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Hip Trip Trips Up on Beer Pairings

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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.

Bob Lachky: “Here’s to Advertising”

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Bob Lachky, the man responsible for Anheuser-Busch‘s Here’s to Beer public relations campaign, has a new job. According to a report in today’s AdAge Lachky has been named Anheuser-Busch’s chief creative officer by Augie IV, who has worked closely with him for twenty years. This means he will be responsible for “all the brewer’s agency relationships and creative output” and, as one insider put it, “Bob is going to be an integral part of the new regime.”

It will be interesting to see what will happen to the Here’s to Beer campaign, since much of it was closely associated with Lachky personally.

Bob Lachky

Stephen Beaumont vs. New York Magazine

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Earlier today I got an e-mail from my friend and colleague, Stephen Beaumont:

I like it when consumer magazines publish stories about beer, I really do, even when I don’t write them. But it pisses me off when they accord such a noble and respected beverage about one-twentieth of the respect and consideration they would wine or cognac or gourmet chocolate bars.

Case in point is the new issue of New York Magazine and its panel review of 21 beers. On the surface, it looks like an okay story, but the more you get into it, the more its flaws are exposed. Which is why I’ve written a rebuttal to the piece.

At the most basic, I’m sending you this simply to bring these stories to your attention and get your reaction. At the most, I’d love to spread the message around a bit so that hopefully these kind of review pieces might eventually become the exception rather than the rule.

Amen. This is the same kind of hatchet job I’ve been complaining about a lot lately. Read the original story in New York Magazine first and then Stephen’s rebuttal. Go ahead, I’ll wait. When you come back, I’ve got a few things to add to Beaumont’s wonderful critique.

Finished? Good, here’s a few random observations I can add. First off, the article is titled Ales in Comparison. But of the 21 beers reviewed — the ones “in Comparison” — nine are lagers and four are hybrid wheat styles, meaning more than half are not ales. That would be like having a tasting of eight red wines, nine white wines and four champagnes and calling the whole thing “Red Wines in Comparison.” That would be ridiculous, of course, but it’s exactly what New York Magazine did here in their zeal to be clever.

In his introduction, author Ben Mathis-Lilley claims Budweiser and Stella Artois taste the same. While I’m not a great fan of Stella Artois, on any given day it does taste decidedly different from Budweiser. And though both are adjunct beers, I’ll drink Stella Artois whereas I’d pass on a Bud, the point being they’re different enough that they can’t reasonably be called “taste-alikes” as Mathis-Lilley does.

The tasters are described as a “panel of untrained but enthusiastic drinking aficionados.” Well how scientific. Forget for a moment that calling an “enthusiastic” drinker an “aficionado” is probably oxymoronic, but what value is there in the opinion of people not trained to judge and/or evaluate the quality of a beer? Why is is you never see wine evaluated by enthusiastic amateurs, but it’s fairly common for newspaper articles to assemble an unnamed group of people to taste beer with no training and then report their findings as if they were all Robert Parker? Why do they assume one needs no training to evaluate beer? It’s preposterous, of course, and one more reminder of how ignorant the wine and food media is about beer. Wine takes years of training to learn, its nuanced flavors reveal themselves only to the sophisticated, discerning palate. But beer? That swill can be tasted by anybody — no training necessary — just throw a bunch of random bottles in a styrofoam cooler and voilà, you’ve got a story.

Even if I knew nothing about beer, why should I care if another person, equally ignorant, didn’t like a particular beer. In the New York Magazine article, negative descriptors such as “sissy,” “too girlie” or “eh” are used to describe some of the beers. What does that tell me about how they taste? Absolutely nothing, of course, which makes this entire exercise all but meaningless. In the first group of random beers, some of the panelists even correctly described one of the beers which was revealed in an aside as “accurately, according to our moderator.” So if they comment that on one of the beers some of the tasters actually got it right, showing by mentioning it they were surprised, what does that say about how wrong they got all the others? And if they got it wrong most of the time, as I suspect they must have, why report on it at all? What value does having the opinions of people with no training and no proficiency for what they’re tasting being used to educate others about what they taste like? Isn’t that like asking a blind person to describe a color?

And as Beaumont points out, the tasting flights have almost no logic to them and the beers tasted against one another bear no relation to each other, which would make it difficult for the seasoned taster, and all but impossible for the neophyte. It’s a process doomed to fail from the start, and another reason why this tasting is so comical. I’d be laughing except for the fact that some people will probably take this seriously and base their buying decisions on the article in what is otherwise considered an influential publication.

Also, in the article, the author gives the following advice. “Beer-pairing rule of thumb: Match up similar flavors.” Which is the same as saying white wines with fish. While such a rule of thumb may sometimes work, it’s extremely limiting and rigid, and ignores what choosing a contrasting beer might add to the experience.

For one of the beers, the only thing said about it was it “had a funny name.” How condescending. Thanks. That’s very helpful for me if I might want to drink it. But it’s indicative of the tone of the entire piece. There’s very little here that’s actually useful and they seem to have a great deal of trouble taking the subject seriously so I’m left with one final question. Exactly what is the point of this article?

 

 
UPDATE: New York Magazine invited Stephen to write a letter to the editor for their next issue. In the hopes of having it carry more weight, he graciously invited other beer writers to also sign the letter. Six of us agreed to sign it. In addition to me and Beaumont, the letter was also signed by Julie Bradford (All About Beer), Lew Bryson, Tom Dalldorf (Celebrator Beer News) and John Hansell (Malt Advocate).

 
UPDATE (10.27): New York Magazine has now printed Stephen Beaumont’s letter to the editor.

GABF 2006: The Awards

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This year, 450 breweries entered 2402 in the competition for one of 207 possible medals in 69 categories. The average number of beers entered in each category was 35, with American-style IPAs again having the most with 94 submitted. The award ceremony is always an exciting time, the rough equivalent of the Oscars for the beer industry. Though it’s undoubtedly with much better beer and without the bother of having to wear a tuxedo or ball gown.

Rich Norgrove and Team Bear Republic from Healdsburg, California won four awards and the big award for Small Brewery Company and Small Brewing Company Brewer of the Year.

With Vinnie’s parents, Vince and Audre in attendance for the first time, Vinnie and Natalie Cilurzo frm Russian River Brewing won three medals, including a Gold Medal for Pliny the Elder.

Owner Brendan Moylan, brewer Shane, and head brewer Arne Johnson of Marin Brewing (one of my local haunts) in Larkspur, California took home another medal this year.
 

For many, many more photos from the GABF awards, visit the photo gallery.

GABF Winners Announced

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The winner were announced for the 2006 Great American Beer Festival earlier today. California won a total of 39 medals, more than any other state. California brewers won 11 gold medals, 15 silver and 13 bronze. Next was Colorado with 28 medals followed by Wisconsin with 18. Oregon came in 4th with 14 medals and Washington was in 6th place with nine medals. The BA has a full list of the winners available.

Healdsburg, California’s Bear Republic Brewing won Brewery & Brewer of the Year in the Small Brewing Company category.

Here’s to American Brew

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I knew Florentine Films, which is the Ken Burns’ documentary film production company, was working on a film on the history of craft beer but I didn’t know exactly who was doing it or what it was precisely. There are four directors at Florentine Film. In addition to Burns, there’s also Larry Hott, Roger Sherman and Buddy Squires. A PA had contacted me looking for old pictures of Bert Grant and some other very early craft brewers. My photos didn’t go back as far as they needed so I put them on to the Celebrator’s photo archive, which does. The depth and breadth of who they were looking for was very impressive and certainly inferred they had done their homework. I was eagerly anticipating a high-profile film about the history of our peculiar industry. Between that and Beer Wars, which was shot last year and is apparently being edited now, it seems like we may be on the brink of some wonderful opportunities for people to find out what craft beer is — perhaps for the first time — and maybe seek it out and drink it in, literally.

Surprisingly, I discovered when a press release via e-mail appeared in my inbox that in fact the film American Brew is being sponsored by “Here’s to Beer,” the A-B sponsored effort to educate people about beer. I have, of course, not been won over by that effort and have said some very harsh words about it. Just look at the post before this one for a flavor of my discontent. But every thing about this film that they’re sponsoring looks great. The people involved seem beyond reproach. Roger Sherman, who is directing the film, is no stranger to film-making and has several awards under his belt to prove it. And many of the people listed on the film’s teaser poster I count as my friends. So unlike, say Beerfest, everything I know about this movie is positive and I’m looking very forward to actually seeing this one.

The one niggling thing about it is that essentially Anheuser-Busch paid for what at least appears to be a film that at first blush doesn’t seem like it will do them any favors. Maybe I’m missing something here, but a film that finally shows the history of innovative, small authentic craft beer would by contast not show the big breweries in a particularly flattering light. I certainly want to believe that A-B’s influence on the project will not extend to the substance and content of the movie, but it’s hard not to speculate. The trailer will be debuting at GABF and it will be interesting to see it. Let’s hope we’ll all be able to say, without reservation, “Here’s to American Brew.”

 

NBWA Gives Bob Lachky Beer’s “Medal of Freedom”

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The National Beer Wholesalers Association (NBWA) gave its Industry Service Award to Anheuser-Busch executive VP Bob Lachky. In their press release, the NBWA stated that the reason they gave the award to Lachky was for “his efforts to promote beer and the important role distributors play in the marketplace”

From the press release:

“August Busch IV created the Global Industry Development group because we firmly believe that everyone in the industry must work to sell and grow the entire category,” Lachky said. “It has been a privilege to work with NBWA and its members and I am thrilled to accept this award on behalf of Here’s To Beer and Anheuser-Busch. Seeing the signs of beer industry improvement this year, we think we are making progress.”

Since late last year, Lachky has spearheaded the “Here’s To Beer” industry initiative. The grassroots campaign to elevate the image of beer focuses on three key areas:

  1. Reminding consumers of the social value of beer — it brings people together in an unpretentious way.
  2. Romancing the product and the art of brewing — reinforcing beer’s refreshment, all natural ingredients and the beauty of its liquid.
  3. Encouraging consumers to view beer differently — giving them new ways to enjoy beer including ideas and recipes for pairing with food.

Well, good for Bob. I’m sure he’s a terrific guy. And as I’ve said before the “idea” of an industry-wide promotion of the positive aspects of beer à la “Got Milk?” is something the industry sorely needs. I hate beating a dead horse, but the wine industry’s efficacy in educating their consumers and raising the standards for wine put us as an industry to shame. Sure they’ve had more money and more built-in appeal (or high-end prejudice), but that’s not all they’ve been fortunate about. Perhaps most importantly, Gallo (and the other large-scale wine producers) haven’t been undermining those efforts for decades the way the big brewery’s advertising has damaged the image of beer. Craft beer’s challenge has been far more Sisyphean in nature. For every positive step craft beer has moved forward, talking frogs, man law, flatulent horses, twins and all manner of other juvenilia has dragged us back down again. As a result, many people remain deliriously ignorant of what good beer even is, never mind how best to enjoy it.

So for the segment of the industry most responsible for the negative associations that beer has today to take up the fight to improve beer’s image seems downright Orwellian to me. Kafka would have a hard time understanding this one. Yet many of my colleagues remain optimistic about this program or have remained silent about it. We all think the industry needs what the stated goals of “Here’s to Beer” are, but given A-B’s transparent agenda, how can anyone take it seriously. Obviously the other brewers saw through A-B’s motives, which is why they all chose not to participate.

And that was my initial — and continuing — problem with Anheuser-Busch’s “Here’s to Beer” campaign. Despite the fact that they continue to spin it as an industry-wide campaign, not a single brewer apart from A-B is involved with the project. Even the trade organization, the Beer Institute, who had initially co-sponsored the effort, withdrew their support right after the first commercial aired during the Super Bowl in Early February of this year. Bob apparently flew all over the country for months trying to convince other brewers to join their bandwagon, but not a single one took the bait. So I have a hard time seeing how this has been a success. Yet the media, even the trade media for the most part, has gone along with it in lockstep calling it a “grassroots campaign,” to take an example from the NBWA’s own press release. Here’s the definition of “grassroots:”

“of, pertaining to, or involving the common people, esp. as contrasted with or separable from an elite.”

So how is this campaign, run solely by the biggest brewer in the country by a wide margin, in any way “grassroots?” Simple. It’s not. You can’t get more elite in terms of resources and influence than A-B. Only a few come close, and not very close at that.

Also in the press release, Lachky makes the following claim. “Seeing the signs of beer industry improvement this year, we think we are making progress.” Wow, he’s taking credit for industry growth this year, how magnanimous of him. But I really can’t see how that’s even remotely true. First of all, the big breweries have made only very modest gains this year. Despite the self-serving rhetoric to the contrary, the big guys aren’t experiencing a period of turnaround and rapid growth. They’re still on the ropes — so to speak — with their core brands. Craft beer, on the other hand, was up 9% last year and looks to be tracking at 11% this year. What growth there is in the industry, that’s where the majority of it resides.

Having not met Bob Lachky personally, it’s hard for me to say he isn’t an enthusiastic supporter of beer. He certainly appears to have worked very hard on this project. And he may be a great guy, who knows? (I will have an opportunity to meet him in Denver next week.) So despite the fact that we’d all like to see the image of beer elevated to its proper place, has the “Here’s to Beer” campaign actually accomplished anything award-worthy? Are there droves of people who’ve been turned around and educated by the information on the website or the marketing materials made available to beer distributors? It sure doesn’t seem that way from where I’m sitting. It takes more than putting up a website and running a few PSAs for a mere eight months to undo the damage to beer’s image that A-B and the other industrial brewers have perpetrated over the last several decades.

So why did the NBWA choose to “honor” Bob Lachky and his “Here’s to Beer” campaign after only eight months and very little obvious or verifiable results? To me that’s the question in all of this. It reminds me a little bit of our President’s recent tendency to give the “Medal of Freedom” to beleaguered underlings as he shows them the door. Screw up, get a medal. Which is not say that Bob Lachky made any mistakes — as far as I know he didn’t — but awards and medals should be for achieving something tangible and measurable. Otherwise they’re meaningless, aren’t they? And while I mean no disrespect, I can’t see that the “Here’s to Beer” campaign has achieved any of its goals or united the industry. We don’t live in a world that, unlike eight months ago, now reveres beer’s social value, romantic allusions and diversity. And while there does seem to be anecdotal signs that the media may be taking beer slightly more seriously lately, I can’t draw a line of causality between that and A-B’s PR efforts, however well-intentioned. And frankly, that could be simply wishful thinking on my part since I’m watching the industry more closely (and a little differently) this year than I have the previous couple of years.

The only way beer will be brought to more people is the only way it’s ever worked, at least in my experience. And that’s one-on-one. The people best positioned to create any sort of “grassroots” movement are the people already doing just that. The servers in brewpubs, the brewers giving tours and pouring beer at festivals, passionate retail clerks and “common people” — like you and me — who simply like good beer and want to share it with their friends. That’s the only grassroots I can see succeeding.

Again, the idea of providing more information to consumers who want to learn more about beer is quite laudable. But it has to come from people who really believe the message they’re preaching, not from the largest beer manufacturer in the country trying to raise it’s share price by any means necessary. And until the “Here’s to Beer” campaign is truly an industry-wide effort with its true goals free from ulterior motives, it’s hard to applaud the effort as shamelessly and unquestioningly as the NBWA did in honoring it. I’ll join the NBWA in praising Bob Lachky for making the effort he has — if for no other reason than to give him the benefit of the doubt — but the results of that effort in the form of the “Here’s to Beer” do not yet deserve such accolades.

Latrobe Deal Not Done Yet

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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.

Time for Fresh Hop Beers

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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.