Brookston Beer Bulletin

Jay R. Brooks on Beer

Socialize

Hip Trip Trips Up on Beer Pairings

By

The Sunday edition of the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a syndicated feature news service for daily newspapers called the Rand McNally Travel News. As near as I can tell, a division of Rand McNally produces travel pieces for a number of prominent newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, the Dallas Morning News and others. With dwindling readership and severe under-staffing at many daily newspapers as most struggle to remain economically viable these days, they’re increasingly turning to syndicated content to supplement original staff-generated stories. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, in my opinion. As less and less people get their news from newspapers, they turn increasingly to AP, Reuters and other wire services, especially for their national and regional coverage, which has the effect of making them all look more and more the same. This homogenization loses them more readers which in turn causes them to layoff more staff and generate still less original content, which again causes a drop in readership.

Yesterday’s example of this cheap excuse for original content was by Mary Lu Laffey for the Rand McNally Travel News and the name of her monthly series is called “Hip Trip.” It’s apparently travel tips for younger people and presumably younger people with money since they would be the only ones who would plan their vacations. The “Hip Trip’s” tagline advice is simple. “Time and money may be in short supply for many younger travelers. Each month, Hip Trip brings you advice on how not to waste either.”

But whether by accident or design, her article is nothing short of an infomercial where in some cases she acts as a foil to corporate propaganda and at other times displays total ignorance for the subject at hand. It’s as if she took a press release, did no research or fact-checking, added a few sentences to personalize it and then added her byline. Of course, she appears to be writing in the first person as if she actually attended a beer dinner, but what we get is her impressions of the experience, what her host tells her and little else. There’s certainly no questions from Laffey as misinformation and laughable advice flows freely from Brent Wertz, chief executive chef at Kingsmill Resort. The Williamsburg, Virginia resort is, of course, an Anheuser-Busch company, a fact Laffey fails to disclose (or perhaps she’s not even aware of it). But it certainly makes what follows more understandable, if no less absurd. She undoubtedly had her beer dinner at the Eagles Restaurant, which lists three beer dinner menus on their website, one with Budweiser, one with Michelob Ultra Light and one with World Select.

So without further ado, let’s begin the show.

Laffey’s first few paragraphs are doozies, and they set an unquestioning tone that permeates the whole article. Here they are, in their entirety.

Brent Wertz doesn’t flinch as he twists open a bottle of ultra light, low-carb beer and pours it straight down the middle of a chardonnay glass. He tilts his head only slightly as he watches it splash big at the bottom. Wertz says the big splash is necessary to break the carbonation and to open the nose of the beer.

Stemmed glass? Nose? Beer?

That’s a big “yes” from Wertz, chief executive chef at Kingsmill Resort. He plans menus around beer, marinates and cooks with it, and passionately recommends beer whether you’re dining plain or fancy.

That’s a big “whoa” from me. In the bigger picture, does drinking beer with dinner mean I have to put keggers behind me?

Just out of curiosity, do many people “flinch” when opening a twist-off cap? Or is the pouring it into a chardonnay glass that should cause the twitch in her mind? Her next reaction — her quizzical “Stemmed glass? Nose? Beer?” aside — is becoming the standard neophyte knee-jerk in virtually every one of these type of pieces. Some ignorant journalist is shown beer in a different light for the first time (where were all these people living for the last 25 years, in a box? The Moon? Prison?) and their first reaction is always one of great surprise that someone might even be capable of taking beer seriously. Worldwide, people have been drinking beer from stemmed glassware for centuries. And did it never occur to anyone that at least the people making the beer would be smelling it, checking it’s “nose,” to insure they were making a consistent product? How out-of-touch with the real world and common sense do you have to be in order to be surprised that people might smell beer to gauge it’s quality? And finally there’s the kicker reaction, that it’s beer and that someone might think of it as more than cheap swill with no discernible flavors worth talking about. The pervasiveness today of this manufactured stereotype of beer as unworthy is frankly quite astonishing, especially from presumably educated journalists who one would assume would be paying a little more attention to the news than the average person that good craft beer has been around for over 25 years? How could anyone have completely missed that phenomenon to present actual shock when confronted with better beer? But here it is on display again, proving once again that the depths of ignorance in the press know no bounds.

When she gets her “big yes” from Kingsmill’s chef she responds with a “big whoa” and wonders whether she has to give up her apparently precious keggers, I feel like I’ve fallen into “Mary Lu’s Excellent Adventure” and I’m reading the term paper of a failing high school student. How bogus is that? Why she thinks that you can’t have fine beer with a meal and also enjoy beer from a keg in a totally different context is beyond my grasping. Perhaps she thinks there’s only one way to do anything, who knows? And the sentence seems to infer that this is the very first time she’s ever had a beer with dinner! How is that even possible?

Of course, I’m using the term “fine beer” here metaphorically since the only beers mentioned in the article by name are Michelob Ultra Light, Budweiser, and Michelob Amber Bock, not exactly “big” beers by any stretch of the imagination. But to our intrepid author, in her “90-minute sojourn into silver-placed settings on table linen, with stemmed glasses, haute cuisine – and beer” she does just that. She describes “swirling the contents of [her] burgundy glass” with its full-bodied Bud coat[ing] the sides of the glass” and imagined herself “talking about how the big flavor of this big beer exhaled deeper with each twirl.” Stop, stop, my sides are aching with laughter. Okay, no matter how much you love Budweiser it can’t reasonably be called “full-bodied.” Its flavor — if you can even call it that — is so light as to be almost non-existent. But to Mary Lu, this is “big beer” with “big flavor.” I wonder what she’d think of an Old Rasputin Imperial Stout? Or even Sierra Nevada Pale Ale?

For dessert, chef Wertz suggested that they needed “a lager big enough to stand up against chocolate” and gave them Michelob Amber Bock. I hope the double-fudge brownie torte they had for dessert wasn’t too chocolately, because that’s not a beer that can stand up to very much flavor and hold its own. She claims to have “found a rich, full lager that smelled a lot like coffee and caramel.” Uh-huh, that’s not my memory of this beer’s nose. And while I’m generally cautious about using the beer rating websites as a source, I think the Beer Advocate reviews of Michelob Amber Bock are pretty amusing and show a great disparity between the inexperienced beer drinker vs. the more experienced ones. Frankly, her description sounds like it came from a sale sheet provided by A-B.

But let’s turn now to her finale:

What a finale, I thought as I turned my attention to my double-fudge brownie torte. The dessert would put my taste buds to the test. Would they dare use beer in brownies? I bit into the brownie and tasted the caramel sauce that was hiding beneath it. I should have known that even a chef like Wertz would not mess with brownies.

That you’d have to “dare” to use beer in making brownies, implying more broadly that dessert really shouldn’t have beer it, once again demonstrates that we’re back to a high school mentality. Wow, what a revelation. I guess I’ll have to take back all the wonderful desserts I’ve enjoyed over the years made with beer in them. Because beer chef Bruce Paton, among many others, have made some amazing dishes using chocolate and beer. This spring he did an entire chocolate and beer dinner with Chimay and Scharffen Berger chocolate. And chef Eddie Blyden, when he was at 21st Amendment (he’s now at Magnolia), did a terrific multi-course meal in which every dish used both beer and chocolate, including the soup, salad and dessert with Cocoa Pete’s chocolate. And that’s just a small sampling in one city. All across the nation — and the world — people are and have for many years been cooking with beer, including desserts. Beer cook Lucy Saunders, for example, has two recipes for chocolate and beer dishes on her website. This is only news to the monumentally myopic and uninformed.

To be fair, her piece is aimed at young travelers, who apparently in the author’s mind would be as ignorant as she is, and there may be some element of truth to that. I’m no expert on youth culture. But with craft beer’s sales on the rise and a generation of young people turning 21 never having known a time when there wasn’t craft beer, such a position seems harder and harder to maintain. Come on, Rand McNally, why not get some writers who know about beer to write about beer. I double dare you.

Reading About Reading Beer

By

Don Russell, a.k.a. Joe Sixpack, had a startling piece of news in his latest Philadelphia Daily News column, my hometown beer is making a comeback! Reading (that’s pronounced “red-ding“) Beer’s advertising and merchandising stuff were about as ubiquitous as it gets for me growing up because I spent a lot of my youth in bars with my alcoholic stepfather (there, now you know). My memory of the beer is that it wasn’t any better or worse than most of what was available at that time. And by the time I was paying attention, it was already being brewed outside Reading, in Fogelsville, which at that time was still a Schaefer brewery, if memory serves.

The Reading Brewery opened in 1886 on South 9th and Little Laurel Streets and closed ninety years later in 1976, when I was a junior in high school. As Don points out, it had a very loyal following in the area. As recently as the late 1990s, I was home for a visit around the winter holidays and went bar-hopping with some old friends who were also in town. Most of the bars we went to not only still had quite a bit of Reading Beer breweriana on their walls but several still used Reading Beer and other local brewery coasters. I must confess I even pocketed a couple of them for myself, I was so taken aback that they were still using them and wanted proof.

So the new Legacy Brewing Co. (who are the same folks that previously owned Pretzel City Brewery) have announced that they will be bringing back Reading Beer in all its adjunct glory. (I confess I’d prefer if it was all-malt, but I won’t quibble.) They’ve even set up a new company just to handle the Reading Beer and keep it separate from the Legacy craft beers. Initially it will be draft only but if it proves popular — and quite frankly I can’t see how it won’t be — then bottles (or better still, cans) will follow in wider distribution. According to Russell’s article, since it was first announced in the local paper, The Reading Eagle, last week, the brewery has been inundated with inquiries.

And I must agree with Jack Curtin when he writes “I definitely like the way these guys think” about brewer Scott Baver’s rationale for bringing back Reading Beer.

“Look, we’re brewers. For me, I just love making beer and being part of the beer industry. But we’re business people, so why not make a product that covers every end of the spectrum?

“If my customer wants it, what am I, an idiot for not doing it?”

I know this was just a regional beer even in its heyday, and that very few people are likely to get worked up about it. But since I’m one of them, you’re reading about Reading here.

The can of Reading Beer that sits on a shelf next to where I typed these very words.

Rolling Rock Sale Finalized

By

While I was in Denver for GABF, the proposed sale between City Brewing of LaCrosse, Wisconsin was been finalized between them and InBev for the purchase of the Latrobe Brewery in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Over 150 union workers ratified a two-year contract. All that remains is an issue about increasing the amount of water available for the brewery and for dealing with the wastewater so that City Brewery can increase Latrobe’s capacity to two-million barrels annually. But the deal is done, and neither side is revealing the pricetag for the Latrobe Brewery. The brewery should re-open shortly, probably in the next few weeks, assuming the water issues are resolved quickly.

Latrobe Deal Not Done Yet

By

Once the news was out that City Brewery of La Crosse, Wisconsin was negotiating to buy the Latrobe Brewery, many people, myself included, stopped paying close attention to this story. You’ll recall that brewing giant InBev sold the brand name Rolling Rock to Anheuser-Busch on May 19 of this year. But the Latrobe Brewery where Rolling Rock had been brewed since 1939 was not part of the deal. It had been scheduled to close July 31 if a buyer could not be found and a mad scramble ensued involving local and state politicians, the media, imaginative rumors, InBev and all manner of possible buyers. Finally on June 21, it was announced that City Brewery was in negotiations. Everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief, and moved on to the next story.

But it’s been almost three months now and a deal to buy the brewery has still not been finalized. While negotiations are ongoing, the brewery closed July 31 and has been dormant since then. City Brewery met yesterday with officials from local and state agencies to work out issues surrounding how anticipated production increases will effect the capacity of water treatment facilities. Currently the brewery’s capacity is 1.3 million barrels and City Brewery wants to brew two million. Let’s hope the deal will be done soon and the now unemployed brewery employees can back to work.

Cans vs. Kegs

By

Okay, to me kegs are cans, just really big ones, so comparing them seems a little strange. But seriously, an article in today’s Baltimore Sun takes on the topic of football game tailgating and which beer works better, canned or kegged. Boy I miss H.L. Mencken.

The story details tailgating at Baltimore Ravens games and to answer the “kegs vs. cans” inquiry does some blind tasting using some frankly questionable methods. But, oh well, the beers chosen aren’t exactly my favorites though happily Bitburger does come out on top over the corn-fed Yuengling Lager. Though to be fair, among light indistrial lagers and related styles, Yuengling makes some reasonably decent beers.

But it’s his conclusion that had me laughing, in a good way:

I now think of canned beer as the equivalent of a wide receiver. It is mobile, easy to carry and, when poured in the glass, packs more taste wallop than expected. Keg beer is like a lineman. It has substantial body. It has to keep cold to perform well. But once it has iced down and assumed its spot in the middle of the action, it can not be moved until it is drained.

Chateau Jiahu from Dogfish Head

By

dogfish-head-green
There’s another new beer coming out from Dogfish Head. Sam Calagione’s latest creation is Chateau Jiahu, which is based on an ancient beverage discovered in a pottery jar “in the Neolithic villiage of Jiahu, in Henan province, Northern China.” Approximately 9,000 years old, the concoction was a fermented drink made with rice, honey and fruit. Dogfish Head again worked with Dr. Patrick McGovern, a molecular archeologist at the University of Pennsylvania to faithfully recreate — as far as possible — this ancient beverage.

Dogfish Head explains the process they used:

In keeping with historic evidence, Dogfish brewers used pre-gelatinized rice flakes, Wildflower honey, Muscat grapes, barley malt, hawthorn fruit, and Chrysanthemum flowers. The rice and barley malt were added together to make the mash for starch conversion and degredation. The resulting sweet wort was then run into the kettle. The honey, grapes, Hawthorn fruit, and Chrysanthemum flowers were then added. The entire mixture was boiled for 45 minutes, then cooled. The resulting sweet liquid was pitched with a fresh culture of Sake yeast and allowed to ferment a month before the transfer into a chilled secondary tank.

A very limited number of 750 ml bottles are being produced and should be in stores early next month. Artist Tara McPherson (who also did the label for Fort) did a beautiful label for this beer.

jiahu-dogfish-head

Shangy’s Sues Goliath InBev

By

Emmaus, Pennsylvania is a pint-sized town (of just over 11,000) a few miles south of Allentown and about 45 miles from Philadelphia. It’s a seemingly unlikely place for a beer store of this magnitude, but there it is. Tucked away on Main Street in Emmaus is Shangy’s, one of the best beer places in the state. (Side note: Emmaus is also the home of John Hansell’s fine Malt Advocate magazine.)

Started in 1980 by the Hadian family, their son Nima is now at the helm and the 35,000 square foot store carries over 3,000 brands, about double what the average BevMo did when I was there and three to four times the average BevMo store now. And Pennsylvania is a case state which, for those of you unfamiliar with that curious institution, means you can only buy beer by the case. This makes getting customers to take a chance on a new beer very difficult, but Pennsylvania’s liquor laws and state agencies seem to care very little about how its citizens are affected. I grew up there and I can tell you the system is messed up beyond belief and should be overhauled. Every state has its own set of peculiarities when it comes to alcohol laws, but Dutch Wonderland (my personal name for the state) got more than its fair share.

But Shangy’s managed to prosper in that environment for a number of reasons, not least of which is that they honestly care about the beer they’re selling. The word “Shangy,” by the way means “happy” in Nima’s native Farsi language, and it is his father’s nickname.
 

Inside Shangy’s during a trip I took there several years ago during a trip home.

Aisles and aisles of cases of beer at Shangy’s.
 

For the past decade, one of the many beers Shangy’s has done well promoting is Hoegaarden, a wit or white beer created by Pierre Celis in the 1960s when he single-handedly resurrected the style. Over time they have become the largest Hoegaarden wholesaler nationwide, moving as many 2,000 kegs each month. Hoegaarden is owned now by InBev, the world’s largest beer company (by volume of beer sold), with such brands as Beck’s, Brahma, Franziskaner, Labatt’s, Stella Artois, St. Pauli Girl, among more then 75 other local and national brands. They recently sold the Rolling Rock brand to Anheuser-Busch. Since InBev was formed by a merger in 2004, they have enjoyed a 14% share of the total world beer market.
 

 
In 1998, Shangy’s settled a lawsuit that “affirmed that Shangy’s was the exclusive wholesale distributor of Labatt products in 17 Pennsylvania counties,” which at the time included Hoegaarden. But with the 2004 merger, Labatt became an InBev subsidiary. Now Shangy’s contends that InBev, who recently gave distribution rights to another of its brands, Stella Artois, to a different beer distributor thus violating the eight-year old agreement. Shangy’s filed a lawsuit in Philadelphia this month seeking monetary damages along with a “court order compelling InBev to abide by the terms of the 1998 agreement.”

As we all know but few will say, “Hadian, who takes glee in ridiculing the mass-market beers, warns that consolidation will ultimately reduce the number of specialty brews on the market. Why? Because wholesalers will inevitably concentrate on selling mass-market, high-volume brands and neglect the craft brews, reducing their chances of survival, he says.”

I’m sure we’ll hear much more about this case as it proceeds. For now, there are more details on this story in an AP Story and a more local take by Lehigh Valley’s The Morning Call.

Blast From the Past: Genny Cream Ale

By

Cans of Genesee Cream Ale were de rigueur when I was growing up in Eastern Pennsylvania in the late 1970s. The simple green can design is emblazoned in my memory of that more simple time. It was certainly one of the favorite beers of my youth — at least in my memory — probably because cream ales are such a light, undemanding style. They fell out of fashion for a number of years, but lately several craft brewers are resurrecting the style as their lightest offering. It’s a much better alternative than making a low-calorie beer or American-style lager. High Falls Brewing, who has owned the brand for many years now, abandoned the all-green design sometime in the 1980s and when I carried it at BevMo in the mid-1990s all that was available were bottles with a paper label. Which is a shame. The beer itself I recall wasn’t great but was certainly serviceable and a decent session choice. It was that plain green can that had us all enraptured, though in retrospect I have no idea why.

High Falls is now trying to tap into that nostalgia I feel for the brand with a new retro-styled website at www.geneseecreamale.com. It’s a nice site but I don’t think they went back far enough because they’re still showing that damned paper label and a bottle on the main page. It does suffer the problem I have with virtually all big brewery sites — Flash. They’re so over the top with using flash technology instead of HTML that I hate navigating them. Maybe I’m in the minority here because I started hand-coding HTML back in the mid 90s, but I find it very annoying.
 

Sure, it’s a nice piece of breweriana, made to look older than it is, but where’s the can?

Frankly, this is how I will always remember Genesee Cream Ale. If they really want to tap into nostalgia, they need to bring back this can.

Judge Ponders: “What Is Beer?”

By

maps-pa
This may be funny only to me since it happened in my hometown of Reading, Pennsylvania (BTW, it’s pronounced “redding”) — or near enough, I grew up in a small suburb adjacent to Reading.

Back in January, a 17-year old testified that an adult bought him a case of Miller Genuine Draft but Berks County Court Judge Jeffrey K. Sprecher (obviously no relation to the Sprecher Brewery in Wisconsin) dismissed the charges because “the prosecution had failed to provide the state Liquor Control Board’s list of beers to prove the beverage was beer.” Makes sense to me, I consider Miller Genuine Draft to be not really beer, but a highly-engineered industrial food product. The judge also stated that it was “equally plausible that the defendant purchased a nonalcoholic beverage with a flavor similar to beer.” Clearly, he’s never tasted a non-alcoholic beer.

An appeals court has now overturned that ruling, stating that the minor’s “testimony was more than enough to establish that the beverage he was drinking was a malt or brewed beverage.” Wow, they actually believed a minor would know whether or not he was drinking beer or not. Now that’s funny.

mgd

Is it or isn’t it?

Landmark Returns

By

Landmark Beer Co., of Syracuse, New York, after a bit of a false start, has switxhed their contract brewery to Wagner Valley Brewing and the first two beers from their new relationship should be out shortly. Brewer/owner Kiernan May reworked the recipe for his India Red Ale (which was previously available beginning in 2004) and re-named it Colonel Hops Red Ale.

From the press release:

The former India Red Ale will be renamed Colonel Hops Red Ale. May’s new recipe has three times as much hops as the old beer, and since those hops are Centennial and Cascade, it will have the citrusy overtones and bitterness of a classic West Coast pale ale. It’ll be about 6 percent alcohol, or about a percentage point higher than a Budweiser.

The second beer, brand new, is Vanilla Bean Brown Ale. It’s an English-style brown ale, with the addition of Madagascar vanilla beans. It’s 4.8 percent alcohol.