Blackfriar, and my big Guinness Discovery

Inside the Blackfriar

My first stop was the slightly touristy Blackfriar Tavern, just on the north side of Blackfriar Bridge. They have good pub grub here, so I had a bite to eat, and tried a couple of the cask ales they had on tap. I first tried the Deuchar’s IPA, on cask. This is a British IPA, and it’s a pretty good one, but it’s not anything like an IPA in the states. The hop presence isn’t nearly as pronounced, and it’s not nearly as strong a beer. However, it is a well-balanced beer that’s very refreshing, and very easy to drink. I would order it again, but I didn’t, because I wanted to try as many beers I can’t get in the US as possible. So my next beer was Guinness.

Guinness Extra Cold at Blackfriar Tavern, London

The very first thing I noticed upon taking my first sip of the Guinness was how unbelievably cold it was. Even in the states they don’t serve it this cold. This was particularly shocking given that I’d just had a wonderful cask ale served at cellar temperature. Why was it so darn cold?

I took a look around the bar for clues, but there were none, so I asked the bartender why the Guinness was so cold and she said “Ah, it’s Guinness Extra Cold”, and she pointed at a tap that was clearly branded by Guinness with the “Extra Cold” label on it. My heart sank. When I asked if she had any other Guinness on tap, she said no. Oh man. Was all of the Guinness in London going to be like this? Turns out it wasn’t. It’s actually quite unusual in my experience to *not* be offered a choice when one orders a Guinness in London.

So how do they get the Guinness to be so cold? Do they put it in a separate fridge or something? Is it some kind of spooky glycol cooling system? What’s going on? Well, there’s no separate fridge. Guinness (or perhaps the distributor) provides a small refrigerator box that is small enough to be placed unobtrusively under the bar. The kegs are kept with the rest of the kegs in the cellar, so it is around 12C (around 54F) at the point where it’s tapped, but then it runs through this cooling box, which brings it down below 5C (around 40F). It’s far too cold for me. I serve the beer out of my kegerator at home at somewhere between 48-54F, and that suits me about right. I was not at all surprised at the beer temps in London as a result. When beer has actual, desirable flavors, this temperature is very pleasant!

Here’s the “Extra Cold” tap, for those on the lookout:

Guinnes "Extra Cold" Tap Branding

Note that it’s right next to what is perhaps the only lager in the place: Foster’s, which is also served super cold, and which I learned later also utilized a cooling box under the bar. Lots of pubs in London serve lagers that americans would recognize on tap, and they serve them very cold. The interesting thing is that if you’re in a pub frequented by locals, these beers seem to be seen as “alternative”, and you very well might not see them at all!

I read everything there was to read in this tavern, and it was a bit of an eye-opener. They had a pamphlet that would guide you along what I believe is a fictional trail of a mayor of London from long ago, hitting pubs along the way. All of them, I believe, are owned by the same company. You can tell because the food menus are largely the same, and the signs with pics of the food are exactly the same. Even some of the “guest ales” are the same between the different pubs owned by the same company.

To sum up my experience with Guinness, having now consumed it at several different pubs all over London, it’s not really all that different from the stuff you get in the US. It’s a great beer, yes. It *is* slightly different, and there *is* a difference between Guinness at different pubs in London, but it’s not the huge, sweeping, it’s-a-completely-different-beer type of experience that people talk about. For that, as I’m told by the locals, you really do have to go to Ireland. Someday.

The Toucan: Obsessive About Guinness

In the meantime, if you’re in London, and looking for folks who are obsessive about how the Guinness is served at their bar, check out The Toucan.

The Toucan recommended to me by a couple of locals as “the” place for Guinness in London. It’s in Soho, not a block from Soho Square. When you see the crowd outside, DO NOT be discouraged. As an American, when I first saw one of these crowds, I turned around and went to another pub. Turns out, it’s not a good indicator of how many folks are inside or how long it’ll take you to get a beer. See, in London, it’s perfectly legal for you to take your beer and step outside for a smoke, or to escape the bar’s interior, as most pubs are NOT air conditioned. Seeing the pic of the Toucan above, it looks like a good-sized pub, with a good crowd, but I was really shocked when I went inside: the entire interior of the bar is probably 10′x15′. People don’t come here for the scene, they come for the Guinness, and I figured out why upon being served my first pint.

I didn’t think too much about my first pint. It was served according to the rules and procedures I had learned myself as a bartender in the states. I took my beer and cleared away from the tiny bar to allow others to be served. I set it on the ledge to let it settle, and before I could take my first sip, the bartender walked over from behind the bar, and asked if he could “fix” my beer. I took a quick glance and didn’t really see a problem, but out of curiosity, I replied “that’d be great!” He took my beer, flopped off a bit of the foamy head, and repoured a bit back in. The result was what he was after:

The line should bisect the word “PINT” on the glass. His complaint about the beer he had just poured was “it’s falling a little low” — meaning the head was at or below the bottom of the word “PINT”.

As if that weren’t enough, after he handed it back, and while I was letting it settle again, another bartender came by with a perfectly clean cloth to wipe of a tiny bit of foam that was just starting to slip down the side of the glass. That’s obsessive.

The Guinness there was extremely good. Does being completely OCD about the beer make it better? Perhaps not, but this kind of attention to detail insures that everyone has a wonderful experience, and this is the only bar I’ve ever seen where *everyone* on the staff seemed wholeheartedly devoted to fantastic Guinness. Not good. Not great. Fantastic. And it was.

By the way, for the record, while in London I *did* see a pub patron return to the bar with his untouched beer to say “we have a problem”. All he did was point to his beer, and the publican knew what the problem was. She took back the beer. It was DUMPED. He got a new glass, and a brand new beer, filled to the proper level. My mind was blown (that was at The Lamb — see below).

Branded Houses

Some pubs in London are “branded”. Many pubs have, in large letters, or on some sign, prominently displayed, a particular brewer’s name and logo. Inside you’ll only find that brewer’s beers on cask, though they may have some other beers on tap. Usually crappy ones. Well, those and Guinness. I’ve been to maybe a dozen pubs or so, and I only saw one single pub who just plain old didn’t serve Guinness, or any other beer not brewed by the brewery that owned them.

Anyway, this whole branding thing becomes a consideration when going out to a pub — or it can become a deciding factor in what beers people drink. It’s a double-edged sword. If you don’t like Young’s beers, but that’s the closest pub to you, you might drink it because it’s the best beer you can get within stumbling distance of your place. On the other hand, maybe you used to like Green King beers, but the pub nearest you that serves it has gone downhill — you might start frequenting the Fuller’s pub nearby instead and develop a taste for that. This kind of thing makes the entire beer drinking experience in the UK quite different.

It wasn’t clear to me whether branded houses were necessarily owned by the brewery, or if the pubs just had distribution agreements with the brewers directly. A local mentioned that these places were owned directly by the breweries. Seems like a whole lot of overhead for breweries to take on, but I guess if they can dictate their presence in the market, and in addition have an iron-clad grip on quality control from the brewery all the way to the pint glass, that’s pretty compelling.

The Lamb, and A Look Inside the Cellar

The Lamb - A Young's House

Not all pubs are branded houses, and some of them serve great beer. But I think my best experiences at pubs in London happened to be at branded houses. One was a Young’s house called The Lamb. This place is renowned by locals, in part because there are very few tourists there, and very few suit-and-tie types. The Lamb really is just a bunch of locals, and some excellent beer, and all of the good stuff was on cask. I had almost every beer Young’s makes that night, all on cask.

The Lamb is like a good number of other pubs in the city which are described as “Victorian” pubs, which usually means that there is a very large amount of ornate wood and glass work in the bar. This is pretty stuff, and lends to the sort of “authentic” London pub feel.

I got into a conversation with a publican at The Lamb, and we got to talking about the differences between how beer is stored, cared for, and served in the US vs. London. There are lots and lots of them. First, there are three different sized kegs, which I had no idea about. There are 9-gallon “firkin” kegs, 18-gallon kegs, and the more common 11-gallon (50 liter) kegs. In the US, all US brewers as far as I know use standard “half barrel” kegs: 15.5 gallons. Of course, if a bar in the US serves a foreign beer on tap they might get a different sized keg, but generally kegs are 15.5 gallons.

Another enormous difference is attributed to the serving temperature. In the UK, beer– especially cask “real ale” is served at cellar temperature — about 54F (12C). I didn’t really understand how enormous a difference this makes in the cellar itself until my new publican friend invited me into the cellar to see their operation. Here’s the thing: what we call a “cellar” in the US is really a walk-in refrigerator. What they call a cellar in the UK is, in fact, the ENTIRE cellar level of the building. See, when you’re only cooling a basement to 12C in an area that’s only barely above that even in the summer months, you can cool the entire cellar pretty cheaply and use the entire cellar as a refrigerator. However, in the US, it would be prohibitively expensive to cool an entire cellar to 34F (1C), which is the temperature that most US mass-produced beers are served at (unless you can get them colder!)

There’s SO MUCH room when you can use the whole cellar. See that white thing sitting on the floor? That’s a vessel that holds line-cleaning fluid. Since you can pretty much leave it there all the time and change it without wrenching your back climbing on top of the kegs, you can clean the lines more often. In fact, The Lamb cleans the lines between every single keg! I was floored by this. I thought the guy was pulling my leg, until another pub, unsolicited, told me they do the same thing! I assure you, Americans, this is not the case in US bars. At least not in the vast majority of cases.

Another difference is more specific to the kegs themselves:

There’s a bung there. It’s made of plastic. After a keg is delivered, it’s allowed to chill and settle for a few days. Then, a few days before serving, they insert a plastic pin in that hole called a “spile”. This first plastic pin is called a ’soft spile’, and it allows some beer and gas to escape. At some point (and I’m not clear how they know when to do this), they take out the soft spile and put in a wooden one called a ‘hard spile’ which completely plugs the hole. This is all a part of the conditioning that takes place, and I believe it’s specific to cask ale — I don’t believe any of this takes place for plain old kegged beer served on tap, pushed by CO2.

Too. Much. Writing.

I had such a great time in London and I got to see lots and lots of pubs, and the people I spoke with were amazingly candid and friendly about their operations. I could write a book about London pubs, and would happily do it, but I can’t do it here on the blog. If I think of an interesting topic that would make a good blog post, I’ll post more, but until then, we’ll get back to homebrewing beer, drinking beer, and the regularly scheduled program, as it were

Everyone I talk to who knows I brew my own beer eventually asks me if it’s hard to get started, if it’s expensive, etc. So here’s a post that’ll discuss it at a little more length. The short answer is “it’s not hard, it’s not expensive, and yes, even you can do it”.

Home Brewing is Not Hard

There’s hard, and then there’s expensive. In brewing, the two aren’t necessarily related. In other words, you don’t necessarily have to spend all kinds of money to get an easy-to-use system. Likewise, spending money on stuff can sometimes make your brewing life much harder than it was before you bought the fancy equipment. I can’t tell you how many batches it took us to finally make friends with our pump!

You don’t need fancy equipment. Most of what you need is probably around your house, or available at the local Home Labyrinth. If you’re not completely broke, home brew starter kits are available. At time of writing, morebeer.com has a starter kit for $69, and northernbrewer.com has one for $75. There is absolutely no reason you can’t make fantastic beer with either of them. Seriously, none. They even include instructions.

The instructions may or may not use some fancy lingo, but the basic steps in brewing beer are all things you’re familiar with already:

1. Make oatmeal
2. Drain the liquid from it
3. Boil it
4. Add hops, and boil s’more
5. Cool, transfer to a bucket (or something), add yeast, and let it sit for a few weeks.

There you are. Brewing in 5 easy steps. The concepts are all cooking concepts. Things need to be at certain temperatures, for a certain amount of time. That’s all cooking is, too: heat, and time.

So, $75, maybe another $20-30 for ingredients (depending on what kind of beer you brew), and you’re all set to brew 5 gallons of your own beer.

Wait. That’s not quite right. For $75, you’re ready to make as many 5-gallon batches of beer as you want! Which brings us to…

Home Brewing is Not Expensive

In fact, home brewing is less expensive than buying beer in the store. Let’s prove that:

I live in NJ. Where I live, unless you buy Bud, Miller, or Coors, a 6-pack is $9. So, $1.50 per 12 ounces of frosty goodness. That’s 12.5 cents per ounce.

Now let’s say you spend $100 on ingredients and equipment to make a 5-gallon batch of beer. How does that work out?

5 gallons at $100 = $20 per gallon. That comes to about 15.65 cents per ounce, or about $1.87 per bottle and $11.25 for a 6-pack. But here’s the thing: that includes your one time $75 equipment purchase! If your spouse got you the kit for your birthday, it’s nothing. What’s the cost per ounce then?

5 gallons at $25 (ingredients) = $5 per gallon. That comes out to about 48 cents per 12-ounce bottle, or $2.88 per 6-pack.

So now the question is, if you bought your equipment yourself for $75, how much beer do you have to drink before this stuff pays for itself?

Well, we’re working with $9 vs. $3 per six pack (I’ve purposely put home brewing at a disadvantage in the equation for the sake of round numbers). That’s a savings of $6 for every 72 ounces you brew yourself. 72/6 = 12. So you have to brew 12 6-packs. How many gallons is that? 6.75. Your equipment pays for itself before you’re halfway through drinking your second batch of home brew.

It sounds so good it must be wrong. Let’s try it another way. Let’s add up the costs for the equipment kit, and 3 5-gallon batches of beer:

$75 for equipment

$75 for ingredients to make 15 gallons of beer.

That’s $150 to make 15 gallons of beer (and note, there are ingredient kits that’ll have you making beer for under $20, but I digress). All told, you’re looking at $10 per gallon, and it comes to $5.63 per 6-pack. Let’s call it $6 per 6-pack, for a savings of $3 per 6-pack. At a $3 savings, you now need to brew 25 6-packs to break even. How many gallons is that? 14 gallons, or less than three batches of beer. If you only brewed once per month, your equipment would easily pay for itself by Labor Day.

It’s a Hobby!

This has been a good exercise. There are things that could add to your initial expenses. You might spring for a shiny new pot to boil in if you don’t have one already. There are things that could cut your costs too — go to a deli to get those buckets (that’s what their pickles are shipped in) instead of paying for the kit, and save bottles from parties so you don’t have to buy them.

Another thing that might justify the cost is that it’s a hobby, and people really should have hobbies, and no matter what your hobby is, it’ll cost money. Hobbies are good for your mental health, and brewing is a great hobby to get friends or the spouse involved in. Matt and I brew year round, and the wives won’t have anything to do with that, but in the summer, they’re out there with us. My wife and I brewed our first batch of beer together with Matt leading us along. It was great fun.

As time goes on, you’ll likely want to buy or build fancier equipment. Check out a book called “Brew Ware”, which has great ideas on how to save money by repurposing stuff around your house for use in your home brewery. Otherwise, northernbrewer.com and morebeer.com likely have anything you could ever dream of adding to your brewery.

Really, home brewing is as hard or easy as you want to make it. On the ingredient end of things, if you decide to study chemistry to understand your mash better, and microbiology to understand your yeast better, more power to you — but it’s not necessary to make awesome beer.There are also people who culture their own yeast (Matt’s starting to do this for the Bamf operation), grow their own hops (I might go this route this year), get deeply obsessed with things like kernel sizes of various brands of grain… It’s all pretty unnecessary. You can make awesome beer without this amazing depth of knowledge.

The equipment part of the equation can be as complex as you want as well. There are folks with all kinds of fancy electronics, heating elements, pumps, computers, etc. I’m a geek, but I kind of like the fact that brewing is my one break from geeking out (at least as far as computers are involved). When Matt first taught me to brew, we were using a coleman cooler for our mash tun. It was probably the same cooler his mom bought him for our fishing trips when we were in middle school, so… free to us.  Our sparge consisted of us taking turns ladling hot water over an upside down bowl sitting on top of the mash, so that equipment was around the house already. Our chiller was a counterflow chiller Matt made by putting some copper tubing through a garden hose. There are instructions on the web and in books on how to do that, and if you want to go even simpler than that, you can still just sit the whole thing in a tub full of ice for a while to cool it down.

Nowadays, we have added a pump, and a Shirron chiller, both of which we love. We’ve replaced our Coleman cooler with a converted (legally obtained) beer keg, and added another keg for a boiler, and yet another for heating sparge water (the “hot liquor tank”, or HLT). We also brew in 10-gallon batches now, and we do it outside on one of those cajun cooker propane burners. So, our equipment costs went up, but we brew, on average, 10 gallons every 3 weeks until we have no more vessels to ferment in, and our efficiency is greater than it would be in a plastic bucket setup, so our savings per batch is higher.

In the end, we still consider it a hobby, but it’s progressing, like most hobbies do, whether it’s model planes or stained glass. You get better equipment, you do more different things with it, you spend time and energy to learn more about it, you spend more money. At least the outcome of our hobby helps justify the cost in real dollars in addition to being incredibly satisfying.

My main philosophy that I’m working from is that saying you don’t like beer is like saying you don’t like food. There are just too many textures, body styles, carbonation characteristics, serving temperatures, hop varieties, grain variations (and, within that, different roasts), and yeast effects available, which combine to create an exponentially larger number of beer tasting experiences… it’s just not believable that a person doesn’t like “beer”, as a blanket statement. In all likelihood, they just haven’t had a broad exposure to different beers, and never came across one by chance that they liked. So…

When someone tells me they don’t like beer, what I tend to really hear is that they haven’t had a beer they enjoyed, and that’s perfectly valid. So I ask them what kinds of beers they’ve tried. Most will reply with some mass-produced American Pilsener like Bud, Miller, or Coors. Others get slightly more exotic, throwing in something like Ice Beer, or Sam Adams. At this point I ask them if they’ve ever tried beers like Paulaner, Hacker-Pschorr, Guinness, any Belgian beers, any of the Schneider beers, any British, Scottish, or Irish Ales, etc. I mix up the beers I suggest, but I’m trying to get a read on the taster’s overall experience while at the same time letting them know that there’s a huge universe of beer out there that is available to them… just not on tap at the local high-volume restaurant chain or sports bar. So far, nobody has ever said that they’ve tried any of the beers that I inquire about.

Is it the Fizz?

At that point, it’s probably safe to assume that the taster just doesn’t like American Pilseners, or perhaps Sam Adams. Let’s stick with the American Pilsener as an example, since it’s common and pretty simple to address. There are multiple things people might not like about BMC-style beers (BMC is how home brewers refer to all beers similar to Bud, Miller, and Coors). First, it’s pretty darn fizzy. Some people (particularly girls it seems) don’t like overly fizzy beers, and BMC-style beers tend to be highly carbonated when compared to most other beers on the market, with the possible exception of Lambics (which most girls I’ve ever met tend to like, because the fruit ones can be a little wine cooler-ish, without being cloyingly sweet).

If it’s just the fizz they don’t like, great! That means they don’t have a particular problem with hops. Point them at a more British-style bitter like Fuller’s, or if you want a more pub-style ale with a head that’s more creamy than fizzy, try Boddington’s. Both are good beers, inoffensive, but of decently high quality. From there, you can move on to get more adventurous – the point initially is just to let them see that it’s not all beer they don’t like, it’s something about a beer, or a particular beer that they’re not fond of.

More about fizz

Beers are carbonated beverages. As such, they have bubbles. However, both commercial and discerning home brewers who keg and carbonate their beer tend to keep a close eye on just how carbonated their beer is. Carbonation can be done with carbon dioxide (CO2), nitrogen, or a mixture of the two called “beer gas”. The cans you see in stores that are equipped with “widgets”, like the Guinness Pub Draught cans (and bottles), are carbonated with nitrogen. Nitrogen forms bubbles that are far smaller than CO2, and it forms a head that is more creamy than fizzy. This can have a dramatic effect on the overall body and “mouth feel” of a beer, making it feel distinctly less watery in some cases than beer carbonated with CO2.

Outside of the handful of different beers available in the US with nitrogen widgets (less than a dozen brands are available, in my experience, between Philadelphia and New York), all other beers are carbonated with carbon dioxide (CO2), and the level of carbonation is measured in “volumes of CO2″. Breweries obsess over insuring that the level of CO2 across their various batches of beer is perfectly consistent. Since most of them (there are exceptions) inject CO2 into the beer, it’s a pretty simple thing to regulate. Even home brewers can purchase a CO2 canister and regulator inexpensively from a welding supply shop or online brewing supplier and carbonate their beers as much or as little as they like.

I mentioned that there are exceptions: some breweries (like Sierra Nevada, for example) do not inject the CO2 into the beer. Also, home brewers who do not keg, but instead bottle their beers, do not inject CO2 into their beers. What they do is known as ‘bottle conditioning’, and it’s a way to naturally carbonate the beer after it is in the bottle. It’s beyond simple, really: yeast produce CO2 in addition to alcohol. Before beer contains any alcohol, it is known as “wort”. Yeast is added to the wort, and it eats the fermentable sugars, and produces CO2 gas and alcohol, and creates what we know as “beer”. Once the yeast have done their job, they fall out of suspension to the bottom of the tank, but this is never a 100% proposition. There are always some yeast still in suspension, so when home brewers bottle their beer, they also add a minute, and measured, amount of sugar for the yeast to eat. They cap the bottle, the yeast eat the sugar, give off CO2, and since the bottle is capped, the CO2 has no choice but to be absorbed into the beer, carbonating the beer.

When you see “Bottle Conditioned” on a bottle of beer, it means that yeast in the beer created the carbonation, not a tank of CO2. In most if not all cases, you wouldn’t really know the difference between a beer that was bottle conditioned and one that was injected. On some bottle conditioned beers, looking at the bottom of the bottle, you *might* see just a tiny ring of residue. It’s mostly vitamin B compounds from yeast that have fallen out of suspension during conditioning. It’s perfectly safe to drink, and some even insist on pouring it into their glass, but be forewarned that this stuff has the potential to give you some horrific gas. Usually, only home brewed beers have enough residue to cause a problem. Commercial brews contain far less residue. Especially Sierra Nevada, who seems to have perfected the science of bottle conditioning beer without leaving a trace of residue in the bottle. Genius.

Is it the hops?

Though it’s hard for me to believe, some people don’t like the flavor of hops. No problem!

There’s more than one way around this:

1. Try a beer that doesn’t rely on hops for its flavor
2. Try a less hoppy beer and drink it very, very cold
3. Try beers that use more interesting hops

Not all beers rely heavily on hops. For example, Guinness, and most other traditional Irish stouts (Murphy’s, Beamish, etc) hardly use any hops at all compared to something like Sam Adams. Also, Hefeweizens have very little hop character to them at all. In addition, both stouts and Hefeweizen styles offer up flavors resulting from interesting grains, ester-producing yeast strains, and sometimes mysterious brewing processes, that tasters might like! My mother-in-law is a noted beer hater, and said that when she was in Dublin and more or less forced to drink Guinness, she found that it was not nearly as disgusting as some of the pilseners that made up most of her beer drinking experience.

How many times have you heard someone say “I like beer, but only if it’s extremely, extremely cold”. As a former bartender, I can tell you that people have asked me multiple times how cold my beer is. Most of the time, people who insist on the iciest of ice cold beer are trying to let the icy coldness hide some of the flavors in the beer they find undesirable. In BMC-style beers, it could be some of the corn and/or rice adjuncts used in the brewing process (these beers do not pass the German Beer Purity Laws, in spite of the heartfelt mottos on their labels), or it could be the hop flavors! As much as I am *NOT* an advocate of drinking beer ice cold (specifically because you can’t taste it), if you’re at a party and all they have is beer, try to sneak a bottle or two and put them in the freezer for NO MORE THAN 10 MINUTES. It’ll be freezing cold, but if you leave it in there any longer, the bottle will very likely explode as the CO2 gas expands beyond the bottle’s abilty to contain it.

I take no responsibility for results of you trying this bottle-in-the-freezer trick. I have, myself, exploded bottles of beer in my freezer. Note, too, that beer never freezes hard like ice at normal freezer temps. It typically just gets syrupy. So don’t think you can wait for it to harden and scrape it off. It’s messy. Deal with it.

Finally, the other option is to drink beers that use more interesting hops. There are tons and tons of hop varieties out there. Over 100 to be sure. Matt and I have been brewing for years, and are still coming across hops we’ve never even heard of, let alone brewed with. We recently brewed with Simcoe hops, and they’re so distinctive and interesting that they’re worth seeking out and giving a try. One beer that is pretty widely available is Magic Hat’s Roxy Rolles. A healthy dose of Simcoe hops offers a very nice, earthy hop characteristic, different from any beer you likely have ever tried.

It’s also worth mentioning that there are some beers where hops might be balanced differently and given less prominence in different beers. I urge you to try a Scottish Ale to get a hint of a beer that doesn’t use any of the same grains, hops, or yeasts as a typical American Pilsener. A widely available commercial example is Belhaven Wee Heavy, which I think is a wonderful commercial example (though Scottish publicans will almost certainly differ – but then we can’t get their beer without taking a $4000 plane ride)

More about hops

Hops weren’t always used in beer. Instead, brewers used widely varying combinations of herbs, flowers, and other things indigenous to their locale to provide bitterness in the beers they produced. Why is bitterness desirable? Well, to balance the sweetness provided by the grains. You see, if there were no hops in your typical English Bitter, it would taste kinda like you took Maple Brown Sugar flavored Instant Oatmeal, put it in a bowl with some water for a few hours, and then strained, filtered, and chilled (and carbonated) the water. I’m not kidding.

Hops caught on quickly, though, quickly replacing every other form of bittering vegetation in beer. In addition to bitterness, hops also have both preservative and anti-bacterial qualities. In days before refrigeration, this meant that loading in the hops would allow beer to travel longer distances without spoiling. When the British needed to send beer to colonists in far away India, they added an abundance of hops to preserve the beer on the journey. They wound up producing a very distinctive ale still known today as “India Pale Ale”. The style didn’t originate in India — it was a result of the British sending beer to India. At that time, most beer was not heavily hopped.

Bitterness in beer is measured in IBUs (International Bittering Units). Some American craft brewers actually list the IBUs right on the bottle. A decently hopped American Pale Ale will probably have somewhere between 40-50 IBU. “Imperial” beers are typically higher, sometimes near 90-100 IBUs. As hops are a relative of the hemp plant, a beer with 90-100 IBUs has the potential to make you feel as though you have “cotton mouth”.

“Just Not a Beer Drinker”

Some people seem to defy your every move as a beer advocate. They won’t commit, or can’t explain, what it is they don’t like about beer. There are some perfectly understandable reasons for this:

1. They don’t want to admit that beer gives them horrible gas, abdominal pains, or headaches.
2. They don’t know how to label or describe the flavors they aren’t fond of.
3. They don’t want to get into a long discussion about how they have Celiac disease, or an intolerance for glutens created by wheat and barley products.
4. They think you’re weird and want to change the subject.

First: Do not underestimate the probability of #4.

There are a zillion chemical compounds in beer, some of which bother some people. Gas is caused by different things in beer: yeast, and bubbles. Bottle conditioned beers may not be high on their list of good beers to try if their gas is really out of hand. Abdominal pains can be caused by gas, so they fit that recommendation as well. Headaches are always a mystery, and unless someone actually enjoys beer and has recent onset of headaches, only when drinking beer, it’s probably best left alone. One reason people can get headaches from beer is that beer, like all alcoholic beverages, dehydrates the body (counterintuitive as it may seem). But if they say they get headaches ONLY when drinking beer, you might have to look to other things. I have not yet identified anything specific to beer that would lend itself to headaches, and what conditions need to exist, so I’m not much help there. Sorry.

People who don’t know how to describe what it is about beer that they don’t like aren’t uncommon, and there are lots of things peoples palates are sensitive to in beer that yours may not be. For example, Matt and I brew beer together. We both enjoy probably most styles of beer. However, we’ve brewed a couple of batches with slightly high phenol levels, potentially as a result of too much grain husk exposure in the mash. Whatever the reason, Matt can drink these beers without complaint, whereas I have to suffer through a pint of it. His palate just lumps the sort of bitter character in with the hop flavors, whereas to me it’s a completely different flavor that drives me bananas.

The best thing to do here is take note of the beers they’ve tried, and try to steer them in another direction. If they’ve tried BMC-style beers, Blue Moon, and Sam Adams, well, those are all really fizzy American beers, pretty light-bodied, and they all have flavors that can sit badly on one’s palate (the adjuncts in Bud, the coriander in Blue Moon, the yeast esters in Sam Adams). Try pointing them to beers that have cleaner or different yeast profiles, less fizz, and no adjuncts, like the aforementioned English bitters, Irish ales, or Scottish ales. You might also point them at more “pure” pilseners, such as Czechvar.

As for item #3, you’ll be happy to know that people with Celiac disease or other intolerances to gluten can drink beer made from a variety of other types of grain, the most commercially available being beer made from sorghum. This style has its roots in Africa, but has been marketed in the US as well. The most popular brand seems to be Red Bridge, which attempts to be Budweiser made from sorghum.

Beer of Last Resort

When all else fails, go for the gusto! Females who drink, but don’t drink beer, tend to really enjoy the Belgian fruit lambic beer. There are a variety of flavors, including peach, cherry, strawberry, apple, raspberry, and more. You might think that these are gimmicky beers targeting a female non-beer-drinker audience. Not so. These beers are very high quality beers, created by a process specific to the style, using yeast and fermentation conditions specific to the style. As a result, you’d be hard-pressed to find any beer that is similar to them in flavor, character, or quality. I’m not a huge fan of them myself, but it’s not because they’re not well made. Women who try them adore them.Those who don’t really hate fizz. They’re probably the only beers more highly carbonated than American Pilseners.

There are lots of other fruit beers that are not lambics, as well. Magic Hat’s #9 is a very nice ale with a very pleasant hint of apricot. Abita makes a beer called “Purple Haze”, which is a Raspberry Wheat beer. Pumpkin ales and spice ales are also popular in the fall months as “special edition” brews.

There are also lots of fantastically exotic or “dessert beers” that I sometimes can get people to try. Young’s Double Chocolate Stout is one. There are several chocolate stouts on the market. Brooklyn also makes a good one. There isn’t necessarily chocolate in a chocolate stout, by the way — the overall character of the beer is chocolatey, and you might even be fooled by the flavor, but it comes from highly-kilned malts used in the mash, perhaps along with yeast strains that accentuate the chocolate flavors through ester production.

Over the years, brewers have attempted to brew with seemingly every conceivable ingredient known to man. You can still find some of these radical brews, but generally only in brew pubs where they have a bit of license with the beers they brew. A few really great beers I’ve had have been made with hemp seeds, habenero peppers, caraway seeds, and watermelon.

Go forth, and find the beer for you!

A frickin’ BAMF t-shirt! The reference in the t-shirt is apparently to Dane Cook (a comedian). The name of our brewery has its roots in something completely different (a brewing experience, in fact, that caused me to shout out a certain exclamation. Mine has more explitives than the t-shirt’s expanded acronym)

I might have to buy one anyway, though, just ‘cos it has the name of our brewery on it.