Author: Professor Good Ales

 

That rain on the plain that saturated Montana’s malt barley crop in late August could be tears in the beer of American brewers in 2015.

Heavy late-August rains have damaged crops in the nation’s largest malt-barley producing states, Montana and Idaho. The rains caused much of the states’ barley to sprout in the field, rendering much of it useless for beer making.

Maltsters are warning brewers that barley will be available but pricey in 2015 when this year’s crop becomes next year’s beer ingredient.

“We’ve been told to expect major price increases for malt,” said Tim Mohr of Angry Hank’s Brewery in Billings. “There is no panic yet. Everybody has been telling us not to panic. There is carry-over from last year’s malt supply. Our prices are stable until January, but beer prices are going up.”

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DON’T ASK for a pint of pumpkin beer at South Street’s Brauhaus Schmitz. One of Philly’s few bastions of Bavarian beer purity doesn’t serve the spice stuff because the Germans already have a perfectly fine autumn beer, thank you.

It’s Oktoberfestbier, also known as Marzen, that copper-colored beauty, rich in malt with a smooth body for endless guzzling.

“Personally, I’m OK with pumpkin beer,” Brauhaus Schmitz owner Doug Hager said. “But as a card-carrying German beer snob, we kind of laugh at it.”

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It doesn’t take more than a cursory glance at the IPA section of your local grocery store to know that ratcheting up hop levels has helped fuel America’s craft beer movement. But could the flavorful flowers also be the next big thing in coffee? Quite possibly, and a Colorado roaster is leading the charge.

For many, coffee and beer comprise the yin and yang of an average day. Coffee for the morning pick-me-up; beer for the evening come down. Even if they bookend your day, they do have a lot of similarities. Both are brewed, both tend to emphasize bitter flavors and both command their own houses (coffee- or brew-). So the marriage makes some sense. That’s why we’ve seen coffee-infused stouts in America’s craft beer lineup for years.

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Written for Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

Close your eyes for a moment and think about what the ideal job might entail. If it involves tasting wine or beer while working, read on.

Meet Gavin Sacks, Associate Professor in Food Science in Cornell University’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS), a person who spends plenty of time with a glass in one hand and a pen in the other. Sacks teaches courses that comprise part of Cornell’s interdisciplinary major in enology and viticulture, including Wine and Grapes: Analysis and Composition, and Wine and Grape Flavor Chemistry. With the teaching day done, Sacks gets down to the business of analyzing the flavour and aroma components of grapes and wine.

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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: There’s never been a better time to be a beer drinker in America. The skillful innovation of American craft brewers over the past decade has pushed beer in delicious new directions. It wouldn’t be hard to argue that the craft beer renaissance is the most exciting development in the country’s culinary world right now.

But this explosion in quality comes at a price. Literally. With few exceptions, prices for good craft beer are far higher than for mainstream macrobrews from brewing conglomerates such as MillerCoors and Anheuser-Busch. A six-pack of beer from breweries like Dogfish Head, Ballast Point or Cigar City almost always costs more than $10 — and routinely exceeds the $15 mark. You could easily get a 12-pack of Bud Light for that much.

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Plastics are everywhere: on the street, in our refrigerators, all over the oceans — you name it. But now they’re hitting us where it really hurts. Authors of a new study published in the latest edition of Food Additives and Contaminants found traces of plastic particles (and other debris … we’ll get to this later) in beer.

This is how the study worked: Researchers lab-tested samples of 24 varieties of German beers, including 10 of the nation’s most popular brands. Through their superpowers of microscopic analysis, the team discovered plastic microfibers in 100 percent of the tested beer samples.

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