Professor Good Ales

by Ryan Pachmayer & Sachin “Chino” Darji

November typically heralds the arrival of Biere de Noel, or Christmas beer, on store shelves. Charlie Gottenkieny, co-founder of Bruz Beers in Denver and two-time AHA Homebrewer of the Year, explains that the modern style harks back to a special beer that brewers offered to their patrons each holiday season, usually with a stronger-than-typical punch. Christmas beers are not always high ABV beers bombs however, and its not uncommon for a brewery to make their holiday offering special by bumping up the flavor and alcohol on their flagship beer. “On the continent they started spicing them,” explains Gottenkieny, but “less so in England,” where holiday beers tend to be maltier and stronger than their everyday pints, old ales and British strong ales that are often called winter warmers. Consistent with their brewing culture, American brewers tend to spice their Noel beers with a heavier hand and bolder flavors than the Belgians do, setting up a trichotomy in world culture of holiday beers.

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Tis the season, once again. Chances are you’ve fended off the icy grip of a frosty December night with a cup of mulled wine at some point in your life, especially if you’ve been to Europe around this time of year. But mulled beer?

Last year I related the story about my first sip of Glühwein (mulled wine) in the western German city of Saarbrücken. Aromas of baking spice, roasted nuts, and pine boughs drifted fragrantly in the bracing winter air, leading me not only to the Christkindl market in the main square, but also setting me down the path of annual Glühwein parties and get-togethers.IMG_5371

A few decades on, I did what might well come naturally to a catholic imbiber like myself: I heated up a bunch o’ beer and spiced it. Turns out the whole endeavour isn’t without historical precedent.

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Written by Franz Hofer for A Tempest in a Tankard

~Or, what do Melville’s white whale, a cathedral in Prague, and Weihenstephan’s Vitus have in common?~

I’ve been drinking Weihenstephan’s lush and expansive Vitus for years now, especially when the weather turns cool. I can’t get enough of that subtly spiced honey and orange zest layered over rich banana custard. But I hadn’t ever troubled myself with looking deeper into the beer’s namesake, St. Vitus, despite my fondness for another material object connected with Vitus’s memory: the imposing Gothic cathedral that looms over Prague.

But then I came across what was, for me, a puzzling reference to St. Vitus in Moby Dick. I immediately had to know what connected the dots between Moby Dick, a cathedral in Prague with some of the most wondrous stained-glass windows I’ve seen, and that elegant Weizenbock from Weihenstephan.

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 While this article is excellent, the Editors at PGA feel sometimes some approach this topic in a problematic way. No one wants word Nazi, yet there are preferred words, descriptors that have ben suggested. The tests given sometimes include grading via acceptable adjectives. This eliminates judge ability to describe by substituting preferred words that are no more object and just as objective.
 Of course, using one example in the article, when you order a ham sandwich you want a hand sandwich, but some takes on word usage could have menus “juicy” considered to be inappropriate (probably due to dirty minds), so “liquid retained” preferable, ending our analogy. In BJCP terms, yes, just saying “nice” or “good” is no good enough. Adjectives help. But the editors feel preferred adjectives goes too far.

By Emma Schmitz

The author interviewed sensory experts Kristen England, Shawna Cormier, and Jen Blair for this article.

“Language is an incomplete tool providing a limited choice of words,” Morten Meilgaard, the guy who wrote the “book” on Beer Flavor Terminology, admits in an essay in Evaluating Beer (Brewers Publications).

However mediocre language is when it comes to representing what we actually experience, it’s our job as judges to do our best to relay what we’re tasting in concise, relatable terms. We can accomplish this by learning ways to strengthen our vocabulary. The more measly words we know and the more we practice, the better judges we can become.

Good Judging Is All About Respect

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We arrived in Murnau to a golden autumn afternoon perfect for wandering through this landscape famed for its light and colours. Since all good beer hikes need a certain beverage to make them what they are, we made straight for the shimmering Staffelsee lake on the edge of town to stock up on electrolytes. Beers from the kiosk in hand, we found a spot on the terrace near a small beach alive with quacking ducks and kids splashing around in the shallows.

The light falls differently here, more vivid and crystalline. Looking out over the cobalt-blue lake reflecting the red and yellow fall foliage, I could see why Expressionist artists in the Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) orbit prized the light in this part of the world they called “the blue land.” Wassily Kandinsky and Gabrielle Münter, two of the founders of the Blaue Reiter, were so captivated by the colour palette of the landscape that they moved to Murnau in 1908.

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The bronzed expanse of the Murnauer Moos against the Alps

I did my once-weekly run through the posts on Instagram, which I seldom use and haven’t posted in for maybe 2 1/2 years, and ran across a note from my old friend, Jeremy Hubbell, owner of Geaux Brewing, late of Bellevue, Washington, now of Auburn, Washington. No, wait…”late” of Auburn, too.

I have written a couple of times, in the going-on fifteen years The Pour Fool has existed, About Geaux. I used to live in Bellevue – or, as I always call it, “Bellevoid” – which was to the Northwest Craft Beer Boom what the Sahara is to ice-skating rinks. There was ONE brewery in Bellevoid, an outpost of the highly-questionable Rock Bottom Brewing which, in that yuppified location near the Microsoft Sprawl of downtown, became basically a happy hour meat market that happened to make a few listless, predictable beers as a sort of moist courtesy to its customers, many of whom use brewer visits as lifestyle cred. In the mid 00s, Rock Bottom was joined by a second brewery, run by an enormous, self-aggrandizing fathead who was convinced that hiring a certain brewer would put them firmly into the beer stratosphere. (It didn’t) That was that for a relatively short time. Then, a youngish New Orleanian named Jeremy Hubbell, a technical and design consultant whose LinkedIn profile reads like this: “Specialties: New business development, product marketing, product management, product design, international business.” He had a successful business doing all this, in a large space in a small urban light-industrial/retail development, tucked away in a secluded side-street just outside of downtown Bellevoid.

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