boston Beer to finally built its own brewery—during its firstdecade as a brewery, the majority of its beer came from contract brewing. It is this type of duplicity that makes me wish for more craft breweries like New Glarus, which intentionally self-limits their distribution to Wisconsin. Sure, it makes getting their beer more difficult to obtain, but I’ll take less-often quality over more-frequent quantity. As it relates to craft, less is often more.
          Finally, the Brewers Association’s third term: traditional. The ill-conceived “Craft versus Crafty” statement from BA in December 2012 was intended to call out “phantom craft” brewers like Blue Moon and Shock Top—breweries actually owned by Big Beer—in order to provide clarity and transparency for craft beer consumers. At the same time, it managed to alienate several of America’s older independent breweries by labeling them as “crafty” for their use of adjuncts, most notably corn. As Jace Marti of August Schell Brewing Company told the Brewer’s Association on BeerPulse, “Shame on you.” This hewing to “traditional” brewing ingredients on the part of the Brewer’s Association—yeast, water, barley, and hops—stems more from a false need on the part of BA to adhere to the German Reinheitsgebot than it does to the actual history of brewing in America. In this sense, the stigma connected to adjuncts has been created via their association with Big Beer: it is a product of those producer’s reputations more than anything to do with adjuncts per se. While this reaction may be understandable given the particular history of beer in this country, the backlash against adjuncts is more a manifestation of our own personal discomfort with American’s brewing legacy. In a discussion we had regarding the American Weissbier recipe from Wahl’s and Henius’s American Handy-Book of American Brewing, Malting, and Auxiliary Trades (1902), a recipe that features 30% corn in the grain bill, beer writer Jeff Alworth aptly observes that “corn is so hated now we forget that it’s our claim to indigenous fame. We call it ‘cheap’ but if the Belgians had had corn, we’d call it ‘rustic.’ Time to reclaim it from the beer geek trashbin.” His point, that we look down on our own history in the same manner that we tend to valorize the brewing history of other countries, hits the proverbial nail on the head. I couldn’t agree more.
          So where does this leave us? I’d like to close with a question, one intended to expand traditional discussion regarding the definition of beer at a local level: if a brewery—let’s call it Brewery X—produces 2-3 million barrels of beer annually and distributes in all 50 states, is it still a craft brewery? After all, at that point, Brewery X would seem to have more in common with Big Beer breweries like Budweiser than a brewery producing 500 barrels a year, even though the scale of comparison between Budweiser and Brewery X is roughly comparable to the one between Brewery X and a brewery producing 500 barrels a year. Pretending that the giants of craft beer share the same concerns with those on the lower echelons of production is both foolish and asinine. And even a little bit insulting. Still, the desire to continue to count breweries like Brewery X, to acknowledge their role in the history of craft beer while also relying upon their successes to document the growth of craft, is important as well as understandable. It would just be nice of that history was based upon, well, history, and was a little more even-handed and based less upon marketing. Even so, craft beer, much like Dayton’s burgeoning craft scene, is at a crossroads.
          Next time, let’s try some beer.

Barrel Beer Replacement Brewday

Time to get ready to swap out the first round of beer currently residing in the barrel, so that means time to make more beer. Such a travesty! Since I already have 5 gallons via the infected No Name Best Bitter, this should give me plenty of gallons to build up that barrel beer stock. Photo is courtesy Jeff Fortney from when we were at Country Boy Brewing for the Craft Writing Conference in Lexington.

174. Barrel Beer 
Mash:
5 lbs. Dingemanns Pilsner
3 lbs. Breiss White Wheat
1 lb. Breiss 2-row
1 lb. Weyermann Acidulated
1 lb. Breiss flaked maize
½ lb. Weyermann Carafoam
½ lb. Breiss Caramel 10° L

Mash @ 152° F for 90 minutes w/ 4 gallons RO water & 5 g. gypsum; collected 2 ½ gallons @ 1.074
Batch sparge @ 170° F for 20 minutes w/ 4 gallons RO water & 5 g. gypsum; collected 4 gallons @ 1.022

Collected 6 ½ gallons; brought to a boil (70 minutes), & added:
w/60 to go: 2 oz. Willamette leaf 7.8% AA

w/10 to go: 3 g. Wyeast yeast nutrient

Chilled and racked onto yeast cake from 170. Barrel Project

Primary: 4/21/2014 @ 68° F
Secondary:
Bottled:

OG: 1.056
FG:

Tasting Notes:

Gems from the Archives

Archival research is one of the many things occupying my time. Usually it involves lots of microfilm, and the need to trace down some obscure reference. Recently, however, I’ve increasingly been making use of some of the new digital online archives—like the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America—that offers a quite distracting searchable interface. Distracting because you can quickly and easily find all kinds of interesting and useless information. As with these two advertisements for Consumers’ Brewing Company. The first was in the Washington, D.C. Colored American on June 15, 1901, appearing on page 3. Below is a second Consumers ad from the Washington, D.C. Evening Times that appeared in the April 9, 1901 edition on page 8. Consumers’ Brewing Company was in Rosslyn, VA, right across the Potomac from Washington, D.C., so it makes sense to find their ads in the majority of the Washington, D.C. papers. I came across the first ad while looking for a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem in the Colored American; I was amused by the image, so I proceeded to search the database using the brewery’s name to see what else popped up. Because who can get enough of an adult bear taunting cubs with a full stein of beer? Certainly not me! Sheer genius! Other delightful ad copy points to the “medicinal value” of Consumers’ porters and ales, as well as the fact that it is “recommended for family use” (Alexandria Gazette, September 3, 1900, page 1). Ah, history. So old and so foolish.

Anyway, after examining the search results on the Chronicling America site, I turned to the internet to see what else I could find out about Consumers’ Brewing Company. Which, as it turns out, was not much. Though more than I anticipated. This is from One Hundred Years of Brewing (Chicago: H. S. Rich & Co., 1901): “In 1895 the Consumers’ Brewing Company, of Rosslyn, VA, was organized for the brewing of lager beer, light and dark. A plant was erected on the Potomac river front, lighted by electricity and refrigerated artificially. It was ready for occupancy January 1, 1897, and since then porter and ale have been added to the brewery products” (207). By 1902, the brewery had changed its name to Arlington Brewing Company, and it attempted to stay afloat during Prohibition by producing Cherry Smash. Here is a picture of the brewery from around 1920 when it was producing Cherry Smash; the building itself was torn down in 1958; this picture shows the brewery from across the river—the building is in the upper right corner. I also found a reference to Consumers’ in American Brewers’ Review from October 20, 1896, indicating that Consumers’ had ordered a “50-ton refrigerating machine” from the Vilter Manufacturing Company of Milwaukee, WI (140). So there you have it: a completely pointless post about a long-defunct brewery. And yet this seemingly large digression, one that has consumed most of my afternoon, has left me in a delightful mood.

(4/13/2014)

Rockit Cup Imperial Stout Recap

So the Rockit Cup finally caters to convention and what happens? All the complainers and detractors fail to brew yet again. So typical. Any who, another small and intimate Rockit Cup, with four beers and three brewers. Brian Gallow was unable to join us—something about moving to Columbus or the likes. Double boo for whatever he tries to pass off as his trumped-up excuse. Overall, all four beers were solid. Still, rankings had to be done because, well, that’s what the Rockit Cup is all about. The final tabulations:

1st: Jim Scofield
2nd: John Hoke
3rd: myself
4th: Brian Gallow

Yes, I am as shocked as all of you that Gallow ended up last. But he has it coming for moving. I ranked the four beers as follows: myself (although the beer I thought was mine was actually Jim’s), Jim, John, and Brian. Additional comments include: Jim’s was a clean beer underneath, but had some hop bitterness and astringency that was a bit harsh, John's was the sweetest, bordering on sticky/cloying, and Brian’s was a little hot with some slight sharpness beyond that provided by the darker malts. The beer that turned out to be mine was clean and balanced with a chewy roasty body that was pleasant. I’m certain that given some time, all will blossom into something even better. And to ensure that we can see the results of that, I conned a bottle out of each of the other three to stash away in the basement until next year!

(4/11/2014)