Lamentationes Desperatorum

I was wandering around the supermarket where I do the weekly shop recently, and as is my wont I bimbled over to the beer section to have a browse. I was pretty sure I wouldn't be buying anything, my beer fridges being pretty full of excellent lager after all, but it is a habit at the end of the shop to just take a peek. Now, while owning the fact that I do my weekly shop in a supermarket, and that I understand they have to offer what is more likely to sell, it was still a dispiriting experience.

Unless you have read a vanishing small number of my posts on here, or any other social media platforms, you will know that I am a very irregular drinker of the old India Pale Ale - side thought, it seems almost jarringly quaint to see it spelt out in full rather than just acronymed down to IPA. Yes, I am predominantly a lager drinker, especially of beers I am buying in the shop or at the pub/taproom. Most of the top fermented beers I drink are my own homebrew, stuff like bitter, mild, stout, and my lime infused witbier, which is currently on tap.

Of course, being a lager drinker gives me plenty of scope for diversity of style, and I love mixing things up with pilsners, Vienna lager, a dunkel or six, the occasional rauch doppelbock, you get the picture. Anyway, coming back to my wander around the beer aisles and their groaning under the weight of many a bottle and can of IPA with cartoonish labeling, it suddenly hit me that there are many beers I have enjoyed which seem no longer to be available, not just in my local store - there are some things that I pop into the northern Virginia branch when I have the chance specifically to buy - but as in gone, and invariably replaced by an IPA of some level of bastardisation.

As I bimbled those short aisles, and not counting here the import section, I noted a single brown ale, the excellent Tavern Brown from Alewerks Brewing in Williamsburg, just the one amber ale, Satan's Pony from Charlottesville's South Street Brewery, and precisely zero milds, hefeweizens, Scottish ales, Czech style dark lagers, and even an utter dearth of Extra Special Bitter - I have given up hope of ever finding a worthy bitter, ordinary or best, on the shelves of the supermarket. Thank goodness for Selvedge, who produce excellent examples of both, and have them on cask, from time to time, as well as my own best bitter than I brew at least 4 times a year.

It seems actually vaguely ironic then that at the recent Beer World Cup, there were 112 categories - and don't get me started on the iconic Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, the very archetype and poster child of the American Pale Ale being submitted as an ESB and winning gold. At last year's Great American Beer Festival there were 102 categories, and yet an alien visiting a supermarket in central Virginia would be forgiven for believing beer was called IPA, and that was pretty much all that was available. Yes, I appreciate that I am not talking about specialist craft retailers here, who tend to have a much better selection of beer in terms of stylistic variety. Even then, the prevalence of badly out of date beer, lagers stored at room temperature, and badly oxidised imports gives me pause when dropping full price money on a six pack of duff beer.

Maybe I am just entering my curmudgeonly dotage as I creep ever closer to my 50th birthday later this year, but I have found little joy of late browsing the aisles and shelves of the beer retailing world, whether supermarket or specialist. Of course there are beers, usually seasonally available lagers such as Tröeg's Little Nator, that I happily stock up on when they are available, but usually my little bimbles are more a ritual performed through a misplaced sense of duty, with a hint maybe of self-flagellating hope of something other than yet another "innovation" in the form of an IPA.

Hop to Murphy & Rude Mother

I don't really post all that often on here about my homebrew, or at least not as often as I actually brew beer in my garage. I am more likely to post pictures of grains, hops, and packets of yeast on my main Instagram account, I have a separate one for my book, "Virginia Cider: A Scrumptious History", if cider is more your thing...

Since the twins have reached an age where they don't need constant oversight, I have been able to find the necessary time to myself to brew. Kid related side, I popped into Selvedge last Friday and the bar staff made a point of thanking me for the fact that when my kids are in the taproom they are impeccably well behaved. We had been in for lunch and a pint the previous weekend and there were kids roaming the taproom unsupervised, which I know is a pet annoyance for many, and I fully understand that. In my world it is one thing to be a "family friendly pub/taproom/whatever you want to call it" but it is incumbent on families to likewise be pub/taproom/whatever you call it friendly as well. I like having the option to take my kids with me to the pub, and would be mortified if they abused that privilege so that fewer places would welcome families - after all, how else do you teach people to be good pub goers if not through teaching them when they are young?

Anyway, back to homebrew. I probably brew twice a month or so these days, having the chest freezer fermentation/lagering chamber means I can have a pretty regular supply of beer in my kegerator, and best yet I don't ever have to look at the menu and wonder if there will anything I want to drink. Currently carbonating, and hopefully ready to tap on Friday, is my first all grain version of LimeLight, my Belgian style witbier that uses lime peel in place of Curaçao orange, and batch 2 of my Haus Lagerbier project is in primary.

As with all my beers in the last couple of years, all of the grain has come from Murphy & Rude, our local craft malting company that I did a profile of a while back for Pellicle. I am not ashamed to admit it, and I realise here I am insanely privileged, but being able to support a local malting company, who in turn buy all their grain from local farmers, and also get involved in projects to make sure that historic Virginian corn varieties remain available to the like of Josh Chapman for making their gorgeous malted corn lagers, is deeply, deeply satisfying. It definitely helps that M&R malts are right up there in terms of quality and freshness. My house best bitter has been brewed for more than 2 years now with just Murphy & Rude malt, and it is the best it has ever been.

Speaking of my best bitter, a few recent batches have been brewed using Virginia grown Challenger hops from Mountain View Hops down the road in Floyd County, and now thanks to Murphy & Rude I will have more options for making near completely Virginia versions of that beer. Over the weekend, they announced that they are now stocking Virginia grown hops, in particular those of Greenmont Hopworks in Albemarle County. At present they have three varieties available, Cascade, Crystal, and their own unique hop called Mother, a wild hop that was discovered on their farm and has proven excellent for brewing - a recent version of Selvedge's landbier, Local Fabric, used them to great effect.

As a result of Murphy & Rude selling hops as well as grains now, my next batch of best will likely use Mother for the 40 odd IBUs that go into it. Now if only they sold Virginian yeast strains, such as that isolated by Jasper Yeast from an oyster plopped in some wort by Josh Chapman, my dream of a purely, and genuinely, local homebrew will become a reality.

Session 146 - What Value in Beer?

 

Yikes, where did the last couple of months go? The cynic side of me says "right down the shitter" whereas the more considered side says "life's just busy". Anyway, it's time for the Session again, and this month is being hosted by Ding and he has asked us to consider the "value" of beer, in the sense of:

"when I part with the cash, no matter how large or small the amount, does what I receive in return meet or exceed the value of said cash? Subjective? Sure, but we all have our own sense of value."

 Yeah, very subjective topic here, but one that I feel gets to the very heart of why we drink beer at all, or at least why we don't submit ourselves to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator brew that is ubiquitous with wherever we live. That's not to say that industrial brews like Budweiser, Carling Black Label, Stella Artois, or Gambrinus are inherently bad, just that they lack value for me.

So, yes, let's think about value, at least the word itself. Value is by its very nature relative, where I might balk at spending $5 on a pint of a given pale lager, I am more than happy to spend $7 on a pint of some alternative lager. For the sake of discussion, let's assume both beers are of the same style, similar ABV, and fairly equivalent IBUs derived from the same family of hops. What factors then make me willing to spend more money on the beer with the higher price point?

My first consideration is likely to be process. If said beers are of a Czech lager style, regardless of strength and colour, then I would be asking questions like "was the mash a decoction?", "how long did it lager for?", as well as expecting a voluminous foam head when poured. I will put this out there from the start, I don't give a flying monkeys if it is poured from a Lukr tap. For nearly the entire time I lived in Czechia, Lukr taps were not a thing, they really only started showing up in around 2008, oh and I don't recall ever seeing the choice for different pours. You asked for a beer, you got a beer, a well poured beer more often than not, with a voluminous foam head, from a flow control beer tap like the ones in this picture^*.

All of that is not to say I won't drink beers if poured from a Lukr tap, just that I don't buy the marketing that has built up around it - after all it's not as if Czechia was a beer desert in the half century or so between the original side pour taps being replaced by modern flow control taps and their making a re-tooled with filter screen re-introduction.

Anyway, got a bit off topic there. Yeah, process, why do I care if a Czech style lager has been made with a decoction mash and extensive lagering more so that how they are poured? Well for starters even when ripping our the original side pour taps, the breweries weren't ditching their process for actually making the beer. From my reading of history, there was no en-masse move to step mashing, there was no trimming of lagering times to get product out the door as soon as possible, there was a well established way of doing things that didn't need changing, so why bother? 

Part of the value then of a beer for me comes from the brewer's own sense of wanting to make an authentic product. Sure you can make a tasty pale lager with an infusion mash, a touch of melanoidin malt, and Saaz hops, but it will never be a truly Czech style lager, and I value that authenticity. Coming back to Lukr taps for a moment, I actually love them when the beer being served from them has been produced in a manner that a Czech brewer would recognise as the correct way to make it. Like this 12° pale lager from Selvedge here in Charlottesville.

Even then this brings up the question of "what is authenticity?". If a pastry stout, hazy IPA, or syruped up fruity gose is an genuine expression of the brewer's view of beer then fine, I am not going to drink it, but everyone has their own thing and will likely find a market for it. And that is another question in my mind that creates that additional value, does the brewer actually drink what they are putting out? If I am in a taproom and see the brewer drinking the only pilsner on the menu, for example, then I am more likely to try that than all the variants of IPA on offer - let's not deny it, we all know many a taproom with 25 taps of IPA, a lager, and Guinness as the guest stout. The beer that the brewer drinks most, is likely to be the only they pour the most of themselves into, and thus it becomes the one that is their "house beer", and that adds value.

Value is intangible, personal, difficult to really describe. What I value in a beer, or even entire breweries, others don't give a rat's arse for, and maybe that comes to the crux of why I am such a crap beer tourist, when I find a place that makes the kind of beers I like, in a way that feels authentic, whether to the brewer themselves or my own little collection of prejudices, then I am a happy, loyal, and potentially slightly tipsy customer.

* - the picture is by my good friend Mark Stewart, was taken at my old local in Prague, Pivovarský klub, on the occasion of my wedding reception.

The Session - Best at Home

This month's iteration of The Session is being hosted by Ray and Jess over at Boak and Bailey, and the theme they have presented us with is:

"What's the best beer you can drink at home right now?"

Until Mrs V and I decided to encumber the universe with children, the vast majority of our drinking was not done at home. We had several regular haunts to sit and have a pint or two; whether the original Three Notch'd Brewery tasting room, Beer Run, or even the bar at Whole Foods - seriously, at one point it was social central as we invariably ran into folks we knew and so another pint was had. We still do a fair amount of our drinking outside the home, often at Selvedge, Patch, or still Beer Run. Even though we used to drink mostly at taprooms or pubs, I always had a very well stocked cellar, often including lots of my own homebrew, but going out was the norm. Times however have been a'changing, and drinking at home has become almost the default for various reasons that I am not going to bother going into here.

I still have a pretty well stocked cellar, including a couple of dedicated booze fridges, one for beer, and one for wine and cider. There are still beers in the regular fridge, and I have shelves lined with Fuller's Vintage Ales of various, ummmm vintages, as well as other strong ales that I haven't got round to drinking yet. And then there is the kegerator...

It might be a single tap setup, but given that I am usually the only person drinking beer at home these days, Mrs V being more of a wine drinker, a single tap suffices for my needs. I do have all the necessary gear to run commercial beer through it, but to date I have only used it for my homebrew. As a result of having the kegerator, I have been brewing a lot more in the last couple of years, which brings us back to the question from Ray and Jess, what is the best beer you can drink at home right now?

The word "best" is no doubt going to get an awful lot of interpretation in posts for The Session. While I wouldn't make any claims for my homebrew being on a par with the professionally brewed stuff that is available in Central Virginia, it is decent. When I have something in the kegerator, pouring an imperial pint or a half litre - pretty much all my glasses are one or the other - of something I brewed is an absolute pleasure.

So, I am going to re-phrase the prompt a little and make it "what is the best beer to drink in my home, from my kegerator"? Sadly I have to leave off the "right now", as I kicked my most recent keg last weekend and have nothing to take its place for a couple of weeks. In terms though of the best VelkyAl beer to drink from my kegerator, it is probably the beer I brew most often, my house best bitter.

If you have ever travelled much in the US, you will know that best bitter is rarer than the proverbial hen's teeth, as are various other styles that I love and therefore brew my own versions of those too. My house best bitter began life as a collaboration with Three Notch'd Brewing, was originally called Session 42 but became Bitter 42. That first iteration was heavily influenced by the paler bitters of the North of England, think Timothy Taylor Landlord, as well as the divine Bitter & Twisted by Harviestoun in Scotland. The aim was to brew a best bitter using US ingredients rather the classic Maris Otter and East Kent Goldings. At one point Session/Bitter 42 was brewed almost annually, but inbetween those brewings I made my own batches and kept on tinkering.

For a long time now, I have had most of the recipe nailed down and largely repeatable:

• 88% Murphy & Rude English Pale Ale malt
• 12% Murphy & Rude Biscuit malt
• 19 IBUs of something for 60 minutes
• 10 IBUs of something for 15 minutes
• 8 IBUs of something for 5 minutes
• Safale S-04 yeast

The original gravity is always 1.042, yes I have my process so dialed in on my homely brewing "system" that I know what I am going to get before I even begin, and I invariably end up with a 4.2% abv best bitter. Until recently though, the "something" hops constantly changed. My initial batches used US Goldings, but I have played with Cascade, Galaxy, Citra, El Dorado, and Motueka, and most recently I have found the hop that really makes the beer everything I want it to be - Endeavour.

Endeavour is a modern British hop that is a cross between a hedgerow hop and Cascade, so you get the blackcurrant and red berry character of something like Bramling Cross with the citrus notes of Cascade, not quite grapefruit, but not entirely lime either. Chuck in some fantastic spiciness, think cinnamon and maybe even a hint of all spice, and you have an absolute dream of a hop, one that I have used to several recipes lately and in each of them it has shone.

If I had a batch of my house best bitter on tap right now, that's exactly what I would be drinking at home today, either from the keg or perhaps from one of my 5 litre mini-kegs I use to approximate gravity poured real ale. That pint would look something like this...

Yeah it would have a touch of chill haze from the kegerator, but I am not fussed about that when it tastes so damned good. 

Thankfully I can say that about several of my homebrew recipes, whether my blonde ale, stout, or Vienna lager, and I hope to add a house lager to my regular lineup on the keg this year - first batch starts carbing this weekend for a middle of March tapping. So to come back to Ray and Jess's question, the best beer to drink at home right now for me is my own, especially as the price of a pint creeps ever higher...but that is a conversation for another day.

Singing The Pub's Praises

I never imagined that I would stumble across a song whilst digging through the online version of Der Böhmische Bierbrauer, but low and behold that's exactly what I found.

I was just searching for any information in the journal about pubs and drinking establisments as opposed to the beer brewing industry, so my search term was "kneipe". Weirdly, one of my core memories of learning German as a kid is being 13 years old and asking the teacher what the German for "pub" was, and nearly 37 years later it is stuck in my brain.

The song though is called "Lob der Kneipe", or "Praise of the Pub" and should be sung to the tune of "Das war der Zwerg Perkeö ..." or "Ich weiss nicht, was soll es bedeuten." I think the tune is the same regardless of the name, at least to my ears, and so here is an example...

Ah but the lyrics, the lyrics...

And here they are in English...

The pub is my life,
The pub is my downfall;
Can there be anything more beautiful
In this valley of misery?
Yes, I live in the pub
As a human being and as a student,
And I strive for the pub
Until my blessed end.

When the beer foams in the glasses
Brown and light,
How divine it dreams are.
Time passes so quickly!
You drink and slurp and drink
One glass after another empty,
You wave happily to the bartender
Over and over again.

And songs ring out happily,
Full of youthful joy,
The soul wants to struggle
From the oppressed breast.
Clouds of smoke drift
Through the sacred space,
And sparks of speech fly.
For me, only vain foam!

But when the witching hour
starts to strike,
the table closes
for the happiest of feasts.
How wonderful is such a stay
with unadulterated liquid!
It cannot be described
such an excess of happiness.

Let us raise our glasses
therefore full of enthusiasm:
The pub should live.
It keeps us all young!
Booze, that is the real thing.
The element of life,
from the cradle to the grave,
to a blessed end!

Obviously, speaking only for myself here, but what a lovely song...

So...You Want to Be A Brewer?

No...don't worry, this isn't a post about being a homebrewer with vague fantasies of upscaling my 5 gallon batches of beer to something that could become a lifestyle business. Nope, I have, sometimes reluctantly, accepted that I will never own my own brewery, for various reasons. So, I will content myself with the occasional brewing project with professionals - if anyone in Virginia is interested, drop me a line, it's been a while since I had a recipe on tap somewhere.

However, there were 66 intrepid souls in 1906 setting out on their education to become brewers through the "Ersten öffentlich Braufachschule in Prag", or "First Public Brewing School of Prague". The earliest reference to the school in Der Böhmische Bierbrauer dates from 1893 and locates the school, according to this advert, at "Wenzelsplatz Nr 54"...

Today that would be known as Václavské náměstí 54, the present day location of a building called Palác Fénix, which was itself built in the late 1920s and thus replaced the buildings in which the brewing school operated. The 1830s building had likewise been built on top of buildings from the 14th century.

By 1906 the school had moved to Mariengasse Nr. 4, or just across the street on what is today Opletalova - ironically on the very street I lived on from 2006 until I left Prague in 2009, and given that the pub I watched Liverpool in for 10 years was on the street opposite Opletalova, I regularly walked past both locations.

It would be in that location then that our 66 friends studied brewing in Prague, and in that school year there were some changes to the curriculum...

It was in 1906 that the school broadened its study program to include lectures in trade law, given by one JUDr. Josef Bohuslav (JUDr is a doctor of both civil and criminal law). As well as studying commercial law, students discovered that their study load had been increased in other subjects - apparently it was felt that not enough time had been allotted to mechanical engineering, and so an hour extra for extra subject had been added.

In the course of the week, our students would study:

• 10 hours of brewing and raw material theory, with František Chodounský (interestingly the guy that claims Pilsner Urquell got their indirect heat kilns from "Brauers Sauer" - I will be digging more into him in the future). 
• 2 hours of administrative theory, again with František Chodounský
• 10 hours of chemistry and lab work, with Dr Heinrich Friedrich
• 4 hours of financial law with a Mr Brokeš
• 4 hours of commercial law with JUDr Bohuslav
• 8 hours of mechanical engineering and steam boiler maintencance with Ing. Josef Pokorný (fun fact, when I taught English in Prague I had a student called Josef Pokorný, he may even have been an engineer)
• 4 hours of exchange law and book-keeping with Dr Haasz

A total of 42 hours a week between the middle of November and the end of June 1907, about seven and a half months, with just shy of half of the hours being the production and fermentation of wort.

The need for mechanical engineering and steam boiler maintenance stirs memories of the first time I attended a brewday at Devils Backbone, when Jason brewed the very first batch of Trukker Ur-Pils, a triple decocted Czech style pilsner that was superb. At one point in the mash, the decoction kettle wasn't heating up as expected, so Jason got under the gantry with a big ass wrench and gave the pipes a smack or several, and hey presto the heating got going again.

Of the 66 students, most came from the lands of the Bohemian crown, but also several from further afield such as Bulgaria, Russia, Poland, Germany, Galicia, and Styria.

I'd be interested to hear how this course of study stacks up with what brewers pursuing professional training here in the US, as well as abroad, had to study in addition to the actual making beer part of brewing.

The Importance of Being Josef?

It was one of those things that you just stumble upon as you are looking something specific. In one of my vaguely regular bimbles around the Austrian National Library's newspaper archive looking for interesting tidbits about brewing and beer in the former Austro-Hungarian empire I decided to do a quick search in Der Böhmische Bierbrauer for Josef Groll...

As you are likely aware, Josef Groll was the first brewmaster at Bürgerliches Brauhaus Pilsen, the brewing company that today is generally known by the brand Pilsner Urquell. It was the beer that he brewed in 1842 that revolutionised the beer world and became the blueprint for countless imitations of varying degrees.

For such an august personality in the history of brewing, I was a little surprised to find just a single mention of him in the official organ of the Bohemian brewing industry between 1891 and 1918, using the search term "Josef Groll". Even allowing for just his surname only 5 results were returned, of which just 2 are definitively about the first brewer of Pilsner beer. While it is true that the archive doesn't have issues from 1874 to 1890, I was still surprised to see so few references to our friend from Vilshofen.

The earliest of this pair of references comes from 1892, in a fairly extensive article marking the 50th anniversary of the founding of the first batch of Pilsner Urquell being brewed. The actual company that would eventually create the largest revolution in brewing was established in 1839. The whole article is interesting as it makes no mention of several pieces of folklore that have become key to the popularly believed mythos of Pilsner Urquell. There is no mention of the citizens of Plzeň smashing up barrels of beer on the town hall steps, the reality was rather less prosaic and more economical...

Until 1839 the private and monastic brewers of Plzeň were making top fermented beers, using "primitive" equipment, but change was in the air in Western Bohemia, which butts up to Bavaria...lager was gaining ground. Not wanting to left behind in the popularity stakes, the leading citizens of Plzeň got together to build a brewery specifically for the brewing of bottom fermented beer, with building beginning in 1840.

At this point, it is worth skipping forward to the reference to Groll from 1897 as it relates directly to the building of the brewery. One of the things central to the mythos of Pilsner Urquell is that it was the "original" golden lager (I use inverted commas there because unless modern Vienna lager is significantly paler than in 1841, and that modern Pilsner Urquell is the same colour as in 1842, then the colour difference is not that drastic). To achieve a paler beer than had previously been seen in Plzeň, English style malting technology was installed. English malting methods were at least known in Germany in 1785 and may have been making in-roads into Bavarian brewing around the same time as Groll came to Bohemia. Andreas over at Daft Ejit has written more extensively about this.

While the use of English malting technology was essential to the creation of Pilsner Urquell, the second reference to Josef Groll in Der Böhmische Bierbrauer would suggest that they were not the first Bohemian brewery to adopt this method of malting barley. If I understand the text above correctly, Pilsner Urquell purchased their malting equipment, which we know to have used the English air drying method, from a brewery called Sauer in Haida, modern day Nový Bor. That claim by itself begs the question, what was being brewed by Sauer in Nový Bor? So far my further research hasn't brought any interesting nuggets to light about that, but I will keep on going. In relation to Josef Groll himself though, the text there basically says that he was "completely at the mercy of the kiln that had been installed", which points to the reality of those times that the reputation of a brewery was heavily reliant on the quality of the malt, which they malted themselves rather than sourcing from the multi-national maltsters supplying everyone these days.

Coming back to the article celebrating the 50th anniversary of Pilsner Urquell, the first brewday on October 5th 1842 produced approximately 36 hectolitres of beer, that's 30 US beer barrels for reference, which was presented to the world on St Martin's Day, November 11th, just 37 days apart. In the rest of the 1842-43 brewing season Groll produced 3,657 hectolitres/3116 barrels, and by the time he left the brewery in 1845, Pilsner Urquell was already brewing 5,510 hectolitres/4695 barrels. By the time the celebratory article was written, Pilsner Urquell was producing 462,540 hectolitres/394,161 barrels per year, under the watchful eye of Josef Binder, the fourth head brewer.

In those 50 years, Pilsner Urquell went from this

to this.

If you look very carefully at the latter picture, you can make out the 50th anniversary gate that is such an iconic landmark at the brewery.

Another fact about the actual beer being produced in Plzeň also caught my eye - that there were 2 types of beer being brewed at Pilsner Urquell, the famed 12° lager and an 11° schankbier, which may have at some point become a 10° version that was known within living memory.

The schankbier, the German equivalent of "výčepní", would be sent out to beer halls to be stored for 2 or 3 weeks before being ready to be drunk, while the lagerbier left the brewery ready to be tapped on arrival, and was mainly consumed during the summer months.

Such a lack of reference to Josef Groll in Der Böhmische Bierbrauer, by comparison the search term "Dreher" results in 162 references, "sedlmayer" 13, and "porter" 82, it makes me wonder if we overplay the role of the "founding" brewmaster in the subsequent success of a brewery? 

Even Groll's immediate successor, another Bavarian, Sebastian Baumgärtner, only lasted 5 years, and increased production to 10,865 hectolitres/9111 barrels by the end of his tenure. It was under the leadership of the third Bavarian to be headbrewer, Jacob Blöchl, that the brewery surged to be the powerhouse we understand it to be today. After 29 years production was up to 224,520 hectolitres/188,291 barrels.

All of this makes me wonder if we overstate the importance of Groll, and I keep coming back to the question, what was Sauer brewing up in Nový Bor with the air drying malting technology in use?