July 2022’s Very Own First Beery News Notes

What to do on summer holiday? Now that it is July, I really have to figure out what the second half of August could promise. Not just chores, right? Chores ought to be done by then, done well before the snow shovels and garden hose swap places again. Martyn’s eternal holiday got me thinking about this… again… this week with his post about the pub in Greve de Lecq, Jersey that is apparently separated from all public transportation access other than by foot. It’s like a pub in some unpublished work on Winnie the Pooh – if and when they all grow up, get jobs (and trousers, if we were into finger pointery) and drink a lot of beer. Look at that path to the village pub! While there are many attractions of the pub ticking life that do not do that much for me, this has me thinking about getting some of that woven into my upcoming weeks off. Toddling down earthy paths to bechy pubs. Too much to ask?

What else is going on out there? Are we at the dog days yet?* Certainly not – at least at one archeological dig to which news of which Merryn happily guided me, excavations in a place called Chalkpit Field where maltings from the Dark Ages are being uncovered:

Much of the work undertaken involved cleaning the main malting house features identified from previous years but with special attention paid to the most recently revealed features at the northern and southern ends of the trench. A the northernmost end of the trench, two kiln-like features appear to represent further malting houses, with a considerable quantity of collapsed daub still in situ.

Nosing around the internets as one does I learned that this dig is part of a project investigating “the entire range of human settlement and land use in the north-west Norfolk parish of Sedgeford” and that the maltings date to the triple digit centuries. Fabulous.

Still with the British stuff, there was a good, summarizing (if ultimately despairing) article in The Guardian about the state of pressures on the British pub:

The total number of pubs dropped below 40,000 during the first half of 2022, a fall of more than 7,000 compared with a decade ago… The hospitality sector has faced immense challenges in recent years as it recovered from the pandemic, which resulted in national lockdowns that caused closures and reduced demand. However, the researchers suggest that while pubs managed to battle through Covid-19, they are facing a fresh challenge because of record-high inflation and an energy crisis.

Also in TG, Singapore Slung? Beer made from purified sewage.

Pellicle ran a tribute to an old friend, an old neglected pal… and old pal perhaps we all take for granted… a pal that may not even be there anymore –  Newkie Broon:

“It doesn’t make it the same, and it’s a shame,” Mark tells me. “But that’s how things move on.” The beer has now become a joke back home, a travesty. A victim of its own success that has been transformed beyond recognition—proving that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. But despite the bitter taste left by losing a legend in the North East, with bottles gathering dust on the shelves of Newcastle offies, the hardy heritage of my hometown lives on through determined, independent breweries sparking a resurgence in brown ale.

I like this near 40 year old clip and the message about what are reasonable sources of influence.

Moving west across the Atlantic, I encountered what was essentially a demand from Stan: “If it were Monday & I was recapping the previous week via beer links this one would be at the top“! Heavens. Good thing it is an interesting read. One Roger Baylor on the question of chatting over beer in America as a person who is outside US alignment, politically speaking, and how it offers hope in these pretty hard times:

I’m free to remain a leftist as it pertains to larger issues, and to vote accordingly, while also judging local grassroots political affairs by criteria unique to the immediate acreage lying just outside my front door. Stated another way, it’s possible for me to have a beer with David Duggins, a Democrat and New Albany’s public housing director, and talk about pressing issues of church-state separation and Supreme Court overreach. I did so last Saturday. It’s also possible for me to have a beer with Indiana’s U.S. Senator Todd Young, a Republican, and talk about federal regulatory issues affecting small businesses, American foreign policy, and other topics that have always been of interest to me.

And so much further west it is east again, I have heard of this sensible use of excess local crops like the neighbours of MacKinnon and their strawberry wheat of a few years back so it is good to see the trend-worthy idea elsewhere, this time in Japan:

Last summer, Ayumi Kato, a 32-year-old member of the town’s community revitalization team, planned the project to support farmers and others amid the pandemic by utilizing nonstandard agricultural produce that would have been discarded. After discussions with other women who are local farmers, Kato decided to create two types of beer: one using Amao strawberries and one using local corn. About ¥850,000 was raised for the project from all over Japan through a crowdfunding campaign. After being offered from the Kirin factory the malt produced in the town, the project members asked a craft beer brewery in Anan, Tokushima Prefecture, to produce the beers for Tachiarai.

Beth Demmon has published yet another in her series on interesting people in the good drinks world, this time Colette Goulding who makes cider in London with Hawkes. This is an excellent observation that came out of their conversations:

The future of cider, both in the U.K. and across the world, lies in the hands of people like Colette. But speaking up in a room full of mostly older men (who often come from more rural areas and espouse old-school ideas) isn’t always easy, especially as a relatively younger nonbinary person who has been in the industry for two years. Discussing diversity as an integral part of cider itself can be a challenge, they say, but one they’re up for.

It has yet to get stinking hot enough here to make the tomato leap in their cages but if it does some day soon, there is only one thing for it – hefeweisen. Nothing breaks the back of a mid-morning scorcher filled with when seven minutes of weeding and thinking about maybe weeding than a few litres of Teutonic clovey wheaty stuff followed by a good nap. And apparently, as Boak and Bailey found out, it is a good year for it – even if not everyone knows it:

BBF’s version, available in 440ml cans, actually pours stubbornly clear, or at least only faintly hazy. It has vanilla in the aroma and, of course, a bunch of banana. At 5%, it’s not as strong as the Schneider original – or, indeed, as most standard German wheat beers. We liked it so much we bought a box of 12 to drink at home. Perhaps others don’t share our enthusiasm, though, because it was discounted to £25.60 – about £2 per tin. At present, they don’t have any in stock.

More about wheat here which, characteristically for US beer writing, misses the entire two centuries of its own wheat beer brewing history.

Tweet of the week:

Finally, a helpful bit of health advice in you are finding too much is causing too much.

There. You have been informed. A bit. For more, check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday but not from Stan every Monday as he is on his summer holiday. Check out the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday (Ed.: Robin got a job!!!) and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. (Ed.: that seems to be dead now.) There is more from DaftAboutCraft‘s podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s (Ed.: now very) irregular newsletterThe Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword (Ed.: …notice of revival of which has been given… still not on the radio dial…)  And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water. There has also been the Beer O’clock Show but that’s now winding up after ten years.

*Could be as there is plenty of writing not about beer under the umbrella of beer writing. Keep keeping it dull, semi-pros!  As a policy point during the times of good beer’s gentle decline, it’s important to remember that beer has reasonably obvious boundaries. 

Your Thursday Beery News Notes For A Oddly Green Mid-October

It’s an odd autumn, isn’t it. Not just the pandemic that is no longer as scary but not resolved either. At least in the privileged bits of the planet. It’s also odd on the longer game scale too. The leaves aren’t turning colour here. Weeks behind schedule. Took the national harvest time short week off with the expectation of cleaning up the yard and there is still mowing to do. The last grapes still on the vine. Potatoes to pull from the ground. Shorts weather at least still today.

What else is going on? First with the positive. Gently manic blogger Retired Martin posted no less than 15 tales over the last week, each with quite attractive photos and a decent measure of wit as he, among other things, defines both cosy and comfy. The aggregation of his writings provide more than a list of taverns ticked off a list. His eye for detail as above (“For Drinkers Only”!) and brief observations on the places he visits are perhaps deceptively rich, adding up to something of an ethos:

Bill the fisherman came in for his late pint, the girls night out were laughing at a boy called Mark who I felt sorry for, and it felt like a happy pub.

Staying in the UK, I was linked to a story by an author this week so I thought it only polite to read rather dedicated fitba and beer blogger Jane Stuart‘s story about the scene around the Blackpool v Blackburn Rovers match on 2 October:

…I now felt hurried because I’d arranged to meet Wilf (of Yorkshire Seasiders fame) in Cask & Tap, which opened at noon. This left me no time for breakfast (not that I can face food first thing anyway) and meant that I was pretty much getting up and going straight to the pub. We did make a pit stop at the ticket office en route to collect around £350 worth of tickets for the next four away games at Forest, Reading, Sheff U and Swansea (there is a Swansea!). Clubs in general have been coy to release away tickets more than 7-10 days in advance this season so it was a bit of a shock (not least financially) to have all these tickets on sale – including one for a match at the end of November.

Supply chain news: beer bottle shortages hit tiny Prince Edward Island.

As Jordan noted, a favorite brewery of mine, Half Hours On Earth of rural Seaforth, Ontario and Canada’s first online retail beer store is shutting down and selling off its brewery gear:

As we wind down the brewery (see full post on Instagram), we’ll be putting our parts and equipment up for sale here on the webshop. This is the first lot, and there will be more listed as equipment becomes out of use. Sign up for our newsletter to be first notified. If anything goes unsold, prices will be reduced until gone. When an item is sold, the listing will be removed. All items are in used condition unless stated otherwise.

As they shared on Instagram, the owners are transitioning to a new focus and a new business, Worldlet, offering sustainable healthy household products:

We opened an eco-shop two years ago, and have plans for something new on the horizon that we hope will be the most impactful of all. It will require more of our attention going forward, and unfortunately, there’s simply not enough hours in the day.

Good. A doubly sensible approach if you ask me. And net positive.

Thing never said in beer: “…and certainly thanks to all those who nominated the winners…” Oh… ***

Speaking of positive news in with a first tiny appearance of neg, it appears that the US hospitality work force has gotten fed up with being low rung on the ladder with millions quitting their dead end jobs:

Quits hit a new series high going back to December 2000, as 4.3 million workers left their jobs. The quits rate rose to 2.9%, an increase of 242,000 from the previous month, which saw a rate of 2.7%, according to the department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. The rate, which is measured against total employment, is the highest in a data series that goes back to December 2000.

Good! Want my advice? Don’t make these jobs suck. Support your staff or soon you will understand that not only are they the ones who make the money but they are also customers of the next place down the road. Create careers for those you hire.

[Q: “bin fire“? You do know you can just not follow unpleasant people, right?]

Stan on the state of beer writing or at least one form:

In the 13 or so years I’ve intermittently posted links on Monday I’ve always looked beyond blogs, and beyond beer stories for that matter, for interesting items to pass along. If you are disappointed that I don’t point to more beer blogs, well, so am I. But let’s face it. Beer blogs are dead. That is why you are not reading this.

I know what he means but we have to be honest. As we wallow in newbie guides and second editions and other ways people in financial need find to get by, we have to remember that many narrower focused web periodicals are just blogs repainted and rebranded.** And similar content is created daily in Twitter threads and Instagram posts with great effect. And newsletters arrive regularly, sent from those gentle wee souls who fear the comments blogs receive, sent by people correcting claims in the content. I see plenty of writing is out there even if the deck chairs have been rearranged due to fiscal anxieties and dreams of monetization.

Maybe really probably bad is the news reported by Canada’s ag new source The Western Producer coming out of China that its insane residential construction boom meeting no identifiable demand for residential construction may hit the world’s food commodity markets:

Companies like Evergrande have fuelled themselves with debt while building millions of homes that stand empty, leaving China with an array of ghost cities and neighbourhoods. If Evergrande goes bust the whole industry, which more and more seems like a house of cards, could collapse. That would be bad for demand for steel, coal, copper and other industrial commodities used in construction.

Why mention that in a beer blog? Global prices for hops and barley depend on demand forecasts. As commodities drop, niche markets like hop growing and malt barley get hammered. As WP states: “It’s a potential killer of general demand — around the world.” Massive supplier Russia is also jerking around its own grain farmers with an export tax causing farmers to “abandon wheat, corn and barley in favour of soybeans, rapeseed, flax, lentils, peas and summer fallow.” Put that on your horizon.

Finally and certainly now very negative, the big news this week I suppose… if you can call it news anymore… relates to the continuing implications of sexist behaviors in craft, this time related to the Danish beer brand but not quite a brewery Mikkeller which has seen presumed acolytes ditch a fest being put on in Copenhagen, all rather late in the day as one Toronto brewery staffer noted:

I find it hard to believe these breweries didn’t know about the Mikkeller allegations. Working in the industry it was all anybody talked about for months. It took public shaming for them to pull out, which is a form of pressure.

Another observer tied events to the call for unionizing what really needs to be differentiated as the legacy big craft beer industry.

What’s really interesting is the continuing greater reticence to engage with the boycott by trade voices who may have invested in the brand too deeply as part of craft’s tight circle of reciprocal praise narrative.  Something called The Drinks Business reports on the response to allegations but puts as much effort into polishing Mikkeller’s brand than inquiring into the problem. We read that the fest is “renowned for featuring some of the most highly sought-after breweries in the world” before, in a classic example of beer trade writing reporting on beer trade writing, repeating the GBH praise that Mikkeller is a “tastemaker within the beer world.

Even with some pretty strong observations on the allegations in past posts including the statement “founder… Mikkel Borg Bjergsø… actively participated in bullying and harassment…” GBH itself still took the time (as if to meet an editorial requirement) to label (if not slur) those rejecting sexist environments in brewing as “activists” and implying a level of ineffectiveness in quite a remarkably dismissive paragraph:

The reversal for these breweries and potentially others is a response to continuing pressure activists have exerted on these companies, urging them not to participate in collaborations or festivals with global beer company Mikkeller, which is based in Copenhagen. Nearly 100 breweries from across the world are still listed on the event’s Facebook page as attending. 

Not necessary. Not every issue has two sides with equal merit. Matt of Pellicle was much more to the point:

I do think that breweries attending this festival in light of ongoing, unresolved issues, paints the entire craft beer industry in a bad light. It feels like a “fuck you” to the victims who’ve shared their stories these past months.

Indeed.* The beer brand owner at the centre of all this has continued to make some astounding statements as Kate Bernot has helpfully shared. But if all that wasn’t enough, what is really unbelievable (but for this being craft beer sucking up and sucking out loud) is how eight UK breweries responded on Wednesday took the time to issue a bit of absolute PR hari-kari of a note explaining their continued participation on certain  “conditions” including:

a. They state (as Matt points out) that they demand a meeting will be held – including other brewers, the abusive and also the victims of abuse (presumably not asked about this kaka meme process at the time of the press release) to move the industry forward;

b. They state that social media (the prime medium for applying ethical pressuring in this case) “is not a productive space” presumably meaning best to keep these things quiet or at least behind closed doors; and

c. They are still attending the event because… why? And each brewery has aligned themselves with the mainly unmoved Mikkeller and each have taken the time to sign on – and openly identify themselves as doing so making it easier for customers to buy somewhere else.

Un. Buh. Lievable. Except… you know… craft.

Positive and negative. Personal experience as opposed to scale and ambition and shameful behaviour. As always, for more check out the updates from Boak and Bailey mostly every Saturday and from Stan now on a regular basis again every Monday, plus more with the weekly Beer Ladies Podcast, and at the weekly OCBG Podcast on Tuesday and sometimes on a Friday posts at The Fizz as well. There is a monthly sort of round up at The Glass. There is more from the DaftAboutCraft podcast, too. And the Beervana podcast. And sign up for Katie’s weekly newsletterThe Gulp, too. And check out the Atlantic Canada Beer Blog‘s weekly roundup. Plus follow the venerable Full Pint podcast. And Fermentation Radio with Emma Inch. The AfroBeerChick podcast as well! And also look at Brewsround and Cabin Fever. And Ben has his own podcast, Beer and Badword And remember BeerEdge, too, and The Moon Under Water.

*And this weeks gold winning use of an obscenity nudging out this tweet by Evan Rail.
**Filled (he unkindly said) with tales that I pass on mentioning every week even if they win a hubcap in the tight circle of reciprocal praise awards.
***By the way, where did those Flemish farmers in England in the early 1500s come from. You know, when aliens were subject to residency licenses and other severe controls in England. Oh, by “farmers” is it “traders” that was meant… like almost one hundred years before that? Or was it the elite English access to hopped beer in the 1300s or perhaps 1200s? Such a muddle.

Session 137: In 2005, I Had Seven Hefeweizens

One of the great things about the internet is the Wayback Machine. When I had to do some fancy footwork in 2016 to move the content of 13 years of two blogs in a matter of weeks, I spent hours and hours determining what I needed to save before the deadline hit and the server was unplugged. Months later I learned that it had all been saved, warts and all, care of the Wayback Machine, part of the Internet Archive project.

Which makes this entry for this month’s edition of The Session – ably hosted by Roger’s Beers – a few things: (1) a reminder that internet beer writing did not start in 2013 or so, (2) a celebration of non-fruit filled or gak-laced adulteration of a style and (3) a reminder that a fairly broad range of the style was available to Ontarians 13 years ago. Wow. Look at those photos. I really cared. Wow. Look at those spelling mistakes I just fixed. I really didn’t care all that much.

++++++++++

A real surprise was in store when I hit the LCBO the other day preparing for a dinner party on a stinking hot summer Saturday. They had actually brought in a bunch of extra hefeweizens, southern German wheat ales with a measure of yeast left in.

Rogue Half-E-Weizen: a loose rich white head falls to a white skim leaving generous lace over a slightly cloudly yellow straw body. Coriander and hops balance well, their bittering leaving some astringency while the lightly creamy yeast with its presence of banana intercedes. A medium light version of the style without the German commitment to full bore clovey creamy goodness. $5.05 for a 22 oz bottle.

Erdinger Weizen: I am a little unsure if this is a real hefeweizen as the labeling is “weissen” but the little neck sash says “mit feiner hefe in der flasche gerfeift” which in my hack German I take as “with fine yeast left in the bottle”. Even with that the nature of this beer still leaves me wondering a bit. White foam over cloudy yellow leaving no lacing. Light body without the phenol of banana or spice that indicate the style. A clean cream yeast without complexity but very refreshing.

Schneider Weisse: This is the business. One of my favorite beers that for some reason screams “lunch” with a cold cut sandwich. How many things scream that in life? It is rich and creamy good with lots of cloves and banana. A fine white head over medium brown with almost a greyish tinge. As befits the style, very moreish and heat-wave cutting.

Schöfferhofer Hefeweizen: this hefeweizen pours a tall egg white meringue over cloudy straw ale. A layer of hop astringency cuts and to a degree hides the yeasty phenol of banana and clovey nutmeg. Not as rich as others from Germany in the style though richer than the American cousins here. Lemony grapefruit in the finish.

Edelweiss Weissbier Hefetrüb: white foam over dark yellow or light brown cloudy ale. Simply lovely. Lighter than the Schneider Weisse with a lemony brightness it does not share. Clove aroma and banana-clove in the mouth. The brewery has had only 530 years to get it right. Clean finish with a nice drying hop astringency.

Saranac Hefeweizen:I am quite surprised by the quality of this beer. Not as creamy a yeast strain as the others but much truer than the other US version of the style from Rogue above and Harpoon’s version tasted in April. It would be worth comparing to Paper City’s Cabot Street. White fine rocky head over cloudy straw coloured beer. Quite pronounced clove over banana. Worthy yet the label says limited edition.

Hacker-Pschorr Hefe Weisse: The last of this set, perfect on a summer warm evening with a game from Fenway on the tubes, soothing to aches and pains from old timers soccer. Neither lemony or particularly creamy, this is quite a grainy rendition of the style with both banana and clove as supporting class. Massive rich white head over cloudy dark straw beer verging on orangey. There is something savory as well in the palate, making me thing of soaking a pork roast in this one. Of the selection above, most like the Rogue with that beer’s untraditional use of coriander but the notes of spice here are in the yeast. Another amazing expression and, for what it is worth, one of the best logos in all of commercial trade.

What an enjoyable inquiry. Hefeweizens are, what, the Rieslings of ale? Like Rieslings with their minerally edge, hefes take a little time to learn about but they are a world unto themselves. And they both go with sausage and sauerkraut – a beer for both summer and fall.

Beer and Art: The Harvesters, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1565

Nosing around the Met‘s digitized collection a bit more, I came across “The Harvesters” by Pieter Bruegel the Elder from 1565. Not hard as it was on the front page. I have posted a few times about paintings by his son, the imaginatively named Pieter Bruegel the Younger, over the years but this one struck me as perhaps illustrating a few things worth thinking about.

Look at the scale of the people compared to the height of the grain. One of the characteristics of Battledore barley two hundred years later in Britain was that it had a short stalk. It could survive hail or wind better than other varieties but didn’t provide all that useful straw that we learned about in relation to beer in New York before the switch to barley from wheat. The stalk was in itself important to the community as a multi-purpose material for mattress stuffing to looser wheat mash spargings. In “The Harvesters” the stalks are tall and entire stooks* are taken from the field with care. The stooks are strong enough to serve as a bench for the workers having their meal.

Harvest time is big stuff. The image is a narrative of agricultural economy in the Renaissance. If you click on the image at the met site, you can zoom in quite closely. Look at how the topography is used to illustrate the economic activity. The field being harvested is on the top of a hill. Scythed and stooked, it is carried one by one to the bottom of the hill where it is loaded on a cart and carried away. There are three communities in the painting. The hilltop has a church to the upper left seen through the trees. Down below there is a manor of some sort where some are swimming while others are killing a tied up goose as a blood sport. In the far distance, there is a coastal town with ships in the harbour. Is one point of the painting’s structure that the grain gets exported?  Or is beer made from the grain getting shipped out?  I should cross reference the painting with Unger.

Where is this place? The blurb attached to the image by the Met says:

Bruegel’s series is a watershed in the history of western art. The religious pretext for landscape painting has been suppressed in favor of a new humanism, and the unidealized description of the local scene is based on natural observations.

But is this really a local scene or an imaginary one? Where is it? Bruegel lived in coastal Antwerp, Belgium a city of about 100,000 at the time and the richest in Europe. He was born in the river town of Breda, another community now in the Netherlands but then also in the Duchy of Brabant. Perhaps one of those two centres is in the background.  Could you find the field and stand where the artist stood?

But what about the beer? As one commentator notes, the scene is about producing and consuming. Or – if you are the goose – producing, torturing then consuming. The workers are eating bread and cheese as well as pears that one guy is shaking from the tree to the upper right. And they are drinking. A central character is a man carrying two large jugs up the path. Another man in the circle having a meal drinks directly from a jug. A fourth jug with what looks like a loaf of bread on top sits in the uncut wheat to the lower left.

We are told by Markowski that saison and biere de garde were brewed for centuries in the Low Countries and northern France to attract and retain workers. Farmhouse beers. The scene in “The Harvesters” is smack-dab in the middle of that culture, in the saison zone that included Brabant. Unger explains that particularly in the sixteenth century, tax records indicate a wide number of names for various grades of beer: “… dun and scheynbier and volksbier and scharbier and scherbier all turn up. No matter the name, it was always cheap.”** Was that what was in the jugs? We can’t reach back to ask those in the picture what they called their drink or even if it was in fact beer. But it could be and, frankly, likely was so… it is what it was. Day drinking 1565.

*I use the SW Ontario usage, spelling and pronunciation of the in-laws.
**at page 129.

Albany Ale: Straw In Wheat Beer Is Next Big Thing

It’s not quite like ten years ago when one’s name could appear in The New York Times, but I got word from cousin Mike Malone of, amongst many other things, “Books and Beer” on 1460 AM radio WVOX that news of the May 16th event in Middleburgh, NY had hit the Ale Street NewsCraig has been working on a press release:

On May 16th, The Middleburgh Public Library, The Albany Ale Project, and Green Wolf Brewing Company are hosting a day long (1pm to 5pm), family-friendly event celebrating beer, brewing, and Middleburgh’s Revolutionary War history to benefit the Middleburgh Public Library. MacKinnon Brothers Brewing Company, of Bath Ontario, will also be participating. The event will be held on Baker Avenue around Green Wolf Brewing Company (315 Main Street, Middleburgh) and behind the Middleburgh Public Library (323 Main Street, Middleburgh.)

The day’s activities include a Revolutionary War encampment, colonial brewing and cooking demonstrations, 18th century toys and games for kids, talks on the history of beer and hops in upstate New York and the Schoharie Valley, a Schoharie Valley hops display at the Middleburgh Library, beer samples from Green Wolf and MacKinnon Brothers.There will be Green Wolf brewery tours, as well as food from Middleburgers BBQ and Under the Nose gift shop and bakery. Craig Gravina and Alan McLeod will be selling and signing copies of their book Upper Hudson Valley Beer, and the day culminates in “The 1780 Beer Challenge”, cask tapping and tasting.

This is really neat. Looking forward to learning more about one of the areas of New York where the people who found refuge in eastern Ontario came from 240 years ago. And really looking forward to seeing recreations of how straw was used to make strong wheat ale. The more I learn about straw the more I think it was critical to pre-industrial scale brewing even if we have all forgotten its usefulness. Go straw!

‘Tis The Time Of The Canadian Goat

image193Is it just me or does the expression on Beau’s Hogan’s Goat bear a slight resemblance to the brewery’s co-founder Tim Beauchesne? A sample arrived a few days ago and, while I am pretty sure I have had the beer before, “spiced” beer of any sort is not something I hunt out. Same with weizenbocks like the sample of Burly Goat sent by British Columbia’s Granville Island Brewing. Yet, given how often I am wrong, I really should check in on my prejudices. Besides, Tim-Goat is giving me a mean death stare from that label. Better do something.

Hogan’s Goat pours a bright caramel under a slightly orange cream head. The almond malty aroma leans slightly to gingersnap. A very pleasant first foamy gulp: rich nutty malt with a late showing of herbal hops. Sweet with nods in the malt to apple, raisin and even old fashioned brandy butter sauce. What spicing there is gets neatly placed. The overall effect is a bit barley candy, a bit herbal lozenge and more than that in beer. You particularly notice the orange peel when you burp. At 6.9%, strong but not over the top. BAers have the love.

Burly Goat is a beer in the style of Aventinus and a respectable homage. It has that spiced weizen yeast in common with its mentor and displays how wheat, when stronger, starts to move from simply grassiness to something itself rustic and spiced in the way that rye is. It has that beefy gravel hue that would be a turn off in any other sort of beer. Green grass, marigold, pumpernickel, a bit of almond in a drying brew. Herbal leathery aromas. You could soak a pork shoulder in this very nicely. Just one rating by a happy BAer.

What did I learn? I was reminded that I like beers like this and that domestic craft can make them with verve. Or is it panache?

1749 Quebec Drinks Advice From Pehr Kalm

image56Home alone on a sick day, what else better to do but catch up with my old pal Pehr Kalm on his travels 264 years ago. Working on the Ontario beer history book in recent days, I am looking for references to brewing in New France to seek if I can established what might have been going on around here before it was even Upper Canada. See, what is now Ontario has been many things in the past, bits and pieces of many empires. Beer and other drinks hitch a ride with most of them. And until 1791, southern Ontario was part of the British colonial Province of Quebec and, before 1758-60, part of New France.

And we have some really swell tidbits of information. On 15 August 1749, Swedish botanist and diarist Pehr Kalm was at a reception for the newly arrived Governor General of New France, the Marquis de la Jonquiere, where he reports the “entertainment lasted very long and was as elegant as the occasion required.” All the greatest and the good of the colony were there but you get the sense that it was a wee bit laddish as this is the main topic he records of the conversation:

Many of the gentlemen, present at the entertainment, asserted that the following expedient had been successfully employed to keep wine, beer, and water, cool during the summer. The wine, or other liquor, is bottled; the bottles are well corked, hung up in the air, and wrapped in wet clouts. This cools the wine in the bottles, notwithstanding it was quite warm before. After a little while the clouts are again made wet, with the coldest water that is to be had, and this is always continued. The wine, or other liquor, in the bottles is then always colder than the water with which the clouts are made wet. And though the bottles should be hung up in the sunshine, the above way of proceeding will always have the same effect.

I need to try that one. We have to remember that Kalm was not an idle wanderer. As the Borgstates, he “was commissioned by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to travel to the North American colonies and to bring back seeds and plants that might be useful to agriculture.” So, he is a scientist on the lookout for things… stuff… doings and goings-on.

He describes a pretty rich diet amongst the elite. Brandy, coffee and chocolate for breakfast. Red claret and spruce beer are in much use at the noontime dinner and again at supper at seven in the evening. He notes that people store their beer in their ice cellars beneath their houses to keep it cool in the summer and notes that it is customary to put ice in drinks to keep them cool. It is likely that the beer is spruce beer as “they make a kind of spruce beer of the top of the white fir” which is seldom taken by people of quality. He also notes that it is “not yet customary here to brew beer of malt” and also “nor do they sow much barley, except for the use of cattle.”

This last bit is interesting as one hundred years before the Jesuit records clearly show efforts to create local brewing capacity as part of the earlier economy of the colony. Kalm, however, describes a wealthier and less self-sufficient colony in the late 1740s at least among the elite. There is no longer a press so all books are imported from France. Large sums are spent on boat loads of wine. Cider and beer are so 1630s it would appear.

What does that mean for Ontario? Well, likely the forts by the end of the French empire were supplied with casks of wine rather than malt made beer. Yet, in the last quarter of the 1600s, that was not necessarily the case. When the likes of Lasalle and Frontenac ruled the spot where the Great Lakes meets the St. Lawrence River… who knows?

What’s With The Boxes For Cutting Straw?

Again with Lord Selkirk’s diary of 1803-04, I noticed one thing on page 114 that sorta suck out. In his description of the set up of the kiln, there is a particular notation: “…small portable boxes for cutting straw are made for $9…” What the heck is that about? What is the function of the box? Why do you need a number of them? And what is the function of the straw?

Here is a very detailed discussion of the straw or chaff cutter. In that discussion, the tool is shown as going back centuries. The function of the cutter was to make the straw digestible by cutting it into small enough lengths to be mixed with the feed of a horse. And in this case, Selkirk’s note follows a reference to a horse run mill to grind the malt. So it could be just that.

But there are two other uses for straw in this brewery. One was expressly mentioned the other day. Mr Grieve the brewer mixed straw into his mash to keep the wheat from gumming things up. Torrified or popped wheat can be used for that today. Cutting the straw would make sense to ensure it was evenly distributed through out the mash. Straw can be a multi-purpose resource in what I am starting to call if only to myself “vernacular” brewing. Brewing with the locally available resources. If, out of that, you make a unique beer maybe that is an “indigenous” form of beer.

But there is another possibility. Or is it an additional one? Maybe he was kilning with the straw. Attentive readers will recall the fern ale post of the fall of 2011. In that discussion, we see that in the 1600s and 1700s, while coke was growing as a kilning fuel for large operations, straw was still a reliable fuel to make the palest and least smokey malt. Good wheat straw, when used with skill, made the sweetest pale malt. Notice, too, that Grieve is kilning his malt in a place and at a scale where other desirable fuels are unlikely to be as readily and cheaply available. Wheat was the monoculture crop, the gold standard for sale and even export. There may have been plenty of wheat straw sitting around as the district filled with settling farmers. If so and as the beer had a high proportion of wheat, these strong ales of his my well have been quite pale despite their frontier origin.

Just a thought. Could be tasty stuff.

Ontario: Weissbier, Denison’s Brewing, Toronto

Brewed since 1990, this wheat beer is one of the best arguments against worrying at all about tenancy forms of brewing in principle. While one might unkindly point out the web 1.0 nature of the brewer’s web presence, it does give you what you need to know and, more to the point, sets the tone. Fairly focused small batch niche brewing at a high standard for the best part of the craft beer revolution. Quite Toronto-centric in business terms, the stuff never gets out here much, here in the rude and rustic hinterlands 200 km to the east. I get there so rarely but did share part of an evening with the brewer, Michael Hancock back in 2009. I recall him complaining or at least explaining the trials of keeping on top of quality control whether in the then new can or as served from taps watched by the eyes of others.

What about the beer? Deft as much as anything. Even from the can, creamy wheat. Then there’s banana, a bit of white pepper and a bit less clove than the other guys. Clouded gold under whipped egg white froth and foamy rim. Leans slightly towards coconut creamy aroma. Lightly soured and spiced in the finish. An insane $2.70 a can, probably the best value in Ontario beer. Would a younger brewer would ruin this with a tiny fleck of shrubbery root or the bark of a tree? It needs none of it. Not so much a vestige of brewing past as a reminder of the days of easy adulteration by adjunct or showboating by faddish hop.

Oddly, the BAers tell you how the RBers rate it #1 then rate it not as highly.

Albany Ale: In 1670 The Best Ale Was Wheat Ale

You ever wonder why the reference you find after two and a half years took two and a half years to find? Look at this:

Their best Liquors are Fiall, Passado, and Madera Wines, the former are sweetish, the latter a palish Claret, very spritely and generous, two shillings a Bottle; their best Ale is made of Wheat Malt, brought from Sopus and Albany about threescore Miles from New-York by water; Syder twelve shillings the barrel; their quaffing liquorsare Rum-Punch and Brandy-punch, not compounded and adulterated as in England, but pure water and pure Nants.

This is a description of the drinking habits of the Dutch population of the Hudson Valley of New York from page 35 of a journal published in 1670. It was written by Daniel Denton and was called A Brief Description of New York: formerly called New Netherlands, with the places thereunto adjoining. So in addition to the 1649 legal ordinance barring brewing with wheat during a crop collapse and the 1749 reference by a traveling scientist to the malting of wheat, we have not only confirmation that wheat ale was brewed but it was the best to be had. The description by Denton is particularly trustworthy as it is incidental to other cultural references about the Dutch, particularly about their smoking and drinking habits. There is another reference to beer in his writing, too, that is quite revealing. It sits in this passage about the freedoms being enjoyed in the newish New York:

Here those which Fortune hath frowned upon in England, to deny them an inheritance amongst their brethren, or such as by their utmost labors can scarcely procure a living—I say such may procure here inheritances of lands and possessions, stock themselves with all sorts of cattle, enjoy the benefit of them whilst they live, and leave them to the benefit of their children when they die. Here you need not trouble the shambles for meat, nor bakers and brewers for beer and bread, nor run to a linen-draper for a supply, every one making their own linen and a great part of their woolen cloth for their ordinary wearing.

There you go. Freedom loving prosperous newly absorbed New Yorkers making their own wheat ale and bread from good malt grown around Albany over 100 years before the American Revolution.

So who is going to brew some up? Are there any mid-1600 Dutch guides to household management that include brewing techniques?