Is The Age of the Flagship Beer Over?

This here marks the second entry in a loosely connected series exploring the development and evolution of a new brewery's beer lineup, and how a brewery goes about refining such a thing. Part one went into the background of what we decided we should brew at Kent Falls, while a third future installment will eventually expand on the evolution of a particular beer, our Field Beer farmhouse ale. Field Beer was, from the start, intended to be sort of a 'conceptual' flagship ale, embodying an ethos that represented the whole brewery, if not necessarily leading the brewery in sales or release volumes.

Everyone knows that craft beer has dramatically shifted the way that the whole of the adult beverage market works. Before I even jumped into the process of helping to launch a new brewery, and planning and brainstorming and stressing and speculating what beers that I wanted to make would also be practical and sellable to the public, I had noticed something interesting about the way that breweries present themselves to their consumers. For years, maybe ever since the craft beer movement first began, its trajectory has been that of slowly and silently killing the model of flagship beer offerings. It has been one long history of flipping the way in which a brewery works.

For years, a brewery was a brand. Not a place or destination or personality or cult or whatever breweries are to the public now. The clarity and message of the brand was the product; the brewery as a personality was only really relevant so far as it was part of the brand. You didn't expect them to change what they were doing or switch things up on a regular basis. You were either on board with their brand, or you weren't. And while most of these brands did offer several products, they were usually slight variations on that initial core brand. Rather than releasing a distinct new brand with a separate identity, for example, you marketed a "light" version of your existing flagship brand.

Until recently, and even probably still now, this had a huge impact on how the average person would think about and discuss beer. For decades, the focus had been on a brewery as a brand. So that when you would talk to people about beer, most people would say things like "I had that Dogfish Head beer last night," or "You know what you would like? This one beer from back home, Troegs... you'd like it." And so on. The previous model of brewery-as-brand still greatly affects how the average person sees a brewery-as-a-business, even though it hasn't been that way for most breweries in decades. How many breweries today focus almost all their efforts on one single beer brand?

I mentioned that I view this as a slow trajectory, and I think there is an evolution in brewery identity that has been going on since the 70's. Those people that talk about a brewery as if they only make one beer would be wrong in almost every case, but you can understand why, if they don't really have much interest in the nerdy details of the beer industry, they might see a brewery like Sierra Nevada as a singular brand largely embodied by Pale Ale. That type of consumer would only rarely notice that there are other offerings from the brewery, and if so, probably understands that seasonals and special releases are a thing, and don't detract from the core identity of the brewery/brand. In the first wave of craft beer, this view would still basically be perceiving things accurately. Sierra Nevada was built by Pale Ale. That is still the core of their identity, though they happen to make many other products, too. And to the public, Sam Adams is just... Sam Adams. That's the beer. That's the brewery. That's the brand. But because they're a craft brand, sure, they also do sometimes have a seasonal release on tap as well. In the majority of bars, ordering a Sam Adams would create zero confusion. Only the pedantic beer nerd would protest: "But they make like 300 beers! Which one do you mean???"

The founders of the craft beer revolution largely stuck close to the existing model, focusing on flagship brands, but generally expanding this concept into having a group of "core" offerings, plus seasonals. This became the basic template for almost every brewery of the next several decades. Gradually, though, the obviousness of the flagship offering (and its singularity as the brewery's identifying brand) eroded. A flagship became merely the most prominent beer in a broader lineup of core offerings. Is 60 Minute the most popular and common product made by Dogfish Head? Sure, but they're a brand built on experimentation, and thus variety; it would be hard to miss that bigger picture.

One or two flagships bolstered by seasonals and special releases soon became half a dozen core lineup beers bolstered by seasonals and special releases. Much of this shift was likely tied to the resurgence of the brewpub, which, for most casual beer consumers, would start to define their image of what a brewery was. At a brewpub, having a clear and obvious single flagship isn't necessary, and from a branding perspective, doesn't even really make sense. As more and more began to define this new wave of breweries by their Friday-night-dinner experiences at a brewpub, the expectation that a brewery would offer a lineup of six, up to maybe ten core offerings, with a few side experiments that change every now and then, worked its way into our consciousness. And I'd say that's maybe where we've been for the last twenty years or so.

In that sense, the flagship beer is kind of already dead. Most breweries now don't expect to have one huge mega-hit that accounts for 90% of sales. In the rare cases where that does happen, it looks shockingly anomalous. How weird was it that The Alchemist, one of the most talked about and sought-after craft breweries in the world for a good part of this decade, only made and sold a single beer for a long chunk of that time? That Heady Topper stood as the sole offering of an immensely popular and beloved brewery was highly unusual for the time, probably because it wasn't even the brewery's intention for this to happen, but the whim's of fate and the wrath of mother nature.

Starting a new farmhouse brewery in a demographically-oddball rural area, we knew that a tart saison (or any kind of saison) was going to be a hard sale as Kent Fall's primary brand. You'd be surprised at how hard it is to sell large volumes of saison in the current beer market. Yes, I know, that probably sounds like a personal problem. "Have you considered that you only think that because you are terrible and no one likes you or your beer?" is probably your response, and while you are right, don't take my word for it. Ask any brewery that's producing a lot (or a majority) of farmhouse ale — unless their product is sour or barrel-aged. It may seem like saisons are super hot right now, but I think beer nerds talk about saison more than the general drinking public actually buys them in large quantities. In other words, it's a style that may do really well in special release formats (especially, again, if it's barrel-aged or has fruit or some other specialty situation), but saison is not dominating volume the way that, say, IPAs are, or session IPAs for example, or fruited IPAs, or to pick another random example, fruited session IPAs, or fruited session IPAs with citrus zest, or hard root beer. Saison is one of those styles that's beloved, but puts you in a weird spot if you want to make a lot of it.

Anyway, we anticipated this when thinking about our core lineup of beers, and came up with several concepts for "core" beers, though being that most of them were still in the farmhouse vein, we still ended up brewing for variety much more than we had anticipated. I'm guessing this is a common experience for many new breweries these days, unless you're focusing on hoppy beers for your flagships. Hoppy beers are probably the category that remains very easily (very easily) sellable as flagships or core brands, but in order to start off pushing hoppy beers as your primary offering, you either need to have put in the planning years in advance to procure awesome hop contracts from the start, or else be so small that you can still round up the hops you need from spot and trading. In other words, I don't think there are many styles remaining that are particularly easy to push as your flagship offering. And that may be a symptom of how drastically the entire brewing industry has changed. Variety, for now, is king. The real interesting question for me, is: just how sustainable is a model of "variety, always" actually is for every type of brewery, big and small?

If you enjoy my writing or reading about fermentation in general, please consider pre-ordering my book, The Fermented Man, on Amazon, and follow me on Twitter and Instagram for more regular updates.

Chickens and Funk: Plan Bee Farm Brewery is Growing (Slightly Bigger) and Growing (Everything)

When, like most extremely normal people, I'm dwelling on stories I haven't written yet weeks or months before I actually sit down and type anything out, I often latch onto some kind of 'hook' that seems like a good encapsulation of the story I want to tell. And so, for some time now, I figured I would open this feature by writing about how Evan Watson, brewmaster of Fishkill, NY's Plan Bee Farm Brewery, appears to be one of the nicest human beings you'll ever meet. I promise this isn't me showing my bias, because truthfully, I don't really know Evan all that well. No, it's just the take-away you'll have after chatting with him at a market on occasional weekends, and seeing him explain his beer and his brewery's mission to other curious shoppers, most of whom haven't the slightest idea what a beer produced by a tiny farm brewery with a local wild house yeast strain might be like. ("Is it a light beer?") Evan may be a bearded giant, but from making his acquaintance in the year-and-change since Plan Bee opened, I had decided that this incredibly humble, soft-spoken man is just a big old sweetie.

Evan is full of surprises, though. And given his quiet, down-playing nature, you won't learn these things easily, without some prying. That he was some kind of All-American football star way back in the day isn't that shocking. But try Googling his name and uncover his music career, which he will allude to only offhandedly, in the vaguest, most demure of terms. You will discover that he's incredibly talented in this realm as well — has, in fact, toured with some very big acts that I promise you've heard of — and you wonder: when in the world did he have time to start brewing? And at Captain Lawrence, no less, one of the Hudson Valley's greatest success stories, and undeniably the brewery with its best sour and barrel-aging program. Evan Watson has some impressive credentials.

And yet, right now, Plan Bee Farm Brewery consists of little more than a small shed behind the home of Evan and his wife Emily. (At least, that's how it would seem if you're thinking of a brewery in the traditional sense). Inside the shed are a couple micro barrels, one normal-size barrel of solera lambic, four Speidel fermentors, and one of the simplest brew-houses that I've ever seen. True, Plan Bee is only running a one barrel (32 gallon) system currently, leading to the rare situation where a professional brewer can drag his equipment out into the yard and clean it with a garden hose. Even for its size, Plan Bee keeps things basic: I've seen any number of homebrew set-ups more elaborate than this.

As anyone in the industry knows, 1 bbl per batch is not a lot of beer. Almost anyone, including those with a 1 bbl system themselves, will tell you that it's a wildly uneconomical business model in the long term. But Evan's ambitions are a bit outside the norm of most volume-oriented brewers. He describes the current brewery as a Petri dish. Plan Bee will grow, and likely soon, but volume will never be the focus. Evan told me he doesn't think he'll need anything larger than a 5 bbl brewhouse for the next phase. Not because Evan doesn't think he could sell more beer, but because he doesn't think he could produce more beer. The operation is unprecedented in the state of New York, as the only brewery to currently make every one of its beers with all-NY ingredients. Not only are the hops and barley grown in the Empire State — many of the hops, in fact, are grown right in Evan's yard — but his current house yeast strain was originally plucked from Muscadine grapes growing in his backyard as well, and developed through repeated brewing sessions. Plan Bee epitomizes the farm brewery model that this state, and many others, are now pushing so hard. And, in a curious way, Plan Bee demonstrates why the farm brewery license, as it stands, may pose harsh challenges for just about any other brewery.

Evan's plans to grow Plan Bee don't follow the usual growth pattern of a nano-brewery. He told me he's currently looking for a new property: "Ideally, 15-30 acres, dedicating most of it to grain growing, and probably just an acre of hops." Curiously, rather than growing significantly larger in volume, Evan plans to grow more... local. With a new location, and expanded farmland, he hopes that Plan Bee will source every ingredient, and every step of the process, from its own property. The new Plan Bee Farm Brewery, whenever it arrives, will be much more than a tasting room next to some tanks: there will be a larger apiary, a malthouse, hop-oast, small orchard, large garden, and more.

I have often wondered if the Farm Brewery Bill in New York is overly-ambitious. It seems pretty clear at this point that it is going to be a huge challenge to make it work as written, however wonderful of an effort in concept. I have debated with many people in the industry if, given the current capacity for growing malt and hops in the state, it's possible for the intended regulations to be sustainable in the timeframe allotted (60% NY-state ingredients by 2018). Just a couple small-to-medium size farm breweries would quickly eat up the entire state's projected resources, to say nothing of its existing resources. Brewers are all very much counting on this licensing intervention to inspire supply for the undeniable cliff of demand, which looms... close. We're counting on a mad rush of producers to fill what has been highlighted as a glaring void.

Way ahead of everyone else, though, Evan's sort of ambition is personal. I didn't get the sense that his plans have much to do with business or licensing or market differentiation at all. It's simply his vision for the brewery — and farm — he'd like to run. He's passionate about developing the terroir of beer in this way. I don't think Evan wants to brew "local" beer so that he can slap that word on the label. I think Evan simply wants to brew beer with things that he grew, that he knows, that he tended to at every step of the way. Because to him, that is the beer. Not the recipe. Not the equipment. Not whatever it is a janitor brewmaster does.

"Growing, developing, and processing your own ingredients allows for a nearly infinite possibilities," Evan tells me later. "Brewing is even more agriculturally based than wine-making, yet we've lost that connection in this country. If you went to a vineyard in Napa or Sonoma and they said they source their ingredients exclusively from other countries, you would laugh in their face. Almost every other brewery in this country is essentially ordering from the same catalog. I feel the ingredients I source myself can be fresher, less-handled, more distinct, and entirely proprietary."

This also sounds like a ludicrous amount of work.

Two buckets of fresh hops go into the kettle for "Hop Wild."

Evan tells me he has a habit of acquiring hobbies. He says he likes distilling things down to their essence, understanding what makes them tick. Just for the sake of knowing how things work, from what I can gather of his quiet musings as we add wet hops to the boil. So when he makes a beer, he wants to craft it through every step of the process. He's brewing a weird hybrid of a beer the day we chat, with two large buckets of wet Cascades from a local farmer, but rather than a standard IPA, he intends to pitch a "weird cocktail of every yeast and blend I had floating around." I have no idea what the result will be, but it sounds guaranteed to be fascinating. The hop cones are so large we spend a good half an hour breaking them into chunks to toss into the kettle. He tells me he "has a million ideas." He wants to make this new, future farm brewery wrapped around growth, around beer, and also music. A place people can go to absorb all these things. It's sounding like a pretty chill place.

Which, I would say, is a good idea considering his current situation: a brewery in his backyard, and a retail 'farmstand' in his front yard, open Saturday afternoons only. The only other place to find the beer? The local farmer's market, on Sundays. Bottles only, in each case. It's not like there's a whole lot to go around. If you're going to find Evan's beer, those are the options.

Plan Bee has released a number of well-received sour beers in recent weeks: Brass Tacks, a barrel-aged golden sour, and two fruit variations of that base beer: Amour, on strawberries, and Precious, on apricots. The Watsons are used to beer collectors and drinkers of all types hanging out around his property, but the line of cars out of his driveway at 9 o'clock in the morning for that recent release of Precious was a first. When Evan and Emily opened the farmstand to customers at noon, the beer sold out in under an hour. A few weeks later, Plan Bee released Comb, a blended sour. The line started before 8 am this time. Though twice as much beer was available for this batch, the Watsons lowered the bottle limited significantly from the previous release. The whole batch still sold out in the same amount of time.

The small scale helps, and certainly, selling out a batch in 15 minutes isn't totally inconceivable when you're making such a small volume in the first place. But the beer is getting out there, popping up in states far away from Evan's little farmstand. A new location will have to cement Plan Bee's accessibility and aesthetic. His roots to the farmland, the wild yeast he favors, spices fresh from the garden. It'll have to be comfortable, as one would imagine such a place, I figure. It's a good problem to have, shared by many of today's best brewers, even if they started, at their smallest, still many times larger than Plan Bee. I'm quite excited by the prospects of this operation, especially given this feeling I get that Evan won't fail to deliver on his ambitions.

I ask him to describe what his ideal brewery would be, beyond just all the farming and creeping bines. There hangs a solitary acoustic guitar on the wall of the brew-shed, for when friends visit during a brew session. Out front, by the driveway, a hammock stretches between trees, bushes arched over the path that leads to the house, chickens racing across the yard. It is the kind of place that is, from the very first impression, extremely charming.

Evan starts telling me a bit about his former football career, of all things — and, not being much of a football person myself, I have no idea where this is going, or if I will understand whatever metaphor he's working at.

After games, he says, he would sit with his father at a pub in Ohio, and have dinner with big imperial pints from Great Lakes Brewing Co. He says he could recall nothing more satisfying after a game. It just felt right, after all that harsh physical exertion. I can relate to that.

Jumping back to the present, he says maybe he wants to learn how to paint. He has this vision for this massive, intricate piece of artwork that will be the focus of the new brewery space, the only piece of artwork in the taproom / hangout area.

"I want to learn how to paint in that old style of dark, romantic, classical oil paintings. And I want to have it be this big intricate mural painting of Vikings."

"Vikings?"

"Yeah. A Viking ship crashing ashore, spilling over with nude Nordic warriors. Pillaging a village. Decimating and decapitating their beach-bound opposition with giant broadswords. "

I'm laughing pretty hard at this point, not entirely sure if he's serious.

"And really vibrantly hued blood, just spraying everywhere. Blood-red paint is splattered all over the canvas... even on the gold frame itself. Some on the wall next to where it’s mounted. Really multi-dimensional."

Other ideas for how he can bring community involvement into the open-space, festive nature of the farm, this "cross-section of the Viking’s mythological Valhalla with a Mississipi Delta BBQ," include: "feats of strength" in the yard. In the hall, there will be only one enormous long wooden table, covered in animal skins, where drinkers can sit. Here I was expecting a pastoral utopia, some neo-farmer paradise subtly integrating the finest in New York brewing and environmentalism, and Evan has his mind set on smashing goblets on the ground at the end of a night, and, I don't know, throwing javelins at wild boars, probably. Okay, surprising, maybe, but it sounds pretty damn awesome. It will certainly be unique in the area, whatever ends up happening with Evan's plans.

"My family is from northern Scotland," he says, by way of explanation. His ancestors might quibble with the Viking-specific imagery, but I'm seeing some logic to it all. The beer as a reward after a hard day's labor, and connecting that tactile labor to the product it results in. Beer, as tied to the real and physical. Maybe it's just the misleadingly quirky name of the brewery and its elegant logo that threw me off from the start.

Why shouldn't farm brewing be gritty and blunt, anyway? There is certainly a violence inherent in farming, and maybe in brewing, too. As we clean out the mash tun and brew kettle in the yard with a hose, later, I ask Evan about a dried snakeskin hanging up on the fence at the vegetable garden.

"We've had, like, three different snakes attempt to invade the chicken coop this summer," Evan tells me. "The other week there was a huge snake that kept eating all the eggs before we could get to them. We were getting like six to eight eggs every morning before that."

One morning, he woke to Emily sounding the alarm: the snake was back, and it had, once again, eaten all the eggs. This time, Evan moved fast enough to catch it.

"I grabbed a flathead shovel and smashed the thing in half. There was blood, and yolk, just... spewing out of it."

So, to crush an enemy's skull, you would grab it like this...

Unlike most brewers catching wild local yeast strains, Evan never sent his off to a lab, or even tried to isolate one single strain himself. Not that he took this route based on some adherence to lofty principals of naturalism, but because he found there was no reason to.

"Brewers are so afraid of Brettanomyces and talk about it as if it's this unstoppable monster, but really, Saccharomyces is the hungriest, dominating, most competitive of yeasts," he says. "That's why basically all pure-culture brewer's strains ended up being Saccharomyces. It's what wins out in the end."

Evan has used a few commercial cultures in the past, mostly favoring Wyeast's 3711 French Saison, but he'll likely phase out commercial yeast entirely at this point. Four different wild cultures make up the majority of his repertoire now, all isolated from around the farm property: a peach tree yeast strain, strawberry yeast, Muscadine grape yeast, and a new culture of honey yeast that Evan is currently developing.

Wild yeast isn't known for its versatility, so it may seem like a lot of effort to turn these raw, feral critters into something clean and consistent enough to base all the brewery's beers around. It probably is, but Evan isn't averse to hard work, clearly. I remember Tachiniki, one of Evan's earliest beers fermented with a wild fruit culture (peach), from when I was first encountering Plan Bee at the farmer's market, and thought it was an interesting, if very raw experiment. Much like how you might expect a first generation wild yeast culture to taste, without much aging: very yeasty, phenolic, vaguely Belgian with a bit of weird grassy funky. Not knowing much about Evan at the time, other than that he had a background at Captain Lawrence, I wasn't sure how to gauge this quirky direction, but I loved that he was trying it. And as an experimental brewer who rarely releases the same thing twice, even though they are all bottled, I figured it was a fair guess that some very cool experiments would be coming down the line.

"I'm basically recreating history with this brewing process," Evan explains. By which he means, instead of sending it off to a lab, he just kept pitching his favorite Muscadine grape culture over and over, spending far more time and resources steering the yeast than most brewers would be willing to. But as the Saccharomyces in the culture out-competed Brettanomyces, Evan noticed that the pellicles stopped showing up. The hint of lactic tang from lingering stubborn bacteria got less pronounced. Through repeated top-cropping and re-pitching, Evan says the culture has become "incredibly clean." And after trying one of Plan Bee's recent farmhouse brews fermented with the stuff, he's right. It's nothing like the yeasty, phenolic culture that I tasted in Tachiniki a year ago. Sharing a recent batch of Farmstand Ale (#3) with friends, later, we decide this particular yeast tastes like nothing else we've encountered. It truly is unique to Evan's tiny operation — and it's fantastic.

When I talk to a lot of brewers — especially those in this new wave of nanobrewery openings — I can't quite figure out what their motivation is beyond "Making beer for a living sounds sweet"... and the results can be all over the place. Some brewers just want to make beer. Some brewers, perhaps, just want to drink beer. Some want to focus on a certain type of beer. Some want to make the most refined, precisely-calibrated beer. I don't think I've encountered another brewer with Evan's exact goals. Some of his beers may be a bit more raw than others, but that's part of what he's doing, and his small scale means, if you've bought the beer, then you've likely had some small connection to the man who made it. He will tell you whatever you want to know, and he will be frank.

"I've made some exceptional batches of beer, and I've made some mediocre batches of beer," he tells me. He's not being arrogant or self-deprecating, he's just observing.

If his recent releases are any indication, Plan Bee's output is sliding more and more into the 'exceptional' side of the spectrum. Evan clearly understands how to cultivate demand in the world of beer traders and roving bottle-sharers, but still seems a bit shocked, and perpetually flattered, by the sudden intensity of attention.

"When people started to come up to the stand and ask to buy a whole case, I would feel bad," Evan says. Due to the economics of small scale brewing and bottling, Plan Bee beers aren't particularly cheap. "At first I felt weird that people were spending so much on my beer. Each bottle of this one batch I brought to the farmer's market was $20, so for a whole case... you know? This one guy was trying to buy as much as he could, and I was like: 'Are you sure you want to buy all that beer, man? That's a lot of money.'"

You can't help but get the impression that Evan Watson is a really nice guy. Just... don't steal his eggs.

Why We Should Take Beer Styles Less Seriously

Random photo of beer of indeterminable style.

Get ready for some more opinion-based rambling, folks. The views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, Bear Flavored Ales' Board of Directors.

I suspect this article may make a lot of people want to throw beer bottles at me. Or I don't know — maybe this is actually a common feeling that we just don't talk about much. The Brewer's Association recently released a massive overhaul of its Beer Style Guidelines for 2014, and it's encouraging to see recognition of rapidly-growing categories of beer, but many entries nonetheless make me think that the effort is largely a shell game. Certainly beer styles do get argued about a lot — wars have been fought over the black IPA; drinkers shruggingly accepting that session IPA is a tad different from a boring old pale ale — but generally, we all seem to be working under the assumption of there being a sacred realm of 'classic and traditional' styles that everyone, thank god, can at least agree on. There's the stable ground of history, and then there's these whacky new styles like 'Brett IPA' and "imperial black rye coffee Kolsch" that are just some nonsense the kids are pulling out of their baggy pants at dubstep concerts with which to spike their Red Bull. 

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against the concept of beer styles. Sometimes life needs simplicity and guideposts. We need styles, and we like to argue about styles; I just think we often place far too much emphasis on them. Especially from a consumer standpoint, it's very important to have at least a broad guideline, a rough sketch of what I'm going to drink. It doesn't have to be a classic style; it can be a little blurb, a few descriptive words. (For example: I love how much info Modern Times manages to convey on their cans despite a very minimalist design.) When I pick up a bottle and there's no style or description at all, nothing but a cute name and a government warning, I become so annoyed that I will almost never buy that beer. Give me at least an idea of what the beer is — however you want to do that. That's what styles are for: guidelines, shorthand, a marker to let you know how close you are to town. And as long as we're not taking things too seriously, I think it mostly works out.

Lately — and maybe this is just because I happen to be on a binge of historical-brewing literature — I feel like the concept of "brewing to style" is being chipped away at from both the past and the future. There's going to be some unexpected benefit to the genre of IPA spawning a thousand spin-offs, in my opinion. The names might sound silly, but ideally, hopefully, it'll help to enforce the idea that styles are not immutable and handed down from the Heavens on stone tablets: they're coined after the fact, to classify something that looks like it'll be sticking around long enough to need a name.

The thing is, styles and beers change. Everything changes. In fact, I would go as far as to say that most beer styles as we think of them today did not exist 150 years ago. A brewer from the mid 1800's would probably be at a loss, trying to enter a modern BJCP-sanctioned contest. Classic and traditional? Sure, depending when you want to set the start date.

Think about it: around the end of the 1900's, within a couple decades' time, a great many things happened all at once. There was a sweeping overhaul of fermentation procedure thanks to the work of Pasteur. Two World Wars happened, drastically affecting the availability of ingredients and the taxation system imposed upon European and English breweries. Gravities dropped, processes changed. Lager-mania shifted a new generation's tastes, right when mass industrialization was becoming easier than ever. Oh, and let's not forget, there was that whole Prohibition horseshit. American brewing was perhaps the hardest hit by these few turbulent decades, but the rich historical traditions of English and European brewing were drastically affected as well, something that modern drinkers rarely seem to recognize when touting the legacy of international brewers.

I'll pick one specific example, saison, because I was just leafing through Farmhouse Ales by Phil Markowski again. Something struck me: Farmhouse Ales was released in 2004, following a period where the saison style could have been considered on the verge of extinction. Not so long after that book came out (and this was probably not a coincidence), the style exploded onto the American scene. In 2014, only ten years later, I would say that saisons are one of craft beer's darlings, a style that a significant percentage of breweries brew on a regular basis. As of this writing, there are over 3,000 saisons logged on beeradvocate.com... more than twice as many as any other Belgian style. That's crazy! I had to look multiple times at those numbers to make sure I wasn't losing my mind — how could saisons be twice as common as witbiers, dubbels and tripels? But it seems to be so, perhaps because the style is generally viewed as loose in its guidelines, historically and conceptually open-ended.

But given all that, the vast majority of saisons being brewed today are pale, moderately hopped, highly carbonated, frequently spiced, and fermented exclusively with a Saccharomyces "saison strain." Perhaps no beer defines the modern saison better than Saison Dupont — I mean really defines, in that Saison Dupont, just one example of European saison, seems to have formed the baseline for the entire modern vision of what a saison should be. But Dupont was only one farmhouse ale, one that happened to survive the difficult first half the century with its integrity in-tact, and remain available enough that American drinkers could discover it when they were ready for it. Historically, there were many different farmhouse beers, and they varied quite a lot. Farmhouse Ales describe most as probably being a bit more amber in color due to historic malting techniques, and being either aggressively hopped or distinctly sour. More sour, depending on age, and sometimes blended with lambic, or even spontaneously fermented. Carbonation, before bottling became the norm, was probably low. Alcohol levels were also much lower, because farmhouse ale was largely brewed as sustenance for farmhands working the fields.

In fact, the primary common thread between historic and contemporary saisons is the reliance on a highly-attenuative yeast strains to result in a low terminal gravity; saisons, whatever else they are, should be dry and refreshing. But what started out as a style closely related to lambic is now almost universally fermented by a culture of brewer's yeast, and usually packs a heavy ABV punch. That these strains have been isolated from European saison brewers gives them credibility, but isn't going to match what historic saisons once were. Even allowing for the fact that saisons were varied and open-ended, the general loss of some of their most widespread qualities in modern examples sounds to me like we've basically redefined the baseline of what the style is, to a degree that would cause uproar if done with, say, an American gueuze.

Though it's not on the sour spectrum and its funk is not too extreme, even Saison Dupont still contains a mix of microbes — White Labs found as many 5 different cultures, and other brewers I have talked to (who have done their own culturing) report the same findings. One strain within the Dupont culture seems to lend the vast majority of the character to the beer, however, so this is strain was selected as the "Dupont strain." But does an ecosystem really function the same way when seemingly-vestigial organisms are dropped?

For as fettishistic as brewers are about the purity of other styles, the use of the term 'lambic' or the blasphemy of calling something a 'Black IPA,' I find it little funny that this reincarnation of the saison slipped through without judgement. Especially when Farmhouse Ales probably inspired it, though the book goes to great lengths describing the beer as very different from how most of us are brewing it.

I don't want to sound like I'm just pooping on American saisons (though I would definitely like to start seeing much weirder, funkier, tartier saisons), because it's a style that I (mostly) love regardless of how it's interpreted. To be clear, this is an issue of semantics, not quality. If you brew a monoculture-fermented, moderately hopped, highly carbonated golden ale and call it a saison, you're not doing anything wrong. It is a saison. That's my whole point: we changed what the style it is. Styles are the Matrix, and we are all Neo, #MINDBLOWN #INCEPTIONSOUND

So back to my overall point of brewing to style: how much can it mean when we keep changing what those very styles are? You could run through this whole thing with almost any 'historic' style. Last year I went through this with India Pale Ale: historic IPA, [contemporary] English IPA, and American IPA are all three pretty different things, which makes the sudden proliferation of IPA sub-styles seem a little less ridiculous. I mean, still a little ridiculous in terms of marketing and bandwagoning, but slightly less so.

Everything has basically been tried by someone before and yet everything is new and ever-changing. I'll leave it to future generations to argue about what to call their THC-infused quintuple IPA brewed by a matrix of self-pitching nano-yeast, growler-filtered via cross-secting dubstep vibrational frequencies. I will yell at them to get off my lawn and continue listening to Led Zeppelin.

Taste trumps semantics. I just want my beer to be weird and interesting and tasty and refreshing.






.... Okay, maybe all I'm really saying here is, if I ever have kids, I want them to grow up having very strong opinions about the microbial content of saisons.

Why Write About Beer?

This month's session will be my first time participating in the monthly beer writer's roundtable, but it's a topic I couldn't pass by: beer writing. Hosted by Heather Vandenengel (her blog: beerhobo), we're instructed: "It’s time for a session of navel-gazing: I’d like to turn a critical eye on how the media cover the beer industry. And, for a broad definition, I’ll define media as newspapers, magazines, websites, blogs, TV, books and radio."

First, let's just be honest about why most of us write about beer. I mean, if we're going to complain about beer journalism's faults (something I have done many times), we should be honest about why the rest of us are doing it at all. We write about beer because we are writers and we really like beer and thus it just kind of happens. Most writing, I would argue, comes from a sort of directionless desire just to write, regardless of whether one actually has something to say. (Journalists, generally, are assigned a story, and I doubt most people write about all the horrible and or aggravating stuff that journalists normally write about because they are enthusiasts of political corruption or oil spills or what-have-you.) But me, a beer writer, well: once I passed a critical threshold of passion for beer, clearly that was the thing I would write about. And since I have a blog, I can write about whatever I want!

So the real question is: what is there one can say about beer that isn't fluff or opinion, or both? Writing is becoming more specialized, and culture is picked apart with far more fervor than it was in the days of newspapers and radio programs. But outside of analyzing every detail of True Detective or Breaking Bad — things which are indisputably vital to the maintenance of society — can we say anything worth saying about our passions, or have we created a bunch of self-sustaining cottage industries that enable us to take turns gushing about our favorite things with people who share very similar opinions, and are only waiting for their own turn to speak?

The last decade or so, most media attention ladled out to craft beer was a welcoming pat on the head by some trend-piece. Part of the reason beer journalism has sucked is that it's taken years for the media to accept that beer is just as complicated as food and wine and whiskey, if not more so. That it is a microcosm of larger agricultural and economic trends. To truly understand beer, one must catalogue a very large array of ingredients and processes and techniques, transmogrified through the magic of fermentation. No one can possibly know all there is to know about beer. I certainly don't. But it helps to write from a place of wishing to spread knowledge. And fortunately, online media is more and more specialized, allowing us who must write about beer to find what useful things there are to say about it. The future of journalism seems likely to be divided up by (and to rely on) highly specialized freelancers, now that the internet has made such a division of expertise possible. While journalism is generally viewed to be in decline, there are strong advantages to this — much of what we read is no longer day-by-day event reporting, and it makes sense to have people in the know covering specialty subjects.

Still, though: what specifically is there to write about? Inarguably, beer is a fun thing to write about, so naturally lots of us are jumping for the opportunity. And beer does affect people's lives, day to day, in a low-level way. It is part of a larger, and very important, shift in the function of local economies and local food systems. But as one of the oldest technologies known to man, fermented beverages aren't poised to change the world as suddenly and dynamically as even the most obnoxious tech trends. Writing about beer is largely a passion project or pop culture observation, and of course the writer's enthusiasm (or condescension) will show. What can we say that's actually meaningful? Why would anyone want to read about what that you drank last night? One hilarious comment quoted by Heather in her introduction to this session kindly states that all beer writers are "subhumans" pushing well-written yet "sanctimonious brown-nosing fluff." (My main argument with this commenter, and a point I hope he has since realized, is that this is true of all writers, certainly not just those who write about beer.) But he continues: "Beer journalism has almost always been a tepid affair; a moribund endeavor due to its singular objective to flatter and promote, without ever scratching beneath the surface.”

Let's break it down by what we're writing.

Reviews - Probably the most primal form of beer writing; humans seem to have an innate desire to start ranking anything we enjoy. In some sense, reviewing or recommending beer is the rawest form of beer writing, because theoretically you are simply writing about a beer, devoid of any context but how it tastes. By educating and spreading awareness (theoretically), this form of writing could possibly be among the most useful, if it were also not the most ubiquitous. (And of course I'm guilty too.)

Who's Reading? - Again theoretically: anyone. We're all out to find new beers we might enjoy. But at this point, with so many people writing beer reviews, the noise generally outweighs the benefits. One way I think beer reviews and recommendations can still be useful is to clearly establish your tastes and preferences, so a reader can get a sense of why you like what you like (and what you don't.) Context is everything. I can often tell that I will enjoy a beer just as quickly from a negative review as a positive one. When injecting opinion into anything, it's important to note subjectivity.


Recommendation Lists - The old: "this is a style, and here are 10 beers of that style you should try!" list. Theoretically similar to beer reviews, but rarely as critical in practice, the line between 'recommendation' and 'marketing fluff' can quickly be blurred.

Who's Reading? - Most likely readers exploring new realms of beer, but most beer nerds probably skip these. I'd say the same concerns apply as with reviews: establish where you're coming from, and understand who you're writing for. Subtly increase the reader's knowledge while providing a simple 'in' for them to quickly try out something different, in case that's all they're looking for.

But beyond recommending beers for others to try, still: what is the conversation? If you've got plenty of beer in your fridge already, why bother reading about beer at all? There must be more to say than just what's in the glass. Which is not to knock the basic format — it's all about providing enough information for the reader to understand why you're recommending what you're recommending.

Moving on.

News Bites - Sites like BeerPulse provide necessary news coverage of developments all across the industry without much depth or context. Exceedingly useful, but these usually don't involve a ton of deep insight, by design.

Who's Reading? - We need these services, because if we don't know what's happening, we can't say anything about it.


Regional Beer News - In many ways the broadening of the former category, regional beer news probably has the potential to be closest to traditional journalism as any of these. Opinion need not creep into these reports, but the localization makes them more relevant to readers. In my area, Chris O'Leary does a great job with this type of reporting at Brew York New York, though there are countless examples across the country. Most newspaper reporting on beer likely falls into this category.

Who's Reading? -  Similar to news bites, this sort of reporting is vital. While the localization allows a writer to inject a bit of personality, are we still actually saying anything here, or just putting up a sign to lead people in the direction of their next beer? With a blog, I think it can actually be advantageous at times to break objectivity and add commentary — provided, of course, you're trying and able to inform, rather than rant.


Profiles and Features - Where regional beer news mostly just takes a look at what's happening, and who's new, there's a difficult-to-classify realm of beer writing focused on exploring the backstories and personalities behind breweries. Not so much recommendations as elaborations, such pieces can help promote what a brewery is trying to do, while making it easier for drinkers to find new and interesting spots they might not have heard about, or just wanted to know more about. The most notable example of this type of beer writing at the moment would be the sorts of features that Beer Advocate does, as well as the photo-features of Good Beer Hunting, though very many beer writers delve into this genre at some point (including myself.)

Who's Reading? - I don't read much as much food journalism as I should, though I need to, just to get a basis for comparison. What do readers want from these feature pieces? Pretty pictures? Recommendations? How much criticism? And how many small-to-midsize breweries across the country can one read about before they start to sound the same? The inherent regionalism of craft beer often makes me wonder what the average person can really get out of beer coverage. Why would someone want to read the intimidate details of another small 7 bbl brewery out in California that they will never likely try beers from unless they happen to be in the area on vacation? What do people want to know about a brewery in the first place? If they're breaking new ground, doing something noticeably different, that's one thing. But how many people want to read the philosophy of another small brewery launching with a pale ale, a wheat beer, a pilsner, a stout and an IPA? Maybe there's a fascinating personal history there, or maybe it's just another business venture by some people who happened to have the resources. But if we pass on writing about breweries that we don't find interesting, are our profiles not themselves sort of reviews?

Man, beer is deep.


Industry Trends and Observations - A great deal of beer blogging probably falls under this category. It is a bit nebulous... but most beer blogging is rather nebulous. Content typically includes a bit of the previous categories, but with more analysis, more of the writer's personality, and maybe a few recommendations too. These are the craft beer commenters, giving an insider's perspective... mostly to other insiders.

Who's Reading? - Insiders and craft beer nerds want to read this stuff, but is there much appeal outside our hardcore demographic? Either way, I don't think there needs to be. Every industry needs commentary, and the beer industry is so dynamic — and so steeped in culture — that there's plenty of room for analysis. After all, beer news is limited by nature ("Hey look, a new beer and / or beer event"), so it may be that informed commentary is one of the few things worth writing about beer. There are plenty of good examples of this, and I particularly enjoy blogs like Boak & Bailey, Stan Hieronymus's appellationbeer.com, Bryan Roth's thisiswhyimdrunk. and lots of articles in larger publications.


Homebrewing - While most of my time spent with food-related blogs online is at recipe sites and guides for the DIY crowd, homebrewing and beer recipes form just one small corner of the beer writing world.

Who's Reading? - In my experience, homebrewing blogs seem mostly apart from the rest of the online craft community. Not that many cooking recipe sites offer restaurant-industry analysis either — I'm guessing that "making at home" and "industry analysis" are simply viewed as entirely different realms, even when they're covering the same resulting product. But here's why I started writing both homebrew recipes and beer reviews, industry rants and whatever other nonsense you find on Bear Flavored. While no one had any reason to believe I wasn't brewing completely mediocre beers, and hopefully you're all still questioning whether any of my advice is worth taking, I could hope to at least flesh out why I was writing about the beers I did, forming the opinions I did, and expressing the tastes I expressed. Context, hopefully useful information, and yes, some opinions.

Why do I write about beer? Because I'm a writer who is slightly obsessed with beer. But as brewer, I hope I can just share some occassional realization that may be of use to someone else. And as someone still passionate about the rhythms of the whole industry out there, I hope my own learning experiences can provide context to the stuff in my glass. Or your glass.

And maybe, looking back through each category I've thought of (not to say I've thought of them all — sure I neglected a few niches, and I didn't even attempt to tackle radio / TV / film) maybe that's the height of our calling as beer writers. The best we can do is to spread useful information, but there's a limit to the audience truly interested in learning detailed brewing specifics. (Which is why homebrewing blogs remain a small niche within the beer blog community.) The broadest and most helpful thing we can do — for those with a more general curiosity, especially — is to bring context.

Beer reviews and lists may fade from memory faster, but every beer could have something interesting to say, in the right place at the right time. And there needs to be, somehow, some exposure to the fact that craft beer is not homogenous. Quality varies — we don't have to be brutal on a brewery when they slip up, but I'm sure people would like to know why something might taste off. And beyond quality, there's still a need to acknowledge that we don't all have the same tastes or the same palate anyway, making the need for context in reviews and recommendations even more important. If writing an article about how hoppy beers are very prevalent in America today despite many people not having acquired a taste for them, simply pointing out "lots of people still don't enjoy hoppy beers," doesn't really explain anything useful to anyone, while explaining the framework of hoppy beer, the contextual reasons for some hoppy beers tasting different from other hoppy beers, may enable a new enthusiast to narrow down a beer that they will actually enjoy. There's a lot to know about beer — add to a reader's understanding, don't narrow it.

When there are thousands of breweries around the world mostly offering some variation on the same ten styles, a better story is needed now than just "Hey, there's beer here." Twenty years ago, "Did you know that some people make local beer?" was a novel tale; we have to work a little harder now. And we should, because there's a lot more to say. Add new details. Draw new lines. Dig up history. Make the beer world bigger, broader, more inclusive. Some stories will get told again and again, but the ones that find some memorable context will be those remembered.

Inside the Brewery at Bacchus - The Most Interesting Brewery in NY That You've Never Heard Of

The Brewery at Bacchus 

4 South Chestnut Street 
New Paltz, NY 12561
Website: www.bacchusnewpaltz.com
Facebook | Twitter

It's rare that a brewery this promising opens this quietly, but the Brewery at Bacchus is a strange case all around. If you haven't heard of them, it's not because you aren't tuned in to the New York beer scene. This is a brewery that's going to take a lot of people by surprise.

For starters: how many breweries in New York do you know of doing funky Brett saisons, farmhouse ales aged on fruit, dark sours, 100% Brett IPAs, whiskey-aged imperial stouts, while utilizing a comprehensive (though small) barrel program? Bacchus has tackled all of these so far, and well. All in the mere six months since their first beer was released.

The main reason you may not have noticed the brewery's opening — even if you live in the area — is that things at Bacchus don't look to have actually changed much, from the outside. Bacchus, a restaurant and bar that's been a staple of the town for years, is located in busy New Paltz, NY. About an hour and a half north of New York City, surrounded by farmland and the looming profile of the Shawangunk Ridge, New Paltz is a Main Street-oriented college town best known for hippies and hikers. I've felt for a while that the Hudson Valley is lousy with opportunity as a beer-tourism destination, and few towns convey why as immediately as New Paltz. The horizon, with the Shawangunks not far in the distance, is just stupidly gorgeous and instantly memorable, and the vibe in the area is as charming as it comes. The town seems to have been uprooted and transplanted wholesale from some valley in Colorado — where, you know, having at least two breweries per town is kind of a thing.

Ad Infinitum imperial IPA.

Bacchus — the restaurant and bar that preceded and still largely overshadows the brewery — was already a fairly curious place. According to its own website, the building has been host to a fascinating past life: "...at various times a Chinese laundry, litho shop, taxi station, barber shop, a cafe, [and] a porno photography studio." Finally settling on a Tex-Mex restaurant with a pub-like downstairs bar in 1974, Bacchus was off to a fine start. Add to that an attached billiards hall and suddenly you have a multi-tasking establishment that's still pretty well suited to a college town. And New Paltz very much is a college town: the crowd at any business on Main Street skews young and counter-culture.

But Bacchus was never in danger of becoming a frat bar (if New Paltz even has anything resembling frats, which I doubt). The restaurant has been known as the craft beer spot for the town for a number of years, partly due to the influence of Jason Synan, a homebrewer and beer-lover that manages the bar. Then, two years ago, Jason Synan and his brewing partner Mike Renganeschi were in a staff meeting pouring homebrew for other Bacchus employees when the owners suggested: hey, your beer is good, let's put a brewery in too.

From an outsider's perspective, it could easily seem like a case of "why not?" And from a cynic's perspective, not knowing better, you'd expect such an addition to an already-sprawling restaurant enterprise might default to safe, inoffensive standards. You know, the same five beers every new brewery needs to make so they don't scare off mainstream drinkers. Adding a brewpub to this already-sprawling list of projects kind of seems risky, on the face of it. Why would this weird college-town Frankenstein building — a Mexican restaurant, college bar, and billiards hall, built on the bones of a taxi station and porn studio — strive to be something unique and unexpected?

Maybe I've answered my own question. Bacchus is no one thing, and once you give yourself the space to stand back from it all, there's some kind of weird logic to it all.

Even the building itself, as I would learn, is a sprawling labyrinth. I joked with Jason and Mike that their brewery probably fulfills the misconceptions the average person has about how a brewpub works: in this case, beer is literally produced from some pots in the back of the kitchen, behind the dish-washing station. While the brewers share horror stories of the aggressive kitchen-bred wild yeast that ruined one early batch, the setup would seem to humble brewing to just another culinary process. The brewhouse itself is set up in a former cold room, with two fermenters and four brite tanks staged just outside, next to shelves of spices and Maraschino cherries. The brewery seems poised halfway between convenience and chaos. But then there's the massive basement, laid out below the restaurant and bar — and floating somewhere above that, a sort of loft space that serves as the brewery's barrel room and grain storage. It's all very labyrinthian — given the Greek / Roman references that the guys' fall back on for their beers, there's gonna have to be a Theseus / Minotaur homage dropped at some point.

Mike and Jason share my taste in beer, so it's hard to contain my excitement at what they're doing with The Brewery at Bacchus. There are a very, very few breweries in New York willing to experiment with Brett or sour beer, yet the gentlemen at the Brewery at Bacchus are devoting almost their whole program to these experiments, and frequently barrel-aging their creations as long as necessary, until they're ready to drink. With two brew-days per week, Jason and Mike usually focus on a non-wild, quicker turn-around beer for one, and something more experimental for the other.

Mike Renganeschi crushes grain in the barrel room.

So here's the most important information I could share about the Brewery at Bacchus, the stuff you really want to know. So far, Jason and Mike have brewed:

Ad Infinitum - This 10% ABV DIPA is as close to a flagship beer as Bacchus has, if only because it's the closest they've come to brewing a beer on multiple occasions. And in fact, it was their first batch, debuted at Dutchess Hop's Hoptember Festival last September (to great acclaim, I hear.) The exact hop bill changes from batch to batch, however, so come for the spirit of the beer, which is always excellent — it fits the mercurial, multi-faceted nature of the place. A fresh batch of this beer hit the taps on the day that I visited Bacchus, and drinking it throughout the day was a treat. I had not the slightest idea it clocked in at 10% ABV until two or three pints later — it drinks as light and refreshing as a well balanced IPA, focused on fruity tropical aromatics and dank citrusy depth over aggressive bitter intensity. Just how I like my IPAs.

Kamehameha - A fairly big and boozy Brett Trois IPA hopped aggressively with Falconer's Flight, then aged with Hawaiian Pineapples. My Scouter indicates that the Power Level of this beer is over 9000. I love to see more breweries doing Brett IPAs, and the pineapple addition was a smooth touch.

Et Cetera - 7% ABV farmhouse ale with a simple grain bill and a flexible second-life in barrels or on fruit. Some batches stick with just saison yeast, others have Brettanomyces added. According to the guys: "The idea is that it will always be an approachable, drinkable, dry and effervescent beer, but each batch will focus on different fruits, yeast, wood, etc." The version I had was aged on Cabernet grape skins from Whitecliff Vineyards in Gardiner, NY — twas tasty and unique.

Proletariat - A porter aged on Madagascar vanilla beans and locally roasted coffee from Mudd Puddle Cafe on Water Street.

Bourgeoisie - The same base beer as Proletariat, but aged on blood oranges and roasted hazelnuts. I haven't gotten to try either of these two porters, but this one especially sounds fascinating.

Luxuria - An imperial stout aged in whiskey barrels from Tuthilltown Distillery in Gardiner, then racked onto cherries.

Lilith - A dark sour ale fermented with wild yeast and local microflora and aged for one year in American oak barrels with raspberries. Mike and Jason were kind enough to open a bottle of this with me, and it really is a fascinating sour ale, creamy and roasty while still sporting a very tart acidity. There are very few breweries doing actual sours in New York, but Lilith doesn't taste like much else that I've had from any state.

Jason Synan contemplates while brewing, probably concluding that time is a flat circle.

Bacchus is brewing on a 3 barrel system right now, and with limited tank space, that's not a whole lot of beer for an established drinking spot without much local craft-beer competition. And therein lays the real reason few people outside of New Paltz have heard of this new brewery. Producing 6 bbls a week, Bacchus can't hope to brew enough beer to fill all 14 of their tap lines. Usually, only one tap at the bar is dedicated to Brewery at Bacchus beers, while the rest remain a rotating cast of other crafts. But even then — just one tap out of all the rest — each Bacchus beer tends to kick fast. According to Jason, who still manages the bar, it isn't unusual for them to go a couple days each week without any of their own beers on. 

In an out-of-the-way college town, with little promotion or regional attention, these guys can barely keep one line of beer from running dry. Pretty incredible. Frankly, I think their early success speaks volumes about the lingering mentality of brewers who think they "have to brew safe beer styles everyone is familiar with" or else people won't get it. 

It's not the 1990's anymore. Brew whatever you love. (As long as you brew whatever you love well). If you love blurring style boundaries, do that. If you love weird and funky beers, do that. There's no built-in market for sour beer or farmhouse Brett funk in New York, at least not yet. People just want to drink good beer.

And that, in my opinion, is what brewers tend to over-think. The average person has no clue what Brettanomyces is, and is more likely to be turned off by over-explanations than the actual flavor of a beer. You don't really need to share all the complicated background to them when you can just tell a curious customer: "this one really tastes like pineapple." Or, "the yeast and the oak create a wine-like character." Or, in the case of farmhouse ales: "it's tart and tropical." According to Jason, who spends most evenings behind the bar explaining beer to anyone curious, "Most people don't care about the specifics of how the beer is made. Beer geeks do, but not the average drinker. Most people just care how it tastes. The fermentation process and yeast strains might not interest them, but once I start explaining the different flavors in the beer, the fruit and stuff, then they're immediately interested."

By now, presumably, you're excited to pick up a few growlers of Bacchus beer for your next bottle share. Here's where the downside of the Brewery at Bacchus comes in — by necessity, there are no taster flights or growler fills just yet, and if you pick a day at random to visit, you may miss out on their beer altogether. As their goal for right now is simply to serve New Paltz, blending in with the locals at the bar over a couple weeks is probably the best way to get a sense of what these guys are doing. That town-bar dynamic could change soon, though, especially as more beer lovers realize that there is, in fact, a brewery hidden inside the sprawling Bacchus maze. Drinkers will be hanging out for the easy-drinking, high-impact IPAs and saisons, but the specialty batches lurking in barrels behind the scenes might eventually have them lining up.

Fortunately, Bacchus has plans for a 7 barrel brewery in a large, currently-unused space next door to the restaurant, and with a significant bump in equipment, it's easy enough to picture a full-fledged brewpub setup in another year.

It's too early to make any promises, but according to Mike, they're hoping to start the transition to the new space and new system sometime later in 2014. Still, the standard uncertainties apply. "It takes a long time to get all that together: the whole place has to be rebuilt and fitted with plumbing, electric, etc. Even when we move down there, we will still be working on our system for a while. But we will continue the same model of business. We will use our bright tanks to serve from and get more fermentors. So we should be able to have more beer, more consistency, as well as doing some growler fills."

The situation is such that it almost feels risky writing about these guys — not that my blog drives huge local traffic in the Hudson Valley, but with their beer limited as it is, it'll be awhile before Bacchus can stay comfortably ahead of demand. For those who don't live in the Hudson Valley, it's difficult to express just how much more success Bacchus could find if they simply become an established, regionally-popular destination. I know a lot of beer lovers, and outside of those that live in or very close to New Paltz, none were aware that Bacchus had installed a brewery. Or that they were making truly interesting beer. Their market, right now, is as local as it can get, and that's still not enough. But good breweries of this sort across the country rarely stay local for long.

There's More to Beer Than Some 'Drinkable' vs.'Crazy Extreme!' Dichotomy

Pictured: the personification of craft beer in the eyes of your local news reporter.

One basic rule of the universe (other than me being unable to write a blog post that's not entirely too long) is that humans love duality. Sorry to get all philosophical on you guys, but take any issue or thing or important staple of human life, and we humans will talk and talk about it until all discourse has been boiled down to two diametrically opposing sides. We love exclusive viewpoints, for some reason.

I could pick out a bunch of examples with beer. Beer is a thing that has always been popular, but which, recently, has become explosively popular to discuss. And that's great, because beer is a much better thing to talk about than, say, teen pop stars. Lately, the biggest talking point has probably been the whole "craft beer vs. corporate beer" thing. Debating whether such a distinction has merit would send this off into an entirely separate discussion, but for now, let's just note that we've created a vast, arbitrarily two-party system by which to divide the beer world. Why two? Why cap it by random numbers of production? In reality, even beer nerds don't really care what a brewery's production level is — unless that becomes a factor in the quality of the beer. What people care about is the quality of the beer.

And that's where it becomes tricky to establish two clear sides, though people are still inclined to try to do so. So for now there is craft vs. crafty, but those lines are unclear and meaningless to most people. There is good beer and there is bad beer, but you'll never get anyone to agree on which is which. There are many others, but most recently, I see a new push: people trying to draw a line in the sand between "drinkable beer" and "over-the-top beer."

To be clear, I'm of the mindset that almost any issue worth talking about is hopelessly convoluted and that, in general, there are few absolutes in life, other than the presence of the Great Old Ones watching us from their seat in the dark immutable heart of the universe. Just, so you know, my philosophy. We live on a rotating sphere forged of unanswerable existential quandaries, the gnawing itch of which shall tear at our small but curious minds forevermore. "Which member of the Just'in Beebers is the hottest?" our younglings shriek to themselves, desperately fixing their eyes upon whatever fleeting curiosity allows them to pretend that the cavernous nothingness does not loom above. To wit: some people think craft beer is threatening to jump the shark with all its crazy wild ingredients and over-the-top experiments. There is a core of truth to this, in that many craft brewers do focus on gimmicky creations — or else set themselves up in staunch opposition to this Straw Man, arguing that their middling beer lineup is just fine because competitors are brewing outrageous beer aged on straw men and bourbon-soaked corncobs. And with this duality, there's now a feeling among drinkers that the opposite of an amber ale is the weirdest and wackiest beer you can imagine. One recent article, prompted by some of Dogfish Head's madder creations, asks its readers: "So is this the future of U.S. beer consumption - a country that stumbles over itself to buy beer made with wild-carrot seed, bee balm, chanterelle mushrooms, and aged in whiskey barrels?"

Yes, those wacky beers do exist. Sometimes an unlikely-sounding beer proves to be popular. No, that will not be the future of U.S. beer consumption, but I do predict that this sort of division — this separation of beer into "crazy! over-the-top! experimental!" and "just a solid drinkable beer, man" — will be another trend in beer commentary for a few years. Is it just me, or can you see where this is going? It's an easy, convenient simplification to divide the beer world into down-to-earth, everyman breweries with the classic five or six styles, versus brewers doing nothing but that crazy extreme stuff. You know, for hipsters.

It doesn't have to be one or the other. And in fact, pigeon-holing beers into either extreme completely misses the point of what makes beer good in the first place.

So what actually does make a beer interesting, once you strip out the Moon Rocks and Ghost Chili addition or cactus-bark barrel aging? What makes a beer over-the-top, versus classic and approachable, anyway? Beyond a few overly-obvious answers, I'm inclined to believe that the real, actual, technical details are just far more boring than the average person cares to deal with. For example, I think water profile, oxygen management, and deliberate timing of hop additions are what makes a great IPA... not IBUs or ABV. Farmhouse ales and sours are about as traditional and historic as one can get, but they're now rare, and thus 'hyped.' Utilizing wild yeast is simply embracing the natural premise of fermentation. And beer has been barrel-aged for a lot longer than the term 'craft' has been around. But that's dry commentary, and you can't wedge a discussion about "extreme vs drinkable" into a talk of mineral additions or lactobacillus fermentation.

What are some of the most popular, most talked-about breweries of the last few years? Off the top of my head: Hill Farmstead, Tired Hands, Prairie, Pipeworks, Alpine, Cigar City, Night Shift, the Alchemist, Sante Adarius, etc. etc. There's many many more — those are literally off the top of my head (I wear a cap in which I store little slips of paper, onto which I write the names of breweries that I see being discussed frequently on Twitter.) Do they make the occasional high-ABV beer, barrel-aged stout, or maybe some brews with fruit or spice additions? Some of them do, but I think they're mostly just known for good beer. Most of which, I would say, is pretty damn drinkable. Do they sometimes make hefty imperial stouts? Yeah, but alongside a whole range of other things. Do a few of those breweries make some of the most hyped IPAs in the world? They do — and they're not hyped because they're explosively boozy, but because they're insanely flavorful and drinkable. I have yet to meet a single person that doesn't enjoy a Hill Farmstead IPA, and in fact, I've converted quite a few new beer lovers through Shaun Hill's hoppy wizardy. Maybe that's why he's got the most talked-about brewery in the world right now — not because he's the most experimental out there, not because he caters to extremes, but because he doesn't cater. He just makes super enjoyable beer, both intensely flavorful and easily accessible, and everyone seems to just... get it. Pretty simple. Extreme quality and mass appeal aren't mutually exclusive.

Let's not let the middle class die. Beer can be interesting and unconventional while remaining drinkable and approachable. We'll keep arguing forever and ever what good beer is, what bad beer is, but why narrow it down unnecessarily? You should be able to identify a good beer without anyone telling you what's in it. And if good beer is truly good, and interesting, and keeps reinventing itself, eventually it won't seem extreme at all.

How To Make Fermented Pizza

Your immediate, gut-level (pro-biotic pun intended) response to reading this headline was probably either "Oh god, why in the world would you want to ferment pizza?", or else it was: "Yes! Finally a way to ferment pizza!"

I, of course, have to eat fermented pizza. For one year, I'm living off of only fermented foods, and clearly I'm not going to give up pizza for an entire year. Why should you do it? Well, it's tasty. It's also fun to point out that you're eating an entirely fermented pizza. And fortunately, it's quite simple to prepare, so today I'm going to show you how.

Here's what I'm curious about, though: what was the first image that popped into your head when you saw this headline? What form, exactly, might fermented pizza take? How would one consume it?

Might one, for example, take some pizza — unbaked, so as not to kill off the naturally-occurring bacteria — and ferment it for 4 - 7 days in a salt brine?

Well, okay, no. Sorry. That header up there is a bit of a fake out; it was too fun to resist. Making fermented pizza at home is far easier and much less gross than that horrific pickled pizza slice vision you may have in your mind right now. The whole reason fermented pizza is such an awesome concept, in my opinion, is that most of the ingredients already are fermented. Yes indeed — that's the funny thing about fermentation, and half the reason I'm doing this book. So many staples of our everyday lives involve fermentation in ways we don't realize, because so much of our food is simply presented to us these days. Many of us don't understand the similar forces at work behind the varied foods we eat.

Let's walk through it, shall we? In a week or two — just in time for that big football game everyone is always on about — you can be enjoying fully-fermented pizza too.

1. The Dough

What is dough? Bread, basically. It rises through the action of yeast. This is fermentation; one major ingredient in your fermented pizza that's absolutely no different. You can make your pizza dough various ways, and you can make it 'more fermented,' so to speak, with some sourdough pizza crust. It will also probably be more delicious this way. But I'll sometimes just buy Whole Wheat pocket-less pita bread from the store. It's the perfect size, shape and consistency for pre-made pizza dough, and it tastes almost as good.

2. The Sauce
Here is the one core ingredient of a pizza that's not already associated with fermentation. Fortunately, fermenting tomato sauce is insanely easy. I don't want to get terribly in-depth with the basics of veggie fermentation today, since it's a sub-recipe for the overall recipe, but below is a quick how-to.





2b. How To Make Fermented Tomato Sauce (In Brief)
Take 4 - 5 lbs of tomatoes, some Italian seasonings (oregano, thyme, basil, bay leafs, etc.) and 1 tablespoon of coarse, non-iodized sea salt. Cut off the stem end of the tomatoes, chop them up into chunks, and mix with salt and seasonings. Stuff into a quart-sized wide-mouth mason jar (or fermentation vessel of your preference.) Leave an inch or so of room at the top, then press down with a flat surface (the bottom of a beer bottle or a smaller mason jar works well) to compact the tomatoes and form a brine. If the tomatoes are not fully submerged in liquid, add a small amount of filtered, de-chlorinated water to submerge. Twist on the lid almost, but not-quite all the way, to allow ventilation of CO2 during fermentation. (Or put an airlocked lid on the jar, or use another fermentation vessel of your choice.) Fermentation will begin in a day or two and should take 7 - 10 days.

Following fermentation, press down on the fermented tomatoes to squeeze out some liquid. Pour off excess liquid, then dump contents of jar into blender. Blend well. Pour back into jar. Screw lid on tightly; refrigerate. Continue to Step 3.

3. Cheese
This should hopefully seem like an obvious one — of course cheese, a major component of all pizza, is fermented. Sadly, this is one you'll actually have to be careful with when you're shopping for ingredients. The go-to cheese for pizza for mozzarella, and most mozzarella cheese today is made quickly through an enzymatic reaction, rather than bacterial cultures. Traditionally, mozz was fermented as well, and this type of mozzarella is probably more flavorful too. When buying your mozzarella cheese, look for it to say something about "cultures" in the list of ingredients. If you aren't sure, I have no qualms with using other types of cheese. Softish cheeses like Monterey Jack (which is aged for about a month), work well.

Sidenote: it is curiously difficult to make cheese look appetizing in pictures. Which is weird, because cheese is the most delicious thing ever.

4. Toppings 
Add some fermented toppings. Get some veggies on there — you know, for your health. As you can see, I enjoy red onions, red peppers, and jalapenos on my pizza from time to time. Most veggies can be fermented just as easily as the tomatoes above.

5. Pepperoni
Oh, what's that? The most classic pizza topping of all is already fermented? My goodness, this is all just so convenient.

6. Bake That Pizza
You'll want to pre-heat your oven to 500 degrees in advance. Finish things off with some umami-packing Parmesan cheese or Balsamic vinegar, if you like. When the oven is ready, pop that pizza in and bake for about 10 minutes, or until the crust looks nice and crusty and the cheese is starting to form little almost-burnt bubbles.

Sorry, this pizza isn't pro-biotic. But if you eat a lot of fermented food as it is, not every meal has to be.

7. Pizza
Get yourself ready for the most savory, umami-rich pizza you have ever had. And it's totally fermented. Guys, when this whole crazy year is done, I just might open my own pizza restaurant. Or maybe... a brewpub that specializes in fermented pizza?

Hmm... this could go somewhere. Any capital investors out there want to get in on this?