Several months ago, there was an obscure posting in the Brewers Forum from Charlie Papazian. He was passing on a request he’d received for a brewer to speak about sustainable brewing issue at a conference taking place in San Francisco. Since I’ve written about organic beer and green breweries several times now, it piqued my interest. The conference was EcoCity World Summit, and it took place April 21-26 at various location in the Bay Area. I wrote to them to get press credentials on the off chance that a brewer did participate, and also because I was curious to see what else might come up related to the recent agricultural shortages with barley and hops. It turned out that Greg Koch, from Stone Brewing, had agreed to be on one of the panels, on Saturday April 26. His panel was titled “The Future of Food For Cities.”

After a gala opening at the Herbst Theatre and two days of academic seminars at Berkeley’s Extension Center at Third and Mission, the remaining three days of the conference all took place at the Nob Hill Masonic Center on California Street. A number of the panel discussions focused on the future of various infrastructures, and had titles that all began “The Future of …,” with future glimpses of transportation in cities, energy to power cities, consumption, population, equity, architecture and urban design.

Below this interesting mural were a couple dozen tables with local organizations, media and other related ecological agendas with fliers, magazines and books. There was quite a lot of interesting stuff to see and read.

The first speaker on “The Future of Food For Cities” was particularly interesting. Eric Holt-Giménez, Director of Food First, which is also known as the Institute for Food and Development Policy, gave a lot of information about the myths surrounding the current food shortage. The most important of these is that he doesn’t believe it’s a shortage at all. He pointed out that the many food riots taking place around the world are not even riots, but rebellions. They aren’t being staged by starving populations, but by the poor angry about how quickly food prices have risen, about a growing entitlement gap and lack of democracy. Worldwide, average food prices have gone up a staggering 83% over the last three years, and 45% in just the last nine months. We all know about barley and hops, but wheat is up 130% and rice 66%.

At the same time, the big food companies are reporting record profits: ADM 25%, Monsanto 45%, General Foods 61% and Cargill 86%. But Holt-Giménez claims there is no shortage whatsoever, that reserve stocks are fine. To account for the higher prices he goes to say that across the board the rising prices are and will continue to blamed on the following:

1. Climate change: droughts, floods, etc.
2. Consumption: greater demand
3. Yields: 2005-06 were down, but not 2007
4. Energy: higher oil prices
5. Agrofuels: half of corn being used toward, demand rising

I’m not quite sure what to make of that. As he was ticking them off, I noticed they were pretty much the exact reasons that we’ve been told barley prices are rising and are some of the reasons for hops, too. With hops, having fewer acres planted — especially of aroma hops — is undoubtedly the primary cause and yields are still down as a result. But it’s hard not to wonder if some of the rising costs are due to some chicanery on the part of what Holt-Giménez refers to as the Industrial Agri-foods Complex.

He gave a lengthy explanation of the root causes, but the ones that seemed the most problematic to me were these. The so-called Green Revolution of the 1960-80s concentrated ownership of the world’s land into just a few very large corporations. As a consequence, we’ve lost 75% of food diversity to the point where cotton, maize, wheat, rice and soy account for 91% of all crops grown. That makes for a vulnerable food system where a problem with just one crop could have a ripple effect across the entire economy. Some of the other things he cited included the removal of transit barriers, dismantling marketing boards, free-trade agreements and food subsidies to the tune of $1 billion per day.

What Holt-Giménez sees happening is a collapse of the food and fuel systems into one, except that the biofuel solution is no solution at all. He calls it the “Grand Mythology,” that we “can’t consume our way out of over-consumption.” There a couple of essays at Food First that go into a bit more detail about this, if you’re interested. I’d suggest The New Green Revolution and World Food Prices, The Great Agrofuel Swindle, and Pouring Fuel on the Food.

Greg Koch went last, telling a receptive audience a story familiar to all of us, but which was largely new to a good portion of the crowd. Koch talked about how “the U.S. is now the most exciting place for beer in the world, bar none.” He told the story of beer’s history, from the golden age to its recent renaissance.

He discussed the malt and hops shortages of late and the statistic about the average American living within 10 miles of a brewery. Koch also brought up his own brewery’s efforts to be green, then delving into a broader examination of what many others were doing as well, painting an honest picture of just how green the craft beer community is.

After each panelist spoke, the three of them, took lively questions from the audience. From left, Greg Koch, Carol Whiteside, President of the Great Valley Center in Modesto (and Modesto’s former mayor), and Eric Holt-Giménez, from Food First.

It was certainly an interesting experience and I was glad to see craft beer playing a role in thinking about the future of humanity and we should go about securing it.
 

I came across a website the today, while trying to read the Danish article, that had the ability to be translated into a variety of languages. I thought being able to reach a significantly wider audience seemed like a cool idea, so I did a little digging around and settled on a WordPress plugin, the Taragana Translator Pro. You can see it there in the right-hand sidebar under the heading “Translate the Bulletin.” Simply click on the flag representing one of the thirteen available languages, and voilà, it will reload the page in that language. You can then navigate to any post or page on the Bulletin and it will stay in that language. To return to English, simply click on the Union Jack flag.

The 13 languages you can now read the Bulletin in are:

1. German
2. Spanish
3. French
4. Italian
5. Portuguese
6. Japanese
7. Korean
8. Chinese Simplified
9. Chinese Traditional
10. Arabic
11. Dutch
12. Greek
13. Russian

Of course, I’m barely competent in English, so I have no idea how accurate the translations are. It could be complete gibberish for all I know. Anybody remember Monty Python’s Hungarian Phrasebook sketch? For all I know, every phrase could simply be rendered “my hovercraft is full of eels.” If you’re bilingual and fluent in one of the languages above, please take a look and let me know if the translations are reasonably accurate.

A maddeningly sparse article in Denmark’s Copenhagen Post today reports that a thesis done by a graduate student at the University of Copenhagen seems to suggest that “[o]rganic beer production emits substantially more greenhouse gases than ordinary beer.” The study’s author, Jakob Majcher, compared CO² emissions between conventional brewing and organic brewing and found that organic beer production produced 12% more. As far as I knew, the only difference between organic and non-organic beer was the ingredients used. I don’t know of any real differences in the “process” of brewing organic beer, so I’m somewhat stumped as to what might account for his findings. There’s almost no details about how he he did his study, just his declaration of the results, which is more than a little frustrating.

There is what looks to be a slightly more thorough, or at least longer, article at Information DK. Unfortunately, it’s in Danish and none of the popular web translators offer Danish. The only one I could find, InterTran, provides a translation that is almost unreadable. Hopefully, this will get picked up by English-language news outlets and we can figure out what’s really going on.

Here is the second half of the photos I took at the 2008 World Beer Cup Gala Awards ceremony, which was held last Saturday in San Diego, California.

Brendan Moylan and Arne Johnson, from Marin Brewing, picking one of the three medals Arne won.

The hard-working staff of the Brewers Association who put on Craft Brewers Conference and the World Beer Cup competition. For many more award photos, go to part 1 of the photo gallery, followed by part 2.

For many more photos from the second half of this year’s World Beer Cup Awards, visit the photo gallery.
 

The 2008 World Beer Cup Gala Awards ceremony was held last Saturday in San Diego, California. 2,864 from 644 breweries in 58 countries competed for medals in 91 categories. In each category, usually a distinctive beer style, a gold, silver and bronze is awarded, though on occasion one medal within a category is not given if none of the beers meet the written criteria for the style. Approximately 268 medals were awarded (91 x 3 = 273, minus 5 awards not given).

Of the 91 categories, an average of 32 beers was entered in each, with IPAs getting the most (77) followed by German-style Pilsener (72). Of the 58 countries entering, beers from 21 won medals, with the US winning the most (158), Germany in second (25) and Belgium in third (11). Beers from the State of California itself won 35 medals, with Colorado winning 22 and Oregon 16.

Bas and Hildegard, from Urthel, accepting their award. For many more award photos, go to the photo gallery.

For many more photos from the first half of this year’s World Beer Cup Awards, visit the photo gallery.
 

Happy Earth Day everybody. This is the 39th annual celebration setting aside a day to reflect on the big blue marble that sustains us and makes every second of all our lives possible, including enjoying some wonderful beer, organic or otherwise. I did a feature earlier this year on Green Breweries called It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Green in All About Beer magazine. In addition to writing about organic beer, I packed as many stories of ways breweries are running their business in sustainable ways as would fit. But the reality is that in doing research for the article what I discovered is that the number of breweries and the numbers of ways that breweries voluntarily adopt green practices is, quite frankly, staggering. And as far as I can tell, most of them do so just because it’s the right thing to do. There are economic advantages for some sustainable decisions, but by and large they’re not necessarily the least expensive way to do things. I was really struck by this as so many places stepped up to tell me what they were doing, so many in fact that I couldn’t fit anywhere near what they told me in the article. So as Earth Day has me reflecting on this while enjoying a frosty beverage, I’m proud to be a part of one of the greenest industries around. It’s time to fire up the iPod and put on a favorite old song: The Most Beautiful World in the World, by Harry Nilsson. Please join me in drinking a toast to our Earth.

We already know that the price of barley has doubled over the least year, but according to a scientist from New Zealand, global warming may keep that situation from getting any better and will continue to hamper efforts to increase the supply of barley to be used in making beer.

From the AP story:

Jim Salinger, a climate scientist at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, said climate change likely will cause a decline in the production of malting barley in parts of New Zealand and Australia. Malting barley is a key ingredient of beer.

Speaking at the Institute of Brewing and Distilling ’s 30th Asia Pacific Section Convention, Salinger predicted “the price of beer is likely to rise in coming decades because climate change will hamper the production of a key grain needed for the brew — especially in Australia.”

Though Salinger was talking about only his native New Zealand and Australia, it’s not hard to extrapolate that the same climate changes will have similar effects in other parts of the world, too. He finished his talk on this cheery note. “[C]limate change could cause a drop in beer production within 30 years, especially in parts of Australia, as dry areas become drier and water shortages worsen.”

For our 14th Session, the topic has turned decidedly personal. Our host, Stonch, has chosen the topic “beer people” with the knowing wisdom that “enjoying beer is as much about people as it is malt and hops.” It seems great minds do think alike, because I’ve actually been thinking about this a lot lately, but more on that later on.

In a broad sense, I think the beer industry and its legions of true fans (oh, what to call them, what to call ourselves?) are all so closely involved precisely because of the people. We may all be drawn in by the beer, but we stay because of the people. I’ve worked in many different industries from the military, music, video, retail, and even the law and I’m here to tell you that far and away the finest people I’ve met are beer people. Sure there are great people everywhere, but there is a much lower ratio of assholes in the beer business than in any other I’ve encountered. So great literalist that I am, I’m going to write today not about a single individual but about the great collective beer people. We’re here and we love beer!

I’ve been involved with beer since I was a kid, really, and I started thinking about it in a more studied way when I lived in New York City in the late ’70s. My involvement grew again after moving to California in the mid-80s, but became much more serious for at least the last twenty years sometime after I started homebrewing and wrote a bar guide to Silicon Valley in the early 1990s. Since then, I’ve been a beer buyer, contract brewer, festival volunteer, judge, tasting organizer, magazine manager and writer. In all those pursuits, I’ve encountered great swaths of people from all walks of life, socio-economic groups, ages, etc. all thrown together by one commonality: beer.

Having been on the business side of beer for a number of years, I got to know a lot of the folks at distributors, along with brewery sales representatives, brewery owners, merchandisers, marketers. In many ways, it’s a different world from craft world, the big companies have so many layers of people each doing one small part of the whole. And even though I often criticize the big brewer’s products and especially their business practices, for the most part the on the ground employees are usually pretty terrific people. It’s especially true at Anheuser-Busch, where I’ve met enough fine people to be impressed with their hiring methods. And Miller and Coors have some great people working for them, too. Seriously. You might not think so for all my complaining, but notice I’m rarely ranting against the employees, only the policy and decision-makers, and more often the consequences of those decisions.

With the small companies, as you’d expect, there’s a lot of multi-tasking with most employees (and usually the owner/brewer) doing all of the jobs. With them, there aren’t many layers from top to bottom, and as a result there’s much more transparency, warts and all, with the way they operate. But surprisingly, even with being so overworked, most still manage to have a positive outlook. It’s actually quite amazing to me. I’m sure they must be as busy, stressed out and pulled in many directions as any other overworked, underpaid segment of the economy. But for some reason, they manage to be enjoyable company, too, somehow. Not surprisingly, most are someone you’d like to have a beer with, and it’s remarkable to me that this is nearly universal, at least in my experience. It’s the primary reason I’m so supportive of the industry and generally will do whatever I can to extol the virtues of good beer. It may have been the beer that got me involved in the beer world, but it’s the people that keep me passionate about it and make it a joy to be a part of.

Eight days ago, it was Michael Jackson’s birthday. It would have been his 66th. One of the things I always liked about Michael’s writing was how much of the brewer’s story he liked to tell. Oh, there was always a lot about the beer itself, the process by which it was made, and so forth, but at the heart of his writing was always the personal story about the men and women who made the beer. I’ve always thought knowing the back story about the beer and the brewery adds something intangible to enjoying the beer, too. I suppose the more you know about anything, the more or better you’re able to appreciate it. I know there are a lot of people who insist “it’s all about the beer,” but I strongly disagree. Like anything crafted by the hand of man, the beer did not magically appear in a vacuum. The blood, sweat and tears of the brewer are what brought the beer into existence. His experiences and the decisions he made up to the point he made that beer you love has a lot to do with how he made the beer, why he decided to make it that way, and how it tastes. To deny those factors is like trying to appreciate Van Gogh’s Starry Night without knowing anything of his life, his trials and tribulations, his challenges with mental illness, his relationship with his caring brother and so on. For a fascinating illustration of how knowing more about the artist adds to your appreciation, rent the DVD collection the Power of Art by Simon Schama. He takes eight well-known artists’ most famous pieces and give them context, by telling the story of how each painting came to be. It’s an amazing glimpse into the creative process and brewers are no less artists for using a palette of hops, malt, yeast and water.

INTERNATIONAL BREWER’S DAY Ever since I saw this “Have You Hugged A Brewmaster Today?” sticker on the door to the brewery at San Francisco’s 21st Amendment Brewery & Restaurant, the idea of starting a holiday to honor the men and women who make the great beer we love has been percolating in my brain. So I’m proposing now that we set aside a day as International Brewer’s Day, a day to raise a toast and honor all the brewers in the world. For the date, I’m proposing July 18, which is the feast day for St. Anou of Metz (also known as Arnulf, Arnould, and most famously as St. Arnold), one of the patron saints of beer. This is the way holidays begin, just by a group of people deciding to start one and spreading it from there. The real trick is acceptance as a holiday. So I suggest we start out small and on July 18, similar to the Sessions (but only once a year), as many who are interested write about a brewer you feel is worthy of recognition.

I’ll post and send out details later this month and I’ll create some graphics and put up a website for everybody to use and link to. If you like the idea, consider helping to spread the word about it. But in the meantime just think about a brewer you’d like to profile. The idea, in my humble opinion, would be to tell their story in whatever fashion you feel comfortable with, be that an interview, essay, video or what have you. Hopefully, over time it will grow. Perhaps one day there will be events honoring the best brewers out there at breweries, bars and restaurants all over the planet. We probably won’t see cards at Hallmark anytime soon, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.

Brewers have given so many of us the pleasure of their artistry and enriched our lives with their beer since civilization began. So I think it’s time we recognized their efforts by celebrating their lives, their commitment and their craft. We’re all beer people, but without the brewers what would we be drinking?

As the old Czech saying goes:

“Blessed is the mother who gives birth to a brewer.”

On the off chance that there’s someone in the universe who hasn’t discovered the wonderfully useful Beer Mapping Project, I’m picking it as my Website of the Month for March. And it’s not just because I’m an honorary Captain in the BMP Army (I keep wondering when my sword will arrive) nor is because the General, Jonathan Surratt, and his lovely wife Robin, are two of the nicest people I’ve met (yes, I’m coming to Great Taste of the Midwest … soon).

It’s really because Jonathan has taken what’s essentially a simple idea and done just a terrific job of making it incredibly useful. The Beer Mapping Project has taken Google’s offer of allowing free not-for-profit use of their Mapping API and created maps to beer destinations. I remember when he was just getting started and little by little new cities were being added, seemingly daily. Today there are maps in eleven countries around the world, all fifty U.S. states and dozens of cities, including our own San Francisco map. Each map includes breweries, brewpubs, beer bars, beer stores and homebrew shops. There are also reviews, a forum, a way to create your own beer trips, and much, much more. The Beer Mapping Project is without a doubt one of the killer apps of the online beer community.

This is my second pick for “Website of the Month,” which I started featuring on the right sidebar last month, because I get so many link requests, and because I have so many in my blogroll, I wanted to highlight the best ones I come across.

I’m not quite sure why people keep trying to “improve” beer by adding vitamins to it, trying to make it akin to the sort of health drinks one might find at a health food store. Beer is plenty healthy already and it certainly feels like brewers have pretty much perfected how to make it by now. If there’s a more perfected beverage, I can’t imagine what it might be.

It’s fairly well settled that when you drink, you lose B vitamins. Alcohol robs your body of those vitamin compounds. My personal regime after a night of drinking is to take a B complex vitamin pill along with two or three Advils before retiring (which has been nearly a perfect preemptive remedy for me).

A Philippine inventor, Virgilio “Billy” L. Malang, has come with yet another beer that adds vitamin B back into the beer. He recently presented his beer at the First International Inventors Day Convention held February 2 in Thailand. Malang’s beer also nabbed a gold medal at the Genius-Europe competition in 2004 out of 1,000 inventions submitted by 540 would-be inventors from forty-six different nations.

Malang apparently began homebrewing while living in the U.S. in the 1980s. He uses organic rice syrup as his wort, using no grains at all, which he believes gives his beer a distinctive taste. There’s also one more secret ingredient, which still has a patent pending, that he uses as a substitute for hops. This substitute he says is “sourced locally” so that suggests a plant that grows in the Philippines. At this point, it’s sounding less and less like an actual beer, since it uses only half the traditional ingredients: yeast and water.

Other related inventions by Malang include “a ‘tagay cup’ good for three drinkers—with three handles and three cup lips assigned to each member of a drinking trio, and an anti-hangover capsule derived from ‘activated’ coco shell charcoal.” For more on Malang and his inventions, there’s a story in the Philippine Inquirer.

I guess what I don’t quite understand is how simply adding vitamins to a beer at some point during the brewing process guarantees that it can be absorbed by the body when you drink the finished product. I mean, it my still be in there, but how do we know that the body can take it from the solution and add it to the body’s total amount, thus replenishing whatever B vitamins have been lost in the same process. Otherwise, it really doesn’t do much good, does it? And it seems like an awful lot of effort when simply keeping a bottle of vitamin pills on the nightstand would do the same job.

Even for those of you old enough to remember Thomas Kemper beer, not just the soda, you may not have known that there never was a Thomas Kemper. Instead the name came from the family names of the two founders, Andy Thomas and Will Kemper, who began brewing on Bainbridge Island in 1984 and soon after moved the brewery to the small town of Poulsbo, Washington, on the Kitsap Penninsula. My wife and I visited the brewery on our honeymoon in the summer of 1996. That was four years after it had been sold to Hart Brewing (later Pyramid Brewing). Initially ales were made under the Pyramid label and lagers under Thomas Kemper. For a trip down memory lane, check out their old labels at Corey and Nate’s Beer Labels website. Rande Reed, in fact, was the brewer there early on but later moved to Pyramid and then Snoqualmie Falls Brewing, before returning to musical pursuits.

But I was never sure what happened to the founders after their involvement ended. In turns out Will Kemper became a brewery consultant, helping launch such breweries as Philadelphia’s Dock Street, Seattle’s Aviator Ales, Capital City Brewing in D.C. and Denver’s Mile High Brewing. For the last year or so, Will and his wife Mari have been in Turkey, building a brewery in Istanbul called Taps. Now that the Taps project is completed they’ve returned to their home in Bellingham, Washington with plans to open a new brewery there this spring. It will be located in the Old Town part of town and have a capacity of 1,000 barrels, with expansion to 5,000 possible if successful. The new name will be Chuckanut Brewery & Kitchen, and the plan is to have six different beers and a lunch and dinner menu.

Reuters is reporting that SABMiller has overtaken rival InBev to become the world’s largest beer company. This is based on preliminary numbers from 2007, and assumes both SABMiller completes the expected purchase of Grolsch and the S&N breakup is approved. Additionally, Heineken’s acquisition of a portion of S&N will also net them the number three spot, displacing Anheuser-Busch who’ll fall to fourth. That will make the new top five look like this:

1. SABMiller
2. InBev
3. Heineken
4. Anheuser-Busch
5. Carlsberg

 
The world beer market grew almost 5% in 2007, also based on the same preliminary figures, up from 3% the previous year.