What Makes a Beer American?

America

As we sidle up to Independence Day, I thought it might be nice to think about the good old US of A.  Compared to the likes of Germany and Belgium, our contribution to the world beer canon is ... modest.  It is however, real, a fact I think we sometimes forget.  When I was writing the Beer Bible, I had to deal with a strange collection of oddities that don't fit in neatly with the idea we have about style and tradition--things like the place of corn and Northwest hops and our strange invented styles that we didn't intend to invent (amber ale, "Scotch ale," etc.).  All of that got me thinking about America's role in brewing.

As I traveled the world, I learned that brewers tend to have fixed ideas about how you brew a beer, and these are shared throughout a country.  So, for example, you have single-infusion mashes in British cask ales breweries, and the regular use of sugar--but never beet sugar.  (An abomination.)  In Belgium you have things like cereal cookers and sugar--often beet--and the most important feature, the warm room where bottles rest for a month during secondary fermentation.  German beer is all about the malt, and in the Czech Republic you almost always see a four-vessel brewhouse designed for decoction mashing.  One could say a lot more, but you get the picture.

Brewers also maintain certain national orientations that surprised me, like the way they would go about constructing color and flavor in a beer.  English and Belgian brewers use sugars, including dark sugars, so they might add a touch of these for color.  Their beers tend to be thinner and crisper than beers elsewhere.  That's why, when you try a Belgian-brewed hoppy beer, it's often screamingly bitter: there's not a lot of unfermented crystal malt to sop up the BUs as is the American way.  Germans, though, never use sugar, so they might add color with Munich malt.  They each think about beer differently.  So, how does an American think about beer?  (I'm mainly thinking craft brewers--we'll come around to mass-market brewers later on.)  Below are a few key markers that make Americans stand out in a crowd.

• American base malt.  I didn't understand malts until I went to Germany and the Czech Republic.  I should have gotten an inkling of the power of base malts when I went to the UK and Belgium, but I'm a slow learner.  North American barley is a powerhouse of convertable sugar and enzymes, and give you a nice foundation on which to pile specialty malts.  It doesn't have ton of character on its own (unlike those soft German malts and aromatic Czech malts).  Americans get their flavor from specialty malts, especially ....
• Caramel/crystal malt.  This is the real tell.  Americans love love love crystal malt.  It is versatile to a point, giving beer body and flavors that range from caramel/toffee to dark fruit, but it is also a really obvious component.  I've seen American brewers build, for example, dubbels and dunkels out of crystal malt--things Belgians and Germans would not do.  Probably Ken Grossman gets the most credit/blame: Sierra Nevada Pale is in many ways the ur-ale in America, and it has that rounded body and classic dollop of caramel flavor at its center.  I'd say this is at least as an important marker as vivid hopping--though native drinkers may not realize it.
  
• Northwest Hops.  This doesn't need a lot of explanation.  It's the thing we're most famous for, the most obvious and flashy part of our beers.  We like 'em early, we like 'em late, we like 'em dry.  Just yesterday Zymurgy released the results of its latest readers poll, and nine of the ten most popular beers were hoppy.  There are lots of beers brewed in the US, but the beers everyone thinks of as characteristically "American" have our distinctive, citrusy/floral hopping.
• Strength and intensity.  American brewers aren't minor key kinds of guys. They brew like John Philip Sousa.  Beers are rarely brewed below 4.5% and a good many are stronger than 7%.  When we make hoppy beers, we make damn hoppy beers.  (Some of our beers that aren't supposed to be hoppy are damn hoppy, too.)  Our sours are really sour.  Our imperial stouts are liquid fudge. 
• Bourbon barrels. Barrel-aging is as old as beer, but bourbon is American.  Proportionally, very few beers spend any time in bourbon, but this is another one of those markers of place.  When a beer has spent time in a barrel, that unmistakable sweet booziness tells you what kind. 

Of course, all of these are generalities.  In a country with 2000+ breweries, you're going to have an example of every kind of beer.  But no one's thinking of the Devil's Backbone double triple-decocted Morana Tmave when they're talking about American beer.

One other noteworthy feature of American beer is brewery set-up.  This is partly a function of our newness--few American brewhouses are older than 30 years.  But that's only part of the story.  Americans like to be able to brew any style of beer, so our kits are optimized for versatility.  Decoction breweries, old-timey single-infusion mash breweries, breweries with cereal cookers--no one bothers with this.  They are purely utilitarian and generic.  (Though the use of hopbacks or other add-ons to infuse beer with hops are becoming common enough that they might stand as an American thing.) 

One of the biggest surprises in traveling around the world was learning that European breweries had a very strong sense of what "American beer" was.  When they called a beer American, they meant these things.  We do make hellesbiers and tripels, but when people say American beer, they mean caramelly, hoppy, muscular ales. And around the world, they do talk about American ales quite a lot--at least in brewhouses from London to Kelheim to Prague, they do.

The Quiet Revolution

Last Friday, I joined some of the Widmer gents to try a flight of their latest specialty beer--a collaboration with Cigar City called Gentlemen's Club.  It's a high-concept beer that takes inspiration from the Old Fashioned cocktail.  Cigar City contributed Florida oranges, the Widmer Brothers threw in some Oregon cherries, and the base beer--an old ale--was aged on three woods.  The three versions are available together or separately, and by all accounts are selling well.  The old ale is rich and creamy but only has hints at the fruit contained within.  In bourbon barrels it picks up a lot more of the sweetness, while in rye it gets more spice and heat (the recipe for the beer in that batch was slightly different and used about 4% rye in the grist).  Oak spirals provide a resiny sharpness.  Brewer Ben Dobler had the good idea to do a bit of in-glass blending, and I found that version to be the most balanced of all.

In the modern world of American brewing, experiments like this count as revolutionary to anyone who can remember back to the last century.  Leaving aside the world of 1980, the world of 1999 barely had barrel-aged beers, never-mind cross-continental collaborations using local fruits and different types of wood.

But what really caught my eye was a different Widmer Brothers beer that happened to be pouring--Brotha From Anotha Motha.  As you all well know, Widmer grew to be one of the largest craft breweries because of the wild success of their Hefeweizen.  You also know that Widmer Hef is essentially an American pale ale (with tons of wheat).  Naming it Hefeweizen confused this beer with the wheat ales of Bavaria, those characterized by clovey phenols and banana-y esters, not Cascade hops.  It has meant that, for the sake of brand clarity, the brothers have studiously avoided the other hefe.  Until Brotha.* 

Bavarian weizens are not always brewed well--even in Bavaria.  Coaxing the yeasts to produce a pleasant blend of weird chemicals is hard.  Many breweries use the Weihenstephan weizen yeast--as Widmer did--and it has a tendency to throw a lot of isoamyl acetate, the banana/juicy fruit ester.  Many the banana smoothie has that yeast made.

Brotha, by contrast, is a superb beer.  The spice and esters are on the subdued side--I shall resist the urge to talk open fermentation and fermenter shape--but wholly complementary.  It's more pepper than clove, and the banana is limned with citrus.  Perhaps the best part is the full flavor of wheat, fresh and wholesome as in a fresh-baked loaf of bread.  It's the perfect summer beer, and one I would love to see come online as a regular.  I know that's a branding nightmare, but consider this one vote put it out to broader market anyway.

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*Apparently Brotha actually debuted two years ago, but I missed it completely.

150 Red Sox Pubs Don't Make NYC a Sox Town

I've got a saison in the mash tun right now, so this is a light blogging day.  I want to direct your attention to a fascinating inter-city dispute between DC and NYC, with the illustrious Garrett Oliver batting clean-up for the Big Apple (hat tip to Jacob Berg).  This weekend, New York hosted Savor, a Brewers Association fest to celebrate beer and food.  (We had several breweries in the house.)  It led to some trash-talking by DC bloggers, which led to the Garrett Rebuttal, which I quote here:

I've had the opportunity to travel all over the world, and I've yet to see anyplace with a better beer culture than NYC. I can walk out my front door in Brooklyn and within a 15-minute walking radius find not only hundreds of great American beers, but also more of the best beers of Belgium than you'd find in a 15-minute walk from Grande Place in Brussels. In a 15-minute walk from the brewery we have Brooklyn Bowl, Gutter, Torst, Spuyten Duyvil, The Diamond, Barcade, Radegast....  Eleven Madison Park has 140 beers on the list. I do not think anyplace else can compare.

And then later...

I think it's great that other city's newspapers have dedicated beer writers. But the best-read beer writer in the world, by far, is the NYT's Eric Asimov, who is the Times' chief wine critic. No one anywhere on the planet even comes close. 

And then even later still (it's amazing he was debating this on a blog)...

DC has its way (and few people love Churchkey more than I do - ask Greg), and we have our way. We find ours equally valid. There are all kinds of culture. I've expressed my respect for yours, so there it is. You don't have to respect ours, but one might expect a reaction when you diss it.

Now, I don't know New York at all--certainly not from a beer perspective.  But I have to say that Garrett's arguments aren't very convincing.  NYC has 8.3 million people--it has tons of everything.  Any member of any niche can say New York has the best culture if they wish to hammer you with stats--the best Thai food culture, the best wine culture, the best pet monkey culture.  Indeed, you could make the argument New York is the best Red Sox city outside of Boston--after all, they've got scores of Sox bars.  This is obviously absurd. 

It raises the question of what "culture" is and whether we should even bother trying to define it.  At least so far as the US is concerned, I think most places haven't gotten there yet, and even those that have (like Portland) need to acknowledge that it's new, unstable, and quite possible evanescent.  You don't have culture until you have generations of history to back it up.  Or at least a few decades.

Is Kona Hawaiian; Is Guinness Irish?

The brewery as I found it in
2008, with my phone cam.

Over at the (one, true, original) Beer Nut, I'm having a spat with the host.  He got his hands on some Kona beer and described it as the "pseudo-Hawaiian Kona range" from Craft Brewers Alliance.  This is factually incorrect.  It's not a line, it's a brewery.  Kona has been making beer on the Big Island for nearly twenty years and, rather than have a company ship a load of bottles deep into the Pacific Ocean, fill them with beer, and ship them back to the mainland, Kona decided to have Widmer contract brew their brands in Portland.  Now: you may despise contract brewing and you may consider this an abomination from the ninth circle of hell.  Fair enough.  But it is not within your authority, even as a well known Irish beer geek, to divest Kona of the land underneath its feet.

He raises a more interesting, existential point in comments, however:

That there is a Kona brewery in Hawaii that produces beer sold in Hawaii does not change the non-Hawaiian origin of the beers I drank. The Budweiser produced in Dublin is also produced in St Louis, but that doesn't make one's pint of it American beer; it makes it pseudo-American beer.

Really?  I wonder how the average beer drinker feels about this.  If you're tippling a Guinness on Saint Patrick's, would you feel cheated and deceived to learn that your pint was brewed on North American soil?  Would you consider it "pseudo-Irish?"  (This would be a big problem for Guinness, though they don't think you'll think it's not real Irish; the brewery proudly proclaims to make it in fifty countries worldwide.)  In many cases, companies make different products for different countries (Mexican sugar Coke versus American corn-syrup Coke), so one might well toss out a "pseudo" if she's feeling saucy.  But if the product is made the same?  AB InBev works very hard to make sure the Budweiser in Ireland tastes identical to the Bud in St. Louis.  Should the customer have to do a background check to determine provenance? It seems like everyone involved would be appalled to think of Dublin-brewed Bud as Irish.

I guess my view on this is clear enough.  What's yours?

Organic Hops Segment Growing, But ...

Post has been updated; see below. 

This item caught my eye (hat tip, Beerpulse)

But according to The American Organic Hop Grower Association, the total pounds of organic hops produced by their member growers tripled last year, growing from 70,000 pounds in 2011 to 218,000 pounds in 2012. What’s even more impressive? A full 10 percent of the hops grown in the U.S. are now certified organic (around double that of the average crop).

That's astounding.  Too astounding.  I visited the Willamette Valley a couple years ago, and organics were nowhere.   So I did a bit of checking.  In 2012, the US produced 61.2 million pounds of hops.  I'm no math whiz, but my back-of-the-envelope calculation puts 10% of that total at a shade over six million pounds.  At 218 thou, organics make up .36% (a third of one percent) of the market.  Perhaps they meant to say 10% of new hops?  Dunno, but whatever it is, it's not ten percent.

Update. Patrick Smith, of Loftus Ranches, clears up the confusion. (Check the comments for his correction on a raft of other glaring gaffes in the Yahoo piece.)

The Yahoo! report misinterpreted the data point. The correct interpretation is that 10% of US hop farms (by number, not volume) are growing certified organic hops on some portion of their acreage. The correct data point was intended to show that hop growers are responding to the market and getting into, or expanding, organic hop acreage. The average crop in the US has ~5% of its farms growing some organic production. Hops are now double that.

What Brands Tell Us

I have long been waiting to indulge my cider Jones, an itch I started scratching last night at Bushwhacker's Cider.  My experience has heretofore been limited almost exclusively to local ciders, and I wanted to see what the famous regions of the world had to offer: the Basque and Asturias ciders of Spain, Breton and Norman ciders of France, and English ciders.  Sally and I enjoyed a wonderful tannic French pour and then had two Basque ciders--Bereziartua and Petritegi.  The former was sharply acetic--a cider so transmuted during fermentation it was difficult to identify the nature of the source fruit.  The Petritegi was pure funk, a lambic-like cider that had a bit of acidity, full apple flavor, but a lot of cheesy wild stuff.  I loved it.

Afterward I went over to select some bottles for sampling at home and came across an amazing diversity of presentation.  These three bottles come from the three famous cider regions and all cost about the same (seven bucks and change).  These aren't cherry-picked especially--they do a good job of representing the style of their home country's packaging, though each in a slightly exaggerated way.  Have a look and then we'll talk about how they appear to American eyes:

Moving right to left, we have the Basque, French, and English ciders.  What do they tell us?

Credit: Todo-Jaunjo

1.  Spain.  If cider were beer, Spanish cider would be Belgian beer, and Basque cider would be lambic.  It's a very old-school beverage, rife with wild microorganisms that contribute tons of acids and funk.  If you look closely, you can see the lees floating in the bottle--I inadvertently roused them during the photography.  The label itself is a quirky, homespun affair that brings to mind both artisanal handcraft and also a bygone time.
That font is fantastic and reminds me of children's books and the circus.  If you zoom in a bit, you can see the blocky small print, which looks like something that got added on later, perhaps when the company got its first computer in 1988.  And if you look at the funny sketch, you see not just a whimsical rendering of pouring cider, but a particular way of decanting known as "throwing the cider." 

This may be a titan of cider-making, producing millions of barrels a year (though I highly doubt it), but the label says: we are a small, rustic cidery and we make things traditionally and by hand.  The cidery wants you to see the local farm where the apples were pressed, so smell the wood and vapors of the fermenting room, and to imagine the wizened, whiskered master cider maker as he tends his casks like a doting grandfather.

2.  France.  Next we go to France, and find the mirror opposite of the Basque presentation.  It has all the hauteur of a French wine bottle, with a refined color scheme, cursive font, and detailed information about the type of cider and apple varietal.  The company has even hung the crest of nobility around the neck.  You can't see it in this photo, but the neck is wrapped, champagne-style, in foil and covers a caged cork.  This company does not want you to see in your mind's eye anything to do with a farm.  Their product is as polished and sophisticated as any Burgundy, and deserves a place next to the Cassoulet.

3.  England.  I actually have no idea what to make of this bottle, which is like one of those foreign names that means something obscene in English.  To American eyes, it looks like a bottle of Olde English 800 or perhaps a fortified wine like Wild Irish Rose.  Both the Basque and French bottles are wine-bottle sized and corked and colored for effect--Gold Rush is in a clear beer bottle, topped unceremoniously by a plain black crown.  And Gold Rush?  That has specific associations in the US that maybe it lacks in the UK--greed and overindulgence, the kind of thing that buttresses the sense of cheap, strong hooch.  It's a simple label, but not good-simple; one has the impression that someone spent four minutes laying it out.  (I suppose the cursive "cider" is meant to suggest elegance, but it's too slapdash to convince.)

I would actually love the insight of a native to describe what the gents at Olivers Cider were going for.  It's lost on these Yankee eyes.  Fortunately, the barkeep at Bushwhacker's recommended it or I would never have even have really seen it, much less bought it. For what it's worth, the bottle is fairly typical.  I also picked up a bottle of the acclaimed Burrow Hill, and although the label was slightly better, it came in the clear beer bottle topped by a metal crown.

Unlike beer, which has a similar status in each nation that brews it, cider's varies.  You can see how the countries themselves see their product in these labels.  Spain's is an artisanal tradition, a cultural expression that is unique to place.  For France, cider is part of the exalted culinary tradition.  And in England cider is--well, that's less clear.  But certainly neither something people take instantly to be either an artisanal handcraft nor a mark of high culture.  I will report back next once I've tried all these and let you know what the insides of the bottles tell us.

The Fruit Stigma Wanes

Over the past weekend, the third edition of the Fruit Beer Fest visited Portland.  When Ezra Johnson-Greenough planned the first one, his notion was to sever, once and for all, the association between fruit and frou-frou.  Let's not give him all the credit--that association was already weakening.  But anyone who stopped by the Fest this weekend would have been hard-pressed to find those sugary, soda-like beers that gave fruit a bad name in the first place.

It got hot and crowded early, so I bailed by midafternoon, sampling not close to all the beers.  But the ones I had were complex examples of the brewing art.  I think my fave was Deschutes' Currant Event, a slightly tart Baltic Porter made with currants.  The fruit was a perfect bridge between the rich, dark-fruit malts and the lactic tart.  It was creamy but quaffable--even under the sun.  Oakshire's elderberry gose was similarly well done, with a troika of tart, salty, and fruity all dancing in perfect time.  Block 15's Psidium was deeply funky and the Commons spelt-and-currant Bier Royale was a sharp farmhousey treat.  Chad Yakobson was in the house with his all-brett Crooked Stave beers, and the one I had lived up to the billing.  It smelled like it was going to be viciously dry and brett-y, but instead had only a mild yeast character and tons of citrus.

Now all we need to do is reclaim our native grain.  Who's with me on Cornfest 2013?

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*The fest has already outgrown its venue.  The little concrete pit that forms the site, the Burnside Brewing parking lot and adjacent section of Seventh Ave, was packed by 1:30 on Saturday.  By three, people had resorted to full pours because wait times were 10-15 minutes long.  As much as I like the central location of the fest, unshaded concrete is a terrible place to drink beer.  I spent the fest huddled with a gaggle of redheaded women under the patch of shade underneath the sole tent there.

The O on Gluten-Free

Brent Hunsberger has a really nice piece in today's Oregonian on the legal issues surrounding Omission and gluten-free beer.  As you may recall, Craft Brewers Alliance uses an enzymatic process to remove gluten from regular barley-malt beer.  The process removes enough gluten to be considered "gluten-free" by some authorities, but the feds are still deliberating about Omission. 

But scientists say the test doesn't detect all potentially harmful gluten fragments. Recent tests by Canada's public health agency found gluten fragments in beers from Spain and Belgium that use a gluten-removal process similar to Craft Brew's. It's unclear whether the fragments are a health concern, Health Canada spokeswoman Blossom Leung said via email. 

The debate goes on (check the comments for a sample).  One surprising thing Hunsberger noted was this:

Nearly two in 10 adults buys or eats food tagged "gluten-free," sometimes just to support gluten-intolerant friends or family, the market research firm says. 

Twenty percent?  A lot more than a niche market is at stake--that could ultimately account for millions of barrels of beer.  The fortunes of Omission and breweries like Harvester (100% gluten-free; no gluten-based grains used) hang in the balance.

Don't Miss Portland Beer Week

In about--well, actually, right now--Portland Beer Week kicks off at the Northwest Lucky Lab.  There are other events scheduled for today and everything wraps up on Sunday, June 16 (which makes it a beefy, two-weekend week).  There are tons of brewer events, brewers dinners (this one at Wildwood with brettanomyces-only Crooked Stave beers looks like a winner), seminars, fun events, celebrity brewers, and festivals keyed by the Portland Beer Fest on Saturday. 

I have gotten ever more pathetic about event discussion, but the organizers have put together a very nice slate of events and you should definitely have a gander at the calendar so you don't miss something cool.

Americans Are Not Doing It Wrong

George Howell in Dunbar.

After a tour of the gorgeous Belhaven brewery in Dunbar, Scotland, brewer George Howell took me and my peripatetic friend to the pub for beers.  At one point, extolling the simple virtues of session ales from the United Kingdom, Howell pointed out that "when you're out with the lads and you have ten or twelve pints" you want a low alcohol beer.  Ten or twelve pints?  That's nearly two gallons of beer!  Patrick and I snuck goggle-eyed peeks at each other.  I assume Howell's session was several hours long, but still, ten pints of even 3.5% beer and I'm under the table trying to find where I left my mind.

I bring this up because Martyn Cornell has an interesting cross-cultural post about a trend Brian Yaeger mentions here--India session ales (ISA).  The post is thoughtful and well-documented in the typically Cornellian way, and the upshot is that the style may have much to recommend it, but it's not for session drinking.  He used Dogfish Head DNA as an example:

While it was less hoppy than 60-minute IPA, at 32 IBUs rather than 60 (and lower in strength, at 4.5 per cent ABV), there was still masses of floral flavour and aroma from both the Dogfish Head addition and the dry-hopping with Simcoe hops the beer had been given in Bedford, so that this was very clearly an American IPA, not a British one. I enjoyed my pint. But I only wanted the one. Palate overload set in after just that single glass. And that means that, regardless of its strength, DNA New World IPA cannot possibly be a session beer.

Matthias Trum in Bamberg

We'll come back around to ISAs in a moment.  But let me tell you about rauchbier.  When I was in Bamberg, Schlenkerla's Matthias Trum explained that you had to drink his rauchbiers up to at least the second and preferably the third half-liter:

"Only as you go through your first two or three pints does the smokiness step back in perception and then the malty notes come out, the bitterness, the smoothness.  So the second Schlenkerla is for you a different beverage than the first one.  And yet the third one is different than the second one.  From the third one on, you have the system running, so to say."

Many people hate rauchbiers and don't want even a mouthful, but in Bamberg they pour them down their throats like water.  (I happily joined them.)

Belgium is a little different, because the variety is such that at a cafe, you are likely not to be drinking a single beer in your session.  You may start off with a gueuze and then head to something lighter with food, and finish up with more alcoholic drinks.  In the US, "Belgian" is an adjective some drinkers deploy only in the negative, to describe any beer that has an abundance of yeast character.  A session of these beers is anathema to them.

I might be able to drink ten of these.

The point of all this is that ISAs are an American thing.  I don't have any doubt that most Brits would find them--and our far more common session ales, IPAs--too assertive for a long session.  Increasingly, American craft beer fans don't.  When I go out with friends, mostly they throw back hoppy beers.  Like rauchbiers, the intense sensations wash over your palate and do overwhelm it; thereafter you adjust, and the other elements of the beer comes out.  For an American, drinking a pint of IPA is just the foreplay for more IPAs--at that point, you can't really go down the ladder, anyway.

But that's what Americans like.  (Or those in the still-small minority who drink craft beer.)  I get that there's a certain amount of disdain around the world for our out-of-balance beers (I'm not a fan of ISAs because they tend to be more out of balance than IPAs).  There's an implicit judgment--not in Martyn's post but elsewhere--about foolish upstarts who don't know what they're doing.  Actually, we do. A love of hops represents the evolution of preference, of local taste.  I wouldn't expect Bambergers to jump on our bandwagon, nor Londoners.  But that doesn't mean we're doing it wrong.