Spring.

Last weekend we had our annual crawfish boil.  It's a rite of springtime in Houston.  Get together, drink some beer, and enjoy the weather before the mosquitos and hurricanes blow in.  We had about 110 pounds of mudbugs, several batches of homebrew, and plenty of neighbors and friends.

This year we got a keg of Southern Star Blonde Bombshell, which I seem to be pimping all the time on this blog.  Anyway, it served it's purpose.

The next day, The Wife summed it up perfectly:  "If a few wives don't get mad, it's not a good party."

I'm sitting here now watching the yeast starter for the next batch of Saison Ike bubble away.  I'm using three different yeast strains pitched in equal amounts into the starter wort.  I've got high hopes, but we'll see how it goes. . .

American Beer.

What the hell is American Beer?

In Brew Like a Monk, Jean-Marie Rock, brewing director at Orval is quoted as saying, "Before copying Belgian brewers or Belgian methods, tell the American brewers that they have to produce a specific beer made for the American people."

My initial reaction was, "He's right - we do need our own beer."  But after about a half-second, I groaned, "Ugh, we have our own beer, and it's light American lager."  (Though even this is hard to call American now that A-B is owned by the Belgians - maybe they need to get their own beer...)

But light American lager isn't the end of the story, either.  We have the West Coast Hop Bombs, too.  But can you really say that an extreme beer from the Left Coast is an American Beer?  Most of the Texans I know say the word "California" with a roll of the eyes and a shrug of their shoulders.

Is an American Beer a beer sourced only with American ingredients?  I think it's a start, and at Blackland I will be brewing all of my beers with 100% American (or at least U.S. and Canadian)  ingredients.  But as I sit here drinking a pilsner brewed in Houston, TX, completely with North American barley and hops, I still don't feel like I'm drinking an authentically American Beer - even if I did kick up the abv by 2 percent in American bigger-is-better fashion.

Maybe there is no such thing as American Beer, because there's no such thing as Mr. Rock's "the American people."  Sure there are lots of Americans, but what it means to be American is constantly changing.  Immigration, religions, American Idol, Coors, Goldman Sachs, Granger National Bank, Southern Star, small brewer, big brewer, suburbs, urban renewal, 230 years of white men in charge followed by one improbable black one.

If it means anything to be American it means not standing still.  It means not being satisfied.  It means being a Cowboy in the best, Texan sense of the word - proud, independent, responsible, respectful.

Maybe we don't have our own beer.  Or maybe it's whatever the hell we want it to be.

Beer Wars.

Last night I went to the live premiere of the new documentary Beer Wars.   It was a decent work in the Michael Moore school of documentaries, replete with an ambush of Auggie Busch the Fourth in a hotel lobby.   You know the story, big brewers and evil three-tier distributors keeping down craft brewers and all that.  Overall, though, it was more optimistic than not that craft brewers can have a place in the market as demonstrated by the success of Dogfish Head, Stone and New Belgium.

During the panel discussion after the movie, there was some awkwardness when they showed a clip of Todd Alstrom from BeerAdvocate calling Moonshot "crap party beer" and then cut to Rhonda Kallman (Moonshot's inventor) for her response.  For her part, Ms. Kallmann admitted she wasn't a brewer and responded gamely something along the lines of "Most of the beer in America is light beer, so I'm just trying to sell an American beer."

I've been thinking a lot about the whole notion of American Beer, but that deserves its own post.

As for Mr. Alstrom's accusation, he may be right that Moonshot isn't a true craft beer - I don't think that Ms. Kallmann would argue with that - but more broadly, I'm coming to the belief that BeerAdvocate's whole system of rating beer runs counter to their stated motto of "Respect Beer."

Ratings and rankings for beer are pure snobbery.  They go beyond beer geekdom - "Gosh, did you know that beer has 74 IBUs and was made with hops grown by Himalyan tribesmen..." - into the realm of "I 'know' beer better than you, and the beer you like is crap."  Is that really necessary?  Isn't that what turns people off about wine snobs and record store clerks?  Shouldn't we leave that kind of attitude to the Cabarnet crowd?

BeerAdvocate's user ratings may be helpful to some, but there is a clear bias for beers like Imperial Stouts and IPAs.  A simple, but delicious blonde like the Southern Star Blonde Bombshell gets a mere "B" even though almost all of the comments are positive.  People just don't want to give an "A" to an accessible, drinkable beer.

Why should any beer drinker be made to feel bad about the beer she drinks just because some snob says anything less hoppy than Avery Maharaja is crap?  And if her first experience with craft beer is someone telling her that she drinks crap beer, how likely is it she will try craft beer again?

Respect beer, yes.  But respect brewers and other beer drinkers, too.

Into the bottles.

I bottled two batches this weekend - a pilsner and a runt of a rye ale.  The pils checks in at a little less than 6.5% abv, while the rye ale barely tips the scales at 4.25% abv.  Both of them should be good drinkers in a couple of weeks, albeit with completely different personalities.

The rye is the little beer that could, while the pilsner is the classic German stoic.  For the pils I did a double decoction, hit all my mash temps and the whole thing was more or less Bavarian engineering at its finest.

The rye on the other hand was almost a total disaster.  I mashed with 12 pounds of grain, including two pounds of rye, and was looking for an original gravity in the 1.062 range.  The malt came to me very poorly crushed, however, so my brewhouse efficiency was terrible - I'm talking like 50-something percent.  I guess it was partially my fault for not checking the crush before starting the mash.  Lesson learned.

Anyway, the actual gravity going into the fermenter was around 1.040, so I was kinda pissed off at the thing - I had wasted a ton of fresh, whole hop flowers and a whole brewing night for this little wimp of a beer.  I didn't even bother to rack it out of the primary, and I didn't dry hop it like I had planned, either.

Much to my surprise, when I went to bottle it - it's got some good character.  Really nice hop flavor and aroma with enough malt background to give it a little bit of balance.  It should be a great session beer.

It may be a lightweight, but I'm not mad at it anymore.

The Best Beer in the World.

According to the people who say such things, Westvleteren 12 is the Best Beer in the World.  It's the Holy Grail.  It goes  $119 for a six pack on eBay.

I was prepared to be underwhelmed.  I was not.

My good friend Joe, author of The Thirsty Pilgrim and the soon to be released book Across Belgium in 80 Beers, which he wrote with Yvan de Baets, last week sent me a couple of 12s along with a Westie Blonde and a few others that I haven't tried. (Note to the monks:  I received the beer in trade for a few Texas brews, so no profit - at least monetary - was turned in the transaction.)

If you haven't had it - it's a fantastic beer.  It's dark and imposing out front like a gothic cathedral, but one inhabited by a jolly old fellow with whom you could spend hours in a tavern.  It's amazingly drinkable for a 1o.2% abv beer.  It's one of the only beers that big I could honestly say would make a terrific session beer - even if the session would end with me falling out of my chair before finishing a six pack.

The beer arrived in two bottle that were physically different.  One had a "Trappistenbier" ring around the neck - the other did not.  The inconsistency would be unacceptable in any modern commercial brewery, but it could be a metaphor for the beer.  The packaging is immaterial - the soul is the content.  This beer is undoubtedly made by people who care.

Is it the best beer in the world?  That's a non sequitur - a question without an answer.  It's like asking a Texan where they would live if they couldn't live in Texas.

But is it worth a trip to Belgium to try it out?*  Absolutely.

* I do not condone obtaining Westvleteren via any means other than a trip to the monastery (unless you can get a personal friend to make the trip for you and said friend will accept only beer in exchange).   The monks very obviously respect their beer, and the drinking public should respect their distribution decisions.