Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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The Times Goes For Extremes

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There was another terrific article by Eric Asimov in the New York Times yesterday about extreme beers called A Taste for Brews That Go to Extremes. Although admitting not everybody likes the new extremism, Asimov certainly does and the article also includes several Bay Area beers, including ones from Lagunitas, Mad River and Moylan’s breweries. And there’s a great quote from Brendan Moylan, owner of both Marin Brewing and Moylan’s.

“We’re the same country that put men on the moon, and we’re taking the same approach to beer,” said Brendan Moylan, the founder of Moylan Brewing Company in Novato, Calif. “We passed the rest of the world by ages ago, and they’re just waking up to it.”

The Times also did a tasting of several extreme beers, and happily included two well-known brewers in the process: Garrett Oliver, from Brooklyn Brewing, and Phil Markowski, from Southampton Publick House. Despite their initial derisiveness over the very pursuit of extremeness, even they found beers they enjoyed. 90-Minute IPA from Dogfish Head was the group’s favorite, followed by the Double Simcoe I.P.A. from Weyerbacher and Maximus from Lagunitas. There’s also a Beers of the Times feature where you can listen to the tasters talking about their favorite beers.

 

Coast Range Closed?

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I heard a rumor today from a fairly reliable source that Coast Range Brewing in Gilroy, California has closed their doors for good. My understanding is that they’re a Chapter 11 Reorganization Bankruptcy and are actively looking for a buyer.

I’m sorry to say that’s it’s not a huge surprise as they’ve been having financial difficulties … well, for a very long time now. For several years at least they’ve managed to stay afloat due mainly to doing contract beers for a variety of clients, having picked up quite a lot of new business when Golden Pacific Brewing was sold to Gambrinus a few years back. Before that they picked up a tidy sum from a French brewery by selling them the U.S. rights to the name Desperado, which had been the name of their Pale Ale, so that the tequila flavored French Desperado beer could try to take over the American beer market during those thirty seconds when tequila flavored beers were the “in” thing — A-B’s Tequiza, which they still make, managed to own the category.

Coast Range’s passing, though, is quite a shame as I thought brewer Peter Licht was quite talented. Back when fruit beers were more popular, he made a Blackberry Wheat that I thoroughly enjoyed. And he did several fine contract brews for me when I was the beer buyer at BevMo, too. The only reason they never seemed to reach very far beyond their own backyard had more to do with distributor networks, retailers and some poor management decisions than bad product. I will mourn their passing tonight with one of their Farmhouse beers, a new label they debuted two years ago.

Lumpy Gravy: Now That’s A Beer Name

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By know you probably already know that Tony Magee, the iconoclastic owner/brewer of Lagunitas Brewing, is a big fan of Frank Zappa. So far, with the permission of Zappa’s widow, Gail Zappa (who runs the Zappa Family Trust), he’s released a Lagunitas beer on the 40th anniversary of each of Frank Zappa’s first two albums. First there was Freak Out and then Kill Ugly Radio, the original title of his second album, Absolutely Free. Now comes Lumpy Gravy, again using artwork from the original album. I haven’t tried it yet, but I can only hope it’s a brown ale. That would be most fitting.

 

 

A Bender That Brews Beer

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Remember the television show Futurama? It was the Simpsons’ Matt Groening’s other animated series that ran on Fox for four seasons beginning in 1999.

There was a robot — or perhaps more accurately a “foul mouthed, cigar smoking, booze drinking, shiny metal arsed, bending robot” — in the show whose name was Bender. Besides his name and the character’s predilection for going on one, you may be asking yourself what that has to do with beer? Well, even though the show was canceled, like many such shows it has a pretty good cult following. There are fans, of course, and then there are fans.

One such uber-fan, Simon Jansen, in New Zealand, if not an engineer by trade then one of the most impressive hobby engineers I’ve encountered. He’s also a sci-fi fan generally and it appears he started his website with the extremely impressive Star Wars Asciimation, which is the entire Star Wars movie done in Java using nothing but ASCII art. For those of you new to the web, ASCII art is pictures created using nothing but the characters that can be found on an ordinary keyboard, which were used in early e-mails before graphics became ubiquitous throughout the internet.

Those emoticons, like 😉 for example, are a simple, though enduring, form of ASCII art. But they can get extremely complicated and detailed, too. Check out the Great ASCII Art Library for hundreds, if not thousands of these.

Okay, so as usual I’m veering off on a tangent, back to the Bender. Last summer (his winter) Jansen was challenged by a friend to make an actual Bender robot. Jansen also took as inspiration a third season episode, The Route of All Evil, in which while the main plot was going on, there was a subplot involving the two characters, Fry and Leela, along with Bender himself where they undertook to “brew beer inside Bender, treating the robot like an expectant mother.” Jansen reasoned that “just having a Bender that doesn’t do anything would be a waste of time so mine shall be used for a practical purpose. One Bender himself would be proud of. I’ll use him to make beer!”

The Bender Brewer Project, as it’s known, took over six months to complete and yielded its first brew last week. The website includes four pages of detailed information showing every step of the way with copious photographs of the various stages along with diagrams and source code. But for my purposes, it gets really interesting in mid-December on page four when the brewhouse went online, so to speak.

Basically, it’s only a rudimentary homebrewing kit but you have to admire the sheer amount of work and effort to take this project from drawing board to actual robot that produces beer. His initial specific gravity was 1.034. In early January, the beer was ready to bottle and he had his first taste f it, describing it like this.

By the way I did have a little taste of the beer before I bottled it. It wasn’t totally unpleasant. It tastes very green but it had a fair amount of body. Yeasty with maybe just a hint of Mom’s Old-Fashioned Robot Oil!

How odd and cool is that?

 

Bender with brewing system inside. Reminds me a bit of the Wizard of Oz’s Tinman, but this time he’s wishing for something different. “If I only had a beer!”

 

Bottled on January 2, the new robot-brewed Bendërbrau, with labels designed by Jen, one of Jansen’s friends.

 

Malt Disneyland

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My friend and colleague, Lew Bryson, must have been thrilled when he came up with the title Malt Disneyland for his most recent First Draft column for Portfolio magazine, because in my humble opinion it’s one of the best new names for Belgium anybody has ever come up with. Of course, I love wordplay and the Walt/malt thing cracks me up. I confess I never remember to check out his Portfolio column — sorry about that Lew — but luckily MSNBC reprinted it yesterday and so it showed up in the old, handy dandy RSS Feed Reader. Naturally, it’s a great read, too, but oh that title — now that’s a grabber. Well done.

 

Beer Without Borders?

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There was an interesting little piece in Canada’s McGill Daily today, about their alcohol laws. I knew about them to some degree and was at least aware that beer from one province couldn’t necessarily be sold in another without a high tariff. Essentially it’s the same as if you couldn’t sell beer from Oregon in California without a ridiculously high tax that made, for example, Deschutes Black Butte Porter as expensive as Westmalle or Chimay. Naturally, it was done this way to protect local and regional businesses from outside competition but it seems weird that Canada would feel that way about their own provinces. But perhaps we just take the interstate commerce laws we have here for granted. Are the majority of other countries set up with porous state borders or are they protectionist? I’ve never really looked at that, does anybody know? I’ll be interested to hear what my Canadian friends think about this. Stephen? Alan? Greg? Anyone else?

 

Tender Is The Beer

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Here’s an interesting looking gadget. Heineken teamed up with Krups, the people who make those high end coffee machines, to create the BeerTender. Essentially, the BeerTender is a mini kegerator that holds 5-liter kegs. As fr as I can tell it’s already available in eight European nations and beginning March 1 will be sold in the U.S. at Williams-Sonoma stores. At least that was the announcement made at this year’s CES in Las Vegas, which began on Monday.

It’s a beautiful looking piece of equipment and would be great if it could be used with those 5-liter kegs of German beer you see everywhere. I sort of doubt they will, though, they’ll probably only work with Heineken mini-kegs and the other brands they deign to package them in the minis.

Here’s some info about the BeerTender from the Unofficial Heineken USA BeerTender Fan Site, BeerTenderUSA:

Imagine…fresh Heineken and other European beers on tap whenever you want it.

The Heineken BeerTender … is a personal draft beer (or draught beer, if you prefer) system for home use. The system consists of a draft beer dispenser and the exchangeable BeerTender kegs each holding and chilling four liters of premium European beer. While at-home beer taps are nothing new, the BeerTender system is unique in its size, style and function.

The recyclable BeerTender four liter keg is inserted from above into the BeerTender, which keeps the beer cold and fresh for up to 30 days from the first glass. Then run the keg’s plastic tube to the BeerTender’s tap and you’re done. It’s that simple. Inserting a keg takes less than 15-seconds.

Heineken has also made the Krups BeerTender sold in France and the ones coming to the US compatible with its standard five liter DraughtKeg kegs (which are available in most US supermarkets) by using a special tube (a five-pack comes with the BeerTenders sold in France and to be sold in the US). Replacement five-packs will be available after March 1 at www.BeerTender.com.

In the US, Heineken is preparing for the launch of the BeerTender on March 1, 2008 after performing a market test in Rhode Island. The current US DraughtKegs, while compatible with all BeerTenders (with the special tube) will not dispense all the beer. To answer this, Heineken is introducing a BeerTender compatible US DraughtKeg (five liters) that comes with the special tube and has a bigger carbonator inside. That keg is will be available nationwide in both Heineken and Heineken Light. Other European beers are available in Europe.

Operating the BeerTender is a snap. While some models have computer operation and temperature controls with an LCD display, pulling a beer is as simple as pulling the BeerTender’s handle. And if you’ve got kids, you can easily remove the BeerTender’s handle. Best of all, the beer only touches the easily removable spout under the handle, making clean-up between kegs a breeze.

BeerTenders are not cheap. List price in the US will be $400, with street prices down to $299. European versions are just as expensive.

It would certainly look great sitting on the bar, if only it didn’t have that Heineken label on it. Damn.

 

The Primo Return of Primo

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primo-new
This was first reported back in late November during what I’ll continue to call “The Great Ennui of Late ’07” when the Bulletin was looking pretty sparse. I’m returning to the new year reinvigorated, or at least willing myself to try, and so I’m trying to catch up on old news people have sent in, and this comes to me by way of my island connection, a regular Bulletin reader living in Hawaii. Thanks Doug. It seems the old iconic Primo Beer brand has returned as of December, so far in kegs only. Bottles will be back sometime in April.

primo-shirt

First, a little history. Primo Beer was originally made by the Honolulu Brewing & Malting Co., which was founded in 1898. After Prohibition ended, it was renamed the Hawaii Brewing Co. and by the 1950s became the best-selling beer on the islands. In 1963, Schlitz Brewing bought the brand, building a new brewery in ‘Aiea, and they continued making Primo until closing it in 1979. At its height, the Hawaiian brewery produced over 400,00 barrels per year. A few years later, in 1982, Stroh Brewing bought the brand and changed the label as well as the formula, trying to sell the brand outside Hawaii in several states. With mixed success, sales grew and then fell again, and eventually Stroh stopped making Primo in either 1997 or 98 (accounts differ on this point). A year or two later, Pabst acquired the brand, along with several others brands from Stroh’s and they are the current owners of the brand.

So last year, Pabst made the decision to bring back the label. And that makes sense, Primo was one of those iconic brands that people couldn’t help but associate with Hawaii. Using a silhouetted image of King Kamehameha, who in 1810 united the Hawaii Islands under his leadership of the Kingdom of Hawaii, was a genius marking move and the bold Hawaiian shirts made in the 1960s-70s with the Primo label continue to be collector’s items right up to the present.

The new Primo is being launched by the Primo Brewing Co., a division of Pabst Brewing. A new recipe was created by brewmaster Phil Markowski, who justly won fame and fortune for his beers at the Southampton Publick House on Long Island, New York.

The beer itself is being brewed by a craft brewery on the island of Kauai, Keoki Brewing, who initially will brew around 200 kegs each month. Once bottled production starts up, that will be handled stateside by Pabst in Irwindale, California. But since Pabst doesn’t own any breweries, that means Miller Brewing — who does own a brewery in Irwindale — will be contract brewing the beer for Pabst. According to a press release, “the draft and bottled versions will be distributed by Paradise Beverage Co.”

It will be interesting to see if they can successfully revive the brand. I imagine it will be great as a tourist beer and for locals looking to support a well-known local brand, at least as far as the draft beer is concerned. The bottles stateside may prove trickier, especially after the initial novelty wears off, as it inevitably will.

primo-btl

Bay Area Firkin Fest Announced

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Mark your calendars. The 5th annual Bay Area Firkin Gravity Festival has just been announced. It will take place beginning at 11:00 a.m. on April 5 at Triple Rock Brewery in Berkeley, California. The cost will be $25, which includes a commemorative glass along with a certain number samples (still to determined) with additional tastings available for a nominal fee. This event has quickly become “the” real ale festival in the Bay Area and I’m sure they’ll have something special lined up for their fifth anniversary. Last year there were two dozen breweries in attendance and I suspect we’ll see even more again this year. See you there.
 


 

4.5

Bay Area Firkin Gravity Festival (5th annual)

Triple Rock Brewery, 1920 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, California
510.843.2739 [ website ]

 

Iron Hill to Highlight Local Belgian Beer

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The Iron Hill Brewery & Restaurant in West Chester, Pennsylvania (near Philadelphia) will again highlight local Belgian-style beers. The Belgium Comes to West Chester event will take place on January 26 at 4:00 p.m. In addition to head brewer Chris LaPierre, several other brewers will be on hand to discuss their beers and there will also be available a three-course beer dinner paired will a few of the available Belgian-style beers. The cost for the event will be $40.

From the press release:

“Belgian style beers are at the center of the craft beer movement right now and both male and female beer lovers are embracing this style,” says LaPierre, who will be pouring his Heywood; Quadfather and the award-winning Cannibal.

“This is a great opportunity for beer fans to see the unique Belgian style beers being brewed in the region, all in one place,” says Mark Edelson, Director of Brewing Operations.

Sounds like it should be a fun event.

Here’s a partial list of beers that will be poured at the event.

  • Dubbel (Stoudt’s Brewing)
  • Stumbling Monk (Stewart’s Brewing)
  • Saison (Sly Fox Brewery)
  • Wild Ale and Belgian Brown Ale (Harpoon Brewery)
  • Abbey Blonde Ale (General Lafayette Inn & Brewery)
  • Bourbon Abbey Dubbel (Flying Fish Brewing)
  • Mad Elf (Troeg’s Brewing)
  • Otay (Nodding Head Brewery and Restaurant)
  • Abbey 6 (Victory Brewing)
  • Imperial Wit (Dock Street Brewery)
  • Barrel Aged Imperial Wit (Iron Hill, other location)
  • Flemish Red (Iron Hill, other location)
  • Cannibal Nocturnum (Iron Hill, other location)
  • Fe10 (Iron Hill, other location)