Now Taking Your Questions…for the Belgian Beer Festival…

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Belgian Beer Fest...

Starting Friday night I’ll be moderating two panels at the annual Belgian Beer Festival, hosted by BeerAdvocate.com. We’ve long been fortunate to have a number of excellent speakers from all areas of the beer world in attendance to offer their thoughts on Belgian beer and culture and this year is no different. During Friday’s Night of the Funk, I’ll be discussing Funk with Dave Yarrington of Smuttynose, Mike McManus of Brewery Ommegang, Tomme Arthur of Port Brewing, Will Meyers of Cambridge Brewing, and Rob Tod of Allagash.

On Saturday, we’ll switch gears and discuss Belgian beers, brewing, and culture with Dann Paquette of Pretty Things, Jason Perkins of Allagash, Megan Parisi of Cambridge Brewing, Patrick Rue of the Bruery, and M. François de Harenne of Brasserie d’Orval.

If you have some questions you’d like asked of these folks, please feel free to drop a comment or an email…

Otherwise, I’ll see you at the fest…

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A New Voice For The New York Times’ Restaurant Reviews…

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So former culture editor Sam Sifton has posted his first review (registration required) after replacing Frank Bruni as the NYT’s new restaurant critic and it’s a curious offering. Sitting down at DBGB, a new Daniel Boulud offering that focuses on sausages and beer, it’s not entirely your typical upscale forum. Putting aside Sifton’s writing style (which is a lighter fare than Bruni’s, but perhaps with too many exclamation points/parentheses/and asides — excepting my irony here), the most curious part is the use and absence of beer in the review.

Sifton notes that Boulud’s place, whose name is a play on the nearby and now defunct rock club CBGB, has a focus on beer and the great photo accompanying the cover page demonstrates this, with a smiling bartender pouring a brooding pint. But the role of beer is generally absent from the article itself. One thing that is positive is Sifton’s suggestions in the informational sidebar regarding the beer selection, and this also works as a demonstration on how the NYT’s review template should be expanded from its outdated structure to include cocktails and craft beers:

WINE LIST Totally acceptable selection, but much better to experiment among the 23 beers on tap and large selection of bottled beers that have traveled here from Britain, from Brooklyn, from Germany, from France.

A good start and I look forward to seeing how Sifton handles beer in future columns.

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Respecting Malt…

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I have a vision of the future, one in which beer lovers stand arm in arm, glasses raised, like in that old Coca-Cola commercial. Except in my version, the pints raised are brim full of malty lager beer and not sugary soda. Alas, this global beverage utopia seems but a distant dream, not because the planet will not come to adopt craft beer as their preferred beverage, but because once transitioned, these craft converts will likely turn their backs on the lagers they once cradled.

Despite popular beer geek antipathy towards the big guys, the result of years of low-brown television ads and decades of ubiquitous, uninspired bottles of light, I believe the consumer disconnect over lager is more fundamental. It stems from a lack of understanding and appreciation of the beauty of malt.

As an illustration, quickly name three hop varieties. Now try and do the same for types of malted barley; a taller and perhaps insurmountable task for even the most passionate enthusiast. And when was the last time you heard a brewer brag about or advertise the types of malt used in his new beer?

While deep golden fields of gently flowing barley remain an enduring American symbol, having been enshrined in forms as diverse as America the Beautiful and countless mass-market beer commercials, their contribution to the final product remains elusive to most drinkers. This was not always the case. For a long period of global brewing history, brewers raised and dried their own barley. As the brewing business became more commercial, the malting process became more industrialized, offering brewers new cost savings over their resource intensive operations. In the modern era, very few breweries perform their own malting, beyond the occasional, makeshift roasting of malts for a specialty beer, such as a smoked porter. In treating malt as just another raw material for purchase in fifty pound bags or by the ton, blown into windowless silos, we’ve lost touch with the ingredient widely considered to provide the soul of beer.

An alarming number of self-professed craft beer fans dismiss these flavor-friendly beers as boring, pedestrian offerings only suited to novice, unrefined drinkers. As with such casual dismissals of all lager beers, Saint Arnold and Ninkasi shake their respective heads at such ironic beer bigotry. Often the focal point of less flavor obvious lager styles, malt centric beers celebrate and equally complex and sophisticated flavor palate. Whether used as a sweet and earthy backbone in otherwise crisp, hoppy German pilsners or as the center of attention in rich bocks and robust Scotch ales, malt brings more than sugar for alcohol conversion to the world’s best beers.

The subtle charms of different malt varieties bring balance and nuance in an extreme era where humulin overload is the popular trend. Whether bready, toasted, velvety, sweet, rich, or robust, different malt varieties can add deep layers of character that are too often underappreciated by many consumers. For their parts, brewers are sometimes too focused, whether through routine, price consciousness, or ease of habit, with using the same malts in nearly every beer they brew. Yet many manage to simultaneously navigate the complicated engineering and wrangling necessary to keep multiple yeast strains in-house. As one well-known brewer, often featured in these pages, told me, “Many brewers just do not understand malt?

As we enter the fall and winter, times of the year when great American malty beers enjoy their widest availability, take some time to give your patronage those brewers who celebrate the oft-neglected yang to hop’s yin. And maybe we can help the world learn to love malt again.

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The Time Has Come To Redefine Extreme Beer…

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The time has come for brewers and consumer beer advocates alike to redefine extreme. After spending years pushing the envelope of what constitutes beer, the movements of brewers have largely been directed down paths towards higher alcohol levels, increased hop ratios, and bourbon barrel aging, sometimes all at once. While hardcore beer geeks continue to salivate over each new such release, when tested blind, it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish between these one-note wonders. Take for the extreme beer movement’s ringleader, the Double IPA. The alcohol levels on most DIPA’s have run so high as to render them nearly indistinguishable from American barleywines and it is the rare that one actually tastes expressively of hops instead of booze.

It is time for this singularity of vision to give way and for a new era of extreme to dawn. Now this is not the biweekly call to abandon extreme beer for a return to traditional beer styles, although brewing a clean helles or crisp German pilsener is about the most radical act an American craft brewer could undertake these days. Instead, it is time to push past alcohol, hops, and boozy barrels as the only gauges of extreme. If extreme means to exceed the ordinary, usual, or expected, then sticking your latest booze bomb in a bourbon barrel, the training wheels of extreme beer, can no longer quality.

At the Extreme Beer Festival a few years back, surrounded by dozens of these usual alcohol, hop, and barrel suspects, I overheard a few folks talking about one beer that had gone too far. After ambling over to the mentioned table, for a local farm brewery, the brewer told me of his plan to turn extreme on its head. Rather than simply producing yet another barrel or booze beer, he decided to brew a Medieval ale. Starting four days before the festival, the brewer produced a 100-percent barley beer, with no hop or spice additions, and served it, as would have been done several hundred years earlier, within a few days. By his own admission, the beer, with no preservatives and a low alcohol level, had already started to turn, as beer quickly did in the early days of brewing. Now I’m not saying that we should return to pre-Industrial Age brewing conditions but it was a memorable beer moment, a rare opportunity to glimpse brewing history, and it was qualified as extreme.

In a time where brewers brag about using fifteen different hop and malt types in their beers, I am drawn away to thoughts of the beauty and simplicity inherent in many single malt and hop offerings. Muddlehop messes are full of sound and fury; signifying nothing, like a discordant cacophony of misaligned and malcontented flavors. It is more the noise of traffic than the mastered hand of Ornette Coleman in its self-promoted dissonance. Today, it is a far more radical thing to rely on a single hop variety to create crisp, clean, and iconic pilsners, as Victory Brewing has done with its Braumeister Pils series, or to create singularly expressive India pale ales.

The same can be said for brewers and their use of multiple yeast strains. Perhaps the least understood element of brewing, the complexities of yeast continue to confound American brewers to the extent that many prefer to work with the same, safe California or English ale yeast strains than truly plumb the depths of this mysterious ingredient. There remains so much unexplored ground in the classic four ingredients of beer that expanding into new areas, for its own sake and to the detriment of drinkability, is growing tired and extreme it can no longer be considered.

In changing the way we view extreme, or at least what we are willing to give that label, we can open our minds to new experiences and allow American beer, which has grown complacent with its reliance on the unholy trinity of alcohol, hops, and barrels, to start the next chapter in the story of extreme beer.

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A Passion for Beer: Suzanne Schalow and Kate Baker…

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While beer bars such as the Toronado, Brickskeller, and The Publick House captivate beer geeks and the media, hundreds of lesser known publicans endeavor everyday to spread the gospel of better beer to their customers. In the Boston-area, beer lovers need look no further than the Cambridge Common for such an underappreciated beer bar, where several dozen beer dinners, tastings, and other special events happen every year. At the heart of the Common beats the passion of its managers, Kate Baker and Suzanne Schalow. This beer-dedicated pair presents thirty taps, fifteen regularly rotating, selected from their deeply cultivated relationships with like-minded local breweries. “I love the fact that we have so many local crafts on tap,� says Baker. “New England is full of so many amazing craft breweries and it’s an honor to be able to showcase them at the Common.� They recently spent their vacation traveling to breweries and festivals throughout New England trying new beers.

Education, access, and experimentation are the big three secrets to their enthusiastic operation. Schalow and Baker treat regulars like family and help nudge some of these relatives to transition from macros in ice cold glasses to new craft beers. “Well, as we say around the Common, ‘changing the world, one beer at a time,’� says Schalow. Under their leadership, the Common also promotes a philosophy of fair pricing on food and beer, a rarity in price challenged Boston. Baker, the Common’s beer buyer who is also known as the Keg Shaker, also oversees the kitchen and its use of beer in cooking, having previously cooked at the Boston Beer Works brewpub.

The pair half-jokingly dreams of turning the Common into a brewpub. But until that day, Schalow and Baker just look forward to learning more about beer to aid their teaching efforts. In addition to their pub work, they recently helped found Women in Beer, a group of dedicated beer lovers, including men and women, who work to celebrate the contributions of women in the beer business. While Cambridge Common may not be on most beer geek radars, it should be. As Schalow notes, “Those of us that love craft beer are really all in this together, just a bunch of geeks on an incredible journey.�

–Article appeared in Issue 31 of BeerAdvocate Magazine.

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