Man, I am wrung out. There was some beer-related thing going on every friggin’ day this week! The Arcadia Brewing introduction on Monday and Tuesday, Joe McBane’s Beer Social, with Ryan from Great Lakes Brewing, over at the Tap & Mallet on Wednesday. Then Ithaca beer night last night at Monty’s Korner, with Dan, owner of the Ithaca Brewing Company, his sales rep Eric, and some cute marketing chick whose name escapes me at the moment.

I’m just glad to get a rest for an evening.

What’s that? It’s Halloween? There’s a big costume party? Oh christ. I think I’m going as an AA member.

-Mark

Arcadia Brewing has come to Rochester. The multiple GABF medal-winning brewery is now being distributed in Western New York. Brewery owner Tim Suprise was out at Monty’s Krown, the first pub in the area to carry his beer.

Suprise will be at The Old Toad tonight, showcasing Arcadia beers on draft and cask. Pop on down if you want to try something new and talk beer with a pretty cool guy.

-Mark

Getting better with age
By Mark Tichenor and Bruce Lish

For the gourmet set, a well-stocked wine cellar is the epitome of fine living.  And they don’t store their wines in temperature and humidity-controlled darkness simply because that’s where the extra space is; properly cellared wine grows mellower and more complex as it ages.

Come to think of it, so do many beers.

When cellared over time, certain beer styles will transform in character, losing alcoholic flavor and rough-hewn hop edginess and growing appreciably smoother and  more alluring. Over time, aromas amplify, and extreme bitterness gives way to smoky or vanilla undertones. Sweet flavors concentrate. Some beers, when cellared, can even take on the characteristics of a fine port wine.

But you can’t just take any old beer and chuck it into the basement.  As any kid who found an old can of Schlitz in their grandfather’s attic might attest. For the best results, you need high-strength ales with a fair amount of residual sugar.

Generally, the best beers for aging are bottle-conditioned, meaning they undergo a secondary fermentation once poured into bottles. Beers like this are unfiltered, so the yeast remains in the liquid, and sugar is added that kicks the yeast back into gear. Belgian Trappist ales fit this category, and can mature to wonderful complexity.

Since hop character diminishes relatively quickly, six months to one year of aging can put the mellow on extremely bitter double IPAs and wines, allowing the hop essence to meld more readily with the malt and alcohol flavors. Imperial stouts also age well, developing amplified sweetness and port-like notes in less than a year’s time.

This being autumn, many harvest ales and holiday ales are prime candidates for cellaring too.

Cellaring beer is a lot easier than cellaring wine too. Because of the corks, wince cellars have to be kept at a certain level of humidity. Most corked beer is capped as well, so dry corks aren’t really a concern.

All you need is a place in your house that stays between 50-65 degrees. A dark place is best because ultraviolet light can do nasty things to hops.  The fridge can be a dicey place to store beer; if it’s too cold, the yeast won’t do its job.  A basement usually works fine. Or that little room at the bottom of the steps in your townhouse that you were going to turn into a beer cellar until your wife decided that’s where she was going to put the cat boxes, which the little monsters tend to ignore half the time anyway.

But we digress.

There’s really no formula to this. Get yourself some strong unfiltered beer, shove it in your storage area, and drink one every three months or so, noting the changes in flavor. Unlike wine, you really don’t need to let it go for decades, a year in storage should bring out the best in any ale.

Of course, if you want to taste aged beer for yourself without waiting forever, you can always hop (ha!) down to The Old Toad and lay down the bucks for something out of their vintage beer fridge. It’ll set you back $12-$24 a bottle, but you’ll get a quick education in how multifaceted beer can actually be. We’re doing that as we write this, sipping 1999 Lee’s Harvest Ale from Manchester, England.

It’s a rough life, writing about beer.

Bruce is a certified beer judge and commercial brewer. Mark owns a laptop and likes beer. For more on beer, check out the beercraft blog, updated regularly, at http://www.beercraftsite.com. Send your questions, suggestions, or comments to beercraft@rochester.rr.com.

It’s official. I am now sick and tired of pumpkin ale. And it only took two pints.

As a beer ingredient, pumpkin pulp is pretty tasteless, so brewers try to recreate the sensory experience of pumpkin pie by adding the same spices. Now I like pumpkin pie as much as the next slovenly white dude,  but two pints of even the most skillfuly crafted pumpkin ale is enough to tide me over for an entire season.

Needless to say, many brewers display a marked lack of restraint when adding these flavoring agents. Far too often, the result is powerfully pungent, like licking nutmeg off a cinnamon stick, or being the recipient of an allspice enema.

Your best bet for the style is Post Road Pumpkin Ale from the Brooklyn Brewery. The spices are present but muted, melding well with the beer.

Or you could order up a real piece of honest-to-gosh pumpkin pie, pair it with a brown ale, and celebrate your autumn with a genuine piece of edible Americana.

After all, that’s what the Pilgrims most likely did.

-Mark

I completely forgot to mention this, but indie brewing rockstar Garrett Oliver (from the Brooklyn Brewery) will be at the Finger Lakes Wine and Culinary Center this afternoon from 4:00 to 6:00 pm for a personal tasting and talk. Oliver will take you through a full food and beer pairing. Turnout should be small, so it’s a great chance to get your beer questions answered by one of the highest-profile brewers in the field. Details here.

-Mark

Yup. I’ve been taking a stand-up comedy class at Writers and Books.

It’s something I’ve always been deathly afraid of, and always wanted to try. Writing and performing material to consistently make an audience laugh, from a bleak and tiny stage, has to be the most difficult of performing arts. Well, maybe not harder than interpretive dance, but appreciably less stupid.

Anyway, this Sunday my mettle gets toasted… er… tested as my class performs our standup at Boulder Coffee Company’s open mike night. What better place to try and make a crowd laugh than a tomb-silent room in which people are trying to study or update their Facebook pages?

We go on starting at 7:30.

-Mark

Good news for Rochester area fans of traditional English beer. In what I think is the first deal of its kind, the Rohrbach Brewing Company will brew Pale Rider, the 2004 Great British Beer Festival Champion Beer of Britain, exclusively as a house beer for The Old Toad.

The Toad, co-owned by Englishman Dave Wickett, who also owns The Fat Cat in Sheffield, has signed a deal with Rohrbach for Bruce Lish to produce Pale Rider under contract in their Rochester brewery. Bruce will also be making a few other  house beers for the Toad, beginning with an IPA.

Beerwise, we Rochesterians miss out on a lot of good stuff. We don’t get draft beer from many of the USA’s most storied indie breweries. No Russian River. No New Belgium. No Deschutes or Troegs. But we do get to be the sole geographic location for a beer so good, it won repeated Gold Medals at the GBBF, and waqs named ‘Supreme Champion Beer’ at England’s most prestigious beer festival in 2004.

Suck it, Philadelphia!

-Mark

Apparently, this area wasn’t slated to receive the Great Lakes Nosferatu, but the brewery has been impressed by the reception to their beers. You can hopefully find this highly rated American strong red ale in 4-packs at Hegedorns starting Friday.  -Mark

Bruce has filtered and kegged the first batch of Rohrbach Altbier, destined to be the house beer for Swan Market in Rochester, NY.

As you undoubtedly know,  Alt (meaning “old” in German), is a traditional ale brewed in and around Dusseldorf. In a nation of lagers, the use of ale yeast makes Alt a rarity, and the slightly bitter, very smooth flavor is a standout from what you might be used to in a German beer.

You can’t get any German examples of Alt here in Rochester. The breweries are small, and the distributors who handle them demand huge commitments of product from local accounts, that is, if they offer Alt at all. The last brand I remember, Frankenheim, ceased to be available here in 2004.

Vermont’s Long Trail Brewery makes a beer in the Alt style: the creatively named Long Trail Ale. It’s very good, but I think it misses the mark on flavor authenticity.

Needless to say, Bruce’s Alt is fantastic. He even had a guy who was born and raised in Dusseldorf sample it and approve. I can’t wait to grab a glass at Swan this coming weekend.

The plan is to have it on tap at the Buffalo Road brewpub as well.

- Mark

Here comes the Edmund Fitzgerald
By Mark Tichenor and Bruce Lish

Cleveland, Ohio, is a much-maligned city and the butt of many an American joke. Whether it’s their toxic sludge stream of a river spontaneously combusting, or their perennially underperforming football team… spontaneously combusting, there always seems to be something for the rest of us to pick on.

But one rather hazily-recalled weekend in 2006 taught us the truth about C-town. It’s no longer the anus of industrial America, the people will surprise you with their friendliness and hospitality, and yes, great things are still produced in Cleveland.

We refer, specifically, to the beer of the Great Lakes Brewing Company, one of the USA’s upper-echelon independent breweries and, until recently, a destination beer for Rochesterians traveling to points west. Only in recent months did the brewery expand, increasing production capacity to the point where they could reliably ship product to the Finger Lakes region.

“The brewery knew they had a lot of people talking about the beer in the Upstate area,” explains John Mula, High End Brand Manager for Lake Beverage, the company that distributes Great Lakes in Rochester. He adds that Wegmans and the Macgregor’s restaurant chain had been trying to get the beer in stock for a while. “We get a ton of feedback from comment cards saying ‘thank you for bringing this beer here.’”

Mula also points out that the brewery is fanatical about freshness. “This beer has the shortest allowed shelf life I’ve ever seen, 90 days,” he says. “ For him, this is both a blessing and a curse. It guarantees freshness for the customer, but taxes the distributor and retailers to sell their inventory within the allowed cycle.

So far, however, that doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. Mula has run sampler sessions at beer festivals and in bars and restaurants around town, but the beer is already popular due to its reputation.

The Edmund Fitzgerald Porter is probably Great Lakes’ best-known beer. Its smooth, roasted malt character, heavy body, and slightly dry finish make the porter an excellent seasonal choice, almost a “comfort beer” that insulates against the damp and chill of approaching winter.

Our personal pick is the Great Lakes Dortmunder Gold, a straw-colored, somewhat sweet brew with a medium body and mild but quite noticeable hop finish. It’s brewed to the Dortmunder Export style, which, unsurprisingly, originates in the German city of Dortmund.  Think Pilsner but slightly less bitter and a bit heavier in the mouthfeel.

As an admitted hophead, Mula’s favorite is the Commodore Perry IPA.  Its standout piney, floral aroma leads into the prominent hop presence and finish. Still the Commodore Perry is reined in by tradition, and doesn’t overwhelm like so many American IPAs do. The object here is balance, not extreme bitterness.

The Great Lakes line also includes Burning River Pale Ale, Elliot Ness Lager, and Blackout Stout (just because we didn’t write about them in detail doesn’t mean they’re not awesome).  Various seasonal offerings will show up from time to time as well.

Great Lakes beer is a symbol of the new Cleveland, and a worthy export to our area. Maybe they could ship it to the port of Rochester in a brightly painted lake boat, the brewery’s logo prominently emblazoned on the side.

Wait, maybe not. We all remember what happened to the Edmund Fitzgerald, and do we really need Gordon Lightfoot droning on about beer?

Bruce is a certified beer judge and commercial brewer. Mark owns a laptop and likes beer. For more on beer, check out the beercraft blog, updated regularly, at http:://www.beercraftsite.com. Send your questions, suggestions, or comments to beercraft@rochester.rr.com.