Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

Socialize

Chocolate Sebbie

By

With only one more day to go before “Beer & Chocolate Day,” here’s one more article on this delicious subject.

This one is by Greg Kitsock and appeared in the Washington Post today, entitled A Different Kind of Drinking Chocolate and explores a number of chocolatey beers, including one of my favorites, Rogue’s Chocolate Stout featuring Sebbie Buhler on the bottle.

Here’s what Kitsock has to say about the Rogue Chocolate Stout, some of which I didn’t know:

Rogue Chocolate Stout, from Rogue Ales in Newport, Ore., originally was brewed for export to Japan as Chocolate Bear Beer.

Its label, featuring a teddy bear with a pink heart on its belly, was hardly designed for macho appeal. “In Japan, women give men chocolate for Valentine’s Day,” explains Sebbie Buhler, Rogue’s regional rep for the Northeast. When the brewery decided to introduce the beer to American drinkers in 2000, Rogue founder Jack Joyce renamed it and substituted Buhler’s portrait on the 22-ounce silk-screened bottle to honor her 10 years of service.

As a base, Rogue uses its Shakespeare Stout (a fairly strong and aggressively hopped example of the style), infusing Dutch bittersweet chocolate into the finished beer. Drier than the Young’s, with a spicy, resiny finish, the stout is complex and intriguing, although the chocolate and the hops clash in the finish.

Sebbie also had a bit to say about the beer that bears her likeness:

Rogue Chocolate Stout is “a very versatile beer,” Buhler says. “It goes beautifully with big, stinky cheeses, and particularly blue cheese.” She also notes that it makes great beer cocktails, especially when mixed with Belgian fruit lambics. Try Lindemans Kriek or Lindemans Framboise (a raspberry ale). Those fruit beers are highly aromatic; to keep the stout from being overwhelmed, blend them at a ratio of at least two or three parts stout to one part lambic.

Buhler also likes mixing Rogue Chocolate Stout with Rogue Chipotle Ale, a beer flavored with smoked jalapeno peppers. The half-and-half makes an excellent accompaniment to spicy Mexican fare such as chicken mole, she says.

Sebbie lives in the same state where I grew up, Pennsylvania. Her brother Dave Buhler is also one of the co-owners of Elysian Brewing in Seattle, Washington. The pair have been in the beer business as long as I can remember. Happy Valentine’s Day, Sebbie.

 

Me and Sebbie at the Falling Rock during GABF week 2006.

 

March IPA Madness

By

Last year fellow beer writer Greg Kitsock conducted a March Madness bracket for beer in the Washington Post, calling it Beer Madness. It was a brilliant idea and I vowed to do my own this year (and I still may). The Post will be doing another one again this year, and over 400 hopeful judges submitted applications including “inspired limericks, hopeful haikus, reasoned arguments and, yes, desperate pleas.” Judges are expected to be announced shortly and the beers for this years contest should likewise one upcoming Sunday soon. I’ll follow along like I did last year.

In the meantime, Great Lakes Brewing News, has announced their own contest involving India Pale Ales, the National IPA Contest, or NIPAC. It may not roll off the tongue like N-C-Double-A but I’ll wager it’s a damn side tastier on your tongue. They’ve chosen 32 IPAs from around the country and over four separate rounds will have three brewers judge each head-to-head competition to determine who moves on toward the championship.

To participate you need to register online (it’s free) and then after receiving your password via e-mail vote for who you think will win each of the sixteen contests in round one. You simply choose who you think will win each head-to-head contest of IPAs. You can even win some prizes, which, according to the website rules will “include a full case of beer from the 2008 National IPA Champion, tee-shirts, posters and brewery merchandise.” The schedule of rounds is below. Get picking.

What fun! Now I need to get off my arse and figure out something different from the other two contests. Anybody have any thoughts or ideas?

 

 

Reunion Debuting at 20th Anniversary Reunion

By

As I wrote about last month, there’s a new Reunion beer but I don’t remember noticing it will be a rye beer. After trying Bear Republic’s wonderful new all-rye beer, I’ve taken a renewed interest in the alternative grain in beer. It will make it’s debut at the Celebrator’s 20th Anniversary Party this Sunday. If you haven’t gotten your tickets yet, there’s still time to order online. Join me for a/the Reunion.

From the press release:

Calling it a beer for hope and in honor of the passing of a long time friend, SBS Imports will once again offer its specially crafted Reunion Beer. Reunion Beer is the inspiration and collaboration of Alan Shapiro, president of SBS Imports, Pete Slosberg, creator of Pete’s Wicked Ale™, and Virginia MacLean, long time friend and colleague, as a way to raise awareness of and donations for the Institute of Myeloma and Bone Cancer Research. All met during the early days of Pete’s Brewing Company. Virginia passed away from the disease last June, four months after the initial release of Reunion.

“Reunion ’08 celebrates the life and cause of our departed friend,” said Alan. “Virginia wanted to continue the mission of bringing hope to others with the Reunion project.” All proceeds are donated to IMBCR. “To date almost $100,000 has been raised by the Reunion team’s creative approach,” said Dr. James R. Berenson, CEO and President, Medical and Scientific Director at IBMCR. “We are eternally grateful to everyone supporting the beer and their efforts to bring this disease to the attention of the public,” added Geoffrey M. Gee, IMBCR’s Executive Director. The beer will be unveiled at the Celebrator Beer News’ 20th anniversary (Mardi Gras) party at the Oakland Convention Center on February 17.

Reunion Beer

Last year’s version was an Organic Imperial Brown Ale based on one of Pete’s popular brews. This year’s style, Organic Red Rye Ale, combines another popular Pete’s style ‐ Wicked Red with rye and caraway. Pete not only lent his name and likeness to this philanthropic and heartfelt effort, he worked closely with Bison Organic Brewery to craft the Reunion recipe. Visit Bison Brewing for more information.

Where to Buy

Reunion ’08 will be available starting mid‐February at leading specialty beer retailers. For those living in states where there is no retail availability, it may be possible to purchase Reunion via mail order from selected retail partners, pending individual state laws. Reunion ’08 will also be available in kegs. Retail availability and distribution, and a list of partner pubs and restaurants featuring Reunion ’08 on draft, will be available at the Reunion website.

 

Pete Slosberg, who’s currently in Argentina, sent me an e-mail with some additional history of this beer:

Just so you know, [Reunion]’s origin was about 15 years ago when we developed Pete’s MultiGrain Beer. We started out doing a rye beer and then expanding it. Along the way, I asked Pat Couteaux, our brewmaster to try, for fun, a test batch of a “liquid rye bread beer” and it was great, but we didn’t go with it. It tasted like I was back in a NYC deli.

The back story on this beer for Reunion is that whenever Alan came to visit Virginia in the Bay Area, they would go to Max’s Opera Cafe for deli food. I mentioned to Alan that our old formula would be a fitting memory to their friendship so I contacted Pat and he got the old formula to Dan at Bison.

Thanks, Pete.

 

 

These Beers Are Made For Walking

By

If you live in the Bay Area or are planning to be one of the nearly 16 millions travelers who visit us each year, then have I got a useful website for you. Beer By BART began less than a year ago, created by two San Francisco natives, Steve Shapiro and Gail Ann Williams. The site is a labor of love for the pair, who I was fortunate enough to meet at the Bistro’s Double IPA Festival yesterday.

Since mass-transit is all but non-existent where I live (and where the annoyingly self-centered NIMBY ethos keeps anything from improving), I hadn’t run across this before. But in many parts of the Bay Area, BART is a convenient and relatively inexpensive alternative to driving. In these days of draconian laws brought on by overzealous neo-prohibitionists, this a very valuable resource. So far, there are thirty places mapped out with all the information you need to get from a BART station to your destination, including how long your walk will be from BART. For each it’s roughly one-quarter mile. If you see four shoes on a listing, you know it’s about a mile to the brewpub or bar. The list on the main page is divided by station, and the list is starting to include what bus to take to get you to a slightly more remote, but worthwhile place. Nice job!

This is my first pick for “Website of the Month,” which I’ll begin featuring on the right sidebar. I get so many link requests and have so many in my blogroll, that I want to highlight the best ones I come across.

 

Optical Illusion Bottle Truck

By

While searching for an image of a beer delivery truck yesterday, I noticed a photo of this truck kept popping up in the search results, but always identified as a beer truck, or words to that effect. However, take a close look at the bottle.

Cool as the image is, it sure didn’t look like beer inside the bottle to me. So I did a little research to find out what Bionade is. It turns out that it’s organic soda made in Germany. But interestingly, it does have a brewing pedigree. Here’s the story, from Wikipedia:

Bionade was created in 1995 by Dieter Leipold. Leipold was the master brewer at Privatbrauerei Peter in Ostheim, a town in northern Bavaria with just 4,000 inhabitants, and a friend of the family that owned the brewery. He was worried about the future of the company, which was about to go bankrupt, as import beers like Corona and Miller Lite were taking over the German market. He got the idea of creating a nonalcoholic drink produced with the same principles and under the same purity laws used to brew beer:[3] not using corn syrup or other artificial additives and making it by fermentation. The drink would consist only of the natural ingredients malt, water, sugar, and fruit essences. For eight years, Leipold experimented spending €1.5 million of the brewery owner Peter Kowalsky’s money. His lab was a bathroom. He isolated a strain of bacteria capable of converting the sugar that normally becomes alcohol into nonalcoholic gluconic acid, which he used to ferment the new drink.

Bionade’s premise was that it tasted like soft drinks, but contained little sugar and no stabilizing or flavor-enhancing additives. It thus combines the taste of soft drinks with the healthiness of juice. It also contains both calcium and magnesium, in such quantities that they do not cancel each other out and is low in sodium and free of phosphorus

To this day, Leipold refuses divulge the exact chemical process he used to do this. the gluconic acid also has the advantage that it allows him to reduce the amount of sugar, because it strengths the sugar’s taste. After fermentation, the natural flavors, elderberry, litchi, orange-ginger, and herb are added along with carbonation.

Apparently sales Bionade started out slowly but with the recent popularity of healthy food and drinks, things have picked up considerably. Since 2006, it’s been sold in the U.S., though I can’t say I recall ever seeing it. But then I don’t drink soda so I wouldn’t have been looking for it, either. It might be worth giving it a try, since it was created by a brewer and he’s managed to keep the secret of how it’s made. There’s also an article about it from Time Magazine that was published last January.

 

Warm Weather Smiles on Double IPA Festival

By

The 8th annual Double IPA Festival took place yesterday at the Bistro in Hayward, California. We couldn’t have asked for better weather. After weeks of rain, blue skies and a warm sun filled the sky. I think a lot of festival-goers were coaxed out of hibernation by the beautiful day. And what better way to spend it but enjoying countless Imperial IPAs?

As noted in the previous post, Flying Dog‘s Double Dog was chosen best in show. Kenny Gross, who works for their local distributor, shyly accepted the medal on their behalf.

The crowds came out to the Bistro to sample over thirty Imperial IPAs.

 

For many more photos from this year’s Double IPA Festival at the Bistro, visit the photo gallery.
 

Losing Their Share of Mind

By

trkanim
Anheuser-Busch’s “100% share of mind” program is legendary. It started ten years ago, when A-B began offering incentives to their distributors so they’d care only about A-B products. Though I assume they never said so — wink, wink — they encouraged distributors to drop non-A-B brands and concentrate on only the important brands. And at that time, such was A-B’s market strength that many distributors did in fact tow the line. But lately as domestic sales have been static or slipping, distributors are adding non-Bud brands to their portfolios to stay at the same level of profitability. The Associated Press had an article last week about this recent phenomenon called Beer Distributors Want More Than One Best Bud.

As the article points out:

For consumers, it means greater choice at their local bars and liquor stores. Wall Street analysts say the movement signals a weakening of the St. Louis brewer’s clout in the marketplace, as small-batch “craft” beers and imports, as well as wine and spirits, wrest market share from mass-market brews like Budweiser.

Many of the 560 nationwide A-B distributors realized that as craft beer is increasingly in demand, that their competitors were having the last laugh, because they were free to pick up whatever brands they wanted and believed they could be successful selling.

While IRI general manager Bump Williams described the program as a “great business model,” not everybody was convinced that it was fair. The DOJ launched an investigation into anti-trust violations, but later abandoned it. Naturally, A-B continues to push the program with such statements as “[w]e want their efforts and focus aligned with ours.” Well, who wouldn’t? But that isn’t how the world works nor is it how it should work. It’s schemes like this one that gave A-B its reputation as a bully. And it appears that they still have that mindset. Again, from the AP article.

Still, Anheuser wasn’t happy with the way it learned of the Tennessee distributors’ decision. “We found out later (in their decision-making process) than we would have liked,” says Mr. Peacock. “When we don’t get early communication, it rubs us wrong.”

Now why would one business be rubbed the wrong way if another, supposedly separate and independent company, didn’t consult with them before making a business decision? The best illustration of this mindset comes from more than a decade ago, with the former head of A-B, August Busch III, sitting around a conference table at their Hawaiian distributor petulantly throwing bottles of craft beer against the wall, smashing them to bits, to show his displeasure with a separate business having the unmitigated gall to sell something he can’t profit from. It’s that arrogance, borne of being the market leader for such a long time, that leads a company to believe that whatever is in their best interest is in everyone else’s best interests, too.

But as the market changes, that’s becoming less and less tenable. Distributors are realizing that to remain successful, they have to stock brands that their customers want, regardless of who makes them. That only makes good business sense. Some industry analysts, like my friend Harry Schuhmacher who runs Beer Business Daily, are surprised that it has taken so long for this to begin happening. As he puts it. “It really hasn’t been a widespread national jailbreak.” But that’s the hold that A-B has traditionally had over its distributors. Now that it’s finally beginning to erode, it will be interesting to see what percentage share of mind Bud is left with.

BJCP Releases New Style Guidelines

By

The Beer Judge Certification Program, or BJCP, released today the new 2008 style guidelines, the first revision since 2004. The new guidelines are available in a variety of formats. There’s also a one-page pdf that gives a short summary of the changes.

In case you didn’t know, the BJCP certifies judges for homebrew and commercial competitions, administers tests, and performs many other worthwhile functions in the beer world. If you’ve ever wanted to be a beer judge or just learn more about beer styles, they’re a very good place to start.

 

Rogue Inspires Imperial Stout Song

By

A great friend of mine, who lives in Seattle, has a new CD out with his new band, called Dyslextasy. Four out of the six songs on it have something to do with enjoying a tipple now and then. The album is called “Live. Die. Repeat.” and has this great tagline: “Drinking songs for the New World Order.”

The last song on the compact disc is an anti-war song that was even inspired by Rogue’s Imperial Stout and the red star on the old label before they switched to the ceramic bottle. The first line of the song is:

As I was sitting there, at the bar
Drinking Imperial Stout
(that one with the star)

Click on the play button below to hear the Imperial Stout song. You can also hear previews of the other songs on their website. The CD is a mere eight bucks and can be ordered online directly from the band or on several other online stores, such as CD Baby. Sure it’s a shameless plug, but as he and his wife are some of our best friends, and the music is great, too, I want to help it go platinum so he can retire from his nine-to-five job. Enjoy.