Real ale revisited
By Mark Tichenor and Bruce Lish

Writing about beer is a tough gig. You have to spend your evenings in bars doing research. You have to figure out what to do with the sample bottles breweries send to you. And, occasionally, you have to spin a trip you were going to take anyway into a single-minded beer odyssey made for the purpose of expanding the minds of readers.

This particular beer journey, which concluded last week, led us to Bree Louise, a pub just behind Euston Station, in London’s Camden Borough. It’s a place where they take beer seriously.

Upon entering Bree Louise, you’ll see the usual bar stuff–tap handles and hand pull pumps–but the majority of space is taken up by large wooden barrels suspended in a big rack, covered with ice blankets and tilted forward. The specialty of the house is gravity-dispensed Real Ale.

Be careful talking to a British guy about beer. He’ll have a lot of opinions, and they’ll probably be wrong. For one thing, our friends in the UK tend to regard ‘beer’ and ‘ale’ as completely separate things (we Yanks tend toward a similar faux pas by assuming that beer and ale are the same interchangeable thing). The true distinction is between lager and ale, the big difference being the type of yeast used and how those funny little buggers act to ferment the beer.

Cold-loving lager yeast ferments up from the bottom of the vessel, over a long time, and generally results in clean, crisp beers without a bunch of competing flavor elements. Ale yeast, on the other hand ferments downward from the top of the liquid, prefers a warmer environment, and secretes all sorts of interesting flavor elements into the beer as it works.

Most of the ale you get has had the fermentation stopped, been filtered until clear, and undergone a pasteurization process. This keeps the ale stable in color, aroma and flavor, from when it leaves the brewery until it enters your tummy.

Real Ale, that great British contribution to beer, does not undergo that process. It ships to the pub with the yeast still merrily chomping away in the barrels, no pasteurization, no filtration. It does in the cellar of the pub exactly what it was doing in the brewery vat.

So when the barman pours you a pint of Weemston’s Extremely Peculiar, or whatever brand you choose that we didn’t just make up, you’re getting a living thing in your glass, and no two barrels of a Real Ale will taste exactly alike.

Now the myth is that Real Ale is served warm and flat, but that’s really relative. An aficionado might just as well say that lagers are served too cold and prickly. The ideal environment for Real Ale is cellar temperature (around 50 degrees Fahrenheit). It’s warm enough for the beer to stay active, but not so warm that the beer goes bad.
Likewise, Real Ale is carbonated, but only through the CO2 emissions of the yeast. It isn’t force carbonated with pressurized gas. There’s a lot less carbonation, but you still feel it on the tongue.

What’s the allure of Real Ale? For one thing, it’s old school. This is how beer was brewed in the British Isles as far back as Roman times, and it reflects brewing before refrigeration, within the parameters of natural temperature and environment.

Also, Real Ales are some of the most interesting, character-intensive beers in existence. Unlike the American “hop-bomb” technique of brewing iconoclastic beers, the Brits add bitterness only with restraint, letting their beers develop through the esters and phenols given off by the yeast. The result is fragrance, fruitiness, and complex flavor that changes between each part of the drinker’s palate.

Today’s younger, more image-conscious drinkers often dismiss Real Ale as their grandfather’s drink. It’s not strong enough, not glitzy enough, and doesn’t have the consistence of soda pop. In a sense, Real Ale is like the smoking jacket of beer.

But that assumed dowdiness belies the fact that it’s the perfect pub beverage, inviting, intriguing, light enough to for several pints with your mates, and evocative of cozy pub fireplaces, decorative hand-pumps and rustic tilted barrels.

Like the yeast that ferments in our Real Ale, we get the joy of consuming it among exactly the right conditions.

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. Find us on Twitter @beercraft. Send your questions, suggestions, or comments to beercraft@rochester.rr.com.

Here’s a chance to taste a bunch of beer from one of the oldest and most revered American craft brewers. Join us at Monty’s Korner in Rochester, 7:30 pm, as we slurp down an American Icon.

A style less recognized

By Mark Tichenor and Bruce Lish

It is tempting to describe classic European beer styles as immutable, their hallowed characteristics chiseled into marble. But that simply isn’t the case and never has been.

Sure, styles like porter and Dunkel go back a couple hundred years, but a quick look into their histories shows that these classic variants of beer are merely benchmarks in the evolution of the beverage, porter turning to Irish stout, Dunkel to Helles.

In the beer world, everything is, ahem, fluid.

As such, styles come and styles go. Some evolve and some disappear. The IPA brewed by Stone in San Diego bears no resemblance to a classic English IPA like Samuel Smith beyond the fact that their names share three initials. That’s beer evolution.

And in the city of Berlin, we bear witness to Berliner Weisse, a famous beer style with, sadly, no place in the modern world.

Prussian Berlin, a booming megalopolis yet to feel the perditions of world war, was always a city with an inferiority complex. Rougher around the edges than Paris, less grand than London, Berlin nevertheless grew into a major economic engine, and the people took pride in their city.

They also took pride in their locally brewed Berliner Weisse: a wheat beer completely unlike Bavarian Hefeweizen, with a light, prickly, champagne-like character and mouth-puckering tartness. Its sourness is remarkable, a thin veneer of acidity that torments the tongue and is mitigated only by the effervescent lightness of the beer. Drinking a Berliner Weisse straight is a challenge for anyone, and definitely a feat true beer connoisseurs should be happy to undertake.

But when you’re having a beer with a hasty lunch, a challenge is the furthest thing from your mind. To counter this tartness, the Berliners flavored their Weisse with the woodruff herb, which cut the acid and left a sweet, pistachio-like character. Later on, raspberries also found their place into the beer, resulting in a beverage that didn’t technically defy the German purity law (more than any other wheat beer), but definitely flew in the face of its spirit.

At any rate, a Berliner Weisse properly laced with green woodruff or red raspberry syrup remains a delightful singularity among beer. Champagne body, slight sweetness and complexities of herb and fruit, and counterplay from the beers inherent sourness create a sweet, refreshing swallow with a finish that positively demands another sip.

Berliner Weisse has been around since the 15^th century, and at the height of its popularity, was brewed by hundreds of breweries, all located in and around Berlin. But it’s iconoclastic flavor and low alcohol content made it easy competition for the stronger lagers and Hefeweizens of newly reunified Germany. Nowadays, only two Berlin breweries, Berliner Kindl and Schuhultheiss, produce the style.

Those same characteristics make Berliner Weisse unappealing as a style for American craft brewers. In an age where drinkers want huge double IPAs and imperial stouts, a spritzy beer with a 3-4% alcohol content just doesn’t capture the public appeal, especially after the shocking blasphemy of adding flavored syrup!

Sly Fox Berliner Weisse, from Sly Fox brewing of Phoenixville, PA, is the only American example we’ve tasted. At the time of this writing, it’s available on draft at the Tap and Mallet. For the real experience, try a “traffic light,” a flight of 3 glasses, one with green woodruff syrup, one pale yellow and unflavored, and one with red raspberry syrup. The beer is tame enough that three won’t do you in.

And hey, with Berliner Weisse, you gotta get it while you can, before it’s all gone.

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. Find us on Twitter @beercraft. Send your questions, suggestions, or comments to beercraft@rochester.rr.com.

Thank you, Sly Fox Brewing, for making a Berliner Weisse. You never see this style from Indie brewers because it’s frightfully low in alcohol and it’s usually flavored with raspberry or woodruff syrup.

Anyway, I’ve been digging on Sly Fox Berliner Weisse during the World Cup games at the Tap and Mallet. It makes me nostalgic for the Kurfürstendamm.

-Mark

We’re taking a roadie tomorrow. Heading to the Philly area to check out Victory, Sly Fox, and assorted beer bars in the city that rightly claims to be the East Coast beer capital, and also boasts sports fans that purposefully throw up on little girls.

If you’re in Downingtown or Phoenixville tommorow night and want to hoist one with Bruce and me, leave a comment or shoot me a tweet on twitter, the popular social networking service. (username: @beercraft).

Are they cool with Yankees T-shirts in the City of Brotherly Love? Is it… too soon?

-Mark

Flagship beers make extreme beers possible

by Mark Tichenor and Bruce Lish

Among enthusiasts, the term ‘craft beer’ is a dichotomy. It’s a celebration of breiwing’s limitless creative potential, but at the same time the label is a constraint, a narrow beer VIP room into which only a few highly priced, extremely strong, violently flavored beers may pass.

Hey, that’s cool. These folks are right. For some, beer drinking is an extreme sport, and these, uh, beerdevils, get their pleasure from huge hop character or challenging roasty finishes. Sometimes, we’re beerdevils ourselves (less so, after that one particular incident. Who knew she had a video camera anyway?)

Plus, the craft brewing world needs extreme beer lovers. These are the folks who view beer as art. They see beyond the supermarket shelf into the malt silos and fermentation tanks where their beer is born and gestates. It’s these folks who visit small breweries in the middle of nowhere, and who camp out in dew-soaked fields at festivals. Beer enthusiasts like to know their brewers personally. They become fans; they become friends. And they push breweries in ever more creative directions.

But beer enthusiasts are not the only people who love good craft beer.

Were that the case, the craft beer industry really wouldn’t be much of an industry at all. The market would simply be too small. The reason brewers, usually intense beer enthusiasts themselves, can focus on the wants and whims of craft beer geeks is because they rely on tamer, more accessible beers that resonate with a much larger and less specialized audience,

“#9 is our bread and butter,” explains Aubrey Volbrecht, “Curator of Curiosities” for Magic Hat brewing. “It’s our flagship, it’s what we sell the most of, and it helped make us one of the largest craft breweries.”

“Everywhere we introduced #9, it sold out immediately, “

She also feels that beers like #9 develop a strong brand loyalty absent in the upper stratospheres of beerdom, where drinkers are more concerned with creativity and novelty than a solid go-to brew.

While hardcore hopheads may shun the light, apricot flavored Magic Hat #9 like it was plutonium, thousands of people make the beer their staple. It’s not a brew for which you have to train your palate. It’s even tasty to many people who say they don’t like beer.

Rather than being apologetic about being an independent brewery aiming for the middle of the market, Volbrecht points out that the people who order #9 are craft beer lovers too, and their taste is every bit as valid as the guy who spends all his free time arguing about beer on the internet.

Jeff O’Neill, Brewmaster at the Ithaca Brewing Company, agrees. Acclaimed for their Excelsior series of high-end beers, Ithaca’s fortunes rest squarely on the performance of the key beers in their downmarket portfolio, such as Ithaca IPA (representing 40% of brewery output), Nut Brown, and Apricot Wheat.

O’Neill alludes to the idea that, in the past, the same enthusiasts who gush over Ithaca Brute and Stone Double Bastard were once the same folks who couldn’t get enough of Ithaca Nut Brown and Ithaca Pale Ale. “In the market now where there are so many super quality beers, those styles are not as exciting to those that are already initiated, he says.”

Taking that one step further, O’Neill points out that it’s the more accessible beers that serve as the portals to beer enthusiasm. These days, he formulates and brews things like the massive, bourbon cask-aged 10.5% abv Ithaca Ten, but O’Neill recounts the first steps of his own his beer journey.

“There was one summer [in college] where my housemates and I drank ridiculous amounts of Saranac Mountain Berry Ale. That’s the first thing I tried that was not macro lager. Then I went through my snobbery phase about fruit beers, then woke up one morning and saw that, lo and behold, there was a fruit beer paying my mortgage.”

Still, O’Neill stresses the importance of, and the camaraderie he shares with, the tastemakers who push the high end of the beer envelope, He points out that the mid-market range makes it possible to brew beers that please those who’ve made beer their passion.

It’s important to realize that beer love is a spectrum, and while it’s tempting to keep banging on about how craft beer hobbyists are this and casual drinkers are that, there is no demarcation line. A solid fruit beer drinker just might hanker for something a little more challenging the next time she’s at the pub, and likewise a hobbyist homebrewer might feels crave an icy cold Apricot Wheat after a hot day of yard work. The greatest thing about craft beer is the variety, and there’s a place for every beer at this banquet.

Even if your friends see you drinking it.

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. Find us on Twitter @beercraft. Send your questions, suggestions, or comments to beercraft@rochester.rr.com.

What will the Emperor Wear?
by Mark Tichenor

The biggest names in craft beer can now be found pretty much anywhere. This hurts the craft beer lover.

Craft beer is a mature segment of the beverage industry. It’s no longer a place for mavericks, corporate outcasts and visionaries. Nowadays you’re more likely to find venture capitalists and investment groups funding breweries than gatherings of friends and community. It sucks, but those days are done.

Also seemingly gone is the notion that there’s enough space at the tap for all. With over 1400 American breweries pouring out the suds, those taplines get pretty tight. Nowadays, the same breweries that once lent each other ice tubs at beer festivals must elbow each other out of the way for the privilege of occupying your glass and your tummy.

It seems almost perverse to say this, but craft beer is now a commodity. Such a multitude of brewers competing in a style range spanning maybe 30 categories causes backlog and confusion at the tap. But since investors that back breweries now see this segment as a cash cow, the financial performance demands are often more stringent than ever before.

All things considered, the once American, now international craft beer industry excels. As beer lovers, we cannot be more thankful for the hundreds of luscious, diverse, passionately fussed-over beers we have the luxury of buying everywhere. And in fairness, we cannot think of a single top-tier American craft brewery that does not demonstrate fanatical mania for the quality of the beers they proffer.

But making great beer is no longer good enough. The onus is now on breweries to convince drinkers that their beer is the most special, yet traditionally accurate, yet innovative, yet difficult to obtain. The selling proposition of top craft beers is now a demand. Buy it or never have the chance to taste, because there’s only 10 barrels being made. By the way, if you don’t snap as much up as possible, you’re a poser and not a craft beer lover. Did we mention it’s 20 freakin’ dollars a bottle?

This is the new American beer reality.

Maybe the big brewers were right. In some ways, craft beer is no different from Budweiser or Coors. Small brewers now compete for market share with very similar products. In the movie ‘Beer Wars’ the filmmaker ran blind taste tests on brand loyal mainstream light beer drinkers who ultimately couldn’t differentiate their preferred Bud Light or Miller Light or Coors from rivals. It begs the question. In a blind taste test, could beer dorks tell the difference between, say Dogfish Head 90 minute IPA and Stone IPA?

Enter the marketing department. Chuck out the window any notions about the romantic craft brewing cottage industry. We drinkers bought the hype. We let new brewers define how our beer should be. We demanded more hops, more alcohol, and higher prices. Now we’re at the point were a certain Scottish brewery can put their mediocre beer on a boat to age for six weeks, call it ‘Atlantic IPA, and sell it to drooling Yanks for midrange wine prices.

When does it stop?

Folks, here’s how you measure beer. Is it tasty? Does it make you feel good? Then it is a good beer. Yeah, often you want something REALLY good, or a brew that spikes your senses in a sharper or radically different way, and the American craft beer juggernaut certainly indulges drinkers with variety and experience. But the growing movement to fetishize such a historically basic staple of human food serves no purpose other than to line brewery owners’ pockets and demonstrate to them their staunchest loyalists’ gullibility.

An entire process to dupe and fleece beer lovers is now in place. Beer review websites, in some cases, now allow reviewers to rank beers to the third freakin’ decimal place. The qualifications necessary to do so? Own a computer and a six-pack. Who really could tell the difference between, say, a pale ale ranked by anyone with access at 98.624% and one ranked at 98.942%/ Yet people make buying decisions, and fall lustily in love with, beers based on idiocy like this.

Please, ask yourselves, why are you buying this? Is it because, as we believe, good beer is a sublime pleasure of modern life? Or is it to one-up your friends, demonstrate intellectual superiority, and show that you belong to a club that, while never exclusive, once had far fewer members?

The financial firms backing Big Craft Beer sincerely hope it’s the latter.

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. Find us on Twitter @beercraft. Send your questions, suggestions, or comments to beercraft@rochester.rr.com.

Travel Guru Rick Steves recently did a radio show/podcast on beer in which he discussed European beer with  tour guide friends from Belgium, Ireland, England and Denmark. The guests weren’t beer enthusiasts as we know them in the US craft beer scene, but you got a sense of their affection  for the stuff and the everyday part it played in their lives.

As each guest spoke, he pointed out the territorialism inherent, these small countries’ beer culture. The Irish dude explained you’d never say “Slainte” in a Belfast pub, that in protestant pubs you’d be more likely to find Tennant’s than Guinness, and that proud Corkers would more likely drink a Murphy’s.  The American resident of Copenhagen pointed out that loyalty to a beer ran fiercely to Tuborg or Carlsberg, despite the latter owning the former.

We used to have that here in the USA. In her excellent book, “Ambitious Brew, the Story of American Beer,” Historian Maureen Ogle talks about German immigrant brewers setting up shop in the Midwest and competing locally for the hearts and taste buds of particular ethnic enclaves. She points out that, prior to the arrival of the tumultuous 20th century, only a few of the largest breweries attempted to ship to distant markets.

These days, we have those artisan conditions again, but absent is that that territorial culture, that ‘our stuff is the best’ mentality still prevalent in Europe. The modern American craft beer market disdains consumer loyalty.

The reason why seems obvious: the insane growth rate of the American market means breweries keep finding fresh customers. Distribution gets the beers of even small-batch small-town brewers to places where that growth takes place. At this point, craft breweries have the luxury of competing for the new guy, or luring a customer back to their particular tap, with gimmicky marketing, extreme beer line extensions, and flashy stunts.They can be content with letting beer drinkers revel in variety because the new customer stream is so strong.

So what happens when growth slows? How will hundreds of craft breweries compete for drinkers in a saturated market? When the chips are down, what are the modern beer luminaries doing to ensure future customer loyalty?

The principal way, of course, is to make great beer. Most small American breweries do this. But that raises the bar pretty high. At the end of the day, is an amazing Stone IPA really all that different from an amazing Dogfish Head 60 minute IPA? How do you keep your drinkers when the chips are down?

I’m not condemning anyone, or even suggestiing shortsightedness on the part of the brewers. Certainly business-savvy folks in this Wild West industry consider this problem. A bigger concern is that the industry created a type of core customer that shuns brand loyalty in favor of wild adventure.

From a beer lover’s point of view, that’s fantastic. I just wonder how things will turn out down the line.

-Mark

Once again, it’s time for thirsty and curious beer fans to sit in a bar while Tom and I drone on about beer.Oh yeah, and pour you a bunch of it too.

This week’s Beer School brings a brewery that’s brand new to our area: Wisconsin’s Steven’s Point. We’ve never actually tried Steven’s Point before, but rest assured that won’t deter us from highlighting its nuances, flavors and features as if we apprenticed with the brewmaster himself.

$5 gets you in, and the show starts around 7:30. Come on down to Monty’s Korner and let’s all make a “point” of enjoying the tasting. Ha!

-Mark

A taste of what used to be: pre-prohibition lager

by Mark Tichenor and Bruce Lish

The history books overflow with terrible ideas, and up near the top of the list, right after ‘invading Russia in the winter,’ sits prohibition. The USA’s decade long attempt to combat drunkenness by outlawing liquor proved a colossal folly of social engineering, and obliterated American beer as folks knew it.

In a way, the American beer industry of the 19th and early 20th century resembled the craft beer industry of today. Many small brewers made beer with high-grade ingredients, selling primarily locally. A few larger players fenced with each other for market dominance. The majority of brewers in this time frame, however, were German immigrants or of recent German descent. So American lager bore much similarity to their venerable German counterparts.

Then bam! America got stupid.

The outlawing of alcohol in the USA spelled death for many brewers. Others hung on by producing non-alcoholic malt syrups and malt-based soft drinks. By the time the dark cloud of temperance was lifted, apart from a couple of the larger players, the American brewing industry was basically gone.

The legalization of beer, on April 7, 1933, opened a fire hose that drenched a nation. But things weren’t quite the same. Before full repeal of the 18th amendment, the new Roosevelt administration took advantage of a loophole. Taking a cue from Sweden’s classification of beer under 3.2% alcohol as “non intoxicating,” Congress passed legislature mandating that percentage as the maximum allowable for American beer.

So consumers got to taste beer again, and even if it was weak, nasty crap, it was still better than the illicit consumption of worse home and back-alley brews. At any rate, after over a decade of no beer at all, the new 3.2 beer must have seemed like ambrosia to thirsty Americans.

After World War II, the USA entered its boom era. Transportation improved and everyone got TV. Now it was possible not only to sell beer on a national level, but to effectively market on that scale as well. Most of the brewers still surviving after prohibition got enormous, buying out smaller competition and then each other. Meanwhile, the all-barley recipes of previous generations was increasingly adulterated with cheaper adjuncts like corn and rice, morphing into the mainstream beer we know today. American Lager had died, long live American Lager.

Fortunately, the first wave of craft brewers brought with it a resurgence of traditional American lager. The Boston Beer Company (Sam Adams) and Brooklyn Brewery both launched with lagers brewed from pre-prohibition recipes. Yuengling retained its connection to the lagers of the 19th century, and many indie brewers across the nation delved into history books and dusty brewing logs to craft versions of their own.

It’s impossible to tell how true these beers are to the originals, but modern American craft lagers proudly hearken back to the beers that made our country drunk enough to piss off the government, Roasty, hinting of honey sweetness, with a body fuller than that actress from ‘Precious,’ they go a long way to dispelling the unfortunate groupthink in the beer community that lager is fizzy, weak, yellow and generally nasty. May the new tradition continue!

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. Find us on Twitter @beercraft. Send your questions, suggestions, or comments to beercraft@rochester.rr.com.