Drinking, again! Premium from Stillwater, reviewed.

Throw a rock and you'll find some 'craft' brewers and drinkers indicting adjuncts, with supercilious derision, as cheap and tasteless. Corn, rice: blech! Big brewers use 'em. Can't be good. Wheat, sugar: oh, those are acceptable because we use them. Fatuous claptrap spit in glass houses.

So, bub: try this. Buy a bottle of Premium Post Prohibition Style Ale from Stillwater Artisanal (of Baltimore, Maryland), and drink it.

It's a 'Post Prohibition' style ale rife with the craft-scorned corn and rice (and, yes, 'premium' Pilsner malt), hopped at 2 pounds per barrel with Cluster (U.S.) hops, Northern Brewer hops (Germany), and Saaz hops (Czech Republic), and fermented with a farmhouse ale yeast and two (!) strains of brettanomyces yeast. 4.5% alcohol-by-volume (abv).

Here's what I got.

Aromas of breakfast cereal, mowed grass, white pepper, citrus, pale stone fruit, anise, and fresh mulch (in a good way!). Don't believe me? Buy a bottle.

During fermentation, the Brettanomyces yeasts (which contribute those 'funky' aspects) consume the complex carbohydrates left behind by the Saccharomyces ('regular' brewing) yeasts, which eat only maltose, and other, simple sugars. The corn and rice ferment out fully, with few complex carbs left. Thus, the body of the beer —delivering a cereal taste to go with all that aromatic fun— finishes dry (that is, in jargon, not sweet). It's a magic act. Complex, yet not pretentious; dry, yet flavor-full.

Stillwater Artisanal is the 'gypsy' brewing project of Baltimore, Maryland, native, Brian Strumke, his beer roster filled with saison-hybrids. Like other 'contract' brewers, he has no 'brick-and-mortar' brewery. Unlike other 'contract' brewers, Strumke brews in many places, at many breweries, sometimes overseas.

of Love & Regret [lower case correct] is Strumke's pub/restaurant/retail shop. It sits within the shadow of the old National Brewing Company, in the Highlandtown neighborhood of Baltimore. Many of his draft beers that he serves there, he brews in Westminster, Maryland, at Dog Brewing. (He's magnanimous. Strumke serves guest drafts from other breweries at his pub, as well.)

A lot of his packaged beer (bottles and cans), Strumke brews at Two Roads Brewing in Connecticut. Premium, with its brett yeast —anathema to brewers wary of cross-contamination— he brews at Westbrook Brewing in South Carolina.

I asked Strumke about the bottle I had purchased at a wine/beer/cheese shop in Arlington, Virginia. It was six-months old, but tasted fresh. How, so? Brett(anomyces) yeast has good keeping power. It ages well, he said.

Premium has a sibling, Classique, a hybrid ale-lager, brewed alike with Pilsner malt, corn, and rice, but the brett withheld, available in cans. Both beers are bold-brewed offerings from Strumke, but I especially like Premium, a 'deconstructed' American adjunct beer. (Even his use of Cluster hops is a throwback to earlier brewing times.) "Will you produce it again," I asked Strumke? "Yeah man ... more to come."

So, bub: drink a Premium . You will not be able to tell me, afterward, that adjunct beers are insipid.

It's not what you have; it's what you do with it, or something like that. Don't scorn the corn. Praise the maize. And, like the rice.

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Vote!

Vote today as if democracy depended upon it. It does. Without voters, democracy fails.

Okay, if you need beer as inspiration to vote today: vote for good beer.

If your Senator is a member of the Senate Small Brewers Caucus, vote for her. If your Congressperson is a member of the House Small Brewers Caucus, vote for him. They work for good beer.

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Clamps & Gaskets: News Roundup for Weeks 42/43, 2014.

A bi-weekly, non-comprehensive roundup
of news of beer and other things.

Weeks 42/43
12 October - 25 October 2014

• 2014.10.25
  Less "sunshine" today. Jack Bruce, vocalist and bassist for 'super' rock group Cream, dies at 71. Played with famed rock/blues guitarist Eric Clapton.
  —Via Associated Press.
  
  
• 2014.10.22
  A Canadian soldier was shot and killed in Canada's capitol in Ottawa, and a gunman was killed by the sergeant-at-arms after racing inside Parliament. Prime Minister Stephen Harper called it the second terrorist attack in three days.
  —Via USA Today.
  
  
• 2014.10.21
  When newspapers were news-papers. Ben Bradlee —editor of Washington Post during era of Pentagon Papers and Watergate— dies at age 93.
  —Via Washington Post.
  
  
• 2014.10.18
  "Beer isn't going to get any better than it is now. The beer business is going to stop being about beer, and become more about business." 'Craft' beer in a post-craft world.
  — Via Are You Tasting the Pith?.
  
  
  
  
• 2014.10.17
  The tragic history of the London Beer Flood of 17 October 1814. Two hundred years to this day, a broken vat at the Horse Shoe Brewery on Tottenham Court Road, in London, UK, flooded the local area with 265,000 gallons (US) of porter, killing eight people and demolishing a pair of homes.
  —Via The Independent.
  
  
• 2014.10.16
  When celebrity chef David Chang wrote in GQ Magazine that 'craft' beer drinkers were snobs, Garrett Oliver —author and brewmaster of Brooklyn Brewing— responded:
  
  "It's not the fancy beer you don't like. You don't like us, your people. You have a "tenuous relationship with the Epicurean snob set?" You are the epicurean snob set! I've seen you with champagne in one hand and a Noma lamb leg in the other, chatting up celebrities. Why you frontin'? You spent your first three paragraphs insulting people just like you…is the cash, fame and luxury not working out?"
  —Via GQ Magazine.
  
  
• 2014.10.14
  Construction begins on the Virginia Beach, Virginia, facility of San Diego, California-based, Green Flash Brewing. To open in 2016, hiring more than forty employees.
  —Via Virginia Pilot.
  
  
• 2014.10.14
  Dann Paquette —co-founder of Boston, Massachusetts, brewery Pretty Things Beer & Ale Project— publicly complains about pay-to-play, under-the-table transactions, where brewers or wholesalers offer cash and incentives to retailers and bar owners in exchange for guaranteed placement. Doesn't publicly name names.
  —Via Brewbound.
  
  
  
  
• 2014.10.13
  Columbus Day and the sanitization of history."The strife that has engulfed Christopher Columbus' legacy in recent years has put the concept of an Indigenous People's Day at the forefront of discussion."
  —Via Truthout.
  
  
• 2014.10.12
  
  • Questions about the incentives Richmond and Virginia offered to lure Stone Brewing to the city.
    —Via Richmond Times-Dispatch.
    
  • “Nice for our cool factor, but great for our bottom line.” How Richmond, Virginia, plans to recoup its thirty-one million dollar investment in luring California's Stone Brewing.
    —Via Richmond Times-Dispatch.
  
  
• 2014.10.10
  The re-release of an American mid 20th century, pre-'craft', IPA: Ballantine IPA, now to be brewed by ... Pabst!
  —Via Washington Post.
  
  
• 2014.10.10
  Scientists at the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology and the Belgian University of Leuven have discovered why yeasts produce flavors prized in beer: yeasts' aromatic molecules attract fruit flies, which then unintentionally provide transport for the otherwise non-motile yeasts.
  —Via Popular Mechanics.

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NaBloPoMo 2014 ... or bust!

I did this thing, intentionally, in 2012 and 2011, and, before that, accidentally, in 2008 and 2007. That is, I posted once per day during the entire month of November, participating in NaBloPoMo, National Blog Posting Month.

The whole thing started off as a goof based on National Novel Writing Month, the challenge of which is to try to write an entire novel during the month November. Not everyone can commit to an endeavor of such magnitude, though, and so National Blog Posting Month was born. However, after doing a November NaBlo for a couple of years in a row it seemed that a lot of people had found their momentum and wanted to keep going into December and beyond. So now NaBloPoMo is something you can drop into any month of the year, though November is still the biggest month, and is the only month when members donate prizes that are then given out randomly to other members who posted every day in November.

I have to be honest here. Tweets don't count, so, if I were to do this again, excluding two 'cheating' entries —this one, announcing a tentative start, and, then, maybe one declaring a triumphal end-of-month victory— that would be twenty-eight greater-than-140-characters posts. Quality over quantity? Yes, of course. Why do you ask?

Maybe by engaging in this tomfoolery, successfully or just-short, I might re-hone and re-whet the blogging edge. Or, maybe raging against the challenge itself will be its own reward. After all, I'm not writing a novel.

Here, I go.

Pic(k) of the Week: Real ale smilin'.

The photo seems to encapsulate the good times and good fellowship (and the several good ales) exhibited at the 11th annual Chesapeake Real Ale Festival, held at, and organized by, the Pratt Street Alehouse, in downtown Baltimore, Maryland, Saturday, 18 October 2014.

The festival was just one of many during Baltimore Beer Week, itself in its 5th year.

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