Holiday Gift Ideas for The Beer Lover

Has the beer lover on your list has neglected to drop any good hints for gift ideas? Are you looking to surprise? Here are some ideas to consider.

Give the Obvious With Style

 

The gift of beer itself may seem obvious, but it is fraught with pitfalls. Especially if the gift giver is not as knowledgeable, experienced, or perhaps as jaded as the intended recipient. Craft beer lovers tend to have promiscuous taste buds. They crave new and exciting, and occasionally hard to find beers. How can anyone hope to keep track of another person's sense of new. You may have an advantage if you live a few states away and distribution agreements give you unique access to a hot new Nano, or even a New Belgium scale microbrewery. That's a great in if you have a little guidance. A beer lover that's a bit of a hoarder may enjoy an annual gift of Brooklyn Black Chocolate Stout, or Sierra Nevada Bigfoot for their cellar. However, the safest bet for a beer gift is the somewhat corny Beer of the Month Club.

I'm not an advocate of the cheesy mail order companies that may think they are doing subscribers a favor when they send three bottles of Cave Creek Chili beer. If they are great. The exciting development in beer of the month clubs is occurring much more locally. Great beer stores, like Massachusetts' Craft Beer Cellar are running subscriptions a bit like a CSA. Here the club is curated by a highly knowledgeable staff, and may be tweaked a little bit to the individual tastes of the members.

Educate and Entertain, Inspire Conversation 

 

Beer is consumable and fleeting.  While there's poetry in transience, more premance may be found in prose.  Contemporary beer writing tends to break into a handful of easy categories travel writing, home-brewing, and general food and drinks reference.  It's almost too easy to get trapped in these styles.  However, great creatives, be they brewers or writers, artfully bridge, or ignore stylistic bounds.  Pete Brown has been called the "Beer Drinker's Bill Bryson" and his two most recent books are must reads for anyone who is interested in beer, and enjoys a good chuckle. Hops and Gloryexplores the history of the famous beer style from the perspective of a beer writer, out of book ideas, desperately trying to recreate IPA and experience it as it was after it arrived in India.  You'll have to order his most recent, Shakespeare's Local, from the UK to read how 600 years of English history unfolded around a single charmed pub.  

Travel writing takes either the form of personal narrative or guidebooks identifying the great breweries and taverns in a region.  Basic names, addresses, and reviews are commonly available on the web.  However, a well constructed guidebook like the Good Beer Guide 2012 is easier to use than most websites (and much cheaper than data roaming).

It's easy to recomend homebrewing books.  It's hard to pick one that a home brewer wouldn't have.  There are plenty of great texts that provide all the technical details necessary to brew many classic styles in the home.  Most books offer some historical context for the styles, and quite a few perpetuate the much loved (and maligned) myths.  My recomendations are on the right.

In terms of general refference, the encyclopedic The Oxford Companion to Beer is an insightful annd stately tome.   Good beer and food pairing can add a lot of depth and character to a meal.  Highly opinionated books like The Brewmaster's Table or Beer, Food, and Flavor are excellent and informative reads.

Experiences Are Excellent,  Even If They Just End As A War Story

 

Beer Festivals are the rock concerts and football games of the craft beer movement.  Lots of like minded people gather, and share a collectove experience.  However, unlike sporting events and concerts, the headliners and locals are rarely the stars of the show.  The big guys know this and tend to bring something rare or at least weird to get geeks' attention.  The big hits are usually small brewers debuting something surprising, or a mid-size craft brewery making its debut in the area.  There are craft beer festivals everywhere.  The only pitfals are a few festivals that market themselves more for over-consumption than exploration.  A lot of great festivals like the BeerAdvoacte fests sell out early.  A pair of advanced tickets will be appreciated.

If crowded festivals aren't your thing, you can always plan a weekend get together in a great beer city or town.  (Portland, Portsmouth, Boston, Denver, Seattle, Burlington, Prague, etc).  Share in the experience.  It will be fun!

Dear Science: Where Does This Lead?

Let's face it .  Beer is a commodity.  Throughout the history of brewing, the content and character of beer has been influenced by the costs of ingredients, brewing processes, and direct or indirect costs associated with batch inconsistencies.  Even though 21st century propserity allows the resurection of higher cost/higher flavor brewing.  It's silly to think that the embrace of brewing tradition will always ignore the tradition of embracing sciencentific advance to improve brewing economics or beer character.  

In fact, scientific advance is clearly needed to improve the economics of organic hop growing.  There's a growing market for organic beers as craft drinkers like their occasionally unique character, and this type of farming's sustainability.  However, Hops are a challenging crop.  Just ask any north eastern hop grower.  If you can find one.  Growers have long suffered from blight, and weather which has encouraged farmers to listen to Horace Greely and "Go West, young man". 


Farming hop heaven in the Yakima valley, or Žatec, is no guarantee  As sexed perennials, often grown from root cuttings, humulus lupus plants tend to lack genetic diversity.  They are more inbred than any crazy royal or country bumpkin.  Hop fields are practically armies clones.  If one plant gets sick there's a good chance that its neighbors will be equally susceptible.   Hops are sickly.  However, like any rapid grower, they are hungry and thirsty.  There's a great opportunity for science to improve fertilization techniques and balance the nitrogen replenishment provided by ground cover without competing with the thirsty hop.  Craft beer drinkers can expect to see near term benefits from this research.

Those with a longer view, may start looking at brewers chasing the holy grail of process economics continuous production.  Beer is brewed and it sits in one or more tanks for weeks or months of fermentation and conditioning.   This same stodgy old-fashioned batch process is used today by home brewers and commercial giants, alike.   Just imagine a process where grain goes in, and beer comes out at the same rate.  In brewing there's really two pieces to this puzzle:  continuous fermentation, and continuous wort production.

Continuous fermentation is real.  Its used today Dominion Breweries, and was after a fashion done by Bass in the 50s.  The process can be improved by immobilizing yeast cells on some sort of substrate ginger, wax, whatever.  Since alcohol is lower density than the sugar liquid feed, it self separates.  A fgascinating application of continuous fermentation is to make mead making a viable, low capital, enterprise in sub-Saharan Africa..  The same techniques have been co-opted by Maine Meadworks, and presumably others to generate quite respectable craft mead.    This could even been done with multi-cellular mega-yeasts.  Recent studies of nature's microbrewers have shown that the traits related to flocculation and settling are linked to mutations that promote evolution into multicellular organisms.  The trade-off with continuous systems is that they are great at making one flavor, but can be very challenging to changeover to another.    

The tricky part of continuous brewing is continuous mashing.  There's a of biochemistry in this short step.  Starches are extracted from crushed grain.  The starches are then broken into fermentable sugars by various enzymes.  Different amylase enzymes break the starches in different ways, at different temperatures.  Brewers control their mash to balance the alcohol content, body, and even head retention of their finished beer.   In some nightmarish scenario from a chemical engineering textbook, continuous mashing could use a series of vessels each.  Plug flow through heated tubes, or a similarly temperatures controlled auger/extruder could also work.

Is continuous brewing scary?  Yeah.  But it's probably key to getting brewing in space.  If science promises anything for our future it is beer from space.

Dear Science, Are You Flavoring My Beer?

It's impossible for traditional crafts to exist in a vacuum, isolated from the innovations and discoveries of the modern world.  Brewing is no different.  It's a craft rejuvenated by home brewers returning to the traditions of the past, and entrepreneurs who followed their passions into a battle against Goliaths of commerce and misconception often romanticizing the individual artisan while celebrating the greatness created when the brewer's art embraced industry in Bohemia, Britain, and Germany.  The pace of scientific discovery and technological change has only hastened.  Today scientific discovery and technological improvements are influencing beer through its ingredients, brewing processes, and marketing.

Technological changes to beer ingredients are both the most frightening, and the most exciting sources of science driven innovation available to the modern brewer. While a good beer may be transcend the qualities of its components, it's difficult to artfully mask flaws in water, grains, and hops.  The yeast and other organisms responsible for the fermentation must behave appropriate, or they'll introduce a plethora of off-tasting and maybe even hangover inducing compounds.

It was concerns about genetically modified barley that prompted Alan at A Good Beer Blog to question whether science had anything positive to add to the craft of brewing good beer.  these concerns are founded justly upon a history of industrial farming and agricultural strain development that established a strong precedent for trading flavor and character for per-acre productivity.  Brewers have long debated the merits and economics of two and six row barleys.  Genetic modification offers an opportunity to increase productivity, lower prices, alter flavor, and introduce complex and questionable chemicals.  Basic economics dictates that early GMO barleys will be tailored to have mass appeal, meaning to suite the needs of the big boys.  It won't be to implant some tolerable productivity or diastatic power in the genomes of your regions charmingly awkward heirloom varietals.  GMO's are a politically sensitive topic.  The questions of science are drowned by concerns about seemingly foolishness of techniques employed to increase pesticide resistance.   Pesticide resistance is commonly implemented by programing the crops to express portions of the pesticide molecule.  Those pesticide parts will never wash off.  Neither the sceintific safety or horror studies make a solid case either way.

Grains are the base of the beer.  Understandably there's trepidation around tweaking the foundations of brewing, but those concerns evaporate shortly after we walk past the mash tun.  Hops are a spicy, sexy, and dynamic ingredient.  A new beer, with a new hop is a double novelty.  A new beer with a great hop may just be the break out hit a small brewery needs to get national attention.  Interestingly, the hop growing industry is increasingly responsive to the interests of the craft beer industry.  Even traditional European growers are looking into interesting aroma varieties in addition to productivity and disease resistance.  Who could resist the spotlight American brewers shine on their products?

Hop strain development is a lengthy process.  Instead of relying on labs and geneticists, it's an application of the plant genetics practices developed by Gregor Mendel coupled with modern analytical chemistry investigating acid and humulone and polyphenol content.   The citra cultivar that has become a superstar in the past couple years was initially crossed in 1990.  It took nearly 20 years of development to get right.  Even the highly tradition Germans are getting into the aroma hop breeding.  The Hop research center in Huell is also screening wild hops for signs of disease resistance, and attempting to identify genes responsible for that resistance so that those genes may be transferred to existing commercial hop varieties.  Transgenic hops are currently in development for medicinal applications.  It is only a matter of time before genetics is used to tweak the expression of brewing related compounds.

The single celled breweries responsible for that miracle of science converting sweet and sticky wort into wonderful beer were unknown heroes prior to the advent of microscopy.  Plenty of exciting research is investigating the creatures that make beer.  A study of various lager strains has linked beer oxidative stability to the yeast's stress response to oxidation.  This is an interesting consideration when selecting a bottling yeast.  Yeasts fermenting high gravity beers have been shown to express protein degrading enzymes, and thus limit head retention.  Better yeast nutrition could improve the appearance of absurdly strong beer.  Outside of the lab, the PhD fermentation scientists at the Mystic Brewery are isolating native yeast strains and selecting candidates that are well suited for brewing.

Advances in water purification technology occur all the time increasing the options available for brewers to create water matching that in any brewing locale.

The changes scientific advances bring to ingredients must be considered on an individual basis based on their relative merits.  However, the American craft beer movement has embraced changes to ingredients that add to the palette of available flavors,  and flavor control.

Dear Science, What Have You Done?

This week, Nature published a paper entitled "A physical, genetic and functional sequence assembly of the barley genome".    Promotional Press releases were quick to link this achievement to potential crop improvements.  The London Press wasted no time in connecting the dots to beer.  "Improvements" are changes, and the craft beer community greets all changes with levels of skepticism that are, at a minimum, healthy.  Alan McLeod's Good Beer Blog saw the discovery as the beginning of sceince's impact on brewing, and was quick to expand the question of the relative benefit of genetically engineered barley crops into a broad challenge to science as a whole: Can Science Really Improve Beer As Known Now?  Science has contributed significantly to brewing throughout the history of the art, and provided the tools that allow us to best appreciate our ancestors beer styles and brewing techniques.

Firstly, Science must be defined as an actor if it is to have a positive or negative effect on our beverage of choice.  The Good Beer Blog points out that the word scientist was coined by William Whennel in 1833.  Of course, scientists, by any other name, had been at work for centuries.  Kepler, Newton, Da Vinci, Linnaeus and hosts of others had been advancing the field long before it was so nobly christened.  They labored under the more romantic guises like natural philosophy, or cosmology; but, they produced what we would call science.

An appropriately crowd sourced, moderated, and reviewed definition of science is available from Wikipedia:  "Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe".   The universe is a fairly large bucket. Fortunately, this lucky bucket contains beer.

Quite fundamentally, science provides our complete set of tools to know beer beyond a sensory and social experience.  This recent work by a consortium of geneticists is not science's first interaction with beer.  It is only through science that we know that the Reinheitsgebot of 1516 committed at least one sin of omission when it defined beer as only comprised of only Barley, Hops, and water.  Yeast was invisible until Antonj van Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope.  Science could then begin to reveal beer's secret ingredient. It's difficult to underestimate the positive impact of Louis Pasteur's Études sur la bière on our ability to brew consistently.  And who could forget Daniel Fahrenheit's gift of the thermometer?  Without it we'd be blind to fermentation controls, or scaling mashing steps up or down.

While beer has been brewed throughout human history, science has made tremendous contributions to our understanding of the craft.  A comparison of two texts with quite similar titles, yet differing by slightly less than a century in age illuminates this impact quite quickly.  Michael Combrue's 1762 "Theory and Practice of Brewing" was a major English language brewing text of its day, found in the libraries of both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.  It contains some calculations around heat, but generally relies on practice to deftly dance around gaps in contemporary understanding. 

It is certainly very difficult, if not totally impossible to discover the true and adequate cause of fermentation.  But, by tracing its several stages, circumstances and effects, we may perhaps find out the agents and means employed by nature to produce this singular change; a degree of knowledge, which if not sufficient to satisfy philosophical curiosity, may be so to answer our practical purposes.  p.49

While yeast is mentioned, it's clearly not well understood.

In 1846 William Littel Tizard published a second edition of his book "The Theory and Practice of Brewing Illustrated" and in the preface criticized those who challenged his application of science to brewing.

Surely brewers ought not to be less intellectual than farmers. Let those who are self-sufficient enough to scorn the idea of the necessity of chemical improvement run through a few modem books, subscribe to a periodical or two, attend a series of lectures on agriculture, read the farmers' newspapers, peruse the " Journal," &c., visit their public halls and reading-rooms, inspect their newly invented machines and implements, their improved and scientifically arranged homesteads, well-tilled lands and luxuriant crops ; and if then their own convictions do not cause them to blush, they must really be unaccountable creatures.

He doesn't stop there.  Each technical topic is introduced, punctuated, and colored with frequent editorializing about the virtuous application of science to brewing.  While his science was by no means complete, the text includes a working knowledge of enzymes, sugar content, yeast, and even the atom.

In a few short years science had transformed brewing from practical magic to an industry.  The Good Beer Blog notes improvements in the logs of the Vassar brewery from a record of basic supply chain transactions to logs with details defining the actual brewing process  It's the scientific data - the measurements of temperature and gravity - that make Ron Pattinson's analysis of brewing logs relevant to contemporary brewers.   Without the science, even more guesswork and interpretation is required to bring recreations into the present.  Without science, we wouldn't have beer as it is known now.

Accepting the extensive contributions of science to the craft of brewing, one may wonder, if there's anything positive left for science to add.  It is quite unlikely that this genome map will immediately inspire a radical new recipe, although I wouldn't put it past Sam Calagione to find an absurd way to utilize these genetic maps in brewing.  If nothing else, they'd provide a pleasant design for beer mats.

Subsequent posts will discuss science's contributions to brewing today, and ways it could improve brewing in the future.

Beer Destinations: Prague

Beneath a fairy tale skyline of spires, domes, and towers, a modern city of industry and commerce sits upon cobblestone streets and ancient bridges.  Prague is a maddening riddle.  Brilliant minds like Franz Kafka and Bohumil Hrabal relied upon surrealistic visions to make sense of it.  Despite the city’s complex and frankly tumultuous history, there’s a millennia of brilliantly preserved architecture, miraculously spared the devastation of fire, war, and tasteless modernizations that have continuously reshaped many European cities.

Located between the noble hop fields of Žatec (Saaz in German) and Moravia’s cascading barley fields, Prague is within easy reach of the ingredients to needed to sustain a vital brewing scene.   However, the city was not spared the 20^th century’s assault on local beer culture.  In the early 1990s, international breweries monopolized the city’s tap handles.  Brewpubs were mostly forgotten, a novelty for tourists, at best. This Prague earned a reputation for drinking holidays notable for cheap light lager and beautiful blonds. 

Today, the city of a hundred spires offers quite a bit more for the discerning beer drinker.  Prague even has a proper beer festival. Entering its fifth year, The Czech Beer Festival fills two weeks in May with a celebration of traditional Czech food and regional Czech beers.   Brewers inspired by both tradition and travel are opening pubs and microbreweries maintaining traditions of brewing and innovation.  Yes, it’s true that many of the city’s pubs and restaurants remain divided among big breweries, like cola-war spoils, with only two or three draft lines.   Interesting beers crafted in seemingly forgotten regions of the Czech Republic are poured in downtown Prague from a “fourth pipe”, or “čtvrtá pípa”.  This tap has become a symbol of the burgeoning craft beer movement.   A few adventurous publicans offer broad ranges, and grace the city with truly world class beer bars. 

 

Zlý Časy

Čestmírova 5, Praha 4

The name Zlý Časy translates as “Evil Times”. Troubles are left at the door of this subterranean pub with charming bier garden.  The staggering scope of the draft is best appreciated standing back from the small bar, trimmed with full-page, hand written infosheets for each of the 20+ draft options.  Only a few well-curated international selections punctuate the list of regional craft masters like Matuška, Opat, and Chodovar.  The impressive globe spanning bottle list offers more Czech beers, plenty of treats from the continent, and even Founder’s and Green Flash.

Pivovarský Klub
Křiľíkova 17, Praha 8 - Karlín

Beer bar meets bottle shop at Pivovarský Klub.  Dine in an airy street level space among walls lined with shelves stocking many Czech and international bottled beers, or the additional seating in the boisterous basement bar.  The six draft options are always fresh and change frequently.  It’s a great spot to try Primator Weizen, and take home a bottle of Pardubice Porter.  

Pivovar u Bulovky
Bulovka 17,  Praha 8 - Liben

Located a bit off the tourist track in a residential neighboorhood, the Richter Brewery at Pivovar u Bulovky showcases a variety of styles.  A chalkboard listing of the available drafts will show Czech and German lagers, alt biers, wheat beers, and English ales.

Prague Beer Museum
Dlouhá 46,  Praha 1

Smoky, loud, and a little bit obnoxious, the Beer Museum seems is anything but a collection of dusty relics. This vibrant 30 tap laboratory encourages experimentation with samplers of various sizes and traps both tourists and locals alike.  Enjoy regional beers from the likes Krakonoš, Ferdinand, and the American microbrewery inspired Kocur.

Les Moules
Paříská 19/203, Praha 1

Belgian beer is at home everywhere, even in heart of lager land.  This seafood café has a small dining room, and wonderful alfresco seating.  The street corner setting is perfect to people watch at the juxtaposition of high end retail and historic synagogues.  Eight taps include a few beers brewed specifically for the restaurant, big ticket Belgians, and Staropramen lager from Prague’s Smichov neighborhood.  Find the perfect pairing for each flavor in a series of an all-you-can eat mussel pots from a bottle list that reads like Belgium’s greatest hits.
 

Pivovarský Dům,
Ječná/Lípová 15, Praha 2

New Town’s Pivovarsky Dum opened in 1998 and helped usher in Prague’s beer cultural renaissance. Eight beers range from strictly traditional, to perhaps overly enthusiastic exhibitions of unusual ingredients like nettles, and coffee.  Štěpán, the unfiltered house lager is delightful.

U Pinkasů
Jungmannovo Náměstí 15/16,  Praha 1

The first pub in Prague to serve Pilsner Urquell retains an air of history while tastefully restraining the trappings of nostalgia.  The modest décor remains traditional to the 20s and 30s.  U Pinkasů was a local frequented by politicians including T.G. Masaryk, the first president Czechoslovakia, and authors like Bohumil Hrabal. 

Restaurace Jáma
V Jámě 7, Praha 1

This American themed pub, looks a bit like a Hard Rock café. Primarily German concert posters nearly paper the walls.  Ten taps highlight beers from Lobkowicz, and Rychtář among others.  A few TVs in a back room offer ex-Pats a chance to keep track of sports back home.

Klášternípivovar Strahov
Strahovské nádvoří 301, Praha 1

This charming brew-pub is situated in the north east corner of the walls of the Strahov monastery.  A relaxed bier garden, decorated with a brewing process map painted onto stucco, separates a large banquet hall from the copper clad pub/brewery seating area.  Typically, four beers are on offer – two or three regulars and a seasonal.  The brewery’s take on an English style IPA is interesting, and the tmavý (dark) lager is a must try.  If you happen to visit in December, seek out the Christmas dopplebock.

U Fleku
Křemencova 1651/11, Praha 1 

The sing along atmosphere of the shamelessly touristy U Fleku beer hall is an essential experience.  Claiming more than five hundred years of continuous brewing, the beer hall pushes one delicious dark lager, presumably perfected over that lengthy span.  It’s an excellent complement to a plate of goulash and dumplings

Pivovar Basta
Táborská 389/49, Praha 4 - Nusle

The simple Czech country décor of Pivovar Basta, with knotted wood trim on white walls is quite relaxing and a bit of a rarity in Prague.  The house beers are similarly crisp and traditional, reflecting a Viennese influence. 

U Medvídků Beer Hall and Restaurant

Na Perstyne 7

Where else but Prague could one find a place simultaneously boasting the city’s largest beer hall, and smallest brewery?  “At the Bears’” main rooms serve typical Czech cuisine and tank Budvar. The real attraction is tucked away in the back, upstairs. The nano-brewpub pursues a manic balance between tradition and innovation.  Sessionable beers with rustic character are crafted with historic techniques and equipment including a tiny coolship, open fermentation and wooden barrels.  Those same techniques are pushed to the extreme to produce what the brewery claims as the world’s strongest lager: a beer with an original gravity of 33 degrees Plato. 

Pražský Most U Valsů
Betlémská 5, Praha 1

Convenient to the Charles Bridge, Pražský Most U Valsů offers patrons simple refreshment within a carefully designed restaurant.   Unusual angles, and touches of wrought iron modernize otherwise plain wooden tables and chairs, that otherwise might seem original to a room defined by medieval vaulted ceilings.  The two house beers are supplemented with a pair from Pivovar Rohozec.

This piece originally appeared in BeerAdvocate magazine, issue #62.