Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Self-Opening Cantillon

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Our friends Steve Shapiro and Gail Williams from Beer by BART are visiting, in part to go to the Cotati Accordion Festival to see Polkacide, and others. Last night we were opening beers and I pulled a 2007 bottle of Cantillon Rose de Gambrinus out of the cellar.

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After opening the bottle, removing the crown, we were searching for a corkscrew (we’re still settling into our new home). I looked back at the cork and noticed it had risen up from the bottle a few centimeters on its own. It almost appeared like an unseen ghost was opening the bottle. We all stopped and watched the cork as it very, very slowly kept rising. It took long enough that Steve pulled out his phone and started video-taping it just before it popped. It took a long time, at least two or three minutes. It started moving very slowly and then picked up speed toward the dramatic conclusion. Eventually, the cork reached the end and rocketed out of the bottle, exploding up and out, hitting the ceiling. It even left a baptismal mark on the ceiling in our kitchen. I fully expected it to start gushing, but it didn’t at all. And most importantly, it tasted fantastic. That’s the first time I’ve ever seen a bottle open itself.

“Craft Beer” Added To Webster’s Dictionary

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The interwebs are all abuzz with the news this morning that the term “craft beer” has been added to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. I know very few people who are happy with the term already, so this is probably not going to help. The definition they chose doesn’t seem to quite work. I know they were trying to generalize a term that itself has struggled to be defined, and there are already many differences of opinion about what the term means, so it was no easy task. Even so, it seems like a fail. It will apparently be in the next print edition of the dictionary, but has already been added online. Here’s the entry:

craft beer noun

Definition of CRAFT BEER

: a specialty beer produced in limited quantities : MICROBREW

First Known Use of CRAFT BEER

1986

That definition suffers from the vagueness of what it means to be “a specialty beer” — which itself needs to be defined — and that it includes only beers that are brewed “in limited quantities.” As opposed to those beers in unlimited quantities? Does that mean year-round beers cannot be considered “craft beer?” Probably not, but my point is this is a pretty inelegant attempt at defining craft beer. It’s simple, at least, but hanging what it means to be a craft beer on it being “special” and “in limited quantities” is not exactly doing anybody any favors.

But other dictionaries have also tackled “craft beer” with mostly the same uninspired results. Here’s a few others.

American Heritage Dictionary: A distinctively flavored beer that is brewed and distributed regionally. Also called craft brew, microbrew.

Dictionary.com: an all-malt or nearly all-malt specialty beer usually brewed in a small, regional brewery.

Oxford English Dictionary: a beer with a distinctive flavour, produced and distributed in a particular region.

Stan had a post a couple of years ago about Craft beer: The 1986 definition that explores its origins. A lot of terms have come and gone, picked up and fallen out of favor, and there’s a twitter discussion swirling about what the next term will be, with Ray Daniels suggesting “Artisan Brewer” as the “next big thing.” Here are a few that have been, and continue to be, used to describe beer that’s not “good old macrobrew made in vats the size of Rhode Island” (however we define that, too), and at least one suggested this morning just in jest:

  • Artisan Beer
  • Authentic Beer
  • Boutique Brewer
  • Cool Brewer
  • Cottage Brewery
  • Craft Beer
  • Craft Brew
  • Flavor Beer
  • Hand-Crafted Beer
  • Handmade Beer
  • Microbrewery
  • Nanobrewery
  • Picobrewery
  • Real Beer
  • Regional Brewery
  • Small Batch Beer
  • Small Brewer
  • Specialty Beer
  • True Beer

Did I miss any? Are there any you think should be added for consideration? What do you think we should call this stuff we all love? Maybe just call it “beer” and be done with it?

Guess What The Next Session Will Be?

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For our 67th Session, our host, Derrick Peterman, who writes Ramblings of a Beer Runner, has chosen a topic that requires you to take out your crystal ball and gaze five years into the future and make some beery predictions. Among many other unknown questions about what the future of the brewing industry holds, predict How Many Breweries [There Will Be] in 2017?. Here’s how to think about your immediate future (at least as far forward as Friday, September 7, when this next Session will take place):

There’s been much cheering and fanfare reverberating throughout the brewing community about the latest brewery numbers recently released from the Brewer’s Association, who counted exactly 2,126 breweries in the United States. To put that into context, you have to go way back to 1887 when the United States had that many breweries. It’s an astonishing 47% increase from just five years ago in 2007 when the tally was a mere 1,449, despite the United States slowly recovering from a serious recession over this period. And according to the Brewers Association, another whopping 1,252 breweries are in the planning stages.

Where is it all going? The growth shows no sign of stopping and the biggest problem most breweries have is that they can’t brew beer fast enough. But can the market really absorb all these new breweries? Are we headed for a cataclysmic brewing bubble where legions of brewers, their big dreams busted, are left to contemplate selling insurance? Or is brewing reaching a critical mass, only to explode even more intensely in a thermo-nuclear frenzy of fermentation?

Now you have a chance to weigh in on these questions. For this month’s Session, tell us how many breweries the Brewer’s Association will count five years from now in 2017, and why you think it will be that number.

So grab your crystal beer glasses, and start peering into them, or better yet start pouring something into them. Then start predicting.

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Hopefully, you’ll have figured it all out and you can say with unwavering certainty where we’ll be in five years by Friday, September 7. And here’s one more more incentive, from this Session’s host. “If five years from now your prediction is the most accurate one, in addition to enjoying beer blogger bragging rights, I will personally buy you a beer.” So you’d have that going for you … which is nice.

America’s Geographic Beer Belly

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Here’s another interesting set of data from the curiously named Floating Sheep, this one regarding The Beer Belly of America. Essentially, what they did was “a simple comparison between grocery stores and bars.” They anticipated that they’d find more grocery stores than bars, and that did prove to be true. But they were surprised to find what they termed the “‘beer belly of America’ peeking out through the ‘t-shirt of data.'”
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In this chart, the size of the green symbols represents the number of mentions of bars in the Google Maps directory. To see it full size, click here. Chicago, Illnois had the highest number.

In the chart below, yellow dots are area where they found more mentions of grocery stores and the red dots indicate where they found more bars. And while there are red dots … well, dotting the whole nation, there does seem to be a definite concentration of red from Wisconsin/Illinois west to Idaho. That’s the area they refer to as The Beer Belly of America.
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To see it full size, click here.

They also compiled a list of each state and the number of bars per 10,000 people. I don’t know what it means that the top seven states were all within the The Beer Belly of America.

  1. North Dakota 6.54
  2. Montana 6.34
  3. Wisconsin 5.88
  4. South Dakota 4.73
  5. Iowa 3.73
  6. Nebraska 3.68
  7. Wyoming 3.4

I’m also not convinced that this type of per capita statistics are that useful. Because of economies of scale, it seems that states with less people always do better in per capita comparisons. The same thing happened when looking at per capita brewery distribution by state, with perhaps the exception of Oregon.

The final chart is similar to the first, but shows the number of bars “normalized” based on the average number of mentions for all locations. That means that where you see color are the places where there were mentions of bars exceeding the average. In this view, it’s easier to see where there are more bars, or at least more Google Maps mentions of them.
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To see it full size, click here.

The Toronado Comes To Russian River

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Last night, in the continuing and ongoing celebration of the 25th anniversary of the Toronado, a bus left San Francisco from lower Haight carrying a majority of the pub’s employees (leaving behind only a skeleton crew) along with significant others and friends of the bar. After traffic slowed their progress, two hours later sixty people emerged from the bus — now 18 cases of beer lighter — in Santa Rosa for a Toronado Anniversary Party at Russian River Brewing.

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The dining section of the brewpub was set aside for the private party, while patrons could continue to sit at the bar and use the other sections of the brewery.

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I even got the missus to come out and play, seen here with Brian Hunt, from Moonlight Brewing.

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Toronado balloons hung throughout the place.

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There were many folks at the party who came into town from all over the place; from Philadelphia, Denver, Portland, Seattle, New York and even San Diego. For instance, Jeff Bagby, looking for a location for his new San Diego brewery, and Eric Rose, from Hollister Brewing.

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Our hosts Natalie and Vinnie Cilurzo introduced the band, American Dog, who flew in from their native Ohio to play the party (they’re one of Toronado owner Dave Keene’s favorite bands). The last time they were here was five years ago for the Toronado’s 20th.

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Natalie air-guitaring with a giant bottle of Toronado 25th Anniversary.

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Raising a toast, Dave Keene (in the back) flanked by Ian Black (from the San Diego Toronado) and Jen Schwertman (from New York’s Blind Tiger).

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Dave Hopwood sporting his latest for-charity dyed beard. Click here to donate for Dave.

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American Dog played a great 21-song set and we said our good-byes (Mrs. J having a real job, had to get up early the next morning), leaving the assembled guests as they celebrated into the night. Thanks to Vinnie, Natalie and Dave for another wonderful evening of beer, music and camaraderie. Happy Anniversary Dave!

Russian River Toronado 25th Anniversary Beer

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Today Russian River Brewing‘s newest beer is being released, and it’s been some time in the making. It’s a blended beer made with six beers, only two of which are actual finished beers made before, with the other four being brewed just for blending purposes. Some of the beers had been aging for many months before finally being blended and bottled in April of this year, with additional yeast added to referment in the bottle. The beer, if you haven’t guessed, is the Toronado 25th Anniversary, made for the San Francisco pub’s silver anniversary which takes place next week, though the celebrating has already begun.

Tuesday night there was an intimate beer dinner in the back room of the Toronado, to introduce the new beer for their 25th anniversary, which was called the “Toronado 25th Anniversary Dinner and Blending Session.” Homebrew Chef Sean Paxton did the food but was told he could only use one plate. In typical crazy Paxton bizarro world, he did exactly as he was told, but found the biggest plate any one of us had ever seen. The ginormous plate of many foods was paired with all six of the base beers used to create the beer.

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Known as “The Plate,” it included 547 Pate (Willie Bird turkey thighs, Liberty Duck — breasts, hearts, livers — and Sonoma County pork, marinated in Toronado 25th Anniversary, mixed with bay leaves, cloves, cinnamon, thyme and pistachios), Haight Street Sausage (Sonoma County pork — shoulder, jowl and belly meat — cold smoked in Russian River Consecration barrel staves and mixed with currants soaked in Toronado 20th Anniversary, caramelized shallots and lemon thyme), Egg Head Customers (quail eggs pickled in malt vinegar infused with coriander, bay leaves, chilies and salt with red beets and sugar, garnished with a mushroom flaked sale), Fungi Dave (Petaluma chicken sous vide in Russian River Beatification, chopped and mixed with fennel, candied lemon peel and a Beatification aioli with paper thin mushroom slices, garnished with fennel pollen and truffle salt), Duck Duck Canapé (Liberty Duck confit in Toronado 25th Anniversary, made into rillettes infused with dried sour cherries topped with confit duck hearts on a hemp chia and sesame seed cracker), Riff Riff Salad (Mixed marble potatoes, green bean, yellow wax bean, apple smoked bacon and hydroponic watercress salad tossed with a Beatification funkigrette), Bejkr Bread, Humboldt Fog Goat Cheese, Beatification Jelly, Fatted Calf European-style Ham, and a slice of ripe melon.

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The six base beers were:

  1. Sonambic
  2. Blonde Ale
  3. Strong Pale Ale
  4. Ale Aged with Currants
  5. Strong Dark Ale
  6. Baltic Porter

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Around 60-70 people in the back room of the Toronado for the Toronado 25th Anniversary Dinner and Blending Session.

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I was fortunate enough to be seated at the table with my friend (and Washoes partner), Toronado owner Dave Keene, along with ….

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Natalie and Vinnie Cilurzo from Russian River Brewing.

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Each table setting included a pipette and an empty tulip glass so that everyone could use the six base beers to blend their own beer.

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Arne Johnson, from Marin Brewing, working on his own blend.

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Jen Garris, from Pi Bar, Dave’s wife Jen Smith, and Natalie Cilurzo.

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All six base beers with the finished product in the middle, the Toronado 25th Anniversary. If you look closely in the center, you can see the proportions for my two attempts at blending my own beers. Both of them turned out pretty well, with the second being more sour than the first (which was what I was going for).

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There was also extra pate and the Toronado 25th Anniversary along with a taste of the Toronado 20th Anniversary beer, too.

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Sean slipped in a second plate, with a dessert on it, a Toronado ‘Bar’ Cookie (a dark chocolate brownie topped with grafitti composed of oats, pistachios, dried cherries and ribbons of malt syrup).

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Dave Keene showing off the special bread Sean Paxton made for him.

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At the end of the evening, Vinnie revealed the actual blend percentages for the base beers used to create the Toronado 25th Anniversary, which were:

  1. Sonambic = 4%
  2. Blonde Ale = 16%
  3. Strong Pale Ale = 36%
  4. Ale Aged with Currants = 28%
  5. Strong Dark Ale = 12%
  6. Baltic Porter = 4%

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Dave Keene and Vinnie Cilurzo at the end of a great evening, holding a bottle of the Toronado 25th Anniversary.

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After which, the stogies came out and the evening began, with Matt Bonney, from Brouwers in Seattle, and Dave Keene getting things started. Thanks Dave, Jen, Sean, Vinnie and Natalie for spectacular evening. As of today, the new beer is available for sale. Pick up some as soon as you can, because when it’s gone, it’s gone. There’s more details on the Russian River Blog on how to get a bottle of your very own. Basically it’s $25 per bottle with a limit of two bottles per day, and it’s very limited. But stop by Russian River’s brewpub tonight for a taste of it on draft.

Don’t Fear The Beerd

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My friend and new neighbor Fred Abercrombie is even more of a graphics nerd than I am, but then he does it for a living. For his day job, he runs his own ad agency, while at night — after donning cape and cowl — writes at his beer blog Ünnecessary Ümlaut. He noticed one day that no one has really taken a look at all the beards, mustaches and facial hair that grace so many of the beer labels we see dotting the craft beer landscape. Sensing a hole in our deeper understanding of the world, he decided to do something about it. And so began Craft Beerds, subtitled “a well-groomed collection of craft beer labels.” Fred researched, photographed and laid out his hirsute book, but after it ballooned to 300 pages with over 175 breweries represented, he realized that he could no longer afford to publish it on his own. Undaunted, he turned to Kickstater (I love Kickstarter!) for a little help from his friends — or at least other like-minded whackadoodles.
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With 19 days to go, he’s raised over half of the $8,000 he needs to print the book. The minimum to get a hardback copy of the book is a mere $25. For higher pledges, there are cooler rewards, such as getting your name in the book, t-shirts, prints and a signed copy of another book, The Facial Hair Handbook by two-time World Beard Champion, Jack Passion.

Below are some sample pages from the book:

Shmaltz Brewing’s Coney Island Human Blockhead.
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And FullSteam’s Certificate of Awesome and their Liborius Gollhardt Southern-Style Sour Rhubarb Ale.
Liborius8.2.12

So I would encourage every lover of beer and every lover of beerds to help ensure this book gets printed and published. Check out the Kickstarter page and see if you can help. Here’s more reasons why you should:

WHERE YOUR FUNDS ARE GOING:

Printing. Every single cent. The project grew from something cool that we could afford to self-publish, to something really cool we really need your help on. Really. Turns out, printing an almost 300-page hairy book is kinda expensive.

We’ve already collected, photographed and laid everything out. It looks beautiful — and handsome — but it needs your help to live the printed dream.

WHY DOES THIS NEED TO EXIST?

  • Because no one’s paid a tangible tribute to all the killer art and packaging from the recent craft beer explosion. (There’s enough to fill a book)
  • Because it’ll give exposure to many breweries you already love and want to succeed further.
  • Because it’ll give exposure to many local, regional breweries you may not even know you love. Yet.
  • Because we’ve broken the book into themed chapters that keep it fresh, every time you pick it up—Devilish Beerds, Royal Beerds, Side-Beerds and of course, Red Beerds, to name a few.
  • Because craft beer and facial hair are a natural combo. Ever been to a beer fest? You can’t swing a growler without grazing a beard.

Go ahead, pledge. You know you want to. Even if you don’t want to, you really do. You just don’t know it yet. Check out the Kickstarter page and see all the potential rewards and good karma you could receive. Then try to resist. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

And finally, here’s two pirate-themed bearded beers.
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For Love Of IPA

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One of my favorite authors is Henry David Thoreau, who in 1843 wrote A Walk to Wachusetts, which later became chapter 3 of Excursions. In it, he recounts a long walk taken with a friend, during which part of their journey included waking through hop fields. Here’s the passage:

This part of our route lay through the country of hops, which plant perhaps supplies the want of the vine in American scenery, and may remind the traveller of Italy, and the South of France, whether he traverses the country when the hop-fields, as then, present solid and regular masses of verdure, hanging in graceful festoons from pole to pole; the cool coverts where lurk the gales which refresh the wayfarer; or in September, when the women and children, and the neighbors from far and near, are gathered to pick the hops into long troughs; or later still, when the poles stand piled in vast pyramids in the yards, or lie in heaps by the roadside.

The culture of the hop, with the processes of picking, drying in the kiln, and packing for the market, as well as the uses to which it is applied, so analogous to the culture and uses of the grape, may afford a theme for future poets.

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It’s hard to disagree with that. Hops on the vine, especially at harvest time, are a beautiful sight. They’re just so green, especially in person. These were at the Moonlight hop field in 2007.

So today is the second IPA Day, fun new holiday celebrating beer that showcases hops. For several years, IPAs have been the fastest growing style in mainstream outlets, and have been doing very well everywhere else, too. Very few breweries don’t have an IPA or a similar hoppy beer these days, though as recently as a decade, or a decade and a half, ago that was not the case. Being on the west coast, and relatively close to the hops, it’s hard not to get caught up in hop fever. As much as I love malty beers, sour beers and most other styles, an aromatic hoppy IPA is pretty hard to beat. I find myself gravitating toward a hoppy choice, especially if I just want to enjoy the aromas and flavors of what I’m drinking.

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Harkening back to that earlier time, Moonlight Brewing in Santa Rosa has a 1/4-acre of hops that owner Brian Hunt uses for his fresh hop beer each year and invites friends and family to come up the brewery and help pick hops, just like in the old days when it was a community effort.

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Brian Hunt with some of his freshly cut down hops.

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My daughter Alice in 2009 in the Moonlight hop fields. I just love being in the hop fields at harvest time. It just smells so great and, as I said, it’s just so green.

Ashley Routson, who co-founded IPA Day (and works for Bison Brewing), had an interesting piece today at CraftBeer.com, The Ever-Emerging Sub-Categories of India Pale Ale, in which she identifies a multitude of shades and variations of IPAs.

  • American-style India Pale Ale
  • Belgian / Belgo IPA
  • Black IPA
  • Brettanomyces/ Wild /Traditional IPA
  • English-style India Pale Ale
  • Farmhouse IPA
  • Fresh Hop IPA
  • Imperial Black IPA
  • Imperial (Double) India Pale Ale
  • India Pale Lager (IPA-style, but fermented with lager yeast)
  • Red IPA
  • Rye IPA
  • Session IPA (IPA flavor at lower than average ABV)
  • Spiced/ Herbed IPA
  • White IPA

I’m sure some people will quibble with her list, but I love the broader idea that IPAs are not just one thing, but are different things to different people. The only real common thread is that they’re generally beers that emphasize the hop aromas and flavors possible in a beer. To some they’re unbalanced, while still others find that enamel-scraping, ginormous hop character what makes them so delightful. I can see both sides of the coin, and under the right circumstances like both subtle hop beers and the bigger hit-you-over-the-head variety, too. There’s a time and place for both. And they’re all worth celebrating. Happy IPA Day.

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Jumping in the dried hops, waiting to be baled, at Hop School in 2007. I’m so glad I had a chance to do it, but I was sticky the rest of the day. You really have to love hops to do this.