Beer News Blog

Tired of being late on gifts of the season? Don’t despair! Get started now for next year…anyone who likes beer (and who doesn’t?) will appreciate this trio of beer possibilities:

• A belt buckle that doubles as a bottle opener.

• A handy little device that chills a 6-pack down in a jiffy.

• A beer brewing machine that’s about easy to use as a toaster.

Kids! Get one of these for your dear ol’ dad. Any one of these trinkets would be welcome under any brewhead’s tree…especially his. But you don’t have to wait ’til Christmas…everyone alive has a birthday. Gifts like these could be the perfect tokens of your love.

In a lot of circumstances they could even make a great Valentine gift. Ladies! Want to put him in the mood for romance on February 14th? Make him think about tying the proverbial knot? Or maybe just being a little knotty? Well, the bottle-opening belt buckle could be just the thing. Check one out for about $20 at www.xpressmart.com.

You have a beerhead friend (we all do) that just MUST have the coldest beer possible, and FAST! Gift him this: The Cooper Cooler. It’ll get a can of beer down to freezing in one minute…and for her, a bottle of Two Buck Chuck Chardonnay in 6 minutes. The price was not available in time for this post, but for something this extraordinary, could price be an object? Learn more at www.uberreview.com/2005/10/cooper-cooler-cold-beer-now.htm/, and follow the link to the Cooper Cooler’s homepage.

But now for the ultimate beer gift…the Beer Machine 2000! For $249, just mix the beer powder with water and wait…out will come fresh, delicious draft beer. At least that what they say at www.tesora.com.

Do you like animal stories? Here’s one about some pigs.

In Father’s Office’s early days as a draft beer emporium, we caught all the beer that went down the drain in buckets. An enterprising pig farmer asked if he could have it for his livestock, and would periodically drop by and take the swill.

I never got any bacon out of the deal, but I did get the satisfaction of knowing our stuff was being put a good use. The thought of pigs somewhere drinking down fresh pure microbrewery draft beer gave me a glow.

It’s such a good idea that of course it’s done in other civilized countries as well. Australia springs to mind immediately. In fact the “Pub in the Paddock” on the isle of Tasmania has taken it a step further, inviting its patrons to pour watered down bottled beer down the throats of the pub’s two pet pigs, P.B. and Priscilla.

Sounds like fun for everyone, doesn’t it? The pub’s owner stated that the pigs seemed to look forward to a couple of beers, and tourists loved it.

Animal welfare activists from Choose Cruelty Free have objected to the practice. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has investigated the pub’s pigs and says that “unfortunately” there is nothing cruel about it.

Chalk one up for the home team.

I’ve got to try this. Now beer can literally double your pleasure. In the little Czech town of Chodova Plana the world’s first beer spa has opened. I mean, you actually get right down into a big vat of warm dark lager and soak. Don’t drink the beer, please—it’s only about 2% alcohol. Just order a cool one from the attendants. It’s a real brewery, and you’ll get a fine example of good Czech beer.

Afterward you get the usual spa accoutrements, including a wrap and massage. Here, and here only, you’ll get the massage with oils made from beer’s ingredients.

Chodova Plana is near Prague in an area renowned for its healing spring waters. The waters’ benefits seem to be amplified by being brewed into beer. The spa seems to be most helpful to those with circulatory and skin problems (I mentioned not drinking the beer!). The town’s brewery is very old, having opened in 1573, and for centuries the area’s doctors have recommended the beer itself as a palliative. Internally applied, of course.

German, Czech, British, and American tourists have responded strongly. In the first three months over a thousand people have been “treated” at the brewery’s spa.

I can’t wait to say “Cheers” while up to my palate in beer.

See you there!

Books, Covers, Judges

This week I’ll take a turn away from the malt and toward the grape.

I once ran a little place in the Santa Cruz, California, area community of Soquel called Django’s. We had some snacks, some beer, some wine and some jazz. Newly opened and off the beaten track, sometimes we’d not have a single customer during the day.

Such was the situation one Wednesday afternoon as I worked the bar and a very large, unkempt man entered. His clothes were tattered and matted, with leaves and twigs stuck here and there in his long hair and thick unkempt beard. He had a slightly unhinged look in his eye and could probably have made two of me.

Santa Cruz is a place where lots of wackos literally live in the woods, completely “off the grid”, and rumors of strange goings-on were common. Django’s was at the base of the Santa Cruz Mountains and its thick forests. Many of the people that lived in the forests also used the hillsides and creek beds to travel around the county. I was alone with this guy, and thinking that I might be trapped by a crazed maniac.

Squinting up at my wine board, he growled, “Gimme some of that there ‘Merlaht’. I always wanted to try that.” I glanced up at the board and realized he wanted the Merlot, but mispronounced it. I was getting more hints that he was a nut and just hoped to placate him long enough to get rid of him before he became violent and murdered me.

It was 1983, and Django’s offered some high quality, and for the time, expensive wines. It was my conceit then that I would open any bottle of wine on my list and serve a single glass. This Merlot was one of my most expensive bottles, and I thought I had a way to get rid of him quickly. “That’s a $5.00 glass of wine sir, just wanted to be sure you knew”, I informed him.

Breathing noisily from his mouth, he grunted and reached into his overalls, pulling out a giant handful of coins and flopping them noisily on the bar. With no paper money in the mix he began to carefully count the pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters, muttering the amount as he added it in his head.

Oh, yes, indeedy, completely nuts for sure, but I hoped he wouldn’t make it to $5.00 and he’d go back to his tent in the hills. Sadly for me, he had $5.16 in loose change and I knew I was stuck.

Slightly nervous, I opened the wine and poured him a glass.

He set it on the bar, just looking at it for a moment. Holding his beard back with one hand, he bent over, stuck his nose deep in the glass and took a giant sniff.

He stood up straight, contemplating the experience, and growled again. “Late pickin’, I’d say.”

Oh, yeah, sure, dude. You ARE cuckoo.

He took another giant sniff, saying, “Alcohol about 13%”.

Whoa, Nellie! Was he crazy, or was it me? He was starting to make sense. I took a surreptious glance at the bottle. “This Merlot is from a special late-picking,” the label read. He was right! Alcohol content 13.3%…almost exactly his estimate.

He finished one more sniff and said, “Residual sugar about 0.8” and quickly seeing on the label ‘residual sugar 0.8’, I knew then I had somehow misjudged this beast from the wild.

Not only did he have an incredible knowledge of wine, but he had an amazing sense of smell. I relaxed a bit and we talked as he began to actually drink form the glass. He was a winemaker from the Bonny Doon winery (one of America’s premier wineries) straight up the mountain behind me, he said, and one way he unwound after work was to walk through the forest.

So here’s the long-awaited moral of this story—you can’t judge a book by its cover, but some of us can judge a wine by its nose.

And don’t get trapped alone with a homicidal maniac.

Tap handles…you see them by the bazillion now…big, gnarly, colorful, showy tap handles, artfully sculpted into skeletons, gargoyles, shapely women, even a battery-powered lighthouse—anything that establishes a visual connection to the brand that slides under it.

Do they help sell beer? Nobody knows, that’s for sure, but brewers and their marketers sure have fun doing it. So do the retailers working those handles, and the customers who are able to watch their favorite handles being pulled. Again, the question, does anybody try a beer based on what its handle looks like?

The truth, as superficial as you may find it, is “yes”.

One year, Rogue Brewing in Ashland, Oregon presented us at Father’s Office with a beautiful skeleton as the tap marker for their brand. It was with great pride we pulled a beer from that one. Did staff suggest a Dead Guy Ale so they could pull that handle? I think they did.

One thing about those who sit at the bar and not at the tables…they tend to be more involved in beer, more interested in what might be new. Even though at Father’s Office the beer selection often changed each day and was printed and handed out to careful scrutiny, a lot of places stick to a list in a more doctrinaire manner, changing rarely. A new handle could have a greater import and stand out.

Some handles are so top-heavy that when they are pulled downward they exert so much stress on the fitting below that eventually they actually break…an embarrassing moment indeed!

Others are so fat they can’t be pulled without opening the adjacent tap and sending good, expensive craft beer gushing down to the floor…another embarrassing moment.

But you still see it over and over…someone sits at your bar and begins the familiar head waggle indicating they’re trying to figure out what you have on tap. It’s at that point that a kind bartender jumps in with, ”Let me tell you what we have on tap.”

“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can not fool all the people all the time.”—attributed to Abraham Lincoln

Here’s a fool’s story from the Darwin Awards, just to reinforce that idea…and if you don’t know what the Darwin Awards are you don’t deserve another beer:

(1999, Tokyo) The recent craze for hydrogen beer is at the heart of a three-way lawsuit between unemployed stockbroker Toshira Otoma, the Tike-Take karaoke bar, and the Asaka Beer Corporation. Mr. Otoma is suing the bar and the brewery for selling toxic substances, and is claiming damages for grievous bodily harm leading to the loss of his job. The bar is counter-suing for defamation and loss of customers.

The Asaka Beer corporation brews “Suiso” brand beer, in which the carbon dioxide normally used to add fizz has been replaced by the more environmentally friendly hydrogen gas. Two side effects of the hydrogen gas have made the beer extremely popular at karaoke sing-along bars and discotheques.

First, because hydrogen molecules are lighter than air, sound waves are transmitted more rapidly, so individuals whose lungs are filled with the nontoxic gas can speak with an uncharacteristically high voice. Exploiting this quirk of physics, chic urbanites can now sing soprano parts on karaoke sing-along machines after consuming a big gulp of Suiso beer.
Second, the flammable nature of hydrogen has also become a selling point, though it should be noted that Asaka has not acknowledged that this was a deliberate marketing ploy.

The beer has inspired a new fashion of blowing flames from one’s mouth using a cigarette as an ignition source. Many new karaoke videos feature singers shooting blue flames in slow motion, while flame contests take place in pubs everywhere. “Mr. Otoma has no one to blame but himself. If he had not become drunk and disorderly, none of this would have happened. Our security guards undergo the most careful screening and training before they are allowed to deal with customers,” said Mr. Takashi Nomura, Manager of the Tike-Take bar.

“Mr. Otoma drank fifteen bottles of hydrogen beer in order to maximize the size of the flames he could belch during the contest. He catapulted balls of fire across the room that Godzilla would be proud of, but this was not enough to win him first prize since the judgment is made on the quality of the flames and the singing, and after fifteen bottles of lager he was badly out of tune.”

“He took exception to the result and hurled blue fireballs at the judge, singeing the front of a female judge’s hair and entirely removing her eyebrows and lashes, and ruining the clothes of two nearby customers. None of these people have returned to my bar. When our security staff approached Mr. Otoma, he turned his attentions to them, making it almost impossible to approach him. Our head bouncer had no choice but to hurl himself at Mr. Otoma’s knees, knocking his legs from under him.”

“The laws of physics are not to be disobeyed, and the force that propelled Mr. Otoma’s legs backwards also pivoted around his center of gravity and moved his upper body forward with equal velocity. It was his own fault that he had his mouth open for the next belch, his own fault that he held a lighted cigarette in front of it, and his own fault that he swallowed that cigarette.”

“The Tike-Take bar takes no responsibility for the subsequent internal combustion, rupture of his stomach lining, nor the third degree burns to his esophagus, larynx and sinuses as the exploding gases forced their way out of his body. Mr. Otoma’s consequential muteness and loss of employment are his own fault.”

Mr. Otoma was unavailable for comment.

XXX

AND HERE’S WHY…HE’S NOT REAL. THE ENTIRE STORY, THE BREWERY, THE NIGHTCLUB, EVERYTHING…TOTALLY MADE UP.

But according to Barbara Mikkelson of Snopes.com, that didn’t keep The New York Times in March 1996, the Boston Globe in November 1997, and The Washington Post in September 1999 from publishing this urban legend, internet hoax.

Said Mikkelson, “Karaoke is weird enough without anyone having to blow blue flames as part of it.”

I’ve mentioned that I had a great time at the Micro Matic Dispense Institute last August, and many of my classmates have expressed great satisfaction with what they learned as well. Classmate Dave Dyer with Stone Brewing says he mostly uses his new expertise to balance draft systems for proper dispensing. He also educates retailers about producing the BCG, or Beer Clean Glass—the gold standard of our industry—and its crucial importance to draft beer presentation.

Stone Brewing began operation in 1996 in Escondido, California, San Diego’s North County. Owners Greg Koch and Steve Wagner are on track to produce about 53,000 barrels this year, offering 6 standards year-round (including the well-known “Arrogant Bastard”) and another 6 seasonally. That’s a big jump up from the 36,000 they made last year.

Dave’s job is to set up and maintain their draft accounts. One of the most common troubleshooting problems he sees results from a draft system that’s not balanced. Since one draft account is often serviced by several draft distributors, lots of different people mess with the gas pressure and temperature settings, and according to Dave, “99% of the people in the industry don’t know about draft beer”.

“We’ve got a bad keg”, one account complained, “it’s way too foamy and it tastes funny.” His practice is to just listen to the owner’s story, then start looking at temperature and pressure settings. At this location the “idiot knob” (temperature control) was set at its coldest setting, yet the beer was dispensing at a very warm, foamy, and funny-tasting 45º (we’re shooting for 38º). The coldest setting on most beer coolers will freeze the beer.

The problem? A dirty compressor—as dust builds up on its vents, they clog and make it work so hard that eventually even when its running all the time it still can’t cool the box. The beer pours poorly and eventually the compressor needs to be replaced.

“I cleaned all the dead rabbit fuzz off the compressor and reset the temperature,” says Dave, and everything worked.

“When you own a car,” he says, “you’ve got to change the oil, gap the plugs, replace a broken window, maintain it in good running order. The same is true for a draft system. You’ve got to stay on it.”

Those of us with kids of a certain age have been going to children’s birthday parties for years. We’re often forced to jar joints and tear tendons in an infernal contraption called a ‘bouncer’. This bouncer is not a security guard hired to maintain order, but rather a really really giant balloon shaped like a castle or a dinosaur—or some such entity of children’s fantasies—firmly anchored to the ground with an opening for entry to an internal jumping chamber large enough to entertain a herd of cattle.

This big inflated rubber platform looks like a the hugest version of a parent’s bed these imps have ever jumped on. The kids who jump are made of rubber, like the bouncer itself. We dads, stiff with age and experience, don’t bend the way they do, but are honor-bound to heed their call to join in the ‘fun’.

Finally, finally, finally rescue is at hand. The Airquee company has begun offering something inflatable for us…the amazing Airquee inflatable pub!

It’s 40 feet long, 19 feet wide, and 22 feet high, taking ten minutes to erect and holding 30 frazzled parents. It looks like a cute little slanty-walled country pub made of stone, with a red tile roof, a fireplace, and pictures on the walls. It’s even OK to play darts, although I assume you’d better have a really big dartboard or very dull darts.

It’s just the thing for us tired dads, especially since, unlike the bouncer, you only have to bend at the elbow. Also unlike the bouncer, falling down is frowned on.

Amazingly, covering all bases, they also make an inflatable church.

Draft beer, and in this context I mean beer not bottled or canned, was for millenia the only form of beer. Only after a reasonably inexpensive way of putting it into airtight containers was invented could it even be shipped. For further centuries that container was some sort of barrel.

In a sense, draft is the most natural form of beer. Many think it superior to bottled or canned beer in flavor and aroma, and I’m solidly in that camp.

Since the 19th Century more and more laws have been created that prohibit the carrying of open containers of draft beer away from a licensed premises (which used to be a prevalent practice), causing bottled and canned beer to become more and more important to the profitability of brewers and distributors. In the era of modern marketing that trend has increased.

In addition, one thing very important to the marketing of a beer is the label on a bottle, what we call “Badge Value”. When a bottle is served it stands before its buyer, proudly displaying its artwork. This artwork and its logo produce a brand identity independent of a beer’s quality, flavor, and presentation. A glass of draft beer doesn’t carry the brand identity throughout a dining room and cocktail lounge. But at its core, we all know that what a beer is consists of quality, flavor, and presentation.

There was a period beginning in the 1980s when bottle or ‘package’ beer was recognized as more profitable than draft beer, and better for the brand. As margins began to be tightly squeezed, distributors tended to delay or eliminate expenses related to draft beer, such as in-house line cleaning, training staff to ensure the freshness of draft kegs, and other related costs.

Trouble can arise, however, when draft beer at on-premise accounts is not cared for and presents less than favorably. When potential package customers taste a draft beer brand not at its best, it can slow or stop the sale of the same product bottled or canned.

So when I see those things—quality, flavor, and presentation, being carried back to the fore, and brewers and distributors making investments in them, as is happening today, it seems a good thing to me.

I have written a lot about the Anchor Brewing Company because it and its owner Fritz Maytag have long been icons in the craft beer movement. For instance, it was to Fritz Maytag that Ken Grossman and Paul Camusi turned for advice and start-up equipment in the late 1970s to get the Sierra Nevada Brewing Company off the ground. He looked back at the traditional brewing styles that were being neglected by the American industry during that era an began producing a barleywine, a porter, and the first wheat beer brewed in the US since Prohibition began on January 16, 1920.

Maytag also helped revive the custom of brewing heartier ales during the winter known as Christmas Ales. In 1987, he went to the fullest extent possible in that style by making a spiced winter ale known in Britain as Wassail, and by design its recipe was to change each year.

Here’s where I come in. Those who have read some of my tales about “back in the day” might have gotten the slightest whiff of a self-ascribed air of infallibility regarding my instincts and vision about the craft beer movement.

Believe me—this episode certainly exposes me at least once as a total dunderhead who completely failed to appreciate what would turn out to be one of the most beloved beers that ever graced my little pub.

In the autumn of 1987 I got a call from Anchor Brewing representative Bob Brewer. I was planning my first tour of the brewery and he let me know he had “something special” to taste when I got there.

The tour ended and I was headed for the airport when Bob pulled me aside and stuck a plain brown unmarked case of beer in my arms. “It’s our Christmas ale this season,” he explained. “It’s spiced…although I can’t reveal the recipe its got stuff like nutmeg and clove and orange flower water. It’ll be like nothing you’ve ever tasted,” he said proudly.

Boy, was he right about that part.

I arrived at SFO carrying the case of beer in my arms, so excited to taste this new miracle I could barely breathe. I talked a bartender there into opening a bottle and I drank. Bob’s words echoed back…”like nothing you’ve ever tasted.”

It was the strangest sensation I remembered ever having. What was promised as nectar of the gods was the scariest stuff I’d ever encountered. It didn’t taste like beer at all. It was so strange that I knew when I tried to sell it at Father’s Office I would be laughed right out the door.

It couldn’t be!! What were they thinking?! It tasted ridiculous! Not just me, but the entire Anchor Brewery would be a laughingstock.

I had to get word to Bob Brewer right away! I had to find a pay phone fast! My flight was boarding as I searched! Finally I found a phone! But I had no change! I found some fast! I dialed quickly! Bob answered!

“Bob!” I yelled, “I don’t think I can sell this!”

He calmly and patiently let me rant, then said “Just relax, People who know this style very well have tried it. It’ll do fine. Get on your plane and we’ll talk when you get home.”

Bob’s words always have had a very calming effect on me. I flew home and waited with dread for the day when the first kegs would arrive.

The big day came and I tapped one, looking at the eager young faces at my bar waiting for what they thought would be Nirvana, and what I knew would be the biggest fiasco of my career.

One by one they tasted. Their eyes and faces told the story—their socks were knocked off. The excited buzz started. “Another, please,” it began, and by the end of the day we’d sold the entire keg.

That winter we sold 35 kegs of Anchor’s 1987 Christmas ale, making it to this day the fastest selling beer ever poured at Father’s Office, which became the largest seller of Anchor Christmas Ale in the entire world. Bear in mind that thirty other drafts were offered beside it, and Father’s Office only seated 49.

How good it felt to be right once again.