Here’s a fun project. Admittedly, it wouldn’t work very well in a lot of places, but it’s ideal for Montana. Journalist Bill Schneider has set out to visit and write about every brewery in Montana. His column begins today in the New West, which styles itself as the “Voice of the Rocky Mountains.” His first stop is Lewis & Clark Brewing in Helena and he also provides a good overview of his plan. The fact that there are only around seventeen breweries in the state helps, but it’s still a fun and worthwhile endeavor.

On Saturday the Portland Spring Beer & Wine Festival took place at the Oregon Convention Center. Awards were given in eight categories, with a gold and silver awarded in each. The results are listed below:

Amber, Brown & Red
Gold – Pelican Pub & Brewery Anglers Amber
Silver – Lost Coast Brewery Downtown Brown

Belgian-Style
Gold – North Coast Brewing PranQster
Silver – Widmer Belgian Golden Ale

Double IPA and other Strong Ales
Gold – Stone Brewing Ruination IPA
Silver – Lang Creek Brewing Zeppelin Imperial Ale

Golden & Pale Ales
Gold – Stone Brewing Pale Ale
Silver – Pyramid Curve Ball Blond Ale

IPA
Gold – Laurelwood Public House & Brewery Organic Green Elephant IPA
Silver – Henry Weinhard’s IPA

Lager
Gold – Pabst Blue Ribbon
Silver – Kona Longboard Lager

Porter & Stout
Gold – Stone Brewing Imperial Stout
Silver – Deschutes Obsidian Stout

Wheat
Gold – Deschutes Wolf Mountain Wit
Silver – Blue Moon Belgian White

Last night, the Beer Chef, Bruce Paton, held his latest beer dinner with Chuck Silva and the beers from Green Flash Brewing near San Diego. With some new Green Flash beers to try, and some wonderful food, it was another terrific evening of beer and food.

The beer chef, Bruce Paton, with Chuck Silva, from Green Flash Brewing.

For more photos from the Green Flash beer dinner, visit the photo gallery.
 

This month’s online version of The Scientist magazine has an interesting historical piece entitled Beer, and the Biochemists Behind It. Despite beginning with the now discredited Franklin beer quote, the article is a nice overview of brewing science historically and talks about Charlie Bamforth’s advocacy on behalf of beer, too. I love the assertion that because of beer’s 8,000-year heritage, it may be “quite possibly the world’s oldest biotechnology.” I’d like to see brewers start saying, when asked what they do for a living, respond casually, “oh, I’m in biotech.”

The Green Life, which is the official blog of the Sierra Club, did a long post on St. Patrick’s Day about the other real green beer, organic beer, along with a number of breweries whose sustainable practices they applauded. New Belgium was mentioned, of course, and so was Sierra Nevada, Great Lakes, Brooklyn and Orlio. There’s also a number of comments listing even more green breweries that people knew about. It’s interesting to note that people interested enough to read the Sierra Club’s daily blog were so aware of so many breweries whose operations were green.

Yesterday the California Board of Equalization made a troubling ruling that has the potential to threaten the production of all barrel-aged beer in the state. The changes were urged by neo-prohibitionists in their misguided attempt to have Alcopops taxed at the higher distilled spirits rate instead of as beer (or more technically malt-based beverages). But the language, perhaps unintentionally, makes it possible to be applied to any beer that’s been aged in a used wooden barrel. Here’s the relevant language from the ruling:

any alcoholic beverage, except wine, which contains 0.5 percent or more alcohol by volume from flavors or ingredients containing alcohol obtained from the distillation of fermented agricultural products will be classified as a distilled spirit for tax purposes.

Brewers will be “required” to “prove” their beer doesn’t meet that criteria, meaning they’ll have to submit a form for every current and new beer they produce, a ridiculous requirement at best. Effectively they’ll have to “prove” each beer they make is really a beer, and not something else. Guilty until they prove themselves innocent. And who better to monitor that than a tax organization, with little or no brewing knowledge? Since distilled spirits are taxed at a much higher rate, they’ll have no incentive whatsoever to act fairly. To me, this has disaster written all over it. In California, we’re facing a huge budget deficit and beer makes a convenient bogeyman to help pay for other people’s mistakes.

Also, under the ruling the Board of Equalization will give itself the authority to define and implement regulations applying to alcohol, a power previously reserved for the legislature (and enforced by the ABC). That, too, I find disturbing. Tax authorities regulating alcohol do not exactly have a good track record.

But let’s get back to calling a beer a distilled spirit just because it touched wood that used to have one in it. I can’t even fathom why, apart from economic greed, that makes any kind of sense. It’s just wrong on so many levels.

I may spend time abroad in a foreign land and be forever changed for the experience. Perhaps if I go for any length of time to … let’s say Canada, I might start paying closer attention to hockey, or even curling. Maybe I’ll start calling a case of beer a “two-four,” spelling colour with a “u,” hanging prints by one of the Gang of Seven in my home, or quoting Louis Riel, eh? But I’ll still be an American. The same is true for beer. A stout may spend years in a bourbon barrel, taking on rich vanilla character and other flavors from its time in the wood. But it will still be a 5% abv stout. To suggest it will turn into Maker’s Mark, even just for “tax purposes,” is an insult to common sense.

Aging beer in wooden barrels has, of course, become quite common and I’d say many, if not most, California craft brewers are making a beer of this type at least from time to time. And there are several that have made names for themselves with their barrel aged beers, such as Russian River and the Lost Abbey, to name two prominent ones. Their entire business will be under threat if the ABC decides to apply this ruling to these beers. The higher taxes will make them too expensive to produce.

The EU did something similar a year or so ago, when they tried to implement a requirement that all breweries meet a standard of cleanliness, inadvertently threatening all lambic breweries, whose wild yeast microcosms would have been destroyed under the proposed regulations. I’m pretty sure an exception was worked out, but the general public has a bit better appreciation for beer in Europe than on our shores.

Paranoid? Maybe, but I love these beers far too much to leave it to chance. Something needs to be done, but at this early stage I don’t even know what or who this can be appealed to. I’ll keep you posted. But I’m sure your local state representative will be involved. Find out who yours is now, and be ready to send him a letter or e-mail. Hopefully, I’ll have details soon on what we all can do.

I was forwarded this something like fourth-hand, but I’ve been assured it’s also on Magic Hat Brewing’s website (though I couldn’t find it) and was created by them as a goof. I think it’s pretty funny, but then I have a dark, twisted sense of humor. If you’ve been following the Hookergate scandal in the New York Governor’s office you know the former top dog was referred to as customer #9. But there’s already a beer by that name, but you probably already knew that ….

My friend and colleague, Greg Kitsock, had an article last week in the Washington Post that got me thinking. It was titled Another Layer of Enjoyment and tackled the issue of blending beer, especially with Guinness, as in beer cocktails. It was written to coincide, one presumes, with the then impending St. Patrick’s Day holiday. The two most common of these are a Black & Tan — which Guinness has long promoted as Guinness and Bass Ale (the two shared distribution for many years) — and a Half & Half, which is Guinness and Harp Lager, also a Guinness product. Obviously generic stout and a pale ale or lager may be substituted, but as Guinness has promoted the combinations for such a long time, they are well and truly most closely associated with those brands. I once got into a huge row with the copy editor that Beverages & more used to employ when she changed my text for our March newsletter and switched Black & Tan to Guinness and Harp, and vice versa, without consulting me, so the paper went out to thousands of Club Bev members (the company’s loyalty card) with the wrong information and my name on the item as the author. She was one of those insufferable people who felt they already knew everything and couldn’t conceive of ever being wrong. Surprisingly enough, many continue to spread confusion, with plenty of websites — even bartending websites — with conflicting definitions, including a few that contradict themselves. So perhaps the dilemma is not as well-settled as I believed.

Even Wikipedia, which states that the term Black & Tan, in its meaning as a mixed beer drink, was first recorded in 1899. It’s not listed in my OED, so I can’t confirm that. But after beginning by claiming the two drinks are as I think they should be, they later in the article state that “[t]he two most common types of Black and Tan in the United States use Guinness Draught (not Extra Stout) and either Bass, or Harp Lager,” [my emphasis] which at best is contradictory. When you consider that Harp Lager was first launched in 1960, it’s seems hard to imagine that after 61 years of Black & Tan meaning one thing that it should suddenly make no difference what kind of beer is used, but then I presume the Wikipedia folks who wrote that entry were not on to the finer points of what makes a lager and an ale different. Perhaps they simply assumed a light colored beer is a light colored beer.

I know these drinks are just marketing gimmicks, and possibly not even worthy of discussion, but that ‘s the anal-retentive in me. Is there some confusion about what goes in a martini or a gin and tonic? I just think there should be some consensus, that’s all. Am I asking too much? Anyway, there are actually plenty more of these type of mixed beer drinks, many of which are black and something, like black and red or black and orange. Wikipedia has a huge list and a website, No Sheep, has a few more as well. Personally, my favorite thing to add to Guinness is just a few drops Crème de Cassis, which gives it just a touch of berry sweetness. But I’ve never had a name for it — I suppose I could call it a black & currant or a black & black.

I forgot to mention this earlier, but when I met with Dan Gordon a couple of weeks back he told me that the four beers he’ll be making for Costco will be sold in a loose variety pack, meaning there will be six bottles of each of the four styles in every 24-bottle case, with no carriers. That means their new private label beers will only create one additional sku, not four, as I had originally feared. Since this changes considerably the heated debate that ensued, I thought I’d pass it along.

The 6th annual Hard Liver Barleywine Fest took place — as it has for the past four years — at Brouwer’s Cafe at the corner of 35th and Phinney in Seattle, Washington. There were 45 barley wines on tap and the place was packed from the time it opened at eleven until I left around five o’clock. With so many tasty treats, the Hard Liver was certainly hard on your own liver.

The packed crowd at Brouwer’s enjoying barley wines from the second-floor balcony.

Festivals hosts Matt Bonney and Matt Vandenberghe, co-owners of Brouwer’s Cafe.

For many more photos from this year’s Hard Liver Barleywine Fest, visit the photo gallery.