Steve Duin Hearts Ninkasi

Every newspaper worth its salt features a flinty columnist who is equal parts cynic and romantic. The Oregonian's is Steve Duin, who today showed his romantic side by writing an ode to Ninkasi.

Just when crafting a product seems to be a lost art in Oregon, [Jamie] Floyd and [Nikos] Ridge are successfully making great beers and energizing the community of beer drinkers....

Everyone in Eugene buys in. "Ninkasi has taps in 95 percent of the bars in Eugene," said Chris Ormand at Portland's Belmont Station, which stocks 1,200 beers. "That level of saturation has an impact up here when Oregon students come home from college...."

They're proud the brews are local and glad the beers are rich. They want to believe there are profits, as well as rewards, in doing everything the right way.

Oh, Steve, Ninkasi is so yesterday. Don't you know all the Eugenies are now insane for Oakshire?

Kidding. Still, a strange piece. Ninkasi is a phenom right now, but surely Steve knows that crafting beer is not exactly a lost art in Oregon. Surely he had heard that there were a few breweries doing this before Jamie and Nikos. (Like, umm, 90.) If there is anything unique about Ninkasi, it's their phenomenal growth.

But it took only 24 months for Ninkasi to outgrow the building in Eugene's Whiteaker neighborhood that was meant to last 10 years. Its expansion has been fueled by great instincts, memorable graphics, unrivaled marketing and undeniable karma.

When I spoke to Jamie earlier this year, he said they'd probably hit 20,000 barrels this year, though according to Duin, it looks like it will be more like 17,000. What's interesting is that Ninkasi has done it solely with keg and 22-ounce bomber sales. As a business model, I wouldn't have expected that kind of growth was possible without six-pack sales. According to Jamie, 80% of Ninkasi's beer is sold in Oregon--which is roughly 13,500 barrels. That means the growth is coming in one of the most competitive, active markets in the country. That is newsworthy.

I have lately become fascinated in the different models breweries identify for growth. Rogue, for example, went for a national strategy, while Deschutes eschewed distant markets until they had grown into them. Ninkasi is going for the local strategy. Jamie told me:

It is absolutely our philosophy to be as deep as possible right here at home. We source ingredients locally and we always will stay focused locally as we grow. t is not at all important to me how far my beer gets or how many markets. It is totally not sustainable as a long term business model.

I will confess to a little anxiety about Ninkasi's growth curve. I was around in the early 90s when craft brewing was a fad, and we saw many examples of unsustainable growth. I've heard some grousing about diacetyl in beer, a buttery chemical that comes from not letting a beer age long enough, and some folks have suggested that this is due to quick growth. On the other hand, Jamie has been around since the 90s and he has a lot more experience than those early breweries did. Ninkasi seems to have tended very closely to its identity as a local brewery, and that's paying off in loyalty.

And with love like Ninkasi gets from Steve Duin, they should be fine.

More Honest Pints in Salem

I love waking up to an email with a new Honest Pint certification, but it gives me special pleasure when it appears to have been sent in by a patron. I believe that's the case with the newest Certified Purveyor--which also appears to be a new pub. To Scott, who sent in the photo below--thanks!


f/stop Fitzgerald's Public House
Certified Purveyor of an Honest Pint
335 Grove St. NE
Salem, OR, 97301
Facebook Page




You'll notice that the glassware at the f/stop is a cool variant of the dimpled Scottish mug and delivers well over 16 fluid ounces. I don't know so much about this pub, but Scott says they have three taps and that owner Kirk Kindle makes sure there are always locals on tap. As always, stop by and have a pint if you have the chance. And if you've been there, let us know what it's like.

Cheers--


Update: Oh, by the way, the web half of the Honest Pint Project is home tending to a one-week old baby, and so the official list of Certified Purveyors may not get updated for a little while.

Are Flavorings the Future? (Probably.)

A thought experiment. Imagine that you sat down at a pub to try the new, say, Ninkasi Hopposaurus and were stunned by the aroma--a piquant blend of passion fruit, black pepper, and sea breeze. The flavor is even more amazing: the hops have a quality you've never encountered before--lavender, white tea?--and the body is rich, lustrous, like creme brulee. You wonder how they did this. A new variety of hop, oats in the grist, maybe something more exotic? And then you learn the truth: it's actually a combination of chemical compounds, labda8(17) and gamma-decalatone, added by a flavorist from Cincinnati.

This is what ran through my mind as I read a fascinating article in the New Yorker a couple weeks ago, "The Taste Makers" by Raffi Katchadourian.

"More than half of Givaudan's business--which generates nearly four billion dollars in revenue a year--is built on deceiving our senses when we eat. The consumption of food flavorings may stand as one of the modern era's most profound collective acts of submission to illusion. When you watch a movie of look at photographs or listen to an iPod, you tend not to forget that what you are taking in has been recorded and re-created for you in some fashion....

"Placed in the context of art history, the flavor industry today would be in its modernist phase, somewhere in the waning days of Cubism, for even the most outlandish flavor concoctions take direct inspiration from the real world. Whereas a perfumer can invent commercially successful aromas that are totally nonrepresentational--a Pollock in a crystal bottle--the flavorist must still respect the deeply held conservatism that people tend to hold when it comes to putting food in their mouths. Snapple's use of kiwi-strawberry flavoring in a juice drink may seem unusual ... but we can imagine that the flavor is authentic--that it captures some platonic gastronomic truth."

Apostasy, surely. Treating beer like the latest energy drink is unthinkable, even if it is just to draw out the flavor of hops--even if it just uses some synthetic molecules discovered to be resident in hops. This would take us back to the bad old days of additive-rich, taste-poor macrolager from the 1970s.

Actually, I doubt it. As the article later points out, citrus flavor has already been added to beer (presumably Miller Chill or Bud Light Lime) chemically. Is it really such a long step before Sam Adams or Dogfish or Widmer give it a whirl? And really, if they did, so what--isn't that more or less the history of beer, anyway?

Beer and Additives
You can get alcohol by fermenting malted grain in water, full stop. You don't need gruit infusions or hops. But unspiced beer is undrinkable. So to balance things out, brewers started dumping stuff in. We know that the original debate about additives is at least 500 years old--when Bavarians decided that any spice more exotic than hops (water and malt okay; the later inclusion of yeast came only after brewers discovered its existence) was verboten.

But okay, in the modern era, we're not so Reinhetsgebot. Organic additions are kosher: coriander, cherries, even chocolate. We're still on all-natural footing. What then to make of hop pellets and hop oil?--they're not exactly a natural product. You don't just find hop oil pooling out there in the fields. Still, it's naturalish--no petrochemical juicing or anything unseemly like that.

But what about synthetic hop oil, made to be identical, molecule by molecule, to regular hop oil. Or just synthetic alpha acid, again, molecularly identical to organic alphas. Would that be all right? The line becomes quickly unclear.

And anyway, haven't we already strayed pretty far from "natural?" Barley has been genetically trained to be perfectly suited to brewing. It has gone through generations of training, straying pretty far from the original genome that the first Egyptians used. Hops? Is there even a single native strain used in brewing? If it's okay to tinker with the molecular biology of a plant, why not just skip the biology altogether and go straight to the molecule?

Human Perception
In a certain sense, there's no reason we shouldn't tweak flavors to suit our preferences--it's the same process that got us to food in the first place, except in reverse (we don't evolve to enjoy food, we make food evolve for more enjoyment). Here's a delightful passage from the article:

"Flavor is a cognitive figment. The brain fuses into a single experience the results of different stimuli registered by the tongue, nose, eyes, and ears, in addition to the memories of previously consumed meals. For reasons that are not fully understood, we perceive flavor as occurring in our mouths, and that illusion is nearly unshakeable, as is made clear by our difficulty identifying, with any reasonable specificity, the way each of our various senses contributes to the experience....

"Taste receptors are blunt instruments. With taste alone, one cannot distinguish a grape lollipop from a watermelon one; coffee is like hot water with a bitter aftertaste, and Coke a bland sugary solution. The limits of taste are unsurprising when one considers its evolutionary purpose. Our biological progenitors, living in the wilderness, needed to know only what was worth eating and what wasn't....

"Smell is a more supple and primordial sense, and its centrality is evident in the way the human brain is arranged. Our forebrains evolved from tissues that once focussed on processing smells, and there are three hundred or so olfactory receptors in the nose. When we taste or see or hear something, the information must pass through the thalamus, a kind of relay station in the brain that allows us to attend to different aspects of perception.... Smells, for the most part, are fed directly from the nose to the 'presemantic' part of the brain where cognition does not occur and where emotions are processed."

Flavor is not like sound or shapes--things our senses can perceive directly and about which we can find wide agreement. Instead, it is a nested experience that has the capacity to transport us experientially miles and decades away. In Harold and Maude, Maude owns a machine that can emit aromas. But it's purpose is really to recreate experience:

''Snowfall on 42nd Street!'' Harold inhales. ''What do you smell?'' she demands. ''Subway?'' he asks. She nods. ''Perfume. Cigarettes.'' He coughs . . . then there's a pause. With quiet wonder, he says, ''Snow.''

Beer is not separate from other foodstuffs. We hold an almost Hindu-like view of purity and pollution around the nature of "natural" ingredients, but this is cultural, not innate. If a brewery could evoke not just the flavor of 18th Century England with a version of Entire Butt Porter, but the experience of Victorian England?--it would do it in a heartbeat. Maybe that kind of transformation isn't possible, but subtler evocations are. We already do a pretty fair job of summoning an image of "green" with our native, hoppy beers, what if we could just add a bit of the experience of a fern-floored, old-growth fir forest in for added measure?

Now it is just the macros using the latest flavor du jour to hawk cheap beer. But flavorings could be used to a higher purpose. When the Belgians began dumping weird adjuncts into their beers, the Germans rejected it as a corruption, but the Belgians were just following the flavor. Now we revere their concoctions. Synthetic flavorings are now considered a pollution. But one day? They will probably define what we think of as world class; and from that distant vantage, they'll look back on our crude "natural" beers the way we look back on those infected, burnt beers people made in Medieval Europe.

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Photo: Vanier College

One More

Okay, this is something else. Seattle's Brouwer's Cafe had a groovy barrel-aged festival called "Big Wood," wherein all the beers had been aged in wood. (Hey, what did you think?) It was a pretty incredible list, including six from Cantillon, Allagash, Firestone Walker, plus lots from the locals (list here). They hold an audience award, and the winners were announced today. Behold:

1. Hair of the Dog, Bourbon Fred from the Wood

2. (Tie) Hair of the Dog Matt & Port Brewing Older Viscosity

3. Hair of the Dog Bob

This, incidentally, is Bob:

This Beer is named in memory of Robert Farrell Jr. November 1946 - July 2008, gone but not forgotten. It was aged for over three years in an old American oak barrel, originally use for Fred from the Wood. He has matured with Apricots, Cherries and Raspberries for 15 months.

Nice job, Mr. Sprints!

Newsy Bits

This cold weather has provoked some interesting tweets (for those of you in real winter climes, our teens/low twenties weather is silly, I know, but it's like that recent snow in Houston for us):

OakshireMatt Bottling 6480 bottles of beer today.The below freezing brewery means the bottles are frozen meaning the carbonated beverage goes in better!

RogueAles Brrrr. It's officially colder in the brewery than inside our coolers!

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Roots Epic is imminent.

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BridgePort's latest Big Brew is a bourbon-aged Scottish ale, which is just a little bit strange. Whiskey confusion, or the difficulty of finding a decent Scotch cask in the US? Of course, the Scotch-Irish settled the South, whereupon they started distilling, so maybe there's a logic to this thing after all. There's a historical connection, too. Locally famous Stuart Ramsey was the pub manager at BridgePort when Scottish Ambush was first brewed more than twenty years ago, and this is its reprise.

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Seattle sees Portland's many new breweries and antes up as Naked City Brewing opens tonight.

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Speaking of new breweries, in that scrum of news last week, I almost missed the tip about a new brewpub in The Dalles called Clocktower Ales. The Dalles! (I wonder which is the largest city in Oregon still without a brewery. Hmmm....)

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The Village Voice has a "best of" list, but it's not bad. I sort of like the way they broke things down. Interestingly, Dogfish Head is the highest-profile diss. Overexposed?

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Finally, Chow Magazine has a slight piece on Sierra Nevada (not bad if you are unfamiliar with the brewery) that inexplicably circles around this theme: "Sierra Nevada tries to reclaim its cred." Reclaim? Really? Someone should really have let me know they'd lost it. Here I was admiring them all these years.


Update. Okay, one more thing. In the dim recesses of my brain, I had heard of a brewery called Pale Horse in Salem, but what with the extreme distance and all--40 miles--I let it float out of my mind. I don't usually mention meet-the-brewer events, but for new breweries trying to get their name out, it makes some sense. They'll be at Bailey's tomorrow from 6-8 with their three beers, a blond, an Irish stout, and an IPA.

Deep Thought

Nice Maine weather we're having here, isn't it? Wind howling around the corner of the house, temperature still in the twenties (all right, 29 according to the iPhone--still), pallid little sun, weak as a warm Budweiser, skimming across the Southern sky. At some point, I'm going to have to give up on the idea that summer will give me another dog day, aren't I?

Holiday Ale Fest Final Roundup

Since I've already spent a number of posts talking about the Holiday Ale Fest, I'll try to keep the final roundup short.

The Event, Generally
I had the good fortune to look behind the curtain on Saturday and see some of the machinery that makes this event what it is. While we were off on separate expeditions, Sally ran into Peter Kruger, the head brewer at Bear Republic. (He's a graduate of my alma mater, Lewis and Clark--go Pios! Brewpublic as a nice piece on him, including a video, if you want to see more.) The following discussion was fascinating, as is nearly every discussion I have with a brewer. For example, Peter described how he came by the 100-year-old cognac barrel (the twinkling smile of lady luck, mostly) and how he defeated a knothole to make it usable. Later on, Fest organizer Preston Weesner joined us, and I got to ask a question I was even more interested in: why would Kruger send one of these precious kegs to Oregon?

I learned two parts of the answer. One is the relationship Weesner cultivated with Kruger (which he cultivates with other breweries, too). It is typical for festivals to just put out a call for entries and accept what breweries offer. Weesner actively engages breweries, discusses their beer with them, and, in cases where beer is aged in 100-year-old barrels, lobbies and cajoles. Kruger was clear: that beer wouldn't have gone to another fest. But it's not just Weesner; Kruger was also really impressed with the overall level of beer and the appreciation it received by Portlanders. There are precious few fests like this, and for breweries, they're a lot of fun. That cognac-aged trippel of Bear Republic's spent 14 months aging. It was a special, one-time batch that will never be replicated. When a brewer makes a beer like that, he wants to see it released somewhere it will be appreciated. So in a certain sense, we can thank ourselves, too.

The Beer
As it turned out, I had already had some of the Fest's best beers when I returned on Saturday (reviews here). The one beer that really lept out at me in the second round was Block 15 Oaked St. Nick. This fest featured scads of barrel-aged beers, but mostly they had been aged in casks previously inhabited by wine or liquor. They therefore take on the character of those other potables, and less of the oak. St. Nick is pure beer, though. A lucious, creamy beer with a spicy backbone of hops that were brightened by dry-hopping, it drew vanilla from the oak. In fact, too much vanilla--it got a bit cloying at the end. Still, all the pieces were there to make a spectactular beer. A real head-turner and a wonderful introduction to a brewery about which I am still mostly ignorant.

Others I enjoyed were Firestone Walker Velvet Merkin (a nicely-balanced oatmeal stout), MacTarnahan's Chocolate Imperial Stout (creamy and rich, but not heavy--perhaps better than the much-lauded Firestone Walker), and Oakshire Very Ill Tempered Gnome (a straightforward American barleywine with 47 bales of hops).

When breweries brew one-off, single-batch beers, they don't always hit homers. That was the case in my view with Full Sail Wassail blend (a blend of Wassail and imperial porter that failed to blend), Laughing Dog Chocolate Huckleberry Stout (Sally's analysis: Idaho's where Oregon was when Saxer Lemon Lager was popular; in other words, berry soda), Ninkasi Unconventionale (a bit charred and tannic and with little evidence of the herbal infusions), Upright Holy Herb (a well-made beer that was nevertheless a bit too herbal and sweet for me).

Further Reading
Lots of commentary out there if you want more. The O published a nice piece by John Foyston yesterday. Derek has reviews and pictures. Nate offers reviews at Champagne of Blogs, as does Jared at the Weekly Brew. Oh, and look who came out of a very short retirement to do a run-down (double entendre intended) of the beers.

Liveblogging the Holiday Ale Fest

I'll be trying to liveblog from the well of the Holiday Ale Fest today. No idea how (un)succesful it may turn out to be. One thing's for sure: iPhone + jostling crowd + distractions + beer ... typos will be made.

10:09 am. HAF have annunced the 11am tastings. Three beers from Bear Republic, including one aged in a 100-year-old cognac barrel. (!)

11:42 am: the eagle has landed. Crowd mellow but growing. First pour Dogfish chicory stout. Eh. Chalky, tannic. Not me fave.

12:21pm: the Trebuchet, Bear Republic's cognac-aged beer, when warmed, was very nice. A trippel, intense, alcoholic. Ninkasi's lavender heather stout--also a bit charred. Herbs are ... odd.

12:39: First pour of Cascade Sang Noir. Damn, what a beer. Moving on to another will take some willpower.

1:01: Block 15's entry is a real winner. Aged on oak, but dry-hopped. Oak is a bit overmuch--I would have blended it 50-50 with a non-oaked batch. Still, impressive.

1:24: first whoop. Crowd getting big, lines still okay.

1:43: second whoop.

1:52: Ill Tempered Gnome. Huge, massive, large, ginormous, and so on.

2:07: another Sang Noir or Dupont?

2:19: damn. Mislaid Sally...

3:02: long chat with Peter Kruger, the Bear Republic brewer, and just learned that they do spontaneous fermentation!

Czech Craft Breweries - the "Fourth Pipe"

A very nice piece in the New York Times about how Czech craft breweries are finally starting to make an appearance in Prague:

Though Prague has become a hot spot for beer tourism, visitors can end up disappointed by the lack of options in the city’s pubs. Many bars in town are locked into exclusive agreements with large breweries, which often install and control the taps. (Obzerstvi’s standard offer is Staropramen, a mass-produced brew from Prague that is part of the giant Anheuser-Busch InBev.) But recently, a few pubs like Obzerstvi have begun selling rare craft beers on a so-called ctvrta pipa, or fourth pipe, a new term for an independent tap on which pubs can offer a greater variety of brews....

The Czech Republic is home to about 125 breweries, ranging from tiny brewpubs to industrial giants, according to the list at www.pivovary.info. A couple of years ago, I counted just 23 Czech breweries whose beers could regularly be found in Prague. This fall I counted more than twice that number of just what could be considered Czech craft brewers, the small-scale producers whose products are preferred by connoisseurs.

Not so much on the styles of beers these craft breweries are making, but it's still a very nice piece on the overall beer scene there. Sounds like some very positive developments.

Now, off to the Holiday Ale Fest!

Resting Up

Tomorrow I make my ascent on Mount Holiday; today I'm resting up in the surprisingly sunny base camp. (When was the last time we had a run of sun this late in the year?) Since it will be a slow day here, why don't you go have a look at Matt Wiater's slideshow from the fest. For those of you who don't know, Matt is a photo-blogger who has captured some of the most interesting images of beer and brewing around Beervana.


For those of you who are going today, don't forget to watch the Festival's Facebook page and Twitter feed--they'll be using those to announce limited release tappings.

Beavers and Ducks and Roses, Oh My!

So apparently there's a little scrimmage happening down in Eugene tonight. If you trawled the right news sources in the past few days, you might have been lucky enough to see a short mention of it. Apparently there's something at stake for the winner, too--some kind of bowl game in California.

If you're like me, you did not attend either the University of Oregon nor Oregon State University. (My team, which also participates in the annual Rose Bowl sweepstakes, are the mighty Badgers of Wisconsin. They will, sadly, not be facing the winner of tonight's game.) This means you have vague, divided, or oscillating loyalties. But at 6pm there will be no room for ambiguities. We must all pick a horse and ride it--to historic glory or humiliation. For those of you reading this blog, you may consider the beer connection. I have generally favored the Ducks, for no reason than their uniforms are less ugly (though this year that advantage is considerably narrower).

But consider: one of these two schools has a program in fermentation sciences (and an accompanying brewery). One of these schools has a hop research lab that is responsible for a number of commercial hop strains and may consequently have had more to do with creating the unique character of Beervana than anyone else. That school is Oregon State University, who tonight will receive my favor.

Go Beavs!

Holiday Ale Fest: Early Sampling

Last night, the Holiday Ale Fest had a mini-tasting for bloggers. (Please, it's rude to laugh.) If the other beers at the fest are as good as the half dozen we tried last night, this is going to be an exceptional fest. I want to draw your attention to five in particular (in the order we tried them):

• Bear Republic Baba Yaga's Imperial Stout. An unusual imperial stout. It's roasty and smoky, and reminded me of some of the single-estate coffees I've had at Stumptown. There's one Sumatran coffee that has much of this character. It's aged in cabernet barrels, and you find a sweetness at the edges of your tongue, as if pushed aside by the bitter, roasty main note.
• Fort George North III. "North" is the beer brewed especially for this fest, now in--suprise!--it's third year. I was worried about this beer because the website says it has 99 BUs; the printed program said 50, though--which was more reassuring. A beer made with sugar plums and an abbey yeast strain, it comes across more like a typical English winter warmer. It mixes the two things you want most--a bit of gentle sweetness and a warmth from the alcohol. Hops come across more as a spicy accent note. While the imperial stout would leave non-stout fans cold, I would recommend this beer to everyone. Oh, and this is your only chance to try it--once the fest is over, the beer will be gone.
  
• Hair of the Dog Jim 2009. This year's batch is a blend featuring a preponderance of Doggie Claws and Blue Dot, a fact evident instantly, by the piney hop nose. That pine carries through very clearly in the flavor, too, giving this beer a particularly seasonal character. The hops are not enormously bitter, and the beer finishes with a sweeter note. For beer geeks trying to isolate some of the minority blends, wait for the hops to pass, then see if you can catch a glimpse of the bock or English brown also blended in. Jim is only available at the Fest.
  
• Deschutes Mirror Mirror. The brewery discovered some barrels in the brewery that had gotten mislaid. They contained some of the most-recent vintage of Mirror Mirror, Deschutes' barleywine. They have only 24 kegs, and half have come to the Fest. The rest will probably not make it out of Bend. These kegs contain 100% barrel-aged, unblended Mirror Mirror, and they are, to my palate, a far more finished beer than I recall having from the bottle. Rich, creamy, caramel-sweet, alcohol-strong, yet balanced with sprightly hopping, it's a wonderful beer.
  
• Cascade Drie Zwarte Sang Noir. The final beer was my favorite. Another blend of various potions from Ron Gansberg's laboratory, this beer falls somewhere between a Flanders red and oud bruin, with some cherries added for complexity. I intend to have another pour of this, perhaps even the $4 full pour, and I'll study it then and take more detailed notes. Suffice it to say that if you're a sour ale fan, this must be first on your list. You will find few beers this good anywhere.
  

Finally, a tip of the hat to Preston Weesner, the impresario who organizes the Holiday Ale Fest. Over the course of years, he has managed to coax and cajole breweries into brewing one-of-a-kind beers for the fest. He does a great job of mixing up the styles so there's something for everyone. And he maintains a stash of beer somewhere in the Portland area that is maintained at precise conditions so that when he brings them out a year or four later, they're magnificent. He poured us a dram of the legendary Jim 2007, for example, which went on tap yesterday afternoon. (I didn't review it because, well, it just seemed cruel to talk about a beer that is no longer available for love or money.)

It was already fairly packed with people, even at 4pm on a Wednesday, evidence that the word's out. But don't let the crowds dissuade you--this has the makings of a real gem. (Maybe tonight, during the Civil War, you would find smaller crowds? A thought.)

The elite corps of PDX beer bloggers

Preston Weesner

Outside the Holiday Ale Fest

4pm on Wednesday and already a nearly-full house