Erika Bolden

Reposted from the LA Weekly...

DENVER — Change is upon the brewing industry, as evidenced by the goings-on at the 2015 Great American Beer Festival, organized by Boulder, Colorado-based Brewers Association. And the changes in the L.A. beer community, from notable newcomers to shifting ownership, were a hot topic on Thursday night, during the first session of the festival.

This year, the 750 breweries at GABF are serving more than 3,750 beers, making it the biggest American beer festival — a place for industry professionals and beer aficionados to sample the best of what the country has to offer, and for beers to compete against one another for numerous national awards.

The L.A. presence at GABF has shifted this year. A few familiar faces are missing — including previous medal winners Smog City and Eagle Rock. GABF also opened the day after news broke that Golden Road Brewing had been acquired by beer goliath Anheuser-Busch Inbev. Golden Road co-founder Meg Gill manned the brewery's booth during the first session, discussing the deal and what it means for the Los Angeles brewery.

"My day-to-day won't change," she said. "This is an opportunity to grow our presence in existing distribution networks."

GABF runs the largest and most respected beer competition in the country. L.A. has more than a few chances to win some of the coveted medals, which are awarded for excellence in nearly 100 beer styles. Beachwood BBQ and Brewing has won an unprecedented nine medals since opening in 2011 and for the last two years has been named one of the best brewpubs in the country. It will be defending those titles alongside other previous local winners, including brewmaster Alexandra Nowell, now of Three Weavers Brewing, who won two medals in 2013 while at Kinetic Brewing. Three Weavers was not brewing in time to submit beers for judging last year (it opened in October 2014), but made it to the festival as a sponsor to pour some of its early batches.

Golden Road Brewing also might have a chance at a medal this year. The L.A. brewery hired Orange County's most tenured and decorated brewer, Victor Novak, last July, and he is brewing batches in preparation for the opening of his own Golden Road brewery in Anaheim.

The following 10 breweries made the trek across the Rockies to represent L.A. in Denver. Winners of the GABF competition will be announced Saturday, Sept. 26.

Returning L.A. breweries and their competing beers (in alphabetical order):

Beachwood BBQ & Brewing (Long Beach) - Mocha Machine - Foam Top - Udder Love - Rye Like an Eagle - Un Atout

King Harbor Brewing Co. (Redondo Beach) - South Bayern - Storm's a Brewin' - Swirly - 70 & Sunny - The Quest — Rakau

Golden Road Brewing (Los Angeles) - What She's Having Red - Pamplemousse - Point the Way IPA - Wolf Among Weeds IPA - 329 Days of Sun Lager

Ladyface Ale Companie (Agoura Hills) - Trébuchet - Flamberge - Verrückt Weizen - Dérailleur

LAB Brewing Co. (Agoura Hills) - After Midnight Moo - Imperial Stout - Take Her Home - Hop Solution

Reposted from the LA Weekly... 

Los Angeles has a lot of festivals — tacos, ramen, Sriracha, wine, beer — but it has never celebrated cider. Until now. The inaugural L.A. Cider Fest will take place on Saturday, Sept. 19, at the historic Raleigh Studios in Hollywood. During each of the two sessions, festival-goers will be able to taste 100-plus craft ciders, beers, meads and kombuchas.

Mark McTavish is the man behind the celebration of all things fermented apple. McTavish is curator and architect of the L.A. Cider Fest, in partnership with Hand Crafted Tasting Co. As owner of distribution company Half Pint Ciders, McTavish opened L.A.’s first cidery, 101 Cider House, in Westlake Village this year. “My vision started back in 2014," he says. "I wanted to create a unique festival wherein attendees could party their hearts out while learning about cider."

Cider is popular here, especially popular with health seekers and the gluten-free crowd. “L.A. is the largest market for cider in the U.S., based on sales volume,” McTavish says. “Shocking to many, but it’s true.” That market volume represents commercial cider varieties that taste more like liquid Jolly Ranchers than apples, but McTavish is confident that more artisanal beverages will find their audience.

Many drinkers don't have access to the small-batch ciders that will be available at the L.A. Cider Fest. This makes the fest an opportunity to change minds and challenge palates, broadening the cider spectrum from saccharine bombs to balanced and nuanced beverages. The fest will feature tasting pavilions, organized by style, so that you can isolate what you do or don’t like about a cider and get an idea of what to pair with it.

You can expect a wide range of cider flavors and even textures. The imports are especially worth sampling. Canadian Sea Cider Prohibition is aged six months in Screech barrels, lending it a strong rum character and high alcohol content. French import Bordelet Poire Granit is a perry (cider made from pears), far more delicate than the barrel-aged selections.

101 Cider House will also have its latest release, Black Dog cider. The world’s first “black cider,” Black Dog is made with Newtown Pippin apples, Ventura County lemons and activated charcoal from coconuts. This release comes on the heals of the activated charcoal craze you've witnessed at your nearest juice bar. 101 Cider House also will offer its full lineup of bone-dry ciders.

“The L.A. Cider Fest is 100 percent curated with quality in mind," McTavish says. “The majority of our selections will be new to consumers in L.A., as they are rare and limited in production.”

Reposted from the LA Weekly...

You don’t often see beer served alongside haute cuisine. While gastropubs and other mid-range eateries have increased the range of their beverage programs to include local and regional craft beer, high-end establishments have been slow to do the same. Beer, historically a working class beverage, is an afterthought.

The Club Bar at the Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills is one L.A. institution working to change that. Starting Aug. 1, they will offer a custom-made beer from Napa Valley nanobrewery, Mad Fritz Brewing Co. Nanobreweries are the smallest of microbreweries, and the beer, called The Lion and the Mouse, is a 7.5 percent ABV abbey dubbel made with small batch raw ingredients. It has more in common with wine than most beer — aged in French oak barrels and served in an elegant, large format bottle. The beer's Full Pint malt from Mecca Grade Estate Malt in Madras, Ore., and its organic Gargoyle hops from Hops-Meister in Clearlake, Calif., make it unique — and extremely limited in quantity.

Mad Fritz beer is usually only for sale at the brewery in St. Helena and is available by exclusive membership. Needless to say, the wait list is long.

Owner and brewmaster Nile Zacherle is well versed in both the wine and beer industries. After earning a B.S. in fermentation science at U.C. Davis and graduating from the Master Brewers program, he worked for Anderson Valley Brewing Co. in Boonville, Calif., before moving into the wine industry, where he continues winemaking under two labels. He operates Mad Fritz as a side project with his wife, vineyard manager Whitney Fisher. 

To debut The Lion and the Mouse, Zacherle worked with Peninsula chef David Codney to build a beer-pairing dinner that showcased Mad Fritz beer in a fine dining context. 

There is an advantage that beer has over wine in terms of pairing: hops. “It sounds very simple but the reality is that when you drink [a liquid that has] hops it’s a palate cleanser," Codney says. "Wine will linger longer whereas every time you sip with hops it cleanses your palate.”

In addition to crafting dishes like pickled mackerel salad and pastrami-rubbed smoked pork belly, Codney is a prolific homebrewer. “It’s really taught me about yeast, the fermentation process, winemaking and distilling," he says. "I’ve really learned to fall in love with the beverage side of food more due to homebrewing.”

Beer pairing dinners are not uncommon at L.A. restaurants,especially during L.A. Beer Week. But they typically are one-off events. Before the release of The Lion and the Mouse, the only beer options at The Club Bar were commercial imports like Stella Artois. Beverage director Michael Ploetz initiated the Mad Fritz collaboration after meeting Zacherle through his winemaking.

Reposted from PUNCH...

It’s April in the sleepy town of Independence, Oregon, an hour’s drive south of Portland. On a 42-acre plot just east of town, the alluvial, burnt umber soil sops from the afternoon’s passing downpours. This moment between squalls is the only time to run from the rackety farmhouse café out to the hopyards. There, entangled within the detritus of last year’s harvest, is a first look at the tiny, finger-length hop plants emerging from the earth and signaling a new season for Oregon beer.

Farmers have cultivated hops here next to the Willamette River since the 1800s, but the land’s current steward is Rogue Farms. By August harvest time, these bristly bines will climb trellises 20 feet in the air, heavy with the oily cones that add bitterness and aroma to Rogue Farm beer.

Rogue’s brewers believe that where and how these hops, as well as barley, grow affect beer’s flavor—a belief that has become something of a controversial talking point in the craft beer community. In a general sense, this stems from the fact that, while beer is made from agricultural ingredients, modern craft brewing rarely recognizes it as an agricultural product. Barley malt, the primary fermentation source in beer, functions as a commodity ingredient in an economy of scale. Brewers need a lot of malt, so it must be inexpensive. And consumers expect flagship beers to taste the same every time, so barley must be grown and malted consistently.

But as the beer market grows bigger and broader, brewers are looking closer to home for regional ingredients that will differentiate their beer, making the debate over whether beer’s flavors can reflect the environment in which the ingredients were grown—beer’s terroir—increasingly difficult to ignore.

Even within the context of wine, terroir does not have a tidy definition. Wine critic Matt Kramer translated it as “somewhereness,” a word only slightly less vague than its French counterpart. Generally, terroir refers to myriad place-specific factors that affect a food product like wine or beer, such as environmental conditions and even human elements like grower practices.

Standing in a barley field or hopyard, it’s easy to see the connection between land and beer; from the vantage of the bar stool, the connection is blurred. Small craft brewers don’t have the same close relationship to their growers that winemakers enjoy. For winemakers, decisions like when to thin fruit, when to spray (or not to spray at all) and when to harvest can seriously impact the grapes they use. But because of the industrial scale of production, brewers can’t communicate their specific needs to barley growers and maltsters. When a facility like Rahr Malting Co. produces more than half a million tons of malt a year, your neighborhood brewery and its minuscule portion of malt are not considered special.

This distance gets translated to the consumer, who may know every measure of the beer they’re drinking, like the grain bill and the varieties of hops used, but not where those ingredients came from. In addition to the impact of place on flavor, transparency in grower practice—one of the values that farm-to-table chefs and natural winemakers revere—is becoming a more pressing concern for those brewing beer. More and more brewers feel they should be able to answer questions about whether the hops they use were sprayed with fungicide, or if the barley has been responsibly irrigated.

Whether the terroir flavors derived from barley and hops can be detected after the agricultural ingredients have been prepared for brewing is still under debate. Many of the best-known brewery operators believe that what happens in the malthouse and brewery overpowers any expression of terroir. But there is one necessary ingredient in beer that unites opposing opinions on whether beer can exhibit terroir: yeast. In almost all American commercial beer production, brewers use a yeast strain that has been isolated, stored and propagated by a laboratory. But there are a number of experimental breweries that are gathering yeast from their region and isolating it for the purpose of creating beer that better reflects its place.

Kristopher Parker is one of those brewers. At his family’s Fess Parker Winery in Santa Ynez, California, he saw firsthand the trial and error that went into determining the best-fit grape varieties for each plot of land. To Parker, the range of terroir flavors in wine is limited to the scope of a single agricultural ingredient: grapes. Beer, with its hops, barley and additions like fruit, offered more possibilities.

In 2014, Parker and Patrick Rue from the Bruery co-founded the upcoming Third Window Brewing Co. in Santa Barbara. Of beer, Parker says, “I think terroir, as in wine, will return to the conversation.” By using locally grown hops and barley that are dried and malted to his specifications, and making additions like foraged fennel and beet sugar that thrive in the area, Parker hopes to create beer that tastes and smells like Santa Barbara.

Regionally restricted ingredient use is not a radical idea. It used to be a necessity. Before transcontinental railroads brought growers and brewers closer together, beer in America was difficult to make and often limited to available fermentation sources like molasses and bran—even corn. As the 20th century rolled on, beer spiraled from a small-batch, handcrafted (and inevitably inconsistent) product into an inexpensive, homogenized commodity made by a handful of national brands. Prohibition shut down the vast number of breweries in America, and when it was repealed, bars and brewers had difficulty regaining licenses. At the same time, technological advances in packaging and refrigeration moved the average beer consumer from drinking draught at a pub to drinking cans from the fridge at home. By the 1970s, a handful of breweries had monopolized American beer.

As microbreweries began popping up in the 1980s and craft brewers experimented with style, a broader spectrum of beer flavors re-emerged. In recent years, beers made using traditional techniques like barrel-aging and bottle-conditioning have increased in popularity. These methods are expanding consumers’ palates to make way for more obscure styles and push the envelope on flavor. “Beer has begun to and will outgrow its commoditized past,” says Parker, “and I think regional styles defined by unique geography will return in a prominent way to the differentiation story.”

Whether the terroir flavors derived from barley and hops can be detected after the agricultural ingredients have been prepared for brewing is still under debate. Many of the best-known brewery operators believe that what happens in the malthouse and brewery overpowers any expression of terroir. But there is one necessary ingredient in beer that unites opposing opinions on whether beer can exhibit terroir: yeast. In almost all American commercial beer production, brewers use a yeast strain that has been isolated, stored and propagated by a laboratory. But there are a number of experimental breweries that are gathering yeast from their region and isolating it for the purpose of creating beer that better reflects its place.

At Wolves & People Farmhouse Brewery in Newburg, Oregon, founder Christian DeBenedetti is using hops and barley grown in state, along with heirloom fruit and hazelnuts from his region and wild yeast. “The main yeast we have been experimenting with came from the fruit of some overripe Brooks plums,” DeBenedetti says. “I brewed a batch of saison, filled a large, sterilized Mason jar with the wort, covered it with cheesecloth, and let the wort cool in the nook of the oldest plum tree here on Springbrook Farm, where I grew up and where Wolves & People is under construction.” The cooling wort (unfermented beer) was the perfect medium to capture and grow the wild yeast that exists naturally in the orchard’s air.

With the help of White Labs, a yeast laboratory and bank in San Diego, DeBenedetti isolated a viable strain that he could use as his proprietary farmhouse-style yeast. Exposing beer to wild yeast is a traditional technique that was prevalent amongst Belgian Lambic brewers. They would leave beer to cool outside in the night air, allowing local microflora harbored on the fruit of cherry trees to inoculate the beer. Other American brewers, like Jolly Pumpkin Artisan Ales in Michigan, are also working with spontaneous fermentation methods. While Dan Carey, co-founder ofNew Glarus Brewing Co. in Wisconsin, champions a brewing process where plant breeders, growers, maltsters and brewers all work together to create distinctive beers by favoring barley malt and hops that produce the most compelling flavors, not just those with the best disease resistance and flavor homogeny.

Reposted from Cheers Magazine...

There are more than 3,464 breweries in the U.S.—as of March—now producing an ever-growing number of individual beers. Add that to increasing import portfolios, and building a balanced beer selection can seem a Herculean task.

Whether you are improving upon an existing lineup or just getting started, consider the following suggestions as you lay the foundation for a competitive beer program.

1) Solicit—and use—consumer input

With so many beers available, external input from knowledgeable customers can be an asset.City Tavern in Culver City, CA, provides a bustling meeting place for some of Hollywood’s biggest film and TV studios; it’s also a destination bar for craft beer lovers. And general manager Ryan Hughes often heeds customer suggestions. “As long as it is something that we believe is a good beer, I would absolutely take requests into consideration.”

Pay it forward by letting your clients know about special beers. “We have some of our regulars on speed-dial for when certain beers come up, and we shoot them a text so they don’t miss it,” Hughes says. “Usually they are here within the hour.”

At Eastern Standard Kitchen and Drinks, an upscale American restaurant and lounge in Boston’s Kenmore Square, you can find a modern beverage program set in Old World ambience. The establishment prides itself on a drinks selection that extends from classic cocktails and unique wine varietals to a beer list with something for everyone.

Bar manager Naomi Levy also appreciates guest input when it comes to beer. “There have been times a beer aficionado opens your eyes to something you’ve never heard before,” Levy says. “But mostly you have to let your program be your program, or it won’t have a solid voice.”

2) Look for market strength

Consider your market and which beer styles are gaining momentum. IPAs may be pervasive in popularity throughout the country, but there are several elements within the style to consider.

For instance, Two Hearted Ale, from Bell’s Brewery in Kalamazoo, MI, is an award-winning American IPA that’s widely distributed. But it might not perform well in a city like San Diego where intense, West Coast IPAs are standard, and the local brewing companies such as Stone and Ballast Point contribute to supplying the style.

3) Seek out seasonals

From the warm, wood finishes and the low lighting to the traditional fare and clinking glasses, Republic in Minneapolis has all the makings of an old-school pub, but the beer selection is modern and expansive. Co-owner Matty O’Reilly gets a jump on seasonal releases. “I proactively stay ahead by researching release dates,” he says.

Part of his strategy likely has to do with the pub’s Minnesota location, he notes. With the massive changes in temperature, which can go from from minus 10 degrees to 60 degrees in a few weeks, “there is a huge change in what people are drinking.”

Most operators organize their rotations to feature heavier, stronger styles in colder months and lighter, more sessionable brews during the dog days of summer to ensure they are offering the most appealing beers with the seasons.

4) Consider customer comfort levels

No beer menu should be tailored to accommodate one level of drinking proficiency, but it is important to keep your audience’s beer education in mind. If you are the first craft-beer-centric bar or restaurant in a neighborhood, an obscure gruit ale might be too advanced.

But if you are trying to distinguish yourself from several other neighboring establishments with impressive beer offerings, a bottle of Special Herbs—a gruit-style brew from Portland, OR-basedUpright Brewing—might be just the thing.

The first thing you may notice at Links Taproom in Chicago is the digital menu. Two monitors above the bar display listings of the 36 beers on tap, along with their descriptions, pouring size, and how much of the keg remains.

This high-tech presentation illustrates the thoughtfulness that co-owner Michael Quinlan put into the beer menu. “It’s important to consider the needs of any customer who walks through the door, regardless of their experience with or knowledge of craft beer,” Quinlan says.

This may mean dedicating a few taps to gateway beers, he adds. “We always keep Left Hand Milk Stout[from Left Hand Brewing Co. in Longmont, CO] on nitro and [Chicago’s] Metropolitan Brewing Lager on our list as a way to bridge that knowledge/taste gap.”

5) Carve out and maintain a concept

With so many choices in beer styles and brands, it’s easy to get out of control with your selection. Try to stay somewhat focused to organize the beer program. “If you remain true to your concept, everything else falls into place,” Quinlan says.

Links Taproom, for example, focuses on domestic beers vs. imports, which limits the brands it chooses to feature. “When it comes to building our tap list, we are local first, Midwestern second and American third,” Quinlan notes.

Food pairings are also a consideration. If a bar or restaurant already emphasizes a certain style of cuisine, the beer program should provide offerings that complement menu choices. It’s an important factor for Republic, “since we’re a restaurant and sell as much food as we do beer, I look at flavor profiles a lot and how different beers pair with different foods,” O’Reilly says.

6) Pursue best-in-style beers

Levy enhances the Eastern Standard beer program with strong style representations. “It’s important to highlight not only some unique offerings, but also to find a mix of one-offs and solid expressions of some of the most called for styles,” she says.

The Eastern Standard bottle list is organized by style with carefully appointed versatility. If you look under “Saisons,” for instance, you can choose from a classic like Saison Dupont, imported from Brasserie Dupont in Belgium, or a local such as Saison Renaud from Mystic Brewery in Chelsea, MA—two different but valuable stylistic interpretations.

“Be sure to give different brands and styles a reasonable amount of time each to expose plenty of your guests to it before rotating out,” Levy adds.

7) Rotate for variety

Bringing in new beer styles and brands is a reliable way to invigorate a beer program; it is attractive to new customers and offers variety to regular guests. At City Tavern, Hughes considers tap rotation a critical component of the selection.

“Sometimes it is hard for me not to keep reordering a favorite,” she says. “But unless it is something I cannot get again easily, everything has its time and place here.”

City Tavern’s regular customers appreciate the bar mixing up the beer offering. “There are bestsellers that make their way back into the rotation much more than others, but as long as I can find something comparable in style and price, I like to keep things fresh,” Hughes says.

8) Gain advantage with exclusives

City Tavern is situated between competitive restaurants and bars, so a selective beer program is essential. That’s why Hughes keeps her tap list edgy: “Make sure there are at least a few rare beers that you won’t find at all the other bars around the block—sours, barrel-aged beers, and funky, one-off infusions.”

Exclusivity is not something you can just demand from beer distributors, however. You have to build relationships with beer representatives and distributors to access special brews.

“Sometimes it is a numbers game that I have to play,” Hughes notes. “I keep a steady amount of the core beers in rotation, and then when the special stuff comes I am at the top of the allocation list.”

9) Celebrate local—quality local

Many breweries promote the idea of “drinking locally.” As beer ingredients are rarely sourced locally, these slogans are meant to engender community support.

There are some advantages to offering locally made beer. For example, buying local will increase your chances of getting the freshest product—especially beneficial to hoppy beers—and the financial and environmental cost of shipping is minimized.

Forming relationships with local breweries can also build support that benefits both bar and brewery.

That said, just because a beer is made locally does not mean it is good by default. Quality should trump geography, and if a beer is inconsistent or compromised by infection, you should immediately rotate it out and notify the brewery of the issue.

At Republic, “we get praised on our commitment to small and emerging breweries, with a focus on quality,” O’Reilly says. Looking for what’s local is another way to anticipate market changes. “We spend a lot of energy meeting new breweries before they launch and enter in to the Minnesota market,” he adds.

While local is good, “it’s always quality for me,” O’Reilly says. “If it’s quality and local, that’s a win-win.”

Assessing the quality of a beer is not a subjective evaluation of its features. Simply put, when beer leaves the brewery, it should be consistent within the brand and free from off-flavors—including infection and oxidation.

The only way to ensure you are getting a quality product is to familiarize yourself with the beer and know what to expect. That means tasting. A lot.

Reposted from the LAWeekly...

Downtown L.A., already home to two craft breweries, is about to get a whole lot more. In addition to existing Angel City Brewery, which opened at Rose and Traction in 2013, and brand-new Mumford Brewing Co., which opened two weeks ago with a tasting room, there are five other breweries under construction or in planning, all within a mile of one another.

Boomtown Brewery breaches Little Tokyo to the north while Indie Brewing Co. and Dry River Brewing Co. cross the Los Angeles River into Boyle Heights. Filling out the Traction Avenue contingent will be Arts District Brewing Co., while Iron Triangle Brewing Co. will anchor the southern end of the neighborhood with a property that spans an entire city block.

Once all seven breweries open — at least three more should be operating by the end of the year — it will make the Arts District area home to the highest concentration of craft breweries in L.A. County. And with public transportation delivering people from farther away, downtown could easily become a walkable, accessible craft beer destination.

Because there is a great deal of variation and experience between the breweries, the mix could offer something for every kind of beer drinker. Cedd Moses and Eric Needleman's Arts District Brewing Co. has a built-in audience from their 213Hospitality family, including Seven Grand, Las Perlas and Caña Rum Bar. They’ve also recruited esteemed brewer Devon Randall from Pizza Port Solana Beach.

Dry River Brewing Co. is pushing the sustainable angle (it hopes to be the greenest brewery in the state) and is embracing its hometown of Boyle Heights, though it is not planning to have a tasting room. Boomtown (which is already brewing and on tap at several local bars) has the branding success of the Stout Burger pub chain from the Kaglew partners. Startup Indie Brewing Co. is slated to have bottles and kegs released this summer.

The largest and most ambitious of them all is Iron Triangle, whose 30-barrel brewhouse and proposed initial capacity will be enough to saturate the Southland. According to owner Nathan Pacetti, his brewery will rival the output ofGolden Road by 2016. All he needs now is a brewer.