The guys from Sly Fox must really freakin’ love it here. Corey and Brian guest-host the Lovin’ Cup Beer Social on Wednesday, April 8, and then Beer School at Monty’s Korner on Thursday, April 9.

It’s cool that these guys, who already exist in the huge (albeit very competitive) Philadelphia market, see so much potential in far-off, tiny Rochester. I think all area beer lovers can take heart that, even while their opinions and wants are scoffed at as small potatoes by local brewers, they are still noticed and appreciated as discerning, valuable customers.

-Mark

I had a chance to swap beer tales over coffee with David Wickett, owner of Sheffield’s Kelham Island Brewery. It’s always interesting to talk to someone with perspective gained from operating in a completely different market. Kelham Island shuns present-day beer fads, brews classic British styles, and carries numerous CAMRA awards. To say Wickett is committed to keeping true to that vision for his brewery would be understatement.

He lamented the current state of US brewing, the emphasis on extrimity of strength and bitterness, and the selling of hype over quality. For the most part I agree. Not that there isn’t a place for wild beer experimentation (as Delaware’s Dogfish Head has proven), but the time seems to be right for a return to the classics. From Wickett’s English viewpoint, the smart money in the now-maturing US market is a focus on classic styles, brewed with uncompromising quality.

In a way, that’s extreme. The wild spirit that had brewers pushing the alcoholic and bitter envelopes, just because it was their brewery and they wanted to, is the same spirit that would drive a producer to make Kölsch amid a sea of IPA. Plus, a trend like this would provide a good baseline for beers to be extreme against. We’ll see.

-Mark

I’ve been kinda out of it for a bit.

Preparation for the Sisters of Murphy St. Patrick’s Day shows, the performances of said shows, and an ilness have taken me off my easel. Not to mention a couple of local beer-related disappointments have kinda sapped away some of my interest.

But I’m a resilient guy, and though passions may dwindle, they also roar back to full flame stronger than ever. Tonight I’m gonna head on down to Monty’s Krown for a sample of the latest beer craze of the moment: Lagunitas Hop Stoopid.

Every couple of months, another craze beer is released that gets the brew community all in a kerfluffle. Sometimes (as in the case of Tröegs Nugget Nectar) the beer lives up to the hype. Most often it does not.  Usually you get an overalcoholic hop bomb with the subtlety of an accordion and the balance of Muhammad Ali (2009 vintage). Oh and usually they have retarded names.

Sorry, SO people, ‘developmentally disabled’ names.

Bruce already weighed in on the Hop Stoopid (check out mmmmmbier on Twitter), but it’s only fair if i throw a glass down before I write about the stuff. At any rate, cheers to Monty’s Krown, my favorite dive bar, for carrying stuff the beer community is into.

It’s gonna be a good evening.

-Mark

Beer is in the air?
By Mark Tichenor and Bruce Lish

Spring is back. Even though we’ll still probably have a snowy evening or two, the difference in season is palpable. More sunlight, a fresh tang in the air, and the slow encroachment of green into the color palette of daily life. Oh yeah, and the taste of spring beer.

Brewers have been celebrating the return of spring for centuries, and the styles are as diverse as the cultures which spawn them. From southern Germany, we get Bock beer, originally brewed by monks to sustain them during the fasting of Lent.  It’s slightly darker and appreciably sweeter than standard lager, with a bready chewiness that results from its substantial malt-laden body.

You don’t see many Bocks in the USA. For the last couple of years, the High Falls Brewing Company has nostalgically released a Bock in a classic sixties-vintage can. Aside from that, regular Bocks are few and far between.

Much more common is Doppelbock, which is darker, sweeter and very strong. German brewers have a saying about Doppel: you’re not supposed to feel it working until you try to stand up.

German Doppelbocks have the dual virtue of being realatively common and absolutely freakin’ delicious. You can identify examples by their carriage of the suffix –ator, so you get ‘Salvator,’ ‘Celebrator,’ ‘Optimator,’etc. American brewers have embraced this naming tradition with all the glee of a preteen with a frog and a firecracker. And the names of domestic examples range from the almost dignified ‘Brooklynator’ to  Elevator Brewery’s  more whimsically named ‘Procrastinator.’ We have personally thought of several Doppelbock names that hover too close to the edge of obscenity to print in these delicate pages.

This dark heavy beer is delicious, but many Americans have grown to associate the changing of the seasons with lighter, springier tastes. That’s why witbier is a popular choice in area cafes and pubs. Wit has grown way beyond its Belgian roots. And to think, this beer style nearly disappeared from the face of the Earth. And we have one man to thank for its salvation.

Pierre Celis comes from the town of Hoegaarden, the traditional epicenter of witbeer brewing. At one time, the village had dozens of wit breweries, but the lager fever that gripped Europe from the mid ninteenth-century on drove all of them out of business. By 1960, not a single brewery was making witbeer in Hoegaarden.

Celis, a milkman, took his fascination with brewing, and with the style of his hometown beer, to the same height that any self respecting obsessive-compulsive maniac would. He opened a wit brewery in Hoegaarden in 1966. The beer became an unlikely hit across the land of Belgium.  An investment from Belgian giant Stella Artois propelled Hogaarden to the status of a worldwide brand.

You’d think that would be enough for Celis, but noooooo. He moved to Austin, Texas, and opened up the Celis Brewery, where he turned himself into a beer geek legend by making a second reputation brewing Celis White,  A competitor to his original freakin’ beer!

Hoegaarden and Celis beers have given impetus to dozens of American wits. The style, which combines the wheat and oats of Belgium with the traditional clove and coriander of the Dutch East Indies is produced to great effect by breweries like Ommegang, Allagash, and Unibroue.

So whether your tastes run heavy or light, there’s a spring flavor for you. As the season turns, look forward to that first day you can sit at a sidewalk table enjoying a Doppelbock or three.

Just remember to take care when standing up.

Bruce is a certified beer judge and former 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 know, I know. It reads like a cheap shill. I promise beer will be tied into this post somehow.

Anyway The Sisters of Murphy (with Bruce on Bass and me on vox & concertina) will play Irishly tonight at the patrons of Murphy’s Law, corner of East and Alexander, around 7pm. Oh, and you can catch all the Sister’s updates on Twitter: @murphysisters.

And while you’re at the Irish pub, on an Irish day, chances are pretty good you’ll be ordering an Irish beer.  Just remember, even though Guinness spends the most, it’s still not “their” holiday. If you can find Beamish or O’Hara’s on draft, go for that instead. You won’t be sorry.

-Mark

It’s that time again kiddies! Join us at 7:30pm at Monty’s Korner in Rochester, NY (United is offereing an E-fare) for sampling and beer education from a brewery that’s truly one of Western New York’s best kept secrets: Rooster Fish Brewing of Watkins Glen.

Owner/Brewer Doug Thayer will take us through a flight of his beers (which include an awesome nut brown ale), and talk about what goes into their development and brewing.

Oh, yeah, there will bee some sort of food product.

-Mark

Sorry this is so late.

Lovin’ Cup, at Park Point by RIT, is holding the latest in their cleverly-named ‘Brew-ha-ha” beer samplings. The topic: You guessed it. Irish beer.

In the spirit of cooperation over competition, the special guest presenter will be a guy who lived relatively close to Ireland: Tap and Mallet owner Joe McBane.

You’ll get informative facts about the finest Irish beers, plenty of samples of said beers, and fine tradtional Irish foods such as “pigs in a blanket” and “meatballs.” The festivities begin at  8pm. Begorrah!

-Mark

Sly Fox brings it from Philly
By Mark Tichenor and Bruce Lish

Philadelphia takes a lot of abuse from the rest of the country. The place gets picked on for its crime, unfriendliness, and the fact that, despite the existence of several sites that bore witness to the founding of our nation, the most famous landmark in town is a statue of a character from a movie.

Yet if you’re a craft beer lover, you envy the people who live in the Philadelphia area. It’s the epicenter of beer on the East Coast, and butts heads with Portland, Oregon as the greatest beer city in North America.

Fortunately, Philly’s breweries are now coming to us, frequently in person. The folks from the Sly Fox Brewing Company of Pikeland, PA, somehow found Rochester on a map and recognize the Flower City as a great beer town in its own right.

“Rochester has a healthy beer culture,” says Sly Fox Head Brewer Brian O’Reilly “Everyone ‘s been very welcoming.” O’Reilly, in town along with Marketing Director Corey Reid to host the Tap and Mallet’s beer social, looks around appreciatively at a barroom packed with paying social attendees. “Very welcoming.”

Sly Fox, founded as a family business in 1995, differentiates itself by doing what everybody else doesn’t. The brewery wholeheartedly embraces cans, which O’Reilly says do a better job of protecting the beer, not to mention making it easier and more cost-effective to ship. O’Reilly is also not shy about brewing lagers and Belgian ales, difficult styles which can give lesser brewing operations fits.

Reid points out that it is necessary to strive for excellence in brewing and variety in order to thrive in 2009. “Beer drinkers are pretty educated, “ he says. “You have to believe in what you do. Sometimes doing the easy thing isn’t the best thing.

And it seems Brewmeister O’Reilly has made a habit about not doing the easy thing. Taking full advantage of the degree he earned in Philosophical Literature, he slogged around in an Austin rock band for a bunch of years before moving back to his native New England and finding himself in a pair of rubber boots, shovel in hand, at the Old Nutfield Brewery in Derry, New Hampshire. Having honed his craft with a number of acclaimed New England brewers, O’Reilly wound up at Sly Fox in 2002, and hasn’t looked back.

To us, the real standouts in the Sly Fox line are the Pikeland Pils. It’s a crisp, slightly citrusy with an appealing hop snap, closely fitting the flavor profile of Czech Pilsner. Pikeland is available on draft, on a rotating basis at Rochester’s fine beer pubs, as well as off the shelf at Beers of the World.

Also of note is the Phoenix, a well-balanced American pale ale with a solid Cascade hop nose and pleasant, non-overpowering bitterness.  Phoenix is unnervingly easy to drink, so one must exert considerable self-discipline, unless one wants to wake up the next morning without one’s pants.

Breweries like Sly Fox are more than beer factories; they’re embassies for their city, teaching us that great beer is a part of regional culture. And it’s that regional culture that gave us the World Series Champion Phillies, the cheesesteak, and, oh yeah, our nation’s independence.

Perhaps Philly isn’t so bad after all.

Bruce is a certified beer judge and former 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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Before I start this post, please realize that I felt like musing, not doing research. So all the following text is pure conjecture on my part. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if I was dead wrong.

The first wave of “microbrewing” entered a completely different marketplace than the one we’re in today. Pioneers of the business had to educate a consumer base conditioned only to mass-market lagers, and they had to do it on shoestring budgets. New entrants at the dawn of microbrewing could expect to lose money on their beer for years as they built consumer confidence and trust, turning their odd brown-colored liquids into brands.

To offset those losses, it was necessary to develop an alternate revenue stream. So most of the craft breweries of the 1990s were brewpubs, basically restaurants serving upscale food  that happened to have a brewery inside them.

I think the model is the opposite for new entrants to the brewing industry today. In the tough economy, people are scaling back their entertainment dollars, eating out less. This, combined with the natural cutthroat competition of the restaurant industry, casts a gloomy forecast over new eateries. Also, today’s consumers and distributors are much more educated. They’re used to the presence, if not always the flavor, of craft beer. There’s brand familiarity, as well as better distributor relations.

In 1990, the beer shat out by your brewpub didn’t have to be very good, because few people knew how it was supposed to taste. The northeast hosted a bunch of crummy micros. As consumer sophistication grew, inferior brewers lost out. Many brewpubs were culled.

In 2009, craft brewers had better be ready to pursue excellence, to push the envelope on what beer can be, and to deliver a solid product. And they’d better be willing to trumpet to their customers that they’re doing so. Dogfish Head is a prime example of the modern approach. Most of their beers are strange and strong (often TOO strange and strong for my tastes), and every single thing that founder Sam Caligione does in the public eye is a commercial for his brewery. For chrissake, dude formed the Pain Relievaz, a Beastie Boys-style rap act, with his head brewer. That takes some balls.

More important, it’s not an accident that many of the craft brewers who’ve enjoyed the biggest growth–Tröegs, Ithaca, etc.–focus on beer, not making burgers. It’ll be interesting to note how many new breweries will be opening as brewpubs, and how many will take the plunge as beer-only establishments, trusting the marketplace and the customer to get what they’re doing.

-Mark