Professor Good Ales

Written by Franz Hofer for Tempest in a Tankard

Raise your hand if brown beer is one of your all-time favourites.

Just as I expected: not too many hands.

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Craft beer fans love capped jugs known as “growlers,” and they’re an efficient way to carry fresh beer home. But in Florida, half-gallon growlers are banned, even though it’s legal to fill jugs that are smaller and larger. Critics call the law “stupid” and now one bar owner is fighting the state of Florida in court, reports CBS News Vicente Arenas.

In craft beer bars across the country, the half-gallon jug, called a growler, has become a best seller.

“Four and half pints, almost five pints to share with friends at home or for the weekend, 64 oz is a good amount, I think,” a New York City bartender said.

But filling a growler is a sobering thought at the Crafted Keg in Stuart, Florida, where bar owner Guy Piasecki would be breaking the law if he sold you one.

“I don’t get it,” Piasecki said. “I can buy the small and the large but not the medium.”

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Your next specialty beer could cost you a lot more.

High demand for craft beers is creating a black market for some small batch brews, and unauthorized dealers are selling the beers underground (or online) for inflated prices up to 20 times above retail.

“Whether it’s a top-rated brew or one with new or seasonal ingredients, everyone wants to get their hands on exclusive batches. The demand is certainly there, and people are stepping in to fulfill that need in unsavory ways,” said beer cicerone Anne Becerra.

It’s common for craft brewers to release small or limited-time batches of a beer. Most of the time, it’s out of necessity.

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On Oct. 29, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History hosted a talk and a dinner to honor the contributions of some of the earliest makers of fine wine in the United States. It was also part of the museum’s American Food and Wine History Project, which has been curating artifacts, oral histories and documents about the history of U.S. wine and winemaking.

Distinguished guests on Oct. 29 included Warren Winiarski, the winemaker who crafted the Cabernet Sauvignon that famously won the red wine half of a blind-tasting in Paris in 1976, and Fred Frank, the grandson of the late Konstantin Frank, a Ukrainian immigrant who proved that delicate, European varieties of grapes could thrive in harsher climates (in Frank’s case, New York’s Finger Lakes region).

All the honorees could trace the reason for their presence at the Smithsonian back to the early and mid-1960s, that period when American wine fine began to slowly—then quickly—emerge from France’s shadow and stake its critical, as well as commercial, claim upon the world stage. The September 1966 launch of the Robert Mondavi Winery, Napa Valley’s first ground-up winery since Prohibition, is generally credited with birthing modern fine wine in the United States.

Curiously, a full year before, Fritz Maytag’s re-launch of the Anchor Brewing Co. in nearby San Francisco birthed modern beer and brewing in the United States. Not that the Smithsonian appears to have noticed. Yes, in roughly 10 months, August 2015, it will have been a full half-century since Maytag famously saved Anchor from closing.

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It was like a punch in the face, today…

I was out all day and away from the computer. I sat down and clicked onto Facebook and scrolled down a half page or so and caught a whiff: “Stunned by the news about 10 Barrel sold to AB…“

WHAT?!?

More scrolling and confirmation: “Haters gonna hate, Tonya Cornett. Congrats on getting the chance to take that berliner global (not to mention the others).” It got worse just that fast. One of my all-time favorite brewers, Tonya Cornett, is now one of the pawns in this sordid tale. If AB had come to me and asked, they couldn’t have found a person about whom I would be more grief-stricken to see absorbed by the Beer-Borg Collective. Jimmy Seifrit, former brewmaster under Larry Sidor at my beloved Deschutes was also involved. It was exactly like a death; like someone I knew and loved was in excellent health one day and stone dead the next.

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No, really we won and then ate a chicken dinner! But before we discuss such excitable matters, let’s talk about some other eventful happenings.

Though the club had to struggle through many challenges this year, they managed to make the pre-competition super special. If you are a hardcore home-brewer, you are probably familiar with Denny Conn. He is a big deal in the home-brew scene, as husband explain to me. Apparently, he was a pretty big “get” and a mad scientist in his own right.

Denny Conn gave the guest lecture Friday night extolling his various brewing experiences in his quest to make the most delicious beer. In his most recent venture, he compared decoction against single infusion mash steps to see if it made a differences in flavor. According, to his findings, no, it did not matter. This is a revolutionary finding for the brewing world.

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There is no denying the popularity of the new wave of “wild” brews. These cutting-edge, contemporary versions are variously inspired by the aged sour, earthy and musty brews of Belgium and Germany and old stock ales of Britain. European brewers use both anachronistic and more modern techniques today to get that natural, primitive personality, but all are firmly grounded in historical, regional brews, those made well before the true understanding of microbiology.

North American brewers, ever intrigued by experimentation and new frontiers, are increasingly integrating the methods and catalysts of yore into avant-garde wild brews. Insatiable consumers, exploring their own boundaries and dimensions, drive this movement just as fervently. Extensive cellaring, elaborate barreling and maturation schedules and the introduction of “wild” organisms all figure into this unconventional and fashionable approach.

If wild brews are in your wheelhouse, then take a shot at brewing one. Start with a simple strategy and low-risk method that leaves nothing to chance. And, if you love the earthy, musty notes mentioned above, then a beer accented with a Bretta­nomyces yeast strain should more than scratch your itch. It will unveil a novel, intriguing realm of brewing and offer a solid foundation for more complicated adventures.

What is Brettanomyces?

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