Hey, Craft Brewers: Who's Your Daddy?

Just picked this up off ProBrewer.com (thanks to Guy Hagner for the tip). Hats off to Jim Koch, and I hope we won't see any more mean-spirited slagging of Koch among the beer brewing and drinking community after this.

For a couple of months now, we've all been facing the unprecedented hops shortage and it's affected all craft brewers in various ways. The impact is even worse on the small craft brewers--openings delayed, recipes changed, astronomical hops prices being paid and brewers who couldn't make beer.

So we looked at our own hops supplies at Boston Beer and decided we could share some of our hops with other craft brewers who are struggling to get hops this year. We're offering 20,000 pounds at our cost to brewers who need them. Specifically, we are able to spare 10,000 pounds of East Kent Goldings from Tony Redsell, a top English grower featured by Michael Jackson in Michael Jackson's Beer Companion (page 75 has a picture) and 10,000 pounds of the German Noble hop Tettnang Tettnanger from small farms in the Tettnang region in Germany. These are both type 90 pellets from the 2007 crop and are the exact same hops we brew our own beers with. We're not looking to make money on this so we're selling them at our cost of $5.72 a pound plus $.75 a pound to cover shipping and handling for the Goldings and $5.42 per pound plus $.75 a pound to cover shipping and handling for the Tetts. They're packed in 22# foil bags, boxed four bags to a box in 88 lb. boxes and will be shipped from cold storage.

The purpose of doing this is to get some hops to the brewers who really need them. So if you don't really need them, please don't order them. And don't order them just because we're making them available at a price way below market. Order them because you need these hops to make your beer. We're not asking questions, so let your conscience be your guide.

A few mechanics--until we know how much need there is, we've put a maximum out there of 6 boxes per brewer, which is 528 pounds. You can order less in 88 pound increments. You pay shipping. If we get more orders than the 20,000 pounds, we'll have a lottery. We will be putting the basic information to order, some faqs and the actual offer on our website www.samueladams.com in the next day or so, probably no later than Tuesday. Look for "Hop-Sharing Program" on the front page of the site.

We hope this will make brewing a little easier for those hardest hit by the hop shortage.

Jim Koch, Boston Beer Company

Michelob Celebrate Chocolate Lager

I liked this when I tried it two years ago. It's a big (8.5%) lager aged on a bed of roasted cacao beans: kind of slick, eh? And two years ago, it was richly chocolatey. Now...not so much. It tasted thin, like skim chocolate milk; the richness I remembered was not there. The package is cool, like a little artillery shell (until you get the plastic nosecone off and see screw-top underneath, which looks kinda cheesey), but the beer just doesn't come up to standards. I'd like to know if things changed, or if I'm just remembering it differently in the glow of pleasure surrounding it when I had it in 2006: eating a fine meal with friends, enjoying good conversation.

Might crack open the cherry Celebrate this weekend.

Back to Normal

No more slander, no more crap. Just blogging.

Oh, well, it will still come in, but I'll be the only one to see it. And I can take it. The cyberstalker ain't so smart: just says the same crap, over and over.

My Last Duchesse

Hey, thanks to Jay Brooks, I now know that I share today as a birthday with Mary of Burgundy, the woman honored on the Duchesse de Bourgogne beer label. Cheers, baby!

Miller Lite Brewers Collection tasting

Time to taste the Miller Lite Brewers Collection. All three are poured in fairly similar, beer-clean glasses.

Miller Lite Amber: Aroma is somewhat sharp, grainy. Head forms well, and lasts. Don't know if I'd go "amber," more like a dark gold, but a nice color. More flavor than Lite, for certain, but hardly overwhelming. A light, malty/grainy flavor, ashy notes, a slightly sour aftertaste, doesn't break particularly clean. Fizzy. Overall impression: too much flavor for a Lite drinker, nowhere near enough flavor -- or distinction -- for a craft drinker. Third out of three, nothing to like here.

Miller Lite Wheat: Cloudy medium yellow; cloudiness is very uniform, most likely protein haze rather than yeast. Nice tightly bubbled head, and good retention. Beer looks quite nice. Whoa! Startling sweet orange nose, like an orange hard candy or gumdrop. (Obviously not a coincidence that the beer they chose to compare it with in the release was Blue Moon.) Dammit. The wheat beer here is, I suspect, not that bad. The body's right -- light-medium, creamy -- and there's a decent tart flip in the release. But that overlaid fakey-tasting orange ruins it. I'm obviously not sure where that's coming from -- could be sweet orange peel, could be essence -- but it's too much, and it's wrong. Tone it down, or make it less sweet, and you could have a winner here. With it, well, it tastes like your dopeass marketing team is running things, and they still don't really understand "craft beer." This makes me remember that before they came up with Miller Chill, the same group was considering a shandy. Sticking fruit in a beer don't make it "craft." Second of three, and that mostly on potential.

Miller Lite Blonde: Slightly ruddy gold color -- actually darker than I would have expected from a "blonde." Head is the worst of the three: big bubbles, not much retention, and hard to resurrect with swirling. Aroma's kind of interesting: some fruity/estery notes, a little malt, maybe some floral hop. Well...not too bad. There's some bitterness in the drink and the finish that spreads through the whole mouth, there's definite structure to this one, and it has -- shock! -- a good aftertaste. I'll probably finish this one with lunch, though I doubt I'd get one when I was out, unless I was faced with nothing but The Usual Suspects, or I wanted to go light on alcohol. If that was the case, I'd be happy to find this available, because it handily tops every big-selling light lager I can think of. First of three, by a large margin...a plausible session drinker.

That's just my opinion, of course, and I -- we -- are hardly the target market. It is worth keeping in mind that Miller is not aiming these at the die-hard craft drinker. The three beers they are compared to in the press release are Blue Moon, Fat Tire, and Bass Ale. Not the first choices of your basic BeerAdvocate, but strong sellers, and if Miller can grab some of that, they'd probably be happy.

Can they? I doubt it. "Miller Lite" and "craft" have a much stronger cognitive disconnect than "Sam Adams" and "Light." The packaging is very generic (though that could change), there's very little story here (the description on the neck ring of "Miller Lite Brewers Collection Amber" reads "AMBER: refreshing amber lager brewed with a distinctive rich finish"), there's none of the cues that casual craft drinkers key on.

If you're going to aim at that group, you've got to think about what they're buying: with Bass, they're buying import prestige; with Fat Tire, they're buying a different look and a quirky name/badge; with Blue Moon, they're buying a very different -- cloudy -- look and taste, and a pretty badge. They're buying flavor, too, don't get me wrong: all three of those beers are very different from mainstream lager (they are, really, if we're being honest). But the other factors are stronger.

The Miller Lite Brewers Collection has none of that, except the slightly different look, the Wheat most of all. It's Miller Lite, it says so right on the label. That's not different. There's no prestige, there's not a big difference in look, and there's no story. I know I sound like a different guy from the one who wrote about authenticity, but I'm talking about a different set of beer drinkers here.

I don't like conspiracy theories. I think most of the wacky shit beer geeks come up with about the evil marketers at the macrobrewers is just that: wacky shit. But I can't help thinking that this represents one of the recurring theories about why macrobrewers try craft-type beers: they do them in a half-assed way, designed to fail, so that they can point to them and say, "See? People don't really like this stuff. They're just buying it because it's small/local/trendy."

The one other time I really got that feeling was when I went to a Miller Reserve tasting back in the mid-1990s. The Miller rep set up her display, carefully arranged the cases of Miller Reserve Amber and Velvet Stout (which were actually pretty decent beers -- better than these), and then just went through the motions, monotone "Like to try Miller Reserve? No? Okay," inflection, and packed up on the stroke so she could get down to the serious business of selling Miller Lite. I never forgot that.

So I can't help feeling that someone or some group at Miller wants to sell craft beer, to make bigger, more characterful beers, and a bigger group sees that as diverting focus from Lite. So they set this whole thing up to prove that craft won't work for Miller.

As far as this goes, they're probably right.

It's my birthday and I'll bark if I want to

In keeping with my New Year's resolutions...a gratuitous picture of my Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Penderyn. The juxtaposition of pink ears and Nora's pink socks was too cute for me to pass up.

We celebrated my birthday this morning by splitting a bit of nice pork sausage from the Langhorne Cafe (I just wish they wouldn't deep-fry them...that's what the grill's for, guys!).

Miller Lite Brewers Collection

Miller Lite Brewers Collection.

"Craft Beer. Done Lite."

I got 'em. They're going in the fridge. Miller Lite Amber, Wheat, and Blonde Ale. They're in test markets in Baltimore, Charlotte, Minneapolis, and San Diego now. All 4.2% ABV, all 110 calories per 12 oz. bottle, all 6.2 grams of carbohydrates...for those of you who are counting.

"Real craft beer taste and true light beer refreshment." Well... we'll see.

A Better Job Than Me

Carolyn, the librarian who writes the Pub Crawlin' blog (and does a great job of it), has been hitting upstate PA breweries: One Guy, Selin's Grove, Elk Creek, and Bavarian Barbarian, and southwest PA too: a Pittsburgh run and Red Star. Excellent write-ups, go have a look.

And people say I've got it good... Carolyn, you are livin' the life!

Grass-fed Cheesesteaks at Otto's

Some of you may recognize the name of the man I call my Central PA correspondent, Sam Komlenic. Sam's our proofreader at Malt Advocate, he's a real rye whiskey geek, he's a beer guy with solid old school credentials, and we think alike on enough things that I don't fear sending him out to check things for me. Like last week when I got an e-mail menu from Otto's, the State College brewpub, presenting their weekend specials, which included "grass-fed cheesesteaks." !!! I've been getting more and more into sustainable and grass-fed meat since reading Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma (thanks again, Stan), and when I saw that, and realized I was going to be in upstate NY all weekend, I forwarded the menu to Sam immediately and asked him if he could make the sacrifice and get his hungry self over there to check them out. As it happened, Sam already had a Friday lunch appointment with Otto's partner Roger Garthwaite, and within 5 minutes he had received the e-mail and accepted the challenge. Here's what he sent me:

Well, after dining on two local beef-infused dishes over lunch, I'm ready to report.

Up front; you asked for the first food review I've ever attempted. I'm an Otto's Pub Club member and feel that they do a great job of being creative with their menu and ingredients, let alone the consistently great beer quality and selection. It's ten minutes from my house. I like the place. They also get negative feedback from me when it's warranted. Equal opportunity.

That said, I had lunch today with brewery partner Roger Garthwaite. (I paid, by the way, so whatever integrity I had going in I tried to maintain.) Also on the special board was a beef-barley soup made with "Our Own" cow. This was a cow raised on Otto's spent grain as well as pasture, and it gave its life decently to be a part of "our" diet. I had a gorgonzola burger made from "our own cow" a week or so ago, and I kid you not, it was the best burger I've ever eaten. Rare, by the way, a luxury that shouldn't be attempted with industrial ground meat.

The soup arrived after being recommended with conviction by our server, J.K. Very thick and dark (the soup, not our server), and really delicious with a nice pepper kick at the end. Lots of our own cow in that one.

The sandwich was prepared from beef raised by Northern Tier Sustainable Meats in Troy, PA, a cooperative of family farms paying attention to environmental responsibility. It arrived hot on an oven-crisped, good quality roll. (Though Otto's works with a local artisanal bakery for most of their breads, this was not one of Gemelli's.)

A good base of really tender meat was accompanied by sauteed onions, peppers, and mushrooms. The onions seemed to have more of a presence than the other two. I had asked for provolone cheese, and the steak was served without sauce (sorry Philly fans), which is how I prefer mine. Topped with lots of shredded lettuce and chopped tomatoes, I'd call it a California or garden style (I'd call it an abomination; that kinda stuff don't belong on a cheesesteak!).

The meat didn't appear to have been heavily macerated by spatulas on the grill, a process I generally prefer. Turns out it didn't need it. I find beef raised on grass (pasture and hay) to be more tender than all grain-fed, and this may have been the first cheesesteak I ever had with not one little piece of gristle in that clean, succulent meat. Tasted great, though I'm not sure if it necessarily tasted better or if the tenderness does that much for it.

Cows, as ruminants (critters with more than one stomach), were meant to digest grasses, not grain. Grain consumption elevates the need for antibiotics in the animal, and is part of the chain of "confinement agriculture," where the animal, darn near any animal, is kept in a stall/pen/cage for its entire (or nearly so) life. Grass is the way to go. Live an honorable life, die an honorable death.

The only thing that could have been better would have been more of that great meat, but grass-fed quality comes at a premium. Still, it's definitely worth the price of admission. Otto's participates in the "Buy Fresh, Buy Local" campaign anchored by the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture (PASA), and encourages residents and businesses to use local, PA produced ingredients (I do too!). They are also looking into the PA Preferred program administered by the PA Department of Agriculture.

Don't just drink local; take it to a higher plane. Ask your favorite brewpub, pub or restaurant to cook local, too!

Thanks, Sam!

New Jersey Breweries one step closer...

Ah, a lovely thing to behold...

We've got the cover art to look at, and we like it.

Even better, Mark and I met yesterday to go over the proofs of the manuscript, and it went very smoothly. We went through the whole thing in under half an hour. I take it up to Stackpole Tuesday, and away it goes.

We're still looking at August for publication.