Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Join Me For A Beer Dinner At Anchor With Sierra Nevada

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sierra-nevada anchor-steam
Join me for a five-course beer dinner at the Anchor Brewery in San Francisco celebrating Sierra Nevada Brewing‘s 30h anniversary and the release of their first collaboration of the year, Fritz & Ken’s Ale, which is a stout.

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There are only five seats left for the beer dinner, which will take place on April 1 (no fooling). Here are the particulars.

Join two of the original craft-brewing pioneers for an intimate one-night-only celebration of beer and food at the historic Anchor Brewery in San Francisco. Anchor Brewing’s Fritz Maytag, and Sierra Nevada’s Ken Grossman will be celebrating the release of their collaboration beer, Fritz and Ken’s Ale, in honor of Sierra Nevada’s 30th anniversary. Come and join us for a 5-course dinner packed with unique rare and vintage beers, seated amongst the kettles in the legendary Anchor brewhouse.

Reception starts at 6:00 PM on April 1st, 2010 at Anchor Brewing Company, 1705 Mariposa Street
San Francisco, CA 94107

Five-Course meal, 11 interesting beers, and souvenir glassware.

$100 tickets, limited to 60 seats, no tickets available at the door.

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Tickets must be purchased online, they won’t be available at the door. You can get them at ClicknPrint Tickets. I’ll see you there.

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Ken Grossman and Fritz Maytag in the Anchor brewhouse, where the dinner will be held next Thursday.

Beer In Ads #71: Mackeson’s Milk Stout Love

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Tuesday’s ad is for Mackeson’s Stout, originally brewed by the Hythe Brewery in Kent, which was founded in 1699. The Mackeson family acquired the brewery in 1801 and introduced their most enduring beer, the milk stout, in 1907, before being taken over by Whitbread in the late 1920s. I love the notion that the milk stout is the product of illicit love between beer and milk, though of course there’s no actual milk in the beer.

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Hard Liver 2010

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On Saturday, the 8th annual Hard Liver Barleywine Fest began at Brouwer’s Cafe in Seattle, Washington. People started queuing in line at 9:00 a.m. for the eleven o’clock opening and the line ran up Phinney almost to 36th Street. There were 50 different barley wines and 12 more different vintages for a total of 62 available beers to sample.

Brouwer's on Hard Liver day
Brouwer’s Cafe on Hard Liver Day.

Tables filled with sheets of barleywine while the line for beer behind snaked from the bar
Like the Toronado Barleywine Festival, people camp out at tables to sample and discuss the barley wines, with many managing to work their way through all of the beers.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, this has become one of my favorite niche festivals. Brouwer’s is doing a great job with this barley wine festival and it continues to grow each year with more beers and greater attendance. What many people don’t realize is that it’s not just Saturday, but will continue through the entire next week, until all the barley wines run out. So don’t think you missed it, there’s still time to check out most of the barley wines, which are listed below.

Below is a slideshow of the 2010 Hard Liver Barleywine Fest. This Flickr gallery is best viewed in full screen. To view it that way, after clicking on the arrow in the center to start the slideshow, click on the button on the bottom right with the four arrows pointing outward on it, to see the photos in glorious full screen. Once in full screen slideshow mode, click on “Show Info” to identify each photo.

Meanwhile, upstairs we deliberated on the final eight
The Final Eight Barley Wines

Barley Wines Available

2009 vintage unless otherwise noted
Bold = Winners / Italics = Reached Final Round

  • Alaskan Big Nugget 2008, 09
  • Anacortes Old Sebastes [3rd Place Winner]
  • Anchor Old Foghorn
  • Anderson Valley Horn of the Beer
  • Avery Hog Heaven 2006, 09
  • Beer Valley Highway to Ale
  • Big Sky Old Blue Hair 2008, 10 [2nd Place Winner, 2008]
  • Black Raven Old Birdbrain
  • Boulder Beer Killer Penguin
  • Boundary Old Boundary
  • Deschutes Mirror Mirror
  • Dicks 2005
  • Dogfish Head Olde School 2008
  • Elliot Bay Pro-Am
  • Elysian Cyclops 2008, 09, 10
  • Firestone Walker Abacus [Honorable Mention]
  • Flying Dog Horn Dog 2008, 09
  • Full Sail Old Boardhead 2008
  • Glacier Brewhouse Old Woody [1st Place Winner]
  • Great Divide Old Ruffian Barley 2008, 09
  • Green Flash
  • Hair of the Dog Doggie Claws
  • Hales Rudyards Rare 2007
  • Hood Canal Breidablik
  • HUB Noggin Floggin
  • Lagunitas Olde Gnarleywine 2008
  • Left Hand Widdershins 2008
  • Lost Abbey Angel’s Share Bourbon
  • Lost Abbey Angel’s Share Brandy 2008
  • Lost Coast Fogcutter
  • Mad River John Barleycorn
  • Moylans Old Blarney
  • Ninkasi Critical Hit
  • North Coast Old Stock Ale 2007, 09
  • Pike Old Bawdy 2006, 07, 08, 09
  • Port Townsend Barleywine 2007
  • Port Townsend Barleywine Wood Firkin
  • Ram Mallwalker
  • Redhook Treblehook
  • Rogue Old Crustacean XS 2008, 09
  • Scuttlebutt Old #1 Barleywine
  • Sierra Nevada Bigfoot 1996, 2009
  • Speakeasy Old Godfather
  • Stone Old Guardian 2010
  • Three Skulls Barleywine
  • Victory Old Horizontal

1001 Beers Today

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reading-book
The book I contributed to, 1001 Beers You Must Try Before You Die, comes out today in the U.S. The book is the collaborative effort of 42 beers writers from around the world. We each wrote up beers from our areas of expertise, telling the beer’s story and also including tasting notes. There are 1,001 beers from 69 different countries listed, though the United States has more in the book than any other nation. I contributed 35 beers to the project, many of them from the Bay Area or the West Coast, with seven more American beer writers — all friends and colleagues — filling in the rest. Some of the beers were chosen by the editorial staff and the Adrian Tierney-Jones who headed the project, and the rest were suggested by all of the other writers. Some of the other contributors you might be familiar with include Stephen Beaumont, Pete Brown, Melissa Cole, Chuck Cook, Stan Hieronymus, Rick Lyke, Lisa Morrison, Randy Mosher, Chris O’Brien and Don Russell.

1001-beers

It’s a beautiful book, I must say, fully illustrated with nearly every beer’s label or bottle shown in full color. With every beer getting at least a half-page and most a full one, it’s also one seriously heavy book, weighing in at nearly five pounds and with 960 pages! I’m not sure where it will be sold, but it is currently available on Amazon.com, though the American cover is the one above, showing a full pint and bottle of our own Anchor Steam beer. It’s certainly great to see a book about beer from around the world that uses a San Francisco favorite on the cover.

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Most pages look like this, which is the first beer reviewed, Odell 5 Barrel Pale Ale (it’s also one of mine.)

Beer In Ads #70: Burgie’s Gardening Day

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ad-billboard
Monday’s ad, since it’s the first one I’ve posted since Spring began on Saturday, is all about getting out and working on your lawn and garden … with a beer, of course. A lawnmower beer, perhaps? Though it looks like a pretty old lawnmower. It’s for Burgie, brewed by Burgermeister Brewery of San Francisco, California. It’s about as green an ad as I can imagine. I’m not sure of the date, though it was probably before 1972, when the brewery was bought by Falstaff from Chicago’s Meister Brau (who owned it at that time). Eventually, the brewery closed around 1979.

burgie-lawn-ad

The True Joy Of Homebrewing

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ba
Congratulations to Charlie Papazian, and his wife Sandra, on the birth of their daughter, Carla Vitoria, born March 19. Charlie, of course, is the founder and president of the Brewers Association, and the author of The Joy of Homebrewing. According to a recent tweet, mother and daughter are doing fine. Join me in wishing Charlie and Sandra warmest wishes and congratulations on their new bundle of joy.

Particulars:

Original Gravity: 9 lbs., 1 oz.
IBUs: 21 3/4 in.
Style: Girl
Release Date: March 19, 2010
Label: Carla Vitoria Papazian
Notes: “Full bodied. Long on enJOYability. Fermentation has commenced.”

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Charlie with his new daughter, Carla

B.A.C. & The Definition Of Being Drunk

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Thanks to my friend Rick for sending this my way. In an editorial in the student newspaper for Temple University, the Temple News Online, student commentator Cary Carr writes about sudents getting drunk in a piece she called When Your BAC Exceeds .31 and the Label Reads Natty Ice, Trouble Brews. It’s mostly an anecdotal essay about student drinking and how kids should be more responsible and watch their intake. It’s all well and good, and there’s nothing I take issue with, but there’s just something that leaps out at you in the middle of it.

After all, there does tend to be a hierarchy to drunkenness, ranging from a happy tipsy to an invincible and shameless drunk to the stage we’ve all witnessed or experienced: how-are-you-even-alive drunk.

Of course there are more technical levels of intoxication, which Dr. Jeremy Frank, a psychologist from Tuttleman’s Counseling Services, explained.

“The best way to categorize stages of drunk is with Blood Alcohol Concentration,” Frank said. BAC is the ratio of alcohol to blood in the body. “Drunk is from .11 to .15. Very drunk is usually between .16 and .19. Once you get to .25 to .30 you generally are in a stupor, and from .31 and up would be the beginning of a coma.”

Hmm, according to the field of psychology, drunk is “from .11 to .15,” or above the 0.08% that MADD and other groups rammed down our throats in the early 1980s, when the standard was 0.10%, very much in line with Frank’s definition. Interesting. I wonder how other fields define being drunk?

MillerCoors: Is A Global Merger Possible?

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millercoors
Several sources are pointing out a Reuters interview last week with Peter Swinburn, head of MolsonCoors. In that interview, Swinburn suggests that while he considers his company to be a “buyer,” he doesn’t discount the notion that MolsonCoors could be a takeover target. He further remarked that “SABMiller, Molson’s partner in the MillerCoors joint venture, would be a natural fit as a buyer.” While going on to say he doesn’t believe that will happen, this is, after all, how these types of things begin. A rumor that’s denied and discounted by all involved parties becoming a reality is nothing new, so you never know. Currently SABMiller is the 2nd largest global beer company and MolsonCoors in sixth. Though a merger wouldn’t eclipse A-B InBev at the top spot, it would move them closer together. Only time will tell.

Beer In Art #70: Erik Henningsen’s The Art Critics

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art-beer
Today’s work of art is by Danish artist Erik Ludvig Henningsen, who created the iconic Thirsty Man for Tuborg in 1900. Henningsen, who lived from 1855 to 1930 had a long distinguished career as a fine artist. As you might expect, at least one of his other paintings must have also depicted beer, and I did find this one, painted in 1915, entitled The Art Critics.

Henningsen_art-criics

The painting today is at the Hope Gallery in Salt Lake City, Utah, who specialize in genre paintings. They describe the Art Critics like this:

The bartender in white stands at the end of the counter listening to two artists critique an unframed painting that faces them on a chair. They are seated at a simple brown wooden table with three chairs. Their glasses, a candle and their elbows fill the tabletop. The men are dressed in their finest (black suits, shined shoes, collars and neckties) as they have ventured out in public. The bearded man sits holding a newspaper yet reads the painting as his companion critiques the work. Protruding from his beard and mustache is a lit, smoking cigarette. The other gentleman holds his cigarette in the air as he talks about the painting before them. The bartender is amused by what he hears as he has a smile on his face. With exception to the table and chairs, all of the woodwork in the room is a light blue — a nice contrast against the soft white of the walls and bright white of the bartender’s coat.

A simple, yet amusing genre piece showing an everyday event of looking at and critiquing a painting — just as you are doing now.

As someone who likes to look at art, it’s often not possible to walk around a gallery with a beer, so to be able to drink and look at art in a bar is pretty much my ideal.

There is also a short biography of Henningsen and you can also see a few dozen more of his works at the Hope Gallery. The Hope Gallery also has prints of his work available for purchase.

Knowing Your Limits

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limits
I woke up again in Seattle, my second day here. Yesterday I helped to choose the winners of the Hard Liver Barleywine Fest at Brouwer’s Cafe. It’s the eighth year of the festival and it’s really grown into an impressive event in the several years I’ve been coming up for it.

But the weekend has got me thinking, not about barley wines, but tasting in general. At these types of festivals, people often try to taste every offering — in small quantities of course — of some very big beers. You see it at the Toronado Barleywine Festival and you see if at Brouwer’s Hard Liver, where this year 50 barley wines will be judged and something like 62 or 66 will be served, owing to multiple vintages of the same beers.

And as impressive as that is, it’s today that has me worried. Each Sunday, the day after the Hard Liver Fest, Matt Bonney hosts, with his business partner Matt Vandenberghe (a.k.a. Vern) and a cast of characters, the private, invitation-only Keene Tasting, named for Dave Keene, who owns the Toronado in San Francisco. With Dr. Bill now working at Stone and no longer doing as many of his legendary tastings, the Keene Tasting is one of the few that follow the format Dr. Bill (at least as far as I know) pioneered.

It’s a simple, if punishing format, where a new beer is opened roughly every five minutes over a period of several hours. So while you never get a large portion of any single beer, you do ultimately taste a lot of different beers. Still, it adds up. There are snack breaks and a lunch break, and those that stick with it can expect to be there eleven or twelve hours. Like many other types of marathons, very few actually reach the finish line, tasting every single beer.

At the beginning, the first beer
Last year something like 160 beers were tasted, beginning around 11:00 a.m. and going well into the evening. That year I made it to 110 beers before reaching my limit.

The year before, I only made it half-way, and dropped out at beer 75, owing to getting very, very sick — not from the beer, just a feverish flu — which I detailed then in Pride Goeth Before A Fall. And that brings me to my point. We all have our limits, and it’s not only good to know them, but also pay them heed.

Matt Bonney keeping things moving
Impressively, one of the improvements Bonney employs over the average Dr. Bill tasting is that a clean glass is used for every beer, a Herculean task if ever there was one.

There are, of course, myriad ways to taste from settling in to drink only one beer, exploring it thoroughly from start to finish, lingering over it as it changes when it warms, really letting it sink in to the very opposite, tasting as many beers as possible, very quickly, and everything in between. Generally, when judging beers in competition, you want no more than nine or ten in a flight and 30 or less for a single session. But that’s just one legitimate way in which beer can be sampled. That may be too many at a time for some people and too few for others.

I know there are people critical of the rapid fire Dr. Bill-style tasting, but I’m not. Is it my favorite way to sample beer? Not necessarily, but it is still quite enjoyable and while you can’t linger over every single beer, you can get a sense of it all the same. There’s a Danish proverb, “better thin beer than an empty jug.” And that’s the rub. I still prefer the opportunity to sample some truly rare beers, even if not under the most ideal circumstances, than not at all. So yes, I’m a relativist when it comes to the marathon tasting but I’m just fine with that. The important thing is to have a good time and know when to walk away. I already know there will be some spectacular beers poured later today and I’m looking forward to giving it another go. Will I make it to the end? Probably not. But that’s okay, there’s no shame in that as far as I’m concerned.

In the words of the immortal Kenny Rogers, equally applicable to drinking as gambling. “You got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away and know when to run.” With any luck, I’ll know when to fold and can walk away. Stay tuned for details.

Below is a slideshow of the 2009 Keene Tasting. This Flickr gallery is best viewed in full screen. To view it that way, after clicking on the arrow in the center to start the slideshow, click on the button on the bottom right with the four arrows pointing outward on it, to see the photos in glorious full screen. Once in full screen slideshow mode, click on “Show Info” to identify each photo.