I got a couple of e-mails today that Jay Misson, the head brewer for Triumph Brewing in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, passed away today. He worked for Gordon Biersch for a time, training brewpub brewers, and I think I met him once during that period in his career. Lew Bryson, who knew him quite well, has a moving piece on his blog today.
On the first day of Summer, June 21, the Beer Chef will set sail for uncharted waters with a beer dinner featuring the beers of Craig Cauwels from Schooner’s Brewery of Antioch, California. It will be a three-course dinner and the cost is $70 per person. It will be held at the Cathedral Hill Hotel on Friday, June 21, 2008, beginning with a reception at 6:30 p.m. Call 415.674.3406 for reservations by June 12. I’ll see you there.
Reception: 7:00 PM
Beer Chef’s Hors D’Oeuvre
Beer: Schooners IPA and Belgian Wit
Dinner: 7:30 PM
First Course
Salad of Honey Crisp Farms Yellow Peaches, House Made Mozzarella, Opal Basil and Dried Cherry Vinaigrette
Beer: Schooners Vindecation
Second Course:
Brined Berkshire Pork Tenderloin with Potato Risotto and Espresso BBQ Sauce
Beer: Irish Stout on Nitro
Third Course:
Butterscotch Bread Pudding
Beer: 2007 Old Diablo Barleywine
Schooner’s brewer Craig Cauwels, with Steve Altimari, from Valley Brewing athe Celebrator’s 18th anniversary party in 2007.
6.21
Dinner with the Brewmaster: Schooner’s Brewery
Cathedral Hill Hotel, 1101 Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, California
415.674.3406 [ website ]
Yesterday, June 7, the 17th annual Beerfest in Santa Rosa was held at the Luther Burbank Center (which has a new, corporate sponsor name, but I refuse to call it by that name). It’s one of the oldest of the small town fests that used to proliferate throughout the festival landscape. There aren’t nearly as many of this type of festival around anymore, which is a shame. But this is one of the best, and it’s no surprise it survived because since its inception they put an equal emphasis on food and beer, not to mention cider (a rarity in the U.S., especially when compared to British festivals). That set it apart from the average festival back in the day, but as food and beer is finally coming of age, it just seems obvious now. That’s also led to it being a much more crowded festival. C’est la vie.
The first “official meeting” of the Bay Area Beer Bloggers. From left: Merideth Nelson, from the Beer Geek, me, Chris Nelson, ditto, JJ, the Thirsty Hopster, and Gail Ann Williams and Steve Shapiro, both from beer by BART.
Brian Hunt, from Moonlight Brewing, explaining his latest beer, Out To Lunch.
For more photos from this year’s Santa Rosa Beerfest, visit the photo gallery.
Last month several beer bloggers from the Bay Area had an impromptu meet-up at the 2008 Boonville Beer Festival. Though all of us were very different and approached our blogs from a different perspective, we all shared a love of good beer and the geography of the greater Bay Area.
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When I looked at how many of us were covering the same turf on the same subject with very little overlap or conflict, I was struck by how we might work together on specific projects, events or who knows what. So the first step is to come together. With that in mind, I’ve created “Bay Area Beer Bloggers” as a very loose collection of like-minded individuals in the hope that we could develop a group that will work together on some still-unspecified projects. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and write a blog, website or podcast about beer, you’re already a member of our community. If you don’t see your blog listed on the BABB page, please shoot me a note or post a comment, and I’ll add you right away. I also created this logo for anyone to use on their blog, if they’re so inclined. I made a few in different sizes, which you can find here, but please download them and don’t hotlink to them. Thanks. I figure that eventually we can arrange to get together every now and again either at beer events or at our own events. I’m not envisioning anything formal, just a way for all of us to stay connected to one another in our common pursuits. I can also imagine ways in which as a group we can help promote the local beer scene, but more about that later. |
The first meeting of The Bay Area Beer Bloggers at Boonville. From left: Peter Estaniel, from the BetterBeerBlog, JJ (a.k.a. Jessica), from The Thirsty Hopster, me, and Jay Hinman from the Hedonist Beer Jive.
For our 16th Session, our host, Thomas, from Geistbear Brewing Blog, has chosen the topic “beer festivals” for June, the month when beer festival season really heats up.
| I don’t really recall the first beer festival I ever attended. When I first moved to California in 1985, I lived in and around San Jose so it was probably the California Small Brewers Festival that was held at the Tied House in Mountain View. I suppose it could have been either of the now-defunct San Jose International Beer Festival or the Brew Ha-Ha in downtown San Jose’s Pedro Square, but I think those were both later. It may even have been the old KQED Beer & Food Festival in San Francisco, but I doubt it. Being in the back parking lot of the Tied House is the memory that sticks out the most clearly. I can still picture in my mind the giant tent with breweries positioned in a circle around the outer edge with the center filled with long benches and chairs in the center. Those were the days when beer festivals were still quite exciting for me and I felt more like a schoolboy on a field trip than they are today. |
Don’t get me wrong, I still very much enjoy beer festivals. But they don’t hold the same charm they once did. When I was first learning about beer and when the craft beer movement was in its relative infancy, new discoveries could be made every day and at almost every beer festival. Admittedly, some might be better left hidden, but there was a real sense that you might turn up something spectacular. In fact, you expected that you would. I was recently in New Zealand, and their national craft beer movement is where we were then in many ways. I tasted a lot of different beers there, and quite a lot were — to be diplomatic — problematic. They only started an actual brewer’s guild two years ago — similar to our Brewer’s Association — and only recently took over the country’s biggest beer festival, Beer NZ, and are trying to create their own GABF-like event. I’d love to go back there in September and judge at the event, but I’m not sure yet if I can work out the details. Consumers there are only beginning to discover that beer can taste differently than they have been led to believe by the big industrial breweries, who like our own, have turned beer into an interchangeable industrial product.
I’ve had several conversations about this phenomenon with different people. Roughly twelve to fifteen (or more) years ago, at GABF, it was not uncommon to find a beer with problems or even a defective sample. Over the last decade, that’s become harder, much harder. It’s now very much the exception. And while I think it signals a maturity of the craft beer industry that the vast majority of breweries are making consistently good beer, in some ways I miss those more romantic early days. Please don’t misunderstand that. I don’t miss finding bad beer. That’s certainly not what I mean by romantic. But that sense of exploration and uncertainty made finding something wonderful that much sweeter.
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As a result, back in the late 1980s and early 90s, I rarely missed a beer festival. There had to be a pretty compelling reason not to attend one because it felt like there was always something new there to discovered. So my bachelor party started at a beer festival (The KQED one) and the day after my wedding, we met friends at the California Small Brewers Festivals in Mountain View. My point is that nothing stopped me from going to festivals. I still try to go to as many as my schedule permits, but there just isn’t that same urgency. If I have to miss a festival, I’m not bothered about it like I once was. Nowadays I generally go for the people, the beer community. I know I’ll get a chance to see friends at virtually every festival I attend. If somebody hand me something impressive, I’m every bit as excited as I used to be, I just don’t expect it the way I once did. But I’m not the typical attendee any longer, I know that. Every year there’s a entirely new group of young adults who have the same opportunity to be wowed like us old folk a generation ago. I envy them in some ways. They probably won’t have to taste as many bad beers as we did, but that sense of discovery is what beer festivals are all about. They’re still one of the best ways to introduce people to beer’s variety and diversity. They’re still one of the best ways to sample many different kinds of beers and find out what you like or don’t like. |
These days, in my dotage, I prefer the smaller, more intimate festivals, especially ones that highlight a particular style. Those type of festivals provide wonderful opportunities to really compare beers of a similar style and learn more about them. That’s still quite exciting. You can do that at bigger festivals, too, of course. I’ve been doing that at GABF since the beginning. Pick a particular beer style and then walk around the hall (or wherever) and just order samples of only that style. It’s a great way to learn about a style, who makes it well, or what you like or dislike about it more generally.
The modern beer festival, which probably began with CAMRA’s Great British Beer Festival in the mid-1970s, is a far cry from the European harvest festivals and large scale trade fairs that were their likely progenitors. But they are probably the best tool we have to spread the word about great beer. Because in the end, words are meaningless compared to actually tasting the beer itself. So this summer, during the beer festival’s high season, try to invite as many non-craft beer drinker friends as you can to go with you to a festival. They might go kicking and screaming, but some day they might also thank you. If you can expose your friends to the lifelong experience of appreciating good beer, you know you will have improved their life and done them a great favor. Beer festivals provide the opportunity, all you have to do is provide your friends. See you there.
The proposed merger of U.S. operations between SAB Miller and Molson Coors has been approved by federal regulators after an eight-month investigation into possible anti-trust issues. In a statement released today, the U.S. Government said “the proposed joint venture between Miller and Coors is not likely to lessen competition substantially” and concluded that it “is likely to produce substantial and credible savings that will significantly reduce the companies’ costs of producing and distributing beer” instead. According to the Business Journal of Milwaukee, this was the last remaining “hurdle” necessary before the McMerger will take place, which more than likely will now occur in the next few weeks. The planned joint venture, which was revealed back in October of last year, would have Coors and Miller combine their operations in the United States (including Puerto Rico) “in an effort to better compete with dominant domestic brewer Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc.” The new entity will be known as MillerCoors, which is why I’m calling it the McMerger.
Each parent company will have a 50% voting interest but an economic interest of 58% for SAB Miller and 42% for Molson Coors, based on the assets contributed by each to the joint venture. Pete Coors will become the chairman and Leo Kiely, from Molson Coors will be CEO of MillerCoors. No word yet on how many employees of either company are likely to lose their jobs. Once completed, the “Big Three” will become the “Big Two.” A large brewery is generally defined as one which produces over 2-million barrels of beer annually. Currently, only four breweries meet that definition: Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Coors and Pabst. But as Pabst does not own a brewery and contracts to have all of its beer made elsewhere (primarily at Miller brewing facilities) they are generally no longer considered one of the big boys. The feds have declared the merger no big deal, but I’m not entirely convinced. We’ll see how it plays out, but I can’t help feeling a little uneasy about the prospects.
UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal has now weighed in with their thoughts:
The merger combines Miller Brewing Co. of Milwaukee, the second-largest U.S. brewer with about 18% market share, and Coors Brewing Co. of Golden, Colo., the No. 3 player with about 11% market share.
The companies aim to pare $500 million in costs over the first three years of the venture, in part through lower transportation costs derived from using each other’s breweries to make each other’s beers. As one company in the U.S., Miller and Coors will also have more leverage with retailers, which could help them garner more shelf space at bars and stores. Anheuser, based in St. Louis, controls nearly 50% of the U.S. beer market and boasts the nation’s top-selling beer, Bud Light.
Today’s L.A. Times had a nice write up of Charlie Bamforth and his advocacy of beer’s superiority over wine, typified by his most recent book, Grape vs. Grain.
Here is a chart of the latest style trends broken out by the top six selling styles, based on seventeen-month’s worth of sales as of May 18, 2008, courtesy of DBBB, the Domestic Brewers Bottled Brands. They publish the book, “The Essential Reference of Domestic Brewers and Their Bottled Brands” and have a website, which offers monthly online updates of the book.
The chart is based on IRI Data showing sales of beer from January 2007 through May 18th of this year by beer style. IRI is short for Information Resources, Inc., a company that surveys sales of beer (and everything else) from over 15,000 retailers (mostly groceries) in the U.S. As a result, their data is invariably skewed toward the national and regional brands since it doesn’t take into account direct sales and sales from small mom & pop stores. I used to get IRI data from almost every medium to large brewer who called on me when I was the beer buyer for BevMo. And while it’s not as accurate for craft beer in specific, it does give you a general idea of certain trends, especially when you follow it over a period of time.
Like most people, my first truly micro-canned beer was Dale’s Pale Ale from Oskar Blues. Before that I’d had beer in cans from Portland Brewing (MacTarnahan’s Amber Ale) and Big Rock Brewery in Canada, not to mention all those 16-oz. widget cans from Great Britain and Ireland. Those weren’t bad, but Oskar Blues showed (and continues to show) that big, flavorful beer can taste great in a can, too. I was also quite impressed when I visited the Ball canning plant in Fairfield, California to watch the 21st Amendment beer cans being manufactured. Prior to that, I shared the anti-can bias of most of my peers. I probably even helped to spread it because I vividly remember drinking a lot of beers with metal turbidity problems when I was a teenager. But as I learned, the problems with metal leeching in the cans that altered their flavor had largely been solved using newly developed organic polymers that coated the inside of the cans. And the true test — taste — proved it once and for all. I have now done several side by side taste tests with draft beer and the same beer from a can, and you can not tell the difference between the two. Between that and the many advantages to beer in a can, I am firmly in the flavorful-beer-in-cans-are-a-positive-development-for-the-industry camp. With New Belgium Brewing entering the market with canned Fat Tire I’d say the future of canned beer is safe.
Collecting beer cans is probably one of the most popular hobbies within all breweriana. People have been collecting cans since 1935, when the first ones appeared. It probably peaked in the 1970s, when many savvy breweries created not only special commemorative cans but entire series of them to cater to collectors and, not incidentally, increase sales. But by 1980 less than fifty breweries remained to feed collectors. Over the past five or so years, the number of new breweries beginning to can their beer has increased dramatically. A year ago when I wrote a feature story on canned beer for Beer Advocate magazine there were around two dozen micro-canneries using Cask systems or a similar set-up. Today there are over forty, with several more contracting canned beer or hand-canning. The Queen City Chapter, a breweriana club in Cincinnati, Ohio, has set out to document all of the new cans and they have an impressive website that chronicles this second wave of canned beer. For most examples, they have a photo of the can. They have, as far as I know, the most comprehensive online collection of new beer cans and it’s a great place to follow along with who’s started canning now, because it seems to change fairly often as new breweries join the ranks of beer can breweries.
This is my fifth pick for “Website of the Month,” which I started featuring on the right sidebar four months ago, because I get so many link requests, and because I have so many in my blogroll, I wanted to highlight the best ones I come across.
Bruce Paton, the Beer Chef, has announced the next three beer dinners to be held at the Cathedral Hill Hotel.
Well, those all sound tasty. Menus should be coming shortly, at least for the next one, and I’ll post them as soon as they become available. See you there. Bring your appetite.