A few months back, Laurelwood made the bold decision to scrap a big part of their regular line and offer more one-offs, including a rotating pale ale. They also added a cask engine. Unfortunately for me, it seems like some hop titan is always on cask, so I have mostly skipped it. Yesterday everything came together, however, and they had the current pale ale, a 4.5% charmer weirdly called "Nail Pale," on both keg and cask. Perfecto!
If you want to understand the mysteries of packaging chemistry, I recommend conducting the following experiment. Go to Laurelwood and get a pint of this beer in both forms. They look the same, except that the sparklered cask pour has a tighter, more mousse-like head. It might have been a touch cloudier. But put your nose over the beer and the differences present themselves. The icy keg pour has little to offer in scent, whereas the cask offers a vivid resinous pine perfume. Warmth encourages volatile aroma compounds to lift off the beer.
When the beers enter the mouth, the differences get even more obvious. At 30 BUs, Nail Pale is probably about five too many for a 10 Plato beer. On cask, it's okay, though. The architecture of the malt, mildly sweet, bready, and soft, cotton the hop zing. And the hops, for their part, are full of juicy flavor. The brewers must have added some salts, because it has a London-like minerality that stiffens the finish. On keg, all the flavors are present, but it's as if they beer has been pulled taut so that they're in very sharp focus. The carbonation both diminishes the malt's flavors and soft mouthfeel and sharpens hop bitterness. On cask the beer teeters on the edge of balance but on keg it falls into hoppy imbalance. What feels full and lush on cask seems thin on keg.
Last week we talked a lot about balance and hoppiness. In my comments, I should probably have admitted that the crime of overhopping is far more common than underhopping--at least on the West Coast. That gateway misdemeanor leads to certain felonies, like misusing cask engines. A cask isn't ideal for every beer, and they rarely work with big, hoppy ones. Cask ale is different, but you have to be willing to appreciate the benefits it offers. Souping up hops is not among them. It's only with a beer like Nail Pale that you can begin to see what casks can do for a beer.
Yesterday Portlander Adrienne So penned a provocative piece in Slate called Against Hoppy Beer. It created a predictable amount of hubbub on the intertubes and didn't seem to warrant a post from me, so I Facebooked it, whereupon a debate broke out. The issue is nicely summed up by a slugline to the Slate piece is "the craft beer industry’s love affair with hops is alienating people who don’t like bitter brews." Well, is it? So, arguing for the prosecution, offers this evidence:
Thanks in part to Grossman’s pioneering influence, the pale ale, and its
hoppier sister, the India pale ale, grew massively in popularity.
(Today they’re the third-best- and best-selling craft beer styles in the
country, respectively.) This was a positive development, but some
breweries went overboard. By the 1990s craft breweries like Rogue,
Lagunitas, Stone, and Dogfish Head were all engaged in a hop arms race,
bouncing ideas and techniques off one another to produce increasingly
aggressive, hop-forward beers....
Most beer judges agree that even with an experienced palate, most human
beings can’t detect any differences above 60 IBUs. Sierra Nevada Pale
Ale, one of the hoppiest beers of its time, clocks in at 37 IBUs. Some
of today's India pale ales, like Lagunitas’ Hop Stoopid, measure around
100 IBUs. Russian River’s Pliny the Younger,
one of the most sought-after beers in the world, has three times as
many hops as the brewery’s standard IPA; the hops are added on eight
separate occasions during the brewing process.
With respect to Adrienne (and Alan, who defended the position on Facebook): hogwash. This is one of those cases of the beer geek mistaking the bubble for the world. Most of the best-selling beers in the "craft" segment are all modest beers: Boston Lager, SN Pale, Fat Tire, Blue Moon (which to the average consumer is a craft brand), Widmer Hefeweizen. Those beers alone account for something like four million barrels of production--something on the order of a fifth to a quarter of the entire segment, depending on how you characterize it. Add to that the ton of wheats that sell like hotcakes (Oberon, Gumballhead, 312, Boulevard Unfiltered Wheat) and you're taking another big chunk of the market. To think that the craft market is awash in only the Plinys and Lagunitases, you have to live in ... Portland.
Three other quick points and then I'll knock it off:
Bitterness is relative. Adrienne begins by using mass market lagers as her baseline and notes that SN Pale was "one of the hoppiest beers of its time." But that's only because at the time there were no other types of beer in the US. A 37 BU beer isn't going to shock residents of Britain or even Germany. That it shocked Americans was a testament to our debased state at the time, not Pale's hoppiness. What humans consider normal changes over time. Sometimes we like beers quite hoppy, sometimes we don't. There is no Platonic ideal for the "right" amount of hoppiness, so it's impossible to norm it out. (So's story begins with a Kentuckian shocked at 30 BU Hopworks Velvet English. Ask yourself: who's out of step with hopping levels in this story? If your baseline is Bud Light, 30 IBUs are shocking--but there's no world in which Bud Light should be the baseline for anything.) Also, as a technical point, 60 BUs is nowhere near the threshold of human perception, and there's the further issue of the density of the beer. A 60 BU barley wine is no hop titan.
Hoppiness isn't just bitterness. Hop flavor and aroma can be intense, and when we say "hoppy," sometimes we don't mean bitter. I wouldn't be surprised if the Kentuckian in the story was just shocked at the type of beer he was served. Americans are making more richly layered, hop-forward--but not necessarily bitter--beers. Recently I've heard young beer fans describe IPAs and pales not as bitter, but "sweet"--so rich are they in the fruit flavors of modern hops. We have to define our terms.
Regions have different styles. You could easily go to Brussels, order up that unpronounceable "gueuze" thing and declare it "too tart." You could go to India and declare the food "too spicy." These are preferences, not, again, some kind of measure against a Platonic ideal. The United States appears to be developing a taste for hops, and I believe we may one day find ourselves with a hop-centric brewing tradition. It's way too early to make that case now. The opposite is true. We are the most style-promiscuous country in the world, probably in the history of the world.
If you look around you and all you see are ultra hoppy triple IPAs and imperialized whatevers, you're very deep in the beer geek bubble. In most of America, a surfeit of hops is not yet the central problem confronting beer culture.
Yesterday I was fooling around with Brewers Almanac statistics and came across three data points I think are critical if you want to understand the beer market in the United States. I have put them into visual form for your consumption pleasure. First up, we have the total beer market in the US (smoothed to avoid the chaos from 1919-1933) in millions of barrels. You'll see it follows a nice upward trend before plateauing around 1980.
From the post-prohibition period to about 1980, you have an expected incline for a country on the move. (We went from 150 million to 226 million.) But then note the trend, even while the country continued to grow (roughly 310 million now) thereafter, when the total beer US market stayed right around 200 million barrels. How is it possible? We started to drink less:
That's a little bit bad if you're a brewer in the US, but not terrible. As long as people keep coming, you can at least hold firm. Except that you can't. Since 1980, purveyors of beer have gotten quite a bit more numerous. Behold what happens when you take into account the effect of imports and craft breweries*. Then the number for the mass market beers looks a whole lot worse.
In the years I've been writing about beer, Anheuser-Busch has managed to sell about half the beer in America, and I think they're still doing that, more or less. But you can see from these figures that they're only able to do it by cannibalizing or absorbing other mass market brands. Imports now constitute nearly 28 million barrels--14% of the market--and most of that is stuff like Pacifico and Corona, which helps explain why AB InBev was so keen to snap up Modelo. The amount of mass-market American lager has now dipped to about 150 million barrels--the amount they were selling 40 years ago when there were 85 million fewer Americans. If the trajectory continues, that segment could well fall below 100 million barrels in the next forty.
Interesting times, no?
____________________
*These are a bit hard to estimate. The Brewers Almanac gives good numbers on imports, but doesn't parse out "craft beer." I've used Brewers Association members, which are exact, and added an estimate of extra-craft beers like Blue Moon and Shock Top and those breweries the BA has ejected from their membership roles (though I've probably low-balled it).
The Brewers Almanac is quite a lot of fun if you love arcane statistics. (Excise taxes broken down by state and by beer strength? Check. Percentage of beer sold in cans in 1962? Check.) This one was especially interesting: the estimated price of a six-pack of beer using BLS consumer price index figures. "Six pack" here means national brands (those selling for around $5 now). They used actual prices, so I ran them through the BLS's inflation calculator and came up with the following figures, based on current 2013 dollars.
Except for short blips where the price was essentially flat, beer prices dropped an average of about 70 cents a decade between 1955 and 1990 and have been flat since then. The big question is whether Bill's adjusting his Portland Beer Price Index for inflation.
It has been five years since BridgePort first released Stumptown Tart, and in that time they've changed brewers and much of their line has turned over. I therefore assume that Stumptown Tart is popular enough that they've brought it back for a sixth iteration. Originally, the idea was to create an actual tart fruit beer with, you know, acidity. Then-brewer Karl Ockert consulted with New Glarus' Dan Carey, who of course has his own pretty-popular tart fruit ales. They used native Marionberries and brewed a large beer but, alas, just dumped in some lactic acid to achieve the tart part.
It was a flop, but they retooled the recipe and next year came back with a fruit beer minus the tart. Ockert used sour cherries in an effort to add a bit of acid, but it had wandered away from the wild-yeast sense of tart the geeks expected. In subsequent years, BridgePort reissued the beer with a rotating variety of fruit, and the '13 vintage was brewed with blueberries, raspberries, and blackberries. And like the beers in the post-tart period, it's fine.
It's a vibrantly-colored beer with a soft, blossomy fruit nose and a light, sweet palate. The fruit is fresh and sweet and the beer is delicately wheaty. I did find the finish, with a slightly tannic-bitter note, less than ideal, but it's a minor note. Although the fruit changes year by year, there's a real coherence in the line. If you like the Stumptown Tart, you'll like it every year no matter which fruit the brewery chooses.
I, of course, want the tart. Nothing showcases fruit so well as a little acidity. In regular beers, the malt competes with the fruit, which becomes a little duller and more flaccid. Acidity preserves flavors and aromas and deliver the fruit to one's mouth almost as if it were coming straight off the bush. As I was drinking it, I was thinking: why not add a touch of acid malt or even do a sour mash? I know the brewery doesn't want to make a wild ale, but this would surely give it some depth and distinction.
At one time, I would have been confident to say that these choices would make a "better" beer. Something about traveling around the world and seeing how palates differ really highlights the subjective nature of "better," though. If BridgePort took my advice, they'd very likely sell less beer. More people, in other words, like it the way it is than would like my "improvements." It's easy enough to dismiss the masses as untutored, to actually use this as evidence that it's a lesser beer. But geeks are slaves to their own preferences, too; they love imperial stouts but give a shrug to helles. The things different people like sometimes reflect different levels of discrimination and education, but a lot of times, it just reflects base prejudice.
So Stumptown Tart is not for me. Let's leave it at that.
I once said offhandedly to another beer fan (who may out himself if he wishes) that hops had the most influence on a beer. He contended the point, I believe arguing for malt instead. The issue came back into my consciousness last night as I tried a beer I was certain would be dominated by the malt flavors. Instead, the yeast took the floor and muscled poor malt to the side. More on that beer in another post. In the meantime, which is it--malt, hops, or yeast?
MALT Argument for: body of beer, the sugars, the hooch. No malt, no beer. Argument against: as a matter of flavor, something of a pipsqueak.
HOPS Argument for: the mighty spice, rebuffer of infection, bringer of bitterness, flavor, and aroma. Argument against: you can have a beer without hops, but not without malt or yeast.
YEAST Argument for: lagers, ales, and wild things; yeast determines beer's very nature. Argument against: yeast schmeast; people made plenty beer before they even knew what it was.
The correct answer? Water. Because, you know, yeast, malt, and hops piled up amount to compost. I kid. The actual answer is *. All three are enormously expressive and their influences are easier to see in different beer styles.
Hops are the biggest blowhards, no doubt. They have the greatest capacity to overwhelm a beer--but in many styles they are nearly disposable. Yeast provides the alchemy that makes beer spirituous, and they are the deep-thinking philosophical members of the trio because they do determine a beer's nature. They are not far behind hops in their capacity to make a big impression, either. Malt is the hardest case to make, but the gluten-free movement does an excellent job. Barley malt's presence is subtle and you can easily overlook it, but the parade of sorghum counterfeits, thin, sour, and unbeery put proof to its importance.
It is a debate with no answer, but a fun one to have. Your opinion?
Washington's No-Li Brewhouse recently made news by successfully winning federal approval for the designation of "Spokane-style" beer. The definition of this "style" is that it must be brewed and bottled in Spokane and made with ingredients from within 300 (!) miles. In other words, it's a federally-approved marketing gimmick. Good for No-Li, I guess, but it's bad in just about every other way. It conflates style and region and, with the 300-mile ingredients loophole, makes a mockery of "locally grown." Instead of moaning, though, let's think how the idea might actually be retooled to bring some value to the general concept. The first thing we need to do is split style and geography.
Beer By Geographical Indication
Although it is not quite so elemental as in the case of wine, ingredient sourcing is an important component of beer. Barley and hops do turn out differently depending on where they're grown. Ingredient-based certifications are common and pretty easy. Here's how the US Patent and Trademark Office describes it (pdf):
“Geographical indications” (“GIs”) are defined at Article 22(1)
of the World Trade
Organization’s 1995 Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual
Property Rights as “indications which identify a good as
originating in the
territory of
a Member, or a region or locality in that territory, where a given quality,
reputation or other characteristic
of
the good is essentially attributable to its geographic
origin.” Examples of geographical indications from the United States include:
“FLORIDA” for oranges; “IDAHO” for
potatoes; and “WASHINGTON STATE” for
apples.
In the beer world, this is really handy. When I visited France, young craft brewers at St. Germain resolved to only brew with French ingredients. There were trade-offs: limited hop varieties and no organics. Still, they applied for certification and now bottles have the government seal designating the Page 24 Hildegarde line as all-French.
Americans could follow suit and designate their beer by region. (States make sense, but I suppose you could have "Yakima Valley" as a designation if you could source the ingredients from there.) This has many obvious downsides: 1) only Northern, barley-growing states could ever receive the designation (and even if states in the South could coax a hop crop into producing, it would never be a commercial prospect), 2) except for Oregon and Washington, it would sharply limit the variety of hops brewers could use. On the other hand, it would have some substantial benefits, too. It would: 1) encourage local crop production and create interesting opportunities for farmers, 2) bring biodiversity to brewing, including some probably wonderful new flavors to malts and hops, and 3) give brewers an additional hook to promote their beer locally.
[There would be a few issues to hammer out: yeast and malting. In France, you can win approval if the barley is grown locally, even if it's malted elsewhere. That seems sensible. Yeast is an organism and in no way a product of terroir--so sourcing it from Washington or California doesn't seem verboten, but I suppose you could demand that the yeast be propagated on-site.]
Beer By Regionally-Specific Style
The other way to go is something they call "Traditional Speciality Guaranteed" (TGI) in the European Union. This requires not only that the product use traditional (though not necessarily local) raw materials but also made in a traditional processing method. An example is gueuze, one of the few beers granted a TGI. To be called an oude gueuze, a beer must satisfy all of these conditions:
Use 30% unmalted wheat (that's part of the traditional raw materials piece).
Employ spontaneous fermentation.
Use hops aged at least one year.
Be refermented in the bottle.
Contain certain compositional elements measured by a lab, including the presence of brettanomyces, absence of isoamyl acetate, and the presence of other volatile acids (this test confirms the process and aging of the beer).
Contain one-, two-, and three-year old beer.
This is an extremely high bar, and other styles have had a harder time agreeing on qualifying criteria. To go back to the France example, breweries couldn't agree on how long the beer needed to be garded (aged) to qualify as bière de garde. In Flanders, breweries couldn't agree how long red/brown beers should be aged on wood. (Rodenbach led the charge but was also a stickler for high standards others couldn't meet.)
I could imagine the US establishing guidelines that would qualify certain beers for "specialty" designation. Corn is the unique native ingredient in American (north and south) beer, and could be a key feature in this designation. The US has a trove of old corn-using styles to dig into--cream ales, sparkling ale, steam beer, American weissbier, Kentucky common--should we want to offer such a designation. Given the standard for gueuze, steam beer might be the best place to start. Designating beers using corn would meet the ingredient criteria (but would, ironically, exclude Anchor), and there are several important elements to the process: the use of coolships, warm-fermenting with lager yeast, and krausening. Kentucky common, championed by a brewery like Bluegrass for example (it was originally a style of Louisville), might be in a prime position to claim the designation.
These designations tend to link the style to a place--Lambics to the region around Brussels--which is a big downside. Should only San Franciscans be able to make steam beer? Should Louisvillians be the only brewers to make Kentucky Common? Doesn't seem quite American. But then, when you restrict, you restrict. No-Li didn't mind that everyone outside Spokane was cut out of their definition (poor Cheney). It might be worth designating some of the old styles if only to revive them.
_____________
The Spokane case is a bad one: god forbid we have a separate, useless designation for every city with a brewery in the US. (Wait, is that Milwaukie beer or Milwaukee beer?) But it might be nice if it sparked interest in something more valuable. These are a couple options.
Below is an astounding takedown of an American politician using the fulcrum of beer. I'm going to quote it at length, but I'd like to point out that it's not actually partisan. The charges leveled here could apply to any congressman or senator in the country. There's just two pieces of info you need to know to understand the context. The first is that the politician is from Wisconsin, where Miller is the sacred local brewery. (The dynamic is identical to Detroit and GM.) The second is the precipitating event, when said Wisconsin pol turned up at Belgian gastropub in DC and was chagrined to learn that the 115 different available beers didn't include Miller Lite. Then comes the takedown:
Such a man of the people!1
It's worth noting that [the politician's] tastes in alcoholic beverages do not always run along such downscale lines. In 2011, [an opponent] confronted him drinking a $350 bottle of wine at Bistro Bis2, a swanky French restaurant catering to the political elite3. ("Its regular guests include Senators, Congressmen, celebrities and powerbrokers looking to dine in the ambiance and luxury of one of Washington's most popular restaurants," boasts its website.)
Bistro Bis probably does not serve Miller Lite4, which likely forced [the politician] to instead order $350 wine as a fallback, as most Miller Lite fans do when their beer of choice is unavailable. And you can see why he mistook a Belgian brewery for a French restaurant. The one time he was publicly confronted at Bistro Bis is probably the only time he has ever patronized a European restaurant of any kind, and he probably naturally assumed that all European restaurants are French5, 6.
Let's break this down:1) beer is the people's drink, the tipple of the (choose your meme) 47 or 99%. 2) Wine is the drink of the upscale, though permissible if vinted in, say, Fon du Lac, WI, and French restaurants are, it goes without saying, suspect. 3) Especially when patronized by political "elites," a term of art politicians only use when referring to the opposition party. 4) Ordering Lite was an especially nice touch, as its workingman cred is as unimpeachable as its likelihood of being on tap in a gastropub is remote. 5 and 6) This is a deft slam by the writer, who simultaneously evokes American crassness and our ignorance of the foreign world--hanging it around the politician's neck--while reminding readers of a time when America inexplicably targeted France as History's Greatest Monster in the period before the Iraq war.
This is why I do my best to avoid dragging tarnished politics into the wholesome beer world. It's more amusing when politics tries to drag beer into its world in an effort to polish things up.
The mass market is definitionally the thing people buy the most of. Wonder was the king of breads once; now its parent company is bankrupt. Since prohibition, very light, sweetish lagers have been the mass market style, but they're slipping. One of the ways big beer companies have responded (aside from the constant stream of gimmick products and packaging changes) is to enter the "craft" segment and beat the insurgents at their own game. But this has the effect of hastening the demise of their extraordinarily valuable base brands. The other option? Double down and keep the mass market right where it is. Beer companies that want to own that segment are doing it by moving toward stronger, more flavorful beers--the opposite direction they've been going in the last forty years.
This year marked Budweiser's extremely high-profile roll-out of Black Crown, very much a legacy product. There are a couple other recent entrants that are a little lower-profile. One finally made it to my grocery store shelves this year: Coors Batch 19. Looking for a way to make a fuller-flavor beer that is still recognizably Coors, the brewery started digging around the archives and found a beer from 1919--the last gasp before Prohibition--that was to their liking. What they found in basement logs was reworked to become Batch 19.
It was a beer made with Chevalier barley, an English type that was grown in California in the 19th century. It was apparently not a great barley and was almost commercially extinct by 1919. One source compares it to Scottish bere/bygg, a landrace variety optimized to grow on the sides of crags in the Scottish moors (I kid ... slightly). The varieties of hops, which might well still be available, were not listed. Coors maestro Keith Villa, in an interview with Lew Bryson, said, "Hops, we didn’t know what they were using. They didn’t note the variety of hops until the 1940s... The hops were only noted as 'imported' and 'domestic.'" The domestic hops were almost surely Clusters, which are still available, but not prized. Imported could be anything, but if they came from Germany, they would still be available or, if not, decent substitutes could probably be found. Coors didn't go that direction. If you look at the label, you'll see Hersbrucker and Strisselspalt. Lew, doing some nice reporting, got Villa to admit there's a bit more, too: "I stuck in a little bit of Cascade to round out the fruitiness. There’s a little Mt. Hood, and some Hallertauer Select. They added hops at the beginning, towards the end of the boil, and right before the end of the boil."
The beer Coors made would definitely never be confused with a typical mass market lager. (In the accompanying photo, we compared it to Pabst. You see the difference. While I'm huddling here in the safety of this parenthetical, I'll explain why we were drinking Pabst. Sally has been mentioning our great mass market tastings and everyone kept asking about Pabst, which I didn't include. So we got one so she could try it. Pabst is ... basic.) The malts are the most characteristic. Villa calls his malt "Moravian," but it's not only grown in Idaho, it's "improved every year." Well, it tastes American to me: husky and rough. This is a seriously full-bodied beer. That is, of course, what the geek wants, but I'm not a fan. Perhaps Germany spoiled me, but to my palate rough malts are bad malts. Nevertheless, it does taste very American, and my guess is it does probably taste a bit of the old Chevalier. This is a beer designed to both appeal to a craft-compromised palate and also keep the focus firmly on American lagers. The rollout has been slow and deliberate, and it will be most interesting to see if it succeeds.
The next product is every bit as fascinating. One of the famous Busch family has opened a new brewery to make exactly the kind of beers his family has always made. William K. (Billy) Busch is one of the sons of August "Gussie" Busch Jr. He only worked briefly for the family brewery and then was part-owner of a distributorship in the 90s. He sold his portion, though, and was therefore not party to the non-compete clause signed by the Busch family when InBev took over Anheuser-Busch in 2008. Which means he can proudly link his new beer, Kräftig, to the family heritage. There are two beers and although they are brewed to the standards of Reinheitsgebot--no cereal grains--they are firmly in the American mainstream. It's currently contract-brewed in La Crosse, WI, but Busch plans to build a large production brewery in St. Louis. Kräftig is a 5% lager with 13 IBUs, and Kräftig Light is 4.2% (exactly standard) and 9 IBUs. This video pretty much lays out every talking point in the business plan--including some not-so-subtle shots at the guys across town.
So what's at stake? Anheuser-Busch brews 15 million barrels of beer at their St. Louis
plant--more than all the craft beer produced at the 2000+ craft
breweries in the country. They have 20 plants in North America. Then you have MillerCoors, which adds tens of millions of barrels more to the equation. Mass market lager is huge business. If you have this kind of volume, you really don't want the market to turn to IPAs because your brand is not IPA. I have long expected mass market lagers to become more flavorful as they compete in a market where people expect flavor. These are just the two data points, but it looks like the big companies are thinking the same thing, too. They need to save the segment they dominate. And they ain't gonna do that by brewing IPAs, shandies, or witbier.
At long last, I have had a chance to swab the decks on this garbage scow of a blog. In a radical move, I've dumped the blogroll over in the left-hand column. This was how we did things back in the early 2000s, when the internet was still run on a telegraph-based electronic chassis. It was a stupid way to link between sites, and I mean that in the technical sense; it was not dynamic. Links sat over there as the source sites mouldered or went off line. No one clicked on them. I have joined the late 2000s by adding the dynamic blogroll, which will take you to newly-updated posts. Two categories, local and not local. You might actually use the new version, and other bloggers will appreciate the traffic.
I'm also sorta halfty considering throwing the adsense widget back onto the site to see if I can earn my $4.93 a year. As a now-unemployed writer, I can't sniff at a potential free pint of beer, even if it is just once annually. The question is: how irritated would this make you on the following scale:
I will refuse to come here so long as you have that abomination staring back at me.
I think it's junky, cheap, and lame, but that's the nature of the internet.
I probably wouldn't even realize you'd added it.
I love this blog and not only do I support the idea, but I'll click the links so you can earn more money, you big, beautiful genius.
I'd post this as a poll, but polldaddy has gone Wordpress and I don't have the time to find a widget. But I would appreciate the feedback.
Let us review: long ago, beer was a local product. It was made in a town and drunk largely in that town. Rare was the beer from another place--and it was just too expensive to make and ship to displace local beer. Came the 18th and 19th centuries and their attendant technological breakthroughs, and beer got big. Porter circled the globe. Breweries powered by steam grew geometrically. Even then, local beer dominated. Then in the 20th century mass markets won out. Regional breweries declined and multinationals seized counties, countries, continents. In the US, everything became inverted so that the presence of a tap handle by a regional brewery was the rarity--mostly it was the standard national brands in every bar from Portland to Portland.
A few weeks ago, Harpoon sent me a press release announcing the 20th anniversary of their IPA. Twenty years! For an IPA, that's quite a thing. I distinctly recall the first time I tasted this beer. It was round about 1996 and I was meeting my future wife's family. Mainers, they had mostly migrated south to the capital of Red Sox nation. Sally's brother fetched a beer from the fridge and it was brightly-colored and bore a name perfect for Massachusetts (I thought of white whales). There was no Sam Adams in the house--this was not regarded as an authentic New England tipple. Harpoon IPA, that was the city's beer.
By modern standards, Harpoon is a pale ale, not an IPA--just 5.9% and 42
IBUs--but it was impressively ahead of the curve back then. Dry-hopped
with Cascades, it's round and caramelly (tres 1993) but quite sprightly with hops. I think both he and I had placed a lot of faith in that bottle. We both wanted it to meet with my approval, to illustrate that Boston had a Portland-worthy beer. We were so pleased it did.
In England, if you travel more than 100 kilometers in any direction, the beer changes. Actually, the crap beer is drearily the same no matter where you are--icy Kronenberg and Guinness and so on--but the cask beer reflects the place. The entire island of Great Britain is no bigger than Minnesota, so I found this surprising. I got Fuller's in London, Harvey's in Brighton, Greene King in Suffolk (okay, you can find Greene King everywhere, but this subverts my thesis so let's move on), Marston's in the Midlands and so on. I was charmed by that and thought it one of the ways that Britain was superior to the United States, but it occurred to me much later that the United States is actually now very British.
If you go to a pub in Boston, you'll find mass market lagers, probably Sam Adams (a brewery that, no matter what locals think, is loath to cede the city), and Harpoon. If you go to Chicago you'll find the mass markets, Goose Island, and what, Three Floyds? (It's been too long.) You come to Portland, Ore, and you'll actually be lucky to find a mass market beer in some places--otherwise it's a sea of locals. The interesting thing is that you can't get Harpoon in Chicago,* and you can't get Three Floyds in Portland, and you can get almost nothing brewed in Portland outside the Pacific NW.
When I visit Boston, I always want a Harpoon. It's a beer I associate with the city. I know there is a ton of great beer in New England, and I also have a bird-dog's sense of flushing out something new. But the first thing I want is the standard, the tuning fork for the region. It's pretty hard to maintain the kind of dominance that was possible in the 90s, so probably Harpoon's flagship is no longer the Boston beer. But it's one of them, and I have to wait until I'm on the East Coast to get a bottle. And having to wait, having the beer be a part of that very particular point on the globe, makes it all the more special when I finally do.
Happy anniversary old boy, I hope you're around another twenty.
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*I see Harpoon has made it to a half dozen pubs in Chicago, but again, as this subverts my thesis, let's forget it.
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