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Russian River – Supplication

I had the pleasure of enjoying an excellent beer today. So good, that it inspired me to write about the experience.

Supplication – definition – To ask for humbly or earnestly, as by praying

I happened to be walking down Pine St. in Philadelphia after a dentist appointment today. Ordinarily, this would just be another street. However, I was far enough east that my journey would take me right past a Philadelphia beer mecca known as The Foodery. If you strolled by briskly you could easily mistake it for your typical corner bodega/deli if it weren’t for the assortment of beer bottles on display in the windows. I love when I find myself in the neighborhood.

The store has the usual suspects in terms of the Belgians, a wide variety of American craft and a great selection of one-offs and randoms scattered around the back of the store. I saw the bottle of Supplication (style = Ameican Wild Ale) sitting by itself on a shelf and I knew I needed to purchase it. I gave up browsing at that point since I knew this one bottle would be a small fortune and worth every penny: ~$19.50 for 375ml/12.68oz.

I was planning to eat spicy chili tonight so I made it a point to enjoy this beverage fully before touching my dinner. Didn’t want to ruin my palate with such a great beverage ready to entertain my mouth.

I poured 90% of the beer into a Duvel glass and did a good swirl to capture the yeast (against the advice of the bottle) as I like to get the fully experience even if it means extra yeast flavors. The color was brown/cherry. Jumping ahead, as I drank the lacing was light but looked like it would never give up its grasp of the side of the glass. No real head on this beer.

The smell is sour but nothing pastoral or farm-like about it other than the fact that it makes you feel strangely relaxed much like being in the rural lands of central Pennsylvania. Who would have thought that sour is a smell? As you breathe it in you can almost taste sour without anything touching your lips. The smell is enhanced as you take the first sip.

Exactly what I hoped. Sour thought smooth at the same time. The liquid is thin and first but fills your mouth instantly with flavor that makes it feel a lot more heavy-bodied. I don’t know enough about the bacteria in this beer to say how they each contribute to the flavor but overall the wildness of it is enagaging but not overwhelming. It is not too wild (this beer was made by aging it in a pinot noir wine barrel and had four different wild bacteria added to it: brettanomyces, lactobacillus, saccharomyces and pediococcus). After drinking a sip and thinking about it for a minute the acting of licking one’s lips is a treat. It is a different sense of sourness. Speaking of sourness, on the grand scale of sour this really isn’t too bad. I’d give it a 6/10 on the sourness scale.

Overall, this is definitely an easy drinker which might be surprising for such an extreme mouth shocker. Equally shocking, the weight of the bottle. This is one heavy bottle for such a small volume of beer. Totally worth the price to try but I don’t think I’d penny up another $20 as I’d rather try other Russian River offerings first.

Brew House Efficiency

In the world of all grain brewing there is a concept known as brew house efficiency. Before I explain what that is and its significance to me, I should first explain what all grain brewing is. There are three primary methods of brewing beer: all grain, partial mash / specialty grain and extract.

In extract brewing you purchase either liquid or powder malt and dump it into your kettle of water. Malt is sugar extracted from grains – typically barley. This malt is the fuel for yeast so that they can produce alcohol and carbon dioxide. The sugary water is known as wort. You boil hops in the wort to add bitterness and balance out the sweetness from the malt.

In all grain brewing you go through a process of extracting the sugar directly from grains of malted grain. Malted grain is just plain old grain that went through a process where germination of the seeds got started and then stopped  and dried before it actually fully sprouted into a new plant.  To do this you soak the grains in a specific volume of water at a specific temperature for a specific period of time. After that time has completed you adjust the temperature of the grains by adding additional hot water of a specific temperature to stop the extraction process. That whole process is known as mashing. Once the mashing is completed you essentially wash of the grains with a specific volume of water at another specific temperature. You collect this washing and you have wort.

You can combined both processes by doing a small amount of mashing/sparging and adding malt extract to get your wort to exactly whatever sugar level you are looking for.

When you go through the mashing/sparging process you will never get 100% of the sugar extracted. However, you strive to get as much as you can to hit a target sugar level with the least amount of grain you can. Another term for sugar level is the gravity of the wort/beer. Getting a high efficiency depends on a ton of factors but grain type, grain crush (how finely crushed the grains are), mash temperature, mash thickness, sparge temperature and sparge time are some of them. Since there are so many factors it is tough to say what is actually a good yield since it depends on so much. However, 75% seems to be pretty common in examples of calculating it.

In my first batch I got about 71%. This weekend I managed 81%. Very exciting stuff.

6 Things That Bother Me About the Beer Industry

I was reading through the latest copy of Ale Street News when I found myself shaking my head at the “Points West” section. This section highlights what new things are happening at breweries around country. It is definitely interesting reading for a beer geek, but it also reminded me that I think the industry has some fatal flaws. Ok, they probably aren’t fatal but they do annoy me.

1) The abuse of alliteration. Why does everyone need to name their beers things like Bob’s Brown, Interesting IPA and Double Dutch Dunkel. Sure, you need to name the beer something but the use of alliteration is annoying and uncreative in my opinion. I would believe that a random and thought provoking name will bring you a better crowd even if your beer sucks such as Shiny Mud Puddle, Death by Hops and Sir Weinerschnitzel Dunkel. Three names that could present the same three styles of beer but much more enticing.

2) Breweries that only produce standard styles. I understand that breweries need to make a profit and you do that by selling volumes of beer. To sell large volumes you need people drinking a lot. To get people to drink a lot you need things that are of a style that makes them sessionable (you can sit down for a drinking session and have a lot of a particular beer – need to be simple and balanced) and the price needs to be right. Complex beers are expensive because they require extra time/materials to develop. Complex beers don’t tend to be particularly sessionable as they tend to push the palate. With that said, only producing the money makers is boring and shows a lack of interest in promoting the craft of brewing. A good brewer doesn’t need to produce 15% ABV quadruple-hopped coffee bombs but should produce styles that will encourage the drinker to try something new.

3) Breweries that only bring their most standard products to a festival. A festival is a great opportunity for a brewer to showcase their wares especially when they have only recently come to market in the location of the festival. I’m sure there are varying schools of thought on this one, but I would believe it is in the brewer’s best interest to bring at least one beer that will get people talking. Sure, your bread and butter might be some really crisp and tasty pilsners but if you produce a porter with coffee beans you import from Madagascar, you should bring that along as well. Your pilsner might be great and sell well in an established market but it will soon be forgotten by the drunken masses. That porter however will slip into many conversations and might even find itself being requested at the local beer bar by festival patrons.

4) Using your medals to demonstrate how good your product is. I’ve never entered a brewing contest so I can’t say how I’d feel if I won the bronze medal and the Mid-Atlantic Brewers Guild of America Californian IPA award (I just made this up but I wouldn’t be surprised if it exists). I’m sure it would be pretty exciting. However, just because one of my beers won said award doesn’t actually mean my beer is anything to write home about. I’ll be honest, I know little about these competitions but I do know that breweries seem to be really excited to celebrate their competition success. I say that you should let your sales and true differentiation do the talking. Marketing is certainly important but some medal that has no significance to the general public really can’t be that great. I’d love to see some data that proves me wrong.

5) Selling a pint but giving less than a pint. If you are selling a pint then give the customer a pint. I’m really not trying to be a beer snob here but if you order an American pint of beer (16 fluid ounces) then you should get that much beer. The head of the beer does not count and there are actually laws against under-serving (especially in Europe). I don’t care if the beer is Miller Lite or Founder Kentucky Breakfast Stout, I want what was advertised and what I paid for. It may seem trivial to the average reader but when you are paying $5-10 for a pint of some interesting craft beer the loss of product you pay for adds up over time. I understand that not every bar in the world gives two craps about whether they served you 15 oz or 16 oz. While they should, I focus my statement towards those who promote craft beer but shaft us. Get some imperial pint glasses or perhaps glasses that indicate the fill line and we won’t have this travesty.

6) Having 200 bottles of beer available but just 2 taps. I get excited when I find a new bar that has a mad selection of brews which means I’ll surely find something new to try. The problem with bottles is that unless you have an amazing ability for turnover, there will be bottles of this and that in the fridge that really aren’t meant for long-term storage. I did have a run-in with a bartender one time who found it amusing that he could get people to buy the old stuff from his huge selection. I understand that not every bar can serve 20 different awesome craft brews at any given time (and ensure high quality in the product and serving equipment). I wanted to make the arguement that a draft beer will give you a better experience than a can/bottle but alas, I don’t really have any solid grounds to make that statement (except maybe that draft beer will have had less exposure to light than bottles). Having a good rotating tap list is good for business both with your customers and your distributors. I think your average beer drinker would agree with me if they had a choice between a draft of something and a bottle the majority of the time they’d go with the draft. I also don’t have any data to back this but it would be a great marketing experiment.

The bottle line is that the beer industry shouldn’t be complacent. The customer is getting smarter and smarter and with that will come more stringent demands. Get ahead of the curve and start making little changes today to ensure that you are on the clear path to beer advocation.