Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

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New Belgium Frambozen Brown is Back

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new-belgium-new
New Belgium Brewing‘s tasty Frambozen Raspberry Brown Ale has been released for the holidays again this year, and will be available in select markets until the end of the year. At previous Celebrator tastings, we’ve given it high marks. Last year we described as:

Strong raspberry fruit aroma with red tinged amber color. Rich tart raspberry flavor with good hop presence that nicely balances. Effervescent creaminess and a lingering finish.

And in 2004:

Sweet fruity berry nose and reddish-amber color with a tan head. Great sweet fruit flavor with nice balance and a clean finish.

I always felt the brown ale sweetened slightly with fruit works very well. It’s a nice twist on Belgian lambics, a mix of the idea of those beers with the caramel, often nutty, flavors of a brown ale. I’m looking forward to seeing these samples in the mailbox.

And how about this great quote they included in the sale sheet, from Stephen Beaumont, writing in Esquire.

“More and more American men are downing big, bold, ungirly fruit beers. Typical is the seasonal Frambozen from new belgium Brewing Company, a raspberry brown ale made for Colorado winters, with a massive taste and a face-slapping 6.3% (this year it’s 7%) alcohol.”

From the press release:

Experiencing Frambozen begins with the aroma of fresh red raspberries, followed by the ripe seductiveness of a fruity brown ale with depth and delicate notes. Frambozen, New Belgium’s traditional winter seasonal, is inspired by the Framboise beers of Belgium, where the use of raspberries as a beer adjunct outdates the universal acceptance of hops.

Frambozen is deep ruby in color, with flavors just as rich. With the fruit as the integral ingredient, its name is derived from the Flemish word for raspberries. Every year, New Belgium sends delegates to Salem, Oregon to oversee the process of turning freshly picked berries from northern Washington into a pure juice that is loaded into oxygen-free CO2 tanker trucks that make the journey back to Colorado. The end result is a delicious, complex beer that is delivered on time to complement holiday meals.

“We have made a conscious decision to process the raspberries into a single strength, straight juice with nothing added,” said Bill Hepp, a brewer with New Belgium who takes the journey to Oregon annually. “As a pure juice, it is a whole food, with no taste or aroma lost in the concentration stage, which ultimately makes the beer that much better.”

Frambozen is available in certain New Belgium markets now through the beginning of the New Year.

nb-frambozen

Crossing the Red Bridge

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I have an article coming out next month in New Brewer magazine about gluten-free beers, so I’ve been watching what’s been going on with this kind of beer for many months. In case you’ve missed this growing phenomenon, celiac disease now effects close to 1% of the U.S. population and people with the disease can’t properly digest glutens, a protein in many common grains, including wheat and barley. This means no bread, pizza, pasta or, most importantly, beer. Here and abroad, there is increasing interest in producing a beer that’s both gluten-free and tastes similar to beer. To date, only a handful of American brewers are making one, with several more in Europe and Australia.

My son, Porter, is autistic and many kids with ASD also have some stomach problems similar to those associated with celiac sufferers. As a result, both are put on gluten-free diets with generally positive effects. Over the past summer, I was talking with Dr. Michael Lewis, who pioneered the brewing sciences program at U.C. Davis, about these beers. He mentioned that Anheuser-Busch was also working on a gluten-free beer and suggested a few people there I should talk to about it. Try as I might, I could not penetrate A-B’s bureaucracy beyond a tersely-worded statement from their P.R. department. They seemed genuinely surprised that I even knew about, despite the fact that Miller’s BrewBlog broke the story in early August that A-B had filed a label registration in Missouri for the beer, called Red Bridge Sorghum Beer, and test batch bottles reportedly had been quietly sampled at MBAA meetings. All Anheuser-Busch was willing to say on the matter was the following:

Our goal at Anheuser-Busch is to make sure every consumer can enjoy the kind of beer they feel best about — it’s that simple. That’s why our brewmasters are continually exploring and brewing a variety of beer styles year round. We are currently brewing a beer made with sorghum and without barley, wheat or oats and we’re still developing the final product.

They were unwilling to provide a sample, show me a label, allow me to speak to the person I knew to be working on it, nada. Needless to say, I wasn’t able to include much in the article. This despite the fact that I had seen and tasted a test bottle, seen a label mock-up, and knew they’d both registered the name and picked up the domain name redbridgebeer.com on July 12. To hear the P.R. flacks tell the tale, it was years away from being on store shelves, if ever.

So it was with a gentle smirk that I received the news today — a rumor at best, from an anonymous source — that A-B would be rolling out Red Bridge Sorghum Beer nationally (not in a test market) on December 18. Is it true? I’ll let you know in just under two months.

 

This mock-up may or may not be the label for A-B’s new gluten-free beer, Red Bridge.

How Craft Beer Can Save the World

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The world’s cup runneth over with living beer traditions. But this vast repository of cultural brewing capital is under attack by global corporations. The top five brewing companies, all of which are American- or European-owned, control 41% of the world market. Perversely, economists and politicians calculate the conquest by industrial breweries as economic growth while the value of small-scale traditional brewing goes uncounted. Much will be lost if this global “beerodiversity” is lost to the forces of corporate-led homogenization.

So begins a very interesting essay at Foreign Policy in Focus (FPIF), a think tank, which, according to it’s website, “brings together scholars, advocates, and activists who strive to make the United States a more responsible global partner.” The essay, The Perils of Globeerization, is by Chris O’Brien, who first contacted me a few months ago to tell about his beer activism at his cleverly titled Fermenting Revolution website. The essay is heavy on foreign policy, big business, history and local traditions of alcohol. It may seem somewhat radical to the more conservative, but it certainly agrees with my own view of how the world works. His take on the history and economics of brewing, and especially how the dominant breweries are effecting brewing traditions across the globe is fascinating. And perhaps most importantly, there are obvious parallels to the craft beer industry in America, as well.

O’Brien also has just published a new book, Fermenting Revolution, too, which is available from the publisher, New Society Publishers, or from Amazon. The subject matter seems pretty interesting, I’m looking forward to reading and reviewing it.

 

Kansas City Hometown Beer Tour

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I got an e-mail from Jim Quinn, “The Beer Jockey” of Kansas City, who’s hosting what sounds like a fun and educational tour of Kansas City brewing history as well as local breweries still operating. The limousine tour runs three hours, from Noon to 3:00 p.m., and three tour dates are scheduled: October 28, November 11, and November 25. The tour will begin and end at Boulevard Brewing. The standard cost is $35, which includes “chauffeured transportation, guided tour, on-board beverages, beer samples and handouts.” For $65, your tour also included an “autographed copy of Bob Sullivan’s book, ‘Hometown Beer: History of Kansas City’s Breweries‘”

Here’s an overview of the tour:

  • Tour and taste at KC’s own, nationally-renowned and newly expanded Boulevard Brewing.
  • Hear about the “Beer Castle” on Main Street.
  • See the remains of a family brewery that survived floods and fires yet fell to Prohibition.
  • Learn how many out-of-town breweries were able to enter the local market in the 1870s.
  • Celebrate local brew and sample handcrafted ale at McCoy’s Public House in Westport.

 

 
Fine print: Preregistration and payment is required. DEADLINE for registration is the Thursday prior to the tour. A minimum of 12 passengers is required to run the tour. Maximum is 20 passengers. Private chartered tours are also available.
 

10.27, 11.11, 11.25

Kansas City Hometown Beer Tour

Boulevard Brewing, 2501 Southwest Boulevard, Kansas City, Missouri
816.512.5555 or 816.471.1234 [ e-mail ]

Drinking in Germany and Nebraska

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My friend and colleague, Lisa Morrison, sent me this provocative essay by a woman who grew up in Germany but has lived in Nebraska since she was 17. Angelika Byorth, writing in the Daily Nebraskan speaks to how alcohol is handled differently in the two countries and wonders in print whether adopting a lower drinking age and introducing alcohol into the home as a natural part of daily life might not remove some of its stigma. She makes some great points and it’s nice see an alternative viewpoint to the one the neo-prohibitionist lobby is always pushing. Angelika Byorth lost her husband at 47 to alcoholism and still argues in favor of changing our country’s alcohol policy, so she may be harder for the neo-prohibitionists to dismiss and rebut than usual. Regardless of your side on this issue, an interesting piece and well worth reading.

Write Your Own Arrogant Bastard Label

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Do It For Humanity’s Sake. Or Your Own… You Arrogant Bastard! (Humanity Will Still Benefit)

Stone Brewing, of course, has a history of doing charity work. And unbeknownst to me, they’ve been auctioning off stuff on eBay all year long to raise money for charity. This auction will benefit one of Stone’s charities, the San Pasqual Academy. There are many others. The take so far just this month totals just north of $130,000!

But this one is a doozy, and I’ll let the press release speak for itself:

This month we have an unprecedented opportunity that we’re auctioning off: You getting to write your own Arrogant Bastard Ale bottle!

This is a “once-in-a-lifetime-don’t-expect-you’ll-get-it-again” chance for you to express your arrogance on a bottle of Arrogant Bastard Ale. Try not to screw it up by not bidding enough.

We’ll be taking your writings (either handwritten or submitted as text – your call) and producing at least 60 cases (720 bottles) of your text. Of those 720 bottles, you will personally get 4 cases (48 bottles) and the remainder will be distributed out into the marketplace in your region of the country.

We will not ship beer to your door, but we will work with your closest wholesaler to get the beer to you. (If you wish to pickup the cases here at the brewery, that works too.) Clearly, there’s going to be some guidelines to this. The bottle will need to meet California ABC guidelines, and if we need to ship it out of state it will also need to meet Federal (TTB) guidelines and any other guidelines required by your state. We will make sure it meets with the required governmental approvals. This means that you can’t write any boneheaded thing you want, but a fully Arrogant approach will work! It does for us.

The auction is already up on eBay and will close this Sunday, October 29 at 8:00 p.m. PST sharp. So far there are 10 bidders, and highest at this moment is $760.

Write your own rant for Arrogant Bastard.

J-Schools and “Happy Amateurism”

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I’ve been writing quite a bit lately about journalists in the mainstream media who write about beer yet appear to know virtually nothing about the subject. I’ve had a few of my own theories about this phenomenon but I recently came across another one that I hadn’t considered in a book I happened to be reading. The book was 100 Ways America is Screwing Up the World by John Tirman. Number 99 on Tirman’s list is “‘Professional’ Schools, by which he means medical schools, law schools and the one that caught my attention — journalism schools. Here’s his general take on J-schools:

And journalism schools — what is it exactly they teach? What is it that one can learn that will improve skills as an investigator or writer that other disciplines cannot provide? Journalism schools do not and cannot teach problem-solving skills — critical thinking — as well as the social sciences or humanities or natural sciences.

Okay, I think it’s pretty clear he’s no fan of modern journalism. But it was the next sentiments Tirman expressed that really got me thinking about this issue. I hadn’t considered it before, but it makes a lot of sense. Here’s his analysis of the problem:

More than half of the new hires in newsrooms hold undergraduate degrees in journalism. There is an ethic among many in this field of “happy amateurism” — that one can report on anything using certain standard methods. You need not know anything about the covered topic, which means you’ll be at the mercy of people purporting to know — usually the well-heeled who can afford fancy P.R. operations.

That’s exactly the way beer is reported in many instances. A lot of stories originate with press releases from the big breweries, the ones with large marketing budgets. A reporter is then assigned to write the story who appears to know little, if anything at all, about the subject and often seems to do no discernible research. I have always suspected that the way beer is reported extends to other subjects, too, but since I don’t know much about those other disciplines I have no way of knowing. Because if they’ll assign reporters with no knowledge of one subject, why wouldn’t they do the same thing for other topics. So it makes a lot of sense that the problem is the process itself. I mean, it would be simple-minded and ridiculous to suggest there was a conspiracy against beer so this theory goes a long way in explaining why beer is so poorly covered by the media.

Happy amateurism may not explain everything but it seems a very viable start. Unfortunately, if Tirman’s assertion that this is a trend that’s essentially growing as older reporters retire and are replaced by J-school graduates then this problem is only going to get worse unless we can collectively figure out a way to get beer the respect in the media we think it deserves.

Oaked Arrogant Bastard Now in Six-Packs

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Beginning next Monday, October 30, an Arrogant Bastard Ale that uses American Oak Chips will hit the stores. This is the third year now that Stone Brewing has made available this oaked version of their popular Arrogant Bastard. And this year, Oaked Arrogant Bastard will be available for the first time in 12-oz, bottles sold in six-packs.

From the press release:

This year the OAKED is determined to make its presence known even more. How? By fitting in your hand. This year we’ve crammed, forced, shoved and cajoled the OAKED Arrogant Bastard Ale into itty bitty tiny little 12oz bottles. It did not go willingly. Some Stone peeps got hurt. More emotionally, than physically, but it was definitely both. This means that six packs of OAKED Arrogant Bastard Ale are ready and they’ll begin hitting store shelves along side the Double Bastard Ale on Monday, October 30th.

Be cautious. As always. Neither the OAKED Arrogant Bastard Ale, nor the Double Bastard Ale like being bottled up. The OAKED is feeling especially put out about the whole experience, so it is suggested that you either be extraordinarily polite to it (which we’ve been told doesn’t work all that well…dunno…we’ve never tried that route ourselves), or move in with equal or greater arrogance to keep the beer in check. Good luck whichever approach you choose. You will need it.

Oaked Arrogant Bastard, now available in six-packs.

Beer Chips

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Also at the Anchor event for Maureen’s book, Ambitious Brew, I had my second encounter with Beer Chips, a new snack food on the market.

I first noticed them at their own booth next to the Sierra Nevada Brewing tent at GABF last month where, at $1 a bag, they were selling like hot cakes. Now I should make yet another confession here from the start. There are few foods I like more than potato chips. I am quite passionate about my potato chips. I can still get worked up about chips that have been off the market for decades; brands like Tommy Dale’s or Uncle Don’s. Where I grew up in southeastern Pennsylvania, the average grocery store carried at least a dozen local brands of potato chips, and some had many more. My favorite chips growing up were a brand called “Good’s Original Chips,” or “Good’s in the Blue” to distinguish them from a rival brand, “Good’s in the Red.” My “Good’s Potato Chips” could be bought only one day a week and, except for visiting the farm, at only one place on Earth, the Shillington Farmer’s Market, which was open every Friday less than a mile from my childhood home. They were made by Mennonite farmers who appeared to make just enough to sell each week (they never made more for the rush during various holidays) and when they sold out, packed up and went home. You could buy them in bags, but the best way was in a returnable can. Every Friday, I’d pick up a 5-lb. can, pay for the chips and a deposit on the can. The following week, I’d return the empty can and get a new one, this time paying just for the chips inside. It was a beautifully simple system, ecologically as well economically sound.

Sadly, they don’t do the cans anymore, not since the company was taken over by a nephew and moved from the farm to an actual plant. Happily, they still taste as good but I must say some of the magic in them is gone. But I bring this up only to illustrate that potato chips are one of the other things I know something about. So when someone makes chips with beer — combining two of my great loves — then attention must be paid.

The creator of Beer Chips, Brett Stern, who’s a native New Yorker, flew down from Portland, Oregon (where he makes his chips) with boxes of his chips in tow. That gave me a better chance to try the chips, and I must say my first reaction is that they’re very tasty and highly addictive. Of course, that may be the added sugar, itself an unusual ingredient in potato chips. Generally, there are only three ingredients in what I’ll refer to as “craft chips” — let’s call it the spudheitsgebot — which are potatoes cooked in oil (either a vegetable oil or lard, most commonly) with salt added. I’m told the beer used is a bock style that is reduced to a powder and sprinkled on the chips during the cooking phase. And for the most part it works. They do seem to have just a hint of beer flavor and happily it’s not overpowering the way it is in barbecue or some other strongly flavored chip. I brought some home for my wife to try and she loves them, as well, and has become quite addicted. Now if I can only get BevMo to get off their bureaucratic arses and carry them in my neighborhod …

Here’s another review of Beer Chips from Chipworld.

These potato chips had a kettle-cooked texture and were crisp with varying levels of crunch. They earned praise around the chip bowl for being quite tasty. Most of our tasters thought that the chips did taste like beer, though some thought the beer taste was most noticeable on first bite and faded away after that. The chips were generally smallish with wiggly, irregular shapes, some folded over.

The Beer Chips table at GABF.