It’s short notice, but I’m filling in as the guest speaker at tonight’s Beer Social at the Tap and Mallet. The topic: blended beers.

We’re not talking household appliances with a “frappe” setting here.  Much like wine, scotch or cognac, mixing of beer of varying character  is vital to some styles (such as Belgium’s lambic). Porter, it is said, descends directly from “three-threads,” which three types of English ale blended together(although author and beer historian Martyn Cornell offers compelling evidence to dispute this).

Beer blending has a classic place in the English pub as well. Mild-and-bitter is a classic example, as is half-and-half. Today, people are discovering that sweet Belgian fruit labmbics meld well with witbier or Irish stout.

The possibilities are immense, and demonstrate once again thesubtlety, complexity, and sophistication of the world’s greatest beverage. If you’re in Rochester around 7pm, bring yourself, your thirst, and $12 down to the Tap and Mallet and blend right in.

-Mark

What’s the longest you’ve spent agonizing over a beer list, or staring blankly at shelves filled with bottles? Anyone with more than a passing interest in beer has probably done this, scrutinizing potential purchases for fear of not getting the absolute best beer for the moment.

It’s really a bit silly, constantly trying to shoehorn a beer into one’s current mood. I like a very broad range of beers; it’s not like, if I pick the wrong pint off the list, I’m going to have a miserable time. Plus, all the head scratching, hemming, and hawing bugs the crap out of the dude waiting to pull the tap handle.

My advice to beer lovers (and to self) for this week: keep it light. Take a page from the casual consumer’s playbook and go with a whim. In the constant drive toward beer sublimity (is that even a friggin’ word?), it’s nice to pull into the rest stops from time to time.

-Mark

Going to extremes
By Mark Tichenor and Bruce Lish

Extreme. It’s a word that’s lost its meaning, thanks to overuse in thousands of lame marketing pushes, commercials, and product names. But in the beer scene, the adjective ‘extreme’ still means ‘you’d better watch out.’

If you figure most beer comes in around 5% alcohol by volume, than how else could a 9% beer be described? For the record, that 9% is nothing. American brewers routinely brew beers in the 11-12% beer range, and some, such as Sam Adams Utopias, have hit the 25% alcohol mark.

Now, barring the obvious relativity question about any of these beers being ‘extreme’ if their strength is so commonplace, let’s take a moment to ponder the evolution of this almost purely American lust for super strong beer.

First of all, a beer of great potency isn’t necessarily extreme just because of that strength. German Doppelbocks can range as high as 11%, but that’s a traditional style all its own. For a beer to be extreme, it needs to be either some bizzaro mutant from an established style, or a mad scientist’s creation bearing little resemblance to any style whatsoever.

A good example of the former would be The Czar Imperial Stout from Colorado’s Avery Brewing Company. It’s a 12/2% ABV beast, a takeoff on a style originally brewed strong to survive the voyage from the UK to the court of the Russian empire.

The Czar is a testament to brewers’ skill. Despite its strength, there’s very little alcoholic burn in the flavor. Chocolate, mocha, and strong malt sweetness are much more prevalent, along with a creamy, comforting body. For a beer of this strength, The Czar is dangerously drinkable.

Pennsylvania’s Weyerbacher brewery, known for its strong beers, gives us an amped-up version of IPA brewed with Simcoe hops, and thusly named Double Simcoe IPA.  The intense flavor of this beer won’t be for everyone. But those who like it like it a lot. And then they fall down.

Double Simcoe checks in at 9% ABV, which is more than enough to get folks to develop a judgment problem after just one pint.  But the beer isn’t just massive in alcohol content; it’s also huge in hop character, and in all the citrusy, piney nuances those flowers release. To add balance, the malt flavor is magnified as well,

The result is a toffee-colored, thick brew with a pervasive ivory head and an earthy, funky aroma. Each sip is a boot to the taste buds, filing the mouth with fruity esters, grapefruit bitterness, and a candy like quality that rounds out the harshest bits.  Double Simcoe is truly a beer for a connoisseur. Or a masochist.

Representing the “mad scientist” approach to extreme beer, we have, who else, the good folks at Dogfish Head. Over the years, they’ve developed a rep for producing the most offbeat, convention-defying brews in the nation.

Chateau Jiahu is no exception. It’s described as a modern recreation of a 9000-year-old Chinese beverage, traces of which were discovered by Archaeologists in clay pots  (the beverage, not the Archaeologists). But really, who’s gonna know if they just made that story up for marketing?

At any rate, the resulting “beer” is a mishmash of malt, Muscat grapes, Hawthorn fruit (whatever that is), rice and chrysanthemum flowers.

The taste is as hard to describe as you’d expect. Kind of winy, sweet, with a honey funk. There’s an herbal quality and an aftertaste like no other beer. It’s not bad, but you’ll definitely have to make a psychological leap in your taste expectations, because it isn’t going to taste like any beer style as you know it. At “only” 8%, Jiahu isn’t killer strong for this category, but this weird alcoholic Jackson Pollock painting earns extreme points for its ingredients and genesis.

Just remember to be careful when you get these beers. Usually, the extreme stuff served on draft is poured into 11oz glasses instead of full pints; that’s for your benefit and the continuation of the pub’s liquor license.  These beers go best as nightcaps, to be sipped and enjoyed rather than gulped for quenching purposes. Take it easy, enjoy your snifter, and enjoy the fact that American brewers have enough disregard for classic brewing tradition to invent beers of their own, big, brash, and quintessentially American.

In other beers:
Swan Market, the venerable German butcher shop and deli on Parsells Avenue in Rochester, now has it’s own house beer, brewed by the Rohrbach Brewing Company. It is a German-style beer, but get this: it isn’t a Lager.

Swan’s beer is an Altbier, one of the rare German ales, mostly brewed in the city of Düsseldorf. It’s heartier and darker than a Pilsner, slightly fruity, with a pleasant bitter snap.

Barry Fischer, owner of Swan Market, has not yet decided on his beer’s name and is leaning toward holding a contest to assign the Altbier its moniker.

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.

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I did an exclusive article, more of a glorified blog entry really, for the good folks at Associated Content. This is the first in a series I’m going to do for that site. I’ll always provide a link from here.

Anyway, if you click the link and read it, not only do you gain fascinating beer insight from one of the laziest minds in the field,  but you also cause AC to pay me money based on page views.  Mmmm… I can almost smell that yacht…

I don’t believe in something for nothing, but the blog is a lot of work for one guy and it would be cool to eke even a pittance from it. I’m not going to make readers of Beercraft scan through a bunch of AdSense text links to find articles on here, and I’m not comfortable with the tip jar thing, so if you like the writing go get yourself another dose on my AC page. Thanks.

-Mark

There’s a new brewery in the Finger Lakes region- the Keuka Brewery. They just opened, new enough so there’s no information about them on Beer Advocate, and seemingly without a website of their own. Fortunately, your intrepid beer writer is gonna head on down today for a leisurely lunch in Hammondsport’s Villiage Tavern (one of my favorite restaurants in the world) and a visit to the brewery. Hey, it beats sitting in a cubicle.

Anyway, tomorrow I’ll have a full report on this place, complete with mediocre-quality pics.

-Mark

Craft beer marketing is a fascinating subject, and a study in contradictions. yet with over 1400 breweries pumping out their finest, attention to marketing is necessary. On the other hand, this is a business of iconoclasts. Often, craft brewery owners’ way to personal peace is to make what they want, and fuck off if you don’t like it.

For many beer fanatics, that ‘damn the torpedoes’ attitude is extremely appealing.  After all, indie brewing is one of the few Victorian-era industries still extant in the USA. In what other business can you go down to the local site of production and purchase goods directly from the source, knowing that they will vary wildly in character from producer to producer, and that this fact makes this place special? A craft brewery gives a region cultural identity, and can instill within beer lovers a pride in their small brewery that’s unmatchable by traditional branding.

And those beer lovers can be an ornery lot; they’re suspicious of big-budget glitz marketing, and emotionally invested enough to seek out new flavors and new beer producers on their own. And for all their love of the local brewery, beer geeks are notoriously brand-disloyal; A passion for beer is a passion for discovery, and for mastering the broad spectrum of tastes, hues, textures and aromas that is the new American beer scene.

So how does a small brewer appeal to the crowd that loves his or her product category the most?

It’s gotta start with the good ol’ marketing mix: product, place, price and promotion.  Is your beer any good? It can be pretty much any style and beer lovers will fall over themselves to drink it, but it had better be good. One of the most damaging ideas caused by big time marketing is that great advertising can make a shoddy product OK, and what’s really depressing is that this notion seems to be true. But it won’t work on homebrewers or beer lovers.

Next, brewers need to decide where they’re going to make their money: by expanding for wide scope like Rogue or Sierra Nevada or staying true to a fanatical local market a’ la McNeil’s in Vermont or Rochester’s own Rohrbach Brewing Company. Producers have seen success using both philosophies. Obviously, the cost of starting and running a big brewery is a heckuva lot greater than the capital outlay for a 7-barrel ski-village local. It depends on the ambition of the principals and the validity of the business plan. Many brewery folks don’t see themselves as a national corporation, and contentedly operate their ‘hippie business’ because it offers a lifestyle they love.

Brewers are fortunate in terms of price; people expect to pay more for a premium product. And for anyone who’s ever been sentenced to a nine-hour layover in a Dulles Airport bar, the $4-$6 price of a typical craft beer won’t comeas a shock.But as last year’s hop crisis demonstrated, lacking the economies of scale in purchasing means that a brewery’s prices may have to fluctuate wildly as a reaction to the price of supplies.

Promotion is the fun bit. How the hell do you advertise to the “don’t call us, we’ll call you” crowd? I think you do it through respect. You take the opposite tack of major brewing conglomerates who tout such absurdities as “cold-filtering” or “drinkability.” I don’t think this crowd can really be swayed by cutesy beer names (those really piss me off) or cartoon characters. That’s not to say you don’t produce for yourself a consistent image and identity, but trying big-time, lowest-common-denominator promotion is best left to the big boys with millionsof promotional dollars to burn.

I think you connect with people at beer festivals. You get out there in the bars and represent your brewery and your passion, one-on-one. I think, when you start getting your brewery into the black, you give back to your local community by getting involved in social causes. I think you realize that, in the eyes of the hardcore beer geek, craft brewing is the triumph of man over marketing.

Most indie brewers seem to get this. Beer is a people business again, and the market is vibrant and strong, leading me to believe that, even with its already meteoric rise, craft brewing as an industry has nowhere to go but up.

Don’t get me wrong; another decision brewers must make is whether it’s worth worrying about beer geeks’ business at all. For larger breweries, the population of full-bearded overweight unix engineers with a superior attitude and butter stains on their denin shirts is too small to cater to. But for little guys this population can make a big diference when the bills come due.

-Mark

I’m not much of an extreme beer fan, having gone on record as calling the big beer trend ‘gimmicky,’ ‘faddish,’ and ‘contrary to the social nature of beer.’ But only a fool closes his mind when he opens his mouth, so I keep trying them. Every now and then, a big beer blows me away, and not just in the sense of making me fall off the damn barstool.

Case in point: Avery The Czar Imperial Stout. 12.2% of murky goodness. It’s a sweet, vaguely chocolatey brew with a light, oily texture, with notes of raisin and roasted grain. For all of its alcohol and complexity, The Czar is surprisingly light on the tongue, and the flavor blend camouflages alcoholic flavor surprisingly well. Maybe too well. This beer will kill you, and, if you’re insane enough to order more than one, you probably deserve it.

You know, one of the things I admire about American indie brewers is their determination to keep working on improving mediocre beer styles until they’re perfect. The big beers on the market today are definitely tasting better than just a couple of years ago. They’re more refined, less brutish, less one-dimensional. Finally, extreme beers are deserving of the cult status they enjoy among beer devotees. It’s evident that there’s stil an element of the hobbyist in a lot of the people who make them.

I hope that never, ever goes away.

-Mark

My first article for Associated Content was published a couple of days ago. It’s a reprint of a very old Beercraft column, one of my favorites. If 1000 people look at it, I get $1.50. So your page view would be appreciated. I’m going to keep providing AC with more exclusive beer-related content. After a while, there might be enough cash for a Slurpee.

That’s viral marketing at its best.

Anyway, it’s Election Day, so as a blogger, I’m supposed to sanctimoniously lecture you on the importance of voting. Because you probably haven’t heard it enough. And I, in my lofty position of self-designated Beer Writer, am in a good position to lecture people on political matters. So vote. Or don’t. I did.

-Mark

Grab a pint of Arcadia Beer
By Mark Tichenor and Bruce Lish

There’s a new beer in town, and it’s damn good.

The Arcadia Brewing Company, in business since 1995, is making its first foray into western New York. The brewery’s mix of traditional and eclectic beers can now be found on tap at Monty’s Korner and The Old Toad, with more locations to follow.

“In 1995, I left a perfectly good-paying job to start a brewery and restaurant,” says Arcadia’s owner, Tim Surprise. Originally from South Glens Falls, he spent 4 years as a policeman in Saratoga County, then 14 years in the paper industry before following his dream and setting up shop in Battle Creek, Michigan. At a trim 51 years old with an affable, enthusiastic nature, Surprise is a capable evangelist for his own beers.

Okay, stop. Look, this isn’t meant to be a goof on the guy’s name, all of which I’m certain he’s heard before, but can you imagine being pulled over by Officer Suprise? It sounds like the entertainment at a bachelorette party.  Maybe that’s why he got into a different line of work.

Anyway, back to the column.

It was while traveling internationally in the paper business that Suprise caught the beer bug.  “I became interested in local beer wherever I was,” he explains. “In Bangkok, Atlanta, L.A., I visited small breweries. I became a fan from a consumer perspective.”

The respect he gained for those traditional beers carries over to Arcadia’s brewing methods. The brewhouse is British designed and built, and even utilizes an open fermentation system which leaves the bubbling liquid exposed to the air, much like the traditional Yorkshire Square method used by Acclaimed English Brewery Samuel Smith.

As you might expect, much of the beer maintains close ties with tradition. Arcadia IPA, for example, is subtler, with less of that extremely bitter hop flavor, than most American IPAs. Its flavor profile is closer to the original English IPAs from which American variants derived.

Surprise acknowledges his love of traditional beers, but points out Arcadia’s range of stronger and uniquely flavored offerings as well.  “A number of the beers in our portfolio address that particular genre of assertive,” he says. “But we have an equal number that aren’t ‘one and done’ beers. As long as I have a brewery, we will continuously offer beer that is sessionable.”

For those who gravitate to the big or eccentric stuff, there’s Arcadia Cocoa Loco Triple Chocolate Stout, which combines the best elements of stout, chocolate, and a hangover into one glass.

Another standout is Cereal Killer Barley Wine (named as homage to Kellogg, the big business in Battle Creek).  It’s a 9% ABV brute that won the silver medal at the 2007 Great American Beer Festival.

In addition to that prize, Arcadia’s IPA and London Porter have each taken a gold medal at the World Beer Championship. The Chicago Beer Society also named Arcadia Shipwright Porter as their Championship Beer for 2007.

Ultimately, Suprise realizes it’s not about awards; it’s about making something people love to drink.  As he puts it: “I’m thrilled to have our beers in Upstate NY, which is where I’m from. I’m delighted to be coming home.

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.

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