No, I didn’t receive 33 literal beers (I wish!), but rather the beer sketchbooks 33 Bottles of Beer. Portland beer blogger and journal entrepreneur Dave Seldon of The Champagne of Blogs is the man behind the booklets, and it’s a clever and well-executed idea (one I wish I’d had). The premise is, these are pocket-sized beer journals ideally suited to note-taking during events like beer festivals where it’s not very convenient to lug around a larger notebook:

This beer journal is designed for ease of use. It’s tough to hold a notepad in one hand, a pencil in the other, and have another hand left for beer. Taking notes with 33 Beers is as simple as checking a few boxes and entering a few basic facts.

Each page contains the necessary note-taking space for a single beer: name, brewers, price, rating, 5 lines of notes, and the facts about the beer (IBUs, ABV, OG and FG). The most unique aspect, though, is the flavor wheel on each page which gives you a visual “image” of the flavor and body characteristics of the beer, with values like dark fruit, hoppy, malty, toffee, sour, and more. You rate each characteristic on a scale of 1 to 5 on the wheel, then connect the dots. I’m really curious as to how well these “images” of beer flavor work across like styles—for example, would you be able to tell the style or type of beer by the flavor wheel image you see?

Each booklet is 32 pages long—32 pages plus the inside back cover give you 33 reviews per sketchbook, a nice maximizing of space. And here’s something else to like, too:

33 Beers is made with 100% recycled papers sourced in the Pacific Northwest. Interior pages are 100% post-consumer recycled content and covers are 85% post-consumer recycled content and 15% recycled content. The booklets are printed using US-grown soy-based inks in sunny Portland, Oregon.

The booklets sell for $4 each or $10 for a pack of three. I received my three as review copies, but I think that’s a good deal from what I’ve seen so far.

I’ll be trying it out this weekend at the Bend Brewfest, and let you know how it worked out for me.

I was tempted to type the headline, add (eom) and see what happened . . .

I understand the concept of nano brewery (or nanobrewery). But if we are going to have a rule about when a brewery is too big to be called micro shouldn’t there be one for nano?

I ask because the Green Dragon in Portland, Ore., is sponsoring its second Nano Beer Festival next week — “25+ nano breweries and food from Portland’s food cart scene.” Referred to as Nano Food Carts (a nice touch) on this poster.

If you give the poster a good look you’ll notice Upright among the breweries. We visited Upright last year and there’s a 10-barrel brewhouse at the heart of that system. The guys at Berkshire Brewing in Massachusetts cranked out 6,000 barrels one year on their seven-barrel system. Granted, they had to be crazy, and microbrewery has been defined on the basis of production rather than size of each batch, but nano generally refers to something very, or even extremely, small.

A nanosecond is a billionth of a second. Feel free to check my math (because it is probably wrong), but the amounts get too small if we try this with billionths. Start with a 700-barrel brewhouse — mega breweries make even bigger batches but consider of the Anheuser-Busch plant outside of Fort Collins, Colo., which is gigantic. Divide 700 by 1,000,000, then multiply by 31 (that’s how many gallons are in a barrel). Multiply that by 128 (ounces in gallon) and we’re at a batch size of less than 3 ounces. That’s a millionth of 700 barrels. Divide that by 1,000 for a billionth.

Screw it. Let’s just call them craft breweries. Much more concise.

The Christian Science Monitor’s feature “5 famous pork projects: Beer museum and more” includes, as you might have guessed, funding for the National Brewery Museum in Potosi, Wis.

In 2004, The Potosi Brewery Complex restoration project received a $449,574 grant from the Federal Highway Administration’s National Scenic Byways Program to help renovate the building in order to attract tourism. Straddling the Mississippi River in Wisconsin, the renovated brewery became home to the National Brewery Museum, the Potosi Brewing Company Transportation Museum, a Great River Road Interpretive Center, and a micro brewery.

I don’t understand why this is a bad thing. As far as government projects go a half million dollars isn’t much. Efforts to create a national museum have failed elsewhere. Beyond the fact the museum houses rotating exhibits of items on loan from members of the American Breweriana Association there’s the Research Library. What could be more important?

A few photos from when we visited a couple of years ago:

My old desk top Dell gave up yesterday. I am a couple of days away from a vacation and I feel like doing much the same. But what about giving up imported beer not for the cause of slackerdom but for a higher cause?

A majority of Canadians would give up imported beer or wine to reduce shipping and lessen the environmental impact of imported products, according to an Ipsos Reid poll conducted for Postmedia News. About 67 per cent of Canadians polled said they'd relinquish imported beer -- what, no Heineken? -- and 56 per cent said they'd forgo foreign wine. "That's just a testament to the good beer that we produce in Canada, and increasingly, the good wine as well," said Sean Simpson, a senior research manager at Ipsos Reid.

While I am not the first in line for right-wing libertarian economic opinions, it seems to me to be reasonable to want to avoid the extra costs of travel, and not just the extra cash. But wouldn't it be nice if the reasons for forgoing the foreign were also based on the taste of what was in the glass? I can't imagine I am the only one who has been disappointed with the too well traveled ale. And I am not talking only of the extreme case of the beaten up beer. I recently have had a couple of beer from The Bruery from California which, though reasonably priced, I suspect had just gotten beyond their natural sphere of... influence? Maybe sphere of persuasion. I am left with a poor impression of the brewery but have to remember that the would not likely taste as they did closer to their home. And how much more the case for the green bottled, mass produced stuff.

So while it is swell to be green in an abstract sense, isn't it just as valid or even more so to pass on bottles that have been trucked a thousand miles or more because a more local one should always be fresher?

In my beer review column on Taste T.O. this week, I freely admit to enjoying Rickard’s White, despite the fact that they might take my Certified Beer Geek card away for liking a Molson Coors product. It’s certainly not the best Belgian-style wheat beer around – it’s too sweet for one thing, and less nuanced than better examples for another – but it’s still tasty, especially when it’s fresh, and serves as a good fallback beer in the sort of places that haven’t come around to the fact that there’s more to beer than Molson, Labatt and a few big name imports.

Because as far as we’ve come in the current Craft Beer Revolution, we’ve still got a long way to go. For a lot of Canadian beer drinkers, Rickards White may be as close as they’ve ever come to a craft beer, in much the same way that a lot of American beer drinkers view Blue Moon Belgian Wheat, the Coors-owned beer that Rickard’s White is based upon, as something really unique and out there.

This is something I can relate to, as I had a similar reaction to another Rickard’s beer around 20 years ago. While I was already familiar with the craft beer of the time from breweries like Brick, Formosa and Upper Canada, the beers I was drinking from them were mainly pale lagers. So the first time I saw Rickard’s Red, I was confused and intrigued. A red beer? Who had ever HEARD of such a thing? And since the Molson connection wasn’t well publicized at the time, I assumed that it was from some other small brewery like those others I’d been discovering.

I downed my fair share of pints and pitchers of the stuff back then, usually sitting on the deck patio at the Imperial Pub, but left it behind soon enough as my palate for microbrews developed further. I honestly can’t recall the last time I ordered it in a bar or pub, and the only reason I’m writing about it now is because there was a can in the same Molson Coors promo pack that contained the Rickard’s White and the light beers I covered a couple of weeks back.

Even after 20 years and literally thousands of other beers, I still find Rickard’s Red to be an attractive beer in the glass, with a with a bright copper colour and a big and natural looking off-white head.  The aroma is simple – basic malt notes, a bit of caramel, a slight graininess, and no evidence of hops. The flavour is similarly unchallenging, and nowhere near the “flavour rollercoaster” promised by the commercial – just too-sweet malt, nondescript fruit notes, and a quick, blink-and-you’ll-miss-the-hops finish. For someone used to nothing but pale lagers (just as I was two decades ago), it may represent a step into a new beer realm, but put up against a ever-growing selection of distinct craft beers available to drinkers today, it’s fairly uninspired.

There’s plenty of inspiration elsewhere in the Molson Coors brand portfolio, though, as found in the couple of cans of Creemore Springs Kellerbier that were also in the package. When I wrote about it on Taste T.O. soon after it was launched as a seasonal beer last summer, I described it as “one of the best beers to be launched in Ontario in recent memory,” and I was glad to see it return for a second year.

I must confess that I drank the cans in the promo pack too quickly to write a proper review (or even take a picture – hence the generic image to the right), but my notes from last year are still pretty accurate:

It has a rich copper hue with the hazy body mentioned above, and a remarkably fresh and enticing aroma that holds notes of toasted grain, dried grass and juicy hops, along with a hint of yeast. The body is lightly carbonated, as is correct for the style, and while the flavour seems a bit muted if tasted straight from the fridge, giving the beer a few minutes to warm allows it to open up considerably, revealing a perfect balance between sweet, caramelish malt and pleasantly bitter hops, with a delicate suggestion of lemon zest in the finish. The yeast is also noticeable, but not overpowering, it just adds a well integrated depth and richness to the flavour.

Final thought: I wonder how the 20-years-ago version of me would’ve reacted to the Kellerbier? Considering how wild and crazy I found Rickard’s Red at the time, I can only imagine – and at the same time, I’m both happy and jealous that today’s young beer drinkers have the option, and many more besides.

Over on Taste T.O. this week, I’ve got a review of Muskoka Pilsner Light, a newish beer from Muskoka Cottage Brewery that is “Light” due to being 4% alcohol, but is otherwise a solid and flavourful German-style pilsner. In the piece, I make the point that the name – which I assume was chosen at least partially to get the beer noticed by drinkers of Coors/Bud/Blue/etc. Light who may be willing to experiment a bit – might end up alienating Muskoka’s core customer base of craft beer drinkers who would sooner drink water than a typical North American Light Lager.

I have hope that the quality of the beer – which is quite high – will win it fans regardless of the name. But there’s still a big reason why so few small breweries call their beers “Light” even if they happen to be lower alcohol lagers, and that reason is that most mainstream light lagers simply aren’t very good. Not that they’re completely undrinkable (well, some of them, at least), but they inevitably lack some or all of the elements that craft beer drinkers look for in a beer – elements like colour, body, aroma and flavour.

I recently had a chance to reconfirm my opinion about macrobrewed light lagers when I received a promo shipment from Molson Coors Canada containing a selection of beers from their portfolio, ranging from light and ultra-light lagers to craft and pseudo-craft brews. I’ll give some thoughts on the beers in the latter category in a subsequent post, but for this one, I’ll be concentrating on the quartet of cans in the former group.

First up – Molson Canadian 67, the first Canadian entry into the ultra-light category that is one of the latest beer fads south of the border (see: MGD Light 64 & Bud Select 55), although it has more calories and slightly more alcohol (3% vs. 2.8% & 2.4%) than the American brands. The marketing behind the beer emphasizes the calorie count, noting that it’s “about 1/2 the calories of wine or mixed drinks”, and promises a “clean, crisp, fresh taste.” And honestly, I can’t say that they’re lying, as this straw-yellow beer is definitely clean and crisp – but it’s also remarkably lacking in aroma and flavour. There’s a vague hint of grainy malt and a passing wisp of grassy hops, but to its credit, it remains drinkable even as it warms up, which isn’t something that can be said about most mainstream lagers. In a word, it’s inoffensive.

Canada’s top selling beer, Coors Light, is the next one to hit the glass, where it exhibits a slightly darker yellow hue than the previous, but nothing in the way of a head. It also has more aroma than 67, but that’s not really a good thing, as there’s a distinctly stale and slightly sour malt character that’s quite unpleasant. The flavour is less problematic – or so it seems in the first couple of mouthfuls, when I taste pretty much nothing. But it’s not long before the same stale/sour notes from the aroma start to come through in the flavour as well. Not something I want in my mouth – although to be fair, neither the “COLD” nor “ROCKY MOUNTAIN COLD” indicators on the can were showing when I poured it, so I obviously wasn’t drinking it at it’s optimal serving temperature – i.e. a temperature at which your tongue is half-frozen so you taste nothing whatsoever.

Discount brand Keystone Light follows, and hey, look, there’s an actual head on this one! Well, there is for a minute or so, before it disappears and leaves the beer looking just as lifeless as the Coors. The aroma is, um, not good – stale grain, wet cardboard, cooked veggies, and something slightly fishy (and I mean that literally, not figuratively). Yikes. But thankfully, the flavour isn’t nearly as bad – it just tastes of dry hay with a faint hint of lemon. Next!

Last in line is Miller Chill, launched in Ontario this summer to compete against Bud Light Lime and other lime-flavoured beers. This is the second time Molson has offered me a sample of this beer, with the first coming to me last fall when it was released in Alberta. My review back then noted that “the aroma is initially not so pleasant, offering that stale malt and wet corn husk smell that I get from many mass produced lagers, but that slowly clears and is replaced with notes of candyish lime,” and that “the flavour holds very little that can be described as ‘beer-like’ – it’s more reminiscent of Sprite with a very, very faint wisp of malt.” Trying it again, my thoughts are virtually identical, with the main difference being that I find it a touch more enjoyable on this hot July evening than I did back on the cold day in October.

What to conclude from all of this? Mainly that it’s pretty clear these are not beers meant to be sipped and savoured and analyzed. They’re mass-produced products meant to be drunk cold and quickly on hot summer days. I don’t begrudge Molson-Coors for making them, or people for drinking them – they’re just not my sort of thing.

The two big beer festivals for Bend are just around the corner, and are nearly back-to-back: the Bend Brewfest is coming up this weekend, and The Little Woody is two weeks after that, on Labor Day weekend. Interesting how that worked out on timing; a little closer together and we almost could have had a Bend Beer Week.

The Bend Brewfest takes place Friday the 20th and Saturday the 21st, from 4 until 11pm and noon to 11pm respectively. It takes place at the Les Schwab Amphitheater in Bend’s Old Mill District. Admission is free but—as usual—the purchase of a souvenir tasting mug is required to drink beer, and tasting tickets (or tokens, I’m not sure which they’re using) are $1 each. (No mention of the mug price on the site that I can find.)

In addition to a pretty impressive brewery lineup (including all eight Central Oregon breweries) with some 67 beers, there will also be wine from Volcano Vineyards (one of Bend’s local wineries) and hard cider from Crispin Cider Company. There will be food vendors on hand, and children will be allowed up until 7pm (though parents will be required to sign a pledge “acknowledging the responsibility of preventing children from consuming alcohol and the penalties for the parent and child”—an OLCC holdover from last year’s cancellation).

There will supposedly be “activities and music” but that page on the site still says “info coming soon.”

The site for The Little Woody, on the other hand, lists just about everything except exactly what beers and food are going to be served up. This year’s Little Woody still takes place on the lawn of the Deschutes Historical Society, and it has expanded: in addition to Central Oregon’s local brewers (plus newest Boneyard Beer), Eugene’s Ninkasi and Corvallis’ Block 15 will also be represented. Plus, there will be a bourbon tasting: six tastings of five bourbons (not sure how that works) for $30.

It takes place Friday, September 3rd and Saturday, September 4th, from 5 until 10pm and noon until 10pm, respectively. Admission is $6 and includes the commemorative glass; tasters should be $1 (like last year), but I’m not finding that specific fact on the site.

The event details page lists the live music schedule for the two days, as well as the bourbon offerings. I have an email out to the organizers to see if I can get a beer list (and food list), which I’ll post if I get.

Update: I forgot to mention that The Little Woody is not kid friendly, it’s a 21 and over event only. And besides the beer and bourbon, there will also be cocktails from Bendistillery, wine, and soft drinks.

Remember Albany ale? Last spring, I found a number of references to beer being shipped around the eastern seaboard from Newfoundland to New Orleans as well as references to it being sold in Texas and even California. Not sure what it was but there was plenty of evidence that it was something.

The other day I found something particularly helpful. In 1835, the Senate of the State of New York received the Report of the Select Committee... on the Memorial of Sundry Inhabitants of the City of Albany, in Regard to the Manufacture of Beer. Forty pages long, the Report consists of answers by brewers given in response to six questions posed by Senators intended to discover whether the brewers of Albany were brewing impure beer. Question 3 gets to the point:

3. Have coculus indicus, nux vomica, opium, laurel leaves, copperas, alum, sulphuric acid, salt of steel, aloes, capsicum, sulphate of iron, or copperas, or any other deleterious or poisonous drug or compound, or any or either of them, or any extract or essential property thereof, been, at any time, or in any quantity, directly or indirectly infused, mixed, put or used in beer, ale or porter, either when being manufactured or when preparing for market? If aye, at what time, in what quantities, and by whom?

Yikes. Yiks, too. Happy to report, however, the answers were a complete and fairly convincing denial of all charges, charges no doubt trumped up by some downstate faction. But in giving that answer, the brewers, brewery owners and staff give a lot of information about what was going on with brewing in and around the Hudson Valley at that time. I will return to this text on other topics but today, I want to look at what they say about hops and where that can lead us. Here are some of the comments:

• James D. Gardner of Vassar and Co., Poughkeepsie stated: "I do not know the cause of that flavor, which gives to some beer the taste of aloes, unless it is owing to the use of strong hops which may have become damaged by packing, before sufficiently cured, or to unskilfulness in the operator, or to both combined."
• James Wallace of the firm of J+U Wallace, Troy, NY reported: "There is a great variety in the flavor of hops: some have a strong, others a more delicate flavor, which readily accounts for the different flavors perceptible in the ales of the same establishment."
• Thomas Read of Thom. Read and Co., Troy NY confirms he used 2.5 to 5 pounds of hops to a barrel and that they looked for the palest bales of hops to use in their pale ale.

What were these hops? It is reasonable to suggest they were New York state hops. In Volume 50 of the American Journal of Pharmacy from 1877, there is an useful article setting out the importance of hop industry in central NY in the mid-1800s. In 1860, it states, each of four countries of central NY including Otsego produced more hops than all hops produced in the USA outside of New York state. Two varieties are mentioned by the pharmacists: "large and small cluster." In another report, this time the 1860 Report of New York State Cheese Manufacturers' Association, a trip to Otsego County is describe in which the hop plantings in every village are estimated. We are told at page 150 that at Richfield, about 75 miles west of Albany two varieties were grown:

Messrs. Allen & Hinds, the leading hop merchants of' the town, informed us that the past winter had been unfavorable to hop plantations in this section, and many yards had been badly winter-killed, more especially the older yards. There had been greater losses from this cause than in any previous year, but a considerable number of new plantations had been set, and it was believed the new yards would more than supply the place of those winter-killed. Two varieties of the hop are generally cultivated in town, the Pompey and Cluster. The Golding hop of England had been tried but did not succeed well, being liable to rust . The Pompey is a large coarse variety, a vigorous grower, but inferior to the Cluster in strength and flavor, and does not keep its color so well as the latter variety.

While there is still a village of Pompey and even a modern day effort in the re-establishment of the central NY of the hop industry there, we are unfamiliar with that strain. We do know about Cluster, however. Cluster is still with us, often described as an old American cultivar which is, notably, a hybrid of Dutch strains and wild indigenous ones. Hmm... where did the Dutch meet the wild in the US? The Albany area, of course.

There is more to know about Cluster and the need to more closely locate it in the early 1800s in an Albany brewer's log book but for now suffice it to say that when the brewers of Albany ale were talking about hops they were likely talking about the finest hops available locally, Cluster.

So MillerCoors has launched a separate company to manage its portfolio of (existential warning) craft beers and imports, calling it “Tenth and Blake Beer Company.”

Is this different than what America’s megabreweries breweries tried in the mid 1990s? On the surface, but maybe not that different. Will Tenth & Blake prove more successful? We’d be guessing, wouldn’t we? Before you do, consider a bit of history.

1995. “We are behind the curve, no question about it. We need to learn about specialty beer,” Scott Barnum, then general manager of Miller American Specialty Craft Beer Co., told All About Beer magazine. That’s the year that Miller bought a stake in the Celis Brewery and Shipyard Brewing. Leinenkugel and Miller Reserve were the other key brands in the ASCBC portfolio. “We have people in here helping us train our palates and our noses, working with our sensory development. We listen to guys tell us how they built their microbrewing businesses, about investment, capital. We talk to entrepreneurs. We are immersing ourselves in this world.”

Anheuser-Busch formed what it called the Specialty Group of Anheuser-Busch. “We are trying to think differently,” said Jeff Jones, who was senior product manager for the group. “That’s the whole thought process of the specialty beer business. I do have a passion for beer. We have to think differently from a large brewer, and that was the purpose for separating out our group.”

Coors established its own specialty group, Unibev, much earlier than the others, and in 1995 its star was Killian’s. The year before bock, Oktoberfest and wheat beers all flunked various trials. However, Unibev managing director Tex McCarthy said that a new brand, Blue Moon, wouldn’t carry the Coors name. “We want them to be disassociated from the Coors family. . . . If people see a major brewer’s name on a micro it loses some of the cachet that makes the beer interesting to begin with.”

You know the rest. It didn’t happen over night and it didn’t happen because Coors threw a bunch of advertising money behind the brand but Blue Moon Belgian White became the best selling wheat beer in America ever.

1997. Miller remained focused on working with regional partners rather than brewing specialty beers (the Reserve line had been axed by then). “We’ve said before that this is a regional business,” Barnum said. “More and more, you will see people contracting, narrowing their focus.”

That didn’t exactly work out. Miller ended up buying out Pierre Celis and his family and by 2000 had closed the Celis Brewery. Miller sold its stake in Shipyard back to Alan Pugsley and Fred Forsley and that company has thrived.

Forsley explained what happened a few years after he and Pugsley regained full control of their brewery: “I think initially the plan was well conceived, where Miller was focusing on portfolio selling. The whole Miller network was designed so their sales force could come in and sell their whole portfolio of beer. American Specialty Craft Beer had a relationship on the sales side with Molson, the imports, Asahi, and so on. That way a salesman was responsible not only for Shipyard but Molson. They had a variety of resources to pull from. When it changed from being a portfolio sale to a priority sale, as acknowledged by everybody in the organization, the goal became to make Miller’s main brands their focus. That really caused major problems for us. Up until then the sales efforts were working very well.”

A press release from MillerCoors indicates Tenth & Blake “will own the strategic business drivers — marketing, trade marketing and an independent sales organization dedicated to the craft and imports business.” That’s the something different. But it’s not all it takes.

“We didn’t really fit into the Coors distribution system until about five years ago,” Keith Villa, who wrote the recipe for Blue Moon White, said last year when I visited Coors while doing the research for Brewing with Wheat. A sales force is not what made that beer. Many readers here feel obliged to beat up on Blue Moon White, and yes it has became hip, a badge even. But Villa put a beer in the glass that drinkers who are willing to pay more want to drink.

Fifteen years, and more, after the people working at the nation’s largest breweries said they were ready to think like smaller breweries how many successes similar to Blue Moon can you point to? Maybe it’s not a matter of training. Maybe it’s company DNA.