Jeff Moses, who produces the Monterey Beer Festival, among several other Bay Area beer festivals, sent me this article about the festival that ran in San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, while I was still out of town vacationing with the family. It’s nice to see a beer festival get some good, positive press for a change.
Monterey Beer Festival Brew with a View
September 9, 12:30-5 p.m.
Monterey Fairgrounds, Monterey, California
Autumn brings many changes, even here in California where the change of seasons is not as dramatic as in more temperate areas. But regardless of specific climate, throughout the country, it’s harvest time. Only the exact date to begin picking changes. For Moonlight Brewing and Russian River’s combined hop harvest, that date was Monday.
A little more then ten years ago, small breweries began making “fresh hop beers,” which are usually ales made with freshly picked hops thrown into the boil as soon as possible after they were picked from the vine, often within a few hours of being harvested. Usually, many times more fresh hops are used than in ordinary brews and aficionados claim that fresh hopping enhances aromas. It may be merely a perceptional advantage, but to my mind — and senses — they definitely do have great aromas and flavors.
These beers are also known by other names, including “wet hop beers” and “harvest ales.” Sierra Nevada Brewing’s Harvest Ale was undoubtedly one of the first and today is sold in every state. But most remain small batches, generally limited by the fresh hops themselves, as well as other factors. Over the years, an increasing number of breweries are now making fresh hop beers, including Alpine Brewing of San Diego (WHAle, Wet Hopped Ale), Deschutes Brewery of Bend, Oregon (Hop Trip Harvest Ale), Dogfish Head of Delaware (Fed-Extra Mid), East End Brewing of Pittsburgh (Big Hop Harvest Ale), Great Divide Brewing of Denver (Maverick Fresh Hop Pale Ale), Left Hand Brewing of Longmont, Colorado (Warrior IPA), Rogue Ales of Newport, Oregon (Hop Heaven), and Victory Brewing of Downingtown, Pennsylvania (Harvest Pilsner) to name only a few.
On Monday, I helped out with the hop harvest of cascade, chinook and red vine hops grown on the property at Moonlight Brewing and shared with Russian River Brewing for the two breweries’ fresh hop beers. Moonlight’s is called Homegrown (in some places) and Russian River’s is know as HopTime. It was a lot fun — though today I’m still a little sore and scratched up — and took about five or six hours to complete the harvest. Then both brewers retired to their respective breweries to begin the process of making their fresh hop ales. The rest of us enjoyed a yummy lunch at Russian River provided by Natalie Cilurzo, the hop queen of Russian River Brewing.
Barley, the dog, adorned with fresh hops plays in the hopyard.
The Moonlight/Russian River hopyard.
Brewers Brian Hunt, assistant brewer Travis, and Vinnie Cilurzo in their hopyard.
Brian Hunt on a ladder cutting down hopvines from ten-foot wires strung across the yard.
Then the bottoms are cut so the vines can be moved for picking.
The volunteer hop pickers in front of Moonlight’s brewery.
Everybody works in a circle picking the hop cones from the vine and collecting them in buckets.
A mound of hopvines ready to be picked. Cascade and Chinook hops are mixed in the pile.
Hops on the vine.
Stored in a bucket after picking.
A third hop is kept separate. This is Red Vine, a type of cluster hop.
Vinnie Cilurzo picking Red Vine hops.
Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal did a feature article about Fresh Hop Beers. If you don’t have a subscription, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette syndicated the story and “To toast a new crop, brewers roll out ‘wet hop’ beer” is available online. I’ve been complaining lately that only smaller and regional traditional media is covering beer so it’s nice to see a big player step up. Though according to insiders, the story took many weeks to get approval and the author had to advocate persistently to finally get it published.
The Metro, San Jose’s alternative weekly might not be exactly mainstream, but when I lived in the area the years ago, it was a pretty good paper. This week’s edition features a short little column listing five recently discovered health benefits associated with drinking alcohol in moderation. These included a healthier heart, lungs, bone density, help in fighting cholesterol, and reducing the risk of a stroke.
Forbes.com, the online part of the conservative financial organization, announced recently their list of the nation’s “drunkest cities.” Here’s the full list:
Setting aside the inanity of such a list, how — one might reasonably wonder — did they come up with such a list and keep a straight face?
Well here’s what they have to say:
Each city was ranked in five areas:
- state laws
- drinkers
- heavy drinkers
- binge drinkers
- alcoholism
Each metro was assigned a score in each category, based on quantitative data. All five categories were then totaled into a final score, which was sorted into our final rankings. For a fuller explanation, read the methodology used.
But here they are in nutshell, with some of my own commentary.
1. State Laws:
Cities were ranked on a scale of 1 to 8, with states deemed to have the least restrictive laws getting a higher score. They considered such intangibles as whether MADD liked that state’s alcohol laws, whether there was a law banning open containers and if kegs had to be tagged with identifying tags. Well, how scientific. How any of those vague standards can be said to make one state more “drunk” than another is simply ludicrous. The idea that a more permissive society in and of itself causes alcohol abuse or even leads to it is specious at best. Just because open containers are allowed, for example, does not mean citizens will necessarily abuse alcohol. That such a flimsy set of criterion was used and is being reported seriously is astounding.
2. Drinkers:
Cities were ranked from highest to lowest and given a score based on the number of each town’s residents who admitted to having one drink in the last month. One drink! Have we really gone so far down the neo-prohibitionist path that one drink in 30 days is equal to being an alcohol abuser? The idea that the more people who have one drink each month, the more abuse is occurring in a geographic area is so fallacious that it’s downright insulting. They use the seemingly non-judgmental term to describe this as a larger “percentage of [the town’s] population are alcohol consumers.” Well so what? last time I checked alcohol was still legal in this country and I can hardly see how a drink a month rises to the level where any reasonable person would be concerned.
3. Heavy Drinkers:
Scored similar to #2, but this time it was based on “the number of adult men who reported having had more than two drinks per day, and adult women having had more than one drink per day.” Apparently that’s what constitutes a “heavy drinker.” It doesn’t appear to make a difference what type of drink it is which apparently means there’s no difference between three pints of beer and three pints of whiskey per day. Yeah, that seems reasonable. So a beer with lunch and two with dinner and you’re a heavy drinker!
4. Binge Drinkers:
Scored like the previous two, the Forbes survey defined “binge drinking” as five or more drinks on one occasion. Is that ever? Within a year? What? To say that if you’ve ever had five beers at one party makes you a binge drinker is beyond ridiculous. It’s more than a little misleading to suggest that drinking one beer short of a six-pack one time makes you anything bad at all. Take the Super Bowl as an example. With pregame, long commercial breaks, an overblown half-time show and post game analysis it weighs in easily at least as long as five hours. So if you had one beer every hour during that one occasion you were a binge drinker according to Forbes and the CDC. Sure you are. What utter rubbish.
5. Alcoholism:
As laughably contemptible as the first four criteria were, this one takes the cake. Scoring was done “based on the number of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings held in the area, as a proportion of the number of residents over the legal drinking age.” Okay, personally I don’t agree with the idea of AA. To me, people are simply trading one addiction for a more socially acceptable one. But it obviously does work for some people and at least those who go to AA are trying to help themselves. So to measure a town’s relative drunkenness by the number of people trying to help themselves is not only wildly off the mark, it’s highly insulting to those attending the meetings. Is there a calculation or formula that explains how many people are alcoholics but not seeking help through AA. Are there no other methods, perhaps even private ones or clinics, besides AA?
The ways in which these results were calculated is so completely outside the realm of reality that it’s amazing an organization so supposedly respectable would have anything to do with it. I haven’t even scratched the surface on the ways in which these results are misleading and just plain wrong. They’re just too obvious and there are too many ways in which to show how embarrassingly disgraceful this list is.
A report on the survey by television station KPTV Channel 12 in Oregon added the following:
Forbes pointed out some surprising results. Some stereotypically “partying” cities didn’t rank high on the list. Las Vegas came in at only No. 14; New Orleans, home to Bourbon Street and Mardi Gras, only ranked in 24th place. And a town known for spring-break revelers, Miami, was only No. 33 on a list of 35 cities.
Well, perhaps it was the way in which the rankings were created in the first place. Given the amount of alcohol that flows in Las Vegas, couldn’t that fact alone be a clue that the results are erroneous? Saying people drink more in Providence, Rhode Island or Columbus, Ohio than in Vegas isn’t just “surprising,” it’s downright fiction. It could only come out that way if you design the survey to have little or no basis in reality.
So given how obviously absurd this all is, you have to wonder why an outfit like Forbes would put its name on something like this and publish it at all. It’s not exactly obvious what they’re up to. But if you look closely at the other items in Forbes’ “The Business of Nightlife,” of which America’s Drunkest Cities is just one part, there’s a link to an article entitled Cutting Alcohol’s Cost. This article is about the costs that people drinking — not even necessarily on the job — brings to businesses in increased health care and lower productivity. I should have guessed it would return, as things tend to do, to money. And their assertions that people who abuse alcohol do cause those problems may even be correct, but they completely ignore any factors that might cause their workers to drink, as if people generally make conscious choices to become alcoholics. And while there may be a few who are genetically predisposed to drink too much, I’m willing to bet that the stress of their jobs made as many or more drink too much as any other factor.
A study by the George Washington University Medical Center examined the incidence of “problem drinkers” (whatever that means) by different industries broadly defined and found that in the general population for every thousand people, an average of 91 are problem drinkers. The industries with higher than average problem drinking included:
At the bottom of the list was professionals with only 54 in every 1,000. But notice the jobs most associated with drinking are also the ones with the highest stress, the lowest wages and/or the lowest respect. Professionals have unquestionably the highest income among the list and so it’s not terribly surprising that the have fewer problems with drinking. But Forbes knows its readers and so is more interested in how to get more productivity out of low-level employees by getting them to stop drinking than addressing the root causes of that drinking. They could just as reasonably suggested that to avoid drinking problems employers should pay them better, treat them with more respect and not put so much pressure on them that severe stress is produced. But sympathy for labor has rarely been considered by big business.
Curiously, but perhaps not surprisingly, big business was generally very supportive of the first temperance movements that agitated for prohibition in the late 1800s and into the early part of the last century. The industrial revolution had recently changed the business landscape and with workers using so many more machines, business owners looked for ways to keep their employees sober. Of course, making the machines safer, having shorter work hours or better working conditions overall might also have been beneficial to the workers, but it would have cost the business owners profits. Better they try to change the workers habits both on the job and more intrusively off the job. So many businesses gave money to support temperance groups and helped usher in a climate where prohibition was possible, all in the name of commerce. Breweries saw it all coming, of course, and tried to counteract the temperance movement with moderation PR campaigns and ads that focused on the tradition and heritage of beer. But it was too little, too late, and Prohibition decimated the industry and probably led to the Great Depression.
Then as now, business didn’t care about why their workers drank. That might focus attention on their own actions and it does nothing for the bottom line. Labor unions were created because so many were treated so unfairly for so long. If it weren’t for labor unions, we’d all still be working six or even seven days a week, far more than 8 hours a day and have far less safe working environments. All of these and more happened because workers fought to improve their lives and business fought these innovations every step of the way.
From the Forbes article:
Each year, alcohol abuse costs the United States an estimated $185 billion, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. But only $26 billion, 14% of the total, comes from direct medical costs or treating alcoholics. Almost half, a whopping $88 billion, comes from lost productivity — a combination of all those hangovers that keep us out of work on Monday mornings, as well as other alcohol-related diseases. People who drink too much and too often are at greater risk for diabetes and several kinds of cancer, according to some studies.
“Alcohol is a worthless drug that affects every single cell in your body,” says Harris Stratyner, director of addiction recovery services at Mount Sinai Medical Center. Even hair transplants can fail because of the damage, he says.
“A worthless drug”? I know millions of people who might take issue with that statement. Anything and everything has the capacity to be abused. You could overdose on aspirin. That doesn’t make it a worthless drug, does it? People drink for many different reasons, of course, but certainly its popularity comes at least partly from the temporary positive effects alcohol has on the body. It allows one to relax, feel a little bit less stress for a period of time, give a feeling of euphoria. That some people might crave that feeling more often than others is directly proportional to how they feel about the rest of their lives. If you have a crappy job, a bad love life, etc. you might reasonably seek ways to feel better, and that might include alcohol. To ignore this, and other reasons why people might drink too much, in addressing alcohol’s impact on society is to overlook one of the most important aspects of the problem.
This series of stories by Forbes, and especially this last one addressing the relationship between worker productivity and alcohol, is startlingly reminiscent of big businesses’ support for prohibition groups over a century ago. And like the Anti-Saloon League, American Temperance Society and the Prohibition Party (among many others) the neo-prohibitionist groups of today are gaining power, especially political power. If business is truly once again supporting neo-prohibitionist causes to increase worker productivity, then we may be in for some dark days ahead. Today’s politics, of course, is very closely aligned with business interests so it doesn’t seem too far a leap to suggest that the conditions are once again repeating themselves in such a way that the possibility of another prohibition doesn’t seem as far-fetched as might have even a decade ago. That news alone might drive me to have another drink.
There was as interesting overview of the obstacles of buying, selling and making organic beer in the Star-Telegram last week. The article had a special emphasis on its market in Texas, but also had a decent amount of general information.
I realize that the Ventura County Reporter isn’t exactly mainstream media, but they’re in print and people believe what they read in print, so they’re fair game as far as I’m concerned, especially when they wear their ignorance on their sleeve. A regular column in the alternative weekly, called Body Politics, is written by Robert Ferguson, who apparently is a diet guru, at least according his byline, which reads:
Robert Ferguson is recognized as the weight loss “guru” and wellness expert, co-author of Fat That Doesn’t Come Back, speaker and has Diet Free Life offices in Southern California. E-mail him at robert@dietfreelife.com, or visit his Web site at www.dietfreelife.com.
Apparently in his column each week he answers questions sent in by readers. This week’s is particularly troubling. The question is innocuous enough, here it is:
You often talk about the benefits of drinking wine, but what about beer?
— Cia W., Thousand Oaks
Okay, Bobby, you got my attention, please tell me. What are the benefits of drinking beer? He brings up only one of the numerous studies showing health benefit for moderate beer drinking, this about “men who drank 11-24 pints” having a 66% reduced chance of getting a heart attack over teetotalers who drank none at all. All well and good, but he also says that the scientists conducting the study were “shocked” by the findings. Hardly. It’s not like the health benefits of beer is a new phenomenon. People have known beer is good for them for millennia and there were centuries when it was preferable to water, health-wise. But it shows his true disdain for beer while at the same time trying to appear unbiased.
Ignoring the many other and different ways beer provides health benefits, he then suggests that “[j]ust because there is a hint [my emphasis] of health associated with beer doesn’t mean it’s to your benefit to rush out and purchase a case of your favorite flavor.” Setting aside that beer doesn’t really come in “flavors,” but styles, just because he apparently knows only about a single study doesn’t mean there’s only a hint of benefits. A simple Google search of “health benefits of beer” would have revealed to him over 9 million hits! Even if only a tiny fraction were legitimate scientific studies, that would still be many more than one. Just in the last few years, there have been many new major findings on the health benefits of beer. But why use facts, when as a “guru” you can pretend to know what you’re talking about.
But Bobby’s not done insulting beer yet, as he ends with this bit of wisdom:
The challenge with beer is that it’s not usually sipped, but guzzled. And guzzling positions you to consume more than if you were to sip it.
Now here was a perfect opportunity to educate Cia and his readers that there are thousands of great beers designed to be sipped rather than knocked back. But instead Bobo, who appears to know precious little about beer, chose instead to recommend the following:
If you want weight loss however, choose a five-ounce glass of wine instead.
Dammit this is the sort of thing that if I were a cartoon would make smoke shoot out of my ears. Why does wine always get trotted out as this saintly stuff, perfect for a diet? Ferguson cautioned earlier in the article that beer had “alcohol and calories,” making it bad for dieting, apparently. But so does wine. And ounce for ounce wine has more calories than beer does. There’s 100 calories in five ounces of wine, while a similar amount of beer contains (depending on the amount of protein) between 50-75 calories which is — say it with me — less. Why couldn’t he have suggested that Cia share a nice bottle of Cuvee de Tomme (Ventura is in Southern California, after all) with some friends, having only five ounces herself in a nice tulip glass? She was asking about beer, after all, not wine. But talk of alcohol and health always seems to work its way back to grapes, despite the mounting evidence of beer’s positive benefits in a myriad of areas. This perception of wine as angelically good and beer as demonically bad is one tough nut to crack. People seem very, very attached to this misconception. We could debate the reasons for this and where the culpability lies, but that’s for another day. The fact is our cause it not helped by so-called experts like this guy who in his zeal to sell diet books, magazines and his online weight loss program, ignores the facts and plays on old stereotypes to misinform the public.
Robert Ferguson, the “Diet Guru.” “Remember kids, don’t guzzle that beer, you’ll get fat.“
No one in his right mind would argue that it’s better to drink beer directly from the bottle or can, yet thousands — perhaps millions — of people do that every single day. So getting people to first pour their beer into some type of vessel, preferrably a glass one, is job one. The advantages should be obvious. The head produced when you pour beer into a glass releases carbon dixoide (CO2) and makes the beer much less gassy. That’s why bottle drinkers burp and … well, you know. Also, the CO2 gets in the way of whatever flavor is in the beer because it overpowers it, so it’s absoluetly essential that you let the beer breathe. Usually that one big exhale when you pour it is enough, but what’s the best way to pour your beer into the glass?
On this point, many people differ, often bitterly. Today’s Sun-Sentinnel (which covers south Florida) has an article entitled “Beer foam foments flavor,” which explores this idea of a right way to pour a beer in surprising detail.
Boston Beer’s Jim Koch weighs in first, saying “A nice collar of foam around a glass of beer not only is aesthetically pleasing but serves a real function.”
He continues in the article:
“As the CO2 [carbon dioxide] rises in the glass, the beer will capture some of the hop aroma, and the foam releases this aroma,” Koch says. The more protein in the beer, the more sizable and durable the head.
The practice was so widespread, Koch says, that the ritual of pouring a glass with a good collar of foam practically disappeared, unless one happened on a knowledgeable bartender.
Pour the beer down the middle of a slightly tilted glass, straightening the glass gradually. If it is a bottle-conditioned beer, you can leave a half-inch of liquid in the bottle to keep the yeast sediment from clouding your beer.
Next up, Grady Hull, assistant brewmaster at New Belgium Brewing, who “agrees that the foam affects the flavor.” His take:
“Some aromas are released by the foam, and others are held in to be released as the beer is consumed,” Hull says. “It’s also an indication of the content of the beer. Beers made with cheap adjuncts like rice and corn are typically low in foam because they are low in protein.”
Lastly, Sam Calagione, of Dogfish Head Brewing, adds that “a good inch (two fingers) of froth on a glass of craft beer” is ideal.
CAMRA, unfortunately, while having done much else that is good, has been whining for years that a large head is cheating consumers out of their full pint of beer. They’ve been stubbornly demanding taller and taller glasses so that the liquid comes up to a pint line and the foam extends beyond it but still is in the glass. But the foam, of course, consists of a percentage of liquid which slides back into the glass as the bubbles dissipate. This argument for larger glasses always struck me as pedantic. A pint is 16 oz., not 20 oz., as is the British Imperial Pint. If pub owners want to end this argument, all they need do is stop selling pints and instead offer a glass of beer (which then could be of any size) for a set price. That the word “pint” is the trouble strikes me as fairly ridiculous. But I think this had led many to believe that a good-sized head is not desireable, and that is not the case at all.
Here in the states, the American-style lagers manufactured by the big breweries are all very highly carbonated, most likely to mask the lack of flavor underneath. One thing you can say about the big guys is they’re not stupid. These beers from the bottle have to be poured down the side of the glass, otherwise you’ll have foam everywhere. Notice you rarely, if ever, see their products in a glass in print or television ads. Letting an American-style lager breathe will reveal more of it’s actual flavor and that’s not necessarily something they want to do. So I was particularly puzzled to discover that the Beertender Guide to Serving Packaged Beer actually suggests the following:
Don’t pour the beer by the “down-the-side” method. This minimizes the foam, and the beer looks flat and will taste gassy. CO2 is retained in the beer and swallowed, so your customers fill up faster — and they may not have room for snacks or a meal.
The Beertender Guide is maintained by Anheuser-Busch for their wholesalers. It’s shared content that any of them can use on their individual websites and/or to train their employees. Their advice on pouring is also quite interesting.
For the smoothest taste, pour beer to produce a nice head or collar of foam.
- Place the neck of the bottle or lip of the can over the edge of a clean glass or cup.
- Quickly raise the bottom of the bottle or can to a high angle, causing the beer to agitate into the glass.
- Lower the bottom of the bottle or can to reduce the flow until the foam rises to the rim.
This flies in the face of some conventional wisdom, especially the 45° angle theory, which is quite prevalant among most craft brewers. Beer Advocate, for example, in their advice on How To Pour Beer, advocates this method and even has a little online video of founder Todd Alström pouring a glass of Mendocino’s Eye of the Hawk to show this technique. Go watch it. Go on, I’ll wait. Like most of the advice in Beer Advocate’s Beer 101 pages, there’s a lot of good information there but this I think illustrates why the 45° angle is partially flawed. He’s using an imperial pint glass, of course, which is for 20 oz. of liquid and the bottle is 12 oz. which is fine. I, too, like and often use imperial pint glasses depending on the beer style. But notice at the end of the video, where his fingers come to rest at the edge of the foam, that the head produced looks to be maybe one finger thick. But the ideal head is at least around 1-1½ in., which is about two fingers on most of us. Now personally, I like a good thick head, more on the order of 1½ to 2 inches. That’s how important I think it is to blow off the gasses in the beer and get to the remaining flavor. And the 45° angle method just doesn’t get it done. It’s not bad per se, but in many cases it’s simply ineffective for getting a thick, pillowy head going. I prefer the following:
This is a dynamic process that much be watched constantly and continually adjusted for to get the head just right. Maybe it requires more concentration but it’s well worth it in my opinion, because of how important the results are.
Now I realize I’ve ignored certain exceptions, like bottle-conditioned beers, and certain styles with their own peculiarities, such as stouts or hefeweizens, but for the majority of beers, I think my method works quite well. This is especially true if your goal is to produce a generous head, and I think that’s crucially important to getting the full enjoyment out of your bottle of beer.
UPDATE: SeattleBeerGuy sent me the following tidy little article entitled Pouring the Perfect Pint from Pacific Brew News, which is a similar method to mine, but also includes a bit more detail.
There was in interesting profile of Stone Brewing in last week’s San Diego Business Journal. The article begins by suggesting that “San Diego has earned the distinction of being one of the top craft beer capitals in the country” which is correct, but it’s still nice to see it acknowledged by the business press.
Somewhat surprisingly, this is the second article from a Florida newspaper in recent weeks about pairing food with beer. Today’s South Florida Sun-Sentinel has a short article entitled The right foods can elevate beer by Food Editor Deborah S. Hartz. The focus of the story is a monthly beer dinner put on by Trina, a Fort Lauderdale restaurant in the Atlantic Hotel.
A couple of days ago, Evan Rail had an interesting travel piece in the New York Times entitled The Ultimate Beer Run in the Czech Republic. The focus is naturally more travel-oriented but Rail speaks a lot about the beer there. Happily, Garrett Oliver is on hand (via phone) to lend a hand and give the beer info some context and history.
Bohemia is the western part of what today is known as the Czech Republic.