Month: December 2015

Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

The Chistkindl markets tucked into Vienna’s squares large and small foretell snowflakes and frosty windowpanes. The fragrance of the town has become decidedly seasonal. Cinnamon and clove announcing mulled wine (Glühwein) mingle with the sweet brown sugar aromas of roasted and spiced almonds (gebrannte Mandeln) and the smoky-woodsy notes of roasted chestnuts (heisse Maroni). The leaves on the trees have long since flown south, and the seasoned imbibers have left the beer garden for the warmth and Gemütlichkeit of the pub or Beisl, some of them warming themselves up with that granddaddy of malty seasonal beers, the Doppelbock.

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Among the dozens of craft breweries around Wisconsin, women run the show in only three of them.

Jamie Baertsch has been brewmaster at Wisconsin Dells Brewing since 2005. She discovered her passion while studying biology in college.

“I didn’t drink beer and didn’t know anything about it. But we had bioreactions class, and I don’t know how they wrote up the course syllabus, that the dean didn’t know what we were doing, but all we did was make beer in the class. And I was good at it. I was doing tricks with my yeast, so instead of getting a nut brown that would be like 6 percent, I was turning it into imperial porters with nine percent, and the teachers were like, ‘wow, and you could be a brewer!’ I was like,’that’s a job option?!'” says Baertsch.

Allyson Rolph has three years under her belt as head brewer at the Thirsty Pagan, a brewpub in Superior. She began as a homebrewer.

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I quote a close friend: “Craft brewers must have a license to print money.” It was a statement uttered shortly after informing said friend about Cincinnati’s Fifty West Brewing’s $1.5 million expansion, which includes volleyball courts and a cycling business. It seems like every week we announce an exotic expansion or a how-is-that-even-possible success story — from the posh, new pub/restaurant/music venue/brewery that the folks at SLO Brew are building (replete with rentable lofts) to SweetWater Brewing’s announcement that it’s looking for not just one, but TWO new breweries to expand westward.

Sometimes, to the public, it must certainly appear that craft brewers are riding an unstoppable beer train of success (totally different from this snowpiercer), but is that perception a reality?

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At Rushing Duck Brewing Co., a microbrewery in New York’s Orange County, owners used to pour free samples of beer, because state law prohibited charging customers for a pint at breweries’ tasting rooms.

“We were getting about 200 people per weekend in, and from a keg perspective, that is 2½ full kegs we were going through for free,” said brewery co-owner Nikki Cavanaugh.

But in December 2014, with a new state law taking effect, the brewery began selling pints for the first time. “It increased our revenue drastically,” said Ms. Cavanaugh, 29 years old, who in 2012 founded the brewery about 60 miles north of New York City with her husband, Dan Hitchcock.

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About 500 years ago, the accidental natural hybridization of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the yeast responsible for things like ale, wine and bread, and a distant yeast cousin gave rise to lager beer.

Today, cold-brewed lager is the world’s most consumed alcoholic beverage, fueling an industry with annual sales of more than $250 billion.

The first lagers depended on the serendipitous cross of Saccharomyces species as evolutionarily diverse as humans and chickens. The result, however, yielded a product of enormous economic value, demonstrating the latent potential of interspecies yeast hybrids. In nature, the odds of a similar hybridization event are, conservatively, one in a billion.

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