Top Shelf thursday, November 2014: Horn of Plenty

If the recent weather is any indicator, fall is definitely on its way out.  The food-growing season is done, & anything that hadn’t been harvested by the beginning of last week would’ve been killed by single degree temperatures.  So time to eat, right?  Time to buckle down & start storing up fat for the winter.  That might not be such a big priority for us civilized, mobile bipeds, but try telling that to our reptile brains.  Cold air plus more dark equals “build those reserves”, gobble up calories while you can.  Thanksgiving is a great symbol of this transition from the salad days of summer to the lean, survivalist nights of winter.  It made sense for this month’s tasting to reflect that, featuring beers that used food stuffs not included in “traditional” (read: “Reinheitsgebot-compliant”) recipes. 

We started light, with a beer representative of the working season: Saison Rustica, from Virginia’s Hardywood Park Craft Brewery.  This easy, dry farmhouse-style ale would hit the spot on a hot day, with a little twist from peppercorns & star anise in the finish.

The hemispheres met with Wells Banana Bread Beer, from the UK’s Wells & Young’s Ltd.  The toffee notes of an English-style dark ale blended naturally into a sweet banana flavor, a logical extrapolation that saved this from being a gimmick.

Terrapin in-sourced Pineapple Express, the result of an employee homebrew competition.  This Munich-style helles lager was given a euphoric dose of pineapple & smoked malt, creating a sweet, slightly acidic flavor that singed around the edges.  Puff-puff!

Plenty of fruit found its way into tonight’s line-up, & fruit can often mean sour & funky beers (yum!).  ShawneeCraft brought it with their Frambozenbier, a blend of two vintages of their Raspberry Blanche, one of which had been aged in oak.  It was surprising that such a light, subtle source beer created such a tart & intensely flavorful offspring, with big raspberry, big oak, & a puckering sour character.  Free Will Brewing (out of southeastern PA, like ShawneeCraft) presented Alexander, a saison with sour cherries, oak, & brettanomyces.  Sour beers tend to be divisive, & this was no exception – even among fans of sour beers – with its mildly tart body & deeply funky & downright strange aftertaste.

Evil Twin’s collaboration with Sante Adairius Rustic Ales, Joey Pepper, continued with the wild yeast.  This cousin-of-Orval, brewed with white peppercorns, brought a kind of savory twist to the earthy farmhouse notes of the bretted Belgian-style pale.

Our sour departure alit with Rodenbach’s Caractere Rouge, a Flanders red with cranberries, cherries, & raspberries.  This hit hard with the fruit, but showed some restraint with the sour, delivering a sweet beer that veered more toward strawberry than the actual berries it contained.

We stayed in Belgian-esque territory with Too Much Coffee Man from Oregon’s Gigantic Brewing.  This coffee beer took the unusual approach of using an imperial black farmhouse ale as its base, blending the coffee with the spicy phenols & roast of the dark saison – very interesting!

Rather unceremoniously, we passed a Top Shelf Thursday milestone – our 25^th tasting!  I chose to mark this occasion by going a little “off script” & sharing a Stone Vertical Epic 11.11.11 from my cellar.  This Belgian-style amber was brewed with Anaheim peppers & cinnamon which stood out more when fresh, but after aging a few years, melded into a tasty kind of dark fruit pudding with just a hint of pepper flavor, without heat.

It would be a little ostentatious to include a “foodie” flight & not include Dogfish Head, so we invited their Scandinavian ancient ale, Kvasir, to the party.  Brewed with cranberries, lingonberries, birch syrup, honey, yarrow, & myrica gale, you could smell the juniper-like aroma from the table, complimented well by the sweet-tart berries.  Always a mouthful with Dogfish Head!

And for the second month in a row, Avery Brewing lent its muscle to the final course, this time with The Beast Grand Cru.  Avery packed a lot of sugar into this Belgian-style dark ale, with dates, raisins, turbinado, blackstrap molasses, honey, & dark candy sugar, bringing the ABV up to 16.1% & leaving plenty of residuals for a sweet, full-bodied ale. 

It was a fun & interesting exercise to pick out the food components in these beers – after all, beer itself is an agricultural product.  It’s a relatively recent development that things like spice, fruit, & other culinary substances are the exception rather than the norm.  Just another small excursion across the vast continent of beer.  Thanks to all who came out tonight – those who’ve become regulars at our little monthly get-togethers (especially Matt, who hasn’t missed one yet!), as well as those who joined us for the first time.  It was an intimate group; all were, & are, welcome.  Top Shelf Thursday takes off for the month of December – see you in 2015!

(Shelf) Life of the Party

The beer world seems to have quieted down about the “bubble” a bit.  A year ago, two maybe, everyone was in flight over how much growth the beer market could handle.  The pool hasn’t gotten less crowded, but it still appears to be accommodating everyone alright.  One reason is that many of the new producers jumping in are not taking up a whole lot of space – here in Pittsburgh, the model seems to be small, walk-in taprooms & brewpubs serving the local area.  There aren’t a whole lot more bottles from Pittsburgh brewers crowding up the shelves & getting distribution far & wide.  Much like the small, house-only wineries of which there are thousands & thousands, the new stripe of brewer is finding their niche with on-site sales & a few draft accounts, keeping things very artisanal & boutique.  Locals CoStar Brewing penned an eloquent blog entry to this point recently.  CoStar are a great example of this local nano model; incidentally (& fittingly) they’re not that far away from us at all, yet I’ve never had any of their beer.  Nothing against them – I’d love to get a taste, but they just haven’t crossed my path yet.  Maybe they’d be interesting in sending some kegs our way, but if we’re outside of their territory, that’s cool, too.  If they’re into just supplying the immediate vicinity, we’re in the next county over.  I get it, & more power.

So the supply end may be more mindful & self-regulatory than we’d realized.  How about the demand?  Craft beer fans are thirsty.  When I got into this hobby, Pittsburgh had one beer festival a year ( Sharp Edge’s Great European Beer Festival), that by definition did not include any local brewers – or any American brewers, for that matter.  This year, it’s seemed like every other weekend there’s been something beery happening somewhere.  Last week saw Beers of the Burgh – the second Pitt-centric fest this year, no less – a great idea that I’m glad has become worth doing.  The festivals are going strong, & almost always sell out in a short time.  The fans are much more numerous, & thus much more competitive.  Big Pour has sold out in minutes for years. 

So yeah, the festival atmosphere is just one sign that things are heating up.  There are also the crazy special releases, here & (moreso) abroad, that folks line up & camp out for.  The media coverage, with more stories devoted to craft beer in magazines, newsprint, television, & on-line outlets.  More folks are treating craft beer as a hobby, & the numbers on Untappd are way beyond what I would’ve anticipated a few years ago.  And then there’s Pittsburgh Craft Beer Week, Pennsylvania Craft Beer Week, American Craft Beer Week, IPA Day, Stout Day, & probably some other landmark “events” I’m overlooking. 

You get the gist, right?  So maybe the growth in supply seems sustainable given the current demand, but when does the demand trail off?  I’ll make the distinction again that, while not necessarily a fad, craft beer is definitely a trend, on the rise & getting more popular.  The “bubble” may not be a drastic deflation in popularity & sales, just a slowing in the rise, eventually plateauing.  The goal of “20% by 2020” – that is, craft beer getting 20% share of the US beer market by the year 2020 – has been thrown around.  An ambitious target, for sure, but one that I’d love to see reached. 

I don’t think 20% is unrealistic (though maybe not in the next six years), but I do have a hard time believing that the current fervor is sustainable.  Right now, everyone is enjoying riding that wave, but I can see the excitement reaching a pitch & dying down.  Beer blogger & notorious contrarian/curmudgeon Andrian “Ding” Dingle has cited the numerous festivals, “beer weeks”, & other antics as indicators that America, while its passion is undeniable, doesn’t really have much of an entrenched beer culture.  There are the hardcore craft fans, & the majority of the country still drinks mass-produced & -marketed industrialized lager.  There’s little middle class.  Rather than being ingrained into everyday life (as in Ding’s home of the UK), craft beer in the US is still largely fireworks & carnivals – you don’t need a “Craft Beer Week” if the public has embraced it as a whole.  It would be just part of the culture & seen as normal, unquestioned, & not needing promotion & celebration.

I agree with Ding, to an extent.  Riding this wave is fun right now, but my hope is that we see a plateau rather than a crash.  I think there’s possibility for people to embrace good beer as a given in daily life, & maybe five years from now, maybe more, it won’t be something we have to seek out & treat as special.    We might be able to go to any restaurant with a liquor license & order from a list of twenty or forty good beers.  If the festivals are still happening (which I hope), tickets sales might last more than twenty minutes.  The local breweries will stay afloat, serving their people & making a quality product consistently enough that people see they don’t have to go nuts.  The on-line media will stop writing contrarian-for-contrarian’s-sake pieces.  The fiendish hunting will die down, & normal people will get a chance to drink everything again.   And the hardcore contingent will have to chill out a bit, not acting like crazy, entitled assholes if they don’t get their way.  The lines will get shorter.  The party’s gotta end sometime – let’s just hope everyone keeps the promises they made the next morning.  Life will go on, & the beer will still flow.  And it will be good.

To Infinity...and Beyond!

Have we hit a million different beer brands yet?  I don’t mean The House, specifically, but the world over.  Has the number of commercial beer brands with a distinct name, recipe, brewer, etc. reached seven figures?  I don’t know whose job it is to keep track of this stuff, but we must have by now, right?  When you consider all the brewers & all the beers they put out, including year-round, seasonal rotation, one-offs, pub-only, etc., we can’t have not hit one million distinct brews conceived & born.  On a whim, I just now looked up Troegs on BeerAdvocate.  They have 225 documented beers, & I’m sure there are probably a few missing.  That’s one of three thousand-ish in this country, at this moment, so yeah, a million seems very possible.

225 different beers.  Okay, so Troegs has been around a while.  Wicked Weed’s newer, let’s check them out.  186!  Four Seasons is just over a year old, let’s try them.  Ten.  Okay, that’s surmountable (though again, that’s assuming that every beer has been entered).

There are many, many choices.  Our current stock is in the range of 1300-1400 brands, but that just doesn’t have the same ring as “House of 1000 Beers”, so we round down.  If you factor in seasonals & single releases, bottle & draft, it’s likely that the number of beers passing through our establishment annually is double that estimate.  That kind of selection can lead to consumer paralysis, a paradox of choice.  There’s so much to choose from, I’ll stick with my tried-&-true.  Josh Bernstein gave voice to this dilemma in a Bon Appetit article that gained some traction earlier this year.  Can’t venture outside, too scary.  Why pick this one, or these six, & hope they’re better than the other hundreds I’m passing over?  Courage, friend!  There’s plenty of guidance to be had – just ask a buddy, or the web, or one of our friendly, knowledgeable staff.

Another product of this hyper-variety is the “ticker” mentality: the completist, the consummate collector, ever searching out something new.  Dare not drink the same beer twice – there are Untappd badges to be had!  “Hmm, I’ve had Hop Devil, Hop Stoopid, Hop Juju, Hoptimum, Hoptimus Prime, Hop Henge, Hop Nosh, Hop Head Red…  What’s that?  Hop Stalker?  Hello!”  “Yeah, the rum barrel-aged one was good, but I had the rum barrel-aged with scorpion peppers & brett down at Fat Head’s during Craft Beer Week & it was the shit.”  I get both excited & exhausted by this kind of pursuit, & have all but stopped pining for the deeper & more elusive niches brewers carve.  Although, never say never…

America’s craft renaissance is still in its adolescence, & I wonder if we’ll see a decline in breweries putting out scores of different beers & variations a year.  I kind of love that The Alchemist has achieved a pretty meteoric rise on the back of one beer.  If he wanted to, John Kimmich could probably brew & sell Heady alone into an early retirement.  The European model seems to be much more conservative in line-up; to my limited perception, most European brewers (save for the ones borne by the western craft boom like Nogne O, for instance) release between one & six beers, period.  Maybe my provincialism is showing & there are way more European brewers doing a ton of one-offs, but it seems to me that the European example locks in a few styles & brands & does them consistently well.  Imagine if every American brewer whittled down their portfolio to single digits & did that handful really well – there would still be thousands & thousands of great, domestically made beers available. 

Part of me wonders if that’s where we’re headed, would be curious to see that future, & truth be told, wouldn’t mind.  There’s just too much to keep track of right now; I could have a selection of thousand beers for life & be perfectly happy.  And then I remember – this is America.  We like choice & novelty as much as quality.  It keeps the game interesting.  I have to remind myself, too, that American craft brewing is essentially home brewing writ large.  Randy Mosher’s definition of craft beer: “If a homebrew (current or former) gets to decide what the beer tastes like, it’s craft beer”.  Home brewers always having something going – this is in the fermenter, this is in secondary, I’m working on a recipe for this.  Part of the essence of American craft brewing is the individual doing what they want & then sharing it with others, & constantly taking on some challenge, doing something new.  Sometimes they want to do it all at the same time, & it becomes a trend, like I’d mentioned in the case of “session” IPA.  But good luck trying to tell them to tone it down.  The craft brewers may come to the paring down conclusion on their own, eventually.  Or maybe not.  For now, though, there’s still a lot of exploring to do.

Top Shelf Thursday, October 2014: Trick or Treat!

Halloween’s just fun.  There’s relatively little stress (even if you have kids), participation is completely optional, & if you don’t even have to see relatives.  It’s a big party holiday, though I can’t see that it’s reached the “Amateur Night” status of, say, St. Patrick’s Day or New Year’s Eve.  It’s not a shit show.  It’s acceptably gimmicky, though in a way that elicits very few eye rolls.  And it’s open to interpretation – if you choose to dress up, you can go as anything from a corpse, to an ex-president, to Lenny Kravitz if you want. 

We designed our “Trick-or-Treat” Top Shelf Thursday to be open to interpretation.  Somewhat predictably, we were treated to beers featuring chocolate, pumpkin beers, & beers with evil-themed names.  There were also a few tricks, with beers throwing interesting curveballs.

Our first “wicked” beer of the evening came to us from Evil Twin Brewing, no stranger to Top Shelf Thursday.  Jeppe delivered a 100% brettanomyces-fermented IPA, Femme Fatale, with the Japanese fruit Kabosu, giving a dry, floral brew with a citric tartness.   Things stayed wild with Luciernaga, the Firely, from Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales – the first “pumpkin” beer of the evening, if in name alone (trick!).  This open-fermented Belgian-style pale hit some very funky notes, with a spicy twist from the additions of coriander & grains of paradise.

We made a 180 with the Double Chocolate Bock from Block House Brewing, a.k.a. Pittsburgh Brewing, a.k.a. Iron City.  DCB represented a drastic departure ideologically - an inexpensive beer from a big brewer - & sensorily, with big notes of chocolate that sharply contrasted with the dry, even sour character of the first two courses.  The next brew stayed the course: Chocolate Indulgence from Brewery Ommegang.  First brewed in 2007 for Ommegang’s tenth anniversary, this delivered a strong nose from the inclusion of Belgian chocolate, while the body packed sharper, fruity flavors from the ester-heavy Belgian yeast.

Dogfish Head transported us through time & space with Theobroma, a recipe from their Ancient Ales series & based on Aztec archeological findings from about 1100 B.C.  It brought some familiar cocoa notes from the use of South American nibs & powder, & twisted it by adding ancho chilies, honey, & a ground tree seed known as annatto.  Personally, I really appreciated the Theobroma & Chocolate Indulgence in this flight, both better than I remember from having them years ago.

What they lacked in creative naming, Boulevard Brewing made up for in flavor with their Chocolate Ale.  Boulevard collaborated with Kansas City chocolatier Christopher Elbow on a beer that balanced Dominican chocolate with malt very nicely & lightly (despite its 9.1% ABV), without tasting like dessert.

Local brew-gooders Helltown brought us the night’s second “wicked” beer (hey, their zip code is 15666!), with their 2013 Barley Wine.  This English-style barleywine delivered a notable heat that remained drinkable, smoothed out by aging on oak & maple.

The secret to making a great pumpkin ale is not being half-assed about it, which O’Fallon Brewing certainly were not.  Their Imperial Pumpkin Ale (another prosaic name, forgivably) packed a wallop at 10% ABV, with a full flavor of pumpkin, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, & allspice to match.  This was one of the first pumpkin ales to wow me in a long time; let’s hope it makes a comeback next year.

One that will not return, unfortunately, is the Black Butte XXVI, the anniversary release from Deschutes Brewery.  They tweak the recipe on this imperial porter every year, this time adding cranberries, cocoa nibs, & pomegranate molasses, tart fruit that meshed interestingly with a little tannin from time spent in bourbon barrels.

And speaking of bourbon barrels, AND delivering whole-assed pumpkin beers, Avery dropped a bomb on us with their 17.22% ABV Pump[KY]n (the “KY” is for “Kentucky”, by the way, not the personal lubricant, a joke not lost on those in attendance).  This monster of a spiced pumpkin porter, aged in bourbon barrels, was the strongest beer ever served at a Top Shelf Thursday, & approached a pumpkin liqueur in its flavor & mouthfeel.

Definitely saw some mischief being played this evening.  Calling back to this post’s preamble, & the question of gimmicks: one thing that most impressed me about the night’s flight was how a good brewer can take a flavor that CAN be gimmicky (chocolate & pumpkin can raise some eyebrows for the seasoned beer drinker) & display it with depth & substance.  There are plenty of superficial-tasting chocolate & pumpkin beers around, but each beer in the flight was as far from gimmicky as you can get.  Regardless of what additives are used, good beer is good beer, a maxim well illustrated by those poured this evening.  It goes without saying by now, but thanks to those who showed up, drank, chatted, & had a good time.