Category Archives: Beery Thoughts

Random musings on my favorite topic…beer.

2011 GABF Interview with Brett Porter of Goose Island Beer Co.

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Brett Porter, the Brewmaster at Goose Island Beer Co. has had a busy tenure. He came to the company from Deschutes in late 2009 as Head Brewer. Within a couple of months co-founder and former Brewmaster Greg Hall had announced his resignation to go into the cider business and Porter found himself at the helm of one of the Midwest’s largest craft breweries. Shortly thereafter Goose Island was sold to ABInbev, a move that drew heavy criticism from many in the beer world. It was a lot for the new guy to take on.

So far, the ABInbev merger hasn’t changed the beer coming out of Goose Island. It has allowed them to expand production of their Vintage series and invest in equipment to insure better and more consistent results in their Brettanomyces-fermented beers. Porter has instituted an intensive program of research into the workings of this “wild” yeast strain, which to me is fascinating stuff. Porter talks at length about that research in this interview, as well as about his efforts to include the entire staff of the brewery in the creative process. A warning, this one gets pretty geeky.

2011 GABF Interview with Brandon Wright of Hamburger Mary’s in Chicago

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Hamburger Mary’s Brew & Grill is located in the heart of the Andersonville neighborhood (a.k.a. boystown) on Chicago’s North Side. It’s a very diverse neighborhood full of unique shops, exotic restaurants, and fun bars. It happens also to be the home of the famous Hop Leaf Belgian beer bar, which is just a few steps down the street from Mary’s.

Owner and brewer Brandon Wright is crafting some unique beers (peanut butter porter anyone?) on what is basically a large scale homebrew system. The mash and boil are handled on a ten-burner commercial stove in the prep kitchen. Wort is hauled to the fermenting cellar in buckets. He calls his brews “Mary’s homebrew.” Are the beers great? Well no, but they’re not terrible either. And the ambience of the place more than makes up for any shortcomings. The main dining room is colorful and kitchy. One might even say “Fabulous.” Two other spaces in the Mary’s complex include a sports bar and a nightclub where they do what they call “Maryoke.”

As they say at Mary’s, “Eat, Drink, and be Mary.”

GABF 2011 Interivew with Pete Crowley of Haymarket Pub & Brewery

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The 2012 Great American Beer Fest (GABF) is only a few weeks away. I though I might celebrate that fact by finally posting some of the video interviews we shot at last year’s festival. I’ll kick it off with an interview with Pete Crowley, Brewmaster at the Haymarket Pub & Brewery in Chicago.

I first met Pete in 2009. I had passed the Certified Cicerone exam just a few months before and saw Cicerone Certification Program founder Ray Daniels chatting with someone across the bar at the Goose Island Clybourn Brewpub. That someone was Pete Crowley, who at the time was head brewer at the Chicago Rock Bottom. During our conversation I made the mistake of referencing “house beers” at the Rock Bottom Chain. At that time – unbeknownst to me – the Rock Bottom chain had no system-wide house beers. The brewer at each location had nearly total control of what they brewed. Having revealed my ignorance, Pete proceeded to roundly dress me down for at least 10 minutes.

Fast forward to 2011. I’m in Chicago doing a two-month theatre residency with men in a halfway house on Chicago’s West Side. I happened also to be doing brewery visits for my upcoming (at some point, I promise) Upper-Midwest Brewery Guide. Haymarket had just opened, and happened to be within walking distance of the halfway house. Needless to say, I was a frequent visitor. I had the opportunity to engage in many, more-civil conversations with Pete and to share a few beers along the way. Haymarket quickly became – along with Goose Island Clybourn – my second “Chicago office.”

Minnesota Cheese Festival as Metaphor for…Something

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Last Sunday saw the first annual Minnesota Cheese Festival. The event was heavily publicized and highly anticipated beforehand, then roundly trounced afterward. Over 3000 tickets were sold in advance and even more at the door. I have no idea how many attendees there were in total, but it was certainly too many for the number of vendors, leading to overcrowding and long lines. There probably weren’t enough volunteers to manage things, and those that were there weren’t easily identifiable. And only one vendor of beer and wine was nowhere near enough.

Criticisms flowed hot and heavy in the aftermath as disgruntled, fromage-famished ticket holders tweeted of hour-and-a half waits to seize a single sample. Valid complaints all. Cheesefest organizers have heard and already posted plans to remedy the situation for next year.

My purpose here is not to rehash what has already been well hashed. Instead I want to examine what I observed. My booth at the festival was at the front near the entrance. From it I could see the whole thing as it went down from promising start to ugly finish. What I saw was quite frankly one of the most bizarre things I have ever observed.

The Line

It all started quite innocently. A few people got in line at one of the booths, but rather than forming a line in front of the booth, they formed it parallel to the booth so that it curled around the side. As new people entered they simply joined onto the end of the line. More and more people meant longer and longer lines and eventually several long lines as new arrivals unquestioningly took their place in the queue. Before long the crowd had organized itself into multiple, intersecting, single-file lines that snaked at a snail’s pace past every booth. Each conversation with a cheesemaker slowed the whole procession down. It all formed spontaneously and organically. And it was the worst possible arrangement.

The whole thing would have gone more smoothly if people had been willing to leave the line and mill about freely from booth to booth. But once in line they wouldn’t budge. The initial line went right past my booth allowing me the opportunity to talk to people as they waited. Over and over I asked the question, “Why are you in line?” The universal response was, “I don’t know.” I usually followed up by asking where they thought the line was going. Again, “I don’t know.” I must have asked at least 50 people these questions. Always the same response. “I don’t know.” They just saw a line and got into it, and then complained about being in it.

Over and over I suggested to the stranded that the whole thing would go faster if people got out of the line. “You should get out of line.” I said. The organizers did the same. But again the reaction was always the same – cold, hard stares that suggested we were somehow crazy. Looks that said, “I’m in line, damnit.” It was like a Samuel Beckett play; Vladimir and Estragon waiting in vain for someone named Godot without knowing why, but unwilling to abandon the wait.

Adding to the absurdity, one of the cheesemakers shared with me that he had used the line to his advantage. As attendees snaked by, this vendor sold them bags of curds so that they would have some cheese to munch on as they waited in line for free cheese.

Afterward

The craziness continued in the aftermath as the complaints rolled in. In a Facebook comment thread the suggestion was made by many that the organizers should have instructed people not to form lines as they came through the gate. “Next year specify no lines and that might help.” I can hear that conversation now. “You may walk in circles. You may form wedges in groups to push your way through to a table. But under no circumstances should you form a line.” Really? We need to be told how to navigate a festival. I go to eight or ten beer festivals a year, including one in the very same space. Never have I seen a crowd organize in this strange way.

I engaged in a twitter exchange with one angry cheesehead afterward. I don’t know why I kept the back-and-forth going, but I did. In her last tweet she said sarcastically, “entirely right- A group of 3000+ should direct itself…lucky #mnnice prevented looting.” Groups that large and larger self-organize all the time. In fact, this one did just that, only in the most inefficient way. As I responded, “the organizers can’t be blamed for attendees who act like lemmings.”

Final Thoughts

When I related this story to a friend of mine a couple of days after the event we could not stop laughing. The more I thought about it, the more absurd it seemed to me. We both came to view the Minnesota Cheese Festival as some kind of grand metaphor for the human condition. A metaphor for what, I don’t know, but certainly a metaphor for…something.

Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah: the First Thirteen Years of Shmaltz Brewing Company

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Jeremy Cowan, the owner and chief shtickster at Shmaltz Brewing Company, was the first brewery owner I interviewed. We met in 2008 at City Beer in San Francisco (a great beer store/beer bar, and a must-stop if you are in the Bay Area). Over a couple of hours and more than a couple of beers we talked about Shmaltz, beer, politics, the hop crisis, and Palo Alto real-estate. The man’s brain seemed to run at abnormal speeds. “Shtick” came to him with extraordinary ease, which together with the beers made for an entertaining conversation to say the least.

Reading his recently released book Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah, I almost felt like I had been transported back to that table. It’s written as Cowan speaks. His sense of humor and lightning wit pervades every page. Self-deprecating anecdotes and tales of his personal explorations of Jewishness reveal a deeper soul hidden beneath. The story-line sometimes gets diverted onto tangents, but always manages to find its way back to the center a few paragraphs or pages further on.

Craft Beer Bar Mitzvah, written with James Sullivan, tells the story of the first thirteen years of Shmaltz Brewing Company from its genesis in the late 1980s as an in-joke among volleyball-playing friends to hard-won profitability in the early 2010s. The journey reveals the inner-workings of both the craft-beer industry and Cowan’s mind. The reader goes along with Cowan on sometimes humorously-awkward ride-alongs with distributor reps attempting to sell a case here and a case there. The long hours and financial struggles involved in building a beer brand are described in such vivid detail that it should make one think twice about starting such a project.

At the same time Cowan lets us in on the personal price paid, from crack-fueled parties and broken relationships to a complete mental and emotional breakdown culminating in an attempt to sell the business. But it is ultimately his boundless energy and stubborn determination to make the business prosper – or even turn a profit – that holds the story together.

The conversational tone of the writing was sometimes too much. I found myself at times wanting more traditional structure and narrative to help me make sense of things. Keeping track of names and relationships proved a difficult task throughout the book. While necessary for setting the stage, I found the early, pre-Shmaltz portions of the book to be less interesting and less well-written. I sometimes had difficulty following the story. Once the first batch of beer is brewed however, the book definitely picks up steam.

Craft Beer Bar Mitzah is a good read for anyone interested in a behind-the-scenes look at the beer industry and must-read for anyone starting on the path to owning a brewery, especially those who choose to go the contract brewing route. It’s an object lesson in what not to do, and sometimes what to do, to make your business succeed.

Garrett Oliver Interview Part 2: Beer and Food Pairing

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Part 2: Beer and Food Pairing

Can I veer into beer and food? You wrote the book that I refer to almost every day, The Brewmaster’s Table. How did you get interested in beer/food pairing to begin with?

Doing it. From day-one when I started doing professional brewing in 1989, the beer dinner was always one of the main ways that you got your beer out in front of people. And as the whole Food Network thing developed and you had chefs being made into rock stars, it kind of occurred to me that at the time that people didn’t necessarily respect craft beer. They didn’t understand it. But people respected chefs and they respected food. So if you tied craft beer to food and people saw how well the beer worked with the food, the kind of glow of respect that the food got shined onto the beer. I think it’s kind of changing these days in that we don’t always need the food to reflect that glow upon us. The beer has its own thing.

Brewmaster’s Table was written from a point of view of not only information, but also pure utility. I’m having pork chops. I’m doing it with this and this. I’m going to have a soft drink, or I’m going to have wine, maybe some people drink cocktails with dinner, or sake or whatever else. But basically most people are going to have a soft drink of some sort, or wine, or beer. So assuming that your choice is beer, beer has a much broader range of pairing ability. Well, what should I do?

And I’d watch people shop for beer and they’d walk up and down the aisles. They clearly didn’t know what was in the bottles and what to do with it. I think the questions that people have are pretty straight-forward. You know, the number one question asked of sommeliers is not, “What is the loam content of the soil in the Loire valley?” They want to know red or white with chicken? What’s the best wine to have with thanksgiving dinner? People want to know basic things. What is it? What does it taste like? Who made it? Why is it interesting? What do I do with it? And then around that you can build something which is interesting and entertaining.

Over the years I’ve done about 700 or 800 beer dinners in over a dozen countries, everywhere from little neighborhood restaurants to some of the most expensive restaurants in the world. Beer belongs at all these places. And we want to demonstrate that beer is an everyday luxury. It’s something that almost everyone can afford. A decent beer will cost you often less than a cup of coffee at Starbucks. And so really, it sounds grandiose to say it, but every day can be made better than it would have been otherwise.

What makes a great beer/food pairing? What is it about a particular combination that makes you say “wow?”

Well I think beer has a particularly superior ability to do harmony. Wine is largely contrast based. You have steak and you have a glass of cabernet. The flavor of the steak does not actually have anything to do with the flavor of the cabernet. When you’re putting the cabernet with the steak, what you’re essentially doing is putting almost like a fruit sauce on the steak. And that works in a kind of contrasting way. You have caramelization and salt, the flavors that are in the steak, and then you have this opposite flavor from the wine.

In the case of beer, you can do contrast and harmony at the same time. I can bring a roasted flavor or a caramelized flavor that harmonizes with the flavors in the steak, and some bitterness, some sweetness, and some fruitiness to do the contrast part. And that’s what makes what I call the flavor hook, that part of the beer’s flavor that grabs onto part of the food flavor. And so often with the best pairings, the beer is interacting with the food in two or three different ways. It’s doing contrast, and harmony, and various accentuations. You definitely are looking for 1 + 1 = 3. 1 + 1 = 2 is easy. It’s really about getting to that third thing where something is greater than the sum of the parts.

Good beer in general is becoming more and more accepted and popular. The concept of beer and food pairing is becoming accepted. Or to take it even further, beer and food pairing is now being thought about…

What’s happening is that it’s mainstreaming. It’s becoming mainstream. If you looked at 2011’s biggest trends in national restaurant news you will see beer and food pairing. And so something which sounded exotic 10 or 15 years ago is becoming routine. And that’s something that I have been saying. Craft beer is not a trend or a fad, it’s simply a return to normality. We’re like one-third or one-quarter of the way to getting back the level of variety that we used to have going back a hundred years and that we’ve largely forgotten about. We had thousands of breweries and we brewed every kind of beer in the world. And now we’re just kind of regaining all of that stuff. We used to have a fascinating food culture that brought in everybody’s immigrant roots. That kind of got paved over in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Everybody said, “Okay, I want to be an American. I’m going to eat meat and potatoes.” And now everything re-differentiates. You see that in what’s happening in the supermarket. You go to Whole Foods and there’s a whole wall of olive oils. There used to be one olive oil or two olive oils. It’s like everything. As things that used to seem exotic become normal it’s a good thing for everybody. There’s more choice. Now, more choice also means people get waylaid or confused. It’s that thing where you walk in and there are a thousand things to choose from. Well which one do you choose? A little bit of information gives somebody the ability to go in and say, “Okay, I’d like to have that.” Otherwise you’re just looking at a wall of stuff.

That’s what happens to me when I go into the beer store.

At least you’re coming at it from the point that you know almost too much. You look at it and you can see how each one of these might be fun. That’s the other hard thing.

What about pairing beer and cheese?

The tricky thing about beer and cheese tastings is that the cheese in a moving target. You say stilton or something like that, but there’s a pretty wide range of what that cheese might be like. So any kind of information you can get on what kind of condition the cheese is likely to be in that day is helpful. Or if you know that a particular place likes to push their cheeses all the way out to their ripest point or you know that they tend to serve their cheeses fairly young, you can work with that to figure out how your pairing is likely to go.

Also, the funkier they get the harder it can be. So that part is always tricky. I try to ask as many questions as I can and also get my samples as close to the actual date, like if I can get my samples two days before we’re going to do the actual tasting. And I ask if it’s coming from the same wheel and the same place etc. That’s your best shot, because there’s only so much that’s going to change in a couple of days. But if you taste it three weeks beforehand or a month beforehand, well…

And I have my go-to pairings that, when I don’t have information in advance, I know a lot of cheeses pretty well so I can say, “These are the five sets we’re going to start with.” And I try to mix the various types. I would like one goat, at least one sheep, one washed-rind, one blue, and one cooked, firm cheese – cheddar type or usually a gruyere. That’s six. That gives you an opportunity to talk about the differences in milks and how the beers are interacting. Say with a saison or a Belgian witbier, how the beer interacts with the tangy quality that goat cheeses have. So I have favorite pairings when it comes to that.

And there are cheeses that I know are likely to be available even though they are good artisanally-made cheeses. For example, you have Cypress Grove Humboldt Fog. You know you can find it in a good cheese shop. You know you can get it even at Costco sometimes. So a person that has a Whole Foods somewhere near them is going to be able to get it. Then if we need to get more esoteric we can. You can teach people about what is wash-rind cheese. Now, as you have the flourishing of beers with Brett character, you know wash-rind cheeses go great with Brett. So you get a chance to tell these tales together.

When I’m doing events I like to help people figure out what kind of beer they gravitate towards. I focus it around ingredients, malt, hops, yeast. How do you approach this?

I do it somewhat differently in that kind of tasting. Like the cheese, I tend to cover ranges of flavor. I want you to understand the two main kinds of wheat beer, because I think they have great utility. You can drink them with so many different things. I want you to understand pale ales and IPAs. Bitterness. I want you to understand caramelization, roast, yeast character, usually represented by some of the Belgian beers where you have a lot of yeast character. I like to serve something with some vintage character.

So a typical beginners tasting might start off with a Belgian wheat beer, then go to weissbier. Then do a real pilsner and start talking about lagers. An IPA. Some sort of Belgian Abbey ale. Maybe a stout or imperial stout. And then a barleywine. Hopefully in there, if we have room to do it, one lambic so that we can show that end of things. Other variants that you can throw in there are like a saison, etc.

I can say that the one thing I have learned over the years, which should not have been a surprise, but was a big surprise, is never talk down to anybody. I can’t tell you how many times I have served Black Chocolate Stout, a big 10.2% imperial stout, to the little old lady, she’s 82 years old, she’s got a blue rinse, and she’s tasting it and saying, “Well I like this one the most. I’ve been looking for a beer like this for a long time.” And I’m like, “Wait, you have been looking for a beer like this? A 55 IBU, black, blow-your-head-off imperial stout. This is what you’re really into?” She’s like, “I don’t usually drink beer very much. I don’t really like beer. But this stuff is awesome.”

I came to realize that just because somebody came in saying that they don’t even like beer or that they’re a Coors Light drinker, or whatever else, doesn’t mean that you can’t have them walking out of there loving Schlenkerla Rauchbier. You have no idea what they are going to like, and neither do they. Your job when you are doing a tasting is to show them. “Here it comes. This is what you are about to taste. Get ready. And now we’re going to talk about the culture and the flavor and whatever else. And if that one is not for you, great.” But I don’t make the mistake any more of not putting stuff in front of people because I think they can’t handle it. Basically what you find out is that almost everybody can handle almost everything as long as you tell them what they are about to taste. My goal is that I want to go all the way there in a couple of hours. And maybe the end of the tasting will be a J.W. Lees Harvest Ale from 2005. My goal for the tasting is that I want to completely blow your mind. I want you to walk out of the room dazed and confused if you have never really come to beer before, and to walk out saying correctly, “I’ve been missing something. I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

Here’s the way I like to put it. Every enthusiasm you have, at some point there was a single moment of introduction. It might have been that you love baseball and your uncle took you to your first baseball game. You love jazz because somebody played you your first Miles Davis record. In that one moment, a little door opens up. On the other side of that door is a better life. And that’s a real thing. It’s an absolutely real thing. You will meet those people ten years later and they will tell you what you did for them. “That one day, in two hours, you changed my life.” And that is absolutely real. And that is the thing that we are here to bring to people. My job is to be the guy that opens that door up. And you’ve got to walk through it. That’s a great thing to be able to do. It may not be rocket science or brain surgery. But you know what? It’s at least as important. You’re going to make peoples’ lives better every day. If they love jazz, they can listen to jazz every day for the rest of their live. But if nobody every plays them the record, guess what. You’re not going to hear it. And the rest of your life you don’t get any of that. You lose that. People think we’re just going out slinging beer, but no, it isn’t that. You see how happy it makes people to have enthusiasms for things. To enjoy dinner every day a little bit more, hell, what else do you want?

Garrett Oliver Interview Part 1: The Oxford Companion to Beer

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Photo by Michael Harlan Turkell

Garrett Oliver is the Brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery in New York. He was introduced to good beer while stage-managing rock bands in England in the 1980s. The unexpected flavors and aromas of British real-ale led this wanna-be filmmaker first to homebrewing and eventually to a flourishing career as a professional brewer. His professional career began in 1989 at the now-defunct Manhattan Brewing Company. He left there in 1994 for his current position at Brooklyn Brewery.

Garrett has been an outspoken advocate for the American craft-brewing industry through his many public talks and media appearances. He has garnered myriad awards for brewing including the 1998 Russell Schehrer Award for Innovation and Excellence in Brewing, granted by the Institute for Brewing Studies and the 2003 Semper Ardens Award for Beer Culture (Denmark). In 2007, Forbes named him one of the top ten tastemakers in the country for wine, beer and spirits. His 2003 book The Brewmaster’s Table has become a classic in the canon of beer literature and a must-read for anyone interested in beer and food pairing.

Most recently Garrett Oliver was the Executive Editor for the recently released Oxford Companion to Beer. The result of a five-year effort by Garrett and a crew of 166 contributors, the Oxford Companion is a comprehensive encyclopedia of all things beer. You can read my comments about the work in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

I had the opportunity to sit down with Garrett for an interview during a recent visit to the Twin Cities to promote the book. I’m publishing the interview in two parts. The first part deals with the Oxford Companion to Beer. The second part, to be published tomorrow, deals with the subject of beer and food pairing.

Part 1: The Oxford Companion to Beer

I have to admit that I don’t yet have my copy of the book.

There are 166 contributors and a lot of them don’t have the book either. The book sold out so fast that they had to pull back all of the contributors’ copies and send them out to paying customers. A couple of days ago was its official publication date and it’s already looking at a fourth printing. I think it kind of goes to show that craft beer in particular has arrived. Even though the book isn’t about craft beer, it’s about all beer, but certainly it is the craft beer enthusiast that is the first to grab onto it.

What was the inspiration for the book?

The originating editor was a craft-beer fan and saw what was going on. He saw the hole, the vacuum for something of this sort. The Oxford Companion to Wine has been out there for many years. And in the United States the craft beer market is bigger than the better wine market. When I say better I mean not a bag-in-box and a finger loop. Something with a cork or at least a screw cap. And even though people seem to be more interested in beer than they are in wine, every newspaper has a wine column. But this book was missing. So that was a strange disparity. We have the works obviously of Michael Jackson. We have a number of other books out there, some of which are quite good, but nothing vaguely like this.

So he came to me and said, “I’d like you to be the editor in chief.” Of course I had the Oxford Companion to Wine. I knew how big it was. My first reaction was, “I am not insane, and I’m not going to take this on.” Turns out of course that I apparently am insane, and I did take it on.

What changed your mind?

I think it’s one of those things where friends and family said, “You have a choice between accepting a certain amount of pain now, or accepting pain later when you realize you should have done it and that it was an honor to be asked. Later on, it will be much later, but later on you’ll regret that you didn’t do this.” I think that they were right, but in the meantime, I had a lot of pretty tough days, as did others, putting this together. It does represent not only an effort by me, but an effort of 166 people in 24 countries to really put together something definitive.

How did you gather the contributors?

There were several ways. The first thing you do is assemble a subject list. There are now 1120 some-odd subjects. There were originally, on my first list, about 600 subjects. I put out a call on the Brewers Association forum asking anybody who would like to see the list and add in some others that they think we should consider, to please do it. And we had dozens of people in the craft brewing community, not just here but in other countries, who would take the list and then fill in some other terms that they thought we should cover. Here and there something would come up that I didn’t even know what it is. I mean a stuykmanden; I didn’t know what a stuykmanden was.  So I was like, “Okay. Sounds fascinating. This guy knows what a stuykmanden is and it’s a real thing. So sure, let’s carry it.” Eventually over time we refined a list that appeared to make sense.

Inevitably when you have something of this scope, something is going to be missing. There will definitely be things that are controversial. I got a thing this morning from the UK about some blogger. Apparently he’d just gotten the book and he went directly to the entry for sparkler, which is a term for the widget that you put on the end of a cask faucet, and he was taking issue with my having said that there was still a regional difference about whether people used it or not. He called that a myth. I’m like, I don’t know. I’ve never seen them in the south and I’ve seen a lot of them in the north. But what’s fun is that people are so geeked-out that they’re going to go and dig into every corner of this book and be looking at, thinking about, and talking about what we’ve brought about here. And although some things will certainly be controversial, I think what you have here is a lot of what I call earned authority, things that have been dug up through actual research, not just Google it and copy what come up on Wikipedia or something.

There’s a lot in this book. Some of it is really fun to read like the history of ale houses and some of it is, let’s call it super-über-geeky.

I think we had to be not afraid to go there. And you know this as well as I do, a lot of craft beer enthusiasts, in particular and homebrewers, they know their organic chemistry as well as we do. I’ve met three or four people since I got here saying, “I’m loving how much organic chemistry there is in this book.” I’d never even heard the term “O-Chem” before. People are like, “I’m an O-Chem guy.” I’m like, “I’m so sorry.” I drew the line at actual pictures of molecules, but if you want to know how a particular compound ends up in beer, we’re going to tell you.

The nice thing about this kind of format is that if you decide you don’t want to read about pentanedione, you just skip that one and go on to the next entry. But if you do want that, it’s here. So it really is kind of one-stop shopping for all information. Inevitably you are going to cover in a few thousand words something that you could write an entire book about, so like an encyclopedia you have to distill things down. But I think it’s important not to talk down to people. Give them a lot of information, but also not have it be dead on the page. And Oxford itself has a kind of voice. I wanted to make sure that even though I didn’t squish people’s individual voices, that it had the tone of an Oxford book.

Who is the intended audience for this book?

That’s a good question. I think that’s what makes this type of writing interesting and challenging is that you really are writing for everybody; the professional brewer, the beer geek, the amateur brewer, the person working in a restaurant who needs to know the beers well enough to talk to customers, and casual enthusiasts. You know, aunt Jane buys her nephew Bob the book for Christmas because she knows that he has brewed beer a few times and he seems to like beer a lot. In that way it needs to be accessible in its overall style, but that doesn’t mean that you don’t have a lot of information there.

I think there’s a certain level we were looking to fly at. When it came time to dive into the chemistry or whatever else, we would go there. Basically, what I wanted was, if a professional brewer’s eyes would glaze over it probably wasn’t something that we needed to really get into. But that allows for a lot.

So we’re looking to cover the entire world of beer, and that goes from sours at one end, with Vinnie Cilurzo writing about the cutting edge of what’s going on in sour-beer making, all the way to American mass-market light beer, a piece written by somebody who works for one of the big breweries and knows exactly how these beers are made, basically giving it to you straight. It’s not a polemic. I’m not saying that the book is without points of view, but when you ask, “What is light beer?” the answer is not, “Well you shouldn’t like light beer, why are you asking?” You ask the question, we’re going to answer the question in great detail. And so it’s really different that way.

You obviously know a lot about beer and beer-making. As you were putting this together were there things that you learned?

Oh yeah. I learned tons of stuff. And that was actually one of the motivations for doing it. I kind of said to myself, “Not only is it an honor to do it, but by the time I finish with this process I’ll either be really smart or I’ll be dead.” I came close to the latter. We hope for the former, although we’ll see.

 

GABF 2011 – Day One

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My day began at 4:30 AM, the time I had to get up to catch my flight to Denver. Left the house early and decided to catch the 5:31 AM #8 bus to the light rail instead of the planned 5:39 AM #9 bus. I arrived at the stop by 5:28. Still sitting there at 5:35, I decided that the bus had come early. That meant a 5-block run with suitcase in hand to catch that 5:39 bus. Man I’m out of shape!

The beer-festivities got underway quickly. We arrived at our hotel at 10:00 AM and by 10:45 PM we were crowded into a van with the folks from Original Gravity, a Minnesota craft-beer distributor for an afternoon trip to Odell Brewing Company in Fort Collins. Midwest regional sale rep Todd Ewing showed us a good time, giving a tour of the brewery and lunch. Of course the beer flowed liberally. I especially liked Hiveranno, a so-called American wild ale fermented with yeast isolated at the brewery.

Returning to Denver, we had time for a quick beer and burger at Rock Bottom before heading to the Convention Center for Session 1. This session was mostly about work. I’m doing short video interviews with some of the Upper-Midwest regional brewers that will be featured in my upcoming Upper Midwest Beer Guide. These will be posted on this blog once I can get them edited.

We talked with Brett Porter, the new Brewmaster at Goose Island about his work with Brettanomyces. Spent a bit of time with Boulevard Brewing founder John McDonald. I talked Sahti with Scott Manning, the head brewer at Vintage Brewing Co. in Madison, Wisconsin. He brought a very tasty pumpkin beer with hints of Belgian yeastiness.  Brandon Wright from Hamburger Mary’s in Chicago gave us a few moments of his time as did Pete Crowley, brewer and owner of Haymarket Pub and Brewery. A chat with “Farmer” Dave Anderson from Dave’s BrewFarm, who is out here judging wrapped up our work day, leaving just enough time for a bit of sampling before the session ended.

Beer and Wine Tips and Videos in June Cambria Style Magazine

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A while back I teamed up with my good friend sommelier Leslee Miller of Amusée to create some super pairings for the summer issue of Cambria Style Magazine. Outside, the gray and snowy day hardly made one think of summer, but inside Kitchen Window in Uptown things were warm and glowing. We shot several videos that day to accompany our written pieces about pairing beer and wine with food. The only down side was that the food and drink were being photographed for the issue, so very little sampling was done. Nonetheless it was a great day. The videos came out beautifully. Be sure to check out the magazine spread as well.

Summer Beer/Wine/Food Pairings

Pouring a Proper Pint

I’ve Been Gone, But Now I’m Back

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I’m back. Looking back it seems I have only posted four times in the last two months.

I’ve been away from home for the better part of those two months working on a non-beer project that was pretty all-consuming, but definitely worth the time and effort. I have a nearly annual gig at St. Leonard’s House, a halfway house on Chicago’s West Side making theatre with men and women who have just been released from prison. This year I actually lived at the men’s house with the guys. That was interesting in its own right. Imagine a Cicerone® spending two months in a sober house. You get the picture. Still, it’s one of my favorite gigs and one of my favorite places to be and to work.

Being away for two months, I became pretty disconnected from the Minnesota beer scene. A lot of things were happening of which I was only vaguely aware. The “Surly Bill” is now the “Surly Law.” The t-shirt bill, Sunday sales, and brewpub bill all went down in flames. Not to mention that I missed all of Minnesota Craft Beer Week!

I was in Chicago during Chicago Craft Beer Week, but it fell during my production week, so I didn’t even really get to take advantage of that. I think I attended one event. But it wasn’t an entirely beer-free two months. During my stay I managed to squeeze in around 25 brewery visits for the Upper Midwest Beer Guide that I am writing, interviewing brewers or owners at most of them. Illinois is in about the same place as Minnesota in terms of developing its craft beer industry. It was late to get started, but is making up for it with a vengeance. During the time that I was there, three or four new breweries put beer on the streets, making it hard to keep my master brewery list up to date. There is some great beer being produced by breweries and brewpubs both old and new in the great Chicagoland area. More posts about these will be forthcoming.

It’s time to end my internet silence. It’s great to be back.