Author: Professor Good Ales

“Malt is the soul of beer.”

Those are the words of Bay Area brewing legend Ron Silberstein, founder of ThirstyBear Brewpub in San Francisco and Admiral Maltings across the Bay in Alameda. Over two decades after it was founded, ThirstyBear remains innovative in a competitive market, while Admiral Maltings is making waves in an entrenched industry.

“Some of the bigger malting companies can make a thousand tons in a batch,” said Silberstein. “We can’t do that in a year.” And yet, he adds, “Malt freshly out of the kiln has aroma and flavor that can’t be duplicated by malt that’s generally at least a year old by the time you get it.”

In the country’s nascent quest for new expressions within beer, Silberstein provides a compelling path toward new scents, flavors, and ways of doing business.

Kenny Gould: How’d you get into beer?

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Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

It was my last day in Bamberg, and the sun had finally dispersed all the clouds, gloriously illuminating the fall foliage. I had just spent the late morning hours at Greifenklau and still had a few hours before my train. The gravitational pull of Aecht Schlenkerla was too hard to resist. Not that I tried very hard: after all, rumour had it that Aecht Schlenkerla was going to tap its seasonal Urbock that day.

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Kevin Mullan is a non-profit-CEO-turned-marketing-executive who for years harbored a very specific dream: to retrofit a fire truck into a rolling tap house that would serve specialty brews to adventurous beer connoisseurs.

This year, he finally cranked the engine on the project, literally. For his own birthday, he debuted his 20,000-pound craft-beer-spewing side gig in a party with his family and friends.

Some guests were skeptical at first. But the party — and 10 taps worth of Ohio’s finest microbrews — extinguished their doubts. Maybe even some of his own. Since then, the fire truck has frequented corporate events, birthdays, kids parties, festivals and more around Mullan’s home of Toledo.

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The Brew is Out There!

A few episodes back – Denny got to taste Drew’s beer and now the tables are turned! Drew tastes and discusses with Denny two of his beers – A Belgian Golden Strong and a Veterans’ Blend IPA. Are they any good? What could be changed and what the heck is that bottle Denny used to ship his beers?!?

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Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

Writing about the history and culture of beer in Central Europe invariably involves acts of translation — not only translation of the German-language sources that I read, but also translation in a broad sense. The Russian linguist Roman Jakobson identified three modes of translation, including intersemiotic translation. Unlike “translation proper,” intersemiotic translation allows us to translate cultural phenomena such as customs or even the organization of space from one cultural sign system or linguistic code into another. In plain terms, intersemiotic translation helps us translate affective terms like Gemütlichkeit, or terms that refer to spaces imbued with cultural significance, such as a Stube or a Wirtshaus.

Such words, though, cannot be exchanged as one-to-one tokens. We cannot simply render Gemütlichkeit as coziness, or Stube as parlour. Indeed, as the Weimar-era cultural theorist Walter Benjamin observes in his essay, “The Task of the Translator,” there remains something of all languages that cannot be conveyed or communicated. But Benjamin sounds a reassuring note regarding the transmission of experience from one language to the next. The task of the translator involves incorporating “the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of the vessel” (Benjamin, 78). Like words themselves, cultural phenomena are akin to fragments of a vessel that the translator pieces together in the “spirit” of the original.

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The success of Downtown Syracuse, in particular Armory Square, has been at the forefront of my interest and business priority since 1992. When Empire Brewing Company first opened its doors on November 3rd, 1994 I think we paid $3 per square foot; a fair rent at the time for a basement. And over the past quarter-century and five different landlords we have watched Armory Square grow into something remarkable. Local business people interested in creating a unique entertainment and shopping district of downtown primarily developed Armory Square, fostering the character we see today.

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Written by Franz Hofer for a Tempest in a Tankard

What began life as a rough-and-ready list of Vienna Lagers to accompany “Vienna Lagers Past and Present” (coming soon) has morphed into something more than that. Below you’ll read about beer names that evoke colourful characters and aspects of Viennese history. You’ll also find the beginnings of a meditation on the price of craft beer in Europe. And, of course, you’ll find tasting notes aplenty. Dig in!    

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Not long after Anton Dreher tapped his first Vienna Lager in 1841, it became the toast of Europe. Though it eventually faded into obscurity in its native land, the style lived on in other places, including Mexico, and was one of the styles that figured in the North American craft beer revival. But it wasn’t until earlier this decade that Vienna Lager found its way home.

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Keptinis is a little-known Lithuanian style of beer where the mash is baked in an oven. The first farmhouse brewer I ever wrote about was keptinis brewer Ramunas ÄŒižas. A few years ago I put together a description of how to brew keptinis based on ethnographic sources. Martin Warren followed my instructions, but ended up with just black, unfermentable water. So when Simonas invited me to come to Lithuania to see keptinis being brewed, he didn’t need to ask twice.

The Jančys family lives in nearby Utena, but often visits their farm in Vikonys, in north-eastern Lithuania, where they come from. And they still brew keptinis in the old way. The brewhouse is a small brick building on the farm, where Vytautas Jančys, who owns the farm, has built a brick oven specifically so he can brew keptinis. The art of brewing keptinis is something he learned from his father and grandfather, so he’s a real farmhouse brewer. He used to also make his own malts from barley, dried on top of the oven, until about a decade ago.

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AND HERE!!!

If you remember any part of the period from the late-1970s to the mid-1990s, you may remember the beerball. (Although if you drank from a beerball, it is possible you don’t remember it).

The beerball was a hard plastic container, perfectly round, that held a little more than 5 gallons of draft beer (more than two cases of 12-ounce cans or bottles). Attach a tap, give it a few pumps, and wait for the foam to blow off. Then have a ball.

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