Time to Restart the Engine

Somewhere in between Greensboro in North Carolina and Virginia's Danville is Eden. Not the mythological garden in which, if you believe these things, talking snakes beguiled a woman into eating some fruit and getting her husband to do likewise (possibly the earliest parable of the perils of healthy living!), but rather a rest area on the drive home. The rest area at Eden is pretty much the midway point of the drive from Mrs V's parents' home in Columbia, SC, and Charlottesville, VA. It is the place where we get out to stretch our legs, give the dog a break from his crate and it is also where we swap driving duties.

Every year when we head back from Florida, I take on the driving duties from Eden to home, which this year meant turning right at Junction 124 of the I-64 where we used to turn left, and every year it feels as though the end of summer is just round the corner. In a few weeks Mrs V will be back at work, teaching 3-6 year olds, and then Labor Day will be upon us, which is, I believe, the official end of summer over here - hopefully the weather will take notice and cool off.

The End of Summer is also, for me at least, the time when my thoughts turn back to brewing as I generally don't brew in the summer months. My thoughts turn not only to beer, but to cider and mead as well. This year I plan to make more cider than in previous years, perhaps up to 10 gallons though I have something a bit different in mind for most of the cider. I have only made mead a couple of times, and the maple syrup infused version I brewed a couple of years ago is finally drinkable, so mead needs patience. Given the size of my new garden though, I am playing with the idea of starting an apiary to supply my own honey.

On the beer front, things take a darker turn, with milds, porters, stouts and "Scottish" ales very much in attendance, and hopefully it won't be too long until I have a fridge for fermentation and lagering, at which point my plan becomes the brewing of the perfect Czech style Pilsner - a long term project I am sure.

Well, after a week at the beach, and the shoulders to show for it, it is good to be home.

What's In Your Beer?

I am nearly at the end of the my case of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, and the few bottles of Saint Terese's Pale Ale from Highland Brewing that I bought with me. To head off any potential beer shortage, when we went to the nearest Publix I grabbed a couple of six packs of Oskar Blues Dale's Pale Ale. When we were back from the shop, Mrs V bimbled on down to the pool to enjoy a drink in the gathering gloom of night, and I was surprised to find that Dale's Pale Ale was much sweeter than I expected. Further research was required, and not of the liquid kind, but rather a quest for information online.

One of my bugbears with the vast majority of beers over here is the complete absence of key, decision making information on the label. I bought Dale's mainly because it was in cans and the name would suggest it is a regular American style pale ale, yet at 6.5% and 65 IBUs it is more in the American IPA ball park. When I am sitting by the pool (when you grow up on a small island in the Hebrides in the North Atlantic, sand and beaches really hold very little fascination) I really don't want to be drinking beers too far north of 5% - call me a wimp or a dilenttante if you wish. Admittedly with Dale's the alcohol content is listed on the side of the can, but other than that there is nothing to tell me what I might expect, like what hops are involved. With SNPA and Saint Terese's Pale Ale, you need to check their websites to learn about the alcohol content, IBUs, hop varieties and malts involved.

Is it really so difficult for brewers, or their designers, to actually find space on the labels to tell us what is in their beer? At a bare minimum there should be a list of malts and hops as well as the alcohol content. To completely misappropriate Ricoeur's hermeneutics of suspicion, what are they trying to hide by giving us just waffly bollocks about being a "completely natural ale", utter tosh since beer does not occur in nature, or that the beer in the bottle is "just a wee bit different". Sure you can argue that I can just look it up on the internet, but when in a shop and without owning a smart phone, yes there are still those of us out here who believe the telephone is for talking to people, you are effectively relying on producers of any foodstuffs to tell you what they use. In the case of the Dale's Pale Ale, checking out the website for meaningful information about the beer is as useful as a chocolate teapot.

I am not entirely sure if there are legal reasons for an absence of useful information on beer labels, but if not then could brewers please start telling their consumers at least the alcohol content, malts and hop varieties in a beer?

Follow the Flagship

Last week Andy Crouch wrote a very interesting piece entitled "Death of the Flagship", looking at how the craft beer industry, for want of a better phrase, seems to be moving away from having a flagship brand to having lots of seasonals and rotations. If you didn't read it already, once you are finished reading this, then head on over.

The reason I mention Andy's post is that I am on my annual holiday in Florida. As I type this post I am looking out over the Atlantic Ocean, watching early risers like Mrs V and I stroll along the shore, and thinking that perhaps I should be sensible today on the laying in the sun front. From a beer perspective, whenever I come to Daytona Beach, I am so glad for the very flagship beers mentioned in Andy's post, Samuel Adams Boston Lager and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.

On the first afternoon of our week here, we always go to Walmart to stock up on food for the week and I get my first stash of beer. The Daytona Beach Walmart has a pathetic beer selection, let's be honest here. I think they have every conceivable shade of BMC lager and then a token "craft" selection of some Samuel Adams and Sierra Nevada, and so that is my choice, and this year it was a case of Pale Ale which worked its way into the fridge.

This is why having flagships like Boston Lager and Pale Ale is important for the industry, because of their near ubiquity, their acceptance within the larger world. Knowing that I can get a good, tasty, well made beer without having to traipse my wife's parents half way round the city is a good thing as far as I am concerned. Perhaps I am just not a genuine beer lover in that I really am not such a zealot as to afflict those around me with needless trips to obscure shops when we are on holiday. Admittedly when it is just Mrs V and I we do go looking for out of the way places, but that's because she is incredibly indulgent of me and should be sainted by whatever secular humanist organisation would hand out such gongs.

Anyway, this week will be spent raising bottles of hoppy American Pale Ale to those pioneers of good tasty beer, long may they prosper!

Hope for Pilsner

If you have gleaned anything from the more than 700 posts on Fuggled, it should be, at least, that I love lager. In particular I love Czech lagers, hence Mrs V and I started our annual trip to Florida with a six pack of Budvar last night, at the half way point of our journey, her home town of Columbia, South Carolina.

When I swung by Greens Discount Beverage last night (I wonder if this country has a Trades Description Act, because I couldn't work out where the "discount" came in to it) in the hopes of picking up some cans of lager from the Bohemian Brewery, I made a point to see what Czech lagers they had available, Budvar, Pilsner Urquell and B.B. Burgerbrau Tmave were there but sadly nothing from Bohemian Brewery.

Anyway, recently the people from Pilsner Urquell announced that they are doing something new for the American market - they have started shipping their beer from the Czech Republic in refridgerated containers, and it will apparently be "express shipped". Hopefully this will see an improvement in the overall quality of Pilsner Urquell available in bottles in the States. I also hope that if the freshness of Pilsner Urquell improves we'll see an end to this ridiculous notion that Pilsner style lagers from Europe are supposed to be "skunky", and there are several pro-brewers I have in mind with that comment as well as muppets making uninformed comments on websites that advocate the rating of beer.

In other fairly recent news relating to beer from the Czech Republic, Budvar is cancelling its contract with AB-InBev to import and distribute its quality lager, thankfully there is another importer taking up the contract - and if I may be blunt, I hope they do a damned sight better job at getting the beer into shops and bars.

As I said, we are on holiday for the coming week, so here's to a week of beach and beer!

From the Source

Think of the great brewing cities of the world, London, Burton, Vienna, Plzeň. Each of them home to a famed type of beer, London its porter, Burton its IPA, Vienna its red lager and Plzen its Pilsner. When we look at brewing history, we look at the malt, hops and yeast that made these styles, we look at the methods employed to create the wort, we look at how long the beer spent conditioning, and then at how it was handled once it left the brewery. One thing though that I sometimes feel is overlooked is the most important ingredient in beer, water.

Whether it is hard water of London, the soft water of Plzeň or the famous sulphurous liquor of Burton, water has played a greater role in the development of beer that probably any other ingredient. As recently as the early 1890s the brewers of Munich were convinced their water would not allow them to brew a pale beer in the Pilsner style.

When I went to the new Blue Mountain Barrel House a couple of weeks ago I was talking with Taylor about the water source they have there - not a common beer lover line of conversation I am fairly sure. Taylor told me that the Barrel House water is insanely soft, on a par with the well at Devils Backbone apparently, while the well at the Blue Mountain brewpub, just a half hour drive, is quite hard.

To taste the difference between water sources, we sampled Blue Mountain's Full Nelson at the Barrel House, and again, half an hour later, at the brewpub, and the difference was very noticeable. The soft water version has a softer, gentler bitterness and hop flavour which I find very appealing, in fact I think I prefer it over the original, the Full Nelson Urquell you could say. That's not to say that the brewpub Full Nelson isn't a moreish, drinkable pale ale, just that the Barrel House version is more so.

It sometimes feels as though the only truly local thing about many beers is the water, given that malt, hops and even yeast are shipped in from around the world. While I understand the reasoning behind tampering with a water supply to recreate the waters of great brewing cities, when a brewery has access to tasty, clean water, I think it is something of a pity not to let it speak for itself.

You Can, But Should You?

Over the weekend I sat and did a fair bit of reading. We are now completely moved in to the new house, indeed with hand over the keys to the old apartment on Wednesday, and in between bouts of box emptying, tree limb sawing and other sundried tasks I caught up with my reading. I have a confession to make, I have neglected my reading lately, mainly because we have Netflix and streaming endless tv shows and films through our Wii was so easy that we watched inordinate amounts of stuff. In the new house we don't the luxury of essentially limitless broadband, so Netflix has gone by the by and I for one am enjoying reacquainting myself with the written word.

Among the beer related stuff I have been reading is a recent edition of Brew Your Own magazine with clone recipes of beers available in cans, including 21st Amendment's Bitter American (official beer of the TEA Party from what I hear). Cans are the big in thing at the moment, a couple of our local breweries having canning machines, Starr Hill and Blue Mountain, and canned beer from independent breweries is becoming ever more common. One part of the article that intrigued me was the description about how using cans is better for the environment than bottles. According the writer of the article the energy required to recycle aluminium cans is much less than to recycle glass, which may or may not be true, I really have no idea. One thing I do vaguely understand though is that making the aluminium to begin with is viciously destructive.

The starting point of aluminium production is the mining of bauxite, which is then heated with sodium hydroxide (caustic soda or lye) to create alumina, apparently this process alone creates 5 tons of caustic waste to produce the equivalent of 1 ton of cans. The alumina is then smelted to about 1800°F (980°C) to form aluminium itself using the Hall-Heroult process, which gives the aluminium a purity of 99%. According to some statistics I have seen, 5% of electricity usage in the USA is consumed in the process of making aluminium. You remember the 5 tons of waste that was mentioned earlier? It is known as "red mud" and is pretty much just dumped into holding ponds where it sits around doing nothing but taking up space. When there was a accidental release of red mud in Hungary in 2010 it "extinguised" all life in the Marcal river and 9 people died, as well as there being a large area of contamination. Even when these ponds of red mud are dry they are basically just dead zones, with agriculture and housing both impossible.

I think it is pretty clear that the production of aluminium is far from environmentally friendly and while glass is barely any better, it is obvious to me that the "environmentally friendly" claim for aluminium cans is misleading at best and spurious at worst.

Beer Historian Appreciation Day

I have always been a fan of history. At school I left my Geography teacher perplexed as to why I chose to take History O Grade (the then Scottish equivalent of O Levels) rather than his subject, especially as my test scores were higher in Geography. Simply put, History was, and is, more interesting to me. My tastes in historical interest are fairly catholic as well, whether it be the Russian Revolution, Scotland's role in the expansion of the British Empire or the development of Anglo-Saxon society, I will read pretty much anything about history.

I believe that without a knowledge and understanding of history it is more difficult to understand our world today, and that is just as true with beer as it would be with any other sphere of human endeavour. Few beer styles have so clear a defined origin story as Pilsner, for example, and so an interest in the history of beer continually takes you back through the eras to see what the monikers attached to beer have meant at any one point in time. So being interested in the history of beer becomes an etymological exercise.

Take for example Mild. I love modern milds, usually around 3.5% abv, dark, quaffable, rich and complex, they are in my as ever unhumble opinion a dream of a session beer whilst being a bitch to brew really well. Take a step back to the Victorian era and the ceramic pot of mild that you ordered is pale, as strong as a modern barleywine, has as many IBUs as an imperial IPA and because it came out of the William Youngers brewery a few weeks ago and is yet to age, it is Mild.

As you sit, magically transported back to your modern day drinking hole, you wonder what happened in the beer world that in about 150 years the 120/- Strong Scottish Mild with an abv well north of 9% and IBUs that put Pliny the Elder almost to shame, should become the equivalent of the little black dress? The answer really is simple, history happened, World Wars and the subsequent forcing down of gravities, the pressure to make a product in a world of rationing and want for basic ingredients.

Given that beer history is important, in my opinion, it is no surprise then that I think the work undertaken by beer historians such as Martyn Cornell and Ron Pattinson is more than just a fascinating read, it is a vital contribution to our understanding and appreciation of beer and the people that shape it, and how their own sitz im leben shapes the things they do. Hence I am officially calling today, the Fuggled Beer Historian Appreciation Day - thanks Ron, Martyn and any one working to bring a knowledge of the history of beer to the people, it is much appreciated.