This Rice is Nice

Usually, all you ever hear about rice in beer is how the macrobrewers use it as an adjunct, along with corn, to lighten the body of their beers.  When used broadly, an ‘adjunct’ refers to any ingredient other than water, malted grain, hops, and yeast added to a beer.  However, in common use, the term ‘adjunct’ usually refers an unmalted grain (often rice or corn) added to beer to do one or more of the following:

• Lower the production cost (Rice and corn both cost less than malted barley.)
• Enhance stability of flavor (Rice & corn add fewer soluble proteins, which can cause haze.  They also add fewer polyphenols, which can give an astringent taste.)
• Decrease the amount of malt flavor (Rice has almost no flavor, so a beer with lots of rice in place of malted barley will have less malt flavor.  Corn has a mild, sweet flavor.). 
• Lighten the color (Rice & corn are both lighter than malted barley, and because they have very mild/neutral flavors, they will produce a lighter colored beer without changing the taste of the beer too much, aside from lightening it.)
• Lighten the body (Medium-sized unfermentable proteins, some of the same ones that cause haze, are responsible for the body, or ‘mouthfeel’ of beer.  Using rice or corn will lower contribute fewer of these proteins to the beer and lighten the body.)

So, if you are looking at this list, you are probably thinking something along the lines of, “Well, I like inexpensive, stable beers, but not when it comes at the expense of flavor, color, and body.  I mean, those elements of beer are the whole reason I drink beer.”  And that, my friends, is why most craft breweries do not brew with corn or rice.  The macrobrewers are a whole other kettle of fish (or wort, as the case may be).  They rely on being able to produce a high volume of low-cost beers that can last for interminably long periods on the shelf, to eventually be bought by consumers who are probably looking for something light in flavor and body, for ease of consumption in large quantities.  This is why the macros use a lot of rice and corn.  So much rice, in fact, that Anheuser-Busch is the single largest buyer of US rice. 

All this is very long lead up to this an admission I’m about to make that might not have otherwise made sense to all the Thirsty Hopster readers out there:

I just had a rice beer last night and thoroughly enjoyed it!

Now, the beer I tried, the Hitachino Nest Red Rice Ale from Kiuchi Brewery, isn’t your average beer with rice.  In fact, it seems like no one is quite sure what it is.  Beer Advocate calls it a Belgian-style Strong Pale Ale, their importers call it a “Sweet Lacto Stout” (which it most definitely is not), and I’d argue that it’s got a lot of characteristics of an Imperial Pilsner.  It starts with pilsner malt (and of course the red rice that makes up 25% of the grain bill), is hopped with Hallertau hops (one of the classic Noble hops used in pilsners), is fermented up to 8.0% (in the “Imperial” range).  But that’s where this all falls off the tracks.  You see, Belgian Strong Pale Ales start out with these ingredients too, but are made with Belgian ale yeasts, instead of the lager yeasts used to make Pilsners.  Hitachino definitely uses an ale yeast (and a sake yeast to break down the rice!), not a lager yeast, so… so much for my imperial pilsner theory.  I can’t find a reputable source for what kind of ale yeast they use, Belgian or otherwise, but a few threads of conversation from other bloggers suggests that it is Belgian.  Perhaps I will have to verify this when I’m in Japan next month. 

Ok, so if we’re going to settle on calling it a Belgian-style Strong Pale Ale (BSPA from here on out), which I am now in agreement with, it’s time to start calling out what’s unique about it.  The two main differences from your standard BSPA, such as Duvel, are both mentioned above:

• 25% rice in the grain bill
• Sake yeast added to ale yeast during fermentation

The rice has a strong effect on the beer.  It is light bodied, but not watery.  It has a fantastic pink color, but one that is just pink enough to be charming, and not so pink that images of bubble gum and Barbies come to mind.  In fact, I kept holding it up to the light, because from some angles, it was just a light amber, while from others it was unmistakably tinged the hue of ruby red grapefruit.  The color even bubbles up through the head a bit, which was remarkable in itself for its great staying power.  It wasn’t quite as effervescent and aggressive a head as you’ll find in typical BSPAs, as in, it won’t take over half or more of a snifter, but it will give you a thick half inch or more that sticks around while you drink. 

The flavor of the rice and the sake yeast are hard for me to tease apart from one another.  I think it’s fair to say that the berry-like tastes the beer offers come from the combination of the fruitiness of Belgian ale yeast with the dryness and tartness of sake yeast.  I would also hazard a guess that the earthy and spicy flavors come from the rice.  They reminded me of jasmine rice, but then I’ve never had red rice, so I could be taking an unnecessary step away from the source with my guess there.  The best source on red rice that I can find is an online natural foods store that describes red rice as “nutty and earthy,” so maybe that earthy part is right on.  The flavors just kept washing in, in waves, and then dimming out, all relatively subtle.  There’s no one flavor that dominates here, and part of the trouble of describing them is that neither red rice, nor sake, are items that I consume regularly.  Suffice it to say that the beer is complex, shows no hint of the ‘adjunct-y’ off flavors of macro-lagers, and is a fun workout for your tasting functions. 

The high alcohol content was very well masked by the other elements of the flavor and mouthfeel.  This is particularly dangerous if you find yourself with a 23.4 ounce bottle, an intense curiosity, and no roommates at home.  You might think to yourself, “Oh, that’s just a pint and a half, I can handle that.”  No, no you cannot.  Not at 8%.  Not if the bottle doesn’t mention anywhere on its lovely screen-printed owl label that it is 8%.  Not unless your former professional Israeli baseball playing roommate comes home and finishes it for you.  And with that my friends, I am off.  I hear Drake’s calling my name. 

For more on this subject, check out this NY Times article from late 2006. 

Saison & Biere de Garde tasting wrap-up

I think it’s fair to say the saison & biere de garde tastings this weekend were a great success!  Thank you so much to everyone who helped make these tastings happen:

• Rami, Nate, & Dave at Healthy Spirits for helping me pick out beers and bringing over some very tasty hummus.  See photo at right.: Rami, me, Nate. 
• Beth & Craig at City Beer Store for helping me pick out beers
• My roommates & building-mates for putting up with two-a-weekend tastings
• Gary & Diana Arsham for minding the home front when I ran out at last minute to pick up cups
• Rich Yazbeck for manning the camera Saturday night
• All the blog commenters who offered suggestions for beers to include
• All of the tasting attendees for indulging my obsession and showing up to taste and discuss new beers

We ended up running two tasting sessions to accommodate all 31 attendees:

• 13 attendees plus me on Friday, May 30^t
• 19 attendees plus me on Saturday, May 31^st - See photo at right

Each session tasted nine beers, with one substitution from Friday to Saturday.  Here’s the line-up:

1. Ommegang Hennepin (saison, American)
2. North Coast Le Merle (saison, American)
3. Lost Abbey Red Barn (saison, American)
4. Fantome La Dalmatienne (saison, Belgian)
5. Fantome Noel (saison, Belgian)
6. Rulles Estivale (blonde/wheat biere de garde, Belgian)
7. Lost Abbey Avant Garde (golden biere de garde, American)
8. Russian River Perdition (brown biere de garde, American)
9. Castelain Blonde (blonde biere de garde, French) - Friday only
10. Eisenbahn Lust (biere de champagne, Brazilian) - Saturday only

Yes, yes, I know I picked many American brews for a pair of styles in which a traditionalist might have gone Belgian and French.  However, I think these were the best choices given the selection available at local stores.  For some of the imports, e.g. Castelain, I was only able to pick up 3 bottles between both City Beer Store and Healthy Spirits, which is why it was a Friday-only beer. Plus, I wanted to show the range of these styles, rather than picking four of each that were almost indistinguishable, and if there is one thing at which American brewers are very good, it’s pushing the bounds of styles to create unique niches. 

As for the Eisenbahn Lust, that was a last minute addition to the line-up.  It was not meant as a true member of the tasting, but as a special toast to my friends Alexa and Dave.  They had RSVP’d a couple weeks ago for the Saturday night tasting, and then on the Wednesday before the tasting Dave proposed to Alex and the got engaged.  I figured what better way to celebrate than pouring a couple bottles to the tasting group so everyone could wish them a hearty congratulations.  The Eisenbahn was a little too syrupy-sweet for my taste, and I’m not sure it justifies the price tag except in novelty and celebratory value, but it was a fun beer with which to toast the new couple. 

We ran through the saisons from light to dark, with the Hennepin being the clearly lightest pick at a bright straw color, the Le Merle and Red Barn being a pretty similar golden tone, the La Dalmatienne being an orange-gold or light amber, and finishing with the medium brown Noel.  For an overview of both the saison and biere de garde styles, see this handout I prepared for the tasting. 

The two clear favorites in my mind were the La Dalmatienne and the Red Barn.  I can’t pick between the two because I’m not sure they were directly comparable.  They took the saison style down very different paths.  The La Dalmatienne was more candi sugar-y and caramel-y than any of the others.  It still had the fruit-forward flavors and spice of the other saisons, but I wondered if the richer, sweeter flavors it offered didn’t make it more of a saison-biere de garde hybrid.  I don’t think it sits solidly in one camp or the other, with the peppery spice and lack of ‘cellar’ character pulling it in the direction of a saison, and the noticeable malt presence and lack of typical saison dryness pulling it in the direction of a biere de garde.  In any case, whatever it is, I loved it. 

I’d give the Red Barn the win for best of the traditional saisons, hands down.  In fact, it’s quite easy for me to rank the three light saisons in order of preference: (1) Red Barn, (2) Le Merle, (3) Hennepin.  The Red Barn had just so many more layers of flavor than the Hennepin, and a bit more than the Le Merle.  Orange and lemon flavors swelled forward on the first part of the taste, beginning to alternate with just a slightly sour tang and mild spicy hop flavor from the Phoenix & Tettnang hops, and then ending with the peppery spice of the farmhouse yeast.  It was very smooth and well integrated, considering that they add orange peel, ginger, grains of paradise*, and black pepper to the brew.  Sometimes when additives are used in other beers, rather than relying on the quirks of the yeast or hops that suggested these flavor families originally, the additives stick out and demand to be noticed as individuals.  In the Red Barn, the flavors all work together to created a unified, complex taste profile.  It is a beer you could just as easily sit and savor, rolling it over your tongue to try to pick out the different elements, or drink by the less cautious mouthful on a hot summer day. 

*Grains of paradise are a West African seed with a peppery flavor that is sometimes compared to coriander or cardamom and often used in beers with citrus flavors to add spice and to give a warming sensation. 

The Fantome Noel was a great addition to the line-up given that it was such a different variety of saison than all of the rest.  It is a winter or Christmas-style saison, meaning that if you want to get strict about beer style classification, it is actually a Belgian Specialty Ale, a sister to the saison and biere de garde in the larger Belgian and French ale category.  I expected a beer with the nutmeg, cinnamon, or clove flavors that are usually prominent in Christmas beers.  While the Noel was a medium brown color, much like a spiced Christmas beer, it surprised me in that the spice profile was much more like a traditional saison, with just hints of Christmas spices.  The biggest difference from the traditional saisons was the beer’s smokiness.  Genelle hit it right on the head when she said it tasted like beef jerky.  I hadn’t yet tried it, and looked up at her from my pouring duties nervously, “As in, it tastes like beef jerky and that’s a good thing?  Or, as in, it tastes like beef jerky and that’s disgusting?”  Genelle, “Oh, no! I love beef jerky!  I make my mom mail me giant Costco packs of Oberto from Seattle, since I can’t get it here.  I like this!”  I liked it too, but I wonder if I wouldn’t have liked it more with a punchbowl spice profile making it Christmas-y, instead of the smokiness making it Christmas-y. It was interesting to taste how the smoke melded with the saison fruitiness, and to compare it to the La Dalmatienne in mouthfeel, since this one was did have the typical saison dryness. 

The biere de gardes were harder to compare to one another because each one had a very different color and body.  They are a relatively obscure style, originally from France, and somewhat difficult to track down.  As such, only the Castelain, of which I could only get 3 bottles, is a true French biere de garde.  The Avant Garde is still traditional in style, but made in America.  Both the Estivale and the Perdition are borderline biere de gardes, in that the first can potentially be called a witbier (a sister style to the biere de garde in the Belgian and French Ales category) or a Belgian pale ale (another sister style), while I’ve seen the second called a Belgian pale ale despite its brown color, a Belgian specialty ale (yet another sister style), or a brown ale. 

The Estivale was most interesting to me as a point of comparison to the other biere de gardes.  The wheat character of the beer was noticeable in the taste, lightening the body of the beer, and giving it the grainy flavor that made me think of pancakes or Pillsbury biscuits, just a touch sweet.  I would drink it in the same situations that I would choose a witbier, and if push came to shove, really I’d call it a witbier.  Not only does it have the mild herbal flavor of a wit, I don’t think it lived up to the biere de garde profile, in having wheat-y instead of toffee or caramel malt and in lacking woodsy funk. 

By contrast, I think the Perdition does fit well within the biere de garde style.  It did have the woodsy funk.  It did also have a prominent but soft malt character that was barley, not wheat, and somewhat caramel-y, though really a bit darker, with a touch of dark dried fruit, but drier than in Belgian strong dark ales.  I liked this best of the biere de gardes, but wasn’t as excited about any of the biere de gardes as I was about Red Barn and La Dalmatienne. 

The Avant Garde and Castelain were both representative of what we set out to try, but just not as interesting to me as some of the other styles of beer I’ve been drinking lately.  They didn’t have the funk of a Brett beer, the exceptional malt forwardness of scotch ale, or the peppery spice of the saison.  This isn’t their fault - they do what they meant to do very, very well.  I just couldn’t get too excited about it.  I wish that I had included the Jolly Pumpkin Oro de Calabaza instead of the Avant Garde, because it brings so much more funk that it treads the line between biere de garde and a sour, wild beer incredibly well, instead of staying safely but less interestingly within the biere de garde definition. 

Next Tasting Session:

I haven’t set either the date or the theme for certain yet, but I can give a tentative preview to everyone. 

Unlike the last three tastings, the June one will likely be on a weekday.  I need to move these tastings out of my apartment, as they’ve gown too big and the various restaurants, bars, and beer stores I’ve talked to about hosting the tastings can only accommodate a group like ours on a weeknight, likely a Sunday. 

Right now, the tentative date, subject to confirmation with the hosting venue is Sunday, June 29^th.  The host venue is completely up in the air right now. 

Though I’ve had a lot of fun with the Belgian-style beers the last two months, I don’t want to get stuck in a rut, so I am thinking that the theme of the next tasting may be off-beat IPAs.  I plan to look for breweries that do something unusual one way or another with their IPA, whether that means using rye malt, fermenting with a Belgian yeast, using a very unique hopping technique, or adding an oddball fruit or spice. 

I hope that those of you who came to the saison tasting can come again and that those of you who couldn’t make it can join us next time!

What’s a vacation without a little beer? The Thirsty Hopster takes on Santa Fe

A week ago today, I departed San Francisco on a much needed vacation.  Unlike most of my other recent trips, this one was not supposed to revolve around beer.  Now that my various beer enterprises (this blog, the tastings I host, the beer business ideas I bat around, etc.) consume on the order of 20 hours per week of my free time, I had been starting to feel the need for a vacation from beer, rather than a vacation with beer. 

The plan was simple:

• 4 days in Santa Fe, a city not renowned for its beer, with my sister and a group of 11 co-workers and friends
• 2 days driving Route 1 up the California coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco with a college friend

And we did stick to the plan, more or less, but somehow along the way beer weaseled its way onto the itinerary.  All I can say is

• (A) What? You expect me to drive by a brewery without stopping to poke around? Really! I can’t help it if they just appear along the side of the road.
• (B) I’m so glad I caved because the sudsy parts of the trip were a reminder that when you love what you do, you don’t really need a vacation from it.

Friday, May 23 - Monday, May 26: Santa Fe

Photos to be added tomorrow

The day began early, at 4:15am.  Living in San Francisco, where a cab to SFO costs $45+ and a cab to OAK $55+, and the public transportation requires multiple transfers on vehicles overflowing to the point of active passenger management, I miss the option of an $18 cab ride back home or the $1.25 T ride complete with an almost-guaranteed seat in Boston. 

After taking the J line to the BART to the AirBART shuttle to the Oakland airport, I arrived just in time to hear my flight had been delayed an hour, giving me ample time to gulp down a vat of iced coffee, which I would come to regret while occupying my window seat for the next two hours. 

When I first arrived in Albuquerque it was overcast but warm, but by the time the Sandia shuttle had driven me an hour northeast and 1,700 feet up in elevation, it was pouring hard enough that I was wishing the shuttle were an ark, or at least that I had any one of the following: an umbrella, a jacket, closed-toed shoes, a sister who understood the phrase “unlock the car before I come out from under the awning so I don’t get too wet”.

I’ll spare you the full details of every meal, every conversation, etc., but beer highlight of Friday was our trip to Kokoman Fine Wines & Liquors. 

This place is an oasis in what is quite literally a desert, both beer-wise and otherwise.  They have a large warehouse-like space with one moderately long aisle devoted to beer, half refrigerated, half shelved.  Their selection was about 2/3 domestic, with an emphasis on New Mexico and Colorado beers, a fair showing of California and Pacific Northwest brews, and a smaller but still surprising number of beers from elsewhere stateside.  While the selection beats anywhere else I’ve been in the Santa Fe area, I have one gripe: many of the bottles on the shelves were coated in a none-too-thin layer of dust.  Fresh beer, this was not.  However, as we went to check out, we discovered that inexpensive beer, it was.  At least, it was to us San Franciscans, who need reminders every once in a while that paying $10.99 for a six-pack of microbrew is not inevitable.

We were stocking up with a diverse group of non-devotees in mind, and an eye on the specials, but I think we still assembled a pretty decent stock:

• Jolly Pumpkin Tasting Group:
  • Calabaza Blanca Witbier
  • Bam Biere Saison
  • La Roja Wild Ale
• Full Sail Brewmaster’s Reserve Tasting Group:
  • Vesuvius Belgian-style Strong Pale Ale
  • Nugget Red Ale - it took me a while to find this online, I realize now this is because it was a spring seasonal beer from 2007!  Seriously, someone needs to get inventory management under control at Kokoman.
  • Top Sail Bourbon Barrel Imperial Porter
• General drinking beers:
  • Fort Collins Retro Red Ale
  • Deschutes Mirror Pond Pale Ale
  • Bridgeport IPA

My favorites of the bunch were the Jolly Pumpkin Bam Biere and La Roja, and the Full Sail Imperial Porter.  Between them, you’ve got something for drinking at just about every occasion. 

The Bam Biere packed a surprising punch of funkiness for something looked so unassuming in its 12 oz. bottles without any labels screaming “special!”  The La Roja appeals to my recent obsession with sour beers.  I like that the earthiness (which you also can find in the Bam or other pale farmhouse ales) is combined with fruity and sour flavors.  While the Bam is dry and spicy, the La Roja is tart and spicy, without being too sweet. 

The bourbon barrel-aged imperial porter knocked the other two Full Sails out of the park.  I regret that we drank all three out of short plastic cups, because I think the Belgian-style and the red ale suffered for it.  However, I am also sure that part of the problem was oxidation, given that I now know the red was over a year old.  I love the richness of this barrel porter.  You can taste the vanilla oak flavors from the barrels, the whiskey flavors from the Kentucky bourbon that had been in the barrels previously, mild roast flavors from the malt, and a noticeable alcohol presence. 

Though I thought we’d be set for the weekend, by the end of Friday night most of the beer was gone, and I was glad I had hidden a few for Saturday consumption.  We went back to the store on Saturday, but this time only to Albertsons, and only to pick up a few mix packs and get on our way.  We picked up a couple New Belgium Mixed 12-Packs with 1554 (Belgian-style dark ale), Mothership Wit, Fat Tire (American amber ale), and Mighty Arrow (American pale ale).  I stuck to the 1554, which has been a personal comfort-beer of mine for a while now, and which I credit for getting me through the LSATs.  I used to go sit in Rose Pistola on Columbus Ave on a weekday, order a pizza and a bottle of 1554, and run through my practice tests.  Nerdy as it is, I miss those days — they were some of my quietly happiest days from last year. 

We also spent Saturday visiting the Georgia O’Keefe Museum, where we were asked to stand at least a foot from the artwork.  They had a joint Georgia O’Keefe and Ansel Adams exhibit showing, and we had beer staring up close at an Adams photo in which a rock seemed to be floating in a black void surrounded by snow.  After being warned by the security guard (we weren’t being rambunctious, or threatening to touch it, just curious), he followed us around the rest of the museum.  I’ve loved almost everything Ansel Adams did for a while now.  He can take such mundane natural scenes, and some that are spectacular no matter what, and make them seem otherworldly just by cranking up the white/black contrast or focusing on the nearly parallel lines in a stand of trees, or bringing out a precise clarity of texture in the foreground presented against a smooth and texture-less background.  However, I think I’m just starting to appreciate Georgia O’Keefe, mostly the abstracts, though I still hate those ubiquitous sunflowers.  This may just be because they trigger memories of a horror movie I saw as a kid, in which people get lost in a sunflower field full of stalks taller than their heads, and then attacked by aliens.  I think.  The details are sketchy but the aversion to sunflowers remains. 

Then in the afternoon, we set out on an impromptu brewery tour that ended up encompassing Blue Corn Café and Santa Fe Brewing Company. 

At Blue Corn Cafe, we had lunch and ordered sampler platters of their beer, so many platters (between the 13 of us) that they ran out of sample glasses and started pouring us half-tumblers - bad idea.  Though the tray started with a series of benign light beers (a honey wheat, a blonde, a hefeweizen), they started cranking up the body and hops in the medium-range beers (a pale ale, an IPA, an amber, a red), and then finished off with a couple light bodied but dark beers (a brown, a stout).  It was a very complete platter. 

My favorites were the red and the stout, followed by the IPA.  The red had a good hops-malt balance.  It wasn’t something incredibly unique, but it was a very enjoyable beer to drink alongside my stuffed sopapilla.  The stout, as mentioned above, was relatively light bodied, perhaps the opposite of an imperial, but the flavors that were there were pleasantly roasty, without an overly acidic or bitter aftertaste.  The IPA was very citric, especially in the nose, which made it easier to get the non-hops fans to try.  I think they went easy on the bittering hops and high on the aromatics.  Again, nothing incredibly unique, but easy to drink and enjoy. 

Once we had finished the trays, with much trading across platters (I gave away our blonde and honey wheat in exchange for a red and a stout), it was off to SFBC.  But first, we walked by a store in the mall with a sign that said “cleavage jewelry & clothing,” with the “cleavage” covered up by a somewhat transparent piece of tape with “vintage” written on it.  Was that a typo?  And why did they not send the sign back to the printers?  “Cleavage” for “vintage” is a pretty obvious swap. 

Of course, the first half hour of the SFBC trip was a comedy of errors.  No one had looked up the address, but we all knew we had seen it from the highway on the way in from the airport.  Emily had to pee.  Badly.  And we had eight people stuffed with very little elbow room into the SUV.  We navigated back onto I-25, with Melissa at the wheel and about four backseat drivers shouting over her shoulder.  Then one of the multiple BlackBerry owners in the car got service and the BlackBerry informed us that we ought to be heading east from Santa Fe (not true).  Then someone else got service, found the SFBC webpage and informed us that it was now quarter to four, but the brewery closes at two on Saturdays (also not true).  We were about to throw in the towel and pull over at the nearest fast food franchise to give Emily some relief, when all at once we saw the brewery on out left, like a beacon on a hill.  Getting to the brewery required off-roading up a hill through the back entrance (or rather, it wouldn’t have required this if we hadn’t missed our original turn), but we made it.

When we arrived at Santa Fe Brewing Company, we worried that we were crashing a private party, since we still thought the brewery wasn’t officially open past 2pm.  Not that this stopped us, it just meant that I hung at the back of the group while telling everyone else, “Of course this isn’t a private party!” so that if it was, they’d be the ones to take the brunt of the weird looks. 

Things got off to a rocky start when I saw a beer listed on their board as “Viszolay Belgian” and asked the bartender, “What kind of Belgian is it?”  His response was, “It’s brewed with Belgian yeast.”  Yeah, dude, no shit.  I continued to probe, “Oh, ok.  But what style is it? You know, dubbel, tripel…?”  His response, “No, it’s a Belgian.”  Ok, whatever.  This was the point where I gave up and said, “I’ll have the Chicken Killer Barleywine.”  I wish he had been able to articulate what the Belgian was like,  because when I look at their website now, it sounds delicious:

Viszolay is a distinctly continental ale with a hint of the southwest. Belgian malt, Bavarian and Czech hops, and a secret blend of German and Belgian yeast strains provide this beer, inspired by the Trappist’s Dubbel style ale, with a strong traditional base, while a hint of New Mexico wildflower honey infuses it with that ethereal quality that we New Mexicans simply call, “enchanting”. Like the Trappist ales from which it sprung, Viszolay is light and refreshing. The hop’s subtle notes are overpowered by complex fruity flavors derived from the Belgian yeast, leaving Viszolay a very drinkable (yet rather potent) addition to the Santa Fe Brewing Company’s family of beers.

We took our drinks up to the balcony for what unfolded as a nearly perfect late afternoon.  The sun was shining, it was about 80 F degree out, we had some cold pints in our hand that had cost only $2.50 because it was happy hour… and a massive rugby team was sprawled over the grounds below us.  These guys were hilarious, and at one point started playing full cup boat races, after which they were more hilarious.  There was also the point at which Melissa pointed over the rail and said, “Look, Jess.”  Me: “The dog?  It’s really adorable.” Melissa: “No wonder you’re single — I clearly meant the hot guy.”  Me: “Eh.  But I do really love that dog.” 

Though I drank a pint of each of the barleywine and the IPA, I have no lingering thoughts on either.  I’d drink them again, but didn’t come away vowing to import SFBC to California.

Sunday rolled around and with it came the Tent Rocks hike.  We schlepped out there, mildly hung-over at 9:00am, only to spend an extra 45 minutes in the car because we took the wrong exit.  I have a remarkable ability to sleep through any car ride (and a dangerous capacity to slip into this state even when I’m the driver), so I dozed most of the way.  The hike winds through narrow chasms in the rock, carved by now non-existent rivers up to a 360 degree vista at the top.  We all enjoyed the hike, which was only very mildly strenuous, but I felt bad for sweating at all when we passed an 8-month pregnant woman with three little boys under 5 years old making her way down from the top.  The other moment for concern was the boulder incident.  At one point Kevin thought it would a great idea to climb a boulder for a photo op, a move that followed Matt’s equally fantastic (but, luckily, scrapped) idea to crawl into small den in the rock that looked like it might house a pack of sleeping coyotes.  As Kevin scrambled to his boulder of choice, he dislodged a rock larger than my head which started rolling down hill with ever-increasing momentum.  Though it might have taken out downhill hikers, if there had been any near us, there was no danger of it taking out one of us, something everyone in our group realized, except me.  In my panic, I tried to run away and picked the one direction in which I was absolutely blocked, running myself straight into a rock wall, bashing my shins, and breaking a large branch with my head.  Clearly, if we still lived in a “survival of the fittest” type environment, I’d have been weeded out long ago. 

Monday mostly just involved cleaning up the remarkable quantity of trash accumulated of the last few days, and bidding good-bye to sub-sets of the group as they headed off to the airport. 

I originally intended to include a description of the road trip up the coast in this posting, but it is so long already, that I think I need to work on my materials for tonight’s saison tasting and hold off on the second half of this story until tomorrow. 

So, until then,

Cheers!

Where to eat while you drink in San Francisco

I got a question by email tonight from someone coming in to SF from out of town, who wanted to know where to get dinner while he was here.  My go-to suggestion for these occasions is usually Magnolia, but this question came with a twist.  He’d already been to all the brewpubs/microbreweries in town.  Where else is there to go? 

Luckily, I have lots of thoughts on this.  I’m posting the 3 suggestions I gave him here, for all to debate.  This could have been a much longer list, but I wanted to avoid places that are really about their food and just happen to have good beer.  I wanted to focus on places that are very much about their beer (and in The Alembic’s case, all drinks) and just happen to have good food as well.  

So here they are, in alphabetical, not rank, order (because I just can’t choose between them, they have such different strengths and weaknesses):

The Alembic is owned by Dave McLean, the owner of Magnolia, and is just a couple blocks further up Haight Street, at Cole Street. 

 

 

• Beer: They have great beers, with a limited selection on tap (5 - 10 if I remember correctly), always including at least one Magnolia brew and at least one Moonlight brew, and a bunch more in bottles.
• Other drinks: They also have arguably the best cocktails in San Francisco, including traditional ones and inventive ones, so your non-drinking pal will be very happy. They make almost all their own syrups and bitters, etc., that go into the cocktails.
• Food: The food is very in the hard to define good “new American” sort of style. It is also small plates style and almost all local, organic, etc. If you get 2 small plates a piece, that’s about $18 - $20 per person on food.
• Ambiance: It’s dark and has an upscale ambiance, that gets somewhat overcrowded in the front of the restaurant by the bar, but is much better at the back where the tables are.
• Service: (1) it gets crowded on weekends, so go early if at all possible or you could find yourself on an hour long waitlist, (2) the bartenders get rude every time they get busy, so this is one more reason to go early.

La Trappe just opened in the last year, on the same block in North Beach that I moved away from a year ago.  I am so jealous of the new inhabitants of my old apartment!  It is a Belgian restaurant serving authentic Belgian food and all Belgian beers. 

 

• Beer: They have just about every potential Belgian beer you could imagine available. I’d love to list them for you, but their website has no information on it. I’ve had St. Bernardus Abt 12, Kwak, Duchesse de Bourgogne, and others there.
• Other drinks: I have no idea if they have hard alcohol, you may want to call to find out.
• Food: Ilovedthe chicken stew I had the one time I ate there (I usually just drink there), and the frites are great as well. I’d say entrees would be $14 - $24-ish, but I’m just guessing at my memory.
• Ambiance: The ambiance at La Trappe is probably the nicest of the 3 suggested here. It is all underground and designed to look like a monastery, with exposed brick walls, wrought iron lanterns handing from the ceiling, and rough hewn wooden furniture.
• Service: I’m not sure how busy it gets on weekends, since I’ve only been on weekdays, but I bet they’ll let you make reservations. It is much more a restaurant than the other two, which are as much bars as they are restaurants. When the owner is there, which is every time I have been, he loves to give beer suggestions, and once (only after he talked to us and realized we were beer people who would appreciate this) even sent over a different beer than I had ordered, offering to replace it with the original beer I had ordered if I didn’t think this one was better. Of course, it was better, so I kept it and drank it all down.

Monk’s Kettle is in the upper Mission, and it also just opened recently, in just the last six months or so. 

 

 

• Beer: They have a large beer list, about 20 - 25 beers on tap, and a six page long list of bottles. They have some great stuff bothin the tap and bottle lists, including Moonlight Working for Tips on tap, Gouden Carolus Tripel on tap, Ola Dubh 12 Year reserve in bottles, Aventinus Eisbock in bottles, andMountain Meadows Mead in bottles.
• Other drinks: They have some wines, but I don’t think there are any cocktails or hard alcohols of any kind available.
• Food: The food can be very good or just ok, depending on what you get. It is a mixture of upscale pub food & some Belgian items. My friends and I love their burgers, especially the blue cheese burger, but thought the pulled pork sandwich was pretty boring. They don’t have their prices on their menu online, but I can tell you that an entree will run you something in the teens.
• Ambiance: It’s pretty small, but did not seem too loud to me. Most of the tables are sheltered from the crowd by big booths and the bar has a chalkboard in front of where you sit so people can write notes or suggestions to the next customers, which I loved.
• Service: They also get very crowded, and do not take reservations. I’ve waited hours on weekdays before. However, their bartenders are really extra nice, and love to talk beer and chat, and they’ll make you think they are your best friend even if you’ve just met them. Sitting at the bar to eat can save you some waiting time, but not much, you still need show up early.

 

Two Brew Books (say *that* five times fast)

Yesterday was the annual Bay to Breakers “race” in San Francisco.  While I had a fun time dressed as the letter ‘A’ in an alphabet (plus full punctuation contingent) of friends, and beer certainly featured prominently in the day’s activities, I’m afraid B2B has no place in the blog.  Quality over quantity, my friends. 

In fact, I figure this is the perfect time to roll out reviews of two beer books I read recently, to counter with literacy any impressions of idiocy I created yesterday in the midst of the “beer cheer”.

Brewing Up a Business by Sam Calagione (Dogfish Head Brewery)

The short of it: Interesting and funny, but in the end, probably not incredibly helpful to a budding entrepreneur.  Ironically, despite the fact that balance among competing strong flavors is a hallmark of Dogfish beers, balance is exactly what this book lacked.  I don’t want to sound too harsh about it though, because I did enjoy it, but I just felt unsatisfied in the end and wish I had gotten more.  But, on to the positives first…

There is no doubt that Sam is a natural-born story teller.  The anecdote about his worst day ever (the multiple car wrecks are only the beginning) is hilarious and I loved the story of him rowing across the Delaware.  What can I say, I’m a sucker for historical re-enactments of any kind. Also, I was thinking Allie would really love to have seen it. 

Plus, the business lessons are in here, if you can cut through the smarminess of hearing “we make off-centered ales for off-centered people” for the 5,000^th time.  The ones I will take away are:

• Do your research: make sure the market needs your product before starting your company.  I think this is one of the most depressing lessons in microbrewing today.  The market expanded hugely 15 or 20 years ago where there were so few brewpubs and microbreweries.  If only I had been a legal drinker, or even out of 3^rd grade, during this era…  Now?  They’re everywhere and even if you make great beer, well, there’s already a lot of great beer on the shelves.  It’s not enough to be able to brew beer and run an operation, there needs to be a market opportunity if you expect your beer to take off. 
• Fall in love with sales.  If no one’s buying your product, you don’t have a business.  And, especially in an industry like brewing, no one can/will by your product if you’re not out there selling it.  All. Day. Long.  It’s a cliché complaint of small business owners, that they got into XYZ because they love XYZ but now all they do is take phone calls from customers and prepare invoices.  Yup, that’s what being a business owner is about, and if you don’t like it, you’re probably better off working for someone else.
• There’s a lot of do-it-yourself mechanical tinkering in brewing.  Sure, obviously commercial brewing involves lots of equipment for producing the beer.  And of course the brewer needs to know how all this equipment works and how to maintain and fix it all.  But I was surprised at how much re-use of equipment there was across breweries, from dairies to breweries.

However, there was an odd mix of personal and professional focus.  Sam seemed to want to give the viewer an insight into his personal life, but never commits to it.  You’re left wondering if this is (A) a lopsided biography or (B) a business how-to guide.  More likely it is (C) a book that does each reasonably well, but could probably be better if it chose to go one way other the other. 

On the personal side, I wanted to know more about how he got interested in brewing and how he developed his home brewing skills.  We get one story about hot, newly sanitized bottles that melted into his synthetic carpet, but that’s about it.  It’s all over before the first 18 pages are up.  I also wanted to know more about his wife, because she’s mentioned in passing references so frequently, but we never get the full story on her role in the business, or how becoming a small business owner affected her.  

The structure of the book is pretty clear, each chapter has a theme (e.g., building a brand), starts with a summary of the coming chapter, then a story about how Dogfish Head dealt with this issue, then a “moral of the story” type section on what the lesson he learned was.  I think it was this last part that irritated me - it came off as a bit pedantic.  As in, “Ooh, I once was as naïve as you, but now I am so wise.”  That’s probably true, but it emphasizes the gap between himself in the reader in the way a straight-forward how-to book doesn’t.  A how-to book just delivers instructions and assumes you are capable enough to follow them, without constantly reminding you that before reading it, and probably after as well, you have no idea what you are doing. 

There were two other items that I have to admit bugged me:

• I just have never liked the “off-centered ales for off-centered people” slogan.  I know he can’t really help that, but I always think: what does off-centered even mean?  Who wants something ‘off-centered’?  It sounds like ‘unbalanced’, I’d rather have something ‘innovative’ or ‘experimental’ or ‘original.’  Doesn’t “Original ales for original people” sound so much better?
• I find his obsession with certain subjects bizarre.  He seems to fixate on certain ideas like the Northfield Mt. Hermon School, Black Mountain College, or Andy Warhol, in undue proportion to their relevance.  I guess my stint in corporate America has left me jaded, but I just can’t get that excited about a motto or a mission statement, I care much more about the product (is it tasty?) and the business realities (are we making a profit?).  I’ve seen what happens when you agonize over a mission statement or a strategic plan, and in the end it just seems like most of that effort would be better spend honing one’s operations.  

 

Beer School by Steve Hindy & Tom Potter (Brooklyn Brewery)

I thought this one was the more helpful of the two books, but lacked some of the charisma of Brewing up a Business.  I think both differences stem from the fact that although Hindy homebrewed, it’s clear from the beginning that they are business-savvy beer lovers, not brewmasters.  They’ve had Bill Moeller or Garret Oliver overseeing the brewing, and F.X. Matt doing most or all of the brewing on contract until their own brewery was built.  The upshot of all this is, they are good at business and communication, it’s what they do full time and what they did before opening the Brooklyn Brewery (commercial banking and foreign war correspondence). 

 Part of the helpfulness of the book comes from their specificity.  They don’t just tell you the incorporated, they’ll tell you which ownership structure they chose, a limited partnership, and why, and what the alternatives were.  They don’t just tell you that raising the initial capital is hard, they explain how many dollars they needed, how long it took, what increments it came in, and the external factors that almost sunk them. 

The structure also makes it a little easier to understand.  Each chapter contains some storytelling and some instructing, as with Brewing up a Business, but the instruction comes packaged in its own sub-section with a clearly marked header proclaiming the main point of the lesson. 

Sure, there was some annoying cheerleading (for themselves and for the reader) in this book as well.  At the end of each chapter, they give themselves a letter grade, assessing how well they did at each of the facets and phases of their business.  Of course, this is as silly as it sounds because it gives the reader no extra useful information they had before and the grading criteria seems a little ludicrous.  They don’t give themselves all As, but when they give themselves a D on something, they usually also give themselves an “A for effort” as well. 

It is peppered with good stories as well, most of which make me realize I had no idea how much the crime situation has improved in their part of Brooklyn since they opened the brewery.  Between being robbed of $30,000 at gunpoint, losing their forklift battery to a break-in, and fending off thuggish mafiosos, there’s plenty of entertaining material. 

At the same time though, because the beer itself isn’t their baby as much as the business, it doesn’t seem to sparkle with the same reader-engaging joy of Brewing up a Business.  Don’t get me wrong, they’re not cold-hearted cutthroat businessmen and Sam Calagione isn’t a naïve creative type without an eye on the bottom line.  All of them care about their businesses and profitability, and all of them want to offer a well respected beer.  The difference is that Sam seems to be more interested in imagining what more beer could be (what if we put finished beer through a fresh hopping filter on the way to the glass?), while Hindy and Potter seem more interested in what more Brooklyn Brewery could be (what if they sold beer direct to the consumer online?).  The world needs both, innovators in beer, and innovators in business to make sure those beer innovators reach us consumers.  The difference is that the first feels romantic and adventurous to the beer lover in me, while the second sounds practical and responsible.  It’s closer to what I’m good at, but you know at least that the first type came to business for the love of beer, the second type may have come to beer for the love of business.  And there’s nothing wrong with loving business, I do, there’s a difference between those who are really intrigued by a cool new business idea, and those who just want to make a buck.  I think Hindy & Potter fall into the love of ideas camp, but it’s never quite possible to tell with business where the enthusiasm for an idea ends and the enthusiasm for cash begins.