By the time we finally got together, Adrienne was three months pregnant.
“One of the side effects is that alcohol and caffeine taste like sulfurous fish barf right now,” she’d told me in an e-mail. “But that shouldn’t get in the way of the studying and research part.”
I was relieved she still wanted to study with me, because I desperately needed some accountability. When she arrived at a beer bar we had chosen in North Portland wearing an oversized hooded sweatshirt and carrying a backpack, I had a flashback to some ill-advised college study sessions in bars, which were never remotely productive. Even though this was a different situation entirely, beginning with the fact that one of us was pregnant, I was reminded of the inherent conflict that comes from having to approach beer, something consumed to diminish one’s perception, with heightened senses. We asked the bartender for a few tastes of beers on tap, including the Imperial Doughnut Break from Evil Twin Brewing, an inky porter made by a famous Danish gypsy brewery.
“Interesting,” Adrienne said, smacking her lips. “It really does taste cakey.”
The beer was fermented in barrels stuffed with actual donuts, an ironic preface to our discussion of beer styles. We were hoping to better understand how beers belong in well-defined categories, but unless there are “pastry ale” parameters, this one surely landed out of bounds.
I ordered a pint, payment for the table space we’d occupy for a few hours, and we started making flashcards packed with acronyms—OG (original gravity), FG (final gravity), ABV (alcohol by volume), and IBUs (International Bitterness Units)—and the numbered ranges of each that define different beer styles. After about thirty minutes, my hand was cramping and my cards were slightly illegible. Even though Adrienne was in her thirties, her cursive handwriting made it look like she grew up without a keyboard. Making the flashcards had me thinking about how the evolution of beer styles corresponded with the development of an increasingly complex world.
During the Middle Ages, women brewed in their kitchens as part of their standard domestic duties. They weren’t trying to create specific levels of bitterness or color; they simply brewed with what they had, the available ingredients of the day. (I like to think they had the capability to finesse their brews to suit their own tastes.) The development of commercial brewing helped delineate styles, but even so, brewers made beer based on available ingredients. As ingredients became more refined, brewers had the luxury of tailoring recipes to meet the public’s tastes.
In the city of Plzeň in Bohemia, where commercial beer was first brewed in the early 1300s, the mid-1800s finally revealed a problem: the town’s brewery made horrible beer. City officials came up with a solution: they tore down the brewery, built a new one, and recruited a German brewer named Josef Groll to take the helm. He started brewing a lighter-colored beer using a pale malt now called pilsner malt, Saaz hops, and a lager yeast. The new style, pilsner, became a worldwide sensation thanks to the happy blend of available ingredients and the public’s thirst for a lighter-colored beer. Brewers in other parts of Europe began recreating the beer, with variations caused by things like the levels of carbonates and salt in their local water.
Money influenced the development of beer styles, especially taxes. In eighteenth-century England, the new availability of coal meant brewers had more access to malt that was free of the smoky flavors and aromas that pervaded malts made in wood-fired kilns. But for a while, high taxes on coal made the lighter, less smoky malt a more expensive ingredient. I imagined a British brewer poring over handwritten ledgers before pounding his fist on a rough wooden pub table: “There must be a way to make lighter beers!” he’d cry. Still, some brewers paid for the more expensive, lighter colored malt, which resulted in early versions of British pale ales and bitters. Since breweries had to charge more for the lighter beers, porter—made with the malts dried over straw or wood—became the working man’s drink.
As Randy Mosher explains in Tasting Beer—the quintessential study aid I was now carrying with me everywhere—British beers became weaker once the malt tax was abolished in 1880. At that point the British government began charging brewers based on the original gravity of their wort, the amount of residual sugars suspended in the liquid, a number that portends how much alcohol the final beer will contain. The less residual sugars, the less brewers were taxed, a system that led to the rise of English “bitters,” essentially pale ales with low alcohol.
As Adrienne and I made more flashcards, I flipped through my BJCP Style Guidelines, which mentions some of the reasons why specific beer styles are being made today—either as interpretations of historical styles or modern inventions. But the full equation, which takes into account the cost and availability of ingredients, production methods, and government regulations, isn’t spelled out entirely. If every influence were listed, Great American Beer Festival medals would most surely be mentioned.
Even though it wasn’t yet ten o’clock in the morning, a lot of people at the medal ceremony were drinking beer, which was being served just outside the doors of the convention center’s auditorium in a frenzy. The rest of us clutched cups of coffee. I ended up sitting between two men: a beer book publisher and a brewer from Columbus, Ohio. Colorado’s governor, John Hickenlooper, delivered the welcome address, not only because of his political rank but also because he was a bona fide member of the craft beer community. Hickenlooper cofounded Denver’s Wynkoop Brewing in 1988, and as he told the crowd, he brewed his first batch of homebrew in 1971, “only a few months after Charlie did.” Last year, Hickenlooper said he’d had four beer taps installed in the governor’s mansion, a fact that could only help his current reelection campaign. (He’d eke out a win four weeks later.)
“This is based off a quote by writer Damon Runyon, my father’s favorite writer,” he said, raising a festival glass filled with amber-colored beer. “The race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet. And I’m betting on all of you.”
Finally, the announcement of the medals began. Out of 5,000-plus beers, 271 beers would win medals in ninety-three categories.
“271 medals?” I muttered.
“Yeah, it always takes a while,” the book publisher said. Now I understood the frenzy in the beer-serving area. We were going to be here for hours.
The protocol went like this: after winners were announced, they’d head to the stage, where Charlie Papazian would hand them their medals and they’d pause for a photo. Charlie warned brewers not to shake his hand but instead go for a fist bump; excited brewers had nearly crushed his hand in the past. I remembered how he’d told me he always sensed the nerves in the audience. “You can feel the vibrations of all those people in the room, stressing out about if they’re going to make it up on that stage,” he said.
I saw a bunch of Oregon brewers sitting together, a nice show of camaraderie, although I suspected they hadn’t left their competitive spirits at the door. I felt my heart race for a brief moment. For the first time since I had learned about GABF medals, I understood how important the medals were to brewers, people I knew and hoped would succeed. When winners were announced, there were hoots, hollers, cheers, and celebratory dances to the stage followed by fist bumps with Charlie Papazian and photos. After the announcement of each Oregon win, the state’s brewers hugged and high-fived each other.
Then it was time for the American-Style India Pale Ale winners. With 279 entries, it was the biggest category ever at the Great American Beer Festival. I didn’t need to calculate the odds to know it was also the most competitive category. Oregon’s Breakside Brewery had just won a bronze medal for American-Style Strong Pale Ale, so brewmaster Ben Edmunds and his crew were close to the stage. Before the announcer had the chance to break the news, the name of the gold-medal winner for the American IPA category flashed on the screen: Breakside Brewery. The crowd went wild.
When the ceremony finally ended, I walked alongside the brewers who’d stuck it out for every last medal as we follo
wed a troupe of bagpipe players (another storied GABF tradition) to the festival floor, which was already buzzing with beer drinkers when we arrived. That’s when I saw John Harris, who hadn’t won any medals. “It would have been nice to win,” he said, shrugging off disappointment, then wandering down the aisle toward the Oregon section.
Volunteers were adding medal stickers to the booths serving the winning beers, and the lines at those booths seemed the longest. Those kegs would soon be emptied. Even though beer judging isn’t a science and style categories are debatable, medals do matter. Because, when it comes down to it, everyone wants to drink the best.
The next morning at the airport, where presumably everyone had dumped their legalized weed in favor of air-friendly edibles, the greasy clamminess of a collective hangover hovered over the checkin areas and security lines, as haggard-looking and foul-smelling beer lovers endured the last lines of the weekend. It wasn’t yet eight o’clock, and I was one of them. I could almost hear John Harris’s voice, echoing from some distant place. “Always leave GABF on Saturday night,” he’d admonished. “You do not want to be at the airport on Sunday morning.”
At the Pizza Hut nearest to my gate, while I ordered a box of wedge-shaped, seasoned fries and a Pepsi, I vowed to follow all of John’s advice in the future. A bunch of Oregon brewers were on my flight. Before we boarded, they filled their water bottles with shaky hands and kept conversations brief. “I may have overdone it,” one told me, avoiding eye contact.
As our tube of stale, sweaty air roared across a few Western states, I closed my eyes and tried not to notice the distinct smell.
CONTAINED AND DRAINED
An empty vessel makes the loudest sound.
—PLATO
CHRISTMAS WAS APPROACHING, and my dream of being the person who arrives at holiday parties, not with a plate of homemade cookies, but with a beer I’d brewed myself, was being silently squashed by a glass carboy wearing a T-shirt. Filled with the beer I’d brewed almost two weeks earlier, the carboy was a near-constant reminder that I needed to get its dark, murky liquid into bottles before the tan layer of sediment on the bottom started to create strange flavors in the beer.
I’d come up with the vision of being a holiday beer fairy after listening to my industrious DIY friends talk about the knitting and canning gifts they’d be doling out to friends. Until then, Tony and I had brewed only hop-forward pale ales and one red ale. I was ready for a deviation. What if I could create a beer that embodied the season—the fruitcake of beers—without tasting like cinnamon or cloves, the typical “holiday ale” flavor profile? Ever since Lady Brew Portland, I’d been thinking about how I would make a conscious effort to be in charge of our next brew session. After all, I was the student of beer. I’d start by going to the homebrew shop and choosing the recipe.
“I’m going to the homebrew shop,” I yelled to Tony over the heavy bass line vibrating from the stereo. I was standing in the doorway of his shop, bundled up for the five-minute bike ride. He was holding Oscar up to the milling machine, so he could see the levers.
“Mama,” Oscar squealed as he craned his neck to try to see me. I was relieved to see he was wearing a pair of Tony’s safety goggles. “We’re cutting metal!”
“Sounds good!” Tony shouted at me. “Did you see if we have Star San?”
“Oh right,” I replied. In fact, I hadn’t checked any of our staple supplies, including the sanitizer. If I was going to be a successful brewmaster, I needed to remember these details.
At the homebrew shop, I plopped down in a comfortable armchair and set a thick binder of recipes in my lap. The recipes were organized by style, and almost by accident, I turned to stouts, the style that many historians consider to be the progeny of porters. In England during the 1700s, porters were the hearty, unrefined, brown, and smoky beer that quenched the thirst of the working class in that country. Because the porters of the day were so rough and inconsistent, most breweries blended different batches of the beer to create a single, palatable beer with a suitable strength. By 1799 a brewery in Dublin called Guinness began brewing a “stouter kind of porter,” a clear connection in the shared history of the two dark styles.
I liked the simplicity of one stout recipe in the book, but the beer it produced would have just 3 to 4 percent ABV, which seemed like a cruel Christmas gift. The gift receiver would drink one and just want another. Then I saw it: an oatmeal stout with a few kinds of malts, which offered the promise of complexity, and with a 5-plus ABV, a better gift. The oats were in a bin between dozens of kinds of malt, which made them look like just another granular food in a variant shade of brown. I scooped some oats into a plastic bag as though I were planning to make oatmeal. In late Medieval times, oats and spices were common in beers brewed specifically for the poor, but as time progressed, healing properties were attributed to the grain. In England in the late 1800s, oatmeal stouts were sold as nourishment for invalids and the chronically ill. These days, we know that, because oats contain high amounts of proteins and oils, they create a creamy mouthfeel in beer, plus a foamy head. The trick is not to brew with too many oats, which can turn into a gluey mess in the mash tun.
Later that afternoon, Tony and I pulled out the brewing equipment from the basement and started the slow process of bringing a giant kettle of water to a boil on our stove. I poured the cracked grains and oats into a cotton mesh bag and tied a top knot. I’d decided to deviate from the recipe, a first in my homebrewing history. In order to make the beer drier, I replaced a malt that would have created nutty and biscuity flavors with some Crystal 120L, a less bready and more chocolatey malt I hoped would add notes of bittersweet chocolate dipped in caramel. It was the holidays, after all.
Oscar wanted to help. He pulled a chair over to the stove, and we lowered the mesh bag into the water together. On impact, a black cloud seeped from the bag.
“Look!” he said excitedly. “It’s turning into beer!”
After the grains steeped for awhile, I pulled the bag out of the water with metal tongs and held it, dripping, over the pot.“Now pour the water from the teakettle over the malt, slowly,” I told Tony.
“Whatever you say,” Tony replied, as he gently poured the water, which had just boiled, through the steaming, water-logged mass of malt. “You’re in charge.”
The guy at the homebrew shop had told me about this teakettle technique, which he said would add an extra boost of roasted coffee flavors to the beer.
In keeping with our brewing tradition, it was time to drink a beer, and I was happy to find a stout in the fridge. But this stout wasn’t so plain as to include oatmeal. Stone Xocoveza Mocha Stout is a milk stout brewed with chocolate, cinnamon, nutmeg, chili peppers, and coffee. The description of the beer I read online mentioned it was created by a homebrewer, which made it seem like a good-luck charm. Somehow, despite all the science homebrewing requires, I’d become irrationally superstitious. Next thing you know, I’d be brewing in my lucky socks. One sip of the stout transported me to Oaxaca, where during our honeymoon Tony and I had visited a chocolate shop warm with the pungent smell of cinnamon. I remembered watching a chocolate maker pouring a huge vat of granulated sugar into oozing melted cocoa. Because the stout incited such a sweet memory—combined with the fact that I’d altered the recipe I was using instead of following it to the letter—I had hope. This homebrew had promise. But now all would be lost if I didn’t get that beer into bottles.
The history of moving beer begins long before bottles were invented, during a time when beer was transported in whatever container was most convenient: bowls, buckets, mason jars, troughs. Medieval monks were forced to face the problem of beer storage when they began brewing more beer than they could immediately consume. So they started storing the beer in barrels, which became the standard way to store and transport beer for centuries. That standard came to define how beer was fermented as well as stored, especially in Great Britain.
Barrels, otherwise known as “casks” in England, hav
e helped the British develop their reputation for drinking weak, flat, warm beer. Since I have yet to set foot on British soil (a travesty for someone with an English last name), I’ve learned about these ales from friends, books, and inside a small brewpub about five thousand miles from London. In the town of Oakridge, a depressed former logging town in central Oregon, a brewpub called Brewers Union Local 180 serves imperial (twenty-ounce) pints of beer from “firkins,” or casks, that are tilted slightly on their sides in a room adjacent to the bar. The modern casks are made of a breathable plastic instead of traditional wood, and they’re slowly tilted by an automated system as the beer empties from their insides. Bartenders use hand pumps to get the beer into glasses. The last time I was at the pub, I was in the middle of an ambitious bike tour with Tony and Oscar, who was a good-natured toddler at the time. Starting in Portland, we rode the length of the Oregon Cascades with Oscar in a trailer. I’ll never forget the perfection of the fresh, hoppy pale ale I drank during our stop at the pub. The beer didn’t seem warm or flat, which meant the beer wasn’t all that traditional, stereotypes about British ales are wrong, or thirsty bike tourists don’t care much either way.
In 1971 a group called the Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) worked to save traditional cask ales in England, which had nearly been pushed into obscurity by modern kegs and corporate beer. They started by creating a name and a definition: “real ale” is “beer brewed from traditional ingredients, matured by secondary fermentation in the container from which it is dispensed, and served without the use of extraneous carbon dioxide.” The group’s definition has become the standard way to talk about these beers, even in the United States, where cask ales remain a bit of a mystery. (Not only does the 175,000-plus-member group run the campaign to save real ale, it also works to save British pubs, which the group reports are closing at a rate of twenty-seven per week.)
My Beer Year Page 10