Labor Day Hop Picking

September 8, 2009 By Jay Brooks

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On Labor Day this year, Moonlight Brewing held their annual hop-picking event for friends and family to come and help harvest their hops. Since the kids were out of school and the lovely wife off work, we made a family outing of it, reminiscent of 19th century hop-picking when entire communities stopped what they were doing to help the farmers with the hop harvest. My daughter, Alice, was a hop-picking veteran, having come with me the previous year, but both Porter and my wife, Sarah, were newbies.

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Moonlight Brewery’s owner/brewer Brian Hunt with his hops.

It was a beautiful sunny day in whatever town Moonlighting says it’s in, and nearly three-dozen folks showed up to help. I’d guess we knew a little better than half the people there, so it was great fun sitting around, chatting, enjoying Brian’s beer straight from the tanks and picking the hops. There was also abundant food, and even Sean Paxton, the Homebrew Chef, put together a plate of some delicious cheeses. After we were done, we pulled out the Washoe Boards and played a few games, too.

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Alice wasn’t content just picking the hops, she wanted to help cut them down and carry them back, too. The kids had a blast and, as always, it felt great to pitch in and help. It was the perfect way to spend our Labor Day.

Below is a short slideshow of our day at Moonlight’s hopyard. If you click on the button on the bottom right with the four arrows pointing outward on it, you can see the photos in glorious full screen.

Beer In Art #42: Cat Scott’s Paintings Of Beer On The Wall

September 6, 2009 By Jay Brooks

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Today I want to showcase an artist who’s painting a series of beer bottles that will eventually be nearly 100. The artist, Cat Scott, is calling the series 99 Paintings of Beer on the Wall. She’s finished a dozen so far, and here’s a familiar one, Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

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Scott is primarily an illustrator and graphic designer, but loves to paint and draw in her spare time. Of the project itself, she says. “I like beer, and I like painting. So why not combine the two? I intend on doing 99 paintings of many different types of beer.”

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Here’s some biographical information about Scott, from her website:

I was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky and, like many artists, spent my childhood drawing and painting. With generous gifts of art supplies from my parents, I developed quite a knack for rendering. After taking as many art classes as possible during my high school years, I ventured off to the University of Dayton to study graphic design. My love for the fine arts led me to concentrate on Illustration.
After receiving several awards for my art and being honored as the Most Outsanding Graduating Senior in Visual Communication Design, I graduated with honors in 2003. In 2006 I attended the Illustration Academy and worked with illustrators and artists such as John and Mark English, Sterling Hundley, George Pratt, Gary Kelley, Brent Watkinson, Anita Kunz, and CF Payne.
My full time gig as a Graphic Designer in Santa Monica, California gets the rent paid and inspires creativity, but there’s nothing like taking a pen/brush/marker to paper.

One of my favorites is her Unibroue La Fin Du Monde, which is actually different then the rest of the works. It’s not painted, but instead is a pen and ink drawing over top of a postcard of Francis Picabia’s La Source (“The Spring”).

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Here’s two more. With twelve done, she has 87 left to paint. It may take a few years, but it will be fun to watch. If you own a brewery, maybe you want to consider commissioning her to paint one of your bottles. That way you get a cool painting, you support the arts and further the project.

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You can more of her work at her own website, Cat Scott and her blog. She’s also a member of Girls Who Draw, a website featuring a baker’s dozen of female artists showcasing their art.

U.S. Select Beer Taste

September 6, 2009 By Jay Brooks

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I stumbled on the photo of a peculiar beer below while looking for another image. It was on Holy Taco, a humor website as far as I can tell.

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Best I could find out is that it’s a Japanese beer made by what appears to be a fairly large global food and drinks company called SC Foods Co., Ltd. The beer is called U.S. Select Beer Taste and is fairly resplendent with patriotic imagery from using a red, white and blue palette to the U.S. flag, an outline of the lower 48 and even part of the Statue of Liberty.

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It’s certainly an odd duck. But what fascinates me most is wondering what it tastes like. I mean that in an abstract sense. I know in reality it’s likely a clone of a tasteless American-style macro lager or similar low-calorie light beer. Or is it? What is the perception of the “select beer taste of the U.S.?” Is is still the former big three, or has craft beer managed to upstage that as an antiquated image of American beer?

I also can’t help but wonder, if it is an American light lager, why? The three major brands in Japan — Asahi, Kirin, Sapporo — aren’t substantially different from Bud, Miller or Coors. So if you’re going to label it U.S. Select Beer Taste, then it has to mean something to the intended consumer, which appears to be the Japanese. They have to perceive it as being something different than their own beer, don’t they? And if so, then doesn’t it follow that U.S. Select Beer Taste might be more craft-oriented in taste? It wouldn’t taste like a German, Belgian, Czech or English import. Sadly, I couldn’t find any ratings for the beer on either Beer Advocate of Rate Beer, so I don’t really know if it’s more Dale’s Pale Ale than Bud Light.

So what exactly is American Beer’s Taste perception in Japan and around the world? Among brewers and the über beer geeks certainly our reputation for quality is unsurpassed and the craft industry has staged a remarkable comeback for American beer since the low point of the 1970s. But that’s among the small, niche customer for whom beer matters. To the general consumer, I’m not so sure. Budweiser and Coors both sell surprisingly well in Great Britain and Bud is even making modest progress in Germany. What do you think U.S. Select Beer Taste is?

Happy International Bacon Day

September 5, 2009 By Jay Brooks

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Happy International Bacon Day everybody. It’s a relatively new holiday, to be held each year on the Saturday before Labor Day Monday. If you’re a regular Bulletin reader, you already know of my unbridled love of bacon. I already had some for breakfast and am now plotting how to work it into the rest of today’s meals.

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It’s no secret, of course, that beer and bacon work very well together. Rauchbiers and other smoked beers often have bacon aromas. But as far as I’m concerned, bacon pairs nicely with many styles of beer. But what about a bacon beer?
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Well, it turns out that at least two breweries are making one. First, Garrett Oliver is making one for the bowling alley, Brooklyn Bowl, that’s across the street from the Brooklyn Brewery.

Using a special malt smoked in the same room as the bacon made by Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams of Tennessee, he’s making a bacon barley wine ale. Picking up the story from the New York Times:

[Brooklyn Brewery] plans to brew about 15 gallons of barleywine with that malt. In the meantime, he’s been infusing a brown ale with the flavor of Benton’s bacon fat through a technique known as “fat washing.” (Nick Fauchald described the process in this profile of the bartender Eben Freeman.) Oh, and the bacon-fat-infused ale was also aged in bourbon barrels, because bourbon and bacon go together like, um, beer and bacon.
Eventually, the barleywine with the bacon-smoked malt and the bourbon-aged, bacon-fat-infused ale would be blended to create one monstrously bizarre beer.
“One of two things will happen,” Mr. Oliver predicted. “Either this will be the most amazingly disgusting thing you’ve ever tasted in your life. Or I shall rule the earth.”

A little closer to home, the Uncommon Brewers down in Santa Cruz are also working on a Bacon Brown Ale. Given their track record of successfully using uncommon ingredients in their beer, I’m actually optimistic that they could pull this off. Bacon is being used these days in all manner of different ways, so it’s only a matter of time before somebody perfects a bacon beer.

PNC To Create Exclusive Beer At Allagash

September 5, 2009 By Jay Brooks

The Publican National Committee, or PNC — if you’re not familiar with them — is a group of Publicans that own some of the best beer bars in America. Current members include the owners of Brouwer’s Cafe, the Falling Rock Taphouse, the Horse Brass, Monk’s Cafe and the Toronado. One of the things they’re doing is working with brewers willing to make them a custom, exclusive beer that only members serve. The first PNC beer was brewed at Russian River Brewing and all the members got together there to help make the beer, which was dubbed Publication.

They’ve just announced that in October, they’ll be creating their second beer, this time at Allagash. No word yet on what kind of beer it will be, but I’m guessing it will be worth seeking out.

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At the PNC’s Second Convention in Denver 2008, all the members except Don Younger, who preferred to remain in the bar

Session #31: Summer Beers

September 4, 2009 By Jay Brooks

As this month marks the end of summer, our last summer Session takes on summer beers, courtesy of Peter Estaniel of the BeerBeerBlog. His take:

With the summer coming to a close, what was your favorite beer of the summer? It doesn’t even have to be from this summer. Is it a lager or maybe a light bodied wheat ale? Maybe you’re drinking anti-seasonally and are having a barleywine or Russian Imperial Stout. Why is this beer your favorite? Is there a particular memory associated with this beer? How about a city? Maybe there was a particular dish that made this beer memorable? Spare no detail.

For me, the most memorable summer drinking I did was in London, where I spent a week with fellow beer writer Stephen Beaumont visiting pubs, attending the Great British Beer Festival and endless (and vainly) searching for late night food. While by no means sweltering heat, London was, as always, more moist than the average California summer. They’d just come off a heatwave during the weeks before we arrived, and welcomed some rain. But it was certainly warm enough, staying in the narrow range of mid-70s to high 80s, even late into the evening.

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We walked around a fair bit of London, taking the tube whenever possible, but also sometimes we just wanted to be above ground, taking in the sights and sounds of the city. To be fair, there was another reason waking was more attractive at times. Besides even the mild summer weather, below ground it could be stiflingly hot, especially when we were sandwiched into the trains during busier times of the day, sweat pouring off of us.

To compensate ourselves, we’d often duck into a pub just for a quick pint, even though we were on our way to another pub, and one which quite possibly was only be fifteen minutes or so away. But thirst must be obeyed, and by god we were often thirsty. And there’s really nothing quite like a English ale on cask, the way nature intended, to quench one’s thirst. Not too cold, which would undoubtedly be a shock to the system, fairly low in alcohol (especially as compared with American beers), which meant we could enjoy more of them, and tasty as all get out. My favorite aspect of cask beer is just how much more flavor can be perceived; more complexity and, perhaps most importantly, more delicate characters. What more could you ask for in a summer beer?

Stephen Beaumont at The Dove, a Fuller’s pub along the Thames near Hammersmith where we rested and recharged with a pint.

Even when most of the beers we enjoyed weren’t summer seasonals, but everyday offerings, they were ideally suited to the climate and the warm August weather. And they slaked our thirst almost perfectly.

Beer In Art #41: Dudley Pout’s Barley & Beer Time

August 30, 2009 By Jay Brooks

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Today painting is entitled Barley and Beer Time and was created by Dudley Pout.

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Apparently Pout was primarily an illustrator comic artist who was most well-known for his movie poster artist. He was born on a farm and began doing oil paintings of farm scenes after retiring and moving back to the same type of farm he grew up on. There’s not to much information I could find about him, except on a blog about British comics called Bear Alley, who fills in some biographical detail.

Edward Dudley Pout was born at Frog Island Farm, Herne, Kent, on 24 November 1908, the 2,000 acre farming estate being owned jointly by Pout’s father and his four brothers. The Pout family moved to various farms, and at the age of 8, young Dudley attended the village school at Swalecliffe where his headmistress recognised his drawing ability and arranged for an interview with the principal of Margate School of Art. He was awarded a full-time Art Scholarship, and at the age of 13 became their youngest ever student.
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After the War, Pout continued to work as a freelance commercial artist, and [from the 1950s through 1962, he drew comic books until], mindful of the decline in sales and concern for his wife’s poor health, was forced to leave comic strips behind.
Pout moved back to Kent and resumed farming, specialising in cross-breeding cattle. He retired in 1973 to a small house in Biddenden, Kent, where he painted in oils for pleasure, although he also produced a series of ‘Farming in Bygone Days’ paintings for a postcard company. Pout lived at Gribble Bridge Lane Farm, Biddenden, Ashford, Kent, where he died on December 12, 1991, aged 83.

So that suggests that Barley and Beer Time was most likely painted in the 1970s or 80s.

You can a peak at his comic book work at Bear Alley and more of his later oil paintings at the Bridgeman Art Gallery.

Macro Beer Prices Finally Going Up

August 28, 2009 By Jay Brooks

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(updated below)

Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABIB) announced a couple of days ago that come fall, their prices would be going up. MillerCoors also made it clear that they would be taking a price increase as well. The Wall Street Journal reported that “Anheuser-Busch InBev NV, the largest U.S. beer seller by revenue, and MillerCoors LLC will increase beer prices in the majority of their U.S. sales regions, the two companies said Tuesday.” Bloomberg added that, at least for ABIB, “the plan has met with “general acceptance” from retailers.”

Finally. This will probably end up being controversial — though it shouldn’t be — but I think that’s very good news. For a long while now, the major beer companies have all kept their prices to consumers artificially low to maintain their volume sales. Part of the reason is simply the competition among one another — the big guys that is — and none of them wanting to be the company that blinks first. I’ve watched this for many years, especially when I was a beer buyer for a chain of California stores, when each year the big companies would try to keep their price increases as small as possible. Now obviously, no company wants to raise its prices too much, but in the big beer business the increases over time have not kept pace with inflation and especially with the rise of ingredient costs and other factors, such as transportation, fuel, etc. There are likely several reasons for that, but chief among them is needing to keep sales volume up in order to maintain and increase the share price. And so over the past decade or two, none of the big beer companies have taken prices increases up as far as they otherwise would have if they were just looking at the cost to wholesale/retail price ratio. Even with the economy tanking, eventually someone has to blink. ABIB, with the InBev predisposition toward profit at all costs, seems poised to end this period of artificially low price points.

A side benefit for them, though most likely merely an externality, is that the price difference between the average big beer and a craft beer has widened, giving the impression that the macro beers are a far greater value. That’s because most craft brewers have not had the resources to do likewise and the price of their beer is more realistic, taking into account all their costs for ingredients, transportation, staff, and costs of doing business. A few have tried to keep the price to wholesalers down, but the increase in hops, barley and fuel over the last two years has made that increasingly difficult, even for the larger craft breweries. If ABIB raises their price (and MillerCoors follows suit, as they usually do) to more realistic levels, the price differential between a big beer and a craft beer should decrease, making it more likely that consumers might trade up to a craft beer, if the difference isn’t as great in doing so. Because of the economy, that’s already happening to some extent, with craft beer being seen as an affordable luxury from two directions. One, some people are trading down from more expensive bottles of wine or spirits to more affordable craft beer and, two, people trading up and treating themselves to a nice of bottle of beer, which isn’t stretching their wallet as much as a more expensive beverage. But if the price gap shrinks, we should see an increase in craft beer sales.

On the other hand, although it’s not a popular stance, I’ve long thought that craft beer should be more expensive than it is. It should be priced according to its value instead of against the more popular, but inferior tasting products. Organic food offers a good analogy. Organic food is more expensive to grow for a variety of reasons and thus costs more in the grocery store. But if people aren’t willing to pay a little bit more for it, it will disappear entirely and we’ll have little choice in the food we eat. Luckily, many people recognize that organic food, despite its more expensive price tag, offers additional benefits that make its increased price worthwhile. In a sense, you get what you pay for. If organic food tastes better, is healthier for you, often keeps money in the local economy, and is better in the long run for the planet’s sustainability, paying a little bit more for it isn’t just a good idea, but a moral imperative. I believe the same applies to craft beer.

We all tend to look for whatever is the cheapest and often forget about what “value” even means. I’m as guilty as the next guy, but I try to consider it whenever possible. We’ve all been indoctrinated with the idea — the “Wal-Mart Syndrome” — that value means cheaper, but that’s just not the case. If I pay more for a better constructed (and probably more comfortable) pair of shoes, and they last twice as long as the cheap pair, the expensive ones are the better value. Similarly, if I spend more more for a bottle of good beer, it will taste better and I’ll enjoy it more, making it a far better value.

A motto for this idea could be “drink less, enjoy it more.” That might not work for large companies that depend on volume, but there plenty of small sustainable craft breweries for whom that model would work perfectly. All we have to do is be willing to pay the price.

UPDATE: The L.A. Times ran a story yesterday entitled Is the Price Increase Justified?, citing a supply management expert, Bob Zieger, who took “issue with the idea that “general commodity prices” are behind beer price increases.” He continued:

“After all, beer is not made from a combination of pork bellies, copper and cocoa. Its key price drivers, like hops and barley, are actually not experiencing a serious price increase right now. If there was ever a time to blame commodity costs for a necessary price increase, it was last year,” Zieger said.

As any brewer can tell you, hop prices have not returned to the levels they were three years ago, nor have barley prices, though they have abated a little better than hops. Of course, hops and barley aren’t the only cost increases, as fuel and transportation costs have skyrocketed, too. Naturally, Zieger has a blog — doesn’t everybody? — called Supply Excellence where he expands his criticism. I think it’s unfortunate that the L.A. Times cited him as an expert because while he may know a lot about supply management and commodities generally, he doesn’t know the brewing industry, its particularities and the history of this issue. This gives a bad impression, I think, since it’s the only criticism they cite and in fact his thoughts were the story. While he’s certainly welcome to voice his opinion — and it was interesting to read his full blog post — it seems odd, and perhaps even a little wrong, for the L.A. Times to do a story calling into question one of the reasons given for an increase of beer prices without having any contrary opinion or indeed any person connected with the beer industry who knows anything about it. That just seems like irresponsible journalism to present one man’s opinion as a news story. Isn’t that what the op-ed section is for?

CNBC Talks Up Boutique Beer

August 27, 2009 By Jay Brooks

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CNBC did a short segment last week on craft beer, which they insisted on calling “boutique beer” — sigh — because the interviewer was Australian. Hey lady, you’re not in Australia anymore, call it by the name we use here! You don’t see American talking heads calling it soccer, instead of football, on English television, do you? Seriously, is it too much to expect that she’d learn the lingo?

But on the plus side, at least they interviewed people who actually know something about beer. First, there was Paul Gatza, president of the Brewers Association (and the man who compiles and interpret the brewing statistics) so it was great to see him on camera. The other person they interviewed was Justin Phillips of the Beer Table, a beer bar in Brooklyn. Despite the usual ignorance leading to perhaps not the best possible questions, it was still better than usual.