My Beer Year

  I paused. Was I really about to pour dextrose into a GABF-gold-medal-winning beer? Around us, the hum of the brewery made communicating with Ben difficult, so I held back asking the question I longed to ask: why were we adding dextrose to this beer? Muted by our surroundings, I did what any good assistant brewer would do: I followed instructions. Each brown-paper bag weighed more than my four-year-old, and when I tried to lift the first one over the whirlpool without dropping it inside, the bag slipped in my hands. I took a step back to stabilize my body. As the white powder billowed into the wort, the bag became lighter. For the second time that morning, I considered how the physicality of brewing must be a barrier for women in commercial brewing. Once I asked Whitney Burnside, the petite head brewer at 10 Barrel Brewing in Portland, how she coped with the physical demands of the job.

  “I’ll never stop asking for help doing things I can’t do myself,” she said bluntly.

  With her in mind, I yelled to Ben for help. We wrestled with the bags. Every second counted. In brewing, like cooking, ingredients need to be added together, at the right moment, for even “cooking” and precise temperature control. As soon as the dextrose touched the liquid, the powder disappeared, becoming an invisible piece of an increasingly complex puzzle.

  For days afterward, I thought about the dextrose, a sugar that is completely fermentable. Because yeast will ferment all of it, brewing with dextrose means adding no residual sweetness to the beer. I remembered that Tony and I had used sugar (dextrose, in fact) during homebrewing, but we added it after fermentation, when we were putting the beer into bottles. During that phase, the sugar gives the yeast a little extra boost, a bit of fuel to help it produce extra CO2 to carbonate the beer. The way Ben had used dextrose was different.

  Online, I found lots of homebrewers sharing their experiences using dextrose, good and bad. One site mentioned it as the cause of an off-flavor. “Try cutting down on the amount of corn or cane sugar being used,” someone advised a brewer who was trying to deconstruct the origin of some off-flavors. “Using an alternative source of fermentable sugar can help to reduce cidery or winey flavors.” A homebrew forum from the nineties referenced American craft brewing pioneer Charlie Papazian as having said sugar produces cider-like flavors, something I’d heard before. “I used no sugar,” the homebrewer wrote, to which another replied, “Papazian simply got it wrong.”

  Eventually I e-mailed Ben. “Question,” I wrote. “The sugar that was added to the kettle. Is that standard for most of your recipes? What are the pros/cons of adding sugar then? I’m guessing it cuts down on the size of the malt bill, but maybe there are other reasons for the addition.”

  He replied within the day.

  “I should probably state up-front that it is a ‘controversial’ practice in that some people view it as a ‘cheater’s method’ of getting more gravity/alcohol without having to foot the cost of more malt,” he wrote. “While those things are true, I think there are important flavor impacts of using a small portion of simple sugars in hoppy beers: first, they improve fermentability.” He went on to explain that by using less than 10 percent sugar as part of the total fermentables, he gets “greater attenuation,” or more conversion of sugar into alcohol. That creates a drier beer with a lighter body, which “allows the hops to shine.”

  He admitted there are some downsides to brewing with dextrose, but cidery flavors wasn’t one of them. If you use the sugar for more than 20 percent of the malt bill, the yeast will suffer, he said, and keeping yeast healthy, so you can reuse the same yeast in batch after batch of beer, is one way brewers keep costs down. Also, unhealthy yeast can produce undesirable flavors.

  “We stand by the practice one hundred percent,” Ben said.

  I felt like I did when I heard David Chang defend cooking with MSG: a strange mix of thrill and disappointment. Later I’d learn my bias against sugar was common among homebrewers and craft beer lovers, who considered “adjuncts”—ingredients that include corn, oats, rice, and sugar—to be the stuff of big corporate breweries. Sugar, in particular, has been widely used in British brewing, not to save money on malt but to create the beers drinkers desire. During World War I, when sugar was rationed and therefore expensive, brewers in the United Kingdom continued to brew with sugar because it helped them affect a beer’s color during an era when malt, and its color, was inconsistent. Sugar also helped reduce the nitrogen in beers made from nitrogen-rich malts, which could produce less haze. When I started researching sugar in brewing, I learned white sugar creates neutral flavors, while dark sugars—including dark candi sugar, turbinado and demerara—can add plumy and dark-dried-fruit notes to beer.

  Weeks later, on an unseasonably dry January evening, Tony, Oscar, and I went to Breakside’s brewpub for dinner. At one of the long sidewalk picnic tables, I peered through a pint of their straw-colored IPA, which was so transparent it would have passed the newspaper test. Even before I took my first sip, I’d convinced myself that this pint was from the batch of beer I’d help brew. Sure enough, it tasted better than ever, with an alluring zing of grapefruit zest and a fresh, palate-cleansing finish that made me want just one thing: more.

  My trip to Belgium was six weeks away, and on my return, I’d only have one month until the test. I was starting to feel like every day counted. I’d been reading Tasting Beer by Randy Mosher during my train commute to work, but my study sessions with Adrienne So had fizzled. I felt like I wasn’t making much progress studying alone. Plus, all the books in Powell’s wouldn’t prepare me for the tasting portion of the exam. So I signed up for a class.

  One Monday night, after a long day at my copywriting job, I sat by myself in a suburban brewpub forcing myself to eat a French dip sandwich that resembled a crusty salt lick, while pro football players bashed heads on television screens. Tony and Oscar were at home having dinner together, and I wouldn’t see Oscar until morning. I was fueling up for my beer class, which I thought sounded like a euphemism for getting drunk at the bar. (Once, one of Oscar’s preschool teachers asked him what I did while he was at school. “Go to her beer class,” he replied, which may have given her pause.) The class was run through Portland Community College and taught by Bill Schneller, a man with wispy shoulder-length brown hair and a graying goatee.

  We all introduced ourselves that first night: the students included a twenties-something homebrewer, a California transplant who loved wine, two admitted beer geeks, and a woman who planned to open a beer bar. Bill told us he got into beer through wine, an entry point I assumed had something to do with the saying, “It takes a lot of beer to make good wine.” But I was wrong. After working some wine-related jobs in New York, he moved to Oregon to make wine. When those plans fell through and he lost a lucrative job, Bill found himself without the funds to buy the kinds of wine he appreciated. Starved for sauce, Bill accepted the invitation to brew some beer with a friend.

  “It was a horrible brown ale, an extract beer with a ton of sugar in it, and I thought it was the best thing ever,” Bill later told me.

  He was hooked, and started brewing on a regular basis. In 2001 he attended a meeting of the venerable Oregon Brew Crew, one of the oldest and largest brew clubs in Portland. Bill climbed through the ranks of the Beer Judge Certification Program, which certifies judges for homebrew competitions, to become one of four master BJCP judges in Oregon.

  One of the reasons I thought the class would broaden my knowledge was because we’d cover mostly European beer styles that I didn’t encounter much in Portland. (Beer with lower amounts of alcohol and hops didn’t move quickly in the City of Roses.) In a sense, I’d be forced to drink what I wouldn’t normally order, which reminded me of one of my college journalism professors, who suggested reading the stories in the newspaper that didn’t seem interesting. That’s how you learn, he said.

  Every week, Bill began the class by lecturing about whatever style we were studying that night—from pilsners and light lagers to English and Scottish beers. Then he distributed bot
tles and cans of beer to each table, so we could pour our own samples into clear plastic tasting glasses. We spent the next few hours tasting through them, together.

  During one class about wheat beers, Bill explained how wheat kernels have smaller, less robust husks than barley kernels, which made wheat turn into a gluey mass in the mash tun. That’s why wheat usually makes up 50 percent or less of the grain used in any particular beer.

  “The taste of wheat is grainer,” Bill said from the front of the room, over the sounds of a video game console spewing computerized bleeps. “It’s not rich, but has a round feeling, like flour.”

  I wrote his words in my notebook, hoping to inherit his ability to feel a beer in three dimensions. “There’s some smoke,” he said, as he swirled his glass of Andechser Weissbier Hell, a German hefeweizen. Then he shoved his nose inside the rim of the glass and inhaled deeply. “More clove on the nose.” He took a sip, closed his eyes for an instant and said, “Banana up front, but wow, this beer is crisp, light and dry. Is anyone else getting anything else from this beer?” Bill repeatedly told us that one of his motivations for teaching the class—besides the chance to hear himself talk—was the opportunity to taste with other people. “I always learn from you guys,” he said.

  Bill told us he drove all over town to find the freshest examples of the beers for class, but even so, the locally unpopular beers stayed on the shelves for a long time and, therefore, suffered from oxidation. While I lamented that the imports weren’t at their prime, I noticed that, with each class, I was getting better at identifying the cardboard and papery notes of oxidation, which seemed to be less a set of flavors or aromas than a texture I felt in my mouth. If tasting was building muscle memory, I was bulking up on wet paper towels.

  After one class, I asked Bill if he had any recommendations for learning to blindly identify a beer by style, something I’d need to do on the Cicerone exam.

  “You can drink a beer here and a beer there,” he said, “but that’s not going to help you. Drink beers of the same style, side by side. It’s the only way to really learn the differences.” To prepare for class, Bill said, he would buy six or eight beers of the same style. One night, he’d taste three or four. The next night, three or four more. Then he’d decide which ones to bring to class. His side-by-side approach made sense. One time we tasted a Hoegaarden Wit next to a St. Bernardus Wit. The less cloudy St. Bernardus smelled like a floral perfume and tasted like a bowl of lemons tucked under a dishcloth. If the St. Bernardus was layers of puff pastry and custard cream, the Hoegaarden was a plain biscuit begging for butter and jam.

  Bill told me he played rock guitar until his wife signed him up for classical guitar lessons. “I’d always played with a pick, and as soon as I had to use my fingers, I couldn’t roll a chord,” he told me. “I’d try, and couldn’t do it. I’d think about it and try again. I still couldn’t do it.” One day he rolled a chord naturally, without trying. “To me that’s what beer judging is,” he said. “You practice and work on it, then it becomes unconscious. Tasting is just a skill. It’s a matter of doing it again and again and again.”

  The next week, my friend Danielle Booth, aka Badger, wanted to get together to talk about writing. But I wanted to taste beer. So we struck a bargain: we’d talk about writing while drinking beer. When she arrived, I produced a stack of beer evaluation sheets, two pens, and three bottles of different doppelbocks. Side by side, the beers revealed their differences with a lucidity that made evaluating beers one at a time seem like a failed lie detector test. The Ayinger Celebrator was hoppier than the Spaten Optimator and tasted like raisins or another kind of dried fruit. “The more you have, the better it gets,” Badger wrote on her tasting sheet. One of the beers was Aecht Schlenkerla Eiche, a doppelbock brewed with 100 percent oak-smoked malt in the German town of Bamburg, a place known for its smoked rauchbiers. I’ve never been a huge fan of smoked beers; usually the smokiness makes me feel like I am inhaling a campfire. But this doppelbock was different. It smelled like smoked ham and tasted savory and complex, a bedrock for the smoky notes. I couldn’t stop sipping the beer, as I tried to figure out how the sweet malt intertwined with the smoke. Badger wrote, “Aftertaste is icky.” Badger indulged my tasting exercise for awhile, but our conversation drifted, and she started drawing diagrams of her memoir on the back of the tasting sheets. When she left, I realized I’d learned two lessons: not everyone wanted to study beer like I wanted to study beer, and Bill was right about side-by-side tastings.

  One January afternoon, I stared at a recess in my basement where, behind a naked lightbulb with a pull string, two shelves packed with bottles of beer hovered. I called the space “the cellar,” while Tony referred to it as “all those beers we never get to drink.” Ever since I learned that certain styles of beer age well, I’d started to stash bottles with a hoarder’s vision of the future. Slowly, the beer began to outnumber the wine I had started with. That afternoon, I was looking for a beer to take to a party at my friend Brian Yaeger’s house, which he calls Beeradise. Brian, another Portland beer writer, has infused his surroundings with beer references, from the beer-themed bed and breakfast he and his wife run out of their converted garage, to his dog named Dunkel. Even though I’d never been to one of his beer parties, I knew they usually took place in his basement—near his beer collection—while his wife was out of town. It sounds like an invitation for scandalous behavior, but in reality, the parties were more like excuses for Brian to let his toddler stay up way past his bedtime. Each party had a theme, and this one was “old beers.”

  Even though the party would give me the chance to taste a bunch of potentially hard-to-find vintage beers, which sounded like a delightful way to study oxidation, I realized I was getting tired of all my recent forays into beer analysis. Between the Breakside brew day and the Bill Schneller classes, I felt like I’d shifted from fun study to more of the rigor I’d expected when I’d committing to taking the exam. I needed to remind myself that I actually enjoyed drinking beer. To that end, I invited Tony to join me for a date in Beeradise. Not only were we overdue for a night out together, I knew having Tony by my side would help pivot beer talk into bike talk, which sounded refreshing. Besides, if Tony came to the party, I could prove to him in person that I had the capacity to drink (and share) something from the cellar.

  While a majority of beers are best drunk fresh, beers with high amounts of alcohol and yeast in the bottle have the capacity to change for the better over time. Unlike wine bottles, which are typically stored on their sides, which helps keep corks fresh, beer should be stored upright as it ages. The exception is beers capped with corks. Some beer collectors choose to store beers with corks upright, as well, which keeps the yeast in the bottom of the bottle and makes it easier to pour without letting the yeast slide into the glass.

  It’s not just the storage position that’s disputed. A slew of online forums are dedicated to discussing when to drink specific vintages of hundreds of beers, subjective choices that are debated with relish. Did the 2008 Bourbon County Brand Stout peak last spring, or would it peak next spring? Forum participants demand thoroughly documented positions, complete with pictures of full or emptied bottles.

  I’d been to bottle share parties before, the kind of party where people gather to share hard-to-find beers, many of which are aged. I had attended a bottle share called What Would Jesus Bring (WWJB). Each gathering had a theme, which ranged from beers made of breakfast ingredients—including oatmeal and coffee—to bourbon-barrel-aged beers. One focused on verticals, side-by-side tastings of the same beer from successive vintages. Usually verticals are hard to come by. Either you dutifully buy each beer the year it’s released, then stash it away until you have enough years to taste them in a vertical, or you spend the time trading or buying beers from the years you’re missing, an activity that may lead you to online beer forums or illegal trading sites.

  Whether because of their rarity and lack of national distribution, some of the most vau
nted craft beers in the world are being sold for exorbitant prices online, and not by the people who made them. Let’s say you’re a law-abiding citizen of Seattle, and you’re thirsty for a bottle of Dark Lord, a Russian imperial stout made by 3 Floyds Brewing in Indiana. Good luck. Unless you can score a coveted ticket to the annual Dark Lord release in April, travel to Indiana for the event, then get the bottles home without breaking any shipping laws, your best bet is to find a neighbor who already has a bottle of Dark Lord in the cellar. Maybe she’ll share. Or you could find and buy the beer online, which is illegal. Unless you’re licensed, buying and reselling beer isn’t something state and federal governments allow.

  In 2012, Westvleteren 12, a rare Belgian ale that’s considered one of the best beers in the world, went on sale for the first time outside Belgium. Boxed six-packs (which included two glasses) sold for $85 but were being offered online and between friends, within hours, for $300 to $500. For a while, beer lovers were selling rare beers on eBay. They got around the U.S. website’s policy forbidding the sale of alcoholic beverages by listing “collectible beer bottles”—insider code for selling the collectible beer inside. When eBay responded with a ban on the sale of “collectible containers that contain alcohol,” other sites fielded the traffic. Beer even ended up on auction blocks in auction houses more experienced with selling wine.

  There are legal ways to get cult beers, which are commonly referred to as “whales,” “whalez,” or “white whales” (references to Moby-Dick). First, there’s beer trading, the practice of swapping similarly valued beers, which is entirely legal (except if you break alcohol shipping laws). Beer traders frequently meet online, everywhere from Craigslist to BeerAdvocate, which has a trading forum complete with a “Bad Traders List” and a thread where people post pictures of their latest hauls.

  When I wrote a story about black market beer, most brewers told me they were upset by the practice. “When somebody is selling our beer for five hundred dollars on eBay, it’s a falsely inflated price point and a bad representation of our brewery,” said Natalie Cilurzo, the co-owner of Russian River Brewing, whom I met in Yakima during the hop harvest. Natalie told me she and her husband Vinnie Cilurzo, brewer and co-owner of Russian River, wanted their ales to be stored and shipped properly, which the average black market beer seller can’t ensure. And they wanted to be the ones setting the prices for their beer. “Could we charge a lot more?” she said. “Sure. But it’s beer. It’s not gold.”