Beer & Me

It all started with He Said Beer She Said Wine by Sam Cagalione and Marnie Old. They promoted the popular book with a series of dinners that compared his beer pairing suggestions with her wine pairing suggestions.

The idea has caught on and similar events are beginning to show up all over the place. The latest is a dinner scheduled this week in St. Louis. Wine from Majestic Wines and beer from Schlafly Beer will by paired to various dishes and compared by the participants. Benefits from the event will go to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

For more information check out the press release Beer vs. Wine? You Make the Call.

No doubt you’ve heard the news by now – Anhueser-Busch finally acquiesced to being taken over by Inbev. After the Belgian beer giant upped their bid by four or five billion – but what’s a few billion among friends? – the board at A-B decided that was their price.

It’s been a remarkable few months. Back in the beginning of 2008 three companies dominated US beer sales – Anheuser-Busch, Miller and Coors. At the end of 2008 none of these companies will exist! Miller and Coors’s respective foreign masters decided to join their American interests into a single company called MillerCoors and now Anheuser-Busch Inbev, or as some are already calling it A-B Inbev, will replace the once mighty brewer of Budweiser.

By the way, if you want to get an in-depth look at the brewer that was Anheuser-Busch, CNBC is airing a show that should be pretty interesting this Friday.

If you’re one of the many Budweiser fans concerned about the fate of Anheuser-Busch then you’ll be glad to know that at least one brewer in St. Louis is prepared to take a proactive stance against Inbev.

Schlafly Beer, a craft brewer in St. Louis, has started a fundraising campaign with a goal of buying Inbev. So even if the beer giant does eventually buy out A-B at least, ultimately, Budweiser will remain an American beer! Go, contribute now!

By the way, Schlafly makes some really excellent beer, too. If you ever have the chance you should try some.  They make a nice oatmeal state and a beautifully hoppy American pale ale.

In a letter to Inbev this week Anheuser-Busch told the Belgian beer giant thanks but no thanks to their unsolicited bid. The letter points out many reasons that the bid was rejected but they all boiled down to “We are SO worth more than that!”

Is it a real rejection or a negotiating tactic? Conventional wisdom is that this will now enter the hostile takeover phase. I don’t pretend to know what the next step will be but I fully expect that this time next year Inbev will own the American brewer.

I also fully expect that most beer drinkers in America and Europe will notice very little difference.

For some time now I have not bought Heather Ale from the Fraoch brewery in Scotland. I saw it everytime that I dropped by the local beer store but I ignored it. It seemed like little more than a gimmick. But today I decided that I would finally try the stuff.

Turns out it is a lovely beer. The ale is on the lighter side though it is still substantial enough that no one would confuse it with a lager. The heather, I presume, adds a very nice flowery and fresh aspect to the beer giving it a refreshing and spicy flavor. I enjoyed it thoroughly and might have to go pick up a few more bottles tomorrow

In case I haven’t mentioned it I live 90 miles south of St. Louis, the home of Anheuser-Busch.

Busch country.

So as you might imagine things are reaching a fevered pitch around here. You’d think that a foreign government is threatening to take over the country; not the run of the mill big beer business deal that this really is. I can usually calm the hysteria a bit when I point out that Coors is owned by a Canadian company and Miller a South African company.

Even so, people are still freaking out. And this headline, Inbev tone turns more hostile in bid for A-B, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch didn’t help any.

But we all need to calm down. First, it’s just beer, ok? We all love it but life will go on if something about beer changes. Second, Budweiser and the other big brands brewed by Anhueser-Busch aren’t going anywhere. And odds are they’re going to be brewed in exactly the same breweries in exactly the same way as before.

Interesting side note: It occurred to me today that if this deal does wind up going through the Boston Beer Company, Sam Adams’s brewer, will be the biggest American owned beer producer.

It may seem that I’m a relentless homebrewer based on the fact that a mere two days after I bottled my stout I started another beer. But don’t assume anything yet. We’re only two brews into this second homebrewing phase of my life so my enthusiasm may peter out soon.

Anyway, today’s brew: I ordered the extract German alt kit from Northern Brewer a few weeks ago and today was it’s day of reckoning.

The brewing went OK – no major hitches. Well, none until I was cleaning up. The kits come in these substantial little cardboard boxes. When I picked this one up to throw it in the recycling stack in the garage I noticed that it seemed a little heavy. I opened it up and there was a pound of dried malt extract.

By now I had already boiled the wort. The carboy was full and cooling in a bathtub full of cold water. I couldn’t re-boil it; that would screw up the hopping schedule. So after cursing to myself and staring at that damned plastic bag full of brown powder for about 20 seconds I decided to just dump it straight in.

If you’ve ever dealt with DME you know that it’s very fine and likes to clump. The barest amount of moisture will make it form into solid little rocks. And that’s exactly what it did when I dumped it the carboy – it formed three or four dozen little malt balls in the wort which, eventually, drifted to the bottom.

Once the wort was cooled down sufficiently I pitched the yeast as usual. Will this affect the brew? I have know idea but it will be interesting to watch.

Yesterday I mentioned a mead that I bottled alongside my stout. Let me tell you about that mead.

When I got the beer.about.com gig I was really a bit surprised. I expected that another more qualified writer would land it. But I got it and I couldn’t have been happier. I had to work really hard to earn and keep the position and consequently my homebrewing exploits fell to the wayside.

Fast forward two years to now and I’m finally getting back into homebrewing. When I decided to start brewing again around a month ago I began cleaning the dusty heap of homebrew equipment that had sat neglected for two years. Among all of that I discovered a carboy full of mead. It didn’t have a cap or plug of any sort; it was just sitting there open to the world - or really the nasty air of my basement.

But I smelled it then, after it smelled OK, I tasted it and it seemed to be in good shape.

I have no memory of this mead - when I put it down or why it didn’t have a plug and airlock. But there it was. So as I brewed my stout I also tended to this mead. I transferred it twice to a clean carboy so to clean it a bit and I think it’s going to be really quite good.

I bottled it yesterday; even added some priming sugar in the hope that it will have some yeast left and will carbonate like any other homebrewed beer. I’ll report back when it’s aged a bit.

I bottled my stout today. My wife had to work – her job requires the odd Saturday – so as soon as she had gone I got busy. I started by lugging the five gallon carboy up from the basement to the kitchen. Actually there were two. I also bottled a mead that I don’t think that I’ve mentioned here before. Anyway, I brought both up and sat them on the counter. I always start with this step because it agitates the beer and I want to give it time to settle down before it goes in the bottles.

So, I left the two carboys on the counter and took my time gathering and cleaning everything for my bottling. Plenty of time, right? But when I turned to the stout to start siphoning when *bloop* the airlock bubbled! Three weeks and the damn thing thinks that it’s supposed to still be fermenting!

I stood there staring at trying to decide if I should give it another week. I have no idea how long it took – a few minutes at least - but it bubbled again. It was definitely working and not just burping from the ride upstairs

I bottled anyway. I decided that it’s got to very close to finishing and bottling at this point isn’t that different from krausening, right? I did add priming sugar but only about half of the usual amount. The possible outcomes I’m looking for here, setting aside for the moment the chance of exploding bottles, is super-fizzy, average carbonation or near still.

That’s right; Danger IS my middle name!

I’ve long complained about a style that rose out of the craft beer revolution known as American wheat beer. The original Bavarian wheat beer known as Hefeweizen uses a unique ale yeast that gives the beer a spicy flavor and aroma with strange but completely enjoyable hints of banana. The flavor is pronounced in the finished beer but it’s even more apparent if the brew is left unfiltered with the tasty yeast suspended in it.

American craft brewers took this idea of unfiltered wheat beer except that they didn’t use the same sort of yeast – they use a regular, clean fermenting yeast. So what is left was a largely flavorless, sweet beer with a lot of body (thanks to the wheat).

I’ve always complained about the style but rarely find an ally among other beer geeks.

But could I have been wrong? Tonight I tried a beer from Schlafly in St. Louis, MO that was labeled Hefeweizen. I expected the usual Amercan flavorless version and, as I expected, this one did not use the proper Bavarian yeast. But still it was very tasty. Spicy and sweet but very good. I may have to give this whole style a second look.