#cascade hops

Apples and Apricots and Some Other Stuff

Nat West isn’t your usual cider maker. He got his start making backyard cider from old crab apples, traditional dry ciders. But being in the beer haven of Portland, West saw that cider flavor didn’t need to come just from apples. In Cider Made Simple, Jeff Alworth writes that Nat West approaches fresh pressed apple juice like a brewer approaches wort. He adds spices, fruit, and chooses his yeast to create a cider that is tastier than any single ingredient alone. 

Reverend Nat’s was also an early pioneer in dry hopped ciders. Hallelujah Hopricot is based on a Belgian Witbier, with additions of coriander, grains of paradise, and bitter orange peel. It’s fermented with a Saison yeast strain and finished with apricot juice and cascade hops. It’s as far from traditional cider as one can get, but should raise the eyebrows of fellow beer geeks. 

I wanted to do a brief follow-up to “The Learning Curve of a Student Archivist” about the side-effects of learning about Oregon beer culture. These are things I’ve noticed as a new beer nerd in my daily life that truly make the things I do outside of the archives unique and colorful.

You get excited about all the cool beer at local restaurants, and then frustrated when you can’t try it. Believe it or not, I am actually not 21 yet. This gives me the distinction of knowing a lot about local beer while simultaneously not being able to drink it legally. Recently, I went to American Dream Pizza for dinner with my boyfriend after work, and he asked me for details about all the beer on tap. Easily, I could tell him which ones were from Corvallis, other areas of Oregon or a large corporation, the bitterness of each one, the style and other cool facts, such as the sustainability efforts of the brewery etc. Another time, I saw Nectar Creek mead on tap at a restaurant, and got exasperated that I couldn’t have some. Nectar Creek is a meadery based in Corvallis that I learned about in my oral history with Kyle Almlie, and as a person that’s not fond of bitter flavors, I look forward to a time when I can try it.

You have your 21st birthday plans to do an Oregon beer tour already figured out. Since I have to wait to try beer in taprooms and restaurants, I also have plenty of time to figure what I want to do when I can actually go. Currently, my list of places to visit are Heater Allen Brewing for their lagers (as I heard about in Lisa Allen and Rick Allen’s oral histories), the Widmer Bros. Gasthaus, Nectar Creek, McMenamins, 2 Town Ciderhouse, Ninkasi, Wandering Aengus Ciderhouse, Deschutes and Apple Outlaw Cidery to name a few. It’s gonna be a cool birthday weekend of finally meeting really cool brewers and tasting their delicious products.

You have a lot of imaginary friendships and can recognize people by their voices alone. A few months ago, we had a book event (as written about in “That time when Peter Kopp gave a talk OSU -- and Al Haunold helped him out”) featuring the book Hoptopia by Peter Kopp, who helped Tiah establish the archives. After his presentation, there was a Q&A session. During the session, an older man stood up and started speaking about hop varieties and various hop breeders. As he stood, I thought he was just an audience member with a question, but as he spoke, I realized that he was Dr. Al Haunold, the renowned hop geneticist who developed Cascade in the 1970s. I knew who he was because I had been finishing the transcription of his oral history a week before. It’s funny, watching all these people’s interviews, they’ve become a mix of friends and celebrities to me, so it’s exciting to see them in person from time to time. It’s also weird because, depending on the person, I know their life story, family history and entire career path, yet I’ve never met them. It would also be pretty weird to start meeting and talking to these people because I know all these details. 

You recommend beer chemist jobs to all your graduating friends with a science background. One of my favorite oral histories is the one with Dana Garves, who worked as the lab technician for Ninkasi Brewing and was crucial to their space program. Interestingly enough, she ended up working for the brewery through a craigslist ad for the position, and initially wanted to be a chemistry teacher. She now works as the founder and director of BrewLab, which performs beer analysis tests for small microbreweries in Oregon. Her story is so cool that I tell my chemistry and biochemistry friends looking for jobs to check chemist positions in local breweries or businesses like Garves’.

You feel like there should be a National Treasure movie about you because you work in an archive. Growing up, I had a curiosity with history and conspiracy theories. I wasn’t super nerdy about it, but I loved the fact that you could be privy to a hidden view of the world, and that you could also protect those secrets. While most of my tasks at work are related to beer and oral histories, I also do help with public service in the SCARC reading room. Let me tell you, you feel really cool getting items from the collections for patrons or for your own projects, almost like someone on a secret mission. I swear, The Librarians movies were about archives like ours. 

There are, of course, many more quirks to being a beer archivist, but these are some of the most present in my daily life. I think it comes with working in such an esoteric niche of history and culture, to the point where you are both a fan and a scholar in your field. I look forward to the other oddities of an archivist coming in the next 5-8 months. 

Kegged and Conditioned

This weekend, we found ourselves driving through the state capital in search of a nice pint. Salem isn’t a particularly beery city, but the metro area hosts a respectable ten or so taprooms and brewpubs. We went straight for Santiam Brewing on the southside of town. It’s not the fanciest place in town, nor the most famous, but in addition to a dozen beers on tap, Santiam serves not one but four cask conditioned ales. 

For the uninitiated, cask conditioning is a beer serving method most often seen in the UK. In a typical American brewery, when beer is packaged in kegs, carbon dioxide is forced into the beer. Carbonated beer is then dispensed on tap with more gas. Cask conditioned beers, or “real” ales, are fermented right in the keg giving it a much lighter carbonation. When it comes time to serve it, a tap can be inserted right into the cask and dispensed like a big gatorade cooler. To keep the yeast working, cask beers are kept at about fifty degrees fahrenheit. It’s this unique conditioning that gives English beer the appearance of being warm and flat.

Santiam has four beer engines which pump the beer from under the bar. The result is a smooth, slightly bubbly beer. Without the extra carbon dioxide, even a light beer feels full bodied. But this is America, and an ordinary bitter with less than four percent alcohol won’t move too fast, so all the Santiam taps were over six percent. But that’s not to say they weren’t tasty.

Spitfire is an amber colored extra special bitter. It’s brewed with traditional Maris Otter malt with a little crystal malt and Belgian candi sugar for color and English Admiral and Fuggle Hops. Despite being on the strong side for a bitter, it’s incredibly drinkable, and even in the afternoon warmth, Spitfire is still cool enough to be refreshing. 

The IPA, Stonehenge, is a burnished copper color and full of classic Cascade hop flavor. I could stick to that for an afternoon very happily. The cask conditioning really brings out the grapefruit flavor. It’s not harshly bitter, but it’s far from the fluffy, sweet hazy IPA currently in fashion.

Coal Porter feels like a pint of nitro Guinness but with a deeper flavor. The low carbonation calls for gulping and glugging instead of the usual taproom sniffing and swirling. The toasty flavor goes perfectly with thick cut french fries.

Keeping Bees and Beer

Every May, we visit Sarah’s parents in Virginia. And every year, we visit the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival. Sarah and Cynthia squish some fibers and pet some sheep while Asa and I try to watch a sheep dog competition. It’s hard to stand on your toes very long, especially with a toddler on your shoulders.

But our first stop was the Milkhouse Brewery tent. It was right near the front entrance, but even at noon, they were running low on supplies. Last year, they had closed up shop before I could check it out.

I didn’t have a chance to chat with anyone behind the booth, and the sample pours were miniscule, but the few sips I had seemed, at the very least, not terrible. So I grabbed four bottles and dragged through barns and across fields for a few hours. Plenty of time to do some research on my phone. 

Milkhouse Brewery is located at the Stillpoint Farm in rural Maryland –from what google tells me, somewhere outside Frederick. They raise sheep, keep bees, and grow their own hops. The beer range skews toward the classics – porter, stout, pale ale.

When we finally got home, I cracked open Goldie’s Best Bitter, a sessionable 4.5% pale ale brewed with wildflower honey and Cascade hops. It’s not strictly traditional, but it’s really good. The honey does a lot of heavy lifting, adding a aromatic floral sweetness to the beer. The Cascades are just there for balancing bitterness. I could do with a little more hop flavor, but it’s a real nice beer.

I definitely tasted the Dollyhyde Farmhouse Ale at the Wool Festival, I remember the thimbleful sample being incredibly dry and fizzy. I had to double check the board. This is definitely not a cider? OK… Dollyhyde is also brewed with honey but is complemented by additional chamomile. The beer is fermented with a Trappist ale yeast strain which explains the extreme attenuation. Again, Dollyhyde is only 4.5%. This isn’t exactly a saison, the yeast character is pretty sedate. I’d figure it’s closer to a biere de garde. It’s light on the tongue with just a light floral scent like a breeze in springtime.

At this point I was impressed. I opened up the Irish-style dry stout and was convinced. Milkhouse knows what it’s doing. Coppermine Creek is the third beer under 5% but it blew me away. It’s full bodied. It’s simple. Not a lot of coffee or chocolate. Just dry peanuts and plain crackers – charred around the edges, but still good. It’s the perfect bitter counterpoint to a chocolate cake.

That left us with only one beer left, Stairway, the classic India Pale Ale. In the days before the glitter bombs and the milkshakes, this is what an IPA was about. It’s a little simple – on the brown side of amber, featuring decidedly uncool Cascade hops. It tastes like beer with subtle notes of citrus and pine. And at 7.2% it’s the strongest beer in the line up. It’s not bad, but it’s not exactly what I’m looking for in an IPA these days. 

What’s Old is New Again

Baerlic Brewing is doing something different. Their beers taste very unique among Portland breweries. While every other brewery is falling over themselves making ultra-fruity IPAs and added-fruit ales, Baerlic is making bitter, toothsome brews. The beer is more akin to that brewed at an early aughts microbrewery than a contemporary hophouse, but they utilize the same modern hops and flavors.

For example, the latest New Noise is brewed with classic Cascade hops – like an old Sierra Nevada brew – but also Amarillo, El Dorado, and Azacca – the latter two were bred in the last ten years. In a single pint of New Noise you can taste the entire evolution of American IPA in reverse order, it moves from the modern and juicy, to the old and hard in a single sip. Upfront, the beer tastes of tangy tangerine and passion fruit, very de rigueur. On the backend, you get a really firm handshake of pine and spruce. It’s earthy. The body isn’t pillowy or fluffy. It’s oily. 

Harvested the crops today.

One bine out of 5 produced. One was a no-show, the others are just reluctant.

The Crux Fresh/Wet Hops: An Embarrassment of Riches

Okay, First: “Fresh Hopped” and Wet Hopped” are the same thing. Fresh, resin-drippin’ hop flowers, picked, tossed into bins, driven hurriedly back to the brewery – often a journey of several hours – and tossed into a brew tank. A LOT of outright BS that gets slung around about freshness in dried flower, pellet, or extract hops IPAs, MANY of which remain viable for a couple of months, at least,…