Beer with Cheese and NPR

The former Carnegie Library, a glorious building in Washington, D.C., now houses the Historical Society of Washington, D.C.

On a recent cold November evening, the Society played host to National Public Radio. Susan Stamberg moderated a discussion with The Kitchen Sisters about their radio program: Hidden Kitchens.

What's the beer connection?

During a reception beforehand, cheese was donated by Cabot Creamery of Vermont and beer by Clipper City Brewing of Baltimore, Maryland. Wine was provided by Chateau Morrisette of Virginia.

Placards on each table displayed the appropriate pairings.

• McHenry Lager with Cabot Reduced Fat Cheddar. This all-malt lager, reminiscent of what mainstream American lagers once tasted like, has subdued but enough malt and hop character to pair with this reduced fat cheddar.
  
• Clipper City Pale Ale with Cabot 3-year Aged Cheddar. The earthy bite of bitters or pale ales matches the sharpness of cheddars.
  
• Small Craft Warning Uber Pils with Cabot Pepper Jack Cheddar. The beer's hellerbock-like sweet malt soothes the spice of the cheese. But its spicy hops (thus named Uber Pils, rather than bock) match the intensity of the cheese's peppery spiciness.
  
• Loose Cannon Hop3 Ale with Cabot Sun-Dried Tomato Basil Cheddar. The ebullient herbal and fruity hop aromas and flavors of the beer are a match for the cheddar's basil and sun-dried tomatoes.
  

NPR's Susan Stamberg wasn't a convert. She stayed with wine: wonderful juice from Virginia winery Chateau Morrisette. But there was a split loyalty. NPR's Ari Shapiro, sartorially elegant, chose beer.

A few weekends ago I tutored a beer-with-cheese tasting, a charity event for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.

The major theme of the evening was that beer is a wonderful mate with cheese. In fact, I claimed, most any beer pairs well with most any cheese. Exceptions might be some of the more extremely flavored beers.

This does not always hold true with wine.

According to common lore, matching wine and cheese is a no-brainer. But when a rich, plush red wine meets a fresh, tangy chèvre, it causes an unpleasant tannin explosion in the mouth.

Wine Spectator
100 Great Cheeses
September 2008

The Wine Spectator does not, however, praise beer's companionship. The Baltimore Sun did: Crafty Combo.

Silent jazzman: Lawrence Wheatley

Located near Washington Circle in Washington D.C., One Step Down was the city's cool, hip jazz club from the 1980s into the mid 1990s. And, yes there was a step down at the front door.

The coolest, hippest cat who played there was also the most mysterious and the most urbane: Lawrence Wheatley, composer, pianist.

Mr. Wheatley died October 19th.

I worked at the One Step for a few years. But before that, there had been many Sundays when I would stop in for a hair-of-the-dog brunch, reviving from Saturday evenings of too much fun, as Mr. Wheatley would lead the Sunday jam sessions.

From a comment posted at Express Night Out:

Anyone associated with the jazz scene in Washington DC over the past half century or more would likely be familiar with the name Lawrence Wheatley. Certainly among players and serious fans of straight - ahead jazz the name has reach legendary status in the nation’s capital. Although awareness of his work has yet to reach national and international levels it’s just a matter of time especially in today’s internet world. Virtuosic, compelling, and fiercely original might be just a few reasons why this broader recognition is sure to come about at some point in the future. <..>

Not only was Lawrence a great player but he also created a considerable body of original work that demonstrated his stature as a jazz composer of the highest order. Although his music has yet to be recorded and released commercially, Lawrence indeed scored it, and as he would say, ‘by hand, from scratch, with love’. <...>

On top of all of this Lawrence was a gentleman. He carried himself with a certain dignity, grace, and courtesy that is almost unheard of these days. And although at times he spoke very eloquently and even mysteriously he also had a great sense of humor and was not pretentious in the least.

Bard of Bebop: Lawrence P. Wheatley, RIP

Express Night Out

Christopher Porter

Flocculating in public

Flocculation is one of those evolutionary traits of yeast that —Godisgood*— is essential to creating beer.

As any brewer will tell you, the yeast used to make beer tends to bunch up during fermentation. However, despite thousands of years of brewing and decades of genetic research on yeast, no one was able to explain why yeast stuck together.

But now, scientists at Harvard University have at last identified the specific gene that enables yeast to, ahem, flocculate.

That gene allows the normally solitary yeast cells to shield themselves from toxins in their environment by banding together in protective balls. Since one of those toxins is the ethanol that the yeast themselves produce, grouping together allows the yeast to survive in the alcohol-rich environment that results from brewing [emphasis mine].

More from Beer Brings Yeast Together, by Stuart Fox, posted 11.20.2008 at PopSci.com:

The gene, called FLO1, produces a Velcro-like protein on the outside of the yeast cells. When a yeast cell bumps into another cell with the same gene, they stick together. <...>

Over time, the yeast cells with FLO1 weed out the freeloaders, pushing them to the outside of the ball. Through this process, the freeloading cells not only don't get the benefit of being in the yeast ball, but they pay a cost by acting as the first line of defense for the yeast flock.

It's almost like game theory for yeast.

And, for Kevin Verstrepen, the lead scientist of the Harvard study, "who got his biology PhD from the Center for Malting and Brewing at the University of Belgium"

this is just one more example of how much the science of beer has to offer the science of biology.

Extrapolating from unicellular biology to group sociology, sometimes it is all about the beer.

• * Godisgood: a term once used by brewers to describe the beneficent activity of yeast without understanding its nature. Or maybe they did.
• Alerted to this story by Alan McLeod at A Good Beer Blog.

SOLD

It appears as if InBev has completed its purchase of Anheuser-Busch Cos.

InBev SA on Tuesday formed the world's largest brewer when it closed its $52 billion (euro41 billion) takeover of Anheuser-Busch Cos.

The new company, named Anheuser-Busch InBev, will be headed by InBev CEO Carlos Brito and will be headquartered at Leuven, Belgium.

InBev says it has closed Anheuser Busch takeover

AP Business

Tue Nov 18, 9:40 am ET

From the St. Louis Dispatch:

After the vote, August A. Busch IV said the tie-up with InBev would be the best option for shareholders, and would lead to a “promising future” for the brewer. “We are about to sell more beer, to more people, in more countries than any other company in the history of brewing beer," Busch said.

Of course, that's the same August-Busch IV —now a non-executive director of the new conglomerate— who, only a few months ago as CEO of Anheuser-Busch, had pledged, like a latter-day Churchill of beer, to fight the the invaders ... in the brewhouse and in the boardroom, and to never surrender.

Now that the deal is finalized, Anheuser-Busch’s reign as the biggest independent American brewer has come to an end.

The company traces its history as an independent company back five generations, to 1852.

Today, more a quisling.

Now, back to what is now true domestic American beer: the craft brewers.

Lychees and torpedos

From Sierra Nevada Brewing comes this description of a new hop varietal called Citra.

Sierra Nevada ( and two other breweries) funded the research and development of this variety and we own most of the acreage available in the world, (which is something like 3 acres). This hop has a crazy strange flavor profile, leaning toward pineapple, mango, papaya [emphasis mine] and other tropical fruit flavors and aromas. As always, we use only whole cone hops.

And, from Hop Science Newsletter (October 2008) of the World Brewing Congress:

The variety Citra, with a alpha acid content between 10-12% and an oil content of 2-3 % originated from a cross between the female European noble aroma variety Hallertauer Mittelfrueh and a male that was derived from the variety known as U.S. Tettnanger. Citra is 50% Hallertauer Mittelfrueh, 25% U.S. Tettnanger and the remaining 25% is East Kent Golding, Bavarian, Brewers Gold and other unknown hops.

Citra has a special flavor and aroma that it imparts to beer. Depending on the brewing process and the hopping rate, the flavors and aromas of beers hopped with Citra might range from grapefruit to lime, melon, gooseberry, and lychee fruit. [emphasis mine]

Citra is the hop of prominence in a formerly draft-only beer that the brewery —the third-largest American-owned brewery in the US— calls its Sierra Nevada Torpedo Extra IPA. That name itself is derived from the name of a device designed by owner Ken Grossman and his brewers to more efficiently dry-hop their beers in large 600-barrel fermenters.

The Hop Torpedo is a cylindrical stainless steel vessel that was developed to harness the essential oils and resins in hops, without extracting bitterness.

The device essentially works like an espresso machine. A stainless filter basket is packed full of whole cone hops loaded into the vessel and sealed against pressure. The device is then placed in the fermentation cellars where beer from the cylindroconical fermenters is pushed down from the tanks, through the pressurized column of hops and back into the fermenting tank.

The flow of beer out of the tanks, into the Torpedo and back into the fermenter can be controlled to extract different levels of flavor, aroma and bitterness. Essentially, it is a new way of dry-hopping that extracts all of the oily resin without the residual bitterness of the traditional method.

The final two sentences seems to imply a pickup of bitterness from dry-hopping. Most breweries extract bitterness by boiling their hops submerged in wort for an hour or so in the kettle.

Think of dry-hopping as a brewer's caprese salad. Rather than adding uncooked basil to a salad, a brewer add hops to finished beer, cold in a storage tank. The process imparts herbal, resiny, and grassy aromatics to a beer.

Press release as posted at BeerNews.org: Sierra Nevada to bottle first new year-round release in over 28 years

Zymo-Platonism vs. Zymo-Relativism

The New Yorker magazine has published an article about the so-called 'extreme beer' movement of American craft beers.

The author —Burkhard Bilger— cuts and pastes to create the impression of an argument between Garrett Oliver of Brooklyn Brewing and Sam Calagione of Dogfish head. I think it's more of a spirited rivalry.

“The whole idea of extreme beer is bad for craft brewing,” [Garrett] Oliver [of Brooklyn Brewing Company] says. “It doesn’t expand the tent—it shrinks it. If I want someone to taste a beer, and I make it sound outlandish and crazy, there is a certain kind of person who will say, ‘Oh, let me try it.’ But that is a small audience. It’s one that you can build a beer on, but not a movement.”

To which, Sam Calagione of Dogfish Head Brewing Company "smirks":

“Garrett and I are good friends, but we definitely disagree on this,” he said. “It’s a purist versus populist position. If all of our palates are subjective, who am I and who is Garrett to decide whether there’s too much hops in a beer, or whether you should be putting lemongrass or rampe leaves in it? As long as it finds an audience, it’s valid.”

A Better Brew
The rise of extreme beer.

by Burkhard Bilger

The New Yorker

24 November 2008

Alerted to this piece by Kasper on Tap.

Blog Guilt

At his blog, Seen Through a Glass, Lew Bryson had this to say after not filing a post for five days:

Sorry I've been absent, it's been a busy week.

I understand the sentiment.

A well-tended blog can begin to seem visceral. You feel the urgency to satisfy with a post, and when you haven't, you feel a pang of guilt.

If you want to learn about the state of beer in general, American beer more so, and the greater Pennsylvania area specifically, read Lew's blog.

And whisk(e)y, too: Lew is the Managing Editor of the magazine Malt Advocate.

Baltimore Beer Week for October 2009

In the successful wake of this year's inaugural Philly Beer Week —a week in March stretched to 15 days of beer events throughout Philadelphia, Pa.— folk in Baltimore, Md. have proposed the same thing, for their city, but in October 2009.

From the Baltimore Sun's Rob Kasper:

Joe Gold, along with a handful of other beer enthusiasts including me, are exploring the possibility of putting together a week of beery festivities in Baltimore sometime in the fall of 2009.

From Mid-Atlantic Brewing News' Alexander D. Mitchell IV:

We've announced the coming Baltimore Beer Week below--next October. About all we definitely have are the dates. We also know that the Brewers Assn. of Md. will hold its annual Oktoberfest on Saturday the 10th, and that the SPBW is slated to hold its annual Chesapeake Real Ale Festival on Oct. 17th. In theory, we can push the week to include Friday the 9th and Sunday the 18th. <...> The bare minimum would be just what you'd expect: hearty participation by the brewpubs and the prime local beer bars. <...> It's fair to expect a beer dinner or three, maybe many at many venues--maybe even beer dinners at places that don't normally do beer

Related:

• Could Philly Beer Week happen here in DC?
• Philadelphia's second Philly Beer Week occurs in 2009, March 6-15.

Tradition and 'traditionalists', and beer engines

As the customer walked up to the bar, he announced "I'm a traditionalist."

The occasion was a meeting of the Chesapeake branch of the Society for the Preservation of Beer From the Wood (SPBW).

The setting was the upstairs bar at the Metropolitan, a combination of coffeehouse, restaurant, music spot, wine bar, and good beer bar in the Federal Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, Md.

The situation was that the bartender had just asked him if he would want her to pull him a pint of cask-conditioned stout.

"Handpulling from a beer engine isn't traditional," the customer had replied. "The cask should be sitting on the bar."

I was reminded of the scene in Woody Allen's film Annie Hall in which an officious man is pontificating about Marshall McLuhan and the global village. The man behind him announces that he is Marshal McLuhan, and that the other man has no idea what he's talking about. Woody Allen breaks character, faces the camera, and asks whether we wouldn't prefer real life to be like this.

Just at the moment the customer in the Metropolitan had made his 'traditionalist' comment, Bruce Dorsey, owner of the restaurant, happened to be walking past.

"Yes, it is traditional," he growled.

Despite its name, a (true) beer engine is not motorized. It's a hand operated piston pump which pulls beer from a cellar to the bar. Since 1797, when Joseph Bramah —the inventor of the hydraulic press— patented the beer engine, most pubs in the United Kingdom have 'traditionally' served cask through handpumps.

Pubs in the US —those, that is, that frequently serve cask beer (a tiny number, but increasing each year)— use beer engines as well.

"Oh ... but I prefer my cask ale pulled through a beer engine," the customer verbally backpedalled, as the bartender served him his pint of Wolavers Organic Oatmeal Stout.

We all smiled.

Metropolitan has only just re-opened after suffering damage from a fire.