For our 15th Session, the topic remains personal, but instead of profiling another person, the goal is to hold up a mirror to see ourselves. Mirror, mirror, on the wall, how did you get started in this all? Our hosts, Boak and Bailey, want to know “the moment when you saw the light. At what point did you realise you were a beer lover / geek / enthusiast? What beer(s) triggered the conversion? Did someone help you along your way, or did you come to it yourself?”

I’ve actually written about this before, two years ago. And if you think I’ve been long-winded before, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. There’s a collective writing exercise known as NaNoWriMo, which is short for “National Novel Writing Month.” During the month of November, whoever wants to participate is challenged to write a 50,000-word novel in thirty days. That works out to just under 1,700-words per day. The first NaNoWriMo took place in November of 1999 with under two dozen friends of founder Chris Baty trying to write a novel in his apartment. Last year, it’s ninth, over 100,000 people gave it a shot. Of those, 15,000 people managed to finish writing 50,000 words, which is the equivalent of a short novel of around 175 pages.

I’ve done NaNoWriMo three times, and managed to complete it each time. I skipped last year because I was in Bavaria for almost two weeks in November, but the previous three years I spent my Novembers writing even more than I usually do. It was a terrific experience each time and one I heartily recommend. It made me a much faster writer. When you have such daunting deadlines, you learn to just keep going and write through any blocks. You get into a zone where it just pours out of you, akin to a runner’s high. And that’s proved quite valuable as I take on more and more writing assignments. Plus it’s a lot of fun just to see what comes out.

The NaNoWriMo website puts it like this:

Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

Because of the limited writing window, the ONLY thing that matters in NaNoWriMo is output. It’s all about quantity, not quality. The kamikaze approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly.

Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.

So why bring this up? Because in 2006, I wrote a literary memoir about growing up with beer. It was called Under the Table and subtitled A Fictional Memoir of Growing Up With Beer. What I meant by that I wrote about in a foreword, but essentially I combined events and characters, moved some dates around and changed a few details in order to make the story work better, a perfectly acceptable practice in the genre. Since I was writing on the fly, I organized it into twenty-four chapters, a case of chapters. I chose two dozen beers that I remember from my childhood and used each one as a jumping off point to trigger remembering incidents in my life, similar to the way Proust did with pastry in Remembrance of Things Past. The story is filled with underage drinking, teen sex and violent alcoholic psychopaths. Almost all of it is true, but I’m not saying which is which.

The question of how it all started for me with better beer is largely answered in Chapter 24, Jazz in the Dark. The beers were Bass Ale and Guinness that introduced me to beer with flavor. I was stationed on Staten Island with an Army Band and many of the Manhattan jazz clubs I frequented in New York City in the late 1970s had begun carrying the two. They were as different as night and day from the regional lagers that all tasted the same I had grown up on. They were the catalyst that drove me to learn more about beer and discover what else beer could be. That was exactly thirty years ago and I’ve never looked back.

The whole novel is online if you’re feeling really bored or have a long wait ahead of you in the emergency room. Be warned, it is a rough draft, literally written in one take — extemporaneously — eighteen months ago. At the end of November 2006, I crossed the finish line at 55,622 words. But although I met the challenge of 50,000 words in thirty days, I had stopped in the middle of the second to last chapter. It’s hard to explain, but once the peer pressure and self-imposed routine has ended I’ve found it near impossible to keep going on December 1. But that was okay, because there was only one person who really wanted me to finish it. Shaun O’Sullivan, from 21st Amendment, got pneumonia that same November, and was stuck at home, bored. So he ended up reading — and apparently enjoying — Under the Table. He continued to pester me for months afterwards to finish the last two chapters and it became a running gag between us. So Shaun, I’m happy to tell you the wait is over and it’s finally done, or at least the first draft is.

Since this is a post about ourselves, I pulled out this old label. It’s for a private label brand we were developing at Beverages & more shortly before I left the company. It wasn’t my idea. The VP of marketing, who himself was a Brit, came up with it and the plan was to have a line of English-style ales to complement some of the others we were working on, like Coastal Fog, Brandenburg Gate and Truman’s True Blue. I guess he thought my name sounded sufficiently English. The initial styles were to be an IPA and an ESB. Anyway, it got scrapped but I still have a few labels left and they’re fun to see. I like the fact that not only am I bitter, but Extra Specially Bitter. That’s me, alright. To read Under the Table, follow this link to the home page. You can either just scroll down as you read or use the chapter numbers in the sidebar to move from chapter to chapter. I confess I’m more than a little nervous that it’s too self-indulgent or just plain crap, but you only learn by doing and this is definitely me just going for it and giving it a try. If you do actually give a read, even just part of it, please let me know what you thought. But please do go easy on me. Not only is it as rough a draft as I could imagine, but it’s very personal, too. Constructive criticism is always appreciated but let’s not be too insulting or harsh. This is my life we’re talking about, after all. My life with beer. Cheers!

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.”

Lucky number thirteen, the beginning of year two of the Sessions. This time around our host, Chris O’Brien, the Beer Activist, chose a topic near and dear to his heart, organic beer. It’s one I’m fairly familiar with as well. I wrote a feature story on green breweries for All About Beer magazine in January of this year that covered both organic beer and the green ways in which breweries operate. As I’ve been traveling a lot the last few weeks, my session post is a bit of a rehash, let’s call it recycled. That’s more green.

To me, one of the main issues about organic beer is its perception and what exactly makes a beer organic. Unsurprisingly, it’s the ingredients used to make whatever product is going to be called or labeled “organic.” Several years ago, the standards for organic products varied from state to state, but in 2002 the federal government instituted the National Organic Program (NOP) that standardized the requirements for organic labeling nationwide. This made it easier for companies to sell across state lines without having to worry about individual and possibly conflicting standards between states. Some states did complain, of course, because it undermined their own efforts at defining what it means to be an organic product. The standards in Oregon prior to the NOP, for example, were more rigid than the national standard adopted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But this intervention did make it easier for regional and national breweries to more easily meet the requirements for a larger market.

The USDA does not do the certification process directly, but rather they have “deputized” independent certifying agents, which in some cases do include the former state certifying agencies. Currently, there are about sixty such agencies. Among these are the California Certified Organic Farmers (CCOF) and the Oregon Tilth. In addition to the actual certifying, they also investigate noncompliance complaints and check records, monitor label usage, etc. There are now essentially four levels of organic labeling: “100% organic,” “organic,“ “made with organic materials,” and “some organic ingredients.” The differences in these four are listed in the table below:

While this is undoubtedly a good step, the fact that there are four of these and they sound so similar it seems to me this is still confusing for consumers, especially the casual consumer who is not likely to be familiar with the precise differences. The “made with organic ingredients” designation, for example — which only requires 70% of its ingredients to actually be organic — seems to convey a false impression of how organic the product really is, at least in my opinion. A company could use 30% of complete crap and still make a consumer believe their purchase is organically sound. This undermines the very idea of organic products. It seems to me products should either be organic or not. This slippery slope of degrees is bound to cause nothing but confusion and perhaps even ill will. The FDA has approved some sixty plus chemicals for use in the manufacture of beer. Are they all bad? Certainly not, and even craft brewers use some of them on occasion. But health and beer is all about perception. A brewery could theoreticaly use many of them and so long as it’s less than 30% of the total ingredients say their concoction is “made with organic ingredients.”

All beer is in effect natural, especially those that use only the four basic ingredients. This begs the question of how much better is organic beer vs. a typical craft beer? I’d say in the end it has to do with how it makes the customer feel on an emotional level. I think that’s true of almost all organic products. People buy them because it makes them feel good, like they’re doing something good, both for themselves, the environment and perhaps even society as a whole. They feel like they’re helping out small farmers. This is why the labeling is so important. And not just the organic designation but also the truthiness of the entire package. A customer should be able to feel good about what they’re buying, but if details are left out — no matter how legal it is to do so — then this damages the emotional response that is so central to buying organic.

This is the very reason big companies hide behind dba’s and buy up health food companies. Colgate recently bought Tom’s of Maine. Will that make Tom’s a bad product now? Probably not, unless Colgate takes over production and relaxes standards. But some people will likely still think twice about buying Tom’s knowing it’s just another product line in Colgate’s massive portfolio. It’s all a matter of what perception will be created in the mind of the consumer based on that new information and what the change of ownership means to them. Some may not care at all, of course. But what happens if this information is not disclosed on Tom’s packaging? At that point it goes beyond simple ignorance and becomes a calculated lie-by-omission.

There will almost certainly continue to be a market for organic and healthier products that maintain a small niche within the wider market. What will allow it to grow is directly proportional to the confidence that the market has for the products within the niche market. That’s the exact reason the labeling standards are so important. But doing the minimum required for purely business reasons in order to sell a product is just not enough. Common sense standards will also have to be adhered to as well in order to gain customer confidence. This will vary from company to company but makes sense in relation to the product. For example, an organic farmer who refrains from using pesticides but hires slave labor would not be adhering to a common sense standard, in my opinion.

By and large, I think the majority of organic beers available today do adhere to a good set of standards, both the mandated ones and the common sense ones. But as larger companies begin to compete for these niche markets, the line becomes blurred. Some will leave the smaller companies they’ve purchased alone and some will swallow them whole. New ones created within larger companies will suffer the same problems. And then who knows what will happen to common sense standards.

There’s a great series of charts on Michigan State’s website showing how many organic products of all stripes are currently owned by large corporations hedging their bets and trying to appear socially conscious.

Excerpted from my All About Beer article: The problem with the USDA’s definition is that every beer is 5% alcohol and roughly 95% water plus a fractional amount of flavor compounds (including vitamins, minerals and trace elements), dietary fiber, carbohydrates, hop oils and resins, and proteins. When brewing beer, for every 10 pounds of malt, only a few ounces of hops are used, almost regardless of style. This means that a beer could use organic barley and no organic hops and still technically fit the USDA’s organic definition, as long as the USDA has been satisfied that the particular type of hops used in the beer is “not commercially available in organic form.”

Until very recently, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of ingredients that organic companies were claiming weren’t available organically and, therefore, a non-organic substitute could be used. But there’s a difference between allowable and acceptable, and consumers supporting organic products precisely because they were better for the environment began complaining that the distinction was being blurred. By allowing goods to be called “organic” that contained non-organic ingredients it was creating confusion as to exactly what was being offered for sale. This consumer backlash forced the USDA to change their policy and limit the number of items that could be substituted and still be called organic. After a public debate, the number of ingredients that could be substituted was fixed at 38, with hops still on the list.

So when it comes to organic beer, hops have become the crux of the debate. There was a time when the only available organic malts were pale and crystal malts, but today almost any common malt is available organically. Organic hops, on the other hand, remain more elusive. Hops are a fragile crop, susceptible to many pests, fungi and mildew problems. Today virtually all hops are grown in just three states: Washington, Oregon and Idaho. Pesticides and fertilizers have greatly enhanced yields, and hop growers have developed varieties with better yields and that are disease resistant. Many of these varieties have become an integral part of beer’s wide array of styles. Certain hop varieties have become associated with specific styles, making it all but impossible to use a substitute and get the desired results. You may be able to make a pilsner without Saaz hops or an American pale ale without Cascades, but they won’t taste quite right.

Of the roughly fifty common hop varieties, only about one-fifth have shown the potential to be viable organic crops. Stephen Carpenter, great-great-grandson of the Yakima Valley’s first hop grower, tried unsuccessfully to grow the very popular Cascade hops organically. For many years, organic hops were available primarily from New Zealand, with as much as 80% of all organic hops grown by a single farmer, the Oldham family, on 25 acres.

Last year, Anheuser-Busch entered the organic market with two brands, Wild Hop Lager and Stone Mill Pale Ale. During the public debate on labeling, they were strongly criticized for not using 100% organic hops by misguided consumer groups who believed that if you are big enough and have enough money then it should be easy enough for you to get whatever you want, including organic hops. But the hops business doesn’t work like that. Hop growers are just beginning to come out of a decade-long down cycle that has seen many leave the business just as demand for hops is on the rise. By every account, there is a worldwide hop shortage that has no easy solutions. Unfortunately, A-B bowed to public pressure and announced their organic beers would be made with 100% organic hops. Even they’re unsure where a steady supply of hops is likely to come from. Thanks to A-B’s having been forced into this decision by consumer groups, small craft brewers who make organic beer may very well have a much tougher time finding organic hops and even staying in business because what hops may be available will be at least twice as expensive as conventionally grown varieties. According to Morgan Wolaver, founder of Wolaver’s Organic Ales, this is perhaps organic beer’s biggest challenge. “We need to find an answer to these crop issues, because the controversy will not simply go away. If a beer is made with 100% of the more expensive organic hops, will consumers be willing to spend another dollar per six-pack?”

So that’s my recycled three cents on organic beer, most of it written before today but in one place for the first time, so that should count for something.

 
Below is a list of many of the organic beers and beer producers available today.

Domestic Organic Breweries

• Bison Brewing; Berkeley, California
• Blackfoot River Brewing; Helena, Montana
• Butte Creek Brewing; Chico, California
• Eel River Brewing; Fortuna, California
• Elliott Bay Brewing; Seattle, Washington
• Fish Brewing; Olympia, Washington
• Laurelwood Brewing; Portland, Oregon
• North Coast Brewing; Fort Bragg, California
• Peak Organic Brewing; Burlington, Massachusetts
• Pisgah Brewing; Black Mountain, North Carolina
• Roots Organic Brewery; Portland, Oregon
• Wolaver’s Certified Organic Ales; Middlebury, Vermont
• Santa Cruz Mountain Brewing; Santa Cruz, California
• Ukiah Brewing; Ukiah, California

Domestic Organic Beers

• Big “O” Organic, Snake River Brewing; Jackson Hole, Wyoming
• Biologique Dupont Beers (5), Brasserie Dupont; Tourpes, Belgium
• Kaya Organic Pale, Fitger’s Brewhouse; Duluth, Minnesota
• Kraftbräu Summer Moon Organic Ale, Kraftbräu Brewery; Kalamazoo, Michigan
• Mothership Wit, New Belgium Brewing; Fort Collins, Colorado
• OGA (Organic Golden Ale), Lucky Labrador; Portland, Oregon
• Organic Amber, Bluegrass Brewing; Louisville, Kentucky
• Organic Bock, Big Horse Brewpub; Hood River, Oregon
• Organic ESB, Lakefront Brewery; Milwaukee, Wisconsin
• Organic Porter, Brooklyn Brewery; Brooklyn, New York
• Tree Hugger Organic IPA, Redfish New Orleans Brewhouse; Boulder, Colorado

Organic Breweries Abroad

• Arkell’s; Swindon, England
• Black Isle Brewery; Munlochy, Scotland
• Brauerei Pinkus Mueller; Munster, Germany
• Crannog Ales; Sorrento, BC, Canada
• Clarke’s Organic Brewery; Dewsbury, England
• Founders Organic Brewery; Nelson New Zealand
• Marble Beers; Manchester, England
• Mongozo Exotic Beers; Venray, Netherlands
• O’Hanlon’s Brewing; Devon, England
• Pacific Western Brewing; Burnaby, BC, Canada
• Pitfields Organic Brewery; London, England
• The 4 Elements; Richelbach, Germany
• Thisted Bryghus; Thisted, Denmark
• Waedenswiler Bierwelt; Wädenswil, Switzerland
• Wild Rose Brewery; Calgary, Alberta, Canada

Organic Beers Abroad

• Border Gold & Angel Lager, Broughtan Ales; Broughtan, Scotland
• Brakspear Organic Beer, Brakspear Brewery, Witney, England
• Cantillon Gueuze 100% Lambic-Bio, Brasserie Cantillon, Brussels, Belgium
• Duchy Originals Organic, Wychwood Brewery; Witney, England
• Eisenbahn Natural, Eisenbahn; Brazil
• Emerson’s Organic Pilsner, Emerson’s Brewery; Dunedin, New Zealand
• Golden Promise Organic, Caldonian Brewery; Edinburgh, Scotland
• Mill Street Original Organic Lager, Mill Street Brewery; Toronto, Canada
• Organic Ale, Brasserie Rancho El Paso; Hokkaido, Japan
• Organic Ale & Best Bitter, St. Peter’s Brewery; Suffolk, England
• Organic Beer Shinshu Sansan, Yo-Ho Brewing; Japan
• Organic Honeydew, Fuller’s; London, England
• Samuel Smith Organic Ale & Lager, Old Brewery at Tadcaster; Yorkshire, England
• Yella Bella Organic Ale, Batemans Brewery; Wainfleet, England

Wow, it’s hard to believe this is our twelfth Session or that a full year has gone by since we began this delicious odyssey. Our host this time around, Jon Abernathy, of The Brew Site, has chosen one of my favorite beer styles, and a most appropriate one for the season: Barley Wine. I was fortunate enough last year to judge both a preliminary round and the finals for Barley Wine at the Great American Beer Festival, along with Rich Norgrove, from Bear Republic, and George Reisch, brewmaster at Anheuser-Busch, among others. We had some very lively and engaging discussions about the style guidelines. It was a most enjoyable and satisfying way to spend an afternoon.

The earliest Barley Wines were not well defined, but were simply the strongest beers a brewery made, usually using the first mash runnings. They were originally called by names like first sort, malt wine and malt liquor to indicate both their relative strength and their distinctiveness as compared to grape wine, and later as old ale, stock ale or simply strong ale. Other names have been used, and in some cases continue to used occasionally, such as stingo, wee heavy and even winter ale. It wasn’t until the early part of the 20th century that the name Barley Wine began to take hold. One of the earliest, and perhaps most famous, was Bass No. 1, which was labeled Barley Wine beginning in 1903, according to most accounts. The first Barley Wine I can recall enjoying was a bottle of 1977 Thomas Hardy, which I drank while still living in New York around 1979 or 80. It was at that time as different as anything I’d ever let pass through my lips. But it wasn’t until relocating from North Carolina to California in the mid-1980s that I had another example.

Naturally, our paternalistic government can’t chance us being too stupid to know the difference between a beer and a wine, though why that would be such a horror I can’t fathom. For that reason, the TTB prohibits not only mixing beer and wine but even a label that might confuse the average citizen, who apparently they believe is an idiot. Thus it is in the U.S. that Barley Wine is almost always referred to as the cumbersome barleywine-style ale. In America, over fifty brewers currently bottle a version of Barley Wine, and undoubtedly many more make only a draft interpretation.
 

Anchor’s Old Foghorn was the first Barley Wine in America, at least after Prohibition. It was first brewed in 1975, and first appeared in bottles the following year. And while it’s essentially an English-style Barley Wine, the only hops used are our native citrusy Cascades, making it one of the most successful single-hop beers. It’s also well-hopped, for an English-style, at around 65 IBUs. Cascades are also used for dry-hopping. Anchor ages it for at least nine-months (and as long as eighteen), and thereafter put it in 7 oz. bottles — at least until 2005 when they changed it to a 12 oz. size. The beer is quite lively when poured into a glass, and the effervescence is very evident as the tan head builds before your eyes. The colors I saw were copper with beautiful streaks of a deep ruby red. My three-year old daughter, Alice, looked at me quizzically as I held the glass up to the light. So I invited her to tell me what colors she saw. Alice saw oranges and pink. The nose was sweet and malty with just a touch of lemon citrus aromas fighting their way to the surface. There was also some earthy and raisin aromas too. The initial sensation is one of dancing bubbles on the tongue, as the effervescence continues into the taste. The flavors of malty sweetness dominate, especially in the foretaste, but then playful hops cut in mid-taste making the overall character surprisingly mild. The finish lingers long as a warming sensation with sweet malt remaining after the hops have left the dance early. It improves as it warms as more and more of the flavors are released from cold storage. Despite years of more extreme examples, Anchor’s delicate flavors and balance make this still one of the finest American-made Barley Wines. It’s just a delight from start to finish. I just love the complexity and diversity that this style exhibits. No two taste exactly alike, and therein, at least for me, lies their charm. The Toronado Barleywine Festival is just two weeks away, and I can’t wait to taste this year’s crop. I’m also planning a trip to Seattle in mid-March for the Hard Liver Barleywine Festival at Brouwer’s. This should be a fun late winter.

It’s time once again for our eleventh Session, and this time around we’re highlighting Doppelbocks courtesy of this month’s host, Wilson at Brewvana. I recently spent two weeks in the home of Doppelbocks — Germany — when many breweries I visited were just debuting their winter seasonal, which more often than not was a doppelbock.

Their history is, of course, reasonably well settled, with the Pauline Monks of Munich making the first example of the style around 1780. By the Napoleonic Era, the brewery had become secular and brewmaster Franz-Xaver Zacherl began selling his strongest beer around Easter-time each year, calling it “savior,” which in German is “Salvator.” Other breweries began adopting the name and it was in danger of becoming generic when, in 1894, trademark law made Paulaner the only brewer legally allowed use the name. As a result, countless other doppelbocks renamed their beers but continued using the suffix “-ator,” possibly to denote strength, but more likely to continue associating themselves with Salvator. The traditional reason for brewing this beer at this time of the year was for the forty days — not counting Sundays — of fasting just prior to Easter, known as Lent. The monks wanted something heartier to drink while they weren’t able to eat. This period also became known as “strong beer season.” This year, strong beer season will begin February 6.

As fate would have it, last night was the bimonthly blind panel tasting at the Celebrator Beer News and one of the two styles we tasted was doppelbocks. Of the seven we sampled, I decided to write about three common German examples, the original Paulaner Salvator, Spaten’s Optimator and Aying’s Celebrator.

So let’s drink some doppelbock, shall we?
 

Paulaner’s Salvator bright amber in color with a tan head. It has sweet, toffee aromas with alcohol quite evident in the nose. The alcohol — at 7.9% abv — carries over into the taste profile and bites tartly against the malt backbone, which has a hint of candied sweetness. The finish lingers and continues to bite back long after it’s left.

Ayinger’s Celebrator Doppelbock was a very dark brown, almost black, with a rich tan head. The nose was predominantly sweet malt with touches of earthy, herbal aromas. Creamy and chewy, with a gritty effervescence that dances on the tongue, the flavor is a big wallop of malt with a restrained smokiness hiding underneath. The finish is clean with a touch of tartness.

Spaten’s Optimator was dark brown with a thick ivory head. The nose was dry with aromas of lightly sweet malt with just a touch of smoke or roasted toffee. The flavors were likewise sweetly malty. At only 7.2% abv, the alcohol was somewhat less evident in the taste and there was a little astringency, possibly from the hops. Overall it was full-bodied and rich and the finish clean.

This month’s Session, sponsored by Barley Vine, is Let It Snow: Winter Beers. Of all the seasonal beers, the ones released during winter are my favorites; the ones I look most forward to sampling each and every year. The category of winter beers lacks the tradition of, say for example, oktoberfest beers or springfest beers, both of which owe their existence to the seasons, a lack of technology and brewers having to adapt themselves to the weather. And, of course, even calling them winter beers is a modern conceit to be politically correct and, perhaps more importantly, to try to insure they will continue to sell beyond December 25. Because for the most part, whether we say so or not, most of the “winter beers” are really Christmas beers. And they are, like Christmas itself, largely a modern invention.

For centuries, the most important Christian holiday was Easter, because — as I remember it being explained — the redemption and resurrection it represented was the miracle that made Christianity different from other religions and so it was the centerpiece of an ecumenical year filled with celebrations Sunday after Sunday. Our present calendar system, the Gregorian calendar (named for Pope Gregory) was created precisely to more accurately predict the date when each year’s Easter would be because under the prior system, the Julian calendar (which is still used today by some Christian denominations) had allowed the year to drift by several days because it did not accurately reflect the true length of a year. (For a riveting account of the history of our calendar, read David Ewing Duncan’s Calendar: Humanity’s Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year.) The calendar geek in me could go on and on about this but the point is simply that for the majority of Christian history, Easter was the big day. Beginning in the 1840s, things gradually shifted toward Christmas so that now most people would say Christmas is the number one holiday.

The first Christmas beers were most likely brewed in medieval times by monks making a special beer — and stronger — at Christmastime to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. But it would take far longer for commercial breweries to begin making and bottling seasonal beer. And while there were breweries in decades past that made a holiday beer (I have, for example a full bottle of Ballantine Christmas Ale that was brewed in 1946 but not bottled until 1957), it was not the big business it is today. In my experience, here in the U.S. Christmas beers were more the exception than the rule until somewhat recently.

Germany has a rich tradition of Weihnachtsbier, as do several other Scandinavian countries. So does Great Britain with winter warmers and Belgium with beers like Delirium Noel and many others. My friend and colleague Don Russell (a.k.a. Joe Sixpack) is currently working on a book about Christmas beer which will be published next year. I can’t wait for it to come out, it should be a very interesting read. For a time, there were only a few holiday beers, and most of them were quite obviously Christmas beers. Sierra Nevada’s Celebration, Samuel Adams’ Winter Lager and even Noche Buena (from Mexico’s Grupo Model) were all early favorites. Little by little, more breweries began making a holiday beer and by around 1996 practically every brewery made one and a large number bottled it, too. And they all sold pretty well. But oddly enough, the day after Christmas sales would abruptly stop. With the exception of the most popular two or three brands, you could barely give away a Christmas beer once the holiday was over. This made it tricky for retailers trying to balance not running out before Christmas but not wanting any inventory immediately thereafter. When I was a beer buyer, I can’t tell you how many offers at rock bottom bargain prices I would get in the weeks after Christmas by breweries trying to unload their remaining Christmas beer. So what most breweries did was secularize the beers, calling them names like winter ale or holiday beer. Whatever the name, it de-emphasized Christmas in the hope that the fickle consumer would continue to buy them after December 25. And for the most part the strategy worked and eventually led to many breweries having a seasonal beer year-round, whether four different ones quarterly or more often. The reason for this is more business-related than you might assume at first blush. Most grocery stores have very specific beer sets (which is a schematic layout of what beers they carry and where they will be put on the shelves).

Breweries work very hard to get a slot on a grocery store’s beer set. No one wants to put in the effort to get their Christmas beer in the beer set over the holidays only to lose it as soon December ends. So what many did was get a seasonal sku authorized in the set that would be filled with whatever the seasonal beer happened to be. In other words, the same hole would be filled in summer with a summer seasonal beer, etc. throughout the year. One seasonal release would follow the last so that all year long there would be a rotating beer in that same slot on the store shelf. In that way the brewery would not lose it’s spot on the shelf and as a result, today we all have much more diversity on the shelf, a boon for consumers and breweries alike. Nielsen and IRI data confirms that the category “seasonal beer” is one of the fastest growing and best-selling categories of craft beer today. And this all grew out of Christmas beers and trying to figure out how best to sell them.

In modern times, one of the first and to my mind still one of the best is Anchor’s Christmas Beer. Technically, the name of this beer is not Christmas Ale as it is usually called but it’s more proper name is actually Our Special Ale. The first one was brewed in 1975. While there are certainly many other truly great holiday beers, this is always the one I look most forward to each year. It used to be released the Monday before Thanksgiving each year, making it one of the last Christmas beers to come out. A few years ago they bowed to market pressure and it’s now available in early November, usually the first week. I can’t say I don’t like getting it earlier now, but there was something grand about having to wait for it that built up your anticipation and made it somehow more special.

To me, there are two (or three) other factors to this beer that make it so great. First, they change the recipe each year. So not only is there anticipation about its release generally, but also about what it will taste like this year. How much time have I spent sitting around with friends trying to figure out just what spices are in each year’s version? I know there a lot of people, including many beer enthusiasts and the entire nation of Germany, who don’t like spice in their beer. I am not one of those people. I love spicy beers. Not every day, of course, but the more different types of beer loose in the world, the better off we are. The more choices, the better we can experiment and decide what works best when and with what. And there are times when spices in beer work perfectly. I usually pair my Thanksgiving meal with Anchor Christmas, for example, because the spices work so well with turkey’s modest flavors, making both taste better. In addition, the mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce and stuffing all benefit from being lubricated with a spicy beer.

Second, they change the label each year. Each year it’s a new mini-work of art featuring a different tree (which I confess I’ve always had a thing for: trees, that is). They’re beautiful labels and each year they create a new poster featuring all of the labels from 1975 up to the current year. I have one from a couple of years ago framed and hanging in my kitchen. You can see this year’s poster at Anchor’s website and you can even buy one in their gift shop. That also adds to the anticipation, finding out what tree will be featured on each year’s incarnation. They also do a kick-ass neon sign. But there’s one more thing about this beer that I love. It can be aged.

Despite it’s modest strength and most likely due to the spicing, Anchor’s Christmas Ale can be laid down, usually for almost ten years and still be drinkable. For a time during the late 1990s, when the beer was more heavily spiced, it actually seemed to taste better after being aged for at least a year and I would lay down quite a bit of it to take advantage of that phenomenon. I still have several Magnums from year’s past in one of my beer refrigerators, as well as at least a case of 12-ounce bottles from various years stretching back to the early 1990s. There’s nothing more enjoyable than doing a vertical tasting of Anchor Christmas beers. I’ve done a few myself, at least one at the Celebrator and twice at Anchor Brewing with older beers from their private cellar. It’s great fun to compare both the different year’s recipes and also what the aging process has done to the beer.

Last night was Anchor’s annual Christmas party and it was my first chance to have this year’s Christmas Ale on draft, though I’d had bottles several times. To my mind, this year’s tastes quite similar to last year but I haven’t yet had a chance to do a side-by-side comparison. The spicing is mild, as has been typical in recent years. As a result, it has a wider appeal — though for myself I miss the heavily spiced days — and is still a wonderful beer. I won’t even try to speculate on what spices are there, that’s a better thing to do with friends over a shared pint or bottle.

One last thing about winter ales that is somewhat different from most traditional seasonal beers. Unlike springbocks or marzens, which are distinct styles, holiday beers can be any style that the brewer chooses. This has led to much more diversity in Christmas beers than in any other kind of seasonal. Even summer ales, which have no style attached to them, still tend to be lighter so they’re more appropriate during that season’s warmer weather. This makes tasting all of the holiday beers the most enjoyable one each year, because you never know what you’re going to get. It’s fun seeing what a brewery decided to brew when left to do whatever they fancied. Since brewers under such circumstances tend to make what they like, you can learn different brewers’ personal tastes, which can be useful in evaluating their other efforts. Plus, it’s just plain fun, the best time of the year to try different beers is without question the winter when strong, full-flavored beers of striking diversity are king. It’s the most wonderful season of all.

Holding a cup of Christmas Ale by the Anchor “tree” at their annual Christmas party last night.

Our ninth Session, hosted by Tomme Arthur at the Lost Abbey Brewer’s Log, involves the pairing of beer with music, another subject near and dear to my heart. My original aspiration was a career in music, preferably writing, and once upon a time I played the saxophone and clarinet. What’s interesting about that is how common it is. There are so many brewers and beer people who are musicians that it’s harder to not find a brewing musician than it is to find one.

It’s almost five in the morning on Friday, and I have to get on a plane in a few hours for a trip to Germany. Couple that with the lost days in Pennsylvania to attend my great aunt’s funeral earlier this week and I’ve gotten myself more behind than usual. So instead of something new, I’m instead going to quote myself from a piece I did on beer and music for Beer Advocate magazine’s May issue. Music has a way of getting under the skin and directly into our soul. It touches us in ways that seem almost magical. Hearing an old tune can transport us back in time and allow us to relive memories. A new song can infect us with a desire to dance, commune with friends or shout to the heavens. As German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche quipped, “Without music life would be a mistake.”

Only beer can make this experience more intense. Alcohol is called a social lubricant for good reason. When enhanced by the inhibition-releasing power of beer, music comes alive and worms its way into our very being. As Nietzsche later wrote, “For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication.” So it is that brewers provide an invaluable service to humanity’s progress and spiritual evolution. They create the catalyst that allows great music to flourish and they give all of us a simple way to enhance life’s pleasures. For this reason, music and beer go together like no others and create a combination that’s bigger than the sum of its parts. A good beer makes the music sound better and a good song cries out for a brew.

To the outsider, both beer and music seem to flow chaotically, yet both are very ordered and mathematical. The best of brewing is both art and science, and brewers who make a consistent beer are fastidiously organized. There is a precision integral to the process from how long the boil lasts to at what exact moment to add the hops and in what amount. So, too, music can be endlessly ordered into time signatures and tempos. For each, measures are very important. Both musicians and brewers express themselves as artists by putting a lot of themselves into their craft, be it a new stout or a new song. But beyond that, because of the nearly infinite combination of 12 notes and four basic ingredients, both pursuits are a kind of ordered chaos. It’s no surprise then, given these fundamental similarities, that many brewers are also musicians and many breweries have their own band. The same type of person is drawn naturally to both pursuits.

So no specific tasting this session for me, but really every tasting involves music as a backdrop so perhaps it’s not necessary. As no doubt will be shown time and time again in the posts that will appear for this session, beer and music are inextricably linked. My iPod is loaded with beer drinking songs and my brain is loaded with beer memories that are triggered by music. All I need is a beer to complete the cycle. But of course that will only make me thirsty for more music.

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Our eighth Session, hosted by Captain Hops at Beer Haiku Daily, involves the pairing of beer with food, a subject near and dear to my heart. I have been persuaded by extensive testing — better known as eating — that beer and food go together far better than wine will for the average meal. Oh, I’ll grant you that there are fine pairings that can be made with wine, but a diet of heavier flavors, potent seasonings and meat dishes will yield to beer’s superior ability to cut through this complex and thickly rich mélange of tastes. There are many people to thank for that awareness, from Michael Jackson to Garrett Oliver to Bruce Paton.

Friday night, I was happy enough to be invited to the 10th annual beer dinner at the Northern California Homebrewers Festival held at Lake Francis Resort in Dobbins, California. It was put on by Sean Paxton, the Homebrew Chef and ran to six courses. And many of the courses had several dishes, too, so the amount of food was truly staggering. Sean went all out for his tenth anniversary dinner. And with eight great beers being paired, it was sure to be a memorable evening. I had come with the entire family and because the weather had grown quite cold, we were all bundled up and brought our appetities, ready to eat. We were not disappointed. Chef Sean Paxton deserves much praise for not only his pairings, but also using the beer in the dishes, as well. When you consider the entire dinner was accomplished by amateurs, the achievement is all the more impressive. But enough praise, here’s a nutshell account of the evening’s culinary and fermented delights. But before we can begin, a haiku is both necessary and appropriate: Pairing food and beer To compliment or contrast That is the question

Our chef for the evening, Sean Paxton, addresses the hungry and thirsty crowd.

The beer paired with our first course, a Belgian endive salad, was Watermelon Funk, a collaboration between 21st Amendment Brewery and Russian River Brewing. This is perhaps the fourth time I’ve had this beer and it just keeps getting better, it’s too bad it’s virtually all gone. Here Vinnie Cilurzo from Russian River tells the beer’s story in humorous fashion. They took a barrel of Shaun O’Sullivan’s popular Watermelon Wheat and aged it in an oak barrel, sparking it with brettanomyces. It worked nicely with the crisp flavors of the salad, especially the pomegranate seeds.

I sat with Vinnie Cilurzo at the dinner and happily he brought along a few extra beers for the table. Here my wife Sarah holds up one my personal favorites: The Damnation Batch 23.

A bit unusual for the typical beer dinner, but — and I can’t stress this enough — Frittes should become de rigeur for every beer dinner. You can just never have enough frittes for my tastes. Served with two kinds of aioli sauce (Duvel Shiso Aioli and Fou’ Foune Aioli), Sean’s frittes were spectacular.

Two of the other beers served at the dinner were brewed by these two gentlemen, Peter Hoey, from Sacramento Brewing, and Todd Ashman, from Fifty Fifty Brewing.

We weren’t the only ones thrilled that Vinne brought some of his beers along with him. Matt Bryndilson, from Firestone Walker Brewing, kisses a bottle of Russian River’s Toronado 20th Anniversary Ale.

Piping hot steamed mussels, steamed in beer that is. They were Prince Edward Island mussels, with shallots and thyme steamed in homebrewed wit, which was also the beer paired with them. Delicious!

For the vegetarians among us, pumpkin steamed in beer topped with spinach, sorrel, parsley and a Japanese mint (that Sean had grown in his garden). Yum.

At this point I got too busy eating and drinking and forgot to keep taking pictures of the food. The next beer was one of the GABF Pro-Am beers for this year. It was brewed at 21st Amendment Brewery and was Jamil Zainasheff’s award winning Belgian Strong Dark, which he named The Beer Hunter. It was paired with a thick stew of a dish, Les Carbonnade Flamandes, which Sean described as a Flemish stew cooked with beef, lamb, dark candy syrup cured bacon, leeks, shallots, thyme and, of course, the Belgian Strong Dark beer. It was piping hot and very rich. In the cold October night air, it warmed our souls.

An extra treat, Sean created a sorbet-like dish at our table using liquid nitrogen.

Much to the delight of my daughter Alice.

Sean stirring the sorbet looked more like a scene from Halloween than a restaurant. But the sorbet was delicious.

The fourth course paired Peter Hoey’s sour mashed farmhouse style saison with a Waterzooi, described as a classic Ghent milk stew made with cod, leeks, fennel, onions, shallots, saison, milk and herbs. A very nice saison, it worked well with the complex and diverse flavors of the stew.

The fifth course paired two beers from Russian River, Sanctification and Temptation, with two amazing dishes, duck legs cooked in a brett blonde and beer-braised veal cheeks. These were served with Brussels sprouts cooked in brown butter and nutmeg and cauliflower gratin, which had been blanced in an ale and topped with a Gruyere cheese sauce. Also, there was a bier risotto made with heirloom tomatoes and pearl barley served with a sauce made up of Temptation, lobster mushrooms and roasted thyme shallots. There were just so many different tastes going on here it made your head swim. Luckily the two Russian River beers cleared your head as they cleansed your palate so that each subsequent bite could be enjoyed as much as the first one.

Finally, the dessert course had two sweet pairings. First there was Todd Ashman’s Trifecta Belgian Style Tripel, from his new brewery in Truckee, California, Fifty Fifty Brewing. It went with a vanilla bean tripel infused pot de creme, a very creamy dessert using Todd’s beer along with vanilla beans infused into cream and slowly cooked in a water bath. If that sounded too light, then there were the dark chocolate framboise truffles. Sean took a Brendan’s wisky barrel and filled it with porter and dark chocolate, spiked it with Brettanomyces and let it age for seven months before blending it with Thirsty Bear’s Golden Hallucination and Brown Bear. It was served with Brendan Dobbel’s Thirsty Bear Menage a Framboise. I could have eaten these all night, as full as I was, because they were so damn good. I just kept telling myself with each one, “they’re wafer thin,” which, though a lie dead surely, allowed me eat as many as I possibly could guilt free.

After the dinner, chef Sean Paxton and my wife, Sarah, share a hug.
 

This month’s Session, hosted by Rick Lyke at Lyke2Drink, is another clever one. The theme is the Brew Zoo, meaning beers with animal names or labels, of which the beer world is replete with examples. Today was my son Porter’s birthday party (his actual day is Monday) and so I wasn’t able to blog yesterday because there was just too much to do to get ready for the party. So instead I decided to have something furry today.

In honor of Porter’s birthday, I decided on an English Porter I picked up somewhere during my recent travels. It’s from Nethergate Brewery, which is in Suffolk, England. It’s called Old Growler and is, of course, a porter. I tried it with my friend Sean Paxton, The Homebrew Chef, who was at the party to help celebrate Porter’s birthday with his wife and new baby girl, Olivia. The beer had a beautiful color, black with reddish purple streaks, a very appropriate color which I’ll explain later. It also had a thick tan head with great lace and silky rich aromas of milk chocolate and dry powdered cocoa. Silky smooth and rich, thick with milk chocolate flavor and just a touch of vanilla and hazelnut. The hops are nicely restrained. They’re like finding a black hole, we can’t really perceive them but know they’re there by the obvious balance. The finish is very dry. There’s a lot going on in this complex porter and it would make a wonderful dessert beer. Here’s how the brewery describes the beer: Our famous porter has won at the CAMRA winter festival twice, the only brewery to do so, first in 1998 and again in 2003, also winning the highest accolade Supreme Champion in 2003. Also Supreme Champion at the Chicago International Beer Festival in 2004, in the porter category. A complex, satisfying porter, smooth and distinctive. Roast malt and fruit feature in the palate. The finish is powerfully hoppy with a hint of liquorice.

But back to the story of the reddish purple color.

Before my son Porter was born, my wife and I came up with a list of five boys’ names and girls’ names that we both liked. We had to do both since we didn’t know whether we were having a boy or girl. As perhaps the most anal-retentive couple on the planet we went through months of perusing baby name books and compiling lists, which we would then compare and knock each other’s out until at long last we came up with ones we could each live with to name our child. The idea was that armed with a few names we both liked, we’d see which one best fit after he or she was born. At one point, I even tried to get Bullwinkle on the list, but that didn’t last long. Brewer also made the short list, and I still like the sound of it for a name. Porter, of course, was on the final list, but I honestly didn’t expect it to be the winner. But then my son was born. At our Lamaze classes and in my reading, somehow I missed the information that there’s a point in the birth where the baby isn’t getting any oxygen before it takes its first breath.

So I was quite alarmed when my new son was a dull purple when he first made his entry into the world. As the doctor carted him off for his initial testing, I didn’t even know if he was breathing and was very nearly panicking. My first thought naturally was “is he okay?” After being assured that this was normal and that he was just fine, I began to calm down and drink in the sight of my first born child: the wiggling fingers and toes, the bleating cries and gasps of first breaths, and odd purple discoloration on reddish pink skin. My second thought then was “wow, he’s the color of a nice robust porter.” Later, after we were moved into a room, I was recounting these thoughts to my wife. She just looked at me, smiling, and said “well … I guess we know what his name is.” And that’s how my blond-haired, blue-eyed boy became a Porter.

Porter at his 6th birthday party, in the midst of his own zoo.

This has been a brutal month for me, in the last few weeks I’ve been to Denver, Portland and am writing this from Mammoth Lakes, California, where I’m attending a CSBA meeting and beer festival. So the Bulletin has suffered, but I didn’t want to miss this month’s Session because it’s an idea that I strongly believe in. I’ll try to be brief for this one (at least brief for me) since I have a speaking engagement in a few hours. Our host for the month, Greg Clow, chose fruit beers for this month’s topic and it’s another worthy one.

The use of fruit in beer, of course, is not a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination. The Belgians, for example, have been using fruit in lambics for centuries. I always chuckle to myself when people make allusions to fruit beer not being for men, without having the foggiest notion what their talking about. I’d love to see their face when they try their first sour cherry lambic and can no longer sustain that argument. Fruit beers are, according to taste, for everybody. It’s probably a good idea to like the fruit used in a particular beer, and to have it be not too sweet or not too sour, depending on your own tolerance and preferences. But there’s such a wide range and variety of fruit beers that there’s undoubtedly one to suit any person’s tastes.

Off the top of my head, here’s just a few different fruits that are or have been used in beer:
 

• Apple: Jack Russell Harvest Apple, New Glarus Apple Ale, Unibroue Ephemere
• Apricot: Alpine Apricot Nectar, Cantillon Fou’ Foune, Pyramid Apricot Ale, Valley Apricot Ale
• Banana: De Troch Chapeau Banana Lambic, Wells Banana Bread Beer
• Blackberry: Coast Range Blackberry Wheat, Jack Russell Blackberry Abbey Ale, Oregon Trail Blackberry Porter (Jim Koch’s Oregon Brewing also made a blackberry porter)
• Black Currant: Lindemans Cassis Lambic, Unibroue Ephemere
• Blueberry: BluCreek Blueberry Ale, Jack Russell Blueberry Beer, Marin Blueberry, SLO Blueberry Ale
• Cherry: Bell’s Cherry Stout, Cantillon Kriek, Melbourn Bros. Spontaneous Fermentation Cherry, New Glarus Belgian Red, Samuel Adams Cherry Wheat
• Cranberry: Samuel Adams Cranberry Lambic
• Elderberry: Ebulum Elderberry Black Ale (I also once had an Elderberry Barleywine at a CAMRA festival in Peterborough that knocked me for a loop)
• Gooseberry: Grozet Gooseberry and Wheat Ale
• Grape: Cantillon St. Lamvinus, Cantillon Vigneronne, Concord Grape Ale
• Grapefruit: Groslch 2.5 Pink Grapefruit, St. Peter’s Fruit Beer
• Honeysuckle: Barrel House Honeysuckle Blond
• Kiwi: Bube’s Kiwi-Strawberry Wheat
• Lemon: Magic Hat Hocus Pocus, Saxer Lemon Lager, Stiegl Lemon Beer
• Lime: Lakeport Brava Lime, Viking Lime Twist
• Orange: Buffalo Bill’s Mandarin Hefeweizen, Caldera Dry Hop Orange, Craftsman Orange Grove Ale, Dogfish Head Blood Orange Hefeweizen, Triple Rock Orange
• Peach: Four Peaks Arizona Peach, Lindemans Peche Lambic, Unibroue Ephemere
• Pear: Hopper’s Pear Lambic
• Pineapple: Maumee Bay Pineapple Wheat
• Plum: J.W. Lee’s Plum Pudding, Watch City Jack Horner’s Plum Wit
• Pomegranate: He’Brew Genesis Ale (original recipe), Moylan’s Pomegranate Wheat
• Prickly Pear: Real Ale Brewing Prickly Wit, Sleeping Giant Prickly Pear Pale Ale
• Raspberry: Undoubtedly the most popular fruit in beer, probably because it works so well. Great Divide Wild Raspberry, Lindemans Framboise, Marin Raspberry Trail Ale, New Glarus Raspberry Tart, Purple Haze Raspberry Wheat Brew
• Strawberry: Melbourn Bros. Spontaneous Fermentation Strawberry, Pete’s Wicked Strawberry Blonde
• Tomato: Pizza Beer, Uehara Shuzou Tomato Bibere
• Watermelon: 21st Amendment Watermelon Wheat

This list is merely to show the amazing diversity of different fruits used in beers. No two are alike, and so saying you don’t like fruit beer is like saying you don’t like people. There’s just too many variables to make such a blanket statement. I think it comes down to perception again of some weird prejudice in the U.S. where fruit in beer is seen as unmanly, as ridiculous a notion as I can imagine. There’s just too many good flavors here to ignore them over masculinity. But I guess that’s more for the rest of us.

When fruit beers became trendy fifteen years ago, there were certainly some that were better than others and a few used too much extract, in my opinion. But at some point there seemed to be something of a backlash for reasons unknown, and a lot of breweries quietly dropped their beers made with fruit. Today, breweries that still make fruit beers are generally the ones where their popularity never waned and they just continued making them without worrying too much about how they were perceived. Customers were buying them, and that was really all that mattered. Happily, new breweries are also venturing into fruit beer and seems pretty clear to me that they’ll always be around, at least as long as people care about flavor and how things taste.

The Plumcots Are Coming, The Plumcots Are Coming!   Russian River Brewing recently added another fruit to the list of fruit beers, the plumcot, which is a hybrid cross between a plum and apricot. It was crossbred by none other than Luther Burbank right in Santa Rosa, just a few blocks from the brewery. That’s why brewer Vinnie Cilurzo chose it, because he could use a local ingredient created right in his own backyard. Plumcots are also called Pluots, but the two are not interchangeable. Pluots are a variation on Burbank’s Plumcot created by Floyd Zaiger. Pluots are three-quarters plum and one-quarter apricot whereas plumcots are closer to 50-50. Pluots are also a registered trademark owned by Zaiger, a practice that I understand but loathe on many levels.

The beer is Compunction, a blonde ale brewed with plumcots. It had an original gravity of 1048 and is 5.8% abv. It’s slightly cloudy with golden color and a thin white head. Brett is the first aroma that hits you with fruity esters coming closely behind. The sweetness is puckering and works nicely as a contrast for the Brettanomyces. It’s surprisingly refreshing and light, given its strength. The beer is also aged in wooden barrels, but the beer’s strong flavors don’t allow much barrel characteristics to come through, really only a touch. Another interesting beer from Russian River Brewing.
 

Today is our fifth Beer Blogging Friday “Session” and the topic is decidedly cerebral. Ron and Al, who run Hop Talk have chosen a topic near and dear to their hearts: atmosphere. Ron at Hop Talk wrote about atmosphere when they first started their blog almost a year ago. In that first atmospheric post, he wrote: “It might be a place, it might be a time, and it might be the company you are with; but, there’s no two ways about it, a beer will taste better if enjoyed in the right atmosphere.”

Fast forward to this June and the set-up for today’s session, which Ron and Al describe thusly: Beer is about more than flavor, IBUs, and the debate over what is a craft beer and what isn’t. It’s about Life. It’s the proverbial icing on the cake. So, we want to know about the “Atmosphere” in which you enjoy beer. Where is your favorite place to have a beer? When? With whom? Most importantly: Why? Because while life isn’t all about beer, beer is all about life. I like this topic because it appeals to my philosophical nature and my tendency to over-analyze everything. I can’t really decide what is the right beer to have for such a discussion, though something atmospheric should do the trick. I suspect one isn’t really even necessary but I want to keep the tradition of including a beer as part of each Session. After all, what’s a Session without a beer? After rummaging through the beer refrigerator I settle on a small 375 ml bottle of Russian River Temptation (batch 002) that’s been in there for several months, at least. As this is an out-of-this-world topic I give in to temptation and pick an out-of-this-world beer. So beer in hand, let’s tackle this sucker. High in the upper atmosphere — the exosphere — where the air is thinnest, is a good place to start. Metaphorically, I’d like to peel back the layers as we get closer and closer to the surface of things, where the air is thicker and richer. Will the heat shield hold? It’s been hotter than hades in the Bay Area this week. I hope I chose my beer wisely. This far from home, your favorite place to have a beer is undoubtedly home. No matter how far you roam, no matter how many places you adopt as new homes, no matter how much time has passed, you only have one original home, the place you were born. I spent the first eighteen years of my life in one place and only three houses, two of which belonged to my grandmothers and the third one was purchased by my mother when she married my alcoholic stepfather when I was five. That one was in downtown Shillington. After high school, I left and came back more times than I care to remember, always drawn home like the proverbial moth to the flame, perhaps for the warmth of familiarity. I was amazed to see Stan over at Appellation Beer chose the Northeast Taproom in Reading, Pennsylvania and included a piece he wrote ten years before when owner Pete Cammarano still had the place. What’s amazing about that is that Reading is my hometown — or near enough, I grew up just outside Reading in a little suburb called Shillington. So every visit home also included stopping in at the Northeast Taproom to spend time with friends who weren’t fortunate enough to escape the slow death of Reading from a mid-size industrial, manufacturing hub into the “Outlet Capital of the World” where busloads of shoppers from all over the east coast flock to buy cheap goods and take advantage of Pennsylvania having no sales tax on clothing. After a stint in the Army Band, I was back living in the Commonwealth when I turned 21. I was also married (to my first wife) and putting myself through college and working full-time running a record store in the mall. So my best bar days were behind me, at least in Reading. I learned about most of the good ones while still underage as my stepfather had an uncanny knack of knowing all the best taverns, especially which ones had the best food. So by the time I was 21, I already knew the best ones to go to and so spent little time on experimentation. I already knew which ones felt comfortable to me, though it would take considerably longer to understand why that was so. Two teachers at Wilson High School — where by father-in-law was superintendent — wrote a book called “The Bars of Reading” and were invited to b