PCBW 2015 at Ho1KB: Halftime Report

It’s that time of year again – what are you doing with your tax refund?  Wrong!  The answer I was looking for was “Blowing it all during Pittsburgh Craft Beer Week”!  Because it’s all going down now - ten days of craft beer fun all through the ‘Burgh & beyond.  Breweries, bars, restaurants, distributors, & other small businesses are upping their game once again, & once again, we’re stoked to be part of the action.  This is the House’s fourth year as a PCBW sponsor & participant, & we’re more than ever this year, throwing six events & dipping our toes into uncharted (for us, anyway) waters.

We had a good warm-up last Friday with a night of flights from Great Divide, featuring four high gravity beers from this high altitude brewery.  Hercules & Yeti are reliable standbys, & the flights poured were augmented by the rarer Peach Grand Cru & Barrel-Aged Old Ruffian.  And each flight came with a sweet Great Divide glass.

Saturday saw the welcome mull of puckerheads with the fourth annual Sour & the Funky, our festival of sour & bretted beers.  This year’s was more labor-intensive than usual: we hoarded bottles for months to make this year special, & John was up bright & early on Saturday tapping 20 – yes, 20! – kegs of wild  & funky beer, including more local offerings than in years prior, a sign that local breweries are stepping it up, too.  It felt good to offer a majority of beers not seen in past years, with Gose showing up in a big way, & the first appearance of sours in cans!  The crowd is always good & game for this fest, & many found some new favorites (personal highlights were Pizza Boy’s Pinot Grigio Abascio-Cell & Brew Gentlemen’s Loose Seal).  And each ticket came with a sweet glass.

As I write this, we’re pouring flights of Ballast Point Sculpin & its variants.  We’re lucky enough to have Grapefruit Sculpin & Habanero Sculpin on tap right now, next to the original, for a hoppy experience to be remembered.

We’re really proud of our monthly beer-pairing dinners, showcasing some great breweries supported by a truly talented culinary artist, Brian.  We’re especially psyched to welcome a unique voice in the Pittsburgh beer scene: Draai Laag Brewing.  Using spontaneous fermentation to cultivate a singular, signature flavor profile, Draai Laag’s carved their own niche – one that presents some really intriguing food-pairing possibilities.  Chef Brian’s created an equally innovative menu for this dinner, & we can’t wait to see how these two creative entities mesh.

PCBW at The House has traditionally been book-ended by The Sour & the Funky & a fantastic tap takeover from Voodoo Brewing, & we’re happy to stick with tradition this year once again.  Friday night, we tap a dozen-ish beers from a brewery that’s killing it these days, including six from their Barrel Room Collection.  Voodoo’s been a good friend to The House, & though they’re focusing their local efforts on their own taproom in Homestead, they’ve been awesome enough to roll with us for another year during PCBW.  This is always one of our busiest days of the calendar, & this time no exception.  And there will be sweet glasses.

And we’ll be wrapping up an exciting long-week by breaking some new ground for The House, partnering with another super-popular local business for a unique event: our donut-beer pairing with pastry prodigies Oakmont Bakery!  It’ll be a packed House on the final Saturday of PCBW, as we match some of Founders Brewing’s finest strong ales with some custom donuts from Oakmont Bakery.  The response to this has event has exceeded our expectations so far, but we promise an amazing time to all! 

Even more impressive than the craft beer scene’s efforts during this year’s PCBW, is the demand from the beer-drinking public.  Far from being spread too thin by hundreds of happenings, the crowds have come out in droves across the region, making each event a success.  We’re thrilled at the feedback we’ve gotten, selling out events, & bringing in even more adventurous drinkers looking for new, delicious suds.  So here’s to a continually rising tide, & to the Pittsburgh scene riding this beautiful wave into the sunset!  And dammit, we’ve got a keg of that Cool Ranch Doritos beer sitting into the cooler just begging to be tapped…

Enjoy by...? It's Complicated

Love it.  Hate it.  Like it.  Don’t like it.  Thumbs up.  Thumbs down.

Sometimes enjoyment can be complicated.  It’s convenient to think of things in black & white terms.  It’s something of a luxury.  But life can have shades of gray, & often we don’t think in terms of absolutes but levels of nuance, with multiple considerations to make.  Most of the time, life is more complex than good or bad.

And by “life”, of course I mean “beer drinking”.  As creatures given to categorization, evaluation, & discrimination, our nature leads us to rate most things that come our way.  And by “things”, of course I mean “beers”.  We have gut instincts that automatically attract or repel, & those instincts are tempered by conscious analysis.  A bartender puts a beer on the bar in front of us, & we have a reaction to its color, clarity, composition, cleanliness.  Smelling the beer allows us to refine our opinion a little more, tasting even more so, etc.  By the end of the glass, we decide whether we like it enough to have another, or to move on.  Our opinion is based on the beer’s perceived pros & cons, how much we liked the various facets it presented, basically how it made us feel.  

We might round up or down to conclude that we enjoyed a beer, or not, but there’s more to the story.  “The flavor was there, but it felt thin & watery.”  “Nice smell, but it had a nasty aftertaste.”  “Great beer, I just can’t put away more than one.”  You rate this beer a 3, & this one a 2.85.  It boils down to enjoying beer A more than beer B, but there’s a spectrum & so much is relative.

I believe that beer itself is an acquired taste, & there are plenty of colors on the beer palette that also take some getting used to.  The roast of a stout, the bitterness of hops, the pucker of a lambic - these can all be turn-offs at first, but grow on people to the point that they enjoy what those flavors bring to the table.  So challenge can be part of the equation, as long as it pays off & you’re justly rewarded.

What if you respect or appreciate a beer more than you enjoy it?  This concept isn’t foreign to a lot of art forms - I appreciate the energy & creative chaos in, say, free jazz, but do I enjoy it?  Is the sound inherently pleasurable or gratifying?  Some of art’s value can lie in it being difficult.  It makes us sit up, or moves us in a way that might not be comfortable.  Can beer do the same thing?

Knowing the origin of gueuze, the far-out process in the beer’s creation, brought my respect for it to a new level.  Were I tasting it blind, I might have been turned off, but the context gave me pause to reflect & consider elements that may have gone unnoticed.  I took the challenging elements into perspective, & realized that the acidity, the funk, the earthy nature of it were not flaws, but a parts of the process that the brewer/blender was intentionally presenting.  

 I remember trying Full Pint’s Rye Rebellion for the first time.  I think it was my first rye stout, & definitely my first rye barrel-aged rye imperial stout.  It was dark: dark color, dark, bold flavors, so deeply roasted, a little tannic, thick & strong with almost no balancing sweetness.  Unyielding, uncompromising.  There was nothing “off” about it, it was just a stoic monolith of a beer.  And I believe that’s exactly as the brewer intended.  The beer said to me “I am as I am.”  I can’t say my enjoyment for it was as great as my appreciation of it (though I didn’t NOT enjoy it, either), & that experience has stayed with me since.

I’ve come to have the same sort of relationship & understanding with the beers of Draai Laag.  I see them almost as works of abstract art, to be engaged on their own terms.  There are only a few Draai Laag beers that hit me on that “pleasure” level: Aureus & St. Angus are both rich & dessert-like, & though they’re not lacking in complexity, are also just plain tasty.  Same with Gouden Brugge, perhaps their most relatable offering.  

So much of their line-up, though, I find stimulating, intriguing.  They’re like Cubist paintings or David Lynch films in a glass.  They take unusual, sometimes disparate elements & combine them in ways that come together to form a whole.  They may clash a bit, they may have jagged edges, but I always get the sense that they’re exactly as lop-sided, angular, or surreal as the brewer intends.  So often I come away from a sip of one of their beers not necessarily wanting to down another right away, but to contemplate what’s in the glass.  I take a taste, let it do its thing, & just reflect on what it is the beer (& by degree, the brewer) wants me to see.  They’re beers that make me go “Hmm..” more than “Mmm…”, & therein lies their beauty

Consider, then, that there’s another kind of dimension on which we can fathom beer, that adds to our overall experience.  What is the beer showing you, & what if it’s more than “just” sensory gratification?  What if it’s getting to your brain through your nose & tongue?  It’s one more aspect of art in which brewers are just beginning to scratch the surface.  

To add to the elevation (here comes the pitch part), The House is thrilled to be hosting Draai Laag for a pairing dinner on April 23rd, during Pittsburgh Craft Beer Week.  We can’t wait to see what Chef Brian creates to accompany these brews.  The gustatory fur will fly.  It promises to be a truly unique experience.

Top 5 New Breweries!

With the beer scene growing at its current rate, it can be hard to stay up-to-speed on whose wares are worth tasting & who can remain in the middle of the pack.  No worries!  We’ve compiled a listicle of the top 5 breweries for the serious beer enthusiast to watch.

Pearls Before Swine Artisanal Fermentarium, Gilead, Maine

Owner/founder/brewcrafter Trent Moyer has made “happy accidents” his raison d’etre at this tiny farmhouse brewery in rural New England.  After brewing his first batch of wort, Moyer called it a day & went to bed, only to awaken a few hours later & realize that he’d forgotten to pitch the yeast!  Panicked, he shot out of bed, hit his head on a beam in the barn loft, & fell into a coma.  Upon emerging two years later, he tasted the beer & found it delightfully tart, earthy, & rustic, with a house character approaching enteric.  Moyer jokes that his farmhouse brewery is “more like an outhouse brewery”.  We get the sense that he’s only kind of kidding.  If you’re into small-batch, wild, artisanal beers in bottles that stuff smeared on them, check out Pearls Before Swine’s funky saison-style ale, Solipsism; wild-fermented table beer En Flusikc Lthdiklks; or the experimental Urge, Urge, Ever the Procreant Urge of the World.

River Dog Mountain Brewing, Greeley, Colorado

This innovative microbrewery is rocking craft beer to its foundation, with handmade libations that take balance to new extremes while capturing the essence of outdoor living!  Tear into their wickedly inoffensive Upstream Blonde; their aggressively moderate Gone Fishin’ Amber; or their Paddle Harder Copper, with just the right amount of both malt & hops.  As if these boldly subtle ales weren’t distinct enough, River Dog Mountain’s eye-catching labels, with hand-painted scenes of waterfalls, rocks, & various North American wildlife, are sure to make them stand head & shoulders above the fray.

Aggro Necktat Brewing, Chula Vista, California

Duck & cover, dweebs, because Aggro Knuckle is gonna bust you in the jaw with alpha acid!  This in-your-face, IBU-heavy, verbally abusive brewery started as a fight club, & now wants to take the brawl to your taste buds!  Be prepared to cry “Uncle!” when you get a face-load of the 100% Zeus-hopped DIPA Hop Proctologist; the 50/50 malt extract/hop extract blend Curb Hopped; or their triple IPA, No Pussies Allowed, brewed with real sweat & blood instead of strike water.  You won’t know what hit you!  

Beaver Patrol Brewing, Lubbock, Texas

What would craft beer be without a dose of ribald humor?  No one would accuse the crew at Beaver Patrol of taking themselves too seriously, & they pour some of that playful, low brow, crypto-misogynist spirit into every bottle.  Take a gander at their Udderly Full-Bodied Milk Stout; leer at their Master Bator’s Doppelbock; & get ready to salivate over their tart plum ale, Prune-Tang.  And if you think the names are full of double-entendre fun, just wait til you get a load of the label illustrations.  Wink!

#walezbro Brewing, Chicago, Illinois

These guys really cut to the chase, brewing only beer that makes hardcore beer geeks lose their shit.  Every bottle is numbered, limited, & can only be obtained through sharing in line at a release for a slightly less-hyped beer.  The names are all acronyms &, to be honest, we don’t know what they stand for.  We’ve heard good things about CYRY & hope to someday try it (though, apparently, the coconut fades, so maybe the “C” stands for coconut); a buddy of ours has some HWTCB coming, which is supposed to be amazing, but you really need to lay it down for a few years; & to really one-up your friends with “generosity” at that next epic bottle share, whip out EGK & its variants FREGK, UREGK, & TAMEGKWP for a side-by-side tasting.  #walezbro is also known for its strict quantity-control measures: every bottle that goes untraded after 48 hours must be drain-poured.  Beer porn ahead!

So don’t get left behind, folks – start seeking out these exciting new breweries that are really going places.  There’s still plenty of room in the pool!