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My Beer Predictions for 2009

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crystal-ball
I keep seeing ads on television for Nostradamus and others’ predictions that the world will end in 2012, so I guess it’s time to get cracking on my own vague, hare-brained predictions. First of all, I do not believe the world will end on December 21, 2012 so you can stop planning your end of the world blow-out parties and put away that R.E.M. CD. It’s time once again to look into the crystal malt ball and try to divine the future. Let’s see if anything that happened last year can be used to predict what might happen in the beer industry in 2009. Here are five things I think will happen this year. Let’s see how I do a year from now. What are your predictions?

 
Collaboration Beers: 2009 will be the year of the collaboration beer, a trend that’s been building for the past few years. But this year I think you’ll see a steep rise in the number of breweries pairing up with one another to do a special beer together.

 
Food & Beer Goes Mainstream: Last year I predicted 2008 would be the year of the beer dinner, and I think that was largely correct. I was invited to more beer dinners in the first quarter of last year than the entire year before that, and not because my popularity as a dinner guest grew. More restaurants discovered just how well beer and food work with one another and, perhaps more importantly, some culinary schools finally started including beer in their curricula (it’s a sad fact that most only teach students about cooking with wine and pairing it, a decidedly narrow-minded, elitist philosophy). With so many successful experimenters last year, it seems almost inevitable that we’ll see beer pairings on menus, special dinners and an increased use of beer as an ingredient from not only more fine stand-alone restaurants, but also some chains, too.

 
Merger Shakeouts: Many people have been putting their heads in the sand, saying that the recent mergers will have no effect whatsoever for consumers or small brewers. This year they will finally be proven wrong. For some time now, distributor consolidations have been on the rise and have been making it tough for some smaller breweries to gain access to market or to have their brands adequately represented in the marketplace. With the Coors/Miller merger and the InBev acquisition of Anheuser-Busch, this will be the year what that means will come dramatically into focus as the distributor adjustments, mergers, closings, etc. settle out. I believe this will continue to make things difficult for small brewers trying to bring their beer to market or increase their distribution to new areas, but time will tell. It may, of course, create opportunities for self-distribution or new boutique distributors to be created with small portfolios of craft beers.

 
Beer Prices Will Continue To Rise: Access to most hop varieties and all malts seem secure, though prices will continue to remain high, causing additional price adjustments throughout the year. It will be two more years before acreage newly planted last year will be at full yield. Between that and rising energy costs and price going up for virtually everything, it’s inevitable that the price of beer will go up again. I think the major companies will try their best to keep prices down as best they can, but it’s going to be difficult for them to continue with rzor-thin margins, especially with the rising costs plus at least one having to pay of the largest cash-buyout in history.

 
New Drys’ Attacks Will Be More Aggressive: As we saw in 2008, Neo-Prohibitionists will use almost any tactic to further their agenda. They really ramped up their attacks on drinking society and showed just how far they were willing to go to remove alcohol from society. I think we’ll see that played out more and more and no doubt we’ll see many states tax structures targeted as the economy tanks, with alcohol used as a convenient scapegoat to pick up the tab for years of fiscal irresponsibility not of their making. Beer will again, as usual, take the major brunt as the New Drys perceive it the greater threat because of its popularity. As the backlash of their failed policies continue with new common sense suggestions of returning the drinking age to 18 to be in line with the rest of the civilized world will expose them to more and more criticism, and hopefully more and more politicians will be emboldened to ignore their bullying tactics, but sadly that may still a few years in the future.

 

Brewed and Cultured in Marin: A Beer & Cheese Pairing Extravaganza!

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I just got word that a fortnight hence, on Thursday January 22, Iron Springs Pub & Brewery in Fairfax, Marin County, California will be posting what sounds like a very fun beer and cheese event. They’re calling the event Brewed and Cultured in Marin: A Beer & Cheese Pairing Extravaganza! because in addition to the beer, all the cheeses featured will be local, too. Their focus is to bring awareness to the public that beer pairs with food just as well, if not better than, wine.

The event will begin at 6:00 p.m. There will be a modest fee, but the price has not yet been announced (I’ll update this when I learn the final price). Although not yet confirmed, it is likely that representatives will be on hand from the Cowgirl Creamery and Point Reyes Farmstead Cheese, who are providing the cheese for the tasting.

The Four Cheeses and Their Beer Pairings Will Be:

  1. Cowgirl “Mt. Tam” paired with Chazz Cat Rye
  2. Cowgirl “Red Hawk” paired with Casey Jones Double IPA
  3. Cowgirl “Pierce Point” paired with Dark Path Lager
  4. Farmstead “Reserve Bleu” paired with the Barstow-Lundy Barleywine

Also on hand will be local food favorites such as homemade Spicy Nuts, locally baked sourdough bread, Marshall Farms Marin Mix honey, olives and some dried fruits to snack on. It sounds like a fun time. Perhaps I’ll see you there.

 

Flavor Declares Beer Top Culinary Trend

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Given that I, and several other beer writers, dubbed last year as “The Year of the Beer Dinner,” it’s nice to see the food world catch up. The food and restaurant trade publication Flavor & Menu released their top ten trends in the food business. Unsurprisingly, at least to those of us in the beer world, their number one pick for culinary trend is food paired with beer.

From the press release:

Top Culinary Trend – Tapping Beer’s Potential: Now that beer is the new wine, thanks to a flood of new craft beer products and imports, chefs are creating menus that match beer lists in their complexity and casual-yet-sophisticated approach to pub food. Beyond the usual pretzels and peanuts, these post-modern pub menus present hearty food that’s designed to pair with beer.

Nice. This is one trend that really can’t go too mainstream, in my opinion.

 

Beer’s Big Brother

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While driving down to the East Bay for the bimonthly Celebrator tasting Tuesday night, I had my iPod on shuffle. A few years back someone gave me a handmade CD entitled “Music To Drink Beer By” featuring a bunch of cool beer-themed songs. Actually I have three out of four of these, each with different songs. Curiously, many of them start out with an old radio beer commercial before the song starts. Prior to Big Bill Lister’s Blowing the Suds Off My Beer is an unintentionally hilarious ad for Ballantine Ale. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s from the 1950s.

It’s a nice reminder that although it feels like a great majority of people know very little about beer nowadays, we’ve certainly come a long way since the Fifties. In context, I understand that this comes from a time when beer and lager were marketed as synonymous terms and it wasn’t uncommon for breweries to advertise they had beer and ales. So this would have undoubtedly sounded perfectly normal to the ears of people in that time, but it now sounds positively quaint. If possible, in your head imagine a silky smooth deep bass male voice over.

Here’s the transcript I made from it:

Beer drinkers, if you’ve tried every beer there is to try and even the best doesn’t quite make it with you, maybe it isn’t beer you’re really looking for. Maybe you’re ready for beer’s big brother: ale. Ballantine Ale. Oh, ale looks like beer alright and it’s light like beer. But it packs a lot more taste than beer. A clean, dry, tangy taste. The aroma tells you right off. Clean. Dry. Tangy. Here’s the kind of flavor it takes to really satisfy a man. Yet, because it’s light, there’s plenty room for more. Try it. Beer’s big brother. Ale. Ballantine Ale. C’mon. Graduate from beer. Join the ale men.

After hearing that, I know I wanted to join “The Ale Men!” I love how they describe the bitterness as “tangy,” presumably to avoid any negative associations. And the notion that it takes “flavor” to “really satisfy a man” just cracks me up, though to be fair I want flavor, so maybe they were on to something. But be careful the next time you order a pilsner or other lager beer. Big brother could be watching!

 

Ballantine Ale was one of the few ale breweries that had much impact prior to the 1980s. Ballantine was founded by Peter Ballantine, who was born in Scotland in 1781. It’s flagship pale ale is one of the oldest brands of beer in the United States. At its peak, Ballantine was the 4th largest brewer in the United States. Like seemingly most defunct brands, it is now owned by Pabst, and they have up an “official” website. There’s also some more information at Wikipedia and at Falstaff Fan Page (which once owned the brand, too).

 

Top Ten Tuesday: Top 10 Barley Wine Names

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I’m inveterate list maker. I love making them, reading them and commenting on them. I’ve been sharing any beer-related ones I come across here for three years now, so I figured it’s time I start making my own. So each Tuesday will be Top Ten Tuesday, when I’ll post a new list, usually with a beer-related theme. But one out of every four will not be a beer list, just something for fun. Please post your thoughts on each list; what you like, what you don’t, what you’d have included and what I was off my rocker to list. As I often comment on other lists, no list is ever going to find universal acceptance and agreement. In a sense, that’s their point, to spark a lively discussion or start a conversation.

The first list is my favorite names of Barley Wine-style ales, a usually colorful group. This is just the names I like, irrespective of what’s in the bottle. The one name I’ve always hoped someone would use for a Barley Wine is “Big Galoot,” hint, hint. Big Galoot Barley Wine; is has a certain ring to it, don’t you think? In case you didn’t know, a galoot is an old-fashioned slang word that means essentially “an awkward, eccentric, or foolish person,” though I usually think of a galoot as a lovable goofball, usually a bigger person, hence “big galoot.” It’s just one of those words that sounds sort of like what it means, though not quite onomatopoeia. It’s shame it’s fallen out of fashion and people rarely use it anymore. I, for one, try to use it whenever I can. Anyway, here’s List #1:
 

Top 10 Barley Wine Names
 

Old Horizontal (Victory Brewing, Pennsylvania)
Fred (Hair of the Dog Brewery, Oregon)
Release the Hounds (Bull & Bush Pub & Brewery, Colorado)
TIE: Chicken Killer (Santa Fe Brewing, N.M.) / Super Chicken (Grand Lake Brewing, Colo.)
Old Numskull (AleSmith Brewing, California)
Old Gubbillygotch (Russian River Brewing, California)
Spank Me Baby (Tyranena Brewing, Wisconsin)
Slobberknocker (Capitol City Brewing, Maryland & D.C.)
Gluteus Maximus (Max’s Fanno Creek Brew Pub, Oregon)
Old Knucklehead (BridgePort Brewing, Oregon)

 

Also, if you have any ideas for future Top 10 lists you’d like to see, drop me a line.
 

A-BIB Closing Their Brewery In London

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Anheuser-Busch InBev announced today plans to close the Stag Brewery, their brewery in London. Situated in the Mortlake District on the River Thames, it’s part of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames and is on the south bank of the River Thames between Kew and Barnes with East Sheen inland to the south. It’s one of England’s oldest brewing sites and is also the largest brewery in London today. Once a Watney’s brewery, the present structure was originally built in the 19th century, though exactly when is uncertain. There may have been brewing on the site as early as the 15th century. Martyn Cornell at Zythophile has a typically thorough history of the place from June of this year.

The decision was made because of a “restructuring of its operations in the United Kingdom,” according to A-BIB. British InBev Spokeswoman Rebecca Mowling also mentions “’synergies’ arising from the $52 billion November takeover of St. Louis-based Anheuser-Busch.”

It currently employs 182, brewing Budweiser, Bud Ice and Michelob Ultra. Pending union negotiations, under the present plan it will close next year, in 2010.

 

The Stag Brewery on the River Thames, right at the finishing line for the famous annual Oxford/Cambridge Boat Race.
 

B Is For Beer

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If you have kids and are in the beer business, there’s precious few things you can buy for them with beer logos or graphics on them. Which is shame, I say. When Porter was born, Anchor Brewery presented him with a cool onesie. A year or so later, a friend at Deschutes gave him a logo shirt just his size.

I don’t understand why people are so squeamish about this nowadays. When we were kids and iron-ons were all the rage, especially down the shore at Wildwood, Ocean City or any of the other New Jersey resort towns we’d drive to for a weekend getaway in high school. Tourist shops were littered with countless iron-ons, many of them beer themed and they had no qualms selling them to us. And why should they? You can’t drink a shirt. There’s no law so far as I know that prohibits minors from wearing the image of a product that they aren’t allowed to buy. It’s the same bullshit thing with websites claiming that you must be 21 to read their brewery website. Why? Since when is reading about anything restricted?

One of my favorite painters — Rene Magritte — famously reminded us of this in his iconic The Treachery of Images, though you probably know it by the translation of its text, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” which is “This is Not a Pipe.” The painting, you’ll recall, is simply a tobacco pipe on a blank canvas with the text beneath it. And the point Magritte was making is that images are not the objects, just representations. And so it is with brewery logos and words on a page (or computer screen). They’re not the beer themselves, which is prohibited for kids, but merely images. They have no intrinsic power, only what we assign to them.

But our society is so in thrall to the screeching minorities that believe they know best how you should raise your children that almost no company can offer such products for fear of these groups’ reaction, effectively curtailing what would otherwise be legal products that harm no one, unless you count the delicate sensibilities of the neo-prohibitionists (okay, I’m tired of writing that word and so will start using Lew Bryson’s preferred term, the New Drys, just to break it up). Heaven forfend that children see beer, beer brand logos or worst of all, beer on clothing. They might become familiar with them and/or not afraid of them, and we can’t have that. Because of this, I personally love finding shirts for my kids that will drive the New Drys nuts.

So I was mightily bummed yesterday when I came across this shirt, “B is For Beer,” because it’s only available is size up to 36 months, well past my urchins. I first stumbled on it from a UK website, but happily there is an American retailer carrying it, Baby Dagny.

It’s available in white, light blue and hop green. If my kids were younger, I’d buy two.

 

Sacramento Closes Oasis, But Still Brewing

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sac-brew
I learned today that the Oasis location of Sacramento Brewing on Madison Avenue in Citrus Heights has closed its doors for good. The original location at Town and Country Village is alive and well and will continue as usual. Recent rumors that Sacramento Brewing was in danger of closing are simply not true. After the remaining beer in the tanks at Oasis is finished, all production — including bottling — will take place at Town & Country.

I’m told business at the Oasis location was always hand to mouth, even from the very beginning, but with the economic times we currently face dipped down below profitable levels. At Town and Country, on the other hand, business remains good and the new owner is optimistic and confident that will continue.

Head brewer Peter Hoey tells me that he will concentrate on having at least a dozen Sacramento beers on tap at any given time and will begin introducing guest taps, possibly as many as 24 in an effort to make the brewpub a Sacramento destination for not only his beers, but better beers of all stripes.

sacbrew-oasis
Some some good news, some bad. I’m certainly pleased to learn that the brewery is not closing. I think Peter is a talented, under-appreciated brewer so it will interesting to see what he comes up with this year in the way of specialty beers, which he promises won’t be dull.

Beer in Art #9: John Brack’s The Bar

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While the name John Brack is not often heard outside his native Australia, down under he’s one of the most well-known fine artists. As one of the Antipodeans — a group of seven modern artists who “asserted the importance of figurative art, and protested against abstract expressionism” — he made a name for himself in the local Melbourne art scene in the mid-1950s.

Today’s painting is known as The Bar, and was painted in 1954.

It was in the news somewhat recently, when in 2006 it sold for $3.12 million dollars, setting a new record for the highest price paid for a work of art from Australia. It was purchased privately, so it won’t be available for public viewing, as the Victoria Museum had hoped. They own three of Brack’s works, including his famous Collins Street 5 p.m., which is widely considered to be the companion of The Bar. Both paintings are mentioned in the Wikipedia entry:

Brack’s early conventional style evolved into one of simplified, almost stark, shapes and areas of deliberately drab colour, often featuring large areas of brown. He made an initial mark in the 1950s with works on then contemporary Australian culture, such as the iconic Collins Street, 5 pm (1955), a view of rush hour in post-war Melbourne. Set in a bleak palette of browns and greys, it was a comment on the conformity of everyday life, with all figures looking almost identical. A related painting The Bar (1954) was modeled on Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, and satirized the Six o’clock swill, a social ritual arising from the early closing of Australian bars. Most of these early paintings and drawings were unmistakably satirical comments against the Australian Dream, either being set in the newly expanding post-war suburbia or taking the life of those who lived there as their subject matter.

In 2007, another Brack Painting — The Old Time (looking like a scene out of the hilarious Australian film Strictly Ballroom) — broke that record, selling for $3.3 million.

There is a little more information about John Brack at Wikipedia, and also some more of his works at the ArtCyclopedia.

 

Session #23: The New Year of Beer

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The new year brings our 23rd monthly Session, a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday, crashing into being like a newborn. The previous year is often portrayed as an old, decrepit man and the new year a bouncing baby, filled with the infinite possibilities that youth brings with another 363 days of 2008 stretching out in front of us. And that essentially, is what this Session is about. Hosted by Brewmiker (a.k.a. Beerme) at Beer and Firkins, he wonders aloud what the new year will bring to the world of beer and what lessons you may have learned in the year just past, though I’ll let him tell you what he means.

It seems that change is a theme the entire world is dealing with at the moment. Hope for a better future seems also to be on the minds of many. The topic for the next edition of The Session, hosted by [Brewmiker], will be a New Year theme. I would like to write about the yearly mix of the hope for the new rising out of the ashes of the old, as it relates to … beer.

Specifically, what will you miss about 2008 (feel free to list your tasting notes, if that item is a particular beer) and what do you expect will excite you most in 2009, in the “Beer World”? (again, if that is a beer, what about it is special and worthy of being excited about?)

I confess that I’m not entirely certain how to even approach this question. I don’t think I ever consider the transition from one year to the next in terms of what beers I had last year or which I think I might like to try the next. I tend to take them as they come. Unlike wine and some spirits, they’re aren’t very many beers that are vintage dated. So I rarely find myself lamenting the loss of some vintage beer, though it does happen. I wouldn’t mind a few more bottles of Russian River’s Damnation Batch 23, or a Thomas Hardy 1977, for example. But by and large, beer doesn’t change that much from year to year. In fact that consistency is what most brewers strive for.

Of course, there are plenty of small batch one-off beers, that is beers that are only made once and are very limited. Some are anniversary beers, some are collaborations and some are just for the hell of it. While I very much enjoy the opportunity to try one of these, and will often go out of my way to track them down, there are very few I anticipate unless I’ve heard about one from someone else or from a press release (which are notoriously absent for limited edition beers).

While I am eternally fascinated with calendars, dates and anything, really, to do with time, I just don’t think of beer in those terms.

Is there a mood of phoenix-like hope this year? Probably for some people, as the words “hope” and “change” have been thrown around politically for the last several months leading up to our most recent Presidential election. For me, I can only muster cautious optimism. As pleased as I am with the change in administrations looming — and I am pleased — I also fear that the problems our new Prez will be facing are too daunting to respond to quick or inexpensive fixes. The outgoing regime left behind a nation in shambles (including many 11th hour parting gifts). Has there ever been a greater eight-year swing from surplus to deficit? And no matter what he does to raise money to reduce it, Conservatives will say Obama is the tax and spend liberal they’ve always accused him of, contracting a severe but convenient case of political amnesia as to who caused those problems. That’s my prediction for the new year’s political landscape; things will get worse before they get better, assuming that they will in fact actually get better. I’m hopeful, but only in the classical sense of Pandora’s Box. When all the evil has been unleashed into the world, hope is all that remains. For some reason I’ve always been drawn to that story. As cynical as I am (and have almost always been) the concept of hope has usually allowed me to avoid sinking into abject nihilism. But the very fact that hope is essentially at the forefront of political thought I find oddly discomforting, precisely because it’s an emotion of desperation. When there’s nothing left to cling to, hope is all there is.

Or perhaps that should be “hops” is all there is. One possible positive effect of the economy bottoming out is beer will become the affordable luxury for millions of people looking for a little temporary joy in otherwise bleak times. If craft brewers can seize the opportunity and work to present and persuade people that their hand-crafted artisan beers are the equal of many wines — but at a fraction of the cost — then perhaps small boutique brewers can increase their market share. It may seem counter-intuitive but selling less at a higher price (and at higher margins) will yield higher profits. That’s what wine and spirits have been doing for years, while big breweries who rely on volume have convinced most people that beer is a cheap commodity unworthy of true premium pricing. But now the conditions may be ripe for the rise of craft beer in the time recession, a.k.a. 2009.

There’s little I’ll miss personally from 2008, a miserly little year that took more than it gave. I still have a garage full of beer that needs to be sampled before summer begins baking it. That should keep me busy for a few months and I’d certainly rather be writing about the beer than the politics, business and neo-prohibitionist issues that seem to be occupying so much of my time lately. I suppose that’s my overall resolution for the coming year. More beer, less not beer.