Travels with Barley (35 page)

Roaming the festival is the ubiquitous Fred Eckhardt—it's his hometown after all. He's such a Portland craft beer fixture and hero that Hair of the Dog Brewing Co. in town has named its ultra-strong bottle-conditioned ale (11 percent ABV) Fred. Eckhardt, when I catch up with him, has just come off a sermon inveighing against the neo-prohibitionists, specifically religionists who are not only teetotalers themselves but would make everybody else so.

“What's wrong with these people?” he asks. “Don't they know that Martin Luther himself was ‘fortified' when he pinned his theses to the church house door? He wasn't ‘fortified' on water, I can tell you that.” (It's a pretty safe bet that Luther, a good German, was a beer drinker.)

Eckhardt stops to gather a little more steam, then says, “A big part of our problem in society is that we've developed a just-say-no-to-
everything
policy… . In the old days, young people learned to drink responsibly by drinking with their elders. Now, they can't do that anymore… . If you give an eighteen-year-old an IPA, he'll probably take a sip and spit it out. But if he drinks in the company of his elders, he would learn something about it and he might eventually come to appreciate it.”

Eckhardt then seamlessly switches to the subject at hand: whither Portland's distinctive position in the beer universe. “Portland people understand what beer is and what beer isn't,” he tells me. “They know it's not yellow industrial pre-piss… . It's not just something you go and get drunk on on Saturday night… . Beer is seasonal… . It can be strong, dark, roasty, light… . There are fifty to one hundred ways of brewing it.”

Eckhardt thinks beer's complexities are what make it attractive to Portlanders and Oregonians in general, who perhaps lead the rest of the U.S. in beer knowledge. He credits this to the fact that most of the early beer writers like himself hailed from out West, where the craft beer revolution began, and where craft beer still probably gets more press exposure than in other regions. ‘'An educated clientele is a big part of it, honestly… . Every time you get an article in the newspaper it helps. Look what the wine writers have done: they've educated people about wine. When the newspapers everywhere start paying as much attention to good beer as they do good wine, we'll sell a lot more good beer everywhere.”

Portland, Eckhardt wants to point out, may be wildly anomalous but it's hardly the only craft brew haven. The greater Seattle area, Colorado, Northern California, Vermont, and upstate New York all show promise of how it might be possible to end the lager domination of American beer, he says.

Later, I talk to Lisa Morrison, another beer journalist who writes a column under the pseudonym the Beer Goddess. She moved to the city with her husband about fifteen years ago after visiting on vacation and falling in love with the place. She's of the opinion that Portland somehow has gained so much critical craft beer mass that nowadays beer passion is passed on by osmosis. “If you've lived in Portland more than two years and you don't know anything about craft beer, you're not listening.
Everybody
in Portland knows what an IPA is. You can sit down at a table in the company of strangers and you can start talking about IBUs and
everybody
knows what you're talking about.”

I find myself in a scrum of ostensible Beer Geeks—the beer press—but everybody in this scrum doesn't necessarily know an IBU from an IPA. One or two people don't seem to know anything. We've gathered for the start of the aforementioned press tour and the twenty beers that await our sampling. Behind me is a man who's asked, more than once: “All these breweries, surely they're not independent? Who owns them all? Anheuser-Busch?”

Later, somebody will ask, apropos of nothing: “Are there hops in Budweiser?” (And, no, this was not a facetious Beer Geek asking the question.)

It takes me a while to realize that there are posers in the bunch—not that anybody cares. They won't be the first people ever trying to scam free beer. It's an otherwise legitimate gathering of beer scribes; two have come all the way from Germany, one from Britain, most of the rest from the Pacific Northwest.

Pretty soon our Official Beer Geek shows up. He's a smiling, mildly earnest man named Noel Blake, a festival volunteer. We know he's our Official Beer Geek because, shuffling through the press handouts we got earlier, we see he's the author of a two-page handout titled “Beer Geek-Speak.”

Examples:

“First, the two most used words: malty and hoppy.”

“Hoppy refers to the contribution of (surprise!) hops!”

“Another frequent taste word is estery… . Fruity is the most common ester that people notice.”

“OG, or Original Gravity, tells you how much malt sugar the beer started with… . The higher this number, the stronger the finished beer will be… . FG, or Final Gravity, tells you how thick the beer you drink is.”

To really get down and geeky, Blake recommends we “compare the IBUs to the OG and FG. Chop the 1.0 off the OG rating and compare what's left to the IBU.”

(Warning: Don't try this sober.)

There are twenty or twenty-five people assembled. We've all been issued official mugs. Blake gathers us around him and lays out the beer plan. We'll start with lighter beers first, then segue into the really heavy ones; first stop will be a beer called Hogwart's Kölsch. “If you find you're reaching your limit, just hold your mug down so they won't pour anything into it. But you really should try a little of all of them.”

Behind me somebody says, “Don't worry about
that
, Noel.”

We reach the Kölsch tap and everyone gets a pretty good squirt of it. I do the math based upon what seems like a reasonable estimate of what was poured in each mug—about three ounces. So: 20 beers × 3 ounces = 60 ounces of beer. That's
0f a six-pack. And a few people, I notice, are taking whole mugsful.

It's a little after 11:00
A.M.

The Hogwart's is made by the Port Hailing Brewing Co.
of Gresham, Oregon. I sniff, sip, and scribble a note—“tasty.” I'm not, I realize, improving in my beer vocabulary. Blake informs us that “This beer goes back 500 years… . The brewer is a fanatic about using herbs and spices in beer… . This is very healthy beer” because it's full of things like “lavender, grains of paradise, marsh rosemary, chamomile, and mugwort.”

“What are we tasting here, Noel?” somebody asks. “The mugwort?”

Blake says he thinks it's the lavender that's coming through.

“What's mugwort taste like anyway?” somebody else asks.

Blake doesn't hear this question. Nobody else has an answer.

We blast through a Belgian ale and a couple of Belgian wit beers, which are beers made with unmalted wheat and, in one case, coriander, orange peel, and spices. (“The orange peel gives you a taste in the back of your mouth,” Blake tells us.) I've sampled wit beers before and have decided they are an acquired taste. Both of these make me pucker. At least I'm not alone because somebody asks, “Is this a sour beer?”

Blake says, “Well, it's not like a red ale. The Belgian reds are very sour.”

Our fifth beer turns out to be geeked-up lager called Hopfenkopf—a made-up word that could be translated as Hophead. It's made by the Portland representative of BJ's Restaurant and Brewery, the big brew-pub chain, and the literature on the beer raises the question: “What would an IPA have been like if Germany, rather than England, had colonized America?”

Blake tells us he hasn't tried this beer yet and he can't resist a pun when he introduces it: “When in Portland, don't worry, be hoppy!” (After only four beer samples, this draws huge laughs.) We all get a squirt and, being a Hophead, I love it dearly. For the first time I break my one- or two-sips-per-beer rule.

Blake takes a sip and says, “I'm very impressed… . I think the cleanness of the lager ferment helps bring out the hops… . This should give you something to talk about if you want to talk about hoppy lagers.”

We linger on this beer. Many other people take more than one or two sips. Before we leave the tap, Blake says, “Anybody else want more Hopfenkopf? I think I'll have another splash.” (I have another splash, too.)

Around Beer 9, we run into King Gambrinus, the patron saint of beer. In real life his name is Art Larrance. He not only co-founded Portland's fourth microbrewery, the Portland Brewing Co., but he is also the brainchild behind the brewers festival, which drew 15,000 people in its first year. He's dressed in full king kit and with full king makeup. He's lugging a beer, of course, but he waves to us royally with his free hand. A few people bow, as though they're doing the wave at a football game. A few people, apparently active in the anti-beer-tax movement, shout out, “No more beer taxes! No more beer taxes.” The King assures us he's the last guy in the world who would ever raise beer taxes.

Beer 9 is by Stone Brewing Co. of San Marcos, California. It's called Ruination IPA; it's 7.7 percent alcohol by volume and measures a whopping 100 IBUs on the hops meter. (“Think of IBUs as the temperature of a beer,” Blake admonishes us.)

“Dang,” says the official description of Ruination, “this beer has more hops than a sackful of bunnies!”

“Drink a lot of this beer and you'll think you've had a shot of novocaine,” says Blake. “You'll also get brewer's droop.”

We inquire as to what that might be.

“Hops contain herbal estrogen,” he explains. This causes some brewers to become … chesty. (A Beer Geek later informs me that brewer's droop also refers to that malady known in modern terms as erectile dysfunction.)

At Beer 14, we reach the earlier alluded-to imperial
Schwarz bier
. We are forty-eight minutes into the tour and running behind. In fact, some people have lagged behind. One person has dropped back and is now lounging on the lawn. The Alcohol Monitors have come by, checking us out but keeping a friendly distance. They wave. We wave back.

The imperial
Schwarz bier
is by Rogue Brewery, Newport, Oregon. It's name is Skullsplitter. It's 9.2 percent ABV. Those still bothering to read the descriptions learn that Skullsplitter is a “towering product” of the brewer's “fertile beermagination. Amarillo dry hops give a tangerine citrus nose that is enveloped by a burnt toffee aroma.”

At Beer 14, it's kind of hard to resist a beer named Skullsplitter. My tasting notes say, “Wow!”

Second sip: “Yikes!”

I notice the two German journalists in animated discussion (in German). I ask one of them what he thinks of the beer.

“Many of the American beers overdo it on the hops. But this is zehr interesting!” he tells me. “Very interesting!”

He goes for a second helping of Skullsplitter—a mugful.

At Beer 17, we run out of time; some people have run out of steam. We've lost about a third of our number. One of the Germans is listing badly. Beer 17, named Domaine Dupage, is brewed by Two Brothers Brewing Co., Warrenville, Illinois. It's a French country ale also known as a
biere de garde
. Blake tells us it's the “indigenous beer style of France” and that it should be “kind of nutty, with just a hint of chocolate.”

I think the novocaine that Blake warned us about in the Ruination IPA is starting to kick in. I can't really taste the nuts or the chocolate.