MOAR PUMPKINZ!!

“Nobody goes there any more.  It’s too crowded.”

That’s become one of my favorite sayings.  Years before I learned that Yogi Berra said it, I read it in Lew Bryson’s Pennsylvania Breweries, referring to Rock Bottom.  It deftly jabs at the “over it” mindset, when people voice disdain for something based solely on its popularity.  Too many people are into something, it’s lost its special little niche.  This used to be my little secret, now every everyman walking in the door wants a piece.  I get that mentality – being “in-the-know” can make something esoteric feel a little more like a treasure.  It takes a little more effort, more willingness to dig & explore to uncover something really worthwhile, rather than having the least common denominator shoved down our throats.

That attitude can also get a little tedious past a certain age.  That band you heard first blew up, & now people both fifteen years younger AND older than you are into them.  Sure, it might suck having to share them with twenty times more people now, but they’re good, right?  And if things really work like they’re supposed to in a capitalist meritocracy, quality should equate to popularity, right?  It’s only right & natural that more people should be into something good.  So at the right time of our lives, we should all shed the idea that popular is bad.

Where was I going with this?  Oh yeah – I never noticed the pumpkin beer-bashing so much as this year, & I don’t buy it.  I had a brief exchange with another bottleshop’s twitter account, who said markets without a particular hyper-popular pumpkin ale (not gonna say the name) are better off, which made no sense to me, at least from a business standpoint.  He went on to say that he can’t stand the stuff, that if he wants pumpkin pie he’d prefer it on a plate, that beer should taste like beer, etc.  The standard talking points.  That’s fine, whatever, but I feel like I’ve heard it more this year than in recent memory, from more people, & it has a ring of “doth-protest-too-much” about it.  I get the vibe that people are pushing back against the early releases & overwhelming demand, & maybe being a little conspicuous in their nose-turning. 

Sure, pumpkin beer’s ubiquitous this time of year – just read on the Brewers’ Associations’ website today that sales of pumpkin beer rival those of IPA in the fall.  Pumpkin-flavored EVERYTHING is happening this time of year.  Candles.  Ice cream.  Apparently people lose their heads over Starbucks’ Pumpkin Spice Latter.  They might make deodorant from cinnamon & nutmeg now, who knows?  Know why?  ‘Cause it frickin’ tastes good!  Those flavors are delicious & nostalgic.  It makes people feel cozy & gives them some reassurance when the days start getting shorter, cooler, & we all shore up for our inadequate excuse for hibernation.  Each sip is a shot fired in the battle against Seasonal Affect Disorder. 

So yeah, I think the hatin’ on pumpkin beers is a little disingenuous.  People love them because they’re good; it’s fine to let your guard down & just admit that you like what tastes good that a lot of other people like, too.  It’s gonna be okay.  It’s gonna be okay.

Top Shelf Thursday, September 2014: Lagers

Ah, lager.  So underappreciated.  So taken for granted.  In a world of extreme this & full-flavored that & in-your-face the other, which still largely characterizes the craft beer culture, lager is often overlooked.  Without doing any real research, off the top of my head, I’d say craft ales outnumber craft lagers on our shelves about ten to one.  Just a guess.  Not that lager hasn’t always had a place in craft beer – heck, Penn Brewing spent the first twenty-plus years of life brewing almost exclusively lagers -but it’s fallen by the wayside.  BeerAdvocate ran a story a year-ish ago about lager-centric craft breweries, & it kind of struck me as odd.  You mean it’s that much of a rarity to find small-batch lagers, enough to warrant a feature?

Along with other movements of focus – session, souring, farmhouse brewers – lagers are kind of back on the trending margin among America’s small beermakers.  The first barrel was tapped at Oktoberfest in Munich this past weekend, & it seemed like an opportune time to showcase some of the breadth & depth of the lager world for this month’s Top Shelf Thursday.

Lagers are nothing if not drinkable, & things launched with the small, dark, & very drinkable Extra Schwarze from Germany’s Innstadt Brauerei.  This Schwarzbier had a character that was both roasty & surprisingly fruity, & packed a lot of flavor into a 5% ABV package.

A less well-known style that’s gained some traction lately is the Kellerbier, a slightly hoppy lager that’s unfiltered like Hefeweizen, giving the yeast a chance to play a more prominent role than most lagers allow.  Ungespundent-hefetrub, from Mahrs Brau, complimented its light hop bite with an organic, even slightly funky & sulfury character from the yeast, familiar but just a little novel.

I love what smoked malt can bring to a beer, & the incorporation of smoke in lager often fits so much better than in ale (in my opinion).  Oregon’s Heater Allen Brewing, an all-lager craft brewery, brought the smoke to their Dunkel, creating Rauch Dunkel, with a meaty, bacon taste overlaying the toasty base beer.

We dove into another Kellerbier with Monchshof Kellerbrau from Kulmbacher Brauerei.  This one showed the hops a bit less, with more cleanly fruity notes coming from the yeast (in a cool swingtop bottle – love that “pop”!).  And we revisited the Dunkel (this time smoke-free) with Polar Vortex from Two Brothers Brewing.  Possibly the cleanest so far, this carried lightly biscuity flavors with an interesting finish & aftertaste, like brown sugar but drying quickly.

 We hit on a classic with Brauerei Aying’s Celebrator Doppelbock, already known & loved by many in attendance.  On the lighter side for a Doppelbock at only 6.7% ABV, Celebrator yielded rich caramel, dark bread crust, & a little date while being remarkably smooth & easy-drinking.  And the little goat charms made for popular souvenirs.

While the tasting had an air of tradition about it to this point, we got propelled into the now with Founders Dissenter, described as an Imperial India Pale Lager.  Just pouring the beer, I got a whiff of the strong tropical fruit aromas from assertive hopping with American varieties, supported & amplified by the dank character of the lager.  The best of both worlds.

And again, leave it to the Amerikaner to take the old world & twist it, as Boulder Beer did with Dragonhosen.  This Oktoberfest was amped up to an imperial 9% ABV, giving the familiar toasted malt profile a shot in the arm with a warming alcohol & sweet aftertaste.

Old & new world met with a collaboration from Deschutes Brewing (Oregon, 1988) & Distelhauser (Germany, 1811): their Doppel Dinkel Bock.  A weizenbock with spelt substituted for the wheat (& technically not a lager – derp!), Doppel Dinkel delivered everything the style should & more – one guest described it as bananas Foster French toast.  Excellent.

We couldn’t bear to go too long without a pop-in from one of the Bjergso twins, this time in the form of Mikkeller’s Frelser Tripelbock Holy Ale [sic].  This big (11%), chocolatey, pruney lager was christened with the Danish word for “savior”, in an homage to the original Doppelbock, Salvator from Paulaner.

Can’t forget the bonus round!  House Hall-of-Famer Ed was generous enough to share some bottles of Mass Rising, a double IPL from Jack’s Abby Brewing in Massachusetts.  The hop-heads in attendance unanimously agreed it was a home run.  Thanks, Ed!

Dark, light, malty, hoppy, yeasty, clean, strong, mild, & everywhere in between, this tasting showed that lager can cover a lot of territory.  Here’s hoping we see lots more quality lagers being brewed by skilled crafters young & old.  As always, a hearty thanks to those who came, ate, drank, & socialized with open minds & senses.  Catch you at next month’s Top Shelf Thursday!

Note: All umlauts omitted due to laziness.  Sorry, Deutschophiles!

Weyerbacher? 'Cause They're Awesome, That's Why!

It’s hard not to have a soft spot for number three.  One is great, always reliably quality, having won hearts & minds across the board.  Two offers a good complement to one, arguably just as great, but a little scrappier, a little edgier, always vying for that top position with something to prove.  The Beatles & the Stones.  Coke & Pepsi.  Chocolate & vanilla.  Even  Bud & Miller.  So it goes with Pennsylvania’s craft breweries: Victory’s well-recognized, having gotten in early & offered a well-made line-up over the past 18 years; as of 2013, they were the 28^th largest craft brewer in the US.  Out of Harrisburg came Tröegs, a little newer (1997), not quite as big, but also yielding a consistently high-quality product with a few cult favorites.  You can see these two neck-&-neck to be at the head of PA’s craft brewing culture.

Then there’s number three.  I’m not sure that Weyerbacher’s volume would necessarily make them the third largest PA craft brewer, but I always think of them as the dark horse in the triumvirate.  Weyerbacher predates Victory by just a year & has always been a little different.  They’re that “Oh yeah!” brewery for me, not always at the front of my mind, but when I remember them I get excited.  It’s kind of like “What do we want to order in tonight?  There’s pizza, there’s Chinese.  Hmm, what else?  Ooh, how about Thai?  Hell yeah, I love Thai!”  Know what I mean?  Number three doesn’t have as much at stake as one & two, which gives it a little more freedom to just be itself.  People love the Beatles & Stones, but the Who has a niche all its own.

Practically from the get-go, Dan Weirback & company haven’t been afraid to go big.  Not sure that I’d call it their flagship, but the beer that put them on the map was their 12% barleywine, Blithering Idiot.  Distributors sold out of this big boy two weeks after its initial release.  I imagine people were drawn to the name, the label art (the jester has since become Weyerbacher’s mascot), the “bang-for-your-buck” factor, & the fact that it’s a damn good barleywine.  Forging your way with a strong beer like that is no mean feat, but it didn’t take long for other high gravity brews to roll out: Raspberry Imperial Stout & its successor, Old Heathen; Tripel, which became Merry Monks; Imperial Pumpkin Ale, one of the first big pumpkin beers in my recollection, trumping the strength of Dogfish Head’s Punkin.  The list goes on.  They used to offer a variety case of their big beers.  Their Double Simcoe IPA introduced me by name to what’s become my favorite hop.  Their anniversary series, starting with Decadence (as in “decade”), has been perpetually sought-after, further experiments in high-gravity brewing – they just released Nineteen, a wheatwine with mango.  And what goes better with big, bold beers than bourbon barrels?  By taking some of their core & aging in wood they rolled out Insanity, Heresy, Prophecy, & Blasphemy.  And don’t forget Riserva…

It’s not all about big booze, though - Weyerbacher makes a solid witbier in White Sun (nee Blanche), Autumnest, Winter Ale, & continuing selection of “more-than-one-in-a-row” brews.  They’ve always seemed very hometown & handmade in the best possible way.  In the near past they underwent a design change, slicking up their label art & logo.  This was a good move as they’ve gained more ground, & craft beer has become more competitive.  They need to look as professional as they are, no doubt, though part of me always had a soft spot, too, for the old logo, which appeared taken straight from Microsoft Office circa 1995.  It was kind of cheesy & dated, sure, but it spoke to a very DIY aesthetic, & I always wondered if the brewery wasn’t sort of stubbornly, sentimentally attached to it.

As my PA Dutch friends would say, “Machts nicht.” – onward & upward.  Weyerbacher is still kickin’ it, & showing it to be a driving force on the forefront of Pennsylvania’s craft scene.  The House is thrilled to be hosting our first beer & food pairing in years, with four courses created by our own beloved Chef Brian, complemented by the excellent beers of Weyerbacher.  Featured will be the afore-mentioned Insanity (Blithering Idiot aged in bourbon barrels), Nineteen, & Imperial Pumpkin, as well as Jester’s Tree a double IPA made in collaboration with Spain’s Naparbier with Apollo, El Dorado, & an experimental hop.  This should be a really fun event, & give us a chance to flex some culinary muscles while highlighting some quality brews from a landmark brewery.  Hope to see you there, & remember: three is where it’s at!

CONTROVERSIES: IPA Edition

This post could’ve just as easily been titled “Even More Rambling Thoughts on IPA”, but I decided to go with the momentum of the past month’s motif & highlight a few of the debates swirling around the craft beer ether.  Plus, I have a love/hate relationship with listicles: a few actually offer some substance, & the ones that are complete fluff at least give me the chance to scroll through & tick which ones apply to me.  You’re probably rolling your eyes over me devoting another post to IPA, but it really does captivate me right now – the beer AND the phenomenon.  And it’s got its own little list of debates going, which, again, may or may not be of any real consequence to the reader.  Just a little food for thought.

Wet-hopping.  I’ll admit that fall is my favorite season for seasonal beers.  I love pumpkin beers, Oktoberfests, & I get excited for the fresh-hopped harvest brews that come out after hop-harvesting season.  Hops fresher=beer better, right?  The dialogue is moving more toward “Eh…”.  Sure, the good stuff is bright, the volatile oils are fresh, but you get a lot more plant matter in there too than you do with dried hops.  All that extra green can impart grassy or even vegetal notes.  The same oils are present if the hops are kilned & used shortly thereafter (as is done in standard, “non-wet” practice), but without that chlorophyll component.  So wet-hopped can mean the good plus some of the not-so-good, while using kilned hops is just the good.  “Good” & “bad” are subjective, here – if you like the grassy elements, then wet-hopping is right up your alley, it’s just a qualitative difference that some hopheads don’t necessarily dig.   Homebrewing icon & Heretic Brewing founder Jamil Zainasheff was once asked on a podcast “How do you wet-hop without imparting the grassy flavors?”  His reply: “You don’t.”  (Thanks to Stellmacher Brewing for recently putting me in mind of this point, too)

IBUs.  The entry on “International Bitter Units” in The Oxford Companion to Beer (contributed by Matt Brynildson & Val Peacock) comes with a few caveats: “Regardless of how IBU values are derived, however, they do not provide information about the quality of the bitterness…For all its recent use in the public sphere, where it sometimes even appears in craft beer advertising, the IBU is a laboratory construct that was never meant to leave the laboratory…other hop components, roast character, carbonation, water chemistry, & residual sugar, may exert such influence as to make the IBU an entirely unreliable indicator of actual perceived bitterness.”  IBU has become the beer world’s equivalent to kilos in the weight room – a point of bragging & one-upsmanship - without much real practical use for the consumer.  It’s something everyone talks about without really understanding it, so take those stats with a grain of salt. 

The IBU threshold.  The IBU arms race came out, & brewers scrambled to have the highest figure.  A little later, the “threshold” was introduced, & it was said that human’s perception of bitterness plateaus at 100 IBUs, so it didn’t matter how crazy it was over that watermark.  A year or so it seemed to drop to 80.  Then in the past six months or so, I think I’ve heard 50 quoted a few times.  This would  equalize most hop-forward beers; I have a hard time swallowing that.  Along with reinforcing the argument above about just leaving something you don’t understand alone, the shifting threshold bugs me because it smacks of beer geeks trying to out-geek one another by showing off whatever anecdotal “knowledge” floats downstream.  “Really, we can’t perceive bitterness above 50, so…”.  Says who, & if so, so what?  That’s a whole other ball of wax for me, though.

The IPA blob.  “IPA” has become to beer marketing what “-core” was to music genres.  If something’s heavy or aggressive, slap “-core” at the end & you’ve got a new genre: emocore, slowcore, skacore, mathcore.  How about “Krishnacore”?  Same with IPA.  Any hoppy hybrid gets called an IPA: black IPA, white IPA, red IPA, session IPA, Belgian IPA, harvest IPA.  On the one hand, it’s a clear signal to the consumer that “This is a hoppy beer”.  On the other hand, after a while it loses its meaning, or is exploitable by  those wanting to ride the wave & everything becomes an IPA.  Writing in BeerAdvocate magazine, Andy Crouch asked the question “So what kind of IPA are you drinking?”.    Used to be “hoppy lager” was an adequate description, too, before “IPL” came along.

Brewers are sadists (& hopheads masochists).  This may not be so much a controversy as a cliché, & I love to bitch about clichés.  The uninitiated, & even the initiated, taste the piney, citrus pith bitterness of an IPA or double IPA & imagine that the brewers wants to rip their taste buds off.  I don’t know how many hundreds of times I’ve heard someone surmise that a brewer “just wants to shove as many hops in there as possible & rip your head off with bitterness”.  I don’t think that does justice to the skill & intentionality inherent in making a beer with a really assertive hop presence, without making it undrinkable (that’s a relative term, I know).  I’ve come to love aggressively hoppy beers, & it has nothing to do with wanting to inflict pain on myself.  In that big character is a subtle balancing act between challenging & gratifying, a really exquisite dance that the best IPAs have down.  Fans of spicy food like the heat it because it heightens ALL the flavors; it makes the palate stand up & notice.  It’s not just heat for heat’s sake, or bitter for bitter’s sake.  Appreciating a very bitter beer takes some acclimation, but can be so rewarding when you’re in the zone.  So don’t discredit the brewers by assume that they’re just ham-handedly squeezing hops in at all costs.

Alrighty, a few more nuggets for thought, a few more grievances shed.  One thing I feel bears repeating: I think it’s a feather in the cap of craft brewers that a style as inherently controversial & polarizing as IPA has gained such a high place in the zeitgeist.  Beer is fun, challenge is fun, so let’s all have a drink. 

Thanks to the website DC Beer for this article; it fueled a lot of the thought that went into this post.  If you haven’t read it, I strongly recommend you do so.