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Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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Session #18: Happy Anniversary

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Welcome to the anniversary of our 18th Session a.k.a. Beer Blogging Friday. This month our theme is celebratory anniversary beers, brought to us by our host, The Barley Blog, under the title “Happy Anniversary.”

Use this as an excuse to celebrate. Open a limited release anniversary beer from your favorite brewer. Enjoy that special beer you normally only open on your wedding anniversary or birthday. Either way, tell us about it. Why is it a beer you may only drink once a year? Why is that brewery’s annual release the one you selected?

Last month, our Session was about seasonal beers and how certain beers follow cycles determined by the pre-industrial weather and climate patterns. There was a natural rhythm to that type of beer.

Anniversary beers are, I think, in a sense the opposite of seasonal beers, although initially that may seem counter-intuitive. Bear with me. Anniversaries do, of course, occur each year but there’s no rhythm to them in the same way as seasonals. The word anniversary means literally “returning yearly” from the Latin “annus” (meaning “year“) and versus (a word of Indo-European origin meaning “to turn“). Anniversaries commemorate a very specific event, something concrete in time. Last year, on this date, something happened and now on the same day every year after that, we remember what happened by force of will. We decide that day will have special meaning and we assign that meaning ourselves. Take for example, these very Sessions, the first of which took place March 2, 2007. In 213 days, it will be our Biennial Session, commemorating two years of monthly Beer Blogging Fridays.

Seasonals, by contrast, are more organic and the climate conditions have more or less been the same (or changed very slowly) for centuries allowing the traditions that surrounded them to be adopted over a long period of time. We didn’t have to force ourselves to remember that in spring temperatures grow warmer and in fall they grow colder. The physical evidence is unmistakable. The rhythm of the seasons continues whether we take any notice or not.

Personally, I love anniversaries, because I am a self-avowed calendar geek. I love dividing the year up and figuring out what happened every day of the year. Our present calendar, the Gregorian calendar, sucks and there are far better systems that we could implement for keeping the year more tidy and orderly. The fact that we probably never will change it is a product of our aversion to change. The last time we changed the calendar, from the old Julian system, it happened in different years in different places, which really threw things into turmoil for quite some time.

And there are still several nations today that still use the Julian calendar. Both of these calendars, are, of course, based on the Christian religion. There is also a separate Muslim calendar, Hebrew calendar, Hindu calendar and Chinese calendar to name a very few. There are literally dozens and dozens of very different calendar systems in use today all over the world. People have, from time to time, tried to suggest adopting a “world calendar” in various guises in order to standardize time but it’s never quite caught on. More’s the pity.

In addition to today’s Session, it’s also Swiss Confederation Day, National Non-Parent Day, National Raspberry Cream Pie Day, and Lammas Day, to name a few holidays taking place. It’s also the birthday of Herman Melville, Francis Scott Key and Jerry Garcia, among others. Today in 1876, Colorado became a state. Three years before, in 1873, the first San Francisco Cable Car began operating. MTV debuted in 1981 and Anne Frank made her last diary entry today in 1944.

But by far the most common anniversaries, for beer at least, are the annual celebration that they’re still in business. Usually these start around year 5, the fifth or Quinquennial anniversary. With modern craft brewing only around thirty years old (New Albion incorporated in 1976, and started brewing in 1977), five years is a fair amount of time and worth celebrating. Ten (Decennial), fifteen (Quindecennial) and twenty (Vigintennial) even more so. As the craft segment matures, there are many more breweries hitting milestones and creating special beers to commemorate them. And frankly that’s great news for all of us, because usually anniversary beers are brewed to showcase the talents of the brewery and/or the brewer. Whether deliciously delicate or radically extreme, anniversary beers hew to no style but the imagination of their creator. To my mind, that’s the most exciting aspect of anniversary beers. They’re rarely what you expect them to be. The only categories they can often be put in are the catch-all varieties like “experimental,” “strong” or something like that. And the success of them moves the bar for all beers, allowing innovation to trickle down into everyday beers, too.

But there are also anniversary beers commemorating more unusual things, too. Lagunitas Brewing, for example, is putting out a new beer on the 40th anniversary of each of Frank Zappa’s albums. So far, the first four have been released with no plans to stop. And beginning in 2001, Stone Brewing took the idea of Bonza Bottler Day one step farther, releasing a special beer once a year on the day that all three — month, day and year — are the same. The last one was 7.7.07 (my daughter’s birthday) and the next release will be 8.8.08. Sadly, I have none left from my own birthday release back on 3.3.03. This type of anniversary beer I find the most engaging because invariably it was inspired by something the brewery really believed in or thought would be a lot of fun to do. It’s no small amount of effort to conceive, brew and package a new beer so to do so is as deliberate an act as I can imagine. These are the anniversary beers that really make me sit up and take notice.

That’s why I chose He’Brew’s Bittersweet Lenny’s R.I.P.A. for my anniversary beer. I love that owner Jeremy Cowan was inspired to commemorate the 40th anniversary of comedian Lenny Bruce’s death, which took place August 3, 1966 (two days from now). Not to mention taking Bruce’s wry sense of humor with rye and making it a big, bitter IPA was the perfect way of expressing his personality in liquid form, if such a thing is even possible. As Lenny Bruce himself said:

“Satire equals tragedy plus time.”

Amen, brother. Whatever you think of Bruce’s brand of humor, he unquestionably paved the way for later comedians like Richard Pryor, George Carlin and, my personal favorite, Bill Hicks. Bruce’s language seems tame by the standards of these later comedians, but without Lenny Bruce’s trials and tribulations, free speech might still be in the stone age of the Fifties. We do, in fact, owe him a great deal of gratitude that ideas today aren’t limited in how they can be expressed and with the odd exception of the broadcast media, most of the 80,000 or so words in the English language may be employed. And that, I think, is fucking awesome.

The beer itself is made with 2-row, rye ale malt, torrified rye, crystal rye 75, crystal malt 65, wheat, kiln amber, caramel 70 and spiced with Warrior, Cascade, Simcoe, Crystal, Chinook, Amarillo and Centennial hops, and dry hopped with Amarillo and Crystal. Or as the label puts it: “Brewed with an obscene amount of malt & hops.” He’Brew described their inspiration thusly:

Ladies and Gentlemen, Shmaltz Brewing Co. is proud to introduce Bittersweet Lenny’s R.I.P.A. Brewed with an obscene amount of malts and hops. Shocking flavors – far beyond contemporary community standards. We cooked up the straight dope for the growing minions of our nation’s Radical Beer junkies. Judges may not be able to define “Radical Beer,” but you’ll damn well know it when you taste it. Bruce died, officially declared a pauper by the State of California, personally broken and financially bankrupt simply for challenging America’s moral hypocrisies with words. The memorial playbill read: “Yes, we killed him. Because he picked on the wrong god.” -Directed by, the Courts, the Cops, the Church… and his own self-destructive super ego. Like Noah lying naked and loaded in his tent after the apocalyptic deluge: a witness, a patron saint, a father of what was to come. Sick, Dirty, Prophetic Lenny: a scapegoat, a martyr, a supreme inspiration.

The beer is a beautiful copper penny color, with streaks of red in the light. Topped by a very thick tan head, it has bready aromas with herbal, hoppy notes. The mouthfeel is surprisingly creamy, almost buttery. It’s well-balanced with great interplay between candy sweet malt and dry, fruity hops. As it says in the name, it’s both bitter and sweet and the balance of power between these competing tastes is what gives the RIPA its soul. The finish is dry and long, and the high alcohol becomes apparent as the warmth likewise lingers in the aftertaste. A wonderful beer, and worthy of commemorating the rye … er, wry wit of Lenny Bruce’s life.

A final quote from Lenny Bruce:

“The only honest art form is laughter, comedy. You can’t fake it … try to fake three laughs in an hour—ha ha ha ha ha—they’ll take you away, man. You can’t.”

To which I’d also add that beer may also be an art form that can’t be faked. Happy Anniversary.

 

Beer in Laos

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The Wall Street Journal had an interesting profile a couple of days ago about Beerlao, a beer made in Laos. (Thanks, Doug, for sending me the link.) Partially owned by Carlsberg (it’s three of their 255 brands), the Lao Brewery makes a lager, a low-calorie Light and a Dark lager.

According to the Wall Street Journal profile, the brewer is Sivilay Lasachack, a 49-year old Russian woman who prefers sweet tea to beer. But by marketing to backpacking tourists from around the world, Lasachack hopes to build Beerlao into a national brand recognized worldwide.

The brewery itself was founded in 1971, mostly to provide beer to French colonists because the Laotians are not big beer drinkers. “Lao Brewery currently produces 200 million liters of beer a year, and it is the country’s biggest taxpayer.” That’s nearly 530 million gallons, making Lao Brewery slightly larger than New Belgium Brewing, but with a population of 6.5 million (which is about the same as Washington state).

The beer is now imported to the U.S. (along with Great Britain, Australia and Japan) and is, according to the journal, gaining momentum in grocery stores and other places. It’s interesting to see a small country using beer to try and build their global image, especially one with no long brewing tradition.

But check out their theme song on the website. It’s catchy even though I have no idea what they’re saying. You can even download a mp3 of it to put on your iPod.

 

Craft Beer Up 11% In 1st Half Of 2008

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The midyear numbers are out, and things couldn’t look better, which is especially wonderful under the circumstances. The Brewers Association released sales through the first half of 2008 and growth of craft beer by dollars is up a very healthy 11%.

According to their press release, “The Brewers Association attributes this growth to a grassroots movement toward fuller flavored, small batch beers made by independent craft brewers.” I’m all for that, but since it’s dollars one must at least speculate that higher prices for craft are driving that number, at least to a certain extent. Since others (admittedly with an agenda of showing craft in not the best light) have suggested that craft sales are slowing, it’s tempting to worry about the absence of where volume of sales is for the first half of the year. But as the Nielsen Company, points out, “beer sales are affected the least by the economic downturn, with wine sales showing the most impact. Additionally, craft beer is gaining customers from across all segments of beverage alcohol.” So perhaps I’ve no reason to worry after all.

More from the BA’s press release:

“Newer brands by the larger brewers, like Belgian style wheat beers, have huge distribution advantages over beers by independent craft brewers,” said Paul Gatza, Director of the Brewers Association. “These brands can grow when the large brewers decide they want them to grow with the ability to impact what brands get shelf space and tap handles. At the same time, beer from craft brewers is being requested by the customer, which encourages distributors and retailers to make the beer available.” According to the Brewers Association, 1,420 of the 1,463 U.S. breweries are independent craft brewers.

The Brewers Association reports that in the first half of 2008 volume of beer sold by craft brewers grew by 6.5% totaling an estimated 4 million barrels of beer compared to 3.768 million barrels sold in the first half of 2007. Harry Schuhmacher of Beer Business Daily stated, “Crafts have really taken pricing this year given high input costs, and yet it is still driving volume gains faster than the beer category.”

But if the numbers all bear this out, then it’s very good news indeed. With rising prices across the board for all manner of food and beverages, there has been much speculation about whether consumers would continue to be willing to spend more for craft beer or would retreat back to the cheaper stuff from the big beer companies. The initial anecdotal evidence I’d been hearing suggested to me that sales by most breweries had not suffered significantly from higher prices at retail and at the tap. More than a few people I’ve talked to in the last several months have said demand is still rising unabated. The BA’s stats do appear to bear that out, so hopefully what initially seemed like a brick wall staring us down in the near future might in reality be another hurdle, but one which can be jumped over with a good business plan and, most importantly, a good-tasting, full-flavored beer.

Nature’s Brewery

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The science news outlets on the web were all abuzz with an odd discovery yesterday involving the symbiotic relationship between the Pentail Tree Shrew and the Bertram Palm, whose flower acts essentially as a natural brewery, creating a 3.8% abv concoction that’s closest to beer in strength and is fermented using wild yeast. My friend and colleague Rick initially sent me the NPR version of the story (thanks Rick) but it seems every science website has a version of it.

The Pentail Tree Shrew

 The Pentail Tree Shrew, a native of Malaysia, seems to be the major focus of the story. The shrew is a lightweight at about 4 inches long and weighing a scant few ounces soaking wet. According to biologists studying the newly found mammals, they look like a cross between a mouse and a squirrel, with a birdlike tail that resembles a feather at the tip. They have large eyes and developed fingers and toes. Biologists believe that they are evolutionary cousins to the primates.

And like us, they spend their evenings drinking beer. In fact, they may be the only other animal to regularly drink alcohol. Scientists believe the shrew imbibes the equivalent of nine glasses of wine each night, yet would pass the average roadblock sobriety test. According to Bayreuth University biologist Frank Weins, “[t]here’s no sign of motor incoordination or other odd behaviors. They just move as efficiently as they would on any other tree.” Because being drunk would put the Pentail Tree Shrew at risk for being eaten by other jungle predators, they believe the shrew has a metabolism that very quickly detoxifies the alcohol. That would keep the concentration in the shrew’s brain low enough so that it could effectively avoid predators. And here’s the capper from Weins. “As a result, the tree shrew is able to detoxify alcohol more efficiently than its primate cousins: humans.”

The focus of almost every one of these stories is about the wonders of the shrew (because they’re the one being closely watched), but according to Scientific American, there are at least seven animals nourishing themselves from the beer made by the Bertram Palm. There’s also the Slow Loris, who also “quaff[s] alcohol nightly, sometimes going back for seconds and thirds in a single evening.”

But frankly I’m more amazed by the flower that can naturally create a beer in the wild. To me, that is simply awe-inspiring. It’s the Bertram Palm, and it’s flowers have a very pungent and distinctive smell. As Weins puts it. “They smell like a brewery.”

From the NPR story from All Things Considered:

In fact, the flower buds function as brewing chambers — they have been invaded by previously unknown species of yeast, which ferment the nectar into frothy alcohol.

“The maximum alcohol concentration that we recorded was 3.8 percent,” Weins says. “That’s in the range of a beer.

Or explained another way, “sugars in the palm’s floral nectar ferment in the warm, moist environment, producing alcohol in concentrations up to a beer-like 3.8%.”

Nature’s Brewery: The Bertram Palm

There’s also a description in Germany’s idw:

‘This palm is brewing its own beer with the help of a team of yeast species, several of them new to science,’ explains Wiens. The highest alcohol percentage the scientists could measure in the nectar was an impressive 3.8 %. ‘It reaches among the highest alcohol contents ever reported in natural food.’ The palm tree keeps its nectar beer flowing from specialised smelly flower buds for a month and a half before the pollen is ripe, probably to keep a guaranteed clientele of potential pollinators visiting. In contrast to most plants the bertam palm flowers almost year-round.

And here’s yet another version of how the tree makes beer, from Science News:

Bertam palms (Eugeissona tristis) don’t observe a strict season, so at any given time plants will be flowering somewhere in the forest. The stemless palms send up a tall spike with more than 1,000 flowers, some with just male sexual organs and the others hermaphroditic. For weeks before a particular sexual phase, the flower buds dribble nectar. Yeasts inside the buds typically raise the nectar’s alcohol content mildly, to around 0.06 percent, but can punch it up to as high as 3.8 percent.

“This is an astonishing story,” says John Dransfield, a palm specialist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in Richmond, England. He says he doesn’t know of another palm offering such a beer bash, but perhaps the other species secreting abundant nectar just haven’t been studied yet.

Since the Pentail Tree Shrew has been drinking beer daily for millions of years, a German science website declared that “Boozing Is Older Than Mankind.” They continue.

A wild mammal closely resembling the earliest primates is drinking palm beer on a daily basis since maybe millions of years. Nevertheless, this Malaysian treeshrew is never drunk. This suggests a beneficial effect, and sheds a whole new light on the evolution of human alcoholism.

From the New Scientist account:

“It’s a beautiful example of the natural biology of alcohol consumption, which people have totally neglected in alcohol research,” says Robert Dudley of the University of California at Berkeley.

Dudley has previously suggested that our taste for alcohol may be an “evolutionary hangover” from our fruit-eating primate ancestors, who developed a taste for fermented fruit.

And idw also tackles this contradiction:

Alcohol use and abuse can no longer be blamed on the inventors of brewing of about 9,000 years ago. So far, the current theories on alcoholism have stated that mankind and its ancestors were either used to take no alcohol at all or maybe only low doses via fruits – before the onset of beer brewing. As brewing is such a recent event on the evolutionary time scale, we were not able to develop an adequate defence against the adverse effects of alcohol and the partly hereditary addiction. Mankind is suffering from an evolutionary hangover, as they say. Contrary to this belief, chronic high consumption of alcohol already occurred early on in primate evolution, [according to this new study].

The beery nectar on the Bertram Palm.

 The stories themselves all stem from a new study published July 28, 2008 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States entitled Chronic intake of fermented floral nectar by wild treeshrews.

From the Abstract:

For humans alcohol consumption often has devastating consequences. Wild mammals may also be behaviorally and physiologically challenged by alcohol in their food. Here, we provide a detailed account of chronic alcohol intake by mammals as part of a coevolved relationship with a plant. We discovered that seven mammalian species in a West Malaysian rainforest consume alcoholic nectar daily from flower buds of the bertam palm (Eugeissona tristis), which they pollinate. The 3.8% maximum alcohol concentration (mean: 0.6%; median: 0.5%) that we recorded is among the highest ever reported in a natural food. Nectar high in alcohol is facilitated by specialized flower buds that harbor a fermenting yeast community, including several species new to science. Pentailed treeshrews (Ptilocercus lowii) frequently consume alcohol doses from the inflorescences that would intoxicate humans.

Yet, the flower-visiting mammals showed no signs of intoxication. Analysis of an alcohol metabolite (ethyl glucuronide) in their hair yielded concentrations higher than those in humans with similarly high alcohol intake. The pentailed treeshrew is considered a living model for extinct mammals representing the stock from which all extinct and living treeshrews and primates radiated. Therefore, we hypothesize that moderate to high alcohol intake was present early on in the evolution of these closely related lineages. It is yet unclear to what extent treeshrews benefit from ingested alcohol per se and how they mitigate the risk of continuous high blood alcohol concentrations.

Fascinating stuff, and yet more evidence that alcohol is far more natural than the neo-prohibitionists would like. It will be interesting to see what further study reveals.

 

OBF Thursday

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Whoops, I forgot about Thursday evening and posted Friday first. After the parade and ceremony was over, the Oregon Brewers Festival officially began.

The Beer Tent North just after the festival started.
 

For more photos from Thursday during this year’s OBF, visit the photo gallery.
 

OBF Friday

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Whew, that was a great weekend in Portland for the Oregon Brewers Festival. Look for posts throughout the next week with photos from the weekend, starting with Friday. The last few years at OBF on Friday, there have been so many side events that it’s been hard to even make to the festival and this year was no exception.

I started the day at the Glen Hay Falconer Foundation Brew-Am Golf Tournament. The foundation honors the memory of brewer Glen Hay Falconer and the event raises money to send two brewers each year to the Siebel Institute. For the past three years I’ve sponsored a hole at the tourney and here’s the “foursome” I played with at my hole.

Later that afternoon, Hair of the Dog hosts an open house at the brewery. Alan Sprints, owner of the terrific Hair of the Dog Brewery, with Portland beer writer Fred Eckhardt at the Hair of the Dog event.
 

For more photos from Friday during this year’s OBF, visit the photo gallery.
 

The Official Start Of OBF

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Once the OBF parade reached the festival grounds at Governor Tom McCall Waterfront Park, the “official” wooden festival keg was wheeled into place for the ceremonial tapping by the mayor of Portland, signifying the official opening of the 21st annual Oregon Brewers Festival.

Portland Mayor Tom Potter, on hand to open the festival.

 

For more photos from this year’s OBF keg tapping, including a short video, visit the photo gallery.
 

Oregon Brewers Parade

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The now annual Oregon Brewers Festival parade and brunch took place the morning the festival begins. This year it was held at PGE Park, the home of the Portland Beavers, a minor league baseball team. Widmer Brothers Brewing has a beer garden at the ballpark and they served a hearty breakfast washed down with Widmer beer. From there, the 300 paraded to the Tom McCall Waterfront Park, where the festival was opened, with Tom Potter, Portland’s mayor leading the way.

The Oregon Brewers Festival parade.

 

For more photos from this year’s OBF Parade, visit the photo gallery.
 

BA Board Chairman Not Optimistic Over ABIB Deal

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The Brewers Association, of course, has a board of directors made up of brewery owners. The current chairman, Rich Doyle, owns Harpoon Brewing in Massachusetts. In a recent article in the Patriot Ledger, Doyle ruminates on what the InBev takeover of Anheuser-Busch will mean for smaller brewers. (And I’m going to adopt Harry Schuhmacher’s “ABIB” to refer to the new company.)

Like me, Doyle doesn’t think the ABIB merger will do small brewers any favors. “When you read in the paper that 80 percent of the beer sold in the United States is now controlled by two companies, that’s a pretty sobering fact.”

From the Patriot-Ledger article:

Doyle said most independent beer distributors in the U.S. have a contractual arrangement with one of the big brewing companies. He said that as those companies gain clout, small craft brewers worry they could be squeezed out by the big conglomerates if they provide financial incentives to the distributors to focus on their big-name beers.

“The small brewers are concerned that these contracts will be even more constraining on the somewhat independent wholesalers to be able to handle products like ours,” Doyle said. “Ultimately, this is about the consumer having access to the brands they want and the choice they want.”

The article goes on to quote Jim Koch, founder of the Boston Beer Co. (who makes Samuel Adams beers) as not being nearly as concerned. Of course, Boston Beer is the largest craft brewer in the country and is already well-established in virtually every market. But I continue to believe that for smaller, newer and less middle-of-the-road brewers, the challenges in getting their beer to market will only increase.
 

Rich Doyle, leading a toast after giving the keynote address at the Craft Brewers Conference in San Diego earlier this year.

 

21A Can Release Party

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Next month is the 21st anniversary of the Toronado and last night they hosted the release party for the new cans from 21st Amendment Brewery & Restaurant.

21st Amendment’s Chief Hop Head Shaun O’Sullivan and Chief Watermelon Officer Nico Freccia show off their cans.

In 21 years, this was the first tome the Toronado ever sold beer from a can.

“Big Daddy” Dave Keene enjoying a can of Hell or High Watermelon.

Shaun O’Sullivan, Dave Keene and Nico Freccia.