Please let this mean Magic Hat in California!

The blogs and newstreams are buzzing with yesterday’s announcement that Magic Hat will buy Pyramid. 

I’m not going to post the full press release here, and oddly enough it is not posted on the Pyramid site yet, even under the ‘Investor Info’ or ‘Company News: hot off the presses!” sections.  Hmmm…If this isn’t investor info or news hot off the presses, what is?

This means linking to Magic Hat’s regrettable website (see link above, it won’t even let me link to the press release itself, just go to ‘about us’, ‘in the press’, and ‘press releases’ once there).  Much as I like their beer and their kooky creepy aesthetic, their website annoys me like none other.  If I were in charge, first order of business in their now bi-coastal company would be hiring a new web-designer.

For those unfamiliar with these brands, this is a big deal for the craft beer world, considering that Pyramid is the 5^th largest American craft brewery, a Northwest brewery whose signature is wheat beers.  Magic Hat is the 12^th largest craft brewery in the country, with a decidedly experimental streak.  Why then, you ask, is Magic Hat buying Pyramid and not the other way around? Well, Pyramid has been losing money for the last five years and Magic Hat has been growing. 

It’s also worth noting that Martin Kelly, the CEO of Magic Hat, used to be the CEO of Pyramid.  So, he clearly understands the company and what he’s buying. 

So, enough with the facts, the real question is what does this mean? The short answer: I don’t know yet. 

Availability: No news yet on which beers will be available in which geographies, but the rumor, or at least the proposed deal rationale, is both beers on both coasts.  Yay!  If so, I get my Magic Hat back and now people will know what my favorite t-shirt is all about. 

Recipes:Will they change them?  I’d guess not, but they might add to them.  How cool would it be to see the Magic Hat twist on wheat beers?  Imagine if every box of 12 Pyramid beers came with three beers from a mystery batch!  Huckleberry vanilla weizen?  Honey wit beer? Nutmeg dunkel weiss?  They might not all be great, but it would be awesome to try them. 

My gut reaction: I was anxious at first, but believe it will work out positively for beer drinkers.  I was anxious because Pyramid has always struck me as a very safe, corporate beer company and I wondered what would happen to Magic Hat’s creativity and flair.  It might not be fair to paint this impression since Magic Hat’s Martin Kelly used to work at Coca-Cola and Miller and the whole concept of growth by acquisition smacks of corporatism.  But hey, times are tough, ingredient prices are up, the market’s crowded, I can see why people are starting to feel like it is an eat or be eaten world out there right now.  Given that it is Magic Hat doing the buying, and I’ve always liked what they’ve done with their beers, I’m choosing to hope for the best: (A) Magic Hat gets distributed on the west coast and (B) Magic Hat lends a little pizazz to Pyramid’s brews.

 

Clever new beer tool for NYC

Normally I’d bemoan the fact that this new site has no coverage of SF, but BeerMenus already has so much hype going for it that I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before they make it out here.

It’s a Google Maps mash-up that allows you to search within NYC for:

• A listing of bars that carry a particular beer
• A list of beers currently being carried by a particular bar
• A list of bars in a particular neighborhood
• A list of upcoming beer events

I was a bit skeptical about this new tool at first because wouldn’t it just be better as an application within the BeerAdvocate site?  Then it could be linked in to their established network, and all of their ratings.  The best example of the redundancy this creates is the Beer Events portion of the Beer Menus site, which is completely redundant to BeerAdvocate’s beer calendar, which has the added functionality of allowing you to RSVP to an event to let your BeerAdvocate friends know you’re coming.

However, I was quickly won over by a few features:

• The mapping functionality is key.  While BeerAdvocate lets you narrow your search by zip code or city, etc., there is no map mash-up, which means that when I’m traveling and want to find a good beer bar I can look up likely candidates on Beer Advocate but have to switch back and forth between their site and Google Maps to figure out which will be easiest for me to get to.
• They have price information.  I’m not sure you can get this information anywhere else, including at many of bars home pages.  While I’m sure a lot of bar owners (especially those in higher end places who charge extra to cover their fixed costs of high-rent locations and a snazzily designed sites) are cringing, this is obviously a great benefit to consumers.  Now we’re armed with information about what beers cost at different places and can decide for ourselves whether a higher priced bar is worth the premium.  I wouldn’t be surprised if this also helps out the brewers and/or distributors.  If they can see what retailers are charging and that the market might bear a higher price than they expected, they might be able to charge a little bit more themselves.  So, all around bad news for bar owners, I guess, unless all this extra information in the hands of consumers means more patrons.
• I prefer the Beer Menus style and layout to Beer Advocate.  This may change as BeerMenus grows and necessarily becomes more complex, but right now it has a very clean user-friendly layout.  BeerAdvocate seems a more cluttered to me, probably due to the side bars, ads, and black background for all but the center pane. 

So, I’ll definitely still use BeerAdvocate for its massive database of beer reviews and probably for beer events as well.  I don’t think Beer Menu’s maps offers much of an advantage over BA’s beer calendar. 

However, this might spell the beginning of the end of BA’s Beer Fly and Beer Menus for me.  I’ll use both for now since each provides something the other doesn’t (BA has reviews, BM has maps, prices, and lists of beers on tap now).  But, if either one can integrate the features of the other, I’ll commit to that one. 

The perfect pairing for edamame cakes?

I’m always looking for new restaurants to add to my list of ‘places with great beer in San Francisco’.  And though I’m a lapsed vegetarian, I never thought I’d be adding a vegan place to the list.  Vegan food is half the reason for my lapse: I wasn’t ready to make that commitment yet, but in college a lot of the food for us herbivores was vegan food that they figured the vegetarians could also eat.  I missed my eggs and cheese in this dining hall-provided food and found myself subsisting on self-made grilled cheeses several nights a week.  It was only halfway through freshman year when I decided enough was enough.  

So… though I knew I wanted to try Millennium after hearing about it from Erica & Eric at the Five Guys and a Barrel dinner, I was also approaching it with a bit of trepidation. 

First sign I had no reason to worry: the awesome drinks list.  I’ll skip a discussion of the wine since I didn’t even look at it and don’t know much about it, but both the beer and cocktails were some of the best lists I’ve seen. 

Though there are no beers on draft, but they have 15 – 20 bottles, all craft-brews, including some real stand-outs.  A couple points about the beer list:

• They have 4 or 5 larger size bottles for sharing, which is nice because some of these beers aren’t available in 12 oz sizes and a restaurant is the perfect place to try these, since bars can be too hectic for sharing sometimes. 
• They definitely seem to feature local beers as much as possible since 11 of the 17 beers when I was there were Northern California beers from North Coast, Butte Creek, Mad River, Russian River, Bear Republic, Bison, and Eel River Brewing Companies.
• They also seem to make an effort to feature organic beers.  There aren’t a whole mess of these out there yet, but they had the Pinkus Hefeweizen, the North Coast Cru D’or Belgian, and the Eel River Porter.
• They had some really unique and hard to find beers.  I’m sure it won’t last long because it will get drunk up, but while I was there they had Russian River Supplication and a buckwheat ale from Brasserie Silenrieux in Belgium. I haven’t even heard of a buckwheat ale before, aside from Rogue’s soba beers.  And then, you can’t go wrong with an Ommegang Three Philosophers.

I got the Pranqster, a Belgian-style strong pale ale from North Coast.  I’ve had this beer before and knew I wanted something Belgian-style (what can I say, I’m on a kick, this happens sometimes), and not too alcoholic or malty (this wasn’t a quadrupel night, I had beer work left to do that evening…ah, when administering your hobby starts getting in the way of participating in your hobby, that’s when you know you hobby needs to be your job).  I love the spices and esters on this one and haven’t had it in a while. 

I didn’t order a cocktail, but this was one place where I wouldn’t even have been disappointed if there had been no beer list.  They had some really cool drinks, such as:

• Prosecco with elderflower syrup, garnished with an edible flowers
• House-infused kumquat-star anise gin, lemon and lime juices, and agave, served up
• Maker’s Mark bourbon with sweet vermouth, chai spiced tea, ginger-chamomile syrup, and bitters, served up

Ok, but I know you’re all thinking, “Yeah, yeah, but I could have these drinks at a non-vegan restaurant…what did you eat?” Well, I’m not really sure, but I know I liked it.

We were lucky in that we got to try a lot of stuff because Erica sent out a couple extra plates (thank you!).   I think the best part for us non-vegans was that many of the plates seemed to just happen to be vegan, and could hold their own on other upscale restaurants’ menus.

I’ve only just come around to liking olives relatively recently, so I picked most of the green olives out of the marinated olives plate, leaving the darker ones behind.  I guess this makes me an olive racist.  Then there was also a black bean torte (“whole wheat tortilla, caramelized plantains, smoky black bean puree, pumpkin-habanero salsa verde, cashew sour cream, strawberry-jicama salsa”) that was sweet and not too spicy.  I thought it was going to be my favorite until we got a trio of things that included who knows what all, but my favorite on that plate was the pickled radishes.  It was much simpler than black bean tortes, but I am a sucker for pickled vegetables, and they hold a special place in my heart for being a traditional German beer accompaniment.

The one problem with my write-up here is that not all the dishes we ate are available online for me to reference and so many of the ingredients were new or exotic to me that I’m not even sure I knew what they were I was eating then, much less able to remember it correctly now.  We joked as we sat down we probably understood maybe every other word on the entrees page.  I picked edamame cakes that came with a couple of sauces (tangy and creamy?).  It was crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, comparable to a crab cake. Most of all, everything was filling in addition to tasty and interesting.  This was something I had worried about quite a bit, but by the end I couldn’t even finish my entrée, much less fit dessert.  

I will definitely come back.  I hope one time I have a vegetarian or vegan friend with me because they’ll be in paradise.  But even if you’re a committed omnivore, as I am and my two friends that night are, the food is exciting, fresh, filling, and a great complement to the impressive beer list.

My one question for the restaurant: have they looked into how the beers they serve are clarified?  I’m not sure all vegans diners know that gelatin (made from animal bones) or isinglass (made from fish bladders) are often added to beers in small amounts to reduce haze.  I’ve done a little poking around and it seems like most beers from most commercial craft brewers are vegan friendly, including that North Coast Pranqster I sipped.  I guess their initial note on the website homepage stating that all of their dishes are completely animal free should cover it, but if I were a vegan I’d have a little more reassurance if there were a note on the beverage menu as well. 

Pretty nice little Saturday

I kicked off my post-Sour Ale Tasting morning with a brunch with the Urban Family group.  Most of them had been at the tasting the night before, but no one looked too worse for the wear, which I guess means scaling the tasting back from 23 brews to 9 brews a night was a very good move.

I had brought along two of my staples (though this makes it sound like I have many staples, these two represent about half my cooking repertoire and each barely involves cooking):

• Onion, tomato, & cheese tart: sautee a sliced sweet onion until tender, throw in the bottom of a pre-made pie crust, slice fresh tomatoes into wedges and throw on top, grate 3+ types of cheese generously over onion & tomato, bake for about an hour.
• Chicken club salad: take meat off the bone of a rotisserie chicken from the grocery store and chop, fry bacon and crumble, seed a tomato and chop, slice an avocado into chunks, mix all of the above with a couple table spoons of mayo.  Eat between bread or on its own.

Both represent my philosophies about food:

• (A) include cheese, bacon, and avocado whenever possible
• (B) cheat whenever possible – it’s ok as long as you admit it’s not actually your pie crust…or chicken

Along with the above I brought my bottle of Allagash Curieux.  Yum!  Now my posts are a bit out of order here, and this brunch actually took place before Five Guys and a Barrel and the Trappist Tasting, so this was my first of many recent tastes of Curieux (the two mentioned above plus the Bar Crudo beer dinner). 

I’m glad this brunch came first since it gave me the chance to tell Rob Tod that I had drunk his beer with breakfast.  I’m not sure if he was appalled or just bemused, but I think it went very well, especially with the French Toast that Justin was serving up.  My tasting notes are in the Trappist Tasting post, linked above. 

From brunch, it was back to (I think this is just what I’ll be calling my apartment for all purposes, not just brewing purposes, for here on out) to get started on my Amber is the Night alt beer.

I had gone to Brewcraft the weekend before, so I was armed with a recipe from Tucker and a tub full of malt extract, and a fragrant bounty of grains. 

My ingredients:

Water treatment

• 1 tsp gypsum (calcium sulfate dihydrate) -drops mash & wort pH to allow enzymes to work

Malts

• 1.50 lbs 2-row barley
• 0.50 lbs 120°L crystal
• 0.50 lbs special ‘B’
• 0.50 lbs aromatic
• 0.25 lbs flakes
• 6.00 lbs malt extract

Hops

• 1.00 oz Challenger
• 1.00 oz E.K. Goldings

Yeast

• Nottingham

Fining agent

• 1 tablet whitfloc

The process:

I put my pot with 3 gallons of water and my gypsum table out on my camp stove.  It was another VERY windy day, but luckily my stove shelter hasn’t blown away/molded away/been confiscated by the fire marshal yet. 

I tied up my 3.25 lbs of specialty grains in my mesh bag and placed them in my pot and raised the temperature to 154°F.  Unfortunately, I had already made my first mistake, though I wasn’t to realize this until later. 

Once the partial mash got to the right temperature, I turned off the heat, put a lid on it, put a towel on the lid to keep the heat in, and let it stand for 40 minutes.  Once the 40 minutes was up, I went to pull the grain bag out of the water and discovered what I had done. 

All I was thinking was “Don’t squeeze the grain bag like last time, just dip it in and out of the water 7 – 10 times to let the sugars drip off,” when all of a sudden the grain bag came apart in my hands.  Turns out, it had been touching the bottom of the pot, part of the bag had been singed, and now all the grains were spilling out of the bag in to the wort.  

I was able to get about 2/3 of it out, still in the grain bag, but I had about a pound of grain floating around in my wort now.  Luckily, I had just bought a colander recently and I used it to scoop up most of the rest of the grain.  

My directions actually came with alternate instructions for what to do if working with more than 2.5 lbs of grain (enough grain that the bag will touch bottom and burn), but I had misread my ingredients list and thought I only had 2.25 lbs, and just used the basic instructions.  Ah well, I’m pretty sure this was just a time-consuming fiasco and not one that will actually affect the beer taste much.

I heated the beer back up to near boiling, then turned off the burner and added my malt extract and the Challenger hops.  I gave it a good stir, turned the heat back on and returned the wort to full boil.  It was touch and go for a bit with a near boil-over.  Though I obviously don’t want to lose precious beer to a boil over, or mess up my proportions, the one good thing about my set-up, is that if I do have a boil over it will drip through the slats of my fire escape onto the downstairs neighbors’ patio. 

After 30 minutes of boiling, I added half of my Goldings hops.  After 45 minutes, I added the rest of my Goldings, and then boiled for 15 minutes.  That was it for the boil!  I put the wort in the sink in an ice bath to chill.  

I put 2.5 gallons of cool water into the fermenter, added a third of my wort, and pitched in my yeast.  I poured in the rest of my wort ‘vigorously’ as instructed, popped on the lid, and filled my airlock.  Done!  It was actually pretty easy aside from the grain bag debacle.  

The next morning Amber Is The Night was bubbling away.

 

I noticed because I bookended my brewing with a second brunch, this time at Magnolia with Felice.  As she ordered a mimosa, I looked longingly at the beer list considering how inappropriate it would be to have one (It was after noon  by the time I opened the Curiuex the day before).  I saw the Gruit and decided to go for it.  It was flavored with rosemary, yarrow flower, mugwort, nettle, and mugwort.  It tasted a bit like a really weird cola, but not as sweet. 

Sour Ale Tasting

Jumping straight from “Beer: 101″ to “Beer: 401″, this was the second in a series of self-hosted monthly beer tastings.  We pulled in a crowd of seventeen for a sampling of nine different beers and what turned into a discussion of the attendees’ spirit animals.  No joke. 

Beers for this event were, understandably, a little harder to track down than those for the prior beer tasting, which focused on exemplary beers from a variety of common beer styles.  My first destination was Healthy Spirits, which has fast become my favorite beer purveyor as (A) it’s close enough that even with a backpack full of beer I can still walk home, and (B) I can’t think of a better use than a few freezer cases than filling it with their beer selection.  From there, it was a short zip over the City Beer Store to round out the line-up.  CBS makes up for their distance from The Monkeyhouse with an even larger selection that never fails to entice me into buying far more than I intended upon entering. 

The final tasting list was:

Flemish-style Red Ales

• Duchesse de Bourgogne
• Rodenbach Grand Cru
• Panil Barriquee

Flemish-style Oud Bruins

• Ichtegem’s Grand Cru
• Monk’s Café Flemish Sour Ale*

Fruited Wild Ales

• Russian River Supplication
• Birrifico Montegioco’s Quarta Runa**

Gueuze

• Cantillon Classic Gueuze
• Russian River Beatification

Other

• The Monkeyhouse Grains of Wrath IPA***

*Not served because I lost it in my fridge.  With most of my usual beer-accommodating space taken up, this bottle went into the butter compartment on the door, and wasn’t discovered until the next day. 

**A suggestion from CBC, this was not actually sour and it’s not clear if it is wild, so it didn’t really fit the theme of the event, which I didn’t discover until we opened it that night.

***This obviously did not fit the bill of the event either, but was an exciting public debut for The Monkeyhouse’s first brew

In the Flemish-style red ales, the Rodenbach Grand Cru was the clear winner in my mind.  It and the Duchesse de Bourgognewere similar and both very full flavored, but the Rodenbach was a little less sweet and a little more tart, which I thought provided a better balance of flavors.  The Panil Barriquee stood out clearly from the other two, with a much smoother and more subtle.  The tastes in the Barriquee were integrated together in a more cohesive way than in the first two, whose tastes seem to pop out of nowhere mid-sip to surprise the drinker.  I preferred the latter profile for probably the same reason I prefer California cabernets to French Bordeaux – I like getting a full wallop of flavor, even if it means sacrificing a little subtlety.

I had the Jolly Pumpkin La Rojalast night at Bar Crudo’s April beer dinner and thought it would have been a nice addition to the line-up above if I had known about it.

In the oud bruins, well, we only had one due to the butter compartment mix-up mentioned above.  It was cool to taste how a beer that seems so similar to a Flanders red relative to the full range of beer styles, and even is identified as one on its own label, actually tastes quite different when sampled back-to-back with reds.  I liked it, but preferred the red ales as a style, given that they were both more sweet and more tart than the mellower Ichtegem’s Grand Cru. 

In the fruited wild ales, we had my other favorite of the night, the Russian River Supplication, and a bit of a surprise in that the Quarta Runa.  The Quarta Runa wasn’t really a sour ale, and so far as I can tell was not wild either.  This is a shame because I think it would have been better sampled alongside more comparable beers.  With all the sour beers we had tasted so far, the non-sour beer fell a little flat on palates expecting some pucker. 

The Supplication, on the other hand, is a beer that I will probably never be able to get enough of, quite literally, since there are only a limited number of bottles out there to be bought.  The Supplication has so much going on between the sour cherries in the brew, the Brettanomyces yeast and the Lactobacillus and Pediococcus bacteria that fermented it, and the oak and Pinot Noir flavors from the barrel aging process.  It is quite tart, but the interplay of all these flavors together gives it a complexity that the other beers couldn’t quite match, much as I loved them.  The Brett flavor was mild, although it was awesome that even the first time drinkers of craft beer noticed it.  Before I got a chance to explain it someone asked, “Why does the cherry one smell like gym socks?”  After telling the group that they had horse-y smelling wild yeast in their beer, not to mention bacteria, a few were skeptical that this was really a coveted beer.  However, I don’t think there were any skeptics left once everyone had given it a taste. 

The gueuze round really knocked home the point about Brett.  As we were passing around the Beatification and the Cantillon I told everyone to give them a sniff and the point was settled once and for all that, yup, good beer really can smell like a saddle blanket.  I also got a chance to put my new theory out there:

•           American beer fad on its way out – extreme hops
•           American beer fad reaching its peak – barrel aging
•           American beer fad just ramping up – spontaneous fermentation
•           American beer fad yet to be – low/no hop beers: bocks & gruits?

Extreme hops: Everyone has done the super-hopped thing by now, and I think it would have died down already if it hadn’t been for the shortage, which tempted rebellious-by-nature brewers across the country to spit in the eye of prudence and market dynamics.  It may sound like I’m not a fan, but that’s not true, I just think it’s been overdone and genuinely delicious high hop beers (see: pretty much the entire Stone portfolio) have given way to some hops-for-the-sake-of-hops beers.  

Barrel aging: I love this trend and am so happy that it seems like everyone has one now.  The barrels are a whole new dimension for brewers to play with, in addition to the old standards of malt, hops, and yeast.  Not only is there a question of which wood to use (most go with Oak but Dogfish Head’s new brown uses Palo Santo), there is the issue of what prior experience the barrels have.  Brewers right now are playing with a variety of wine barrels (as with the pinot barrels used in the Supplication above), bourbon barrels (as with those used in the Allagash Curieux or the Lost Abbey Angel’s Share or Firestone’s Velvet Merkin), and brandy barrels (as with North Coast’s Old Stock). 

Spontaneous fermentation: So far, Russian River (Beatification) and Allagash (TBD) are the only American brewers I know of with 100% spontaneously fermented beers, but where they go, I’m sure others will soon follow.  Be on the look out for more of these to come.

Minimal hops: Now that the realities of the hops situation have hit home and Imperial IPAs are getting a little overexposed, I’m hoping some people see it as an opportunity to introduce malt-driven styles like bocks that have gotten little attention before, or herb bittered gruits that are virtually unknown to-date.  I haven’t seen much evidence of this yet, except for the gruit at Magnolia (see upcoming post), but I’m expecting it.