Cricket Hill Rant: OMG, LOL

Without comment (other than to wonder if Rick Reed's gonna pop a vein some Friday...), I present this hilarious rant from the Friday night tasting at Cricket Hill Brewing, Fairfield, NJ:

Capone's bulletin...

I don't normally run alerts for bars with beers on tap, but Capone's has something special on: two years of Tröegs Mad Elf -- 2006 and 2007 -- and the non-cherry Naked Elf as well. That's a great 3-beer tasting education on what fruit, yeast, and age do to a beer.

The East End Black Strap Stout and Grisette Matt has on make a nice reason to go, too.

A pleasant lunch surprise

A while back, a local reader tipped me that the Pizzeria Uno at the Oxford Valley Mall had developed a decent beer selection. I had to run over there today to pick up a book for my son's Latin class at Barnes & Noble, so I figured I'd stop in and check.

Well, lookie here! Uno had some decent drafts -- HopDevil, Stoudt's Scarlet Lady ESB (which used to be everywhere in this area), Troegs Hopback Amber, and Rogue Dead Guy -- but the real treasure was the bottle selection: Duvel, Smuttynose IPA (I assume the Finestkind, didn't see it), 3 Philosophers, Arrogant Bastard, Lefthand Sawtooth, Bell's K-zoo Stout...and about 10 others of similar interest, including North Coast Old Rasputin imperial stout, which is what I had. It was in fine shape: burnt-bitter but with delicious alefruit notes, authoritative body, and great with my pesto-underlaid pizza.

Kinda made me laugh about how chain operators were telling me that having craft beers at chain restaurants was completely unrealistic, "a fairy tale," beer snob pipe dreams. I remain convinced that -- at least until the huge materials cost increases came along in late 2007 -- the biggest thing holding back strong growth for craft beer is availability, either because of lack of distribution, lack of capacity, or lack of retailer commitment. Uno's holding up their end.

Philadelphia Beer Weekocyclopedia

Bryan Kolesar is doing a very nice job of reminding us just why Philly Beer Week is a great idea and a great place to realize it. Kolesar's blog, the Brew Lounge, has featured some excellent and detailed profiles of area breweries, something he's calling The Path to Philly Beer Week, and you should go refresh your memories.

Authentic Thoughts

What do you think of when you hear the word authentic? I think real, I think original, I think genuine, I think good, and I think proper.

So what do you think of when you hear authentic beer? How about authentic Belgian beer? Or authentic lambic? Or authentic double IPA? Or authentic farmhouse brewery? How about authentic Belgian-style beer?

There's a discussion over at Stan Hieronymus's Appellation Beer blog (which I still check every day because I'm an RSS moron), something that started in the comments section when we started talking about what kind of things young drinkers were looking for. I poked around a bit, and found this additional discussion at Jeff Alworth's Beervana blog.

'Authentic' is obviously an issue, at least for some of us (I remarked in that comment thread that this stuff was obviously important to us, but that we may over-estimate the impact on the general beer-drinking public outside the geekerie; and that GB-DP is buying these beers, believe it).

I hate doing the "dictionary definition" thing, but authentic is obviously a slippery concept, and I think we need to nail the little bastard into a corner so we can get a better look at it. Here's the definition from Merriam-Webster's website (I use that because it's easier than typing it out of the M-W Collegiate Dictionary I have here at home), with emphasis added by me and exegesis supplied by me:

1. obsolete : authoritative (obsolete? Throw this one out!)
2 a: worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact (more about ideas than tangible things)
b: conforming to an original so as to reproduce essential features ((an authentic reproduction of a colonial farmhouse) (like an 'authentic Belgian-style tripel,' maybe?)
c: made or done the same way as an original (which doesn't jibe with what Jeff or Dale Jacquette talks about)
3: not false or imitation : real, actual (authentic cockney accent) (looks like the meaning Belgian brewers, importers, and alpha geeks are looking for -- and I'm not judging that...yet)
4 is music theory, about church music chords, skip it.
5: true to one's own personality, spirit, or character (so...integrity, delivering what is expected?)

That gives us a springboard. I'll jump right off, head-first: 'authentic' means different things to people in different parts of the beer community, I'll even say the specialty beer community. Europeans see 'authentic' and, I suspect, immediately short-circuit to AOC/PDO thinking: legal protection of regional products by name and process. That's a whole other argument, and I'm going to dismiss it right now with this: "authentic" is not needed if there is a legitimate PDO designation. (If you want to discuss this wholly legitimate topic of what obligations American brewers have to PDO designations, please e-mail me and I'll start a new post, and we can go wild, but let's not clutter this one with it for now.)

From there, I think it quickly breaks down into two divisions. Either authentic means "the original", or it means "produced in a way that closely emulates the original." Where do you sit on this? Cui bono: who benefits? The first definition favors the first producers, the second definition favors those who taste the original and want to emulate it...or, to be fair, hope to sell something like it. If this reminds anyone of the foofaraw over the definition of craft beer, well, yeah. After all, the post and discussion on Stan's blog was about business. (One of the major reasons I check Stan's blog so often: he acknowledges that all this beer wonderfulness is a business.)

I got an e-mail about my comments on Stan's post, encouraging us (writers and geeks, I'm assuming) to save the word 'authentic' from big beer marketers. I responded that I think authentic is already being used for marketing, just by small brewers and their importers.

'Authentic' is not a useful term on a beer label, because it is imprecise, and means different things to a lot of people. If a product is an original, "Original" has always meant a lot to me. If a product is from a particular area associated with a type of beer, "Genuine (insert place-name here) beer" works, and the PDO, if there is one. If a product is a brewer's honest and effortful homage to a specific beer or type of beer, then the tired "(insert beer type here)-style" is hard to argue with, although if it's not a PDO beer, hell, why not just call it "(beer type here)"?

There is an argument on-going on the Burgundian Babble Belt about the use of the term "Belgian-style," and I agree: given the number of different types of beer made in Belgium, "Belgian-style" is meaningless noise. I blame the GABF categories, which label everything this way: "German Style Kölsch/Köln Style Kölsch." As I've said before, this is to distinguish it from all that French-style Kölsch that's been flooding the market?

But I don't think that has anything to do with the authentic argument. I think the authentic argument is about selling beer. And what this still comes down to, what it all comes down to, is the damned beer. Put it in a glass. Hand it to me. Stand back and shut up while I drink it. Let me react, let me enjoy or despise. But let me do it without telling me about the beer's pedigree, it's maker's history. I'll want to taste other beers that claim to be similar. But if the beer's good, and not too simple, or too complex, or not integrated enough, or overdone, or just plain bad...that's usually a lot more important to me than whether or not it's authentic.

Flame on.

Philly Beer Week: details on the Fork brunch and Real Ale Festival

Well... I thought we were doing the PA Preferred and PA beer brunch at Fork. Then Ellen Yin came back to me with a suggestion for a dim sum and beer buffet kind of thing, and I liked it. We can do the PA Preferred brunch next year (which gives me time to make better contacts at PA Preferred, too). So here's what we have this time:

Start Your Day Right: with Fork and Pennsylvania Breweries!

Join Fork in welcoming nationally-noted beer writer Lew Bryson for a special brunch featuring a breakfast variety of local beers from his book Pennsylvania Breweries. You'll enjoy pairing those beers with Fork's interpretation of dim sum, the Asian small plates traditionally served with tea. The menu will include items like potstickers, braised ribs, clams in black bean sauce, etc. Consider it a delicious preparation for the Real Ale Festival at Triumph, just two blocks away. Sunday, March 16, noon to 2:00 PM, $35 excluding tax and gratuity; beers extra.

Now, about that Real Ale Festival: Jay Misson called me about that. Tom Kehoe at Yards has been behind the idea from the start, but there were obviously some problems with the split of the business and ongoing issues with their new brewery building (the screw piles are all in, by the way, according to Kehoe's report at Groundhog Day). But with that old "work together" attitude that has characterized small brewing in this country for years, Yards and Triumph got together and the event will be on at Triumph. Jay said they may be alternating the site in years to come (note: "years to come." An event with a future).

Details: The festival will run from 1-4 on Sunday afternoon, and you'll have the choice of "in the neighborhood of 20 different firkins, and we hope more, from 20 different breweries," according to Jay. It's a one-price ticket: $50 a head, limited to about 300 people. There will be special food for the event, but that menu isn't set yet. "The spirit," said Jay, a radically traditional brewer, "is to try to maintain traditional cask styles rather than to have an extreme beer fest. Maybe there won't be enough hops for people, I don't know."

So join me at Fork for beer and dim sum, get a base laid in for the Real Ale Festival. Sounds like a great way to end Philly Beer Week to me.

The One Guy Visit

I did, as I said, visit Guy Hagner at One Guy Brewing in Berwick (still no website, or I'd link). I called when I was about half an hour out and told him to order us a pizza at King's (which, you'll notice, does have a website). Guy got pizza there when I was up to help with demolition, and it was delicious; the one I picked up now was equally good (half meatball/onion, half sausage/green pepper, and a bargain). I brought it in, said "Lunch is served!" and Guy poured us a couple of glasses of his Peach Wheat, which he said had been very popular. Easy to see why: tart peach flavor on a clean light-medium body, not too simple, not too big, and brewed with local peaches. It is unfiltered, like all Guy's beers, but dropped out quite bright.

We continued to eat and drink, while talking about how successful the opening had been. Very gratifying for Guy, after all the time and effort of getting the place going. We got Berwick Lager next: clean, refreshing, mainstreamish, and just a bit amber, kinda like Yueng -- well, you know. Then we had the surprise best-seller, the Dark Lager. I can see why, it's smooth and a little sweet, a very pleasant beer. On the other hand, Guy's not completely happy with this, and I can see why: it needs to clean up just a bit, and has some huskiness to it. Tweaked, this will be magic.

The Pils was probably the weakest of a good lot. The hop buzz was good, but the malt on the palate was a bit slippery, not clean and firm as it should be. Guy said he'd tried something with the Pils, and wouldn't be doing it again; he poured me some from another keg he hadn't "tried something" with (5-gallon soda canisters, by the way), and it was noticeably better.

We grabbed a Rauch Bock and walked back into the brewery. As you might be able to tell from the picture, this is one of the biggest small breweries I've ever seen. The brewhouse is tiny, but there's a ton of space. Space is cheap in Berwick; that's a lot of the reason Guy's here.

You can just see the chiller on the left edge of the picture: it's a steel tank full of water, with a restaurant ice-maker sitting on top of a hole cut in the top. Ice gets made, drops into the tank, and the cold water circulates into coils in the fermenters. A lot of Guy's equipment came from eBay and restaurant auctions (he ran an eBay business for a while and knows what he's doing,) the bigger stuff came from the work he's been doing in brewery salvage. The brewery was cheap -- "under $100,000" is about all you can get out of him -- but there's a lot of sweat equity in the place and the equipment. That coldbox in the back, for instance: $1,500, and installed by a friend in exchange for beer.

The Rauch Bock, right. Not as huge as you'd expect from the name, but Guy's not really about big. It's a good clean lager, solidly smokey, and the last half of it went very nicely with the last piece of meatball pie when we walked back to the taproom.

Things are going well for One Guy, but it's very early. (People are already asking when he's going to expand, hell, I did too. Relax, says Guy, I just opened. I want to sell beer, brew beer, and just do that for a while.) A lot of his success is going to count on locals: One Guy is not exactly easy access off the interstate, and Berwick's not surrounded by cities, it's surrounded by woods and hills. Bloomsburg and Hazleton are the closest towns of any size, and I doubt many folks from there are going to travel to Berwick for beer; maybe from the college at Bloomsburg (don't underestimate the thirst of professors).

But it's going to be Berwick that makes this work. I'm hoping that the local business owners -- like the folks at King's -- will realize that One Guy is drawing people into town to spend money, and work at sprucing up to get some of that themselves. This is how brewpubs improve towns. Oh, um, of course, One Guy is not a brewpub, Guy said so. And he's right, hot dogs don't make a brewpub. But he's happy to let people bring food in from wherever, and that's where Berwick makes money. I see opportunity for a lot of businesses here: Berwick Chamber of Commerce, time for a tourist map of town! The big deal, of course, is the nuke plant: if Guy can get the attention of the engineers there, that will help a lot. They drink, they've got money, and they'll spread the word.

Places like this, and the two new breweries in Williamsport, Abbey Wright and Bavarian Barbarian, and Elk Creek Cafe & Aleworks in Millheim, Voodoo in Meadville, and more coming along, these places are filling in the beer map in Pennsylvania, just like the beer map's getting filled in elsewhere. The Brewers Association noted not too long ago that the average American now lives within 10 miles of a brewery; Pennsylvania's trying to beat that average. There is a wave of small breweries opening. It's exciting. Spread your attention around, try new things.

Speaking of which...there was one more beer to try: Cinnamon Boldy. What the hell? "We kind of named it for our dogs," said Guy. "My wife calls them "boldy dogs" because they just charge into everything." He handed me a glass: it was a light gold, and the cinnamon came bursting out of the glass, not like a little cinnamon on an apple dumpling, more like cinnamon in Moroccan stews. Bold, like the man said. The beer in the mouth was big, blazing, almost like a tea made from cinnamon hearts, but not clinging or gagging. I am not a fan of spice beers, but I'll be dipped if I didn't enjoy this. I've never had anything like it, and if this is the kind of thing the hop shortage brings about, well, it's not all bad.

Get thee to Berwick.

Benefits of Beer Proselytization

Seventeen years ago, I worked at a small start-up pharmaceutical company in Ft. Washington, PA. One of the friends I made there was a young chemist, Tom Lawler. Tom was a good guy, and we got along well, but Coors Light was where his beer world began and ended. I decided to open his eyes to the variety that was available -- which wasn't really all that much, in 1991, in the Philadelphia area.

The first cracks in the wall were Yuengling Lager and Killian's Irish Red (which was a significantly beefier beer in those days). Tom took to them, and we ran around in Berks County, drinking Yuengling and eating the local Pennsylvania Dutch chow. We grabbed a new toxicologist at the firm, Les Gibbs, a Bud man, and broke him in on beer variety, too.

We toured the Yuengling and Lion breweries (talk about back in the day...our first Lion tour featured scrounging up some hardhats, and duckwalking under tanks in the crowded old fermentation hall). We took a day off work to go down to the old Dock Street brewpub at 18th & Cherry for May Day, when they released their bock and had a farmer bring three goats into the city.

The high point while we were at Greenwich was probably in 1993. (Warning: long and rambling reminiscence ahead.) Eight of us did "The Long Ranger Trip," a three-day journey into New England, where we visited New England Brewing (where I first met Phil Markowski), New Haven Brewing (where we had a very funny and profane tour and walked away with an unexpected free case of each of their beers...those were the days) the Hartford Brewery (where the beer tasted like there'd been a cleaning solution incident, except the alt, which was good), Northampton Brewery (where one of our gang got a quick French lesson), Commonwealth (a sadly missed brewpub that was all about cask ale), Harpoon (we sucked down a lot of Oatmeal Stout on the tour, during which it started snowing heavily), Cambridge Brewing (where we had one of the coolest yards of beer I've ever seen; a dark beer floated on top of a lighter one, and the dark spiraled down into the light), and then a harsh run up a very snowy I-95 that ended just short of the Maine border where we finally gave up and ditched it for the night in a hotel. We'd planned to visit the Portsmouth Brewery and Gritty McDuff's and Geary, but the three hours it took us to go fifty miles up I-95 convinced us otherwise.

The next day we made the 11 AM tour at Catamount, did some drinking at the Inn at Long Trail (still a favorite stop; we dropped off about half the guys here, they were going to stay and ski at Killington), took in the self-guided tour at the old Long Trail brewery (and bought lots of stuff from the powerfully cute woman in the hospitality room), and then finished up in Brattleboro at The Latchis (back when they were still brewing; we were terribly gruffty and rough for the white linen dining room, but the waiter was extremely gracious about it) and the last stop, appropriately, was McNeill's (as rough and gruffty as we were, but friendly, and the beer was excellent).

As you can see, the beer education process had gone well. The point of this whole long post was last night, when I was over at Tom's house for the Super Bowl. The three of us -- me, Les, and Tom -- stood in his barroom, where beer posters lined the overhead, and his "shrine" of Yuengling collectibles and antiques sat proudly below the plasma screen. Each of us was holding a glass of draft Tröegs Nugget Nectar from the sixtel he'd reserved for this occasion, served on his two-tap home draft system (Miller Lite on the other tap, he's a reasonable man). That's when Tom gestured at the shrine, and held up the beer, and said to me, "You know, this is all your fault." We clinked glasses and grinned.

The pleasure of having turned someone on to the fuller joys of the broad spectrum of beer was gratifying. Getting invited to a party where there was draft Nugget Nectar was a nice side benefit as well!

The Session: Head to Head

The Session this month is barleywine. My, um, beer influences were formed at a time when what you did -- to be hip, you understand -- was age your barleywine. Um, I also aged the beer because I bought more than I could drink. I still do, kind of.

Regardless, that's the kind of thinking that brought me to this evening: a 1999 Full Sail Old Boardhead on my left, and a 2003 BridgePort Old Knucklehead on my right. There's also a nice gooey puck of La Tur in the middle, an Italian mixed-milk cheese -- cow, sheep, and goat, Cathy called it "the turducken of cheese." You need some serious beer to take on a cheese like this: it's rich and creamy, it's also kinda stanky, thoroughly my kind of cheese. But me and the Heads, we're up to it.

The Boardhead shows its age in oxidation -- sherry, old paper, and a stickiness around the edges that ain't all malt. But you know, one of the things I learned back when I was being influenced was that I likethat oxidation effect in a big malty alefruited beer. What the hell, I like a little diacetyl in my English ales, too. Never said I was like everyone else. The cheese pulls some nuttiness out of it, and heightens the sherry notes, brings it to life somewhat.

The Knucklehead is notably younger, or fresher, or lighter to begin with -- probably the latter as I recall from drinking both these beers fresh, years ago. There's fruit, and a dry note of anise, some berries, and a touch of that sherry. It's lighter, but it's still barleywine for sure. The cheese lights it up like a damned carnival ride, too, blowing the fruit right up my stack. It's just amazing to me how that happens. Because when I take a good pull on the beer, and clear the cheese...it backs down to normal, the previous baseline.

What's interesting with both of these beers is that sweet, and old, and oxidized as they are, and with no up-front hop character to speak of, they both eventually leave a bitter finish. Ah, the power of hops.

This is a bit premature for me. My big barleywine day is always the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter. I blame Jim Anderson because Split Thy Skull, the annual barleywine event that Jim instituted, always fell on Easter Saturday. And I'd go drink barleywine, and then have to sing at Easter Vigil services that night. I sang well, too. Barleywine has always been a big part of Easter for me.

But hell. I'll drink it now, and love it.

SBP: the Project gets another bump

Forgot to post this: Imbibe magazine did a piece on Session beer in their January/February issue, a nice one, and interviewed me for it. I was pretty happy with how it came out.