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Pine Street Brewery Needs Your Help

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One of San Francisco’s newest beer companies, Pine Street Brewery, is building its own brewery and trying to expand its business. One of things they’re in desperate need of is tap handles and kegs. So they’ve turned to Indiegogo (a crowdfunding website similar to Kickstarter) to help raise the funds they need to grow. They’re offering various tchotchkes for different levels of financial support, as detailed in the Indigogo Pine Street Brewery web page.

With our recipes perfected and a commercial brewing space secured, we need tap handles and kegs to keep up with growing demand in San Francisco! With your help we can provide our city with enough green PSB handles to have our beer in every neighborhood.

We’ve brainstormed hard to come up with great incentives for your donations – just a small token of how much we appreciate your generosity. (Check the gallery for photos of the prizes: http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/pine-street-b…). Your contributions will help us establish our presence in the city, and we hope you’ll be proud to say you helped make it happen!

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The Pine Street Brewery founders.

The Pine Street Brewery Story

Our Story – Pine Street Brewery from Pine Street Brewery on Vimeo.

Anchor Announces New Fall Seasonal

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Today, Anchor Brewery announced that they’re releasing a new fall seasonal beer, BigLeaf Maple Autumn Red. According to the press release, the beer will be available beginning August 5 and will be around through October. In addition to draft, it will also be bottled in 6-packs and 22-oz. bombers.

BigLeaf Maple Autumn Red was inspired by a native California tree, its incredible leaves, its delicious syrup, and the colors of fall. The tree, known as Bigleaf maple, thrives along the banks of California’s mountain streams. Native Californians once made rope and baskets from its bark. Today, artisans handcraft its wood and burl into custom guitars.. Bigleaf maple sugaring in California dates to the 1800s; yet this tree’s unusually flavorful syrup remains the product of a small group of hobbyists. A hint of maple—including bigleaf maple—syrup in every brew perfectly complements the malty complexity, balanced hoppiness, and rich fall hue of BigLeaf Maple Autumn Red, a red ale like no other.

“When presented with the challenge of developing a new seasonal beer, all of our brewers collaborated to think fall and came up with this red ale,” said Mark Carpenter, brewmaster at Anchor Brewing. “We are very happy with the finished product, especially since we don’t do test batches here at Anchor. It requires us to be on top of our game when crafting new beers and BigLeaf Maple is a beer we’re all proud to share.”

BigLeaf Maple Autumn Red (6% ABV) is a quaffable, well-balanced red ale with character. Its malty complexity and coppery color come from a combination of two caramel malts, pale malt, and a hint of maple syrup. To complement these flavors, Anchor Brewing uses three additions of Nelson Sauvin hops in the brewkettle and a unique blend of Nelson Sauvin, Citra, and Cascade for dry hopping. The result is a distinctive fall seasonal with extraordinary depth and intriguing aroma.

Since the 1970’s, Anchor Brewing has worked with renowned local Artist Jim Stitt to create our beer labels. A distinct, handmade beer deserves a distinct, handmade label and BigLeaf Maple is no exception. In autumn, the bigleaf maple’s huge leaves, up to a foot across, can display a full range of color as they slowly turn from green to gold to red. Capturing this symbolic transition from summer to fall, a watercolor of bigleaf maple’s magnificent leaf is featured on our label and signed by Jim Stitt.

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Beer Industry Trademark Concerns

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Boston attorney Shannon Sadowski, founder of New Leaf Legal, wrote an engaging piece for the Boston Globe on trademark concerns that craft breweries will be facing as more and more brands emerge in the growing market. These disputes aren’t going to go away, and I’m always amazed by all of the naked ignorance of IP law on display anytime one these disputes rears its ugly head. Before the 24-hour news cycles and the internet, these controversies existed largely in back rooms out of the public eye, where — I believe — they belong. But until I finish building the time machine, “progress” marches on and these disputes are now part of the public brewing world landscape. Any-ha-who, her article, Trouble brewing: fierce competition for beer industry trademarks, is a good overview of the challenges breweries are facing, and even includes a link to Scott Metzger of Freetail Brewing’s wonderful response letter to a trademark dispute. Read it, and be prepared for the next trademark dispute, coming any day now to a brewery near you.

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Beer Serves America Interactive Map

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Today’s infographic is an interactive map of the country created by the Beer Institute for their Beer Serves America, which used to be a separate website, but has since been folded back into the BI website. In the interactive map, holding the cursor over the pint glass in each state bring up additional data about that state, and provides a link to a pdf with much information about the economic impact of beer for each state.

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Click here to see the interactive map full size … and interacting.

Beer Taxes By Lester Jones Of The Beer Institute

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A couple of months ago, the Tax Foundation interviewed Lester Jones, who’s the economist for the Beer Institute in Washington, DC. As I am a great fan of the dismal science, Lester’s become a good friend over the years and is a great asset to the beer industry. Tax Foundation host Richard Morrison describes the podcast interview. “Beer Institute Chief Economist Lester Jones explains the tangled web of federal, state, and local taxes that get applied to the beer we drink.”

If that doesn’t work, try listening to it directly on the web.

Lester Jones, of the Beer Institute & George Reisch, of Anheuser-Busch @ GABF Saturday
Lester Jones, at GABF a few years ago, with George Reisch of ABI.

Cantillon’s Zwanze Day 2013 Announced

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Cantillon just announced both the date — September 14 — and the participating bars for this year’s Zwanze Day. If you’re not familiar with it, here’s an overview I wrote about last year’s Zwanze Day for my newspaper column.

Belgium has essentially two separate regions, with the northern half known as Flanders. The language spoken there is a dialect of Dutch, known by the same name as the people of Flanders: Flemish. The word “zwanze” is unique to Flemish, has its origins in Yiddish, and essentially means a self-deprecating type of humor that’s typified by sharp-edged, playful jokes, usually good-natured. It’s said that this type of humor has become “a characteristic, defining trait” of the Flemish themselves, and for some a way of life. A “zwanze” is a joke, a “zwanzer” a joker.

It was with that same playful spirit that Cantillon approached the concept of making a Zwanze beer. The goal was to create a fun beer; something a little unusual, using non-traditional ingredients. This year’s Zwanze beer is made with rhubarb. The base beer is a Lambic, with two seasons, or summers, in wooden barrels. That’s then moved into a stainless steel conditioning tank where 300-grams of rhubarb per liter — about 2/3-pound — are added and aged for roughly three months, and then it’s kegged directly from the tank.

The first Zwanze beer was made in 2008, and was also a rhubarb beer. In subsequent years they’ve made it with elderflowers, pineau d’aunis (a red wine grape) and last year they brewed a sour witbier, made with the traditional coriander and orange peel. This is the only repeat so far, which was necessitated when the originally planned 2012 version — a Lambic take on a Trappist Abbey Ale — didn’t mature in time. Van Roy decided instead to make the rhubarb Lambic again, primarily because it was his wife’s favorite.

As a result, while it’s not been announced, I believe this year’s Zwanze Day beer will most likely be that Lambic take on a Trappist Abbey Ale that wasn’t quite ready last year.

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A worldwide toast of the rare, unique beer will be held simultaneously at 46 beer bars and breweries across the globe, in 14 countries, mostly European. By far, the U.S. has the most, with 22, including four in California:

  • Beachwood BBQ — Seal Beach, California
  • Mikkeller Bar SF — San Francisco, California
  • Russian River Brewing — Santa Rosa, California
  • Stone Bistro & Gardens — Escondido, California

You can find the full list at Cantillon’s website.

Synthetic Yeast

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According to the UK Telegraph, a worldwide effort is underway to create Synthetic Yeast, which scientists believe will allow brewers to “make beer cheaper and stronger.”

From the article:

Researchers, who have been awarded £1 million of government funding for the project, will first attempt to recreate a slimmed down version of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast used in the brewing industry to ferment beer.

It will be the first time a genome has been built from scratch for a eukaryotic organism, the branch of the evolutionary tree that includes plants and animals.

The scientists then aim to redesign parts of the yeast genome so that it can perform functions that are not possible naturally.

Professor Paul Freemont, from the centre for synthetic biology and innovation at Imperial College London who is helping to lead the British part of the project, said they could help make yeast more efficient so they required less energy and could tolerate more alcohol before dying, allowing beer to be made stronger.

He said: “The brewing industry is very interested in this project for any new opportunities it may present as they use yeast to manufacture beer.

“One of the aims of the project is to develop this yeast strain as a vehicle that you can put in new chemical pathways and directly manipulate it in a way that is not possible at the moment.

“Clearly there are strains of yeast that are highly resistant to alcohol, but they all die off as the alcohol gets higher, so making more alcohol resistant strains will be very useful for that industry in terms of cost value.

“Strains that are metabolically more optimal and don’t require as much energy will also be useful.”

The synthetic yeast project, also known as Sc2.0, will draw together expertise from around the world.

I can’t quite decide yet whether I think this is a good idea, offering brewers many more choices and opportunities to create unique beers or a Frankenstein moment of science going too far in manipulating an essentially natural process. I guess time will tell.

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