Today is The Session‘s Diamond Anniversary! (Although technically it would be its “mensiversary” for the Latin and date geeks among you.) The Session is a monthly collaborative beer blogging event where a different host for each month suggests a topic, and on the first Friday of that month everyone who wants to participate writes about that topic. (As simple as that!) Our host then collects links to all the other Session posts for easy reading.

This month’s host is Kendall Jones of the Washington Beer Blog, and the topic he has selected is “Growlers Galore“:

These days people take growlers for granted. In my neck of the woods, growlers are a relatively new phenomenon. I don’t recall exactly when they appeared on the local beer scene but it could not have been more than eight or ten years ago. Maybe they existed in obscurity before. My memory fails me. Today growlers are everywhere. I think. Growlers are very common around the Pacific Northwest, anyway. I cannot speak to their popularity elsewhere. I’d love to know.

Tell us about your growler collection. Tell us why you love growlers or why you hate them. What is the most ridiculous growler you’ve ever seen? Tell us about your local growler filling station. Ever suffer a messy growler mishap? Anything related to growlers is acceptable.

I haven’t taken to collecting growlers in the same way that I would collect bottles, partially because I don’t have the room—indeed I did a major purge of my bottle “collection” about a year ago and I still really don’t have room for more—and partially because the growlers I have are a reusable commodity: I keep getting them refilled!

I only have a small number of growlers though: two from 10 Barrel Brewing, one a Rogue Dead Guy growler, one from Hopworks Urban Brewery, and one from Steelhead Brewing in Eugene. Those are my clean and reusable set, and all are the standard brown glass, half-gallon “jug” style without much fanfare; I have another fancier one from Southern Oregon Brewing with a ceramic flip top and metal handle that my brother gave me, but it’s not in good enough condition to fill unfortunately.

But for me these are “working” growlers: I’ve taken to always carrying one or two in the car with me on the off-chance that I’ll be near a brewery, and for the most part I’m unconcerned about the decor on the bottle. And fortunately that decor doesn’t matter as I live in a state (Oregon) that has lenient enough beer laws to allow breweries to fill any growler that comes in the door, even ones from other breweries (indeed, some breweries will fill just about any lidded container you bring in), unlike, say California or South Dakota that will only let you fill a growler if said growler is from that same brewery.

So I love having a growler on hand, but not for a collectible purpose, for me it’s almost entirely functional. Don’t get me wrong—having a Hopworks growler is cool but what’s even cooler is being able to fill it with fresh beer from Deschutes, or Brewers Union, or Barley Brown’s, or any number of other Oregon breweries anytime I’m in their neighborhood. It’s hard to beat that.

Remember those hilarious videos from Breckenridge Brewing a while back? My favorite was “Gravity Activated Pouring.”

They’ve released two more. Probably as good as at least half of those that will be on display Sunday during the Super Bowl.

Happy Friday! Here’s the beer news from around Oregon for Friday, February 3rd (and going into the weekend). I will be periodically updating this post throughout the day with news bits, so if you have something to share please contact me and I’ll get it updated.

Old Mill Brew Wërks (Bend): The original owners of the brewpub/restaurant in Bend’s Old Mill District have sold the pub to focus entirely on building out their own (production) brewery, according to a local Bend Bulletin article (which is unfortunately behind their paywall). They will be renovating the brewery space formerly occupied by 10 Barrel Brewing tentatively beginning in March, installing a 7bbl system. They’ve tapped Michael McMahon from Langley Brewing in Langley, Washington to be their new head brewer. (I’m not sure how/if the name will change considering they’ve taken the brewery out of the “Old Mill”.)

Brewpublic has a nice article on the new Golden Valley Brewery Beaverton which opened recently, giving a nice overview and introduction to the new brewpub and former Chili’s location. “The bar now offers up large TV’s to catch some sports while sitting at some tall bar tables in the middle and shorter tables around the perimeter. Speaking of the bar, Golden Valley offers a full liquor selection along with 6 wines on tap and 10 taps of their beer that they bring in from their McMinnville location. The ten selections offer some excellent variety in styles that you’d expect from a brewpub with this history.” And they just recently released their first beer brewed at the new Beaverton location, “Exit 65 IPA” which is looking to be a popular addition to the GVB lineup.

Continue reading “Oregon Beer News, 02/03/2012” »

Welcome to the start of a new regular feature here at The Brew Site for 2012: Apocalypse Beer. This is a (mostly tongue-in-cheek) subject I’ve been thinking about for awhile and since nobody else appears to be doing it, I thought it was high time to tackle it. What follows is the introduction to “Apocalypse Beer” and I’ll be unpacking the concept over the next few weeks before getting into practical matters. Or as “practical” as post-apocalyptic brewing can be, I suppose…

Just what is an “apocalypse” anyway?

The original definition of the word refers to a writing or work which acts as a disclosure of hidden information, akin to a prophecy, and from the Biblical Book of Revelations it came to be associated with the end of the world.

Modern usage defines “apocalypse” to mean a great disaster, and commonly it’s viewed as leading to the end of the world as we know it. And while this sounds pretty straightforward, modern times and pop culture has given us a variety of apocalyptic scenarios to choose from:

• Zombie epidemic
• Meteor strike
• New Ice Age
• Technological collapse
• Nuclear war
• Epidemic/disease outbreak
• Environmental catastrophe
• Natural disaster
• The Mayan 2012 “end of the world”
• Alien invasion

Sort of a “Choose Your Own Adventure” for the end times, and shows that we have a (unhealthy?) fascination (obsession?) with the Apocalypse. Or rather, it shows that we have a fascination with the post-apocalypse, as much of the focus is actually on life and survival in the post-apocalyptic aftermath.

One of the most common visions of the Post-Apocalyptic world is one of a societal and often technological collapse, with survivors banding together to scavenge, forage, survive, and rebuild. Often they have to start from scratch. We get details of food (foraging, hunting, growing), defense (weapons, fortifications, building armies), building (shelter, agriculture, attempts to recreate “lost” technology), but one question has been repeatedly coming to my mind lately:

Where are the beer brewers?

Continue reading “Apocalypse Beer” »

Happy Groundhog Day! Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow today which means six more weeks of winter, traditionally. Do any Oregon brewers make a “Groundhog Day Beer”? At any rate, here’s the news in Oregon beer for Thursday, February 2. I’ll be periodically updating this post throughout the day, so if you have some news you’d like to share please contact me and I’ll get it updated.

Alameda Brewing (Portland) today is celebrating their My Bloody Valentine Release Party, their Valentine’s Day-themed Blood Orange Farmhouse Saison: “Dried orange peel and hand squeezed blood orange juice adds to the citrus and peppery essences from the yeast.” As part of the celebration, pints are available for $2 all day long, and limited-edition wax-dipped bottles will be for sale all day as well. The release party itself runs from 5 to 9pm tonight and will feature live music from the Alice Kollinzas Trio.

And speaking of Valentine’s Day events, Brewpublic and Saraveza are teaming up again for the third year in a row to present My Beery Valentine on Sunday, February 12th starting at 6pm (no tickets required to enter): “This is an event designed especially for lovers of craft beer, sweethearts, and sweettooths, and features some of the region’s best breweries concocting specialty one-off brews with a Valentine’s Day theme.Dessertif and delicioso decadent ales will be married with the tantalizing treats of Sugar Pimp, Saraveza’s own Lori Adams Clinton’s divine cupcakes. Beers brewed with fruit, chocolate, liqueurs, barrel-aged, and other fanciful ingredients will be featured from Alameda, Block 15, Breakside, Cascade, Coalition, Fort George, Laurelwood, Mt Tabor, The Commons, Upright, Vertigo, and more. If you love craft beer the way we do, you are not going to want to miss out on this event!” The beer list has also been published to the event page, and all I can say is “Wow!” Yes it’s that impressive!

Continue reading “Oregon Beer News, 02/02/2012” »

In the early 1980s, Anheuser-Busch chairman of the board August Busch III ordered that freshly brewed cans of Budweiser and Bud Light would be cryogenically frozen, so that they could be tasted against each other over time.

More than 20 years later, Wall Street Journal reporter Sarah Ellison described a scene where Busch and Doug Muhleman, then A-B’s vice president for brewing and technology, had cans from 1982, 1988, 1993, 1998 and 2003 thawed and set before them in the corporate tasting room. She wrote, “Muhleman . . . says the company didn’t set out to make the beers less bitter. He calls the change ‘creep,’ the result of endlessly modifying the beer to allow for change in ingredients, weather and consumer taste. ‘Through continues feedback, listening to consumers, this is a change over 20, 30, 40 years,’ says Mr. Muhleman, gesturing toward the row of Budweiser cans. ‘Over time there is a drift.’

“The sample cans demonstrate how ‘creep’ works. The difference in taste between two beers brewed five years apart is indistinguishable. Yet, the difference between the 1982 beer and the 2003 beer is distinct. ‘The bones are the same. The same structure,’ says Mr. Muhleman. Overall, however, ‘the beers have gotten a little less bitter.’”

In Why Beer Matters Evan Rail suggests we consider “beer’s unstuck relationship to time.”

Which is why I find myself thinking about beer’s bones. Why when I drink a crappy bottle of Pilsner Urquell it pains me to think about how good it can still taste in the caves underneath the brewery. Why if I didn’t have a cold that disconnected by olfactory system from my brain yesterday — when temperatures here in St. Louis were flat out balmy — I would have been sitting in front of Urban Chestnut Brewing drinking Zwickel, a beer most definitely unstuck in place as well as time.

Beer Matters is first of about Rail’s own relationship with beer.

I can’t explain what beer means for everyone: as a subject, beer is too broad and deep, too varied and multiform, just like the wide public for whom it has clearly come to mean so much. But I can tell you a few things about beer that I like most myself, why beer has come to matter to me, and what I tell people when they ask why I have chosen to write about it.

An allusion to Billy Pilgrim aside, this relationship is an act of free will. He writes, “If the unexamined life has less merit than one which has borne deep investigation, clearly there is some value in caring about what you eat and drink.”

He gives 937 words to his personal obsession with the Polish smoked-wheat beer known as Grodziskie, and part of the story is about how quickly a single beer can disappear.

Despite its recent fall from grace Budweiser hardly seems in such danger. And I don’t really care what a can from 1982 might taste like. But I do appreciate that August Busch III understood why it matters, why beer matters.

*****

Now the full disclosure. Evan Rail and I have been drinking together. He bought rounds. I bought rounds. He emailed me a copy of Why Beer Matters for review. In fact, I bought it from Amazon, in part because we are sort of friends and in part because of curiosity about how the whole “download it to Kindle” would work even though our family does not yet don’t own a Kindle. (We go to the library a lot, plus I read it on my phone.)

The essay runs about 6,500 words, a chapter in some books. You’d like to read it in a beer publication, but find me one that will print something of such length. I have no idea what Beer Matters might lead to from Evan — notice he was “Rail” in the review part, very professional, but this is the personal part — or others. But I hope it’s more.

Stan asked me to elaborate on something:

Could you elaborate on what you mean by 'beer thinking'?

Hmm... I think there is beer thinking. If there is anything, there is a lot of under-thinking about beer thinking. If I were honest with you, there is a lot of under-thinking about over-thinking, too. Not sure if there is over-thinking about under-thinking but that could be, too. And if there is beer thinking there must be schools of thought. Can we describe them?

♦ The School of Aesthetics: As a pleasure trade, beer is concerned with sensory experience and - as with any ideas of beauty, art and enjoyment - the sensory-emotional values of the individual. In a way, all efforts to elaborate the subjective experience of the aesthetic undermine its purity. Boak and Bailey observed in a tweet this morning: "we're going to run out of language for talking about beer soon..." But as we know, by any other name, a beer is a beer is a beer. The aesthete knows that there is no higher thought than moving into a less conscious experience... maybe I could put that in a better way... a less dictated experience with their perception of pleasure. Yet less of that can be more of something else - the drunk, the addled.

♦ The School of Empiricism: These place the emphasis on observational evidence. While still involved in what we may experience, objective is added to the mix. In this school we find the historians, the data miners, the mash bill reviewers, the home brewing replicators. Just as the aesthete is the neighbour of the short term drunk and the long term addled, the empiricist can lead us astray through the musty corridors of the library. They forget sometimes that the well stocked beer shelf in a store or a pub is the only library you really need. They also lead to judging. Where the aesthete might describe, empiricists judge. The county fair jam and jelly contest is a very fine thing and a blue ribbon a treat - but remember: judge not lest ye be judged.

♦ The School of Ancient Wisdom: These accept received wisdom or, in another way, believers that others - their betters - were and are wiser. When you read enough beer books about the same few notions, it does become pretty evident that not thinking can in fact occur. I blame Jackson who did a very fine thing in layering classification upon us but then did not enforce enough that it was only one mode, one approach. As a result we are left with broadly practiced rote based lessons. They are related to conservative pessimistic approaches like skepticism as it presents a doubtful outlook, doubtful that there is anything new to be said. It also gives rise to experts to tell you, for a fee, that you do not know what is right. They even tell you that something is off when it's simply not to their taste. Never mind that. You simply need to be told.

Ultimately, while each may have a place, each school distracts us from the good, that simple state of the moderate engagement with meaningful pleasure. When combined, they are disaster. Imagine a library where the best books were removed after a few weeks and taken out of circulation. Aestheticism meets empiricism. That is what we face here in Ontario with the restricted and regulated government store that stocks it shelves with temporary listings of good beer, our better's ideas of what the experts tell us to enjoy when and where they determine. And imagine a store that sells paperbacks for fifty bucks because there are only a few copies printed. The wise meets the empirical. That's what is being foisted upon us by short run swanked up brews which seem to have as part of their experimental goals a study of the best way to get wallets opened wider. But surely we have to forgive them. They know not what they do. Maybe. It is always truly wise to recall the first lesson of Thales.

Are there more schools? Many more no doubt and likely splintering schismists amongst these schools above each trying to set in stone a better more complex rule to define what for most really does not need proscription. They do as much harm as good. Each aggrandizes an aspect what is essentially a simple thing - the enjoyment of a malt mildly intoxicating beverage that has been enjoyed for thousands of years quite nicely, thank you.